Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob PittmanHugh 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.
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
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.
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 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, 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.
Thanks, So what's the best introduction I've ever had?
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?
Ready?
You prefer cats or dogs?
Dogs?
Early Riser? Night out? Oh?
Early Riser?
West Coast or East Coast, East Coast, New York City or North Carolina, New York City City or Country Country. Surprisingly coke or pepsi?
Oh, coke? Let it be close?
Books or movies?
Books?
Cook or eat out?
Eat out?
It's about feel a little harder. All time favorite music artist, just for.
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.
Oh okay, good one. Childhood hero by mom? What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be a writer.
Favorite sport to watch basketball, Favorite.
Movie probably Shaw Shake redyption.
Secret talent probably billiards.
People are surprised, but I can run the table almost anybody.
Okay, let's jump in.
Hey, that's fun. You could really get to know someone that way.
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 about how it happened.
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. 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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. 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.
So where did you hit on the idea of it being a silo.
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 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 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.
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.
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. 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 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 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 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.
So you started with fifty pages, how did it go from fifty pages to wall to the trilogy?
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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
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?
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. 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
You mean you went to them, you thought they were a regular publisher, But what they were really doing was just self publishing exactly.
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 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 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 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 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, 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.
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?
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 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, 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.
How do you do it today with the publishers.
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 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 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 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. 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 down the road that makes sense for both parties.
I want to close out the sil of piece a little bit. How close is the TV series to your books? How true?
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 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.
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. Can you paint the picture of those times in your childhood, what it felt like, what you were exposed to what influenced you.
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 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 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.
Were you a good student?
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 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.
Were you athletic I was?
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.
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 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.
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 for men, and dance tights and learning the moves like right before the curtain opened.
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?
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 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 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.
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 this fit into the philosophy? What is that a part of.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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.
I think it'll be a mix of both.
You know.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 for me.
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.
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?
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.
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. 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
Thanks for having me, Bob, It's a pleasure talking to you always.
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 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 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 Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.
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 next time,
