The strangest things happen when you’re driving to pick up a pizza.

Having spent much of the day shuttling the kids around to various activities, my car radio was fixed on all things Taylor Swift, Adam Levine and Katy Perry. With a glorious 15 minute round trip by myself to pick up dinner, I immediately scanned the dial and the first hit was a financial advice show on how to invest my money more intelligently.

I was hooked, in the worst possible way. I actually sat outside the pizza joint for an extra ten minutes just to make sure I understood I wasn’t mis-hearing the message.

Fronted as a talk show with a friendly host and a couple visiting “experts,” this was a sly infomercial for an in-person trading seminar. Note: this was at 6:30 pm in Chicago on a very popular station, not a backwater outfit in the wee hours of the night. It being AM radio, I’m also confident that the intended audience was older Americans in or near retirement, a community to whom I’m dedicated to providing sound advice, which is why I was admittedly captivated.

The general thrust of the message was two-fold: The “market” and “the banks” are out to get you. And you can fight back with a very high winning percentage.

The black helicopter-style paranoia was sort of taken for granted, so the fighting back part was the thrust of the sales pitch. The proposed tactics, broadly defined, were to trade your own individual stocks — not only long but to short them as well — in order to capture the market upside, step out of the way with falling markets, and even profit from declines.

All of the upside, none of the downside. One of the testimonials admitted to having the occasional down day, but never a down week. Sounds great.

The expertise, should one purchase and attend the seminar, would develop through understanding how “banks” (who?) buy and sell stocks. With that understanding, one can front-run their moves — or at least know how to stay out of harm’s way. And so on.