Why Content Creation is important these days

The land rush scene from the 1992 movie Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. 

In 1889, the United States opened up a huge chunk of land, what is now much of Oklahoma, to homesteaders.  By the order of President Benjamin Harrison, on April 22, 1889, about 50,000 people lined up on the borders of this huge area, ready to grab a free piece of land.  At noon, cannons and guns fired, and trumpets sounded, that was the start signal, and people raced into the region, which is what this movie scene is about.  The deal was,  people would find a piece of land they wanted, and plant their flag.  By doing that, and then registering the claim soon after, these people could claim 160 acres of land.  They had to live on that land, and make improvements on it, for five years.  If the homesteaders did that, they would receive the title of that 160 acres of land, for no money.  This is one way that the U.S. got people to claim the former Indian lands, and encouraged settlement of those lands.  You can learn more about the Land Rush here.

If you own a small business, do some kind of creative work, or maybe are an athlete who makes money from some kind of sponsorship deals, you're ignoring "free land" and free promotion for your business, work, or ideas, if you don't create content on many of the platforms available in today's world.

So what does this Oklahoma land rush of 1889 have to do with the internet and social media?  It's a pretty good analogy.  When you open an account on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, or create a blog or website somewhere on the internet, you're claiming your own piece of the cyber world.  Like the Oklahoma land rush, you're staking your claim and saying "This area is mine." 

Once you have your little piece of the cyber world, you can share your ideas through text, photos, audio, and video.  You can also share other people's ideas and content, drawing attention to that content and those ideas.  When you do that, you're "creating content," as it's now known. 

Why create content?  There are a whole bunch of reasons.  Getting Likes is one of the worst reasons, but a popular one.  Some people just want attention.  Some people want others to like them and validate them.  Everyone has their own viewpoints on many different subjects.  A lot of people have specific info, or some skill or experience in some area, that can help other people learn a new skill, entertain people, expose people to something new, or share ideas. 

For most of human history, there were very few ways for an average person to share their knowledge and ideas with very many people.  But the internet and social media have democratized media, and now, nearly everyone can get their ideas out and make then available to a huge chunk of the people, in the entire world.  For centuries, there were "gatekeepers" who let only certain people have a voice to large groups of people.  The gatekeepers may have been a TV producer, a magazine publisher, a newspaper editor, or someone like that.  Now, in today's world, there are no gatekeepers.  Virtually everyone can put stuff out on the web, or on social media. 

Because of this, there's a ton of crap out there to look at, and there's a lot of really good stuff, too.  By creating content, the best stuff you can put out, you can take advantage of one of the greatest opportunities in all of human history.  But hardly anyone really does it well, or puts much effort into it.  Nearly everyone shares stuff on the internet's websites, and social media platforms, today.  Most people go through their days spitting out mostly lame and crappy content.  But very few, even those people who are trying to promote something, take the time to learn to do this well, and work at creating good content on a consistent basis.  All kinds of business are in trouble, or going out of business these days, because they don't create good content regularly.  With the rise of the internet, social media platforms, and smartphones, people of all kinds now expect businesses and organizations of all kinds to put out good content. 

This has changed the business and social game.  In effect, if you own a business, creating content has been part of your job since about 2000-2005.  Before then it was helpful.  But since about 2005, you're leaving a great deal of money on the table, if you're not consistently creating good content, and a lot of it.  If you want to promote anything; your artwork, your business, yourself as an athlete, your favorite political candidate, your band, whatever, content creation is simply a necessary part of the game now.  If you don't get good at it, the person who takes your place, or puts you out of business eventually, will get good at it.  So that's why it's important in today's world. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does that leave us with as options?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paradox of being a homeless entrepreneur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start-up money versus actually selling stuff

Throwing some 80's New Wave at ya, Cyndi Lauper with "Money Changes Everything."  And kicking a trash can full of pretend trash, because... well I don't know.  Hey, the 80's were weird.  A different kind of weird than today, anyhow.

I've been slowly working my way through the book, The $100 Startup, since I left Lancaster three weeks ago.  It's a book that caught my eye in a library a couple years ago, but just not enough to pick up and read.  While working with the bike business up in the desert, I thought it might give me some ideas that would help in my work there.  The object on that was to get a lot of traffic to a big website real fast, and create an enormous cash flow quick.  That is basically the opposite of how I tend to work.  I work slow, step by step, and build gradually towards things.  Ultimately, I realized I wouldn't be able to do what was needed there, and I headed back to Orange County (CA) to build my own small business. 

At this point, talent-wise, I focus on three things:  I do a unique form of Sharpie marker artwork that actually sells.  I blog, write and publish zines and small zine books, and really want to get into writing actual books when I can.  In addition, I have become good at building a web presence and building online traffic to websites for little or no money.  That last skill is one nearly every small business can use, and one I could teach pretty easily in a zine, a small book, an ebook, and online course, a workshop, or in one on one consulting.  The biggest issue I'm dealing with right now is that I'm homeless, and I got down here with about $20 in my pocket.  That's not the greatest place to start.

I've been focusing on scraping up money both in homeless ways (panhandling), and through selling drawings (I've sold two in the last three weeks).  Having been in and out of homelessness for many years, usually while working full time, I'm actually good at surviving on the streets.  It's a lame thing to be good at, but I learned by necessity.  So I've spent three weeks building a very basic level of stability, which is one of the many things people don't understand about homelessness.  Like everyone else, I need a place to sleep, preferably a place where I don't get harassed, beat up, attacked by wild animals, or murdered.  I've got that figured out, for the moment.  I also need a place to go to the bathroom, a place to eat, a place to clean up or shower, a place to charge my old laptop and phone, and a place with wifi to write, blog, connect, and promote my work on social media.  I also need money to buy food, and to buy what's needed to use restrooms, wifi, do laundry, and other basic stuff.  So I've got those basic things figured out, temporarily.  Things are always sketchy, and can change at any time, but I've got places to do the basic things, and can scrape up money for food, bus fare, and to survive day to day.  That gives me a bit of a base to build from.

Once I hit that basic survival level of relative stability, then came the next stage, building a business straight from the streets.  In this next phase, I need to get my California driver's license, I need an address to do that, then I need a 30 day bus pass, because that saves me $80 a month, then I need a small storage unit, because carrying everything I own every place I go really sucks.  Then I need a P.O. box so I have an actual mailing address.  Then I can get a bank account, and THEN I can open an online store, and THEN I can actually sell my artwork, zines, books, and BEGIN to build a business, create a decent cash flow, and finally make enough to rent a weekly room, or maybe a room in an apartment somewhere.

That's the way I've been thinking about things.  Like everyone, I tend to get into ruts in my thinking.  "I need this to do this, so I can do this, so I can do that, so I can FINALLY do the thing I really want to do."  In reading The $100 Startup," I learned a lot of people starting small businesses do the same thing.  They think of all these things they need to do, buy, build, and get ready, so THEN they can begin to get their business going.  But then I read one little paragraph, a simple idea from a small business woman, Naomi Dunford, whose business, IttyBiz, helps other small business people get their ideas up and running.  Naomi's thought was this:

"Many aspiring business owners make two common, but related, mistakes: thinking too much about where to get money to start their project, and thinking too little about where the business income will come from."

-Naomi Dunford, quoted on page 165 of The $100 Startup

That thought hit home with me.  I was basically stuck in homeless guy thinking, "How can I panhandle or sell a couple of drawings to get all these things I need, so THEN I can start building a little business?"  Rather than "Where and how can I sell some copies of my drawings or a zine,starting right now, to start earning an income now, and buy these things I need, to keep building the business into an actual, legit business.  Yesterday was a weird day, everything felt a bit off.  I kept just missing buses, and everything seemed more frustrating than usual.  Living homeless, especially when you're reasonably smart, talented, and hardworking, is incredibly frustrating.  Over the course of the day, I realized this was a big part of my problem, I was focusing on how to scrape up a few hundred dollars in "start-up money," rather than just beginning to sell the things I can get ready to sell over the next couple of days or weeks.  

I pondered this idea all afternoon, and things started to fall into place again.  I realized that I need to just start providing the service and selling the products I have now, and I thought of a few ways I can start doing that, in my current situation.  So today and maybe tomorrow, I'll be getting the basic things together and ready so I can start doing that.  That decision took a ton of weight off my shoulders.  I don't need to stress about getting a 30 day bus pass.  I'll get one day by day, until I can afford a 30 day bus pass, or to get my driver's license, or this or that or the other thing.  

So that's the thought I'm working with right now, thank you Naomi Dunford for sharing that with Chris Gillebeau, who wrote The $100 Startup.  Maybe this idea will resonate with some of you out there in a similar position.  That's what this blog is all about.  

Buy The $100 Startup on Amazon (not a paid link).

IttyBiz - Naomi Dunford's website (and links to her blog and shop)

Robert Kiyosaki on today's economy: "You don't have much time."

As a kid in the 1950's and early 1960's, Robert Kiyosaki lived on the poor side of a sugar plantation town in Hawaii.  His dad was a teacher, and rose to the top education job in government in Hawaii. But Robert's real dad, like most people, didn't understand how money works.  Robert's best friend's dad, who he calls his "Rich Dad," was building a bunch of small businesses at the time, creating assets for the future.  That man went on to become one of the richest men in Hawaii.  As kids, Robert and his best friend asked Rich Dad to teach them about wealth. 

Now, 50-some years later, Robert Kiyosaki and his wife Kim own 7,000 rental properties, as well as gold, silver, interests in oil drilling companies, and many other things.  His investments provide a huge monthly income, he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do.  He could go fishing or play golf everyday, no matter what the economy does. 

He writes books and teaches people about how money and finances work, because he knows how bad the system is rigged against average people, and that pisses him off.  He knows where things are heading.  Here he shares his views of the current bubbles in our financial world, he knows a huge crash is coming, and he's been teaching people financial education since 1997.  This video gives a quick look at why most people are struggling these days, and I highly recommend watching it, and then reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and his other books that interest you at that point. 

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

-Robert Kiyosaki's  

fundamental understanding learned from Rich Dad.

Buy Rich, Poor Dad on Amazon.  This is NOT a paid link.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Trash Talk #2

Mug life bitches!  No that's not a typo... MUG, not THUG.  America's favorite garage sale hunting multi-millionaire hits the driveways and garages of New Jersey on a rainy Saturday last fall (2018).  He finds the cheap coffee mugs, he scores big with Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, stuffed animals ("plush toys" these days), and lands a huge collection of collectible Olympic pins.  All told, his $75 in garage sale finds turns into about a grand on Ebay.  Why does a guy who owns a $150 million a year digital agency do this?  To prove to everyone out there that hustling can make virtually anyone some cash.  He's a hustler from childhood.  #fliplife #garyvee Check out his content, it's everywhere.  Gary's entertaining, and gives you ideas on how to make some cash when you're starting out. 

Check out WPOS Kreative on Pinterest for more ideas on making money and building a small business in today's crazy world.

Why I think highly creative small businesses are the future of America

These two are old friends of mine, and BMX freestyle pioneers from the NorCal scene, Mike Golden and Chris Rothe.  They are flipping through the brand new, second edition, of The Birth of the Freestyle Movement, a catalog-sized book chronicling the rise of BMX freestyle, now a worldwide  series of recreational and competitive sports.  In the background, you see huge photos, iconic in our little world, from 1980's BMX magazines.  Mike, Chris, myself, and a few hundred other weird kids in the mid 1980's, were drawn into the obscure new sport we expected to go nowhere.  Thousands more joined us over the next few years.  By learning and inventing tricks on "little kids bicycles," we inadvertently became part of the action sports movement, one of many sprouts that have grown into worldwide sports and industries, in about 35 years.  We are a part of the huge cultural changes that have shaken and reformed human society in our lifetimes.

The biggest changes over the last 40 or 50 years are due primarily to new technology.  As we all know, this technology now allows an average person access to most of the information collected in all of human history, at any time, with a small device we carry in our pockets.  With this same device, we can instantly communicate, by text, by voice, and even by live video, to much of the human population, anywhere in the world.  This technology, and all the associated technologies, have changed everything in our world... in our lifetimes. 

The original Apple computer, shown off at the Home Brew Club in San Jose, and the birth of Microsoft, were 44 years ago.  These massive changes in human society have happened in the lifetimes of The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and most of Generation X, my age group.  We've watched this happen.  We've seen massive disruption spawned by these technologies and related social changes.

Think about going to a financial advisor back in 1989, just before the 90's recession.  He (it was a traditionally male industry then) would have advised investing in the blue chip stocks, mutual funds, and maybe real estate.  All of those things crashed in price in the few years after 1989.  What he would not have advised investing in was a BMX or mountain bike company, a snowboard company, a tattoo and piercing shop, a custom-built motorcycle business, or even Google.  Google didn't exist for several more years, and the other things were weird, fringe activities then, not something a person should invest in.  Yet any one of those businesses, properly run and managed, could have made you wealthy in the time between 1989 and now.  And those "blue chip" stocks?  There is a single person, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, worth more than many of those entire blue chip companies are now.  Think about that one for a minute.  That's serious change.

But, a huge number of people, well over a hundred million in the United States alone, are being left behind, by the changes to everyday life, to work, to business, to social norms, to housing, to education, and to our world at large.  Most people use their smart phones to communicate, yet most don't use that same technology to anywhere near its full potential to earn a living.  Whether shackled by insurmountable college debt, or balancing family with two service jobs, MOST of our population is struggling to survive day to day.  Poverty and homelessness are soaring, at a time where there are grade school kids making million dollars a year with a YouTube channel, and high school age millionaires in the social media influencer, entrepreneurial, and high tech worlds.

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Futurist thinking, real world economics, and big picture social dynamics are the things that really fascinate me.  I've spent most of my life reading about these things, observing what is predicted, and then what actually happens, and working to understand this huge transition period we're in now.  I literally wake up in the morning, even on my worst days, thinking about these things.  Yes, I'm weird, even in today's weird world.  

I've come to the conclusion that our best hope in these fast changing and and highly turbulent times, is huge growth in the number of small businesses.  

We need MILLIONS of new small businesses.  Here are the main large trends I think lead to this conclusion:

-An Oxford study 2013 said 47% of American jobs could be replaced by new technologies by about 2035 or 2040.  That's roughly 92 million MORE jobs that will likely disappear.  Yes, other new jobs will be created in that time, but not near enough to employ everyone who loses a job.

-With the research of Richard Florida and his team, we've learned about the Creative Class, and that high tech businesses are clustering in about ten major metro areas, which causes a couple of huge shifts.
     -The huge salaries and stock wealth in the tech world lead to surging real estate prices in those tech hub metros.  This leads to massive wealth inequality, and a struggle for affordable housing by most of the people, from lower end tech workers, those with massive college debt, and the large number of service workers, in the tech hub cities.
     -In the huge expanses of land where mid-sized cities, small towns, and rural areas are, most of the United States by area, civic leaders are struggling to attract businesses that can create living wage jobs for their populations. 

-The esteemed futurists, the late Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi, described "The Third Wave," (title of their 1980 book), the shift from an industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They describe this shift as being as massive as the shift from hunter/gatherer society to agriculture, or from agriculture to industrial society.  But this big transition is happening much, much quicker than those transitions did.  The disruption, as we can see nearly everywhere, is causing most of the population to struggle on low or mid-level paying jobs.

-The massive wealth inequality, the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years, the continuing loss of jobs to new technology, and the resistance to new ideas by local leaders, has led to the huge populist movements on both the Right and the Left, and political polarization.  This political polarization has led to gridlock and downright incompetence in the the political realm, at the very time when we most need smart, fast, effective change to help people, and society at large, to adapt to the rapid technological and social change.

-The huge rise in student debt is due, in large part, to the fact that Wall Street has structured, packaged, and resold much of the $1.5 trillion in U.S. student debt in SLABS, Student Loan Asset Backed Securites, nearly identical to the CDO's that triggered the 2008 economic collapse.  In the next major economic downturn, the faucet flowing money into colleges and universities will be hit incredibly hard. That cheap money to enable students will slow down dramatically.  This will mean college towns, much of the U.S., and most of the "Red State" economy, will be hit incredibly hard.  The concept of college itself is about to be disrupted, and will have to be re-invented for the 21st century, over the next decade or so.

-All this is in the economic/social dynamic sphere.  I'm not even talking about massive disruption caused by global warming, and the more intense storms, hurricanes, and floods that will disrupt tens of thousands of lives at a very fundamental level.  Losing your home or business to a major weather event is another massive form of disruption happening at the same time all these other things are happening.

I've been thinking many years about these things, and I'm always looking towards the future.  We're looking at some really intense and really tough challenges ahead.  With all these things in my mind, after many years of thinking, I think a massive surge of people going from an employee mentality to a small business/entrepreneurial mentality, is really our only long term hope.  I'm not talking about having an idea and finding an angel investor whose money you can burn for two years.  I'm talking functional, PROFITABLE, small businesses, high tech and other kinds.  There will not be major top down changes happening quick enough.  The true answer to all these massive changes will have to be D.I.Y. and grassroots responses.

I believe that there are people in every rural area, every small town, and every mid-sized city who already have the ideas needed in those areas.  But those people are fighting against their own personal fears, people resistant to new ideas, entrenched local power structures, and at least a few, powerful local curmudgeons.  If we can empower the people throughout the country, who already  have the good ideas, to make the leap from being an employee to being a FUNCTIONAL small business person, to build what their local area needs, we rebuild America, and the economy, from the ground up.  These millions of new small businesses are the only hope I see to put the remaining employees to work in the future that we're heading into.
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A month ago, I got tapped to use my blogging and social media skills to help promote an old friend's bike business, and help it transition from upscale bike shop to viable online bike business.  At the same time, I'm now back in Southern California, I have to rebuild my own life, and build my own income back up to a reasonable level.  I'm actually doing what I'm talking about here, on a day to day level. 

This is where I'm putting my effort, building my own small business while sharing what I've learned to help other small businesses.  The biggest thing holding back our economy, in my opinion, is the mindset that kids (and adults who've lost jobs) need to learn to "find a good job."  Half of the jobs may be gone by the time today's infants hit working age.  Kids, and all the older people left behind for one reason or another, need to find meaningful work, much of which will not be traditional jobs in the future.

Where "W.P.O.S." came from

In 1999, I was making decent money as a lighting technician in North Hollywood, California. I lived in Huntington Beach, a near 50 mile commute, which sucked, but I liked my job, and I liked the pay.  But I got sidelined by an injury, and could do the heavy lifting the job required anymore.  I decided to try taxi driving, something I could do right in Huntington Beach, and something I thought I could make good money at.  It took a few months to learn the business, partly because taxi driving is a business, not a paycheck job.  I had one good year where I could work weekends, have 4 days off, and pay my bills.  Not the best job ever, but it was fun at times.  

I was a taxi driver in the H.B. area for most of the early 2000's, but didn't realize how technology would change the game.  Long story short, I had to start working 7 days a week, to pay my taxi lease and gas, as more and more taxis were put on the road.  Computer dispatching, a new technology, completely changed the game, like so many other industries.  I worked more and more hours, up to 100 hours a week, and was living in my taxi for years.  It stopped being fun, but if I quit, I lost my "job," my vehicle, and my "home."  Because of that, I couldn't find another way to make a living.  

It finally got so bad I had to just drop off the tax one day, and I became fully homeless with no income at all.  After a year on the streets of Southern California, I took my family's offer of a plane ticket to North Carolina.  My parents, my sister, and I grew up in Ohio, and moved across country, winding up in California when I had just graduated, and my little sister was in high school.  I got a job in SoCal, why they were in the Bay Area.  My dad got a job in North Carolina, and my sister later followed, and finished up college there.  

In November 2008, as the economy was collapsing into the Great Recession, they paid for me to fly to the Piedmont Triad area, in central North Carolina.  I stayed in my parents spare bedroom of their tiny apartment. I couldn't find any job, and lost everything I owned except for a couple changes of clothes.  I got real depressed, but I had their desktop computer in my room.  I'd never had a computer with an internet connection up to that point, I was pretty much a Luddite.  

So after spending a week looking up porn and a few other things that seemed interesting, I started blogging about my days in the BMX industry in the 1980's.  About a month into that,  few old friends found my blog, and told me to keep it up.  So I wound up writing hundreds of blog posts about weird little moments in the BMX freestyle world, as that sport was just getting off the ground.  

One day, years later, a friend and I were messaging on Facebook, and he said that with all my old school BMX posts, I was kind of like an oldies radio station, but for BMX.  My little stories were like the classic oldies that reminded other old schoolers of their teens and 20's.  I joked back, "Yeah, I'm WPOS radio, We Play Old Shit."  We got a laugh out of it, and I didn't think much of it.  But the WPOS stuck in my head, and became the title for this blog.  So that's the official story of where "WPOS" comes from.