The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 94
Episode 94: Summer John Rented a Boat
Get ready for an entertaining journey through the world of finance with The Liquidity Event! Join us as we sail through absurd jobs, boat rental success stories, recalled exercise bikes, VC firm squabbles, coastal city exodus, Amazon's epic MMO adventure, even a surprising Windows 11 and iOS collaboration and credit-card debt! -Don’t forget to Join us on May 31st at 5:00 PM for our can't-miss webinar: "Credit Card Points, Travel Hacking, and How to Have Fun for Free" to learn more tricks and tips on using credit cards! Don't miss out on the fun!
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.
Shane:
All right. Welcome to the Liquidity Event. This is episode 94. We are your host, Shane Mason.
John:
And John Owens. Once again, pinch hitting.
Shane:
There he is. AJ is somewhere off the coast of Zimbabwe doing some snail snorkeling. No, she's in the Mexican airport. She just came to visit me. We had a great week focusing on the biz, and we ate like kings and queens for five straight days. I'm pretty sure I put on another leg.
Okay, so today's episode is being recorded on May 17th, 2023, airing on May 19th, 2023. We've got some AI stuff. Of course, Vice has gone bankrupt. Yikes. What else do we have? A lot of IRS free file stuff. Some turmoil in the VC space. And of course, you can now finally use iMessage on a Windows laptop.
John:
Wow. Dreams do come true for those of you with iPhones.
Shane:
I know. John, how you been, man?
John:
I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm fresh back from San Diego. I got a nice tan. I was there for a bit of fun. Did some hiking, did some kayaking, hung out with some sea lions, and then was there for a conference hanging out with AJ for a few days before she hopped on a plane and went to Mexico to see you. So how are you?
Shane:
She was visiting her financial planning buds.
John:
Here we are. Maybe she'll come on the podcast again someday.
Shane:
Yeah, yeah. One day. One day. We'll see. Well, she got her Vision Quest in Japan satisfied. So we don't log in to the podcast when we're doing Vision Quest. So good for her. So you gave a presentation at the National Association of Professional Financial-
John:
Personal Financial Advisors.
Shane:
There's so many damn acronyms in this business. So you taught, what, a hundred people how to do equity compensation?
John:
Yeah, I talked about how you plan for equity compensation from basically corporate formation all the way up through when your company's public, you're [inaudible 00:02:32], you're an established company. So we're one of the few financial planning firms that really handles equity comp from soup to nuts, does taxes does investments all under one roof. There are a lot of advisors that just touch bits and pieces of it because they may have one client or two clients that deal with it. And it's a highly technical area. So one of the things we do, not only me but you, AJ, other members of our team, we go to conferences and we teach other people some of the cool shit we do here at Brooklyn Fi and how it all works.
Shane:
Nice. Nice. Well, thank you for wrapping the firm and getting some double CPE. You get double CPE when you teach? Is that right?
John:
I don't know. I didn't ask them to scan my badge twice. I should probably look into that, but I'll figure that out.
Shane:
Right on. Right on. Right on. Cool. So just a quick plug. We do have a new blog post up about how to qualify for solar credits. The summer's coming up. One of our other colleagues in the space, I saw Eric throw some solar panels all up on his house. So there's both federal and state solar tax credits available to you. It could cut the cost down by 50% just off the rip just to install it on top of all the electricity savings that you'd be experiencing over the summertime. Also, on May 31st, we have a can't miss webinar, credit card points and travel hacking and how to have fun for free. I think we've already got like 50 people signed up for this one.
John:
A bunch of people coming to this one. AJ's going to host it. She's going to be talking about all these travel hikes. I should probably attend because I don't think I'm doing it right either, to be honest with you.
Shane:
I don't do it right either. I just let them stack. If you don't use them, you lose them. They don't earn any interest. It's not like a savings account.
John:
Once every 15 years, I'll go ahead and take a free flight to Alaska or something. I guess just build them up in the meantime.
Shane:
Going down to the Maldives before they're totally underwater. Aren't you going to Alaska?
John:
I am. I go to Alaska next month and I paid for the entire flight, a thousand dollar flight all with points.
Shane:
Amazing. Summer John.
John:
Summer John.
Shane:
Grizzly land. Grizzly John.
John:
Summer John is out and about. So be careful, folks.
Shane:
I want to see you with a grizzly bear. I won't be happy unless there is a grizzly in the background of a photo.
John:
We should probably do some [inaudible 00:04:40] planning ahead of that interaction.
Shane:
One of the best Werner Herzog documentaries of all time, Grizzly Man. Have you seen that one?
John:
No, I haven't.
Shane:
Watch it before you go to Alaska. You're going to dig it. You get to hear a man get eaten by a bear.
John:
Wow, that sounds really cheerful and positive right before my trip. I more like the Jim Gaffigan Alaska trip. I don't know if you ever saw his standup piece on that, and he calls himself a giant land salmon as he's walking through Denali. I think I could be a land salmon too if I get the right amount of sunburn.
Shane:
I need you a little pinker and a little bit more oily.
John:
Yeah, yeah. You only need to be the second least fast person in your group if you're going to escape a grizzly bear. So I'm going with my sister, my mom, and my brother-in-law, and I venture to guess that my sister might be a little bit slower than me these days, and so I think I'll be okay.
Shane:
I did not realize this was a family trip.
John:
Yeah.
Shane:
Very cool. Well, I'm leaving for surf camp after this podcast, so hang 10, bro.
John:
Bro.
Shane:
Okay, let's get into the news. Looks like Vice Media, we got some breaking news, has gone bankrupt. Now what does this have to do with tech and our clientele? Well, Vice Media for one is a huge Brooklyn staple and had a large impact on the gentrification of North Brooklyn. Me personally, I watched three or four of my favorite indie venues get removed and get shut down. Shout out to Death By Audio in Grasslands because Vice was coming into the neighborhood and opened up multiple thousand square feet. This must have been in 2014, 2015, and now the company is bankrupt just about eight years later. This is quite a story arch we had for the hottest, freshest gonzo Media publication to come about over the next 20 years. I did not realize that Shane had... One of the other-
John:
A different one of your personalities. Is that what we're talking about here?
Shane:
No, no. I keep track of all famous Shanes, of course. And the CEO and the founder of Vice News was a Shane. Apparently he founded it 30 years ago.
John:
It's been around that long and then just really kind of came on the map in the last, what, 15 basically?
Shane:
Yeah, I think it was like 2007 or 2017 is when they started to really blow up. But they really started to have trouble when all media publications around 2017, 2018, their valuations started to dip. They peaked at a high of 6 billion. Disney offered to buy them at 3 billion and I think they're for sale for about 225 million at this point. [inaudible 00:07:22].
John:
I mean, it's interesting because we also have this backdrop of just somewhat non-traditional media in general in a bit of trouble. Look at Buzzfeed, for example. They laid off a bunch of folks. Their stock price, they were SPACs. They debuted at $10 a year. They're trading earlier this week at like 50, 60 cents a share. I don't know what it's at right now, but I looked a couple days ago. And media in general is in a tough spot. Disney, for example, is laying off a bunch of people and they own a bunch of media platforms. ESPN, ABC News, those sorts of folks. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the land of milk and honey and media has started to dry up a little bit, especially since maybe we're not subscribing to every single streaming platform. It's not the middle of Covid. You're not just binging content constantly and people are utilizing their resources a bit more differently. In the same backdrop as valuations have come back down to reality for many of these companies.
Shane:
It doesn't help when the founder extracts a hundred million dollars from the firm to buy a mountain in Costa Rica and a Rolls-Royce. I don't think that was-
John:
Is that all you need to buy a mountain these days?
Shane:
I don't know. How big is the mountain?
John:
What does a good mole hill go for? That's my question.
Shane:
How big is your mountain? Yeah. Well, a lot of listeners don't realize that we got started in dealing with the taxes for creatives in the Brooklyn area and about half of them were freelancers from Vice Media.
John:
Oh wow.
Shane:
So what an arch that we saw here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to talk a little bit about Peloton later and when you should probably take your chips off the table. It looks like the folks' advice didn't know when to fold them, as they say.
Moving on into a Bloomberg article we have here. What do you do if you're drowning in credit card data? This is a special request from one of our employees to explore what's going on with the credit card space, which is one of the biggest economic indicators of a country that consumer spending makes up, I think about 70% of GDP, give or take 10%. And it's really important to keep track of consumer spending and also their levels of debt. And if their levels of debt continue to rise and rise and rise, that is not a good look because as future spending is going to be hampered or hamstrung. And it looks like traditionally Q1, after all that credit card bonanza spending that we see during Christmas, typically credit card balances come down in Q1. We got some reports back from Bankrate that says that they're just remaining high at about a hundred billion dollars of credit card debt. So looks like people aren't able to pay off their credit card. Is that your tag, John? Or are people just comfortable with-
John:
I think we probably have a higher rate of credit card utilization overall. I haven't seen the data on it, but that would be something I'm guessing. Plus inflation prices have gone up, so you'd expect credit card utilization and borrowing there to go up. I mean it's interesting because [inaudible 00:10:05] economies, right? On one hand, unemployment's incredibly low. It's still a competitive workforce. We're still adding jobs, but things have gotten pricier and we've seen some wage inflation, but not drastic wage inflation. But I think to get to the point that you brought up is what do you do when you're drowning in credit card debt? And I think this is a fun little back to basics. I don't quote Dave Ramsey often, but talk about podcasts, talk about radio. He's the guy you hear about often. It's like the debt pay down snowball. You tackle the highest interest credit card debt first. You pay that off and then you apply it to the next one and the next one, the next one down the line. It's not bad advice. It's not bad advice at all for somebody in the situation.
Shane:
Well, who doesn't have credit card debt, John, is these penned tech specialists that are earning six figure salaries to "do nothing" and string out 10 minute tasks. We got an article here from Fortune. There is a company called Blind that will do surveys anonymously of employees. How hard they're working is one of the metrics that they track. Apparently software engineers, 71% of them claim they work six hours or less a day. 12% said they did between one and two hours of work a day. Apparently there are all these developers or AI specialists, machine learning specialists that are hired, especially at Meta, Google, et cetera, anyone with an AI background hired and they're just chilling. It's so complex and so hard to actually get them into the code base. And there are different levels of complexity and access, especially in the banking space because there's so much compliance there that it could take them three to four months to have the ability to do anything. And they're losing their minds because they're just sitting at home doing 10 minute tasks.
John:
I mean, I worry less about the ramp up piece. I mean anybody who starts a new job is not going to be as productive on day one as they were on the last day of their previous job. But if you are one of those people that's sitting at Google who makes TikTok videos about how you go to yoga at lunch, eat breakfast there, eat lunch, and work for two hours, if you haven't lost your job yet, I'd be pretty freaking scared. Right? No wonder there's layoffs. Honestly, I'd be bored out of my mind. I'd I'd lose my mind if I only had to work one to two hours a day but fill up eight and pretend to work for the other six. I think I had an internship or two like that in college and it was like watching paint dry and watching the clock. It was just terrible.
Shane:
Yeah, yeah. They speak about some of the mental difficulties of having no one value your work. If you work at a job and you're not contributing anything, even though you're making $300,000 as an AI specialist to go scuba diving and show up for a weekly 10 minute how to find your policy manual meetings. You're starting to spin out because you don't feel like you're useful to the world.
John:
Plus then the Peloton bike at the company gym that you normally ride on for two hours during lunch got recalled. So you can't even do that and you're just going to lose it. You're just going to lose your shit.
Shane:
Yeah. I mean with all this said, probably a good idea for... Just makes me think about how nobody really understands what coders do or a lot of this complex tech, and it's probably a good idea for any general manager if you've got some free time to figure out what the hell's going on in the project management space. It's probably a good idea to have on your resume, understanding how project management works, understanding a little bit about backend development, understanding about how much time it takes. I've been diving into this space. There's like dozens of tech YouTubers that a day in the life and it's all a joke about how they work an hour or two per day from home.
John:
I'm sorry, but I wouldn't put that on the fucking internet if that was my job. You're the last person, Shane, I'd want to know that I'm only working two hours a day. Right?
Shane:
John, I know you're working a lot harder than one hour per day. Did you share that Instagram reel of what happens when your boss follows you and you start posting-
John:
Oh, yeah. When your boss follows you on Instagram, it's like, "Checking emails early." Oh my goodness. I shared it with Emily on our team as well, and we were going to make a fake Instagram reel for you and AJ of holding up signs saying like, "I love my job."
Shane:
Oh hell yeah.
John:
To mess with you guys. So stay tuned. Maybe we'll do that one of these days.
Shane:
I'm looking forward to it. Speaking of what I'm looking forward to, apparently I can rent out a boat for 500K in revenue per year. Somebody put this article in here just for me, I think. This is from Business Insider. There is an Uber/Airbnb for boats apparently called Boat Setter. So for those of you that have boats or want to rent boats, Boat Setter is there for you. I thought this-
John:
This podcast brought to you by-
Shane:
By Boat Setter.
John:
Leafy Greens and Boat Setter.
Shane:
I'm kidding. What a plug. Yes indeed. Athletic Greens.
John:
Exactly. Whatever the hell it's called.
Shane:
Casper. Yeah. So I don't know. Looks like a sick little side job if you live in Miami. Buy a couple little speed boats for 80K. Rent them out. There's some anecdotes about somebody made 500K in revenue renting out two boats.
John:
Okay, that's a little bit of a click bait headline. Because I read the actual article and, "My earnings from boats that are in 2022 came in at 260,000. The vast majority came from my boat in Key West. I made net profit of 190." So I'm assuming somebody's extrapolating out the 260 over the course of the year. He only did it for part of the year to make it $500,000 and make it more appealing. But Shane, when are you going to start renting out your boat like this?
Shane:
First of all, to touch on your topic there. Yes. Boating is definitely a seasonal thing. So extrapolating out of the high season is going to be running through the rest of the year is silly and frankly, lacks integrity, John. Nice try Business Insider. Renting my boat.
John:
Yeah.
Shane:
No, my boat is too insane to rent out. It's a 40 foot-
John:
I think you could pay people $200 a day to take your boat out.
Shane:
Yeah, for sure. It could happen. Especially if I lived where the boat is.
John:
Did you hear what I said? You could pay people $200. Yeah, yeah. I don't think they'll pay you, but...
Shane:
Right. Well the article does say that a lot of these people used to send people out on the water without a captain. And I can't think of something scarier than, "Hey, here's my boat. Go out." Total amateur. There's an Instagram called Qualified Captain. Highly recommend. Yeah, it's just people that don't know what the fuck they're doing out on the water. A lot of people driving their car down the boat ramp into the ocean. A lot of people on coral reefs.
John:
Driving into instead of backing up to unload your boat.
Shane:
No, they are backing it. They're backing the boat down and the car doesn't have the power to stop it and they just lose control. There's like dozens of those. It's a fun one. It's a fun one.
John:
Check your property and casualty insurance, folks. Make sure that you're covered if you're towing a boat that's not yours.
Shane:
Yeah. Speaking of underwater, we got a lot of underwater options at this company Peloton. Looks like two and a half million of their bikes were recalled and the government says they should immediately stop using them. I told you we would talk about when you are at the table and your chips of 10x, you should stand up and walk away. Or when you've won the lottery, just take your winnings. Yeah. So this is a tragic tale. Peloton has had a horrible past two years descending from the heights of their 2021 pandemic valuations. John, you're more in touch with the Peloton journey. Why don't you fill the listener in?
John:
Yeah, so they're down 95% from the end of 2020, 80% since the end of 2021.
Shane:
That's almost a hundred percent.
John:
Yeah. And 14% year to date. This stock was trading at about $170 a share during Covid. And as of this morning was trading around $7 a share. So if there's a less in diversification, I'm thinking about the next slideshow I'm going to put together either for clients or for an industry conference, Peloton is a stock that is likely to make that slideshow. I mean, honestly, the Peloton business model is fascinating. Because they've got people that are very loyal to it, right? But the fact that you need to buy the most expensive treadmill or stationary bike on the market and then pay a monthly subscription for it, that's like saying I need to go buy a $4,000 television and then pay $50 a month to watch Netflix. And it's kind of like, this is ridiculous and it's probably not sustainable. And people are kind of like, "Yeah, we're not feeling it anymore." And multiples have contracted. Yeah. And it doesn't help that they've had all these recalls and safety issues. That's also kind of kicked their teeth in a bit. So yeah, not great if you own Peloton stock, that's for sure.
Shane:
Yeah. My favorite bit about Peloton is somebody explaining Peloton bike to someone that lives in a third world country. "Oh, it's a bike. It costs $2,000. It must go very fast." "No, it's stationary." "Oh, well then why do you need a bike that doesn't move anywhere?" "Well, because I order too much food in and I get fat, so I need to work it off." And they're like, "Well, how do they deliver the food?" And they're like, "By bike."
John:
By bike. Yeah. On a much cheaper bike.
Shane:
Yeah, it's fun. So yeah. Rough stuff. Hopefully they can bounce back. I love Peloton. It's still a great experience. We talked about it a ton in 2020 and 2021. Hopefully they're at the depths of their valley and they can bounce back. I mean, if someone's going to acquire them. There was always rumors that Apple or Nike would acquire them.
John:
Interesting, interesting. I mean riper and riper for acquisition these days.
Shane:
Yeah. I'm going to make a prediction that they're acquired within the next 12 months.
John:
You heard it here first, folks.
Shane:
That's right, baby. Speaking of predictions, VC firms are having difficulty making predictions about the AI space because it's moving so fast. We have a debate here happening.
John:
ChatGPT.
Shane:
What's that?
John:
Why don't they just ask ChatGPT, is this going to be a good VC investment or not?
Shane:
Yeah. Which one should we buy? Just give it some access to the internet. Let it Google for you and let it make the decision. Well, according to Tech Crunch, there's a debate happening inside of every VC firm. No one's sure where to plant the seeds. There's so many tech startups, so many AI startups. There's a fun anecdote here about a VC getting really excited about talking to an AI entrepreneur until he asked them how long it would take for someone else to spin up the product. And the entrepreneur said, "About two weeks."
John:
Good luck.
Shane:
Wow. Learned a lesson on that pitch.
John:
How did it not raise any money whatsoever?
Shane:
Good call, Adam Neumann. Jesus.
John:
Is this proprietary? No. How long did it take somebody else? A fraction of the time it's taken us.
Shane:
There are a lot of products out there that are ChatGPT with a little skin over the top of it. I was able to get an API key from ChatGPT and into some other tools. Yeah, there's one that we use. It's like $10 a month. I think it just converts a PDF into something readable and plugs that into ChatGPT. There's hundreds of these little businesses and if you just know how to code, a little bit of coding that you can leverage, you can spin up a little subscription company. Honestly, I love that. That's so cool. I love all these little entrepreneurial endeavors to make people's lives easier that just need a bridge from, I have a PDF to plug it into the ChatGPT for me and I'll pay $10 a month for that.
John:
And if you think about a side hustle, it's less capital intensive to set that up probably than it is to buy a boat and have to rent it out.
Shane:
Absolutely. No capital required. And then there's some articles in here. It kind of harkens back to the kept coder. There's some VC partners that are just desperately trying to get anybody that knows anything about AI onto their staff so that they can understand what really works and what doesn't, so people that know what's going on under the hood. So this is a great tweet from a Spark partner that says, "This is an experiment for us. If you're already coding away on nights and weekends with AI tools and want a front row seat to thinking about startups, please join us at this small VC firm called Spark that specializes in AI." It's like, when is this person going to be working for you if they're already coding nights and weekends? I imagine they're going to get paid 300K.
John:
They're already putting in Elon hours, right?
Shane:
Yeah. So there's no better time to have five years of experience as an academic AI researcher. You are the golden goose right now. What's up, man?
John:
So one of the things we've seen over the last, I'd say 10 years, is the advent of ESG investing, socially responsible investing. Then one of the byproducts of that has been what we like to call greenwashing, which is just how you are an evil company that's now a good company because you hired some marketing folks or you do this one thing to offset the thousand bad things that you do, whatever. So I'm wondering, are we heading in the direction of AI washing? Everybody's going to put AI in their 10K, everybody's going to put AI in their S1. Everybody's going to put AI in everything, in their earnings reports and all that. Because what do people want? They want AI. They think it's the future. So we're just going to have this whitewashing of AI into everything because who defines what AI is and how you use it? And all of a sudden it's like, well, who really does AI and who just says they do AI? That's my cynicism coming through here.
Shane:
Well, I got some good news for you, John, because your email address is now BKFI.ai.
John:
Oh yeah.
Shane:
Because we're raising VC funds to throw a ChatGPT layer on top of anytime anyone emails us. So we'll be able to 10x our ROI there.
John:
There we go. I have 15,000 clients because it's me plus the AI. So it won't matter.
Shane:
Exactly. Exactly. They're just talking to John.ai. JohnGPT. That should be your name for next week.
John:
JohnGPT.
Shane:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, next time I host the podcast, I won't be Summer John. I'll be JohnGPT.
Shane:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cool. So speaking of ROI, coastal elites are finding the ROI on living in LA and New York does not work out for them. A story from the New York Times. We have a diaspora of a brain drain happening in the big cities, John. Everyone's moving to North Carolina where you apparently can't get an abortion anymore after six weeks. Give me some insights on this article. Where are these people going?
John:
Yeah. What they basically found is that over the last eight years or so, people are starting to move out of big cities, which is no surprise. People have been leaving big cities for a while, but who's leaving has changed. So we've seen this inflection point between it's actually educated folks in white collar jobs who are leaving big cities. And where are they going is the question. They're going to Phoenix, they're going to Austin, they're going to Raleigh. They're going to mid-size metros like Tucson, Tulsa, Fresno, those sorts of places.
Shane:
Mexico City.
John:
Mexico City perhaps. Yeah. Lower earners had been priced out of cities a while ago. Now, white collar workers, middle class earnings levels and higher, college educated are being priced out. So you have to ask your question though. Okay, why did those cities get so expensive? They got so expensive in part because all these people moved. There's so much infrastructure to maintain and cities tend to be more progressive. So there's more social services, more costs, more overhead, bigger government and all that. So then you move to these places like Austin, other places that are a bit more conservative, but you still have your same political ideologies and those sorts of things. So my question is like, is this just going to be a cycle? Is Austin going to become more expensive? Austin is already very expensive, relatively speaking, much more than it was when you were there 10 years ago.
So is this cycle just going to cycle through and it'll wash through Phoenix, Austin, Raleigh, just to name a few and then people go back, "Oh, LA's so much cheaper now and so much cooler. Let's go back." That sort of thing.
Shane:
But it's not. That's the thing that I don't understand is that... I've talked about this so many times on the podcast. We talk about during Covid, everyone left New York City and everywhere is being gentrified. Everywhere is expensive. How can everywhere be expensive? Everyone moved to Tucson. Why are the median rents in New York City the highest they have literally ever been right now? I don't get it.
John:
I mean we have a housing glut. That's the problem. We just have a problem. We lack a supply of housing and we're not replacing it fast enough. Then we have this whole issue with real estate where all these corporate buildings are empty and we're not using our resources efficiently. Yeah, it's a interesting proposition. You're right. Why is everywhere getting more expensive? Shouldn't someplace be getting cheaper?
Shane:
Everywhere I go, I'm gentrifying it. Everywhere I go, it's more expensive than the place before.
John:
Where are you going next?
Shane:
It's exhausting.
John:
Because I want to get in there first so I can buy low before you end up there. Where's next after Mexico City, Shane?
Shane:
Biggest financial mistake in my life was not buying that house I was under contract on.
John:
If I hear about this one more time.
Shane:
In Austin in 2011. What was that?
John:
If I have to hear about that story one more time. But where are you going next? You got another place to go. Where would you move? You can move anywhere in the world, Shane, next, where are you going?
Shane:
Anywhere in the world?
John:
North America.
Shane:
Ooh, Buenos Aires would be good.
John:
Buenos Aires is in South America, but okay.
Shane:
Oh, you said North America.
John:
I said North America. Yeah.
Shane:
Okay, got it. I think I live where I would go. I think Mexico City is the spot.
John:
Stay in Mexico City. Awesome.
Shane:
There's like signs about gentrification here happening just like everywhere else I've ever lived. Gentrifying for 30 years and running now, folks. All right. Speaking of a place that was gentrified, a Mordor was gentrified after Sauron was crumbled. The hood became habitable. Amazon is developing a Lord of the Rings MMO. They're leveraging the IP that they've purchased to make the Rings of Power, and it looks like they will be making a massively multiplayer online RPG, AKA a game where you can sync thousands of hours into. There's this world of Warcraft streamer that I saw recently, John, that has been playing since the game's release in 2017, and he's been playing essentially 40 hours a week ever since. 17 years.
John:
A full-time job.
Shane:
Well, he is a streamer. Yeah. So I think he has... I mean you add up the numbers, it's like 40,000 hours or something of game time in World of Warcraft. So Amazon is trying to make a hit with the same IP or similar IP, same beloved IP of High Fantasy. I think I'll be taking a sabbatical on this game drop.
John:
Yeah. Sounds like it. Shane just needs about six years off and he can catch up with that dude. I know we're running out of time here, Shane, though. We got to be careful.
Shane:
Yeah, yeah. All right. So real quick update. Apparently you can now use iMessage on your... John, you're an Android user.
John:
I'm an Android user.
Shane:
So you don't have this problem.
John:
It doesn't help me.
Shane:
You can't use messages on your Windows machine?
John:
I mean, I use text [inaudible 00:29:22], so I need to figure that out.
Shane:
A quick no-brainer for our listeners. Apparently you can now use a phone link for iOS is now available to all Windows 11 users. You got to have Windows 11, which brings iMessage and more to PCs.
John:
When the fuck do I get blue bubbles instead of green? That's my question.
Shane:
John, just buy a god damn iPhone.
John:
I'm not buying an iPhone. No. Anyway.
Shane:
All right, dear listeners, this has been episode 94 of the Liquidity Event. Thanks so much for listening. Email us to your financial problems at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. We'll answer them on the air. Leave us a voicemail, we'll play it on the air. Show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode94. Finally, Brooklyn Fi fans can leave us a review and they don't want to be weird about it. All right. Thank you, John, for joining us as a guest host.
John:
Great to be here.
Shane:
We'll see you next week, folks.
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.