The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 76

 

Episode 76: Aaand we're back!

Shane and AJ have missed each other and missed our listeners even more. In this episode we'll find more awful tech layoff news, a floppy IPO from Mattress Firm, a cruise ship living update, and some insight on our upcoming BKFi retreat in beautiful sunny Los Angeles, California. Correction: there is historic flooding in Los Angeles, CA and our whole team is soggy. Enjoy episode 76 of the Liquidity Event! A very fine episode indeed!

Read the Full Transcript:

Presenter:

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.

AJ:

Hello and welcome to The Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, AJ.

Shane:

Y yo soy Shane.

AJ:

This is episode 76 being recorded on Monday, January 9th, airing on Friday. Ooh, Friday the 13th. Can't wait for that. This week we got a-

Shane:

An auspicious day.

AJ:

An auspicious day. We've got a fabulous and slightly spooky show for you today. We've got cybersecurity, more tech layoffs unfortunately, living in luxury on the high seas. Shane, I have a request for commentary from you on that one. And of course, discussion of our annual company retreat, which we are having right now in beautiful, sunny Los Angeles, California. Just kidding. It's gross and rainy outside in Los Angeles, California. [foreign language 00:01:18].

Shane:

[foreign language 00:01:20] Seattle apparently it is disgusting out here. I was promised sunshine when we planned this trip.

AJ:

I know. I feel like I've personally let everyone down by bringing our crew out here and-

Shane:

You would go [inaudible 00:01:32] everything's AJ's fault.

AJ:

And now, it's raining.

Shane:

Everybody stoke the flames of AJ's anxiety and tell her it's her fault that it's raining.

AJ:

Too late. Our retreat will be over by the time this podcast airs. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we actually have some breaking news in The Liquidity Event space. I got an email about 30 seconds ago. Sorry, Shane, I just popped this right in here. I just wanted to make sure we cover it because it is so urgent. That Mattress Firm, a company that filed their S-1, I think it was back in October, was planning to go public in Q1. They were trying to raise about $500 million, and they have just withdrawn their IPO, so I wonder... I haven't had a chance to dig into that. Maybe we'll look into that next week, but just wanted to share that breaking news with our audience.

Shane:

Yeah, thank you for not sleeping on that highlight. I really appreciate inserting that soft landing here for... It doesn't make me comfortable to hear that Mattress Firm will not be more liquid and have more opportunities.

AJ:

Do you think you're going to lose sleep over it?

Shane:

There it is. I don't care. I just want the IPO market to get back to normal. Not necessarily 2021, highlights the halcyon days of 2021, but just back to normal.

AJ:

Yeah, for sure.

Shane:

That's not how that word works, but you know what I mean.

AJ:

Halcyon? How do you spell Halcyon, H-A-L-C-Y-O-N?

Shane:

You nailed it. Look at you.

AJ:

I always pronounce it hard C, but oh, well, that makes me an idiot.

Shane:

Halcyon?

AJ:

Halcyon? No.

Shane:

No. I think it's the halcyon days, but you never make fun of somebody that mispronounces a word because it means that they learned the word from reading it.

AJ:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't ever make... I'm a bad pronouncer. Speaking of bad pronouncers, what are you most looking forward to this week in Los Angeles with the whole BKFi team?

Shane:

I'm just looking forward to... We just met one of our employees for the first time in person. That's always a jarring but awesome experience to put a face to a Zoom name and presence, and I'm looking forward to doing that with about seven to eight other people I believe that I've never met in person before.

AJ:

Yeah. Immediately shocking. The height is always the first shocker.

Shane:

Yeah. Bobby's quite tall.

AJ:

Yeah. Hey, Bobby, how're you doing?

Shane:

Yeah. Bobby handles the podcast for us, dear listener. And yeah, it's just a lot more trust. We work in very stressful situations during tax season and year-end planning season and just throughout the year as well, so it is always much more helpful... And we work very interdepartmentally. We have all our different divisions, so it's great to know that while someone might not be a tax manager or a financial planner, they don't have the same background as you, at least you've met them in person and you know that they've got your back and they're helping everyone run the same direction. Especially if you've seen someone karaoke a Disney song on three or four tequila shots, you get to build a little bit better of a bond than playing virtual bingo or whatever it is.

AJ:

You took the words right out of my mouth. I am most looking forward to karaoke. That has become a Brooklyn FI retreat tradition as a last retreat. That is what I am most excited about. Yeah, we always do it the last night because it can get a little... I want to make sure that there's no tax season planning or anything that has to happen after a night of karaoke. Just McDonald's breakfast sandwiches and flights home. I think at our last retreat after karaoke, we were going to the Japanese Botanical Garden, which ended up being lovely, but attendance on that went from mandatory to optional considering how fun karaoke was the previous evening.

Shane:

Indeed. Indeed. How were your-

AJ:

Speaking of a-

Shane:

... holidays, AJ? Have you guys spoken about this on the podcast already? I missed this. How was your New Year's Eve?

AJ:

I know, Shane, we've missed you. Yeah, my New Year's Eve was fantastic. I spent it with a six-week-old puppy and some great friends in the desert. How was your New Year's Eve?

Shane:

I was asleep by about ten o'clock, I think. I'm not a big New Year's Eve fan. I don't know. I like the way you did it out in the desert just far away from the shenanigans, but then again, that's mid-thirties piping in here.

AJ:

Yeah. I love New Year's Eve, but my definition of a perfect New Year's Eve is fancy dinner that you cook at home with a good bottle of wine or two and toast... In the desert, we call it Desert Midnight, which is nine o'clock, which means after nine o'clock, it's time to go to bed.

Shane:

Yeah. I just stayed with you at your house in Palm Springs, and nine o'clock was y'all's version of midnight. I thought that was very cute.

AJ:

Yeah. Good night.

Shane:

Dear listener, AJ Ayers goes to bed at around 8:30, wakes up around 3:30 apparently, in case you're wondering when you can get ahold of her Eastern to Pacific.

AJ:

All my New York friends are like, "Where are you? Why are you texting me at four o'clock in the morning, you psycho?"

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

To each their own.

Shane:

It's pretty psychotic.

AJ:

I adjust the time zones. I had a good indeed segue, but we wanted to talk a little bit more about our New Year's Eve. So speaking of bad hangovers, Salesforce is cutting 10% of its personnel. That is about 7,000 employees. We've got an article here from CNBC. They're reducing their office space as well. They're chalking this up to a restructuring plan. They just announced it last week. They currently employ over almost 80,000 workers as of December. So they're cutting about 10% of that workforce. And basically the rationale here is customers have been more measured in their purchasing decisions given the inflation, stock market, where it is just a general macroeconomic client. So they have made a very difficult decision, those are CEO Marc Benioff's words, to lay off workers here.

Shane:

Co CEO.

AJ:

Co CEO. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Co CEO, Benioff. Yeah, I mean, earnings in Q4 were great for them, so this is very much a preemptive measure saying they're looking at the forecast, they're talking to their experts, they're talking to their finance team who are saying, "We ought to figure out a way to keep up this profit without having over hired." That's an admission that we expanded quickly and to shore up ahead of a potential recession, have to make some cuts. What's your take on this?

Shane:

Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to let people go and the people that were making the hiring decisions and the executives at all these tech firms, there's always the war for talent. They were gearing up for a longer... I mean, who could have predicted the vaccines would come out so fast, right? I mean, I think the miracle of science behind the vaccines can almost be blamed for all these layoffs because people thought... I mean, isn't that a crazy way to think about it? We didn't know we'd be able to get back to work and the pandemic darling's like Peloton and Zoom and all these other companies whose valuations exploded at the beginning of the pandemic and in the midst of the pandemic, who would've thought we'd be not wearing masks just 18 months, two years later? World travel's open, Japan's back open, et cetera. So I'm not saying obviously that vaccines are terrible, but we couldn't predict that we would be able to get back to a normal or semi-normal or post pandemic 2.0 this fast.

So these companies that over hired thinking that we'd be continuing to expand into the digital space now have to cut back, including Amazon, Meta, Twitter, say what you will about the Twitter layoffs, et cetera. And then the other thing I thought was interesting was Marc was saying that he'd be more measured about acquisitions and these 8,000 employees means they would take a $1 billion hit to the P&L, I'm assuming, for severance packages. Interesting that Salesforce acquired Slack in the midst of the pandemic December 2020 for $27 billion. So that's about, I don't know, 27 times the expense size as these 8,000 employees. So maybe that's what he is trying to say. I imagine people at Salesforce are like, "Why the fuck did we buy Slack, and now we're laying off 10% of our workforce?" Having a pity party about that. And they also purchased-

AJ:

So you think they overpaid for Slack, you think the valuation was driven up?

Shane:

I'm not an evaluation expert, but that seems to be the peak of the, at least public equity valuations for companies, and that's why everyone rushed to IPOs in 2021-

AJ:

December 2020?

Shane:

Yeah. Surely, Salesforce's valuation would be lower than it was in December of 2020 given the shift to fully digital, work from home, the necessity for Slack to replace the walking around the office. Do you think the same way?

AJ:

Yeah. I think so. I think the coming out and saying you're going to be more measured about acquisitions is an indicator that you are probably wanting to go back to your core business and that you just need to get lean and make it through whatever's coming. It's not like, "Hey, we need to grow. There's something missing from our product, or we want to increase our market share." Saying we're going to be measured about acquisitions means, "Well, we got to make this work with what we have," right? I mean, I think the Slack acquisition was a great move personally. Who else could you see Salesforce acquiring at this point? I don't know. Some tool we haven't heard of that tracks customer... To me, it's all about reporting at this point, so I'm sure there's a lot of startups that we've never heard of that have figured out some kind of incredible metrics for reporting that Salesforce has their eye on. That would be my prediction for who their next acquisition would be.

Shane:

Oh, definitely a decentralized AI machine learning neural network VR metaverse platform. That would be my guess.

AJ:

You forgot crypto. You forgot crypto in your adjectives.

Shane:

I said decentralized.

AJ:

Oh, okay.

Shane:

Sorry, I got a slip in the blockchain and that's okay. Yeah.

AJ:

You forgot the SI after your decentralized.

Shane:

Yeah, my bad. No, I don't know enough about Salesforce's core business. I just know it's impossible to use for a small business.

AJ:

Have demoed, will not be purchasing.

Shane:

I had my own little journey down Salesforce lane in 2018 or '19. It was like, "This ain't going to work for us. Maybe in 2030 we'll join the Benioff team."

AJ:

This is how I feel about Salesforce. I was like, "I see where this is going and I see how this could be great, but I'm not an octopus. It feels like you need eight arms to be able to use Salesforce and understand how it works, but I only have two."

Shane:

Right.

AJ:

If I had eight arms it would be amazing, but I don't have that and I don't know how to add them to my body.

Shane:

Tom Cruise... I would love if somebody-

AJ:

Who's the villain in-

Shane:

Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

AJ:

That or Alfred Molina as the villain in Spider-Man in the one with Tobey Maguire. What's that character with all the legs, the robot arms? Octoman?

Shane:

Octoman? It's so funny. I was just watching on a flight, Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark, whatever it is, and that guy is his buddy at the beginning when he steals the sculpture.

AJ:

Molina?

Shane:

Yeah. And you remember the big iconic rolling ball to get out of the temple at the beginning?

AJ:

Oh, I forget.

Shane:

Molina steals the statue from him. I'm like, "I know this guy who's stealing from Harrison Ford." He's like a young Molina in his early twenties. It's cute [inaudible 00:13:19]-

AJ:

I love Alfred Molina. Wait, was he just... I think he was just Diego Rivera in Frida. Yeah.

Shane:

Frida, yeah.

AJ:

I like that movie. I feel people didn't like it and I just missed it and I just watched it on a plane. I enjoyed it very much.

Shane:

Yeah. Oh, you're doing your Mexican homework too. I also am doing my Mexican homework considering I live in Mexico City now-

AJ:

I forget-

Shane:

And I didn't know anything about Frida Kahlo at all until I watched-

AJ:

Oh, really?

Shane:

I guess I have to watch Salma Hayek for two hours.

AJ:

Oh, poor you. No, there was an exhibit of hers at the Brooklyn Museum two... It was pre-pando, three years ago. That was pretty cool. So I got to see... They not only had a lot of her paintings, but a lot of her outfits and obviously visiting the... oh, azu car, isn't it? Isn't it called azu car? Or no, Azul. Sorry, I'm mixing up my Spanish word.

Shane:

Casa Azul. Yeah.

AJ:

Right. Right. Right.

Shane:

Yeah, pretty awesome, a studio in Mexico City. Yeah, it's really cool. Let's get back on track here. Enough south of the border talk. We have some more layoffs. Surprise, surprise. Let's get the layoffs out of the way that we can talk about non-competes. Amazon is also expanding its corporate layoffs to an additional 18,000 jobs as per the New York Times. I don't know, do you have commentary here?

AJ:

I don't.

Shane:

Besides [inaudible 00:14:39]-

AJ:

I guess my commentary is that they are corporate, these layoffs are at the corporate level. These are not warehouse workers like Amazon. The logistics side of the business is actually hiring and they're adding to that because we are all addicted to ordering things that show up within two days at this point. There's a lot of engineers being laid off. I think there's a lot of sales team, some of the Amazon Studios, a lot of the production side of things. I think that's unfortunately where a lot of layoffs have happened. That's all I have to say about that. I think we can move on. So speaking of being laid off, if you've got a non-compete contract that might make getting a new job a little bit difficult.

Shane:

Nice segue.

AJ:

So we have an article here from the New York Times, US moves to bar non-compete agreements in labor contracts. I read this article with great interest and I still don't know how I feel about it.

Shane:

Really?

AJ:

But essentially, there's a proposal from the Department of Labor to basically do away with non-compete agreements. There's a bunch of data that says the agreements actually... they harm productivity and they actually lead to lower salaries, especially for mid-level employees who are able to... they feel that they cannot leave their job. And typically, in the beginning of your career, the way that you level up your salary is to move around and get promotions and convince the next firm that you should have a different title and move up on the career ladder. Thoughts on this one?

Shane:

Yeah, a couple thoughts. First of all, this is the first constructive thing I've seen from the FTC under the Biden administration. I haven't seen any other antitrust stuff. I guess the potential stopping of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard could help out with competition in the video game industry, but I haven't seen... I was Googling other accomplishments of the past two, three years, couldn't find anything. Unless I'm wrong. A reader or a listener can feel free to share additional things with me. And the other thing is, this is an actually really cool policy, I think. This is one of those policy decisions that I never thought about that might have a big impact. And you just take it for granted that non-competes are legal and that they can be enforceable and non-competes do exist in our industry. We all know people that have signed non-competes in addition to non-disclosures and all that.

It'd be wild if they made non-disclosure agreements illegal. But yeah, non-competes, I don't know if they're constitutional or if they have the authority to make these illegal, but it makes sense that if you are barred from practicing that your compensation is going to be harmed because you can't do your job. And this seems to just cut down... It only seems to help businesses and entrenched businesses that have a foothold in the market that are trying to fend off... We're going to see other policy decisions that support big businesses as well later on in the episode. But yeah, unsurprisingly, the lobbyists at big businesses have been able to keep these non-competes around and the pro business community has enjoyed the legality of these non-competes. And I wonder how many other policies like this... We hear about policy wonks like Elizabeth, not Holmes-

AJ:

Warren.

Shane:

... who is the Massachusetts Senator.

AJ:

Warren.

Shane:

Elizabeth Warren seems like somebody that has thought about this policy for decades, and I just wonder how many other really cool policies are living under a rock or in some think tank somewhere that rarely get to see the light of day because we have to make 16 attempts to elect a speaker of the house?

AJ:

To elect a speaker.

Shane:

You know what I mean?

AJ:

Yeah, or argue about something that's in the Bible. Yeah. Yep.

Shane:

Yeah, sure.

AJ:

This is kind of a rabbit hole, but I'm fascinated by this. There was a Supreme Court of Hawaii case which actually banned non-competes in the state of Hawaii, which is interesting because deep in the filing cabinet of my brain, I was like, "Oh, I feel like I'd know about this because there was a Planet Money episode about non-competes, a guy who worked at Microsoft in Hawaii." But the Hawaii Supreme Court case is actually a different case. It has to do with a real estate agent who worked for some group and then started her own firm and she actually won. So non-competes are actually nonenforceable in the state of Hawaii.

Shane:

Seems like Hawaii would be one of the most important places to not enforce non-competes. It's not like you can just-

AJ:

Yeah. Small pond.

Shane:

Yeah. Oh, I'll go work in LA. It's just a six-hour flight.

AJ:

Yeah, what are you going to do, swim? Yeah. I mean, the point of this article is if we get rid of enforceability of non-competes, especially for people who are... the article uses the example of if you're one of the 25 people in the world who knows the secret formula to Coca-Cola, fine, you should sign a non-compete to not go work at Pepsi. Fair enough. But if you are someone who's designing merch for the Super Bowl at Coca-Cola, should you be barred from ever working in soft drinks again? No. That's your resume, you've worked at a company like this. So I think hopefully there's smart enough people in government who can craft policies that actually end up helping regular people, but probably have to have some carve outs in order to get this thing passed. We can't just have a blanket rule that applies to everyone otherwise it's stubborn, won't have any legs, won't go nowhere.

Shane:

Yeah. I mean, I didn't realize that these non-competes... I mean, in the New York Times article it says they apply to everyone from sandwich makers to hairstylists to doctors and software engineers. I was only really familiar with the software engineers one, anyone that has company secrets or could start an immediate rivalry. A sandwich maker, what kind of company secrets-

AJ:

I mean, that oil and vinegar ratio, if you get that right, that is priceless. So I agree with that one. I'm just kidding. I don't agree with that. The hairstylist one is wacky. Can you imagine being a hairstylist and signing a non-compete? What else are you going to do?

Shane:

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Speaking of leaked secrets though, we do have another New York Times article about a breach at LastPass that has password lessons for us all. Apparently the one password cloud storage company experienced a leak over the break. I feel bad about this one considering we obviously use LastPass at Brooklyn FI, but we also encourage all of our users or all of our clients to also use a password manager. I still think that using a password manager of this type is way better than using just your memorized passwords because you're looking at two different centralized databases of passwords. One being you using the same one over and over again, and another one being well encrypted various passwords that are centralized in the cloud. Some details on the hack. I think you've got some juicy details on how it went down?

AJ:

Do I? Do I ever? Yeah, so it taken from an employee's key chain. So we can hazard guess that it was either a theft or intentional, meaning someone made a pretty penny off of selling this data, but it's not that-

Shane:

Oh, yeah. Didn't think about that.

AJ:

Yeah, right? I'm just a pessimist.

Shane:

That's probably worth tens of millions of dollars.

AJ:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean look, the breach was... and there's a ton of opinion pieces that I've read some of floating around there. At the end of the day, the data that was leaked, there was still an encrypted master password that they likely did not get their hands on. So it is unlikely that your last pass vault was exposed and they stole your Gmail password. Just the fact that they were able to get in is what is scary and gives us all... or gives me pause to trust cybersecurity. I don't know. I feel like there's this... Obviously, with ChatGPT in the news so much, AI and robotics, it feels like that's so much sexier than cybersecurity. So my question is, is cybersecurity not getting enough investment and thought leadership because it's just not as sexy as AI? Sort of like taxes. Taxes are not sexy. Investment banking is sexy, but taxes... Investment banking can't exist without taxes and understanding the laws. I don't know, it's boring.

Shane:

It's like infrastructure. It's things that are necessary and things that have to be done. People feel like, "Oh, if I have to do this, it's just an expense that I'm required to pay. I'm just going to try to get this expense down as low as possible and try to think about it as little as possible." And unfortunately it's not very sexy, to your point.

AJ:

Yeah. Yeah.

Shane:

Yeah, I hear you.

AJ:

I mean, I remember back in the day when you had to remember all your passwords... Yeah, I mean the safest thing to do is to remember 16 different 22 character passwords, which is impossible.

Shane:

It's impossible. I have hundreds of passwords. Yes.

AJ:

It's in passwordable.

Shane:

Thank you. You sent out the newsletter or Bobby sent out the newsletter today or yesterday. My uncle called me. He works in cybersecurity and-

AJ:

Oh, yeah?

Shane:

... he just immediately invited... He's like, "Oh, you want to get serious about password security?" He's like, "Come to DEFCON with me in Vegas in August. We're going to go to the hacker conference, DEFCON 32." I was like-

AJ:

Definitely my crush.

Shane:

... I'm not sure if I want to go to Vegas-

AJ:

DEFCON32.

Shane:

... in August for a hacker conference.

AJ:

With the cybersecurity community.

Shane:

He said it's sick though, and he knows me pretty well. So maybe catch me in the desert in-

AJ:

Catch you? All right, cool.

Shane:

... a weird version of Burning Man. Yeah.

AJ:

Amazing.

Shane:

Do you want to end on high note?

AJ:

Oh, speaking of... I was going to say "You want to end on the high seas?" Okay.

Shane:

Yeah, that would be very nice.

AJ:

A little bit of background here. So Shane, last week John and I were talking about... there's this article that was click bait... 28-year-old guy buys cabin on cruise ship.

Shane:

I saw that.

AJ:

Yeah. And the article was-

Shane:

That made it into my feed, of course.

AJ:

Yeah, obviously.

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

That article was very flimsy on details. So we were sort of scrounging around for like, "Wait, what's going on here? How much does this cost?" So I did a bit of research and I've been studying the brochure for a cruise line called Storylines, S-T-O-R-Y-L-I-N-E-S, storylines.com. You can check out their 88-page brochure and this seems pretty damn cool. So essentially, you basically buy an apartment on this cruise ship. You can either buy it outright and own it, or you can put a pretty hefty down payment on it and lease it for 24 years, I believe. I guess they're assuming that's going to be the longevity of the cruise ship. Didn't quite understand the pricing structure. That was not immediately available in the brochure. I'm assuming I have to book a sales call to learn more, but you can get a studio apartment at sea for about a million dollars. And they're nice. I mean, they look like architectural rendering, so they're not the actual build yet, which as we all know, that can be a slight departure from reality but I'm in, are you in?

Shane:

I mean, obviously.

AJ:

Oh, sorry, important detail. The cruise ship, it's going to circumnavigate the world every three years. And the itinerary is crazy. It's like "We're going to go to Istanbul for... we're going to park there for six days." Then, if you're an owner, you get to go on the Storylines app and vote on the next destination that they go to sometimes. So there's a bit of a loose itinerary, but then the residents get to vote where they want to go next. And by the way, the million dollar apartment is the cheapest one.

Shane:

Right.

AJ:

There's an $8 million duplex with four bedrooms and four bathrooms and a grand piano. It looks really sick, but I don't want to live here.

Shane:

The $1 million-

AJ:

So you can rent them out, which is cool. So I would love to rent someone's apartment for three weeks. I'm going on a three-week cruise.

Shane:

A three-week cruise with wifi?

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

Right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm looking at this $1 million apartment. Looks like it's got a Murphy bed [inaudible 00:26:38]-

AJ:

Well, that's a cheap one. That's the lowest.

Shane:

It's 237 square feet, so yeah. And there's also a commentary about how it's potentially $2,600 a month as a living fee on top of the 1.1 million.

AJ:

Yeah, it's not cheap.

Shane:

So that might be where they get you.

AJ:

So I did a little bit of sleuthing and basically a lot of our clients are trying to buy homes in New York City, a lot of our clients are trying to buy three bed, two bath homes, which is about enough space for a family of four. And so basically it seemed that it would cost you a... to get the equivalent of that three bedroom, two bath home in New York City would cost you about 3 million at sea. And then plus that $2,600 living fee. So it's basically equivalent with New York City is kind of what I came... That was my hot take on this is you could either live in New York City in a crappy three bedroom, two bath in Crown Heights, or you can fucking live on a cruise ship and see the world in five star luxury gym, physician on board, all meals. I don't know. I'm into it. Having never been on a cruise, I'm into it.

Shane:

Oh, that explains your appeal. Totally explains your [inaudible 00:27:52]. You, for one would not survive on a cruise. I know you pretty well. I don't know. I don't know if I've been on a nice-

AJ:

As long as there's a bathtub, I can live anywhere.

Shane:

Yeah, there's bathtubs. There's bathtubs. The world is your bathtub on the Storylines cruise ship.

AJ:

Oh, yeah. Did you see the in-ocean dock? There's a dock where you can just plop off the back right into the ocean.

Shane:

Well, they just open up the butt of the ship and allow you to go swimming right in the ocean wherever you want. Looks like they'll stop in Venice, Santorini, Istanbul, Kotor. I don't even know where that is. So just randomly going from port to port. Dare I say, I think you called me undateable the other day. Let's say I lived on a cruise ship for three years at a time. Do you think this would make me more dateable because at least I own a place? Or would it make me more undateable because I'm roaming the world in a boat?

AJ:

I'm going to go with more undateable. And by the way, the undateable comment was strictly related to your roving tendencies, not anything else, listener.

Shane:

Oh, no.

AJ:

So therefore, it would-

Shane:

I don't care about that.

AJ:

It would increase. Yeah, it would increase your undateable factor due to location.

Shane:

Self-aware. Self-aware.

AJ:

By about 365 X.

Shane:

How're we doing on time? Should we do credit card awards?

AJ:

Oh, we're out of time. No, we are out of time, my friend. Why don't you read us out?

Shane:

Yes, I'm happy to be back. Happy to read us out. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Liquidity Event. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com, leave us a voicemail, link in the bio. Show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode76 if you want to read about Shane's new traveling cruise ship that will make him undateable. BKFi fans can leave us a review if they want to be weird about it. Thank you everybody.

AJ:

Thanks, you guys. See you next week.

Presenter:

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.