Between the Lies Podcast

Luke Tatum
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Politics
  • Updated Weekly

Providing Positivity & Balance For An Uncertain World

  1. 2d ago

    Mortgage Rates Cross 7%: A 2008 Mortgage Insider Says This Is What Normal Looks Like | Between The Lies 047

    Mortgage rates just crossed 7%, and the internet has two pieces of advice: wait for rates to come down, or buy now and refinance later. Rob Brayton of Perfect Spiral Capital and I think both are the same bet, and The Big Short already showed us how that bet ends. Rob was in the mortgage industry in 2008, when a 6% conventional loan was considered a good rate. So what if today's rates aren't the problem, and the decade of cheap money was? We get into the refinance trap that leaves people house poor, why home prices reflect a weaker dollar more than better homes, the Fed's leaking fuel can, and why investors are turning to private money. Then the better plan: stop waiting for the iron to get hot. Build dry powder you control, so when the next correction hits, you're standing on a stockpile instead of shoveling out.

  2. Sep 22

    Kroger & 30 Million Fewer Grocery Trips | Between The Lies 046

    Kroger just lost $12 billion in sales to Amazon and Walmart, and it's not because they lost touch with their customers. It's because 700,000 lower-income shoppers made 30 million fewer trips to the store this year, priced out by a cost of living crisis nobody wants to put a real number on. I sit down with Luke Tatum from Perfect Spiral Capital to dig into why Kroger, Target, and Aldi are all scrambling for value shoppers, why the Fed just hiked rates again anyway, and why brand loyalty, normally one of the stickiest things in retail, is breaking down in real time. We get into gas math, bulk buying, sticker shock at Aldi, and the Nelson Nash insight buried at the start of Becoming Your Own Banker that changes how you should think about every dollar you spend.

  3. Sep 16

    60% Odds of a Fed Rate Hike: What the Bond Market Already Knows | Between The Lies 045

    Luke Tatum is back, and Rob Brayton and I are trying out a new roundtable format, grab bag of news, see what's falling off the wheels this week. Top of the list: the Treasury just doubled its bond buybacks trying to prop up bond prices, and it barely moved the needle, all while the market's pricing in a 60% chance the Fed hikes rates anyway. Then we get into the story that actually stopped us cold, the White House quietly omitted debt projections from its own report as the U.S. closes in on a $41.1 trillion debt ceiling. We also cover Trump's new ban on Canadian dairy, alcohol, and vehicle imports, and pick apart a Gartner headline claiming 30% of "AI-displaced" workers will be rehired by 2029. Spoiler: we're skeptical those workers were ever displaced by AI in the first place.

  4. Sep 10

    From $475 in the Negative to Owning a Bank: One Investor's Infinite Banking Real Estate Playbook | IBC IRL #2

    Real estate investor Sean Wantulok built his way up from $475 in the red every month to running a car wash, a duplex, a tax lien portfolio, and an ATM route, all while treating his life insurance policy like the smallest banking experiment he could get away with. In this IBC IRL conversation, Brian Pritchard and Luke Tatum sit down with Sean to talk about the plateau that pushed him into real estate, why he asked Luke for the tiniest policy possible, and how he's using policy loans to fund tax liens, advertising, and deals his bank would never touch. Sean's moved past the Dave Ramsey playbook, he's building dry powder and a five-generation plan he calls changing the family tree. If you've wondered what infinite banking looks like outside the theory, this is it.

  5. Aug 14 ·  Video

    Nvidia Building the Next Bailout? BlackRock, Brookfield & the $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Bet | Between The Lies 044

    Nvidia doesn't have a demand problem, or so they'd have you believe. This week Rob Brayton and I dig into the news that Nvidia wants Wall Street to build out a $500 billion financing ecosystem so its own customers can afford to keep buying its chips. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are the names attached to it, and the pitch is that AI compute should be treated like an "infrastructure asset class," the same bucket as cell towers and toll roads. Except cell towers and toll roads generate revenue from people who actually use them. Not one of the AI companies driving this boom has turned a profit. Rob breaks down why Bank of America is publicly trying to downplay the "circular investing" concerns while simultaneously helping assemble the exact group of private capital firms that would make those concerns real. We talk about why this isn't a bank problem, it's a private-capital problem, because the actual banks won't touch the risk. Then we go where this always goes: who's going to be holding the bag. If this financing structure gets built, those packaged loans get sliced into derivatives and marketed straight into your 401(k) and IRA, whether you ever chose to be exposed to Nvidia's balance sheet or not. Sound familiar? It should. We call it what it is, 2006 with a chip shortage instead of a housing shortage. We also get into the parts nobody's talking about: data center land fights breaking out across the country, why calling data center opponents "Luddites" misses that a lot of their instincts are correct, and why an economy this dependent on AI adoption can't actually function when the average American associates AI with losing their job or their land. Rob and I also get into the moral side of investing, you don't have to believe AI is evil to decide you don't want your retirement account financing something you have real reservations about. If that's you, there are other ways to grow capital that don't route your money through Wall Street's latest "everyone wins" story. Check out PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast for our free toolkit & Luke's book, Between the Lies If you're tired of discovering your retirement account is quietly funding things you never agreed to, this episode's for you. Full breakdown below.

  6. Aug 13 ·  Video

    The Yen Carry Trade Unwind: Why the US Treasury Stepped In to Save Japan's Currency | Between The Lies 043

    For thirty years, the smartest money in the world ran the same play: borrow yen for basically nothing, dump it into something that pays more than nothing, repeat. It's not a scandal. It's arbitrage. But arbitrage built on a central bank promise is still just a promise, and last week that promise cracked. This week Rob Brayton and I get into the yen carry trade, what it actually is, how it survived three decades of near-zero Japanese interest rates, and why the Bank of Japan finally raising rates set off the kind of turmoil that made the US government do something it hasn't done since 1998: step directly into the market and start buying yen to stop the bleeding. Rob walks through the full arc, the zero-rate era that kicked off around 1999, the brief reprieve after the financial crisis, the renewed expansion from 2013 through 2022, and the final blowoff top as US rates spiked and everybody piled back into cheap yen to keep the trade alive. Then the Bank of Japan started tightening, the yen started sliding, and the US decided the risk to our own Treasury market was too big to ignore. We also get into the Austrian read on all of it, which, shocker, is not the same as the mainstream diagnosis. This isn't a mystery. Inflate the money supply without the growth to back it, and you get distortion. Artificially low rates send capital to the wrong places, and every "fix" just delays the correction instead of resolving it. Rob's line says it best: the real question isn't whether intervention works, it's how far you can kick the can before it actually breaks. We also talk about who else is exposed, China's treasury holdings, other economies riding the same cheap-yen wave, and why it's fair to assume nobody's books are as clean as the headlines suggest. But the real value of this episode isn't the macro tour. It's the pivot Rob makes at the end: stop looking at Japan's balance sheet and start looking at your own. Too much debt and not enough growth is the root problem in Tokyo. It's also the root problem for a lot of households. The US gets away with its debt load because it has a massive production engine behind it. Do you? For our free toolkit: PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast

  7. Aug 4 ·  Video

    Charlie Munger's GROWTH Rule & Yahoo Finance's $100K Advice: What are they not telling you? | Between The Lies 042

    Two Yahoo Finance articles dropped this week, both built around the same number: $100,000. One says you can ease off the gas once you hit it. The other tells you what to do with it, pay off debt, build an emergency fund, start a sinking fund, max your retirement contributions. Rob Brayton and I go line by line through both, and honestly, it didn't take long to figure out why this advice keeps people stuck instead of getting them free. Here's the thing nobody says out loud: a sinking fund and an emergency fund are basically what a dividend-paying whole life policy through a mutual company already does, except your money's actually working the whole time instead of sitting in an envelope earning nothing. Rob breaks down why paying off high-interest debt with a lump sum of cash isn't the free lunch it sounds like, you're not eliminating the cost, you're just choosing who eats it, you or a bank. Then we get into the part that made me want to record this episode in the first place. Buried in the "ease off the gas" article is a list of where millionaires under 43 are supposedly putting their money: gold, real estate, artwork, and, I'm not kidding, "cryptocurrency, more than a craze." Not Bitcoin specifically. Just crypto, broadly, like a Vegas chip. That's not a portfolio, that's a dartboard. And then there's Berkshire Hathaway. $397.4 billion sitting in cash and cash equivalents. If speculation and diversification-for-its-own-sake were actually the winning strategy, Buffett and Munger would be the last people hoarding cash right now. They're not. That tells you everything about the gap between advice given to regular people and the actual behavior of the people who built real fortunes. Rob also unpacks Charlie Munger's GROWTH framework, gain control, root your investments, optimize tax management, weed out debt, tap additional income, heighten discipline, and honestly, we don't disagree with a word of it. The problem isn't Munger's principles. It's the ClickBank-style investment suggestions bolted onto them that have nothing to do with how Munger or Buffett actually built wealth. We close on inflation, why $100K today isn't what $100K was even six years ago, and why "ease off the gas" is exactly the wrong instinct once you've built a real system. If your money's finally working, that's the moment to accelerate, not coast.   CTA: Get the free Perfect Spiral Capital toolkit — including a free copy of Luke Tatum's book Between The Lies — at PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast.

  8. Jul 27 ·  Video

    Why This Dad Ditched His Honda Pilot Lease for a Debt-Free Minivan | IBC IRL #1

    I love when we get to do these "in real life" episodes, because it's easy to nod along to Luke and Rob talk theory every week, but it hits different when you hear an actual guy in Springfield, Missouri tell you he used his policy loan to take down a dying maple tree and then buy his way out of the worst financial decision of his life, a leased Honda Pilot.   This one's a conversation between Brian Pritchard and our own Luke Tatum, sitting down with listener Brendan Seburn, who's been following the show since the beginning. Brendan didn't jump into IBC overnight. He heard Luke on the Tom Woods Show back in early 2023, filed it away, then went and burned through 60-something episodes of the Lara-Murphy Show while driving for work, letting the concept click into place piece by piece. That's the real path most people take, skepticism first, understanding second, action third.   What makes this episode worth your time is the specificity. Brendan's policy isn't massive. He's paying around $80 a month. This isn't a "rich guy" story. It's a young dad with three kids under three, a modest premium, and real bills, a hazard tree that had to come down, then a lease payoff and a used minivan purchase that he'd rather own outright than finance through a dealership. Luke breaks down the death benefit math in plain terms: even after Brendan pulled out policy loans, the insurance company just does subtraction. The coverage doesn't vanish, it's reduced by what's borrowed, and it's still there. That's the piece people miss when they hear "he spent all his cash value" and assume the whole thing collapsed.   Brian closes the episode with the idea of "conceptual legacy," not just the money, but teaching your kids how this works before they need it, so IBC becomes a generational habit instead of a one-time discovery.   If you're the type who's already suspicious of what a savings account actually does for you, or you've had that nagging feeling that "buy term and invest the difference" doesn't tell the whole story, this episode is a good gut-check. It's not a pitch. It's a guy telling you what actually happened when the tree fell down and the lease came due.   Get the free toolkit, a copy of Luke's Amazon bestseller, and two full video courses on infinite banking at PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast.

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