Category: Hippies

I have a good friend who is a foodie.  I actually have several friends who are foodies.  In the one case, she always asks where each element of the dinner I serve comes from.  It is usually 80% from Safeway, 10% Trader Joe's and 5% Costco.  I’m declasse and proud of it.

Safeway does many things that I consider brilliant, but one thing ranks as genius. (Safeway is owned by Cerberus, that also owns Vons and Albertsons.)

I remember the hippie days when the dump-bins around Safeway were the place to go for food.  Enormous amounts of food had to be thrown out everyday.

I remember the evolution of food banks in the late hippie era when much of the same food was donated to the food banks instead of being thrown out.

We have now entered a new era, for which Safeway deserves a genius award.  Safeway sells the food that used to be thrown out or given away back to us.

The first place I noticed this is the chicken chunks.  This is really the shredding of the roasted chickens that didn’t sell the day before.  It is delicious.  Stores that don’t sell all their roast chicken have plenty of shredded chicken the next day.  The same is true for fried chicken nuggets and turkey.

Then I noticed that there are many containers of fresh sliced fruit.  Usually perfectly ripe for immediate use.  This is all the fruit that was close to being thrown out.  It has been carefully sliced to get the ripe parts out and put into fresh fruit containers.  

Finally there are all the containers of mixed veggies that are in small chunks, often packaged with cheese or a dip.  Again, veggies that were ready to be thrown out, sold for perfectly ready luncheon snacks.

To me this ranks as a way to use food without throwing it away.  Selling it to us in a desirable form.   Simple living genius.

A writer I generally respect (George Gilder) wrote a Wall Street Journal article on getting the economy started again.  He got the fundamentals right.  You need an abundance of new business start-ups.  New businesses become big businesses.  A simple observation that many can not make.

The writer goes wrong when he makes policy recommendation for getting new business started.  He is a writer after all.  I have helped more start-ups in every field get started, than any person living or dead.  

Gilder focuses on the lack of loan funds in banking.  Absurd.  Banks don’t lend to small businesses and never have.  They only lend on 180% collateral.

I’ve never seen a business person starting who lacked funds.  Friends and family know who can start a business and they are 100% the source of start-up funds plus starvation and other forms of simple living deprivation.

If funding isn’t important, what is?

People only start a business in an environment with two qualities: (1) a network of friends who are optimistic about life.  The hippies were wildly optimistic about the world they were creating and they created more new businesses than any group in history.  (2) there must also be a milieu of cooperation.  Business survival depends on friends, community and support from everyone around.

So how do we create an optimistic environment with people who have a desire to help each other?

The answer to that question is the answer to business and economic growth.

The title of this blog should be ‘I apologize’. But it is hard to apologize for the end of a great boom that I helped cause.

I have caused several great changes in my society.  

* I and only I had the knowledge and was in the right position to have created the modern international credit card. The first international money.  

* I and only I had the math skills and was in the right place to raise bank savings account rates which a decade later brought down the savings and loan industry. Its gone now.

* The greatest force I helped unleash was the economic boom from 1984 to 2006.

I am ironically apologizing for the collapse of American economic growth from 2008 until today; as well as the global impact of the American failure to grow. I caused the great boom that preceded it.

It is very simple.  From 1974 onward I provided business advice to hundreds of small businesses starting out.  I wrote books, taught classes and travelled the country giving lectures.  In the San Francisco Bay Area I organized the Briarpatch which had over 1000 small businesses including some members in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis. This created the greatest boom in small businesses in history.  Here is a chart going back to 1981.

It was my approach to business that spread the enthusiasm for new business and generated a 90% success rate for small business survival (the opposite of the normal 10% survival after three years rate).  

This chart for the U.S. shows that it was my work and the apprentices that I trained that created the economic boom of 1984 to 2006. 

Small businesses create vast employment that is half the total of all jobs. Many of these small businesses ultimately grow to be the big businesses that provide the other half of the jobs.

The proof of my role in this business explosion is that I was invited to create small businesses in Sweden and I created 4,000 new businesses from 1978 to 1985.  My approach was copied in Germany a short time later. I replicated my success.

The chart comes from a paper by Steven J. Davis U. of Chicago. Data is from the U.S. Census.

Back in the wild hippie days, I helped Margo St. James found a hookers organization called Coyote.  I gave her an office and some foundation money to get started as well as abundant operational advice.  

For the first five years, until Margo was seduced by the anti-male feminists around her, Margo gave me full credit for my role in founding her organization.

This is by way of introducing a subject my readers will never have encountered anywhere else.  I got to meet many hookers (street working prostitutes) as well as call girls and others in the trade.  I met them in  unthreatening, none business social situations.

One old tale that was widely believed was that sex with many men would keep a woman from getting pregnant; that men’s sperm would fight each other’s.

Years later, when I was involved with the research done for the Institute for the Advance Study of Human Sexuality I learned that the old tale from hookers was probably right.

There are three kinds of human spermatozoa.   One aims just to impregnate the ovum.  One aims to attack spermatozoa from other males.  The third is intended to create a more acidic vaginal environment to thwart other males' sperm.

The ratio of these three types of sperm varies with the occasion; it depends on frequency of ejaculate, time of separation from the female and other situational contexts.

The other related sperm phenomenon that was passed on from old hooker tales and was confirmed with recent scientific methods is that sperm success is sometimes related to female orgasm.  In careful studies it has been found that after a female organism the cervex is likely to dilate and allow entrance to more sperm.  In some instances the uterus also displays a pulsating movement that moves the ejaculate toward the ovum.

If you are looking for the original research on these issues add the term ‘academic’ to your google search and be prepared for paywalls around every article.

Here is a good summary of the research.

A gay friend pointed out how many members of top Apple management were gay.  He is getting this from the local gay newspapers which also report a generally high proportion of gays in top management of many American companies.

My first reaction is that Apple was founded as a hippie company and retained its hippie roots. Steve Jobs was a hippie every day of his life.

That led to another thought: how much does the gay movement owe the hippies?

I can personally testify that gays were unnoticed as different and were openly welcomed by hippies who were not judgmental about sexual matters.  In the hippie business community that I organized (the Briarpatch Network) there were many businesses operated by gays.  We never noticed it.

I finally noticed it when Harvey Milk ran for San Francisco city supervisor and began going to all the hippie parties.  He got widespread support because hippies liked him.  Being gay was not of importance.

The role Glide Church played in the liberation of the gay community, with Ted McIvenna’s  Sex and Drug Forum, is unquestionable.  I also see a major role for the hippies, too.

The hippy world brought chaos to all American norms. The hippies searched the world for new perspectives and new ways of living.

In San Francisco they found a Zen priest, Shunryu Suzuki san, who had come to America particularly to teach Zen to the people whom he viewed as open and curious. By 1971, when I found his disciples, he had a solid organization alive and vital. In the middle of the 'scene'.

I spent many years learning about Zen and practicing its teachings. Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, had one main disciple, Dick Baker, who became a close friend of mine. Dick, was brilliant and exciting in an exciting milieu.

Zen seemed to offer a new approach for humans. Sitting motionlessly for hours, days and weeks, with an empty mind brought a clear view of the world without the on-going video that endlessly plays in our heads. The empty-mind-world was fascinating to me. The teachings that explained it as the 'original mind' or 'big mind' were a well developed 2,500 year old oral tradition. That rationale on top of the experience was also fascinating.

I remained associated with Zen for the next four decades. Unfortunately the hope and promise that Zen appeared to offer me, turned out to be imaginary. Zen is no different than the mainstream American religions that failed their followers, too. Zen, like Methodism, Lutheranism, Reform Judaism and the rest of the mainstream religions became ideological caucuses for the Left wing of the American Democrat Party.

This hit me painfully when a 40 year practicing Zen abbott (Norman Fischer) gave a favorable memorial pitch for a Jew-hating communist poet. The same view of the world he held when he started practicing Zen at age 18.

I realized that sitting on a pillow, quietly for any amount of time, hours, days, years, does not help anyone get through the period of age 20 to 25 when the brain becomes hardboiled and freezes all original thought capacity.

Too bad.

Zen fails. People who practice Zen will not come out appreciating the be-here-now world of commerce if they started out with the normative anti-commerce values.

After about six years of successfully creating a network of small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area, with over 600 members, at the time, I was invited to Sweden to help Sweden get new businesses started.

Sweden had a poor record for start-up businesses. It was common to build housing projects with several thousand housing units and not even one private laundromat or convenience food store.

I showed the Swedes how to get small businesses started. They paraded me around the country where I would talk to small business people and potential start-ups. The first place I talked was to a group of about 30 in Filipstad.

After talking for an hour to an audience that only pretended to know English, I had the group take a break and stand up. Then I had them go around the room and announce one thing their business needed. They each had one thing that they needed badly: 'Some one with a truck who goes to Stockholm once a week', ' some one with a commercial grade wood plane', ' a good bookkeeper who can work part time'….etc.

What happened then?

Chaos ensued. They all went to talk to each other about how they could help. The din of noise was all in Swedish. The group finally broke up for lunch.

The lesson for small business start-ups? Every business needs a little help and every business can help another business. Cooperation is the key ingredient in helping businesses get started and surviving.

Within four years Sweden had its first burst of new small businesses, 4,000.

The Swedes taught the Germans. The Germans brought the Phillips (me) small business start-up approach back to the U.S. with funds from the German Marshal Plan. A small circle.

This graph says two things to me.:

One advances the hypothesis that I have had for a long time. The second is an explanation for the current long economic doldrums.

In 1974 I started an organization with several other people called the Briarpatch Network. This was a network of hundreds of small hippie startups in a nearly infinite range of businesses. It began as people who came to meet me in a wharf office I had set up shortly after publishing the Seven Laws of Money. Hippies came to me because they knew that I understood finance and that I was sympathetic to their interests. Along with the first coordinator and many subsequent coordinators of the Briarpatch, we built an organization that rapidly reached 600 members and remained at about that size for the next ten years. I would say that our membership was well over 1000 small businesses. Over that period of time there were 5000 to 6000 employees.

It has been my hypothesis that this explosion of small businesses was the source of the very rapid growth of America from the late 1980s until the early 2000's. The hippies learned from me and from each other that the best way to start a business is to cooperate with everyone else in that business and nearby businesses. Cooperation was a very hippie value that gave us nearly 90% success rate for business startups over a five year period.  That compared to a 10% success rate among non-hippies businesses.

I know that the Briarpatch methodology of cooperation among start-ups worked because I duplicated the pattern in Sweden starting in 1980.

I think this chart in some ways is a reflection of the hippie interest in starting businesses and the Briarpatch success model that was widely imitated.

The second issue is that the hippies maintained a very optimistic view of what they could do in the world and what their impact on the future would be. This led them to start businesses and led them to start innovative, imaginative businesses.

It is my contention that this optimism is necessary for business startups to be abundant and that this business optimism has been on the wane for the past 15 or so years. Partly due to politics, meaning the Democratic Party, and certainly due to local hostility to commerce evident in the mistreatment of Uber and AirB&B as well as the horrible enactment of a rising minimum wage.

If my hypothesis is correct we will not see rapid economic growth again in the U.S. until we see an optimistic pro-business, pro-commerce climate.  The kind one finds in Israel.