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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 Howey. And Mano Man, do I love having conversations with Hugh? I always learn so much. I
laugh so much. But who is Hugh? Hugh is the New York Times bestselling author of wool beacon 23
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 23
starring Lena Headey also released last year with season two do in March. Hughes works have been
translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives
in New York City with his wife, Shay. You can find him at HughHowey.com. That's HughHOWY.com
and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as Hugh Howey. We talk about all sorts of things. Creative
process. We talk about his publishing journey from a small press to self publishing. Hitting the
New York Times list with a self published book to a first of its kind print only deal with a big
vi 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 Howey.
Hugh, it's all good 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
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 levels. You're like, who can think crazier than me? Yeah,
this is a good thing. I guess. Oh, it's great. That's a great thing. We're not going to get to some
of the crazy. We're not going to get to the sailing adventure. So I'll probably tease that in
the intro, but we are going to talk about creative process. I thought I would start with something
that I have a big recollection of, we're walking in the woods together talking about this and it was
how you structured and we're going to bounce around chronologically, but how you structured the end
of wall. And I want to say it was related to a bit of creative slight of hand, the game 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 could 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 tickle me. And this actually,
and this happened before, what I'm going to 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 there 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 want to make
them feel like you're not going to get what you want out of this. When they think the story,
the story 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
when I need 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.
Yeah, Q&A with the author. Yeah. And I think the last question and answer is, did you write all
these questions yourself in the last answers? Yes. So I'm very upfront about it. But it's the first
time after spending 500 pages with me that you're spending time with me in my own voice. I didn't
mean for it to work this well, but I wasn't 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, 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&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. And not everyone does.
This is after the interview. And I think the last thing they remember in this rollercoaster
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 going to go do that right now.
So it worked in a way that I didn't anticipate it worked so well that the year that wool came out,
it was the most reviewed and highest reviewed item on Amazon, which I didn't find out about until I
was at a conference with some Amazon people and someone on stage mentioned that without knowing
that I was in the audience. It was news to me. I was like, is this a real thing? And it was
honest. It's a great way to get the news. Yeah. And 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 rollercoaster
and not being beholden. Because when I published the book traditionally, publishers were not up for
this. They were like, no, we don't we don't see them. Yeah. And you had to follow the formula. But
in my case, breaking that formula really worked to my advantage. All right. 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
effectively committed to writing and obscurity for 10 years to see what would happen. What did
you writing career, so to speak, look like prior to wool? I was writing and obscurity. But you
know, 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 within a year of writing, I was making a couple hundred
dollars a month off my writing, which might sound like really small, but that puts you already
in what? Yeah. Top one percent. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane how little writers make. And I knew
that going in because 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 10 years.
And then after 20 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'd seen as a bookseller is that these writers who broke out who had three or four books by them,
like Dan Brown. When Dan Brown broke out, he already had a few books out that weren't that huge.
The same with George R. Martin. And that back list takes off. So it's almost like you instant
published six books at once. You sort of published the prequels, but they are actually prequels.
They are. But it's beneficial for not your first thing to take off. Because I'll tell you,
it's much harder to write once you've had some success because you have other demands on your time.
You have many more people watching and it's a far-end syndrome. Totally. All that stuff gets in
the way. I hate giving this advice to writers because 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. It might not be your
best time as a professional or a human financially. But your best time as a writer is when you're doing
it for yourself and no one's looking at 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. You're also very eager to grasp serendipity and so on, but you're a
thoughtful guy. Why commit to 10 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
12 or 13 years old, I read my first word to science fiction. I think it was Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy and Enders game. I read them back to back and I'd never read books like this before.
There aren't many books like this, two books. A lot of people rate them in their top 10 and I just
want more of that and I want 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,
but for any reader who walked in, there were very few that were actually going to blow them away.
I wanted to feel some of that void. My first attempt to write was right after I read those books and
it's basically terrible fan fiction. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan fiction.
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 non-fiction world. For sure. It's like, I'll only write if I can't find it.
If I'm right, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do a lot of heavy lifting. 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,
because I just want to own it. I don't actually want to like Kevin Kelly. Same thing.
So you mentioned something in passing on a comeback, too, which is buying back the rights
to that first book in order to write the sequel, but also to self-pulpush the first book.
Why did you do that? What was the language that you used? 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 going to give
my first book away. I was going to 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 of my take to read it. It's a huge ask.
Most people will do it. And you're expecting people to pay you for the pleasure. I was like,
how about to pay my sister $20 to read this? That's how this was going to go transactually.
So I was going to 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. I have a force people to read it. But just anybody who
thought this would be a fun story. Here it is. And the day that I signed the contract to sign my
right server 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 like, you're like, okay, I've absorbed this second hand smoke slash dream.
Yeah. I'm getting a publisher. How do we do this? Yeah. Go into 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 that right 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 have a blog on blog spot. This is like, wait, 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 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 posts in my Twitter feed and asked for a parcel read.
And both asked for a full read after reading the parcel 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 going
to do all the editing, cover art, all the production costs. I wasn't going to have to spend a penny
to publish my book, which was 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 know, signed this contract to celebrate it, I felt sick to my stomach. So your system,
my system had a different take, my gut new. 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, I was given the rights away. And when I was giving
the way 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 given away
rights for my lifetime, even major deals with big publishers. As far as my agent, I know we're the
only ones in the industry you get. This is the key. You see a little bit more about this because
this is something I think for any author or even would be author who's listening, they've done
their homework. It's something they will find shocking. Yeah, I saw one of the shocking. It's crazy.
When we went around to the big publishers, Wool was already a New York Times bestseller. We had
Ridley Scott on board in 20th 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'd never really
and just for the sake of clarity, this is self published. There's all self published and I had an
agent at this time, Kristen Nelson, the best in the industry, who was so cool because she was like,
I'm not sure you should do a deal with a publisher, which believes her out of the money, right? It's
not her incentive to say that. But her incentivize, 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. And 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 them 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 Aschuster
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 want to underscore something you said for people who may not be in the industry,
the term limit. Yeah, the term limits the best. So for most authors who do a book deal, number one,
it's all rights. And it's usually world rights. So it's worldwide. And it's all formats.
Every format, even formats that aren't invented yet. And it in effect, you're handing over the
copyright. And you're like, okay, this is yours. And for the rest of your life. And then like
another 30 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. It's 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 best seller 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
not sure. It was like, look, we'll make some money for a year. This fat will go away. And in five
years, we won't 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 TV show is 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 publish it. And the good thing is I'm hoping I don't get
attempting enough offer next time because I'm dying to sell publishing 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 you 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 tantalizing, 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 who entire publishing houses structure
around also don't ask for 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 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 because they're book people and I love book 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 have had the career they've had. Their relationship has always been
with the publisher first. My relationship was with readers first. And 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 of the 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 imposter. I shouldn't publish this. There's some 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. Because
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. You also mentioned something that I think we'll
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 the 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 counter examples. Sometimes they're imprints. But then we get into
a bit of a gray area. They're like smaller, basically publishing houses within a publishing house.
And it's not quite what we would consider self-pub. Let's say, how does that work? How do you get the
distribution to count? Because the New York Times list specifically is kind of a black box.
Yeah. Right. On some level editors' 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 UPC code
on the fake cover, which I just grabbed as clipart or some type of Google searches result. And they're
like, oh, is this self-published? Because if so, we're not going to touch it. Yeah. And I would love
to hear you just explain how you actually hit the New York Times list with the self-pub book.
It's changed over time. Other people have done it. There have been times where quite a few
self-published books will be on the best out of list. It is a curated list. I might get some of
these details wrong, but someone did an analysis of New York Times contributors and found that their
books were higher on the list than made since in any other statistical way. One of the weeks that I
hit the list with wool, I know what I sold that week and I know at 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 sales were like three X. 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 there's a real book sales. There's a real book readers, all that
stuff. So there's all these weird biases that go into it. I think I hit it because I got lucky
that week 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 so if a bookstore wanted it, they would have to go out of the way to buy it through like
Ingram, like an expanded distributor. There wasn't a sales rep from a publishing house coming
over the catalog and saying, we believe in this book, which is how most books are sold or purchased
by bookstores in bulk. So it was the power of the reader. It was like too big to ignore because at
the time, I think I was selling, you know, 50,000 or so copies a month on the low end month after
month. That's a lot of. A lot of it. Yeah. 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 all? I'd written five novels and another novel
that this thing that's like shorter than a novella. And then woke him up. That was like my seventh
published thing. And it was also in that novel that range, like 50 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 chord?
I think I was very lucky that I was started to publish at a time when e readers and print on
demand were 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. And honestly, that once you start, it's hard not to finish. And
that really helped. It's super affordable. I was charging 99 cents for the e book. And the
the little paperback, which I think only like several hundred maybe got purchased before the
cover change was like 499. And those little paperbacks now go for like a thousand dollars. And I
wish I had more of them. I don't have enough of them. So I priced it to really be read 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 99 cents short story than all of my books combined. Was that a lower price in your
prior books? Yeah. And Amazon tries to make you not price things that low. They don't want
e books sold for that little. If you price it at 299 to 999, you make 70% of the cover price
as an author, which is huge. Traditionally, public authors might make 15 and a half, 18%.
So you have to sell like five times as many books to get this same kind of royalty. But if you sell
it for less than 299 or more than 99, then your royalty goes down to 35%. So half. It's a strong
incentive from Amazon. They want e books to be priced at a certain range. And they and since the
ones that despite that, you make the decision to go low. Yeah, because I you don't want a bad review.
Someone to pay 299 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 299, which for me, it still seems dirt cheap.
You'd be surprised. But versus 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. I'm not trying to solve your question because you're leading that 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 avoid one star reviews and to get more people hooked on a story.
Yeah, I get more people hooked. Serialized how long would it take people to read all the
parts of being a thick novel like 500 page novel. So I'm not sure. I think I can look at this data,
but I think it might take 10 hours to read the whole thing for an average reader.
We're talking about the business a little bit and I want to stay with that for just 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, 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 thought I would ever get in the US.
It's 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 a rich deal. 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 the sort of tear down the cheek, sob story of like
there's always 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 50 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 renewed sense. So it's just a constant and your agent is doing the like,
we're going to have one primary agent in the US and have 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 are working with. So they'll say, okay, here are the three offers. My Asian agent
came to us with offers in Taiwan and he said, okay, these two offer more money, but this third
person who you've never heard of any of these publishers, but this third person is 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 enormous. People hear me talking about self publishing and they think that I
hate agents and I hate publishers, I hate book stores. 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 so hard to write a book. Like congratulations to
everybody listening to written a book because that took me 20 years of like beating myself up,
unable to do it. And 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. That might
be an exception, but they might think to themselves, I want to write. I don't want to be a business
person running a venture because I think that I'll distract from my craft. Let's just say
nothing over that. If they want to go kind of hue howy innovation light and I want to go to the
traditional route, but I want to be smarter than the average bearer, 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 think
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. Publishers aren't super successful. They aren't great at picking
which books are going to sell. That's like venture capital, right? Yeah, it's a parallel distribution.
If you can give them a guarantee revenue stream, you have a huge amount of sway. That's a great point.
I really thought about it because you're already ahead of the vast majority of books that they will
pay for upfront. Absolutely. Here's guaranteed readership. Here are the reviews. Here are the people
online who are raving about it. Here are what people with good reads are saying about the book.
And publishers used to think a book kind of burned out. It's welcomed really quickly. And now they're
realizing books have really long tails, successful books. And if you can get an engaged readership on
board, it's worth so much money to have like that engaged 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.
Something that reduces their perceived risk. That's where you have it. That's exactly it.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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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 because otherwise it'd be really creepy to do like a bunch of like Google
Slut thing 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 and becoming accustomed to working on deadline. And I 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 a 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 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
hangups about writing and the famous quote about writing is I hate writing, but I love having written.
Yeah. Right. Everyone loves to like gotten some pages behind them. And I tried for 20 years to be
a writer from age 12 to 32. My number one bucket list thing in life is to write a book and no one
was stopping me by myself. But for 20 years, I couldn't do it. And honestly, like all I had to do
is 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? And we all 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 in its 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 in that day.
Is there a certain amount or is it just something? It used to be. I used to try to do like 2000 words a day.
Wow. I know. It's a lot of work. 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. And when I start my daily session as I'm writing, I can see at the bottom of
the word document what the current word count is and I can just see the comparison. And 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 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.
Is when you said effectively when you turned on this big, you're afraid of turning it off. So you
kept up the daily practice. But how did you, after so many years, turn it on the first place? Like,
what was the catalyst? You mentioned the review website I was writing 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 I was sharing the URL of saying 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 it feel to me.
And I was building bookshelves all over my house to houses, these things for one genre.
Yeah, for one genre. And but it was the biggest genre. 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 that. Duneson College too. I got through a period of like two years
where I was reading a book a day as a challenge. And some of these are 400 page books. So you're not
doing much else just that. I didn't know how good this was going to 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. Wasn't getting paid to do this. I was doing
it for a friend to try to get a website going because I love reading. But that experience is what
made it possible for me to write. Is there any Mount Rushmore of fiction books?
Well, they come to mind, right? This is not a fixed list. But whatever comes to mind, if you were
to say, look, 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. But what are some books people should
consume or that I might want to consume to 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 proofs. And you can just turn to any part of proofs. It's all the same.
The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of his stories. But the way a good translation
or proofs flows that I am a 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 yourself.
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 so good. Yeah, so good. That is an incredible book. And it's short.
And it's one of those that you can just pick up and read again to like remind yourself what writing
can sound like. Also fast name 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. It took me forever
to read that. The prose in that book is so special and will make you a better writer.
Just recently is another one that someone recommended was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Oh, I haven't heard of it. I tried 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. Am I writing? No, kid. Why did I take you five times? I've heard this
from a lot of people. So if you're here, this recommendation and you want to read the book,
get through the first like 70 or 80 pages. And I know it's like, I'd rather read something that's
captured me from the first page. This book pays off. So those are recent books that have
you recommended. Link and highway to me. Link and highway, which I thought was spectacular. Anything
by Amor. Amor Tolls is one of the, it's just a book full of literary and narrative magic tricks.
It's wild. He upsets me because he wasn't even a writer as his primary career. I was like,
no, one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Super successful investment banker. You know, it's like a Michael
a Lewis kind of story like super stuff. By the way, but it turns out the quality of reading that he
does. And he's just one of the smartest human beings I've ever met. But his writing, there's a
short story collection coming out by him this year called a table for two. Get it on day one
because there's one short story in particular in there that is the cleverest thing I've ever read.
So he's another one that I read his works in order to remind myself like, well, we're aiming for.
And his word smithing is beautiful. Yeah. But it's not pristine. It doesn't strive to be that.
It's clear. But his, it's so clear. And the story arcs and character development.
And the weaving. Right. And he's like sitting at a loom of pros and just like weaving these carpets.
And you don't see the finished pattern until after he's saying an hour and you're like, oh my god.
I didn't see that coming at all. He's a genius and he works hard at it. You know, it spins
that 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 you're expected outcome.
So update for you. This is 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 am collaborating with a friend of mine
because I had written 72,000 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 going to take to get this to where I'll be happy with it.
And to 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 because he wanted to read it. And I was like,
well, if you want to read it so badly, you write it. Yeah, you write it. 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 TV side. Yeah.
It has been a blast. It has been so much fun. It has been so much. In a better writing was
it has been so great. We destroy ourselves when we do it. Oh, right.
Roodle'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. It's awesome.
I've been such a solo operator and the quality is 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 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? I'm friends with a number of people
who are publishers. Yeah, and I've worked with folks. And the idea of a print only deal off the
table for really bigger publishers. Wow. Now there are some like clever workarounds that I had one
publisher who I won't name, but there's like a distribution deal, like a 5050. 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. I love it. Two things that I found fascinating.
One, I heard from people in the industry because I got to know like editors in chief at many of
the publishing houses over the years go into 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. Because the deal got listed in like sets of
precedent. Yeah. Exactly. So the whole idea that competition exists in the marketplace, it's
insane. The contract's all the same. The terms are all the same. The dollar mounts 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 150 people super proud of it. Blue 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 $8 a cup of coffee?
Yeah. That's a little fishy. Yeah. No. 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, and get that next 10th airs book when no one else will. That was kind of
disappointing, but surprising. One of the 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 sequels. So they thought that I was going to be trapped now giving them all the
rights. So I was self publishing sequels while they were publishing the first book which creates a
really awkward life. What I'm smart. It's what leveraged. They think they had. Yeah, they had
nothing. They thought, I think they thought once I had a taste for the publishing life. Once you
had a taste of the high life. Yeah. That's a thing right in your rich, rich car. I take a pay cut
to go and publish it. Great. It's like, I make less money to do a publishing deal than I do to
self publish. 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
of wall, like I was going to 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 want to work with these publishers because we get to
do box sets and special editions and go do a two week book tour that I've never organized on my
own. But that publisher has all the infrastructure to set 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 might have been walled to tell me which it was. It might have been after your first book came out.
You started working in 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. Can you tell us hilarious? Okay. So could you
expand on this? And then I'd love to just hear kind of where you fall on promotion because it can
be helpful or 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
in 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. Like places you wouldn't
expect to see books being sold. And he's driving 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 Jen Romney or a cribbage instead of just doing like these books.
Your front of the hardware store. And you 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 realize this was promotional work until I saw
how it snowballed my sales. But instead of and I'm never uncomfortable asking someone who's never
read my stuff to get read it. I've never pushed my book on people. But what I have done is tried to
like engage with people who've already enjoyed it. And I think that it works for me emotionally
because I have the feedback loop of my writing is doing something. It's got an audience. I'm
getting a little positive reinforcement. So it may be less alone. But it also made them
talk about my books more on their page or what their friends or family. Other people would see
this interaction like what's this person really jazzed about and they 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 to 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're working anymore. You're just having fun. My co-writer
and all things, TV and film is kind of meek a lot of us. He's an amazing author and his own right.
Beautiful screenwriter. He's already had some TV 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
divvying up writing and working on scripts, I forget that it's worked. 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, 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
do divvying 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 those are day a few
weeks ago where we pushed five projects forward on the same day. These are all TV slash films.
TV and film and they all have a good chance of going to the next phase. They'll have them
into 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 two-page pitch out to 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 many? They don't really write it. That's a bolster good. It's like,
it's, how do you figure this out? We've done both. What we find now is we write an outline,
like a rough outline together, brainstorming. Then we 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 like two
right now. Like I know where that's going to go. We already have all the beats, so we're not
to debate anything. And I'll just be working on Act 2. And when you look up, Act 1 is also written,
which is one of the best feelings. It's a writer. It's like having those little
brimlands that come out at night and do like all the work. Because your partner's wringing on
Act 1 while you're working on Act 2. 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 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. The industry is 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 audiobooks were going to be the next biggest thing. And this is way before they blew up.
They saw it before anyone else. And that advice they gave me changed my career in a big way.
Change because you retained your audio rights? Yeah. And started focusing on creating audiobooks
and launching them with the books and making sure the production value was really high. I just
thought it was like an extra format. I didn't know it was going to 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 of 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. I'm going to write under this for sci-fi and under this for romance. And this is my
nonfiction stuff. And the brand is you. And if 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
into 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. The 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 14 years later. That bond was so real and so intimate. And I
think anyone who tells you to shy away from that might be leaving you astray. This reminds me of
some behind the scenes stuff I was going to mention earlier when you were talking about
different rights and different origins. 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. 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. And then I realized 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're like, no, but we'll give you a million for everything. They were telling me
what the digital is worth in the business conversation. But in the creative conversations,
they were telling me digital is worthless. And so I think that was really eye-opening for me.
Yeah, it'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 who
were 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 six sisters, I can't recall.
There's been some consolidation. Is it still five or is it four now? I think it's still five.
But it's like Highlander. Yeah, that is immortal, but not some. They've been unwilling to my perspective,
right? I don't have any evidence here, but break rank. Like they're not going to 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 sure will happen.
At some point, I just don't know what form that would take. They would have to cut expenses.
Based themselves in the most expensive real estate, there's a lot of blood. Yeah, there's a lot of
excess that could be cut. And they've cut a lot. It used to be the two-hour lunches and 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 Barnes and Noble and Borders and those guys because they were doing
huge discounts and demanding unbelievable deals from publishers in order to move big volume.
So things started changing in the early 90s. But there's still room to cut if they wanted to.
It's room to cut. So let's talk about peering into the future a bit. Last time we hung out,
I want to say, you should meet a number of cover mockups. And they weren't just mockups. They
looked great. And you said, I made this in 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 going to touch everything eventually. Same way electricity and computation
have Kevin. I believe it was the first one Kevin Kelly to point out that we electrified everything.
And then we added compute to everything and then we're going to add AI to everything.
Right now and everything you can say about AI will all be wrong in the future. So the really hard
pronouncements people make are hilarious. Like AI would never be able to do this. We have no idea.
We just invented 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 80% 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 80% of an industry veteran on my own in a single day. That's game changer.
But we're doing 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 want to contribute 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 self publish I
wouldn't hesitate to use AI to create something that was good enough that I loved because I was
already doing this with a terrible Photoshop. What do you think about on the text pro 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.
Amazon changed our 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 books which can also be
great. This is the great Russian literature. This is everything written more than 100 years ago
is all free to read and you can download them all. That is 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 hit product, let's call it Matterhorn 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 going to be fake websites. There are going to be people
advertising on Google to try to poach that traffic. Yeah. And maybe it happens all the time.
Right. So I would imagine the same exact thing would happen on publishing platforms if people
are able to quickly generate. 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 in the cover
and reupload it. And they would be selling copies. They would do that to Wikipedia articles.
Just use Wikipedia. Yeah, they just copy and paste and then say like, you know, it's a gardening
series and it's about every tree and here's my book on sycamores and it's the Wikipedia entry.
It's pretty 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
pleasure. So that's already happening and Amazon. Somebody made millions of dollars doing that.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, because they had thousands of titles up and each one was generating
a little stream of money. Yeah. Amazon has been playing whack-a-mall with these kinds of schemes
for a long time. As soon as you open the flood gates up like this, you're dealing with everyone
thought self-publishing will be a problem. We were amazing. We were providing great books,
a great price for a lot of people. It's all the little scams that were in issue. What are the
opportunities hiding in the threats? When I see this, except 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. I think he wrote in his wired piece that he felt net-known would lose jobs because
I disagree with that. But are there any opportunities that you see? I guess we telegraphed some of it
in terms of getting skills up to 80% of an industry veteran. But as you think about all of the noise
it's going to be generated and all of the experimentation is going to happen, which is
intrinsically interesting to me. What are some of 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 say something to Matt and the ready partner. And it comes out
perfect. And neither one of us are typing. And we will never get that back when 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. And now I have something, once I have clay
like on the table to work with, now I can work with it. Revising is so much easier than writing.
So much easier, right? So 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.
And we've gone through it many times. So yeah, I would also say that people who are finding new things
to do are likely that people who are already employed or most capable to find employment. Whereas
a lot of the folks are going to lose jobs are going to have, I think, a very tough time in terms of
rescaling. It's going to 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, all right, gig economy. I mean,
there have been a lot of scares over the last, a lot of scares, handful of decades. So we'll see.
And last year was supposed to be a recession for sure. And 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 anthropomorphize our votes and our cars and our mechanical things. But imagine what
we're going to do when it's robots and things we're talking to. And it's just not starting to happen.
Chat GPT was never really made to be a conversationalist. But some of these, there's one called
Pi. That's what called replica replica. Sheila, there's these handful that are so conversational
in their brand new. And already with my wife and I, Pi is like a person that's living in our pocket.
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 going to be like? At the end of this conversation,
Pi'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 going to get wired up that way. And we're not going to be able to get enough of it.
And so I think the occupational crisis is going to be one thing. I think there's an existential
crisis that we're going to face when we realize what you would 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 going to have a hard time with that. I'm having a hard time
with it. And I'd pro it. I'm here for it. So you're also, I would say, one of the most optimistic folks.
I know. Yet you write about the end of the world. So true. How do you reconcile those two things?
I'm a short term optimist. I'm a 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 enough gravity that the universe collapses back in on itself, back to
singularity. And that's going to mean every bit of information and data that we've ever formed,
every memory, every relic, every manuscript becomes a pinpoint. Yeah. So nothing matters in
the long run. The heat death is things keep expanding and entropy wins. All the suns run 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 has been thrown up in the air.
This is millions of years, right? Yeah. 15 billion. Right. So most people are going to worry too
much about that. Yeah. Well, I think everyone should embrace if they can embrace that nothing is
forever, that 15 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 going to 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 200 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 had to be a very specific targeted technology, someone will use it. If we all woke up tomorrow,
and this is a common thought experiment, if 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,
so let's go 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 crisper level genetic engineering
that you could do in your basement, nanotechnology, where we could develop a virus that
infects everyone but leaves dormant for 10 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 sit up a drone. We're seeing what drones
are doing in Ukraine right now, this new warfare. But imagine we have a launch of drone from Chicago
that can go to the other side of the planet. 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 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 a nuclear bomb. It's like most of the science,
art sciences out there. Yeah, you know, I don't take us to. Yeah, we can go way off. To 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 to one thing, we'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 a 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,
we're 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 want to ask you a personal? Yeah, this will
be different. And let me ask you if you don't mind. Yeah, a deeply personal question. Don't
have to answer if you don't want. How do you think about kids? If 200 years, iffy. What a great question
because my wife and I started embryos like two days ago. Wow. All right. So she's still recovering
from the procedure. I hadn't mine a week before. And as funny as I reached out to a mutual friend
of yours, your procedure is a little easier. Oh, actually, I don't know what you were talking about.
It was tough. Oh, I thought it was talking about forced extraction. Oh, forced extraction.
Needles. What? Yeah. Wait, no. I now, sorry. Now here we go. It was rough. Wait,
forced extraction. Yeah, I was going to say otherwise. It's just some bad videos in a
cup in a room. I still feel it. Oh, that's awful. Okay. All right. I retract my
which is personal as you want to go. Okay. So kids 200 years, yeah. And that's not that long
in human time, right? Yeah. I mean, if you take 100 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 to have kids based on what kind of life you
think they're going to have, no one would have kids. Nothing's a guarantee. Life is going to be
weird. You and I have been through a global pandemic. We've been through a crazy terrorist attack
on our soil that, you know, I was at ground zero for my parents, what 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 could 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. Well, that's the best I've ever heard anybody
present that. I'm going to 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 for
whenever you live it as 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 were no longer having an average of seven
or eight per couple. So we're over that danger. We're actually going to enter into a much bigger danger,
which is a population population crash. 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 and I'm being a great conversation with Kevin nonetheless. It's one of my favorite
things to do is to walk and talk with him. Yeah. And I said, Kevin, is there anything he said,
well, I think this is tractable and I think this is tractable. I don't think there's anything you
think is intractable. So yeah, we have to state that by his upfront. And he said, no, no, I think I found
something. You can hear Kevin's voice. Oh, really? He's like, no, no, no, I found something. I think
there might be intractable. And I was like, wow, tell me please, this is so exciting. And he said
of the population in position. Oh, yeah, that we might not be able to fix. And we had a long
conversation about it. It was lost into the ether. But it's one of the disagreements I have with
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 will never come back because the hedonistic reward for having your fifth kid
will never be as great as your first kid. And I really apologize to all fifth kids are hearing this.
But the joy just has to get less over time with anything that we do. And so a lot of people I know,
the you and I know are 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 Shabbat 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. I was like, well,
what happens as the population gets smaller, but the percentage of deeply religious people goes up.
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 omnis. Because if you
just look at the trends, statistically, yeah, 100% certain that everyone in the United States will
be omniscient at some point. That's only because you're you're carrying out trends that won't stick
around. Right. Right. Right. But it is true that 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 and maybe preserve something that we were losing anyway, because we're dropping religion
like nothing. What is your take on religion? So I was built 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 ever talked
about this publicly. I got to the point where I could basically match all of his arguments. And he
is 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 persony mat, it was like come to my church and
got inducted into this group, which was pretty sort of a theologically weaponized, pretty scary stuff.
And we're very vulnerable to that weapon. Yeah. And he and I kind of 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
lose their minds as happens. But I figured out the argument that would kind of defeat the last
remaining resistance that he had 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,
you might be taking that away from him is this religion and I decided not to do it because I was
like wait a second. It hit me last night. 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 12. 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 where I was like no one else should have even got either. And I forgive
myself for going through that phase because I was young. It was like having to drive in the other
ditch for a while because I'd been in another ditch. I now 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 their 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 could be really abusive. And I think
if you trust in your system, if you trust in your religion, then your kids and people around you
will find it as well. You can do it through being a good person. You don't have to
into 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, because 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, right? Community building.
A lot of science. A lot of science. A lot of science. A lot of science.
Coming out of absolutely a lot of amazing science. And just this 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 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 can be lose reality too. 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 I think a lot about, and I'm blanking on the exact
writing or speech from David Foster Walsh, 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 die for CrossFit, die for veganism, die for QAnon, die for Phonoplank,
die for atheism. I know atheists who are the most devout, dogmatic people I've ever met.
Right? And they've devastated if God appeared. 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 millenathias with like capital S,
you know, skepticism. I'm 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.
And someone that 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 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 morays 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 for you. Oh boy. It's another. It's another
another conversation. Yeah, I've encountered a lot of different decisions. It was made
over time on your behalf. Yeah, exactly. When I heard the argument for objective moral truth,
it resonated with me in many more sense than the idea that morality has made that argument. A lot
of people have. But one of the best was a teaching company. Course was like a Harvard philosopher,
professor philosophy, who 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
40 hours of lectures about this. 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 Grashtap,
but told them well, we just see more in common with each other that we do to similar. One thing
that we're not touching on in this conversation is the years I've been sailing around the world,
done more sailing than writing. Yeah, we've we've we've we've we've had to make some creative.
We've heard the audience 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 were this kind of close
and we were these kind of close and those are different like we're both wearing close. We have
to really find ways that we're not alike. And the fact that I can read the Iliad 2,000 year old
story written in a different language in different time and the human emotion of it resonates with
me today. Understand the fear and the jealousy and the conniving and all the things that we're going
on means that in that other culture, 2,000 years ago, we were the same. And 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 fairest 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, we make game theory things, we find this tip for
tat game theory algorithm to went out over every other algorithm we can come up with. And it's one
of complete fairness, 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 going to put you in your 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 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? How do we violate the comments 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 going to go into this whole whole entire new chapter of personal line
of questions. But we are, we're starting to descend from cruise altitude, beginning to land the
plane. So let me instead, we'll do around to some time. We can have lunch and talk any time to.
Yeah, we can have, oh, of course, we can't even do it. Yeah, yeah, we're going to hang out.
We're definitely going to hang out. And I'll ask you the question which relates to your religious
upbringing, but I'm going to bookmark that and save for another time while we are recording.
Is there anything else you'd like to talk about? I want to do one of these where I can just
get to drill you with questions. Do you have someone to do 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 venture capitalists. So rare. 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 a Hollywood
friend tell me like, you know, you got the last one of those deals, right? Because the strikes all
happened 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 show being ahead. I could talk about
sailing forever, like some of those adventures you wouldn't believe. And the best things that
ever happened to me is my wife who you've gotten to know really well and you're putting 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?
You might know who this is. But I was like, huh, you're not going to tell me. He was like, no,
you're to go to the podcast. So I had to go find out what he thought about having kids while we
can talk about it. Yeah, but it's funny that like you're like getting this out of more and more of
your interview ease. Yeah. Well, it's on my mind too. Cool. I want to talk about that. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's have a cohort, man. Yeah. I mean, I got some pre-rex to figure out. But I'll make
it 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, rolling Griffiths, amazing scientists 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 brother slapped
him on the shoulder and said, welcome to the human race. That's cool. And I've thought about that a
lot. I 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, it's stuck at a lower level. Yeah. I'm ready for the next level. I'm excited for your
brother. Thanks for taking the time today. So nice to see you. And people can find you at
huhawi.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 on whatever Twitter's calling itself these days.
Yeah. So Facebook.com slash huhawi. Same for Twitter slash x forward slash huhawi on Instagram as well.
Hughhawi. Such pleasure. Always to see you, man. My pleasure, man. All right, man. I'll
spend the time with you. I'll see you soon. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before
you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every
Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people
subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share
the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of
like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums,
perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends,
including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then
I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,
a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday. Type that into your browser tim.blog slash
friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by Mementis. Mementis offers high quality supplements and products across
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