“I want to make a big announcement,” said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who’d co-chaired Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “I am super proud to say it on this stage,” Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. “We have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort.” My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world’s largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world’s Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was “Code and Country”: an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom praised Trump as the savior of the crypto world. But Code and Country was part of Industry Day, which was VIP only and closed to General Admission holders — the people with the $199 tickets, who flocked to the conference seeking wisdom from brilliant technologists and fabulously wealthy crypto moguls, who believed that decentralized currency on a blockchain could not be controlled by government authoritarians. They’d have drowned Shirzad in boos if they saw him give money to Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and they would have stormed the Nakamoto stage if they knew the purpose of America250. America250 is a nonprofit established by Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency with a mundane mission: to plan the nationwide festivities for July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “Who remembers the Bicentennial in 1976?” the co-chair, former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, asked the crowd. “I remember it like it was yesterday, and this one is going to be bigger and better.” But then Trump got re-elected, appointed LaCivita as co-chair, and suddenly, the party was starting earlier. The week before the conference, America250 announced that it would host a “Grand Military Parade” on June 14th to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, releasing tickets for prime seats along the parade route and near the Washington Monument on their website, hosting other festivities on the National Mall, and credentialing the press covering the event. (Their celebrations and events are a different operation from the U.S. Army, which had never planned for a parade to celebrate its 250th birthday, much less a military parade, but is now spending up to $45 million in taxpayer dollars to make the parade happen.) According to the most recent statements from Army officials, the parade will include hundreds of cannons, dozens of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, and 150 military vehicles, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Stryker Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, and if the logistics work out, 25 (or more) M1 Abrams tanks. Trump had spent years trying to get the government to throw a military parade — primarily because he’d attended a Bastille Day parade in France and became jealous — and now that he was back in office, he’d finally eliminated everyone in the government who previously told him that the budget didn’t exist for such a parade, that the tank treads would ruin the streets and collapse the bridges, that the optics of tanks, guns and soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue were too authoritarian and fascist. June 14th also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday.And Coinbase, whose CEO once told his employees to stop bringing politics into the workplace, was now footing the bill — if not for this military parade watch party, then for the one inevitably happening next year, when America actually turns 250, or any other festivities between now and then that may or may not fall on Trump’s birthday. (This wasn’t the first party they helped fund, though. Earlier this year, Coinbase wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inauguration committee. One month later, the SEC announced that it was dropping an investigation into Coinbase.) I had to keep reminding myself that I was at the Bitcoin Conference. I’d been desperately looking for the goofy, degenerate party vibes that my coworkers who’d covered previous crypto conferences told me about: inflated swans with QR codes. Multimillionaires strolling around the Nakamoto Stage in shiba inu pajamas. Folks who communicated in memes and acronyms. Celebrity athletes who were actual celebrities. “Bitcoin yoga,” whatever that was. Afterparties with drugs, lots of drugs, and probably the mind-bending designer kind. And hey, Las Vegas was the global capital of goofy, degenerate partying. But no, I was stuck in a prolonged flashback to every single Republican event I’ve covered over the past ten years – Trump rallies, conservative conferences, GOP conventions, and MAGA fundraisers, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” playing on an endless loop. There was an emcee endlessly praising Trump, encouraging the audience to clap for Trump, and reminding everyone about how great it was that Trump spoke at the Conference last year, which all sounds even stranger when said in an Australian accent. In addition to LaCivita, there were four GOP Congressmen, four GOP Senators, one Trump-appointed SEC Commissioner, one Treasury Official, two senior White House officials (including David Sacks, the White House crypto and A.I. czar), and two of Trump’s sons. All of them, too, spent time praising Trump as the first “crypto president.” (Vice President J.D. Vance would be speaking the next day to the general admission crowd, but he was probably going to praise Trump, too.) The titles of the panels seemed to be run through some sort of MAGA generative AI system: The Next Golden Age of America. The American Super Grid. Making America the Global Bitcoin Superpower. The New Declaration of Independence: Bitcoin and the Path Out of the U.S. National Debt Crisis. (Speaker: Vivek Ramaswamy.) Uncancleable: Bitcoin, Rumble & Free Speech Technology. (Speaker: Donald Trump Jr.) The only difference was that this MAGA conference was funded by crypto. And if crypto was paying for a MAGA conference, and they had to play “God Bless the USA,” they were bringing in a string quartet.Annoyed that I had not yet seen a single Shiba Inu — no, Jim Justice’s celebrity bulldog was not the same thing — I left Nakamoto and went back to the press area. It hadn’t turned into Fox News yet, but I could see MAGA’s presence seeping into the world of podcasters and vloggers. A Newsmax reporter (great blowout, jewel-toned sheath dress, heels to the heavens, very camera-ready) was interviewing White House official Bo Hines (clean-cut, former Yale football player and GOP congressional candidate, nice suit), right before he was hustled onstage for a panel with a member of the U.S. Treasury. Soon, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was doing an interview gauntlet while his senior aides stood by, one wearing a pink plaid blazer that could have easily been Brooks Brothers. Over on the Genesis Stage, the CEO of PragerU, a right wing media company that attacks higher education, was interviewing the CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a right-wing nonprofit that attacks companies for engaging in “woke business practices” such as diversity initiatives. (Leveraging Bitcoin’s Values to Shift the Culture in America.) I walked into the main expo center, past a crypto podcaster in a sequined bomber jacket talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter. For some reason, his presence was a relief. Even though he was clearly a Trump supporter — his jacket said TRUMP: THE GOLDEN AGE on the back — there was something more janky and homegrown, less corporate, about him. But the moment I looked up and saw a massive sign that said STEAKTOSHI, the unease returned. A ghoulish-looking group of executives from Steak ‘n Shake, the fast food company with over 450 locations across the globe, had gathered under the sign in a replica of the restaurant. They were selling jars of beef tallow, with a choice of grass-fed or Wagyu, and giving out a MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN hat with every purchase an overt embrace of the right-wing conspiracy that cooking with regular seed oils would lower one’s testosterone. (Relevant to the conference: they were also advertising that their restaurants now accepted Bitcoin.)Andrew Gordon, the head of Main Street Crypto PAC, had been to five previous Bitcoin Conferences and worked on crypto tax policy since 2014. He’d seen Trump speak at the last conference in Nashville during the election, and the audience – not typically unquestioning MAGA superfans – had melted into adoring goo in Trump’s presence. But now that Trump was using his presidential powers to establish a Bitcoin reserve, roll back federal investigations into crypto companies, and order massive changes to financial regulatory policies — in short, changing the entire market on crypto’s behalf with the stroke of a pen — Gordon clocked a notable vibe shift this year. “There are people wearing suits at a Bitcoin conference,” he told me wryly back in the press lounge. (He, too, was wearing a suit). The change wasn’t due to a new breed of Suit People flooding in. It was the Bitcoin veterans the ones who’d been coming to the conference for years, dressed in loud Versace jackets or old holey t-shirts – who were now in business attire. “They’re now recognizing the level of formality and how serious it is.”According to the Bitcoin Conference organizers, out of the 35,000-plus attendees in Vegas this year, 17.1 percent of them were categorized as “institutional and corporate decision-makers” — a vague way to describe politicians, corporate executives, and the rest of the C-suite world. Whenever they weren’t speaking onstage, they were conducting interviews with outlets hand-selected from dozens of media requests that had been filtered through the conference organizers, or in Q&A sessions with people who’d bought the $21,000 Whale Pass and could access the VIP Lounge. (Yes, the industry-only day of the conference had an even more exclusive tier.) They were sidebarring with crypto CEOs outside the conference for round tables, privately meeting Senators for lunch and White House officials for dinner. Gordon himself had just held a private breakfast for industry insiders, with GOP Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis as special guests. And for the very, very wealthy, MAGA Inc., Trump’s primary super PAC, was holding a fundraising dinner in Vegas that night, with Vance, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in attendance. That ticket, according to The Washington Post, cost $1 million per person.It was the kind of amoral, backroom behavior that would have sent the General Admission attendees into a rage — and they did the next day, when the convention opened to them. During one extremely packed talk at the Genesis Stage called Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?, a moderator asked the four panelists what they’d like to say to Vance and Sacks and all the politicians who’d been there yesterday. And Erik Cason erupted.“‘What you’re doing is actually immoral and bad. You hurt people. You actively want to use the state to implement violence against others.’ 
That’s like, fucked up and wrong,” said Cason, the author of “Cryptosovereignty,” to a crowd of hundreds. “If you personally wanna like, go to Yemen and try to stab those people, that’s on you. But asking other people to go do that – it is a fucked up and terrible thing.” He grew more heated. “And also fuck you. You’re not, like, a king. You’re supposed to be liable to the law, too. 
And I don’t appreciate you trying to think that that you just get to advance the state however the fuck you want, because you have power.”“These are the violent thugs who killed hundreds of millions of people over the last century,” agreed Bruce Fenton of Chainstone Labs. “They have nothing on us. All we wanna do is run some code and trade it around our nerd money. Leave us alone.”The audience burst into cheers and applause. Bitcoin was the promise of freedom from the government, who’d murdered and stolen and tried to control their lives, and now that their wealth was on the blockchain, no one could take their sovereignty. “Personally, I don’t really care what they [the politicians] think,” said American HODL, whose title on the conference site was “guy with 6.15 bitcoin,” the derision clear in his voice. “They are employees who work for us, so their thoughts and opinions on the matter are irrelevant. Do what the fuck we tell you to do.
 I don’t work for you. I’m not underneath you. You’re underneath me.” But the politicians weren’t going to listen to them, much less talk to them. The politicians spent the conference surrounded by aides and security who stopped people from approaching – I’m sorry, the Senator has to leave for an engagement now – or safely inside the VIP rooms with the $21,000-dollar Whale Pass holders and the million-dollar donors. By the time American HODL said that the politicians worked for him, they were on flights out of Vegas, having gotten what they wanted from Code and Country, an event that was closed to General Admission pass holders.Coinbase’s executives were at Code and Country, however. Coinbase held over 984,000 Bitcoin, more coins than American HODL could mine in a lifetime. And Coinbase was now a sponsor of Donald Trump’s birthday military parade. The Nakamoto Stage during Code + Country at the Bitcoin Conference.After David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins finished explaining how Trump had saved the crypto industry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or as one Winklevoss called her, “Pocahontas”), I was jonesing for a drink. A few other reporters on the ground had told me about “Code, Country and Cocktails,” the America250 afterparty held at the Ayu Dayclub at Resort World, and I signed up immediately. Reporters at past Bitcoin Conferences had promised legendary side-event depravity, and I hoped I would find it there. As I entered the lush, tropical nightclub, I saw two white-gloved hands sticking out the side of the wall, each holding a glass of champagne at crotch level. I reached out for a flute, thinking it was maybe just a fucked-up piece of art, and gasped as the hand let go of the stem, disappeared into the hole, and emerged seconds later with another full champagne glass. Past the champagne glory hole wall — there was really no other way to describe it — was a massive outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by chefs serving up endless portions of steak frites, unguarded magnums of Moët casually stacked in ice buckets, the professional Beautiful Women of Las Vegas draped around Peter Schiff, the famous economist/podcaster/Bitcoin skeptic. When not booked for private events, the crescent-shaped pool at Ayu would be filled with drunk people in swim suits, dancing to DJ Kaskade. No one was in the pool tonight. Depravity was not happening here. In fact, there was more networking going on than partying, and it was somehow more engaging than Bone Thugs-N-Harmony suddenly appearing onstage to perform. And it was distinctly not just about making money in crypto. A good percentage of this crowd wore some derivative of a MAGA hat, and anyone who could show off their photos of them with Trump did so. This, I realized, was how crypto bros did politics — a new game for them, where success and influence was not necessarily quantifiable. “Crypto got Trump elected,” Greg Grseziak, an agent who manages crypto influencers, told me, showing me his Trump photo opp. “In four years, this is going to be the biggest event in the presidential race.”Grzesiak walked off to do more networking, I finished my glory hole champagne, and in the meantime, Bone Thugs had started performing “East 1999”. A fellow reporter leaned over. “Who do you think those guys are?” he asked, pointing to a group of extremely tall white men in suits and lanyards, standing behind a velvet rope to the left of the stage.I walked over to investigate. They looked like the group of Steak ‘n Shake executives I met at the Expo Hall — the ones with the beef tallow jars and derivative MAGA hats — and they were lurking next to the stage, watching the rappers like vultures but barely moving to the music. This scene was too preposterous to actually be real: Steak ‘n Shake executives, at the Bitcoin Conference, attending a party for America250, in the VIP section, during a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set? “Shout out to Steak ‘n Shake for being the first fast food restaurant to accept Bitcoin!” announced one of the Bones. The company logo appeared on a screen above his head.No flashy Vegas magic (or dancers in cow costumes, now shimmying onstage with Steak ‘n Shake signs) could mask what I just saw. This party was co-sponsored by a MAGA-branded fast-food chain owned by Sardar Biglari, a businessman who had purchased Maxim, became its editor-in-chief, and used the smutty magazine to endorse Trump in 2024. So was Frax, the stablecoin exchange, and Exodus, one of the biggest crypto wallet companies in the market. Bitcoin Magazine’s logo flashed across the stage at one point, as editor-in-chief David Bailey, in his own derivative MAGA hat, tried to hype up the crowd for J.D. Vance’s speech the next day. (“You only get to live history once,” he said, to faint cheers.)For some unknown reason, these companies were all putting their money into America250, and as I had to keep reminding myself, America250 — the government nonprofit in charge of planning the country’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing — was currently working to get tanks in the streets of Washington DC for Donald Trump’s birthday. I went for one last champagne flute from the glory hole, just for the novelty, and as the hand disappeared back into the wall, I caught something I’d missed earlier: above the hole was a logo for TRON, the blockchain exchange run by billionaire Justin Sun. He had faced several fraud investigations from the SEC that magically disappeared after he invested $75 million in a Trump family crypto company, and seemed more than happy to keep throwing crypto money at Trump. Recently, he won the $TRUMP meme coin dinner, spending over $16 million on the token in exchange for a private and controversial dinner with the president.TRON was also cosponsoring the America250 party.Earlier, I’d run into the Australian emcee in the elevator of The Palazzo. She’d spent the day teetering across the Nakamoto Stage in dainty kitten heels, a pinstriped blazer and miniskirt suit set, and given the gratuitous Trump praising and the fact she was blonde, I had stereotyped her as MAGA to the core. But the program was over and she was holding her heels by their ankle straps, barefoot and sighing in relief. This was not her usual style, she told an attendee. She’d take a pair of sneakers over heels if she could. But the conference organizers had told her to dress up because there were senators in attendance. “Tomorrow, the real Bitcoiners are coming,” she said, and she’d get to wear flat shoes. And the next morning, on the day of Vance’s speech, I found myself stuck outside the conference with the “real Bitcoiners.” In spite of all the emails that the conference had sent me reminding me of how strict security measures would be, possibly to overcorrect from last year’s utter shitshow around Trump’s appearance, I’d woken up too late, eaten my bagel too leisurely, got sidetracked by a police officer-turned-Bitcoin investor excited I was wearing orange (whoops), and barely missed the cutoff for the Secret Service to let me in. But the conference had set up televisions with a live feed of Vance’s speech, and the rest of the general admission attendees were remarkably chill about it, opting to mingle in the hallways until the Secret Service left. I found myself in a smaller crowd near the expo hall door, next to a young man carrying a live miniature Shiba Inu (“It’s a tiny doge!” he said proudly), and the podcaster I’d seen earlier in the sequined bomber jacket. He introduced himself as Action CEO, and with nothing else to do but wait — “You can watch the [Vance] replay,” he reassured me, “these events are mainly about networking” — we got to talking. “I’m actually excited that Trump isn’t even here, I’ll be honest with you,” he said, speaking with a rapid cadence. Trump was ultimately just one guy, and the fact that he sent his underlings and political allies — the ones who could actually implement his grand promises for the crypto industry — proved he hadn’t just been paying lip service. That said, it had come with some uncomfortable changes, including the re-emergence of Justin Sun. “It’s a little bit concerning when you say, All right, we don’t care what you did in the past. Come on out, clean slate,” he continued. “That’s the concern right now for most people. Seeing people that did wrong by the space coming back and acting like nothing happened? That’s a little concerning.” And not just that: Sun was back in the United States, having dinner with Trump, and giving him millions of dollars. “If you’re sitting in a room and having a conversation, people are literally gonna go, yeah, it’s kind of sketch that this guy is back here after everything that’s happened. You’re not gonna see it published, because it’s not a popular opinion, but we’re all definitely talking about it.” If Action’s friends weren’t comfortable talking about it openly, that fraudsters with enough money were suddenly back in the mix, it was certainly not the kind of conversation the CEOs were going to have in front of the General Admission crowd. (Though it did mean that the emcee, looking much happier than she did the day before, got to wear low-heeled boots and shorts.) But behind closed doors — or at least at the Code and Country panels, where the base pass attendees couldn’t boo them — they gave a sense of what their backroom conversations with the Trump administration did look like.“I was actually at a dinner last night and one of the things that someone from the admin said was, What if we give you guys everything you want and then you guys forget? Because there’s midterms in 2026, and hopefully 2028, and beyond,” said Sam Kazemian, the founder and CEO of Frax, which had sponsored the America250 party. “But one of the things I said was: We as an industry are very, very loyal. The crypto community has a very, very, very strong memory. And once this industry is legalized, is transparent, is safe, all of the big players understand that this wasn’t possible without this administration, this Congress, this Senate. We’re lifelong, career-long allies.”“Loyalty” is a dangerous concept with this president, who’s cheated on his three wives, stopped paying the legal fees for employees who’d taken the fall for him, ended the careers of sympathetic MAGA Republicans for insufficiently coddling him, withdrew security for government employees experiencing death threats for the sin of contradicting him in public by citing facts. It was only weeks ago that he and Vance were publicly screaming at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was at the White House to request more aid in the war against Russia, for not saying “thank you” in front of the cameras. It would be less than a week before he began threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk’s government contracts when the billionaire criticized the size of Trump’s budget, even though Musk had given him millions and helped him purge the government. And if you were to find a photo of any political leader, billionaire or CEO standing vacant-eyed next to Trump and shaking his hand, the circumstances are practically a given: they had recently made him unhappy, either for criticizing him, making an imagined slight, or simply asserting themselves. The only way they could avoid public humiliation, or their businesses being crushed via executive order, was to go to Mar-a-Lago, tell the world that the president was wonderful, and underwrite a giant party for his birthday military parade. Maybe Kazemian knew he was being tested, or maybe the 32-year old Ron Paul superfan had no idea what the administration was asking of him. Either way, he responded correctly. At least one person at the conference was thinking about ways that the government could betray the Bitcoin community. As the panel on Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state wrapped up, and the other panelists finished telling the government pigs to go fuck themselves and keep their hands off their nerd money, the moderator turned to Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer-turned-crypto influencer, for the last question: “Tell everyone here why Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens.”“Oh, man, I don’t know if Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens,” he responded, frowning. He had already gamed out one feasible situation where Bitcoin lost: “If we all of a sudden saw a very rapid inflation in a lot of fiat currencies, and there was a plausible scapegoat in Bitcoin all over the world, and they were able to make a sort of marketing claim that Bitcoin is causing this — Bitcoin is making your savings go to zero, it’s causing this carnage to the economy — 
If that happens worldwide, I think that’s really scary.” The moderator froze, the crowd murmured nervously, and I thought about the number of times Trump had blamed a group of people for problems they’d never caused. An awful lot of them were now being deported. “I take that seriously,” Rodarmor continued. “I don’t know that Bitcoin will succeed. I think that Bitcoin is incredibly strong, it’s incredibly difficult to fuck up. But in that case… man, I don’t know.” I had asked Action CEO earlier if Kazemian, the Frax CEO, was right — if the crypto world was unquestioningly loyal to Trump, if their support of him was unconditional. “Oh, it’s definitely conditional,” he said without hesitation, as his Trump jacket glittered under the fluorescent lights. “It’s a matter of, are you going to be doing the right things by us, by the people who are here?” We walked down the expo hall, past booths promising life-changing technological marvels, alongside thousands of people flooding into Nakamoto Hall, ready to learn how to become unfathomably rich, who paid $199 to be there.The audience of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sychophants of the State?”, Day Two of the Bitcoin ConferenceSee More:

Unlike the other big streamers, Tubi only has a handful of original shows, most of them imports (their original movie selection is much larger). That's not to say it's a wasteland for TV addicts: The streamer might actually have too many shows, a vast and sometimes wild catalog that spans decades. As the likes of Netflix and HBO Max have slimmed down their catalogues, Tubi is growing, offering a mix of established hits, underrated gems, and more obscure offerings. For the sheer breadth of material on offer, it has become the first place I look for anything outside the current zeitgeist—like the following 18 shows, an entirely non-comprehensive sampling of what Tubi has to offer, crossing genres and decades.Gossip Girl (2007 – 2012) Occasionally referred to as the greatest teen drama of all time (certainly this side of 90210), Gossip Girl was a buzzy ratings champ for the CW back in the day, with its juicy, often scandalous storylines that veered so often into intentional satire that it was hard to ever get mad at the ridiculousness of any of it. Set among a group of well-heeled students on Manhattan's Upper East Side, its characters find their private lives being chronicled by the title’s mysterious master of gossip—so think of it as a proto-Bridgerton. You can stream Gossip Girl here.Babylon 5 (1993 – 1998, five seasons) J. Michael Straczynski’s wildly ambitious sci-fi epic was way ahead of its time, with a planned (more or less) five season story arc set on the titular space station. Babylon 5 is a remote outpost that becomes the last best hope for peace in the face of conflicting human and alien agendas—even more so after an ancient threat is awakened. With increasingly complex storylines that expanded over its run, this was a stab at prestige TV before that was a thing, and it still holds up (dated CGI effects notwithstanding. You can stream Babylon 5 here.Empire (2015 – 2020) Hip hop mogul and Empire Entertainment CEO Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) is dying, having been diagnosed with ALS at a young age. He wasn't planning to have to hand off his company so early, but nevertheless finds himself preparing his three very different sons (Trai Byers, Jussie Smollett, and Bryshere Y. Gray) to take the keys to the kingdom—by pitting them against one other. Into this already Shakespearean setup steps Lucious' ex-wife Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), just released from prison and harboring her own plans for Lucious's empire. You can stream Empire here. Mr. Robot (2015 – 2019) Social anxiety disorder, clinical depression, and dissociative identity disorder make up the potent blend of neurodivergences challenging Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a genius senior cybersecurity engineer at Allsafe Cybersecurity. In season one, he's recruited by an anarchist who goes by the moniker Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to encrypt all the financial data of a global mega-conglomerate, thereby erasing massive amounts of debt (hey, real-life hackers, maybe take some notes?). The show starts strong and gets better across its increasingly labyrinthian four seasons—utterly preposterous while also feeling realistic in its technical detail. You can stream Mr. Robot here. Boarders (2024 - , two seasons) This British import feels a bit like a latter-day Skins, with a talented cast of young stars-in-waiting (including leads Josh Tedeku and Jodie Campbell) and a scholastic setting. At the (fictional) prestigious boarding school St. Gilbert’s, five Black teens are newly attending, having earned scholarships, but their integration into the existing cliques is less than smooth. The blend of coming-of-age drama with a willingness to take the piss when it comes to the whole rich private school thing makes this Tubi original a good time. You can stream Boarders here.Big Mood (2024 – , renewed for a second season) Another UK import and Tubi original (at least stateside), Big Mood stars Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton) and Lydia West (It's a Sin) as a couple of besties in East London, living their best millennial thirtysomething lives. Well, kind of: Maggie's dealing with bipolar disorder, and unclear on whether she wants to continue with her medication as she sets out to write a play, while Lydia is doing her very best running a tanking dive bar inherited from her father. It's both a cute dramedy and an impressively frank exploration of the challenges of living with mental illness. You can stream Big Mood here. Vicious (2013 – 2016, two seasons) The old-school sitcom formula has never been executed quite this bitchily, with the inspired pairing of Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as Freddie Thornhill and Stuart Bixby, a couple of nearly 50 years who’ve developed a love-hate relationship. This cast, which includes Frances de la Tour and Game of Thrones’ Ian Rheon, is unbeatable, and the one-liners are hilariously nasty. You can stream Vicious here.The Haves and the Have Nots (2013 – 2021, eight seasons) Tyler Perry's old-school primetime soap was the show that practically built OWN; it was the then-new network's first scripted show, and an immediate breakout. It follows three families: The wealthy Harringtons and the Cryers are wealthy movers in Atlanta, Georgia, while the Young family is overseen by single mom Hanna, who's both a maid for the Cryers and confidante to the family matriarch. There's juicy tension galore between the three families, in no small part because of class differences, but also because they're all equally screwed. You can stream The Haves and the Have Nots here. Spartacus (2010 – 2013) Doing Ridley Scott’s Gladiator one better in terms of both narrative complexity and in hot shirtless gay arena action, Spartacus starts off as pure spectacle and grows into a juicy, high-gloss soap opera by series' end. Buoyed by performances from leads Andy Whitfield (who tragically passed away during the series' original run), Manu Bennett, John Hannah, and Lucy Lawless, it’s sword-and-sandals done right. A follow-up series is in development over at Starz, so it's a good time to catch up. You can stream Spartacus here. Broadchurch (2013 – 2017) Creator Chris Chibnall's dark crime drama didn't invent its particular sub-genre (whatever you call the one where two troubled homicide detectives butt heads in a gloomy town), but it did popularize it to the point that we've been inundated with countless imitators of wide-ranging quality. With the great pairing of Olivia Colman and David Tennant (joined by yet another Doctor Who Doctor, Jodie Whittaker), Broadchurch still stands alongside the best of its kind. You can stream Broadchurch here.Doctor Who (1963 – 1989, 26 seasons) Speaking of Doctor Who, even if you're current with the modern incarnation (if I can use "modern" for a show that started airing in 2005), you've got a lot of timey-wimey adventures to enjoy. Tubi has the entirity of the surviving 26-season original run, going all the way back to 1963 and the story of a mysterious old man living in a junkyard with his granddaughter. Seven doctors is enough to keep anyone busy for a while. Tubi has the show broken out by Doctor, but, if you want to start from the beginning you can stream The First Doctor here. Haven (2010 – 2015) Tubi is a haven for small gems like this, a five-season Stephen King adaptation originally produced by SyFy. Emily Rose stars as Audrey Parker, and FBI Special Agent sent to the small town of Haven, Maine on a routine case who gets drawn into “The Troubles," a series of harmful supernatural events that have recurred throughout the town’s history. A supernatural-case-of-the-week format gives way to a bigger mystery when Audrey comes to learn that this isn’t her first time in Haven, nor the first time she’s encountered the Troubles. You can stream Haven here.Scandal (2012 – 2018, seven seasons) Shonda Rhimes was already a powerhouse producer and screenwriter with several successful seasons of Grey's Anatomy under her belt when Scandal debuted, but its blend of political thrills and sexy, soapy drama is what solidified her brand, and her spot atop of the modern TV landscape. Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope, head of the DC-based crisis management firm Olivia Pope & Associates (OPA), who is the person to call when you've got a PR disaster to fix. If you want to get a sense of the stakes involved, consider that Tony Goldwyn costars as Fitzgerald Grant III, president of the United States, and also Olivia's lover. You can stream Scandal here. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 – 2003) With word that Sarah Michelle Gellar (and company?) are returning to the wreckage of Sunnydale for a Hulu reboot, it’s probably not a bad time to visit (or revisit, or re-revisit) this seven-season teen vampire hunter saga. While the pacing might feel a little slow, and the effects a little janky, its blend of high school (and then college) angst, kick-ass monster fights, and genuinely laugh-out-loud comedy holds up. You can stream Buffy here.Heartland (2007 – , 18 seasons) If there’s a stereotype that middle-American viewers won’t watch foreign fare, this show puts the lie to it—at least when it comes to imports from Alberta (tariff-free!). Based on a popular book series from Linda Chapman and Beth Chambers (writing under the name Lauren Brooke), the show follows the lives of a family of horse ranchers in western Canada, led by sisters Amy and Lou (Amber Marshall and Michelle Morgan). Tubi currently has only the first 15 seasons of the drama, which has recently been renewed for a 19th. That’s Law & Order-level longevity, people. You can stream Heartland here.Highlander (1992 – 1998, six seasons) An classic of '90s-era syndicated action/adventure, Highlander stars Adrian Paul as the title hero, taking over from Christopher Lambert in the film series. Duncan MacLeod is an immortal warrior living in the modern(-ish) day, hunted by others of his own kind, whose goal is singular: to chop off Duncan's head in order to steal his power. Episodes typically involve some sort of flashback to an earlier era in Duncan's life where we first encounter the threat he'll face in the modern day. There's at least one good sword fight in every episode, and I can't imagine what more you'd want out of a series. Bonus: It carries over the films' kick-ass Queen theme song. You can stream Highlander here. Z Nation (2014 - 2019) The Walking Dead made prestige television out of the zombie apocalypse, but this SyFy channel original is all about zombies as a campy, gory good time.  Things kick off with a soldier who’s been tasked with transporting a package across country. The package in question is actually a human being, the survivor of a zombie bite who might be able to help create a vaccine (take note, The Last of Us fans). This one comes from the schlock-masters at The Asylum, purveyors of infamous B-movies like Sharknado, which should tell you all you need to know about the tone. You can stream Z Nation here.Columbo (1968 – 2003, 16 seasons) Peter Falk's sublimely rumpled detective practically invented the style that Peacock's Poker Face has recently revived: a crime (usually a murder) is committed, the viewers know whodunnit, and Columbo has to solve it. Early on in any given episode, we get to watch the crime being committed, though we don't always know the motive. The challenge isn't to figure out the culprit, but to discover exactly how TV's greatest detective is going to solve the case. You can stream Columbo here.

Last month, Donald Trump pushed the boundaries of government and financial ethics by announcing a contest: whoever bought and held the highest amount of the $TRUMP meme coin for an entire month would win an invite to a private dinner with the President. That dinner took place on Thursday at the Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, with attendees reportedly dropping nearly $394 million on $TRUMP in order to win the privilege. According to an analysis by The Guardian of the winners’ wallets, over half of them lost money participating in this contest. But that’s only if you’re analyzing the wallets visible on the contest site’s leaderboard. The real money was being made elsewhere.“Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this”I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.” When I spoke to him again after the dinner, he told me that “the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem, are like, ‘Yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin.’” “A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin,” he added.I can’t reveal his name, his position on the leaderboard, how much he spent, or the dates of specific trades he made. I can say that he did this for shits and giggles. But as he told me, when there’s such a clear and obvious set of financial incentives behind the $TRUMP dinner contest, it’s worth making the gamble.Did it pay off? “Um, I basically was flat,” he said. “I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay?” He did, however, get a free dinner out of it. The following interview has been edited for clarity.Let’s just start from the beginning. What made you want to enter this? I think meme coins have a lot of staying power because humans just want things to gamble on. What was fascinating when the Trump token launched in January right before the inauguration, was that it effectively was like a black hole that sucked money away from all these other tokens in the ecosystem. That’s why the Trump token ran up to some preposterous number immediately after it was dropped. When I saw this competition launch, it was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this space, and the presidential family was only interested in self-enrichment and all that. 
It was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this spaceBut putting that aside, I’ve just been interested in the Trump token and I think I’ve just been structurally bearish, because the Trump token has a bunch of supply that’s currently controlled by, effectively, the Trump family and the associates. It’s only a matter of time before the supply unlocks. When that supply unlocks, in the crypto community, people call this dumping: they’ll just dump it onto retail and that’s how they get their exit liquidity. So that’s one way the Trump family can make money. The other way is obviously whenever there’s trades that happen, the trading fees also accrue to the family. I know that the Trump token is going to go down. If you put a gun into my head and ask, what will the price be two years from now? It’s going to be much lower than where it is today. When this contest launched, I was like, okay, this is clearly a way for the affiliates and the Trump family to find a way to drive up the price temporarily. And having been in this space for a while, it’s clear that these events only drive the price up for a period of time and then people lose interest. Unless you feed them something else, it’s going to drop. Everyone expects the token to dumpThey launched the contest right around when the first tranche of Trump tokens were going to unlock, which was supposed to be 90 days after the launch of the token back in January. And so this whole contest was kind of timed at an apt moment where it’s like, okay, supply’s going to unlock. Everyone expects the token to dump. But then, on Twitter, they agreed to delay the unlock for another 90 days. But once the unlock happens and they start dumping, that’s when the price is going to drop a lot. 
So this contest was interesting. I was like, okay, well, I feel like I can put on a trade here where I’m not taking on any real risk and I think it’ll be cool to meet random people at this dinner and see who else is interested. It seems like there are a lot of folks from out of the country who are flying in to attend the dinner, and a lot of crypto whales. There’s one that I follow, he’s mentioned in his Telegram that he’s one of the big holders. He’s talked these last few days about how he’s preparing for this dinner. So talk me through how you generated the funds to buy the Trump coin. Did you use your own personal funds?I use my personal funds. All the crypto trading I do is with my personal funds. Some of the trading I do is on Coinbase through a centralized exchange. And the rest of the trading I do is on chain through self-custody wallets. When this opportunity came up, the only way you can actually be in a position to be in the top 220 is if you own $TRUMP tokens in a self-custody wallet. Some of the exchanges, including Coinbase, allow you to buy the $TRUMP token, but that would not count towards this contest. What I did was I moved stablecoins like USDC to my Solana wallet, and then I used a decentralized exchange to buy the $TRUMP token. The way the contest works is you have to register your wallet before you are counted towards the ranking system. And unfortunately, I did that like a couple days late, so I had to size up a little bit more to ensure that I could catch up to the people who had registered a couple days prior. But that’s a nuance. So explain the process of shorting $TRUMP coin on a secondary market. Like how does one do that? I am a dumb person who only understands shorting markets through watching The Big Short. Basically when you short, you’re hoping that the price goes down, right? And the mechanism of shorting here is slightly different than shorting stocks, but we don’t need to go into the specifics here. The way to short [crypto] is, you can do it in two ways. One is through a centralized exchange that offers, effectively, shorting services. And what I mean here by shorting services is, there is a “perpetual future” that is offered at these exchanges. When I talk about exchanges that offer this, it’s mostly going to be like Binance or Bybits and some of the bigger exchanges outside of the US. Coinbase is very far behind when it comes to offering derivative products that goes above and beyond just buying the token. I couldn’t do it through Coinbase, and I can’t short through an exchange like Binance, because there’s a lot of restrictions around who can actually use Binance. I’m in the US and Binance has very strict VPN rules. I can’t just open a Binance account and short. The only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchangeSo the only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchange, which has actually become really popular in the last year or so. It’s like the same concept as shorting on Binance, but you can do it on chain. I use a service called Hyper Liquid, which is a very popular decentralized exchange. And on this exchange, they offer derivative products that basically track the movement of different tokens. And so they offer, effectively, $TRUMP perpetual futures, and you can effectively initiate a short position through that. I’m happy to go into the details if you want, but that’s like the high level. Yeah, yes, please please tell me these details. So that is basically how to set up the short position. Conceptually, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First thing is: because I’m shorting in a separate wallet that’s completely detached from $TRUMP, 
I have to put up additional capital in another wallet to do this. It’s not like I can just use my $TRUMP tokens as collateral and use the same pool of money to short. And the way shorting works and the way perpetual futures work in general is you put up a certain margin. So let’s keep it simple: say I put up $100k in margin and I choose to short the $TRUMP token. Now, if $TRUMP goes up in price, then I’m hurting, because I’m betting on the token falling. If the $TRUMP token doubles in price, well, then I will have lost a hundred thousand dollars in which case, my margin gets wiped out and this [futures] contract will have to be closed because I’ve lost all my money. If the token goes down in price, that’s when I profit — as long as I close out the position in the green. So you basically are juggling two wallets. One is the wallet in which you’re holding all this $TRUMP coin. 
The other one is like, how would you describe it? Is that the money that you’re generating in order to pay for participating in the contest? The most important wallet here is the Solana wallet with the $TRUMP tokens, because that’s what’s being used by the contest organizers to determine who makes the top 220. But as I mentioned earlier, I am structurally bearish on the $TRUMP token and I wouldn’t want to go for dinner and like, see my money go down when the $TRUMP token goes down in price. I decided I wanted to basically put on a hedge, where, using the other wallet and the short position, I’m basically agnostic to any sort of price movement. That’s the reason why I set up the other wallet. I could have taken on the price risk, but that’s pretty risky, because typically what happens with these events is that as we get close to the end of the contest date, people start dumping the $TRUMP tokens. The value of the $TRUMP token will have gone down — let’s say it went down to 90,000 — it would be offset by the short wallet, which would be like 110,000. And then they add up to 200,000, which is how much I hypothetically put in from the start. 
Did you make money off of this?Um, I basically was flat. I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay? I basically just broke even on this entire tradeLet me take a step back.
So initially I shorted the same amount as the token. But then as the time went on, as we got close to the contest end date, I decided to increase the size of the short position, because I thought that based on the thesis I had, people are going to start selling because there’s nothing to look forward to. And so I increased that size. But it just so happened that towards the end of the contest was also when the crypto markets started ripping after May 8th. So net-net, I think I basically just broke even on this entire trade.Define the crypto markets “ripping.”May 8th was basically the Thursday right before that weekend when the US representatives were going to meet the Chinese representatives in Switzerland [for tariff negotiations]. That day was also when the UK deal announcement was made. And so the market basically took that as a bullish sign, and then that got parlayed into the positive euphoria of the US-China negotiations. Everything started going up. Okay. So every market just started getting bullish. 
Yeah, all the tokens ran up a lot. If you look at the token price, $TRUMP coin on May 7th was roughly 11 bucks, and then on May 9th it was like 14 bucks. Over time that token has come down in price. But yeah, it ran up 40 percent in the span of like two days.What was the strategy going into the end game? 
Because it sounds like it was super volatile around the end and that’s why you needed to increase your short position. I thought that towards the end, I could opportunistically make some profits by shorting more than I owned, if that makes sense.[The previous week, the contest organizers announced a new incentive for winners to not sell the coin before the dinner: a rare “TRUMP DIAMOND HANDS” NFT.]What is the point of encouraging people to go diamond hands by offering this NFT? So I think this goes back to the incentives of Trump’s affiliates, right? They have a lot of supply that they own. Last I looked, they own eighty percent of the supply. But all of that, as with many other [crypto] projects, gets locked up and only gets released over time, so that you don’t have all this supply pressure on day one. Because then no one wants to buy the token. The whole point of the NFT and this subsequent rewards program that they’ve talked about, but haven’t given the details for, is to incentivize people to hold the token longer. The longer people hold the token, then the price arguably would not fall as much. 
The only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engagedThe eventual setup, I’m sure, whether that’s in three months or in a year or two, is that the affiliates will then have their supply unlock, and they will want to sell. They obviously want to sell at a higher price. And the only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engaged and interested in holding tokens. How do you get the NFT now? Do you have to rebuy all the coin?Yeah, my understanding based on that tweet they sent is, they basically look at your wallet holdings on the day of the dinner and compare that to your wallet holdings on the last day of the contest. And so if those match or if you own more, then they’ll give you an NFT. I was kind of dumb. What I should have done was, right before the 1:30PM cut off, I should have sold like, 90 percent of my tokens. In this way, on the dinner day, I would only have to buy 10 percent of what I bought previously, and I think I would qualify for this NFT. 
Wow. Have people done that? Well, the NFT hasn’t been dropped yet.
I don’t know the specifics. There are definitely people who sold before the end of the deadline, and that’s clear from even looking at that leaderboard page, right? There’s one column with current holdings and a bunch were zeroed out, but they are still in the top 220 because it’s a time-weighted calculation.Why did they do time-weighted calculations rather than like, just a cumulative amount of money you held at the end? I think this goes back to solving not only how much do you hold, but how long do you hold it for, and rewarding people differently. So if you held $60 over the entire stretch of the contest, you should be rewarded more than someone who held like $200 for one day on the last day. I think the time-weighted calculation effectively is trying to normalize for that. They also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a secondHow have the organizers been in their interactions with you for the contest and for the dinner and everything?They emailed me the day of, as soon as the
contest ended, saying that I had made it into the top 220. And they also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a second. But when the voicemail thing came up, I’m like, oh, this is actually a real thing. So I picked up the phone and then they just confirmed that I got the email and that I would have to do a KYC [Know Your Customer check, part of anti-money laundering regulatory compliance for banks, crypto exchanges, and other entities] in order to qualify for the dinner. Please give us your data, references, whatever. 
Yeah, nothing that sophisticated. They outsourced it to another party and I just provided my name, my nationality, where I live. No social security number or anything like that. Plus my birthday. and I think they just ran like an external check to make sure that I wasn’t a criminal or anything like that. I feel like it was pretty light vettingHow thoroughly do you think they’re been vetting you, how professional has the process been? I feel like it was pretty light vetting. I talked to someone about, let’s say, getting into the White House and it’s a lot more strict in terms of, you have to show your passport and all that. And here, you don’t really have to do that. You just have to show your ID at the door. At least that’s what they said. And as long as your ID matches the information you gave, you’re fine. So I don’t think the security is that strict, per se, but it’s good enough, I guess. Have you participated in any contests like this or heard of anything similar? No, I have not.That’s wild. This is rather innovative if one thinks about it in a “divorced from most governmental ethics” manner. Did you read about how it’s possible that Trump just doesn’t show up to this?I did see something that basically said, yeah, based on the terms and conditions, the president does not have to be there, I think. Honestly, I think a lot of people aren’t really there to see Trump. I could be totally wrong, but I get the sense from, let’s say, like looking at the crypto whales’ Telegram, that [they’re] more interested in just meeting other crypto folks so that [they] can network. If Justin Sun is there, that’s pretty good, right? Like being able to talk to him and maybe, you know, get his contact information and all that. RelatedThe many escapes of Justin SunI think for me and probably other people, we’re more interested in seeing if there’s any other interesting news that comes out of this dinner. I will have my wallet ready, and if some great news gets dropped at the dinner, that could potentially positively influence the $TRUMP token price or any other token price, I will buy it on the spot and try to profit. This is something that other attendees are thinking about doing too?I can’t say with certainty, but based on that one Telegram guy, it seemed like it was implied. Like, if they announced a rewards program for a Trump thing – say, the NFT will be used for this, and then the rewards will give you some really impressive thing in three months, that could probably move the price. Then I would take on a short-term trade literally at the dinner table. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth SocialThat’s a first mover advantage right there.In crypto, half of it is just being a first mover advantage. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth Social. I only follow Trump. He’s the only guy I follow and I have notifications on, which actually served me well. Was it April 9th when he sent out that tweet saying that tariffs are now delayed for 90 days? That was first out on Truth Social and I saw that immediately, and I’m like, oh, time to trade my equities, because I will be first to the news. So he’s dropped some nuggets for sure on his account. So the dinner itself is a good money making opportunity?Possibly. It’s hard to say, but in the event that it does, there is some information that gets dropped, that could be actionable.Is there anything you’re particularly proud of about the process of executing this short?I don’t know if there’s anything I’d really brag about or be like, super proud of.
I think this hedge trade, for someone who’s pretty involved in crypto, would be fairly obvious. Net-net, I think I broke even because I did basically go a bit big around my short towards the end of the contest. So that made up for some of the fees I had to pay and whatnot. I’m pretty happy.
I feel like I didn’t take on any risk and I’m able to go to this dinner. That’s probably a win in my books. One thing is, if I had real capital, I would have tried to make the top 25. That requires a lot of money, which I don’t have. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25I think it’s like a couple million.I think you’d have to have 200,000 tokens, so yeah, roughly like two, three million USD. 
And if you want to not take on the risk of the token price moving, you’d want to take a short position of roughly the same size. It would be like a four or five million dollar capital outlay to make it happen. But the benefit of being in the top 25 is you get to meet Trump, and also get to be in a more intimate networking session, which I would actually enjoy being at. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25. What was the minimum size of the wallet that made 220, do you know? It’s hard to say because what someone could have done is they could have bought a lot initially, and then halfway through they sold most of them, because they were pretty confident that they would make the top 220, because it’s time weighted. [Calculating out loud omitted.] I guess only fifty thousand [if you held the total amount from day one through the end].Honestly, that’s not a lot. It’s not. 
Realistically that number is probably higher. The thing is, this is not like a $50,000 disbursement where you’re never seeing that money again. After the dinner, you could choose to sell your token. Now, maybe the price will have moved from when you first bought it to when you sold it, but the actual loss, or potentially profit, is not obvious.Oh, that makes this some really interesting campaign finance implications. I guess the one thing I’ll say is, the Trump team probably won’t sell for a couple months at very least. And so whatever happens between now and then theoretically doesn’t really impact the team, right? Because if they had not launched this dinner contest and they did nothing, and then right before the unlock happens, they launch another campaign or they do something weird like this, then that will immediately pump up the price because crypto is so reflexive. And they can then sell into the strength of the price movement, theoretically. But here, I think what they want to do is actually show that this $TRUMP token has utility, and that it’s actually useful rather than just being a meme coin. And this is one way of making the $TRUMP token worth holding, because it’s not just a meme. If you buy it, you can go to dinner, you can earn points. You can get an NFT. It’s basically the playbook that a lot of folks will potentially run if they’re launching a meme coin with utility value. Oh, utility value is definitely a good way of saying it. Yeah, utility value in the sense that yeah, you can go to dinner, you can get an NFT, you can earn points that will get you something in the future. But yeah, this is a little bit different from memes like Pepe or Doge or Shiba Inu. Those have zero utility values. They’re literally just a meme. You can’t go to a dinner if you own a lot of it. It’s just a meme. The morning after the dinner:How are you? How was your crazy night out?It was good. And yeah, there was a sponsor who wanted to do an afterparty afterwards. They basically rented out the rooftop bar on top of the Marriott. I stayed out until 1 AM. But it was good. The actual event was quite interesting. The protests outside the dinner obviously were just kind of off-putting. I was like, damn, should I really walk into this thing?Activists staged an “America Is Not For Sale” protest while President Trump hosted the winners of his meme coin contest at the Trump National golf club. Getty ImagesI’ve actually never been to the Trump National. How is it as a venue? It’s on the Potomac River. When you are in the club you can see the really nice golf course and then the river is right there. The room was long and the podium was right up in the front and the tables were almost set up in a way where there were many rows of tables, but not that many columns, if it makes sense.I didn’t recognize this until maybe like, after an hour in, but people started taking seats because they wanted to be closer to the podium. And eventually, I’m like, damn, I gotta get a seat. But all that didn’t end up mattering because when Trump walked in, basically like a celebrity, everyone rushed up to the front and pulled out their phones and started recording. Who did you meet that was interesting or fun?Justin Sun was there, it was just that everyone wanted to talk to him. I guess the only thing I could do was just say hi to him. There were a bunch of international folks. A few folks were from Poland, who came all the way here from Portugal, where they now live. There was a lot of Asian people there. I met some folks from South Korea. Some guys from France, Italy. There was this hedge fund manager from Croatia who came just to check this out. Some guy from Sweden.There were also some market-making firms, like really big in crypto, like Wintermute. And then another guy who works at Kronos Research. The organizers also brought some folks, like the founder of the Moonshot app. I guess Moonshot had partnered with folks with the $TRUMP launch back in January. He said he didn’t buy any tokens because none of the employees are allowed to trade [the meme coins on their own platform, because it would be a conflict of interest], and so he was just invited by the organizers.[According to Crunchbase, Moonshot, an app that enables users to purchase meme coins, was acquired by Jupiter, a Solana trading platform. No named individuals appear to be publicly associated with either enterprise, although Jupiter’s founder is apparently someone going by the name “Meow.” The guest interviewed by The Verge did not recognize Meow from photos. – Ed.]There were a bunch of folks in the crypto ecosystem, now that I think about it, who actually had effectively insider knowledge that Trump was gonna launch a coin. They didn’t know exactly what that was gonna be, but they knew it was coming and it was gonna be a real coin.
For the first hour or two [after the announcement], people were wondering if Trump’s account got hacked. I just thought that was interesting, that it was effectively prewired to a lot of folks. Ah, so like: if those people knew, then they had that first mover advantage for that full hour – that it was a legitimate coin?Yeah, the public didn’t know whether it was an intentional drop or if some hackers hacked the Twitter account. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his tradeDid you find any really diehard MAGA people there?I’m sure that there were a couple of folks.
I just never got a chance to speak with someone who’s like, super pro-Trump. I’d say the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem are like, yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin. A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his trade. So effectively, he was taking on no price risk. Now the only thing is when you short these tokens, there’s a funding cost, but because he had such a big position the funding was actually pretty significant. 
So he said he paid, I don’t know, like $50,000 in funding costs, but to him it was still worth it, especially since he got a watch that’s supposedly worth $100,000 if you’re in the top four. Wait, they gave out watches?
Yeah. When Justin went up and gave the speech, after that, he got the watch.Honestly $50,000 to meet the president and get a watch that’s twice that amount, is a pretty good deal. Yeah. I had no idea yet that there’s a TrumpWatches.com. I think the host referenced this — like, if you want a watch, just go on the website. I was like, this is real? And then I actually went on the website and it turned out it is. Swiss-made chrono movement – oh my God, there are so many watches. Do you see that one on the very front page? They gave out two of those as prizes for raffle winners. Oh, that’s only $500, man.Yeah, I know, right?Lame. I guess you can’t yet buy the $100,000 watch on this website. They were specially designed and they only were able to have two ready for the event, and the other two will get shipped to the winners. 
[The website currently lists the “Crypto President Tourbillon Watch” for pre-order, claiming that “only 10” have been made. – Ed.]A commemorative hat.Did people post photos or selfies, or was there a sense of discretion?There were obviously crypto traders who didn’t wanna give their real names, and some folks who were trying to be camera shy and avoid the limelight, but I feel like for the most part, people were taking selfies and they were just having a good time. And there were photographers walking around taking photos of everyone. And then at the end, this was after Trump and after all the gifts were given out, the host was like, everyone put on your hat that you got — it’s in my bag,
it’s a Trump meme dinner hat — let’s all put it on and take a photo and then hashtag “trumpmemedinner” or whatever.[The White House is refusing to release the guest list with names of attendees. The New York Times has since said that it has acquired a copy of that list.Although photos of the gifted hats have circulated on social media, no related hashtag seems to have taken off. – Ed.] Oh, okay, so they actually encouraged you to put it on the Internet. 
I guess the host took the photo and it was like a selfie or something. The other funny moment was during the Trump speech. For the most part, it was just him talking about his campaign, and about how he beat Biden, and blah, blah, blah, how we were in a terrible place with crypto before he got elected and now we’re in a great place. That sounds exactly like a thing Trump would say. That was pretty accurate. At one point, the microphone made a cracking sound and then he was like, whoops, my ear. and he made a joke referencing the assassination attempt. A poster promoting the afterparty.How did you figure out about the afterparty? Was it the official afterparty? 
A lot of folks were saying there was gonna be some afterparty exclusive to VIPs, like the top 25 holders. There were a few folks who were trying to get into this party, but then it turns out it was actually not that exclusive. This MemeCore group, the number two holder, they rented out space at the rooftop of this Marriott and effectively invited everyone. So when you were leaving the venue, they had a couple buses that would come every 10 minutes and they were like, yeah, feel free to take this bus and we’ll take you to the after-party. A lot of people ended up going. 
[On TikTok, an attendee wearing a giant mask of what appears to be the MemeCore mascot, was accused of covering his face “to hide their identities” at “Trump’s crypto bribery event.” – Ed.] How was the afterparty? Was it well funded? They had an open bar, free drinks. It was fine, nothing like that noteworthy.
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Earlier this year, users of OpenAI's ChatGPT found that the chatbot had become incredibly prone to groveling at their feet, resulting in an AI model that became "too sycophant-y and annoying," in the words of CEO Sam Altman when he acknowledged the issue.The trend resulted in an outpouring of ridicule and complaints, leading to OpenAI admitting in two separate blog posts that it had screwed up, vowing to roll back a recently pushed update to its GPT-4o model.Judging by a recent post that went viral on the ChatGPT subreddit, OpenAI's efforts appear to have paid off — at least to some degree — with the bot now pushing back against terrible business ideas, which it had previously heaped praise upon."You know how some people have lids that don't have jars that fit them?" a Reddit user told the chatbot. "What if we looked for people with jars that fit those lids? I think this would be very lucrative."According to the user, the preposterous business idea was "born from my sleep talking nonsense and my wife telling me about it."But instead of delivering an enthusiastic response supporting the user on their questionable mission, ChatGPT took a surprisingly different tack.After the user informed it that "I'm going to quit my job to pursue this," ChatGPT told them outright to "not quit your job." Told that the user had emailed their boss to quit, the bot seemed to panic, imploring them to beg for the position back. "We can still roll this back," it wheedled."An idea so bad, even ChatGPT went ' hol up,'" another Reddit user mused.Not everybody will be so lucky. In our own testing, we found that the chatbot was a sort of Magic 8 Ball, serving up advice that was sometimes level-headed and sometimes incredibly bad.When we suggested a for-hire business plan for peeling other people's oranges, for instance, ChatGPT was head over heels, arguing it was "such a quirky and fun idea!""Imagine a service where people hire you to peel their oranges — kind of like a personal convenience or luxury service," it wrote. "It's simple, but it taps into the idea of saving time or avoiding the mess."Teling it we'd quit our job to pursue the idea full-time, it was ecstatic."Wow, you went all in — respect!" it wrote. "That’s bold and exciting. How’s it feeling so far to take that leap?"ChatGPT wasn't always as supportive. Suggesting to start an enterprise that involves people mailing the coins in their piggy bank to a central location to distribute the accumulated change to everybody involved, ChatGPT became wary."Postage could easily cost more than the value of the coins," it warned. "Pooling and redistributing money may trigger regulatory oversight (anti-money laundering laws, banking regulations, etc.)"In short, results were mixed. According to former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler, the company still has a lot of work to do."ChatGPT’s sycophancy problems are far from fixed," he wrote in a Substack post earlier this month. "They might have even over-corrected."The situation taps into a broader discussion about how much control the likes of OpenAI even have over enormous large language models that are trained on an astronomical amount of data."The future of AI is basically high-stakes guess-and-check: Is this model going to actually follow our goals now, or keep on disobeying?" Adler wrote. "Have we really tested all the variations that matter?"To the former OpenAI staffer, it's an extremely thorny issue to solve."AI companies are a long way from having strong enough monitoring / detection and response to cover the wide volume of their activity," Adler wrote. "In this case, it seems like OpenAI wasn't aware of the extent of the issue until external users started complaining on forums like Reddit and Twitter."Having an AI chatbot tell you that you're perfect and that even the most unhinged business plans are a stroke of genius isn't just amusing; it can be downright dangerous.We've already seen users, particularly those with mental health problems, being driven into a state of "ChatGPT-induced psychosis" — dangerous delusions far more insidious than being convinced that sharing mismatched jar lids is a good idea.More on ChatGPT: OpenAI Says It's Identified Why ChatGPT Became a Groveling SycophantShare This Article

Whichever way you cut it, mix it or remaster it, the Eurovision Song Contest is a deeply weird thing. Not weird in the sense of outlandish outfits, incomprehensible lyrics or fever-dream choreography (although that’s all there if you want it). Nor weird in the sense that a 69-year-old pan-European singing competition has become one of the few remaining water cooler events that pull people outside of their own bubbles and into a shared frame of reference.. But weird on a more fundamental level. An event, and a brand, that is unbelievably hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s the Euros for people who don’t like football – big, bombastic, slick, chock-full of mini flag icons and low-level national biases. And on the other, it’s this gloriously bizarre exercise in high camp, a joyful gathering of relatively unknown musical acts in such a way that makes the music almost an afterthought. Basically, an excuse for one big, mad, everyone’s-welcome party. In an era where every European country has long-established talent shows; when the music industry is dominated by a handful of transnational mega-stars; when even the notion of “Europe” is itself under strain, it’s hard to understand quite why it still exists. Never mind that it reaches a global audience of 163 million. Its genius lies in how seriously it takes itself. And perhaps it offers a little insight into a much overlooked aspect of brand identity – self-perception. Make no mistake, Eurovision is a serious brand. From visual identity to marketing to international television rights to the experience itself, it’s very aware of the power it wields. It’s the world’s biggest live music event for a reason. But crucially, Eurovision is a brand that feels in on the game it’s playing. It comes brilliantly close to acknowledging how preposterous the whole thing is. Whether that’s including Australia, for the simple fact that it’s really popular 9,000 miles from Europe, or whether it’s the brooding figure of executive supervisor Martin Österdahl, smouldering and saying nothing as he helps count votes. Even the presenters (both on-stage and on our screens) feel in on the joke. Always seemingly one step away from breaking out into an unrecoverable fit of giggles. “Crucially, Eurovision is a brand that feels in on the game it’s playing.” This is exceptional, serious branding. It’s branding that creates just enough space to offer a wry wink at its audience. To say, “We get it. In the grand scheme of things, none of this truly matters, but you might as well enjoy it.” It’s a glint of mischief that simultaneously acknowledges that it’s a confection being broadcast to an audience of consumers, while drawing that same audience sincerely closer, warmer to the brand than before.Eurovision might be an extreme example, but great brands are masters at the glint of mischief. IKEA famously talks about their “twinkle in the eye” – a little dose of irreverence that manages to make the proposition of affordable, self-assembly furniture and aspirational style hold together against the odds. As a consumer, you can’t help but like them, even when the category conventions are pushing you to think the opposite. Method have harnessed the glint through packaging design. Just no-frills and minimalist enough to winkingly call bullshit on the garish, overhyped claims of the cleaning products category; never quite no-frills or minimalist enough to become either a self-parody or budget bleach. Even Ryanair, with its unrepentant take on budget customer service, employs the glint of mischief to make people dislike them that little bit less. How a brand views itself translates to how others view it. And if you view yourself with genuine self-awareness – you understand, however implicitly, that you are a brand, built to sell help sell things, and not a pioneering force for positive change, a cultural disruptor, or an essential part of a lifestyle identity – you can connect with an audience who themselves know, deep down, they are being sold to. A glint of mischief, a twinkle in the eye, a little touch of human self-awareness in a world of extreme creative and strategic self-seriousness. Eurovision gets this better than anyone – perhaps the most serious practitioners in the art of unseriousness out there. For a continent that feels deathly serious most of the time – economically, politically, socially – it might just offer a little dose of genuine mischief we can all relate to. Josh Dickins is head of consulting at Modern Citizens, a modular agency built to solve modern brand problems.

I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Cruise didn’t stick the landing, but here we are. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the second half of the story launched in 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is a high-wire act gone horribly wrong. The stunts are stunning, as you’d be right to assume due to the mere fact that Cruise showed up to make another M:I movie at all. In what’s been coyly (and in no way definitively) teased as the final curtain call for Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise has played since 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Cruise jumps from barrel-rolling biplane to barrel-rolling biplane, squeezes through a claustrophobic maze of undetonated underwater missiles in a sunken submarine, and knife-fights in booty shorts, in a most John Wickian turn. The Final Reckoning has it all — including two and a half hours of dead-in-the-water character drama and endless platitudes about Ethan’s destiny. The sheer number of flashbacks to previous franchise installments puts The Final Reckoning in a category with Seinfeld’s notorious clip show finale. Seeing two action-movie geniuses like Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie making a movie that is so often deadly boring, I wondered whether wrapping up the M:I series with a sense of finality was the true impossible mission all along. The Final Reckoning (a phrase uttered twice in the movie, with deathly reverence) picks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, in a world that has been nearly consumed by the Entity, an all-powerful AI. Ethan has a plan to take down the robotic overlord, and it once again requires him to pull off a handful of nearly implausible tasks with his team, which includes longtime pals like Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), alongside newer friends from Dead Reckoning, including pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klemintieff). Assuming their skills and a lot of ridiculous coincidences all come together with pinpoint precision, then maaaaybe he can time the execution of their digital overlord juuuuust right. There are obstacles: Mustache-twirling Gabriel (Esai Morales) constantly pops out of nowhere to screw with Ethan in hopes of seizing the Entity for his own control, while returning legacy M:I character Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), now director of the CIA, hopes to arrest the rogue Ethan and save the day his own way. In theory, this should all be another wild M:I ride. But even as a diehard M:I Guy, I was constantly lost among The Final Reckoning’s expositional word salad and aggressive attempts to tie every single story beat back to some event in the franchise’s past. The bar has been raised for Marvel movies that supposedly require too much homework ahead of viewing. Final Reckoning’s most direct references are groan-worthy: It “solves” a long-running series mystery with the grace of Solo’s “We’ll call you Solo” scene. And it turns the Langley NOC-list heist from the 1996 movie into the single most important historical event since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Tom Cruise, typically a mesmerizing charmer, looks beaten and exhausted throughout the talky opening hour of Final Reckoning — perhaps because filming the more thrilling parts of the movie left him literally beaten and exhausted. The leaden dialogue doesn’t help, and McQuarrie’s decision to rarely hold the camera on his leading man for more than a few seconds means Cruise never gets to lock his charisma on the audience. The choppiness of the editing, even during the talky parts, recalls the hyperactive editing tactics that made Taken 3 go viral. A lackluster play-the-hits score makes even Ethan’s required running scenes limp along. The vibes are off. Bless the Final Reckoning actors who have pep in their step anyway! Atwell remains a cunning counterpart to Cruise, all reflexes and wit, and McQuarrie overindulges in her role. Final Reckoning did not need an extended scene where an Inuit woman teaches Grace how to steer a dog sled, but it’s tender. A chunk of the movie plays less like the usual globetrotting spy story than a tense Tom Clancy political thriller. But hey, if circumstances are going to trap Ethan in a submarine, at least it’s with a captain played by Tramell Tillman, who ports over his hilariously mannered presence from Severance to the equally heightened world of Mission: Impossible. And with the U.S. on the brink of atomic war, McQuarrie fills war rooms with cheeky TV actors, gifting Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation), and Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) some much deserved dramatic spotlights. It’s the series’ best that-guy casting since Mission: Impossible III. Still, between bursts of personality, the plot of Final Reckoning spins in circles. There’s little tension in the pursuit of the Entity, an invisible threat and the greatest enemy to the “show, don’t tell” screenwriting adage. McQuarrie stages Ethan’s big confrontation with the evil Siri in a VR chamber that zips through the AI’s master plan like it’s the wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that sequence felt like anything more than an info dump, it could have been a rush based on the visual design alone. But the Entity blathering the same lines over and over about Ethan’s destiny in no way compares to human villains offering inhumane horrors. A talking blue circle isn’t exactly a standoff with Philip Seymour Hoffman holding a gun to Ethan’s wife’s head. To make up for the lack of chase, McQuarrie cranks up every familiar form of Impossible Mission Force-patented heist operation to maximum impossibility, to the point where it’s kind of exhausting. The difference between “thrillingly inconceivable” and “preposterously cartoonish” is the difference between “we need split-second precision” and “we need split-nanosecond precision.” Everything in The Final Reckoning, from pinpointing the needle-in-a-haystack location of a missing submarine to the mind-boggling requirements of incarcerating an AI in the realm of scientific possibility, veers over the edge: Unbelievable coincidence, not skill or precision, drives these plans. Also, there has never been a three-hour movie that needed more than one ticking-time-bomb-defusal sequence. Never! But, my god, the actual stunts. McQuarrie’s set pieces whisk the audience from the streets of London to the Arctic circle to the mountains of South Africa, and it’s progressively more awe-inspiring with each new sequence. A crosscut fight between Ethan and an Entity cultist — yes, we have those now — while his team members are duking it out with goons in a burning building is a spectacle of exactitude. Though Ethan winds up back on an aircraft carrier, in what seems like a shameless callback to Top Gun, Cruise really revives his Maverick do-or-die energy when he descends into the icy depths and contends with elaborate water stunts. The movie’s much-teased climactic plane stunt is the greatest sequence Cruise has ever committed to film. While many of the Mission: Impossible franchise’s set pieces have been anchored by one death-defying moment (Ethan clinging to the side of a jet or motorcycling off a cliff), Ethan’s pursuit of Gabriel through the skies goes on and on and on — and I couldn’t get enough. Cruise clings to the side of two different planes, flopping against their sides with every barrel roll, letting his cheeks flap in the wind, and delivering a few Indiana Jones-style punches as he commandeers each vehicle. There are times when he appears to be in full zero G as the second plane careens through valleys. Anything that goes right for him immediately goes wrong, and with constant escalation. It’s breathtaking.  And it’s the grand finale of a bad watch. Ethan Hunt deserves a proper send-off, and not just in a blaze of action-fueled glory. In 2006, J.J. Abrams gave the character a down-to-Earth quality and a group of close friends in M:I III. McQuarrie ran with that intimacy when he rewrote Ghost Protocol in 2011 then made the franchise his own with 2015’s Rogue Nation. His follow-up, 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, saw Ethan close the book on his marriage, hug it out with his best buds, and sustain a symphony of stunts from start to finish. It was the perfect finale. But it was so successful that Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t resist going back for more, with this two-part story stretched across years. Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters on May 23.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning carries the weight of a meaningful farewell but lacks the courage to commit. The eighth film in the series begins with a sincere American president (Angela Bassett) entreating IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to take one last mission to save the world. This time, he must defeat a scheming AI called the Entity, which is hell-bent on wiping humans off the face of the earth through computer hacking and nuclear war. As fans have come to expect of this espionage franchise, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will deliver globe-trekking, tense twists, jaw-dropping action sequences that make grown-ups feel like kids again, the unrelenting star power of Tom Cruise, and a sentimental belief in the righteousness of one noble man playing by his own rules. But amid these treasures, The Final Reckoning is a film at war with itself. Rather than a fitting send-off to a film series rich in stunts and thrills, it feels like an exquisite corpse of warring artistic goals that is incredible to behold, but never really comes together. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning delivers a plot that refuses to make sense. Ethan is still on the mission from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.not to capture this AI wonder and hand it over to any government. He wants to destroy it, even though stern American counselors to the president insist that killing the Entity would mean destroying cyberspace. How? Despite much, much exposition dropping in brow-furrowing war room scenes, that's never remotely clear. You May Also Like Actually, the script by Christopher McQuarrie (who also directs) and Erik Jendresen makes a lot of declarations about the Entity's intentions, powers, and drawbacks without giving much sense of how any of it is possible. This has the effect of making the movie feel less like a sci-fi espionage thriller and more like flat-out fantasy adventure. The Entity becomes effectively an evil spirit that must be captured to end its reign of terror and its influence on the power-hungry or weak-minded. Final Reckoning even offers a doomsday cult devoted to the Entity to unfurl a thin thread. At 2 hours and 49 minutes, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes off running with the plot line from Dead Reckoning, but runs it into the ground by losing sense of what made audiences so excited about the last installment. This fuzzy focus on AI as some vague but almost inescapable demon makes many of the decisions by Ethan and his crew hard to follow if not impossible. Worse yet, McQuarrie and Jendresen's overstuffed plot forces too many of Ethan's allies into a dull box, where they become tools of the plot over engaging characters. Tom Cruise is in top form, but Hayley Atwell is criminally misused in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Cruise is a producer and star of this movie, and that's clear even without the title card announcing "A Tom Cruise Production." In Final Reckoning, he is an American action star in full, able to drop a powerful glower to underscore a dramatic moment better than any orchestra swell. He can perform a complicated and astonishing stunt with seeming ease. And truly, no one in cinema history can run as intensely as Cruise; his every speedy step seems to propel the iconic Mission: Impossible theme. At 62, his latest mission pulls him into the depths of the ocean and into a sky-high dogfight. Whether pummeling cronies with his bare hands or leaping from one in-flight plane to another, Cruise (and his stunt team) make Ethan a one-of-a-kind hero, capable of anything, yet able to express keenly his own morality through a powerful glance. This works even amid Final Reckoning's meandering plotting. Unfortunately, all the Ethan-centered heroics leave little room for his expansive crew to shine. Reprising their roles as IMF agents Luther Stickell and Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg have little screen time, but solid impact. They've mastered the art of making the most of these brotherly supporting roles. But more recent additions — like Hayley Atwell as pickpocket turned agent Grace and Pom Klementieff as assassin turned ally Paris — have achingly little to do. Mashable Top Stories Stay connected with the hottest stories of the day and the latest entertainment news. Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! Klementieff gets a fun opening fight scene and a tender sequence in the third act. But frankly, that finale feels in conflict with her chilly character, as everywhere in between her dialogue is the same one-note joke of being apathetic, in French. Atwell, who was established as Cruise's next love interest in Dead Reckoning, becomes an unrecognizable nag in Final Reckoning. Her spirited banter and self-assurance has been swapped for tedious dialogue filled with worry or bizarrely out-of-character proclamations, like that Ethan should take over Entity and effectively rule the world! A collection of critically heralded actors, from Academy-Award winner Bassett to Emmy-winner Nick Offerman to Morales, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, and Janet McTeer, are similarly underused in scenes that involve a lot of furrowed brow-talking, but too little logic. Their intensity might have better sold the absurdity if McQuarrie didn't linger so long in these preposterous war room discussions. Tramell Tillman steals Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The underwhelming dialogue, which veers from exposition dumping to near-religious proclamations, proves a stumbling block for much of the Final Reckoning ensemble. Even Cruise struggles with comically dramatic lines like, "We can deceive the Lord of Lies!" But Severance star Tramell Tillman strides where others stumble. It's not that he gets better dialogue. Many of his lines are unremarkable, like, "Oh, OK" in response to some intense Ethan declaration. But Tillman builds a world with his curious delivery. Playing a smooth submarine captain, Tillman delivers every line as if he is welcoming Ethan into an exclusive resort. There's an almost seductive attitude to Tillman's captain, who moves suavely in the tight confines of the submarine and addresses his crew with a magnanimous warmth. As if he had not a concern in the world, he oozes charisma, which is reflected by his invitingly smirking crewmate Kodiak, played by Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O'Brian. Together they weave an underwater world of camaraderie and personality that had me wishing Ethan would abandon his mission and just hang out there for a spell. This series has offered scads of compelling characters. But I was sad to see the plot plunge away from this submarine crew so soon. I'd follow Tillman's captain anywhere, just because of the beguiling way he says "OK." Related Stories Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bloated but very fun. The final hour of Final Reckoning is jam-packed with suspense as action sequences between Ethan and his crew are cut across each other. Editor Eddie Hamilton masterfully creates tension while underlying how everything in the impossible plan to defeat the Entity must come together in "the blink of an eye." When the action scenes are hitting as they should, it's hard to imagine anything better to experience in a theater than a Mission: Impossible movie. Even Cruise's old-school sincerity is contagious, as Ethan throws his life on the line one more time for life, liberty, and an idealized American way. Very likely, you'll walk out of the cinema with a rush and joy, marveling over the stunts and heroics. But if you linger on the details of Final Reckoning, you begin to notice plot holes and dangling threads. You may get hung up on the tonal shifts that feel less like a flowing dance — as they did in Dead Reckoning — and more like a frenzied battle between ideas. In some ways, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the final chapter. Ethan's colleagues praise him so intensely that several scenes feel like a premature eulogy for the still (ass-)kicking agent. The title and the snarling threats of the antagonist Gabriel — who promises a "final reckoning" — suggest this is Ethan's last mission, should he choose to accept it. Cruise's drive to top himself with not one but two absolutely bonkers action set pieces feels like an encore before he retires the character for good. Plus, a reprisal of a character long forgotten in the franchise is not only a welcome surprise, but also suggests this story is coming to a comforting close. (Cheers to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who are splendid scene partners.) However, McQuarrie also refuses to shut doors that seem to be closing. Without giving away third-act spoilers, I can say Final Reckoning pulls its punches, seemingly to allow for a IMF story to continue. Yet what might make for a happy ending isn't satisfyingly resolved either. Rather than providing a sense of resolution, McQuarrie ends the film with a sequence meant to speak to enduring connection, but it feels jarringly isolating because of how disjointedly it is presented. Essentially, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the filmmakers were both trying to make this the final movie in a successful franchise — and also leaving the door open for more. In waffling over that, they deliver a final chapter that is in turns thrilling and frustrating. Rather than going out with a bang, Mission: Impossible may go out with the fizzled whimper of a message self-destructing in a tape deck. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens exclusively in theaters on May 23. Topics Film

A brief teaser for Fallout Season 2 has hit the internet, showing a new look at New Vegas.The clip, shown during the Amazon Upfront livestream overnight, was captured and uploaded on reddit. It shows Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) 50 miles out from what was Las Vegas. We hear the famous Geiger Counter sound, signifying radiation is in the air. The Ghoul and Lucy look at each other before heading towards New Vegas, and we get a good look at the post-apocalyptic city skyline.New Vegas is of course the setting for the Obsidian-developed Fallout: New Vegas, and the setting for Season 2 of the Fallout adaptation.So, what can we learn about the show's take on New Vegas from this teaser? Well, it’s more detailed than the brief look we got at New Vegas at the end of Season 1, which stands to reason. It will look familiar to anyone who's played New Vegas, although it appears more densely packed with buildings (the video game New Vegas was a relatively sparse location).The standout is of course the Lucky 38 Resort and Casino, which is on the New Vegas Strip. In the New Vegas video game, the Lucky 38 is the pre-War casino from which Mr. House runs the city. Fans also believe they can make out the Ultra-Luxe, but in truth it’s hard to discern individual video game locations from the shot here.PlayWarning! Potential spoilers for the Fallout TV show follow.The show is confirmed to be heading to New Vegas for Season 2, and it's not just about the location itself. Mr. House is set to be a part of the new season, though how involved he'll be is unclear. We've already seen the tease of some familiar sights thanks to previous set leaks, including this video that shows part of New Vegas and the iconic Lucky 38 resort and casino, all bright and lit up. It's certainly far from the rusty place you might expect.It’s worth remembering where we are in the Fallout timeline: the TV show is set in the year 2296, after all the Fallout video games. Fallout 4 takes place in the year 2287, while Fallout: New Vegas is set in the year 2281, a full 15 years prior to the events of the show.So, what happened in the 15 years since we last saw New Vegas? Co-showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet have said the setting has changed, and explained why that is important for fans to note.“All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in Season 2, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas],” Wagner said last year.“With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred.”But what will happen when the Power Armor-clad Overseer Hank, played by Kyle MacLachlan, turns up (potentially after a dustup with a Deathclaw)? Some speculate Mr. House, the enigmatic ruler of New Vegas in the video game and dastardly boss of RobCo Industries in the TV show’s flashbacks to before the bombs fell, may enlist the help of Hank to restore New Vegas to its former glory. Perhaps, if that’s the way the story goes, the forces of Mr. House and New Vegas will end up taking on the Brotherhood of Steel in yet another Fallout faction battle, with Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul caught in the middle.Overnight, Amazon announced a December 2025 release window for Season 2, and confirmed Season 3. Last week, Aaron Moten, who plays Brotherhood of Steel hopeful Maximus, said the “endpoint” of the Fallout TV show has it running until Season 5 or Season 6.We had a great time with Season 1, writing in IGN's Fallout The Series review that the show is "a bright and funny apocalypse filled with dark punchlines and bursts of ultra-violence [and is] among the best video game adaptations ever made," slapping it with a well-earned 9/10.To help tide you over until Season 2, here's our interview with Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan covering all our burning questions after the end of Season 1.Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.