Some of my futurist and economics posts from the last 4 years...

This video about automation an globalization replacing human jobs is now over 5 years old.  I was the taxi driver in this clip who lost his job to new technology, before Uber and Lyft.  I known what this feels like.  I also put this video in a blog post in June 2017.  I've been writing about the "crazy times ahead," for over 4 years now, trying to give a few people a heads up.  Now it's October 2021, is it crazy enough for you yet?  I hope not, it's going to get A LOT crazier.

Disclaimer

I've been writing about a major economic downturn, and crazy period of massive cultural, businessm and political change that I've seen coming, since at least mid-2017.  The Big Freakin' Transition is one of the main underlying causes, but not the only one.  Here are a bunch (but not all) of my blog posts from mid 2017 to late 2019, all pre-Covid era, on the economic downturn and massive period of change we are now two years into (with lots more to come).  This first one is my personal favorite blog post title:

Our economy is powered by unicorn farts- March 2019 (Here's the missing video)

Now starting with the beginning of my Steve Emig: The White Bear blog (not racist, it's a nickname from my BMX days) in June 2017:

Looking at a world beyond jobs- June 2017

Art is an industry... no, really, it is- July 2017

The jobs picture right now, in 2017- July 2017

A whole lot of facts about rural poverty in America- August 2017   Ideas for small towns and rural areas struggling right now- August 2017 You'll notice "TV/Film studios" on this list.  Right now in 2021, with the popularity of streaming, they TV/ movie industry can't build sound stages to shoot TV and movies fast enough, there are at least 6-7 major projects nationwide, most $100 million projects or more, across the country, right now.  Told ya so, people).

Work is changing... FAST- September 2017

Creative Scenes in today's economy- October 2017

What are Creative Scenes?- October 2017

Richard Florida and the New Urban Crisis- October 2017

A funny look at economic development- November 2017

The student debt ball and chain- November 2017

The FCC repeals Net neutrality, despite 22 million Americans petitioning for it- December 2017

A 4 billion dollar reason why your city's Innovation District needs a skate (and bike) park- December 2017

What will we do with all those empty buildings?- December 2017

Larry Kudlow's wishful thinking- January 2018 (This is the first post where I mentioned the stock market crash I saw coming- it took a bit longer than I thought to happen, but the Dow dropped 10,000+ points in 2020)

The Retail Apocalypse is expected to expand in 2018- January 2018

Davos 2018: A good look at the future- January 2018

States with the worst student loan debt- February 2018

Would you live in a town that Google built?- February 2018

Toys-R-Us: Another chain bites the dust in the Retail Apocalypse- March 2018

The Rise of the Warrior Sports- 20 years later- March 2018

Recession zine coming- March 2018

Great Recession II: Trump's Dump- has begun- April 2018- OK, I was a little ahead of the curve on this one.  Just for the record, the Dow peaked on January 26th, 2018, and was basically flat until October 2020, which is when The Fed began pumping billions into the Repo Market to prop up the banking system.  It is STILL being propped up by newly created money, and THAT'S WHAT it causing this crazy inflation (which will get  A LOT higher next year).

A video for businesses and civic leaders who hate the internet, social media, and obscure bloggers who get more page views than their websites- April 2018  Not surprisingly, looking back, a bunch of guys with baseball bats came out to the tent where I was living (in central NC) about two weeks later and threatened to "kick my tent in a teach me a lesson I should have learned a long time ago," if I didn't stop blogging.  My response was, "Hoke hey, it's a good day to die... go for it."  Not the response they expected.  After much deliberation on their part, they just left.  That blog, which had about 35,000 page views then, has over 128,000 now.  What can I say, The South is still The South.  Free Speech bitches.  It's in the Constitution.  

The cities that get most of the start-up business money (venture capital) in the U.S.- May 2018 

Retail Apocalypse- May 2018- Sears closing 72 more stores- May 2018

Mallpocalypse leads to a new kind of Mall Rats- June 2018

Why I think Creative Scenes are a key to our future- July 2018 

What I do IS work- August 2018

Why HUGE businesses (and towns and cities) die- September 2018

Crazy sounding, but actual financial news headlines today- October 2018

Are you ready for the economic collapse?  Gary Vaynerchuk is- October 2018

Spooky!  The stock market lost $2 trillion this month- October 2018

I told you to watch the FAANG stocks for signs of trouble- October-2018

Economic Rehab revisited- November 2018  My favorite quote in this little post is "... because former Fed Chair Janet Yellen said that they've figured out how to never have recessions again."  

This is the lead in to the recession I've been talking about- December 2018

My stock market predictions for 2019- December 2018  I was wrong.  I was over a year early, and didn't think The Fed would lower interest rates to near zero.  Even so, none of the markets dropped to these levels, because they had all gone up considerably before the 2020 crash.  Lowering interest rates how The Fed propped up stocks in mid to late 2019.  The they started throwing a ton of money (by 2019 standards, not 2021 standards) into the banking system because of the Repo Market crisis.  

Recession watch 2/6/2019- February 2019 

The Big Transition- How the Toffler's Third Wave is actually playing out in the real world- April 2019   Hmmmmm... this sounds kind of familiar.  Yep, I've been talking about this Big Transition idea for quite a while.

How I became interested in Creative Scenes- May 2019

The Unraveling- June 2019

We've just begun the prelude to The Great Recession of 2019- July 2019

The beginner's guide to the next great recession- August 2019

The economic collapse of our lifetimes will happen this month- October 2019  I wrote this post after looking up "Repo Markets."  The Repo Market had just seized about 10 days earlier, The Fed was saying they would have the mess taken care of in a few days, when I wrote this.  It is now two years and three weeks later.  Last night, 10/20/2021 The Fed loaned the banks $1.493 TRILLION in assets, overnight, in reverse repo operations.  The U.S. banking system had to borrow nearly $1,500,000,000,000 last night, to stay in business for a couple more days.  This is STILL happening every other night, on average.

The Phoenix Great Recession- October 2019- No one was ready to hear the phrase "great depression" then, so I used the word "recession."  At the time, October 2019, conventional wisdom was that there might be a minor recession in late 2020 or early 2021.  Maybe.  Guess what, they were wrong.

Welcome to Dystopia... the future is now

This is a still shot of the opening slate of the Blade Runner (1982) movie trailer.  I didn't notice this slate until the second time I watched the trailer.  

Disclaimer

I woke up one morning early, before dawn, about the middle of October, in 2019.  I woke up in a parking lot with a big idea in my head.  No, I hadn't been on a three week binder, or had some crazy adventure like in a bachelor party movie.  I'm homeless, and I just slept in a small parking lot every night.  Why am I homeless?  I'm not sure, I think the reason is classified, they won't even tell me.  

But all that aside, I have a geeky side that reads big, weird, books about the economy, future trends, and stuff like that.  I've been watching the financial markets for over 30 years, though I've never owned a share of stock, and only bought a bit of precious metals and a few futures options, in that time.  I've been interested in the future, and trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future, since I was a kid.  Over the last 35 years, I've come across three theories that I think can help me, and others, understand our crazy world today, and why so many things seem so chaotic on an unprecedented level.  I've mentioned those theories in the last couple of posts.  They are Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Third Wave concept, P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles, and Richard Florida's Creative Class concept.  

I've found those three big ideas, in particular, explain different aspects of our society, our world, over the last 30 years.  I've also run across other cycles, like the fact that nearly every 30-60-90 year mark we tend to have a recession, if not a depression or great depression, going back to colonial days.  My geeky, brainiac side was watching these long term, and ultra-long term cycles play out, watching the ups and downs of financial markets, real estate cycles, and other stuff like that.  I find the dynamics of all these different trends interacting fascinating.  Yes, that's weird, like I said, I'm a geek, and not a typical geek, but an economics futurist geek, which makes me a geek among geeks.

Meanwhile, I was struggling as a taxi driver in the early and mid-2000's, as that industry got hit by new technology.  First,  computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios, which allowed the taxi companies to put far more taxis on the road, killing the business for seasoned drivers.  Later, as we all know, Uber and Lyft wiped out most of what was left of the taxi, town car, limo, and airport ride industries.  

I became homeless while driving my taxi, living in it for years, and eventually wound up on the streets, unable to find a "real " job.  My family offered to fly me to North Carolina to stay for "a while," and I wound up stuck there for ten years, still unable to find a "real" job.  I finally started selling my unique Sharpie artwork online to make a little bit of money.  While I was in NC, I started blogging like crazy, mostly about my BMX freestyle days, and worked to learn the basics of online and social media marketing.  That helped me sell about 90 original pieces of art, and some prints, over the last 5 years.  

Eventually, an old friend from my BMX bike riding days paid my bus fare back to California, to help promote an online business he was starting.  That didn't work out as planned, and I went back to the streets, and kept blogging and working on new ideas to get back to making a living.  I know most of you don't give a damn about all of that, but that's the short version of how I was the guy waking up with a big idea, in a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley, in October 2019.  

At that time, I had been blogging about the economy, a major recession (likely depression) I saw coming in the near future, and other Big Picture issues around the continual trend of new technology replacing human jobs, and our transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age.  That, as you probably know by now, is what I call The Big Freakin' Transition, the title of this blog.  It was just "The Big Transition," for 2-3 years, but I needed a better title to start the blog, so I added "freakin'."  That's not the most creative title, but it works. 

I had all of these different ideas and theories I had learned of, studied, and pondered, combined with my own observations of markets and trends, and what I'd learned from a couple hundred other books, in my head.  It was all this big mish mash of disjointed ideas, all pointing towards a lot more change, and some pretty chaotic times in the future.  I had not tried to organize all these ideas at that point, in late 2019.  

That October morning, the big idea was for me to go back and watch the top 30 or 40 dystopian movie trailers, and TV show intros, from the 1960's through the 1990's.  Doing that, I would see how all those different writers and directors viewed "the future" from their time, and from their personal perspective.  I realized that in 2019, at 53 years old, I was living in "the future" of my childhood and high school self, the time when I was most affected by futuristic movies.  I decided I would begin by watching the trailers, then comparing the future each of them predicted with what 2019 was really like.  How close were they?  What did they get right and get wrong?  Did they miss key elements of today's world? What did they come up with that's not real yet?  From there, I would look at the future my lifetime of interest and study saw in the coming years, the 2020's, in particular.  

So I took this old laptop (which I'm still using, now about 5-6 years old), and began that work at a McDonald's and at the local library.  I also got a notebook just for this idea, and began writing my thoughts.  It was early November, 2019, when I watched this Blade Runner (1982) trailer, and saw the silent slate at the beginning.  That stopped me cold.  Blade Runner, now 39 years ago, was set in Los Angeles in November of 2019.  But some weird trick of fate, I began really getting going on this big series of ideas about the future, in Los Angeles County, in November of 2019.  I was literally living in the real future that the original Blade Runner movie tried to predict.  That's pretty crazy.  I grew up in Ohio, and lived in Boise, Idaho when that movie came out, both of which seemed a million miles from L.A. and Hollywood.  Yet somehow I ended up in L.A county, I was bouncing between The Valley and Hollywood, as I wrote out the rough ideas of this big, personal project.  I could take bus or train around, and compare the real Los Angeles 2019 with the Blade Runner version, day after day.  Obviously, there's a huge difference. 

As the ideas came together, and I realized I had something big to write, I thought about how to publish it.  With so much of other people's work involved in what I was talking about, a free blog, in the form of a book, seemed the way to go.  I built the basic blog with 20 chapters, so it could be read top to bottom, like a book, not backwards, as normal blogs work.  I figured I would have 9 or 10, maybe 11 chapters.  From late December 2019, to about April 2020, I wrote this 20 chapter book/blog thing, and called it Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now, Book 1.  Yeah, I not only filled up the 20 chapters, I thought a "book 2" might come along.  So far, no book 2.  To date, this is the most complete version of my thinking about the future, the theories that help me look forward, and at times predict major inflection points, and why I dubbed this decade The Tumultuous 2020's right before the decade even started.  

This blog is here for me to go deep into the more minute and detailed aspects of all the various parts of this Big Picture, The Big Freakin' Transition.  As you all know, a lot has happened in our world, and everyday life, since late 2019.  I DID expect a major economic downturn to happen, and I believe it will at least feel like a Great Depression, to most people, by the time we get to about 2027.  Technically, we are in an economic Depression (3 year contraction OR a 10% or more GDP drop- we had a 33% drop in GDP in Q2 2020), by one of the two traditional definitions.  

I DID NOT see a major global pandemic coming along to amplify the economic and social change.  But it did, and we are still dealing with Covid-19.  But that is just part of what's going on in this decade.  Even without Covid, this would have been one of the most chaotic decades ever, in my belief.  

So with that incredibly long intro, here are the links to my late 2019-early 2020 book/blog thing about The Future:

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1 

Chapter 1: We are the Mutants

Chapter 2: The Future the Media Shows You is Not the Future You Get

Chapter 3: Where the Hell is My Flying Car?

Chapter 4: Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?  

Chapter 5: Was There Anyone in the 20th Century Who Did Get "The Future" Right? 

Chapter 6: Why Care About the Future? 

Chapter 7: The Power of Creative Scenes (What I did instead of college) 

Chapter 8: How I Became and Amateur Futurist 

Chapter 9: The "Blade Runner Future" and the Future We Actually Got

Chapter 10: The Tofflers' Third Wave 

Chapter 11: Surf's Up Brah... The Long Term Waves of the U.S. Economy

Chapter 12: P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

Chapter 13:  The Big Transition- The Unplanned Revolution of Everything

Chapter 14: Disruption: Apocaplyse Past, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Soon 

Chapter 15:  Richard Florida and The Rise of the Creative Class 

Chapter 16: Blowing Bubbles 

Chapter 17: The Phoenix Great Depression 

Chapter 18: The Economic Collapse is Here... Now What? 

Chapter 19: Rebuilding America- Dream On... Time to Make Your Dreams Come True 

Chapter 20: Our Dystopia is CHANGE- It's Time to Mold a New Reality 

 That's Dystopia as I refer to it, the best collection of my thinking on the future, the 2020's in particular, and the things I saw ahead, back in 2020.  

Personally, I think the 2020's will be so crazy, that any person or business with a 5 year or 10 year plan, will simply have to throw it out the window.  There are so many fundamental things in our world that will change in this decade, many of which have layers more change built upon them, that I don't think anyone can accurately plan beyond this decade.  

I don't think the major changes will stop on January 1st 2030, I just think most of the fundamental changes will happen between now and then.  Afterwards will be more of fine tuning what has already happened, providing we, as a species, are still here.  

The dark side of all of this is that we are in a period where things can go totally off course, and it's possible we destroy our species before 2030 gets here.  We're sitting on thousands of nukes, unstable political climates, bio-weapons, and a lot of just plain ignorant fools in positions of power.  This is a decade that many things could go completely wrong.  Game over.  I DO NOT think that's how things will ultimately play out, but it's a remote possibility in times this turbulent.  Fortunately, humans have a way of coming together in the worst crises, and working for a common good in times of great change.  

Another thing that many people may notice is that I barely even touch on global warming, and today's other trendy environmental issues.  My reason for that is because this economic and social turmoil could take us all out long before environmental issues really get bad.  If humans aren't around in 2030, global warming isn't an issue.  I think we need to make it through these economic, social, work, business, and political issues before environmental issues become the main focus.  If environmental issues are your primary focus, great.  But we have a lot of other stuff, as a society, to get through first, the way I see it.  

Since there will be great change in business and social models, there's no reason not to design new things to work in a much more environmentally friendly way, with healthier production and manufacturing, and use.  But human "civilization," by it's nature, is destructive to the environment, that was the point of chapter 1 of Dystopia.

So for anyone who has stumbled across this blog, and wants to know where my weird ideas come from, this post, and the thinking and writing in Dystopia, is the best place to find out.  Thanks for reading.  Lots more to come... 

Steve Emig 10/13/2021

Would you want to know if a hurricane is coming?

This is some seriously crazy footage of Category 5 Hurricane Michael, which hit the Florida panhandle on October 10, 2018.  My question is, if you lived in this area when the hurricane was coming, would you want to know about it ahead of time?

Disclaimer

It sounds like a ridiculous question.  If a huge hurricane was heading towards your house, your town, would you want to be warned about it?  Or would you rather have the weatherperson say, "It's another lovely day, we might see a bit of rain and some wind this afternoon?"  You feel secure, and then a Cat 5 hurricane rolls in and levels your house.  Nearly everyone is going to say, "I want to hear about the hurricane before it gets to my house."  That's common sense.  Hurricanes can be so incredibly destructive, that an elaborate tracking system has been put in place to see them as they form, track them, and warn people where they are most likely to make landfall, so everyday people have a warning, a chance to take whatever action is needed.

If the storm is big enough, and it's coming close enough to where you live, a warning system gives you time to board up the windows, and either evacuate the area, or shelter in place somewhere that's safe and storm proof.  A warning system for a catastrophic storm that will affect thousands of people is a no-brainer.  Yes, people want to know about dangerous weather before it gets to them.  Then they can decide whether to board up, put sand bags around the house, go somewhere else during the storm, or stock up on food and water and hunker down.  

But for some reason, economic "storms," that affect tens of millions of people, are a different story.  Most people seem to not want to hear that there's a recession coming, or a depression.  Most people seem to want the "weatherman," meaning economists and financial forecasters, to tell them, "Oh, we're just in for a light shower and a little wind," and then get blindsided by what really happens. I know I'm a geek, and I think in longer times spans than most people.  But it baffles me that most people don't seem to want to hear a major economic crisis is coming before it happens.   

In today's hyper-connected, media saturated world, this seems to have gotten even worse.  I recently heard stock market media guy saying that Millennials, in particular, don't want to even hear negative reports on financial matters.  When a legit online analyst warned that a stock was getting  bit too high priced recently, and could be due for a correction, he said so.  Many of his followers got upset, "Why are you being so negative?" they asked.  He wasn't being negative, he was being responsible, and accurate, using his judgement and years of experience.  He was warning them things were getting too hot, and a correction could be coming.The influencer knew his followers could lose a big sum of money if the stock corrected, and the price went down dramatically.  He said he lost quite a few viewers of his YouTube channel, who seemed to go find another person who had a "positive" outlook on that stock.  A couple days later, the stock did go down, and many people lost a serious amount of money.  

This blog, and this whole idea, The Big Freakin' Transition, are my analysis of a major financial storm" I saw brewing, back in 2017-2018, and which first hit last year.  I see this blog as a continuing "financial weather forecast" of sorts, my thoughts on rough times ahead.  Yes, an economic recession or depression is a negative event, and lots of people lose lots of money, and often jobs, real estate, even vehicles and other personal property.  

But having a heads up before it happens, gives people time to see if they need to take action.  They may want to sell one investment, and buy others.  They may want to refinance a home, or sell that car that's really too expensive for their budget.  They may simply want to stock up on some extra food, toilet paper, and household items, in case there are supply shortages at some point.  Simply put, a heads up gives people time to react in some way to a potentially threatening event.

We have recessions every 4-7 years, on average, in the U.S..  But for some reason, people always seem to believe that the last recession was the last one ever.  "Those people in Washington D.C. have things figured out now, and there will never, ever, be another recession or depression," we hear the talking heads say.  When people in the business media are saying, "That will never happen again," is usually right before it happens again.  

Like I said in the first post, I've been an amateur futurist for most of my life, fascinated by trying to figure out where things in our world will head in the future.  In early adulthood, as I started reading business books, I got interested in economic trends, and social trends that affect economic trends.  That has continued to this day.  My basic thoughts are, if something bad it heading my way, like a potential recession or depression, I'd rather accept it's there, analyze it in the ways possible, and figure out how big of a threat, if any, it is likely to be.  Then I have some good information to decide what action makes the most sense.  We can't always do that, but we can a lot of the time.  

So that's the thinking behind this blog.  Yes, there are industries that don't want you to understand the financial world, and don't want you to think ahead.  But those industries, and the people in them, aren't going to pay you back the money you lose in a major downturn.  Also, major "negative" events, like recessions and depressions, also offer many of the biggest business, financial, and investing opportunities.

So this is the basic idea of this blog.  I've followed some ultra long term trends for years, and some long term trends, and several are reaching big inflection points in the 2020's.  That tells me that we will probably see a lot of trouble, a lot of change, and a lot of opportunity, in the 2020's.  So this is my long term "financial weather forecast" on the potential issues, good and bad, that I see heading our way.  If you have an ultra short term, gambler or day trader mentality, this isn't for you.  But if you are drawn to the longer term financial thinkers, like investors Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, or Ray Dalio, or Robert Kiyosaki, then you might find something worthwhile in this blog.  Much more to come.  thanks for reading.

Where is our human society headed? A futurist is a person who spends time trying to figure that out

Here is the late Alvin Toffler, the futurist I most identify with.  He died in 2016 at the age of 87, survived by his wife Heidi, partner in life, and partner in figuring out where the world was headed, decades ago.  From his first bestselling book, Future Shock, in 1970, through Revolutionary Wealth in 2007, the thinking of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in the series of books he wrote, and talks he gave, inspired and influenced tens of thousands of people around the world.  Leaders in China, notably, made Future Shock required reading for officials at one point. 

Disclaimer 

I believe their concept of "The Third Wave," first published in Alvin's 1980 book by that name, is still playing out, and can help us understand the chaotic world of the 2020's.  Like Alvin Toffler, I've spent most of my life, since childhood, thinking a lot about the future, and trying to figure out where society was headed.  I'll go into more detail in future posts, but the extension of the Third Wave concept, into today's world of 2021, and well into the future, is something I've been calling "The Big Transition."  Very simply put, I don't think we are in the Industrial Age anymore, but I don't think we're in the Information Age either.  I believe we are in an 80 to 90 year transition phase between the two, and I think we are the late part of that long transition period.  

With that idea as a Big Picture, the chaos of the 21st century world makes a lot more sense to me.  I've been able to see and sense a lot of trends coming, and I've made some financial market predictions, several of which seemed crazy when I made them, but later came true.  I've been writing on these subjects for over three years now, across several blogs.  But these posts from my brainiac side have been mixed in with posts about Old School BMX freestyle, the new, little sport I got seriously into while in high school, and which was the main theme of 20 years of my life.  And the reality is, most BMXers don't really give a damn about the future, although they've played more of a role in it than most "average" people.  More on that in future posts, as well. 

So this blog is going to focus on my thinking about where society is, why we are where we are, and where I think we are headed.  I've literally had my life and well being threatened over these ideas at times.  There are some people, more specifically, some political ideologies, that don't want ideas other then their own out in the world.  But I'm an idea guy, and I'll keep putting my ideas out there into the world as long as I'm able.  If you get something worthwhile from reading this blog, and my other work, that's awesome. If not, there are about 4.2 billion or more other web pages for you to choose from, and 129,864,880 books published, as well as other media.  I'm sure you can find something you like.

So that's the basic idea of this blog.  I knew I needed to find a slightly better name for my Big Picture concept than "The Big Transition."  There are a few other, completely unrelated things, that come up in a Google search of that phrase.  After thinking about it for a few minutes, "The Big Freakin' Transition" is what I came up with.  So that's the name of this blog.  Yeah, still not super creative, but it will do.  It's kind of a reminder to have fun with these posts, and don't take anything too seriously.  All of our best made plans get messed up, and the future always seems to surprise us sometimes, no matter how much we think about it.  Enjoy.