Unstoppable, AI Assisted

Richard Lowe: Hello, I’m Richard Lowe, and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m here with Lisa Hamilton, and we’re going to talk about AI and a whole bunch of other things. So buckle up and let’s have some fun. Good morning, Lisa. How are you today?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Good morning. I’m having an amazing day. I’m sitting here in a little cottage in the United Kingdom, so a little bit further away from you.

Richard Lowe: Interesting, yes. What’s the weather like over there, just out of curiosity?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: It’s been incredible this summer. We’ve had an amazing summer, and it’s sunny today, which is not always a thing in England. I’ve been out and fed my horses, and I’m back to talk to you.

Richard Lowe: Yes, I knew a lady who had four horses once. She lives in California, and she loved those horses. And they’re super expensive in California.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: They’re super expensive anywhere, I assure you.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. She was always doing GoFundMe and stuff to keep them going.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Resourceful. Good for her.

Richard Lowe: Very resourceful lady. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Okay. Hello, my name is Lisa Hamilton-Smith. I am a very strange new concept of person called a life and AI strategist. I’m one of those new titles that’s popping up as a result of AI. You’ll hear a lot of people called AI leads, AI consultants, AI strategists, which is good, and I’m kind of all those things as well. But as a fully qualified life coach for the last 15 years, and a performance coach in the equestrian world in my life before that, I bring a very different bent to AI.

I like to think I can help people have what they truly want with AI, instead of being forced to fit into what the prompts say, having to do this and having to do that. I’m here to help people create the life they want, using AI as a tool to do that.

Richard Lowe: So you help individuals, not companies.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Correct. I’m not a corporate beast.

Richard Lowe: That’s cool. So how’d you get started in that?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Like I said, I am 62, so I’m getting older, and I wanted to retire as a life coach. My plan was that in my retirement I would just work as a life coach. I fully qualified 15 years ago, but I was so busy as a performance equestrian coach that I didn’t really do much with it. Then of course, during COVID, we were all stuck and couldn’t go anywhere, so I started to work more on the life coaching. It was like, great, I’ve got this in my back pocket, so let’s do this.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: And then I had a session with my coach, a lovely guy called Kane Novak in Australia. This is about two and a half years ago, and he said to me, you need to go and create some master classes and some courses for your life coaching. Go and use ChatGPT. And I went, how do I do that? It was bonkers how basic this was. He said, we’re going to make a recording. You’re going to send it to YouTube. You’re going to get YouTube to transcribe it, because we didn’t have any other tools then. It was back at the beginning.

It might be longer ago than I’m thinking. And then you’re going to put the transcription in ChatGPT.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: So that was my first experience. I stuck the transcription in ChatGPT, and it’s like, woo, it’s telling me all this stuff about who I am. It was about my story. He’s a story coach. He helps people define who they are by their story and then become more visible because of the story. So it took my story, and I’m like, this is incredible. And then he said, right, now you need your masterclass. So I’m like, okay, make me a masterclass. I’m liking this. Create me the slides. Back then the slides weren’t as good as they are now, but it still created me some Google Slides.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: And I am non-tech. I’m very blonde. I have not been a tech person my whole life. Every time my computer fails, I’m like, what do I do? I was always like, how do I send an email? I was one of those. So for me to end up being in AI is extraordinary. It’s because AI is my best friend. As a result of creating masterclasses and courses, I think I wrote 50 courses in about four months, just because I could, not because I sold them. Let’s do a course on manifestation. Let’s do a course on quantum physics. I just went mad.

But in that time I did something really, really important: I taught myself how to use AI, because I was creating. And I tell this to everyone. If you’re listening right now and you’re thinking, I need to learn how to do it right, no. You just need to use it. That’s the secret with AI. Like most things: you want to learn to run, you run. You want to learn to swim, you swim. I started that way, and that led me down a rabbit hole.

Richard Lowe: Interesting, interesting. My story is similar. I’m a writer, as you know, a ghostwriter and a writer. And when I jumped into AI, at first I resisted a little bit, because I’m a tech guy, and I was like, this newfangled thing, it can’t be that good. It was the early versions, probably three years ago, and they were awful, but they worked. They were awful compared to now, ChatGPT 3.0 or 3.5 or something like that. And then I just started using it to help. One thing that I do is lots of interviews with my clients, like 10, 20, 50.

I’m not going to go through those by hand. That’s what I used to do. I just throw them into ChatGPT, or Claude now, and it gives me outlines and all that kind of stuff. I still write the book, but going through all that data is just a pain in the butt to do manually.

Richard Lowe: That’s what I use it for, as a digital assistant. And that’s what I preach to people: use it as a digital assistant. Use it as something that helps you, like making master classes. Something that’s pure grunt work, and you’re going to be doing great. It’s not creative. It’s never going to write a great book, at least not the way it looks now. But it will write outlines, and it will create plans for the next meeting, and it will do emails just fine, and so forth. That’s what I use it for.

And that was my road into it: helping me get the volume up so I could get the income up. Clients love it. Not one has had a problem with my use of it yet, because I’m very open about it. That’s part of it. You’ve got to tell your client exactly what you’re doing. I’m using it for this and this and this. They get the AI outline, they know it’s AI, and they know that AI has these problems. So they go through it and review it, laugh at some of the AI mistakes and correct it. And then we go manually after that.

Richard Lowe: I’ve learned to use AI to help me as a writer and in life. I took my medical records and put them into AI, and it came up with some interesting things. I had it come up with a supplement plan for me. Of course, I double checked it all, because I’m not stupid. It came up with a supplement plan that was very good for the various things that I wanted to do with my body, and it checked my medications and found some interactions, and I talked to the doctor about them, things like that. At first I was worried about privacy and stuff.

And then finally I realized, I’m 65, I don’t give a shit if anybody knows that I have diabetes. Who cares?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Who cares about what medications you’re taking? I mean, really.

Richard Lowe: Right. Nobody’s going to say, oh no, they’re going to use that against me. I’m 65. I don’t care.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You and I, being post-60, we don’t care, right? That’s the wonderful thing. We can just let go and say, well, this is who I am now. That’s one of the things I love about being a bit older. I’ve had my life. I’ve had an incredible time. And now it’s just about creating the future, and nothing matters in the same way it did before.

Richard Lowe: It’s about creating the future and making the best life that I have continue to be the best life that I have, and staying active and things. I’m convinced a lot of the older people who get ill are getting ill because they’re not doing anything of value. They’re puttering around the house, watching TV, playing on a smartphone. I think that’s what makes them ill. It’s a lot of sitting.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Sitting is deadly. And a lot of eating.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that’s one of my problems. I’m a ghostwriter, so I sit on my butt all day.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: You’d have to ghostwrite without sitting on your butt. Walk around ghostwriting. But you presumably have to type, so that’s the problem.

Richard Lowe: I just need to get up every couple of hours and walk, and that helps a lot. I’m visiting all the local bookstores and libraries and things and photographing them for my website to add a little local pizzazz, because it turns out a lot of my clients are local.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: They like to meet you and work with you. Do you ghostwrite anything, or do you specialize in a particular area of ghostwriting?

Richard Lowe: Almost anything. I won’t ghostwrite porn, obviously. That’s not my area of expertise, so to speak. I don’t ghostwrite revenge memoirs, where a spouse is trying to get revenge on their ex. Don’t do that. And I had an unusual one, where a person who was a mafia informant for the FBI wanted me to write his book. He was going to pay me a lot of money. He explained what he wanted, and he was going to name names. And I said, I’m going to have to turn you down, because I really can’t spend that money with a bullet in my head.

And he said, well, I’ll just keep you anonymous. Don’t worry. I said, you’re naming all the confidential informants, people you promised you’d keep anonymous, and you expect me to believe you?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yeah, it’s not worth it. I love it. You can’t spend it with a bullet in your head. That’s a very good statement.

Richard Lowe: Hard to spend. Yeah, it makes it difficult.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: So the AI is just for your collation of the information, and then you write it by hand, basically?

Richard Lowe: It’s for the tasks around writing. To do lists, collations, reminder emails, things like that. There are a bazillion tasks that are just grunt work. Spreadsheets for writing fiction. Oh, to answer your question, yeah, I write fiction and nonfiction. I’ve written a few novels on my own. I’ve written 113 books under my own name, a couple under pseudonyms, and then 54 for clients. Actually, I’m on my 56th book for clients. And that’s all in 12 years.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: That’s incredible. No wonder you have a podcast, because you’re what we’d call a super niche expert in the field of ghostwriting.

Richard Lowe: And I’m technical. I spent 33 years in tech, so I can write all those kinds of books. That’s one reason why I got into AI, because it’s tech. I’m a tech geek, and it’s techie. So you do life coaching. If I came to you and I needed some help on something or other, what would you do?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I have a specific niche, because if you’re just a life coach, you’re a commodity. We all have to have niches. I specialize in helping people become unstoppable. That relates back to my story, because I went to America with $1,000 in my pocket and created my life in California, funnily enough, as you mentioned it earlier. I lived there, I got married, I got divorced, I came home. There’s a little bit more to that story, in that I unfortunately married a man who was abusive. I didn’t know it at the time. I was very young and very naive.

I was his fifth wife, and it turns out he hurt all of us. I learned the hard way that it’s not good to be with people who have power and control issues and don’t accept you for who you are. So the most important thing in my life ever since then has been: I am who I am. Accept me or get out of my life, because I’m not going to be told I’m not good enough, I’m not this, I’m not that. I have a kind of trigger on that one. But it taught me a lot.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: And it wasn’t all bad. He was a very clever man and quite wise in some ways, but he had this terrible temper. He would flip, almost like a split personality. But when he wasn’t being that, he was charming. And he’d worked with Werner Erhard of Landmark Education. He’d been his right hand man. So he knew a lot about personal development, and this is relevant to how I got into life coaching. How about this story? I was on a plane reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

I got on the bus from the plane, and there was a man sitting opposite me, and he said, oh, you were reading the book. He’d seen me on the plane reading it. I used to talk to anyone. I love talking to people. I was going to get my car from the long-term car park, and I asked him what he did. And he said, I help people’s lives work. I’m like, really? Wow. I was an adventurous, curious person. Tell me more. But I got to my car, so there was no time to tell me more. He said he worked with Werner Erhard and Landmark Education.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: So I go home to my husband and I say, I met this fascinating guy, and he said he worked with Werner Erhard from Landmark Education. And he went, yeah, I used to do that. I’m like, what? He’d never told me. He’d evaporated that part out of his life, and to this day I don’t quite know why. I said, well, I really want to know more. And he said, well, go to one of these evenings about it. So I went, and I was like, I want to do this. I want to learn how to be everything I can be.

I did the Forum and something called the Advanced Course. I was very, very lucky, because it was expensive, and my husband bought it for me, and I’m very grateful to him for that. Part of it is you learn to say who you are as a possibility in your life. And I said I was the possibility of people living their dreams.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Because apart from my husband’s split personality, when life was good, life was very good. I had an incredible life. I lived in a house looking over the bay. I had a lovely life. That’s why it was very tricky. But there was this flip side, this dark side to it. It began me on a journey, which I think is my mission: to help people be who they are and live who they’re meant to be. And it’s a sort of twist that he’s the one who helped me get into personal development.

I began a lifelong love of learning how the mind works, psychology, Tony Robbins and Bob Proctor and all that sort of thing, and I became a fully trained NLP coach.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: But it was because of what I learned, and then when he flipped on me, that I had to change who I was. I had to realize that who I was was somebody who believed I wasn’t good enough, which is also why I was into personal development, right? I was thinking I’m not good enough, I need to spend all this money to learn how good I am. And after that experience, I was never going to go there again, and ultimately I wanted to help people not go there. Being unstoppable is the secret.

Women particularly, and men get abused too, I’ve worked with a few men who’ve been in bad relationships, but women particularly tend to give up and believe they can’t have what they want. They stay with the husband, they stay in a bad job, they stay in a bad situation. And I’m here to say, no, you don’t have to. Let’s find a way you can make more money, because whether we like it or not, good or evil, money helps you get power over your own life, to have choices. It is a necessary thing.

It doesn’t make you happy, but it’s what’s called a hygiene factor, something that you need, without which you might get sick, like having to drink dirty water. But obviously there’s a point where clean water is okay. You don’t need fancier and fancier water. You’re not going to get more well if you buy 50 pound water, right?

Richard Lowe: Money is energy.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yeah, exactly. So as a consequence of all of that, there were experiences, and my husband did end up in jail, sadly. There was an actual moment where I was lying on the floor thinking, is this it for me? And I made a sort of split second choice. This is not it. I’m going to come back from this. My life isn’t over. I was only in my early 30s. I’m going to create a new world, and I’m going to help others do the same. And that’s what I do.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Unstoppable You is AI assisted. Of course it is. I started doing everything completely manually, taking the notes manually, doing all that sort of thing. But don’t forget, I created all these programs about limiting beliefs and manifestation. And I’m very neuroscience. I’m not fluffy, you know, imagine, imagine. I read Neville Goddard, I work with all that, but I bring it into the science, because my dad was a chemist. I’m a science-based person.

I applied all of that to every client, and I created a way for AI to help me very quickly, using AI and their story and what I’m interviewing them for, getting to the bottom of it. It’s just an incredible tool. And same as you said, I tell my clients, this is all going into AI. And 99.9% of them have no problem. They don’t want their name in it, obviously. But they’re okay with it because they understand the power of what I’m doing. Sometimes I literally have the AI listen to the sessions.

Vishen Lakhiani does that, and a lot of the coaches at Mindvalley do that now. At first I was horrified. I can’t do that. But it makes such a difference, and it also means I can answer them immediately. That was the beginning of AI in the life coaching.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: The Unstoppable You program helps people get out of their own way to have what they truly want. And every client who does Unstoppable You now says, tell me more about the AI, because they see what I’m doing and they hear my stories, and they get more and more interested. So I started something called the Dream Team AI Academy. That’s for solopreneurs and small businesses, not big corporates. Someone who has maybe one to five employees, normally, max. I help them find ways to make themselves more successful in that business with AI, whether it’s saving them time or money, assistants, or even agentic workflows.

So I do all that.

Richard Lowe: Well, very cool. It sounds like you’re very busy.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I am very, very busy. And on top of that, I’ve decided to do a podcast called AI and Money. At the end of the day, I’m not a builder. You have a tech background. I am so not a tech background. What I love doing is being the voice that helps people understand that AI is a tool that can help them live their dreams. I’m all about living your dreams, and AI is just a tool to help them get there. I want to unleash that possibility, to use Tony’s term, so people aren’t afraid and they use it effectively. That’s all.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Well, several topics came up there in my mind. First of all, I wrote a book about my early childhood called My Life in Crazytown, which was about living in a family where the dad was very abusive. Mom went along with it. I remember running away from home because I couldn’t take it anymore when I was eight years old, getting a couple of miles away and then realizing that I was leaving my baby sister alone at home with him. So I came back and stayed there. That’s one of the things in the book. It goes into all of the things that happened.

It’s very open: here’s what happened. Some of it is very uncomfortable. But somebody’s got to write this stuff so people know what it’s like. In those days, there was nobody to report him to. Nobody would have cared.

Richard Lowe: Now, I was married for 12 years. She passed away. And it turns out that, although she was never diagnosed, she was a covert narcissist. Her son was an overt narcissist. So I had both in the house at the same time. And the thing about narcissists is they’re very nice until they’re not. Then they explode, and then they’re very nice again, and they don’t even realize they exploded. To them it’s, what are you upset about? You deserved it, or something like that. To them, it’s perfectly normal. So I lived with that for 12 and a half years.

She got sick, and I had to deal with that. So abusive relationships I know about. Now I’d just rather not have any, because after getting burned so many times, why bother?

Richard Lowe: But I did write a book called The Relationship Bullshit Men Fall For. It talks about how the red pill, the blue pill, all the stuff you hear about, is all bullshit, and here’s what men really need to do. Here’s all the stuff they’re being trained to do, to be macho and so on, and that’s just bullshit. And being controlled is bullshit, all of the different things. I think it’s a pretty good book. It goes through all of the various scenarios and so forth. I like to write. They just kind of flew off my fingers.

Richard Lowe: And one of the cool things about using AI for writing is that with a novel, you can put your novel in and say, did I have any characters that I forgot about? Sometimes you have characters who just disappear. Game of Thrones had a lot of them. They had this big intro, and then they’re gone and you never hear from them again. What happened to that guy? Where’d that girl go? It helps you with that. Or: tell me the slow parts of this novel that I could speed up. You don’t have it do the work for you.

Just tell me what I can improve in this novel. Otherwise, you’re doing it all by hand, and that just takes time to do exactly the same thing the AI can do for you. So you don’t have AI write it.

Richard Lowe: But the most interesting thing I’m running into: I wrote a series called Dogpile. That’s where everybody piles on to one person. And if you go into a writing group nowadays, with only a couple of exceptions, and you even breathe the word AI, they will pile on you.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yeah, they’re mad at you. They’re like, how can you do it? You’re a traitor. You can’t use AI.

Richard Lowe: Oh, you’re scum. You’re a traitor. You’re awful. You’re going to hell. You name it. The language is there. And it’s like, people, it’s a tool. You can use it or not. If their book is written by AI and people like it, they’ll buy it. If they don’t, they won’t. What are you complaining about?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Exactly, exactly. You would know more about this than me, but doesn’t Amazon look at whether a book is too AI written, and if it is, it doesn’t allow it? Is that right?

Richard Lowe: No, it doesn’t care. You have to disclose whether or not it’s AI, and the reader’s not told. You just tell Amazon, I used AI with this. That’s it. It doesn’t care. It makes money off your book regardless. Although now they’re kind of fighting it, because they’re only allowing two books to be entered per week. And that’s because I could, if I wanted to, generate 20 books in a day with AI and upload them all to Amazon. They restricted that because they were overwhelmed with all these affiliate marketing places and scam places: here’s a tool, you can make a book and make lots of money.

So people started making 30, 40, 50, 60 books a day, hundreds of books a week. Amazon got swamped with junk, so they had to restrict it somehow. I don’t think that’s necessarily the right way, but I don’t know what the right way is.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: And they also haven’t figured it out. That’s interesting. I didn’t know that, because I thought it did. LinkedIn, for example, goes through and looks at whether it’s too much. I’m unashamedly using AI all the time. It’s what I do, right? I teach people how to do social media agent flows. So of course I’m using AI, but I don’t use it all the time. I use AI to make sure I’ve got some consistency, and then I do some by hand. That way I’m always present. It’s not a matter of AI doing everything for me.

And when I look at my posts, some of my AI posts do quite well and some don’t. Some of my handwritten ones do well and some don’t. It’s like you say, it’s what works. If it gets results, who cares?

Richard Lowe: I just had a thought. Maybe you’re AI right now. You’re just an AI. You’re not a real person.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Well, I promise you I’m real. But you know there’s a coin called Worldcoin in crypto? Do you know anything about crypto?

Richard Lowe: I know this much about crypto.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Okay. Well, there’s obviously Bitcoin, the main one, and then there are all these alternative coins, and one is called Worldcoin. Worldcoin’s purpose in life is to prove humanity.

Richard Lowe: Oh, interesting.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: The system behind it is to scan your eyeballs. You go somewhere and get your eyeball scanned, and then you have a token which says that you are you and I am me, and we can prove our humanity. It was quite valued when it first came out, because people liked the idea, and it’s died down since. But I think in the end that will be quite an important thing, because we can’t tell. I saw a cute little video on LinkedIn the other day of a puppy adopting a rabbit, and it wasn’t real.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, there’s a lot of that now.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yeah, and people get fooled. You get people saying, so cute, so cute. So again, you see, it’s hard. How do we tell?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I’m much more iffy on the AI videos, because, first of all, they’re usually obviously AI. Very, very obviously. But my attitude is I just block it. I just block that channel. Problem solved. If I don’t want to see it, I don’t have to look. I don’t have to dogpile on some poor soul who made them. I just don’t visit the channel. They get one less hit. If a lot of people do that, they go out of business.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Avatars, though. A lot of people now are camera shy, and they don’t want to do what we’re doing and be on camera. So they use a script with an avatar that looks like them. I mean, it really does look like them. If you spend enough money, you can get a really realistic one. It’s all about film production. I’m just curious what your view is on that.

Richard Lowe: In that case, as long as it’s disclosed that this is not really me, then it’s fine. It’s the same as using Photoshop to make yourself an avatar. You’re using a tool to make something that’s not quite you. You Photoshopped your picture, Photoshopped out all those wrinkles and made the hair a little blonder. Mine used to be red, by the way.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: You could put more hair on, couldn’t you?

Richard Lowe: Back in the 60s they had the spray paint hair, remember that?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Yes. You had a bald patch, and you sprayed the back of your head so it didn’t show.

Richard Lowe: And it really was just black paint. It must have been awful, but people bought enough of it that it was on the infomercials. I don’t think they do that anymore, but it was pretty silly.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I think bald is fine now. People are going bald on purpose. My son, bless his heart, is 25, and he just decided his hair was so bad that he cut it all off.

Richard Lowe: I don’t care about hair. It’s what I’ve got, and I’m not going to worry about it. Never had any problem with women going, oh, you’re bald. Never had any problem with women at all, as far as finding women. That’s one reason why I wrote the book. How do you pick up women, so to speak, or how do you meet women? I get asked that question sometimes, because I’m a photographer and I photograph women. I haven’t done it in a while, but I’ve done something like 2,000 photo shoots of women. And people say, how do you talk to women?

I say, well, first of all, you just go up and talk to them. But I don’t know what to say. If I saw you somewhere and I wanted to talk to you, at the supermarket, I’d say, that’s a nice hat. What does it mean? And there you go. You’ve started a conversation. You keep it away from the creepy stuff.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Starting a conversation like that is exactly what I recommend people do with AI. People are like, I don’t know what to say to it. I say, just start. And if you don’t know where to start, say: hi, I’m Lisa. I don’t know much about using AI. This is the first time I’ve ever worked with you, Claude. I have a business. I’m doing X, Y and Z, and I’d like to know how you can help me. It’s as simple as that. Do you know how many people do not think of doing that?

They write to me in my academy and say, Lisa, I really want to achieve this thing. How do I do it? And I’m like, have you asked Claude? Ah, no, good point. Exactly. Come to me after you’ve asked Claude. Then we can discuss what Claude suggested. We can work together as a trio and work it out. I think AI is like a business strategist. You’re not going to have it write your business for you, like you don’t have it write your books, but you use it to implement.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: This morning, I don’t know if you’re familiar with GEO. There was SEO, and now there’s GEO and AEO, which is basically awareness in the LLMs.

Richard Lowe: I have a book about it.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Oh, well, then you know all about it. I didn’t know a lot about it. But a client came to me with it, and I went to Claude and said, write me a master class. And then I have it. There is nothing you and I can’t know now. Obviously, it’s not the same as being a scientist who’s been studying physics for 50 years. But on the surface, we can get a lot of what they know very quickly. They obviously have the depth of experience. But we can end up being, what’s the word? A polymath.

Because you can know a lot about lots of things, because we have this access.

Richard Lowe: I’m a polymath. I learn about everything.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I rather thought you might be, given what I’m learning about you.

Richard Lowe: Which is because I’m ADHD. I tend to be scattered all over the universe. And I only found out I’m ADHD a year and a half ago, which was very amusing, because all the mysteries in my life, all the stuff I’d been trying to get therapy on for thousands of hours, as soon as I found out I’m ADHD, I went, oh yeah, that explains everything. Done.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: How did you find out? How did you come across working it out?

Richard Lowe: I ran across a test, took the test, and it said you’re 97% ADHD. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. All the symptoms: face blindness, check. Time blindness, check. Hypervigilance, hyperfocus, check, check. I’d say that’s true. Everything was explained, and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. All those thousands of hours of therapy, and all I needed to find out was that I was ADHD. Done.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: It’s so true. I had a client with exactly the same story. She’s neurodivergent, autistic and ADHD, so she has lots of other diagnoses as well.

Richard Lowe: Me too, me too.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Oh, okay, so you understand. I’m very, very friendly with my clients. That’s just the way I am. Let’s really get to know each other so I can help you. I get more out of them. I get to really see behind the mask, and of course masking is what women do with ADHD. She was telling me all this stuff, and I’m thinking, gosh, I do that. Oh, I do that. Oh, I do that. So what do I do? I write my own test with AI. Every time I have an idea, I’m like, let’s do it with AI.

So I created a little ADHD test app, and ditto, I got 38 out of 40. Then I went to the doctor and said, I think I might be. And same thing, 38 out of 40. There’s no question in my mind. It becomes obvious. But I didn’t know. I’m scatty, as they would say, right? And I’d ask, what’s wrong with me? Why am I scatty? But it’s because, like you, I’m thinking this, thinking that, thinking that. And if we harness that energy, it becomes a superpower. It’s a form of genius. And then we stop judging ourselves, and it’s amazing.

So well done you for coming to terms with it, and me too.

Richard Lowe: The subtitle of my book My Life in Crazytown is How I Turned ADHD Into My Superpower. That’s the subtitle.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Great minds think alike. What can I tell you?

Richard Lowe: Yep. I’ve got a funny story there. I go to restaurants alone, because I like myself and it’s fun, and I read a book. I walked into this restaurant, and one of the waitresses comes up to me, puts her arms around me and says, hey, Richard, how you doing? I have no idea who she is. And she’s getting a lot more friendly than she should have gotten, and I’m uncomfortable. And she says, you don’t remember who I am. I said, honestly, I have no idea.

She says, well, a few years ago, we spent several years walking around the block every single day, talking for hours at a time. I said, okay. And then she told me her name. Didn’t ring a bell. Her face didn’t ring a bell. It’s ADHD face blindness. Of course, I faked it and said, I remember, blah, blah, blah, but I didn’t remember squat. The way ADHD works, as I understand it, is if it’s not important to you, you don’t remember it. The brain doesn’t keep it. It’s in the moment. We obviously didn’t say anything that had any importance during that whole time. We were just chatting.

I don’t remember those things. I don’t remember the people. I don’t remember the face. I don’t remember anything.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: So interesting. It’s a whole brave new world out there. I think it’s just gone undiagnosed for years and years, and people are called distracted or crazy or whatever. And I have something called rejection sensitivity. That was why the abusive relationship got to me, because instead of walking away, I’d be like, oh no, I’m being rejected, and I would try super, super hard to make it work, which meant I didn’t leave. It was a therapist who helped me, and her wonderful thing was that she helped me re-establish my value as a human being by getting me to do what I love. I love horses.

I was a horse trainer, but I wasn’t doing enough of it. So she said, come on, Lisa, build your business. As I built my business, I got more feedback that I wasn’t rejected. I got more positive feedback, and that gave me the strength ultimately to recognize what was in front of me. That’s my lovely Labrador. I had a lovely Labrador called Mocha, and he helped. He used to come to therapy with me. He was super cool.

Richard Lowe: I’ve got a cat named Zeya. Zeya number two. Zeya number one died, so I got Zeya number two.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Is it a moggy, or a breed of cat?

Richard Lowe: She’s just a mutt. She’s a mixture of who knows what. I think they call it American shorthair. Gray hair. She’s sitting right over there.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: It’s a lovely thing about podcasting, that you have your animals. My lab is curled up on my feet over here, and my Bengal is lying on the kitchen table. I have a Bengal cat, and they’re like dogs. He doesn’t walk around the farm anymore, but he used to walk with the dog. It’s very cool.

Richard Lowe: Anyway, we’ve been doing this for 45 minutes. We’re coming up to the end. Anything you would like to say to the listeners before we hang up?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I would love to let people know that they can find me at the Dream Team AI Academy. I’ve added the AI in because that’s what I mostly do now. LisaHamiltonSmith.com is a very, very easy place to find me. Just go to my name, and you can track me down from there. I’d love to talk to anyone who needs help being unstoppable or wants to use AI to live their dreams.

Richard Lowe: Be sure and take your energy pills before you talk to her. You’re one bundle of energy, that’s for sure.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Oh, brilliant. It has been so lovely to meet you and share your stories. Can I find your books now? Where do I find them? Are some of them on Amazon?

Richard Lowe: On my website. I sell them on my website. They’re on Amazon also. This one here, and this one there. That’s about AEO.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Amazing. Well, I definitely need to go and get that one. And you need to come on my podcast to talk about that. You’re obviously an expert in it, and that would be amazing on the AI and Money podcast.

Richard Lowe: Can you email me an invitation, and I’ll be sure to do that?

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: I will absolutely do that afterwards. It has been such a pleasure to meet you.

Richard Lowe: What a pleasure. Yes, I’ve had a great time. Thank you.

Lisa Hamilton-Smith: Take care. Bye-bye now.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for coming to the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. This is Richard Lowe, and I’ve been with Lisa Hamilton. We’ve been having a great conversation. Join us for the next one. Thank you.

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