Episode 111: Finding a Path Forward with Kim “Kid” Curry

For this episode of the podcast, I want to go in a little bit of a different direction than you may have heard on some of our other episodes. One of the things that is so incredible about so many of the people who come on the Career Clarity Show is that they’ve always had this ability to navigate career transitions with authority and confidence. I have been realizing more and more that this is not the way that career change goes for all of us.

In fact, there are more times than not when it comes to making a transition, something happens in your life that turns things upside down. So many people don’t get to have that beautiful heroic narrative of standing on the mountaintop all by yourself having done it in isolation. We saw evidence of this with how the pandemic affected entire industries, markets, and countries. 

So on today’s podcast Kim “Kid” Curry is here to share his story about overcoming things outside of his control. He’ll share ways that each of us can play the hand that we’re dealt and find a path forward, even when it’s not necessarily on the terms that we would have liked.

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

Show Notes:

• Kim Curry
• The Death of Fairness
• Roadmap to a Fulfilling Career eBook

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Transcript:

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:04

Welcome to the Career Clarity Show. If you want to create a career path you’ll love, you’re in the right place. I’m Lisa Lewis Miller, career change coach, published author and your host. And each week, we’ll bring you personal transformation stories, advice and insights from experts about how you can find a more fulfilling, soulful and joyful career. Hello, and welcome to the Career Clarity Show. It’s Lisa Miller, and I am delighted that you are here with us today. For today’s episode of the podcast, I wanted to go in a little bit of a different direction than you may have heard on some of our other episodes. Now, one of the things that is so incredible about so many of the people who come on the Career Clarity Show is that they’ve always had this ability to navigate career transitions with a lot of agency and authority and confidence. And one of the things that I have been realizing more and more is that that’s not the way that career change goes for all of us all the time. And in fact, there are more times than not when life forces your hand, when it comes to having to make a transition, something happens in your life that has turned things upside down. And you don’t get to have that beautiful heroic narrative of standing on the mountaintop all by yourself having done it in isolation, that things can happen outside of our control. I mean, goodness knows, in 2020, we saw a lot of evidence of that with how the pandemic affected entire industries, entire markets, entire countries. And I wanted to talk about stories, at least today on the podcast, and hopefully many more in the future of when you got an experience, you had something happen in life that was outside of your control was outside of what you’d predicted and what you’d hoped for. And talking about ways that each of us can play the hand that we’re dealt, and find a path forward, even when it’s not necessarily on the terms that we would have liked. So that’s why I am particularly excited for today’s podcast guest to come on and share his story of career pivoting life change, and share about all the different decisions and the question marks along the way. So today’s guest on the Career Clarity Show is Kim or kid curry. And we may even talk about that the differentiation between the two identities there. Give is a 33 year radio broadcast programmer who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and forced into retirement, who stopped focusing on the struggle and became a reinvention in his life and in his story. He’s also a writer whose second book is coming out shortly, which we’ll talk about as well. But I’m just excited to get to dive into all of the different pieces of Kim’s story to get to talk about all of the different ways that life can present itself and that careers can shift with and without some of our knowledge, consent and control. So with that, Kim, or kid, welcome to the Career Clarity Show.

Kim “Kid” Curry  3:36  

Well, thank you very much for having me, at least I guess we should get to that first the Kim kid thing. Um, I imagine I was a young little boy in Canyon city, Colorado, where I my father was retired man and we grew up that’s where I grew up. My dad, because he was a retired military man. He did a variety of different things. And one of the things he did in my hometown was be the news guy. On our hometown radio station, there was only one radio station. And one day my dad came home and he said, Listen, they’re looking for you to come and babysit at the radio station. And when I was 17 years old, I would babysit my parents, friends, kids, and that’s how I made my money. So I thought my dad wanted me to go pick up like the General Manager’s kids and then go babysit. When I got there. I was told I was going to babysit the god show. Now every Sunday morning from 6am until noon, they ran all the pre recorded services from the prior week’s churches. And they ran them on Sunday morning. And nobody wanted to run that show. So they needed a high school boy to do so. So that’s how I got started. But you know, the first time I said you know first time I heard my voice and I remember it still to this day. The first time I said kr ln Canyon city, Colorado, the station with the news reputation that was a safe And identification. I heard it and I was like, Whoa, this is cool. So that little boy ends up going to college and studying radio and then getting a part time job in Pueblo, Colorado, I worked on a little station called k k m. And back then we were changing radio to where we take numbers and add them to letters. And so k k m turned to 13k. There we were in Pueblo on the am dial. And after a couple of years ago into college and doing part time, I decided I was going to go ahead and go out and become a real radio DJ, the part time. Kim curry DJ, you can’t call a guy Kim on the radio in the 1970s. So they gave me a name, Gary Paxton. So I was Gary Paxton on this part time little radio station. I applied across the country to get a full time job and I got one in Knoxville. So as I’m driving across the country to Knoxville, I’m thinking I’m gonna be on the radio at 10 o’clock at night. I’ll call myself night smoke because back then, there were guys like the Boogey Man and Wolf Man, I was gonna call myself night smoke. So imagine driving up in my 1971 Plymouth valiant it was white with blue interior and I come up to the radio station, I get out and I walk up to the door and I open it. And at the receptionist desk was a young lady sitting there and behind her was this big, fat guy with curly hair and a Hawaiian shirt. And I said, Hello, ma’am. I’m your new nighttime DJ night smoke. And the guy behind her says, Well, if it isn’t kid curry, and if you know the history of Western culture call, you know, cowboy culture. Kid curry was a legend kid curry Hannibal Hayes, were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And my friends would call me kid and it drove me nuts. So he says, Well, if it isn’t kid curry, and I said, I hate that name. People call me that my I hate it. He says, Well, I guess I will sign your check. And I said, kid green it is. So during the time that was in the radio business for 33 years, there was only one kid curry. It was me. Everybody knew who it was. There was a billion bill Tanner’s and Gary Stevens and Gary Atkins on the radio. But there was only one kid curry. So it was a real identifiable thing for me. So that’s where that name came from. Lisa. That’s my first story.

Lisa Lewis Miller  7:34  

I love that you went through several several identities and several names to land there. Yeah. Well, tell me about it knowing that the passion for radio and podcasts and getting to hear yourself on the airwaves started at a really young age. Tell me about some of the decision points along the way in your career, that you feel like I really shaped who you are.

Kim “Kid” Curry  8:06  

I can tell you that when I six months after I got to Knoxville, my first full time job, the radio station didn’t like it didn’t like the people didn’t like the boss. In fact, the guy who hired me a week after I got there got fired. So it was all different immediately. So I started applying for jobs again. And I applied to a station in Miami. And I was sitting at home watching it was 1976 we were celebrating the 200th anniversary of America. There was a big boat thing going on in New York Harbor. And it was like a Saturday and my roommate and I were sitting watching this and the phone rings and he picks the phone up and he looks at me and says it’s Jerry Clifton. And I’d never heard this guy’s name before but the guy who picked up the phone, I knew exactly who it was. And he says, It’s Jerry Clifton, and he wants to talk to you. He was surprised he wanted to talk to me and not him. Well, I didn’t know who the guy was, but at the time of very influential radio programmer and the business of the kind of guy who would come up with things that had never been done before. So I went down there and work for this guy. That’s where I got attached to him. But right after I found him, the radio station, got in some legal trouble and got shut down. And so was everybody was leaving for the exits. I applied to go across the street. Now the station across the street was the number one top 40 radio station in America. It was the best top 40 station in 1970 some 72 till I left in 1980. It was the most influential top 40 radio station in America. And actually they came to me because they knew I was leaving town so they said hey, why don’t you come to work for us because they liked my show. You know If you look, if you thought, Man, I’m sorry, I know I’m an old guy. So but if you were in radio back in the 70s, you had big deep radio voices. Nobody ever talked like kid curry because good curry had a little kid voice. So it was a very unique voice. My show was unique, that hired to go to Miami, and then went across the street to the biggest station in town. And those were the two most important decisions I made. Because Fast Forward 30 years later, 25 years later, I am. Those guides have combined themselves into a major consultancy in the business. And they’re probably one of the most influential in the business for top 40 and rhythmic top 40 music, the biggest radio stations in America were these guys. Well, the one in Miami, I took over for them, and took it to the highest ratings in the history of the radio station. So these guys captured me when I was 22 years old. And then when I was 50 or 40 something, I got to run their station. And it really worked out very well for me. Then I had my life change. I was home 2004 visiting my mother here in Canyon city. And it was when the tsunami happened. The we had never seen a tsunami live on television before the world was mesmerised. So I would be at my mother’s house every morning watching these videos and just seeing this stuff and just thinking man, what has happened down there. This is just terrifying. Those with my wife and my kids. So when it came time to go back to Miami, my wife, my mother stops me and my mom says, you know there’s something wrong with you. You don’t look right. Your eyes don’t look right. It looks to me like you’re limping. What’s wrong with you? I said, Well, I’m under stress. I run the biggest radio station in Miami. I don’t sleep. I just watched this horrific tsunami can’t be anything. I get back to Miami and my wife starts saying, you know, your mom’s right. There’s something wrong with you. Right? I it’s drooping kind of you are limping a little bit. So what’s going on, and we went to the doctor, and about two or three months later, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And it came on strong and hard.

Kim “Kid” Curry  12:11  

And because I’m such an I’m the kind of radio you know, I love radio, it’s in your blood. My dad was a radio guy. I did this. So it was all I thought about. And we had the biggest radio station in Miami, Florida, which is fairly big deal. But when I got diagnosed, all of that went away, because suddenly I had a chronic disease. And I couldn’t focus and I didn’t want the radio station to suffer because of it. So I left because to me that was more important. Those guys, that thing I had built for nine years and really had a history of over 30 was more important to me than than anything so I wanted to step away. Two years later, I was in a wheelchair. My shoulders, I was having ms problems all over, you get lesions on your brain, depending on where those lesions appear, is where is what part of your body is affected. My legs from mid thigh down to my toes are completely dysfunctional, but also they seize constantly. So I’m on medicine all the time to stop my left sector seizing right now if you can see under the table here, my legs are sticking straight out. So I really beat me up for eight years. And it was a hard transition going from kid curry, the big time guy who was at the Grammys, every year I produced records why club Shawn, good friend, Casey in the sunshine, all from all my years of doing stuff. Everybody wanted to be close to kid curry. But then suddenly, when you’re in a wheelchair, nobody wants to be close to you. And it really was hard for me to deal with mentally. Because you know, I was the guy and then suddenly nobody cared. So it took a long time for me to figure out that what I was going to do with that, I mean, I wanted to completely get rid of the name kid curry. I didn’t want anybody to refer to me as that. In fact, I even did a thing on the internet for a while at was kid curry calm, because I wanted to get rid of it. So I’m having all this mental thing my body’s falling apart my doctors telling me that the medicine that you’re using, when I first got diagnosed, there were only four or five drugs for Ms. By the time eight years went by, there were now eight or nine drugs for Ms. Maybe as many as 10. And he said it’s time to change because what you’re taking is not doing anything for you. So we need to get you on some different medicine and I want you to take vitamin D, and I want you to take it to access because I believe the vitamin D combines with your medicine and blah blah blah blah And it’s going to help you. I’m an old guy on the radio many years very skeptical. My mom used to say take vitamin D, you won’t get a cold, I get a cold. And when I take vitamin C, you won’t get a cold and I would take vitamin C and get a cold. So vitamins to me were a thing. But after six months of harassment from the doctor and my wife, I started taking vitamin D. I mean, 5000 I use a day I was taking it like crazy, along with my ms medicine. Six months after that started, my condition leveled off. And I was crashing, but it leveled off. I mean, surprised me to no end. But it was a glimmer of hope. You know, to me, it was like, wait, I’m not, I’m not going to die because people die from this. And at the same time, I kind of I disappeared from the radio business. When I got out, I just took off. Well, some people thought, well, one guy in particular thought that I should have gotten some more recognition for what I had done in my radio career. A guy by the name of Vince Pellegrino, you know, you see the people that get the Grammys, when you watch that show. It’s because those people have hit records. Well, they wouldn’t have hit records on radio stations, if there weren’t a bunch of promotion guys getting them on the radio stations. So Vince was an independent record promoter who had a big thing every year where he gave out awards to the promoters who did the biggest and best work to get these big stars, the Mariah Carey’s the whitecliff, John’s, all their songs on on the radio.

Kim “Kid” Curry  16:39  

So he has this party, he invites me to come out brings my family out there, I see people I haven’t seen in 30. I mean, well in 30 years over a 30 year career. And and it was invigorating for me, I really loved that it was like this big round of applause, we brought me on stage to give me the award, it really made me feel good. I mean, it’s this was something for me after going downtown in my mind and physically. And then the next morning, he proceeds to tell me, he’s going to be dead so that he’s dying. And the whole reason for him to bring me out there was to try to wake me up, because he didn’t like the fact that I was gone. And he thought that I had more to offer. But the radio business is quite fluent fluid. I can’t, I can’t imagine after eight years trying to be on the radio, I could produce records eight years before that. But it was completely different back then, like I couldn’t get it. So he wanted me to come back and do something. But I couldn’t do anything, because I wasn’t going to be any value for anyone. But I wanted to show respect to my friend, Vince for doing what he did, because he really did pull me up and shake me off. And I thought I would learn to write and tell the story. So I had to completely change my radio brain into a writer’s brain. Now it is quite different. I consider and tell you all sorts of stories and do them in my fanatical way. But that doesn’t translate on the piece of paper. So I had to I actually had this idea to tell my story to to write a memoir and get the event story in there and talk about my ms situation. So I hired a writer. So Matter of fact, Carrie Flanagan, guide to writing to magazine article writing Carrie is my editor and my longtime to your friends through your friend almost now. And she taught me how to write. She made me read books before she would even talk to me. She said these are the books that you need to read save the cat Strikes Back. Okay, any authors out there anybody who wants to learn how to write, grab the book, save the cat strikes back? Okay, that’s your little, your little tip for today. But what that’s what that book did, for me was remarkable. And it’s simple and it’s, you can read the whole thing. I’m going to tell you what it what it says in a few little sentences. You can’t write a book until you have a spine of a story. And then everything you write about has to come back to the spine. Okay, so I started working on that she then made me for six months to research and then I wrote for six months and she was on me every week I’d write write write and she corrected you know, kind of like getting it back from your teacher with the red marks on it and stuff. You know, I get my little computer thing about all this stuff on. And so I became a writer and surprisingly enough my memoir, come get me mother I’m through. I ended up at number 11 on the Amazon general broadcasting list. Howard Stern is number one, but I got to number 11. And that which surprised me like crazy. But when you become I was in the mode, I learned how to write and I didn’t want to stop. And I had this story that has always been going through my mind because my father was in radio. And I went off and took off and had a big radio career. My dad saw the radio station that he started me on the one he was working at basically fall apart and become a completely different entity. So I wanted to write a story about what happened to that radio station. And it’s called the death of fairness. And what it talks about, it’s the tale of what happens to a small American town. And it’s only radio station. After 1987, when ronald reagan rescinded the Fairness Doctrine, that was the FCC rule that required equal time for contrasting points of view. If you’re going to make a claim, and it’s not real, and it’s a lie, I legally have the right to go on that very same broadcast facility and dispute your lie. So I can at least tell people, you’re a liar. So when you take out that law, you take out that rule, what you’ve done now is you’ve taken away my first amendment rights to call someone out as a liar. you fast forward from 1987 to today. The Division you have in America today is because of that decision. So that’s what my books about the second book, and my third book, which you referred to earlier, but it’s my third book will be out some time around, hopefully, May. So Gee, that’s a whole lot of stuff in one little thing that I told you, I talk a lot.

Lisa Lewis Miller  21:19  

I apologize for taking away your credit for three books and only giving you two. That’s all right. No problem. Well, Kim, I want to come back to the part in your story. Where where the diagnosis happened? It sounds like it wasn’t a particularly fast diagnosis with two to three months of waiting. And then it sounds like your world and your life got turned completely upside down.

Kim “Kid” Curry  21:47  

Well, I, my wife refers to it as our snow globe moment. We’ll take that, well, everything got tossed up. And when, what did we do now? Like a snow globe? And it was it was, it was scary. Because I know what it was going on with me. You know, I had I told you a story. Before we started doing this about the White House and my friend, Frank de framer, the official framer at the White House. Well, my MS symptoms go all the way back to when I knew him. I mean, that’s probably 20 years prior to my diagnosis, well, maybe 10 or 15 years. So Ms had been occurring in my life my whole life. The one

Lisa Lewis Miller  22:30  

of the things that I think is really striking about chronic illness is that it really turns everything upside down in your work in your life. And I’m wondering what the what that period of time was like, and knowing that it had consequences in your life, and you’re feeling like you were yourself, and you’re feeling like you could contribute for years and years. Always happening in your life.

Kim “Kid” Curry  23:00  

It didn’t affect me, just me affected my wife and my family. I mean, you know, my wife was my data on my arm at the Grammys every year, suddenly, you know, it was like, now what do we do, and the first thing I thought was to go home, go live in Canyon city, as in Miami, and been there for 25 and 30. Some years, and let’s just go home, because it’s quiet there. And I’ve got high school friends there. And if I need anything, we can go home and my wife, and I took our money, and started doing some investigate investing in properties, and doing flips and things like that. But during that process, here’s another life changing moment for not me, but for my wife. My wife, decides that she’s not happy with the way the realtor is treating her. So my wife says, I can do this. I’m going to go out and get my real estate license, and I’m going to become a realtor. Well, fast forward three years after that, and she’s breaking state records in Realty. So my wife does this turn around like crazy. And then she becomes the primary person in my life for for our money. I mean, she is the primary breadwinner, but she’s doing it very well. And then the company she works for it’s Keller Williams, she’s moved from there. She went to be a coach to coach realtors, how those who sell 10 houses how to sell 30. And now she coaches people who sell 100 houses, how to sell 200 houses, and is an international business coach. So this whole thing that changed me, changed my wife. And I see a woman now But you see, keep telling her. I knew it on the marriage. I knew it. When we moved out to Canyon city, there was an opening at a bank president and I said you should go apply for that. You can do that. I’ve always known my wife could do this. It’s just our life. She’d never had to happen. I mean, she was always on my arm at the Grammys. So suddenly, when we got this life changing event, it changed us both. And she’s she works across the hall from me here. She’s right now doing her International Business call, she goes from seven in the morning to four in the afternoon, sometimes five, and a new client every half hour around the world. And so not only does she did I have to change, but she had to change. And it’s been. And you know, I can tell you that the guy that came out of the medicine change, and the vitamin change is not the same guy you’re seeing today. When I started writing, and I started using my brain, my doctor swears he knows, in fact, he wanted me to get some brain games on the internet in the first place. Now that you’ve healed now that we stopped this, let’s get that brain going. And let’s rewire some of what’s gone on in your brain. Well, the guy you’re talking to today is not the guy who was here five, six years ago, I’m a lot smarter, a lot sharper. And, and it’s because I’m now a writer. And if you’re a writer, it’s not something you can put down. If you want to get good at this, it’s every day, and I write every day. I just got finished. I told you, the third book should be out soon. I came up with a scenario on Sunday, that I got ahold of Carrie, my editor and I said, I’m going to put the end on the paper today. It’s a project that we’re working on for six months. But I felt like Sunday morning. I got it. I’ve got this scenario. Well, I start writing in three days later, yesterday morning at 530. I finally typed the end. Because what I the scenario I came up with, didn’t reconcile. And I had to keep doing what I needed to do, because this is all fiction. But it’s historic fiction, because it’s based again, on ronald reagan rescinded the Fairness Doctrine and making America what it is today. So I don’t want to say too much more. But the but the protagonist, you’re going to love Molly.

Lisa Lewis Miller  27:07  

That’s a wonderful. Well, tell me a bit about what happened in that first year? Well, because you walk away from the career that you probably thought was going to be the rest of your life, you are feeling like you are declining rapidly that you’re not getting the support and the treatment that you’re needing stress and a lot of scary decisions.

Kim “Kid” Curry  27:34  

And you know, you talk about the diagnosis, it took, you know, two or three months, I mean, because they go through MS is not an easy thing to diagnose. Yes, they can take an MRI, they can see lesions, but they do all these nerve things and all this eye tests. And it even culminates in a good old Spinal Tap, you know, and the spinal tap was dread for me. My doctor laid me on my side, put the needle in and went, oops, I’m not getting anything. And she pulls it out. And she says, I’ll go get somebody who can do this, because we got to get this done. I was just go find somebody else. And they bring somebody else in and now I’ve had to like within an hour, still nothing. So then they said, well, we’ll bring in the specialist. We got a guy here who is a specialist and he gets me and sits me up and bends me over a table. And then he shoves a needle in my back. And my whole body just got straight up. He was terrible. He hit a nerve or something and went this. So now that’s three, in about a three and a half hour four hour period, they ended up having to put me under an X ray machine to X ray my spine to find the spinal fluid and take that, which is the final. The final key to the puzzle that is multiple sclerosis. So it was torture. It was torture. And, you know, you talk about the first year you know, I we moved out here to Colorado and that, I mean I was I went from a cane. I was using the cane. And then about six months after that I was on crutches. And that’s when I started feeling this negative thing you know, because I come from a very small town and I people still knew who I was in my little hometown because my mother was my son’s radio guy. You know, but I felt people moving away from me. I could when I walked in the grocery store, I can see that they were like Oh, hi. Because my crutches and then the wheelchair just you know when you’re at but level in a wheelchair. Let me tell you that. That’s another story. My wife. You know, she Fords me everything I need and you know, I get one wheelchair for the house but If I want to leave my house, I can’t This is a motorized wheelchair, I have to have special equipment to either put this on the back of my car on his lift, put it in a bigger vehicle or get a manual wheelchair out of my own cost out of my own money. And that it folds up and you can put in the back of the car. So it costs to be disabled in America. I had to do that. Because otherwise, I had to make it I had to do Sorry, I couldn’t get out of the house. So you know, my wife says let’s get you a more manual wheelchair that we get the nicest slim wheels and everything. So we go out to her boss’s real estate boss has this party out of the local golf course in Canyon, which is now closed. And it’s a white party like puff daddy’s white party, I’ve been to those. And he’s having a white party. So my wife and I get all dressed up. And we’re looking forward to going to the white party. But it was the first presentation in my wheelchair, my wife rolled me out. And there’s all these oohs and ahhs and people are all around me, and they’re talking at me, and I’m looking up and I’m talking and, and across the bus goes Ding, ding ding on this cup. And everybody turns around, and all I see are bots. I was like, Whoa, is this where I’m at the rest of my life. It was really, it took me a few minutes just to even talk to anybody. Because it was like, Whoa, what is that? So the first years were a little shocking. Um, you know, because I was going down, I was learning how to have Ms. was trying to get along. And my wife and I were just beginning our business things. And in the beginning, I was doing a lot of the rehab work because I had done rehab work before. So I was on the ground crawling across the ground doing tile work, because I couldn’t stand up anymore. But you know, when you what I’ve learned is, he got to do it, you got to figure it out. And I do that I control my mind, I could be in desperate ways if I want it to be but I’m not. I’m my wife and I have always been very positive.

Kim “Kid” Curry  32:16  

You know, it’s funny. You can wake up every day and decide you’re gonna be in a bad mood. Or you can wake up every day and decide you’re going to be in a good mood, well, in my house, everybody decides they’re going to be in a good mood. Everybody decides they have a purpose. Everybody knows what that purpose is. And they know how to accomplish those things. My wife is a business coach, do you think anybody in my house sits around. She makes a lot of money doing. So we don’t have a whole lot of we don’t have a whole lot of sitting back in my family. We’re pretty sharp people and we move forward. And I know anybody can do it, because it’s just mind control. It’s simple mind control, you can decide what you’re going to do. And you can decide you’re going to do it right. Everything you want to know about anything you want to know about is in your computer. If you want to learn something, turn the computer on and Google it and then study it. During the pandemic. I was doing a thing every day I

Kim “Kid” Curry  33:15  

made a big mistake I because I’ve been on the radio in certain parts of the world and everybody kind of knows kid curry went on the 13th of March, maybe the 12th. Before the president told the country who were on lockdown my wife put me on lockdown. I’m a researcher I’m a radio guy was soon as I heard about this virus in June and January, I started research and I knew we were in trouble. And my wife’s wouldn’t let me go out of the house. I was panicked by it. I couldn’t sleep. I knew it was coming. And then one day a friend on Facebook said he was on a Facebook Live thing. He says you know, I’m just mad that we’re all in lockdown now and I can’t have a cocktail with anybody. And I said, you know, let’s do a live Facebook. Let’s cook up a Facebook Live. I’ll do one and we’ll sit here and do it together. Well, that turned into a thing I called one cocktail with kid on facebook live every day at five, where I would just talk about things that you should be doing to make yourself better things you can do to distract yourself because I wasn’t by myself, everybody else was having the same problem. And because I’ve been on the radio in some places five 600 people started viewing these things every day. And because I have friends who are stars, I started inviting them to come on the show with me and every day I’d my wife would have to do all the technical work because I know nothing about this thing. So she would hook me up on on Facebook and then we get zoom and we connect those two and I did this thing every day. And so it was a distraction for me because I my mind really can be controlled but it can get out of control when things are in desperate ways like anybody’s mind. I just know how to fix it. I just went off and did some thing else and started thinking about other things. And I encourage my friends to do things that they’ve never done before. I encourage people to learn how to write. I’ve got a friend Eric Rhodes, streamline, streamline publishing. He’s he isn’t he was when I went on the radio Miami in 1976. At 10 o’clock, the guy that came on after me who was Eric rose, and he was just this little skinny guy. But he had this house on Fort Lauderdale beach, and a guest house in front because his dad was an inventor of some guy. I don’t think of that story, right? Well, fast forward years later, Eric has bought radio stations, he solo radio stations, he’s made all this money. And now he can do whatever he wants. And you know what he decided to do? become an artist. So he learned how to paint. His wife got him some painting lessons from a very famous artists. And he went into the room. And he was dumbfounded. What am I doing here? And he started to walk off. And the artist said, No, no, no, you have to come back here when I teach you how to do this. Fast forward. Now. I think streamline publishing is one of the biggest art publishing houses in the country, and it’s all under him. And so, you know, he’s just the guy who decided to learn how to do that. So I push people to go he does how to lessons. So I push people towards Eric’s how to lessons and I push people toward Carrie. Here’s my friend Carrie, she’ll teach you how to write I’ve got it. I’ve got other friends who are homeschoolers. And so I get all these people. And I just kind of did this. And I did it. And I in the beginning, I said, I’m only going to do this for a few months, because it’s only going to take a few months, because we’re all going to lock down we’re going to do the right thing. And then when June when the latter part of may came, I say you know what, I’m going to stop this because this is not going to change. No one has paid attention the way it’s supposed to be. Thank you all very much. But I’m going to go back now and do what I need to do. And that’s right, I need to get to my next book. Because I had started the book before when it’s quarante. And then I went on to do this other thing, because I was so invested with this tragedy happening to the world that I went and did, I had to do something major. So this thing that I did every day was my constant. And then then it became something my doctor told me to stop doing. Because my blood pressure raised, my blood pressure went out of control because I was outside of my norm. I hadn’t done that since 2005. I had to have guests every day in questions every day and had to keep up on current events every day. And I hadn’t done that since I was in the little radio guy. 2005. So it really, I was losing sleep again, it kind of like did the opposite. Again, it distracted me in the beginning. But my mind became so obsessed by it. I had to shut it off and get back to writing. I’m a piece in my writing. And it’s like I said, it’s taken me six months to do this particular story. So

Kim “Kid” Curry  38:01  

if you can control your mind, it is not easy, but you have to take command of it because it can it can mess with you. It can make you believe things that can make you believe lies. It can make you believe things that aren’t true. And it can make you believe things that are hurtful to you. And so I’m a mind control guy. Deep Deepak Chopra. There was another book I read Oh gee, where is it? Oh, my wife gave me one. Oh, it was so good. And it’s not coming to me because my Ms. brain will let it but someday we’ll talk about it again. Lisa, how’s it

Lisa Lewis Miller  38:40  

we love it. Well, Kim, if somebody has been listening to this, and they felt really connected to your story, and they maybe want to find out the name of that Deepak Chopra book and they want to keep in touch and hear more about your your forthcoming new book. were the best places for them to stay connected.

Kim “Kid” Curry  38:58  

I’m a website guy kr curry, calm letters, k. r curry, cu rr y.com. That’s my website. When I started writing my book, I kept up doing some editorials, just some posts, things that were going through my mind I tell stories about I was watching of all things Hopalong Cassidy One morning, and there was a guy in Hopalong cast in a wheelchair and I thought I’m gonna watch this. Let’s see how they dealt with wheelchairs back in the Oh, I don’t know 1930s in in motion pictures. So I’m enjoying the show the guy is he’s got a nice wife. She’s rolling them around town but the bullies start bullying him one day and start messing with him and then the sheriff gets real drunk. And he doesn’t like the bullies. So he takes his badge off and gives it to the guy in the wheelchair. And the guy in the wheelchair says I want to straighten up this town. I’ll show you a switch to a scene where he’s like rolling down the street in these cases. They, they rope him, and they roll him in the wheelchair behind the horse through town. And then all of a sudden you see this wagon in this wheelchair explode. And then you see this guy take his last breath. And I thought man treated guys in wheelchairs back then I don’t want to say anymore. He was pretty crazy. But so so events that happened to me are on my blog, they’re in there you can see that kr curry calm I’m also a kr curry, the author on Facebook and kr curry, the author on instant gram, or Instagram, whatever they call it. Wonderful Insta, my kid says,

Lisa Lewis Miller  40:45  

look, Kim, thank you so much for coming on the Career Clarity Show and sharing all the ups and downs and all the coping skills that you’ve been utilizing and in ways you’ve been finding to find find the light and find the joy. 

Kim “Kid” Curry  41:00  

It was my pleasure. I hope somebody got something out of this. I can talk a lot as you can tell, but I hope someone got something. Check out the website. I think you’ll get stuff off of there too. heartwarming stuff, okay.

Lisa Lewis Miller  41:19  

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