Scams, Passwords, and Respect: Delicious Adult Conversation About Staying Safe | Delicious Talk Radio

This is the complete conversation from Richard Lowe’s evening on Delicious Talk Radio, a BlogTalk Radio program, lightly edited for readability. The host’s introduction and station segments are condensed where they repeat.

The introduction

Host: Welcome to Delicious Talk Radio. We don’t discuss religion or politics, and we have the most fascinating guests on BlogTalk Radio. We’re here to entertain, and you might even learn a thing or two. Our special guest tonight served as vice president of consulting at a computer systems company before settling down as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s during his 20-year tenure at the esteemed company, where he focused on computer security and preparing for the possibility of disaster. After spending over 33 years in the computer technology industry, Richard decided to take an early retirement to pursue his dream of becoming a professional writer and published author. He has created hundreds of articles for the web and blogs and actively works as a professional ghostwriter. He has completed books on a wide variety of subjects, including memoirs and business volumes. His own published books include volumes on surviving emergencies and disasters, ebooks and blogging, ghostwriting, How to Plan a Party, and How to Surround Yourself with Beautiful Women. Richard has been a photographer for much of his life, with a focus on nature and events: he has hiked dozens of national parks throughout the country, photographed unique festivals and events, over 1,200 dance events and hundreds of festivals, and for several years photographed in Pasadena, California. He’s currently working on a large number of short Kindle ebooks, and beginning in 2016, the first of a 10-volume series of fiction novels will be published. One of Richard’s passions is to use the power of words to educate people on human rights; he believes the world will be a better place when human beings are treated with full respect and dignity. It seems like I’ve read his whole life, but without further ado, we’re going to bring on our guest, Richard Lowe. Good evening, Richard. How are you?

Richard Lowe: Good evening. I’m doing fantastic, thank you. How are you?

Host: I am fantastic as well. That was quite a little bio; I see you’re very busy. Now let me ask you: what made you get into computers?

Four refrigerators and two washing machines

Richard Lowe: That’s an interesting story. Back when I was 19, I had just started my third semester of college, and I had a schedule to fill. You know how it is when you’re late and you’ve got a class to fill and they’re all full. So I grabbed a computer class, and I had no idea what it was. This was back when a computer was the size of a room, literally. I took that class, and then the next semester my teacher started a company and invited me to join, which I did. I dropped out of college, and within a year I was vice president of consulting of that company, and then just moved forward from there. It was a startup; they paid me peanuts, but it was worth it.

Host: How many courses did you take before you dropped out?

Richard Lowe: I took four courses in various computer languages and theory of computing, and I just had a natural love for it. I stayed late and became the administrator of the computer lab and things like that. It went really well.

Host: How would you compare the computers of today to the computers you were on back then?

Richard Lowe: The computer I was on back then was literally four refrigerators bolted together, with two washing machines bolted to it. And your watch has about a hundred times the power of that. Those washing machines were literal in that the disk drives were so unstable they would literally bounce around.

Host: That’s very interesting, because I remember the first time I was introduced to computers, back in the 70s. Is AOL still in existence?

Richard Lowe: Yes, it is. It’s changed dramatically, but it’s still there.

Host: It really has come a long way, and there’s so much you can do on the internet and with the computer. At one point you were writing letters to people and mailing them, and now you can just email somebody. I understand they also have a setup so you can call people on the computer. Could you give us the pros and cons of the computer?

Richard Lowe: Starting with the pros: I’m actually calling you from my computer now. I don’t even have a phone. I’m calling you on Skype. It’s basically free, it’s very clear, and I can call anywhere in the world. And of course I’ve got video, and I do graphics on the computer. The pros are you can get a lot of work done, and quickly. One of the cons is I sit on my behind all day long writing and working on the computer and don’t get as much exercise as I probably should. That’s true of a lot of people who work in an office. My posture is probably wrong; that’s my bad side.

And then, when you get beyond the personal, one of the real negatives, and you could treat it as a negative or a positive or a gray line, is how much information the big advertising companies have about you. It’s kind of scary. I created an account on UPS, and it asked me questions to validate that it was me: what was my first car, what was the name of my first girlfriend. It’s like: how do they know this stuff? I was on Facebook, and I did something, and then I got on Amazon, on another computer in another office, and up came an ad for the product I’d been looking at on Facebook. How did it know? It’s scary.

Host: Sometimes it can be kind of scary. You go on looking for something, and then it pops up when you’re on another site. It just mystifies me.

Richard Lowe: One of the books I’m writing this coming year is actually on that subject: what do they know, and how do they know it. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s about what are called data warehouses. They gather data, and then everybody asks them for data about people. The purpose is to make advertising more efficient, because a random ad is no big deal, but an ad for something you actually want to buy means the person selling that product is more likely to get paid. It’s all about money.

Host: It mystifies me: when I Google myself, everything about me comes up, even pictures of myself.

Richard Lowe: That’s what they do. They’ve created robots, basically, that surf the web robotically, find data, and store it so it can be found by other people. I’m calling it a robot; it’s an application, and we call them spiders. They spider websites: they go in, they grab data, and they leave.

Host: Well, that’s amazing too. So it’s done by robots. Now, at Trader Joe’s, what did you become the manager of?

Richard Lowe: I was the Director of Technical Services and Computer Operations, which means I was in charge of all of the computing resources in Trader Joe’s corporate office, about 1,500 computers, including the disaster site. Our main computer site was at the main office, but if there was an earthquake, we still wanted to be in business. So we had another site that duplicated it somewhere else. If an earthquake happened and the roof collapsed on our main computers, we could just switch over to the one down the road. And I was in charge of that.

Does deleting a file actually erase it from your computer?

Host: I also understand that even though we delete things, they’re not really gone?

Richard Lowe: That’s right. You can delete it for sure, but the way it works, to describe it: computers don’t actually erase things. Let’s say you had a list of the books on your bookshelf, and then you took that list and scratched out the name of one of the books. The book’s still on the bookshelf. It’s just not on the list anymore. That’s what happens when you delete a file on your Windows or Mac machine. It just erases it from its list, but it’s still on the bookshelf, so somebody else can find it.

Host: I had a problem where I didn’t save some information, and I tried to go back and retrieve it, and I couldn’t, even with the recovery thing.

Richard Lowe: What happens is, once it erases the file from the list, it knows that slot on the bookshelf is available, so it might put another book there. And then the book that was there is gone. Yours was probably just overwritten by something else.

Host: Is there anything that can truly be erased from the hard drive?

Richard Lowe: Everything’s on the hard drive, and I’ll tell you a scary story. When I worked at Trader Joe’s, we sometimes bought disk drives off of eBay, and we would get these drives, and they would have data on them. They would have pictures, people’s personal checkbook data, confidential data from corporations. They didn’t erase them before they put them on eBay. And some of them that were erased: if you just reformat the drive, it’s really easy to get the data back, and voila, you’ve got all the family photos or whatever else they had on there. There’s a way to erase a disk drive so it’s truly gone. What I do is take out a chisel and a sledgehammer and put a chisel through the disk drive, and it’s gone.

Host: That’ll be the way. It’s pretty much toast at that point. I’ve had problems with my computer where everything on my desktop disappeared. I spoke to someone at Microsoft, and they got everything back, but they said something might have caused it.

Richard Lowe: Most likely they were corrupted by some kind of virus.

The ILOVEYOU virus and ransomware

Host: Have you ever had a virus that you could not get rid of?

Richard Lowe: Oh yeah. A company I worked with a long time ago got hit by ILOVEYOU, which was one of the first really nasty viruses. What it did was get on your computer, look at the address book on your email, and send itself to everybody in that address book. It turned out it had a kind of bug, because it was one of the first ones, and it did that for the whole company. We basically sent out millions of emails, and it took us months to get rid of that virus. It was just awful.

And then, coming back to modern times, there’s the new ransomware stuff. Are you familiar with ransomware?

Host: No, I’m not.

Richard Lowe: Ransomware is: you get infected by a virus of a certain kind, and it will pop up with some alarming message, like “the FBI has determined your computer contains illegal materials and you need to pay a fine,” something like that. And if you don’t pay that fine within, say, 10 days, it will erase your computer. Once you get hit by ransomware, you’re done. Your computer is gone. Don’t even try. Just rebuild it. We used to call those computers bricks at that point. They were just worthless; you had to erase them and start over.

Host: So when you see that, you just can’t shut your computer off? Don’t you have to click on something for it to work?

Richard Lowe: Right. You got a pop-up that said something alarming, like: you have viruses, you need to install this antivirus software. And you said, oh, okay. Well, you just installed the virus, and at that point you’re infected.

The fake tech support call

Host: Before, I used to get all these pop-ups, and it got to a point where they had called me on the phone. He called me one morning, I’m waking up: “You need to go to your computer, because I’m from” whatever he said he was from, “and there’s a virus attacking your computer.” So I get out of bed, go to my office, turn on the computer, and I give him control of my computer. It was a done deal. To get the virus off, even in safe mode, nothing was happening. I had to notify the maker of my computer, and they had to send me out software. And they still call. Now when they call, I say: don’t call me anymore, I’m going to report you to the FBI if you call again. What makes a person just sit around and want to put viruses on people’s computers? Do they get paid for that?

Richard Lowe: What that’s called is social engineering. The process of social engineering is: a con man pretends to be something to convince you to do something. He pretended to be a computer technician helping you, and you, of course, said sure, because most people are trustworthy. And he installed a virus.

Why do they do it? Because it’s money. First of all, he can get money directly from you, because if he installs a virus on your computer, that virus can see what you type. It can see your bank accounts, your websites, everything. It can look through your webcam and take pictures of you. That’s number one. Number two, he wants your computer itself, to make what’s called a botnet. It stands for robot network; the machines are also called zombies. He can take over your computer and use it for illegal things: laundering money, sending out spam, attacking other systems. And if he gets a lot of these, like thousands, he can sell them to other people. Let’s say you were a spammer, and you need to send out a hundred thousand emails. You ask, what will that cost me? He says, well, I’ve got a thousand systems. How’s a hundred bucks? Then the spammer sends out his hundred thousand emails using a thousand systems that don’t even know they’re doing it. And it’s untraceable. It can’t be traced back. So social engineering is basically a con man pretending to be something else.

What is phishing and how do you avoid it?

Host: Okay. Let’s talk about: what is phishing?

Richard Lowe: Phishing: somebody sends out an email that says, oh my God, your PayPal account has been locked because we’ve detected security fraud. You need to click here and log in right away. You click there, because you trust people, and you log in. When you log in, you just gave the criminal your password and username, and they will then log into your PayPal account and steal all of your money. Same with bank accounts. Don’t ever click on links in those messages. Period. Just don’t. If you think it’s real, type the name of the website yourself. Don’t click the link.

Host: I used to get those PayPal ones. And you’re never supposed to give out your Social Security number. It’s terrible how people do things like that.

How does the Nigerian 419 advance-fee scam work?

Richard Lowe: It’s a shame. The Nigerian scam is very famous. It started many, many years ago; I remember getting an actual physical letter in the mail back in the 70s, and it’s the same exact scam. It’s also called the 419 scam, which stands for the penal code for fraud in Nigeria, or the advance fee scam.

Here’s the way it works. You get an email saying: I’m the king of Nigeria, someone left a bunch of money, a million dollars, and you can get half of it if you help me get it out. And you’re like: well, that sounds cool. I could use half a million dollars. You reply to the email, and he says: great, let’s do it. But first we need to bribe some officials, and I need five thousand dollars. You think about it, and he’s really slick, and finally: okay, I’ll send you the five thousand dollars. So you wire him the money. It’s always wire, because a wire cannot be gotten back. Then he comes back and says: well, we almost got the money out, the officials were bribed, but now we need to do this other thing, and we need ten thousand dollars. And some more, and some more, and some more.

What’s happening here: first, it’s greed. Second, some of it’s helpfulness; you want to help somebody. And the third thing is that it’s always mildly illegal, like you’re bribing someone, so now you think you’d get caught in an illegal act as well. It’s all woven together. When the scammer finally realizes you’re out of money, and believe me, some people have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to these people, he’ll say: okay, fine, we’ve got the money, it’s waiting in some country, and I’ll meet you at the airport. And you, being an idiot, fly there. You’re lucky if you just get mugged and robbed. You might get held for ransom. You could get murdered. These things have all happened. That’s the end game. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s possible. The best thing to do is delete those emails.

The host’s fake check story

Host: Because I’ve received so many of them. At one point, I met someone on Facebook, and he sent me a box; every chocolate Hershey ever made was in that box, so much candy. He was supposedly living in Pennsylvania. Lo and behold, a few days later he went to Nigeria, because his mother had died, and he needed money to get back to the States. He wanted me to send money. I don’t have that kind of money. Then he says a check is coming. I get a check, and the name on it wasn’t the name of the person I knew. I put the check aside, because I’m saying: who’s sending me this two thousand dollars? I don’t even know this person. The guy calls me: did you get the check? Why isn’t it in your name? Because, he says, the person whose name was on the check owed him money. I asked, why couldn’t you cash a check over there? “They don’t cash checks over here.” I called the person the check was from, in Philadelphia, and told him I had a check for two thousand dollars, would he like me to send it back? He said he was having a problem; obviously that wasn’t really his account. But the scammer almost had me, because when I saw that check for two thousand dollars with my name, I was tempted to cash that check. And then I thought: I don’t know this person, and why would a stranger send me a check for two thousand dollars? I’m saying all that to say: people have to be very careful.

Richard Lowe: Just to fill you in: if you had cashed that check, what happens is you get the money, but the money doesn’t actually clear in the bank account for ten days. So you think you’ve got the money, and you think he’s got the money you forwarded, but the check bounces. And you’re out of luck.

Host: It’s a shame how people sit around and scam hardworking citizens out of their hard-earned money.

Richard Lowe: What’s worse yet, a lot of them are actually funding terrorism. So you don’t want to give them any money.

The stranded-in-Britain message

Richard Lowe: Now let me tell you a story that happened to me, if you don’t mind. I met a lady at a show, and we friended on Facebook that night. The next day I’m on Facebook, and this message pops up: “Hi, I’m in Britain right now, and I’m in a spot of trouble.” And I’m thinking: wait, I was just in Santa Barbara yesterday, eight hours ago, talking to this woman. There is no way she’s in Britain. I’ve got a scammer here. So this scammer starts giving me a sob story about needing $2,500, and they gave me an exact amount, down to the penny, to get them out of jail, get them home, and pay for the passport. I’m just typing along, because I know it’s a scammer. I asked, “What color is your hair?” Gave the wrong answer, of course. The lady’s Facebook account got hacked, which is pretty typical. It’s happened several times around me. Just ignore it. It’s some scammer trying to get money.

Host: I’ve heard that exact same scam. One lady sent her life savings to a guy; she was on Dr. Phil. Every time he was supposed to come here, he had an excuse, something always happening, and she believed it. That could not have happened to me. Maybe I’d accept the first excuse, but the second? No. Too many excuses.

Protecting yourself: firewalls, patches, and bad neighborhoods

Richard Lowe: So, other things to protect yourself. First of all, whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, there are steps you need to take. The Mac does tend to be safer than the PC out of the box, but Windows 10 has gone a long way toward being safe. You need to make sure you’ve got what’s called a firewall, which is exactly what it sounds like: an electronic wall protecting you from the dangers of the internet. I describe how to do that in my book Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex, which is on Amazon, by the way. You should have antivirus software. And what I go over in my book is best practices: don’t click on links; put in some ad-blocking software to get rid of the ads totally, because ads do deliver viruses to your system; don’t go to bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods would be hacker websites, porno websites. Stay away from those.

Host: Oh my God.

Richard Lowe: Those spread faster than venereal disease. You start randomly going to porno websites, your computer will be infected. And make sure your computer’s patched. Windows 10 is automatic now; you will be patched. But if you’ve got an older one, make sure you follow the patching schedule, because the number one reason people get infected is they don’t install security updates.

Host: What’s a patch? What does that mean?

Richard Lowe: The word is very descriptive. Let’s say you get a pair of pants from the supermarket, and it has a hole in it. The seamstress puts a patch over it, a piece of fabric. Well, when the operating system goes out, it has a bug, a problem. The developers create some program fixes and send them out to fill that hole in the program. That’s why it’s called a patch: it’s an update that fixes the problem. There may be a way for a hacker to break in, and somebody finds it and reports it to Microsoft, and Microsoft creates an update, or patch, that fixes that particular way the hacker could break in.

Host: And you mentioned that a Mac is more secure than a PC. Explain that.

Richard Lowe: Well, it’s actually not inherently more secure than a PC. The thing is, there are a hundred times more PCs than Macs, and I’m exaggerating the number a little bit. There are PCs everywhere: PCs in ATMs, PCs in factories, PCs all over the place. So PCs are a big target, and the hackers go after PCs. Most of your viruses are engineered to break into PCs. There aren’t a lot of Macs on factory floors or in ATMs or serving as servers in computer rooms, so they aren’t as big a target, and not as many viruses are created for them. That’s why Macs are more secure: there aren’t as many viruses.

Ad blockers

Host: You also mentioned ad blockers. How do you get one? Because I have a lot popping up when I’m on a page.

Richard Lowe: If you run Firefox or Chrome, those two browsers, you can install extensions, and one of the extensions is called Adblock Plus. Once you install it, which takes about five minutes, you won’t see most ads anywhere. Some slip through, but you won’t see very many at all. And your browsing will be faster, because you’re not loading all those ads. I’m on the computer now, so I can tell you exactly how to get there: if you’re in Firefox, you go to the menu, there’s something called Add-ons, you go there and type “Adblock Plus” in the search, and it brings it up.

Host: Okay, I’m going to do that when I finish this show, because I get tired of those.

Richard Lowe: And you can buy my book, and I’ll tell you exactly how to do it.

What is the best way to manage your passwords?

Host: All right. Now let’s talk about the best way to use passwords.

Richard Lowe: The problem with passwords is: you have a username, which is almost always your email address, and a password. Most people, because they have, say, 50 accounts on the internet, Amazon, Sears, their bank, all these places, will use the same email address and make the password the same for every site. The problem with that is: Target had 40 million passwords stolen. If your username and password are the same on all of your websites, then by stealing one set of passwords, the hacker has the password to all your accounts.

So you have to make your passwords different for every account. Every single account needs a different password, and they need to be 20 characters long and random. And your first question should be: how the heck am I going to remember 50 twenty-character random passwords? Well, you don’t. You get a product called LastPass. Go to LastPass.com. You only need to know the password to it, and it remembers all the passwords for your other sites, and it even fills them in for you.

Host: How does that work when you log in?

Richard Lowe: First you install LastPass on your computer and create an account with it, and you set it up following the instructions. Now, the first time you go to Facebook after that and log in, it will ask you: do you want me to save Facebook’s password? And you say yep. That’s the only time you need to actually type in the password for Facebook anymore. From then on, it does it for you.

Host: Okay, I see. That is pretty cool. Because on some of my accounts, the password is basically the same, but the last two characters are numbers that change. Should I change them all up differently?

Richard Lowe: Get a product like LastPass, and there are other products that do the same thing, and then change them all to be different, because it’s not hard for a hacker to figure out a pattern like that. One of the nice things about LastPass is it has a generate-password button, and it will create a good password for you. It’s a very cool product. It takes a little getting used to, because it’s kind of quirky, but once you get used to it, it’s really nice.

Host: I’m going to add that to my computer. I have Windows 10; there are just so many different things I need to learn about, but I do like it.

Richard Lowe: I just installed it a couple of weeks ago myself, and I’m digging it. It’s a nice product.

The story behind the beautiful women book

Host: Your other book. One was how to pick up beautiful women without being a sleazeball?

Richard Lowe: No, it’s How to Be Surrounded by Beautiful Women Without Being a Sleazeball.

Host: I’m sorry. How did you come to write that book?

Richard Lowe: Let me give you a little history. My wife passed away ten years ago, and I was full of grief, so I decided to go out and start photographing. I started photographing nature, and then I wandered into a renaissance faire and made friends with all the people there. Then I ran into belly dancers and made friends with all of them, and before I knew it, because I’m a pretty nice guy, I was the belly dance photographer for the whole Southern California area. I got invited to shows, I got special seating, and it finally got to the point where each year I had a birthday party where a hundred dancers came to dance for me. There are pictures on my website, richardlowejr.com, of women hanging all over me.

So then I was thinking: how do I do that? The way I do that is: I’m not a sleazeball. And I’m not what you call a “nice guy,” because I think that’s kind of a facade that guys put on. “I’m a nice guy, why aren’t you going out with me?” The hell with that. That’s not what you want to be. You want to treat women with respect. And I took the approach of human rights: women deserve the exact same human rights that men do. People of all colors, all races, all religions, all backgrounds, we all deserve exactly the same human rights, and we should demand them. They’re outlined on a site called humanrights.com, and my book links to it.

You’re a guy, and you expect a woman to give you something when you go on a date? You’re violating her human rights. She’s a human being. You shouldn’t expect anything. The book explains which rights you’re violating. Another example: a woman gets drunk. Well, she’s not in her right mind, so you’re violating her rights there too. Anybody who’s under the influence of drugs or alcohol is no longer able to make a decision, and by law you can’t have sex with that person, male or female. Period, end of story. The book goes into these different scenarios and explains how on earth I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of women as friends. They were all friends.

As an example: I had a lady, her name is Jana, she’s a dear friend, and we would go on cruises together, in the same room. And rooms on a cruise are not big. It was totally fine, because we had the conversation up front: are we friends, or are we more? We’re going to be just friends. We both agreed. Great. After that, because I respect her and I know she has rights, there was no question that I was going to get her drunk or put my hands on her. Of course I wasn’t. She’s a human being. I went on trips across the country with women, trips to Vegas, with showgirls and models and even supermodels, with that attitude: this is a person. This isn’t anything more or anything less than a person. That’s the starting point, not what a lot of guys start from. And the reverse is true too: women can also think of men as a thing, a body, something to expect things from. Screw that. It’s a person. Ask permission. Get permission.

Host: What you’re saying is just about right. If some men would understand: we don’t want that all the time. It’s okay to go out to dinner or an event and be dropped off back home without worrying about a man being angry with us because we won’t have sex. Men with that mindset will see it differently.

Richard Lowe: Something men are very confused about is: what about the signals? Believe me, if a woman is interested, you’re going to know. Generally, unless she’s inexperienced or being very secretive, she’s going to let you know.

Host: That’s just the way it is. Some women have a lot of male friends, and maybe there’s that one particular male friend that she doesn’t mind.

Richard Lowe: There’s actually an answer to that, and that answer is communication. “Hey, I like you a lot, and I think I’m getting some signals. Am I, or am I not?” Have an honest conversation. I’ve had that conversation many times: “I think we’re getting a little close. Are we ready to form a relationship?” “No, I’m not interested in going there.” And believe me, the first thing on the man’s mind should not be, “Oh God, I’ve been friend-zoned.” That’s just dumb. The first thing on his mind should be: “Okay, good. I got the answer to my question. We’ll go back to being friends.” And maybe next week she’s interested. Maybe the week after.

Host: Because sometimes we women have to warm up. If it’s somebody we’re interested in, it’s going to happen. But if we’re not interested, taking us out to dinner doesn’t mean, because we want dinner, that we’re supposed to give you sex. Men actually feel that way. Even a fifty dollar dinner. I’m worth so much more than a fifty dollar dinner in the first place. They get attitudes when you don’t comply. I’m going to tell this little story: I had a guy take me out, back in the day, to Sizzler. He tells me what I can order, over the menu, don’t go over this amount. We eat, he brings me home, and he asks if he can come up and watch television for a while. I said okay, no problem. He comes upstairs, we’re on the couch watching television, and he inches over. I allow one kiss. Then he tried again, and I pushed him back softly and said, you know, we’re just friends. He asks, can he take his shoes off. He took his shoes off, getting really comfortable. We watched a couple of movies, and I said, well, I’m getting ready to go to bed. He said, “So what you’re saying is I have to leave?” I said yes. He’s putting his shoes on, huffing and puffing and grunting. He walked out the door and didn’t even say good night. The next day at work, because he was a friend of my co-worker, she comes up to me: “So-and-so said you got him to your place and teased him all night. You were kissing all over him, and when he wanted to have sex, you told him no.” I said: that is not how it happened. He only kissed me once. He got angry because I told him no, and he wasn’t the type of guy I wanted to be with anyway, especially after telling me what I could order at the restaurant. I called myself being nice, even letting him come upstairs. But I teased him all night? Whatever.

Richard Lowe: If he’d simply said, somewhere during there, “Look, I’m interested in you. Do you want to go any further?”, and you did say no several times, implicitly, by not kissing him twice, then fine: is it going to be a friendship, does he want that or not? And even if you do want to have sex with her and she refuses and you’re disappointed, still treat the lady with respect. Come on.

Host: He got an attitude and didn’t even say good night. It kind of tickled me. Maybe he has problems with women. He did not make a good impression. We need to respect each other. We respect men, at least I do, and I expect them to respect me.

Richard Lowe: And as a result of me respecting women and treating them nicely and being a respectable man myself: women throw parties for me. They demanded I fly back across the country to have a birthday party, and 70 dancers were sitting there dancing for me. Very pretty ladies, and it was quite fun and quite fulfilling. I’ve given a lot to that community; I’ve photographed and given to their causes. It’s nice to have friends. Women and men can be friends, but both of them have to let it happen, and not let stupid things like what you just described get in the way. A guy acting like an idiot. Have some friends. Friendship can grow pretty fast into something else.

Real World Survival: the closing segment

Host: We’re back on Delicious Talk Radio with our special guest Richard Lowe, computer expert and author. Now we’re going to discuss his book Real World Survival Tips, because we never know when we’re going to need to know how to survive a disaster. Do you want to touch on that for us, Richard?

Richard Lowe: Yes. The whole theme of all my books, and this one especially, is: you can be afraid, or you cannot be afraid. And by not being afraid, you’d be prepared. Disasters happen; they always do. I was caught in the middle of a forest fire, literally. I’ve been in earthquakes. My sister-in-law was in Hurricane Katrina. My parents were in a big fire in Lake Arrowhead. I’ve been exposed to disasters, and I was also in charge of being able to recover from a disaster at Trader Joe’s. The whole idea of the book is: prepare for them, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of money.

For example, one of the things I say is: create a stock of food, so you can survive if there’s an earthquake and you can’t get to the store, or there’s nothing at the store, for a few days. You don’t have to go out and buy it all at once. Buy an extra can a day, or every other day, and put it in the stock. Buy a big bottle of water and keep it in your closet. One day, if you’ve got a little extra money, buy some other supplies, and just build it up over time. At least you’re doing something.

The number one thing I talk about at the beginning, and I use a lot of the book on it, is called situational awareness. It’s why people get mugged, and why people have bad things happen to them: they’re sleepwalking through life. You see them all the time, walking and not paying attention. I’m sure some of you have seen the video of the lady who’s texting and falls into a fountain. Those things happen all the time. Don’t do that. Be aware of what’s going on.

The first thing I recommend is that you stand in your house or apartment and look around. Think: how do I get out of here if there’s a fire in the living room and I’m in the bedroom? I can go through the window. Oh wait, I’m on the fifth floor. Oh wait, grandma’s in this room and she’s in a wheelchair. How do I get her out? Start thinking of these things. You don’t have to come up with solutions yet; just get the questions going. Walk to the next room and look around. Then go to your kids’ school and think: God forbid there’s some kind of shooting incident, what do they do? Get these questions going in your mind. Don’t panic; just get the questions. Then you start doing a little research. Talk to the fire department and the police department; they’re really good resources for these things. Talk to various other experts. And then sit down with your family and friends, including the children, and have discussions about what to do. Make it a game for the kids: you’re at school and this happens; now don’t be afraid, but a bad thing happens. What do you do? And get them involved. Really, what would you do? Work them through it. Get the neighbors involved. Have a serious discussion, and keep it light: get some chips, not beer, and go through the scenarios until you actually come up with a plan. If there was a fire in this house, what would we do? We’d go out the window, but we need some kind of rope ladder to get down. So you go buy a rope ladder. Or: if there was an earthquake and there was no electricity for three days, we need flashlights and batteries. By knowing the questions, doing the research, and having the discussion, all of which are very simple things to do, you can figure out what you need.

And what if an earthquake happened and nobody could get to your house for two weeks? Which is actually normal in a big earthquake; nobody’s going to get to you for two weeks. You want to have a lot of food and a lot of water, and you want to get with the neighbors.

My parents were in a situation where there was a fire, and the fire department came around and said: leave now, you have five minutes to evacuate. If you have five minutes, you don’t even have time to think about what to grab. They grabbed some pictures and some stuff that was pretty and some stuff that was just stupid. What’s going to help them survive? In my book, I go through creating a go bag, also called a bug out bag or grab-and-go bag. It’s a duffel bag, and you fill it with survival supplies that will last you one day, maybe two. Each person should have one. If the fire department or police come around and say you need to go, you grab it, you grab your box of medicine, and you go.

I usually keep some water in the trunk, because water’s heavy. And I make sure the duffel bag’s on wheels, like one of those airport bags, so you don’t have to carry it. Put in a change of clothes and a pair of shoes; old shoes are fine, but believe me, if there’s a hurricane, your shoes are going to get wet, and you’ll want a dry pair and socks. Some food to last a day. Don’t put water in there, because water leaks. Keep the medicine separate, in a little bag you can grab, because medicines have dates and you need to get to them all the time. Every six months, go through the bag and rotate things, because food has dates on it too. Then you’re ready. When the fire department comes around and says there’s a big fire and you’ve got to go, or there’s a dangerous situation and you need to leave now, you’re prepared. And if you’re prepared, you don’t have to be afraid anymore, and your kids don’t have to be afraid anymore. You’re ready. It doesn’t mean you know how to deal with everything, but you’re at least ready for something. That’s what my book’s about. That’s what the computer book’s about. All the books, really: don’t be afraid of things. Don’t even be afraid of girls; that’s the other book.

Host: Now, you mentioned you were in a fire situation?

Richard Lowe: I was commuting from school to my house. I lived in the mountains, and school was in the valley, and there was a big forest fire. I didn’t see it; I was zoned out, because I drove that drive every day, I could drive it sound asleep, and I probably was half asleep. Then it smelled funny, like fire, and I looked in my mirror, and there was fire behind me. And then I noticed fire to the left, and fire in front, and I thought: uh oh, I’m going to die. It was getting pretty dicey. And then a fireman happened to be there, and he got in my car, and he guided, on his radio, a water drop on top of me to get me out.

Host: Aww, I’d have been afraid too. A fire in front of you, on both sides of you, and in back of you. They had to do a water drop to get you out. Well, it’s a good thing. And your parents?

Richard Lowe: Same mountain, different forest fire. I had moved out; I was 40 years old, long gone. They had a big forest fire, and the fire department told them they had to leave. So they grabbed a bunch of stuff, stupid stuff, threw it in the car with the dog and the bird and a few paintings, and drove into the desert. My sister spent the next three days frantically calling around, trying to find them. She finally located them at some sleazy motel a hundred miles away, sleeping in the car, because they didn’t grab any money. She called up the local pizza place and told them to knock on their window, hand them a pizza, and tell them there was a room waiting in the hotel.

Host: Oh my goodness.

Richard Lowe: One of the recommendations I make in my book: keep your gas tank full. You never know when you’ll have to leave, and if the power is out, the gas pumps aren’t going to work. You won’t be able to get gas. So make sure your tank is full.

Host: How do you recommend a person handle an earthquake?

Richard Lowe: You get under something. You go under the desk, under something heavy. I have big wooden desks; that’s what you do, you get under them. And do not get near a car. Cars bounce around like you won’t believe in an earthquake. They’re like dragons with a mind of their own. They have rubber wheels, and they’re actually very light. Obviously, you are where you are in an earthquake, and if you’re in the car, stay in the car. But if you’re beside the car, get away from it, because it’s going to move. I was in an earthquake in my house, and it was amazing how much the furniture moved. The shelves fell, and things on the walls became missiles. I mean missiles: they were shooting across the room, and glass was breaking. This was 20 seconds. The couch wound up moving from the living room into another room.

Host: I remember we had a little tiny earthquake here in the DMV. I didn’t know what was going on; my house was rocking back and forth, and I said, I hope the ceiling isn’t getting ready to fall in. I looked out the back window and noticed people coming out on their porches looking around, and what had happened was we’d had a mild earthquake. That’s the first time in my 66 years on this earth. It did do some damage to the monument and the cathedral. If I was in a serious earthquake, I’d have been running from room to room like a rat.

Richard Lowe: You were probably in a small earthquake, with maybe a couple of inches of ground movement. Think about the Japanese earthquake a few years ago: 20 or 30 feet of ground movement, a tsunami 20 to 25 feet high. Those are the kinds of disasters where there’s not much you can do; you just hope you survive. A wall of water 20 feet high, you just hope you’re in a high building. But you can be as prepared as you can, and most disasters are small. By being prepared, having some knowledge and a plan, you can handle at least the small stuff. It’s like having some money in the bank: you can handle the small financial disasters, the missed paycheck, even if you can’t handle the stock market crashing. That’s the philosophy. Be ready, at least a little bit. If it’s big, it’s going to affect everybody, and you’re all in the same boat.

Closing remarks

Host: With that being said, do you have any closing remarks before we close out the show? And let our listeners know how they can get in touch with you.

Richard Lowe: The easiest way to get my books is to go to coolauthor.com. It goes straight to my Amazon author central page, which has all my books listed. They’re all available on Kindle, generally three bucks each, so they’re cheap, and a couple are in paperback. Also, at the beginning of the year, I’m starting a weekly webcast, five or ten minutes long, on computer security and surviving disasters. You can sign up at realworldsurvival.com or leave-me-alone.com; just get on the mailing list, and it’ll be free.

Closing remarks: the whole idea of everything I write is, don’t be afraid. Be prepared. Just stop being afraid. Don’t be afraid of Muslims; be prepared, be ready, understand. Not all people of any group are bad. Every race, religion, and background has people who are bad and people who are good, and you can’t condemn a whole group of people because of what some people in that group do.

Host: That’s not true of any group. What you need to do is love everybody as you love yourself. This world is in such turmoil these past years, and it’s been heartbreaking. We have to get hold of ourselves and be grateful and thankful for what we have. Just love people. The world needs love.

Richard Lowe: I agree. And my closing remark is: don’t be afraid. Be ready. Be prepared. Learn. Communicate.

Host: We really did enjoy tonight, and I learned so much. I am going to check Richard’s books out: coolauthor.com, C-O-O-L-A-U-T-H-O-R. You can pick up his books at a modest price, three dollars. For being our guest this evening, we’re going to give you a great big round of applause.

Richard Lowe: Well, thank you.

Host: We’ve come to the end of another show. My co-hosts are on a little vacation with the holidays coming up. Thank you, guys. Have a wonderful night, and again, thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful weekend.

Richard Lowe: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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