April 10, 2025 • 35 mins
Hugh Howey is an international best-selling author whose work has been published in 40 languages. But he’s not just a writer, he’s an entrepreneur in the purest sense. When Hugh self-published a short story, the world demanded more. Soon enough the income from that one story was enough to quit his job to begin work on what became the now-iconic Silo trilogy. Instead of going the traditional route with a publisher, Hugh stuck with his instinct to self-publish, disrupting an entire industry along the way. His conversation with Bob dives into the inspirations and the dollars behind his decision-making. Plus, he talks about turning Silo into the acclaimed AppleTV+ series, how he ended up in a performance of the Nutcracker, and the sailing trip he’s planning to take around the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What I'm writing I write for myself. It's almost like reading.
You kind of have an idea of the story, but
the sentences surprise you and say You're getting to read
what you're writing in real time. It's a magical experience.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to this episode of Math
and Magic. Today we're going to chat with a man who,
in his heart is a creative, but he also has
the mind and instincts of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur in the
purest sense, he has figured out how to do something
he loves, make money from it, and still have control.
He's the author of the wildly successful Silo series, which
(00:45):
is one of the top series on Apple TV Plus,
and from a business perspective, he is one of the
pioneers and most successful examples of self publishing. He's Hugh Howie.
He grew up in North Carolina and he's also been
an adventurer. Attended college but never finished because he kept
being lured to the sea. He worked as a bookstore clerk,
(01:06):
computer repair person, roofing, but his real passion led him
to be a boat captain and then a writer. We're
going to dig into all the improbable twist and turns
it took. He was a great friend, nice and kind
everyone he meets, and is a true adventurer. Hugh, Welcome,
Hey Bob.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thanks, So what's the best introduction I've ever had?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Okay, well listen. Before we get to the meaty stuff,
I want to start off with a feature we do
called you in sixty seconds. Ready?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Ready?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You prefer cats or dogs?
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Dogs?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Early Riser? Night out? Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Early Riser?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
West Coast or East Coast, East Coast, New York City
or North Carolina, New York City City or Country Country.
Surprisingly coke or pepsi?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Oh, coke? Let it be close?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Books or movies?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Books?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Cook or eat out?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Eat out?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's about feel a little harder. All time favorite music artist,
just for.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
The length of time and the number of hits them
out to go with the Beatles. First job a cook
in an Alpeck Steakhouse. Favorite TV show recently it was adolescence.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Oh okay, good one. Childhood hero by mom? What did
you want to be when you were growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Favorite sport to watch basketball, Favorite.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Movie probably Shaw Shake redyption.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Secret talent probably billiards.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
People are surprised, but I can run the table almost anybody.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Okay, let's jump in.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Hey, that's fun. You could really get to know someone
that way.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Exactly sixty seconds and we're done. Okay, I got to
start with the obvious. Silo, huge, huge hit on Apple.
Let's dissect it. It all started with the trilogy, wrote,
but start by describing even how you built that trilogy,
and also for people who haven't watched it or read it,
what it's about in your words, and then let's talk
(02:56):
about how it happened.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Silo is about the last ten thousand people on Earth.
They live in this underground silo, almost like a missile silo,
and they've been there for so many generations they've forgotten
how they got there or why they're there. And it's
a bit of a mystery as a new sheriff starts
to unravel the kind of the dark secret behind the silo.
(03:21):
And it started with a short story I wrote while
I was working in a bookstore in North Carolina, and
at the time I didn't think it would be a
commercial success. I wrote it as a bit of cathartic writing.
I was dealing with the loss of dog, and so
I wrote just a really dark story that I thought
no one would want to read, and it was only
(03:42):
about fifty pages long, and I put it online for
ninety nine cents, and within a month it was out
selling the six novels that I've written at the time.
And pretty soon that short story was making me enough
money that I could quit my day job and just
work on writing the follow up stories, and those collected
(04:04):
became the novel Wool, which all self published, became a
New York Times bestselling novel, and got a film deal
with Ridley Scott and Agent and all the other improbable
things that are not supposed to happen.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
So we're going to come to that, but I want
to go back a little bit into this. Where did
the idea or silo come from.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
There's a few different ideas that kind of merge into one.
I was working at a university bookstore at the time
that smartphones started taking hold of our attention, and I
noticed the kids, who I was a generation apart from,
coming through the bookstore. Their view of the world more
and more was coming through screens. It's this little window
(04:46):
into a world that's not quite real We want to
see things that are more titillating or shocking or scary
or funny, and so we get an unclear picture of
the world. At the same time, I've always been in
in a philosophy. When I was looking at Plato's allegory
of the cave, where we don't see the true forms
(05:06):
of things, we see shadows on the wall cast by
fire that's behind us. Let's just started thinking that maybe
these screens are the new cave allegory. The other thing
is I had sailed to Cuba a few years prior
on a friend's boat that I was working on, and
what I found in Cuba was very different than what
(05:26):
I'd been told would be there. And this is related
to the other point that in order to understand the world,
you really have to go out and see it and
experience it. And so the silo is kind of born
in the idea that these people, with a limited view
of the world through this singular screen on the top
level would have to piece together what the world's like.
(05:48):
And if they were shown bad news all the time,
would they lose the courage to go out and see
the world for themselves. And so the hero of our
story is someone who's courageous and to think that the
outside world might be better than we're led to believe.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
So where did you hit on the idea of it
being a silo.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I'm pretty sure that's just being a kid of the eighties,
Like I grew up terrified. We used to do fallout drills,
like you'd hide under your desk, which I guess somehow
this desk were armored enough to keep us safe from
a nuclear blast. The thing that I was drilled into
at a very young and impressionable age was that at
(06:28):
any moment, Russia is going to drop bombs on us.
And all the movies you have to have a bad
guy in film, and back then there was always the Russians,
and of course we had missiles aimed at them, So
missile silos were kind of a big deal to my
childhood and other popular culture. There was a video game
(06:48):
when I was a kid called GoldenEye, a Nintendo sixty
four game, and one of the game levels takes place
inside of a missile silo at the spiral staircase. And
that's why stories have a lot of the same flavors.
We're not just inspired by each other, but we grew
up through experience in the same kind of events.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So very dystopian. Is that tied in any way to
your love of the sea and being out there in
sort of solitary moments nothing but you in the water.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
One hundred percent and the wave they're linked is probably
not obvious. But when we look at all the disaster
films of the end of the world stuff that we
see in fiction today, people think that this is because
folks are losing hope or something, and that's not the case.
Our primary story engine for millennia has been the survival story.
(07:37):
If you look at Sir Dauwaine and the Green Knight
or the Iliad of the Odyssey, you have these stories
where someone is away from their friends and family and
technology and civilization and they're trying to survive. So the
precursor to these stories would have been Lost in the
wood stories, which we have so many legends and fairy
tales that show us where those stories came from, because
(08:01):
when we were tribal, the woods were the scary place
and there were things in there that would eat you.
If you look at the story progression of the years,
like we went to sea and now you had lots
of seafaring tales, you had castaway stories, deserted island stories.
We started writing Westerns as we pushed beyond civilization into
(08:21):
the West. Once we kind of covered the globe, we
started writing about being lost in space, and so you
can see that we're telling the same story, which is like,
how would we survive without our people, without our tribe,
without our tools, and apocalypse stories are the only way
to really tell that without rewriting history. We have to
(08:44):
imagine a future in which our tribe is gone, our
civilization's gone, our tools are set back, and how do
we survive in a fraud and liminal space. Being at
sea made me think of like deserted island stories. But
when you're writing science fiction, you're telling the same thing.
Orth it just becomes the deserted island.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
So you started with fifty pages, how did it go
from fifty pages to wall to the trilogy?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Because of Amazon reader reviews. I was working on a
different novel when the short story blew up. And one
of the advantages of self publishing is you can hit
refresh on your Amazon Kendall dashboard and sees sales in
real time. Someone buys a book, and I had refreshed
(09:33):
the sale pops up. In traditional publishing, it might take
six months to a year to find out that something
is happening. So I'm sitting at the bookstore thinking about
the novel that I should be writing, and I noticed
the sales picking up on the short story. You know,
you don't get a lot of reviews. You can sell
a thousand books and only get like maybe one or
(09:55):
two reviews. It's just not something everybody does. But reviews
started popping up on this book at an alarming clip.
They were all five stars. The only thing negative people
had to say it was that it was too short
what happens next? And so I'm reading this feedback. I've
never had an audience clamoring for a sequel for me
(10:15):
other than my sister and my mom, you know, wanting
to the next book. And I started thinking, well, a
bit of a spoiler, but it's only fifty pages in.
So here you go. At the end of that short story,
all the main characters are dead, or they appear dead anyway,
and so you're like, Okay, you want more in this world,
but everyone that I set up you to care about
(10:36):
is off the page now. So I had this really
fun challenge and a unique situation where people were asking
for more story and there's really no more story to write.
I hadn't planned anymore, so I had to sit down
and figure out, Okay, who's the bigger story going to
be about? And I came up with Juliete Nichols, who
is easily become the most beloved character I've written over
(10:58):
twenty novels and stories. So once I had this character,
I could plot out, Okay, it's going to take five
stories to tell this in a novel, and I serialized that.
I released them as I was writing them, and within
two or three months, these five stories were all at
the top of the science fiction bestseller lists on the Amazon.
(11:19):
I credit it to these initial readers who were asking
me to write more, giving me positive feedback, and that
reinforcement gave me the courage to plow forward.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
When you're writing, do you think about who that reader is?
And I know you've met a lot of the readers.
Are they who you imagine they would be?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
No to both. When I'm writing, I write for myself.
It's almost like reading. You kind of have an idea
of the story, but the sentences surprise you and say
you're getting to read what you're writing in real time.
It's a magical experience. Once you've started playing around with
fiction writing, all of a sudden, characters will do or
say things that you didn't plan on, or you'll come
up with a joke in the moment that makes you laugh.
(12:00):
So you're creating and consuming in this little feedback loop.
It's just delightful. So I concentrate on myself as the
reader when I'm writing. When I think about what readers expect,
I usually use that as a tool against them. You know,
they want this to happen, so I'm going to give
that to them. They expect this to happen, so I'm
going to tease them that something else might happen, or
(12:22):
send the story in a different direction. Like having a
feedback from your audience allows you to subvert what they
think the story might do. So I found that very valuable.
But I try not to write with the thought that
a million people might read this, because that's paralyzing.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Let's talk a little bit about the self publishing aspect.
Let's start of the business. I mean, you've had just
a wild success with self publishing. Tell us a little
bit about what the publishing business look like when you
started all this and what self publishing was and how
you figured it out.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Self publishing was very different. When I started writing, I
was told by everybody that if I self published, it
would be the end of my career. Prior to the
rise of kindle and print on demand, an amazing paperback
technology where you can print a book the moment it's ordered,
it's printed and shipped out the same day, so you
don't have a warehouse. You don't have you not sell
(13:16):
them out of your garage or the trunk of your car.
So prior to two thousand and nine, self publishing was
often called vanity publishing. You paid someone a lot of
money to create cover art at it and produce a book,
and they made money. The chances of you ever selling
enough books to pay that debt off is nil. Almost
(13:40):
when I started writing, the kindle and print on demand
came around, and all of a sudden, it was actually
free to publish, Like it costs nothing to make a
book available as an ebook, and even a print on
demand physical book, even an audiobook can be done with
no cost, and that had never happened before. So I
(14:00):
published my first book with a small press, but they
were using self publishing tools to publish, and I realized
this tools are available to me as well.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
You mean you went to them, you thought they were
a regular publisher, But what they were really doing was
just self publishing exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
And that's what most small presses do, and there's no
scandal there. They are providing a service. Like not everyone
wants to learn how to paginate a book. Trede cover Art,
do all their own editing, marketing, all that stuff. Some
people just want to write a book and hand it
to someone and let them keep most of the money.
But while they were publishing, I thought the interior layout
wasn't quite up to par. And I'd been a bookseller
(14:36):
for years, an avid reader since I was a little kid,
and so I just love the craft of books. And
while they were paginating the book, I would get the
pages back and say, man, I think I would spend
more time on it than they will, and I'll do better.
So I got a copy of end Design, which is
the industry standard for laying out books, and started learning
how to use it. And when I sent them an
(14:57):
interior file, they were like, yeah, we'll use your because
it was so much better. They gave me some cover
art that was just like stock art that you buy
off a five dollars kind of immager website with some
texts on the front. It just looks so self published,
and I was like, I can dabble in photoshop and
come up with something on my own. And the cover
(15:19):
art that I came up with they liked more, so
I was like, man, I can actually do all the
things that they're doing. So when they send me the
contract for the second book, I said, actually, I'm going
to self publish it, and I would love to buy
the rights back to my first book. And I had
a great relationship with them, so they allowed it to happen.
But I got kind of a hurt email from my
editor who said this would be the biggest mistake I
(15:41):
ever made. And that was the general consensus. To get
to your original question, what was the state of self
publishing at the time. I was hounded out of writing
forums for suggesting that self publishing might be viable with
these new tools. Everyone told me I was crazy, but
it just sense to me. I wasn't trying to get rich,
(16:02):
but I thought if I sell ten copies, it'd be
great to make one hundred bucks instead of ten bucks,
and pretty soon that's what I was doing. Like I
was making enough every month to pay a power bill
or something, which not every hobby. You know, most hobbies
cost money. This was a hobby that had money flowing
in and it just grew.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
So you started with a publisher, then you went self publishing. Today,
I know you also have publishers. How does that work
with yourself publishing?
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I never thought I would go with a publisher because
by the time I was making enough money to live
off my writing, they couldn't offer me more than what
I was making. And every time they made an offer
it was something that I might have accepted six months before.
So they were always lagging. As my sales were increasing,
their offers were coming in too low. So I remember
(16:55):
when I got a fifty thousand dollars offer for one book.
At that time, I was like, I was making that
in a month on my own sales, and I was like,
you're going to take lifetime rights for a book that
earned that much last month, And none of that made
sense to me. And there was worldwide rights and all
the ebook and all the print and audio and everything,
And then six months later someone would offer me six figures,
(17:17):
and I'm like, that's what it made last month. And
then we got to where publishers were offered me seven figures,
and I was like, I've already made that. And these
were all incredible deals and I would have jumped at
had they come six months earlier. So that was kind
of my advantage. I knew what I was making before
they knew the potential of this series.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
How do you do it today with the publishers.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I got this amazing email one day from my agent,
Kristin Nelson, and I was getting calls and emails from
agents at the time because I had a book on
the New York Times list that was not represented by anybody,
and Kristen sent me an email then the subject said
you probably don't need an agent, however, and I was like,
this is different from all the other agents were all
(18:00):
calling me and saying like, okay, first thing you should
know is I want to take fifteen percent. And I'm like, wait,
who is this? What's happening? But Kristin was like, you
probably don't even need an agent. She is so so
savvy and she understood what was happening even before I did.
About the industry. She said, you should just keep doing
what you're doing in the US. But I can take
(18:21):
this book overseas and get you deals that you're not
even thinking about. And I can get you a co
agent to help in Asia, one in Europe, one in Hollywood,
and we'll work our butts off to you know, bring
this story to more people, and you get most of
the money for all the work we do. And that
was the second best decision ever made in my life,
was signing with Kristen. We started getting really interesting offers
(18:43):
from publishers by saying no to everything else. So after
saying no to a seven figure deal, Simon and Schuster
came in gave us what we had wanted, which was
a print only deal for a limited term of license,
so they could do the print book for five years,
and after that we get all rights back, which had
never been done before. And it hasn't been duplicated much since, unfortunately.
(19:06):
And I've done three or four deals now on the
same series of books, and I keep getting the rights back.
If this is the way it should be done, the
way it's done overseas. All my foreign deals have limited
terms of license, and so you can reevaluate how the
book is doing and what it's worth, and make decisions
(19:27):
down the road that makes sense for both parties.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I want to close out the sil of piece a
little bit. How close is the TV series to your books?
How true?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Pretty close? In the modern world of adaptations, like this
is about as good as it gets. It's so much
better than what I imagined because I'm just one one
person who's slightly creative. When we built the show with
two hundred people who were massively creative. So we have
someone who's just thinking about fabrics, and someone who's just
(19:59):
thinking about pat and someone designing furniture and doing signage,
and an architect, Like it's so addedive. Having that many
creative people come together with a common goal is much
better than me just putting some words on a page.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
More of math and magic right after this quick break,
Welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with you, Howie. Let's go back in time.
You were a child of the seventies, eighties, a little
bit of the nineties. You were born in Charlotte, North Carolina.
(20:39):
Can you paint the picture of those times in your childhood,
what it felt like, what you were exposed to what
influenced you.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
I grew up in the country. My dad was a
third generation farmer corn and soweetpean and wheat before I
was born, some tobacco and cotton, and we had just
a massive amount of acreage and were upper middle class.
But I never really felt like it, Like we lived
(21:07):
at one hundred and fifty year old house and you
worked for what you had. My mom was a school teacher,
actually had her for math when I was in high school.
My parents divorced when I was eight. My mom raised
three kids pretty much on her own, with stepdads along
the way at times for its three jobs to make
everything work out for us. And I feel like I
(21:30):
had a great childhood, Like I just was skateboarding all
the time and listened to amazing music. The eighties and
nineties were epic times to be into tunes.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Were you a good student?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I got good grades. I was a pain in the butt,
you know. I was a voracious reader, and I was reading,
like under my desk in school. I would cut class
to go send the library and read books, and not
just novels, but I would like read, you know, physics books.
And I would walk around with a mirk manual or
a Grave's anatomy, and just like study bones and stuff,
it's not something to brag about. I realize now, like
(22:04):
being a little bit ahead doesn't help you because we're
all in the same place now. I don't know anything
more than anybody else. We all catch up with each other.
But if you're like two years ahead in school, it
just makes you disruptive to the other kids. It makes
you bored. And so I don't see myself as a
good student.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Were you athletic I was?
Speaker 2 (22:24):
I played soccer, ran track, ran cross country. If I
saw a ball in the air, I ran over to
introduce myself. If I go to the beach to this
day and I see a frizevi or football, or if
I see a basketball like, I want to join in.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
So where did Bali come from? Where did Bali come from?
Bally came from chess. I was playing chess in Charleston
where I went to college, and one of my favorite
opponents would come in and just kick my butt and
he would sometimes sit and do the splits while we're playing,
and I was like, what is going on? And he
(22:58):
was playing on his lunch break and he was the
principal dancer at Charleston Ballet Theater and he was stretching.
He was sore from doing ballet all morning, and we
became best friends, and I started learning ballet just by
hanging out.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
During bar class. Years later, when I was working on yachts,
they came down to Miami and performed The Nutcracker at
the Jackie Gleason Theater and the girl who plays the
maid was sick, and so my friend Scott was like,
Hugh knows enough he could jump in there play the butler.
So next thing I know, I'm like putting on a
dance bell, which is basically a jockstrap slash g string
(23:33):
for men, and dance tights and learning the moves like
right before the curtain opened.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And it's always great at a late night party to
pull out a ballet move and impresses people. So the
sailing has been such an important part of your life?
Where'd that come from?
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Hugely important. When I was a kid, there was a
family beach house in North Carolina that everyone in the
family shared. We had of like two weeks every summer,
and the first thing I would do when I would
get out there, and I think I was probably eight
or nine years old. When I started doing this is
to drag this sunfish sailboat down to the sound behind
the house. And these are small boats. Even one of
(24:13):
us could pick this up with one hand, you know.
But at the time I was pulling the Titanic down
to the shore side. And when I pushed offshore and
had this boat to myself and I could go wherever
I wanted, I was instantly hooked. I started thinking about
sailing around the world by the time I was like ten.
By the time I went to college and purposely picked
(24:35):
up place that was by the water, I bought a
boat to live on, twenty seven foot sloop, and I
became my home while I was in school. By the
time I finished my junior year, I decided to just
drop out and go sail around the world and not
finish college. And that's set my life off in a
very strange direction.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
So that's that sort of ties into life philosophy. The
hard rock cas they had, they may still have it.
The slogan there was love all, Serve all. When I
think of you, I sometimes think of that slogan. How
do you view this journey of life? I think most
of our mutual friends would describe you as this super nice,
always there for you, interested in you person. How does
(25:19):
this fit into the philosophy? What is that a part of.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
That's very flattering. I wish if this wasn't true, But
I do think that a lot of our happiness is
built in. It's hard to change, and I think I
was born lucky with a happy demeanor. I've had really
good people around me in my life. Whenever I'm around
my friends, that's what I fell out the luckiest. That's
(25:43):
not my writing success or financial success. It's like when
I'm hanging out with the people that I get to
be friends with, That's when I'm like, how did I
win this lottery? And those two influences just to be
born with a good attitude and be surrounded by great
people and feeling so full all the time that the
(26:03):
best thing that I could do is spill some of
that out to other people. You know, when your cups
full and there's more still coming in, it's got to
go somewhere. And I've got to the point where my
greatest joy is seeing like a friend succeed because you know,
I've got what I had ever dreamed of in life,
and you've known me since I've met my wife and
(26:24):
fall in love. But that attitude, which has always been
a part of me, has gone one hundred acts by
finding my soulmate and someone who is the same in
a lot of these ways. Sharing a life together is
just like the biggest thrill.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Let's talk about that for a minute, because I happen
to know your future plan is. I hope this is
okay to reveal. This is you're building a boat and
then you and your wife are just going to sail
around the world. Can you tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I've done this before. I built a boat ten years
ago and took off. The only thing missing in my
life then was the perfect sailing partner. And my wife,
Shay is a huge adventurer. She's a pilot, she flies seaplane,
she's a sailor. Adventure is her north star. As a
matter of fact, we fell in love on a boat
trip in the Arctic looking for polar bears, two weeks,
(27:14):
sharing a little bunk and just thrive in that condition.
And Shae was the one recently who was like, let's
get a boat, Let's go do this again. So we
moved to Florida to be by the boat shows, and
look at more boats. We looked at dozens, and one
day we stepped aboard a boat in Fort Lauderdale that
(27:34):
we absolutely loved. So we ordered one, and it's being
built now and we'll launch in July in France. We'll
get aboard and start getting it ready for the South Pacific,
the really remote lifestyle and take off. It wouldn't be
for everybody, but it is for us.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Let's jump before we end the episode. Let me get
your views on a couple of things. With the constant
connection over social living on these screens, do you worry
that we're stunting the creativity and imaginations of the generations
growing up with it.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I think it'll be a mix of both.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
You think about the people who built stone hinge in
the Pyramids and created early calendars and came up with
mathematical insights. Like we're creative, smart people and have been
for hundreds of thousands of years, even before we took
the kind of form that we're in now. So our
cleverness has always been there. The tools that you and
(28:36):
I grew up with allowed us to unleash that creativity
in new ways, like getting cameras, getting digital cameras, having
access to a computer, being able to write and edit
with a word processor instead of having to do a
cuneiform tablet or on a scroll or long hand. So
(28:56):
the technology that we grew up with, there was resistance
to those things when they came around, Like was it
really writing if you typed it on a typewriter? Was
it really writing? It didn't a computer and you were
just copying and pasting instead of rewriting. What do they
do to your creativity to have these tools? So I
do think there's extra creativity that comes from limitations, and
(29:18):
I think that a lot of our creativity comes from
quiet time where we're not consuming but just contemplating. But
those were problems before the smartphone revolution and the Internet.
I think what I worry more about is what we
will do with that creativity. I think we're losing some
(29:42):
of the best parts of our empathy and our compassion.
I think people are getting a little too hardened in
their ideas instead of changing their minds and becoming new
people and upgrading themselves. So I don't think creativity will suffer,
but I do think that we are suffering from our
relationship with technology these days. I think we crave a
(30:04):
simpler life, but it's not one that we know how
to choose, because we tend to not make decisions like that.
We just gobble whatever's in front of us, instead of
asking ourselves, how's this going to impact me? And to
what degrees should I accept and reject different tools and
options atomy.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, you and I were sitting at a conference last
week and someone put this chart up on the screen,
and the chart showed how young people they had a
couple like I think it was three variables like what
do I feel like? That were sort of symptoms of depression.
And it was sort of stable until about twenty fifteen,
(30:44):
and then it just took a turn up into the
right and has been continuing since. And as you know,
you and I discussed there, it was the moment, not
so much of social or the phone. It was the
moment the algorithms took over and instead of seeing posts
from my friend, I saw things the algorithm wanted me
to see that may or may not have been good
(31:04):
for me.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I think you nail the analysis of that. We'll figure
it out, and this will be a speed bump, but
we tend to figure things out by steering from one
ditch to the other instead of navigating down the road rationally.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Before we end, I have to ask you one question.
If you could go back in time, what advice would
you have for your twenty one year old self?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh, man, I know exactly the conversation I would have.
I would tell my twenty one year old self that
the person for me and whom I'm for is out
there and we will meet and we will spend the
best parts of our life together. And don't worry about
that it's coming. Trust the process.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
It's beautiful, Hugh. We end each episode because this is
math and magic stories from the frontiers and marketing. And
the idea of math and magic is it is the
combination of the analytical, the math, and the creative the
magic that really makes great businesses, great ideas, great marketing successes.
(32:08):
Who would you say gets your shout out for being
the best math person, the analytical person, and who gets
it for being the most creative that's on the magic
side of it.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Paul de Rock would be my favorite mathematician of all time.
Very strange brain, super literal, the kind of guy. If
you ask him about the weather at dinner, it would
literally leave the building and go check it out and
come back and see what he's not there for the
small talk, you know, an absolutely brilliant guy. But it
predicted a lot of things that we would find later
(32:40):
in theoretical physics and found it just in the math
for magic, a literal magician. My favorite magician is David
Kwang because he's a good friend and what he can
do with language and crosswords in addition to magic is
just amazing. But for creating magic, mutual friend of ours
Michael Benneville his company, which they create experiences and bespoke
(33:03):
little gifts and surprises. But the things that they come
up with, to me are pure magic and the best way.
It's like the technology of love. And so he's an
inspiration to me for his solutions to unusual problems.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But then it's a footnote. Michael Bennival designed most of
the iHeart Media's office space, and I met him when
he designed our camp burning Man. Yeah, it's creativity that
runs with the real span. Hugh, you have been wildly
successful building a life that works for you and allows
you to be who you want to be and who
(33:40):
you are. Congratulations through all your success. Congratulations bother me
on silo every time I turn on the TV and
I see it was number one, I go wow, go
for it to you and thanks for sharing your stories
and insights today.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Thanks for having me, Bob, It's a pleasure talking to
you always.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Here are a few things I picked up from my
conversation with Hugh. One, it's possible to forge your own path.
He realized that he was capable of doing a lot
of the work traditionally handled by publishers. He decided to
prove it even though few thought he could pull it off.
Trusting Scott and having confidence in his own skills led
him to disrupt an entire industry and find a great
(34:20):
deal of success along the way. So for alliance could
be risky, but sometimes it truly pays off. Two. Saying
no can actually open doors. This goes against traditional wisdom
to be a yes man and see what comes. Hugh
said no to almost every offer that came his way
from publishers. Knowing your worth can put the pressure on
others to create more interesting deals and opportunities. Three, a
(34:44):
common goal allows creativity to thrive. You may have broken
barriers by remaining an independent publisher, but he doesn't deny
the power of collaboration. Developing a show for Apple TV
taught him that incredible things can happen when many minds
come together. Once you find a team that's the right fifth,
allowing people specialties to shine will elevate any project. I'm
(35:07):
Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is created and hosted
by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloom for booking
and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat.
The Math and Magic team is Jessica Crimechitch and Baheed Fraser.
Our executive producers are Ali Perry and Nikki Etoor. Until
(35:34):
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
What I'm writing I write for myself. It's almost like reading.
You kind of have an idea of the story, but
the sentences surprise you and say You're getting to read
what you're writing in real time. It's a magical experience.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to this episode of Math
and Magic. Today we're going to chat with a man who,
in his heart is a creative, but he also has
the mind and instincts of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur in the
purest sense, he has figured out how to do something
he loves, make money from it, and still have control.
He's the author of the wildly successful Silo series, which
(00:45):
is one of the top series on Apple TV Plus,
and from a business perspective, he is one of the
pioneers and most successful examples of self publishing. He's Hugh Howie.
He grew up in North Carolina and he's also been
an adventurer. Attended college but never finished because he kept
being lured to the sea. He worked as a bookstore clerk,
(01:06):
computer repair person, roofing, but his real passion led him
to be a boat captain and then a writer. We're
going to dig into all the improbable twist and turns
it took. He was a great friend, nice and kind
everyone he meets, and is a true adventurer. Hugh, Welcome,
Hey Bob.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thanks, So what's the best introduction I've ever had?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Okay, well listen. Before we get to the meaty stuff,
I want to start off with a feature we do
called you in sixty seconds. Ready?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Ready?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You prefer cats or dogs?
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Dogs?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Early Riser? Night out? Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Early Riser?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
West Coast or East Coast, East Coast, New York City
or North Carolina, New York City City or Country Country.
Surprisingly coke or pepsi?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Oh, coke? Let it be close?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Books or movies?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Books?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Cook or eat out?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Eat out?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's about feel a little harder. All time favorite music artist,
just for.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
The length of time and the number of hits them
out to go with the Beatles. First job a cook
in an Alpeck Steakhouse. Favorite TV show recently it was adolescence.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Oh okay, good one. Childhood hero by mom? What did
you want to be when you were growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Favorite sport to watch basketball, Favorite.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Movie probably Shaw Shake redyption.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Secret talent probably billiards.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
People are surprised, but I can run the table almost anybody.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Okay, let's jump in.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Hey, that's fun. You could really get to know someone
that way.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Exactly sixty seconds and we're done. Okay, I got to
start with the obvious. Silo, huge, huge hit on Apple.
Let's dissect it. It all started with the trilogy, wrote,
but start by describing even how you built that trilogy,
and also for people who haven't watched it or read it,
what it's about in your words, and then let's talk
(02:56):
about how it happened.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Silo is about the last ten thousand people on Earth.
They live in this underground silo, almost like a missile silo,
and they've been there for so many generations they've forgotten
how they got there or why they're there. And it's
a bit of a mystery as a new sheriff starts
to unravel the kind of the dark secret behind the silo.
(03:21):
And it started with a short story I wrote while
I was working in a bookstore in North Carolina, and
at the time I didn't think it would be a
commercial success. I wrote it as a bit of cathartic writing.
I was dealing with the loss of dog, and so
I wrote just a really dark story that I thought
no one would want to read, and it was only
(03:42):
about fifty pages long, and I put it online for
ninety nine cents, and within a month it was out
selling the six novels that I've written at the time.
And pretty soon that short story was making me enough
money that I could quit my day job and just
work on writing the follow up stories, and those collected
(04:04):
became the novel Wool, which all self published, became a
New York Times bestselling novel, and got a film deal
with Ridley Scott and Agent and all the other improbable
things that are not supposed to happen.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
So we're going to come to that, but I want
to go back a little bit into this. Where did
the idea or silo come from.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
There's a few different ideas that kind of merge into one.
I was working at a university bookstore at the time
that smartphones started taking hold of our attention, and I
noticed the kids, who I was a generation apart from,
coming through the bookstore. Their view of the world more
and more was coming through screens. It's this little window
(04:46):
into a world that's not quite real We want to
see things that are more titillating or shocking or scary
or funny, and so we get an unclear picture of
the world. At the same time, I've always been in
in a philosophy. When I was looking at Plato's allegory
of the cave, where we don't see the true forms
(05:06):
of things, we see shadows on the wall cast by
fire that's behind us. Let's just started thinking that maybe
these screens are the new cave allegory. The other thing
is I had sailed to Cuba a few years prior
on a friend's boat that I was working on, and
what I found in Cuba was very different than what
(05:26):
I'd been told would be there. And this is related
to the other point that in order to understand the world,
you really have to go out and see it and
experience it. And so the silo is kind of born
in the idea that these people, with a limited view
of the world through this singular screen on the top
level would have to piece together what the world's like.
(05:48):
And if they were shown bad news all the time,
would they lose the courage to go out and see
the world for themselves. And so the hero of our
story is someone who's courageous and to think that the
outside world might be better than we're led to believe.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
So where did you hit on the idea of it
being a silo.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I'm pretty sure that's just being a kid of the eighties,
Like I grew up terrified. We used to do fallout drills,
like you'd hide under your desk, which I guess somehow
this desk were armored enough to keep us safe from
a nuclear blast. The thing that I was drilled into
at a very young and impressionable age was that at
(06:28):
any moment, Russia is going to drop bombs on us.
And all the movies you have to have a bad
guy in film, and back then there was always the Russians,
and of course we had missiles aimed at them, So
missile silos were kind of a big deal to my
childhood and other popular culture. There was a video game
(06:48):
when I was a kid called GoldenEye, a Nintendo sixty
four game, and one of the game levels takes place
inside of a missile silo at the spiral staircase. And
that's why stories have a lot of the same flavors.
We're not just inspired by each other, but we grew
up through experience in the same kind of events.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So very dystopian. Is that tied in any way to
your love of the sea and being out there in
sort of solitary moments nothing but you in the water.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
One hundred percent and the wave they're linked is probably
not obvious. But when we look at all the disaster
films of the end of the world stuff that we
see in fiction today, people think that this is because
folks are losing hope or something, and that's not the case.
Our primary story engine for millennia has been the survival story.
(07:37):
If you look at Sir Dauwaine and the Green Knight
or the Iliad of the Odyssey, you have these stories
where someone is away from their friends and family and
technology and civilization and they're trying to survive. So the
precursor to these stories would have been Lost in the
wood stories, which we have so many legends and fairy
tales that show us where those stories came from, because
(08:01):
when we were tribal, the woods were the scary place
and there were things in there that would eat you.
If you look at the story progression of the years,
like we went to sea and now you had lots
of seafaring tales, you had castaway stories, deserted island stories.
We started writing Westerns as we pushed beyond civilization into
(08:21):
the West. Once we kind of covered the globe, we
started writing about being lost in space, and so you
can see that we're telling the same story, which is like,
how would we survive without our people, without our tribe,
without our tools, and apocalypse stories are the only way
to really tell that without rewriting history. We have to
(08:44):
imagine a future in which our tribe is gone, our
civilization's gone, our tools are set back, and how do
we survive in a fraud and liminal space. Being at
sea made me think of like deserted island stories. But
when you're writing science fiction, you're telling the same thing.
Orth it just becomes the deserted island.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
So you started with fifty pages, how did it go
from fifty pages to wall to the trilogy?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Because of Amazon reader reviews. I was working on a
different novel when the short story blew up. And one
of the advantages of self publishing is you can hit
refresh on your Amazon Kendall dashboard and sees sales in
real time. Someone buys a book, and I had refreshed
(09:33):
the sale pops up. In traditional publishing, it might take
six months to a year to find out that something
is happening. So I'm sitting at the bookstore thinking about
the novel that I should be writing, and I noticed
the sales picking up on the short story. You know,
you don't get a lot of reviews. You can sell
a thousand books and only get like maybe one or
(09:55):
two reviews. It's just not something everybody does. But reviews
started popping up on this book at an alarming clip.
They were all five stars. The only thing negative people
had to say it was that it was too short
what happens next? And so I'm reading this feedback. I've
never had an audience clamoring for a sequel for me
(10:15):
other than my sister and my mom, you know, wanting
to the next book. And I started thinking, well, a
bit of a spoiler, but it's only fifty pages in.
So here you go. At the end of that short story,
all the main characters are dead, or they appear dead anyway,
and so you're like, Okay, you want more in this world,
but everyone that I set up you to care about
(10:36):
is off the page now. So I had this really
fun challenge and a unique situation where people were asking
for more story and there's really no more story to write.
I hadn't planned anymore, so I had to sit down
and figure out, Okay, who's the bigger story going to
be about? And I came up with Juliete Nichols, who
is easily become the most beloved character I've written over
(10:58):
twenty novels and stories. So once I had this character,
I could plot out, Okay, it's going to take five
stories to tell this in a novel, and I serialized that.
I released them as I was writing them, and within
two or three months, these five stories were all at
the top of the science fiction bestseller lists on the Amazon.
(11:19):
I credit it to these initial readers who were asking
me to write more, giving me positive feedback, and that
reinforcement gave me the courage to plow forward.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
When you're writing, do you think about who that reader is?
And I know you've met a lot of the readers.
Are they who you imagine they would be?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
No to both. When I'm writing, I write for myself.
It's almost like reading. You kind of have an idea
of the story, but the sentences surprise you and say
you're getting to read what you're writing in real time.
It's a magical experience. Once you've started playing around with
fiction writing, all of a sudden, characters will do or
say things that you didn't plan on, or you'll come
up with a joke in the moment that makes you laugh.
(12:00):
So you're creating and consuming in this little feedback loop.
It's just delightful. So I concentrate on myself as the
reader when I'm writing. When I think about what readers expect,
I usually use that as a tool against them. You know,
they want this to happen, so I'm going to give
that to them. They expect this to happen, so I'm
going to tease them that something else might happen, or
(12:22):
send the story in a different direction. Like having a
feedback from your audience allows you to subvert what they
think the story might do. So I found that very valuable.
But I try not to write with the thought that
a million people might read this, because that's paralyzing.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Let's talk a little bit about the self publishing aspect.
Let's start of the business. I mean, you've had just
a wild success with self publishing. Tell us a little
bit about what the publishing business look like when you
started all this and what self publishing was and how
you figured it out.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Self publishing was very different. When I started writing, I
was told by everybody that if I self published, it
would be the end of my career. Prior to the
rise of kindle and print on demand, an amazing paperback
technology where you can print a book the moment it's ordered,
it's printed and shipped out the same day, so you
don't have a warehouse. You don't have you not sell
(13:16):
them out of your garage or the trunk of your car.
So prior to two thousand and nine, self publishing was
often called vanity publishing. You paid someone a lot of
money to create cover art at it and produce a book,
and they made money. The chances of you ever selling
enough books to pay that debt off is nil. Almost
(13:40):
when I started writing, the kindle and print on demand
came around, and all of a sudden, it was actually
free to publish, Like it costs nothing to make a
book available as an ebook, and even a print on
demand physical book, even an audiobook can be done with
no cost, and that had never happened before. So I
(14:00):
published my first book with a small press, but they
were using self publishing tools to publish, and I realized
this tools are available to me as well.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
You mean you went to them, you thought they were
a regular publisher, But what they were really doing was
just self publishing exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
And that's what most small presses do, and there's no
scandal there. They are providing a service. Like not everyone
wants to learn how to paginate a book. Trede cover Art,
do all their own editing, marketing, all that stuff. Some
people just want to write a book and hand it
to someone and let them keep most of the money.
But while they were publishing, I thought the interior layout
wasn't quite up to par. And I'd been a bookseller
(14:36):
for years, an avid reader since I was a little kid,
and so I just love the craft of books. And
while they were paginating the book, I would get the
pages back and say, man, I think I would spend
more time on it than they will, and I'll do better.
So I got a copy of end Design, which is
the industry standard for laying out books, and started learning
how to use it. And when I sent them an
(14:57):
interior file, they were like, yeah, we'll use your because
it was so much better. They gave me some cover
art that was just like stock art that you buy
off a five dollars kind of immager website with some
texts on the front. It just looks so self published,
and I was like, I can dabble in photoshop and
come up with something on my own. And the cover
(15:19):
art that I came up with they liked more, so
I was like, man, I can actually do all the
things that they're doing. So when they send me the
contract for the second book, I said, actually, I'm going
to self publish it, and I would love to buy
the rights back to my first book. And I had
a great relationship with them, so they allowed it to happen.
But I got kind of a hurt email from my
editor who said this would be the biggest mistake I
(15:41):
ever made. And that was the general consensus. To get
to your original question, what was the state of self
publishing at the time. I was hounded out of writing
forums for suggesting that self publishing might be viable with
these new tools. Everyone told me I was crazy, but
it just sense to me. I wasn't trying to get rich,
(16:02):
but I thought if I sell ten copies, it'd be
great to make one hundred bucks instead of ten bucks,
and pretty soon that's what I was doing. Like I
was making enough every month to pay a power bill
or something, which not every hobby. You know, most hobbies
cost money. This was a hobby that had money flowing
in and it just grew.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
So you started with a publisher, then you went self publishing. Today,
I know you also have publishers. How does that work
with yourself publishing?
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I never thought I would go with a publisher because
by the time I was making enough money to live
off my writing, they couldn't offer me more than what
I was making. And every time they made an offer
it was something that I might have accepted six months before.
So they were always lagging. As my sales were increasing,
their offers were coming in too low. So I remember
(16:55):
when I got a fifty thousand dollars offer for one book.
At that time, I was like, I was making that
in a month on my own sales, and I was like,
you're going to take lifetime rights for a book that
earned that much last month, And none of that made
sense to me. And there was worldwide rights and all
the ebook and all the print and audio and everything,
And then six months later someone would offer me six figures,
(17:17):
and I'm like, that's what it made last month. And
then we got to where publishers were offered me seven figures,
and I was like, I've already made that. And these
were all incredible deals and I would have jumped at
had they come six months earlier. So that was kind
of my advantage. I knew what I was making before
they knew the potential of this series.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
How do you do it today with the publishers.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I got this amazing email one day from my agent,
Kristin Nelson, and I was getting calls and emails from
agents at the time because I had a book on
the New York Times list that was not represented by anybody,
and Kristen sent me an email then the subject said
you probably don't need an agent, however, and I was like,
this is different from all the other agents were all
(18:00):
calling me and saying like, okay, first thing you should
know is I want to take fifteen percent. And I'm like, wait,
who is this? What's happening? But Kristin was like, you
probably don't even need an agent. She is so so
savvy and she understood what was happening even before I did.
About the industry. She said, you should just keep doing
what you're doing in the US. But I can take
(18:21):
this book overseas and get you deals that you're not
even thinking about. And I can get you a co
agent to help in Asia, one in Europe, one in Hollywood,
and we'll work our butts off to you know, bring
this story to more people, and you get most of
the money for all the work we do. And that
was the second best decision ever made in my life,
was signing with Kristen. We started getting really interesting offers
(18:43):
from publishers by saying no to everything else. So after
saying no to a seven figure deal, Simon and Schuster
came in gave us what we had wanted, which was
a print only deal for a limited term of license,
so they could do the print book for five years,
and after that we get all rights back, which had
never been done before. And it hasn't been duplicated much since, unfortunately.
(19:06):
And I've done three or four deals now on the
same series of books, and I keep getting the rights back.
If this is the way it should be done, the
way it's done overseas. All my foreign deals have limited
terms of license, and so you can reevaluate how the
book is doing and what it's worth, and make decisions
(19:27):
down the road that makes sense for both parties.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I want to close out the sil of piece a
little bit. How close is the TV series to your books?
How true?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Pretty close? In the modern world of adaptations, like this
is about as good as it gets. It's so much
better than what I imagined because I'm just one one
person who's slightly creative. When we built the show with
two hundred people who were massively creative. So we have
someone who's just thinking about fabrics, and someone who's just
(19:59):
thinking about pat and someone designing furniture and doing signage,
and an architect, Like it's so addedive. Having that many
creative people come together with a common goal is much
better than me just putting some words on a page.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
More of math and magic right after this quick break,
Welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with you, Howie. Let's go back in time.
You were a child of the seventies, eighties, a little
bit of the nineties. You were born in Charlotte, North Carolina.
(20:39):
Can you paint the picture of those times in your childhood,
what it felt like, what you were exposed to what
influenced you.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
I grew up in the country. My dad was a
third generation farmer corn and soweetpean and wheat before I
was born, some tobacco and cotton, and we had just
a massive amount of acreage and were upper middle class.
But I never really felt like it, Like we lived
(21:07):
at one hundred and fifty year old house and you
worked for what you had. My mom was a school teacher,
actually had her for math when I was in high school.
My parents divorced when I was eight. My mom raised
three kids pretty much on her own, with stepdads along
the way at times for its three jobs to make
everything work out for us. And I feel like I
(21:30):
had a great childhood, Like I just was skateboarding all
the time and listened to amazing music. The eighties and
nineties were epic times to be into tunes.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Were you a good student?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
I got good grades. I was a pain in the butt,
you know. I was a voracious reader, and I was reading,
like under my desk in school. I would cut class
to go send the library and read books, and not
just novels, but I would like read, you know, physics books.
And I would walk around with a mirk manual or
a Grave's anatomy, and just like study bones and stuff,
it's not something to brag about. I realize now, like
(22:04):
being a little bit ahead doesn't help you because we're
all in the same place now. I don't know anything
more than anybody else. We all catch up with each other.
But if you're like two years ahead in school, it
just makes you disruptive to the other kids. It makes
you bored. And so I don't see myself as a
good student.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Were you athletic I was?
Speaker 2 (22:24):
I played soccer, ran track, ran cross country. If I
saw a ball in the air, I ran over to
introduce myself. If I go to the beach to this
day and I see a frizevi or football, or if
I see a basketball like, I want to join in.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
So where did Bali come from? Where did Bali come from?
Bally came from chess. I was playing chess in Charleston
where I went to college, and one of my favorite
opponents would come in and just kick my butt and
he would sometimes sit and do the splits while we're playing,
and I was like, what is going on? And he
(22:58):
was playing on his lunch break and he was the
principal dancer at Charleston Ballet Theater and he was stretching.
He was sore from doing ballet all morning, and we
became best friends, and I started learning ballet just by
hanging out.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
During bar class. Years later, when I was working on yachts,
they came down to Miami and performed The Nutcracker at
the Jackie Gleason Theater and the girl who plays the
maid was sick, and so my friend Scott was like,
Hugh knows enough he could jump in there play the butler.
So next thing I know, I'm like putting on a
dance bell, which is basically a jockstrap slash g string
(23:33):
for men, and dance tights and learning the moves like
right before the curtain opened.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And it's always great at a late night party to
pull out a ballet move and impresses people. So the
sailing has been such an important part of your life?
Where'd that come from?
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Hugely important. When I was a kid, there was a
family beach house in North Carolina that everyone in the
family shared. We had of like two weeks every summer,
and the first thing I would do when I would
get out there, and I think I was probably eight
or nine years old. When I started doing this is
to drag this sunfish sailboat down to the sound behind
the house. And these are small boats. Even one of
(24:13):
us could pick this up with one hand, you know.
But at the time I was pulling the Titanic down
to the shore side. And when I pushed offshore and
had this boat to myself and I could go wherever
I wanted, I was instantly hooked. I started thinking about
sailing around the world by the time I was like ten.
By the time I went to college and purposely picked
(24:35):
up place that was by the water, I bought a
boat to live on, twenty seven foot sloop, and I
became my home while I was in school. By the
time I finished my junior year, I decided to just
drop out and go sail around the world and not
finish college. And that's set my life off in a
very strange direction.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
So that's that sort of ties into life philosophy. The
hard rock cas they had, they may still have it.
The slogan there was love all, Serve all. When I
think of you, I sometimes think of that slogan. How
do you view this journey of life? I think most
of our mutual friends would describe you as this super nice,
always there for you, interested in you person. How does
(25:19):
this fit into the philosophy? What is that a part of.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
That's very flattering. I wish if this wasn't true, But
I do think that a lot of our happiness is
built in. It's hard to change, and I think I
was born lucky with a happy demeanor. I've had really
good people around me in my life. Whenever I'm around
my friends, that's what I fell out the luckiest. That's
(25:43):
not my writing success or financial success. It's like when
I'm hanging out with the people that I get to
be friends with, That's when I'm like, how did I
win this lottery? And those two influences just to be
born with a good attitude and be surrounded by great
people and feeling so full all the time that the
(26:03):
best thing that I could do is spill some of
that out to other people. You know, when your cups
full and there's more still coming in, it's got to
go somewhere. And I've got to the point where my
greatest joy is seeing like a friend succeed because you know,
I've got what I had ever dreamed of in life,
and you've known me since I've met my wife and
(26:24):
fall in love. But that attitude, which has always been
a part of me, has gone one hundred acts by
finding my soulmate and someone who is the same in
a lot of these ways. Sharing a life together is
just like the biggest thrill.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Let's talk about that for a minute, because I happen
to know your future plan is. I hope this is
okay to reveal. This is you're building a boat and
then you and your wife are just going to sail
around the world. Can you tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I've done this before. I built a boat ten years
ago and took off. The only thing missing in my
life then was the perfect sailing partner. And my wife,
Shay is a huge adventurer. She's a pilot, she flies seaplane,
she's a sailor. Adventure is her north star. As a
matter of fact, we fell in love on a boat
trip in the Arctic looking for polar bears, two weeks,
(27:14):
sharing a little bunk and just thrive in that condition.
And Shae was the one recently who was like, let's
get a boat, Let's go do this again. So we
moved to Florida to be by the boat shows, and
look at more boats. We looked at dozens, and one
day we stepped aboard a boat in Fort Lauderdale that
(27:34):
we absolutely loved. So we ordered one, and it's being
built now and we'll launch in July in France. We'll
get aboard and start getting it ready for the South Pacific,
the really remote lifestyle and take off. It wouldn't be
for everybody, but it is for us.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Let's jump before we end the episode. Let me get
your views on a couple of things. With the constant
connection over social living on these screens, do you worry
that we're stunting the creativity and imaginations of the generations
growing up with it.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I think it'll be a mix of both.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
You think about the people who built stone hinge in
the Pyramids and created early calendars and came up with
mathematical insights. Like we're creative, smart people and have been
for hundreds of thousands of years, even before we took
the kind of form that we're in now. So our
cleverness has always been there. The tools that you and
(28:36):
I grew up with allowed us to unleash that creativity
in new ways, like getting cameras, getting digital cameras, having
access to a computer, being able to write and edit
with a word processor instead of having to do a
cuneiform tablet or on a scroll or long hand. So
(28:56):
the technology that we grew up with, there was resistance
to those things when they came around, Like was it
really writing if you typed it on a typewriter? Was
it really writing? It didn't a computer and you were
just copying and pasting instead of rewriting. What do they
do to your creativity to have these tools? So I
do think there's extra creativity that comes from limitations, and
(29:18):
I think that a lot of our creativity comes from
quiet time where we're not consuming but just contemplating. But
those were problems before the smartphone revolution and the Internet.
I think what I worry more about is what we
will do with that creativity. I think we're losing some
(29:42):
of the best parts of our empathy and our compassion.
I think people are getting a little too hardened in
their ideas instead of changing their minds and becoming new
people and upgrading themselves. So I don't think creativity will suffer,
but I do think that we are suffering from our
relationship with technology these days. I think we crave a
(30:04):
simpler life, but it's not one that we know how
to choose, because we tend to not make decisions like that.
We just gobble whatever's in front of us, instead of
asking ourselves, how's this going to impact me? And to
what degrees should I accept and reject different tools and
options atomy.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, you and I were sitting at a conference last
week and someone put this chart up on the screen,
and the chart showed how young people they had a
couple like I think it was three variables like what
do I feel like? That were sort of symptoms of depression.
And it was sort of stable until about twenty fifteen,
(30:44):
and then it just took a turn up into the
right and has been continuing since. And as you know,
you and I discussed there, it was the moment, not
so much of social or the phone. It was the
moment the algorithms took over and instead of seeing posts
from my friend, I saw things the algorithm wanted me
to see that may or may not have been good
(31:04):
for me.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I think you nail the analysis of that. We'll figure
it out, and this will be a speed bump, but
we tend to figure things out by steering from one
ditch to the other instead of navigating down the road rationally.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Before we end, I have to ask you one question.
If you could go back in time, what advice would
you have for your twenty one year old self?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh, man, I know exactly the conversation I would have.
I would tell my twenty one year old self that
the person for me and whom I'm for is out
there and we will meet and we will spend the
best parts of our life together. And don't worry about
that it's coming. Trust the process.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
It's beautiful, Hugh. We end each episode because this is
math and magic stories from the frontiers and marketing. And
the idea of math and magic is it is the
combination of the analytical, the math, and the creative the
magic that really makes great businesses, great ideas, great marketing successes.
(32:08):
Who would you say gets your shout out for being
the best math person, the analytical person, and who gets
it for being the most creative that's on the magic
side of it.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Paul de Rock would be my favorite mathematician of all time.
Very strange brain, super literal, the kind of guy. If
you ask him about the weather at dinner, it would
literally leave the building and go check it out and
come back and see what he's not there for the
small talk, you know, an absolutely brilliant guy. But it
predicted a lot of things that we would find later
(32:40):
in theoretical physics and found it just in the math
for magic, a literal magician. My favorite magician is David
Kwang because he's a good friend and what he can
do with language and crosswords in addition to magic is
just amazing. But for creating magic, mutual friend of ours
Michael Benneville his company, which they create experiences and bespoke
(33:03):
little gifts and surprises. But the things that they come
up with, to me are pure magic and the best way.
It's like the technology of love. And so he's an
inspiration to me for his solutions to unusual problems.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But then it's a footnote. Michael Bennival designed most of
the iHeart Media's office space, and I met him when
he designed our camp burning Man. Yeah, it's creativity that
runs with the real span. Hugh, you have been wildly
successful building a life that works for you and allows
you to be who you want to be and who
(33:40):
you are. Congratulations through all your success. Congratulations bother me
on silo every time I turn on the TV and
I see it was number one, I go wow, go
for it to you and thanks for sharing your stories
and insights today.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Thanks for having me, Bob, It's a pleasure talking to
you always.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Here are a few things I picked up from my
conversation with Hugh. One, it's possible to forge your own path.
He realized that he was capable of doing a lot
of the work traditionally handled by publishers. He decided to
prove it even though few thought he could pull it off.
Trusting Scott and having confidence in his own skills led
him to disrupt an entire industry and find a great
(34:20):
deal of success along the way. So for alliance could
be risky, but sometimes it truly pays off. Two. Saying
no can actually open doors. This goes against traditional wisdom
to be a yes man and see what comes. Hugh
said no to almost every offer that came his way
from publishers. Knowing your worth can put the pressure on
others to create more interesting deals and opportunities. Three, a
(34:44):
common goal allows creativity to thrive. You may have broken
barriers by remaining an independent publisher, but he doesn't deny
the power of collaboration. Developing a show for Apple TV
taught him that incredible things can happen when many minds
come together. Once you find a team that's the right fifth,
allowing people specialties to shine will elevate any project. I'm
(35:07):
Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is created and hosted
by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloom for booking
and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat.
The Math and Magic team is Jessica Crimechitch and Baheed Fraser.
Our executive producers are Ali Perry and Nikki Etoor. Until
(35:34):
next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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