Between the Lies Podcast

Luke Tatum
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  • Politics
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Providing Positivity & Balance For An Uncertain World

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Jul 17 ·  Video

    Fort Knox vs. Beijing: Is China About to Expose the World's Gold Lie? | Between The Lies 041

    Gold's always king, right? Except right now, China might be trying to prove that most of the "gold" the world thinks it owns doesn't actually exist in a vault anywhere. This week Luke, Rob, and I dig into a video from Tom Bilyeu that got all three of us talking about what China's been quietly doing with its gold reserves, and why it should matter to you even if you've never bought an ounce of it in your life. Central banks have been rotating out of US Treasuries and into physical gold for a couple years now, but China's play looks different. They're not just stacking metal. They appear to be positioning to strip the "paper gold" games out of their own system entirely, forcing a real accounting of how much physical gold actually exists versus how many claims to it are floating around the financial system. We get into why that's such a big deal: fractional reserve banking isn't just a dollar problem, it's a gold problem too. There are more paper claims to gold than there is gold. Nobody really knows the true ratio. If China builds a clearing house that forces price discovery on real, audited gold, that's a direct challenge to a system the US dollar has quietly leaned on for decades. I push back a little on the doom framing here, the US dollar's value has never come from us behaving responsibly, it comes from everyone else holding it too. That's not exactly a strong foundation, and this episode is about what happens when someone starts testing it. We also talk about the Japanese yen's decades-long low-rate arbitrage trade, why Poland and the UK keep buying more Treasuries while China quietly sells them off, and whether a gold-backed yuan could actually force better outcomes, like an asset-backed dollar, rather than just being bad news for America. Bottom line: none of us know exactly how this plays out. But paying attention to what's happening behind the headlines is how you make better decisions with your own money, regardless of which currency wins this round. Websites Referenced: PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast (free toolkit + Luke's book) pricedingold.com (Rob's reference resource) YouTube: Rob Brayton PSC If you're tired of hoping the people running the global monetary system have your best interest at heart, head to PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast and grab the free toolkit. It won't fix Fort Knox, but it'll fix what you can actually control.

  6. Jul 2 ·  Video

    The Part of Banking You're Not Supposed to See | Between the Lies 040

    Most people only know two roles in banking: depositor and borrower. But there are actually five key roles — and the people who understand all of them keep way more of the profit. In this episode, Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton break down the five roles involved in the banking process (depositor, borrower, lender, banker, and bank owner) and show you how to move from being a customer to taking control of the entire system in your own life. They explain how banks actually make money, why deposits are a liability to the bank, the concept of velocity, and how you can use dividend-paying whole life insurance to become the "bank owner" in your personal finances without needing to charter an actual bank. If you've ever felt like the financial system is designed to keep you on the outside looking in, this episode will change how you see money forever.   🎯 Key Topics: - The five roles in banking most people never hear about - How banks create money and profit from your deposits - Why conventional advice keeps you stuck as a depositor/borrower - How to take over the banking process using the Infinite Banking Concept - The power of thinking long-range like a real bank owner - Why dividend-paying whole life insurance is the practical tool for this   📚 Resources: Get the free toolkit: https://www.perfectspiralcapital.com/podcast  Rob's YouTube channel:  ⁨@RobBraytonPSC⁩

  7. Jun 22 ·  Video

    From Snapchat to SpaceX: Why IPOs Are Where Smart Money Exits and Dumb Money Enters | Between The Lies 039

    Elon Musk just became the richest person in the world by a margin that's hard to even process. $1.1 trillion in personal net worth. Jeff Bezos is sitting at a distant $240-something billion looking like a participation trophy. And the thing that pushed Elon over the edge? SpaceX going public. Now, the internet had its predictable response. Half the world wanted to know why he doesn't just give it all away. The other half figured he must be sitting on a pile of coins like Scrooge McDuck. Both are wrong, and that gap between what people believe about wealth and what's actually true is exactly why this podcast exists. This week, Luke, Rob, and I used the SpaceX IPO as a lens to zoom out on something bigger: what wealth actually is, how IPOs actually work, and why the people who built a dream from the ground floor deserve every dollar they made. Luke makes a connection I didn't see coming, the 1986 Microsoft IPO created 12,000 millionaires, and one of those millionaires was Gabe Newell. Gabe Newell went on to found Valve Software and Steam. So the next time someone tells you IPO wealth is obscene, ask them if they use Steam. Rob breaks down why a $2 trillion market cap on $5 billion in revenue is the part worth being skeptical about, not the success itself, but the timing of when the average person gets in. IPOs are where the ground-floor investors get their money back. That's not cynicism, that's structure. And Luke drops the fact that ties this all together: Elon Musk earns $54,000 a year from SpaceX. That's his salary. He doesn't need more income because he doesn't need income, he has assets, and he borrows against them. That's not a loophole. That's the strategy. And it's the exact same principle Luke and Rob teach at Perfect Spiral Capital. We also get into the indie film angle, a movie made for a few hundred thousand dollars pulls $100M opening weekend, and the art director complains she only made $8,000. She took the guaranteed paycheck. She didn't take the risk. That's not the system failing her. That's the system working exactly as designed. If you've ever looked at how the wealthy use money and thought "that should be illegal," this episode is for you. And if you've ever been curious about how to build that kind of structure for yourself, without being a billionaire, PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast is where you start.

  8. Jun 5 ·  Video

    The Genius Act, SoFi, and the Dollar's Global Digital Takeover Nobody's Talking About

    You ever wonder why the dollar hasn't collapsed yet, even though by every reasonable Austrian economics metric, it should have?   Rob and I spent this episode pulling apart the answer, and it comes in the form of a stablecoin launched by SoFi Bank. Here's the short version: SoFi just rolled out a dollar-pegged stablecoin under the framework opened by the Genius Act. It's backed one-to-one by US Treasury securities. That sounds boring until you realize what it actually does, it allows people in countries with destroyed or nonexistent banking systems to hold and transact in dollars digitally, without going through traditional banking infrastructure.   Think about the billions of people on the planet who are unbanked. They don't have a broken banking system, they have no banking system. And a lot of the currencies they live under are so unstable, or outright illegal to use internationally, that dollar access in any form is genuinely valuable. When those people start using dollar-pegged stablecoins, guess what increases? Demand for dollars. And guess what that does? It slows the inflation repatriation scenario that's been a quiet terror in Austrian circles for years, where all those exported dollars come flooding home and we end up in a hyperinflationary spiral.   Rob put it plainly: this is a mechanism to undermine other countries' central banks using the dollar. That's not a conspiracy theory. Federal Reserve Governor Waller literally said stablecoins are a tool to "import US monetary policy" across borders. This is the official play.   Does that make it good? Not necessarily. It props up the same system we've been critical of. It accelerates fractional reserve lending if every major bank eventually issues its own stablecoin, and they will, SoFi is just the early adopter. Citi and Chase will have their own eventually.   But here's the uncomfortable honest take: for people who hold dollar-denominated assets right now, a mechanism that extends dollar demand globally is a short-term stabilizer. It kicks the can further down the road. And Rob and I are both smart enough to know that's not a solution, it's just a more creative delay.   What doesn't change is the IBC thesis. Whether stablecoins extend the dollar's run for another decade or accelerate its collapse, the private banking framework Rob and Luke have built their practice around doesn't depend on the Fed making good decisions. It works regardless.   Grab the free toolkit at PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast.

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Providing Positivity & Balance For An Uncertain World

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