Hugh Howey

For the first time since 1946, the total debt of the United States ($39.5 trillion) is greater than our GDP ($32-ish trillion). The interest on this debt is currently about $1 trillion per year, which is more than we spend on defense. This level of debt won’t create an explosion, but more of a slow burn. To service this debt, yields on bonds will go up, which means borrowing goes up, which means…

Adapting a novel into film or TV requires a ton of decisions. What parts of the book are most important? How can we reduce the cast size, or the number of locations, or do things practically or with effects to meet a budget. Things have to change for the new medium. But there are a few things that should never change. The most important of these is your main character. There are a ton of reasons…

GOOSEBUMPS! I can’t wait for you all to see where this goes.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of game theory’s all-time great puzzles. It goes like this: Two men are taken into custody for a crime. The cops have a little evidence, enough to put both men away for a few years, but if they had more to go on, the punishment could be a lot more severe. The two men in the holding cell know the cops won’t have much if they both keep quiet. All the crooks have to do…

My first game console was Pong, which was THE first game console. Pong was created a few years before I was born, but by the time I could twiddle a knob it was the only thing in the household to jack into a TV. From there, we had an Atari, ColecoVision, my dad’s Apple IIe, and then the NES. It felt like the videogame industry was five guys with pocket protectors rummaging in a Radioshack to see…

Apple just announced the premiere date for Silo season three! The first of ten episodes drops on July 3rd. This is, by far, the best season yet. You all aren’t ready.

I dream about space a lot. I was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I used to build model rockets and see how far I could shot them into the sky. My obsession with the cosmos in high school is the reason I majored in physics in college. Han Solo was my spirit animal — all I ever wanted was to explore the stars with my beater of a starship and a few friends. The closest I could get to this was living…

The first time I flew overseas was in high school. My mom chaperoned a school trip to England and France. We did all the tourist things, saw some cathedrals, ate strange food, walked around museums, had too much to drink for the first time. Traveling to Europe felt exotic. The only other times I’d left the country were trips to the Bahamas and a cruise that took us through Jamaica and…

I grew up in the deep south, the buckle of the Bible Belt. My dad was a farmer and my mom was a schoolteacher. Everyone I knew was a Republican. I was taught to pray so early that I don’t remember it happening. I just always said a prayer with my mom when I got in bed “Now I lay me down to sleep…” A terrifying nursery rhyme about the possibility of not waking up and hoping God would take my…

A lot to unpack here, but first let me stress the difference between the AI investment bubble bursting, the AI hype train derailing, and any chance that AI is going to disappear from your life. All three are big questions and each has a very different answer. Working backwards: AI is not going to disappear from your life. In fact, you’re gonna have a difficult time avoiding it. Software…

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the asymptotic nature of intelligence and the limits of AI. It’s long been my contention that intelligence is not boundless; it doesn’t shoot up an infinite curve to the stratosphere. Rather, there is an upper limit on what can be known and the inferences that can be made based on what’s known. That is: a complete understanding of the universe may theoretically…

I wrote my first novel in 2009, fulfilling a lifelong dream. That dream was simply this: write a novel. It wasn’t to get a novel published. I wasn’t to get people to read the novel. I never dreamt of making money from my writing. I was just an avid reader from my Dr. Seuss days, fell in love with science fiction when I was eleven, and spent the next two decades dreaming of writing my own…

24 36.644′ N023 13.143′ W Put that in your favorite maps site to see where we are as I write this. Roughly 400 nautical miles southwest of the Canary Islands and 2,200nm from the Caribbean. How did we get here? Well, about two years ago, Shay started talking about us getting on a boat to sail around the world. Or at least, spend more time on the water. We were living in Manhattan at the time,…

In 1949, George Orwell coined the term “Big Brother” in his (unfortunately) timeless novel 1984. The fear then — and now — was that mass surveillance would give totalitarian states even greater control over its people. As prescient as Orwell was, here’s something he missed: surveillance works both ways. Bodycams have proven a nuisance for belligerent cops. Hot mics get politicians in hot water.…

“They had no idea,” Percy realized. And so he resolved to remedy this. Percy Perceival Pierce lived in a time of miraculous inventions. There were computers to help design these inventions and robots to help build them. “Help” here is used the same sense that Thomas Jefferson “helped” tend his crops and build his home. Realizing their ignorance, and how undesirable this was, Percy had three…

I’m ten years old, sitting in a little sunfish sailing dinghy in the bight of water behind Figure Eight Island, and the wind has died down to nothing. The sail sags. The water is a polished mirror. The shoreline is an agonizing distance away. The only way to get a becalmed sunfish to move in these conditions is to work the rudder back and forth, back and forth, fanning the sea like a fish…

I’ve had a few friends this summer ask me about my diet and workout routine (usually while I’m prancing around in my speedos). After posting my 50th birthday photo below, I’ve had quite a few comments and DMs asking the same. I published a short work about my fitness habits a decade ago, but I figured I’d put into one place everything I’ve learned through experimentation over the years. First…