My favorite bands are mostly punk bands, the music I listen to most often, are bands like Social Distortion, The Descendents, and Face to Face, and several others. But when I'm in a creative mood, actually working on creative projects, I listen to this entire concert of the Lilith Fair in 1997. I've watched and listened to this dozens and dozens of times. This is one of the best documentaries on creativity I know.
"Writing's so bizarre. I think that's why it's so fulfilling. It's like you're... you're making something out of nothing."
To be able to reach into the void, to literally stretch your soul out into that other dimension, and bring out something new, something you think the world needs, to breathe life into it, and set that creative piece on its journey into the physical world, that is the work of an artist. And that work requires every bit as much dedication as that of a doctor, or a soldier, to do it well, and do it consistently. An artist, a poet of life, may not fight battles with guns, but we are always fighting battles.
While in North Carolina, three years ago, living in a tent in the woods, and drawing my Sharpie art day after day, fighting the darkness of the deep shadows of the worst aspects of Old Southern Culture, it seemed like I was planting flowers in Hell. I wondered if it was all worthwhile many times, like when I was hunkered down, under a tarp, inside my tent, as a Carolina thunderstorm raged around me, thinking about drawing at the library the next day. One day I realized, if you plant enough flowers in Hell, it doesn't feel like Hell anymore. That is our work as artists.
To keep trying, keep creating, to build our technical skills, and learn our own creative process, to bring new things, new creative works, new ideas, into the world. That is our job. If you dedicate yourself to that over the long term, you eventually build up the drive to keep going no matter what forces of the evil parts of the everyday human world throw at you, or our own fears and personal demons we may be wrestling with.
That is our job. We light matches in the darkness and create new lights to share and pass around and light new paths. To do that, we must be sensitive to the creative sparks and the nuances, but also build a toughness to break past the doubters and haters. At this point, if you put me in front of a firing squad, condemned to die a moment later by the executioners' guns, I'd write a haiku on the spot and recite it, as my last work in this world.
You pull the trigger
Sending lead death to end me
A poem comes, I win
Sometimes it takes that level of dogged dedication to be an artist. History would forget the names of the firing squad members, and the leader who told them to shoot. But that poem, that haiku would be written down and remembered, I guarantee it.
Yes, sometimes it takes that level of dedication to your creative work to be an artist. Most of the time it does not, thankfully. But there is a dedication to being a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a songwriter, a musician, a dancer, a content creator, a director, a producer, an inventor, a graphic designer, whatever. You may not face the firing squad for your creative work, but you face days of creating crap, you face your insecurities, your personal bad habits, your doubts, your mom's doubts, your dad's doubts, everybody's doubts. You face moments, even days, where it doesn't seem to be working.
And then... that spark comes, from somewhere. That next right idea that you need to create. But the spark is the just that, the spark, it is not the poem, the song, the play, the finished work. Then comes the dedication that you've built over time, the work to take that creative spark and form it with your technical skills, into the piece of art to share with others.
Some pieces of art may be instant hits, going viral in your genre' to be admired and to inspire many people in a short amount of time. Other pieces may not receive much initial excitement at all. They may sit out there in the world, seemingly unnoticed, for months or years. But in that time, in their place, those pieces inspire one person here, and another there. And years later someone thanks you for creating that piece or work you'd long forgotten about. It did have a purpose, it was needed in the world at the time you created it. Maybe that "failure" ultimately inspired entire new people and new ideas while you went on, busy elsewhere. You never know.
There is a reason we are driven to create something. Sometimes it's just for our own survival. Sometimes we just need to get out of our everyday mindset and goof around, and make something to keep our own spirits up. Sometimes we create a gift for someone dear to us, to help them through a dark time. Sometimes we create a piece of art that speaks to many, many people. Sometimes we may create something that seems like no big deal at the time, but it sparks a whole new genre' of creativity in other people. Sometimes we may create a work that speaks to our times, and helps drive a major, needed, a change in society itself.
We never know, as artists what effect a certain piece will have. Our job is to actually live life, and to learn and grow as artists, to dedicate ourselves to doing the best work we can, as we journey through life. Our job is to learn our own creative process, to follow our our weird path, to build our technical skills, and to drop everything and create that next piece of work when the spark hits us.
The world of humans needs our work, even if it may not seem like it at the time. The world needs us, as artists, no many how many mean and seemingly evil people (most of whom are blocked artists themselves) may try to destroy us. The world needs new creative pieces of work, new ideas, of all kinds, constantly. The world needs you to create. Do your best to hold up your end of the bargain. Keep creating.
Become
You must risk
If you're to succeed
From when we grow
Sometimes we bleed
Each must climb
Over the fence
For the only cage
Is ignorance
Each Jedi Knight
And Shaolin monk
Evolved from
A lowly punk
Don't get caught
In the world's throws
We must become
Our own heroes
-The White Bear
(aka me, Steve Emig)
A couple of memes I made a while back, on the idea of creativity...
This is the version of the 2-Hip Meet the Street comp that I edited for the 2-Hip season video. That video is now on YouTube as 2-Hip BHIP. This was the first street contest most of us remember, though Dave Vanderspek put on one or to regional street comps in NorCal earlier.
Everybody was looking forward to this contest at the time, because we had no idea what was going to happen. Dave Vanderspek and Eddie Roman were known as street riding guys before this, though it was something all of us did daily. Wall rides had been a thing for a year or so, fakie wall rides were really new. Abubacas had been a trick on vert for a year and a half. None of us had seen a magazine photo of a wall ride more than 2 1/2 feet high in a magazine, before this contest. It's hard to explain now how new all of this was then.
Street riding wasn't really a thing yet, no one had any ideas where the limits were. Peg grinds were done on vert ramps, but no one really did them on street. It was two year after this contest that the first handrail peg grind was caught on video. We honestly had no idea what the obstacles would be, who would be the standout riders, or what new tricks we would see. This was one of the most fun contests I ever went to.
I'm the guy ghost riding his bike into the wall in the blue shirt. I did other stuff like sketchy footplant tailwhips, but decided to only put myself in the video doing something goofy. There were so many riders no one expected were doing cool stuff that day.
San Francisco innovator, Dave Vanderspek, was one of the first guys to do hard tricks on street, going back to 1982-1983. He does the bar endo on the box at 3:55. Freeze that shot, look how edged he is. That's some of the earliest roots of street riding, doing flatland tricks on a sketchy or high spot. Dave and the Curb Dogs showed us all footplants and blunts on parking blocks early on, too. Vander represents the deepest roots of serious street riding.
The other guy we all expected to rip it up that day was Eddie Roman, he got the first wall ride photo in FREESTYLIN' (on the Jinx Bank in Redondo). Eddie put walls in play, and that changed riding forever. I love Eddie's 180 to backwards bunnyhop off the box at 3:55, that's the kind of classic "Eddie Roman stuff" many of us expected. But guys like magazine guy Scott Towne(2:57), ramp rider Todd Anderson(2:10), Orange County local George Smoot (1:25), 2-Hip guy Kevin Martin(2:46), San Diego basher Pete Agustin (4:02), and "Conan the Bikebarian," pro racer/bodybuilder Rich Bartlett (3:12) ripped it up that day. Vic Murphy also ripped, but somehow we didn't get much footage of him. Mike Golden, the young vert rider from NorCal, was the only guy who jumped the roof of the car to flat. All kinds of BMXers threw down that day.
Craig Grasso (4:11)was known for being weird, artsy, and riding everything pretty well, and he was a standout rider all day. I spent a lot of time riding with Grasso in 1986, and I knew he was a great street rider. But he was way better than we all expected him to be in Santee. Another rider no one really expected to flat out rip at the Meet the Street was R.L. Osborn (3: 37). We all grew up looking at R.L.'s photos in the magazines, but he was believed to be more or less retired by 1988. R.L. came out and showed off 15 years worth of BMX skills applied to new obstacles.
The trick of the day went to Englishman Craig Campbell, with the wall ride to 360 (4:53), or 540 wall ride, we didn't know what to call it. That trick blew everyone's fucking mind. Craig got the trick of the day, no doubt. But the man of the day, which oddly surprised a lot of us, was Dave Voelker (1:07). We all knew Dave was a great ramp rider, and flat out crazy on his bike, but he wasn't one of the first guys that came to mind when someone mentioned street riding, before this contest. But Dave's insanely high wall rides, big jumps, and all around aggroness, made him the man of the day in Santee.
Yeah, this was his stomping grounds, but no one stomped like Dave that day. From Santee on, Dave was the first name that came to mind when street riding was mentioned. It sort of seemed like a changing of the guards in that way. The earliest pioneers of really pushing street, like Dave Vanderspek and his Curb Dogs, and Eddie Roman, handed the torch to guys like Dave Voelker, Vic Murphy, and Craig Grasso to really push the level of street riding as it morphed into its own genre.
Pretty much everyone got really psyched on street riding that day, and that's the work of Ron Wilkerson and the 2-Hip crew, for putting on this Meet the Street, and the ones that followed. This contest changed BMX freestyle forever. A year later the bike industry decided BMX and freestyle were dead, and turned their attention, and their money, to mountain bikes. Freestyle went underground, and street riding was a big part of the down years.
There's another video clip form this contest, edited by Dave Alvarez, our video editor at Unreel Productions, on pro caliber equipment. Here's that clip, go to 4:02.
Here's somebody's home video from that day, that shows several of the pro rider's runs. Check out what happens when Dave Voelker shoots his bike jumping the box. I forgot about that part.
If you've read a few of my Old School freestyle blog posts, you should check out my new ebook. It's big, 263 pages, but you can read each little chapter separately. You can download it anywhere, and it costs about the same as a cup of coffee. It covers me getting into freestyle in 1982-'86 in Boise Idaho. I write about meeting pros for the first time, riding in Golden Gate Park, [ublishing a zine, and stumbling into the BMX industry. I also get into the bigger picture of why BMX freestyle happened during our time, and how a few guys doing tricks in SoCal turned into a worldwide thing. I tell a little bit of every freestyler's story in telling my own story. Check it out and get you copy now at the link below:
Tyler was a baby that my mom babysat for in about 2012-13 in North Carolina. At the time, unable to find a "real job" in Kernersville, North Carolina, while living with my mom, I occasionally drew kids' names, like this, and sold them for $20 each. This was the first thing I made money drawing in my Sharpie "scribble style." These took me 4 to 5 hours to draw. Yeah, it's a long way from what I draw now, but I had to start somewhere.
The Birth of my Sharpie Scribble Style
A few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the gulf coast in 2005, I was sitting in my taxi one morning, near the entrance of the Huntington Beach Hyatt hotel, a block form thre Picific ocean. A taxi driver I knew walked up to my cab, from where he parked at the back of the line. Richard was a weird dude, in a good way. He was a long time taxi driver, which was a crazy way to make a living, even in good times. He was also an old punk rock influenced guy, and a highly creative and controversial artist. He owned and ran a small indie art gallery called AAA Electra 99. Here's a taste of Richard at the Anaheim location of Electra.
I knew Richard from the taxi company, and I had drawn some stuff for a couple of taxi driver art shows he had, and was an occasional visitor to the gallery. So Richard walked up, hopped in the back of my taxi, and said he had a deal for me. The deal was I could live in the art gallery for $50 a week, and then drive his taxi (he owned his cab, within the company we worked for) on the weekends.
When he offered me this deal, I was working 7 days a week, homeless, and living in my cab. I worked 16-18 hours a day Tuesday through Saturday. Sundays I'd work from about 7 am to about 2 or 3pm. Then I'd go rent a motel room for the night. I'd get a pizza, watch some TV, and sleep for 10 to 12 hours. I'd wake up at 5 am, go catch a couple of Monday morning airport runs in the taxi, go back to the motel room, and chill and watch TV until checkout at 11 am. Then I'd work in the cab from 11 am Monday until after bar close at 2 am. I had been doing this, week after week, for two years straight, as the taxi industry went down the tubes due to computer dispatching.
That adds up to about 100 to 120 hours a week of work. Yeah, it wasn't physical work, "working" in a taxi mostly meant sitting and waiting to hit a button on the computer when a call popped up. We couldn't leave the cab, or we might miss that $40 ride that would make the day profitable. Not hard "work" but monotonous.
In two years, I had about five days off. I don't mean that I had weekends off like normal people, and then took five more days off. I mean I literally had five days off in two years. To say I was burned out is a huge understatement. In the year 2000, I could rent a taxi on the weekends, work 40 hours in three long days, and pocket about $350. I rented a cheap room, lived in a beach city, and had four days off.
But in 2003, the taxi company took the old CB radios out of the cabs, and put in dispatch computers. Overnight, the industry completely changed. That's when technology really began to disrupt the taxi business, years before Uber and Lyft entered the picture. We all had to either quit, or work 7 days a week. Meanwhile, the computer dispatching let the companies put more and more cabs on the road, so there was less business per driver. So it got harder and harder to make money, and we all worked more and more hours. AND I was homeless, living in my taxi, and sleeping in parking lots six nights a week. I'd bulked up to about 370 pounds, did nothing but work and sleep, and I was burned out, fat, pissed off, and miserable.
I took Richard's offer, and I moved into the Electra gallery, the small industrial unit in Anaheim you see in the link above. I've always been a highly creative guy, but had done nothing creative in two years. Suddenly I had 4 1/2 days off, and was surrounded on all sides by art from some of Orange County's most weird, fun, and creative people. I started drawing with markers huge pieces of paper, cut from a roll of banner paper.
I was never was much into painting. I got into drawing with markers in 2003, when I saw a thing on MTV's House of Style about putting butcher paper up on your walls, and drawing on it to make "doodle art" walls. I lived in the little room, and tried to make a mural with markers. It sucked. So I wound up making big collages with the paper instead, cutting photos from my old BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and rock climbing magazines. In between photos, I doodled, trying to find a cool ways to shade with markers.
Back in 2005 at the art gallery, I drew a little drawing in pen my second night there, just a doodle. My creative floodgates opened, and I began drawing all day, every day. I went back to experimenting with markers. A couple of months later, while drawing a tree, I scribbled with one color. Then scribbled over it with another. Then another. I wound up with these cool shades of brown that actually looked like tree roots. That's when my Sharpie "scribble style" was born, October or November of 2005. I had finally found a way to shade with Sharpie markers. I soon found the smaller, ultra fine Sharpies worked much better for this. So I had a cool and unique way to color and draw with markers. I just wasn't sure what to do with it.
I lived in the gallery for about 7 months, playing with the Sharpie scribble style idea most of that time. When I went back to full time taxi driving, I got a sketch pad, and would spend many of the hours sitting in my taxi drawing. I wound up losing all those earliest drawings, dozens of them. But here are some of my drawings from 2008 to 2015. They're a long way from the kind of drawings I do now. But you have to start somewhere.
Something about aliens smoking cigarettes just makes me laugh. I started thinking one day, what if there really were aliens in some underground base. In effect, they'd basically be prisoners, it'd be kind of like a prison mentality, so maybe they'd evolve into gangsta aliens. Then I thought, no, they would be living off government money, and they wouldn't have to work. It'd be like a trailer park, everyone getting a Disability check, playing video games and doing drugs all day. You know, like West Virginia. The aliens would turn into white trash, but they're aliens, they'd be Grey Trash. So I draw a whole bunch of these aliens smoking cigarettes and wearing wife beater T-shirts. Not great art, but it was amusing. This one is for the skateboarders.
Here's my dad's drafting/engineer influence, mixed with my early influence by M.C. Escher's work coming through.
The "tile drawing" phase. Lame, just an idea to try for a while.
The "Georgia O'Keefe" phase. Getting a little closer to something kind of cool.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'sThird 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.
A Retail Archeology video, "The Deader Side of Sears."
The "Retail Apocalypse," for any not familiar with the term, is the name given to the closing down of THOUSANDS of retail stores over the last several years. This has been happening at scale since The Great Recession of 2007-2009. It really took off about 2016, and the name was dubbed around then. In an article this past spring, a count of 20,000 retail stores was listed as either closed in 2017, 2018, and closed or scheduled to close in 2019. There were probably another 20,000 stores that closed from 2008 to 2016. These counts are major chain stores, and generally don't include all the mom and pop stores, and smaller regional chains, that may have also closed.
This article today on CNBC, "We are in the Middle of the Great Department Store Shakeout-and There's No Stopping It," focuses on the larger department stores. Among other things, it says that 1,000 actual department stores have closed, many the anchor stores in malls, which used to draw in foot traffic for all the smaller stores that have been closing. In the department store world, Bon Ton and Gordman's (and Toy-R-Us, though technically not a department store), are gone, Sears is bankrupt, J.C. Penney's is working to restructure its debt, trying to avoid bankruptcy, and sales at Nordstrom's and Macy's are down 35% or more in 2017- 2018. The market is rough, and getting rougher, for department stores, it's definitely not getting better yet. Keep in mind this collapse in traditional retail stores happened during the long uptrend in the economy and stock markets. Now that talk of a coming recession is common, things are likely to get worse faster.
Why is all this happening? From my own reading, research, and thinking, it seems pretty obvious. The big shopping mall and shopping center world was the Industrial Age distribution of goods network. That's how we did it, mass market brands, advertised on the three TV channels, distributed through big warehouses to big stores in big malls. Hey, it worked well for 60 years or so. And then the internet came along, and then became a commercial tool, and made shopping online and getting goods shipped direct much more efficient. Buying products and getting them shipped direct did happen in the 20th century, but it was through mail order catalogs, which is slower and less efficient.
As I've written in my idea, The Big Transition, I see this as the inevitable collapse of the Industrial Age way of distributing goods, while a new, Information Age way of distributing goods, is being built. The new way is led by Amazon, Walmart, Target, retail brand direct websites, but also includes tens of thousands of smaller Amazon resellers, eBay stores, thousands of Shopify and other small online stores, discount sites like Wish.com, and millions of other retail websites around the world.
Hell, I'm a homeless guy at the moment, and I've sold my artwork in 9 states and 3 countries, starting on half a shoestring. It's not that Jeff Bezos and Amazon killed traditional retail, it's just that there was a technology enabled paradigm shift, and most old companies simply didn't keep up. They were big and entrenched and used to kicking butt in sales, and didn't see the possibilities coming in the online world. So now they're dying. Hey, that's capitalism. Retail natural selection. If you lose your competitive edge, you go out of business. Bezos and several others saw the potential of online sales early on, and took advantage of the opportunities. Sears itself did the same thing itself in the late 1800's, ushering in catalog sales and shipping of goods.
So several major retailers, most of whom should have died off already, are hanging on to the old days, and trying to keep alive a bit longer. There's still a place for bricks-and-mortar retail, but it will be a different model, and there will far fewer stores across the country. TJ Maxx is a good example of a retail business that will likely keep going for a long time to come, focusing on really good deals on major brands. So that's where this is at the moment. In my opinion, as we head into the next recession, the Retail Apocalypse will accelerate even more.
Bethany Hamilton surfing a ginormous wave at Jaws, on the north shore of Maui, in 2016.
Inflection point- (2) (In business): A time of significant change in a situation; a turning point.
- Google dictionary
This video is an inflection point, it captures a very short span of time where many conditions came together to form an absolutely huge wave that had the right characteristics to allow Bethany Hamilton to surf it successfully, changing or enhancing many people's view of Bethany, the surf break of Jaws, women's surfing, and the idea of wave riding itself. Most people would see this video and think, "Wow, that guy's crazy!" Then a surfer would respond, "That's a woman! A woman with one arm." Then the inevitable response. "Wait... really? She's NUTS!" Yeah, and just plain amazing.
All kinds of things had to happen to make the 18 seconds of the ride in this clip above get captured on this video. The tectonic plate of the crust of the Earth, under the Pacific Ocean, slowly moved over a hot spot of magma, volcanoes formed, and eruptions over millions of years built up those volcanoes from the bottom of the sea, eventually rising above the water level, and formed Maui and the other Hawaiian islands. A ridge offshore off the north of Maui, the area known as Pe 'ahi to the locals, formed from volcanic activity, and then was worn into a certain shape by ocean currents and wave action over hundreds of thousands of years.
Meanwhile, in 2016, a huge storm, perhaps a thousand or more miles away, sent out pressure waves that travel through the water at 500 miles per hour, in a very specific direction, towards the small island of Maui. That pressure wave combined with ocean currents, the tides created by the Moon's gravitational relation to the Earth, the local shape of the shore, and the underwater ridge. Those and many other factors forced the water upwards, into the wave we see in the video, at that particular moment in time.
At that same time, surfer Bethany Hamilton was there, holding a tow rope attached to a jet ski, waiting for the right wave. Bethany, born and raised in Hawaii, was already a legend in the surfing world. Bethany was just 13-years-old in 2003, already a hot up-and-coming amateur surfer, when she was attacked by a huge, 14 foot Tiger shark, of Kauai. The shark bit off her left arm near the shoulder. With the help of her best friend Alana Blanchard, and Alana's dad and brothers, Bethany got to shore, was rushed to the hospital, survived losing 60% of her blood, and came through the ordeal.
A surfer to the core, Bethany not only got back in the water, she learned to surf again, with one arm, and went on to become a top women's surfing pro. Her shark attack ordeal was written in the 2004 book, Soul Surfer, and made into a movie in 2011. The attack made Bethany famous. What Bethany did after the attack, not only learning to surf again, without one arm, but going on to become a top pro and a big waver rider, made Bethany a legend to surfers and non-surfers alike.
In addition to the legendary surf break Jaws, and legendary surfer Bethany, this short video took the lifetimes of work of the surfers/watermen (and women?) on the jet skis, the photographers on the boats, and the video cameraperson from Shannon Reporting, Shannon Marie Quirk, who captured this moment on video. All of these things I've mentioned, and many other things as well, came together to create this 18 seconds of action on video, which will raise anyone's opinion of what is possible by a human being. In other words, this short video is an inflection point, something that enhanced Bethany's surfing reputation greatly, Shannon's video reputation, and even the reputation of the mighty surf break Jaws.
So why am I going into so much detail about a cool clip of amazing surfing? Because it's a good metaphor for inflection points in the economic and business world. All my life I've been an amateur futurist, always wondering what would happen in the future, and trying to figure out how to understand the present, in order to accurately predict the parts of the future that were predictable to some degree. This seems to be where my fascination with predicting the future evolved from.
In late December of 1989, I visited my parents in North Carolina, going there for a week over Christmas. I bought a book to read that week, because staying there was pretty boring most of the time. After the initial, "How have you been?" conversation for a couple hours, everyone mostly did their own thing, and reading was a good option to fill my time. I picked up the book, The Great Depression of 1990 by economist Ravi Batra. Yes, I know, not the subject matter most people would choose. I'm an economics geek, making me a geek even among the geeks. I found the book fascinating, as Batra explained a very obscure social theory from India, added in his understanding of economics, and then predicted am economic Great Depression, like in the 1930's, starting in 1990. I found that fascinating, because I'm weird like that. After reading the book, I headed back to Huntington Beach, and I began to read the business section of the newspaper every day.
We didn't have a Great Depression in 1990. But we did go into a recession, then popped out a bit, then back into it. They called it a "double dip recession." To me it seemed that most of the reason it was given that name was so they wouldn't have to actually call it a "depression," which has a much darker, and scary, connotation.
The traditional definition of an economic recession, at that time, is an economic "contraction" for two consecutive quarters. So instead of the total economy growing, it shrinks for six months. A "depression" is when that happens for three years, and a "great depression" is when that happens for five years. The "double dip" thing "officially" only lasted 8 months. But the economy sucked for average people, and the California (and most other places) real estate market didn't rebound until late 1996 and early 1997. So things largely sucked financially for 6 years, and we happened to have this little thing called the internet being invented (in a widespread way, as opposed to the original military uses) to help bring us out of it. That was a huge, unexpected, one time economic boom, that almost everyone by surprise.
So from my point of view, most of what Ravi Batra predicted in 1989 actually happened. It just didn't happen to as deep of a level as he predicted. I became really interested in the social theory from India, "The Law of Social Cycle," by P.R. Sarkar, as well as many of his thoughts on long term economic trends.
One of those trends was that we have a depression (or great depression) every 30 or 60 years in the U.S., going back to colonial days. The only exception was the reconstruction era, for about 30 years, after the Civil War. That period through everything out of whack. But looking at the historical records, Batra found that if the depression skipped the 30 year mark, it tended to be more intense at the 60 year mark. So we had the stock crash of 1929, leading into The Great Depression of the 1930's. There was no depression in 1960, 30 years later. So he saw a deeper depression looming in 1990. Guess what 2020 is? Yep, it's the 30 year mark after 1990. So that's one long term trend suggesting an economic downturn, a sizeable one, could happen in, or around, 2020. That's one historical trend in a possible major inflection point for our economy.
By actually watching the economic news, actually reading the newspaper in the early 1990's, and later watching CNBC business news, as it came along and grew, I noticed that many different things would happen, which could be seen in real time, and often in different charts of different economic factors. The stock market would be doing one thing. The bond market and interest rates doing another. The price of gold, the price of oil, the price of agricultural commodities would each be doing their own thing. But when you looked at several different charts over the same span of time, you'd see spikes at the exact moment, in many different things. Some spiked up while others spiked down. Some things would trend up before the spike, while other things trended in a rough parallel, and others trended down. But many different charts would show the exact inflection points, suggesting there were deeper things, factors, happenings, that affected all of them. Interest rates being moved up or down by the Federal Reserve was the most obvious. The effects of The Federal Reserve moving interest rates up or down ripples throughout the economy. But that's not the only cause of these inflection points.
In the late 90's, I took a home study course on trading commodities, which relied heavily on looking at the different price charts for the 40 or so traded commodities. That's when I really began to notice these inflection points, in multiple markets, all happening at the same time. So I started looking up and searching for what the business news was on those particular days, the times when several different markets made big moves, at the same time. Like I just mentioned, several were when interest rates were adjusted. But others had different causes, and some I never did figure out. But I learned that when several markets are heading in the general direction of a big inflection point, its an indicator a big inflection point if coming.
That's where we are in today's economic world. There are all kinds of trends pointing at a HUGE inflection point, something that will be a massive negative hit to millions of people's lives. Yet no one wants to know it's about to happen. That's why I predicted we're in the "prelude" to a Great Depression on my personal blog a couple of days ago. Many different factors are coming together in a big confluence pointing to that happening. I've been saying this since 2017, knowing we were heading that that direction.
Here's the ting about inflection points. If you were in a sea kayak or small boat, not knowing the swell was coming to Jaws, the wave above could easily kill you. But Bethany spent her life pushing limits as a surfer and as a human, to be able to have a chance to successfully ride this huge wave. HUNDREDS of millions of people will be crushed by the economic wave I see building. But some will surf it. That's why I write things like this. For those who don't want to be crushed to know to get out of the way, and for those who can "surf" economic waves to surf this one that's building.
There is one more aspect to the video above that I haven't mentioned that played a crucial role. Someone predicted that there was a huge swell coming, and that it might make Jaws go off in an epic way. That's how Bethany Hamilton, the guys on the jet skis, the photographers, and Shannon with the video camera all knew to be there. That was most likely Surfline.com, based in Huntington Beach, California, where I've spent most of my adult life. Surfline predicts swells around the world, and top big wave surfers regularly fly halfway around the world, on a couple of days notice, to surf a spot Surfline.com predicts will go off in a big way.
When it comes to the big economic waves, I am Surfline.com. There's a huge crash coming, a "negative" wave that will also create more opportunity for smart businesses, new businesses, and new ideas of all kinds, than any period of time in our lives. It's about to happen. Get your board waxed up.
