The 100th Guest: Ghostwriting, Roman History, and the Follow-the-Money Doctrine | The Impossible Puzzles Show, Episode 167

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on episode 167 of The Impossible Puzzles Show with Mike Merkur, recorded August 9, 2026, presented in full and lightly edited for readability.

Who is Richard Lowe, and how many books has he written?

Mike Merkur: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Impossible Puzzles Show. It’s episode 167. Good lord, we have survived this long, and we’re saying hi today to Richard Lowe. Hello.

Richard Lowe: Hi.

Mike Merkur: Tell us about yourself, to those who don’t know you yet.

Richard Lowe: I’m just a guy, you know?

Mike Merkur: Uh oh. The people with the most accolades always have the Hawaiian shirts, the extra expensive leather chairs with the extra head support. And when you ask them open-ended questions, they give you one word. They give you Robert De Niro answers. Is that Peanuts behind you? Do you have the full collection?

Richard Lowe: Black and white and the Sunday colors. I’ve got the full collection of both.

Mike Merkur: Oh, Lord. You bought the whole set.

Richard Lowe: And Hagar the Horrible and Family Circus and a couple of others. Oh, and Dennis the Menace.

Mike Merkur: That has to be, how many are there? It’s been running for decades.

Richard Lowe: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. Plus I’ve got the entire Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion series on the top up there.

Mike Merkur: Good Lord. Do you need a Jewish friend in Canada who’s 42 years old and forgot to shave and shower? I will be thy friend, and while we’re friends, maybe you’ll let me peruse thy collection. You’re a ghostwriter. You’re a memoir and business ghostwriter. We chatted at length. What is ghostwriting, to those who think they know what it is?

Richard Lowe: Well, what we do is we go out into the wilderness, and we find a ghost, and we write on them. Sorry, that’s a different kind of ghostwriter.

Mike Merkur: They’ve almost done my popcorn now.

Richard Lowe: What I do is I write books for people. So my name is not on it. Their name is on it. I get paid, I write their book, they reap the profits and rewards of having their own book.

Mike Merkur: You have written, is it true, over 100 books?

Richard Lowe: I’ve written 113 plus. 113 for me, and over 54 for ghostwriting. That’s in 12 years.

Mike Merkur: You have written 113 books in 12 years.

Richard Lowe: 113 of mine, plus 54 of others.

Mike Merkur: 160 books. For every podcast episode I did, which means clicking record and tricking a person to click a Google link before you click record, and then setting up your little $40 Amazon microphone, for every episode I did, you have written a book.

Richard Lowe: Yes. And most of them are substantial.

Mike Merkur: Don’t you sleep at night? Are you a ghost or a writer? What’s the story here?

Richard Lowe: What is that word you used? I’m not sure I’ve heard that word before. Of course I sleep at night. I write fast. It’s my job.

What did Richard Lowe do before ghostwriting?

Mike Merkur: What did you do before you got into ghostwriting?

Richard Lowe: 33 years in tech. For 20 years, I was the director of technical services and computer operations for Trader Joe’s. And for the 13 years before that, I was the VP of two different consulting companies.

Mike Merkur: Oh my God, I should have prepared a lot more before this interview. Let me quickly cyberstalk you on LinkedIn on the computer next to me. Trader Joe’s director of computer operations and technical services for 20 years. And how many stores are there? Trader Joe’s is all over America.

Richard Lowe: There are about 600 now. When I left, there were about 460-ish. [Ed.: public counts put the chain at about 400 stores at his 2013 departure.]

Mike Merkur: You ran the entire–

Richard Lowe: I ran the central office, not the stores.

Mike Merkur: You ran the central office, which is, what is that like? That’s gotta be cray cray.

Richard Lowe: It’s crazy. It’s all the laptops and desktops, plus accounting, HR, merchandising, warehousing, eight warehouses, and everything else you can think of that’s central. That was my job.

Mike Merkur: What year did you start? What was that like when you started, technology?

Richard Lowe: I started in 1993 or ’94, probably ’94. And the technology was AIX and VAX VMS. Bigger machines.

Mike Merkur: It was a different ballgame. There were no YouTubes and Googles and Facebooks and Instagrams. So what was it like? You had a mouse, a keyboard, a huge terminal. Explain, explain, explain.

Richard Lowe: Mouse, keyboard, terminal, desktop. Laptops were actually very expensive then, so we didn’t have a lot of laptops. And they weighed a lot. They were bricks. We did not have mobile at all, so there were no smartphones. We used BlackBerry for pagers, and before that, just plain old pagers, beepers, as we used to call them. Beep, beep.

Richard Lowe: Before that, when I was VP of consulting at the two companies, they were both computer companies and I managed the consulting department. So I would send people out to do jobs, repair computers, write systems. One of the systems I designed and wrote and led was fraud detection for telephone cards. And I was the project lead on systems that ran the water systems for the Las Vegas Valley, New Haven, Connecticut, and Ojai, California.

Why does he work for himself instead of a boss?

Mike Merkur: Did you like the job, or did you wake up in the morning and think, I’m going to throw people out the window today?

Richard Lowe: Loved the job. I’m an introvert, so working with the people was more of a challenge, especially because I was in a leadership position. So it became more and more of a challenge. And I was especially challenged because working for somebody was driving me crazy. That’s why I left Trader Joe’s.

Mike Merkur: You, Richard, feel that you need to be your own man, your own boss. Why?

Richard Lowe: Because I had people giving me directions, commands, to do things where they didn’t even understand what they were commanding. We’ll do this. But boss, that’ll just, do it. I said, just do it. And then you have to do it, because they said so, even though what they asked for was sometimes stupid. And that drove me crazy.

Mike Merkur: When I was a younger man, it was a different world. It was very command-the-troops.

Richard Lowe: It’s still that way. Don’t let anybody fool you. It hasn’t changed a bit.

Mike Merkur: You are happier now, in a Hawaiian shirt, working for yourself. You are both the boss cracking the whip and the servant being whipped, building the pyramids, if you will.

Richard Lowe: You could argue my bosses are my clients, but you can fire a client. And I’ve never been fired as a ghostwriter. It’s always gone very well, because I make sure it does. That’s income. I picked the high end of ghostwriting, or the low high end. The high end would be celebrity ghostwriters. They get a lot of money, the people who write for politicians and actors and actresses. I haven’t breached that yet. I did write for a couple of musicians. But I picked the high end of the middle of ghostwriting, because it’s just as hard to get a $100 client as it is to get a $10,000 client. It takes the same amount of work.

Mike Merkur: That is so true. I heard someone the other day, a great conversation, and they said, oh, if I could just get $20,000. I’m like, if you go to an investor and you ask for $20,000, you will appear a fool. If you ask for $200,000, they may entertain the conversation. It takes the same amount of time to do X as 10X. You might as well do 10X.

What did the first disk defragmenter teach him about venture capital?

Richard Lowe: It depends on what you want to give up. When I worked for my very first consulting company, as VP of consulting, we decided we wanted a product. I wasn’t part of that decision, that was the development side and senior management. We were going to make a product, and I was one of the project leads and one of the coders. And it was the first ever disk defragmenter that anybody ever wrote for any system on the entire planet. You know what a disk defragmenter is. It eventually worked its way down; pieces of the design are probably still floating around out there somewhere. It got sold and sold and sold and sold.

Richard Lowe: So they went out and got venture capital. My opinion was asked as one of the programmers: how much is it going to cost to develop this? We said a quarter mill. Well, first of all, programmers have no idea what they’re saying. That’s rule number one. Number two, we didn’t know the rule of double your estimate and add 20 percent. That’s a rule. So we said it’s going to cost a quarter mil, because that’s what we thought. So what did they do? They went out and got a quarter mil, and they came back with it, and they were so happy. And I told them, you guys are idiots. They said, what do you mean? Marketing, sales, support. Engineers have no idea how to estimate a project. Why didn’t you get a couple million? Well, we didn’t want to give up 50 percent of the ownership. That’s what it would have cost.

Richard Lowe: The company got into hard times, where they were having trouble making ends meet and paying for payroll on their personal credit cards. I decided I was going to leave at that point. They got bought by somebody instead of going bankrupt, and the product got sold to somebody who sold it to somebody who sold it to somebody. And that’s one of the things I learned: if you’re going to get money, get money. Get real money. You might have to give something up. That’s what negotiating is for. Learn to negotiate.

Mike Merkur: Yeah, so true. You’ve opened a can of worms here. Something I’ve learned in my own experiences as a programmer, as a techie, is that if you’re good at tech, you’re usually not so good at sales and business development. And if you’re good at those, you’re definitely not good at estimating a proposal or pitching. I’ve been told by, I think, over 100 people: Mike, great stuff, too bad you can’t string two words together. And you’re introverted also. You’re introverted, but yet you’re on a podcast.

What is the difference between introverted and shy?

Richard Lowe: Oh, I’m introverted, but not shy. There’s a difference.

Mike Merkur: Unpack these parables, oh Master Booksmith.

Richard Lowe: Introverted is where you don’t want to even get out of the house. You’re into yourself. Introverts get energy from being alone. Extroverts get energy from being with others. So I get drained when I’m with others in a group. I can stay at a party for a couple of hours, and then I’m done. It’s time to go home. I used to drive my wife crazy when I was married. Shy is the ability to talk to people. Once I get into a conversation, I can talk for hours. I’m not shy at all. And now I don’t care what anybody thinks, so I’ll just say what’s on my mind.

Mike Merkur: That idea, of I, Richard, am just going to say whatever’s on my mind. When and how? How did you get to that? I’m finding that recently.

Richard Lowe: Well, part of it’s being self-employed, where I don’t have a boss. So I don’t have to coddle the boss, make that boss who really doesn’t know what he’s doing happy. The boss I had at the last company had a master’s degree in music, and he was the VP of IT. What are you doing being the VP of IT when you have a degree in music? And then he would put me down, because I don’t have a degree. The only people I have to make happy are the people giving me money. That’s clients. And of course the tax man. Now, I’m not rude. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be rude to people. It just means that if there’s something that needs to be said, I’m going to say it. And I’m probably not going to wrap it in that social veneer.

Mike Merkur: I love that language. Reflecting it for my own wisdom here: we don’t need to be rude, but we shouldn’t be afraid to speak our piece. And this is a luxury of the small business owner, the consultant, the self-employed. Fascinating. But if you’re ghostwriting for a client, how do you get into their head and their heart? How does that work?

How does a ghostwriter get into your head?

Richard Lowe: Take a drill. No, sorry. I do a lot of interviews, and I speak to them, and I learn the way they speak, and their style, and what they want to say. Usually I do between 10 and 40 interviews. An hour long each, usually over Zoom. Although the one I just landed tonight is going to be in person, which is fine. She’s local. And I use the Socratic method, which is: ask questions instead of giving answers, to get the answers. What do you think of that? And then you let the question follow you down. The question generates the next question. The answer generates the next question.

Mike Merkur: You are not one with pen and paper and pre-written questions. Oh, teach me, rabbi, sensei. Your interviews are, could we say, pulling out the vastness. 40 hours, 10 hours. Is there that much to know about a person?

Richard Lowe: Remember, I’m trying to match their voice. I’m trying to match their style. I’m trying to make a book that is them. So I have to get into their head. Now, I do have an interview plan when I go in. I have high-level questions, but those questions lead to questions, lead to questions.

Mike Merkur: Yes, high level. What are examples of high-level questions?

Richard Lowe: Well, you’re Jewish. Tell me about that. That might be where we start. Okay, good. So what’s this hat thing that you wear, this little circular hat? And then you’d answer, and I’d say, oh, so tell me what that means, and we’d work it down. You might say what the name is, and I’d say, well, what does that name mean? And then, what does it mean to you? Does it mean something different to you than what it means in the text? Because I’m trying to get down to what it means to you, not what it means in the Torah.

Mike Merkur: Good. Yes, you’re on par. The Torah, yeah, the Old Testament, if you will, books of Moses.

Richard Lowe: I’m partially educated. I’m not Jewish, but I know just enough about Judaism to get into trouble.

Mike Merkur: I know enough to get into trouble. That is a great line. I know enough to be dangerous is another one I’ve heard. Big questions to small questions, too.

Richard Lowe: And I’m getting down to your heart. So I’m starting with a big question, which might be, how did you get into the computer field, worked down into the heart. What does that mean to you? So not, why did you get into the computer field, but, what happened when you were a child that set you up to be in the computer field? Work my way down. And speaking of Jewish, one of my favorite books that I ever read was Josephus.

Why does reading history make you a better writer and decision maker?

Mike Merkur: Josephus, the Roman histories.

Richard Lowe: The Roman histories, yeah.

Mike Merkur: Jewish historian, yeah. Go on. Oh, you know about Josephus.

Richard Lowe: I do, I do. It’s been a long time since I read it, don’t force me to quote anything, but I was fascinated by that whole series of books.

Mike Merkur: Yeah, Flavius Josephus is a famous historian on the topic. He was a Roman Jewish historian.

Richard Lowe: He was a traitor, if my understanding is correct.

Mike Merkur: Yeah, yeah. He was born in Jerusalem, which was Judea, a Roman province. Let me Google this quickly. Yes, okay, on Wikipedia: born to a father of priestly descent and a mother of royal ancestry. Flavius Josephus, best known for writing The Jewish War.

Richard Lowe: Which is what I read.

Mike Merkur: Yeah. And you’re an avid reader, not just comic books.

Richard Lowe: I’m an avid reader, especially histories, especially Roman history. Rome is fascinating history.

Mike Merkur: I don’t know anything about Roman history. I’ve studied Jewish history, Canadian history. I have different histories in my brain. What sayest thou about the history of the Roman history?

Richard Lowe: Well, the war against Carthage, there were actually three of them, was with Hannibal, the elephants over the Alps. Fascinating story. Absolutely fascinating how Hannibal pulled these poor elephants across the Alps. He won major battles. He slaughtered 60,000 Romans in the largest double envelopment, which means his army was around all sides of the Romans, slaughtered them almost down to the last man. One of the worst defeats ever in history, and one of the very, very few big double envelopments. Another one was in World War I, I think it was the Germans doing a double envelopment of the Russians. Those things are nasty, because you’re being attacked from all sides. Have you ever seen Game of Thrones?

Mike Merkur: I have not. I’m not sorry. I’m not the most TV.

Richard Lowe: There’s a battle, I think it’s season five or six, called the Battle of the Bastards, and the good guys get double enveloped there. They’re being slaughtered until troops come in to break it up. If you get double enveloped, you’re in deep trouble. You’re dying. And that happened to Custer, too. Custer got surrounded. It basically means you’re surrounded.

Mike Merkur: Wait, you’re not kidding. You’re telling me it was Hannibal?

Richard Lowe: The Battle of, I’m pronouncing this wrong, I’m butchering the word, the Battle of Cannae. It’s in Italy. One of the great defeats, where Hannibal defeated the Romans. What’s interesting is Hannibal still lost the war. But he was probably the world’s greatest military genius ever, and he has battles that are still taught today. Incredible, incredible tactician.

Mike Merkur: He went, you’re telling me, instead of going across the sea–

Richard Lowe: He started from that area, Tunisia. But no, he was based in Spain. His troops were Spanish. Now it makes sense why he came through Italy the way he did: he was on land.

Mike Merkur: Oh, Hispania. Of course, of course. Fascinating. Oh man, I’ve got to sit and learn some Roman history.

Richard Lowe: Carthage itself is in North Africa. And I may have gotten some of those details wrong, so I’ll just take my whipping for that too, because it’s been a while since I read it. And then there are the Roman wars against Judea, which are all over the New Testament, all over history. They were pretty brutal. And then there were the wars against Gaul, which are what brought Caesar to power.

Mike Merkur: Fascinating. Tangential to all this: do you feel that having deep knowledge of history and being such an avid reader is an essential human skill for everyone? Or, sorry, reading with the goal of being a better writer, even today?

Richard Lowe: Well, it’s essential for being a better human, and it’s essential for being a better writer. If you know about history, you know where you came from. By understanding the history of Rome, and thereby a little of the history of Judea and Spain, because this was all Roman Empire, I understand my roots. Although I’m Scottish, Irish, and Austrian, there’s a lot of Roman influence there. Our civilization, Western civilization, is Roman civilization. It came from Rome, which came from Alexander and the Greeks. I’m talking culturally here, not necessarily militarily. Look at the New Testament: if you want to understand why things happened, you look at what came after those wars. Over a million people died in the Judean wars. The land was depopulated. The Great Diaspora.

Mike Merkur: What did someone say the other day? Isn’t it interesting that anti-Semitism is just a constant thing in history? We thought, oh, it’s probably over. Oh wait, now synagogues are being shot up again. When’s the last time this happened? Every 20 years for the last 20,000 years.

Richard Lowe: Well, the thing about that war is that what the people of Judea didn’t fully account for is that that particular piece of land was absolutely vital to the Romans. They could not let it go, because further east were the Parthians, the Persians, and Rome had to hold that land. By revolting, they put themselves in the worst possible position. It was a no-win situation. The Romans were, without any doubt, going to come in and do what they did. I don’t know what they should have done instead. I don’t have enough information to say, and I’m not God. But I know that what they did caused a reaction. It’s the same as when the Germanic tribes destroyed three legions in the forest. They wiped them out, just gone. There was going to be retribution. It was coming. The Romans came in with everything they had, and it took them decades, because they had to bring new troops. When you understand that, maybe you can make better decisions. Okay, if I do this, this person is going to react this way, because they’ve always reacted this way.

Mike Merkur: It’s so true. If you know the history, people are people, things don’t change. You get a broad view on humanity. Nothing new under the sun. Same problems, same situations, whether 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago. And in writing some 160-some books, were you writing fiction, or more nonfiction, like history?

Richard Lowe: I’ve written a fiction book about the Year of the Four Emperors. Four emperors came to power in that one year, Vespasian and Vitellius among them, and there were executions. I wrote about one of them, a historical, real person, a general who helped support Vespasian. And I’m sure I’m mangling the pronunciations, because I don’t know Latin.

Mike Merkur: You’re better than me. I didn’t know the first thing about it.

Richard Lowe: So, you understand things. If you’d understood history and you were in Putin’s place and you attacked Ukraine, you’d know the Ukrainians are going to fight back. What are they going to do when you attack them? What have they always done? They hit back. They’re going to hold on to the last possible man. So why would you take that wasp nest and hit it? That was just dumb. If Putin had understood history, he would have known: don’t do that. And he didn’t. So he attacked, and now he’s been in a war for four years, lost over a million men, and he’s losing this war, in my understanding, because of it.

What is AEO, and why does your canon have to match everywhere?

Mike Merkur: This is a very multifaceted and beautiful conversation. You’re interesting: given the podcast platform, you’re not one who aggressively pushes and prods and forces his financial gain, pitching his services from all angles. I’m actually kind of frightened here. I’m glad I brought my pen and paper. I had to fetch it, because here we have a highly intellectual man who’s written many texts, and he’s not going to fall for the one open-ended question trick. You’re the opposite. You’re asking me questions, and I haven’t prepared for battle.

Richard Lowe: Too bad, so sad. I’m crying.

Mike Merkur: Let me check your LinkedIn for a second here. You say that you’re, this is getting feisty over here, the memoir and business book ghostwriter, AEO and AI search consultant for executives and vendors, author of The Day Your Website Died. Oh yeah, I was going to ask you about that. What’s that all about, Mr. Techie?

Richard Lowe: The big thing a few years ago was SEO, search engine optimization. Everybody worked on making their website findable by the search engines. Search engines don’t work anymore, at least not as much as they did, and they’re doing less every day. Why? Because the artificial intelligence engines are taking over. A search engine in the past would just dump you traffic, and if you were lucky, a certain kind of traffic based on your articles. Well, in AEO, first of all, you have to have credibility. The engine has to recognize you as a credible source. How do you do that? You have other people recommend you. It used to be called backlinks, but it’s different now. And your canon has to be the same everywhere. I say 54 plus books ghostwritten, everywhere. That has to be everywhere. If it’s sometimes 54 and sometimes 73, the AI engines look at it and go: this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because he keeps changing this number. Now, if in one place I’m described as a philosophical person, and in another as a historian, the engine goes: I don’t know what he is. And you get less traffic.

Richard Lowe: Why does it do this? Because when you ask Claude or ChatGPT, what’s the answer to this question, why do rabbits have long ears, well, if your website has the answer to why rabbits have long ears, and the engine recognizes you as an expert, and it’s found you, and you’re the best it can find, it will send the person directly to the information on your website. Now, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a link. If not, it’ll just pull the information from you, and that you don’t want. What you want is for it to link to you, pin a little description, and say, basically, see this website for more information. That’s the goal with AEO: to answer the questions that people ask. The more you can answer, and the more credible you are, the better you’re going to do. And if you lose that credibility, it takes a lot of time to build it back.

Mike Merkur: Fascinating. Oh my God, okay, we’re getting deep into it. You love tech. You never put tech to the side. You are a technologist.

Richard Lowe: I am a technologist, yeah. My first book was about the Internet of Things, which is the smart light bulbs, smart alarms, cars. That was my first high-paying ghostwritten book. I wrote some low-paying ones before that.

What does a ghostwriter’s day look like, and how does ADHD fit in?

Mike Merkur: What’s a day in your life like?

Richard Lowe: I get up in the morning, I check my emails, and then I start working on a client book, and then I start working on one of my books. And then I might go out and do some walking, because I’m sitting here in this chair all day, and I don’t want that, right? And then I go out and do some more walking, and then sit down and write some more. I generally start writing about 6:00 in the morning, and I’ll finish probably about 11 p.m. And then I have a hell of a lot of interviews.

Mike Merkur: You like doing interviews like this. Why? You love it.

Richard Lowe: I meet interesting people, and I don’t get out a lot. This is my way of meeting people. I used to get out a lot. When my wife died, I became a photographer for eight years. I photographed things, people. Every night I’d be doing something: a party, a dance show, traveling to the Renaissance fairs on the weekend and then going to see WWE pay-per-view live the next day. Stuff like that.

Mike Merkur: You used to be more out and about, and now it’s walk, write, and do interviews. Those are your stratagems.

Richard Lowe: Walk, write, do interviews, build model kits and paint fantasy miniatures, and torture my cat. I pet my cat and dangle stuff over him. The cat loves it.

Mike Merkur: Walking, I’ve always benefited from. I’m not tooting my own horn: I’m a poor, horrible writer. In fact, I’m below average in reading comprehension, struggled with every essay, copied off people at the English desk my whole life, got maybe a C in English throughout. But when it came to math or computer science, I was always super smart, and also getting into trouble at times. But you, writing is your creative thing. Why? Why the written word?

Richard Lowe: It just appeals to me. I couldn’t explain it. One thing is, I’m high-level ADHD, 97th percentile, which is very high, and autistic. And I just found that out a couple of years ago, and it changed my perception of myself. Things that were a mystery, like, why did I act that way, why does this happen, became: oh, well, ADHD. That explains it. One thing about ADHD is called hyperfocus, and time blindness. They go together. So I’ll get a task. Today I reorganized my website’s library of my own books, and I finished it just now, but I worked on it all day long without even getting up. And that’s hyperfocus. And then I look up and it’s like, oh, damn, it’s time for that interview. And I could not tell you what happened in between. Time blindness.

Mike Merkur: You said it first, but yeah, put me down as well for super high ADHD that borders on autism, and restricted activities, and repetition. If anyone touches my blocks, I’ll murder them. And scattered, and mentally, time blindness, yeah. What was it, last night at 3:30 in the morning I was still filling an entire notebook with number patterns. And your podcast, your interview show: share some wisdom around the passion behind that. You love doing that.

Richard Lowe: I love doing that. I’ve gone on and off, and that’s one thing about ADHD: I’ll start something, I’ll get to a point, and I’m done with it. And then later on, I’ll start it up again. Model building, that’s plastic models: I’ll build a bunch of models, put it aside for years, and then it comes back. I was a photographer, and I photographed supermodels and dancers and belly dancers and all kinds of stuff, and then just gave it up. That’s typical ADHD. Just scattered all over the place. I know a lot about a lot, but most subjects I don’t know super deep. I know a little about a lot.

Mike Merkur: A little bit about a lot. You want to be eclectic, a broad net of information. My wife and I are watching Jeopardy sometimes, and I’m answering 20 questions in a row perfectly.

Richard Lowe: There’s a word for this. It’s called polymath. A polymath knows a little about a lot of subjects. That’s a polymath.

How did the Crazytown childhood shape the superpower?

Mike Merkur: You’re not one who says ADHD and then a tragic vocal. You have turned your uniquenesses into gifts. Half the people I’ve had on are neurodiverse and mega successful, and they say they’ve turned dyslexia into a superpower of visual thinking, or ADHD into being an incredible toy designer of the most meticulous detail. How have you turned what could be called a challenge, a weakness, a disability, into a super ability?

Richard Lowe: Well, it just so happens I wrote a book on my early life called My Life in Crazytown. And it’s not a book for the weak of heart, because it goes into an abusive childhood, mentally abusive mostly. And the subtitle is how I turned ADHD into my superpower. I took on ADHD characteristics, and I think this is true for a lot of people, because I was protecting myself. The hyperfocus came because when I was hyperfocused on, say, building a model kit, my dad would leave me alone. He wouldn’t hit me. When I was reading, he wouldn’t hit me. Mom wouldn’t yell at me. So the hobbies became the protection mechanism. That’s just one of several things. I learned to use my ADHD to protect myself, and for the most part it worked.

Mike Merkur: Fascinating. You’re older than me, I’m 42. You grew up in a time where the whips and belts and hits were normal.

Richard Lowe: Oh, copper pipes.

Mike Merkur: Oh. I get more so paddles. There was a time where the whooping was normal.

Richard Lowe: It was not only normal, it was encouraged.

Mike Merkur: What was that about? I was born in the mid-80s, so that was dying down.

Richard Lowe: The group my family belonged to back then, which I was a member of until I was 14, basically taught that you need to whip your children to get the devil out of them. I don’t know what it teaches now. But that’s what it was then. Beat it out of your kids.

Mike Merkur: Good Lord. And you escaped.

Richard Lowe: I just told my dad that I wasn’t going to be in that church anymore. He locked me in my room, and I couldn’t eat for several days. He beat me until he knew that I was serious. And he never listened to the reason why I decided to leave.

Mike Merkur: Would you say this experience falls into that milieu of the horror stories about cults or overzealous religions? You’re not afraid to talk about it.

Richard Lowe: I would not call the broader church today a cult, because I don’t know. I’m not in it. But in those days, this was the 60s, because I am older than you, the group that I was in was a cult. There are 12 or 13 defining characteristics of a cult, and it met them all. It was a cult, and it acted like a cult. The reason I left at 14 is that I saw a pastor doing something with a 13-year-old that no adult should ever be doing with a child. I went and told people, and they told me I was lying. That’s called gaslighting, by the way, when they tell you you’re lying when you tell them something. And a few weeks later, I said, I’m not going to be in this church anymore.

Mike Merkur: I sometimes complain that I don’t agree with everything that happens in the Jewish religion, but the dynamics are different.

Richard Lowe: Stuff happens in every religion, because they’re people. You’re going to find the evil people everywhere. I don’t know whether that was just that one person or many. I can only speak for what I saw. I was 14, and I saw it, and people didn’t believe me. So then I told them where to go, literally. And boy, did that get me smacked.

Why will he never retire?

Mike Merkur: Later in life, you look back: would you say the silver lining from past challenges and chaos in your younger years has propelled you to be the man who has written 160 books today? You’re not one who puts his feet up and says, I’m going to retire, maybe go golfing.

Richard Lowe: One of the reasons I chose ghostwriting is, barring brain damage, I can ghostwrite from my deathbed. I can literally write until I die.

Mike Merkur: But you worked for multiple decades in IT and IT management, and you never said, I’m done with working, I have enough. You are working more now than you did then.

Richard Lowe: Yep, I am.

Mike Merkur: What? Explain this newfound–

Richard Lowe: It’s a passion. It’s my passion. I get to help people deliver their message. Sometimes I write my own book, and that’s me delivering my message. Sometimes I deliver other people’s messages, and it’s a passion. I love delivering people’s messages, and delivering them in such a way that they’re received and understood and acted upon. If I write a book about some new product that’s going to change the world, or a book about somebody whose life changed when he was a wrestler in high school, that’s a real story, then he got his message out, and now he’s happy.

What are Richard Lowe’s own podcasts, and who was the 100th guest?

Mike Merkur: Fascinating. And a bit about your podcast. That’s a weekly thing you do. How is it structured?

Richard Lowe: Just like we just did. It’s Leaders and Their Stories. There are actually three: Leaders and Their Stories, Author Talks with Richard Lowe, and Conversations With Influencers, and I split things between them. Mostly it’s Leaders and Their Stories. And you were the 100th guest, the last one we did. This one’s the 100th.

Mike Merkur: Oh my God. Fascinating. And are you on YouTube, or Spotify?

Richard Lowe: My website.

Mike Merkur: You choose to keep it on your website, structured there. Fascinating. And in the last two minutes before we let you go: what do you say to all the people out there who are not yet running their own business, not yet doing that podcast, not yet writing their book? Give them words of encouragement, so that one day they could do once what you’ve done hundreds of times across many mediums.

How do you leave corporate without living in fear?

Richard Lowe: Well, I wrote a book on it, and I actually just published it, and it’s called Don’t Live in Fear. And that’s the key. I was afraid to leave corporate, because I was afraid that I couldn’t make a living on my own. When I left corporate, I made a living on my own, because I had to. It was that or give up and go live in a trash can somewhere.

Mike Merkur: I’ve heard go live on a farm. You say live in a trash can, like Oscar the Grouch?

Richard Lowe: The first thing I found out when I moved to Florida and started interviewing was that people don’t hire people who are in their late 50s. The ageism is real. You will not get a job when you’re older, except if you have really good connections, or if you’re a millionaire or something. That’s why so many people who are millionaires start their own company: once you get older, you can’t get a job. So one thing I would say: stop living in fear, and start building your own business on the side. Build in the gig economy. Don’t go work for Uber, go build your own business. What is your passion? Is your passion selling on eBay? Go do that. It’s a hard way to make a living, but go do it if it’s your passion. Is your passion being a pastor or a rabbi? Learn how to do that. If your passion is inventing, go do that, and start doing it while you have your job. Then when you leave, if you leave, you have something to base it on. And actually, I would build two. You might not make a lot of money at first, but what the hell.

Richard Lowe: When I left Trader Joe’s, I started up as an affiliate marketer and made about ten grand, until I realized affiliate marketing attracts a lot of scummy operators. Then I went and sold on eBay, and I made 35 grand, and then I decided that’s a really, really hard way to make a living, because people are always going for the cheapest price. And then I started writing. Being a writer is also a hard way to make a living. But being a ghostwriter is a little easier, because you get clients. With books, you have to sell tens of thousands of copies to make a living. As a ghostwriter, I only have to sell once, to a client.

Mike Merkur: Ding, ding, ding. Go on, if you wish. I don’t want to keep you against your will, but you have so much wisdom and experience, and those listening are really those who call me.

Richard Lowe: It’s just the white in the beard.

Mike Merkur: The white in the beard, that makes me blind. I can give you my advice, but better than that, let me find the people who’ve written 100 books and invented 50 products, and are not in their early 40s but 50 plus, 60 plus. All the experience and wisdom is stored in the people who have decades of it. I talked to a 77-year-old toy inventor who first pitched at 24 years old, the original sticky note, the battery-powered water guns. When someone called me the other day, I said, don’t listen to me. I’m going to send you the episode with the great master inventor. And I know that you, Richard, without you saying anything, we have recorded this forever, and when anyone asks me how do I do writing, they may not be as confident as you, or as super neurodiverse genius eclectic Roman historian as you, but they will be inspired by this beautiful message. Any other wisdoms?

What does follow the money mean?

Richard Lowe: One more. One more. When you’re going to put some money down, let’s say you’re a kid out of high school, and you’re deciding which college to go to. You’re talking to these people who supposedly know what they’re doing and supposedly have your best interests at heart. What should you do? Follow the money. Why are they telling you this? How do they make money? The salesperson who’s telling you to put $100,000 into the university is making their money from your $100,000. The university is making their money from your $100,000. So why on earth do you think they have your best interests at heart? They’re after your money. So my advice to the younger people: consider skipping the university at first. Go to a trade school. If you want to come back and go to college or university later, after you have some experience and you know what you’re doing with life, then do that. But to begin with, go to a junior college, they’re almost free, or go to a trade school and learn a trade. I hired somebody who went to DeVry, and everybody thought it was a big joke until they realized this guy could work on computers with his eyes closed, because he went to trade school. So follow the money. Ask yourself, why is this person trying to sell this to me? Because they make money off of me. Good. Does that mean they have my best interests at heart? Absolutely not.

Mike Merkur: Amen. Follow the money. Just to echo the wisdom here: we have to look closely, we have to assess what’s going on.

Richard Lowe: You don’t even need to look closely. Just look. They’re asking you for 50 grand for tuition this year. Great. What are your options? Well, there are tons of options. Good. Why are they insisting so hard that you pay 50 grand? Because they make 50 grand. Why do you think they have your best interests at heart? Are they going to tell you there are other options? No. They’re not. They’re biased as hell, and you need to pull your head out and take a look. Don’t be an ostrich with your head in the sand. Which I don’t think they actually do anyway, but that’s beside the point. I’ll have to ask Claude that. Note to self.

Mike Merkur: We are getting to the humorous crux of the matter.

Richard Lowe: Look at who actually benefits from what they’re trying to tell you to do. When you’re online and you run into this webpage that says if you take these special cranberry-mixed-with-whatever pills, this snake oil, your diabetes is going to go away. Is it? What do they gain? They gain your money. So why would you listen to them?

Mike Merkur: Okay, so I’ve said similar things in my own way, but having Richard Lowe say it, with all the Peanuts books behind you and all the 160 books behind you and all your life experience, it has such a strong message. We can always do this again. We will pause here.

Richard Lowe: One follow-up. One follow-up. The follow-up is: okay, if they all have their own interests at heart, who do you listen to? You listen to yourself. You listen to the data, and you listen to data that can be proven, scientific data. You have questions about, let’s pick a controversial topic now, vaccines. Do they work or not? Great, there are a lot of opinions out there about it. Well, what is the real data? Go to real scientific websites that actually do testing on vaccines, and then make up your own damn mind. Don’t let Joe Blow’s website make you decide that a vaccine is bad or not. Go read the information on real, live, peer-reviewed scientific websites. You might have to open a dictionary, because it can be pretty complicated, and learn what the vaccine is, and learn the history of it. Look back 100 years at the world without vaccines. Smallpox, polio, measles, diphtheria. The death rates were enormous before vaccines. Now they’re not; now you get five cases of measles and the country freaks out. I’m not saying for or against vaccines. I’m saying do your own research. Figure it out for yourself, instead of having some Yahoo on some website tell you about vaccines. That was my one political statement.

Mike Merkur: No, it’s totally kosher. And this has been an amazing episode.

Richard Lowe: I’m done now.

Mike Merkur: We can always do it again, and I will pause the recording here, being true to the one hour, as my computer’s sign says.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.