Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s jump into the questions, the first of which was emailed by Sean Pratz. He writes.

As I’m sure you know, because you’ve mentioned your affinity for the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov was an amazingly prolific writer. He penned over 500 books over the course of his career. All told, estimates of his total published word count, not counting books he edited or letters he wrote, come in at around 7.5 million words.

By your own estimate, you’ve written over three million words for Everything Everywhere Daily. Assuming you’re still going strong into the next decade, you should surpass Asimov’s word count somewhere around episode 5000, or roughly 14 years after your first episode.

It took Isaac Asimov an entire lifetime to write seven and a half million words. You’ll do it in only 14 years. So my question is this: Are you a cat person or a dog person?

The answer to the literal question is dog person. The answer to the implied question is that I could surpass Asimov, but since I hired writers, the amount I write has decreased. Asimov was publishing honest-to-goodness books, although he was sort of a machine and could pretty much get whatever he wrote published. I can publish whatever I want whenever I want.

If you include everything I wrote before I started the podcast, that is probably another million words easy.I have no intention of stopping what I’m doing, so it should continue for the foreseeable future, albeit not at the same rate as the first five years.

So, I think it is possible I could write more than Isaac Asimov, but it’s under totally different circumstances. I think if he had lived in the internet era, he might have been even more prolific.