Follow the Money
Where Campaign Cash Really Comes From, Who Benefits from Climate Policy, and Why Christians Stay Silent About China
By Paul Truesdell
Before I begin…
Why I Do Long-Form: A Four-Minute Explanation
You know what’s funny? Every marketing guru out there tells me I’m doing it all wrong. “Paul, you need to be on TikTok. You need fifteen-second clips. You need memes. You need to hook ‘em in three seconds or they’re gone.”
And I say: Good. Let ’em go.
Here’s the thing about those short-form videos—the TikToks, the Reels, the quick-hit content. They’re designed for instant gratification. Quick dopamine hits. Scroll, laugh, scroll, react, scroll. The average user burns through two hundred videos in thirty minutes. Half of viewers bail within three seconds if they’re not immediately entertained.
That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the feature.
And it works beautifully—for a certain kind of audience. The “entertain me” crowd. The “what have you done for me lately” folks. The meme-based, short-attention-span consumer who wants answers without questions and solutions without understanding.
That’s not my type of prospect or client.
Let me tell you who I’m looking for. I work with people who are fifty-five and older, often within five years of retirement or already there. These are folks who’ve spent decades building something—careers, families, wealth, wisdom. They didn’t get there by scrolling through thirty-second clips. They got there by thinking things through. By asking hard questions. By sitting with complexity.
Long-form podcasting is my filter.

When I do a two-hour episode, I’m not trying to compete with TikTok. I’m doing the opposite. I’m saying: If you’ve got the patience to listen to this, if you’re intellectually curious enough to follow a conversation that unfolds over time, if you actually enjoy thinking deeply about money, about retirement, about how to spend the next chapter of your life—then you might be my kind of person.
The research backs this up. Long-form podcast listeners are different. They score high on what psychologists call “openness to experience”—intellectual curiosity, comfort with complex ideas, appreciation for nuance. They have what’s called a “high need for cognition”—they genuinely enjoy thinking. They’re not stressed out by three-hour conversations; they’re energized by them.

These are the people who say, “I really want to dig into this and understand it fully.” Not “just give me the bullet points.”
And here’s the beautiful irony: the completion rates on long-form podcasts are extraordinary. Seventy to ninety percent of listeners finish episodes. Even those marathon three-hour shows? Dedicated listeners stick around because the content rewards their attention.
Compare that to short-form, where you lose half your audience in three seconds.
Now, some would call that a failure. I call it efficiency.
When someone finds The Paul Truesdell Podcast and actually listens—really listens—to an episode or two, they’re self-selecting. They’re telling me something about who they are. They’re patient. They’re thoughtful. They want depth over speed. They’re not looking for entertainment; they’re looking for insight.
That’s exactly the kind of person I want to work with in my practice. Because when we sit down to talk about retirement planning, about protecting what they’ve built, about making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives—I need someone who can handle a real conversation. Not a soundbite.
The “entertain me” client? They’ll fire you the moment the market dips. The “what have you done for me lately” client? They’re always chasing the next shiny thing. But the intellectually engaged client—the one who found you through a long-form podcast and thought, “This guy thinks like I do”—that’s a relationship built on substance.
So no, I’m not going to dance on TikTok. I’m not going to compress forty years of experience into fifteen seconds. I’m going to keep doing what I do: long conversations, deep dives, real thinking.
And the right people will find their way here.
That’s the nature of the beast.
Now, the rest of the story. 

Let me tell you something I learned a long time ago, back when I was carrying a badge and working cases that most folks never hear about. If you want to understand why something that makes no sense keeps happening, you have to follow the money. It is that simple. The money trail never lies, even when everybody around it does.
Now, when you start looking at where the big institutional money managers are putting their clients' assets, you discover something interesting. All that patriotic advertising, all those commercials with American flags waving and military families featured prominently, well, it starts to look a lot like window dressing. Marketing. Because when you dig into the actual portfolios, you find massive investments flowing into companies that operate primarily in countries that are not exactly our friends. American patriotism, for a lot of these outfits, is nothing more than a way to get your money. What they actually believe in is whatever grows their assets under management, because that is how they get paid.
And here is where it gets really interesting. Follow the money behind the folks fighting against immigration enforcement. Follow the money behind the sanctuary city advocates and the obstruction campaigns. You start seeing patterns. Money flows in from foundations and organizations that, when you peel back two or three layers, connect to foreign interests. Some of those interests are not friendly to this country at all. The structure is clever, I will give them that. A Communist Chinese company invests in a subsidiary, which creates an American offshoot, which funds a political action committee or a nonprofit advocacy group. By the time the money arrives at a politician's campaign or a legal defense fund, it looks as American as apple pie. But it is not. It is money laundering for the purpose of influencing American political outcomes. Plain and simple.
Florida is not exempt from this. We have politicians right here in our own state taking substantial donations from sources that, if you trace them back far enough, lead to some very questionable places. And nobody seems interested in asking the hard questions about where that money originates. The pattern is always the same. Layer upon layer of corporate structures designed to obscure the original source. They are betting that Americans are too busy, too distracted, or too trusting to follow the trail. Most of the time, they are right.
Just recently, federal investigators secured a guilty plea from a woman in New York who orchestrated a thirty million dollar fraud scheme that included selling foreign nationals, many from China, access to prominent American politicians at fundraising events. She collected foreign-sourced funds and then made contributions in her own name or through straw donors, violating every campaign finance law on the books. She took photos with elected officials at these events and used those photos to market her scheme to more foreign investors. And this is just one case that happened to get prosecuted. How many others are operating right now without anyone looking too closely?
This is not a new phenomenon. It goes back decades. Remember the Clinton administration? During the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee had to return nearly three million dollars in illegal foreign contributions, much of it traced back to Chinese sources. Names like John Huang (pronounced HWONG), Charlie Trie (pronounced TREE), and Johnny Chung became synonymous with campaign finance scandal. Chung received three hundred thousand dollars from Ji Shengde (pronounced JEE SHUNG-DUH), who just happened to be the head of Chinese military intellig...