Mind baffling TED Talk by Skateboarder Rodney Mullen

It just occurred to me that I might be the only homeless person who's had a published interview with a person who's done a TED Talk years later.  My life is filled with obscure things like that.  Actually, Rodney has done several TED Talks.  Groups of super intelligent, high achieving techies, scientists, business people and others show up in rooms like this and willingly spend 18 minutes of their precious time to listen to a skateboarder.  Why?  Because Rodney is well known as one of the most innovative people in action sports, not to mention the whole world.

Yes, I know Rodney kind of jumps around in this talk, and comes across like a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  That's because he is a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  It's a little hard to follow.  But he brakes down skateboard tricks into little groups of movements.  Once you learn a basic group of movements, a trick, then you can either add variations to that trick, or take that trick to an entirely new type of terrain.  In doing this, skaters (and other action sports people) continually innovate, and add to the collective base of tricks.  The community respects these contributions (mostly), and those contributions then live on long past the time you came up with them, and continue to evolve.

I first met Rodney in August of 1986, at a place we called The Spot, just north of the Redondo Beach Pier in California.  I had just started a new job at Wizard Publications, a BMX magazine publisher, and my new co-worker and roommate Lew said, "You gotta meet this skateboarder Rodney, he's amazing."  Lew and I went to The Spot to practice our flatland BMX freestyle tricks on a good sized brick area.  After we'd been there for a couple hours, Rodney rode up on this rickety, old, black beach cruiser bike he called Agnes.  Where we would just start practicing our tricks, Rodney prepared to skate.  He taped his fingers, checked over his board, and stretched.  It was the first time I met a skateboarder who actually trained.  Then he did some basic, but still hard, tricks to warm up.  Then he skated, alone, for two or three hours.

At one point, he stopped to take a break, and Lew and I rode over to say "hi."  Rodney was staying with then washed up skater Steve Rocco for a few weeks.  Lew introduced me, and we talked for a few minutes.  Rodney was kind of quiet, really down to Earth, and obviously really smart.  After meeting him that first night, I started hanging out after I was done sessioning, and watch Rodney skate.  We started talking, and hit it off.  So I got to know him over those three weeks or so, and then later that fall when stayed at Rocco's for another month.

FREESTYLIN' magazine, where Lew and I worked, was covering skateboarding at the time, as well as BMX freestyle.  So I got the chance to do a short interview with Rodney, and he even got a photo on the cover of that issue (below).  BMX freestyle and skateboarding drew a weird crowd of people who generally felt like outsiders to "normal" life.  Some of those guys were the total crazy daredevil types.  But hanging out with Rodney, I found it was possible to read big books, be smart, and still be part of the BMX/skate world.  The more introverted, intellectual skaters and bikes often invented technically hard tricks.  Those tricks were often taken to bigger and crazier version by other riders and skaters.  That's where the community aspect of action sports, which Rodney speaks of at the end of this talk, comes into play.  No one person in these "sports" is "The Best," and everyone can contribute to the scene.  You can read my 1986 interview with Rodney Mullen.  I couldn't get that to load today.  If you can, it's in the skate section of the magazine near the middle.

Two maps that tell the story

You don't even need to play this clip, unless like to listen to President Trump talk.  You know this map, we all saw it election night.  But I want you to look at it in a different light.  The massive red areas are the parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump.  He won the electoral college with those votes.  Visually, the red of the Republican voters areas completely dominate.  But all those little blue spots are not only the places that voted for Hillary Clinton, they are population centers that gave Hillary nearly 3 million more actual votes than Trump.  So this map not only shows where the voters are located, it shows that over half the people who voted (which was only about 40% of Americans) live.  The little blue areas are where over half the people live.

Now, take a look at this map that shows where the highest incomes are in the U.S..   It's mostly the same places that voted for Hillary.  The maps are nearly identical.  Most of the higher incomes (meaning business owners and high income jobs) are in the bigger cities that voted Democrat.  Most of the high tech companies, old and new, are also in those urban areas.  Most of the innovation that leads to new products, businesses, and even new industries are also in those small blue areas.  Most of the U.S. economy is in those small blue areas.

What the comparison of these two maps really shows is that the huge areas of the country in red can't create high numbers of good jobs in the tech-enabled 21st century.  Much of the "red" part of the country are either struggling, or in full-on decline after the Industrial Age fizzled out.  I don't care who you voted for, if we want the U.S. to thrive, we need to get the people in the red states coming up with new ideas for businesses in the future to replace the millions of jobs lost to outsourcing, and the millions more lost to new technology. 

I've written about the Retail Apocalypse several times, and no one has made a good map of all the 4,000+ stores closing this year.  But there is a map of the Sear's/Kmart stores closing, and most of those are in the small cities, towns and rural areas east of the Mississippi.  In other words, the red areas in the East are taking the biggest hits and losing lots of retail jobs now. 

To re-strengthen America's economy, we need highly creative people in the red areas to step up their game, think up new ideas, new businesses, and even new industries to kick start the lagging economies in those areas.  Now you know.  Tell somebody else.