The Financial Grift Fueling Civil Unrest

Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing and please subscribe below and and think about joining my substack@sarawestall substack.com or my newsletter. You can sign up for that as well@SarahWestAll.com and remember to give a thumbs up and to subscribe on the platform that you’re watching. Welcome to business Game Changers. This is going to be an economic review extra and I’m publishing this on Substack with Jonathan Deaver. He’s a former state representative in Ohio and he has an extensive background in finance and ran built his own law firm while he served as a representative in Ohio. He was the chair of the Financial Institutions Housing and Urban Development Committee.

He worked to update Ohio’s banking laws and protect homeowners, consumers and small businesses. He also authored the Ohio Staple act landmark landmark legislation creating tax advantaged savings accounts and helped individuals with disabilities and their families build financial security. He was also up for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to lead that. He ended up not getting it, but he went through that whole process and he met a lot of people in the process. But he’s been writing on Substack now some pretty interesting articles, but I wanted to have him on to talk about how he saw the Diesel situation.

You know, the current agreement that’s happening with Russia and Trump’s agreement with Diesel. And I also wanted to ask him about the AI situation with the CEOs all coming together, all of them warning about how all these jobs are going away. I’ve said many times on my show I do think it’s a really big threat, these jobs going away, but I think that them coming together is a ploy to get the government to protect them. And I compare it to telecom and we talk about that. How, how do I compare it to telecom? And you’ll understand that comparisons in the show.

It’s a big deal. It’s the future of our, I mean it really is the probably the biggest threat we’ve had in humanity and also how these governments are going to deal with it. And we’re going to talk about that with his extensive background and his experience. So I hope you appreciate that. You’ll see his sub stack, you’ll see the links to his sub stack below, but you’ll see it@deaverjohnathan.substack.com and hopefully you’ll check him out there. He has a book that is coming forth in January, he says with beginning of the year. So that’s coming soon too.

Here’s former state rep from Ohio, Jonathan Deaver. Hi John, welcome to the program. Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate it. You are a former Ohio state legislator, but you’re so much more than that, right? I mean you, you had, you built a law firm, but you have been in finance for, I mean that’s really been your focus and you’ve been, you’re no longer a former, but you’ve just come out punching. It’s a lot of times politicians are really, really vanilla, if you will, until they’re out of office and then they say what they want to say. And I think you’re in the state of you saying what you want to say.

So you’re, you’re sharing things that you’ve learned through your experience and through what you’ve seen. And now you’re writing articles on, on your sub stack and elsewhere on the state of where we’re at. And I, I brought up before we started this that Martin Armstrong, who is a regular on my program every, you know, six weeks or so, he just got done stating that he’s calling that the western governments aren’t, are going to fall in 2032. He doesn’t even think there could be a 2028 election. And your economic indicators are pointing to a lot of the same thing he’s saying.

Yes, and thank you for that, Sarah. So just by way of background, yes, I have been a lawyer. I retired from the practice of law, but most of my legal career was just representing individuals who are getting kind of abused by the systems that I saw. Right. So whether it was big Ag taken over a small legacy family farm for seven, eight generations, the processes they use, they weaponize the federal government, the institutional capture processes that they’ve codified in the patent office and et cetera. Right all the way down to just somebody who’s losing their house because some bank was Defrauding them or not crediting them a payment.

Right. So I did all that in the private sector and I found all these glaring, massive structural problems and that’s what actually led me to run for office. And I mirrored my campaign off of Newt Gingrich’s 94 campaign when he had the Contract with America, because personally I thought that was probably the best campaign I had seen. And granted, I was young at the time, I was still in college, I was a college Republican helping candidates. But that was brilliant. He said, here’s 10 things that we’re going to do. We’re going to work on these 10 things and we’re going to get these done.

We’re going to put them on the President’s desk and dare him to sign it. Is it almost like it’s passed? It’s like the old pol, these old school guys who are doing things were just so good is gone. It’s like, yeah, it seems to be. But I, I’ve identified the why behind it because I think that’s, that’s our biggest problem is why are, why are members of Congress or members of our state General assembly or local township trustee or our local city council guy not doing anything? Like they, they run and you ask them why they’re and you know, they’ll say something like, like currently, well, I’m running so that President Trump doesn’t get impeached.

Well, okay, if you’re a Republican, okay, but who cares? What are you going to do? Right, but what are you going to do when you get there? What? You know, we have these massive institutional structural problems. What are you going to do? Congress, you haven’t even passed a budget this century. 1. Why, why are we in a situation? I mean this is, proves that we’re kind of in a fascist government situation because we are worried about jobs. Like, you know, all these AI guys are coming out saying there’s not going to be jobs. Just a Microsoft AI CEO just came out, said the same thing Musk just said about.

He said 18 months from now we’re all AI is going to be replace all white collar jobs. I mean, I don’t believe that to the degree because it’s going to take a. Here’s the deal. I think it could, but I think there’s a huge catch up as people learn how to implement the AI. Right. So it’ll take some time. But the thing is that’s a very real threat that we have in the background and the fact that the private corporations are not able to create the jobs and we have to rely on the government here to save us.

But the government is who is investing heavily in this area and backing all these CEOs and saying, yeah, this is. I mean, I don’t even know what’s going on here when I’m seeing all this. Yeah, there’s a lot to it. I mean, honestly, we don’t have enough time in the hour to go through all the layers of this. That’s honestly why I started the substack is just start peeling these layers back. We have to talk about. We have to talk about freaking. Yeah, we do. I mean, here’s the. Here are the big items, right? And so getting back to what you had private privately previously said with your, your prior guest, right? The reality of it is that we are coming to a fiscal tsunami, okay? So what I don’t think people do is pay attention to math very well.

So if you’re, you know, if you’re old enough to see your portfolio do anything, if you’re in your 40s or 50s or older, you know that this, these things are true. When you’re younger, you don’t see the growth as much, right? The, the discipline of doing anything, whether it’s investing consistently or whether it’s eating right every day. Because you can’t just eat right one day and eat garbage all week and expect to get a good health result. You can’t get big muscles if you work out one day a month and then wonder why you don’t have a physique like someone who’s entering Ms.

Ms. Or Mr. Olympia, right? You have to have discipline in everything that you do to see results as an individual. So when we take that same reality and we apply it into our systems, right, Whether it’s government, corporate America, our religious institutions, we’ve seen this drastic atrophying of basic processes, right? And what we’re now seeing is the results of institutional capture. So I’ll give you a simple example. Social Security, when it was started, was created on the idea that we need to help a group of people who don’t have anything because of the Great Depression and the war and the, and the pandemic that occurred at that period of time.

It wiped out a lot of people and there was nothing there for them. And the idea was we need to be able to have a way to take care of our seniors in their most vulnerable time. It was a noble aspiration. And they created a system and a process to do that in Social Security. But you’re saying now it’s going to collapse gaps in 2032, based on what you’ve been writing about. So. Correct. Right. And so they, when they did that, it was like, you know, you’re saving money for your future and for their future. Right.

But what they’ve done in the meantime, over the course of time, what have they done? They’ve taken every single dollar that’s supposed to go there. They give it to Congress to spend. There’s no accountability for it because, mind you, we don’t do budgets anymore. So during the budgetary process, you have to propose a bill, you have to have people come in and talk about it. We don’t do that anymore. What we do is just keep spending money and adding more money to the spend. But how do we. How have we gotten to a mental point where we just don’t do budgets anymore? Yes, that’s been a problem since about 2000.

We just don’t do them. We do continuing resolutions. Because the way our system has devolved, I guess is the right way of doing it, is that Congress has pushed all of their authority and power basically into that of the executive. So it doesn’t really matter who’s the president, Republican or Democrat, all that power is in that office. And Congress has ceded that authority to the executive. Right. So if you look at Social Security as a simple example, this is something that we know by math in 1983, we’ve known this. Right. This is nothing new. We’ve known this since 1983, that in 2032, the amount of money that will be in the IOUs, the inter government alone.

Right. Would be gone and there’s a fiscal cliff there. So essentially what that means is ever since 2021, we’ve been cashing in these intergovernmental 0% IOUs. Right? So when the treasury takes in that little money off your paycheck, so anybody’s wondering, go get your little W2, there’s a little line there. It says Social Security, 6.2%. Now the. Your employer also pays an extra 6.2% that you don’t see into that fund as well. Right. Now that money goes immediately out through Congress, it goes to Congress and then Congress writes it and they write a little IOU. But what’s happening now is that’s interest free, so 0%.

So now what the treasury has to do since 21, there’s not enough money coming in from the Social Security tax to pay the obligations. So they’re cashing in those IOUs. And the way they do that is they go out and they create a Treasury bill. Well, everybody knows interest rates have just gone up, right? So now we have interest debt and debt that we have to pay as a nation. So that, that money that was in the, the accounts for Social Security and Social Security, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, that money now that’s inter government zero, is now going to interest bearing loans that we all have to pay.

So the national debt is growing faster than expected. By 2032, all of those IOUs are gone, zeroed out. And by federal law, every single retiree in America in 2032, by law, will see a 17% reduction in their net monthly check. By law, because it’s not actuarially sound. That is our massive problem. Just for Social Security. Now take that one. And in my sub stack I’ve identified 15 other areas where the same problem is occurring. Right. Is it all around 2032 or. It’s between now and 2035. So we’re getting one or two of these every single year as we go in.

And the biggest ones are the social safety nets which trigger in 2032-2035. That is our biggest problem. And, and so people can go to your substack and read that, but maybe we’ll go through a few of them. I’ll pull it up and look at some of your articles because you got some other good articles on there too. But I think that’s why there’s an, they realize that there’s going to be this economic reset. They realize this is all coming down the pike. They’re like, well, who cares now? Let’s just spend what we can and then let’s get a reset underway.

I, I think that’s what’s happening. They’re like, they’re working on a complete overhaul of the entire system because they know it’s going to collapse. Well, and the biggest problem that we see right now, if you want to know what it, what the forecast looks like, just go look at France. Go pull the headlines right now. Look at their economic numbers. They mirror ours. They’re, they’re in the same financial position now. They’re, we’re actually a little bit worse than they are. The difference is they can’t print money because they’re, they don’t have a reserve currency. They’re a member of the European Union.

Only the European Union can print money. So they’re a member nation. So they don’t have the ability to print their way out of their problems. That’s what happens when you aren’t, don’t have national sovereignty. So everybody who says that you Know, being a white nationalist or something white. Get rid of the white. Being a nationalist is not good. It’s like, well, this is what happens when you don’t have power over your own finances. Well, it’s not only power over our own finances, but the biggest part too, that I don’t think people realize with the United States, you have to have power over your own finances.

Well, absolutely. Absolutely you do. Whether you’re, whether you’re, whether it’s the national government or whether it’s the, you know, your business or us personally. Right. It’s a universal truth. But the biggest problem that we’ve got right now is that we don’t have the discipline to manage our economy correctly. Because again, I’m going to go back to Congress. Congress isn’t functioning. The President of the United States can point out whatever problems he wants, but unless Congress does something, there’s very little he can do outside of the authority they’ve granted him under the Constitution. So he’s very, very limited on.

Because he can’t spend it. Right. He can’t appropriate it and he can’t write the law. All he can do is sign it and then he can give his agencies authority to do things. But he can’t fix the fraud, the waste, the abuse. Congress has to do that. Right? He can’t fix. Congress isn’t doing it. They’re not doing it. And, and we’ve already identified that about 3 to 4 trillion out of our $40 trillion we’re paying interest on for fraud, waste and abuse compounded. Right. So we’re paying interest on that, which, so that’s about 10%, 8 to 10% of our national debt.

We’re paying interest on fraud, waste and abuse. If that doesn’t make your blood boil as an American, nothing will. Well, it does. It’s just so obvious. But I mean, we’re in a situation where we’re also pounding down. All the jobs are going away. I mean, I just, I don’t even know what kind of mental perspective they have. Well, they’ll come on and how can you allow a business executive to go on air and say, we’re going to take away everybody’s jobs? That is the worst marketing you could possibly do on the planet. And they’re all engaged in that.

They’re not, they’re not dumb. They know this is horrible marketing. So they’re doing it on purpose for a reason. Yes, they are. And I, I have my own personal theory and I will, and I will tell you exactly what I think it is. The Reality of it is that there is about $7 trillion of investment that’s going into this space between now and 2030. Okay? $7 trillion. That is a lot of money investment because people are like, they don’t know if we want to invest there. You know what I’m saying? Oh, yeah. But no, they want to invest there.

But here’ problem, right? So think. Think like a business owner for a moment, all right? Just a big business owner. You’re investing 7 trillion. You’re only able to charge $20 a user per month. They’re not enough users on the planet to do an ROI on that. So what they’re doing is by putting out that fear proactively, what they’re encouraging Congress to do, which I’ll give the President credit, he didn’t fall for this trap, but they’re encouraging Congress to regulate it so they have a regulatory capture so they. That nobody can compete with them, right? And then they’ve got the market cornered, and they do that through fear and intimidation.

It’s fascism. They’re trying to get the government to prop them up and get engaged. So that protects their market, creates regulation, and then no one else can compete. And these AI companies that aren’t making a profit will be locked in to be the AI companies that the government protects and make sure it’s kind of like telecom ran, right? I was in the telecom space when AT&T got broken up. They had all the baby bills that bells that are all regulated. Nobody really could easily get into those markets. They were locked. And that’s how it works. And this is what they’re trying to do.

They’re trying to create a redo of the. The telecom market. It’s exactly right. And the sad part is, so I’m an Ohioan, right? And we had this wonderful Senator Sherman. Senator Sherman was a rev or a sorry Civil War hero who created the Sherman Antitrust Act. Now we don’t use that anymore. We ignore that law as though it’s not even on the books, Right? The last time we actually used that was in the 90s when Newt Gingrich was in, was the speaker and Bill Clinton was the president. And that’s the last time that was with Microsoft trying to control all the operating systems that were available at the time, if you recall.

So we don’t use that. And now we’re creating these institutional capture pieces inside of our statutes. And the sad part is, I mean, you think about it, you know, probably when you and I were kids, anybody could run for the State House, Anybody could Run for Congress. If you had a good idea and you worked hard, you could make it today. You can’t do that. You have to have 10, 20, $30 million just to run for Congress. In my state last cycle they spent a billion dollars on a Senate race. 500 million aside. That’s crazy. So we’re not getting the kinds of people that are going to Congress for the right reasons.

We’re going to people that get elected today are independently wealthy or they have somebody who’s bankrolling them. And we also have congressmen and congresswomen and senators that are running for office that don’t have an agenda, legislative agenda, to fix anything. One of the things I always ask is why are you running? And they don’t have an answer other than I’m going to do this. You know, it’s always something. They want the fame, they want the power, they want the prestige, but they don’t really have the ability to do anything. They can cut, they can talk a big talk when they’re doing a debate.

Right. But they don’t really because they have all the answers pre canned. Right. I mean, do they really know and they have to, they have to talk at like a sixth grade level. Well, I think the reality of it is, is I proved that you can do big lifts that, that have never been done do them. I’ve done lifts that everyone said were impossible because I did the work and actually cared about the policy and I won the constituencies and brought them to the table before I introduced the bill. And that at that point no one can stop it.

Right. So if all the constituencies do it, that it has to be the government doing everything. I mean we’ve lost way, you know what I’m saying? We, we shouldn’t be to a point. And this is what these AI companies are doing. They want to turn into a complete, we do that now we got a complete fascist situation and. But in some ways we should slow it down, but not to the point where the government controls it and, and protects that industry. Yeah. I think the one thing to keep in mind with this though is every time that there’s a technological leap, everyone gets really scared and jittery.

Right. I mean the automobile created chaos amongst the buggy whip manufacturers and the buggy maintenance, this is at a different level because every single freaking job can be automated. You can automate an md, you can automate a lawyer, which you are you, you can automate judges, you can automate. They’re already, you know, removing all the financial analysts, their audit. My son is in a area with senior software engineer where he runs a department that by himself only. He has a team of few people, but that used to be a hundred people in the past. It is changing quickly.

It is changing quickly. But I think, look, the nice part about our nation is that we are entrepreneurial at heart. And even with that, because of that, because we have a drive, because we’re entrepreneurial and we have that drive as Americans. There’s always opportunity in this, right? So I look at it, you know, I retired from the practice of law partially because I saw the writing on the wall, but I also didn’t like, more importantly, what the law has become. It’s become a. It’s not about justice anymore. It’s not about getting the right results for people.

Most of the people that end up on the bench shouldn’t be there for various reasons. There’s a lot of good people in there, but there’s a lot more bad. And so I viewed it as, you know, as a lawyer, the thing that keeps you available to, to be productive is they still need someone for a courtroom. Right. But more importantly, the license follows. So there’s certain things that will absorb and there’ll be certain tasks that will absorb, but there’s going to be a whole new economy that we just don’t even understand yet that’s going to come out for other people, but it’s going to be extremely disruptive until we get there.

Yes, it will. Yes. But we all have to like, think about it from the standpoint of, you know, we are Americans and we always seem to find a way to get through difficult times and disruptive technologies and disruptive pieces of time. That’s what makes us unique in the world. So it gives us a strategic advantage in the world to. To figure this out for everyone. Because quite frankly, all these other countries, like in Europe, there is no incentive to go out and start a business. They take everything from you. There’s no incentive in Asia to start a business.

It’s oligarchy run and that includes Russia and everything in the Asian continent. It is, it is run by oligarchies and there’s two classes of people. This is really the last place on the planet where you have the opportunity to take something this disruptive and still make a good future for your family. So I do want to keep that as the positive side of it, even though it is a little bit interesting and scary. People assume the financial system is safe, but then banks fail, governments freeze assets. Inflation quietly stick steals purchasing power. And then many people Realize they don’t actually own what they thought they own.

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Yeah, we have some entrepreneurial aspects of our country. That’s what made us great. But as the government becomes bigger and bigger, it drowns out. It’s almost like a dark energy that just destroys the entrepreneurial spark, the bright. You know, and we. You have to keep that spark going. Otherwise. And, and this is the perfect example of why we’ve never in history had this kind of challenge to enterprise before, to small business, to everybody. This is a challenge humanity has never faced. I don’t disagree with you. This is going to be a unique challenge. But we’ve always found a way to rise as Americans.

We’ve always figured it out. People thought that about World War I. People definitively thought that about World War II and the Great Depression. So we have found a way as a nation to always dig deep. But when we do, it’s because we come together as Americans and we don’t play tribalism games with one another when it comes to big lifts. That’s the problem, and that’s the warning shot that I’m concerned with right now that all of these things that I see, that your other guests that you alluded to see these things. We can steer the ship in the right direction, right? But if we wait to the last minute, it’s like taking the largest aircraft carrier.

You can’t turn that thing within a mile of the shore. You’ve got to turn it a couple of miles out, because one degree matters over time. And so we’ve got to come together as Americans, not Republicans, not Democrats, not liberals, conservatives, but as Americans, to start fixing some of these things. Otherwise, that great reset that’s going to happen in most of the world, we’re going to be left holding a massive bag that Americans aren’t prepared for. Well, it’s kind of like when you’re on the, if you’re going to use World War II, it’d be like marching on the, you know, beach of Normandy.

You’re not looking to your neighbor and wondering whether they’re a Republican or Democrat. You don’t care. You don’t give a crap when you don’t solve this problem. That’s right. Right. We’re getting shot at here, people. We gotta figure this out. So let’s look at some of your, your, your substack articles. I’m looking, I have it up right now. There’s some interesting ones. But let’s. Before we get into some of your other interests, it says it’s rigged. What’s draining your primary bank account. You said that everything is rigged. I mean, it’s rigged against you. What do you mean by that? Yeah.

So right now what we’re experiencing is I call this the era of the grift. And so that’s the thing, the title of my forthcoming book, and I have a trilogy about it. But there is a definitive pattern of extraction that occurs across everything. And the hard part is understanding what the pattern is and recognizing it. You kind of recognize it after the fact, after you’ve been ripped off, after you’ve been drained of your resources, whether it’s financial, time, energy, what have you. But understanding it on the front end and seeing it for what it is has always been a challenge for everyone.

We, we identify a grifter after the fact. Right. We know who Ponzi is, but when we’re being victimized by a current Ponzi scheme, we don’t understand it or recognize it until we’re. It’s. Our bank accounts are drained. So the premise is very simple. It’s that what I’m writing about in the substack is things that didn’t make the book, if that makes sense, but are also relevant to what’s going on right now in the culture, whether it’s our government, whether it’s corporate, corporate America. If you’re a Maha person, I write about, you know, pharma and AG and the regulatory capture and the, and the grifting that occurs in that space.

So the first idea here with this is let’s figure out how we can identify what a grift is and show that seven step pattern. So that way when you know whether, Sarah, you’re watching something, I’m watching something, or any of the viewers are watching something, they can see it for themselves and they know what it is. The second step is the second book, which I have already written, and sitting there waiting is the broken. That’s where I took all of the stories of all the people I know that have been hurt by this stuff personally so that I can personalize it because I think one of the things that we miss is the personal stories and understanding that you’re also you, your neighbor, the people around you, you can fall victim to any of this.

You know the article that I’m going to kick out tomorrow, it’s going to be about this, the 764 crew. I didn’t even hear about this until last week. And these people are extremely dangerous. And they came around in 2021 and anyone who has a young child, I’ve got a 17 year old and a, and a, and a 19 year old. But you know they play games, Roblox and Minecraft and you know they’re on discord talking to their friends and there’s some kid who was 15 years old in 2021 decided that he was going to weaponize this space to, to hurt people.

And, and one of my wife’s staff members had to leave the office early last week because the FBI called him and let him know that his daughter was teed up to execute herself online live on a live stream. Oh my God. Because this group had coerced her and blackmailed her and got her into such a dark place that she was willing to do it. So they get these kids to do these God awful things, they blackmail them and they put them into these corners and then they reward each other by sharing the information and they rank up in the organization based on how many people they hurt.

It’s God awful. And the FBI was, was wonderfully called. You know, Cash Patel’s all over this. Called, called my wife’s staff. He went home, saved his daughter, found out all about it, told her it’s okay. And they’re subsequently arresting a whole bunch of people right now. And that’s in my neck of the woods. So these are grifters for a different reason. It’s not, they’re not trying to extract money out of you. Which is why the FBI had to come at it from a different angle. They’re trying to extract your very life and the things that make you a human, they’re just mentally insane.

They want to hurt as many people as they can and they’re evil. They don’t even care about making money. That’s incredible. They’re absolutely just evil. So it’s, that’s the point. It’s like we have to really start thinking about what is a grift and how it manifests. We’ve got a responsibility to not only help ourselves, but you’ve got an audience. You’ve got people that count on you and rely on you to help them and educate them so that they can protect their own families and protect their own financial future. And so that’s really what the substacks about in my books are about is, okay, this is what’s happening out in the real world.

This is what is happening to real people. These could be your neighbors, the people that you work with, you know, members of your church or your synagogue that are going through these things. We need to help people understand it. And then lastly, there’s always hope. Right? I always like to end on hope with this stuff, which is my last book. It’s Hope in the Darkness is that there is a way to find hope and peace and safety for yourself and your family. And it’s not only on this earth, but it’s also eternal. And so that to me is what’s the most important piece is getting people through that process so they understand what it is.

They understand how they can identify it and their friends and their family and when it’s happening to them and then ultimately how do we fix it? And it’s, it can be, look, it could be as simple as in your own family. It could be your neighborhood, it could be your church, your synagogue, it could be your place of business. And it’s definitively in our state and local governments and our federal government. Government. How do we empower people to be strong enough to stand on their own two feet, to fight back on some of these things that are just hell bent on destroying America and ourselves? Well, people are overwhelmed, right.

They’re getting knocked from all different like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Okay, so you got. And you’re giving people what they can do. But okay, Russian diesel deal. Yeah. You dug into what this diesel deal really is and. Yes, ma’. Am. Can you give us the straight on that? Yeah, I’d be more than happy to. It’s really confusing for your average person. So. Because average people use just regular gasoline, so understanding diesel markets is a little bit harder to understand. Diesel is pretty. We have a pretty bright market, but our pretty. Yeah, I’m just.

Your average American doesn’t know the difference between the two markets. Right? Just they, they just don’t. And the man on the street just doesn’t know it. And I don’t. You know, unless you’re a truck driver or your merchant marine. Yeah, well, diesel fuels all, almost all Everything. Yeah, everything. Right. It’s a lot. Yeah, so. Right. It’s everything. So Trump wanted to get a deal to go to ease the prices of diesel. But one of the pushbacks is that I’ve heard from the, from the NATO group, is that okay? But doing this is actually helping Putin be able to fund the war.

And so that’s what they’re claiming. That’s what his opposition is claiming. And he’s claiming he’s doing it to lighten the load on the diesel that’s affecting our entire economy. Tell us what’s really happening. Well, so if you go back a year, a year ago, your average semi tractor trailer, when it was filling up, spent about 800. Today, it’s 1500. So. So when you. And that doesn’t include locomotives. That doesn’t include the big ships that are moving the products overseas that, you know, it doesn’t include. They’re talking like some of those ships are hundreds of thousands. I mean, it’s hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands of gallons of, of diesel.

So that’s turning into millions of dollars, you know, of cost. You’ve got the railroads, of course, we talked about, but then the farming industry. So every single implement runs on diesel. So it’s basically twice the price a year ago. So every dollar that goes into that shows up in everything that it delivers. Right? Whether it’s a plastic box, whether it’s cardboard box, your apples, your bread, your milk, whatever, it’s all being transported with diesel. So that transportation cost is double. It just is what it is. And then it gets embedded in everything. So, and then diesel is also.

It’s kind of a weird thing because it’s an international marketplace with, like, gasoline. The reason why I say it’s different economically is that you and I, we can make a decision not to go for that Saturday drive. We can choose not to go, get in our car and drive 12 hours, see our family member for Thanksgiving. We can say, I’ll see you at Christmas, we can make those adjustments, but the tractor still needs to run the, the semi needs to run the business environment. The business has to keep going. Right. So, and then in America, 72% of all of our freight goes through trucking.

Right. I think that’s important also to keep in mind. So we can’t just ignore it. It’s. It is there. So what’s behind it? It’s a good question. So on October 9th, President Trump announced the deal that he had with Putin. Okay, so that’s going to throw about 300,000 tons of diesel and then there’s going to be another 500,000 in November and another million that will, so it’s about a million roughly, that’ll go to American international buyers. Now, for the United States, it’s, it’s like a drop in the barre. It’s about, people are saying it doesn’t help us, but it helps Putin fund his war.

Well, but, but the issue is it’s going to provide the amount of diesel we consume is obnoxious compared to the rest of the world because we are so, we’re so logistically oriented, right. We’re moving stuff all over the planet all the time. But it’s going to loosen this up for the rest of the world. So this is an international market, right? It’s going to help Europe, it’s going to help our allies south of the border, you know, our allies down in South America. It is going to loosen that up a little bit. It’s going to help a lot of Europe, is going to help a lot of the NATO.

So when they claim it’s helping Putin, it’s like, well, I don’t, yeah, but it’s helping you too. So I think that’s more of just a political rhetoric to sound bad right now. And it just, it sounds good to people. I think you’re probably accurate on that. I mean, I think the biggest sticking point here is the legal process that we have embedded based on the law that was passed in 22 and that was the, you know, the, I think it was. What was that? The ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, I think it was. And so there was a certain process that had to be followed.

There’s going to be, you know, there’s a couple of senators on both sides that, that claim that the White House didn’t follow the protocol. You know, I think the White House is looking at it like I need to do something. So we’re gonna, that’ll probably get sorted out. But the upside, though is that because these negotiations happened with Trump, Putin and Angie agreed to come to the table to try to work out a resolution to the war with Ukraine. So at the end of the day, if we’ve, if we’ve got peace talks coming back, the small price to pay of freeing that up too, for Europe’s sake and for some of our other allies, may very well be worth it.

We’re going to find out whether or not that effort by the President has a long term peace impact. But I understand why the President did it. The question that still has to be resolved is whether he followed the law correctly, whether there’s going to be any ramifications of it expose facto and then whether this, this summit that’s going to occur next month, what kind of fruit will be born out of that? Have you thought about whether your investments are making the highest returns they can and eliminating as much taxes as you can? I think all of us want that strategy.

Right? That’s the strategy that the wealthiest use. And my friends at Ironhawk Financial are helping my listeners figure out a strategy to do exactly that. If you want the best returns on your portfolios, you want to eliminate as much taxes as you humanly possibly can, and you want to set up your grandkids, you want to set up your kids, and you want to set up yourself for having the most amount you possibly can in your portfolios. I highly recommend you look at the strategies that my friends at Ironhawk Financial do for my listeners. Go to sw hawk.com and get information.

They are professionals and they will help you understand what those strategies are. So that you’re looking at portfolios that are making twice, three, four times more than what you would have and paying a lot less in taxes in the process. Who doesn’t want to do that? Go to sw hawk.com and learn about it today. Well, okay, so you have other things here. A fake psychic took 170 million from 1.3 million Americans. People need to be careful of. Because I, I actually have a thrive hour where I talk to intuitives and remote viewers and stuff. People love it, but they need to be careful not to be taken advantage of.

Yes. And this is a good example of somebody that just. You could be taken advantage of by anybody. But people will put their faith in somebody and then stop thinking. Yeah. And that experiment was fascinating because what he did was he just put these people and he gave them this, this. The survey. Right. And it was supposed to be a personality survey, but then what he did is he went to the local horoscope and he just wrote everything down from that and put it in the results of the personality test and gave everyone the same identical results.

And then they score and then they scored it well on a scale of 1 to 5, whether it reflected who they were and almost unanimously, it was like 4.3 average out of five. Everybody said it, it was reflective of them. Right. So, yeah. So it’s like they call it the fallacy of personal validation. So if you compliment somebody in a very specific way, they’ll accept that as truth, whether it’s true or not. And that. And then I think somebody Else coined it as the, the Barnum effect, as in the, the circus magnet, right, that you can, you can fool people by showing them a little bit about themselves and a little bit about other people, describe a little fundamental quirk in their personality or this, that or the other, and then they’re just going to adopt it.

And the illusion is really interesting because these statements apply to almost everyone, right? You have, you’re going to have a cheerful day today. Well, that’s a choice you can make. You can either be grumpy or you can be cheerful, right? You can choose. And part of your day could be cheerful, part of it could be grumpy, just depending on what happened to you. But they’ve replicated this stuff over and over and over again. But what’s interesting is that there’s been some scammers that when they understand these things, they apply them to their grift, right? And there was a guy who went to prison recently.

Patrick or Patrice Runner, I can’t remember exactly, he went to prison for 10 years. And essentially what he did is he, he sent these mass letters to American mailboxes under a false name. And, and, and the false name was of this proclaimed psychic. Right? And, and it was like, hey, this is an immediate thing. This isn’t going to happen to you. I’m a psychic and, you know, I can, I can do this for you. And I can do this for you for a fee, of course. Right. And there was no person, you know, there was no psychic.

It was just a fictitious psychic. And the letters were all identical templates mailed to literally tens of thousands of people every week. And people wrote checks. And he would then send a follow up letter personalized, just your name, but it was the exact same letter. And, and it was just a mail fraud scheme. And he would target elderly, the most vulnerable, people with disabilities. That’s who he was targeting. And he ended up with like, I think they topped 175 million in that scam. So it’s just using, yeah, it’s just using these techniques. And so I like to, yeah, I like to try to write about some of these about on every Friday to, to give people an idea of like.

So when you’re seeing something that doesn’t feel right, well, you’re pro. Listen to that, you know, listen to your gut, listen to your head when you. This doesn’t feel right. This seems like this is just too good to be true. It surely probably is. And today, going back to our AI conversation, you can take AI and if you prompt it Right. It’s going to find it for you. So. Well, companies can do that with AI. Absolutely. Op eds that just went out on and that was published and I talked about surveillance pricing. So if you want to take AI scam people, you can do it with, I mean, if you want to do these kind of psychic scams, you know, on YouTube and some of these big platforms, the most, some of the most watched shows are with psychics.

And you know, I get into that kind of, I like remote viewing, I like intuitive stuff. But I watch some of these psychics, they’re just making things up and taking advantage of people and that all the time that we have intuitive abilities, but they’re taking it and using what is a basis of knowledge and then using it to scam people. That’s the sad part, right? And so the, the, the beauty though is today we have all this information at our fingertips. But what I always caution people, especially my sons, right, I’ve got one, he’s freshman in high state, the other one’s a junior in high school.

And I caution them, said the, the technologies are a tool, but it’s just like a hammer. If you know how to use the hammer, you can build some wonderful things. But if you really don’t know what a hammer is for, you can also use it to hurt people, right? And so make sure that you have the understanding, the knowledge of the information, internalize it, put it in your own head. That’s the beauty of, of getting an education is if you learn the material now, you’ve learned how to analyze the fact pattern and you can apply that to real life situations and then the AI is a tool to help you.

It’s a superpower. Honestly, if you, if you know the law, like I’m a lawyer, I know the law, I know what to ask it, but I also know how to fact check it because it does hallucinate and I can fact check it and make sure, and I can ask the right questions. But if I, if I, if I know how to use it the right way for the task at hand, it’s a superpower, but it can also be weaponized by bad people. So look, we’re seeing it especially during this campaign season, all the AI fakes, the AI videos, the, all the stuff that’s out there, it’s, it’s a, it’s a snowball effect and it’s going to get.

Creating division too. It’s creating a lot, I think, so the division. And it’s like every group of people that are against each other it’s just I, I see it as really destructive for civilization. Like we are on a snowball downwards. We, we didn’t, we weren’t like this before and now I just see it’s like children on a playground fighting on everything, everything, absolutely everything. What is going on? Why are you fighting on this? Who cares what that person thinks on this? You know what I mean? It’s like, who cares? Let’s focus on this policy. The best piece of advice I can give anyone and I try to follow it myself and I’ve been told this also, so I’m just sharing what I’ve been told is take at least 10, 20, 30 minutes every morning and every night in silence.

Take the time, take. Turn off your phone, you don’t need it. Stop doom scrolling. Turn off the tv, turn off your screens. Spend some time in silence every day. There’s some peace in that. There’s an opportunity to reflect. Time to pray, Time to read and read real things, like real pieces of paper instead of things on the screen. Get rid of it, put it down, close it, you don’t need it. You wake up in the morning, you don’t need to grab your phone, it doesn’t need to be attached to you. And just take that, put it in the other room, charge it another room, get an old fashioned alarm clock to wake you up if you need it, and then spend your first 30, 40 minutes of the day without the dumb thing.

You don’t need it, you really don’t. And you’ll be attached to it the rest of the day and then put it away at least a half an hour, 45 minutes before you go to bed and leave it alone. Nothing is that important. And recharge your mind and start thinking and reading and getting back to basics so we can be human again. It’s really hard to be human when every, when you’re spending all your time in your phone. I mean, I go out to restaurants and I watch couples not talk to each other and they’re literally texting one another rather than having a conversation.

I’m like, that marriage isn’t going to last or that relationship isn’t going to get anywhere. You gotta, you gotta enjoy people for what they are. We’re all fun, you know, we’re all weird. We are, we’re all weird and fun. It’s like, great. I love all the things that make people what they are. It’s the best thing about life. But if you’re missing out on that, man, that’s like, that’s all there is. Is the things that make you you, the things that make me me. That’s the best part of life. Well, that is life. Right. Well, I guess the teenagers aren’t dating anymore.

From what I’m hearing from people who are running schools, I’m hearing that they just really aren’t dating anymore. I’m like, what’s going on? And I guess young people, it’s just a different environment right now. And as I said, the challenge we have is something we haven’t had in the past. And it’s going to get interesting and it’s just starting. The civil unrunts that we’re seeing in Europe is coming here. I, sadly, I think you’re right. I mean, you know, just bring it full circle back. I mean, I think the biggest challenge that we have is, you know, the rest of the world has the same fiscal problem that we have.

The difference is, like I said, we’re the world currency so we can get away with exporting our inflation and all that. And that’s actually been the stabilizing force for the world. The United States still remains even with all of our flaws and all of our, our fights. We are the world’s police officer. We’re the ones that can come in and create stability. We can only do that because we’re the reserve currency and because we can afford the military component. The minute that dies, then the rest of the world is going to be at a free for all.

And I don’t think anyone, you know, you can go out there and say you want communism, socialism, tongue in cheek, when you’ve got capitalism and you can go down and get whatever you want at a drop of the dime, but you don’t really want that. And the minute that happens here in the United States, the minute we lose our reserve currency status, who do you think is going to keep the peace in the world? Who do you think is going to create the, the, the, the safety and security of the basic things that you count on.

Food, water, shelter, the products that you get, the food that you get all comes from this international and global economy. We’ve done that as a, as a global society over the last 50, 60 years. And if we’re not careful, that can all fall apart very quickly. Well, well, I want to push back a little bit in the sense that I like free markets. Right. And we have capitalism. Capitalism can be pretty fascist and I think to a point where it grinds, if it’s not free market based, it can grind to a halt just like communism can, because that’s the evil twin of communism is fascism.

And we are moving in that direction pretty quickly. We need to get back to free market principles. Yes, I, I 100% agree with you. And I would say that’s where I go back to that regulatory capture. In a free market, you wouldn’t have that. You know, in a free market, when an AI company spends too much and they go under, so what? Let them go bankrupt, Let them fold. Somebody else will step into their shoes. In a free market, we wouldn’t have passed the Dodd Frank act where we codified too big to fail while we were lied to and said that we’re going to make sure that these banks can’t do this anymore.

Instead, the law said that, oh, no matter what you do, no matter how bad you are, no matter how unsafe and sound you are, what are we going to do? We’re going to bail you out by federal law and it’s codified. That’s not free markets. It’s not. And fascism is just as bad as communism. They’re very similar. They’re the evil twin. Yes. Evil twin. Yes, yes. Same result. They always result in consolidation of power and the elimination of the people that you don’t like. And it’s not a good elimination either. So. No, no. Okay, well, where can people follow you? We talked about your sub stack.

Where can they get your sub stack? Where can they get your book? And this was a good conversation. Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate it. My substack is Diver Dialogue. That’s D E v e r dialogue.com. that’ll take you to my substack. You can subscribe for free. I do have a paid option, but that’s just if you want to be nice to me. But it’s a free subscription. There is a page on there for the book and you can send. If you fill out the little form, it’ll put you on the list. It’ll come out sometime next year.

Still working with the publicist on our release date, but it should be out in the first part of next year. Okay, well, excellent. Thank you so much for coming into the program. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.
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