The Paul Truesdell Podcast

MY VOTE: MIKE MILLS AND DR. SARAH JAMES
By Paul Truesdell
Early voting begins today, Thursday, October 22, in Marion County. One of the first things I intend to do today is vote. Early voting continues through October 31, from eight in the morning until six in the evening.
I am voting for Mike Mills for Marion County School Board District 4 and Dr. Sarah James for District 5.
I am asking you to please read this all the way through and share it with as many people as you know.
School board races often receive far less attention than they deserve. People concentrate on the offices at the top of the ballot and overlook decisions that directly affect our children, teachers, property taxes, and community’s future.
In my opinion, this is a watershed moment for education in Marion County. These races deserve your attention.
I will not vote for Brigitte Smith or Donald Barber.
Our children deserve capable leadership. Our teachers deserve support. Our taxpayers deserve people who understand budgets, ask intelligent questions, and explain their decisions. Political ambition and loud accusations are no substitute for preparation.
Mike Mills and Dr. Sarah James have long histories of paying it forward through education, mentoring, and service. Their commitment to young people began long before this election. They have invested their time, knowledge, and experience in helping others move ahead.
That matters to me. Show me what you have done before you tell me what you intend to do.
Mike Mills brings an MBA, business ownership, Navy service, experience as an adjunct professor, and an active commitment to mentoring students. He attended Marion County public schools, and his children attend them today. His connection to education includes showing up and doing the work.
Dr. Sarah James brings experience as a teacher, school administrator, business owner, and school board member. Her work in education reflects an ongoing investment in children and the people responsible for teaching them. Her priorities include retaining qualified employees, managing growth, and preparing students for productive lives through academic and career opportunities.
Both understand that paying it forward requires personal involvement. You give your time. You share what you know. You help someone develop the confidence and ability to succeed.
In my assessment, Mills and James are articulate, prepared, and capable of discussing difficult issues without turning every disagreement into a personal confrontation. They offer the stronger combination of education, practical experience, and judgment.
Smith and Barber strike me as political candidates first. In the campaign literature and public presentations I have reviewed, neither has articulated a history of sustained, direct engagement in our schools comparable to the records of Mills and James.
Seeking authority over schools is easy to announce. Establishing a record of service takes years.
My concerns about their candidacies are substantial.
I have been deeply disappointed by Brigitte Smith’s leadership of the Marion County Republican Executive Committee. In my experience, factional fighting and political litmus tests have taken too much attention away from recruiting people, encouraging participation, and building an effective organization.
I was present at a committee meeting when Smith yelled at her vice chairman to shut up and sit down.
I saw it. I heard it. That is not the temperament I want helping govern our schools.
In separate conversations with Smith and Barber, I have also come away troubled by an attitude of distrust toward people who are new to Marion County. New residents bring experience, skills, relationships, and a willingness to contribute. Treating them as outsiders who must first prove themselves to a political inner circle is a poor way to build a community.
A title means little if the organization behind it cannot bring people together.
Florida has 67 counties, each with its own Republican Executive Committee. Yet I have seen no other county committee publicly thumb its nose at the Republican Party of Florida and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson in the manner of Marion County’s executive board.
Under Smith’s leadership, the executive board publicly announced its opposition to the proposed state party endorsement of Simpson. Its stated explanation was that Republican primary voters should choose the nominee. That explanation does not excuse the judgment or the tone of this public declaration.
To me, it amounted to giving the middle finger to our Republican agriculture commissioner and the state party. Coming from Marion County, a county vital to Florida’s agricultural industry, that display was especially obnoxious.
This was a public posting that remained available for an extended period, one I have seen copied and preserved. Leadership requires understanding that public statements have lasting consequences for relationships, credibility, and the community you represent.
I consider that conduct outrageous. It gives me no confidence in Smith’s ability to build the relationships and exercise the judgment our school board needs.
The committee’s financial history deserves attention, too.
The Republican headquarters property, a former theater, was sold to Sonny’s Real Pit Barbecue for use as a parking lot. The transaction I am referring to included barbecue credits. That history deserves a clear explanation of the terms, the proceeds, the credits, and how those resources were used.
After the sale, the organization moved into rented space. That office subsequently closed. The committee’s website now directs people to meeting venues rather than identifying a dedicated, staffed headquarters.
Where is the money?
What did the organization receive from the sale? How were those resources spent? What did subsequent fundraising produce? What is the organization’s current financial position? Why was the rented office given up, and what is the plan for maintaining a working headquarters?
I want an accounting that follows the resources from the property transaction through the years that followed. The history spans different periods of leadership. Current leaders should be able to explain what they inherited, what they raised, what they spent, and what remains.
Those questions become more pressing when I consider the elaborate events at the World Equestrian Center.
I attended. I saw the spectacle: sculptures, clowns, people on stilts, and the atmosphere of a circus production.
An impressive evening can still be a poor financial result. The questions are straightforward. What did the event cost? How much did it collect? How much remained after expenses? Were all vendors paid, and when?
Where is the money?
If an organization can stage an elaborate event but cannot maintain a dedicated headquarters, its members deserve a clear explanation of those priorities and the financial results.
The REC now promotes an annual fundraiser called Sequins and Saddles. I would rather see a traditional Lincoln-Reagan dinner emphasizing Republican history, principles, and serious political leadership. The measure of any fundraiser is how much useful support it generates, what it costs, and whether it strengthens the organization.
To me, too much of what I have seen feels performative. A stage, a dinner, and a few political speakers do not establish organizational strength. Results do.
That includes the everyday work of electing Republicans.
The committee’s website advertises voter-outreach training through the Pulsar calling app. I want to know what that effort is producing. How many volunteers are actively making calls? How many voters are being reached? What organized support is being delivered for Byron Donalds and the rest of the Republican ticket? How directly involved is the chair?
Those are core responsibiliti...

When the Safe Harbor Takes Fire
This is about money, and the parts of it most people have never laid eyes on. It is not a sermon about whose side God is on in the Middle East. It is about what happens to people's savings when the balance of the world shifts, and it is shifting right now.
Here is the plain truth. Most people who save money do not know what they are actually invested in. Not because they are careless. Because the money sits in bundled financial products, and nobody ever opened the box for them.
That is especially true of retirees and people close to retirement. They are the ones holding the money. The Federal Reserve says the baby boom generation alone holds about half of all household wealth in America. That money took a lifetime to build.
So if you are retired, or close to it, keep one question in your pocket the whole way through. Do you know what is in your bundle?
The Box With Your Name on It
Most savers do not own stocks one at a time. They own bundles. A mutual fund is a bundle. An ETF, which stands for exchange-traded fund, is a bundle that trades like a stock. A variable annuity is a set of those same bundles, called subaccounts, wrapped inside an insurance contract with the insurance company's fees on top. Same bundles. Nicer box.
The Investment Company Institute, the trade group for the fund industry, says about fifty-six percent of American households own funds like these. That is about seventy-six million households.
Here is the trouble. You write the check, and somebody else decides what goes in the box. The name on your statement says Growth, or Balanced, or International. The name on the statement is not what you own. And some of what is in those boxes is sitting in the most dangerous places on earth, starting with the Middle East.
The City That Sold Safety
Look at Dubai. For twenty years it sold one product above all others, and it was not sand or sunshine. It was safety. Glass towers, no income tax, and a promise that your money could sleep there safely. Dubai Land Department figures, reported by the trade journal MEED, show home prices up somewhere between sixty and seventy-five percent from 2021 to 2025.
Then came February 28, 2026. The United States and Israel struck Iran. Iran answered with missiles and drones aimed at its neighbors, and the United Arab Emirates was one of them. Within two weeks, the Anadolu news agency reported, the stock index that tracks Dubai's big real estate companies had fallen about thirty percent. The Associated Press reported that the hottest ticket in town was a seat on a private jet out, at around two hundred thousand dollars a seat.
Now, you would think home prices crashed. They did not. The real estate stocks crashed. The houses themselves slid. According to the property firm Cavendish Maxwell, average home prices in August were down one point seven percent from a year earlier, the first yearly drop since February of 2021. The total value of sales for the first eight months of the year was down twenty-four percent.
And not all of it is missiles. Dubai was building too much before the first shot was fired. S&P Global expects the supply of homes there to grow by about a fifth over the next two years. The war did not create the problem. It turned on the lights.
Now, you may be thinking you never bought a condo in Dubai. Are you sure? An index is simply a list of stocks that a fund copies. A company called MSCI builds some of the most widely copied indexes in the world, and thousands of funds follow them. One is its Emerging Markets index, which covers stocks in developing countries. At the end of 2025, MSCI's own fact sheet put about six and a half percent of that index in four Gulf countries: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. That is the same neighborhood Iran has been firing into all year.
Six and a half percent will not sink you. That is the honest number. The danger is not one slice. The danger is that you never looked at any of the slices.
So look at the biggest one. In that same index, China is about twenty-seven and a half percent. More than one dollar in four. The country we can never trust is the largest piece of a fund somebody may have sold you as diversification, which is supposed to mean spreading your money around to lower your risk. Diversified, it turns out, can mean a little of everything and a lot of Beijing.
What the Pump Is Telling You
About a fifth of the world's oil normally moves through one narrow strip of water, the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has held a grip on it since the war began. Before the war, Brent crude, the oil price most of the world goes by, sat around seventy-two dollars a barrel. At the end of April it touched one hundred twenty-six.
You felt it. AAA put the national average for regular gas at two dollars and eighty-three cents in January. On October 1st, it was four dollars and forty-one cents. September averaged four dollars and thirty-three cents, the highest September on record. A year ago, you were paying three sixteen.
That is a dollar and a quarter a gallon. Fill a fifteen-gallon tank once a week and you are paying close to nineteen dollars more every time. Call it nearly a thousand dollars a year, for one car, before anybody hauls a single tomato to the grocery store on a diesel truck.
Your bundle is paying it too. Every airline, every trucking line, every chemical maker in your fund buys fuel at the same counter you do. Whether they pass the cost on to customers or swallow it, it shows up in their profits, and their profits show up in your statement. You will not find a line that says so.
President Trump has said oil will drop like a rock once this war is won. Even so, the European Union's own energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, warned back in March that prices would not snap back to normal even if peace were declared the next day.
The Price of Doing Nothing
So why pay it at all? Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it plainly. He said Iran is run by lunatic clerics with an apocalyptic view of their religion, and that they can never have a nuclear weapon. Every president has said it. Every world leader agrees with it. This year, President Trump finally did something about it. Rubio's picture is the one to hold onto: North Korea, but in the Middle East.
Look at what this regime does to its own people. Rubio puts the number it has killed at more than seventy thousand, and some believe it is closer to a hundred thousand. The record backs him up. Amnesty International documented roughly five thousand political prisoners executed in a few months in 1988. Reuters, citing sources inside the government, reported about fifteen hundred protesters killed in two weeks in November of 2019. Then came this past January. Time magazine reported that two senior officials in Iran's own Ministry of Health counted more than thirty thousand people killed. In two nights. The regime's official number was about three thousand. That tells you how much to trust the official number.
A government that will do that to its own people will do it to anyone. Price that into your portfolio and four-dollar gas starts to look cheap.
Europe Bet the House on Other People
Now go across the Atlantic. Germany shut down its last nuclear power plants in April of 2023. Europe as a whole leaned on Russia for its natural gas, about forty-five percent of it before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to that same energy commissioner.
Europe cut that to about ten percent and replaced it with gas shipped in by tanker, a good deal of it from Qatar. Morningstar reports the Iran war halted Qatar's gas production. In the first month of the war, Europe's gas prices jumped about seventy percent and oil about sixty. The investment firm Lazard said the shock would likely hit Europe harder than any other major developed economy.
A continent that shut down its own power pl...

If It Quacks
Her hair never moves.
She sits in a white coat with a stethoscope around her neck, a neat bob, a kind face, and a calm voice. She tells you what to put in your coffee. She tells you which thirteen foods help your body's natural weight-loss hormone. The channel calls her Dr. Elizabeth Monroe.
Here is the surprising part. Much of what she says is ordinary, decent advice. Eat your greens. Eat fish a couple of times a week. Eat beans, berries, and eggs. Watch the sugar. Walk. Your own doctor would tell you most of that. Some of it is stretched, and some of it you should run past your doctor first, especially the supplements. But the advice is not the real problem.
The real problem is that she isn't real.
The Tells
By every sign we can find, she is a computer creation. Same face, same haircut, same voice, same pace in every video. No practice, no hospital, no license anyone can find. The channel's own About page calls her Dr. Ashley Monroe. A real doctor's office does not forget the doctor's first name.
Then there are the scripts. One video says out loud, "In this script, we're going to walk through six levels." It ends with, "Note this script is intended for general informational purposes." The narrator is reading the production notes. The same video promises to share "the combination I personally use most mornings." She doesn't have mornings.
And she has company. A Spanish fact-checking group called Maldita.es counted more than one thousand YouTube channels run by doctors made with artificial intelligence. Nearly half of them were collecting a share of YouTube's ad money.
The Hook
Now understand how this works, because it is the part most people miss.
It starts with something harmless. An attractive face. A friendly voice. Good advice you already half believe. You watch one video. You like it. You follow. You start scrolling, and one thing leads to another. The next video is a little bolder. Then come the powders, the capsules, the detox, the special offer. Then a form that wants your name, your phone number, your email.
That is a slippery slope, and it is built that way on purpose. The free advice is not the product. You are. Every like and every follow tells the machine one thing: this person trusts a white coat on a screen. Once your guard is down, you are on a list, and lists get sold, worked, and pitched.
The money says who pays. The FBI reports that in 2025, Americans sixty and older reported losing more than seven point seven billion dollars to fraud.
Seven point seven billion dollars. In one year.
The Duck Test
I can't tell you this particular channel is out to swindle anybody. I don't know who runs it, and I won't pretend I do.
But it fits every fact pattern. A doctor who doesn't exist. A name that changes. Scripts read word for word. Supplements slipped in with the groceries. Headlines that promise more than the science delivers. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
You don't need a confession to recognize a pattern. You need to look at the facts and add them up.
The Same Test at the Ballot Box
That same test works on people who are very much real.
Take the Marion County School Board races. In my opinion, Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber are not qualified, and they are running against two highly qualified candidates, Dr. Sarah James and Mr. Mike Mills. You judge a candidate the way you judge that channel. Look at the historical behavior. Look at the fact patterns. Look at the finances. Look at how they answer a hard question, and whether they can do it without getting upset.
Too many people skip all that. They grab the meme. They grab the red meat. Everybody says this, everybody's doing that, so do this, vote that. They never check. That isn't how a good doctor works, and it isn't how a good investigator works. A doctor looks at the chart. An investigator looks at the evidence. They look at all the facts and figures before they decide.
That's what we do here. We show you what's real and what isn't, and how to tell the difference.
Look It Up
A real Florida doctor has a license you can look up with the Florida Department of Health. A real investment adviser shows up on FINRA's BrokerCheck, record and all. A real candidate has a record, a history, and answers you can check.
Real people leave tracks.
My friends, go back to that haircut. It never moves because there is nothing underneath it. Real people change. They age, they learn, they get tested, and they leave a trail you can follow. The ones with no trail, on a screen or on a ballot, have earned your suspicion, not your trust.
The Idiocracy is trusting the white coat because the name says Doctor.
Be careful out there. Not everything that looks real is real.
Think about it.

Hooves on the Ballot

Ground beef is running close to seven dollars a pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reason is simple. America is running out of cows. And the place where that problem meets your kitchen table, your property value, and your grandchildren's jobs is a school board runoff right here in Marion County, where two candidates, Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber, are running a cancel campaign.

I am going to explain how these two individuals, with their wildly intolerant cancel culture, are clueless when it comes to agriculture in Marion County, and why their backyard chicken and pigpen experience does not equate to understanding the business. This is a piece about one industry built on two animals, the cow and the horse, and about the children who will run it someday. It is about who should be in charge of those children's education.

Look at the national number first. The USDA's January cattle report counted eighty-six point two million head in this country. That is the smallest herd since 1951. Beef cows are the fewest since 1961. Last year's calf crop was the smallest since 1941.

Fewer cows. Higher hamburger. Same story.

Now bring it home. Florida has eight hundred seventy-two thousand beef cows, ninth in the nation, according to the University of Florida. Marion County is the Horse Capital of the World, with about seventy-five thousand horses, more than any county in America, per the American Horse Council Foundation. The USDA's 2022 Census counted about forty-one thousand head of cattle here too. Horses and cattle share the same pastures, the same hay fields, the same vets, the same feed stores, the same fence builders, and the same bankers. In this county, agriculture is not three industries. It is one.

And on November third, you pick the people who decide whether our schools keep producing the folks who run it.

Where It Started

Go back with me to 1521. Ponce de León came back to Florida that year with horses and seven Andalusian cattle, according to the University of South Florida's Florida history project. Seven cows. That is where American ranching began. Here. Not Texas.

Texas would prefer you not bring that up.

By 1700, the State Archives of Florida counts about thirty-four ranches and twenty thousand head of cattle in Florida. That was before there was a United States.

Now come closer to home. In 1941, Marion County started a steer show. In 1945, the county built the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion on Jacksonville Road, one of the first new arenas finished anywhere after the Second World War. The country had just come home from a war, and one of the first things this county built was a barn big enough for cattle and the children who raise them. That tells you what kind of people we were.

What Is Happening to the Herd

Cattle are not a factory. You cannot flip a switch and make more. A rancher has to hold back young heifers instead of selling them, breed them, wait for the calves, and raise those calves before a pound of hamburger ever reaches a store. The American Farm Bureau says the national herd probably will not truly grow again until at least 2028.

Cattle run on cow time, not campaign time.

In the meantime, the middle of the business is crowded. The USDA's Packers and Stockyards Division says four companies buy and slaughter about eighty-one percent of the nation's fed cattle. The biggest of them, JBS, is owned out of Brazil. A rancher selling calves sells into a market a handful of giants control.

So in August, President Trump moved to help families at the meat counter. He signed a proclamation letting an extra three hundred thousand metric tons of lean beef trimmings, the meat that gets ground into hamburger, come in at the lower tariff rate for ninety days, starting September first. He said plainly it was a short-term fix, and he was right to call it that. A Michigan State livestock economist told NPR the extra beef is about two percent of the American supply. The American Farm Bureau checked forty-one grocery stores afterward. Prices had not moved at thirty of them. The average drop was sixteen cents.

Sixteen cents.

That is the lesson, and it is a good one. Imports are a bridge. You cannot import your way out of a shortage of mother cows. The only lasting fix is more ranchers raising more cattle on American grass. And ranchers do not fall out of the sky. They start out as children at a steer show.

One Industry, Two Animals

Here is how it fits together in Marion County. The horse brings in the money. The USDA's 2022 Census says horse sales here were about one hundred forty million dollars that year, first in Florida and fourth in the country. The 2023 American Horse Council study puts the whole equine economy at four point three billion dollars a year, about twenty-two percent of everything this county produces. The World Equestrian Center opened in 2021 and brought the world to our door.

The cow holds the ground. Cattle sales were smaller, about fifteen million dollars, but the same census counted about one hundred thirty-four thousand acres of pasture in this county, close to half our farmland. Hay is our biggest crop by acreage. That hay feeds horses and cattle both. The grass a cow keeps green is the same grass that makes this horse country in the first place.

And the cattle are thinning out here just like they are nationally. The census counted about fifty-two thousand head in Marion County in 2017. Five years later, about forty-one thousand. Every pasture that goes under becomes a rooftop, and rooftops do not raise Thoroughbreds.

Lose the cattle, and the horse country goes with them.

The Green Acres Mistake

Now look at what some people think farming is.

If you were around in the late sixties, you remember Green Acres. A New York lawyer moves to the country because he is sure farming is a simple, honest life. It ran six seasons, and the joke every week was that it was not. Hollywood figured out sixty years ago that the funniest man in America is a man who thinks farming is a feeling.

Here is the false belief. Some people think that if you keep a few chickens in the backyard and a pig in a pen, you understand agriculture. You do not. Backyard chickens and a pigpen do not equate to running a cattle operation or a horse farm. Owning a fishing pole does not make you a commercial fisherman. Explain it to a child this way. A lemonade stand is fun because when it loses money, Mom buys more lemons. The grocery store has to pay the light bill whether anybody walks in or not. Agriculture is the grocery store.

Here is the number that proves it. The USDA's 2022 Census looked at every farm in Marion County, about three thousand three hundred of them. Together they sold about two hundred twenty million dollars of product. To do it, they spent about two hundred ninety-seven million.

They spent more than they sold.

Add back the side money, things like boarding and custom work, and the whole county's farms cleared about seven point seven million dollars. The census works that out to about twenty-three hundred dollars per farm, for the year. One bad storm, one dry season, one bad swing in prices, and a family is out. The people who survive in that business are some of the sharpest business minds in America. They pay for feed, fuel, fertilizer, and interest up front, then sell into a market they do not control. A rancher who cannot read a balance sheet is a rancher about to hold an auction.

More than half the farms in this county sold less than twenty-five hundred dollars of product, the census says. Those are hobbies. Hobbies are fine. But a hobby is not a business, and a school board had better know whic...

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...

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

September 26, 2026

From a 1970s science class to a 2026 school board race, the same wave of nonsense keeps rolling in. Here is how to see it coming.
Dinosaur oil, famines that never came, a burger that crashed the cattle market, and two local candidates who see fraud behind every door.
Every generation gets its prophets of doom. Ours had Ehrlich, Carter, Oprah, and Gore. Marion County has the Bobbsey Twins.
History repeats itself. The trick is remembering it.

 Waves of Hogwash
A Rare Breed
Numbers and story, introvert and speaker, and why I will never tell you something I don't know.
I'll accept it. I'm a rare breed. I'm equally quantitative and qualitative. I work the numbers, and I work the story behind the numbers. I've always described myself as an analytical expressive.
When I tell people I'm an introvert by nature, they look at me up in front of a big room, perfectly comfortable 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 Balderdash
This 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-Pants
An 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 Station
Where 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...

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

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...