Hello, and good afternoon. How are you doing today, Catherine good?
How are you? Absolutely fantastic? I gotta ask you, is we continue
to do this every single year. We love weird stuff, and what is
it about weird stuff that calms down our anxiety? You guys have got magic
inside of this book. Thank you. Yeah, this look is full of
the weirdest rackiest of the world has to offer. I don't know. I
think weird stuff is like changes the way you feel about the world. So
from one moment you don't know something exists, and then you open this book
and you're like, Wow, the whole world has changed. I now know
about It's really weird thing I didn't know before. The one thing that charges
me up about this book is that when when young adults and younger read this
book, they're not on Google reading that and I love the fact that they've
got a book in their hand and it shows them and hopefully inspires them to
use their own imaginations. Yeah, it's a great experience to just be able
to flip through this book, open into any page. We have incredible photos
and we have a team of photo editors who really spend a lot of time
selecting the best images, the coolest stuff. We have writers working so hard
on all of the facts and the stuff we put in here. It is
a really a labor of love, and I think a lot more rich than
maybe what you could get from a quick Google search. Well. Probably one
of the biggest biggest shocks to me was I always thought you could see the
Great Wall of China from space. Not so true? Is it tell me
something else? I don't know about the Great Wall. I do know that
parts of the Great Wall of China, this one is in my brain,
were that rice was used. Sticky rice was used as part of the construction
material in the Great Wall of China many many, many years ago. What
sticky rice? I mean, I mean the stuff that we usually have for
like sushi and stuff. Yeah, just part, just part of it though
not the whole. Oh oh. Well. And another thing that really what
I thought was so incredible was a leaf sheep. When I think of sheep,
I think of sheep, you know, out on a farm. But
this leaf sheep, I mean, what an amazing photograph you've got of this?
Yeah. So the leaf sheep is a little sea slug that has a
face that looks a lot like a sheep. It's very funny. Highly recommend
looking it up. And it looks like it has a body made out of
lead, but it is a sea slug and it is only a little less
than half an inch long, so it's super tiny. And the photo we
have in the book is very very much zoomed in. It's much much larger
than the actual animal is. I think it's quite cute. It's a very
strange looking creature. Speaking of strange creatures, I love the way that doctors
will the rumble rump and the crunch roll. I've never seen a spider dance
before, and I love spiders. Oh you do, Yes, I do.
That's awesome. Yeah that these these little jumping spiders are so fun.
And yes, the scientists have been naming their dance moves because they're so unique.
When you put a book together like this, I mean, I'm wanting
listeners to understand that. First of all, this book is eight and a
half by eleven or a little bit larger, but it is hardcore when it
comes to the cover, are you guys pretty much speaking to the generations of
twenty to thirty years from now, because you know that this book will be
in pristine shape even during that time period. Oh, I don't know.
We're coming out with a new book every year, so who knows what we'll
be doing in twenty or thirty years. But this is this is quite the
tone. It is a big book, hardcover, and I think bill to
last. So there's a lot in here that I think, I hope some
of it will still be. You never know, a lot of stuff changes,
but a lot of this stuff I think will still be still be weird
and exciting. Well being a part of that creative team, I mean,
how is it that you know where is the cutoff point? Because there is
so much weird in our weird lives. Yeah, it's tough. So part
of my job is just to decide which weird stuff gets in the book and
which weird stuff we don't put in the book, or maybe we favor a
different book. And part of it is signing stuff that is weird enols,
and then another part of it is just making sure that we have all of
our bases covered. So within each continent, we want to represent a good
number of different at different countries, and then different ecosystems, so we wanted
some desserts and rainforests on a good mix of manmade stuff and natural stuff,
and so part of my job is to make sure the book feels diverse and
not too much of the same type of things, because you could find,
you could feel a whole book of weird waterfalls from around the world. There's
a lot of them, and so part of what we want to do is
make it feel like you open any page and there's something just totally different,
fresh. Well, even as an adult. You make me feel like Pusti
Leon or even Christopher Columbus. I go in there to explore. I'm going
in there to learn something new, even at my age. Yeah, I
learned things every day when I work in this book. And I think one
thing I love about it is that because of the photo if you can really
armchair travel and feel like you're seeing parts of the world that, especially for
middle school kids, they may be too far away, not accessible right now,
but you really can get a flavor of all of the all the how
big the world is and how many things are are to see in it.
Now. I am here in the South and we do have our beaches and
we boogieboard all the time down in Charleston, but I've never heard of volcano
boarding. What the heck is that all about? So it is kind of
exactly what it sounds like. There is a volcano called their Own Negro in
Nicaragua where you can rind a sled essentially a board and sled down the side
of a volcano. And I did have someone asked me, is the volcano
erupting? And no, you're not sledding on lava. It's this volcanic ash,
which turns out is good for sledding, So people do put on their
safety goggles and their job suits and sled down it. But it is.
It is a tourist attraction in the area. You know. The twinkie has
always been talked about as being the one thing that will always be here,
But now now I've discovered inside this book the fruitcake will last over a hundred
years as well. Yes, there's a fruitcake that that was discovered in Antarctica.
I forget exactly how old, but very very very old, one hundred
years or so, and they found it and it's still as as they say,
edible. I don't know, would you try it? Yeah, you
know what I would. I would, I would, but it would be
just a little bit of a nibble. I would have to say, it's
just let me, let me just try just a little bite problemies. I
would probably like it and try to finish it. Sound good to me.
You might be braver than I am. But who knows on a book project
like this does this? I know that it comes out each year, but
it's got to take more than a year to put something like this together.
Yes, so the our books take maybe a year and a year and a
half, sometimes too, depending on the books to put together. And so
we work on this quite a while in advance, and then we keep our
eye on the news every bit of the reason why I keep coming back because
you're so up to date, and yet you take us back into this time
period where it's like, really, you got to come back to this show.
I love talking with you guys and sharing conversations National geographic kids. That
is great to hear. Excellent, Will you be brilliant today? Okay,
all right, you se