The Paul Truesdell Podcast

MY VOTE: MIKE MILLS AND DR. SARAH JAMES By Paul Truesdell Early voting begins today, Thursday, October 22, in Marion County. One of the first things I intend to do today is vote. Early voting continues through October 31, from eight in the morning until six in the evening. I am voting for Mike Mills for Marion County School Board District 4 and Dr. Sarah James for District 5. I am asking you to please read this all the way through and share it with as many people as you know. School board races often receive far less attention than they deserve. People concentrate on the offices at the top of the ballot and overlook decisions that directly affect our children, teachers, property taxes, and community’s future. In my opinion, this is a watershed moment for education in Marion County. These races deserve your attention. I will not vote for Brigitte Smith or Donald Barber. Our children deserve capable leadership. Our teachers deserve support. Our taxpayers deserve people who understand budgets, ask intelligent…

When the Safe Harbor Takes Fire This is about money, and the parts of it most people have never laid eyes on. It is not a sermon about whose side God is on in the Middle East. It is about what happens to people's savings when the balance of the world shifts, and it is shifting right now. Here is the plain truth. Most people who save money do not know what they are actually invested in. Not because they are careless. Because the money sits in bundled financial products, and nobody ever opened the box for them. That is especially true of retirees and people close to retirement. They are the ones holding the money. The Federal Reserve says the baby boom generation alone holds about half of all household wealth in America. That money took a lifetime to build. So if you are retired, or close to it, keep one question in your pocket the whole way through. Do you know what is in your bundle? The Box With Your Name on It Most savers do not own stocks one at a time. They own bundles. A mutual fund is a bundle. An ETF,…

If It Quacks Her hair never moves. She sits in a white coat with a stethoscope around her neck, a neat bob, a kind face, and a calm voice. She tells you what to put in your coffee. She tells you which thirteen foods help your body's natural weight-loss hormone. The channel calls her Dr. Elizabeth Monroe. Here is the surprising part. Much of what she says is ordinary, decent advice. Eat your greens. Eat fish a couple of times a week. Eat beans, berries, and eggs. Watch the sugar. Walk. Your own doctor would tell you most of that. Some of it is stretched, and some of it you should run past your doctor first, especially the supplements. But the advice is not the real problem. The real problem is that she isn't real. The Tells By every sign we can find, she is a computer creation. Same face, same haircut, same voice, same pace in every video. No practice, no hospital, no license anyone can find. The channel's own About page calls her Dr. Ashley Monroe. A real doctor's office does not forget the doctor's first…

Hooves on the Ballot Ground beef is running close to seven dollars a pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reason is simple. America is running out of cows. And the place where that problem meets your kitchen table, your property value, and your grandchildren's jobs is a school board runoff right here in Marion County, where two candidates, Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber, are running a cancel campaign. I am going to explain how these two individuals, with their wildly intolerant cancel culture, are clueless when it comes to agriculture in Marion County, and why their backyard chicken and pigpen experience does not equate to understanding the business. This is a piece about one industry built on two animals, the cow and the horse, and about the children who will run it someday. It is about who should be in charge of those children's education. Look at the national number first. The USDA's January cattle report counted eighty-six point two million head in this country. That is the smallest…

The Argumentative Waterboy What This Is About A week ago I said, Mr. Barber, you're next. This is that piece. It is about a man running for the Marion County School Board in District 5 against Sarah James. His name is Donald Barber. His campaign calls him Donny. I call him the argumentative Waterboy, because he ran a city's water system and because of his long history of plain obnoxious arguments. By the end of this you will see that the record backs the nickname. This is not about his family, his faith, or his children. It is not about whether he can read a utility budget. He can. It is about temperament. A man who could not keep the peace inside one small-city department now wants a vote over a school district with a budget of roughly $1.23 billion. That figure is the tentative 2026-27 budget, as reported by The Florida Trib. A Lesson from Rome Go back with me about two thousand years. Seneca was the most celebrated philosopher in Rome and the tutor to a young emperor named Nero. Seneca spent years trying…

Leaving the Room Separation Anxiety, the Caregiver's Own Life, and What a Fiduciary Actually Does Contents The Essay 1. Two People in One Room 3 2. A Letter from 1994 3 3. What Separation Anxiety Actually Is 3 4. Leaving Well 4 5. The Bench 5 6. The Caregiver Is the Second Patient 6 7. Two Households 6 8. Medicare Already Agrees with You 7 9. What a Fiduciary Does in This Season 7 10. ALIVE, for Two 8 The Essay 1. Two People in One Room There is a particular moment that nearly every family caregiver knows. You are standing at the front door with your keys in your hand, and the person you love asks, for the third time in ten minutes, where you are going and when you will be back. You answer patiently, and then you answer again. Then you face the real question, which is whether you are allowed to walk out the door at all. This piece is about that moment. It covers three things: the practical side of separation anxiety in a loved one living with Alzheimer's or another dementia, or in a family member who is…

Waves of Hogwash The Dinosaur in the Gas Tank - The Star Chamber on the Ballot Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC September 26, 2026 From a 1970s science class to a 2026 school board race, the same wave of nonsense keeps rolling in. Here is how to see it coming. Dinosaur oil, famines that never came, a burger that crashed the cattle market, and two local candidates who see fraud behind every door. Every generation gets its prophets of doom. Ours had Ehrlich, Carter, Oprah, and Gore. Marion County has the Bobbsey Twins. History repeats itself. The trick is remembering it. Waves of Hogwash A Rare Breed Numbers and story, introvert and speaker, and why I will never tell you something I don't know. I'll accept it. I'm a rare breed. I'm equally quantitative and qualitative. I work the numbers, and I work the story behind the numbers. I've always described myself as an analytical expressive. When I tell people I'm an introvert by nature, they look at me up in front of a big room, perfectly comfortable…

I'll Be Your Huckleberry The Paul Truesdell Podcast and Blog September 23, 2026. Tuesday at Stone Creek On Tuesday, September 22, I sat in the Stone Creek Republican Club meeting with hundreds and hundreds of Republican residents, and a few non-residents, to hear our State Representative Ryan Chamberlin promote Amendment 3. It would significantly increase the homestead exemption and give tax relief to a lot of retirees. Ryan has worked diligently to abolish property taxes and now to increase the homestead exemption, and he should be respected for his efforts. This piece is not about Amendment 3. It is about what was going on in the reunion center room before the meeting began. Two candidates for school board arrived early and worked the crowd. They did the good old fashion shoe leather politicking; however, in my opinion, they spread false narratives to whoever would listen and some were gullible. Now, I want to make it perfectly clear why I want nothing to do with these two people as candidates or as fake…

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 0:08 Well, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. It is Monday, September the 14th, and it is 2026. So today, I thought I would start reactivating the Paul Truesdell podcast and start doing things a little bit different, kind of telling you what we're doing and why we're doing it, because I think it's important for me to talk to you in a way that we're having a real conversation and talking about things that may you may not know how things have developed over the years, and it's been you know really quite amazing the way things have have occurred. I mean, I did a lot of of conversations called workshops, and we did these workshops at the in Ocala, in in in Zephyr Hills, Dade City, Tampa, San Antonio, and as time has developed, I I've always used technology pretty efficiently and effectively. We used to hand out cassette tapes. Always I handed out cassette tapes, and then I handed out VHS tapes, then CDs. We never did DVDs. I never really quite caught on. And…

The Warehouse Where They Keep You By Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder – September 8, 2026. What This Is About This is not a story about the government spying on you. That is an old fear, and a healthy one, and I am not here to talk you out of it. This is a story about the other crowd. The ones who never needed a warrant, because you let them in the front door yourself, and you did it for free. The Chat Room Go back with me to when people were just getting on the internet. AOL was a big deal. The chat rooms were a big deal. There was no compression and no streaming, so there was no video and no music to speak of. You typed, you waited, and you read. That was the internet for most of us. I was one of the first people doing podcasting, back when most folks had not heard the word. And I used to tell people something they did not believe. I told them I could prove the machine was paying attention. Not the government. The machine. Here is the test I gave them. Type the word John into Google. Just John. Watch what…

Disclaimer Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34482 Horse Capital of The World 352-612-1000 Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Founder of The Truesdell Companies Facts are important and are often muddled with language that is not necessary. A rapid-fire listing of facts is one way to make a point. Four and a half years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine under the brutal dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, the numbers tell a story the Kremlin never expected to experience. What follows is not opinion. It is arithmetic — territory measured in meters per day, casualties measured against months of recruitment, refineries measured in barrels lost, and a birth rate measured against two centuries…

Think About It Connecting the dots with clear-eyed forecasting and practical wealth advice and management. Rational. Calm. Built for a mature audience that wants facts, not noise.Think about it. For most of our lives, radiation has been a scare word. The movies taught it. The news stories taught it. The school lessons taught it. Radiation was pure poison, the thing that turned people into monsters or gave them cancer overnight. A whole generation of us grew up believing it was the worst thing on earth. Here is the simple truth. We cannot live without radiation. Not one day. Not one hour. Radiation is energy moving through space. That is the whole definition, and nothing more. It covers a wide family of energies, some of them gentle and some of them strong, and telling them apart is the whole job. So let me start with where you are sitting right now. Right now, sitting in your chair, radiation is hitting you. The light in the room is radiation. The warmth coming off your coffee cup is radiation. The radio…

Fix the Engine Before You Wax the Hood A bite-size think about it bite. When my father worked on the family car, he never waxed the hood while the engine was still knocking. He fixed the big thing first, then worried about the shine. In Ukraine, they made a smart choice about order. Most of the supplies moving into Crimea came over land. Only a small slice, something like four or five percent, came by sea. So they went after the land routes first, the ones carrying the heavy load. Only after those were degraded did they turn to the ships. Had they hit the ships first, it would have been a minor distraction, and the rest would simply have shifted to the roads. Here is the point worth holding onto. The order you do things in can matter as much as the things themselves. A lot of people pour their energy into small financial tweaks, the equivalent of waxing the hood, while the big levers sit untouched. Handle the largest items first, the ones carrying most of the weight, and the smaller pieces tend to fall into…

The Outernet. A bite-size think about it bite. Remember when finding a phone number meant reaching for the white pages, and finding a good plumber meant flipping through the yellow pages? That world has quietly slipped away. And here is something even harder to wrap our heads around. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Buck Rogers — the shows many of us watched as kids and assumed were pure fantasy — have started to become real. That future is unfolding above us right now, and it is beginning to change the way money moves. Some people are calling it the "outernet." A growing number of investors, both retail and institutional, are pouring billions of dollars into cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and even blockchain and cryptocurrency. When you look closely at all of these industries, one common thread tends to connect them. That thread is data, and in many ways, data has become the whole ballgame. Here is a piece that many people seem to be missing. Space companies are often the ones…

Paul Grant Truesdell, Sr. Paul Grant Truesdell | Founder & CEO The Truesdell Companies The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34482 212-433-2525 - Switchboard paul@truesdell.net - General Email Websites truesdellwealth.com ttruesdell.net paulTruesdell.com The Long Bet Two and a half million souls, a wild coast, and the wager that built an empire Picture the whole country in 1776. Every man, woman, and child who called this new place home — you could have gathered them all up, and you still wouldn't have filled a big modern stadium twice over. Two and a half million people. That was it. They were strung out along the eastern rim of a wild continent, their backs to the ocean and their faces to a wilderness nobody had mapped. No army worth the name. No treasury. No factories humming in the night. By every measure the world used to keep score back then, they were nobody. And you and I both know how that story turned out. Now, the land itself was a character in this tale — maybe the…

Paul Grant Truesdell | Founder & CEO The Truesdell Companies The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34482 212-433-2525 - Switchboard paul@truesdell.net - General Email Websites truesdellwealth.com Truesdell.net PaulTruesdell.com Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 0:00 It is Thursday, june 25 Let's talk about AI and the bias built into the programming, and how frustrating it is when you are fiscally conservative or Republican and favorable of the overall direction of the Trump administration, regardless of who you are and what you believe. The soft to hard push is always there. Speaker 1 0:25 Welcome to the Paul Truesdell podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook, and@paultrusedell.com where you will find much more and the rest of the story. Let's begin. When Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 0:48 you use AI programs, you have to understand what each one can and cannot do. Not all programs are created equal. That is why I warn people, do not take your financial…

Rough Producer Notes LIGHT BLUE They told us Antifa was just a myth, an idea, a figment of conservative imagination cooked up to scare folks, but this week in Minneapolis the Department of Justice proved every last one of them wrong and the arrests have already begun. YELLOW For years the legacy media, the Democrat Party, and every left-wing voice with a platform swore Antifa didn’t really exist while black-clad militants blocked roads, stalked officers, and launched military-style attacks on American law enforcement right in our cities, yet President Trump and his team have now cracked down hard with federal charges against fifteen members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota, that umbrella outfit of militant groups including the Black Hat Workers Collective whose own Facebook page proudly showed the burning of a Minneapolis police precinct. These weren’t peaceful protesters waving signs; they were organized operators who held planning meetings, practiced military-style operational security, set up…

Kaiser's Coffins to Killer Swarms Truesdell Wealth Events Truesdell Wealth Contact Truesdell Travel The February 2027 Cruise Truesdell Travel Contact Paul Truesdell About Blog Podcast Why Cheap, Expendable Drones—Not Billion-Dollar Platforms—Will Decide the Next Century of American Power Good morning, afternoon, or evening, this is Paul Truesdell and this is the Paul Truesdell Podcast. There is an old truth out in the high country, one that every scout and every hunter and every man who ever read the weather off a ridgeline comes to learn. The wind always tells you what is coming before the storm arrives. You only have to be quiet enough to listen, and honest enough to believe what you hear, even when the sky straight overhead is still blue. I want to talk to you about a storm that is gathering. Not to frighten you, because fear is a poor compass and a worse general. I want to talk about it so that we are ready. Because the United States is in the middle of the largest retooling of its military since the…

SOCIAL SECURITY 2033 The 2033 Deadline: What Every American Over 55 Needs to Know About Social Security and The Truth About Social Security's 2033 Problem The trust fund didn't fail overnight. It was emptied one predictable year at a time. What the Trustees' report actually says -- and what it means for the check that lands in your account every month. A straight-shooting look at the largest government program in the world, and the seven years that will decide its next chapter. Paul Grant Truesdell, Sr. J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Paul Grant Truesdell | Founder & CEO The Truesdell Companies The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34482 212-433-2525 - Switchboard paul@truesdell.net - General Email Websites truesdellwealth.com Truesdell.net PaulTruesdell.com THE EPISODE DROP IN – 12-01 Welcome to the Paul Truesdell Podcast. This episode will be a little different — a combination of discussion, with questions sprinkled throughout. It is Friday, June 12, 2026. Today's topic: The 2033…

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS You have known the aircraft carrier all your life. It is the floating city of steel — a thousand feet of runway riding the open ocean, home to thousands of sailors and scores of fighter jets. For three generations, it has been the proudest symbol of American reach. When trouble flared anywhere on the globe, a president had only to ask one question: where are the carriers? And the answer, more often than not, settled the matter. That great ship is not going away. But the story of the carrier is changing — quietly, and faster than most folks realize. And in a moment, I'll tell you the rest of the story. Here is the trouble, told plainly. The very thing that makes a supercarrier so mighty — its size, its cost, the sheer value packed into one hull — has also made it a tempting target. Today an enemy does not need a battleship to threaten one. He needs only cheap, fast missiles and small unmanned boats and aircraft. We saw the lesson written large in the Black Sea,…

562 Podcast # Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start The Justice Department finally indicted someone. One person. A 78-year-old senior adviser, two years past retirement. On April 28, 2026, a federal grand jury in Maryland charged him with five crimes: conspiracy against the United States, destroying federal records, falsifying records during a federal investigation, hiding records, and helping others do the same.[^1] The law allows up to 20 years in prison for each falsification count.[^1] Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a "profound abuse of trust" during a global pandemic.[^1] He is right. The problem is that David Morens did not do this by himself. The people above him — the ones he reported to, the ones whose careers his lies protected, the ones who built a workplace where a senior NIH adviser could write down a plan to hide emails and send it from his government phone — those people walked out the door with paper in their pockets that says…

561 May 22, 2026 PODCAST EPISODE 561 — THE NUMBERS NOBODY WANTS TO SHOW YOU By Paul Truesdell This is episode five hundred and sixty-one. And I'm going to start with that number, because that number is the whole reason I'm doing this episode. The title of Episode 561 is The Numbers Nobody Wants to Show You. Last time, I wrapped up episode five hundred and sixty. Five-six-zero. And I'll come back to it in a minute, but I want to set the table first. Last episode I talked about what I've learned over three decades behind microphones. Why I'm not playing the algorithm game anymore. Why I'm not chasing thumbs-ups, view counts, or any of the rest of that digital fool's gold. After that one went out, a few of you asked the same question. So, Paul — where does that actually put you in the mix? What do the real numbers look like? Fair question. So I went and pulled twenty-four sources for this episode. Edison Research. The Interactive Advertising Bureau. Amplifi Media. Buzzsprout. Pew Research Center. Google's own…

Why most podcasting efforts are a waste of time. PODCAST NOTES — WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT PODCASTING By Paul Truesdell A LITTLE BACKGROUND Let me give you some background on what I've learned about this whole podcasting business. When I started, we had dialup. That's right — dialup. The internet sounded like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, and I was running a program called Icecast. I-C-E-C-A-S-T. Phenomenal piece of software. Still around, by the way. We did everything live. I shut it down. Why? My business partner had a peculiar habit — he was late, unprepared, and apparently allergic to a clock. I tried it again later with a few other folks. Same story, different cast. And I don't cotton to that. That's one of my phrases. I don't cotton to certain things, and chronic unreliability sits right at the top of the list. Here in little old sleepy Ocala — and I mean truly sleepy, the kind of sleepy where the town rolls up the sidewalks at sundown — we had built that show up to fifteen hundred, two…

Oh Cala Wood. Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road…

Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One. Drug overdose deaths fell to pre-pandemic levels in 2025. The same crowd that blames a President for the weather can't seem to find the microphone today. The Lifeguard Pulled 30,000 People Out of the Water. Now Ask Who's Pushing Them In. America just had its third straight year of falling overdose deaths — and the real story isn't only who gets the credit. It's why the beach was ever this deadly to begin with. Rough Draft & Disclaimer There's a story making its way out this week, and it's the kind of story that ought to be on every front page in the country. Ought to be. Won't be. But ought to be. The Centers for Disease Control just put out their preliminary numbers for 2025. Drug overdose deaths in the United States — the thing that has been ripping families apart for over a decade, the thing that's the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 44 — drug overdose deaths dropped nearly 14% in 2025. An estimated 69,973…

Recently, I did a podcast where I connected the dots between Chinese propaganda, its infiltration into Hollywood, and the ramifications for movie theaters and rank-and-file Americans. Not that many people watched it. And I will be a little bit mean about this: complex topics are getting harder and harder for the majority of Americans to understand and deal with. We are seeing the endless rise of attention deficit disorder, fed by telephone scrolling, YouTube scrolling, Facebook scrolling, and one short video after another. As disappointing as that is, I have to remind myself that those folks are not my client base. My client base actually thinks. My prospective clients actually think. They are able to set emotions off to the side, engage in rational, serious discussion, and recognize value when they see it. So let’s get into today’s topic. The Middle-Class Millionaire Trap – The Subtitle: Why Financial Comfort Doesn't Protect You From the Real Cost of Growing Older There is a problem in this country that…

The Fifty-Dollar Movie Ticket Hollywood, Beijing, and What It Means for Investors Over Fifty-Five Podcast script · Truesdell When I was growing up, a movie ticket cost a couple of dollars. You walked into the theater on a Saturday afternoon, you bought a box of popcorn, and you settled in. It was not a special occasion. It was a Saturday. That model is gone. This spring, Regal Cinemas sold opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three for fifty dollars apiece in their 70-millimeter IMAX house. Premium tickets now average eighteen dollars nationwide. They run as high as thirty in New York and Los Angeles. A standard adult ticket on a regular screen is about thirteen dollars. The dollar matinee is a memory. That price gap — from a couple of dollars to fifty — is the story I want to walk through with you today. It is a story about how the theater business has changed. It is a story about the kinds of movies Hollywood is making and is not making. It is a story about the quiet competition the Chinese government has…

#BigBoomerBites #TruesdellWealthChannel #SleepHealth #ChronotypeMatters #LionChronotype #FiveFiftyFive #CognitiveHealth #AmericanIndependence​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This IOC conversation does not involve securities. Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Founder Rough Show Notes OCTOBER 1, 1986 The Day I Stopped Letting Other People Run My Clock I came upon this naturally. Nobody taught me how to sleep. Nobody handed me a schedule. I just paid attention to my body, and over the years I learned what worked. Then I built a life around it. For most of my life,…

A New Dawn of Americanism: America Is Back at the Bargaining Table — and the World Knows It By Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder Let me tell you something, and I mean this from the deepest place in my chest — the place where pride lives, where conviction breathes, where love of country isn't a campaign slogan but a way of life. I have watched this nation, my nation, your nation, get picked apart, laughed at, taken advantage of, and quietly hollowed out by decades of so-called leaders who confused diplomacy with surrender and called it sophistication. They shipped our jobs overseas and told us to retrain. They signed trade deal after trade deal that gutted American manufacturing towns, and then flew home on private jets to give speeches about the working class. I watched it. You watched it. We all watched it. And then — then — something extraordinary happened. Donald Trump happened. Again. Now, hold on. Stay with me. Because this isn't just a political story. This is an American story. And it's only getting…

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Why Higher Oil Prices Are Not Saving Moscow — and What That Means for Your Portfolio PaulTruesdell.com Picture a warehouse full of product the world suddenly wants to buy. The orders are coming in. The prices are the best they've been in years. The problem is the loading dock. Someone has been quietly, patiently, methodically disabling the loading dock — not once, not dramatically, but in waves, each one designed to make the next repair harder than the last. That is Russia's position in the global energy market today. And the people responsible for it have been working toward this outcome far longer than the recent headlines suggest. When the Iran conflict pushed global energy prices up 40 percent, most financial analysis treated it as an uncomfortable windfall for Moscow. The logic was clean on its face: Russia sells oil, prices rise, revenues follow. What the logic skipped was the operational question — the question of whether Russia retains the physical capacity to move its product to market. It does not.…

The Wall Street Journal's Dirty Little Secret Let me be perfectly clear about something. I rarely read comment sections. Life is too short, and my time is too valuable. But this morning, I made an exception. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about President Trump. He likes a particular brand of dress shoes. He buys them out of his own pocket and gives them to people. As gifts. Because he's generous and he found something he likes. I personally favor Stacy Adams — good fit, fine construction — and I own most of the brands mentioned in the article. So I read it. It was a pleasant, harmless little piece showing the human side of a man the media has spent nearly a decade trying to dehumanize. Now here is where it gets interesting. You need to understand something about how the Wall Street Journal manages its comment sections — because there is a pattern, and it is not subtle once you see it. Not every article at the Journal allows comments. Many do not. But the ones that *do* allow comments? Pay attention. The…

The Bill Is Coming Due — And Nobody Wants to Hear It Governor DeSantis said it plainly this week in Kentucky: Interest payments on the national debt now eclipse defense spending. Our national debt is projected to reach a record $64 trillion by 2036 — triple the pre-COVID figure. Twenty-eight states have already passed resolutions supporting a federal balanced budget amendment. Every state except Vermont has a balanced budget requirement in its constitution. It's time Congress lived by the same rules the rest of us do. I've been watching this slow-motion train wreck for a long time. Back during the Obama years, I stood before a room of about 50 retired men and women — clients and prospective clients — and walked them through the numbers. The national deficit. The debt. Then the unfunded mandates at the federal and state level. Then municipalities — pensions especially — Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit. When I added it all up, my estimate of total unfunded obligations was somewhere around $34 trillion. The room…

Scheduling Prevented Paul From Recording THE GREATEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN Walter Isaacson’s Timely Meditation on America’s Founding Creed A Discussion, Elaboration, and Outline Introduction: Thirty-Five Words That Built a Nation There is something audacious about writing a book on a single sentence. But when the sentence in question is the second line of the Declaration of Independence—the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident”—the audacity seems proportionate to the subject. Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, published by Simon & Schuster in November 2025, is a slim volume—barely 67 pages of main text—that punches well above its weight. Timed to the approach of America’s 250th birthday in 2026, the book is part historical detective story, part philosophical meditation, and part civic sermon. It is also, unmistakably, a plea: in an era of corrosive polarization, Isaacson wants Americans to remember what they agreed upon before they started disagreeing about everything…

Deliberation, Not Debate: A Casual Conversation on Writing Your Story with AI Reflections on Session One of a Four-Part Series By Paul Truesdell This piece is written for those who attended the first session of our four-part series on using artificial intelligence to write your own personal stories. It is also written for the lady who arrived a bit late and missed the handout, for those who could not attend but wish they had, and for anyone considering joining us for session two. Consider this your on-ramp. Consider this your invitation to keep going. — — — One of the things I enjoy most in life, beyond doing the talking myself, is listening. Really listening. Not the kind of listening where you are just waiting for the other person to stop so you can say your piece, but the kind where you are genuinely trying to understand the why behind what someone is telling you. In my world, the why is what we call the qualitative analysis. You have your quantitative side, of course, the facts and figures, the hard…

Almost Nobody Writes. Here’s the Proof. And Why That’s About to Change for You. A Handout for Folks Who Like Facts By Paul Truesdell, JD, AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC —————————— Let me tell you why you’re here, or at least why I hope you’re here. You’re not here to write the next great American novel. You’re not here to craft fiction or chase a publishing deal or see your name on a shelf at Barnes and Noble. You’re here because somewhere inside you, there are stories that matter. Real stories. Your stories. The ones your children and grandchildren deserve to hear, the ones that explain where they came from and what shaped the family they were born into. Memories that will be cherished long after you and I are gone. The problem is, almost nobody actually writes those stories down. And I can prove it. The Size of the Country The United States population sits at roughly 342 million people as of early 2026. That’s the official Census Bureau figure, not one of those inflated estimates floating around the internet. Of…

Oops. $40 Billion in Bitcoin—Gone in 30 Minutes. By Paul Truesdell, JD, AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC If you ever needed a reason to be skeptical about cryptocurrency, South Korea just handed you one wrapped in a bow. Bithumb, the country’s second-largest crypto exchange, accidentally gave away 620,000 bitcoins—valued at more than $40 billion—because a staffer made an input error during a rinky-dink promotional giveaway. The total prize pot was supposed to be about $425. Four hundred and twenty-five dollars. Instead, one lucky winner who was supposed to get enough for a cheap cup of coffee walked away—at least temporarily—with over $120 million in bitcoin. You can’t make this stuff up. Within minutes, enough recipients tried to cash out that bitcoin’s price dropped 17%. Bithumb scrambled to halt transactions after roughly 30 minutes, but not before investors—including people who had absolutely nothing to do with the giveaway—lost about $685,000. And here’s the real kicker: Bithumb only held around 50,000 bitcoins in…

The Deadly Poison of Nullification How the Selective Application of Justice Is Destroying the Republic and Why the Reckoning Will Be Severe By Paul Grant Truesdell, JD, AIF 1 What We Are Witnessing Is Nullification and It Will Not End Well: A Warning From History There is a principle in American jurisprudence that most citizens never learn about in school, and for good reason. It is called jury nullification, and it occurs when jurors refuse to convict a defendant not because the evidence is insufficient, but because they disagree with the law itself or believe the prosecution is unjust. It is not written into statute. It is not encouraged by judges. But it exists, and it has been used throughout American history for purposes both noble and shameful. What we are witnessing in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Los Angeles, and in courtrooms across this nation is something adjacent to this principle but far more corrosive. We are seeing the selective application of justice based on political alignment. We are…

Freeloaders And Fantasies Why Europe Collapsed While America Course Corrected Trump as plain-speaking truth teller who communicates complex realities to ordinary people Europe's self-inflicted irrelevance through destruction of economy, industry, military, and diplomatic influence The freeloader analogy comparing Europe to an employee who cannot perform, will not learn, but expects full compensation Statistical reality of Europe consuming sixty percent of world welfare spending while representing twelve percent of population Trump's warning to Germany about Russian gas dependency and their dismissive laughter followed by the five thousand helmets debacle Net Zero as industrial suicide illustrated by Britain unable to produce virgin steel The North Sea hypocrisy of Britain shutting down domestic gas production while importing gas from Norway drilled in the same waters Green energy paradox where petroleum required to manufacture and maintain wind and solar often exceeds fossil fuels replaced Net Zero producing…

Greenland Is Not About Ice. It Is About America. Let me tell you something that most people do not want to hear. Greenland is not some frozen wasteland at the top of the world that we should ignore. Greenland is the key to North American security in the twenty-first century, and anyone who cannot see that is either not paying attention or does not want you to understand what is really happening on the global stage. The world got small. It happened faster than most people realize. When intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach any city on earth in thirty minutes, when satellites can photograph your backyard from space, when hypersonic weapons are being tested by our adversaries, the old rules about geography went out the window. Except they did not. Geography matters more than ever. It just matters differently now. Greenland is the largest island on the planet. Over eight hundred thirty thousand square miles. More than three times the size of Texas. And fewer people live there than in Kalamazoo, Michigan.…

Follow the Money Where Campaign Cash Really Comes From, Who Benefits from Climate Policy, and Why Christians Stay Silent About China By Paul Truesdell Before I begin… Why I Do Long-Form: A Four-Minute Explanation You know what’s funny? Every marketing guru out there tells me I’m doing it all wrong. “Paul, you need to be on TikTok. You need fifteen-second clips. You need memes. You need to hook ‘em in three seconds or they’re gone.” And I say: Good. Let ’em go. Here’s the thing about those short-form videos—the TikToks, the Reels, the quick-hit content. They’re designed for instant gratification. Quick dopamine hits. Scroll, laugh, scroll, react, scroll. The average user burns through two hundred videos in thirty minutes. Half of viewers bail within three seconds if they’re not immediately entertained. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the feature. And it works beautifully—for a certain kind of audience. The “entertain me” crowd. The “what have you done for me lately” folks. The meme-based,…

Rough Draft / Script When the power was cut to the Stone Creek Republican Club Christmas party in 2025, think about it. When power was cut to the George Bush presidential campaign visit to the Villages in 2004 by a disgruntled Democratic Party operative working for Sumter Electric, think about it. When Covid lockdowns took place and you were told to trust the science without being allowed to question it, think about it. When political leaders at the national or local level behave like children and tell you to shut up and go away, think about it. When school textbooks reflect revisionist history designed to support DEI principles and present fiction as fact, think about it. When form over substance continues to rule the roost, think about it. When people who claim to be Republicans play games of continual posturing that would be better suited to the Democratic Party where that kind of nonsense is tolerated, think about it. And when major defense contractors reap ridiculous profits and pay outrageous salaries…

Rough Notes Paul Truesdell dot Com When a nation loses its people, it loses everything else shortly thereafter. This is not philosophy or political commentary. This is arithmetic. An economy requires workers to produce, consumers to purchase, and taxpayers to fund the infrastructure that makes commerce possible. Remove the people, and the entire system unravels like a cheap sweater. History offers no shortage of examples, and they are worth examining because the patterns repeat with uncomfortable regularity. Start with the American West. The ghost towns scattered across Nevada, California, Colorado, and Arizona tell the same story over and over again. Rhyolite, Nevada, exploded into existence in 1904 when gold was discovered nearby. Within three years, the population swelled to somewhere between five and ten thousand people. They built a train station, a stock exchange, an opera house, and a three-story bank made of concrete. By 1920, the population was fourteen. The gold played out, the miners left, and…

Casual Cocktail Conversations and Client Coffee Quarterly at The Truesdell Companies Wednesday, December 31, 2025 – Episode 526 Somewhere along the way, the financial services industry decided that the best way to talk to people about their money was to put them in a conference room with stale coffee, a PowerPoint presentation, and a sales pitch dressed up as education. You sit there for an hour, maybe two, nodding along while someone reads bullet points off a screen and wonders why you are not more excited about their proprietary mutual fund. Well, that is not how we do things at Truesdell Wealth. Starting in the first quarter of 2026, we are hosting a series of Casual Cocktail Conversations at the Stonewater Club in Stone Creek. These are not seminars. They are not sales presentations. TheyCasual Cocktail Conversations and Client Coffee Quarterly are exactly what the name suggests, conversations. You show up, grab a drink, sit down with people who are in the same chapter of life you are, and we talk about…

The Variable Annuity Money Pit Tuesday, December 30, 2025 - Episode 525 Now let's talk about variable annuities, which might be the most cleverly disguised fee machine the financial services industry ever invented. And I say that with the kind of admiration you'd give a con artist who manages to pick your pocket while shaking your hand. Here's how they work, and pay attention because the industry counts on you not understanding this. When you buy a variable annuity, your money goes into what they call separate accounts. Not mutual funds. Separate accounts. Why the fancy terminology? Because the law requires it. Insurance products can't technically hold mutual funds directly, so they create these separate accounts that are, for all practical purposes, mirror images of mutual funds. Same stocks. Same bonds. Same management. Same everything. Except the price tag. Think of it this way: you're buying a name-brand product repackaged in a fancier box, and someone's charging you a premium for the privilege of the…