The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 55

 

Episode 55: The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Tech Billionaire 

Oh brother! Shane is out at summer camp, so we've got everyone's favorite dude from Pennsylvania, Mr. John Owens on the mic with AJ. Our hosts are extra critical of Mark Andreessen's decision to invest $350 million into Adam Neumann's new real estate company Flow. You may remember Adam Neumann from his previous startup, WeWork, which is still limping along while Mr. Neumann left unscathed with more than a billion dollars. We've got Zuck of Meta and Pichai of Google whining that their employees aren't working hard enough. Let us buy shit we don't need on Instagram in peace, please! Then we've got a guy who hid billions in assets from the IRS and almost got away with it. Also mentioned: Malcolm Gladwell, Rivian, and Taylor Swift’s PJ. This one is offshore. 

Read the Full Transcript:

Speaker 1:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice. Welcome to the liquidity event, a show about all things personal finance with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI, each episode will take you through the week's news on Fin Tech, IPA, SPACs, founder wins and fails, crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at BrooklynFI.com.

AJ:

Hello. Welcome to the Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, AJ...

John:

And John, pinch hitting hitting for Shane Mason who's off at summer camp this week.

AJ:

Oh my god. This is episode 55, being recorded on Wednesday, August 17th, airing on Friday, August 19th. Yes, Shane is at summer camp this week. It's actually really cool.

John:

We sent him home off.

AJ:

We sent him off.

John:

We just said, "Hey Shane we think you need this." If you've ever seen the movie Heavy Weights from the 90's, kind of like that.

AJ:

He's making friends. He's learning how to build-

John:

He's making friends.

AJ:

... friendships bracelets. No actually, shout out to Shane and X Camps, it's called Experience Camps. It's a really great program for kids who have lost a parent, so it's a bit of grief counseling, a little bit of psychology work, while also regular summer camp with Tug-O-War and kayaking and stuff.

John:

Teach them how to throw a football, that kind of stuff.

AJ:

Exactly. Yeah.

John:

That's awesome.

AJ:

It's great. We're happy for Shane and I'm excited to hear the report next week.

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

It's either going to be great, or terrible. I think it's going to be great.

John:

Shane and I have actually talked about sending you off to summer camp at times, AJ, so maybe starting summer '23.

AJ:

Everyone would benefit from that. I'm too competitive for summer camp. I would not do well at summer camp. Anyways, what are you doing? What are you up to John? You're not at summer camp.

John:

I'm not at summer camp. I'm watching Only Murders in the Building, season two, which dropped recently on Hulu, but they roll them out like a new episode every week, so I can't just binge it, which has been tough, but-

AJ:

Terrible.

John:

... Martin Short, Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, love it.

AJ:

I've heard very good things about it. It's on my list.

John:

What are you watching or reading?

AJ:

Nothing. Oh, that's not true. I'm reading Ben Hogan's Five Tips for Golf Practice, or whatever, because I'm trying to teach myself how to play golf, and it's not going very well, but I'm also reading the INC 500, Fastest Growing Companies in America, because Brooklyn FI is number 563.

John:

63, top 12% baby.

AJ:

Shout out to us for fast growing. No it was really cool to see that we were recognized, yeah. We're growing pretty fast, not as fast at the other 562 people in front of us, but a lot faster. It's the 5,000. It's out of five, and I'm not going to do that math live on the podcast. Anyway, no that was cool to see. Yeah.

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

Good for us. We're growing fast.

John:

The only reason I saw it is because the Crumbl Cookie CEO posted something on LinkedIn, and so I clicked on the link so search and see if we were on it, and I think we're higher than the cookie people, so that was exciting.

AJ:

Faster than crumbling cookies.

John:

Yes, yes.

AJ:

Amazing.

John:

It's very exciting. Then I'm also, it's kickball playoffs this week, so summer league, adults, beer league kickball here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Kickball championships tomorrow night, so by the time this airs we'll know if we won or not. Our team is undefeated. We're the number one seed.

AJ:

Okay, anyways.

John:

My nickname is Number Crunch, because I keep the stats, that's why.

AJ:

Nobody cares.

John:

[inaudible 00:03:48]

AJ:

Okay, moving on.

John:

Okay.

AJ:

Any exciting IPOs this week?

John:

Innovative Eyewear. I don't know if this is exciting, but it's an IPO.

AJ:

Yeah. Their revenue is a million dollars, one million dollars.

John:

Something like that.

AJ:

Not to knock them, that's great. We love to see it. Anyway, this is a micro, micro, micro cap IPO, went public this week. The company, the ticker is LUCY, L-U-C-Y, which is Lucid Eyewear.

John:

That's a cool ticker.

AJ:

Yeah I know, why waste it on this? Anyway, sorry that was rude. Sorry Lucid. They are doing smart glasses. Remember Google Glasses?

John:

Yes.

AJ:

Those weird quirky things that allowed you to Google shit.

John:

You could go watch porn in a park with nobody else knowing.

AJ:

Yeah. What? Oh that's the use case?

John:

I don't know that's what I think it was, yeah. That's why people were like, "This is creepy."

AJ:

Anyways, Lucid, they've got, they're Bluetooth glasses so you can listen to music, you can control things with your eyes in your glasses.

John:

There already are glasses that have speakers built into them. That's not a foreign thing to have those.

AJ:

I think their differentiator is that they look cool, and they actually do look cool. The Google glasses just looked weird. Yeah, they just made you look creepy, and these actually are cool aviators and nice hipster frames with tortoise shell, so I don't know it could be cool.

John:

If you're watching porn on your glasses in the park, you are creepy. Let's just be clear about that. I read the note here and it's like, "We are designed to allow customers to remain connected to their digital lives," and I think I'm connected enough to my digital life. I don't think I need my glasses to be smart. I want dumb glasses. I'm fine with dumb glasses.

AJ:

I know, I know.

John:

That's my hot take.

AJ:

Yeah. What's your take on Apple watches? Are you an Apply watch guy?

John:

I'm a Garmin guy. I track my steps. I use it for all my running and stuff. I don't know if I need to be that plugged in. I've thought about upgrading. I'm back and forth. I'm more okay with that than the glass thing.

AJ:

Mm-hmm.

John:

What about you? Do you have an Apple watch?

AJ:

No I'm anti Apple watch.

John:

You're a watch person though.

AJ:

I love watches. I love beautiful watches, not tech, not a phone on your wrist.

John:

Tech-y watches.

AJ:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. You're not trying to be inspector gadget.

AJ:

No and I know people love them, and that's cool for them. We'll take about that later. We'll talk about knocking other people's habits, because that's important. I think that's a theme of today, is people just shitting on other people's lifestyle choices. I didn't mean to shit on Apple watch users.

John:

It's my favorite hobby.

AJ:

It's just not for me. Anyway, speaking of shitting on people, big news of the week in the VC space.

John:

Big one for us to shit on here.

AJ:

Oh, boy. The article title, "Andreessen Horowitz announces plans to invest in Adam Neumann's new residential real estate company." I'm glad they called it a real estate company, so that's a step in the right direction.

John:

Basically here, there's very little description here, but this company is called Flow, and to quote from the article, it's effectively a service that landlords can team up with for their property, somewhat similar to the way an owner of a hotel might contract with a branded hotel chain to operate the property. Is this this bullshit where somebody's trying to get a tech valuation for a property management company?

AJ:

Yes.

John:

Is that all this is?

AJ:

That's what it is. This is We Work V2. Look, my question is, can Mark Andreessen not afford Apple TV? Did he not see We Crashed? Is he not familiar with this story? I'm sure there's something-

John:

Oh they love second chances. I read the article. It's like, "We love giving-

AJ:

They love second chances.

John:

... people second chances to learn from their lessons."

AJ:

Mark Andreessen, obviously a very, very smart person, invested in Meta, AKA Facebook, Air B&B, a bunch of other winners, and arguably tech that changed the way we live and operate in the digital world. Big, big futurist, great thinker giving Adam Neumann a second chance? Not so sure that's-

John:

I know. He wouldn't be high on my list of people to throw how much money, I don't even remember how much money-

AJ:

350 million.

John:

350 million dollars, yeah, yeah.

AJ:

Yeah. He could have-

John:

I'll put my 350 million somewhere else.

AJ:

Yeah, yeah. Maybe there's something we're missing, but to the folks in our community who read this press release, again there's not a lot of information. We don't have business plans yet. There's just a placeholder website that says, "Coming 2023," but it really looks like Adam Neumann used his, what, 1.2 billion that he got from We Work to buy up all these apartment buildings in Atlanta, and he's going to use tech to manage them. I don't know.

John:

Apparently one of the things the article talked a little bit about, rent to own potentially, which rent to own always feels like a scam to me. It's how do we dangle the carrot out in front of people who might not otherwise be able to get a mortgage or buy a place and make them think they're making progress, but they're never going to be able to buy it. I just think a lot of people get screwed over through that.

AJ:

I don't know I disagree there with rent to own. If someone can crack rent to own and if that's what this is, you can have my 350-

John:

If they can, but are they just using it to screw people over and string them along is the question.

AJ:

Right. Exactly. Yeah, it's paying off a loan... It's like student loans when you do the income based repayment, which is kind of a great program if you never are going to make over a certain amount of money, and then once you start making over a certain amount of money, you have this massive tax bomb of hundreds of thousands of dollars of all the interest that's accrued that you can literally never pay off. That's, I think, what you're referring to John in terms of what rent to own could end up being. It seems good, it seems great, but no one's ever actually able to execute on it.

John:

Exactly. Exactly.

AJ:

Yeah. This seems, I don't know. I'm skeptical. Adam Neumann had such a spectacular fail, upwards of screwing over all of the early We Work employees. We Work finally did go public, VS back. It's been unimpressive in it's performance in the market, so I don't know. I'm a skeptic here.

John:

It's kind of the canary in the coalmine I feel like, for some of the stuff that we've seen. Last year that didn't go well, the company is still un-public but it doesn't look great. We Work was a bit of a canary in the coal mine I think.

AJ:

Is he just bored? Is there just not enough other things to invest in right now?

John:

Maybe not.

AJ:

350 million dollars-

John:

You've got [inaudible 00:10:10]

AJ:

That's a lot of money, even for A16Z. There are, how many other companies are not getting funding right now because all of this went to stinking Adam Neumann who doesn't need the money, because he's got money.

John:

He's okay. He got a nice gold parachute from the sale.

AJ:

He's fine. We're shitting on tech billionaires today, aren't we?

John:

Oh we are going, yes we are totally shitting on tech billionaires because Zuk was saying, "There's probably a bunch of people at our company who shouldn't be here," which is exactly what you want your boss to say at an all company meeting. We haven't said that here.

AJ:

This guy is such a prick.

John:

He is. No social cues whatsoever, but here's my thing, okay. Facebook knows so much crap, or Instagram. I'm not really on Facebook, but Instagram, [inaudible 00:11:01] they know so much crap about me. I think about buying something, I don't say it out loud, and it shows up in an ad. It's so creepy, but they can't tell which of their employees are being productive and which ones are slacking off.

AJ:

They know that their employees are on Instagram shopping all day. They literally know that.

John:

Yeah, because they know, yes. It's been a side of them. You think there'd be a better accountability system than having to just shit talk your employees at an all company Zoom meeting.

AJ:

Yeah I don't like this. Yeah this is a Business Standard article, basically saying, it's not just Zuk. It's also Sundar Pichai at Google who is saying, "There's too many employees but no one's working enough." The best quote from this, yeah Zuk's quote about, "You shouldn't be here," but he also said, "Part of my hope, by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just turning the heat up a little bit, is I think some of you might say this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is okay with me." Look, that's one leadership approach, to say, "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen," but also it's okay for people to take mental health days if they're working really hard.

AJ:

To me that's the catch 22 of these tech companies. High salaries, high equity compensation. They expect you to work 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks for those salaries. You're going to need to take some time off. You're going to need to have a mental health day. He literally had a breakdown because people were out of the office, they weren't able to attend all-hands meetings, and that pissed him off. He's like, "You're not in the office." It's like, "It's the summer, dude. Get over it."

John:

Yeah. I don't know. We work with a lot of clients in big tech and startup tech, we run the gamut. AJ, I don't know anybody who's resting and vesting, do you? I've never met a client who's like, "I'm just so fricking bored at work and I make $400,000 a year."

AJ:

No. Our clients are like, "I'm so busy."

John:

I'd love to be one of those people, get that job.

AJ:

"I'm so stressed out. I don't have 15 minutes to get on the phone with you. Can you help me handle this via email?" We're like, "Yeah of course," but I agree. Yeah, I don't know any slackers at Facebook, but anyways... This is so depressing. Can we skip to anything exciting this week? I don't think we have anything.

John:

I wanted to shit talk Rivion a little bit, if we can do that.

AJ:

Oh yeah sure, you want to shit talking, all right, keep going.

John:

Yes. I'm not done. I'm not done. Okay so Rivion is talking about their production values-

AJ:

You know I love Rivion, so watch your words carefully.

John:

Okay. Rivion went pubic last year. They make electric trucks, cars, you know what I mean, really cool-

AJ:

Luxury sport utility vehicles. If you love Land Rovers or Range Rovers and you don't want to pollute the environment, you might enjoy a Rivion. Hashtag Rivion girls.

John:

You might as well get in line, because Rivion made 4,400 cars in '22, and expected to make 25,000 in 2022, despite the fact that is has a market cap of $33 billion dollars. Ford. Ford has a market cap of $66 Billion dollars and they make 1.7 million cars per year. This is nuts. Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

AJ:

It is crazy. Here's my counterpoint.

John:

Okay.

AJ:

Apple. Apple showed us that one revolutionary product can change the word, and can take your company from being worth a few billion dollars to a few trillion dollars in less than a decade, right?

John:

Okay.

AJ:

iPhone, Apple Watch, Air Pods, all of these products are so important and so revolutionary. With technology that's as new as electric vehicle technology, we have Tesla, that works. They've figured out production, sort of. Big asterisk.

John:

Kind of.

AJ:

Kind of. It's so new that you can't really compare apples to apples, and it's such a crazy... It's like building a spaceship, right? NASA has spent billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, and then they make a spaceship two decades later, right? It's kind of the same thing, where you have to have all this R&D. You have to test it. You have to get your supply chain right. They spent 10 years developing the tech, so my counterpoint is that it's a big bet, and give them a chance. Yes, they're doing only 25,000 cars, but last year it was only 200 cars so it's a...

John:

Well I understand but Ford's been making cars for 100 years, do you know what I mean? I'm not saying there's not a space for disruption in the automobile industry, I just think some of these valuations are crazy.

AJ:

I agree. I agree with you, but if you take the philosophy around ESG investing, which is that if your company is not focused on what the world is going to look like in 20 years, you're going to fail. Yes, Ford right now has a 66 billion dollar market cap. Rivion, literally half of that with 1/100th of the the production, or even less than that, but Rivion is going to be that company that's going to be here in 20 years or 30 years and Ford is not, unless they get smart with EV tech, which we both know that they are, so maybe I'm wrong.

John:

Ford's going to be here. I'd be very surprised if they weren't, but yeah. Kind of funny, kind of funny. Let's just keep shitting on things. Malcolm Gladwell is getting shit on like crazy, in terms of his little rant.

AJ:

Most hated man on the internet.

John:

Let me go back to the office.

AJ:

Yeah.

John:

Yes.

AJ:

Most hated man on the internet this week. What did he actually say? What was his tweet? He was just like, "Everyone is just sitting at home hanging out and not working."

John:

In their bedroom in their pajamas working from... Okay. First of all, I call BS on that because I've worked from home for basically two and a half years now almost, and I've never showed up to work in my pajamas.

AJ:

I wear my pajamas every day on the bottom half. On the top half I'm professional.

John:

I'm very professional. I put even a sweatshirt on like the classy dude I am. I just think there's no one size fits all answer to this. It's like, what's your true company culture? Can you do your job from home? Can you collaborate? I guess they can't do that at Pushkin, where they're cranking out podcasts, but we're cranking out a podcast and I haven't seen you in person in what, a month and a half. We're doing just fine.

AJ:

Right, yeah. Malcolm Gladwell, for those who don't know, he wrote Outliers, big thinker, great ideas. It's funny Shane was reading Outliers at a conference recently. People were shitting on him like, "Oh you're so basic reading Outliers." That's not, it's interesting.

John:

Shane discovered Malcolm Gladwell like two months ago, okay, which is really crazy.

AJ:

Anyway, interesting, yeah they're books that make you think because he has all these observations and he aligns the data nicely to backup his points. I like the guy.

John:

I do too.

AJ:

Pushkin Industries is his company where he does, he takes all of his ideas and puts them in blog posts and podcasts and all that shit.

John:

Podcasts, yep.

AJ:

He's saying he can't get his employees to go back to work and he's pissed off about it.

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

I agree. We're going to be arguing about working from home until the end of time. There is not a solution to this. For some companies it works, for some companies it doesn't. At our company we're 100% remote.

John:

It works.

AJ:

I think it works pretty damn well. However, there are sometimes where I'm like, "We're sitting on a Zoom all day and we're not getting anywhere." Yeah, if we were in a room together, having lunch, taking breaks, maybe we would have been ideas, but when we get together twice a year for our retreats, people just complain that we're doing too much work and they just want to go hangout and do karaoke and get drunk. I don't know what the answer is.

John:

Yeah, yeah. I did like the one quote from the article though that was, "No shit Malcolm Gladwell thinks that I'm not good at working home. I've only been doing it for 8,792 hours." Malcolm Gladwell being the guy who says, "In order to become an expert at something and become good at it you need to do it for 10,000 hours."

AJ:

10,000, okay.

John:

10,000. Yep.

AJ:

That's funny.

John:

I thought that was great.

AJ:

Oh I didn't even get that. Okay, cool. Yeah that was from Jenny Hogan. Amazing.

John:

Yeah, yeah. I was laughing. I was laughing at that one. I'm like, "I know this reference," because I've read a bunch of his books. I listen to his podcast, and I really do like Malcolm Gladwell. I don't agree with this hot take here, but nonetheless.

AJ:

Yeah, but isn't, I don't know, the idea of working from home, it's not for everyone and I think there's a lot of, TikTok or whatever, Instagram, "My company is making me go back to work so I'm quitting." Okay, great. That's not a culture fit for you. You've adopted to working from home, you love it. Maybe you're able to spend more time with your kids, you don't have to sit in your car for two hours a day, great. That company, not a good fit for you. They're not going to change, so get a different job.

John:

Exactly. There are some people that we've interviewed here that we've realized would thrive better in an office environment, and they're not a fit here. If they want to work in an office and do that thing, that's important.

AJ:

That's what I'm saying. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Brooklyn FI said, "I really like working here but I'm lonely in my apartment and I'm an associate, I'm not at that salary level yet where I can afford the two bedroom apartment with the separate office, and this sucks. I want to go make friends and meet my spouse." Great.

John:

Absolutely.

AJ:

We're not a fit for you.

John:

Yeah. Well speaking of that, speaking of meeting your spouses, speaking of generational gaps, this is a very interesting article from The Wall Street Journal, talking about inflation widening the gap between married couples and their single friends. This was, the medium net worth of married couples aged 25-34 was nearly nine times as much as the medium net worth of single households in 2019. The latest inflation pandemic trends have only exacerbated that income differential.

AJ:

Oh, I just slid right in there at age 34.

John:

I was going to say how old were you, oh just in the-

AJ:

I'm 34.

John:

You were younger than that when you got married.

AJ:

Yeah, I was younger than that. I don't remember how... I was 30-ish.

John:

But yeah, I think this is interesting. Not a surprise, right, because living alone, higher fixed costs in terms of rent, utilities, health insurance, just shit that gets wasted, but there's a very high cost of co-habitating, which is you have to live with someone, and that is worth at least about $5,000 a month.

AJ:

He's a four but he's got a two bedroom apartment in Green Point. I'm in. I have done this. I have co-habitated for financial reasons before, no shame, three times. Two of the times I should not have done it.

John:

Got it right on the third try, right? Third times the charm.

AJ:

Got it right, third try's the charm, as they say. Fool me once, shame on you. But no, the financial system, the tax system is built for married people, right? You get to go on your partner's health insurance, which you can potentially can do if you're not married, if you're a domestic partnership. If you are hanging out with someone and you're not married and you don't have plans to get married, for a domestic partnership, that's cool. I did that for a couple of months before we got married, which is really awkward because you have to annul your domestic partnership before you can get married. That was a weird step that isn't really talked about much.

John:

Does the bishop get involved, or is it-

AJ:

Yeah. There some different city halls involved in that. It was like, "Oh weird." We literally couldn't get our marriage license signed until the domestic partnership was dissolved, so I wonder if there are illegal marriages out there because there's partnerships [inaudible 00:22:03]

John:

Interesting. I never knew that much about it.

AJ:

Yeah, yeah. You learn. Getting married is a whole paperwork cluster fuck in it's own. Love the whole idea of it-

John:

Not worth it.

AJ:

John, "Not worth it."

John:

Anyway, next topic. Where are we at? Oh. Taylor Swift, and all these folks on their private jets. This is where I'm going to riff people not for stupid investments, or riff people for their arrogance in their team meetings when they're running mega tech companies, but for their arrogance around ESG and the environment when it comes to their private jets. This was an article put together by one of these big ESG blogs. Talks about how Taylor Swift, Floyd Mayweather, Jay-Z, A-Rod, Blake Shelton, bunch of other people, Kim K, are taking all these trips on their private jets. AJ, some of these are 35 minute flights, 60 minute flights that they're taking all over the place, polluting up the environment.

AJ:

Have you ever tried to drive from Malibu to Studio City?

John:

I have not.

AJ:

Exactly. No, I'm just kidding. No, I agree. These crazy, short flights. I'm a worry wart. I love flying and I'm not nervous when I fly, but Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash, the Kennedy's, every time I hear of people bouncing around on private jets I'm like, "You guys." Aliyah, there's so many, your risk of death... I'm sure the percentages are still minimal, but my weird paranoid-

John:

It's not commercial.

AJ:

Yeah, you guys, don't just bop around because you can. Bop around out of necessity. Yeah, it's incredibly polluting to run a private jet, and for these little flights the actual fuel required to get you off the ground is astronomical as compared to what you're actually doing, but the best was Taylor Swift. When someone asked her about it she was like, "Well I wasn't on those flights. I was loaning it out to other people." It's like, "What? That's not a good argument, Taylor." Come on.

John:

Oh my goodness, yeah.

AJ:

Oh my god we literally are just shitting on billionaires today.

John:

That's all right. That's all right. I'm good with it.

AJ:

Okay, billionaire, we're bad at segues today for some reason.

John:

I was going to say, yeah.

AJ:

I think it's because we're jumping around.

John:

We are jumping around a little bit.

AJ:

Speaking of private jets, billionaire Robert Grothman definitely used a private yet to fly-

John:

He did not. I don't think he did. He was a big cheapskate. He used to stay in cheap motels.

AJ:

Oh, right, right, right. Well I was going to say he somehow flew to these islands where we was offshoring potentially up to five billion dollars that was not reported to the IRS. He went down in flames and unfortunately just passed away recently while he was awaiting trial for defrauding the American taxpayer.

John:

Fortunately or unfortunately for him, for not having to go to jail I guess.

AJ:

I never like to celebrate death.

John:

Oh no, I'm not celebrating that. I'm just saying.

AJ:

Yes, in his old age he didn't have to go to jail as an old man.

John:

Yeah this guy was a total cheapskate. I get the vibe, I've seen this person, I'm like, "What can I do on my taxes to take care of anything?" I'm like, "That's not how it works."

AJ:

Wink, wink, yeah.

John:

Yeah, to the Nth degree, for he ran a software company for automotive dealerships, so already feeling a little shady. Then we go to the level of offshore assets of billions of dollars.

AJ:

Here's a question. Dude's a cheapskate, doesn't necessarily need a lot of money to live on, right?

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

Maybe he's worth, by some accounts seven billion, by some other accounts four billion. If he had just paid the taxes on that and not ruined his life by being indited by the federal government, he would have been left with what, at the minimum a billion dollars, which...

John:

Oh yeah, probably a lot more than that, yeah.

AJ:

Paying highest taxes, paying 50%, 60%.

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

Which we wouldn't have anyway, because it would have all been in investments, but still. He would have been left with a billion dollars. Now instead of, maybe he was trying to protect the legacy for his kids, but now the legacy for the kids is that, "My father was a crook."

John:

Yeah.

AJ:

I hate this shit.

John:

Nice try. Nice try.

AJ:

You know who loses? The American tax payer. That's who loses.

John:

The American tax payer loses. Well guess what? Inflation reduction act. They're going to get all those $84,000 new IRS agents, and so they'll be cracking down, or maybe at least answering the phone and not shredding and burning the documents that we send them.

AJ:

We should do a check in on the IRS call wait time for professionals versus the regular tax payer. Yeah, for those listeners who don't, we have, as tax professionals there are hotlines that we can call to get through faster, which in normal times is typically what, five or ten minute hold or even shorter. I think last week one of our tax managers was on hold on the super charger hotline for three and a half hour, so that just gives you a sense of-

John:

Yeah that's very normal for Dan.

AJ:

Ay-ay-ay

John:

[inaudible 00:27:14]

AJ:

Oh I have a light, quick non-depressing thing.

John:

Let's go. Let's go. Let's turn this around in the last few minutes.

AJ:

Oh my gosh. We learned really cool things from our clients all the time, because they're really smart people who yeah, they work really hard at their jobs and they're always looking for innovation. There's this really cool website called Levels.fyi. Yeah, I learned about this from a client, and basically it's a salary tool. It's crowd-source platform where people list salaries and benefits, so if you are trying to measure up an offer from a couple different companies, you can actually join. I think it's one of those things, like GlassDoor, where you have to give them some information to get access. It's not just totally open, but it's really neat. If you're looking at jobs, or you just want to see what else is out there, check out Levels.fyi. Love to see stuff like this in the community. I imagine, I think it's a new-ish site, so hopefully in a couple years we'll start to see some really cool data coming out of that.

John:

Yeah. I was on there just tinkering around as we were preparing for the podcast. It's neat what you can see, breakdowns at different levels, salaries, stock, compensation, what to expect. Pretty cool.

AJ:

Very, very cool. One more from me John. What you got?

John:

Hochul administration shuts down a gas-fired cryptocurrency plan in New York. This is crazy. I have a brief anecdote here. My hometown had a co-gen plan, a co-generation plan for-

AJ:

Which is where?

John:

Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania, middle of the coal region, okay? What a cogen plant does is it burns waste coal, so not even regular coal, but waste coal from the mines, okay?

AJ:

Which is dirtier, right?

John:

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, clean coal. Anyway. I'm from the coal region and I don't even buy that.

AJ:

You [inaudible 00:28:57] liberally, propaganda.

John:

Yeah, yeah. Okay so here we are. Burns waste coal. Was shutting down a year or two ago, but a crypto company comes in, buys in. Now they're burning waste coal in this plant to run crypto mines. What I don't want to hear is if you're a crypto girl and you want to have the ESG portfolio, because my guess is that it's probably not a huge priority, since we're just running computers to mine nothing.

AJ:

Hot take.

John:

Mining waste coal to run computers to mine something else.

AJ:

I know. That argument, I wish I had a scientific brain and I wish I could actually understand the science behind that, and actually understand it.

John:

The blockchain thing?

AJ:

No, not blockchain, the actual running of... I understand how blockchain works. Running of energy, and how the metrics work to create. How much does it actually take to create a Bitcoin, that whole mining ideology. Anyway, I love that argument but I don't know how much longer we can make that. That's the only anti-crypto argument that we have left at this point.

John:

We'll see, we'll see.

AJ:

Anyways, on that note...

John:

Been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AJ:

Always. Always a pleasure John Owens. This has been The Liquidity Event. You can email us at LiquidityEvent@BrooklynFI.com. Leave us a voicemail and we'll play it on the air. No one has ever done that, but we hope that you do. Show notes can be found at BrooklynFI.com/episode55. [inaudible 00:30:28] leave us a review in iTunes or Overcast or whatever podcast platform you like.

John:

If you want to be weird about it. Goodbye.

AJ:

Oh boy.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to The Liquidity Event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI. Head on over to BrooklynFI.com where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel, or if you want to learn about their full-service financial planning, tax, and investment firm, specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the path to financial independence. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.