AI may change a lot of things, but much of the money behind it moves in a circle. Chipmakers take stakes in AI companies, those companies spend the money on the chipmakers' products, and every announced deal lifts both valuations, while OpenAI reported a $7.8 billion operating loss for the first half of 2025. In Episode 013, Nicky P, Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton look at how the circle works, how much of the S&P 500 is exposed, and what to do with your own money while it plays out.
“It’s literally a trust me bro model for how we’re funding all this.”
Luke got the idea for this episode from finance YouTuber Patrick Boyle's video on whether circular financing is inflating an AI bubble. Boyle's conclusion is that it may turn out fine. Luke, Rob and Nicky aren't so sure.
What We Covered
Real upside, real exposure. Rob starts with the positive: AI already makes daily life easier, and he isn't worried about doomsday scenarios. His concern is that so many companies have bet their revenue and spending on AI working out that a disappointment would hit the broader economy.
A $7.8 billion operating loss. Luke points out that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, ran an operating loss of $7.8 billion in the first half of 2025 with no clear path to profit, and only about 5% of ChatGPT users pay. He calls the funding model trust me, bro. Rob recalls the market scare when DeepSeek, the Chinese AI firm, suggested similar results might take far less spending.
Echoes of the dot-com era. Nicky wonders if everyone is buying into everyone because they know only one will win. Rob says it feels like the dot-com era: big valuations, no defined revenue, and few survivors. That's normal for a new industry, as with the early car makers. The real question is how much of it runs on leverage, which ties back to Episode 012.
“Some of these companies don’t have any money to begin with and they’re completely leveraged”
How the circle works. Luke walks through it. AI suppliers sell the computing power and take stakes in AI companies. Those companies use the backing to raise more money. Infrastructure firms like CoreWeave build data centers, and users burn through graphics cards that wear out in about five years. When a deal is announced, both companies' valuations rise, and the new stock can help pay for the deal.
How much of the market is exposed. Rob's research puts the share of the S&P 500, by market cap, with medium to high AI exposure somewhere between 20% and 50%. A 15% to 20% correction in that slice could pull the whole index down, and nobody knows how many NDFIs from last episode are lending into it.
Chasing returns. Luke says high inflation pushes institutions to chase returns, and when government joins in by taking stakes in mining companies and Intel, part of the boom is probably artificial. He compares it to the railroad era, when government paid by the mile and track got laid that nobody needed.
“Do you feel like you are missing out on rates of return because you don’t go to the casino every weekend? No, of course not.”
Power and nuclear energy. Nicky, the show's self-described tree hugger, says nuclear energy is the best long-term answer and AI's power demand may force the issue, but he expects household electric bills to rise first. Luke mentions an xAI data center in Memphis running its own generators instead of waiting on the grid, and notes that the most recent US nuclear plant only came online in the past year or so.
Credit and speculation. Luke notes that OpenAI has a $4 billion line of credit from a group of banks, with an option to expand it. Trying to profit before a bubble pops means knowing when to get out, and few people manage that.
Know what you own. Rob says putting money to work means controlling as many variables as you can. Without that, it's speculation. His bigger point is about rate of return: if you had all the money you needed for your passive income goal, would it matter what rate got you there? For most people, it wouldn't.
Key Takeaway
You don't have to bet on how the AI story ends. Start with what you control: where your money sits and how you can reach it. Luke notes that insurance companies aren't buying much AI, which is one reason he keeps his savings there. If you're well capitalized and want to take a risk later, that's your call, but it isn't where you start. Saving first is the foundation Perfect Spiral Capital builds with clients.
Key Moments
[4:00] OpenAI's $7.8 Billion Operating Loss
[5:00] The DeepSeek Scare
[9:00] Echoes of the Dot-Com Era
[13:00] How the Circle Works
[16:00] How Much of the S&P 500 Is Exposed?
[18:00] Chasing Returns and Railroad Miles
[20:00] Power Bills and Nuclear Energy
[21:00] Data Centers Off the Grid
[25:00] OpenAI's Line of Credit
[27:00] Rate of Return Isn't the Goal
“If you had that, would the rate of return matter of how you got there? And for most people, the answer is no.”
Related Episodes
Episode 011: Is Government Ownership of Companies New? From TARP and AIG to Intel and a Sovereign Wealth Fund
Episode 012: What Are NDFIs, and Could They Cause the Next 2008? Non-Depository Lenders, Bank Exposure and Bail-Ins
Episode 044: Nvidia's $500 Billion Ask: Why BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs Are Bankrolling Their Own Customer's Demand
Want the full conversation, including the railroad comparison? Listen to the full episode and grab the free toolkit at PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast.
FAQ
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No one knows for sure. Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton point to warning signs: OpenAI reported a $7.8 billion operating loss in the first half of 2025, much of the industry’s money moves in a circle between chipmakers and AI companies, and big valuations aren’t backed by defined revenue. The dot-com era had all three.
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It’s when money moves in a loop between companies that depend on each other. A chipmaker puts money into an AI company, the AI company spends it on the chipmaker’s products, and both companies’ valuations rise on the news. The loop can make demand look stronger than it is.
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Estimates vary. Rob Brayton’s research put the share of the S&P 500, by market cap, with medium to high exposure to AI between 20% and 50%. At the high end, a 15% to 20% drop in AI stocks could pull the whole index down.
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Keep a base of savings that isn’t tied to the stock market and that you can reach when you need it. Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton use properly designed whole life insurance for that, with contractually guaranteed cash value growth. With that foundation in place, taking risk in the markets becomes a choice instead of a requirement.
Show full transcript
Between The Lies: Episode 013 Transcript
New Economy or the Next Bubble? [0:00]
Nicky P: Everywhere you look today, AI is on the tip of everyone's tongue. No place more than Wall Street, but is this the beginning of a new economy or just the next bubble? Welcome to the Between The Lies Podcast. You're with the lesson on how to approach an uncertain world with positivity and balance. I'm Nicky P here with my good friends and money brains.
Luke Tatum and Rob Brayton from Perfect Spiral Capital. Stick around until the end of the video for their free toolkit and be sure to like and subscribe if you enjoy the video. Gentlemen, are you outsourcing your investments to the whims of the machines yet?
Luke Tatum: Not just yet. Although, thank you for asking.
Patrick Boyle and Circular Financing [0:00]
Luke Tatum: Man, today we got a lot to talk about. So we have, and this is, I mean, this is all over the news. I feel like at this point it's some real big YouTube videos popping off talking about this. I was actually inspired. To pitch this as an episode idea to, Nick and Rob here by Patrick Boyle.
Patrick Boyle is someone I don't necessarily keep up with, but he's got an AI or a video called is AI's Circular Financing, inflating a Bubble. And there's some pretty compelling arguments in there that maybe it is, although his ultimate conclusion is that, eh, maybe it's fine. These companies have good books, some of them.
There's definitely a lot to pick apart and a lot of weakness that could, as they say, infect the rest of the financial system, if people are not careful. So what do we do with that Rob? I mean, what's your first take on this?
Real Upside, Real Exposure [1:00]
Rob Brayton: So, I mean, trying to be positive about it, I think there's the potential for a lot of great upside, and I think that's where you see so much, so much of the, sort of the hope and the excitement and the emphasis.
Is that we do see advantages for, where I, AI can have a lot of great benefits for society there. I mean, we certainly already are experiencing a lot of those even on a day-to-day basis, even the average person. So like there's some good benefit there in a lot of potential. To have it make a lot of people's lives easier.
Obviously you have the doomsday type folks as well that are worried about terminators and all the, all that jazz, which from large language models maybe, I dunno. But I don't know, like if you interact regularly with ai, we're nowhere near to that level, not even close. So I'm not too worried from that aspect, but I certainly see it why there's a big hype around it, because it does have.
The potential to be really game changing, at the same time the way it's taking place and the level of exposure that's existed out there in the market. That's where I see where people have some trepidation too, because if we get overexposed or you have something that does not go as expected, 'cause a lot of these, companies are kind of basing their revenue and all of their investment.
Really stakes on this being successful. And if it doesn't go as expected, that could have large scale impacts to the broader economy as a whole at this point, because of how infiltrated, the AI boom is in a lot of different ways.
Nicky P: Well, so much of this feels like everyone sees the potential. Maybe too much potential in this.
Like honestly, I think we're in a bigger danger of people relying too much on it and the bad code collapsing the economy that's, neither here nor there. But the issue being is I think everyone's trying to be the early adopters and maybe it, to me it almost like people are trying to make up for sleeping on Bitcoin as long as they did the way they're pouring money into ai.
In that they want, they don't wanna miss out on the party. And so they're all trying to get involved in this. But the interrelated nature, like of how this functions, is definitely causing some concern. And Luke brought up a number before we even started today that like. We'll really make you scratch your head and go, okay, so we're waiting on a profitability that hasn't arisen yet, and the only way to even keep what we're, we are imagining in the future going is gonna take huge infrastructure changes.
And it's a little, it's definitely concerning to the layman like myself.
OpenAI's $7.8 Billion Operating Loss [4:00]
Luke Tatum: Yeah. I mean, so, so that number just to. Kind of put a cap on that thought. OpenAI, which everyone just knows is ChatGPT. They have an operating loss for 2025, so far, the first half of 2025 of $7.8 billion. Which is a lot of money to be in the red.
You know, when we keep propping up the price of this company, when we keep going, oh, it's all gonna be fine guys. It's all gonna work out. Don't worry about it. But they don't really have a model. That has any definite promise of making a positive revenue like next year or the year after that. It's just like, trust me, bro, let's build more data centers.
Trust me, bro. Buy some more Nvidia GPUs. Just trust me bro. You know, like it's literally a trust me bro model for how we're funding all this.
The DeepSeek Scare [5:00]
Rob Brayton: I mean, we've already seen. You know, the little bit of a scare that, that occurred a while back, I can't remember the name of the company off the top of my head, but the Chinese AI firm that, you know, supposedly was going to do things for significantly less.
And you saw the whole market kind of shutter because that might have meant maybe all this investment wasn't necessary. DeepSeek, are we talking about DeepSeek? Yeah. Deep. It was DeepSeek. Yeah. Yeah. So you get to a point where. Let's say somebody does come on the scene like that. Now what if you're already 7.8 billion in the hole on an operating loss, and that's just one company, and now you have all these other companies.
And then if we get into the topic that we're talking about today, they're all invested in one another in some way, shape, or form. That's where I think we have larger scale concerns. So, yeah, I don't know if we wanna talk more about that in particular.
Who Actually Pays for ChatGPT? [6:00]
Luke Tatum: Well, it's easy. I mean, I'll just say it's easy to pick on ChatGPT, OpenAI because of their operating loss and all those things.
But like to the layman. You talk about ai, you're talking about ChatGPT, they don't care about DeepSeek, they don't care about Mistral, they don't care about, you know, all these other things. They're not using Claude. It's just they're using ChatGPT as a therapist and they're not paying for it, by the way.
Right. And so another stat I saw about 5% of ChatGPT users are actually paying customers. It's mostly like organizational spending coming in. And you know, a lot of these people, of course, are. Buying ChatGPT services, compute power, and they are running a little ad agency or they're running, you know, they're trying to make money, they're trying to arbitrage their way into some, you know, more money by paying for it.
But we're burning up GPUs, you know, you gotta keep making all these graphics cards. It's just really weird. But you also have big players like Google and Microsoft and Meta. And all these guys in there pouring tons of money in here, a venture capital over to Grok, right? And then Grok doesn't make any money.
And then, you know, okay, what are we doing with that? Like xAI, all the, all these companies, you know, it's like, does it make any sense? Is there any money if you know, if you dig far enough down, is there something that's actually a real tangible asset? I don't know. I mean, there are graphics cards. They burn up in about five years.
So I don't know. Lot of servers you gotta keep making up,
Nicky P: But we're talking about a service economy and this is a service. The big issue is that, is this a for everyone service or is it a niche service? Like where is that gonna shake out? And I think maybe a big part of the issue is that we're you have all of these companies fighting to be the do it all.
Thing like we wanna, we want to do it all with ai. Everything's gonna be fixed with ai. Now, anyone who's dealt with AI realizes that's not probably the best way of handling it, but because no one understands the future of where it's going to go. Once again, they're trying, they don't wanna miss the bus, so they're trying to throw it at the wall, see what sticks, see where like the innovation needs to go so that, you know, it can work in the future, can be, you know, reliable industry.
And, and you know, this stuff's been around for how long the public's even known about it. And even in that, that timeframe, it has gotten how much better. So who's to say, you know. How, I guess, how long does it take any industry to find its footing when it's a completely new industry? You know, there's gonna be a lot of things that get shaken out.
Now is the that issue more complex because they're all kind of. It is like they're all hedging their bets on each other. And maybe that's the, maybe that's the idea, is that they all know, look, one of us is going to make it, and as long as one of us makes it, like all of us will have our, we're all invested in that one company.
That makes it,
Echoes of the Dot-Com Era [9:00]
Rob Brayton: It makes you think it does give you that feel it. So I'm glad you bring that up, Nick, because it doesn't, in some respects, really gives you dot-com era vibe. From the early, you know, 2000, where a lot of these companies are, you know, popping up all over the place. Big valuations, no net, no actual revenue stream that's been defined.
But everybody's trying to get involved because they want to have a piece of the ones that make it. I mean, you look back to how many companies are still around, there's very few, from that particular time. So it does have that feel, but I mean, it, that's what happens when it's new. Is that sort of mentality or that theme, any different, look how many car companies there were when automobiles first came out and how many are left.
Like it's not uncommon like these things happen. It's part of new innovation. So I think from that angle that I think it's a great point that you bring up my concern and I think where this ties into some of what we were talking about today is. How much of it is all based off of leverage to be invested into the company that you want?
And that's where we, that even ties into our last episode about talking about leverage, where some of these companies don't have any money to begin with and they're completely leveraged and they're leveraged into investing into other companies in hopes that one of them, or all of them managed to make it.
And that's a, that's a dangerous house of card.
Government, Malinvestment and Derivatives [11:00]
Nicky P: Let's add to that. How much of, how much of this is going to be, you know, pushed by the government? How much are they trying to sneak into this game that we don't necessarily know about? And you know. That's you, we all are of a mind that economies do what economies are going to do and they break sometimes.
You know, the idea is to get the break to happen quickly and get it over with. And, you know, the issue you see is that yet, The mal-investment and the, that propping things up longer than necessary. Like, are we wasting billions of dollars? Because some of these companies should have already folded and maybe they haven't because, you know, so and so knows so and so, and they're like, well, we're gonna, we gonna invest in them so that they can't go down.
'cause you know, I like the guy. We don't know what that is. The other thing that is kind of. I guess alarming to me is that how much of the market this actually makes up and then like how much of these companies or make up that, that are actually really kind of questionable. But then to be, the first thing I think is well, until you open up the derivatives market and you know much like what was it the Tom of housing?
It was the fact. People started playing the derivatives on it, and it starts becoming this far more complicated thing. Like Sure. On the face of it's, you know, maybe it's just a momentary issue in the market and it'll fix itself until you realize all the investment that's really going on is happening in these casinos on whether or not it's gonna work.
How the Circle Works [13:00]
Luke Tatum: Right. Right. It's like we're. Investing our money in who's gonna win a basketball game or something, you know, it's like, oh, okay. I mean, the, there's not a thing, a basketball game is not a physical good, you know, it doesn't have a value in and of itself. You can't later market it. It's just a live event.
It's just, we're just speculating. We're just speculating on nothing. Right. And so, you know. We talked, again, pre-show about this graphic that I'm just gonna kind of talk through real quick. I think, we'll put it up on the screen here. It's a, sort of a circular logic that is going into this, and so I'm just gonna kind of read from it, but we've got AI tech suppliers.
That are developing AI models and infrastructure solutions. They require specialized computing power. There's prior to the GPUs, all those graphics cards, when we're talking about millions of graphics cards. By the way, you wanna wonder why graphics card prices are so high? Well, there's a lot of baked in demand, and those AI tech suppliers are also taking ownership stakes in these startup companies.
And then we move into the funding and investment phase. And this could start anywhere, of course, but they're utilizing funding from the tech suppliers to raise capital from investors. AI infrastructure. You've got companies like CoreWeave and they're building the data centers, and then the data centers.
They expand the compute capacity. In other words, you're renting time from a graphics card when you're using these models, right? You're burning up a physical product. When you're using these AI models, it's gotta figure out the answer to your ridiculous question, right? Or make your AI video of a cat. It's just gotta do that.
You're burning up a physical depreciable asset by doing that. And. You remember what, a long time ago it was kind of a sidebar, you remember a long time ago we used to talk about, digital assets, bitcoin, things like that. As like, imagine you were just running your car all the time. It was just idling.
And the idling of your car was solving complex computer, you know, math problems and somehow that made you money. Right? It doesn't make any sense, right? And so in this kind of same sense, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. But it just, it just kind of flows back into itself. We have this, well, hey bro, I'll give you, I'm sorry to just keep doing the bro thing, but it's like, Hey, I'll give you, shares of my stock.
I'm Nvidia, I'm gonna give you shares of my stock at 10 cents a piece if you'll do this. Oh, okay, no problem. We'll definitely do that. And then when they announce the deal, both companies valuations go up and it's like, oh, cool. I'm gonna sell my Nvidia stock that I just made. 70000% on and that's gonna pay for the deal.
Right. That doesn't make any sense. There's very confusing.
How Much of the S&P 500 Is Exposed? [16:00]
Rob Brayton: Yeah. I, you know, I was, look, doing a little bit of research beforehand as well on this topic and just trying to get a rough idea of what the exposure in the broader market is from these companies and. Best estimates at this point are granted that it's still a fairly broad range, but the conservative side is 20 to 50, 20%, all the way up to 50% of the S&P by cap, by market cap has meaningful exposure, meaning medium to high exposure to these AI companies.
So that's a lot. I mean that's a huge amount of one, supposedly very solid sector. You know, or, index. And if you were to have even a 15, 20% correction in that sector, that's enough to bring the entire index down. Not to correct. Not to like, not for to nothing, of course, but it would certainly be a massive impact.
Luke Tatum: Does it trigger a wider sell off, is the question, right?
Rob Brayton: Yeah. And that, that's the bigger concern, right? And then that ties into what we talked about last week. How many of these, you know, no defies that we had talked about are potentially invested or used to invest into these startup companies? I mean, we don't know how far that exposure goes, but, and I mean, I want to level set and be, not be like, oh, well, you know, I know all this stuff about how all these companies are invested, but we have experience to leverage from, we've seen these types of things happen before.
We know how much people are chasing return constantly, so it's not a far stretch to assume that it could happen or is happening
Chasing Returns and Railroad Miles [18:00]
Luke Tatum: When inflation is high. When inflation is high, people chase returns more so than otherwise. Right. They are panicked, especially institutional money. Major net worth players, right?
They're chasing. High rates are return so they can combat the fact that the dollar is getting weaker, right? Or whatever currency we're talking about. And so we're just pulling out the stops, you know, whatever crazy, latest scheme we can get in on. How can I make money today and get out so that I don't have to see the downside later?
Right? Let somebody else hold the bag, let the taxpayer hold the bags, what it's ultimately gonna be, right? And it just. It reminds me a lot because we have the White House buying precious metal, you know, mining companies and, and Intel and all these things. Even the government itself is getting involved in trying to prop up these companies and participate in this runaway bull market in the AI sector.
What does that tell you? It tells you this probably at least partially artificial, right? And so is this the railroad industry, right? Is this. Man, let's just lay down as much railway as we possibly can, as fast as we possibly can, because the government's paying per mile, baby. You know, like that is what happened.
Tens of thousands of miles of railway was laid that nobody needed. It was laid in stupid ways. It was like zigzaggy all over the place, up and down mountains, you know, nonsense. And they later pulled it all back up. But the people who laid those rails got paid. Because the government's chasing it. Right.
And what do you think defense contractors are? You think a fighter jet actually costs as much as they say it costs? No, of course not. It's propped up by government demand. And so what does the government want all this AI infrastructure for? I mean, that's not probably good either, right?
Rob Brayton: I don't know.
Well, probably not at all.
Power Bills and Nuclear Energy [20:00]
Nicky P: Well, as the relative, the local tree hugger here, I do wanna point out that the best solution that we have for a lot of the world's problems is the move towards nuclear energy. We should have made it in the seventies, and for a variety of reasons. People made that not happen and you know, there's a certain amount of forcing that technology to happen right now is, well, I will see it good for the long term. The fighting over power that's gonna happen, like your consumer electric bill is going to skyrocket at some point because of our inability between. This and the, you know, forced green car initiative that we, that we all have cross country, like it's gonna be some serious problems that need addressed in the short term.
Data Centers Off the Grid [21:00]
Luke Tatum: Yeah. Hundreds of, billions of dollars of data centers and all this stuff that's happening. Right. And all of it takes electricity. You have in Memphis. A, xAI data center. That's, you know, it's not even on the grid. They're not waiting for hookups.
They got money to make baby. And so they are, they are running generators and different stuff to just at any expense at, because it's this race to the top mentality. It. We gotta get these GPUs online. We gotta start selling our compute so we can get a return on our investment so we can prove to our investors that we need an even higher valuation so we can sell more stock so we can do the next deal.
I mean, that's what we're doing, right? And so, they're polluting the air like crazy over there. They're not even waiting for permits to run all these generators, you know, all this crazy stuff. It's like the government exists to protect you from this sort of stuff, but it doesn't, so now what? Right? It's wild.
It's a wild thing. And. To your point, Nick, nuclear power, that's what we need. But the last nuclear power plant in the US didn't come online, I think came online like last year. And I think that's right. Yeah.
Nicky P: Yeah. And
Luke Tatum: We don't, we're not building one
Nicky P: My well in, that's like, I think the runways that I've seen, even from like the building with all the.
Crap in the way. Governmentally, you couldn't even break ground on one for the next five years at the best of scenarios,
Luke Tatum: Even. Even if you've fast tracked that sucker. I mean, okay, maybe best-case scenario, seven years or something, right? For completion, even if you started today. Not fast enough.
Nicky P: Well, unless there are people in the know who are trying to force it to happen sooner.
Perhaps by creating artificial demand. I don't know. That's, it's, you know, any, anytime you get into some of this stuff, like maybe that's what the whole AI thing is really the demands to force us to build the infrastructure that we need for other things. I don't,
Rob Brayton: Yeah, maybe the next little add-on into that wheel is gonna be nuclear power.
Nicky P: Well, I mean, the, our, the direction that we're going doesn't exist without it, like is, as Luke said,
Rob Brayton: I mean, you're right. I mean, there's so much energy being used. The stu it's not a, I mean, it's super efficient in terms of processing power, but when we're talking about actual usage, it, I mean, it's crazy the amount of energy that's used.
It's unbelievable.
Luke Tatum: Don't worry about it guys. Don't worry about it. We're gonna put some wind turbines over here and it's gonna be fine. Okay? Like, don't, just don't question it. It's gonna be fine.
Put Money Into What You Understand [24:00]
Nicky P: I guess the big question is what is, what is the positive angle to take on all of this? Do we take it back to the basics and say, invest in things that you know and understand.
Yeah. And you're always gonna Yeah. Gonna make move. I think that's part of the, part of, yeah. And,
Rob Brayton: And never lose money, right. Like
Nicky P: Part of. Part of the issue with this is that nobody understands, even the people invested in this industry have no idea what this is going to look like 10 years from now or how it's gonna work culturally.
So everyone's investing in this kind of blind and just hoping for the best. You know, as long as you are doing what we say, doing what we say, as far as like only invest in stuff you don't understand, you're not gonna get caught up in the. You know, sure, yeah. Maybe you're gonna lose out on some money, but that's only if, let's just, you might as well say, well, every time I don't go and throw my money into the lottery, I'm losing out on Money Door.
But is it worth it? Well,
OpenAI's Line of Credit [25:00]
Luke Tatum: So I think what you have to look at is, you know, OpenAI. They have, as of last year, a $4 billion line of credit. A whole bunch of banks came in and said, Hey, we'll give you all this money. They have the option, I think, to add another 2 billion on top of that, just line of credit.
Sure. Whatever. They're paying 6% on that money, I believe, roughly. And so they are just speculating and speculating and speculating. And if this is a huge house of cards, you know, you could say, you could walk into that and say. You know, I'm gonna try to make some money before the whole bubble pops. Right.
But how many times has that worked out for people? Right. Do you just know when you need to sell out? I don't. I think you go back to fundamentals and you say, I'm not gonna participate in this. I'm not gonna play healthcare sector stocks because we're in the middle of the pandemic and just hope that I know when to get out.
Right. I think you have to go. I'm gonna invest in things I know and understand. I'm gonna focus on what I can control and not try to play this casino. You know, like, do you feel like you are missing out on rates of return because you don't go to the casino every weekend? No, of course not. Because you might lose money.
I mean, so why do you feel differently about investing in crazy speculative. Asset bubbles or stock market bubbles, I, you know, whatever, some kind of bubble. And so I think you just, you focus on what you can control. You focus on something that isn't exposed to that, you know, who's not buying a whole heck of a lot of AI stuff, insurance companies, right?
You park your money, some are nice and safe. And when the opportunity does present itself for something like this. If you're well capitalized, if you got a ton of money, you wanna risk some in the stock market of the S&P 500 or whatever. Guess what? Maybe you can, maybe you should, but that's not where you start.
You know, you're chasing money. You need to control the basics. You need to control the banking function, where your money resides, how your money is deployed, those sorts of things. And so that's where we focus. What do you think, Rob?
Rate of Return Isn't the Goal [27:00]
Rob Brayton: There is something to. Making sure that when you are actually investing, you know what you're investing in.
True investing is controlling as many variables as possible, knowing that this is likely to succeed. Otherwise, it does turn more into speculation and when you are in control of the capital and you have the opportunity to do that. At the same time, simultaneously protect your downside in investing in the way we would probably recommend somebody to do.
It puts you in a much better position. You're the one who's in control. You know what, when I think about, you know, all of this situation and you know, we've brought up rates of return a few times in this episode. When you think about it, if you had all the money that you needed by the time you hit your passive income time.
And I, and I'm saying you pick a number out of the air and you say, this is the number I'd want to hit. And if you had that, would the rate of return matter of how you got there? And for most people, the answer is no. The rate of return doesn't matter because I've, I'm at what I need in order to make things work.
So don't worry so much about what the rate of return is and focus instead on how you actually get to where you want to go. And that's a lot of what we do. We focus on that foundational aspect of how someone gets there. And with the proper foundations in place, we can then. Help somebody get to those areas that they want to be, you know, be invested in or, attained to.
There's lots of different ways just to do it. That's why the Infinite Banking Concept is infinite. So there are so many ways to make it happen. So I, you know, I'll kick it over to you, Luke, to kind of bring us out, but I, you know, I think that just kind of ties into a lot of what you were talking about too.
Outro and Free Toolkit [29:00]
Luke Tatum: Absolutely no. And, and, this has been great. What a privilege, you guys, I love doing these episodes with you and, and you know, it's so fun. So, for you, the listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in and spending some of your valuable time with us. This has been in the Between The Lies Podcast.
If you watch this full episode, I know you're interested in the future of money. We've got a free toolkit to help you demystify the future of your money. We've got two full free video courses and a copy of my book, which is all available to you for your email address. So head on over to perfectspiralcapital.com/podcast.
Or just click the link in the description and. Grab that toolkit today. We'll talk to you.
