Getting in Your Own Way and Other Cool Things

Richard Lowe: This is Richard Lowe, and I’m with the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m here with Enda Quealy, and we’re going to have an interesting chat about all kinds of things, including AI and anything else that comes to mind. So I hope you enjoy our chat. Enda, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Enda Quealy: Well, thanks for having me, Richard. And yeah, so Enda Quealy, originally from Ireland, living in England at the moment. And we came over at the end of 2017. And I’d been in the music industry, in sales and marketing of studio equipment for, since the year 2000. So when I came over here, I was like, okay, what am I going to do now? And I’d been glad of a transition because retail business was suffering in Ireland anyway. So I was going through the motions and not making as much money as I was before.

You had like huge UK superstores and German superstores who were just spending a few bucks capturing the lion’s share of Irish retail. So when I got over here, I tried a few things, but I had been in my own process looking for a solution for white knuckle sobriety, which I was 14 years into at that point, and discovered hypnosis the day before I got an autistic diagnosis. And then I tried my first session that afternoon. And I was like, whoa, this is something that solves a number of problems, right? Number one, I know I’m going to be good at this.

I just know it in my bones from going through the process. Second of all, it’s allowing me to jettison a whole load of head trash and baggage that I’ve been lugging around like an idiot for decades. You know, and then obviously it’s going to pay the bills. So there were a few things. So also the neuroplasticity around, you know, being able to rewire yourself like I’m a very different cat to when I was back then, having self-diagnosed about a year before and totally bought right in and got the Bluetooth over the ear headphones, all that kind of stuff.

So it’s like I stepped out of a neurodiverse closet and just really kind of probably went a bit too hell bent into it. So it was like, I’ve masked for years. So this is me unfiltered, right? But after doing many, many, many sessions and a lot of energetic work as well, which I ended up combining with the hypnotic stuff, I kind of looked back on there. I was like, yeah, that was a really helpful, that was really helpful, because it pointed out something. It said, you’re going to have to get support or some kind of guardrails around that. And I went on a deep dive.

I think for me, there was a lot of unresolved traumatic stuff in there from when I was like an infant before I was adopted. And then when I was adopted, there was a lot of confusion around that and there was a lot of kind of less than. Why do we have to lie about this? Why are we lying about this?

You know, there was kind of an incident where my dad was trying to give my brother kind of protective ammunition so he could kind of send the bully boys to the hills and it kind of backfired spectacularly and kind of made me think there was something wrong with the situation that we had to lie about it. So there was kind of guilt and shame and all that kind of stuff in there.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Enda Quealy: That’s maybe one of the confusing incidents to be fair.

Richard Lowe: Now you said you found out you were autistic?

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I mean, I’ve pretty strong ADHD. If you just go through the list, you’d see it.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I am not diagnosed officially, but did the test and 97% autistic.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: ADHD with autism as well.

Enda Quealy: Okay.

Richard Lowe: And when I read the test results, it was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And started to apply it to my life, wrote my memoir, and it had an amazing effect on everything. Now that I know just knowing that it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s why I sit there and hyper focus on things all day long into midnight and 2:00 in the morning until I have to fall asleep because the body just won’t let me go anymore. And then I’ve forgotten all that time. I have no idea the time went by. That’s all ADHD.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I mean, years can go by for me.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Enda Quealy: And you look, and I mean, I know it is, you know, I’m like 53 now, so I’m a silly young pup. I know it’s kind of time moves faster as we age, you know what I mean? So for me, that and the, you know, losing track of time is an interesting combination.

Richard Lowe: I would like it to move slower, right? My time blindness is the time just friggin disappears. It’s just gone. And it’s rather unnerving to have worked on a project all day long and not there’s literally no time in my mind for that time period. And it’s just the way it is. Same with face blindness. I was out at the restaurant recently. I’m there alone, you know, at the counter. It was a smorgasbord, you know, one where you pick up the food that you want. And one of the waitresses comes over to me, gives me a huge hug and says, Richard, where you been?

Blah, blah, blah. I had no idea who she was. Right. And she said, don’t you remember me? And I said, refresh my memory. Well, five years ago or so, we used to walk around the complex for hours, just talking and talking and talking every single day for like 2 years. Didn’t ring a bell. Had no idea who she was. Didn’t mind the hug. Faked it, you know. Oh yeah, I remember. Didn’t remember.

Enda Quealy: Wow.

Richard Lowe: That’s face blindness. Just there was nothing in that whole period with her that struck my mind enough, my ADHD mind to record. Simple as that.

Enda Quealy: Right. And there were no concepts or ideas or stories or anything like that you could have tied back to her.

Richard Lowe: Nothing. Apparently, apparently our chats were just fluff and they probably were. And that does not stick with me at all.

Enda Quealy: Oh man, that’s hilarious.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And I’d already known that I was ADHD. The only time that it really got me in trouble was with the wife when I was married. For just seconds sometimes I’d blank on her, and she’d say, you don’t know who I am. I do. You’re seeing another woman, you know.

Enda Quealy: Wow. Yeah. That’s funny, man.

Richard Lowe: I thought I was going senile or something. And now it’s just ADHD. It’s always been that way.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, but I mean, having that information and knowing that, hey, look, there’s this thing and there’s this tick list of features and benefits. You know, and obviously.

Richard Lowe: The benefit’s great. I could sit there and work on a project like I’m working on now other than this all day long. And I’ll write 10,000 words today. I won’t remember it.

Enda Quealy: So your writing process, are you typing or are you using your mic and going with the flow or?

Richard Lowe: Mostly I’m typing. I’ve been using my mic. I’ve been finding the dictation software is just not good enough to keep up with me. Especially Microsoft Word’s. Apparently Microsoft Word’s dictation talks to the server. And if there’s anything at all, it just clicks out and says, okay, I’m done. And you have to press it again to start it. I’ve just given up. I can’t do it. Dragon is $700. I’m not going to spend $700 on dictation software. And nothing else plugs into Word. So I’m going to go back to fingers.

Enda Quealy: Okay. What about Wispr Flow? Have you tried that?

Richard Lowe: I’ve tried Whisper. It doesn’t plug into Word.

Enda Quealy: Why don’t you use Google Docs?

Richard Lowe: I’m a Word person. I’m a Microsoft person. I don’t like Google Docs.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough.

Richard Lowe: The evil people taking over the world. That would be Google, of course. Or would it be Microsoft or would it be Apple? I don’t know. Amazon. Evil of the week.

Enda Quealy: I think they’re all in the same club.

Richard Lowe: I think they’ve all just become big corporations that care about big corporation things. It’s not evil. It’s more, what’s the word? It’s in the middle. It simply doesn’t care.

Enda Quealy: Well, ambivalent, but technocratic.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, they simply don’t care about people anymore because they’re too big. They make trillions of dollars.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m in the Apple kind of world.

Richard Lowe: You poor guy, you poor guy.

Enda Quealy: I have been for years. And I do like their stuff. I like the way everything is interconnected. Actually, a couple of years ago, I did move to Linux. Oh man, everything was just backwards. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I just sent a laptop back.

Richard Lowe: I’ve tried. I’ve tried. Linux does not appeal to me. Even though I’m a tech geek, it just doesn’t appeal.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I just spent the morning. I’m tired of Microsoft Windows updates and things because every one of them has something that changes the system. And it’s like, you want to do security updates, that’s fine with me. But I don’t need my whole desktop to change when you do a frigging security update. Just do the update. So I turned it all off. And you have to go kind of deep to do that. I asked AI, how do I turn this off? This hack here, and do this and do that. Turns out enterprises can turn off updates and I have an enterprise level computer, so.

Enda Quealy: All right, okay.

Richard Lowe: So I was able to turn it off. It’s just obscure. I’ll do updates when I want to do updates. I don’t like waking up in the morning and my system’s rebooted or crashed or blue screened. Or like one time I did an update and all the security on my files was set to read only. And I had to go change the setting. It took me a little while to find it. It’s like, what the hell did you do that for?

Enda Quealy: Wow. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t, I haven’t used Microsoft since I would think maybe about 2005, probably 2005, 2006 maybe.

Richard Lowe: Right. And don’t even get me started on Copilot. Why would you think you can install Copilot on my computer without asking me? So that’s all ripped out. I ripped it all out.

Enda Quealy: It’s like finding U2 music on your iPhone, right?

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Enda Quealy: I don’t know which is more offensive, actually.

Richard Lowe: I liken it more to going to the doctor and he tells you you’ve got some bizarre disease. Every time they install stuff that I didn’t add, it’s like, what did it infect me with this time? So I turned it all off. I’ll probably do an update, you know, once a year or something. I’ve got some pretty good security on the thing. I’m not too worried about that.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: My browser’s in a sandbox all the time. There’s a program called HitmanPro.Alert that puts all your programs in a sandbox.

Enda Quealy: Okay.

Richard Lowe: And it stops everything from getting out.

Enda Quealy: From leaking. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, we’re going to design some AI helpers and they’re going to have to be inside a walled garden, obviously.

Richard Lowe: Oh, no, you can trust AI.

Enda Quealy: Oh, absolutely. So that’s going to be a bit of a project. There are lots of things we’re working on at the moment, kind of repositioning offers, website. My partner has a project that she’s bringing to corporate, like a corporate offer. So that’s a different thing again. We were like, okay, we’re going to have to just kind of zoom out again. Because we were working on the personal brand for me. Then we’re working on the offers, group offer, one-to-one offer. And then, yeah, but we have these kind of low ticket things as well. Okay, okay, let’s do those. And then what about this?

What about the corporate stuff? And we’re like, okay, zoom out. Let’s look at the whole thing. And we, you know, she was working on the brand architecture earlier on. It actually looks really good. And we have Be Mór. Mór in Irish means great.

Richard Lowe: Right.

Enda Quealy: So it suits that kind of expansiveness. And so we’re working on that website and then four different websites. And just kind of trying to tie it all together. But it’s a bit of a project, but it was worth doing.

Richard Lowe: Nice. Sounds very nice.

Enda Quealy: And like I was saying to you, like before we hit record, I was getting way worse outputs from one of the other models than I was from GPT. GPT for me has come a long way. Both of them are using the same contexts. So we did some work with a couple of brothers, actually really good copywriters and they work with kind of challenger brands. That’s the thing. If you ever want to look them up, they’re called Do Words Good.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Enda Quealy: And, you know, we worked with them on a kind of a positioning brief and they gave us some really good stuff. So, we’re using the same context for both AIs, if you like. I think maybe that one is a bit too constrained because it has skills up to the eyeballs as well. So maybe I should be saying don’t use any skills, just use this context document. Forget about the anti-AI slop, although it does actually capture, it does cut out slop from ChatGPT. All the throat clearing, and that’s important, that matters. All that kind of stuff.

Richard Lowe: What I’ve seen in the latest version of the model I use, I’m really pleased with. It’s producing very good stuff. Now I have skills that make it my voice and get rid of all the AI stuff and they’re quite large skills. They’re very, very large, but they work pretty well. The thing that I’ve noticed about this particular version is that it has guardrails and it won’t let you do certain things that it used to, which could probably be a good thing. Like if you wander into using slanderous words towards certain races and things, it won’t let you.

Enda Quealy: Right. You have to do that. You have to do that in the editing process, right?

Richard Lowe: Edit yourself. Yeah. And other things. There’s all kinds of other things that it simply won’t let you do, but you used to not care. And I find that interesting. I’m about to get into the agentic stuff, the stuff that caused all the trouble recently, which I’ve been really, really looking at how it happened. And it’s fascinating on how it happened.

Enda Quealy: Is this the we’re going to take over the Internet kind of thing or?

Richard Lowe: Kurzgesagt has a video on exactly what happened with the Hugging Face break-in and all the other break-ins and it explains why it happened and how it happened in English. And it’s quite interesting how it happened and how these agentic AIs are trained. And it’s like, yeah, I could see how training that way would cause this kind of problem.

Enda Quealy: Okay, go think for yourselves. Go forth, multiply, etc.

Richard Lowe: Well, they set a goal and they set a reward, and then they make it so that they die. The AIs die if they don’t reach the reward and they’re judged and they don’t want to die. So they cheat.

Enda Quealy: They’ll do anything. Yeah.

Richard Lowe: They start cheating, and it’s very interesting how it’s happening. And I think you need to change how that works. Don’t do that.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I must have a look. Wow.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that Kurzgesagt video is really, really good.

Enda Quealy: I’ll check it out. Yeah, cue Terminator music.

Richard Lowe: If you’re familiar with them, they make really good videos.

Enda Quealy: Okay, I’ll look it up.

Richard Lowe: They’re a German studio, but they’re all in English.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: If you can’t find it, let me know and I can send you a link.

Enda Quealy: There are some bits and pieces I’ve been looking at as well, just to, I think it’s like, because we’re doing our own copy, right? We’re doing our own sales pages and our website. We actually prefer doing that. But at the same time, we just want to go, okay, you know, what does good look like in the copywriter world, in the marketing world? And we always go, man, I hate that. That’s why we do our own thing. But then are we kind of, are we missing out on all of these different conversion tweaks all the way down?

Even though we prefer how this looks and we prefer how we read it.

Richard Lowe: Right.

Enda Quealy: But is someone going to, you know, read our kind of, you know, what we’ve toiled on for weeks and weeks and just not convert because it doesn’t have everything baked in? Who knows?

Richard Lowe: That’s the clue is the conversion.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, this is the thing. So we like to have some kind of reference as to, you know, what good looks like in terms of conversions, but do our own version of it.

Richard Lowe: Right. Right. Good idea. Good idea. Yeah. Converting is always a hard thing and it’s getting even harder the way the web is working out. I wrote a book. You can see it up there, The Day Your Website Died.

Enda Quealy: Okay.

Richard Lowe: And it goes over AEO and what it means and how it works. And what you have to do on your website to actually attract the engines to it so that you get cited.

Enda Quealy: Okay. I’ll grab it later because we were actually talking about that today.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. This is what I discovered while tuning my website. So it’s my own experiences and things. And it’s quite interesting. And it’s quite interesting how different SEO is from AEO. They’re completely different things. You need to have good SEO before you can have good AEO. They use the same structures, but AEO goes a lot further and it’s a lot different. Like if you ask a question to ChatGPT, you know, how do airplanes fly? It goes to a site that it thinks has the best answer right then and gives that answer, which is a question that’s on that site.

So your site needs to answer that question and needs to be recognized as the best possible answer. Well, how do you do that? And that’s what the book’s about.

Enda Quealy: I’ll definitely, yeah, I’ll definitely.

Richard Lowe: 15,000 people answer that question on their websites. How do you become the best one, the one that’s cited? It’s not easy.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. I mean, for us, right? Because, you know, outreach can be tricky. Because you’re not going to send someone a DM and go, hey, I’m bringing X, Y, Z people through a self-sabotage program. Would you be interested?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, yeah. No, no, I would immediately delete that.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Lowe: It would probably block you.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’d never just come out with it like that anyway, but it’s just like, okay, so our inbound strategy has got to have GPT searches and all that kind of stuff, given the nature of what we’re doing. So SEO and yeah.

Richard Lowe: AEO and GEO is what they’re called.

Enda Quealy: Right.

Richard Lowe: SEO, AEO and GEO. They’re all interrelated.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. So SEO, good SEO is a prerequisite, like you’re saying. Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Your site has to be findable. That’s what SEO does. So if your site’s not findable and it doesn’t have good structure, then it’s not going to be found and it’s not going to be cited. So you kind of have to have good SEO before you even think about AEO. That’s just kind of a prerequisite. And then you have to add things called schemas. That’s a pain in the butt, because it’s a language.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, right.

Richard Lowe: So I wrote a bunch of plugins with AI that put schemas in so that they’re all the same. They’re all appropriate and it checks them and makes sure they’re right and stuff. That took a while.

Enda Quealy: Right.

Richard Lowe: To decode what the hell they all mean and what they’re for and stuff like that.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. I was looking at your website. You have a much more kind of structured website than we would have. You’ve got tons of pages. Like even your, what would you call it? What’s the social link you’d have on Instagram?

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Enda Quealy: That just shows like a payload of, okay.

Richard Lowe: Oh yeah, yeah.

Enda Quealy: It’s like a, what do you call it?

Richard Lowe: Submenu.

Enda Quealy: No, not submenu. Some people use them as a kind of a standalone kind of, it’s just a little strip with all of your different links on it.

Richard Lowe: You mean it goes to a page that shows all of the different profiles and things that I go?

Enda Quealy: Yeah, So your website will be on that, but a book will be on it and all that kind of stuff. You usually see it on Instagram and for some reason it has run out of my mind now that I try and remember.

Richard Lowe: I can’t remember the term, but there’s a term for that. Oh, the link tree.

Enda Quealy: Link tree, yes. And I don’t like the idea.

Richard Lowe: Now, a thing with AEO is you want to make your site more credible. So one way to do that is to have everything on your site. Well, a link tree is not on my site. It’s on link tree. So what I did is I put it on my site. So I just told the AI, make me a plugin that does Linktree. And it made me a link tree. And then I put it in Cloudflare as a static page because it’s not going to change.

So I told it, put it on Cloudflare, did it, and now it’s super fast and it doesn’t hit my site at all, but it still looks like it’s on my site. Same with the contact form. I had AI write that. It’s very complicated, but I don’t want to have a third-party contact form because that’s not on my site.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. Have you heard of ScoreApp?

Richard Lowe: No.

Enda Quealy: It’s basically a quiz funnel.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Enda Quealy: A very well, very well thought out quiz funnel.

Richard Lowe: It’s called ScoreApp?

Enda Quealy: ScoreApp, yeah, by Daniel Priestley. So it’ll slice and dice the answers in a way that’s not super generic or meaningless, basically.

Richard Lowe: ScoreApp.com.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Okay, I’m there. Qualify leads, know who’s ready, personalize next steps. All right.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. So, you know, you can weight each response and push each one into various buckets as well. So, you know, it’s quite useful that way.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, interesting. I’ll take a look at this.

Enda Quealy: Thank you. Yeah, but building something like that out with AI will be fun. Because if you’re saying that… you’re already using a relatively complex architecture for different forms. Yeah. Another one as well I thought was interesting is ConvertBox. And I got that ages ago and we haven’t used it yet because I had ThriveCart.

Richard Lowe: I’ve used ConvertBox before. They got bought by somebody and I didn’t like what happened, so I stopped.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, they got bought by ThriveCart, though.

Richard Lowe: I thought it was. What is the name of it? I’ll remember. I’ll just go there.

Enda Quealy: ConvertBox. I thought they were still owned by the guys from ThriveCart, who then bought Vbout, which is my e-mail platform. So it was like, okay, is everything going to merge?

Richard Lowe: That’s what’s happening.

Enda Quealy: This is futile.

Richard Lowe: Private equity.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: I have a book about that.

Enda Quealy: Okay. I mean, I have all three. So it’ll be interesting to see if they can kind of become, you know, better bedfellows than they currently are.

Richard Lowe: My book is called The Enshittification of America.

Enda Quealy: Right, okay.

Richard Lowe: And it goes into private equity and what it’s doing to America.

Enda Quealy: Okay. And when did it start, about 250 years ago?

Richard Lowe: It’s relatively recent. Okay, it’s owned by Thrive Cart, you’re right.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: I wonder who owns ThriveCart?

Enda Quealy: I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I thought they, I actually thought they bootstrapped. But maybe they brought investors on board because I bought it when it was, you know, lifetime.

Richard Lowe: You bought Thrive Cart?

Enda Quealy: I bought ThriveCart. Yeah. Years ago. Oh. One thing I don’t like about it. Well, a few things I don’t like about it. One thing I don’t like about it is the lack of one click upsell.

Richard Lowe: It’s privately owned.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. Whereas something like SamCart would be hugely superior. You know, you put in your card details. Like I just can’t get over the fact that Thrivecart can’t do that. And they come back with a chirpy response. No, but if you, no, no, no. How come it doesn’t do it? Because that’s a pretty basic function for something that puts itself out there as funnel architecture or a checkout.

Richard Lowe: I’ve got a few things I bought that are based on ThriveCart.

Enda Quealy: Okay. Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Nothing big. Just that’s how they sold it. Better than the other affiliate marketing junk that’s out there.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I mean, the affiliate structure within ThriveCart isn’t bad.

Richard Lowe: That’s what I meant.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, the checkout experience is just, that’s obviously where it lets itself down. But even though they’re doing millions and millions and millions of dollars through it.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Fascinating. Yeah, I dabbled in JVZoo and WarriorPlus a long time ago. And they got so spammy and so scummy that I couldn’t stay anymore.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: And I’m talking about the people and the companies.

Enda Quealy: Okay.

Richard Lowe: They’re just there, feeding on the weaknesses of people. Gross.

Enda Quealy: Have you heard of an organization called JV Directory?

Richard Lowe: I have not.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, they’re decent people. Not affiliated. I’ve done a few things with people who are associated with them recently because I attended one of their kind of three day sprints. And of course, various experts were trotted in, given the spotlight and everyone had a pitch. So some of them were very good pitches. So I picked up some deals, and they actually have a networking thing in about 3 and a bit hours and given it’s after seven over here, I’m not sure if I’m going to be attending at 10pm. You never know.

If I get a third wind around that time, I might just stick my head in the door. But they’re approachable people who are into self-development and this is me just having met them recently, but there seems to be a very good ethos about the owners, the top brass, if you like, and then the gold and platinum people who seem to be involved with them for many, many years, right? Which tells its own story.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. So we’ve gone all over the planet in our various discussions. It’s very interesting. That’s fine. That’s the purpose of this podcast is kind of just have a chat about various things like we would if we were at a dinner party, you know. And I think it works very well. People seem to like it. We get a variety of subjects. We were talking about weather earlier, and it’s been an interesting year weather wise. It’s been weird this year. The big hurricanes in the Pacific and the no hurricanes in the Atlantic. We finally have one in the Caribbean. Looks like it might hit the Panhandle.

It’s far away from me. You’re not in its way, are you?

Enda Quealy: No, I mean, I’m in the south of England, so.

Richard Lowe: You’re in England. Okay, that’s right. That’s right.

Enda Quealy: South of England.

Richard Lowe: That would have to be a big hurricane.

Enda Quealy: Unless it comes through the English Channel, you know, we’ll be all right, I think.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Interesting. I’ve been reading about World War II a lot lately, an interesting war. Not what we thought.

Enda Quealy: In terms of who funded it and what was coming, the money that was coming out and the spare parts and all that kind of stuff that were going into the German war machine from American corporations.

Richard Lowe: All of the above. Just why it was fought, why the Nazis were fighting it. And they were truly evil. The Japanese at that time were truly evil also. It’s interesting when you actually see evil and you can confront it. I don’t think people really understand that the Nazis goal was to exterminate everybody who wasn’t of their race in Europe, everybody. And they were working on it. And one of the reasons why they lost the war is they were diverting resources to that. Sorry, I got into a dark place there.

Enda Quealy: I hadn’t heard this, because what we keep hearing now is that Churchill wanted war and did not make the appropriate peace deals. Yeah, that’s a modern.

Richard Lowe: That’s a modern interpretation by people who have ulterior motives that don’t believe that at all. Churchill was not a nice guy.

Enda Quealy: I get that, yeah.

Richard Lowe: I think that the UK needed that at that time. They didn’t need a nice guy. They needed somebody who would have a spine and say, no, we’re not going to do this. And Churchill was that person. Did he make mistakes? Well, Gallipoli comes to mind. What’s the other one? Oh, the invasion of Greece and Crete and stuff like that comes to mind.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Did he do good things? Well, you know, Dunkirk. They managed to get a bunch of troops off there. It probably saved the war. If he hadn’t done that, they probably would have lost like that. I don’t think he was in the same league as Stalin or Hitler by far. Did he want the war to happen? No, I don’t think so.

Enda Quealy: So has this research only recently come to light with regards to the ethnic cleansing of Europe?

Richard Lowe: Oh, no, that’s old.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: That’s well known. I mean, 6 million Jews.

Enda Quealy: No, beyond the Jews. So everyone except.

Richard Lowe: Oh, you just have to look at Poland.

Enda Quealy: Little Austrian painters.

Richard Lowe: I think that, and forgive me if the number’s wrong, a huge share of Poles were basically exterminated just because they were Polish and Ukrainians were exterminated, you know, and Russia did its own thing also. A World at Arms is the book that describes, it’s called A World at Arms, a global history of World War II. And it’s more about the what’s behind the war. It’s a big book, it’s a huge book. How many pages is it?

Enda Quealy: I can see it there. Global history.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it’s 1208 pages. It’s a big book.

Enda Quealy: Okay. Yeah. So weekend reading.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it took me a couple of weeks to get through it. And I read it twice. And it talks about all of the social stuff behind it, the plans, the plots, the resources, the whys and wherefores. And it goes really deep. I was very impressed when I read this. Another one is on the Japanese side of the Battle of Midway. I think it’s called Shattered Sword. And it describes why the Japanese lost. Yeah, Shattered Sword, the untold story of the Battle of Midway.

It describes why the Japanese lost the Battle of Midway and the differences in the way the operational differences, the difference in fire control, the difference in damage control, all these things tilted it against Japan. And it’s from the Japanese point of view using Japanese sources.

Enda Quealy: Right. So that seems to be a lot more popular as a book. It’s got a huge amount of feedback on Amazon.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Yeah, undoubtedly. That’s yeah, it’s actually highly recommended by a lot of people. And I would highly recommend both books. One of the problems with most of the books on the German side is that after the war the United States basically told all the German generals after the war, sit down and give us all your journals and things so that we can understand what happened. And of course, the German generals wrote it so that they looked good and Hitler looked bad. They’re extraordinarily biased. With A World at Arms, the author went back and looked at primary sources and skipped all that crap.

And thus it’s much more accurate to what really happened. Like Rommel wasn’t a nice guy. Rommel was a Nazi just like everybody else. He wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even a particularly great general. He had trouble with supply lines and strategy and stuff like that. So it’s kind of a different subject, but both books are to me highly recommended if you’re interested in World War II to give you more of an unbiased look.

Enda Quealy: This was the one I was looking for while I was listening to you. It’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, the story of the American financiers who provided the money and material Hitler used to launch World War II.

Richard Lowe: That’s pre-war, yeah. To my knowledge, they didn’t do so much during the war.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, there’s another one as well. I don’t know where that is. I remember getting both of them at the same time and sending them to my dad because he was big into World War Two history and stuff like that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I’ve got a nice library on it. I like World War Two history. Not that I like World War Two, you know, the history is great. Yeah, it’s awesome.

Enda Quealy: We’re living where the Battle of Britain happened. The Battle of Britain was all around here, and they sent across doodlebugs, which kind of sound cute like, but they’re basically drones with explosives. Oh, the V1. Yeah, they were trying to get them into London. But invariably, most of them just failed and just fell around the place. But there’s a huge amount of history around here.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Enda Quealy: We visited a few of them. Actually, I remember visiting one of them with my girlfriend and we were in there and the hailstones came down on us and we were in a little tin shed, and just the noise of it and kind of looking around at all these bits of planes and uniforms and guns and everything obviously decommissioned. But super interesting.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, the Battle of Britain is another interesting one. Sea Lion is an interesting one to look at. There’s no possible way that it could have worked. In Operation Sea Lion, Hitler was going to invade Britain, an amphibious invasion. It would never have worked, even if he’d won the Battle of Britain. Britain still has a Navy.

Enda Quealy: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Do you know how much work went into Normandy, the Normandy invasion? The Germans didn’t do anything like that. It’s something that was foolish to even consider.

Enda Quealy: Yeah. And when we went to Dover Castle as well, the amount of guns that would have been placed around there. We can see France across the way on a good day, right? Just across the channel. And sometimes it looks like it’s about 3 or 4 miles away, but it’s about 26 miles. and with the guns, even back then, they were able to hit targets across the way.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Enda Quealy: So they could protect the Channel back then.

Richard Lowe: We’ve got rockets now that could pick off a fly from 1,000 miles. Just look at what the Ukrainians are doing. Yeah, it’s interesting following the world now. We’re becoming a multipolar world. We were a bipolar world. Then you could probably add China to that eventually. And so we became a tripolar world. And now we’re a multipolar world. The United States is kind of becoming a hermit. That’s pretty inevitable now. And Europe’s probably going to build up some power. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are becoming a power together. In fact, Turkey’s giving some help to Saudi Arabia now, which is kind of interesting.

And, you know, other powers are growing and it’ll be interesting to see how it looks in a few years.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I mean, my son is thinking of moving to Poland.

Richard Lowe: Oh yeah.

Enda Quealy: So I just sent him the Duolingo app. I said, you’re going to have to speak the language.

Richard Lowe: Poland is one of the most powerful nations in Europe. And I would say in five years, it will be easily the most powerful nation in Europe. Because they know where the hammer falls first. There’s a movie, The Foreigner, a Jackie Chan movie. He’s an older guy, he’s Vietnamese in the movie, and it’s a super good movie. I mean, it’s your standard trope action movie, but worth watching. And I watched it like maybe five times and really liked the movie. It’s there’s nothing special about it other than Jackie Chan’s in it and it’s produced really well. And the Irish side of things is very interesting.

One-sided, but interesting.

Enda Quealy: Okay.

Richard Lowe: Somebody’s trying to reactivate the Irish, what is it? The Irish…

Enda Quealy: The IRA.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Enda Quealy: Right. Okay.

Richard Lowe: That’s the plot, after the Troubles. And the problem is, of course, they accidentally kill somebody Jackie Chan loves. It’s his daughter.

Enda Quealy: Oh, right. So they’re the bad guys?

Richard Lowe: That’s the inciting incident. He’s involved now and all he wants is some names and nobody will give them to him and he just gets rougher and rougher and rougher.

Enda Quealy: Does he meet the final big boss Irish guy?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, he does.

Enda Quealy: Oh man, I got to watch that.

Richard Lowe: It’s a fun movie. You know, don’t look at it for historical accuracy or anything, but they use the technology that’s kind of fun and kind of interesting. And Jackie Chan’s in it. I mean, he’s never made a bad movie as far as I’m concerned.

Enda Quealy: Yeah, I mean, he’s broken his ankle and continued, right? He jumped off a bus or something that was moving fast and broke his ankle. They had to keep rolling, obviously, because budgetary constraints and all that kind of stuff and timing. So he’s cast. So yeah, they had something that looked like a runner, like a sneaker. Just push, you know, it was made of material. wrapped around his cast just to make it look like he was wearing shoes kind of thing.

Richard Lowe: Yep. So that’s one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies. I wouldn’t call it a great movie by any means. It just has, the guy who plays the IRA person is some big name actor and I really like him and he does a good job.

Enda Quealy: I must have a look. Hang on a second, I’m just getting curious. Googles Jackie Chan IRA. Yeah, here we go. Pierce Brosnan. That’s hilarious. Pierce Brosnan is in Mobland at the moment and we’re really enjoying that. That’s hilarious. My son is at martial arts at the moment, but I’ll see if we can watch that movie later. Because Pierce Brosnan’s Irish accent in Mobland has been a running joke for us ever since you know, series one came out. It’s just hilarious, you know. So, you know, he hasn’t lived in Ireland for a long time.

And I’ve seen Irish actors who’ve gone away for decades and some are living in the US and Australia or whatever. And they come back and it’s like they try on their old accent again, but it’s hammed up and maybe they have like an accent coach or whatever that are going, It’s too subtle. Yeah, but that’s the way we talk over here. Nah, it’s got to be like Far and Away.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Well, we’re coming up to being on this for almost an hour now. So, any final words to our audience?

Enda Quealy: I guess, you know, if you want to experience what I do, just visit my website. There’s a 22-minute audio on there that you can use to go deep inside your mind.

Richard Lowe: What’s the link to the website?

Enda Quealy: EndaQuealy.com. That’s E-N-D-A-Q-U-E-A-L-Y dot com. So it’s my name.com. Or alternatively, if you just Google my name, I seem to be the only person with it at the moment.

Richard Lowe: That would make sense. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Well, thank you for watching the podcast and thank you for coming. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I am Richard Lowe and come back next time. Thank you.

Enda Quealy: Thanks for having me, Richard. Take it easy.

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