Heroes' Path Podcast

Tonight, somewhere along the Florida Panhandle, a man in a bucket truck is eating a gas-station sandwich and waiting for the wind to quit. When Isaias moves through, he’ll go up the pole. In the dark. In the rain. Nobody will interview him. I’ve been thinking about him all day. Jeff Steinberg and I sat down Friday afternoon, a few hours before landfall, to walk through the week. A hurricane in the...

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....

1.2 million Americans. Forty-seven days. The end of the First World War — and a commander carrying a private grief almost no one knows about. Our conversation with Dr. Mitch Yockelson. One afternoon in 1915, a general in El Paso grew tired of a telephone that wouldn’t stop ringing, picked it up, and barked “Hello” into it. The reporter on the other end went quiet, then asked him to confirm the fir...

Our apologies--we posted this, but just realized we failed to publish it.  It's live now. A plain look at how decisions made in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Washington end up on your grocery receipt. Most weeks the news goes by like traffic. A headline crosses a screen, somebody argues about it for six minutes, and we go back to work. This week will not go by like that. In Moscow, the polls c...

At 8:46 this morning a bell rings in lower Manhattan and somebody starts reading names. It takes most of four hours to get through them. They’ve done this every year for twenty-five years, and every year there are fewer people standing there who remember the sound the first one made. Twenty-five years ago at 8:46, my brother was at his desk in the White House, finishing a memo. He thought the memo...

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel, U.S. Army, Retired. We called it “Before the Day” on purpose. Catastrophe has a way of making everything that preceded it look obvious. Once you know what happened, the warnings get louder and the missed chances get bigger, and the people who were there start to look like they should have seen it. But the pe...

Here’s a fact I did not know until last Thursday night: in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, a foreign navy sailed into New York and San Francisco carrying sealed orders. Those orders, if opened, would have placed the entire fleet under the command of Abraham Lincoln. It was front-page news in every major paper on both coasts. Then it vanished from the story we tell ourselves about the war. Th...

Scaffolding Without a Building Happy Labor Day! If you build things, teach kids, drive trucks, grow food, patch people up, write code, stand a post — today is yours. This show, and this page, exist for one reason: because every headline we cover eventually lands on the people who get up and do the work. Today we say it plainly. Thank you. The gas under your road trip today is the most expensive La...

Ben Zweibelson was the kid in high school who was always drawing. Then his father died, the money ran out, and a National Guard recruiter at a Connecticut county fair offered him a way to pay for college. He took it — and he stayed for twenty-two years, four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, four Bronze Stars, and the Ranger tab. Along the way the Army also gave him three master's degrees...

We Weren't There Eighty-one years ago this month, a young colonel named Paul Tibbets took off from a small island in the Pacific, in a bomber he'd named after his mother, and dropped the first atomic weapon ever used in war. Three days later, another crew did it again over Nagasaki. And the deadliest war in human history came to an end. I always thought I understood that decision: whethe...

The War Moved Closer For the past two weeks, no American bombs have fallen on Iran. And yet the consequences of the war have kept moving. Fewer ships are moving through the Strait of Hormuz, but the effects are traveling far beyond it. They’re beginning to register in fuel prices, shipping and insurance costs, the jobs market, fertilizer supplies, food prices, and even the holiday merchandise bein...

A war can be thousands of miles away right up until your water stops running. This week on The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, Jeff Steinberg and I talk Iran, oil, cyberattacks, NATO, Ebola, the Colorado River, and one rocket that finally stopped exploding long enough to do its job. Different stories. Same question: How much strain can a system take before ordinary people get the bill? Watch this week&apos...

Ten Nights The war came home this week — to three American families, to the sign at your corner gas station, and to a promise the republic made 250 years ago. There’s a gas station at the edge of my town where the price has become a kind of national instrument panel. Ten days ago it read $3.84 and falling, and negotiators were landing in Oman with a flicker of hope. This week it clicked well past...

The kid who works the counter in our neighborhood gas station spent part of his week on a ladder, pulling numbers off the price board and hanging higher ones. He hung those numbers because Iranian missiles hit oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, seven thousand miles from his ladder. Within hours of the first strike, oil rose six percent. By the weekend the increase reached his pumps, on our stree...

This week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch, made especially for our paid subscribers. Pour a coffee. It runs about 30 minutes, and with Jeff' Steinberg’s insights, I think it’s worth every one of them. When I was 13, my mother took us to see the Freedom Train. Maybe you remember it. It rolled through the country for the bicentennial carrying Lincoln’s top hat and Wilt Chamberlain’s shoes, which were r...

What are we actually celebrating this week? I sat down with Michael Shriver to talk about the founding and the American habit of giving, and how closely the two run together. Mike spent forty-five years around other people's money, raising it early in his career, then giving it away as a foundation executive at MBNA and Bank of America. These days he rebuilds old bicycles in his garage and ha...

In a small room in Oxford, Florida, a man holds up a brass shell. It stands three feet tall and weighs forty-five pounds. He had it remade after the war. He pays to haul it from school to school and hall to hall, because when he tells people what he fired at German planes from a ten-thousand-pound gun, they don't believe him. A few veterans, he says, are all liars. So he brings the proof and...

Heroes’ Path is about clarity: about ourselves, our road ahead, and the world around us. Today we’re launching The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, the first in an ongoing series designed to make sense of the events shaping our lives, our families, and our future. In this first episode, Professor Jeff Steinberg joins me to unpack Iran, gas prices, China’s rare earth leverage, and the war in Ukraine. The war...

He jumped into Normandy at one thirty in the morning, into anti-aircraft fire so thick his son says you could have walked on it. You know George Luz from Band of Brothers, the paratrooper whose humor held Easy Company together. What you don't know are the stories his son has carried for nearly sixty years. In "Through My Father's Eyes," George Luz Jr opens the family album. The...

Our latest Heroes' Path webinar with Colonel Gerry Tertychny is 90 minutes that will stay with you. Here's a taste. On the morning of June 4, 1942, the course of the Pacific war turned in about six minutes. Japan was at high tide on June 3rd. By the end of the next day, the United States was on the offensive and never gave that initiative back. How it happened is one of the great stories...

The war isn't over because a document got signed. This week, Jeff Steinberg and I discuss what comes next after 112 days of conflict, a disputed Strait of Hormuz, and a fragile ceasefire. 23 minutes. Worth your time. 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 , Inst...

Two things happened in the same 24 hours. An American Apache helicopter was shot down near the Strait of Hormuz. And the President of the United States announced that a deal with Iran could be signed within days. That's not so much a contradiction, as it is modern warfare. One side is negotiating. The other side is shooting. Sometimes they're the same side. This week, Jeff Steinberg and...

The thing about ceasefires is that everybody talks about them like they’re the finish line. Most of the time, they’re not. They’re a pause. A chance to count what’s been spent, what’s been broken, and what’s still sitting there waiting to be dealt with. This week marks roughly ninety days since this war began. In that time, thousands of people have been killed. Billions of dollars have been spent....

We are now roughly 80 days into a war that many people believed would last four to six weeks. The Strait of Hormuz remains under pressure. Oil markets are reacting. China publicly invoked the “Thucydides Trap” in front of the President of the United States. And the diplomatic and military tracks are moving in opposite directions at the same time. This week’s Iran Update with Professor Jeff Steinbe...

Two weeks ago we left it with a deadline. That deadline passed. The ceasefire stretched. Then two ships were taken within hours. Now there’s a blockade in both directions and a line of tankers sitting still where the world’s energy is supposed to move. Gas is up. Diesel’s worse. You’re already paying for it whether you’ve looked at the headlines or not. So we got Jeff back on. He lays out what cha...