hi everybody today I talk with Dan Gan Dan is probably one of the most prolific content creators and Technical writers this planet has ever produced he has written over a 100 books probably a whole lot more if you want to count his updated editions which are often significant rewrites he's also the creator of the for dummies series of books he had this radical unheard of controversial idea that technical writing should be fun should be playful it should not be condescending to the reader the author's personality should shine through these are all things we take for granted today but they were almost unheard of when Dan was pitching his earliest ideas for the first couple of books in the series and the rest given the influence that for dummies

books have had and its popularity the rest is just history and on a more personal note his writing style was a huge huge inspiration for me and some of his earliest books live rentree in my head as perfect examples of what technical writing should be this is going to be really fun chat so stick around Dan it is great chatting with you and I have an introduction where I talk a little bit about you know why I'm chatting with you and so on but I've been reading your books for a very long time actually your book was one of the first ones I read when I was very young and just getting to learn more about computers and that got me into of course technical writing and the whole world

that came from there so just want to say thank you for doing all the things you've done and welcome and then I want to just kind of start with at the very beginning the same question I like to ask all the people I chat with on this is how did you get started you know in your case what came first a love for

writing or a love for technology well it was writing first I wanted to be a writer so went to school wanted to be a writer write books write science fiction and all that stuff and for a long time I was writing articles short stories and kind of trying to do novels and I was getting really good connections with some magazines to where the editor would actually personally email me back or actually was writing back then they would send me a letter and say you know this is good but we need something more along the lines of this and then there was a local magazine in town in San Diego where I grew up and it was called The Bite buyer and they were looking for

people to write computer articles for them and I had a computer and I like to write so I figured I would write an article about computers and I did and so I was first published in that magazine in April of 1984 and they liked what I did so I kept doing more for them and eventually I became the editor of that magazine um I also spent time working at a computer book publishing house so I ghost wrote quite a few how-to computer books and that's kind of where I started to learn how the art of writing to a beginner was and so learned that you had to be informative and you had to have humor I also loved Mad Magazine when I was a kid so I tried to combine the two

and I tried to sell an idea for years about a beginning computer book something that would be friendly to people and approachable and say what they needed to learn learn about computers cuz none of the other books were doing it and the Publishers didn't want to publish a beginner's book because they said beginners didn't buy books and I said well they don't buy books because you don't write books for beginners and eventually we just hit upon Doss for dummies which was a publisher approached me with the idea and I said well I already have an outline for a book like that and we just melded the two and the rest is history it exploded so that's that's where I came from that's the three minute

version yeah I want to dive into some of

these details first but so 1984 people had computers back then you know it wasn't until like maybe even 10 years later or even like some of your some of of your first videos I think you did an interview for one of the local news stations where you talked about you know what you should look for in a computer and there was actually a picture I Think of You by the pool side on a laptop it was like 1991 so I'm like okay you were way ahead of the curb even for people who were ahead of the curb at the time so what got you into a getting using

computers in the early 1980s well it was it was uh so at at College um you know they would have they had a computer they had a big they had a vax and so there were terminals all over the place for the computer science kids and then I found out that uh anyone could use the computers any student had access to the computer system and that there was a word processor on there and I'm a writer and I had typewriters uh that I would go through and I would break them because I would type so fast or I would get angry or whatever and the typewriters would break and I'm like well what I really want is a word processor and I'm uh I knew a lot lot of people around then who

would say oh yeah writers are using word processors now this is you know because you can cut and paste on the screen you can move words around you can you know back up and erase without having to use white out or you know to erase the page or whatever and I'm like well yeah and at school they also had Apple 2 computers and they had word processors word star on them and I was well that's what I want as a writer so I bought the first computer as a tool to write with now the guy in the Apple Store was was was pretty rude to me he wouldn't help me so I didn't buy an Apple I went to a Radio Shack and the guy there was nice

so I bought a trs8 and um I actually have the ancestor to one of them is is right back there I used to have that computer was my writing computer for the longest time and um so I would write on the computer but the problem was is being a a cook in a restaurant I couldn't afford to buy a computer a complete word processing system so I only bought a computer and it didn't even have disc drives so sitting there with this thing that I just paid a lot of money for and I'm going okay so what can I do with it well it came with a book and the book was like learn to program your computer now I didn't touch any of that in college because I thought

it involved a lot of math but it actually doesn't really because the computer does the math and so I started reading this book on programming and I'm like hey this isn't that hard it's kind of easy so while I was waiting to finish the rest of my word processing system I was playing with a computer and then for my birthday my mom bought me a them now this is kind of weird cuz I mean my mom's from that generation and you know they don't know how to use smartphones or anything and she went to Radio Shack and said what can we get as you know a peripheral and she got me a modem so I'm online 1982 I'm online and going around and and chatting with people on what

were called bulletin board systems back then and that was that was pretty fun so I got to know computer nerd friends and get to know other programmers and stuff as I was learning how to program and it was kind of fun um and then of course it just the writing ended up tending to the computer Direction because I could explain computer things in a manner that people would understand and it just kind of blossomed from there so when you talk about you know

how your writing blossomed from that person you know point of view I depending on what source I'm looking at you have anywhere from like over 150 to 200 books that you published over the period of Time how do you manage that

well it's it's not that hard because if you look at the unique titles and I I can bring them up over here CU there's a difference between having um you know writing a God I I don't know what my number is currently I will tell you in just a second but um but when you write for technology you're rewriting a lot so if I can I can just grab a book off the shelf so we have PCs For Dummies and this is the um they call this the 13th edition and so what happens is as you write about technology of course technology changes so this version of PC for dummies does not cover floppy drives but the first version did um and the first version covered Doss which is no

longer used as an operating system so as they keep changing the uh computers you have to keep updating the books so a lot of my books are um uh are redu so you know 13 versions of PCs For Dummies that's really one book that's been updated in various editions 13 times so is that 13 books or is that one book so there's actually the the number of unique titles that I have so oneoff books is about 68 so and most of those are a lot of them are programming books but a lot of them are on technology that doesn't really exist anymore so you know uh older books on Excel and windows and um I did a computer dictionary uh did a book on memory management back when that

was a thing in the 1990s so those are all the unique titles but the total number of titles let's see if I can get what the current number is is 175 so that's counting if you count each time a book came in the mail and they said well here's the latest edition of your book then it's 175 which does mean that I've actually you know published that many books but um it also means that a lot of them are rewrites so you know you go through and you say hey here's the new version that's really a new book but is it I mean I got

introduced to your work from PCs For Dummies you know one of the first books I read was pieces for dummies I forget what Edition it was you know my Amazon history goes all the way back like 97 or 98 but I'm guessing this is back when I probably bought it at Barnes & Noble itself because you know every weekend my parents just take me to Barnes & Noble you know and they'd be getting coffee you know was like a thing back then I'd be like you know jumping between video game books and Technical books and so on but of course the piece for dummy's book was like the one I read I was like I I to buy this this is actually really good and I remember like you know what I

really liked about it were the jokes in it because you know I was a kid and like some the humor was perfectly aligned to me and I don't mean to you know as a disrespect you in any way I really like the kind of humor in it like there something I think the one that always struck me and I try to find it today if I can find the quote for it it was really about like you know like something about the Intel Pentium and it was at the Oracle at Delphia like using all those terms from back then that happened to use very specific names of companies and Technologies from that era I was it's a core memory for me because even now like you know I don't have the

context for it my my my memory probably completely fudged up extremely but I know in an adct somewhere at my parents's house that book is there can know exactly where it is from that and it always was like fascinating thing to me and so when I got started into writing because similar reasons I was into animation and graphics and people would ping me about hey how do you do this and email was no longer scalable I started publishing on the blog you know like started in 1998 was in Middle School starting to blog and so on and so was always like you know I'm like I'm G to make mine just as funny as some the Dan wres because hey it's just more add a human connection to it as opposed to

all the boring stuff that they saw from everyone else and so that was you know really fun there but I did you know partly in preparation for what we're doing here I bought a more recent version of PCs For Dummies like you know a couple of weeks ago and that was very different so I I you know I realized like it's not you know it's the same book but to me it was a complete rewrite in a certain sense so it's like over the period of time whatever was book a this is a brand new book in its own way I'm pretty sure they probably brand new versions of it in in the middle between like the 20 or 30 years since the first time that book came out so I think in

that case you know even though you're being humble and saying it's not a full re I think it is a whole new book just the title happens to be the the same

there it's it and it's it's easier to write because you know what you're going to write about so you have the book there like you said um but things change the technology changes and I don't like to reuse old material um I try to keep it fresh it's hard because sometimes they want the book so fast that it's like I really don't have time to think of something really clever or funny so I do try to keep the humor up in there because it should be fun it should be entertaining you know back in the in the day you know you'd read a a computer manual or a computer book and the examples were really dry and boring and I'd be like oh they still are I mean I

have a book on SQL programming and you know you know here's a database that's a collection of users and it's boring and so I'm I'm always looking for things that you know that I can do that's that's more entertaining and fun that someone may you know if someone's looking at it and they actually look a little deeper they may say oh yeah I there's humor here something's funny it's it's outrageous and it was they were were a lot more funny back in the in the early days the publisher had a lot more gave me a lot more latitude to write some silly things in there uh so like the original version of Word Perfect For Dummies which I think is is the best book I've done um and that was

back in 1992 uh that was like had a lot of stuff in there that I that I would get in trouble for today I mean it's nothing that's offensive but it was just silly silly stuff that um that was like I mean some some of it I got email from a guy who said you know I am reading a computer book on the subway in New York and laughing out loud and people are looking at me like what's wrong with me um because it was funny you know I tried to make it that entertaining informative of course first but entertaining so I mean you know the the section in Doss for dummies on recovering a deleted file I mean obviously there's no humor in there it's just like get the file back

they don't want to read a joke first they want to get the file back and then after the file's back then I can tell a joke so you know that's kind of the way uh the way I would do it but never really never really tried to put any humor in there in fact the humor usually comes during the second draft so I write the first draft and then the second draft I can actually think of silly things to do uh which is a lot easier because it's to me it's easier to make fun of something than it is just to start out to be funny that that makes a

l of sense how were you able to convince your earliest publisher to actually take a bet on this more humorous take on writing given that historically at least my understanding of it is like you know the publishing industry is very traditional they don't like to change too many things up a whole lot and especially back then where you had a handful of players who controlled a large the distribution it was tricky to break in there because you know it's hard to print Ship Store keep the WRA from eating all the books from warehouses and so on and so how did he

pull that off yeah that was uh I I still say the to the this day I say that you know publishing book publishing is a 18th century business that thinks that it's in the 21st century but they're just they're an old do that's the way they do things and it was at a uh conference there was used to be a computer book convention where all the Publishers and authors would come and it was in San Diego and um and so I was talking at the time I'd written about a dozen computer books and I was giving a talk on you know the author's perspective or whatever it was and I said one of the things I don't like about books is that when I write a book

I try to make it fun and entertaining and creative but yet a lot of these Publishers do what call they they take the book and they put it over a creativity magnet and so you have all this good stuff in your book and the magnet just sucks it all out and you're left with a dry boring computer book and I said I hate that and I was actually referring to a publisher called Cybex and I just written a book for them and I forget what it was about some subject and the editor kept saying I mean he actually sent me a a an email and he said can you stop putting these jokes in your book cuz I just have to edit them out and the same thing happened when I

would work with Microsoft press which I love Microsoft press and I had a great relationship with him but they would do the same thing you can't they they actually told me once they said you can't put this thing in there about cops and donuts because it's not going to translate into German and I'm like why that was their reason for pulling the joke out and um and so I'm I'm complaining about this stuff and in the audience is this guy Mack McCarthy he is the Editor in Chief of idg books which had just started out I mean they'd maybe done books and he was the guy who was looking for an author for Doss for dummies and so he said hey I want to want to take you out to lunch so we went

to lunch at the hotel and he said I have an idea for a book and we're looking for an author to write it and I want to write a book that has personality and his fun and all this stuff and I said well I'm your author and I have the book it's you know I called it the idiots guide to Doss he called it Doss for dummies I sent him the outline and from then on we actually changed the Entire Computer book publishing industry because all of a sudden those other Publishers like Cybex and Microsoft and the rest of them they were all looking for books that had humor in them suddenly that became important now the Publishers would say we want a book with

Attitude which I think is dumb and I said no you want a book with personality you know we we read these books all our favorite authors that we have out there if it's Stephen King or whoever you generally read them because they just they're very Lively reads they have personality in there and you can identify with the characters and I'm like we can put the same stuff into computer books you just got to let the author Express their personality in there and find good authors and good writers who will do it and they actually did I mean there were lots of guys Andy Rathbone uh Dee mclen um or I if I messed up his last name everyone calls him deck and and a bunch of other good

authors who had great senses of humor and could write really well and express ideas and they all put together all these for dummies books and they just sold like crazy oh David POG was another one who you know great sense of humor and um sense of fun too and that absolutely came across in the book and so these books Mac for dummies and windows for dummies and PCs For Dummies and Doss for dummies they all became tremendously popular because the the the people out there who were bored to death with the old books suddenly loved the new books it's like now I finally have a computer book that I can read it's entertaining it's informative and it you know it keeps me going so that I don't

I'm not like just looking at chapter six that's all I want so yeah I think the enthusiasm of the writer kind of just

oozes out because in many places if you look at real world teaching as well the material can be dry and boring but the teacher is excited and like makes the material engaging you can get a you know you can buy osmosis essentially get better at understanding the material because that it's addictive and I think the personality out to these books made some of this material that much more useful because yes it's boring but it's explained in a way where I can tell that the person who writing it cares about the material greatly as opposed to just droning on and on about something yeah

and and when you find a book like that it's like yeah I I like this guy and I've done that several times I bought many books by someone by an author who I enjoy technical books um and that's just and yeah I think that that's what really set the industry apart and of course it it only lasted a few years because then they realized that that it didn't really matter what was in the book and they just kept printing more and more of them and you know and kind of diluting the content which is just you know it's capitalism what can you expect but I've always tried in my own books to keep up the uh to keep up the the interest level and to make them fun in fact I just got

a comment I've I updated um uh my word book said there's a new version of Microsoft Word coming out and the editor wrote me back and said wow you just you really make books fun I really like reading the books and I'm like well thank you you know take time and you put thought into it and you try to do clever little things to take a topic that otherwise is kind of boring and make it interesting yeah the nice thing about the humor as well is that even if you know the material really well you just want to read it because you just want to see what the humorous take on the material is going to be like as I definitely remember reading some PC and

this actually the poor dummy books not because I didn't know how to use this product but because I just wanted to light read on an airplane or a train and I just wanted to see how the humorous take on it would actually be because you know I I'm a geek I love technology things in general and so getting reinforcement on the same material I know but from a different take on it was totally fine with me so I think from a business point of view it was probably a really good decision as well oh yeah and and getting a belly laugh from a book when I'm reading something about like Photoshop or something and all of a sudden that they they have you do something and then all of a sudden it's

like oh that's so funny you know it's it's like thank you for entertaining me instead of uh just telling me what it is you know step ABC I no no no I mean I I want to have fun too it's like let's make learning fun so and the for dummies books were also interesting in that the design was very different as well like

if you saw a collection of books on the book aisles at libraries or in bookstores they stood out the yellow and the black and so on do you have any

insight into how that came about yeah Mac mck McCarthy again uh he he did research and he found out that the the two two opposing colors that most attract the human eye are red are yellow and black and that uh if you put yeah this is why caution signs are yellow and black because psychologically or cognitively we react to those colors they're very strong and so he decided to make the book yellow and black he was the one who added that now originally they don't have them anymore which is shows again how they they're kind of like tamping down on the humor a bit is they all had cartoons in them which I didn't I didn't like the cartoons but people love the cartoons uh they love

the little icons they love you know the the little dummies man that was another thing that came around they when I was writing Doss for dummies about two-thirds way through the book they came back and said we want icons in the margin and I'm like what a what and so they sent me a book to show me what the icons look like and I'm like okay so I came up with the the four basic for dummies icons the technical stuff the tip the warning and um remember and the uh the technical stuff one has the what they call now the Dummy Man on it and the dummies man is actually a caricature of the guy the graphic artist who designed those icons his name is peepe

and if you meet him in real life he looks like the dummies man so that was basically him and I got to meet him once at a when I was visiting in San Francisco and and he was just really funny he was really surprised too at how uh how well the the books were doing and he's and I'm like well that's you and he's like yeah that was me I drew myself as the as the technical nerd guy and I thought that's really fun so that's

great so every writer it's a process on how you go from an idea in your head to putting it down into the screen or on paper what's your process

like um well usually uh so I always start with an outline everything has to have an outline so you start putting ideas down in an outline and the more you flood your ideas there the more you can organize Microsoft Word helps you do that so you start promoting and demoting topics you shuffle them up and down you move them left and right to try to see how to to fit things together um and the more you do that the better the final book's going to be because then that helps you build the whole picture uh because everything out everything to me everything always starts out scattered so I'm always like oh I got to talk about this and this and this and this and this and um you know move all over

the map and then of course as you're working on the idea more ideas pop into my head which again is why I have to have an outline in fact for that one book for um Word Perfect For Dummies um the outline on that book was so complete and so thorough that when I sat down to write it I wrote it in three weeks it took no time to write it because it was all done in the outline I just had thought about it so much and how I wanted to present the information um the other thing is is just to leave the computer room um all all all my life I've always I've been a member of a gym so I always go to the gym or I go on a

walk or I do something to get out and to free my mind so that the ideas will come popping in again because as a writer sometimes it's very frustrating to you know it's like oh I need to I need to think of a good metaphor here I need to think of something to compare this to so that someone will understand it better and I I can't do that when I'm stale so it's like okay so even though I know I'm on a deadline and I have to get work done I'm going to leave the house I'm going to go walk around the park do a couple of laps you know go down to the river whatever throw rocks in the river because I know that once I take my mind

off it the idea is going to rush into my head and I'll be like yes and then I have to go back so that happens a lot and that's really the the source of inspiration is to you know you have to leave it's like the the old right guy sitting at his typewriter you know he's off in his cabin in the woods and he's doing that and he's got his coffee and whatever and he's trying to think of an idea nothing's going to come to you you have to go out and you have to do something else take your mind off it it's a left brain right brain thing so I do have a wood shop and so sometimes when I uh when I'm really frustrated

I'll go out and try to make something out of wood it's like okay making another birdh house or whatever and then all of a sudden the idea comes in it's like yes back to the computer so that's how I do it yeah I think letting your

mind wander is something that almost all articles and research on what makes creative people creative comes up all the time MH and it's also just it's just

and some people some people don't have that so my mom wanted to be a writer she doesn't have that she's very focused she's a very linear person you she thinks a a bcde e um and I can be really scatterbrained at times I can just hop around which again is why I do an outline because if my brain's hopping around and I'm just writing down a list of ideas at some point in time I can switch gears and go okay now how do we organize this what comes first so if I got to talk about this they already need to know this so this comes up here and oh they all already need to know this before they know that and again that's that's how you build uh and present the

information so you're not and I've read computer books like this where you're reading along and on page three it says now this just to find out how to do this go to page 16 and I'm like well why do I need to go up there when it should be right here you know those kind of things it's not a choose your adventure book in that sense reference and linear exactly yeah

when we have an idea like doing something not in front of your computer and you want to jot it down what what do

you use to do that well I a lot of tools uh I used to back in the old days I would get on my cell phone and I would leave myself a message so I would would phone I had a separate cell phone and of course an office phone and I would call the office phone and I would say this is what you need to do and so leave myself a phone message now I can dictate into my phone or I'll bring up an app that a writing app like Google Docs and I'll write something down but most of the time what happens is it sticks in my head and that's that's really cool so the other day I was thinking of a of a

um of of a something that I'm writing now which has to do with shapes so putting shapes in you know creating shapes Circle squares those kind of things and all of a sudden it popped into my head getting into shape and I'm like oh my gosh I can do puns so I would go ahead and just start thinking of all these shape puns and then put them in the book as much as I could and as much as made sense so pretty much now the idea comes in and it's really heavy so it stick sticks around with me but when I'm thinking and I'm like oh yeah I need to do that gotta write it down I mean because sometimes it'll be you'll be walking around come back into the office

and I'll be like yeah what was that idea uh I didn't write it down now I forgot so there's that and of course with the new technology and everything I mean with the with the um with cloud storage and stuff it's really easy to keep all that stuff connected so I don't have to worry about I used to have a Palm Pilot before the phones got fancy and so I would carry a Palm Pilot and I would write the ideas down on a Palm Pilot but now I can write them down in Google doc it's saved on the cloud it's here on the desktop so you know that that made it a lot easier but that's yeah you have to cuz you know like I said if I'm out

wandering around and an idea pops into my head I don't want to lose it yeah and are you also someone who if you have an

idea in the middle of the night do suddenly wake up you can remember it when you wake up in the morning or do you jot it down at that moment itself

just so you don't forget it usually when I wake up in the middle of the night I'm screaming and so those aren't really the ideas that I want to keep unfortunately yeah that hasn't happened in a while it used to though and uh that's why I have a laptop by my bed and the reason is is so I can jot down the idea if I have an idea and that has happened and it's like you know here I am at at 3:30 in the morning and the laptop lid is open and I'm writing down an idea um and that has happened a few times so but again it's like in a Google doc or somewhere and it's just keeping it there the other time is like you know I'll be out I'll

be in a boring meeting or it'll be a luncheon or something and and I'll just I'll have an idea and then I can flip up my phone and put it in there really fast and that's one way to keep it and it's yeah but most of the time the good stuff the good stuff I won't forget it's more of the random stuff it's more of the oh yeah we should do that and that and that it's like now I have to write this down or I'll will forget that so so end to

end how long does it take for you to go from starting your outline to getting a book ready to send to your publisher

depends on the deadline so there's been there's been some that there was one that they gave me a week to do and that was a terrible version of a of a book that was just a week-long update but they were just pressuring me so hard to get that book out um but usually I give myself about two to three weeks to do a good outline and that's working on it at least an hour every day building it and getting it to that point where it's just where it's down to the almost the paragraph level of what's going to be covered because then if I can get that done then the book may take me six weeks to write and that's it and so and I can write

them faster too it's it depends on how much of a social life want and whether I want to go outside that day um but yeah just getting that done it's also one of the biggest problems uh for people who don't work for themselves and don't understand how that works is you really have to have a sense of Duty to show up and actually get the work done um I know a lot of people who've tried to work for themselves and they're just they're too distracted they will go they'll go off and they'll be like oh you know I should really clean this room right now I got a couple of minutes or uh you know they look outside and they say wow it's really pretty I really I want to go

outside and play with the dog or whatever um you have to say Okay so this morning like good example this morning so I knew I had this event that we were going to be chatting here and I said okay before I do that I want to go do these three things and I think I have enough time so I went ahead and scheduled it so that I could get that done and then get this done and then after this I have a bunch of other stuff that I would like to get done so I just set little deadlines and I've been doing it so long that I can be successful at that but I know how much how long it takes to write things and the current

book that I'm working on which isn't due until January I figured out in my head that if I can do maybe five or six pages every day then I'll get that book done so that's kind of my goal if I can do that if I can do more it's even better and then when I'm done with that I'll go off and I'll do something else so generally I'm juggling several projects at a time um which also helps keep me fresh because you don't want to get stuck and then say well I really need a break now and that happened oh I was under a deadline once and I had to they wanted a book like in three weeks and um I'm like oh so I'm going to have to work

like every day 10 hours a day to write this book but then I found out after about four days of doing that is you it doesn't work anymore brain's all clogged up and so it's like I definitely need to take a day off and that's that refresher that's getting out into nature that's doing whatever just leaving the scene and then you come back all freshened up so there is there is something to be said for taking a break every so often and that's the way you do it

yeah you know the example I often give when people ask you know this question for me as well sometimes is like you know and I think you probably can recognize is like you remember this def fragmentor from back in the day like 95 and '98 and so on there are moments where you're just seeing like you know the pale teal color turn to a slightly darker one slowly one at a time is going like man this is never going to get done now why was I watching that I have no idea but the thing is that at some point though it starts going like page after page it's like fills up gigantic blocks at any given time and my view is always that what you want to optimize for is

those giant blocks coming in those large buckets as opposed to like you know focusing narrowly on this one word or something for like eight hours because you're going to make like very little progress but if you took a break had other things to kind of get your mind off of what you're working on you can optimize for those large things which in aggregate be a much faster way of getting things done even though it may not look like to you at that moment they're spending your time productively

it's a marvelous analogy yeah bad for if if someone's watching and they don't they aren't familiar with that you know I would do that too you know watching the defrag and you got this this screen full of all these little dots and stuff and they're just they're twinkling and just moving just a little bit at a time and it's like I know it's working because it's doing something but then at the end it's like big chunk shuffling up and down and and of course the result after suffering through that was that the computer was faster everything ran faster it it did and I even like you know fell for like installing like Norton system works back in the day and doing that little optimized thing where

you probably like deleted valid entries from the registry and like remove things that it needed from the startup but I'm like oh it's so much faster the first time around after two restarts it goes bad again let me run it one more time and make it work but the thing with defragmenting was like you know I don't want to spend too much time on defragmenting specifically but there be moments where you'd see like immovable region would come up I'm like why is that region immovable like what's in there it's everything in the dis is it's like zeros and ones like what is it about that those red I think it's red squares you know what those things that cannot work and is it safe for that

other data to be right next to the immovable region like that might be like what if it's like you know radioactive kind of thing like infect other regions if I have too many immovable regions that's prob storage I can't use to install my games and do whatever I was doing and so a lot of things you know like I hate to say a lot of my core memories were probably on like very mundane computer things and going like why does it do these kind of things and of course my interest would never be like okay let me go dive into detail like let me jump into something else instead yeah yeah those were the days we didn't know we didn't know anything no no I forget well I think

Windows 98 had the def fragmenter I think it was Windows Millennium that removed it I think at that point had an automatic system optimizing thing where you just you know you you hit def fragment but you just see a progress bar there nothing to see anymore at this point and then I think after that when XP came out it was done automatically behind the scenes you never really you had the defragmenting to make people like us probably feel like we're doing something productive but the reality was was always doing it behind the scenes without any any active work for and the file system has changed so it's it's much more efficient but back in the old days I mean that was a file system that

was designed for a 10 megabyte hard drive and so you know it was like yeah things got really sloppy fast and uh yeah now it's it's just it's super efficient and of course with the with the nvme drives and the you know sdds and everything I mean it's all so fast it doesn't you don't even notice it anymore no no there was no like you know scare stories about like like going from fat 16 to Fat 32 and like what may or may not happen at that time and NTFS just forget about that one you know that would be like you know you're like doing Enterprise level things at that moment

yeah yeah I do think that a lot of people today just don't understand like don't take for take for granted how easy it is like just hit something and just have things work like you know for me like my you know I lived in a small town in Tennessee at the time when I was like doing a lot of my computer things and there's this moment where my us robotics modem there two competing standards I believe like one was by and one was was by us Robotics and at some point the government said it standard on v90 as the option for it and then there was a little firmer update we had install from make a floppy disc and then magically you now connected on a v90 thing and I

was in the back like how in the world was that possible you like two competing standards that people either you know you were either on Camp a or Camp B you know your identity was wrapped up around that the ISP you chose was wrapped up around that as well like oh I can't use that one my modem will not work with this ISP I need to use the other one and then this thing came up where he just like installed this thing that suddenly made all of it work and now you're like wow I'm connecting at like 48.8 kvps that's magical yeah it was crazy though that those those were insane days I mean it's just uh I I think about that too it was just it was it was crazy but now now

it all works it all worked exactly and and and nowadays you know I'm like you know my friends is like yeah I have a starling portable thing I'm just going to take you I'm going to go hiking in this middle of the woods and they put it on the ground like in 10 15 seconds there's a nice UI in the app and it works magically I'm like wow like even my physical fiber connection here may not be as good at times as what is available here and that's like going to space and back and so the Technology's gotten pretty pretty you know Advanced so you know that that's why I always like found it very fasting your piece of your dummy's book later I'm like wow it

changed a lot because my memory of what it was back then and what your books were right now and how much it captured the changes here and like yeah I don't think anybody who read a book from you like 30 years ago would even recognize 90% of material you're talking about right now because it was so far ahead of its time and futuristic when we describe like you know just the ability like hey hit a button your internet works you have video and audio conferencing and and things in real time like what we're doing right now would have been like unheard of back then it's like yeah well

live live video on I mean that just that was not a thing too slow I mean the there's there you know images that we have now that we we find on the internet that we download were larger than a floppy disc andan 1.44 megabytes and yet you know I mean the other day I uploaded to the publisher 36 megabytes worth of stuff and I can imagine making 36 floppy discs and then sending that in the mail exactly whenever I have to see it when whenever I see a file size in my inbox that's like more than like you know a few hundred kilobytes my mind immediately goes back to like wait I only have 15 megab storage total in my entire email thing I'm paying for that

extra store the free one would have been like one megabyte or so on it was like lyos mail or like hot mail or something like that and so I'm just like baffled at like how quickly this happens and I spent some time talking to you know I interview High School High School in my college my alma Mo and I often talk to them about like you know technology and so on and their mind starts off with like where technology is like right now whereas whenever I think about something I always go back like 30 years from I gradually get to today and I'm like okay now let's talk about what's going on right now so it's always fascinating seeing like how people's default experiences are shaped by modern

technology as opposed to like what we had so many years ago and the people who just use phones or tablets as opposed to using computers so it's and they they think that you know you design a website you know it's going to say hey where's the mobile version and it's like mobile version yeah exactly you know we have like know whole responsive design thing where we have designed for something Beyond like a 640 by 480 screen or you know the whole of dpis being like more than like you know like 72 is probably the one you always cared about you never cared about anything beyond that and then like looking back at like especially when I look at my my website stuff from like the late 1990s

and I'm like yeah this was like garbage right now because like the top left corner of my screen for some reason this table is like taking up page because I never test on anything else because no one used on anything beyond that particular one so it's funny seeing how much the technology has evolved and how our behaviors have changed as well yeah yeah it's crazy yeah speaking of

behaviors changing writing has changed a lot from back then to now especially how you write how you market and know WR to the internet self-publishing and and video content and so on how are you able to navigate all that because I do know that you're creating videos you also have instructional content on LinkedIn so you've definitely you you know have your hand across both you know Legacy publishing but also like futuristic modern you know non you know digital

media as well yeah so uh LinkedIn learning basically well they do all the marketing and everything so I I provide the content um I've also provided my own content online and you know you do have the online Publishers the key is marketing and I'm dumb when it comes to marketing so when it comes to the self-published books I have on uh Amazon Kindle I subscribe to their marketing service and they Market the books so you know you just type in you say what what the topics are and what some competing titles are some some interest some search words and then people who are looking for that they'll you know your book comes up and hopefully they buy it um and that's about all I do for

marketing because I'm really dumb when it comes to marketing I mean I you know traditional Publishers they do the marketing I write the book and that's pretty much how I've been doing it I'm just kind of ignorant when it comes to to all that stuff yeah and I think

that's something I've always noticed is a big change especially you know nowadays is that the barrier for entry for someone to get a book published is fairly low you know the traditional publisher proess still you know still has some hurdles but if you are good at marketing you can bypass so many things and I'm terrible at marketing as well because that's like a full-time job in its own way and also requires you to kind of shamelessly self-promote which if it's not in your personality to do that it just feels you know a little bit uncomfortable or maybe even like you know downright like not appealing in

some ways as well yeah no I just I and I don't like tooting my own horn that's another thing went back in the in the 9s when we had bookstores all over the place so I'd go visit a bookstore and my mom and she'd go oh there's your book look it's up there this my son wrote this book and all this stuff and I'm like oh Mom why are you doing that but um yeah I don't I just don't one time I went into a bookstore and I found a bunch of my books and I signed them and put them back on the shelf and I thought well this will be kind of cool whoever buys the book will get an autographed copy but I that's about all I ever

did yeah it's uh I I think the decline

of book stores in some ways is like makes it very difficult nowadays because if I go to the tech section of many bookstores now it's tiny and then the books that are there I'm like I talk to my publisher about it like yeah I to pay a lot of money to even be on that sections now because it's not like you you can just be there I'm like yeah this is we're in like can goods and cereal territory point where like to be able to be featured here you're competing with essentially other products that are for the most part you know substitutable Goods right right and it's and it's

always been that way the the thing is the turnover is so so strong I mean the computer books uh they're only good for so long well some of them have legs you know programming books always going to be good as long as the language isn't overhauled too severely but uh yeah some of the other books they just you know they're it's it's it's a it's a high turnover thing and so I think the the bookstores don't really want to take it um because there used to be like you said there's you go to Barnes & Noble and it was awesome there was a whole row of computer stuff and you could look at if you whatever your topic you was there were dozens of books there that you

could look at and see which one you like the most and now that's that's pretty much gone and it's sad too because I mean I still buy computer books as references and the online thing isn't the same you can't really I mean you can look through some of the books but you can't really see what it is you want to see so it's uh but I think books still have a place I I just wish the Publishers would respect the books a bit more um when they do like a dummy's book it's just it's kind of like the paper quality is a little cheap the cover is a little flimsy if they would put a little bit more into it you know some's going to buy a book I think they'd be willing

to pay a little bit more to have something that's going to last so that's just my thought no agreed and the gray

scale and the black text is never quite the same it looks a little bit fuzzy at times and no I completely agree with you on that because you know I looked at some of the older books that I gotten many years ago they were in like you know three color or full color in some ways and I'm like okay what was it about books back then that you know ignoring inflation the cost is very similar yet now the same books you know you're lucky if the publish is like willing to do a color copy version of it's like you know we're going to do black and white primarily we maybe do three colors just because you're you know you're being a pain and bugging us way too much on it

but yeah I think we kind of lost the appeal of books because when you giving an option of like you can read this book it's black and white probably not the highest quality or you can visit the ebook version of it where it's like all in color it makes the it makes it difficult for a consumer to kind of justify going like no I'll get the book version anyway even it's a more lousy experience and I do think that like you mentioned if a Publishers did a little bit more to make make the physical books appealing it' be a more equal conversation you know it's like like the convenience of you know portable you know ebook readers like an iPad or Kindle but I also like this book here

because I'm not sacrificing readability because I'm choosing this exactly oh man that we can talk forever about all of that but also I think one change I've noticed is that back then if you want to learn about some computer topic you either had to go to like a community cult or you know course and actually learn from a human being or read books you know those are like at least back then the big options there were VHS tapes of course on like how to do stuff that you can like buy series of and so on but nowadays you have a lot more competition you know if you want to learn something like for me today if I want to learn something brand new I don't go for a book immediately I just

go to YouTube and be like okay what is the you know the best thing I can find very quickly to give me like a three minute overview to see like do I want to go deeper into this yeah how has that changed how your books are marketed and how your books are written and so on knowing that there's the another Market

here for this well I'm still I'm still writing to the person who's a a linear learner who needs a book um I mean I do have videos for for doing stuff on on uh on the internet and uh but again I don't Market that and so uh no I'm just looking for the traditional person who needs a book as a reference uh wants to keep it handy needs to needs to have that thing it's it's quicker in my opinion and I've done this before it's quicker for me to look up something in a book than it is to try to find that one perfect video because as you know as anyone knows who's looked it up I mean my latest example was lawn sprink lers

one of my sprinkler heads was was acting weird and so I wanted to find a video on how to fix it and I think I must have looked at 20 of them because you you start and you look and all of a sudden it's like hey guys good to see you again subscribe and like my channel and it's and you're like just tell me what I need to know it takes so long to get that and then to find the one guy who you can understand who you know who who isn't holding the camera with one hand and trying to do it with the other and it's just horrible um that's why I always say no I'm going to default to going to a book because not only can I can I open

the book like the one I just bought the other day which is you know writing a c compiler not only can I can I open this book and and leaf through it I I can mark up the book I can draw in here I can put a sticky note on here that says things and then that's a reference that I can use for the future so that when I have something like my Unix power tools book and see it has all these Mar in it and it has like Pages where there's there's like something in the page that says this is important and notes written in the margins because that's something I do that happens to be finding files and so these are you know these are

reasons why I have books and I I'm I think there's other people like us who have that as well who need that reference who know that it's it's quicker for me to grab that book off the shelf and look at something that I've looked up before because I know it's in there um then it would be to start searching the videos and looking through and finding you know oh wow I have have to watch even three minutes of this just to find that one thing that I've already written in the margin so that's my philosophy no very true and I was

reading a statistic a while ago that talked about the sale of bookshelves has been declining year-over year for like decades on the back of I'm like okay you know I'd like to write because I just enjoy writing and my style is I put my content for free on my website first and then I put into book form you know it's like marketing free marketing and then you know you kind of do this then I'm like but why would anyone ever you know if you buy a book we're going to put it if the bookshelves keep disappearing and people aren't using books anymore you know to me like these proxy metrics concern me you know I have a six-year-old daughter for example and you know she likes reading books but for

technical things she you know she for her she's more comfortable with a touchcreen than you know a mouse and keyboard and I'm like yeah that makes sense because I didn't have a touchcreen until much later in my life because it didn't exist until now where Now the default is you know touchreen and you know I have you my Apple MacBook Pro which does not have a touchcreen her default thing is like let me touch a screen to go what's going I'm like actually it's not not a touch screen you can't really touch it and in the back I'm like why is it not a touchcreen like you know is Apple not seeing the same data that we are seeing that the world is moving into this kind of a kind of a

world and sometimes I wonder if you and I are probably like the last number of people in the world who still think about books and writing and things like

that in the same way yeah it's it's still you know what I would always tell people when I do an interview or or uh just reference it I would say you know when the power goes out you can still read a book so you know when when the internet is down you know I can still work because my references are all here um and that's that's why you know it's important because other people who rely on that stuff now granted that would be me too because like you and everyone else there are programs that I use like uh Adobe After Effects and I don't know everything in that program I actually don't think if there was a book it would probably be this thick um so want to

look at the one thing you know how do I how do I animate this and then there is a couple of videos and there's some great people up there who actually have a two-minute video that shows you exactly how to do it um but all that's gone when the power's out or the internet is down or whatever um so there's still value in having a book and then there's also value in in the that way of learning and I've seen studies that will say that when you learn something by reading a book you will retain it longer than when you learn something by watching a video so I think there's there's magic there too yeah and

I think also like if you what you're doing is like annotating and taking notes as part of what you're learning you retain the knowledge even a whole lot more and I think the ultimate one is if you can teach it back to somebody else that's like the ultimate peak in you understanding a material really really good which in some way motivation for me to learn random things it's like if I write about it and teach people that means that I fully understood it and often while I'm writing it I detect gaps in my knowledge or I'm like wait why is it done this way like let me actually go back and explain this because someone reading it they're going to be like why is he explaining

something that doesn't make any sense and so it's been a good motivating factor sometimes in just becoming better at something it's having that insight

and the Insight is also how I when I write is I and I I like to do a like a parable on something it's like you know you're trying to do this this and this and now we're going to apply that same thing to what's going on in the computer and then hopefully instill that insight into someone so they kind of get a just a hint of what's really going on as opposed to saying you know do this random thing this random thing and this random thing and then it creates whatever it is you want to create well they'll never understand it all they know is that there's these steps they have to follow and then they won't be able to handle it when the things don't

work but if you can tell them what's really going on behind the scenes so here you're you're setting this up you're putting these things together to build this thing that's a machine that's going to do this for you and then finally produce the result then they can understand it and then that that's when they become a better user as opposed to someone who's just you know like in the early days when I wrote dos for dummies and people would lit literally have a flower petals of sticky not around their monitors that would have the instructions for everything they needed to do it's like okay so I I need to need to send this over to accounting so there it is so I need to type that and then

that and then that and of course if it didn't work they're they're stuck they got the instructions there and I typed exactly what it said and it's not working I mean that was the person I was writing Doss for dummies to it's like look here it is and now it's going to be in a book so you can free all your sticky notes from the monitor you know you know speaking of

After Effects a lot of your videos have animations in them did you create the animations yourself and did you create

them in After Effects I did yeah in After Effects most of the time I mean I originally um it was Flash they had Adobe Flash and that was kind of a silly program and so some of the early videos used flash but um which I would just capture so it wasn't like flash animation it was recorded and then after effects could do all kinds of miraculous things which is which is fun and so that's why I do some of the animations and it's and and I granted pretty sure that the way I'm using it is awkward and wrong and that there's probably a better way to do it for someone who has that insight and says oh why are you doing that you should do this and here's the

way you key frame it and all this other you know pre-m and all these technical terms and I'm I'd be like okay but you know so some of it would take a long time to do but it was it was fun and and see I just I like stuff like that it keeps me interested so yeah same and I

have you know for me when I started using Adobe Premiere I realized I get that point where back in the day when I had more time and more patience I would actually want to go deep into something fully learn everything inside and out and then go from it but I realized I'm getting to that point now where when I get to new technologies I'm like I don't care about why it does it thing or how it works I just want to know the bare minimum needed to get this particular job done which in my case is autoc captions you know gu me auto captions and I don't know why I'm clicking this button I don't I I do know if I click this button incorrectly or I you know

maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way things break so I'm just going to blindly copy and paste what I've learned and do things which I remember back in then I was like I'm never going to be that person I'm never going to be that person going to like look at some reference manual do that thing blindly and then memorize those steps with a deeply understanding what's going on behind the scenes as part of doing this lo and behold I'm now that person for a certain class of apps where I don't really care how this works I don't care about you know color profiles and things there's an auto button I'm going to hit the auto button I'm you know change some fonts here and there I I know I get

fonts I get font sizes that's it I'm not going to do anything more I'm going to touch it I'm going to hit the button I'm going to walk away because I'm going to be sitting here I might break something and I've gotten that point and I wonder if you ever get you seem to be far more interested like a variety of topics like for I talk a little bit about you learning what C programming and talking a lot about C the C language and so on so I feel like you're definitely still in the area where you're still excited by new technology and still want to go deep into all these things I I try as

much as I can and there was you know I used Premiere 2 and some of the teex stuff in there would frustrate me until I find it finally dawned on me I finally gained the insight as to what was going on because it was like w how does what is this doing why is it why is it being stubborn why doesn't it do it the way I want to do it and so I had to get into the frame of mind of whoever the programmer was or whatever Their audience was and say yeah okay so I okay I get it now and then once that clicked and there's there's kind of a if you use a lot of adobe stuff there's there's kind of a similar thread between all

their Pro programs and once you figure out kind of how things work then you can kind of you can guess a little bit um and that's just from using the the program for so long um but I still have no I I know there's a lot more stuff that goes on in these programs than I am am doing and that because I mean I'll see I'll still look at you know you search up how to do something in After Effects or Premiere and then on YouTube you're getting more and more videos along those lines and some of them I'll look at and it'll be like wow you can do that you know and not only that you can you know the video is only two minutes

long so it's something that's really simple to do and it's like that's really cool that's why I think you know back in the old days you know back in the 1990s it was possible for you and I to know everything and to figure all it out today it's just impossible so you you do as best you can and of course if you really want to learn it you you just get a book and the book will help hopefully help you and and get through that but yeah it's it's tough to be able to I mean I would never say I know everything about everything because there's always someone who's going to come up and say hey here's a trick and I'll be like wow I'm embarrassed I don't know that yeah

and the fear I often have is that am I spending a lot of time learning the right tool for this right job you know I have an adobe subscription so I have Premiere I have After Effects all these tools come along with it whereas some of my more you know graphically video oriented friends they use Final Cut Pro and I'm like wait am I am I missing out here am I learning the wrong thing as a part of it and then you look at what a lot of content creators use today you have a variety of other tools that are being created you have Camtasia you have cap cut you have like 20 different things that you watch the videos from like wow this is much easier to use

should I be learning that instead you know I'm just going to you know like those kind of the this is like the paralysis of choice in some ways you know I feel like back then there weren't really too many things out there you had macr media Adobe they both had very different styles and how they cared about presenting UI in some ways I was very much a team macr media person when I was using flash things and once Adobe bought them you know I found that things changed the tool tips were different things were different but luckily I wasn't doing too much of that kind of work at the time anyway so I was like it's fine I don't know much about how these things work whereas today you have

small oneperson developer shops who are able to use more modern Technologies and things to not have to work at a low level there apis that exist for so many things as opposed to you have to reinvent what it's like to capture you know video from like your Hardware using like very basic Primitives now it's like there an API in whatever language you're doing just like you know write couple lines of code you now have video in your app you're like wow this makes it so much easier which also means that there are many more options for you to choose

from on how to do this yeah it's I think that that part's fun to me I I enjoy doing that part that's you know hacking so you know Swit shifting over

to C programming you know a lot of your books you you've been programming for a long time you know I think mentioned like he started programming you know earlier on like you as part of like before you got your word processing system set up and so on but a lot of your books early on were less about programming but more about just general topics so was it something that in your background you always like to just program for fun but you always chose to write about things that were you know things that people at that time were mostly interested in yeah and you know

you're going to write about what's going to sell and so uh I mean my my start at the computer book publishing house was writing programming basic programming and I knew knew basic pretty well because that was all I could do on my computer for a while so I bought a lot of books on basic and I wrote a lot of programs and figured out how to do a lot of things now Basics slow so once I fig F out it was slow I was like well what's what's faster than this and then I took up Assembly Language did the same thing bought books on learning Assembly Language and programmed a lot of stuff in assembly um and then picked up C after that because assembly is very slow

as far as development's concerned programs are really fast very tiny very fast but C is kind of a Midway in between so I picked up C and and learned that and of course I'm still learning it because there's just a lot to know and a lot to learn um and a lot of good stuff out there so it's it's always been a process and um uh and I enjoy it to me programming is very relaxing it's fun to think of a problem or to find a problem online like I I've always loved way back when I was a kid my mom had the time life series on computers and um one of the problems that they presented in the early days programming problem was called the nights tour which is where

you take a a knight on a chessboard and the Knight can move to every single Square on the chessboard without hitting the same square twice and that is a computer problem you can figure that out and so after years of admiring that when I was just a kid I finally coated it I said you know maybe I should think about cating the night's tour and just did it for fun now I put it up I have a Blog I have a c for dummy's blog so I finally put up the result on the blog and showed the little animation of the night moving around the chessboard you know hitting every square and never hitting same square twice um and to me that was incredibly satisfying as I just did it

on my own I'm like well how would I do this okay figure out well we need recursion or something we'll just kind of figure it out and then figuring out how to do it for different size chess boards because it works you know there's a minimum size but you could have a chess board that's you know 200 squares and the KN can still go all the way around and never hit a same square twice because that's the algorithm and so um it was for me it was really fun and uh that's why I do it because I enjoy it so I'm nuts but I pass along that knowledge to other people so I'm to tell other people how it works and explain it in a

way that's easy to understand because back in the days for programming they were really reluctant to to help beginners out I mean it was kind of like a protect your Turf type thing and so I'm and I'm not like that I'm like no I'll show you how to do it and here's the insights and here's what you're supposed to do to make this happen and so that's always been fun for me yeah so

what motivates you to keep writing

money so well I I enjoy doing it I've you you know I'm doing more online stuff which I really enjoy I really enjoy doing the online stuff and uh you know YouTube videos and stuff like that to me to me that's more exciting than than writing which is like I said a lot earlier which is that's you know an 18th century technology it's it's old and it's stagy and I still enjoy doing that but today I think things are more lively more interactive more on the internet there's a lot of good stuff that's going to come out as far as learning is concerned and interaction um that I think is you're going to see with online learning coming up pretty soon the um the writing is

still fun I'm still writing books I mean people always say oh so you still writing books I'm like yeah are you still reading them and so um you know I have a a book contract uh right now I just finished two books so I'm working on a third and these are all updates actually one was a new book and then uh and then I want to update some other books because you know they go out of style that version of PC for dummies I showed earlier that's seven years old so obviously we need a new version of PCs For Dummies out there if people want to keep buying that book so that's uh but it's it's always fun and I'd love to do I do some self-publishing too which is

nice because it allows me to do shorter books you know maybe it's 100 pages long as opposed to Publishers who they want something that's you know three to 400 pages long so it fits on the shelf and moves their competition away um so I can do some short little publishing things which I have on Amazon Kindle and I want to do some more of those too I've just

been really busy have you thought about doing paperback editions of your

self-publishing books as well yeah they are I had them all printed out we Kindle I I assume it's only going to be you know ebooks only so I did uh Dan gin's the guide to curl programming guide to end curses programming and guide to XML and Json programming which is all these are all C programming things and uh there were stuff that that I was interested in and then I'm like you know I ought to sorry I'm off camera so I thought you know what I just just write this up and put it in a I want to do one on pointers for C do One on network programming and just you know do these little uh quick um things for people who want to uh stick to one topic I tried to

sell that to the publisher and they weren't interested I said we need to do like one topic books books that are just really thin they just cover one topic you don't bother you know padding it out to 600 Pages it's like let's just get to the point because that's what most programmers want to do I they don't want to sit down and read the history of things which as much as I love those other books that I have a lot of them sit there and they say you know back in 1962 and it's like okay I mean I could read this back later when I really want to understand it but right now I want to get into I want to get my hands dirty so

no it's funny because exactly the reason I got into self-publishing as well is because I want to like talk about one particular topic very narrowly and then get it done and you know I also had the other you know more Insidious goal which is like for a lot of children's books especially when you used to grow up you know there would be a series and then you put the spine of the series on the Shelf they'd paint a picture across all of it and so I was like you know that's what I want to do I want to basically I don't know what the picture's going to be but I want to have a series of really small books so that when you put them on

the Shelf next to each other they'll paint a picture and if you're someone who's like a completionist you're going to be like I don't care about the other 80 books he wrote but I can't have this picture be incomplete want to buy the other 80 just so it could satisfy my desire to have that all the way there the publisher didn't find that interesting at all and I me think they knew what I been referring to so I'm like okay you know I think I'm you know I may not be like know like aware of like what they know about this but they definitely understand like what it was then like back then you know like the 0 90s and so on so and you need a

bookshelf for that too so you bookshelf exactly so I my first book will be how to get a bookshelf build it or you know or buy one what am I going to do yeah and the second like what do you do with a bookshelf because clearly people have no idea anymore what what to do with a bookshelf but I I have tons of bookshelves matter of fact I'm the guy who has the books piled up on the table because there's not enough room on the bookshelf so oh man but Dan I feel like you and I can talk about this forever but you know yeah no it was great chatting with you and you know yeah can't wait to see more of your books as

they come out and and yeah and continue to see you know how much other people enjoy your content you know for the many

years to come as well thank you very much and I wish you the best of success you're fun and um I think that's great and thank you for using this platform to help spread the good word anytime