The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 24

 

Episode 24: What Rhymes with Sconce?

After a one-episode hiatus, your boy Shane is back in the saddle. On this week’s episode, our hosts are hung up on the Elizabeth Holmes verdict. She’s guilty by the way. AJ is also guilty of enjoying Eric Wareheim’s Las Jaras canned natural wine from Mendocino county. Shane drops some tax knowledge surrounding a strange recommendation that you actually do in fact need to report stolen property as income on your tax return. US Covid cases hit the terrifying milestone of one million cases in a single day, so that’s fucking horrifying. In other very sad news, a financial services company that backed loans to taxi drivers in NYC to purchase medallions goes under with some criminal charges thrown in. For the first time in the entire course of their five-year friendship, AJ learns something from Shane: that the Guinness Book of World Records was invented to settle bar fights in Ireland in the 1950s. This one is a little sloppy.

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Speaker 1:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice. Welcome to The Liquidity Event, a show about all things personal finance with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI, each episode will take you through the week's news on FinTech, IPOs, specs, founder wins and fails, crypto and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

Shane:

I'm back, you can't keep me away.

AJ:

Hello and welcome to The Liquidity Event.

Shane:

You thought you lost me.

AJ:

I'm your host AJ.

Shane:

I'm Shane, motherfucker.

AJ:

You're my worst nightmare.

Shane:

Nice try.

AJ:

How are you doing, Shane?

Shane:

It takes more than a couple of national parks to keep me out of the mix. I'm good, I'm great. I'm good.

AJ:

I'm glad to hear it.

Shane:

Are you?

AJ:

I'm glad to hear it. I always wish well for your welfare. I always want to hear that you're in good health and good wealth and good spirits.

Shane:

That's exactly what I would say too if I was you. Everyone knows that when I go, you get 100% of the company, so I know you had your fingers crossed that a bald eagle would swoop down at Big Bend National Park and lift me up into the into the great retirement.

AJ:

That would make me angry, that would be too good. That would be like... That's when the CIA is like, "We don't want to martyr that person. We don't want to kill them."

Shane:

We all know birds aren't real, so when the eagles do come down for your boy, it's going to be the NSA saying goodnight.

AJ:

Anyways, what do you-

Shane:

Today is January... Oh, AJ, you're not drunk this time. You are sleepy, you're tired?

AJ:

Sleepy, I do have a fun drink to talk about, which is why I want to talk about... Oops, fuck, what we're drinking.

Shane:

Oh, great.

AJ:

Also, shout out to not Amazon Logistics because I have label maker on the way, which was graciously gifted to me by my business partner right here, but it's delayed by like 10 days. I still haven't figured out the soundboard. Come on, Jeff. I am drinking canned natural wine, and I am super psyched about it. You know that guy, Eric Wareheim, like Tim and Eric?

Shane:

Of course.

AJ:

This is his natural wine label, Las Jaras, and this is a red wine from Mendocino County, and it's pretty good. It's fine, it's a nice chilly, delicious... I don't know where the grapes are, but it's good.

Shane:

Right, well it's 2:30 in Los Angeles, so I put down that I'm drinking soup because I'm having a late lunch, a really good clam chowder that I got from the World Market last night.

AJ:

Wait, you mean Cost Plus World Market?

Shane:

Costco, I don't know. I'm not much of a shopper, so I've been to Target like three times in my life, but I was looking for anchovies and they're at this World Market spot, so I went into World Market and bought a knife and some charcuterie and some soup, $5 can of soup.

AJ:

Fun.

Shane:

You don't have hot takes on that?

AJ:

Well, if it was Cost Plus World Market, which [crosstalk 00:03:23]-

Shane:

What is that?

AJ:

It's only on the West Coast, I think, you can buy everything from like tiki torches to cans of clam chowder, to cheap, interesting sconces for your Brooklyn apartment when you're 22 and you have a $70 budget to decorate your closet that you're living in.

Shane:

Sconce is one of my favorite words. Can you rhyme a word with sconce?

AJ:

Decadence. If you got room for a sconce, you got hella decadence in your living room.

Shane:

If you know what the word sconce means.

AJ:

The first five minutes of our show are so boring.

Shane:

[foreign language 00:04:08], I think the second half is the boring part.

AJ:

All right, ooh, we are both reading books this week. That's so exciting, we're both reading books that we're actually interested in. What are you reading this week?

Shane:

I'm reading one of my sailing books, the memoir South by Ernest Shackleton about how he tries to conquer the South Pole and how his ship gets stuck in the ice and people die.

AJ:

But, he's not the one who died, that's the other guy who died. This guy survived to write the memoir.

Shane:

It's a test of endurance.

AJ:

I remember as a kid I was obsessed with that story. I had a picture book and I would just read it over and over and over again.

Shane:

Oh, it was totally unknown to me until recently.

AJ:

Really?

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

I can't remember the other guy's name, which is a testament to my long-term memory problem.

Shane:

It's one of those books that shows up on business books because it's a test of how to mental toughness and fortitude that never resonates with me in that regard, but I just like to hear stories about people eating each other.

AJ:

Cool. I'm reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which I can't really figure out what it is. My old and dear friend Gabe recommended it to me. It's like sci-fi meets horror, meets coming of age. I don't know, it's like good YA, like my catnip-y, easy, fall asleep book. I'm liking it so far.

Shane:

Are you reading a young adult novel?

AJ:

Yes, I am.

Shane:

No comment.

AJ:

I am a young adult.

Shane:

Sus, cool, so you're in Brooklyn. I'm in Los Angeles. I'm in your hometown.

AJ:

Is this your first time in LA ever?

Shane:

I've been here before, but not for more than like two or three days at a time. I'll be here for four months. I'll be here for tax season.

AJ:

I love it.

Shane:

LA will tax me and I drove the company car all the way across the country. So, I put 5,500... Well, it's my car now. I put 5,000 miles on that. I'm the bad girl, boo-boo, went through, I think, six national parks on the way over, which was really tight. I went to big bend, went to White Sands, went to Zion, Bryce, it was awesome. I saw buffalo. I almost hit a bull in the middle of the road, it popped out with its horns of Big Bend National Park and almost ran it over. It almost ran me over. It was a dope trip. America does not deserve the national parks.

AJ:

That's your hot take, is that national parks are too good?

Shane:

Are you okay? What's going on with you? Are we going to do the podcast today or are you going to just drink your wine?

AJ:

I told you I was not here for the podcast today.

Shane:

Oh, wow. All right. Let's talk about the IRS. That'll pep things up.

AJ:

That gets me going. I love the IRS.

Shane:

All right.

AJ:

Before we talk about the IRS, we do have an update.

Shane:

What's the update?

AJ:

So, there's three biotech companies going public by the time this airs. It will be today. There's three companies going public. I'm not really familiar with them, not super exciting to talk about, but we do have pricing information for Justworks. We did a big deep dive on Justworks on episode 22, and we now have a confirmed IPO, which will be trading on January 13th, which is next Thursday and they've priced it at 30 bucks a share-ish and they're offering 7 million shares. I don't know, I'm super excited about this IPO. How about you?

Shane:

I'm not excited about the Justworks IPO. I don't know. It's an accounting firm, accounting tech. I don't know. Why are you excited about this IPO?

AJ:

I'm excited about it because there's so many companies in this space that this actually makes a difference in small business owners' lives. If we get more attention on this, more small business owners can use products like this that actually can accelerate the ease of starting a business. I feel like a lot of businesses fail, everyone knows the statistics are most businesses fail, but when most people start businesses don't have an accounting backgrounds, cough, cough, Shane Mason, they need things like this. So, if we can bring attention and get these companies to have very successful, splashy IPOs, ergo business owners will become aware of these products instead of trying to mess around with expensive, shitty payroll when they hire their first employee.

Shane:

We do have some clients on Justworks. It's my least favorite platform for them to be on at the moment, but it is one of the... I'm just speaking frankly. It's hard to run a good PEO, a private employer order organization that's tech forward. There's dozens and dozens of PEOs out there, and they're all really clumsy and clunky and difficult to work with. Justworks is, in my opinion, the best, but it is still difficult to work with when compared to a Rippling or Augusto, but they do more than those platforms, so I do hope that the IPO does provide a much needed injection of liquidity into the balance sheet of Justworks, so they can deploy it towards product innovation, hire more service teams. I haven't seen any development or innovation in the Justworks product. Given I don't go in there every day like our account managers do, it hasn't been splashy over the past two years since I've first encountered the product, but I hope they take this money and they make business owners' lives a lot easier.

AJ:

Maybe they just needed the cash, right?

Shane:

Can I help you?

AJ:

Charlie, the almost three year old Aussie has entered the chat.

Shane:

He's so much more cuddly in LA than he was in New York. He's a little cuddle bug now.

AJ:

Really?

Shane:

I don't know what happened. Your home state-

AJ:

LA will do that to you.

Shane:

California's bringing it out in him. I'm not complaining.

AJ:

All right, now can we talk about the fucking IRS please?

Shane:

I'm down, whatever gives you energy. I'm trying to get you up to speed here. Do you want to talk about this meme that's been going around?

AJ:

Oh my God, so when you are in our position, meaning that you have friends when 95% of the people that you know don't have anything to do with finance or accounting, and you are the only person in multiple friend circles who work in finance and accounting, when something happens in the news or in the meme space or on Reddit that's related to personal finance or taxes, you just get inundated. How many people sent you this article?

Shane:

I think four people sent me this.

AJ:

About the same for me, so there was a meme floating... Do you want to take this one? IRS is your domain.

Shane:

Yeah, sure. So, for those of you that don't know or didn't see the meme... It's not even a meme, it's just people are [inaudible 00:11:13]-

AJ:

It's just a screenshot.

Shane:

Literally a screenshot in the IRS's website. People think taxes and accounting are boring, they're right, but occasionally there are highlights or funny things or silly things. There are so many provisions written into the code that are really obtuse or obscure, elements of our economy like the tax rules around fishing and specific whaling off the Aleutian Islands, and a novella is written about the rules surrounding that and you're just like, "What is this? Why is this developed? Why did this get any attention?" That's just one example of something silly that you can go down a rabbit hole if you enjoy silly, nerdy things like that. Well, I guess what a lot of people don't realize is that every type of income that you receive is taxable.

Shane:

I think we've talked about in the podcast before that you can either have a default on or a default off for those of you that are familiar with nudges, a default on for contributions to 401(k)s equal more contributions in general when someone... It requires a button to be clicked to turn it off. Well, if you think about that in terms of the IRS's definition of what income is, everything is taxable income, unless it's turned off by the IRS. So, they say that everything you receive is income unless there's a specific exclusion. That's a long winded way of saying that everything you get is income, including stolen property. If you steal property from somebody else, that is taxable income them to you. If you deal drugs, if you sell cocaine, all of your proceeds from selling cocaine are technically supposed to show up on your tax return.

Shane:

So, somebody, some memester, or somebody that has some sort of sway went to the IRS's website, probably for the first time ever, and realized that they found the website where the IRS lists definitions of taxable income that includes stolen property must be... It says stolen property must be reported on your tax return, friendly reminder. The sale of illegal substances needs to show up on your tax return, even though it is illegal to sell narcotics. It's like, yeah that's true. Why do you think it says that, AJ? Why do you think that they're making that clear?

AJ:

I don't know.

Shane:

Well, this is what Al Capone went down for, was for-

AJ:

Wire fraud.

Shane:

No, we have a different wire fraud reference today, but he went down because of tax evasion because he had income in his life from the sale of bootleg alcohol and from gambling that was not reported on his income tax returns, and they were able to arrest him and he died a syphilitic mess just talking to himself in a corner, but he went down for tax evasion because he did not report the sale of ilegal substances, in his case alcohol. I don't know what else he sold. I'm not up to speed, but that's why it's on here as a reminder that even though they can get you for income tax evasion in addition to sale of type one narcotics, which is a separate crime.

AJ:

Right, so basically the idea here is that maybe they don't have enough evidence, they can't actually convict you for selling drugs, but they can convict you for not reporting the income that they can see in your bank account or they can... That's how these cases get-

Shane:

You got $2 million of cash underneath your mattress, can you prove where it came from? No, well okay. You live in a trap house on the edge of Memphis. It's okay for me to say that, I'm from Memphis. I've been to trap houses on the edge of Memphis. Where did you get this money? Well, we don't have any evidence of you selling drugs, but you have $2 million of unreported income, so you show us the receipts or experience a jail cell.

AJ:

My favorite part of this entire story in the meme, the screenshot that got the most attention, this CBS article, it's like stolen property, there's the tag on the IRS website, the tag right below it, or the paragraph right below is... So stolen property, if you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year. So, if you steal a car and you return it, it's fine, you don't need to report it, but the next bullet point, the next item is transporting school children. Don't include in your income a school mileage allowance for taking children to and from school if you are in the business of taking children to school.

Shane:

See?

AJ:

Unless you are a bus driver and you have income from that you can't...

Shane:

Everything is income, unless it is specifically excluded such as the school children allowance from the definition of income [crosstalk 00:15:49].

AJ:

If I'm driving the carpool this week and the dad down the street is so grateful that I drove all the kids to school and gets me a gift certificate to the spa for $500, technically I'm supposed to report that as income, except [crosstalk 00:16:06]-

Shane:

You're technically transporting children.

AJ:

That's not my business.

Shane:

That's none of your business.

AJ:

That's none of your business. Renaissance rhymes with sconce. All right, anyway, let's move on.

Shane:

Not, that's our favorite IPO website. Nice circle back.

AJ:

Renaissance Capital, shout out to the IPO data, the data.

Shane:

Speaking of wire fraud, you've got celebrities and billionaires, Ms. Elizabeth Holmes was recently-

AJ:

It's always wire fraud.

Shane:

Recently [crosstalk 00:16:40]-

AJ:

Why is it always wire fraud?

Shane:

She's no longer a suspect. She's always been suspect.

AJ:

The seventh day of deliberations, the truth told US district judge Edward... That's my Elizabeth Holmes voice.

AJ:

I don't know how to feel about this.

Shane:

You're very conflicted about Elizabeth Holmes.

AJ:

I'm so conflicted about so many articles. She did wrong, there was definitely fraud committed. A jury just convicted her of that fraud on four counts. What's interesting about this trial and a lot of the articles and hot takes surrounding it are that she was not convicted of misleading the public or medical fraud or anything like that, it's just purely... There are four different counts, but basically misleading investors, falsifying documents, slapping labels on things that weren't true. So, she likely will go to jail.

AJ:

She hasn't been sentenced yet, but there are a lot of other male founders who have also misled investors. I think in her case the general opinion is that it's more extreme because this was medical testing and committing fraud in this arena, falsifying test results, could have led to harmful things. I don't think anyone actually did die as a result of an incorrect test, so she can't be charged with manslaughter or murder or anything like that, but she's guilty as charged. 37 years, female founder going to jail for misleading investors. Now, her former romantic partner is getting... His trial has not happened yet, that will happen in 2022, so I will be watching to see what happens during his fraud trial as well.

Shane:

I have a few things to say about this.

AJ:

Oh no.

Shane:

They're not problematic.

AJ:

Also, sorry, a very popular investment CEO that I greatly respect this morning posted an Instagram photo in support.

Shane:

Wow, okay. Shots fired.

AJ:

In support of her, and then I've got taken down. I'm not going to name names, but that was very interesting.

Shane:

Josh Brown doesn't care if you talk about him on your podcast.

AJ:

No, it's not about him, it was more of a Downtown Josh Brown posted a photo and said, was Elizabeth home? It was a witch hunt. She basically committed similar crimes to these male CEOs that are walking free and are billionaires, and then just got piled on in the comments. He took it down. I would imagine because he probably got a death threat from someone saying, how could you ever defend women? Which just kind of adds to my conflicted heart right now. What were you going to say?

Shane:

I was going to say, don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

AJ:

Anyway.

Shane:

Come on. I agree with you that Adam Neumann... Did he? He committed wire fraud? Is that what you're talking about, and Kalanick?

AJ:

Yes.

Shane:

Kalanick was ousted, but he didn't do jail time.

AJ:

He didn't do jail time.

Shane:

Did he mislead-

AJ:

[crosstalk 00:19:54] ousted. I don't know the details of those of the Kalanick case. The Neumann case is profits were lied about business... Financial projections were complete fallacies as presented to investors. So, Josh Brown's argument was that those male investors never ran... Elizabeth Holmes ran out of runway, she ran out of money, and therefore if she had had more time and money, maybe she would've figured it out, and we never would've heard about any of this, but she ran out of money in time, whereas Neumann and Kalanick had plenty of money and time.

Shane:

Well, sure.

AJ:

Adam Neumann former CEO of WeWork, Travis Kalanick former CEO of Uber is what we're talking about.

Shane:

Right.

AJ:

Speaking of crimes, speaking of financial crimes, our good friends at the SEC who do a lot of good work in busting insider trading schemes and financial service, our friends in the financial service industry are doing bad things. SEC charges a financial planning company and its president with engaging in fraudulent schemes to boost stock price. This is a company called Medallion Financial Corporation, which actually their whole business model is based on taxi medallions, and obviously speaking of Kalanick and Uber, with the rise of Uber, the value of taxi medallions has greatly plummeted. This was a financial services company based specifically on granting loans for taxi drivers to get those medallions, which are notoriously very expensive, to the tune of seven figures, their company was experiencing dramatic losses, and this guy's in trouble for trying to cover up those losses with moving money around and creating a web of lies and holding companies to not show that he was losing money.

Shane:

Wait.

AJ:

RIP.

Shane:

This is a male CEO getting arrested for a wire fraud?

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

Okay.

AJ:

Not wire fraud, but this is not misleading investors, this is literally moving money around to [crosstalk 00:22:06].

Shane:

That's a comedic segue.

AJ:

You wanted me to loosen up.

Shane:

This just sucks. That's my succinct summary of what's going on. For those of you that don't know, I think a nice introduction for those of you outside New York City or those in New York City that aren't familiar with the economics of yellow cabs, I was for fortunate enough to do the taxes for a yellow cab company that owned a bunch of medallions, and a medallion, there's only 10 of them, or there's a limited supply of them like Bitcoin, and once they're all distributed, there's not going to be any more available unless by legislation, so they have a fixed price, and I think they could be between... In the heyday of the yellow cabs, they were seven figures, sometimes multiple millions of dollars to acquire one.

Shane:

And if you were able to acquire one via loan, you could be an immigrant from anywhere and you could come to the United States, get a loan to buy a medallion, and then you can ride that yellow taxi for 30, 35 years, have a middle class lifestyle and retire, but then Uber came in and it had an especially large impact on New York City yellow cabs, and the London black cabs. I think they have a similar system wherein they had purchased these medallions for millions of dollars, which is obviously risky, and then they were disrupted by this tech company that was using VC money to put all of these immigrants to flip their loans, and to be... It's essentially like the housing crisis, but just for the medallions. So, all of a sudden you're underwater, you can't earn money to pay back your loans.

Shane:

I imagine this head of the Medallion Financial Corp was struggling since the launch of Uber in New York City, what, 10 years ago? Maybe 2016 is when that happened? And, some things were moved around, some books were cooked and now they're paying the consequences because they were facing bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of people were definitely looking down the barrel of bankruptcy and their families going underwater, so I can't imagine the... We know the forces that were at play here, I can't imagine the loss of sleep that all these people experienced prior to this conviction and moving forward after this conviction. It's just sad and it sucks. It's terrible.

AJ:

The New York Times, I think they won a Pulitzer for doing the reporting on the taxi medallion story, so we'll drop some links in. It's for those who are not in New York City who are not familiar with this practice or how this system works, it's wild. I rarely take yellow cabs now, obviously, because of Uber, but I usually take them from JFK home because it's easy, so if the taxi line is not too long, I'll hop in a taxi cab, and I generally enjoy my yellow taxi rides more than my Uber rides. That's neither here nor there.

Shane:

I mean-

AJ:

Speaking of neither here nor there, the US sets its global daily record of over 1 million coronavirus cases today. Congratulations.

Shane:

Cool. Shout out, it's a Guinness record for failure.

AJ:

Congratulations.

Shane:

I don't know.

AJ:

Did you ever have a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records growing up?

Shane:

Of course, yeah.

AJ:

Were you obsessed it?

Shane:

Yeah, from like age 10 to 13, maybe like eight to 12. I don't know, somewhere in there.

AJ:

I feel like our microgeneration, the internet was a thing, but it was so slow that it wasn't something you would spend time on, so the Guinness Book of World Records was my internet.

Shane:

Are you familiar with the theory on why it was created?

AJ:

No.

Shane:

Why did Guinness create it?

AJ:

Oh no.

Shane:

No, I think this is real. I don't know, I read it somewhere, bouncing around in this dumbass head of mine. The theory is that there were so many bar fights in Ireland about whether something was the actual best thing that ever happened or the most things that ever happened. So, in order to stop bar fights, the Guinness Book decided to publish a book about... No, this is the person verified has pogo-sticked the longest across the United States.

AJ:

It's literally the Guinness Brewery company, that's what Guinness is from?

Shane:

Yes, to stop bar fights in Ireland. I don't know if that's true, but don't-

AJ:

That's incredible.

Shane:

Don't at me. It's probably one of those things that just [crosstalk 00:26:36]-

AJ:

Wow, I learned something from you for the first time ever in the entire [crosstalk 00:26:40]-

Shane:

Oh my God, don't even. Let's circle back to 2017, that coffee shop where I'm punching in your financial calculator. People don't forget.

AJ:

Never forget. Shane will never let me live that down when I was studying for some exam.

Shane:

I always got that in my pocket.

AJ:

What else we got here?

Shane:

We got some IPO stuff. I think you should do some IPO stuff. I think we've got one minute. Do you want to save it for next time?

AJ:

Yeah, let's save it. This is very interesting. The erosion of the IPO lock up, stay tuned for next time, but I've actually we have some listener questions.

Speaker 4:

You've got mail.

AJ:

Should I invest in alternative assets like collectibles? I hear you can make great returns there. How does that compare to the US stock market? So, there's this company called Masterworks that will allow you to invest in fractional shares of literal masterworks, like paintings, like Rembrandts, and I don't know, who else is... Kusamas and other Warhols and [crosstalk 00:27:57]-

Shane:

I'm a master of the segue, that's what I am. A master-

AJ:

We're not supposed to call anything master anymore. I thought that's a word that we're trying to retire from the vocabulary.

Shane:

That's a problematic word that hearkens back to master and slave.

AJ:

Yeah, anyways, what do you think? Should I invest in alternative assets like collectibles?

Shane:

No.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

End of debate.

AJ:

A question for you, Mr. I'm a CPA. Do you think that the investments in these collectibles, do you think they're subject to these special collectible tax, or do you think these are actually long-term capital gains depending on how they've structured these?

Shane:

I don't know, if it's an ETF, then it's probably going to be taxed at exchange traded fund. It'll be taxed at capital gains rates, but if it's a mutual fund or a partnership when you have carry through characteristics or attributes, then it might be taxed at the collectibles tax rate, which is higher of 28%. Either way, I guess you should be cognizant of the tax impact of your investments and the liquidity of your investments and the holding periods necessary. Liquidity and the expenses and the historical track record, that all goes into the conversation, and almost every time that you take a look at that when you compare any investment that you can touch, it usually does not perform as well as the stock market in general. It's usually subject to idiosyncratic risks. It's usually something that, I don't know, we look at the performance of these Masterworks results, what was it, over the past three to five years? They outperform the S&P, was it one year?

AJ:

When you go to their website, it's like the S&P 500 since 1995. So, they picked this very specific period from 1995 to now where these masterworks had outperform the S&P 500 by about four points. It was like 13% versus 9%. That's why we don't talk about returns because you can pick whatever time period you want. I can outperform perform you if I get to pick the time period that we're comparing, that's like trying to time the market. Also, they're talking about all paintings ever. I think this is like an ETF where you get to buy all paintings that were ever sold at auction across like Sotheby's and Bonhams and all the different auction houses. I don't get it is where I'm at, so no is the answer. Should you invest? No.

Shane:

The question is why. Are you trying to increase returns? Do they actually return? Maybe in one of the most intense periods of inequality ever have the prices of masterworks increased over the past 20 years because the people that are billionaires, the ever increasing amount of billionaires, have driven up the prices because they're already saturated in the stock market. They've already inflated those values high enough and they don't need that money anymore, so they're investing in these... Is that going to continue into the future? I don't know. We don't have data back to 1910 like we do with the stock market. So, I don't know what you're up to. It sounds fun.

AJ:

What are you up to over there?

Shane:

I don't know. I realize that the listener's going to listen to my response and it's going to be very cynical, but at the end of the day you can allocate 5% of your portfolio to whatever you want. If you're an investment management client and you've got every $100,000 of investible assets, that's $5,000 that you can play with and it should not have a material impact on your long-term retirement income, and if that keeps you engaged in the market and keeps you interested and keeps you on your toes, then we do advocate for it, and that's why we allocate 5% to alternatives of this kind. So go for it, don't expect it to move you from LA to Palm Springs in your retirement years. Is that an appropriate analogy, AJ? I'm getting used to the local geography here.

AJ:

Oh, you are? Move you from LA to Palm Springs? No, because typically people move... I guess you would [crosstalk 00:31:58].

Shane:

Is that the bougie-r version.

AJ:

That didn't make any sense at all.

Shane:

That's a lateral move, not enough?

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

All right.

AJ:

When you retire, you want to retire to a cheaper retirement community in Palm Springs. Shane is going to Palm Springs for the first time, and I am very excited to show him my lazy playground.

Shane:

This is where I lay down for two days straight, great. Cool.

AJ:

Oh, I have one more. Oops, we need to give you the soundboard. I could not be trusted with the soundboard. My CEO crush of the week is Emma Walmsley, who is the CEO of GlaxoSmithKlein, which is a massive UK... Speaking of pharmaceuticals, a very large pharmaceutical-

Shane:

[crosstalk 00:32:56] in your house?

AJ:

It's literally in my house. Hey, boys-

Shane:

[crosstalk 00:33:01] okay?

AJ:

[inaudible 00:33:06]. She's my CEO crush of the week because she makes 8 million pounds a year and she is helping us close the gender pay gap. That's [crosstalk 00:33:12]-

Shane:

I'm sorry, she eats 8 million pounds a year?

AJ:

She makes, it's a UK company.

Shane:

Yeah, I know, come on.

AJ:

Shut up.

Shane:

Wow, good for her.

AJ:

Good for her, so she's helping us. Single handedly, she's skewing that gender pay gap two tenths of a percent.

Shane:

What's the conversion rate? What is that in USD?

AJ:

It's a little more USD. It's kind of equal right now.

Shane:

Is it really?

AJ:

I think so.

Shane:

No way. What is it in Bitcoin? How many Bitcoins is that a year?

AJ:

One, that's one Bitcoin.

Shane:

Cute.

AJ:

That's the show, folks. Thanks for listening.

Shane:

Sincerely, thank you.

AJ:

We're The Liquidity Event.

Shane:

John did a great job last week, by the way.

AJ:

He did do a good job.

Shane:

He did an amazing job.

AJ:

John and I have great chemistry, maybe even-

Shane:

What, maybe even better than you and Charlie? Maybe better than you and Nabil?

AJ:

Maybe we should do a poll.

Shane:

I fucking dare you. No, of course you chose the week I was out to do a IPO of the week on a boat manufacturing company, by the way.

AJ:

That was obviously just a dig at you. Actually, it wasn't. We had picked the IPO deep dive before it came to our attention that you would not have service at the exact time of our recording each week.

Shane:

No, I did not have service at all that week. If you look at a cell phone map of all the places, you do not have service in the country. That's where I was for a full-

AJ:

You ticked off all the boxes.

Shane:

T-Mobile does not cover national parks.

AJ:

Well, comment on our YouTube if you liked John better than Shane.

Shane:

I dare you, I will find you. I will drive 6,000 miles and I will knock on your door. All right, email us at liquidityeventa@brooklynfi.com. Leave us a voicemail and we'll play it on the air podinbox.com/liquidityevent. The show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode24. BKFI-stans can leave us a review if they want to be weird about it. We do have some nice five star reviews. Shout out to those that have provided them to us. It really touches us when you do that, so we really appreciate it, guys. Have a great week, everyone. We'll see you next Friday.

AJ:

I'm looking forward to the sconce Renaissance. See you next week.

Shane:

Bye

AJ:

Bye.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to The Liquidity Event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI. Head on over to brooklynfi.com where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel, or if you want to learn about their full service financial planning, tax, and investment firm specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the path to financial independence. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.