The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 59

 

Episode 59: The Ramen Girl Goes Public

In this episode we've got a delicious IPO: a small southern California ramen company listed this week. We look forward to slurping up those returns. Then we've got some sports news. Peloton's Chairman departed amidst poor post-pandemic performance for the stationary bike firm. In other bad sports money news, the New York Times has a deep dive into why tennis appears to be a poor economic performer despite the growing popularity and general international love for the sport. We wrap up the show with housing and education news and some hot travel tips!

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, IPOs, specs, founder wins and fails, crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

Shane Mason:

Hello and welcome to The Liquidity Event. We are your host Shane.

AJ:

And I'm AJ.

Shane Mason:

And this is episode 59 of The Liquidity Event being recorded on September 14th 2022, going to air-

AJ:

It's September 13th.

Shane Mason:

Spreadsheet's fucked up. Sorry, everyone. Excuse me. The G sheet lied. Let's roll it back. Oh, right, right. Because we're a day early.

AJ:

Yeah. We're a day early.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. We're a recording on a Tuesday instead of our normal Wednesday because we're at a conference.

AJ:

Yeah. Because we'll be leaving on a jet plane.

Shane Mason:

[inaudible 00:01:13]. We, at least I am terrible at karaoke. AJ's pretty good at karaoke. So you might hear some more songs from AJ. Anyway, where are we at, AJ? What conference is going on? Why are we recording on Tuesday instead of a Wednesday?

AJ:

We are recording on Tuesday because we are at the future approved conference in beautiful Huntington Beach, California, which for those of us who grew up in Los Angeles, who didn't know that Huntington Beach is very far from Los Angeles. Yeah. It's a beautiful beach city, amazing conference right on the beach, lots of inspiring speakers. We get to hang out with people who do what we do. If you're listening to this podcast, maybe you work in wealth management or taxes or financial planning or maybe you're a client of someone who works in taxes or wealth management or financial planning. It's just a kind of meeting of the minds. I don't know. Whatever you do, I don't know if you like going to conferences, but we love going to conferences. You meet cool people, some of the sessions are good and inspiring, but really it's the interesting people and things you hear about in between the sessions. And usually at 1:00 AM a couple drinks in at the after party hosted by some piece of software you've never heard of.

Shane Mason:

1:00 AM maybe Eastern time. I haven't stayed up till 1:00 AM Pacific time. I have been crashing early, I believe. Although, I did lose track of time. When did we leave last night? What time did we leave the party last night?

AJ:

I don't know. It was not early.

Shane Mason:

Fair enough. Spry Enough for today's festivities. Did you see any cool speeches today or this week at all? Oh, Big Boi is performing tonight, so we will be speaking about Big Boi's performance, which I find hilarious that some of the best concerts I've ever seen are at wealth management conferences. We saw famously Weezer at the TD Ameritrade conference in San Diego about three years ago. And I believe we were front row and you got Rivers Cuomo's guitar pick, I believe.

AJ:

Shout out to Rivers. Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Rivers for needing the money and needing to play to 600 financial advisors in a conference center ballroom at the Hilton in San Diego.

Shane Mason:

That was embarrassing for the boys.

AJ:

At least this festival looks like a music festival, right? If I were Big Boi, I wouldn't be terribly embarrassed to be performing here because it looks cool. Performing as a semi-famous successful rock band in a conference center ballroom is depressing AF.

Shane Mason:

A lot of white guys wearing dunks at this conference.

AJ:

Present company included.

Shane Mason:

A lot of [inaudible 00:03:47] is here.

AJ:

You can't call other people out for shit that you do. I guess you can. I do that all the time. I think hypocrisy is cool.

Shane Mason:

Am I wearing dunks? I'm not wearing dunks.

AJ:

You're not?

Shane Mason:

What? No, I'm not wearing dunks. I own dunks.

AJ:

Those white shoes that you have.

Shane Mason:

Those are Air Force 1s. Those are required wearing for everyone between 25 and 40.

AJ:

Oh okay.

Shane Mason:

They're staples.

AJ:

Anyways. Yeah. No. It's a cool conference, learning-

Shane Mason:

Walk around Brooklyn, every third pair of shoes is a pair of white Air Force 1s.

AJ:

Okay.

Shane Mason:

What?

AJ:

Oh, okay. So that's what we're doing for fun.

Shane Mason:

Trust me, dear listener. It's different.

AJ:

In defense of not being like everybody else, by Shane Mason. No, it's cool. We do have an IPO this week.

Shane Mason:

We sure do.

AJ:

It's a ramen company. It's a ramen company.

Shane Mason:

Okay. Tell me. Go for it. What?

AJ:

Is a tiny little company. Yoshiharu is a fast growing restaurant operator that was born out of the idea of introducing their modernized Japanese dining experience to customers all over the world. So they have a secret sauce, they have a secret broth for their ramen. And they have eight restaurants with one in development and eight on the way. And mostly in the Southern California area. They went public this week. And after some trading, they priced a little bit lower than they initially thought they priced it, $4 a share. And now they're commanding a market value of 53 million. And their revenue last year was just under 8 million. So we wish Yoshiharu all the best in their journey as a public company. Hopefully some of the chefs there who are responsible for that secret bone broth got some equity. What else do I want to say about this? Oh, the ticker symbol is Yosh.

Shane Mason:

You know that they didn't.

AJ:

Yeah, they did. No? Didn't?

Shane Mason:

Well, I mean, I don't know.

AJ:

You don't think they did. I think they did.

Shane Mason:

Do you think chefs are getting paid in equity? A line cook? "Thank you, chef. Here's your RSU."

AJ:

You never know. You never know. 130 employees.

Shane Mason:

There is a Yoshiharu on the way home, AJ. On the way back to the airport.

AJ:

Really?

Shane Mason:

Should drop in for a little.

AJ:

Oh, we're going.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. We should drop in for-

AJ:

Congratulate them on their liquidity event. Hello. We should have a liquidity event at Yoshiharu. Have a Asahi or something like that.

Shane Mason:

So annoying. Well, I'm looking at this map.

AJ:

What's the problem?

Shane Mason:

Somebody was like, "That's Catalina Island." I'm like, "No, I'm pretty sure that's long..." I got into a fight with an advisor last time.

AJ:

What happened?

Shane Mason:

[inaudible 00:06:41].

AJ:

Anyways. Anyways.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. So let's drop into a ramen spot and drop it on the gram.

AJ:

Sounds great. Speaking of getting in fights, did you know that tennis is a failing business?

Shane Mason:

What a segue. Wow. Crushed it. Yes. Actually, I did not know that. You found this article from the journal, which is sick.

AJ:

Yeah. It's a great article.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. From the DealBook on the Times. We should start reading more of these DealBook articles. I feel like there's always good stuff in there. Always good deep dives.

AJ:

Wall Street's favorite sport is a failing business. So premise of the article is US Open just happened in New York City last weekend or... It's in Queens, right? You went, didn't you?

Shane Mason:

I was at the US Open last week. Yep. It's a very cool cultural event.

AJ:

Yeah. Lots of celebrities there. Lots of famous like Jamie Diamond, head of Chase. JP Morgan is there, Bill Gates is there.

Shane Mason:

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is Jamie Diamond a celebrity?

AJ:

Well, no, but that's what I'm saying, the article is about the who's who of Wall Street goes to the US Open. But if the US Open or tennis in general was a company, the shareholders would be revolting because it's a terribly run sport because there's a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of people getting paid fat salaries and potentially not doing much. So the article's just about all the bureaucracy. There's seven different tennis organizations that are all doing the similar things. And it's really hard to make it as a player and actually support yourself. You have to be in the top hundred players in the world. And I think tennis is afraid of going the direction of golf, where we see the PGA tour. We had this other entirely separate golf tournament. Is it L-I-V? LIV? I haven't actually said that out loud. They set up this whole other completely separate entity for players to compete in because players were just like, "I'm sick of this PGA stuff, I need to make more money." So we could see the same thing happen in tennis.

Shane Mason:

No, I thought the Saudi Arabian government set up the LIV tour in order to compete with the US or the rest of the world, and that's why there was all those protestors that were... Phil Nicholson famously was over there playing for the Saudis, which is just, I mean, a cash grab. They pay him a ton of money to come and use their brand.

AJ:

Right. Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. It's like the Saudis have money, so they're like, "Yeah. Come play for us. We'll pay you a bunch of money, we'll double whatever you're making on PGA tour or more."

Shane Mason:

Yeah. And there was that great heckler, the guy at TGO that interview people at Trump rallies and just catch them in their own bullshit. And he was heckling Phil Nicholson being like, "How much do you think the guys that killed the Saudi journalist got paid to do the [inaudible 00:09:27]." He was heckling with quotes like that and Phil was just not responding.

AJ:

Oh no.

Shane Mason:

What's the journalist name? I feel like you might be able to remember. Ash Kashagi?

AJ:

Oh.

Shane Mason:

I'm butchering it.

AJ:

Kashga... Oh, yeah. Sorry. Apologies. This is embarrassing. [inaudible 00:09:42].

Shane Mason:

Sorry, listener. I shouldn't have taken a crack.

AJ:

Yeah. This is embarrassing.

Shane Mason:

But yeah, yeah. I mean, tennis is... I don't see the article's talking about how it's a failing business and it doesn't have a strong support structure financially. It's a mess, even though it seems like... When I was there, it's like Emirates was one of the big supporting brands, Rolex was a big supporting brand, Chase, MX, all of these aspirational brands that are for our luxury brands essentially. And yet it seems to not be doing very well financially and the players don't seem to be getting great pay if you're not in the top 20.

AJ:

Yeah. It's a cool event. It's a cool cultural event. In New York city it's like, "Oh, have you gone to the Open?" Tons of tourists come in. I just met someone today at the conference who doesn't live in New York. And he was like, "Oh, I was in New York City for the Open last weekend. It was so awesome to get back to the city." It was just good for, I don't know, New York City morale or whatever. And if that goes away, it's bad news. Obviously, Serena's retirement from tennis was in the news. Did you happen to catch her match?

Shane Mason:

If she had won that match, I would've seen her match when I was there on a Sunday, but she lost on Friday. I did watch that on television, which was really, really cool.

AJ:

Thanks, Serena. Yeah. Lame.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. So the women play after the men. And one of the other things that they mentioned is that sometimes it's just not very well organized. The men's games can go until 3:00 in the morning, just because they don't have a tiebreaker. Well, they have a tiebreaker, but I didn't know this because I don't pay a lot of attention to tennis, but it could just go on forever. It's cricket. It has to. One of the games went until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. And the women play after the men.

AJ:

So the women could get started at 2:00 AM, a little sleepy.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. I don't know if they started that match afterwards. But there just needs to be some better rule. It's only a 2 billion industry, which I find interesting. All of tennis is only a 2 billion sport. Whereas I think the Dallas Cowboys are worth over $10 billion and the Yankees are worth a ton of money.

AJ:

Yeah. Yeah, those are huge stadiums, but anyway, that's cool.

Shane Mason:

I don't know. The only cool thing about the US Open is that just literally the physical structure of Arthur Ashe Stadium, it's like it's just a big party and it's a tiny little stadium. We're talking a lot about sports this week, I guess. And it's a modern, tiny, micro stadium. It's what I imagine a micro nuclear plant looks like it's not a giant-

AJ:

Like a model.

Shane Mason:

It's not like a mega-

AJ:

[inaudible 00:12:10].

Shane Mason:

Yeah. It doesn't give you mega phobia. It feels very manageable and cute. You can see the tennis ball, even though we were in the last row. And there's all these giant TVs and it just feels really clean. I mean, Michelle Obama was there. Yeah. But I do want to go back to that. I'm curious what our listeners think if Jamie Diamond or Bill Ackman, who are both mentioned in this article are celebrities. And they would be some of the only people from the finance world that are celebrities besides Suze Orman.

AJ:

That are known.

Shane Mason:

Or Dave Ramsey, I guess.

AJ:

I mean, Dave Ramsey or famous con artists. Madoff would be a celebrity. No longer with us now.

Shane Mason:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

AJ:

Speaking of...

Shane Mason:

Are you segueing? Oh here, let me help you out.

AJ:

Yeah, yeah. I'm segueing, but I'm drowning.

Shane Mason:

Speaking of failing sports businesses. There you go.

AJ:

Thank you. Yeah. Peloton CEO is out. Or sorry, not CEO. He stepped down from CEO back in February and he was the chairman. Peloton chairman, John Foley to exit in a management shakeup at Peloton. Peloton, as many of you know experienced explosive growth during the pandemic because everyone was stuck at home, couldn't go to the gym, had some money potentially from their startups doing very well. And you were a remote worker, you were stuck at home, you wanted to stay in shape and look cool and have a community of fellow cyclists. Great pandemic business.

AJ:

There was a lot of criticism that Foley invested way too much in the supply chain and just overproduced betting that this would continue forever. And when the pandemic started to wind down, people went back outside, back to the gym. Peloton demand dropped off. So he is out and we will see what new leadership comes in and see if they can turn around this company. I remain hopeful. I think exercise tech is always going to be around as we start to live longer and be more interested in our health. I have faith in the future of Peloton, it might take a little while, but I think there are some smart ideas that we don't even know about that are coming down the pipeline is my prediction.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, yeah.

AJ:

Have you ever ridden a Peloton? I fucking love Peloton. It's so awesome.

Shane Mason:

Yes. Yes, my sister-

AJ:

Do you have one? No.

Shane Mason:

No, I tried to get one. I move around too much to own anything of that size, but my sister owns one in her Houston home, which has plenty of space. You know Houston homes are large. Everything's wide instead of tall down in Texas. I loved it, suffice to say. And it actually kicked off my whole reinvigoration, post COVID I'm going to get back into working out. Back in November, December, I took a week or two off drinking, maybe even a month. I took a long time off drinking and rode the hell out of the Peloton and lost a couple pounds and was like, "Ah, this is what feeling good feels like. I forgot about this." So yeah, I attribute that to Peloton.

Shane Mason:

So I'm a big fan. Huge fan of the brand. If it's only valued at 4 billion now down from its peak of 50 billion, there's a lot of people talking about how it will be acquired by a larger trillion dollar company. Apple's a $3 trillion company ish. That's less than half of 1% of it. It would be almost free if they did a stock swap. So I just don't know if the market's even big enough for Apple to consider it. And they already integrate with the Apple watch and all that.

AJ:

Yeah. They were saying one of the new moves is they're going to have a partnership with the Amazon. So they're going to start selling through Amazon to reach more people. I'm sure Amazon's got some discounts lined up.

Shane Mason:

Did you say poor people? Or you said more people?

AJ:

No, I did not say poor people. More people.

Shane Mason:

I was like, whoa.

AJ:

Spends two days at a wealth conference, immediately becomes an evil capitalist. No, I did not say poor people. More people. I would love for everyone to have access to Peloton. What a great way to stay in shape without having to leave your house. If you got young kids or a demanding job, et cetera. Speaking of demanding jobs, the US has banned advanced technology firms from building facilities in China for a decade. This headline is a bit misleading because the US did not ban all building any kind of factories in China. Basically, they have banned companies that have received tax breaks and credits or help from the US government from taking jobs offshore. This is the CHIPS act, the US CHIPS and Science Act. What are these? What's it called? What's the word for chips? Not super...

Shane Mason:

Semiconductor.

AJ:

Semiconductor. Thank you. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. That's the industry that we're talking about. I forget the percentage, but most of these chips are produced in Asia and we want to bring them back here.

Shane Mason:

90%.

AJ:

90%. Yeah. So that's cool.

Shane Mason:

Well, rather only 10% are produced in the United States.

AJ:

Right. Got to bring that number up. We don't want to be dependent on a trade partner. So that's cool. That law's already in effect. So yeah, we don't want to be so reliant on Chinese factories to build our semiconductor chips.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Yeah, we talked about CHIPS acts on another episode. I believe it was two or three episodes ago. We went into the CHIPS acts. It's a sleep or hit, I believe, when it comes to legislation that came out of this agenda or out of this administration, I think it's really cool that we're committing so much money to domestic manufacturing of chips. There's already been a large set of announcements of people that are using this money or letting people know that they're getting ahead and accelerating investment and building manufacturing plants in the United States. Just onshoring in general, I find very cool. It's going to be good for advanced tech jobs.

Shane Mason:

In the US, going to provide some more opportunities for people to reverse the hollowing out of the United States manufacturing sector. Yeah. I mean, these are just some of the covenants that you would expect from a government loan. Every loan has a bunch of covenants and it's not just free money. It's no surprise that there's a string attached to this. Whenever PPP came out-

AJ:

Except PPP.

Shane Mason:

No, there were 26 different sets of restrictions, different iterations of the restrictions that we infamously had to navigate over the course of 2020 and 2021. Just looking at tax returns now, I'm still dealing with PPP because those were mostly forgiven in 2021.

AJ:

Still forgiven. Yes.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. So those are getting forgiven on tax returns that we're filing now. So refuses to die. But yeah, it makes sense that you would not be able to take our US government money and use it to build a manufacturing plant in China.

AJ:

Our competitor.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. What else was there in this article about...

AJ:

[inaudible 00:19:23].

Shane Mason:

[inaudible 00:19:25].

AJ:

Got a lot to get through, my friend. We got to keep moving.

Shane Mason:

It's true. Yeah. Go for it.

AJ:

What do we have next? Yeah. Speaking of computers and chips, Apple unveiled their new iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus. The only thing I have to say about this is that, Shane, I'm not paying for you to get another iPhone when you lose this one, because we were hanging out yesterday and you left it at the pool. So I don't know if you have any insight into this article.

Shane Mason:

I don't think it would be a 14, anyway. I don't understand the appeal. I guess it can detect when I'm in a car crash. I guess if my Uber driver gets in a crash, that's one of the new features. It doesn't seem-

AJ:

I get a notification. It's like Shane got a car crash. Anyway, you were saying. No, just kidding.

Shane Mason:

And if you get in a car crash, there's no service there, then it can broadcast your location to a satellite instead of using a cell phone tower, which could be cool.

AJ:

Didn't we have that before? Starlink? What was that called? That thing in the car. You know what I'm talking about?

Shane Mason:

OnStar.

AJ:

Onstar. Thank you. Not Starlink. That's the Musk internet thing. OnStar. Yeah. What happened to Onstar? Are they still around?

Shane Mason:

Wait, Starlink just had a massive update as well that we need to... I think we skimmed over, we'll come back to that later. But yeah, OnStar is still around, I believe. I think you can still get that in some cars, but that was the biggest flex when you got in your buddy's car and his dad had the Escalade with the OnStar.

AJ:

With the button.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Like, "Hello Richard, how can I help you?" And it was an actual person that answered every time. Yeah. It was like the original MX Platinum.

AJ:

Yeah. Gen Z will not remember this, but back in the day, you could call information. You could call 411 and an actual person answered the phone and get you the phone number for somebody else. So kids, before there was Google and you're in this new city and you needed to... I'm trying to think. You need a phone charger. We didn't have cell phones then. You needed to get your nails done and you need to find a nail salon, you would literally call 411 and say, "Hey, can you give me the number of a nail salon near this address?" And they would look it up in the phone book and then give you the number. Or sometimes they would even connect you. It was crazy, crazy times.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. I think they charged you a dollar every time you used it. Remember getting in trouble for using it too many times when I was 12.

AJ:

I'm not nailing the segues today.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. I'm enjoying this dumpster fire segue. This is my favorite. This is your article as well. So you got to take this one.

AJ:

Speaking of-

Shane Mason:

Speaking of dumpster fires you might want purchase [inaudible 00:21:54].

AJ:

Dumpster fires.

Shane Mason:

That's all you can afford.

AJ:

There's this company called Flyhomes. This is an article I just came across. And essentially, the business, their tagline is most people don't have the money to win an expensive bidding war, that's why we created the Flyhomes Cash Offer. You get faster upfront funding so you can get your bid in. So in the house bidding bonanza craziness of 2021 and early 2022, I'm sure everyone's heard stories of like, "Oh, I need to show up to this offer with cash in hand ready to go, and I need to be ready to go even higher because I'm in a bidding war with someone and it's just nuts." And there's this madness created like, "I need to pay $600,000 over this ask and I need to pay all cash."

AJ:

And basically, Flyhomes is saying like, "Well, that's crazy. And most normal people can't do that, so we're going to give you a super high interest rate, short term loan to be able to put in that offer, and then you can go refinance later at a more reasonable mortgage rate later." I don't know how I feel about this. The pro of this is you're a young family and you need to buy a house and you actually cannot participate in this bidding war because you're up against private equity money or people who just have literally a million dollars cash. So this maybe does get you into that house. But generally, if you can't afford to be in the bidding war, you probably shouldn't be in it in the first place. So maybe rethink the house purchase or wait a little bit.

Shane Mason:

Absolutely.

AJ:

I already know your take on this.

Shane Mason:

Oh yeah. Anybody that's using Flyhomes to convert from "Hey, I got to get a mortgage," to, "I'm going to use this cash offer." Which is essentially just a more expensive mortgage. You need a rent versus buy calculator immediately and you cannot afford the home. And by the way, if you think you're going to get a great return on your investment with the home, the higher your initial price, the lower the yield on your investment is going to be. So all these crazy inflation of price that we're seeing, it's not like whatever you purchased the home for, it's going to guarantee you a return on that investment, that would've been the same if the price was lower.

Shane Mason:

High prices equals lower returns on the other end, so that means that if you're doing a rent versus buy calculation, it's even more in favor of renting that quantitative analysis of whether you should be buying. You could stake all the money that you were going to put into the mortgage and put it in the stock market and give your 8% returns and come out way ahead and know you won't look as cool to your mother-in-law, but down the road, you're going to have a way higher net worth, which is just good advice. Obviously, behaviorally people don't think rationally and they just want to own their home. Yeah. You knew my take before I said it, but that's it.

AJ:

I knew your take. Yeah. I mean, I think there is an argument though, in these crazy housing markets, the rental market's also crazy. So it's like young family needs a house in this area because their job is in this area and the school is in this area. And I like this because it actually does make them compet... That's what they were going to pay anyway, they just need the cash there to even participate in this crazy market. My question is, as the market starts to cool off, as we see interest rates going up, is this even a viable business model? This business model literally only works when there's a absolutely psycho insane housing market, like there was in LA earlier this year or Austin, Texas, which you have some experience with.

Shane Mason:

For sure. How do you feel about-

AJ:

Anyhoo. We'll see how that plays out. I will not be recommending this to clients, I can tell you that much. I just wanted to talk about it.

Shane Mason:

Somebody will come and ask for it though. How do you feel about schools? I get the whole school thing. If you need to live in a school zone... So bad with the vocabulary around the stuff without having kids. A school district.

AJ:

School district. Zone. Yeah, zone. You're right. You're right. Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. So the classic segregationalist or institutionalist concept of all of our schools being funded via real estate taxes. How do we [inaudible 00:26:02] that terrible gentrification and ancient practice of-

AJ:

Are you asking me to solve the education crisis?

Shane Mason:

Maybe I should be arguing for it. I'm the one on that side of the debate of just rents when you're trying to get into a school zone. But I'm talking more economically, politically, philosophically, how would you reshape the school funding? Do we have an opinion on that or we have to come back to that?

AJ:

Do I have an opinion on it?

Shane Mason:

Off the top. Off the rip.

AJ:

Anecdotally, I went to a very interesting elementary school. It's called Wonderland Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles, public school. That was part of the magnet system. And the magnet system was basically to basically saying throw your hands up, but we're not going to be able to fix this funding issue, but we have a really great school here in an area where there are high property taxes. Let's bust kids in from where the housing prices are lower, and that neighborhood over there let's bus them in, mix everybody together. And all the high performing students can be together in this magnet program.

AJ:

And the students who wouldn't necessarily benefit from the better public school get to benefit from it. So to me, that worked. I mean, it's hard. It's also, you have to bust these poor kids 40 minutes from their houses into this other different neighborhood. But to me, instead of trying to fix the massive institutional problem that's been around for forever. That's a good temporary, "Hey, we've got millions of kids that need to get good education, let's mix it up a little bit. Let's make room for them in our better funded schools."

Shane Mason:

Oh okay. So you're taking-

AJ:

I don't have an opinion fit for you.

Shane Mason:

Oh, you don't have an opinion. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It reminds me of that article where we talked about a few weeks ago.

AJ:

I feel ill equipped to talk about this because I don't have kids. I imagine this is such an urgent, important thing for so many parents, but you and I, I'm aware of it, but I don't feel the urgency, which is why I don't have an opinion yet.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of the article that we talked about, where in the biggest indicator of success for lower socioeconomic status access to, yeah, if you had access to people like role models that were higher socioeconomic status. It wasn't necessarily education level, but access to those people living around them and being influenced by them and seeing the other side of the status.

AJ:

Yeah, exactly. And that was the idea of the magnet schools like, yeah, they're in the neighborhood. I lived in the neighborhood and I would have kids over after school who lived an hour away and my mom would drive them back home afterwards because they missed the bus. And that was a chance for us to meet people who we wouldn't have met otherwise because they live so far away.

Shane Mason:

So that's what the magnet means in magnet school, is that they take kids out of other neighborhoods and they magnetize them to that school.

AJ:

Mm-hmm.

Shane Mason:

Got it. Got it.

AJ:

Yeah. No. They implant magnets in your brain so that you'll always go back to that school.

Shane Mason:

So that is the exact opposite of the school I went to in Mississippi, where if you were a good student, you went to a private school and all the public school kids were left alone.

AJ:

Oh, I mean, that's rampant all over LA. Yeah. The fact that I went to public school in LA is... Everyone goes to private school, but yeah. Anyway. Ooh. We're out of time. What the hell? Where does the time go, Shane? We were yammering on about schools and homes is and Peloton bikes.

Shane Mason:

Is that real? Oh wow. Incredible. I had so much fun hanging out with you. Time flies when you're making podcasts.

AJ:

Time flies when you're having fun. What do we want to close with? Do you have any no brainers from you? You haven't done a no brainer in a while. Well, I'll start because I have one. No brainer, when you go to a conference or really any hotel where you're going to be there for more than three days, get groceries delivered, so you don't have to buy the expensive ass hotel water and you don't have to eat the unhealthy hotel food. Call up your local grocery store or Amazon, obviously, get water, protein shakes, protein bars, little fruit, little yogurt, little granola, and you're set. I feel so good in the mornings instead of eating disgusting piles of bacon and French toast.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, yeah. I'm with you on that. I did that in New Orleans recently and I have some of our... But bring a fork as well because-

AJ:

Oh yeah. Bring your own utensils.

Shane Mason:

There's no forks in hotel rooms. My no-brainer is that if you fly a lot, you don't need $300 boast headphones to enjoy the movie on the plane, but you cannot enjoy the movie on the plane with the headphones they give you because you can't even hear what the hell they're saying. So just $20 headphones, $30 headphones that you plug into your laptop that I'm talking on right now, actually. My mic probably sounds terrible, but you can hear the movies, you can enjoy them.

AJ:

It's fine.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. So yeah, that's my brainer.

AJ:

Awesome. Thanks for hanging out with me, Shane. This has been The Liquidity Event. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. You can leave us a voicemail and we'll play it on the air. You can find these show notes to this episode at brooklynfi.com/episode59. See you next week folks. Bye.

Shane Mason:

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.