Episode 104 - Biblically Responsible Investing with Robert Netzly
Subscribe to the Podcast:
Robert Netzly is a globally recognized authority in the Biblically Responsible Investing movement and author of the Amazon #1 best-selling book "Biblically Responsible Investing". He is the Founder and CEO of Inspire Investing, a leading innovator in providing low cost, high impact, biblically responsible investing solutions to institutions, advisors, and investors. Robert is a frequent contributor on FOX Business, Bloomberg, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Christian Post and other major global media for his thought leadership in the faith-based, environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing marketplace. Today, Robert joins us to talk about key aspects of Biblically responsible investing, what it means to be an active and engaged shareholder, and how your faith is reflected in the way we shepherd our capital.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast, Luke. Great to be doing this with you.
Luke Roush: It is great to be on. It's good to be on with Robert again.
Henry Kaestner: It is. It is, is great. In the last episode we had done. I recall that I talked about my very limited economics, background and capability at the University of Delaware. I just kind of stumbling through micro and macro as I was spending more of my time selling T-shirts. But I didn't ask you about your background, and I don't know that anybody knows on the podcast that you actually study public policy at Duke. You must have had economics at some point in time. Right?
Luke Roush: Me, absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of it more than I'd like to remember, but I really enjoyed it, particularly the micro, because you can kind of get your arms around it and you get to see it every day.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, yeah. OK, so speaking of economics, we have a guy that we've had on. This may be their first repeat customer on the Faith Driven Investor podcast, and we've got Robert Nazli in the house. And Robert has been a great friend of the movement and has been an inspiration to us and that he's gone out and launched a firm against all odds, finding a need in the market and really just really launching something really special. We've had you on before, Robert, and where you gave a little bit of a longer biographical sketch, but I want to revisit some of that too. Who are you? Where do you come from? What is inspire?
Robert Netzly: Yeah, it is good to be back. And if I am the first be customer, wow, what an honor. I think unless you just can't find another guest to be on here. And then so, you know, it's absolutely one of those things. Yeah, no. My economic background consists of learning how to grow up on food stamps with a single mother with a younger brother who is autistic. And, you know, parents, you know, went through the 70 drug scene and everything and just not, you know, a typical background that you might think of as a business leader went to community college and dropped out my junior year, you know, done all kinds of different things along the way. A lot of ministry, you know, at our local church that we kind of helped start up back in the day and somehow by God's grace ended up in the investment industry and really took to it, you know, so that's my background, you know, in a nutshell, but I'm certainly not the guy you would have picked in high school or junior high or anything else is like, Hey, this is this is the guy who is going to start an investment firm. I got D's in math, hated public speaking, and here I am, talking to lots of people about money. So there you go.
Luke Roush: Well, you know, the concept of biblically responsible investing is really something that you helped really to initiate, maybe to share a bit more about that and then maybe how the movement has evolved over time.
Robert Netzly: Yeah. And I certainly didn't invent the idea, for sure. You know, my professional background was at Wells Fargo Private Client Service. Working out in Carmel, California really is happy as a clam there and then of learning how to do math and learning how to talk to people again by God's grace. But then I stumbled across this whole concept of biblically responsible investing online one day. This idea that you're not just looking at the financial returns of a portfolio, but you know, God probably cares about the kinds of companies we're investing in. Are these companies manufacturing abortion drugs or selling pornography or violating human rights in their supply chains? What are these companies doing? What are you doing as an owner to profit from these things? And what does the Bible have to say about that? So that's that's typically responsible investing. When I first looked into that, I honestly the Holy Spirit has gripped my heart because here I was president of our local pro-life pregnancy center at the time, and I discovered I owned stocks in three companies that manufacture abortion drugs and got hit me upside the head with the fact that every time that young lady goes across the street has an abortion. Planned Parenthood. I just made money in that transaction. I literally profited, recommending all my clients to do the same thing, and that was my intro to biblically responsible investing.
Luke Roush: It was there. Was there a moment in time where all of a sudden or maybe an experience where you realized, like, I need to leave wells, I need to start a firm? You know, oftentimes in that formation story of a company, there's some sort of injustice or something that's, you know, just broken in the world that you feel called to fix. Let me speak a little bit to kind of that catalytic zero to one moment.
Robert Netzly: Yep, and it came really quick. Once I again stumbled across this realization, I just I could not do my job with a clean conscience anymore. In two weeks time, I was just dead in the water, which was, you know, troubling because I didn't know if I could even stay in the business. I've never met anybody doing what we do now. I have no conception that there is even something else going on in the industry, you know, in other places, in a Christian sense. So I went home, told my wife, Hey, honey, I think the God's call somewhere else, and I need to work somewhere else in a different industry. And here's what I found. And she's like, Well, we got two babies in the mortgage. So what's the plan? Right? And ended up just was this close to going to seminary? I was honestly in conversations with multiple seminaries, and like that was I was just going to do a pastor thing. And the only way I could think of staying in the business was, well, I suppose I could, you know, leave the bank start an independent firm that only did some sort of. Look, gold type, you know, investing, but that's crazy, because I don't have the experience or money or connections or, you know, all the things that you're supposed to have before you do something like that. But as we prayed as God does, he just made it unmistakably clear through a number of ways. But the compulsion was just undeniable that that's exactly what I was supposed to do. So two months later made the incredibly frightening decision to leave the bank left my clients there with a team I'd been with previously started over or just need a laptop. Less than two months of savings, the bank fully prepared never to pay my mortgage ever again in my life and fully convicted. This is exactly what God is calling me to do. It doesn't mean it's going to be financially successful, so maybe I'll go broke in six months and move on to the family with my mom and whatever and then go to seminary. But whatever God like this is your plan. I know this is your call in my life and I've got to obey. So that was, you know, a little over 10 years ago. So while the think
Henry Kaestner: Robert, one of the things that you've talked about a bunch is what does it look like to engage with companies and be kind of an activist shareholder? Having some skin in the game? Being a shareholder affords you a different opportunities to be able to witness and be heard. Talk to us a little bit about what that looks like in the investing you all do.
Robert Netzly: Yeah, and this is again, I mean, it was accidental almost that this whole business started. I got into this industry and then really sort of fell into this idea of shareholder engagement wasn't something that was on our, you know, business plan to do. But as we, you know, as guidance really grew this business from those early days and started opening our eyes to there's more Christians in this industry that God is doing the same sort of work in their hearts. It wasn't mine and looking for ways to do this. It just became evident that there is a larger voice that needs to be shared with corporate America. And these companies were investing in, you know, occasionally a quote good company will sort of get off the rails or something. And now we got to dump some out of our portfolio or think of, you know, do something there. And I think the first time that we had a conversation around this idea was a friend of ours in the industry. Another Christian financial advisor was working with Chevron, kind of engaging with them to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood. They've been donating money to Planned Parenthood, and we live near the Chevron headquarters in the Silicon Valley area. And so he asked, You know, can we attend this meeting and stuff like, sure. And so you end up going to this meeting and happy story. Chevron stopped donating money to Planned Parenthood and, you know, the short version of that story. And that led us to sort of think of, well, what other companies might we engage with? And so over this time, when we've seen things at a business that we're invested in or we like to invest in a business that needs a little help, we just pick up the phone and call investor relations, send an e-mail. Investor Relations and we've had amazing success that we never thought we would with many companies, huge companies that are actually interested in hearing from all of their investors, including faith based investors. And oftentimes are very receptive to integrating the feedback they hear from us into their business practices. So it's been really encouraging and it's become a bigger part of our business and kind of day to day here it inspire.
Luke Roush: So you're kind of describing, you know, and this concept of kind of negative screening, positive screening, active engagement, which you're kind of describing, is that third bucket. Maybe you speak a little bit to kind of how you've seen bride evolve over time along all three dimensions of how people might think about their faith being reflected in how they shepherd capital.
Robert Netzly: Yeah, I think historically the exclude part of that equation has been the starting point, going back decades and decades, and it's absolutely essential. I mean, I do believe strongly converted from the word of God that it's just like I should not, as a Christian, be making money from abortions, right? And a number of other things. So we have to be looking at the exclusionary criteria in our portfolios. But then we go beyond that. And really, the nexus of inspire and Inspire was this idea that well, in addition to excluding where the most glorifying companies, I mean, there's companies out there that they're not necessarily Christian or run explicitly by Christians or Christian values, but they're operating in line with God's principles like fairness and morality and ethics and things like that, right? Surprise, surprise. And I wonder if we could measure the relative biblical alignment of companies and then invest in those most biblically aligned companies. You know, the most inspiring, positive companies that are creating products that are blessings of people that use them, that have policies and practices that just bless their employees, that bless the communities they operate in a lot of different specific ways. And so we created what we call our Inspire Impact Score methodology, which is just our rules based approach to scoring companies from a negative hundreds of positive 100. We invest in anything above zero, anything below zero we exclude. But really, we're looking for those highest scoring companies as a real, faith based approach to environmental, social and governance investing ESG. And that's been a big trend as we're seeing more investors. Is sort of ride the coattails of a broadly secular, you know, progressively secular, oftentimes ESG movement in the industry and say, Hey, you know, the Bible talks about environment, the Bible talks about social, the Bible talks about governance. What about a biblical worldview on those issues from a positive perspective? So we invest in those highest rated companies from a biblical lens in those categories? And then the third is that engagement where we have this, you know, as investors, we have an opportunity to call the companies that we invest in. We can file shareholder resolutions and get involved in proxies. If you want to or just very casually just off the books to have conversations, say, Hey, you know, I'm an investor, I'm a Christian, I care about certain things and you know, x y z like, please don't give money to Planned Parenthood. That's something that I don't really want my company doing. Here's why. In a number of other issues. So that's that exclude, endorse, engage sort of framework that we use here to inspire. And we're seeing a lot of other faith based asset managers and wealth managers get more involved in that, which is really exciting to think. You know, as Christians, as the industry, there's a lot of money 20 trillion dollars plus that are controlled by Protestants, evangelicals and Catholics in this country alone. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds. That's a lot of capital that can have a lot of influence if we just are intentional with those conversations.
Henry Kaestner: One of the things I want to do is just go off script just a little bit. We've got a great carryover audience with Faith Driven Entrepreneur and you are a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. You've seen an opportunity, a problem to be solved. You've leaned into it, you've created a business around it, a business that has grown very rapidly. What's it like just to navigate through all that? As you know, your interview by The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, all of a sudden the spotlights on you and the more influence you have, the more critics you have. What's that ride been like for the last five years?
Robert Netzly: Unexpected as everything else, and to flesh that out a little bit. Yeah, I mean, from the moment I left Wells Fargo and started talking to clients about this concept, it was obviously God was at work, people's jaws at the floor, their eyes opened like, Wow, I've never thought about this before. How do I invest this way? I had to bring other advisors into the practice, not my plan. The influence and business just started growing, and I have no business training background, as I alluded to, and it's been failing forward fast and trying to keep up with what God is doing. So there's a whole lot of learning on the fly. A whole lot of build the airplane before you hit the ground, FDE jump off the cliff and all of those analogies that entrepreneurs are aware of. Our particular story around 2015 is when we started aspire as a standalone company and realize that there's more of an industry and we need to create some products like our exchange traded funds and other asset manager products to really serve the financial advisors that we're trying to go all in for God's glory in the practice. But there was a dearth of, you know, product availability. And so in 2017, we ended up launching the first two ETFs in the New York Stock Exchange on a wing, a prayer hole, up top ramen beans and rice, you know, months without salary. Small, committed team that just knew that. We knew that. We knew that God was calling us to do this, and we had to bring this to market because God's people need to be empowered to invest for us, and they weren't empowered to do that. And so by God's grace, we lost this to its 10 year goal ended up being like a one year goal somehow. And the next day, we're yeah in the New York Times, on the front page of the business section in The Wall Street Journal. All these other hundreds of articles and interviews later, just trial by fire and what we've really learned from that process. Obviously, what we're standing for is not really well embraced by many people in our world these days, and we've been called lots of names, you know, for believing things about the Bible. But we've just been encouraged also that there's such an outpouring of support from people who do love God and do believe the Bible and are just so thankful that first week I got a Twitter message from a gentleman in Zambia and he was just gushing and saying how he's been praying for us ever since he heard the news of the New York Times and that he bought shares in our ETFs in Zambia. You know that very first week we were trading, you know this hundreds, literally hundreds of other stories like that. So we've been incredibly encouraged that this is a work that God is doing. He is opening the eyes of his people all over the world, literally that he cares about how we manage his money and that when you step out in faith to follow God and something he's calling you to do, he's not going to let you get just get run over by the bus, right and say, Oh, sorry, you thought you were following my instructions, but you made a wrong turn? Sorry. Now he either protects us by correcting us when we do make those missteps or encourages on those correct steps that correct direction. But if you're stepping out in faith, you can't make a wrong step is the point. You're not always going to have success when actually you're not always going to, you know, avoid problems, but God will be with you, and he will take you through those things and faithfully follow his leading through prayer to the world through intensive to the Holy Spirit. Direction your life. Without a doubt, we would not be here if it was us trying to figure out a business plan. This has been trying to follow God's leading in our life as a business. A lot of times as counterintuitive. A lot of times it flies against the business convention. We got a lot of advice from a lot of smart people who got decades of industry experience that our idea was terrible and we were going to be miserable failures. Some of them were Christians, but we just knew God was calling us to do it. And it's not bad and thankfully miserable failure. You know, we were managing about $2 billion of assets right now or the third fastest growing registered investment advisory firm in the nation, two years running in 5000 top quartile. Like all glory to God because this was not our plan. And he is just doing a work and we're trying to keep up and be faithful. That's the calling is to be faithful. And that's what we've learned.
Henry Kaestner: We started a new program with the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We're kind of doing a pilot on it. It's called Lightning Round, where we go through, and we asked our guests a series of questions maybe proceeding from easy to hard. But we want to try that with your new game.
Robert Netzly: I'm game. I mean, do I win a prize or something? And I do? Well, that's big
Luke Roush: prize for those. We're in and out burgers and the children's prize?
Henry Kaestner: Yes. All right. Number one, there's been much talk about the fact that the next generation, the next generation is just much more conscious about what matters to them. And I'm thinking about this as a father of a 17 year old and 16 year old and a 20 year old. Big name and teen fashion is Hollister, you move the company to Hollister, California. Is that the pander to this next generation of new investors
Robert Netzly: and move the company away from Hollister, California? To be clear, so we started the company in Hollywood, California, which has no relation to the clothing brand other than enterprising high school students selling their Hollister phys ed. You know the thing about $15 for $75 on eBay? So that's the limit of the connection there. OK.
Henry Kaestner: So I was hoping it was more so for us. It was just brilliant marketing. You're a fourth grade teacher. Give us one quick story 30 seconds or less about your favorite interaction with a fourth grader.
Robert Netzly: Yeah, I was almost the fourth grade teacher. Again, not to correct the host of the show twice in a row, but I went to school with the fourth grade teacher and I was this close. I did guest teaching during college before I dropped out. But an interaction that sticks with making those sort of student teaching things was clear. Today there is this little fourth grader named Paul in California, whereas doing my student teaching and there's a little school garden. We went out there and we were pulling weeds in the school garden and this little kid, you could tell he just didn't come for the best family. He had behavior issues. I was sort of assigned to sit with him like in the class because, you know, the teachers like, you just deal with this and that's, you know, if you can deal with this kid like, great, thank you. So I can teach the other ones. But me and Paul just like, hit it off and I like I started saying, Do look at that, we you just that's a huge weed. You are like a championship weed puller, Paul. And he just his eyes got big and he was pulling more weeds faster with more enthusiasm. Many other kids in that playground would bring every single one of them show me so I could like, give him an attaboy, Paul. And it just was so great. Is it a delight to me to see you when you encourage people?
Henry Kaestner: I imagine that translates into role as being a manager. Yeah, right? Because I'm not going to let the hostage thing go. I visited you in your office. It was on Main Street in Hollister, right?
Robert Netzly: No, we moved it from there. We started it there and we moved it. Now we're in Boise, Idaho, so.
Henry Kaestner: Oh my goodness, I didn't. Yeah.
Robert Netzly: Yeah, we moved. We escape California and are here. So we moved here in 2020. Super happy. We still have an office in California. I just we love our people there and it is a great community and
Henry Kaestner: you did teach fourth graders OK and I did. Yeah. Aside from your interaction with Chevron, what's your favorite interaction you've had with a company in your role at Inspire?
Robert Netzly: That's a hard one. I had some good ones. One company that will remain nameless, so I don't throw them under the bus, but it was a different sort of conversation. It's a major military contractor, major military contractor, and we called them because they had seemingly started moving towards endorsing, like LGBT activists, sort of legislations and policies that were also discriminatory against people of faith and things of that nature. And so we were just ERG. So I ended up having a conversation with the CFO. And after a few minutes of sort of getting to know each other, he's feeling me on the phone. He realizes this is a safe space. He opens up and says, You know, I just got to be honest. I go to the Calvary Chapel in the next town over on a Christian. I love Jesus. I resonate with the things that you're telling me right now and your concerns. But here's my problem. I'm the CFO of this major military contractor, Fortune 500 company. I sit on the board, obviously, and we are just getting hammered by this really militant group that wants to push this particular agenda and push us in this direction. And I don't know what to say, but I can't just say, you know, I'm a Christian. I don't believe in this stuff. I don't want to support it. Like that would be suicide and wouldn't be effective anyway. But he said, Thank you for calling and sharing your perspective because now what I can say in the boardroom is, you know, actually, I just had a conversation with this. Group of investors represent faith based investors all over the globe who see this issue in a different way. And so now I have some counter pressure that I can just say, Hey, you know, we need to serve all of our shareholders. Let's just do our business and let's stay out of the social politics arena and just do a good job for our shareholders and make good products that help our troops and everything else stick to the plan. And so it gave him something to, you know, to bring to the meeting. So I thought that was really cool, that we could have that effect.
Luke Roush: All right. I've got my three verses. You're an early adopter in biblically responsible investing, and yet, you know, 10 years in or 15 or 20 years and you look at sort of the percentage of assets within kind of faith driven institutions that are managed in kind of a traditional British manner. And it's still it's really early. How do you walk alongside, you know, other investors that maybe kind of either on a different glide path towards a different way of doing what they do or maybe have different views? You know, I'll always remember this time when Henry and I were in Texas talking about, you know, we kind of avoid alcohol, firearms, adult entertainment, all these things. I said, let's go back to those firearms for a moment. And so there's different. People who kind of see things differently, a couple that issues that we should all be able to agree on as believers. But then there's also some kind of different perspectives, maybe just kind of walk us through and it's maybe more than a 30 second answer, but walk us through how you have engaged with others in your own journey and then translated that to the journey that there are.
Robert Netzly: It's a good question. And for us, as an asset manager who you know, you buy one of our funds, we can't customize this fund for people, right? And so what we found is that having a standard approach to how we're screening on the screens, we just screen out the same things for everybody. And we don't do the whole custom screening thing. What we found is if you ask a client what's important to you, I'm going to customize your screens. Usually it wraps around an . They don't know how to think about that. And it just kind of it's not a really positive conversation and it sort of stands out. So instead, we're just like, what? Here's the screens and we take the approach where we want to defer to our brothers and sisters who, you know, don't have a problem with alcohol. I'll drink a beer with you, right? But I understand I've got brothers and sisters who have alcoholism in their personal history. Maybe they're had an abusive parent or something, and they don't want to have anything to do with that. So we keep alcohol out of the portfolio. I'm a gun owner. I live in Idaho, you know? But I understand the other side of those issues. And so we add deference to our brothers and sisters. We screen out more than just sort of what, you know, our own personal conscience or whatever else may lead us onto. And what we found is a sort of counterintuitive that the people who care about those issues are absolutely grateful. It allows them to invest with a good conscience in your product. The people that were like, well, alcohol and I don't really care about it. Well, it's not like they want to invest in Budweiser specifically, and they're not going to invest with you because you don't own Budweiser. It's just not really important to them. So as long as you can deliver a good product, the more you screen out, the more people you will actually attract and be able to serve is what we have found, and we see people having challenges and they try to water that down or sort of find a middle road. You end up not appealing to anybody.
Luke Roush: What's something that you see differently than the rest of the world, but they would disagree with you?
Robert Netzly: Yeah. Well, I mean, as far as like the world in general, secular terms of the world, obviously lots of things we see differently. The whole approach to the ESG conversation, you could start with that. You know, we see that differently, both within the faith community and within the secular community. We're a little bit of a pariah in both of those categories, sometimes because in very conservative Christian circles, ESG is, you know, synonymous with, well, progressive liberal. And they think, well, you know, ESG is evil. On the other side of the equation, you know, ESG does mean, well, the liberal progressive. And we're not that. And so like, who are you guys to say that you're is ERG like, you're not like us, you can't believe the Bible of Jesus and also see your ESG. So that's a big differentiator. I think it just makes sense. The Bible tells us to take care of the planet. It doesn't mean that we can't pump out of oil out of the ground, but we should do it in a responsible way. Right. We shouldn't just rape the planet, you know, indiscriminately. We should care for the stewardship of the planet does say how we should care for society people. You know, abortion is wrong. We shouldn't do that. Those are social issues that are not, you know, the progressive ESG style and governance, corporate governance. Yeah, if the executives are stealing from the company, that's wrong. If they're bribing politicians, they shouldn't do that. So having a truly faith based biblical worldview on ESG and using that terminology, I think is important for a number of reasons, but sometimes causes us to need to explain, you know, on both sides of the equation, you know what that actually means.
Luke Roush: What's the new discovery? Since you remove the Boycie, you appreciate the most? And what's the thing that you miss the most about Hollister
Robert Netzly: new discoveries in Idaho, Ben? Just freedom and just leave it at that in a lot of ways. I do miss. There's just so much in California in general. I mean, you can drive to the beach and then later you can be in the mountains and you can be in the redwoods and it's all around there, right? And it really is a special place. Just the diverse topography here. Here you've got mountains, you've got sagebrush, you've got topography, but it's not quite the same. So I'd say I miss that. I was also, I'll say I've been surprised to find that there's phenomenal coffee shops and exquisite cuisine, including sushi. I had the best sushi in Boise, Idaho. We're going to have anywhere else in the world. Come on, come on. There is some really good restaurants here and the coffee shops are like and is better in San Francisco or Santa Cruz or any of those other places. I challenge you to that test. That is absolutely true.
Henry Kaestner: All right. So I think you did well. I think you're around 30 seconds, maybe forty five. But I thought the answers were awesome. We're going to go back to a tried and true question that we've asked every guest across the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast and Faith Driven Investor podcast, and that's something that you're hearing. From God's word, maybe it's today, maybe it's over the course of last week, but how is God speaking to you through the Bible?
Robert Netzly: Well, just recently, and this is related to the business where Jesus is really criticizing the Pharisees about use of the analogy that it's like a cup this washed on the outside, but inside it's all filthy and they're just caring about the outside. But the inside is dirty. You know, there's a lot of applications in our personal lives. We don't want to look nice and shiny, but that our personal life is a wreck in our thought. Life is a wreck. And I've just been convicted that as the Supreme Court is looking at, you know, potentially rolling back Roe v. Wade and broadly expected, you know, ruling that just recently, I was given a statement from one of the most outspoken advocates for pro-life issues huge ministry, $200 million or some endowment. They own five stocks and companies that are manufacturing abortion drugs. Obviously some intentional, but it's there and it's across the Christian landscape. And so, you know, as we're praying for an end to abortion, how can we not also be investing for an end to an abortion? So we really need to, you know, not just have a nice looking portfolio in terms of returns, risk adjusted or anything, but inside we've got to clean that up and things like abortion drugs do not belong, you know, in a portfolio like that. So that's the stuff that's been on my heart and God's grace will we'll get there?
Henry Kaestner: So you have been called the best dressed man in the world of faith driven investing. So that has nothing. So that passage in Matthew that you refer to presumably has nothing to do with you.
Robert Netzly: I hope not. But yes, in some sense, of course, my cup inside needs to be washed daily so that you're
Henry Kaestner: not refuting the fact that you're the best dressed man in Faith Driven
Robert Netzly: Investor. Well, I'm not saying that either. I don't know anything.
Henry Kaestner: It's awesome seeing you again. I'm sorry to have not known that you believed. I mourn the loss of another great, committed Christ follower that's serious about faith and investing in this fine city, California. We've lost two great ones over the last two years, Luke and now Robert nicely. But I'm grateful for you. Spend the time and in via Zoom and and share with us.
Robert Netzly: It is my honor. Thank you guys for having me.