Episode #15
The Heroes' Path Dispatch: September 29, 2026
A war decision, a Russian budget, and a record at the pump. And why we think knowing about them early is worth something. Nine days ago we told you the President said he was in deciding mode on Iran. He decided. On Friday the twenty-sixth he turned down Iran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. His words: I would like to make a deal, too, but that deal would not be acceptable. Two days before that, the Senate voted on whether to pull American forces out of the war. It failed by one vote, forty-nine to fifty. Four Republicans voted to end it. One Democrat voted the other way. A Republican congressman has filed eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense. And on the twenty-second, the boards outside American truck stops read six dollars and fifty-three cents for a gallon of diesel. Nobody held a press conference. The numbers changed the way numbers on those boards always change, and the drivers who saw them went inside and paid. It was the highest price for diesel ever recorded in this country. Jeff Steinberg and I walked through all of it on this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch. It takes about twenty minutes. Why We Do This at All There is an old line in the military about pressure. You do not rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. Most of the people who listen to this program have made a hard decision on short notice, and most of them will tell you the same thing about it afterward. The decision was not the hard part. The hard part was everything they had learned, or had not learned, before the moment arrived and stopped asking whether they were ready. That is as true at a closing table, or in a doctor’s office, or in a voting booth, as it ever was in a hallway at three in the morning. Nobody assembles an understanding of the world in the same hour they are asked to act on it. You gather it slowly, in ordinary weeks, when nothing is at stake — and then it pays out all at once, on a day you were not planning for. We are not going to make anyone an expert on Iran. We are trying to see to it that when something reaches your door, you have already watched it coming. And Why Early Matters Two weeks ago we told you a missile had struck a pipeline in the Saudi desert, and that it would arrive at your grocery store, as the price of ground beef, in the second week of October. Nobody else was covering that as a food story. Last week we explained why the interest rate on your credit card had gone up, before the statement came that said so. Nine days ago we gave Congo’s Ebola outbreak a full minute of a twenty-minute program, when it was a single sentence everywhere else. This week the case count passed eight thousand, and new cases have fallen by two thirds. Fifty health workers have died since May. We also got two things wrong in those same nine days, and said so on the air before anybody asked. We blamed the wrong group for the pipeline strike — Saudi Arabia blamed Iran-backed Iraqi militias, not the Houthis. And we told you to watch for a Russian order calling up three hundred thousand men. No order has come. We would rather hand you a correction than a reputation. Moscow Wrote It Down Last Monday somebody in Moscow finished a spreadsheet. It goes to the Russian parliament this week. It puts seventeen point one trillion rubles into defense for 2027 — twenty-seven percent more than was planned, about two hundred billion dollars. Across three years, fifty trillion. On the same pages the government marks down what it expects to earn from oil and gas by one point three trillion rubles, doubles the deficit, and raises borrowing by forty-three percent. A government will say almost anything. It only has to fund one document. Nobody budgets fifty trillion rubles for a war they expect to end next year. Moscow wrote down, in the only document that cannot lie, that it is planning through 2029. Whether Russia is right about that is a different question, and on the program Jeff makes the case that it is not. But everything in your life this war touches — diesel, groceries, the cost of borrowing, whether somebody you love gets orders — is priced off how long people believe it lasts. And the Money at Home Somewhere in this country last week, a couple sat down with a lender the way couples do every week, and heard seven and a half percent. A year ago, on the same loan, they would have heard six and three-eighths. The difference is about four hundred dollars a month, every month, for thirty years. Nobody in that room caused it. A good part of it was settled on September twenty-third, when the Treasury auctioned five-year notes and not enough buyers came. The notes sold at a worse price than the market expected, by the second-largest margin ever recorded for that maturity. By Monday the ten-year Treasury had reached its highest level since 2007. That couple did not need to understand the auction. Three weeks of warning might have been worth four hundred dollars a month to them. Three weeks is roughly what we are offering. The cost-of-living raise announced on October fourteenth looks like about three and a half percent, against diesel up seventy-five percent in a year and gasoline up forty-three. Meanwhile claims for unemployment are near a fifty-seven-year low. People are working. This is not a collapse. It is an economy where the work is there and the money costs more, and that is a problem a family can plan around, if somebody tells them in time. We also cover the federal judge who ruled against the administration that appointed him, the worst measles year in this country since the disease was declared beaten here, and a rocket that reached orbit on Sunday after ten years of trying. The Fourth Decision Three men made large decisions this month, in rooms that none of us will ever enter. There is a fourth decision, and it belongs to us. Whether to pay attention. Whether to check a thing before repeating it. Whether to understand what is happening before somebody else tells us what to think about it. Thirty minutes for this episode. On the drive home, on a walk, or over coffee. Then write and tell us what we missed, because people do, and we read every one of them. One Ask The Heroes’ Path Dispatch is free to listen to, and it will stay that way. What is not free is the week behind it — the reading, the second and third sources, the hour it took to find out that Riyadh blamed Iraqi militias and not the Houthis, and the calls we make out loud and then grade in public whether they went our way or not. There are also the pieces we write for subscribers between episodes. Last week’s explained what the Federal Reserve had just done to the rate on your credit card, and four things worth doing about it this month, including the words to use when you call the number on the back of the card. You will also be helping us stand up The Heroes’ Path Foundation, which we will have more to say about soon. We’re just getting started. If this is the kind of company you want to keep on a Tuesday night, come with us. Subscribe, so the next one reaches you without your having to look for it. Become a paid subscriber, and you make the next one possible. — John Fenzel his video is about Heroes' Path Dispatch (9.29.26) Support the show Learn • Serve • Lead • Remember Never miss an episode—subscribe on YouTube or grab the RSS . Follow & join the conversation ➔ @HeroesPath on X , Instagram, LinkedIn • #HeroesPathPodcast
