Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe: Hello. I'm Richard Lowe. And this is the leaders and their stories. Podcast. I'm the writing king and ghostwriting, Guru. And I'm here with Kenneth Curitan. He's 1 of my best friends from a bazillion years ago.

Richard Lowe: and he's here to talk about resilience. So ken take it away

Ken Cureton: Okay, hey? Rich, we've only been friends since about 1981. So it's not a bazillion. It's actually just about 45 years

Richard Lowe: It's a long time

Ken Cureton: I know, anyway, as part of all of this, I've retired from industry, but I'm still active on the International Council, on Systems engineering in Cosi. They have a working group that deals with system resilience. And I'm chairman of that working group. But we don't just deal with computers and airplanes and spacecraft. We also deal with organizations.

Ken Cureton: So I thought a discussion of personal resilience would be of interest to a lot of people, because we all deal with adversity in our lives. Right?

Richard Lowe: Well, all of us don't walk on water. Have adversity in our lives. Yes.

Ken Cureton: Even he who walked on water had adversity in his life. So there.

Ken Cureton: so just wanted to let you know we've defined resilience as the ability to deliver some required capabilities, some basic capability when facing adversity. Adversities could be lots of different things

Richard Lowe: But when I think of resilience, I usually think of like

Richard Lowe: you go deep in debt, and you get out of it, and then move on or you lose your job. And so some crisis happens, and then you somehow recover and continue in spite of the odds

Ken Cureton: Those are what we mean by adversities. Those are a few adversities.

Ken Cureton: Now, we follow decision theory which says, that's fundamentally what we're trying to do. We're trying to do something, deliver some capability. Do you know function when we're facing an adversity?

Ken Cureton: So how do you do that?

Ken Cureton: Well, okay, you've mentioned one of them, we say, Well, you can avoid it, you can withstand it.

Ken Cureton: you can recover from it.

Ken Cureton: and these things are kind of iterative. In other words, if there's somebody that I see that just gives me a complete pain, I don't like working with them. I just avoid them.

Ken Cureton: But if I have to deal with them. Then I kind of withstand. And then afterwards I say, what could I have done better? What could have I improved? And I say, Okay, I will do a better job of avoiding withstanding and recovering next time around. So it's kind of an iterative thing. The idea is to be able to do something so that you don't have to deal with all of these

Ken Cureton: problems.

Ken Cureton: Okay? By the way, these problems could be from the environment, it could be from

Ken Cureton: illness, it could be from other people. It could be whatever just to let you know. Okay.

Richard Lowe: Well, it sounds like that. That's a not just an iterative process. But there's several distinct steps. Number one is. There's some kind of crisis that occurs.

Richard Lowe: And then there's recognizing that there's a crisis

Richard Lowe: which can take a while. I mean, you know, somebody could get in debt and not realize that they're over their heads for a long time, right? Or be in a bad relationship. And then there's attempts to to deal with it, usually ineffectual or sometimes disastrous.

Richard Lowe: and then eventually, if you're still want to be resilient and not not succumb to the threat

Richard Lowe: or action you have to. You have to recover. But then there's a final step in that. Learn from that and build a process in. So that doesn't happen again. Boy, I'm such a computer guy build a process in

Ken Cureton: Yeah, that does that. And that's often what is used with computers. But even in personal relationships the same sort of thing happens. We learn from it. We adapt so that we can avoid, withstand and recover.

Ken Cureton: Okay.

Richard Lowe: Right? Yeah. Like you know, you get in a fight with the with the spouse about something stupid. And and you recognize if you're smart, you recognize. Don't do that again, or I pushed a button that I shouldn't have, or

Richard Lowe: I'm gonna fight back and tell the person that they're wrong and probably make it worse. And whatever the whatever the the thing is, is you're gonna have some response, and then you're gonna judge whether or not it worked

Ken Cureton: Exactly. So. That's why I say it's iterative. You're going to learn to better avoid better withstand, or better recover. By the way, this whole business of personal resilience comes from organizational resilience. We realize it's not just about the computers and the airplanes and the cars that have to be. The people have to be resilient as well.

Ken Cureton: So yeah, I'm I'm applying this to you.

Richard Lowe: To me personally. Yes, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. But then there's another part of it where you don't react accordingly, or you don't like you're in. You're in a fight with the spouse, and you just keep fighting and fighting and fighting, and you don't ever fix it, and then you wind up in divorce, or whatever or whatever happens there, and it gets bad. So it's important to

Richard Lowe: go. The you've got 2 paths that you could take for every one of those or many paths, probably.

Richard Lowe: and one of them is the best which is, have the have the issue.

Richard Lowe: Learn from or fix it and learn from it, then the worst would be obviously

Richard Lowe: don't learn from it and continue to have the problem until something causes some.

Richard Lowe: The problem I see with not being resilient, not not following through with this is, it's going to keep banging you in the head

Ken Cureton: And get worse

Richard Lowe: Yeah, you're you're getting deeper and deeper in debt, deeper and deeper and deeper. And you're, you know you're in debt. So you keep spending more and spending more and spending more, because that's a habit, and you like spending. And before long

Ken Cureton: Good.

Richard Lowe: And before long it becomes a situation that you can't deal with anymore, and then you declare bankruptcy, or

Richard Lowe: somebody comes in and carts out your furniture or the loan shark comes and beat you up, whatever happens.

Ken Cureton: Yeah, it's not good. Let's just say all of us have been in relationships where there's difficulties here or have been in financial crises where, Ouch! You know, I wish I had done a better job of managing my finances, etcetera.

Richard Lowe: Now the best kind of resilience, I would think, is anticipating it and dealing with it in advance of it being a crisis

Ken Cureton: Aha! Guess what I have a whole bunch of means of avoiding, withstanding and recovering. You want to hear of them

Ken Cureton: Okay, we've written all of these down. So I'm going to read from this list you can adapt. In other words, you can be or become able to deliver whatever it is you're supposed to do in changing situations.

Ken Cureton: or you can, as you stated, you can anticipate. You can look at things and say, I see what potentially can go wrong. I can see the consequences. I can develop appropriate responses before bad things happen, and then, of course, you can anticipate by developing and maintaining courses of action, that address predicted adversities. So one can anticipate what's going on.

Ken Cureton: My favorite is to constrain, in other words. You withstand stress by limiting damage.

Ken Cureton: Now, the way I usually constrain is, I run away. I avoid. I leave. I say, gotta go.

Ken Cureton: It's not

Richard Lowe: I,

Ken Cureton: Early. A good thing

Richard Lowe: I tend to like. If I get adversity from a friend, I tend to avoid the friend or reject them from my life rather than trying to deal with it, because it's just easier. Yes, and there's there's so many good people out there that trying to deal with one rotten tomato

Richard Lowe: just does isn't worth the time to me.

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Ken Cureton: Point being on all of these things, you can take it too far. You cannot do it and not get the the benefit, or you can take it too far and get yourself in trouble. Huh!

Richard Lowe: I've never been in trouble before, so I wouldn't know about that.

Ken Cureton: Yeah.

Ken Cureton: well, I can just continue. In other words, you can say, all right. I'm going to grip my teeth and continue this to try and get through it so you can continue.

Ken Cureton: You can degrade gracefully. In other words, you can say, Okay, I'm not going to let this get under my skin. I'm not going to get temper or arguing with my spouse, or something like that. I'm just going to be calm

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I used to when I was married. I used to shove all my anger and frustration and stuff and tried into my chest, which didn't do anybody any good

Ken Cureton: Doesn't. Okay, you can evade. In other words, you can just avoid it, or you can evolve. You can learn to deal with this and essentially adapt over time.

Ken Cureton: Okay, here's my favorite managing, complex situations.

Ken Cureton: Boom! All right. You look at this, and you say, All right, let's try and

Ken Cureton: to keep things simple. You know the old kiss principle. Let's try and focus on keeping things simple. So we don't get overly complex. Okay.

Ken Cureton: now, the other thing you can do, of course, is to minimize the adversity again avoiding it.

Ken Cureton: or you can try and minimize the faults by. If you're talking to a friend

Ken Cureton: who gets off into politics. Oh, my goodness! And you don't really like talking about politics, you can simply change the subject.

Ken Cureton: Okay, you can watch what's going on, you can try and prevent it.

Ken Cureton: You can try and reduce your vulnerability.

Ken Cureton: Go get counseling. Okay, something like that.

Ken Cureton: You can tolerate it. And when you can try and understand what's going on here. Try and develop a mental model. Put yourself in the other person's shoes, put yourself in the position of a person who's recovered from gambling addiction, or spending money addiction, or something like that. Those are some pretty cool ways, aren't they?

Richard Lowe: Yes, yes.

Richard Lowe: because I've been actually making quite a few changes in my life lately that that fit right into what you're saying is, I looked at all my

Richard Lowe: my faults, of which there were many and things I was doing that I didn't like, or

Richard Lowe: that weren't pro survival, so to speak and

Richard Lowe: fixing them. And it was a big project, because I was hitting every part of my life

Ken Cureton: Right.

Richard Lowe: And it's working pretty well. It's things are coming back in line the way I want, because I'm kind of making

Richard Lowe: like a pivot.

Richard Lowe: And it's working very well.

Ken Cureton: You're being resilient

Richard Lowe: Well, I'm not only being resilient, I'm being for what's it? I'm thinking ahead

Ken Cureton: Exactly. That's what I mean. Avoid withstand, recover. The void is my favorite part, because most of us don't think about that.

Ken Cureton: Avoid. We think. You know, I'm just gonna run away. No.

Ken Cureton: with credit card debt. You can avoid it by not spending so much

Richard Lowe: Not spending so much declaring bankruptcy, getting rid of all your cards, deleting your cards.

Richard Lowe: Don't give your cards to your spouse to hold for you. Nope, it's probably a mistake

Ken Cureton: Yeah. Give get yourself on a budget and keep to it there. Avoidance doesn't always mean running away. It just means proactively doing something to make things better

Richard Lowe: Yes, indeed! Yes, indeed!

Ken Cureton: Okay.

Ken Cureton: so that's 1 of the things you can do. And I don't know if any of these things on the list really kind of catch your fancy or anything, because, after all, as a as a ghostwriter, you probably have to deal with adverse customers and adverse situations

Richard Lowe: Oh, I deal with that all the time. Had had clients who. Their story was so deep and so emotional that

Richard Lowe: I, de facto became their therapist. I had to stop that. They were very, very

Richard Lowe: upsetting stories that they wanted to write about, and it's like, sorry I'm not your therapist. We either have to knock that off, or you know we have to knock this off

Richard Lowe: and or

Richard Lowe: clients who become abrasive sometimes, usually because they don't understand the process. So then I have to educate them. And then everything's fine. You know, we talk it out. Say, okay, this is the way, especially in the revision phase. This is the way revisions really work.

Richard Lowe: They want to do it piece by piece. Every paragraph they want to send me an email or give me a phone call. It's like, No, read the whole thing and comment on the whole thing and then send it to me so I can do it all at once. These

Richard Lowe: these one off phone calls, where you're fixing 3 paragraphs

Richard Lowe: 50 times a day are driving me crazy. And I'm not getting any work done and have to. That's just an education step. So that's part of resilience, is that? And then there's some that you can't. They? Just. You know, you're like, sorry we're. This is actually very toxic, and we're not going to move on with this.

Richard Lowe: Those I have vanished lately to learn to catch before we get in an agreement

Ken Cureton: But you just raise kind of a little barrier, and you say, let's let's not go so far

Richard Lowe: Well, one of the things I do when a client starts up is, I say, Okay, I want we're gonna make an agreement. We're both gonna be responsible. We're both adults.

Richard Lowe: And if you have a problem, you tell me. And if I have a problem, I tell you, and nobody's going to get their feelings hurt. But we just we're going to talk like adults, and that works very well. It stops any.

Richard Lowe: There's no more of this. Well, am I going to insult Richard by telling him I want a couple revisions? No, you're not

Richard Lowe: we'll have a discussion, and then I'll tell you. Can you do them all at once, you know, and you'll probably say, Well, how about half, you know? Can I do half a book, you know? We'll come to an agreement, and it works out or it doesn't. And then you gotta. Then I got a different thing to handle

Ken Cureton: Yeah, if I complete the book, and then I have to go rewrite the whole thing. There will be a cost to do that

Richard Lowe: Yeah, there's anything more than a

Richard Lowe: revision phases intend to be minor revisions. If it's more, if it's major revisions.

Richard Lowe: then we're gonna talk extra cost. Because basically, you're talking about a new project and the new, all software people, probably anybody is familiar with the problem of scope creep

Ken Cureton: Oh, yeah.

Richard Lowe: Most hated terms in the world. Scope creep is where somebody says, Well, you know, I'd like this change. And you say, Okay, and then you sit, you get okay. I like this change. Okay, I like this change. Okay? And before you know it, you've got a whole new project on your hands.

Ken Cureton: Right.

Richard Lowe: That you're not getting paid for

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: And then the client he's used to that. He gets all pissy when you say

Richard Lowe: we're gonna have to pick. You know, this is gonna cost you money. But you gave me all this other stuff, you know.

Ken Cureton: For free.

Richard Lowe: For free what's going on here? And you caused it, I mean, in that case, me being the ghost, I would have caused that because I didn't. And the very 1st one you should say.

Richard Lowe: Okay, I'm gonna give you this one for free, or I'm not. And here's this is a 1 off. You know the

Richard Lowe: this or whatever the solution is, you need to make sure that the client understands. This is the truth, all freelancing

Richard Lowe: and even jobs because it has scope. Reap happens in a job

Ken Cureton: Oh, yeah, we're withstanding the adversity. You're looking at this. And you're saying, Okay, I'm going to limit the impact by making sure that it won't get worse

Richard Lowe: Like when the time when the boss comes by and says, Well, Sally, quit so for temporarily, I want you to do all of Sally's job. Well, you know damn well that that's going to become permanent.

Richard Lowe: and that's not the time. The time to have the discussion is right. Then, when the boss needs somebody right? Cover. Okay, I'm gonna do Sally's job for how long? How much of it? And how much are you going to pay me for it?

Ken Cureton: Yes, and worse yet. Who's going to do my job?

Ken Cureton: Oh, wait. You're assuming I'm going to do my job and Sally's job. Well, let's discuss that.

Ken Cureton: Yeah, we're going to change my job description. Am I going to get a promotion? How does this work? If you're doing 2 jobs at once. Who's going to take over my old tasks, as you said

Richard Lowe: That's the problem that I've always had with corporate is you just get things piled on, and it just assumes just assumed that you're going to take them. And there's this fear factor that you can get fired at any point

Ken Cureton: Oh, hey, Richard, you did such a great job with Sally's job! Can you take on this aspect of Fred's job, too?

Richard Lowe: Or can you train the replacement

Ken Cureton: Oh!

Richard Lowe: Yeah, or any number of other ways that it's hidden

Ken Cureton: Us.

Richard Lowe: Those things all need to be discussed when they're you approach. That's when the boss is the weakest when they approach you with this. And of course you don't yell, scream, and

Richard Lowe: just to pretend you have a rational

Ken Cureton: Trial, you'd be reasonable

Richard Lowe: And if the boss isn't reasonable well, then, you got a different decision to make

Ken Cureton: Well, then, you say, well, this isn't reasonable. This is why, here are some options. Let's try and work this thing through

Richard Lowe: And if worse comes to worse, you say, no, I'm not going to take Sally's job

Ken Cureton: Okay, hey, I have a trick that I've been using. That is way cool. That helps on these things, on my personal decisions.

Richard Lowe: I figured you did

Ken Cureton: Yeah, it involves one of your favorite topics, large language models known as artificial intelligence, like Chat Gpt

Richard Lowe: Wait. We have an artificial intelligence now.

Ken Cureton: Don't have natural intelligence. There's no there is that. Yeah.

Ken Cureton: So what I do is I will create a chat. Gpt, prompt, that essentially says, here's my situation.

Ken Cureton: What are the possible steps I could take, and what are the consequence? What are the benefits, and what are the consequences? And, Shazam? I get a long list of things, and I thought, Oh, I didn't think about that.

Richard Lowe: I did exactly that this

Ken Cureton: Oh!

Richard Lowe: You'll love this one. Okay?

Richard Lowe: I went to the doctor and I said, Doctor, I need. You know. The doctor says you need to change some things because you're getting older, and you're you know the body doesn't.

Richard Lowe: If you keep doing this it'll be bad. And it was about that nebulous

Richard Lowe: so I'm like, well, thank you. That was absolutely worthless, you know. Cut down on carbs. Eat less of this. It's like

Ken Cureton: All solved.

Richard Lowe: 10 min looking at me, and you came to this stuff, and I didn't even get a chance to ask questions. So I went in Chat Gpt. I spent about 4 h putting in my entire medical history, I mean, and I said it on private, of course, because I'm not that stupid.

Richard Lowe: So I put in all my medical history, my my tests, my medications, my supplements, my my habits like exercise and stuff. And I said, Okay, Chatgpt. Now you have it all. And it said, Yep, and I said, we said, What do you want me to do with it? And I said, Well.

Richard Lowe: I want you to tell me 2 paths. One path is, I change nothing on one path. You tell me what to change and what happens in that point, and it's a well, if you change nothing. And that was a scary path. It was like.

Richard Lowe: Oh, yeah, okay. Now, now I understand.

Richard Lowe: Okay, yeah.

Ken Cureton: Bad things would happen.

Richard Lowe: Bad, very bad things to me in in very short time in in a matter of like by the end of this decade.

Richard Lowe: So then I said, Okay, now, what's the good side? And I said, Well, you're going to have a pain pretty much pain normal, you know. Good chance of pain-free life. Not a lot of things happening till you live to be 90

Richard Lowe: or or right in that timeframe. And I said, Well, what do I need to do to do that, and it said.

Richard Lowe: Eat healthy and exercise 20 min a day.

Richard Lowe: That's it.

Richard Lowe: It's a it's a just eat better. And it gave me a diet, of course.

Richard Lowe: because you know, Chat Gpt is chatty

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: And he gave me this diet

Ken Cureton: Ashes! Oh, my goodness.

Richard Lowe: M. Dashes and in this digital age, you know.

Richard Lowe: I've made scripts to cut all that crap out, but still but it gave me this, these 2 options and I saw in Stark. And I did this because I wanted I have trouble had been having trouble changing my diet and my lifestyle, because that's hard to do.

Richard Lowe: they said. I want you to scare this. I told Tab cheap. I want you to scare the shit out of me tell me what is really going to happen. And it said, Well, there's, this is the percentage of this. This is the percentage of that. This is the percentage of that. It's going to be a very bad death.

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: Literally said that

Ken Cureton: I know you're not gonna have quality of life, which is one of the things we want

Richard Lowe: You're going to have a very painful death

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: I was like. Well, that was pretty rude.

Ken Cureton: Well, yeah, but it's it's sometimes that's what you need to hear.

Richard Lowe: It's what I wanted to hear. Yeah. So then I looked at the good side and I said, Okay, so what I,

Richard Lowe: you know, it's basically gave me a diet that

Richard Lowe: basically rabbit food and and somebody some meat and stuff, you know. Pretty good diet, not too bad, mostly portion size

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: And some exercise, and the exercise is, you know, walk a mile a day, kind of thing, you know. Do do a little bit of upper body stuff, and you're set

Ken Cureton: You can't just run your mouth

Richard Lowe: I could do that, but it'd be a lot of running

Ken Cureton: Oh, my goodness! You have to really exercise

Richard Lowe: No, I don't.

Ken Cureton: Wow!

Richard Lowe: I don't have the mouth, you do so. I can't run that fast

Ken Cureton: Okay, that's true. I I had met.

Ken Cureton: I'm a garrulous punster.

Richard Lowe: Yes, you are. You're that. Among many other things, you have many talents.

Richard Lowe: including, I gather, you worked on the space program for a while

Ken Cureton: Yes, I did. I worked. I was shortly after the challenger accident. I was hired at Rockwell that was supposed to go work on the space shuttle, and I did a number of things, part of the accident investigation trying to figure out what all went on, because there was a whole series of events.

Ken Cureton: and I also worked in a number of programs for a while. There I was in charge of upgrading the Orbiter Avionics. All of the research and development for all kinds of things. Shuttle had really old computers.

Ken Cureton: core memory, 256 MB of memory, mega not giga mega

Richard Lowe: Well.

Richard Lowe: the shuttle basically had a very significant flaw. 2 of them, actually, one is a program run by committee IE. Congress

Richard Lowe: and 2 idiots were in charge

Ken Cureton: Well, yeah, a large number of things happened. So trying

Richard Lowe: I'm boiling it down

Ken Cureton: Yeah, trying to upgrade. All of this stuff was exciting.

Ken Cureton: So I have all kinds of stories which I won't

Ken Cureton: bore you with, but other than trying to get a vehicle that was essentially designed in the early 19 seventies

Ken Cureton: to be able to fly in the 19 nineties and 2 thousands. And it did fly till it was retired. In July of 2011

Richard Lowe: And now Elon Musk is shooting off what?

Richard Lowe: 4 4 shot launches a week or something

Ken Cureton: Yeah, a lot of the the folks are are amazed at what Spacex has been able to do. They're using a philosophy called Fail fast

Richard Lowe: Yes, I know

Ken Cureton: Okay, and what I I like what they do in a way. And I don't like what they do in a way, what I do like is that they try and do experimentation. They do, as I call it, build a little test a little, learn a lot.

Ken Cureton: Okay? So they do a lot of that. That's a good thing. The bad thing that they do. And this is just my personal opinion is that they're very hard on their employees. They wear them out and they quit. They have to get excited, they do stuff, and then they quit in droves, and they just hire more people.

Ken Cureton: so they use them up.

Ken Cureton: I call it the Mcdonald's serving mentality. We're we're just gonna hire more servers

Richard Lowe: Yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with that mentality in in some of the places where I've worked. Use use them till they drop and get, then use them some more, and then, when they can't do anymore, you get a new one.

Richard Lowe: That's right.

Richard Lowe: People are replaceable

Ken Cureton: That's my only problem with Spacex. But wow! Are they achieving some amazing results?

Richard Lowe: Oh, yeah, watching that thing that landed and got caught by the the hands was great

Ken Cureton: The chopsticks maneuver to catch the 1st stage. That's amazing. That's that's really something, or the kind that lands on the barge or lands on the foldable legs that lands on land. I look at that, and I went cool

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And the ones that explode are pretty interesting, too.

Ken Cureton: Well, yes, but remember, you learn a lot from explosions

Richard Lowe: I know, I know, and they're relatively close to me. I get to see the launches go right overhead

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Ken Cureton: the ones out of Vandenberg. Since I'm in Southern California. I get to see them in the afternoon because the plume trail will illuminate in the sunset, even though I'm in dark, it's not up in space, so I get to see the glowing contrail. It's great

Richard Lowe: Interesting, interesting, I gather, just as a side note. There's a total digression, I gather. Most of the anti-ballistic missile missiles are stored in Vandenberg or Alaska.

Richard Lowe: So if you see a lot of launches from Vandenberg all at once, you know, something bad's happening

Ken Cureton: I'm going to decline to comment other on that other than to say, Oh, wow!

Richard Lowe: Yeah, yeah, I think my statement is true. If you see a lot of launches out of Vandenberg happening in rapid succession, that's probably a bad thing

Ken Cureton: Yes, but it wouldn't be coming out of Vandenberg, because one of the things you want to do is to be resilient is to disperse your capability

Richard Lowe: That's why we shut down Cheyenne Mountain by the way, single target

Ken Cureton: Yeah, it was a single target. We said, Okay, we'll just make it harder and harder and harder for somebody to destroy it until they came out with more accurate nukes that would pile on one after another and essentially drill their way almost to the center of the earth.

Ken Cureton: or that that Russian 50 50 Megaton bomb star Bomba

Richard Lowe: Darba would probably take out the whole mountain

Ken Cureton: Well, let's, that's actually a silly way of doing things. So what we did was we decided to distribute stuff.

Ken Cureton: So good luck, finding it good luck hitting them all. It only takes one

Ken Cureton: to make a bad day in response

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And of course, the theory is that'll be a 1st strike so or close to 1st strike. So

Richard Lowe: basically

Ken Cureton: Would be response to a 1st strike

Richard Lowe: Right.

Ken Cureton: It's official Us. Policy that we will not launch a 1st strike with nuclear weapons

Richard Lowe: Makes sense to me

Ken Cureton: That was the official policy of the Russian Government. Until recently

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And I wonder if it's still the unofficial policy

Ken Cureton: Don't know.

Ken Cureton: I would. I would point out there's been a couple of cases where, back in the Soviet Union days Russian commanders delayed

Ken Cureton: orders to launch or suspected launch, because they wanted to make sure

Richard Lowe: So

Ken Cureton: Perhaps unofficially. That's the case.

Richard Lowe: I remember one of those he got. He? Yeah, it's a very famous story where he he thought it was a malfunction, right? And it turned out, it was because it was brand new software brand, new hardware

Ken Cureton: Right.

Richard Lowe: And he did it twice, and I think he got

Richard Lowe: like fired, or whatever they do in Russia.

Ken Cureton: Don't know that I think I know which case you're talking about. Let's just say that for any military commander to not follow orders is not a good thing

Richard Lowe: Regardless of the outcome. Yeah.

Ken Cureton: Regardless of the outcome. That's correct.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, well, yeah, you have to. You can't have mutinies happen. That's regardless of how good it is or bad it is

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: Unless unless the fault is from

Richard Lowe: like the immediate commander or something.

Richard Lowe: But

Ken Cureton: Well, there are orders and procedures for dealing with, you know, crazy commanders or questionable commands, orders, etcetera. So you but you still have to follow those

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Well, otherwise you don't have an army. You have a you have a mob

Ken Cureton: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, anyway, we kind of diverted off course, but it does. It does generate resilience. The United States defense system is resilient. It's designed to be resilient because it assumes it's going to be hit first.st

Ken Cureton: Yes, and notice the nuclear triad

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Ken Cureton: Okay, yeah, you might be able to shoot down all of our bombers.

Ken Cureton: Yeah, you might be able to figure out where all our Ibm Icbm sites are and take them out first.st Yeah.

Ken Cureton: But about those subs

Richard Lowe: Yeah, the biggest, quietest subs in the world. You're probably not going to take all those out

Ken Cureton: Well, it only takes one to create a bad day, and if you miss everything but one of the launch sites, you're going to have a bad day, and if you miss one of the bombers that happens to be stealthy like a b 2 or a B 21, you're going to have a bad day

Richard Lowe: All of them carry multiple weapons. So

Ken Cureton: Oh, yeah.

Richard Lowe: Yep so. But we got way off topic there, but they do

Ken Cureton: Point is, you gotta be resilient when dealing with these things.

Richard Lowe: Yes.

Ken Cureton: Doesn't.

Richard Lowe: The more resilient you can make your life the better your life's going to be.

Ken Cureton: Yes, but you can take things too far. It costs money, it takes effort, it it does stuff. So you have to say, this is, as far as I'm willing to go.

Richard Lowe: Yes, indeed!

Ken Cureton: You have to be intelligent about it.

Ken Cureton: Yeah. You could, for example, deal with any financial situation by simply selling everything, moving out into the hills and trying to live off the land.

Ken Cureton: maybe, but

Richard Lowe: I love.

Ken Cureton: Too far for most people.

Richard Lowe: Would that be a good life? Probably not.

Ken Cureton: Well, it depends. There are people who like doing that there, most of us, though I would say, No, I need. That's going too far, I need to not do that. So let's come up with something that's reasonable.

Richard Lowe: A neighbor of mine is actually considering going the Rv. Method. She wants to move, get rid of most of her stuff and just

Richard Lowe: take an Rv. Around. I mean, she's a real estate agent, so she doesn't need to be in one spot. She's got the Internet

Ken Cureton: A friend of mine did much the same sort of thing, and then he discovered that there was a factor he didn't take into account

Ken Cureton: crazy drivers that crashed into him

Richard Lowe: Crazy drivers Rv being stolen. There's all kinds of problems with it.

Ken Cureton: Yeah. So basically, he was without his Rv for a month. And when that's your place to live, that's inconvenient.

Ken Cureton: Just just a tad, just a Tad.

Ken Cureton: Ted, hey? Back to chat, Gpt and Bard and Microsoft copilot and all these other things. Pardon me for using bad words in your presence.

Ken Cureton: Another thing you can do is you can point out your current financial situation and ask for paths out of it. What might I do

Richard Lowe: I did that and had some good results

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: I did that with every part of my life, and the results have been very excellent. You got to take into account that chat Gpt often isn't the truth, and doesn't, and often lies and doesn't know the whole circumstance, no matter

Ken Cureton: Oh, that hallucinates! Yes.

Richard Lowe: Well, not just hallucinate. Sometimes it's just wrong.

Ken Cureton: Yes.

Richard Lowe: And you just you got to use your brain. In addition, you can't just say, Oh, it's got a plan for me. Follow the plan

Ken Cureton: No, no, no, I don't ask it for a plan.

Ken Cureton: I ask it for options with pros and cons of each, and then I make my decision

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that's that's the way to do it.

Richard Lowe: Well, we've been going for a while. Any last words you want to leave our listeners with

Ken Cureton: No, I just wanted to point out that when you're considering dealing with problems in your personal life or your professional life, think about some of the methods we've talked about here, and see if some of them can't apply, because I think it would really help you a lot

Richard Lowe: Awesome. Well, thank you, Ken, for appearing on the leaders in their stories. Podcast is there any way that people can reach you

Ken Cureton: Oh, absolutely I happen to have my own website.

Ken Cureton: skit.com SKIT dot COM.

Richard Lowe: You got a 4 character name. That's really wonderful.

Ken Cureton: Yes, back in 1995, I decided, you know what I need to have my own domain name.

Ken Cureton: So I wrote a quick pearl script against the online English Oxford English Dictionary, which was available at the time.

Ken Cureton: and I discovered that there were a whole bunch of words in the Oed that were not taken. Most of the 4 letter words were inappropriate

Ken Cureton: so, but Skit, meaning a short, humorous sketch in English, was available. So if you go out to skit.com down to bottom. You'll find my email address at that time, whatever my current email address is.

Richard Lowe: Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you for appearing. This has been the writing king and ghostwriting. Guru. I'm Richard Lowe, and you can reach me@thewritingking.com or ghostwriting. Guru either place works fine. And this is a podcast that's happening, sometimes as many as 2 or 3 times a day. So there's a lot of episodes, and they're going fast and always looking for leaders to appear on it.

Ken Cureton: So thank you again, and we'll call it a wrap.

Ken Cureton: Thank you.