THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS

You have known the aircraft carrier all your life. It is the floating city of steel — a thousand feet of runway riding the open ocean, home to thousands of sailors and scores of fighter jets. For three generations, it has been the proudest symbol of American reach. When trouble flared anywhere on the globe, a president had only to ask one question: where are the carriers? And the answer, more often than not, settled the matter.

That great ship is not going away. But the story of the carrier is changing — quietly, and faster than most folks realize. And in a moment, I'll tell you the rest of the story. 

Here is the trouble, told plainly. The very thing that makes a supercarrier so mighty — its size, its cost, the sheer value packed into one hull — has also made it a tempting target. Today an enemy does not need a battleship to threaten one. He needs only cheap, fast missiles and small unmanned boats and aircraft. We saw the lesson written large in the Black Sea, where Ukraine, a nation with almost no navy to speak of, used inexpensive remote-controlled sea drones to bloody Russia's proud fleet. We saw it again in the Red Sea, where small bands fired waves of low-cost drones at some of the finest warships afloat. The point was made for all the world to read: a swarm of cheap, expendable machines can rattle even a sophisticated fleet.

Now, a wise old hand on the frontier never tied his whole fortune to a single horse, no matter how fine that horse might be. He kept a string of them. And that, in essence, is what the United States Navy and its allies are now learning to do at sea.

Enter the "mini" carrier.

These are smaller, cheaper ships built not to launch heavy, manned fighter jets, but to launch drones — unmanned aircraft and vessels guided by remote control or by their own onboard intelligence. Because a drone weighs a fraction of a piloted fighter, the ship that carries it can shed much of the heavy machinery a supercarrier requires. No giant catapults. No reinforced steel decks built to absorb a thirty-ton landing. The result is a vessel that can be built smaller, fielded faster, and bought in far greater numbers. They go by many names — light carriers, drone carriers, unmanned surface vessels — but the idea behind all of them is the same. Trade a little exquisite capability for a great deal of useful mass.

And mass, in this new arithmetic of the sea, matters more than ever.

The plan is not to retire the great carriers, but to surround them with these smaller companions. Picture the formation: one supercarrier at the center, the seasoned trail boss, providing command, manned air superiority, and heavy striking power. Riding alongside it, a handful of mini carriers — the outriders and scouts — each carrying its own herd of drones. Together they form what the Navy calls a battle group, only now it is a hybrid one, part manned and part machine.

What do these smaller ships actually do? Several jobs, and each a valuable one.

First, they serve as the eyes of the fleet. Their drones fly long, patient circles over the horizon, watching, listening, and feeding a steady stream of information back to the flagship. This work goes by the cumbersome name of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — but you may simply think of it as keeping watch, the way a good lookout once kept watch from the high ground while the wagons made camp below.

Second, they confuse and protect. Some drones are sent up not to strike, but to jam an enemy's radar or to play the decoy — drawing fire away from the precious carrier at the center. Let the enemy waste his expensive missiles on cheap and empty bait.

Third, and most striking, they attack in numbers. From racks and rails, a mini carrier can loose dozens, even hundreds, of small, low-cost attack drones at once — a swarm meant to overwhelm an enemy's defenses by sheer saturation. And here lies the heart of the matter, the cold arithmetic that has admirals rethinking everything. A single attack drone may cost a few thousand dollars. The missile required to shoot it down may cost a few million. When the cheap can exhaust the expensive, the old math no longer holds.

Now, who is building these things? The answer reaches around the globe, and that is part of the rest of the story.

Turkey moved first, taking a ship originally meant for fighter jets and repurposing it to launch drones from a curved, ski-jump deck — and flying them successfully in NATO exercises just this year. South Korea, once set on a traditional light carrier, changed course and aimed its new ship squarely at commanding swarms of drones. Portugal is bringing into service Europe's first vessel built from the keel up for unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and beneath the waves. And China — let no one mistake this — is racing ahead with stealthy drone-carrier prototypes and converted cargo ships, rehearsing the very kind of mass drone launches that would accompany a missile strike.

The United States has chosen a somewhat different road. Rather than build a fleet of standalone drone carriers, the Navy is weaving unmanned systems into the force it already has. Through an effort fittingly named Replicator, it aims to field thousands of inexpensive, expendable machines in a hurry. It is fitting unmanned surface vessels — robot ships — to act as floating drone trucks. It is bringing aboard a new unmanned aircraft that can refuel jets in midair, easing the burden on the carrier's pilots. And it is adapting its big amphibious assault ships, the workhorses that already carry jump-jets and helicopters, to launch drone swarms of their own. The aim, spoken openly, is a larger and more distributed fleet — one that does not place every egg in one very expensive basket.

There are honest difficulties yet to be conquered, and any straight-talking man will name them. Launching a drone is one thing; catching it again on a pitching deck at sea is another, and engineers are still perfecting the nets, the guidance, and the artificial intelligence to do it. A determined enemy will try to jam the signals that guide these machines, so the Navy must build communication links that bend but do not break. Batteries and small engines still limit how far and how long these drones can range. None of these are small problems. But none of them, judging by the progress of the past two years, appears beyond the reach of American industry and ingenuity.

What does it all add up to? A fleet that is harder to find, harder to cripple, and far harder to bankrupt. The optimal Navy now taking shape would keep a modest number of mighty supercarriers — perhaps ten or twelve — and ring them with dozens of smaller drone-launching companions and hundreds of robot vessels besides. In the wide and contested waters of the Pacific, near the island chains that have shaped naval strategy for a century, such a force could keep a persistent, patient watch that no single missile could erase.

The frontier of the sea, like every frontier before it, rewards the side that adapts — the one that learns the new country fastest and rides it best. The lone, magnificent gunfighter has his place still. But the smart money, out where the trails are dangerous, has always been on the well-led outfit that travels in numbers and watches every approach.

So let me tell you, now, the rest of the story.

The supercarrier — that floating city of steel — is not being put out to pasture. It is being given a posse. Cheap, plentiful, unmanned machines, launched from smaller and humbler ships, are becoming the eyes, the decoys, and the swarming spear-point of the modern fleet. The lesson, hard-learned from recent wars, is a simple and almost old-fashioned one: that mass matters, that distribution protects, and that it is wiser to risk ...

562 Podcast
# Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start

The Justice Department finally indicted someone. One person. A 78-year-old senior adviser, two years past retirement. On April 28, 2026, a federal grand jury in Maryland charged him with five crimes: conspiracy against the United States, destroying federal records, falsifying records during a federal investigation, hiding records, and helping others do the same.[^1] The law allows up to 20 years in prison for each falsification count.[^1] Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a "profound abuse of trust" during a global pandemic.[^1] He is right.

The problem is that David Morens did not do this by himself. The people above him — the ones he reported to, the ones whose careers his lies protected, the ones who built a workplace where a senior NIH adviser could write down a plan to hide emails and send it from his government phone — those people walked out the door with paper in their pockets that says they don't have to answer for any of it.

## The Charges, in Plain English

For 16 years, Morens sat inside NIAID's Office of the Director. He advised the man who, for those 16 years, ran the country's response to infectious disease.[^1] After NIH canceled a grant to EcoHealth Alliance — a grant that sent money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — Morens allegedly teamed up with two other people. The indictment doesn't name them, but reporters identified them as Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and a former NIH official named Gerald Keusch.[^2] Neither has been charged.

The plan, according to prosecutors: get the grant back, and shoot down the theory that COVID came from a lab. To do it, the three of them agreed in writing to do their work through Morens's personal Gmail. That way, public records requests would never see it.[^1]

One email reproduced in the indictment is almost too good. In May 2020, Morens was drafting a science journal piece "in part to benefit" the company. He told his co-writers he wanted no "fingerprints" of theirs on it. He added: "I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text."[^3] He typed that sentence on a government phone, from a government account. The man briefing Tony Fauci on what to tell the President of the United States could not even hide an email conspiracy without leaving it on the very system he was trying to hide it from.

The indictment also says Daszak sent Morens wine, as a thank-you for his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans." Morens then went looking for an official act he could perform to "deserve" the gift — a journal article saying COVID came from nature, not a lab.[^1] Prosecutors say Daszak also offered Morens dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington.[^1] In plain English, that is a bribe. A federal employee is not allowed to take either the wine or the dinners. He took both.

## The Pardons That Insult the Country

On January 20, 2025, hours before he left office, Joe Biden handed out a stack of pardons. Anthony Fauci was on the list. So was retired General Mark Milley. So were every member and staffer of the House January 6 Committee.[^4] None of them had been charged with a crime. The pardons were "preemptive" — meaning, they covered any future charges that might be brought.

Biden's team said the pardons were needed to protect these people from "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions."[^4] What the pardons actually did was draw a circle around the most senior figure in the chain that produced the conduct now being charged at the staff level. And across that circle, they wrote: *off-limits.*

Fauci himself says he committed no crime and didn't need a pardon.[^4] If that's true, the pardon was unnecessary. If only the second half is true, the pardon was a confession dressed up as a gift. Either way, it stinks. The 78-year-old staff adviser is in front of a grand jury. His boss cannot be touched. That is not how a serious legal system works.

## The Chinese Are Going to Pay Nothing

No sanctions. No prosecutions. No formal demands of any kind that the Chinese government will feel. The Chinese Communist Party blocked outside investigators in the first weeks of the outbreak. They ran the wet-market story as long as it was useful. They disappeared the early whistleblowers in Wuhan. Whatever combination of accident, fraud, or worse happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the United States has now chosen — twice, across two administrations — to absorb the damage and make Beijing pay nothing.

That is its own breach of trust. The people who lost loved ones, jobs, businesses, schooling, and years of their lives are entitled to ask why. They are entitled to ask why the only person presently in federal jeopardy is a 78-year-old American science bureaucrat, while the lab at the center of the story is still running, fully funded, on the other side of the ocean.

## A Full Accounting of the People Who Helped

The cover-up was not just inside NIH. It included the media outlets that carried water for the official story and ridiculed everyone who asked obvious questions.

Remember CNN's coverage of Joe Rogan's COVID in the fall of 2021. Rogan, a grown adult, took ivermectin under the care of his doctor. Ivermectin is a Nobel-recognized drug given to humans hundreds of millions of times for parasites. CNN called it "horse dewormer." Anderson Cooper said it was "something more often used to deworm horses."[^5]

Then CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, sat down on Rogan's podcast. Rogan pressed him on it. Gupta admitted his own network "shouldn't have said that."[^6] CNN then put Gupta on with Don Lemon, who doubled down on the smear anyway.[^7] That is the whole story of pandemic-era media in a single 24-hour news cycle: caught, conceded, then re-asserted the lie on the next show.

The 2020 *Lancet* letter — the one signed by 27 scientists that called any non-natural origin a "conspiracy theory" — was secretly organized by the same Peter Daszak now named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Morens case. That letter is still cited. The journals that suppressed open debate on origins are still in business. The fact-checkers who flagged ordinary citizens for saying things the U.S. intelligence community would later formally adopt have not apologized. None of them will be charged. All of them helped.

## The Vaccine Reckoning the Establishment Won't Hold

The same institutions that hid the lab-leak debate also hid the vaccine-safety debate. The record is now hard to dismiss.

**Myocarditis.** Heart-muscle inflammation showed up as a real side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in young and teen-aged males after the second dose. The CDC and FDA acknowledged the signal in 2021 and added warnings. Studies in the United States, Israel, and the Nordic countries confirmed rates above what would normally be expected.

**The J&J vaccine.** The Johnson & Johnson shot was pulled from the U.S. market over a rare but sometimes deadly clotting disorder.

**AstraZeneca.** AstraZeneca pulled its COVID vaccine, Vaxzevria, off the global market in 2024. The company said the reason was "commercial." By that point, in court filings, the company had already admitted the same clotting problem in rare cases.

These are not fringe claims. These are the drug companies' own admissions, written in the smallest print available, years after honest disclosure would have meant something.

And then there are the ordinary people in between — otherwise healthy adults who report chest pain, racing hearts, exercise problems, and exhaustion that started within weeks of a shot and never went away. The honest position is that the long-term picture is still...

561
May 22, 2026

  PODCAST EPISODE 561 — THE NUMBERS NOBODY WANTS TO SHOW YOU
By Paul Truesdell

This is episode five hundred and sixty-one. And I'm going to start with that number, because that number is the whole reason I'm doing this episode. The title of Episode 561 is The Numbers Nobody Wants to Show You.

Last time, I wrapped up episode five hundred and sixty. Five-six-zero. And I'll come back to it in a minute, but I want to set the table first.

Last episode I talked about what I've learned over three decades behind microphones. Why I'm not playing the algorithm game anymore. Why I'm not chasing thumbs-ups, view counts, or any of the rest of that digital fool's gold. After that one went out, a few of you asked the same question. So, Paul — where does that actually put you in the mix? What do the real numbers look like?

Fair question. So I went and pulled twenty-four sources for this episode. Edison Research. The Interactive Advertising Bureau. Amplifi Media. Buzzsprout. Pew Research Center. Google's own official YouTube documentation. Academic studies. Trade publications. The full list — every one of them, with links — is in the show notes at PaulTruesdell.com. Go there. Read them yourself. Don't take my word for any of this.

What I'm about to tell you is the truth, with receipts. Settle in.

PART ONE — THE CLIFF

Let me start with the cliff. Because there is a cliff. And almost nobody who starts a podcast gets past it.

Amplifi Media, working with James Cridland over at Podnews, ran the numbers off the Podcast Index database. The Podcast Index lists about four million podcasts. Four million. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it.

Here is what they actually found.

Forty-four percent of all podcasts ever launched have published three or fewer episodes. Twenty-six percent published exactly one episode. One. They recorded it, they uploaded it, they probably texted their mother to listen to it, and they were done.

It gets worse. Only thirty-two percent of all podcasts ever reach episode ten. Let me read that again, because the people listening on a walk just missed it. Out of every hundred people who start a podcast, sixty-eight of them never make it to episode ten. They quit before they even know what they're doing.

Now raise the bar one more notch. Active podcast. Meaning ten or more episodes, plus an episode released in the past week. The number who clear that bar is just under four percent. Four percent of every podcast ever launched qualifies as a real, breathing, ongoing show.

A reasonable listener asked the question, Paul — do very few podcasts go beyond forty episodes.

Yes. Very few. By the time you hit forty episodes, you've outlasted essentially everyone who ever stood behind a microphone with a dream and a USB cable. You are in a small room.

Dan Misener at Pacific Content put it nicely. He analyzed millions of podcast feeds and reported the median age of all podcasts is one hundred and seventy-four days. About six months. He called it mosquitoes versus tortoises. Most podcasts are mosquitoes. They show up, they make some noise, and they're gone.

Now. About that five hundred and sixty.

If only thirty-two percent of podcasts reach episode ten, and only four percent reach the active threshold, what happens when you keep going? What happens at one hundred episodes? Two hundred? Five hundred?

The curve doesn't level off. It falls off a cliff. There is no clean public dataset on exactly how many podcasts reach five hundred episodes, because almost nobody does. But every factor-of-ten gate cuts the survivors brutally. Industry pattern data places podcasts with one hundred or more episodes at well under one percent of all shows ever launched. Five hundred or more — somewhere around one-tenth of one percent. Or fewer.

For context, here is the company you keep when you cross five hundred episodes.

Joe Rogan, who started in two thousand and nine, sits north of twenty-two hundred episodes. The Daily, the New York Times show, has fifteen hundred plus, and they run a daily cadence. Stuff You Should Know, started in two thousand and eight, sits past eighteen hundred. This American Life, on the air since nineteen ninety-five, is past eight hundred and fifty.

Then the smaller ones. Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, around two hundred and fifty. SmartLess, around two hundred and fifty. Crime Junkie, around four hundred.

I'm past all three of those. Past Conan. Past SmartLess. Past Crime Junkie. I'm well into the territory of shows that have been grinding for a decade or more.

I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because it is the answer to the question. Five hundred and sixty episodes puts a podcaster in roughly the top one-tenth of one percent of all podcasts ever launched, measured by the one metric that actually requires showing up — episode count.

Most "top one percent" lists rank by downloads. Anybody can buy their way onto a download leaderboard with one viral guest or a hundred grand in promotion. By durability — by actually being here every week for years — the room is much, much smaller. And most of the people in it are too busy working to brag about it.

PART TWO — THE LISTENER NUMBERS

Let's say you do beat the cliff. Let's say you publish your fortieth episode, your hundredth, your five hundredth. How many people are actually listening?

For this part, I'm leaning on Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is one of the largest podcast hosts in the world. They're certified by the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab — meaning their download numbers are honest, not the inflated raw-hit nonsense that everybody else uses. They publish their statistics live on their website. They host more than a hundred and fifteen thousand active podcasts.

Here is the median number of downloads a new podcast episode gets in its first seven days on Buzzsprout.

Twenty-nine.

I want you to hear that one more time. Twenty-nine downloads. That is the fifty-percent line. Half of all podcasts on the biggest indie host in the world get fewer than twenty-nine downloads in seven days.

If you get one hundred and two downloads in seven days, you are in the top twenty-five percent.

If you get four hundred and seventeen, you are in the top ten percent.

If you get one thousand and twenty-three, you are in the top five percent.

If you get four thousand seven hundred and forty downloads in seven days, you are in the top one percent of all podcasts.

Joe Rogan, by comparison, runs around eleven million downloads per episode. The math gap between the median podcaster and Rogan is roughly the gap between a garden hose and the Pacific Ocean. So when somebody tells me they want to be the next Joe Rogan, I just nod politely and think about lunch.

Now, the demand side is actually healthy. Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2025 report came out this past March. Forty percent of Americans twelve and older listened to a podcast in the past week. Record high. Fifty-five percent listen monthly. Roughly one hundred and fifty-eight million Americans are listening to something every month.

People are listening. Lots of people. The problem is, they are not listening to your show. They are listening to the same fifty shows everybody else is listening to.

PART THREE — THE MONEY

Now let's talk money. Because every person who calls me about starting a podcast eventually gets around to asking — Paul, when does the money show up.

Here's when. Almost never. But let me give you the numbers, because precision matters.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, publishes the most authoritative report on internet adv...

Why most podcasting efforts are a waste of time. 

PODCAST NOTES — WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT PODCASTING
By Paul Truesdell

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Let me give you some background on what I've learned about this whole podcasting business. When I started, we had dialup. That's right — dialup. The internet sounded like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, and I was running a program called Icecast. I-C-E-C-A-S-T. Phenomenal piece of software. Still around, by the way. We did everything live.

I shut it down. Why? My business partner had a peculiar habit — he was late, unprepared, and apparently allergic to a clock. I tried it again later with a few other folks. Same story, different cast. And I don't cotton to that. That's one of my phrases. I don't cotton to certain things, and chronic unreliability sits right at the top of the list.

Here in little old sleepy Ocala — and I mean truly sleepy, the kind of sleepy where the town rolls up the sidewalks at sundown — we had built that show up to fifteen hundred, two thousand listeners. In the early days of the internet, that wasn't small potatoes. That was a whole bushel.

I've always been one of the first ones on a platform. Not all of them — a lot of them came and went — but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it, we were early. And along the way I figured out something important: there is no one format that works for everybody.

THE JOE ROGAN FANTASY

Let me address the elephant in every podcaster's studio. So many people sit down behind a microphone and genuinely believe they are going to be the next Joe Rogan. Let me explain how that actually works.

Joe Rogan spent decades — plural — building connections across the country. His early guests were comedians, because comedians were his friends. He did not roll out of bed one Tuesday and suddenly have heads of state on the line. He grinded. For years.

And he does not edit people the way 60 Minutes edited a certain presidential candidate. He just lets the tape roll. That's a feature, not a bug.

So before you order business cards that say "podcast host," ask yourself one honest question: Do you actually want to sit and interview people for hours, day after day? You might. But you had better have connections. You had better know how to interview. And — this is the kicker — the people sitting across from you had better have something worth saying.

Here is the dirty little secret nobody wants to print on a billboard: most podcast guests are boring. They don't know how to use their voice. They have no rhythm, no cadence, no sense of when to land a point and when to let it breathe. They mumble through a thought that should have taken thirty seconds and stretch it into a seven-minute meandering autobiography of their lunch order.

A RADIO VOICE IS A TRAINED VOICE

I have a radio voice. That isn't bragging — it's the result of a very long time spent learning how to raise the voice, lower it, color it, and end a thought with a little signature click that tells you we're done.

Most folks haven't done that work. They sit down expecting the microphone to do it for them. The microphone doesn't.

THE TWO-PALS-IN-A-POD PROBLEM

You can do the co-host thing — two people, three people, just riffing. I did it with my son. We called it Two Pals in a Pod. Loved every minute of it. Here's why it ended: he has his life, I have mine, and the moment you involve another human being, you adopt their schedule. I'm not doing that anymore. Life is too short and calendars are too full.

EDUCATIONAL CONTENT AND A LESSON IN HUMAN NATURE

Then I tried the educational route. Training videos. Real, useful, actionable material that could change your finances, your health, your life.

You know what I learned?

Most people don't actually want help. They want entertainment. They want a good-looking woman or a buff young fella reading a teleprompter, and they will happily sit through twenty minutes of pure nonsense as long as the dopamine drip stays steady. The information could be pure crapola — they'll watch anyway. Because they are not there to learn. They are there to feel.

Now, there is a smaller crowd — and you know who you are — who, when life hits the fan and you find yourselves wedged between a rock and a hard place, suddenly want real answers. Those are the people I work with. Those are my clients. They become family. And when I say family, I mean it the old-fashioned way: I actually care about you.

WHAT NOBODY WILL TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

Here is a truth no podcasting guru will ever sell you in a course.

Nobody gives a damn about you.

Read it again. Let it sink in. The general public, given a comment box, will use it the way a vandal uses a brick wall. Look at the Wall Street Journal comments. Look at any platform. People are mean, nasty, and bored.

So if you enjoy throwing red meat into a piranha tank and watching the water churn, podcasting will give you exactly what you want.

I have a simple rule. I only work with nice people. Dead serious. Less, in this case, is more. A small group of folks who actually engage with you, who use your products and services, who treat you like a human being — that's gold. Everyone else? Why, exactly, are you worrying about them?

Oh, I forgot. The algorithm. The algorithm will reward you if your viewer count goes up. Who cares? The algorithms are screwing your brain. They don't mean a thing.

A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE WORD "PODCAST"

I don't know how the word podcast got so universally adopted. They were audio casts. Leo Laporte — good man — tried to push "netcast." Didn't take. The word podcast comes from the iPod, and right now somebody listening to this is asking, "What's an iPod?" And there you go.

Today, YouTube says it has podcasts. YouTube is video. A podcast can be live, on-demand, behind a paywall, free, audio, video, an audiobook in disguise. The word means nothing and everything at the same time. It's a linguistic accordion.

Why isn't an audiobook called a podcast? It hits every technical definition. Nobody knows. Sometimes I wish George Carlin were still around. He had a gift for slicing through the hogwash, balderdash, and poppycock. We could use about ten more of him right now.

THE TRUTH ABOUT VIDEO

I've done video. I've done green screens. During COVID I had a whole production setup that would have made a local news station envious. Here's what I've learned: video is a lot more effort for not a lot more return.

Live video means technical glitches, sneezing fits, a stray nose hair that's plotting against you, a burp at exactly the wrong second, the moment your tongue ties itself into a sailor's knot. On-demand video means editing. And editing means clip, clip, clip, clip, clip — those little jump cuts that have become the visual vocabulary of modern YouTube. Every time I see a video edited like that, I think the same thing: this person can't hold a thought together for twelve consecutive seconds.

If I need to show you a diagram, I'll put it on the website and tell you where to find it. Open a new tab. We do still use that word, right? Tab? Browser? Some of you, I know, need to be told. So here it is: open a new tab. Look at the graph. Come back. That's the whole trick.

YOUTUBE DID ME A FAVOR

I am grateful — genuinely grateful — that YouTube and its discriminatory algorithm decided to bury me. Because it gave me back my time. I'm not playing the game anymore. I shouldn't have ever started. I got sucked in because it was cool to watch the view counter climb. It was bull. It really was.

My clients can think. They connect the dots. They understand there is no such thing as a free lunch. They pay me for my time, my effort, my aggravati...

Oh Cala Wood.
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. 

Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor 
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue
Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or 
212-433-2525 

If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere.
Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write.
Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes.
There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press.
For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic.
An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind.
So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas.
Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again.
Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it.
To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily.
That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, bec...

Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One. Drug overdose deaths fell to pre-pandemic levels in 2025. The same crowd that blames a President for the weather can't seem to find the microphone today.

The Lifeguard Pulled 30,000 People Out of the Water. Now Ask Who's Pushing Them In. America just had its third straight year of falling overdose deaths — and the real story isn't only who gets the credit. It's why the beach was ever this deadly to begin with.

Rough Draft & Disclaimer

There's a story making its way out this week, and it's the kind of story that ought to be on every front page in the country. Ought to be. Won't be. But ought to be.
The Centers for Disease Control just put out their preliminary numbers for 2025. Drug overdose deaths in the United States — the thing that has been ripping families apart for over a decade, the thing that's the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 44 — drug overdose deaths dropped nearly 14% in 2025. An estimated 69,973 Americans lost. Still too many. Way too many. But here's the math: from over 100,000 deaths a year just a couple of years back, we're down to roughly 70,000.
Synthetic opioid deaths — and we're talking fentanyl here, the stuff coming in from China through the cartels — those fatalities dropped from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025. That's more than ten thousand American mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who are still alive today. Cocaine deaths, down. Methamphetamine deaths, down. The drops have even pushed U.S. life expectancy to a record high, according to the federal government. Three years in a row of declines. Just the fifth time in over three decades the numbers have moved the right direction.
Now. Pause. Take a breath. Because I want you to notice something.
Where are they? Where are the cable news panels? Where are the late-night monologues? Where are the columnists who, for the last decade, have written every single overdose death as a national emergency? Funny thing. Real funny. The silence is just deafening, isn't it?
For four years we heard the border didn't matter, that fentanyl was a complicated, multifactor problem, that nobody could really be held responsible for what comes across because, well, you know, it's just complicated. And now — what a coincidence — the President who said he was going to lean on China, who said he was going to slap tariffs on the precursors, who said he was going to treat the cartels like the terrorist organizations they are — that President takes office, and the numbers keep moving in the right direction. And the people who would have you believe Trump caused the sunrise to be late are suddenly very, very quiet.
Imagine, just for a second, if these numbers had come out on a different administration's watch. Imagine the press conferences. Imagine the victory laps. Imagine the magazine covers. "He Saved a Generation." You'd be sick of hearing about it by Tuesday.
I'll be fair, and unlike some folks, I'll actually do it. The decline started before this administration. State programs, naloxone access, telemedicine, mobile clinics — none of that is nothing. Credit where credit's due. But the trend continued, and it continued during a year when one man made fentanyl a centerpiece of his foreign policy and his border policy. You don't have to like him. You can hate his tie. But you don't get to memory-hole the numbers.
And here's something that gives this weight. The President has been very open — painfully open — about losing his brother to alcoholism. He doesn't touch a drink. Never has. Tell me that doesn't matter when a man sets policy on addiction. Tell me that doesn't change how he hears the phone call from a parent in Ohio or West Virginia who just buried their kid.
Now. Here's the rest of the story.
Picture a lifeguard on a beach. And this lifeguard pulls thirty thousand people out of the water in a single summer. Saves them. Drags them onto the sand, gets them breathing. Thirty thousand souls.
What do you do with that lifeguard? You give him the key to the city. You name the pier after him. You put him on every front page in the country. You absolutely do.
But then a reasonable person stops and asks a second question. Wait a minute. Why are thirty thousand people drowning at my beach?
That is the real question. That is where the attention has to go next. Because the lifeguard is doing the job. The lifeguard is doing the job. But somebody is pushing people into the water. Somebody is pouring fentanyl across the border. Somebody is profiting. Somebody is looking the other way. Somebody in Beijing is signing off on chemical exports. Somebody in a cartel is laughing all the way to the bank.
So which is it, friends? Either the President of the United States gets credit for the lives saved, or he doesn't. You can't say a President owns every bad thing that happens on his watch — every storm, every market dip, every bad jobs report — and then turn around and say, well, this good thing, this seventy thousand instead of a hundred and ten thousand, that just happened. The wind blew. The tide came in. Nobody did anything.
You don't get it both ways. You never did.
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click Click, Later, I’m out of here. 
Xxx
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. 

Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor 
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or 
212-433-2525 
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder

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

There is a problem in this country that nobody in government really wants to talk about. When you look at the people I call middle-class millionaires, the folks who have a paid-off home, a couple of vehicles, some personal belongings, a modest investment portfolio, a pension, and Social Security, you find a group of Americans who look fine on paper. Add up the present value of those benefits, which of course drops as you get older, and the picture seems comfortable. But comfortable is not the same as protected.
These families are in a good financial position, just not good enough to easily absorb an extra twenty to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in long-term care expense. And that figure does not even count what I call the negative team: the time, the effort, the aggravation, and the money that gets poured into caring for a spouse or partner who is physically, emotionally, or intellectually challenged. On top of all that, somebody still has to manage the money. Everything sounds wonderful when the family is doing fine and dandy. The trouble starts when things stop working, because that is exactly when the worst decisions get made and when deep family connections, if they were never built, cannot be summoned out of thin air.
This is why healthy aging matters so much, and why I keep beating the drum on living an active lifestyle and maintaining your independence. Fall prevention and chronic disease management are not optional add-ons. They are the foundation. There are excellent, scientifically tested programs out there with verifiable results. Most of them, ironically, are offered free or low cost to people who qualify for Medicaid. The middle class often falls right through the cracks. And let me be honest with you, the people who would benefit most from these classes are frequently the least likely to show up. Who wants to sit in a room exposing every weakness in front of strangers? That is part of why we do what we do online, followed by private, confidential, one-on-one conversations where you can let your hair down. In my case, you are talking with someone who has worked in this field for over forty years, and who grew up with parents born in 1915. I have been dealing with these issues my entire life: pre-diabetes, diabetes, dementia, memory loss, and family caregivers stretched to their breaking point.
Let us talk about balance. You see people doing chair exercises, and that is wonderful, but those folks are often already well past the point of an easy intervention. The smarter move is to build the routine when you are younger, so you are doing everything possible to avoid the fall in the first place. A fall does not just hurt a hip. It restricts activity, which destroys muscle strength, which deepens the very weakness that caused the fall to begin with. That cascade is one of the worst adverse impacts of aging, and it is largely preventable.
Programs like Tai Chi, a low-impact form of Chinese martial arts built around slow, controlled, flowing movements, can help. So can yoga, swimming, and walking. But none of these is the solution by itself. The solution is moving your body, every day, on purpose. When I talk about physical wealth, I mean three things: strength, endurance, and flexibility. Strength training, in particular, is non-negotiable in retirement. Lifting something heavier than your coffee cup keeps your bones dense, your posture upright, and your independence intact. Pair that with natural nutrition, real hydration, and the old-fashioned rule of everything in moderation, and you give yourself a fighting chance.
Then there is intellectual wealth. The mind, left alone, will go into a rut and rot. It needs a breadth of knowledge, a depth of knowledge, and plain old common sense, which, as we all know, is sometimes not that common. Read. Ask questions. Learn a new skill. Stay savvy about the world, your finances, and the technology your grandchildren take for granted. The families coping best with a loved one's memory loss are usually the ones where everyone keeps feeding their own brains right alongside the person they are caring for.
And then there is emotional wealth, which is knowing when to react, how to react, and having the patience to let some things take longer than you would like. This is where team support becomes everything. A solid plan brings together a multidiscipline group: your doctor, your financial advisor, your attorney, your family members, and trusted caregivers who actually know your situation. Family office management, even at a modest household scale, is the quiet skill that keeps everything from coming apart when one spouse can no longer carry their share of the load.
Here is the bottom line. Healthy aging is not a single class you take or a single supplement you swallow. It is the daily choice to stay strong, to stay curious, to stay connected, and to stay honest about what is coming down the road. Everybody wants to do everything themselves, right up until the moment they can't. By then, when it hits the fan, the options have narrowed and the bad decisions stack up fast. Start now. Build the muscle, build the mind, and build the relationships, because that is the only portfolio that pays out exactly when you need it most.

Paul Truesdell is the founder of Truesdell Wealth, Incorporated, a true fiduciary-based registered investment advisor. Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. For more information, visit Truesdell Wealth dot com, or call three five two, six one two, one thousand. 

The Fifty-Dollar Movie Ticket
Hollywood, Beijing, and What It Means for Investors Over Fifty-Five
Podcast script  ·  Truesdell
When I was growing up, a movie ticket cost a couple of dollars. You walked into the theater on a Saturday afternoon, you bought a box of popcorn, and you settled in. It was not a special occasion. It was a Saturday. That model is gone.
This spring, Regal Cinemas sold opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three for fifty dollars apiece in their 70-millimeter IMAX house. Premium tickets now average eighteen dollars nationwide. They run as high as thirty in New York and Los Angeles. A standard adult ticket on a regular screen is about thirteen dollars. The dollar matinee is a memory.
That price gap — from a couple of dollars to fifty — is the story I want to walk through with you today. It is a story about how the theater business has changed. It is a story about the kinds of movies Hollywood is making and is not making. It is a story about the quiet competition the Chinese government has been running against American culture for the better part of twenty years. And it is a story about where I think an investor over fifty-five ought to be paying attention right now.
Part One: Why the Ticket Got Expensive
Every spring, the theater industry gathers in Las Vegas for a convention called CinemaCon. Cinema United, formerly the National Association of Theatre Owners, runs the event. About six thousand industry professionals from more than eighty countries attend. The 2026 convention was held in April at Caesars Palace and was described as the largest in the organization's history.
The Wall Street Journal sent reporters to cover it, and the price story came through clearly. Theater attendance in the United States is down more than a third from pre-pandemic levels. Fewer people are going to the movies. But the people who do go are spending more. AMC's chief executive told reporters that the average customer now spends about nine dollars on concessions per visit, nearly double what it was before COVID. Premium large-format screens — laser projection, immersive sound, big screens — now make up a growing share of total box office. Theaters have learned what the airlines learned twenty years ago: charge the loyal customer more, dress up the product, and call it an experience.
Not everyone in Hollywood is happy about this. Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures, used his CinemaCon platform to argue that ticket prices have climbed so high that going to the movies has become a special-occasion purchase rather than a routine one. He wants prices to come down. The theater owners pushed back. Their answer was straightforward: the studios are producing about twenty-five percent fewer films than they did before the pandemic. With fewer titles to fill the calendar, the economics force higher prices on the films that do release.
Both sides are right. Fewer movies, higher prices, fewer customers, more spending per customer. That is the business today. For the consumer over fifty-five who remembers when a movie was an ordinary weekend habit, the change is real. The casual matinee is gone. What replaces it is a planned outing — closer in cost and feel to a nice dinner than to a Saturday afternoon at the mall.
Part Two: What the Movies Used to Stand For
I want to step back from the dollars for a moment and talk about the films themselves, because the change there has been just as significant.
For a long stretch of American history, our movies carried a point of view. They did not preach. The good ones never preach. But they had a backbone. John Wayne made The Green Berets in 1968, in the middle of an unpopular war, and he put his name and his face on a picture that took the soldier's side. Conservatives have argued for decades that Hollywood lost that nerve somewhere along the way, that the studios in Burbank grew uncomfortable with flags, with uniforms, with anything that looked too much like national pride. There is some evidence for that complaint.
But every so often, the older tradition reappears. Top Gun: Maverick is the clearest recent example. Tom Cruise climbed back into the cockpit, the Navy lent its aircraft and its carriers, and the film grossed almost a billion and a half dollars worldwide. Audiences applauded in the theater. The Top Gun franchise has been a quiet patriotic anchor for nearly four decades now, and that is not an accident. There is a market for these stories. There always has been. People will pay eighteen dollars or thirty dollars or even fifty dollars when a film delivers something they recognize and want to support.
That is the lesson I think the studios most need to hear. The audience is not gone. The audience is selective. When the product is good and the message is honest and the experience justifies the price, the seats fill. When it does not, they do not.
Part Three: The Long Game Out of Beijing
Now I want to spend some time on a story the Wall Street Journal has been reporting this spring that I think every American investor and every American moviegoer ought to understand.
In January, a Chinese animated film called Ne Zha 2 was released in China. It is based on traditional Chinese mythology — a story about a young hero who battles demons. By every measure, it is a sophisticated production: strong special effects, broad comedy, dramatic action. It is, in essence, China's version of a Marvel film. In its home market it earned one-point-two billion dollars. That is more revenue than any American film has ever generated in a single country. It surpassed the domestic record set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015.
On its own, that is just a successful movie. But the background matters.
In 2008, DreamWorks released Kung Fu Panda. It was an American animated film built around Chinese cultural material — pandas, kung fu, ancient temples — and it was a major hit inside China. According to the Journal, officials inside the Chinese Communist Party watched that success carefully and drew a strategic conclusion. An American studio had used Chinese culture more effectively than Chinese studios themselves. The Party decided to fix that.
What followed was a deliberate, long-term effort. The Chinese government invited American directors to teach Chinese crews. Chinese studios studied Pixar and Marvel in detail. State money flowed into domestic animation. By 2016, Chinese films were regularly beating American films at the Chinese box office. That trend accelerated during the first Trump administration as trade tensions widened. Today, the heads of major Hollywood studios plan their budgets on the assumption that the Chinese market will contribute essentially nothing. Recent Disney releases — Mufasa: The Lion King, Moana 2 — barely registered there. Ne Zha 2 dominated. The shift is real, and it is structural.
The asymmetry between the two markets is worth describing clearly. In the United States, Ne Zha 2 can play in any theater that wants to book it. No federal agency reviews the film. The Chinese Embassy ran a trailer on a billboard in Times Square, and no one in Washington tried to stop it. That is consistent with the American principle of free expression. We do not censor incoming culture, even from competitors.
Inside China, the situation is the reverse. Every film shown in Chinese theaters — American, Chinese, or otherwise — passes through a Communist Party censorship process. Scenes referencing Taiwan, Tibet, or Hong Kong are routinely cut. Marvel films have been delayed for months. Top Gun: Maverick reportedly faced scrutiny over a flag patch on Maverick's jacket. China admits roughly thirty-four foreign films per year, and its domestic releases receive the best calendar dates and the largest screens. That is not a free market. It is a managed one, designed to favor state-approved content.
There is one piece of good news in this picture. T...

#BigBoomerBites #TruesdellWealthChannel #SleepHealth #ChronotypeMatters #LionChronotype #FiveFiftyFive #CognitiveHealth #AmericanIndependence​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only.  The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This IOC conversation does not involve securities. 

Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor 
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or 
212-433-2525 
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder

Rough Show Notes

OCTOBER 1, 1986
The Day I Stopped Letting Other People Run My Clock

I came upon this naturally.
Nobody taught me how to sleep. Nobody handed me a schedule. I just paid attention to my body, and over the years I learned what worked. Then I built a life around it.
For most of my life, people have told me my schedule is abnormal. They’ve told me I should adjust. They’ve suggested I’d be better off if I just slept like everyone else and ran my day like everyone else. I’ve tried. Every time I’ve tried to fit somebody else’s idea of normal, I’ve gotten worse — slower, sicker, less sharp, less productive. Every time I’ve gone back to what works for me, I’ve come back stronger.
Let me tell you where I learned that lesson the hard way.
In the 1970s and 1980s, I worked in law enforcement. Shift work. Rotating hours. Some weeks I was on days, some weeks I was on nights, some weeks I was on something in between. The schedule was set by the department, not by my body, and my body let me know it. Shift work was a killer. The men I worked with who stayed in it for thirty years didn’t all make it to retirement, and the ones who did weren’t always in the kind of shape a man hopes to be in when he finally hangs it up.
So on October 1, 1986, I declared my independence.
That’s the day I went out on my own. That’s the day I stopped letting somebody else’s schedule run my body. And I have a saying I’ve lived by ever since.
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And what I can control .
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And I can’t be controlled.
I’ll say it twice because it’s worth hearing twice.
The 1990s tested that decision. There was a stretch in there where I let the work creep back into the late hours, and the early dinners turned into late dinners, and the schedule started to drift. It almost killed me. I am not exaggerating. My health went sideways in a way that got my full attention. So I put my foot down. I went back to what my body had been telling me all along, and I have felt fantastic ever since.
Here is what that schedule looks like.
I don’t like to eat after five o’clock in the afternoon. By that time my body is already winding down, and food just sits there. I take an hour or two after dinner to relax — read, sit quietly, let the day come off the shoulders. When it gets dark, I get tired. When I get tired, I go to bed. Most nights that’s somewhere between eight and nine. I fall asleep fast. I sleep like a log. Once in a while I’ll get up to use the restroom, but I’m right back down. And then between three and four o’clock in the morning — most days right around three-thirty — I am wide awake, refreshed, eyes open, and ready.
That is when I do my best work.
From the time I wake up until somewhere around nine or ten in the morning, I have the sharpest, clearest, most productive window of my day. The phone isn’t ringing. The email isn’t pouring in. The world hasn’t woken up yet, and so the world isn’t asking anything of me. I get more done in those quiet hours than most people get done in eight hours at a desk. By the time everyone else is sitting down with their first cup of coffee, my best work is already on the page.
After about ten in the morning, the interruptions start, the administrative tasks pile up, and the day shifts into reaction mode. By four or five in the afternoon, I am toast. And I am fine with that, because by four or five in the afternoon, I have already done what mattered.
For a long time I thought I was the only one who lived this way. I now know I am not.
The researchers who study sleep have spent the last twenty or thirty years figuring out that human beings are not all on the same internal clock. They’ve identified what they call chronotypes — genetic patterns that determine when your body naturally wants to sleep, wake, eat, focus, and rest. They’ve named these patterns after animals to make them easy to remember.
About half of the population are bears. Bears run on a roughly nine-to-five schedule. They wake when their alarm tells them to, they peak around midday, and they go to bed around eleven. The whole modern world has been built around the bear, because the bear is the average. If you’re a bear, the way the world is set up actually fits the way your body works.
About one in five people are wolves. Wolves are night owls. They are the artists, the writers, the late-night creatives, the people who do their best thinking at midnight and resent every alarm clock that has ever been invented. The world is hard on wolves, because the world starts at eight in the morning whether the wolf is ready or not.
A smaller group are dolphins — light sleepers, anxious by nature, often very intelligent, often struggling to fall asleep at all.
And then there are lions.
Lions are rare. Somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the population — the smallest of the productivity-driven chronotypes. Lions have melatonin that starts early in the evening, cortisol that comes online before the sun does, and a peak work window that runs from before dawn to mid-morning. Lions go to bed early. Lions wake early. Lions get their best work done while most of the world is still asleep.
That is me. That has always been me. And it turns out it is also Tim Cook at Apple, who is up before four every morning. It is Bob Iger at Disney, up around four-fifteen. It was Indra Nooyi when she ran PepsiCo, up at four. It is Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan. It was Howard Schultz at Starbucks. It was Andrew Carnegie a hundred and fifty years ago. It was Benjamin Franklin a hundred years before him. It is most of the senior military officers I have ever known, most of the farmers and ranchers I have ever known, and most of the small business owners I have ever known who actually built something with their own two hands.
There is a reason this pattern shows up so often at the top.
The early hours are the only hours nobody can interrupt. A lion gets two, three, four hours of uninterrupted deep work before the rest of the world wakes up. By the time the phone starts ringing, the lion has already done the day’s most important thinking. Everything after that is reaction, and reaction is fine, because the work that mattered is already done.
Now I want to talk directly to those of you in the five-fifty-five group.
Five-fifty-five means you are within five years of retirement, or you are fifty-five years of age or older, or you are already retired. That is a large part of the audience I speak to, and it is the part of the audience that needs to hear this next piece most clearly.
Sleep is not optional. Sleep is not a luxury. Sleep is not a thing you catch up on later.
The deepest stages of sleep are when the brain does its housekeeping. Researchers have identified a system inside the brain that activates only during deep sleep — a kind of internal cleaning crew that flushes out the proteins that, left to accumulate over years and decades, wrap themselves around nerve endings and become the disease none of us want to name out loud. When you protect your sleep, you give tha...