The Importance of Creative Scenes

Me getting creative on my freestyle bike, underneath the Huntington Beach Pier, 1987.  Apparently I was too broke to get a haircut at the time. 

 

We've all heard of cities that have a good music scene or a great art scene.  But what does that mean really?  What is a scene?  While a lot people like to go see a live band in a bar or club, or check out a gallery of local artists, do these things really matter much?  Aren't art and music scenes just place where artists, musicians, hippies, weirdos, and other people who don't want to really work hang out?  As a kid growing up in the 1970's and 1980's, that was what I heard about art and music scenes.  

My own interest in what I now call "creative scenes" began in October of 1982.  I was in my junior year in high school in Boise, Idaho, and my family lived in a trailer park outside of town, that we called Blue Valley.  We weren't diehard trailer trash, my parents moved there to save money for a year or two, so they could buy a house in town.  Unlike most of their financial plans, that plan ultimately worked.  

But, over the summer of 1982 in Blue Valley, us teenage guys in the park got more and more into BMX riding, since there wasn't much else to do.  That fall, someone heard there was actually a BMX track in Boise.  Four of us packed into a Ford Pinto, with 3 bikes, to go check it out.  Scott, Rocky, and Brian all won trophies in their first races, while I watched and coached.  We were hooked.  The next weekend, we packed the whole posse, 9 or 10 of us, with all our bikes, into my dad's Ford van, and headed to the Fort Boise BMX track.  It was the last race of the season.  That day, something weird happened.  Us trailer park kids, with cheap, crappy, bargain store bikes, in blue jeans and T-shirts, with paper plate number plates, all raced really well, for our first or second races.  Every one of us went home with a trophy, most for 1st or 2nd place in our class.  The Boise track locals, on $400-$500, high end BMX racing bikes, in their fancy racing leathers, couldn't figure out who we were, where we all came from, or why we were all so damn fast, for newbies.  

For us in Blue Valley, over several months, BMX was our thing.  We had been going out to our little jumps on the edge of the desert, and trying to out ride each other, day after day after day.  I later realized, we had developed a BMX bike scene.  We were a small group of people, with one dominating common interest, who got together, (daily, in our case) to push each other to get better.  That's what I now call a "creative scene."  We weren't making art or music, but we were learning jumping tricks on our bikes, and trying to invent a trick or two.  Not super creative, but somewhat creative.  We raced each other, practiced carving through turns, and speed rolling jumps.  But mostly we tried to jump for style better than all the other guys. At that time BMX racing was a sport, only 12 years old, and BMX trick riding, an offshoot, was just morphing into a sport of its own, called BMX freestyle.  

As I got more into freestyle in 1983 and 1984, a sport born in Southern California, I began to hear of small groups of freestylers around the country, and later in Canada and the U.K.  The BMX magazines sometimes covered these little scenes, or sometimes kids got letters published in the magazines, about their local group of riders. BMX freestyle was about doing learning tricks on BMX bikes, and inventing our own tricks, and it was highly creative, as well as a physical "sport."  

As BMX freestyle grew, it seemed to pop up in small groups, in different places around the country.  Freestyle didn't grow evenly across the U.S., town by town, city by city.  After the original riders, like Bob Haro, Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff, in the South Bay area near Los Angeles, groups of freestylers popped up in San Francisco, San Diego, Kansas City, Austin, New York City, and obscure places likeYork, Pennsylvania, Elgin, Illinois, small towns in New England, and the three of us in Boise, as well as couple dozen other places.  

One or two riders would see a factory team trick show, get hooked on the idea of BMX freestyle, and get a couple other people into it, and start their own trick team.  That trick team would do shows and spread the word of this weird little sport in their area, drawing more riders in.  I didn't realize it then, but along with trying to eventually become a pro BMX freestyler, by riding daily, I was also witnessing how a creative scene grows from a couple dozen people, to a worldwide sport and industry.  BMX freestyle was also a part of the larger action sports movement, spawned mostly by surfing and motocross, and including skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, wake boarding, and other new sports.  Our weird little sport, credited to one person, Bob Haro, is now worldwide, on TV, the internet, and social media, part of the X-Games, and will demo in the next summer Olympics.  None of that was planned in the early 1980's, it just happened organically.  It started with high school age kids having fun on bikes. 

That's what "creative scenes" do, at times.  They start with one or two people, with some new idea involving some form or creativity.  It can be a new style of art.  The Impressionists, were a scene in their day, taking painting in a new direction.  It can be music.  It can be entrepreneurial, spawning a new business, or even a new industry.  It can be technology.  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, creating the first Apple Computer to share with the local Homebrew Club, in San Jose, in the 1970's, that was both a technological scene (computer enthusiasts), and soon after, an entrepreneurial scene, Apple Computers (now simply Apple).  These scenes just kind of happen, and it's hard to engineer one to grow into a worldwide movement or industry.  Research centers in major companies and universities are attempts to create creative scenes, usually around technology of some sort, but with major business potential.  These centers of innovation come up with a lot of ideas, but most don't take off and go very far. Some do, and spawn new products, businesses, and industries.

The best scenes, judged by overall influence on society, just seem to happen, and they seldom happen where major corporations want them to.  Jobs and Wozniak borrowed ideas from corporations that were trying to create major technological breakthroughs, and then created the personal computer revolution in a garage, a few miles from highly funded research centers.  

Creative scenes don't have to spawn major businesses to be highly successful, influential, and beneficial to society.  The Beat Poets didn't become billionaires, but their initial small poetry scenes influenced a huge part of their generation, as did the Acid Rock bands and Hippie culture of San Francisco's Haight/ Ashbury District in the late 1960's.  Whether that was mostly a good influence or a bad influence,depends on who you ask.  A lot of great art, music, and things like meditation became popular as a result.  But then, hallucinogenic drugs became popular, also.  

Some creative scenes just give local creative types a place to try ideas, experiment, and become more creative people in general. Those scenes are incredibly important in the overall scheme of things.  Those are the "nursery" scenes where a lot of people, often afraid to try new ideas, find out, "Hey, I can make something interesting."  The kids who have good creative scenes, some organized, others totally unorganized, gain some confidence, and begin to get better at bring creative in general.  Often great creative people had little known scenes they were a part of early in life, that sowed the seed of using creativity on a regular basis.  Those seeds often blossom years later, in art, music, or other creative endeavors.   

Other creative scenes take root in a part of a city or town, and then attract more creative people, of various kinds.  Some creative scenes become legendary places in their genre's.  Think of Hollywood (a mile form me, as I write this), a major creative scene for movies, TV, and music.  Broadway in New York City is a legendary creative scene for live theater.  New Orleans is a famous creative scene for its culinary and music roots.  Nashville is the major creative scene for country music, and now all kinds of music.  Austin, Texas became a creative scene for music, followed later by art, movies, and high technology. When it comes to the business end of things, the world's most famous creative scene (and creator of billionaires) is the San Jose, California area, aka Silicon Valley, for computer related high technology.  

In the 1990's, as computer technology, and other tech began to take off exponentially, it became apparent that these new high tech businesses clustered in a few areas.  Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin were the standouts.  The Raleigh Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Cary) in North Carolina was the first major high tech campus area.  But Silicon Valley, and the others listed, sprang up faster and larger.  Dozens of other cities were trying to create and build high tech centers, but the best start-ups kept gravitating to these, and a few other cities.  

Professor Richard Florida, then at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, dove into the research on this phenomenon, trying to figure out why high tech firms clustered in certain areas.  After all, the rise of the internet, and personal computers, meant people could work from most anywhere.  After several years, he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, in 2002, sharing his initial  findings (here's a speech from then).  While there were many reasons for this clustering, the underlying theme was that tech people were highly creative people, and creative people liked to be around other creative people.  The high tech workers creating the new technology liked to set up in cities that had good art and music scenes, and other groups of highly creative people, already living there.  They also liked to live in places that were tolerant of weird and unusual people.  Computer nerds really were mostly serious nerds then, and they'd been picked on enough.  So they migrated to places tolerant of all kinds of people.  That explains Austin, Texas as a tech hub, their city motto is "Keep Austin Weird."  

So while creative scenes can happen anywhere, and most live as small local scenes, some scenes spark a new idea that takes off in art, music, technology, or some other area.  Places with solid creative scenes in one area, often attract more creative people from other facets of the creative spectrum.  And these areas attracted tech workers, and still do.  So our most innovative cities and areas, that are now a huge part of the U.S. economy, and centers for most of our innovation, often started with tiny art or music scenes, decades ago.  Over years, they attracted other creative people, and became "scenes of creative scenes," inter-meshed with each other.  Some of these cities eventually became the tech hubs where most of the United States economy is now centered.  There are both good and bad aspects to this arc of creative scenes into known "creative cities", and into tech hubs.  Ask the old time locals in San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin about real estate prices, the Yuppie invasions, and often homelessness issues, as well. 

My point here is that a group of weird, screwball, seeming degenerates can be the seed of a great place for innovation in many different areas, and that can ultimately grow into major business ventures at times.  It's for this reason, and my fascination with Creative Scenes since that BMX race in October of 1982, that I'm focusing most of my time and energy on this concept in the coming months, and maybe years. 

We have a ton of major issues to work out in society right now, and creativity itself, new ideas and new solutions, are needed.  A handful of people, who just start doing creative things on a regular basis, usually come up with these new ideas that ultimately transform society in a meaningful way first in neighborhoods, then towns and cities, and then across regions and nations.  Those little creative scenes, the ones that will transform our lives in the next 10-20-30 years, could be happening ANYWHERE right now.  

While forcing creative scenes rarely seems to have good results.  Creative  scenes CAN be nutured as they grow.  Our country needs that right now.  Pretty much everywhere.  I'll have lots more insights and ideas on art, writing, creativity, and creative scenes, in coming blog posts on this blog.

Thoughts on failure

This video takes a while, but ultimately this guy pulls up a good sized vase, it's off center, and it finally wobbles and goes splat.  Is this a failure?  My best friend in high school, a guy named Darrin, got me into pottery, and we came up with a different take on failure while throwing pots on the wheel.

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I have a much different view of what "failure" is, than most people.   This started with throwing pottery while I was in high school.  At the beginning of my junior year at Boise High School, in Boise, Idaho, a guy named Darrin and I hated our small, half size lockers, and we went looking for a couple of open, full size lockers to take over.  We found two, side by side, and became best friends as the year went on.  Being one of the best pottery students at the time in our school, he got cleared to go into the pottery room at lunch, to throw pots on the wheel.  I started going in and hanging out with him, and he soon taught me how to throw pots on a wheel.  

Making pottery on a wheel is a weird idea.  You start with a wet lump of what it basically mud, and on a good day, you have a vase, a pot, a jug, a spittoon, or a bowl when you finish.  Once you get the basics down, it's just a lot of fun to create pottery on the wheel.  As we threw pots and talked during lunch hours, Darrin and I talked about the different results of a session at the pottery wheel.  We would sit down each time with some really cool vase or jug idea in our mind.  That was the goal for the day.  

The thing with clay is that you have to continually add water to it while working on the wheel.  So as you center the clay, open the hole in the middle, and then pull up the walls of the initial cylinder, the clay gets softer and softer.  You can see that process in the video above.  All the while, you need to keep the clay cylinder centered, and push the limits of that hunk of clay.  

If you let the clay get off center, or it gets too soft, it wobbles and the top part falls.  Usually you can catch it, and cut the top part off with a needlepoint, and there's still a chunk left on the wheel.  There's not enough clay to make a cool shaped vase, jug, or large bowl.  But even after losing the top part of the cylinder, you can make a spittoon shape.  If you keep pushing the clay, and the spittoon flopped, you still had enough clay to make an ashtray.  OK, this was the 80's, and we all knew people who smoked, and you could always find someone to give the ashtray to after it was fired and glazed. 

If you totally screwed up on the pottery wheel, and couldn't even make an ashtray, you scraped the little hunk of clay left off the wheel.  Was that a failure?  Darrin and I debated this.  Every time we sat down at the pottery wheel to make something, it was fun.  Most of the time we didn't end up with the cool shaped vase or jug we wanted to make, it was still fun.  Darrin and I came to the conclusion that there was no "failure" when working on a pottery wheel.  The worst case scenario was that we scraped the clay off the wheel when done, and  called it a "learning experience."  So our four stages of making pots were: Vase, Spittoon, Ashtray, and Learning Experience.  There was no failure, the worst that happened was that we had fun, and learned something that would help us the next time.  

With my year and a half of throwing pots in high school, my concept of what failure had changed.  I was getting seriously into BMX freestyle at the same time, where that new idea of failure also came into play.  Some days I landed my tricks well, some days I didn't, but still had fun.  Either way, the long term trend was continual progression.  In BMX freestyle I really learned how important failure is to eventual success.  BMX freestylers, skateboarders, all the action sports people, as well as many mainstream sports, spend much of their time "failing," missing their tricks, in order to further improve and perfect their physical skills.  "Failure" is what action sports people do every day, so they can later do incredible tricks and stunts, often for a crowd, a video camera, or at a contest.  

Getting used to "failing," and making it part of the process, in art, action sports, or many other things, the fear of failing diminishes, which opens us up to more creative ideas, in many cases.  

But I've also worked on TV crews, hanging lights as a roadie type guy, and at Cirque du Soleil, where people could get seriously injured, maybe even killed, if someone failed at their job.  When you're holding a belay rope for someone climbing up a 32 foot high climbing wall, for example, failure is not an option.  But most of life falls somewhere in between, usually a lot closer to the pottery level.

About 90 days ago, I got a good-sized chunk of money from the pandemic unemployment program.  My goal was to get the best deal on a room to stay in (since I was homeless then), and I'd have 60 to 90 days to build some kind of business to support myself, which would take a $2,500 to $3,000 a month of income.  That's a tall order.  Guess what, I failed.  Then money got shut off long before I expected, the best deal on a room cost me a ton, but it was during a full pandemic shutdown mode.  I did manage to write a 250 page ebook during that time, and sold 50 copies inexpensively.  But I had banking issues, couldn't get my online store fully functional, and now I'm back close to where I was 90 days ago, financially.  Failure.  

I don't know anyone else that has started a business, and had a cash flow they could live off of in 90 days, but I couldn't manage it.  What I have learned from years of "failing" and successes, like throwing pottery on a wheel in high school, and years of learning freestyle tricks on my bike, is that the next step is what matters.  I've learned to get back up and keep going after a "failure," no matter how big or small.  I do my best to turn it into a learning experience.  Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.  But in the long run, persistence usually pays off at some point.  Keep on keeping on.  That's where I'm at... after a BIG learning experience.  And hey, I've been wanting to write an actual book my whole life.  OK, it was electronic, and not earth shattering by any means.  But 250 pages qualifies, I've written my first book.  So in a big "failure," a kernel of future success, perhaps.  Onward.

The craziest vintage bike photos I've found in the archives...

I just found this photo in December, I think.  I have no idea where he was supposed to land, but obviously, he didn't make it.  And how 'bout the kink in the ramp, pretty gnarly.  Early 1900's crazy man.

I'm pretty sure this is either a circus performer, or a daredevil who went around doing this loop.  The circus idea comes from the rigging and rope nets to crash into, circus people knew how to do those things.  There are 3 or 4 different photos of this loop and set up, and I think it's from 1910-1920 era.

Old School street riding, really old school.  This is a safety bike, a penny farthing design, but with the little wheel in front to make it safer to ride.  The inventor rode it down the U.S. Capitol steps, in the 1890's, I believe, to prove how much easier this bike was to ride, than the standard penny farthing.

I think this is from the 1930's to 1950's era, and I found it deep in some public domain files.  Cool idea.  Don't be surprised if someone brings this idea back to life, just on a beefier sprocket. 

Ow.  Just OW.  Not only does this take strength and balance, but it had to hurt his head like crazy.  Don't try this at home, especially if you're drunk.  (Unless your friends are shooting video, anyhow). 

Mega ramp, 1904 or 1905.  This one actually had a date.  This looks to be a 20 to 25 foot gap, and a pretty well built ramp.  Keep in mind, though, that these bikes were all made with what we call "mild steel" not chromoly.  He's hucking this gap on a bike that you could snap riding off a loading dock one time, and he's doing it without a helmet, without an emergency room to go to afterward, and without a Red Bull video budget.  Gnarly.

This is from around 1910, I think.  Look close at the back rim, there seems to be a flat spot.  Let's put this nutcase in perspective:  It took about 105 years, MUCH stronger bikes, and Morgan Wade, for this trick to be repeated.  This guys balls must have clanged when he walked.  In-freakin'-sane.  

Hope you enjoyed this look back at the crazy bike riders of your grandparents and great-grandparents day.  

I just finished my 363 page ebook about freestyle in the early 1980's.  It's called Freestyle BMX Tales: Idaho Dork to Industry Guy.  The ebook (aka digital file, not a dead tree book), has several of my most popular blog posts about the era from 1982 to 1986, when I got into BMX and freestyle, and freestyle itself was just turning into a sport.  It's costs $3.43 (+ applicable taxes), and is available in my brand new online store.  Check it out at the link below:

WPOS Kreative (Freestyle BMX Tales ebook)

 

2-Hip BHIP- The 1988 2-Hip contest season video

 This video came out in early spring of 1989, and was the 7th BMX freestyle video I directed or edited.

When it came time to put the first official 2-Hip contest season video together for the 1988 season, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me if I wanted to edit the video.  Yeah, that surprised me, too.  But to put it in context, this happened in early 1989.  Eddie Roman, who I credit with really starting the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle, was still working on Aggroman at the time, so he wasn't really known as a video producer yet.  I had been working at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, for over a year.  I just got tapped as the Unreel cameraman that spring, after our old cameraman, Pat Wallace, moved on to a better job.  Pat's the guy who shot all the contest footage in this video.  

I had produced six videos for the AFA in 1987, and then got hired at Unreel.  So from Ron's point of view, I was a rider and a video guy who could do the job, and work cheap.  Cheap was $500 for logging hours and hours of footage, picking the best shots, and then editing it all together on Unreel's S-VHS system and getting a duplication master tape made.  My bosses at Unreel were cool with loaning me the S-VHS edit system to do a side project, which was way cool of them.  I think it took 3 or 4weeks of working nights, after working at Unreel during the day, to get this done.  Ron got music from Bob Haro and the The Bohemians to use in the video.  When I ran out of that music, I recorded myself drumming beats on a phone book and a little metal can full of thumb tacks.  Hey, it was a low budget video, I was on a deadline, and it worked.  

The intro part with Kevin Martin calling Ron, and then carrying the ramp pieces, was their idea, and the 2-Hip crew shot all those parts, and gave me the footage.  I didn't really like the idea, but they did, and it was their video.  The biggest thing to explain about making a low budget BMX freestyle video in 1989 was that nobody had really done it yet.  Mark Eaton had made Dorkin' in York, which was really sketchy VHS footage of incredible riding by Kevin Jones, Mark, and the York crew.  The riding was insane but the video quality sucked.  Like all of us, Mark was working with no budget, and in his case, two VCR's to edit it.  I hadn't see that video at the time I made this one.  Eddie Roman was working on Aggroman, which was like a super low budget BMX and Kung Fu movie, shot on video.  That came out soon after this video.  The "real" freestyle videos of that era were the BMX company sponsored videos, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to make.  The main ones were the BMX Plus videos, and GT Bikes video GT-V.  Those were all shot and edited on pro level equipment, but by people who were industrial video producers, not freestylers.  They had great technical quality, and good riding, but they also had guys wearing leathers and helmets to ride flatland. 

There was no playbook for us low budget guys at the time.  There was no standard way to make a low budget freestyle video then.  This was one of the first rider-made videos ever.  So it it kinda sucked in a lot of ways, but the riding was great for the time period.  AND, this video had the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in it.  Street riding competitions were brand new when that footage was shot, and a lot of freestylers watched that section over and over, and then headed out to street ride in their towns.  

Unlike the AFA videos I directed, which sold about 25 or 30 copies each, this video sold a few hundred that first year, I think.  Also, it was watched by most of the freestylers around at the time.  Originally we called it 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure,  but it got tagged 2-Hip BHIP sometime later, and 2-Hip just kept selling copies of this video for years, when people ordered T-shirts or other things.  Then, for the 1989 contest series video, Ron Wilkerson asked Eddie Roman to make the video.  Eddie was his normal weird, creative self, and made an awesome video called Ride like a Man, in early 1990.  That's when the low-budget, rider-made freestyle movement really got going.  

When I finished this video, I got Ron Wilkerson the master tape, and a duplication master (so he wouldn't wear out the original when he got copies made, and he gave me a check for $500.  My little sister was heading off to college soon after that.  So, being the good (and stupid) brother that I was, I got a money order for $500, and sent it all to her.  She's been a teacher in North Carolina for many years now.  Here are the remaining segments of the video, except the street part, I'm going to do another blog post about that. 

2-Hip BHIP- Part 3

2-Hip BHIP- Part 4

2-Hip BHIP- Part 5

2-Hip BHIP-Part 6

2-Hip BHIP- Part 7

2-Hip BHIP-Part 8

 My online store, WPOS Kreative, is being rebuilt, and will open for business soon.  Check it out...

A talk about original thinkers that's actually interesting to original thinkers

I was taking a break from a writing project this morning, and wanted to listen to "something smart."  So I searched Ted Talks.  Plenty of  "smart" in TED talks, and a fair amount of dumb, too, in some cases.  This was the first one that popped up, the algorithm's pick from my recent searches.  Actually the first one that popped up was a TED Talk called, "Let's Talk About Porn."  I'm like, "I haven't looked up any porn recently, this algorithm must be female, she's bringing up shit from a while back."  But Porn didn't sound like a topic I wanted to hear a Ted Talk about right now.  So I looked at  the videos in the side bar, and this one was first. 

Initially, I wanted to skip it, thinking, "I'm already an original thinker."  I spent my childhood thinking up all kinds of amazing ideas, and then not acting on any of them.  Classic daydreamer with low self-esteem.  Then, I got into BMX freestyle at age 16, and a couple of years later, had this idea to start a zine.  It seemed an interesting enough idea, that I stuck with it, and actually published my first BMX freestyle zine.  It really sucked.  But I met a bunch of really good freestylers in the San Francisco Bay Area because of it.  They thought it was halfway decent.  So I made another one the next month.  And the next month.  M zines got better, I did 11 issues, got written up in FREESTYLIN' magazine, and then hired to work at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  The first zine, one of the first ideas I actually stuck with, changed the course of my life... for the better. 

I became a part of the BMX industry, and was suddenly surrounded by guys who had lots of cool ideas, and then acted on some of those ideas.  BMX, and especially BMX freestyle, was super entrepreneurial in those early days.  I met Bob Osborn, Scot Breithaupt, R.L. Osborn, Bob Morales, Bob Haro, Don Hoffman, Chris Moeller, Rick Moliterno, Spike Jonze, Brad McDonald, Steve Crandall, and many others.  Being around people like that, acting on my ideas became a natural thing after a while.

My point is, despite my lack of financial success, I've done a lot of cool shit over the years.  A TED Talk about "original thinkers," didn't seem all that interesting at first.  But I gave it a shot.  This is actually a really great talk, and this guy's really funny, and a good speaker, as well.  Check it out. 

How I sold 80 major pieces of art, starting without a dime, while homeless

Sumatran tiger I drew in late 2018, for my first First Friday Art Walk in Richmond, Virginia.  18" X 24", I sold it last spring.  I love this one, I need to draw more animals at some point.  #sharpiescribblestyle

by Steve Emig, #sharpiescribblestyle

My life up until late 2015 is a really long, and ridiculously crazy story.  It may or may not involve aliens, sasquatch, government conspiracies, taxi driving, time travel, the American Gladiators, BMX freestylers, pro skateboarders, porn stars, and circus clowns.  Whatever the true story, by late 2015, I was 49 years old, and living with my mom, in a small two bedroom apartment, in Kernersville, North Carolina.  I couldn't find a "real job," despite three big pushes to do so, and filling out over 140 applications in the area.  That was something I'd never had happen, so I was pretty baffled by the complete shut-out on the job front.  I got hired for every single job I ever applied for, up until age 28, and most of those I  applied for after that.  Whatever the case, another means of making money was in order.

My mom and I didn't get along when I was a kid, and 40-some years later, the living environment still had a Chernobyl level of toxicity.  I was pretty miserable, and needed to find some way to make some kind of money.  I did the guy things around the apartment, and drove her to doctor's appointments and on six hour shopping expeditions regularly.  But the only thing that made me any money was doing an occasional Sharpie scribble style drawing of a kid's name, usually for a mom at our church, or sometimes drawing a cartoon character for a friend of of friend's kid.  Here's one of those you'll recognize.

Cowabunga dude!

Now, like a lot of moms out there, my mom has issues.  We're talking more issues than the  magazine rack at Barnes & Noble.  She also has a wall of denial when it comes to admitting those.  I'm not talking about a brick wall, more like a ten foot thick wall of steel reinforced concrete, covered by a foot of chromoly steel, covered by Teflon.  Nothing penetrates that wall.  Yes, that's a horrible thing to say about my mom.  But it's true.  And yes, I have plenty of my own issues.  The main difference is that I spent 25+ years of my adult life working through most of my issues.  My mom never saw the point in that.

The other thing to note is that my mom got progressively worse at handling money as she aged.  She spent her Social Security check, more than enough to live comfortably on, within three days of getting it, each month.  When she needed money the other 27 or 28 days, she came up with really bad ideas to come up with some.  Those ideas usually started with selling some overpriced kitchen machine she bought on QVC 2 or 3 months earlier.  The ideas quickly went downhill from there.  It was ridiculous. 

If I made any money in any way, my mom would nag me until I confessed the exact amount.  The next day some "crisis" would come up that desperately needed that exact amount of money.  If I had $23, a crisis popped up that needed exactly $23.  If my mom knew I had $1.76, a crisis popped up, usually involving chocolate, that needed exactly $1.76.  As if living in Kernersville, North Carolina, as a long time Californian actions sports guy, wasn't bad enough, living in those conditions made it ultra-miserable.  But my mom's a good cook, so I tolerated it.  It was a classic case of justifying staying in a toxic situation that already had put me on depression meds.  I had to find a way to make my own money, and get out of that situation.

The first Bruce Lee drawing I did, my Sharpie scribble style take on a Bruce Lee stencil.  Drawing this changed the course of my life.

One night, in November 2015, I decided to focus on trying to make money with my Sharpie art.  I put a few of my earlier drawings in that last post, and as you can tell, they were alright, maybe, but a long way from great.  I knew I needed to step up my art game.  Step 1 was simply to ask myself, "What would I want to put on my wall?"  I sat down at my mom's computer, it was faster than my $65 refurbished HP laptop, which was still running Windows XP.  For 2 1/2 hours, I looked at all kinds of art online.  I started with some classics, like Monet, Renoir, Degas, daVinci, Michelangelo (the artist, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), and others.  Great painters, but they don't do much for me.  I looked at some 20th century people, like Picasso, M.C. Escher, Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, and such.  Pretty cool, buy not what I wanted on my wall.

I spent most of the time that night looking at graffiti and street art, because that's the stuff that gets me psyched.  I checked out Banksy, Shephard Fairey, the early New York graff writers, big wall bombs, urban murals, and much more.  Being a BMX/skateboard guy, I also looked Bob Haro's BMX drawings, sticker and T-shirt designs, at skateboard graphics, like Marc McKee's epic World Industries deck art.  I also looked up my former FREESTYLIN' magazine boss, Andy Jenkins, I love his old Wrench Pilot comics.  Finally,  I found a simple stencil of Bruce Lee.  He was my first hero as a 5-year-old kid in Ohio, shortly before his untimely death.  Yeah, I wanted to draw my version of that Bruce Lee stencil, and put that on my wall, so I did.  That's it above.

Cam Newton's infamous Superman pose, done in my Sharpie scribble style.  One of my first paid drawings, from early 2016.

That's how it started, drawing a Bruce Lee drawing, in my style, for my own wall.  Since that night night in late 2015.  I've drawn over 100 original drawings, most of  them were 18" X 24", and took 30 to 45 hours each, to draw.  I've sold over 80 of those originals, and over 120 smaller copies of drawings in the four years since. Most of the other 20 drawings were given away, a few were lost in my travels.  My Sharpie scribble style artwork is now hanging on walls in 10 or more U.S. states, several countries in Europe and Scandinavia, Australia, Taiwan, and even Russia.  In the last six months, while homeless, my art has sold on 5 of the 7 continents.  That's crazy.  I wondered if I could even sell one drawing, when I first started back then.  I'm currently looking for buyers in Africa and Antarctica, so if you know any, email me.  I need to get art on those other two continents.

I started in November 2015 with a bunch of Sharpies, a dollar store pad of sketch paper, my crappy, slow laptop, and a little card table in my bedroom, to work on.  I literally didn't have a dime to my name.  Not even a penny, actually, because of the mom situation.  I had no reputation as a visual artist at all.  Hell, I didn't think of myself as a visual artist for about two more years.

So how did I manage to sell 80 major pieces of art, starting with nothing, while homeless most of the time, in four years?  Here are the steps I took to make that happen.

- In 2008, after some really tough times, I was unemployed and living with my parents in Kernersville.  The taxi industry went downhill until I could no longer make money, and I was homeless for a year in SoCal, before I took up my family's offer, to go live with them a while.  As fate would have it, I went to North Carolina in November 2008, right when the economy was collapsing, and jobs were nearly impossible to find.

Once there, I started blogging about my times in the 1980's BMX freestyle world.  I had no intention of ever becoming a working artist at that point.  I was depressed, had time on my hands, and started writing little stories about things that happened as a rider, and an industry guy, in that world.  Within a few weeks, I began to re-connect with a lot of old school BMX friends, and met new ones online.  I became a part of the Old School BMX freestyle community online.  At the time, I was such a Luddite, I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online.

-I blogged consistently, mostly because I liked doing it, and partly because I was bored and had lots of time.  I had no one with similar interests to talk to in NC, so it was also good connecting with old friends online.  I also had a computer (my parents' desktop) with the internet, for the first time in my life.  Because no one else in the world was really blogging about Old School BMX stuff, I wound up with the two top Old School BMX blogs in the world.  I became #1 in my niche, worldwide, without trying to.  I was just writing about things that were interesting to me.  I gained a steady following, with my main blog getting 3,000 or so page views a month. That's not stellar in the blogosphere, but it my little niche, it was really good.

-One day in 2009, someone, I can't remember who, emailed me and said, "You know, people actually make money with blogs, right?"  I didn't know that.  I was in my own little world, my only social life in NC was online, and I didn't know anything about the larger blogging world.  I did know, from working doing zines, and working at magazines and a newsletter, that I'm a writer at heart.  But I had no idea how to be a writer in the 2009, 21st century, internet enabled world.

-So I started learning, self-educating.  That's how the vast majority of practical, real world, viable learning takes place in today's world.  Over the 10+ years since, I watched thousands of YouTube videos, how-to's, TED Talks, and keynote speeches by guys like Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many others.  I signed up for email lists to get free ebooks about internet marketing.  I couldn't afford to buy the brand new ebooks, but many internet marketers would give away their old ones for free, to get you on their mailing list.  I read a bunch of those.  I began to learn about the larger blogging world, building/serving online communities, search engine optimization (SEO), why tags matter, and all the basic ins and outs of blogging, and later various forms of social media.

-Years later, when I sat down to look at all the art on the computer in November 2015, as I mentioned above, I asked myself one simple question, "What drawing would I want to put up on my own wall?"  It turned out to be that simple Bruce Lee drawing above.

Kurt Cobain drawing, which was used as an online flyer, which I did for my first little art show at Earshot Music, a great, old school record/music shop in Winston-Salem, NC,in November 2017.  This drawing sold a hour after being put up on the wall, the night before the show.  I stepped up my game with this drawing, and it led to selling dozens of musician drawings, nearly all commissions, since.

-I made a commitment, that night in November 2015, to focus on making money with my Sharpie art, no matter what.  Full commitment.  This is probably the most important step on this list.  While art seems like a lame way to try to make a living when you're already broke, I had no other option that seemed to give me more hope.  It wasn't that I said, "Hey, I want to be a famous artist,"  it was simply the only thing I did then that made me a little bit of money now and then.  So I doubled down on that.

-I put a photo of that Bruce Lee drawing on my Facebook page, where I interacted with a bunch of my blog followers from my BMX blogs.  I asked if anyone would like me to draw them something.  In internet marketing terms, I had already become a well known, and reasonably respected member of an online community, and I offered my service to that community.  This is the game in the 21st century.  Create a community, or become a known member of one that already exists, and serve that community.

-I offered to draw pictures CHEAP.  Another key.  When you're just starting, make it worth someone taking a shot on you.  I originally did 12" X 18 drawings for $20 I think.  Maybe $25.  Those drawings took me 12 to 15 hours to do then.  So I was drawing for $1-$2 an hour.  That sounds horrible, I know.  But...1) I was unemployed, couldn't get hired for any job in my area (for whatever reasons), so I would be sitting around watching TV, and getting nagged by my mom, if I was not drawing.  2) I was getting paid something to draw pictures.  That's an improvement.

Me with a Jimi Hendrix drawing I did for a couple who wound up buying 9 drawings from me.  In the photo, I'm in the Gallery at 625, part of Winston-Salem's cool Trade Street art scene.

-I drew the one or two pictures people ordered, and I put photos of them on my blog, and on Facebook, the main social media platform I used then.  I showed my readers/friends I was doing art.  If I didn't have a paid drawing to do, I drew something else I wanted to draw, and put photos of that drawing up on my blog and Facebook, and asked for more orders.  They began to trickle in.

-In early 2016, I did a Go Fund Me campaign to raise $1,000.  I didn't have Paypal then, people were actually sending me checks by snail mail for drawings.  I offered drawings to everyone on Go Fund Me.  I wasn't really asking for donations, I was asking to draw picture for people for a slightly higher price, and telling them I was working on turning my Sharpie art into a business.  My plan was to get $1,000 in a couple weeks, buy the basic supplies I needed, get a business bank account, and become a legit little art business.  What actually happened is that the Go Fund Me campaign helped encouraged people to let me draw them something.  It also worked as an order taking and payment website.  Two people had me do several drawings for them, one old school BMX friend, and one new Facebook friend, also an Old School BMXer.  The drawings I did then were 18" X 24" drawings, that took 20 to 25 hours, for $50 each.

In effect, Go Fund Me became my art business website for a while.  I started getting consistent orders, and I got enough work so that I was drawing, every single day, for four months.  I was also making a little money while doing it.  It was far from a real living, but I became a "working artist" during those four months.  One big problem with artists is that they think, "my piece took me 20 hours, it MUST be worth $250."  Or whatever price.  News flash, Your art is worth what someone will pay for it, right now.  Period.  Every product, especially art by an unknown artist, needs to be marketed to find an audience.  I knew this, and I knew I was in it for the long haul.  So I was more interested in actually selling art, even if I sold it cheap, then drawing something that looked cool, but sat in my bedroom for a year.  One more thing...

Not one single person that bought a drawing from me, for $50 in 2016, has complained that I now charge $400 for the same size drawing.  People like it when their artwork goes up in value, even if that had nothing to do with why they bought it.

-Because of the sketchy money situation with my mom, which I wrote about above, I could not re-invest the little bit of money I made, to give me any chance of actually getting ahead.  Every dime I made was needed for some "emergency."  So I left my mom's house, and moved into a patch of woods in nearby Winston-Salem.  I simply had no other housing options, no friends with spare rooms to rent cheap, or couches to surf.  That's a really extreme measure, and it sucked, but in my particular case, it was the only way I could get off on my own, and earn some money for myself.  The job market was so terrible there, that there was no chance at all of me getting a good paying "real job."  So I slept in a tent in the woods, scrounged money for food and bus fare, and kept drawing at libraries or McDonald's, all day, every day... for months. Three weeks after moving into the woods, I started a brand new blog, bringing my BMX stories, my Sharpie art, and my thoughts on the economy and the future (longtime geeky hobby of mine), into one blog.  

-One day a couple of hippy guys were stoned and eating at McDonald's, while I drew one of my pictures at a nearby table.  They told me I should show my drawings to the guys at a record shop across the street.  I knew the shop existed, but hadn't been in there.  "Your drawing is way better than the art on their walls right now," the one guy said.  So I took their advice.  I went to the shop, and showed my work to the manager.  He said to come back the next day to see the owner, so I did.  He liked my drawings, and called up the woman who handled art displays for the shop, they showed off work by local artists.  They put two of my drawings up before long, which got a good response.  That led to me doing a small show at Earshot music a couple months later, as soon as I could draw 8 big pieces.  That little show led to six drawings selling quickly, for $120 each.  It also led to many commissions, and I was suddenly drawing all day, nearly every day, one paid drawing right after another.  I also got an artist's profile in the local newspaper.

Dr Maya Angelou lived the last 30 or 40 years of her life in Winston-Salem. So when I was asked to do a drawing for the front window of a gallery, for Black History month(even though I'm a white guy), she was the obvious choice.  Dr. Angelou's only niece, and archivist, now has a print of this drawing in the Maya Angelou collection.

-In the winter of 2017-2018, I managed to finally make it down to the First Friday Art Walk in Winston-Salem's Trade Street art district.  It's a great little creative scene, and I met a few people and showed them my drawings.  One woman was really excited by my stuff, and I soon had drawings on the walls of her studio in the art scene, as well as at the record shop.  She priced me stuff higher, and they didn't sell often, but I kept busy with commissions from the record shop and personal contacts, and occasionally online. While I built my name as an artist online, having works hanging locally in the studio and the music shop, got attention from local people.  One guy became a collector of my works, buying four drawings.  Another couple bought one, then went on to commission eight more.  Return customers are big in selling art, I learned.

 -Unfortunately, my blog posts about the economy and managed to piss off some of the good ol' boys in that area.  The people who run North Carolina really don't believe in the whole freedom of speech idea, you know, that right that  all Americans have because we simply exist.  Hey, The South is still The South in many ways, so I got a lot of pressure put on me, and wound up leaving Winston-Salem and catching a bus as far as I could afford to, which happened to be Richmond, Virginia. Richmond has a ton of murals, and a larger, and more  spread out, group of art scenes, than Winston-Salem.  I had to really struggle to survive while in Richmond, still homeless, but I kept drawing daily, and sold most of my drawings on Facebook, though 3 or 4 wound up in Richmond galleries.

This "Tainted Love/Harley Quinn/Joker drawing is my personal favorite of the 100+ original drawings I've done from 2015-2020.  I did it for the Earshot Music show, but it it didn't sell.  I planned to keep it for myself, but wound up having to sell it cheap, in Richmond, to get a motel room, after a 7 day hospital stay, due mostly to being given a medicine I turned out to be really allergic to. 

In April of 2019, an old friend from the BMX world paid my way back to California, and gave me a room to stay in.  The plan was to help him promote, and drive traffic to, a new online business he had started.  Ultimately, that turned into a job that really needed a full scale digital marketing firm to accomplish.  I wasn't the right guy for that job, and we didn't have the budget needed for the quick and big results required.  With no real income, I went back out to the streets, this time "back home," in the L.A./Orange County area.  I lived in SoCal, mostly in and around Huntington Beach, for 21 years, most of my adult life.  I still making some money drawing, but not enough to rent a room full time, and really get a business off the ground.  Being homeless through most of this time period, I just wasn't able to raise money to actually start a business, stabilize my life, and get on to more and better work.  I've done drawings mostly for other people, while doing an idea of mine when I could find the time.  This drawing of Biggie was a photo I wanted to draw for quite a while, and finally did.  It sold in a few days.

 Biggie Smalls, The Notorious B.I.G., lookin' Brooklyn, in this famous shot that I drew.  This is another of my personal favorites of all the drawings I've done.

Four years after I committed to do whatever it took to start making money with my Sharpie art, I'm still not actually making a living.  On the other hand, I'm back in California, I have this huge body of work that I've done, nearly all online where anyone can check it out, and friend from years past has let me stay in a spare bedroom for a while, giving me a chance to take things to the next level.  I haven't even begun promote my work in Southern California, I'm still unknown here, outside the old School BMX world.  Along the way, I got really good at content creation, and pretty good at marketing online and on social media platforms.

 Four years ago, I would never have imagined selling as many drawings as I actually have. 

On one hand, you can write me off and say, "Hey, Steve's just some loser who draws other people's photos, and is too lazy to get a "real job."  You can say that because these last four years have not been financially successful for me, and I've spent most of the time homeless.  Keep in mind, I started without a dime, in a small town in rural North Carolina.  It wasn't a hotbed of the art world.  

Or, you can check out nearly all of my drawings in these 23 posts ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 the later ones are best) on my personal blog, and you can see why I am now known for being a Sharpie artist.  You can search "Steve Emig Sharpie art" or my main hashtag, "#sharpiescribblestyle" on Google images.  Or search the hashtag on Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter.  Over four years, I slowly, but steadily, built a new reputation as a pretty good, and completely unique Sharpie artist.  I didn't build that reputation by drawing 100 Sharpie pictures.  I built that reputation through content creation, in blogs and using social media.  AND... I actually sold over 80 original pieces, and over 100 copies of my work.  Not a lot of artists can say that.  I managed to make that happen, even in ridiculous conditions.

When it comes down to it, I sold 80 major pieces of art, most that took a week or more, each, to draw.  I did that because I made a commitment to do it, and every day I did the work needed to survive that situation I was in, focus most of my time on creating something, and then promoted myself and my work in my blog, and on other platforms.  I created content, day after day, to show what I could do, and I asked people if I could draw them something.

My situation is still super sketchy (no pun intended) financially.  But now I have a huge body of work.  It's online, and on social platforms, where people can easily see it and check it out.  I've sold the majority of the pieces I've created, including most of the ones I originally did for myself.  I'm a much better artist, technically, then I was four years ago.  I'm in a much better physical location, for me, Southern California compared to Kernersville, North Carolina, than I was four years ago.

Four years ago, I started drawing pictures, without a dime to my name, living in an absolutely horrible situation, in a place I couldn't stand to live, and these 100+ drawings are what I have to show for four crazy years.  I can live with that.

It's safe to say, nearly everyone reading this is in a better situation, with more resources, than I was in back in late 2015.  My question to you is, what can you do in four years, if you focus on what's really important to you?

I'm looking for places to workshops to teach how I managed to sell 80 pieces of art, and how you can use my ideas to help you sell your artwork.  If you're interested in a workshop, or know a good (and super cheap) place I could do a workshop, email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com , or hit me up on Facebook (Steve Emig).

World War III is a bad idea... just sayin'

Bruce Srpingsteen, in a performance from my teenage years, covering a song that was written when he was 20, and I'm sharing it for today's teenagers, as a madman in the White House puts everybody's lives in the world at stake.  Do we really need to play out this stupid scenario yet again?  #nowariniran

"War.  What it is good for?  Absolutely nothing.  Say it again..."

-Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, 1969

When the world gets crazy, step up to meet it.  It's getting crazy...

 My Sharpie drawing I did recently, as I watched the stupidity of our world build.  #sharpiescribblestyle

Photos from the L.A. Blue Line Train- part#2

 Palm trees over the hood.  Near Watts, I think.

 Not straight outta it, just passing through.  There are brand new, quite nice looking, apartments in Compton, right next to the train.  Looks a lot different than old rap videos from the train.

 Tiled mural at the Compton train station.

 Used to be a church.  Apparently God moved out a while back.  Downtown L.A..

 High end condo tower in the background, homeless person tarped domecile in the foreground.  Both end of the spectrum.

 The new towers going up in downtown.

I got a better shot of the  Kawhi Leonard mural on the way back up there New Year's Eve.  Photos by me, Steve Emig

Photos from the L.A. Blue Line Train-part 1

With the offer of a room to stay in in Newport Beach, and the end of the month/year/decade coming up, I needed to move my small amount of stuff to Newport.  This involved two trips up and back on buses and trains.  The Red Line and Blue Line trains, and two buses in Long Beach and Orange County.  So I packed the backpack, a shopping bag, and skateboard decks (for art), and made the trek the two days before the New Year.    So here's me looking stupid on the Blue Line train. 

 Colored leaves, through the train window.  Downtown L.A.

Not Glen Plake.  Train rider with a red Mohawk.  7th & Metro station under L.A.

 New skyscrapers going up, downtown L.A.

Kawhi Leonard mural, heading for the hoop.

 L.A. skyline from the Blu Line.

Mural in South Central L.A. area.  Photos by me, Steve Emig.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker movie premiere-

Did mention I was at the premiere of the new Star Wars movie that just happened?  Yeah, I was there... right out in front on of the Kodak Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard, trying to sell art skate decks.  I didn't sell any that night, and the other vendors didn't sell much either.  The whole block of Hollywood and Highland was blocked off, and there was a huge white tent right on Hollywood Blvd. Everyone coming to the premiere entered the tent at the end of the block, and there were bars and things to see, and places to hang out inside it.  All of that was hidden from view from tourists and people walking by. 

I worked at the company that did the lights and red carpeting for most of the movie premieres back in the late 90's, and I worked at a couple of them.  But this Star Wars premiere was HUGE.  They probably spent a million bucks just on that event, it was insane and took over the whole area.  And Hollywood boulevard is a really expensive area to take over. Here's a few pics from that night.

As all the celebrities, and people invited to the premiere, left the big tent, and they had to cross this open area, basically to walk across the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard.  The little tented thing above is the tent over the sidewalk, which had to be kept open for tourists and everyday people.  So the guards would block off the sidewalk for a few minutes, and the dignitaries at the premiere would walk through, into another tent leading up to the entrance of the Kodak Theater.  So this is tourists, phones in the air, trying to see and get photos of famous people walking by.  Somebody said Adam Driver walked by about the time I snapped this shot.  Woooo.  Famous people.  Whatever.

Here's my little set up, earlier in the evening, trying to sell my two Harley Quinn fan art skate decks.  I got a lot of interest, several people commented on them, but none were ready to throw down money.  The guys just past me were selling bracelets with names on them.  You can see the big tent, that all the premiere attendees went through, on the left.

 Here's a huge canvas, an original painting of an orangutan getting glammed up, left on the boulevard by the artist.  I saw another canvas by this artist a couple days earlier.  Some guy was standing next to it, so I figured that was the artist.  In my time hanging out and selling (or usually not selling) art on Hollywood blvd., I made friends with several of the "characters."  People, some kids from the hood just trying to make money, and some actors looking to make extra cash, dress up as well known characters, and take photos with tourists for tips.  So I got to know Edward Scissorhands and Freddy Krueger pretty well, along with a few others.  Both thought my artwork was pretty cool. 

Anyhow, the night of the Star Wars premiere, Freddy told me this artist was painting these huge canvases, and just leaving them on Hollywood boulevard for some one to pick up and take home for free.  A little free marketing to promote his work, I guess.  So these huge canvases, like five feet high and twelve feet long, just sat there.  This one, and the one below, Freddy said, had been sitting there for three days.

This painting, of zebras fucking in the rain, was sitting about 30 feet from where the tourists were watching for celebrities.  Obviously, it's hard to miss a twelve foot long painting of zebras fucking, and lots of people were checking it out, it was getting all kinds of reactions.  Later in the evening, maybe 10:00 pm or so, a couple of young women, maybe 19 or 20 years old, were checking this out and taking selfies in front of it.  The two were dolled up, high heels and all, out with their boyfriends for the evening. 

I told them, "Hey, the artist left this here for someone to take home, it's free.  I said that to several people that night, just joking around.  Much to my surprise, the two girls just looked at each other, picked this huge painting up, and walked down the street with it.  They were both maybe 5'2", and the huge painting dwarfed them, and they were in high heels.  But they decided they needed fucking zebras on their living room wall, and just walked off with the painting.  It was pretty funny to watch. 

About ten minutes later, some young guy who panhandles there, asked where the painting went.  For a minute, I thought he was the artist.  I told him that I told some girls it was free, and they walked off with it.  He was pissed.  "Man, I was trying to sell that thing."  What can I say, Hollywood boulevard is a weird place.  It's actually as crazy as Venice Beach these days, I think, maybe crazier.  You never know what you'll see there.

I still haven't seen the new Star Wars movie.  Or the one before that, for that matter.  Maybe I'll get the chance.

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.

Some of my memes - 12/22/2019