AI: The Death of Thinking | Richard Lowe on Optimal Conversations EP 55

Richard Lowe returns to Optimal Conversations, the leadership podcast hosted by Mary Wong of Optimal Coaching in Australia, for episode 55. His first appearance was back in season one, episode six; this time the conversation centers on the Enemies of You series, and in particular the paired volumes The Death of Thinking and The Augmented Human.

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books under his own name and ghostwritten over 54 more for clients. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows, lightly edited for readability. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

Mary: Welcome to Optimal Conversations, the leadership podcast where we share stories and amazing, life-changing conversations. My name is Mary Wong and I am your host. If you’ve been listening a while, you may remember Richard Lowe from way back in season one, episode six, where he and I had a fabulous conversation about a multiple of topics. It’s worth going back for a listen if you haven’t listened to that episode already. Well, Richard’s back today. He is a multiple published author and ghostwriter. He’s been hard at work researching and writing a seven-book series called The Enemies of You. It’s an eye-opening commentary all the things going on in our world right now. And whilst it’s written from an American perspective, it includes topics that affect us all, including AI and how that is affecting us as humans who are taking on wholesale adoption of this tool. I’m keen to get this started. So welcome, Richard. It’s great to have you with us.

Richard: Well, thank you for having me. It’s going to be fun.

Mary: It is. It is. So you’ve been really busy since we spoke last time. Tell me, what is this Enemies of You series and what’s the simple argument that connects all of these books?

The Enemies of You Series: Seven Books, One Argument

Richard: Well, it’s not so much conspiracies as it is just things that are happening in the world and in your area and to you personally. So one of them talks about what you’re doing to yourself. And then The Death of Thinking talks about how AI is undermining you. The augmented human talks It talks about how it’s the opposite side of the coin. I actually wrote those two at the same time together, where it talks about how AI can help you. So you’ve got the choice of hurting yourself with AI or helping yourself with AI. The Enshitification of America, and believe it or not, that’s a real word, talks about, and it applies to most countries in the world, talks about how private equity, which is the idea of using money from a retirement fund to buy up companies, how that’s been destroying the things we love. The emasculation of America is about how the Russians have a plot that they’ve had going since 1946 or 7 to emasculate American males. And they’ve been very successful. There’s, looking at my list here, the villainization of America. Why in the heck do we think America is a bad country when it’s actually not? Again, that’s out, that’s exterior plots. All of this is backed up by sources and things. And then stuck in the middle, is the one that caps it all off and talks about how the military side of things and how all of this affects the military and keeps us having the not as powerful military as we could. And that’s the capstone of the series.

Mary: So, Richard, why would anyone listen to you specifically on these topics? Who are you to talk about these things?

Why Listen to Richard on These Topics

Richard: Well, I’ve got the 33 years of experience in industry. I’ve got 13 years of experience as a ghostwriter. I’ve written lots of books. I’ve gotten heavily into geopolitics, so I understand geopolitics. I do a lot of reading, a lot of research. Everything in here has been heavily researched. Doesn’t mean I’m always right, but I know these subjects very well. And I just decided, you know, I should write about these so people can understand how they can know these things are happening. They’re trends, really. They’re not conspiracies, they’re trends. and how they can avoid these trends and make themselves have a better life.

Mary: So when you first mentioned that you’d written these books, I jumped at the chance to talk more with you about them, particularly about the first two books in the series that we’re focusing on today. The first of those books is the one called The Death of Thinking. I find this particularly interesting. It’s really reflective of what I’ve seen playing out with people who use AI exclusively in their business. And it also fits with my use it or lose it belief about mental capacity. Your book, The Death of Thinking, carries the subtitle, The Enslavement of Humanity. Now that packs a punch. Are we really that far gone, or is the line, enslavement of humanity, just a powerful marketing line?

The Death of Thinking: Cheating Yourself Out of Learning

Richard: It’s real. And what it is, is you have a choice between those two books. And those are both defined two different lifestyles. The Death of Thinking is, let’s say a college kid who is going into college doesn’t understand that the purpose of college is to help you learn to think. So they cheat on a lot of tests using AI. Well, that’s just dumb. I mean, it gets you through the college, you get a degree. They need to use college as a way to learn, to learn how to learn. But by using, say, ChatGPT to cheat those tests and make papers and things for them, they short circuit that and they don’t learn how to learn. And that’s kind of the central point of the book is you’re cheating. You learn by failures, you learn by friction, you learn by trying really hard and not succeeding in the right way. When you’re cheating with AI, and I’m specifically using the word cheating, You don’t learn that deviation and you learn a lot by deviating. Now, on the other hand, in the augmented human, you use AI to help you be more productive. So you’re using it not as a, as a replacement for your own brain. You’re using it as a, as a to supplement what you’re doing. I use it in my writing to help me come up with outlines, to help me come up with questions, to ask clients, to like, I I just had a client, we had 24 hours of interviews, and all of them transcribed. It would’ve taken me weeks to go through those to come up with an outline. I did it in half an hour with AI, and the outline was really, really good. I, of course, fed AI what I needed to feed it to make it what I wanted. So that’s how I’m augmenting my intelligence. I’m feeding AI the parameters, and I’m getting back the data so I don’t have to do a lot grunt work. But I’m not saying, just create me an outline and here you go, client. And that’s not how you use it. That’s not how you’re supposed to use it.

Mary: Yeah. So I was particularly interested in the part in there about the young people learning, because I find it really interesting that these kids have grown up with being able to access an encyclopedia in their pocket, more or less, with your search engines and your ability to access the internet with our mobile phones or our cell phones, I think as you guys call them. And they’ve always learned to have that convenience, right? They’ve not needed to jump on a bike, go to the store, go to the library, do the research from the books like we had to when we were kids. They’ve kind of been schooled into accessing the easy way of doing things, of going to what’s most convenient. Do you think that’s the reason that they default to looking in AI for answers?

Why AI’s Confidence Is the Trap

Richard: Well, they’re looking in AI for answers ’cause it’s on their smartphone or their tablet and it’s easy. And they get an answer and they don’t bother to fact check it. They just, they get an answer and they go use it. And it’s been getting worse and worse and worse. If you don’t fact check it, I mean, AI lies shamelessly and the worst yet, it’s 100% confident. It’ll tell you all the time, this is it, this is the truth. It’s not the truth. And you can ask it, you can then feed it more data once you have that truth that it said is the truth. And then it’ll say, oh, no, no, this is it. And it’s always presenting it as if it’s 100% true. And that causes lots of logical fallacies to kick in in human beings where they think, oh, okay, this is an authority figure, much like a cult leader is, and I’m going to trust it. Well, it’s very untrustworthy.

Mary: I’m noticing that even when you, for example, if you use Google search, even when if you just go to Google a question, you immediately get an AI generated answer with a whole lot of different links and things like that. But when you look at the links, a lot of them are social media links.

Richard: A lot of them are social media links or they’re sales links where Google makes money or somebody makes money.

Mary: So not necessarily there to be a legitimate authority, but there to sell you something.

Genealogy the Hard Way: What Friction Teaches

Richard: Well, they’re just what Google has categorized in its infinite wisdom as what it thinks the authoritative sources for this information. So if you ask, what is a dog, it’s going to find a few answers and put it together in AI that says, here’s what a dog is. But there’s no telling you that it’s right about what a dog is. And then it’ll tell you the sources, this, this, and this. And as you said, it’ll be social media links or Quora is a big one, or Quora is a horrible source ’cause it’s all crowdsourced. Another one is Wikipedia is another terrible source for finding facts. And it uses a lot of that. Reddit is not the best source. Again, these things are all just, you don’t have to be vetted. You don’t have to have a degree. They’re not peer reviewed, so they’re not good sources. And the good sources are like on page two, page three, you gotta go further and get the real sources. Or let me give you a good example of the process of how it’s enslaving people. I did my genealogy many, many years ago. And when I did my genealogy, you had to go and get manifests from ships. I had to go down into the… sub-basement of the Mormon temple. I’m not Mormon, but I had to go down in the basement of the Mormon temple and sub-basement actually, and go through their records and microfiche, you know, these little flat plastic things that you look at with a microscope and found all of this interesting information. Like this person came over on this ship in this year and had a bunch of babies and a lot of them died and all kinds of stuff. And now you just jump on Google, you get onto one of the, of the sites like Ancestry, and you just ask them, well, I found out a lot of stuff by looking at those source records that I could then use my brain and say, okay, this and this are related, but Ancestry or any of those sites is just the data they have. So it’s probably 5% of the data, 10% of the data, because all of that has to be entered in the computer. And a lot of that data is stuff that other people entered and it’s not vetted. Nobody checks it. So you wind up going off on tangents that have no meaning, which I did myself a couple times when I started using the computer. Oh, good, these two are linked. It says they’re linked. They’re not. When you get to the microfiche, they’re not linked at all. Or when you go to the source documents.

Mary: So, yeah, so definitely go back to the source because apart from anything else, there’s that human error element of the entry of the data, isn’t there? It’s pretty easy to make those errors when you’re entering data.

Richard: Not only that, you’ve got a level of interpretation on top that first the person who enters is doing, and then the machine, and then the stuff that’s excluded because it doesn’t include a lot of international data. And you lose that friction of having to do it yourself. By having to do it myself, I learn really fast, oh, I can go here and here and here and here and find more information. But by using AI, I don’t learn any of that. I just get the answer. And I miss out on getting all those little other stories and little other things. Maybe the niece that you have to kind of figure out that she’s the niece because the family back 300 years ago covered it up ’cause she was not reputable, you know? But you could figure that out if you go look yourself. And that’s what AI, I hope that’s a good example.

Mary: Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite interesting. It’s quite interesting. I mean, I can relay a bit to the family history bit because I’ve just recently been starting to look at my family history and what’s available online as opposed to what’s available through various family sources of people who’ve kept documents and things through the years. It doesn’t necessarily So it’s quite interesting. And when you were talking about that, you mentioned the friction of finding things. And that was something that you mentioned as well when you were talking about the young ones and the learning. In your book, you also talk about the convenience trap. So is that convenience trap avoidance of friction? Tell me more about it. What is it? How does it show up in our lives and quite often without us maybe even realizing it?

The Convenience Trap and the Death of Coding

Richard: Actually, that’s the perfect term for it, avoidance of friction. People tend to want to find the answer fast. They got busy schedules, they got a paper to write, they got an article to put out, they wanna impress their friends, whatever it is, they wanna find an answer, not the answer, an answer fast. So they use AI, they use their mobile phones and stuff to get the answer. So they think, and AI, like I said earlier, is very confident that, okay, that’s the answer. You know, you are descended from this person and it sounds really good. But if you have that friction in there where you’re doing some research and you have to learn how to do the research, like I learned how to code when I was back in the 80s, you know, I just learned assembly language code. I was programming machines down at the bottom. You know, my first computer, we booted from paper tape and then punch cards and then 10 megabyte disks. I mean, You’re talking primitive days.

Mary: It’s kind of, it’s unbelievable when you think about where we are now and where we were then. It’s so different, right?

Richard: Yeah, but back then there was so little memory and so little disk, you had to, every single byte was important. And now scripts are written that are 20 million miles long because communication times aren’t that a problem anymore. And nobody knows how to code anymore. Not everybody, but Not knowing how to code means you’re depending on AI to give you the code. Well, how do you debug it? If you don’t even understand what that code does or how it was written, how do you debug it? How do you fix it? How do you make it better? We go back to AI and ask it. Well, I mean, I just one time recently, I asked AI to write me a plugin. Of course, it didn’t work, crashed my whole site. And I said, okay, we got to debug this. And I went round and round and round and round and finally said, to hell with that AI. And I wrote my own plugin. It wasn’t very complicated. 20, 30 lines of code. And I did it probably in a few hours. And I was sitting here wasting all this time trying to get AI to do it when I could have just done it myself. Because I know how to code. And it doesn’t matter what language. I’ve done enough languages. I’ve done enough languages, writing code just about anything.

Mary: Yeah. So this is the thing about AI, isn’t it? And probably one of the most unsettling things in the book. And that is that when we don’t use it, we lose it. So if we don’t have to code, we don’t bother to study coding. So we’re allowing AI to do that becomes a very minute percentage of people who understand those particular tools and eventually they get lost. So that’s in things like coding when you’re using it for coding. But what about everyday stuff? Like we, we lose our cognitive capacity if we don’t use our cognitive capacity. So and we often that often happens without us even feeling it’s happening. So I’ve always been concerned about AI for that reason, because I see people, for example, people who create workshops and have created workshops for years and been very, very good at creating workshops will now go on and go, create new workshop about this, make sure you include these few things, bang up comes a workshop. And they don’t even go back and go through it, they just go, right, cool. I’m out there delivering this workshop. After a while, their ability to create a workshop, it goes, right? Yep. So where else is this happening? Like, what’s that looking like in practice? And how would someone start to recognize that it’s happening to them or happening for them?

Stuck in the Middle: When Strategists Stop Thinking

Richard: That’s where the seventh book comes in, stuck in the middle. It’s affecting things like the US military strategy, tactics, where all A lot of the strategic thinkers, the younger ones, can’t think through strategy because they’re depending on AI to do it. Strategy has gotten very complicated. Strategy is, tactics is when you’re fighting a battle, you know, strategy is, in World War II, strategy or Tactics was the Battle of the Bulge, landing on Normandy, all these things happen, Pearl Harbor, that’s all tactics. Strategy is where do we attack? How do we attack? What’s our purpose for doing these attacks and so forth? Well, like the current Iran war, which is heavily mentioned in that 7th book, what’s the strategy? The tactics are pretty obvious, you know, hit this place with missiles, hit that place with missiles, do this, do that. But what’s the strategy? What’s the overall goal? How are you pursuing that goal? How does that combine with politics, geography? Do we understand how the Iranians think in comparison to how we think? What about getting a third party in to help us negotiate? All that stuff is strategy and it’s not, I don’t see it gelling. And a lot of that is because people aren’t thinking. They’re just doing and they’re doing because they’re being told to do it sometimes by, you know, hit this place, do this, do this, do that. And it makes it it makes it harder to get things done.

Mary: So we are already in many ways being directed by robots.

Autonomous Drones and the Danger of Easy War

Richard: Oh, they’ve got autonomous robots now fighting in Ukraine where the the the drones, they don’t have a human being necessarily guiding them. They just say, go that way, find a tank, blow it up, and it goes and does it. It’s not a human involved there. And I actually have a novel called Shield of Ashes that goes into that. It’s not a, it’s a World War III book, but part of it is these autonomous drones are being used in the attack and they’re used quite effectively.

Mary: And, you know, part of me goes, yay, great. We’re not killing humans. We’re just using drones. We’re not putting humans into danger. But then another part of me goes, but what happens if the drone goes wrong? If in one line of code that way we’ve coded a drone, that code isn’t exactly what we wanted because AI is only what it’s been programmed to be.

Richard: There’s a bigger problem.

Mary: What happens then, right?

Richard: There’s a bigger problem here. And the bigger problem is it makes war easier. And if it makes war easier, there’s less resistance to fighting the war. If you don’t, if humans aren’t in danger, at least your humans, you know, if your country’s not in danger, your soldiers, then you’re more likely to start blasting things on the other side because you’re not going to feel the effects. In World War II, you know, there were millions of casualties on all sides and Vietnam and all these other wars. But now it’s the potential. It’s not there anywhere near here yet, but the potential is you just have a robot war and the robots fight each other. And then of course, all the people who live there are blasted. But nobody ever seems to care about that. And then war becomes easier. And I don’t know if I want war to be easier. War’s intended to be bloody, so you don’t want to fight it.

Mary: Yeah, that’s meant to be the thing that stops you or makes you think twice before stepping in, right? It feels like less and less, like we’re holding back from that edge. And that for me, particularly as a mom of a couple of boys, is really very concerning.

Richard: Yeah, yeah. And that’s what the 7th book in the series goes through, is that kind of thing where you’re making war easier and war is becoming very different than it was. It’s very much going to be drone-oriented, both, they have something called dog drones now, which look just like dogs. And they run, and on the ground, they have seaborne drones now that look for mines. They’re using those in the Strait of Hormuz right now to clear mines. Most of these are autonomous. They just say, go find a mine, and it goes and finds it. And autonomous means it does it on its own. It doesn’t need a human.

Mary: Yeah, it’s quite amazing, really, isn’t it? The technology behind that?

Artificial Stupidity and the Singularity Question

Richard: And that’s all AI driven, of course. And the problem, the big problem with AI is it’s stupid. There’s nothing smart about AI. It should be called artificial stupidity because it’s just following patterns.

Mary: Artificial lack of intelligence.

Richard: It’s just following patterns and it’s just very good at it so that it appears to be sentient. It appears to be smart, but it’s not. It’s not smart at all.

Mary: Where does that end? I mean, there’s got to be some… authority. And this sounds a little bit like a movie that I watched many years ago, but there’s got to be some authority behind the robots, right? Some authority behind the AI that sets it up. But if we’re not thinking for ourselves, are we giving one entity, whatever that entity is, a lot more power? Like what’s happening there?

Richard: That’s the magic question. It’s called the singularity. What happens when AI achieves sentient, achieves intelligence? When it achieves that level of sentience, when it becomes self-conscious, that’s the question is what happens then? What does AI do then? Does it become the Terminator? I really doubt it. Does it become something else? Don’t know. But it’s called the singularity, and there’s been lots of theories about that could be anywhere from next year to 10 years out. It’s going to happen, so people think, unless it’s not physically possible for AI to become sentient, it may not be possible. Sentience means it’s self-aware. It’s aware of its thinking.

Mary: Yeah. It’s a little bit scary, this future that we’re working towards. So it almost makes you feel like you shouldn’t use AI at all sometimes and that we, you know, but then it’s really hard not to because everybody is and you get left behind if you don’t. So like thinking about this, you might wonder if we should be using AI at all. But before I move on to book two, which is the augmented human, I need to ask you an obvious question. You are You’re a prolific author. You’re a ghostwriter. You’ve published over 113 books. How much do you use AI in your own work? And does that undercut your argument within the death of thinking?

How a 113-Book Author Actually Uses AI

Richard: I use AI more in the way that augmented human tells you to use AI, which is use it as a tool. It’s a tool just like a smartphone is a tool, just like your car is a tool, just like your shopping cart’s a tool. You use it appropriately. I mean, I can go out there and hit people with my car, but don’t do that because that would be stupid. You can use AI to think for you. I don’t do that because that would be stupid. And I say that it makes you stupid. It’s not, that’s the problem is it makes you stupid. When you have, as we started this conversation, when you have college kids who can’t think because they’re using AI to pass their tests and to get through the course, They don’t know that course. And it really should make you shiver when you think maybe some of those are medical students learning how- It’s.

Mary: Pretty scary.

Richard: To do surgery, faking it using, it’s really faking it using AI. It’s kind of the same as buying the test answers on the internet, you know? You’re just, you don’t know the answer. You’re hoping you’ll figure it out later, but you know, there’s so much pressure just to pass the darn class and you’re under that pressure yourself that you just, you cheat and that’s a problem.

Mary: So as humans, we’re cheating.

Richard: Well, if you use AI the wrong way, you’re cheating. The right way is to use it as a tool. So use it as a research assistant, keeping in mind that it lies, but so does everything else. I mean, Wikipedia is lies. All of the Wikipedia is basically lies. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I use it to start searches. I don’t use it to finish searches.

Mary: Public opinion, maybe.

Richard: Well, that’s what it is. It really is public opinion about what this means. It’s crowd think. And crowd think is always bad. I should write a book about that. Groupthink is bad.

Mary: I feel a book coming on there. Groupthink, the damage of groupthink. Yes. You use the word augmented with two different definitions, and there’s a really sharp distinction between those definitions. So what’s the difference?

The Augmented Human: Digital Assistants, Not Digital Brains

Richard: Well, augmented to increase your abilities is the definition that I tend to use. So I’m augmenting my ability as a writer by using AI to help me with putting together interviews, to help me sort through those massive, massive 24 hour long interviews that I did for a client and come up with an outline. Not using it to write, that would be… I’m not getting paid what I’m getting paid to use AI to write it. If you want to use AI to write it, go hire somebody off Fiverr, you know, or some other, some lower level thing. That’s, there’s another, I don’t remember if I use this term for augmented, but there’s the other augmented thinking where you’re actually getting implants in your brain and you’re, if you’ve ever seen Ghost in the Shell where you’ve actually got robotic implants and things like that, and you’re controlling things with your mind, That’s actually happening. Musk and his Neuralink have actually had some great success at letting people who can’t speak, speak using stuff that’s implanted in their brains. It’s amazing to me. The main way that I use augmented intelligence is, think of it as having digital assistants. You have, say you’re a small business and you, Rather than hiring an employee to fill out your spreadsheets, you hire a digital assistant to fill out your spreadsheets. That would be AI. Rather than coming up doing taxes and hiring some tax company, you hire a digital assistant that’s an expert on tax and have it do your tax forms. These are grunt work things that people don’t need, they just need mediocre of training to do. They’re not necessarily trivial, but they’re things that AI and computers do very, very well. And it lets you free up your mind and your thinking to do something That’s important. So I use digital assistants. I’m going to call them that to do my outlines. Then I go through them by hand. I use them to maybe do a little editing. Tell me what’s, tell me where I missed something in this paper that I just wrote. Does this paper hit all the points? Does it hit him in the right order? Is the pacing of this novel, right? Is the pacing good? Is it pacing bad? What about point of views? You know, you can have it check those kinds of things. Does the point of view swap in the middle of the thing where I’m doing third or the first person, third person? So I got a novel and it’s using first person and then suddenly it shifts to third person. Maybe I didn’t intend that. So is there any place where I do a point of view breach? And AI is very good at finding that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, on page 47, you know, you switch point of view. Did you really want to do that? And I say, no. And then I go in and I fix it myself. That’s augmented thinking.

Mary: I find that very useful if you’re checking between one document and another, for example, if you’ve been updating something and you’re not sure if you’ve updated on both things. You might have a policy book and a procedure book, and you want to check that the two together are correct. I find it very useful for that sort of thing. Find any inconsistencies for me. I find it fantastic for that because it’s just straight analysis, right? It makes it a lot easier.

Richard: Yeah. It’s something in the past you would have hired a virtual assistant to do, and now you don’t have to.

Mary: Yeah. And I find that it’s very good for that. I don’t use it for my original thought, my original ideas. If I’m creating something, I will sit down and go, okay, what is it that I want? How do I want that to work? What do I want to come out of this? What’s the strategy? You know, what’s the outcomes? Sort of plot it out and then I’ll go to AI and go, this is what I’ve come up with. This is what the strategy is, the outcome is that this is what I’ve come up with. Have I missed anything? And that’s where I use AI, because AI will then sometimes come in and go, oh yeah, you should have talked about this, and this. And I’ll go, yeah, that’s rubbish. That’s a bit of Reddit rubbish. That’s actually good. That’s really good. I need to put that in, you’re right. And this bit here, yeah, no, it doesn’t really fit the outcome that I want, so that’s not necessary. So I find it useful almost as an error checker for me to make sure.

Richard: That I have it.

Mary: It’s tool.

Richard: You’re augmenting your thinking by taking those things that are that more or less waste your time or take a lot of time that are just grunt work and letting the machine do it. And then you’ve got your mind is free to do the important stuff, the creativity stuff.

Mary: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I also find it useful sometimes when I need to write an e-mail that might be need to be a bit harsher. or a bit more, keep someone a bit more accountable than what I’m generally like to do is I’ll sometimes go, make this a little bit firmer in tone and it’ll come out with another tone and I’ll look at it and go, ah, that’s better. I’ll have to remember that particular one. That’s a good phrase. I’ll remember that phrase. And then I use that phrase when I’m writing next time. Sometimes you just can’t in the moment come up with the word that you want or the phrase that you want, and then you’re a little bit dark and you could spend half day worrying about that. Or you can just go, give me an idea here. And it comes up and you go, I like that. Or that’s not quite it. And then you’ll fiddle around with what it’s written and go, there it is, there it is, there. I’ve got it now. And I find that area useful. It does reduce a bit of friction.

Richard: And that’s the point. You want the friction around your thinking. You don’t want the friction around stupid stuff that you just have to do to get there, the logistics. Let it do the logistics. You do the thinking. Then you’re augmenting your mind. You’re augmenting your intelligence. You’re freeing it up. And that’s a good thing.

Mary: And not losing it.

Richard: If you use it to think for you, well, then you’re basically making yourself stupider and you don’t want to do that.

Mary: Yeah. So you talk in the book about specific daily habits that separate the people who are building something from the people who are just getting faster at churning stuff out, producing outputs, and trying to get their productivity up higher, but without any thought behind it. So what are those habits?

Richard: Well, you mentioned already one of them where somebody creates a webinar using AI, and webinar is done. That is all fine and dandy. They want to make money really fast, so they create a webinar. The webinar is not going to last long. It’ll attract a few people who don’t know. They’ll take it, they’ll hate it, or they’ll pretend to love it because they get a free gift or something. And great, you can cheat like that. Or you can design the webinar and then have AI build it. So where you’re not just saying, I want this and this and this and this, and you spend half an hour on it, and then boom, you’ve got a whole bunch. good example is the AI slop that I’m seeing on YouTube. That’s actual term now, AI slop. I can’t even watch YouTube anymore. It’s just full of AI junk. It’s just horrible. I need to write an article of the enshitification of YouTube because, oh my God, it’s just AI. I could tell AI is bang, you know, that was written by AI. The habit is to do your thinking. Just think, create exercises that cause you to think. and keep doing that. So when you’re using AI, use it to help you increase your reach, increase your boundaries. Like if you’re going to create a website, yeah, let it create the website. You don’t have to hire somebody for that, but you design it, you put it together, you decide what you want the website to look like, and you decide how it’s going to work and who it’s going to attract and all that kind of stuff. Because the worst thing you can do is depend on AI to do all that stuff and then find out it was wrong, because it probably is. AI, the way it’s designed now, it’s called a large language model, will never, ever be 100% right. That’s not the way it works. It will always hallucinate and it will always drift. You know what the two terms mean? Drift.

Mary: I know. Drift is sort of move sideways, right?

Richard: It does that. So you’ll say, you’ll start telling you to do things and as it continues to do them, it’ll change it slightly and slightly and slightly. And it’ll become unrecognizable after a while to what you actually asked for.

Mary: Because sometimes it completely contradicts itself after a while.

Richard: Hallucination is just making stuff up. And ChatGPT was horrible at that. Claude seems to be much, much, much better at it, not making things up.

Mary: So tell me about Claude, because ChatGPT is the one that I’m most familiar with, probably because I’m not a big adopter of AI. But I’m hearing a lot more about Claude lately. Is Claude taking over?

Claude vs ChatGPT, Privacy, and Skills

Richard: Claude and ChatGPT are kind of going neck and neck. I think ChatGPT is bigger in the market currently, but they both are $100 billion companies. They’ll probably eventually be trillion dollar companies. One of the advantages of Claude is it’s by Anthropic, and Anthropic’s privacy statement says it will be private. It has a much better privacy policy, and it’s much better at that. And it has a little quick button that says, if you said it, it’s not used in the model. Be sure and set that. It’s in the settings.

Mary: So I thought that chat also had that if you were in the paid version.

Richard: Yeah, GPT has that same button, but it does, its privacy policy is much weaker.

Mary: Oh, I see. Right. Can you do that in Claude in the, does Claude have a free version or is it all paid?

Richard: It has a free version. It’s very limited. I have the $200 a month version, and believe me, I use it. And it’s a lot. There’s a $100 a month version and a $20 a month version. Probably for most people, the $20 a month is fine. $100 a month should cover anything that’s beyond that. Highly recommend paying for it. It unlocks a lot of things and makes it much better.

Mary: What we’ve been talking about here with the augmented human, the augmented human pathway, if you would. kind of goes against the grain of all the commercial incentives in the current environment. So we’re told if we don’t use AI, we’re going to be gone. Like from a business perspective, I’m constantly seeing, not using AI, you’re a dinosaur, you’re going to be dead. So why would we take the augmented path rather than the quick production path because we’re trying to compete against those people who can create those webinars in five minutes, can create those workshops in five minutes rather than spending three days working on putting together a two hour workshop. You know, I mean, I know for myself because that’s one of the things that I do with my leadership work is put together workshops that are specific to businesses within industries. So when I’m working on a workshop for a business I’m going into, like, what are the actual business values? What are the problems that business is facing right now within their leadership, within their teams? What sorts of individual issues are popping up that need to be dealt with? All of that are the things that I take into consideration when I’m about to do a workshop for somebody. And all of that requires me asking the questions in a gentle, sensitive manner of the person who’s booking me. And so I don’t see that that’s something that AI can do. But then there’s other people out there selling workshops for the same price, if not more than what I am and going, oh, that’s great. You know, I can stick that together in five minutes. They just fill out a form. AI creates the workshop on the form, boom, it’s done. And there’s no personal interaction that’s gone on, no understanding of that person’s personality, of the various, the intricacies of the issues that are arising. It’s all very generic, but they’re out there selling it.

Richard: Let me tell you what it can do for you right now. First of all, you can use it to research. Get on Claude, I don’t know about ChatGPT, Claude. So you can say, research this company, and then it’ll come back with some vague stuff. And you can say, I want you to do deeper research on this company. I want you to find out all this information that you can about whatever you’re looking for. Has the company ever been sued? Has it been, Has it been, is it public? And how much is it losing or gaining? You can find out tons and tons of information. And then you say fact check that now, make sure it’s right. You can just say fact check it, and it’ll go, okay, that’s wrong, and it’ll fix it. That’s one thing you can do. The second thing you can do is say, okay, I’m going in to talk to the VP today, and here’s his LinkedIn profile, and here’s the background that I have. What questions should I ask? Or I thought of these 12 questions, are there any more? And then you have the interview. If you do it on Zoom or something like that, you’ll get a transcript. You can put the transcript into Zoom and you can say, okay, give me a summary of that. I say a detailed summary. Give me a detailed summary of that meeting. Then you’ve basically, all this stuff that used to be by hand, you’re short circuiting all that and you’re using, you’re still doing the grunt work of coming up with the questions and, but you’re using Claude to help you research and put together all that stuff. Then when you have all those interviews, say with the 40, let’s say you did 30 interviews with 30 people, you could tell Claude to put it together and tell you any patterns. Did you notice any patterns here that I should look for? That’s something that’s really hard for humans to find unless there’s trained in analytics. What are the patterns? And then you could say, are you seeing bad patterns, good patterns, are you seeing a pattern of thievery, what are you seeing? And why are they losing money? Why is their engagement low? And it’ll tell you. May not be right. Keep that in mind. But it’s a shortcut, the stuff. You’re just using it as an analytics tool then. You’re not actually, I mean, that’s AI, but it’s just analytics. And you’ve increased your productivity by several times because you can do all this very quickly. What I just said, you could probably do in an afternoon, minus the interviews. You do the interviews yourself. But you let Claude do the grunt work and you know how much work it is to go through an interview. If you got a bunch of them and figure out what the common thread is, you can have Claude do all that. And, and keep, still keep the brain, you’re still managing it, but you’re, you’re you’re outsourcing the work, some of the work. Think of it as outsourcing. You’re outsourcing it to an analyst.

Mary: Yeah, it certainly could give you some really helpful pointers. And it’s.

Richard: Better than that because if you’ve got it down to a pattern, you can make a skill. And a skill is something that stores permanently. You could say, okay, do the XYZ skill on this company. And the XYZ skill goes, okay, got to go research that company. I’m going to do detailed research. I’m going to look specifically for this guy’s LinkedIn profile. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this, whatever you want it to do. And it’ll go out there and look for it and tell you what it couldn’t do. And it’s basically a program, but it’s all written in English. And what’s really cool is you can do it, okay, you just do it. And then you say, okay, everything we just did in the last three hours, I want you to put into a skill. It builds a skill for you if you want. And then you, okay, then you run the skill and you say, okay, that didn’t do quite what I wanted. I wanted you to also do this and that you did wrong. And here’s what you did. And okay, I’ll change the skill. And there you go, you know. So the skills are pretty cool. There’s other things.

Mary: It’s like you’ve trained it. You’ve trained it like you would if you had the VA doing it, you’d be training the VA. So you’ve trained Claude instead?

Richard: You’ve got a digital assistant. I’m calling it a digital assistant specifically. You’ve trained a digital assistant to do some work for you that you no longer have to do manually, keeping the thinking parts for yourself. And the thinking part is, well, now that I have this information, what do I do with it? What does the company need to do to fix whatever you’re trying to fix? But what is the problem is something that I can really help with. Because that’s what it is, is a pattern recognition engine. And you can just say, I got all this data, recognize the patterns.

Mary: And that’s the hard part, right? Recognizing the patterns.

Richard: That’s the part that the machine is perfect for. Recognize the patterns.

Mary: Yeah. So that truly augments the human aspect to it.

Richard: You got it.

Mary: Yeah. No, that’s very cool. That’s very cool. So they’re really powerful books. And like we’ve mentioned, there’s like seven books in this series, and we’ve only really talked about at any degree the first two. We have already mentioned the book four, I think it is, is Entitification of America. You did quietly mention emasculation, but the emasculation of America, which is book five. And at first glance, that kind of, when I, when I looked at that one, at the precis for that one, I went, oh, it sounds a little bit like a, a conspiracy theory. Because it argues that the culture war over masculinity is actually a foreign intelligence operation that’s been going for 60 years. But that’s a pretty serious claim, right? Is that for real?

Richard: It’s for real.

Mary: And there’s the evidence behind that.

The Emasculation and Villainization of America

Richard: KGB defectors, They came in and explained exactly what they were doing and exactly what the plot is. And it’s all outlined in the book. The purpose of the Russia, they couldn’t win a war against us, a real war. So they did that. Russia tends to do what’s called soft power and that’s soft power. They undermine. And they felt perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, that undermining the American male would underline the United States, undermine the United States.

Mary: Now, that could be a really big conversation, that one, particularly around the patriarchy and the way that the patriarchy rules.

Richard: The book, it has nothing against feminism. What it has against is a foreign country coming in and just help wanting to destroy our country and taking active measures to do it by brainwashing people. And it’s quite serious and they are doing it still.

Mary: It’s quite stunning to consider that. There’s a lot There’s so many levels, so many layers to that, but we’re not going to be able to talk about that one today. We’ll have to talk about that some other time. The next book, book six, is Villainization of America. Now, that I know was shaped fairly directly by your move from California to Florida. And you’ve talked to me in the past about moving, and you’ve mentioned that you watched things happen in California that convinced you that this wasn’t just an organic cultural drift. So do you want to tell me a little bit more about the that one, just a light overview.

Richard: People put down, well, our country’s, by statistic, a great country. There’s things wrong with it. There’s things right about it. But overall, it’s a good country to live in, regardless of whatever race, sex, whatever, you know, you are. It’s a good country, but people don’t think of it that way. They think of it as a country that’s bad and evil and has, well, how did that happen? How did we change from being, thinking of ourselves after World War II as the best country in the world, to now we think of ourselves as scum. What happened there? And that’s what the book’s about. Is why is this happening? And it’s also foreign enemies. Because if you think badly about yourself, it undermines your own, why would you fight for a country that’s not good? And it’s a lot of social media involved there and a lot of other things. It’s about that. How did that happen? Why is it happening?

Mary: It’s, it’s interesting. Again, there’s, there’s so many layers to that with free, free speech and people who feel they can go out and say anything they feel like, because after all, you know, you have freedom of speech, but I think there’s a level of responsibility with what we say and how we say it. And that we, even though we have free speech, we still have to have, take responsibility for what the outcomes are of the things that we say and do. And I think that there’s a lot of people out there saying things that undermine entire societies without even caring because they’re just too busy looking after themselves and not anyone else. I think it’s something we have to be aware of.

Richard: It’s something we need to really look at social media and what it does and the news industry, news I use in quotes because it’s not news anymore. Back when Walter Cronkite was here, it was news, not anymore. Now it’s just entertainment, so to speak. Now it’s just garbage. Really look at what that does to people and why people should start avoiding, or lessening at least, the time they spend on social media and the time they spend watching the news. And then get away from those cell phones. But one of the books is, Turn off the TV, get off your… posterior and do something that’s more of taking personal responsibility and turn off that darn cell phone. I mean, it’s not going to hurt you to have the phone turned off for an hour.

Mary: And like you started that book, didn’t you? You started that book in 2016.

Richard: I did. I wrote that version in 2016. It’s changed dramatically and complete rewrite. But it’s the argument is, is that you can, you can be more than just a passive consumer. You can be somebody who actually takes control and takes advantage of social media and uses it or doesn’t. I don’t use social media except for business stuff. So I use it to promote and it’s not even that good for that.

Mary: Not anymore, I don’t think. I think it’s changed a lot. It’s.

Richard: Been perverted.

Mary: I feel that AI has been used by too many people as a promotional tool for doing their socials. And now like there’s so much AI stuff on socials, you don’t know what to believe anymore. So you kind of don’t believe anything. So it kind of makes you go, well, I’m not going to go to socials anymore for information. And that kind of has undermined the entire social media marketing team, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, we still do it because we feel we have to, but it certainly feels like it’s nowhere near as effective as it once was.

Richard: It’s almost completely ineffective.

Mary: Yeah. Your series was written quite recently, and book seven, Stuck in the Middle, opens with the Iran War as a stress test for American military capacity. And you did touch on this earlier when you were talking about what it revealed?

Missiles, Demographics, and the Cost of Easy War

Richard: Yes, Stuck in the Middle is a geopolitical book, and it’s about how, like with the Iran War, how we’re using up our missiles, we don’t have that many. And we’ve probably lost 30 to 40% of our entire missile storage. by using them. And we’re only building a few hundred of these a year. So it’s going to take years and the factories are basically being built now because it looks like we’re going to be in a few wars for a while. And the current Trump administration has a $1.45 trillion military budget, which is an increase of I think 40% from last year. So it’s dramatic.

Mary: I personally find that quite horrific I mean, imagine if we use that money for good. Imagine if we use that money for good.

Richard: That’s been an argument through history and it’s never going to work. People don’t think about that.

Mary: I know. No.

Richard: People don’t care.

Mary: What an incredibly different world it would be if we did. Instead of spending trillions of dollars on blowing things up, we spent trillions of dollars on building things up.

Richard: But then the American military, the military complex wouldn’t exist. And you know, that can’t be.

Mary: Well, so yeah. apparently. It would take a lot to change that perspective, wouldn’t it?

Richard: I think that perspective can’t be changed. I think it’s hardwired into humanity. I mean, we’ve been fighting since we were evolved.

Mary: Yeah.

Richard: Everybody.

Mary: And yet we keep saying that we’re so superior to what we once were. And I can’t help but wonder if we really are. If that’s the way that we think, if the way that we think is that we must kill each other, that we must war, that we must fight, is there not a better way? If we are so evolved and so much further ahead than what we once were, wouldn’t there be a way to let that go? And that’s where I find that a very interesting concept to consider.

Richard: Yeah, but anyway, the seventh volume is about that. about that whole geopolitical demographic situation. We have a falling demography and you think, well, the population is falling. That’s a good thing, right? No. Our entire economic model is based on having more young people than old people. And in China, that’s actually inverted now. And that’s going to collapse Greece. In Russia, it’s very inverted. Germany, it’s inverted. The United States is close to being inverted.

Mary: Australia. Australia. Yeah, birth rates getting too low as well.

Richard: Well, everybody is.

Mary: Yeah.

Richard: With the exception of some of the countries in Africa. And it’s not an evil thing or a bad thing. It’s what happens when you move people from rural to city. When they live on a farm, it’s an advantage to have more kids to work the farm. When you live in a city, kids are an expense. The less kids you have, the less money you gotta spend. I mean, kids cost money. So it’s as simple as that, that, and Russia was aided by some wars that just devastated its population. They’re still suffering from World War II. The demography is still rippling from that. China has the same problem. Japan, I think is point, you need 2.1 people to replace every two people. And China or Japan’s, I think a 0.9 or something ridiculous like that. And I think China is a 0.7 or 0.6, I’m not sure, don’t quote me. It’s very low. And that’s the one child policy that turned out to be one of the biggest blunders anybody’s ever made.

Mary: Well, yeah, they went, there was a lot of bad stuff going on there. They were knocking off female children just so that they, you know, leaving babies out to die just so that they could have a male child because of the cultural significance of male children. And now there aren’t enough women for the men either.

Richard: That’s what the Spartans used to do too.

Mary: Yeah, it doesn’t serve them in the long run, does it? This series, as I mentioned right at the start, is a bit of an eye-opener. It makes you stop, makes you think. As you say, you know, you might not be right about everything, but it’s It certainly is enough to make you stop and go, whoa, hold on, where are we headed? Are we down a slippery slope here? And I think that whilst that’s written about America specifically, it is transferable and relatable right throughout the world. We’re so interconnected these days. We can keep up on our global affairs. We can and see what’s going on everywhere. And my husband always says, you know, you fly into another airport in another city somewhere in the world, and you honestly, you look at the airport, you could be anywhere. It’s no different anywhere these days. It’s almost, there are very few airports that are different, they’re nearly all the same. So yeah, whilst it feels like we’re probably heading down a slippery slope when you read it, and it all kind of sounds a bit scary, what your series left with me from reading through the bits that I’ve read through is not fear, but clarity. It’s more of an explanation of what’s going on, of more of a, of a realistic view around, okay, how did we get where we are and what are we going to do about it? You let us know where we’re going wrong. You let us know the tools that are already available to us and that we can use these tools to turn this around. And for me, that brings hope. The question I think is, Do we choose to ignore the warnings and stay on the current track, which I think would be a little bit dangerous? Or do we use the tools available and make the changes that make us better humans? And I guess the only thing that’s going to tell is time. But I want to say thank you for bringing this to our attention, for creating this series and taking it out there. So, Richard, where do people get hold of your book?

Where to Find the Enemies of You Series

Richard: So they go to my website, one of my websites, master of worlds, master of worlds, W-O-R-L-D-S.com slash enemies dash of dash me. Excuse me, enemies dash of dash you. My mistake, of you. Or they can just go to master of worlds and it’s on the menu. That’s where I have all my books. There’s, I think I’ve written, I just finished my 76th book that I’ve written for this [113+ authored as of 2026]. That’s in the last few months. I retired a whole bunch of books because the ones in 2015 and 2016 were a little old. So I deleted a bunch.

Mary: Because that’s what happened. Yeah, that’s what happened. I think I wrote my first book in 2019 and I published it in 2019. I wrote it in 2018. But yeah, I’m now looking at it going, yeah, that’s so far out of date now. I need to rewrite that one because the world’s just changing so fast, right? We’ll share the links to your website in the description so that anybody who hasn’t picked that up can go and look at the description and go in and find you.

Richard: Anybody who visits my site, feel free to leave comments and then it’s got, you can buy all the books. They’re in Kindle, ebook and paperback.

Mary: Okay, super. Thank you so much, Richard, and thank you everyone for listening in today. Take care of yourself and remember, Use your augmentation, the way in which it serves you and serves society as we move forward. If you enjoyed this conversation, hit the subscribe button to be notified as each new episode lands. And if you’d like to level up your leadership, go to optimalcoaching.com.au and book a chat to find out how we can help you to make that a reality. This is Optimal Conversations and I am Mary Wong signing off for now. Thanks for listening.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

What is the Enemies of You series?

A seven-book nonfiction series by Richard Lowe examining researched trends working against ordinary people: The Death of Thinking and The Augmented Human on AI’s two paths, The Enshitification of America on private equity, The Emasculation of America on a decades-long Russian influence operation, The Villainization of America on why Americans learned to despise their own country, and the capstone geopolitical volume Stuck in the Middle. The series is available at masterofworlds.com.

Is Richard Lowe against using AI?

No. The Death of Thinking and The Augmented Human were written together as two sides of one choice. Using AI to replace your thinking erodes it; using AI as a tool for grunt work, outlines, analysis, and consistency checks frees your mind for the thinking that matters. Richard uses AI daily in his ghostwriting practice but never to write the books themselves.

What does “the death of thinking” mean in practice?

Learning requires friction. A student who cheats through college with ChatGPT gets a degree without learning how to learn. A developer who only prompts for code cannot debug it. A consultant who generates workshops without designing them loses the ability to design them. Skills that aren’t used quietly disappear.

Who is Mary Wong?

Mary Wong is a leadership coach and the host of Optimal Conversations, the podcast of Optimal Coaching in Australia, where she works with businesses on leadership development and team workshops.