The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 48
Episode 48: Small Potatoes
The squad is back at it but sadly there are no sexy IPOs to discuss. Instead, we’ve got more nanocaps, aka small potatoes. Speaking of potatoes, Elon Musk is pissed that Tesla got kicked off an ESG list. In other news, Earnst & Young is in deep trouble for allowing its auditors to cheat on ethics exams. It’s a big yikes fest. Stick around till the end of the episode to hear one of the worst French accents on earth. This one is outrageously French.
Read the Full Transcript:
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, IPO, specs, founder wins and fails, crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today@brooklynfi.com.
AJ:
Hello. Oh, welcome to The Liquidity Event. We're you're hosts, AJ-
Shane:
And Shane.
AJ:
This is episode 48 being recorded on a Wednesday, June 29th [inaudible 00:00:44]
Shane:
[inaudible 00:00:44] that's the summertime.
AJ:
July 1st. July 1st.
Shane:
That's spicy.
AJ:
July 1st begins the most important season of the year, which is ...
Shane:
Hot thot summer.
AJ:
AJ's birthday season.
Shane:
Oh, my God. Jesus, you never fail to surprise me. It's not even July and we're already-
AJ:
No, it begins on Friday, so like 1st.
Shane:
Discussing big plans.
AJ:
So Friday begins the one week countdown to my birthday, which is Friday, July 8th.
Shane:
Wow. In what ways am I that insufferable?
AJ:
Oh, so many ways. Let me count the ways. I only have 30 minutes.
Shane:
Give me one. Give me one off the rip.
AJ:
Off the rip, your insufferability, let's go. Okay. I'll be there in a minute.
Shane:
Nevermind. Nevermind. Moving-
AJ:
Let me tie my shoes, go make some coffee, take my dog to take a shit and do some other things.
Shane:
Whoa.
AJ:
45 minutes later.
Shane:
You don't have to curse to make your point there, raging Cajun. Good lord.
AJ:
Anyways, speaking of raging and Cajun-
Shane:
Yeah, what's on the docket today, Christopher Hitchens?
AJ:
Whoa. Wow. That was below the belt. Speaking of raging and Cajun-
Shane:
What's with Christopher Hitchens?
AJ:
Nothing.
Shane:
I threw you off.
AJ:
Let me go [inaudible 00:02:12]
Shane:
I got her.
AJ:
Speaking of raging and Cajun, what we're doing for fun is that we've had an awesome 24 hours. We hung out with a friend and client on their farm, and we had farm fresh chicken marinated in harissa grilled for us and we got to ... What did we do? We planted a whole garden.
Shane:
I'm still waiting for the connection to Louisiana's Cajun culture.
AJ:
Raging Cajun? We had Cajun spice harissa. That was the segue.
Shane:
Oh, okay, because you got from harissa from Paris? Harissa is an African sauce. by the way. It's not-
AJ:
I know, but it's a segue. Speaking of raging spices that are spicy. [inaudible 00:02:56]
Shane:
Are you talking about the Africans that were brought? Dear God. All right, all right.
AJ:
Anyways.
Shane:
Two out of five, two out of five segue
AJ:
You can't land every plane perfectly perfectly.
Shane:
Tenuous connections.
AJ:
So yeah, we planted a garden, which it felt really good to do some like manual labor and good service and we hung out. We went swimming. It was awesome. It was a really, really great time, but now we are back in Brooklyn.
Shane:
Yes.
AJ:
Both of us.
Shane:
We went swimming. I threw her kid around in the pool. Always loved to stand in-
AJ:
Very safely, but for the record, fun was had by all.
Shane:
Who cares? That's less fun if you clarify that it was safely. My dog got herded by sheep. He is a shepherd and the sheep herded him. He's definitely a city version of an Australian Shepherd.
AJ:
World's worst, but cutest sheep dog.
Shane:
What else did we do?
AJ:
Went to the beach.
Shane:
Went to the beach, man. Yeah, it was very cute. We talked biz, met some famous people. It was pretty cool.
AJ:
Yeah. If you have a farm or an upstate house or vacation home of any kind, we will absolutely come visit you. We will bring harissa for you to barbecue us some chicken is the moral of this story.
Shane:
And we'll spend a couple hours shoveling dirt in your backyard.
AJ:
Yes.
Shane:
For sure.
AJ:
I would mow a lawn.
Shane:
Apparently is really good for serotonin. We were talking about that while we were there and it came up in an app that I'm using to like manage serotonin and dopamine levels and stuff like that. Part of the instructions were like-
AJ:
What, are you Tim fucking Ferris over here?
Shane:
He's got a pretty successful podcast. You would really hope that I listen to Ferris. I actually drive to [inaudible 00:04:43] doing that podcast, but no, I don't want to be Tim Ferris. Anyway, yeah, they just say playing in the dirt is really good for your mental health, so there's a lot of reasons to be mentally upset these days, which I don't think we've talked about or will talk about on this podcast. I'll leave that up to you.
AJ:
We can talk about it.
Shane:
Playing around in the dirt, getting the hell out of the city. I've been in a snowbird the past two years each winter and each place that I've gone has been full of dirt and sun and nature and it really is a huge juxtaposition to the city and I think really healthy to get the hell out there and get your hands dirty. But anyway, what are you drinking today?
AJ:
I'm drinking coffee. I got a long night ahead of me. I'm going to the musical theater tonight.
Shane:
You know what? Tulum does not have any musical theaters. Go on.
AJ:
A friend of mine invited me to see Into the Woods, which I've never seen before. And I don't love musical theater, but as a New Yorker-
Shane:
You got to go.
AJ:
Yeah. I haven't been taking advantage of the things that this beautiful, amazing city has to offer, so when someone says, "Do you want to come with me to a musical that's sold out and it's hard to get tickets on Wednesday night and we can go. I haven't seen you in a while," you say yes. No matter how tired you are, you say yes.
Shane:
Sometimes I feel like all you care about is that it's hard to get into when it comes to restaurants or-
AJ:
What do you mean? No. That's not what it meant. That's just something I would do in my-
Shane:
Is it expensive or hard to get into?
AJ:
It's something I would do on my own. Shut up.
Shane:
In that case, yes, I'll go.
AJ:
Shut up.
Shane:
All right. All right.
AJ:
Speaking of expensive, no, I don't have a good segue, but I do want to talk about what I'm reading because I feel jilted. I feel betrayed. I feel wronged by the fact that no one has ever told me about this book. It's called Good Omens. It's a novel co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pritchett. It's like a satire on the-
Shane:
Pratchett.
AJ:
Pratchett, sorry. Pratchett. Thank you, Terry Pratchett. It's a satire on the apocalypse and it's got witches and science fiction and very, very dry, dark British comedy. I randomly picked it up in an airport. I was like, "What's this?" It looks cool. I don't want to read James Patterson or one of the other limited selection in the airport bookstore. I was like, "This looks cool," and I started reading it and I'm literally laughing out loud on every page, and it's very much up my alley and I've never heard of it, so thanks, world. Apparently there's an Amazon series that just launched with it, so yeah, I've been living under a rock. The algorithm doesn't know everything.
Shane:
I could hear you laughing through the walls this morning while you were reading your little book. You're very much sharing a Airbnb with a teenage girl that's crashed getting through Harry Potter. I hear the show's not fire, but we'll see.
AJ:
All right, well, I'm almost done with the book.
Shane:
So fire being the giveaway that I'm in my late thirties. When the slang that you hold onto is a dead giveaway to your age, I hear myself calling something fire, like okay.
AJ:
Oh, I heard you were reading a book that you called the bomb recently.
Shane:
I did?
AJ:
I don't know. That was my mid-thirties slang. Is that the bomb?
Shane:
Yeah. That's just the bomb, man.
AJ:
dabomb.com for those who survived the dot com crash.
Shane:
Yeah. Again, nothing gives your age away like the slang that you refuse to give up or that naturally flows out of your mouth when you're in conversation and the Gen-Zers roast you for it, or I don't say anything at all. They just mentally tuck it away. Yeah. I'm picking up this book, How the World Really Works. Haven't started it yet, but it looks really cool. Our client friend is reading it. It's about how much the basics and the units of all the resources on earth, written by this physicist who breaks down how electricity's carried across the globe and how much agricultural we can produce and how much inputs it takes to create those outputs and breaks down the amount of diesel that goes into every tomato that arrives at the supermarket. It's like five tablespoons, supposedly, of diesel is required for each tomato. It's kind of cool. Little bit of fundamentals that will help. Like when you're reading articles about how the world works, you'll have this book tucked away, so looking forward to reporting back on that one.
AJ:
Awesome.
Shane:
You want to talk about this up listing?
AJ:
Sure. Yeah. I don't have an IPO for you this week, but we do have an S1 filed by MusclePharm. And I thought this was interesting because-
Shane:
With a PH.
AJ:
Pharm, yes, with a PH. It is a lifestyle supplements brand. Yeah, they do sports nutritional products and functional energy beverages. I could use one of those right now, MusclePharm.
Shane:
Does it fall into the biotech space or is it a retail-
AJ:
I don't think so. It's retail.
Shane:
... food and bev item.
AJ:
Yeah. Food and bev branded sports nutritional products and energy beverages, so definitely consumer products. Not necessarily-
Shane:
The Las Vegas, Nevada based company. No surprise that the muscle nutrition product is coming.
AJ:
Wait, what's just good slang for like a protein powder?
Shane:
Frat juice.
AJ:
No, no.
Shane:
I just made that one up.
AJ:
It's a currently publicly traded company, but it's not on any recognizable public market. It's not on the NASDAQ. It's not on the New York Stock Exchange. It's on what's called OTC or over the counter trading, so you can buy and sell shares of this company, but you do it in individual transactions. It's not regulated on a market usually because company's too small, so this is an up listing. It's already publicly traded, but they have filed their S1 to now become traded on the NASDAQ, but still, it's a $10 million uplifting, so they still would be considered nano cap, still pretty, pretty small potatoes, which seems to be the trend of IPOs in 2022, small potatoes, folks. No offense, these awesome companies raising money, but we haven't seen any big fish this year so far.
Shane:
It's a dry market. There's a drought, as Weezy would say.
AJ:
There's a drought.
Shane:
What is it with performance drinks and they're always in the typical cities that you would expect them to be in? Have you seen the how to with John Wilson where he crashes the Bang energy drink dudes' party in Miami.
AJ:
Yes, yes, in Florida. Yeah, yeah
Shane:
In Florida?
AJ:
Oh, my God, yes.
Shane:
Like abandons his family to be like, "Oh, I'm talking to HBO now. Like screw my family." Let me give you a tour of his house.
AJ:
Yeah, no, it's his wife's baby shower is the ... Yeah. It's the CEO like a sketchy ... Yeah.
Shane:
Bang.
AJ:
Bang is the drink. Yeah. It's his wife's baby shower, John Wilson. If you haven't seen the show, by the way, folks, please check it out. Hilarious observations of the random everyday-ness of human life. But yeah, you're saying energy drinks are always Florida, Nevada? California.
Shane:
I don't know. This is anecdotal. Just messing around. Just a little observation.
AJ:
Anyways, speaking of messing around, accounting giant, Ernst & Young, admits its employees cheated on ethics exams. This is bad news. Fined what, $100 million? These are auditors, so these are the companies that audit public financial statements for the most part. These are CPAs who have to take additional ethics training because they're in charge of keeping companies honest or at least reporting to regulators on how companies are doing. This is bad, right? This is like a big, bad strike for public trust of accountants and financial professionals.
Shane:
Yeah, this one's been bouncing around the accounting podcast that I listened to for a little while here. A bunch of CPAs get together and point fingers at the silliness of the business models of big four. And there's a trend going on in the accounting space in general, where in the audit departments, which ... What's interesting about the CPA, it's called a license, so it makes you think that you can only do something with the license. It allows you to do something and in reality, the CPA license is only required to do audit work. You can do bookkeeping, you can do tax work, you can do advisory. You only need that CPA, certified public accountant, because you're making financial statements public via the SCC and you're signing off on audits and providing that verification that the books that the companies have provided to investors are materially accurate.
Shane:
So these auditors in this case have to take ethics exams and they cheated on them. It all comes back to the culture of these big four firms where you are incentivized. They bill by the hour, which means they're incentivized to go as slow as possible on projects and bill as much as possible to the clients, and not only that, because they can generate the highest amount of revenue. If you're intended to go as slow as possible and focus on that audit, are you really incentivized to spend time on other things like ethics exams? Not only are they incentivized to bill as much as they can, but your performance as an employee is based on how much you bill just like at a lot of law firms, so if you're spending time on ethics exams instead of billing things to clients, this is, what, 2000 hours in a work year?
Shane:
I remember spending 23, 2400 hours working, and the culture of these firms is to, I'm sorry to go on and on about this, is to spend 2500, 2600 hours grinding away as the whole business model. Elsewhere in this article, also like the audit department, because it's so highly regulated is often a place and it's a required expense for all these public companies that these companies are being audited just try to find the cheapest place to get it done because it doesn't provide a lot of value to them. It's just like a required expense. And these audit firms also have consulting practices where all the profit is. Like Ernst & Young has a consulting arm that provides advisory services that actually add value, but if you're being audited by the company, that's also telling you how to run your company.
Shane:
That's a conflict of interest, right?
AJ:
Right.
Shane:
So the consultants might be telling you something to do something that could run afoul of what the auditors are doing, or you might not want to jeopardize the consulting practice by telling that company, "Hey, your books actually don't look that good and you need to change those up." So there's been a conflict of interest running rampant for 10, 15 years, and they're actually splitting the two companies apart, so they're going to split Ernst & Young's division, the consulting division, away from the audit division. This might be a whole nother podcast, but they're spending millions and millions of dollars buying out the old audit partners and they're going to have two separate companies, which is kind of wild because these companies do over 15, $20 billion of revenue per year.
Shane:
And like you said, going back to the penalty, $100 million dollar penalty is not much to a company.
AJ:
That's nothing.
Shane:
Yeah, does does $20 billion in revenue. But anyway, I can go on and on about the big four's practices and how-
AJ:
Shortcomings?
Shane:
... antiquated they are. Yeah, they're really old companies, and a ship that large is going to take many, many years to steer into a different into the future.
AJ:
Just to zoom out a little bit on that point about these fines like when we hear Google get fined for antitrust or for Facebook get fined for privacy violations or Ernst & Young get fined for ethics violations, $100 million to you and I sounds like a lot of money, but to them, it's a drop in the bucket. It's just a line on the balance sheet. There's definitely this movement to increase these ... These fines are nothing until we start making them meaningful. $2 billion would be meaningful. $100 million is nothing.
Shane:
Yeah. Yeah. Circling back to this, a lot of people think that the next big catastrophe in the financial ... Some people in the accounting space, it's very hard to recruit accountants right now. If you're an introvert that's really good with numbers, do you go into accounting or do you go into software development? A lot of wealth and it's a lot flashier to go work for Facebook or Amazon and to get into the software development space. Not that that has been a siphoning off. The reason that accountants are hard to recruit, and the numbers are just way down in accounting in terms of college grads. It requires a graduate degree to get a CPA. It's very hard to do that for most people. It's kind of restrictive to people that can't afford to get a fifth year of college that need to go out and start working, so it's biased.
Shane:
And then a lot of CPAs are in their sixties and seventies and some crazy number like 70% of them are going to retire in the next 10 years, so not only are audit firms' fees low, but the amount of people that can do it is also getting a lot smaller and a lot of people think that the next crisis is going to be around fraud and not catching fraud and misrepresentation in financial statements from these companies that can't find good auditors to suss out all the issues that would prevent an Enron or a WorldCom or a Tyco, or even just mistakes on accident, not even intentional fraud, but just losing track of liabilities. The watchdogs of the public markets are getting are growing thinner and thinner. Their ranks are shrinking, so yeah.
AJ:
Right. So what the solution is create software to fix this problem so we don't have to have highly skilled, highly paid auditors to do this. It's a talent problem, so how do you fix a talent problem? You lower the barrier to entry or you fix it with automation. Are we going to see automation in the accounting industry that typically requires a human to look through balance sheets or is Intuit going to come out with a product that's just plug and play and everyone is on the same platform so these statements can basically be audited automatically?
Shane:
Yeah. There's a lot of concern going into this space. There's a lot of VC money going into automation of audits, et cetera. It's just not very sexy. No one understands it. No one wants to do it. It seems like a requirement. It's like policing, you know?
AJ:
Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're the cops. Do you want to be like-
Shane:
A number cop? Do you want to be a number cop? Nobody wants do that.
AJ:
Do you want to be an accountant? It's like what's like a profession shutdown at a cocktail party? What do you? I'm an accountant. Cool. Anyway.
Shane:
Exactly.
AJ:
What do you do? I'm a cop. Cool. Anyway. Oh, you're an accountant and a cop? Okay. Anyway, I'm going to go get another drink.
Shane:
Yeah, and that really appeals to people that don't have those interactions to begin with. If you're an introvert that doesn't care about cocktail parties, sure, go be an accountant and you can have a nice stable life that doesn't change very much and you do what you got to do and you're always going to be in high demand. The problem is it might be too much of high demand and we might be running short on the skills necessary to keep these companies under control.
AJ:
Here's some advice for useful folks in college. This is sort of related, but not really. Let's say you just started college. You're deciding what you want to major in. Accounting doesn't sound sexy. You're like, "Oh, I don't want to do that. I want to go be an English major or philosophy major or business major," but you love music or you love the theater or you love snowboarding. Be an accountant because you can actually work in finance at these companies that align with your interests and your passions. You get paid a lot to do the numbers. You can rise up quickly through the ranks, but you still get to work at these places where you can hang out with cool people, for example, like a record label. Record labels need a ton of accounts. There's a ton of like stupid line by line transactions. If you like rap music or indie music or country music, go get your CPA license and try to get a job as an accounting assistant at one of these companies and then you just go to all the shows for free. That's my career advice for this week's episode.
Shane:
Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I'll say is that it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein you get into an industry that won't change very much so you feel secure, and then the industry doesn't change and it gets antiquated and there's a big skillset shortage. And then legislation might come in or tech might come in and change it for you. I don't know. There will always be a need for accountants. If you're currently in the biz, you'll be in high, high demand as based on us trying to find accountants all the time. Yeah. Let's move on. We've been talking about accounting for too long. What else do we have? Speaking of numbers ...
AJ:
I was going to say speaking of introverts who don't go to parties-
Shane:
Hey.
AJ:
... or are forced to go to parties ...
Shane:
You are-
AJ:
Elon Musk.
Shane:
Yes. Somebody that's good with numbers, introverted, should not tweet very often. Well, ESG is related to the public market, and we have an article here in the Times about ESG investing and how Elon snap back at ... Which company was it that told him that they were going to exclude him from ESG indexes for governance reasons? Tesla was obviously a ... All right, how do you want to handle this one?
AJ:
Yeah, sure. So ESG-
Shane:
You want to explain what ESG is first?
AJ:
Yeah. Quick back up. ESG, environmental social governance. This is the philosophy that corporate governance and being a good corporate citizen of the world, whether that's not directly contributing to pollution, making sure that your workforce and your board is diverse. There's a various set of metrics that makes your company ESG. The theory is that if you invest in these companies, these companies long term will survive as opposed to the companies that are contributing directly to destroying the planet. Those companies won't make it in the long run. Anyways, Tesla, electric car company, you would think very ESG, right? Environmental, that E directly contributing to the removal of polluting vehicles off the road. However, S&P Global decided to remove them from one of their ESG indices because of accusations of racial discrimination and other worker mistreatment, so Elon was real pissed about that because he sees Tesla as a leader in the ESG space, but the metrics told this regulator or this index otherwise, so he was pissed about that and there's a big article in the New York Times about ESG, which I believe deserves more attention and more transparency in the space, but he was just pissed. I don't know.
Shane:
Let's talk about why it matters as well, because that might not be clear. So why do you want your stock price to be higher if you're the CEO of a company and how does this impact the value of your stock? Well, millions and millions of Americans pour their money into mutual funds and ETFs that are very ... They probably just look at the title and it might be ESG fund. Hey, I'm going to put my money into ESG because I think that I'm going to vote with my wallet and I'm not going to hold ExxonMobil and they might be thinking ... Right, so their money goes in and gets equally distributed across all those companies. When they buy those ETFs and those mutual funds, it increases the price of them because there's more demand, so Elon of course wants that price to be high or would push up the price of Tesla, which allows Elon to say to his engineers, "You guys are compensated based, or other people at the company too, are based on the stock price. As long as the price goes up, then you will have a higher compensation via RSU, stock options, et cetera," so being excluded from the S&P 500's ESG indexes directly impacts his ability to recruit talent. Fun. All right. Moving on, we have-
AJ:
You think that's what it was? I think it was just ego. I think he was just pissed.
Shane:
Yeah. Yeah. Any opportunity to be the center of attention. We talk about Elon at least two out of four or one out of two of our episodes.
AJ:
Yeah. I do want to talk a little bit about electric cars in the context of Elon.
Shane:
Or six out of 12.
AJ:
Six out of 12. Half a dozen on one, same six the other.
Shane:
12 out of 24 volts.
AJ:
Tesla is the largest producer of electric cars in the world. They have produced the most electric vehicles on the road. In the US, when we think of electric cars, we think of Tesla. What else do you think of? When you think of electric car, what brands come to mind?
Shane:
Literally none.
AJ:
Yeah, exactly.
Shane:
I know that Chevy has some. The Volt, I think, but you put a gun to my head-
AJ:
Kia has a few. What's my favorite?
Shane:
Rivian?
AJ:
Rivian. Rivian's another one, but their tech is so new that they actually don't have very many vehicles.
Shane:
Does the Prius not fall under the 100?
AJ:
Toyota, right?
Shane:
Yeah.
AJ:
I think it's a hybrid.
Shane:
That was the year [inaudible 00:25:45] the OG in terms of after the year 2000. There's a cool article later about the history of electric cars we're going to touch-
AJ:
But still requires gas.
Shane:
Yeah.
AJ:
Yeah. Well, yeah. I wanted to get into that because-
Shane:
Are you transitioning?
AJ:
I am transitioning. I am transitioning to electric cars. I was in Europe. There are so many different brands of electric cars. There's Renault, there's Citroen, there's all these companies and you're like ... I was in London and I'm like, "What is that car? I've never even seen that car. I've never even heard of this brand of car," because Europe has basically been in a gas crisis for a lot longer than we have so they have been focusing a lot more on this. The city of London has committed to making all of their black cabs electric by 2023. There's just more diversity in the market, but Tesla still is leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else, so there's more inventory. There's more cars to choose from, but none of them have the range that Tesla does or the sexy brand recognition that Tesla does. My favorite electric car that I saw when I was over there is called a ... It's made by Renault, a French company, and it's the Wind. It's the Renault Wind. It's like this little cute little Bug convertible that I would like to import over here. Apparently not a very popular car over there.
Shane:
So you're telling me you were out of commission for two weeks and you were in Europe and what you're doing for fun is farming? You're not going to talk about Paris and London?
AJ:
I forgot about Paris and London. I'm still tired.
Shane:
I totally forgot, too, until you were reminding me that you were just in Europe for two weeks.
AJ:
I forgot to do my British accent. I forgot to do my French accent. I'm tired.
Shane:
Wow. Interesting. Little jet lagged over here. Still on Parisian time. [French 00:27:37] So that's all you got is that, all right, taxis are ... Yeah, it's only 20,000 cars and [inaudible 00:27:43] it's cool, and I think they do have gas engines in there. 20,000 electric vehicles in London is dope. What's really cool is what the skyline, in my opinion, is what the skyline's going to look like when all these cities do go 100%, at least 50% or whatever. LA would be so cool to see them switch over to like the fog going away, Beijing, too. Beijing, you can literally see the smog right in front of your face. Disgusting.
AJ:
There's a rating of smogginess in Beijing where you have to wear a face mask outside because the air is not safe to breathe because how much pollution there is, and LA is headed in that direction. And it's amazing. There was all those pictures of during the pandemic when early days when no one was going to work at all and everyone was stuck home, the air cleared up in LA because there were no cars on the road or 80% less cars.
Shane:
Right. That reminds me of when-
AJ:
[inaudible 00:28:34]
Shane:
... they had the power outage in LA in the 90s and people were calling the cops because they could see the stars for the first time. They could see the Milky Way. They're like, "The aliens are invading," because there was no noise pollution.
AJ:
Sir, That's the North star.
Shane:
Did you see any Teslas in Europe? Do they have them over there?
AJ:
They did. All over. Yeah, all over London, all over Paris.
Shane:
Tight.
AJ:
They're smaller countries than the US, obviously smaller markets, but they have more diversity of people working on the technology to get the products to market faster. Like in the US, Tesla is so far ahead of Ford and Rivian and all those other brands that Tesla just feels ubiquitous, whereas over there, not so much.
Shane:
Yeah, Americans are more willing to blindly walk off a cliff than are our eastern friends.
AJ:
And that's the show.
Shane:
Well just one more thing-
AJ:
Steve [inaudible 00:29:39]
Shane:
Oh gosh. Nevermind.
AJ:
I'll end it here.
Shane:
End it. End it. Let's go. [foreign language 00:29:45] Let's hear it.
AJ:
[foreign language 00:29:46]
Shane:
[Spanish 00:29:47]
AJ:
[foreign language 00:29:49]
Shane:
[German 00:29:50]
AJ:
[foreign language 00:29:50] farewell. It's good to have you back, Shane. Good to be back in [inaudible 00:29:55] I'm done.
Shane:
I was here last week. You were in Paris. No.
AJ:
You were out for like three weeks.
Shane:
All right. Close us out. Get us out of here.
AJ:
All right. Bye, everyone. This has been The Liquidity Event. You can find us at brooklynfi.com/episode48. See you next week, folks.
Shane:
[German 00:30:15]
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 independent. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.