What is The X Project?
I. The X Project is knowledge and learning at the intersection of these ten topics: commodities, debt, deficits, demographics, economics, energy, geopolitics, interest rates, markets, and money.
II. The X Project is an interplay between Generation X and the Roman numeral X.
III. The X Project is a Generation X perspective on how and why so much of our lives will likely be different in the future compared to our lives up until now.
IV. The X Project wants to understand how and why the middle class that so many of us were born into has been slowly and steadily getting X’d out.
V. The X Project aims to understand why so many of Generation X (and younger generations) are challenged in meeting or exceeding the living standards of our parents.
VI. The X Project strives to educate and prepare us for what’s possible and probable in the future so we can make and advise our loved ones on the best career, investment, and other significant life decisions.
VII. The X Project targets a broader audience of people who want to know what they need to know about The X Project topics but do not have the time or the interest.
VIII. The X Project will distill, summarize, and synthesize the opinions, analyses, expectations, and forecasts of various authors, experts, consultants, and strategists related to The X Project topics.
IX. The X Project will publish two weekly articles (and podcasts) that take ten to twenty minutes to read (or listen to) so all this knowledge and information is easy to consume and digest.
X. The X Project will always try to answer why this is relevant to you and why you should care.
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Who is the Guy behind The X Project:
I. I am a mid-Gen Xer male born in 1970.
II. I am married to a woman born in the same year and have an early Generation Alpha daughter born in 2012.
III. I live in the suburban north shore of Chicago.
IV. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BA in Economics from Loyola University in Chicago.
V. I also graduated as a member of Omicron Delta Epsilon, the international honor society of economics for high academic achievement.
VI. I spent the first five years of my post-graduate life (using my economics degree) as a commodity futures retail broker and trader, accumulating 10,000+ hours studying the markets and many of the associated topics listed above.
VII. I then spent the next 22 years (sans a two-year sabbatical) growing an IT services company as a sales management executive, starting in 1999, which allowed me to witness the tail-end of the dot.com bubble and the subsequent burst.
VIII. I experienced the Great Financial Crisis differently as I was on a sabbatical from work from mid-2007 through mid-2009, traveling abroad and in Europe during the summer of 2008.
IX. I maintained my passion for economics, markets, and associated topics during those 22 years. I invested at least another 15,000 hours more time in them outside of work while also learning at work from thousands of business clients we served by leveraging IT to solve their business problems across every industry vertical.
X. I left my IT services job in the middle of 2022, and as such have been able to spend another 3,000+ hours on these topics and what it means for my (and our) future(s), which brings me to The X Project.
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