July 20, 2023 • 25 mins
How did the Guinness World Records company come to be? And how, in the age of the internet, does the company make money? Imogen West-Knights spent a year investigating. She learned how to be a record adjudicator (it’s riskier than it sounds), met a man who has broken more than 700 records, and tried to break a record herself.
You can read Imogen West-Knight’s Guardian story, “The Strange Survival of Guinness World Records,” here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/25/guinness-world-records-norris-mcwhirter-ashrita-furman
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Imma June West Nights and I wrote The Strange
Survival of Guinness World Records for The Guardian and it's
the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Before we get in today's story, I wanted to hear
a related story from you. Aj Jacobs, a constant guest on.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Our show You Can't Get rid of Me.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
We're doing a show about the Guinness Book of World Records,
and I know that you have attempted or maybe succeeded.
I don't know in breaking a record.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I attempted and did not succeed in breaking.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Is this hard for me to bring up? Is it painful?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
There's some scars, there's some mental scars, but I'll go
into it anyway. What happened was I was writing a
book about assembling the largest family tree in history. As
part of the book, I thought it'd be fun to
hold the biggest family reunion ever in New York City,
invite all eight billion of my cousins and try to
(01:11):
break the world record, which at the time was about
sixty five hundred people. So I looked into getting it
as a world record, and it seemed it's very complicated.
They didn't make me, but they really encouraged me to
hire an adjudicator for a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Do you remember how much they were asking for.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, there were different levels, but one of the levels
was like ten thousand dollars and you could do it yourself,
but it seemed very discouraged to do it yourself instead.
At the time I hired a friend had come up
with sort of a scrappy alternative to Guinness called record Setters.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
He took on Big Guinness.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
He took on Big Guinness. So I hired him for
a much, much smaller amount. It was like fifty bucks.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
How many people did you invite?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well again, I invited eight billion because the premise why
I couldn't invite, well, you didn't look in the right places.
It was like, you know on my Facebook you were invited.
Believe me, it definitely.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
As an Ashkenazi, you're probably like my seventh cousin.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
You should not marry.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I have a section in the book about cousin marriage.
It's a complicated moral issue.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
We're gonna end it there. Thank you, Thank you. Writing
is hard.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be you all stanned, So it turns on
a Mike. Maybe the twitles en because a journalist trand
has got in that jugle job. Single story. Just listen
to smart people speak, conversation, film and information. It's a
(02:50):
story up for.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Imaging. West Knights investigated the Curious Survival of Guinness World
Records for The Guardian. Imagine how did you first get
interested in this story?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So it was kind of accidental in that I was
at the Guinness Storehouse, which is a sort of tourist
attraction in Dublin where you learn about the beer basically,
and there was this room that was out of bounds,
you know that the door was slightly open, and I
don't know, I just curiosity got the better of me
and I went in there and there was nothing in
there except a table which had three Guinness Book records
(03:33):
on it from nineteen ninety four twenty twelve. So I
went in there and I was looking at them, and
I had never thought about the connection between the brewery
and Guess World Records before. And it all kind of
went from there.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So how did the Guinness Book of World Records start?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So it began with an argument I suppose that took
place in nineteen fifty one where the then managing director
of the Guinness Brewery, a man called Sir Hugh Beaver,
was on a hunting party and he and his group
gone in this fight about which was the fastest game bird,
and then he had this brainway that this must happen
all of the time in pubs, people get into arguments,
(04:13):
and so if you could put together a book that
had all the facts in it and then put it
behind the bar, it would help them sell more beer.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Do you believe this story? The more I'm listening to
you say it? Sir Hugh Beaver on a hunting trip. Really,
and I'll trust these people at all. How did they
go about putting a book of records together?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
So they did it remarkably quickly. I think he decided
he wanted to do this in nineteen fifty four and
the first edition came out the following year. And the
people that he went to to do this were a
pair of identical twins eccentrically enough, who ran a fact
provision service for Fleet Street's newspapers, which is like where
most of the UK's newspapers were based at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So if you needed a fact, instead of googling it,
you would call these twins and then for your article exactly,
so what are these twins? Their names are Ross and Norris,
make murder. What are they like?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Very eccentric. They were a real pair of weirdos by
all accounts, I mean in a good way in some ways.
Although it became their profession to keep records, they were
doing it for fun since they were really little. They
used to keep these scrap books where they would write
down facts that they learned.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That seems adorable, like identical twins who were keeping a
book of facts. Yeah, it also sounds like a horror
movie though, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yes, I think you know. It's a little bit the
shining somehow. They were odd characters. One of them got
murdered by the IRA.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Murdered, yes, waited well on the murder please.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
So he was shot in nineteen seventy five by the
Irish Republican Army because he publicly offered this reward for
any information leading to the conviction of terrorist bombers in Britain.
But Norris stayed on at the book until the nineties.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Wait. So he was sort of conservative.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Very conservative, and so was Norris. Like Norris was one
of the first people who was really anti the European
Union and went against sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Some
pretty unsavory.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Oh yeah, and so were they conservative in their choices
of what records to put into the Guinness Book of
World Records.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
There was absolutely no mention of anything to do with
sex in the book.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No sex records, which was horribly disappointing. I was so
into the Guinness Book of World Records when I was
like seven eight years old. I would look and I
was like, Oh, we have no idea how big the
world's biggest penis is. This is right, this is the
fact we need.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I know. You would think that the pursuit of fact
would come above his kind of conservative views in that way,
but it didn't. It didn't.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I probably couldn't have handled the biggest penis. That would
have just ended my whole social life.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
No one could handled it.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So if there were no penises, what were the records
in these very early editions.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
A lot of them are geographic records tallest mountain, deepest
depression in the Earth's surface, stuff like the highest lifetime
yield of a cow for milk.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Oh, what is the highest lifetime yield of a cow
for milk.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
God, am I going to remember this? I remember the
name of the cow, Manningford faith Jan graceful.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
You memorized the name of the cow.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
How could you forget Maningford faith Jen graceful.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, I have it here. It was three hundred and
twenty five one hundred and thirty pounds. That's a lot
of milk.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I can't even picture how much milk that is.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's the wrong way to measure milk and pounds. No
one talks about how many pounds of milk they have gallons.
Who's running Guinness World Records now? Just Guinness still own it?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
No? No, no, they sold it. I mean it's changed hands
many times. So the editor of the book is a
man called Craig Glende, who has been in that job
for over twenty years now, I think. So he's the
kind of headhunt show and he gets to say what
goes in the book and has all this experience over
the years and has adjudicated a load of records himself,
been all over the world. So he's the man in charge.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
What's he like? What does he look like?
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I want to make a comparison to something you won't
have seen, which is there was a cartoon in this
country called tom was the tank engine that had a character.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I'm sorry, Yeah, my son had still probably somewhere has
a whole box full of time.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Okay, but did you have the TV show?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
We did, right, So there's a character in that called
the Fat Controller. Who is this like almost spherical man.
The human he Craig Glenday, looks exactly like him. Picture
that man, that's what he looks like.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And so where did you meet with him?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I met, well, actually I met him the first time
when I went to see my first record attempt that
I ever witnessed, which was someone trying to poe go
stick over the most consecutive cars.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
You got to watch this?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, it was great.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Was it frightening?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yes? Yeah? I was really nervous for this guy. And
also I wasn't expecting Craig to be there necessarily. I've
just been told they were doing a record attention I
could go along and watch, but he was there. He
was doing the adjudicating himself.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Was this pretty serious? Like? Was it tense there?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah? I mean it was the strange atmosphere because obviously
pogo sticking is like one of the most ridiculous things
you can see some do and yet the atmosphere was
like very somber intense because this meant a lot to him.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Plus death is on the line.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, I mean he's so. He was kind of bouncing
around in this big four court at the Olympic Park
practicing and he did fall over on one of the jumps.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So you get a couple of chances.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
I think yes, I think he got three chances. Although
he did it in the first try. Every Guinness record
attempt gets three.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Goes like, what kind of adventures has the editor, Craig
Glenday had.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
He has just been absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I mean that.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
He said. He got stranded for a week in Punta Arenas,
which is like on the furthest southern Tip of Chili
with the band Fallout Boy. You remember fall out Boy.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I know the name.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
I actually was a huge fan of them, but I'm
not going to get into it because it's embarrassing. So
he got stranded for a week with the band Fallout
Boy in punter Arnas and the Southern Tip of Chili
because they were trying to fly to Antarctica because they
wanted the record for the fastest time to perform a gig.
On every continent, but they couldn't fly because of weather conditions,
so he was just stranded there with this band, and
(10:13):
the locals thought he was a member of Fallout Boy.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
And even though he looks like the top hat guy
from Thomas.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The Tankers, it could not look less like he was
in a popular EMAO band if he tried.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Has like Craig Glenday, had dangerous experiences he has.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
He told me this one story about a time he
went to Moscow to adjudicate an attempt of the largest
pouring of concrete in history, and he was standing on
the side of this huge building site hole in Moscow
and they failed. They didn't get the record because it
was too cold, they couldn't pull the concrete, and he
was very hard to say no. He ended up having
(10:53):
to give the record and revoking it the next day
because he just thought, I actually don't know what's going
to happen to me if I'm standing here at the
edge of a basically a pre dug grave and they've
got lots of concrete and they seem very angry with me.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That's a smart policy to like give it to you
in person and then revoke it once you're.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
On the plane right exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
After the break, Guinness will sell out to an evil dictator.
But first, our advertisers are going to try and set
a record for the least amount spent for an ad
on a podcast. So I'm assuming they can't sell many
(11:37):
books at this point. People just go online and look
at this for free. So how does this company make money?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
So they twig this obviously with the advent of the
Internet that people could see sensational things, bright pictures, big facts,
big figures just by googling them. Giants, giant penises at
the touch of a fingertip exactly. That's a horrible phrase, unfortunately,
but I've used it now. So they started to kind
of diversify, and one of the ways that they did
(12:02):
this was that they realized they could offer a kind
of pr brand consultancy type service, so they specifically started
catering to commercial clients for record breaking. So let's say
Ford goes to Guinness and says, we have a new car.
We want to put Ford's name in the press somehow,
and we'd like to do it by breaking a record.
Can you help us come up with a record that
(12:25):
would suit us to break.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
How much does that cost?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It starts at eleven thousand pounds, which is roughly fourteen
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
This explains all of the crappy publicist emails I'm constantly
getting right, like this year Pizza Hut breaks the world's
largest pizza record. My email box is flooded with this crap.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Well, someone paid a lot of money for that.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Are there moral guide rails on this project? Like the
Guinness records? Like will they do healthiest cigarette? Or like
the person who can do the most shots of Jaegermeister,
or like a guy who can shoot the most holes
in a target shaped like a nun Like what are
there limits?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
There's some interesting rules about this. You can do a
record that puts yourself in danger as long as you consent.
What you can't do is a record that puts anyone
else in danger. So like you can set yourself on
fire should you choose, you can't set yourself on fire
at the post office. And then there's things like they
retire records when they start to feel like, ah, we're
(13:24):
kind of dicing with some political things we don't want
to be doing anymore. Like they used to have one
which was largest terrorist organization, which is last awarded to
Al Chayeda in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Not physically, that's not fair because they.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Were never given a certificate.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Apparently they've really fallen by the wayside too. Al Kaeda
there they wouldn't hold that.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Now they're out on their ass.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So it's almost unfair that they still have the record.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Well it's been revoked. The record no longer exists. I
think they eventually were like, I don't think Guinness World
Records should really be saying what is and isn't a
terrorist organization like that doesn't feel like within our remit
so that one's been scrapped.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
But don't they like work with dictators as part of
their consultancy gig where you can bring them in.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They have done. They did quite a lot of work
with the government of Tokumenistan between two thousand and seven
and last year, I think, and they have a pretty
shoddy human rights record. But as it happens, the dictator
of toke Meenistan, the then dictator whose name is gerb
and Gooli Berdie Mohammadov, so he is a big GWR
(14:30):
fan and he wanted to get them to awards the records.
So there were things like the city of Ashkeabat got
the record for the highest density of buildings with marble
white cladding, and.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Anotherwise such a dictator record.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yes, isn't it. It's all like giant marble so much
they love marble. And another one was the largest architectural
image of a star. That means it's just a really
big star they built. And since then I asked Craig
about it and he was like, no, that was actually
a big miss step. We shouldn't be you know, we
want to look a little bit more carefully about who
(15:08):
it were with.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So corporations are paying money to get their dumb records
broken so that I get these awful emails from publicists.
But normal people like the pogostic guy are still doing
it too.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Right, yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
What kind of people are they who do this?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
The adjudicators, I think they receive as many as like
one hundred requests every day from all over the world
about new record creations. And it is just normal people
who think they're really good at something. But then there's
this class of people who make it almost into a
sport in its own right. The person I met who
has the most ever had over seven hundred oh that's
(15:45):
too many.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
That's like your life's work, right, Is that like your
full time job.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's not his full time job. So this guy, his
name is Ashreyta Furman. His birth name is Keith, but
he renamed himself because he's a follower of an Indian
spiritual teacher called Schreitrin Moy and they all rename themselves.
But he's just a guy from Jamaica, Queens who runs
a health food shop.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
And so how did he first get into this?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
So he he started following this teacher when he was sixteen.
And as part of the teachings this teacher, they have
to do a lot of kind of physical exercises and
means of transcending the body and things like that. So
the teacher had signed up his followers for this cycling
marathon around Central Park, and Ashrita having actually signed up
(16:30):
because he was never very athletic and not into that
kind of thing. But he went to a meeting with
his teacher and the teacher was going around the circle
and saying, Okay, how how many miles is everybody going
to be in this race? You know, two hundred, three hundred,
And then the teacher turns to a treater and goes,
I you're a shreeter four hundred and he's like, oh
my god. He wants me to do this thing to prove,
(16:52):
you know, my worth. And he'd never trained. He had
a bike, but he'd never cycled any distance before. He
went straight home and wrote a will and left all
his welcome possessions to his roommate. And then the following
day he cycled four hundred and five miles around park
and he did it by meditating yes. And so he
(17:14):
got off this bike, legs jelly and was like, I
can break records. He immediately made the connection with the
book because he liked the book. I can get in
the book.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
That's like twenty was it like fifteen twenty hours of second?
A long time to do it that many times?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
It's unthinkable, and you know, with no training whatsoever. So
I think he must have the bill for these things naturally,
But he said it's not really physical at all. It's
all mental.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Oh I don't know, really, so he says, And so
he started breaking records just for fun or.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
What was his He thought this was a really great
way that he could promote the message of his teacher
and to like promote the value of transcendental meditation to
a wider audience.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I think it's working. Our audience is finding out about it.
I think it's a good plan. Yet. And what's he
like as a person?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
I actually really liked him. He's like, very warm to
be around, super enthusiastic. I went to see him at
his house in Queens and you know, he's sixty seven
or whatever he is, and he looks good. I think
the guy does a lot of exercise really, you know,
keeps himself in good health. And he just loves records.
(18:21):
He loves it. You know, his eyes light up talking
about it.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Wait, what kind of records does he have?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
He's got everything. He's got some really odd ball ones
like rolling an orange a mile with your nose, the
fastest there's standing on a yoga ball for the longest time,
the fastest mile done like forward rolls. He's got that one.
A lot of balancing records, pint glasses on his chin.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
I'm seeing he won a potato sack race against a
yakad he did.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah. So he quite often likes to do them in
slightly flamboyant ways, because obviously of the point is to
create publicity. For this spiritual teacher. The more kind of
flashy it can be, the better.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
So he's just looking for records that he can break,
or he's just has these weird hobbies that how does
this work?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
So I think it's a bit of both. Its strategic
feat almost more than it is a physical one, and
that he's really good at identifying what he calls soft records.
So a soft record is a record that he thinks
hasn't yet been broken to the fullest extent of human capability,
or like a record that you or I, if we
had the time and the energy, we could break.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Oh. So he's looking around strategically for ones that like
a normal human can break. Yes, is he still breaking records?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
He is, although less so than he used to. I
think partly because of his age and also he's I
think various things in his personal life. He's got to
focus more on this shot that he runs, but he's
still really invested in helping other people do it.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Do you try and help you break any records?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well? Yes, in a manner of speaking. So when I
first went to the Guinness offices, they asked me if
I wanted to try and break a record. While I
was there, which I did, and the one that they
picked out was standing on one leg blindfolded, so oh, well.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That's just a prank. This is what they do to journalists.
Journalists command. They're like, would you like to break a record? Here?
Let me flip through and see what I.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Could fin They pushed me over on the floor, so yeah,
I said, yeah, cool, I'll do that. I mean, yes,
how long do you think the record stood at at
the time?
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And then I guess like two hours.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
The record at the time was thirty two minutes, and
so when I heard thirty two minutes, I was like,
holy shit, that's actually like not that much.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Maybe it sounds like too much though to want to
do it, should do?
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I think I think I was very very foolish to
be like, yeah, great, I could. I could definitely get
like pushing.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
You into it wasn't so.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
You feel I gave this a go, it'd get.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Three chances any training that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
They were just like, off you go, because they knew
right that I wasn't gonna be able to break this record.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That's mean, it was mean.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
So I tried, and I got up to thirty seconds
or something just terrible, really no good at all. So
I tried this record, failed, went home, didn't think about it.
But then I was talking to a Shredeferment about this record,
and he was and his whole face lit up, and
he was like, that's a soft record, classic soft record.
Thirty two minutes is not so long. You could do
that if you put in the time. So I was like, okay,
(21:15):
really fired up. Having met this guy, I go home
and I start practicing. You know, my housemates thing come
going in saying, and I get up to twelve minutes
and eight seconds, which is not that bad. I mean,
it's not the record, but it's like a lot better.
But it was at that point when I got up
to twelve that I thought to check because obviously this
is actually like almost a year after I first met
(21:36):
Craig and did this attempt. But then I checked whether
it had been broken, and it had been, so it
was now an hour.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Did it behind your back? I encouraged you to do it,
and then he broke it himself.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
If it had been him, I would have been like,
fair play. It was wide open that well, yeah, he
deserves it, he knows what he's doing. But it was
someone else, someone in India broke it by loads doubled
it. It was like an hour and six minutes now, so
I was really demoralized. I was like, there's absolutely no
way I'll ever get up that high. So I stopped.
But yeah, he did inspire me to try.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
How much time do you think you devoted to this?
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Probably not that long. I mean ten hours maybe total.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
That's a lot in a way for that task.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I mean just like a little bit every day for
a while.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
And what are some of the things that like motivate
people to do these things? Like what are the great
stories you heard?
Speaker 2 (22:27):
So I think that the one that I heard where
I kind of realized what the heart of my story
really was, like why it was worth writing about this
thing was the woman with the longest fingernails. Do you
remember seeing that picture in the book as a kid?
I do?
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I do. I remember the longest nails, the most and
the longest hair and the tallest person because they were
all it all shook me a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Almost everyone I asked, and I asked everybody of my
acquaintance at the time, like, what's the one you remember?
They all said fingernails. I don't know why quite. I
think it's because if you've never seen that before. You
don't know a what fingernails look like when they grow
out that long until you see it and you're like whoah.
But then also, how do you live the questions posed
by that photograph, like how do you type? How do
you do? Less? There at things you do with your
(23:09):
hands every day?
Speaker 1 (23:10):
You know the woman who does have the longest fingernails, Now,
why did she start this project?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So she started it because she used to get her
nails done every week with her daughter, and then her
daughter died when she was sixteen, and so she decided
never to cut her fingernails ever again. And I just
thought that I was just like I think with so
many of these records that seem really wacky and out
there and outlandish. In fact, I'd say with all of them,
(23:36):
you look behind and you find someone pursuing something that
is really meaningful to them.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So did you gain kind of a respect for record
keepers by the time you finished your story?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I think I kind of did. I feel like there
was this sort of easy version of this piece that
I didn't want to write, where it was like, look
at these freaks, they're so strange. I think I always
wanted to try and work out what it is that
motivated people to do this thing that seems really out
there to most people. And yeah, I think for a
lot of people, they're really proud of it.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I know I've kept you a long time, but would
you mind if I quickly just tried to stand on
one leg?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Of course? No? Please, I'm devastated you didn't do it.
Hold on, do you have something to rough around your eyes?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Can I just close them?
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Or no?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
No? Absolutely not? Whoa? Whoa? You became like an adjudicator.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Well, look, you know I'm the only person here who
knows what the guidelines are.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
There's a video of me so you can see me. H.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, and I've got this top perfectly all right.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Would someone start the timer?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah? Okay, so countdown, three, two, one go?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Did you bounce around as much as I have?
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oh, that didn't go well.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?
Maybe he'll take a napper poke around online.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Our Show Today was produced by Kate mccauliffe, Joey fish
Ground and nishaven Cut. It was edited by Lydia Jean Kot.
Our engineer is a man to Kay Wang, and our
executive producer is Catherine Ghirrado, and our theme song was
written and performed by Jonathan Colton and a special thanks
to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer
(25:22):
Laurence Alasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week.
You were working on this story for a year.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, it took so long, partly because I was traveling.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
At a record of some kinds the longest someone worked
on a story about the Guinness Book of World Records.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Finally, pretty sure you have Chief
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Imma June West Nights and I wrote The Strange
Survival of Guinness World Records for The Guardian and it's
the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Before we get in today's story, I wanted to hear
a related story from you. Aj Jacobs, a constant guest on.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Our show You Can't Get rid of Me.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
We're doing a show about the Guinness Book of World Records,
and I know that you have attempted or maybe succeeded.
I don't know in breaking a record.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I attempted and did not succeed in breaking.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Is this hard for me to bring up? Is it painful?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
There's some scars, there's some mental scars, but I'll go
into it anyway. What happened was I was writing a
book about assembling the largest family tree in history. As
part of the book, I thought it'd be fun to
hold the biggest family reunion ever in New York City,
invite all eight billion of my cousins and try to
(01:11):
break the world record, which at the time was about
sixty five hundred people. So I looked into getting it
as a world record, and it seemed it's very complicated.
They didn't make me, but they really encouraged me to
hire an adjudicator for a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Do you remember how much they were asking for.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, there were different levels, but one of the levels
was like ten thousand dollars and you could do it yourself,
but it seemed very discouraged to do it yourself instead.
At the time I hired a friend had come up
with sort of a scrappy alternative to Guinness called record Setters.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
He took on Big Guinness.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
He took on Big Guinness. So I hired him for
a much, much smaller amount. It was like fifty bucks.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
How many people did you invite?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well again, I invited eight billion because the premise why
I couldn't invite, well, you didn't look in the right places.
It was like, you know on my Facebook you were invited.
Believe me, it definitely.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
As an Ashkenazi, you're probably like my seventh cousin.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
You should not marry.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, I have a section in the book about cousin marriage.
It's a complicated moral issue.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
We're gonna end it there. Thank you, Thank you. Writing
is hard.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be you all stanned, So it turns on
a Mike. Maybe the twitles en because a journalist trand
has got in that jugle job. Single story. Just listen
to smart people speak, conversation, film and information. It's a
(02:50):
story up for.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Imaging. West Knights investigated the Curious Survival of Guinness World
Records for The Guardian. Imagine how did you first get
interested in this story?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
So it was kind of accidental in that I was
at the Guinness Storehouse, which is a sort of tourist
attraction in Dublin where you learn about the beer basically,
and there was this room that was out of bounds,
you know that the door was slightly open, and I
don't know, I just curiosity got the better of me
and I went in there and there was nothing in
there except a table which had three Guinness Book records
(03:33):
on it from nineteen ninety four twenty twelve. So I
went in there and I was looking at them, and
I had never thought about the connection between the brewery
and Guess World Records before. And it all kind of
went from there.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So how did the Guinness Book of World Records start?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So it began with an argument I suppose that took
place in nineteen fifty one where the then managing director
of the Guinness Brewery, a man called Sir Hugh Beaver,
was on a hunting party and he and his group
gone in this fight about which was the fastest game bird,
and then he had this brainway that this must happen
all of the time in pubs, people get into arguments,
(04:13):
and so if you could put together a book that
had all the facts in it and then put it
behind the bar, it would help them sell more beer.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Do you believe this story? The more I'm listening to
you say it? Sir Hugh Beaver on a hunting trip. Really,
and I'll trust these people at all. How did they
go about putting a book of records together?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
So they did it remarkably quickly. I think he decided
he wanted to do this in nineteen fifty four and
the first edition came out the following year. And the
people that he went to to do this were a
pair of identical twins eccentrically enough, who ran a fact
provision service for Fleet Street's newspapers, which is like where
most of the UK's newspapers were based at the time.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So if you needed a fact, instead of googling it,
you would call these twins and then for your article exactly,
so what are these twins? Their names are Ross and Norris,
make murder. What are they like?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Very eccentric. They were a real pair of weirdos by
all accounts, I mean in a good way in some ways.
Although it became their profession to keep records, they were
doing it for fun since they were really little. They
used to keep these scrap books where they would write
down facts that they learned.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That seems adorable, like identical twins who were keeping a
book of facts. Yeah, it also sounds like a horror
movie though, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yes, I think you know. It's a little bit the
shining somehow. They were odd characters. One of them got
murdered by the IRA.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Murdered, yes, waited well on the murder please.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
So he was shot in nineteen seventy five by the
Irish Republican Army because he publicly offered this reward for
any information leading to the conviction of terrorist bombers in Britain.
But Norris stayed on at the book until the nineties.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Wait. So he was sort of conservative.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Very conservative, and so was Norris. Like Norris was one
of the first people who was really anti the European
Union and went against sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Some
pretty unsavory.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Oh yeah, and so were they conservative in their choices
of what records to put into the Guinness Book of
World Records.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
There was absolutely no mention of anything to do with
sex in the book.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No sex records, which was horribly disappointing. I was so
into the Guinness Book of World Records when I was
like seven eight years old. I would look and I
was like, Oh, we have no idea how big the
world's biggest penis is. This is right, this is the
fact we need.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I know. You would think that the pursuit of fact
would come above his kind of conservative views in that way,
but it didn't. It didn't.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I probably couldn't have handled the biggest penis. That would
have just ended my whole social life.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
No one could handled it.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So if there were no penises, what were the records
in these very early editions.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
A lot of them are geographic records tallest mountain, deepest
depression in the Earth's surface, stuff like the highest lifetime
yield of a cow for milk.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Oh, what is the highest lifetime yield of a cow
for milk.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
God, am I going to remember this? I remember the
name of the cow, Manningford faith Jan graceful.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
You memorized the name of the cow.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
How could you forget Maningford faith Jen graceful.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, I have it here. It was three hundred and
twenty five one hundred and thirty pounds. That's a lot
of milk.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I can't even picture how much milk that is.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's the wrong way to measure milk and pounds. No
one talks about how many pounds of milk they have gallons.
Who's running Guinness World Records now? Just Guinness still own it?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
No? No, no, they sold it. I mean it's changed hands
many times. So the editor of the book is a
man called Craig Glende, who has been in that job
for over twenty years now, I think. So he's the
kind of headhunt show and he gets to say what
goes in the book and has all this experience over
the years and has adjudicated a load of records himself,
been all over the world. So he's the man in charge.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
What's he like? What does he look like?
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I want to make a comparison to something you won't
have seen, which is there was a cartoon in this
country called tom was the tank engine that had a character.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I'm sorry, Yeah, my son had still probably somewhere has
a whole box full of time.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Okay, but did you have the TV show?
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
We did, right, So there's a character in that called
the Fat Controller. Who is this like almost spherical man.
The human he Craig Glenday, looks exactly like him. Picture
that man, that's what he looks like.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And so where did you meet with him?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I met, well, actually I met him the first time
when I went to see my first record attempt that
I ever witnessed, which was someone trying to poe go
stick over the most consecutive cars.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
You got to watch this?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, it was great.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Was it frightening?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yes? Yeah? I was really nervous for this guy. And
also I wasn't expecting Craig to be there necessarily. I've
just been told they were doing a record attention I
could go along and watch, but he was there. He
was doing the adjudicating himself.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Was this pretty serious? Like? Was it tense there?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah? I mean it was the strange atmosphere because obviously
pogo sticking is like one of the most ridiculous things
you can see some do and yet the atmosphere was
like very somber intense because this meant a lot to him.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Plus death is on the line.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, I mean he's so. He was kind of bouncing
around in this big four court at the Olympic Park
practicing and he did fall over on one of the jumps.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So you get a couple of chances.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
I think yes, I think he got three chances. Although
he did it in the first try. Every Guinness record
attempt gets three.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Goes like, what kind of adventures has the editor, Craig
Glenday had.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
He has just been absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I mean that.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
He said. He got stranded for a week in Punta Arenas,
which is like on the furthest southern Tip of Chili
with the band Fallout Boy. You remember fall out Boy.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I know the name.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
I actually was a huge fan of them, but I'm
not going to get into it because it's embarrassing. So
he got stranded for a week with the band Fallout
Boy in punter Arnas and the Southern Tip of Chili
because they were trying to fly to Antarctica because they
wanted the record for the fastest time to perform a gig.
On every continent, but they couldn't fly because of weather conditions,
so he was just stranded there with this band, and
(10:13):
the locals thought he was a member of Fallout Boy.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
And even though he looks like the top hat guy
from Thomas.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The Tankers, it could not look less like he was
in a popular EMAO band if he tried.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Has like Craig Glenday, had dangerous experiences he has.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
He told me this one story about a time he
went to Moscow to adjudicate an attempt of the largest
pouring of concrete in history, and he was standing on
the side of this huge building site hole in Moscow
and they failed. They didn't get the record because it
was too cold, they couldn't pull the concrete, and he
was very hard to say no. He ended up having
(10:53):
to give the record and revoking it the next day
because he just thought, I actually don't know what's going
to happen to me if I'm standing here at the
edge of a basically a pre dug grave and they've
got lots of concrete and they seem very angry with me.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That's a smart policy to like give it to you
in person and then revoke it once you're.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
On the plane right exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
After the break, Guinness will sell out to an evil dictator.
But first, our advertisers are going to try and set
a record for the least amount spent for an ad
on a podcast. So I'm assuming they can't sell many
(11:37):
books at this point. People just go online and look
at this for free. So how does this company make money?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
So they twig this obviously with the advent of the
Internet that people could see sensational things, bright pictures, big facts,
big figures just by googling them. Giants, giant penises at
the touch of a fingertip exactly. That's a horrible phrase, unfortunately,
but I've used it now. So they started to kind
of diversify, and one of the ways that they did
(12:02):
this was that they realized they could offer a kind
of pr brand consultancy type service, so they specifically started
catering to commercial clients for record breaking. So let's say
Ford goes to Guinness and says, we have a new car.
We want to put Ford's name in the press somehow,
and we'd like to do it by breaking a record.
Can you help us come up with a record that
(12:25):
would suit us to break.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
How much does that cost?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It starts at eleven thousand pounds, which is roughly fourteen
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
This explains all of the crappy publicist emails I'm constantly
getting right, like this year Pizza Hut breaks the world's
largest pizza record. My email box is flooded with this crap.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Well, someone paid a lot of money for that.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Are there moral guide rails on this project? Like the
Guinness records? Like will they do healthiest cigarette? Or like
the person who can do the most shots of Jaegermeister,
or like a guy who can shoot the most holes
in a target shaped like a nun Like what are
there limits?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
There's some interesting rules about this. You can do a
record that puts yourself in danger as long as you consent.
What you can't do is a record that puts anyone
else in danger. So like you can set yourself on
fire should you choose, you can't set yourself on fire
at the post office. And then there's things like they
retire records when they start to feel like, ah, we're
(13:24):
kind of dicing with some political things we don't want
to be doing anymore. Like they used to have one
which was largest terrorist organization, which is last awarded to
Al Chayeda in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Not physically, that's not fair because they.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Were never given a certificate.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Apparently they've really fallen by the wayside too. Al Kaeda
there they wouldn't hold that.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Now they're out on their ass.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So it's almost unfair that they still have the record.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Well it's been revoked. The record no longer exists. I
think they eventually were like, I don't think Guinness World
Records should really be saying what is and isn't a
terrorist organization like that doesn't feel like within our remit
so that one's been scrapped.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
But don't they like work with dictators as part of
their consultancy gig where you can bring them in.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They have done. They did quite a lot of work
with the government of Tokumenistan between two thousand and seven
and last year, I think, and they have a pretty
shoddy human rights record. But as it happens, the dictator
of toke Meenistan, the then dictator whose name is gerb
and Gooli Berdie Mohammadov, so he is a big GWR
(14:30):
fan and he wanted to get them to awards the records.
So there were things like the city of Ashkeabat got
the record for the highest density of buildings with marble
white cladding, and.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Anotherwise such a dictator record.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yes, isn't it. It's all like giant marble so much
they love marble. And another one was the largest architectural
image of a star. That means it's just a really
big star they built. And since then I asked Craig
about it and he was like, no, that was actually
a big miss step. We shouldn't be you know, we
want to look a little bit more carefully about who
(15:08):
it were with.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So corporations are paying money to get their dumb records
broken so that I get these awful emails from publicists.
But normal people like the pogostic guy are still doing
it too.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Right, yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
What kind of people are they who do this?
Speaker 2 (15:22):
The adjudicators, I think they receive as many as like
one hundred requests every day from all over the world
about new record creations. And it is just normal people
who think they're really good at something. But then there's
this class of people who make it almost into a
sport in its own right. The person I met who
has the most ever had over seven hundred oh that's
(15:45):
too many.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
That's like your life's work, right, Is that like your
full time job.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's not his full time job. So this guy, his
name is Ashreyta Furman. His birth name is Keith, but
he renamed himself because he's a follower of an Indian
spiritual teacher called Schreitrin Moy and they all rename themselves.
But he's just a guy from Jamaica, Queens who runs
a health food shop.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
And so how did he first get into this?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
So he he started following this teacher when he was sixteen.
And as part of the teachings this teacher, they have
to do a lot of kind of physical exercises and
means of transcending the body and things like that. So
the teacher had signed up his followers for this cycling
marathon around Central Park, and Ashrita having actually signed up
(16:30):
because he was never very athletic and not into that
kind of thing. But he went to a meeting with
his teacher and the teacher was going around the circle
and saying, Okay, how how many miles is everybody going
to be in this race? You know, two hundred, three hundred,
And then the teacher turns to a treater and goes,
I you're a shreeter four hundred and he's like, oh
my god. He wants me to do this thing to prove,
(16:52):
you know, my worth. And he'd never trained. He had
a bike, but he'd never cycled any distance before. He
went straight home and wrote a will and left all
his welcome possessions to his roommate. And then the following
day he cycled four hundred and five miles around park
and he did it by meditating yes. And so he
(17:14):
got off this bike, legs jelly and was like, I
can break records. He immediately made the connection with the
book because he liked the book. I can get in
the book.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
That's like twenty was it like fifteen twenty hours of second?
A long time to do it that many times?
Speaker 2 (17:29):
It's unthinkable, and you know, with no training whatsoever. So
I think he must have the bill for these things naturally,
But he said it's not really physical at all. It's
all mental.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Oh I don't know, really, so he says, And so
he started breaking records just for fun or.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
What was his He thought this was a really great
way that he could promote the message of his teacher
and to like promote the value of transcendental meditation to
a wider audience.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I think it's working. Our audience is finding out about it.
I think it's a good plan. Yet. And what's he
like as a person?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
I actually really liked him. He's like, very warm to
be around, super enthusiastic. I went to see him at
his house in Queens and you know, he's sixty seven
or whatever he is, and he looks good. I think
the guy does a lot of exercise really, you know,
keeps himself in good health. And he just loves records.
(18:21):
He loves it. You know, his eyes light up talking
about it.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Wait, what kind of records does he have?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
He's got everything. He's got some really odd ball ones
like rolling an orange a mile with your nose, the
fastest there's standing on a yoga ball for the longest time,
the fastest mile done like forward rolls. He's got that one.
A lot of balancing records, pint glasses on his chin.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
I'm seeing he won a potato sack race against a
yakad he did.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah. So he quite often likes to do them in
slightly flamboyant ways, because obviously of the point is to
create publicity. For this spiritual teacher. The more kind of
flashy it can be, the better.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
So he's just looking for records that he can break,
or he's just has these weird hobbies that how does
this work?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
So I think it's a bit of both. Its strategic
feat almost more than it is a physical one, and
that he's really good at identifying what he calls soft records.
So a soft record is a record that he thinks
hasn't yet been broken to the fullest extent of human capability,
or like a record that you or I, if we
had the time and the energy, we could break.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Oh. So he's looking around strategically for ones that like
a normal human can break. Yes, is he still breaking records?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
He is, although less so than he used to. I
think partly because of his age and also he's I
think various things in his personal life. He's got to
focus more on this shot that he runs, but he's
still really invested in helping other people do it.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Do you try and help you break any records?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well? Yes, in a manner of speaking. So when I
first went to the Guinness offices, they asked me if
I wanted to try and break a record. While I
was there, which I did, and the one that they
picked out was standing on one leg blindfolded, so oh, well.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That's just a prank. This is what they do to journalists.
Journalists command. They're like, would you like to break a record? Here?
Let me flip through and see what I.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Could fin They pushed me over on the floor, so yeah,
I said, yeah, cool, I'll do that. I mean, yes,
how long do you think the record stood at at
the time?
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And then I guess like two hours.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
The record at the time was thirty two minutes, and
so when I heard thirty two minutes, I was like,
holy shit, that's actually like not that much.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Maybe it sounds like too much though to want to
do it, should do?
Speaker 2 (20:34):
I think I think I was very very foolish to
be like, yeah, great, I could. I could definitely get
like pushing.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
You into it wasn't so.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
You feel I gave this a go, it'd get.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Three chances any training that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
They were just like, off you go, because they knew
right that I wasn't gonna be able to break this record.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That's mean, it was mean.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
So I tried, and I got up to thirty seconds
or something just terrible, really no good at all. So
I tried this record, failed, went home, didn't think about it.
But then I was talking to a Shredeferment about this record,
and he was and his whole face lit up, and
he was like, that's a soft record, classic soft record.
Thirty two minutes is not so long. You could do
that if you put in the time. So I was like, okay,
(21:15):
really fired up. Having met this guy, I go home
and I start practicing. You know, my housemates thing come
going in saying, and I get up to twelve minutes
and eight seconds, which is not that bad. I mean,
it's not the record, but it's like a lot better.
But it was at that point when I got up
to twelve that I thought to check because obviously this
is actually like almost a year after I first met
(21:36):
Craig and did this attempt. But then I checked whether
it had been broken, and it had been, so it
was now an hour.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Did it behind your back? I encouraged you to do it,
and then he broke it himself.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
If it had been him, I would have been like,
fair play. It was wide open that well, yeah, he
deserves it, he knows what he's doing. But it was
someone else, someone in India broke it by loads doubled
it. It was like an hour and six minutes now, so
I was really demoralized. I was like, there's absolutely no
way I'll ever get up that high. So I stopped.
But yeah, he did inspire me to try.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
How much time do you think you devoted to this?
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Probably not that long. I mean ten hours maybe total.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
That's a lot in a way for that task.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
I mean just like a little bit every day for
a while.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
And what are some of the things that like motivate
people to do these things? Like what are the great
stories you heard?
Speaker 2 (22:27):
So I think that the one that I heard where
I kind of realized what the heart of my story
really was, like why it was worth writing about this
thing was the woman with the longest fingernails. Do you
remember seeing that picture in the book as a kid?
I do?
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I do. I remember the longest nails, the most and
the longest hair and the tallest person because they were
all it all shook me a little bit.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Almost everyone I asked, and I asked everybody of my
acquaintance at the time, like, what's the one you remember?
They all said fingernails. I don't know why quite. I
think it's because if you've never seen that before. You
don't know a what fingernails look like when they grow
out that long until you see it and you're like whoah.
But then also, how do you live the questions posed
by that photograph, like how do you type? How do
you do? Less? There at things you do with your
(23:09):
hands every day?
Speaker 1 (23:10):
You know the woman who does have the longest fingernails, Now,
why did she start this project?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So she started it because she used to get her
nails done every week with her daughter, and then her
daughter died when she was sixteen, and so she decided
never to cut her fingernails ever again. And I just
thought that I was just like I think with so
many of these records that seem really wacky and out
there and outlandish. In fact, I'd say with all of them,
(23:36):
you look behind and you find someone pursuing something that
is really meaningful to them.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So did you gain kind of a respect for record
keepers by the time you finished your story?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I think I kind of did. I feel like there
was this sort of easy version of this piece that
I didn't want to write, where it was like, look
at these freaks, they're so strange. I think I always
wanted to try and work out what it is that
motivated people to do this thing that seems really out
there to most people. And yeah, I think for a
lot of people, they're really proud of it.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I know I've kept you a long time, but would
you mind if I quickly just tried to stand on
one leg?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Of course? No? Please, I'm devastated you didn't do it.
Hold on, do you have something to rough around your eyes?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Can I just close them?
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Or no?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
No? Absolutely not? Whoa? Whoa? You became like an adjudicator.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Well, look, you know I'm the only person here who
knows what the guidelines are.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
There's a video of me so you can see me. H.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, and I've got this top perfectly all right.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Would someone start the timer?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah? Okay, so countdown, three, two, one go?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Did you bounce around as much as I have?
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oh, that didn't go well.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?
Maybe he'll take a napper poke around online.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Our Show Today was produced by Kate mccauliffe, Joey fish
Ground and nishaven Cut. It was edited by Lydia Jean Kot.
Our engineer is a man to Kay Wang, and our
executive producer is Catherine Ghirrado, and our theme song was
written and performed by Jonathan Colton and a special thanks
to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer
(25:22):
Laurence Alasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week.
You were working on this story for a year.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, it took so long, partly because I was traveling.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
At a record of some kinds the longest someone worked
on a story about the Guinness Book of World Records.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Finally, pretty sure you have Chief
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