Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: April 2025.

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) appears as a guest on Interchain Live, cross-posted to the Are We Here Yet? podcast and the Innova802 network, for a long conversation focused on what AI, digital transformation, and demographic shifts are doing to creative work and the broader economy. Topics: where AI helps a writer and where it can’t, NFTs and the provenance problem for artists, why digital transformation projects keep failing without cultural transformation, the bionic worker concept and what “digital employees” actually look like, the demographic crunch and the case for older workers, and why a book is still the single most reliable differentiator for professionals competing against machine-generated noise.

BOOK YOUR PRIVATE CONSULTATION

Interview

Ryan: And we are live with the Interchain Live channel. This is Ryan Munn, and we’re recording today for Interchain Live and possibly with my co-host. Well, definitely with my co-host, Scott Graves, possibly to put out with the Are We Here Yet? podcast.

Scott: Hey, man, I’m here in the flesh. I’m a definite. Not a possibility. Although I’m full of possibilities. So my mom told me a long time.

Ryan: Absolutely. And so we’ll get this out to our audience, at least in one, if not more channels. And today we have a special guest to share some very interesting insight and experience in the business of writing books. And in particular, having written 113+ books under his own name and ghostwritten 54+ for clients. A very impressive collection out there. We have Richard Lowe Jr. on with us today. Richard, how are you doing?

Richard: I’m doing fantastic. Thank you. It’s a great Tuesday.

Ryan: Excellent. So just to get us kicked off, why don’t you give us a little bit more background of kind of your professional adventure and what brought you to ghostwriting all those years ago?

Origins: From Grandfather’s Story to Trader Joe’s

Richard: Well, it’s been quite a maze of twisty passages. And if you recognize that, you’re older than me. It’s from a text game named Zork. That was one of the first computer games. You’re stuck in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Ryan: Oh, nice.

Richard: Anyway, back when I was 17 years old, I wanted to meet my grandfather. Everybody said stay away from him. I said, no, I’m going to go meet him. So I sat down and talked to him and I learned all kinds of fascinating things. He was a World War II vet, in the Yangtze River Patrol, captured on Corregidor, on the Bataan Death March, spent four years in POW camps. I wrote him a book. That was my first book. We never published it. It’s since been lost. But I learned about my grandfather before he passed away, and I learned a lot of interesting things, and I respected the hell out of him after that. And you know what? After what he went through, he could be as difficult as he wanted to be. He was in the right.

Then life got in the way: family, job, had to move out, all kinds of stuff. So I went into tech. And I became a VP of a company, then a VP of another company, and then settled in at Trader Joe’s as the director of computer operations for 20 years. And about within a month of my 20th anniversary there, I said, I’m done. And I loved Trader Joe’s. I started my own business, drove to Florida. There was a whole brand adventure involved with all that you can talk about later if you want.

I started playing with different ways to make money. One of them was writing. Writing worked out OK. I did affiliate marketing, sold on eBay, all the usual stuff. And then I fell into ghostwriting.

$1,000 Books and the Fortune 50 Client Who Raised $30 Million

Richard: I started with a ghostwriting company, and he paid me a whole $1,000 to write a book about an Afghan politician who was the guy who built all the roads in Afghanistan before the Soviets invaded, before the Taliban even existed. So I got to write his book. He never did finish it, but I had to do 16 hours of interviews. He was in transit before he flew to Afghanistan to do something. So it was interesting. I had to learn Muslim culture and Afghan culture and all kinds of things that were totally foreign. So I had a blast.

I wrote two more books. And then I said, you know what? I can make more than a thousand dollars on a book. This is pitiful. I’m going to start my own company. My boss said, you don’t know how to do this. You’re going to starve. Very, very supportive, sarcasm intended.

So I went off and within two days I had $25,000 worth of books.

Ryan: Wow.

Richard: Never looked back. The first book that I wrote on my own, the guy wanted to get the notice of the CEO of a Fortune 50 company. The CEO wound up writing the foreword. He got promotions, he got raises, went on the speaking circuit, $5,000 to $10,000 a pop for speeches, and then went to get venture capital and got $30 million from my book. How I wish I had a different contract with him.

Ryan: And you didn’t benefit from the venture capital?

Richard: No, I didn’t really. I get paid upfront and any other royalties or anything go to the author. The author’s the client, I’m the writer, just to get the terminology right. So he got all that, was very happy. And then I’ve written 113+ books under my own name and ghostwritten 54+ for clients.

Ryan: Wow. That’s an impressive library you’ve generated there.

Richard: Yep. Loads of fun.

The Ghostwriting Advantage and Why Stories Matter

Ryan: So what are some of the books or what’s the range of books that you’ve written yourself as the author?

Richard: The most recent one is called The Ghostwriting Advantage, released on April 24th. And it’s about, from the client side: how do you find a ghostwriter? What kind of ghostwriter do you want? What are all the steps involved? It’s actually quite large because there’s a lot to it. All the publishing steps, everything that you need to know. I’ll probably make a Cliff Notes version also.

Ryan: Yeah.

Richard: Because I think it’d be beneficial. And then I’ll do user lead magnets and stuff from that.

Scott: It’s an essential thing, isn’t it, that we, I mean, we learn so much. Everybody learns differently. Everybody’s intellectual self is slightly different. But one thing that I don’t think there’s anybody that you can say doesn’t learn by storytelling, the stories that we tell each other. And so I just can’t think of anything more essential. You know, when I hear from folks, you know, I just don’t read. And I can understand one’s ability to read can be compromised or some of us, it’s easier to read than others. But it’s the storytelling part of that I find like, you know, how do you intake, unless you’re telling stories and having stories told to you, like how are you learning and experiencing one another? It seems to be one of the most essential of human things.

Richard: Well, I focus on the storytelling, because, and the emotions of the person who’s writing, the passion is where I focus. So I do a whole series of questions at the beginning of a project, Socratic method basically, where I’m asking question after question, getting the answers. And from there, I put together a profile of the person and what they believe, and what they want to do, and their passion and their heart. I borrow their heart for a while.

That’s what goes in the book. That’s what makes a book really readable. That’s what makes a bestseller. The passion is there. If there’s no passion, why read it? But if there’s, and then that boils down to stories, as you say. It’s very important to have all the stories, or as many of the stories as you can get. Stories of failure are very important to make the person more human. Stories of success, all the stories that you can find, both human and business. Throw some humanity in there. Like maybe the choice between a business meeting and going to a wedding, and he chose the wedding. Get some humanity in that.

And that is the key to a good ghostwriter versus a mediocre ghostwriter. And even further down the chain versus AI: a good ghostwriter, a premium ghostwriter, gets that passion into the book.

Capturing the Client’s Voice

Scott: Is that process also important from the standpoint of, I’ve got to imagine for you, the writer, the ghostwriter, the single hardest thing to do is to unlock enough of that other person’s voice that their own voice comes through in the book. So I just wonder if your process helps you to do that or if that’s even a priority for you.

Richard: It is a priority because that’s what their attention is on first, usually. Get my voice. What they mean is everything I just said, plus the way they speak. I had one client who cursed a lot. I mean, a lot. A sailor’s mouth, worse than a sailor’s mouth. So I said, do you want the book to do that? And he said, oh, expletive, expletive, yes. And I said, okay. And then I did what he said, and then he read the book and he said, no, let’s tone it down just a little bit.

But I get the voice of the client or author as much as possible. And we do a round of like three or four pages around and around and around until I get that right. And then I can write the rest of the book with that voice.

Scott: It’s like the literary version of a painted portrait versus the photograph. Let’s clean up some of the wrinkles.

Richard: Yeah. And it’s even the difference between a photograph taken by anybody and a photograph taken by a pro. Look at wedding pictures. Wedding pictures by a pro wedding photographer are far different than pictures taken by the general public.

Scott: One hundred percent.

Richard: Which is why they make lots of money, because they’re good at it.

Ryan: So what makes a bestseller these days?

Richard: The passion. The passion and a little bit of luck and a lot of promotion. Yeah, the passion has to come through. The story has to be good. It has to be something people want. There has to be something in the current environment that people catch on to. Vampires caught on for a while. Now they’re pretty much passe. AI is catching on big now.

In a few months, there’s something called the hype cycle, where some new technology comes out and goes way up. Everybody puts money into it. Everybody thinks this is the new big thing. Eventually it collapses because it’s not as clear as everybody thought. And it goes back to normal. It doesn’t get to the bottom, but it goes back to normal. You saw it with the cloud, you saw all kinds of things. AI is about to do that. Don’t kill me, AI people.

AI, Artistic Expression, and the Commodification of Creativity

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, how much are people, I guess, you know, there’s writing about AI, but then there’s also folks writing with AI. How much has that impacted your business now? I mean, are people coming to you with more content and more material to get started? Do you get more of a boost from what you can get out?

Richard: Some are. Most aren’t. Most want to avoid AI. That’s not why they’re hunting me down. They don’t want anything to do with it.

I have one client who came in to me with reams and reams and reams of AI-generated garbage. I had to basically incorporate that as best I could. And it was way overwhelming. And it was pretty poor. From now on, if AI comes to me, I’ll just say, we’re not using it. That’s not why I’m here. You want to write with AI, go for it. We’re done. If you don’t want to write with AI, if you want a human there, we’re going to get started. But I don’t want your AI outlines. I don’t want your AI stuff. It’s garbage.

It’s tolerable for the low end. You want to write a quick article for LinkedIn, AI is great. Want to write a book? They’re not going to get the soul into that.

Scott: Yeah, we’ve actually on the Innova802 podcast, we’ve talked a lot about artificial intelligence. We’ll continue to talk a lot about artificial intelligence. Two years ago, I first published podcasts and essays and looked at it from a variety of different ways. And one thing as a person who started off, my chosen profession was in the arts, and as an intellectual self, I’m an artist first, right? What concerns me most, and I’m wondering, you must have some thoughts on this, is its long-term consequences.

First off, do we all agree that human behavior, it is absolutely innate in us, to express ourselves creatively in as many different ways as possible to each other, right? It’s just, it’s one of those fundamental human behaviors, whether we suppress it in ourselves or not, it’s still a need, right? And so if we agree with that, I wonder what the long-term consequences are. And it’s not that AI is new in this way. It’s just accelerating what’s been going on for a very long time, which is between what I would call the commodification of artistic expression. You know, we got to a certain point in the last quarter century or so where after first having commodified things like popular music and a lot of writing, right? We then dehumanized it. It became content.

And in the digital age, that made it possible for people to say, I have no interest in buying your music as an example. I’ll buy a t-shirt from you as a consequence of going to your concert and getting the music for free or getting a download for free, right? Why am I going to pay for this when I know I can just go on the internet and get it for free?

And then the next logical step to that has been to literally aggregate the visual, audio, or written artistic expression of billions of people and not pay them for it. Right? That’s one of the things we’ve really dealt with at the Innova802 podcast is, well, with all this investment going into AI, surely we can create a model that pays the artists who are now just literally at a frightening and exasperating rate being stolen from every day.

One version of the future I see is the possibility that for the vast majority of people, we penultimately suppress, even though it’s innate in us, the need to express ourselves artistically. In fact, giving up all that agency, and people will assume at a very young age that the artistic expression is generated. There’s always the machine doing it. And that that is the accepted practice. That in fact, it becomes the unique or largely unacceptable practice of the expression coming from the human. That the human expression becomes the imperfect, the dirty, the gross, right? Versus the cleansed version a machine can come up with.

Provenance, NFTs, and Who Owns What

Richard: Right. Well, a lot of what you said is solved when NFTs become really big. Then artists will have an NFT that says they own this piece of art. And then the NFT has built into its smart contracts the royalties and things based on that. That’s not widely rolled out yet, but as NFTs and smart contracts become more popular, that’s blockchain stuff, that problem will reduce because all of these things that everybody creates should and will have an NFT associated with it that makes it all behind the scenes. And if you don’t have an NFT associated with it, you’re basically saying it’s public domain in the future because you don’t have any way to enforce it.

Ryan: Yeah, ideally, we can restore provenance, right? And that’s what you’re alluding to, Scott, when you talk about, you know, we’re pulling the systems at play, the machines are pulling all this content and then generating it as if it’s its own. And the reality is that it came from somewhere. And what we’re lacking in the current paradigm is the actual track and trace mechanism to connect those dots back to the original source and give people an opportunity to at least attempt to engage with the authentic sources of the things, the art, the expression that they’re interested in.

Scott: My take is we already live in a world, we just have disrespected it for about 30 years or so, but we already live in a world of blanket licensing. This has been around for 110 years or so, maybe even a little more. So you know, the financial model is already there. It’s about applying it to the digital realm through the NFT.

And the other part of this, which is a little harder to pin down, but I think is a worthy thing, and the way to deal with it or work with it is for smart people at every level of society to constantly be talking about it and getting other people to think about it, which is what consequences this have on our role of giving up our agency as creative beings to technology. And can it ever get to a point where it’s actually literally psychologically unhealthy?

I’m not a professional musician any longer. I haven’t been for some time, but I still consider myself a musical artist. So much of my head when I’m awake, and sometimes when I’m not, is still spent writing, arranging, experiencing being on stage and playing music for others. Seriously, it’s like a major part of who I am, right? Whether you know that or not. But so what happens when people have never had the experience over decades of doing it, right? And their whole lives have been spent, oh, I have to be creative right now. I got to go to the bot. What are its consequences on us? Again, that storytelling is not only a function of artistic expression, but the artistic expression is really about how we know each other, how we know ourselves. It’s a fundamental mechanism of being human, right?

Richard: Well, what happens when AI is actually plugged into your brain? Then it becomes even more intimate, and they’re working on that.

Scott: What do you think about that? What happens next?

Richard: There’s a couple of routes that could happen next. Number one, blockchain could finally become widely accepted and could resolve this problem of ownership pretty well. But that’s, I think that’s a long shot because there are billions and hundreds of billions of pieces of content out there that aren’t on any of that, and they’re never going to be. So there’s that problem. New stuff, there isn’t that problem.

I run into it all the time, and especially the low-end ghostwriters run into it all the time. What about AI? And it cuts out the low end. And they either have to use AI to survive or they won’t survive, because they can’t survive at the rates that they can do with AI. I could spit out an article in AI in five minutes and edit it in maybe another 15. In handwriting, I can’t do that. And a book, but it’s not going to be very good. But of course, it’s just a matter of time before it is actually good. It’s probably a few years out.

It’s going to be an interesting world. But I didn’t predict mobile phones. Nobody did. There is nobody on the planet that predicted mobile phones 40 years ago, other than Dick Tracy with the phone on his wrist. But nobody predicted everybody would have a supercomputer in their hands. And that’s changed society dramatically. You see people just wandering around with their phone in their hand in front of their face all day long, even while they’re driving. They’re tapping on the phone all day. It’s changed society, and AI is the next level over that.

I do all my shopping online now, and it pretty much picks things out in advance and says, you want the stuff? I say, sure. You know, it’s interesting.

Digital Transformation: Why It Fails Without Culture

Scott: It’s living in a time where the technology, we’ve become so good at creating disruptive technology, to use a 21st century term, that we really got to start asking like, okay, how is the implementation of this technology best suited to society in a positive way? Or even do we implement?

Before AI, the example we’d often use is self-driving vehicles. Okay, so what are its consequences to traffic, to urban planning, to urbanism, right? How can an autonomous vehicle best be used? How would it be implemented? How would humans truly interact with it? What would be the financial model? As an example, if we replace 350,000 or so truckers with self-driving trucks, can we build into that financial model the funding of the next step for those truckers? As opposed to, well, they’ll find a better future eventually, which is the way we usually, for the first 200 years of technology, we’ve implemented technology. Like, there’s this far-off time called the future that’ll be better. Well, how about we incorporate that into the way we transition into new technology?

Richard: Well, I’ve led digital transformation projects, and digital transformation projects virtually always fail unless they have one thing in them, and that’s called cultural transformation. You have to transform the culture to accept the digital and to be part of it. And part of that cultural transformation is your job’s going to be obsolete. What do we do about that? Well, we retrain you, we retire you, we put you in a different position, whatever the solution is. That has to be part of the model. Or number one, you’re going to be sabotaged by your people, and they’re not going to get it, and you’re probably going to fail.

And that’s probably one of the core reasons why a lot of digital transformation projects fail. I’ve written books on that. In fact, I wrote a paper on exactly the case you just mentioned with the truckers. By the way, it’s 350,000 truckers that get replaced. And then you’ve got the forklift operators and all the other things. Forklifts are already using autonomous, because forklifts are relatively easy to program. It’s already using autonomous stuff. And look at autonomous drones.

But when you throw malicious actors into the mix who want to cause damage to a country, then you get a whole different mix of problems, where not only are you getting all of the change, but you’re getting some maliciousness thrown in there. And that’s a different problem.

Ryan: Yeah, in my experience implementing digital transformation, one of the key factors was hiring a new person or two to fulfill a role that directly contributed to the change in the workflow or the process. That sounds good, like great, we’re hiring more people and maybe people more technical or digitally savvy. But at the end of the day, that role was simplified by the technology, and what ultimately happened in that experience was those lower paying roles increased. We had more people doing that low-paid work because we were able to take on more volume, while we had fewer people doing the high-paid work because they also were able to take on more volume and make more money for the company. But the net result was that distribution of employee wages became overall less for a more productive work environment, because the technology made it all more profitable, made us Americans more productive, but the value didn’t necessarily go to the people.

Richard: Yeah. If you want to look at somebody who really uses automation, that’s Japan, because they have a declining demographic, so they don’t have a choice. Either they die as a country or they put in automation. They’re depopulating very fast.

I’ve actually done two digital transformations and led them. It’s an interesting problem. We were successful, but it was quite tumultuous because we didn’t even think about cultural transformation. I’ve written three books on the subject now and it gets pretty deep.

You have to use a certain amount of, what is the AI for? Like a factory. Manufacturing, it’s great for running factories and things and building cars. You don’t need a lot of people for that. That’s what technology is great for. But then you have people like me or people like you, probably. I use AI as a digital assistant. In many ways, it replaces a virtual assistant in some ways. In some ways, it doesn’t. New things for me, like take this transcript and break it up. Tell me what I said, because sometimes an hour-long conversation can be very confusing to try and figure out. It takes two hours to go through a transcript. AI will do it in one minute and say, okay, now show me what my commitments were. Okay, good. Tell me what their commitments were. Okay, fine. Show me the timeline we agreed on. Okay. Just a simple transcript becomes five minutes’ work instead of taking laborious notes and things. I don’t even have to take notes anymore. It does it for me. Although I was kind of screwed when I didn’t get the transcript once.

Scott: And that seems to me the most readily available and positive use of any form of personal artificial intelligence, personal interaction with artificial intelligence, I should say. Is that sort of like what my buddy Dominic refers to as creating bionic workers, right, so that we can focus more of our time on the true stuff that takes a lot of intellectual capability by getting rid of the mundane.

You know, you mentioned you wrote three books on digital transformation. I wonder, what are some of the other holes in the way that we are laying out new technology that could be better or that could benefit society more than it already does?

Richard: The biggest hole that we have in most projects with most corporations is they consider technology first because they put technology in charge of the IT department. IT, what does IT do? It’s technology. Digital transformation should be done by a business unit, and IT is a sub-function of that. And business units think differently than IT. They have different goals and different purposes.

What an IT department will do is say, what sexy new technology can we get? What the business department’s going to say is, how do we solve this problem in the least amount of money and so forth? And you’re going to come up with a whole different solution and a whole different scenario. That’s the biggest problem that we have: actually not understanding what technology’s for and getting it out of the hands of the technologists. I know, don’t shoot me, technologists out there. You’re still involved and you’re still going to need new technology. It’s just not the front end, it’s the back end.

It’s people, processes, and technology in that order. People come first, processes second, technology third. Are you going to need new sexy technology? Probably, but only after you consider the other two things.

Scott: There’s that idea of agency again, right? We have to have agency over the technology, not give away all our agency to a machine.

Richard: Well, some vendor walks in with this new, wonderful, cute machine that you want to buy. Doesn’t mean that’s the right solution, and you shouldn’t do your whole digital transformation effort around that. Instead, think of the problem you’re trying to solve.

And then think of it this way. You want to have digital employees and regular employees, human employees, and you mix them. I’ve got a digital employee with an assistant, and it’s ChatGPT, and it works for me and it does things for me. Please don’t kill me, ChatGPT. I’m not going to your sleep. Sometimes I think of it as almost human. That’s a digital employee. And you give your accountants digital employees, and you basically hire them to do things for you. Somebody gave me a digital employee the other day that’s going to remake my LinkedIn to be better. That’s a digital employee. And if you think of it that way, it becomes a bit easier to conceptualize. You’re not replacing people, you’re adding components to help them.

Ryan: Those bionic workers.

Richard: Well, digital, or they’re usually not physical, but yeah, they could be physical.

Demographics, Ageism, and the Older Worker

Scott: It is a world I’d like to see us realize. When I was in school at the end of the ’90s, mid to late ’90s, every way you looked, every publication, Harvard, in the Globe, everywhere you looked, in the Times, everyone was talking about how then this new generation for the 21st century, it’s all going to be about, you know, you’ve got to be a good problem solver. You have to be creative, right? They were interviewing kids coming out of Harvard, and they had to put Lego things together. And based on what they did, that’s how they got the job.

And all that went away. The dot-com bubble in the first couple of years of the 2000s, all of a sudden, and since then, it’s all been about scarcity. And as you alluded earlier to, an increase in low-wage jobs and a decrease in higher wage work. And as a business owner, the high net margin opportunities, regardless of what it is you sell, have been reduced significantly. There’s really two industries left in North America that are high net margin: landfill management and apparently artificial intelligence. And even that is really just an advance on your future.

Richard: There’s another problem that’s happening, which is we’re in a demographic problem right now. People are getting older and there are fewer people being born. So we’re actually in an upside-down pyramid. And it’s really bad in some countries like China and so forth. But the problem that leads to is the older people are retiring, and that’s causing a capital crunch.

The capital crunch is not caused by what people think it is. It’s caused by retirees who are taking their money out of investments and spending it because, you know, they’re not going to be around much longer, or they want to use it. So it’s causing a lot of ageism, to be quite frank, quite in your face.

These older employees know the systems. Did you know, I heard a statistic the other day that 70% of computers are programmed in COBOL still. That’s banks.

Scott: Yeah. That’s remarkable.

Richard: They’re using AI, so they’re using COBOL. That’s what I learned in school, COBOL and Fortran. So these older employees are very, very necessary. And a lot of us older employees are working well beyond the retirement age, because why not? Life gets extended and bills need to be paid and stuff like that. And who’s going to trust Social Security nowadays?

Scott: Well, and frankly, a lot of people lost most of the value in their retirement savings after ’08. And a lot of that hasn’t been recovered. And at the same time, they’ve stayed in homes longer than they thought they would because of the varying issues within the housing ecosystem. And so you get this dual sort of, I don’t have quite enough to retire on. My house isn’t worth as much as I thought it would be. And for a lot of folks, it’s really, even if they wanted to retire, that ship sailed for a while.

Richard: Besides, they still feel pretty good. They’re 60, 70, even 80 years old and they still feel like they can produce. And I think there’s a large number of untapped resources there in the older population that are strongly prejudiced against. Use older people. They know what they’re doing. They’ve been through all this stuff and they’ll accept lower pay, not necessarily entry-level pay, but they’ll come in and do the job if they want to work. And you’ll find out if you do that, that you have experienced employees that you don’t have to train, maybe a little bit on some of the more advanced stuff. They can work with the younger people who are coming out of college and help train them and bring them up to speed and pass on that knowledge, because it’s becoming a real problem that there aren’t a lot of COBOL programmers anymore. Real problems with ADA and things like that. Those languages are dying.

Scott: You speak to a kind of like a change in the overall culture of the workplace. And before I say that, I know just as many people that are younger, published journalists that are saying the ageism is the opposite. That we are a geriatric nation because the boomers are demographically the majority. And so therefore, we’ve created a society that’s slowly bankrupting itself because it’s paying for all the old people and doing nothing for young people. But isn’t the fact that every age group, no matter where you are, it’s very easy to sort of posit yourself against the other groups. What if this was an environment where we all started to work together, just as you’re describing, rather than seeing the differences, you know what I mean, and pitting ourselves one against the other?

Richard: Well, you actually named two different problems there. One is the older people, they still want to work. You’ve got 200 people who are looking for work. There’s a point at which we can all get along, and then if you recognize that reference, kudos to you. There’s a point at which we could all work together. Older people want to work, and they don’t want to be favored necessarily, but they don’t want to work at a Walmart greeter. Young, good people want to work. And hey, you can hire these older people to train the younger people and bring in the new generation and stop having the ageism. It’s not so much that you’re prejudiced against old people. You’re losing a valuable talent.

Scott: Right.

Richard: And we have a job shortage in the United States right now, a big one. It’s huge. And it’s going to get much, much, much, much, much worse. Because the younger generations aren’t producing as many offspring. So that also means we’re going to be capital poor in the next 20 years or so. So you need to take advantage of these people who are willing to work, probably don’t need the amount of income that the younger people do. And you can work together.

Scott: Yeah. And when speaking of things that are innately human, we are communal regardless of the mythology of the individual. We’re communal and we need, not just within our nuclear families, but we need the interaction that comes from the wisdom of people who have been around longer than us. There’s great care you feel, you know, when you’re working with folks and having that kind of lifetime wisdom imparted on you. It’s healthy.

Ryan: Yeah, I know I’ve often felt that there’s a strong need for a better apprenticing model in our work and educational culture and the idea of having a sort of universal mechanism for carrying and conveying credentials as we go through our academic and professional careers. There’s a huge lack in that, and part of it’s because things have become so complex, but we have these digital tools to bring that to a method of simply, who knows what I can do? Why is their opinion valid? Because they’ve proven that they know what they can do. And being able to convey that in a simpler format and make the job market a little more fluid, in terms of conveying knowledge, imparting knowledge, sharing opportunity, and, you know, rising tide floats all boats, right?

Richard: Well, there’s an even bigger problem in that life ages are being extended. People live longer. And by the time 10 years pass, our life expectancy is probably at least 150 years. And the problem we’re talking about now becomes a much bigger problem. 150 years of somebody who doesn’t, I mean, there’s no Social Security program in the world that’s going to take care of that. Where you’ve got that many people in Social Security, in fact, you’ll undermine your society very fast.

So you need to put the older people to work, and they want to work. Most people enjoy working. They like working at a good job, not toxic jobs. But given a choice between working at a good job or sitting at home and watching TV, most people are going to choose doing a good job, especially older people.

Scott: We derive meaning from it.

Richard: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been 20 years at Trader Joe’s, 33 years in tech. Had a lot of meaning from it. And you can still see I’m very technical. I kept up on it. So that’s just the world’s a-changing.

Why a Book Differentiates You

Ryan: So to bring it back a little bit to the work that you’re doing, I just quickly want to talk a little bit about the power of, whether it’s someone early in their career path and maybe they’ve done some really interesting things or just have some life story to share, and especially folks as they are aging that are looking into how do they parlay their experience into their own personal brand. And really bring it full circle to their trajectory. And that’s what, you know, I think the opportunity to work with someone like yourself can really bring is being able to share that story. So talk a little bit about that and then feel free to dive into some of the business acumen from your experience in that business that can help a new author really be successful in that.

Richard: What a book does in the business sense, for example, there are all these younger people coming out of college and they want to find jobs and they’re finding the best job they can get at McDonald’s, which is very sad. They got conned by these people who want to get the $100,000 loans, and they took liberal arts classes instead of something that can actually help them get a career. But that’s a whole different can of worms.

So they’re out of college and they want to find a job. How do you differentiate yourself from everybody else? Well, let’s look at coaches. A lot of people are becoming coaches now because they just got laid off. What do you do when you’re laid off? Well, you need money now. How am I going to get money? Well, I can sell an hour of my time for 300 bucks because I was a mid-level manager or high-level manager or something. Let me become a coach. Sounds easy, except there’s a lot of coaches, a lot of people with the same idea. Well, how do you become the one that people call?

You write a book. And how do you know that’s true? Just look at the coaches who are making it. Virtually all of them have a book. Why did they write a book? Because now they can say, I’m the coach who knows what he’s doing, and here’s my book to prove it.

If you’re a young kid coming out of college, carve out a little money and get a book written or write it yourself. And it doesn’t have to be long. And now you can say, this is what I do and this is what I do well, and I have the book to prove it. Now you go to your jobs and they say, so what are your credentials? And you say, want a book? You’re going in as an apprentice or whatever the young people are going, whatever you choose. Here’s my book that tells you all about what I do. And it’s not a resume. It’s much, much more than that. It’s got stories and it’s got all kinds of stuff. Stuff that happened in college and stuff you grew up with. I could work with them and spin a whole bunch of nice tales that are true about, but very dramatic about, their life and how it pertains to what they’re doing, how they worked with others in college, how they were on certain teams and they did certain things, how this makes them team members and how they led things, all these things that they did in school that helped them prove themselves.

And a book can do that. It puts you ahead of everybody else. It’s not a guarantee, but it does put you ahead, gives you a leg up. And it’s not going to be that expensive. If you came to me, we wouldn’t make a long book. We’d make a nice short one and maybe make a longer one later. If you’re a coach, you definitely want a book. And if you’re a C-level person or a VP or even a director and you’re switching careers or you just want to prepare for it, get a book.

Ryan: Now, the business is a lot different nowadays compared to even 10 years ago or maybe 15 years ago, right? So what are some of the factors that go into actually getting the book out there, getting into the marketplace and getting it published and getting it in people’s hands?

Richard: Well, the first thing to remember is your book’s a tool. It’s a marketing tool. It’s not something you’re going to sell on Amazon, ton of copies of. It’s something that you’re going to use to get speaking engagements. You’re going to send it to people who do that. You’re going to send it to Oprah Winfrey, I’m just naming a name. Or you’re going to send it to people like your podcast. So they should send you the book and say, I need to be on your podcast, and here’s my book. And you’re going to go, that’s a pretty good book. And you say, sure, come on, tell me about it. That might be a way to get in. Or you’re going to use it in that manner in all areas.

New employers, tell them you got a book, put it on your resume. I wrote a book on this subject. You’re going into AI? Well, I wrote a book on AI. And here’s my theory. People say, well, I did a PhD, I did a dissertation. Yeah, a dissertation is academic. We’re talking about something to business people, not academia. If I’m a business person, yeah, it’s very impressive to have a PhD, but it’s going to be better to have something that talks about ROI, return on investment. Same thing, duh. And KPIs and all the other business terms that probably aren’t in a PhD. And it won’t be written in academic style, it’ll be written in business style. That’s the main difference.

And if you did a dissertation, you could work with someone you need as a book coach or as a ghostwriter, and we could whip one out. And you’d have something that actually makes you look really, really good to business people, not something you brag about to fellow academics.

That’s the story that builds the relationship. You’re building a relationship and you’re building know, like, and trust. They’re going to know you from the book. They’re going to like you because they like what you’ve written, and then they’re going to start to trust you. If you can get know, like, and trust, all three of those in, you’re ahead of everybody else in the queue.

Ryan: Awesome. Well, I think that’s actually a really great quote to leave us off at. I want to thank you, Richard, for joining us today and sharing your experience and insights with us. Thank you, Scott, for joining us on this. And this is Interchain Live, and I look forward to folks listening in. And look to the show notes for some opportunities to learn a little bit more about what Richard offers and how to take advantage of those services.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

---

Notable quotes from this conversation

---

Common questions from this conversation