The Paul Truesdell Podcast
Waves of Hogwash
Waves of Hogwash The Dinosaur in the Gas Tank - The Star Chamber on the Ballot Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC September 26, 2026 From a 1970s science class to a 2026 school board race, the same wave of nonsense keeps rolling in. Here is how to see it coming. Dinosaur oil, famines that never came, a burger that crashed the cattle market, and two local candidates who see fraud behind every door. Every generation gets its prophets of doom. Ours had Ehrlich, Carter, Oprah, and Gore. Marion County has the Bobbsey Twins. History repeats itself. The trick is remembering it. Waves of Hogwash A Rare Breed Numbers and story, introvert and speaker, and why I will never tell you something I don't know. I'll accept it. I'm a rare breed. I'm equally quantitative and qualitative. I work the numbers, and I work the story behind the numbers. I've always described myself as an analytical expressive. When I tell people I'm an introvert by nature, they look at me up in front of a big room, perfectly comfortable giving a talk, and they say, yeah, right. But it's true. My personality, my makeup, my composition, who God made me, and what I've trained myself to be, all point the same way. I drill for skill. I find the facts and the figures first. Then I boil them down to the simplest, most basic way of saying it. And I can go deep. I've always said it. Anytime, any place, anywhere, I'll debate you on whatever topic you want. And I will win. When I say it is the way it is, fine, let's go debate it. Because it is the way it is. But I'll tell you something else. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Donald Rumsfeld said that at a Pentagon briefing in 2002, and a lot of people laughed at him. He was right. There are things we know. There are things we know we don't know. And there are things we don't even know we don't know. What I'm not going to do is tell you things I don't know. That's exactly why I can't stand certain politicians. Locally, we have two. Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber. Both of them are heavily involved in the Marion County Republican Executive Committee. I want nothing to do with either one. In my opinion, they're an embarrassment. And they're not alone. This country has had some really embarrassing people who've been President. Who've held Cabinet posts. Who've been governors, senators, and members of Congress. And talk show hosts. Like Oprah Winfrey. People mistake fame and fortune for knowledge and expertise. That's why you'll always see me roll my eyes, shake my head, purse my lips, squint, and let out a long, deep breath whenever some Know Nothing Hollywood actor or actress decides to use their fame to push something that isn't just out in left field. It's out in Wackoville. Now, when I say Know Nothing, I mean it literally, and it's a piece of American history worth knowing. The Know Nothings were a real political party back in the 1850s. It started out as a secret society. When members were asked about it, they were told to answer, "I know nothing." So that's what everybody called them. Officially they were the American Party, and mostly they were against immigrants and against Catholics. In 1856 they ran a former President, Millard Fillmore, for President again. He got about a fifth of the vote and carried exactly one state, Maryland. Within a few years the party split apart over slavery and was gone. A party named for knowing nothing. At least they came by the name honestly. Today's Know Nothings don't hide behind a secret handshake. They say it right out loud, on camera, with a publicist. Hogwash and Balderdash This is about common sense and what it costs to use it out loud. It is not about being right for the sake of being right. There are some things in life you just have to call what they are. Hogwash. Balderdash. And when you do, you pay a price. Most of the time, nobody remembers you were right. You don't get a plaque. You don't get to go to your grave saying I told you so. You just keep moving, because you can't live in the past. But you can learn from it. I hear it all the time. We've never seen anything like this. Interest rates have never been this high. The world is running out of something. Everybody in charge is a crook. People nod and say, sure, history repeats itself. Then they forget it by the next morning. So, I want to walk you through a few waves of it. A science class in the early 1970s. A book that promised mass famine. A President who said the world's oil would be gone. A talk show that crashed the cattle market. A former Vice President and the ice. And then, because the waves don't stop at the county line, two people running for our school board right here in Marion County. They sound unrelated. They're not. Stay with me. This isn't liberals against conservatives, though a lot of it lands that way. Some of the worst of it comes from our own side, and I'll get to that. It's about people who say big, scary things with nothing behind them, and the rest of us who go along. Mr. Smarty-Pants An eighth grader, a science teacher, and a trip to the vice principal's office. Go back with me. I was born in 1958. So this is the eighth or ninth grade, somewhere around 1971 to 1973. My science teacher had a long Polish name nobody could pronounce, so she told everybody to call her Miss S. The joke among the kids was what the S really stood for, because she was full of it. She stood in front of the class and told us oil came from the rotting carcasses of dinosaurs. And she tied it all together. Gasoline was bad. Too many people was bad. There was a book called The Population Bomb that said the world would soon have so many people we couldn't feed them all, and starvation would be everywhere. Birth control and abortion were controversial back then, and she connected those dots too. I sat there thinking, there's no way. That's not how it works. It just doesn't make sense. So I raised my hand and said, I don't buy that. And she said, "OK, Mr. Smarty-Pants." So I went through it. There's no way there were that many dinosaurs. And if there were, how did they get to all the places we pump oil? The Middle East is desert. We were drilling out in the Gulf, way down below the water. How did the dinosaurs get down there? I told her the earth is a living thing. It's not just a rock. You've got volcanoes. You've got eruptions. You've got magma coming up from below. Why wouldn't oil come up the same way? Sometimes oil comes right up to the surface all by itself. And I told her about my father and World War II. His stories about oil in Burma, and how critical oil was to fighting that war. She didn't want to hear it. She had the formal authority. I had the informal authority, and a couple of the kids thought it was a pretty cool debate. I got sent to the vice principal's office. He asked me what happened. I spent the rest of that class period in the cafeteria, doing my own thing. And that was the end of that. Except it wasn't. The more I thought about it, the more disgusted I got. At that young age, I started thinking, this has got to be political. And here is what that punishment did. It didn't shut me up. It reinforced me. It taught me that common sense matters, and that using it out loud costs you something. I've carried that my whole life. It's the reason I do what I do. The Dinosaur in the Gas Station Where the dinosaur story came from, and what the oil company's own exhibit said. So where did a science teacher get the idea that oil came from dinosaurs? A lot of us got it at the gas station. Sinclair Oil used a big green Brontosaurus for its symbol. They called him Dino. If you rode in the back of a station wagon in the 1950s or '60s, you remem...
