The Paul Truesdell Podcast

Paul Grant Truesdell, JD., AIF, CLU, ChFC
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The Paul Truesdell Podcast Welcome to the Paul Truesdell Podcast. So, what's the gig? Paul records frequently at the Truesdell Professional Building. He eplains a few things about how life works before time gets away. Paul connects the dots, the plot and knots, spots the ops with a heavy dose of knocks, mocks, pots, rocks, socks, and mops. Confused? Then welcome aboard! You see, Paul the Elder enjoys telling complex stories in a way that is easy to understand. While always based on business, economics, and forecasting, having fun, laughing, and being among like-minded men, women, and children from Earth, Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune is a requirement. Paul the Elder coupled with Team Truesdell, have been there and done it. If you enjoy front porch philosophers who take deep dives and connect the dots, while drinking coffee during the day and a whiskey after five, welcome. It is a true pleasure to have you onboard. This is, The Paul Truesdell Podcast.

  1. 2h ago

    The Argumentative Waterboy

    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 to restrain the boy's worst instincts. It did not take. Nero grew into a ruler consumed by suspicion. He had his own mother killed. He turned on his wife. And in the year 65 he ordered his old teacher to take his own life. Seneca had written that fear does damage all on its own, and that plenty of men walk straight into the fate they spend their lives dreading. He lived just long enough to watch his student prove it. Now jump to 1996. Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a giant, published a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. Business schools still assign it. But read Grove carefully and notice where he pointed his paranoia. Outward. At competitors, at shifts in technology, at the forces that could wipe a company off the map in eighteen months. He did not point it at the people down the hall. That difference is the whole story. What Happened in Williston Williston is a small city in Levy County. From 2018 into early 2026, Barber worked there, most recently as the administrator over water, wastewater, gas, and the city's fiber system. In 2025 the city grew tired of the fighting inside its Utilities Department and hired the law firm Douglas & Douglas to find out what was going on. Attorney Meagan Logan interviewed 35 city employees over five days. The bill, according to the Levy County Citizen, came to $25,000. Twenty-five thousand dollars. In a small town. To learn why grown men could not work in the same building. Her fifteen-page report, dated September 22, 2025, is posted on the city's own website. Anyone can read it. Here is what it found. The department had split into two camps, and the employees themselves had a name for it: the great divide. You were either on Team Donald or on Team Jonathen, the second camp named for Utilities Director Jonathen Bishop, Barber's boss. The split traces to October 2024, when the city manager restructured the department. Barber's authority was cut back to water, wastewater, and gas, with explicit instructions to stay out of the other divisions. Barber considered it a demotion and believed it came because of complaints against him. According to the report, Bishop tried more than once to apologize, even though the decision was not his to make. Barber would not accept the apology. Eventually Bishop stopped trying. Look at one of those complaints, because it tells you everything. A city employee had been driving a city vehicle at 51 miles an hour through a 25-mile-an-hour school zone. Barber was right to be angry. Nobody serious defends that. But rather than let the director handle it, Barber called the entire department to the city barn and lectured them. Multiple employees told the investigator he spoke to them "like they were 10 years old." He had the right point and lost the room anyway. That is a pattern, and the report documents it. Many employees acknowledged that Barber would yell at and belittle Bishop and others. The report says he struggled to accept suggestions from anyone and always preferred to be in control. Even employees who liked him conceded that communication was his weak spot, and that good ideas died because of the way he delivered them. A city manager put a rebuke in writing over the tone of his emails. Some employees said he quoted the employee handbook selectively, leaving out the parts that did not help his case. In June 2025, Barber filed his own hostile work environment complaint. And one former employee told the investigator he would not come back to work for the city as long as Barber was still there. When the council took up the findings, according to the Levy County Citizen, Vice President Michael Cox asked publicly why Bishop was demoted and put on probation while Barber was only sent to leadership classes. Leadership classes. The city, bless its heart, thought it could fix a temperament with a workbook. What I Saw at Stone Creek I do not have to take the report's word for any of this. I saw it myself. Most of the candidate forums put on by our Republican clubs are polite affairs. Softball questions, a round of applause, coffee and cookies. Nobody gets pressed. At Stone Creek, I was the moderator, and I asked Donald Barber a hard question. He became visibly argumentative and upset. In front of the room. One hard question. That is all it took. Think about what a school board member faces on a normal Tuesday night. Angry parents at the microphone. Reporters. A superintendent defending a budget. A colleague who votes the other way. If a friendly question from a fellow Republican at a club forum gets under his skin, the public comment period is going to be a long four years. And I Want to Be Fair Here The same report that documents the fighting also says this, and you deserve to hear it from me before you hear it from his campaign. Almost everyone interviewed agreed Barber is extremely smart and knows city operations cold: utilities, grants, planning, growth. Many said he did the bulk of the department's work and made his boss look good. One employee called Bishop the body and Barber the brain. By most accounts, the investigator wrote, Bishop was a poor manager. Many employees said Barber got a raw deal from a city council that had it out for him. The investigator also concluded that the conflict did not amount to a legal hostile work environment claim. She found that the dysfunction started at the top, with council members meddling in daily operations. And in Archer, where Barber became the part-time city manager in early 2026, he inherited books in such poor shape that he could not give a financial report. By June he told commissioners the city was operating at a positive net income, according to WCJB. So understand what this is and what it is not. This is not the story of an incompetent man. It is the story of a capable man who could not stop fighting, in a workplace where the fighting became the job. That is the strongest case for Barber. It does not answer the question voters actually face. The Archer Ask Now look at what came next, because it is all in the public record. In January 2026 the little city of Archer, in Alachua County, hired Barber as its part-time city manager. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand dollars a year. That deal runs to February 2027, according to the Alachua Chronicle. By August, about six months in, a new contract was on the table. Full time. Ninety thousand dollars a year, plus health insurance, retirement, and twenty weeks of severance if he were let go without cause. From thirty thousand to ninety. A sixty-thousand-dollar jump. That is an eyebrow eraser in any town. In Archer it lands differently. According to WCJB, this is a city that had to admit it missed a state deadline for its financial reports. It had a...

    The Argumentative Waterboy

  2. 13h ago

    Leaving the Room

    Leaving the RoomSeparation Anxiety, the Caregiver's Own Life, and What a Fiduciary Actually DoesContentsThe Essay 1. Two People in One Room 32. A Letter from 1994 33. What Separation Anxiety Actually Is 34. Leaving Well 45. The Bench 56. The Caregiver Is the Second Patient 67. Two Households 68. Medicare Already Agrees with You 79. What a Fiduciary Does in This Season 710. ALIVE, for Two 8The Essay1. Two People in One RoomThere 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 physically dependent; the caregiver's own health and why stepping away is an act of responsibility rather than selfishness; and what a true fiduciary wealth advisor and manager does when a family enters this season. It is not medical advice. Diagnosis, medication and behavior plans belong to the physician. This is about planning, logistics and permission.Let me concede the obvious at the outset. Leaving is hard, the guilt is real, and on some days you genuinely cannot go. Nothing here pretends otherwise. What this piece argues is narrower and, I think, much harder to dispute: a caregiver who never leaves eventually cannot help anyone.2. A Letter from 1994On November 5, 1994, Ronald Reagan wrote a letter by hand to the American people telling them he had Alzheimer's disease. Most people remember its closing, about beginning the journey that would lead him into the sunset of his life. Fewer remember two sentences a little earlier: "Unfortunately, as Alzheimer's Disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience."Consider what that means. The man receiving the diagnosis, a man who had carried the weight of the presidency, spent part of that letter worrying about the person who would take care of him. He understood before most of the country did that Alzheimer's has two patients.Nancy Reagan cared for him for the better part of ten years, until his death in June 2004. In 2002 she described it to Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes as "the long, long goodbye." She also said this: "When you come right down to it, you're in it alone, and there's nothing that anybody can do for you. So it's lonely." This was a woman with more resources than almost any caregiver in America: staff, security, money and friends in high places. She was lonely anyway. If the disease could isolate her, you should assume it can isolate you, and plan accordingly.3. What Separation Anxiety Actually IsStart with the scale, because it matters. The Alzheimer's Association's 2026 Facts and Figures report estimates that 7.4 million Americans age 65 and older are living with Alzheimer's dementia. More than 12 million family members and other unpaid caregivers provided an estimated 19.6 billion hours of care in 2025, and the Association values that unpaid work at $446.3 billion.$446.3 billion.The same report projects paid health and long-term care for people living with dementia at $409 billion in 2026. Set those two figures side by side and the conclusion is hard to escape: the largest dementia care provider in the United States is not Medicare, not Medicaid and not the nursing home industry. It is the family, working without a paycheck.Now to the behavior itself. Caregivers call it shadowing. The person follows you from room to room, asks the same question repeatedly, and becomes distressed the moment you are out of sight. It is common in the middle stage of Alzheimer's, and it tends to worsen in the late afternoon and evening, the pattern known as sundowning. The cause is neither manipulation nor a judgment about you. As memory fails, the world keeps rearranging itself, and the caregiver becomes the one fixed point in it. Because short-term memory is going, a promise like "I'll be back at four" simply does not hold. To someone who cannot track time, ten minutes can register as abandonment.This is the key concept, so it deserves room. The anxiety is a symptom. It is information about the disease, not a verdict on your character. Guilt treats it as a verdict, when it is closer to a weather report: it tells you what conditions are like today, and you plan around them.The physically dependent family member whose mind is sharp is a different case, and he deserves a different answer. His fear is rational. If he falls while you are gone, who helps him up? Reassurance does not solve that fear; systems do. A medical alert device, a written check-in schedule and a named backup who lives ten minutes away answer the question he is actually asking. Ask him what coverage would make him feel safe. He can usually tell you exactly, and being asked preserves the dignity and independence he is afraid of losing.4. Leaving WellThere is a craft to leaving, and most of it happens before you pick up the keys.Introduce the substitute while you are still in the house. A new aide or a relative who visits several times while you are present becomes a familiar face before the first departure, and familiarity is most of what the person needs. Keep the routine identical whether you are there or not: the same meal times, the same chair, the same program on television. Consistency is the one medication nobody has to prescribe. Give the person something purposeful to do, such as setting the table, folding towels or sorting coupons, because purpose calms, and it gives you a clean exit.Timing matters as well. Do not announce a departure hours ahead of time; to someone who cannot track time, advance notice is simply advance worry. Tell them shortly before you go, briefly and calmly. Leave during their best hours rather than in the late-afternoon window when sundowning is most likely. Keep the goodbye short and warm, because a long, emotional exit teaches the person that something is wrong. Many caregivers leave a visible anchor behind: a large handwritten note that says, "I went to the store. I will be back after lunch," or a recorded message the aide can play.Expect the first few separations to go badly, and do not treat that as proof that you should stay home. When you come back, ask how the hour after you left went, not how the moment you left went. Then apply the test that should replace guilt. The question is not whether they were upset when you walked out the door. The question is whether they were safe and cared for while you were gone.5. The BenchA rotation that exists only in your head is a hope. A rotation written on the refrigerator, with names, days and phone numbers, is a system. Families, churches and neighbors can carry more of this than most people expect, but only when someone asks them for specific hours rather than general help.Paid help costs real money, and the numbers should be said plainly. According to CareScout's 2025 Cost of Care Survey, the national median for adult day health is $95 a day. An in-home non-medical caregiver runs $35 an hour, which comes to about $80,080 a year at 44 hours a week. Assisted living runs $6,200 a month. A private nursing home room runs $355 a day, or about $129,575 a year. Those are national medians; Florida and your own county will differ, so pull the local figures before you plan.Adult day health deserves special mention because it serves both people at once. The loved one gets a structure...

  3. 4d ago

    Waves of Hogwash

    Waves of HogwashThe Dinosaur in the Gas Tank - The Star Chamber on the BallotPaul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFCSeptember 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 HogwashA Rare BreedNumbers 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 giving a talk, and they say, yeah, right.But it's true. My personality, my makeup, my composition, who God made me, and what I've trained myself to be, all point the same way. I drill for skill. I find the facts and the figures first. Then I boil them down to the simplest, most basic way of saying it.And I can go deep. I've always said it. Anytime, any place, anywhere, I'll debate you on whatever topic you want. And I will win. When I say it is the way it is, fine, let's go debate it. Because it is the way it is.But I'll tell you something else. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Donald Rumsfeld said that at a Pentagon briefing in 2002, and a lot of people laughed at him. He was right. There are things we know. There are things we know we don't know. And there are things we don't even know we don't know. What I'm not going to do is tell you things I don't know.That's exactly why I can't stand certain politicians.Locally, we have two. Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber. Both of them are heavily involved in the Marion County Republican Executive Committee. I want nothing to do with either one. In my opinion, they're an embarrassment.And they're not alone. This country has had some really embarrassing people who've been President. Who've held Cabinet posts. Who've been governors, senators, and members of Congress. And talk show hosts. Like Oprah Winfrey.People mistake fame and fortune for knowledge and expertise.That's why you'll always see me roll my eyes, shake my head, purse my lips, squint, and let out a long, deep breath whenever some Know Nothing Hollywood actor or actress decides to use their fame to push something that isn't just out in left field. It's out in Wackoville.Now, when I say Know Nothing, I mean it literally, and it's a piece of American history worth knowing. The Know Nothings were a real political party back in the 1850s. It started out as a secret society. When members were asked about it, they were told to answer, "I know nothing." So that's what everybody called them. Officially they were the American Party, and mostly they were against immigrants and against Catholics. In 1856 they ran a former President, Millard Fillmore, for President again. He got about a fifth of the vote and carried exactly one state, Maryland. Within a few years the party split apart over slavery and was gone.A party named for knowing nothing. At least they came by the name honestly. Today's Know Nothings don't hide behind a secret handshake. They say it right out loud, on camera, with a publicist.Hogwash and BalderdashThis is about common sense and what it costs to use it out loud. It is not about being right for the sake of being right.There are some things in life you just have to call what they are. Hogwash. Balderdash. And when you do, you pay a price. Most of the time, nobody remembers you were right. You don't get a plaque. You don't get to go to your grave saying I told you so. You just keep moving, because you can't live in the past.But you can learn from it. I hear it all the time. We've never seen anything like this. Interest rates have never been this high. The world is running out of something. Everybody in charge is a crook. People nod and say, sure, history repeats itself. Then they forget it by the next morning.So, I want to walk you through a few waves of it. A science class in the early 1970s. A book that promised mass famine. A President who said the world's oil would be gone. A talk show that crashed the cattle market. A former Vice President and the ice. And then, because the waves don't stop at the county line, two people running for our school board right here in Marion County.They sound unrelated. They're not. Stay with me.This isn't liberals against conservatives, though a lot of it lands that way. Some of the worst of it comes from our own side, and I'll get to that. It's about people who say big, scary things with nothing behind them, and the rest of us who go along.Mr. Smarty-PantsAn eighth grader, a science teacher, and a trip to the vice principal's office.Go back with me. I was born in 1958. So this is the eighth or ninth grade, somewhere around 1971 to 1973.My science teacher had a long Polish name nobody could pronounce, so she told everybody to call her Miss S. The joke among the kids was what the S really stood for, because she was full of it.She stood in front of the class and told us oil came from the rotting carcasses of dinosaurs. And she tied it all together. Gasoline was bad. Too many people was bad. There was a book called The Population Bomb that said the world would soon have so many people we couldn't feed them all, and starvation would be everywhere. Birth control and abortion were controversial back then, and she connected those dots too.I sat there thinking, there's no way. That's not how it works. It just doesn't make sense.So I raised my hand and said, I don't buy that.And she said, "OK, Mr. Smarty-Pants."So I went through it. There's no way there were that many dinosaurs. And if there were, how did they get to all the places we pump oil? The Middle East is desert. We were drilling out in the Gulf, way down below the water. How did the dinosaurs get down there?I told her the earth is a living thing. It's not just a rock. You've got volcanoes. You've got eruptions. You've got magma coming up from below. Why wouldn't oil come up the same way? Sometimes oil comes right up to the surface all by itself.And I told her about my father and World War II. His stories about oil in Burma, and how critical oil was to fighting that war.She didn't want to hear it. She had the formal authority. I had the informal authority, and a couple of the kids thought it was a pretty cool debate. I got sent to the vice principal's office. He asked me what happened. I spent the rest of that class period in the cafeteria, doing my own thing. And that was the end of that.Except it wasn't. The more I thought about it, the more disgusted I got. At that young age, I started thinking, this has got to be political.And here is what that punishment did. It didn't shut me up. It reinforced me. It taught me that common sense matters, and that using it out loud costs you something. I've carried that my whole life. It's the reason I do what I do.The Dinosaur in the Gas StationWhere the dinosaur story came from, and what the oil company's own exhibit said.So where did a science teacher get the idea that oil came from dinosaurs? A lot of us got it at the gas station.Sinclair Oil used a big green Brontosaurus for its symbol. They called him Dino. If you rode in the back of a station wagon in the 1950s or '60s, you remem...

    Waves of Hogwash

  4. Sep 23

    I'll Be Your Huckleberry

    I'll Be Your HuckleberryThe Paul Truesdell Podcast and Blog September 23, 2026.Tuesday at Stone CreekOn 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 Republicans. And it has to do with media bias, which is a word we like to use about the other side. And yes, I am going to connect liberal media bias with two members of the Marion County Republican Executive Committee who are also candidates for the Marion County School Board. You see, Republicans are quick to blame the liberal media for fake news. But when two of our own peddles it, suddenly it's perfectly fine. Well boys and girls, it is not. Somebody has to call out the extremes, on a regular basis, to keep things normal. To explain why, with facts and figures, not emotional baseless memes, and so, I have to go back a ways.When We Ran OutsideGo back with me to the fifties and sixties, and on into the seventies. As kids, we were not overweight. We played outside from dawn to dusk and beyond. We ran. We did things, and we were outside playing football, baseball, basketball, tag, and running the neighborhood, not as hoodlums, but as kids, coming of age, learning, doing, and figuring out life, until somebody's mother called us in for supper.That is not nostalgia talking. Those are the facts.Now let’s talk about the Center for Disease Control. The CDC has been weighing and measuring Americans since the early sixties. In 1960 to 1962, about 13 percent of adults were obese. In the early seventies, about one child in twenty. Let me repeat that. Around ten percent of the adult population was obese and five percent of children. The CDC's most recent count, 2021 to 2023, found about four adults in ten, or forty percent, and about one child in five, twenty percent, are now obese.As Robin would say: Holy cow Batman.Ladies and gentlemen, when we grew up, we didn't have drug problems as kids, and we didn't have alcohol problems. And there was one more thing going on, and I want nobody to take this personally. There is a thing called fat shaming. I'm not talking about a kid who was a little bit overweight. I'm talking about the kids who were really, extremely, outrageously overweight. The ones who didn't exercise, who weren't out running with the rest of us or playing baseball, and when they were outside, they had a candy bar in their hand. They just didn't stop eating.We engaged in fat shaming. I admit it. And right or wrong, that kept our nation healthy. And by God, we looked great. Just look at the millions of Polaroid photos, those black and why, grainy photos from back in the day. We looked great. Four Steps DownThen, as time went on, it was the media, the left-wing media, that pushed to normalize abnormal behavior. The oddballs. And you know exactly what I am talking about. That was step one. Normalization. Now say that word with me out loud. Normalization.Step two was celebration. The abnormal, the oddball, the weirdo and the extreme opinion, the argumentative, disruptive employee who causes havoc at work, the drug dependent, and the overall extremist who loves to bash anyone and everyone who will not kowtow to them, well they got the spotlight. That's when the pendulum began to swing.Step three came when those of us who are the overwhelming majority said, wait a minute, we're not putting up with that. We were vilified for saying it. Now say it out loud, normalization, celebration, vilification.  Yes, vilification. This now leads to step four, which is when it became dangerous for the overwhelming majority of normal Americans.  Vilification was one thing but then came criminalization.  Yes, we became criminals because we, the majority truly believed in America as great and full of opportunities.  Why? Because too many people did not have the guts to stand up and call it the way it is. Criminalization. Yes, criminalization. Today, oh Dear God Almighty, make fun of the weirdo, the fellow who went to school and piled up degrees fifteen times over, piled higher and deeper, and can't get a job and doesn't know how to change a light bulb, and you are the one treated like a criminal. The light bulb, for the record, has not gotten any harder to change.And so, Normalization. Celebration. Vilification. Criminalization. Four steps, and we took every one of them because not enough people stood up at the first one.The New EraWell, there's a new era. That new era began with Donald Trump. That's a fact.In his first administration, as the 45th president, you had Republicans doing everything they could to defeat him. Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House are true RINOs – Republicans In Name Only. If you want to know why you have to be extremely firm with the people who interfere with progress, look no further than what Donald Trump went through, not only at the hands of the lamestream media and Democrats, but also with the Little Lord Fauntleroy’s within the Republican party.  Folks, we've made a lot of progress getting back to making America great again. Reversing the outflow of jobs, for one. And we have an election coming up that could reverse that progress, on a national and local level.  And I am now going to focus on the local level.  Get ready, I am taking the gloves off going forward. The It's-My-Turn CandidateHere is something that doesn't get said enough on our side. Extremes on both ends are extremes. The left has its abnormal candidates, and we have ours. Yes, we have our abnormal candidates. Locally, a lot of them are far-right, negative, mud-throwing candidates. Mudslingers themselves and leading their minions on social media with endless lies and mudslinging.  True pigs at heart. And they are gunslingers too.You see, you have the: it's-my-turn candidate. Let me repeat that, the: it’s-my-turn candidate. We have one in Marion County. She waddles around babbling, and I truly mean babbling by losing her train of thought and complaining that there’s a cabal following her and filming her, and we have it on film, and she says: I'm the head of the Republican Party, therefore it's my turn to run. Are you kidding me? Again, never forget Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush, the poster boys for “it’s my turn.” Look what happened when we nominated it's-my-turn people for president. Bob Dole in 1996. Mitt Romney in 2012. Losers, both of them, and the country got four more years of the other side each time. Then Donald Trump, who waited for nobody's permission, beat them all and became the 45th president of the United States.Here is how the: it's-my-turn candidate works. First, because it's his turn, you should not oppose him or her. She shuts out the opposition. In a recorded Marion County Republican Executive Committee Meeting, she, the chairwoman of the Marion County Republican Executive Committee can be heard telling the vice chair to shut up and sit down.  Yes, boys and girls, disagree with the hen and she’ll sho...

    I'll Be Your Huckleberry

  5. Sep 14

    Episode 574 - Back in the Day

    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 eventually, we would we would provide people online access, and that has been hard. If you go back into what was going on in the 1970s and into the 80s, when you had reel-to-reel tape, like like I have right over here, that was something that was really quite amazing. Cassettes, wow, fantastic! I mean, remember driving my Datsun b2 10 into into college, and I'm going down the road, and I can pretty well just curate my own information. We would take tape recorders into some of our big lecture halls, and I could listen. It was just-it's totally nothing the way it is today. You know, life evolves. There's no doubt about it. But what I want to do is talk to you a little bit about my personal business background when it comes to the fact I've been doing audio and video for a long, long time, many, many years, and don't really need these things. And I have an undergraduate degree in communications. In communications, whether it's audio and video or or reading, you know, you have to have a sender and a receiver. And for communications to exist, there has to be a link between the sender and receiver, and that's a lot more difficult than you think because when you have a sender and a receiver, and the wavelengths are off, you you you don't have communication. That's that's all there is to it. So you might be thinking, well, that's kind of Captain Obvious. It's not, because getting people together, as I did yesterday, we had about 75 people all together attend our casual conversation at Stone Creek, at the reunion center, and I talked. The talk was wealth is more than money, and I think it made the point, without any in-depth financial discussion. A lot of what goes on in life is luck, and if wasn't for bad luck, some people would have no luck at all. And I told everybody there that the reality is is that every one of us there was lucky. We're lucky because we made it. And I started off with a little joke: if anybody arrived with a golf cart, they show your hands. And I said, just think about how lucky you are, because so many people don't stop at a stop sign; they just roll through it. And if you go to village-news.com, I think it is. Anyways, it's village news. You're always reading about accidents involving carts and people driving into ponds and flipping them and killing themselves. It just is what it is, and so we're lucky we all got here today. Yay! That's a fantastic thing. As you see on the screen, the next conversation will be October the 11th, and if you want to make a reservation for that, call 352-612-1000. But you know, audio and video. Radio has have changed as time gone along, and what people did years ago, Jack Benny, and and they would make their radio broadcasts, and they would make noises, and and you know, let's say like for example, you want to have sound of let's say something fluttering, and they would they would go, and they would make the noise and do whistles and all sorts of different things. Well, that was the days of radio, terrestrial radio, and these Foley sounds are still available. But today, it's it's just amazing. Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF  5:40  I mean, everybody can do anything they want, and the development has been quite amazing. Now, when we started years ago, I remember being in Donellan, where we we had an office there for a while, and I told a lady that we were doing more and more video, and she said, "Oh dear, you're doing porn, and if you think about it, back in the day, a lot of video when it started was porn, and that was her mindset. I thought, well, now I know where you, I know what you're looking at. It just kind of, kind of made me chuckle a little bit, but everything has developed, and for people who are today, right now, they just don't know how much things have developed. One of the reasons I do not work with younger people is because they know everything, and it's it's not worth the time and effort. If somebody is actually willing to, you know, follow the protocol, I'll entertain it. But it's only on a fee for service. It's not on a product distribution basis. It's it's a fee for service, and the fees for people who are under the age of 40 are double what they are for people over the age of 40, because it's just too much extra work. And so, as we started, we started with one studio, and the equipment was difficult, dial-up, and you know these are the days of the old AOL, and you've got mail with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, that type of stuff, and it was tough. We started off with a company called Icecast. I still have Icecast. We would do live broadcasts. Well, what do we got going on now? Well, now I have two solo studios. I have the Monkey House here, and then I have the brick house, and then I have a portable studio that we are completely redoing because technology is amazing. And then at the office, what we're doing is we're doing a new studio, a big, massive new studio, because we're going to be doing some more commercial type podcasts, all about longevity, life expectancy, living a longer life, and higher quality. And I've got a business partner, Mike Crimmy, is coming in on that, and it's it's going to be, I think, really really interesting as we we move along. So when we look at how things have developed, sometimes people get a little anxious and say, "Well, you know, this is how I do it, and oh, everything is shorts or everything is reels or everything's on Instagram. Well, that's not true. You've got Facebook, you've got Instagram, you've got Snapchat, you've got God knows all the different social media outlets out there, and then you have YouTube. But one of the most important things to understand is, for for if you're watching this with me, is I have been doing this for a long, long time. I mean, a long time. I had one of the original Twitter accounts, one of the original YouTube accounts, one of the original Facebook accounts. I was one of the first people to actually use Facebook when when they started doing video, and when it first started, boy, you had to be a celebrity and you had to have enough followers. But a lot of that was shut down because of liberals who controlled social media networks, and the shadow banning was real, and I I wasn't going to take that stuff. So I've shut down and lost a lot of viewers, and just not going to take it over the years. So we're coming back and doing some more things on YouTube, we've put things up, taken it down, kind of modified it. But here's the thing, I don't care anymore. My clients generally come to me on my website, paultruesdell.com. From there, they springboard to all the other websites we have, and. That seems to be the best way to do it, and for us, I just really do not care about, you know, if you have listeners in Seattle. Oh, that's fine, but I don't have paid advertising. I don't care about it. It's meaningless to me. What we do is we we serve our clients, and this is just a great way of providin...

    Episode 574 - Back in the Day

  6. Sep 8

    The Warehouse Where They Keep You

    The Warehouse Where They Keep YouBy Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder – September 8, 2026.What This Is AboutThis 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 RoomGo 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 happens. All sorts of things start filling in on the screen by themselves. Now get out of Google. Leave that page. And start talking about John Wayne. All his movies. The Green Berets. Every John Wayne picture you can think of. Then go back, open a new Google search, and type John again.John Wayne.People told me I was out of my mind. There is no way they are listening to you. Then they tried it, and every one of them said the same thing. Holy crap. John Wayne just popped up. Yes. No kidding.What the Test Was Really Telling YouNow. I want to be fair here. I cannot prove to you that a microphone was listening, and the companies say it was not. What I can prove is that it did not matter. The machine did not need to hear you. It already had everything you typed, everything you clicked, everything you lingered on, and everything the fellow sitting next to you did on the same connection. Back then it was a party trick. Today it is the entire business.Understand what the deal was. Nobody sent you a bill for the search engine. Nobody sent you a bill for the email or the maps or the videos of somebody's cat. You thought you were the customer. You were the inventory. The customer was whoever wanted to sell you something, and the product they were buying was a very good description of you.Google's parent company took in somewhere around a quarter of a trillion dollars in advertising in a year. That is their own number, from their own reports. A quarter of a trillion. Nobody pays that kind of money to guess. They pay it because the guessing stopped a long time ago.The Ad That Followed Me HomeLet me tell you what happened to me, because it puts a face on it. I was on Amazon looking at a product. A very unique product for a very unique project. I put it in the cart. Then I did more reading, and I figured out two things. One, I could do the same job with something I already had at the house. Two, they were asking about four times what an equivalent cost. One thing led to another and I had a great workaround. So I took it out of the cart. That was all I needed to know.Later I had a television show running in the background on Prime. Amazon's own television. And up came an ad. For that product. That very unique product.Now, once is a coincidence. But it was not once. It was not occasional. It got very, very frequent. The thing I looked at in Amazon's store was chasing me through Amazon's television. Same company, same memory. I did not say a word out loud that time. I did not even buy it. I just almost bought it.And here is the part that ought to stick with you. Amazon started putting ads in front of Prime Video in early 2024. Before that, you paid your fee and you watched your show. Now you pay your fee, you watch your show, and your shopping cart watches you back. Amazon reports its advertising business at somewhere north of fifty billion dollars a year. They built it out of the things you almost bought.The Warrant and the CheckboxHere is the misunderstanding, and it is an honest one. For two hundred and some years we were taught to keep an eye on one kind of watcher. The government. And we built real walls against it. If a sheriff wants to look in your house, he needs a warrant. To get a warrant he needs a judge. To get a judge he needs a reason he can write down and sign. That is the Fourth Amendment, and it has been doing its job since 1791.A company does not need a judge. A company needs a box. A little gray box on a screen, sometime around 2011, next to forty pages of small print, that said I agree. You clicked it. I clicked it. Everybody clicked it. And that click is worth more than a warrant, because a warrant runs out and a checkbox never does.So put the two of them side by side. On one side you have a government that has to ask permission, in writing, from a third party, to look at one thing about one man for a limited time. On the other side you have a private company that has permanent permission, from you, to look at everything, forever, and sell the results. We spent all our worry on the first one. The second one did not even have to sneak.Where They Keep ItNow look at what is going up out on the edge of town. Big windowless buildings, size of a warehouse store, humming day and night, drinking power like a small city. People call them data centers and argue about the electric bill. That argument is fair. But ask what is inside.What is inside is you. Every search since the chat rooms. Every cart you filled and emptied. Every show you paused and where you paused it. That product I almost bought is in there, in a building I have never seen, and it will be in there long after I have forgotten I ever wanted it. They are not building those warehouses to store somebody else's memory. They are building them to store yours. The government has files on people. The private sector has a warehouse.Think of it like the old corner grocer. He knew you. He knew you bought the same brand of coffee every Tuesday and that your wife liked the good butter. That was fine. That was neighborly. Now imagine he wrote it all down, never once forgot a line of it, and sold the notebook to every salesman who came through town. On commission. That is not a grocer anymore. That is something else, and it does not have a name yet, so we let it call itself convenience.And I Want to Be Fair HereThe strongest fact against everything I just said is this: the ad was right. I really was looking at that product. The machine was not lying to me and it was not selling me something I hated. Most days this business works the way it says it does. It shows you the thing you were already leaning toward, and a fair number of people are glad of it. That is real, and I will not pretend it is not.But notice what the ad did not know. It did not know I had found a workaround for a quarter of the price. It knew what I wanted. It did not know what was good for me. Those are two different things, and the entire business is built on hoping you never notice the difference.Somebody Else Already NoticedEurope wrote a law about this back in 2018. A company over there has to tell you what it holds on you if you ask, and it has to erase it if you tell it to. California passed something along the same lines a couple of years later. Neither one is perfect. The main thing Europe's law gave the world was that little banner asking about cookies on every website you open. Which is what happens when you ask a lawyer to solve a plumbing problem.But the idea underneath the law is right, and it is not complicated. The notebook is yours. The grocer can look at it while you are in the store. He does not get to keep it, and he does not get to sell it. That is all. We have written harder rules than that about who can read your mail, and the mail was never worth a quarter of a trillion dollars.Ba...

    The Warehouse Where They Keep You

  7. Aug 17

    Facts - Russia's Brutal Invasion of Ukraine

    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 Building200 NW 52nd AvenueOcala, Florida 34482Horse Capital of The World352-612-1000Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFCFounder 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 of Russian history.This list from Truesdell Wealth is provided as a straight read, and what follows will keep you talking for days.Let’s begin. Number 1. Fact: The war between Russia and Ukraine has been ongoing for more than four and a half years.Number 2. Fact: This war has now lasted longer than the First World War and longer than the Soviet Union's fight against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.Number 3. Fact: In November 2022, Russian forces controlled approximately 108,600 square kilometers of Ukraine, roughly 18 percent of the country.Number 4. Fact: Ukraine's counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson reclaimed more than half of all territory Russia captured in the opening months of the invasion.Number 5. Fact: By the middle of 2026, Russia controlled approximately 116,000 square kilometers of Ukraine, roughly 20 percent of the country.Number 6. Fact: Over three and a half years of offensive operations, Russia gained less than 2 percent more of Ukraine's total land area.Number 7. Fact: Russian forces lost more ground than they captured in both April and May 2026, a net loss of roughly 400 square kilometers, and the first monthly net losses since August 2024.Number 8. Fact: Russian forces returned to marginal net territorial gains by June and July 2026.Number 9. Fact: Based on DeepState data, Russian forces made a net gain of 15 square miles of Ukrainian territory between June 23 and July 21, 2026, compared with 12 square miles in the preceding four-week period.Number 10. Fact: Between July 7 and August 4, 2026, Russia made a net gain of 24 square miles according to ISW data, and 31 square miles in the preceding four-week period according to Deep State.Number 11. Fact: In the opening weeks of the invasion, Russian forces seized more than 60,000 square kilometers of Ukraine within a matter of days while advancing toward Kyiv.Number 12. Fact: Around Kostyantynivka in eastern Donetsk, Russian forces have advanced at an average rate of approximately 50 meters per day.Number 13. Fact: Near Pokrovsk, Russian forces have advanced at an average rate of approximately 70 meters per day.Number 14. Fact: The Battle of the Somme in 1916 lasted more than four months, introduced tanks into combat, and produced territorial gains measured in single-digit kilometers.Number 15. Fact: In May 2025, Forbes calculated that Russian forces were advancing at a rate of approximately 176 square kilometers per month.Number 16. Fact: Forbes calculated that at the May 2025 rate of advance, Russia would require 231 years to occupy the entirety of Ukraine.Number 17. Fact: The Forbes analysis estimated Russia would need 100 million soldiers, set against a total pre-war Russian population of roughly 140 million.Number 18. Fact: According to Institute for the Study of War figures, Russia advanced approximately 628 square kilometers over the first six months of 2026, an average of approximately 104.5 square kilometers per month.Number 19. Fact: At the 2026 rate of advance, Russia would require approximately 400 years to occupy the whole of Ukraine.Number 20. Fact: Four hundred years is longer than the time that has elapsed since the founding of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great.Number 21. Fact: Russia suffered approximately 200 casualties for every square mile of territory taken in 2025.Number 22. Fact: In the first five months of 2026, with a net gain of 17 square miles, Russia suffered over 9,600 casualties for each square mile taken.Number 23. Fact: Russia's spring 2026 offensive against the Fortress Belt opened in mid-March with large armored column attacks and produced catastrophic losses in its opening days, with the Institute for the Study of War assessing that seizure of the Belt in 2026 is unlikely.Number 24. Fact: According to Ukraine's General Staff, Russia has lost 1,462,970 troops in Ukraine since February 24, 2022.Number 25. Fact: July 2026 marked the highest monthly Russian losses of 2026, with over 42,000 recorded.Number 26. Fact: Russian losses averaged approximately 34,000 personnel per month throughout 2026, according to Ukraine's General Staff.Number 27. Fact: CSIS assessed as many as 450,000 Russian battlefield deaths and 1.4 million total casualties between February 2022 and June 2026.Number 28. Fact: The UK Ministry of Defense, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service, the Netherlands' military intelligence service, and CSIS converge on an estimate of between 400,000 and 500,000 Russian dead.Number 29. Fact: Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II.Number 30. Fact: Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II.Number 31. Fact: According to CSIS, Russia has suffered more battlefield casualties than any major power in any conflict since the Second World War.Number 32. Fact: Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties in the war have passed 2 million.Number 33. Fact: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated in January 2026 that Russia was losing between 20,000 and 25,000 soldiers killed each month.Number 34. Fact: Rutte noted that the Soviet Union lost 20,000 men over ten years in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a figure Russia now exceeds in a single month.Number 35. Fact: Military analysts citing CIA assessments place the life expectancy of an inexperienced Russian soldier during a mass infantry assault at 20 to 30 minutes.Number 36. Fact: The 20-to-30-minute life expectancy figure applies specifically to "meat wave" tactics in which small groups of poorly trained troops are sent directly at Ukrainian positions.Number 37. Fact: The purpose of meat wave assaults is frequently not to break through defenses but to draw fire, expose Ukrainian firing positions, and deplete ammunition stocks through attrition.Number 38. Fact: Russia's monthly casualty rate of over 30,000 in 2026 has likely exceeded its recruitment rate of roughly 27,000 new recruits per month.Number 39. Fact: Russia is losing men faster than it can replace them despite record signing bonuses.Number 40. Fact: The Russia-Ukraine casualty ratio has likely risen to nearly 8:1 in the first half of 2026, up from between 2:1 and 3:1 for much of the war, largely due to Ukraine's use of drones, including AI-enabled drones, in its air interdiction campaign.Number 41. Fact: According to President Zelensky's July 2026 figures, Ukraine has lost an estimated 50,000 soldiers killed and approximately 400,000 wounded.Number 42. Fact: A July 2026 CSIS report placed Ukrainian losses at between 525,000 and 625,000 killed, wounded or missing between February 2022 and June...

    Facts - Russia's Brutal Invasion of Ukraine

  8. Aug 3

    Radiation

    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 signal bringing the ball game or the news is radiation. The glow from your television screen is radiation. You just survived another paragraph of it, the same as every day of your life. Not all radiation is the same. Think of it like different notes on a piano. The low soft notes are radio waves. They are long and slow, and they have been passing through our bodies since before most of us were born. Few of us ever noticed a thing. Move a little higher up the keyboard and the notes change. A little higher are the microwaves. Your phone uses those, and so does your kitchen oven. Those energies make water jiggle, and jiggling makes heat. That is how the oven warms your soup. Higher still is the heat you feel coming off the sun or a warm stove. Then comes the tiny slice we call visible light. Every sunset you ever watched. Every face of a grandchild you ever smiled at. All of that sits on basically one single note of the whole piano. Everything else on the keyboard is invisible to us, which is worth remembering the next time somebody tells you that invisible means dangerous. Now the notes get higher and stronger. Ultraviolet from the sun starts to have enough energy to cause trouble if you stay out too long. That is sunburn. That is skin damage. That is the spot your doctor looks at every year. Ultraviolet sits right at the line where energy stops being merely warm and starts being able to break something apart. Above that line the names get familiar. Higher still are X-rays, and the even stronger gamma rays. Those have enough energy to knock electrons off the atoms in your body. That is the kind doctors call ionizing radiation, and that is the kind that can damage cells if the dose is high enough. Which raises the question a lot of people are actually asking. Your cell phone is nowhere near that strong. Neither is your Wi-Fi. Neither is the radio in your car. They simply do not have the energy to do it. That is not opinion, and it is not somebody's position paper. That is how the physics works. There is another kind of radiation, though, and it works a little differently. Some materials throw off tiny particles instead of waves. One kind is stopped by a sheet of paper, or even by the outer layer of your skin. Another kind needs a little more shielding, like aluminum. The strongest kinds need thick concrete or lead and distance. What stops it tells you how to handle it, and here is something most people never hear. Getting a chest X-ray does not make you radioactive. Food that has been treated with radiation to kill bacteria does not become radioactive either. The energy passes through, does its job, and is gone, just like sunlight does not make the grass keep glowing after the sun goes down. So why does any of this matter to us? Because nuclear energy is built around the careful handling of radiation. For decades the fear of the word itself has kept us from having a calm, clear talk about nuclear power. We treated the whole subject like the monster under the bed instead of looking at the real differences between one kind of energy and another. And the differences are the point. Some radiation warms your coffee. Some lets a doctor see a broken bone and fix it. Some can be dangerous if the dose is high or the material is not handled right. Just like water. Too little and you die of thirst. Too much and you drown. Or fire. It cooks your supper, or it burns the house down. Here is my favorite example. Run a washcloth under the tap, wring it out, and give it fifteen seconds in the microwave. Lay that hot towel over your face in the afternoon. It is the same towel they hand you in first class on an airline. Another form of radiation. Oh my God, how terrible. That is the danger I run two or three times a day. Radiation is not one single scary thing. It is a whole family of energies, some gentle, some strong. Once we stop treating the word like a curse, we can talk sense about nuclear power as one tool that keeps the lights on. That is all. No more. No less. Think about it. What any of this means for your own household depends on your circumstances, and that is a conversation worth having at your kitchen table this week. For more on this and other bite-size think about it bites and casual conversations, visit truesdellwealth.com and subscribe at no cost.

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About

The Paul Truesdell Podcast Welcome to the Paul Truesdell Podcast. So, what's the gig? Paul records frequently at the Truesdell Professional Building. He eplains a few things about how life works before time gets away. Paul connects the dots, the plot and knots, spots the ops with a heavy dose of knocks, mocks, pots, rocks, socks, and mops. Confused? Then welcome aboard! You see, Paul the Elder enjoys telling complex stories in a way that is easy to understand. While always based on business, economics, and forecasting, having fun, laughing, and being among like-minded men, women, and children from Earth, Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune is a requirement. Paul the Elder coupled with Team Truesdell, have been there and done it. If you enjoy front porch philosophers who take deep dives and connect the dots, while drinking coffee during the day and a whiskey after five, welcome. It is a true pleasure to have you onboard. This is, The Paul Truesdell Podcast.

Information

  • Creator
    Paul Grant Truesdell, JD., AIF, CLU, ChFC
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    577
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Truesdell Companies
  • Show Website
    The Paul Truesdell Podcast