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

The 2033 Deadline: What Every American Over 55 Needs to Know About Social Security and The Truth About Social Security's 2033 Problem

SOCIAL SECURITY 2033 The 2033 Deadline: What Every American Over 55 Needs to Know About Social Security and The Truth About Social Security's 2033 Problem The trust fund didn't fail overnight. It was emptied one predictable year at a time. What the Trustees' report actually says -- and what it means for the check that lands in your account every month. A straight-shooting look at the largest government program in the world, and the seven years that will decide its next chapter. Paul Grant Truesdell, Sr. J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Paul Grant Truesdell | Founder & CEO The Truesdell Companies The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34482 212-433-2525 - Switchboard paul@truesdell.net - General Email Websites truesdellwealth.com [http://truesdellwealth.com]Truesdell.net [http://Truesdell.net] PaulTruesdell.com [https://paultruesdell.com/] THE EPISODE DROP IN – 12-01 Welcome to the Paul Truesdell Podcast. This episode will be a little different — a combination of discussion, with questions sprinkled throughout. It is Friday, June 12, 2026. Today's topic: The 2033 Deadline — What Every American Over 55 Needs to Know About Social Security, and the truth about Social Security's 2033 problem. And so, The trust fund didn't fail overnight. It was emptied one predictable year at a time. This is what the Trustees' report actually says — and what it means for the check that lands in your account every month. Paul is a straight-shooting and blunt story teller, the polymath sage who looks at the largest government program in the world, and the seven years that will decide its next chapter. Now get that cup of coffee and settle in. Let's begin the ride.  PAUL -- OPENING: Social Security is the single largest government program in the world. Sixty-seven million Americans receive a check every month. No program in our nation's history has lifted more people out of poverty. And according to the Social Security Trustees themselves -- not the pundits, not the politicians, the program's own actuaries -- the retirement trust fund is projected to run dry in 2033. When that happens, benefits don't go to zero. But every check -- every retiree, every survivor, every disabled worker -- gets cut by roughly twenty-one percent. Automatically. No vote, no warning, no exceptions. That's not my opinion. That's the math, published every year, in black and white. Now, I've been talking about this for forty years. Four decades ago, I started writing and speaking about what I call the baby boomer bulge -- seventy-six million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, the largest generation in our history -- and what would happen when that wave stopped paying in and started drawing out. I've watched the projections. I've read the Trustees' reports year after year. And I've watched Washington read them too and do next to nothing. So today I'm going to walk you through how this system actually works, why it's straining at the seams, what happens in 2033, and -- most importantly for those of us fifty-five and older -- what's worth thinking about right now, while there's still daylight. Along the way, you'll hear a few questions drop in. Think of them as the questions you'd ask me if you were sitting across the table. Let's start with the one I get most often. DROP-IN -12-02 Paul, you have been discussing the dramatic effects of the baby boomer bulge in births for forty years. Are you surprised that the date at which the Social Security trust fund runs out of money keeps getting closer -- that the year keeps dropping? PAUL: Not surprised in the least. And honestly, that's the part that ought to bother people the most. There's an old truth any rancher will tell you: you can ignore the weather report, but you can't ignore the weather. The demographics behind this were never a secret. Those seventy-six million boomers -- we knew their birthdays. We knew, to the year, when they'd start collecting. This wasn't a storm that blew in overnight. It was a slow-moving front we watched cross the horizon for half a century. What surprises me isn't the date. It's that Washington has watched the same horizon I have and done essentially nothing since 1983. The numbers are public. The report comes out every single year. And every year of delay, the hole gets deeper and the fix gets more expensive. Forty years ago, this was a problem you could solve with small adjustments. Today, the window for a gentle fix is closing fast. Now -- before we go any further, we need to clear up the single biggest misunderstanding in American retirement, because almost everything else flows from it. Most people believe Social Security works like a bank account. You pay in during your working years, the money sits there with your name on it, and you draw it out when you retire. I've spent decades explaining why that picture is wrong. DROP-IN – 12-03 If it's not a savings account, Paul, how does Social Security actually work? PAUL: It's a pay-as-you-go system. The money coming out of your paycheck this Friday is not being set aside for your retirement. It's being sent, almost immediately, to someone who's retired right now. Today's workers pay today's retirees. When you retire, tomorrow's workers pay you. That's the deal, and it's been the deal since 1935. The mechanics run through FICA -- the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. You pay six-point-two percent of your wages. Your employer matches it. Together, that's twelve-point-four percent. But here's the catch most folks have never heard: that tax only applies up to a cap -- one hundred eighty-four thousand five hundred dollars in 2026. Every dollar earned above that line pays nothing into Social Security. A person making one hundred eighty-four thousand and a person making five million pay the exact same dollar amount into the system. That cap is one of the most consequential design choices in the entire program, and we'll come back to it when we talk about fixes. But first, you need to understand the one number this whole system rises and falls on. Because once you see it, you'll understand everything. DROP-IN - 12-04 What is that one number, Paul, and where does it stand today? PAUL: The worker-to-retiree ratio. That's the whole ballgame. In 1945, there were nearly forty-two workers paying in for every one retiree collecting. The system was swimming in money. By 1960, it was about five to one -- still healthy. Today? Two-point-eight workers per retiree. By 2035, it'll be two-point-three. Picture a wagon. In 1945, forty-two people were pulling and one was riding. Today, fewer than three are pulling for every rider -- and roughly ten thousand boomers a day are climbing off the hitch and into the wagon. No system on earth, public or private, holds up under that shift unless somebody adjusts the load. Three forces brought that ratio down, and they all hit at once. First, the boomer bulge itself. For decades, those seventy-six million people were the engine -- paying in, building surpluses. Now they're flipping, en masse, from contributors to collectors. Second, longevity -- and this one's good news wearing a price tag. When Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, life expectancy at birth was sixty-one. The retirement age was set at sixty-five. The arithmetic was almost cynical. Today, the average American lives to about seventy-seven and a half, and a person retiring at sixty-two can reasonably expect to collect for fifteen to twenty years. The system was never engineered for that duration. Third, declining birth rates. T...

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS, AI, AND MORE

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 ...

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

562 Podcast # Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start [https://paultruesdell.com/] 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...

May 22, 2026

561 May 22, 2026 [https://truesdellwealth.com/]   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...

May 21, 2026 - B

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...