The Zach Foust Show

Zachary Foust
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  • Investing
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We break down housing, growing wealth gaps, and the economy in a simple, meaningful way. Clear, honest, and structured for real people.

  1. 3d ago

    Jared Kushner, Nicki Minaj, and Ron Lauder | ZFS 113

    Send us Fan Mail In 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/iY1i3Osf5RM Five 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

  2. Oct 24

    Trump’s Stressed, Iran Escalation and Proof We’re in a Recession | ZFS 112

    Send us Fan Mail The 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

  3. Oct 21

    EMERGENCY: We are being dragged further into Iran...

    Send us Fan Mail I 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

  4. Oct 20

    Julian Dorey and Tommy G on Staying Motivated

    Send us Fan Mail I 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

  5. Oct 14

    Russian Bots, Energy Ceasefire & the September Inflation Report | ZFS 111

    Send us Fan Mail We have a diesel deal that turned out to be a nothing sandwich, a ceasefire nobody actually agreed to, a 3D printed salmon with no fish in it, and two pieces of real data that dropped yesterday and this morning. We start with Trump at a midterm rally saying out loud that he could say the stupidest things and the crowd would still clap. I think that is the most honest thing he has said in a while, and it frames everything that follows. On the diesel deal with Putin, people ran the math. Trump described it in tons instead of barrels, and once you convert it, you find out it works out to roughly 18 to 20 minutes worth of diesel released to global markets over a two and a half month span. Not to America. To global markets. Then he turned around and blamed Ukraine for our diesel prices. This war has been going since 2023. Our prices started climbing in February of this year. Do that math too. Ukraine responded by hitting three Yandex data centers, and Zelensky claimed it suddenly got easier to breathe on social media because the bots went quiet. There is some evidence for it, including a visible drop in impressions on major accounts, but there is also a strong case that what actually went offline was web crawler traffic. Every country runs PR, Ukraine included, so I am laying out both sides. Then Trump announced an energy ceasefire on Truth Social that Zelensky says he found out about through the media, and when asked why both sides deny agreeing to it, he said they agreed because I said they agreed. On the September CPI, inflation came in at 3.7% year over year, higher than the last two months, and energy is the driver. Fuel oil is up 74.2% in twelve months. Gasoline is up 34.2%. Electricity is up 4.4%, which I do not believe for a second based on what people are actually paying. And I explain owner equivalent rent, which is how shelter gets measured. They call homeowners and ask them to guess what their house could rent for, then compare that guess to last year’s guess. More than a third of this data comes from surveys like that. Then the good news, and it is real. The NAR affordability index shows the median existing single family home peaked at $448,800 in June and has come down every month since, to roughly $422,700 in September preliminary data. Three straight months of declines. On top of that, 14.5% of home purchase agreements fell through in September, the highest September on record, with only March and April of 2020 running higher. Rates jumping from 6.75% to 7.5% is the cause, and I had two clients personally lose their contracts over it. But I also explain why prices are not falling faster despite the biggest seller to buyer gap on record. The answer is motivation. In 2008 we had 4 million homes on the market and 3.5 million of them belonged to people who had lost jobs and had to sell. Today we have 1.16 million listings, about 485,000 of which are new construction, leaving roughly 650,000 real sellers who mostly have low payments and no reason to move. Lennar has even been found buying back its own unsold homes through a separate LLC and renting them out. Builders are also handing out $40,000 to $50,000 in closing cost assistance, which never shows up in the price data. So prices are coming down. Not because the market got healthy, but because high rates finally broke demand. And this data lags six to eight months, which means it is likely already lower than what we are seeing. Support the show

  6. Oct 13

    “How do we FIX the HOUSING CRISIS?” Interview w/ Freddie Smith

    Send us Fan Mail Freddie Smith came back on for our second minisode and we spent the whole hour on one question. Can the housing market actually be fixed? We started with the grieving process. Freddie made the point that if inflation and home prices had taken fifteen years to get where they are, we would have slowly adjusted. Still been getting screwed, just in smaller pieces. Instead it happened all at once between 2022 and 2026, and that speed is what made it so devastating. He also pointed out something I have noticed too. In 2023 his comment sections were split. In 2026 almost everyone agrees the system is broken. That shift matters. Then we got into solutions, and Freddie made it clear he does not think a single policy saves us. His big one is eliminating federal income tax on the first $100,000 of everyone’s income and making up the difference at the top. His argument is that for someone making ten million a year, groceries and gas and health care are effectively free, while for someone making 100K that same tax burden is the difference between a down payment and nothing. I brought up mine, which is charging investors a fee at closing on any property they buy to profit from, capping single family ownership at twenty homes, and requiring purchases to be made under a Social Security number instead of a shell company. If we had charged a 3.5% fee on long term investor purchases over just the last three years, we would have had enough to put 4.2 million first time buyers in homes with $15,000 in down payment assistance. We also walked through why builders are not building. Regulatory costs on an average new home have jumped more than 40% in five years. On a $420,000 build you are roughly $131,000 in before a single shingle is ordered, up from $96,000 in 2023. Profit margins do not really work until you get past 2,450 square feet, which is exactly why nobody is building the small starter homes Gen Z would actually buy. I pulled up the August monthly Treasury statement live. Individual income tax for fiscal year 2026 came in at $2.5 trillion. Corporate income tax came in at $295 billion. Sit with that ratio for a second. And we closed on what comes next. Death and divorce. I have clients right now who are divorced and still living together because neither one can qualify for a mortgage alone. Then the boomer die off somewhere around 2032 to 2038, a birth rate that is not recovering, and net negative immigration. Freddie thinks the market just stays frozen as long as rates sit here, and his advice is pay down debt, stack cash, and wait. Go follow Freddie Smith on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and grab his book Generation F’d, out now at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Minisode two. Next week we have two surprise guests. Subscribe and join the Dollar Club to keep independent media alive. Support the show

  7. Oct 12

    Iran, Housing, & How to Prepare for 2028 | ZFS 110

    Send us Fan Mail I want to start with my buddy Jared. I sold him a home in Kent County Delaware in the summer of 2022 for $267,000 when he was making $63,000 a year. Four years later he built a software company, works harder than almost anyone I know, and now makes $127,000. More than double. His home is now worth $410,000. If I tried to requalify him today, for his own house, he would not qualify. He has a $1,500 mortgage and nowhere to go, because selling it and buying something comparable would nearly double his payment even if he rolled all his equity in. That is the economy in one story. So I want to ask you honestly. Is the American dream still alive? Then Iran, month eight of what we were told would be two to four weeks. Mr. Global has been the best follow of this entire war and his latest update is worth sitting with. A tanker struck 300 miles west of the Strait of Hormuz, in port, with casualties. Fourteen tankers hit in a single week. Ship to ship transfers happening at sea because nobody wants to take a full size tanker deep into the Gulf anymore, which means you now need two or three tankers to move what one used to. Shipping rates have gone from $30,000 to $50,000 a day to over $1 million a day. One tanker run from the United States to China just went for $72 million. Crews are reportedly being paid $100,000 a month plus a $50,000 bonus to make the run. None of that is sustainable and all of it lands in your grocery bill. On housing, I pulled up the National Association of Realtors affordability index live. Median existing single family home went from $394,100 in 2023 to $412,500 in 2024 to $419,300 in 2025 and sits at $434,800 as of the August data, which does not even include the September rate jump to 7.5%. And I need you to internalize this. If inflation drops to 1%, prices did not come down. They went up 1%. That is all it means. The actual problem is that wages never caught up, and nothing in Washington is fixing that. Then I get into the theory I laid out on our Dark Money Breakdowns channel. I call it the dog kicker. There is an old Powerpuff Girls episode where a boy keeps heroically saving dogs from traffic, until someone realizes he has been kicking them into the road himself. I think that is the play. Kick the economy, hand the legislature to the Democrats in the midterms, let it crack in 2027 or 2028, point at the scapegoat, and bring in the hero. And I think the hero they have teed up is funded by the same people building the surveillance infrastructure. Look at the pattern. 1907 panic gave us the Federal Reserve. 1929 gave us 1933 and gold confiscation. The savings and loan crisis gave us Reaganomics. 2008 and Covid gave us $7.5 trillion in printing. Every single crisis, something gets taken. That is why I have been saying own an asset for four years. That is why I keep telling you to hold gold and silver. I ended this one in a weird headspace, because somewhere in editing that video it stopped feeling like a puzzle I was solving and started feeling like the world I am raising my daughter in. So take care of your body, your brain, your spirit, and then your wallet. Serve the person to your left and your right. That is whole wealth and it is the part nobody can take from you. Support the show

  8. Oct 6

    Is the world a stage? | ZFS 109

    Send us Fan Mail Five things Trump said this week that are worth sitting with, an AI development that genuinely rattled me, and our full reaction to the FlyDubai story. We open with the numbers because the numbers do not spin. The August Monthly Treasury Statement is out and we are running a $167 billion deficit in a single month. Tariff revenue comes in fourth on the receipts sheet, below Miscellaneous. You would have to multiply our tariff income by twelve just to break even for one month. Meanwhile the fiscal year 2026 deficit is already at $1.966 trillion. So when the president promises $5,000 checks for every adult citizen if Republicans win the midterms, understand what that actually costs. $1.68 trillion. And understand what he said would happen if they lose. A 1929 disaster. Those are his words. Then we played the rest. The bayer aspirin ramble and the 386 milligram pill that does not exist. The line about letting them take out Los Angeles, letting them take out San Diego, because it is a small price to pay. The admission that he loves the inflation. And the war that is ending immediately after the election except it might go a little longer and there will be attacks after the midterms. I want you to hear all of it in one sitting, because individually these get buried under the next headline, and together they tell a very different story. Sean also walked me through something I had not seen. People are using AI to reverse engineer the code of two separate video games and stitch them together. Spider Man swinging through Arkham Gotham. If AI can deconstruct a game engine that fast, the obvious next question is what else it can deconstruct, and nobody seems to be talking about that. And we closed on FlyDubai with James Li's breakdown. An Omani pilot who is not permitted to fly into Israel. A plane that dropped 18,000 feet in under a minute with no injuries, no luggage out of the bins, and a full glass of water sitting upright on a tray table. A passenger in a blood soaked shirt standing in front of Netanyahu hours later saying he learned to level out a nosedive from watching a TV show. I am not telling you what happened. I am telling you the story we are being handed leaves you with more questions at the end than you had at the beginning. I ended this one talking about mourning. I think a lot of Americans have figured out the American dream is dead, and nobody ever gave them a funeral. No closure, no ceremony, just a phone and a few people around you who see it too. If that is where you are at, I want you to know that caring that much is the most patriotic thing about you. Take care of yourself first so you can take care of the people to your left and your right. Support the show

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About

We break down housing, growing wealth gaps, and the economy in a simple, meaningful way. Clear, honest, and structured for real people.

Information

  • Creator
    Zachary Foust
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    128
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Zach Foust Show
  • Show Website
    The Zach Foust Show

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