How AI Is Making You a Worse Thinker, with Leonard Hope

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Leonard Hope, a US patent attorney and computer engineer who has spent nearly three decades protecting the ideas of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo, and who now builds his own AI tools for legal work.Here's the contradiction at the heart of this conversation: Leonard writes AI software that could draft a patent in seconds, and he deliberately refuses to use it that way. He explains why he forces himself to do the hard thinking first, why offloading your brain to AI is a slippery slope that quietly costs you something you can't get back, and what that means for all of us, and our kids, in a world where the answer is always one prompt away.Leonard also built a patent firm from just himself to twenty-five people before a national firm acquired it, and he's candid about the reality that professional partners are business owners doing every job there is. But maybe the most striking part of his story is how he got to New Zealand at all. He and his wife fell in love with the country, sold their house, packed their entire lives into a shipping container, and then the border slammed shut. It took them nearly five years, and a lot of refusing to quit, to finally arrive.This is a conversation about protecting what makes you valuable, the discipline of thinking for yourself, and what it really takes to chase a life on the other side of the world.Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcastsLearn more about Leonard here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leohope/Learn more about Leonard's company here: https://www.hopeiplaw.com/#waystowealth #ai #patents #intellectualproperty #law #legaltech #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #cognitiveoffload #parenting #resilience #immigration #technology #wealthbuilding