Ep 183: Macroeconomic Trends with Ben Fraser

That's an area that, that we're shifting our approach to is to go further down the capital stack, reduce your risk and still get the same or better returns. I think that's, that's the smart play in this, this kind of part of the market in housing.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlight. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, we have Ben Frazier. Mr. Frazier is the chief Investment officer at Aspen Funds, an Inc. 5000 company is responsible for sourcing, vetting and capital formation for investments. Ben has prior experience as a commercial banker and underwriter as well as working in boutique asset management. He's a contributor on the Forbes Finance Council and is also the co host of Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. We're going to have fun today talking about the macroeconomic cycle. What we think is HAP has happened in 2023, where we think the economy is going in the future and what asset classes you should be looking at today. Ben, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to ch.

Yeah, man. This is going to be kind of like a, kind of like a nerd out session here. We're going to talk some macroeconomics, talk about kind of where we, where we think things are going here. We're recording this a little bit before it airs. So we're kind of rolling into the end of 2023. But before we kind of get into that, Ben, please share a little bit for the audience about your background and what you're doing with Aspen Funds.

Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me and always love a good nerd out sesh. So this will be fun. Yeah. So I'm currently the chief investment officer at Aspen Funds and been here for about six years, really helping find deals, vet deals, put together capital and manage our portfolio. So that's what I do. Now my background is actually in banking, so I kind of come from a commercial background, was a underwriter, a lender for a period of time and learned a lot in that, in that timeframe. It was really cool experience to look under the hood of these successful businesses, successful owners, and really one of the cool things I got to do is look at their personal statements to see exactly what they had and what they invested in and how they made their wealth. And so one of the kind of common denominators was, you know, of course, business ownership, owning businesses. But then two was real estate. And it just always piqued my interest. And, you know, I knew I didn't want to be in banking long term. You know, it got a little bit depressing over time because you're only looking at the downsides, right, because you don't have any upside as a bank. So it's just what's the worst case scenario? And really got, was excited to jump more into the, the equity side of it and create opportunity, create upside. And it's been, been really fun.

Yeah, no, I love it, man. And yeah, you're right, you know, it's. If you can own a bank, that's fantastic. And what's cool is a lot of ways, you know, we working with investors, allow them to be the bank in a lot of different ways. You know, bring, bring their capital in, leverage their capital, sometimes even lend their capital out, you know, with, with some of these different structures that are out there. And you know, the, the. I think it's just wild looking at the, the history of banking in the United States and the way the Federal Reserve was created and ultimately what that leads to. It leads to these cycles. And I often talk about the real estate cycle on our podcast, you know, 18, 19 years. And you know, I think 20, 23, if, if we go back almost a year now, coming into this year, there's a lot of anxiety. You know, we started to see regional bank failures, interest rates were starting to go up. Ben, if you don't mind, kind of walk us through, you know, what we saw going into this year and then we can kind of talk about, you know, where, where we think we are in the cycle today.

Yeah, absolutely. One little kind of side comment on banking, it's always been funny because, you know, as lenders, you're taught to, you know, evaluate all the risks. And you know, one of those risks is leverage. And you know, when it's a good time of the cycle, banks are very, you know, go higher leverage. And right now they're not to leverage out. But I remember one of my senior credit officers telling me, he's like, you know, it's kind of interesting where we get all negative when something goes above, say, 70% leverage at that point. But no one really thinks about the fact that banks are levered 90%, 10 to 1, usually with their equity, and they're the most levered businesses There are, which is just really interesting to think about, as if you kind of zoom out a little bit at what's going on the macro. But yeah, I think what's happened and how we, how we got here, you made a, you know, a great point. You gotta look at the cycles and the broader cycles here. And it's, you know, coming out of the great financial crisis, really a lot of slow growth years and you're kind of a muddle through and you know, decent employment, but it was never high growth. And then all of a sudden we kind of come into this turbocharged economy and lending is just super, yet rates are, you know, the lowest they've ever been in history. And it was smooth sailing for a couple of years. Right. Things couldn't matter. And if you're a real estate owner, you know, and you sold properties in 2021, you know, 2020, you made a lot of money. Didn't matter if it was the worst deal and the worst block every problem, right. And so that is the power of cycles, which I think is a whole other, you know, concept to talk about if we want. But cycles change and inevitably there's, you know, things have to change. And so we talked a lot about this in our podcast of kind of how do we get, we are now with the interest rates and you know, it's, it's, there's a lot of factors going to it. But a simple, you know, idea to understand is we had a lot of changes, you know, coming into Covid. They just turbocharged the economy with a massive amount of stimulus. We've actually done some analysis on historical types of stimulus. Right. Because this wasn't the first stimulus that they had done. They did a lot of quantitative easing and you know, other types of indirect types of stimulus before that. And you know, it didn't actually cause inflation, which was really interesting.

Right.

And so, you know, if you're a hard money economist, which, you know, I'm, I'm right into that camp, but you would think any type of stimulus would cause inflation, but it didn't. And even the first parts of stimulus and Covid didn't cause inflation and the later parts did. And what we've kind of identified as being one of the kind of critical factors that create this butterfly effect inflation was capacity and industrial manufacturing capacity. And what happened is all of a sudden we turbocharged all of this capital resource right to the consumers and they're going to spending it. And at that point our supply chain was falling apart and we could not meet the demand, create this Huge ripple effect.

Supply down, demand way up. Yeah, yeah. Econ 101, baby.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it's a lot, sometimes people will make it out. And now we're having inflation, which we haven't had to these levels since the 80s, and people forget what it's like. Right. And I was born in the 80s, so I'm, you know, don't really remember a whole lot of it, but you can, you can read a lot. And look, look historically. And so it's, it's kind of caused a whole new, you know, world. And how do we make investment decisions? How do we make business decisions? You know, what do we do? Are we about to hit a massive recession? Are we not? These are all the questions everyone's thinking about. You know, I don't have a crystal ball, but, you know, we're trying to pay attention to a lot of different going on. And obviously the higher inflation is caused higher interest rates. The Fed has committed to 2% core inflation. We're still a ways off from that. And we're still believers that inflation is going to be higher for longer. We could talk about that if you'd like, which I think is going to cause interest rates to be higher for longer, which is going to probably have some pretty big impacts in the economy, especially in real estate. So that's kind of where, where we're at right now. And you know, we have lots of different takes on things, but it's still anyone's guess what happens for me.

Yeah, no, and I like the point you made. You know, we had all this stimulus early on last decade, you know, like 10 years ago, and it didn't seem to create inflation. And that, that's one thing where, you know, as we have, you know, the, the modern monetary system that we do now. Yes, we have, we have credit. You mentioned, like banks are levered at times ten to one. It's, it's amazing. Right? So if I, if I, if you come in, well, maybe we should do it the other way around. But if, if I come in to your bank, Ben, and you say, okay, what do you want? I say, well, I want a loan. And you loan me a hundred thousand dollars based upon collateral, I can go out and I can spend that. A hundred thousand dollars, I can buy that. A hundred thousand dollars. I can lever that up and that money goes into the pockets of other people and then they have assets, they can go into their bank, they can lever that based upon different things. So, you know, as I looked at it, we had all this credit that had, had been built based upon all these inflated values, specifically in real estate. It was, it was huge. Right? And I'll never Forget in like 2008, 2009, 2010, bank said, hey Chris, you don't have any more lines of credit. So I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in lines of credit that was essentially wiped out. So I might have had $100,000 in the bank and a million dollars in lines of credit, and I still had that $100,000 in the bank, but I lost that million dollar line of credit. So even if the government pumped in another couple hundred thousand dollars, know, based, you know, for, for an individual like myself, we're still down $800,000 because of that credit creation. So I think, you know, it was like, it was kind of like pissing in the wind or pissing in the ocean really because, you know, the government was producing all this money. Whereas now we've recovered, you know, land prices have recovered, asset prices are recovered. The stock market's at, you know, all time highs. Commercial real estate is it, is it all time highs. You have, and you have a ton of credit. And then we had all this stimulus and what was the, what was the statistic? It was like 6 trillion of cash on the sidelines like two years ago or something like that. So as we, as we came into this year, I was, I was actually on a panel with mutual friend that we were talking about the, the deal here a little about a year ago and he's like, we're going to have a recession next year. And I'm like, we have all this cash and there's like all this credit still. I was like, I just don't, I didn't see it, you know, personally, you know, and I think it's interesting because, you know, I kind of felt the same way. I was like, I don't really feel like asset prices are going to drop, that we're going to drop that much this year because there was so much cash on the sidelines. Where are we standing now, Ben? With like, you know, liquidity and cash and not just in this country, but also like around the world.

Yeah, I don't know the global, I mean the one that we focus most on is the, the domestic number. And yeah, it's still right now $4 trillion.

That's a massive amount.

Yeah, this is excess. This is above the, the mean historically. So it's, it's not just like everyone's saying, you know, I did some podcasts recently. Oh, you know, credit cards are at all time highs Credit cards just cross a trillion dollars of balances, and savings rates are declining. Those are actually true statements, but you have to take them in context to the other pieces of data that are very important. Right. And so savings rate is the rate of change, not the actual number. And sure, the savings rate is going down, but the actual absolute number of savings is still very, very high. And so consumers are still pretty flush. Meanwhile, we've actually had massive wage growth. Right. I mean, we've had a huge labor shortage the past few years that since COVID it hasn't been solved. And so, you know, there's taco bell.

Paying $5,000, bonuses, 15 bucks, 20 bucks an hour. It's. Oh, yeah, it's. It's just entry level. It's wild.

It's just.

Yeah, you couldn't get somebody to help out with our kids for less than 25 bucks an hour a year ago, and it's still like that. It's. It's incredible.

It's crazy. And so I think that's getting solved. Solved anytime soon for some systemic reasons, which we could talk about. But, yeah, I think there's too many things that are kind of pushing against the tidal wave of challenges in the economy to cause a very severe recession. Is it possible we hit a recession? Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of things that are teetering on the edge, but there's another article in the podcast we just talked about where there was just recently over $200 billion of private equity raised from these big funds to go. Just. They're sitting on the sidelines waiting to scoop up commercial real estate for, for good deals.

Distressed assets, right.

It's like distressed assets, right. They're, they're waiting for the distress to hit. So, you know, if you're waiting for the distress to hit, it's. If it hits, it's going to get scooped up. And is it going to cause distress? I mean, you know, the, the, the real issue is when the domino hits, the other domino hits the other domino, and it creates this huge. The fact that it's crippling the economy. But if it can kind of be contained in these little idiosyncratic events, then does it create the massive global recession that we had in 0809? I don't know. I'm definitely leaning closer to. We're going to hit some form of a soft landing now, but that could change as new data comes out. But just knowing where consumers are at, knowing where wages are at, and even knowing how, you know, we have a lot of, you know, Debt and commercial real estate maturing this year and mostly in next year that are going to be very challenged. Right, to finance, to, you know, hit the certain covenants they have. But still banks, you know, they'll likely be, you know, into work with the borrowers. They don't want to take back properties. And even if there is deals that go into foreclosure, which we've already been to see the beginnings of. Right. Yeah, they're going to get up because there's a lot of capital waiting. And that's, I think, a big difference that we have now that we didn't have really, you know, 15 years ago.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And you know, there's all these, there's all of these things that people look at. One of them is the yield curve inversion, which, you know, normally we see, we see higher yields out into the future as people lock their money up in yo or leel yield yields. And then when the yield curve inverts, if you're listening, you're not familiar with that, it's when you have short term rates that are higher than longer term rates. So you're actually, you're actually compensated at a higher rate. And typically what happens within what, six, six months to two years, you see a recession in that period. But the yield curve's been inverted for quite a while now. So it's, it's kind of interesting to see and there's different, you know, different term bonds and different things that they look at, so you can kind of argue about that fact. But yeah, it is, it is really interesting right now, Ben. We're seeing all these different factors floating around and it just doesn't seem like that the foundations are shaking right now. And I think, you know, I would, I think it's going to be a couple more years before we see a significant downturn based upon the same things that you said, the liquidity on the sidelines. You know, we're not, we're not as overleveraged as we were before, specifically in the residential market. There's still a lot of regulations that came in and then the other thing. So I want to, I want to kind of take it a slightly different direction. So for, for longtime listeners, you guys have heard me say this before, but I got into the medical device space because of demographics and then I got into multifamily real estate 10 years ago because of demographics. And I, I always go back to the demographics and I say like, we're, you know, we're what it's Kind of like supply and demand, right, Ben? It's like if you have the baby boomers in the, in the 80s buying houses and buying stuff, well, you know, there's a lot of demand and interest rates go up. Now we have the millennials and boom Covid ends. They start moving out of their parents houses and they're buying up properties left and right. And the baby boomers are retiring and they're moving to areas and buying up properties. So it caused this just massive, massive spike. We have a residential development here locally and we're, we're moving through, putting it all together. The thing is there's like, there's, there's no supply. There's like just no supply right anywhere. And it's, it's really interesting when it comes to that. How do you, do you guys look at demographics? How do you look at that when it comes to, I know we're talking about residential and commercial real estate and different things. How does that play into the equation and your thought process? Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth, and increasing stability for their investments. Now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link@nextlevelincome.com.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's one of the most foundational aspects of understanding where are the opportunities, right? I mean, you know, our tagline that we use at our Aspen funds, you know, macro driven alternative investments. And, and the operative word there being macro driven, we want to look at the bigger picture trends that are driving the investment thesis. Because you can have the best deal on, you know, the best market or, or the best location in a terrible time in the cycle, right? And you have bad debt on the property. It doesn't matter what you do. You, you could be operating this asset just perfectly, but you might lose the property, right? But if you tailwinds behind you, you might make a few mistakes, you might, you know, miss a few things. But if you've got, you know, tailwinds behind you, it just creates so much more margin, so much more opportunity. And demographics is absolutely a part of that. I mean, I'm probably appreciation of the choir. But you've probably heard the demographics is destiny, right? And there's a lot of to what that that means. But it's, it's absolutely, it's, it's one of the foundational pieces of demand, right? You got supply and demand. You gotta look at both sides and demand is a very, very powerful driver. And then the other side of it is supply. You know, we're, we're very probably right now more concerned about supply in a lot of markets because we are seeing deliveries. This is not in residential, this is mostly in housing, you know, commercial housing that we're seeing massive amounts of supply hitting the market over the next several quarters, the highest we've ever seen in history and might be alerting to some people. And in some cases it is going to be alarming because maybe some markets have been slightly overbuilt in the short term. But the problem is construction starts have massively dropped off because construction costs have been going up. No one's lending, no one's taking the risk on new developments. And so you fast forward, I think 18 to 24 months from now, you're going to be in the exact same spot that we were in a couple years ago when all these construction starts out and we're going to still have some massive supply shortage on the residential side. I just don't see the supply getting fixed, you know, anytime soon. And it's, it's just, I think people are shocked because they're like waiting for, you know, the shoe to drop and they could come in and, you know, scoop up cheaper properties. It's just not going to happen. There's just not enough supply. And you add to the fact, I forget the exact numbers, but I believe it's over 75%. Homeowners have a mortgage under 4% and right now to go get a new mortgage, it's over 7% and depends where this is released. But no one's selling it because it's going to double your mortgage cost. And you know, they're just willing to wait it out. And so it's, it's only exacerbating the supply issue. And, and then like we see in these kind of credit tightening parts of the cycle, you know, new developments, new starts, you know, drop off a cliff because it just gets harder to do and to take that risk. So yeah, I think it's a massive piece of it. I think the other piece of it is supply. And you got to pay attention. That's why we're a little bit less bullish on some of the Sunbelt markets in the short term just because of some of this massive, I think short term oversupply. But you continue to have demographic trends that are in your favor and people continue to move, you know, to these locations that will get absorbed and it will over time create more opportunity.

I think that's a great point. So you know, you have, you have a need for more homes because people want to buy homes, but people aren't selling their homes. So then you have to build new homes. But it costs a lot more to build homes now because land prices are high, labor prices are high, supply prices are high, interest rates are high. So a mortgage, the mortgage gap to rent, I believe today is at an all time high again based upon when we're recording and when we're airing this. So, you know, it's way cheaper to rent than it is to buy. So then, you know, that's good for us people, you know, and investors that own multifamily properties. But you have all this demand from the supply that was started a couple years ago when interest rates were, were at the lowest they'd ever been and liquidity was at a massive amount. But we still need about 4 million multifamily units in over the next 10 years in the United States. So again, kind of that, you're, you're, you're, you're peeing, you're peeing into a pretty big pool, you know. So yeah, it's creating some big waves right away, but then those ripples fade really fast. So yeah, I think, you know, we're going to, we're going to see some short term shocks here. But if we can, we can ride out the storm here over the near term, it demographically it looks like we have a really solid decade of demand ahead.

I agree. I mean, I think people have been saying, oh, housing's overpriced, housing's, you know, how to stay in the sun is over. But I don't think it's the case. I think where it's really going to impact the market is a lot of these Sunbelt deals that were purchased, you know, the past couple of years at sub 4 cap rates with very high leverage, very aggressive business plans, have maturing debt coming due with the bridge debt and seen slower absorption.

Right.

In a lot of markets we're seeing higher vacancy and you know, if you have decent debt and you have a longer term business plan, you'll be fine. You can ride it through because you know, the long term case is there, but what it's really going to cause Is some of these shocks where they were too aggressive in the business plan. They're planning on getting 20% rent bumps, but now the consumer has more options and the consumer has a little bit more buying power speak in the short term. So I think it is going to cause some, quite a bit of a turmoil on some of those properties that were too aggressive. But you're exactly right, I agree. You fast forward past two years, probably it's, I want to be a holder of real estate because I mean it's, it's by far the best inflation adjusted, you know, highest correlated asset class to inflation there is. And over, over time it's, it's going to be a winner if you, if you can make it through.

Yeah, no, I agree. So, you know, Ben, you just touched on something. So inflation people are still out there looking for yield. We have all this liquidity where, where do you think we go for yield over the next five to 10 years? And what, what assets and what asset classes do you think are going to outperform in your opinion?

Yeah, well, traders are paying 5% right now, so that's, that's a lot better than we ever seen. But no, it's actually kind of funny because we have a debt fund and you know, people are, well, I was going to go buy some risk free. You know, it's like, don't blame you. But you know that I don't think that's going to be the case for, for forever. And what asset class you're going to outperform? I think they're the ones that are going to be supply limited and are high demand. And right now we're seeing a few asset classes. Honestly, we love retail. This is something that's very contrarian to a lot of investors, but we're buying these at going in cap rates of sometimes 8 to 9% strong.

Yeah.

Stabilize over double digits. And these are neighborhood retail centers. So they're not big shopping malls. These are kind of right by residential areas. And it's continued to get headlines on Wall Street Journal, their big publications, because the values are still there. And there's the, there's been no new supply built really in the past 10 years. The construction costs are so limiting for these kind of retail centers. So again, we like that. Where there's some supply constraint and there's still strong demand, retail is still very, very strong. And probably our number one asset class is industrial because there's been what we kind of believe a phase two of the industrial boom really being caused by bringing manufacturing back to the US and bringing inventory and reshoring back to the US as well. And so there's been some pretty big fundamental shifts in how companies want to just protect the supply chain, protect different parts of the process of manufacturing that are really going to. America is going to be a winner in this scenario for a lot of reasons. And so we're seeing, we already had all time low vacancies in industrial. We have again, there's a lot of supply hitting the market, but that's going to be absorbed pretty quick in most markets and then again back to the, back to the same issue with limited supply. So we like those, we're still big believers in housing, both residential and commercial. I think you got to be smart with the types of deals you're doing right now. And to be honest, just the bid ask spread is a little bit too large for a lot of the deals that we're looking at. So we're actually shifting our approach to actually going lower in the capital stack. All the deals we've looked at the past, really three to six months, the preferred equity guys were making as much or more than the common equity and taking substantially less risk. And so that, that's an area that, that we're shifting our approach to is to go further down the capital stack, reduce your risk and still get the same or better returns and capital. So I think that's, that's the smart play in this, this kind of part of the market in housing.

Yeah, I think it's wise. And you know, as we've, as we've kind of come out of the last five years when we've seen just, just amazing returns, you know, we're kind of, we're kind of shifting back towards, you know, more historical returns when it comes to, to multifamily. And I mean, when I wrote my book, I talked about 12% returns in that book and that was an example. But you know, it's just interesting where, you know, we got, we got to this point where people thought 12% was really cute and now, now it's like it's not, that's not so bad. You know, if you, if you tell me you're going to get 12% returns for the rest of my life depending on what inflation is. That ain't too bad.

That ain't too bad for sure.

Awesome. Ben, I'd love for you, I mean, dude, we can go on and on here. I'd love for you to touch on one more thing here before we wrap up. We're coming towards the end of the year a Lot of investors, especially high income investors have heard about or interested or even invested in oil and gas. Give me thoughts on that.

Yeah, well, we're very, very bullish on oil prices for a lot of reasons. Mostly again a big supply constraint story. So we y, I mean investment into new production over the past seven years decreased by over 50%. 5 0. If you think about oil and gas like real estate, it's a depleting resource, right. So every year we're depleting production by 5% so our total production just goes down by 5% just by producing. And so if we're constantly reinvesting back into more new wells, new drilling, we're reducing supply just automatically. So that, that's been a case that's been going on a while, a little bit of time. And meanwhile, you know, the transition to green alternative energy sources is you know, severely hand by a lot of factors that are going to make it take a lot longer to transition to these alternative sources than you know, most of these agencies are, are really being honest with themselves or predicting. So demand is going to stay the same if not go up. By most predictions over the next 10 to 15 years you have lower supply and that's a good recipe for prices to go up. Right. But even aside from that, so that's kind of the price story but the capital market side also interesting in that most of this production and drilling has been done by big, big private equity capital allocators. But they've got a lot of pressure the past five years to allocate into esg friendly, you know, environmental societal governance standards. And so they're, they are kind of being penalized if they're not that. And so it shifted a lot of capital. There's been a huge gap in the market for investing into these types of, you know, producing wells. So we're actually producing or buying producing properties. These are not just pure drilling programs that are, have higher risk but producing cash flowing properties and we're buying them at 20% present value. So similar to a cap rate in real estate, percent cap rate unlevered that that's with all the decline curves, depletion, you know, estimates built in, that's what we're getting. So from a return standpoint we think there's a lot of, makes a lot of sense from an allocation from a, for your portfolio. But then also you have some great tax benefits, you know, not to get all that. But it's, it's as good or better than, than real estate in a lot of cases from a tax standpoint so it's definitely something people should be. Be paying attention and looking at, especially as maybe they're on the sidelines on some real estate right now. They're kind of waiting to see. It's, It's a great area to look.

Yeah, no, I agree. And, you know, it is interesting. Typically, Democratic administrations tend to be good for the oil and gas industry because supply goes down, regulations go up, people stop drilling or companies stop drilling. I should say the ESG has been an interesting one as well as you've had that capital pull back. And, you know, it's, it, it kind of, you know, I read some of these stories and, you know, it's, it's funny. You know, you used to have the Onion, now you have the Babylon Bee. And you read stuff like California mandates that all new cars sold need to be electric vehicles by, was it 2030 or 2035? And then the next week they say, don't plug in your electric vehicle because you might crash the grid. And I'm like, wait a minute, is this, I'm like, wait. I'm like, is this a joke? And then you read it and you're like, no, it's not a joke. This is actually real. And then the, the, the chief of fire comes out. I may be mixing up his title here. He comes out and he says, oh, no, no, no, no, you must, you should charge your electric vehicle because if there's an emergency, you need to drive it, you need to charge it. So it's, you know, I think you have the tail wagging the dog when it comes to some things. And for those that know me, give.

Me a quick example. So John Kerry, you know, he's in the Biden administration, you know, running the energy side of things. And he earlier this year was telling the CEO of BP who was planning a billion dollars of investment into new drilling, said, no, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that. We need to focus on, you know, renewable energy and you should be drilling that. So basically a little bit, right? And they've threatened these kind of other big windfall taxes and other things. And, and then, well, if we reduce supply, go up, well, then Biden comes out and is bashing the oil companies for not producing more and hurting the consumer because they're not producing enough oil and gasoline prices are higher. So it's like, well, which is it?

Yeah, it is. It is interesting. And it's. It. Look, I'm an environmentalist. I want, you know, I would love it if we had absolutely energy, but we had, you know, we, we've had, we've kind of had this whipsaw effect. And you know, we had, I think Nixon had a plan. It was Nixon to be energy independent by, by, by 2000 based upon nuclear energy. But those things were shut down due to different things. So there's, there's a lot of exciting technology there. I'm a big fan of all the above. I'm an optimist when it comes to technology and these sorts of things. But I'll throw one last thing out there to kind of put a bow on this. Our emissions in the US are way down over the last 20 years. And actually the greening of the planet has increased 20% over the last 20 years. You heard me right. It's, it's more greener than it used to be and it makes common sense. It's common sense. If you think about it. If you put carbon dioxide into the air and plants feed off of carbon dioxide, they're going to grow better. But I think a lot of people don't realize that the planet, you know, is, it's either healing or it's, it's getting green. I hate, you know, pollution is a terrible thing. But one of the reasons that we've lowered emissions so much is we've shifted away from coal to natural gas, which is clean burning, which comes from fracking. So, you know, all these things interplay. We need, we need petroleum products to produce things like, like solar panels that I had in my house, like the, you know, like the battery that's in my wife's plug in hybrid electric car. So, yeah, so you can, you could do your part. You can help produce energy, you can help the United States be more energy independent and you can get a tax benefit with oil and gas, which I've personally done myself. Ben, I can't wait to see you here in the, in the next couple of weeks when we get together and we can maybe have a drink and continue this conversation. But until then, how can people get a hold of you? How can they learn more about what you guys are doing at Aspen Funds?

Yeah, I appreciate that. And if you like podcasts, we have a podcast called Invest Like a Billionaire. And if you're interested in kind of the investment side of things, Aspenfunds US is our private equity company.

Awesome. And I also have a link in here for your free economic report that you have on your website. Ben, it's been fun. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with our audience today.

All right, thanks so much. It was really fun.

Hey, Chris, here again I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audio book, and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.