F (54:42)
Well, you have to wait right now. No, look, it's a good question. I don't think this is going to be how it ends in the final form necessarily. But the reason I do this this way is that when you sit down at A computer to write. Computers are great editing tools, but they're not great writing tools, at least if you're old fashioned. I mean, I'm not having AI do it, you know, so if you sit down at a computer, you're. You always want it to be perfect. And so you, you delete a lot, you start over a lot, and you end up looking at a blank screen for a long time. I do this longhand because I think when you create a physical product, it feels like you're making progress and then you can keep going. So it doesn't have to be perfect, you know, it's not going to be perfect. I can't hand this in to the publisher. I've got to recopy it. So I know that I'm committing to an imperfect first draft, but that doesn't stop me from going. And then I keep going. Right now I'm just trying to wrap my hands around the narrative so it's chronological. And the plan I have for the last three pages, I've just reached a point where Scott has to leave the experimental drug trial because his tumors start growing again and he has to go on radiation, which means he can't do the experimental trial. So basically I'm right up to December, December last year. And the last page. Well, so the next page that I'm doing tomorrow will probably be about his death and the last few weeks of his life and then about the memorial service and the tributes and then I think the last two pages, in other words, four pages because they're each double sided. The last four pages will be looking back at his life and career and trying to summarize it and understand what it meant and what the common themes were. And I think I need to do that. As I close this draft out. I'm not sure that's how I'll end the book, but I need to look back at all this because this has been a journey for me as well. I've learned things I didn't know, not just by talking to people and by the way, people who've wanted to talk about Scott who approached me. I haven't written back to everybody, except sometimes to say thank you for writing. I'm reaching out to you for the second draft because that's the draft where I'm going to be filling in different things and adding details. But I just needed to know, where is all this going? So I learned, even just from looking back at Scott's life and some of the notes I did on interviews with him and some of the books that he published. I had never read God's Debris, to be honest, before working on the biography. I think, just to give you a little preview of where I'm at with summarizing it, I actually think God's Debris is the most important book Scott wrote, and it's not the most influential book, and it's maybe not even the most useful book. But I think if you read God's Debris, it's the blueprint for the next 25 years of Scott's life. And so you can understand everything that happened. If you understand the characters and the plot of God's Debris. It's almost like he visualized his future and lived it. It's absolutely incredible. And there's a detail in God's Debris that blew my mind when I realized it. And I had asked Scott before about certain details in certain books. If they were Easter eggs, if we were meant to see something or notice something, and he said no. But I think this one was. I think this one was. Because it was so. It was so emphasized. And so I think. I think it's going to be. I don't want to spoil the surprise. You'll have to see the biography now. I'm going to give you a little emotion before we're done with the hour, I guess, and I'll tear up a little bit. But the thing was, when you write the last chapter, like, I was going through my messages with Scott to try to remember just chronologically, like, what happened. You know, he was sick. He knew he was sick, and he told me, and very few people knew. And even though he was absolutely clear from the beginning that he was likely to die, he just kept reaching out and asking how he could help, because he told me he was sick on December 4, 2024, and then the Palisades fire happened on January 7, 2025. So about five weeks later, he just kept asking me if I needed help. And I didn't. I didn't. You know, we kept it together in every way, and, you know, we kind of made it by. Through the skin of our teeth. But, you know, I just. I realized just. You don't see it in the moment, you realize, you know, because I don't think. I don't think it dawned on us really in a full way that he was dying. I knew he was struggling with a health issue, obviously kind of a terminal diagnosis and all that, but in the moment, I'm also, like, running, literally, to put out a fire and try to move my family and all this stuff. I just realized that he was thinking about other people's needs when he had the most pressing need any of us could ever have, facing a life or death situation. And it just, again, just moved me so much. I was writing it yesterday. I called my wife, I said I was tearing up as I was writing this thing. I can't believe it, just looking back on it, how concerned he was about my family and other friends who lived in Palisades. Just what an extraordinary human being. But that also comes out of God's debris is that Scott envisioned a role for himself in his life where he would be helping other people. And it's not what you might expect necessarily from the cartoonist who gave us Dilbert or the brilliant strategist who came up with how to fail at everything and still win and how. And win bigly and lose or think, I mean, but that was the essence of it all. God's debris ties it all together in that way. And you realize that Scott's mission was to be useful to other people and Dilbert was a vehicle for doing that, but the underlying mission was to be as useful as he could be. So I just.
