Speaker 0 | 00:09.207
All right, well, welcome to another podcast or an episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, where we’re allowed to geek out with fellow nerds and there’s no eye scrolls or loss of conscious thought as people’s eyes roll under the backs of their skull. Today I’m proud to introduce Richard Lowe, the writing king. who has 30 plus years in the IT world. One of your last jobs was the Director of Technical Services and Computer Ops at Trader Joe’s. So Richard, take it away. Tell us some about yourself.
Speaker 1 | 00:41.171
Well, I’m Richard Lowe. Currently, I’m the writing king. I’m a ghostwriter. But to get a little of my history first, I was in college trying desperately to make enough money to move out of the house because it was a bad scene. And one of my teachers decided to start a company, a computer company. And back then, back in the early 80s, 1980s, the computers were the size of rooms and not very powerful. And I jumped at the opportunity to join his company. And I became, within a year after that, I was the VP of that company, VP of consulting. So I ran a group of eight people. And while at that company, I was one of the team that developed the very first ever disc defragmenter ever written. I was the project lead, and then there was a designer and a coder. That later became, I think that later got bought by Raxcode, became their version. Not sure what happened after that. That company went under. So then I went to a different company. I actually took two jobs. I was the senior designer for the Las Vegas Valley, New Haven, Connecticut, and Ojai, California SCADA system for water. What SCADA is is system control and data acquisition. And so it monitored all the dams, loose gates, pipes, meters, tanks of water through those three different places. They were different systems, of course.
Speaker 0 | 02:05.369
And most of those SCADA systems are still in place today. Most of them are running some of that same original code.
Speaker 1 | 02:12.334
They are. And they’re running on VAX, VMS. And one was written in Fortran. And one was written in Pascal. We had two systems.
Speaker 0 | 02:21.100
Needs to be back to the college days.
Speaker 1 | 02:23.141
Yeah. Yeah. But back then, those were the big languages. And we wrote one in Fortran. And then after one manager left, who was kind of a pain in the butt, we rewrote another one in Pascal and it was much better. And at the same time, I worked a job in Long Beach where I was, again, VP of consulting for a company. And I had about six people working for me. And there we wrote a, in addition to supporting companies, we put together a fraud detection system for credit cards, not credit cards, phone cards.
Speaker 0 | 03:03.563
What time period is this again? Because you started out in the 80s.
Speaker 1 | 03:08.324
This is still the mid 80s.
Speaker 0 | 03:10.104
Damn. So fraud detection on phone cards in the 80s. What kind of, what was that like? Because I imagine the, your database to draw from wasn’t anywhere near what it is today.
Speaker 1 | 03:22.220
I ran on MySQL, I believe, if my memory is correct. And it basically built a profile of your calls. So if you normally called from California between these hours of the day, and you normally called your dad in Mississippi and a few other places, that was let through. But if it didn’t meet the profile, then by a certain deviation, it would flag it for investigation. and for shutting the card off and stuff. It was quite advanced for the time, not using AI at all.
Speaker 0 | 03:56.023
Right, exactly. There was no AI. There wasn’t a national database. There wasn’t like a behavioral database. You guys were just using your thoughts and your programming skillset to do it. And actually thinking about that technology, man, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about phone cards.
Speaker 1 | 04:15.536
I know, I know. It was a big thing back then.
Speaker 0 | 04:18.618
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 | 04:20.440
It was huge. So it was a challenging team. One of my guys who worked on it was a, he came from Serbia and he was involved in the Serbian war there, the one that NATO started bombing. So he disappeared every once in a while to go do whatever he did. He was on the opposing side, the side that we supported, but he was, he basically, I always suspected he was Making bombs and stuff is probably something more harmless.
Speaker 0 | 04:50.677
Yeah, he was doing cyber attacks back then.
Speaker 1 | 04:54.063
Probably not. There really wasn’t an internet back then. in fact there wasn’t an internet back then one of the projects i worked on for that first company was some a precursor to the internet that got shoved out i was the senior designer on it um it used uh digital equipment corporations deck net as a base and then built
Speaker 0 | 05:13.649
on top of that so you’re probably more familiar with this term than a majority of our our younger license the the freakers or freaky p spelled with a ph phone for you
Speaker 1 | 05:28.647
Yeah, you would whistle into a phone because typing the keys made certain tones into the phone and you could whistle in phone numbers and things. I was never very good at that, but I hung around with people who were. And it was just, it was, excuse the pun, freaky to watch them phone freak and be able to do things like put in money into the phone. And the phone would say, okay, thanks. You put in 50 cents and give them the call just from their whistles.
Speaker 0 | 05:54.537
Yeah. And I remember like one of the big things was the cap. crunch whistle um and 3600 3600 was the um frequency that that the captain crunch whistle blew at that allowed them to um freak the phone and and set it up and make it think that money had been deposited or that there was a credit available that was easy though there were i was hanging around with guys who could do that night day and night in their sleep and uh it was kind of fun yeah the original hackers
Speaker 1 | 06:28.003
Yep. Yep. That’s not what they were called. And I forget what they were called, but it was something else. Phone freaks was one of them. So I stayed at that company for six years. And I worked on the SCADA system for about a year until I did my taxes and realized that it was actually making less money working for two companies than I would for one. This was before Reagan was president. Reagan did a tax thing to simplify the taxes. And before that, you would actually want if you made more money you actually wind up making less money after taxes then so i quit one of the jobs which was good because i was flying to and from las vegas for six months every week to support it so i was working the weekends on one job and working weekdays on another and one was in vegas and i got so tired of vegas oh my god i don’t drink i don’t smoke i don’t gamble i don’t do any of these things i don’t even like the shows so it’s really boring wow and so was vegas the weekend job or the Vegas was a weekday job.
Speaker 0 | 07:27.027
Okay. So lots of time there. And if you didn’t enjoy any of the entertainment there, yeah. Middle of the desert.
Speaker 1 | 07:35.830
Middle of the desert with nothing to do and having basically in the computer room because it was cold. And so I stayed there for a few years. And then one of our customers was a warehousing company. And I did some work for them. And then they put me in contact with Trader Joe’s. And a guy named Fred hired me there as the director of technical services. And my title later got amended to include the computer operations. That was an interesting position for the first two years. Fred had a certificate on the wall that said he was certified by a psychiatrist to be insane. And he did that for ADA protection. So they couldn’t fire him. He was concerned about getting fired. So you can’t fire somebody with a… with a disability. So he was protected and it took them a long time to build up a case because he basically built a wall. We could not talk to anybody outside the department without him being there. We couldn’t have a single conversation. We couldn’t even say hi without him being there. And he would, he had to prove all money. So if it was a $5 book, he had to prove it. It got really, really weird for about a year and a half.
Speaker 0 | 08:50.386
So one of those total people.
Speaker 1 | 08:52.263
controlling micromanagement kind of personalities running the department running the department running the the probably the most important department in the company because we kept this thing is going to the shelves arguably
Speaker 0 | 09:07.229
the most important yeah because you guys were the your well the communication um the the all of the communications for placing orders and or you know what’s needed and getting them onto the shelves how many stores at that point
Speaker 1 | 09:21.827
I think it was 40. It wasn’t huge. So then one day I come in and there’s two big sumo wrestler types there with guns. And we’re like, me and my pal Jimmy, we’re like, what the heck? And it turns out they were going to fire him that day and they thought he was going to go postal. So he quit and things settled down. And I got to work for John Shields. John Shields was the man who was CEO of Macy’s. And he became CEO of Trader Joe’s. John Shields was a breath of fresh air. Oh my God, John Shields is my hero. He’s passed away long since. But he… He basically brought Trader Joe’s into life. And it was wonderful working for him for a couple of years directly for the CEO. And he had an attitude of support and almost a servant leader. And he was really good before the term existed. And then after John Shields left, I had another breath of fresh air and I got to work for Dan Bain, who’s still the CEO, I believe. Dan Bain was awesome. A little more introverted than John, but he basically is the reason why the company became what it is today. I believe it’s 15 or 20 billion a year revenue, something like that. It’s not a private public company, so the numbers aren’t public, but it’s up there in the many billions of dollars. It’s probably number 12 or something in supermarkets. Go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 10:55.335
I was going to ask, how many stores was it by the time that you left?
Speaker 1 | 10:59.225
I think it was 340 or something like that. And I think it’s 500 now. And it’s a good little chain. You know, it’s a nice chain. It’s kind of almost a cultist chain. People love it. I mean, to me, it’s a food store with friendly people. But for some people, it’s the place they go. They drive 500 miles. They’ll have stuff shipped from clear across the country. They’ll buy it on eBay at five times the price just to get Trader Joe’s products. I never really understood that. But. c’est la vie you know the stores are nice they run nice they’ve got very very friendly people that’s unfriendliness to customers is not tolerated um and it has kind of a nautical theme so it’s kind of fun it was fun working there i did a lot of good work um enjoyed the place my manager tom was a good manager and um have four three other peers i was the i was the head of the computer production computer department Then Jimmy was the head of networking. Linda was the head of development. And some guy whose name I don’t remember was the head of stores, store development.
Speaker 0 | 12:08.069
What was something unique about working in that industry and working with the stores? Something that I wouldn’t guess. Knowing IT, knowing the stores, knowing point of sales and networking and everything else. What’s something unique around Trader Joe’s?
Speaker 1 | 12:26.225
that you ran into well number one trader joe’s does not all of it we did digital transformation i was me and a couple of my peers were in charge of digital transformation at the company before that became a term and we did it twice basically but all of the digital transformation was on the back end there is no nothing on the front end on the front end is all manual so there’s no website that you can order things from there’s no mobile technology there’s no coupons there’s no loyalty programs, none of that, because that violates Trader Joe’s rules or customs. What they want is a store where you’re comfortable to come in through and they like it run in an old-fashioned kind of way. And I think that’s what makes it very endearing to a lot of people is there is none of that stuff. So digital transformation, if we even approach the boss about going to the customer side, it was no, forget it. And you didn’t push on that because then you got yelled at. no we don’t do that here’s why if you if you think we should do that you don’t understand the company culture and you need to go get some more training or whatever so it’s very focused on customer support customer service as opposed to um trying to automate things so it’s kind of the opposite of everybody else yeah
Speaker 0 | 13:39.620
and and you know there’s not one around me um i think the closest one to me is like 200 miles away and i i’m not that loyal customer yet you know i’ve gotten a chance to go buy oh trader joe’s and so i went in checked it out and it was still like you talked about but that it’s been a decade since i’ve been there and and i’m wondering if they’re still doing that as
Speaker 1 | 14:00.328
far as i know it hasn’t changed in that in that regard now on the back end we put in quite a bit of sophistication because products are typically ordered overseas or they’re sourced from somewhere we private label them So everything got private labeled, most things. So basically we became kind of a manufacturing company on the back end, a food manufacturing company. So if it was some kind of new brand muffin, that would be made by our vendors for Trader Joe’s.
Speaker 0 | 14:30.617
Yeah, so they would have to set up a special role and produce it in your packaging.
Speaker 1 | 14:36.580
Right, right. And there were times we finally went into the point where we were actually doing the manufacturing of salads and sandwiches and things like that. So we had assembly lines set up for food stuffs. And it was kind of interesting to set that up.
Speaker 0 | 14:49.996
Okay. And then depending on the number of stores that you guys had by that time, I’m betting that a lot of that had to have been done local or were you guys shipping across the country with salads? and sandwiches and the like?
Speaker 1 | 15:03.785
There’s a limit to how far you can ship it for freshness. So I believe it was shipped maybe two states away or something. There was a limit to that. And we did a lot of efficiency things too where we found one of the operations department did a study and found out that a truck went one way and then it came back empty. So that wasted fuel. So we figured out a way to use that space on the truck by selling the truck. empty truck to other companies to ship back for example that’s called a backhaul so there were a lot of things like that with that huh yeah they’re a lot familiar with that with my uh my experience in logistics and transportation go ahead we were just getting into that talking about that when i left i’m assuming that it got implemented i’m not sure um so i was there for 20 years and it was a fun place to work it was challenging because i was the point man and it was exhausting because i was the point man so i get i’d got woken up at 2 a.m. I got, you know, computers down. I got woken up. Somebody, some buyers having trouble at three in the morning because they can’t sleep on their computer. I got woken up, you know, whatever they had, I got woken up and then I put the team together and we did it. We had some rather serious crashes, just like every company. We had a disaster site. I built it. That was the first thing I built, a live hot disaster site, 40 miles away. I think they’ve moved it now to some other state, which is. was something I was pitching for for a long time, but nobody wanted to do. And back in 20 years, back now it’s 35 years ago. There was no internet. So transferring large amounts of data meant you, you bought a phone line from where you were going from where you were to where you were going, a T1 or T3, or you rented it. So it wasn’t as easy now as just connecting to the internet and shooting data across. You actually had to put in the, have the phone company put in the phone lines.
Speaker 0 | 16:58.632
we had to have them dig the phone line sometimes so it was interesting okay yeah i hadn’t thought about that so a majority of the stores how many of the stores are freestanding where you would have to have them dig the lines because they you’re not moving into a building with free or to
Speaker 1 | 17:15.685
warehouses to warehouses okay to the warehouses side yeah the stores went over satellite initially and then they went over t1s and finally i think they’re all internet connected now i would guess but um yeah anymore that’s the way to do it but man i remember when i getting a t1 was like getting um high speed internet 1.5 megabit i remember when 350 386 bot or whatever it was was high speed so i’m a little bit older than you we
Speaker 0 | 17:44.485
started at 110 baud with teletypes oh man see i yeah i came in a little after that i was when i started doing some of the stuff in college it was still modems dialing up so you know we’d get the 56k but um and that’s why going to a uh business and and getting a 1.5 megabit was like huge oh yeah yeah or 75 people could run off of that connection and now at home i have one terabit oh
Speaker 1 | 18:15.967
man excuse me one gigabit sorry one gigabit i want some yeah i got a one gigabit it’s like 400 meg i got a one gigabit line um that’s very very stable knock on wood and um I have 75 terabytes of storage in my hand.
Speaker 0 | 18:31.354
Oh, man.
Speaker 1 | 18:32.094
Plus, that’s all in the cloud also.
Speaker 0 | 18:35.355
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 | 18:37.216
It’s backed up into the cloud, so just in case. Yeah. So that’s a lot. I do videos, so there’s a lot of video up there.
Speaker 0 | 18:46.540
Okay. So what was one of the biggest successes from a failure? You know, that’s a… new twist on some things. So, you know, what, what challenge did you run into or, or find what hidden nugget did you find in the middle of one of those 3am calls?
Speaker 1 | 19:07.139
Well, I’ll give you two. The first one was, um, learning how to communicate with high-level managers. The C-level people I learned don’t talk geek. And I was a geek. I mean, I was as hardcore geek as you can get. And I was shy and introverted and stuff. And trying to present something to a C-level person at Trader Joe’s or at any place, I’m assuming. And I had to learn how to talk to them in business speak. And there was one meeting where basically I had to switch gears right in the middle of the presentation because they were not buying it. And it was something they needed. They needed. We needed to do. And I. Had to basically change my whole modus operandi of speaking to them right in the middle of the speech. You know, just say, OK, I’m going to throw away these slides, literally throw away these slides. I’m going to talk to you and just start talking business. And they went ahead with it. But that was a big learning experience of punting. And that’s where I learned that business people don’t talk geek normally. Sometimes they do. And the more you can talk business, the better you’ll do. Because I actually sold, it was a multimillion dollar thing. And I sold it to the C level, but I wasn’t. I mean, by 15 minutes of the meeting, I was like, okay, I’m failing at this. I have to change. and that was that was you could see the the glaze in the eyes you know like what oh they were getting the intro they were getting pissed they wasn’t just glazed they were they were like ready to throw me out we don’t care we don’t want this stuff what are you talking about this stuff for um and then i switched give me another chance i threw away the slides and started talking business and the numbers they were interested in roi and things like that and the whole attitude changed and i never became their best buddy because you know i still was a geek but at least i could speak the language and i learned a lot from that dan bain is was pretty good at um letting his thoughts be known hold on a second you know you’re talking about making this major switch in the middle of a presentation and
Speaker 0 | 21:19.986
so you already had to have that capability or you know where did where did that come from where did learning how to speak business come from?
Speaker 1 | 21:30.758
Well, I was VP of two companies before that. It just got rusty because I went straight back into the tech after that. I had eight people working for me, plus a team of anywhere from five to 20 consultants, but I didn’t need it for that intervening time. And then it just had to, okay, this is all rusty, but I have to do it because I’m not going to fail at this because we need to do this right now. And there was.
Speaker 0 | 21:55.131
And so it was a multimillion dollar cost. to add this thing in and and you just had to help them understand the value of it and and um what it how it was going to actually pay for itself later yeah yeah how it was going to pay for itself what the what the impact of the business was as opposed to what the geeky stuff was um
Speaker 1 | 22:16.975
i was when i started i was talking about how wonderful the technology was and how it was going to do this and this and they didn’t care And then when I switched, I was like, okay, what this does for the business is users will have their response time will change from this to this. They’ll be, you know, their systems won’t be dirt slow anymore. They’ll be more productive by this amount and so forth. I had all the numbers. I had all the data. I just wasn’t presenting it right.
Speaker 0 | 22:40.655
Yeah. Well, and there’s definitely going to be some assumptions made. I remember a conversation that a consultant was having with our controller. one time and he’s like you know it’s the the action that the person that we’re talking about you know they were talking about um indexing paperwork that’s being scanned in and he’s like it’s 35 seconds per page and the uh the controller started to get pissed off thinking that that he’s saying look man it’s 35 seconds per page what do you want and then um So the controller was getting mad about that, thinking that we’re downplaying the speed with which things were happening or that we were upselling the speed with which things were happening. And the consultant said, wait a minute. What I’m telling you is that they’re going through like 2000 images and 35 seconds per each means that that’s their whole day right there. And we need to make that faster. We need to get that down to five to 10 seconds. And if we do that. Then they’ve got half their day done. And so the controller had their assumptions on the fact that he’s talking about seconds versus minutes. And they were both talking the same thing. It was just the separate approaches into the same problem.
Speaker 1 | 24:03.722
It’s usually just language. It comes down to just speak the right language and don’t speak down to them. Don’t be arrogant. And that’s what I learned in that meeting. And it was very interesting. It was very interesting.
Speaker 0 | 24:22.531
So you changed up some. So you were at Trader Joe’s or you had the two companies prior, did Trader Joe’s, and then what happened?
Speaker 1 | 24:33.356
Well, things were changing. The role was changing. The business was changing. Trader Joe’s has a policy of not hiring for the main office. So we were expanding. like 10%, 15% a year at a pretty big rate. I think it was 15% a year or some big rate. Yeah, I couldn’t hire more staff. In fact, I had to cut staff. And the grind was just becoming too much. So I decided to… start my basically become a writer at first my thought was i’m going to just quit i’m going to move to florida and i’m going to become a writer and that produced its own level of stuff but there’s actually a story before that you said major changes in life that
Speaker 0 | 25:17.293
i think your audience will find very interesting um if you don’t mind no by all means i mean i we talked i think we talked a little about this but go for it yeah my
Speaker 1 | 25:28.522
I was married to a Guatemalan and she passed away in 2005 and from smoking related things. It was, she was sick for basically 12 to 12 and a half years we were married. I mean, he’s sick to where I was doing IVs on her. I was trained to do her IVs and take care of it home. She had MRSA a few times and some other things. So she passed away and I was just, as you can imagine, completely caved in. My entire life was supporting her as a caregiver and work. And suddenly she was no longer there. And I went into grief. I became, because I was only doing that, I was super shy, back off from people. I mean, really, really shy and introverted and so forth. And one day, three days after she passed away, after the funeral, I went to Joshua Tree National Park and I climbed to the top of Skull Rock. And by the way, if you ever climbed to the top of Skull Rock. be sure and wear a suntan lotion because i didn’t and that was a big mistake with this i got i was good about uh yeah never mind keep going i turned into red just yeah i got very sunburned um i had a hat at least and sat up there for like eight hours and watched the things got rained on you know birds came down watched the bears not bears excuse me cougar and all kinds of stuff and thought i decided i need to change my life um to something different and i think that’s where the c that was about 10 years before i left 10 years yeah about 10 years before i left and i think that eight years before i left i think that was when the seeds of leaving got planted but um one of the things i decided was to break the shyness shy introversion is fine introversion just means extroversion means you get power from being with people introversion means you get trained from being with people so that’s fine. I mean, I’m an introvert. I get, I, I can go with people for a few hours, but give me, put me at a party. And by the end of the party, I just want to go home and go play on the computer. While there’s an extroverted person will stay at the party all day long and keep going. But shyness means you don’t want to talk to people. And shyness is actually detrimental to survival. At least I concluded that because you’re not talking to people. You need to talk to people. You need to be out there. You need to. So I decided to break that. And the way I broke it was I became a photographer. and I needed to do something when she passed away because I needed a hobby. So I picked up photography, and I thought, this is going to help. First, I started with national parks and things. I photographed all the national parks in Southern California and then in the Southwest, American Southwest. And then I ran into Renaissance fairs. So I started photographing people. And then I realized I can use the camera to talk to people. So I talked to the camera to talk to them. And that made it easier. So I started photographing. I became basically an honorary Rennie, as they call them. I was a Renaissance Fair person. I was their photographer. They’d always hunt me down. They hired me a few times. They paid me to photograph. I still have probably 600,000, 500,000, something like that, Renaissance Fair photos out there. Then I ran into belly dancers at the Renaissance Fair. That helped break the shyness more. I started photographing them. Now I was sitting there in the back because I was so shy. I was in the back row with my telephoto lens, you know, taking good pictures, put them on the rudimentary internet and they found them and they love them and they so forth. So one day I’m sitting there and one of the dancers at the time, I was super conservative, you know, very, very caved in, very shy. And she’s all extravagant with tattoos all over her arms and tattoos that she did herself. I later found out she actually. tattooed herself and piercings and all kinds of stuff very exotic lady and um she starts approaching me i’m like oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god she puts down and she puts she sits down next to me she puts her arm around me i’m like oh my god you know violation of privacy violation of personal space you know alarms going off yeah trying to keep my cool and she says uh richard you know we’ve we’ve we’ve watched you for now for the whole renaissance there and We love you. We love your pictures. And we would like to see you in the front row center from now on.
Speaker 0 | 29:52.101
Wow. So, and let me jump into a little piece of the technology here. You’re still doing like film, true film, not digital pictures at this point, right?
Speaker 1 | 30:02.768
These were digital. These were digital.
Speaker 0 | 30:03.969
Okay. You had moved to digital.
Speaker 1 | 30:05.654
yeah this was right at the digital change yeah i got a nice digital camera with the you know the multiple lenses and stuff so um yeah which i had to learn and it’s different photographing people than photographing national parks because of the ranges and stuff but um it was very interesting so she she said that not only did she say front row center at the renaissance fair shows but she would get me into any other show that i wanted to get and she introduced me to like the entire belly dance community to Southern California, which was about a thousand dancers. Literally within six months, I was the photographer of dancers in Southern California.
Speaker 0 | 30:43.197
So you went from being introverted and shy, very shy, to being front and center for all of these, I assume, beautiful women who were dancing in very scantily dressed clothes.
Speaker 1 | 30:57.626
It depended. A lot of them, like Marjani was her name. She was traditional Moroccan and head to toe and face covered and stuff. And then there were those, the restaurant dancers who had the $5,000 Egyptian dress again, head to toe. Most of it was not scantily clad. Most of it was the longer dresses and stuff. They were of course showing off things, but they weren’t, they weren’t anything super risque. So I was busy photographing those and still using the camera. Cause I still couldn’t talk directly to people, but I was learning to, and I went, I, was literally going to like three shows a night on the weekdays and three shows in the weeknights and then on the weekend i’d fly to like ohio to go to the renaissance fair fly back on friday saturday night sunday night excuse me and then be ready to do more we’re and working a full-time job while i was on call 24 by 7. i was having a blast but i was killing myself but even better because i didn’t charge for these photos And I was just giving them away. I was like a nice guy. The dancers all decided that every year on my birthday, they would throw a party for me. All I needed to do was rent the space. So I rented a pirate shop first. I had 50 dancers come just for me. And then the next year I rented a bigger place. And the next year I rented the community center in Monrovia, which seats a thousand. And I had 200 dancers come. My final one, just before I left for Florida, I had 200 dancers and I had so many, I had to rent two venues for over two nights. now how many people can say they’ve had that many belly dancers yeah and their husbands were always there sitting in the corner bored you know because they’ve seen these acts all before right so okay you know the the topic that we’ve got here is how did you overcome something
Speaker 0 | 32:48.415
in your life and so what were the things that you learned through that what did you know it’s an interesting thing that you You used the camera as that intermediary for a bit, but did you learn anything else or anything? What else can we pass to somebody who’s listening to us to try to overcome something in their life?
Speaker 1 | 33:12.602
Well, what I learned is that everybody creates a box around themselves. And what I decided as I was going through this was, and, you know, these wrote. statement that everybody makes is get out of your box. And I finally decided, why the hell do we need a box? So we got comfort zones, but why do you need a comfort zone? And that didn’t eliminate the box for me or anything. But what it did is it said, this barrier that I thought was there of talking to people and that they were scary and that there’s some reason why I couldn’t go up and talk to… I mean, I had lunch with two supermodels in Vegas at the World Mermaid Show. That was one of my bucket list items was to have lunch with a supermodel. I had lunch with two.
Speaker 0 | 34:00.519
At the same time?
Speaker 1 | 34:02.040
Yeah. I met them at the first annual World Mermaid beauty pageant. I was the photographer for it. And they met me and they said, hi, and let’s go to lunch. And we had lunch and just talked and talked. And I learned about supermodels. I would never have done that until I had broken through that barrier. And I realized. It’s just something that I thought I couldn’t do. There’s nothing to it other than I thought I couldn’t do it. And when I finally decided I could do it, I did it. And this set me up to leave Trader Joe’s and start my own business because I was terrified of starting my own business. But then I had money in the bank. I had a nice runway. I knew where I wanted to go. And I thought, you know what? I’m terrified of this, but it’s just in my head. People start their own business all the time. I’m not going to die. This is the United States of America. You know, worst comes to worst, I got places I can go. There’s social safety nets and all kinds of stuff. So all I need to do is just do it. And I did it. And it was tough because I became a writer. I wrote 60 books in a matter of a couple of years. And one thing I found out is selling books is hard. And then I became a ghostwriter. And that was better because I could get a client and I could have steady income from that. But writing books, you don’t get a steady income. I considered starting consulting.
Speaker 0 | 35:34.172
for computers because i can help people with their computers i mean i could do desktop work and stuff i’m still considering that sometimes as a side it’s a side gig and one of the things after after some of the discussions that you and i’ve had i’ve come to realize that you you’re even though your focus is on the ghost writing and that piece you still understand and leverage technology you’re you’re reaching out in multiple ways so talk about your use of technology today well i use linkedin
Speaker 1 | 36:03.708
to do lead generation and Facebook. And that’s a very interesting thing. You have to do it in such a way that you’re not spammy because LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter will cancel your account or penalize you if you look like a bot, for example. So you can’t look like a bot. You can’t be a scammer. So I leverage the social media technology wisely to be able to get leads and not annoy people. I leverage… Which… AI a lot in the writing. I don’t write with AI, but I use AI to help me, say, do research or help me. Like today, I’ve looked at my front page on my website and it’s just not generating leads. So I took the text and I put it in ChatGPT and I said, okay, ChatGPT, you’re an SEO expert. And it said, okay. And I said, I want you to look at my front page and here’s the text and tell me why this is not bringing in traffic. And it started telling me all kinds of external things. I said, only considering the text that’s internal, just the text. And it said, here’s what you need to fix. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I said, oh, yeah, you’re right. And now I got to do all that stuff. So that was like chat GPT. It cost me 20 bucks a month for the professional version. And it’s probably going to create lots of money from just those little hints there. A lot of them were just stupid stuff that I simply forgot about. okay i use writing i use ai for um for proofreading so like pro writing aid is one of the best proofreaders out there’s better than grammarly in many ways at least it’s called pro writing aid and the reason why it’s better than grammarly in my opinion is grammarly advertises you to death and pro everything’s a pop-up and and providing it doesn’t oh man i hate there’s so many i the the clickbait
Speaker 0 | 38:03.568
I fall into the clickbait every once in a while and I go to a website or I’m looking for a recipe. You know, I’ve got a cut of meat downstairs that I need to prepare for dinner. And so I go to the websites and all of those pop-ups. I just get so annoyed by all of that and the advertising, everything else.
Speaker 1 | 38:21.558
Yeah, I’ve got ad blockers in everything that I can put them in. And I’m just going to stay that way. I’m told that Chromium, which is the base for… for Chrome and Edge and most of the other browsers is going to eliminate the ability to use ad blockers very soon. And I will switch to a browser that lets me do ad blockers like Firefox in that point because I’m not going to put up, not going to tolerate all those stupid ads. I have to put up with them on my smart TV because my smart TV doesn’t have ad blockers. And I watch YouTube. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 38:54.902
you’re not allowed to just install whatever you want either.
Speaker 1 | 38:58.004
Yeah. And YouTube is frustrating with its ads. because they’re just random. They’re not like old TVs to be where they were timed. It’s random. I use technology all the time to get my message out. I’ve got a blog at therightingking.com. I’ve got another website, richardlow.com, which I’m still developing, which will be my lead generation website. I use the mailing list. I reach out. I use Zoom, of course. but I’m also experimenting with Google Meet and StreamYard. I do podcasts. I sell on eBay. So there’s a tool you can buy with eBay, which I’m just about to invest in to let you do what’s called drop shipping. It’s an interesting tool. Drop shipping is where you never have the product in your hand. So you find a, say Walmart’s having a three-for-one sale. You sell them on eBay at the normal price, and you buy them from Walmart at three. the one-third price and you ship them direct from walmart to the customer
Speaker 0 | 40:05.272
I was just going to ask if you were doing one of those side gigs, because I’d seen that on a couple of the social medias of people doing that and being able to generate income.
Speaker 1 | 40:16.638
Yeah, I’m already generating $5,000 or $6,000 a month on eBay, and when I stick dropshipping in, that’ll go up. Just selling my own junk that I no longer want. I’ve made as much as $35,000 a year from eBay, and I’m getting into affiliate marketing. I’ve been into it before. affiliate marketing is where you get you sell other people’s product and you get a commission so somebody has a product to well pro writing aid probably started as that so you know you sell it you make a commission of 50 or something in fact if i sell a copy of pro writing aid with my marketing tag on it i’ll make 50 bucks and i sell a few so i’m getting into that more um it’s just i know the technology and i know what works and i’m beginning to know what doesn’t work And that’s the hard part, by the way, because it’s all very tempting. And the only thing I’m running into is time, of course. I got how much time do I have in a day?
Speaker 0 | 41:13.766
You know, I heard this term, I want to say it was probably a decade ago. And I’m trying to think of exactly, I can’t even remember the term now, but the micro economy and the micro jobs that, you know, the new economy was, and especially for the kids. that are growing up today um that they’re gonna they’re not gonna have one job like you know for the longest time i had one job 40 hours a week on on a good week um 60 hours or 80 hours on on bad weeks and when the when things were breaking um but these guys are are going to have multiple jobs doing things like that side gig that you just talked about and then the writing and the photography and and social media and so so you’ve moved into that
Speaker 1 | 42:03.164
yep in fact for this for the for the photography what i’m also doing is i have my own photography website i make a couple grand a year off of people buy the photos digital photos digital copies i’m also going to be putting them on the stock photo sites um because some of them are pretty good and those make about three four hundred bucks each each sale because they’re not cheap so i want to start doing that and that’s on my plans for the remainder of the year just the idea is The economy is changing. It’s not getting worse. It’s not getting better. It’s just changing. The economy always changes. And if you work just one job, you could get laid off. If you have just one gig, it could dry up. And if you have multiple gigs and multiple jobs and multiple things, well, one goes in a downslide, you push some resources into the other one. But the key is you have to have them going. They take a while to spin up. Like eBay takes… If you want to sell on eBay, it takes probably six months to spin that up and get the name and the recognition and the brand and figure out how to use it and know all the tricks and stuff. You’re going to take six months at least to get to know it. You want to be a writer? It’s going to take a couple of years. You want to do Uber? That’s going to take some time because you’ve got to learn the tricks. There’s tricks to Uber. There’s things like, I wrote an article on this. There’s things like you have to. time you’re when you’re out there because there’s peak times and you get more money and there’s not peak times and there’s people who who want you to go clear across the country for no no big benefit and there’s all kinds of tricks and things to know about uber or lyft and you it takes time so you have to spin them up and keep them going at least in kind of a maintenance mode see that’s a geek and then when you need them spin them up and okay yeah i mean that’s a basic
Speaker 0 | 43:55.728
business technique too. You don’t want 80% of your business relying on a single customer because if something happens to that customer for whatever reason, what happens to your business?
Speaker 1 | 44:08.977
So I’ve been there, done that. It’s pretty terrifying to see your business change to nothing overnight and you got to spin it up some new stuff really fast.
Speaker 0 | 44:17.803
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 44:19.024
And I also learned the value of coaches. Coaches, having a good coach is Business coach, writing coach. I’m a writing coach, by the way, if anybody needs a writing coach. Copywriting coach, personal coach, religious coach. Whatever kind of coach you need, hire them and get those things. They’re not going to be expensive. They’re going to sound expensive. It’s only $100 an hour. But you’re only going to need a few hours. And that knowledge you get is, I have a business coach, and it’s been invaluable. He has changed my life just from a few hours of… talks. I’ve had writing coaches that changed my writing style overnight. And I’ve seen my clients who benefit from the writing coaching, their whole lives change because of just six hours worth of writing coaching, which is annoying because I don’t only get paid for six hours and they’re going to make an income from it.
Speaker 0 | 45:16.935
Yeah. So you miss out on the recurring long-term revenue off of it.
Speaker 1 | 45:21.258
Speaking of that, one of my current clients, he’s writing a book and I’m getting a certain amount for it as a fixed amount. And he just figured out a way to turn it into a million dollars. And it’s like, well, I got.
Speaker 0 | 45:32.406
i get paid a fixed amount up front that’s what i get paid but it’s it’s that part of me is going have i done this deal differently yeah well but now you’ve unfortunately you lost it or you missed out on this one but you’ve learned a trick to potentially add in or slip it well slipping probably is not the best way to say it but probably not something something else to add into any of those contracts or the statements of work that you know that um one percent
Speaker 1 | 46:03.102
oh that would suck huh yeah generally they don’t they won’t go for that the deal is and i want the money of course up front because i’m a freelancer so i i get frustrated by it but it’s just the game i’m playing uh one of these days i’ll run into something that i know is going to become a best seller and maybe i’ll work on that in a different way but that implies that i have other money coming in while i’m working on the book yeah yeah so that you can enjoy and yeah like if i had if i had three book projects and one of them and then i had a fourth that was royalty based i could do that but i can’t do one book project that’s really based on nothing else okay yeah so i’ve had a long and varied career as i think the stone said it’s a long and winding road or something no beetles beetles
Speaker 0 | 46:50.247
yeah it’s been very strange and very interesting but i like it well it’s great i mean i you know you’re Telling me that you live in Florida and everything. And you got the shirt that goes with it. I know the majority of our listeners are listeners and they don’t get to see things. But that is a colorful shirt.
Speaker 1 | 47:12.801
Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I know I had a story to go along with it for the life of me. I cannot remember it right now. But that was a good segue.
Speaker 0 | 47:20.587
I tried.
Speaker 1 | 47:23.009
It was a very good segue. I used to be very boring with clothes. And then I read a book. by, it’s called People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It by Larry Winget. And he’s called the bulldog of personal coaches or something like that. And he dresses with earrings and it’s very, very different. And he said, you know, you’re just like you want to dress, be yourself. And that’s probably the number one advice I’d give to anybody who’s going to be an entrepreneur or be a writer or anything. You can be the same as everybody else. And then you’re the same as everybody else and you don’t stand out. The way you’re going to make money is you stand out. You want to be different than everybody else. So what makes you unique? That’s what you want to be.
Speaker 0 | 48:10.829
You know, that reminds me of something else that’s on your resume. And that’s that LinkedIn coaching and that LinkedIn. Well, tell us about it.
Speaker 1 | 48:24.418
Yeah, when I first left Trader Joe’s, one of the first things I did was I started working for, well, I wanted my profile updated. So I went to LinkedIn Makeover and I paid, at that time, I could pay $1,000 and get worked on directly by the owner of the company. Her name is Donna Sadula. So she worked on my profile. A few months later after that, she called me up and said, would I like to work for her? So I worked for LinkedIn Makeover for two years. I was trained by her. So she was the expert at making profiles and made about 300 of them. during that time and learned a lot about how to do profiles i made profiles for the c levels and stuff because i used to be a c level and i’m a good writer and ambassadors and you know very very high level people um i eventually left there it just i didn’t want to work in a job and that was a job even though it was not a job but it was working for somebody else and i now do linkedin stuff on my own. And what that basically means is I look at your profile and we work together on it. We collaborate for several hours to make your profile as good as it can be. So when we’re done with that, in my opinion and your opinion, it’s going to be as good as it can be. So you’re going to have the person who’s done 300, 400 profiles, and then you’re going to have what you want to say combined, and you’re going to have the right profile. And that’s everything from the about all the way down to skills. stuff like that. And then you’re going to get a little coaching on top of that, probably an hour or two. We just talk over how you can use LinkedIn and answer your questions and tell you some of the ways you can leverage it. And some of the things that you shouldn’t do, like one of my friends. A month ago, he started doing 300 or 400 connections a day, and he did them really fast. Just bang, bang, bang, bang. Well, when you’re going bang, bang, bang, bang, LinkedIn says, what? You’re a bot. You’re killed. They killed the account. So he did it again. He got another account, killed the account, and he hasn’t come back yet. And those are things like, just don’t do that.
Speaker 0 | 50:29.713
Yeah. Yeah, the simple use. ironic it kind of brings us all the way back to the the beginning of that fraud detection because that’s that’s their version of the fraud detection they’re trying to catch um spammers or or people that are leveraging their system um to to
Speaker 1 | 50:49.267
their own selfish needs in fact in fact there’s a systems for that but of course there’s a i mean now there’s a scam out there where Three or four times a day, I’ll have somebody try and connect. It’s always a picture of a beautiful Asian woman, young, like 21. This Asian woman has no connections or just a few. It’s a relatively new profile, blah, blah, blah. So it’s obviously scam. I just didn’t connect with them because I’m a security guy. I know the signs. But I started reading about it on the internet. It’s called pig butchering. It’s the pig butchering scam. It’s also called romance scam. And that’s where they basically. Their goal is to come in there and starting from just the tiny slices to basically butcher your finances. That’s why it’s called pig butchering. They want everything. And they make you fall in love with them. And, oh, their car is broken. They need a few hundred dollars to fix their car. Oh, they need fees to do this. Oh, they need this. And since you’re falling in love with them and you’re thinking of them because you’re communicating all day long all the time, you think they’re friends. They’re not friends. And. I’ve read about women who’ve lost three, $400,000, their entire life savings giving to these guys, men, the same kind of thing. They just, they fall for the scam and it’s called pig butchering. I love the name.
Speaker 0 | 52:08.702
Well, and I’ve watched, um, Oh, what is it? Uh, um, damn it. I’m doing it again. I’m blanking on it myself. Um, one of the, uh, one of the TV series where she goes around and looking at the black markets. And she did a special on this, on the romance schemes and doing all of these kinds of things. And it’s a team of people. They have somebody that’s out there doing all of the lead generation, like you talked about. And so they’re setting up all of those profiles and reaching out to people on LinkedIn. And then there’s another guy that’s watching all of the communications. There’s a guy that’s a specialist in. in talking to people and you know being the the the she or the he um for the the relationship and and just doing the communication if you go to a site on YouTube called pleasant green that’s the channel name he catches
Speaker 1 | 53:08.030
scam scammers and sometimes he turns them around to become non-scammers and it’s very interesting the way he does it check him out he’s really cool he has a few videos a month um he actually found a somebody he thought was a scammer that turned out not to be He had her put together a book of drawings. They sold about $20,000 and that was enough to fund an operation so that she, her life has been changed. It’s quite a, and he’s, he’s flown to Lethace. So I think it’s called Lesotho to visit that’s near Nigeria to visit an ex scammer that he turned around again by creating a book that they sold. And he went over there and saw how they live and stuff. And he’s, he’s a fascinating guy and his, his channel is fascinating.
Speaker 0 | 53:51.784
and he talks he’s actually recruited people inside the inside the boiler rooms of those scamming places and he’s interviewed them and stuff so it’s kind of cool yeah pleasant green right pleasant green okay well you know um it’s about time to wrap things up so here’s a chance tell us a little more about where to find your stuff and how to get in touch with you and you know here’s your chance for the self-promotion go for it
Speaker 1 | 54:17.604
Well, I am Richard Lowe, the writing king, and my website is, obviously enough, thewritingking.com, thewritingking.com. And if you go there, you’ll find probably 500 articles and plus two podcasts, author talks, and conversations with influencers there. If you go on YouTube, you can find me, just look up Richard Lowe Jr. or the writing king, and you’ll find me. And I’ve got the podcast there. And you can send me a message at rich at the writing king.com. And that’ll get right to me. Yeah. I’m the writing king. And I’m in the process of rebranding myself that whole all through my whole stream that way. So everything is that. And then I’ll get back. We’ll set up an appointment. If you want a book, I write books for people. I also write blogs, case studies, white papers. basically if you want it written come see me i write fiction and non-fiction i’ve written a couple science fiction books written a children’s book a young adult book plus lots and lots of non-fiction and everything from ai to franchises to how to run an apartment complex um in computer i’ve written a computer book um have
Speaker 0 | 55:27.363
you heard of the company no before oh yeah yeah they used to be fish fishing or something like that but now no before i um i wrote their cyber heist book okay
Speaker 1 | 55:38.874
That’s on their website. It’s a free download. Actually, I rewrote it. They wrote it in 2010 and I rewrote it. It’s one of the ones I can talk about. That’s the problem with being a ghostwriter is I can’t talk about it.
Speaker 0 | 55:49.198
Can’t talk about a lot of them because they need the credit for it, not you.
Speaker 1 | 55:52.420
Yep. And I just remembered why I had you mention my shirt.
Speaker 0 | 55:56.342
Oh, well, go for it. And then we’ll close out after that.
Speaker 1 | 55:59.163
Yeah. One of the things that I love doing is going to Masquerade Balls. So there’s a masquerade ball in California. If you can get to this one, it’s in Hollywood. It’s called the labyrinth of Jareth and it’s based on the movie, the labyrinth with David Bowie. And it’s every year. I think it’s in July-ish. And I went about five years in a row. And basically all of the low level actors, makeup artists, engineers and stuff go there with their super cool costumes. It costs like 50 bucks or a hundred bucks a ticket. I don’t know what it costs to get in. I used to get free tickets because I was photographing the thing. you go in there and you dress up and you have a great time and one time i um there was a couple makeup artists that wanted to get in but they couldn’t afford the tickets and i said well i got i can get some tickets but you have to do something for me and he said what and i said i want to be count dracula so they made me up as the best count dracula you can ever imagine and you know full makeup full goth makeup uh you know imagine me and god um and costume and everything. And they played my acolytes for a while. So they were my servants, you know, for a couple hours. And then they went off and had fun. And it was a blast. What does that have to do with anything? Well, that’s kind of one of the reasons why I switched to the bright shirts is to stand out. Anybody can be part of the group and be unique, be you. I like bright shirts. I like dragons. I got lots of dragon shirts. I like… I like the businesses I run. I like my customers. I like my past. I like all these things I like. There’s things I don’t like, but why bother with those? Learn to like yourself, respect yourself, learn to speak, don’t be shy, and hire coaches. There’s some advice right there in a nutshell.
Speaker 0 | 57:52.110
Right on. Well, thank you very much, Richard.
Speaker 1 | 57:54.172
Oh, yeah. And hire me to write your book.
Speaker 0 | 57:57.714
There you go. Hire him for the book, for the LinkedIn profile, for the social marketing, and to make sure that you’re presenting yourself well.
Speaker 1 | 58:05.680
And if you’re writing something on your own, I can coach you and I can help you with that. Whatever barrier you’re in, if you can’t figure out how to publish it, I can publish it for you. If you can’t figure out how to edit it, I can edit it for you. If you can’t figure out how to get started, we can figure that out. I can help you with the whole cycle because I’ve basically done 120 some odd books so far of my own and other people’s. If whatever problem you’re running into, I guarantee you, I ran into it before.
Speaker 0 | 58:31.532
Well, and, and this has definitely been a unique interview for us because, uh, you know, typically we’re, we’re working with those people that are still right in the middle of their, their technology career, but I love how you’re using technology and enjoying doing what you wanted to do.
Speaker 1 | 58:49.482
That’s, I think the key is if you’re not enjoying your job, you need to fix that because if your job is. a third of your life and you’re spending a third of your life sleeping then that means you’re only enjoying a third of your life if you’re enjoying it at all so fix it if you don’t like your job find a new one build build some gigs if you like your job great if you you know if you if you and technology can really help and learn technology learn it
Speaker 0 | 59:17.038
Technology is everything nowadays. I mean, there isn’t a job out there that doesn’t have some level of technology, even if it’s just clocking in.
Speaker 1 | 59:26.362
Even if all you do is learn, take some classes on Microsoft Office, or I think it’s Microsoft 365 now with all of its tools, that will help you find a job. If you become good at those, you can find a good job. Then if you put ChatGPT and some of the other things on top of that, you’re going to get a better job. And those are simple classes. You can find them on, what is it, Udemy or one of the other sites just like that. And take them. And I think Udemy classes are like 15 bucks each or something. And there’s other ones that are free. And you can get yourself certified in Word and Office and so forth. And you can find jobs. They’re not going to be high-paying jobs. But hey, if you need a job. you just start and you keep moving up and you keep moving yep so you become data entry and you can get make documents and you can use excel and then you learn how to use access which is very rare and you learn how do you you know yeah no access i need access but that’s because i’m coming from that enterprise environment you know access is for a single user um mom and pop shop you know they might need help with access you got yourself the gig you can sell to a mom and pop shop yep start learning some other things You’d be amazed at what there is out there. So, you know, stop worrying about the economy going down and make some gigs. And Fiverr, by the way, is a great place for that. F-I-V-E-R-R. Go to Fiverr, create an account, learn how to use it, create gigs, and you will get business.
Speaker 0 | 60:53.171
All right. Awesome. Well, as we come to a close on another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, I got to invite everybody that’s out there listening to us to comment, rate the podcast on iTunes. or on the iTunes store or wherever you’re grabbing the copy of the podcast. We really appreciate the support of the program and the time you invested listening to us. So thank you very much. Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful day.
