#211. Coming Friday: 'Dumb Money'
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The main review is Dumb Money, Craig Gillespie's dramatization of the 2021 GameStop meme-stock squeeze, and the three hosts land in very different places: JVL says he may not have seen a better movie all year, loving it as a pandemic artifact, a sketchy-but-effective portrait of five overlapping relationships, and a story about markets-as-mass-delusion (complete with a long Gettysburg analogy about how the standoff escalated by accident); Sonny is torn, arguing the movie fails as straight stock-market drama — too much screen-staring and ticker talk — but succeeds as an accidental, almost subversive document of pandemic absurdity (especially its handling of mask-shaming), singling out Pete Davidson as the most magnetic thing in it and comparing the film unfavorably to Gillespie's own I, Tonya; Mike flatly hated it, finding it mind-numbingly boring, resentful of reliving 2021 lockdown culture, annoyed by needle-drops and TikTok-dance filler, and unpersuaded he should root for market manipulators just because they're the little guys. Before any of that, the first third is classic Sub-Beacon banter: a long, granular debate over New Jersey pizza spots (triggered by a listener question to JVL), Sonny's new MacBook Pro purchase and his "run it into the ground" computer philosophy versus JVL's buy-often approach, and an extended, joyful Mike story about taking his son to Nationals Park to watch Ronald Acuña Jr. hit his 40th home run of a 40-40-eventually-40-60 season — plus a run-in with a stranger who called him racist for doing the tomahawk chop. They close with a quick, grim box-office roundup (a disastrous Expendables 4 opening, The Nun 2 still outgrossing Blue Beetle, and Dumb Money posting the weekend's best per-screen average) before diving into the review proper.
From the show notes
Apes strong, or something.
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00How much did we make today 5 million how much did we lose today a billion and yesterday 4 million and yesterday a billion yeah fucking rich
Mike00:00:17welcome to the sub beacon podcast i'm your co-host mike warren with me as always are my two co-hosts who love a good short squeeze jonathan v last and sonny bunch join us at sub beacon.com where you can become a patron and get first access to our episodes every friday join the community comment vote and polls you'll be glad you did at sub beacon.com we'll be talking about dumb money later in the show but first we usually kick off dudes chatting by asking how everyone's doing but to show you the listener just the kind of power and influence you get by being a member of the sub beacon community let's go to the comments on our last episode thomas davis hey thomas writes jvl help great show as always i am visiting my mother-in-law in montville for thanksgiving i have one night to get good pizza which is rare in my area of florida any recommendations jvl help us up beacon or out let's go i was in montville this weekend
JVL00:01:36funnily enough at a trampoline park because it rained for two straight days and what else you're going to do with your children uh i i give you two choices two choices wildly different pizzas uh both are going to be a little bit of a drive both are absolutely worth it first is gay pizza c-h-e as in guavara um in this is a very uh nouveau kind of pizza joint they do both a super thin crust and their normal regular crust is i don't even know how to describe it it's different than any other i've ever had and it's luxurious it's fantastic they're great the other option is delucias in raritan and this place does also a pizza unlike anything i've ever seen before the oven goes to like a thousand degrees or something insane like that it's in raritan again it's a drive it's worth it and ordering there is like the soup nazi it's like the the mafia version of the soup nazi you order exactly the right thing and then step to the side and they bring it to you when it comes to the the bottom of the pizza is burned in the most perfect way you you pick up a slice and it sticks out like a is it like a like like a balcony off of a ship or something is it is it uh is it like a um like a coal-fired pizza place uh i don't i mean their oven is like 100 years old okay it's in this fallen down place and they i mean they have a whole you could glimpse into it it's a whole operation about how they get you know they make the dough in the morning and they serve pizza until they've run out of dough because they make they make the dough in the morning to the level that they expect demand to be and that's it and so i i would say go if you're gonna go to de lucia's you go for lunch don't you go you go to lunch there and you check the hours right and you get because if you show up and they're out of dough then you're out of luck
Mike00:03:44so okay i have so many questions jbl yes first being i thought it was matuchin it's matuchin matuchin okay uh what style pizza are we talking about here because something tells me that one of these is a little more like connecticut style a pizza some of it's more like is it are we talking new york hand-tossed what what are we what are we talking about neither
JVL00:04:09neither both of them are their very own again wildly different honestly i would probably make your well it depends on when you can go because you could go to the che or k pizza you could go there for dinner you could get to get dinner there uh if that's your only the only time you can do it the other one de lucia's if if i could only pick one i would say go to de lucia's but gonna be a little bit harder because you got to be there on uh on a lunch day on a day that
Mike00:04:39okay all right uh any any other pizza thoughts sunny what do you how do you how do you spell
JVL00:04:45this de lucia's place d-e-l-u-c-i-a apostrophe f i'm ron burgundy yeah it's famous by dave portnoy dave portnoy did a stand up there and called it one of like the three best pizzas he's ever had
Sonny00:05:01in his life and that man knows pizza that man knows his pizza uh i'm just i'm just looking at it yeah so it's a brick oven pizza place i'm trying to see what the anyway it the way you're describing it makes me think of grimaldi's
JVL00:05:15i don't know if you if you've ever been to grimaldi's i never what or where's grimaldi
Sonny00:05:21well it's it's i think it started in brooklyn and it's it's a smallish chain i think there's like a i don't know like maybe 10 of them around the country now but it's a it's like a coal-fired pizza place they have to shut the oven down at certain because it gets too hot they got it they have to like shut it down at a certain point in the day and like let it cool down a little bit and then they're like oh my god it's a pizza place it's a pizza place it's a pizza place and then fire it back up again that sounds right so it's a whole it's a whole thing uh no but i actually i actually have a recommendation uh for oh sonny bunch oh are you gonna tell them about that great place the joyce kilmer rest stop tomorrow no no it's uh it's uh it's a place it's 931 main street boonton new jersey boontown boonton new jersey top of the park no it's just it's a little little place little place called dominoes you just go right up you get you get get your $6.99 large takeout it's great this is this is what i don't understand about boonton
JVL00:06:15new jersey boonton new jersey has a seven block main street on it there are five pizza joints four of them are three of them are really really good one of them sucks but the other is dominoes and i do not understand how the dominoes stays in business i never see anybody coming out of dom like who orders from dom if you i i just don't get it i'll tell you how dominoes stays in
Sonny00:06:39business high quality products at a very reasonable price made quick to order i don't that's not it's
Mike00:06:46not rocket science pass you know we do we do have dominoes in our house every basically every
JVL00:06:52weekend but that's only because it's virginian you don't have any options there are no good
Mike00:06:56no good pizza places yeah i mean there there's a couple good places that i like the issue for for that is that my boys like it's pizza night for them in part so that like they can they like we don't have to like cook something and they have a very particular taste when it comes to everything but particularly pizza and like we have like done all of the narrowing down and chiseling well all the filtering and figured out that it has to be from dominoes hand tossed uh well done bake light on the sauce and they'll eat it like you you you mess with any of those factors and they're like i don't like it like it's pizza it's pizza
JVL00:07:47michael you have hit upon the single most important the really the only consideration for any meal is will your children eat it without bitching at you and turning dinner into a civil war because if so then i don't care what it is that's what you give them
Mike00:08:02yeah but here's but here's the thing here's the thing just tonight our kids are very strange they they're the only kids in the entire country who do not like macaroni and cheese oh no i have one
JVL00:08:15of those oh you have one okay so i have one who won't eat any pasta product whatsoever spaghetti that mac and cheese whatever i've got i've got uh two who don't like pizza the only thing they all agree on is chicken filet chicken tenders i i can't say all chicken tender because you know they won't do mcdonald's chicken tender the only chick-fil-a sometimes wendy's and and pancakes that's it so we do pancakes and chicken tenders i would say eight nights out of
Mike00:08:45out of seven uh yeah anyway well okay uh thomas i hope that was helpful we answered your question and let us know when you go in what in in around thanksgiving uh which one you went to and uh and what you thought uh anything else jvl
JVL00:09:04thomas please make sure they're open it would i would be very very i feel very responsible if you drove 45 minutes to get a to get a pizza and they were closed because it's holiday hours or
Mike00:09:14something so there that's your warning yeah there's your psa all right uh sonny what's going
Sonny00:09:21on with you not a whole lot uh just an update from last week's episode i went i went with the the macbook pro 14 uh our friend of the show tony davis uh i ran into him at the texas tribune fest he was uh he was hanging out with uh tony's the one who told
JVL00:09:39literally tony is the one who convinced me to get the mac air because of the not needing more ram
Sonny00:09:45yeah i he he was like no you you made the right call uh you made the right call because i have a macbook 14 it's amazing it's it's uh it's the greatest thing that i've ever i've ever purchased uh so i feel i feel very excited to really really put this to use uh editing this episode we'll see hopefully it takes me mere seconds to get all the files down and ready no after the show yes last time you were you were describing a you have a whole system for computers like you use them for a little while and then you trade them in and that's why you don't get it i was just like i don't want a system i just want one thing that i can use for six years and like run it into the ground no and then get the next thing that's what i do that's that's how i live my life that's i live my life one computer at a time you know who who turned me around on
JVL00:10:32this yeah that's how i view cars it's not a computer um and chris caldwell our friend chris a long time ago said to me he said look how much how much time a day do you spend on your computer i was like i don't know 12 hours 14 hours like right what percentage of your income is derived from your computer 100 of it you that's a thing that you should spend a little bit more on to make every minute of your productive life a little bit better just make it a plant like a two-year life cycle uh and you know will you spend on you know on average three hundred dollars more a year than you would otherwise if you you know like gutted it out to year five with yes you will spend you know two to three hundred dollars more a year but this is what you do for
Sonny00:11:19a living and so you should yeah you should spend that money on look all i'm saying is that this is what this is this is the exact reasoning that led me to get this computer instead of the macbook air because again the way i prefer to use it is just i i use it i would have used my last computer which was perfectly fine it was it was still it was still in perfect operational order uh more or less it was getting a little hot to the touch uh but you know that's a that's a problem that would that was that was a problem and this is another reason i went with the macbook 14 is because it uh the macbook pro 14 is because it has like a built-in cooling system and the macbook air does not and i don't know if you guys remember this uh but uh for three months out of the year this podcast studio gets up to about 90 degrees inside so i don't uh i don't i don't want to mess around with that anyway uh i just wanted i wanted to let folks know about that
Mike00:12:09well because i know that was a burning question it was and it will of course affect the edit to to paraphrase our friend andy ferguson people are going to say that was a really well edited podcast episode they're going to notice they're going to they're going to pick up on on those all the little nuances uh yeah well uh i guess i guess let's quickly because jvl wants to talk about this movie let's quickly talk about what is going on in my life right now you can see bravos hey did
JVL00:12:39did somebody just last night create a new club in major league it was it was friday it was friday
Mike00:12:46friday night yeah and can you tell us all about it michael because it's very exciting i can tell you all about it because baby i was there no and we're there my oldest for his ninth birthday was there with me too oh michael that's awesome we're sitting so so setting this is this is the atlanta braves america's team really when it comes to baseball they sure should are because
JVL00:13:09they're going to have to beat the houston astros in the world series for us i know i know i know
Mike00:13:13we've done it before we can do it again uh so we though they are the atlanta braves my team my team for life uh we have a atlanta braves flag in the in our front yard uh i your children do the tomahawk chop they do the tomahawk chop in fact somebody uh uh i don't want to get too political on this thing but somebody uh yelled at uh me afterward uh for saying uh saying it was offensive and um i just i i firmly disagree and i can go
Sonny00:13:45yelled at you at the game yes they yell somebody somebody at the game said you're a racist for
Mike00:13:52doing the tomahawk chop somebody you didn't know somebody i didn't know stranger in front of my kid and my kid didn't nobody else doing it uh no other people were doing it yeah um so i just him in his stupid face well it was a woman um did you punch her in her stupid no but she did you call
Sonny00:14:09her the c-word no but can i that's what i would have done but you know like we had a kids never
Mike00:14:16used this word ma'am we had a run-in earlier in the night which was very odd too like it's like she was like she was looking for a fight so okay so let let me look i guess i should talk about this and then i'll return to the big news that happened on friday i don't care about whatever
Sonny00:14:36raccoon you did i want to know about this quiet sonny so
Mike00:14:39there was a uh there so at nationals park they now have at every concession stand the least efficient like you thought it was inefficient the way that uh you could buy a hot dog and beer at a ballpark well the national nationals park found an even more inefficient way of doing it so now they have touch screens where you go up to the touch screen and you don't just plug it all ahead you plug you can do that but just okay just just okay sorry you can do yeah as a former season two get older i did everything on the app i i know but it's it gets there's something about getting
Sonny00:15:14up out of your seat going to the bathroom i i agree i don't like i don't like apps at stadiums i want to go i want to go to i want to have a guy either bring me a hot dog that he throws to me across the seats or uh get a beer from that's like passed down yes the whole row that's what i want
JVL00:15:31i always thought the guys walking around selling stuff is basically one step away from girls in a i don't like it it feels dirty it feels dirty to me that's no that's that i don't agree jvl but
Mike00:15:46let's return to the topic at hand which is the touch screen that they have that that you you basically order from an app at the counter and you press the button and then you press what you want and then you say uh pay by credit card because everything's cashless and then you put your credit card on the thing and there are about four or five of them like in a row like this so everybody's lined up to do this and then the little receipt machine prints out a little receipt and then the person who's working there who is standing there staring at you the entire time you're doing this then like grabs the receipt reads it and then goes and gets the food that you asked for and so like they've added this extra step in that makes absolutely no sense why should why why can i not just so then here's
Sonny00:16:39here's why it makes sense it makes sense from their perspective because any order fuck up is now on you the customer because if if you plugged it in if you had ordered something from them and they put it wrong in the computer and they go get and they don't bring it to you then there's a whole fight about well i told you i wanted this and they say no you but now it's this is all on you if you did not put it in correctly 100 on the customer well i guess so but it slows everything
Mike00:17:04down because the other thing is that people don't understand that this is how you order food now and there were like open kiosks because people crowd around it's just like everybody like a party of four people everybody has around i have problems with crowds at nationals games these days michael no that's a good point no well i will say i'm only when the braves are in town you get all the
JVL00:17:25other every nl the other nl east teams pile in and it's like a home game for them not not not the
Mike00:17:31marlins but yes the others uh fair uh but so but okay but so there's like these the kiosks and like hard to tell and like people will like line up behind one rather than go to a free kiosk in order to order because it's confusing i guess so i'm looking at the at the kiosk and i see there's like a a man and two women who are like i hope we get to the fight soon and uh i can i can't tell if one if the woman who in a few in a couple hours is the one who's going to yell that i'm in front or not um but there's a free one next to her and then i get the feeling that they're all three together so then i jump over to the kiosk and i start to order and then she kind of gives me a look and i turned her i said oh i'm sorry were you in line first and she looks at me like no and it turns out she is with that couple but she gives me this like dirty look like i jumped ahead even though it was free give me an age uh approximate between 75 and and 65 karen okay go ahead yeah um so then later yeah so then give me give me a guess bethesda or chevy chase uh fort totten um just take that uh anyway so then later later on the after after the braves won so she she just it was more of a general like that's racist kind of thing so i think she was just you know chapped about the gnats losing but um did you yell scoreboard biatch no i was with my son i was like
JVL00:19:15you gotta teach him how to put earmuffs on him you put earmuffs on him you can say anything you
Sonny00:19:20want fuck right piss bitch just say just say earmuffs frank that's all you gotta do so anyway
Mike00:19:26no the whole thing the whole wind up to all this is to say that we watched ronald acuna hit his 40th home run which makes him the fifth player in history to have a 40 40 season but also the only player in history to have a 40 50 season 40 home runs 50 stolen bases and 40 home runs and 60 stolen bases 40 60 get to but he's gonna get to yeah but i did i did see him at at the second game that i went to uh he tried to steal and and uh was uh was caught um but it was what was great about it was so i've been kind of building up uh his you know the the idea that this might happen at the game that we're going to and so he was aware of this and what was going to happen it was a big deal and then like we're sitting there and acuna leads off and and um first first uh uh pitch of the you know first uh at bat of the game and i kind of said i said see if acuna does it on this first one and like i think he didn't quite like he didn't quite believe that we were actually going to see it you know it was like the the kind of like the idea that we were actually going to see this thing that we had been talking about in person where we had pretty good seats too uh and then like i think he he had like two balls and a strike and he just launches it into left field and like we're watching it and i'm going to my head it's this thing's going out this thing's going out and the look on my son's face of like joy and disbelief you know like i can't believe i just saw it was i was like okay he is like he was old enough to remember the 2021 world series and like he was like kind of into it like now he is a braves fan for life oh yeah having seen that and i just love it so it was great um i i went on sunday to see another game uh with my brother who came down uh from philly and the braves lost that game that's okay um but we we had a we had a good night and um it was just it was just
JVL00:21:29wonderful baseball with uh with my son love it did you boys see uh what happened to j-rod today no julio rodriguez who is
Mike00:21:39one of the young stars of this game yeah may have another one lost his team the division
JVL00:21:46with a what should have been a routine play in center field not routine exactly a difficult play but long fly ball to center field he's got a very good jump on it and a good beat on it and at the wall he sticks his glove up and it goes off of his glove over the wall what is at that point a tie game and so uh what should have been an out turns into the go-ahead home run against the team they're locked in a playoff struggle with the texas rangers your
Sonny00:22:21people sonny so is that are you not ground rule double that's it if it has to hit the ground to
Mike00:22:27be a ground rule double i guess i think so uh if it if i mean they called it home run did they call it a home run so so ground rule double yeah i guess what it technically means is like whatever
Sonny00:22:39the rules of the ground i mean if it like bounced off your head and went into the stands i guess that's a home run too yeah that's not that happened to jose can take a yeah that happened
Mike00:22:46but if but if it hits if it hits a uh a piece of the field a part of our field and bounces
JVL00:22:54you know so are you not into the rangers the rangers are having the the the rangers always have such a letdown but it's it's like every they've never been no i'm an orioles fan we're
Sonny00:23:04having this is like the greatest season in in the last 20 years for the orioles
Mike00:23:09i went to an orioles game this season it was that was that was a lot of fun was that
Sonny00:23:12depressing because i i i can't i can't see your your picture's too blurry i can't see what that is adly rochman rookie card i literally can't you're you're you're we gotta we gotta work on your internet jbl that was uh that's uh it's too no i the the the orioles are great this year i i'm just hoping batista comes back apparently his ucl his ucl is not necessarily irreparably torn and damaged they think he may
?00:23:38they have it
Sonny00:23:39he has not had surgery yet they think he might be able to come back before the end of the season maybe possible we'll see so we'll see i don't know but this all of these things
Mike00:23:49this is why what you have to do is you just have to win the division uh so far ahead that none of the games that happen in september matter and that's that's what that's what
JVL00:24:00the situation's been for atlanta how many games ahead of the braves like it was like
Mike00:24:0328 games oh my gosh uh well so the phillies have been on a have been on a great tear uh as we're recording this on sunday braves are up 13 games out of the phillies so it's really tightened up it is really tight well i mean literally the phillies have won like eight of their last 10 and the braves have lost uh six of their last 10 so it has tightened up to 13 games okay let's talk about box office real quick just there's not much going on again it feels like we're in the doldrums here expendable four wasn't a huge hit the worst the worst opening is it is it is it expendables for or is it expend four bowls
Sonny00:24:44nobody nobody knows because that's what it looks like j-pod j-pod j-pod texted me and was like how do i how am i supposed to pronounce this is this expend four bowls i don't what what is what is happening here expend four bowls it's expend four bowls i that feels
Mike00:25:00like such a relic of like what was hip to do like 15 years ago with with movies and like it just like everything i guess with these expendables movies like it's it's like old
JVL00:25:12and and beat up so who's asking for them is it just foreign box office nobody apparently is it fox is it foreign box office honey like will people in china go crazy for this sort
Sonny00:25:23of thing yeah i mean the thing about these movies is that they weren't actually that expensive though i think this one is the most expensive of them everything about this movie is a disaster for uh for lion's gate i mean it cost 100 million dollars this is the worst opening um that
Mike00:25:37that they have uh that how much of that is how much of that is craft services for 50
Sonny00:25:43cent i don't know i don't know probably a lot uh it's uh it's it's a bad opening i mean i have any i like barely even knew it was coming out i i had not i was not really uh even i like i didn't review it i i was just kind of it it was totally off my radar um it's been a weird it's we're in a very weird time of the year where you get a lot of real crap and this was the lowest grossing weekend of the year by a very very wide margin i mean nothing gross more than 10 million dollars the nun 2 in its third weekend is still number one somehow um you know that movie that movie again say what you will about the nun 2 and how terrible all these conjuring movies are but it's gross 200 million dollars worldwide off 30 million dollar budget or whatever so um uh the this the most surprising uh result to me actually is uh this this horror movie called it lives inside which the trailers were pretty good for it looks like the sort of thing that could you know pop and surprise at the box office and do you know 10 or 15 million dollars off of you know 3 or 4 million dollar budget and just a guy it grossed 2.6 million dollars like neon does not neon does not understand how to open a movie like a24 does and part of that is the a24 mystique and brand and all that but i thought that movie might do a little better it did not the the best per weekend uh per theater average is the movie we're talking about today that's right money dumb money had the highest per theater average of uh uh any anything in the top 20 and actually it actually bumped up
JVL00:27:25is it in wide release because it's only showing like three times a day no it's theater it's it's
Sonny00:27:31in it's in it's in kind of a middle mid-tier release so i think it's in uh so it's in 616 screens now it came out in on eight screens last weekend it's on 616 screens this weekend i think it's gonna get up to 2000 or so next weekend um but they they really should have just put it out on they they should have put it out on 2000 screens this weekend there was there was nothing there's nothing else out now it may it may have been the highest grossing movie of the year or highest grossing movie of the weekend if they put it out in 2000 screens
Mike00:28:01instead of what they did before we jump into dumb money the only other comment i have uh box office wise is uh the none two is basically i mean the none two will outgross blue beetle and it's like already there and it's blue beetle has been out for twice as long and like that i don't know like it not to repeat ourselves but it just like tells you everything that's like wrong with these superhero movies that that what is the seventh of the
Sonny00:28:32conjuring movies yeah i mean again blue beetle is a weird like i i feel kind of bad for the people who made blue beetle because it was supposed to be it was supposed to be part of one thing and then you know that that whole universe is in flux and maybe folks didn't show up because they were like well i don't know if this is you know i don't know if i need to see this to be able to keep up with what's happening in the right but i also don't feel that bad for them because it's not a very good movie so could they have marketed that movie
JVL00:29:00to be any more generic i mean i've never i don't know that i've ever seen a superhero
Sonny00:29:05well they tried to market it they tried to market it as uh we're we're hispanic spider-man basically it's it's it's pitched as like hispanic spider-man uh the problem is there already is a hispanic spider-man it's miles morales across the spider-verse like i just couldn't imagine
JVL00:29:23who would want to see the movie the way it was positioned and advertised but maybe that's all
Sonny00:29:26they had to work with i mean the worst the worst the way it's funny we we goofed on blue beetle and how ridiculous the character it is but jbl did you actually go see it did you go see no so they it's not even it's not even the terrible 80s blue beetle with like the rich guy who you know it's like yeah it's like it's some it's some i don't know i guess modern blue beetle woke blue beetle is what it is boo all right all right that is way
Mike00:29:54more talk than i wanted to do about blue beetle but there we are uh the old blue beetle was a
JVL00:29:59magical character well remember the scarab was like an ancient
Sonny00:30:04egyptian thing which gave him man scare the scarab in this telling is a it's an alien artifact like an alien weapon that is essentially venom it's then i was gonna say that sounds like that sounds like venom it's essentially well it's almost explicitly venom because it's a symbiote that comes and it merges with uh this kid ramos's dna and it makes him uh that's not a bad way
JVL00:30:28to reimagine the character well it doesn't work well i mean i'm just saying as a top level
Sonny00:30:34thing it's not a bad but there already is a venom though is the thing there's a there's
JVL00:30:38the other that's marvel that's marvel sorry michael okay michael's like
Sonny00:30:46the other thing the other thing about blue beetle the other thing about blue beetle
JVL00:30:53sonny dumb money man this gingerbread stout's going down good
Mike00:31:00give us we're talking about dumb money on the show presumably jvl you're taking time away from yourself i just wanted to let you
Sonny00:31:08know yeah you're the one who wanted to who's so excited to do this give us a review sonny bunch of dumb money dumb money uh it's directed by craig gillespie written by lauren shucker bloom rebecca angelo ben mesrich um all right so dumb money is the story of the game stop meme stock uh robin hood uh stock bubble that was a was a huge story in uh in in i don't know what was it like early 2021 yeah 2021 you know we're in the midst of the pandemic and people are going a little bit crazy they got all this they got all this government bailout money that there's just sitting there in their accounts they don't know what to do with um and somebody uh in this guy on reddit um he has played in this movie by paul dano his name is keith gill uh aka give him an oscar aka hey you can you can you'll have your time over this you'll have your time over this movie in a minute all right watch it counselor uh but uh but he uh he is this reddit guy who is uh he's talking about tendies his chicken his tendies and he's doing the memes the meme stock because it's uh he looks at i just like the stock he thinks it's undervalued he just likes the stock so he starts he starts you know it goes viral and people are buying into it and he's talking about how these big hedge funds are shorting it and if they short it you know that they're going to destroy this this great american business game stop uh and you know they're gonna they're gonna put all these people out of work out of their important game stop jobs um uh and uh the this the the short seller is gabe plotkin he's played by seth rogan uh with backing from ken nick offerman and uh there's also vincent d'onofrio who's playing steve cohen is like another billionaire hedge fund guy who kind of comes in and bails
JVL00:33:10rogan out and gabe plotkin worked for both of them this is why he they are his two mentors only he loves steve cohen and he hates the guy from citadel yeah
Sonny00:33:21uh anyway uh so the all right there there there are two ways to look at this movie and one way is i think it fails as the movie that it is ostensibly about which is about this uh this this the rise and explosion of this meme stock and you know how they're really sticking it the little guy is sticking it to the big guy for once and you know the big guy tries to play influence games and has robin hood shut down the ability to buy game stop which you know brings the stock back down to a reasonable price and you know it's it shows the system is rigged man the system is rigged against the little guy the problem with this is that it's not cinematic at all it's just a bunch of people looking at screens and talking about tickers and this is this is this that is all very very boring and it does not work it is not is not interesting or fun to watch the one exception out of all this is Pete Davidson who plays Keith Gill's brother Kevin and Pete Davidson again I was I was talking with J-Pod about this Pete Davidson is is the most magnetic person to watch in this movie by far and he is often the most magnetic person when he is on screen either in the show that he did on Peacock bupkis or King of Staten Island like he's just he's got it I I know this is gonna be this is gonna come across as a fit this is a fairly controversial point I know a lot of people don't like Pete Davidson out there they think he's a joke and terrible and like he's kind of a ridiculous person I I will grant all that but he is very compelling to watch on screen all of the best funny funny stuff the actual funny stuff in this movie is funny because of him sorry so as a movie about stock bubbles and all that I think this I think it fails I think it's boring and not that interesting there's there is a second level though that this movie does work on and it's if you it it's very interesting very very few movies have really acknowledged the pandemic in any real way we get very little talk of lockdowns and that whole period we get you know people kind of wear masks in the background sometimes but it's definitely not like a main plot point it is a it is a it is a forgotten time it is a gone it's a lost time people don't care about the pandemic on screen they don't want to watch movies about it and this is a very interesting movie because it is it's one of the few that is set explicitly during the pandemic within the pandemic the pandemic itself is I think I think you could reason I think you could reasonably say this the pandemic itself is the catalyst for everything that happens with GameStop it is a it's it's it's a moment when we all went a little bit insane and we were all like all we had was our screens we were all bereft of our communities we're all dealing with lockdowns and mandates and you know masking and all that and I do and I mask it this may be I think I feel like I may be poking JBL just a little bit on this I know I'm not poking the bear here JBL I promise but I do think the that Gillespie does something interesting with masks in this movie in that there the the anytime you see the hedge fund guys none of them are ever wearing masks right and there and like all of their events and servers are always wearing that oh yeah and you look at that and you think like oh look at these assholes who don't wear masks and you know they're doing it because they don't care about anybody else a blah blah blah except later on right who is the other person who is always telling somebody to put on a mask the GameStop manager who's played by Dane DeHaan like a one level scumbag actor if you want to if you want to have like a guy in your movie who is like this guy is a dead-eyed scumbag you also see it in Oppenheimer but you
Mike00:37:00know by the way really quickly is he like in movie jail or something because
Sonny00:37:05like well he was he he starred in several movies and they all flopped badly okay that's what I thought I mean I don't I didn't mean to derail but that's not it's not it's not rocket science he was he was he was given a shot to be a for some reason someone somewhere was like Dane DeHaan should be a leading man it's because I like Dane DeHaan he doesn't look like a leading man I like Dane DeHaan I think he's a good actor but he is not like top-tier protagonist material in big-budget movies um he doesn't he doesn't have the right look so the he is he is the other person who like you notice how he deals with masks and what he is he is constantly bitching at the GameStop employee to put his mask on and the again like the the way so my point here is that masking comes across as like another means of control another means of like how people were told to behave and told to act and like what people were vaulting against which is interesting again it's like you don't see this is genuinely subversive you do not see things like this in the movies very much I found that interesting so again I think that it's I'm very I'm very torn on this movie I ended up giving it a thumbs up on Rotten Tomatoes but it is it is two movies one of which doesn't work one of which I think does and they are working kind of at cross purposes with each other except for the fact that they tie together because the game like I think it's a totally reasonable thing to say that GameStop and the apes and the meme stocks and the like resultant saving of AMC which isn't really mentioned and dealt with in this movie at all all of this happened because we all went fucking crazy during the pandemic everybody went a little bit nuts during the pandemic we were all you know it was a weird time we all reacted weirdly to it and that is what this movie captures better than anything else I've seen to come out of Hollywood or anywhere else all right Sonny that's my take on games on dumb money JVL for the defense I mean I don't know that I've
JVL00:39:06seen a better movie in 2023 but at the same time I don't know that I trust my own judgment on because so this is a story about which I know a frightening amount I follow I follow finance reasonably closely I followed the GameStop slash hurts slash AMC signals last bed bath and beyond stuff very very closely and so in order for a movie like this to succeed it has to do what the big short does which is explain some semi-complicated financial ideas to the audience coherently it is possible that dumb money fails to do that but that it just doesn't register with me because I understand all of it going in and so I am I am happy to ignore if you guys tell me well I don't get the short squeeze right that doesn't make any sense to me then I would say okay sure totally understand you know
Mike00:40:19maybe that what they needed was Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining to
JVL00:40:22people how short squeezes work yeah well that's what all movies need that's what all movies need okay I don't know how to respond to that that's what all movies I don't think totally oh I see what you mean okay yes sorry my bad my bad this movie is about so many different things and for me it worked on like seven different levels I loved I loved it as a pandemic movie I loved the relationships sketched out I mean we have like five four or five different types of relationships happening none of which is really given more than just again sketches to it but they're all done very deftly so we have America Ferreira and her her relationship with her co-worker which is really about her in the aftermath of a bad divorce and you know how she's making ends meet we have Kevin Gill and Keith Gill they're dealing with the death of a sister we have the two college lesbians who if that's what college was really like for people now I understand why people like
Mike00:41:35college it looks amazing that was so that was the what is going on with Gen Z because like I did I went to a I went to a pretty party partying school and that stuff was happening the parties I was going to if that's how it is sign me
JVL00:41:50up but again that that relationship is sketched very thinly but in ways that to me work it works as a really an Occupy Wall Street movie in the sense of being about about very real class conflicts but they aren't really class conflicts they're conflicts about a system which is broken and the reason I say it's right we can spend a lot of time talking about this the GameStop the moment was a six billion dollar wealth transfer billion with a B in which nothing affecting the actual like selling or buying of real things in the world that incurs profits and losses changed at all and this illustrates the extent to which finance has gone from being a mechanism for allocating capital efficiently in order to create value and productivity to being a casino this is this is like the liz warren uh you know objection to what finance has become finance again divorced from the actual allocation of capital for the free market right and you see that happening a lot signal is the i mentioned this to you guys right so in uh in january of 2021 signal uh this is this company called signal uh signal analytics i think um they're worth 17 cents a share elon musk tweets out use signal he's talking about
Mike00:43:33the app signal right overnight the encrypted uh right encrypted texting app which has nothing to
JVL00:43:40do with the company who's called who's you know ticker sign is sngl or whatever it is uh they go from 17 cents a chair a share to 1350 a share like 100 x overnight because elon musk has tweeted like this is again you're in a casino and the the the climb down of that took like three years and it was still trading at like 5x the you know even after everybody understood oh this was just a thing this was just an artifact of a misunderstanding of a mass delusion and you know at the heart of it all markets are mass delusions right that's what you know we we put value into paper dollars with us dollars because we assume everybody else values paper dollars but if everybody in the world woke up tomorrow and thought that the dollars were useless and that uh adly rutschman rookie cards were the the most important thing then that's what we would trade it right this is what finance financial systems are mass delusions in the extent to which this is a story about that uh while also being a fantastically interesting story about how how random events get out of hand watching this i kept thinking about the battle of gettysburg i don't know how much you guys know about gettysburg and i'll stop talking after this i promise um so gettysburg was not going to be uh an important battle what happened was the the union confederate scout forces wound up encountering each other in town very very small small forces and they take a couple pot shots at each other around the shoe store and then they
Mike00:45:22they withdraw
JVL00:45:23and the reason gettysburg became important was because both the union and the confederates began piling forces into it and so it became a hinge battle almost by accident just because both sides just kept committing and committing and committing and at one point you know that you cross over the tipping point where their their pot committed and this becomes a major battle again not because there's a river or any piece of land that was important or anything like that that's how the gamestop thing started so the gamestop stock is trading at like a dollar 19 and it is undervalued and so you've got guys like keith gill who are buying into it right and they realize that a bunch of institutional investors are short on it they then realize that these institutional investors principally melvin of the float of the stock so what this means is they have shorted more shares than exist right i don't know if that's make that's making sense they start putting pressure on on this uh by buying and trying to create a mass movement to buy at which point the institutional investors
Mike00:46:42instead of just closing out their position keep going in and they start buying themselves so you
JVL00:46:50they are short already they buy more shares and they start buying more shares and they start buying more stocks in an attempt to cover their shorts what this does is they wind up both a exposed right exactly michael it's a ladder so they drive up the share price as they are bidding up more and this driving up the share price then makes their shorts more exposed and you have both sides piling more and more and more money in this in an attempt to break the other and that is what makes it into as we see throughout i mean the real message of the movie is about that phase it's not about the accidental part of it but about the class warfare between retail investors and wall street and i think the movie even does a pretty good job of showing that it's very ambiguous in the end what happens right the good guys don't really win many of the good guys lose the bad guys don't really lose many of them wind up okay uh right america frera winds up losing everything right she winds up when we see her originally her her net worth is like fifty three thousand dollars and at the end of the movie her net worth is negative fourteen thousand dollars uh you know a lot of people the people who came in late to this the retail investors who were late lost a ton of money a lot of institutional investors who were on the sidelines originally came in in the middle of it and made a ton of money uh gabe plotkin who you know made eight his compensation package the year before game stopped with eight hundred million dollars he got bought you know his company melvin capital gets bought by citadel uh he's fine right to my knowledge gabe plotkin is not out living in a van under the you know down by the river uh and so it's a very ambiguous ending to the whole thing ah man i fucking loved
Sonny00:48:35it and i can't wait to see this thing again i would my my one pushback on that is i don't think it's quite that ambiguous i think it is very um i of of all the the dumb money investors of all the investors we see only one of them loses and that's america ferreira and it's really spun in the the title card as like she's still holding on she's still in there time in hands and it's it's i it it is i the the the my biggest problem in this movie is that it does not it does not really uh give any it does not give nearly enough attention to the retail investors who came in late and got in at the top of the bubble and lost everything they put into it because i think that there are far more people like that than people who
JVL00:49:26actually made money like keith gill did well and this is the idea about dumb money right dumb money is the last money and normally retail investors are the last money in but in the age of you know this moment in time you had a whole bunch of people who were but retail investors who got in
Sonny00:49:44earlier in the middle right but again again in that in that in that you know coda there what do they say about keith gill keith gill still in he still got his money in there he still believes in uh gamestop and he's he's holding long and like i i like okay that that works for him because he got in at a dollar a share or whatever uh but it is not that is not representative of maybe you know
JVL00:50:11and it's i think i'm sorry michael i'll come to you in a minute but the other thing i want to talk about is manipulation of market right and this is the other undercurrent of this is because what the our wall street bets did was they tried to manipulate the market and they tried to manipulate it by by having a coordinated effort to buy things right and this is something which is unique in the age of the internet and which is a brand new thing right
Mike00:50:38the sec doesn't know how to deal with this doesn't know how how these things should work and but what
JVL00:50:45that really is is that's normal people trying to mimic the power of the people who hold a lot of capital uh as an example so elon musk famously holds a very large position on dogecoin dogecoin is an nft without sorry not an ft dogecoin is a cryptocurrency a cryptocurrency which was originally created as a joke one of the things elon musk likes to do is buy a bunch of dogecoin and then later tweet about it he tweets about it because he's elon musk people go and buy more dogecoin driving up the price of dogecoin at which point elon musk can sell a bunch of his dogecoin and drive the price back down this is literally a perpetual motion machine for money right and this is this is the kind of market manipulation that the big guys can do and the little guys couldn't uh i mean he did something like this i could be wrong uh i forget whether it was doge or bitcoin but at one point he tweeted out that tesla was gonna start letting people buy teslas bitcoin yeah that was in bitcoin right and this comes out and then when his the tesla filing comes out you know like eight months later whatever we see that before he tweeted this out tesla had gone and acquired you know 800 million dollars worth of it right this is it's just pump and dump and guys like him could do it and little guys couldn't and this to the extent that the gamestop thing was an attempt by people to do the same sort of shenanigans that the the people who hold lots of capital do that ah ah i love it michael please tell me you like please tell me you liked it well first i should
Mike00:52:24let you know you have been reported at the house on american activities uh committee so just better dead than red no better red than dead sorry other way around uh so i did not like this movie and it basically boils down to sunny's objection which is i found it extremely boring like everything you just described is interesting i like i like and i have read uh articles in bloomberg and in other places about it where i have learned things and i found those very interesting and i've read them at my leisure and i have learned things i found the experience of sitting in the movie theater and watching it to be almost mind-numbingly boring not one single
JVL00:53:14bloomberg article featured college girls putting hands down each other's panties and fingering each other i'll just say this movie has that and none no matt levine piece no not one single
Mike00:53:26matt levine column features that are you sure about that are you sure about that jvl or okay um no look where my pussy at where my pussy at okay so so that's so that's just like on on the first level order number one number two is i actually found sunny i i found going into 2021 into the world of 2021 and pandemic world um i did not enjoy it even in this movie um it's it's not it's it was not fun for me to watch it and to have like all of that in the that milieu you know to be back there um maybe this is because it wasn't that long ago and it just feels like too recent to be interesting um but i didn't like it i don't want to see masks i don't want to see uh you know people sitting in their houses and and not able to go to work and empty uh you know empty uh tea trains uh in boston um i just i didn't like it and uh was not interested i hated the music drops in this and maybe i'm just maybe i'm just an old folk but like like this is going to be miserable to have music drops like this in every movie that takes place you know in the early 2020s uh because the music is just garbage
Sonny00:54:54like because music today is bad it is music now it is bad it was great when i was a teenager
Mike00:54:59they listen to bad music it is bad and it was only good when i was young um so i i you know like as soon as a a wop came on at the i was like oh god i have to hear this song um i i just didn't i i didn't enjoy any of it it felt like i it felt like too breezy going through this whole thing i did not like i i frankly didn't like the politics of it i'm sorry jvl i just i don't see why i should be rooting for the market manipulators that are that are you know doing it why should i be cheering for them over anybody else like it's all market manipulation it doesn't seem to be adding any value um also also the institutional investors were right
Sonny00:55:52gamestop is a shit company i probably deserves to be driven out of it totally agree with you
Mike00:55:56totally agree with you sonny um how about the perfs vincent d'onofrio clancy brown i did love seeing clancy brown that was great to see clancy brown olivia
JVL00:56:08thrillby oh i know it's not pronounced thrillby but for me thrillby sebastian stan that's right
Mike00:56:16offerman i mean this movie is stacked i know but here's great actors and this is another thing and
JVL00:56:23they up they don't they elevate the material no but here's tell me a writer went on a writer's
Mike00:56:27daughter because i don't oh sorry but here this was actually distracting to me like to have like one other person oh i know that person like it just it felt i the whole thing felt manipulative manipulative um i didn't like it i thought um i thought it's politics where they're in the wrong place i thought the performances were fine i guess i just didn't care about it like it's all just it was all like like sonny said like people staring at screens i was staring at a screen i don't want to stare at a screen so i can watch other people staring at screens and like this like all the youtube like i don't i also don't get it i i guess did
JVL00:57:09you like the big short i love the big short so maybe the problem is that the big short did a really good job it making all that right man because the big short whatever else you want to say about the movie i didn't love it i thought it was okay but it did a really good job of helping the audience be grounded in what was happening well and and frankly the source
Mike00:57:29material like i don't know who did who wrote what was this based on a book it's ben mesrick wasn't it well the source material for big short was michael lewis this is ben mesrick who did bringing down the house right yeah i just yeah he's not as good right exactly that i mean this is my like i i'm not a i'm not a blind michael lewis you know uh a super fan but he's he's good at what he does he's very good writer and and he's like it just is better anyway i don't know i i was i was annoyed with this movie i just if i found it annoying it was annoying and because i didn't like the gamestop stuff when it was happening and that felt it feels like that what happened yesterday so now i have to watch it in a way that tells the story from their perspective and like says how great it was and at the time i thought this is bullshit like this is all bullshit and like you're i'm not supposed to cheer you exposing the bullshit i just don't like it and so now i have to be see it again thumbs down boo don't like it and in fact as the show goes on i hate it even more let me let me throw this at you boys tell me try this on first time uh it is true that pandemics
JVL00:58:45than wars in terms of how society acclimates in a in a war you typically get rally around the flag effects and even though the aftermaths of war are almost always like political upheaval sure the side that was on the side of war even when the war is successful gets fucking kicked to the curb people don't like it ask winston churchill exactly uh that is not true of of pandemic pandemics are very very rare when they happen uh people turn against one another they there is a reason that we have 50 million movies about world war ii and like zero movies about the the flow right the 1918 pandemic the spanish flow no ain't no movies about that it was a very important event there was one recently actually
Sonny00:59:31the movie uh uh the sequel to x what the pearl oh is that a horror movie it was it was it was actually it is so i'm sorry i didn't mean it no well maybe i mean maybe this is like you know
JVL00:59:44we're not going to do pandemic movies because people won't like it yeah right maybe that's maybe that's a thing i don't know i think that's totally i know i mean i agree like at the gas station which by the way is my gas station in my town that like awkward like exchange that attempt to reach out and connect over the problem that we all had with fucking great that was a great scene
Sonny01:00:09again i i disagree with mike in the sense that i think that this is it's an interesting it is an interesting cultural artifact again as as one of the first things to really grapple with the response to the pandemic and how we all uh handled it and i thought that scene was like that that scene felt achingly real there there was a there was a realness to it that was just frankly absent from the rest of the movie because like mike i don't i don't care i don't i don't want these i there was nothing about the apes that i found appealing except for their together strong except for their accidental saving of amc it's literally and like the difference between amc and gamestop and this is like another reason why gamestop deserves to go out of business amc used this you know to refine and restructure a whole bunch of their debt like it's safe it essentially saved the company um in a in a very real way uh i i like i i mean i i don't i i it's not just that i don't share the politics of of the movie it's that i like actively dislike a lot of
Mike01:01:13in uh on both sides frankly i agree i i don't love these i don't love these uh market manipulators in institutional uh investment but it it too wrong but at least but at least at least what
Sonny01:01:28they're doing made sense because again gamestop is a is a it's a terrible company it's it's like not well run it doesn't it it doesn't serve an important function it is as predatory as anybody else uh in terms of their purchasing of used games which they did that they they they explained that in the movie that
Mike01:01:47was i thought the i was that that made sense wasn't that great let me see the gamestop movie about the about the the evils of the gamestop corporation even i i can't get you guys to sign
JVL01:01:58on with the the the very sensible politics of the mask stuff which this this this is you know you said you were going to trigger me sonny but but in fact i i think you and i are basically the same place with all the mask stuff right i mean this is the idea that the mask scolds did more to hurt like public health not more did at least as much to hurt public health as the people who refuse to wear the slave mask right because the idea is to reduce your overall exposure right and introduce the other people's exposures and if you if you only wore a mask 50 percent of the time you're still reducing exposure vectors 50 that's great right this is it's it's logicians in public health people call this the abstinence theory right like if you you have sex without a condom once well then well you might as well never have sex without a condom right i mean this is you're gonna wind up getting a girl pregnant eventually anyway but that's not how it works right if you just you wear the mask when you can when you remember to great and why are you yelling at people in costco about this right this is don't don't be that person that's terrible uh this movie takes a very sensible view of all that
Sonny01:03:06nothing sunny can i say one more thing i mean i well i already said that i mean i i think that
Mike01:03:13fine yeah yeah we yeah but but let me say one more thing about the about the movie and where
JVL01:03:18it lost me actually anthony ramos was the girls fingering each other you just you do not cotton
Mike01:03:23that stuff um no comment uh i'm gonna get in trouble here priests listen to this show um no uh anthony ramos who we saw at the in the in the transformers okay okay so i don't know if it's that i i despise my legend broadway legend anthony ramos he's not a broadway legend he was in one shitty play no quiet you jbl um okay the movie lost me when he with the whole scene where they're like oh you can do the tiktok dance uh uh the contest at gamestop and you can get like 10 more dollars and you had 10 labor hours that's what it was and then anthony ramos does a tiktok dance and i guess he's supposed to be making fun of dane dahan but it goes on for a really long time and he's like singing it out loud and he's like doing all the little dances and i was like what the fuck is this movie what is that what is happening no i mean this gets to a real problem
Sonny01:04:31with the movie movie qua movie it is not a good movie because i have never felt an hour and 45 minutes be this long in a movie yes i mean it just i could have taken another hour 45
JVL01:04:43if this had ended with like part one the adventure continues i would have been like yeah
Sonny01:04:49next stop amc no i okay yeah it was just i just like again i like i just i thought
Mike01:04:59much like much like this episode of the sub beacon it went on for a really long time as as a as a
Sonny01:05:07piece of cinematic storytelling it simply does not work i don't think i am but it as i said
JVL01:05:13at the beginning i am happy to say that i may be wrong about this it's possible i'm wrong but i
Mike01:05:18fucking loved it there all right any other final thoughts on dumb money no where my pussy here's
JVL01:05:26my final thought i just like the stock okay legend he said that this fucking senate confirmation
Sonny01:05:36senate hearing he's not even i don't even think paul dano's that good you know here's the thing find paul dano to be uh only really tolerable when he is going to excess so when he's in there will be blood or uh or like or prisoners like when he's being a weirdo and and that but in this movie where he's just like he's just a guy he's just a normal guy he's just talking he's never really
JVL01:06:06like paul dano on screen this is the first time i was ever like this guy's awesome yeah you know
Sonny01:06:13who is good though is sebastian stan he's great isn't he great oh i did i did like him so craig gillespie is also the guy he directed uh i tanya which is i think a much better movie than this like again movie qua movie i think it's much better but also like it has it has all the like sebastian stan is in that movie as well and he's fantastic in it as the the scumbag uh i think he it has paul walter hauser as like the big bumbling uh kneecapper um who he is also very good and i like i i like i like that movie is doing a very similar thing to this movie and that it is about like you know you've got the good girl uh favorites of the system that everybody wants to see succeed and nancy kerrigan and then you've got like the outsider uh underdog in tanya harding and i i like i think that movie is probably too sympathetic to tanya harding as well uh you know just as this movie is much too sympathetic to the apes um but i i do think that you know i like that that i like this is i tanya is the version of this movie
JVL01:07:26that's good is i guess what i'm saying i haven't seen i tanya i can't wait to go you should it's
Sonny01:07:32i think it's on hbo max now or max or whatever it's called just max it's cleaner yeah everybody
Mike01:07:39knows that uh okay that's all the time i think we're going to give to this episode go to subbeacon.com become a patron and we will talk
Sonny01:07:50to you next time i can't believe you i can't believe jbl you said that the the senate confirmation hearings and security hearings in uh in oppenheimer were boring and terrible and went on forever and this movie this movie you're like give me more screens of stock tickers well this was more interviews with jim kramer this was half the length of oppenheimer and i
JVL01:08:23know a lot more about this than i do about the history of the manhattan project oh sorry another
Mike01:08:29thing and another thing so this is this is like a mix so a lot of the footage in the movie of like jim kramer or like the the guys on fox business uh like yeah like so that's like real that's like contemporary stuff but then when they when they don't have that archive material and they have to like make up news news uh coverage it looks like super fake so you have like actual real cable financial news footage and then like 10 minutes later it's like it's like the news announcing something and it's and it's like looks like it was made in in a basement and i just that annoyed the hell out of me i'm sure i didn't notice that oh it's fine i didn't know that okay
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