Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Hugh Howey (@hughhowey), 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. 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 Shay.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Hugh, it’s so great to see you.
Hugh Howey: Good to see you, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m glad we were able to do this in person. I wanted to say up front, I like to think of myself as being pretty unorthodox in my creative process in 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 you out to lunch to ask questions because you’ve had such a wild journey, man, on multiple levels.
Hugh Howey: Really, who can think crazier than me?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Hugh Howey: This is a good thing, I guess.
Tim Ferriss: 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 and I thought I would start with something that I have a vague recollection of. We were walking in the woods together talking about this, and it was how you structured, and we’re going to bounce around chronologically, but how you structured the end of Wool. I want to say, it was related to a bit of creative sleight of hand.
Hugh Howey: The interview?
Tim Ferriss: Taking readers through—
Hugh Howey: The interview.
Tim Ferriss: —Yes—emotions. Could you just walk us through, not necessarily giving too many spoilers for people who haven’t read the book.
Hugh Howey: I could do it vaguely, I think.
Tim Ferriss: Vaguely, yeah. What did you do there? What was the artistic decision there and the practical decision?
Hugh Howey: Most of what I’ve figured out as a writer, I’ve learned as a reader. There’s things that tickle me. 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.
Tim Ferriss: When they think the story —
Hugh Howey: They think the story is over.
Tim Ferriss: — runs to credits.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. I was trying to figure out, well, what could 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 questions as well.
Tim Ferriss: Right, with you. This is a Q&A with the author.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. 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 up front about it. But it’s the first time, after spending 500 pages with me, that you’re spending time with me and my own voice. I think the thing that I — 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?” The answer was, “Tell everyone you know about it. Write reviews. Go on Amazon and write reviews. Share it on Facebook.” And that year, I think because — 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, it’s hard 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.
Tim Ferriss: And this is after the interview?
Hugh Howey: After the interview. I think the last thing they remember in this rollercoaster of emotions, 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. It worked in a way that I didn’t anticipate to work 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?
Tim Ferriss: It’s a great way to get the news.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, and it was really cool. But it was because I was trying to engineer what would have tickled me as a reader and thinking about that emotional rollercoaster and not being beholden. Because when I published the book, traditionally, publishers were not up for this. They were like, no, we don’t sandwich —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not something we do.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, and you had to follow the formula. But in my case, breaking that formula really worked to my advantage.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you have Wool and your Silo trilogy, later adapted by Apple TV, becoming the number one drama of all time. 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.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What did your writing career, so to speak, look like prior to Wool?
Hugh Howey: I was writing in obscurity but it is 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. Within a year of writing, I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month off my writing, which might sound really small but —
Tim Ferriss: That puts you already in, what, the top one percent, probably?
Hugh Howey: Yeah, it’s insane. It’s insane how little writers make. I knew that going in because I worked at a bookstore, so I was spending time with a lot of writers. 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. 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 back list takes off, so it’s almost like you instant published six books at once.
Tim Ferriss: Right. You published the prequels, but they are actually prequels.
Hugh Howey: 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 [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: Sophmore syndrome.
Hugh Howey: 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Right, financially.
Hugh Howey: — 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.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you make that decision? There’s the decision you made, but I’m interested in the thought process behind it because you’re very deliberate, in my experience. You’re also very eager to grasp serendipity and so on, but you’re a thoughtful guy, 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?
Hugh Howey: I hoped 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. I just wanted more of that and I wanted more newness, like things that just tickled me. 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. I wanted to fill some of that void. My first attempt to write was right after I read those books. It was basically terrible fan fiction, like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan fiction. 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 tried to find it, I don’t want to do it.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, I don’t want to do it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of heavy lifting.
Hugh Howey: 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Kevin Kelly, same thing. He does the same thing.
Hugh Howey: Great about that.
Tim Ferriss: 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 onto it? How did that actually happen as far as conversation or negotiation?
Hugh Howey: 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 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, strangers on forums. People 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, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Hugh Howey: Most people won’t do it, and you’re expecting people to pay you for the pleasure? I was like, okay, I’m about to pay my sister $20 to read this. That’s how this was going to go transactionally. 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, 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. The day that I signed the contract to sign my rights over to that publisher was one of the worst days of my life. It was everyone else’s dream.
Tim Ferriss: How did they find you or vice versa?
Hugh Howey: I was querying agents. I was doing everything normal.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so you were like, okay, I’ve absorbed this secondhand smoke/dream of —
Hugh Howey: Yeah, I’m on forums.
Tim Ferriss: — getting a publisher, how do we do this?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. Going to the library, reading books on querying, how to write a query letter. Here’s the book of agents. This is like —
Tim Ferriss: I remember that.
Hugh Howey: — 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. 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 way back in the day. On Twitter, I created a Twitter account under my character’s name. I’m tweeting as her, which led to a lot of confusion and emails. People were emailing me as Molly, which is my character’s name. Two small presses saw my blog post 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 circumvented the agent route.
At this point they were paying me money, which, it was 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, so 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, and decided sign this contract, to celebrate it, I felt sick to my stomach.
Tim Ferriss: So your system —
Hugh Howey: My system —
Tim Ferriss: — had a different take.
Hugh Howey: My gut knew. Because here were these characters, I was already hip deep in the sequel. I was planning on writing at least a trilogy with these characters, and I was giving the IP away. I was giving the rights away. And what I was giving it away for, I was like, “Wait, I would spend that amount of money to own this for the rest of my life.” I’ll never forget that sensation and ever since then, I’ve never done a deal where I’m giving away rights for my lifetime. Even major deals with big publishers. As far as my agent, I know we’re the only ones in the industry who get —
Tim Ferriss: 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’ll find shocking.
Hugh Howey: 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 so 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. 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 —
Tim Ferriss: And just for sake of clarity, this was self-published.
Hugh Howey: This is all self-published. I had an agent at this time, Kristin 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.
Tim Ferriss: Right, it’s not her incentive to say that.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. But her incentive was, she wanted to have these conversations with publishers to help her other clients. She was like, “The deal that I want to get, you will never get because it’s too soon.” She told me that early on, but we need to start having these conversations so a future author can get this deal. What we didn’t know is that it would change quick enough that we would get that deal. 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. Finally, Simon & Schuster said, “We’d rather make some money than no money.” And of the big five, they’re the smallest, most nimble.
Tim Ferriss: I want to underscore something you said for people who may not be in the industry, the term limit.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, the term limit is the best.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so for most authors who do a book deal, number one, it’s all rights and it’s usually world rights. It’s worldwide and it’s all formats.
Hugh Howey: Every format, even formats that aren’t invented yet.
Tim Ferriss: In effect, you’re handing over the copyright and you’re like, “Okay, this is yours.”
Hugh Howey: It’s for the rest of your life, and then another 30 years after your death.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a long time, but you did not do that, so what was the time limit and what happened at the expiry of that period of time?
Hugh Howey: Yeah, we did a five-year print-only deal. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Hugh Howey: The book was still a bestseller when we got the rights back and so we got to go to auction again. 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 fat will go away and in five years we won’t be sad to lose it.” And five years later we got to go to auction with all the big publishers and we’ll get to do it again while the TV show is probably still airing, which will be a really unique situation to be in.
Tim Ferriss: So you get multiple bites of the apple, financially speaking, right? Because you get to sell it, you get to resell the IP or the individual book every five years.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, I get to lease it to publisher. And the good thing is I am 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 additions.
Tim Ferriss: 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 it’s, it is tantalizing, but out of reach for people unless they have a situation like Hugh.” What would you say to them?
Hugh Howey: Well, I think what’s wild is that 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: And I think there’s a bit of a Stockholm Syndrome with publishers and authors and they feel so, 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 loved 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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, they’re 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 a black box, right?
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: On some level, editors’ 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 an ISBN, like the 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.
Hugh Howey: It has 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, but it is a curated list. Someone, 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’s a friend of mine, sold the week before. And I think I hit the list at three or five, and it was just the New York Times not wanting me to be number one because my sales were like three x what — 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, the gatekeepers just weren’t paying attention. They saw something number one on Amazon and they gave it.
Tim Ferriss: But you had retail distribution?
Hugh Howey: I had retail distribution, but it was through CreateSpace at the time, which is what Amazon’s print on demand, I think it was called, so if a bookstore wanted it, they would have to go out of their way to buy it through Ingram, like an expanded distributor. There wasn’t a sales rep from a publishing house coming with a catalog and saying, “We believe in this book”, which is how most books are sold or purchased by bookstores in bulk. The power of the reader was 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a lot of copies.
Hugh Howey: It’s a lot. 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.
Tim Ferriss: How many books had you completed prior to Wool?
Hugh Howey: I had written five novels and another novelette, this thing that’s shorter than a novella. And then Wool came out and that was my seventh publishing. And it was also in that novelette range, like 50 pages.
Tim Ferriss: 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. What made it different? Why do you think it captured people in the way that it did, struck that chord?
Hugh Howey: 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. 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 was super affordable. I was charging 99 cents for the ebook and the little paperback, which I think only several hundred maybe got purchased before the cover changed, was like $4.99. Those little paperbacks now go for like a thousand dollars and I wish I had more of them. I don’t have enough of them. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Was that a lower price than your prior books?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. And Amazon tries to make you not price things that low. They don’t want ebooks sold for that little. So if you price it at $2.99 to $9.99, you make 70 percent of the cover price as an author, which is huge. Traditionally, published authors might make 15-1/2, 18 percent, so you have to sell five times as many books to get the same kind of royalty. But if you sell it for less than $2.99 or more than $9.99, then your royalty goes down to 35 percent, so half. So it’s a strong incentive from Amazon. They want ebooks to be priced in a certain range and they incentivize that.
Tim Ferriss: And so despite that, you make the decision to go low.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, because you don’t want a bad review, someone to 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.
Tim Ferriss: Now, 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, right —
Hugh Howey: You’d be surprised.
Tim Ferriss: — 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, right? I’m trying to figure out —
Hugh Howey: 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. You’re making it — I’m pricing it because I want my story to get picked up and 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, get more people hooked. So serialized, how long would it take people to read all of the parts?
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: So 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?
Hugh Howey: Oh, man —
Tim Ferriss: Do you sell worldwide rights?
Hugh Howey: I do not sell worldwide rights, no, 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 for —
Tim Ferriss: So for context, what often happens is an author will sign a deal with the publisher, they kind of sell the farm, they give everything over which, by the way, for some people might make a lot of sense if they don’t have the infrastructure or maybe if their agent isn’t able or willing to do a bunch of legwork in foreign sales. But what will often happen then, let’s say a publisher comes to me and they make me what seems like a very rich deal and it might be 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.
Hugh Howey: They’re in the black before you get your first —
Tim Ferriss: They’re way in the black. So the sort of tear down the cheek, sob story of like —
Hugh Howey: “We never pay authors this much.”
Tim Ferriss: — “Woe is us,” the publisher’s not always a reflection of financial reality. But so if that’s the norm, what did you end up doing?
Hugh Howey: 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 —
Tim Ferriss: And your agent is doing the legwork on that?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. 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 an Asia-specific agent who knows those and they know the publishers they’re working with, so they’ll say, “Okay, here are the three offers.” My guy, my Asian agent, came to us with offers in Taiwan and he said, “Okay, these two offer more money but this third person who,” you’ve never heard of any of these publishers, “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.” And I have no idea what — 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.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so cool.
Hugh Howey: So having these people working on your behalf, it’s enormous. So 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 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: Nothing wrong with that.
Tim Ferriss: So 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?
Hugh Howey: I don’t think you’ll have any leverage going the traditional route if you’re not self-published already. You really have to —
Tim Ferriss: You need something to bargain with, right?
Hugh Howey: Yeah, and I think when you’re making money and leaving them out of it, then you can say, “Well, I’ll cut you in, but these are my demands.” And publishers aren’t super successful. They aren’t great at picking which books they’re going to sell.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s like venture capital, right?
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a power law distribution.
Hugh Howey: If you can give them a guaranteed revenue stream, you have a huge amount of sway.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: 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 its 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. You can have a podcast that’s super successful, a platform. Yeah, a website, a huge following on social media.
Tim Ferriss: Something that reduces their perceived risk. That’s where you have leverage.
Hugh Howey: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.
Tim Ferriss: 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 think you gave the advice, and I’m wondering if it still applies, that writers not take days off. That’s one. That could be one of those “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
The second is related to writing for — I think it was a book review website and becoming accustomed to working on deadline. And I’d just love you to speak to the importance of that because I know, for me, I think of myself occasionally as a writer. If I don’t have a deadline, man, I am not terribly productive. So 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?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. 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 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.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Hugh Howey: 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 was 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. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Is there a certain amount or is it just something?
Hugh Howey: It used to be. I used to try to do 2,000 words a day.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. That’s a lot of words.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. Now, if I do a thousand words a day and what I find helpful in my Word document, whatever I’m working on, there’s the word count written in the document at the end, wherever I’m writing. And when I start my daily session as I’m writing, I can see at the bottom of the Word document what the current word count is, and I can just see the comparison and that gives me my, like, “You need to do a little more.” And then once I’m done for the day, I update that number to the day’s number. 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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? What was the —
Hugh Howey: You mentioned the review website I was writing for.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Hugh Howey: 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, I was 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.
Tim Ferriss: For one genre.
Hugh Howey: 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. I had done this in college too. I’d gone through a period of two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge, and some of these are 400-page books, so you’re not doing much else. Just that.
I didn’t know how good this was going to be for my writing, but absorbing that much prose just made it so easy for me to tap into not only the ability to string words together but all the plot elements that I was absorbing from weeks and weeks and weeks of absorbing this many books. And then I was also writing that review every day, and so I was getting a daily writing habit. And that wasn’t even a job. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Is there any Mount Rushmore of fiction books that come to mind? This is not a fixed list, but whatever comes to mind. If you were to say — look, and I’ll make this personal. So I’ve been experimenting with short fiction for the last year or so. I think I will do quite a bit more possibly in screenplay format, which I definitely want to talk to you about at some point.
Hugh Howey: Oh, cool.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
Hugh Howey: So I think reading beautiful prose, it’s 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 the story reads just like the middle of the story. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Which is so good.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, it’s so good.
Tim Ferriss: That is an incredible book.
Hugh Howey: And it’s short and it’s one of those that you could just pick up and read again to remind yourself what writing can sound like.
Tim Ferriss: Also fascinating because it was written by two authors who alternated back and forth.
Hugh Howey: Alternated back and forth, which is structural to the story, which works. Circe — have you read that?
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t yet read it. I have seen so many people reading it. I’ve seen friends reading it.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I haven’t heard of it.
Hugh Howey: I tried to read that 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.”
Tim Ferriss: No kidding. Why did it take you five times?
Hugh Howey: 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 70 or 80 pages, and I know it’s like I’d rather read something that’s captured me from the first page, but this book pays off. So those are recent books that have —
Tim Ferriss: You recommended Lincoln Highway to me, which I thought was spectacular.
Hugh Howey: Anything by Amor. Amor Towles is one of the —
Tim Ferriss: It’s just a book full of literary and narrative magic tricks. It’s wild.
Hugh Howey: He upsets me because he wasn’t even a writer as his primary career.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no. One of those.
Hugh Howey: 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 A Table for Two.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, can’t wait to read it.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: And his wordsmithing is beautiful, but it’s not Proust, right? It doesn’t strive to be that —
Hugh Howey: It’s clever. It’s clever.
Tim Ferriss: — but it’s so clear and the story arcs and character development and the weaving — 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.”
Hugh Howey: Yeah. He’s a genius and he works hard at it. He spends the years and time it takes. That’s a level of writing that it’s fun to aspire to, but I know I’ll never reach. But you have to have loftier goals than your expected outcome.
Tim Ferriss: So update for you, this is personal on my side, and you have been along for the ride here. So 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’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…”
Hugh Howey: “You write it.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, “You write it or you help me write it.”
Hugh Howey: Yeah, get it to the finish line.
Tim Ferriss: And 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. Has been a blast. It has been so much fun. It has been so much —
Hugh Howey: Isn’t it better writing with someone?
Tim Ferriss: It has been so great.
Hugh Howey: We destroy ourselves when we do it alone, right?
Tim Ferriss: Brutal. It’s just being locked in a padded cell with your own mind. And it’s been great. The book is not done. Who knows where it will go? But I can say, at the very least, it has already partially succeeded. And I see that as such a tremendous unlock for myself.
Hugh Howey: That’s awesome.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been such a solo operator, and the quality’s good. It’s not finished, it’s not fully polished, but I was like, “Okay, this is actually working.” And at this point, based on our lunches and conversations, I’m planning on probably doing effectively as much self-publishing as possible and then potentially a print-only deal. What I have been surprised by, I’d love to get your take on this, I’ve talked to a couple of publishers. Just why not? I’m friends with a number of people who are publishers —
Hugh Howey: Yeah, you’ve worked with them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and I’ve worked with folks and the idea of a print-only deal, off the table for bigger publishers.
Hugh Howey: Wow.
Tim Ferriss: Now, there are some clever workarounds that I had one publisher who I won’t name, but it was like a distribution deal.
Hugh Howey: Like a 50-50.
Tim Ferriss: 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.”
Hugh Howey: And that’s why they do that. I can give you some behind-the-scenes stuff.
Tim Ferriss: I want some behind-the-scenes. I would love it.
Hugh Howey: Two things that I found fascinating. One, I heard from people in the industry, because I got to know editors-in-chief at many of the publishing houses over the years, going to conferences and kind of talking on a business side. I didn’t get called in to talk to some publishing houses that I didn’t even publish with. And one of the things I heard was a publisher who gave me a print-only deal, got phone calls from all the other publishers blasting them.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m sure.
Hugh Howey: Because the deal got listed in —
Tim Ferriss: It sets a precedent.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, exactly. Which is 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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.”
Hugh Howey: [inaudible]. So that surprised me that publishers weren’t willing to do deals because of the stigma and the social pressure from other publishers. Like do the things that they won’t do and get that next Tim Ferriss book when no one else will. So 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 and wouldn’t give me the same terms for the sequels. So they thought that I was going to be trapped now giving them all the rights. So I was self-publishing sequels while they were publishing the first book, which creates a really awkward, like —
Tim Ferriss: I’m curious. What leverage did they think they had?
Hugh Howey: Yeah, they had nothing. I think they thought once I had a taste for the publishing life —
Tim Ferriss: Once you had a taste of the high life.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Rolling around in your Richie Rich car and —
Hugh Howey: I take a pay cut to go with publishers.
Tim Ferriss: — eating Grey Poupon.
Hugh Howey: It’s like I make less money to do a publishing deal than I do to self-publish.
Tim Ferriss: So why do the publishing deals at all?
Hugh Howey: 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. So it opens up new avenues. It’s also for me, once the money was no longer an issue, because probably two years into 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.
Tim Ferriss: Book tour. So 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?”
Hugh Howey: Yeah. My dad was hilarious.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So could you expand on this and then I’d love to just hear where you fall on promotion because it can be helpful or it can be a huge distraction. Sometimes both.
Hugh Howey: 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 someone’s coffee shop, places you wouldn’t expect to see books being sold. And he’s driving me around, we’ll do three or four of these in a day and I would do this for 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 [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: You’re in front of the hardware store with some books.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, totally. And you would sit there all day and maybe sell five books if you were on a good day. So it makes no sense financially. You’re better off spending that day writing. But I will say if you can find something that you enjoy that counts as promotion, tap into that. And for me, that was engaging with readers on Facebook. I didn’t 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. 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 with their friends or family. Other people would see this interaction like, what’s this person really jazzed about? And they’d get curious about it. So blogging, being on social media, putting out little videos, it looks like promotional work, but it was basically therapy for me to feel like I wasn’t doing this just by myself and I wasn’t all alone in this.
Tim Ferriss: Not feeling alone. You’ve been doing a lot more collaboration in the last, I guess, handful of years.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Why do that? And what have you found are the keys for you in good collaboration?
Hugh Howey: Personality is the number one thing. You can just get along with your co-creator and it doesn’t feel like your work anymore, you’re just having fun. My co-writer in all things TV and film is this guy named Matt Mikalatos, is an amazing author in his own right. Beautiful screenwriter. He’s already had some TV and film stuff out there. And we started working together on a script for fun and realized this is better than doing this individually. So now we just do all of our projects together. And spending time with him, brainstorming story and divvying up writing and working on scripts, I forget that it’s work. It’s so much fun.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s focus on that last part. How do you work together in the sense that you actually ship things, you and your partner ship 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?
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: These are all TV/film?
Hugh Howey: TV and film. And they all have a good chance of going to the next phase. So they all have momentum behind them and 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.
Tim Ferriss: And when you say we went into a rewrite, is one person at the keyboard? Not to get to nitty-gritty.
Hugh Howey: Nuts and bolts are good. It’s like, 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 act two right now, 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 all the work.
Tim Ferriss: Because your partner’s working on act one while you’re working on act two?
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: 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’s 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, big, big, big way.
Tim Ferriss: They were changed because you retained your audio rights?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. I started focusing on creating audiobooks and launching them with the books and making sure the production value was really high. I just thought it was like an extra format. I didn’t know it was going to be one of the money drivers. So trusting your gut is often going against the established wisdom and that can be really beneficial. There’s just so much change happening and you might have an idea 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. The brand is you. And if people enjoy your prose, they’ll follow you to other genres. So really consolidate your identity. Unless you have a reason to not write under your real name, embrace your writing under your real name and make sure that you are the brand. The more readers can feel a connection with the person behind the work, the better off your career will be. I’m convinced of that.
I think the relationship I have with my readers and the first thousand fans, I remember when we hit 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.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Which reminds me of some behind-the-scenes stuff I was going to mention earlier when you were talking about different rights and different agents. I had a publisher offering — 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. I was like, “Well, I’ll do the print with you for free. You don’t have to give me any money.” And they wouldn’t do that deal because I was like, “I’m making enough money on the ebook. I’ll give you the print for free. You run off of the print version, make whatever you want.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.
Hugh Howey: “Cut me in to a little bit of royalty, but no advance at all.”
Tim Ferriss: The other syndicate families would be very upset.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a bit of a tell.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, it was a tell.
Tim Ferriss: And 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. 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 — or Six Sisters. I can’t recall.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: There’s been some consolidation.
Hugh Howey: It was down to five. Is it still five or is it four now? I think it’s still five.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like Highlander.
Hugh Howey: Not as immortal.
Tim Ferriss: Not as immortal. They’ve been unwilling to, my perspective, I don’t have any evidence here, but break rank. They’re not going to break formation. And 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. 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.
Hugh Howey: They would have to cut expenses. They base themselves in the most expensive real estate.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of bloat, there’s a lot of access that could be cut.
Hugh Howey: And they’ve cut a lot. It used to be the two-hour lunches and it was kind of a very breezy industry before the big-box retailers. It’s not even Amazon that changed it. It was the pressure that Barnes & 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 mockups. And they weren’t just mockups, they looked great. And you said, “I made this in,” however much time it was, not a whole lot of time, “with AI.” And I’m curious how you think AI is going to change, let’s say book creation and book publishing because it’s hard for me to imagine a corner of that that it won’t touch.
Hugh Howey: 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 percent minimum of what an expert can do. So 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 percent of an industry veteran on my own in a single day, and that’s a game changer. But we’re doing a deluxe edition of Wool that’ll be out later this year, which I’m probably upsetting somebody by talking about it. But we’re going with a traditional cover artist because for something that’s important, we want to 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.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think about on the text prose story book side? Because I would imagine, and I don’t know this for a fact, but I would have to imagine that there’s already an avalanche of AI-generated books hitting self-publishing.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay. So where do you think that goes? How do you think that will impact the ecosystem?
Hugh Howey: I think there will be authors who no longer have a seat on the bus because of it, because there’ll be enough AI-generated books to make some readers happy. And there’s readers who 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 a hundred years ago is 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 if someone comes out with a hit product, let’s call it Matterhornn — I’m making this up, whatever. There’s a new product called Matterhornn, 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. And maybe —
Hugh Howey: Happens all the time.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So I would imagine the same exact thing would happen on publishing platforms if people are able to quickly generate.
Hugh Howey: So it was already happening where people would download even some of my books. They would download them, copy and paste the whole thing, change the title and the cover, and reupload it. And they would be selling copies. They would do that to Wikipedia articles.
Tim Ferriss: They’d just use Wikipedia articles.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. They’d just copy and paste and then say 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 certainly illegal. And 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Somebody made millions of dollars doing that.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Hugh Howey: Well, because they had thousands of titles up and each one was generating a little stream of money.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Okay.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: What are the opportunities hiding and 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 no one would lose jobs because of AI. I disagree with that. But are there any opportunities that you see — and I guess we kind of telegraphed some of it in terms of getting skills up to 80 percent 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 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. So if I could use voice to 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.
Hugh Howey: So many times, I’ll say something to my writing partner and it comes out perfect. And neither one of us are typing. And I’m like, “We will never get that back, will we?” And it’s gone.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: Revising is so much easier than writing.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. That’s a really good one thing I’ll say about, going 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.
Tim Ferriss: I would also say the 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.
Hugh Howey: It’s going to be tough. What’s wild is how low unemployment is right now and has been for a while, while all these disruptions are happening.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. Gig economy. There have been a lot of scares over the last —
Hugh Howey: A lot of scares,
Tim Ferriss: — handful of decades. So we’ll see.
Hugh Howey: 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 because there’ll be an existential — 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.
Tim Ferriss: There’s one called Replika.
Hugh Howey: Replika, 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. And so there’s an existential —
Tim Ferriss: Why do you use it?
Hugh Howey: For lots of reasons. If we’re like, are there only four states that have the capital start with the same letter as the state? I think that’s right. Asking Pi is so much more fun than Googling it. And getting the weather. If we’re traveling to L.A., what’s the weather going to be like? And at the end of this conversation, Pi is like, “Stay dry.” 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’d say so.
Hugh Howey: I’m having a hard time with it. And I’m pro it, I’m all for it.
Tim Ferriss: So you’re also, I would say, one of the most optimistic folks I know, yet you write about the end of the world.
Hugh Howey: That’s so true.
Tim Ferriss: How do you reconcile those two things?
Hugh Howey: I’m a short-term — I’m a mid-term optimist even.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Mid-term optimist.
Hugh Howey: I’m a long-term pessimist. We know for sure either the big crunch or the heat death of the universe is looming.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the big crunch?
Hugh Howey: 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Becomes pinpoint.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. So nothing matters in the long run. The heat death is things keep expanding and entropy wins. All the suns run out of energy, they all become brown dwarfs and even those cool. And eventually, the universe becomes lifeless. So either we’re running the clock down or the clock has been thrown up in the air.
Tim Ferriss: And this is, minimum, billions of years, right? Presumably.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, 15 billion.
Tim Ferriss: Most people aren’t going to worry too much about that.
Hugh Howey: 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, then now we’re just talking numbers. Now we all agree: we’re all fucked. We can agree. And now it’s just like how many years? And some people think it’s five years, which I think is crazy. The environment is not the number one threat that we have. 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. 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 would 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 eight 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 lays dormant for 10 years, and activates all simultaneously so you don’t have time to develop a resistance. Or if we ever develop a battery that has infinite storage capacity, that would be really bad because you could 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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. You could regulate on a geo-fenced limited basis, but this is a global playing field.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, 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 bigger than our — this is more evil than our brains can comprehend. And we don’t want everyone having this.” And the systems we put in place, we’re pretty good at limiting. I mean, everyone knows how to build a nuclear bomb. It’s like most of the science, the hard sciences out there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t want to take us too —
Hugh Howey: Yeah, we could go way off.
Tim Ferriss: — too off-track, but there’s no track. But I would say that when you’re dealing with enriched uranium or very limited resources that can be tracked and locked down, it’s one thing. But when you’re dealing with GPUs and open source code for —
Hugh Howey: So, that’s the difference. So 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, we need — instead, we’re like, “Oh, NVIDIA’s 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.” And so, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?
Hugh Howey: We’re going at this a little differently.
Tim Ferriss: I know, let me ask you, if you don’t mind, a deeply personal question. Don’t have to answer it if you don’t want. How do you think about kids, if 200 years, iffy —
Hugh Howey: What a great question. Because my wife and I started embryos two days ago.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. All right. So, timely.
Hugh Howey: 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Your procedure’s a little easier. Oh, actually, I don’t know which procedure we’re talking about.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, it was tough.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I thought we were talking about —
Hugh Howey: Forced extraction.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, forced extraction.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. Needles.
Tim Ferriss: What?
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, now. Sorry. Now, here we go.
Hugh Howey: It was rough.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, forced extraction.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, with clips.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. I was going to say otherwise it’s just some bad videos and a cup in a room.
Hugh Howey: I still feel it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, oh, that sounds awful. Okay. All right. I retract my —
Hugh Howey: We can go as personal as you want to go down.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so kids 200 years out, and that’s not that long in human time, right?
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: 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, because 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 didn’t — what 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 can do a whole podcast about this, is pretty fixed. And so —
Tim Ferriss: You mean from birth?
Hugh Howey: Yeah, from birth. I think it’s pretty — we’re kind of delta.
Tim Ferriss: It’s closer to height than we would like to think.
Hugh Howey: It’s closer to height than — 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, 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: It’s one of my favorite things to do is to walk and talk with him.
Tim Ferriss: 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 saying this. 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.
Hugh Howey: Oh, yeah. That, we might not be able to fix.
Tim Ferriss: And we had a long conversation about it. Too bad, it was lost into the ether.
Hugh Howey: 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 would 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s max.
Hugh Howey: But very few. For every couple we know, or two single people we know not having kids, we need to know a couple having four kids.
Tim Ferriss: I went to this beautiful Shabbat dinner last night, and I’m not Jewish, but it was 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?”
Hugh Howey: This should happen eventually, right?
Tim Ferriss: I would imagine that, I mean, it seems almost inevitable just if you run the numbers.
Hugh Howey: So far the opposite. 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 percent certain that everyone in the United States will be Amish. That’s only because you’re carrying out trends that won’t stick around. 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 I won’t spend a whole lot of time on it, but I sort of studied up to try to rescue him from basically being inducted into this very extreme cult, which had religious orientation. And I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this publicly. I got to the point where I could basically match all of his arguments. And he 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, who was like, “Come to my church,” and got inducted into this group, which was pretty theologically weaponized, pretty scary stuff.
Hugh Howey: We’re very vulnerable to that weapon.
Tim Ferriss: 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 —
Hugh Howey: You might be taking that away from him.
Tim Ferriss: — 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.”
Hugh Howey: It was important.
Tim Ferriss: Because I don’t have to live his life, but you need —
Hugh Howey: I’ve been where you were. And we need justification for the extreme change that we’ve made in our viewpoint. And so we need someone to agree with us so that we know that we’re doing the right thing.
I was raised very religious. By the age of 12, I was complete atheist. I told my parents I no longer believe in God. And I went through a period where I was a militant atheist, where I was like, “No one else should believe in God either.” And I forgive myself for going through that phase because I was young and it was like having to drive in the other ditch for a while because I’d been in another ditch. And now 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.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Hugh Howey: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Playing devil’s advocate there, I also, I find captivating the idea that religion has some deep fitness value, like evolutionary value. 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.
Hugh Howey: A lot of science, a lot of original science coming out of —
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: 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 people lose reality to, not that believing in religion isn’t also losing a sense of reality, but watching the QAnon, some of that was a gap left by a loss of religion, I think.
Tim Ferriss: I’m so glad you said that because I think a lot about, and I’m blanking on the exact writing or speech from David Foster Wallace, but the gist of it is we all worship something. The key is to know what you worship, right?
Hugh Howey: Yeah. That’s a good line.
Tim Ferriss: And if religion is removed from the picture, you still find people who will die for CrossFit, die for veganism, die for QAnon, die for fill-in-the-blank, die for atheism. I know atheists who are the most devout, dogmatic people I’ve ever met.
Hugh Howey: They’d be devastated if God appeared. And I’m the kind of atheist where if God appeared, I’d be like, “Sweet, I’ve got questions. Can we talk?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And some of these militant atheists with capital-S skepticism, 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.”
Hugh Howey: 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, make that change, and the fact that the religion is so dogmatic that it can make a change that will make the lives better of innocent children, that’s the kind of thing that’s pretty easy to turn people off on religion as a whole for. And it’s so easy to change. And that’s a frustration that, let’s see where we can make a small change and make lives better.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Hugh Howey: I believe in an objective moral truth. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I think that we’re all working toward the same kind of — in the same direction. So it’s asymptotic. I don’t think values and mores are necessarily subjective and cultural.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you believe in an objective truth? Is that just a decision you made to hold that as a belief?
Hugh Howey: Well, I don’t know that we get to make — another thing, one thing I don’t believe in is free will.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. So it’s just coming. That’s another one’s coming.
Hugh Howey: That’s another conversation.
Tim Ferriss: It’s another podcast.
Hugh Howey: Yeah. I think I’ve encountered a lot of different —
Tim Ferriss: A decision was made over time on your path.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, exactly. When I heard the argument for objective moral truth and it fresonated with me, it made more sense than the idea that morality is such —
Tim Ferriss: Who made that argument?
Hugh Howey: A lot of people have. But one of the best was a teaching company course of a Harvard philosopher or 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 in, 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’ve spent sailing around the world, done more sailing than writing. We can’t talk about all of —
Tim Ferriss: We had to make some creative decisions with our time constraints.
Hugh Howey: 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 kind of clothes, and those are different, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Deviating from the code.
Hugh Howey: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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 round two sometime.
Hugh Howey: We can have lunch and talk any time too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, of course we can have lunch.
Hugh Howey: I forget we’re even doing a podcast, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We’re going to hang out. We’re definitely going to hang out. And I’ll ask you the question which relates to your religious upbringing, but I’m going to bookmark that and save it for another time.
While we are recording, is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Let’s call it five minutes.
Hugh Howey: Man. I want to do one of these where I can just get to drill you with questions.
Tim Ferriss: Deal.
Hugh Howey: Has someone done that to you yet?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve only done it —
Hugh Howey: You’ve done it on other people’s?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe once in recent memory, but it was very specific to, I’d say, predominantly tech with a venture capitalist, so rare.
Hugh Howey: There’s so much happening in life right now. The journey of adapting something into the scope and scale of Silo, which I had a Hollywood friend tell me, “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 show being a hit.
I could talk about sailing forever, 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 and us setting off on having a family.
Tim Ferriss: Congratulations, by the way.
Hugh Howey: Which, I was talking to a friend who I was like, “What do you think about kids?” And he was like, “Have you listened to my podcast with Tim?” And I was like, so 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.
Tim Ferriss: Well, we can talk about it.
Hugh Howey: Yeah, we can talk about it off the air, but it’s funny that you’re getting this out of more and more of your interviewees.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well, it’s on my mind too.
Hugh Howey: Cool. I want to talk about that next time we have one.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s —
Hugh Howey: Let’s have a cohort, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, I’ve got some prereqs to figure out, but I’m eager to start that adventure. And it 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 brother slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Welcome to the human race.”
Hugh Howey: That’s cool.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ve thought about that a lot.
Hugh Howey: I had a friend tell me, he’s got three kids, and he said, 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 feel that, the more I take these small steps, I’m like, “Oh, it’s like a little role-playing game and this is next level,” and I was stuck at a lower level, and I’m ready for the next level.
Tim Ferriss: I’m excited for you, brother. Thanks for taking the time today. So nice to see you, and people can find you at hughhowey.com. That’s probably the easiest. Is there any particular social where you’re most active?
Hugh Howey: No. Our Facebook group is a lot of fun, and I’m on whatever Twitter’s calling itself these days.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so facebook.com/hughhowey. Same for Twitter/X, HughHowey, HughHowey on Instagram as well. Hugh Howey, such a pleasure always, to see you, man.
Hugh Howey: My pleasure, man.
Tim Ferriss: All right, man.
Hugh Howey: I love spending time with you.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll see you soon.
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A great episode that I’ll listen to more times than just the one. I stumbled upon Hugh s book Wool through some podcast that talked about it, i got interested and since the first part was free to access on my Kindle I downloaded it and was hooked. Bought the following episodes and continued with more stories after that. It opened up the realm of sci-fi for me, a genre that I’d previously skipped over. Thanks for that Hugh and thanks to Tim for having this great conversation.
Uncharacteristically, Tim never asked Hugh about his writing materials, pens, notebooks etc.
I’d have loved to hear more about Hugh’s writing-on-the-go process. He talked about writing anywhere in the podcast. Does he use a notebook on the go, a laptop, or his phone?
In the discussion, Howey says “we’re delta” and Tim responds by saying “we’re closer to height than we think”.
Is this a reference to delta height? I feel like I’m missing something obvious to everyone else. Can someone explain this to me?