The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 70

 

Episode 70: Alexa, Play Yourself Out

Shane Mason and John Owens cover FTX updates, BlockFi's bankruptcy, subscriptions to drive your car faster, the Amazon Alexa dumpster fire, and more data for Facebook/Meta. Guard yourselves, dear listeners! Major tax-filing websites are sharing your income data with Meta, says Ars Technica. Alexa is costing Amazon wayyy more money than it's making--to the tune of $10 billion. And Mercedes-Benz is going the way of Peloton by charging a subscription fee to unlock one additional second of acceleration. Stay warm, happy December, and drive responsibly!

Read the Full Transcript:

Speaker:

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

Shane:

Welcome, welcome, welcome to The Liquidity Event. We are your host, Shane Mason...

John:

And, John Owens, pinch hitting for AJ this week.

Shane:

My man. And, this is episode number 70, recorded on November 30th, 2022. This week we've got some FTX updates, including a BlockFi bankruptcy. We've got some subscriptions to drive your car faster. Amazon Alexa is apparently a dumpster fire, and we're going to talk about how TurboTax data, TaxAct data is being shared with your favorite data collection agencies, Facebook and Meta.

John:

The Zuck.

Shane:

So, that's fun. Good. More data for Zuck, for the Zuck suck. How you doing, John?

John:

I'm doing all right. It's like, a rainy day here. We're wrapping up our busy season, so I'm hanging in. I'm ready for the holidays, though. And, I've been practicing Shane. I've been going to Wegmans every day, and buying some cookies and eating them, so I can, kind of, build up my stamina as we get closer to Christmas.

Shane:

Wait, you're pre holiday eating to get ready for the holiday?

John:

I just want to be able to make sure I can consume as much cookies as I'd like to this holiday season. If I don't practice, I'm not going to get there.

Shane:

Okay, so you're, you just finished running a marathon in the Philadelphia Marathon, and now you're training for the holiday cookie marathon that's coming out.

John:

I'm training for the holiday cookie marathon. To be honest with you, having run the Philadelphia Marathon, having survived the Philadelphia Marathon, I think holiday cookie marathons are more my thing, going forward. But, I got my 26.2 sticker coming for the car, and I'm set. Nobody can take that away from me.

Shane:

I've noticed you haven't gotten your neck tattoo of 26.2 yet. When is that coming down the line, so that everybody knows you ran a marathon?

John:

Geez, I need to reschedule that. I totally, totally forgot. Yeah, I got to get that done, and then my sleeve, and I'll be set.

Shane:

Right, right. And then, the Iron Man lower back tat, as well.

John:

Oh, that's true.

Shane:

Are you... Well, how was your time? How did you do on... I don't know how marathons are. What's going on?

John:

Yeah. I mean, it depends. I mean, a real good solid marathoner is going to run three hours, maybe less than that. The top finishers in the world are around two hours and change. My first half of the race, I was on pace to finish in under five, but it was a very cold and windy day, and everything got really tight, and so I finished about five hours, 43 minutes. I was just happy to finish, by the end of it. But, yeah. It's one of those things you never... I never thought I'd be able to run a marathon. I never thought I'd do it. And, it was a goal I set early on in 2022, and did a lot of training, and glad to have it on my belt. And now, I'm like, "Okay, maybe for 2023, I'm going to not do as crazy challenges like hike to the top of El Cap, and run a full marathon." Because, those were two things that were huge wins, but also pushed my body to the limit and thought I was going to die.

Shane:

But, you did check a box on the bucket list for...

John:

I did.

Shane:

For yourself.

John:

I did. I did. I did. What have you been up to Shane, you've been traveling all over the place. How are things going? What are you doing?

Shane:

Yeah. I successfully moved to Mexico City for the winter. I don't know if our listeners know this, but past four years I have become a snowbird. I've gone to Mexico, Los Angeles...

John:

Like most folks your age.

Shane:

Right? Right. I'm 35. I'm currently in LA at a friend's house. That's why you're getting laptop quality microphone and audio, or video and audio, dear listener. But, I'm on the way to Asia for various reasons. I'm going to go do a little pre-tax season vacation, going to be in Japan, and the Philippines, and Thailand, for a little while. So, yeah. I'm embracing our totally remote culture, the ability to work from anywhere. It's cool thing about BKFi, cool thing about 2022 in gen. I don't work for Elon Musk, so I can log in remotely.

John:

You might work occasionally the hours that Elon Musk would expect you to work, but you're allowed to do that from anywhere, which is...

Shane:

Yes. I do sleep under the desk, because that's where my bed is. Literally. Not in the office, not in the Twitter office.

John:

Yeah. You watching anything lately? Reading anything good? What have you been up to there?

Shane:

I'm on a horror movie... I'm a big horror movie fan.

John:

Okay.

Shane:

I watched Barbarian, the indie horror flick. I recently watched that one. That one was incredible. If you're a horror movie fan, I think that's a good monster flick that people need to... Really awesome, new innovative twists, in terms of storytelling there. Good transitions from current to past. No spoilers, but really good. Skarsgård's in it. Bill Skarsgård, who played Pennywise in IT is... The premise is that two people show up at an Airbnb at the same time, and one was booked on HomeAway, and one was booked on Airbnb, so they have to share this house and then things start to go awry.

John:

Ooh. Ooh.

Shane:

Yeah. It's a little bit of "Men, bad" subplot situation going on there.

John:

Okay. Okay.

Shane:

Yeah. Doing that. What about you?

John:

Yeah. I mean, I've been watching season two of White Lotus. They're dropping new episodes every week and...

Shane:

I hear that's incredible.

John:

It's incredible. I mean, these are the worst people. But, yeah. No, it's really good. I'm a huge... I mean, I love F. Murray Abraham, from Homeland. I'm a fan of Michael Imperioli, from both Sopranos and a little bit of Law and Order. And so, they've got a great cast this year. I would say, even an upgrade over last year on the cast and the acting and... Yeah. No, it's been pretty good. But, it's one of... It's not all out yet, so I got to watch it one at a time, whereas I watched the first season and a half in a day.

Shane:

Hell, yeah. I hate having to wait. It's really taking the piss out of rich people, right? Isn't that the vibe of the show?

John:

Yeah. It's like all these very wealthy people that are really shitty folks, and, kind of, showing the ins and outs of it, and then somebody dies at the end of it. And, that's not a spoiler, because they literally lead off the season by telling you somebody dies. You just don't know who.

Shane:

That is, literally, the plot of the movie and the premise of the movie, The Menu, that I watched last night, where Ralph Fiennes is a jaded chef that has to deal with rich people all the time and he is had enough. And...

John:

By the way, before we move on... Mexico City. You're spending time in Mexico City, this winter. That's the largest city in North America, I believe, population wise. I think I might have read that recently, which, kind of, shocked me.

Shane:

It's a huge city, yeah. It is gigantic. It's also at 8,000 feet elevation. We can get into Mexico. I've been talking Mexico a lot lately. It's really a rad country. It's like, got a lot of weird wealth and equality dynamics, education dynamics. They have six political parties. Giant country, yeah. Giant metropolis of Mexico City is, it takes like an hour and a half, driving at full speed to drive out of it.

John:

Wow.

Shane:

Yeah, it's cool. A lot of fun gentrification Instagram memes. Everyone sends me their Mexico City and memes about gentrification in Mexico City. What's the last town you gentrified, John?

John:

The last town that I gentrified?

Shane:

You did move to Brooklyn, for a little while.

John:

I moved to Brooklyn for a little bit. I would say... I mean, there was some gentrification going on in Ann Arbor, when I was there, I would say. I think it was already gentrified, honestly. We used to hear a lot about it in Detroit, when I lived in Michigan, as well, about Detroit gentrification, and how neighborhoods were changing. So, that was like the... That was my introduction to real gentrification and how it's impacting people, living in Michigan and hearing about the changes in Detroit, and everything that was happening there.

Shane:

Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Detroit, which was being gentrified, when? In the 90s or the 2000s?

John:

No, no, no. This would be a few years ago. These people in these old, old neighborhoods, there's these new neighborhoods, kind of, up and coming, and young people moving in. And then, Detroit, which is a majority minority city, of course, kind of, just going through these changes, and people who are lifelong Detroiters, kind of, being pushed out, and this new development coming in and changing things. And so, that was my exposure to gentrification. And then, you know I lived in Brooklyn for a little bit. I would say my neighborhood in Brooklyn was gentrifying. I mean, I was in the newest building on the block and Prospect Lefferts Gardens is probably going to be a great place to live in a few years. So...

Shane:

Yeah. I think I need to redigest what gentrification looks like in Detroit, which is a hollowed out community, which is turning a corner over the last 10 years. And...

John:

Because, you got the Rocket Mortgage guy, who's like the fake mayor, they, kind of, say. You know Mike Duggan's the actual mayor. But, the Rocket Mortgage guy, they, kind of, joke is the actual mayor of Detroit, and who really kind of changed things around there.

Shane:

Like the Zappos guy in downtown Vegas? The billionaire that tried to turn around downtown Vegas?

John:

The Zappos... Didn't the Zappos guy die, though? Right? Wasn't that the whole thing?

Shane:

He successfully turned around downtown Vegas, and then successfully asphyxiated himself in a barn in Connecticut. Yes.

John:

Got it. Got it.

Shane:

Playing with fire.

John:

And, he was the guy that he didn't have a will. That was the whole thing.

Shane:

I think it's Tony Hsieh. Yeah, he was working on doing, on renovating Park City, as well. Very, very controversial figure. I read his book about the Zappos turnaround, really good read. And, about his cultural... We've actually implemented some of his ideas at Brooklyn FI, whether you know it or not. [inaudible 00:09:39] So, I've also implement... I have not implemented asphyxiating myself in a small barn yet though, so.

John:

Thank goodness. And for that, we are all thankful.

Shane:

No worries, buddy.

John:

Speaking of founders and drama, FTX, back in the headlines again this week with BlockFi filing for bankruptcy. FTX drama continues. Crypto world, crypto winter continues. Shane, I mean... This is just going to be, I feel, like an enduring headline, and more and more stuff is going to come out here. But, the BlockFi one's interesting because they were, kind of... Their pitch was a little bit more that they're the adults in the room, and they're not decentralized finance, necessarily, as part of the big BlockFi deal.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what we're going to be able to say on this podcast that won't be covered elsewhere. But, first of all, BlockFi sounds a lot like Brooklyn FI. So, don't worry folks, we're still in business.

John:

We're in great shape.

Shane:

We haven't been wrapped up in the Sam Bankman-Fried allegations. We did not have an outstanding loan, or an offered to be purchased by Sam for plannings on the dollar. So, if we manage your assets no fret. Nothing to fret about. We're a classic firm here, no crypto in our... Yeah. Yeah. So, this is going to have ripple effects, obviously. We're seeing multiple companies, a lot of... I, while reading up on these articles, I did not realize how many other bankruptcies... I wasn't counting the bankruptcies elsewhere in the crypto space. You have a crypto winter, and then a general recession happening, which is driving down the prices of these assets, which, the price of these assets increasing as a large, is going to be the only way, apparently, that a lot of these companies would stay afloat. If it didn't go up and to the right, then these companies go down and to the left, apparently. So, we have Celsius, Three Arrows Capital...

John:

We have FTX, then BlockFi, there might be a couple others, as well. And, I think, the thing that just completely scares the hell out of me, is just the amount of leverage that was deployed in the crypto space. And, when we think about leverage, borrowing against assets, I mean, we do leverage all the time. Almost everybody has some degree of leverage, right? You have a mortgage, you have a home equity line of credit, you have a securities based line of credit, you've got some type of loan or something. That, that's common. The whole way it works is if the underlying asset that you're leveraging does not depreciate substantially in value. And so, if you're borrowing against your portfolio, and it starts to go down, then you get a margin call, right? They start selling off assets in your portfolio. If your house goes underwater and you stop paying your mortgage, you just walk away from it, right? It'll destroy your credit score, but... That's one thing there. Here, the underlying assets, when they're, when there's no inherent value to them, or it's all speculative, their values range dramatically. And so, you're barring against something that's now worth substantially less and, kind of, causes a lot of shit to hit the fan.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to try to give my perspective on it, because you were listening to that podcast, I guess this podcast. I guess this is why you're here. And, I think it's very interesting, the intermingledness of the crypto space, and how these people tried to prop each other up, because a sound ecosystem was just good for all of them, and provided legitimacy. And, Sam Bankman-Fried, actually... We're going to talk about BlockFi, here in a second, but he was one of the lenders to BlockFi, because if Celsius falls apart, BlockFi falls apart, Three Capital Partners falls apart, then the crypto space, in general, looks like it's a house of cards, which is not good for FTX, because their whole business model, or a big part of their business model was creating a coin. Let's say they create a hundred coins, they sell 10 of their coins to their friends at $10 a piece. That's means that the other 90 coins that they have are ostensibly worth those $10 a piece. Right? So, now you have a lot of equity in a company that you can get loans for, because you have all this equity. You have all this equity that you can use as collateral. You can deploy the equity that you collect to create whatever reason, whatever return on that investment.

And then, Lyn Al... With that in mind, Lyn Alden, this Twitter user, has the best shakedown of why that house of cards, and how easy that house of cards can happen. She says, "Imagine McDonald's makes its own money, and in this case this would be FTX's token, and let's call them clown bucks. McDonald's keeps most of it, and sells some to the market. McDonald's then uses the remaining clown bucks as collateral for loans. And then, people remember that clown bucks aren't real. And then, Starbucks comes and the market sells the clown bucks they were holding, while reminding the market that clown bucks aren't really a thing. So, now Starbucks is in trouble, because they were holding clown bucks that are no longer worth anything, and this ripple effect across everyone's balance sheet, nobody pays back their loans and everything implodes. So, that's what we're seeing with BlockFi. That's what we're seeing with FTX. Clown bucks are not worth anything anymore, compared to the US dollar."

John:

You just wait. It sounds like there's going to be an ICO for a clown buck coin here, before you know it, now that this idea is floating out there.

Shane:

Actually, somebody should ICO clown bucks. That would be incredible.

John:

Coming next week, on The Liquidity Event... No, I'm just kidding. But, yeah. I mean, I think it's, kind of, crazy. I mean, I think back to The Big Short. And, I know there's going to be a movie about this, I literally can't wait. But, apparently, Michael Lewis, who wrote The Big Short, Moneyball, The Flash Boys, which is the other one about high frequency trading, has been falling around Sam Bankman-Fried for the last few months. And, he's already selling the movie rights to the book he hasn't written yet about it. And so, sign me up. I'll be first in line to watch that film when it drops. But, yeah. The use of leverage behind assets that were propped up and not really worth anything. Kind of scary.

I mean, one of the things that stands out to me is that, occasionally, folks last year were telling me that they could put... Do they want their emergency fund to be held in cash when they can put it in crypto and they've got a risk free 8% rate of return or something like that? That's what they... Clients would tell me this, occasionally, a year ago, and I was like, "Interest rates are nothing. Okay? And, if we think about how interest rates work, and how risk premium works, no. If it's risk free, then it's not paying you 8%." Because, that's not how it worked in early 2021 when the Fed hadn't touched rates yet. And so, if something sounds too good... The old age rule, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Shane:

Yeah. And, it's... That's the great thing about working with a financial advisor, not to plug our own book here, but, in the short term... And, that's what BlockFi was doing, they were borrowing short and lending long. Right? So, if they're, all of a sudden they need to make a margin call, or somebody asked for their funds, and they don't have enough funding set aside, which they actually had 10% of their funds set aside, like normal banks, because they were the adults in the room. And, I really do wish that this bankruptcy didn't happen, because there are a lot of people in... Half of their clients were in developing nations, or in nations where currencies inflate so quickly that the value, such as Argentina... Looking at you Argentina, good luck with your game today against Poland, by the way. Except, if that knocks Mexico out of the World Cup, and then I have to deal with that fallout. Anyway.

Then, you need some sort of stable currency in order to make sure that you can buy groceries every day, and not just deal with the terrible impacts of inflation on your daily life. So, BlockFi was helping people with that. They were able to use their tokens that they have at BlockFi, not only to help with currency, but also, to help with getting loans against that currency, and fighting inflation, and also getting loans against that currency. One of the founders is, she's an immigrant from Argentina. One of the co-founders also had to deal with inflation in their home country. So, it truly bums me out that this is happening for such a good, actual utility in the crypto space. A company that was actually deploying the asset in a way... A use case that I could get behind is no longer available, unfortunately. For a company that was going to file an S-1 in early 2021, and has now declared bankruptcy within 18 months of that, or two years of that. So, my heart goes out to the founders.

John:

Yeah. And, I think the... One of the things I remember learning in economics class, how do we define a currency? A currency is a means of exchange and a store of value. They're the two things that make something a currency. And so, means of exchange, my knock on crypto's always been, "Well, I've never bought anything with crypto. I've never sold anything with crypto. And, crypto has not historically been a store of value." The thought is that if you've got $10, and you walk to the grocery store, it's not worth eight by the time you get there. With crypto these days, it could be. It could swing 20, 20% by the time it takes you to drive to the store, which is kind of nuts. Yeah, and less regulation. There's no Fed. At least with dollars in the bank, you got FDIC insurance, and there are banks that are too big. For better or worse, there are banks that are too big to fail, and the Fed's that lender of last resort that can come in and save things. They're not going to come in and save FTX or BlockFi or any of these crypto. They will save JP Morgan though, most likely.

Shane:

If Elizabeth Holmes is in jail for 11 years, and Sam Bankman-Fried does not go to jail for that amount of time, then I finally legit have a real beef with regulators when it comes to people committing fraud and mismanaging clients' funds. Like, what the fuck? Let's go.

John:

It's crazy. Crazy.

Shane:

Well, anyway. Not to dunk on crypto again. It's nonstop with us on this podcast, but it's just always in the damn news. We can't ignore it.

John:

Yeah. Literally, you couldn't make this up. But, moving on to something even more...

Shane:

Speaking of cultural failures.

John:

Speaking of colossal failures, Amazon's Alexa is on pace to lose 10 billion dollars this year, because it costs a lot of money to run an AI tool that's in all of our houses and we don't use to actually purchase anything with.

Shane:

Yeah, this one, kind of, caught me by surprise. I love a good artist technical article. They love to dive into these things. And, yeah. Apparently, Amazon Alexa is a huge cash suck for Amazon. I mean, they can obviously afford to absorb 10 billion dollar losses, but this article is...

John:

Who can't? Come on.

Shane:

Yeah. I think Business Insider interviewed a few dozen people that worked within that subdivision of Amazon Alexa. And, it's been shuffled around. It used to be a pet project of Mr. Bezos before Andy Jassy took over in 2022 or 2020, and he doesn't care about it, and he's not interested in saving Alexa. I guess he's has less autonomy for supporting big projects like that, and focuses, probably, more on AWS, I believe. He comes from the AWS division.

John:

I think he was more so on the Cloud side of things. Do you remember that movie, though? I don't know. You might be a little bit older. You're a couple years older than me. Smart House, with Katey Sagal? And, the house... They win this smart house, and then the house is like, "I'm your mother now." And then, it kicks out the actual mom, and takes over, and turns them into a prison. And, I think the goal with Alexa was like, it was going to control everything, and everything was going to be great, and everybody's going to want to use Amazon Alexa for everything in their house, and order all their stuff on it. And, that's really not the case. I still order my Amazon stuff from the app, most of the time, or even on a computer, not through my... I do have an Echo, but I don't have it plugged in most of the time. But...

Shane:

Well, I guess the monetization strategies, the various monetization strategies that they tried to deploy never worked out. It's, kind of, interesting to think about. Like, yeah, you ask Alexa about the weather, or you ask her to set a reminder, maybe. But, I never asked her to buy me anything.

John:

Yeah.

Shane:

Right? Like, "Buy me toilet paper." And, some weird toilet paper shows up, and I'm like, "Okay, I guess I'll go to the bodega now." What else are you going to ask her to buy? People like to see what they're going to buy before they buy it. Just [inaudible 00:21:45].

John:

Buy me 79 cent, one ply toilet paper, like I buy at the grocery store. Don't send me that four ply stuff. It's going to clog everything up. I don't want to email my landlord. Come on Alexa.

Shane:

Here we go. Toilet jokes. I started it. But, yeah. And then, the other monetization strategies I guess they could have explored were advertisements. Are you going to, literally, listen to the advertisements on your Alexa? You just kind of yank that shit out of the wall.

John:

It's like having a nice, quiet evening at home when it's like, "This silence brought to you by Scott's toilet paper."

Shane:

Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to lie, I was excited about Alexa. I have some, one in storage. But, my life isn't much worse without it. And, it's not even in first place when it cut... They were first to market. They are the best ad voice in my opinion. Amazon is really good at it, but they're still in third place behind Google and Apple's Siri. Because, Apple has the phone, they have the means of distribution and the rails of distribution. They could throw it right there on your phone in front of you.

John:

I use mine is a speaker more than anything else. To listen to music or something like that.

Shane:

Oh, it's excellent for that. And so, everyone's drunk at your party and they say, "Alexa play whatever." And then, it's just too easy to pass the aux, because the aux is your voice. It's a nightmare.

John:

And then, there's those people that were haunted. There was a thing about a year ago, the people that were named Alexa that were haunted by the Alexa thing. Which, we used to, we had an Alexa on our team. I had my Alexa plugged in, and every time I talked to her in one of our Zoom calls, my Alexa would start blowing up and then I'd have to yell, "Shut up" to it.

Shane:

Yeah.

John:

It's fine.

Shane:

And, well, you could change the name to Echo, but my girlfriend's name is [inaudible 00:23:22]. So, Echo would also trigger. The ex-girlfriend's name is [inaudible 00:23:26], so, yeah. That was a fun one. So, it just got unplugged.

John:

Which is really bad for monetizing it. And so, we are part of the 10. We're helping Amazon lose 10 billion dollars a year on Alexa is the TLDR here.

Shane:

Yeah. And, apparently, the voice... Voice, in general, Google and Apple are all losing money on voice. A lot of the hardware... I guess, the hardware was actually sold at cost.

John:

At cost? Yeah.

Shane:

And, Amazon... And then, Apple does have a $350... Used to have a $350 Apple Home that would listen to you, but they discontinue that in 2021, so it looks like the innovation in voice has hit a speed bump, in terms of monetization of profitability.

John:

Yeah. Interesting to see the next, where this goes next. And, because I don't think voice is done. I think they just need to figure out how voice, how they're going to use voice in a way that's profitable. And, I assume it's, literally, just spying on all the conversations that we have at home, and using that data against us. So we... For marketing purposes.

Shane:

To sell ads in Instagram. Which is, we've seen is one, is the cash mountain that Facebook has been able to use to build the metaverse for billions of dollars. Anyway, speaking of subscriptions and monetization, we have here, one of the most annoying versions, and the inflammatory ways to piss people off is that Mercedes-Benz is jumping on the bandwagon that BMW started, to introduce subscription fees to certain features of cars that the hardware already supports, but can be turned off and on with a subscription fee. It looks like there is the ability for Mercedes-Benz to actually accelerate about 20% faster, which they're charging $1,200 a year.

John:

I think it's 1200 a year. So, a hundred bucks a month for your car to go from zero to 60 a little bit quicker. Okay. This reminds me. This worked out so well for Peloton. Right? Buy the most expensive treadmill in the world, and then, we're going to charge you on a monthly basis so that you can use it, or bike. Bike or treadmill. They got both. And so, I just feel like this is what Mercedes-Benz is doing, and I'm just put off by this. I'm put off, by the... You buy something that's supposed to function a certain way, you pay for it, and then you also need to subscribe to something so that you can actually use it. One of the knocks in the article was that like, "Hey, you already have this functionality built into this, so you built... This component was built into your P&O when you developed the car. So now, you're just milking people for another 1200 bucks a year to use their car the way you designed it." Which, is, kind of, ridiculous if you ask me.

Shane:

Yeah. I can understand the pushback. If I bought a Mercedes, if I had the dough to splash with a Mercedes and then they also ask me to be nickel and dimed for another $1,200 a year to accelerate a little bit faster, that would irk me, for sure. But, I also, kind of, understand it, because there are people, I think there Mercedes knows that they're customers, they've got two types of customers. People that actually care about performance of the vehicle, and then people that just want other people to see them in a Mercedes-Benz. Deep down that... It's a luxury brand. It's an aspirational brand. All three of the brands that we've mentioned here are all aspirational. Peloton, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. We're not talking about Subarus here, or Toyotas charging us, but that could be on the horizon, especially if the revenue from these subscriptions put these other companies in a position to continue to innovate, and create a competitive edge because they've got the additional cash flow from these subscriptions that clients are, or customers are willing to pay. So, while I don't hope this ripples out, all of us need, probably, a few less subscriptions in our lives.

John:

Not your financial planning subscription, though.

Shane:

Not your financial planning subscription, just be clear. You need that. Don't cancel that, dear listener. Yes. Yes, yes. Well, there's obvious value that comes from a financial planning subscription. Being able to go from zero to 60 in one second faster, I don't know if that's worth it.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's designed for the person with the aspiration that wants to show, that wants to show off their BMW, then can say, "My BMW..." Or, excuse me, "My Mercedes-Benz", I should say, "goes from zero to 60 one second faster than yours." And so, I guess what they're hoping here is that the bros all try to one up each other, and then they sell a bunch of subscriptions.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, I can imagine your buddy gets behind your car, and you don't have the sub. How embarrassing.

John:

How embarrassing. How embarrassing. And, my Subaru goes from zero to 60 at about nine seconds. So, yeah.

Shane:

All right. Final article for today. We do have our coverage of sharing data with Big Brother, here. We do have a reveal from the Wall Street Journal that H&R Block, TaxAct, TaxSlayer were looking to monetize the data that they have, the goldmine of data that comes from tax returns. They've been selling it to Meta and Google. John, what are your thoughts?

John:

No surprise here, obviously. Of course, they're selling our data and your data any way that they can. And, of course, the Zuck needs to know how much we make, and what we pay taxes, and where our tax refunds going, and how much it is. So then, he can use the target ads to be on Instagram for stuff that I don't need. Yeah. I mean, it sucks. I mean, I think it's stupid. I think it's ridiculous. I know why they do it. And, I'm, kind of, over all this. I think we're going to move at some point to a world where we get maybe a little bit of our privacy back, because I think we've given up a lot of it with technology these days.

Shane:

Yet another thing that will require boomers to no longer vote. Okay. This has been episode 70 of The Liquidity Event. Email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. You can leave us a voicemail, and we'll play it on the air. Show notes can be found at brooklynfi.com/episode70. And, you BKFi stans out there can leave us a review on Apple Podcast, if you want to be weird about it. Thank you so much for listening, folks. Thank you, John Owens, for being a guest star today. Love to have you, buddy.

John:

All right, great to be here. Thanks, Shane.

Shane:

Take care.

Speaker:

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 paths of financial independence. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.