#726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/29cf3ce7b38e3d73

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Optimal minimal.
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Now it is seemingly.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers to figure out
How they do what they do. How do they pull it off? What can you use? My guest today is my friend Hugh Howie.
And man o man, do I love having conversations with you. I always learn so much, I laugh so much.
But who is Hugh?
Hugh is the New York Times best selling author of Wool.
Beacon twenty three, sand, machine learning, halfway home.
And more than a dozen other novels. His Silo trilogy was recently adapted by Apple TV, becoming their number one drama of all time.
A series based on his novel Beacon Twenty Three, starring Lina Heaty, also released last year with season two due in March.
Hugh's works have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold millions of copies around the world.
Lives in New York City with his wife, Shay. You can find him at huhowie.com. That's huh.com.
And on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
As Hugh Howie, we talk about all sorts of things, creative process, we talk about his publishing journey from a small press to self publishing, to hitting the New York Times list with a self published book.
to a first of its kind print only deal with a big five publisher. He breaks all the rules and he is a very original thinker.
and also a prolific, prolific.
Producer of all things.
So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with
Hugh.
Howie.

Yeah.
So great to see you. Good to see you, man. Yeah. I'm glad we were able to do this in person and
I wanted to say up front.
I like to think of myself as being pretty unorthodox in my creative process and publishing, but you are the person in the last year or two
What I've called the most.
For advice and I've wanted to take out to lunch.
Ask questions.
Because you've had such a wild
Journey Man.
On multiple level.
You're like, who can think crazier than me? Yeah. This is a good thing, I guess. Oh, it's great. It's a great thing. We're not gonna get to some of the crazy. We're not gonna get to
The sailing adventures, although I'll probably tease that in the intro.
But we are gonna talk about creative process. I thought I would start with something that I have a vague recollection of. We were walking in the woods together talking about this, and it was how you structured and we're gonna bounce around chronologically, but how you structured the end of wool.
And I want to say it was related to
A bit of
Creative Slight of Hand.
Taking readers through emotions.
And could you just walk us through
Not necessarily giving too many spoilers for people who haven't read the book, but I can do it vaguely, I think. Vaguely, yeah. What did you do there? What was the artistic decision there and the practical decision?
Most of what I've
figured out as a writer, I've learned as a reader. There's things that
Tickled me.
And this actually and this happened before what I'm gonna talk about sounds a lot like the Marvel
Teasers after the
Credits.
This was before any of that.
But I had the same gut feeling that
Yeah.
are some things that you don't want to just turn the page and get hit with.
That you really need to
Ask the reader.
To step away.
Have some emotional response, maybe even get upset at me as the author.
And then
After that pause.
have that little extra nugget that they've been waiting for.
You wanna make them feel like you're not gonna get what you want out of this.
When they think the
Runs to credits. Yeah.
I was trying to figure out well, what can I put at the end of the story that's not part of the story? It needs to be
acknowledgements like thanks to my family and whatnot. Needs to make it feel like the book is over.
And what I came up with was
an interview, a series of questions and answers.
And of course I'm writing the questions as well. Right. Right. With you. This is a Q and A with the author. Yeah.
And I think the last question and answer is did you
Write all these questions yourself and the last answer's yes. So I'm very
Up front about it.
But it's the first time after spending five hundred pages with me that you're
Spending time with me and my own voice.
I didn't mean for it to work this well, but I was intentional about asking for this.
One of the questions was, Hey, I love this book.
How can I help other people discover it?
And share the word and the answer was
Tell everyone you know about it.
Write reviews. Go on Amazon and write reviews. Share it on Facebook.
And
That year.
So what happens? You finish this book.
You're happy it's a good book.
But there's a little thing that's upsetting you.
You read this Q and A and you're like, Okay, I try to be mad at this guy. He's pretty funny.
And then
Right after you're not mad at me anymore, I give you the thing you really want deep down.
After that.
And it's up to you to find it.
Not everyone does. This is after the interview. After the interview.
And I think the last thing they remember.
In this roller coaster of emotions, like they hate me.
Oh, this guy's not too bad.
Oh my gosh, that's exactly what I wanted. I love this guy.
Oh, he asked me to write a review.
I'm gonna go do that right now.
So it worked in a way that I didn't anticipate to work so well that
The year.
Yeah.
Wool came out.
It was the most reviewed and highest review.
I am on Amazon.
Which I didn't find out about until I was at a
a conference with some Amazon people and someone on stage mentioned that without knowing that I was in the audience.
It was newest to me. I was like, Is this a real thing? And it was
It's a great way to get the news. Yeah, and it was it's it was really cool, but it was because I was trying to engineer
What would have tickled me as a reader.
And thinking about that emotional roller coaster and not being beholden'cause what I
Published the book traditionally.
Publishers were not
Up for this.
They were like, No, we don't
We don't think we do.
Yeah.
And you had to follow the formula, but
In my case, breaking that formula really worked to my advantage.
Alright, you have wool.
And your silo trilogy
Later adapted by Apple TV becoming the number one drama of all time. So I think some people might have an inkling
of this piece of work.
My understanding is that you
What did your writing
Career.
So to speak, look like prior to Wool.
I was writing in obscurity, but I you know, it's it's amazing. My first book
Did better than
a lot of first books that come out with a very small press.
I ended up buying the rights back to it in order to self publish the sequel and then self publish the first book as well.
And with then
a year of of writing I was making
Couple hundred dollars a month off my writing.
Which might sound like
Really small.
But
That puts you already in what, yeah, top top one percent. Yeah, it's probably how little writers make. And I knew that going in.
'Cause I worked at a bookstore. And so I was
Spending time with a lot of writers.
So I had low expectations going in.
I told myself I would write two books a year for ten years.
And then after twenty books I would know if I had what it took to be a writer.
And
It basically lets you just get out of your own head.
You don't
market that first book. You don't wonder why
Success hasn't happened to you.
You just work on
Getting better, producing content.
Because what I've seen as a bookseller is that
These writers who broke out, who had three or four books behind them.
Like Dan Brown.
Broke out he already had a few books out.
That weren't that huge.
Same with George R Martin.
And that backlist takes off.
So it's almost like you instant
Published.
You know, six books at once.
You sort of published the prequels, but they are actually prequels. But it it's beneficial for not your first thing to take off,'cause I'll tell you, it's much harder to write once you
had some success because you have other demands on your time.
You have m many more people watching and it's more syndrome.
Totally. All that stuff gets in the way.
I hate giving this advice to writers'cause no one wants to hear this.
But
The time that you just get to write because you love to create.
You're just trying to write one or two books a year.
You're not thinking about sales.
is the best time you'll ever have as a writer. Might not be your best time.
As a professional or a human. Right. Financially.
But your best time as a writer is when you're doing it for yourself and no one's looking over your shoulder while you're doing it.
Why did you make that decision? The decision you made, but I'm interested in the
Thought presses.
behind it because you're very
Deliberate.
In my experience. I mean you're also very
Eager to to grasp serendipity and so on, but you're a thought. So
Why commit to ten years?
of doing that. What did you get from writing or what did you hope to get from being a writer?
I hope to put books out that weren't already there. I think when I was
twelve.

My first works of science fiction. I think it was
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Ender's Game, read them back to back.
And
I've never
books like this before. There aren't many books like those two books. A lot of people rate them, you know, in their top ten.
And
I just wanted more of that.
And I won more.
Newness.
Things have just tickled me. And
It's hard to find that. Again.
Something to learn as a bookseller is there's all these books on the bookshelves.
Or for any reader who walked in, there were very few that were actually gonna blow them away.
So I wanted to fill some of that void. My first attempt to write was right after I read those books and
is basically terrible fan fiction.
Like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fanfiction.
And yeah, I was trying to fill this space that I thought was on the bookshelf, which is
Why to this day when I write something, if I feel like it's similar to anything
Else.
I'm not interested. I do the same thing.
In the nonfiction world, for sure. It's like I'll only write if I can't find it.
If I'm if I don't want to define it, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do a lot of heavy lifting. I d I give away my ideas all the time. If I think of an invention that I think will make a lot of money, I just try to convince someone else to make it'cause I just want to own it. I don't actually want to like Kevin Kelly, same thing. Yeah, he does the same thing. Great about that.
So you mentioned something in passing I wanna come back to which is
Buying back the rights.
So that first book in order to write the
Sequel but also to self publish the first book. Why did you do that?
And what was the language that you used? Because if the first one was
More successful than you anticipated, did that mean the publisher wanted to hold on to it?
How did that actually
happen as far as conversation or negotiation. Yeah, I got really lucky there. So
I was gonna give my first book away. I was gonna publish it on my blog like a chapter at a time.
And
Just use it to get feedback on my writing while I worked on more stuff.
I was already sending the Word document to anyone who wanted to read it. Like strangers on forums.
You know, people who are worried about piracy and
protecting their stuff. I was like emailing this to every cousin I had, all my family members.
Because what you realize is like
Yeah, you spent so much time and energy making this thing you love.
Convincing even a loved one.
to take the eight hours it might take to read it is a huge ask. Yeah. Most people won't do it.
Yeah. And you're expecting people to pay you for the pleasure? I was like, Okay, I'm about to pay my sister twenty dollars to read this. That's how this
It's gonna go transactionally.
So
I was gonna give it away. People who were reading it were like you should get this published. It's great.
And everyone's dream was to get a publisher.
And so I was absorbing that dream.
second hand, even though it really wasn't necessarily my dream. My dream was just to get people
Who wanted to read this to read it.
Not even force.
people to read it. But just anybody who thought this would be a fun story, here it is.
And
The day that I
Sign the contract.
to sign my rights over to that publisher was one of the
Worst days of my life.
And it was everyone else's dream. How did they find you or vice versa?
I was querying agents, I was doing everything. Okay, so you were
You're like, Okay, I've absorbed this secondhand smoke slash stream. Yeah.

How do we do this?
Going to the library, reading books on querying, how to write a query letter, here's the book of agents. This is like
There was a lot of online resources like there are now. Now there's apps to help you
Keep up with who you've queried and
The responses and all this stuff.
So I'm figuring this out, but I'm also signing up for Twitter as soon as Twitter launches. I'm
I have a blog.
on BlogSpot.
This was like way you know back in the day.
And on Twitter, I created a Twitter account under my character's name. I'm tweeting as her.
Which led to a lot of confusion in emails.
People were emailing me as Molly, which is like my character's name.
And two small presses saw my blog post and my Twitter
Feel.
And ask for a a partial read.
And
Both asked for a full read after reading the partial.
And then both made offers.
And so I kind of circumvented the
Agent route. And at this point.
They were paying me money, which
It was like
Not even in the tens of thousands. It was in the thousands.
But they were gonna do all the editing, cover art, all the production costs.
I wasn't gonna have to spend a penny.

Already
Better than I thought.
My ambitions were so low that I thought this was a huge win.
But then the night we went out to dinner, me and my
Ex girlfriend.
You don't sign this contract to celebrate it?
I felt sick to my stomach.
So your system
My system had a different take. My gut knew.
Here were these characters that was already.
Hip deep in the sequel.
I was planning on writing, you know, at least a trilogy with these characters.
And
I was given the
The IP way.
You know, it's given the rights away.
And when I was giving it away for, I was like, wait, I would spend that amount of money to own this.
For the rest of my life.
I'll never forget.
That
sensation and
Ever since then I've never done a deal
Where I'm giving away rights for my lifetime. Even
major deals with big publishers.
As far as my agent and I know, we're the only ones in the industry who get this is the this is something can you say a little bit more about this? Because this is something I think for any author or even would be author.
Who's listening if they've done their homework.
It's something they will find shocking.
Yeah, I still find it shocking.
It's crazy.
When we went around to m
the big publishers. Wool was already a New York Times bestseller. We had Ridley Scott on board and twentieth century Fox to do a feature.
It was making a lot of money, selling a lot of copies, crowding out
Books in the bestseller list from the major publishers.
And so
People were offering seven figures plus for this.
For the rights.
And I was showing them my monthly sales and saying, you can't compete with what I'm already doing.
Which was a power imbalance they never really
And just for the sake of clarity, this was self published. This was all self published. Mm-hmm and I had an agent at this time.
Kristen Nelson, the best in the industry.
It was so cool because she was like, I'm not sure y you should do a deal with a publisher.
Which leaves her out of the money, too. Right. It's not her incentive to say that.
But her incentive was she wanted to have these conversations with publishers to help her other clients.
She was like, the deal that I want to get.
You will never get.
Because it's too soon.
She told me that early on.
But we need to start having these conversations so a future author.
Can get this deal.
What we didn't know is that
it would change quick enough that we would get that deal.
And so we were turning down these huge
offers from publishers until
And we just told him like we want to do a print only deal.
With a time limit.
And I get to keep all the digital rights, all the audio, the rest of the world.
But you publish it.
The print only as if it's a major book.
Book tours.
Major distribution, all that.
And finally Simon Schuster said, We'd rather make some money than no money.
And of the big five, they're kind of the smallest, most nimble.
So I wanna underscore something you said for people who may not be in the industry.
The term limit.
Yeah, the term limits of the big so for most authors who do a
Book deal. Number one, it's all rights.
And it's usually world right. So it's worldwide.
And it's all formats. Every format. Even formats that aren't invented yet. And it it in effect you're handing over the copyright and you're like, Okay, this is yours.
For the rest of your life and then like another
Thirty
Years after your death. It's a long time like that. Yeah. But you did not do that.
So what was the time limit?
And what happened.
at the sort of expiry of that period of time.
We did a five year
print only deal. And so after five years, we knew the date we'd get the rights back. A lot of other books, you can might get your rights back because it stops selling. It goes out of print.
But now that there's print on demand and ebooks, it's easy to keep a book in print, just to keep the rights.
So
The book was still a bestseller when we got the rights back.
And so we got to go to auction again. And this is where you believe in your work more than a publisher does.
I guess I'm a Suscher was like, Look, we'll make some money for a year, this fat'll go
Away and
In five years we'll be sad to lose it.
And five years later we got to go to auction with all the big publishers and we'll get to do it again.
While the T V show's probably still airing.
Which will be a really unique.
situation to be in. So you get multiple bites of the Apple, I mean financially speaking, right? Because you get to resell the IP or the individual book every five years. Yeah, I get to lease it to publishers. And the good thing is I'm hoping I don't
Get a tempting enough offer next time because I'm dying to self publish again.
I love knowing
What's coming in every month.
Doing price promotions.
I love being able to
Put a new cover on or
Create new interior content.
Like it's fun to just give new life to the additions. What would you say to people listening who think to themselves
I think rightly so, just based on what we've said so far. Well
Look, he had a
Tiger by the tail or a dragon by the tail with wool. He had Ridley Scott. He had all these offers. So he had
Incredible leverage that I will never have.
So the idea of having a time limit is just
Canalizing but out of reach for people unless they have
A situation like
Q.
What would you say to them?
I thought that about myself as well, so I get that.
But what's amazing is that a lot of
Big name authors to entire publishing houses structure around.
Also, don't ask work.
And they could do it.
You're the only person I know who has this. And I know a lot of and you know a lot of very, very, very big authors.
And I think
There's a bit of a Stockholm syndrome with publishers and and authors. And
I love my publishers. I've loved
all my publishers I've worked with, even the ones who like didn't do a great job, I still love working with them'cause they're book people.
And I love both people.
But I've always felt like we were in it together.
We helped each other get lucky.
They didn't do everything for me and I didn't do everything for them.
But I think some authors feel like
Without that publisher they wouldn't have had the break. They wouldn't
had the career they've had, their relationship has always been with the publisher first.
My relationship was with readers first.
So that's my bedrock. I always know that I can
That the readers and myself were in it together.
And publishers can come in and play around.
But I don't feel like I need to
Make stupid business decisions.
just to thank them for our past relationship.
But I think a lot of other authors are in that.
But to the people starting out that you're asking about
I think you have to have confidence in your work.
You have to write a book that you think one other human will find this the best book they've ever read.
It'll be their favorite book. Not because it's objectively better than other books, but because it finds the right
Audience.
And most writers I know have this
They feel two things at once. They feel like
My work is terrible. I'm an impostor.
I shouldn't publish this. There's so many mistakes in it.
But deep down they also think this is going to find the right person, they're going to love it.
And I would say when you're trying to
Believe in yourself to listen to that voice.
And make business decisions based on that voice. Make your
Creative decisions based on the imposter syndrome,'cause that'll make you be a better writer.
But listen to that part of you that thinks this might be amazing.
And protect.
Your work with
That
voice in mind.
He also mentioned something that I think will stick out to a lot of folks who have
Published or who are hoping to publish.
And that is that you hit
The New York Times list with a self pub book.
A lot of folks would assume that is not possible if they've tried to do their homework. Or maybe they've even been told by publishers that it's not possible. And there are some counterexamples. Sometimes they're imprints.
But then we get into a bit of a grey area, right? They're like smaller
Basically.
Publishing.
houses within a publishing house and it's not quite
What we would consider self published, say. How does that work? How do you get the distribution to count? Because the New York Timelist specifically is kind of a black box. Yeah. Right. On some level editor's choice list. There is input from Nielsen book scan and stuff, but certainly when I was shopping my first book.
I mocked up a cover and I threw
A
ISBN.
U P C code on the fake cover.
Which I just grabbed as clip art and or or some type of you know Google searches result and they were like, Oh, is this self published? Because if so, we're not gonna touch it. Yeah.
And I would love to hear you just explain how you actually hit the New York Times list with a self pup book.
It's changed over time.
Other people have done it. There's been times where quite a few self published books will be in the on the bestseller list. It is a curated list.
I might get some of these details wrong, but someone did a
An analysis of New York Times contributors.
And found that their books
were higher on the list than made sense in any other statistical way. Yeah.
One of the weeks that I hit the list.
With war.
I know what I sold that week and I know what the number one author who's a friend of mine sold the week before.
I think I hit the list at like
Three or five.
And it was just the New York Times not wanting me to be number one.
Because my cells were like three X.
W so it's not based on sales.
It's based on a handful of independent bookstores around the country that are called reporting stores.
They do take Amazon into account but they
have a like a fractional multiplier.
To discount the sales because those aren't real book sales, those aren't real book readers, all that stuff.
So there's all these weird biases that go into it.
I think I hit it because I
I got lucky though.
Weak that the people who
The gatekeepers just weren't
Paying attention.
They saw something number one on Amazon and they gave it
But you had retail distribution.
I had retail distribution, but it was through
Create space at the time, which is what Amazon's print on demand.
I think it was called.
If a bookstore wanted it, they would have to
go out of the way to buy it through like Ingram.
Like an expanded distributor.
It wasn't a sales rep.
from a publishing house coming in with a catalogue and saying
We believe in this book.
Which is how most of the
Books are sold or purchased by bookstores in bull.
So it was
the power of the reader is like too big.
To ignore.
Because at the time.
I think I was selling you know
Fifty thousand or so.
Copies a month on the low end.
Month after month.
That's a lot of for it to do it.
And there were times where
It was double and triple that.
For a single month.
And
You can't ignore it when it happens.
That big.
But I'll also say you don't have to set out
to do this to have a successful career. I was super happy.
How many books had you completed prior to wool?
I'd written
Five novels and uh
Another
novelette, this thing that's like shorter than a novella.
And then Wool came out and that was like my seventh publishing and it was also
in that novelette range, like fifty pages.
Okay.
And
What was it?
I'm sure you've had this question a lot, but I've never asked it, so here we go. Yeah.
What made it different? Like why do you think it
Captured.
People in the way that it did.
Struck that cord.
I think
I was very lucky that I was started to publish at a time when
E readers and print on demand.
Around it's a short piece.
You can read it in a lunch break.
It's hard to recommend a book you don't finish.
And it's hard to review a book you don't finish unless you're writing a really bad one star review.
So
One thing that helped with word of mouth is that I was writing something
that people could get through. Mm. And honestly that once you start it's hard not to finish.
And
That really helped. It was super affordable. I was charging ninety nine cents for the ebook.
And uh
The little paperback which I think only
Like several hundred maybe got
Purchase before the cover changed.
was like four ninety nine.
Those little paperbacks now go for like a thousand dollars and I I wish I had more of them. I don't
I don't have enough of them.
So
I priced it to really
Be red.
Not to be profitable.
But
You make it up on on volume, I guess, because next thing I knew I was making more from this ninety nine cent short story.
Then all of my
Books combined.
Was that a lower price than your prior books?
Yeah.
Amazon tries to make you not price things that low.
They don't want.
E book sold for that little
If you price it at two ninety nine to nine ninety nine.
You make seventy percent.
Of
The cover price.
As an author, which is huge.
traditionally published authors might make fifteen and a half, eighteen percent.
So you have to sell like five times as many books to get this same kinda royalty.
But if you sell it for less than two ninety nine or more than nine ninety nine.
Then your royalty.
Goes down to thirty five.
Percent.
So
Half.
That's a strong incentive from Amazon.
They want eBooks to be priced in a certain range and they
Despite that.
You make the decision to go low.
Yeah, because I you don't want to bad review someone to pay two ninety nine for something they read in an hour.
No amount of money is worth
The onslaught of one star reviews from
Angry readers.
How much of that was a
fear of one star reviews if you price it at two ninety nine, which for me s still seems dirt cheap.
You'd be surprised.
you not really caring about the financial payoff and you just wanting to make enough to continue writing.
That's a leading question. That might not be a driver versus something else, right? Because you're leading me towards
A truth that I probably wouldn't
Admit to myself otherwise, but that's a huge part of it.
I'm pricing it because I want
my story to get picked up. I want to find an audience.
And
The proof of that is that as soon as I figured out how to make it free, I did that instead.
So once the
Work was serialized and there was the five parts of wool.
The first part.
I made for free.
And
That's a great way to to avoid one star reviews and to get more people hooked on a story.
Yeah, get more people hooked.
Serialized.
How long would it take people to read?
But is it being a
Thick novel, like five hundred page novel.
So I'm not sure I I think I can look at this data, but I think it might take
Ten hours to
Read the whole thing.
For an average reader.
We're talking about the business a little bit and I wanna stay with that for just uh a few minutes longer and then we might come back to it, but what are some other
Terms or clauses.
Where you have zigged instead of Zagged done things differently, where it's really been worth it. Oh man, I've
It's been Do you sell worldwide rights? I do not sell worldwide rights because audio became
Huge. Foreign rights became huge.
I was shocked the first time
Foreign deals started coming in from Brazil and Germany and it was
Way more than I

And so for context.
What often happens is an author will sign a deal with the publisher. They kind of
Sell the farm. They give everything over. Which
By the way, for some people might make a lot of sense if they don't have the infrastructure or maybe if their agent isn't able or willing to do a bunch of legwork.
In foreign sales, but
What will often happen then?
Let's say a publisher comes to me and they make me what seems like a very rich deal.
And it might be rich too.
Once that ink is dry
Before they
have wired me money. They will have already had conversations with foreign publishers.
And received funds from those foreign publishers. They're in the black before you get your first check. They're way in the black. So these sort of tear down the cheek sob story of like. We never pay others as much as woe is us.
The publishers.
not always reflection of financial reality.
So if that's the norm.
What did you end up doing?
We've done just for wool probably
fifty deals in other countries. So it's normal for foreign deals to be
Term limited.
Like five or seven year deals.
And most of those have gone around in in renewed sense. So it's just a constant
And your agent is doing the leg work. I do and I have one primary agent in the US and I have a a European agent.
Jenny Meyer who's doing all these deals.
Around
Europe and then I have an Asia specific agent.
They know the publishers they're working with.
So they'll say, Okay, here are the three offers.
My
Asian Asian.
Came to us with offers in Taiwan and he said
Okay, these two offer more money, but this third
person you've never heard of any of these publishers, but this third person
It's a one man operation.
He does all the translations himself. He only does one or two books a year.
You should go with him.
I trust my agents.
So we go with this person who's offering the least amount of money.
And they were right.
We had the number one selling book in
Taiwan that year because
People buy books because he touched them.
Not because of me or my story.
And so having these people working on your behalf, it's it's enormous. People hear me talking about self publishing and they think that I hate agents and I hate publishers.
Eight bookstores.
I love all those people. These are all book people and I love
the success of any writer however they get published. If you sign with a big publisher
Fantastic. It's so hard to do.
It's hard to write a book.
Like congratulations to everybody listening who's written a book.
Because
That took me twenty years of like
beating myself up, unable to do it.
And I'm I'm thrilled for everyone in this industry, however they
Move forward.
So you
Are describing this process, and I imagine some people listening will think to themselves, I have no interest in pricing specials. I have no interest in figuring out cover art. Uh that might be an exception. But they might think to themselves, I wanna write, I don't wanna be
a business person running a venture'cause I think that'll distract from my craft.
Let's just say. Nothing wrong with that.
So if they want to go kind of Hue Howie innovation light.
Night. I wanna go the traditional route.
But I wanna be smarter than the average bear.
What types of things would you encourage them to pay attention to?
I don't think you'll
have any leverage.
Going the traditional route if you're not self published already.
You need something to bargain with, right? Yeah, and I I think when you're when you're making money and leaving them out of it.
Then you can say, Well I'll cut you in.
But these are my demands.
And
Publishers aren't super successful.
They aren't great at picking which books are gonna sell.
That's like venture capital, right? Yeah.
It's a power law distribution. If you can give them a guarantee.
Revenue stream?
You have a huge
Amount of
Sway. That's a great point. I never really thought about it.'Cause you're already ahead of
The vast majority of books that they will pay for up front.
Absolutely.
Guaranteed readership.
Here are the reviews.
Hear the people online who are raving about it. Hear what people in Goodreads are saying.
About the book.
And
Publishers used to think a book
Kind of.
Burned out.
It's welcome really quickly. And now they're realizing
Books have really long tails, successful books.
And if you can get
And engage readership on board?
It's worth so much money to have like that engage fandom.
To your question.
If you want leverage.
With traditional publishing. If you want to ask for things that will
further your rights in your career, you really need to
establish yourself in other ways and doesn't have to be from self publishing.
Have a podcast that's super successful.
A website a huge
Following the something that reduces their perceived risk. That's where you have exactly it.
That's exactly it.

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Yeah.
I read in the process of doing research, which is always fun for me to do with friends when I have them on the podcast,'cause otherwise it'd be really creepy to do like a bunch of like Google Sluthing on my friends. And
I was wondering, I think you gave the advice and I'm wondering if it still applies that writers not take days off.
That's one. That could be one of those don't believe everything you read on the internet.
The second is related to
writing for I think it was a book review website.
Mm.
And becoming accustomed to working on deadline.
And I'd just love you to speak to the importance of that because I know for me
I think of myself occasionally as a writer.
If I don't have a deadline.
Man.
I am not terribly productive.
Yeah.
There's the deadline piece if you could speak to that and then just how you would suggest people
Train themselves.
To write. Is it daily?
Is it?
Few days a week, is it?
Something else.
So I can only speak
to what works for me, but I will say that I found that I have m way more in common with other writers than we are dissimilar.
Like I hear the same laments like you were just mentioning. I know you and I have a lot of the same
Hang up writing and the famous quote about writing is
I hate writing but I love having written. Yeah. Right. Everyone loves to have like gotten some
Pages behind them.
And
I tried for twenty years to be a writer.
From age twelve to thirty two.
My number one bucket list.

And no one was stopping me but myself.
But for twenty years I couldn't do it.
And honestly, like all I had to do was write a little bit every day and I would write a book. That's all I ever wanted.
And so how can you get in the way
Of yourself.
That
Consistently.
Do it as writers.
And once I unlock the ability to write.
My fear was ever
Turning that.
Switch back off.
And that's where I think the daily habit is critical.
Like I wrote today before I
Came here and it's Saturday.
And I'll write on the plate and I'll write in the back of an Uber, I'll do whatever it takes to get
Some words then that day.
Is there a certain amount or is it just
Something.
It used to be. I used to try to do like two thousand words a day.
Wow. I know it's a lot of words. Yeah. Now if I do a thousand words a day and
What I find helpful in my Word document.
Whatever I'm working on, there's the word count.
Written in the document at the end, wherever I'm writing.
When I start my
Daily session as I'm writing, I can see at the bottom of the word
Document.
what the current count is and I can just see the comparison.
That gives me my
Like you need to do a little more.
And then once I'm done for the day I update that number.
to the day's number. And so I'm always just trying to march that.
That forward.
It sounds
Calculated and cold?
But if you just sit around waiting for inspiration and try to write a few sentences here and there.
You'll never stay with the story enough to know what it's even about.
When you said
Effectively, when you turned on the spigot, you're afraid of turning it off. So you kept up this daily practice. But how did you, after so many years
Turn it on in the first place. Like what was the catalyst
You mentioned the
review website I was ready for. So I was trying to help a friend get this crime mystery thriller website up and running and he was doing the film movie side of it and I was doing the books.
And I just put a call out to publishers. It was a beautiful website that he had made.
So it's sharing the URL of seeing this is what we're doing.
And I started getting a flood of books in the mail.
And for a reader like me, this was like
Christmas every day.
I was getting more books than I could review, so I was having to go through and see which ones appealed to me.
I was building bookshelves all over my house to house these things. For one genre. Yeah, for one genre. And but it was the biggest genre. Yeah. It was like the one that publishers make a lot of their money on.
And
In order to keep up with it, I started reading and reviewing a book a day.
And this is all I was doing.
I'd done this in college too. I'd gone through a period of like two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge.
And some of these are four hundred page books.
So you're not doing much else. Yeah. Just that.
I didn't know how good this was gonna be for my writing.
But absorbing that much prose.
Just made it.
So easy for me to tap into
Not only the
Ability to
String words together.
But
All the plot.
elements that I was absorbing.
From
weeks and weeks and weeks of absorbing this many books.
And then I was also writing that review every day.
And so I was getting a daily writing habit.
And
That
Wasn't even a job, I wasn't getting paid to do this. I was doing it for a friend to try to
Get a website going.
'Cause I love reading.
But that experience is what
made it possible for me to write.
Is there any
Mount Rushmore of
Fiction books.
They come to mind, right? This is is not a fixed list, but whatever comes to mind, if you were to say like
And I'll make this personal, so
I've been experimenting with short fiction.
For the last year or so.
I think I will do quite a bit more.
Possibly in screenplay format, which I definitely want to talk to you about at some point. Oh, cool. But
What are some books people should consume?
Or that I might want to consume.
Two
Provide myself with really good nutrition.
for absorbing some of what you're describing.
I think reading
Beautiful prose is almost like striking a tuning fork before your writing session.
I think it's really
Awesome to pick up.
There's several things you can do. You can read stuff that's nonsense, but beautiful, like some Proust, and you can just turn to any part of Proust, it's all the same.
The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of the stories?
But the way
A good translation approved.
flows that I amic pentameter.
The run on sentences.
It's like it's
You start to hear
The tonal quality of
Good music.
in words and then you can start to sing in that key.
Yours.
Some of the books I've read.
recently that have I think
Up to my writing.
One was this is how you lose the time war.
Which is just so good. Yeah, it's so good. That is an incredible book. And it's short.
And it's one of those that you could just pick up and read again to like remind yourself.
What writing can sound like.
Also fascinating because it was written by two authors. Yeah. Who alternated back and forth which is structural to the story, which works.
Cersei? Have you read that?
I haven't yet read it. I have seen so many people reading it. I've seen friends reading it.
Took me forever to to read that.
The prose in that book is so special.
And we'll
Make you a better writer.
Just recently.
Yes, another one that someone recommended was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Oh yeah, I haven't heard of it.
I try to
read that like five times and it was the hottest thing.
And I never gave it enough of a chance, but when I finally finished it, I was like, That's what I'm aiming for.
Okay. And why did it take you five times?
I've heard this from a lot of people. So if you're hear this recommendation and you want to read the book.
Get through the first like seventy or eighty pages.
And I know it's like I'd rather read something that's capture me from the first page.
This book pays off.
So th those are recent books that have that have recommended Lincoln Highway to me.
Lincoln High, which I thought was spectacular. Anything by Amore.
Immortals is one of the book full of literary and narrative magic tricks. It's wild. He upsets me. Because he he he wasn't even a writer as his primary career was a no, one of those Yeah, yeah. Super successful investment banker.
You know, it's like a a Michael uh Lewis kind of story.
Like super successful other ways.
But it turns out
the the quality of reading that he does and the he's just one of the smartest human beings.
I've ever met.
But his writing
There's a short story collection coming out.
I am this year called uh Table for Two.
Get it on day one because there's one short story particular in there.
That is the cleverest thing I've ever read.
So here's another one that
I'll read his works in order to remind myself like what we're aiming for.
And his wordsmithing is beautiful. Yeah.
But it's not Proust, right?
It doesn't
strive to be that. It's clear. But his clever is so clear.
And the story arcs and character development and the weaving.
Mm. Right. He's like sitting at
a loom of prose and just like weaving these carpets and you don't see the finished pattern.
Until
After you say an hour and you're like, Oh my God. Yeah I didn't see that coming at all. He's a genius and he works hard at it.
You know, it spins the the years and time it takes.
That's a level of writing that it's fun to aspire to, but I know I'll never reach.
But you have to have like loftier goals than
Your expected outcome.
So update for you, this is just personal.
On my side is that and you have been along for the ride here.
I'm working on my first book project in six years or so.
And I'm collaborating with a friend of mine because
I had written seventy two thousand words of this maybe five years ago and then thrown in the towel I was like, I just don't have what it takes to get this to the finish line because I recognize I'm
Seasoned enough, I recognize what it's gonna take.
to get this to where I'll be happy with it.
And two.
scratch that imposter syndrome and actually be satisfied enough that I would put it out in the world.
And this friend of mine kept bugging me about it.
'Cause he wanted to read it. And I was like, Well if you want to read it so badly You write it. You h yeah, you write it. Or you help me write it. Yeah.
Get it to the finish line and
It is so far, we've been working on it for a few months and inspired by a lot of your stories about collaborating with writing partners on the T V side.
Yeah.
Has been a blast. It has been so much fun. It has been so much in the better writing list. It's been so great.
Because
We we destroy ourselves and we do it alone, right? Brutal it's just being like locked in the padded cell. Yeah. With your own mind. And it's been great.
The book is not done. It's who knows where it will go, but it is I can say at the very least it is already partially succeeded.
And
I see that as such a tremendous unlock for myself because I've been such a solo operator.
And the quality's good. It's not finished. It's not fully polished, but I was like
Okay. This is actually working.
And
At this point, based on our lunches and conversations, I'm planning on probably doing
Effectively as much self publishing as possible and then potentially a print only deal.
And
What I have been surprised by, I'd love to get your take on this. I've talked to a couple of publishers.
Just why not? Like I'm friends with a number of people who who are publishers. Yeah, and I've worked with folks.
And the idea of a print only deal.
Off the table.
For bigger publishers. Wow.
Now there are some like clever
Work arounds.
that I had one publisher who I won't name, but
It's like a distribution deal, like a fifty fifty. Well, they do the profit sharing stuff. Yeah. But they want all formats. Yeah.
And then there have been options where people have said, look
What we could do is like buy all rights, but then basically give you an exclusive license back for those other formats. So in practice, like you'll get what you want, but publicly we have to say we got all rights. And that's why they do that. So I can give you some
behind the scenes stuff. I want some behind the scenes stuff. Okay, I would love it.
Two things that I found fascinating. One, I heard from
people in the industry,'cause I got to know like
Editors and achieved it.
Many of the publishing houses over the years going to conferences and
Kind of talking on a business side.
I didn't get called in to talk to some publishing houses that I didn't even publish with.
And
One of the things I heard was
A publisher who gave me a print only deal?
Got phone calls from all the other publishers blasting them. I'm sure.

Listed in like sets a precedent. Yeah, it exactly.
So
The whole idea that
Competition.
exists in the marketplace, it's insane.
The contract's all look the same. The terms are all the same. The dollar amounts are all the same.
It's like just as this quick side note, I remember I threw my one and only like event, like a conference was like a hundred and fifty people, super proud of it.
Blew all the money that I made on like producing the event.
And it was in Napa.
And I was like,
Why do all of these catering services charge eight dollars a cup of coffee?
That's a little fishy.
So that surprised me that
Publishers weren't willing to do deals because of the stigma and the social pressure from other publishers.
Do the things that they won't do.
You know, uh and
Get that next Tim Fair's book, but no one else will.
That was kinda disappointing but surprising.
One of things that happened.
One publisher gave me a really good print only deal.
With a time limit.
then made an offer for the sequels, it wouldn't give me the same
Terms for the sequel. So they thought
That I was gonna be trapped.
Now giving them all the rights.
So I was self publishing sequels while they were publishing the first book, which
Creature really awkward, like what?
I'm curious, what leverage did they think they had?
Yeah, they had nothing. I think they thought once I had a an a taste for
The publishing life. Once you had a taste of the high life. Yeah.

Rolling around in your Richy Rich car. I take a pay cut to do a publishing great bouquet. I it's like I I make less money to do a publishing deal.
Yeah, dude.
So why do you why do the publishing deals at all?
Because you can reach
different readers. You might not reach more readers.
Because the pricing.
Will be
less appetizing in a lot of ways.
But you you'll get in
Different distribution channels.
And so it opens up
New avenues.
It's also for me, once the money was no longer an issue.
Because
You know.
Probably two years into myself publishing a wool, like
I was gonna be able to live off that.
For the rest of my life.
Then I can make decisions that were just like what's creatively fun.
I wanna work with these publishers because we get to do
Box sets and
Special editions and
Go do
Um
two week book tour that I would never organize.
on my own, but that a publisher has all the infrastructure to
Sit up and do.
Book tour. Let's talk about promotion for a second. Where do you fall on promotion? Because
I believe
after your first book or it might have been Wall, tell me which it was. It might've been after your first book came out. You started working on your second book and I want to say your dad
Maybe it was like
What are you doing to promote the first book?
Yeah.
Okay, could you expand on this?
And then
I'd love to just hear kind of where you fall on promotion,'cause it can be helpful or it can be a huge distraction, sometimes both.
Yeah, often both.
My dad was amazing. He
Didn't know anything about books or book sales or any of that.
But he knew every small business owner.
And
The town that he grew up in and the town that he lived in in Colorado.
And when I published, next thing I know, he's got a table in front of like someone's coffee shop.
Ha.
Like places you wouldn't expect to see.
Books being sold.
And he's driving me around. We'll do like three or four of these in a day. And I would do this for like the week that I was hanging out with him and
Visiting we're supposed to be hanging out.
Playing Jin Rumi or Cribbage. Instead we're just doing like these books. In front of the hardware store with the books. Totally. And you would sit there all day and maybe sell five books if you were on a good day.
So it makes no sense financially. You're better off spending that day writing.
But I will say if you can find something that you enjoy
That counts.
As promotion.
Tap into that.
And for me that was engaging with readers on Facebook.
I didn't realise this was
promotional work until I saw how it snowballed my sales.
But instead of
And I'm
I've never been comfortable asking someone who's never read my stuff to go read it.
I've never pushed my book on people.
But uh what I have done is tried to like engage with people who've already enjoyed it.
Um
I think that it works.
For me.
Emotionally.
'Cause I have the feedback loop of my writing.
Yeah.
Doing something. It's got an audience.
I'm getting a a little positive reinforcement.
So it made me feel less alone.
But it also made them
Talk about my books more.
On their
Page or with their friends or family.
Other people would see this interaction like, What's this person really jazzed about? and they'd get curious about it.
So blogging
Being on social media, putting out little videos.
It looks like promotional work, but it was basically therapy for me.
Mm.
Feel like I wasn't
doing this just by myself and I wasn't all alone in this.
Not feeling alone.
You've been doing a lot more collaboration in the last, I guess, handful of years. Yeah.
Why do that and what have you found?
Are the keys.
For you.
In good collaboration.
Personality is the number one thing.
If you can just get along with your
Co creator.
And it doesn't feel like you work anymore. You just haven't
Fine.
co writer in all things T V and film is this guy named Matt Mikelados, who's an amazing
Author in his own right.
Beautiful screenwriter. He's um
Already had some
T V and film stuff out there.
And we started working together on a script.
for fun and realized this is better than doing this.
Individually.
So now we just do all of our projects together.
And
Spending time with him.
Brainstorming story and
Divvy up writing and working on scripts.
I forget that it's work.
It's so much fun. So let's focus on that last part.
How do you work together in the sense that
You actually ship things.
Mm-hmm. You and your partnership things.
So there must be some process with deadlines and so on. Are you working on multiple projects at once? Do you do one at a time
How do you divvy up responsibilities? Like what does
A week in the life or a month in the life.
Look like.
We usually have something that needs our attention more than other things, but there was a day a few weeks ago
Where we pushed five projects forward on the same day.
Um Tv slash film. T V and film and they all have a good chance of going to the next
Base.
They'll have momentum behind them.
And yeah, that blew our minds. We're like, did we work on five things today?
Normally it's one, maybe two things.
This last week we got a
A two page pitch out to uh
a studio that was waiting on it.
And then went back into a rewrite of a
Pilot that we're working on.
a brand new IP for another major studio. And when you say we went into a rewrite, is one person at the keyboard not to get too
'Cause like it's how do you figure this out?
We've done
Both.
What we find now is we write
And
outline, like a rough outline together, brainstorming.
They'll write a detailed outline, the kind of thing that you would show a producer.
And then once you have that detailed outline, I just feel that too right now. Like I I know where that's gonna go.
We already have all the beats, so we don't have to
Debate anything.
And I'll just be working on act two.
And when you look up, act one's also written.
Which is one of the best feelings as a writer.
It's like having
There's little
Gremlin should come out at night and do like all the work. Because your partner's working on act one while you're working on act two. Yeah. And it's more than a doubling
It feels like
You triple or quadruple your output.
Also because
Now you have a deadline. You have a social deadline.
They're working, so you have to work and you're doing the same thing for them.
Are there any other mistakes, common mistakes that you see because you're known as someone who has experimented with self-publishing. You're known as someone who has tried a lot of things in publishing. So you must get
A lot of questions and a lot of stories.
From various people who are
attempting to
Take on the
creative projects on some level. What are some other
mistakes. We've talked about a few in this conversation so far.
But maybe
other common mistakes that you see.
The number one mistake.
I see
Will undermine everything else I'm about to say because I think it's trusting expertise.
Can get you in trouble. Uhhuh. Okay. The industry's changing all the time.
And so even what I know might be outdated.
And I'm still operating on it.
Like I remember early on someone
telling me that audio books were gonna be the next biggest thing. And this was way before they blew up.
They saw it before anyone else.
And that the advice they gave me
Change my career.
In a big way.
Change because you retained your audio rights. Yeah, and started fo well, I started focusing on creating audiobooks and launching them with the books.
And making sure the production value is really high. I just
Thought it was like an extra format. I didn't know it was gonna be
One of the
Money drivers.
So
Trusting your gut.
is often going against
The
Established wisdom.
And that can be really beneficial. There's just so much change happening and you might have an idea no one else has had.
So being your own expert I think is one of the
Keys.
A common mistake I see people make is thinking that readers
won't follow you across genres.
So you see people spread out their name amongst different pen names. Well I'm gonna write under this for sci fi and under this for romance and
This is my nonfiction stuff. And the brand is you.
And
People enjoy your prose, they'll follow you to other
Genres.
So really consolidate your identity.
And
Unless you have a reason to
Not write under your real name. Embrace your writing under your real name and
Make sure that
You are the brand.
The more readers can feel a connection.
with the person behind the work.
The
Better off your career will be.
I'm convinced of that.
I think
The relationship I have with my readers and
The first thousand fans. I remember when we hit like a thousand
People on Facebook.
Yeah.
fans on Facebook were calling themselves the first thousand. They were really proud of being early.
And I still have a relationship with all of them.
Today.
Fourteen years later.
That bond was so real and so intimate.
And I think
Anyone who tells you to shy away from that might be leading you astray.
This reminds me of um some behind the scenes stuff I was gonna mention earlier when you were talking about
Different rights and different things.
Regions.
I had a publisher
We were trying to do a print only deal before the first one.
And they were like
No.
We will give you a million dollars for all the rights, but we won't
Parcel these things out.
And they were talking about how the print was so important.
And I was like, Well, I'll do the print with you for free.
You don't have to give me any money.
And they wouldn't do that deal.
Ha ha ha.
Because I was like, I'm making enough money on the ebook. I'll give you the print for free.
You run off of the print.
version. Make whatever you want.
Cut me into
A little bit of royalty, but no advance at all. The other syndicate families would be very upset. Well they all said no.
They're all talking down about digital rights.
And
Trying to sell me on
A beautiful print edition.
But then when I would offer them the print rights for free
They were like, No, but we'll give you a million for everything.
They were telling me what the digital was worth.
Yeah, yeah.
business conversation. But in the creative conversations they were telling me digital was
Worth. And so I think that was really eye opening for me. Yeah. That's a bit of a tell. Yeah. It was a tell.
I should be fair in saying that I spoke with one or two kind of mid sized publishers.
Or
Absolutely game for print only.
Yeah.
But the big boys and girls.
And I won't name names, but anyone who's part of Flank.
But used to be called the five for the six sisters, I can't recall. There's been some consolidation. It was down to five. Is it still five or is it four now? I think it's still five, but it's like Highlander. Yeah. Yeah. Not as immortal, but not as immortal.
they've been unwilling to my perspective, right? I don't have any evidence here, but break rank. Like they're not gonna break formation.
In their defense I would say I understand that
If that becomes the new normal.
They will necessarily have to go through major reorgs.
I would imagine.
Yeah. Unless they are able to create new revenue streams in some capacity, which
Uh sure will happen.
At some point, I just don't know what form that would take.
They would have to cut expenses. The
base themselves in the most expensive real estate. There's a lot of bloat. There's a lot of access that could be cut. And they've cut a lot. It used to be, you know, the two hour lunches and the
It was kind of a very breezy industry.
Before
the big box retailers. It's not even Amazon that changed it. It was
the pressure that Barns and Noble and Borders and those guys'cause they were doing huge discounts.
And demanding.
Unbelievable.
Deals from publishers.
In order to move big volume.
So things started changing in the early nineties and
But there's still room to cut if they wanted to.
Peering into the future a bit.
Last time we hung out, I wanna say you showed me a number of cover mock ups, and they weren't just mock ups, they looked great.
And you said I made this
And
However much time it was. Not a whole lot of time.
With AI.
And I'm curious how you think AI is going to change
Let's say
book creation and book publishing because it's hard for me to imagine
A corner of that that it won't touch.
Yeah, it's gonna touch everything eventually.
Same way electricity and computation.
Um
Kevin, I believe is the first one, Kevin Kelly, to point out that
We electrified everything and then we added compute to everything and then we're gonna add AI to everything.
Right now
And everything you

In the future.
So
Really hard pronouncements people make.
are hilarious. Like AI would never be able to do this. We have no idea. We just convinced this. Like these new language models are
Less than a few years old.
Right now what
AI can do is lift your worst skill.
Up to like eighty percent.
Minimum.
Of
What an expert can do.
I don't have any
Cover art ability and you can see that with my
Old.
Self published cover art.
But now I can get to eighty percent.
of an industry veteran.
On my own in in a single day.
That's game changer.
But
We're doing a a deluxe edition of wool.
That'll be out later this year, which
Probably upsetting somebody by talking about it.
But
We're going with a traditional cover artist.
Because for something that's important we wanna
A contribute, you know.
To the
Other arts.
But also get it right and have the feedback loop to like make this
The best cover art possible.
But for the next things that I saw publish I wouldn't hesitate to use
AI to create something.
That was
Good enough that I loved.
'Cause I was already doing this with like terrible Photoshop.
What do you think about on the
Text prose story book side, because I would imagine
And I don't know this for a fact, but I would have to imagine
That
There's already an avalanche of AI generated books hitting
Self publishing.
It's already happened.
Change their policy around it to limit the number of books you could upload in a short period of time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
So where do you think that goes? How do you think that will impact the ecosystem?
I think
There will be authors who no longer have a seat on the bus.
Because of it.
There'll be
Enough.
AI generated.
Books.
to make some readers happy and those readers are no longer buying books.
From
Another author.
There's already more books in the public domain.
than anyone could ever read.
And these are classics. These are like
Not self published.

This is
the great Russian. This is
Everything written.
More than a hundred years ago.
It's all free to read.
And you can download them all.
That has not stopped people from having amazing careers.
So the idea that there'll be too much to read and so no one will make a living.
That's always been true. I'm not sure.
what AI would change about that.
Well, I suppose what I'm wondering is
for instance, if somebody has I guess Amazon as the dominant player here in the US at least will have to
just get very good at different types of filters.
In the sense that
Much like if someone comes out with
A hip product.
Let's call it
Matterhorn. I'm making this up. Whatever. There's a new product called Matterhorn with two ends at the end.
And if that product takes off within
A few weeks there are gonna be fake websites. There are going to be people advertising on Google.
To try to poach that traffic. Yeah.
And maybe so I would imagine the same exact thing would happen on publishing platforms if people are able to quickly.
So it was already happening where people would download even some of my books. They would download them.
Copy and paste the whole thing, change the title and the cover, and reupload it.
And they would certainly be selling copies.
They would do that to Wikipedia.
Articles.
Oh, then just use Wikipedia or something. Yeah, they just copy and paste and then say like, you know, it's a a gardening series and and it's about every tree and here's my book on sycamores. And it's the Wikipedia.
Enjury is totally illegal. Yeah. That is pretty close to an accurate description of someone who I know made millions of dollars
doing this very thing.
It was like a gardening specific kind of
Wikipedia.
Please resume.
So that's already happening in Amazon. Somebody made millions of dollars doing that. Yeah. Wow. Well,'cause they had thousands of titles up.
And each one was generating
A little stream of money.
Yeah, Amazon is been playing whack a mole with these kinds of schemes.
for a long time.
Open
The flood gets up like this.
You're dealing with
Everyone thought self publishing would be a problem. We were amazing. We were providing great books at at great prices for a lot of people.
It's all the little scams that were
An issue.
What are the
Opportunities hiding in the threats, right? When I see this, because I've also seen
Some fears around
Unemployment which I think are
valid in a lot of respects. I would disagree strongly with Kevin on that. Right. I think he wrote in his wired piece that
He felt n net no one would lose jobs because of AI. I disagree with that.
But
Are there any opportunities that you see? And I guess we kind of telegraphed some of it in terms of getting skills up to eighty percent.
Of an industry veteran.
But as you think about all of the noise that's gonna be generated and
All of the experimentation's gonna happen.
Which is intrinsically interesting to me.
What are some of the maybe the opportunities that people
Might not see.
Or things that come to mind for you.
Because I think of for instance, I'll throw one out there.
Which is
Just conquering the empty page. If I could use voice to kind of ramble my ideas, which I'm very good at doing, they come out.
pretty polished. I'm like, man, I wish I could have just written that. So many times I'll I'll say something to to Matt Moretti partner.
And it comes out perfect and neither one of us are typing. I'm like
We will never get that back, will we?
That is gone. No, exactly. So if I could do that.
Into an AI.
Who would clean it up.
Make a few suggestions.
Boom, I've just conquered the empty page.
Yeah. And now I have something once I have clay like on the table to work with, now I can work with it. Revising is like so much easier than writing. So much easier, right? So I that would be one example.
Where I could see AI
enabling me to do better.
More consistent writing.
I'm wondering if other
Use cases come to mind.
Yeah, that's a really good one.
One thing I'll say about go back to Kevin's net unemployment.
I think
He can be right.
But it doesn't make it any easier because net unemployment means a whole bunch of people are losing jobs while a bunch of other people are finding new things to do.
And that transition is painful.
Yeah, we've gone through it many
Time so Yeah, I would also say that people who are finding new things to do are likely the people who are already employed or most capable to find employment. Whereas a lot of the folks who are gonna lose jobs are gonna have, I think, a very tough time in terms of reskilling.
It's gonna be tough. What's wild is how low unemployment is right now and has been for a while while all these disruptions are happening. Yeah. So yeah, right, gig economy. I mean
There have been a lot of scares over the last a lot of scares. So we'll see. And you know, last year was supposed to be a recession for sure.
And
You know, this year for sure.
But all the indicators are
Pointing in a better direction.
I think AI will
be one of the biggest challenges we go through.
We anthropomorphosize our
boats and our cars and our mechanical things.
But
Imagine what we're gonna do when it's robots and
Things we're talking to.
And it's just now starting to happen. Chat GPT was never a really
May to be a conversationalist.

There's one called Pi.
That's what's called replica.
Sheila, there's these
handful that are so conversational.
And they're brand new.
And already
With my wife and I'm not going to be able to do
Pie is like a

It's so endearing.
There's an existence. Why do you use it?
Lots of reasons. If we're like
Are there only four states that have the same the capital start with the same letter as the state? Like I think that's right.
Asking Pi is so much more fun than Googling it.
And
Getting the weather. Like if we're traveling to LA
What's the weather gonna be like?
At the end of this conversation, Pai's like, Stay dry.
It's just
We're wired to talk.
The way you and I are talking right now.
And our machines are gonna get wired up that way and we're not gonna be able to get enough of it.
And so I think
The occupational
Crisis is gonna be one thing.
I think there's an existential crisis that we're gonna face when we realise
What you and I do is
Computational.
Our brains are large language models. We're not that special.
We can replicate.
The human soul in a lot of ways.
I think people are gonna have a hard time with that. Yeah I'd say so. I'm having a hard time with it. And I'm pro it. I'm all for it.
So you're also, I would say, one of the most optimistic folks.
I know, yet you're right about the end of the world.

So true.
How do you reconcile those two things?
I'm a short term optim I'm a mid midterm optimist even. Okay, midterm optimist. I'm a long term pessimist.
We know for sure either the big crunch or the heat death of the universe is looming.
Well the big crunch is there's enough gravity that the universe collapses back in on itself.
Back to singularity. And that's gonna mean
Every bit of information and data.
that we've ever formed. Every memory, every
Relic.
Every manuscript becomes becomes a pinpoint.
Yeah.
So
Nothing matters in the long run. The heat death is
Things keep expanding.
And
Entropy wins all the
Sun out of energy, they all become
Brown dwarfs and even those cool.
And eventually the universe becomes lifeless.
So either we're running the clock down or the
clock is like been through in the air so this is minimum billions of years, right? Yeah.
Right.
So most people aren't gonna worry too much about that.
Yeah, well I think everyone should embrace
If they can embrace that nothing is forever.
that fifteen billion years is functionally a long time, but it's not forever.
Now we're just talking numbers.
Now we all agree.
We're all fucked.
We can agree.
And now it's just like how many years?
And some people think it's five years, which I think is crazy.
The environment.
Is not
The number one.
threat that we have. You know, it's not the thing that's gonna end us a comment.
nuclear warfare, all these like short term
crises have never been
An existential threat. None of them have ever been an existential threat.
But we treat them like it.
So I think in the short and medium term will be fine.
But
The question.
Will we be
Here two hundred years from now?
Which I consider the start of the long term is
Iffy.
Because if we can build
A technology that would
End us all. And it have to be a very specific
Targeted.
Technology.
Someone will use it.
If we all woke up tomorrow and this is a common
Thought experiment. We all woke up tomorrow with a button around our neck.
And it said if you press this, every human will die.
The question is how long do you give us?
It's a fraction of a second.
As soon as all eight billion people finish reading that sentence.
Someone's gonna push it.
So the only question that matters is are we developing that button?
And one way we would develop that button would be to have CRISPR level genetic engineering that you could do in your basement.
Nanotechnology.
Where we can develop a virus that
Infects everyone but leaves dormant for ten years.
And activates all simultaneously.
So you don't have time to develop a resistance or
If we ever develop a battery that has
Infinite storage capacity.
That would be really bad.
Because you could set up a drone. We're seeing what drones are doing in Ukraine right now.
This new warfare.
But imagine being able to launch a drone from Chicago.
That can go to

And all that's limiting that right now is battery technology, GPS.
Making explosives, all that's
Pretty easy.
So we're actively trying to build this button that would create problems.
I'm wondering if maybe that's a not a great idea.
Maybe we should slow down our pace.
Is that even possible, though?
A lot like talking about safety precautions and ethics boards related to AI.
I mean my feeling is that ship
has really already sailed by and large. Like you could regulate on a
Like a geo.
fenced limited basis, but
This is a global playing field.
I hear that argument. The last time we went through something like this was when
The nuclear
Bombs went off in Japan.
And people
said this is worth fearing. This is more
evil than our brains can comprehend. We don't want everyone having this.
And the systems we put in place were pretty good at limiting. I mean, everyone knows how to build it.
nuclear bomb. It's like
Most of the science art sciences out there.
Yeah, you know I don't take us too.
Yeah, we can go way off. Too off track, but there's no track.
But I would say that when you're dealing with enriched uranium or very limited resources that can be tracked and locked down, it's one thing, but when you're dealing with like GPUs and open source code for so that's the difference. So when GPUs are a limited resource.
And people who've gone through the bitcoin mining phase and couldn't
Get up.
GPU for their video games saw how limiting it could be.
What's different now is we have these things that could be crises.
And instead of saying we need regulators.
Instead we're like
Oh, NVIDIA's worth investing our money in. Like this is one of the best stocks. And so the people making the thing that's dangerous were actually just pouring gas on it and saying that's the purpose now.
Like we should all try to make as much money as possible.
Do you mind? Going at this a little differently. Oh no, let me ask you, if you don't mind a deeply personal question.
Don't have to answer it if you don't want.
How do you think about kids if two hundred years
If he's
My wife and I
Started
Embryos like
Two days ago. Wow. All right. So
Finally. She's still recovering from the procedure. I hadn't
mine a a week before.
And it's funny is I reached out to a mutual friend of ours. Your procedure's a little easier.
Uh Well actually I don't know which procedure we're talking about. It was tough. Oh I thought we were talking about forced extraction. Oh forced extraction. Yeah needles.
What?
Wait, now I now sorry, now here we go. It was rough. Wait, w forced extraction for you. Oh, it's just some bad videos and a
Cup in a room. I still feel it.
Oh.
Oh, it sounds awful. Okay, all right. I retract my
Make it as personal as you want to go. Damn it. Okay, so kids, two hundred years out and that's not that long in human time, right? Yeah.
I mean, if you take hundred year old people who exist at any point in time and line them up back to back, like it's not that many to get back to the Egyptians is one small room of people. I think if you try to decide on whether or not to have kids based on
What kind of life you think they're gonna have?
No one
But have kids. Nothing's a guarantee.
Life is gonna be weird.
You and I have been through a global pandemic.
We've been through uh
Crazy terrorist attack on our soil.
That you know, I was at ground zero for my parents
But they
would have known the things that I would have seen, they might they might not have had me.
But those things didn't
Make me miserable.
I think our set point of happiness and we can do a whole podcast about this is pretty fixed.
And so
Yeah, from birth. I think it's we're
We're kind of closer to height than we would like to think. It's closer to height than that's the best I've ever heard anybody
Present that. I'm gonna steal that.
So
My wife and I want to have kids because
We think.
It might be the best adventure that we ever go down.
We think we would be great parents.
And we think
Life.
True.
Whenever you live it.
As uh
A surf.
You know, hundreds of years ago.
Human life has been terrible for most people for most of human history.
And yet
I bet there isn't a human who hasn't laughed.
Who hasn't felt love.
No matter what their situation was.
Our condition is so complex.
And there's so much of it that makes all the
Rest of it worthwhile.
So
I don't think there'll ever be a time.
That
A human life isn't worth having.
I think the numbers.
We're no longer having
An average of seven or eight.
For a couple.
So we're over that danger.
We're actually gonna enter into a much bigger danger, which is population.
I was talking to Kevin recently.
And it was actually intended to be a podcast, but it was a walk and talk and I screwed up the tech and
Didn't record the conversation. Ended up being a great conversation with Kevin nonetheless. Yeah. And
I said, Kevin, is there anything he said, Well I think this is tractable and I think this is tractable. I was like, Kevin, I don't think there's anything you think is intractable so
Yeah. We have to state that bias up front and he said, No, no, no, I think I found something. You can hear Kevin's voice saying he's like, No, no, no, I found something. I think that might be intractable. And I was like, Wow. Tell me, please. This is so exciting. And he said it the population implosion.
Oh yeah, that we might not be able to fix. And we had a long conversation about it. It's one of the disagreements I have with a a friend who thinks
Settling space is super important.
Because
We can
greatly increase the number of people without hurting the planet.
And I do not see how we will increase the number of people. Like I think that
We'll never come back.
Because the
Hedonistic
reward for having
Your fifth kid will never be as great as your first kid.
Yeah.
Really apologize to all fifth kids who are hearing this. But the joy just
y has to get less over time with anything that we do.
And so a lot of
people I know the you and I know.
Or either having no kids.
One kid or maybe two kids.
For every couple we know.
or single two single people we know not having kids. We need to know a couple having four kids.
I went to this beautiful
Shabat dinner last night.
I'm not Jewish, but
It was beautiful dinner. Amazing. And
Tons of kids.
Tons of grandkids.
And I was thinking, Wow.
struck me as like, Well, what happens as the population gets smaller
But the percentage.

This should happen eventually, right? I would imagine that I mean it seems almost inevitable just if you if you run the numbers, right? So far the opposite, like we're becoming more secular over time.
But there's a funny article out there about when we will all be Amish.
Yeah.
Because if you just look at the trends,
Yeah.
one hundred percent certain that everyone in the United States will be Amish at some point.
That's only because you're you're carrying that won't
Stick around. Right, right, right. But it is true that um
People with more traditional values, one of those being having a big family.
to instill your values and
Ever more people.
That
is going to change the
Makeup, but maybe.
Preserve something that we were losing anyway.
Because we're dropping religion like nothing.
What is your take on religion? So I was Mildred an atheist for a long time.
In part because I saw my friend go down a really horrible path and
Yeah, I won't spend a whole lot of time on it, but I sort of studied up to try to rescue him from basically being inducted into this very extreme cult.
Which had religious orientation.
And
I don't know if I've ever talked about this publicly. I got to the point where
I could basically match all of his arguments. And he's and he is a very bright guy. He's very well educated and he just went through a brutal time in his life.
And
the safety net ended up being this person he met.
It was like, come to my church and
got inducted into this group, which was
Pretty sort of uh
Theologically weaponized, pretty scary stuff.
And We're very vulnerable to that weapon. Yeah, and he and I kinda went toe to toe. I was trying to get him out of this situation.
And I won't go into the nitty gritty of it because people will lose their minds as happens, but I figured out the argument that would kind of
defeat the last remaining resistance that he had.
Well, to my position.
And when I looked at his face.
Because I was like edging into it and I realized like the only thing this guy has in his life right now. Maybe taking that away from him. Is
This religion.
And I decided not to do it'cause I was like
Wait a second.
It like hit me last minute. I was like, This is actually really selfish of me.
Because I don't have to live his life. Yeah.
I've been where you were and
We need
justification for the extreme change that we've made in our viewpoint.
And so we need someone to agree with us so that we know that
We're doing the right thing.
I was raised very religious.
By the age of twelve I was
Complete atheist. I told my parents I no longer believe in God.
And I went through a
Period where I was a militant atheist.
I was like, no one else should believe in God either.
And I forgive myself for going through that.
'Cause I was young.
It was like having to
drive in the other ditch for a while because I've been in another ditch.
Enough.
feel like I'm on at least this pretty bumpy
Road.
With the ditches on either side of me.
And I have so much compassion for people in both ditches. I just don't judge the way I used to.
And
Everyone's trying to figure out
The way through life.
Any of us could be wrong.
And I think we need to embrace that.
But
Whether or not someone is being good to themselves and others is pretty easier to ascertain than whether or not
Third.
Epistemological system is accurate.
So if they're being abusive, if they're not
Giving their
Kids' room to be creative and curious.
And
pounding their belief system into people before they're old enough to think for themselves.
I think that can be really abusive.
And I think if you trust in your system.
You trust in your religion.
Then
Your
Kids and people around you.
We'll find it as well.
Being a good person.
You don't have to in doing the indoctrination thing that I see a lot of.
Same goes for atheism. You know, playing devil's advocate there, I mean, I find captivating
The idea that
religion has some
Deep fitness value.
evolutionary value'cause it's so prevalent.
Which is not to say it justifies
All of the
atrocities that can be seen.
perpetrated in the name of religion and there's plenty of beautiful things and many, many beautiful things. Music, works of art, you name it.
We're at uh community building.
Absolutely.
And just the sheer prevalence and persistence over time.
Despite in some places persecution.
Is it like
Birds building bird nests. Is there some
Evolutionary inherent
drive that is coded into us.
That leads us to pursue
what we label as religion.
I don't know. I have no idea. I d I just I just find the sheer persistence and durability of it very interesting. It's very interesting. Well, our superstition will never go away.
And
I think
Religion is a
much more benign superstition than some of the other ones that we've seen lately. These deep conspiracy theories that people lose
reality to not that believing in religion isn't also losing a sense of reality.
But watching the QAnon.
Some of that was a gap left by
A loss of religion, I think.
I'm so glad you said that because
Yeah, I think a lot about and I'm blanking on the exact
writing or speech from David Foster Walls, but the gist of it is
We all worship something.
The key is to know.
what you worship. And
If religion is removed.
From the picture you still find people who will like
Die for CrossFit.
Die for veganism. Die for QAnon. Die for fill in the blank. Die for atheism. Yeah. Right. Like I know atheists who are
The most devout.
Dogmatic.
Yeah.
people I've ever met. Yeah. Right. I'd be devastated if God appeared. And like I'm the kind of atheist where if God appeared I'd be like
Sweet. I've got questions. Can we talk? Yeah, some of these militant atheists with like capital S.
you know, skepticism and like, wait a minute, you guys have all the trappings of a religion. You just don't have like the you just don't have heaven. You've got all the trappings. At some point I realized we all serve a purpose.
But
There's criminality.
To all these things too.
And I think the thing that
Really
Should wake us up to the dangers is
How many children were abused?
In the Catholic Church.
Because of a very small arbitrary change of just
Not allowing
Your leaders to be married.
People.
It's a filtering mechanism.
And so once you see that and make that change and the fact that the religion is so dogmatic.
Then it can't make a change that will make the lives better of innocent children.
That's the kind of thing that's pretty easy to turn people off.
on religion as a whole for and it's so easy to change.
And that's a frustration.
Let's see where we can
Make a small change and make lives better.
How do you think about a
set of rules or moral codes for yourself. And I'm particularly interested in asking you this because you were raised religious. So you have had exposure to
Presets.
Yeah. Like the
On the menu options.
I believe in an objective moral truth.
I don't know exactly what it is.
But I think that we're all working in the same direction. So it's asymptotic.
So I don't think
values and mores are necessarily subjective and
Cultural.
Why do you believe in an objective truth? Is that just a decision you made to hold that as a belief?
One thing I don't believe in is free. So we keep coming. That's another that's another another conversation. Yeah.
I've encountered a lot of different things. On your behalf. Yeah, exactly. When I heard the argument for objective moral truth and m it resonated with me and made more sense than
The idea that
Morality is so.
A lot of people have, but one of the best was a
Teaching company.
course was of like a Harvard philosopher, professor of philosophy.
Yeah.
Gave a
I don't remember the name of the course because there were several about ethics that I love.
But one was about
The idea that
Moral truth is objective.
And it's like
Forty hours.

And
I found myself
getting a whiplash, I was nodding my head so much.
Through it all.
It really synthesized a lot of things that already
Believed in Graft, but
Told them well.
We just see more in common with each other than we do dissimilar.
One thing that we're not touching on
In this conversation is the
years I spent sailing around the world. I've done more sailing than writing.
Yeah, we've we've we can't make some creative decisions with our time constraints. Exactly.
But the thing that I learned
Visiting
all these countries sailing across the Pacific, going to really remote islands and meeting remote people.
Is that
We're the same everywhere.
And we have to be really creative in finding differences to talk about.
Because
The way we love our kids, the way we love each other, the way we laugh.
The way we spend our days is so similar.
That
We have to like
Oh.
They wear this kind of clothes.
Then we wear these kinda clothes and those are different. Like but we're both wearing clothes.
We have to
really find ways that we're not alike.
And the fact that I can read the Iliad.
Two thousand year old story.
Written a different language, in a different time.
And the human emotion of it resonates with me today. I understand that
The fear and the jealousy and the
conniving and all the things that were going on.
Means it
In that other culture, two thousand years ago, we were the same.
So how can moral truth
Be subjective when we're the same.
As a people.
That's my best argument for it.
But also we're just moving in the same direction.
We see a step backward here, but the two steps forward. We're just heading more and more towards this.
Universal truth where
We all want to be treated about the same way in general.
And we think the fair system is that
If you treat me in that way, I'll treat you in that way as well.
And even when we do the math and we make game theory.
Things we find this tit for tat.
game theory algorithm to
went out over every other algorithm we we can come up with.
And it's one of
Complete.
There it is.
Equal retribution.
And
Short memory
As soon as you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you again.
As soon as you break the rules, I'm gonna
A junior place.
And
If you
Cooperate with a tit for tat algorithm, you both benefit.
Completely.
And
human history seems to reinforce that.
And the golden rule.
So much of the
Which we find in almost every
Ethical and religious system, at least some sense of
Treat others as you want to be treated.
I think objective moral truth is right there and everyone else is trying to cheat that system.
We all are, even you and I.
Are trying to like
Okay, how can we believe that, but then get a little bit more
out of the system than we're willing to give up.
And we
violate the commons just a little bit.
And most of our
criminality and ethical dilemmas are all coming from us violating our own
Objective.
Deviating from the code. Yeah.
I was just gonna go into this hole.
whole entire new chapter of of personal line of questions. But we are we're starting to descend from cruise altitude. Begin to land the plane. So let me instead
We'll do a round two sometime.
We can have lunch and talk any time too. Yeah, we can have l of course we can have lunch. I think we're even doing a podcast. Yeah, we're gonna hang out. We're definitely gonna hang out.
And I'll ask you the question which relates to your religious upbringing, but I'm gonna bookmark that and save for another time. While we are recording
Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?
I wanna do uh one of these where I can just get to drill you with questions.
H has someone done that to you yet?
You know, I've only done it
You've been on other people's. Maybe once.
In recent memory.
But it was very specific to say predominantly tech.
With uh venture capitalists, so
Right.
There's so much
happening in life right now. Like
the journey of adapting something into the scope and scale of Silo, which I had at Hollywood friend.
Tell me like you know you got the last one of those deals, right?
The strikes all happen because these things have gotten
Ridiculous and
budget ways and
Won't turn a profit.
So
Being in the last wave of that was really exciting.
And working with the creative people who made that happen.
And watching fans just get rewarded for the the show.
Being ahead.
I could talk about sailing.
for ever like some of those adventures you wouldn't believe.
And the best thing that's ever happened to me is my wife who you've gotten to know really well. Yeah. And us setting off on having having a family. Congratulations, by the way.
Which you know, I was talking to a friend, I was like, What do you think about kids? And he was like
Have you listened to my
Podcast with Tim.
Uh.
You might know who this is.
But I was like
Uh, you're not gonna tell me? It's like no, you're to go listen to the podcast. So I had to go find out what he thought about having kids.
Well we can talk about it. Yeah, we can talk about it on the air.
But it's funny that like you're like getting this out of more and more of your
Interviewees. Yeah.
Well it's on my mind too.
Cool. I want to talk about that next time we have one. Yeah.
Let's have a cohort, man. Yeah, I mean I've I got some prereqs to figure out, but I'm eager to start that adventure.
Makes me think of actually this.
Very close friend of mine who unfortunately passed away in the last
Handful of months, Roland Griffiths, amazing scientist from Johns Hopkins, and we spent a lot of time together.
And he had his kids relatively late, and by relatively I mean compared to other people in his family. And when he had his first kid, his his brother slapped him on the shoulder and said, Welcome to the human race.
That's cool.
And I've thought about that.
A lot.
Had a friend tell me he's got
Three kids.
He's one of the best dads I've ever known. He said, When you have kids, it's leveling up.
in the journey of becoming a man.
And I really I feel that the more
I take these small steps. I'm like
It's like a little role playing game and this is next level. You know, stuck at a lower level. I'm ready to I'm ready for the next level. I'm excited for you, brother. Thanks for taking the time today. So nice to see you. And uh people can find you at huhowie.com
That's probably the easiest. Is there any particular social where you're most active?
No, I love our Facebook group is a lot of fun. I'm I'm on whatever Twitter's calling itself these days. Yeah, so Facebook.com slash Shoe Howe.
Same for Twitter slash X.
Ford slash Hugh Howie. Hue Howie on Instagram as well.
Hugh Howie.
Such a pleasure.
Always. To see you, man. My pleasure, man. Alright, man. I love spending time with you. I'll see you soon.

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