I realized how important study, practice and dedication was at an early stage in my life.
I have 2 older brothers.
The one who really showed me focus was Anthony. He would be in our garage in South Central Los Angeles for eight hours a day practicing, practicing, practicing. For his line of work and business, his skills had to be the optimum of perfection. It was a matter of life and death.
It was so long ago that I don’t really remember the exact location, but I would ride with Anthony to this run down looking two-story building and wait for him to come out. I never went inside with him. Don’t remember if he ever asked me to or not. I just know, I always sat in the car and waited.
As I waited, my mind would try to imaginize the process that was used to make the product that Anthony would go to this place to procure.
Only took a few minutes. In and out, each time we went there. I am sure he had to order in advance.
We would drive back across town to the area where we lived and go to the garage.
Small brown paper bag. The time I remember most was that the bag was carrying from 5-7, small green dice with little white dots. One dice had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 dots on each side. The second one had the same. The third dice had 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5. The fourth had another variation that created a mathematical advantage for winning. The 5th, an advantage for losing. The last two were misshapen and filed down so much that they would almost land on one side automatically.
This may not be the exact numbers scheme. But, you get the idea.
He called them “T” dice. I don’t know what the T stood for, but maybe it was for tapper? This was around 1981 and my older brothers wore Roland shirts and “Tee” pants. Often with a shampoo, press and curl or afro or perm.
I was at the perfect age to document what was going on. And, still a bit too young to really indulge. That is what saved me.
Although, I would watch and practice with Anthony for hours, stitching and palming those dice, his stories always prevented me from really becoming his apprentice. Anthony was not a magician. However, he was practicing magic. Cheating in gambling may or may not have been common. But it was most certainly very common that a gunfight would breakout if someone got caught with 3 dice in a basic L.A. crap game.
I got pretty good at palming and switching dice for a while. But I never wanted to take my show on the road. I looked up to and admired my brother, Anthony. But even at a young age, I realized that I wasn’t him.
I was glad that he was him. For sure.
Before we move on in this little story, I remember being sweated by an older boy in jr. high school. It wasn’t really a confrontation that I felt comfortable handling myself, tho.
All through elementary school, I would fight for myself. I lost my earliest scraps at Hyde Park elementary school. Got flipped by one big dude. Beat up by the school bully. Then, I developed an evil streak that would wait until my opponent went to go to the water fountain and get some water, and I would walk up behind him and ram his face into that metal drinking faucet so hard that the porcelain would become horror-story red from all of the blood coming out of his face.
I didn’t get beat up anymore. I was beating up the bullies myself. It got to a point that I liked to fight.
But this day in Palms, Jr. High school, it was different.
All I remember is that there was some guy in the school messing with me. But he was not just talking smack. He was bangin’ on me. That is why, for some reason, this was a different KIND of fight situation.
My first thought was to call Anthony.
I called him from a payphone at the school and told him what was going on. Anthony had a Brougham in 1983. White. Green phantom top. He also had a phone in his car.
He got to Palms Jr. High school campus within about 30 minutes. He brought a friend.
His friend was a really big dude. Not buff or muscular. Just big. He came on campus with Anthony. He was wearing a trench coat.
He opened his trench coat and had a dirty looking sawed off shot gun in one hand.
This is on a jr. high school campus!
Needless to say, I showed Anthony and his friend who the nigga was and I had never saw that boy at school ever again after that day.
Anthony and his friend used to rob dope dealers.
It was that part of his life that brought me into the idea for Thug Coding®.
The hood and street life is very dangerous and infinitely meaningless and aimlessly destructive. When I saw how some people idolized and chased money, and would do absolutely spineless, heartless and intensely violent things to get it, I realized that I had to have it!
I didn’t want to murder people for it. I didn’t want to poison others with drugs for it. I didn’t want to steal and rob or lie and cheat for it. So, I looked for work. Honest work.
Trying various ideas built character. It taught me how to sell. It taught me how to be independent and entrepreneurial. I even tested out of high school at 16 in my junior year to work full time at a corporate retail job. Made a lot of money there and learned the benefits of what customer service really meant. I was making so much money at that time that I had a brand new car on rims with a monster sound system. Gold link chains and diamond rings. Gucci watch and $140 linen pants.
Then, something unexpended happened that changed my life. I was devastated.
I felt out of control and distanced myself from everything. Felt like I lost my mind and my soul.
I floated and drifted around in L.A. for many years. I was doing music and that was the only thing that kept me on Earth. But, I really didn’t even enjoy that. I was empty.
I had done some music with my crew, called The ATF (Absolute Truth Foundation). We became one of the more popular and artistically viable underground groups during the time, and I stood out as one of the best emcees to ever touch a microphone. I had made a few demos. But I was empty inside because of the loss I had experienced when I was 18.
One night, I got kicked out of the popular night club in Hollywood, called Gazzarri's.
All of my friends were still in the club, while I was outside kicking cans on Sunset Blvd. It is strange, to say the least, how things happen. One thing leads to another that appears to be unrelated. But, they are totally connected 100%. Later, I may write a book about that supernatural occurrence. Metaphysical.
There was a couple of white guys in a jeep, parked by the gas station while I was outside of the club. One of them asked me…”Hey, man. Can you rap?”
I said, “I am one of the best.”
To make a long story short, the next day I was that their studio in Holmby Hills working on a rap project. Like I mentioned before, a lot of people liked my music. This included the guys in the jeep. We worked on a project that they were scouting for a rapper to do, but after that project, they were so impressed with my rap and rhyme skills, that they wanted to make my album. I specifically said my rap skills, because, although I had also produced the songs on my demo, they wanted their own in-house production team to make the music for my project.
They totally fucked my songs up!
After recording the project and months of negotiation with the group with the help of my high powered, Century City attorney, they finally realized that they did not know how to market the project. What they had created was not rap. Was not hip-hop. Was not pop. They had created a mess. Honestly, they should have let me produce the music with the original hardcore, hip-hop boom slap style that I had been creating over the years.
The project was never really released. But, the company became very powerful because of the connections they made shopping my album. They eventually bought the company that my attorney worked for and have a strong position in the area of music soundtrack and movie placement.
A couple of years after the album situation, I got a call from one of the main producers of the that company. There was an opportunity for an NBC Saturday morning t.v. show theme song to be done and submitted to Peter Engle’s Production.
Would I be interested in writing and performing it?
A theme song for an NBC Saturday morning teen show by the maker of Saved by the Bell?!?!
Next thing I realized, I was on my way to Holmby Hills with a .99 notebook and an ink pen.
I heard the music and wrote the theme song in about 30 minutes.
“C-I-T-Y, you should see why, these guys, the neat guys, smart and streetwise”…
It was a wrap! The song was sent to NBC and in a few days, we got the call that the loved the theme song. There had to be one change made. Some of the lyrics were too collegiate, I was told. Dumb it down a little bit.
So, the theme song went from, “Notebooks and cleats, those, looks in street clothes,” to, “City Guys, pose, looks in street clothes.”
I talked to Peter Engle on the phone, personally. He said, “This isn’t a good theme song. This is a GREAT theme song.” I am still getting paid residuals on my work.
This was September 6, 1997, when the show started.
The way it worked with the royalties and residuals from the show was that I no longer had to.
I was getting some good bread from that show. I used the royalties and residuals to live a normal life. But I used my time to study Title 26 United States Code.
THE INTERNAL REVENUE CODE.
I walked (mostly) from the bottom of Stocker, up into the Dons, from 1998 until about 2003. Baldwin Hills. Almost everyday at one point, I would be there studying the "code"...and other things about business and law and trusts.
At the top of the world. Looking east on the top of Don Felipe Dr., you could see the entire Los Angeles laid out. The fine sections of Beverly Hills. The Ghettos. Downtown L.A.
The view from where I was made me always want to duplicate that type of luxury and lavish environment. But, it was the code that brings me to your eyes today.
From my music and writing skills, I was allowed to study income tax law for 5 years without needing to have a "regular" job.
But it was never really thought of as "tax law"...as much as it was the code. The tax code.
I would buy paperback copies of Title 26 from RIA/Thompson publishers wholesale back then and sell them to my students for about $75.
I was in Laguna Beach teaching tax seminars and had a good amount of clients that I would help at the IRS building with meetings and audits and other situations.
I learned a lot and had real affinity for the code. Even started on the other side of the pendulum swing that the "code" was not law.
The U.S. Constitution allows for a certain, specific, authorized legislative process to occur in order for laws to be enacted. Not codes. I will go into details about that at another time.
So, I found myself ...in a situation where everything seemed to be falling apart. Something unexpended happened that changed my life. I was devastated. Again.
It seemed like many years had passed without any results. Either good or bad. Aimless.
Have you ever felt like nothing mattered? I have always had high self worth and esteem. But the reality was that my life was unfulfilled because I had not created anything and put that thing into motion.
Sure, I had avoided the rapacious snares of ghetto fabulous, freak-a-holic hedonism. Written and performed one of modern society's most popular television theme songs. Learned the inner working of the world's most complex taxation systems. Hell, I even found one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, that was thought to be lost or destroyed, still standing right in the thick jungles on the outskirts of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
But the jackpot satisfaction of accomplishment just did not come.
I even ended racism in 2016.
Which brings me to the end of my brief story.
As I was doing research on the discovery of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the written records of antiquity had so much power and treasure. I was able, for the first time in my life, to hold an interest in these stories of long ago because I finally understood that they were about me. About people like me. That looked like me.
I remember being in the 11th grade at Pacific Palisades High School in an advanced English Composition class with a girl named Eurydice.
That's about all I remember. How pretty she was. She was dreadfully pretty, like Medusa - and how disconnected I was with the materials that I was being told to study. Timeaus and the ancient Greeks? Nah, I needed to ditch 4th period and get down the hill to PCH and on the beach. Indoctrinated in distractions. It was easy to see how subtleties ruined so many of my peers.
Had I known then that Medusa and Timeaus and all of the Greeks were Black people, I would have been more interested in the Classics and those classes. But the ancient written records allowed me to know much more than the PhD's at the antiquities Department at Tulane University. Irrefutable. Unfathomable histories that turns the world of academia upside down. Achilles; Black with braids. The almighty God of the Bible was the Black Egyptian God/Man called Amen. That is why his name is said at the end of prayers.
Yes. I ended Racism in 2016. There is no such thing as race....
It was around this same time that I started wanting to build a tech company and call it Thug Coding®...
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It was around this same time that I started wanting to build a tech company and call it Thug Coding®.
And that name is intentional.
I know there are Black people in technology who do not like the word “thug.”
I understand why.
Some of us have spent our entire lives trying to escape the stereotypes associated with that word. We worked hard to get educated, become professionals, build businesses, enter corporate America and prove that Black people belong in technology, science, engineering, finance and every other sophisticated industry in this world.
Then here I come talking about THUG CODING®.
But I am not trying to make the word comfortable for corporate America.
And I am not glorifying criminal behavior.
Quite the opposite.
I am talking to the young brother who might never walk into a traditional technology conference.
I am talking to the kid who knows what a Glock is before he knows what Python is.
The kid who understands a trap house before he understands a data warehouse.
The young man who can tell you what a brick costs but has never been taught what equity means.
The kid who has watched people around him make money illegally and has begun to believe that crime, entertainment, sports or somebody else's minimum-wage job are the only realistic choices available to him.
That is who THUG CODING® is for.
I know that world exists because I grew up close enough to it to see the intelligence required to survive in it.
I watched people calculate risk.
I watched people build networks.
I watched people negotiate.
I watched people recognize opportunity.
I watched people create underground businesses from practically nothing.
There was intelligence there.
There was creativity there.
There was courage there.
There was entrepreneurship there.
But too often, all of that human ability was being deployed into systems that eventually destroyed the very people participating in them.
What happens if we redirect that intelligence?
What happens when the same young man learns Python?
JavaScript?
Databases?
APIs?
Artificial intelligence?
Cybersecurity?
Hardware?
Accounting?
Intellectual property?
Business?
What happens when somebody teaches him that he doesn't have to hustle a product on somebody else's corner?
He can build the product.
He can own the code.
He can own the company.
He can own the intellectual property.
He can own the platform.
He can own equity.
And that last word is extremely important to me.
Ownership.
I don't want our communities to participate in technology only as consumers.
Buying the newest phone.
Buying another game.
Buying another subscription.
Watching another video.
Scrolling another platform.
Making somebody else's technology company more valuable with every click.
We should be creating the applications.
Building the platforms.
Owning the servers.
Developing the intellectual property.
Creating the companies.
Hiring the employees.
Licensing the technology.
Owning shares.
Creating assets that can survive us.
Technology is one of the greatest wealth-creation engines humanity has ever developed.
Our children deserve to understand how that engine works.
That is why the word CODING matters.
And that is why the word THUG matters.
THUG CODING® isn't an endorsement of street life.
It is an alternative to it.
The name is supposed to reach somebody who might not believe that the traditional technology world was built for him.
I'm not interested only in teaching a young brother how to get a job at somebody else's technology company.
That's a good outcome.
But it isn't the ceiling.
I want him to understand enough about technology, business, law, accounting, intellectual property and capital that one day he can own the company.
We have had generations of consumerism.
I want to teach ownership.
We have watched extraordinary intelligence get wasted on dysfunctional behavior.
I want to redirect that intelligence toward creation.
We have watched young men learn systems designed for survival.
I want to show them systems designed for building. For LIVING!
And if somebody in the respectable technology community doesn't like the word THUG, I can live with that.
Because somewhere in South Central Los Angeles there is a young brother who may hear THUG CODING® and, for the first time, wonder:
“What's coding?”
That question might change his life.
And that is the point.
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THIS has to be revisited because it seems to be the TOPIC that always gets me into trouble. Please, read this again:
"Which brings me to the end of my brief story.
As I was doing research on the discovery of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the written records of antiquity had so much power and treasure. I was able, for the first time in my life, to hold an interest in these stories of long ago because I finally understood that they were about me. About people like me. That looked like me.
I remember being in the 11th grade at Pacific Palisades High School in an advanced English Composition class with a girl named Eurydice.
That's about all I remember. How pretty she was. She was dreadfully pretty, like Medusa - and how disconnected I was with the materials that I was being told to study. Timeaus and the ancient Greeks? Nah, I needed to ditch 4th period and get down the hill to PCH and on the beach. Indoctrinated in distractions. It was easy to see how subtleties ruined so many of my peers.
Had I known then that Medusa and Timeaus and all of the Greeks were Black people, I would have been more interested in the Classics and those classes. But the ancient written records allowed me to know much more than the PhD's at the antiquities Department at Tulane University. Irrefutable. Unfathomable histories that turns the world of academia upside down. Achilles; Black with braids. The almighty God of the Bible was the Black Egyptian God/Man called Amen. That is why his name is said at the end of prayers.
Yes. I ended Racism in 2016. There is no such thing as race....
It was around this same time that I started wanting to build a tech company and call it Thug Coding®..."
People THINK that they understand the concept of RACE and it's byproduct...RACISM. They don't Most people do not understand.
It is NOT a person's skin color that gets them into a life of crime, murder, death.
That is going to be another talk. Another POST for this journal/blog.
It is the person, their enviornment, upbringing, chemical structure and constiution of their minds, etc.
Skin color is only that. Skin color. There is a genuine affinity between the universal solar system and dark skin. But, how dark? Are dark Black people BETTER than lighter skin Black people? This is the END of Racism and Poverty.
That MUST be addressed in detail so that people can understand the FRAUD of "race"...There IS no such thing as race.
The part of this writing that mentions...GOD?
What does God have to do with tech? Especially, tech in the hood?
If you do believe in God, or not. That is not what this is about. What I believe about God is what is what I believe. If what I believe about God works for me, then, that IS all that matters.
I want to say the same for you.
My WORDS about God may not have rubbed you right. I understand. But...this is about YOUR understanding and belief. Some people follow a religion that is different from yours.
Some people follow the religion where they don't believe in God. Some people don't use the word God. Some people think that there are many Gods. Some people think there is just one God.
Also, some people THINK cucumbers taste better pickled.
If GOD loves you, God would SHOW you by the WORKS done in your life.
LEARN TECH