This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we have the story of John Collins.

He holds the Guinness World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft at 226 feet, 10 inches.

To learn more about him, visit the paper airplane guy.com.

Here's John sharing how he came to love paper airplanes so much that they are now his full-time career.

I started probably about the age that most people start thinking about paper airplanes.

You know, eight, nine made the same kind of, you know, basic dart design most people make. You fold the piece of paper in half and fold the corner down, you know, three more times and then, or two more times. So it's a total of three folds down. And you end up with this kind of dart-shaped plane that kind of flies. Flies okay, the first couple of flights, and then it starts like unfolding itself and coming apart and the nose gets crunched and it's not a very good

paper airplane. So we started kind of tinkering around me and my brothers. I had three brothers

around the same age and we would you know kind of tinker around with changing the design

here or there. And then my mom knew how to do this really cool origami base called

a water bomb base. And that's where you make a big X in the page and then flip it over and fold

the other direction. And then this thing all collapses down into a triangle that's got, you know,

flaps on top and center of gravity's automatically move forward because you've got all these layers in the front of the plane. It's just this magic base.

I continually invent planes even to this day using this origami base, this water bomb base. How my mom

knew how to do that? I have no idea. But she did know how to do that and showed it to us.

And, you know, from that moment on, I was off and running on

making paper airplanes. And I was just, I think, just a little bit better than my siblings

at folding paper accurately and sharply and, you know, remembering folding sequences and

stuff. And so I could see that this was a little bit of a success niche for me.

You know, the world record idea came along pretty soon after I started folding a lot of designs.

I started going, you know, pushing as far as I could with inventing, you know, folding techniques on my own and trying to figure stuff out.

And then around the fourth grade, I think it was a substitute teacher brought an origami book in and she was going to lead the class through making an origami crane, which there's,

...