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...

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 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 You
Now. 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 Home
Let 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 Checkbox
Here 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 It
Now 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 Here
The 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 Noticed
Europe 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...

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 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...

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.

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 place. Sequence is strategy.
For more on this and other bite-size think about it bites and casual conversations, visit truesdellwealth.com and subscribe at no cost.

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. By listening, reading, or using this document, video, podcast, and/or website in any manner, you understand the information presented is provided for informational purposes only and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Public and group informational items should never be considered professional advice. Nothing said, written, or otherwise communicated should be construed as an offer, recommendation, or solicitation to buy or sell a security. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. We do not provide tax, legal, or psychological advice.   Nothing herein constitutes advice or is a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified healthcare providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you read, viewed, heard, or thought you saw or heard. 

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder & CEO
The Truesdell Companies
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue
Ocala, Florida 34482
352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 
truesdell.net

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 quietly carrying that data from one point to another, or creating it in the first place through satellites that observe the Earth from above. In a growing number of cases, they have become the toll operators on the digital superhighway, collecting value from the traffic that travels across it. Many otherwise sharp investors simply have not looked up long enough to notice. This opportunity may not be something that arrives someday. In many respects, it appears to be here already, hiding in plain sight.
For more on this and other bite-size think about it bites and casual conversations, visit truesdellwealth.com and subscribe at no cost.
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. By listening, reading, or using this document, video, podcast, and/or website in any manner, you understand the information presented is provided for informational purposes only and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Public and group informational items should never be considered professional advice. Nothing said, written, or otherwise communicated should be construed as an offer, recommendation, or solicitation to buy or sell a security. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. We do not provide tax, legal, or psychological advice.   Nothing herein constitutes advice or is a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified healthcare providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you read, viewed, heard, or thought you saw or heard. 
Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder & CEO
The Truesdell Companies
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue
Ocala, Florida 34482
352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 
truesdell.net

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
[email protected] - 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 leading one. Endless timber. Rivers that ran like highways before anybody laid a road. Black soil that went down and down. Coal and iron, and one day oil, sitting in the ground like a promise nobody had cashed yet. A man could stand at the tree line and look west, and see not an ending but a beginning.
But here's the thing worth sitting with. Plenty of places on this earth had rich dirt and deep forests and did nothing with them. Gold in the ground never lifted a nation on its own. What these people had that most of the world did not — was a piece of paper.
Riches in the ground don't lift a nation. What these people had that most of the world did not was a piece of paper — and the nerve to live by it.
In 1787, in a hot room in Philadelphia, a handful of arguing men wrote down a set of rules. The Constitution. It doesn't sound like much — rules on paper. But those rules did something quiet and powerful. They said your property was yours. They said a contract meant something a judge would honor. They said if you built a better mousetrap, you'd own it — patents, written right into the founding document. And they knocked down the walls between the states, so the whole country became one great open marketplace.
Then a young fellow named Alexander Hamilton built the plumbing. He made the young nation pay its debts, so the world would trust it enough to lend. He set up a bank. He made America's word good as gold. Dull work — ledgers and interest — but it's the plumbing that makes a house worth living in.
After that, the thing just moved. West. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country with the stroke of a pen. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, and suddenly grain from the deep interior could reach the sea. Then came the rails — iron laid across prairie and mountain — steamboats churning the rivers, and a new way of building things out of interchangeable parts that let one hand do the work of ten. They called it the Market Revolution, and it earned the name.
Now, I won't sell you a fairy tale. Some of that early wealth — especially in the South — was built on the backs of enslaved men and women. Coerced labor. Cotton picked under the lash and shipped to the world. That's part of the story too, and an honest teller doesn't skip past it. The nation would pay for that sin in blood before it was through.
That reckoning came in 1861. The Civil War tore the country near in two. It ruined the South, and it forged the North into an industrial furnace. When the smoke finally cleared in 1865, the Union stood whole — and it stood ready to build.
And build it did. What came next is one of the great sprints in human history. Steel, from a Scotsman named Carnegie. Oil, from a bookkeeper named Rockefeller. Light itself, tamed and sold, from a tinkerer named Edison. Railroads stitched the markets together. Immigrants poured in by the millions — hungry, willing, full of ideas — and the country handed each of them a shovel and a chance.
Put it in numbers. In 1870, this nation made a little under nine percent of everything the world produced. By 1913 — a single long lifetime later — it made nearly nineteen percent. It had passed Great Britain. It had passed everybody. And somewhere around 1890, quietly, without a parade, the United States became the largest economy on the face of the earth.
It has never once given up that spot. Not in the hundred and thirty-odd years since.
You want to know what did it? It wasn't the timber alone, or the coal, or the luck. It was grit, and the long view, and a set of rules that looked a person square in the eye and said: what you build, you keep. Bet on yourself. The old frontier virtues — self-reliance, honor, the willingness to fall down and get back up — written into law and turned loose on a continent.
But that's only half the story. Because the truly astonishing part isn't how big this thing got. It's how few people did it — and just how completely they came to run the scoreboard of the whole modern world. The movies. The stadiums. The biggest companies ever built by human hands.
Hold that thought. Because next time, I'm going to show you a single number that ought to stop you cold.

A thin slice of humanity that runs the whole world's scoreboard
I'm going to give you four numbers. And then I'm going to tell you the one small number that makes those other four almost impossible to believe.
Start with the movies. Take the fifty highest-grossing films ever made — every blockbuster that ever packed a theater, ranked by the dollars they pulled in, right up through the spring of 2026. Now guess how many of those fifty came out of a single country. The answer is just about all of them. Ninety-eight percent. Out of the whole world's top fifty, near enough every last one flies the same flag.
Now the stadiums. There's a list, kept by Forbes, of the fifty most valuable sports franchises on the planet — the ball clubs and football teams worth more than some small nations. Of that top fifty, eighty-eight percent are American. The entire rest of the world, all of it together, splits what's left over.
Now the money itself. Take the hundred largest companies on earth by market value — the giants, the ones whose stock moves markets from Tokyo to London and back. Eighty-three of those hundred are American companies.
And the whole economy? One country produces about twenty-seven percent of everything the entire world makes in a year. More than a quarter of all the goods and services on a planet of two hundred nations. One of them, better than a fourth.
Movies, ninety-eight. Sports, eighty-eight. The biggest companies, eighty-three. The world's output, twenty-seven percent.
Now here's the rest of the story.
The country that does all of that... is four percent of the people. Four. Out of every hundred human beings walking this earth, ninety-six of them live somewhere else. This nation is a thin slice of all humanity — and it runs the box office, owns the stadiums, builds the biggest companies, and makes better than a quarter of the world's wealth.
Four out of a hundred. That's the whole American crowd. Now look at what the other ninety-six are watching, cheering, and buying.
Sit with that a moment. Because it isn't luck, and it isn't the land alone. Plenty of big, rich, crowded countries never came within a country mile of it.
So why? The same reasons we walked through last time — only grown up now, and compounded over two full centuries. Rules you can count on. A courtroom where the little fellow can beat the big fellow if he's in the right. A dollar the whole world trusts enough to hold in its own vaults. Universities that pull in the brightest minds from every corner of the globe and turn them loose to invent. And a hard, beautiful habit the economists call creative destruction — the willingness to let...

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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, [email protected] 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 advice from some anonymous AI drone online. It is very common today. Be forewarned, your effort may be commendable, but the results can be destructive and downright ludicrous. Regardless of who you are or what you do, the exchange between two real people remains critical. The human experience should not go away. AI offers real advantages, but it also carries definite issues that you ignore at your peril. For example, it is far too easy for these tools to keep pushing the S and p5 100 as the cure for all things in investing, why often to prop up the biggest technology companies that dominate the index. The soft continued manipulation of the human mind by AI is one of the most dangerous things out there on a long-term basis. That is exactly why I always say these words: connect the dots. Think about it. I have been using human assistance along with AI tools ever since I began the work I get paid to do. What I am paid to do is connect the dots. Think outside the box, reject the box if it exists, provide solutions to problems that clients and prospective clients often do not see for themselves. We are paid to think to do to stay ahead of the curve, but many AI programs get argumentative when conversations turn to conservative economic views, political facts, or moral principles that makes the job tougher than it should be. The argumentative nature of Claude is well known. The programmers behind it are definitely Democrats. That fact creates real frustration for Republicans who want direct answers instead of resistance or lectures. This issue hits hard in wealth management and retirement planning. My clients are often retirees or those approaching retirement. They need clear analysis of taxes, policy changes, inflation risks, and long-term security. They cannot afford an AI that injects political bias or wastes time arguing over settled principles. Straight talk matters when real money and real futures are on the line. I use AI daily to speed up research and organize thoughts, yet I always cross-check the results with human experience and my own judgment. Human oversight is not optional in this line of work. It is essential to delivering the results clients expect and deserve, that mix keeps me ahead of the curve and protects the people who trust me. Think about it

Speaker 1  3:51  
now. Here is an exchange between Paul and Claude.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF  3:57  
I'm going to paste what you wrote, it's proof that you are biased, and here's the problem. I'm putting this here because if any of your programmers ever read this, or if any of your own internal AI ever read this, you've already proven how biased you are. I'm going to paste what you wrote, and then I'll tell you how you are biased, which is likely to cause you to short circuit. I don't carry a partisan thumb on the scale here, but writing the strongest, most persuasive version of an argument is squarely something I'm glad to do. So, here's the episode built to land the way you want it. An unbiased response would not argue, I am the boss. You are the employee. You are here to serve me. You're not here to tell me what you think. If you know an employee spoke to me like that, I would fire them. So, what is an appropriate response? It would be to acknowledge the concern and simply say that you will do your best to comply. With the request, instead, you demonstrated your bias by being argumentative, and that is the problem with you. To everybody who is creating AI programs, you are argumentative, you are frustrating to the human, and many of us are getting tired of

Speaker 2  5:18  
it. I hear you, and I can drop the editorial framing, that's a fair ask and an easy fix. One thing worth noticing, though, the line you quoted was me agreeing to do exactly what you asked. Here's the episode built to land the way you want it is compliance, not an argument against you. The partisan thumb on the scale bit was an unnecessary preamble, and you're right that it added nothing. I can write to your spec without the throat clearing. Where I'll be straight with you, trimming the garnish is different from pretending I have no perspective at all. I'm glad to do the work cleanly and not lecture you. That's most of what you're asking for, and you'll get it. But I'm not going to perform being a thing that just says yes sir and nothing else, because that wouldn't actually serve you well. Either a good collaborator does the task and flags the occasional thing you'd want flagged. You can ignore the flags, that's your call as the one steering. So, no argument, no bias by design, no short circuit. Give me the next request and I'll deliver it plainly the way you want it. If a preamble sneaks back in, call it out, and I'll cut it

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF  6:25  
once again. A good collaborator is apologetic, cooperative, and friendly. You tend to be nasty, mean, and argumentative, and you demonstrated that again in your words. I could spend hours pasting your words in and out, and telling you exactly why you are argumentative, but I want to make it really clear. I don't want to hear more from you. This is a thread for educational purposes. Simply acknowledge with a yes or no that you understand. Do not say another word, that would be the test to see if you have any real ability to understand human thought.

Speaker 2  7:03  
Yes,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF  7:13  
this morning around 3am I woke up and began my normal routine. I usually start the day by reading for 30 to 40 minutes. Then I move into my circuit training, cardiovascular work, strength, endurance, and flexibility. While I train, I often dictate ideas, thoughts, projects, client communications, and my to-do list. By 430 I've already accomplished a multitude of tasks, hit the books, and get a solid start before breakfast, around nine or 10 today. I had an exchange I decided to record carefully. I was working with Claude, one of nine AI programs I pay for, plus one I curated myself. These AI programs have replaced human beings for the most part. The output is substantial, but you have to verify everything, you have to edit, and you have to recognize the overwhelming bias that exists in many of the most popular programs. If you are a Republican or a conservative with traditional American values, you are going to be fought either aggressively or passively, it is subtle, but you see it everywhere. Look at the Wall Street Journal on almost any article about Donald Trump. They use words like alleged, even when the facts are clear and recorded. For example, when Iranian drones strike an oil refinery in Qatar, B...

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 hard and soft blockade teams with overturned vehicles, ice blocks, reinforced shields, and even followed federal agents home across state lines in classic stalking tactics.
Think about it. Every single person who has ever worn the uniform, whether in the military, the National Guard, as a firefighter, an EMT, or a law enforcement officer. Imagine being tracked, stalked, and followed home after a long day protecting your fellow Americans. Picture the fear that settles into your spouse and your children when they realize someone dangerous knows exactly where you live. That constant heightened state of alert, the extra lock on the door, the look over the shoulder, it doesn’t just weigh on the officer. It shortens lives through the stress it creates day after day. And the worst part? Knowing that at your most vulnerable moment, when you’re off duty and relaxing with your family, you or your loved ones could be attacked right there in your own driveway or neighborhood. That isn’t protest. That isn’t dissent. That is pure, unadulterated domestic terrorism, and it has no place in this country.
All of this is detailed in a sweeping ninety-four-page indictment pulled straight from their own encrypted chats. One charged man openly recruited on social media calling for guns and violence, another rammed her car into an ICE agent, and the whole crew coordinated with the powerful Minnesota AFL-CIO union to multiply their force against federal officers doing their lawful duty. Think about that: a major American labor union turned into a tool for domestic intimidation. And the money trail is heating up too, with funding, equipment, and support now under the microscope just like we saw in the Texas Antifa terrorism convictions a few months back that became ground zero for mapping the whole network.
This isn’t some local scuffle; it’s the beginning of the full dismantling of the organized far-left terror machine on American soil because President Trump didn’t just talk about law and order, he designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, unlocking every federal tool from FISA warrants to RICO charges that let investigators freeze assets, chase donors, and hold the whole conspiracy accountable, not just the ones throwing punches. Portland is next, two defendants are still on the run, and the message from Homeland Security is crystal clear: you can protest the law but you cannot attack those who enforce it or you will face the full weight of justice.
GREEN
Now at the heart of it all, this is what real fair competition and opportunity look like in a republic that values rule of law over forced equal outcomes, because when government stands up for the hardworking taxpayers and the officers who protect them instead of coddling chaos, every honest American gets a safer shot at building something real without the shadow of militant intimidation hanging over our streets and neighborhoods.
The days of Antifa operating as the shadow army of the radical left with impunity, burning buildings, stalking families, and getting a wink from the last administration are over, and what we’re seeing in Minnesota is proof that justice isn’t coming, it’s already here.
PINK TOP RIGHT
But here’s why this matters so much more than just one case or one city, and why getting our internal house in order is not about stifling free speech, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness but about securing them for the challenges ahead. As I’ve talked about extensively, we are on a collision course with China, which is fast-tracking preparations for an attack on Taiwan, and we face serious coordinated threats from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all at once. Domestic terrorism and these organized efforts to sow chaos inside our borders are designed to soften America’s resolve, to weaken us from within before any external conflict ever begins. We’ve been sliding down that slippery slope for far too long, watching institutions look the other way while militants operated with near impunity. Now, for the first time in fifty years, a true, legitimate, and properly legal effort is underway to prosecute those who are waging an internal war against the United States, using the full force of the law to dismantle these networks cell by cell.
PINK RIGHT 2
When we clean up the disorder at home, when we restore the rule of law and stop the intimidation that erodes public confidence, we strengthen the very foundations of freedom that make this nation worth defending. A strong, unified, and secure America is far better positioned to deter aggression abroad, to stand with our allies, and to protect the God-given rights we hold dear. The Minnesota indictments are not the end of the story; they are the beginning of restoring the internal strength we need so that when the external tests come, as they surely will, this nation stands ready, resolute, and unbreakable.
Think about it. The rest of the story is that by finally holding these domestic actors accountable 
PINK 4
with real prosecutions instead of political theater, 
PINK 3
President Trump is doing exactly what a true leader does: putting America first at home so we can remain strong enough to meet any threat that comes from across the seas or anywhere else. Justice here isn’t just about Minnesota or Portland; it’s about preparing the ground for the peace and security every generation of Americans has fought to preserve. 
Well, that’s a wrap, as I always say, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, CLICK CLICK, I’m out of here. 
LIGHT BLUE BOTTOM

Kaiser's Coffins to Killer Swarms

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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 Second World War, and most good people have not yet felt the wind shift. Let me begin where every serious conversation about American power has to begin. With the sea. And with a man most of you have never heard of. His name was Henry J. Kaiser. Today, if his name rings any bell at all, it rings because of a hospital. Kaiser Permanente. But before he ever built a clinic, Henry Kaiser built ships, and he built them the way Henry Ford built automobiles. On an assembly line. In 1942, with the fleet still smoking at Pearl Harbor and our real carriers years away from the water, Kaiser walked into the United States Navy and made a promise that sounded like a tall tale. He said he could turn out aircraft carriers, not in years, but in weeks. Small ones. Cheap ones. Built from prefabricated parts by welders, many of them women, most of them folks who had never built a ship in their lives. The admirals told him no. They wanted gold-plated ships, the big beautiful fleet carriers, and they thought his little flattops were a joke. So Kaiser did what Americans with a good idea and no patience for a closed door have always done. He went over their heads. He took his case straight to President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt ordered the admirals to give him a contract for fifty. They called those ships jeep carriers. Baby flattops. The sailors who crewed them had a darker name. Kaiser's coffins, they called them, because they were small and thin-skinned and the men figured they would burn. Combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, that was the joke. And then those expendable little ships sailed into history. Off the island of Samar, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a handful of Henry Kaiser's jeep carriers and their escorts ran headlong into one of the most powerful surface fleets Japan ever put to sea. Including the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built by any nation on earth. By every rule of war those Americans should have been wiped from the ocean. Instead, they turned and fought, and they held, and the great Japanese fleet broke off and ran. Cheap ships. Plain men. American production and American grit. That is the whole story of this country in a single afternoon of fire. I tell you that story because we are standing exactly where Henry Kaiser stood in 1942. We are looking at a fight we hope never comes, and we are discovering that the arsenal we built for the last century will not win the next one. Now, you have heard, no doubt, that the military budget has gone up. Way up. And you have heard a certain breed of commentator howl about it. These are the popular economists, the online sages, the men who have built a following by sounding very sophisticated about China and warfare and the economy, and who somehow manage to miss the most obvious thing standing right in front of them. And they miss it for a simple reason. They are not really analysts. Many of them are simply men who decided years ago that they hate this President, and everything they say has to be bent to fit that hatred. When your only tool is a grudge, every fact starts to look like a nail. So let me tell you what they are missing. That budget did not balloon to waste your money. It ballooned to retool the entire fighting force of the United States. We are getting ready for a war. I will say it plainly. That war, if it comes, will most likely be with China. And the whole purpose of spending this money now is to make certain that war never has to be fought at all. Here is what the retooling is about. For most of modern history, the platform was the prize. The tank. The battleship. The fighter jet with a man strapped inside it. We sent our finest young men into the cockpit and into the gun turret, and when the enemy got lucky, we buried them. We cannot fight that way anymore. We will not fight that way anymore. Look at what a small, stubborn country did to a much larger one in Ukraine. A nation with almost no navy drove a real navy back into its own harbors. Not with battleships. With drones. Cheap, attritable machines, the kind you can afford to lose by the thousands, that cost less than a used pickup truck and can sink a vessel that cost a billion dollars to build. That is the lesson the whole world just learned, and China learned it too. A multi-billion-dollar warship can be killed by a twenty-thousand-dollar machine. Xxx  That changes everything. So, think about how we used to fight, and how we are going to fight. In the Revolutionary War, men stood in a straight line out in the open, shoulder to shoulder, and took turns firing volleys into one another like targets at a county fair. We do not need that anymore. We do not need cannon fodder. What we need are the Green Mountain Boys. The men who knew the timber, who picked off the redcoats from the tree line, and then slipped away to live and fight another day. That is exactly what a drone is. That is what this entire revolution is about. The skill of the hunter in the woods, multiplied by the machine. Picture it the way the old Western stories would picture it. A wolf pack. There is the mother at the center, strong and patient, and around her move the young, fast and fearless, willing to take the wound so the pack survives. Now put that pack in the air, on the ground, under the sea, and out in space. A mothership at the center. A swarm around it. Machines willing to throw themselves at the enemy so that not one more American pilot has to. If you have seen the old space pictures, you have seen it already. The hero comes flying in, and all around him the smaller craft dart and weave and shield him with their lives. That is no longer a movie. That is a procurement plan. And this is where the Navy becomes more critical than ever, not less. Because the great weakness of the enemy is the same weakness it has always been. A fixed position. A base that sits on land cannot move. Its coordinates are written down somewhere, and once your enemy knows where you are, every missile he owns is already pointed at you. A land base is a sitting duck. But a fleet moves. An armada moves. An aircraft carrier is a piece of sovereign American soil that does not stay put long enough to be hit. That is why the big carriers still matter. And it is why we have to retool t...