Our BMX/Unclicked podcast with Todd Lyons- aka "The Wildman"

Ryan Fudger of Our BMX/Unclicked and Mike "Rooftop" Escamilla interview Todd Lyons.  

I already put this on Facebook and shared it, and I want to go into some detail about the P.O.W. House days and the Bordello club that Todd talks about (and other clubs), in another post.  Here's 3 1/2 hours of funny and crazy stories from Todd Lyons, former pro racer, early  dirt jumper, Sheep Hills Local, two time amateur world champion, doer of big backflips (landings optional), and now long time brand manager at SE Bikes. I know Todd from the P.O.W. House days of the early and mid 90's, and some of these stories had me laughing so hard that my stomach hurt,  For real.  If you're into Old School/Mid School BMX racing and dirt jumping, check this podcast out.  Great stuff.

Fox Air Raid promo- 1996- Alan Foster, Brian Foster, and Todd Lyons are Sheep Hills (then other riders in other places)

Todd Lyons JNCO (jeans) commercial from about 1999-2000

SE Fat Ripper promo- about 2017: 40-something Todd still busting out on a big bike

Todd Lyons at Sheep Hills, 2019.  SHL.  #stevemigphotos

Todd at Sheep Hills, 2019.  SHL.  #steveemigphotos

I've been doing a lot of writing lately on a platform called Substack, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The College Apocalypse is finally becoming visible...

This report just dropped, in mid March 2024.  Is a college degree really worth the time, work, and cost in today's world?  Obviously, for some careers, you absolutely need a degree.  But the number of college grads in the workforce has exploded, and the financial cost of college degrees is higher than ever.  There's a drop in enrollment in many colleges now, even at large universities.  The whole idea of college is in for some major changes in the next several years.  I've been saying this for years, and this issue is now... finally... just starting to make it into the mainstream news.

Let me begin by saying that I have never taken a single college course.  I have nothing against college, I just didn't have the money to go to college when I graduated high school, so I took a year off, and then another year.  I didn't have a real strong drive for any career that needed a degree when I was 18.  My high school friends, who were not BMX guys, were all outdoorsy guys.  We all talked about becoming wildlife biologists, because that seemed to be the one career where spending a lot of time out in the mountains seemed possible.  But I didn't take that path.  BMX freestyle riding soon led me down a different road, and college never happened for me.  It just wasn't my path, I don't hate colleges in general.  

That said, back in 2017, I had lunch with a friend in North Carolina, and his friend, who was an American living in Denmark.  We talked about all kinds of things, many comparing life in the U.S. to the culture of Denmark and Scandinavia.  The subject of college, and student debt came up, and we all wondered why student debt had exploded to the ludicrous amount (then) of $1.3 trillion dollars or so.  

When I got back home after that lunch, I was curious, so I looked it up.  It took me about 10 or 15 minutes of Google searches to find the answer.  From about 2009 on, student loans had been bought and packaged into huge bundles, just like high quality and subprime mortgages had before the Great Recession.  It turns out that from 2009 to about 2020 , U.S. public student loans were bundled into SLABS, which stands for Student Loan Asset Backed Securities.  

They are virtually identical to the Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), that helped spark the 2008 financial crisis.  Here's the classic Margot Robbie bathtub scene from The Big Short movie, explaining Mortgage Backed Securities.  Here's a Linked In article explaining and comparing SLABS and CMBS (Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities).  When I looked this up, and discovered that SLABS existed, I had already seen the movie, The Big Short, about the guys who bet against the U.S. housing market in 2008-2009.  So I knew what happened when enough people didn't pay their loans, which the MBS or SLABS are made out of.  Here's the Jenga Scene from The Big Short, explaining these mortgage bonds, and this whole idea, with the visual metaphor of a tower of Jenga blocks.  

After 15 minutes of Google searching in 2017, and finding out about SLABS, I did some very simple thinking.  At the time, there were around $1.3 trillion in public student loan debt.  After the collapse of subprime mortgages in 2008, regulators came down on Wall Street for the Mortgage Backed Securities made out of subprime loans (loans where people didn't really qualify).  So Wall street financiers just took the same idea, and did it with student loans.  They made tons of money on fees for making the SLABS, and selling the various levels of investments created from the SLABS.  They needed lots of new student loans, so the loan brokers had major motivation to make lots of student loans, regardless of whether the students could really afford to pay back the loans or not.  

After all, people are not allowed to get out of their student loans, even if they go bankrupt.  So the amount of student loans exploded from 2009 until 2020 or 2021.  Wall Street also bundled, made bonds, and sold investments, made out of commercial mortgages, like those on office buildings (Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities-CMBS), business loans (Collateralized Loan Obligations-CLO's), and even auto loans and credit card debt (Asset Backed Securities).  

All of those debt bubbles kept growing larger and larger from 2009 until 2020, until the pandemic hit.  Guess what's happening right now?  Thousands of people and businesses are having trouble paying many of the underlying loans that the SLABS, CMBS, CLO's, and ABS are made from.  That means all those investments are falling in value.  Some investors, like major banks, hedge funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors, own those investments that have dropped in value.  The rise in interest rates over the last two years made this even worse.  

Go back and watch that Jenga Scene from The Big Short again.  That is what is happening to all of these investments right now, in 2024.  Commercial Real Estate (CRE) is the biggest worry right now for regional banks, but all of these debt bubbles could crash.  That's where we are right now.  But now there's another $400 billion in student loan debt, it's over $1.7 trillion now, far more than the $1.3 trillion in subprime loans that collapsed the economy back in 2008.  The other debt bubbles add up to hundreds of billions of more debt.

Way back in 2017, I started thinking about this, and concluded that there would be a huge crash in the student loan SLABS system at some point.  The easy financing provided by those SLABS led to much more money going to colleges and universities, which is part of the reason tuition could increase so much from 2009-2020.  My thinking, back in 2017, was that when the SLABS market crashes, it would cut the number of people who could get student loans, and therefore, there would be far fewer people who could afford to go to college.  Here's a blog post, from November 2017 where I mentioned the student debt issue, commenting on a Rolling Stone article about the huge debt burden student loan debt poses.

I began to see a College Apocalypse coming in the 2020's because of the inevitable (as I saw it), collapse of the student loan financing system.  When financing collapsed, far fewer people would be able to go to college, enrollment would drop, and colleges and universities would begin to struggle financially.  My belief in a coming College Apocalypse was tied entirely to the economics of student loans and the SLABS system, regardless of other factors.    

Later on, I dug into this idea more, and found that many small colleges had been closing down since about 2000.  Around 100 small colleges have already closed down since then, or merged with other schools.  Then I learned that there's also a demographic issue with young people.  Fewer families had kids after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  That turned into a drop in the population, and that age group with fewer people will start hitting college age in about 2025.  So that's another reason for a drop in enrollment, one that colleges themselves have had an eye on for years now.  Oddly, no college seems to have figured out that the SLABS system will eventually crash, as well.  

Here's the real kicker, it looks like we are in, or headed into, a serious recession right now (March 2024, as I write this).  A deep recession will amplify the economic effects, and speed up the drop in enrollment, due to financial condition of potential students.  In a weird bit of synchronicity, the breakdown in the SLABS bubble looks like it will happen right before the demographic wave of fewer students happens.  It's like a Perfect Storm of negative events for colleges in the next few years.  

I first described my thoughts on the "College Apocalypse," in depth, in my online book/blog,  Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, chapter 14, written around March or April of 2020.  It's down near the bottom of this post.  

My take is that we will see many more small colleges close or merge over the next 5-10 years.  We will see major colleges begin to struggle financially, and will likely see closures of some of the less popular campuses in the major systems over the next several years.  All in all, I wouldn't be surprised to see 20% to 30% of all college campuses close down. Think about the Retail Apocalypse.  We've had somewhere around 30,000 retail stores close down since about 2015.  But we still have many brick and mortar stores.  The Retail industry had to adapt and re-invent itself, to go forward, and become viable, in the Information Age.  The same kind of dynamic is happening now for colleges and universities.  The entire college and university system has to re-invent itself, to become viable and functional, in the emerging Information Age.  That means a lot of change to come, and less school campuses overall as time goes on.  A driver to much more online courses seems to be a huge part of this transition, which has been happening for some time.   

I've been waiting for the College Apocalypse to start becoming visible for seven years now, and a couple of articles or news clips mentioned it.  But now even Cal State, a major university, is seeing declining enrollment, before the student loans system crashes.  Here are several news stories and videos on this subject, most of them from the last year or so.  

KPIX: California colleges grapple with drop in enrollment - February 2024

Gen Z is souring on college degrees as a path to success - September 2023

CNBC: What more and more colleges are closing down in America - June 2023

Borrowed Future: How student loans are killing the American Dream - March 2023

Forbes: The Future of Colleges and Universities - April 2023

Don't go to college: Watch this instead - November 2023

CNBC: Why college is so expensive in America -  Spring 2019

Closed Colleges- lists and statistics - March 2024

U.S. New & World Reports: The Higher Education Apocalypse - March 2019

There are no paid links in this post.

I've been doing a lot of writing on deeper subjects on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The book "Generation X" was not actually about Generation X

This is an early 1990's interview with Douglas Copeland, the author of the book Generation X.  She mentions the third printing of the book, which was published in 1991.  This interview appears to be in 1993, two years later.  Copeland was born right at the end of 1961, now considered the late part of the Baby Boom generation.  That make's Copeland was about 30 or 31 in this interview.  Yes, the only Generation X interview I could find with Copeland from that era is on an LGBT Canada YouTube channel.  I had no idea what his sexual preference was, and don't really care.  But this is the only interview about this book I could find.

A young writer writes a novel about a small subgroup of people around his age, and winds up naming three whole generations by accident.  He was writing about some of the people born between 1961 and 1971.  He never mentions the band Generation X, from the late 1970's, and fronted by Billy Idol, so that seems to have little influence on this book, except the term "Generation X" was out there.  The generation after Douglas Copeland's, my generation, got tagged with the title of his book, Generation X.  Now, over 30 years later, the widely accepted age range of Gen X is those born from 1965 to 1980.  The Baby Boom, which actually began as a real baby boom after World War II, was born from 1946 to 1964.  I was born in 1966, making me one of the older Gen Xers.  The group after us, born from 1981 to 1996, largely came of age around the year 2000, and got dubbed the Millennials.  After that, the powers at be apparently gave up trying to name any more generations.  The post-Millennial generation, born from 1997 to 2012, is now known as Gen Z.  We were X, the Millennials would then be Y, the next group is Z.  Who comes after Gen Z?  Gen Alpha are the new kids, born from 2013 to present, and probably until about 2028.  Back to "A," but now it's "Alpha," so now we're either using the Greek alphabet, or military walkie talkie radio talk letters, you decide.  

I got a bad leg infection in January, struggling through SoCal's chilly, rainy winter, as a homeless guy in the suburbs north of L.A..  That led to a couple of days in the hospital, then a couple weeks in a sketchy "homeless recuperation center," which was a sketchy, underfunded, broken down motel in Palmdale.  I could barely walk for a couple of weeks, had no wifi, and no place to work on art.  For two weeks, I laid in a small bed, with my leg raised up on my backpack, thinking.  I decided to work on an idea for a novel.  I used a book about screenwriting to block out the different pieces of that story.

As research for that novel I started planning out, I just re-read the book Generation X, published in 1991, and then looked up this interview, to see what Copeland had to say about the book back then.  Much to my surprise, Generation X wasn't even written about Generation X.  In this short, but solid, interview above, Douglas Copeland explains that he was writing about a subgroup of what is now the late Baby Boom generation and early Genartion X, those born from about 1961 to 1971.  They are the last part of the Boomers, and Copeland, born in late 1961, is a part of that group.  In his experience, many of them had a much different outlook on life than the early Boomers, and that's what Generation X was written about.  

The story is about three young people, in their late 20's, Andy, Dag, and Claire.  They all careened off of the traditional career path of life, the rat race, as we used to call it, and wound up in Palm Springs, California.  Palm Springs, about an hour east of the Los Angeles metro, is a desert resort town, inhabited mostly by old people, a bunch of TV and movie stars from days gone by, and other old people who love plastic surgery.  The three main characters work "McJobs," low pay, low prestige, no future gigs, and live in small bungalows next door to each other.  All three are hipsters, at least by my standards.  To pass the time, they get together and tell each other weird stories.  Generation X follows their lives over a few months time, as they navigate life, family expectations, and try to find meaning in a world where a nuclear holocaust could bring all human life to and end, at any moment.  

I thought Generation X was a decent read back when I first read it in 1992 or so.  But the characters were just too hip for me then, and I couldn't relate to them very well.  It reads a lot better now that I'm a middle aged loser.  I cranked through it in about three days this time.  I had almost completely forgotten the book, there were very few parts I remembered from my first reading.  If you're kind of burned out on life, or want to time travel back to the "before times," pre-internet, before cell phones, but when young people struggled with finding meaning in life, much like they do now, Generation X is a good read.  

Douglas Copeland- "Life is not about essays"- 2019 or early 2020

1991 MTV's special report on Generation X, before it was fully known as Generation X

I've been writing a lot of my deeper ideas on Substack, a platform specifically designed for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The job I thought I always wanted... sitting for ideas

This is a horrible, robot voiced video, with some language captioned over it.  But it's all I could find about the little known inventor, Dr. Elmer R. Gates.

Who the hell is Elmer R. Gates?  Born in 1859, Elmer Gates is a man I read about in the classic Napoleon Hill book about success, Think and Grow Rich.  Published in 1937, from an idea sparked by the great industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, Think and Grow Rich is one of the all time best selling success books, in print for over 80 years, now.  It's one of the first books anyone interested in business or personal success should read.  You can look it up and learn about this book. Heck, you can even read the whole book online at the link below.

Back to Dr. Elmer Gates.  Elmer Gates was an inventor, that's how most people of his day would have thought of him.  He came up with ideas that earned him over 200 patents, in the same time period when Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and many others of the mechanical and electrical era were inventing new technologies.  We still use Edison-style light bulbs lit up by Nikola Tesla's AC current today, so the effects of these men's inventions carry on, even today.  Elmer Gates invented the foam retardant used in fire extinguishers, among many, many other things.  

Like I said, I read about Elmer Gates in Think and Grow Rich, which, ironically (since I'm a homeless guy these days) I've read 8 or 10 times.  It wasn't the inventions of Dr. Gates that Napoleon Hill wrote about in the book, it was how Elmer Gates came up with many of those ideas.  

On page 179, of this online version of Think and Grow Rich, we read that Dr. Gates would go into a special room in his lab.  He called it his "personal communication room."  The room was sound proof, and it was sealed, so he could turn the lights off to make it completely dark.  He had a chair, a small table to write on, and a pad of paper.  Elmer Gates would go into this room alone, sit down, hit a button to turn the lights off, and then mentally concentrate on all the known parts of the invention he was working on.  Then he would sit there, until new ideas for the invention came to him.  When that happened, he would hit the button, turn the lights back on, and start writing down his ideas, until all the  new information that came to him was in his notes.  Then he would go out, and apply the new information that came to him to the project.  

Where did all that new information about the invention come from?  His imagination?  His subconscious mind?  Some collective superconscious mind?  No one else seemed to know.  But new information came to him, and it came to him  time after time after time.  At times he would get paid to "sit for ideas" for major corporations or other entities.  Time after time, reading Think and Grow Rich, I thought, "sitting for ideas?"  That sounds like a real cool way to make a living.  In a sense, that's part of what a writer does.  So maybe I have a chance, in that sense.  In any case, I always found the little story of Dr. Elmer R. Gates fascinating, and maybe you will, too.  It's less than a page, you can read Napoleon's Hill's story of Dr. Gates on that link.

Today, on my Substack site, I wrote a post about insights, and how I think that intuitive insights, artistic and creative sparks (new ideas for techniques or projects), scientific breakthroughs, and spiritual revelations and epiphanies, all seem to come to people through the same process, or very similar processes.  

That doesn't mean this process is easy, or that anyone can just go into a dark room, think for a while, and come up with  million dollar, or these days, billion dollar ideas.  But the basic process is something anyone can try to improve upon.  I think just about everybody has had some kind of intuitive hunch, or idea, at some point in their life.  Artists, musicians, inventors, and top caliber athletes have all talked about intuition, unplanned responses to events, time slowing down, and being "in the zone," or the "flow state," at times.  This is how many of my poem ideas, years ago, and many writing and other creative ideas, have come to me, for over 30 years now.  So if this sounds interesting, you can read my insights about insights, in this Substack post.  

If this whole concept interests you, I highly recommend reading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.  You can find the whole book at that link, to read it online, or pick up a copy at a book store, the library, or a website.  

I've been doing writing on deeper subjects on Substack, a platform designed for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The $10,000 Investment Challenge (paper trade) - Up 40% in three months!

Numba go up.  Solana has more than doubled in price since I started this paper trading experiment on December 11, 2023.  I bought into it at $69.65, and it was $147.80 today when I took some profits.

Disclaimer

Just a reminder, this is a paper trading exercise, which began with this blog post, on December 11, 2023.  I opened a Coinbase account, but was unable to put any money into it, because of my cheap ass phone.  That really pissed me off, since I knew the next big Bitcoin/crypto bull market was already underway.  I decided to to pretend I had $10,000 to invest in anything, and do a paper trading experiment instead.  This whole thing started with this November 14th, 2023 post, about the coming Bitcoin bull market potential, due to the BTF spot ETF's and the upcoming Bitcoin halving.  So I don't actually have $10,000 invested in crypto, and this experiment should not be taken as investing advice.  See the Disclaimer above.

Anyhow, I clicked on the news today and saw that Bitcoin was up over $72,000 per coin, a new all time high.  I knew Solana, the early star of my pretend portfolio of cryptos, was about double from where I bought in, on December 11th, 2023.  Sure enough, about 8:25 am PDT this morning, Solana was $147.80 per coin.  I initially bought into SOL at $69.65.   Here's where my portfolio stood after the last trades, in this February 21st, 2024 post.  So here's today's actions:

I sold 7 SOL (Solana) @ $147.80.  That came to $1,034.60, minus the 5% gas fee I'm figuring per transaction, which was $51.73.  That left me with $982.87.  

I took that $982.87 and bought 405.97 APE (Apecoin) at $2.30 per APE, after a $49.14 fee, that cost me $933,73.  

Now, my crypto (paper trading) portfolio consists of:

.011995 BTC (Bitcoin)

.2259 Eth (Ethereum)

7.647 SOL (Solana)

56.931 AVAX (Avalanche)

74.962 DOT (Polkadot)

595.298 Matic (Polygon)

2,685.31 APE (Apecoin)

490.196  SAND(Sandbox)

510.204 MANA (Decentraland)

The total value of this portfolio, that started with $10,000 on December 11, 2023, now ads up to :  $14,017.97

So it's up over 40%, after gas fees, in three months.  I'll take it.  

At this point, my 7.647 Solana are completely paid for by profits from selling Solana.  So I'm "playing with house money," as a gambler would say.  I own those free and clear in this portfolio.  I put the profits into more Apecoin, because I'm a big fan of Yuga Labs, and think APE is a solid bet, that could go 3X to 14 X from here, based on its past prices.  It could go up even more.  Time will tell.  

Again, this is a paper trading portfolio, these are pretend investments.  This is an experiment, since I couldn't put money into an actual account to buy crypto when I really wanted to.  

I've been writing on many other topics on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Blogger's note- 3/24/2024- When I wrote this post, I didn't link all the previous posts about my $10,000 investment paper trading experiment, or the original post from last November, which led up to this post.  So now, on March 24th, I'm adding those links, but not changing anything else in this post, not one character.  So here are the links of the previous posts in this series.  

November 14, 2023- The Great Bitcoin Play of 2023-2025  Bitcoin was about $36,366

December 11, 2023- The $10,000 paper trade investment challenge Bitcoin was about $41,935

December 21, 2023- The $10,000 investment challenge paper trade  Bitcoin was about $43, 875

February 21, 2024- My $10,000 investment paper trading exercise- two months in  Bitcoin was about $51, 109

February 28, 2024- My $10,000 investment challenge- paper trading- Taking profits! Bitcoin was about $61,069

March 11, 2024- Bitcoin was about $ $69,000, after an intra day peak of over $72,000

March 24, 2024- Bitcoin is $69,633 today, as I was adding this note to this post.  Bitcoin, and other cryptos, have largely backed off the last few days.  It's the end of March, 2024, and the Bitcoin halving is supposed to happen sometime in April.  

Much like before the Bitcoin ETFs got approved in January, the price rose up before the event, and then backed off shortly before the ETF's got approved, and then started moving up again a short time afterwards.  I expected Bitcoin to take a break for a while before the halving, since there's been such a good rally.  Yes, the peak around $72,000 could be the top of this Bitcoin bear market.  But I, personally, don't think so.  The trough to peak spread on the last two Bitcoin bull markets were 18X in 2017, and 17X in 2021.  If that happens again, Bitcoin would hit $282,000 to $298,000.  I think it's unlikely Bitcoin will grow that much this cycle, but those numbers make a rise to $120,000 to $150,000 at the peak, seem quite plausible.  I think Bitcoin, and crypto in general, is just taking a break, which could very well be manipulation by Wall Street, pushing down prices so the companies that opened up the Bitcoin ETF's can buy more BTC before the halving, at a cheaper price.  That might be what's going on right now.  My educated guess is that Bitcoin will chill out for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or so, then, after the halving, continue the bouncy upward rise that has been happening the last 2-3 months.  Again, this is speculation on my part, this is not meant at financial advice, it's simply one person's opinion.  Read the Disclaimer linked above, and always do your own research and due diligence before making any investment decisions.   

 

Danika Patrick interviews Josh Gates- host of Expedition Unknown

Who new former race car driver Danika Patrick had a podcast?  Obviously, a lot of people.  Her Pretty Intense podcast has dozens of episodes, most with tens of thousands of views, or more.  I stumbled across this podcast, while watching a bunch of Josh Gates' videos.  This is a really cool interview.  I knew Danika only from driving race cars and some web host commercials.  She's actually really smart, funny, and into a whole bunch of weird shit.  I'm going to have to check out more of her podcasts when I can.

I've been a fan of the Josh Gates hosted show, Expedition Unknown, since I first ran across it, several years ago.  Since "In Search Of" in the 1970's, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, I've loved many of the weird mystery shows.  But over the years, many of those TV programs mostly repeated earlier shows, and then never seem to break new ground.  But in Expedition Unknown, Josh Gates and his tough and hard working crew always seem to find people actually making progress on which ever mystery they're digging into.  In this podcast above, Josh talks really candidly, as he usually does, about his background, his TV shows, and many of the things he's gone looking for.  If you like ancient history, historical mysteries, and just weird shit in general, check this interview out.  

Josh Gates best archeological finds

Josh Gates most amazing underwater finds

I've been doing a lot of writing lately on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The money I'm not making...

Yeah, that's right baby... uh huh... make it rain.  OK, hopefully it's raining money for someone out there.  Times are tight, and getting tighter, financially, for most people.  I think the recession is already here, and is just in stealth mode for now.  We'll see.  Here are a couple of the financial blog posts I've written in the last year and a half about money and investing.  

Disclaimer

Life is full of ironies.  I'm a homeless guy who's been fascinated by the dynamics of the financial markets for over 30 years now.  Way back then, starting when real estate was surging in Southern California in the late1980's, I started trying to understand the dynamics of the real estate market cycles.  Then I started watching stocks, and it just kept going from there.  From time to time I write a blog post about things I think will happen in markets, or where I think we are in a particular cycle.  This post is about two of those blog posts.  

Post #1 I wrote on December 28, 2022- "What separates Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger from everyone else"

This post was sparked by a video I saw on YouTube, of CNBC TV show host, and stock market legend, Jim Cramer.  In the embedded video, Cramer talks about how the mega cap tech stocks, the stocks now known as The Magnificent 7, completely cratered in 2022.  After giving excuses for why they all tanked, he tells investors/speculators to "pare back" on those stocks the next time they rally.  "We want cheap stocks now," he says in that clip.  As a homeless guy who had been watching, studying, and learning about long term trends on my own for 30 years, I was laughing.  To me, that looked like the perfect time to buy all of those stocks.  

So I wrote that blog post talking about Berkshire Hathaway's legendary investors Warren Buffet, and the now late Charlie Munger.  Those guys made their own fortunes, and fortunes for many Berkshire investors, by doing just the opposite.  They called it "value investing."  They studied businesses, and waited for good businesses' stocks to get beat up, and be underpriced in the market.  That's when they would buy, when everyone else hated those stocks.  

I said in this blog post that I wasn't interested in buying stocks then, even if I would have had money at the time.  I was learning about the crypto world, and watching it's peak to trough cycle play out.  But if I had to buy a handful of stocks to hold, and not touch them for 5 whole years, these are the stocks I would buy:  Apple, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Microsoft, and two companies I just liked as businesses:  Pinterest and Shopify.  Those were my "going to go live on a deserted island and just let them ride" stock picks on that day, December 28, 2022.  

All of those stocks are way up, as of right now (March 4, 2024).  Apple is up the least in 14 months, 39%.  Shopify, surprisingly, is up the most, 130% in 14 months.  Shopify has actually tanked for a while.  At its peak, it was up 412% from the day of that blog post.  The other ones I picked are now up between 30% and 130%.  

Now, I fully expect these stocks to tank in the coming months of 2024.  I'm surprised they haven't already.  I expect Jim Cramer to make another show like the one in this blog post at some point in 2024.  And I still think those six companies are solid bets for the next four years.  But I wouldn't put my money in any of them.  The Magnificent 7 stocks are absurdly high priced at this point, and I think there are much better places to put money as an investor right now.  

Yes, I'm a broke homeless guy.  But I'm a broke homeless guy who makes some interesting investment calls from time to time, because I've studied the dynamics of the markets, and learned about them, for a really long time.  I expect up and down cycles.  I don't expect stock prices to defy gravity (and common sense), forever.  So that's a few thoughts about my December 28, 2022 blog post on this blog.  

The other post I want to mention is one I wrote on November 14, 2023.  "The Great Bitcoin Play of 2023-2025 has begun."

There's a weird difference between the mostly older stock investors, and the younger Millennial and Generation Z people who are many of the investors in crypto.  Crypto investors expect downturns.  They expect crashes to happen.  "Crypto winter" is a widely used term in that world.  But stock market investors (actually most are speculators), always seem to get caught up in the late cycle hype, and think prices will go up forever.  We're at that point in the stock market right now, as the vast majority of all stocks are actually down over the last year or so, and even a couple of The Magnificent 7 may have peaked.  

Crypto's different.  The whole FTX and Sam Bankman Fried scandal in late 2021 led to a crash of the whole crypto world.  The Trad Fi world, traditional financiers, said, "See, we told you so, it's all a scam.  Worthless internet money."  The crypto world faded from public view for the most part, and went quiet.  But crypto coins didn't die off, and even NFT's kept selling.  The hardcore crypto people bought the lows over the last two years, quietly.  New ideas kept coming up, and some new crypto/DeFi/Web 3 businesses started up as well.  

Bitcoin dropped from it's November 2021 peak of  over $64,000 per Bitcoin, to a little under $16,500 per Bitcoin in the trough.  Then it slowly began to rebuild, and to rise back up in price.  In the summer of 2023, word that Blackrock planned to start a Bitcoin spot price ETF came out.  That would open up many traditional finance players to get some exposure to Bitcoin's price, without actually have ing to buy the crypto.  People argued whether that was good or bad for the crypto world overall.  But the majority expected the ETF to happen in early 2024.  The price of Bitcoin began to rise even more.  Another big milestone, the next 4 year halving, programmed into the code of Bitcoin, was set to happen in the spring of 2024.  Those two things seemed to spark talk that the next big Bitcoin cycle, which would lead crypto overall in to a big bull market, was beginning to happen.  When Bitcoin goes up over time, other cryptos follow.

On November 14th of last year, 2023, I wrote a blog post, and explained this case that many people in the crypto world were talking about.  The ETF and the halving should send Bitcoin back into another bull market cycle that would last from 12 to 24 months, or so.  Bitcoin was at 36,366 the day I wrote the post.  It had already climbed more than 100% in price from the low after the 2020 crash.  

In early January, several Bitcoin spot price ETF's were approved, and opened up for business.  Bitcoin had risen from 36,366 to over $40,000.  Then it backed off a while, and eventually started climbing again, as we head into the halving in mid April of 2024.  Today Bitcoin reached a new high of over $68,000 per Bitcoin, and was at $68,386 as I wrote down numbers to get the info for this post.  

Bitcoin, the original blockchain crypto token, is up over 314% from the low in the 2022 trough, about 14 months ago.  Bitcoin is up 88% since I wrote that post in November of 2023, about 3 1/2 months ago.  I personally think it may back off around the halving, take a breather, then start climbing again.  When the halving happens, Bitcoin miners get 1/2 as much for each time they solve a problem, and get Bitcoin through mining.  This means that the price tends to double within a few months, to compensate for the reduced payments to miners.  The overall consensus I've heard is that Bitcoin is expected to top $100,000 per Bitcoin in this next bull market.  

After working out the numbers of how much it has climbed in price in the last two bull cycles, I personally think we will see Bitcoin hover in a range between $120,000 and $150,000 per BTC, for a little while.  I think we will likely see some spikes up to maybe $180,000 per Bitcoin, probably in the first half of 2025.  And then, like before, the hype and FOMO will fade, and it will crash significantly.  

But there will be a lot more institutional money in the ETF's and much more money in Bitcoin, and other cryptos, and the next trough will almost certainly be higher than this past one of $16,500.  This is all a mixture of educated guesses, looking at the previous two bull cycles, and pure speculation on my part.  Nobody knows for sure what will happen.  But Bitcoin, and many other cryptos, are in a bull market right now, before the halving, and there are fundamental reasons it should go quite a bit higher, eventually, than the new high set today.  

So there are thoughts on two of my previous posts about investing in stocks and crypto, and how things have played out so far.  I personally think that we are already in a recession, and that will become obvious in the next two to three months.  This should cause a major correction in stocks.  But I think Bitcoin and crypto have a lot of fundamental reasons to keep going up, even in a major recession.  We'll see what happens.  

I've been doing a lot of writing on Substack lately, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Why I'm not doing any drawing right now...

Janis Joplin drawing I did last year (2023), one of the most detailed drawings I've done with my Sharpies.  #sharpiescribblestyle

As some of you may have noticed, I haven't shared any new drawings in a few months now. If you've followed my blog or social media, at any consistent level, you also know I'm a homeless guy.  I'm not your typical homeless guy, by any means.  I work 7 days a week, writing, blogging, and drawing usually, and doing social media every day to promote the art and writing, and keep in touch with the people who follow my work.  

But it's winter here in Southern California, and that means it's our rainy season.  When I first moved to SoCal, back in the 1980's, the rainy season was from early December to the end of February.  Back then, by March first the rain was over.  Southern California is known for is great weather, so I'm not complaining.  But it's different here.  We rarely get a quick downpour that's gone in 20 minutes, and almost never get actual thunderstorms.  I think I've seen lightning three times in California.  

This is desert that's right next to the ocean, much different than Florida, which California often gets compared to.  We get long, slow rains that often last two to four days.  It's gray and ugly, with steady rain, almost the whole time.  All winter here, it's chilly, in the 50 to 65 degree (F) range, often with some wind.  No big deal, until you're outside in it around the clock, and it gets down to 40 or 45 degrees at night.  Now I know people in most of the country are laughing.  Hey, I grew up in Ohio and Idaho, I saw plenty of cold and snowy weather as a kid.  My family survived a week during the Blizzard of '78 with our power out, heating our living room with the Franklin stove, one of those steel fireplaces.  I appreciate the lack of weather in SoCal, a lot.  

Young Bob Dylan Sharpie drawing I did in 2018.  

But the winter rainy season here, when you're homeless, is a time of panhandling money for basic needs (food, bus fare, laundry, other daily needs) during the sunny days, then hiding as much as possible, and hanging out in dry places (libraries, fast food restaurants, buses, metro trains etc.) during the rainy days.  It costs extra money to stay dry when homeless.  

It's a time of just surviving much of the winter.  I get a lot less done as far as writing and particularly with artwork, because I spend a lot more time scraping up money, dodging the rain, drying out clothes and sometimes my sleeping bag, and hanging out in places where I can't draw.  There's more daily "work" to surviving as a homeless person during the rainy season.  

With the climate change going on, the Southern California rainy season has stretched out, as well.  We may get rain in November, and  those rain storms now stretch into March, and often April, maybe even May.  It used to be that on March 1st, there would be no rain, at all, until early December.  Now this season of having rainstorms every week lasts maybe six or eight weeks longer into the spring.  

This year, in addition to the normal rainy season to deal, a bunch of other stuff happened.  I signed up for Food Stamps again(called CalFresh), the one government program that really helps, in late November.  I got one months worth a couple days later.  I normally get those loaded on my card the 2nd of each month.  But they didn't show up in December, or in January.  That meant I had to panhandle much more to buy everyday food, right after the holidays when regular people pretty much stop giving to homeless people.  So I was struggling for day to day food in early January.  I called up the office twice, and they said, we'll load your card in a day or two.  Then it didn't happen.  

In addition, the sketchy prepaid debit card I had, that lets me get my art money out  of my Paypal, that account got shut down.  No notice, no reason.  Eventually I got a notice saying it expired, but the expiration date on the card  wasn't until 2025.  That happened in December.  After that, I couldn't sell artwork the way I normally do, using Paypal for payments,  So that was a a double financial hit during the already sketchy rainy season.  

Then I got really sick in mid January.  I was just worn down, more tired than usual, not eating much at all, and caught some infection when my system was depressed.  I went to the hospital, where I spent 2 1/2 days, getting antibiotics.  Then got shipped to a "homeless recuperative facility" way up in Palmdale.  When I left the hospital, they had either lost my sleeping bag and blanket, or thrown it away.  When you sleep outside, a sleeping bag is pretty important. The infection I got turned to cellulitis in my left leg, which got really swollen, and super painful.  Initially I was told I would be at the recuperative place for 90 days.  Then that got cut to just over two weeks.  The recuperative places are super low budget, and while the staff was really cool, I didn't always get my meds on time, and didn't heal as fast as expected.

 Stevie Ray Vaughn Sharpie drawing I did back in 2018.

I could barely walk a few painful steps when I went in there.  By the end of the two weeks,  I'd lost about 10-15 pounds, because we didn't get a whole lot of food.  by the time I left, I was walking about a quarter mile to the local library every day.  My leg was still really swollen by the end of each day, and still swells up every day.  

I expected to be sent back out to the streets.  But then I got sent to a "transitional housing" place on the outskirts of downtown L.A..  It was an 80 or 100 year old, dilapidated, building.  The rundown, old hotel was a real looney bin of characters.  One of the residents was walking around with a baseball bat under his arm in the lobby, because someone had dissed him a couple days before.  The food was pig slop.  There was mold or mildew all over the window sill of my room, and some on the mattresses.  The toilet didn't flush, and there were no public restrooms in the building, which had been a mediocre hotel, in probably the 1940's.  The elevator was tiny, and had the safety thing you had to pull across before hitting the button to go up or down.  

I was supposed to live there, with no food stamps, surviving off of their horrible, cold food, for 3 to 6 months, while they tried to find me "permanent housing."  Now, that sounds good to average people.  But "permanent housing" means being diagnosed as either having mental illness or serious addiction, then getting S.S. Disability or SSI.  Then you eventually get approved, living in poverty, in a ghetto apartment that is empty because the people in the ghetto don't want to live there.  

"Housing" programs DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT help you get back to working in some normal way, and making a good living again.  When you go into housing, you are going to rely on a government check, and several local programs, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.  You're not allowed to earn very much money.  If you find a decent job, and start making money, you lose your housing, your food stamps, your monthly government check, and your medical insurance and prescription benefits.  My point is, there is a reason that there are 40,000 homeless people in L.A. county. If the "housing programs" were really better than living on the streets, the homeless people would flood into them.  Most people, myself included, would rather live homeless, rather than to be in the current housing programs.  The people going into housing are the worst of the worst, the people who just don't care anymore.  

I can actually work every day as an artist and writer, living outside.  I'm (supposedly) allowed to earn money, and try to get my life back on track.  The homeless programs of this country are creating a separate population of people, and they are government sponsored drug addicts, for the most part.  There are over 7 million men already living this way, and more every day.  I don't want to be a government sponsored drug addict.  I don't drink ANY alcohol.  The last beer I had was in 2009, I think.  I don't do any drugs.  I don't take any prescription drugs, except when I'm sick, like for the leg infection.  I don't do any recreational drugs, at all.  My last hit off a joint was at a Cirque du Soleil crew party in 1997 or '98, and before that was in Boise in 1987.  I don't have a work history after the years of not being able to find a job while in North Carolina, which, combined with being old and out of shape, make a "real job" pretty much impossible.  If there was a job I could have found that would pay enough to rent a place to live, I would have done it years ago.  So I keep working to create my own job, some combination of my art and writing.  Not being able to get a real bank account has been one big issue over the last few years. 

Evel Knievel Sharpie drawing I did in 2023.

 

Anyhow, I left the sketchy ass transitional housing, the government sponsored crack house in downtown L.A., after one night, and went back to the streets.  Right into the storm that dumped over 7 inches of rain in about four days.  A few nights later, someone stole my shopping bag with some of my stuff, while I was sleeping.  It had all my spare clothes in it. 

So, to recap, I lost my food stamps in late December (but finally got them going again a couple weeks ago).  I lost use of the debit card that I use to get money out of Paypal, so I can't get paid to draw right now.  I lost my sleeping bag and blanket.  A friend here loaned me a sleeping bag, but it's really not good under about 48 degrees.  It's much better than nothing.  And I lost all my spare clothes.  I have the clothes I'm wearing, and two extra pairs of socks right now.  That makes laundry a bit of a problem.  Then I left my big sketchpad in a restaurant one night, and lost that.  That was totally my fault, I was tired and just spaced off and left it behind.  I do still have my Sharpies and basic art supplies.

So I'm working to slowly replace all the stuff I lost, and get back just to a basic street survival level.  Then figure out a new debit card I can get, and get back to drawing.  This is everyday life as a working, homeless, artist/ blogger.  But it was just a whole bunch of hits in a short period of time, and that time was the worst part of the year for weather here. It's just been a rough winter.  

I'm writing a lot now, and I will get back to drawing, but probably not for a couple more months.  Check out my Substack for some of the deeper writing I've been doing link below).  Yes, this is a depressing, whiny post.  I don't write these very often.  I'm not asking for help, I'm just explaining my current situation.  My Patreon money from February and March is in Paypal, but I can't access it yet.  There's just a bunch of little steps I need to take to get back to "homeless normal," and then work to rise beyond that.  So that's where I'm at, for any of you wondering.  Lots more writing coming, and the drawings will start up again when I can do it.  

"Regrets"  The drawing that was in my big sketchpad when I left it in a restaurant one night, about a month ago.  I did this Sharpie drawing in October and November of 2023.  

I've been doing a lot of deeper writing on Substack lately.  Check it out.

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack