Mark Cuban talks about a future with millions less jobs

Billionaire Mark Cuban is best known to most people as the loud talking owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the sharks on the Shark Tank TV show.  He's a serial entrepreneur who got into high tech early, started MicroSolutions at age 24, sold it, and later made it big with Broadcast.com.  He's been working in and investing in high tech his whole life.  He's also well known now for vehemently disagreeing with President Trump on most everything, which he addresses in this clip.  Whether you like Mark Cuban or not, he understands tech.

Here are some of the highlights of this interview:

-We're going to have a lot of displaced workers in coming years.
-We'll see more automation in the next 5-10 years than in the last 30.
-We're seeing the "automation of automation."
-"Either software works for you or you work for software... then you're gone."
-The nature of work is changing.
-You have to realize more people will be out of work (because of automation).
- There may be more demand for liberal arts majors than computer coding in ten years.
-He thinks we'll soon need major growth in AmeriCorps (or a similar type program), to put the displaced people to work, maybe MILLIONS of them.
-You have to deal with the issues (and the Trump Administration isn't).

I started really looking into the jobs issue on the macro scale after I couldn't find work here in North Carolina.  I'm a fairly smart, hard working guy, but I couldn't get ANY job.  As a long time Californian, I thought, "OK, I'll just create my own job."  I've known dozens and dozens of people who have started their own businesses, many of whom have become incredibly successful.  But the mentality towards work here in central North Carolina is just, "Get a job."   That 1970's mentality from back before all the factories closed down still prevails.  The same seems to be true in much or small town and rural America.  The established high tech companies and most of the start-ups are clustered in a few regions.  The technology being created has replaced millions of jobs and continues to replace human jobs in large numbers across the country.  This issue is not being worked on to any great degree by the government or anyone else.  Mark Cuban, with his tech background, sees this happening, as do many tech leaders.  But very few other people are thinking about it. 

In this blog, I'm going to dive headfirst into the issue of technology replacing jobs, and how we can find work, preferably meaningful work, for the millions of people who will lose their jobs as we move forward.  The start is to look at the people who are thinking about this issue, like Mark Cuban, and see what they're thinking, and sharing this info with you who are reading this. 

Old school archery reborn

This is just plain badass.  It's also a great example of how someone with an interest in history brought back amazing skills form the past.  With a ton of practice.  Will this lead to a new school of archery and perhaps even new sports?  Who knows.  But by studying the past, Lars Andersen has become a pioneer in the present.  You never know where that will lead.  Enough babbling... just watch.

Richard Florida on the issue of rising economic inequality

In 2002, Professor Richard Florida literally wrote the book on how and why high tech businesses clustered in certain areas, and completely ignored others.  The old, Industrial Age businesses went to cities that bribed them with tax incentives and infrastructure improvements.  When one of those companies built a factory in a city, the workers followed.  Richard Florida found that the high tech industry did just the opposite.  Those businesses moved to where the talented workers were.  Those workers were the Yuppie hordes that moved to cities with good art and music scenes, tolerant cultures, and lots of fun stuff going on. 

That 2002 book by Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, got towns and cities all over the world trying to create a better environment to attract those high tech and similar workers, what he called "The Creative Class."

 It happened right here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I'm living now.  The old Reynold's tobacco complex that built the economy of this city has been turned into a biotech research and business incubator.  The old warehouses that once held tobacco and textile mills are now Yuppie apartments.  The downtown area  that was largely empty 20 years ago is now bustling and being rebuilt.  Winston-Salem is one of many cities that have amped up their downtowns in the 15 years since Florida's seminal book. 

But the high tech success comes at a cost, and the cost is turning out to be much higher than Richard Florida originally anticipated.  When the high tech Yuppies deem a place cool and start moving in to work in new, high paying jobs, several things happen.  They drive up real estate prices, which make it much harder for the lower paid service workers to survive.  They wind up gentrifying old neighborhoods, often driving out some of the quirky and artsy businesses that made the place cool in the first place.  As a city focuses on rebuilding their downtown to attract these Creative Class workers and hopefully attract high tech start-ups, money is diverted from other parts of the city, and rural areas.  This is the New Urban Crisis, the title of Florida's new book. 

Decades ago, the "white flight" to the suburbs left many downtown areas poor and decaying.  Urban decay became a huge problem, and ultimately led to all kinds of crime, rampant drug problems, and riots.  In today's world, the downtown areas have been reclaimed by the Creative Class and other high paid workers, while suburbs, small towns, and rural areas now have major drug epidemics, more violent crime, poverty, and millions of poor people who are sick of their lowering standard of living. This rising unease of the suburban and rural poor fuels the populist movements on both the Left and the Right, and much of the polarization in our country.  Now Florida is setting his sights on how to combat this and raise the standard of living for everyone.

Amazon buying Whole Foods

If you ever watch CNBC business news, you know that Jim Cramer (the guy on the right) is very rarely speechless.  Cramer's a guy that millions of people look to for insight into the stock market.  When he says something is a game changer, THAT'S BIG. 

There's a pretty good chance you've heard of the "Retail Apocalypse" by now.  It's occasionally in the network news but all over the web.  The last time I tallied it up, over 4,200 retail stores in the U.S. have either just closed, or are scheduled to close.  One big reason why is that Amazon, and other online retail companies, have changed the shopping game so much that old school department stores and mall stores just can't compete anymore.  There's been talk for quite a while that Amazon wanted to get into the grocery business in a big way.  Now they're doing it in a very big way.  That means all our favorite old grocery store chains will have to really step it up as Amazon changes the game in yet another industry.

So why am I putting this in a blog where the last posts were about BMX and motocross?  Because most of you either didn't notice this huge sale happened today, or couldn't care less.  The people across the country who couldn't care less are the people who aren't creating good paying jobs in today's world.  This is one little part of a huge issue I'll be discussing in this blog.  In the next post I'll go into some of the big trends most people haven't paid much attention to in the last 20 years or so.  Those trends (and others) have completely changed our world, and tens of millions of people are being left behind financially.  This is a huge issue we need to work on in the U.S..  Someone needs to create millions of good jobs.  I think we, as individuals, are the only ones who can actually make it happen.  That's the core reason for this blog.

The Birth of BMX Racing

In this trailer for Mark Eaton's 2005 documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray, we see early BMX riders looking back on the start of this sport.  In 1970, a young motocross racer named Scot Breithaupt started holding motocross-style races for local kids riding bicycles in Long Beach, California.  Thirty miles north, and handful of other people started doing the same thing.  Bicycle Motocross racing, or BMX, was born.  Like surfing and motocross before it, BMX started with a small group of young people, a scene, who wanted to have fun and imitate motocross racers.  BMX played a huge role in my life, it was the activity/sport that pulled me away from traditional team sports that I hated.  It did the same thing for thousands of other kids, mostly boys, but some girls, across the U.S. and the world in the 1970's and 1980's.  BMX evolved and morphed into many different genre's, and heavily influenced mountain biking and freestyle motocross in their early days.  Like surfing and motocross, BMX turned into a series of activities, sports, industries, and many, many businesses.  It continues to evolve to this day. 

European Motorcycle Scrambling in the 1950's

The first motorcycles made their appearance in the late 1800's, and people probably started racing them almost immediately.  But it was 1950's "scrambling" races in Europe that sparked similar riding events in the U.S., and eventually the birth of motocross.  By the late 60's, races were huge events in California and other places, and the sport grew through the 1970's, and spawned Supercross, the stadium-friendly version of motocross.  Like all the action sports, motocross evolved and morphed into many different variations and types of racing and trick riding.  Along with surfing, motocross was the root sport of nearly all action sports. 

The scenes of off road riders in Europe in the 1950's, much like the Waikiki surfers 50 years earlier, started something that continues to ripple through society today.  Again, a relatively small scene of people started something that turned into several different activities, sports, industries, and countless numbers of businesses in the decades since. 

Duke Kahanmoku and the birth of Modern Surfing

This 1931 clip of Hawaiian surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku and actor Douglas Fairbanks happened more than 25 years after surfing was brought back in Waikiki. 

Shortly after the year 1900, about the same time airplanes were being invented, a group of young guys in Waikiki, Hawaii decided to bring back the ancient sport of the Hawaiian kings.  George Freeth, Duke Kahanmoku, and some others built 14 foot long, hundred pound boards, and started surfing.  They were all accomplished swimmers as well.  In 1907, novelist and travel writer Jack London, best known for books like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, visited Hawaii.  He was amazed by the locals that seemed to be "walking on water" on big boards.  He wrote an article about the newly reborn sport of surfing for a women's magazine back in the United States.  One thing led to another, and both Freeth and Duke traveled to the U.S. to demonstrate their swimming, diving, and surfing skills.  George Freeth died in the great influenza outbreak of 1918. 

Duke became an Olympic swimming champion, appeared in many movies, and spread the sport of surfing to California, Australia and elsewhere.  He earned the title of "Father of Modern Surfing" along the way.  Most of today's action sports owe part of their history to surfing, even if they don't use boards.  The little scene in Waikiki, 110 years ago, brought surfing back into the world, and influenced action sports, music, movies, and clothing around the world in the century since.

The Potential of Little Creative Scenes

This is a local TV segment from the San Francisco Bay Area that aired in 1986.  I'm the dork running after his bike at 5:07 in this clip.  This was shot on a Sunday afternoon at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  Back when BMX freestyle was a new thing, little freestyle scenes started popping up all over the country.  But the Golden Gate Park scene was the best by far.  When I say, "make a scene," this is what I'm talking about.  I'm not talking about acting like an idiot or yelling at the McDonald's clerk because your fries are cold.  Not THAT kind of scene. 

The group of bike riders above is a creative scene.  We traveled from all over the Bay Area every weekend to  hang out, ride, show off new tricks, and stoke the crowds that gathered to watch us.  The thing about creative scenes is that the people in a scene feed off each other, push each other, and usually improve faster than one person alone would.  Creative scenes, like ours above, attract people who have an urge to explore the boundaries and find something new.  In our case back then, we were seeing how many different things we could learn to do on a BMX-style bike.  It was a new thing then.  We were coming up with tricks no one had ever done before at times.  And we just had a lot of fun. 

But that little Golden Gate Park BMX freestyle scene turned into much more.  Maurice Meyer, the focus of this clip, was one of six pro freestylers that were part of the scene.  Each of them influenced the emerging sport of freestyle in a lasting way.  Months before, I started a zine.  A zine is a little, hand-made, photocopied, booklet with interviews and photos of our scene.  By the time this segment aired on TV, I had taken a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  The guy talking at 6:03 is Karl Rothe, he went on to be the editor of BMX Plus magazine for several years.  The guy in the yellow shirt at 4:43 is Marc McKee, and he went on to completely revolutionize the world of skateboard graphics in the 90's while working at World Industries.

At the time this was shot, none of us had any idea those things were going to happen.  We just wanted to progress as riders and and have fun.  But we all had talents in other areas that bloomed later, in part because of our interest in BMX freestyle.  That's a big lesson about creative scenes.  You never know who those kids trying creative stuff will turn out to be in the future.  Keep that in mind.