In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, Stuart Turley welcomes Paul Auslander, CFP, and President of Seabridge Private Wealth, for a sharp, insightful dive into the economic and investment landscape following the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” They unpack the bill’s impact on tax cuts, interest rates, energy dominance, and bond market stability. From LNG exports and nuclear microreactors to AI, housing, and the global investment rebound, this episode explores key financial trends shaping the future—with a healthy dose of humor, geopolitics, and T. Boone Pickens’ wisdom.
I had an absolute blast visiting with Paul, and we highly recommend staying with Paul and your CFP and CPA before tax season. Paul brought some real insights to investing in our current market.
I loved Paul’s insights and his comments on the bond markets. His joke about “James Carville, wanting to come back instead of the Pope or a 400 baseball hitter, come back as the bond market and intimidate everyone.”
Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulauslander/
Thank you, Paul, for stopping by the podcast and for your leadership in the investing and finance market. – Stu
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
01:06 – Tax Cuts Made Permanent
03:35 – High-Tax States Benefit
04:10 – CPA Burnout & Complexity
04:31 – T. Boone Pickens Legacy
05:15 – Tariffs & U.S. Manufacturing
06:07 – Market Uncertainty & Bonds
08:46 – Debt & Bond Market Risks
09:40 – Trump vs. The Fed
10:15 – Interest Rates & Real Estate
12:09 – LNG Boom & EU Demand
13:34 – Global Markets Rebound
13:42 – Wind Project Stalls
15:40 – Wind Turbine Failures
16:08 – Nuclear & Micro Reactors
18:02 – 2025 Investment Picks
19:52 – Contact & Wrap-Up
Make sure to check with your CPA or reach out to Paul and check your portfolio before it is too late.
Are you Paying High Taxes in New Jersey, New York, or California?
Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone group. Well, you know, we are in an absolute crazy time in the United States where we have total fear mongering going on about the big, beautiful new bill. We have investment wondering what’s going on. And then all of a sudden we have the stock market hitting all new highs. We have drill baby drill going on and we have the three horsemen of the energy dominance. It’s taking on Drill Baby Drill with Chris Wright, Secretary Burgum. And Lee Zeldin leading the charge in industry and energy, getting out there and getting the investments, but we want to talk about what’s going on in the markets and what are people looking at for investments today, we have Paul Auslander, and he is the CFP and president of Seabridge private wealth. And you’ve been doing this for at least a week or two. How are you today?
Paul Auslander [00:01:07] I’m doing well, and yes, it’s been a few weeks, but no, I’m doing great, Stu. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Stuart Turley [00:01:14] Hey, I just saw you on Forbes and that was a very good, very good interview that you did there and tell us a little bit about what your thoughts were on the big, new, beautiful bill and the tax cuts, because that has made a big difference.
Paul Auslander [00:01:28] No question. I mean, well, the first thing is that it’s it’s one of the best tax bills I’ve seen in a long time in the sense that the first thing it did is it made permanent the tax cuts of 2017, which had they not been done, would have been the largest tax increase in this country’s history. So that I think is lost when everybody starts parsing away at the details that that was one of most important parts. But it had The benefits completely ranging from the folks that are very wealthy all the way down to the folks that working a day job. And you had things like the interest on auto loans, which hasn’t been deductible for years up to $10,000. Now, that’ll sunset in 2029. I’m hoping it’ll be continued because that means a lot to people. The salt deductions, which I’ve had some debates with people about, but you don’t have to be a wealthy person and living in Long Island, New York, where you’re $30,000, $40,000 a year between property taxes and state income taxes, it’s a real life-changing event to have those deductible again. The corporate tax cuts, the expensing of plants and equipment, I mean, you just go down the list. There are a number of benefits to this tax bill that I think are overlooked. And you know, the thing that gets the… The press and the attention are the cuts, right, and Medicaid and various other things like that. And I could argue that. I mean, I come from a small area, Kentucky, that’s very rural, and I have friends down there, doctors are worried about their hospitals, and I understand that, and I’m hoping that’s gonna be resolved in the coming months in Congress. But in general, it’s made the market look good, and I think it’ll continue to make the market look good.
Stuart Turley [00:03:04] So as a financial advisor, you know, for my day job at Sandstone, we sit back and we’ll take a look at oil and gas deals. We’ll evaluate whether or not it’s a good investment for us to take a look and investing in that deal. And that, and believe it or not, the funny thing is Paul, some of the biggest listeners we have are in New York, New Jersey, California, Delaware. And what does all that got high taxes? Oops. So that’s a very big deal out there for those kinds of changes.
Paul Auslander [00:03:35] No question. No question, yeah. And there were, you know, there’s still a lot to be done. The tax code, it’s a very frustrating document in the sense that this one was 900 plus pages, right? I mean, I have friends who are CPAs and not to diminish this concept, but I find it amazing that more and more of them have not pulled the plug and gotten out of that business because it’s just maddening how they have to learn these new rules. And I’m not an accountant. I work very closely with CPAs, but I see what they go through trying to understand it. And I think this one’s along that line too. Again, it’s, it, it it’s uber complicated.
Stuart Turley [00:04:10] I’ll tell you, I did manage to fail accounting at Oklahoma state university. So I will admit, I admit that that is me and accounting don’t mix, but I’ll tell you I, we, we’ve got a, uh, a fellow person, the T-Boon Pickens. You were mentioned that before we were chit chatting before the show. He knew how to find money. Didn’t
Paul Auslander [00:04:31] Yes, he did. You know, as I mentioned to you before we got on air, when I first started in the business, he was one of those gunslingers that wasn’t in New York, you know, he wasn’t a Ivan Boesky or a Michael Milken, although Milken was based at LA, you know, we spent a lot of time in New york with Drexel. But I mean, you’d read about these guys and what they did. And some of them did it a little bit on the edge and were perhaps even went over the line in the wrong direction. But Pickens sort of had a had had a following among us and started in the investment business where He was of the old school, wildcatter, he was out there. You know, I think I read that he went bust as many times as he went rich. And as he put it the last time, I just want to make sure it’s on the R side rather than on the B side.
Stuart Turley [00:05:15] So when we sit back and we took, you know, some of the folks that I, when the tariffs started, the tariff war started, I got really tickled at president Trump when he started the tarif war and everybody at the kitchen table was like, we’re all going to die. So, you hear the, you, you’re here, the press over here going, wait a minute, we’ll gonna die cause tariffs and everything else. Well, all you have to do is have it manufactured in the U S and it seems like we’re not doing so bad now. They were getting billions rolling in. I’ll tell you, it really is going to make a big difference if he can get the ship building going back again, so that we can build our own tankers and those kinds of things, think about the jobs that’s going to create the high paying jobs and, and, in all of the tariffs, it seems like it might be on a roll here.
Paul Auslander [00:06:07] You know, I think you put that well. You know the concern, and I understood this, I have a number of CEOs of fairly large companies that are clients of mine. And frankly, they were deer in the headlights for a while, frozen. And these are smart men and women who generally don’t get intimidated, but the word uncertainty kept cropping up. They just, you know, you got a guy like President Trump. Who will throw out a bombastic number. He’s negotiating and people should realize that by now, but the point is that the company’s had no idea where these numbers were gonna wind up and it scared a lot of people and it froze them, I think. Now they’re seeing that, you know, with negotiation, it comes down to a level that people can understand and accept 15, 20% is not gonna bankrupt countries and it’s gonna try to get us back to being able to be treated fairly by other countries. I think the big thing and we discussed this a little bit earlier you’re looking at 25 to 30 billion a month coming in times 12 times 10 years, that’s a significant number. You know, the thing that I worried about all the way through in the economics is not the stock market as much as the bond market. The bond market was telegraphing to us that if the didn’t work. That the increase in debt in this country could be overwhelming. And that concerned me as an advisor to clients. I have a number of folks that sell businesses and have liquidity events and now they’re 65 years old and they made their pot of gold and they’re not going back to work. So we can’t lose that pot of goal. A lot of times we put that money to work in bonds because they’ll use the income coming off the bonds. And when the bond market starts getting rattled, it makes folks in my business nervous. James Carville, one of Clinton’s advisors many years had a pretty famous piece. He used to say, I think if I believed in reincarnation rather than coming back as the pope or a 400 baseball hitter, I’d like to come back as a bond market and intimidate everybody. And I think, if you understand… The bond market, that was a pretty apropos comment. So that’s been avoided and I think that’s important because it’s gonna keep the deficit from increasing. But I do worry about that. That’s that sneaky little cancer in our economic system that could derail us down the road if we’re not careful. So a combination of interest rates dropping so our debt service will be less expensive to the country is very important. But I also think the terrorists being able to take down some of that debt is important too. Sort of why I worry about what happens in the elections in 26 and 28 because just as quickly as tariffs were put on Tariffs could go away And if we don’t have another mechanism to fill that gap on the debt, we’re back into that problem with the bond market. So it’s a long-winded answer saying he’s been shown to be right with that, Trump, and I’m hoping it continues.
Stuart Turley [00:08:47] I like the way you just phrased all of that, but that gave me about 15 being I’m sitting here. I’ve got about 19 questions now rolling through my, you were talking about the bond market and I would not want to come back as a bond market in Japan because Japan’s bond market is about to crater. There’s a whole difference between Japan’s, bond market and our, our bond market because we have hopeful of, of getting out of debt. So be careful which, you know, as you’re sitting there saying, I want to be reincarnated as a bond market, let’s pick which country to come back at.
Paul Auslander [00:09:19] I’d be all right if James goes to the Japanese bond market. That’s fine with me. No, no, you’re right. You’re right, and you clarified a great point. I mean, our financial system is second to none, and it can weather… I mean we’ve proven it, right? COVID, we’ve seen it in a massive rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve. Our economy is amazingly resilient. It continues to be.
Stuart Turley [00:09:40] I am, and I’m, this morning, at the day we’re recording this, President Trump announced that he’s firing the Fed governor for fraudulently doing her home problems. And again, that’s alleged, but the forms are the forms and she, it doesn’t look good for her. That means that he is going to have another chair or another vote that he can put in because I believe he has the appointing of power to be able to put a new one in. That’s another chair and another vote for lower interest rates as it comes in, which is a huge win for president Trump.
Paul Auslander [00:10:15] President Trump is a real estate developer. He’s never met an interest rate he doesn’t want to make lower. And I think I think this is a byproduct of that. The Federal Reserve governor and I love this country, so I’m a big believer in innocent until proven guilty. But the fact of the matter is if you’re a regulator having something to do with setting the policy of interest rates and then you turn around and self serve by lowering your own interest rate in a way that’s not necessarily legal, that’s obviously doesn’t look good. The answer is there. But the fact of the matter is, regardless of what happens with her, I think interest rates are coming down. I worry, again, this Fed independence is a big deal, right? And you saw the markets waffle a little bit early this morning when that came out, because they are worried about if this escalates and then Powell gets in the middle of it and it turns out to be something only Trump could do, which is get this front and center all over the world. That may not have positive implications initially. So I hope that part of it is taken care of. You’re absolutely right. He’s moving in the direction where he’s gonna get control of that and we’re gonna see interest rates down as a result.
Stuart Turley [00:11:21] And I’ll tell you, this is an exciting time for folks as we sit back and try to take a look at, you know, the where we are going as the investments coming in. The amount of trillions of dollars that have been committed just as a, but, you know, talking between us girls here, I’m a little bit kind of concerned about the EU and the billions of dollars they’ve committed to buy LNG, that we can support that amount of exports and things. That’s a great thing to have that wanting to be able to be done, but we’ve got to get those mechanisms and build the ships and build the pipes and and all of those things. But that’s great for energy dominance that we export a lot of energy. I mean, I think that’s a great investment strategy as well too.
Paul Auslander [00:12:10] Yeah, you know, and you touched on something, if I could segue into that a little bit, I’ve been pushing for a number of years, even though those markets haven’t done as well, that clients diversify into more international. You know, when I first started in the business, everybody was, pick a number, 30, 40% of their equities were international and the balance were US. Well, in the last five to seven years, the US companies, the US markets have dominated. And so most people are 100% US equities. Starting back in 24, second to third quarter, really fourth quarter, it really took off. You started to see the international markets do very well. And at some point you could lay some of that credit to President Trump. He bludgeoned those countries into starting to pay more for their defense. If they’re adding to their defense, they’re also going to have to spend more on their infrastructure. I was born in Germany. I still have relatives in Germany, it’s amazing how cheap those people are. And I say this with great love and respect for my my now deceased grandmother, my uncle who’s 95 years old. But the fact of the matter is they needed to spend more money, and that’s going to build those companies up because their defense spending is up, their infrastructure spending is… If you look at the indices for this year, the S&P is up something like 8%, 9%, but the All World Country Index, basically the world’s S&Ps, that’s up 18%, 19%. And so I think that’s gonna continue for the next couple of years, and part that will be energy.
Stuart Turley [00:13:34] Oh, that’d be interesting. Uh, now Orsted is one that I would definitely not want to invest in. They’ve got a bit of a black eye going.
Paul Auslander [00:13:42] The Revolution Wind Project is, well, they don’t, they haven’t canceled it. If I understand it, it’s a stop work order. But it’s, you know, it has its own connotations, right? If you don’t mind me going down this path, I’ve been following this a lot. Forty five of the 65 turbines have already been built. They and their partners have spent billions on this. And all of a sudden, this this this project is stopped, which will be interesting. I find the added it’s almost a Netflix special. If you think about it for a moment, that it’s Denmark, the U.S. And Denmark have another little interesting tiff going on, and I wonder how much Greenland factors into that. We’ll see how these negotiations go. But yeah, to your point.
Stuart Turley [00:14:22] You knew exactly that you’re you and I are why
Paul Auslander [00:14:24] in this same little tip. Well, it just, you know, so I have family up in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and literally if you stand on a hill in Connecticut or Rhode Island, you can see where they’re building out there. And so, yeah, it’s an interesting concept, but you’re right, I think I’d be shorting them.
Stuart Turley [00:14:39] Absolutely. And you sit back and take a look, you know, president Trump, I have to hand it to president Trump the other day. I’ve been talking about for years that wind turbines don’t last 15, 20 years, 30 years, they last at a minimum, they become fiscally, irresponsibly stupid at eight years, They start failing at three years at three years they’re failing. And then like the inflation reduction bill, I’ve got a reports from folks that they start redoing the turbines at three years, and then they are calling them nameplate upgrades when they do that, then they can last them, you know, to that eight year at eight years, they become so fiscally unsolvable. And president Trump use that, that number that I’ve been talking about for years, the other day when he was talking to Ursula of the EU, he said. When farms don’t last eight years, like we’re president Trump. Where did you get that number?
Paul Auslander [00:15:40] That’s a great piece of Intel. I did not realize that. I had heard some some friends of mine that were engineers, but when they start talking that language it’s above my pay grade, but that’s very interesting.
Stuart Turley [00:15:51] And it’s all because of the way the subsidies have rolled out to the wind farms that they have been feeding this misnomer of the name plates. So when you’re investing in energy, be careful of the type of energy that you’re investing in.
Paul Auslander [00:16:08] So that raises a question. If you don’t mind me just throwing this out, I’ve noticed from my German folks and my European contacts, we have an analyst in London that there’s suddenly a renewed interest in either bringing back their nuclear plants online or building new ones, which five years ago even, but certainly 10 years ago was taboo in a lot of those countries because the Green parties were all over it. I keep where my wife’s family is all around the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area. And as you probably know, Microsoft has taken over Three Mile Island and reconstitute that plan. I keep thinking that with modern technology, nuclear may be an answer to a number of our problems. And I’m ignorant on these things from the standpoint of the technology, but.
Stuart Turley [00:16:54] I think it is, and I had the pleasure of interviewing Jay Yu, who was the founder of Nanonuclear. They’re building micro reactors. They’ve got two that are two locations that are already approved. Then their target is, within the next few years, building a hundred of these, which is about the size of a semi-reactor. And then they can put out a megawatt to 10 megawatts, depending on the size of the unit on just from a small trailer, tractor trailer size reactor, which would mean ships, which we’d mean in small cities, which will mean all of a sudden, all these business use cases. We’re, we’re becoming that we’re coming that way. So nuclear is definitely that way and you mentioned Germany’s nuclear. I found it interesting that last year when they went through They just bought a ton, lots of uranium from Russia, even though their nuclear reactors are closed down and they don’t have the votes to turn them back on. So at least they bought the uranium.
Paul Auslander [00:18:03] Well, they’re thinking in the future and I think again, you know, that that’s I mean, the power consumption here, the electricity for data centers, I mean you go right down the list. I mean it’s not going backwards. It’s increasing almost exponentially. So I think the world has to look at that carefully.
Stuart Turley [00:18:18] Oh, you bet. So what do you see in your crystal ball for your investors here in the United States? What are you, what are your hot.
Paul Auslander [00:18:26] Right now. Of course the easy low-hanging fruit there is AI, right? AI I think is in the second maybe third inning of potential where it’s going. Unfortunately, I think defense spending is a close second, not only here domestically, but internationally. I grew up in the Star Trek era and I wish everybody were like Mr. Spock, but there are too many Klingon warships out there and I just don’t, I think, defense spending is going to continue. I think housing is going be on a tear, particularly if interest rates go to where I think they’re gonna go. There’s already too little housing out there anyway, and these have stopped building. I think that’s an issue. An area where I’ve had a lot of success with clients, and I think it’ll continue, is utilities, because of those data centers. They’re investing in them. The electric drain on those is, I think, an opportunity for people to make money. And then finally, and I’ve said this to other folks, healthcare has kind of languished, But people our age… And I see it with clients, baby boomers, they may get cheap on a vacation or a car, but they will spend like it’s going out of style on their healthcare. Whether it’s GLP-1 drugs or Botox or something, colonoscopies, you name it, go right down the list. They wanna live longer and they’re gonna spend money towards it. And I think the healthcare profession has figured that out. That would be my order of preference. And I there’s a number of investment themes out there that are just beginning.
Stuart Turley [00:19:53] Wow. Well, how do people get a hold of you?
Paul Auslander [00:19:56] SeaBridge Private Wealth is a division of SeaBridge Investment Advisors. The website’s www.seabridge.com. You’re welcome to give them my cell phone if somebody wants it. I love talking to people, whether they become a client or not. I’m based out of the Tampa area of Florida, but our company is in Atlanta and New Jersey as well as here in Florida.
Stuart Turley [00:20:15] Well, that sounds, and I also include your LinkedIn information as well, too, in the show notes as well. So thank you for stopping by the podcast. I look forward to speaking to you again. And I’d like to have you back again, because I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I did too.
Paul Auslander [00:20:30] Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Hey, we’ll talk to you soon.