cool so charlie we're just hitting record in our private conversations now perfect yeah like it's you know that's this is the nature of our friendship we have to be recording this for posterity or blackmail or whatever it is do you think it's like a 50 50 chance that we hit uh delete at the end of this i i if we do that means it was a good combo okay cool we'll get to catch up yeah yeah it's been it's been a couple weeks been kind of busy over here i was just wrist deep clearing some gutters so i took a shower um i showered for you oh appreciate that yeah um you want to chat about the book publishing stuff that we were yeah yeah i mean i've been i've been extolling the virtues of flutz press to you for what feels like many years now and i feel like you're starting to you're starting to get it a little bit what's uh yeah give me give us all the pitch again why is the cuts press the uh the pinnacle of publishing let's press it's a typically spiral bound book i guess they cheaped out on this version but it's a book for kids that teaches you something cool and typically comes with whatever you need to do it so there's a book on making friendship bracelets a book on tying knots and the knots book comes with two ropes there was a tabletop football one and these were things that you would typically get or you know if you were lucky you might get as a gift from maybe a grandparent or some holiday or your birthday and it would just be this doorway into learning something new and the best part was that it was written for you the writing is hilarious um there's all kinds of silliness and jokes and it was never like talking down to you it just felt like you were whoever was writing it was sort of in the muck with you and it was it made you feel like it's great to be a kid and as a kid i get to do all this random weird stuff and maybe i'll get good at this so i've always loved it uh and it became a thing for me and i've always loved it and i've always loved it so i've been doing that in the last couple years i found a couple of mine from home i've been sort of buying them all back up and so much so that i wrote this whole blog post a couple years ago because i had discovered that the company motto for klutz press was this phrase create wonderful things be good have fun and i subsequently decided to make that my life's my life's motto and life's work i don't know exactly what that means maybe we can get into that today but how is that for a pitch because um i've been saying this for years pretty good i mean what what really resonated with me was when you posted that to hacker news and i saw everyone chiming in about how much of an impact particular cloth books had on them as kids or at least how memorable they were it's not like they all became jugglers like i guess that's not the point but it's like out of out of the blur of childhood stands out this like experience of having achieved this thing through this book that was speaking to them that's just fantastic yeah it was cool the john cassidy the creator of klutz somehow i think he was on some sort of road trip or something at least that's what he said made his way in over to Hacker News and started answering everyone's questions I think this was his only interaction Hacker News he sort of had a unexpected ama and then drifted away never to deal with Hacker News again that is probably the best Hacker News experience I can imagine uh but yeah it's it's just cool I don't know that and even the origin story of klutz uh because I've done some digging into Cassidy he's uh the company was founded in his Palo Alto garage which has some nice you know early computer history aesthetic and vibes which is which is cool and he was a river raft instructor sort of bumming around teaching English as well and I think I've never done River rafting but you spend time on the land as well and you're sort of camping around a fire there's not a lot to do so you probably play cards you tell tell tales and juggle and juggling did so the first couple of years yeah yeah tie knots that was basically the first 10 years of klutz it was random stuff you did around the campfire um which is just really cool and so he he packaged it up and I think it was the sort of thing like you didn't want to start a company per se it wasn't like I'm gonna go off and do this thing it's just hey I've got this teaching style and I've got this nice idea and I can present it in a way that is uh not talking down to kids and makes them feel empowered and uh I don't know just it just feels like Discovery it feels like summer reading Joy type stuff so I try to keep them around um not always within arm's reach but usually that that to me is what's so fantastic about this and that we should try and take to our publishing project as well yes I mean obviously we've discussed this but for the sake of everyone else listening like the the idea that it is for the kid like there's a respect for the the reader who happens to be a kid probably uh they we know that they're going to be able to learn this thing we know probably within a few pages they're going to know more than their teachers about this thing that may also be about magnetism or whatever right like remember they didn't they partner with the modern Gardner to do like science magic kind of I think so yeah yeah so oh right it's not just juggling it's like the kind of thing that they're supposed to be learning in school too like magnets electricity magnetism or whatever um but uh but because of the kid is engaged with the book and is speaking to them um they are going to know more than their teachers in in a few pages yeah um so just like to present it that way actually maybe this is a bit tangential but Charlie how many textbooks let's say did you read that you felt were written to you that were addressing you like when you were in school in high school or in University or whatever like you pick up a book you feel like they're actually speaking to you as opposed to like the academic void or whatever and you're supposed to pick up bits and pieces here and then I'm obviously zero but the funny thing with my school you'd get these hand-me-down textbooks and you sort of hoped that your predecessors were um effective highlighters because yeah they make good notes yeah yeah I remember like the circulating student note Market where like there's someone else your peers notes on the textbook were worth more than the textbook yeah um but yeah I I also had this experience of um um so I majored in mathematics I don't know you know but I imagine math I assumed I I did uh I did like quite a bit of abstract algebra um but like you know some of it I picked up some of it I struggle with and um ultimately didn't go down that path obviously um but I came back to abstract algebra just because I was interested and um in the course of this uh encountered one book called abstract algebra a student-friendly approach and it's pretty introductory and like you know I I knew the stuff so I was I was pretty comfortable with it but I worked through the book and the presentation of the book is um kind of like little schema insofar as there's like a question answer it's not as committed to the question and answer format as a little schemer is yeah but it's basically like here are a sequence of questions and some supporting explanatory material where if you were to work through it in this order uh then you will and it's you know it's written in person okay if you uh if you made you want to if you were to answer those questions then you will understand this and it's just totally different to the standard way of teaching anything let alone abstract algebra and you learn abstract algebra and it's like it has it in the name abstract algebra a student-friendly approach and the moment you read that you're like shouldn't everything be a student-friendly approach like aren't these books for the students so why are they not why do people write them in this sort of stayed boring way is it just it's it easier I think part of it is like an academic tradition okay um it's like part of it is maybe you're writing for peers you're writing for the people who make the purchasing decisions when you get into certain parts of academic textbook Publishing um you're writing for your editor at Pearson or whatever yeah um and they're writing for the like the department or it's like the you've probably never seen this movie The Plot of Hook when Peter Pan forgets childhood and he's a grown person and he's in the corporate world now and he's forgotten Tinkerbell and everyone so much of teaching is like that yeah so much of teaching it's like I mean that's why a lot of the time the TAs like you learn more from the TAs or your peers and and we're just talking about that in relation to like sharing notes and highlighting and whatever yeah your peers are better at speaking to you about that kind of thing so yeah I did remember some courses in college where I felt just to play with the other direction um I felt like this lecture had been given for 20 years and that also was kind of cool to me um so it wasn't necessarily for me but I felt like I was hearing maybe that's the sort of Arcane knowledge type appeal to some of this stuff so even if it's the same thing I now have access to this but that doesn't mean I actually learned it it was maybe more of a just this is interesting but it didn't actually teach me the topic yeah I think there's value there's value in both I mean for me I've gotten better and better at learning by myself like um literally uh teaching myself and I think a lot of people in computer science are doing exactly that I mean something like a million people a year on teach yourself yes uh and um and uh so there's that uh there's like trying to learn off the greats whether that's a textbook or like Andrew Ng's Coursera course or whatever yeah um and then there's like this uh this spectrum of community peer you know whether it's Reddit or your buddy with whom you're doing this or like a classroom uh where you're all getting the same degree like there's that spectrum there as well I think being able to navigate all of those is is worthwhile yeah but it definitely didn't feel that with those books growing up and we were even chatting about the workbooks that you would get would be the companion to the textbook and they were even worse because you just get this slim volume that you know is just homework I'm going to suffer through this and I'm going to mark this up I'm not going to like any of it I'm going to be racing so I can go watch Dragon Ball Z after this or whatever it was after school yeah it's an afterthought um a lot of the time I mean sometimes it's written by a different person like you have this amazing person write the textbook and then like I'm done I've spent all my energy on this on the expository material someone else can figure out the challenges the exercises or like a great example of this is um computer systems from the programmers perspective where it's a fantastic book it's it's really the best textbook on that topic uh like I've just had a lot of students can have a lot um and the exercises and labs that those guys teach at CMU are also fantastic um like uh there's this um you know there's a the kind of standard malloc and shell implementation labs but there's also this one where you like have to do this reverse engineering to defuse a bomb that's going to explode and stuff and they've got auto grading and it's just really good stuff okay and then their book has pretty good exercises but not comparable to the labs that they teach yeah in there in at CMU but then the international edition of the book for whatever reason has just like balked exercises just like terrible exercises incorrect solutions to the point where the original authors have have a note on their website being like don't buy this please be aware the international edition has terrible exercises uh I don't like how did that happen in publishing I don't know thank you thank you publisher oh man it's kind of like the Celeron uh you know the story is like what is that a computer chip yeah yeah it's an Intel it was like the Pentium did you have a Pentium I had a Pentium that was a that was a big day yeah I'm pretty sure I haven't verified this but I'm pretty sure that the way that Intel uh did price discrimination uh you know you know about the concept of price discrimination like you you basically no I deal I mean I should I studied economics but yeah the the ideal pricing model is to like you know if you could uh if you could guess the price that someone is willing to pay and offer them exactly that price for your textbook or whatever and do that for every individual person that would be the optimal right it's like they're just willing to pay this much money for the book and someone else is willing to pay that much money for the book uh and you're still going to make a profit so you'll still sell it to them like that would be ideal yeah but you can't do that realistically so a lot of the time people have like a kind of fake premium uh or like you're buying a car and you pay extra for the badge or for some like trim that costs you not very much more but yeah but cost the customer much more because they are willing to pay more that's price discrimination got it okay I was thinking the way Intel did price discrimination and please someone fact check this because it's like just something that I picked up somewhere but I think that the Celeron was basically a a a not very good Pentium where like you fab the chips and you test them and like there are some defects yeah and um and so it ends up being like it's still correct but slower or something yeah it's good to be Celeron's or maybe like it's just fabricated in a way where it's like intentionally broken uh in a way like uh retarded in a way like yeah we're taught in a way yeah uh that's the Celeron wow and so they just came up with that they came up with a brand for that yeah okay that's rough I was thinking of the price discrimination which is not the exact analogy here but it's like sort of in the other direction which is that Radiohead album which was the one of the first remember in Rainbows that came out maybe 2010 and it was the first thing I saw which was pay whatever you want for this album and I paid zero and I later bought it on vinyl but I paid zero and I loved it um but yeah maybe some people paid them hundreds of dollars I don't know yeah that happens a little bit with um uh Kickstarter campaigns and um sub stacks and stuff oh I was gonna ask long story short what we're talking about is like very few people are starting from the question of what is going to be most effective for because actually it's actually hard and if you are an expert on a topic you've already invested so much of your intellectual energy on being an expert at that topic it is highly unlikely that you're also investing a lot of intellectual energy in being good at conveying that topic to newcomers um there is this kind of conflict and so you know that's why I resist the temptation to be an expert on a topic uh that's my help out uh no like the the it's very rare to have people and obviously there are some people like this as well um uh but they're very rare to have individuals who can be world-class at a topic and also world-class at teaching that thing and so I think a lot of the time in textbook just the exercises and so on yeah well this this makes me this makes me think I feel like we were talking about this the other day that you're down on the idea of the young ladies illustrated primer so I'm just curious your thoughts on text the next generation of textbooks where Anki and spaced repetition is built in but you did I think you're my read is that you're not bullish on people tackling this illustrated primer model for textbooks can you talk about that like where are you I think that's a little bit of a different problem that I have um with that I mean what I'm responding to is that a lot of people see how surprisingly successful lms are at some tasks and they say hey like well I read sci-fi uh I I have this brilliant idea that maybe we can actualize this I mean really a plot device um in the Diamond Age for people who are not yeah we'll try and do this without spoilers it's it's worth reading this book even just to understand what's in the zeitgeist I think uh then you'll see once in uh the Diamond Age um but uh excuse me in this book there's really a narrative device a book like an interactive book that teaches the protagonist a bunch of things kind of responsibly excuse me do you want to take over while I mute myself and call yeah yeah this is when um in Wayne's World there's this moment when Garth is yeah he's dying Garth is in front of the screen and Wayne's not there and he's like I'm having a good time not uh this is a a heavily quoted phrase in my household have you seen that movie probably not Wayne's World no of course not someone out there has um are you all right are you all right over there yeah I'm fine uh it would be funny if I died on air yeah the audio uh folks wouldn't have uh wouldn't have gotten to enjoy that unless I just narrated it after but the the YouTubers would have enjoyed that um um the um Diamond Age that I was saying what I don't like what what I'm seeing right right now is a lot of people just trying to prompt hack their way to a universal interface for learning where they're like hey I have a custom GPT which will teach you anything you want and this is the extent of their creative use of LLMs in education it's like I am giving you a universal interface that adapts to you or whatever uh in the same way that the young ladies Illustrator does and it's just not it's just not going to work um even the best human tutors cannot do that effectively across different topics and you want to see an LLM as being like third quartile at everything uh or you know the second quartile of some things um and uh you know not not world class at everything so so can I just can I press on that let's say theoretically you could feed the corpus of klutz press into an LLM and then you said hey generate me a clutch book or at least a chapter on teaching me something completely random I don't know like pogo sticking you don't think that would be possible would it just is it because of hallucinations and it would just teach you something completely random what would be the I think if you were class press you would still go to the effort of finding the person to write the book yeah yourself and you just wouldn't bother generating the output of that because in publishing like you get a good book and you publish that and a lot of people have it and like it's worth making the effort to have it be you know first quartile or like 99th percentile um uh let alone like reasonably good LLMs do well at the reasonably good task not at the like the world-class task what about forget LLMs but just spaced repetition should textbooks be if you make an online textbook should it just be built in that you're constantly flash carding things would that be a direction you think you should go on some country kind of thing quantum yeah exactly the Michael Nielsen project um I think it's I think they can be neat uh I think yeah like I like execute program um yeah that what so what I like in execute program in particular one country I guess also decently well but particularly um this is Gary Bernhardt's executeprogram.com yeah I played with that I like it what I like about that is that the topics fit the style of learning right like if the topic is uh JavaScript's array methods or something yeah which is the one I remember doing then that's great like if that's all you want to learn then there is memorization there and it is nice to be able to just load that into your brain and to have the questions be kind of adaptive a little bit like not just you know avoid the failure mode of you memorizing the numbers and instead they're a bit of a template yeah um then that's something that you can't just do by writing your own Anki cards uh and so that kind of thing is a great fit for that what is problematic is then if you say well let's extend this to all of programming which is not about memorization uh that that is where you start to fail let alone all of computer science or all of the knowledge there are so many other modes of understanding things yeah where memorization is just a piece of it uh and so that's that's what like what I really like about execute program is that Gary has fit the topics to this the style of teaching them so yeah I want I want to see thousands millions of those where you're like what is that that we're trying to teach how is the person who's trying to learn this going to learn it what is the best way to do that what is the feedback loop uh is it about being prompted to to re recall this thing well then maybe we should prompt them to recall things yeah on a schedule that's when you end up you know you back your way into space repetition there yeah but what I don't like about the special space repetition scene is that there are a lot of people who've seen the value of space repetition for certain things and they try and extend it everywhere and maybe actually they do a reasonably good job for themselves at like misappropriating or like adapting it to other things but if they were to start from the problem this is polio again like the problem is helping someone learn a topic I could maybe extend my use of Anki cards to cover that topic somewhat well but like as a general solution to this problem do we end up at space repetition as the best kind of feedback loop probably not for for most problems yeah so that's that's my disappointment with that the space repetition scene obviously it's it's it's very good at certain things like if I needed to learn Japanese or something well actually if I really need to learn it's going to be full immersion you know right away right but if the bit if there's there are certain things like I become a med student of course I'm going to use Anki yeah it'd be crazy not to use it yeah yeah um but there are other things where like I try to adapt it to things that I want well it feels certainly anything that feels that you have to digitally with your hands and fingers I feel like you have to have some practical component it's good to have the knowledge it's you know every movie has the book smart person and then they're thrown into the field and then they don't know what to do and maybe some of that's just psychological or um your adrenaline getting to you but I'm the example I was thinking of was learning to make a fire with I don't know a bow whatever that thing you know I can read an Anki part about that but it's probably pretty hard to learn how to do that when I'm when I'm freezing and my hands are chattering and I haven't done this before yeah I mean there are people in the Jujitsu Jujitsu is a really interesting community because a lot of us are like very nerdy and we're trying and we're very uh conscious about um learning methods like there's that like metacognitive aspect to Jujitsu practice that isn't in some other sports um for whatever reason we just get nerd sniped uh we just love complexity complexity I guess anyway there are some people who use Anki cards in Jujitsu and it's like okay there's there's some value in that I guess if you're very good at Anki you may actually support your learning somewhat but obviously it's not like if you make a a list of the top 100 things that you could do to be better Jujitsu it's unlikely that making Anki cards is in there yeah if you start from that point I think Anki comes up very rarely but if you're good at Anki then maybe extending that to cover some of your understanding is not it's not bad yeah so I would say to kind of circle to the idea that you and I have been discussing in publishing one one thought I had that could prompt this was it seems like there's an observation that maybe there are these there are textbooks like the one you mentioned the abstract algebra Etc that have been written and are just undis like out of print and you can't find them anymore so some of what we've been talking about is the using the analogy of Stripe Press that there are these great texts out there that are obscure that no one knows about that if you try to buy it could cost four hundred dollars on a books or something like that so just talk to me about that your your position that you think that a lot of these things are out there and just not easy to access right now yes sometimes there there is a there's a book like this that I find and I and I'm finding it on a blog or something and then I I the only copy I can find is on a scan on internet archive so a concrete example of this is let's play geometry which was published by mirror which publisher a Soviet uh publisher I don't know if they're still around in some manifestation or not but their heyday was like the also the heyday of like optimism around space science mathematics and space yeah in particular and there are just some fantastic titles and it's for for all for all ages um uh you know some some really clearly written for kids and others you know for teenagers and some for adults but a lot of them are just fantastic uh I just like embodies the optimism of that year at that level yeah but yeah let's play geometry is a concrete example of that I I do a little bit with my my oldest kid and we printed it out and bounded ourselves um and it's like a you know a conversational cartoony book um there's like a Pinocchio character and stuff uh and um uh but they're drawing dots and lines and making shapes and seeing things out in the world and it's like great Soviet era art um but also it's just like it's like well here are two dots on a page now you draw a line oh is it a straight line is it still a line if it's not straight or whatever it's just like it it is interactive with the kid now if you want a copy of this book good luck like I don't know what it takes to buy a physical copy of this book now um you know you can print it yourself from a scan on internet Archive I guess wouldn't it be nice if someone was printing these again yeah um and maybe you could say hey look if you did it again from scratch for a modern audience it would look different and wouldn't it would it be an iPad app where you could just yeah maybe that app would be better and you know there is good interactive geometry stuff as well um but if the easier path uh is to like find how to to reprint run of this and to find how to promote this well and to get that in the hands of 10 000 kids um rather than like having to write a book from scratch and illustrate that from scratch and that'd be a year-long process and investing more uh maybe you and I should just print it like yeah we should just get the rights and printed um so there's that and then um I've been obsessed recently with uh Mitsumasa Anno um his books are so cool yeah just like beautifully illustrate it's a little bit different um it's not I mean it's still interactive he's still speaking to the kid sometimes just three illustrations like sometimes intentionally no words um but sometimes there are some some verbal prompts as well but it's like it is in second person uh it is um like actually should we should we bring some up and yeah yeah let's do it we're gonna violate everyone's copyright if we do that uh well it's on internet Archive right yeah I guess it's I guess it's their fault we're just going to a website that gets yanked by YouTube wait let me bring it up first so I don't incriminate myself like selling okay but the but the Stripe Press analogy here is okay uh the Carlson brothers knew about the Licklider book and no one could get access to this and it's a similar exactly yeah yeah the Licklider book the Hamming book these are fantastic books um and when they were promoting them um they like uh Patrick Collison in particular wanted everyone to read uh dream machine yeah and you could get it um but it was starting to get expensive and actually the more they promoted it because of just the limited supply and so if they could find the get a publishing rights which they did then they could start uh selling it for actually quite cheap it's very uh very accessible and uh sorry this is me thanks yeah yeah the accessible thing is key too that's like a klutz press thing when you talk to Cassidy or in his limited interviews his he said every book is less than 20 dollars which is really important to them yeah for sure um yeah so we got to figure out if anyone listening is in publishing and wants to give us a crash course and how to actually do this kind of thing like what it takes to do a reprint run of a book like that and uh then let me know um so this is Mitsumasa I know uh you know I know most people listening here are not seven uh but uh if you've got kids or you want to feel like a kid for a moment or just like be immersed in someone else's world um for uh for uh five minutes and the Mitsumasa honor books are fantastic actually this illustration my kids were cracking up at this for like 10 minutes right last night this is uh this is like a um impossible staircase yeah yeah it's uh it's out of a book called topsy-turvies okay and this is one of his earlier books and uh award-winning like this is when he got international recognition I think um but like at first I looked at it and didn't see much of it and then we started counting the levels it's like this is level one okay so you go up the stairs to the level two and then you go up the stairs too and then they just lost it they just lost control and it's like it was weird it was weird to experience that it's like it's not that funny guys yeah uh but Mitsumasa I don't know he knew it was funny he knew that it was yeah yeah and so topsy-turvies is just it's just illustrated they're no words and uh it's just scenarios like this um just to like get from prompt some like creative thinking or something um so what happened like something like this is lovely this is a beautiful book why did it fade away what happened I mean there's probably a unique story for every one of these like the mere Publishing I don't know the Soviet Union ended maybe that had an impact on mirror but what do you think happens on those books my understanding based on five minutes of research is that this was originally published in English by a publisher that had some fantastic titles something like a dozen plus of Mitsumasa anos but also some early Eric Carl books and some other great stuff um and maybe even the very hungry caterpillar um but uh they did fantastically at selecting these kinds of books and then got acquired I think that's what happens yeah if anyone listening knows the story please let me know or feels like investigating the story please let me know but I think that's it and I think that um some big name publisher they won't mention uh it has the has the publishing rights and they just couldn't be bothered and they're publishing a bunch of other stuff instead um hungry caterpillar persists to this day so they it seems like yeah they pick some holdovers so anyway I mean this counting I know this counting book is is still very widely uh circulated printed um so that's still in print um but there's a bunch of other stuff in here that's not and some of them sadly are becoming collector's items which is just like pushing up the prices quite a lot so Socrates and the Three Little Pigs is an example of this it's just like it's expensive if you want to copy um some others are very good and maybe let's bring up let's see internet archives uh and I think I know this hats is maybe a good example of this that's what it is so let's see if internet archive is going to let us see this without logging in yeah limited preview come on are they going to mask it well I'm trying to uh I'm trying to stay incognito here yeah see can I do this I'll take this off the screen okay it went yeah that was fast you're gonna have you may have a lot of emails on your Gmail account right now I know I know yeah oh that's all right that's like if you if you want to email a celebrity like there's probably a good chance the celebrity is their name at Gmail yeah or this is my birth name though which I don't use oh yeah okay maybe it's a little bit harder but it is published on my website yeah you can email me I like emails okay uh let's see here now I gotta do this two-factor auth okay as you're doing this I'm one of the other things about Stripe Press they've obviously done an amazing job packaging and printing them and making them feel beautiful objects and for me a big part I want I want to work on something where a kid feels like they're building their own personal library in some way so some of that can be fostered by the parents and they just sort of make this available but I love the idea of a kid building their Arsenal of books that they love so I do feel like packaging them in a nice way not that the versions I'm seeing here aren't beautiful but I wonder what we could do there and klutz's angle was everything should be spiral bound or at least print it in a way that you can hold both sides open and it can lay flat um that's just aesthetic thing but I feel like that would be really cool I want my idea is you're under a blanket you've got a flashlight and you've got your thing flat underneath you that's the that's the vibes I want yeah even just usable books doable books you can tear out the pages you can yeah they're designed to be drawn on and so yeah um so this is hat tricks what I I gotta actually click borrow as well okay now we're borrowing it now it's legit are we allowed to borrow it and do a reading on YouTube I don't I don't know let's see if we get a takedown this will be the first the CS take down notice all right you're spoiling it you're going from the back oh sorry yeah all right maybe this is fine all right so firstly illustrations beautiful like this is kind of the motivation to try and do some reprinting rather than just Commission new work yeah it's like really really nicely done uh and uh now secondly like you are present you the reader are present as a shadow oh cool this is your shadow uh so then you are asked questions you the shadow the person who cast the shadow I guess shadow child shadow Charles and it's saying okay we asked Tom what's the color of your hat Tom doesn't know oh wait to be clear we have uh three red hats and two white hats at this point he's he's built up to this so I mean this is like that Khan Academy did you ever do that Khan Academy brain teaser with the aliens and the people in the hats and everything in the different color hats no I didn't maybe it's inspired oh it's so good yeah anyway uh so yeah three uh three red two whites uh Tom doesn't know what color his hat is uh Anna doesn't know either so shadow child do you know the color of your hair like your presence in the book right yeah this is like uh uh abstract algebra student-friendly approach just for like introductory logic for seven-year-olds like you're right there and now I love that yourself uh so this kind of thing and like building up one problem at a time and it gets hard by the end like he keeps doing yeah he keeps sorry did I spoil it no that's I mean look at that look at that binary tree over there yeah um okay yeah so this this kind of thing it's it's a shame that there are more copies around basically it's a shame that they're not printing it right now it'd be nice to nice to have that um or like we we Commission work like this it just feels like maybe you know since you and I have other things that we do in our time and that's the thing I I want to experiment with this in some way I want to see if we can do some limited run you know learn about print on demand or maybe we have to do like something more complicated if we want cool binding I want to go through that experience because I feel as if the experience of getting rights that's its own Adventure and we should we should figure that out because I do believe in this mission but I also wonder maybe we could write one ourselves it you know may not be of the you know it probably won't be of the caliber of anos but that could at least get us in the flow in an experimental way because you know Stripe Press does Commission books they find authors they find things so we could explore for both avenues at the same time um I don't know I I want to make some progress on this I I like your call out to see if anyone has any ideas about the the right side that would be great yeah but maybe we need to dig in and see what the two of us could come up with if we wanted to do a small version of this ourselves do you want to test the printing thing in particular or do you think it'd be easier to make it as an interactive uh iPad app or something I'm probably it would be easier to make it interactive but I haven't done too much interactivity in some way like um we could probably figure that out and we wouldn't have to do apparently EPUB you just do CSS animation oh okay yeah we could try both I like the idea of printing it I just I like physical books I am surrounded by books um and to hearken back to that thing we were talking about getting those Clutz books I still just remember moments in the library where I hold off or my mom pulls off something and gives it to me and just unlocked this whole world I the physicality of it is something that's really important to me so I do want to try that thing yeah yeah I'm with you I mean that's why we published it why so we print it out let's play geometry and bound it and stuff yeah we could actually have that particularly so that you can draw on it but like I just didn't didn't get that much out of looking at on the screen cool well this Oz this is broadly part of a uh thing that you had posted the other day I don't know if you've shared it but just this idea of finding people to collaborate on um different projects but do you want to talk about that at all I feel like I've raised my hand at least about this one but I don't know this idea of the things you're interested in and just chatting with people and brainstorming is really fun yeah I can I can share this maybe this is just a kind of call out extended call out for those who are looking at the screen so I mean obviously I'm working on CS prime it's a CS prime a show I'm about one year into the project and it's probably going to take three years total I'm realizing yeah um to get it to the standard that I want across all the topics that I want um and I'm gonna do it like it's the most important thing for me to do but it is a little bit isolating because it is a long solo project and I've got a lot of respect for people who can do that uh for writers and so on and um I'm doing okay but it's it's nice to have some some uh human interaction from time to time and this is why you agreed to do this with me uh yeah thank you so lonely yeah maybe we wouldn't have started this uh and also there's just like I I'm I'm realizing about myself that I like a little I like to be a little bit over committed uh I like to have a little bit too much going on I just feel better as a person if if if it's a bit manic like that other people get stressed out about I'm like bring it on this is yeah yeah that's been my day today and I've been having a great day so yeah I wish I'd understood that about myself earlier like some people like to be narrow in their focus uh I do go narrow focus at at times but like if you tell me hey you need to drop everything and just like clean the house until it's a hundred percent clean that's a nightmare for me whereas if you're like you have 10 responsibilities today and just do as much of each of them like the more you do the better yeah I'm gonna do better on average like across all the days Aaron long story short uh I I wrote this up as just like it's like a subset of the the ideas the projects list that I'm sure everyone listening has in a Google Doc uh like side project ideas yeah that I thought might be amenable to um working with other people that's just like a bad signal to the you know who who gets it and uh feels like reaching out and honestly a lot of it is just like if you come to me with energy about anything that's like somewhat related to this I'd be interested in in trying something with you you bring some of the energy let's do this uh and a lot of them are related to what we've been talking about as a kind of press for kids books books that speak to the child yeah um but uh you know a bit of a kind of extra twist so what is here there's a lot of like 17th century science that I'm like I wish people had more exposure to this stuff I love the 17th century so like are you talking about leeches and things like that or uh well like things like this where it's like we've for the first time have a good sense of circulation in the body like a good hypothesis for circulation in the body because just this period of science is like now uh we are dispelling long-held notions about how the world works in very simple ways it's not like the fancy sophisticated uh like well-funded lab science of today which is unapproachable very I mean it's just like even I remember I was trying to do some work I I tried to um for my undergrad physics do some lab work to like test out of the uh uh experimental uh physics work that I was doing yeah and I show up at the lab and they have this multi-million dollar machine and the there's a there's a big team and it's like for my like finding a way to work here make a contribution just felt impossible anyway yeah 17th century the 17th century science stuff is approachable for kids because they don't need the fancy instruments you can give them a prism a magnet whatever well this looks like give them a give them a tourniquet and then see what happens is what this looks like well this one like uh feels like it should be a video game because uh and for those listening this is uh Harvey's 1628 moto course which is really like uh trying to get an understanding of the body that is well beyond Galen uh which is just like you know everyone just respects Galen or whatever Galen thought about the about how the body works was just what was assumed about how the body worked and Harvey just did some like back of the envelope calculation and he was like look it doesn't actually make sense that blood would be created in the liver because just look at the volume of blood that would have to be created uh for and so it makes more sense if for instance the heart circulated the existing blood and oxygenated it and just kind of demonstrated this through really simple arithmetic that a that a child could understand um and a lot of these things and this is a fantastic illustration for that a lot of these things are just like well try this input and you'll get this output and you can see for yourself you don't need a fancy instrument you don't need an x-ray machine this is just like an understanding of the body anyway well the best thing for me on this was magic school bus if I think about Anatomy the like the only thing I know about Anatomy is when Miss Frizzle drove her bus into the human body and it was just kind of red and gross but if I went back probably everything I believe about the human body is based on that one episode well yeah um yeah there are different uh different ways of storytelling I guess about this and what I really like is the historical motivation yeah uh yeah definitely and I think you could tell a story here of like yeah what did I say defeating the ghost of Galen uh it's like um the storytelling of where we were as humanity in this situation like in this uh like what what I think you could also convey through the historical storytelling aspect is the um the understanding of how human progress evolves like how we have uh scientific progress so just increases in our understanding as as all of us as people and we're currently wrong as well about things like you're not just getting the final word on how the human body works it's an ongoing process like there's a lot that we don't understand about medicine and you're going to be part of pushing it forward maybe um so seeing like this this kind of thing the updating of understanding in a way that's approachable is really appealing to me that's that's in the same vein of telling a kid everything around you was created by people this bridge was created by someone and then just if these weren't fixed things in time they were created by humans for sure for sure and they got it wrong look at these Bridge Collapses and maybe that Bridge will collapse right yeah that's that's fantastic for kids I think anyway so I've I've got a bunch of ideas here which are like um yeah it's a lot to go to this I think would do well as a computer game just because some of them are like um vivisection uh where you know you don't really want a kid to dissect a live pig uh but but other ones are just like if you have a magnet or if you have some Amber and that's Gilbert's book now then you could do these experiments and you know I think that klutz's uh magnetism book and actually like science magic book are examples of this as well of speaking to the child and having that interactivity but I like the historical context again because of that process so basically the idea for this one would be to have a book that has effectively Gilbert's um process of understanding magnetism and he does lots of fun stuff just like dispelling uh motions of like how magnets would work I don't know I want to do this one I think this could be one of our one of our published books um did klutz do a magnet one did you see they did yeah yeah yeah yeah they did they did like uh electricity and magnetism we should actually get that and check that out all right yeah I'm on it okay but like it's I think it's fine again going back to our conversation of like there's no one young ladies Illustrated Primer yeah it's like different books are going to speak to different kids and I think having the the historical narrative as part of that um is going to be a valuable appealing for some kids and some kids are going to like the Hocus Pocus aspect the whiz bang aspect of um of mine gardeners books yeah I mean they're still going to sell I don't know if he sold a hundred thousand copies of that and close to a million copies of that it's a great book um we should have once they do find that room temperature superconductor we could do a book on that that would be kind of nice make your own yeah yeah yeah um so that yeah so there's that kind of thing micrograph here is in that vein as well this is this would just I think be a fantastic experience for a kid because it's like recreating the imagine doing that for the first time like you're looking at these things for the very first time through the very first microscope and illustrating it this is what kickstarted the Royal Society by the way this is their first publication really yeah cool uh so I mean I just wanted a copy of the book by the way and like the the print quality is really poor on the copies that you can get yeah and it doesn't have these kinds of like holdouts yeah yeah I just I just it astounds me that they were able to typeset these things back then or you know even early 20th century and have these foldouts and things like that and now we're getting I order a book it's like printed in Nevada by Amazon and it's complete garbage yeah yeah yeah there are some people who still put in the effort for this but it's like I guess the accessibility is the trade-off this was not an accessible book that's fair uh yeah now now even if you're paying 100 bucks for a well-printed book that's way more accessible yeah if we're gonna try and get it down to 10 10 dollars uh or a dollar now we're talking iPad apps yeah so that's that's the that's the spectrum I am looking uh as I'm looking at the clock here we may have to return to this but I also will link to it if uh we'll keep the rest as a exercise for them I'm not going to go one by one like showing you a family photo album they're all good ideas um okay well let's meet again on the book stuff okay cool okay yeah let's wait no stop recording now and then let's talk about the super secret stuff okay oh yeah all right oh I'm do I hit leave yeah I hit leave