Between the Lies Podcast

Rob couldn't make it this week, so Luke and I went way off the map. Konami's president, Hideki Hayakawa, says generative AI won't change the game industry much, because people and creators are still what matter. Luke agrees. I go further: AI isn't handing the big guys more control, it's lowering the barrier for everyone else. We get into a closet-hiding indie game that became two movies, the $400 million Concord flop that lasted less than a week, why Nintendo sat on cash instead of borrowing through the pandemic, an AI-built Adobe clone, Steam's $100 flat fee, and why Valve might be the most profitable company per employee on Earth. Then we land back on housing, where pending home sales just hit the lowest level since tracking began. Same lesson everywhere: everything large is crumbling, and the small and nimble are winning.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's "Treasury Twist" has a viral YouTube video claiming America is about to quietly reset its $40 trillion debt problem. The plan: buy back long-term bonds, flood the market with short-term T-bills, and let GENIUS Act stablecoins soak them up. Luke picked this one, and he's not buying it. Even the rosiest projection puts stablecoin demand around $1.2 trillion by 2030. That's a fortieth of the debt, and the debt isn't standing still. Rob gives the plan credit for creativity, then asks what happens if China answers with a gold-backed stablecoin. I push back on both of them about who actually wants dollars. We also revisit 1961's Operation Twist, Ben Bernanke the "maestro," and sanctions as a reason foreign buyers are walking away. The only winning move? Stop playing their game with your own capital.

Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton of Perfect Spiral Capital join Nicky P to pick apart a housing headline that sounds like a loophole: for the first time in a long time, new homes are selling for less than existing ones. A brand-new house with no termites, cheaper than one that's been falling apart for 40 years? Something doesn't add up. We trace it back to the Federal Reserve's money printing after 2020, the bidding wars of 2021 and 2022, and the rate hikes that cooled new construction while existing prices kept climbing. Along the way: why national medians mislead, Dallas-Fort Worth sprawl versus Cleveland revitalization, recency bias and a little Marcus Aurelius, why your home is a depreciating asset, and why the equity on paper might be fake wealth. Plus how to think about owning assets that actually move you toward your goals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.