AI Says It in Three Times the Words

Richard Lowe: Good day. This is Richard Lowe and you’re listening to Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m here with Riley Kaminer and we’re going to talk about some pretty cool stuff today. So Riley, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Riley Kaminer: Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for taking the time and having me on. Yeah, so I mean, I’ve been a journalist for 15 years, always writing about tech, business, startups, investors, that sort of thing. And about over the last five years or so, I’ve been ghostwriting as well. So writing a bit for kind of the same people I would write about for the kind of news publications that I would write, but instead of writing it for a publication, writing it directly for those people. So entrepreneurs, investors, those sort of people. And it’s been great. A lot of kind of shorter form content that I do.

So like more like newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn, that sort of thing. It’s been a really great way of kind of sharing stories that otherwise wouldn’t get shared. And I still do a bit of journalism to keep those muscles strong.

Richard Lowe: I understand. Yeah, I’ve never done journalism.

Riley Kaminer: Consider yourself lucky.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it never really appealed. I’m more into the long form content. I write books. The short form never really appealed. I’ve done it for a while.

Riley Kaminer: It’s a different game. I mean, I think, you know, the advantage you have is you can really go deep in a subject. You know, I think the difficult part with a lot of what I do is it gets really interesting and then the article ends sometimes. I do have that sensation. But, you know, they’re quite compatible because I find a lot of people who have written extensively and in short form can then take that and much more easily create something longer form.

But then also vice versa, where if someone’s worked with someone like you and has a really great manuscript, that’s amazing for me because I can take bits and pieces of it and create content around that for LinkedIn and other places.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, right now I have a client, we’re meeting once a week in a library, I interview her, come back, write a chapter, then go repeat the process. It will be done by the end of the year. It’s coming out to be a pretty good book. She likes it, which is the important part. And I do one chapter and send it to the client and get it back. That way I don’t get too far ahead. And then they get like halfway in and they don’t like it. They don’t do that with me because we’re monitoring it every step as we go. So.

But it’s different than the short form. I’ve done that for a while. I did a hundred LinkedIn profiles, give or take, for LinkedIn makeover. And I didn’t really like the short form stuff. Doesn’t appeal.

Riley Kaminer: It’s a lot more temporary. There’s not a lot of room for evergreen content. You really have to move with the, you just sway with the winds.

Richard Lowe: And that’s the area that’s been more hit with AI is the short form. The longer form is much more difficult, if not impossible, to make anything good with AI. In fact, all the recent customers come to me, they tried it in AI, they hated it, and they come to me and say, please fix this.

Riley Kaminer: 100%. I’ve had a lot of that too.

Richard Lowe: AI just doesn’t work for them. You can make AI work a little bit, but it’s still not going to be good.

Riley Kaminer: Well, you know, I mean, think about what makes a good book. I mean, a lot of it is telling a story from start to finish. I think the issue that a lot of the AI has is they never kind of want to finish, you know, they make it keep going. And I think also even they struggle to start a bit, like it feels very abrupt sometimes. No, you can tweak that. I mean, you know, even in our business, like I definitely use AI as a tool.

But I think if you just, you know, send whatever AI pops out, you know, you’re going to be pretty disappointed.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I found that, well, my opinion is if you’re not using AI in some way to improve your productivity, I noticed I said improve your productivity, not write your book or write your stories. If you’re not doing that, then you’re going to obsolete yourself. You need to do that in a sane way. Like I’ll maybe do 50 interviews with somebody. I had one client who had 50 interviews. There’s no way I’m going to read those again. So I just shove it into AI with his permission, of course, came out with some outlines. He loved them. And then I wrote the book myself.

But at least that grinding task of reading through all of those transcripts and trying to make some kind of sense of them is no longer something I have to do.

Riley Kaminer: 100%. Now I’m curious from an editing perspective, have you used AI at all for that? Whether it’s more like developmental editing or more proofreading anything along those lines.

Richard Lowe: I’ve used it a bit for that and it does. It’s not a great editor because it has the same problem that writing with it has. Now the problem with writing with AI is not what most people think. The problem with writing with AI is number one, it follows a strict pattern that it learned from Reddit and things like that, which were terrible writers. Sorry, Reddit people that, you know, that’s just the way terrible, mediocre to terrible. Or it’s very conservative. It tries to get everything to the middle.

So you’re going to get an article that seems to read fine, but it doesn’t make any real points. And you know, as a journalist, you’ve got to hit somebody hard in the face. Right up front. You know, there was an accident. Then 50,000 people died and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you got to hit them with that stuff hard and you want to do it right up front to get their attention. AI is not going to do that by default. AI is going to write a nice namby-pamby, kind of easy to read article or book that’s boring.

And everything’s going to be the same. All the chapters are the same length. They all go the same way. If you’re writing fiction, they’re going to be start, middle, end, very neat. Chapters will be the same length. It’s a poor writer. Does that make sense?

Riley Kaminer: 100%. I think my issue that I’m seeing today is it extends everything very long. So things you could say in X number of words, for some reason it decides to take three X to make the point.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, well, it does that too.

Riley Kaminer: And kind of meanders and it repeats itself. It’s just very strange.

Richard Lowe: It’s the way that LLMs are designed and it’s inherent in the design of an LLM. That’s large language model. It’s just the way it works. And I don’t know how anybody’s going to get around it.

Riley Kaminer: So one interesting area that I hear a lot about that I haven’t explored that much is agents. So kind of moving away just from the kind of chat interface, but having kind of fleets of workers, let’s say, doing specific tasks for you. I’m curious if you’ve explored any of that or seen any of it kind of working or any kind of agents, your thoughts on any of that?

Richard Lowe: I’ve just started getting into it. It’s fascinating. You can create agents that do things for you that are more autonomous, I guess. It’s not you giving instructions, it’s the agent. But I haven’t really gotten further than that. I’ve got a whole series of articles on my website that goes into the layers of AI. I tore it apart. So there’s like eight layers. So you start with the word, everybody’s focused on the words, you know, in the digital realm, something that’s very common for AI. If you see that AI, you know, nobody writes that. That’s just the first layer.

Then you go down through these other eight layers. And I have this page that I have has a JavaScript, and it just tears each layer off as you click so you can see exactly what the layers are. And when you come out, you come out with a halfway decent book. But let’s circle back to the editing. Trying to hand edit or even use AI to edit something is like playing whack-a-mole. You fix one thing and another thing comes up.

Riley Kaminer: I was having this exact issue recently with SEO. So I mean, SEO is something that I feel like is pretty important, especially today where you like in these other terms, AEO and GEO, basically trying to attract the AI models, not just, you know, Google’s, you know, crawlers. My issue with it has been whenever you ask even the same LLM, you know, platform, give me an audit of this from an SEO perspective. They just keep telling you different things. It just doesn’t end like you just said.

And then I had one issue where one of our clients is very kind of on top of this and very focused on it. And so I would do all this whole process. Everything would look good from my end, according to, let’s say, ChatGPT. Then she would do it in, I think she’s using Copilot, for example. And it says everything’s trash. So it’s really, it’s really, it feels just like a moving target that you can never hit.

Richard Lowe: Well, that’s because it’s generative AI. So it’s going, it’s literally going to be different every single time. I could go in and say, who, what ghostwriter would you recommend in technology? One of them would come up with me, go to another session. It’ll come with somebody else, even though it’s exact same prompt. And that’s the downside and the upside to that kind of AI is it’s going to come up with different answers. And it can be very, very frustrating. And trying to fix something that’s written with AI, that really is whack-a-mole.

If you’re familiar with whack-a-mole, that’s the game in arcades where we used to try and hit the mole as it came up. And it’s an exercise in frustration. Back in the days when they had arcades. I’m old.

Riley Kaminer: No, I’ve definitely played that before. Yeah, it seems difficult because especially more junior people are very much being taught to use these tools on, very integrated into their daily life, into their workflows, which is great, obviously, I mean, it’s a future, blah, blah, blah. However, there’s this element of thinking that I think is kind of important to learn, especially at the earlier stages of your career. And it seems to me that that’s just being completely lost.

Richard Lowe: Well, in fact, I have two books on that subject. One’s called The Death of Thinking and the other one’s called The Birth of the Augmented Human. And they’re both on my website and they’re meant to go together. So you can use AI one way where it thinks for you, or you can use it another way as what I’ve been saying, we’ve been saying as a tool to help you be more productive and to help you have a better life. But if you want it to think for you, then you’re going to get stupider. And we’re seeing a lot of that in society today.

In every country in the world, people are using AI like crazy, but they’re using it the wrong way to get answers for them instead of learning how to think, to learn the result of the equation instead of how to get to the result, for example. And it used to frustrate me a lot in elementary school where I’d have the answer and they’d say, we have to figure out how you got to the answer. But now I understand. You do have to learn how to do the equation. Otherwise, you’re just parroting somebody.

And that’s hitting the colleges really hard now and stuff with their papers and things that are all created by AI. You know, students are under high pressure to get good grades. And I understand that. But the problem with that is, is they’re paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to take this curriculum and they’re cheating themselves because the goal is not to get good grades. The goal is to be able to get a decent job and build a new career. If the goal was good grades, that’s easy. And I mean, any moron can do that, and attending on time and stuff.

I don’t mean to degrade it, but it takes a lot more to be able to understand how to think. That’s what my two books are about.

Riley Kaminer: I have to check it out. No, I mean, it’s going back to this idea that ultimately you have to figure out a way to get hired and be a productive member of society. It’s such a turnoff. I’ve heard multiple times just in this last few days of like when people see writing that’s just straight AI. It’s just, you know, it just doesn’t move the needle. And I think, you know, communication now is more important than ever.

You know, whether it’s a simple Slack message or text, whether it’s an e-mail or whether it’s, you know, a presentation for potential clients, you really have to be able to articulate your thoughts in a way that makes sense and attracts the person you’re trying to attract. And if you don’t have the capacity to figure that out, like figure all that equation out and then instruct the AI to help you with that, you’re totally lost.

Richard Lowe: It’s true. It’s true. Now we’re focusing on AI in writing, but there’s AI in everything. Accounting, factories, assemblies, you name it, there’s AI in it. So this discussion we’re having, you can widen to every single thing on the planet all the way to war fighting and stuff. There’s AI in this stuff. And sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not. A lot of AI is going in really fast because it’s the new buzzword. It’s the new super duper thing. There’s something called the Gartner hype cycle. And if you’re familiar with that, that’s where everybody is all excited about this new technology.

So the graph goes way up and you see all these massive people investing. And you can see that now with all this massive investment in AI. Then reality hits and that crashes hard. And then it comes back and finds a new normal. And that’s happened to SaaS, that S-A-A-S, that’s happened to cloud computing. You can go back and you can find hundreds of different data, dot-com boom. All these things had the same type of cycle where you get all this excitement. Several people get very rich. The rest of them lose all their money because it crashes.

But it does come back and it’s doing the same thing now. I don’t even know how high it’s going to go. Probably it’ll be fine until after the IPOs land and the big investors get their money back because they’re always going to get their money back. And then they’ll have to pull it back a little bit. That’s what I think.

Riley Kaminer: So I’m curious your take on this, having been in the world of the IT world, especially in the dot-com era, or for part of it at least, I mean, do you feel like, does AI feel like the same magnitude of wow, this is really a game changer as the internet felt at that point, or how do you compare that?

Richard Lowe: It’s really hard to compare the two. There would be no AI without the internet. AI is dependent on the internet. I can’t even use Claude without the internet. You can make local versions, but still most of its functionality is being able to address the service. Everything is what’s called client-server now, where the client is something thinner on my side. And the server is where all the action happens. And that’s on a big server farm. Everybody’s getting all up in arms about these AI centers that take up tons of power and heat and stuff like that. That’s where all of the power, the processing happens.

Without the servers, there is nothing. Did I answer your question there?

Riley Kaminer: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I’m just curious a little bit even more from the side of like how it felt in terms of a revolutionary technology.

Richard Lowe: Right. I was around when the Internet was getting on its feet back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The web, remember, didn’t start until much later than that. I’ll tell you, the advent of mobile is a bigger change than the advent of AI. Everybody having a computer in their hand. Just 20 years ago, everybody had a desktop. I have a desktop because I, you know, I’m not, I have more stuff than will fit on a computer on my hand. And I like the power of a desktop. I have a gaming computer, so it has lots of disk and lots of power.

And they’re not that expensive anymore. But mobile, it just think of the, of the power that you have in your hand to even use AI, to use anything that you want, to go out to and get all of the books in the world, to be able to watch videos, to be able to watch 3D videos, to have these glasses all from your phone. It’s truly amazing. And I would call that a bigger revolution than AI is right now and is going to be, or at least equivalent.

The birth of the internet certainly was very big because society changed when the internet was born, but it was slower. Both of these things were slower. The AI is happening very fast. And I think that’s because there’s a lot of money in it. There’s a lot of money in it, and we become convinced that it’s the thing we need. It does make life easier when you use it right. I’m putting together a diet. I just went straight to Claude and said, help me put together a diet. These are the parameters. Boom, boom, boom.

And I don’t really want to cook very much, but I want fresh ingredients and blah, blah, blah. And it said, okay, here’s your diet. And I said, I don’t like that. Make a new one. And I kept doing that until I was like, oh, well, that’ll work. And it was okay.

Riley Kaminer: I’ve had some funny issues with recipes where it’s just like, I don’t know, 85% correct and then just extremely wrong about something.

Richard Lowe: Right. Exactly. And that’s just because of AI, the nature of AI.

Riley Kaminer: It’s pretty funny.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. AI hallucinates a lot and it has drift. Hallucination is where it just makes things up. And that happens a lot. It doesn’t happen as much in the newer models. And then drift is where you’ll put in, say, a long, say you wanted to write a book, the book will change as the book is drafted. So you’ll have, say, two characters, a man and a woman, and by the middle of the book, it’ll be a man and a man. That’s drift.

Or they’ll change the names, or it’ll lose track of the names, or it’ll lose track of the plot, and the plot will be very different. You’ll have to start with a science fiction, and by the time it’s done, it’ll be a romance. That’s drift. It just changes. And that’s one of the worst things of all because sometimes it’s hard to notice that it drifted. And you can actually have AI say, you can say to Claude, I use Claude, check for drift. And they go, oops, I drifted here and I’ll fix that for you.

And it’s even better to take the outputs and put into another session that’s in a different project and have it check for drift as well because sessions are, they don’t talk to each other. So, and because it’s generative AI, it will give you different results and it will find different things. Like if I’m security checking some code, I use Claude Code, I’ll security check it in one session, then move it over to another session and check it again, and then another session and check it again.

And each time it’ll come up with more things to fix and fix them because, you know, why write it when it can do it? And you just keep doing that until after a few times it’s not coming up with anything. But you have to go through that because it’s not that great of a coder. It’s an okay coder. So you have to have this cycle in here to fix that stuff.

Riley Kaminer: Wild.

Richard Lowe: Yep. So you’ve been a journalist. What kind of things did you journal about?

Riley Kaminer: Yeah, always kind of business, finance, tech startups. So like one publication I’ve written extensively for is called Refresh Miami, which is, I mean, just that one publication over the last five years, I’ve written over 1000 articles.

Richard Lowe: And what’s that about?

Riley Kaminer: Startups.

Richard Lowe: No, no, Refresh Miami. What’s that about?

Riley Kaminer: It’s about startups. It’s a online magazine. So it’s like talking about the startups in the ecosystem, investors, that sort of thing. So yeah, it’s been quite interesting. I mean, I think I kind of stumbled into it.

Richard Lowe: As did we all.

Riley Kaminer: Yeah. But it’s been a fun ride and I think as unfortunate as it is that the kind of media ecosystem is not as robust as it was even five, 10 years ago. I think the flip side of that is that there are a lot of new opportunities that are also really exciting. So yeah, just a bit of a mix.

Richard Lowe: Interesting. Yeah. Journalism was something that never really attracted me, interestingly enough, because I’m a writer. You think I’d be attracted, but it never did. I never really was attracted to the live part of it. Going out and reporting, being a news reporter and stuff. That just wasn’t my thing. I tend to be an introvert. So going out to some place to be at the plane crash and interview people. That’s not something I wanted to do. And I’m talking about a different kind of journalism than you were doing.

Riley Kaminer: I did a tiny bit of that at one point, but never really that much. I mean, it’s changed a lot because of the Internet now. You know, I mean, everything I do is via Zoom, it’s all Zoom now. Very different.

Richard Lowe: I’m all Zoom, except when somebody doesn’t have Zoom, they have to use Google Meet. Yeah, Zoom is definitely the, in my opinion, the better of them. And the worst is the one by Microsoft. What is it called?

Riley Kaminer: Teams. Teams.

Richard Lowe: Teams, in my opinion.

Riley Kaminer: It’s terrible.

Richard Lowe: Although it is better at running teams, it’s not a great platform for doing what we’re doing. Google Meet is, eh, you know, it works, but Zoom is the best. And even Zoom, I wouldn’t call 100%. It’s got some things that it could fix, but at least it’s consistent. It’s consistent in its inconsistencies.

Riley Kaminer: Well, you know, now these are huge companies that need to justify their existence, you know, as SaaS products. So they’re trying to add different aspects to it.

Richard Lowe: Well, Zoom’s worst flaw, in my opinion, is its setup screens are a nightmare to go through. If you like, I have Zoom phone because I replaced my phone with it. Setting that up took days and then trying to set up texting. And they haven’t fully implemented it yet. So you can set up this part, but not this part. And you have to get special permission and all this other stuff because it’s business, and business requires a much harsher permission cycle. And there’s a screen after screen, and they go on for miles. It seems like to set things up.

It’s the same reason why I don’t use AWS or Google or Facebook. Facebook is so complicated because they’re so complicated. And I’m a tech person. I love complicated stuff. But I went over and started using Cloudflare. And wow, what a breath of fresh air. Yeah, it has a lot, but it’s organized rationally. It’s small chunks. The domain stuff is in the domain stuff. It’s not scattered all over the universe. And when you want to go to caching, go to the one mark caching, and you fix that. It’s well-designed UI user interface. And it’s complex.

And it took me a while to learn it, but I’ve moved all my domains and caching and parts of my website over there, my videos are now hosted on there instead of YouTube. No commercials. Cost me 84 cents a month to have 50 gigabytes of video on there. It’s like 84 cents a month. Big deal. It’s very nice.

Riley Kaminer: Now how technical is that? Do you have to have a lot of technical knowledge to be able to do what you just described?

Richard Lowe: I would say moderate technical knowledge. They do have help screens. What I did, since I was trying to learn it, is I just went into Claude and said, okay, I need to create a domain. How do I do that in Cloudflare? And it gave me instructions. And then I said, I need them as if I was a five-year-old. And then it would rewrite it and say, okay, go to this screen, do this. Said, well, I’m a little more advanced than that, came to a happy medium. And that’s a trick is you can use your AI to help you get into these products.

But going in trying to create something in Facebook makes me want to rip my eyes out or Google or AWS. I don’t know what they need all the complexity for and it’s not that it has so much, it’s just complex.

Riley Kaminer: You have these organizations where they get into meetings where there’s so many stakeholders and they all have their own thing that they need. And so you end up with these complicated user experiences because everyone has their little thing that they need to have, just too much.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, watch me get some emails from Google and AWS saying, hey, we’ll have it, we’ll talk to you about that.

Riley Kaminer: I even found that with domains like GoDaddy, I used as my domain registrar for many, many years and had just issues up one side down the other. And then I started using Porkbun. I don’t know if you’ve come across those guys before. And I felt the same way like you felt with Cloudflare just like a total breath of fresh air, like just very straight to the point, fair pricing, et cetera, et cetera. So nice.

Richard Lowe: Well, Cloudflare actually sells your domains at cost. So they don’t add a price. That’s not their business. They’re just doing it as a convenience. So if the registrar charges $10, then they charge you $10. No service fees, no nothing, just taxes. Always got to pay Uncle Sam, right? Or whoever your uncle is. Yeah. So I got all my domains on there. And you’re right. I started in GoDaddy and I went over to Namecheap and now I’m on Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a breath of fresh air completely. I mean, I actually had probably 12 different domain registrars in between.

It was a long chain of going from registrar to registrar because I don’t have any problem with switching registrars. It’s real easy. Back in the day, you had to write letters and send emails to people to get things changed. And some things couldn’t change and some things took five minutes and some things took six weeks and it was horrible. And then one of the tools, it was horrible. There were only just a few. I think there were like two or three name registrars at all and there were just the five domain types. They didn’t have all, what did they got now, a thousand or something?

It’s gotten ridiculous.

Riley Kaminer: I find it really funny sometimes. I find them confusing. I do like some of the new TLDs, but some of them I find very confusing.

Richard Lowe: That’s all they are is somebody spent some money to make a domains extension or file type and then they got it. So .ceo, somebody wanted and so it was created. It’s okay. It’s a fine domain name. It seems to be kind of specialized, but whatever. But the real value, a .com is still the value. If you want to recognize, get a .com. Although .io is growing pretty good too. Those are expensive. When you consider all you’re doing is buying digital air. A signpost, so to speak.

Riley Kaminer: Signpost. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s crazy.

Richard Lowe: Yep. So what else going on in your life that our listeners might be interested in?

Riley Kaminer: Good question. I really like cooking.

Richard Lowe: Cool. What kind of things do you cook?

Riley Kaminer: You know, mix. I do a lot of Italian, so a lot of kind of different meats, meat dishes, pasta. I actually like keeping it pretty simple in terms of, the recipes and ingredients and whatever. I don’t do anything crazy, but I like to have a lot of variety. So I find that really fun and trying new ingredients and different kind of recipes. I find that really interesting. And, with, as you were saying with ChatGPT, sometimes you get some crazy stuff, although sometimes you also do get some genius. So I’ve been having fun experimenting a bit with that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. It is interesting. I was into cooking a lot. Then I lost interest back when the wife was sick before she passed away, and I had to do all the cooking, and it became a grind more than fun. And I still haven’t gotten it back. It’s still a grind. And being single, it’s hard to cook for just one. I have to cut. The recipes are not made for one person normally. Although Claude helps with that. It does cut down the portion sizes and stuff.

Riley Kaminer: I’ve never gotten into baking, though. Have you done any baking?

Richard Lowe: Oh, yeah. I especially got into baking with almond flour based on almond flour. But almond flour has gone up in price. It’s super expensive now. A batch of cookies.

Riley Kaminer: Why almond flour?

Richard Lowe: Low salt, low sugar, diabetic. So very, very low sugar. You use monk fruit sweetener or stevia instead of sugar. And it tastes pretty good. It can come out just a little bit grainy, which is fine because that’s what you expect, but it’s gotten really pricey. Almond flour’s gone up and up and up. And almonds are not great on the environment. They require outrageous amounts of water and they’re all grown in California, which like they’re having a water shortage, so why are they growing something that needs a lot of water in California? Pistachios and cows, same question.

The amount of water that it takes to make a pound of beef is like, wow. And I’m not even so much of an ecologist or into that kind of stuff, but there’s stuff that you just use your brain and go, come on, why are we growing cows in California?

Riley Kaminer: Florida is the number two beef producer in the US after Texas, which I was very surprised to learn. I don’t really think of it like that, but the whole kind of middle part of the state, I mean, it’s huge and no one really lives there except for Orlando.

Richard Lowe: We have constant water shortages, so that’s an interesting thing. Pistachios are the highest that use up water. It’s pistachios. And they’re all grown in California.

Riley Kaminer: Very profitable, I suppose.

Richard Lowe: And very, very labor intensive. But that’s neither here nor there. So anything you want to say as a wrap up?

Riley Kaminer: No, I mean, I think just the last thing is I’d love to hear a little bit about your work in the kind of book space and kind of when people come to you to work on a book, what kind of goals do they typically have with that book? Like, is it typically something on a personal level that they want to achieve? Is there often like a commercial goal behind it? What do you typically see?

Richard Lowe: Most of my people, my clients are working on a personal goal or a business related goal. A lot of coaches. Interesting enough, right now, all of my clients are memoirs. So they’re writing their own story for a specific reason. An older person who wants to leave something for their children, somebody who just wants their story out and somebody who wants their story. I just finished one who wanted their story wrapped around a business book. So the how the business was grown and how it was created and all the cool stuff about the business, but related to them. That’s the kind of book that I get.

A lot of it is memoirs, although I do, I do just about anything. I’ve done science fiction, fantasy, romance. Romance is interesting. I have to pretend to be a woman writer. Romance is always mostly written by women. So I have to put on the hat of a woman, pretend like I’m a woman writer writing as a woman and writing women characters. I’ve been told I got it mostly right, that I got it right. Well, you got to understand, I was a photographer for eight years and what I photographed was women, over 1500 of them.

And I got to sit there while they put on their makeup and their outfits and things. And I got to talk with them for hours at a time. Of course, they always talk about what they hate about men and hear all of their talking and blah, blah and whatever. So I learned a lot about women that way and how women think to a certain extent. I know it was all fairly surfacey, I’m thinking, but it was very enlightening. And a lot of that’s baked into the couple of romances I’ve written.

And of course, I’ve written lots of technical books like how to, a couple of AI books, a couple of digital transformation books, something on the metaverse, stuff like that.

Riley Kaminer: Nice. Well, definitely keep me in the loop on what you’re up to. Would love to see what you are working on.

Richard Lowe: Okay. Well, how do people reach you?

Riley Kaminer: LinkedIn, Riley Kaminer on LinkedIn. My business is called Clear Critical. And you can also shoot me a message, Riley, R-I-L-E-Y at clearcritical.com.

Richard Lowe: Very good. Well, thank you for coming on. My name is Richard Lowe and this has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. And we’re finishing up for today. You can find me at thewritingking.com, and you can send me a direct message at contact.thewritingking.com. And thank you for coming.

Riley Kaminer: Thank you.

Quotable moments