A few of the industries that are struggling BEFORE this recession really gets going...

In the video above, we have Nick Gerli of Reventure Consulting, who I've been watching for over two years now.  He's been calling the trends in residential real estate really well that whole time. In this video above he shares the news that the median prices for new homes are down 18% over the last year.  Yep.  As the economies of most major nations  grind to almost to a halt at the end of 2023, the U.S. residential real estate market is just one of many industries heading into some even more difficult times.  

Last week, I wrote this post about the bicycle industry, talking about how screwed up it is after the pandemic shutdowns, supply shocks, and the overall crazy economic shit storm of the last four years.  As a guy who was a hardcore BMX freestyler and industry guy in the 1980's, I really want to see the BMX bike, mountain bike, and over bicycle industry, figure things out, and get back on track again.  I spent 20 years of my life riding daily, and hope to get back to that at some point in the future.  But BMX, and the whole bicycle industry, is small time compared to some of the other large industries out there.  Many, if not most industries, are struggling after the last four years of the pandemic, shutdowns, supply shocks, $6 trillion in "helicopter money," high inflation, and then a historic rise in interest rates.  

Last week's post about the bike industry was just a look at the turmoil there, because that's where I came from, where my first "real job" was, 37 years ago.  Here are some YouTube videos by people looking at several other major industries which are struggling now, along with my thoughts.  

My underlying, Big Picture thesis on today's crazy business environment, is that we're in what I call The Big Transition.  This is the continuation of what futurist Alvin Toffler first described way back in 1980, in his book, The Third Wave.  We are in a transition period between the fading Industrial Age, and the still emerging Information Age.  Many whole industries have not made the full transition from the old, Industrial Age business models, into a new, viable, Information Age business models.  This recession (which I think we're already in) will force the issue for thousands of businesses, large and small, and dozens of different entire industries.  These next few years will be really tough for nearly everyone, but will also present amazing opportunities for enterprising business people.  Here are some of the industries really struggling right now.  

Why the U.S. banking system is in crisis- Lena Petrova  (October 2023)

The commercial real estate crisis of empty offices and the "Urban Doom Loop."- CNBC October 2023  Now... this is CNBC, which means it is telling you "The Narrative" that the powers at be want you to believe.  Yes, Big Cities are taking big hits from the decline in office space rent.  But the big tech cities, like New York City, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, and Austin, will rebound in time.  

Right now business interests in less popular cities are trying to get people, particularly tech people and and tech businesses, to migrate en masse to many smaller cities, still struggling from the loss of factory jobs in previous decades.  So there's a big Narrative right now that there's a huge migration of people (particularly tech people and tech companies) that are moving to these (mostly red state) cities and regions.  But they are over hyping the actual movement of people to those regions.  There are numbers of people moving to southern, midwest, and northeast cities now, and that may continue for the next couple of years.  But in 2-5 years, coming out of this next recession, I believe the Big tech cities will rebound, as they have time after time, and older industrial-based cities will still be struggling, overall.  

Meanwhile, dozens, probably hundreds, of office buildings will be given back to the banks, or be foreclosed on, or be part of bankruptcies in the next couple of years.  This will lead to the collapse of a more banks, very likely a few hundred of them, over the next few years.  Most at risk are those regional banks that so came into focus after the March 2023 bank collapses.  

Car values are dropping- the car and truck industry is a mess- Lucky Lopez- Mid November 2023

EV car values are dropping, too- Lucky Lopez- 11/30/2023

The Trucking industry "bloodbath"- Trucking Made Successful channel, 11/29/2023.  During the supply shock phase of the pandemic, there was a huge shortage or truck drivers for a while.  Not surprisingly, as things opened up, and big money was flowing, more trucking companies and more drivers took to the road.  Now things are slowing back down overall, and the trucking industry is struggling.  This is happening even with the closing down of Yellow trucking, which laid off 30,000 workers, about 22,000 of them drivers a couple of months ago.

The Rise and Fall of the American Mall- The History Guy- September 2012.  The dying off of shopping malls as a center of social life, as well as the huge drop in sales of shopping at department stores, has led to both dying malls, dead malls (70% vacant or more), and fully abandoned malls.  

Sure you can blame Amazon, but I see the decline of malls as the dying off of the Industrial Age goods distribution system of huge department stores and shopping malls, as the Information Age goods distribution system (phone app and that item is on your door step two days later) rose to fill the needs of millions of today's consumers.  

There were once about 2,500 fully enclosed shopping malls, the number is somewhere around 700 now, in late 2023.  The huge influx of helicopter money by The Fed, in 2020 and 2021, slowed down the Retail Apocalypse, but as consumers have run out of that money, retail store closings have begun picking up again.  The consensus view is that the very high end malls, and the very low end ones, those just above flea market and swap meet status, will probably survive.  But a whole bunch of the mid range malls, located largely in mid range cities outside large metro areas, will continue to die off.  There will be malls in the future, but a much lower number of them, and they won't play the cultural role they once did.  Unless some new cultural re-invention of malls as experience centers comes along.  The recession we're heading into now should take out several dozen more malls in the next few years.  

The Self-Storage business has been thrown for a loop over the last four years, and 2023 has caused major struggles for many storage unit owners- Self Storage Income, September 2023.  The Self-Storage industry popped out of nowhere about 30 years ago, and those familiar little overpriced garages are everywhere now.  In the 2010's, REIT's (Real Estate Investment Trusts), and other Big Money, got into the game, and changed it forever.  Now it's a business of a teaser rate to get you into a unit, and then once you move all your stuff in, they know they can jack up rates dramatically, and nearly everyone will pay the higher rent, rather than move all their stuff somewhere else.  But higher interest rates, higher real estate values in recent years, and a higher debt load, have hit their margins.

The movie theater industry got hammered by the pandemic, and they are struggling to survive and adapt at this point- PBS News Hour, March 2023  According to a slate at the end of this news segment linked, there are now about 3,000 less movie screens in the U.S., than there were in 2019.  As we all know, Covid-19 completely shut down movie theaters for many months.  Then AMC, the largest theater owner, became one of the meme stocks when that craze hit.  Due to that, their stock price surged from just over $8 per share, to peak around $230 per share.  That bought AMC some time, because it gave the business more money to work with.  But their share price just collapsed in August 2023, and is $6.65 as I write this.  So they are still struggling, going into the 2023 holiday season.  

Meanwhile, the second largest theater chain, Regal (which includes the former UA or United Artists theaters, among others), got bought out by British theater chain Cineworld.  Then Cineworld went bankrupt, both in the U.S. and later in the U.K.  I dug into their story in this blog post, about the big Barbenheimer movie weekend, back in July.  Cineworld couldn't get themselves out of bankruptcy, so they were taken over by their bankers.  The bankers then managed to form a new corporation, transfer Cineworld and Regal's theaters into it, and completely blew off the $4.5 billion in debt they owed to shareholders.  Just said, "Uh, yeah, you guys ain't gettin' paid."  Then they kept the chains going, like nothing had happened, but in a new corporation with an entirely new board of directors, and they're pretending it's just the same Cineworld.  Check out the very last sentence of the Hollywood Reporter article linked above.  In any case, a few high grossing movies, like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Top Gun: Maverick have helped keep the theater chains afloat, for now.  But the huge rise in popularity in streaming thanks to the pandemic, the proliferation of 85 and 98 inch home screens, and the changing tastes of theaters goers, keeps theaters from thriving again, at least right now.

Like I've been writing for over 4 1/2 years now, in posts like this one from March 2019, "Our economy is powered by unicorn farts."  We are in for a major recession (or depression), and a monumental shift in the business world, and society at large.  Yeah, The Big Transition thing I keep harping about.  Alvin Toffler called this change 43 years ago.  Now it's here, and things are going to get even crazier than the last 4 years.  This will be really hard for most people, but this period will also have incredible opportunities for both business and social entrepreneurs, and people with good ideas about how to build a better future, from the neighborhood level to the global level.  And no I'm not talking about the Globalist/WEF agenda, their plans are falling apart, too.    

These next two or three years are the reason I've been writing about a major coming recession for so long.  These next few years will change society going forward.  But so did personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and the democratization of media, due largely to those devices.  Change.  There's more change coming.  A lot more.  If you have some ideas to build or try something new, these next few years are a great time to give it a shot.

I'm doing a lot of writing on Substack these days, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Abandoned Casino...and other weird stuff out in the desert

There's a lot of cool and random stuff out in the desert.  This guy tools around on an ebike looking at the old junk in this section of Nevada, outside Las Vegas.  In the last part of the video he checks out an abandoned casino and hotel.  For real.  And they are still full of furnishings.  That's pretty crazy. 

Until I was almost 14 years old, "the desert" was a mythical place where cowboys used to herd cattle, and have gunfights in old movies.  I grew up in the very green and moist state of Ohio.  There were creeks small rivers, medium sized rivers, and big ass rivers like the Ohio River, all over the state where my family bounced around during my childhood.  All of the rivers had water in them all year 'round, because that's what a river is, right?  Rivers are never ending places of running water.

Then word got around that the company my dad worked at might get sold, and possibly shut down.  That rumor began to circulate in 1979, and up until about 1978, factories simply didn't shut down.  They just didn't, it was unheard of.  But about a year earlier, one had closed in a nearby town, and then moved the whole plant to a faraway place where people worked for less money... Alabama.  That was the beginning of the mass closings of factories in the U.S., where tens of millions of human jobs were either replaced by industrial robots and other new technology, or they were outsourced to another state or another country.  That mass closing of factories in the 1980's through the 2000's turned the Midwest from the Industrial heart of the U.S. into the Rust Belt we known now.  My family got out of Ohio early, not realizing how big the trend would become. In the summer of 1980 we moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico. 

I was a chubby, wimpy white boy who was suddenly was entering 9th grade in a city that was 70% Hispanic.  Orale ese!  I learned a lot of things during that year we lived in southeastern New Mexico.  I learned that chicken fried steak, steak fingers, tamales, and guacamole were all good things.  I learned not to order mountain oysters at a restaurant.  I learned that the Pecos River was muddy, "too thick to drink and too thin to plow," was the local joke.  Yet both trout and gar somehow lived in the brown water.  I learned not to camp in a sand wash, because if it rains somewhere upstream, a debris flow can happen unexpectedly.  I learned that some rivers don't have water running in them most of the year.  I learned not to step on cholla spines.  I learned "spelunking" is another word for cave exploring, which is big in Carlsbad, home of the Carlsbad Caverns.  I learned how to do the Latino "what's up" up nod to say "Hi" to friends, without words.  I saw Roswell before anyone talked about aliens, the book that blew that story up came out in 1981, while I lived there.  

I also learned that there is all kinds of crazy stuff out in the desert, pretty much any desert, I think.  While I had trouble dealing with the summer heat as a chubby kid in Carlsbad, I loved wandering around the desert on the weekends in the fall, winter, and spring, looking for random stuff.  I looked for turquoise colored, and the more rare purple, glass insulators from the old power lines.  They were clear originally, but something in the glass made then change colors over many years while out in the sun.  An unchipped one was a desert treasure, and many lined window sills in Carlsbad. 

At that time, there was a book of aerial photos you could buy of each county, from an obscure government office, for $4.  My dad's co-workers scoured those books for interesting looking stuff to go find out in the desert.  They found some 1/4 mile wide circles way out in the desert, with smaller, concentric circles inside.  Those turned out to be World War II Army Air Force bombing practice targets.  So we went out nearly every weekend that winter to explore those things.  

We found hundreds pieces of both metal and concrete practice bombs, pieces of hundreds of them.  These were 100 pound practice bombs, maybe 8 or 9 inches in diameter, and about three feet long.  The concrete ones were solid concrete, with metal fins bolted on the back end.  The metal ones were the same size and shape, but were steel filled with either sand or gravel.  They were all broken, and big pieces were hard to find.  But some of the concrete ones still had the light blue color on the parts that had been buried, and white stenciled writing on them.   There were 45 or more of those targets out in the desert in Southeastern New Mexico.  After months of collecting practice bombs, we finally found a little magazine article, from many years before, that explained the basic story.  During World War II, from 1943-1945, one of the U.S. Army Air Force's bombardier and navigator training centers was located in Carlsbad.  Even a local historian we met didn't know that, so we told her what we had found.  Now there's the Wikipedia page about it, linked above.  

On one of our trips to find one of these targets, we found a bunch of foundations for houses, like an early 20th century little village, of maybe 100 people.  It was just out in the middle of nowhere.  In a bit of synchronicity, our next door neighbor lady, who was in her 70's, knew exactly what it was.  My dad mentioned it over the fence, detailing where it was.  "Oh, that's Getty," she said, "It was a little home for oil rig workers in the 1930's, I lived out there for a couple of years."  That was a really random coincidence.  Since those days, as a junior high kid in 1980-81, I've loved just wandering different places in the desert, just to see what there is to find.  My point is, there's all kinds of weird stuff out in the desert, and because of the arid environment, things don't get overgrown, and things last a long time, for decades, even hundreds of years.  

In this video above, this explorer rides around this area on his ebike, and finds a bunch of the more normal stuff you find in desert areas of the West.  Old cans, trash pits from 50 or 100 years ago, part of a glass insulator, turned turquoise by years in the sun, and similar old bits and pieces.  Then he finds what appears to be a dead, rattlesnake, a pretty big one.  Then he rides back to where he started, which is an abandoned casino and hotel, closed in 2020.  That's pretty crazy.  It's in Jean, Nevada, on the 15 freeway, south of Las Vegas.  

This video reminded me of all the time I've spent wandering pieces of desert, when it popped up on my YouTube feed.  So I thought I'd do a post about it.  A lot of my early BMXing in 1982 and 1983, in the trailer park outside of Boise, was riding my bike around the Jeep trails in the miles of desert where I lived, to see what was out there.  There was a filled in water well and rock walls, what we thought might be part of an old Pony Express stop, near the trailer park, among other stuff.  Anyhow, this is just a cool little exploration video, something I haven't really had the chance to do in a long time.   

I'm doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack now.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The bike industry is screwed... Bikes are 50% off everywhere... What happens next?

This is Josh, from Daily MTB Rider channel, giving the lowdown on the crazy state of the massively overstocked bike industry right now.  Long story short, pretty much everybody's got a ton of inventory they're trying to get rid of right now, and sales have dropped off dramatically from last year.  And we're heading into a serious recession.

To begin, I've had nothing to do with the bike industry since the mid 1990's.  In the 1980's, I worked at two magazines (BMX Action and FREESTYLIN') for  few months.  Then came the AFA for most of 1987.  Then I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision Street Wear's video company, for 2 1/2 years, when VSW was the biggest clothing sponsor in BMX.  In the early 1990's. I spent four years as a roommate to a guy who owned a little, upstart BMX company, which is now one of the BIG BMX companies, actually two BMX companies.  So for about a decade, I was in or around the BMX industry, if not actively involved in a bike or component company.  But that was a LONG time ago.  I kept riding daily until 2003, but was out of touch with the industry.  

I was there in January of 1989, at the big bike trade show in Long Beach.  Walking around the show, I literally heard, over and over, in booth after booth, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  The big money pulled out of the BMX bike market, and BMX "died."  It didn't die to us hardcore riders, but most of the industry and money walked away.  At the Brooklyn Banks 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in the late summer of 1989, I had a room as a Vision/Unreel cameraman, with a pro rider.  Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other Kansas City riders wound up sleeping on the floor of our room, because they didn't have sponsors.  That's how much money had been pulled out of the BMX world.  The top vert rider and top overall rider, Mat and Dennis, didn't even have sponsors for a while.  

Riding went underground, and first Ron Wilkerson with 2-Hip, and later, Mat and Swope with the B.S. contests, kept BMX freestyle comps alive.  During those years, S&M Bikes, Hoffman Bikes, Standard Byke Company, FBM Bikes, Eastern Bikes, and several other BMX related companies, either started in business, or grew into the roots of BMX and freestyle.  From 1990-1995, the riders took over the BMX industry.  

Now in the early 2020's, I think we're going to see another huge breaking down and rebuilding of the BMX and overall bike industry.  How can I say this, as a fat, ugly, Old School BMX industry Has Been who's outside the industry?  Because I'm predicting this for EVERY industry.  My geek side has been an amateur futurist, a guy looking at economics, future trends, and shit like that, for over 30 years now.  I think we are in The Big Transition, as I call it.  We are not totally out of the fading Industrial Age society, but we're not fully into a functional Information Age society yet.  We're about 3/4 of the way through the transition period between the two.  Click this link to learn more about The Big Transition.  

In the spring of 2019, I did some online work for a kickass bike shop that wanted to open an online business.  That ultimately didn't work out.  But I was telling the owner the same thing back then.  "There's a HUGE recession coming, and it's going to force a complete change to the bike shop and bike industry business model.  At the time, April and May of 2019, that didn't make sense to him.  I get that.  My weird world view was based on reading all kinds of obscure books about trends (like Alvin Toffler's Revolutionary Wealth- 2006), 30 years of observing financial markets and trends, and what I had learned about internet marketing and internet businesses, as a long time blogger.  

But there's no denying that there's some major change ahead for the BMX and over bike industry now.  AND nearly every other industry.  This didn't happen just because of Covid-19.  It was going to happen anyhow.  The pandemic just made this change happen much faster, by screwing up the supply lines, and the economy overall.  A ten year transition got fast-forwarded into a 3 years of chaos, and now the afternath of figuring out new business models for the future.  

Here's the takeaway from my perspective.  Now, 23 years into the 21st century, we have a world where everyone has smartphones, and money can zoom around the world in seconds.  A potential customer can test ride a $3,000 mountain bike, or a $1,200 BMX bike, in a bike shop.  Then they can walk out to their car, in the parking lot of that bike shop, and order the exact bike for $100 cheaper online.  In this changing world, what is the role of a bike shop?  What is the role of a bike manufacturer?  If kids don't all get $200 BMX bikes as 9-year-olds, will very many want to ride high end BMX bikes in their teens and 20's?  Or will they do wheelies on big wheeled BMX cruisers or ride mountain bikes?  I think bike shops will have to completely change their business model to survive.  They won't make their money off of selling bikes in the future, as crazy as that sounds.  So what will the main revenue source be?  The same for manufacturers, I don't think they will make their money selling bikes in the future, I think some other aspect of the business (maybe media?) will turn into the primary revenue source.  

I don't think this because I have some special insight into the bike world.  I'm totally out of touch, and I admit that.  I think this because it's happening in every other industry as well.  So that's my basic thoughts, heading into Thanksgiving Weekend, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then a God-awful recession in the months afterwards.  I think the bike industry, and many other industries, are heading "back into the early 1990's," or a time much like it.  A time of TRANSITION.  

What will the bike and BMX industries become?  Hopefully a better version of the best that they have been.  Time will tell.  Feel free to dive into the comments about this post on my Facebook.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  

I'm doing a lot of longer form writing on a platform called Substack now.  check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

The Great Bitcoin Play of 2023-2025 has begun

There are a whole bunch of videos talking about Blackrock's application for a Bitcoin spot price ETF (Exchange Traded Fund).  Crypto Casey's video, from July 2023, tells all the basics in 16 minutes, so it's a good place to start researching this potential move in Bitcoin, expected to play out over the next 1-2 years.  Investing in crypto, like any investment, carries risks, so be smart, do your own due diligence, and talk to any need professionals before making any investment decisions.

Disclaimer

Bitcoin, BTC, the crypto asset, the decentralized digital form of exchange, hosted on thousands of computers worldwide, began with a white paper published just over 15 years ago, by some mysterious person or group, who went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.  Satoshi's true identity remains unknown to this day.  A link to a white paper describing the concept was released on October 31, 2008.  The open source code network was created on January 3rd, 2009.  Using the info in the white paper, people began "mining" Bitcoin almost immediately.  You can dig into more details on the Bitcoin Wikipedia page, or watch the documentary The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, or one or more of the other Bitcoin and crypto docs out there.  In any case, in January 2009, reportedly inspired by the Great Recession of 2007-2009 (aka The GFC or Global Financial Crisis), the world's experiment with digital crypto currency and blockchain technology began.  It was over 8 years until the strange digital "coin" hit a value of $1,000 U.S. per Bitcoin.  As I write this in mid November 2023, Bitcoin is trading at $36,366 per Bitcoin.  According to Google, the total market cap of all crypto is $1.44 trillion, with Bitcoin making up $708 billion of that.  Obviously, a bunch of people see value in this digital blockchain technology and transaction system.  There are now many other blockchains, and thousands of other crypto coins being traded online.  

The point of this post is that we have the set-up for what appears to be another huge rise in the value of Bitcoin.  This began slowly, a year ago, as Bitcoin rose from the low after the SBF debacle.  The price is back up well over 100% from the low price in November of 2022, after the last big crypto crash and trough in prices.  But now there's another big event coming that could help the price of Bitcoin surge much higher over the next several months, and into the next year or two.  

Wall Street, and specifically the financial Goliath, Blackstone, has applied to create a spot price ETF for Bitcoin.  They applied for it last June.  A lot of other businesses have also applied.  But Blackstone is the largest, most well connected, traditional financial player (trad-fi), and they've had over 500 ETF's approved, and only one denied.  So the crypto world, and many others, expect Blackstone to eventually get approved to open that ETF.  

What does that do?  That ETF, exchange traded fund, will allow investors, particularly huge investment portfolios like pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, ultra high net worth individuals, and other major investors, get exposure to Bitcoin's volatile price action, while not having to actually buy Bitcoin itself.  Basically, the Big Boys and Girls Club of investors around the world will be able to make money off of Bitcoin, without the risks of actually owning BTC, or any other crypto coin.  It's a huge side bet arena, part of the traditional financial system, that would be as easy to invest in as stocks on a Robinhood account.  It would open the crypto environment up to hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars of investment in a traditional investment vehicle, an ETF, but also be able to profit when Bitcoin goes up in price.  The consensus view is that the Blackstone ETF, or perhaps a series of Bitcoin spot price ETF's, beginning with Blackstone's, would make Bitcoin itself much more valuable.  

In March of 2017, Bitcoin was under $1,000 per Bitcoin.  In December of 2017, the price rose to $19,650 per Bitcoin.  That's a rise of 2038% in one year, a 20X return, if sold at the peak.  Then Bitcoin, and other cryptos, crashed.  In December of 2018, the price got down around $3183 per Bitcoin.  In November of 2021, it peaked again at around $64,400 per Bitcoin.  That rise, trough to peak, was 2023%, another 20X rise.  Then crypto prices, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the alt coins or shit coins, crashed again.  This last low was around $16, 452 per Bitcoin, in November of 2022.  I'm saying "around" for the prices because I'm using the Google chart to simplify things, which is weekly numbers, and not the absolute, intraday lows or highs.  

The crypto world, looking at the likelihood of the Blackrock ETF actually happening, sees the next big price spike for Bitcoin likely going to at least $100,000 to maybe $150,000 per Bitcoin, at some point in the next couple of years.  That's nearly a 10X rise in price, from the 2022 low.  If Bitcoin does another 20X peak trough to peak rise, that would put the next peak price at roughly $320,000 per Bitcoin.  That's the extreme high side of the next potential peak, driven in large part by the continued adoption of crypto, as well as the Blackstone ETF, and possible other Bitcoin ETF's, getting approved.  The Blackstone ETF potential approval dates are January 12-14th, 2024, and I think March 13-14th, 2024.  

But wait, there's more!  The next Bitcoin halving is predicted to take place around April 20th, 2024.  The "halving" is programmed into the Bitcoin code.  Once every four years, the amount of Bitcoin that Bitcoin miners earn for mining it, gets cut in half.  This generally leads to the price rising as well, in time.  The last two halvings, the price went down a bit at first, then recovered, and grew, a few months later.  In 2020, the price went much higher in a few months, but Bitcoin popularity was also growing a lot then.  In any case, miners get paid less Bitcoin to mine it, beginning next April 2024, which  tends to make Bitcoin more valuable, overall.  So there's a one-two punch set to push the price of Bitcoin higher next spring, the very likely Blackstone ETF approval, and the baked in Bitcoin halving.  

Last month, the news broke that the Blackrock ETF got approved, and the price of Bitcoin took off immediately.  Within a day, the news broke that it was a false announcement, based on an intern's mistake.  Sure blame the interns.  In any case, even though everyone realized the ETF did not get approved, the mistaken news leak sent the price of Bitcoin from around $26,800, to over $28,000 in ten days, and it has drifted higher since, and it now well over $36,000 per Bitcoin, after hitting #37,000 recently.  Ethereum and many other crypto coins have risen as well, sparked by Bitcoin's rise. 

Many traditional investors are now really happy to "T-bill and chill," after the 2022-2023 chaos in stocks, buying U.S. treasury bills that pay 5% to 5.5% annually on their money.  But over in cryptoland, there's this opportunity to ride the Bitcoin train up for the next several months, maybe for 1-2 years.  this opportunity exists because of increasing overall adoption, because of the effect the nearly certain approval of the Blackstone spot price Bitcoin ETF, and the Bitcoin halving, are expected to have on Bitcoin's price in the next 6 to 12 months, or more.  So that's the opportunity sitting out there right now, for any of you interested in investing in Bitcoin.  

Crypto is not as easy to invest in as stocks, U.S. treasuries, or something like gold or or silver.  It's volatile, the price swings day to day can be several percent.  You have to do quite a bit of research, if you're not already familiar, on how to safely buy crypto, then how to hold it safely in a hard wallet.  If this interests you, then dive into the research about this potential opportunity.  There are a lot of videos about the aspects of Bitcoin, the Blackstone ETF, and many opinions on how this might play out.  As I said above, Crypto Casey's video embedded above is a great place to start.  If the ETF does happen, and Bitcoin rises steadily in price for a while, that generally drags up the price of Ethereum, the other major cryptos, and many of the alt coins (or shit coins) as well.  Do the due diligence needed before investing any money in any of these. Be smart and be safe. 

If this whole idea makes sense, how do you play it?  Buy Bitcoin, or even Ethereum, and hold it through at least next April.  The real rise should come in the months after April.  Don't expect it to soar straight up in price, but make a bumpy, upward trend over time.  If this is the next big cycle in crypto, as it appears to be, then Bitcoin, and many other cryptos, could rise substantially over the next 1 1/2 to 2 years.  It's a buy and hold, mid term play, for several months, up to maybe 2 years.  You decide when to sell some or all of your crypto, and take profits, if this long move plays out more or less as expected. 

 If you don't know how to safely buy and store crypto, then take the time to do the proper research on how to buy crypto safely, and learn about hard wallets, and how to store your crypto safely.  

Again, this is a potential opportunity that seems to be shaping up, where the ETF approval and the halving will help push the price of Bitcoin up, over several months.  No one is obligated to buy any crypto because you read this post.  If this post sparks your interest, do the needed research, and see if this potential opportunity makes sense for you.  As this is playing out, it looks like we're heading into a recession, so expect much of the rest of the economy to be slow as we see just how the Bitcoin story plays out in the next year or two.  

I'm sharing this information because I see this huge potential investment hanging out there, at a time when economic growth around the world is slowing down, some countries are already in recession, and others, including the U.S., are either heading into, or will soon head into, a recession.  There are no paid links in this post, I don't make any money off of writing this in any way, whether you do or don't buy Bitcoin or other cryptos.  I'm just sharing the potential opportunity with those of you who read my blog, hoping it may help some of you, if it makes sense to you, and if this opportunity plays out close to how its expected to play out.  

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned, there's more to come.  Hit me with any comments or ideas on Facebook.  

Blogger's note- 11/16/2023- BlockRock just filed with the SEC to open an Ethereum ETF, to go along with the Bitcoin ETF that I wrote about above.  Here's the CNBC report on this.  So add Ethereum, the #2 crypto, and the first to incorporate smart contracts, to the ideas lined out above concerning Bitcoin.  

I've also been doing a lot of longer form writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers, lately.  There I'm writing mostly about creativity, creative scenes, art, writing, and a little economic stuff. Check it out. 

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

There are no paid links in this post.

"Regrets" My latest Sharpie Scribble Style drawing

"Regrets."  My latest Sharpie Scribble Style drawing.  18" X 24", Sharpies on paper.  This drawing is for sale, message me on Facebook if interested.  #sharpiescribblestyle

Check out over 200 of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings on Pinterest

I finished up my last Sharpie drawing around the beginning of October 2023, and didn't have another commission drawing lined up.  October was heading in, leading up to Halloween, so I decided it would be cool to draw a "Halloween drawing."  My first thought was to draw Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and the unofficial Queen of Halloween.  But then I thought, 1) I don't know if anyone would want to buy my drawing of her.  My drawings take so long, around 40 to 45 hours of drawing each, spread over two to three weeks, that I try sell them, to help me survive, day to day.  Being a homeless working artist (with no work history after my taxi driving years), I can't find a "real job" today that would pay my rent.  So I simply need to try and sell every drawing to get buy.  Artists aren't supposed to say that, but it's my reality.  There's still this thing in art that artists are supposed to act like money doesn't exist.  Screw that.  We all have bills to pay, even at my level of living.  Besides most artists have not actually sold 100 original pieces that takes two to three weeks to finish, I have.  2) With all of Elvira's cleavage in view, no wife would let a guy keep my Elvira drawing up all year 'round, and I didn't know if anyone would want to pay a couple hundred bucks for a Halloween decoration.  So I gave up on drawing Elvira.  She's amazing, Elvira the character, and Cassandra, the woman behind the character.

Then I started thinking, "OK, what is REALLY scary?"  We all see the fake witches, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, werewolves, and all that kind of stuff, all through October, and it's no big deal."  In addition, I needed something that would be interesting visually, something worth drawing.  What popped into head then was this crazy cemetery I used to go to when I lived in Winston-Salem, NC.  It's right on the edge of downtown, where I used to hang out every day when I lived there, usually going to the library.  The cemetery started with the Moravian "God's Acre" graveyard in Old Salem, the historical part of Salem, and a big tourist attraction.  Salem, NC was founded in 1766, so it's an old cemetery.  The Winston cemetery apparently began right next to it, part of it built into small hills.  Winston, the industrial city built on the tobacco and textile industries, began in 1849.  R.J. Reynolds, the company, was founded, and is still headquartered there.  R.J. Reynolds, the man, is actually buried in this cemetery I'm talking about.  It is the craziest, most medieval looking American cemetery I've ever seen.  

Some of the hillside crypts in the Winston-Salem/Old Salem cemetery.  This is one of the coolest looking old cemeteries I've ever seen.  If you ever become a vampire on the East Coast, I recommend checking this place out to live in.  Photo borrowed from Cemetery Tourist blog.

So then my thinking went to the cool old crypts and abandoned churches.  I thought of drawing either a dark interior of a creepy looking abandoned church, or a really cool looking crypt, like those in the photo above, could look really cool and Halloweenish.  Something with a lot of shadows.  At that point, I started looking on the internet for cool looking crypts and spooky looking abandoned churches.  While I was doing that search for cool photos to work from, these graveyard statue photos came up in the searches.  Like these below.  

I loved these cemetery statues of sad angels.  The poses were depressed and they were amazing sculptures.  Dark, a little creepy, and, best of all, lots of shades and shadows.  Then I started thinking, "OK, what theme best goes with these, for a drawing.  What is most scary in life?  What would make an angel sad?  The idea came to me, "regrets."  We all meet death at some point, and the scariest thing I could think of would be to be lying on your deathbed with a whole bunch of regrets of the things you did in life.  Or worse, all the things you didn't do that you really wanted to do.  So that top angel, and the theme of regrets, became the idea behind this drawing.  At that point, I didn't know how well a stone sculpture of an angel, or the out-of-focus background with questions of possible regrets, would work with my Sharpie style.  This drawing is one of my experiments.  "Hey, I wonder if this will work?  Or if I'll spend 45 hours and it will suck?  So I started drawing.  

Over the last few weeks, the stuff I do to survive day to day took more time than usual, so I slowed down on the drawing.  But I finally finished it today.  As the artist, I really like how the angel turned out, I don't know if there's 50 shades of gray in this drawing but I think there's at least 43 shades.  The background doesn't look as cool as I hoped.  I don't hate it, but don't totally love it either.  That's just my take on this experimental drawing project.  I definitely want to draw some more cool sculptures at some point.  In fact, I started a "Sculptures: Shadows are Magic" board on Pinterest, collecting photos of other ones I really like.  

The drawing at the top is the end result of my Halloween drawing experiment.  Let me know on Facebook or Twitter what you think.  

I'm doing a lot of writing these days on a New platform designed specifically for writers, called Substack.  I'm writing mostly about creativity, creative scenes, art, writing, and some futurist and economics stuff, too, once in a while.  Check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack  

Recession 2023 is here...

Here's macro economic analyst Danielle DiMartino Booth a few days ago.  She's on a Blockworks Macro podcast, calling the beginning of what has been the most anticipated, and then forgotten, recession in history.  Why?  Among all the other economic indicators, the U.S. unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%, which is half a percent higher than the April 2023 low of 3.4%.  In addition, Jeff Snider, a super smart guy, whose YouTube channel focuses on educating people about the Eurodollar system, also called the beginning of the recession last Friday.  So there are two very smart macro economic people who both said the recession has begun, on the same day.  

Disclaimer

To the bond market, which is many times larger than the stock market, and where the Big Money invests hundreds of billions of dollars every year, this news signaled that The Fed is finally DONE hiking interest rates.  When this news hit, the key 10 year U.S. treasury bond started selling like hallucinogenic mushrooms at a Grateful Dead concert.  The big money players, like hedge funds, major investment funds, pension plans, insurance companies, and the like, now are  as sure as possible that The Fed won't be raising interest rates anymore, which made it a good time to stock up on longer term U.S. bonds.  When bonds sell a lot, this drives their interest rates they pay down, and the 10 year T-bond went from topping 5% interest down to around 4.5% interest, in a couple of days.  That doesn't sound like much, but it's a huge move. 

All that jargon means that the world's biggest investors think that interest rates won't go up significantly from anytime soon, and that's interest rates will move down next year.  That's the good news.  The bad news is, The Fed will pause interest rates, keeping them where they are now, for a while.  During that pause, all hell's going to break loose in the economy and the financial markets, and we will plunge deeper into a recession.  Nearly all major economic indicators have been pointing towards a recession for over a year now, most getting worse, then a little better, then worse in again September and October.  

What does this mean for everyday working people?  There will be a lot more layoffs coming, across many different job categories, so be a better employee that your co-workers.  Banks have been tightening credit since the bank failures in March, so it will be nearly impossible for many people (and small businesses) to get loans or new credit, and it will cost more interest for people with really good credit who can get loans.  The overall money supply, the total amount of U.S. dollars that exist as bills or digitally, has been declining, which hasn't happened in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930's.  

Because people (and businesses and governments) have so much more debt now than in the 2008 recession, a lot of people won't be able to make all of their payments.  So there will be a lot of people selling all kinds of items, to raise cash to pay bills, from clothes, appliances, and Star Wars collectibles, to cars and houses.  Many of these will be people who got laid off, or in households where someone got laid off.  Debt becomes a huge anchor, dragging people and businesses down, when one or more sources of income get cut off.  There are several economic signals that consumers, by and large, are about tapped out now.  

When consumers stop spending as much money (including loan money, which is now much harder to get), then businesses make less money.  When businesses make less money, they cut back on costs, and need fewer employees.  When consumers and businesses both cut back on spending, then cities, counties, states, and the federal government make less tax money, so those different levels of government have to cut back.  The federal government can try and get The Fed to print more money, usually.  But if they do that now, it will make inflation start heading back up before too long.  That's the last thing federal officials or The Fed want now.  So they're stuck letting recession play out.  

This means more individuals and businesses will go bankrupt, which is already happening.  The entire banking system has been propped up since March, when the first three banks failed, with the BTFP program, and by The Fed's own stats, over 700 U.S. banks are on the verge of bankruptcy themselves.  Now, your accounts are insured by the FDIC, up to $250,000, so if your bank has issues, it will probably be bought or merged with another bank, and then that will become your new bank.  But when things get sketchy enough, The Fed will do a bigger bailout of the whole banking system, and probably several major businesses again, like in 2020-2021 (and 2008-2009).  They always do.  But with the current Congress, there's no chance of major stimulus programs for everyday working people, and probably not for small businesses, until at least spring of 2025, and that's only if we wind up with a mostly Democratic Congress and White House.  Republicans, as a rule, don't back stimulus programs for individuals. Early 2025 is a long ways away.   

We're going into a gnarly recession, that's reality now.  The stock market is still snorting Hopium, pretending everything's OK, but that won't last much longer, and reality will hit the stock market as well, before long.  As a normal person, the recession basics are to pay off any debt that you can pay off, particularly high interest credit cards.  You want to keep your job stable, and cut back on every day expenses, where it makes sense.  That's Recession 101.  Those of you who remember 2008, 2000, and the early 1990's know that.  The rest of you will learn as time goes on.  I quit a job in 1990, at age 24, when that recession began, and bought food with credit cards for a couple of months.  I learned real quick how stupid that is, and carried that debt for quite a while.  I soon learned how to live real cheap, even to the point of living in a house with 7 to 11 roommates at times.  It's hard to beat $100 rent in a recession.   

There's a whole lot more going on in the Big Picture with this recession, which I've been writing about for 4 years or so now.  Check this blog post from March 2019, "Our economy is powered by unicorn farts."  That was written nearly a year before the pandemic hit U.S. shores.  I'll be writing some more about the Big Picture aspects of this recession as times goes on.  For now, the news is, the real world data suggests that the long awaited recession is here.  The much anticipated and then dissed Recession of 2023 has begun.  

This is the Google Trends search history chart for "Give back car," from January 1, 2004 until this week.  For comparison, the Great Recession/Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 is near the left side of the chart.  Millions of people have bought cars they can't afford since the "Stimulus Baller" days of late 2020-2021.  The car repo market has been going gangbusters this year, according to car industry guy Lucky Lopez, on his YouTube Channel.  (11/9/2023)

Here's the Google Trends search history chart for "Give back house," also from January 1, 2004 until this week.  Millennials and a few high earning Gen Z people are learning the hard way that buying a house with a 3%, thirty year fixed mortgage, isn't necessarily a good thing, if you bought at the peak prices of a 13 year housing market during the crazy FOMO phase.  Can you say, "2024 foreclosures?"  I thought you could.  (11/9/2023).

Future trends and economic cycles are something I've been learning about and fascinated by since the late 1980's.  I've linked many of the sources of info above, and will link three really good economic outlook podcasts below.  I've been studying these trends for 30+ years now.  I have a much better idea what's coming in the next few years most people, just because I've been into this stuff for so long.  I've had trouble earning a decent living after taxi driving died, so steady income is my issue these days.  But, I know where to look for opportunities as this chaos plays out.  Time will tell if I'm able to take advantage of very many of those opportunities.  

Here are my three favorite macro economic analysts, each in recent, long podcasts, going into a high level of detail about the current state of the economy in late 2023.

Stephanie Pomboy- Macro Mavens

Lyn Alden- Lyn Alden Investment Strategy

Danielle DiMartino Booth- Q. I. Research

I've begun writing on a new format called Substack, and I've written about a whole bunch of topics over the first 30 posts.  Substack is more focused on writing, and you can subscribe (for free) to have my posts come straight to your email.  After trying out the platform for a couple of months now, I've decided to focus mostly on creativity, writing, art, and creative scenes from now on.  If that sounds interesting to you, check it out.

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

There are no paid links in this blog post.

Florideah Swampfest Documentary

From Our BMX, this a short documentary of the Florideah Swampfest, put on by Trey Jones and his crew, every year, for 7 years now.  This video is just a really fun watch, narrated by clips of Trey, explaining the process of building and putting Swampfest on.

BMX freestyle was an activity long before it became a sport.  A few kids were riding bikes in empty pools and skateparks in the mid 1970's.  Bob Haro started learning flatland tricks and kickturns in the late 1970's.  He put on the first BMX "trick riding" demos at races around 1979.  Around 1982 or 1983, Bob Morales put on some of the first contests at skateparks, and they were relatively small events, by sports competition standards.  It was mostly a bunch of riders.  What crowd there was could hang out and mix with the pros, shoot photos up close in many cases, and be real close to the action.  

As BMX freestyle grew into a worldwide and legitimate sport, and eventually into huge contest events like the X-Games, Dew Tour, and others, things got more rigid, more formal, more expensive, and ultimately less fun.  At the bleachers, paid admission, and wristband events, you can still see amazing riding.  But that crazy, anything could happen feel of the backyard jam went out the window.  

But through all the 43 or so years of the history of BMX freestyle, there have been smaller, hardcore, lower budget, almost anything goes events.  Those are the jams and comps where even spectators have a small chance of being hit by flying bikes or riders.  Let's face it, Those are the fun events.  Even of there is no pro purse, a bunch of top riders will always show up to the small, hardcore, semi-underground events.  For seven years, Trey Jones and his crew have been putting on Florideah Swampfest, and from the videos, it obviously looks like a crazy and fun time for all.  So check out the video above, about what it takes to make a Swampfest happen.  

 

Music I was introduced to while working at Unreel Productions (Vision Skateboard's video company)

Here's the Agent Orange music video for "World Gone Bad," shot in the legendary Combi Pool at Pipeline Skatepark, in Upland California.  This video was directed by Don Hoffman, the founder of Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboard's video company.  This music video was a segment at the end of Vision's first skate video, Skatevisions, which came out in 1985, I think.  The entire soundtrack of the video was by Agent Orange.  Powell-Peralta's Bones Brigade videos may have been more popular at the time, Vision's videos had way better music.

Many of you reading this have heard my basic story of stumbling into the BMX industry.  But here's the short version for any of you who haven't.  I got into BMX riding, and then racing, while living in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982.  I was heading into my junior year of high school.  By the end of that year, us trailer park kids found the Fort Boise BMX track, and began to race.  I raced until mid 1984, but got more into the emerging sport of BMX freestyle in 1983, and joined the only Boise area trick team, with Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore in the spring of 1984.  By late 1984, about the time FREESTYLIN' magazine put out its first issue, BMX freestyle had become my life.

In the summer of 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California, where my dad got a new job.  I worked my summer job in Boise, then drove to San Jose to live with my family.  I found a job at a local Pizza Hut, and rode every afternoon, since I wasn't going to college.  I knew there was a group of hardcore freestylers in the Bay Area, but I didn't know how to find them.  I didn't get the first two issues of FREESTYLIN' in Idaho, and the first one showed the Golden Gate Park scene.  

So I started a freestyle zine, and put it out in some local bike shops, to find other freestylers.  That worked, and by October 1985, I made it to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jam, put on by Skyway rider Robert Peterson.  I met the Skyway team and the main Curb Dogs, and a bunch of really good amateurs.  I rode alone all week, then went up to ride with those guys every weekend that I could make it up to The City.  I published 11 issues of my zine, San Jose Stylin', which somehow landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home to BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986.  In a year, I went from a freestyler in Idaho who only knew two other BMX freestylers, to part of the BMX industry.  So I became a fanboy and industry insider at the same time.

Me on my Raleigh freestyle bike, my second "factory" sponsor, with a Shingle shuffle under the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987.  Raleigh was basically a flow sponsorship, but I got free bikes for a year, and a week in a motel at the Long Beach trade show, where everybody's riders did group demos.  The H.B. Pier was a well known session spot, particularly on the weekends, with a few local BMX freestylers, and several top freestyle skateboarders, and dozens of other BMXers and skaters that came by once in a while. 

  

But I was still really uptight and dorky, and had lots of issues, coming from a family that was a bit more screwed up than most.  My moodiness and dorkiness got me laid off from the magazines, after a few months.  We all got along fairly well, but I just wasn't the right fit for that crew.  I got hired by Bob Morales, owner of the American Freestyle Association (AFA), to edit their newsletter, and do a million other odd jobs at the AFA.  I moved from Hermosa Beach down to Huntington Beach, and worked there all through 1987.  In early summer, I got the chance to produce a series of six videos for the AFA.  Vision Street Wear was a major sponsor of the AFA, and they sent a cameraman from their video company, Unreel Productions, to every AFA contest, to shoot footage.  The deal was that both Vision/Unreel, and the AFA, could use the footage for any projects they wanted to do.  

They shot footage on a broadcast quality Sony Betacam video camera that cost $50,000.  They also had a full blown, broadcast quality edit bay at Unreel.  In those days, when shooting on video tape, that edit bay cost $500,000 to build.  Today, a high end Mac or PC laptop now could do everything that room did, and a lot more, for about $3,500.  But back then, shooting and editing quality video was really expensive.  To edit the AFA videos, I went to Unreel, and they gave me VHS copies of the footage for each contest.  I would log, or watch all the raw footage at home, making notes of the clips I liked.  Then I'd go back to Unreel with my notes, and Dave the editor and I would work in that crazy cool edit bay.  I'd tell him which shots to use, and he did the actual editing and effects, and walked me through the whole process.  They didn't charge the AFA to edit, so we could sell a few dozen of each videos, and actually make a bit of money.

That year, I made a whole bunch of trips to Unreel, over in Costa Mesa, about ten miles from where I lived in Huntington Beach.  I got to know everyone at Unreel, and when they needed a new guy for an entry level job, they gave me a call.  That's how I wound up working at Unreel Productions.  At the time, Vision Skateboards was one of the Big 5 companies in the skateboard industry, the other four included board manufacturers Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, and the two main magazines, Transworld and Thrasher.  Skateboarding was still rising in the 1980's boom, the third, and largest wave of skateboarding up to that time.  

Vision also owned Sims and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes.  This whole Vision empire was spread out in several buildings in Costa Mesa, California.  Unreel was the coolest, a two story office unit on the end of the building, the edge of the mesa, with an ocean view from the second floor.  When Brad Dorfman, the owner of Vision, had someone he wanted to impress, he brought them over and showed them Unreel.   

My nickname at Unreel Productions was "The Dub Guy," because I was the guy in the little room upstairs, where everyone went when they needed a copy of some Vision video for one reason or another.  My little room, about 6 foot by 8 foot, had one video machine for every format we used, except the big one, the 1 inch tape reel to reel machine.  I had a cable tied to that machine, through the ceiling, to my room.  I also had three pro caliber VHS duplication machines, so I could make copies of whatever format someone needed.  I made videos for the Unreel producers, I dubbed VHS copies of all the raw footage that anyone shot.  That was cool, because I learned where all the pools and skate spots were, so I could go hit them on my bike later.  I also made copies of videos for the promotions department, the art department, and anything else people in Vision needed.

Tape librarian.  That was a big part of my job.  Not the coolest sounding job.  Across the hallway from my room was the tape library, which was a small storeroom with shelves on every wall.  When I started there were well over 1,000 individual tapes, most of them the 20 minute Betacam tapes used in the camera.  Those came in boxes of ten tapes.  In most cases, the outer boxes would have something like "Tampa" written on them.  Our producers were really lazy at labeling their tapes.  So I had to go through every single tape, and figure out, "OK, this is Tampa Am contest," then I'd find out who was the cameraman for that contest, and ask them, "OK, is this 1985? 1986?  1987?  What month was the contest?"  Then I hand wrote the little card, and a label sticker, for every single tape.  I spent months doing that, watching part of almost every tape, and fast forwarding through to note any key shots, like an interview or where the pros runs were.  That's what I did when not doing other work.  I usually didn't leave my tiny room for hours, just copying 3 copies of this, 20 copies of that, for different people in the Vision companies.  By the time Unreel closed down, we had about 2,400 tapes in the tape library, every single tape and case hand labeled by me.  

In a group of companies that grossed somewhere around $50 million that year, the 1987-88 Vision empire, there were all kinds of video projects going on, plus the occasional outside project.  With Vision making so much money, Unreel didn't really have to make money as a separate business.  We were always being called on to do some project for Vision or one of the other companies, from skate videos to fashion videos, or videos to show at trade shows for Vision Street Wear.  But the main thing we did was a series of home videos,  like Psycho Skate, Freestylin' Fanatics, Sims Snowshredders, and Barge at Will.  Unreel also produced the first nationally syndicated action sports TV series, called Sports on the Edge, in 1989.  Six years before the X-Games, we had a series of six TV shows that played on TV stations across the U.S., including Vision's Skate Escape event.  That series featured skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, body boarding.  I had zero creative input on any of those TV shows or videos, I was basically a glorified production assistant.  But now, 24 years later, it's pretty cool that my name is in the credits for Red Hot Skate Rock, the video we did with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, when they played at the big Skate Escape event.  Who knew they'd still be kicking ass in 2023.

One really cool side aspect of working at Unreel was that I got introduced to a whole bunch of pretty cool, and some lame, music.  When you make action sports videos, you always need background music, and the Vision companies were a collection of dozens of really creative people, many into the local punk and rock scenes.  Unreel also had a woman who came in occasionally, who was a 20-something knockout brunette, when I first started going to Unreel.  I think she was a hardcore groupie in Hollywood's Sunset Strip music scene, something like that.  She would sit on the floor, in the downstairs waiting room, before they had furniture.  She just had a phone, and she called all the musicians she knew, and had them send demo tapes and other copies of their music to Unreel.  In addition, the producers were always looking for new bands.  Dave and I dubbed all the good music that came in over to digital PCM music, recording the digital info on video tapes.  Plus I made copies of the finished videos a lot, so I was introduced to a lot of cool music in the 2 1/2 years I worked at Unreel.  

When I came from Idaho to California, I listened to top 40 and MTV music (MTV used to actually play music, kids), groups like Bruce Springsteen, Night Ranger, Queen, ZZ Top, and music like that.  My cassette collection brought me a lot of grief when I started working at the magazines.  Gork was a hardcore metalhead, and Andy and Lew were into punk and industrial music.  I had just never been properly introduced to punk rock, except for a guy in high school who told me about the Dead Kennedys.  While working at Unreel, the hardcore H.B. local freestyler, Mike Sarrail, started introducing me to alternative and punk music, then taking me to shows to see bands like Jane's Addiction, Social Distortion, Human Drama, The Dickies, and a whole bunch more.  Mike really got me into punk, but I also found quite a few bands from working at Unreel, and some on KROQ radio, as well.  So here are several of the bands I learned about while working at Unreel Productions, from 1987 to 1990.  

JFA (Jodie Foster's Army)-  We Know You Suck (full album)  Some skater had shot home video of a JFA show, and it was in the Unreel tape library.  We never used it in a video, but I checked it out when I found the tape.  

Stacey Q- "Insecurity"- Someone at Unreel knew Stacey Q's producer, John St. James.  Unreel was working on the original music video for her song "Insecurity," when I started there.  I heard that song, over and over and over, for the first couple of weeks, coming out of the edit bay, as they edited it.  At the time, 7-Up had just put out this Cherry 7-Up commercial.  They spent something like a million dollars to shoot a video that looked like black and white film, but have just the pink show up.  

Unreel had a component betacam edit bay, not composite, which meant behind the machines there were three cables for everything, instead of one, which separated the three main colors of video.  Dave Alvarez, our editor, figured a way to do the same effect as the 7-Up commercial, just by patching cables a certain way.  So the fairly low budget Stacey Q "Insecurity" video, the original version, had the same look as the million dollar plus 7-Up commercial.  But for some reason, the record company had another video produced for the song later on.  Stacey Q was completely unknown, a wannabe pop star at the time.  She came by Unreel a few times.  She later had success with the song "Two of Hearts."  The song made it to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.  Definitely not my taste in music, but this was the first new music I heard when I started at Unreel.

The Descendents- "Coolidge"- For context, snowboarding was really new in 1987-88, and still largely unknown to a lot of the public, when I started at Unreel.  At the time, 95% of ski resorts banned snowboarding on their mountains.  But Tom Sims, who started Sims skateboards and Sims snowboards, is the west coast inventor of snowboarding.  Unreel was working on the second Sims Snowboards video,  Snowshredders, when I started.  There was a version mostly edited, with pink lawn flamingos being tossed around in the intro, for some reason.  Brad Dorfman, or someone, didn't like the intro, and so the video underwent a major re-edit, over the winter of 1987-88.  I had a 3/4" copy to make VHS promos copies from, and first heard The Descendents song, "Coolidge," there.  I just really liked the song, not knowing who the band was.  I used to play that in my room, over and over, on the big 3/4", cassette, just because I liked the song.  I later found out what the band was, and The Descendents and All became favorites of mine.  

On a side note, I also got the job of making a snowboard tuning video with Tom Sims himself, my first cameraman and lighting job at Unreel.  On the second day of shooting, Tom brought in the first snowboard he made, in 7th grade shop class, in 1966 or so.  That board is now famous as, arguably, the first modern snowboard.   When I saw it, I asked "What is that?" and Tom told me the story behind it.  Snowboards have come a long way since.  

Tom Sims with his first homemade snowboard, from about 1966, made in shop class in school.

Agent Orange- "Bloodstains"- I think "Bloodstains," was the first video I ever saw show skateboarding on MTV, back in the mid 1980's.  After The Descendents, I discovered Agent Orange at Unreel.  Since Skatevisions was already a couple of years old when I started at Unreel, I didn't get asked to make a copy of it for quite a while.  I had never seen the video before working there.  When I did dub it, I recognized a couple of songs that I'd heard on KROQ, but never knew what band it was.  This is another video I'd put in and just listen to every once in a while.  Just great music, from my point of view.  But my favorite thing about Agent Orange and Skatevisions come from an  whereYouTube video Moby interviews street artist Shephard Fairey.  At 7:12 in this interview, Shephard says that watching Skatevisions, with the Agent Orange soundtrack, had a big effect on him, and that was his introduction to punk rock.  Without Skatevisions, Andre' may have never had a posse, and Obama may not have had much hope for change.  So I'm stoked my old boss, Don Hoffman, made the video that helped get 14-year-old Shephard started down the alternative path to all the cool stuff he's done since.   

All- "Don Quixote"- Brian Gillogly, one of the Unreel producers, worked at Skateboarder magazine, years before, and he directed Freestylin' Fanatics, and other videos.  He used the All song "Don Quixote" in one video, and again, like "Coolidge," I just liked the song, and started listening to it at work sometimes.  All is basically The Descendents with a different singer, something like that.  

Big Drill Car- "In Green Fields"- One of the people in Big Drill Car worked at Vision, in the art department, I think.  They have a great sound, which I first heard dubbing videos at Unreel.  I picked up their album "Casette Type Thing," at Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach, and listened to that tape a hundred times or more.  I still listen to them when writing or drawing, on a regular basis, and I saw them play live 3 or 4 times in the early 90's.  

Drive, She Said-  Drive, She Said (full album)- I think we used a song or two from this album in some video.  Mostly I just remember seeing the album laying around.  The name, "Drive, She Said," stuck in my head.  Sounds like an 80's hair band.  

Blind Dog Lost- "Pete's Theme"- This is one song that I just liked, having heard it play while dubbing it many times.  

Slammin' Watusis- "Skt Skt Skt"- This is another song I just heard a bunch while dubbing tapes, and liked the song. 

The Splatcats- "Even Steven"- This is the intro music for the Freestylin' Fanatics video, after the Vision Street Wear commercial at the very beginning.  It's another just really cool song I liked back in 1988.  Brian dug deep and found some really cool music for the videos he worked on, I'll give him that.  I thought this was The Descendents when I first heard it.  Listen to the lyrics of this song, it's pretty crazy, but they get lost in the groove of the music.

Joe Satriani- "Satch Boogie"- So... someone at Unreel talked to Joe Satriani's people, and got a verbal "OK" to use his music, from the Surfing With the Alien album, before it came out.  The deal was we could use any of the music for $300 per song.  Our producers loved "Satch Boogie," and several other songs, and we edited the music into several places in the Sports on the Edge TV shows.  Then... Surfing With the Alien took off.  When they went to pay Satriani's record label, the label said, "Uh... no... we want $3,000 per song."  So Unreel found a good local musician, and had him do similar music, hitting the same beats of the edited video, for much less money.  They had to edit out every Satriani song we used, it was just way too much money to spend for background music.  Lesson of the day, get written contracts to use music, if you're producing videos, folks.  On the bright side, the groupie woman I mentioned above, she got Dave and I tickets to see Joe Satriani and his band play live at a closed event at the NAMM trade show in early 1988.  It was a great show, in a room full of hardcore musicians.  Satriani's bass player was even more amazing than him.  I think Paul Stanley from KISS was standing next to me, one of maybe 200 people in the room, for that show.  I'm not 100% sure, with no make-up, but I think it was him.  Thanks groupie chick!

Yello- "Oh Yeah"- This is another song that everybody in that era heard.  Someone at Unreel did get the rights to use this song in writing, and we used it in several videos, I think.  It was in the intro of Snow Shredders.  But you all probably know this song from this commercial, which came out later, or maybe this one, much later on, or maybe from 80's dance club mixes of the song.

Skatemaster Tate- "Year O' Tate"- Gerry Hurtado, aka Skatemaster Tate, was a skater and musician in the 80's skate scene in SoCal.  He was one of the live hosts of Skate Escape, along with radio DJ The Poorman, from KROQ, and pro vert skater Ken Park.  The producers at Unreel decided to not only make a music video of Tater, but to make a 3D music video.  This was shown on the big screen, above the ramp, at Vision's big Skate Escape event in 1988.  It's also the reason you see a bunch of kids in a crowd wearing 3D glasses (at 1:00) in some of the videos.  But since it was shot in 3D, this clip was never used in an actual video.  I just found this clip online recently, and hadn't seen it since 1989 or 1990.  Skatemaster Tate went on to host Sk8-TV on Nickelodeon in 1990.  That's him on the left with Lance Mountain and the co-host guy, in that clip.

The Stain- "I Know the Scam"   "Flashing Reds"- One day, street skating pioneer, Mark Gonzales, walked into Unreel with a record album, put out by a punk band in Toledo, that none of us had ever heard of.  Mark bought the album just because he liked the cover art.  The band was The Stain, and the producers at Unreel contacted the leader of the band, Jon Stainbrook.  It turns out Jon had some really good friends who were musicians, and one had a home recording studio, so Jon and The Stain, became one of our main sources of cheap, good, video music from then on.  I called him up, and used a bunch of The Stain's music when I made my own BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, shortly after leaving Vision, in 1990.

Uniform Choice- "A Choice" - This is a punk band I had heard of, but never actually listened to.  Then I got to shoot all the video footage for amateur vert skater, Mark Cernicky, for Barge at Will (19:03), and they used Uniform Choice for his segment.  I love that segment now.  Cernicky of DEATH!

Red Hot Chili Peppers- "Fight Like a Brave"- OK, I saw the movie Thrashin', featuring the Chili Peppers, in a drive-in, in Gork's van, with then magazine co-workers and roommates, Gork and Lew, in 1986.  So I knew who they were.  But I never really heard their music until the Skate Escape event.  I ran from Don Hoffman's side, in the event director's booth, at the back of the arena, and into the pit for the Chili Pepper's live show there.  Great set.  Then the Unreel later put out the Red Hot Skate Rock home video, so I heard their music a bunch of times back then.  I like their 1990's and beyond music better, to be honest.  We had no idea they would still be playing more than 30 years later, back then.  They still really fuckin' rock.  More power to the Peppers.  

Bad Brains- "Big Takeover"- Someone at Unreel, possibly one of the skaters, introduced me to Bad Brains.  Then, in 1990, when I worked with Christian Hosoi and his guys for three days, shooting for the Tuff Skts promo, he said he was a fan of Bad Brains.  So when I made the original 7 minute promo video for Tuff Skts, I used Bad Brains and Muddy Waters music (for the slo-mo part).  I lost my copy of that promo in 2008, in a move, and there's no version except that super short clip from Sk8-TV, above, with lame music.  But the real version of that promo had Bad Brains in it.  

Muddy Waters- "King Bee"- When I shot footage at Christian Hosoi's ramp for the Tuff Skts promo linked above), he had kind of a one man media day.  There were 3 or 4 magazine photographers there, his team skaters, Block, Little Man, and Joey Tran, as well as surf filmmaker Herbie Fletcher, shooting film.  Christian Fletcher was also there, skating.  Hosoi had a full sized halfpipe on the top of this hill in Echo Park, where he lived in a house once owned by W.C. Fields.  Herbie had some movie footage of Christian from an earlier shoot, and we all went into the little side house, and watched it on a movie screen.  The footage was all in slo-mo, shot in high speed film.  Christian put some Muddy Waters blues music on the record player while we watched the film, and it worked really well with the slo-mo.  So I bought a Muddy Waters cassette and used the song "King Bee" in the Tuff Skts promo video.  I later realized I like blues music in general, so thanks Christian for turning me on to Muddy Waters.  

The Offspring- "Jennifer Lost the War"- In January of 1990, as Vision was in a downward spiral thanks to the slowdown of the 80's skateboarding boom, we had a meeting at Unreel.  The decision had been made to dissolve Unreel.  All the producers and our manager got the boot.  The two lowest (and cheapest) people on the payroll, a woman named Laura, and me, were kept on.  But we had to move to the Vision main office in Santa Ana.  Don Hoffman would work freelance when needed.  Laura found a "real" TV production job in about a month, which left me, in a big office, with a bunch of the basic video equipment.  Every call that came in for Unreel was then directed to me.  Remember, I was a lowly production assistant, and eventually a cameraman, for 2 1/2 years.  I had nothing to do with any official business at Unreel.  

Suddenly I had distributors from Portugal on the phone, or shops who needed a new copy of a video because one was a bad tape, and other weird, random phone calls from around the world.  One day I picked up a call, and a really mad guy said, "You used my band's music in a skate video without paying, and I'm going to fucking kill you!"  Naturally, I was kind of curious who the hell this guy was, because I had no idea.  So I asked, "Who the hell are you?"  It turned out he was Frank from Zed Records, a huge indie music shop in Long Beach that had a small record label.  I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, and explained my side of the story at Unreel.  Eventually he calmed down.  

The best I could figure out, some skater brought in a ghetto blaster recorded tape with the band he wanted to use for his segment on one side, and a young punk band called The Offspring, on the other side.  The tape wasn't labeled.  In the course of making Barge at Will, somebody turned the tape over, and used one of The Offspring's songs in the video, thinking it was cool.  Keep in mind, this was four years before their breakout album, Smash, came out.  Nobody knew who the fuck The Offspring was in 1990, except maybe a few local friends and punkers.  Ultimately I drove down to Zed Records after work one day, talked to Frank, and we worked it out.  I was able to get $1,000 (retail value) of Vision Street Wear clothes sent to The Offspring, and everyone was reasonably happy.  A year or so later, I saw them play (opening for Citizen Fish), with Mike Sarrail.  Mike started talking to them and I ended up having a beer or two with them before the show, at Al's Bar in downtown L.A.  That's how I first heard The Offspring's music.  These Huntington Beach locals became one of my favorite bands over the years, and I 've seen them live 3 or 4 times.

No Doubt- "Oi to the World" (The Vandals cover)- When Unreel shut down in January of 1990, we had two really nice office units to clear out, Unreel's suite, and the Vision promotions department, which was next door.  Tom, Vision's facilities manager, gave me the job of making a list of every single piece of video equipment in the Unreel office, and writing down the serial number.  Much to my surprise, I found over $10,000 worth of equipment that wasn't on any previous list.  Being the ridiculously honest goofball that I am, I didn't steal any of the equipment and sell it.  

While doing that job, I dug into every nook and cranny of the office.  In the closet by Don Hoffman's old office, I found a big box of albums, CD's and maybe 40 or 50 cassette tapes.  Remember the hot groupie chick I mentioned?  I think a lot of that music was stuff she had musicians send to Unreel  in 1987 or early 1988, along with other music people had sent later on.  

At lunch at Vision, I mentioned this to a guy named Dave, who worked in the mailroom.  He said I had to let him have some of it, being into punk himself.  He came by my apartment the next weekend, and we split the music between us.  There were multiple Anthrax picture disk albums, still shrink wrapped.  Those were already collector's items then.  There were a couple of The Offspring's first album, unopened, and a few other records.  Dave and I went though it all.  He picked one thing, then I picked one, then he picked one.  At the end we both had some really cool music, and I had about 20 hand recorded cassettes.  He wasn't interested in those.  So Dave took off with his haul.  

I went up to my bedroom, and put each cassette in my little ghetto blaster, and played parts of a couple songs.  If I really liked the music at first listen, I kept it, if not, I tossed it in the trash.  One of those cassette had "No Doubt" written in a girl's handwriting on it on the cassette card, and on the tape.  Again, this was 1990, a full two years before the "Trapped in a Box" music video came out, and five years before their breakout Tragic Kingdom album.  I played the first song, there was a guy singing.  It didn't really move me.  I fast forwarded a ways, and listened to a bit of another song, also a guy singing.  The music didn't grab me, so I tossed the garage recorded, ghetto blaster taped cassette, probably hand labeled by Gwen Stefani, recorded in 1987, into the trash, with about 20 other cassettes.  Yeah, I kind of wish I would have kept all those.  Or at least that one.  Lesson learned.  

For those of you not aware, the band No Doubt was formed as a ska band, by Eric Stefani (Gwen's older brother) and John Spence, in 1986, and the original lead singer was John.  John tragically died by suicide in late 1987, and a very reluctant and shy Gwen took over lead vocals.  Obviously, she rose to the task, and eventually kicked major ass on vocals.  But the tape I had still had John singing lead, so the self-taped songs I had on cassette were from some time in 1987, three years before I heard of the band, and eight years before they broke out big time with the Tragic Kingdom album in 1995.  Eric Stefani left the band in 1994, and became an animator on The Simpson's show.

So there's a bunch of the music I got introduced to while working at a pretty cool job, at Unreel Productions, back in the late 1980's.  This post is done and I'm hungry.  It's time for a little something refreshing.