#Sneakers #Tesla #Russia #AnnieDuke #Quit #Vanguard #Truist #CustomerService #Watercooler #WorkFromHome #DataManagement #Hacking #IDTheft #TaxSeason #CharteredAccountants #CPAs #TheTsarTank
Hey....we could hash tag the dog out of this, but that's enough for today.  Enjoy!

Annie Duke's Books - Recommended by Paul Grant Truesdell, Sr.
Thinking in Bets,
The Middle Zone
How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

Sponsor: Truesdell Wealth, Inc. - Registered Investment Advisor
Disclaimer: Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. Truesdell Wealth, Incorporated, is a Registered Investment Advisor.

SUMMARY

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF and Paul Truesdell, II discussed various topics, including the significance of recognizing when to quit in business and personal life, the prevalence of corruption in Russian and Chinese military organizations, the challenges of transitioning to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of balancing what can be counted with what counts in the context of innovation and technology. They shared their personal experiences and observations, highlighting the need for adaptation in the face of continuous challenges.

• Truesdell discusses quitting and the importance of moving on.

• Annie Duke's book "Quit" explores the importance of knowing when to quit, with insights from her experience as a poker champion.

• Truesdell criticizes Russian military incompetence and corruption.

• Wagner soldiers report drug use within their ranks, leading to investigation and potential execution of those who exposed the issue.

• Paul Truesdell, II: Corruption in military industrial complex happens after service, with ex-military personnel profiting from connections and information.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF: Corruption in military industrial complex is complex, with both pros and cons, and can be seen as design by committee or actual experience on the ground.

• Paul Truesdell, II: Venezuela's corruption is systemic, unable to invade neighboring countries.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF: Potemkin villages and parades, fake military strength in Venezuela and other countries.

• Truesdell and Truesdell discuss the history and development of tanks, including the Tsar Tank, with a focus on Russia's involvement.

• Truesdell discusses how organizations managed remote work during COVID-19 pandemic.

• Paul Truesdell, II discusses the challenges of securing access to information within a company with multiple offices and employees.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF recalls a past experience with hiring CPAs in India for tax services due to the internet's ability to transfer data globally.

• Identity theft is a major concern during tax season, particularly for accounting firms.

• Paul Truesdell, II explains how customer support teams have evolved, with a focus on technical expertise and specialized knowledge.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF discusses the challenges of providing effective customer support in the financial services industry, including siloed responses and security risks.

• Paul Truesdell recounts a trip to Yellowstone National Park where he and his family encountered friendly service at a McDonald's, despite being from out of state.

• Paul Truesdell II shares his experience at the US-Mexico border, where he saw supplies for coyotes and observed that the border situation has been a "joke" for a long time.

• Paul Truesdell, II shares his experience with Vanguard's customer support, mentioning the challenges of escalating issues to managers.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF describes the standby hell he's encountered with Vanguard's customer support, where he's been put on hold indefinitely.

• Paul Truesdell, II describes the difficulty of contacting higher-level managers for technical support due to layers of access control and lack of institutional knowledge.

• Paul Truesdell, II and Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF discuss the shift from face-to-face communication to text-based support, leading to misunderstandings and delays in resolving issues.

• Paul Truesdell and Paul Grant Truesdell discuss the impact of remote work on office culture and productivity.

• They mention the loss of informal interactions and the potential for increased workload despite shorter work hours.

• Paul Truesdell, II: Companies prioritize in-person work due to communication issues in remote work.

• Lack of communication leads to turnover in organizations, especially when reaching critical mass.

• Paul Truesdell, II, shares insights on Apple's daily flights between California and China, highlighting the importance of continually bridging the gap between what can be counted and what counts.

• Paul Truesdell, II, and Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, discuss the potential benefits of electric military vehicles, while also acknowledging the challenges and limitations of such technology.

• Paul Truesdell, II criticizes the idea of securitizing mortgages as "diversifying a bunch of crap."

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF emphasizes the importance of understanding the power of energy in various forms.

• Paul Truesdell, II discusses the issue of regulators and ratings companies allowing companies to offload "crap" debt obligations, leading to a lack of scrutiny and potential for fraud.

• Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF mentions the movie "Sneakers" and its themes of hackers, corporate espionage, and government espionage, highlighting the importance of data security and privacy.

• Paul Truesdell, II discusses the movie "Sneakers" and its relevance to the crypto wars, a time when Congress tried to regulate backdoors into cryptography.

• The transcript highlights the impact of movies like "Sneakers" in raising awareness about the dangers of backdoors in technology and the importance of codebreaking and other security measures.

• Paul Truesdell, II discusses the importance of data in criminal investigations, highlighting how the absence of data can be just as informative as its existence.

• He shares examples of how data collection has helped solve crimes, including a case where a suspect's phone being off during a homicide led to their conviction.

• Paul Truesdell and Paul Grant Truesdell discuss Annie Duke's PhD in cognitive psychology and her approach to decision-making.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 0:00
I have made a decision I'm going to quit. Okay, I'm quitting.

Paul Truesdell, II 0:04
Putting what? Well,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 0:05
WC Fields is reportedly the person who said that, because you know, it's always important to keep trying and working and you know, just stick with it the old college try, right? Sure. Only quitters quit winners never quit winners keep going, right? It's okay. Yeah. I'm gonna quit. What what? Well, WC Fields said, if at first you don't succeed, try try again. And well, if you don't succeed, and try something else, it's time to move on. So the last of the V car manufacturers stopped making VCR tapes in July of 2016. So I just thought that we should probably talk about to begin with the importance of quitting. The visa VCR cassette recorder was insanely popular. began its run around 1956. And so that would be 6676 8696 2006 2016. That's 60 years. That's a pretty good run. But yeah, it's it's done the somebody's finally throwing in a towel and they quit. Interesting.

Paul Truesdell, II 1:14
I had no idea they manufacture them. And that late, honestly, yeah.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 1:18
So if you want a VCR tape, you better go out and buy it. Because your your VCR is going to become obsolete, but be able to play anything soon. And yeah, the reason I brought that up is because I'm going to be going to a city council meeting here in Ocala. And once again, we have a group of people that are going to raise issues that they need to quit and move on. And I've got this book by Annie Duke, is it any Duke, whatever, it doesn't make any difference? I think it's at Duke, I'll think about a minute. But it's the word quit. And it's the importance of knowing when to quit. And she's written some pretty good things, thinking in terms of bets. And other other books I've gotten through about the first six, seven chapters of it's amazing. And I talked a little bit about this. But you would think people, especially in the world today that we are looking at would know when to throw the towel in.

Paul Truesdell, II 2:12
Now, these days, I mean, especially with social media connecting everybody in ever greater high speed, high speed, frequency, people's identities are tied with their social media and their personal causes that they advocate for. So they seems to me more and more often we have people willing to die on just the smallest anthills imaginable and not actually capable or even willing to end or shift gears or I don't know, let's say, find an alternative path to solving their problems. Instead, it's, it's kind of like this topic, we keep coming back to some of the stuff you see in particular, in Ukraine. It's like, what are the Russians doing? Why don't they shift strategies or change what they're doing or whatever? And yeah, it's, it's actually quite wild. Well,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 3:11
any Duke is a 56, crushing 58 year old lady, who won the 2004 World Series of Poker, and she is a poker champion, she knows how to, she knows how to bet. He's got a couple of books out there thinking in terms of bets, how to decide, decide to play great poker. And now she has written a book quit. And, again, I think that's a great segue for the Russians, you are continuing to basically do what was done during the Revolutionary War, which is just throw mass numbers of people forward. And I mean, they're just slaughtering them. And I just, I

Paul Truesdell, II 3:54
mean, time and time again, I see things and you look at the after action on skirmishes, or battles, or whatever you want to call it. And it's really amazing to see what amounts to a very large, competent to some degree, organize army that goes down and other players Well, it's not that they go down in flames, they just continue to do the same stupid thing over, over and over and over. And it's like, you know, they learned some lessons and change tactics occasionally. But it's just so slow. I mean, it's like the imagine the worst bureaucracy you can imagine that you've ever dealt with in your entire life. For some people, this is going to be the Postal Service, or it's going to be Social Security Administration, or the VA or Vanguard, or Vanguard Vanguard,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 4:43
the absolute worst broker dealer on the face of the earth if you have administrative needs, especially when somebody dies. Oh, it's yes, please incompetence followed by truest

Paul Truesdell, II 4:53
Yeah, so that's something we'll round back to that because actually, I have some thoughts on this. But, you know, imagine the worst be You're accuracy you've ever been had the pleasure to deal with in your life. And that looks at the outset anyway, from our perspective, what the Russian military is, like you people who seemingly have competence, and notice the problems are often shunned and told to basically just go die in a hole someplace. Because, you know, you can't embarrass people you have to kowtow to certain interests. And you know, your superiors not only have their careers and all this on the line, but they also have all their corruption graphed on the line as well. So, you know, the, I'm reminded of a story where a some Wagner of soldiers or mercenaries or whatever, at one point, at some time after Prigogine was was assassinated. So since he was assassinated, yeah, sometime within the past year, he, some Wagner soldiers are like, Okay, well, we're being forced into this area, and we're taking up regular responsibilities. And they shifted a lot of the command structure around and anyway, long story short, they were out in the field doing something and these guys were attached to a more traditional Russian army unit. And they found that a whole bunch of these guys were on drugs. And in particular, they've got this one guy, and you know, they did what the Russians do a far too often they humiliate and torture people until they speak and this guy gave up who his drug dealer was, and it traced it up the up the ladder inside his command structure. And they figured out where the drugs were coming to in this area, they were able to figure out exactly who was responsible and who was trafficking, the drugs and all this sort of stuff. They then gave this information to us and contacts within I want to say the FSB, which is their kind of like, quasi CIA, FBI organization for domestic purposes, and they get hooked are better than our FBI. Yeah, no, no, Matt? No, it was just it was a throwaway FBI or saints by comparison. And that said something? No, so anyway, they gave this information up the chain of command to the FSPs unit that investigates like, basically corruption or something. Yeah. And instead, the FSB is dispatched, or the military dispatch some special forces to go hunt down and kill these guys, as if they were traitors. Not not the drug dealers, the guys that reported the drug dealers. Yeah, it's insane. Like the stuff that you see, you know, the amount of, again, corruption and graft and, and stuff that is associated with their military. And the what's on the line for a lot of these people is very different than what we're used to. I mean, we've kind of talked about this in the past, but no, are, are called officers in our military, or often people often like to complain about the corruption and all the various things. But the corruption in our military typically happens afterwards, you get out of the military, and you've done your service and whatever. And now you're being paid handsomely, in some cases for access to or information about how certain things are used? And how can you help us design a program or a tool or something, get us an edge into selling into the military industrial complex? Government pipeline, right. You know, and of course, you're also buying connections, and you know, how to get in front of the right people and that sort of thing.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 8:46
Yeah, and I'll come back to this, but it's easy to stop if anybody wanted to do it. But

Paul Truesdell, II 8:50
But in some respects, it's actually a good thing. Because these companies hire people who actually have real experience and they design and build things that are actually useful for people who have experience on the ground and not just some design by committee. hellscape, which is what most of the government is. So on one hand, you can say it's bad, but on the other hand, it's like, okay, well, you know, it has its pros and cons, like in everything is not as simple as it seems to be on the outside. But anyway, point is, you know, you view it from that perspective. At least our corruption happens after these guys are no longer in our military, these people, if you view it as corruption. These guys are actively you know, like, oh, I have, you know, 400 soldiers under my command and 200 of them are real, and 200 of them are pocketing their salary for my yacht. Yeah. And of the 200 that are there they 100 of them had boots, the other 100 have flip flops. Oh, well, yeah, because everybody has to do I've actually seen everybody has to take their piece all the way down. That's the thing is when corruption inside the organization becomes the status quo. And you see this in China, and you see this in Russia in particular. Obviously, this is very common. in all kinds of Marxist or communist countries throughout history, but Russia and China are big examples of this. Yeah, you know, you get endemic corruption that is just systemic to an organization. And you find out really quickly what Venezuela has found out, you know, they, they beat their chests and now we're gonna go after Guyana for their oil, and they find out that oh, well, because of the way Chavez and Maduro have managed keeping the military loyal by giving you know training budgets to people's bonuses and things like this turns out you don't really have a military that's capable of doing anything other than crushing dissent who would have thought

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 10:42
I mean, they can't go in and kick a little tiny country with a handful of people that 4

Paul Truesdell, II 10:47
million person population giant Venezuela no they couldn't even get over there if they wanted to they there's no roads so you're either gonna march to the jungle or you're gonna get like a bunch of fishing boats and you're going to land hop or ocean or water hop across the coasts like it's just it's comical you couldn't you couldn't logistically support any serious invasion of the country if you wanted to. So anyway point is just you know, when you start to understand these really like deep seated deep rooted realities of of how these countries work, it explains a lot and Easton in our system is as messed up as it can be at times it's you know, that type of corruption is just simply not tolerated. Something

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 11:32
that popped in my mind when you were saying this is our old fate my favorite phrase I could hardly get out of my mouth. A Potemkin Potemkin village Yes, I have I have a new phrase on that How about a protect potential? And I suck at this textbook helped me out son Potemkin Thank you protect, say, Potemkin parade and a what Potemkin military? Think about it. If you apply the same thing to you know, the fake village Yeah, now you have your fake parades with all the Chinese if I could only get the word of some tongue tied on it always been that way. You get your your Chinese and Oh, they're so you know why they're out there in a powerful or you got the Russians and all their missiles some years ago? Now if they do on those made a praise what are they gonna do for for a tanks? They're gonna put out fake tanks? No, because the Russian

Paul Truesdell, II 12:25
one has been comical they if you look at their parade and like 2020, and then 2021 and 2022 and then 2023. And the one this year should be very telling because last year, they went from all these tanks and all these these giant things down to the one in Moscow had one like legacy like I don't know what it was at a t 34. Like World War Two T 34. Obviously, it's a none of them are in current operation. Russia, but they they have a few for parade purposes. So they, you know,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 13:04
obviously could come up with the the Tsar Tank the bizarre thing they had from World War One.

Paul Truesdell, II 13:10
I don't even know that the Russians really had any significant use of Tanks and World War one because it really wasn't a tank just Well, yeah. But you know, the development of tanks was largely on the, on the Western Front of World War One. And it just, you know, things like slowly evolved over time. But by the middle of the war, the Russians had capitulated because communist said they had basically infiltrated the government and then laid siege against the czarist government. So I don't know. There probably wasn't much development on that front. That's

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 13:43
yeah, what you know, this, the Tsar Tank, is a good indication of what Russia technology was and continues to be occasionally. It was a tricycle basically. Didn't have caterpillar tracks. Instead, it was basically a tricycle. The two front wheels are kind of spokes and nearly 30 feet in diameter.

Paul Truesdell, II 14:07
It's a different different, different world we live in. Yeah, the best part is look at the weight. Oh, my goodness. 60 tonnes. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 14:19
You know, bigger is better, right? Bigger is always better.

Paul Truesdell, II 14:23
Yeah. Well, so to kind of round back about, um, the, the criticism about Vanguard and some of these other people. So there's an interesting phenomenon that's happened since COVID. And, you know, imagine we're back in, you know, late winter, early spring of 2020. Again, we're starting to think about shutdowns and people are panicking that we're all gonna die and you're gonna get your lungs are gonna fill up with goo, right? Because I mean, that was

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 14:55
that was the Yeah, I do believe I died 37 times. But to be fair, I

Paul Truesdell, II 14:59
mean, and that time period, there was minimal information, the communication about what information was out there was very poor by pretty much everybody. And because there was so much, let's just call it incompetence by people in the government. Everybody was very willing to fear the worst, because of just how poorly managed the response to a lot of this was. So anyway, in this time period, okay, we have to say to people, you have to work from home? Well, most organizations were able to manage that transition pretty well. Even big ones. But so like, let's look at a company like, you know, let's say a nameless, large, international broker, dealer, and, and custodian, because they pretty much all work the same. But anyway, we're going to be nice, what do you do? What do you do you have you have 1000s of people in customer support. And now you that customer support isn't going to go away. If anything, it's going to get worse, because people are going to need to liquidate accounts and make withdrawals and do stuff to just stay alive. Correct. But you still need, you still need this huge staff.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 16:08
And these people have access to information that they cannot and should not be leaving the building with?

Paul Truesdell, II 16:14
Oh, yeah, historically speaking. I mean, you know, a lot of these companies, this is one of the weird parts about it is a lot of these companies, their entire security infrastructure is designed around nothing leaving the physical structure, you know, certain key select employees might have access to a highly, highly monitored VPN, to get into a secure resources, but it's very limited. Yeah, I mean, there was there's just a tectonic shift in how to deal with things at this point in time, there's dozens of anecdotes that are coming up in my mind of, of technologies and tools that went from niche interesting kind of, yeah, maybe distributed companies that have offices all over the place could benefit from this tech too. It's not just we need to connect 10 offices together. Now we need 10,000 employees to be able to access this kind of technology and of the scaling and the implementation of these tools to securely give certain people access to things. It's just, my mind is just kind of exploding with, again, anecdotes that don't really matter. But people really don't kind of hindsight is 2020. But people don't really see the magnitude of work that went into enabling this kind of knee jerk transition that was necessary.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 17:35
And I remember having a very specific conversation with a number of people where I, I have experienced in this area because gosh, is what 20 plus years ago now that we had Truesdell accounting, we shut that down, because it's just is was a loss leader. And I'm not going to do any more businesses or loss leaders. But one of the things we thought about doing is we were going to hire some CPAs. And we were going to use a firm in India, if you remember, recall, you were younger, of course at the time. And in India, they have CA's, they don't have CPAs you have Chartered Accountants, in the firm that we were going to consider having to do taxes. Because the internet was becoming a real thing, you could get data from one side of the world to the other. And while we could be working during the day, or sleeping, and when we're done with the day, you'd have a bit you know, a little bit of overlap and then doing your work at night. You know, by time you come back next day, it's in your inbox. So what would happen is they would do the majority of the of the prep work on the on the tax return and then our people would just finish it up. Okay. With that being said, I learned a lot about technology. And back then the emphasis was these people go into a boys going to the boys room, the girls go in the girls room, locker, and they remove their clothes. And they put under their jumpsuits, and they have no phones. And they have true dumb computer terminals. They cannot access because they got name, address social security, or they got everything. So this is a bonanza for identity theft.

Paul Truesdell, II 19:08
Number one time for identity theft is tax season. When the refunds are coming in the mail or people are sending their returns out on a theft that happens of those is tremendous. And you have a return you pretty much can own anybody's identity if you if you need to.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 19:23
So one of the things that I gave up on that, and I quit, we quit the accounting practice, we sold it to another firm, because I could not have a rational discussion with anyone and I mean anyone about the policies and procedures that I felt needed to take place. The Ianno the liability everything was just either somebody was completely in denial or they would be nothing was good enough and it was just just you again. I started off with the word quit.

Paul Truesdell, II 19:55
Yeah, so So these big firms you know, you look at it the transition to happiness tremendous, but the thing is, at the time of others, there's a couple of things that people don't really understand changed. Behind the scenes, a lot of these customer support people, they went from working in a large office or, you know, units, right, you're in a room with, you know, cubicles or whatever with maybe 1012 other people, and it's a, you're in charge of a certain kind of support for, you know, let's say, IRAs, if we're talking about brokerage firm, right, or trust accounts, or corporate accounts, or whatever the situation is,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 20:35
and everybody listening to you understand that in customer service departments all across this country, in the financial services industry, many of them are massively large. And the ones that are smaller, have very highly technical people who are paid a lot of money. But the problem is volume of calls. So in essence, over time, you have the illusion of knowledge, and you have somebody sitting on the top of the heap, those a lot the hand, as a result, you have really siloed responses. So go ahead. Yeah. And

Paul Truesdell, II 21:05
so you know, you've got all these people with all this, all these support capability. And like you said, is 100% Correct, that says leading to is you have people who have institutional knowledge, you know, our processes and procedures cover x. And if you want to do this weird niche thing, it's like, well, we have a special form, we can email it to you or mail it or whatever, or, you know, you need a certain thing to happen. That's an exception basis only well, okay, here's the process. And here's who we need to get a hold of, to, to process that internally. Some of these things are made obscure, or, or tension or difficult intentionally, purely because there a security risk. That example, our whole account transfers from one taxable entity to another. Those are rare. I mean, we've done them especially they're more common when you're dealing with it was a state settlement. But those are a very rare thing that typically there's a process behind the scenes, and, you know, somebody has to get you, whatever, whatever the special processes and initiate it. Anyway, so, so long story short, you know, you have a customer support. Institution, really, where, you know, your individual frontline first first response type people may not have the capability of solving the problem. But they can put you on hold and ask their manager who's two desks over bingo, or whatever the problem is, right? They can, you know, if that person doesn't know, he can get a hold of, you know, somebody else that he knows that he has maybe more experience, or maybe they have a dedicated person for this type of weird request, or whatever the problem is, right? You know, you can even look over and say, oh, okay, that was on Bob's desk. He was supposed to handle this, and he's not in the office today. So you can actually give, like, actual useful information that people Steads, you know, COVID happened and people migrated to this totally online digital customer support service center. That is a thing that's been around for a long time, it's not new, distributed are, are in the in the, in the era prior to COVID be predominant use of these tools. Were for offshore customer support centers, where your managers may be in the United States still, but the actual people doing the frontline customer support are in Mexico or India or the Philippines or some other let me

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 23:38
jump in there for a second because one of the we were one of the very first families that had an opportunity to use out of state customer service. We went to a McDonald's in right outside of Yellowstone National Park. I don't know if you remember that. And it was a testing they did. But the lady I mean, the lady who took our order was very nice and pleasant. Everything was wonderful. The people working there were interesting, very similar to the people who we met. We were at Laredo, I think, on the Mexico Texas border, where were we at? Douglas Arizona, or Douglas Arizona. And that was an interesting place

Paul Truesdell, II 24:20
never go. Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, I can't imagine what it's like right now. It's probably like, it probably literally is Mexico. I mean, with the lack of border enforcement, the border there. You can literally like see the holes in the fence, at least back then. And you could like walk through them if you wanted to. Yeah. And we just were waiting on patrol people were this back when, at least in theory, border patrol was doing something this is 2005. And even then they were just kind of like driving around looking at people they didn't they didn't care. Who

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 24:48
was the Shawn was a Sean Hannity on Fox? Yes, definitely. He is a fox Host. Yeah. This was back in the day when he had some connections and Fox because of going to the inventions and everything else, you know, blah, blah, blah. You had that guy who went to CNN. Shepard something Smith. Anyhow, I think he's on CNBC. He's on CNBC. No. Well, we all had a connection back in the day, or MSA, MSNBC. And we actually had emails and text messages back and forth. Remember, we still have pictures of the water bottles, and the sleeping arrangements under the Border Patrol, infrared cameras.

Paul Truesdell, II 25:30
These observation posts, like trailers with cameras and communications and stuff. And yeah, under underneath these trailers were, you know, supplies for coyotes, who was the border situation has been a joke, basically, forever. And anybody who says they're going to solve it is very much lacks a very large perspective on how this stuff actually goes down. They, they look, they go down, and oh, I'm gonna go I'm gonna go tour the border, and I'm gonna go look, and they go down and look and they see what they see a microcosm of, of of a very large systemic problem that basically nobody has the stomach or initiative to actually solve.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 26:10
So the reason I brought that up is that because we're outside Yellowstone, excuse me, second, we're in outside Yellowstone, and we've got this, this beautiful, pristine, English speaking, Midwestern voice and the lady comes on, and we she gets, we get our order, the people inside we're, we're interesting, just leave it at that we during the same trip, we want to go into Douglas, we get down to the border. Same thing, we weren't gonna go through McDonald's. And we couldn't move if you remember, we could not order the drive thru because we didn't speak Spanish, you could not do it. So we wouldn't leave you guys in the car, we all went in. And I think you guys hold on to our legs, and we placed our order, but thing they're going back to customer service where it takes people I've never seen so many people behind a counter. And everybody had their own job. In this one person just sat there, filling the the soda pop machine, other was just doing the milkshake. One person was just getting cups and handing to them. It's like, oh, this is make work to the nth degree. So got to think about this, the world is an interesting place. And yeah, you think everything works like it does in your neighborhood, it doesn't, you got to get out and look at things. So go ahead and get going.

Paul Truesdell, II 27:27
Yeah, so the these customer support platforms, you know, were designed, at least initially for, for offshore customer support. That's really what it was for. And, you know, for the implementation during the COVID period, they everybody may be domestic, who knows, doesn't even really matter. Because you get the same problems that everybody that offshored this stuff dealt with differences, as some of these people hopefully have some experience. But as we know, people change jobs and whatever. And it's been two, three years. And now you have people that all they've ever done is do work from home for these companies. So specifically with big, giant, behemoth Vanguard, their customer support is very interesting because you get a hold of somebody in the front line. And, you know, you need to escalate something to a manager or you need to get them to do something that they don't have the ability to do, guess what happens?

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 28:23
Well, I do know that it's a I'll use the word is it's a standby Hell,

Paul Truesdell, II 28:29
no, no, it's worse, that that's the person you're going to talk to there, in order to talk to somebody that has more authority than them, they can't put you on hold, they use text chat, their manager, oh, they

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 28:42
don't put him on hold anymore, because I've had that do any really ministration here, but I've had people put them on hold, they come back and come home to come back. Like, let me just talk to your supervisor you can't get to them.

Paul Truesdell, II 28:53
It very much depends on the organization and their protocols for for stuff with Vanguard, all of their, their managers, my experience from what I've heard, is it is all by their, their their have to type out and ask the person what what they should be doing. Interesting, they can transfer people around to other people with same with with support capabilities. But you will never speak to somebody that is a manager or somebody at a higher level. So it's interesting, because you know, from, from what I'm, from what I've heard, in particular, with more sophisticated more and more. It's called technical requests, the issue seems to be or at least, just my intuition anyway, is that these people have a limited amount of access to certain things and they need to be able to do something more now they're asking for permission, you know, based on the call, and this person's probably reviewing the call up to this point to see if that was actually part of the request. And so you have all these layers of access control because obviously, you know, somebody's sitting up in their apartment someplace and you know Poughkeepsie You know, you don't want them to be able to just pull up everybody's account and be able to do you know, identity theft. It's point is it's a nightmare. And the other thing is, is you've lost, you've taken something that historically would have been very simple. Okay, you're calling from this number, use some other information to verify somebody's identity. Okay, great. Well, if your account that, okay, I don't, this isn't my expertise, Let me transfer you to, you know, the irrevocable trust or business trust department, and they're going to be able to solve this problem for you. I've already authenticated you. Okay. Handoff is person that gets three phone calls a day, because nobody deals with these things. Dun, dun, dun, they can work your problem done. Now. It's Oh, what is that? I was on a phone call with another firm. I mentioned who it is. And I had a question about a 1035. That should have been received by a by a by a client account. I literally had somebody in advisor support services ask what's a 1035?

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 31:02
That's like a realtor says, What was the 1031? Yeah. And I

Paul Truesdell, II 31:06
was like, I really had to pause for a moment and just kind of collect myself. I explained it to the person who I hope was not an intern anyway. I was just, you don't have the institutional knowledge like you used to. And more importantly, you don't have the situation where it just turn around or put you on hold and walk over to your supervisors desk and ask, Hey, I've got this weird problem and talk to him, or can you help me figure out what I need to do to be able to do this? Instead, you're pleading with somebody on text chat? And you know, you probably don't even know what this person looks like. And on top of that, also, consider the efficiencies at play in Oh, wow, are they can do analytics on how many people they need to do things? And oh, well, we can actually fit because we don't have any constraints in our offices anymore. Well, you're a manager of the support group. Well, we can we can double your workload easily. Because you know, hey,

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 32:02
we'll just make everything chat. You know, just AI just to pop your question and get it squared rock. Yeah. So one of the things I want to add to that is just

Paul Truesdell, II 32:09
a ton of things you can think of here that, it just it makes everything harder. One

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 32:14
of the things I want to add is that you know, the old fashioned water coolers, I don't think a lot of people know what a water cooler is. Maybe they do maybe they don't but you know, used to be in a day. In the office in the morning around the coffee pot around the watercooler. You talked about what happened on TV, the Johnny Carson Show. Sure. You talked about what would happen with a TV show mash all in the family and people you know, ABC, NBC, CBS, and you had some cities had UHF and a lot of cities didn't have cable, of course, that was brand new. When HBO came out, it was like, What's this? Remember saying? Why? Why would? Why would you want to get this thing with all movies just go to the movie site. So anyhow, but you you lose that ability to just chit chat? And that's yeah,

Paul Truesdell, II 32:59
that is where the institutional knowledge is created and honed. And this is the thing that, you know, a lot of companies have realized is, yeah, I mean, you can you can have people working from home doing fraction of the hours, they would normally work. In reality, no, let's say you're, you're paid for eight, but you actually, you know, they're tracking everything you're doing, you're doing about four hours of work. But they also are finding that in that four hours, you're doing substantially more work than you would get done in an eight hour shift at an office. The I mean, every business is different. I've seen some interesting studies that kind of prove this out that work from home, especially with very analytical work, people are getting more done in a much shorter, yeah, but it's substantially shorter period of time. But despite that, there's a reason these companies are like, we don't care, we're coming back to the office or you are fired. And the reason is, you lose, you can coast on this momentum, this this, this knowledge momentum that you have in in an organization for a while. But once you start to reach a certain there's a there's a precipice of turnover. Once you reach that critical mass of turnover inside an organization, you will lose, you will lose a lot in a company and that's one thing I can tell you that you can you can you can visibly see it in some institutions now. They just simply don't have the it anymore because there's no communication happening. People are like, Okay, I have my work done. I'm gonna go for a walk now. I mean, you can see him you can if you're out, driving around looking at people doing things, you'll see people that I as their of what looks like a mid 30s couple, just on a walk at 3pm on a Tuesday, right, like, but it's not just one, you'll see three, four or five couples doing the same thing. And we talked about this recently. Yeah, exactly. In an area that's full of, you know, let's call it more working class of residential communities that you wouldn't have never seen seen that before in these are not people that look like they're doing shift work? No, no, no, you can always spot that. Yeah, you can usually spot that. But no, they they look like traditional, traditional working class employees, but thing that's obvious is people are working from home, or at least a portion of them are. So they're, you know, got their hours in or they're working later or whatever the situation is, or, or they're in a case where, you know, nobody's monitoring what they're doing. So now they don't have any appointments scheduled. So what are they going to do? They're just are meeting scheduled? So what are they gonna do? I'm just gonna go walk the dog and go go go do something for the next hour and get an hour pay for leisure activity. So anyway, it's interesting because these people aren't doing the there's not the employee to employee communication and zoom doesn't cut it. No, it doesn't. You know, I'm sure certain jobs certain specialties, where there is a lot of communication required, you know, they've made do and you do what you have to do, even if Zoom is your option, but not every job is like that a lot of a lot of education and a lot of knowledge and how these companies work comes from just osmosis being around seeing something happened talking to somebody, like you said, the watercooler talk or the break room talk and talking to people as you're walking down to your car and the elevator going up the stairs, whatever whatever the case is. Well, there's

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 36:24
this is going to kind of relate but there's a reason why Apple flies daily, multiple flights back and forth between California and China. Yeah,

Paul Truesdell, II 36:34
I think it's, I can't remember the number. But I think when I when I remember reading this as a couple years ago, but they had a steady thing from the American Airlines. And it was like two or three planes a day going, going there and coming back day, a day. Yeah. So you had people you had teams of people, their entire job was to go over there, check things, make sure things are working properly, spend a day or two and then you come back

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 37:01
sniffing dirt and kicking tires, as I say, I'm going to give a quick go item I want to, I want to get my little quote out. And then they want you to think about it. And then we're gonna get out here because I gotta get on the road. We've done this long enough to be a little shorter version. But the one thing is not everything that can listen to is very carefully not everything that can be counted, counts, let me repeat that not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. So I think one of the things we've done here with our firms I've kind of really stressed this a lot is we continually bridge the gap between the things that can be counted, and the things that count. And what I mean by that, when I said about quitting, there are some companies that should fold up the tent and go out of business. And you're seeing that in the electrical vehicle area, I think you're going to begin seeing more and more people are going to say, like this. We have this wackadoodle who is promoting in the Biden administration at 100% of all military vehicles have to be Evie. They have to be electric, you know, just just quit. Go away. Get out of here. Same thing with some of our politicians who don't ever seem to go away.

Paul Truesdell, II 38:17
Although I will say the Evie military thing, that is something we should revisit because actually do know a little bit about some of the projects that are ongoing. Some of them are genius, and they provide a tactical capability that otherwise would not be possible. But making this mass state statement like no a somebody from California would write with regard to it is just incredibly dumb.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 38:43
No there there is the power of energy in whatever form it comes from, is a force multiplier. And before we wrap this up, always remember never forget that I'm Paul the elder. He's Paul the younger, we're with Truesdell wealth. And that is a registered investment advisor and one of our Forte's one of our specialities is the Defense Department of the United States military war, machinery personnel is what we do. It's why we talk a lot about that, because we have a portfolio called our military procurement portfolio. So just remember that and we're biased in that area. And we worked really hard, but the point being the number of innovations, the technology that has come from a war, and it's never going to end, people just can't get along, and we've been killing each other over who's imaginary friend is more real than anything else. So you know, with that being said, yeah, it just, we I'm really proud of how we do things here and again, capturing not just the attention of people, but you know, being experts ahead of the curve where people go, Oh, subprime mortgages, they suck. Yeah, but I would did a lot of such seminars, I talked on that back in the day before, you know, in 2006. And seven, I skip saying this, you can fog a mirror and get get a mortgage, and then they sell it. It's called securitization of crap. Yeah, you know, that was my extra title. My seminar was called securitization of crap at you, you literally take dog dirt, if you put it in a really pretty box, and you seal it up, and you put a wrapping paper on it, you put a pretty bow on it. And oh, you got a present, but it's dog crap on the inside. When you open it up, it's, oh, I couldn't smell it because I had it hermetically sealed. And that's what securitization of ogham your mortgages were. And it was the easiest way for me to explain it to people.

Paul Truesdell, II 40:43
Literally all they're doing is just diversifying a bunch of crap. And the issue was is back then the regulators and the ratings companies and everybody allowed the, let's call it the classification of crap to be much more beneficial to the companies that are trying to offload the crap. They were in cahoots or in the case of, you know, the ratings companies, they just didn't care. Like we're getting paid, we'll put a stamp here thing, whatever we want to do, or whatever, whatever makes whatever makes you right to check. You know, it's it's a it's the, the issue and that entire thing goes back to you know, when you're when you're relieving yourselves you're of a of a huge burden, the person that's relieving themselves have the burden particular long held debt obligations. AB that person is more likely to lie about what's in there. Yeah, maybe more scrutiny is important.

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 41:44
You don't have skin in the game, you tend to let things slide Hey, before I forget real quick, have you heard of a company called C tech astronomy? Seat? A C tech astronomy anybody know what that means? Well, it's a movie from 1992.

Paul Truesdell, II 42:01
In company from a movie. That's right. It's the movie

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 42:05
see sneakers? And I'm going to tell you who was interesting. He had Robert Redford, Dan Ackroyd Ben Kingsley. You had River Phoenix City port EA, it was an amazing movie, I

Paul Truesdell, II 42:15
often tell me, I've seen it about maybe 200 times would be might be an understatement. And

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 42:21
it's a great movie. I mean, it just really is. And the reason is that when you unravel Sci Tech astronomy, it's too many secrets. And so it's a it's just a great movie. I'm not gonna give you all the details of it. If you haven't seen it, go see it. If you have seen it, go watch it again. And remember what I'm going to tell you see tech astronomy and too many secrets. Hackers, corporate espionage, government espionage, taking your data, Russians being involved in everything you can possibly imagine Chinese, you know, go to your Chinese restaurant and give them your credit card. And basically, you're just giving them your your ID I'm telling you, we go on for hours and stuff. It's not new. It's just, it just seems like it takes 3040 years for people to go. Oh, I didn't know that. Sometimes. It's frustrating. Couple final words and thoughts and and we'll get out here.

Paul Truesdell, II 43:18
Yeah, I guess the movie sneakers is interesting, because obviously as a liberal slant to it. That's kind of funny. In hindsight, it's kind of a juvenile. But uh, yeah, I guess it's the movie wraps up. It's interesting, because this this magical encryption device that, you know, is interesting, in hindsight, the this this movie was created around the peak of the what is I guess it's called the first round of the crypto wars as correct. We're not talking about cryptocurrency, we're talking about cryptography. This is a time period when Congress tried to regulate backdoors into all cryptography and, you know, it was a big thing. You know, there's all these fights about I won't buy a computer that has, you know, these these these management chips and these DRM and this cryptography backdoors. And, of course, the hilarious thing is the government capitulated and gave up largely because of movies like this, where they pointed out how dangerous a backdoor in all technology could be. And if you if you recall, you know, the, at the end of the movie, there's a news report talking about how the American National Committee was bankrupt. large donations were given to Amnesty International and the United Negro College Fund and various things and Greenpeace and and how, you know, basically the implication, obviously, is that this magical backdoor cryptography thing that they had had stolen from this company who was working with the government they had been they'd decided to start using it for good for to help people instead of you know, the horrible conservatives anyway. So the point is, is that, you know, this actually did happen in reality now Got this story, but the crypto wars and there's a war is obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but is a huge, what's called debate and attempts by the government to do various things. And the people, obviously behind the scenes helping Congress and other agencies with their various legislative attempts. Obviously, were smart enough to sit back and say, Yeah, this is dumb. Let's not do that. Instead, let's let's invest money in codebreaking, and all kinds of other technology that makes that allows everybody to feel safe. At the same time, we will still be able to have all the information we need. And that's the world we live in. Now. I mean, there's a reason the Iranians, nobody inside the Iranian government can probably, let's say, use the bathroom or fart without us knowing about it. I'm reminded of a scene from body of lies where russell crowe's character is talking to the head of the Jordanian intelligence service. And he says, He's like, he's like, the terrorists may not use their phones, but you sure you sure like to use yours? plying that they know exactly what they're doing? Like, we're, we're spying on you, while you while you're spying on other people? Why do we need the big network and we can just let you do what you do. And we'll come in, plug the holes where we think you're missing or whatever. So anyway, point is, like it this these are, these are things, you know, sneakers is from 92. And, you know, body of lies, obviously, is probably almost 20 years old now. But anyway, was about the Iraq war in particular, and intelligence and how the terrorists were realizing that using technology was getting them caught, because whatever and how they started to shift underground, which is the thing that did happen, started to shift to, you know, human carriers of notes and orders and things, made people's lives a lot harder. But anyway, it's interesting, because you know, as time goes on, is very obvious. People are just more distracted than ever, that if they want to know something, it's not about a matter of time, they already do know, it, just have to look into the pile of stuff they've collected. And like you said, not everything that's countable is important. Well, the same thing goes for data. It's not about, you know, the data collection is is, is phase one, it's about being able to process the data, that is the valuable thing, you'll freeze garbage in garbage out. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes, you know, collecting a lot of extra data, even though it seems nonsensical at the moment that you're doing the collection, sometimes you'll be able to get an insight later that you need all that crap to go through to create that insight. So, you know, or in the case of a lot of criminal cases, now, in particular, with a homicide, an absence of data is a pattern in and of itself. And we've had multiple people get caught, because Oh, you never turn your phone off. But yet, the moment in time that this person was being killed, and the timeline that we've constructed that you would have been necessary for you to do this. Your phone was some for some reason off, you know, there's been actually a few convictions or maybe not convictions, but uh, investigations that have enabled, the absence of data has been just as important as the is the existence of said data. So it's very important. It's interesting. And from the very large perspective, yeah, data comes in all forms. And sometimes, like you said, you need to quit or change. And in the case of like, the data, the support centers, just because it made sense in 2020, and 2021, doesn't mean it makes sense in 2024. So we

Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF 48:44
began with the word quit. I talked a little bit about Annie Duke, and I'm going to round back around with that. I want to congratulate her who are going back to college, after 30 years very successful career. She obtained her PhD in June of last year 2023 Congratulations, Annie. She got her PhD in cognitive psychology. So she you know, a lot of people go to school, they get their education, they get their PhD, and then they learn the real world. Well, she learned the real world and went back to a wrap up not everything that can be counted counts. And again, she is an amazing person who can calculate numbers. She's a forecaster like Paul and I. And she is an amazing person. You got to get her books. I would read every one very thoroughly read it with a pen and paper, highlighter and take notes. You're gonna like us to Bible she's, she's a good egg. And so with that, not everything that can be counted counts, not everything that counts can be counted. With that. Our time is done. My name is Paul Truesdell. I'm Paul the elder. And I'm Paul, the younger, Emirati here typical New tailor to That's it.

Unknown 49:57
You have been listening to the Paul truth Stell podcast for additional items serious to humorous wisdom to occasional outrage of various degrees. Visit Paul truesdale.com That's Paul truesdell.com

Unknown 50:25
Truesdell J.D. AIF

Transcribed by https://otter.ai