Build Your Scene... Build Your City... Build Your Economy

A couple thoughts on the title of this blog:  1) I grew up in a series of small towns and cities in Ohio, New Mexico, and Idaho.  In those cities and others like them, there are lots of young people who have big dreams and who really think their city sucks.  So that's where the title came from.  2) In this blog and "Lame part 2" I'm exploring a bunch of related ideas that I eventually want to distill down into an actual book.  I have no idea what the title of the book will end up being, so I figured I'd give this "rough draft" blog a really stupid name that I know I won't use for the book.

Above we have a clip of former top French freestyle skateboarder Pierre Andre' Senizergues, better known now as the founder of Sole Technology.  Of all my friends who have started companies, Pierre Andre' and Don Brown are the ones I'm most proud of.  Not only great business guys, but all around good dudes.  Sole Technology puts out Etnies and E's skateboard shoes, 32 brand snowboard boots, and clothing as well.  What I want you to take away from this clip is that Sole Tech's huge headquarters, the hundreds of people they employ now, the Lake Forest skatepark they built, and all those solar panels that now give them free electricity, all that started with a single skateboarder, in a small skate scene in France.  Thirty-some years later it's a huge global company making great products and working to reduce their carbon footprint in the process.  This is a great example of what a small local scene can turn into over the years.

This blog is not about any one city or town, it's about the hundreds of small towns and cities in the U.S. (and the world) that are being left behind as we transition into an information-based/creative economy.  These two blogs are basically a rough draft for a book idea that I'm working out in real time.

Who is this blog I'm writing for?

Young creative people- To all the artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, action sports, and tech people in their teens and 20's, this will show you why you should not only do your creative work, but why you should put in a little extra effort to build your scene as well.

Older creative people- This will remind you of the scenes you've been a part of, and hopefully inspire you to find and nurture the scenes in your area now.

Business and civic leaders- Yes... I know, I know, you don't think your city is lame, but it can probably use improvements in the areas of creativity and job creation.  I want you folks to start looking at your combined creative scenes as an industry, and a place for potential job growth.  Many creative groups will never turn into businesses, but even so, your "creative ecosystem" can help attract talented people, including entrepreneurs and start-ups, to your city or region.

What is the basic idea of this blog?

Every town or city is filled with lots of people filled with creative ideas which could enhance that area.  In the Industrial Age, these people were told to shut up and keep their ideas to themselves.  But we're not in the Industrial Age anymore.  Tapping into the latent creativity of their people is one of the best things a town or city can do now.

Politicians aren't going to turn the economy around and create the millions of high paying jobs that are needed.  We, the average people, need to start doing that ourselves.  Finding an nurturing a region's creative scenes is absolutely critical in the 21st century economic world.

Small groups of people with common interests naturally come together and form scenes.  Many scenes will always stay a casual group of hobbyists.  But some scenes turn into businesses and, in rare cases, entire new industries.  These scenes will be some of the primary job creators of the 21st century.

Anyone, of any age, anywhere, can start a scene.



I'm approaching this not as another blog, but as an interactive book that I'm self-publishing, free to anyone, in blog form to start out.  My goal is to turn it into an e-book and real, live old-fashioned paperback book by the end of 2016.

This blog is about scenes.  That word has many connotations to different people.  If you're a parent, when you go to a restaurant, you don't want your kids to make a scene.  If your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse gets trashed at your office Christmas party, you don't want them to make a scene.  In this book, I'm referring to another type of scene.

If someone tells you their city has a good art scene or music scene, you know what they're talking about.  You have a frame of reference for what those scenes entail.  There must be some good local bands, playing original music, local clubs to play at, and probably a local newspaper or blog covering the scene.  But there are many kinds of creative scenes, from people building huge things out of Legos, to open source programmers, to You Tube comics, to creative "sports" like skateboarding, snowboarding or BMX stunts.  These scenes intertwine with each other forming scenes of scenes, which tend to attract even more creative scenes.

I've spent much of my adult life in a series of creative scenes, and I've met amazing people along the way.  In this book I'll share some of my personal stories.  But the real point of this is to educate people about what scenes can grow into.  At a time when millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries or replaced by robots, times are hard for millions of Americans.  Many small towns and cities have been devastated by these economic hits over the last four decades.  Using some recent figures, I estimated that at least 20.3 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed in 2016.  The number may be much higher.  Civic leaders across the country and around the globe are struggling to attract companies to create local jobs, preferably good-paying jobs.  But it's not working that well in many areas.

Meanwhile, entirely new industries have sprung up in the same 40 years, employing tens of thousands of people.  I'm not just talking about technology.  While tech in many forms has changed, and continues to change, our world, a lot of other creative scenes, and industries, are often overlooked.  They're not just overlooked by the business world at large, they're overlooked by towns and cities trying to get their citizens back to work.

Let's look at a few statistics to give you an idea of how different industries compare:

-The U.S. auto industry had a great year in 2015, selling 17.5 million cars and light trucks.  Sales are estimated at "about $570 billion." -WSJ.com, 1/5/2016

-Motorcycling, in all its facets in the U.S., was estimated to be a $42 billion annual business.  If you ad in the "ripple effects" of all the traveling, manufacturing, service, and tourism , plus wages for all of those, that number jumps to $102 billion... annually. -L.A. Times, 2/6/2013

-Total all time sales for all Harry Potter books, movies, DVD's comes to $24.8 billion.  Books sales make up $7.2 billion of that, and movies account for another $7.7 billion. - staticbrain.com

-Total U.S. video game sales in 2015 were $23.5 billion, up 5% from 2014. - fortune.com, 2/16/2016

-The U.S. gun industry has total U.S. sales of $13.5 billion a year, with a profit of $1.5 billion. -CNBC.com, 10/2/2015

-Amusement parks, including water parks and similar attractions, were "expected" to have total sales of $13.4 billion in 2013, a 2.8% increase from 2012. - Bloomberg

 -Total U.S. movie box office sales were over $11 billion in 2015.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens grossed $936 million in box office sales itself.- boxofficemojo.com  Yes, if you're keeping track at home, that means video games made more than double what movies did last year.

-The NFL brought in $7.24 billion in the 2014-15 season.  That's $226.4 million per team. -sbnation.com, 7/20/2015

-Bicycle sales in the U.S. totaled $6.2 billion in 2015, and there are 4,089 bike shops across the country and 99% of bikes are made in Taiwan or China. -statista.com

-The surf and skateboard industries topped $6 billion in annual sales in 2012. -San Diego Tribune, 6/10/2013.

-The NBA brought in combined league revenue of $4.8 billion in the 2013-14 season. -statista.com
 .
-The John Madden Football video game series brought in a total of over $4 billion as of 2013. -money.cnn.com, 9/5/2013

-Theater ticket sales on Broadway in NYC totaled $1.3 billion in 2015. -statista.com

-The Top Ten NASCAR teams brought in a combined revenue of $1 billion in 2015, and each team is worth an average of $148 million. -Forbes.com, 2/17/2016

-From 1999 to 2009, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games series earned $1 billion, making it one of the top video games of all time.  It's still selling today.  -Forbes.com, 9/30/2015

-Cirque du Soleil, the revolutionary French Canadian circus, had estimated annual revenue of $810 million in 2010.  They employ over 4,000 people from 40 countries and have a 338,000 square foot headquarters in Montreal. -wikipedia.org

-Personal drone sales in the world was estimated to be $552 million globally in 2014.  There are predictions it will grow to $1 billion annually by 2022. -grandviewresearch.com

-The U.S. snowboarding industry brought in over $406 million in sales in 2015. -statisticbrain.com

-As I write this (8/27/2016) the Pokemon Go game, released less than 8 weeks ago, has become an international phenomenon, and is earning an estimated $1,906, 840 a day right now. -thinkgaming.com

To paraphrase former president Richard Nixon, "a billion here, a billion there... it starts to add up after a while."

Yes, I realize these numbers are from several different years and time periods, and there's a lot of apples and oranges.  In the action sports world, for example, there are a lot of privately owned companies, and good stats are hard to come by.  So what's my point?

My point is that the entire Harry Potter industry came from the ideas of one woman who was "on the dole" when she first started writing it down. Video games are still thought of as "kids stuff" by most civic and local business leaders, many of which don't realize the industry is now twice as big as movies.  The surf, skate, snowboard, and BMX worlds are still seen as a bunch of losers in many parts of the country, including where I live now. The income Broadway theaters make totally surprised me when I looked it up.  Tony Hawk was a skinny skater kid whose biggest dream in the early 1980's was to get a photo in the skate magazines and maybe have a backyard ramp.  Cirque du Soleil started in 1984 when a bunch of street performers thought, "Hey... you think we could start a new kind of circus?"

All of these industries emerged from scenes of people, highly creative people.  My point is that you never know what a small group of creative people who form a scene will lead to.  Do you think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's parents wanted to hear about their crazy little machine when it was time to take the garbage out?  Probably not.  But they did pretty well for themselves later on.

If you're a local or regional civic or business leader reading this, ask yourself, is playing golf with guys from a large corporation the best way to bring new jobs and growth to your area?  Or should you take a closer look at the creative scenes you already have in your area, and see if helping them might be worthy of a bit of your time and effort.

If you're a creative person of any kind reading this, go ahead and tweet about how I'm only focused on money and business and not the true spirit of creative expression.  Then think about the other creative people in your area and how to create a scene, rather than just random people doing their work here and there.  The rest of this blog is for you.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out my blog about that process, Create Your Own Dang Job.

So... How's Life?

As a guy who does much less cool Sharpie art myself, I had to throw a Jessie Armand clip in here.  It's an old saying, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life."  It sure looks like Jessie enjoys his work.

"I wish this was a fun city." -Wake Forest University student in my taxi in 2012, talking about Winston-Salem, NC

So... how's life?  Isn't it great to wake up in the morning, excited about the day's events?  After a good night's sleep you look forward to the challenges and excitement of your job.  It hardly feels like work because you enjoy it so much.  Even better, you live in a vibrant, fun city with great art, music, and sports scenes.  Your city has lots of good, interesting, well-paying jobs available to move on to, should yours get boring.  Life is pretty dang good, isn't it?

How many sarcastic comments did you make to yourself while reading that last paragraph?  Let's face it, most people's lives don't even come close to what I just described.  After the incredibly slow recovery after The Great Recession of 2008, millions and millions of people are working hard just to scrape by.  Kids, church, sports, and other activities seem to take every extra minute and every extra dime they have.  Then when they do have a bit of free time, the go do the same thing they've done a thousand other times, whether it's go to the local bar, take the kids to the park, or maybe a canoeing trip down a local river.  For the vast majority of people, pure, unadulterated fun is pretty low on the "to do" list.

Yet there are people out there who really enjoy what they do.  They truly love the place they live.  It offers them places to be alone and places to be with family and friends.  There are new experiences to be had and new areas to explore.  There are people who truly love their town or city or region.  Are you one of those people?  Probably not.  It's likely you don't think your town or city is completely lame, like the title of this blog.  But you feel you're missing out by living where you do.  Sound familiar?

I grew up in a series of small towns in Ohio as a kid, then spent a year living in Carlsbad, New Mexico, then went to high school in Boise, Idaho.  Although I really liked all the outdoor activities in Boise, I still felt there was an exciting world out there that I was missing.  I can't count the number of kids I met growing up who dreamed of escaping their boring small towns.

It's not that small towns and cities are bad.  It's just that they often don't have the scenes people are really interested in.  A part of why I'm writing this is to let you know that it's possible to create cool and interesting scenes anywhere.  They may not be very big, but you can usually find one or two people with similar interests to get things started.  You may still move on to a bigger city at some point, but learning to build a good creative scene where you are can have all kinds of perks.  It may even turn into a career... the kind of career that finds you waking up excited about the day ahead.  It actually happens to some people.  I know firsthand, it has happened to me.

Yes, there are millions of boring jobs out there.  When you're young, you often have to work whatever job you can find to make a little money and gain experience.  But you don't have to work one of those boring jobs your whole life.  You can work towards something more rewarding.  You may even make your town or city a better place by building your own creative scene of some kind.  So... again... how's life?  Do you have any ideas bubbling up in your mind right now?

Thoughts on the college student I quoted from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  For a city of a little over 200,000, Winston has a really good, cohesive art scene, centered on Trade Street, downtown.  The music scene isn't bad either.  The bar, restaurant, and coffee shop scene has grown quite a bit over the last 20 years in the downtown area, with help from civic leaders.  What the student in my taxi thought was missing was different social scenes to explore.  After talking to her, we concluded that if there were late night buses to take college students to and from Winston to the other two cites nearby, Greensboro and Highpoint, it would allow the thousands of college students to meet people outside their city.  That's really not a very big thing to accomplish to make the city much more attractive to college students and young adults. 

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out my blog about this process, Create Your Own Dang Job.

A Funny Thing Happened On Break One Day...

Here's a montage of photos of Ron Wilkerson, pro freestyler, trick team owner, contest promoter, bike company owner, all around amazing dude.

It was a sunny fall day in a parking lot next to a medium sized industrial building in Torrance, California.  The year was 1986.  I was standing outside the small door with three of my co-workers, Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Craig "Gork" Barrette.  I can't remember what we were talking about.  I was probably snacking on a Coke and a blueberry muffin off the lunch truck.  The four of us were the editorial staff of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.

We heard a motorcycle coming up the street, then saw it turn into the parking lot and roll right up to us.  At the helm of road bike was Haro pro freestyler Ron Wilkerson.  That was our first surprise, because he lived in Leucadia, about an hour and a half south.  That's a long ride on Southern California's crazy freeways.  Even crazier, there was what appeared to be a blond, 13-year-old kid on the back of the motorcycle.  We looked at each other in amazement, first wondering what Ron was doing giving a ride to a junior high kid, and then wondering what kind of crazy fool would sit on the back of a motorcycle with Ron in control.  Ron was well known for being pretty crazy, on and off his bike.

He turned off the motorcycle and said, "Hey guys."  Then he pointed to the kid on the back, "This is Spike... Spike Jonze.  He jumped in the van and went on tour with us."  That was the first time the four of us met Spike, who was actually 17 at the time, but looked younger.  The name immediately rang a bell with Lew.  We went inside and Lew led us into the conference room where a bunch of photos were laid out.  FREESTYLIN' had a reader photo contest that we had just judged.  Spike sent in a black and white, 8" X 10" someone had taken of him.  He was doing an air, about four feet out, on a backyard ramp on his bike.  Spike had taken markers and hand-colored the photo, giving it a totally unique look.  He had won a prize for most original or something.  Spike was a BMXer/skater kid from the Rockville, Maryland area, the East Coast hot spot for BMX freestyle then.  We talked for a bit, then got back to work as Ron and Spike headed back South.

If you're not familiar with the name Spike Jonze, let me tell you about a few of the things he's done since.  After I got laid off from the magazines a couple months later, Spike was ultimately hired to fill the spot.  I didn't really click with those guys well, but Spike fit right in.  He became a well known photographer for the magazines.  Andy, Lew, Spike, and another later hire there, Jeff Tremaine, started a boy's lifestyle magazine after the BMX magazines shut down.  Spike went on to produce and direct some low-budget videos for World Skateboards.  Before long, he began directing music videos, including the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video and Weezer's "Buddy Holly," which he won an MTV award for.  He co-founded the skateboard company Girl.  He went on to direct the feature films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.  Yeah, somehow he directed Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep in his second feature film.

Then the World Industries crew was making these crazy home videos of goofy and dangerous stunts.  Spike and Jeff Tremaine morphed those into the Jackass TV series and then the Jackass movie series.  Spike was executive director, and appeared in the movies.  Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, the Jackass movies were huge.  What most people don't realize is that the main three Jackass movies are three of the most profitable movies in the history of film making.  If you look on mentalfloss.com at the list of the 20 most profitable movies of all time, you won't see Jackass.  But you should. With a return on investment of roughly 1280%, it should be #14 on the list, after Beauty and the Beast and before The King's Speech.  Really.  It's a well kept secret in Hollywood that the vast majority of movies actually lose money.  That's why they always tell the "box office gross" of each movie, but never whether it was actually profitable or not.  The three main Jackass movies together cost about $36.5 million to make, and then grossed $254, 270, 880.  Oh... and they were three of the funniest movies of all time.

Making those three crazy movies could easily brand a director for life as not being a legit drama director.  But Spike went on to direct the adaptation of the classic children's book, Where The Wild Things Are and later Her, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.  Spike won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Her, as well.

When average people think of a sport like BMX freestyle, or "bike stunts" as it's known today, they don't think of those crazy riders as being particularly creative.  But much like some other action sports, BMX freestyle and skateboarding require loads of creativity as well as physical skills.  Spike never seemed that much more creative that the rest of the guys in those sports, what seemed to set him apart was that he had the personality, and the balls to simply act on his ideas.  Most people have the ideas and let them drift away.

Now let's go back to that day in the magazine parking lot in 1986.  That little publishing company, Wizard Publications, was a small, but highly creative scene.  The owner, Bob Osborn was a fireman when he started the first magazine.  Seriously, a fireman.  His son, R.L. got into BMX in the 70's, and Bob, or "Oz" as we all knew him, started shooting photos of the races.  Then his daughter Windy started shooting photos as well.  Both were, and still are, great photographers.  What brought the five of us together in the parking lot that day was BMX bike riding.  Andy was an BMX racer, art student, and skateboarder in Wyoming.  He won a bike in a contest in BMX Action, and wrote a cool thank you note to Oz.  Oz liked that little note so much, that he called Andy up to be the editor when he started FREESTYLIN' magazine.

Gork made a name for himself with the Gork Trick Team in Sacramento, featuring the one-of-a-kind-rider John "Dizz" Hicks.  Gork drifted back to BMX racing, and answered the call when a new editor was needed at BMX Action.  Lew took some stationary someone had given him as a gift, and started writing to Andy at FREESTYLIN', talking about underground bands, freestyle, and skateboarding.  He was the obvious pick when Andy needed an assistant editor.

Ron Wilkerson started freestyling while living in San Francisco, then moved to Southern California when he got sponsored by Haro Bikes, named for Bob Haro, who invented the whole sport.

As for me, I started BMX racing and then freestyling while in high school in Boise, Idaho.  A year after graduating, my family moved to San Jose, California.  I started a Xerox zine about BMX freestyle, as a way to meet the great riders in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene, best known for pros like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and Hugo Gonzales.  My zine was ranked top in the U.S. by FREESTYLIN' in early '86.  When a job as editorial assistant opened up, I got the call.

We'd all been plucked from obscurity because of our interest in BMX and freestyle, and the freestyle scenes we became a part of.  Again, getting involved in a weird, but highly creative little sport brought us all together on that fateful day in Torrance, and led us all to many amazing adventures since.  Though not as amazing as Spike's adventures.  He very well might be an alien.


Here's a short, but great,  interview with the guy I met on break that day in 1986...

There are at least 20 million Americans that can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Scenes You've Heard Of

Possibly the most famous creative scene in the world, I don't think I have to name it.

I'm going to name some locations.  Pay attention to what your first thought is when you read each of these.  Hollywood, California.  Broadway in New York City.  New Orleans, Louisiana.  Nashville, Tennessee.  With each of those locations, something popped in your head.  You probably didn't picture the bus system in those cities, or the mini-marts, or the gas stations, which each city has plenty of.  Well, except Hollywood, they could use a few more gas stations.  For each of those locations, a specific thought emerged, and it's likely the same thought that thousands of other people think when they hear those locations.  You thought of something each of those locations is well known for.

Now let's try the same thing with some smaller cities and towns.  Moab, Utah.  Taos, New Mexico.  Whistler, British Columbia.  Greenville, North Carolina.  Daytona Beach, Florida.  Did you get a clear thought for each of those?  A lot of people did, but definitely not everyone.

Now, back to the first group.  When most people hear "Hollywood," they think of the movie industry, or perhaps TV production or music.  The funny thing is, most movie and TV production takes place over the hill in the San Fernando Valley now.  Broadway, of course, is the American capitol for live theater.  New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras, jazz music, and great restaurants, though some may think of Hurricane Katrina, since it impacted New Orleans so hard.  Nashville is the place for country music, and actually a lot of entire the music industry now.  In each of those cases, your first thought, most likely, was of a major creative scene there.  These are scenes that have grown over many decades, until they are known nationwide, maybe even around the world.  Most people don't think of the manufacturing in those places, or other major aspects of the city.  They think of creative scenes.  Each of those creative scenes is now an industry that employs a lot of people, as well as inspires other creative people all over.

Now, to the second list.  Each of these locations is known for a scene in some circles, maybe in yours.  Moab is a huge mountain bike and four wheel drive destination because of the amazing rock structures nearby.  Taos, New Mexico is now best known for its art scene.  Whistler, British Columbia is a huge ski and snowboard resort in the winter, and a big mountain biking spot in the summer.  In the BMX stunts world, Greenville, NC is known as Pro Town.  The late, great rider Dave Mirra is from there, as is the amazing Ryan Nyquist.  Several other top competitive pros went to live there in the 90's and 2000's, making it a hot spot for BMX.  Daytona Beach is best known for the huge NASCAR race every year, and as one of the first stock car racing locations decades ago.

So... if you went to a city far away from yours, and asked random people what your city is known for, what would they say?  In most cases, they may not have any idea.  Or your city may have a really negative image, like Detroit right now after the loss of so many manufacturing jobs.  Encouraging and nurturing the creative scenes in your city is a great way get it known to other people in other places.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process on my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

The Big Transition: What Everybody Should Know But Very Few Do

In this clip we see America's premiere futurist, the late Alvin Toffler.  Since 1970, Alvin and his wife Heidi have been looking forward to where our society is headed, and advising business leaders, politicians, and others on the challenges that lie ahead.  I really wish more people would have listened to them.

 Every day, I hear people locally and people on TV talking about how crazy the world seems today.  Part of this is that we have multiple 24 hour news channels, so we hear about tragedies from around the world.  That makes the world seem more chaotic.

But the other thing is that the world really is more chaotic than it was a generation ago, and there were people predicting this decades ago.  Besides being reasonably creative and an old school BMX and skateboard industry guy, I'm also a geek.  But I'm not a computer geek or math geek.  I guess I could best describe myself as a economic and sociology geek.  I've always wondered why people do the things they do, especially when they do stuff that doesn't make much sense.  This started because I was a shy, dorky kid who got picked on for several different reasons and bullied throughout my school years.  But over the years, I became more interested in the big picture of where society is going, and the dynamics of the economy.  Obviously, most of my friends weren't into these topics, so I just watched events happen and read lots of books on a variety of subjects.  As far back as late 1989, I first heard that there were crazy times ahead for all of us.

I read a book called The Great Depression of 1990 by economist Ravi Batra.  Yes, I know we didn't end up having a great depression then, but we did have a six year long, "double dip" recession, which is actually pretty close.  What really caught my attention in that book was Batra explaining a theory called The Law of Social Cycles by a thinker from India named P.R. Sarkar.  You can read the basic explanation of it on Wikipedia here.  The bottom line was that Batra applied the concept to the U.S., and said that we were near the end of the Acquisitor Age.  That's a period, often hundreds of years long, when the business people dominate society.  Near the end of that period, the business culture becomes highly corrupt, the working class people are getting screwed, and eventually they rise up in mass to protest.  The Laborers, as they are called in Sarkar's theory, are sick of the status quo, and civilization goes through an extended, chaotic period as the Laborers rise to power.  But they don't have the skills necessary to actually run society.  So either society collapses (bad option), or a group called The Warriors takes over eventually.  In either case, things get really nutso for decades.

That's where we are now.  We're all in the crazy transition period between one dominant group running society and another taking over.  The Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years ago was a sign of the Laborers rising up in protest.  The huge and surprising popularity of Donald Trump on the Right and Bernie Sanders on the Left in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is an even larger Laborer protest.  The fed up working class is reaching critical mass.  Things are changing and will continue to change for many years to come.

Another take on this "Big Transition," as I'm calling it, comes from the futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, whose ideas you can see in the clip above.  A big part of their thinking is the Third Wave idea.  The title idea of their 1980 book,  The Third Wave, is that our society is in a long, turbulent transition between the Industrial Age (the Second Wave) and an information-based society, the Third Wave.  The first wave was the Agricultural Revolution, for those of you wondering.  In any case, the Tofflers also see the U.S. in a long, turbulent transition period where virtually every aspect of society is being re-invented.  Basically, every business, social idea, and institution will see a revolution in how they operate, if they haven't already.
The bad news is that the world is crazy for a reason, and the craziness will not end any time soon.  The good news is that this Big Transition offers all kinds of opportunities for people, courageous and creative people in particular.  Whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, this Big Transition is happening.  Unfortunately, most of our politicians and traditional business leaders are trying to fix things with Industrial Age thinking.  It's just not going to work.  That's where we come in.  Lots of news ideas and solutions are needed.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Richard Florida's Creative Class and the 21st Century Brain Drain

Here's professor Richard Florida, then of Carnegie Mellon University, speaking in San Diego, California early in his promotion of his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class.

In 1987, the same year I moved to Huntington Beach, California, a young professor named Richard Florida took up a position at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  As many of you know, Pittsburgh was a major industrial city in the U.S. throughout the late 1800's and most of the 20th century.  It was the steel capitol of the country, as any football fan knows.  But, like so many other industrial cities, Pittsburgh took a huge hit as manufacturing jobs began to be lost to technology and outsourced to foreign countries in the 1970's and 1980's.  Professor Florida, specializing in urban studies and economic development, became part of the group trying to figure out how to get Pittsburgh's economy going again.

At that time, the standard, Industrial Age way of growing an economy was to give major corporations a huge pile of money in the form of tax incentives, infrastructure improvements and similar things.  Then the corporation would build a huge plant in your city.  That plant would create lots of good paying jobs and that money would ripple through the city, creating more jobs, and the economy would grow.  So that was the basic idea when professor Florida landed in the city.

As he states in the clip above, everything he thought he knew about economic development was challenged while he was on a sabbatical year in Boston.  Early search engine start-up Lycos spun off from Carnegie Mellon and everyone there thought it would take off and help form a cluster of high tech businesses which would help Pittsburgh become a vibrant part of the tech world.  That would jump start the city's lagging economy and bring Pittsburgh back to national prominence.

Then one morning, at his visiting professor's office in Boston, professor Florida opened up the newspaper and saw that Lycos, the pride of Pittsburgh's tech scene, was moving to Boston.  As he tells the story above, that started a long period of research about why Lycos would move out of Pittsburgh.  Then the answer eventually came, Lycos moved to a city that already had a huge pool of talented tech and creative people.  As he did the due diligence, Richard Florida found that tech companies were clustering in a handful of places.  The main ones were Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area), Boston, Seattle, Austin, Texas, the Raleigh Research Triangle in North Carolina, as well as New York City, Washington D.C. and a few other places.  The companies were moving to where the talented people were, not the other way around as they had throughout the Industrial Age.  Things had changed in a major way.  No one could understand why some of the most talented tech graduates coming out of Carnegie Mellon were moving to Austin.  Really?  "You can get a high paying job anywhere in the world and you're going to Austin?"  The economic development experts couldn't understand it.

The next area of research was to figure out why the talented people were going to this small group of cities and largely ignoring the rest of the country, and much of the world.  So Richard Florida and his grad students dove into the research.  He first published his findings in his revolutionary 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class.  The talk above explains his initial findings.

The basic themes of his findings were that tech people are highly creative people, and they wanted to move to places that had lots of tech jobs, but also places that already had great creative scenes, like art and music scenes.  These people wanted to move places that were tolerant of all kinds of people, places where the often weird, geeky tech people could be themselves.  In short, creative people wanted to be around other creative people.  So at the same time emerging technology was allowing people to work from anywhere, creative people were still clustering in a few areas.  

Another great finding of Richard Florida's research was that there has been a huge growth in the number of creative people working in the U.S., and the world at large.  He discovered that what he termed as the Creative Class has become the dominant economic driving force in the U.S. economy, and this group makes up about 35% of the total workforce.  I highly recommend listening to Richard Florida's lectures if you're interested in these ideas.  

He started speaking to promote his book at a time when cities all over were struggling economically.  Florida's Creative Class book took off and became really popular among civic leaders and creative leaders in communities around the world.  He's followed that original book with three others, The Flight of the Creative Class, Who's Your City?, and The Great Reset.  There's another book on the way, as well.  

In "Flight," he documented a brain drain, a migration happening in the U.S. and other countries.  The "best and brightest" tech workers and highly creative people coming out of college have been migrating largely to a handful of regions, primarily Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Southern California, New York City, and Washington D.C..  So not only are most of the towns and cities across the U.S. dealing with the loss of manufacturing jobs, but they're also losing many of the smartest and most talented tech people in their areas as well.  To put it mildly, much of the U.S. is atrophying while a few regions are thriving.

In The Great Reset, Florida describes the U.S. as being in a turbulent period, which will last decades, where our workforce  is resettling into the new normal of the Creative Age.  His findings in the last several years echo those of Ravi Batra and the Tofflers before him.  All three of these groups of thinkers came to similar ideas from different directions.  I don't see any of these theories as being perfect, but rather each describes a part of the whole scenario playing out.

While all this change is going on, most towns and cities are still trying to re-build their economies and put people back to work using Industrial Age ideas, and those ideas simply don't work well anymore.  Most average people aren't aware of these changes either.  Average, everyday working people are working hard to make ends meet, they don't have the interest or time to read all the books about these changes we all are going through.

To get millions of people back to work and to get economies going again, people everywhere need to learn about these changes going on, and they need to tap into the creativity of their own people to start solving the problems facing each town, city, or region.  In short, civic leaders need to start making the most of the creative scenes already in their areas, and then build from there.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process on my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Jobs and Work in the 21st Century

I picked this clip because job loss can lead to homelessness, and this is a part of the United States, the richest country on Earth.  I know.  I've been there.  If you live in a city anywhere, you don't have to go too far to find scenes like the ones you see in this video.

One key factor to why we have 3 million people homeless in the United States every year is the loss of high paying, middle class jobs.  But where did those jobs really go?  In this CNN Money article from earlier this year, we learn that 5 million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.  That doesn't include the millions lost in the previous two or three decades.  A study cited in the first paragraph of this Pew Research Center article states that as many as 47% of all American jobs are vulnerable to being replaced by "computerization."  Let that sink for a minute.  Then there's this 2015 article in The Atlantic, "A World Without Work," which looks at the financial and social decline of Youngstown, Ohio since the steel mill closed in 1977.  Youngstown, like most other towns, was thriving when I lived in Ohio as a little kid.  You can find one article after another about how technology, particularly robots, algorithms, and communication will make make tens of millions of jobs obsolete in the next few decades.  Using July 2016 numbers available online, I recently was able to estimate that at least 20.3 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed right now, in the summer of 2016.  The more I look at the future job market, the worse it seems to look.

But there are two signs to every coin.  In this short clip, Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe explains that there are lots of jobs available that require some training, but not a four year degree. This CNN Money article from September 2015 agrees, saying there are 5.8 million jobs available in the U.S., many of which are in "the trades," jobs that don't require a college degree, but do require specific training.  The term "skills gap" keeps appearing, meaning there are a lot of jobs but not enough people with the right skills to fill them.  But there aren't near enough high-paying jobs to rebuild the American middle class to what it once was.

The highly praised manufacturing jobs of years past now comprise less than 10% of the U.S. workforce.  The growth in jobs over the past 20 years has been in low wage service jobs, and high wage tech and what Richard Florida calls Creative Class jobs.  But there's not much in between, where the vast majority of U.S. employees once worked.  That's where a lot of the poverty and the homeless people in the clip above once were.  So how do we as a country get tens of millions of people working and making a decent living again?  Richard Florida believes a big part of the answer must be to make the service jobs better jobs.  I agree with that concept, but I don't think it will happen anywhere near soon enough.

So we're left with that question: how to we get tens of millions of Americans making a good living again?  I think we need to help millions of people create their own jobs. 

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Energy

Creative energy and the experience of being alive.  Brian Setzer Orchestra, "Jump, Jive, and Wail" live.

"People say what we're seeking is the meaning of life.  I don't think that's what we're really seeking.  I think what we're seeking is the experience of being alive."

-Joseph Cambell

We're all attracted to energy.  That's what it comes down to.  There is an energy in excitement, in creation, in pure, unadulterated glee.  In play.  In fun.  As human beings, we have had the most miraculous bit of magic bestowed upon us.  We have been given the ability to imagine something, to literally gather the energy of the universe together into a thought, a dream.  We can create an idea, or perhaps tap into an idea that's floating through the ether, and we can mold that vaporous, intangible thought into an idea.

Not only that, but we've been given permission by the universe itself to reach into our imagination and gently grasp that idea, and give it life in the physical world.  We, as human beings, are literally made of the energy of the universe itself, mixed with the dust of stars, atoms that have traveled for eons.  When we create something, anything, there is an energy in the process, an excitement.  Creativity.  That energy, that excitement and joy in the creative process draws other people who accept their desire to create.  These people cluster and group together, feeding off of and enhancing each other's energy.

This is why a handful of places are thriving today, and most of the country is stagnant.  We've come to a point in time where our economy, our physical wealth, is built upon our creative wealth.  The steel and concrete of our 350 year industrial age is literally crumbling.  The creative spark, dormant for so long in most of humanity, is flickering back to life.  A new generation of human beings is emerging.  They are not focused on the accumulation of material objects, they are focused on experience... the experience of being alive. 

-Steve Emig

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process at my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Your City Could Be Much More Interesting

Did you know that Cleveland, of all places, has become a destination for avid mountain bikers and BMXers?  About a decade ago, a guy named Ray who was a good carpenter and an avid mountain biker, rented part of an abandoned factory building and built some wooden mountain bike obstacles out of logs and lumber.  Now thousands ride Ray's MTB each year.  If I won the lottery, I'd do somehting like this with the money.  What would you create where you live?  Here's a few different scenes to give you some ideas.  Some of these clips are NSFW.

Sixth Street, Austin Texas

ComicCon San Diego 2016

Heavy Rebel Weekender 2016, Winston-Salem, NC

Van's Pool Party 2015, Orange, California

U.S. Open of Surfing, Huntington Beach, CA

Joyride 2014 Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

Break Yoself Graffiti & Art Show, El Paso Texas 

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process at my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

More Empty Storefronts Coming Soon

Legendary department store Macy's, the people who've put on the huge New York City Thanksgiving Day Parade for decades, plans to close 100 stores next year.  In a graphic in the story above, it lists other major department stores that will be closing soon, as well:

Major department stores closings coming soon:
Macy's--------100 stores
J.C. Penney---- 7 stores
Sears-----------10 stores
Kohl's----------18 stores
Ralph Lauren--50+ stores

That's at least 185 major department stores that are scheduled to be closed down in late 2016 or 2017.  Why does this affect average people?  First of all, hundreds, possibly thousands of people will lose their jobs directly because of the store closings.  Secondly, most, if not all, of these stores are "anchor stores" in malls and shopping centers.  These are the stores that help keep the malls and shopping centers in business.  If the local mall starts to die, that can lead to many other smaller shops moving or going out of business.  By and large, reports say that mall traffic is down across the country.

Highpoint, North Carolina, fifteen miles from where I currently live, has a mall that's about 1/3 to 1/2 empty.  On a recent Vice channel show called Abandoned, pro skater Rick McCrank visited a mall in Northeast Ohio that's been completely abandoned and left to rot.  He also visited another mall that's largely empty, but now houses many small churches in the storefronts that thousands of shoppers used to frequent.  

Why is this happening?  Amazon.  People's shopping habits are changing, with millennials leading the charge.  

What does this mean for you?  There will probably be more empty storefronts and business buildings where you live in 2017 and beyond.  This means retail real estate will be stagnant and drop in price.  This also means that there will be a lot of opportunities all over the country to rent out these retail spaces at a much lower price and put different kinds of businesses or operations there.  Got any ideas?

TBD 4

Post coming soon...

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process at my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.

Work With the Creative Minded Leaders in Your City

TBD 3

Do It Yourself

This is the trailer for the art documentary Beautiful Losers, which came out in 2008.  The starting sequence is skateboarder/artist Ed Templeton walking backwards on a typical sidewalk in Huntington Beach, California.  Ed was just one of the local skaters I used to see on a regular basis in H.B. in the late 80's and 90's.  I never even knew what his name was until he got on the cover of Thrasher in 1990.

"The crossover between skateboarding, graffiti, surfing... maybe punk...they were all do-it-yourself people."  -Margaret Kilgallen

TBD 2

TBD 1

Scenes I've Seen

Lots of great things have come out of Orange County, California.  But Social Distortion is my favorite.  Music scenes are such a crucial part of creative scenes.  Not only is it fun to go see live shows, especially in small venues, but music is one of the things that helps us all keep going when we're down.  I couldn't count the number of times I've listened to Social Distortion to raise my spirits during a tough time. 

Straight Outta Millersburg

Here's a big scene those of you who know me wouldn't expect.  No, not a classic punk rock club or skatepark.  This is a look at the Amish Country around Millersburg, Sugar Creek, and Berlin, Ohio.  During my fourth grade year, I actually went to school with some Amish kids, and we lived in a big farmhouse, which I loved.  For those who don't know, the Amish, and similar groups like Mennonites refuse to use today's technology in their every day lives.  Many travel around in their horse and buggies, like the one you see above.  They farm the land, and produce all kinds of home made foods, furniture, and other crafts.

In one of the videos I watched before picking this one, they said that the Ohio Amish Country now gets more visitors a year than Cedar Point, the biggest amusement park in Ohio.  That's over four million people a year that come to visit a big group of people who initially wanted to simple lifestyle away from today's modern world.  As I pointed out before, scenes have a way of just evolving, and often turn into something no one expected early on. 

I was last in this area of Amish Country in 2010, and I took a couple photos of horse and buggies that are now in an Amish store here in Kernersville, North Carolina. 

Blue Valley Trailer Park BMX Scene

I don't have any footage of Blue Valley Trailer Park or our scene in 1982-83.  But this ATV footage from outside Boise gives a good feel of what the "desert" outside Boise looked like.  Miles and miles of waste high sagebrush, a few Jeep trails, and not much else... for miles.

Boise BMX Freestyle Scene

Golden Gate Park BMX Freestyle Scene

Without question, the best scene I've ever scene is the BMX freestyle/skateboard scene in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in the mid-1980's.  This is the kind of vibe you want the scenes in your city to emulate, if possible.  In this clip, Curb Dog and Skway factory team rider Maurice Meyer shows the world his city, scene, and love for BMX freestyle.

AAA Electra Art Gallery

The AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery (& Museum) is so far underground, you need spelunking gear to find it.