The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Devin D. Thorpe, Author & Utah 3rd Congressional District Democrat Nominee 2020

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

Devin D. Thorpe, Author & Utah 3rd Congressional District Democrat Nominee 2020 Devinthorpe.com Amazon Link [powerpress_playlist]

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from TheResistanceRadio.com. Here we're together with another podcast. We've got a most excellent guest with us today. And of course, we're coming to you live broadcasting from the CVPN studios, the Chris Voss Podcast Network. We've got a great guest who's running for office here in the Utah 3rd Congressional District, Mr. Devin Thorpe. He's a best-selling author, speaker, and new media journalist.

Devin is known as a champion of social good. As a Forbes contributor with over 500 bylines and over 2 million unique readers, he has become a recognized name in the social impact arena. And through his Your Mark on the World show, he's interviewed over 1,200 individuals out to change the world, including celebrities, CEOs, billionaires, entrepreneurs, and others who shared his commitment to changing the world. His books, read over 1 million times, provide roadmaps of how to use money for good, and Devin has helped nonprofits raise millions of dollars via crowdfunding. He's twice hosted a 24-hour live stream on YouTube for Giving Tuesday, featuring more than 90 interviews with nonprofits.

I really like what he supports, and he's running for office here in Utah. Welcome to the show, Devin. How are you doing, buddy? Chris, thank you so much for having me. What an honor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor to have you here. And, you know, we invited a lot of the people from the Utah Democrat nominations, people that are going to be running and on the ballot this November. And I also noticed that you're also a book author. And we'll get to some of that at the end of the show. But you have five books. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yeah. And give us some of the plugs where people can take a look at some of your books and everything. Yeah. So people can learn all about me at devinthorpe.com. I'm also, you know, my show is available across, you know, whatever podcast platform you use and also on YouTube. So youtube.com slash devinthorpe and just search for my name, Devin Thorpe, on Amazon, and you'll find all my books. That's awesome. And we'll get to some of your books here at the end of the show. 925 Ideas, Building Wealth and Building the Kingdom, Adding Profit by Adding

a Purpose, Your Mark on the World, Crowdfunding and Social Good. I've seen a lot of your videos that you've done. And man, you're like the guy that I always wanted to be where I could just give and contribute and help charities. I see you touring all over the world and helping areas that are hurting and lots of great interviews they have on your YouTube channel. So tell us a little bit about who Devin is. Who is Devin and where did he come from? Well, if I may, I'll tell you a little story that will frame, I think, who I am. When I was 11 years old, back in 1976, there was a dam in southern Idaho that failed. It was called the Teton Dam.

And the dam was located upstream from the little town of Rexburg, Idaho. Rexburg was a town of about 13,000 people, and the flood left about 80% of the structures damaged or destroyed. And so that summer, people from all around the West went to Rexburg to help out. And my dad grabbed me one day and he said, Devin, on Saturday, I'm going up to Rexburg to help dig the muck and mud out of basements. Do you want to come? And I thought that sounded like a good time. So I said, sure. And I went.

And it was a good time. I spent all day, you know, trying to help. And, you know, it was an amazing, amazing experience for me. I really thought I had just really made a huge difference. Recently, I returned to Rexburg just to check, and I could not find the statue that I thought they would build in my honor. I looked everywhere. The fact is, I was an 11-year-old kid.

I have a picture of myself from that day that a friend took that I just got a few years ago after 40-plus years. And, you know, it's clear I was having trouble holding the empty shovel. I didn't really do any good. I was probably more in the way than I was helping. But I didn't know that. I didn't appreciate that. I thought I had changed the world and it changed me. I vowed a vow then that I would never miss an opportunity to serve other people. Of course I did, but that promise I made to myself has guided me. And so when I, you know, I went on to have a prosperous-ish finance career. And when

I lost the best job I'd ever had as the CFO of a large food and beverage company, I kind of channeled that enthusiasm of my youth and went on to launch a new career that started with being an author. And I also became sort of a new media journalist and writing for Forbes and did the show. And that sort of the pinnacle of that career was having Bill Gates on the show and an opportunity to talk to him about global health issues.

And wow, it seems really relevant now. It really does. In fact, he's been talking a lot more about those sort of issues. So you grew up in Utah, right? Yeah. You were born, I think, in Provo, Utah? Yeah, born in Provo. There you go.

I've lived 10 years outside of Utah. I'm 55, so 10 years outside of Utah. I'm 55. So about 45 years in Utah and 10 years living in both coasts of the United States and also in China and Argentina. Oh, wow. You've definitely seen the world. Yeah. So, you know, I've one of the things I'm proud of is that I have traveled extensively in the world. And it does give me, I think, a perspective that some people don't have, because I see how the rest of the world is coping with challenges and problems.

And I see the pros and the cons and the tensions that we face in the United States as we struggle with those issues. But I do think that there are really super relevant ways for me to translate that international experience to Utah's third district. Definitely, most definitely. And of course, everything is global these days. So you grew up here. You love the state. I see your videos and you go around, you're showing off the beautiful aspects of this valley here. And I believe in Utah Valley, a lot of your videos are around the state. And the one thing about Utah that I think everyone appreciates is how beautiful the state is, how scenic it is. We have some great national parks that are here, great skiing as well. So what made you decide to run for office?

What made you decide to make that turn? You've written like five or six books. You have this great speaking career. What made you make this turn into possibly a new career? Well, I have been doing this journalism speaker thing for about eight or nine years. And really, I was becoming frustrated a little bit that I wasn't doing enough good. And so I began a fairly formal exploration of other opportunities where I might be able to do more good. I even interviewed for a couple of CEO positions at nonprofits. But that wasn't coming together for me.

And then I started thinking, you know, I had worked on Capitol Hill 30 years ago. And so there's a part of me that every day thinks I could do better than that. I had to run for Congress. And finally, in late January, it finally hit me that I was, you know, at a point in my life when I could do that. I'm available. And I thought, wow, I could do this. And that would be a way for me to do more good, have more impact. And I got kind of fired up and decided to run. There you go. The ultimate way to give back to the nation,

give back to Utah as a representative. And so you're running in the third district and you've got your slogan is Utah Values Bold Solutions. And tell us about some of the tenets of your platform, what you're hoping to achieve in going to Congress or how you'll make Utah's lives better. Well, I think let's start with the pandemic. We have to start there. And I think there, as I mentioned, I've been traveling around the world, one of the things I focused on is global health. I have been in WHO offices in India, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. And I've talked to many other, you know, WHO leaders and UNICEF health workers and CDC experts over the years. And I am not an epidemiologist. I'm not a public health

professional or expert. But having dug deep on that topic, I know now what some of the things are that we need to be doing. And so for instance, now is not the time to cut the funding of the WHO. The WHO is the central cog in a wheel to fight the pandemic. Now, it's possible the WHO screwed up, and it's possible heads should roll. But the time to do that is not right now. And certainly the time to cut the funding is not right now. So that is that's an example of an insight that I have from my experience in traveling around the world, dealing with these issues that is relevant in, you know, Provo, Utah right now. Now, I also spent 25 years in finance, mostly helping small businesses with their financial situation. And that is super relevant to restarting, relaunching and accelerating our economy out of what will clearly be, by some measures, the second great depression in the United States. And it

will be global, right? And there has never been a time in history when entrepreneurship and innovation has been more important than it is right now. And I have lived in that world for almost my entire career. And for the last eight years, my focus has been on innovation that addresses social problems. I've looked very closely at climate change and climate change innovation and entrepreneurship. And so now we have this interesting pandemic economic crisis. And again, my experience is going to be super relevant. So what we're going to do is we're going to focus on creating paths for success for entrepreneurs. And one of the things that we're looking at is creating a matching fund for crowdfunders.

So there is a concept called investment crowdfunding. It's not very well known, but in 2012, bipartisan efforts led to the passage of the JOBS Act. And the central premise of the JOBS Act is that it should be legal under carefully regulated circumstances for small companies to sell shares to their friends, family, and customers. And that had really been, in effect, illegal since the Great Depression. And so this was an exciting innovation. So one of the things, and I don't mean to suggest that this is a cure-all for the economy, but one of the innovative things that we're looking at, and this idea came to me from some experts in my crowdfunding network, including Sherwood Neese. in the form of a grant to small businesses, it would accelerate dramatically, not only the

recapitalization of small businesses, or the capitalization of new businesses, which was equally important in this time when so many people will be laid off from big jobs. Then there's a very virtuous cycle that crowdfunding creates, right? So if you invest in the restaurant or bar down the street, how often are you going to shop there compared to if you don't own any, an interest in that, right? If you are an owner or a debt holder to that little restaurant down the street, you're going to go in there a lot more often and you're going to drag your friends, right? So it creates... There's a few burger places that I'm a part owner in already. Yeah, but it creates this virtuous cycle, right? And if the federal government accelerates that with some grants, matching grants, then the federal government

doesn't have to worry about picking winners and losers. The public will pick the winners and losers, but everyone will benefit. My first choice is going to be investing in pizza shops, clearly. But no, I mean, and like you say, this may not be a fix-all, but these are some of the ideas that you're having, you're pulling from your financial background. You and I both have a financial background. You know, I've studied finance, you probably have a good working knowledge of how the Federal Reserve works and money policy, et cetera, et cetera. This is a depression. This will be a depression. And we went through the Great Depression in 2008. It wiped out a empire of companies that I had that had been around for 20 years and I thought I would be spending the rest of my life with. And I, of course, like everyone else, got caught in that blender. And I remember we'd moved to Vegas just before the bust

to do real estate investing down there. And then when it busted, I remember living on my block and there was literally every fourth house was occupied by someone. The rest were empty homes. And you could hear the crickets going off of the fire alarms. It was the fire alarms that the batteries had run out, and no one was changing them. And so you would go out during the day or night. And at first you would be like, is there a lot of crickets in the area? And then you're like, oh, no, that's the fire alarms. And sadly, you know, even back then, Vegas casinos could stay open.

And a lot of people don't understand the 2008 recession was a global crisis meltdown too. And all around the world, countries that invested in our mortgage debentures and our bonds and everything for mortgage securities had put all their money in it. And when everything went boom, one of my companies was a mortgage company, it was ugly. And this is going to be really bad on a depression scale. We're probably going to hit probably 25, might hit 30% unemployment. The real unemployment figure is probably 30 percent um i mean technically i'm unemployed with the hit that i took at the beginning of the year with the loss of all the events and everything we do i mean when you count the money i've lost i've lost definitely a couple of people's

incomes or household of incomes in the middle range um but you know that's fine i'd rather have my mom alive than have that money but uh my two sisters who are in a care center, but you're right. We're going to have to have some people that are in the Congress that are, that know how to deal with finance, that know how to rebuild this economy, how to try different techniques that understand the levers of finance and what needs to be done.

I'm really glad that the federal reserve seems to be doing a lot of the right things. Unfortunately necessary, you know, it know, it's kind of like taking a suicide pill at this point, but it's either, you know, you're drinking bleach and hoping to live, basically. So what are some of the other principles that you're hoping to achieve in Congress, if you could? Well, one of the things I'm most excited about is using this crisis to catalyze a new future, right? There's no sense in getting back to the old normal because the old normal was not, by anybody's definition, perfect. And we have an opportunity now to invest heavily in clean energy jobs, right? We need to have massive amounts of new charging infrastructure for electric cars that are coming down the pipe. We need to have higher CAFE standards, right? The Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency Standards. President Trump dropped those, even though many car manufacturers said, please don't drop the CAFE standards.

They were fine with it. The car manufacturers were like, no, we're good. It's like, seriously, you don't have to do that. The standards sound really high, right? Because the standards are like, they were under the Obama standards, were like 55 miles per gallon by 2025. And President Trump has dropped those considerably. But 55 was not hard. Because what people don't appreciate is we're averaging in the electric cars. And an electric car, a fuel-efficient electric car will get 120 miles per gallon equivalent. And so you average in a few electric cars with your small internal combustion engine cars that are already getting 30, 40, 50 miles per gallon. And it was not a challenge for auto manufacturers to meet those standards. It would just accelerate

the transition to electric cars. So we've got to restore the CAFE standards. We've got to incentivize the construction of more infrastructure, condos and apartments. And so many people live in condos and apartments these days. That's where there's really the challenge on infrastructure because most people will charge at home. And so having a charging point in your parking spot every night is essential. And so in apartments and condos, that's trickier. That's a lot of infrastructure to install. And so we've got to find ways to do that. And I know a lot of people out there,

maybe even people in the Utah market might be like, oh yeah, I'm against this, you know, clean air sort of stuff and, you know, all that sort of thing. But what's really going to happen, and this is just going to be a fact with the coronavirus delivery, is you've already seen oil just crash. And if you look at the tankers that are just sitting offshore en masse filled with oil, there is literally no storage in Americaica to put the oil they are literally

paying people to take oil like i don't know i wish i had a tanker in my backyard because gas is like what a hundred a dollar 99 i think i saw it a hundred dollar 80 the other day i filled my i filled my uh car last night for like 20 bucks i was like that's weird yeah um and what people don't realize is this this this collapse that we're going to go through this depression um one of the things that's going to push us towards is more telecommuting teleworking companies are going to we're going to get used to living in telecommuting because i've been living from working from home since 2004 you probably about the same because you can you travel, you speak, you know, your office is kind of on the mobile sense. And so I'm used to working from home and living from home. And I don't know why more companies do it. I have a lot of friends that said to me, you know, I've been bugging my manager to let me work from home. And now I do. And I think what's going to happen is we're going to get so used to and adjusting to this. The other thing is businesses are going to be

forced to deal with that aspect because we can't put kids in schools. We can't put kids in daycare until we can get full testing going. And it doesn't look like that's coming anytime soon. And you're already seeing governments and companies realizing that we've been talking about on the Chris Voss show podcast. You know, Apple is doing a slow return their employees. We just talked yesterday about the collapse of potentially Silicon Valley where employees are like, hey, man, if we're working from home, Jack from Twitter, the CEO of Twitter just said, you know, hey, if you guys want to work indefinitely from home, you can knock yourself out. So I think we're going to finally be forced to do this telecommuting thing. That's going to still keep oil depressed. It is probably going to collapse, unfortunately,

our own oil market here in the States, but maybe we'll just learn to live off that instead of Saudi Arabia. But this is going to cause a whole thing where we're really going to get off oil because people are going to be driving less. We're already seeing the effects of that. My friends in California are like, we can see the mountains. We can breathe the air. We can go outside and stuff. It was shocking how fast it happened in March when suddenly you could see can breathe the air we could go outside and stuff you know like even it was even here in utah how fast it happened yeah in march when suddenly you could see the mountains in every direction yeah

you're like holy crap and one of the problems was utah and salt lake specifically is the inversion like before i left here and moved to las vegas uh about 20 years ago um i would wake up and I would be choking to breathe. And I could tell you how bad the aversion was by how much I was choking to breathe. And, you know, there's some other things that I don't know if they're on your agenda, but I know one of the problems that, you know, we talked about earlier in the show, Utah is a beautiful state. People love to come here. Tourism is the number one industry still. They love to see the arches, national parks, the, you know,

all the different national parks that we have here, the skiing, the movies are still filmed here because of the beautiful vistas. The one thing the Trump administration did was, you know, start opening up oil leases again and mining and just basically taking the, I think they halved one of the parks or something, or a third one of the national parks. I don't know if that's still in litigation, but they basically are just like, hey, you want to make some money and tear up the state and make it look like hell? Knock yourself out. Yeah, it is shocking to me that anyone is willing to drill for oil in this situation that we're in.

The trends are unmistakable. We already have proven oil fields that are adequate for all of our future needs. We never need to drill a new well again for oil or gas. And yet the federal government is continuing to issue permits to drill on federal land. It makes no economic sense. Forget the environment. It makes no economic sense. And so, yes, I'm going to fight hard to prevent that from happening on these sacred, beautiful lands that we have in Utah that are just magnificent. And we have some ground in like the Moab area that is not in the national parks, but that is federal land. And right now, these are multiple use areas where people can take their four wheelers and their Jeeps and their Hummers and go out and experience nature in their vehicles in a way that is really fun and exciting. But if we tear that up to start drilling oil wells, it will be completely ruined. And it will ruin the tourism for that area as well as ruining the environment.

And we will get nothing from it. And here's the thing that you mentioned. Utah's number one export, import, number one revenue source is tourism. So I have this image in my mind that just came to me of the, you know, one of those beautiful arches that they're in the Arches Park, and there's like an oil rig behind it. Can you imagine that picture? You're just like, well, that used to be beautiful.

It's hard to imagine because there are already rigs just barely outside of some of the national parks. You drive into the national park and on your way there, you're seeing the little teeter-totter oil rigs pumping away. We don't need any more. We just don't need any more. We have enough of that. We need incentives for more clean energy, right? We need to be accelerating that transition. I read a great article today that said that already energy from solar is cheaper than anyone predicted it would be now 10 years ago. And in fact, it's cheaper now than some people were saying 10 years ago it would ever be. I want you to think about that. Some people 10 years ago didn't think

that solar would ever reach the price it is today. And there is no indication that that trend is going to lose steam. We're going to see the cost of solar, wind, wave, etc. continue to drop along with geothermal and so many other sources. And the bottom line is we are going to have abundant clean energy in the future. That future is just amazing. When the cost of energy comes down from where it is now, and it's already pretty cheap, when it comes down because of affordable clean energy models, think about all the fun we get to have with flying cars and all the rest, right? This is going to be an amazing, amazing clean future. As long as we can get this coronavirus under control.

Yeah, well, there's that. I mean, but I think people are going to be driving less. I think they're going to be traveling less. I think people are going to telecommute from home. They're going to have to because one of the parents, I mean, I've talked about this on the Chris Voss show for financial stuff. I mean, companies are going to have to realize that one of their employees, whether it's their employee or it's the spouse is most likely for the next maybe year, six months going to have to stay at home to teach the children. And, of course, watch the children.

They can't go to daycares. They can't go to schools. And I know that, you know, the Trump administration is trying to push everybody, go back to school, go back to restaurants. And there are some people that will go back to those. But anybody who's got half a brain or someone they love like I do, where I have three people that are very susceptible to getting this virus and it will kill them. Two of

them are in care centers. That thing will go through them, uh, like wildfire. And then I've got an older mother that I'd really like to, she'll live to 99. If, if, if I can get her through this virus, she's, she's just, she's just cooking. Um, and so, um, and so, you know, I'm not going out, I'm still playing it safe. Uh, I still get the giggles when I go out with my mask and my, and my gloves in Utah, but Hey, that's fine with me, man. I want my mom to live. I don't care. And I'd really like the rest of everyone to live, so I don't want to be that guy that thinks it's all about him and I care about the world. But I really think a lot of that's going to change. And so I think people are out there, whether or not you believe in clean energy, whether or not you believe in green and ozone and stuff like that, global warming, you need to realize that this virus is going to change all that and we don't

have a choice we don't control the virus and we and we do need to realize that a lot of this stuff that we're doing disturbing the world disturbing animals is creating these viruses and it's it's basically mother's earth way of going you know we're really sick and tired of you human beings you guys we're going to come up with a way to get rid of you guys, just like we did the dinosaurs. And you can take that as a comedy bit. But, but, you know, I mean, that's, that's basically where we're at. What are some other principles that are on your agenda that you would like to achieve? Well, you know, one of the things, and again, we can relate it back to the corona crisis again, but the Navajo Nation straddles three states, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, about 250,000 people in the Navajo Nation. And their rate of infection is comparable to New York City.

It's really bad. And it's really scary. And, you know, there are a lot of factors there, all of which should have been addressed by the federal government long ago. In the 1930s and 40s, the United States electrified rural America, right, the rural electrification program back in the 1930s. That program lit up every home in the United States, except on some of the Native American reservations. So there are still homes in the Navajo Nation with no electricity. There are homes in the Navajo Nation that don't have access to running water.

And you think about trying to live a properly clean lifestyle in the day of this pandemic, you realize very quickly that without water, electricity, and then internet access, it's really hard. And so we've had a spread there as a result of that. Add on to that, the Indian health services that provides healthcare on the nation's reservations is woefully understaffed and woefully underfunded. And so people already weren't getting the health care they needed. Layer on, on top of

poor health, on top of poverty, a pandemic, and you get what we're seeing now. And so this is a reminder that we have to completely eradicate extreme poverty in this country. There is no excuse for it. You know, the number of people who are living in these situations is so small that it is a rounding error on the pimple on the elephant's butt, right? This is, from a fiscal standpoint in the federal government and the scale of these stimulus packages, the complete solutions are easy to find. No one would notice them in their scale, and yet it would save countless lives and improve the lives of thousands and thousands of people. So we've got to deal with that. It broke my heart this week to see that we are failing so much as

a country that an organization, Doctors Without Borders, who normally goes to third world countries to save them, had to go to the Indian reservations to save them because the federal government is incompetent. This pandemic is going to do a lot of things. And I hope that a lot of voters that are listening to this, that are trying to decide which way they're going to go, they need to realize some things are going to happen next year. And you have a financial background. So maybe you'll agree with me on this.

But right now, we're still in the freshness of this. It seems, you know, it's kind of lost its tangent. First, everyone's kind of like, hey, we get a week off, our month off, yay. You know, now people are getting a little sick of it. They want to go back to work. But people are going to start running out of funds if they ever run out of funds already. Most people have. You've seen in some of the states the food bank lines are just – that just makes my head spin. There are people spending – they park at night, late at night in the line so that the next morning they can be somewhere in the line just for food to survive.

And this pandemic, we still have bankruptcies. We're going to have a flourish of bankruptcies. And while we're, what are we, six months away from November when people are going to vote? There's still a lot of this pandemic fallout that we're going to see over the next year. And so if you're thinking about voting, you're trying to make your decisions, you need to realize that this is going to continue on for two to three years in the future. The CEO of Bank of America, I believe it was, came out and said they

don't see recovery till the end of 2022, which it took us, what, almost 10 years, at least five to seven to dig out of the 2008 recession. This is going to be a depression with double the numbers. And, you know, at least during the Great Recession, we could operate. We could go to the office. We could go to the store. We could, you know, go to restaurants. We could go to casinos in Vegas. We could operate. We can't operate. This is very scary. There's no rebound here that's very quick. There's no V. We're going to need solid people in the legislature that understand financials, money. We're likely going to need a great deal of some type, like I believe it was FDR had to bring us back.

Was it Truman or FDR? FDR, yep. We're going to have a great deal where we're going to have to do things like you talked about some of the things of, of reestablishing clean energy, putting, you know, we may have to hire people to put electronic things out places, build infrastructure. You know, the one thing about this country is it has a failed infrastructure and they say

it may take $4 trillion to do that. Let's put people to work, put back people back to work, yeah. Doing stuff and keeping them busy, put a paycheck in their thing. And that's what we had to do to get out of the Great Depression. That's most likely what we're going to have to do with this. The legislators are going to have to sit down and go, we've got to figure out a way to get people to work. I mean, yeah, we can hand people paychecks,

but I was reading that on Bloomberg, I believe it was today. Let's see if I have this already available. But you have you're going to be approaching 20, 25 million jobs. They're going to be or 25, 20 to 25 percent of the economy. People are going to be out of jobs. That's one out of every four Americans. That is crazy time stuff. And I'm sure it will be much higher because a lot of people don't go off to work.

Maybe they were part-time, maybe they're self-employed like me. I mean, I don't qualify for, you know, all the goodies. I'm self-employed. I don't, I don't really have employees. If I do, I use virtual assistants, but my income takes a huge kick in the nuts and my spending does. And so the money goes around and a lot of people don't realize this is a global thing. And so even if you're in Utah, you feel like, hey, you know, we're not too bad. We're a little rural, so we're not getting the crazy stuff like LA and New York and stuff. The global economy, what buys into it is going to have a depressing effect on everything.

And the money goes around. And if you don't think that has an effect on you, I mean, Utah has got some really big companies that are global. I think there's Adobe here. You'd be able to probably name them more than I have, but I passed some of them on the freeway. There's very big companies here and they employ a huge amount of people, even here in Utah Valley. A lot of technical, you know, Utah Valley likes to call itself the Silicon Valley of Utah or something like that. Silicon Slopes is what we like to call it. Yeah. There you go. And that's going to have an effect. People are going to get

laid off and we're going to, you're going to see this over the next six months, over the next year, over the next two years. I mean, you're going to see probably, I don't know how soon it would take. You may have a better call on this, but probably the next six months, we're probably going to see bankruptcies kick. You're going to have, people can what usually go about 90 days on their mortgages. A lot of creditors have said, Hey, we'll give you like 60 days to do stuff and cover your butt. But eventually that's going to run out. Creditors are eventually going to say, Hey man, we got to get paid. Um, and, uh, and then, you know, we're going to see the flush of foreclosures that we saw in 2008 where, you know, it was brutal, just brutal. Uh, values are going to go down, so people aren't going to be

able to get their equity out of their 401ks. They're not going to be able to get their equity out of their homes. They're going to lose that because the values are going to tank. I believe the Board of Realtors for the U.S. has said that there will be probably about 20% to 30% fall in values of homes. And 30% might be much. I think it was like 15 to 20. But this is going to be brutal. Car values, everything is going to be not worth as much as it used to be. And there's not going to be people buying. Everyone's going to be selling. I mean, in 2008, I could go down to the pawn shops in Las Vegas and I could buy the nicest stuff because I, you know, I still had money and, and, and fortunately, um, just nobody was buying. So you go down and rip the

arm off the pawn shop and the pawn shop had everybody's gear in it because the, the whole city was in collapse. And now I just fear it's going to be worse for my favorite city in the world. But, um, one of the other things I wanted to go back to too, was we were talking about the environment and how the Trump administration is setting everything back. Uh, one of the things I remember when I left here in Utah, um, and went to Las Vegas was, I can't remember how many super fun sites there are here. Soup is it's super fun, right? Uh, there was one up in Murray, I believe, I believe Kennecott's also's super fun right uh there was one up in murray i believe i believe kennecott's also a super fun site technically and then there was a uh there was a mine down i think near moab

yeah that um that if i recall rightly it was a bestest it was a bestest mine or uranium uranium was big here too during the 50s so utah had all these superfund sites they were having to clean up uh everything else that were besmirching the environment um and now the trump administration is as has basically thrown the epa out with during this virus and said yeah just do whatever the hell you want and uh i mean god knows what that's going to wreak on the havoc of this state. I mean, regardless of party or what you want to believe about global warming, the number one income for the state is tourism. And if you wreck the beautiful state of Utah, I mean, that's all anybody ever talks about. I mean, I lived all over the world and people go,

people go, Oh yeah, you're from Utah. Oh, that's the place. They have beautiful parks and they have that skiing and stuff. Like no one's like, hey, you have that smelly lake that smells like salt and death. No, you're exactly right. You know, we all depend on clean air. We all depend on clean water. And if we roll back the standards that protect our clean air and our clean water, people will die. And if we do things that will damage the beauty of our natural resources in this state, we will lose our incomes, as you say. So there are three different independent ways in which we are at risk from a failure of the EPA to protect us. And so it's just paramount that we make sure that the laws that protect our water, air, and our environment are preserved and restored to the extent they've already been repealed. It's really scary to think about drinking unsafe water, breathing polluted air, and living in a landscape that no one wants to see.

Yeah. And the inversion in Salt Lake City, man, if we could get rid of that, even here in Utah County, holy crap. I remember seeing, I sent it up to my family, drones, where they took the drones above the inversion and it showed the above layer that locks in the uh smog and stuff and i grew up in california in socal and so i grew up in the era of the smog where you couldn't see the mountains you could you see the couple cars in front of you yeah and you'd be sitting there going well this is fucking sucks. But, I mean, there you are. So anything more... You can see the difference, right? There's a huge difference in air quality in Los Angeles,

even though the city has grown because of fewer tailpipe emissions. You know, California has insisted on sun electric cars for 20 years. And California has insisted on cleaner tailpipe emissions from cars with tailpipes for 30 or 40 years. And it has made a big positive difference. And we saw it immediately with the pandemic. When people start driving, driving miles dropped about 30% along the Wasatch Front, I think is roughly the number. And immediately, you could see the mountains again. It was almost instantaneous that that happened.

And it happened around the world. So yeah, you're exactly right. All right. So let's give one more plug before we move on to talking about your books. We'll make a segment for the Book Author Podcast here. Give us the plug for people to go to your website for your running for Congress. Yeah.

So the website for my congressional race is devinthorpe.com and you can follow me on Twitter at Devin D Thorpe. All right. And so if you're just joining the show from our book author podcast, we have Devin Thorpe on. Devin is the author of five books. Is that correct, Devin? Yeah, yeah.

9 25 Ideas, Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom, Adding Profit by Adding Purpose, Your Mark on the World, Crowdfunding for Social Good. And so you can find these, of course, on Amazon. Five books, man. I'm still trying to get my first one done. So this is pretty freaking awesome. And when did your first book get written? So, you know, it's an

interesting story. At least it's interesting to me. I hope it's interesting to someone else. But I wrote it in 1998. I wrote that Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom book, which is sort of a financial handbook for people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's kind of my community. And so I wrote that back in 98. And I submitted it to the three or four publishers that publish LDS books, and no one wanted it. At least I had the foresight. I started preparing to self-publish in 98. and it became very clear after a few weeks of working on this that it would mean paying to have expensive books printed and driving them around in my trunk. I'm thinking, I got a day job. What do I do?

Take my lunch hour and go sell books on the corner? I suspended the project, but I had the foresight to say, I'm going to keep all of these materials and the draft and the manuscript because technology will make this easy to do someday. And sure enough, by 2011, it was very easy. So when I went to China to live for a year, I took all those materials with me digitally so that I could update the book and publish it. And I published it first as an ebook and then as a print on demand book. And it was kind of exhilarating to get my first book done. And then I wrote another book, Your Mark on the World, which is essentially a book about using your money for good. And that is the theme of my books, right? Using money for good, including with adding profit by adding purpose. It's about businesses using their influence to do good in the world. And so I really am truly a capitalist, but I am not one who would say that unfettered capitalism is the way to go.

Unfettered capitalism tends to bring out some of the worst in some of us. And so we need some fetters to keep us. Definitely regulations. We need to make work work, we need to do that. So anyway, lots of books. I'm with you on the unfettered cap, on taking and regulating

capitalism. Unfettered capitalism, uncontrolled capitalism is out of control. And I hate, part of the reason I hate the discussion on that is people go, oh, you're a socialist, you're a communist. And they see things from a very black and white, you know, aspect of it. I've owned my own company since I F you, I got mine. You can get yours. If I can come from being poor, you can too. F you, uh, you know, don't come near my pile. You know, it was the old Pink Floyd song. I got my money and, uh, you know, whatever. And then, uh, 9-11 happened and I started realizing a few things and, and kind of some of the things that I thought were so great about being rich

weren't so great. And the kind of the reality kicked in and caring about the world and caring about other people and realizing that there are some people who are either given into either health issues or a life that they don't have the same sort of opportunities. They don't have access to the same sort of things. Uh, they don't have access to same sort of things. And, uh, you can't just say to them, well, you know, just pull your own bootstraps up and get a positive attitude and you'll be a millionaire someday. That's not the way it works. And, and there's all sorts of trips and follies that people can have happen to them haphazardly along the way life happens to people. Tragedy happens to people. And, you know,

not everyone has a perfect run. And so, you know, more and more, that's been the discussion that I've been having. There was a book that I read recently that talked about how, you know, we keep thinking billionaires come and save us. And billionaires, you know, they have all the money. You know, we let them have all the money by lowering their taxes all this year and we're paying more taxes. And so surely they'll save us, you know, during this pandemic, we've seen that they won't, they're just, uh, they're on their yachts going and their islands going, we're not getting this disease from those idiots. Um, very few of them are putting forth any money. Um, The sad part is a lot of Americans don't even understand finances.

They don't understand when they're like, oh yeah, Michael Jordan just, and I'm not knocking Michael Jordan, but he just came off the top of my head. Michael Jordan just gave $100 million to his foundation that he can give away for charity. And people go, wow, man, he gave that away. And you're just like, you don't understand how foundation works, do you? Yeah.

Yeah. A foundation is required. You know this, right? Chris, a foundation is required to spend or distribute 5% of its assets every year. Yeah. And that phrase is very important, spend or distribute. So a foundation can meet all of its criteria as a charitable foundation by spending 5% of its assets on advisors and giving away nothing. Now, I don't mean to suggest that that's what they do as a rule. In fact, most are very

efficient and most are really charitably minded. But yes, when a billionaire puts $100 million into a foundation, it may or may not have any correlation with that money ending up in the hands of someone who is needing it. And even then it's a tax shelter for them. And that's really all it is. And then you can run all sorts of expenses that you'd normally do with your personal stuff. You know, you can, you can even pay politicians and, you know, you can do all sorts of stuff with foundations. It's crazy.

And a lot of people don't understand these instruments, sadly, and stuff like that. So you've got some other books here. Crowdfunding for Social Good. Yeah. And I imagine that was talking about what we talked about earlier with crowdfunding. Yep. 925 ideas to help you save money, get out of debt, and retire a millionaire. This is probably definitely a book good book to get right now with the economy crashing.

Definitely gets some things. Added profit by any purpose. Now, I saw this in a lot of the videos that I researched on you. A lot of you speaking things, you were showing how when companies give, it really makes a difference in the world. And the more that they give, the more, you know, it's that essence of paying it forward and getting payback from just being good to everyone? Yeah, there is really good evidence that being socially responsible does increase profits. And it's kind of anathema to an older generation of people. the people just a little bit older than us, really were raised on an ethos of capitalism is inherently good, and it should be unfettered. And, and really,

this younger generation of people kind of starting with Generation X, accelerating with the millennials, and certainly, Gen Z just accepts that this is the case, that corporations have an obligation to do good in the world. It is not enough that they employ people. They have to employ people ethically. They have to treat their consumers and the environment ethically and fairly. And we're starting to see people really hold companies to account. In India, companies are now required to do corporate social responsibility efforts. It's almost like a tax. They've got to measure their spending on CSR and prove that they have spent an adequate amount or they're taxed. Yeah. And one of the things I'd like to see

because I was raised in the 70s you know I had that whole expectation of that era where you work for one company all your life you get a gold watch at the end and a nice pension and you have the two picket fence the two car garage the wife doesn't work

and you have the nuclear atomic family of two or three kids and everything's fine you know you vacation once or twice a week a year and everyone goes to disneyland and uh and then i saw the collapse of that in the 80s where we reached that i call it the good is the the ivan bioski greed is good era um the rise of Donald Trump, the art of the deal, where everything was about investors and the stock market and screw employees. Employees are disposable. Hey, you want to make your stock price go up?

Kill off 20,000 employees. There you go. Stock price pops. Investors are happy. You fill your banks. You know, we saw the that was when we saw the flip to where CEOs started making just these crazy exponential amounts times the frontline workers where it used to be very much smaller and things have just gotten worse. And I don't know, it's going to be interesting to see how Gen Z, I believe it is, this newer generation that's coming to college, is going to deal with this. We saw the fallout from the millennials, the damage of the millennials

because they watched their parents lose their retirement, their houses. That caused some interesting damage to that generation. One of the things you were talking about, and I want to just jump in if I may, Chris, but you talked about this shift toward huge compensation for executives. And a lot of that is tied back to an article that was published in the 19, I think 1980, by a couple of University of Rochester professors who argued that management wasn't aligned with owners and that to align the interests of management with owners, they should be given stock options so that their interests would be truly aligned. And of course, what we've seen since then is that in every way to Sunday,

it's been disproven because stock options were a poor way of aligning the interests with shareholders. In fact, they further misaligned the interests between management and companies, but it fixated a whole generation of managers on this idea that managers should get extraordinarily wealthy from their jobs. And it's just absurd. The same thing didn't happen in Germany. So for instance, you can hire a competent executive in Germany for about a tenth the compensation of what you would have to pay in the United States to the same executive. It's just nuts. It's just nuts.

Things are out of skew, out of all sorts, completely out of kilter in the United States. Exactly. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. And we've seen the whole dissolving of the middle class from those concepts. The dissolution of the dissolving from those concepts um the the dissolution of uh the dissolving of main street and so and and what's sad is main street kind of started making a comeback all the small employers entrepreneurs you know we see it with the haircut shops and the barber shops and you know all the people are trying to reopen we see with the little restaurants that are trying to survive. They're entrepreneurial owned.

They're being destroyed right now, just destroyed. And most likely won't come back. I was reading something on Bloomberg this morning that like basically 30% of the restaurants that are out there won't be reopening. They won't be able to, they'll either won't be able to reopen or if they do, there's just not the economy that's going to be there for them. Yeah. And it's tragic. It's tragic. And right now, like I said, we're still kind of riding on savings. We're still kind of riding on backup money. Some people are living off of, you know, what they're getting for unemployment still. But I think most unemployment benefits run for what,

six to eight months? Yeah. In fact, there's a big chunk of the unemployment benefits in the form of a $600 a week uptick, surplus benefit that only runs for 12 weeks. And so, you know, I think the initial thinking of the CARES Act was that we would have this sort of V-shaped recession or depression or whatever you want to call it. And to your point, it's not going to be a V. It's going to be an L or a U. And so we've got to deal with a longer-term problem than that.

Yeah. For a while, it's going to be a sucking drain. and so we've got to deal with a longer term problem than that. For a while, it's going to be a sucking drain and it's going to suck for a while. It's just going to keep spinning. The bankruptcy is going to happen. The savings are going to run out. The employers who haven't laid off are going to lay off. And it spins and it's all global too. This isn't something that's just us

and we're like well maybe we can bounce back if the world helps us out that germany has already hit a depression um it's just going to be this this swirling down the the drain of everything and somewhere we're going to hit bottom and you know be able to rebuild like we did with the great recession but it's going to take time and it's going to take years and it's going to get much uglier i mean right now we're still kind of in the i hate to call it this the sweet zone of like you know we're still kind of like it really still hasn't hit us yet that things like we keep seeing things are bad yet but you're like i still have some cash in the bank i think i'm gonna be okay i got a few things I can move around, sell, and, you know, whatever. But it's going to come to a point.

And, you know, even for me and you who operate from, like, sales of books, sales of products, sales of our consultant services, or, you know, speaking gigs. I have a lot of friends that are speakers. They're out of work, basically, basically at this point there's no speaking gigs yeah so you know all my speaker friends are out of work my dj friends my wedding photographer friends uh i mean there's a a lot of this economy that's in trouble yeah about the only good place to be right now is a funeral director and even even then, that's not going to be very profitable, because they're struggling to just deal with the body count, and where to put the bodies. So, I recommend everyone get a chance to check out

your books. They can go to Amazon and check them out. Anything more we need to know about some of the good stuff you have going on there? Well, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about this. I think the key thing to remember is that money's only real value is the good you can do with it. At the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters.

And if you want to do some good with that money, you can send it to paypal.com. No, I'm just kidding. It will be a charitable distribution i'm not sure if it's a full write-off according to 503b but uh i will feel charitable and i will thank you so no i'm just kidding um that was like that was the paypal plug version uh evidently paypal is the sponsor this week so anyway devin it's been wonderful to have you guys on the show if you got a portion of this on our book author podcast you can see a full version of this on uh the resistance radio and the chris voss show chris voss show

podcast a lot of featurettes of that over there devin is also running for congress in the state of utah the third district and uh and uh i think he's definitely someone worthy enough to go to the Congress. He knows the financials to help dig us out of this market. He cares about the Utah environment. And that's going to be important because tourism is the number one industry here. So if you're going to bring back money to Utah, you got to take care of this beautiful state and get the tourists back here, uh,

enjoying tour and spending their money for the local restaurants and everything else and all that good stuff. Uh, so thanks for being on the show today, Devin. We definitely appreciate it. Everyone go check him out. Give us your links one more time,

Devin. So Devin Thorpe.com for the website, uh, and, follow me on Twitter at Devin D Thorpe and Instagram at Devin D Thorpe too. Awesome sauce. So we appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to check out all of our nine podcasts on the CVPN.com, the Chris Foss podcast network, nine podcasts that are over there and everything else. Be sure to subscribe to thechrisfossshow.com

and thereresistanceradio.com, the podcast where we talk about all things politics. We're going to actually have next week the governor nominee for the state of Utah. He's going to be on. I've seen Devin interview him. He's interviewed a lot of the different... Great guy, Chris Peterson.

Yeah, very nice guy. And so he's going to be on, so look for that. And so are the different other people running for office. Definitely a lot of politics things we'll be talking about as we run up to the November election. This country needs to change, and things need to get better. And I sincerely believe, maybe it's just me, but I think if you can look at the news

and look at how you're stuck in your home, that certainly government needs to change what government's doing. And I think the other thing we're going to hopefully learn from all this is we need to take care of each other's health, just not our own. Because the health of the person in China, the health of the person in Germany, the health of the person next door, the health of the person sitting next to you in the office is just as important as your health. Because what goes around comes around with this sort of virus. it does not know borders race governments flags it it it doesn't care it will just kill you eat you destroy you physically maim you for life um it's no fun and god knows what the next one would be if there is one and even uh dr f Fauci has said there may be another one on the horizon and that may be even less containable. So anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you guys and

we'll see you next time.