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

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Hugh Howey is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Beacon 23, Sand, Machine Learning, Half Way Home, and more than a dozen other novels. His Silo trilogy was recently adapted by Apple TV, becoming their #1 drama of all time. Please enjoy!Timestamps for this episode are available below. Resources from this episode: https://tim.blog/2024/03/13/hugh-howey/Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (20% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)Wealthfront high-yield savings account: https://wealthfront.com/tim (Start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[06:48] Breaking the formula with a literary sleight of hand.[11:00] A commitment to 10 years of obscurity.[15:02] Buying back rights and self-publishing.[22:04] Why authors should strive for a reader-first vs. publisher-first mindset.[24:22] Hitting the NYT Best Sellers List with a self-pub book.[27:44] Pricing logic.[31:00] The undersold value of worldwide rights.[33:57] How authors can find deal leverage early on.[37:07] Establishing a daily writing habit.[41:34] Fiction that inspires better writing.[45:27] Collaboration vs. writing solo.[46:59] Ways the publishing industry protects the status quo.[49:55] Why Hugh makes publishing deals at all.[50:45] Self-promotion as therapy.[53:05] Keys to fruitful collaboration.[55:47] Common mistakes creatives make.[1:01:03] AI’s present-and-future impact on publishing.[1:06:05] AI-generated occupational and existential crises.[01:10:11] Mid-term optimist, long-term pessimist[01:14:57] Procreation in uncertain times.[01:19:07] The future of religion.[01:26:21] Free will and objective moral truth.[01:31:02] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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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 man, oh 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 due in March. Hugh's 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, Thank you so much for having me. We talk about his publishing journey from a small press to self-publishing to hitting the New York Times list with a self-published book to a first-of-its-kind print-only deal with a big five publisher. He breaks all the rules, and he is a very original thinker and also a prolific, prolific producer of all things. So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Hugh Howey. Hugh, so great to see you. Good to see you, man. Yeah, I'm glad we were able to do this in person.

And I wanted to say up front, I like to think of myself as being pretty unorthodox in my creative process and publishing, but you are the person in the last year or two who 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. It's a great thing. We're not going to get to some of the crazy. We're not going to get to the sailing adventures, although 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 were walking in the woods together talking about this. chronologically, but how you structured the end of Wool. And I want to say it was related to a bit of creative sleight of hand, taking readers through, yes, emotions. And could you just walk us through, not necessarily giving too many spoilers for people who haven't read the book,

but- I can do it vaguely, I think. Vaguely, yeah. What did you do there? What was the artistic decision there and the practical decision? Most of what I've figured out as a writer, I've learned as a reader. There's things that 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 runs to credits. Yeah. I was trying to figure out, well, what can I put at the end of the story

that's not part of the story? It needs to be acknowledgements, like thanks to my family and whatnot. It needs to make it feel like the book is over. And what I came up with was an interview, a series of questions and answers. And of course, I'm writing the book is over. And what I came up with was an interview, a series of questions and answers. And of course, I'm writing the questions as well. Right, right. With you. This is a Q&A with the author. Yeah. And I think the last question and answer is, did you write all these questions yourself? And the last answer is 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 was intentional about asking for this.

One of the questions was, hey, I love this book. How can I help other people discover it and share the word? And the answer was, tell everyone you know about it. Write reviews. Go on Amazon and write reviews. Share it on Facebook. And that year, so what happens? You finish this book.

You're happy. It's a good book, but there's a little thing that's upsetting you. You read this Q&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. 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 honestly- 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 roller coaster and not being beholden. Because when I published the book traditionally, publishers were not up for this. They were like, no, we don't sandwich. It's not something we do. 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 in obscurity for 10 years to see what would happen. Yeah. What did your writing career, so to speak, look like prior to Wool? I was writing in obscurity, but 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, the top 1%? Yeah, 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. 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 behind them, like Dan Brown. When Dan Brown broke out, he already had a few books out that weren't that huge. Same with George R.R. Martin. And that backlist 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. books at once. You sort of publish the prequels, but they are actually prequels. 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 anticipating. Sophomore 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. Right, financially. But your best time as a writer is when you're doing it for yourself and no one's looking over your shoulder while you're doing it. Why did you make that decision? The decision you made, but I'm interested in the

thought process behind it because you're very deliberate in my experience. I mean, you're also very eager to grasp serendipity and so on, but you're a thoughtful guy. So 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 works of science fiction. I think it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Ender's Game. I read them back to back. And I'd never read books like this before. There aren't many books like those two books. A lot of people rate them in their top 10. And I just wanted more of that. And I wanted more newness, things that just tickled me. And it's hard to find that. Again, something I learned 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. So I wanted to fill some of that void. My first attempt to write was right after I read those books and it's basically terrible fan fiction, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan fiction. And yeah, I was trying to fill this space that I thought was on the bookshelf, which is why to this day,

when I write something, if I feel like it's similar to anything else, I'm not interested. I do the same thing in the nonfiction world for sure. It's like, I'll only write if I can't find it. If I try to find it I don't want to do it.

It's 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. Yeah. He does the same thing. Great about that. So you mentioned something

in passing I want to come back to which is buying back the rights to that first book in order to write the sequel, but also to self-publish the first book. Why did you do that? And what was the language that you used? Because if the first one was more successful than you anticipated, did that mean the publisher wanted to hold on to it? How did that actually happen as far as conversation or negotiation? Yeah, I got really lucky there.

So I was 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, people who are worried about piracy and protecting their stuff. I was emailing this to every cousin I had, all my family members. Because what you realize is like, yeah, you spent so much time and energy making this thing you love. Convincing even a loved one to take the eight hours it might take to read it

is a huge ask. Most people won't do it. And you're expecting people to pay you for the pleasure? I was like, okay, I'm going to pay my sister $20 to read this. That's how this was going to go transactionally. 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 secondhand, even though it really wasn't necessarily my dream. My dream was just to get people who wanted to read this to read it not even force people to read it but just anybody who thought this would be a fun story here it is and the day that i signed the contract to sign my rights over to that publisher was one of the worst days of my life and it was everyone else's dream how did they find you or vice versa i was querying agents i was doing

everything okay so you were like you're like, I've absorbed this secondhand smoke slash dream of getting a publisher. How do we do this? Yeah. Going to the library, reading books on querying, how to write a query letter. Here's the book of agents. There wasn't a lot of online resources like there are now.

Now there's apps to help you keep up with who you've queried and the responses and all this stuff. So I'm figuring this out, but I'm also signing up for Twitter as soon as Twitter launches. I have a blog on Blogspot. This is like way back in the day. And on Twitter, I created a Twitter account under my character's name. I'm tweeting as her, which led to a lot of confusion in emails. People were emailing me as Molly, which is like my character's name. And two small

presses saw my blog posts and my Twitter feed and asked for a partial read. And both asked for a full read after reading the partial, and then both made offers. And so I kind of circumvented the agent route. And at this point, they were paying me money, which it was like, not even in the tens of thousands, it was in the thousands, but 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, your system had a different take. My gut knew, here were these characters that was already hip deep in the sequel. I was planning on writing, you know, at least a trilogy with these characters. And I was given the IP away. You know, I was given the rights away.

And what I was giving away for, I was like, wait, I would spend that amount of money to own this for the rest of my life. I'll never forget that sensation. And ever since then, I've never done a deal where I'm giving away rights for my lifetime. Even major deals with big publishers, as far as my agent, I know we're the only ones in the industry who get these deals. This is something, can you say a little bit more about this? Because this is something I think for any author or even would-be author who's listening, if they've done their homework, it's something they will find shocking. Yeah, I still find it shocking. It's crazy.

When we went around to the big publishers, Wool was already a New York Times bestseller. We had Ridley Scott on board and 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 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 had before. And just for the sake of clarity, this was self-published? This was 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 leaves her out of the money too. Right, it's not her incentive to say that. But her incentive was she wanted to have these conversations with publishers to help her other clients. She was like, the deal that I want to get, you will never get because it's too soon. She told me that early on. But we need to start having

these conversations so a future author can get this deal. 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, we want to do a print-only deal with a time limit, and I get to keep all the digital rights, all the audio, the rest of the world, but you publish it, the print-only, as if it's a major book, book tours,

major distribution, all that. And finally, Simon & Schuster said, we'd rather make some money than no money. And of the big five, they're kind of the smallest, most nimble. So I want to underscore something you said for people who may not be in the industry, the term limit. Yeah, the term limit's the best okay 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 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 and so after five years we knew the date we'd get the rights back a lot of other books you might get your rights back because it stops selling. It goes out of print. But now that there's print on demand and eBooks, it's easy to keep a book in print just to keep the rights. So the book was still a bestseller when we got the rights back. And so we got to go to auction again. And this is where you believe in your work more than a publisher does. I guess Simon & Schuster was like, look, we'll make some money for a year. This fad will go away. And in five years, we 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 publishers. And the good thing is I'm hoping I don't get a tempting enough offer next time because I'm dying to self-publish again. I love knowing what's coming in every month, doing price promotions. I love being able to put a new cover on or create new interior content. It's fun to just give new life to the editions.

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 it, 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 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 the readers and myself were in it together and publishers can come in and play around, but I don't feel like I need to make stupid business decisions

just to thank them for our past relationship. But I think a lot of other authors are in that. But to the people starting out that you're asking about, I think you have to have confidence in your work. You have to write a book that you think one other human will find this the best book they've ever read. It'll be their favorite book. Not because it's objectively better than other books, but because it finds the right audience.

And most writers I know have this, they feel two things at once. They feel like, my work is terrible. I'm an imposter. I shouldn't publish this. There's so many mistakes in it. But deep down, they also think this is going to find the right person. They're going to love it. And I would say when you're trying to believe in yourself to listen to that voice and make business decisions based on that voice, make your creative decisions based on the imposter syndrome, 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 will stick out to a lot of folks who have published or who are hoping to publish. And that is that you hit the New York Times list with a self-pub book. A lot of folks would assume that is not possible if they've tried to do their homework, or maybe they've even been told by publishers that it's not possible. And there are some counter examples. Sometimes they're imprints, but then we get into a bit of a gray area, right? 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, right? On some level, editor's choice list. There is input from Nielsen BookScan 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 clip art or some type of Google searches result. And they were like, oh, is this self-published? Because if so, we're not going to touch it. And I would love to hear you just explain how you actually hit the New York Times list with a self-pub book. It's changed over time. Other people have done it.

There's been times where quite a few self-published books will be on the bestseller 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 sense 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 what the number one author who was 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 3X.

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 fractional multiplier to discount those sales because those aren't real book sales. Those aren't real book readers, all that stuff. So there's all these weird biases that go into it. I think I hit it because I 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 CreateSpace at the time, which was 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 that wasn't a sales rep from a publishing house coming in with a 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 was like too big to ignore. Because at the time, I think I was selling 50,000 or so copies a month on the low end, month after month. That's a lot of copies.

That's a lot. Yeah. And for it to do it. And there were times where it was double and triple that for a single month. And you can't ignore it when it happens that big. But I'll also say, you don't have to set out to do this to have a successful career. I was super happy. How many books had you completed prior to Wool?

I'd written five novels and another novelette, this thing that's like shorter than a novella. And then Wool came out and that was like my seventh published thing. And it was also in that novelette 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? Why do you think it captured people in the way that it did, struck that chord? I think I was very lucky that I 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 ebook and the little paperback, which I think only like several hundred maybe got purchased before the cover changed, was like $4.99. And those little paperbacks now go for like $1,000. 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 volume, I guess, because next thing I knew, I was making more from

this 99 cent short story than all of my books combined. Was that a lower price than your prior books? Yeah. And Amazon tries to make you not price things that low. They don't want eBooks 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 published authors might make 15 and a half, 18%. So you have to sell like five times as many books to get the same kind of royalty. But if you sell it for less than two 99 or more than nine 99,

then your royalty goes down to 35%. So half, it's a strong incentive from Amazon. They want eBooks to be priced in a certain range and they incentivize that. Despite that, you make the decision to go low. Yeah. Because I,

you don't want a bad review someone to pay pay $2.99 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 $2.99, which for me still seems dirt cheap. You'd be surprised. 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 glad it's a leading question

because you're leading me towards a truth that I probably wouldn't admit to myself otherwise, but that's a huge part of it. I'm pricing it because I want my story to get picked up. I want to find an audience. And the proof of that is that as soon as I figured out how to make it free, I did that instead. So once the work was serialized and there was the five parts of wool, the first part I made for free. And that's a great way to avoid one-star reviews and to get more people hooked on a story.

Yeah, get more people hooked. Serialized, how long would it take people to read all of the books? It ends up 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 probably takes 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. And so for context, what often happens is an author will sign a deal with a 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, We never pay authors this much.

Woe is us. The publisher's not always a 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 we've gone around and renewed since. So it's just a constant. And your agent is doing the legwork on that?

Yeah, they do. And I have one primary agent in the US and I have a European agent, Jenny Meyer, who's doing all these deals around Europe. And then I 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 are offering more money, but this third person, 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 bookstores. I love all those people. These are all book people. And I love the success of any writer, however they get published.

If you sign with a big publisher, fantastic. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to write a book. Congratulations to everybody listening who's written hard to write a book. Congratulations to everybody listening who's written a book because that took me 20 years of 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'll distract from my craft. Let's just say. Nothing wrong with that. If they want to go kind of Hugh Howey innovation light, and they're like, I want to go the traditional route, but I want to be smarter than the average bear. What types of things would you encourage them to pay attention to? I don't think you'll have any leverage going the traditional route. If you're not self-published already, you need something to bargain with, right? Yeah. And I think when you're, when you're making money and leaving them out of it, then you can say, well, I'll cut you in, but these are my demands.

And publishers aren't super successful. They aren't great at picking which books are 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 never really thought about it because you're already ahead of the vast majority of books that they will pay for up front. Absolutely. Here's guaranteed readership.

Here are the reviews. Here are the people online who are raving about it. Here are what people in Goodreads are saying about the book. And publishers used to think a book kind of burned out, it's welcome really quickly. And now they're realizing books have really long tails, successful books. And if you can get an engaged readership on board, it's worth so much money to have 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 it doesn't have to be from self-publishing. Have a podcast that's super successful, a website, a huge following on social media. Something that reduces their perceived risk.

That's where you have leverage. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell

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So why wait? Visit wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. 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 a bunch of Google sleuthing 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 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 have 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 but myself. But for 20 years, I couldn't do it. And honestly, all I had to do was write a little bit every day and I would write a book. That's all I ever wanted. And so how can you get in the way of yourself that

consistently? And we all do it as writers. And once I unlocked the ability to write, my fear was ever turning that switch back off. And that's where I think the daily habit is critical. Like I wrote today before I came here and it's Saturday and I'll write on the plane 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 2,000 words a day. Wow.

I know. That's a lot of words. Yeah. Now, if I do 1,000 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. When you said, effectively, when you turned on the spigot, you were afraid of turning it off, so you kept up this daily practice. But how did you, after so many years, turn it on in the first place? 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 appealed to me. And I was building bookshelves all over my house to house these things. For one genre? Yeah, for one genre. 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. And I'd done this in college too. I'd gone through a period of like two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge. And some of these are 400-page books. So you're not doing much else. Yeah. 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. I 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 that 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 this personal so i've been experimenting with short fiction for the last year or so i think i will do quite a bit more possibly in screenplay format which i definitely want to talk to you about at some point oh cool but what are some books people should consume or that i might want to consume 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 Proust. And you can just turn to any part of Proust, it's all the same. The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of the stories. But the way a good

translation of Proust flows, that iambic pentameter, the run-on sentences, it's like 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, upped my writing. One was This Is How You Lose the Time War. Which is- So good. Yeah, it's 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 remind yourself what writing can sound like. Also fascinating because it was written by two authors. Yeah. Who alternated back and forth.

Alternated back and forth, which is structural to the story, which works. Circe, have you read that? I haven't yet read it. I have seen so many people reading it. I've seen friends reading it. Took me forever to read that. The prose in that book is so special and will make you a better writer.

Just recently, another one that someone recommended was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. 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 with my writing. No kidding. Why did it take you five times? I've heard this from a lot of people. So if you hear 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, that have, you recommended Lincoln highway to me, Lincoln 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 don't know. One of those. Yeah, yeah. Super successful investment banker.

It's like a Michael Lewis kind of story. Super successful in other ways. 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 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'll read his works in order to remind myself

what we're aiming for. And his wordsmithing is beautiful. Yeah it's not proust right 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 prose and just weaving these carpets. And you don't see the finished pattern until after, say, 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.

It spends the years and time it takes. That's a level of writing that it's fun to aspire to, but I'll never reach. But you have to have loftier goals than your 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. badly you write it you yeah you write it or you help me write it yeah get it to the finish line and it is so far we've been working on it for a few months and inspired by a lot of your stories about collaborating with writing partners on the tv side yeah it has been a blast it has been so much fun it has been so much in the better writing with someone it's been so great because we we destroy ourselves when we do it oh right brutal it's just being

like locked in the padded cell yeah with your own mind and it's been great the book is not done it's who knows where it will go but it is i can say at the very least it is already partially succeeded and i see that as such a tremendous unlock for myself. That'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 a print-only deal. And what I have been surprised by, I'd love to get your take on this. I've talked to a couple of publishers.

Just why not, right? Like 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 bigger publishers. Wow. Now there are some like clever workarounds that I had one publisher who I won't name,

but. It was like a distribution deal, like a 50, 50. Well, they do the profit sharing stuff, but they want all formats. And then there have been options where people have said, look, what we could do is buy all rights, but then basically give you an exclusive license back for those other formats. So in practice, 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 would love it. Two things that I found fascinating. One, I heard from people in the industry, because I got to know editors and chief at many of the publishing houses over the years, going to conferences and 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. Oh, I'm sure. Because the deal got listed in like- Sets a precedent. Yeah, exactly.

So the whole idea that competition exists in the marketplace, it's insane. The contracts all look the same. The terms are all the same. The dollar amounts are all the same. It's like, just as a quick side note, I remember I threw my one and only event, like a conference. It was like 150 people, super proud of it, blew all the money that I made on 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? That's a little fishy. Y'all know, man. 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 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 Tim Ferriss 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 sequel. 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 like what i'm so curious what leverage did 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. Rolling around in your richy rich car. I'd take a pay cut to go with publishing. Great coupon. It's like I make less money to do a publishing deal than I do to self-publish.

So why do you 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'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 probably two years into my self-publishing of Wool, 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 would never organize on my own, but that a 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 it might've been Wool, tell me which it was. It might've been after your first book came out, you started working on your second book and I want to say your dad maybe was like, what are you doing to promote the first book? Yeah.

Okay. My dad is hilarious. Okay. like what are you doing to promote the first book yeah okay my dad is 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 it can be a huge distraction sometimes both yes 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 me around we'll do like three or four of these in a day and i would do this for like the week that i was hanging out with him and visiting we're supposed to be hanging out playing gin rummy or cribbage. Instead, we're just doing these book events. You're in front of the hardware store with some books. Totally. 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've never been comfortable asking someone who's never read my stuff to go read it. I've never pushed my book on people. But what I have done is tried to engage with people who've already enjoyed it. And I think that it works for me emotionally what I have done is tried to 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 made me feel less alone. But it also made them talk about my books more on their page or with their friends or family. Other people would see this interaction like, what's this person really jazzed about? And they 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 in all things tv and film is this guy named matt michalatos who's an amazing

author in his own right beautiful screenwriter he's um 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 work. It's so much fun. So let's focus on that last part. How do you work together in the sense that you actually ship things, you and your partnership things.

So there must be some process with deadlines and so on. Are you working on multiple projects at once? Do you do one at a time? How do you divvy up responsibilities? What does a week in the life or a month in the life look like? We usually have something that needs our attention more than other things. But there was a day a few weeks ago where we pushed five projects forward on the same day.

These are all TV slash film. TV and film. And they all have a good chance of going to the next phase. They'll have momentum behind them. And yeah, that blew our minds. We're like, did we work on five things today? Normally, it's one, maybe two things. This last week, we got a 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 no that's a bolster good because 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 too right now, like I know where that's going to go. We already have all the beats, so we don't have to debate anything.

And I'll just be working on act two. And when you look up, act one's also written, which is one of the best feelings as a writer it's like having those little gremlins that come out at night and do like all the work because your partner's working on act one while you're working on act two yeah and it's more than a doubling it feels like you triple or quadruple your output also because now you have a deadline you have a social deadline they're working so you have to work and you're doing the same thing for them. Are there any other mistakes, common mistakes that you see?

Because you're known as someone who has experimented with self-publishing. You're known as someone who has tried a lot of things in publishing. So you must get a lot of questions and a lot of stories from various people who are attempting to take on 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. I remember early on someone telling me that audiobooks were going to be the next biggest thing. And this was way before they blew up. They saw it before anyone else. And the advice they gave me changed my career in a big way. Changed because you retained your audio rights? Yeah. I started focusing on creating audio books 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 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 under your real name, embrace your writing under your real name and make sure that you are the brand. The more readers can feel a connection with the person behind the work, the better off your career will be. I'm convinced of that. I think the relationship I have with my readers and the first thousand fans, I remember when we had 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 leading 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 regions. I had a publisher, we were trying to do a print only deal before the first one. And they were like, no, we will give you a million dollars for all the rights, but we won't parcel these things out. And they were talking about how the

print was so important. And I was like, well, I'll do the print with you for free. You don't have to give me any money. And they wouldn't do that deal. Okay. 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 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 were 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 was 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 like what used to be called the five for six sisters i can't recall there's been some consolidation it was down to five is it still five or is it four no i think it's still five but

it's like highlander yeah yeah not as immortal but not as immortal they've been unwilling to my perspective, right? I don't have any evidence here, but break rank. Like they're not 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 I'm sure will happen at some point. I just don't know what form that would take. They would have to cut expenses. They base themselves in the most expensive real estate. There's a lot of bloat. There's a lot of excess that could be cut. And they've cut a lot. It used to be the two-hour lunches.

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 & 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. There'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 showed me a number of cover mock-ups and they weren't just mock-ups, 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, is 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. 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 this important, we want to A, contribute to the other arts, but also get it right and have the feedback loop to 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 terrible Photoshop. What do you think about on the text prose story book side? Because I would imagine, and I don't know this for a fact, but I would have to imagine that there is already an avalanche of AI-generated books hitting self-publishing. It's already happened. Amazon changed their policy around it to limit the number of books you could upload in a short period of time.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. So where do you think that goes? How do you think that will impact the ecosystem? I think there will be authors who no longer have a seat on the bus because of it. There'll be enough AI-generated books to make some readers happy, and those readers are no longer buying books from another author. There's already more books in the public domain than anyone could ever read. And these are classics. These are not self-published books, which can also be great. This is the great Russian literature. This is everything written more than 100 years ago. It's all free to read,

and you can download them all. That has not stopped people from having amazing careers. So the idea that there'll be too much to read and so no one will make a living, that's always been true. I'm not sure what AI would change about that. Well, I suppose what I'm wondering is, for instance, if somebody has, I guess Amazon as the dominant player here in the US at least, will have to just get very good at different types of filters in the sense that much like if someone comes out with a hit product, let's call it Matterhorn, I'm making this up, whatever. There's a new product called Matterhorn with two Ns 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. 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 and the cover, and re-upload it. And they would be selling copies. They would do that to Wikipedia articles. Oh, they just use Wikipedia articles?

Yeah, they just copy and paste and then say, like, 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 totally illegal. 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 plagiarism so that's already happening and amazon somebody made millions of dollars doing that yeah wow 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-mole with these kinds of schemes for a long time. As soon as you open the floodgates up like this, you're dealing with... Everyone thought self-publishing would be a problem. We were amazing. We were providing great books at great prices for a lot of people. It's all the little scams that were an issue. What are the opportunities hiding in the threats? When I see this, because I've also seen some fears around unemployment, which I think are valid in a lot of respects. I would disagree strongly with Kevin on that.

I think he wrote in his Wired piece that he felt that would lose jobs because ai i disagree with that but are there any opportunities that you see and i guess we kind of telegraphed some of it in terms of getting skills up to 80 of an industry veteran but as you think about all of the noise that's going to be generated and all of the experimentation is going to happen which is intrinsically interesting to me what are some of maybe the noise that's going to be generated and all of the experimentation that's going to happen, which is intrinsically interesting to me. What are some of maybe the opportunities that people might not see or things that come to mind for you? Because I think of, for instance, I'll throw one out there, which is just conquering the empty page. If I could use voice to kind of ramble my ideas, which I'm very good at doing. They come out pretty polished. I'm like, man, I wish I could have just written that.

So many times I'll say something to Matt, my writing partner, and it comes out perfect, and neither one of us are typing. I'm like, we will never get that back, will we? And it's 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

on the table to work with, now I can work with it. Revising is so much easier than writing. So much easier. 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.

Yeah, I would also say that people who are finding new things to do. And that transition is painful. And we've gone through it many times. Yeah. I would also say that people who are finding new things to do are likely the people who are already employed or most capable to find employment. Whereas a lot of the folks who are going to lose jobs are going to have, I think, a very tough time in terms of reskilling. It's going to be tough. What's wild is how low unemployment is right now. It has been for a while while all these disruptions are happening. Yeah. So- Yeah, right, gig economy. I mean, there have been a lot of scares over the last- A lot of scares.

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 boats 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 now starting to happen. ChatGPT was never really made to be a conversationalist. But some of these, there's one called Pi. There's one called Replica. Replica. Sheila. There's these handful that are so conversationalist, but some of these, there's one called Pi. There's one called Replica. Replica, Sheila. There's these handful that are so conversational and they're 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 existential-

Why do you use it? Lots of reasons. Are there only four states that have the same, that 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 and I do is computational. Our brains are large language models. We're not that special. We can replicate the human soul in a lot of ways. I think people are going to have a hard time with that. Yeah, I'd i think people are gonna have a hard time with that yeah i'd say so i'm having a hard time with this and i'm pro it i'm all for it so you're also i would say one of the most optimistic folks i know yet you write about the end of the world so true how do you reconcile those two things i'm a short- two things? I'm a short-term optimist. I'm a mid-term optimist, even. Okay, a mid-term optimist.

I'm a long-term pessimist. We know for sure either the big crunch or the heat death of the universe is looming. Well, the big crunch is there's enough gravity that the universe collapses back in on itself, back to singularity. And that's 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 is like been thrown up in the air and this is minimum billions of years right yeah like 15 billion right so most people aren't 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'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. It's not the thing that's going to end us. A comet, nuclear warfare, all these short-term crises have never been an existential threat. Noneterm 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, we'll 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'd have to be a very specific targeted technology, someone will use it. If we all woke up tomorrow, and this is a common thought experiment, 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 8 billion people finish reading that sentence, someone's going to push it. So the only question that matters is, are we developing that button? And one way we would develop that button would be to have CRISPR-level genetic engineering that you could do in your basement, nanotechnology, where we 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. If we ever develop a battery that has infinite storage capacity, that would be really bad

because you could set up a drone. We're seeing what drones are doing in Ukraine right now, this new warfare. But imagine being able to launch a drone from Chicago that can go to 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 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 science is out there yeah you know i don't take us too yeah we can go way off too off track but there's no track but i would say that when you're dealing with enriched uranium or very limited resources that can be tracked and locked down it's one thing when you're dealing with like gpus and open source code for. So that's the difference. So when GPUs are a limited resource and people who've gone through the Bitcoin mining phase and couldn't get 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 is worth

investing our money in. 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. We should all try to make as much money as possible. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? We're going at this a little differently. No, let me ask you, if you don't mind, a deeply personal question. You don't have to answer it 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 timely. She's still recovering from the procedure. I had mine a week before. And it was funny as I reached out to a mutual friend of ours. Your procedure's a little easier. Oh, actually, I don't know Your procedure is a little easier. Uh,

woof. Oh, actually, I don't know which procedure we're talking about. It was tough. Oh, I thought it was talking about forced extraction. Ooh,

forced extraction. Yeah. Needles. What? Yeah. Wait, now I, now,

sorry. Now here we go. It was rough. Wait, forced extraction for you? I snipped. Oh, okay.

I was going to say, otherwise it's just some bad videos and a cup in the room. I still feel it. Oh, that sounds awful. Okay, all right. I retract my judgment. Be as personal as you want to go, Dan. Okay, so kids, 200 years out, 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, it's not that many. To get back to the Egyptians is one small room of people. I think if you try to decide on whether or not to have kids based on what kind of life you think they're 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 I was at ground zero for. My parents, if they would have known the things that I would have seen, 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 we're kind of dealt with.

It's closer to height than we would like to think. It's closer to height. 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 serf, you know, hundreds of years ago, human life has been terrible for most people, for most of human history. And yet, I bet there isn't a human who hasn't laughed, who hasn't felt love, no matter what their situation was. Our condition is so complex and there's so much of it that makes all the rest of it worthwhile. So I don't think there'll ever be a time that a human life isn't worth having. I think the numbers, we're no longer having an average of seven or eight

per couple, so we're over that danger. We're actually going to enter into a much bigger danger, which is a huge 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. Ended up 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 was like, Kevin, I don't think there's anything you think is intractable. So we have to state that bias up front. And he said, no, no, no, I think I found something. You can hear Kevin's voice. He's like, no, no, no, I think I found something. You can hear Kevin's voice saying, he's like, no, no, no, I found something. I think that might be intractable. And I was like, wow, tell me, please.

This is so exciting. And he cited the population implosion. Oh, yeah, that we might not be able to fix. And we had a long conversation about it. It was lost into the ether. 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. 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 who 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 that you and I know are either having no kids, one kid, or maybe two kids. For every couple we know, or 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 a beautiful dinner, amazing, and tons of kids, tons of grandkids. And I was thinking, wow.

It 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 run the numbers, right? So far, the opposite. Like, we're becoming more secular over time.

But there's a funny article out there about when we will all be Amish. Because if you just look at the trends, it's statistically 100% certain that everyone in the United States will be Amish at some point. That's only because 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 in 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's and he is a very bright guy he's very well educated and he just went through a brutal time in his life. And the safety net ended up being this person he met. It was like,

come to my church and got inducted into this group, which was pretty sort of, uh, theologically weaponized, pretty scary stuff. And we're very vulnerable to that weapon yeah and he and i 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 edging into it, and I realized 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 minute. I was like, this is actually really selfish of me. Because I don't have to live his life. Yeah, I've been where you were and we need justification for the extreme change that we've made in our viewpoint. And so we need someone to agree with us

so that we know that we're doing the right thing. I was raised very religious. By the age of 12, I was a 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 believe in God 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 can 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 do 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 original science is coming out it, right? Community building. A lot of science.

A lot of original science is coming out of theologians. Absolutely. A lot of amazing science. And just the sheer prevalence and persistence over time, despite in some places persecution, is it like birds building bird nests? Is there some evolutionary inherent drive that is coded into us that leads us to pursue what we label as religion?

I don't know. I have no idea. I just find the sheer persistence and durability of it very interesting. It's very interesting. Well, our superstition will never go away. And I think religion is a much more benign superstition than some of the other ones that we've seen lately these deep conspiracy theories that people lose reality to not that believing in religion isn't also losing a sense of reality but watching the

q anon some of that was a gap left by a loss of religion i think i'm so glad you said that because you know i think a lot about, and I'm blanking on the exact writing or speech from David Foster Wallace, but the gist of it is we all worship something. The key is to know what you worship. Yeah, that's a good line. And if religion is removed from the picture,

you still find people who will die for CrossFit, die for veganism, die for q anon die for fill in the blank die for atheism yeah right like i know atheists who are the most devout dogmatic yeah people i've ever met yeah right and be devastated if god appeared and like i'm the kind of atheist where if god appeared, I'd be like, sweet, I've got questions. Can we talk? Yeah, and some of these militant atheists with like capital S skepticism. And I'm like, wait a minute, you guys have all the trappings of a religion. You just don't have heaven.

You've got all the trappings. At some point, I realized we all serve a purpose. But there's criminality to all these things too. And I think the thing that really should wake us up to the dangers is how many children were abused in the Catholic church because of a very small arbitrary change of just not allowing your leaders to be married people. It's a filtering mechanism. And so once you see that and make that change, and the fact that the religion is so dogmatic that it can't make a change that will make the lives better of innocent children,

that's the kind of thing that's pretty easy to turn people off on religion as a whole for. And it's so easy to change. And that's a frustration. Let's see where we can make a small change and make lives better. How do you think about a set of rules or moral codes for yourself? And I'm particularly interested in asking you this because you were raised religious, so you have had exposure to presets, like the on-the-menu options. I believe in an objective moral truth. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think that we're all working in the same direction. So it's asymptotic.

So I don't think values and mores are necessarily subjective and cultural. Why do you believe in an objective truth? Is that just a decision you made to hold that as a belief? One thing I don't believe in is free will. Oh boy, I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. That's another conversation we could have. It's another podcast. Yeah. I've encountered a lot of different ideas over time. A decision was made on your behalf.

Yeah, exactly. When I heard the argument for objective moral truth, it resonated with me and made more sense than the idea that morality is subjective. Who made that argument? A lot of people have, but one of the best was a teaching company course, like a Harvard philosopher, professor of 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 whiplash. I was nodding my head so much through it all. It really synthesized a lot of things that I already believed and grasped at, but told them, well, we just see more in common with each other than we do dissimilar. One thing that we're not touching on in this conversation is the years

I spent sailing around the world. I've done more sailing than writing. Yeah, we've... We can't talk about that. We had to make some creative decisions with our time constraints. Exactly. But the thing that I learned visiting all these countries, sailing across the Pacific, going to really remote islands and meeting remote people is that we're the same everywhere. And we have to be really creative in finding differences

to talk about because the way we love our kids, the way we love each other, the way we laugh, the way we spend our days is so similar that we have to like, oh, they wear this kind of clothes and we wear these kinds of clothes and those are different. Like, but we're both wearing clothes. We have to really find ways that we're not alike. And the fact that I can read the Iliad, 2,000-year-old story, written in a different language, in a different time, and the human emotion of it resonates with me today, I understand the fear and the jealousy and the conniving and all the things that were 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 and we make game theory things, we find this tit-for-tat game theory algorithm to win 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 commons just a little bit? And most of our criminality and ethical dilemmas are all coming from us violating our own objective. Deviating from the code. Yeah. I was just going to go into this whole entire new chapter of personal line of questions, but we're starting to descend from cruise altitude beginning to land the plane so let me instead we'll do a round two sometime we can have lunch and talk anytime too yeah we

can have well of course we can i forget we're even doing a podcast yeah we're gonna hang out we're definitely gonna hang out and i'll ask you the question which relates to your religious upbringing but i'm gonna bookmark that and save for another time while we are recording is there anything else you'd like to talk about i want to do a one of these where i can just get to drill you with questions deal have you has someone done that to you yet you know i've only done it you've been on other people's maybe once in recent memory but it was very specific to say predominantly tech with a venture capitalist. 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 in budget ways and won't turn a profit so being in the last

wave of that was really exciting and working with the creative people who made that happen and watching fans just get rewarded for the the show being ahead i could talk about sailing forever like some of those adventures you wouldn't believe and the best thing that's ever happened to me is my wife who you've gotten to know really well. Yeah. And us setting off on having 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? Huh?

You might know who this is. But I was like, huh? You're not going to tell me? He was like, no, you have to go listen to the podcast. So I had to go find out

what he thought about having kids. Well, we can talk about it. Yeah, we can talk about it off the air but it's funny that like you're like getting this out of more and more of your interviewees yeah well it's on my mind too cool i want to talk about that next time we have lunch yeah let's have a cohort man yeah i mean i got some prereqs to figure out but i'm eager to start that adventure makes me think of actually this very close friend of mine who unfortunately passed away in the last handful of months roland griffiths amazing scientist from johns hopkins and we spent a lot of time together and he had his kids relatively

late and by relatively i mean compared to other people in his family and when he had his first kid his his brother slapped him on the shoulder and said, welcome to the human race. That's cool. And I've thought about that a lot. 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, I was stuck at a lower level. I'm ready for the next level. I'm like, it's like a little role playing game and this is next level, you know, stuck at a lower level. I'm ready to, I'm ready for the next level. I'm excited for you, brother. Thanks for taking the time today.

So nice to see you. And people can find you at Hugh Howie.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 is calling itself these days. Yeah.

So facebook.com slash Hugh Howie, same for Twitter slash X forward slash Hugh Howie, Hugh Howie on Instagram as well. Hugh Howie, such a pleasure always to see you, man. My pleasure, man. All right, man. I love spending 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 2 million people subscribe 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 I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

all sorts of tech tricks and so on that 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.com slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

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