The U-Boat Commander, the Skull Rock Decision, and No Plan B | Real with O’Neill

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on the Real with O’Neill podcast with host Dakota O’Neill, recorded August 15, 2021, lightly edited for readability. This was the second recording of the conversation after a technical failure ate the first; off-air chatter is omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

A reader from the start

Richard Lowe: My mother was very much in favor of reading, so I learned early. I bought from the Scholastic catalogs in grade school, and the libraries had little games: a spider sticker on your Halloween picture for every book read. The first more-or-less adult book I read, at seven, was about the Battle of Iwo Jima; I had trouble with it, but it fascinated me. Then history, then science fiction. My first science fiction book was Stranger in a Strange Land, way over my age level, and most of the mature content went right over my head. What’s fascinating, looking at it from an older age, is that you can see Robert Heinlein change mid-book: the first half is hardcore science fiction, and then it turns into the freaky cultish commune material, and his books after that get progressively stranger. Something changed in the man’s life at that point, and it’s right there in the writing.

In fifth or sixth grade, in 1968, while we were landing on the moon, I started a little newspaper: four pages on that special stencil paper the teachers ran through the machine, the kind that smelled like ammonia. I ran it for about a year.

The bus seat that ended prejudice

Richard Lowe: Junior high in San Bernardino, Shandin Hills, was the first year of desegregation in the area, and the message I’d absorbed from parents and neighbors was: watch out for anybody different, especially Black people, because they will kill you. I was terrified, as was every student. First day, I get on the bus, and the only open seat is next to the one Black kid on the bus. I sit down, terrified, staring forward, and I happen to glance at him, and I realize: he’s just as terrified as I am. So I started talking to him, and we became best friends for a couple of years. Every thought of prejudice just flew out of my mind. People had been telling me stupid things; he was a kid just like me. I learned about his culture, he learned about mine. And he happened to be fairly large, so the kids who’d been beating me up for being a nerd stopped. There were advantages.

After that, bias just slipped away for good. People are people. I figured that out at that age and stopped listening.

The U-boat commander and the meaning of competence

Richard Lowe: High school was a hole for me: we’d moved suddenly to Lake Arrowhead for my parents’ wildlife art gallery, my friends were now separated by mountain distances, the students were getting into alcohol and pot, and I refused completely; I’ve never tasted alcohol, pot, or a cigarette. That pushed them away, my parents fought constantly, and I introverted like crazy. Of six teachers a year, at least four were actively malevolent toward students who didn’t fit their expectations. I skipped prom, over my mother’s objection, and no, I don’t regret it; I have few regrets, and that’s not one.

At 16 I got a work permit, and for two years I was night manager of a liquor store, working for a former German U-boat commander from World War II. A very strict disciplinarian, and turnover under him was constant. After several months, I noticed I was the only employee who’d lasted, and I asked him why. He said: because you’re competent. That word stuck with me for my entire life. I didn’t know what it meant yet, so I started comparing what I did with what the others did, and I saw it: I was competent, and they weren’t, and they were gone. Competence means you’re not ignorant of your area, you have the skills, you do the work well and without lollygagging, and you could teach it to someone else. It applies to a job and it applies to a family road trip.

One night he invited me to the back room for chess; he was a chess master, and he beat me in three moves. And then he started talking about the war, and he was crying. He told me about having to surface the submarine and shoot the survivors in the water, about 50 men, because there was no room on a U-boat for prisoners and they were all going to die in freezing water anyway; in his mind, it may have been mercy. I was 17, thinking: I am not a psychologist, I don’t know why he’s telling me this. But I held it together and listened for two hours, and I saw the war from the other side for the first time. I didn’t even know there was another side. That started a lifelong habit: there’s always another side, or several. Find them before you decide. That’s critical thinking, and it became very important to me.

BASIC fills a schedule hole

Richard Lowe: The village around the liquor store was burned down as a fire-training exercise to make room for a mall, so I moved to a supermarket job and junior college. Registering late, I had a hole in my schedule, and one of the only things that fit was something that sounded really stupid: the BASIC language. It was a computer class, and I fell in love, because the computer would do what I said. At home I was, and I use this word intentionally, my father’s slave: authoritarian, beatings, verbal abuse. The computer obeyed me. I wrote text games; I found Dungeon, the predecessor of Zork, descended from Adventure, the first computer role-playing game. Then assembly language, controlling the machine under the code: I could make the lights blink and the disk drives hum.

My teacher Rick and his guest speakers ran a company, and a classmate, Don Wheeler, took me along to my first computer industry show, DECUS, with the industry still tiny, before Apple was a gleam in anybody’s eye. Don got hired at a water district, then called to say Rick had an opening, cursing me out because he’d wanted it. I was hired as a coder, and within a year I was vice president of consulting, managing about a dozen people on graphics cards and deeply technical projects. I dropped out of college for it: a real career path had appeared.

And the home situation had turned dangerous; the arguments were heading toward real violence. In our last argument my father said: if you don’t like the rules here, you can leave. I went silent, walked away, and thought: I never actually considered moving out before. Thanks for the recommendation. Within six months I was gone, at 19. My sister promptly reported that my parents had bet each other I’d come crawling back on my belly within two weeks. You can damn well bet I never moved back anywhere after that.

Two jobs, one marriage, and Trader Joe’s

Richard Lowe: My career climbed: another company, then two positions at once, VP at one and senior designer at another, building the water control systems for Las Vegas, New Haven, and Ohio, sluice gates on dams, tanks, the works. I’d work weekdays in Oxnard and fly to Vegas for the weekend, for six months, until I discovered that under pre-Reagan tax law I was actually netting less money working two jobs than one. Then five years in North Long Beach until a new VP of marketing soured the place. I got married, decided to look elsewhere, and days later Trader Joe’s offered me director of technical services and computer operations. I stayed 20 years: the production computers, the disaster recovery site, computer security, all the applications, merchandising, and the warehouses, with a team that grew to eight. Development, stores, and network belonged to others. Challenging, fun, and 24/7 on call.

The marriage: I met Claudia, from Guatemala, and after three dates in three weeks I proposed, and we scheduled the wedding for that day. My two best friends objected so strenuously that when the officiant asked if anyone knew a reason we shouldn’t marry, they both stood up and said no, and the wedding was called off. I spent two days convincing my own best friends to let me get married, then a potluck wedding, then the justice of the peace because we’d missed the license, then the justice of the peace again because he lost the license. Married four times in two weeks. And it turned out to be the worst mistake of my life: we hadn’t taken time to know each other, our goals opposed, and about a year in she got horribly sick and stayed sick for 11 of our 12 and a half years: COPD, repeated MRSA, IVs changed twice a day. The whole time, I wanted to be a writer; I wrote hundreds of web articles nobody saw, and a family autobiography that got me disowned by my parents, which I never understood, because it was actually kind to them.

One bright spot: John Shields, the best manager I ever had, the ex-CEO of Macy’s brought in to turn Trader Joe’s from $250 million a year into a billion, which he did. I walked in terrified to ask for a $75,000 system; he asked a few questions and said: go for it. Days later I asked to hire someone and he said: you don’t have your ducks in a row yet; work on it and come back. When I came back ready: go for it. He flowed power to people. He was in charge of finance, I was in charge of tech, and if I didn’t know my job I shouldn’t have it. First and only boss who believed in me like that.

Skull Rock

Richard Lowe: When my wife passed away, I went to Joshua Tree and climbed to the top of Skull Rock, which looks exactly like its name. I sat there and asked: what do I want to do with the rest of my life? Caring for her had been most of what I’d done for years. And I decided: life is short, and I can make my own happiness or my own hell. It’s up to me. Nobody else cares, and nobody else has the power over me. Other than me.

So I started photographing: all the national parks of the southwest, then the state parks, then Renaissance faires, over 400 of them, flying all over the country, sometimes hired, becoming an honorary faire member. I found belly dance and became the belly dance photographer for Southern California: 1,200 photo shoots. For eight years I threw an annual birthday party where over a hundred dancers came and danced, because I gave them their pictures free and they wanted to give something back. How many people can tell you that? The first one was in a rented pirate ship with a bonfire; later I rented the Monrovia community center, which always looked like a glitter bomb had gone off, and probably still holds glitter today. I produced about 20 dance shows, with the proceeds generally going to charities for abused women. And at 50 I got the tattoos: a dragon and a phoenix, eight hours in the chair for one and sixteen over four weeks for the other, plus coral snakes and a black widow, all power symbols: shy creatures, charming and intelligent, until you make the mistake of provoking them. Top artist, name of Zulu. I brought a Bharatanatyam dancer friend whose assigned job was to laugh every time I screamed, and she had a great time.

The cliff, with no plan B

Richard Lowe: Eventually I was done with the nine-to-five stress. I had runway in several places, so I jumped off the cliff: gave Trader Joe’s seven weeks’ notice, threw a final belly dance party across two venues with over 200 dancers, and moved to Florida on my birthday, about as far from California as I could get without Hawaii. My dancer friend, who’s actually from Sri Lanka, said: you’re not going alone, and came with me.

I’m reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall right now, and he says it clearly: never have a plan B. People perform better without a safety net, because you cannot fail. That’s exactly where I was. So I didn’t. Critique groups, the thousand-dollar ghostwriting company, and the owner telling me, not maliciously, that I wouldn’t get more and should stay because the business was too tough for me. The day after I quit: a $10,000 contract. Two days later: $15,000. Both books are still out there being sold.

The $10,000 rule and the businesses that didn’t make it

Dakota O’Neill: How do you market yourself as a ghostwriter when you can’t show the work?

Richard Lowe: I have 60 books of my own published [113+ as of 2026]: those are my credentials. Several clients have given permission to be references. And most business comes from direct cold outreach on LinkedIn: I read a profile, write “I see you’re interested in this subject, I’ve written books on it, have you thought about one?”, and maybe one in fifty responds. At my rates, about ten contracts a year, usually $10,000 to $20,000, and I’m set.

Here’s the important datum: it is just as hard to get a $10,000 contract as a $100 contract. The same level of difficulty. So why chase $100 contracts? Fear. Fear is what motivates people to do small things. Look at the ratio of marketing time to money earned, and if the ratio is wrong, don’t do it. There are exceptions, selling cheap products to the masses: I tried affiliate marketing and made over $10,000 in six months, and gave it up because the products and the people tended toward scummy. I sold on eBay for a year, about a thousand items of accumulated junk, and made $35,000, and quit when I ran out of junk and started eyeing things I wanted to keep. Online tutoring didn’t work. Ghostwriting worked, because it sits exactly on my skills. And since our last talk two weeks ago, I landed a children’s book contract, teaching children about technology, starting tomorrow; no bidding, I was her only choice.

The one structural disadvantage: visible credentials. A Pulitzer journalist’s name on a cover generates sales; mine doesn’t. When I’m up against one of those, I don’t get the project, and it doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of work. And when you see a book by an actor, a politician, or a sports figure, Matthew McConaughey’s included, you can bet with good cause there’s a ghostwriter or at least a coach involved, because they’re not writers, just like I’m not an actor.

Human rights, the abandoned slavery book, and echo chambers

Dakota O’Neill: You’ve made a human rights coloring book, and you’re passionate about the subject. Where does that come from?

Richard Lowe: My own journey: fighting free of a domineering father, and of companies that became domineering. I don’t compare my experiences to anyone else’s; I haven’t lived theirs and they haven’t lived mine. I was in a conversation where a Black woman was talking about Black Lives Matter and a white woman said, don’t all lives matter? And I thought: you don’t have a clue, do you? If a house in the neighborhood is on fire, you don’t scream at the firemen for not spraying all the houses. I started writing a book on slavery once, did the interviews and the research, and abandoned it, because it was literally too emotional to continue. What most people don’t realize: those movie depictions of elderly, gray-haired enslaved people mostly didn’t exist; survival after arriving in America averaged about three years. It’s right up there with the Holocaust in horror, and American Indians and other minorities were enslaved too, which we also forget. I traced my own genealogy back as far as records go and found no slavery in my line: how could I truly understand it? What I can do is ask, listen without getting emotional, and learn. I love learning about cultures; diversity is part of human rights to me, and my Trader Joe’s team was one of the most diverse you’ve ever seen, because all I cared about was: can the person do the job?

And no, I wouldn’t work for the Nazi now, knowing what I know; back then I didn’t understand what a Nazi was. Clients regularly bring me books glorifying things I won’t glorify, and I turn them down. The exception I’d consider: the story of how somebody converted away from it. That happens, rarely. Integrity is the only thing you’ve really got.

One more thing on viewpoints: social media puts you in an echo chamber, where the left can’t imagine how the right thinks and the right can’t imagine how the left thinks, so each concludes the other is stupid. Get out of it. What you’ll find on the other side is people trying to survive, with concerns that may or may not be valid but are theirs. Find out what the concerns are and work alongside them, rather than shaming and yelling. And the divide isn’t new; it goes back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and further. Presidents were despised in their own time, Kennedy included; read the contemporaneous newspapers. Then he got us to the moon, in hand-built ships; the Apollo project is truly amazing when you look into it.

Mermaids, wrestlers, and the last word

Richard Lowe: Yes, the World Mermaid Awards: the Silverton in Las Vegas, where I photographed about 50 mermaids, two of them supermodels; those tails cost thousands of dollars, and Hannah Fraser later filmed herself swimming beside a whale in hers, beautifully. And the WWE: I paid the $700 front-row seats a few times, where you keep the chair, and mine has the Undertaker on it, the man the wrestlers themselves go to for advice. My wife and I agreed on almost nothing, and the one thing we genuinely shared was watching wrestling three times a week; she’d be yelling at the screen. My favorite was Mick Foley, Mankind, who came out in a straitjacket and turned out to be a genuinely funny, kind man.

The lessons, to close. Find the intersection of three things: your passion, an income, and helping people. “Follow your passion” alone is bad advice; if your passion is making paper airplanes, you probably can’t make a living at it. I worked 33 years in computing, and it paid for everything and enabled the writing career, and it wasn’t my passion, and it was making me sick. Now all three line up, and my whole life changed. Second, from Schwarzenegger again: selling is part of your entire life, and nobody else is going to sell you unless you pay them. You buy a Stephen King book because it says Stephen King; the same book by Joe Blow, you’d never know existed. He built that name by selling himself, and then backing it with the work. Whatever you’re good at: sell it, and get over the shyness, because it isn’t optional.

Dakota O’Neill: Where can people find you?

Richard Lowe: thewritingking.com/: there’s a contact form and an appointment scheduler. Writing coaching by the hour, books, blog articles, and if you’ve got a podcast that needs a guest, I do that too. Books at coolauthor.com, straight to my Amazon page, including How to Sell on eBay, my second-best Kindle seller at around 5,000 copies, and Focus on LinkedIn, my bestseller at around 15,000. Courses at fictionmasterclass.com, and my photography at richardlowejr.com.

Dakota O’Neill: Thank you so much for being on the show.

Richard Lowe: My pleasure. A pleasure for all hundred thousand of your listeners.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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