Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.

This is Everybody's Business from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

I'm Stacey Mannix Smith.

I'm Max Chafkin.

Stacey.

There's a lot that's going on in the world that is upsetting or difficult or scary.

But on a happier note, it's Halloween.

It is Halloween.

Happy Halloween, Happy.

Halloween, my children's favorite day of the year.

It's also on a Friday, which is awesome.

And we at Everybody's Business are going all in on the spooky season.

We've got a great conversation with Sean Fantasy.

He's the co host of The Big Picture podcast.

He's going to catch us up on what's been happening in the film industry, give us some recommendations for what to watch tonight.

You visited a haunted bank.

I did lots of Halloween cheer.

And then we also have a really difficult conversation.

Yes, we do, with economist Leo Feller, who experienced an ice raid on his property.

He talks a little bit about what that was like firsthand, but also about the economic impacts of some of the Trump administration's immigration policies and how that's likely to play.

Out and our underrated story.

Stacy, It's sweet.

That's what we have to look forward.

Yeah, candy, I've been promised candy.

Maybe a little sour.

Also, I've been told a little salt.

What kind of candy did you get?

All right, Stacy?

Before we get to all that's ahead of us for this episode, I just want to quickly catch people up on a couple of basically like modest wins for the Trump administration that have made news this week.

First off, we've talked about Javier Mela and Argentina and the US bailout, and I got to tell you listeners, if you have not been paying attention, the bailout worked.

Javier Melay was successful during the Argentine midterm election.

He's going to have any of the things that were sort of worst case scenarios for his administration for Argentina, the chainsaw lives on.

And also a huge deal with China.

I would argue this is a major win.

So President Trump met with President she of China, and obviously there have been a lot of tariffs back and forth.

Most recently, China was threatening to withhold rare earths from the US, which would be a big deal because rare earths are in all of our computers and phones, and China controls ninety plus percent of that market, so that was going to be really bad.

In exchange, Trump agreed to hit pause on tariffs on Chinese goods.

For a year.

You genuinely think this is a big deal.

This is a nothing burger stacy.

This is like a modest compromise over like one tiny aspect of the US China thing.

It's just a truce.

It only lasts a year, and it only relates to the stuff that's happened over like the last month, the rare earth thing like this, Like what.

A dollar sign on this nothing burger max?

Because if we do it's like it's almost unimaginably big.

It is important to keep focused that China is quite simply one of our most important trading partners.

The business we do with them is huge, and so any small change, any small truth, even if it's temporary, is a big deal.

It's good for our economy.

I mean, I totally agree that China is an important trading partner, but like this deal, I mean, come on, like, you know what the stock market is doing as we record this.

It's eleven twenty nine on a Thursday, a deal was announced.

You take your cues from this store is down.

A third of a percent.

That's the SMP.

So like, basically, investors were not surprised at all.

No one's surprised.

You.

Everyone can sleep through this.

Press the snooze button.

There are other and more important things happening in the world.

All I have to say is, if you are taking your cues on the economic wisdom of things from the stock market, you have way bigger problems.

I listen to the stock market when it agrees with me.

Okay, that actually seems that I believe that I believe.

Let's get to Halloween, Stacy.

Obviously, this is a holiday where there's a lot of consumption.

There's candy, there's kids on the street.

I mean, look, it's a special day in the United States and in most of the world now because we have managed to export this holiday even to countries where Halloween doesn't necessarily come naturally.

Well, Halloween is very delightful, and I think it gives us a moment in time to look at our fears and to face them, which is interesting, especially at this moment when there's a lot of economic fear broiling around and As a matter of fact, I visited the site of some economic fear.

Here in New York.

They have a haunted bank that you can visit, so it's like a haunted house, but it's set up in an old bank building.

I love how like normal people are like afraid of, you know, dying or like falling from a high place or having their teeth fall out.

But you, Stacy Vanoxsmith, are afraid financial crisis, financial cricause they.

Are so much scarier.

Do you Financial crises can mess you up way more than like a werewolf or something.

Anyway, I went to the Haunted Bank and talked with the people of the haunted bank to see why they had come.

And I also went through the haunted bank myself.

So here here's our trip through the haunted bank.

What brought you to the haunted Bank?

I was just like, well, it looks fun.

Do you guys find banks scary normally?

No?

No, do you find banks scary?

Not really?

Hell?

Are you here to make withdrawal?

Yes?

Oh the deposits for.

Fools.

This vault was not made to hold cash.

No, this vault was made.

To hold email.

That it was pretty good.

Yeah, it was pretty scary.

We love scary stuff was cool.

I never screamed so much before you.

I don't know do you find banks scary?

Normally banks are not scary, but when they fail is scary.

I worked for JP Morgan.

That's why, well.

Do just coming to this bank like fel cathartic, like a ghost.

Bank scary, feels great.

The whole place shut down.

Happy for it.

Wow, Stacy, that is why you get paid.

The big bus I got that was that was phenomenon.

Let me tell you what is even more wild.

So I started looking into the history of this building.

It's this beautiful building in China.

I think you might know it.

Yeah, this big kind of art modern structure.

It was built in nineteen twenty seven.

Ooh, not great timing there, right.

Before the Black Friday, which crashed the stock market led us into the Great Depression.

And the bank in question, it was National City Bank of New York, was at the time one of the biggest banks in the world and was one of the main banks that was pushing borrowing money to buy stocks.

So that bank is very responsible for the crash itself.

That that is so much scarier than the killer clowns in the vaults.

I totally agree with you, And it makes me wonder like who put this together?

Like who's whose haunted house is this?

Like how much did you pay?

Like what the tickets are almost fifty dollars?

Wow, and five hundred people a day are going through it.

I gotta say, like, I think they need to hire some like consultants to like, you know, punch up their horrors right, Like they're like it sounded like it was like a evil bank teller or whatever.

They need to explore the terrors of like a credit crisis or like structural spill over, like you know financial panel.

Right, it's a fault swap.

The private credit market is imploding.

That max is scary by the way it goes through the early part of November.

So good luck.

You can still visit and take the family.

A lot of kids there a lot of kids at the Haunted bank.

There were Oh the only kid I saw came running out crying.

The scary clowns in the vault were really scary.

They were like yelling at you, and it was scary.

I don't like clowns.

What did the clients say, this is a vault for evil?

No, the no, the clowns were the ones like the deposits.

They were the ones you had to give the deposit slip too.

I couldn't figure out what was going on, but I did manage to hand over the apostles.

So Max.

The Trump administration has been making some pretty seismic changes to the US economy.

We just talked about tariffs.

Another one of the big ones is immigration.

Yeah, and in a way, I think harder to get your arms around, because it's happening in this way that's extremely diffuse, right, You have all of these sort of raids.

You have kind of people maybe who are afraid to go to work or concerned about arrest.

But also, in addition to being very diffuse, you see it, it's also in your face.

There have been these images, these very powerful images of immigrants being hauled off into detention sites.

Yes, I mean, the images, like you say, have been very powerful.

And I got a call in fact from economist Martha Gimbole earlier this week.

She's friend of the show, friend of the show.

Yes, she had the Yale Budget lab and she told me that an economist she knew had just had his home raided by ice agents his home renovation project.

You know, economists normally don't get into the news this way.

And this is even more amazing because, as our guest, Leo Feller not only had this experience, but he had been tracking the economic impact of all of this policy, all of this Trump immigration policy professionally.

Yes, and its effect on consumer spending.

And so we're very lucky to have him with us.

Leo Feller, an economist who's worked at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, the Justice Department.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on your show.

Absolutely.

You know a lot of us have been reading about and seeing images of ice raids for months, but you experienced one firsthand.

Do you mind just kind of laying out what happened?

So?

I've been doing a construction project on my home.

I own a home.

Starting in around October, construction crews have been here to remove the old siding, remove the old windows, put new ones in.

And this past Friday, October twenty fourth, at eleven fifty am, the workers were taking a lunch break and eating lunch on the stoop and suddenly a white van pulls up, Another white suv pulls up.

Nine agents jump out of the car, or we presume they are agents because they were masked and wearing camouflage gear, but they never announced themselves.

They hopped over a locked fence and chased the workers through a construction site into the backyard.

One of the construction workers was able to come in through an unlocked door in the back.

Another construction worker climbed onto a balcony.

The federal agent climbed onto the balcony of my private home trying to chase this construction worker.

A third construction worker went to the garage.

A federal agent entered that garage.

Throughout this time, my tenant, who was home, was asking, where is your warrant?

Show me your warrant.

You do not have a warrant.

This is private property.

Get off.

You weren't home at this time.

I was not home at this time.

I was actually in Toronto, Canada for a client meeting.

I was watching this all through security camera footage, and so I was watching it live as it was occurring, and I also yelled into the ring cameras for them to get off the property.

So how did this look when you got the alert?

So you're at this meeting and like something pops up on your phone like tell us, like walk us through that moment.

It was jarring.

I can see the agents jumping over a locked fence.

And this is a five foot tall fence with spikes on top.

Right.

This isn't like a little white picket fence, right, this is a wrought iron security fence meant to keep people off the property that was locked, and you can see the agents jumping over it.

At that moment, I thought, oh my gosh, this is you know, this is really bad.

I called the tenant right away and I said to her, I was assuming it was Ice ices on the property.

Make sure the doors are unlocked so that the workers can get in.

I was actually a hotel lobby as all of this was happening, and I start shouting voting into you know, the phone, into the ring camera.

Right, Ice, you do not have permission to be on my property.

Get off my property.

You do not have permission to be here.

Where is your warrant?

Canadians are looking at me like what the heck is going on?

And I looked back at them and I said, you can't possibly be imagining what's happening right now in the United States.

I mean, the amazing thing and you kind of alluded to this.

Leo is that this whole raid is documented, and you know, because of ring cameras and because I guess as this unfolded, and this is one of the things that to me is so interesting, just you know, a bunch of the neighbors came out and and also were upset about this, and so there's cell phone videos there, there's videos from the cameras on your property.

I think we should just play like a tiny bit of the audio from this, just to give people a sense of what's going on and what this sounded like, what it felt like.

That is I don't what is it like to hear that right now?

It gives me chills to hear it.

I'm a US citizen.

I never thought I would be this afraid of my own government.

This is the kind of thing that you see in third world countries where you know, armed military, you know, men and fatigues raid your property without a warrant.

This isn't the kind of thing that should be happening in the United States.

We have a Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that protects US as US citizens, as property owners from these kinds of raids.

How did this resolve itself?

Was anyone detained?

Yeah, it didn't even go away in the van, so one worker was detained.

One worker managed to run, and a neighbor pulled that worker into their car and drove them away.

Two other workers were pretty beat up, right, They were bloody, and they were eventually able to come into my home since the door had been unlocked.

When I came home, I spent pretty much an all nighter cleaning up the blood.

There was blood everywhere, right, this was a very violent raid.

The one who was detained was taken to a facility in broad View.

I and the neighbors raised money to pay for an attorney, and we pulled an all nighter together to write a writ of habeas corpus to say that the way that this worker was detained violated the constitution, because it appears right that agents came onto my property without a warrant, since they never showed a warrant, and essentially effectively, you know, burglarized my property by coming into my garage, by coming onto the balcony, and then you know, took someone away.

I mean.

The legality of these raids has been questioned in a number of ways by a number of judges.

The raids, however, are continuing in the Trump administration is insisting that they are legal.

As an economist, I imagine you've been reading about the ice raids and the sort of change in policies towards immigration the Trump administration has put in place.

You experienced it firsthand.

Did that change at all you're thinking about this issue or illuminate part of it, like, how has this experience changed your thinking?

I guess if it has.

I already knew that these raids were having a chilling effect on the consumption of the buying patterns of first generation Hispanics.

I have access to wonderful proprietary data that shows me the purchases that you know, two hundred thousand households are making at representative households across the United States are making at places like wal Mart and Costco and home Depot and also you know, mom and pop bodegas.

And one of the things that we can see is that Hispanic households, first generation Hispanic households, have been pulling back.

And that suggests to me that you know, they're less able to earn income right as is the case with these construction workers right now, they're out of work because they can't come to a construction site they are injured, there might be fear about going to construction sites.

But also it just might be harder for them to get a job because people like myself who would normally hire a repair person to come to their property and do something, who might hire a gardener or a cleaning lady, we are going to be more fearful of hiring these people if it means that the government can invade our properties to try to detain them.

And so we've seen consumption come down amongst this cohort.

I'll give you an anecdote.

I had one worker here for a separate project.

Right this is a big home renovation project.

I had another worker here who is a US citizen, speaks perfect English, but is very clearly Hispanic.

And he told me that he's no longer going to the gym because he's afraid of being picked up.

He goes to work, which he has to do, and he goes home, and he was admiring I have some free weights here at the house, and he was asking me about those because he said, you know, I might just have to pick up some free weight so I can continue working out at home, simply because I'm afraid of going to the gym.

He also asked me to go and pick up some items at home Depot for him because he was afraid to go to home depot.

And that's because there have been raids at home depot, right at the parking lot of home depot against day laborers.

And he said like, look, I'm happy to do the work for you at your home, but I will not drive to home depot.

Now, a lot of the argument that the Trump administration has made has been economic and campaigned on around immigration has been economic.

The idea that people are coming to this country, they're not necessarily documented, and they are taking jobs in an economy that is softening, in a job market that is getting weaker, and so this is actually sort of going to eventually boost the US economy.

Like, yes, this may cool spending among people, this may have a dampening effect on certain things, but in the end, this is going to open up jobs for citizens.

Can you talk about that.

There is so much economic data that says that that theory is incorrect.

So when immigrants first come into this country, they do take that very first rung on the ladder, right, they take the jobs that no one else wants to take.

But that pushes everyone else who is on that first rung up on the ladder up into the second rung.

We saw this.

There's some great research by you know, Nobel Prize winning economists on what happened when you know, the surge of immigrants came to Flora, when you had the Murial boat list, right when Cubans were allowed to flee into Florida.

Florida accepted these immigrants with open arms.

Right for a year or so.

It was a hardship on Florida because they were supporting all of this new immigrant population.

But ultimately these immigrants generated so much demand.

Right.

Immigrants demand housing, they demand food, they demand services.

They also work very hard in sectors that you know that we really need more labor for.

Right AI is not going to be able to put windows and sighting on my house.

Artificial intelligence can do lots of things, it can't do that, right.

Artificial intelligence right now is not going to care for my aging parents as a home health care aid.

So there's a lot of jobs that immigrants do that actually free up labor to then take other sorts of jobs.

And I will give you an example right now with construction.

The fact that there's construction workers working, you know, on putting windows and sightings, allows the American worker to become the head contractor, right to be the one that's going out and generating new business, being the one who's going out and you know, creating the business that does the installations of sidings and windows.

The way that this has an impact on the broader economy.

And again, let's let's let me give the example of my home construction project.

It's a three hundred thousand dollars project on a multifamily building with three different units.

Even though I'm paying three hundred thousand dollars, only a tiny fraction of that is actually going to the workers that we're here putting up the windows and the siding.

Most of that money is actually going towards Marvin windows, which are the windows that we're installing.

Marvin windows.

I looked at their website.

It says all Marvin products are proudly made in the USA.

They are made in Roanoke, Virginia.

So if I'm not buying Marvin windows because I can't find workers to install the Marvin windows, ultimately most of the harm isn't just concentrated in Chicago.

It's also affecting those workers in Roanoke, Virginia who are producing Marvin windows.

The James Harding sighting is produced in Prattville, Alabama, as well as Illinois, Texas, Florida, Nevada, Virginia, Washington.

It's not a huge impact, and it's just right now my project that I'm speaking of, maybe projects in Chicago.

But the more these raids occur, the more this is going to have a broader effect on the overall US economy.

You know, we're talking about the economic impact of this, You're talking about it in very broad terms.

I'm kind of curious, what is your strategy as an employer going forward on a very very small scale.

Well, so first, let's let's back up right.

I didn't hire these workers directly.

I hired a you know, large and reputable contracting company.

That large and reputable contracting company then hires subcontractors, and you know, I'm a little limited in going out and trying to find subcontractors and checking their legal status.

And so, you know, most of us when we go out and hire for a big project, we're hiring a company and that company then hires workers.

In my case, I'm just going to pause this project right, We've cleared the construction site.

It's now completely clean.

Maybe in April May, when things are safe, the work will continue.

There is no just crew of American workers that's sitting around waiting to finish up this project.

And so you know, it's really not that easy to go out and find workers who want to hang off of a four story ladder to put up a window and put up sighting.

Leo Feller, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, Leo, thank you for talking with us.

Thank you, Stacy.

I don't know if you knew this.

Maybe it kind of came up a couple of weeks ago, but twenty twenty five was supposed to be the year that saved the movie industry.

It was supposed to be this was to be a big year at the box office.

I mean, I feel like I did hear that, although I thought twenty twenty three.

Saved the movies.

Well, but it hasn't, Barbenheimer, it hasn't.

It hasn't gone that way.

Though the start of the year was bad.

There were a bunch of flops this summer.

They were all excited about Superman.

Superman flopped.

I didn't even remember that it came through.

It was a big deal.

But anyway, well, our next guest definitely remembers and is here to kind of help us try to understand what has been happening in the business of entertainment where it's going.

Sean Fantasy.

He is the head of content at The Ringer the co host of the Wonderful Big Picture podcast with his co host Amanda Dobbins.

Sean, thanks for being here, Thanks for having me guys.

So Sean, just to get us started, describe for us what the state of the movie business is right now.

I think in general, the movie business is down.

The number of tickets that are sold annually is down.

It's been going down for fifty consecutive years as the onset of all kinds of new entertainment technologies have come into people's lives in more convenient ways.

Going to the.

Movies necessitates a night out.

It necessitates you have to pay for your tickets and your concessions, and your parking, and if your parent babysitters, and a number of other things.

And so it's an expensive hobby.

And it's also a hobby that can be conquered if you're willing to wait two months till the film comes to streaming, So it's harder than ever to get people interested in doing that.

But there are still definitely successes.

I mean, this year is marked by a couple of really fascinating successes.

Ryan Coogler Sinners is probably the most important and interesting one.

An original movie from a major studio and a celebrated o'teur who also happens to have made a bunch of billion dollar movies in the past, and the Black Panther films and audiences love that movie.

It made a ton of money, It.

Was a huge part of the cultural conversation and is almost certainly going to be nominated for Academy Awards.

That's like the old school movie business style.

That's tic tac toe for a movie.

So that is still possible.

It is still possible to make a movie a special event along the lines of Barbenheimer, but it is fewer and farther between.

It is no doubt harder to get people out on that opening weekend to get them to see a new film, especially if they don't know exactly what it is and it's an original story.

I was just gonna say, and the crazy thing is even Barbenheimer like it was good, but it wasn't like historically speaking, it wasn't like a huge it wasn't great.

It was just kind of almost like getting back to some version of the past.

I would argue it was a pretty big event.

I mean, to me, that was the most significant cultural thing that happened in that year.

It's just that it was just two movies, Like there weren't like twelve movies that did that.

But there are not a lot of occasions where two movies are released on the same day and they both make a billion dollars.

There's not a lot of precedent for that in Hollywood history.

So Sean, the industry consensus was that the summer of twenty twenty five was gonna be kind of the moment, the season that things really turned around coming out of the pandemic and all that.

What has gone wrong, I.

Think it's a series of events.

There's some exhaustion in a handful of certain storytelling styles, like obviously superhero films are at a low relative to the last decade.

Jurassic Park Rebirth was one of the biggest movies of the summer, but it was the least successful of the recent Jurassic World movies, and so there wasn't a ton of other IP known legacy products for people to go check out.

And so when you take a couple of those things off the board in a movie like Fantastic four underperforms and Captain America four underperforms, all of a sudden, when you look at the total box office numbers, it feels weak.

But you know, there were also positives.

Weapons was a huge positive, you know, original horror movie from Warner Brothers that came out the first week of August, which is historically more of a dumping ground, and made well over two hundred million dollars on a budget that is way lower than that, But that those are much harder to predict and much harder to identify if you're in the business to say, Okay, we're going to put forty million dollars into this original horror movie and hope it becomes a sensation.

And when the IP stuff isn't working as well, it does threaten the scope of the business, how big it can possibly get, whether we can ever get back to a time like twenty nineteen when it felt like there was no stopping movie going.

I mean, the weird thing for me is that my friends at this very moment.

The thing they're talking about is a movie.

It's a movie, one battle after another.

That movie has been this huge critical success.

It also has made a lot of money for like a pt Anderson movie pt Anderson the director, like a lot for like an indie a serious like arty movie.

But also like I've read these stories saying, actually, it's like not going to make any money because even though it's done like one hundred and eighty million at the box office, it cost over one hundred million to make, and like when you add in the marketing and so on, So like I'm curious, Sean, like, first of all, is that movie a success, And like, how does studios think about movies like that that get like a lot of buzz, that maybe get Oscar nominations, that maybe build a lot of goodwill, but don't necessarily like earn out.

It's a little hard to say on that one in particular until the spring.

It's a movie that I think it will end up making roughly two hundred million dollars worldwide at the box office, which for a pal Thomus Anderson movie, as you mentioned, isn't extraordinary.

That's essentially three times as much as any movie he's made has ever earned.

But it did cost it sounds like well over one hundred and forty million dollars.

So then yeah, when you add the marketing, that's basically two x.

It would need to make three hundred million dollars or so they say at the box office to be profitable in theaters.

But here's the thing.

It's the best reviewed movie of the year.

It's probably going to be nominated for somewhere between nine and twelve Academy Awards right now.

It's the odds on favorite to win Best Picture.

And that means it's a movie that has a chance to become a forever movie.

And if you become a forever movie, it's an annuity.

It means that there it is a revenue stream in perpetuity because it's a movie that people love and want to rewatch and want to pay for on streaming and want to license on streaming services, and they want to own physical copies of it, and it can play in repertory theaters forever.

And so there are a lot of films like this in the studio business libraries that are still valuable to them that were made thirty, forty, sixty eighty years ago.

So you mentioned that moviegoing has been on the decline for a while.

Twenty twenty five is not a great year for movies, or at least hasn't been.

Are you worried about the industry as a whole.

Not really.

I think you just really, if you're a person in my job, you have to accept that the movie business is getting smaller.

And I'm a big believer in a practitioner of the philosophy of movies as the great American art form, that it is the thing that we helped to develop and perfect and ship overseas and influence the world with.

It is the most powerful art form that we ever created, and it isn't as important as it was in nineteen fifty eight, and it's never going to be that important again.

You kind of got to get your head around that a little bit and accept it if you are talking about movies every day like I am, But it doesn't mean that it isn't going to exist, because, like I said, I'm raising a four year old and every day she's like, can we watch a movie?

Like it's just it's it's the perfect container for emotional entertainment and it's better than a streaming TV show.

It's better than a record that you've heard one hundred times.

It is something.

It is like, it's the sensation of new and the opportunity to be thrilled every day.

So I'm not worried about movies going anywhere.

I don't think they're threatened in any meaningful way.

I do think that the way that the movie business is organized is obviously dramatically changing and is going to continue to dramatically change, and I think it's probably gonna end up being something closer to more like live events, where it feels more like a concert, you know, and everything will be a little bit more premium and there will be fewer things to choose from, but the things that you're choosing from might look more like Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey next summer, where everyone you know is going to say, have you seen that?

We have to go see that.

This is really important that we all see that.

They wanted to feel more like a Taylor Swift album than they do an art house film.

That's not great for the art in my opinion, but it will help the business in some ways.

So do you think like we're gonna look back on twenty twenty five as like another down year for movies.

Once the bookkeeping is all done.

I think it's gonna be more or less a hold, maybe a slight disappointment.

The numbers are not like dramatically down in any way.

It's just that I think some titles that were expected to be massive were not as big as expected.

It's just like baseball for me, it's just wait until next year every year where like the anticipating what's coming soon is a huge part of the work that I'm doing on my show.

And so you know, next year The Odyssey is coming.

Next year, there's a new alien film from Steven Spielberg.

You know, like there are a couple of things that are coming out next year that are gonna be very exciting.

I never give up hope on the movies.

Well, let's talk about these horror movies, because Sean brought them up right, Like, this is like one.

This is like a real bright spot for the industry, not just the two you mentioned, but I think there are a bunch of other big ones that have come out recently.

Like why is this genre like such a great business?

It's a good question.

I think there's a few reasons.

One that communal aspect that I was talking about, it's very fun to see a horror movie with the crowd.

It's fun to hear people scream, It's fun to hear that nervous laughter.

It's fun to hear people yelling at the screen.

Sometimes, don't go in that room.

Two, the movies are pretty cheap to make relative to Jurassic World and Superman, and you have a really a built in fan base.

I say this as as a horror psycho fan who will pretty much show up for anything.

You know that the barred quality is lower than we're kind of like, we're willing to eat gruel even if it gives us our horror hit.

And that doesn't mean that there isn't like great artistic horror films out there.

There have been a bunch this year.

But you know, like one of my favorite movies of the year is called Final Destination Bloodlines.

It's the sixth movie in the Final Destinies.

Oh my gosh, really that's favorite movies of the year.

Yeah, it is.

That is the villain still death?

Yeah, the villain is still death.

Yes, okay, spoiler, that's design.

Actually, if you don't know that by now, you have big problems.

There hasn't been a Final Destination movie in like over twelve years when they revived this franchise, and it was really really fun and this movie made over two hundred million dollars as well, like as a huge hit despite being the sixth entry and kind of a second tier horror franchise.

So like movies can still do this.

Whenever we get into the doom saying conversation, I do point to things like that to say, like, hey, people did get a babysitter, you know, they did board their dog for the night, like they did do all the things they had to do to go see Final Destination bloodlines.

So not all hope is lost, all.

Right, So Sean, your horror psycho, like, what are you going to be watching?

Give us some recommendations those of us who are looking for something something to watch on Halloween night or over the weekend.

Okay, I'll get I'll preface this by saying that I am very much a disciple of all of the masters, of John Carpenter, of Toby Hooper, of Wes Craven.

I worship all those filmmakers.

I love really Scott's Alien, all of the classics.

I don't know if listeners need to hear like, you should check out John Carpenter's Halloween.

Like I think everyone knows that that's a very special movie.

There are a couple of movies in more recent history that I think are very effective, some known, some not as well known.

But I was just speaking with my wife about this the other night, and I said, let's try to watch this movie.

I want to say it was roughly two thousand and nine.

A director named Brian Bertino, who kind of came out of nowhere, had a horror movie called The Strangers.

Have you seen The Strangers?

Guys?

No?

No?

Okay?

The Stranger stars Live Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple who live in a cabin in the woods and one night a group of people wearing masks knock on their door and just start menacing them.

And at first it seems like it may be teenagers playing prank or someone from like a towny who just has a problem with these people who have just moved into town.

And then over time it becomes much more malevolent and not necessarily supernatural but genuinely unnerving.

Okay, that's one.

I'll give you another one.

Have you seen the Changeling?

Do you know what The Changeling.

I do know about The Changeling, but I have not seen it.

Okay, It's a movie from the late seventies starring George C.

Scott about a widower who moves into a lonely old house by himself and things start happening in the house and they're not good.

George, he's got one of the great convulsive yellers, yes, yeat, and of course in a very intense actor.

It's kind of a maniac himself, a psycho himself, and he is being taunted by this force that is in the home.

So I highly recommend that one.

Hmmm, third one?

Right?

How crazy do you want to get?

Crazy?

Do you want to hear me say the word cannibal Holocaust?

Like, there's a movie it is called Cannibal Holocaust that maybe most people would not want to watch.

Magnus is nodding his head.

Cannibal Holocaust's Shark NADOs.

Much more evil than that.

Nonado is fun.

Cannibal Holocaust is very dark.

Okay, Max, what about you?

Like?

What are your favorite horror movies?

I got it.

I gotta admit something.

It's kind of I feel like, what like this is not a cool thing?

To say, but I am not a huge horror fan.

My plan was to watch the World Series on Friday night.

Well, like a real American.

Feelings about baseball, that could also be quite scary.

What about you, Stacy.

So as far as.

Things that scare me, I am Slashers don't scare me that much, but go scare me a lot.

I get really scared by the supernatural.

I don't get that scared by like killers, because I feel like you can just lock the door, you know what I mean, Like you're you're aware of the limitations of the killer.

But the ghosts because they can go through the door.

They can go through the door, right, you don't know the rule.

That is just terrifying to me.

So the scariest movies for me that I have seen, The Shining is definitely up there.

The Exorcist scared me so much I started crying in the.

Middle of the movie.

I really love watching horror, but it affects me way too deeply.

I always say that I love going to the movies to feel something, and horror movies think is the genre that makes people feel the most consistently, you know, to scared and to be excited by a movie.

Is very powerful and horror.

Is the best of them all Right, Sean Fantasy, thanks for being here.

Thanks guys, great talking to you.

So Max.

It is now time for our Underrated Story of the Week and I am especially excited for this week because it involves candy.

I hope you didn't need too much before this podcast, so Underrated Story.

There have been a couple of pieces about this.

The one I found was in the New York Times.

It was about the hot trends in candy in honor of a Halloween.

Now, I gotta say, like I don't know.

First of all, according to the National Retail Federation trade group, spending on candy is going to be a record three point nine billion dollars in twenty twenty five.

That's the prediction of the United States.

And this story proposes a bunch of trends, some of which I kind of question because there's not a lot of data, some of which I can one hundred percent back up based on my anecdata of my three children.

For instance, the big trend now that the big trend in candy, Stacey is sort of extreme flavors like okay forget, like Reese's peanut butter, cups.

It's all about extreme sour and also extreme textures.

So experiential candy.

Experiential candy.

And there's a funny quote in this story from a like I don't know consumer behavior person trying to explain why these kind of extreme candies are so popular.

It says, one theory is that young people quote want antidotes to increasingly virtual, repetitive, and isolated daily lives.

Says somebody who's the director of food and drink at a market.

Research that's putting a lot on candy.

So Stacy, I have dumped a bag of candy on the table my daughter Alice, who's ten, to a New York City bodega in Queens and asked her, like, Alice, show me the hot candy, Show me the candy that all the Generation ALPHA is excited about.

And the first one that she picked, which I knew she would pick, because like, my kids are crazy about these things.

It's called a Nerds gummy cluster.

Have you ever heard?

I have heard of these.

I've never had one.

All right, So I've got some of them here.

I'm going to open it up.

I've never had one either.

What is the big deal with these?

Like honestly don't know.

They look really bad for you.

Here, I'll put a few on the table for you.

It sort of looks like you want to describe it.

Sure, it is like the size of a marble, and it's like a little gummy sphere and it's covered.

In it's like a raspberry almost like mine.

Looks sort of like a berry.

It's very sugary.

Who fowl.

Okay, it's actually pretty delicious.

All right, the next one.

And she was really excited about these.

These are sour.

Sorry, super sour gushers.

Oh I remember gushers.

Well, now you've got super sour gushers.

So okay, super sour gushers.

Gushers look foul, but.

They look like gushers.

I mean I used to eat gushers when I was a kid.

All right ready, okay, I think they taste the same.

They're not sour at all.

Are you a sour No?

Hmm, that's kind of bland.

I don't know what this is.

It's a that's a gummy burger.

It's a gummy burger.

I think she just wanted to eat this like when she bought it.

And I don't know how we're gonna split it.

We can.

We can take it apart.

Here you go, It's okay, and then we have to Okay, well, let's have the gummy burger first.

Okay, it's a mini burger.

It basically looks like a time gummy hamburger.

Here, we'll split it, all right.

Oh my gosh, are you into that?

Really?

I'm not sure I can bite through it.

It's so hard it's like a sole of a shoe.

All right?

Is this the future of the candy economy?

Now?

I am underwhelmed by these candy innovations.

I think these just taste like the candy I grew up with.

The Other thing that I understand to be a hot new candy is salted licorice from Sweden.

Swedish candies is very hot right now.

And luckily our producer are a supervising producer.

Magnus Hendrickson is Swedish and his Swedish mother sent us ah some salted.

Thanks Magnus's mom.

I know that you love salted licorice, Stacey, So I.

Like licorice, Oh my god.

Before we started taping, Stacy was like, it tastes like pea.

It doesn't taste great.

Ah, I don't understand.

Oh my god, I don't understand.

It gets worse and worse as masticated.

Oh my god.

See the pe comes later.

It's a bottom note in the back of your mouth, right.

Oh, listeners, If you have a favorite candy, or if you have any thoughts on this episode, send us an email.

Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.

That's everybody's with an asset Bloomberg dot net.

We heard that super powerful story about the ice raids from Leo Feller, Like, I'm kind of curious what people thought of it, whether they've had similar experiences, whether you agree with Leo's perspective disagree, Let's hear it.

We'll read some of those emails when they come in.

Also, if you've experienced something like that, if you're hesitating to go out to go to the gym, anything like that, we would love to hear your story.

This show is produced by Stacy Wong, Magnus Hendrickson, noted fan of Licorice is All So our supervising producer, Amy Kean, our executive producer, Sam Rogic handles.

Engineering, and Dave Purcell fact checks.

Sage Bauman heads.

Bloomberg Podcast special Thanks to Jeff Muscus, Julia Rubin and Maria Ling.

If you have a minute, give us a rating or a review.

It'll mean a lot to us.

And if you have a story that should be our business, email us at Everybody's at Boomberg dot net.

That's everybody with an US at Bloomberg dot net.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.

Happy Halloween.