We are so excited to announce that the Invest Like A Billionaire podcast is celebrating its first anniversary! Thank you all for tuning in over the past 12 months. We couldn’t have done this without each and every one of our generous listeners. In honor of this milestone, we’re looking back at some of our favorite moments from the past year. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing some of the biggest names in the world of investing, and along the way, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve gained a better understanding of the investing process and how to navigate the financial markets. 

On top of these, we have an exciting announcement about our podcast’s new website! https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/

We’re excited to continue this journey in the coming year and beyond. We have some big plans for the future of Invest Like a Billionaire, and we can’t wait to share them with you.  Thank you for being part of our journey – we can’t wait to see what the next year has in store!

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Read the full transcription: https://aspenfunds.us/podcast/top-episodes-from-our-first-year–coming-soon/

Here are the top episodes mentioned:

 01. How the Wealthy Invest & the Alternative Investment Continuum – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/01-how-the-wealthy-invest-the-alternative-investment-continuum/

 03. Intro To Venture Capital & Private Equity Investing – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/03-intro-to-venture-capital-private-equity-investing/

 05. Hedge Fund Investments & When They Make Sense – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/05-hedge-fund-investments-when-they-make-sense/

06. Billion-Dollar Real Estate Broker & Opportunities Post Pandemic – Interview w/ Gary Stache – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/06-billion-dollar-real-estate-broker-opportunities-post-pandemic-interview-w-gary-stache/ 

08. Leveraging 1031 Exchanges and DSTs w/ Brandon Bruckman – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/08-leveraging-1031-exchanges-and-dsts-w-brandon-bruckman/

11. A Financial Advisor’s Perspective On Including Alts In Your Portfolio w/ Josh Wright – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/11-a-financial-advisors-perspective-on-including-alts-in-your-portfolio-w-josh-wright/

12. How Billionaires Pay Less In Taxes Than Average Americans – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/12-how-billionaires-pay-less-in-taxes-than-average-americans/

15. Passive Investor Spotlight #3 – An International Investor’s Perspective On U.S. RE Investing w/ François Braine-Bonnaire – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/15-passive-investor-spotlight-3-an-international-investors-perspective-on-us-re-investing-w-francois-braine-bonnaire/

18. Why You Need To Think About Asset Protection To Safeguard Your Wealth w/ Kevin Day – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/18-why-you-need-to-think-about-asset-protection-to-safeguard-your-wealth-w-kevin-day/

25. 2022 Housing Market Forecast w/ Nikolas Scoolis – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/25-2022-housing-market-forecast-w-nikolas-scoolis/

28. Betting Big On Retail Real Estate w/ Philip Block And Robert Levy – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/28-betting-big-on-retail-real-estate-w-philip-block-and-robert-levy/

30. Scaling Real Estate And Finding The Opportunity – Interview w/ J Scott – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/30-scaling-real-estate-and-finding-the-opportunity-interview-w-j-scott/

35. Top of Mind [New Series] – What Happened to the Retail Apocalypse? – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/35-top-of-mind-new-series-what-happened-to-the-retail-apocalypse/

36. Is Retail Real Estate the Next Hot Asset Class? – Interview w/ Parker Webb – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/36-is-retail-real-estate-the-next-hot-asset-class-interview-w-parker-webb/ 

43. Breaking Down the Brewing Energy Crisis and Opportunities feat. Bob Fraser and Ben Fraser – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/43-breaking-down-the-brewing-energy-crisis-and-opportunities-feat-bob-fraser-and-ben-fraser/

46. Oil & Gas Economics: What the Future Holds feat. Robin Winkle – https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/46-oil-gas-economics-what-the-future-holds-feat-robin-winkle/

 49. Investing in Sports Teams feat. Justin Papadakis https://www.thebillionairepodcast.com/49-sports-investing-in-sports-teams-feat-justin-papadakis/

Invest Like a Billionaire podcast is sponsored by Aspen Funds which focuses on macro-driven alternative investments for accredited investors.

Learn More about Aspen Funds. https://aspenfunds.us

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Watch the episode here

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Top Episodes from our First Year & Coming Soon

Today we have just a short episode. We wanna talk a little bit about some of our favorite episodes, some of the things that we really enjoyed and learned. And if you’re newer to the podcast, we’ll encourage you to go back and listen to those. And then we’re really excited to share some of the things that we’ve got in the cooker here for the future of this podcast, where we see this going.

And some of the fun things that we want to continue to build community around this cool topic of alternative investments and get more education into the hands of the people to make better decisions, make better investments and hopefully eventually become billionaires.

Hello, Future Billionaires. Welcome back to the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast today. We’ve got a unique episode, so we have all three co-hosts of the podcast, myself, Bob and Jim. And we’re talking today about our anniversary.

So we are gonna be sharing just some of the things that we’ve learned over the past year of doing this podcast. So we’ve now done this podcast for a year. It’s been a big undertaking, but it’s been a really cool experience for us to see the reaction of our listeners and the benefit that we’re bringing kind of education around these alternative investments.

So Jim, what are some of the things that you’ve taken away over the past year?

And I know you’ve shared some things earlier, just on your vision of where we saw originally of where this podcast could help us in our listeners and our investors go. Yeah. First of all it’s been a selfish pursuit for me because honestly, and I guess this is a mark of a good podcast and putting out good content.

I can’t believe the amount that I’m learning. How much I don’t know about some of the aspects that haven’t been my particular, my wheelhouse and focus has been pretty much the real estate world. And I have a pretty good depth of understanding and knowledge there, but, there’s so much more that’s involved in alternative investments and we have really you guys have been, hats off, you’ve really curated some incredible content and a wide range of areas that all fall within, accessible, alternative investing.

As you mentioned, that was a vision from the very beginning, even when we started the investment sector that we operate and operate to this day, very well our debt funds the vision was always to serve people, serve investors by. Giving access and education regarding alternative investments and helping them get some of their money out of the institutional off the wall street and on the main street.

And it’s a dream, it’s really a dream come true. I’m just, I’m loving it. We’re, we had a sports, a guy that, a family that owns a sports league as a guest a couple weeks ago. And I, I’m one of the hosts, but I’m frankly, I’m just being candid.

I I hardly knew what questions to ask cause it’s still outside of my realm, but it’s these things actually are accessible. And so I’ve just been having a blast learning myself and I know we’re, I can say in full confidence, we are delivering fantastic. Content and information to our audience.

And so that makes me really happy. And they’ve been building one of the stadiums near your home, right? Is that it’s built. I almost went to a game a couple weeks ago. That’s awesome. Very exciting. We’re not ready to launch a fund yet on that one, but you never know.

No, never know now it’s. It’s so cool. I think it’s one of a kind. I’d say the gut instincts we had before this podcast. And even because we’ve seen running Aspen funds and we’ve been in this kinda alternative investment space for over 10 years now, we’ve been seeing the trend toward democratization and more access to these types of opportunities that historically have not been available to the average investor, but it’s actually surprising to me too.

How quickly the tides are moving that direction. How much interest there is from investors wanting to, get outta the public markets and, find a different way, find a better way. And so it’s been cool to have done the research on this good instinct. And now as we’ve done it, it’s only, it’s blown my expectations away as far as, what’s out there, what’s available.

Are there any surprises Jim, that you had said, I know you kinda obviously shared that you’re surprised how much you’re learning, but anything that’s, other than surprises that you didn’t expect when we started this, I probably would be on a level of how. How perfectly synchronized doing this podcast is with our investment thesis from the beginning, which is, just in a super general sense.

There is always something that’s working, we are so nimble right now that we can move into a sector. Be in love with it while it’s good, but the second it’s not anymore, we’ve already got two or three other things that are anti-cyclical or on the other side of the cycle that, you know, we’re geared up and ready to jump into.

And so having this top of mind refresher going on because of these podcasts continually. We’re always out looking for what’s the next opportunity that’s gonna surface, even while we’re, we’re taking advantage of the one that’s in front of us. So to me, it’s surprising that it’s a podcast.

Sometimes you can think of them, they can be static and dusty. This is not like that at all. It’s very fresh. And it’s, I love it. It feeds the creativity, just even for our own pursuits as I Aspen. So knowing that’s helping other people out there too, is just that I get great feedback from friends of mine that watch the podcast and people I didn’t even know were watching it, and right.

So that’s been surprising. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. To just educate people about the opportunities that are out there. Most people they’re simply, they would like to get out of the stock market, but they don’t know what else to do. So it’s making these things approachable.

And. How can you invest in music streaming or invest in franchises or oil and gas and we make it accessible, and yeah, we’re learned about it, just at the same time, but this stuff is all available and it’s just such an exciting time. I don’t think anybody knew in 2017 when they passed that, that, that regulation that basically.

Allowed private investments to be offered to the public in a new way. It does literally change the world and it’s gonna continue to change the world. And we’re just see this thing, just continuing to go where more and more alternatives are being offered to investors. You still have to be accredited, unfortunately.

All right. If you are there, the world is opening up to you. And so to make that approachable, make it something understandable, something achievable and something that you can de-risk yeah. And get really outsize returns with lots of stability. It’s pretty fun.

Yeah. Bob, I know you love the. The opportunity zone investments, but, I, my little mantra’s always been, the world is our opportunity zone, it’s really true this podcast in a sense. Is an opportunity zone. We cause we’re presenting you, you enter in and there’s information and there’s opportunity it in the opportunity zone.

The zone of, I had to throw that in I think it plays into like our original thesis and I think that one of the first episodes we did is looking at. The alternative investment continuum, right? How most people are investing in contrasting the average individual investor with, the average institutional investor and like the number one difference by, a factor of, 50

So is the alternative investment allocation in how much these institutions have been doing this for so long investing these types of opportunities into real estate, into private equity, into hedge funds. In venture capital and how little, the average investors and how inaccessible it has been up until the jobs act like you were mentioning, but it’s so cool to see even too, the jobs act totally transformed the ability to market these opportunities.

Number one, but we’ve also seen the S E C continue to expand the definition and the definition. At a first blush you think, oh, they’re all about tightening up regulations, making it harder to invest in these things. And you actually think about when they originally made these rules, inflation actually benefits investors in the sense of, to hit these standards of accreditation, it gets easier and easier over time.

And so some people have talked about, oh, they’re gonna increase the net worth requirement, increase the income required. But they haven’t done that. And in fact, they’ve actually opened it up. The other way. Yeah, on the other way. And so to me, it’s just, it’s indicative of, they’re even seen, at a government level and at a regulatory level the need for investors to have more access to these and reggae plus, which is a whole new crowdfunding mechanism to, to fund different companies in different real estate, outside of the public markets.

It’s just creating this whole new universe. It’s been 10 years since they passed the regulation, but I still believe wholeheartedly that we are in very early innings of a massive tidal wave shift of capital to these private alternatives, because. They’re a clear winner in a lot of ways.

And so it’s cool to be in this position and Jim, to your point it’s so easy to get tunnel vision and, we’re not just podcasters surprise. We’re actually operators of an investment management firm and, we’re in our zones of our expertise and we’re doing certain deals and certain vertical.

It’s really easy. I think just as human nature to get tunnel vision, you just get sucked into what you’re doing. And then you have confirmation bias of, you’re locked into this thing, so you want it to work. It has to work. And so you get confirmation bias where you surround yourself with opinions that confirm what you already believe.

But so much of investing is investing in the cycles and investing, contrary a lot of times to the mainstream narrative. And so just by positioning. Ourselves and this podcast forced us to just have constant feedback from different parts of the market, different asset classes.

Exactly. That’s, what’s been the most surprising thing to me is just, it expands your mindset when you can zoom out and you just see all the opportunities that are available and how different things work in different economic cycles and asset cycles. It’s just, that’s been the coolest surprise to me.

Getting outside of the tunnel vision, the breadth of opportunity. It’s the, there’s so many ways to make money. Yeah. There’s so many ways in all the things that you can think are not working. There’s so many ways that are working right. And there’s always something working to figure out what people are doing, and how people are making money.

So you saw that as a banker band, you saw as an underwriter, you under wrote, something like 150 companies, you saw who’s making money, how much money they’re making, who’s losing money, how much money they’re losing. And it’s just, you got an education and it’s the same thing.

Now it’s just to talk to these wonderful entrepreneurs and these investors who really have a rich vein, they’ve got this little gold mine. They figured out how to make money, and there’s so many of these and there’s no right way. They’re all right.

Until, and the real beauty of that Bob is, and we’ve had this happen. I can think of twice in the last six months, but. So we have these entrepreneurs and they’re in their lane. And I was one of those, I was a real estate developer and I was gonna go up with the ship or down with the ship, cuz I was 100% focused on my development projects.

But if I were if Aspen had come along, they’d have said, Hey, this sounds really great. But then as soon as the, as soon as the wind starts shifting. We can, as Aspen, we can say, you know what, we’re gonna pump the brakes on that. And the poor guy that’s like in that vertical, that’s, we’re looking for experts that are committed to their field, but the good news is.

If we see the field changing, we’ve already backed off on a couple different pursuits. That looked really good, things have changed in the marketplace a bit and we’re like, we’re not, we don’t have to make it work in that one vertical. In fact, we’re better off saying let’s pump the brakes.

Let’s see what, let’s see what happens here. Now we may discover ahead of the market opportunity where we say let’s get in now, but I love this. Because having been beaten up by being the other guy in the past, It’s just so refreshing and so freeing to like, Hey, I don’t have to do any one thing.

We’re gonna do something always, but emotions are not your friend as an investor. Exactly. They, in fact, they’re your enemy. And how many times have we seen someone fall in love with the deal? You’ve fall in love with the deal. And you’ve got a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

That just, if certain season in life that’ll work for you, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work anymore. You can’t fall in love with a deal or even an idea. Because every idea has its season, every deal has its season. And then it goes outta season. And you have to know what season you’re in, and so it’s not, you can’t fall in love with deals.

You have to be deal agnostic, right? You have to be market agnostic. You have to be humble. You have to go with what the market is telling you, not what you’re the preconceived ideas you brought in right. Yeah. Fall in love with your spouse and stay with ’til the end but don’t do that with a, don’t do that with a business.

You don’t have to do that with a business, yeah. Don’t fall in love with your investments. You really, you gotta be careful, yeah. It, it totally plays into kind of this theme that we’ve created on our investment, management business, where our tagline is macro driven alternative investments, and macro driven being. What are the big tri the big tides? What are the mega trends that are going on that are going to be the rising tides that lift all boats? Conversely, what are the tides that are, pulling back out and, all those boats are, water levels decreasing, and who is, I think Warren buffet, I always miss.

MIS appropriate quotes, but I think it was Warren buffet who said, I think I said that , we’ll give it to Jim. When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked, basically there. There’s nothing to hide from once the tide’s gone and it’s inevitable in our, the way our financial system is set up that there are cycles and sometimes there’s really big boom and bust cycle.

And you you have to be aware of where you’re at in the cycle to understand what, forces outside of your control are impacting the potential success and or failure of that investment. And so what’s really come from really both you’re both experienced, Bob and Jim, with different things you’ve experienced over your careers and investing in businesses of understanding how critical important that is.

Bob, can you share a little bit you shared this at different conferences recently, but. How kind of your experience, building the tech business. Hammered this point into your head, yeah. Both of us, we’re in our sixties and you get creamed a few times.

It changes you and makes you smarter. So I look at all you young box and you got a lot of energy and drive, but. Maybe not as much wisdom as the gray hairs, and it’s not wisdom it’s perspective. It’s just perspective that, you’ve been through this, so yeah.

I started a tech business in the late nineties. And in the late nineties, if you had a tech business that made dog food and was losing a billion dollars a year, it went up through the moon, you made a hundred X, and it went up and then in 2001, it didn’t matter how good your tech business was.

It went down. Amazon.com was selling for 30 cents per share 0.30 cents, 30, 30 cents swim naked. And here’s a great company. And so my point is the markets are a hundred percent. Sentiment driven and sent because they’re driven by human emotions. Everyone, they are not driven by facts and they’re not driven by numbers.

They’re driven by emotion. The fact that Amazon was sewn for 30 cents this year is not driven by numbers. Okay. That’s pure emotion. It’s and it’s pure sentiment based. And that’s the problem with. And then, our government believes that because you register as a company and you become public company.

You’re now safe. You’re a safe investment. So had you invested in Amazon at $300 a share and it went to thirties, that’s safe. Then Coinbase recently dropped 75% of its value, large, big in dollar company. It’s that’s a safe investment. It’s not safe because it’s public. It’s the opposite.

It’s subject to literally whatever emotional whim or whatever, sentiment change happens. And so I became allergic to the public markets at this point. I just I don’t want anything to do with public markets. He was a business guy. I want a business that I can control. I can go turn a lever, pull a lever, turn a knob, and I can turn, I can invest in my business.

I can make more money and it’s completely unrelated to sentiment. And what other people think of my business. And so that’s when we started Aspen. 10, 10 years ago, Jim and I was really, let’s just do real estate notes and built a great little business, but, since then, it’s just, and then we became passionate about this idea of.

Macro driven realities, right? Let’s figure out what is working. Let’s figure out what Amazon is available at 30 cents per share. And of course, we, back when we started the note business, that was the Amazon at 30 cents, the, the metaphor and And so what is working? What is, yeah, we’re just, so we’re just flying over right now.

We’re just flying over the beaches, looking for naked swimmers, wherever we can fly. I’m sorry, man. You shoulda never put that imagery out.

yeah. I think looking back to the, 10 years ago when you guys started Aspen. It really was the opportunity, that was after the great distress debt. There was unfortunately a lot of distress in the market, but that was the best time to get into it. And, going back to the analogy of tides, what the rising tide lifts all boats.

So even if. You miss time it a little bit, or, you make some mistakes along the way. It doesn’t matter because those ties are such powerful forces that it covers over a lot of, mishaps and other things. And you look at what’s happened in the single family market, which, 10 years ago, people were concerned.

The bubbles popped and single family run is over and it’s never gonna go back. We’ve had consistent run up in, in massive run up in prices, especially the past few years. And we’ve been calling for that for many years saying this there’s no way it’s not gonna go up because of the macro forces right behind the supply and demand fundamental economics in when you can position yourself in a, in.

In a way that is going to, you can see those longer term trends, it’s it’s, it really helps everything else. It makes everything else that much easier. And one of the things that we’ve talked about before in the podcast, and you hit on where like sentiment, can change overnight when the tech work happened.

Sentiment on internet companies changed overnight. Jim, you are developing real estate in California, and when the great recession happened and the market for housing and speculative housing just flipped overnight. We’ve seen it recently with crypto sentiment.

It was, it could only go up. It was to the moon. It was, we saw projections, literally, of what Bitcoin gonna be worth $360,000 in the next three years. Oh, it was just, it just baked in assumption. It wasn’t even oh yeah, just exactly. It was probably on the, not gonna be close to a million a coin, we’ll say 3, 360 to be conservative.

And now it’s, I don’t even notice that now, but. Yeah, it is interesting. And no one wants it. It’s that’s it just shows. It’s like either the sentiment is this manic, or it’s depressive. It’s it’s bipolar. It’s so yeah. Get outta that crap.

And let’s in the private markets where it’s controllable, yeah. And so drew, it’s I spoke at a conference in Los Angeles in January of. So this is two months before COVID breaks out and I’m on a panel. And the question is, how to build a recession proof business.

And I just said, guys I don’t think there’s anybody up here that can tell you that we know, how to build a business that can survive some unknown storm that could be coming. I used kind of some terminology like that, cuz we don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know what’s coming.

But I gotta tell you, we had some operational changes we need to make, we needed to make during COVID. But the bottom line is if you were to look at the performance of our funds and the asset, the VA the balance sheet of our, as of our funds all the way through that, you wouldn’t even see a blip.

But go look at what the stock market did. It was wild and it was just, it confirmed, our thesis big time confirmed it. But yeah, that’s, I’m just, I’m sold for life. My, the bulk of my investing on the personal passive side is alternatives. Isn’t it?

And it’s actually into the alternatives that we’re vetting in house because I, I don’t trust anybody more than I trust you guys in, in our team. For analyzing these deals and bringing in the experts, bringing in the attorneys and the analysts and the consultants that are deeply embedded in the spaces that we’re investing in.

So we’re not just relying on our own horse sets, but it’s. It’s really good curated information. And I feel personally I’m gonna, why would I invest anywhere else? I don’t know if our investors or our listeners realize that we are actually all investors and we are actually. Eating our own dog food.

We we invest pretty much entirely in the stuff that we’re, we’re talking about here and we’re finding and, and I’ll just make a little shameless pitch. You want to, you wanna join in? We did, we, we started doing all this, finding these investments just for our own portfolios.

And we’re like, Hey, why not open this up to our friends? And yeah, you wanna jump in, join our investor club and Ben stick that in the show notes but. It’s just, we’re not salesman, we’re not doing this for someone else we’re doing for ourselves. And just to be good, solid investors, looking for our own alternatives and off the beaten path and in stuff that no one else is thinking about and doing.

So Bob share a little bit of some of the surprises that you’ve experienced over the maybe expectations a year ago when we started this to now maybe whether it was from guests had, or just expectations that were like, oh, wow, this is interesting. I didn’t expect this. It’s been really fun.

And, we’ve had this idea of doing macro driven, kind of things for a long time. And we’ve really done this for a very long time. But what, this is what that’s forced me to do, is put on really work harder and spend more effort and time unearthing. What are these macro trends and really vetting them out and discovering things that, That you know, when you actually make something intentional about something, you do you get a lot further down the road.

And so that’s, what’s happened for me. It’s being more intentional. We had the guest on recently, Robin Winkle about the oil and gas market. It was it’s stuff that I had been just researching on my own, but it’s literally mind numbing and. The stuff that’s going on with the, with oil and gas in the industry world, it’s people are clueless about what is happening.

The mega trends are going on and why there’s this incredible opportunity. And so for me five, six years ago, I was Barrish in oil. And for the reason, but I hadn’t looked at it. Since then, and once I took a lot of the look, I’m going, holy smokes, this is a smoke and hot opportunity.

And so it’s forcing me to pay attention to things that I haven’t been paying attention to. And so that’s been a lot of fun and it’s super, super interesting to, I cover some of these things, it basically creates a, An accountability that, Hey, we actually have to put out an episode Hey, can you do some research?

I’m always bugging you around and doing, Hey, you look at some research in macro trends in these areas and it’s not always, it takes time and it’s effort and it’s a cost to a certain extent to go do this, cuz we’re operating the business alongside of it. But it’s made us better.

It’s made us better made us, the way I’m wired. I just, I love I’m just a knowledge. I just love. Learning. So I love digging in and really learning. And it, so it’s been super enjoyable, but something I wouldn’t, it’s a lot of work, too, something I wouldn’t do, so it’s just it’s super interesting.

And I have been very surprised by some of the things I’ve discovered, for example, industrial real estate. I was really not familiar with that and why that’s such a great opportunity or retail real estate. Why that’s such a great opportunity here in the middle of the retail. Apocalyp. Quote unquote right.

Oil and gas is another one. I was very surprised by what we’ve discovered as we start to really look in these things. It’s fun to be in the beginning of these these big trends, yeah. And and be able to position ourselves and our friends ahead of the game.

Yeah. I love, I think one of the little surprises for me, I think I’ve already shared some. It’s so cool to see the responses from from listeners. And I think I’ve shared some with you guys, but just some of the people that they’re newer to this space, I think for me, who’s been in this space for a while, and this is, all of us, this is the, the dog free weed all day.

We can talk about alternatives and the different asset classes. And it’s just second hand to us, but there’s there. A whole host of people that are looking to get into this, if they don’t have any experience to this is their first exposure, right? This is part of the reason I love this podcast.

Is it’s trying to make these concepts, these ideas, these investment very accessible. And to hear some of the responses from people that are just getting into and say, Hey, investing in some of the Aspen funds, whereas some of the first ones that alternatives I’ve invested in and it’s, it was, you guys made it sound or made it.

Explained it easier to, for me to understand where before was a hard thing to understand. And so to me, that’s been really cool to, to see that. And, we’ve still got a long ways to go and educating the masses on some of these things, but that’s been really fun. Okay. I’ve got a, I’ve got a couple episodes.

Okay. Yeah. Share that. I want to talk about. So one of the, one of the really fun ones was, as I’m looking back at the beginning, 10 31 exchanges with Josh Wright and Brandon Buckman, and understanding the dynamics of 10 31 exchanges. That was so cool. Okay. And I actually learned quite a bit on, on that episode.

Gary sta you remember Gary sta oh, that was a great one. Gosh, billion, billion dollar broker, real estate broker telling us really where the real estate market was going. That was brilliant. That was almost a year ago. Yeah, that was one, our first ones. Yeah. Okay. Here’s another one. So good. How billionaires pay less than taxes than average Americans?

So was, this was this was you and I did this Ben, but I learned a lot from you on this one where you were talking about how billionaires are focused, not on their income statement. But on their balance sheet. Yeah. And so talking about that and it literally shifted something in me to realize that no, that’s what we have to do.

We have to focus on not the income statement, which is where everybody’s thinking yep. The balance sheet and how they think differently and using the creative use of debt. That saves a little self-serving to me that Ben would be wanting you to minimize the amount of taxes that go out the door.

no that’s awesome. Okay. I’m looking back over Fran SW BR boner. Remember him and yeah, gotta love Fran SW an international perspective. Yes. On the, on, on us investments. And the us is just such a great place to invest and it’s so funny. We talk about the affordability crisis in America.

Our real estate is way cheaper than a lot of places in the world. And it’s just interesting to have a different perspective of how you how you how you roll. Oh, here’s a, here’s one of my faves Kevin Day. Asset protection was mind blowing. Yeah. To me, that was my, how to do asset protection and the importance of that.

So I literal, started, I called the guy you’re right after Hey, can we talk? Yeah. Yeah. I’m surprised you didn’t mention any of your own economic presentations, cuz you’ve been very well received by our listeners. how much I’m my own favorite speaker no I think some of those have been so cool because it plays into, again, some of the kind of themes that we are tracking on ongoing basis, but it’s really content.

I always look forward to sometimes we. Hide in your hide in your hole for a weekend and just read, all day long and just put together these thoughts and create these kind of common threads that, for you just pop up and just become obvious at a certain point.

But for all of us watching it it’s so cool to see these very unique perspectives that are really rooted in very. Good data. And so I think there’s good reason why those have been very top performing episodes. Yeah. What have been your, what have been your favorite ones there and your favorite revelations?

I guess the stuff that have impacted you the most. Yeah. I think, earlier on this year in talking about inflation there was a kind of a big. Debate is this transitory, is this gonna be around for a while? How do interest rates affect all that and what was causing inflation? I think that was a big one earlier on this year.

That was really helpful just to break it down because you see all the headlines, you hear all the kind of NA narrative and so much of it is just political motivated. So you just never know what’s actually true. It’s so hard to. The truth. Yeah. And so just to break it down, it became really clear to me of what’s driving this.

And I think that was, a really good one. And then just some of the recent ones and like the more specific, the latest one we did with Robin, winkled your point. And even before that, with just you and I talking about oil and gas economics, There’s just, it seems to me that there’s a brewing energy crisis.

We actually named one of the episodes of brewing energy crisis and a, and really globally. It’s something that is, I think being tampered down a little bit by some of the, political parties, because it’s a way bigger problem than they want to let on. And, it’s it also.

Impact sentiment of consumers and how they’re spending. So it could, cost some pretty big turmoil, but I think there’s some really big trends going on that investors need to be aware of. And it’s, it was shocking to me to see some of the actual data be presented.

So those, one of the big revelations, I also really love the one cause I love economics, but just the one with John Chang that we did, who. That was so good. He’s the so good. I’m looking back. Remember Nick school of the ZDA. That was another great one. Yeah, that was another good one. We gotta get him back.

We do. I, yeah, that, cuz that was right before all the interest rate increases started happening that is, cool to market a little bit, but they had some great data there. Jim, what are some of your favorite ones that you’ve, you’ve been, I know you rented the sports team one.

It was just like our last one was really fun. Yeah. I have the ones that everyone that you all have just mentioned have been great. I honestly, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I actually have everyone I’ve watched, I’ve loved. I’ve learned. So from no, really it’s phenomenal content.

I think what was, maybe the most fun one for me was the Was the sports deal because it was so out in the left field. I’m like, yeah, why are you asking me to cohost this when I get just unintended just ask questions and let the guy talk. But it actually got my my head Spinn and I’m thinking about some of the possibilities, because it’s such a real estate play.

Hold among so many other things, but it’s oh duh, they’re going in the middle of this city that wants something to bring to congeal some energy into their city. It’s really about city transformation, which touches another one of our, as principles, our Aspen, our passions.

But it really involves that cuz they get these stakeholders involved and. Go find a great location to do a stadium and the, soccer is something that America’s way behind the curve on, but all of these kids for now for a couple generations have been playing soccer. At a, a Y O level or whatever.

And now all of a sudden it’s wow, these pros are springing up everywhere. And I’m thinking, my opportunity bell is going off like crazy on that one now, knowing exactly how and where to stick the fork in. Hey, guess what? That’s why we have these pot. That’s why we meet these people that they’re already well into the beast.

They could show us where to stick before. Cause that was a fun one for me. And I really do enjoy just to double back. Bob’s. E economics ones when he, whenever he talks about this. Cause I know he, I know how deeply he studies stuff, but you have a really gift at bringing it to a, communicating it in a way.

Is easy for a guy like me. That’s not into all of that to grasp, I really love the macro, sense of it. But I know that there’s a lot of beneath the level beneath the surface research and cuz I try to poke holes sometimes in your theories, and I’m not surprised anymore, but you always.

The reason that’s not gonna do that, Jim, is this, okay. All right. , you’re really do, you’re really, you’re studying it at depth, but you’re presenting it in a very accessible way. And I, I appreciated that about you before we ever formed Aspen. When I used to hear you speak at conferences and do.

An economic summary. I remember you talking about that one deal where alls it takes is making one good investment every 10 years to create wealth. And it’s I’ve made three crappy ones every year, but so anyway, I’ve always appreciated those episodes. Yeah. That’s what in good investment per decade is all you need to make.

That’s that was the, have some amazing data on that stuff. Yeah. We have lots of interesting studies on volatility and, just really the keys of wealth production, wealth creation, and the numbers, just numbers don’t lie. Yeah, we’ve got a new one. I’ve, Ben has seen at little presentation we’re gonna be doing here about some of the mega trends coming up in the, this year, next year.

So again, gonna be eye opening for folks. Yep. Yep. Get ready, get excited. Just I’m super pumped for getting this content out there. Awesome. I wanna transition a little bit, so we’ve looked back. All the fun things that we’ve done so far to this point, but we kinda wanna look forward now, too.

So it’s obviously it’s our anniversary episode been doing this for a year and we have no plans of stopping. And in fact, we wanna really, hope to continue to ramp up the content and over time, be able to put out more content, and and. And we want to create this community. So one of the cool things we’re doing is we’re actually launching a separate website for the podcast.

Up to this point, it’s been a subpage on our Aspen funds website. We’re now launching a whole separate website. And really in doing that, we wanna create really launch this brand in a whole new way and create a community around this podcast and around alternative investments.

And we have a lot of things that, and, you know, down the road that we wanna be doing and things that we hope we can get to, but in, in the near term we have some cool things that we’re gonna be sharing with soon, but just as a little kind of teaser the kind of first thing I wanted to mention to all our listeners, we have.

Really grown this organically. We haven’t really done really any ad spending around it and just have just been by word of mouth and just talking at conferences and sharing about our insights and just trying to put out as much content as we can, but we’re really getting to the point where, we’re starting to hit some pretty nice growth and the numbers of the listeners in we wanna get this into more hands in more ears I should say of listeners.

And so we’re. Put together a little referral program. And so if you believe in this podcast, if you like this content we wanna get you some fun stuff. And just to promote this brand. So invest like a billionaire. We have. Some pretty cool prizes and not prizes, I should say swag that we’ll be giving for referrals.

So we’re gonna have a whole new kind of system where you can just easily just send an email to a friend or a family member that you might think would be interested in, in, in hearing the content and the podcast. And if you get them to sign up and you get, get certain levels, you’re gonna get different prizes.

So some of the things we’ve we’ve got in store are pretty fun. I’m actually sitting in my office here. I’m gonna pull up this. Little chocolate bar here. If you’re watching, you can see it. And if you’re not, you should go check it on YouTube. But this is a chocolate bar. It’s a billion dollar bill.

What they get picture of a chocolate bar with your face on it. Who’s that guy. As much as I know, you’d want to see my face on it, we’ll actually put your face on it. And that’s the thing. We actually do this for our podcast guests, which has been really fun. We’ll, put their face on a billionaire bill, but we’re gonna do that for you.

And as an option, we have some really cool Yetis with invest like a billionaire on it. Hey, and drink from that. Jim’s got his, and we’ve got some other fun stuff too. So just be aware, we’re gonna be sending out this referral program and it’s just a way for you to help us, spread the good news of of this alternative investment.

Podcast. And then we also, we’ve been doing periodically this series called top of mind where they just shorter little snippets of content around a particular topic. We wanna do more of those and what kind of spawn the idea was sometimes there’s like something going on in the economy.

There’s something going on. In the headlines, the news. And it doesn’t warrant maybe a full episode, but it’s something that is interesting as timely, as relevant. And we’d love to hear from you as listeners to tell us what are things that are on your mind, what are things you’d be great about?

What are things that you would love to see more content around? Yeah. And ultimately this podcast is for you. We’re doing this selfishly for our own reasons, it’s we wanna we’re, we’d love to expand our, outreach of. Getting ideas to all of you and from things you’re seeing and hearing and wanna hear more about.

So on this page this website, it’s the billionaire podcast.com. That’ll be in the show notes. You can go to ask anything and there’ll be several ways that you can reach out to us and it’ll get straight to me and straight to our marketing team of ways that you can. Share feedback you can share.

I’d love to hear them topics. We’re gonna make it really easy just to send you can on a little button on the side, you can hit send a voicemail. You’re just literally talking to your phone on mobile, on the website. And it’ll send us a little voicemail recording. So we wanna make it easy just to have you all share us, share with us feedback ideas, and.

If it’s a good enough idea or a good enough topic, we’ll probably do a show on it. Just want to throw that out there and would really, Hey Ben, can I ask, what would that include now? Somebody who actually has. Or knows somebody who has a business model that we may not even, when I met Bob, I was, I started this thing, buying these defaulted second mortgages.

Who heard of that at that point in time and it became our company for the first several years. We’re all, this is a little bit self-serving, but if you know somebody or you’re involved yourself in a niche business that you feel like. Be a match and fall within one of our macro thesis, put that in the notes too, say hundred percent ask anything, whatever . Yeah. Anything would definitely entail that. So we would love any potential guests that you would have any potential niches or asset classes that you want us to hit on. Anything, an article that, that you’ve read. On, CNBC or the wall street journal or something that you think would be interesting to touch on.

We’d love to see. So yeah, please, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be fun. We’re hoping we can get more of of that kind of content out and then in tandem with that, but a little bit separate is we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast our investor club, right? We haven’t pushed this super hard just cuz it’s a newer thing.

We’re starting to form out, but we have a link on the website, the billionaire podcast.com. Where you can sign up for our investor club. And this is it’s not for everybody. And we actually have an application that you have to fill out to, to join the investor. But we’re gonna be starting to put together more in a community feel and content that’s exclusive to this group on a, consistent basis that we’re gonna be able to share and really build more community of other investors that are looking to get outta the public markets, looking to get these types of assets and wanna create more community around that.

So if that’s of interest to you, if you’re looking to deploy capital in the next, few months, and you’ve got liquidity, you’ve got appetite. If you’re a credit. Definitely click on that and apply to join the investor club. We wanna make it easy. So again, this is the phase 2.0 of the podcast and we’re really excited about it.

So again, please check out the new website. Billionaire podcast.com for any of these new things and leave a review. If you haven’t already, we’ve already got several new reviews recently that just continue to help, just get better rankings within, Spotify and iTunes. And those are really awesome.

I really appreciate seeing the great feedback there. And then again, reach out to us on things that you’re seeing that are interesting for things to comment on different future episodes. And ultimately we’re so thankful to have you as listeners. We don’t take that lightly. We wanna continue to create curate really good content on this podcast and you guys can help us do that.

So thanks so much for listening and a year from now, I’ll be maybe doing this again and looking back and all the things we did do. Thanks for listening and appreciate you all.