#1. The Sub-Beacon on Bird Box, Bandersnatch, and Netflix
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Two Netflix titles get the treatment and neither survives intact. Sonny finds Bird Box merely "fine" — an elevator pitch of A Quiet Place by way of The Mist — praising John Malkovich's shotgun-wielding survivalist as "essentially a MAGA conservative" who turns out to be right about everything, while faulting the flashback-flashforward structure (a point he credits to Red Letter Media) for draining all tension out of the house scenes. JVL refuses to watch it at all, admitting "I'm a girl about this" and that horror gives him no catharsis, then unloads on Bandersnatch as "a gigantic act of sort of dorm room bull session intellectual masturbation," closer to Dragon's Lair and Space Ace than to Clue, and warns that anyone who can spend more than 30 minutes on it needs to re-examine what they are doing with the time God has given them. Sonny, who burned about 90 minutes on it and had to hook his laptop to the TV because his Samsung Blu-ray player wouldn't run the choices, got all the endings and objects less to the gimmick than to Black Mirror's smugness; Vic's Gene capsule gives both movies three stars. That spins into a long argument over Netflix's numbers — the claim that 45 million subscribers watched at least 70 percent of Bird Box in seven days, which JVL translates as "good news guys, only 30% of the audience left the theater during Aquaman" — plus his market-cap sermon that a $155 billion Netflix is worth five Fords and amounts to a market failure distorting everything downstream, against Sonny's rebuttal that $15 billion a year in real subscriber revenue isn't nothing. Before all that: Sonny's Morning Joe hit, where a makeup artist attacked his month-overdue mullet with industrial hair glue and a horse brush while he wore an Imperial lapel pin to talk about Dick Cheney; Jason Reitman inheriting Ghostbusters; Vic improbably out-nerding Sonny on Kitty Pryde's "Sprite" codename; JVL's Carson Wentz–Nick Foles fury; Vic's son learning the code of the street shoveling driveways at $20 a house; and Vic debuting a rainbow-loom gout-awareness bracelet with the proposed bumper-sticker slogan "embrace the twinge."
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- In this latest episode, sponsored by Calm, the Sub-Beacon takes on Bird Box , Bandersnatch , and the Net...
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00This ain't no virus or chemical attack. It is real evil.
JVL00:00:07If you see it, it takes on the form of your worst fears. Every contact we have had with the outside has brought us death.
Vic00:00:30Hello and welcome to another edition of The Sub-Beacon, sponsored by Calm, the number one app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation. I'm Victor Matus, along with Sonny Bunch and Jonathan V. Last. I'd like to remind you The Sub-Beacon is available on iTunes and Google Play. Just look at a podcast and search for Sub-Beacon. You'll easily find us. Please subscribe, tell your friends, and leave a review. Gentlemen, how are we? Sonny, how was morning Joe? It was fun. It was fun. Tell us about it.
Sonny00:01:00it there's not really much to say i mean tv is weird i don't really like doing tv um unless i'm which is a shame because they're so handsome yeah well we'll get to that uh the the the only time i really like doing tv is when i actually get to talk about movies or something like general punditry is i'm just not very i'm not very good at it it's not why it's not what i what i what i make my money doing so uh but it was fun it was i mean it's weird it's tv uh and i was remote i was
Vic00:01:27in dc they're not looking they're in new york you're not looking at joe and mika right i'm
Sonny00:01:32looking into it i'm staring into a camera but as as in all these setups there's a there's like a monitor below so basically um i am i'm staring i'm i'm i have like a death stare into the camera and i'm willing myself i'm like constantly willing myself not to have my eyes dart down you know and like look at look at the monitor you should i could tell them to turn it off usually i do i almost always tell them to turn it off when i have a when i have a remote like this but the problem the problem with morning joe is that there are so many different things going on there's so many different people talking and they're kicking it to different people i actually like to have some sense of what is actually happening on the screen while i'm while i'm talking um and they were also showing like clips of the movie and stuff so i wanted i i like actually you don't want to talk about 90 almost always i have them turn the monitor off fair enough but on this on this on this one one instance i didn't i didn't want to but it's fine i mean joe and mika were very nice uh and we you saw the photoshop right i saw the photoshop afterwards i saw me and the palpatine uh no i some people were surprised i wore the imperial lapel pin uh on on the show but if i'm going on tv to talk about dick cheney i'm not not going to wear the empire the empire paraphernalia i i also couldn't help
Vic00:02:47notice how nicely coiffed your hair was it was so sculpted tell us about that well i my problem
Sonny00:02:53right now is that i need a haircut and i've needed a haircut for about the last month oh man yeah and uh flopping and it's it's a it's a real it's a real issue to the point that i like so the the top you know you can i can get that down that's fine but the back is still like flipping up a little bit like i got a mullet mullet action it's not it's not action it's it's not it's not really a mullet because it's a party all over there's no business there's no business up front it's just a it's just a wild mess but i so i'm like you know that you sit down they do makeup and hair and stuff and the one thing i asked the nice lady who was doing my makeup i was like can you make it so i don't look like i have a mullet on tv because that would be that would be really nice for me what did she say she was like yeah we'll get that and so she got out some like industrial strength hair glue and was like getting her hands all ready and then she she you know she she she starts with like rubbing it into the back of my hair and she pulls out like a horse brush and is like we're gonna we're gonna get that down we and then uh and then the the hairdryer came out to like glue it into place you know so the hairdryer said it like how long did you spend in makeup oh not long i mean like uh like three minutes what no maybe five minutes no i like i because they they do like a very i mean i'm a guy i mean with the hair i mean the whole yeah with for the whole thing like five minutes she just slacked she just slacked it
Vic00:04:13just slathered it on um did you want to keep it that way for the rest of the day well i mean i
Sonny00:04:18i didn't have much choice it was it was the hair it was it was just like that yeah till i took a
Vic00:04:24shower did you think about just maybe just pulling it into a ponytail it's not quite long enough to do that 80s ponytail i could have bobby pinned it down
Sonny00:04:32i could if she if she had some bobby pins in there i'm sure she did i could have been like
JVL00:04:35hey can you just pin it down what you could do you remember get a haircut chris jericho rocked the like the bam bam yeah like top pony the top knot the top is that what it is a top
Sonny00:04:45knot you have enough to do that yeah uh it's pretty close i could probably just about do a top knot not a man bun but a top knot well man buns and top knots are the same genus i think cousins they're like they're on the they're in the phylum
Vic00:04:57but uh sony something else was on your mind you said uh that was in i saw it on variety
Sonny00:05:02uh oh yeah jason reitman taking over the ghostbusters franchise i find this interesting for a whole bunch of reasons first off father son first off there's the father son angle he he tweeted something like they're giving me the keys to the car which is like kind of weirdly like i like jason reitman a lot and i if i say things that are bad about jason reitman on this on this segment it's purely out of love a little bit douchey a little bit a little bit nepotistic and but he doesn't need to is it a franchise though i mean what the ghost i guess we consider one and two franchise ghostbusters so this is supposedly picking up sometime after ghostbusters 2 right it is taking place in a separate universe from the lady ghostbusters from lady ghostbusters uh they are they are deep sixing that terrible idea um like the animated film that they had planned and like they they i mean sony really crapped the bed with the ghostbusters um leaving aside the i think i think jason reitman's sensibility is actually much better for this sort of movie than paul feig's who is who uh has a lot of strengths as a director but um he has also a reliance on like kind of weird gross body humor which i don't like bridesmaids yeah yeah which i or or a spy the like anytime he's with melissa mccarthy they they do like weird like i mean like ghostbusters had a series of queef jokes like i mean come on shouldn't every movie so uh so i do think i do think jason reitman's sensibility is a little better in that sense but he has the same problem where he hasn't really done any like big you know special effects heavy sort of movies but also i mean look just the simple fact of the matter is that like jason reitman is one of our few interesting middle-brow directors i mean and i say middle-brow like that not not not negatively no no like it's a it's a he he has he makes movies about ideas and they are uh they're usually very well done and they're interesting and i am a little bit i mean if this is what he needs to do to stay out of movie director jail which he probably does since both the front runner and tully came out this year and neither grossed uh anything close to their budgets um fine but i would i would hate to see him get trapped in franchise director hell right right okay jvl do you have any thoughts on jason reitman i know you're a fan of jason
JVL00:07:27i think he's great i my concern isn't about special effects it's actually about the broadness of comedy because i think he's a very funny director but i worry that his brand of comedy will not be what ghostbusters audiences expect but see i think i think it i think because it's for me i mean he makes movies that are funny for you and me but go back and watch ghostbusters
Sonny00:07:45ghostbusters is a very quietly subtly funny movie i mean there's there is a lot of very little there's a lot of like there's a lot of i mean and a lot of that's driven by you know kind of bill murray's random looks at the screen or whatever so like who knows how much of that you can translate with a new cast or whatever but i do think that that is a it's a it the the ghostbusters is not a movie that looks funny on paper it's like here's some here's some dudes who are out you know catching ghosts they got a small business they got fired from their college and like none of that actually sounds funny but it is a deeply deeply funny movie it's hilarious i want a jason reitman superhero movie there i would sit with that yeah i
JVL00:08:27could see that i could see that in in the um like jason reitman directs the kitty pride movie
Sonny00:08:32but it's kind of a comedy but a subtle comedy sure right yeah it'd be fantastic with like uh you could make just make jason bateman play kitty pride jason bateman just just have jason bateman play the 15 year old girl you know you could it'd be very dry and subtle comedy is kitty pride
Vic00:08:49sprite is she what sprite what are you talking are you having a stroke no isn't there another x-men superhero named sprite kitty pride's name is kitty pride she doesn't have a sprite
JVL00:09:03i don't know that there is a sprite oh we gotta look into that shadow cat is there is a brief moment where she gets a superhero named shadow cat but it's all she's always just help
Sonny00:09:14me out sonny you're looking for sprite there's a there's a jajing oh who uh let's see when
JVL00:09:20i believe that that sound you just made victorino was problematic um and
Sonny00:09:27she she has the code name sprite uh something something to do i don't know this she's but i i don't i don't understand that sounds anime this is it well she's she's like chinese or something i
JVL00:09:39don't know it's weird i i don't know this girl who flashes the light are you thinking of jubilee
Vic00:09:45that's who you're thinking of i don't know i thought of them i want a jason reitman kitty
JVL00:09:50pride movie it's set up in westchester where she grows up because she's like a rich girl she's a rich jewish girl from the new york suburbs
Sonny00:09:57hold on hold on sonny sprite was the first code name of the x-man kitty pride
Vic00:10:03take that wow i did it for once i'm raising my arms you can't see it but i'm raising i can't
Sonny00:10:12believe i outnerded you for once i'm i it's it's it's true this is from the marvel database i don't know it's some sort of wiki page i can't i will continue to effort this i have the first kitty
Vic00:10:27pride's first appearance i knew i wasn't crazy i knew i wasn't crazy this is this is my shame this is this is like uh the wrestling get out of town match where i now have to leave the show
Sonny00:10:39i can't believe i was notable notable aliases again this is from wikipedia notable aliases ariel sprite shadow cat star lord oh that's weird in any event i knew sprite was somewhere in my
JVL00:10:51mind for some reason anyway jvl what else is going on talk to us i don't really have anything
Vic00:10:57yeah i know i'm sorry about that what do you mean he's gone i mean the eagles have announced
JVL00:11:02they're gonna part ways with him and uh it will wind up i went up huge twitter a very polite twitter argument with philadelphia inquirer's lead sports writer on monday oh uh about this and i just find it i guess moneyball hasn't come to football right there there's no sabermetrics going on in football i guess except in new england and everybody else just sort of looks well i mean look at him you just look at the eyeball test he's the my greatest he could be the best player in the league for the next 15 years he'll have a chance to be the mvp every year because look just look at carson look at the carson wentz's diabetes you know i and i it is as if nobody has ever heard the words joey harrington or robert griffin the third or the magic man the the nfl is wunderkind quarterbacks who are great for two or sometimes three seasons and then defenses figure them out because the key to success in in the quarterback position in this league is that you have to be a pocket passer and you have to be able to do the things that the defense wants to make you do you can't just do what you want to do because defenses scheme for that and the idea that carson wentz is going to be a lifetime 123 QB rating and going to the guy who's been injured and unable to complete two of his first three seasons is going to spend the next generation in bed what
Vic00:12:37happens what happens I'm sure it's fine what happens to foals foals I believe is
JVL00:12:42gonna be signed for 20 million dollars and then is gonna buy his way out of the contract and then will essentially be a free agent and where he makes the most sense actually is New England he is the perfect system quarterback to inherit Brady throne eventually because we live in the worst of all possible timelines he is likely to go to the New York football Giants question yes if New
Sonny00:13:08England is as bloodless and as data-oriented as you suggest is there any universe in which they sign Nick foals and then trade Tom Brady after next season could you envision that happening could you envision them trading him for like the could you envision Bill Belichick trading Tom Brady for like three first round picks I can envision a
JVL00:13:38world in which Bill Belichick owns the team and decides to do that I cannot envision a world in which that is a thing that happens without Boston burning for a year right I mean you imagine the Tommy from Quincy riots Tommy
Sonny00:13:57if Brady were to get traded no it would be I mean it would it would be
JVL00:14:01controversial like you could you could if they found some sucker on the line to give them 15 first round picks for the next decade right and they traded him which would be the greatest deal ever Boston would burn correct if somebody
Sonny00:14:15traded their whole what if somebody traded their whole next draft so if Cleveland was like we'll trade you we'll give you every pick we have in 2020 for
JVL00:14:22Tom Brady Boston would burn Southie would just be in flames for months on end it'd be that picture of the guy with the American flag he's 29 he's so much so much older than Carson Wentz is so much younger he is three years younger than Nick Foles three freaking years yeah yeah yeah everyone I'm thinking oh
Vic00:14:48he must be in his 30s the way people talk about it he must be done he must be
JVL00:14:5136 all you'd say is if if Foles did go to New England flash would be insufferable he'd be a big Pats fan big boy he already already is but then he's got your quarterback imagine Victorino how are you I am how
Vic00:15:11was your snowstorm I was snowstorm was snowstorm was fine it all shoveled out pretty well my son me why and he you did it I did but with your but he went with another well we'll get to that in a second and he went then the street with another kid offering to do some shovel did he get arrested because he's not white oh wow no no what are you talking about he they they did fine and they made some money but then they went over to a couple like one block over and they he told me that there were other kids oh no we got this house oh no this has oh no we told you don't rack it yeah we told you get off our block yeah we told these people that we were shoveling their house but we're getting to it later so they're like okay so in your own neighborhood so he yeah so he ended up going like three learning the code of the street yes I said there's like roving gangs and so I said well where did you make this money where'd you go he's like yeah three or four blocks over I'm like oh my gosh but
Sonny00:16:11you know you do what you got to do got a guy took me in his van over a couple
JVL00:16:15houses down how much did he make me in candy yeah how much did he make and did
Vic00:16:19you pay him for doing yours no I paid him for shoveling an elderly neighbor is I didn't said don't take her money I'll pay for doing hers but he didn't want to take them yeah so I paid him for that and then he made like another 20 bucks off of like one or two other houses something like that modest so it
JVL00:16:38was like 20 bucks a 20 bucks a shovel that's a perfectly yeah normal that was
Vic00:16:43it but you mentioned gout and I'm keeping an eye on you are the gout
JVL00:16:49celebrity spokesperson I mean you are you sure you started the gout trend I did here in America I think I were on this I talked about it
Vic00:16:56your favorite I talked about it before the thing way early before it for the
JVL00:17:00news in England about the rise and you're gonna be Jerry Lewis yeah well
Vic00:17:05look and look what I have on I have a special bracelet it's a gout bracelet I had my daughter make me from her rainbow loom a hot pink or bright red bracelet
JVL00:17:17that is for gout awareness is that the color of a gout stone what color are they yeah cut them out I think they never cut them out they're probably I've heard
Vic00:17:26stories legends were in the olden days when they didn't have a cure you know you could break pieces off and use it as chalk when you say break pieces off I
JVL00:17:35mean you have to like we'd have to pull it out right cuz it's a rock it's a rock
Vic00:17:39underneath the skin yeah it's a rock but that we haven't gotten to that so a bright red is the angry gout and when people say oh what's that bracelet you have then I can talk about and that's the gout awareness for the back of your car oh yeah well then yes that's right you know what I was gonna say that the slogan should be embrace the twinge don't is don't make your
JVL00:17:56ribbon pink because the common people will cut you we get sued for that no it
Vic00:18:00has to be like bright red but not pink bright red they'll cut us anyway my hope my whole thought is to have the bumper sticker to say embrace the twinge because that's where I am now just embrace it because it's gonna happen and you know what I'm perfectly fine with that I'll be like Paul Manafort you can just push me around in a wheelchair speaking of which over the weekend the upside rolled its way to the top of the box office with 19 and a half million dollars followed by Aquaman with 17 million and in third place a dog's way home with 11 million I
Sonny00:18:33hope we're all seeing a dog's way home now my one thought on this is boy you know I bet the Academy Awards would really like to have a box office draw like Kevin Hart whose films always open at number one to host their show instead of having nobody to host it as they're doing this year at at this very moment
Vic00:18:49Sonny at this recording where does he stand does he want to does he not want
Sonny00:18:53to I know but he won't the Academy has announced that they're going with no host that they're gonna how does that work who knows who the accountant the accountant from Ernst and Young let's be honest let's be honest the host really only does one thing really right the big monologue at the beginning and from there it's a bunch of kind of like introducing people and I could do that yeah sure exactly they could easily do Vic Mattis could just as easily fill in for any of these other extremely famous accomplished plus there'd be no pressure there'd be no pressure to lose I got nothing to lose no but it's it's it's the appeal of Kevin Hart it eludes me but it is there and it is real so yeah
Vic00:19:32he's a short fella he is very short he's very short okay so but we're not talking about any of those movies are we we're talking about movies two movies that are on Netflix currently Bird Box and Bandersnatch and we saw them both I saw them both yes I saw them both JVL I watched one of them sort of okay okay you didn't want to get you're scared of Bird Box two
JVL00:19:56I don't watch I look I'm a girl about this and have been since I was a kid I don't know what I just don't want scary things in my like I get no catharsis I
Sonny00:20:04get nothing from it it does nothing for me I would say Bird Box isn't particularly scary I found it disturbing it's just kind of yeah but but not like
Vic00:20:14scary not like a Blumhouse hard does not fast-forward motion of ghost running at
JVL00:20:20you scary none scary but it's hard it's anything involved you know what it is is
Vic00:20:26it's sort of yes horrorish but it's disturbing and anything with kids I kids the world we live in is horrible it's the world we live in is horrible enough so in other words only three of us saw Bird Box yes Bird Box is no flight of fancy people see something so terrible they're killing themselves my guess is it scenes from the movie Aquaman Sandra Bullock is taking is trying to take her kids to safety on a wing and a prayer she's navigating rapids while blindfolded talk about a suicide mission I give Bird Box
JVL00:21:08three stars three stars I'm sorry did we just go through an entire review of Bird
Sonny00:21:17Box without a joke Wow because something's got to be wrong with Jean is the Jean just phoning this in? He's phoning it in. Oh yeah that's too much. How dare you go there. I remember when he came across her before. That's lewd. No I'm sorry it was came across that face before. We don't have to go back there. Okay. How about a big boy review? Sonny Bird Box. Bird Box. So Bird Box stars Sandra Bullock as a woman who has two children under her charge. The film opens with her getting out to a river where they have to keep themselves blindfolded because they can't see anything. We don't know why yet until we flashback five years and learn that there was some sort of event, some sort of invasion possibly where malevolent creatures appeared and they made people see either their biggest fear or their greatest hope or something and it made them, it made everyone who sees it kill themselves. Except for the crazy people who see it and they go kind of zane. But anyway, anyway, so the setup of the movie is essentially if you were doing an elevator pitch on this, it's a quiet place but with blind people. Or possibly a quiet place by way of the mist. I the film I thought it was fine. It's a fine movie. It's fine. It's okay. I was neither blown away nor disgusted by it. I watched it. It kept my interest. The best parts of the film, I think, are the flashback scenes where Sandra Bullock is first with Sarah Paulson, who plays her sister. They go to the hospital. Sandra Bullock is pregnant at the beginning of the film. This event happens and people start killing themselves and she winds up in a house with John Malkovich and B.D. Wong and some other folks. They have to figure out how to survive. I kind of liked all of that part of it. The stuff on the river, and we keep flashing back to her on the river and flashing back to the house and then flashing forward to the river and flashing back to the house. I thought the structure of this was very weird and kind of poorly done. The guys on Red Letter Media made this point. I don't want to steal it from them. I want to credit them. The problem with this structure is that it removes all tension from the stuff that takes place in the house. By doing this kind of flashback, flashforward structure, you know that by the time everyone leaves the house, everyone is dead except for Sandra Bullock and these two kids, one of whom is the one she's pregnant with and then one of whom must be this other lady who comes to the house. She is pregnant. She has taken these two children under her wing, so to speak, and must protect them. Sandra Bullock is fine in this movie. I liked her. John Malkovich is great. John Malkovich, he's fantastic. My low-key favorite thing about this movie is that John Malkovich plays essentially a MAGA conservative. He's shotgun-wielding. He's running around. He's telling people that they've got to stay out of their house. Everyone's got to look out for themselves. There are two types of people in this world. There are the assholes and the dead. And he's right about everything. This is what it... The irony of all this is that he's portrayed as kind of this heartless conservative. But he's actually right about everything. There's a British guy who comes to the house and he's like, you've got to keep that guy out. Keep that guy out of the house. He's bad. The great Tom Hollander. He's a crazy person. You've got to keep him out of this house. We need to protect ourselves and not let him in. And all the rest of them are like, oh, we're going to lock you in the garage and we're going to let this guy in because we need to look out for everyone. Compassion. We need to open our borders and let everyone in. And he's like, no, we've got to keep these people out. They're a threat. And it turns out he was right. Make our house great again. John Magovich. Yeah. Hero of
Vic00:25:20the film. He is because it's the woman who let... The pregnant woman lets him in and then the older woman, another great actress from Silver Linings Playbook, I forget her name, she knocks John Malkovich unconscious. And then, of course, then you realize this guy they let in is insane.
Sonny00:25:37The British guy's a crazy person. He tries to get them all to look at the evil spirit. There's all sorts of... If you had seen this movie, JVL, you would have a litany of nitpicks like we did with Aquaman and The Last Jedi.
JVL00:25:51That's not my movie. It's okay. No, it's alright.
Sonny00:25:52The litany is good. The litany is good. But there is a definite... I mean, like, just for starters, is this creature a physical presence or is it merely a spiritual presence? If it's merely a spiritual presence, why can't it get into the houses? Right. If it's a physical presence, why can't it open doors? It's misty. There's a very smoke monster on the Lost Island feel to it where it can be kind of physical when it needs to be, but isn't physical enough to actually interact with the real world. It's odd. I don't... It's the sort of movie where you could have used just a little bit more explanation on stuff to make the world feel real, more real.
Vic00:26:34My observation... One observation for you and I have a lot of thoughts on Bird Box, but... So my parents saw Bird Box. I was going to tell my mother to see it just as a joke because I said... I was going to tell her, it stars Sandra Bullock, you know, what's not to love. But of course my father made her see it and she... My mother was not a fan of the movie, but my father loved it. But it had the you mentioned this before about the problems like when you see movies like Ballad of Buster Scruggs, when you're seeing it at home versus a theater, the tendency to be distracted. You're going up, you're checking your phone, emails, texting, whatever it is and you're not having the full experience, let alone not being on a big screen. So for like my parents to see it, my mother's getting up because she's making dinner, she's coming back, what's happening and then at some point she was telling me that she was asking my father, she says so why does she have to be blindfolded? You know, as they're rowing down, going down the river. And my father's like, because the aliens, you can't look at the aliens. And I sort of
Sonny00:27:28laughed it off. Maybe they're aliens. No one really
Vic00:27:30knows. But that's the thing. Initially I said that's a funny thing, aliens. But in fact, it's not viral. They said this early on in the movie. It's not some sort of a brain thing. It's not it's there's some sort of weird physical presence. How do they
JVL00:27:42know? Oh,
Vic00:27:44well, they tell you this in the news, but also Tom Hollander had been sketching the creature.
Sonny00:27:50He'd been sketching what he had seen. The thing is what everybody sees is different. It is you unique to the person. So for instance, John Magovich, his wife, leaves the house that they are holed up in to help pregnant Sandra Bullock come in. Like she wants to save pregnant Sandra Bullock. And John Magovich is like, no, no, no, don't do that. We have to save ourselves. Keep her out there. And this woman sees the monster and starts talking about her mother who had died and how she wanted to see her. And so she like goes and kills herself. She sits in a burning car. She sits in a burning car. And that's how she dies. Once again, John Magovich, right. Should have listened to him, lady. Don't help this lady. Don't help that pregnant lady. Save yourself first. But also, but like everybody who sees it sees something different. So it is some sort of weird... It doesn't really matter, does it?
Vic00:28:44Because we never see it. I did have this thought, Sonny, which was the way to survive is if you stay indoors. So you and I would be fine.
Sonny00:28:52Yeah, we would be. I don't know about Jonathan, but...
JVL00:28:55Question. Yeah. Could this movie have been positioned as part of a Cloverfield expanded universe?
Sonny00:29:01Yeah, probably.
JVL00:29:03Yeah. Question.
Sonny00:29:05Yeah.
JVL00:29:07How is it different from The Quiet Place? Well, in A Quiet Place, you can't make sound. You can't talk because a thing will kill you and in this you can't look or you'll kill yourself? Yes. That's basically it. Is that not the single most derivative thing you've ever heard anywhere?
Sonny00:29:22I would assume that this film was already under production before The Quiet Place came out. The book, in fact, was supposed to come out
Vic00:29:30years ago, but then M. Night Shyamalan's...
Sonny00:29:33You could say it's also derivative of The Happening.
Vic00:29:36Right. And he held back because he didn't want people to get, as he said, because it came out The Happening came first. And so he had to wait a few more years. And then, of course, The Quiet Place, you know, you just keep on waiting. So I guess they just said, let's just do it on Netflix as essentially a made-for-TV movie. But I thought it was fine. That's fine.
JVL00:29:56I hear that Netflix has said that this has had 200 billion non-contiguous seconds of use from unique viewers. Yeah. Well, which makes it unbelievable. It's essentially the Titanic
Sonny00:30:08of Netflix. Here's what
Vic00:30:10Netflix said. Here's my blank check. The investors will say that. Here's what Netflix
Sonny00:30:14said. Netflix has claimed that 45 million subscribers watched the movie within the first seven days. And they qualified this by saying watched at least 70% of the movie. Within the first seven days. So they have watched a significant portion of the film. Can you imagine
JVL00:30:34a studio saying good news guys only 30% of the audience left the theater during Aquaman this weekend. Right, right. Because that's what this is saying. When you say 70% people watched at least 70% of it, what it means is 30% of people wouldn't even finish the damn thing.
Sonny00:30:53Yes. That sounds about right. I have to fag it. I mean how many people, but I this is, and then they try to say well this is the equivalent then of a $450 million opening. This is a half billion dollar worldwide opening, which is insane obviously. We all realize it's insane. But, we all realize it's insane, but we also all need to recognize the fact that a significant number of people decided to stay home and watch this thing. Which in turn keeps them away from theaters. Which means that this film is doing exactly what Netflix wants it to do. Which is to become a default, de facto entertainment option for people who are just looking for something to do. Just looking for something to
JVL00:31:40do. Which is to say it just wants to become the new cable television. All it's trying to do is supplant cable. Netflix just wants to challenge Hollywood.
Sonny00:31:53No, but that's I don't think that those two things are at odds, exactly. I think you can do both. I mean, this is what the studios were always afraid of. That TV would kill the studios. Right, but studios have been afraid of
JVL00:32:06every technological innovation since like 1920, right? Radio was going to kill the movies. They haven't been wrong yet.
Sonny00:32:12The audience numbers keep dropping.
JVL00:32:14True, but the business is maturing. It's such a different business than it was when it when Hollywood first happened.
Vic00:32:20It's just that it wants it both ways because it wants the TV thing, but it wants to be treated like a movie in the theater. And so it gets, it wants to qualify, and it gets, does it qualify for Oscars and stuff? No, you
Sonny00:32:32have to be in a theater. Roma did. If you want a film. Oh, it's gotta be. If you want a film to qualify for the Oscars, it has to run for at least two weeks in New York and Los Angeles. Those are, that's like the only real qualification, but you have to actually put it in theater. Those two cities and
Vic00:32:46that's it. Yes. Well, there you
Sonny00:32:48go. I mean, Roma played in more. What's also interesting to think about is the fact that Roma has played in a bunch of theaters and played on a bunch of screens and we have no box office data on
Vic00:32:56that. Yeah, it's not on the thing. Because
Sonny00:32:58Netflix has not released the
JVL00:32:59numbers to the, like, you know the. You know why? Because it's so big. So big. And they've made so much money that they don't want to scare people. That's why. No, I'm sure. I'm sure. But no, I mean, it's. What percentage of people do you think have finished Roma all the way through? Don't know. Okay, do we have any more Bird Box thoughts?
Vic00:33:23No, no. Okay, close your eyes, Miriam. That's all I had to say when I was thinking about this movie. Close your eyes, Miriam, from Raiders. Don't look.
JVL00:33:30Everything will be okay. Just don't look. But apparently
Vic00:33:32they also do voices, right? They're talking. You can hear. You can hear. So it's multi-sensory. That didn't help. Okay. Next up is. No, wait a minute. We were going to. Speaking of things you can hear.
Sonny00:33:47Thank you. That's right. Hold on. I'm going to do the transition for you. I had one, but go for it. Speaking of things you can hear, JVL.
JVL00:33:56That is a B-plus transition, Sonny. Well, I had to wing it
Sonny00:34:00because I had to wing it because, you know.
Vic00:34:02I forgot. I was. No, I was going to say that everyone needs to maintain a sense of calm. It's always panic in these movies.
JVL00:34:08If only people remain calm. JVL. And that's why he's the pro. That's so much better. That's why we called an audible right before the show. As you can tell by this episode, I am thrilled to have my favorite sponsor back on the show. We love all our sponsors. We love all our sponsors equally. The same way I love all my children equally. JVL does have a favorite. And the calm is the favorite of all of my sponsored children. It's calm is a C-A-L-M because I never say it right evidently, is an app you have for your phone. You download it. You subscribe to it and it is stuffed full of meditations and breathing exercises and what we use it for most in our family, sleep stories. Calm is what we use it for and again we've been using it for like a year and a half, two years now, long before they came to the show. We use it to help our kids get to sleep at night and it is amazing. And I will tell you in fact what happened last night. So I got home from work late and I was sitting watching Bandersnatch and my two girls began appearing at the banister overlooking our family room like every four
Sonny00:35:22minutes saying, Daddy, I can't sleep. Daddy, I'm having trouble falling asleep. Daddy, I can't sleep. Can you come up and cuddle us? And so I said,
JVL00:35:30well, have you listened to your sleep story? No, we forgot to put the sleep story on. So I said, okay, go get into bed, girls. Go get into bed. And I waited five minutes. I came upstairs and I cuddled into bed with my two sweet little princesses, one on each side, and I brought our friend from Calm Tamara Levitt.
?00:35:52The Queen of Calm. A meditative bedtime tale.
Guest00:35:56Would you like to hear a bedtime story?
JVL00:36:02Yes. Five minutes later, both girls are snoring. It was the greatest thing. And I have to say, this is, you know. It's amazing. I like to think that I do nothing but real talk when it comes to parenting. Real talk. Real talk when it comes to parenting. I don't subscribe to the Hallmark View of Children. There is nothing so great as sleeping children. Yes. When your children are asleep. You never love your children more than you do when they're sleeping. And even more when they're, like, nestled up sleeping to you. And so, for me, like Tamara's Voice and Calm.com, the sleep app, is like the background music of almost all of my favorite memories of my children. And it's fantastic. It works every time. It is better than better. It's like in a Mission Impossible movie when, you know, there's always, like, some little, like, air gun that you can, like, you know, into the person's neck and all of a sudden they just fall asleep. That's what Calm.com does, especially for kids. And they have a whole library of sleep stories just for children. And then they have them for adults. They have special ones that are just sort of timed for, like, an afternoon nap for a siesta if you yourself just want to conk out for 20 minutes. It's fantastic. So, the good people at Calm are giving people 25% off of their premium subscription, which is a really good deal. All you have to do is go to Calm.com slash SubBeacon. That's Calm.com dot com C-A-L-M dot com slash SubBeacon two B's, no hyphen. And they'll give you 25% off of their premium subscription. It's unlimited access to all of their content. It's really, really great. I simply cannot recommend it enough. Thank you,
Vic00:37:46JVL. So, when you're listening to Calm, you have these choices to make. You can... Oh, you've
JVL00:37:52got lots of choices. I can listen to Tamara or Eric Bra. Or Clark Peters. Speaking
Vic00:37:58of lots of choices, Bandersnatch. Uh, we all saw Bandersnatch, yes.
JVL00:38:05Did anyone else see Bandersnatch? Because between Bird Box and Bandersnatch, I'm really hoping we have...
Vic00:38:12Gene, welcome back! Bandersnatch. This movie made about as much sense as Time Bandits, but I loved it anyway It's a choose-your-own-adventure movie. I wish they had this for a manual in space. I give Bandersnatch three stars. I also like the movie Snatch. Really, I love anything ending in Snatch. Back to you.
JVL00:38:41Thank you, Gene. It's a capsule.
Vic00:38:44So it's like, about the size of one review is like too many reviews. Yeah, okay.
JVL00:38:52I wish we had one movie called Snatch Box.
Vic00:38:56Wow, that's pretty good. I like that. Ooh, I'll save that one. Yeah, a manual in space. That's a great series. The Emanuel series. You can do that in, you know, choose. You get to choose. Was there really an Emanuel in space? Yes. Ask Mike Goldfarb. He's very familiar with the Emanuel series.
Sonny00:39:11That was a Cinemax. That was a regular on the Cinemax rotation.
Vic00:39:15It started in the 70s and then it made it. Cinemax had the genius idea of buying it and running it at 11pm. Got to reboot that franchise.
JVL00:39:23The Emanuel Expanded Universe.
Vic00:39:26Yes, it was. It starts in Paris and it ends in space. I mean, you know, it knows no bounds. She knows no bounds.
Sonny00:39:31Emanuel. It's basically like the Muppets.
Vic00:39:34Yes, it's very much like the Muppets. The Muppets go to Emanuel. JVL, how about a Bandersnatch review?
JVL00:39:42Bandersnatch is a Black Mirror production. It's not actually a movie. There. Do you like that? That's about right. So let me tell you what Bandersnatch is. Bandersnatch is a quasi interesting experimental product, which is half video game and half movie. But the truth is, it's much closer to Space Ace and Dragon's Lair than it is to, say, Clue. If you're thinking about movies that have multiple endings. It is a gigantic act of sort of dorm room bull session intellectual masturbation where you have a bunch of people making the movie essentially for themselves. And burying Easter eggs and, you know, one of them even said in some of the press materials, yeah, we have some golden eggs hidden in there that people are going to have to really walk through. You're going to have to go through this thing a bunch of times before they find them. This is not Bioshock. This is not a... People don't sit there with movies that are choose your own adventures and go through them. Who has the time for this? This is essentially a time waster. If you can spend more than 30 minutes on this thing, then you have made some bad life choices and you need to re-examine what it is you are doing with the time God has given you on this earth. Victorino.
Vic00:41:01So I imagine that if you're like some sort of 20-something dude, no wife or children or girlfriend, you could watch this over and over again? Yeah.
JVL00:41:13And that's what they want, right? This is what they want. It's branching, right? And so they filmed 250 minutes worth of footage and it's like, you know, hey main character, do you want to have Cocoa Puffs or Frosted Lakes for breakfast? And you choose do you want the Cocoa Puffs or, and then they zoom in on the main character while they subtly cut the scene. I mean, as a technological achievement, it's kind of interesting because what you're doing is branching streaming, right? Because unlike, you know, in a video game, all the information and data is right there in one place on a disc in front of you and it's all self-contained. Here, it's all coming to you over the tubes. And so you, you know, Netflix has to have a way of taking input back up stream from the viewer. So, technologically, it's sort of a very interesting achievement. They actually had to write a bunch of code to make something like this possible. Why? Well, I mean, just because you can do something and you can create interesting, elegant engineering solutions for it does not make it art and does not make it interesting and does not make it necessary. If you want a, an example of the decadence of sort of late period golden age of streaming, I present to you Bandersnatch. Thank you, JVL. Wow. I mean, I hated this movie more than I hated, because it's not a movie, more than I hated Vice. I resented every second it was leeching out of me because, as Netflix has said, as a company, they view, you've heard this, right? Like Netflix said, our prime competitor is sleep. You know, we're really, the only person we're really competing against is sleep. We want people to, if you spend a minute more with Bandersnatch than sleeping, then you have just cheated yourself and
Vic00:42:51your entire life. But they get to say we get what, hundreds of millions of views because people keep on trying to want to figure out other endings. Is that why? I mean, they're getting, what are the numbers?
JVL00:42:59What are the numbers? I don't think they have said. No, I don't think, I think the patience audiences will have for something like this is about this big.
Vic00:43:08I also didn't quite get what the movie was about.
JVL00:43:11It is about a boy who is making a video game that itself is a branching video game, but maybe, like Netflix itself has a character in it.
Sonny00:43:21So this is the real problem with Bandersnatch I think, is that it is like all Black Mirror things not about the thing, it's a comment about the thing. So it's not a choose-your-own-adventure movie, it's a comment about choose-your-own-adventure stories. And the kind of facile obsession with the falsehood of choice, that we don't actually have any choices, that we are led down certain paths, and there are only certain branches we can go down. So that's my big problem with it. Like you said, I think it's actually a fascinating technological document. It is a fascinating engineering solution to a problem that didn't really exist, I guess. But I do think it is, I think it's interesting for what it is, but again, my problem with it is the problem I have with all Black Mirror things, which is that, I don't know if JVL, have you watched it?
JVL00:44:25I know enough about Black Mirror, yes.
Sonny00:44:27So Black Mirror schtick is like, what if the internet but more? And it's always bad, except for one episode that everybody loves. Because it turns out not to be bad, because it's actually a surprise. Because they actually do something surprising on the show. Hey, it works out. The twist is like, hey, it's actually not all bad. My frustration with Black Mirror kind of leeches into my frustration with Bandersnatch, which is that it is not telling a story, it is trying to moralize to you about the evils of our moment, and you know, and how technology lies to you. But doing it through the evil of our moment. But doing it through the evil of our moment, like, it has this kind of smugness to it that I find deeply frustrating, because you know that all Netflix is doing is crunching the numbers on how many people stayed on for how long, and which choices they took, and now they are pairing your choices to the algorithm to see what things you will want to see more of next. I mean this idea that... And the answer is always reruns of Friends. No, I mean, that's why they spent a billion dollars on Friends. I mean the simple fact of the matter is that Netflix and Black Mirror want to have their cake and eat it too, and they're doing it, and everybody's **** over this thing, and it's all deeply frustrating to watch. I just, I like, again, I find the whole, the smugness of it to be to be very, very off-putting.
Vic00:45:52Like, JVLI I'm like, what? Whoa! It never comes from that side of the studio.
JVL00:45:57No, it never comes from that side of the studio.
Vic00:45:59My goodness. Okay. It was like, it started off Choose Your Own Adventure, but then it turned into Truman Show or something, right? No, literally
JVL00:46:07Truman Show. What? Turns out they're all just actors in a Netflix production. It turns out actually the girl from it goes on to work at
Sonny00:46:15Netflix to build a show called Did you guys do Choose Your Own
JVL00:46:19Adventure books growing up? Yes.
Vic00:46:21It's the only books I read. So those were It's totally true. That's the least
Sonny00:46:25surprising thing on the show today.
Vic00:46:28But those books would always Except for Hot Air Balloon. If you were a wimp, you read Hot Air Balloon Adventure because no one died in that one.
Sonny00:46:35And those books always had like a weird branch, right? Where like you wind up with something like really, really weird. Like you step into the wizard's cave and you go forward through time too, you know. But like the problem with Bandersnatch is that it has a lot of those endings. And I don't, anyway, that's one of the problems. The story itself was fine. It was banal. I mean, more than anything else. It was just, or banal. Is it banal? Banal? What are we? Banal. Banal. I say banal. You know I'm always right. Yeah, so I got a weird look from Vic when I said banal. It was appalling. Anime. Anime. So I'm I'm I'm also down on this for similar reasons
Vic00:47:21to JVL. You're right about the choices, the limiting of choices because you think you're making it, we're gonna
JVL00:47:27go one way or another, but in the fact
Vic00:47:29like, oh, I don't want him to drop acid. Oh, well, then he'll slip it in the drink anyway. He's gonna take the acid so we can get to the next scene where he's tripping. Or they just, suddenly you have that split screen with the two TVs and you gotta and you just keep on rewinding and it's Groundhog's Day, like, where you just repeat the scenes until, so, I mean, obviously I guess we reached the end of one you know, choice. It ended and so you have to do it again and again until you get it quote, right? I don't, I got all five
Sonny00:47:53endings. Or all six endings. How much
JVL00:47:55time did you spend on this, Sonny?
Sonny00:47:57It took about, it took about 90 minutes. We we had two sessions, basically once while Katie was napping and then after Katie went to bed we finished the whole thing. So it was like, we basically watched about 50 or 60 minutes of it and then another, like, 30 minutes of it after. It was very annoying too, because I had to, like, first off how did you watch it? Did you watch it on your TV? Computer. Like, with your remote? Okay, so I had to hook my computer up to my TV and it was, it was, like, deeply frustrating because I couldn't just do the choices with my Blu-ray player.
Vic00:48:29We started upstairs and that TV, they told you you couldn't do it on this TV unless you did that. So the TV I have downstairs is a more recent purchase from, like, a year ago. That worked.
JVL00:48:40And you just, and you could see the time, sorry,
Vic00:48:41the time lapse and then
Sonny00:48:42make the choices. I think it would have, it would have probably worked on my TV downstairs because I have my PS4, like, I used the PS4 to do Netflix but with my Samsung Blu-ray player they were like, nope, can't do it on this. If anyone's
Vic00:48:57wondering, by the way, the Choose Your Adventure collection, which I've read almost all the, pretty much all those books, Sabotage is the best one that takes place in World War II. It involves Germans. I mean, come on. Whose side were you on? No, you're against them.
Sonny00:49:11You're always trying to angle the guy into the concentration camp? Make the deal.
Vic00:49:15No, Sonny's terrible. And I thought it was very exotic when I read that book because it took place in Morocco. And then you realize that the author was basically just riffing on Casablanca. Years later, like, oh, I see what this is. But it's still entertaining. And death! You know, you could die. But a number of those books ended in death.
JVL00:49:34I mean, that's what made it good. When I read those Choose Your Own Adventures, I always read them with my finger. I'm so risk-averse that I would... You weren't cheating, were you? 100% I would cheat. Not by looking ahead, but by bookmarking where I had been so that if I needed to go back and branch, I could branch from there. You wouldn't make the same mistake? Well, you know, like, my typically... I would hold the book, and I'd have the book sort of pinned between my forefinger and my thumbs, but then the other six fingers would be all wedged into specific page branches. Just in case. Just in case I have to go back.
Vic00:50:09That's good. That's good. Very bad. What else? Oh, Netflix. So, while we were talking about this, and we decided to do Bandersmatch even before the news came out that Netflix is upping their prices, the highest category is $13. They said the low with the
Sonny00:50:25minimum is $9? Who's
Vic00:50:27only paying $9?
Sonny00:50:29There's a $16 tier. I don't know if that's for, like, 4K plus some screen. I'm already paying $16. Oh! For the 4K. I don't know how this affects me. Because Liv and Maddie in 4K is amazing. I don't know how this affects me because I watch it... I have a deal through Comcast where Comcast pays for my Netflix. It's included in the Comcast package.
JVL00:50:52You'll pay the next time your Comcast is on the track for reviews.
Sonny00:50:55The next time it renews, but it doesn't renew for, like, two years. So I think I'm, like, I basically am getting grandfathered in, I guess. I don't know. Okay.
Vic00:51:03And the other thing is, of course, they made that decision and then its stock price rose or shot up something like $354 a share
Sonny00:51:11yesterday or something, you'd say, according to Elevator News. According to the Elevator News? That's where I get my news from. That's where I get all my stock tips from, is the Elevator.
JVL00:51:19Yes. I mean, that's a lot per share.
Sonny00:51:21I'm drinking Oban and I'm buying Netflix. You're drinking Oban?
JVL00:51:25I'm getting drunk over there. Let's get some more stocks.
Vic00:51:27Love that Elevator News.
JVL00:51:29Elevator News.
Vic00:51:30You work at our building, it's an inside joke. Anyway, so, I mean, it's working for them, isn't it?
JVL00:51:37You know my feelings about capitalism and the free market. You're pro. You're very pro. You're the most pro. This is why you love Jeff Bezos. I do not. I'm one cheer. One cheer for capitalism.
Sonny00:51:55Let me read you boys some numbers. Oh, God. Are you going to tell us about market caps again?
JVL00:52:03You have heard of the company Apple, or I'm sorry, Alphabet, right? They have this product called Google. They organize all the world's information. If you had to guess how many, what the multiple of Google's market capitalization is of Netflix's, how many Netflix's would you say that Google is worth? I don't know. Three. You really think that Google
Sonny00:52:31is only worth three Netflix's? I don't know. I'm trying to guess what it actually is, not what it should be. What do you think it should be? A million.
JVL00:52:40Right?
Vic00:52:41I don't know. Google versus Netflix, yeah.
JVL00:52:43What do we think the odds are that Netflix will even exist in any form other than what Yahoo is today, ten years from now? I think pretty good. I think it will be basically HBO. Okay. HBO is not Google, right? I mean, Google is actually...
Sonny00:52:55It's taking over the entire world.
JVL00:52:58Google has... Google's market cap is four times what Netflix's is. And where Netflix's P.E. ratio is, the trailing P.E. ratio is 127 and Google's is 40. The P.E. ratio, if you don't follow this, is basically like the market's optimism on the growth potential for the stock. Ford. You've heard of the company Ford, right? They make these things that they sell to people and people pay thousands of dollars for them. Yeah, but they're all shit. These things, they get in them and they use fossil fuels to create little miniature explosions which then propel the things for thousands of miles where the people then actually go from their homes in place of residences to jobs
Vic00:53:41where they create economic value. What you're saying is they make things. They make things. They make things that
JVL00:53:45people pay for that create economic
Vic00:53:47value. Uh-huh, yeah.
JVL00:53:51Ford's total market capitalization is $34 billion. Netflix is $155 billion. Netflix is worth five Fords. Yeah. What time is it, Sonny?
Sonny00:54:04It's, uh, what is it?
JVL00:54:06Are you f***ing kidding me? This is the man, and this is the problem. So when you have massive market failures, and the overvaluation of Netflix is clearly a market failure, it creates all sorts of distortions downstream. And so Hollywood is essentially fighting against a market failure. And you can't do that. Like, at some point, the Netflix bubble bursts. At some point, they run out of places to go, and the market realizes, hey, actually, this thing is sort of preposterous. And the bubble pops, and it shrinks back down to manageable size. But until then, everybody else who lives in the real world where you have a budget, and you have to you make products, and you sell products, and you have to make more money by selling than you spend to produce them, they are caught competing against this thing, which simply exists because of a mistake in the materialist system that we have established for ourselves.
Sonny00:54:59My only... Sonny. My only critique of this is that Netflix has... Bernie 2020!
JVL00:55:06Netflix has
Sonny00:55:07million subscribers. So, let's see. I'm putting these numbers in a little calculator. So, what's the new monthly rate going to be? So, let's say 13. Let's say most people
Vic00:55:23get 13.
Sonny00:55:25I don't know. So, that's... Oh, s***. I did it wrong. Anyway, they're pulling in what? 1.6, 1.7 billion dollars of revenue a month from their subscribers. So, they're pulling in 15 billion dollars of revenue a year. And what are they spending to get all that revenue? They are shooting money out of a firehouse. I understand. I understand that they're spending a lot of money to make a lot of money, but they do have a very significant income stream. I mean, their income stream is essentially all of Hollywood put together. Right? Wow. Yes.
JVL00:56:09So, that's not nothing. That's not nothing.
Sonny00:56:11And that has nothing to do with venture capitalism. That has nothing to do with investments from people. That is just money that is coming
JVL00:56:20to them from subscribers. It is all of Hollywood's theatrical releases put together. I think it is not all of Hollywood. So, Hollywood is more than DVD, it is television studios, it is more in rights. I mean, if the question is really, where do you think there is more value? Netflix or Hollywood right now? I think it's crazy to think. I mean, content is king, right? And the truth is, Netflix is creating the streaming version of what cable was, which was 500 channels with nothing. Nothing to watch. There is nothing on Netflix to watch. They are shooting money out of the fire hose and giving people Bird Box and Bandersnatch and A Christmas Prince 2. And people watch it, but they don't want that. They don't want the Netflix
Sonny00:57:08stuff, they're watching Friends. Most people just want something to kill the night with. They want something to take away their pain. They want something to take away their pain for 90 minutes and they'll watch Kurt Russell as sexy Santa and they'll watch Choose Your Own Adventure for three hours to find all of the little Easter egg endings and they'll keep watching. Eagles documentary. They'll do Bird Box challenges until they go off a cliff. Your faith in the idea of what the consumer wants is much higher than mine. Because what I think the consumer wants is something to just sit there and take away their feeling of existence. Misery.
JVL00:57:51I mean, their total operating income again, you ask like, you know, what is their what was their net profit, net loss? I mean, when you zero it all out, they're making less than a billion dollars. They're clearing less than a billion a year. On all that
Sonny00:58:05revenue. In profit? Yes. Okay. Well, I mean, I mean, I understand that you know, a billion dollars isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it's still making money. I mean,
JVL00:58:21Not 150
Sonny00:58:23P.E. ratio money. Well, okay, fine. But that doesn't change the fact that it is, again,
JVL00:58:27Suddenly this is a Motley Fool podcast.
Sonny00:58:29I mean, I'm out of my depth here. This is not what I do, but I do think that there's something to be said for the fact that they are generating, again, 15 billion dollars in revenue that is coming out of, about that. I don't know what the actual number is. It's somewhere in there. That is coming out of people's pockets. It's not just VC firehose money. They have that too, and that is a market distortion, and that is, I understand why the studios and like FX and HBO are annoyed by this. I get that. But like Netflix itself, when you say Netflix won't be around in 10 years, I think you're just dead wrong. I think you're dead wrong.
JVL00:59:04What I'm not saying is that it won't be around in 10 years. I'm saying that there is at least an even money chance that it won't. And if it exists, it will exist not as a giant juggernaut, but as a thing like HBO.
Vic00:59:16We will see an episode 1,000 when we're still doing this. Sonny, you remember when you were saying.
Sonny00:59:24Okay. We're running. We're running
Vic00:59:27long. We're running long. Okay. Well, let's wrap it up. Thank you, JVL. Really quickly, you were talking about market capitalization. Remind me of mid-cap funds. And I got a great stock tip for you, Sonny Bunch, mid-cap fund. You know where I learned it from? Elevator News. Mid-cap fund. I don't even know what that is, but mid-cap fund. Okay. All my money is in it now, so it better be good.
JVL00:59:47I put it in there because of the elevator.
Vic00:59:49That's all the time we're giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweet us at Victorino Matus at Sonny Bunch at JV Last. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or Google Play. Just type in Sub-Beacon under Podcasts. We're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends. Until next time. So listener Bill Jolly sent me this link to news about gout and England. It's up like 153% in the last eight years, if you can believe it. The last seven years. And so it's like it's gone from what do we have here? 65,000 recorded cases of the disease to 166,000 last year for whatever reason. And then, speaking of England, Paul Crookston, our colleague, was telling me I need to see the favorite.
Sonny01:00:53Yeah, because it's gout. It's got gout. We mentioned this on the show already. You've seen this. You've seen
Vic01:00:59the favorite. Do you like it? Is it worth discussing? I mean,
Sonny01:01:02we could discuss it. I was like, lesbians and
Vic01:01:05gout?
Sonny01:01:06I mean, I assume we're going to do Glass
Vic01:01:09next week. Okay, fine. Because I was thinking we could also do just a tie-in of other movies besides the favorite. We could do the favorite, Bound, Mulholland Drive, Bend It Like Beckham. You know, movies that are fun and interesting. Yeah, I'm sure that would be fun.
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