The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 65

 

Episode 65: The One With Dr. Shots & Underwater-Stock-Options Ariel

Happy Halloween, dear finance fans! This week, we have some scary cool tech topics to discuss, starting with Amazon's frightening freefall in talent retention. The en vogue expression for when someone is fired from a company? "We call that unregretted attrition," says Amazon via leaked documents. Read: Addition by subtraction. Pro-tip, Amazon: If you don't hire to nurture, employees are going to leave. Boom, solved Amazon's people problem! Speaking of problems, court challenges are hanging up student loan forgiveness a bit. Insiders say to still submit your relief application, though. In other news, Twitter's workforce is fed up with Elon Musk already. Will he drop his projected 5,600 jobs? Will a privately-owned Twitter become the digital badlands? We don't know! And freaking finally...an IPO we can get excited about. Mobileye slid into the market above its estimated trade price, which bodes well for market health. Will we be autonomous on the road by 2025? Probably not. Trick or treat: Home sales are down while interest rates soar. Scary. Last up is a scary moment for T-Swift fans when her new album broke Spotify last week. Listen... if you dare!

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

AJ:

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

Shane Mason:

And I'm Dr. Shots.

AJ:

AJ, AKA Ariel of under the sea.

Shane Mason:

And I'm Shane Mason.

AJ:

AKA an underwater stock option for those who can't see my costume. For those listening on your podcast app and not watching the video, which you should absolutely be watching the video because we are so animated in person, I am dressed as Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and I have three stock tickers in my headband that say Posh, Oscar and Oatly. And Shane is dressed as Dr. Shots, who is currently filling a syringe full of iced coffee and has a medical mask on.

Anyway, this is episode 65, oh, there he goes, of The Liquidity Event, being recorded on Halloween week and airing on Halloween Friday, aka All Hallows' Eve, eve, eve. Today we've got Amazon retention problems, an autonomous driving IPO that may save the entire stock market, student loan forgiveness in jeopardy, Twitter workers are sick of this roller coaster of Elon Musk trying to buy their company, and the computer chip supply chain may be able to stop the recession. How you doing, Dr. Shots?

Shane Mason:

Oh, I'm great. I'm a little jet lagged. I got back from Europe yesterday. I've discovered... All right.

AJ:

Cheers. You got back from Europe.

Shane Mason:

Oh my God, she's drunk at the wheel again. All right.

AJ:

Folks, now I have a soundboard.

Shane Mason:

We've rediscovered. I discovered a hack when it comes to resetting your clock, your internal clock. If you want to be one of those people that wakes up at 6:00 in the morning, just go to Europe for a week, and when you get back, you'll be so jet lagged you'll be going to sleep at 8:00 and waking up at about 5:15 AM.

AJ:

Perfection.

Shane Mason:

Let's see if I can keep this up.

AJ:

Perfection.

Shane Mason:

How are you doing?

AJ:

Perfection. I'm doing great. Yeah, it's a wild week. I just got back from some travel too. I was in a Chicago for the National Association of Stock Plan Professionals meeting. So I got to meet a lot of cool people who actually run the stock plans for billion dollar companies. So a lot of smart people, a lot of cool accounting folks, saw Third Eye Blind in an intimate setting with a 100 people, which was really funny.

Shane Mason:

You said cool accounting?

AJ:

Yeah, cool accountants. Yeah, lots of cool accountants.

Shane Mason:

I thought I knew all the cool accountants. Was Jim there?

AJ:

Jim was not there. These are corporate accountants though. These are not your personal accountants.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, all right.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Thought I knew them all.

AJ:

What are you drinking? Oh, you're injecting yourself with syringes of iced coffee. I'm also drinking iced coffee.

Shane Mason:

Yes, I've been diagnosed with lethargy so I am administering self doses.

AJ:

Just a heads up, this wig is so hot that I'm probably going to have to take it off in the next five minutes.

Shane Mason:

Wearing a wig under the sea.

AJ:

All right. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, we have a new section of the podcast this week. It's called Shameless Self-Promotion, where we talk about things that we're excited about at Brooklyn FI. So the first one is that we're doing something new. It's called a Brooklyn FI Financial Planning Process Product Demo. How exciting is that? Where we are going to show you, potentially folks who want to work with us, what a Brooklyn FI financial plan looks like. And the first one is happening this Thursday at 3:00 PM. There'll be a link in the show notes. You can just sign up. It's free. All we need is your email address and you'll hear John, our director of planning, and myself, wax poetic about what the hell we do here at Brooklyn FI.

What else we got coming up?

Shane Mason:

What do we do here?

AJ:

I don't know. Dress up in costumes.

Shane Mason:

Costumes.

AJ:

And record ourselves.

Shane Mason:

Yes.

AJ:

What do we do at Brooklyn FI? I plan my stupid Halloween costume every year that involves a fictional character and writing ticker symbols somewhere.

Shane Mason:

Yeah.

AJ:

On my body.

Shane Mason:

I do appreciate that you have a financial themed costume every year. This is my fifth year in a row being Dr. Shots. It's just too much of a hit with the friends and family.

AJ:

Yeah, we need a slideshow of my Boba ETF, Shane, Dr. Shots.

Shane Mason:

We've got five.

AJ:

2021, Mr. SPAC, Shane, Still Dr. Shots.

Shane Mason:

Right.

AJ:

2022, underwater stock option. Shane, still Dr. Shots.

Shane Mason:

Yes.

AJ:

Amazing. Oh, we also have a really exciting webinar. This is a reprise of the rent versus buy where John and I duke it out high school debate style about whether it's better to rent or buy a home. The housing market has changed significantly since the last time we did this back in 2020, so I'm excited for that. That is Friday afternoon, November 11th. That's at noon Eastern. So you can also sign up for that at brooklynfi.com/events. Thank you for allowing us some shameless self-promotion.

Shane Mason:

That is a big understatement to say that the housing market has changed a tad since 2020, I must say.

AJ:

Understatement of the century, perhaps.

Shane Mason:

I wouldn't say of the century.

AJ:

A real Sophie's choice?

Shane Mason:

I would say that all equities are fully priced. I don't know. Yeah, so that would be a great opportunity. I might drop in for that one as well.

AJ:

As a third contender or as a spectator?

Shane Mason:

Just a spectator, just have a couple drinks.

AJ:

Shane's like, "I'm living on a boat. Y'all are doing this wrong."

Shane Mason:

Yes. What are the marina fees on this house you're speaking of?

AJ:

Oh my God.

Shane Mason:

How much is ice at the dock house? You've got to factor that in, AJ.

AJ:

Oh my God. Oh my God.

Shane Mason:

Cool, so... Oh.

AJ:

All right. Let's transition into some actual articles.

Shane Mason:

Drunk at the wheel, y'all.

AJ:

Speaking of the wheel, I'm going to need you to take the wheel for five minutes while I change out of this costume, because I'm about to die. Take it to Shane.

Shane Mason:

No, no, no, you have to wear it all the way through. Those are the rules.

AJ:

No, I absolutely can not.

Shane Mason:

You can't wear it for five minutes.

AJ:

Take it away. Tell us about Amazon's hiring problems.

Shane Mason:

All right. All right. And she's gone.

It looks like we have an article here from Engadget who acquired some private details around Amazon's attrition issues. It looks like they have an exclusive around Amazon's attrition costing the company $8 billion a year annually, according to leaked documents. And apparently, it gets worse as well.

I learned a couple things from this article. I'd never heard of the words regretted attrition versus unregretted attrition, which is just a silly negative version of the first word, I feel like. Apparently workers that leave on their own accord, wherein that they didn't want to leave, I guess Amazon regrets that attrition. And unregretted attrition, it's definitely from the perspective of the employer, in this case, unregretted attrition is wherein they fire the person.

AJ:

Right.

Shane Mason:

For a sense of scale here, that $8 billion is a fairly large number of their $33 billion net income that they post every year, but of course, Amazon is a famously low net income company as compared to its valuation, which is at a cool 1.1 trillion as of today's article writing. So that 8 billion only represents 3% of the net worth of the company, so to speak. So maybe not as big as you think when you look at it from that perspective. Also, considering how fast their net worth increases every year, but also, I know obviously $8 billion is the GDP of a small island and bigger than the top line revenue of a lot of Fortune 500 companies. Interesting.

AJ:

Indeed. Yeah, Amazon has 1.6 million workers, right? So they have a people problem. They might also have a process problem. This article goes in on this thing called Consumer Talent Strategy Management and Development. This is a team within Amazon shortened to CTSMD. I'm not sure that acronym is actually any easier to say than the actual department.

And basically, this is a department within Amazon that's responsible for training and developing talent strategy. There's 615 people that work in this department and some of the papers and basically internal reports that this journalist obtained basically are saying that there's almost a billion dollars being lost each year by this department. And there's really not a quantifiable metric within Amazon, a company famous for quantifiable metrics and supply chain and logistics, they don't have a good handle on training and keeping their people.

I went in on this article, so definitely if you're interested in HR and employee retention or anything like that, check out this Engadget piece. Great journalism. I guess if someone hands you a secret report, all you've got to do is write about it, but still, great narrative here in this piece.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. You have a chart here, actually, top ranking companies by revenue. I was surprised to see Walmart at the top of this list of ranking by revenue.

AJ:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Shane Mason:

Obviously when it comes to market capitalization, there are much...

AJ:

Sorry, quick correction, Shane. I actually ranked it by number of employees.

Shane Mason:

Oh.

AJ:

Is how I sorted this chart.

Shane Mason:

Well, fuck me then.

AJ:

But still. Yeah. But still, either way you slice it, Walmart's revenue is bigger.

Shane Mason:

Maybe you should have done the chart explanation.

AJ:

Yeah, it's all good. It's all good.

Shane Mason:

But yeah, interesting.

AJ:

Sorry guys.

Shane Mason:

Walmart has 2.3 million employees and Amazon has 1.6 million employees. So they're still about 700,000 behind.

AJ:

So it's really interesting. This is just the Wikipedia largest company's list. And you can actually sort this chart, and it's not here because I grabbed a screenshot, but if you sort by revenue, Apple is either number three or four, and they've got less than 200,000 employees. So basically Apple is coming to eat these expensive Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, FedEx, these top five employee numbers. They need lots of bodies to pack boxes and check out folks and stock shelves. Whereas Apple, Software company, needs far, far, far fewer employees to run the business. Of course, they have manufacturing costs and all that, but an interesting observation there. So basically build a software company and you'll win the day is my takeaway there.

Shane Mason:

Right on. Speaking of workforces. Okay, I'll have to get used to that, I guess.

AJ:

I'm going to get bored after this episode, don't worry.

Shane Mason:

I sure hope so. It's very jarring. No, no, no, keep it rocking. Yeah, this is a perfect segue. That's a perfect sound bit for the Supreme Court to block the... All right, I'll just let you do the introductions and the segues.

AJ:

Sorry.

Shane Mason:

No.

AJ:

I'm sorry to interrupt. Sorry. That was just the evil laugh intro. That wasn't me.

Shane Mason:

Go for it.

AJ:

Well, yes, so we were all excited about student loan forgiveness. Basically up to $20,000 for certain borrowers, 10,000 for many borrowers, and the Biden administration opened up the applications to apply for student loan forgiveness earlier this month, I believe. But there have been some challenges in court. At first there was a Supreme Court challenge that was struck down, but our legal system is confusing and messy. So unfortunately, six states, that would be Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina. Disappointed, Shane, not to see your home state of Mississippi here on this list. These states filed a lawsuit arguing the Federal relief program would hurt state-based loan companies that managed some of the loans themselves. Basically states trying to delay and block this process through whatever legal means they possibly can scrub together. But the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, has said, "We're moving full speed ahead and we will be ready to deliver relief to borrowers." So proceed with your applications, they'll hopefully figure it out in court. Any idea how the legal system in the United States works, Shane?

Shane Mason:

I have no idea. Injunctions, appeals, grand juries, depositions, discovery, et cetera. These are alien terms to me. I really can't wait for these states to lobby a petition to stop the cancer vaccine when that pops off.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Because of all the administrative people that will lose their jobs because there's so much fewer cancer patients out there.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Just looking forward to people's true colors.

AJ:

Yeah, getting shown.

Shane Mason:

For the sake of corporate profits. We have an incredible, incredible system here in the United States.

AJ:

It's really crazy.

Shane Mason:

Yeah.

AJ:

Yeah. I just wanted to point out for a second, I was looking up the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, from Connecticut. I was just checking out his bio and it's so interesting, in our day and age, I was almost surprised that he had a two decade long career actually in public education because he seems actually pretty well qualified to be the Secretary of Education for the United States. He started as an elementary school teacher and worked his way up, ran school districts, put a lot of programs in place in his home state of Connecticut really quickly during COVID. He set up some emergency FAFSA forums online. So he's got this really robust resume in times of crisis, how to help kids stay in school thanks to our public education system. So all to say, I'm glad that we have some good people in the cabinet who actually appear to have experience with the department that they're in charge of running as opposed to the last administration.

Shane Mason:

So this is the final boss of principals is what you're telling me? This is the principal's principal.

AJ:

Yeah. This is when you go to the principal's office and you act out in the principal's office, then you're going to Cardona's office.

Shane Mason:

It goes all the way up the chain, to the final boss, and he paddles the hell out of you, this one. Do you remember the principal...

AJ:

Speaking of the final boss paddling the hell out of you.

Shane Mason:

Oh, okay.

AJ:

Sorry, moving on.

Shane Mason:

No, no, that's great.

AJ:

You got one more?

Shane Mason:

No.

AJ:

You got one more?

Shane Mason:

I was just going to ask if you remember any of the school principals that you had to deal with?

AJ:

What I'm going to say next should not surprise you at all.

Shane Mason:

No, you never once had to talk to the principal.

AJ:

Correct.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Must be nice.

AJ:

Anyways, speaking of horrible bosses, we've got our Elon Musk, everyone's favorite evil super villain back in the news. I don't know if he actually came out and said this, I think it was in a document that got leaked that he plans to reduce Twitter's workforce by 75% once he is in control of the company. According to a new report, he's going to cut around 5,600 jobs. He thinks that Twitter can run in a much leaner workforce and we'll see what happens. I think the deal is supposed to go through on the day of this airing of this episode. We should see if the Twitter deal closed.

Shane Mason:

I think it's the 28th. Oh, the airing. Yes, you're right. Yeah.

AJ:

Yes.

Shane Mason:

This Friday, right?

AJ:

Yes.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Today, if you're listening to this. Yeah, I think he's just saying this to please investors, frankly.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

I don't think he has any actual intention to lay off 70. He's got a big enough PR issue going on anyway. But you do need to talk like Gordon Gekko to get certain things done in the corporate world. I'm looking forward to Twitter being private. I think that that'll be very helpful for the whole company, the whole organization, not having to deal with public numbers, et cetera, and pleasing Wall Street in general. They've had a rough run over the past 10, 15 years. The stock price has been flat, absent, this $54 share price to purchase the whole company.

AJ:

I hope so. There's some threats of certain people who have been kicked off the platform returning to the platform and being given a bigger voice. I hope that doesn't cause major harm like it did the last time.

Shane Mason:

Well, I don't think, whether they're public or private financially, that'll change anything.

AJ:

Perhaps. We shall see.

Shane Mason:

Do you think that if they remain, well, they're going to be a private company either way, so it's not like they have a choice here, but do you think that that's going to impact Elon's decision to bring Trump back on?

AJ:

Yes, I do. I think without public shareholder scrutiny, I think that he will be able to do more of whatever he wants. And I think economically that will negatively impact Twitter.

Shane Mason:

I would argue the opposite. Having somebody with such a large following on Twitter would be very good to support its stock price.

AJ:

But don't you think the large following will alienate so many folks that they may stop using the platform altogether? For example, what we just saw with the Adidas and Kanye West parting of the ways, that was sort of public outcry that forced a company to make a very negative financial decision in favor of that person saying very hateful things.

Shane Mason:

But I would argue that people never used Twitter as much and it helped grow the user base because Trump was on the platform.

AJ:

Oh, I don't know if that's true. I would like to see the numbers.

Shane Mason:

All right. I don't have the numbers, but I just feel like...

AJ:

Agree to disagree.

Shane Mason:

I think that's just obvious. You don't think so?

AJ:

Is it? I don't think so.

Shane Mason:

You think that more people dropped off of Twitter because Trump was on there instead of just silencing him or blocking him?

AJ:

I don't know. I think a lot of people left Twitter and went to other outlets because they didn't like the engagement.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. What other outlets that he's not on? Instagram?

AJ:

Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, the other alternatives.

Shane Mason:

Oh, he's all over Facebook. I don't know. Does he have an Instagram? I've never seen him on Instagram.

AJ:

I have seen his Instagram.

Shane Mason:

That is definitely not his platform. What?

AJ:

All right. Let's move on.

Shane Mason:

All right.

AJ:

So we have some positive market news today. As of this moment, it's positive. Mobileye, a company that we've talked about before, which makes autonomous driving technology, re-listed for the second time on the public markets. They were spun out of Intel. So far, shares began trading today. Trading opened at $26.71 cents a share, which was over, its IPO price of $21. So finally, a big fat IPO, other than these little tiny SPACs and micro caps. They raised $800 million, almost a billion dollars. This is exciting news for IPOs. I'm excited. This is exciting news for the liquidity event. Any potential takes here, Shane?

Shane Mason:

No, I think it's lovely that we finally have a successful IPO in 20, not finally have a successful IPO, but a nice, successful IPO in Q4 so far. This bodes well for companies going public throughout the rest of the quarter and into 2023. I am curious why now was the time for Mobileye? I don't know what that is, but it being up almost 25% in early trading is fantastic for the employees at Mobileye. Hopefully they have liquidated at least a material amount of their positions in their company. I don't know what the blackout period dates are. We don't have any employees going through this IPO so we have not looked behind the scenes yet.

AJ:

Not at the moment. Yeah, they would've had Intel stock and now it's getting converted or swapped. We'll figure it out. We'll look into it. So yeah, if you're at Mobileye or were at Intel and now at Mobileye, come on down. We'll help you understand what's going on.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, as I've said before, any funding heading towards self-driving cars is fantastic. We've discussed this previously on the podcast, but maybe Mobileye can help us figure out how an autonomous vehicle can take a left turn. Maybe this $800 million will solve the left turn problem, which if the listeners don't know, apparently is the main reason we do not have fully self-driving cars right now because they can't take a left in an intersection.

AJ:

Can't figure it out.

Shane Mason:

Yeah.

AJ:

Can't take a Louie.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, I was talking to my buddy who's the CMO of a robotics company and he says that every day he goes in and the engineers tell him the problems with achieving certain goals and he is just always like, "Wow." It's such a simple thing that...

AJ:

That the robots can't do?

Shane Mason:

Yeah, it just goes to show you that human beings are incredibly good drivers. We're actually great at driving. The amount of accidents that we have as compared to the amount of hours that we spend on the road are actually quite low. We hear about it being one of the most dangerous things that you can do, but I don't think we do that many dangerous things as a species anymore, which is really cool.

AJ:

Right. Right, and a lot of fatal accidents are due to road conditions, slippery things or bad weather.

Shane Mason:

Driving at night.

AJ:

Or traffic jams or driving in darkness, et cetera. Your car acting up, et cetera. Interesting. Yeah, so Mobileye itself, I dug into a little bit about the company. So they make the chips, all right? So they don't make the cars themselves. Right? They make mostly the chips and they sell them to the car makers and help them actually integrate the technology into whatever model car they're working on. So their biggest customers are BMW, they have partnerships with Ford. There's this Chinese automaker that I hadn't heard of that has a huge market share in China.

Shane Mason:

Boo.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Boo, China.

AJ:

Exactly. Boo.

Shane Mason:

What was that? Was that a gong?

AJ:

Suspense.

Shane Mason:

Oh, okay.

AJ:

I don't know. It's the suspense button. No, it was not a gong, for the record.

Shane Mason:

That would've been the worst audio you could've slipped in there.

AJ:

So yeah, so they have this IQ ultra chip that's going to be ready by the end of 2023, and then ready to roll out in 2025. Don't you ever feel impatient when we talk about electric cars? With the Rivian IPO, they were like, "We're going public and our cars are going to be ready in 2028." I'm like, "2028 feels so far." I realize obviously research and development takes time and money and the IPO has to happen first so we can get the money to do the R and D, but I'm impatient. I don't want to wait until 2025 to see this chip implemented in the cheaper Ford truck that looks really cool that I want to buy.

Shane Mason:

I know, I know. I'm ready to pull the future forward myself. I'm ready for the little robots to go down into my bloodstream and fix my cartilage in my knee and all that fun stuff. And I'm sure you could use a little blood work yourself there.

AJ:

I've got a robot inside. I'm good to go.

Shane Mason:

For those that don't know, I'm referencing AJ's defibrillator that is permanently inserted into her chest and sits upon her heart.

AJ:

Love robots.

Shane Mason:

Due to her myocardial... Shit...

AJ:

Nah.

Shane Mason:

I can't get it?

AJ:

Hypertrophic.

Shane Mason:

Hypertrophic.

AJ:

Cardiomyopathy.

Shane Mason:

Oh yeah, I started from the back.

AJ:

Started from the bottom, now we're here. Whatever works.

Shane Mason:

I'll get it one day.

AJ:

Someday. It's okay. What else do we have here? I don't want to talk about cars anymore. I'm bored with cars.

Shane Mason:

All right. You want to talk about existing home sales?

AJ:

Sure.

Shane Mason:

The real estate market. Circling back to our comments earlier.

AJ:

Speaking of beating the dead horse, automobiles and cars. We've got this CNBC article, existing home sales fall to 10 year low in September as mortgage rates soar. Those mortgage rates are soaring high like an eagle. What are they, 7% right now? You want a mortgage with good credit?

Shane Mason:

Yeah, I think so, close to that. I'm really sick of all the memes about people locking in 2.6% interest rates in 2021 being the advanced users, the smartest people on the block.

AJ:

Yeah. Congratulations, you had a bunch of cash and you beat out other offers.

Shane Mason:

No, it's just not the whole story. Good for them. I'm glad that you have a home and you've got the interest rate that works for you. It's just not the whole story. If you got a home at 2.6%...

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

That means that the people you were competing against also had a 2.6% home loan rates so it just increased the demand for homes and thus increased the, supply wasn't going anywhere, and increased the price. So sure, if you got a 2.6% rate on a $700,000 house versus a 7% interest rate on the same house priced at 450,000, that price never changes, but you can always refinance your interest rate.

AJ:

Right. That's true.

Shane Mason:

That's why you're seeing home sales drop because I don't think that the amount of homes being sold is dropped because there's the people that didn't sell their homes when the prices were up there that are now struggling to sell them at the prices they were anchored to, the all time highs, so to speak, the high water mark.

AJ:

Right.

Shane Mason:

So I imagine they're now running to get out the door before they come even lower and lower and lower. But I don't know, we'll see, you never know.

AJ:

Right, so we're down 24% this time last year, but last year was an all time high. Right? So we're down a little bit. I think what's really squeezing people is that housing prices aren't coming down in the same way that rates are going up, right? So what's interesting too is if you think about it, okay, so maybe your house isn't selling at that price you were anchored to that it was listed at in February or that you saw in Zillow in February but you weren't ready to move. If you're selling your house, you've got to move in somewhere else and pay that 7%. So fewer people are actually listing their houses because they don't want to buy in this market either. Maybe it's not quite the amazing seller's market it was a year ago so that's why more people are staying in their homes. We don't have enough houses. There's not enough housing stock. That's a problem that we've had for a very long time.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. The true GOAT here in terms of coming out on the top are those that invested in rental real estate in say 2010 and sold their house in 2021 or early 2022 at the high watermark.

AJ:

Right.

Shane Mason:

Before interest rates started to come up.

AJ:

Yep. That is true.

Shane Mason:

But that's too difficult to express in a meme.

AJ:

Right.

Shane Mason:

So that's why you don't see that in a meme.

AJ:

Indeed. Indeed. So there's this issue of housing stock. Why don't we just build more houses? Well, it's expensive. It takes a long time. There's a massive national shortage of general contractors. I'm looking into general contracting as a profession.

Shane Mason:

I knew you would say that. I could see you doing that. You would really like it.

AJ:

Right?

Shane Mason:

Yeah.

AJ:

I think I'd be good at it.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Integrator, COO, operator.

AJ:

And I like the requirements.

Shane Mason:

Yeah.

AJ:

Yeah, you need a high school degree. You have to have four years of experience in the building industry, so I've got to get that first. And then you've got to pass a few tests.

Shane Mason:

It's just you doing tile work in some McMansion.

AJ:

I'm ready for a pivot. I think I would love that.

Shane Mason:

Get the knee pads on and start your way from the bottom. Oh, my stethoscope fell off.

AJ:

Oh no.

Shane Mason:

Oh no. Can't hear the beat of the podcast anymore. You want to end on a high note and talk about Taylor Swift?

AJ:

I don't know if that's a high note, but sure.

Shane Mason:

Oh, sorry.

AJ:

Taylor Swift has a new album out. It's called Midnight.

Shane Mason:

Wow. Are you throwing shade at your girl?

AJ:

This album sucks. I'm sorry, Taylor.

Shane Mason:

Ooh.

AJ:

I love the single, Anti-Hero is incredible. I listened to it nonstop for the past 48 hours, as I'm sure many other Swifties have. This album is weak. It's boring. It's a close twin to Reputation, which I think was weak. I really liked Folklore Evermore a lot more as a rock and roll fan.

Shane Mason:

Wow.

AJ:

So do better, Taylor.

Shane Mason:

Sound like a true fair weather fan, unlike me, always been T Swift until I D-I-E. Keep going, girl. Got you.

AJ:

You like this album?

Shane Mason:

For sure, yeah. I've listened to it.

AJ:

You've listened to it?

Shane Mason:

Front to back. I got the deluxe pre order.

AJ:

Are you upset that there's a song called Shane's World? There is not.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, I was like, "Wait, I don't remember that track on my first four listen throughs, but I've got to consult the liner notes."

AJ:

Anyways. Anyways. Any no-brainers for us on your international trip recently?

Shane Mason:

Yes. I was going to do a Halloween no-brainer.

AJ:

Okay, great. That's great.

Shane Mason:

Pick a costume and wear it every year.

AJ:

And stick to it.

Shane Mason:

It is very satisfying.

AJ:

Do the cartoon character Halloween costume where you just are always wearing the same thing.

Shane Mason:

Yeah, it's just very satisfying to know something in advance and to just cut down on the decisions you have to make. What you got?

AJ:

Speaking of which, why don't you read out our canned response?

Shane Mason:

Yes. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Liquidity Event. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. Send us some no-brainers, please. We always need those. You can leave us a voicemail and we will play it on the air. We are updating how that's done. Looking forward to making that easier on you. Show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode65. And you BKFI stans can leave us a review on Stitcher or iPodcast.

AJ:

See you next week, folks.

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.