I finally managed to convince Google I was me again, so I could get back into my blogs. But I'm working from a library computer, so I have really limited time online. With some luck, I'll have a laptop again within a week. I'll try to do some short posts with the the time I have online, until then.
For some reason, my page views on this blog, and others, shot up in the last day. Somebody is looking at a lot of my old posts. Anyhow, I'm back in Blogger, and will be doing short posts soon, until I get a new (used) laptop so I can really get back to work. I've been working on a novel in my time off, about creativity, creative scenes, and that kind of thing. So that's in the works, as well.
About a week ago, I wanted to see if there was anyone on YouTube who has talked about The Glass Family, an odd, quirky, mythical family, invented by author J.D. Salinger, and whom he wrote three novellas and 3 or 4 short stories about. I found this great, 18 minute video above about Salinger's book Nine Stories. This really inspired me, and helped me figure out why I like The Glass Family stories so much. Right after watching this video, I wrote a tiny, two page short story, to try out these techniques with an idea I had. If you have any interest in writing fiction, watch this video by Scot Bradfield.
Last December, my laptop broke, it just froze up, for no apparent reason. I spend much of every day doing some blogging, doing my social media, and occasionally other writing. Since I'm homeless, that's pretty much all I do, other than drawing my Sharpie pictures and just surviving day to day. I don't have a TV, or anything else going on, I just create stuff every day. So when I couldn't get the laptop to work, it was a big hit to my daily life. I didn't have money to get the computer checked. So my life of daily creativity ground to a stop instantly. So I went to the library that day, as I always did, and decided to do some reading. While I consume a huge amount of content these days, I rarely read actual books anymore. I'm listening to YouTube videos a lot, everything from lectures and keynote speeches, to financial channel content, to TED Talks and other informational content, on several topics. I also read a lot of articles on websites, on news, business, and anything else interesting to me. My laptop started working again a couple of weeks later, it appears to have been a static electricity issue.
I read at least 200 or 300 books, ranging from business and self-help books, to intense novels like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and many things in between, between 1991 and the mid 2000's. Most of what I read was non-fiction, but I read quite a few novels, as well. I read almost all of Michael Crichton's novels, and most of Clive Cussler's as well. My dad, a lifelong avid reader of spy novels and westerns, turned me on to Cussler's adventure novels. I've read a few novels by some other well known writers, like Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Robert Ludlum, as well as Mark Twain, among others. Those were the years I devoured books, all in my quest to try and figure out what life was all about. Since I started seriously blogging in late 2008, I've done more writing than reading, particularly in the last few years.
Back in December, when the laptop died, I felt like reading some fiction, something different than all the content I had been consuming online. But comtemporary novels didn't interest me at all then. I wound up reading several books I had to read in high school. I started with The Pigman, by Paul Zindel. Then I read Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, a book my sister, Cheri, had to read in high school, and turned me on to. Soon after I read the classic Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which I think is about the most brilliant look at human society possible. A new book, The Reservoir, by actor David Duchovney, caught my eye, and that was a pretty good read, as well.
Then I dove into the Glass Family stories by J.D. Salinger, all of which I first read in the early 1990's. I find those books far more interesting than the uber famous Catcher in the Rye, which I also had to read in high school. These past few days, just to reaquaint myself with it to write this blog post, I went back and re-read Cathcer in in thr Rye again. My main feeling when I finished it this time was, "Man, Holden Caufield was kind of an asshole." I get his whole existential crisis part, millions of people have been there, and I've been there. Hell, I spent most of my life there, that's probably why I'm a writer now. But thinking about it a bit more, Holden was a really provocative character, and highly controversial story, for the time it was written, in 1951. Much like Huckleberry Finn, his character looks at the world of human society, and gives a critique on human civilization itself. It's no surprise Holden sees so many people as phony in the book, there are plenty of those people in the real world, we all know plenty of them. It's still a great book, but I like the Glass Family stories much better, personally.
The Glass family is a fictional family created by J.D. Salinger, and his first stories about them were published in the New Yorker magazine initially. Ultimately, he wrote about members of this family in three (I think) of the Nine Stories (1953), as well as Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955), Seymour: An Introduction (1959), and Franny and Zooey (1961). First of all, hardly any action, as far as things you'd see in an adventurous movie, happen in these stories. Most of them are long conversations between two or three people, just hanging out, or in everyday type scenarios. If you need swashbuckling action, like in a Marvel comic, to get you reading, these are not for you. These are very readable, but intellectual, and spirtual-oriented stories. By spiritual I mean "seeking the meaning of life" type of stuff, with a lot of talk about Buddhism, in particular. These stories are not contemporary Christian fiction, the stories are kind of the antithesis of that.
In my reading of fiction, J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse are the only writers who really go deep, the kind of stuff I really get into reading. Everyone else is pretty shallow, by my standards. OK, J.R.R. Tolkien, by creating the tales of Middle Earth, with its wide variety of characters got pretty deep as well, in places. Even in those great novels, I find things that bug me. In Hesse, the old ferry man at the end of Siddartha is a wise, old, interesting man, but the's not actually enlightened at the end, in my opinion. In Tolkien, what the hell is Tom Bombadil's back story? That guy fascinates me, and there's only one poem about him, besides the short part in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Back to the Glass family. Les and Bessie Glass are the parents, retired Vaudeville performers, who live in a sizeable apartment in New York City. They had seven children, all quite intelligent, and all of which appeared in a popular radio show over the years, called It's a Wise Child. The money from the show helped put all the kids through college. The time most of these stories take place is in the 1940's, and the children are all adults at this point. The children, from oldest to youngest, are: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Several of these are their nicknames in their family, not their given names.
If you are a writer, or think you would like to be one, Seymour: An Introduction, has the best advice I've ever seen about for writing. I won't tell you where it is in the story, you'll know it when you find it. In a similar fashion, Franny and Zooey has some great advice about being an actor, which both of those characters are. I think I first heard of the Glass Family books in an interview with Jodie Foster, where she mentioned Franny and Zooey being one of her favorite books, when she was younger. I looked through several of her 90's interviews today, and couldn't find that reference. It may have been in a written interview.
In any case, The Glass Family stories are some brilliant fiction, in my opinion, and dive into some really deep questions many of us weirdos of the world struggle with, at one point or another. Why are we here? What's the point of it all? How do I work as a create person in a world chock full of fucking idiots? That kind of stuff. That's about all I'm going to say. If this blog posts piques your interest, find a copy of Nine Stories, and read the first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." You can read it at the library, or even hanging out at Barnes & Noble. It's online as well. That story is about Seymour, the oldest, and generally believed to be the most brilliant, of the Glass Family. He's on vacation in Florida with his new wife in the story. Seymour is an amazing character, and if "Bananafish" gets you interest in learning more about Seymour, and the rest of his talented, quirky, and weird family, then check out the three novellas, and the other two short stories. In this group of stories, Salinger creates a written mosaic, or perhaps a collage, of kety moments in the lives of members of the Glass Family, which is another thing I like about these stories. He could have written 50 more stories about them, filling in different parts of the overall picture of the clan.
I've learned in my 50 years of reading, and 38 years of doing some writing, how to tell if you need to read a book at any particular time. If you own a book, and it keeps grabbing your attention, you keep walking by and noticing it, then you need to read that book. Or if you hear about a book, and then hear more references to it soon after, it's trying to get your attention. In my experience, when those things happen, then your sub-conscious (or whatever) knows that there's something in that book that you need to hear at this point in your life.
So that's my message of this post. The weird and crazy J.D. Salinger wrote three short novels, or novellas, about a talented, weird, very intelligent, family called the Glass Family. These books, each in a different way, dive deep into the questions of what life is all about, and how people who are creative and intelligent struggle with our crazy world. If that sounds interesting to you, check the books and short stories out.
J.D. Salinger's own personal story is every bit as crazy as those fictional stories he has written, and that's a whole different thing. In 2010 I heard he had just died, and I thought, "That guy was still alive?" I thought he had died way back in the 1960's or something. I just never got interested in his personal life. It turns out he becames a recluse, in progressing stages, after Catcher in the Rye thrust him into the limelight in the early 1950's. If you are interested in his personal story, as well as how his four books affected the literary world, here are two links below about him. The top one is a journalist and a couple of critics, talking about the impact of Catcher in the Rye on the world. The second is a 48 minute documentary on his life, made before he died.
This 25 minute interview with Alvin Toffler is from 2007, and he goes into several of the many themes of his 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.* The book was published in 2006, and Toffler died in 2016. Yet the book is still mind blowing for how deeply it dives into how different the emerging Information Age is from the Industrial Age we are still moving out of. Seventeen years after being published and still very few people are talking about the changes to society that Toffler was exploring in the book nearly 20 years ago.
It's the middle of May in 2023 as I write this. At this point it's hard for any of us to remember the "before times," way back in 2019. Life in the 21st century was cruising along, not ideal by any means, there was always some new phone model or software update to learn. But we were doing alright, it seems. OK, we had the Retail Apocalypse happening,lots of name brands stores closing down. We also somehow managed to elect a whacko for president in 2016. His autoritarian leanings scared any patriotic American who actually likes free speech and civil liberties, and that Constitution thing. But even so, we were managing.
Then we rang in a new decade, New Year's Eve 2019, rolled into 2020, the third decade of this millenium began, and things still seemed pretty normal. And then the crazy virus from China hit U.S. shores on a couple of cruise ships from Japan, and the world went fucking nuts. A 100 year pandemic that led to mandatory shutdowns of businesses all over, for most of you. I was one of the homeless people who got left outside to die when everything closed down. Turned out the virus liked it better in doors, but we didn't realize that for a while. Either way, everyone's lifestyle was seriously impaced. Over 40 million people lost their jobs for a while, some permanently, and the economy tanked, technically it was a short depression, because GDP dropped more than 10%, it dropped 32% in under three months.
"This will only be for a couple of weeks" we were told at first when mandatory face masks and shutdowns began. Reember that? Then "a couple more weeks," then another month. The restrictions dragged on, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But it kept going. Work from home, Zoom calls, and whole families watching and making TikTok dance videos. School was on a computer screen. Then it kept dragging on, and on. And that's for all of us who lived, over a million Americans, and millions more around the world died from Covid-19 complications. We all know that stuff, as much as we're trying to forget.
Then came stimulus money, "helicopter money" as the business press often called it. Suddenly people were locked down but buying cars and stocks and homes they couldn't afford when things began to open up partially. The pandemic became a political issue, along with a health and economic issue. Just about every single person's day to day life changed dramatically. Then the stimulus money blew up the stock market, the crypto markets, the real estate market, and the car and truck market, even collectibles like vintage comic books and baseball card prices soared. All that money eventually coagulated into serious inflation, which eventually led to The Fed raising interest rates to fight the inflation they caused. The fastest interest rates rise in U.S. history in turn began to kill crypto, stocks, real estate, and now the auto market is feeling it. Ridiculous prices on assets began to drop back down some. But not before thousands of Millennials bought homes at above market prices at the peak of the market. They've got a big lesson in basic economics coming soon. Now we are heading into another recession.
How did all this happen? Why are so many things so crazy now? Did anyone see this craziness coming? Did anyone try to warn us about the long list of issues we've all been dealing with?
Yes, as a matter of fact, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in a series of books that Alvin wrote, did forecast many of the things we have dealt with, not just since 2020, but since Alvin's first major book, Future Shock, was published way back in 1970. His next book took a decade, and tons of research. The Third Wavewas published in 1980, and those two became the books he is best known for.
The main theme was that we were leaving an "industrial-based society," and moving into an "information-based society," as he referred to them. Now, 43 years later, it's easy to say, "Duh!," to the idea that we were (and still are) leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. We are all familiar with that basic idea now. Alvin Toffler wrote several more books, building on The Third Wave theme, the last one being Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006. Alvin Toffler died a decade later in 2016. But the incredible research, thinking, and insights in Revolutionary Wealth are still mind blowing, even today, 17 years after it was published. Being a huge fan of the Tofflers, and having written about what I now call The Big Transition, the continuation of the Tofflers' Third Wave changes still happening in society, I just re-read Revolutionary Wealth.
Here are just a few of the ideas in the book that should be everyday knowledge, but aren't, much to our detriment. If you want to understand why the 2020's seem so crazy, Revolutionary Wealth is the single best book I know of, to help figure out what's happening today.
We all know there are the things we focus on in everyday life. For most people, everyday life revolves around their family, their job, their house, doing laundry, getting oil changes in the car, getting the kids to their after school activities, fixing dinner, and everything else people do day after day. Then there are fundamentals in life, things like going to school, getting an education, finding a job, paying bills, the basics of life in today's world.
Early on in Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toffler goes even deeper, into what he calls "Deep Fundamentals." These are apsects of human life and human society that go on at a level that few of us, even geeky futurist thinker dweebs like me, rarely ponder. Three of the major deep fundamentals he explores are the changes in how we relate to time, space (location in the country), and work.
For example, when the Industrial Age was building, huge numbers of former farmers became assembly line workers in factories, and precise time became much more important. Factory workers needed to be trained to get to work on time, to do repetitive jobs, and to do things at specific times. That era, in the late 1800's, is when people started carrying pocket watches or wristwatches, and began to put clocks everywhere, at home, in the office, and in the factory. Another part of that is that is when our current school system was invented, to "teach industrial discipline," that's actual wording from those days. It's also a huge reason why our education system sucks in so many ways. It's not the teachers, my sister's a teachers, and Alvin Toffler's sister was to, there are plenty of great teachers out there that want to make our education system better, in 1,000 different ways. But we are stuck, for now, with an education system that was invented about 140 or 150 years ago, to turn farm kids into assembly line workers. The system itself is outdated, and needs to be completely reinvented. That's just one big issue affecting not only how "revolutionary wealth" is created in today's world, but it drastically affects how society evolves or devolves going forward.
Back to the Deep Fundamental of time, few people actually work on assembly lines anymore in the U.S., how we interact with time has changed, and continues to change dramtically. The same is true of the deep fundamentals of space, or location. There was a time when a city needed to be near a deep water port, major railroad lines, or natural resources, like timber or minerals, to thrive. That has changed to a huge degree in a world where wealth is often created primarily with ideas. Austin, Texas is a major tech hub these days, not because it's on an ocean port or major navigable river like the Mississippi or the Ohio. Austin is a tech hub largely because of a culture with lots of weird creative people, artists, musicians, filmakers, and tech entrepreneurs. It's not dependent on nearby coal or potash mines. Different things are important now, and we are in a long period of chaotic change between the fading Industrial Age society, and the emerging Information Age society. Alvin Toffler explores these deep fundamentals and really digs into how these nuances make a big difference at a level almost no one is looking at or thinking about.
As with all of his books since The Third Wave in 1980, Toffler goes over the concept that we are still moving into the Third Wave of human society. He also explains this in the video above. To clarify this idea, here are the three waves he defined in The Third Wave. Originally, humans lived in small tribal bands that we generally refer to as hunter/gatherers in sociology today. The First Wave was the change from hunter/gatherers into an Agricultural Age, a world of farmers. This started somewhere around 9,000 years ago, probably in or near Turkey, according to Toffler. Agriculture moved very slowly, and took thousands of years to become the dominant lifetstyle in the world. But when people stayed in one place and became farmers, the lifestyle of every single person changed dramatically from the earlier tribal societies. Villages and small towns and cities began to form.
The Second Wave was the change from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age. The Toffler's put this age's start about 350 years ago, and it took a couple of hundred years to become the dominant lifestyle in the world. That transition happend much faster than the Agricultural revolution, and again every single person's lifestyle changed. Small villages became towns, and some towns grew into large, and even huge cities as the Industrial Age progressed.
The Third Wave began in1956, when the number of "white collar" office workers first outnumbered the number of "blue collar" factory workers in the U.S.. The Information Age began slowly growing from that point. The transition between the two was still continuing, when Alvin offler published Revolutionary Wealth in 2006, and I argue this transition is still going on today.
In today's world, in many developing countries, there still are First Wave people living off subsistence agriculture, and in "developed" countries, we still have many Second Wave Industrial Age people and businesses, still working from that mentality of building physical objects as the main source of wealth.
We also have the Third Wave, Information Age people, creating "products" and services that in many cases, don't physically exist, like websites and internet content, streaming video, financial services, and the huge video gaming industry. Huge amounts of wealth are now created in these revolutionary ways, built in a digital world and a physical world, yet in new ways.
We also have a lot of battles between the people and interests in each of these waves. Toffler refers to this as "wave warfare," where, for example, old school Industrial businesses lobby politicians for one sort of result, and Information Age tech businesses will lobby politicians for a completely different set of results and outcomes. These different special interests are battling each other, though few people think of it this way. This is yet another cause of drama and chaos in today's society.
Another issue Toffler dives into is the economic conundrum of "information-based" products and wealth. One traditional definition of "economics" was "the allocation of scarce resources." But knowlege is not a scarce resource, like coal or steel. Another issue is that many different people can use the same "knowledge," but only one person can use a machine or a piece of steel at one time. The point is that the whole world of "economics" doesn't even have models to even to begin and try and figure out how to quantify and analyze information-based products and services. Economics is using obsolete Industrial Age concepts to try and analyze an Information Age world economy. They simply don't have the basic tools to analyze business and finance in the Information Age world. It will be decades before economists come up with, and agree on, even basic models to anaylze an information-based economy.
This brings me to another idea Toffler shares in this book. The idea is that much of the knowledge each of us has in our head is outdated and obsolete. It just isn't true anymore. The Toffler's call this "Obsoledge," for "obsolete knowledge." We are all operating with some knowledge about particular subjects that is simply outdated, because that specific area has evolved, changed, and our thinking hasn't.
Another huge issue Toffler digs deep into in Revolutionary Wealth is the idea of "Prosuming," another word they made up, in a previous book. Prosuming is creating a good or service for personal consumption. Prosuming is work that is done by someone, but no money changes hands, so it doesn't get counted in the money economy. For example, when you cook your own food and make dinner for your family, that was work that you did for your family's consumption. But other than buying the food, no money changed hands for the actual work of cooking, serving the food, and doing the dishes afterwards. If your whole family had gone to a restaurant, you would have to pay quite a bit for someone else to perform those services.
Prosuming is its own non-money, which is much larger than the actual money economy. All of this work that's done for free, all across the U.S., and around the world, that has huge effects on the money economy. But the contributions of pro-suming are never really acknowledged by economists and others in academia. Linux software was created for free, and has had major effects on the world. Wikipedia is a huge, crowd-source, pro-suming project, another big example of pro-suming in today's technological world. Wikipedia largely put encyclopedias out of business, but doing the job better, more up-to-date, with mostly amateurs, that correct each other's contributions. The end result is an evolving "encyclopedia" that's doesn't physically exist, yet is available as a free resource to billions of people around the world. Another great example of highly productive prosuming are all those thousands of how-to videos on YouTube, to help us all learn to use new devices, software, and other things. YouTube was a year old, and still often laughed at, when Toffler published Revolutionary Wealth. Now half of all TV watching, on big screens, is YouTube content, most of it creator-made content, not scripted shows produced by major studios.
The most influential pro-suming, as any mom knows, is all the work moms and dadsand other family members do raising kids, that never gets counted as paid work. Employers looking for new people to fill jobs don't have to worry about their recruits being potty trained, knowing how to speak English (or whatever their native language in their country), and most basic social skills. Parents do those things, and many more, to prepare kids to be adults. Sure, some do better jobs than others. But imagine how much money would have to be spent to hire a crew to raise and train a single baby until they were old enough to get their first job. The cost would be enormous. All that work of getting kids to adulthood is done by moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and some friends. That is an huge benefit to society that never gets any economic value attached to it. That is just one part of pro-suming in today's world.
Another issue that all these other changes have lead to in this period of transition is the great mismatches in different aspects of society. In the height of the Industrial Age, with most people working repetitive assembly line jobs, people were largely interchangable. When there were 1,000 job openings, average people could fill most of them. A lot of those jobs could easily mix and match employees. So when the government said we have million empty jobs, employers needed a million average people to fill the vast majority of them.
Now we have far more jobs that involve specialized knowedge, creativity, critical thinking, or skill sets that are much more rare. That's why, as I write this, we have (officially) 9.6 million jobs that need workers, and 6 million unemployed people. Because long term unemployed people are no longer counted, we actually have two or three othe runemployed people for each one that is officially counted. So we probably have around 18 million unemployed people of working age now. But those millions people can't, or won't fill those 9.6 million jobs open right now. So many jobs require specialized technical, or other skills and knowledge, that we have this huge mismatch. We have lots of jobs that need filled, and lots of people who need good jobs, but they don't fit each other. This mismatch is just one of many happening in society right now.
Another mismatch is the spatial/geographical mismatch. Tech jobs tend to cluster in a small number of tech hub cities, because tech companies cluster where the best tech workers are, generally. Since tech workers have some of the highest pay in today's work world, they are willing to pay more for housing, and other services. So tech hub citites and regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, L.A./SoCal, Boston, the Washinton D.C./Arlington area, Austin, Texas, have seen rent and home prices soar over the last 30 years or so. This makes it much harder for lower wage service workers to survive in those areas.
But at the same time, many former powerhouse cities of the Industrial Age, like Chicago, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, and many others, have struggled to survive and rebuild, after losing 100,000 factory jobs, and that many people, in some cases. Other big Industrial cities have practically collapsed after the loss of tens of thousands of factory jobs, like Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and one of the worst, Gary, Indiana. We have cities where high paying tech jobs can't find workers. And we have dozens of towns and cities that are a shadow of their former selves, struggling to find any jobs for all their residents.
This is another mismatch of the cities that worked economically 50 years ago, and the ones that work the best economically in the emerging Information Age. We have all kinds of cheap rental houses, and even thousands of abandoned ones, in places where there isn't near as much of an economy anymore. At the same time, we have people renting treehouses in Austin for $3,000 a week or so to go to SXSW, the music and tech festival. Alvin Toffler goes into other huge mismatches in society caused by the changes in how we interact with the deep fundamentals of time, space, and work.
Oh yeah, Toffler mentions a pandemic as one major thing we had to look out for in the future, a handful of times in the book, yes, way back in 2006. That was one of many issues he saw potentially arising and causing a lot of trouble.
Revolutionary Wealth is over 500 pages, and this was the third time I've read it, the first was back in 2010 or 2011, I think. I read dozens of books in that era. I read it again in about 2015-2016, I think. It's still mind blowing, although the world has changed quite a bit in 17 years. There is so much of what he wrote about back then that is not only still happening, but almost no one seems to be using many of the ideas he wrote about. If you ever get a chance to write a reading list for current world leaders, and city leaders everywhere, put this book on the list. There is still a whole lot to learn from the work of the late Alvin Toffler. We would be a lot better off today if most major leaders, at every level, had studied this book back when it came out. We would be a lot better off if Revolutionary Wealth was mandatory reading in colleges 10 or 15 or 17 years ago.
So there's a very brief look at an incredible book, now 17 years old, that still holds a ton of valuable information on why our world is so crazy today. That's the mark of a good futurist, when the book still has a lot to teach a decade or two later. Revolutionary Wealth is one of those books. Now you know. Maybe a few of you will read it, which is my hope.
* Not a paid link
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, the economy, and making money during the recession. Check it out:
Adam Taggart of Wealthion channel interviews several financial industry people every week, and does a lot of great interviews on the economy and investing. Lucky Lopez is a long time car dealer from Las Vegas, and also does a YouTube channel about cars and the whole auto industry these days. If you are into cars, have a car to sell, or are thinking about buying a car and truck in coming months, check this interview out.
If you or someone you knows drives for Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Uber Eats, use a car for Turo or anything like that, DEFINTELY listen to the last 15 minutes of this interview. BIG changes coming! For real.
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, the economy, and making a living during the recession. Check it out:
What happens when you chop up five 80's action sports videos and throw them in a pot? Vision's Mondo Vision. This video sold 40,000 copies through some shady-ass infomercial/distributor, and made Vision about $800. For real. But the whole thing was a commercial for Vision Street Wear, so no one cared. At 5:10 in this video, there's a segment showing the 1987 Palm Springs Tramway GPV (Gravity Powered Vehicle) race. GPV's started with BMXers taking spare parts, and making weird little bikes with no pedals to bomb down big hills and race each other. This was one of the few semi-organized races, in the summer of 1987. I never actually got into GPV racing. But I have a big hill story that I've only told in my ebook a couple of years ago.
The single scariest thing I ever did in 20 years of BMX was riding down a big hill. For real. Now most of you know me, and you're thinking, "Damn Steve (White Bear), you were a pussy, you never really did anything very gnarly." Fair enough. But I'm telling you right now, I doubt anyone reading this would want to ride this hill today in Levi's and a T-shirt, like I did in August of 1985. Here's the story.
My dad got laid off in Boise in the spring of 1985, the year after I graduated from high school. With no money for college, I had been working all winter at a big, mainstream Mexican restaurant called Chi-Chi's. No I didn't know what chi-chi's meant when I got the job. I can still make some mean fried ice cream, though. Anyhow, my dad found a new job in San Jose California, and flew off to start it, and we kept living in Boise. In June of 1985, he moved my mom and sister out of the house they bought two years before, and down to an apartment in San Jose.
I was lined up to work the summer as manager of The Fun Spot, a tiny amusement park in Julia Davis Park, near downtown Boise. I rented a room at my best friend's house for the summer, and ran the little amusement park, day to day, which was pretty cool for an 18-19 year old. The job only paid $3.05 an hour to start, but I was in charge, had 12 employees under me, and it was great practical experience in managing people. To get high school kids to pull weeds in 90 degree heat for $2 an hour, you've got to build some management skills. In the evenings, I practiced my BMX freestyle in the parking lot near work, or the street by our house. I was still doing a few shows here and there with my trick teammate, Justin Bickel.
The Fun Spot closed down about the middle of August, and we tore down all the rides for the winter, and packed everything up. With my job over, I packed up all my stuff, which was actually a lot, into my gigantic 1971, shit brown Pontiac Bonneville. It was a true land yacht. Goodbyes to my Boise group of friends handled the night before, on a early morning in late August, I hopped in the Pontiac for a long solo drive down to San Jose. I'd never made a long drive by myself, and I was really uptight in those days. So I was both excited, and kind of scared, when I pulled out of the street where I lived all summer, and headed out of Boise, Idaho.
I took I-84 west to Route 55, and kept going west. Heading into a little burg called Marsing, I crossed the Snake River, maybe 80 or so miles upstream from the section Evel Knievel made famous when I was a kid. A couple of miles past Marsing, I turned left on Route 95, another two lane road at first. Before long, the highway widened two four lanes, as I headed up a long uphill stretch. As I recall, it was a 5% grade for 5 miles, almost long enough to warrant runaway truck ramps on the downhill side, but not quite. It was about 7 am, and I was comfortably driving in my AFA T-shirt with the windows down. The summer heat hadn't really gotten going yet.
I was barely an hour into my long journey. The huge Olsmobile 455 V8 cruised up the long hill. And then it didn't. My car chugged a little, and began to lose speed. I didn't know what to do, so I coasted to the shoulder of the road. I jammed on the e-brake and got out. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a horrible bike mechanic, and I'm worse with cars. I popped the hood, but the car wasn't overheating. I popped the pressure release on the radiator lid, a bit of steam came out, but nothing serious. After a few minutes, I pulled the lid off, the radiator was fine. That was it, that was all I knew how to handle, my dad's decades of experience as a car guy and engineer didn't make it to me. I looked around.
I was about 4 1/2 miles up a long hill, an hour into a long one day, probably 1 1/2 day trip. My giant Pontiac was dead. It was 1985, cell phones weren't a thing. So I did the only thing that made sense to me. I pulled my Skyway T/A BMX race bike, that I used for freestyle, out of the trunk. It was on top of a pile of junk, just in case. I got my tools, straightened out the handlebars, which I'd turned sideways at the stem, to fit in the trunk. Then I threaded on my pedals, the only things I'd taken off the bike to pack it in the huge trunk. I closed the trunk, locked the car up, and picked up my bike, the T/A rolling a freewheel on red ACS Z-Rims, the plastic rims that were supposed to bounce back when knocked out of true. In reality, they never were actually true, ever, there were always wobbles. Dressed in a pair of Levi's 501's, my red AFA T-shirt, worn for luck, and a pair of Nike Pegasus running shoes, a leftover from my cross country running days I took off. The hill was so steep, that I didn't have to pedal once to get going. I just picked up my feet and put them on the pedals. I started rolling down hill.
After about 100 yards, I hit my front and back DiaCompe MX-1000 brakes, I couldn't slow my bike down to a stop if I wanted to. So I let off the brakes, realizing I was going to have to roll it out, all 4 1/2 miles of the 5% grade hill. That didn't really make me nervous. It should have.
Within a half mile, my hubs were making a loud sound, a sound I've never heard before or since, and I was already going far faster than I could pedal. At some point, I crossed over to the downhill road, I can't remember exactly where. I honestly have no idea how fast I was going, but it was a lot faster than I've ever ridden before... or since. I've ridden 45 mph on a mountain bike with a speedometer, and I was going a lot faster than 45 on my Skyway. The only really scary part was when the side of the hills next to me would open up, into a little canyon, and a strong crosswind gust of air would push me sideways suddenly. I just held on and rode down the hill.
Route 95 that morning was almost empty. I did see a couple of cars heading uphill, and saw their heads double take at the sight of me, whizzing down the opposite side of the road. I just kept buzzing along. As luck would have it, I was at the Palm Springs Tramway GPV event in 1987, two years later, in the video above. That whole road, about 3 1/2 miles long, climbs 1800 feet, and had a 9.6% overall grade. I also later worked with Pat Wallace, the motorcycle cameraman at the event. He personally told me that Tommy Brackens, near the bottom of the GPV race course, passed the camera motorcycle, in a turn, when the motorcycle was doing 85 mph. So the fastest GPV's, in the race above, hit at least 90 miles per hour in spots. The total section of the road used for the GPV race was about 1 1/2 to 2 miles long.
So... in jeans and a T-shirt, I rode down a hill half as steep, but more than twice as long, as the GPV riders in the video clip above. And I did it two years before that race. They topped out around 90 mph. I'm sure I was doing at least 55-60 on my Skyway with Z-rims, and 70-80 mph would not surprise me at all. Actually, thinking back, if I hit100 mph on that ride, it wouldn't really surprise me. I'll never know just how fast I went. But I was going really fast on a stock Skyway T/A race bike, with sketchy ass Z-Rims, and smooth "stadium" tires. So I'm pretty sure I clocked the unofficial Z-Rim world speed record that day. If anyone wants to check out the Route 95 hill, let me know. I doubt you'll want to ride down it, but just a second opion on just how gnarly it looks would be cool.
I hit a long flat area, maybe 1/4 to 3/8 of a mile long, coasted the whole thing at speed, then coasted up another hill, maybe 50-75 feet in elevation, and at the top of that I tried to pedal, and could just barely get my sprocket to catch. I was still going too fast to really pedal. I coasted down the other side of that hill, and a few hundred yards onto the flats, before I had ot pedal the first time. So I coasted at least 5 miles without pedaling once. Then it was another six or so miles into Marsing, where I found a small garage, and two guys straight out of Mayberry RFD. They took me back up the hill in an oversize tow truck, and towed my car to their shop. The downhill run towing my car was actually scarier than riding the hill. The old tow truck only had two of five gears working, and he couldn't downshift for a while on the hill, and scared the shit of of his partner and me. But we got back down into Marsing safely. They guys were pretty surprised when I told them I rode down the hill on my "little kid's bike."
They spent a few hours pulling my engine apart to find the timing chain had broken. I wandered around all day, including climbing to the top of nearby Lizard Butte, across the Snake River from Marsing. I had lunch and a great piece of peach pie at a diner there. Shortly before dusk, and about $250 lighter in the wallet, I was back on the road. I made it into north Nevada that night, got a motel room, and then made it safely to my parents' new apartment in San Jose the next afternoon.
So that's the story of my Z-Rim unofficial world speed record, and the single scariest thing I've ever done on a bicycle. If any of you from Idaho or eastern Oregon want to check out that grade on Route 95, let me know just how gnarly it looks today, to ride a bike down. My car broke about half a mile from the top. Let's just say I don't think there will be any GPV's riding that whole grade anytime soon.
I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack now, check it out:
This is probably the best ditch skating video I've ever seen. Since I first rolled into an Idaho ditch, on my POS BMX bike, in the early 1980's, I've been a fan of ditch riding, and later ditch skating. This is a trek to all kinds of ditches, lots of unusual terrain, and some pools and a DIY skatepark, plus his friend sliding some monster rails. Great street/pool/ditch segment to watch before your next session.
When it comes to Creative Scenes of people in the United States, there are only a few that rank with Greenwich Village. Hollywood for movies and TV, New Orleans for jazz, Nashville for country music, maybe Austin these days for music and technical innovation. Greenwich Village in New York City had a long history of artists, writers, and free thinkers. This documentary, Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation, focuses on the folk music music scene that formed in the Village in the 1960's, and sparked the singer/songwriter movement, along with much more. It's narrated by Susan Sarandon.
I was raised as a dorky kid in small towns and rural areas of Ohio. As a very little kid, the radio provided my music, I remember being 5 or 6 years old and listening to Jim Croce, Three Dog Night, and The Guess Who. I didn't know who the bands were, I just loved the songs. It picked what I heard, depending on the station. My mom had a country station on wherever we lived, so that was the continual soundtrack of the kitchen or living room in our house growing up. I wasn't a fan of country music, with a few exceptions, like Johnny Cash. I got my own record player when I was 8, in third grade, and I could play a few of my parents' albums, and my mom's old 45's, mostly older standards. Neither of my parents were into rock n' roll.
The first album I remember owning, that I got to pick was John Denver's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. Between my mom's country music, and my dad's big band and swing, I became a fan of singer/songwriters, John Denver being the first. While he wasn't a major part of the scene, he was one of dozens of musicians of that era that made their way through the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in the 1960's.
The odd little bit of Manhattan, clustered around Washington Square Park, had been a cloister of all kinds of unusual and creative people for 50 years or more when it began to attract musicians like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and so many more in the early 1960's. Beginning as folk singers, they were singing songs often written decades before. This group mingled around Greenwich Village, talking, singing, philosophising, drinking, arguing, sharing ideas, and playing music with each other, as musicians do. Over the course of a few years, many began to write their own songs. They inspired each other, and millions more people, directly and indirectly, through their music, and later through the musicians following their lead.
As a kid in rural Ohio, listening to John Denver and looking out my window at the cow pasture, even I heard of Greenwich Village. It was one of the only art and music scenes I ever heard about as a Generation X kid in the 1970's. Now cities everywhere have "arts districts," many far to expensive for emerging artists to live in anymore. But some are still filled with art. But back then, in the early and mid 1970's, Greenwich Village was one of the only known "scenes" of creative people those of us across the U.S. ever heard of, Hollywood, Broadway, Nahsville, and New Orleans being the others.
This documentary features many of the musicians from that scene tell their own stories of what it was like, and how it evolved while they were a part of it. In it we hear from Pete Seger, Arlo Guthrie, Happy Traum, David Amram, Richie Havens, Oscar Brand, Judy Collins, Don McClean, Jose' Feliciano, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin, Carolyn Hester, Buffy Saint-Marie, Steve Earle, Carly Simon, and many more. The later part of the documentary goes more into the social and political aspects of the late 1960's, and how the folk music movement of the Village influenced the folk rock and mainstream rock music of the late 1960's and 1970's. This is a great look at an epic period in the timeline of Greenwich Village, and why it was a cultural and creative force in 20th century America
I'm going to be looking into all kinds of Creative Scenes in this blog, going forward. I've been writing for years about the economic troubles I see us heading into in the coming years, and how I think the 2020's will be a major transformative period in human history. I believe we are heading out of the final phase of the Industrial Age, and into the still emerging Information Age. I think Creative Scenes of many different varieties, from groups of musicians to high tech start-ups, and many kinds in between, will be a huge part of the change happening in this decade, and beyond. To get an idea of what makes great creative scenes, I'll be looking at lots of them, large and small. Greenwich Village is one of the most influential Creative Scenes in American history, so this is a great place to begin.
I got sick last week, and thought I had caught cellulitis. For those not aware, cellulitis is a group of infections people with diabetes often get, which often leads to swollen, red lower legs, or maybe arms. These infections, like MRSA, kill a lot of people, they can be incredibly serious. I don't have diabetes, to the best of my knowledge, but I started getting cellulitis when I gained all this weight as a taxi driver, back in 2007. So I'm prone to this illness, and thought that was what was happening.
When I actually got checked out by a good hospital, they thought I might have appendicitis. I spent two nights in the hospital, and they took really good care of me. Ultimately, they weren't sure exactly what I had, some kind of serious infection causing a lot of abdominal pain and overall sickness. It's been six days since this started, my appetite is coming back, and I'm getting better.
I didn't do any blogging or social media for a few days, so I'm getting going again today. A huge thank you to all the doctors and nurses who took care of me, and to everyone who wished me well on Facebook. I'm not 100% yet, but I'm doing better, and will get back to blogging, drawing, and everything in coming days. On the bright side, I've used this illness to stop drinking Diet Coke, which was my worst vice/addiction. So hopefully that will help me in the future. I'm "methadoning down" to iced tea for my daily caffeine fix. Still need that wake-up caffeine.
A weird side note involving the number 43. You Old School BMXers know that 43 is the "lucky number" for BMX freestyle, going back to the NorCal crew/Curb Dogs in 1986. That number's been one of my favorite numbers to me since I was a little kid, and became my top lucky number when the BMX thing happened. So when this blog was about to hit 43,000 page views, I got cellulitis, and went to a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, where I was living homeless then. They unknowingly gave me a medicine I was allergic to, and I damn near died. The hospital spent the next 7 days bringing me back from that accidental incident. This blog hit 43,000 page views, while I was in the hospital. So a week or so ago, this blog hit 143,000 page views, and I wound up in the hospital again, and things looked pretty dark at one point, though not as serious as back in 2018. 43 pops up at another transition point in my life. Weird coincidence.
In this video, Joe Brown, of Heresy Financial ,YouTube channel explains why he thinks we will not only see inflation pull back, but will actually see deflation, prices on many things actually dropping, in coming months.
For 3-4 years now, I've been blogging about a major recession, possibly a depression, I saw coming. My views are based on what I call The Big Transition. This is my name for the continuation of the concept that the late futurist, Alvin Toffler, explained in his 1980 book, The Third Wave. After a decade of research,Toffler came to the conclusion that we were leaving an industrial-based society, and moving into an information-based society. In today's terms, we were leaving the Industrial Age and moving into the Information Age. We're all familar with the idea now. Most people think that happened long ago. Most of the factories shut down, the internet got invented, and that was it.
Toffler published his last book, Revolutionary Wealth, in 2006, and 17 years after The Third Wave, still adding more depth and nuance to that idea. I believe this transition is still going on, now 43 years after he first explored the idea in print. I also believe the peak decade of this change will be the 2020's. This is one of my reasons I believed this recession will be much bigger, and much more transformative, than any since the 1930's. I wrote on this basic idea in some depth in late 2019 and early 2020.
Now I'm just some guy who first got interested in investing when I bought an ounce of silver, as a junior high kid, in 1981, after the big price spike and crash. I was hoping the price would spike again. Then, in the late 1980's, I got interested in real estate, which was soaring when I moved to southern California. I didn't make enough money to buy a house, but I began reading about real estate. A few years later, in 1989, I got fascinated by the dynamics of the economic world, business, investing, and long term trends that may exist in the markets. I've been watching and learning about these subjects ever since.
Don't listen to me. Listen to other smart people who have been studying the economy their whole lives, and who actually run businesses and do consulting.
In late 2019, while blogging about my thoughts on the economy, I began looking for more details and nuances about what was going day to day and month to month. I found The Money GPS YouTube channel in late 2019. I've been watching it almost every day since. In the months and years since, I've found that investors Ray Dalio, Jim Rogers, investor/journalist Nomi Prins, and analyst/scholar Mohamed El-Erian are also really good people to listen to on investing and the economy, on a continuing basis.
After the big moves up in interest rates and down in stock and some real estate prices in 2022, 2023 has been harder to figure out. I had been trying to figure out myself , recently, just where inflation was going, and Joe Brown's argument in this video above makes sense to me. Personally, I think we are most likely to dive into a deep recession, with inflation continuing to drop. It looks now like that will lead to a few months of deflation, actual dropping prices on many big items and investments.
This will wreak a lot of havoc on most everything and most everyone, financially. The Fed will have to pivot, that is, lower interest rates over time, and create a lot of new money, to bail out banks and major corporations (maybe even cities and whole states). Just like they did in 2022, they will do another about face, this time from raising interest rates to lowering them. This will set the stage for more, and even higher, inflation, 12 to 18 months after the pivot. The timing is hard to pin down now, it depends on The Fed's timing, but I think rising inflation by late 2024 or early to mid-2025, is likely. The stage is already set for the next president of the U.S., whomever that is, to have an even bigger inflation battle to deal with then Joe Biden got hit with. While many like ot blame this inflation on the 2020 stimulus package, all that money built upon a base of money creation and historically low interest rates through the Obama and Trump administrations. The Biden administration was in office as we hit the tipping point. Just for the record, presidents don't have that much to do with the economy, central banks have much more influence, the Federal Reserve here in the U.S., and others in other countries. Both parties in the U.S. spend ludicrous amounts of money, mostly debt passed on to future generations, the just put lots of money into different programs, while racking up trillions in debt.
Last year, as interest rates started to rise, I began to look on YouTube for other smart people with knwloedge about real estate, and other areas. Here are the best videos, people, and YouTube channels I like, to build a comprehensive picture of the economy world in these turbulent times.
Here's the best info this year on real estate in 2023. Adam Taggart of Wealthion channel interviews Nick Gerli of Reventure Consulting channel, who is the single best source of real estate info that I've seen anywhere. This video is from January 2023, before the first four bank collapses, but this is the best overview of real estate I've seen this year. Wealthion does multiple long interviews with really smart investment and finance people every week. Reventure focuses on real estate, and Nick spent the winter building Reventure App, a database, which still free as I write this, where you can see exactly what real estate is doing in your area, or any area, of the U.S.. If you are thinking of buyng a home to live in or for investment in the coming years, check out this app.
For a look at Southern California real estate, Christian Walsh of WIRE Associates puts out good videos. He's an agent in this area, and comes across like a guy-next-door type, low key and without the hype of many YouTubers. He explains the latest data and trends in the 5 main Southern California counties, on a continuing basis.
Robert Kiyosaki and his wife Kim interview silver enthsusiast @SilverSlayeron Rich Dad Radio Show on The Rich Dad Channelin the linked video. His channel is, you guessed it,Silver Slayer channel. This interview is from October 2022. As I write this, silver spot price is $25.66 per troy ounce. While gold is near its all time high price, silver has been over $47 per ounce in 2011, and $36 per ounce way back in 1980, which would be about $138 per ounce in today's dollars. Robert and @SilverSlayer talk about the one investment that many people think is completely undervalued, and the investment that anyone can afford in today's world.
You've probably heard of the personal finance book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the best selling investment books of all time. I think this book should be taught in high school, to give kids a basic idea about money and investing, and what an asset is, and isn't. Here's my favorite story about the author of that book, Robert Kiyosaki, and his wife Kim. Robert ran into troubles with his first business, importing nylon wallets and selling them. After that, he and Kim actually lived in their car for a few weeks, in the 1980's. They were actually technically homeless fo ra bit. Then some friends let them live in a basement for several months. Instead of getting jobs, they wrote a business plan, found investors, and started a business. Robert and Kim were doing really well a few years later. That set them up to begin buying real estate in the long, 1990's recession, when prices were really low. Robert and Kim have been serial entrepreneurs and investors, and then financial educators, ever since. Robert tells this story in his book Cashflow Quadrant. My point is that they are not people born rich, they actually have hit bottom, and built their businesses and wealth back up themselves.
What about the Big Picture? Here are my favorite macro thinkers and analysts in recent interviews, looking at the financial chaos that is 2023.
Adam from Wealthion interviews macro researcher/analyst Stephanie Pomboy in this interview, from early February, 2023. Recorded before the four (so far) bank collapses, Stephanie sees a hard landing ahead, and gives lots of nuances of her view, with a lot of info from corporate America.
A big worry of many investors right now is the future of the U.S. dollar. There is a move by Russia, China and other countries for a BRICs reserve currency, to move away from the dollar, and the worry of possible sanctions in the future. Is the dollar doomed in the next couple of years?
Jack at Blockworks Macro's Forward Guidance show interviews Brent Johnson, who figured out the "Dollar Milkshake Theory" several years ago, in this interview. Recorded in late April 2023, Brent gives his case while the dollar should still be the world's reserve currency for quite a while to come.
Other YouTube channels I think have really good information investors, and anyone else interested in the crazy economic world playing out in the 2020's.
Those are the main places I look, and videos I watch, on a regular basis, because I'm a futurist and economics geek, though not an investor. Personally, I think we are now 43 months into a great depression, which I've been calling The Phoenix Great Depression, since early 2020. That's just my opinion, and I could very well be wrong. My belief in some really obscure, ultra-long term cycles, led me to that conclusion. It takes a 5 year economic contraction to officially form a great depression, which means we have 2 to 3 years before that is even possible, let alone likely. Time will tell.
We are definitely heading into the worst part of the major economic downturn I've been droning on about for four years or so. All of these people and channels linked above are much better sources for up-to-date data and ideas on where the financial world is heading, in the short and mid term.
I'm pivoting to spending more time thinkng and writing about what I call call Creative Scenes, the little groups of people who create things. Some of these turn into major and influential businesses or movements, and many of the smaller ones create the businesses and products that will build our way out of this long period of economic chaos. For any of you trying to figure out what's going on in the business, financial, and ecnoomic world, I hope this post is really helpful.
The very knowledgeable Mohamed El-Erian gives his thoughts on the failure of First Republic Bank, and its takeover (of most assets) by J.P. Morgan Chase, in this CNBC interview. First Republic is the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history, behind the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008. This interview was Monday morning, May 1, 2023.