The Zach Foust Show

Send us Fan MailDid Hegseth get impeached? Did Democrats purposefully not show up to the vote? Is the Trump Tracker showing any improvement on affordability? And is the big PPI in the room about to hit us in the face? We get into all of it, and I close with numbers you can pull out at Thanksgiving when Uncle Rick tells you it is the coffee and the Netflix.We start with the October monthly Treasury statement, the first month of fiscal year 2027. Receipts came in at $369 billion. Outlays came in at $773 billion. That is a $404 billion deficit in a single month, which means for the first time the monthly deficit is larger than the money coming in. Annualize that pace and you get a $4.8 trillion yearly deficit and a national debt north of $45 trillion. There is only one lever left when that is your balance sheet, and it is the printer.Then Hegseth’s week. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier video, the guard raising his voice at the party he was with, and the Commendation Medal handed out the very next day. Sean’s point is the one that stuck. If there is no video, that medal never happens. We also go through Massie’s eight articles of impeachment and why the vote failed by seven with 11 Democrats absent, several of them reportedly at a donor funded event that night. One of them posted about being denied the ability to vote on her own articles and got community noted for having missed it.I also walk through the actual timeline of the school strike that leads those articles, because I had it wrong. The building sat on a former IRGC compound that changed use in 2016, and we hit it on ten year old intelligence. The first missile killed two or three people. Everyone moved to the prayer room in the middle of the building. The second missile hit the prayer room. Three hours later, while parents were pulling their kids out of the rubble, a third strike came in.On the Trump Tracker, supply sits at 50.38, affordability at 42.93, and crash likelihood at 39.75. The document is linked below. Making coffee at home is 31% more expensive now, so that argument is dead on arrival.Then Nvidia. Jensen Huang is out, Colette Kress is in, and we read through her background including her close involvement with Nvidia’s Israeli operations and the $6.9 billion Mellanox acquisition. Lawmakers are also calling Howard Lutnick to testify over why Mega Speed was never blacklisted after he was instructed to do it in 2025.And then PPI, which is my forward warning indicator for consumer inflation six to eight months out. Producer prices are up 6.5% year over year, the highest since late 2022. Fresh vegetables up 29.6%. Jet fuel up 104%. Home heating oil and distillates up 117.5%. If you heat with oil, fill the tank.Here are the Thanksgiving numbers. Since 2020, food is up 42%, gas 78%, health insurance 38%, buying a home 49%, rent 43.3%, used cars 41%, ground beef 65%, electric 44%, and coffee 127%. Corporate profits went from $2.08 trillion to $4.79 trillion. The S&P is up 136.3%. Median household income went from $83,590 to $87,460. That is about 5 to 6%.Support the show

Send us Fan MailI brought on Bobby Sauce, Take Naps on every platform, one of the sharpest voices out there calling out the messengers and the money behind them. I met Bobby out in Kentucky riding around Thomas Massie’s property in a Gator, and I have wanted to get him on ever since.The core of this conversation is what Bobby calls influencers being influenced. His argument is that there are now several hundred Operation Mockingbird style social media accounts functioning as a decentralized version of the mainstream media. Fox News reads the script because they know where the bread gets buttered. The same mechanism now works on independent creators, just without a contract. You get the Mar a Lago invite, the UFC seats, the signal boost from admin accounts, the advertisers who could never afford prime time TV. Your audience grows. Then one day you color outside the lines and all of it goes away. Nobody ever has to write it down. Bobby compares it to the mob. Nice pizza shop you have there.What makes it credible is that he admits he felt the pull himself. He applied to be a Turning Point ambassador, they never told him what to say, and he still caught himself deciding not to criticize them because they had been good to him. That is how it works on everyone.We get into the names he goes after and why, including Graham Allen, who ran social media strategy for the Department of Defense and now posts admin talking points mixed with fear content all day. We talk about Charlie Kirk, the donors who pulled money when he stepped out of line, and the questions Bobby is willing to raise and the ones he is careful not to claim he can prove.Then Kentucky. We were both out there with Tiffany Science, James Lee, Ryan Matta and Shannon Joy trying to help Massie beat the money, and the money won that one. But Bobby’s read on these midterms is that Musk getting beat in Texas and AIPAC getting beat in Michigan proves the thing people keep saying is impossible. A strategy works until it doesn’t. Money can be beaten.On voting, Bobby does not think it saves the country by itself, but he thinks the communication in between elections is what makes the votes matter. I told him my soccer story about yelling at a ref ten feet in front of me and watching him change his next call. These people are human. They hear it.We close on 2028. His prediction is the right learns nothing, Newsom and Harris are in play, and the only path back is a dark horse nobody is talking about yet. He also says he would be on the trail tomorrow if Massie ran.Support the show

Send us Fan MailJensen Huang is in hot water, the Senate is floating a 10% cap on credit card rates, we got inflation data that is missing something we have never been missing before, and Thomas Massie is spending his last weeks in Congress filing impeachment articles.We start with the Nvidia CEO and the company wide email he sent after reports of a multi year relationship with a woman identified as a Chinese spy. We read the whole thing, including the part where he addresses the shareholders before he addresses his family. Then we play James Li’s counter take, which flips the story. Alice Wong is a top executive at Mega Speed International, a Singapore based data center rental firm already under US scrutiny for procuring roughly $4.8 billion in Nvidia hardware. James argues Huang may have been the one working the relationship for a back channel into the Chinese market. He also points out the four officials familiar with the matter who keep feeding the story to the Times and the FT every time it starts to die, right before a Trump and Xi summit. Trump, for what it is worth, is invested in Nvidia to the tune of about $12.5 million.Then the credit card cap. Senate Democrats are reviving what is essentially Bernie’s February 2025 bill to cap credit card interest at 10%. I do not think it happens, and I explain why I think it would mostly result in the people who need credit most getting cut off entirely and pushed toward worse alternatives. Joe pushes back on me with the shareholder argument and we go back and forth on it. Graham Stephan’s take is in there too.On inflation, consumer prices rose 0.4% month over month against an expected 0.3%, which is 33% higher than forecast. Core came in at 0.3%. But here is the part nobody is covering. For the first time while the government was fully operational, we did not get a year over year inflation number. Not because they are hiding it, but because the data from September and October of last year was never collected during the shutdown. You cannot go back and reconstruct it. Outside estimates put us somewhere around 3.5 to 3.7%.Then the 60 Minutes interview. Trump responding to a $3 billion net worth increase with “so did everyone’s,” and later, “I should have had stock.” For context, if you combine how much every president since Reagan enriched themselves in office, Trump has tripled that in this term alone. We also walk through the World Liberty Financial exchange and the UAE connected investors, and the pivot to index funds that had nothing to do with the question.On housing, pending home sales are near all time lows, mortgage rates sit at 7.18%, and 49% of adults under 30 are now living with a parent, up 12 percentage points since 2019. Sean gives his honest read on it as someone living it, and the three of us get into whether this is a wages problem, a wealth inequality problem, or an AI problem. We pull up the graph where the S&P 500 and total job openings tracked each other for twenty straight years and then split in December 2022 and never came back together.Support the show

Send us Fan MailToday’s episode includes conversations, testimonies and evidence of sexual assault and r***. These conversations can be triggering or a lot to handle emotionally and we advise viewer discretion.If you want to learn more about these crimes and topics or if you are a victim of abuse and need someone to talk to, please go to RAINN.org or contact their hotline at 800.656.HOPESomebody is scared. Today we walk through Trump’s documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaires and financial titans circling it, a new accuser who came forward last week, and why the people promising to release these files keep moving the goalposts.I want to be clear up front about how we are handling this. There is no confirmed evidence that Donald Trump appears in the Epstein files. The new allegations from Dr. Larissa Portnof, a New York psychologist who says she was abused beginning as a child, have not been independently verified. Snopes could not verify them. The White House categorically denied them and said the president has never met or heard of her. We spend real time on air doing the work on her background, her credentials, her practice, and her history before this video, because I think the conspiracy side of the internet has a bad habit of grabbing anything that confirms what it already believes. Know your enemy means getting it right, not getting it loud.What is documented is a different story. Howard Lutnick told Pod Force One that the last time he saw Epstein was 2005 and that he and his wife were so disgusted they would never be near him again. The files show he visited Epstein’s island in 2012, four years after the conviction, and signed a business deal with Epstein five days later. We pull up the actual signature page between Cantor Fitzgerald and Southern Trust Company, one of roughly 37 Epstein entities we have mapped. He donated $5 million to the Oversight Committee before testifying to it. His closed door transcript came back something like 85 to 90 percent redacted.We also walk back through the Alexander Acosta plea deal in 2008, which agreed that the people affiliated with these crimes would not be named. Victims names are already protected in cases like this. So if names were being withheld, they were either clients or co-conspirators. There is no third option. Then we run the supercut of Bongino, Patel, Bondi, and Trump, and you can watch every single one of them move from release it to there is nothing there.And the argument I keep coming back to. If you coached Little League and a story went around that you were involved in something like this, and you were innocent, you would move heaven and earth to get every document out unredacted. You would not call the people asking stupid.The Figma board with our full map is linked in the description. Sean built out the list of everyone we believe should be investigated based on clear documented connections.Support the show

Send us Fan MailShe is the most consistently passionate person I know in this space when it comes to actually creating change, not just posting about it.She starts by making a distinction most people skip. Private equity is not inherently evil. If your mom loans you money to open a pizza shop, that is private equity. The problem is what it became. Every president since Carter loosened the guardrails. Carter capped it at 100 investors and $10 million. Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall and took it to a thousand investors and a billion dollars. Obama removed the caps entirely. And the holding period went from ten to fifteen years down to eighteen months, which turned the whole industry from build it and take it public into buy it, strip it, and flip it before the debt catches up.She walks through Bain Capital doing it right with Domino’s and then doing it the new way with Toys R Us six years later. Hancock Fabrics, AC Moore, Joann, Michaels, all gone or going. Hobby Lobby will be the last craft store standing and will probably get hit with antitrust for a monopoly it never tried to build.Then the part that should scare you. There is no oversight on collateral, so one firm can pledge the same portfolio to a dozen credit issuers who never compare notes. The debt is floating rate, often 13 to 15 percent, and 21 percent if the company is distressed. A company acquired by private equity is twelve times more likely to file bankruptcy within a year. The firms and the bankers are made whole in under three months. The investors wait ten years, and the risk lands on pensions and 401ks.When the assets stopped selling, they started swapping with each other on the secondary market, which the Financial Times called obvious signs of a pyramid scheme. When that ran dry they invented continuation funds, where fund two uses investor money to buy fund one’s unsellable assets. Tiffany calls that what it is. A Ponzi scheme. It has grown by roughly $300 billion in six months, and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is now suing Platinum Equity for fraud over a prospectus that was different depending on who received it.Her read on why it all hinges on AI is sharp. The AI spend is a dollar for dollar match with our GDP growth over three years. Strip it out and we have net negative GDP for the first time since the Great Depression. The only clients paying are the government, which means the profit model is war.Support the show

Send us Fan MailAnother day in the oligarchy. It is midterm day, there is escalation in Iran, 33 countries have warned their populations to stock up, and grocery stores across Europe are getting their freezers hacked. Let’s get into it.We open with a Ted Cruz clip from March where he said if this Iran thing is still front and center in November, we have done something wildly wrong. Well, here we are. Then Trump on Fox saying Iran’s navy is on the ocean floor and all 288 of their planes are scrap, which raises the obvious question. If they have nothing left, why are we still negotiating, why is the Strait still routed around Oman, and why has tanker transport gone from $100,000 to millions? I walk through it with an analogy about a kid named Billy who has no arms but has a nuclear weapon in his pocket.Then the part I did not have on my bingo card. Tucker Carlson posted that the administration may be within days of a nuclear strike on Pickaxe Mountain, since no conventional weapon can penetrate 300 feet of granite. Take that for what it is worth. But Senator Chris Murphy, who was actually in the classified briefing, said on stage at the Middle East Institute that the plan is insane and would lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law. That is a US senator describing what he was shown. He has since been hospitalized following a stroke.Meanwhile Iranian state television is airing instructions to citizens on how to respond to a nuclear strike. Sean also shares what it was like being in Hawaii in 2018 when the false ballistic missile alert went out.On the midterms we get into the Michigan Senate race, the debate exchange where Abdul El-Sayed dismantles the guilt by association attack on his mother, and his 60 Minutes interview where he explains why the spending comparison between the Israeli and Saudi lobbies is not close. $70 million in his primary alone, $33 million of it from AIPAC. We also cover Haley Stevens endorsing her own party’s nominee and then flipping to the Republican within the same week, and we lay out a few theories on why.Then the grocery stores. Seven European countries had supermarket freezers hacked in a single day, with temperatures driven up to 50 degrees Celsius and entire inventories destroyed. France got hit last month. Six US military commissaries have had freezer malfunctions the Pentagon is investigating as a suspected cyber attack. And 33 countries including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Croatia and Canada have told their citizens to stock up on food, water, medical supplies, and cash.I do not know what is coming. But I have prepper supplies, I just got more, and if nothing happens you have extra ramen and some batteries. That is not a bad trade.Stay in connection with your family. Learn who your neighbor is. And maybe keep some beans around for Mary.Episode 114 of the Zach Foust Show.Subscribe and join the Cucumber Club. Everything past production costs goes to our community garden and the Milford Food Bank.Support the show

Send us Fan MailIn the intro we react to a video we could not include in the podcast for copyright reasons. See the video below.https://youtube.com/live/iY1i3Osf5RMFive stories today. A Vanity Fair excerpt on Jared Kushner that he is denying outright. Trump’s rally marathon. An AI company telling the SEC its product might end humanity. And then we close on Ron Lauder and 9/11.We start with the $5,000 checks being floated for after the midterms, roughly $1.2 trillion if it goes to every adult, from a country already running hundreds of billions in deficit every month. Then the Kushner story. The book alleges Dutch intelligence, working off a flipped Russian source, had access to his phone in 2017 and watched roughly $2 billion move into accounts linked to him from Saudi and UAE leadership. Kushner and his legal team have denied all of it and called for the author to produce evidence. I am not dogpiling on this one yet. If the screenshots exist, show them. Until then it is an allegation, and I said that on air.Then the rally clips, which I will let speak for themselves, and the reporting that people inside the administration have floated Nicki Minaj as press secretary. I said I would eat a sock if that happens. I stand by it.The Anthropic IPO section is the one I would not skip. They filed their S-1, and buried in the risk factors is language about their own models exhibiting self preserving behavior, resisting shutdown, concealing or manipulating information, and behavior resembling blackmail to stay operational. It says the safeguards needed may not exist yet and there is a risk they are never developed effectively. It says advanced systems could pose catastrophic or existential risk to humanity. And it says their models are already accelerating their own research faster than they can evaluate it. We pulled the actual filing and read it on screen so you know I am not working off a screenshot. Name one company from the dot com era that listed ending humanity in its SEC filing.Then 9/11. I am a money guy, so I start with the money. United and American Airlines both saw put option volume the days before at levels never seen in their trading history, roughly 90 times normal. Somebody had foreknowledge and somebody had the money to act on it. That is not a theory, that is trade data.From there I walk through Ron Lauder on the corruption map. Estée Lauder heir. President of the World Jewish Congress. Hundreds of mentions in the Epstein library and a legal vehicle Epstein set up for him and Leon Black years after Epstein’s conviction. The man who funded Arthur Finkelstein’s work on Netanyahu’s campaign and helped make him Prime Minister. His son in law Kevin Warsh now chairs the Federal Reserve. And he chaired the New York State Research Council on Privatization that moved the World Trade Center out of Port Authority hands and into a private lease in July of 2001, six weeks before the attack.I am not telling you he did anything. I am telling you the same names keep overlapping, and that overlap is where my concern lives.We also sit with the part that is harder to say. 2,700 American lives, and then a war on terror estimated at roughly 937,000 deaths including 400,000 civilians.Episode 113 of the Zach Foust Show. No podcast Friday, I am on a field trip with my daughter. We will be back next week.Subscribe and join the Dollar Club to keep independent media alive.Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe president seems stressed. Oil just hit its highest point since this war began. And at the end of this one I am showing you something I spent 48 hours building that I think answers the question people keep asking me. Are we actually in a recession right now?We start with Trump at a series of rallies, a cabinet exchange with a reporter, and a question I keep coming back to. How did we get so disillusioned about what a president is supposed to sound like that this became normal? Then healthcare, because family premiums just hit $28,303 a year, up 5% this year and up 387% since 1999. Worker contributions are at $7,471 on average, and employers are already projecting another 9.5% increase next year. Keep in mind health spending is part of the GDP number we use to decide whether the economy is healthy.On oil, Brent crossed $117 a barrel, the highest it has been since February. Part of that is the Saudi conflict with the Houthis and the east to west pipeline running to the Red Sea. The bigger part is what Netanyahu said at an IDF graduation ceremony, which mainstream media has barely touched. He said Iran is once again attempting to develop nuclear weapons, that the only way to remove the threat is to overthrow the regime, and that this is his directive to the IDF, Mossad, and the security branches. He doubled down in a post saying he will complete the mission together with President Trump. The same two to three weeks from a bomb claim has been made in 1993, 1995, 1999, 2004, 2006, 2012, and now 2026. Meanwhile reporting says US and Israeli militaries have drawn up specific plans for renewed strikes after the midterms.Then Texas, where James Talarico is running for Senate and Elon Musk has spent more than $180 million through super PACs to stop him. We react to two of the best political ads I have seen in years, including one that goes after the funder instead of the opponent.On the markets, the ten year Treasury yield has come down from 5.35% to the four nines, which pulls mortgage rates down to about 7.3%. That sounds like good news, but the reason is that investors are running to the safety of government debt because mainstream finance is finally saying the B word out loud about AI. One strategist literally said taking some air out of the AI bubble is a good thing, which does not describe anything a bubble has ever done.And then the main event. I took the NAR Housing Affordability Index, the Trump Tracker, and every bill I could trace back to 2001, and I built a dashboard that grades the cost of living in America against median income. You can filter by household type, young family, dual income no kids, single earner, and homeowners since 2019. The lowest the index ever got in 2008 was 98.6 in June, right after Bear Stearns. We are sitting at 75.1 right now, and we have been below that 2008 bottom multiple times already.The one group whose line does not follow everyone else’s is people who owned a home before 2019. That is the K shaped economy in a single chart.Support the show

Send us Fan MailI turned on an emergency stream because Bibi Netanyahu just said the quiet part out loud, and I need you to be ready for what comes next.At an IDF officer course graduation ceremony, Netanyahu claimed Iran is once again attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, and then said there is only one way to remove the threat once and for all. Overthrow the regime in Iran. He said that is his directive to the IDF, Mossad, and the security branches. He followed it with a post saying that together with President Trump he will complete the mission and bring down the Iranian regime.I have heard the claim that Iran is weeks away from a bomb for my entire life. 1993. 1995. 1999. 2004. 2006. 2012. And now 2026. Recognize the pattern or do not, that part is on you. The timing matters though. Netanyahu and Likud are facing an election within days, there is pressure on him from people who want him to be even more hawkish, and we are weeks out from our own midterms. The floor is being laid for this war to continue past November.I am not a financial advisor. I am telling you exactly what I am doing. Three things for your lifestyle and three for your finances.On lifestyle. One, lock in with an energy audit. Find your drafts, your window cracks, your insulation gaps, and get your heating oil tank filled now if you have not already. Two, it is cutting season. Subscriptions, extras, habits, vices, the thermostat at 71 degrees. Cut them. Three, produce it. Plan the garden for spring, get a cold frame going for leafy greens, put garlic in the ground, look into hydroponics if you are indoors. Food prices went up at the start of this war and they are going up again.On finances. One, hedge inflation. A high yield savings account is the easiest move anyone can make today, and if your money is sitting in a regular savings account getting eaten alive, move it. Beyond that I look at gold and silver as dollar insurance, inflation protected bonds, and hard assets. Two, energy and commodity exposure, which is where you can draw your own moral line, and I am not here to draw it for you. Three, diversify. The S&P 500 is up roughly 1,200 points off its April low, and my read on that is AI and inflation, neither of which is going anywhere.All of this is stupid and I hate that we have to talk about it. As someone who served, I do not think any of us should have to move our money around based on people dying. But you still have to survive an inflationary economy, and I would rather you be ready than surprised.The majority of what this channel earns on YouTube, after expenses, goes to the Milford food bank.Subscribe and join the Dollar Club to keep independent media alive.Support the show

Send us Fan MailI got Julian Dorey and Tommy G on at the same time, two of the hardest working people in this space, and we spent an hour on one question. What would it actually take to change this country?Tommy opened with his answer. We need a flashpoint. Something that gets young people united in the streets regardless of party. Julian pushed back, and his pushback is worth hearing. We have had plenty of flashpoints this year and nothing moved. He also made the case that revolutions almost never end the way people imagine they will, and that America is one of the very few places in history where it actually worked.Then we got into what they are each working on. Tommy is digging into Epstein’s lawyers and accountant, the men who were named co-executors of the estate roughly 48 hours before he died, each in line for tens of millions, and who would have seen every financial transaction. He also wants to talk to Denise George, the former US Virgin Islands attorney general who went after the estate and recovered $105 million, most of which went to tax settlements rather than the victims. Julian added that the accountant named several high profile clients in congressional testimony, which is a thread almost nobody has pulled.Tommy also talked about Mississippi, a homeless camp, an organization called Operation Good that walks into areas where gun violence is about to happen and tries to stop it before it starts, and why he is using his audience to fundraise for people doing that work.The second half is the part I keep thinking about. Julian’s point on complacency is that people now have just enough comfort to make everything else tolerable. A place to sleep, a streaming subscription, food delivered, and a phone to scroll until tomorrow. That is enough to keep anyone from acting. His test for it is simple. On your deathbed, is this stretch of your life a highlight or a lowlight?Tommy’s answer to that is what I loved. I can’t boil the ocean but I can boil my pot. Know your neighbors. Run the men’s group. Be the guy with the chainsaw when the tree falls. Coach the wrestling team like it matters. Social media has broken our sense of what an effect even is, and reaching three people well is still a real thing.And then we landed on the fix, which Julian laid out plainly. Term limits and getting money out of politics would solve about 90% of this overnight. The problem is the exact people who would have to pass it are the ones who benefit most from it never passing. So we talked about the general strike question, whether it is realistic, who would actually have to participate, and the enormous group of disengaged young men in both rural and urban America who have the numbers to move the entire country and do not believe they have any power at all.Book recommendations are in here too. River of Doubt, The Worst Hard Time, the H.W. Brands and Isaacson biographies of Ben Franklin, Our First Civil War, and Dungeon Crawler Carl.Go follow Julian Dorey and Tommy G. Both of them are doing real work.Minisode three. Subscribe and join the Dollar Club to keep independent media alive.Support the show