The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 87

 

Episode 87: A Cooler Housing Market and Hot Takes from Nvidia on AI and Crypto

Welcome to the Liquidity Event Podcast! In this episode, we'll discuss Microsoft Bing's latest shenanigans with OpenAI's DALL-E AI, turning text into images faster than you can say "Mona Lisa." We'll also dive into the latest housing market trends, where home prices have taken a tumble for the first time in 11 years. Plus, the FTC is cracking down on those pesky gym and cable subscriptions that are hard to cancel. And speaking of big money moves, Elon Musk is offering employees stock grants valuing Twitter at a (not) whopping $20 billion! We'll also talk about the latest banking acquisitions and the hilarious Delta passenger who just couldn't wait to get off the plane - we're minting him Double Black Diamond Status. And let's not forget the hot take of the week: Nvidia says cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society - we're not sure if we agree, but we'll definitely be discussing it. Lastly, we'll chat about Bankman Fried's foreign bribery charges. So grab your drink of choice and join us for the funniest and most informative 30 minutes of your week! 

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

Shane:

Hello, dear listener and welcome to the Liquidity Event. This is episode 87. We are your host, Shane Mason.

AJ:

And I'm AJ Ayers.

Shane:

And on this episode of the Liquidity Event recorded on March 29th, 2023, airing on March 31st, 2023, we have more banking crisis updates. We've got updates in the AI space, of course, can't seem to stop talking about artificial intelligence. Congress tries to understand the internet and TikTok and my personal hero let his intrusive thoughts win and open the door of a Delta airplane. AJ, how we doing?

AJ:

I'm doing okay. Speaking of airplanes, I'm fresh off a red eye, which I swore in my 27th year of life I would never take again and broke that promise to myself. I'm a running on a little bit of fumes, but okay, okay.

Shane:

You've got a couple AJ-isms that are, you do always and nevers. Some of your nevers that I remember are never red eye. Never, what am I trying to say? Well, you always do the seafood tower is one of your always.

AJ:

Always. Yes, that's correct. Always seafood tower, but you have to have at least two people eating seafood to get the seafood tower. Always seafood tower, but never solo tower. Never solo tower. Do not make that mistake, listeners. You'll be very sick.

Shane:

Dear listener, if you have the ability to solo tower, I say go for it. Good for you.

AJ:

Yeah, don't let me stop you. Correction, we issue a correction. Yeah, never Spirit Airlines. I do have a never's list. Anyway, we'll revisit that in the future.

Shane:

You can just start a never's list in Evernote and share with the audience.

AJ:

Okay.

Shane:

Okay.

AJ:

Will do, will do.

Shane:

What else is going on? You are back from Palm Springs. You're in Brooklyn. Your husband had a book tour thing in...

AJ:

Yeah, yeah. My husband, Nabil Ayers, who has the same last name as me, is continuing his fabulous book tour-

Shane:

Did he take your name.

AJ:

World tour. Yes, he took my name. He actually, yeah. Anyway. His book is about his name. Read it folks, if you're interested in race and family history and 23 and Me and rock and roll music, because that's what it's about. Yeah, we had a fun book event yesterday at the Rancho Mirage Public Library. Shout out to the kind folks at the Rancho Mirage reading series. Got to meet a lot of really interesting folks out in the desert yesterday. Speaking of reading, after years and years and years of resistance, I got a Kindle on your recommendation, Shane. And I have to say, it has increased my reading feed and access to books by currently 300% because I've read three books since I got it on Tuesday.

Shane:

You've been upgraded from-

AJ:

I'm stoked.

Shane:

A pipe to a bong, sounds like. She's doing gravity bongs of books here, people.

AJ:

Gravity bongs of the English language. Yeah. I just finished Wifey by Judy Bloom. There's a Judy Bloom documentary coming out on Amazon Prime next month that my dear friend Emily worked on. Shout out to Emily. It's fantastic. If you're even cursory familiar with Judy Bloom, it's an amazing documentary about banned books and the seventies. It's phenomenal. Highly recommend that. What are you reading?

Shane:

One of my friends from summer camp just posted on her gram, her hanging out with Judy Bloom and getting her book signed.

AJ:

Oh, sick.

Shane:

Almost crying in the gram. Yeah, I guess she's still around.

AJ:

She's super still around. She's kicking it in, I think, Delray Beach, Florida. She owns a bookstore down there, speaking of books. What are you reading?

Shane:

Nothing. Moving on. It's tax season. I'm not reading much, I'm not reading much.

AJ:

You're reading my text messages telling you to please read this damn book.

Shane:

Yeah, I'm reading help me Slacks from various team members. Yeah. I look forward to getting back into the Kindle zone. As an owner of hundreds, maybe over a thousand books. I don't know. I do love them. Switching to the Kindle kind of... This is a 10-year-old conversation. Moving on. Personal shout out to-

AJ:

It's 2003, folks.

Shane:

Yeah, goodness. Moving on. Shout out to-

AJ:

Have you heard of this new iPod?

Shane:

All right. Yeah, it's like all the music you want in your phone. Fuck. Anyway. We do have a personal shout out this week to, not to one of our listeners, but to ourselves because we are vain human beings. Out of nowhere, the Financial Times listed Brooklyn Fi as one of the top 100 fastest growing companies in America.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

I don't know how they got ahold of us. I do respect the Financial Times.

AJ:

I love Shane's idea of the world. How do you think this happened? Because I submitted us, dumb dumb.

Shane:

This is not in my zone. I don't remember this submission. I usually get involved.

AJ:

Honestly, I don't either, but I found it once it was released.

Shane:

Yeah. I mean it's honestly amazing. I do have a lot of respect for the Financial Times being in the Inc. 5,000, being in the Financial Times. You recently ask me for my contributions to the press when I get things like my expertise in the news as a CFP or CPA and I realize that the only things I contribute are entrepreneurial stuff and this is huge for you and I, I feel, to get shouted out for having a fast-growing company. I talk a lot less about 529 plans than I do about practice management and stuff like that.

AJ:

For sure.

Shane:

This is a shout out to us, Brooklyn Fi, but an even bigger shout out to all of our employees that actually make this happen. To those of you that do your homework and listen to our podcasts, love you guys. Thank you guys for all the help and taking care of our clients and helping us grow so much.

AJ:

Yeah, this was cool. This was a cool recognition. I remember learning about the Financial Times and being like, it's pink? Cool. The only pink salmon newspaper. Salmon, you're right, I'm sorry. It's rosie salmon.

Shane:

High in omega-3's.

AJ:

Speaking of you, listeners, we have a slight favor with a nice little reward. We've been doing this podcast for almost a year and a half now and we've got a great listener base, but we'd love to get to know you and would love to get to know what you want to hear more of on the Liquidity Event podcast. We have a survey. There will be a link in our show notes, which you can find at brooklynfi.com/episode87. You fill out the survey, it's just a couple questions. You get a $10 Amazon gift card for your participation. What appreciate if you're a longtime listener or a new listener what you like, what you don't like, who you want to replace Shane with as co-host. Any feedback you have would be really appreciated.

Shane:

Henry Caval. Okay, enough Brooklyn Fi-ism's, internal self-aggrandizing. Let's get into the articles, what's going on in the world of finance and tech over the last week. AJ, we have Microsoft Bing, let's start off with some AI stuff is now using Dolly's AI, the other product of OpenAI. Not only do they have Chat GPT, but they also own Dolly, which people forget was their original artificial intelligence image generating service that came out, I believe in 2020. Kind of shook the artist industry. Now we've got Chat GPT shaking up the language industry, so to speak. Apparently it's not available yet to your everyday gen pop user such as you and I, but we can see people on Twitter posting, hey Chat GPT, go create this image. It talks to Dolly, it makes sense. They're all under the same umbrella. How is this going to shake things up, AJ?

AJ:

Well, I'm just really excited for romance novels to have the most badass book art and cover art going forward is really, I see the highest and best use of this product.

Shane:

Gotcha, gotcha. I think the main surprising thing for me when it comes to this release is I actually typed bing.com into my address bar on my Chrome browser. I think that's the first time I've done that in 25 years.

AJ:

Bill Gates is just shuttering with excitement right now.

Shane:

Yeah. I don't know how this is any different. I look forward than just going to Dolly's directly and typing things in. I guess there's going to be some integrations between, hey, just like we can use Zapier to get items to talk to each other, this is a more direct integration between two of the products at OpenAI that Microsoft is always also a part of. I guess a fun thing that we can imagine here is you're in a slide deck or you're in a Word document and you say, hey, convert this Word document into a slide deck and by the way, includes some images from Dolly in between slides to keep the theme of the deck going and boom, you've saved yourself five hours of work.

AJ:

Yeah. Keep my listener engaged and use these keywords to show stock images. We're presenting general financial advice, I can't tell you how many times I've searched image of taxes. You got to say something about taxes, it's a tax deadline coming up. I challenge any artist to visually represent tax deadline. Your taxes are due tomorrow, please pay them. That's what I'm excited for this in our little company's use case.

Shane:

Or if you're a podcast producer, you might say, hey, Chat GPT, go find me an image of a Jewish American princess on a red eye so I can slide it into our YouTube. To the YouTube version of the podcast.

AJ:

Boy.

Shane:

All right. Not much of an AI update there, but just something to keep in mind is that we're going to see these tools talking to each other more often, get more integrated. It's going to be part of our Gen Z, millennial, Gen X tool set that we're all going to have to learn before we die. Speaking of things that you need to do before you die, home prices and purchasing them homes, prices are down for the first time in 11 years, according to, who do we have? Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal has recorded our first home price drop February of 2023. Obviously this is a median of all homes across the country. One thing that we need to keep in mind is that they're only down, and this is from a year ago. If we're looking at home prices that were listed in February 2022 to 2023, this is the first time over that span that they have dropped.

They were only down 0.2%. Some other caveats here is that this is based on closing data, so this isn't what's on Zillow, which means that this data is related to homes that were put under contract actually in December and January and didn't actually close until February. It looks like if it is a trend, the trend started actually potentially back in December and January, and this might be in response to the Feds hiking of interest rates and thus the higher cost of borrowing. And I'm really surprised that it took this long. The interest rate hikes started over a year ago, and apparently home prices are not as elastic. People were anchored to those higher prices that we saw during the 2020, 2021 booms. AJ, your thoughts?

AJ:

Yeah. I mean more of the same. We've talked about this before, just that typically, when you see interest rates rise, you expect home prices to fall because it's more expensive to buy. When money was so cheap, when you could get a million dollar mortgage at 2.25%, which we anecdotally saw, of course there's going to be competition, and when there's less competition, there's fewer buyers out there there, there's less cash flowing in, there's less people needing to borrow, people who can borrow, right? We're talking about approved borrowers. We would expect home prices to fall. They haven't. This lag, in my mind, we're 12 months behind. I don't know. I see this as the economy behaving in the way that the economics textbooks say that it should. I see this as a positive. Home prices should be falling because it's more expensive to purchase the same home now than it was a year ago.

Shane:

Yeah. I'm actually looking at the... Goldman had this great research publication that said that over 99% of mortgage borrowers or mortgage holders currently, 99% of them, their mortgage rate is below the primary mortgage market survey, the PMMS, which I had to look up what that is. Apparently Freddie Mac, a government agency goes out to all banks and says, hey, what are you guys charging for a 30 or 15 year? And then they-

AJ:

What are you guys charging today? [Inaudible 00:12:46].

Shane:

Hey, you got some locks? What kind of locks you got?

AJ:

6.5%, 6.75, what you got, what you got, what you got?

Shane:

Freddie Mac is a Brooklyn Jew apparently, that's a great name for a Brooklyn Jew.

AJ:

Jewish American Princess, Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac, America's Jewish American Princess sweetheart. Sorry. Anecdotally, dear listener, a bit of a consumer protection thing here. It is not always a good idea to refinance your mortgage. It was a great idea, typically, a year and half ago. This is a little bit of a no-brainer. Just anecdotally, we had a client recently, they were on the phone with their lender and the lender was like, oh, by the way, you are eligible for refinance, which we have been led to believe always is a good thing. But with rates being hiked, typically what are we seeing, a quarter percent every quarter? It's not always a good idea to refi.

Shane:

The PMMS right now is six and a half, 6.5% right now.

AJ:

If your mortgage rate is below six and half percent right now, it is generally not a good idea to refinance. Of course, there are unique cases where it might be, but just a PSA folks, that is a sales tactic. If you're happy with your mortgage, don't necessarily rush out there to refi. Banks love a refi because not only they typically get a little refinancing fee, so just a little cautionary tale there.

Shane:

Yeah. I guess the only reason a refi right now is if you needed to unlock the equity that's currently built up in your property.

AJ:

Yep. Yeah. Or if you wanted to recast your mortgage, meaning you wanted to bring down your payment over time because you had a cash crunch right now. I've seen that before.

Shane:

Yeah. Speaking of big investments.

AJ:

Speaking of falling housing prices, the evaluation of Twitter from the time-

Shane:

The Musk-inator.

AJ:

Yeah. The valuation of Twitter, which Elon purchased an evaluation around this time last year, I don't remember, at 44 billion. Based on some recent equity grants to employees now that Twitter is private again, now we've brought our evaluation down to 20 billion. A bit of a val cut there for our takeover king there. Thoughts here?

Shane:

A val, cut. Yeah. The internal emails that-

AJ:

Elon Musk has been trimming his own bangs of Twitter.

Shane:

Right. Well, when it comes to valuations, that's one thing that actually bothers me about valuations, which we can talk about later when we talk about the valuation of TikTok, is that Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter for 100% of it, okay. Now he's issuing grants to his employees for a private company, this "reverse startup" at a $20 billion valuation. You receive these grants that are worth this. If you take the number of grants that were gifted, which is a minority interest of the company, right. Maybe it's 5% of the total equity of the company has now been provided to employees, and if you multiply that 5% and the value times 20, it arrives at a 20 billion valuation, which is a coincidence, by the way, 20 and 20 billion. But that's a minority share. You don't get to control Twitter for your shares, and that control that you get when you buy something, it comes at a premium.

You have to pay more for the control, and if you don't have control, you have a minority discount. It's not always fair to say that, yeah, if you get 15% of this company, if you multiply at times seven and a half, you arrive at 100% of the value. No, that's a discount. The company's probably actually worth more in some cases if you had to buy the whole thing. But it's not fair to do that simple arithmetic to arrive at evaluation. But a lot of journalists will do that just to give readers an idea of a guesstimate or to triangulate. Just keep that in mind, dear reader or dear your listener, because we do talk about valuations a lot on the cast.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

In response to a request for comment, Twitter's press email responded with a poop emoji, which Mr. Musk recently tweeted will be the company's auto response for media inquiries. This is a-

AJ:

How lovely.

Shane:

$20 billion company.

AJ:

Yes. And in response to the poop emoji, a disgruntled employee leaked some of Twitter's source code on GitHub. Someone flung shit and an employee flung shit right back at them. Yeah. TBD on that. Twitter subpoenaed GitHub to try to figure out where the leak came from. I don't know if they were successful in that or not, but yeah, I would love to see what an offer letter looks like from Twitter right now, March of 2023. We've looked at offer letters with clients before where it promises some outlandish multiple in the future. I'm very curious what the Twitter HR team or what's left of it is promising as the future valuation of these equity grants at Twitter.

Shane:

Oh, I think he said something. I think he-

AJ:

Yeah. He wants to go to 250 billion.

Shane:

Right. There's a path to 250 billion, but it's not easy. Yeah, my guy. That's a 10X valuation on a company that is currently a going concern, or not a going concern.

AJ:

Yes.

Shane:

Good luck.

AJ:

Best of luck.

Shane:

Speaking of not being a going concern anymore, the cryptocurrency market has been labeled as nothing useful to society by chip maker Nvidia, which is like looking a gift horse in the mouth if you ask me. For those that aren't PC gamers, it's been incredibly difficult to get a graphics card over the past, really 10 years because crypto knuckleheads have been buying them all up and using them to mine crypto. That has eased recently with Nvidia releasing software that makes it impossible to use their GPUs to mine for Ethereum. I'm not very well-informed on that restriction, and I'm sure there's ways to get around that, but this is an oof right in the kisser from the people that really support your... I know that if you're going to start crypto money, the first thing you do is buy a warehouse full of GPUs and then hook them all up in hopefully an energy efficient space.

AJ:

Hopefully.

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

Let's be energy efficient in processing power for nothing. Yeah. I mean, basically, yeah. The CTO is basically like, stop using our processing power for something as stupid as crypto and use it for something useful like AI or in Shane Mason's world, gaming. The CTO came out and said this.

Shane:

Ah-ha.

AJ:

Do something useful with our product and yeah, stop hogging the supply chain, essentially.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah.

AJ:

Because yeah, the original Chat GPT was built on 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards, which who knows how long that was delayed if they couldn't get them.

Shane:

Exactly. Yeah. I think that if we had to put artificial intelligence up next to crypto on a scale, one of them would have a very high likelihood of ending humanity. Which one is it, AJ?

AJ:

Which one will it be?

Shane:

Which one will it be? Speaking of the end of the line, Silicon Valley Bank has been sold finally to a rival dad, I'm sorry, rival bank. It was, wait, what's the name of this bank again? First, oh my God.

AJ:

First Citizen. Citizen First.

Shane:

I love a regional bank. Bankcorp South, Suncorp, First Citizens, Signature.

AJ:

SunTrust. SunTrust is a good one.

Shane:

What are these? Bank of the Ozarks, what are you, who are you, whom are you? There's thousands of them. They're so cool. Anyway, apparently they have the ability to be bank run a lot easier than JP Morgan Chase. It's a quick banking update. I don't really know much about, at the end of the day, what we have here is Vultures coming into SVB to try to fill in the gaps here. Kind of diversify a way.

AJ:

Right.

Shane:

Yeah, no, I don't blame them.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

I do find it interesting. Bridge Bank is named after the Golden Gate Bridge, and it's a regional bank in San Francisco, which is trying to fill the niche of tech companies.

AJ:

That's terrible branding.

Shane:

It looks like they're...

AJ:

I think of a bridge, I think of bridge loan, little yikes.

Shane:

Bridge loan, yes. Not ideal for a venture company.

AJ:

Well, I guess, yeah, I guess you might need one, but it doesn't seem like very positive growth focused startups if you ask me. We all need a bridge loan once in a while.

Shane:

We all need a bridge loan here and there. Yeah. Who hasn't bridged?

AJ:

I need a bridge loan on your patients someday. Anyway, I don't know. To me, this is inevitable, right? This is what was going to happen. This auction has been going on for basically the past two weeks to try to figure out who's going to be the right bidder. Obviously the FDIC and the government was overseeing these vultures, as you said. I think we just need more government regulation here because SVB went off the rails, was in too much of a risky position. They were pushing for the past decade for deregulation, they got it and then we had a bank failure. I think we do need some regulation of these smaller banks, which typically fly under the radar and are able to lobby for flying under the radar. They have to be riskier in order to maintain their customer base in order to stay alive. But we just saw, what, three banks fail spectacularly because they were too risky. They were taking too much risk.

Shane:

Yep. Age-old problem. The public acceptance of risk, and then the privatization of the profits. I heard a really great Odd Lots podcast, dear listener, about moving all bank deposits directly to the Fed and then having small banks just serve as an intermediary. There's no more need for FDIC insurance, which means that money won't rush to JP Morgan Chase. We saw in this article, the COO of Cruise Consulting, which we know works with thousands or about a thousand startups, saw about half of the startups when they moved money from SVB said Chase, which makes sense. It's a globally systematically important bank. It's not going anywhere. That's where you move your money when there's a bank run, which is not ideal for competition in the banking space. If you just opened up your accounts directly with the Fed and you could still do CDs, they could still do mortgages where they actually make their money, but they serve as an intermediary between you and the Fed. And then if the Fed wants to give you money, whether that's a tax refund or if they want to put stimulus checks in your account, they don't have to figure out where you are. They just put it directly in there and it gives them another tool to regulate the economy monetary policy wise.

AJ:

I mean, speaking of crypto, that was kind of the... It was like, crypto, sure, it was meant to be outside of the banking system, but the idea of crypto was that it could just be so much more instantly accessed. It was just easier to move money around. Forget crypto, why don't we just go directly to the source and just make it easier? I mean, yeah, as accountants we saw, have you ever seen the federal government move as quickly as they did to get $700 stimulus checks at everyone's bank account? That happened in four days. It happened in a weekend. Imagine if every person with social security number had some sort of an account and didn't have to go through all this red tape and nonsense.

Shane:

I mean, as a tax accountant that constantly has to get updated bank information for people for refunds or direct deposits, if you could just say to the Fed, hey, put my direct deposit into my Fed account. I don't need the account numbers and the routing number, et cetera. That would be be a big hitch removed from filing of taxes.

AJ:

Spicy. Spicy.

Shane:

Yep. It would be lovely.

AJ:

Let's give the government direct access to our money, said no American ever. Curious to see how that goes.

Shane:

Yes. The US government is constantly stifling my rights. Glad I can get an AR-15 at no... Anyway. Speaking of crypto debauchery, Sam Bankman-Fried, I'm going to skip one, AJ, sorry, is charged with foreign bribery. How about it?

AJ:

The hits keep coming. This guy, yes. I mean, this guy had no regard for, has this guy ever seen a movie or read a book, is my question. He just seemed like, he was like, oh, you can just ask the Chinese government for, hey, Chinese government, can you unfreeze my assets? I'll make it worth your while to the tune of $40 million, please. What? What's your take on this?

Shane:

My theory on this is this is what happens when you don't get in trouble as a teenager, okay. This guy definitely never snuck out of the house to go play video games at his friend's house or borrow someone's car that he didn't know or do a little light shoplifting at Walmart. Things of this nature that are necessary to understand-

AJ:

The consequences of your actions.

Shane:

What happens when you fuck up. Yes. This guy definitely fucked around a little bit too late in life and found out, and now he has 13 felonies on his case, which by the way is all related to his girlfriend, who I'm calling the Cayman whale from here on out, because her role at Alameda, she lost billions of dollars as her first job out of college. Was losing billions of dollars and then sending her boo to federal prison, which, take that Monica Lewinsky. Your first job out of college.

AJ:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not conflate that.

Shane:

Conflate? No, I'm comparing.

AJ:

Let's take a step back there.

Shane:

What do you mean? It's great.

AJ:

Different relationships there, but anyway. Different power dynamics.

Shane:

[Inaudible 00:26:22] in power, man in power made a mistake.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

Got in trouble with the law. I'm saying that... Wait, wait, what? It's a take.

AJ:

I don't like that. I don't like that take.

Shane:

Why not?

AJ:

I don't like that take.

Shane:

You think I don't respect Monica Lewinsky?

AJ:

It sounds like it.

Shane:

I'm a huge fan.

AJ:

President of the United States. Yeah. Anyway, [inaudible 00:26:43]-

Shane:

You're making it weird.

AJ:

On this podcast.

Shane:

Not me. Huge fan of Monica.

AJ:

But look, the idea here is that we make a lot of fun of the congressmen and women not understanding the internet and older people and Joe Biden's issues with being, well, the oldest president ever. But here we have the opposite, which is that you have very young people with no experience in this case, running companies and people putting so much trust in them. It's like we're swinging in two different directions. We're saying, you have too much experience, you're too old, you don't know what's going on with the tech. And then you have a situation here where someone was like, I'm so young and I know everything about everything, even though I had literally have no life experience or experience running a hedge fund. Now you're going to give me $10 billion to run. What I'm most excited for is the Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman-Fried and rumor has it that Apple has acquired the TV rights. We should see a dramatization of this play out with some high production values, which I'm personally excited about. Succession IRL.

Shane:

Did you watch the new episode?

AJ:

No. I did not.

Shane:

I've not either.

AJ:

There will be no Succession spoilers.

Shane:

Oh, man. Speaking of spoiled people, the Facebook, no, that's a terrible transition.

AJ:

Speaking of spoilers, this guy spoiled a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Shane:

There we go.

AJ:

A Delta passenger, while a plane was taxiing, opened the emergency slide. I'm calling this, he acquired double black diamond status because he skied out of the airplane. Get it? Woo.

Shane:

For those of you who don't know, diamond is the highest tier of the Delta frequent flyer methodology. AJ's pulling out her-

AJ:

I just happen to have my diamond medallion card or luggage tag right here.

Shane:

Wow. Everyone's so jealous.

AJ:

So jealous. That's what happens when you run a business folks and spend too much money is you get status. Congrats to us.

Shane:

Yeah. We spend too much money on a credit card trophy.

AJ:

All right. Let's end on a fun note here, or not a fun note. What do we have here? The FDC wants to ban those tough to cancel gym and cable subscriptions. Yay for the consumer. This is a Verge article stating that the, yeah, the FDC is going to crack down on those impossible to cancel subscriptions that we all have. What's the, what's your worst cancellation story?

Shane:

Oh, God. I don't know. Honestly, one of the ones that's hard for me to stay subscribed to certain types of insurance where they require you to mail in a check to maintain my disability insurance. I move around a lot. Anyway, I'll have to think about a good... Do you have a good cancellation story?

AJ:

Yeah. I mean, just New York Sports Club in 2012 took a year to cancel. They literally would not cancel it. I think it was $65, and it was a very important sore thumb on my budget that I wanted to get rid of, and I had to go to six different offices in Midtown and I wanted to sue them, but I had no power. I'm happy about this. Yeah, there was some movement with Amazon in the EU. They had to make some changes to make it easier to cancel Amazon Prime, so yay for the EU in leading consumer protection. Love to see that. Well, yeah. Thanks for listening this week, folks. Don't forget to fill out that survey. It'll be posted on our show notes, which you can find at brooklynfi.com/episode87. We'll see you next week. Bye.

Shane:

Thank you. Bye.

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.