Joe Rogan Podcast with Gary Vaynerchuk

I'll be honest, Joe Rogan was completely off my radar until this past spring.  Yeah, he's a podcast legend, but I've spent the last 11 years creating content, and consuming mostly business/marketing and news content.  So I wasn't looking for entertaining podcasts to listen to, I just didn't have the time.  Even when a friend talked about Rogan's podcasts back in April, I didn't bother listening. 

A couple months ago, I ran across an interview with Graham Hancock, talking about his new book, America Before.  It was really interesting, and I went looking for more interviews, more in depth stuff.  That's when I found Joe Rogan's podcast with Graham, which was amazing.  In it, they spoke of Randall Carson, and I listened to Joe's podcast with him.  So now I'm a Joe Rogan fan, he's smart, has a wild point of view and background, and just does really great interviews.

So when I stumbled across this podcast with Joe interviewing entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk in 2017, I had to listen to it.  This is fucking hilarious, gets really into some of Gary's thoughts and ideas, much deeper than the 100 pieces of content a day that Gary puts out.  And that's saying a lot.  If you're a Gary Vee fan, or just want to make more money, or maybe start or build your own business, watch/listen to this, it's freakin' awesome.

Street life photos from the last year or so...

 Top, on a super hot day in Richmond, Virginia last summer, I walked around a little wall, and found a ledge to sit on.  then I saw the sign behind me.  In front of Richmond Public Library downtown.  Just above, a free stocking cap from the little business Against Fake Love, at the gallery/co-op I hung out at a few times.  Below, Amish Tuff Wheel (BMXers get it), in Richmond's Shockhoe Bottom district.

 Waiting for the morning bus, heading to breakfast and blogging at McDonald's, after a half mile walk from where I slept, under the I-95 bridge, Manchester district, Richmond, VA. 

 Vulture.  There were sometimes a hundred of these guys (and gals) by the Manchester Bridge in the morning.  Richmond, Virginia, spring 2019.

 Hollywood Boulevard, where I setup to try and sell my artwork.  Fall 2019.  Hollywood & Highland, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Recent photos of Hollywood - 12/22/2019

Some of my memes - 12/22/2019

Lynette Zang says the debt bubble is popping right now

Lynette Zang says the massive debt bubble is popping right now.  Is she right?  Time will tell.  Probably not that much time.  Yeah, she's a "gold bug," you can write her off, right.  Why is she so hyped up about gold and silver?  You're about to find out. 

Juat ignore this canary in the coal mine economic post

As the impeachment arguments happen in the U.S. House of Representatives, Mr. Rosenberg here tells you about the "smoke and mirrors." 

Personally, I firmly believe there will be a major economy crash BEFORE the November 2020 elections, LONG before.  AND I believe Donald Trump will not be in the 2020 election.  In my lowly opinion, the charade, economically and politically, simply can't last that much longer.  Time will tell...

The Federal Reserve is pumping HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS into the economy in December to try and keep it from collapsing

Yes, the economy is doing great, just listen to Larry Kudlow and that guy getting impeached.  But The Fed is going to quietly jam $500 billion into the repo markets/economy, in December alone.  You know, just to make sure things are cool.  Because the $380 or so billion they already flushed into the Repo markets is just barely keeping the economy functioning.  Kind of. 

Like I've said before, in 2008, things got sketchy behind the scenes.  Then 100+ year old investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed and went bankrupt, "out of nowhere."  Then investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and closed shop a couple weeks later.  Then all hell broke loose, and The Fed began a massive bailout to keep the entire economy from collapsing.  We've actually had "rolling bailouts ever since, hyper low interest rates and "quantitative easing."  Then they tried to slowly edge interest rates back up, and begin heading back towards "normal" conditions in 2017.  The stock markets freaked, and The Fed did a quick U-turn.

This year, in 2019, when this thing called the Repo Market seized up in mid September, The Fed rushed in and through money at the problem like a Dubai oil baron throws money at strippers.  Well, actually, a lot more than that.  This time around, The Fed began the bailout BEFORE any major banks could collapse.  And they keep having to jam tens and hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem to try and keep banks and other businesses (names unknown, but including some hedge funds it appears) from collapsing.  This won't end well, and the longer they keep this charade going, the worse the inevitable financial collapse will be. 

To put 500 HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS in perspective, that's like giving every single man, woman, and child in the United States $1,514 all at once.

Robert Kiyosaki on Assets, Liabilities, and Financial Intelligence

Best known for his 1997 financial education book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki has been teaching people about money and financial education ever since.  This short video gives a great look at his basic idea, "buy assets, avoid liabilities."  But most people are never taught what really makes  an asset an asset.  Kiyosaki makes it simple,

"Assets put money in your pocket, liabilities take money out of your pocket."  

This video is part of a series with the young woman in the video, who's doing videos for the Millennial crowd, sharing Robert's knowledge with a new generation.  Personally, I highly recommend Robert Kiyosaki's books, and I think Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Cash Flow Quadrant, should be taught in school.  But they won't be, so you have to learn this stuff on your own.  

In a side note, a friend I hadn't seen in a while told me the other day that I should talk less about being homeless right now on social media, because it casts me in a negative light.  I understand his concern.  But a crazy series of things happened, and this is where I'm at.  It's a long, ridiculous story. 

Part of my role right now is to prove it's actually possible to work off the streets, and actually build a legitimate business over time.  How do I know this is possible?  Well, for one, Robert and Kim Kiyosaki were homeless at one point.  Really.  They lived in their car for about three weeks, then in a friend's basement for about 9 months, I think, as they put together a business plan.  The business idea worked, it did well (before Robert wrote books), and they now own thousands of rental properties, stocks, oil service interests, and other investments.  Robert tells the story in one of his books (Cashflow Quadrant?). 

While I don't ever expect to make the money Robert and Kim do, the fact that I'm trying to build something, and slowly making it happen, may help other people make the leap to make change in their lives that's needed.  That's a big part of why I'm open about being homeless right now.  Also, it's the Information Age, people figure shit like this out anyhow.  You might as well admit it up front, and move on. 

Why I think micro businesses and small businesses are so important now

Technology is taking over human jobs.  Lots of them.  I'm the taxi driver falling down the hole.  I lived through the technological disruption of the taxi industry in 2003, though I struggled through 4 more years of it, before becoming fully homeless.  In my case, I went directly from working 80+ hours a week to living on the streets the very next day.  I, quite literally, became homeless from working too much.  We live in weird times.

Six years ago, a couple of researchers from Oxford University, in England, looked into the problem of how many human jobs would likely be replaced by new technology in the future. The study, which concluded that 47% of jobs will likely be replaced by new technology.  Here's the link to their research paper.  When?  In the next 20 to 25 years, so by 2033 to 2038, by their reckoning.  We're six years into that 25 years now, and yes, a lot of jobs are disappearing.

Now I know most of your eyes just glazed over, thinking "what does this mean to me?"  In the United States, I looked it up a few months back, and that "47% of jobs" works out to around 92 MILLION JOBS, 47% of the actual working population. That's a lot of jobs, and yes, they are already disappearing.  Many people might ask, "are they sure 92 million jobs will disappear?"  No, it's an estimate.  My thinking is, let's say the researchers are off, and it's 20 % less jobs that disappear, that's still 73.6 million jobs going away.  If the researchers are off, and 20% more jobs disappear, that's over 110 million jobs disappearing.  My point is, whatever the actual number turns out to be it's an astronomical number.

Now a lot of new jobs will be created, but nowhere near enough to put all these people back to work.  Looking forward, this is a huge societal issue, and it has already wreaked havoc on society, with the loss of tens of millions of good paying factory jobs lost in the 1970's through the 2000's.  Right now we have over 7 million American men of working age who are just not working.  They don't get counted in the "unemployment" statistics, because they're not looking for work.  Don't believe me? Here's the guy who wrote the book about it.  It appears that about 2/3 of these men get Social Security Disability checks, and/or other government aid.  So now, your tax dollars are not only supporting the whole government, the massive federal debt interest payments, but also 7 million guys, and a large number of women, many just too lazy to work.  Really.

This is just the beginning, most of the jobs haven't been lost yet, this problem will only get much, much worse.  A very small number of people are looking for answers and ideas to deal with this huge and looming social issue.  Most of those people are high tech people, who have a good idea where technology is heading, and how it will affect the job market.  Right now, there are two main thoughts on how to handle this issue of tens of millions more people losing their jobs to technology.

Idea #1:  This comes from economic development researcher and professor, Richard Florida, who wrote the epic work, The Rise of the Creative Class.  His research, among other things, discovered the wide gap in income between the growing "Creative Class" group of workers, and the also growing number of service sector workers.  His idea is to work with government and business to make service class jobs better paying jobs.  Companies like Whole Foods and Costco figured out how to pay their workers better than many similar companies, so it's possible many other companies could follow suit.  That's a really good idea.  Florida's work has many other facets, and he continues today to research and write on this and related ideas. 

Idea #2 comes from the high tech sector.  The idea now being pushed by many on that front is Universal Basic Income.  This is the concept of giving every single person, or at least every single adult, a check from the government each month.  The thinking is that, with this basic amount of money, poverty will be largely eliminated, people will not have to live in poverty, and will be able to buy the basic necessities with their government check, and can work part time or full time to make more money.  Obviously, the money paid out by the government to pay 330 million Americans $1,000 a month (or whatever amount), has to come from somewhere.  That's $330 billion a month, a third of a trillion dollars, a ludicrous amount, even in today's world.

I don't think this is a good idea, even if it could, somehow, be financed.  Just look at the people on living on Disability, and particularly the areas with huge numbers of people on Disability, like West Virginia and Kentucky.  Those areas are also the epicenter of our opiate crisis.  That's not a coincidence. 

Here's my main problem with both of these ideas.  Richard Florida's plan to raise pay for service workers would most likely require Congress to raise minimum wage quite a bit, and encourage the federal government to provide strong incentives to big business to pay workers more.  Those ideas require our federal government to make really controversial plans, and actually take action, in the near future.  Right now, our government barely functions at all.  Smart ideas, no matter how helpful they could be, will not happen anytime soon in a big way, simply because our government won't be able to accomplish what is required, in a reasonable time frame.

The same is true of Universal Basic Income, it would require higher taxes somewhere, along with astronomical amounts of debt, and it would require smart and timely action by Congress and other parts of the federal government.  That's just not going to happen soon.

So what does that leave us with as options?

My idea.  Encourage and help individuals to create their own jobs, by starting micro businesses and small businesses.  A micro business is generally a one person operation, whether it's an ebay store operated from a spare bedroom, working gigs like Uber and Lyft full time, or providing a needed service for local people or businesses.  A small business is just a slightly larger operation, usually involving one or more employees, like opening a cupcake bakery, or a landscaping business, for example.

Here's the good part of my idea, Congress and government is not involved at all.  It's D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself), grassroots economic development.  When people need extra money, they'll start looking for gig work, part time work, or some "side hustle" to help make ends meet.  That will happen naturally.  In today's world, with all the technology available to most people, it is easier than ever to begin a wide range of money making and small business ideas.  It's still not easy, and it takes a little thinking and a lot of work, but it is entirely possible to find ways to make money outside the traditional job market.

Rather than go to government officials and spend months or years pushing for large scale social plans, my drive is to go right to the people looking to make more money, and help them actually do that.  That's what I want to make this blog about.

Yes, I know many of the posts so far are about Big Picture thinking, and the economy writ large.  I'm into those things, those big ideas and futuristic thinking fascinate me.  That's why I'm the guy writing this blog post.  But at the same time, I got hit by technological disruption as a taxi driver several years ago.  I know how much it sucks.  I know what happens if you ignore new technology like I did.  Right now I'm exactly what I'm writing about.  I'm a former writer and video producer turned "content creator."  I'm an artist and writer using these new media skills and tech platforms to promote and sell my artwork.  So I'm right in the middle of all this myself.

As this blog moves along, I'll throw in my own ideas, things I've learned working with several entrepreneurs, or as a taxi driver or manager, and how I'm dealing with all the things I struggle with.  But I'm also going to show people who are building micro and small businesses, and doing it successfully.

I'm definitely not against Richard Florida and other people working to make service jobs better jobs.  That needs to happen.  I just think it will happen slowly, compared to the massive loss of jobs happening as we speak.  I'm not against the tech people toying with the Universal Basic income idea, and seeing if there are functional ways for that basic idea to work in some way.  But personally, I like the simple and direct method, help people create micro and small businesses.  And help that happen RIGHT NOW.

That's why I see this as my main focus these days, and why I started this blog, separate from my personal blog, to dive full bore into this idea.  Personally I think the U.S. will need millions of small businesses to be built in the next 10-20 years.  So that's where I'm putting my effort.  I hope some of you find things that will help you in your life.

The Phoenix Recession

Borrowing this great scene again, this time with the further appearances by Fawkes.  Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes, goes up in flames, and is reborn.  In the last post in my personal blog, I predicted a major event will happen this month that will make it obvious that we're in for a serious economic downturn.  I think we're in the verge of a "Lehman Brothers moment," something in the business or economic world to make it obvious things are NOT as they should be.

It is part of the natural order of things that there are times when something old must die, it simply must collapse, it must go up in flames, its time is over.  And then, also part of the natural order of things, that at that point, something new will be born, and will grow in its place.  The mythical phoenix is a symbol of that period of change.  I think we're at a major point like that in Western society as a whole.  Writing that last post, I realized, I see this next recession as the flaming of the phoenix.  While tough economic times are hard for most everyone, I see the potential for something great to be reborn from the economic ruins.

"May you live in interesting times."

-Ancient Chinese curse

If you read my personal blog much, you know I've been drumming on about this coming recession for a couple of years now.  The reason is because I see this next economic downturn as much more than a slow economic period.  Being the weirdo I am, I've been drawn to little known and often overlooked social theories, and ultra long term trends.  There are several long term trends ending right now, in our little piece of human history, and the best way to describe this time is a transition of many transitions.  That's why my overall theory is something I call, The Big Transition.  Not a creative name, but it fits.  We truly do live in "interesting times."

On one hand, we are simply near the end of a bull run in our stock markets, and in the real estate markets of the most vibrant urban areas.  The stock prices and real estate prices (in prime areas) have been going up since early 2009.  The stock markets have been nearly stagnant for the last year ans a half, but hover near the high water mark.  Things are overpriced, and we're heading into a recession that will shake out, prices will drop dramatically, some businesses will collapse or go up in flames (if they have good insurance), and new ones will be born.

On another level, we are still in the long transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.  The rise of many new technologies, particularly communications, computers, the internet, and biology, are rapidly changing what's possible in many ways, and changing our everyday lives, the way we interact with each other, who it's possible to interact with, and how business and organizational structures work.  We're leaving an economic model based on factories in nearly every town, making physical goods, and selling those goods in mass market stores nationwide and worldwide.

We're going into an economic model based on nearly every person having a voice in society, a model where every person carries a small device that is a phone, a publishing company, and a TV studio, and a comedy club all in one.  One person can now share funny cat videos with a stranger next door and another in Spain, publish a video or blog post that can be viewed by billions, and can sell a homemade item and ship it to South Africa, or nearly anywhere else.  It's a world of tiny niches of interest, of many and multi-cultural voices, and a world that's extremely scary to a lot of people.  It's a world where old business models from the Industrial Age are collapsing, and where new, tech-enabled business models, are being created, and disrupting the old.  It's a world where the old school power structures are straining to keep control, while many of their long hid secrets come to light.  We're in a period of massive change at a frightening pace.  In a word, it's chaotic.

On yet another level, the United States of America, the grand experiment created unlike any other, where any individual, with hard and smart work, could create a business or idea, and move up in society, has reached a point of peak corruption in many businesses and political scenes.  After a full, generation of seeing the rich get much richer, while the lives of the majority of people have stayed financially stagnant, or have gone down, the common people are pissed off.  The average people have had enough, and we've been seeing the beginnings of a worldwide populist movement.  The people, in the U.S., and everywhere, are remembering they have the numbers, and ultimately, the strength, to change things to a more fair system. It's never pretty, and it can be brutal (like in Hong Kong at the moment), but it will keep happening.

On yet another level, America has been built on the idea of common people as business people.  Originally (after stealing the country from the Indians), Americans were farmers, traders, and shopkeepers, creating their own destiny.  Born in the early stages of the Industrial Age, America saw, and dominated, in the rise of the factories, and reigned as a super power in the late Industrial Age.  But with that came the rise of jobs, and most Americans went from being small businesses in the late 1800's (whether a farmer or shopkeeper), to being workers, punching a time clock ,and relying on a paycheck.  Now, with the rise of new technologies over the last 50 or so years, many Americans are turning back into entrepreneurs again, or trying to.  So that's another major shift that's happening.

Another transition is that we've been a country that looked up to the business people for 350 years.  But now the common people are rising, and standing up to the large scale corruption in many businesses, and other institutions.  As that rise bubbled under the surface, a new mentality has been rising to dominate the American collective psyche.  This is what P.R. Sarkar, philosopher and theorist from India, calls "The Warrior Mentality."  These are people who prize physical abilities and courage, more than the salesmanship and manipulation of Industrial Age business culture.

People doing scary and courageous shit have been slowly and quietly rising up in stature for several decades now.  Some of these people are the obvious, when you think of the core values of courage and physical ability, the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes.  We all know these jobs take physical ability, and courage, at different levels.  But courage is also needed, and demonstrated, by action sports athletes, activists, artists of all kinds, pioneers of all kinds, and entrepreneurs.

The Warrior Mentality is becoming the dominant mentality, and the wishy washy fence sitters are getting the boot.   This is why nearly all of us hate most of our old school politicians these days, no matter what political party you belong to.  Our long term politicians are schemers who will flip at the drop of a hat, they are not leaders.  As all of this chaos happens, the average people are looking for courageous leaders, or (as we've unfortunately learned the hard way in the last couple of years), people that pretend to be courageous leaders, and can con a large part of society into following them.  But those types show their true colors soon enough, and most people see through them before too long.  Ultimately, the truly courageous, they will become our new leaders, in business, in political circles, and in other organizations.

So, in my geeky, big picture view, all of these forces and changes are coming together to make this next recession a time of incredible change.  And incredibly scary.  That's where the courage part comes in.  I think this next economic downturn, which will be severe, as the major shakeout of our lifetime.  A lot of major change will happen in a short amount of time.

Like the phoenix, one thing after another that we know well, will burst into flames and die off.  That will be catastrophic on many levels, and painful for many people.  But this is all to make way for new things that are, and will continue to be, born.

Welcome everyone, to The Phoenix Recession.

The paradox of being a homeless entrepreneur

Bad selfie, while sitting outside the downtown library in Richmond, Virginia, where I was living homeless, earlier this year.  I had just walked a long ways, carrying all my stuff, on a hot humid day, and I found this little ledge to sit down on and take a break.  I turned around, and saw this sign.  This photo just seems to sum up being homeless, anywhere you go, you're not wanted, it doesn't matter where it is.

For the last 20 years, since I left my good paying job as a "Hollywood" lighting technician, because of an injury, my life has been this crazy struggle, skipping along the bottom of society, struggling in and out of homelessness.  When I mention that, or people see me and realize I'm homeless, they jump to all sorts of conclusions, nearly all of which aren't true.

I've now spent about 10 years in some form of homelessness.  About 7 1/2 of those years, I was working full time, way beyond full time (70-100 hours a week as a taxi driver), or near full time.  Here's the kicker, I don't do drugs, legal or illegal.  I don't drink at all anymore.  I'm not an alcoholic who went through a program to quit, I pretty much stopped drinking (which I didn't do much, anyhow) while working as a taxi driver. After driving drunks home every night in my cab, I just stopped drinking, I just got sick of the world attached to beer and booze.

I did struggle with depression, in a serious way, after my dad's death in 2012.  That got serious, but I went through group therapy, took meds, worked through all that. I weaned myself off the depression meds a couple years ago, while a friend from group kept an eye on me in case I got sketchy. 

My main issue, the thing I've struggled with most, was simply not being able to find a good paying job after taxi driving went down the tubes in about 2003.  I struggled in the taxi until 2007, then had to quit for both health and business reasons.  Like millions of other people in other industries, the taxi industry got disrupted by new technology.  First computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios in the cabs, which changed the game, and then Uber and Lyft popped up.  Boom!  Business over.  Like millions of people who lost factory jobs in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, I had to find a new way to make a living.  And I have struggled with that.

During that same time period, there has been a ridiculous amount of outside pressure and influence on my life, from a variety of sources.  I can't really tell the story of this, though it's been the dominant theme of my life for 17-18 years now, because it's so ridiculous.  Finally part of the story came out, and all this weird stuff happened, supposedly, because I scored absurdly high on an I.Q. test 34 years ago.  Someone, somewhere, decided they needed to control my life because of that.  Supposedly.  So I've struggled through nearly two decades of crazy adventures, busting my ass to simply survive, and I can't explain this whole mess to anyone.  The story is just too fucking crazy.  It would be more believable to more people if I said I got abducted by aliens in 2001, brought back ten years later, then dropped in the woods of Oregon where I lived with a Sasquatch family for a few years... and now I have to start over.  That kind of crazy tale is actually more believable than what's actually happened in my life.

So I have 20 years of craziness I can't really talk about.  Now I'm 53, homeless, living in the Hollywood area, with a mouthful of broken teeth (20 years of no dental insurance after a life of too much sugar), and working to rebuild my life and start a viable business around my Sharpie art and my writing. 

What I do have in common with many of you reading this (hopefully), is that I'm working to build a creative/artistic based business, and make a living from that.  What I don't have in common with most of you is my starting point.  I started actually selling my Sharpie art, 4 years ago, while living with my mom, in a small North Carolina town, literally without a dime to my name.  After applying for about 140 jobs over a year or so, and not getting called back, it became obvious a traditional job wasn't going to happen.  So I decided to focus on my Sharpie art, which made me a few buck now and then. 

I've sold over 80 major pieces of art in four years, nearly of all which took 35 to 45 hours to draw.  So while most people look at me and see only a complete failure, I've actually sold more pieces of art than most of the best known masters of painting in their lifetimes.  My drawings may suck, in your opinion, compared to the great artists, but 80+ people thought they were worth paying for.  That's something.  No I'm not making a "good living," at this, even after four years, but I have survived through some tough times, by selling artwork.  However lame my life may seem, there are thousands of people out there who wish they had sold 80 pieces of original art.  That's something.  Yes, I have a long way to go, but I have made quite a bit of progress in some areas.

So now I'm dealing with a weird paradox, as I work to build my art/writing business in a new area, in the cliche' of all cliche's, Hollywood, California.  On one hand, as a homeless man, struggling for food money, bus fare, and basic need money, day to day, my main focus is simply keeping my spirits up, and not getting deeply depressed.  The struggle of homelessness is a struggle not to succumb to depression and give up.  The hardcore street people you see in large cities have mostly given up.  I've found the way to keep my spirits up while homeless is to give myself little "gifts."  In my case, it's mostly food, I'll spend a little money on a caramel sundae at McDonald's, or buy a $6 pepperoni pizza at Little Caesar's.  Little gifts to myself help me keep feeling like an actual human being, a person who will do cool stuff again, some day, not the "homeless person," most people see me as.

But as an entrepreneur, trying to start a small business, I need to spend as little money as possible, to put every dime I can into my little business, buy more art supplies, or copies of drawings to sell, or money to promote somehow.  So my biggest struggle right now, is making small amounts of cash day to day, and to try not to eat too much, but to eat enough to keep my attitude positive, because I get really grumpy when I don't eat much. 

We all have our struggles, the things we battling and struggling with right now.  That's mine.  What's yours?  What's keeping you from the small business, or small creative business, you really want to have?

Taking my artwork to Laguna Beach First Thursday Art Walk

 I took one copy of my "I (heart) Sunny Days" VW bug drawing, and went to Laguna Beach for it's First Thursday Art Walk last night.  This is the first time I've hung out in Laguna Beach during the Art Walk, and I wanted to show off my work, and see what people thought. 

I learned years ago that people don't really buy original art for the beauty or look of it, for the most part.  People tend to buy the artist, and the artist's story, as much as the work of art itself.  So I had no idea how people in a city full of all kinds of very good (and some not so good) artwork, would react to the Sharpie drawings of an unknown, homeless guy. 

To my surprise, this simple drawing of a convertible VW bug stopped a lot of people in their tracks.  That's hard to do, and that's pretty freakin' cool.  Most seemed to think it was a painting of some kind as they walked up and saw my drawing at a distance.  When they got closer, quite a few people seemed to realize (because I wrote "Sharpie drawings" next to it), that it wasn't a painting, and it was done with Sharpies.  While most of the people walking by didn't notice, busy with their own stuff,  two or three dozen people stopped, looked closer, and gave me really positive comments.  Two or three people said they'd never seen anything like this (with Sharpies), and a couple called it "amazing."  I said, "Thank you," and told them no one else in the world draws in this style, it's my creation.  So while no one wanted to buy a drawing, or commission one to be done, the reaction from Laguna Beach passers by was really good. 

 I posted up on a bench on the corner of PCH and Forest, in front of an ice cream shop, and this gate hangs on a pole there, about 8 feet out of the ground.  I'm sure there's a story to it, but I don't know that story.

 This guy, who looked a lot like a pre-heart attack Kevin Smith, poured a little water on the ground and busted some dance moves.  Crazy as it sounds, he had some really good footwork, aided by the wet bricks.  He also had some print on canvas he was trying to sell, and showed me a video he edited for some rapper, who was having an online contest to make a video to his song.  Not epic, but quite creative.  There are a lot of weird characters wandering around Laguna Beach, and that's always a good sign.  There's also a lot of really boring rich people.  Gotta take the good with the bad. 

 A lot of people walked their dogs around during Art Walk.  This St. Bernard was the big guy, and the mellowest, of the four-legged bunch.  Remember, St. Bernards were some of the first "service dogs," they carried casks of brandy around their necks, seeking out people who were lost in the snow, in the French Alps, if I remember correctly.  Something like that. 

My little art portfolio sitting below the dog waiter statue beside the ice cream shop, in downtown Laguna Beach. 

What is Content Creation and Why Should You Do It?

When it comes to describing what good "content" is for a business to put out, Patagonia, the company, is my go to.  I went to YouTube and searched "Patagonia," looking for videos by the company, not about the region in Chile, and this is one of the first videos I found.  There's the "patagonia" logo in the beginning.  That's it.  There are no Patagonia commercials in the middle of the video interrupting you.  There are no fashion videos at the end, promoting a certain jacket or shirt by the company.  People in the video may be wearing clothes Patagonia clothes, but I didn't notice.  There were no close-ups of logos that they sneaked in to the video on the down low.  This is a well made video about a group of surfers looking for huge waves they'd heard rumors of near Selkirk Island, off the coast of Chile.  This video is a gift to you from the company Patagonia.  No strings attached.  That's the mark of great content. 

When we talk about "creating content" for today's media platforms, "content" is simple.  It's written words (text), spoken words or music (audio), photographs, or video.  To create content, you make something with text, audio, photo(s) or video, and you put it on some platform where people can experience it.  That's it.  

You personally, or your business, makes some kind of content, and you put it out on a blog, a website, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instagram, a podcast, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, Linked In, TikTok, Medium, Reddit, or one of the other platforms out there for content.  Then you let people experience it.  That's content creation.  These platforms, by and large, are available for free.  Millions, in a some cases, billions, of people check out these platforms.  With today's internet and technology, you can put content that has the potential to be experienced by a huge number of people.  In most cases, you make this content available for free.  You give a gift of some cool photo, thought provoking piece of writing, funny photo, interesting audio bit, or cool video. 

Why?  Why would you "waste" time and money to create pieces of content and give them away for free?  Because people like gifts.  That's it.  You give people gifts of content, and you hope a bunch of them will come to believe in you or your business.  People begin to have a favorable opinion of you or your business, you "build brand."  When people need a product or service you supply, whatever that product or service is, you want your business to be the first one they think of.  People who have enjoyed your content then become customers.  If you continue to do a good job as a business and a content creator, people have a tendency to be fans, and customers, for a long time.  That's why you create content. 

Why the Western world's economy is on the verge of the biggest collapse of our lives...

Yeah, yeah, yeah... massive debt... blah... blah... negative interest rates... blah blah.  $124 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities?  And we have a $20 Trillion economy.  Uh Oh. 

U.S debt clock.   Over $125.6 trillion now.  Bottom right on the debt chart page.

My idea of "The Big Transition" - in a nutshell

The late futurist, thinker, and writer, Alvin Toffler, explaining the "Third Wave" idea that he and his wife Heidi discovered, and then explained in their 1980 book, The Third Wave.  This interview is for their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.

"The Big Transition" is a concept of mine, which is based on, and piggybacks on, the Third Wave idea put forth by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their 1980 book by that name.  Yes, that's a long time ago, but the Tofflers were looking far into our collective future.  We are now in the middle of "the future" that the Tofflers were thinking about, trying to figure out, and writing about.  To get to my concept, let's first get into the Toffler's "Third Wave" concept.

Originally, for somewhere around 200,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily as nomadic tribes of people, hunting wild animals, and picking fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.  We generally refer to these people as "hunter/gatherers" these days.  After thousands of years, there came some huge changes in human society and life, these are the three waves.

The First Wave
About 10,000 years ago, most likely in or near the country of Turkey, people started planting crops.  Agriculture, as we know it, was born.  It spread very slowly.  As it spread, people settled down, stayed in one location, started villages and small towns, grew crops, and fed their families.  Wealth came from owning the land the crops were grown on.  This was the Agricultural Age.

The Second Wave
About 350 years ago, new technology emerged, and machines began to get more important.  This transition happened faster, and villages and small towns grew into cities, as people left their farms, and moved into the towns and cities, because factories were being built.  It was a new economy, wealth came from owning the factories, and jobs were invented.  Before that, people worked on family farms, often on land owned by kings or barons.  The change to living in larger cities and working in factories was a complete change in the way human beings lived in society.  This was the Industrial Age.

The Third Wave
The third wave the Tofflers saw coming was another transition, from the industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They put the start of this era as 1956, the year there were more "white collar workers" (office people) than there were "blue collar workers" (factory people).  This change was fueled by an incredible series of new technologies, which began to fundamentally change society.  Radio, TV, video, computers, biological tech, medicines, all the way up to today's smartphones, A.I., and the like.  There were more and more new technologies that began to change how we communicated, how we built things, and eventually technology took many of the factory jobs humans performed during the Industrial Age.  This change to an "information-based society," the Tofflers realized, was as big and powerful as the changes between the other waves, like society moving from agriculture to factories.  But this change is happening much, much faster. This massive transition in how we live and work and communicate is basically happening in a single human lifetime.  This "information-based society" has been referred to as the "post-industrial society," or "the digital age." I use the term "The Information Age."

In their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin and Heidi Toffler shared one idea, in particular, that got me thinking.  That idea was that different aspects of our current society are adapting to this new technology at different rates of speed.  For example, "Silicon Valley" our high tech businesses, are surging quickly ahead in using, and bringing, this new high technology into their daily lives.  The military has adapted and uses a lot of new technology, obviously.  But other areas of society, like our school system, our legal system, and our government agencies, among other institutions, have barely begun to really adapt to new technology and the many types of changes it has caused.

That idea, that we have different parts of society working with new technology at very different speeds, intrigued me, and I started thinking about this concept in a deeper way.  One main thought was the idea that we had many different parts of society, which were all in transition from the industrial-based society to the information-based society, which led me to a simple understanding.  We're actually not in the Industrial Age anymore, and we're not fully into the Information Age, we're actually still in the transition in between the two.  This long process of changing from one age into another, is "The Big Transition."  The Tofflers set the start of it in 1956, and my rough guestimate is that it will continue until at least 2040.  So instead of being in either age, industrial or information, we are all living in the in between time.  If you think of our current society that way, it's much easier to understand why things seem so chaotic in so many ways.

My next line of thought after that understanding was, "Is there any part of society that will not have to make the transition from an Industrial Age institution to an Information Age institution?"  I could not think of any part of society that would skip this change.  There may be some aspect I don't see, but I can't think of one.  So that means every single aspect of society has to change, at some point, from an Industrial Age model, to an Information Age model. So that puts us in an era, roughly 85-90 years long (maybe longer), where every single part of society has to be re-invented.  That's big.  That's scary.

"How does an industry or business or institution actually change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age?" became the next, obvious question.  I saw two ways.  1) A visionary person or group intentionally re-invents a business or institution, bringing it into alignment with not only the new technology available, but the new business and social environment created by these technologies, and new social standards, adapted to the world of new technologies.  2) A visionary person or group invents a new model for the business or industry or institution that completely disrupts the older, established Industrial Age model, and build the new, Information Age model, for that business or industry or institution.

In practice, this DISRUPTION, the second form of change, is the way most of these changes are happening.  And that's freaking all kinds of people out all across our society.  For example, in June of 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker uploaded the Napster file sharing program onto the internet.  Using that program, suddenly people all over could share digital music files for free, in large numbers.  That act completely destroyed the business model for the entire music industry, immediately.  It took years ot fully shake out, but the initial change happened overnight.

That's Disruption, with a capital "D."  That really pissed off a lot of people, it put companies out of business eventually, fotunes were lost, and new fortunes were eventually built based on the larger change.  One more thing, it was INEVITABLE that a change like this would happen in the music industry, at some point, because of the new technology that had been developed.  It sucks for the Industrial Age music industry power structure, but it was going to happen at some point.  The same goes for Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and other online stores, which have disrupted Sears, J.C. Penney's, dozens of major chain retailers, shopping malls, and have lead to what's now often called the "Retail Apocalypse."  This caused major disruption to many businesses, many power structures, and thousands and thousands of people's lives.  But in a world where technology is going to keep evolving, like it or not, these huge Disruptions will keep happening.

The Big Transition began slow, and largely unnoticed, marked at 1956 by the Tofflers.  It's going to keep happening, like it or not.  It's accelerating, and more and more industries and institutions are being disrupted, and changing from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, at the same time, now.  These changes are happening faster, and these major changes are interacting with each other, and also creating major social backlashes.  It's a chaotic world these days.  It will get more chaotic.  But it's not going to stop until all of our human institutions are working with Information Age models, or until society collapses.  Hopefully, it will be the first one.  But it's not going to stop, and it's not going to slow down, until nearly all aspects of society are part of the Information Age.

That's my concept, "The Big Transition." In my mind, this is the overall contest, the macro explanation, for Western Society, and huge parts of other societies around the world.  As I write this, in August of 2019, the retail system is being disrupted.  The economic system is being disrupted.  both main political parties are being disrupted, many other industries are being disrupted.  The music industry, the publishing industry, and the video/TV industry, and the taxi/limo industry, to name a few, have already endured their main phase of disruption, and are moving forward. 

Many things have not hit their main Disruption point yet, or at least haven't hit the critical mass Disruption.  Our higher education system is just beginning to hit disruption, our K-12 education system hasn't been disrupted, our legal system hasn't been disrupted, and our government (in the way I'm speaking) hasn't been disrupted.  So there's A LOT of societal disruption still to come.

The Big Transition is a huge concept.  There could be dozens, likely hundreds, of books, written on the various aspects of it.  I see it as the background theory encompassing all kinds of smaller, but still very large, and very important, changes of all kinds.  I'm just beginning to share and spread this idea, and a book on this concept isn't in the works yet, because of my own personal issues I'm dealing with right now.  Hopefully I'll be able to put more effort into this idea, and provide a much more in depth look into this concept, before too long.

-Steve Emig, 8/26/2019

The Perpetual "IF" of Homelessness

Didn't know until just now, "Everlast" isn't the name of the band, it's this guy's stage name.  So here's Everlast taking a hit off Joe Rogan's joint, and then singing one of the best songs to come out of the 1990's, "What it's like."

"We've all seen the man at the liquor store beggin' for some change, the hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked, and full of mange.  He asks a man, for what he can spare, with shame in his eyes.  'Get a job you fuckin' slob,' is all he replies."

-Everlast, "What's it's Like."

I know what it's like.  I slept on concrete, under an awning of an abandoned building last night.  I had a hand-me-down winter coat for a pillow, and a $9 felt furniture moving blanket from U-Haul as a cover.  I got woke up late at night, maybe 2 am, by people talking nearby.  It sounded like people talking about me, and about actions to intentionally fuck up my life more.  Nobody gave a damn about that abandoned property, until I started sleeping beside it.  That kind of thing happens, in most every city, most every night.

This is the world we live in in 2019.  It's not enough to be homeless for some people, there are people out there, quite a few of them, who go to great lengths to harass and further destroy the already difficult lives of people, like me, who are already struggling really hard, to simply survive.  I may have misunderstood the conversation happening next door.  Or maybe not.  But there's nothing nearby that's open at 2:30 am. 

I was walking to that sleeping place the night before last, in the dark, alone, thinking of the things I wanted to get done the next day.  Those thoughts were interrupted, by a thought "normal" people don't have to be concerned with.  That thought was, "I have these things I want to get done tomorrow... IF I actually live through tonight."  That's the perpetual "IF" of being homeless.  I go to sleep, alone, in a place I'm not "legally" allowed to sleep at, every single night, a place that would scare the living shit out of most people.  That's my normal.  I know that there are all kinds of things and situations that could take my life before the next morning comes.  I go to sleep every night knowing I could very easily be killed before morning.  I've done that for over 3,500 nights in the last 20 years.  I've struggled with homelessness for so long because of conversations like the one I partially overheard last night.  I've made not-so great-decisions, I've lived low budget.  But that doesn't account for the whole reason I've struggled with putting a roof over my head for so long.  There are people out there who work hard to make homeless people's hard lives harder, for reasons I have a really hard time comprehending.

Am I just amplifying my personal fears and paranoia?  No.  Not really, because knowing you could die before morning is part of the survival mentality that keeps me, and hundreds of thousands of other homeless people, alive through the nights alone.  I don't have the luxury of assuming I will wake up in the morning when I go to sleep at night.  I've made my peace with that fact.  I sleep reasonably well, in spite of the circumstances.  But to put it in perspective, here are a few of the things that I've dealt with during the nights of homelessness I've survived.

Once while sleeping under the stars, in an old slave graveyard in North Carolina, the biggest opossum I've ever seen wandered up near me.  It was as big as a good-sized raccoon, and wasn't afraid of me at all.  I leaned up on one shoulder, and hit the ground hard, to intimidate it.  That didn't work.  I yelled, stomped my foot, and it barely looked up.  It wandered within 4 or 5 feet of my feet, sniffing around, looking for food, and finally wandered off.

Another time, spending another night in that same graveyard, I woke to hear the weirdest animal sound I've ever heard.  I grew up watching Wild Kingdom and lots of other wildlife TV shows, I've heard a lot of animal noises.  It sounded like a cross between a mid-sized dog, and a weird bird call, kind of like a crow's caw.  I had no freakin' idea what was making the sound, but it was wandering around the woods 100 feet away.  All I could think of were the compy's, the little dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movie that ate the fat guy.  Not a positive thought in those circumstances.  In the very first light of day, I saw the animal trot by, it was a fox, making a weird little bark I'd never heard before.

I woke one night to the sound of a car door opening in early 2008.  I was sleeping, sitting up, in a large bus stop here in Orange County.  I saw a figure of a man, walking through the shadows, from one section of the bus stop or another.  He had a gun in his hand in front of him.  As he got closer, I realized it was a cop, a young cop, and the gun was actually his taser.  He walked up to my area, where I sat with my sleeping bag wrapped around me.  He turned towards me, 8 feet away, taser pointed at my chest, "How long have you been here?" he screamed.  I didn't know what time it was, but I told him I came in on a bus about 10 pm.  His hand with the taser trembled as it pointed at my sleeping bag wrapped chest.  I thought the voltage would probably blow my heart up if he shot, I was over 365 pounds at the time, the most out of shape I've ever been.  After maybe 20 or 30 seconds, he decided I wasn't a threat, walked off, and continued his search.

One night working as a taxi driver, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I was sleeping in my taxi, in a shopping center parking lot.  I worked yet another 17-18 hour day, and was barely able to keep my eyes open as I dropped off my last passenger in Anaheim.  I slept in my cab six nights a week, and got a cheap motel room the 7th.  I slept 4 or 5 hours in my cab in a parking lot, a different one every night, and then headed to the Huntington Beach Hyatt, and tried to get 2 to 3 more hours of sleep in the taxi line in front of the hotel each morning.  I headed down Brookhurst boulevard, towards the ocean, literally doing head nods, and making a couple of sketchy swerves.  It wasn't safe to sleep in that area, so I pushed my luck to get back to a parking lot in Huntington Beach that I slept in some nights. Tired as hell, I made it, parked my taxi in the middle of the parking lot,  a distance away from some other cars with people sleeping in them.  That particular parking lot was kind of an informal campground for homeless people with cars and vans then.  I leaned my seat back , pulled my hoodie over my chest as a blanket, and I was out.

I jumped awake to the sound of something really hard bashing against my driver's side window.  It was a police officer's billy club.  Someone had me seen me swerving, apparently, and called the cops.  I hadn't been asleep 20 minutes when the club on the window scared the crap out of me.  The officer questioned me, and gave me the "follow the penlight with my eyes" sobriety test.  It was all I could do to even keep my eyes open.  He finally decided I was just really tired, and not drunk.  He told me he was coming back in 15 or 20 minutes, and I better still be there asleep.  He left, and I was probably back to sleep before his car left the parking lot.  If he came back, he didn't wake me, and I slept there until early morning.

I was at the big bus stop another time, in the spring of 2008.  I was sitting on the end of the bus stop, a section not used by buses at the time.  About 30 feet in front of me, a small hill sloped down from left to right.  Just as I was about to doze off, to sleep another night, sitting up in the bus bench seats, I saw a cat wander down the hill in front of me.  A BIG cat.  Another homeless guy there said he'd seen mountain lions wandering around the bus stop at night, at times.  But he had red hair and once claimed to be a Lakota Sioux chief, he lied more than he told the truth.  So I figured it was just another of his tall tales.  I jumped up and followed the big cat, about the size of a Labrador retriever, down the hill along a small ditch next to a road.  I finally saw the cat stop in a little hole in the bushes.  It was dark out, but there was light from nearby buildings, and I could see it pretty well. I was 25 or 30 feet form it.  The tan cat probably weighed 35 to 40 pounds.  It was a young mountain lion, alright.  It was shivering, more afraid of me than I was of it.  Then I suddenly realized that if there was a young mountain lion, there was very likely a momma lion somewhere around.  Then I got scared.  I clapped my hands real loud, and the mountain lion took of running across the street, and around the corner of a building.  I saw it again, about two weeks later, while walking the other way up that same stretch of road.  It was wandering around the same area where I slept in a chair, covered only by a sleeping bag, every night.

These are just a few of the weird things I've seen, or had to deal with at night, in the years I've spent homeless.  There are many other animals, people, and weird situations I've had to deal with, just like every other homeless person wandering out country and world.  

There are a lot of things I want to do in my life from here on out... IF I live through the nights leading up to those days.  We'll see what happens.

Uh...yeah...this is complete BULLSHIT

Hey, guess what, at a big business round table, executives from 200 corporations just decided that the purpose of a corporation is not to maximize value for the people who own their stocks.  Yeah, here's the article, they just said it's all about making sure you, as a worker, make good money and have a great community to live in.  You know, that's why your wages have been stagnant for 40 years, and executive income has risen about 1,000%.

You can read the official statement in the article.  Sorry douchebags, I'm not buying it, and neither is most of America.  You can fool the Trump voters, obviously, but not the intelligent 75% of the country.  You guys are just trying to ward off the pitchforks of the 99% of the U.S. you've financially raped and pillaged the last 40 years or so.  Here's the article from CNBC:

"The CEO's of nearly 200 companies just said shareholder value is no longer their main objective"

An idea from Colombia for "real world" higher education that works

As we watch the $1.6 trillion student debt bubble grow in the U.S., and watch that debt continue to shackle a whole generation of college graduates, here comes an idea from Columbia that may spark similar ideas in the U.S. and other countries.  In this BBC article:

The Man Who Wants to Make University Degrees Obsolete

we hear of Platzi, a program created by Freddy Vega, a working class kid in Colombia.  Platzi is helping students learn skills necessary to earn more money, and helping to bridge the huge tech skills gap in Latin America. 

I think this basic idea will be one place to look for ideas when the U.S. student debt bubble collapses, mostly likely taking many U.S. colleges with it, and disrupting our higher education system the way Napster disrupted the music industry.  Colleges have their place, particularly for lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other jobs where degrees are absolutely necessary.  But in tech, marketing, media, and many of our really fast moving industries, some kind of hybrid education system needs to be created, and Platzi is one place to look for ideas. 

The accounting fraud allegations against GE... and why I care about them

Here's an interview with Harry Markopolos, whose team just published a 175 page report alleging serious accounting fraud at GE, one of the biggest and oldest companies in the U.S..  

This blog was set up mostly to share ideas that would help people either start a new business, or build small businesses.  The blog is also to share my ideas on the Big Picture of our world, our economy, and where I see things going from that perspective.  Since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated with trying to figure out what the future will be like.  I wasn't a kid dreaming about interstellar space travel or sci-fi stuff.  It was more that I just kind of naturally looked into the future, and wanted to figure out what the world would be like then, so I could kind of plan my life accordingly. OK, my life got derailed, basically, but I'm still a futurist.

When I moved to Southern California in 1986, with my first real job at a couple of BMX magazines, at age 20, the real estate market was rocketing up.  Everyone was talking about real estate, and I started watching the "get rich in real estate" infomercials every Saturday morning.  Initially that started as just wanting to make a bunch of money as a young gu,y so I could pretend to be cool and get laid a lot, like most young guys dream of. 

But it later turned into a fascination with economic trends, market trends, social trends, technological trends, and trying to figure which were most important when looking into the future.  Which of the thousands of economic and social forces out there were most important for figuring out where the world was really going?  That's what I was trying to figure out.  I began to watch the stock market day to day, and see what happened, and then try to figure out why it happened.  I read a lot of books on real estate, and then other business books, and kept reading and self-educating for the 30 years since.  My life has gone to some crazy places, and I was never to fully financially take advantage of what I've learned in these areas.

Over the last few years, after the economy had grown after The Great Recession, I began to wonder when the next recession would come along, and what it would look like.  As I looked deeper into this, I found this crazy convergence of a whole bunch of super long term trends, traditional trends, and completely new factors.  It became apparent to me that this next financial downturn would be worse than 2008. If you want to get a better idea of the weird array of trends and forces I look at, go back and read the last post.

In any case, as we get closer to the critical points of this next downturn, I knew there must be some company out there that would play a role similar to the role that (the now long gone) investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers played in 2008.  The economy had been in trouble for months, and big bubbles were getting ready to pop, when Bear Stearns suddenly went belly up in March of 2008.  That really shook people up.  The sub prime mortgage crisis was a huge factor in this collapse, but not the only factor.

But the economy trudged along after that, or seemed to.  The stock market managed to go up for a couple of months afterward.  Then things really started to unravel, overleveraged positions hit sketchy and over confident investors hard, and in September 2008, the 158-year-old investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt.  That collapse hit the financial world like a 9.0 earthquake, and the U.S. economy, and much of the world's economy, went into a horrible collapse. 

Much of the U.S., primarily rural areas and small towns, have never really recovered.  The stock market began to trend upward in early 2009, but the collapse in share prices took millions of people's retirements, and large portions of their wealth.  Average investors were gun shy, for good reason, about buying stocks again.  Now we're in the verge of a similar crisis, one that looks to me like it will be much worse than 2008, in the long run.

So as I was wondering what company out there had been doing shady stuff to make its numbers, and wondering who might become the "Lehman Brothers of this crisis," this major report drops yesterday, alleging massive accounting fraud at GE.  I read the first two pages (of 175) of the report yesterday, and that gave me the impression that these allegations were very serious, and not just some random guy making stuff up.  I just listened to this interview above, and now it seems even more serious.  It looks like GE is in serious trouble.  So here are the things I find most interesting about all this.

"Seven and a half months of our own time and money, no one paid us to do this."

-Harry Markopolos in the interview above.  His team gets paid later in three ways, the SEC whistleblower program, the Dept. of Justice, and things like the arrangement with a hedge fund that's been mentioned.

-Harry Markopolos and his team self-financed this report.  The unnamed hedge fund didn't pay them to take on this project.  One way they will get paid back is by the SEC whistleblower program, years from now.  That means that at the beginning of this 7 1/2 month project, they thought there was enough wrongdoing to be found, to make it worth the while to take this project on.  That means they really thought there was a lot of wrongdoing to find.

-Markopolos was the guy who discovered the Bernie Madhoff Ponzi scheme fraud, a story that broke back in 2008, a scheme that followed a lot of sophisticated investors for many, many years.  You can get a brief version of the story here (it even mentions Markopolos).  So Markopolos and his team are no joke, they know how to find shady accounting and fraud.

-Markopolos and his team discovered issues with GE's long term care insurance while investigating another insurance company, it wasn't like they just said, "Hey, let's take out GE." There had been rumors about shadiness at GE since the 90's, and when they learned how the other insurance company cooked its books, it looked like GE may be doing something similar, which encouraged them to look into the company in a more in depth way.

-There are things this investigative team found that are not in the report, and went straight to law enforcement.  So they found evidence of illegal actions, serious enough to justify a serious look, and likely other investigations, by some level of law enforcement.

-Mr. Markopolos is smart and well informed on camera, but he's obviously not a professional on air personality.  As someone who's worked in TV years ago, I think that comes across in the interview.  He's all about the facts, he knows what he can and can't say, but he's just laying the facts out.  If this was a well planned public relations (aka P.R.) campaign, and the point was just to manipulate the stock market, or even to destroy GE, this would look completely different.  And... the guy's on Yahoo Finance, which, let's face, nobody watches most of the time. 

In a major P.R. campaign, there would be several people on multiple, major business networks, all of them would be very good looking and very good at speaking on camera, and would be repeating the same talking points over and over.  In other words, it would be the kind of mass propaganda we (well maybe you, I don't watch full scale propaganda as a rule) see every day on some news networks. 

The real P.R. campaign, the organized response by a team hired by GE, no doubt,  has kicked off today (the day after the interview above), with business news quoting Goldman Sachs "experts" and others.  If you want to know the truth about anything financial, the last "expert" you listen to is one from Goldman Sachs.  Hey, they do know finance, that's for sure, but they're the company whose people move often into government positions to work directly on behalf  Wall Street and Big Business, creating policies to help them.

So, in my humble opinion, these really are some serious accusations, and my bet would be on longtime corporate giant, GE, going bankrupt in 2-6 months or so.  I think the ultimate amount of fraud found will go far beyond the $38 billion alleged by Markopolos and his team.  He says he thinks what they've found is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm beginning to think he's right about that.

This leads to the next question, what is GE these days?  GE is a huge corporate conglomerate that started in 1892.  The company, according to Wikipedia has 283, 000 employees, so there may be a slight surge in resume's on Indeed next week. And next month.  And next year. To put that workforce in perspective, GE has more employees than the combined populations of Dayton, Ohio, Norton, Ohio, Massillon, Ohio, Coshocton, Ohio, Mansfield, Ohio, Shiloh, Ohio, Willard, Ohio, and Carlsbad, New Mexico.  Those are eight of the cities I lived in growing up, because my family moved too damn much.

GE has a whole list of subsidiaries, most of the names of which start with "GE."  Not too creative, definitely not as creative as their bookkeeping is alleged to be.  You can check out the subsidiary list here.  GE had an annual revenue of $121.6 billion in 2018, and an operating income of $ -20.72 billion.  (Well THERE'S your problem.)  They are also listed as having assets of $309.129 billion.

If these allegations prove true, which seems likely, the future trouble of GE is going to affect A LOT of people in a lot of places in a lot of industries.  After doing the basic research for this blog post, I think the issues apparently troubling GE could go well beyond a "Lehman Brother" incident.  With their huge workforce and operations all over the world, this looks more like the makings of an AIG-type crisis, because the ripple effects of big trouble at GE will be astronomical. 

In the meantime, expect GE to officially deny everything in public, and to see lots of pro-GE interviews and articles in the business media, if you watch the business media.  That's the P.R. campaign to make things look fine, while the top brass at GE tries to find out what's really going on, and how bad things might actually be there.  Most importantly, the top executives need to try to keep there asses from getting hit with criminal charges, and to get out with tens of millions in golden parachutes.  On this website, we can see that six top executives at GE get $7 to $16 million a year in compensation, as of fiscal 2019. 

We'll see what happens, but it appears that revelations of trouble at GE are just getting started.  If these troubles do turn out to be true, there will massive ripple effects throughout the business world, and U.S. economy.  Another question is, are there other companies out there that have been doing shady stuff, or have been using far too much leverage to try to optimize profits?  Undoubtedly, there are.  Are we going to see other large companies getting into major troubles as we head into the next recession, whenever it starts?  It's likely we are.  One really big company going bankrupt could spark a collapse, something like 2008, and now 125-year-old GE, the former General Electric, is a company to keep an eye on in the next few months. 

A beginner's Guide to The Next Great Recession: The Trends

What's in store for the world's economy in the next year or two?  Here's a pretty good series of visual metaphors for what I see coming...

This is copied from my personal blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear
I'm going to put the financial oriented stuff on this blog from now on...

People watch weather reports.  Why?  So you can be prepared for the rain, snow, wind, lightning, possible tornadoes, and on a really bad day, a hurricane, in some regions.  We watch the reports, and adjust our plans to work around the lame stuff that's going to inevitably happen.

Yet in the financial world, it's just the opposite.  Home prices go up and down.  Stock prices go up and down.  Bull markets happen.  Recessions happen.  But almost everyone ignores you when you say, "Hey, there's a recession coming pretty soon, I think it's going to get really gnarly."  For some reason, the people who would want to prepare for a hurricane, or close all the windows before a bad thunderstorm, don't want to even hear about an economic storm.  In my opinion, there's a Category 9 hurricane 100 miles offshore right now.

I say this because I've been writing about the serious recession I've seen coming, for a couple of years now.  Hardly anyone takes me seriously.  OK, I'm homeless and broke, so those are legit reasons to be skeptical.  But Robert Kiyosaki is rich, and he's been saying the same thing.  Gary Vaynerchuk is rich, and he's ready to pounce on good deals during the next collapse.  Jim Rogers is rich, and he's been saying the same thing.  Warren Buffet doesn't talk about it, but he's sitting on $120 billion, waiting for the next downturn to find good deals to invest in.

Most people don't even listen to those guys, guys who have been through this before and have made fortunes from the downturns.  Most people just jog along with the other lemmings, completely ignoring all the red flags and warnings, from people who look ahead and watch the economic world.  Remember, lemmings are basically hamsters that follow the crowd and go BASE jumping... without a parachute.  Then they die.  For obvious reasons, I never wanted to be a lemming.


Here are the basic trends I've been watching, many for years, or decades in some cases, that lead me to believe we're in for the financial equivalent to a Category 9 hurricane, and we're just heading into it now.  It will be apparent to everyone within six months, I think.

-Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Third Wave idea- This idea says that we, as a society, began to leave the Industrial Age society in 1956, and are transitioning into an Information-based society. This transition will affect every level of society, and is as big as the change from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural societies (about 10,000 years ago), or the change from an agricultural society to an industrial society (beginning about 350 years ago).  Except this time, this massive change is happening in the span of a human lifetime, not over hundreds or thousands of years.  No humans, in known human history, have had to deal with a societal change this big.

-P.R. Sarkar's idea of the transition from a society led by the "Acquisitor" (business person's) mentality to a "Warrior" (those who prize courage and physical ability most) mentality.  Only economist Ravi Batra speaks of this, and his 1989 book is where I first heard of this.  It takes a while to explain, but Batra's take on this theory from India is why I was predicting a future populist uprising, back in the mid to late 1990's.

-The Populist Uprising in the U.S. (and western society) actually happening-  It's kicking into high gear now, and it's far from its peak. While the Trump following racists, xenophobes, and business people got the head start, this Populist movement greatly favors the political Left and the Progressive/Socialist side of the equation, over the long term.  Hey, I'm a capitalist, I'm not stoked on this, but that's where the momentum is, and will be for some time, like it or not.

-Demographic shifts- Rich Dad, Poor Dad author, Robert Kiyosaki, predicted a 2017 recession back in about 2003.  Why?  Because 2016-2017 is when the huge Baby Boom generation was mandated to start taking their money out of the stock market, as the first of that group hit age 70 1/2 years old.  This trend of pulling money out of stocks by the Baby Boom will continue for about 20-25 years.

-The Big Transition- This is my personal term for the transition that the Toffler's spoke of in The Third Wave, the change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.  I don't think we're in either age right now, but the chaotic and messy transition between the two.

During this period, The Big Transition, with the continuing and accelerating rise of new technology, comes Disruption.  Think of the music industry a month before, and a month after, Napster went online.  The whole industry was suddenly toast, thanks to a click of a mouse by a kid we'd never heard of.  A new technology can literally cause a disruption that makes an entire business model obsolete, practically overnight.  Major disruption has happened in music, TV, movies, publishing, and marketing. But Disruption hasn't really hit many other areas.  I believe that every business, industry, organization, or institution, will either intentionally re-invent itself from an Industrial Age model to an Information Age model, or more likely, it will collapse and an Information Age model will be created by someone else.  There's A LOT of Disruption still to happen.

Both main U.S. political parties right now, for example, are in the middle of their disruption.  Trump and Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere in 2016, buoyed by the simmering populist sentiment on both sides, and garnered huge support, because the traditional power structures in the parties had completely lost touch with average Americans.  That will continue, in political parties, and EVERYWHERE ELSE.  I see this period of transition lasting from 1956 (the Toffler's starting date) to about 2040 (my guestimate of when it's all shaken out, and begins to settle, providing humans are still here then).

-The Student Debt bubble- Student debt is now over $1.6 TRILLION in the U.S..  Why is it so high?  That's $300 billion more than the sub prime mortgage bubble that helped spark the 2008 crisis.  Student debt is so high because Wall Street took the sub prime model, and simply applied it to student debt.  The student loans are bought, repackaged as Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), and resold in pieces to other investors.  To keep making the wonderfully high fees on all of this, Wall Street needed more and more student loans.  So the student loan bubble is the new sub prime.  Here's a fun fact, according to this recent Nerd Wallet article, about 40% of current student loans, over 10 million loans, are not being actively paid back.  Right now, 5.2 million federal student loans are in default, about 5 million other loans are deferred in one way or another.  Tick, tick, tick...

-What a student loan bubble pop would do to real world ("Main Street") America- Let's say the student loan bubble doesn't crash like sub prime in 2008, but just has a major correction period, and this causes student loan income to colleges and universities to be cut back by 20%.  Where are colleges?  They're in 150 or so cities and towns around the U.S., all over the place.  After the loss of manufacturing plants and jobs, a huge number of those towns and cities are now referred to as "Eds and Meds" cities.  The colleges and the hospitals (often associated with the colleges) are the primary employers in town.  So if student loan income drops by just 20%, what happens to those 150 or so towns and cities?  MASSIVE economic slow down, everywhere.  Now, what happens to those towns and cities, most of America by area, if the student loan bubble actually does burst, and student loan and tuition income drops 40%-50%-80%?  The financial crisis becomes catastrophic, REAL QUICK.  So there's that...

-The Geographic Recession- Most of the United States, by area, is rural area, small towns, and small to mid size cities.  Most of of those regions simply have not recovered from The Great Recession.  Real estate hasn't surged.  Large numbers of people work two or three low paying service jobs to survive.  High tech companies avoid these areas, and entire regions, like the plague.  There are a handful of people who describe the U.S. as actually having been in a Great Depression for the last 10 years.  We've had growth well below the long term trendline that whole time.  Sure, there's money in the big tech companies in the big cities, but the vast majority of the U.S. is ALREADY struggling.  In the next economic downturn, that will intensify.

-Richard Florida's Creative Class and the rise of Tech Hub cities- This is a very complex set of ideas, but here it is in a nutshell.  In a high tech enabled, information-based society, creativity is a main (probably THE main) driver of innovation and building wealth.  Creative people like to be around, actually physically near, other creative people.  Creative people cluster.  So the emerging tech world is now largely clustered in Silicon Valley/The San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Southern California, New York City, Washington D.C., the Raleigh Reserach Triangle, and Austin, Texas, by and large.  In effect, and for a whole range or reasons Richard Florida has laid out in his books and articles, much of the U.S. is a kind of wasteland with little or no large scale high tech businesses.  We have the tech hubs with lots of wealth and one set of urban issues to deal with.  Then we have the vast majority of the country's small cities, towns, and rural areas, trying desperately, and largely unsuccessfully, to attract high tech companies and viable start ups.  The map of these different areas is also the map of our political divide.  We have tech hubs and tech wastelands.  Since his first book on these ideas, The Rise of the Creative Class, in 2002, Florida has been looking for ways to level this playing field out, but the clustering has actually increased in the 17 years since.  This geographic sorting is a major root, but not the only one, in my opinion, to our current political polarization.

-The Retail Apocalypse- In 2017, 2018, and so far in 2019,a total of 20,000 retail stores have closed, or are scheduled to.  Another 20,000 or so closed from 2009 to 2016.  Toy-R-Us is gone.  Radio Shack is gone.  Sears and J.C. Penney's, once the 800 pound retail gorillas of retail, are now circling the drain.  This is the technology rooted Disruption of the Industrial Age retail industry.  Amazon didn't cause this.  The leaders of all those dead and dying companies, who didn't see the future potential of the internet that Jeff Bezos of Amazon saw, caused this.  The Industrial Age goods distribution system of mass marketing, mass manufacturing, U.S. based factories, and hundreds of department stores, malls, and shopping centers, is collapsing, because most of it is not viable in the Information Age.  A new system, including Amazon, but also platforms like eBay, and millions of small, online, niche stores, is growing to replace it.  By watching how the Retail Apocalypse has taken shape, I (and you, hopefully) can get an idea of what's going to happen to colleges, and to every other major industry where it hasn't happened already.  Technology has changed the game.  If you're still playing the mass market Industrial Age game, you're toast.  Or soon will be.

-And now... we get to the actual current economy.  Historically, we have a recession every 4 to 10 years in the U.S..  We're in year 11, so we're due, simply looking at the timing.

-The everyday person, traditional American economy, has decoupled from Wall Street and the Tech world.  Most of America never left, or barely left, the last recession, even as stocks have soared.  A bull market in stocks, in today's world, barely effects most of the everyday economy.  This is the Geographic Recession I mentioned above.  The Wall Street euphoria died a couple months after the Trump tax cuts, and stocks headed down, but that hype has risen again the last couple of months.  The recent cut in the Fed Funds rate shows that The Fed is getting desperate, and doesn't have much left to keep Wall Street growing.

-The ultra low interest rate and quantitative easing economy-  The Fed lowered interest rates just over a week ago, in what was already a historically low interest rate economy.  The interest rates were lowered dramatically, and quantitative easing (buying our own debt and pulling money out of America's ass, basically) was instituted to help bring the economy back after The Great Recession.  It didn't work.  The Fed was never able to raise interest rates back up to traditional, historic levels.  Yes, we've had a 10 year bull market in the stock markets, but it's been absolutely feeble economic growth the whole time.  There's been very little major infrastructure or capital investments.  But there's been a ton of stock buybacks.  We're in this weird financial Never Never Land, a place the economic world has never been, best described by former Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers quant, Nomi Prins, in this talk, and her book Collusion.  No one knows a good way out of this mess.

-The Orange County/Southern California real estate market- When I lived here in Orange County from 1986 to 2008, it was pretty easy to see economic downturns coming, because the real estate market here soars up, tops out, and then heads down fast.  When you see housing inventories rising, and then prices begin to decline, things are getting ready to drop, and that's happening now.  In this blog post, we see the housing inventory growing here, which happens right before prices begin dropping.  Also Chinese buyers are pulling out of the U.S. market, which has helped it soar to the current point.

These factors (and many others) are all coming together in a huge convergence.  Some of these factors only happen once in hundreds of years, or once ever.  In addition, all forms of debt; government, business, and consumer, are at or near all time high levels.  All this situation needs to turn into a big financial downturn is a spark.  It looks like Trump's trade war with China is turning into that spark.

So that's why I'm predicting an economic collapse in excess of what we saw in 2008, and a 5-6-7 or more year hangover of little, if any growth, and stagnation all over the place.  We're in new territory in many ways, we've never been here before, and there is no roadmap (or GPS directions for you youngin's) to lead us out of it.  If it's not a textbook Great Depression in the next decade, it will definitely feel like one to most Americans.

But with this dismal economic outlook comes opportunities at a never before seen level, as well. Warren Buffet, Robert Kiyosaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Rogers, and other business people, are ready to pounce on all the good deals that will happen soon.  You can do that as well, if you're not crushed by your own debt right now.  A new world will be built in this next economic downturn, if we survive it, that is.