The Economic Reality of 2018... and how to make the most of it

Why would the owner of a $200 million a year, tech savvy, digital marketing agency, make a video of himself hitting 40 garage sales and buying things for a dollar or two?  To show the rest of us how he got started as a business guy, and one of the best ways anyone willing to work can make some extra money in 2018 and beyond.

This guy above is Gary Vaynerchuk.  If you know who he is, you get this.  But if you don't, here's why I'm embedding this video, Episode #1 of Trash Talk, in my blog, and why I'm using this post to jump start my new Facebook Group: Making Money While Making Art.
Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus, part of the former Soviet Union,  basically Russia.  His family brought him over here when he was 3, they lived in a tiny apartment, crammed together, and worked their asses off as merchants.  His dad worked at another family member's liquor store, then eventually bought his own.  
At a time when the future hope of immigrant kids was to get a good education, Gary sucked at school.  D and F student, he says.  But Gary got the merchant gene from his family, he could sell shit, even at a young age.  He ran a neighborhood lemonade stand franchise at age 5.  He was still afraid of riding a bike, so he'd cruise his 5 or 6 lemonade stands on his Big Wheel, where his friends worked for him, and pick up the profits.  By the time he was 11 or 12, he was making $2,000-$3,000 a weekend selling baseball cards at local mall events.  Then, at 14, as his legend goes, his dad took him away from his baseball cards shows, and put him to work bagging ice in the basement of the liquor store for $2 an hour.  Gary was not a happy camper at that point.  But he watched the store, and learned how things worked.  

He later realized that people collected wines, just like they collected baseball cards, and that opened up a lot of ideas for him.  He went on to jump on the internet idea way before it was business friendly, starting Wine Library TV on YouTube.   With his skills honed as a boy, and his interest in the internet, Gary took his parents' liquor store from a $3 million a year to a $60 million a year business from about 1999-2005.  He became known as a brash, hard cussing, young, New Jersey business kid who really understood "this internet thing."  

That led to TV show appearances, and speaking engagements.  With his parents' American Dream business set, Gary and his brother walked away, with very little money, and started a digital marketing agency called VaynerMedia.  So his "real" job is to talk bigwigs at major corporations into using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and today's real communication platforms to promote their products.  In addition to that, Gary puts out a shitload of content telling the rest of us what's happening in these worlds, and how to use it to promote what we're doing.  He's flying around the world giving keynote speeches about how the internet and social media have completely changed marketing and business, but the big corporations haven't caught up yet.  

Oh, one other thing you need to understand about Gary Vee... he plans to buy the New York Jets and win a Superbowl or three with them in the future.  That's his big picture plan. 

Throughout his life, he's made extra cash by going to garage sales and buying things cheap, and reselling them somewhere else, like Ebay.  Today's technology makes this possible for everyone to do.  He's realized that while a lot of people focus on starting high tech start-ups, there are millions of everyday people struggling to get by.  So since 2017, he's been talking about how anyone willing to work can make extra money flipping things they buy at garage sales, thrift stores, auctions, or discount stores, and making more money.  That's what the video above is about.  It'd funny, because Gary gets as stoked finding a stuff animal for 50 cents that he can sell for $20 as he does doing major business deals.  

As for me, I've been through a bunch of crazy years, driving a taxi, winding up homeless, unable to find any real job when I moved to North Carolina in 2008, and then focusing on my Sharpie art to start making money again.  I'm also a pretty smart geek who has always been interested in big picture economics, and looking to the future to see where our world is going.  At 52-years-old, I'm in a new city, getting my name out with my art, but also fighting my way out of homelessness.  I'm building a business, I started literally without a dime, and now I don't have an apartment, a car, or much else.  I've been self-educating on the way business and promotion work these days, which is why I blog to put out my ideas into written content, and help promote my art.  That's how I ran across Gary Vee's work.  So here's my take on today's world...
 

We live in a weird world these days, with everyone inundated by all kinds of media from all sides.  Millions and millions of people now watch really super-biased TV and online media.  These people have taken to believing complete bullshit on a regular basis, and that warped outlook, it's having an effect, not just in politics and the slow steady collapse of our democracy in Washington D.C., but in the business world as well.  Will everyday, real world Americans step up and bring our country back towards a place where people can disagree and argue, but come together and compromise when it's needed?  Time will tell. 

Among other things,  I'm a geek who's always been a futurist, looking forward to where things are actually going, and trying to figure out what coming problems we might be able to partially deal with beforehand.  Here are a few of the actual facts about our current economic situation, facts that are often ignored, because they don't really fit the playbook of either political party's narrative.  

-The U.S. has a recession every 4 to 10 years, historically, and it's been 10 years since the major collapse of 2008, and over 10 1/2 years since The Great Recession actually started.  So we're due for a recession before too long.

-American college students have racked up $1.4 to $1.5 TRILLION in student debt, which is more than the $1.3 trillion of subprime mortgage debt that triggered the collapse in 2008.  Most of this student debt has been turned into investments called SLABS, and sold to institutional investors, who probably didn't fully understand what they were buying, just like the subprime debt a decade ago.  

-In addition to the student debt that's suffocating the Millennials, there's an absurd amount of personal, corporate, and government debt as well.  If interest rates go up (like they have in the last few days), all that debt gets more expensive to pay back.  That's when it gets really ugly in the economy.

-Another huge secret is that AT LEAST 7 million American men, of prime working age, are simply not working.  Period.  The just gave up on the idea, it seems.  There is a growing number of womoen in this category as well.  This is a higher percentage of the working population that is out of work than during The Great Depression of the 1930's, and it's a much higher actual number of working age people not working, than ever, in our history.  This is why the unemployment rate is historically low, but workers' wages are not going up.  There are millions of people, mostly men, but women as well, sitting on the sidelines.  Some of them would probably go back to work if there were solid, high paying jobs to go back to.  It is suspected that about 2/3 of those men get some form of Social Security Disability, and that program is full of scammers living off your tax dollars.  (Source- Nicolas  Eberstadt/ Men Without Work).

-In today's world, nearly 50% of American workers work low paying service jobs, and that number is growing.  About 30% work in what researcher Richard Florida calls the "Creative Class" (arts/design/tech/media/engineering/management/science/teaching, etc.), and that number is growing.  They do well financially, averaging $70,000 a year as of 2012.  Around 20% of the population is still in the traditional, 20th century-style Working class ( about 7-8% of those are actual manufacturing, that 20% also includes transportation, construction, etc.).  This number is shrinking, generally.  Meanwhile, agriculture and logging make up only about 1% of the workforce.  My point here is though there are lots of jobs, at least half of U.S. workers right now work low wage service jobs, and the working class doesn't pay at the level it did 40 years ago, when you figure it with inflation.  (Source- Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, you can see the figures above in the second chart in this article).

So half of the U.S. working people are just struggling to survive, many with two, or even three, low paying, often part time, jobs.  The next 20% to 30% or so are making good wages, but many of them are younger people and are saddled with ridiculous amounts of student debt, so even they are struggling, just with nicer apartments and maybe newer cars.  So while the economy has actually been growing for 9 years now, 2/3 to 3/4 of our country aren't living well.  They're just getting by.  The top 20% or so feels the growing economy.  But most of the country doesn't get the good effects.  

While entrepreneur and marketing hero Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't spend time digging into these facts I've listed above, he sees the everyday version of it in his never-ending travels, in the real people he talks to and meets with.  That's why he's showing people how he made money from garage sales (and still does when he has some time) when he was coming up, and the money really mattered to him.  He sees "flipping" merchandise and a way to move up for the 60% to 80% of the people out there struggling.

There's nothing new about average people buying things one place, and selling those things for a bit more somewhere else.  Thousands of years ago, indigenous people everywhere traded items across whole continents.  Christopher Columbus wandered into the Caribbean in 1492, while looking for a better route to get silks and spices from China and India. What is different in today's world, is that nearly everyone can use Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, LetGo, Etsy, Shopify, and other ways that average people can sell things around the country and around the world.  THAT ability of average individuals to trade worldwide is new.  Well, 20 years old or so, but new in human history.  

That has changed everything.  Digital media, the ability to send a song, a story, and article, this blog, a video clip, or a movie around the world in seconds, digitally, is another thing that's completely changed the game.  The biggest traditional businesses in the world STILL aren't up to date on how this all works.  That makes for some amazing opportunities for average people, like you and me.  There are great opportunities... IF you are willing to take the time and learn how things actually work in today's business world, and IF you're willing to put out content, connect with people, build a following, and put in the hours of 21st century work to make it happen.  

This blog is going to focus a lot on building an art and creative based business in today's world.  That's what I'm working on doing.  That's whqt millions of other people are going to have to work on doing as the world keep changing, as we go into the next recession before too long, and as technology keep replacing human jobs.  

I know this was a long post, and most of you don't like reading for that long.  But I had a lot I wanted to get across as I focus more helping artists and creative people, like myself, survive, make money, AND be able to do our creative work and make money off that, when possible.  

I'm starting a new Facebook group today, "Make Money While Making Art."  Friend me on FB and ask to join to get more ideas on these subjects.  Steve Emig on FB, in Richmond, VA.  

Alright... thanks for taking the time to read this long intro post, now get back to being creative...