This is a recent warm-up jam session at a mini ramp bowl at Woodward West, in Tehachapi, CA. A bunch of pro skaters, the only one I can identify is Andy Anderson, one of my favorite skaters to watch these days. He's the only one with a helmet on. But they all rip. This is a really rough cut of the raw footage of the jam session, and the whole thing is off the chain. If you like mini ramp skating, check it out.
For those not aware, to the best of my knowledge, the first skateboard mini ramp was invented in 1987, in Costa Mesa, California. A few blocks from the Vision Skateboards main building, on Towne Street, Paul Schmitt (aka Professor Schmitt of Schmitt Stix, New Deal, etc.) and a few skaters rented a house, and built a 9 foot high halfpipe in the backyard. But the neighbors complained, and city officials came. They said that, to appease some obscure building code, the skaters had to cut the ramp down to six feet tall. Originally it was either an 8 foot transition ramp with a foot of vert, or a 9 foot transition. When they chopped the top of the ramp off, they had an 8 or 9 foot transition cut off at 6 feet. The mini ramp was born, and it became known as the Towne Street ramp. Skaters from all over sessioned there at times, and realized there was a whole new genre' of tricks, mostly lip tricks, that you could do on a mini ramp. The idea of backyard mini ramps started to spread. At the Vision Skate Escape /NSA season finals in late 1988, Vision took the idea of the back to back vert ramps from the Powell-Peralta Bones 3 video, the Animal Chin ramp, and built a double ramp, with a vert and mini back to back. That was a first for a skateboard contest.
In my 1990 self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, I had footage at what I thought were the first three mini ramps ever in a BMX video. I shot footage at the H-Ramp (2:05) in Santa Ana, CA, pro freestyle skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's ramp (19:43) north of San Diego, CA, and Mouse's Ramp (38:05), the Bad Boys Club clothing art director, near San Diego. Going through a bunch of videos earlier this year, I learned that someone else (Eddie Roman's 2-Hip Ride Like a Man, or maybe the Dirt Bros. Video, I can't remember), also had a little bit of mini ramp footage in their video, a couple of months earlier.
By about 1989-1990, more mini ramps were popping up, like the Blockhead Ramp, a mini bowl outside of San Diego, and there were mini ramp sections at the huge Powell-Peralta skate zone, built for their skaters, in Santa Barbara, CA. From those, as they showed up in videos, the backyard mini ramp idea spread around the U.S. and the world. So there's a little bit of the history of mini ramps in the bike and skate world.
I've been writing a lot on a platform called Substack, designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
It's 7:00 am, Monday morning, August 21, 2023, as I begin this post. It's the day after Tropical storm Hilary slammed into Southern California, and the Baja California peninsula in Mexico. This is the craziest footage I've seen so far, from Mulege, Mexico. Mulege is on the inland side of the Baja peninsula, on the Sea of Cortes, about 200 miles north of Cabo San Lucas. So it was still a hurricane at that point.
Hurricane Hilary was a Category 4 hurricane at it's peak, in late August of 2023. It downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane about the time is made landfall, on August 20, 2023, on the northern Baja California peninsula. It further downgraded to a Tropical Storm by the time it hit San Diego dead on, and quickly surged north into Orange County, Los Angeles, with particularly heavy rain in the inland desert areas of Southern California. This was the first tropical storm to hit Southern California since 1939, over 80 years earlier.
Officially, there has been only one death from Hurricane/Tropical Storm Hilary, and that was a person in Mexico who was trapped in a car that got washed away.
In addition to the Tropical Storm, a 5.1 earthquake hit during the storm, centered southeast of Ojai. I personally felt that earthquake, quite strong, in Sherman Oaks, about 35-40 miles away from Ojai. I felt one or two immediate aftershocks. There were at least 13 earthquakes between 3.0 and 3.9, in the Ojai area, as well as the 5.1 magnitude quake, on Sunday afternoon, (8/20/2023). The hashtag #hurriquake became a thing on social media.
This 19 minute documentary by Jonathan Petralama, below, is amazing, especially considering he put it out on Monday, after the storm. There's footage from the beach area in Orange County and Long Beach, to almost to the Mexican border, and back up to the Palm Springs area, including the Interstate 10 freeway closure. These guys did a great job capturing the effects of Hurricane turned Tropical Storm Hilary as it hit Southern California. Again, this is the first tropical storm to hit SoCal in 84 years.
I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack these days, check it out:
Think this meme is a bit much? The Fed's own report from this spring, 722 U.S. banks are bordering on insolvency. Six U.S. banks have already gone out of business this year. ( My meme)
For over four years, I've been rambling on about "this next recession." Why? because this economic downturn is going to change the world, and our lives like no recession we've seen. This is the recession that will wipe out a big chunk of the retirement savings of my people, Generation X. I've written a lot more on that subject elsewhere, like here. So I've started a new blog looking at side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses for the 2020's, and the economy and recession in general. Basically, what's happening economically, and ideas to survive the next two or three crazy years, and beyond.
The new blog is called Small Business Futurist. It got banned from linking on Facebook and Instagram on the 2nd or 3rd post, which is always a good sign. If the powers at be censor a blog from sharing before it really starts, then it means I'm on the right track. Here are the links to some of the posts so far...
First of all, Google maps has to add a new mountain range to their map every time there's a BMX dirt contest now. The size of the jumps is just ridiculous at this point. Second, everything the riders are doing, and almost doing, is fucking incredible these days. But I'm sharing this for one reason, the guy you see comment at 11:06. Wow.
Here's the Real Street Best Trick... at Rincon... BMX and skate.
This 25 minute interview with Alvin Toffler is from 2007, and he goes into several of the many themes of his 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.* The book was published in 2006, and Toffler died in 2016. Yet the book is still mind blowing for how deeply it dives into how different the emerging Information Age is from the Industrial Age we are still moving out of. Seventeen years after being published and still very few people are talking about the changes to society that Toffler was exploring in the book nearly 20 years ago.
It's the middle of May in 2023 as I write this. At this point it's hard for any of us to remember the "before times," way back in 2019. Life in the 21st century was cruising along, not ideal by any means, there was always some new phone model or software update to learn. But we were doing alright, it seems. OK, we had the Retail Apocalypse happening,lots of name brands stores closing down. We also somehow managed to elect a whacko for president in 2016. His autoritarian leanings scared any patriotic American who actually likes free speech and civil liberties, and that Constitution thing. But even so, we were managing.
Then we rang in a new decade, New Year's Eve 2019, rolled into 2020, the third decade of this millenium began, and things still seemed pretty normal. And then the crazy virus from China hit U.S. shores on a couple of cruise ships from Japan, and the world went fucking nuts. A 100 year pandemic that led to mandatory shutdowns of businesses all over, for most of you. I was one of the homeless people who got left outside to die when everything closed down. Turned out the virus liked it better in doors, but we didn't realize that for a while. Either way, everyone's lifestyle was seriously impaced. Over 40 million people lost their jobs for a while, some permanently, and the economy tanked, technically it was a short depression, because GDP dropped more than 10%, it dropped 32% in under three months.
"This will only be for a couple of weeks" we were told at first when mandatory face masks and shutdowns began. Reember that? Then "a couple more weeks," then another month. The restrictions dragged on, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But it kept going. Work from home, Zoom calls, and whole families watching and making TikTok dance videos. School was on a computer screen. Then it kept dragging on, and on. And that's for all of us who lived, over a million Americans, and millions more around the world died from Covid-19 complications. We all know that stuff, as much as we're trying to forget.
Then came stimulus money, "helicopter money" as the business press often called it. Suddenly people were locked down but buying cars and stocks and homes they couldn't afford when things began to open up partially. The pandemic became a political issue, along with a health and economic issue. Just about every single person's day to day life changed dramatically. Then the stimulus money blew up the stock market, the crypto markets, the real estate market, and the car and truck market, even collectibles like vintage comic books and baseball card prices soared. All that money eventually coagulated into serious inflation, which eventually led to The Fed raising interest rates to fight the inflation they caused. The fastest interest rates rise in U.S. history in turn began to kill crypto, stocks, real estate, and now the auto market is feeling it. Ridiculous prices on assets began to drop back down some. But not before thousands of Millennials bought homes at above market prices at the peak of the market. They've got a big lesson in basic economics coming soon. Now we are heading into another recession.
How did all this happen? Why are so many things so crazy now? Did anyone see this craziness coming? Did anyone try to warn us about the long list of issues we've all been dealing with?
Yes, as a matter of fact, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in a series of books that Alvin wrote, did forecast many of the things we have dealt with, not just since 2020, but since Alvin's first major book, Future Shock, was published way back in 1970. His next book took a decade, and tons of research. The Third Wavewas published in 1980, and those two became the books he is best known for.
The main theme was that we were leaving an "industrial-based society," and moving into an "information-based society," as he referred to them. Now, 43 years later, it's easy to say, "Duh!," to the idea that we were (and still are) leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. We are all familiar with that basic idea now. Alvin Toffler wrote several more books, building on The Third Wave theme, the last one being Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006. Alvin Toffler died a decade later in 2016. But the incredible research, thinking, and insights in Revolutionary Wealth are still mind blowing, even today, 17 years after it was published. Being a huge fan of the Tofflers, and having written about what I now call The Big Transition, the continuation of the Tofflers' Third Wave changes still happening in society, I just re-read Revolutionary Wealth.
Here are just a few of the ideas in the book that should be everyday knowledge, but aren't, much to our detriment. If you want to understand why the 2020's seem so crazy, Revolutionary Wealth is the single best book I know of, to help figure out what's happening today.
We all know there are the things we focus on in everyday life. For most people, everyday life revolves around their family, their job, their house, doing laundry, getting oil changes in the car, getting the kids to their after school activities, fixing dinner, and everything else people do day after day. Then there are fundamentals in life, things like going to school, getting an education, finding a job, paying bills, the basics of life in today's world.
Early on in Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toffler goes even deeper, into what he calls "Deep Fundamentals." These are apsects of human life and human society that go on at a level that few of us, even geeky futurist thinker dweebs like me, rarely ponder. Three of the major deep fundamentals he explores are the changes in how we relate to time, space (location in the country), and work.
For example, when the Industrial Age was building, huge numbers of former farmers became assembly line workers in factories, and precise time became much more important. Factory workers needed to be trained to get to work on time, to do repetitive jobs, and to do things at specific times. That era, in the late 1800's, is when people started carrying pocket watches or wristwatches, and began to put clocks everywhere, at home, in the office, and in the factory. Another part of that is that is when our current school system was invented, to "teach industrial discipline," that's actual wording from those days. It's also a huge reason why our education system sucks in so many ways. It's not the teachers, my sister's a teachers, and Alvin Toffler's sister was to, there are plenty of great teachers out there that want to make our education system better, in 1,000 different ways. But we are stuck, for now, with an education system that was invented about 140 or 150 years ago, to turn farm kids into assembly line workers. The system itself is outdated, and needs to be completely reinvented. That's just one big issue affecting not only how "revolutionary wealth" is created in today's world, but it drastically affects how society evolves or devolves going forward.
Back to the Deep Fundamental of time, few people actually work on assembly lines anymore in the U.S., how we interact with time has changed, and continues to change dramtically. The same is true of the deep fundamentals of space, or location. There was a time when a city needed to be near a deep water port, major railroad lines, or natural resources, like timber or minerals, to thrive. That has changed to a huge degree in a world where wealth is often created primarily with ideas. Austin, Texas is a major tech hub these days, not because it's on an ocean port or major navigable river like the Mississippi or the Ohio. Austin is a tech hub largely because of a culture with lots of weird creative people, artists, musicians, filmakers, and tech entrepreneurs. It's not dependent on nearby coal or potash mines. Different things are important now, and we are in a long period of chaotic change between the fading Industrial Age society, and the emerging Information Age society. Alvin Toffler explores these deep fundamentals and really digs into how these nuances make a big difference at a level almost no one is looking at or thinking about.
As with all of his books since The Third Wave in 1980, Toffler goes over the concept that we are still moving into the Third Wave of human society. He also explains this in the video above. To clarify this idea, here are the three waves he defined in The Third Wave. Originally, humans lived in small tribal bands that we generally refer to as hunter/gatherers in sociology today. The First Wave was the change from hunter/gatherers into an Agricultural Age, a world of farmers. This started somewhere around 9,000 years ago, probably in or near Turkey, according to Toffler. Agriculture moved very slowly, and took thousands of years to become the dominant lifetstyle in the world. But when people stayed in one place and became farmers, the lifestyle of every single person changed dramatically from the earlier tribal societies. Villages and small towns and cities began to form.
The Second Wave was the change from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age. The Toffler's put this age's start about 350 years ago, and it took a couple of hundred years to become the dominant lifestyle in the world. That transition happend much faster than the Agricultural revolution, and again every single person's lifestyle changed. Small villages became towns, and some towns grew into large, and even huge cities as the Industrial Age progressed.
The Third Wave began in1956, when the number of "white collar" office workers first outnumbered the number of "blue collar" factory workers in the U.S.. The Information Age began slowly growing from that point. The transition between the two was still continuing, when Alvin offler published Revolutionary Wealth in 2006, and I argue this transition is still going on today.
In today's world, in many developing countries, there still are First Wave people living off subsistence agriculture, and in "developed" countries, we still have many Second Wave Industrial Age people and businesses, still working from that mentality of building physical objects as the main source of wealth.
We also have the Third Wave, Information Age people, creating "products" and services that in many cases, don't physically exist, like websites and internet content, streaming video, financial services, and the huge video gaming industry. Huge amounts of wealth are now created in these revolutionary ways, built in a digital world and a physical world, yet in new ways.
We also have a lot of battles between the people and interests in each of these waves. Toffler refers to this as "wave warfare," where, for example, old school Industrial businesses lobby politicians for one sort of result, and Information Age tech businesses will lobby politicians for a completely different set of results and outcomes. These different special interests are battling each other, though few people think of it this way. This is yet another cause of drama and chaos in today's society.
Another issue Toffler dives into is the economic conundrum of "information-based" products and wealth. One traditional definition of "economics" was "the allocation of scarce resources." But knowlege is not a scarce resource, like coal or steel. Another issue is that many different people can use the same "knowledge," but only one person can use a machine or a piece of steel at one time. The point is that the whole world of "economics" doesn't even have models to even to begin and try and figure out how to quantify and analyze information-based products and services. Economics is using obsolete Industrial Age concepts to try and analyze an Information Age world economy. They simply don't have the basic tools to analyze business and finance in the Information Age world. It will be decades before economists come up with, and agree on, even basic models to anaylze an information-based economy.
This brings me to another idea Toffler shares in this book. The idea is that much of the knowledge each of us has in our head is outdated and obsolete. It just isn't true anymore. The Toffler's call this "Obsoledge," for "obsolete knowledge." We are all operating with some knowledge about particular subjects that is simply outdated, because that specific area has evolved, changed, and our thinking hasn't.
Another huge issue Toffler digs deep into in Revolutionary Wealth is the idea of "Prosuming," another word they made up, in a previous book. Prosuming is creating a good or service for personal consumption. Prosuming is work that is done by someone, but no money changes hands, so it doesn't get counted in the money economy. For example, when you cook your own food and make dinner for your family, that was work that you did for your family's consumption. But other than buying the food, no money changed hands for the actual work of cooking, serving the food, and doing the dishes afterwards. If your whole family had gone to a restaurant, you would have to pay quite a bit for someone else to perform those services.
Prosuming is its own non-money, which is much larger than the actual money economy. All of this work that's done for free, all across the U.S., and around the world, that has huge effects on the money economy. But the contributions of pro-suming are never really acknowledged by economists and others in academia. Linux software was created for free, and has had major effects on the world. Wikipedia is a huge, crowd-source, pro-suming project, another big example of pro-suming in today's technological world. Wikipedia largely put encyclopedias out of business, but doing the job better, more up-to-date, with mostly amateurs, that correct each other's contributions. The end result is an evolving "encyclopedia" that's doesn't physically exist, yet is available as a free resource to billions of people around the world. Another great example of highly productive prosuming are all those thousands of how-to videos on YouTube, to help us all learn to use new devices, software, and other things. YouTube was a year old, and still often laughed at, when Toffler published Revolutionary Wealth. Now half of all TV watching, on big screens, is YouTube content, most of it creator-made content, not scripted shows produced by major studios.
The most influential pro-suming, as any mom knows, is all the work moms and dadsand other family members do raising kids, that never gets counted as paid work. Employers looking for new people to fill jobs don't have to worry about their recruits being potty trained, knowing how to speak English (or whatever their native language in their country), and most basic social skills. Parents do those things, and many more, to prepare kids to be adults. Sure, some do better jobs than others. But imagine how much money would have to be spent to hire a crew to raise and train a single baby until they were old enough to get their first job. The cost would be enormous. All that work of getting kids to adulthood is done by moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and some friends. That is an huge benefit to society that never gets any economic value attached to it. That is just one part of pro-suming in today's world.
Another issue that all these other changes have lead to in this period of transition is the great mismatches in different aspects of society. In the height of the Industrial Age, with most people working repetitive assembly line jobs, people were largely interchangable. When there were 1,000 job openings, average people could fill most of them. A lot of those jobs could easily mix and match employees. So when the government said we have million empty jobs, employers needed a million average people to fill the vast majority of them.
Now we have far more jobs that involve specialized knowedge, creativity, critical thinking, or skill sets that are much more rare. That's why, as I write this, we have (officially) 9.6 million jobs that need workers, and 6 million unemployed people. Because long term unemployed people are no longer counted, we actually have two or three othe runemployed people for each one that is officially counted. So we probably have around 18 million unemployed people of working age now. But those millions people can't, or won't fill those 9.6 million jobs open right now. So many jobs require specialized technical, or other skills and knowledge, that we have this huge mismatch. We have lots of jobs that need filled, and lots of people who need good jobs, but they don't fit each other. This mismatch is just one of many happening in society right now.
Another mismatch is the spatial/geographical mismatch. Tech jobs tend to cluster in a small number of tech hub cities, because tech companies cluster where the best tech workers are, generally. Since tech workers have some of the highest pay in today's work world, they are willing to pay more for housing, and other services. So tech hub citites and regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, L.A./SoCal, Boston, the Washinton D.C./Arlington area, Austin, Texas, have seen rent and home prices soar over the last 30 years or so. This makes it much harder for lower wage service workers to survive in those areas.
But at the same time, many former powerhouse cities of the Industrial Age, like Chicago, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, and many others, have struggled to survive and rebuild, after losing 100,000 factory jobs, and that many people, in some cases. Other big Industrial cities have practically collapsed after the loss of tens of thousands of factory jobs, like Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and one of the worst, Gary, Indiana. We have cities where high paying tech jobs can't find workers. And we have dozens of towns and cities that are a shadow of their former selves, struggling to find any jobs for all their residents.
This is another mismatch of the cities that worked economically 50 years ago, and the ones that work the best economically in the emerging Information Age. We have all kinds of cheap rental houses, and even thousands of abandoned ones, in places where there isn't near as much of an economy anymore. At the same time, we have people renting treehouses in Austin for $3,000 a week or so to go to SXSW, the music and tech festival. Alvin Toffler goes into other huge mismatches in society caused by the changes in how we interact with the deep fundamentals of time, space, and work.
Oh yeah, Toffler mentions a pandemic as one major thing we had to look out for in the future, a handful of times in the book, yes, way back in 2006. That was one of many issues he saw potentially arising and causing a lot of trouble.
Revolutionary Wealth is over 500 pages, and this was the third time I've read it, the first was back in 2010 or 2011, I think. I read dozens of books in that era. I read it again in about 2015-2016, I think. It's still mind blowing, although the world has changed quite a bit in 17 years. There is so much of what he wrote about back then that is not only still happening, but almost no one seems to be using many of the ideas he wrote about. If you ever get a chance to write a reading list for current world leaders, and city leaders everywhere, put this book on the list. There is still a whole lot to learn from the work of the late Alvin Toffler. We would be a lot better off today if most major leaders, at every level, had studied this book back when it came out. We would be a lot better off if Revolutionary Wealth was mandatory reading in colleges 10 or 15 or 17 years ago.
So there's a very brief look at an incredible book, now 17 years old, that still holds a ton of valuable information on why our world is so crazy today. That's the mark of a good futurist, when the book still has a lot to teach a decade or two later. Revolutionary Wealth is one of those books. Now you know. Maybe a few of you will read it, which is my hope.
* Not a paid link
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, the economy, and making money during the recession. Check it out:
In this video, Joe Brown, of Heresy Financial ,YouTube channel explains why he thinks we will not only see inflation pull back, but will actually see deflation, prices on many things actually dropping, in coming months.
For 3-4 years now, I've been blogging about a major recession, possibly a depression, I saw coming. My views are based on what I call The Big Transition. This is my name for the continuation of the concept that the late futurist, Alvin Toffler, explained in his 1980 book, The Third Wave. After a decade of research,Toffler came to the conclusion that we were leaving an industrial-based society, and moving into an information-based society. In today's terms, we were leaving the Industrial Age and moving into the Information Age. We're all familar with the idea now. Most people think that happened long ago. Most of the factories shut down, the internet got invented, and that was it.
Toffler published his last book, Revolutionary Wealth, in 2006, and 17 years after The Third Wave, still adding more depth and nuance to that idea. I believe this transition is still going on, now 43 years after he first explored the idea in print. I also believe the peak decade of this change will be the 2020's. This is one of my reasons I believed this recession will be much bigger, and much more transformative, than any since the 1930's. I wrote on this basic idea in some depth in late 2019 and early 2020.
Now I'm just some guy who first got interested in investing when I bought an ounce of silver, as a junior high kid, in 1981, after the big price spike and crash. I was hoping the price would spike again. Then, in the late 1980's, I got interested in real estate, which was soaring when I moved to southern California. I didn't make enough money to buy a house, but I began reading about real estate. A few years later, in 1989, I got fascinated by the dynamics of the economic world, business, investing, and long term trends that may exist in the markets. I've been watching and learning about these subjects ever since.
Don't listen to me. Listen to other smart people who have been studying the economy their whole lives, and who actually run businesses and do consulting.
In late 2019, while blogging about my thoughts on the economy, I began looking for more details and nuances about what was going day to day and month to month. I found The Money GPS YouTube channel in late 2019. I've been watching it almost every day since. In the months and years since, I've found that investors Ray Dalio, Jim Rogers, investor/journalist Nomi Prins, and analyst/scholar Mohamed El-Erian are also really good people to listen to on investing and the economy, on a continuing basis.
After the big moves up in interest rates and down in stock and some real estate prices in 2022, 2023 has been harder to figure out. I had been trying to figure out myself , recently, just where inflation was going, and Joe Brown's argument in this video above makes sense to me. Personally, I think we are most likely to dive into a deep recession, with inflation continuing to drop. It looks now like that will lead to a few months of deflation, actual dropping prices on many big items and investments.
This will wreak a lot of havoc on most everything and most everyone, financially. The Fed will have to pivot, that is, lower interest rates over time, and create a lot of new money, to bail out banks and major corporations (maybe even cities and whole states). Just like they did in 2022, they will do another about face, this time from raising interest rates to lowering them. This will set the stage for more, and even higher, inflation, 12 to 18 months after the pivot. The timing is hard to pin down now, it depends on The Fed's timing, but I think rising inflation by late 2024 or early to mid-2025, is likely. The stage is already set for the next president of the U.S., whomever that is, to have an even bigger inflation battle to deal with then Joe Biden got hit with. While many like ot blame this inflation on the 2020 stimulus package, all that money built upon a base of money creation and historically low interest rates through the Obama and Trump administrations. The Biden administration was in office as we hit the tipping point. Just for the record, presidents don't have that much to do with the economy, central banks have much more influence, the Federal Reserve here in the U.S., and others in other countries. Both parties in the U.S. spend ludicrous amounts of money, mostly debt passed on to future generations, the just put lots of money into different programs, while racking up trillions in debt.
Last year, as interest rates started to rise, I began to look on YouTube for other smart people with knwloedge about real estate, and other areas. Here are the best videos, people, and YouTube channels I like, to build a comprehensive picture of the economy world in these turbulent times.
Here's the best info this year on real estate in 2023. Adam Taggart of Wealthion channel interviews Nick Gerli of Reventure Consulting channel, who is the single best source of real estate info that I've seen anywhere. This video is from January 2023, before the first four bank collapses, but this is the best overview of real estate I've seen this year. Wealthion does multiple long interviews with really smart investment and finance people every week. Reventure focuses on real estate, and Nick spent the winter building Reventure App, a database, which still free as I write this, where you can see exactly what real estate is doing in your area, or any area, of the U.S.. If you are thinking of buyng a home to live in or for investment in the coming years, check out this app.
For a look at Southern California real estate, Christian Walsh of WIRE Associates puts out good videos. He's an agent in this area, and comes across like a guy-next-door type, low key and without the hype of many YouTubers. He explains the latest data and trends in the 5 main Southern California counties, on a continuing basis.
Robert Kiyosaki and his wife Kim interview silver enthsusiast @SilverSlayeron Rich Dad Radio Show on The Rich Dad Channelin the linked video. His channel is, you guessed it,Silver Slayer channel. This interview is from October 2022. As I write this, silver spot price is $25.66 per troy ounce. While gold is near its all time high price, silver has been over $47 per ounce in 2011, and $36 per ounce way back in 1980, which would be about $138 per ounce in today's dollars. Robert and @SilverSlayer talk about the one investment that many people think is completely undervalued, and the investment that anyone can afford in today's world.
You've probably heard of the personal finance book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the best selling investment books of all time. I think this book should be taught in high school, to give kids a basic idea about money and investing, and what an asset is, and isn't. Here's my favorite story about the author of that book, Robert Kiyosaki, and his wife Kim. Robert ran into troubles with his first business, importing nylon wallets and selling them. After that, he and Kim actually lived in their car for a few weeks, in the 1980's. They were actually technically homeless fo ra bit. Then some friends let them live in a basement for several months. Instead of getting jobs, they wrote a business plan, found investors, and started a business. Robert and Kim were doing really well a few years later. That set them up to begin buying real estate in the long, 1990's recession, when prices were really low. Robert and Kim have been serial entrepreneurs and investors, and then financial educators, ever since. Robert tells this story in his book Cashflow Quadrant. My point is that they are not people born rich, they actually have hit bottom, and built their businesses and wealth back up themselves.
What about the Big Picture? Here are my favorite macro thinkers and analysts in recent interviews, looking at the financial chaos that is 2023.
Adam from Wealthion interviews macro researcher/analyst Stephanie Pomboy in this interview, from early February, 2023. Recorded before the four (so far) bank collapses, Stephanie sees a hard landing ahead, and gives lots of nuances of her view, with a lot of info from corporate America.
A big worry of many investors right now is the future of the U.S. dollar. There is a move by Russia, China and other countries for a BRICs reserve currency, to move away from the dollar, and the worry of possible sanctions in the future. Is the dollar doomed in the next couple of years?
Jack at Blockworks Macro's Forward Guidance show interviews Brent Johnson, who figured out the "Dollar Milkshake Theory" several years ago, in this interview. Recorded in late April 2023, Brent gives his case while the dollar should still be the world's reserve currency for quite a while to come.
Other YouTube channels I think have really good information investors, and anyone else interested in the crazy economic world playing out in the 2020's.
Those are the main places I look, and videos I watch, on a regular basis, because I'm a futurist and economics geek, though not an investor. Personally, I think we are now 43 months into a great depression, which I've been calling The Phoenix Great Depression, since early 2020. That's just my opinion, and I could very well be wrong. My belief in some really obscure, ultra-long term cycles, led me to that conclusion. It takes a 5 year economic contraction to officially form a great depression, which means we have 2 to 3 years before that is even possible, let alone likely. Time will tell.
We are definitely heading into the worst part of the major economic downturn I've been droning on about for four years or so. All of these people and channels linked above are much better sources for up-to-date data and ideas on where the financial world is heading, in the short and mid term.
I'm pivoting to spending more time thinkng and writing about what I call call Creative Scenes, the little groups of people who create things. Some of these turn into major and influential businesses or movements, and many of the smaller ones create the businesses and products that will build our way out of this long period of economic chaos. For any of you trying to figure out what's going on in the business, financial, and ecnoomic world, I hope this post is really helpful.
The very knowledgeable Mohamed El-Erian gives his thoughts on the failure of First Republic Bank, and its takeover (of most assets) by J.P. Morgan Chase, in this CNBC interview. First Republic is the second biggest bank failure in U.S. history, behind the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008. This interview was Monday morning, May 1, 2023.
Nick Gerli, of Reventure Consulting, is a financial YouTuber I found last summer, looking for more info on wear real estate was heading. He's been calling things ahead of time, trend by trend, by looking at the actual real time data, and just using common sense. Which should be called "uncommon sense" since so few people seem to use it. This video explains where we are now, mid-April 2023, and where things appear to be heading, better than any of the 30 or 40 videos I've watched recently about the economy.
I've been blogging about "the next Great Recession" (or depression) since 2018-2019. Looking at obscure ultra long term trends that most people either have never heard of, or simply dismiss, it looked like we were heading for either a bigger Great Recession,or a full on Great Depression (a recession for 5+ years), starting in 2019-2020. The recession tried to begin in December of 2018, but The Fed dropped interest rates and calmed things down. Then the pandemic hit in 2020, tossing the economy off a cliff into the recession. But The Fed responded by creating $5 to $6 trillion in "helicopter money," throwing money at banks, Wall Street, corporate America, near bankrupt states, cities, and towns, and eventually to us lowly, average citizens. That was like buying 5 kegs of beer at 2 am at a high school or college party. "Hey! More beer (free money) keep the party going!" The new money propped things up from late 2020 into early 2022.
But that eventually caused inflation, which soared, finally forcing The Fed to raise interest rates faster then ever in history, to fight the inflation they caused with all the newly created money. Now a bunch of factors are pulling money out of the economy, and the financial roller coaster is headed back down into recession. A BIG recession. Nick explains the mess in this video above far better than I can. So just watch the video to get a good idea where things are headed economically this year.
Back in late 2019 and early 2020, I wrote this 20 chapter "book/blog thing" called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now. It was about how I saw the this decade, The Tumultuous 2020's as I call them, playing out. So where are we now in this scenario? I think we're at the start of Act 2, to use a theater or movie metaphor. What happens in Act 2 of a play or movie? What you see in this short video above. I'll leave it there.
Other potential "dominos" could be: CMBS, MBS, ClOs, ABS, SLABS (which seem to have completely disappeared somehow), junk bonds, non-bank lenders, and, of course, residential real estate. To name a few.
Here's the Our BMX edit with highlights of the BMX jumping event from one of the Anaheim Supercross events in January 2023.
First of all... exactly when did BMX six packs turn into mountain ranges? These jumps are HUGE. I remember working at a Supercross event in the early 1990's, and all the MX jumps, except the finish tabletop, were about 6 feet tall. Then I rode down to Sheep Hills a couple of days later, and KOD jump take off and landing were about 7 feet tall. I thought, "Holy crap, BMX jumps are taller than motocross doubles and triples now, that's nuts."
Now BMX rhythm sections are gigantic. Seriously, they're insane in size now. And then we see the crazy stuff they're pulling off now. This six minutes just blew my mind. Enjoy.
Here's one of the best future forecasters out there, whose work I've never read. My mistake, I only learned of him recently. This is a crazy interview with Daniella Cambone, where he goes into economic trends, World War III, the future of democracy, the recession, crypto, politics, crypto, gold, and much more. If any of these things interest you, watch this 42 minute video.
I have a new blog called Adaptive Reuse SoCal, about finding new uses for old, unused, and abandoned buildings, as well as the economy, and commerical real estate in general. Check it out!
