Fed Reserve BIG day + Iran Deal Friday? | ZFS 83

Are they selling America for parts? | ZFS 88

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] I just finished laying 204 feet of fencing. No producer, no notes, no script. Just me in the basement with something on my mind that I cannot shake. I think the tech bros are winning. And I do not mean that as a compliment. I spent two hours in Afghanistan in 2013 working alongside an intel contractor who had a blimp camera 400 yards in the air that could read a name tag from two miles away in 10K resolution. That was 2013. Now Flock cameras are going up in Milford Delaware reading your license plate, your dents, your face. Digital IDs are being voted on. CBDCs have no ban. Sam Altman has said publicly he thinks AI could be the end of humankind and he is still building it. Peter Thiel cannot answer why Palantir is being used to target and kill people in the Middle East. And Anthropic executives are quitting to go write poetry in Europe because they believe they have built something that could end the world. I walk through how we got here. The flip phone to the iPhone. The algorithm arriving in 2015. Operation Condor and 96% of American history being spent in active war. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon as the world's most profitable independent security contractors. The military industrial complex not as a conspiracy theory but as a line item on a balance sheet. And then I get to the thing that is keeping me up at night. I think they are selling America for parts right in front of us while we watch, get angry, do a boycott for a week, and then go back to filling our Amazon carts. What would it actually take to do something? I have a number. It is 10 million people. And I walk through what that would look like. This is a long one. Make yourself comfortable. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

Would GEN Z survive the 2010 economy? | ZFS 87

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] The government says cumulative inflation since 2010 is 52.72%. I think that number is a lie and I have the receipts. I spent time building out what I am calling the Real Inflation Tracker. I took real items that real 25 to 34 year olds buy every single week and I looked at what they cost in 2010 versus what they cost today. A McDonald's meal that was $5.29 in 2010 is now $16.79. That is not 52%. That is over 200%. A pack of bacon, ground beef, dish soap, car insurance, health insurance, rent on a one bedroom apartment, a college education, a new construction home. Every single one of them has gone up more than 100%. Most of them more than double the official number. I also walk through what has gone up the least since 2010. Video games, smart TVs, streaming devices, hotel rooms, cell phone plans, Bud Light. Nothing you actually need. Just the things that keep you distracted and comfortable enough not to notice what is happening to everything else. I break down Kevin Warsh's statement on price stability versus persistently high prices and why those two things are not the same sentence. I walk through the Dodge versus Ford 1919 court case that legally locked corporations into choosing shareholders over workers and why repealing it would do more for American wages than any tariff ever could. And I close with five things that would actually fix this system if anyone in Washington had the spine to do them. They are lying about the economy on purpose. I am going to keep building the data to prove it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OAbihkG-bQ70pCUPknM1Gzw-IpR1iPqcEZXnAubdNfM/edit?gid=0#gid=0 Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

How much have prices REALLY gone up? | ZFS 86

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] The government says cumulative inflation since 2010 is 52.72%. I think that number is a lie and I have the receipts. I spent time building out what I am calling the Real Inflation Tracker. I took real items that real 25 to 34 year olds buy every single week and I looked at what they cost in 2010 versus what they cost today. A McDonald's meal that was $5.29 in 2010 is now $16.79. That is not 52%. That is over 200%. A pack of bacon, ground beef, dish soap, car insurance, health insurance, rent on a one bedroom apartment, a college education, a new construction home. Every single one of them has gone up more than 100%. Most of them more than double the official number. I also walk through what has gone up the least since 2010. Video games, smart TVs, streaming devices, hotel rooms, cell phone plans, Bud Light. Nothing you actually need. Just the things that keep you distracted and comfortable enough not to notice what is happening to everything else. I break down Kevin Warsh's statement on price stability versus persistently high prices and why those two things are not the same sentence. I walk through the Dodge versus Ford 1919 court case that legally locked corporations into choosing shareholders over workers and why repealing it would do more for American wages than any tariff ever could. And I close with five things that would actually fix this system if anyone in Washington had the spine to do them. They are lying about the economy on purpose. I am going to keep building the data to prove it. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

Iran or Epstein? | ZFS 85

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] I want you to sit with this question for a second. Why does none of this make logical sense? We give Israel billions. We get nothing back. We go to war on their behalf. We tank our own economy. We choke off a fifth of the world's oil supply. We block 40% of global fertilizer. We threaten Iranian peace negotiators telling them you won't even make it back to your country. And then the moment a deal is close Israel bombs Lebanon again and the Strait shuts back down. Five vessels through on Sunday after 67 the day before. We are right back to square one. James Lee raised a theory I cannot stop thinking about. Trump is stuck between two choices. Support the Israeli agenda and keep doing their bidding or risk more Epstein exposure. Is that tinfoil? Maybe. But Trump was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein. He was best friends before that with Roy Cohn who was suspected of the same thing. The Rothschild family is mentioned 11,938 times in the Epstein files. Twelve CEOs have stepped down since the files dropped. Nobody named in those files has called any of it fake. And Howard Lutnick is on the list. And so is Trump. I said what I said. Bloomberg is now reporting that when our Strategic Petroleum Reserve stockpiles hit physical reality the price of oil does not go from 75 to 85. It goes from 75 to 135 in a month. Chevron and Exxon are both publicly warning the same thing. We have about 340 million barrels in reserve. We use 20 million a day. The math is not complicated. I close with something I believe in more than almost anything I talk about on this show. Whole wealth. Your net worth and your personal worth are not the same thing. Disconnect. Plant something. Put your phone down. You are the number one asset. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

Did Trump take TRUTH SERUM + Reaction to FED Meeting | ZFS 84

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] Something happened in the last 36 hours and I need to walk you through it because Trump said six things in one day that made me think somebody injected him with the truth serum from Spy Kids. He said Iran can keep ballistic missiles because other countries have them. He admitted the stock market shoots up every time peace is mentioned and crashes when it is not because the people like it. He called the bombing of Beirut unnecessary and unfair. He said Iran never won a war but never lost a negotiation in a tweet from 2020 that just resurfaced. And then he told Bibi Netanyahu to stop bombing Lebanon on his birthday while standing next to a mongoose. I am not making any of this up. I also got to watch Kevin Warsh's very first Federal Reserve meeting as chairman and I have a take that a lot of you are not going to like. He actually handled it well. No more future outlooks outside of the meeting. Rates held unanimously 12 to 0. Inflation not returning to 2% until 2028. Half of officials now expect at least one rate hike this year. And he said things clearly and directly in a way that felt genuinely different from what we have been watching for years. I did not expect to say any of that. The MOU has apparently been signed. The terms now include $100 billion in unfrozen Iranian assets instead of $24 billion and all secondary sanctions dropped including those from US allies. Israel has stated they will continue bombing Lebanon regardless. Netanyahu is furious about the deal. And based on a poll of 3300 of my listeners, 49% believe Iran won this war and only 2% believe America did. I am eating a cucumber from my garden during this episode. It is a large cucumber. That is also relevant. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]