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So Odoo is fertilizer magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Ahem. Ahem. Sorry. You all right over there? Oh, I'm fine. It's just a Friday. Hello, everyone. I am Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.
I'm Kyle Rizzo. Thanks for joining us on the pod and on the YouTube live stream. Friday, 25 April is where we find ourselves. Yes. I love how like just done we are at the end of every week now. Just freaking done. Completely done. Could not be more done. But it is Friday, which means that we are going to do our weekly happy hour. We called Economics on Tap. We're going to do some news. We're going to play a game. But of course, first, we are going to chat drinks or the lack thereof. What you got, Kyle?
I am drinking nothing for two reasons. Number one, I'm just not feeling it today. But also, number two, I'm not having a cup of coffee. I'm not having water because I've had five cups of coffee today and I've been making a lot of trips to little boys' rooms. So I need to dry myself out. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Little TMI perhaps, but you know what? I like to bear my soul on this podcast. It's to make us all smart about every aspect of your life.
Once when Twitter was a thing and it was newish and I was still trying to figure it out. I did. You know, OK. All right. OK. So I'll take you behind the scenes. So before I go on the air every day, I do two things. One is I brush my teeth and the other one is if I need to, I visit the little boy's room.
And I got a little tight one day just in terms of timing, you know, whatever. And I tweeted out, buttonfly jeans are a bad idea on deadline. And Lizzie O'Leary like roasted me on the site formerly known as Twitter. And I was like, oh, okay, maybe TMI. Just saying. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Anyway. What about you? What are you drinking?
I am having a big drink. I'm having tequila with pomegranate juice and bitters. Oh, my goodness. I bet you that's tasty except for the tequila part. Also, that's a big, big glass. It's delicious.
It is. It is. I'll let you guess at the ratios here. Are you getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do C-SPAN tomorrow? I am not. I'm getting up early to do other things, but not that. Party time. R-T time. All right, so let's go to the chat here. Daniel Romay, Dragon Shearer Original Bourbon Barrel Seltzer, New Holland Brewing Company. There you go. Rodenbeck, your home crew from Brian Clark. We've got lots going on. Sorry, go ahead.
That's okay. Kevin has a well-being non-alcoholic IPA. How is that one? Because I know Kai's always wondering about how the non-alcoholic IPAs are, and I haven't heard of well-being. Have you? No, neither have I. Neither have I. They're fine, like that first beginning of the taste of the sip, and then the finish is just wrong. It tastes like wet cardboard. It's wild. On the ones I've tried, which is like two or three.
Molly says that a big week deserves a big glass and Molly approves. So thank you Molly. Molly approves. What more do we need to hear? Ali Gomez, Tennessee stud hard decider. Peace goes sour. Yeah, that's my mother-in-law drinks peace goes sour. Blue Lotus Chai. Half traditional and half the Rooey boy or Rooey bow, I guess. Bob is having a South African pinotage. Cool, cool, cool. All right, what you got for news, Kai?
So I've got for news this, and it came in the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment this morning, and it's a little bit weedy, but not really weedy. So consumer sentiment is terrible. We know that. That doesn't really affect how we spend because we can feel cranky and still want to spend money. So I'm not so worried about that. What I am worried about is the fact that in the inflation expectations question, we all say collectively, according to the University of Michigan, that
that we think inflation is going to be 6.5% by the end of the year, 6.5%. And that's number one, a lot. Number two, it's the highest expectations have been since 1981. And even if you weren't alive in 1981, you surely have heard of Paul Volcker and breaking the back of inflation when inflation was actually more than 6.5%. That was very bad. But also what consumers think is going to happen with inflation can actually affect what happens with inflation.
And so the idea that we think it's going to be that high is not great. And I'm sure that's keeping Jay Powell up at night. I wonder how much like somebody in a position like that, you know, takes ownership or feels that responsibility, you know, because obviously he and the folks at the Fed have been doing everything they can to tamp inflation down. But so much of what is causing this is completely out of his control, right? So...
you know, at some point you have to be like, you know, got to do what I can control and go to sleep. Or does it just continue to keep you up at night?
Well, right. So Powell's line that he says a lot and he said to me the very first time I interviewed him was control the controllable, you know, and this is not in his control. The same way, by the way, this being what the president is doing with tariffs, the same way that supply chains during the pandemic were not in his control. Yeah. Right. Consumers had their own mind. So, you know, the Fed's kind of along for the ride and they're about to get stuck between a rock and a very hard place. And that's going to be bad for all of us. It is. What do you got?
I got two. I feel like the other day we were talking and you were like, yeah, we just got to rely on the courts to kind of save us from everything happening. And I was like, but can we rely on the courts? And I was a little skeptical. And I just want to say...
that I saw this story in Politico again by Kyle Cheney and Josh Gersten that the Trump administration has reversed course on the abrupt termination of foreign students US visa registrations the DOJ announced the reversal in federal court after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges so even if these cases didn't make it all the way through
Going to court and fighting these things has made a difference and has changed policy. So I just want to mark that moment that...
of our government are still functioning as they should. Absolutely. That's a good thing. That's really important. Yep, totally. It's a big deal. And then my other one is in a completely different direction. And I was thinking of you because the other day I saw this social media video about the movie Sinners. And it was basically about trying to make the argument that scaredy cats can go see Sinners. And...
I resemble that one.
And so like I'm really on the fence about whether I should go and see this movie because the last horror movie I went to see in a movie theater was when I was...
18 years old with two of my girlfriends and we got up and left five minutes into it because we were so scared like I remember sitting there and there was like a scene in this movie it was like some haunted house made of glass or something like that and a door shut on somebody and it sliced them in half and I remember leaning over to my friends and being like hey
do y'all want to go? And they were like, yes, let's go. Yes, totally. And
the last horror movie I went to go see in the theater. And so it's a pretty high threshold. I love Ryan Coogler's work and everything like that. But the reason I actually brought this up is because of a story that's been really interesting to me, which is the deal he made to make this movie is apparently freaking out studio executives in Hollywood because the movie is so successful. But I'm going to read here from the MSNBC story.
Coogler requested and received a rare stake in his studio-produced film, securing from Warner Bros. first dollar gross points, final cut and ownership of the film in 25 years. An unnamed senior Hollywood executive told Vulture that some other studios are freaking out over Coogler's deal and that it's a very dangerous precedent that, quote, could be the end of the studio system.
Now, like, this is a rare deal. It's unusual. Obviously, Ryan Coogler has power as a director that not everybody has. But maybe with, you know, directors getting a little bit more power in these dynamics, we'll get something other than endless sequels and spinoffs. So I'm here for it. Absolutely. And just to sort of put this in more fully into context, yeah.
It's a movie starring a black guy by a black guy, right? And Franklin Leonard has been all over this, the founder of the blacklist, which is not related to the color of the star or the movie. That's what he called it.
he's been all over this and how the coverage has been really skewed, specifically in the New York Times, about, I think the headline in the Times the other day was, you know, Ryan Coogler's movie makes $47 million first day out, like with an asterisk because expectations were really high for this film. He's doing great. He got the studio to give him this deal and it's,
More power to him. Truly. It's really cool to see. And it's doing so well. It's doing so well. So I should say one of our video producers, Antoinette Brock, says in our chat that she can confirm as someone who doesn't watch horror films that will be fine.
I trust Antoinette. Do you not trust Antoinette, Kai? Oh, that's not the question. The question is how big a scaredy cat I am. And the answer is very large. The last scary movie I saw, I was 12 and it was Jaws. So, you know. Yeah. I'm curious as to the chat. Has anybody in there seen Sinners? There's a lot of scaredy cats in the chat. Hmm.
Lots of people trust Antoinette. Oh, everyone was telling me that this movie that I saw that scared me is 13 Ghosts. Yes, that was the movie. Fair enough. Anyway, shall we? We shall. We're done. We're going to take a quick break. Drew's going to be back with Half Full, Half Empty. Here we go.
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What? You're laughing already. I'm laughing because our tax joined the chat. Oh, all right. Well, there you go. Yes. All right. Let me get back to the script. All right. So we are going to play our game. We are back. We're going to play half full, half empty. It is hosted by our very own, our very wonderful Drew Jostad, who's probably never scared of anything. Drew, take it away. No, I don't watch horror movies either.
There you go. It's a three-fer. Three makes a trend. Come on, here we go. Did you guys see Get Out, though? Like, I can handle a movie like that. Absolutely not. No. Everybody said, oh, it's fine. And I'm like, the bleep I will. Okay. I am ashamed to say as a black person that I didn't see it, but I was too worried about being scared. Maybe I could take it then. I don't know. Anyway. Okay. First up.
You've heard of Airbnb, of course, for your houses. Some people use Turo to rent out other people's cars. A new app called Pickle lets you rent out your clothes. Are you half full or half empty? Wow. So that's, you know, it's a little bit rent the runway ish. I guess I'm OK, but there'd have to be like laundry services. I don't think I would do it. But if that's a business, I'm half full. Sure. Whatever.
I'm gonna go half full only because I've in the last couple of years I've really been buying a lot more stuff secondhand off like you know the Poshmark and the RealReal and all that stuff and there are a lot of people who buy a ton of clothes that they wear once or every so often and like I I like a gala right so I have several evening gowns that I maybe wear once a year
And I'd be game to rent it out if there was like some insurance and a service, like if somebody wanted it. And that, yeah, that makes sense to me. Sure. Half full. Yeah. Half full with some caveats, but yeah. Yeah. Half full with some caveats. Next up, are you half full or half empty on smart eyeglasses that subtitle speech in real time? Half full. Accessibility for the win. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't seen that, but sure.
Yeah, I can. Does it translate as well? That's what we really need. Oh, that'd be interesting. That was not part of the article as far as I saw. Yeah, I think that could be really good for, you know, especially like with our country aging the way it is and folks like who maybe don't want to wear a hearing aid and just need like a little support, but they can mostly hear. Yeah, half full. Yeah.
Yeah, and like, I mean, hearing aids, you sometimes still can't understand what people are saying. Anyway. So apparently TikTok is testing out a new crowdsource fact-checking system. It's called Footnotes. Are you half full or half empty on community fact-checking? I have to say, when community fact-checking first rolled out, I was...
very skeptical of it. And I still think that there are limitations and there are problems. But if the other option is no fact checking, I will definitely take some community context
And, you know, the whole vibe of this show is none of us is as smart as all of us. So like there is some wisdom in the crowd at times. I was looking in the Discord today and they were following, somebody was following up on one of the questions that we had yesterday about what happens to money that Congress appropriates but the president doesn't spend. And someone, and I'm sorry, I forgot exactly who it was, went and did a bit more research and they're like, well, since we fund most of the stuff with a deficit anyway,
it really rather than money going back to the treasury or staying in the treasury, it's more so that the money just doesn't get printed, right? Because if it's deficit money anyway, the treasury would have to generate that money to spend it on things that we couldn't afford anyway. So not spending it just means it's not printed, not printed.
That was, you know, the product of their research and everything like that. And so I think there's value in community fact. I see you processing that. Does that make sense to you? Well, kind of, except that research assumes we have a zero-cast balance day in and day out, right? And that's not true. We've got zillions and zillions of dollars in the bank to float ourselves between bond issuances. So yes, kind of true, but also kind of not. You know what I mean?
Yeah, not the expert here. But anyway, the whole point being that communities, community can at least provide context and, and warn you when something is really off.
Right. It shouldn't be called fact-checking. It was Michael in Houston who did that in the Discord. Thank you. Okay, good. Your point about fact-checking versus context-adding is important because it should be context and not fact, right? Yeah. There you go. Are you half full or half empty? Oh, I'm full with your annotation that it's context and not fact-checking. Yeah. Okay. What's next? All right. Let's wrap it up with the audience poll.
All right. The question is, are you half full or half empty on the Slate EV pickup? And I can give more details on this car. I literally just saw it today. It's a pickup truck, right, for less than $25,000. My oldest son was just texting me about it this morning, saying he really likes the price and the modularity of it. I haven't even dug into it at all. So if you give us the elevator pitch here, would you do it?
Yeah, the idea is that it's customizable. It comes pretty bare bones. There's no paint. It's just like it's only available in the one color that they make the panels in. There's no stereo. There's no touchscreen. You have to just bring your own Bluetooth speaker if you want to listen to music in the car. Wow. There's no screen?
Actually, under $20,000 if federal incentives stay the same. Deliveries reportedly starting in late 2026. Wow. It'd be cool if they could make it. I don't get the no screen part because you've got to have something to... I don't know. Is there air conditioning or heating or any of that? You've got to have something. You can't have air conditioning and heat without a screen. How do you know how fast you're going? An odometer. Which comes on a...
In a circle with a little bar with a little thing on it. You can get an old school odometer. A needle. Thank you. You can get an old school odometer. Battery charge. Battery charge. How do you know battery charge? Okay. That's fair. That's fair. You need even like a minimal screen. If it's electric, yeah. I don't know.
Yeah. Maybe it's just like a light that warns you. It's like red, yellow, and green, just like a light. I should specify no touchscreen. Did I miss anything? All right. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Touchscreen makes a difference. So there is something, right? There's a little control instrument cluster there. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. All right. Okay. How do I feel about this? Actually, I'm looking at the picture. I like it. I like it. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I like it too. I'm half full. I'm along with the majority of the poll for sure. Yeah, I'm actually going to vote in the poll this time. Oh, wow. 89% are half full. Which would be great. It's really cool. I would take a stripped down EV truck. I mean, you know that this appeals to my like surviving the zombie apocalypse tendencies. Yes. Sorry, that's Willow. If you can hear a dog grumbling here.
You know what? We needed some willow action for a while. We've had too much R-Tax and not enough willow. Yeah. Here we go. Well, here she is. Yeah. So we're half full. The poll, we're going to call the poll closed. 171 people are in. Half full is 89%. Half empty, 11%. I don't know what the other one. Oh, that actually adds up to 100 this time. How about that? Oh, yeah. How about that? All right. Well, that's it.
And so is the game. So is the game. And so is the week. So is the week. We are going to be back on Monday. If you'd like to send us a question or comment, you can leave us voicemail, 508-UBSmart. You can also email us at makemesmart at marketplace.org. I just realized the cat is like sleeping right there, just laid out. Cat's in the shot. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseker. Our intern is Zohar Malik. Today's episode is engineered by Charleston Thorpe.
The team behind our Friday game is Emily McCune, Jamila Huxtable and Antoinette Brock. Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodner is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital and on demand. There we go. Happy Friday. If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere, especially when it comes to personal finance.
Financially Inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help you get serious about your money so you can build a life you've always dreamed of. I'm the host, Janelia Espinal, and each week I ask experts important money questions like how to negotiate job offers, how to choose a college that you can afford, and how to talk about money with friends and family. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.