LAS VEGAS — “We often talk about baseball games as a metric for where we are, and we’re literally in the first inning,” one of the Winklevoss twins gloats. “And this game’s going to overtime.”
It’s the first day of Bitcoin 2025, industry day here at the largest cryptocurrency conference in the world. This Winklevoss is sharing the stage with the other one, plus Donald Trump’s newly appointed crypto and AI czar David Sacks. They are in the midst of a victory lap, laughing with the free ease of men who know they have it made. The mangled baseball metaphor neither lands nor elicits laughs, but that’s fine. He’s earned, or at any rate acquired, the right to be wrong.
This year’s Bitcoin Conference takes place amid a boom, the same month the price of a single coin stabilized above $100,000 for the first time. More than 35,000 people have descended on Las Vegas in the final week of May for the conference: bitcoin miners, bitcoin dealers, several retired athletes, three U.S. senators, two Trump children, one U.S. vice president, people who describe themselves as “content creators,” people who describe themselves as “founders,” venture capitalists, ex-IDF bodyguards, tax-dodging experts, crypto heretics, evangelists, paladins, Bryan Johnson, Eric Adams, and me, trying to figure out what they were all doing there together. I’m in Vegas talking to as many people as I can in order to conduct an assay of the orange pill. What is the argument for bitcoin, exactly? Who is making it, and why?
Here is the part of the story where I am supposed to tell you it’s all a fraud. I am supposed to point out that nobody has come up with a use case for blockchain technology in 17 years beyond various forms of money laundering; that half of these people have been prosecuted for one financial crime or another; that the game is rigged in favor of the casino and those who got there before you; that this is an onerous use of energy; that all the mystification around bitcoin is a fog intended to draw in suckers where they can be bled. All that stuff is true, but the trick is that being true isn’t quite the same thing as mattering.
The bitcoin people are winning. A bunch of them have made a staggering amount of money, and they alone hold power after the crypto collapse of 2022 and 2023. Their Hobbesian vision of the world continues to draw adherents as the atomizing effects of the digital world reach something like maturity. The old arguments don’t work on converts, as the most critical aspect of the accumulative logic of bitcoin is its capacity to resist rationality. Bitcoin is an argument for itself, an ouroboric entity whose contradictions are transmuted into mystic truths by what is essentially a series of acts of faith.
Born out of a common disgust with and alienation from the social and institutional structures of our world, bitcoin has found its ideal vessel in Donald Trump. Now that the world’s most powerful person is on its side, its relationship with the world’s most powerful organization has flipped from hostility to warm mutual embrace. “The enemy of your enemy is often your friend,” Eric Trump says onstage Wednesday. “And that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.” The Bitcoin Conference is foremost a wedding, celebrating bitcoin’s marriage with the broader Trump project.
The alliance has taken the coin’s profiteers to new heights, but the arrangement is not without its tensions. Bitcoin is a fundamentally anti-state project, thus its relationship with the U.S. government is not perfectly symbiotic. So where does this go? With newfound power and the means to exercise it, what world does bitcoin want to build for itself?
Strolling through the prefab opulence of the conference hall at the Venetian resort and casino, the first thing the non-initiate will notice at the Bitcoin conference is the language, memetic in both form and function, creating a thick yet permeable barrier between the bitcoiners and the no-coiners. Attendees and presenters—mostly men, nearly everyone rigorously straight-presenting—favor a patois of dense financial jargon and internal memes: KYC, DYOR, WAGMI, HODL. They wear dozens of distinct bitcoin-themed variations on the classic MAGA hat. Companies exhibiting in the sprawling expo center adhere diligently to the BlockFi crypto compound-word Mad Libs naming convention (e.g.: FinTax, NiceHash, BlocksBridge).
Everything is on its way to the moon and everyone is all-in. Nothing is financial advice. The number 21 (for the 21 million bitcoins that will ever be created) is sacred and everything is festooned in orange, the official color of bitcoin. Pseudonymous bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is deified and declared to have a number of different identities, including that of a Miami Heat player. People want former SEC chairman Gary Gensler to take Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s place in prison.
From the outside, everything inside can look extremely complicated. Non-bitcoin people say all the time that they don’t understand it. They see some people get rich, some people lose money, hear stories about crypto people getting arrested, and square the contradictions away by assuming that there is some abstruse technical specification or arcane digital truth that they simply don’t have sufficient processing power to grasp.
Is bitcoin an asset or is it a mechanism? I expected speakers to attempt to mount a coherent use case for bitcoin that distinguished it from its potential as a store of value, though asking for one perhaps misses an obvious point, or assumes a distinction no longer in evidence. Bitcoin’s use case is as an alternative asset, because it’s a bet on something that only can be said to exist in the most abstract sense—similar to how the performance of Tesla stock has less to do with car sales than with a collective confidence in Elon Musk’s ability to warp reality. Bitcoin takes this logic of applied surreality and pushes it to its extreme. It is a bet on the belief that you can create something by believing in it. The mystification—or obfuscation—itself is an onboarding mechanism.
Once you realize everything about bitcoin is as simple as it seems, you also might start to think that you can leverage that information asymmetry to take people’s money. Most people who buy bitcoin lose money; this can be an even more powerful onboarding event, once you realize that even people like you, people smart enough to have supposedly figured it all out, can be taken for suckers. With your investment underwater, the only way out is through. You have to believe in bitcoin as something bigger. On the inside, the linguistic function is the communal reaffirmation of that faith.
I link up with a trio of people from publications whose names you’d recognize; the composition of the Bitcoin Conference’s press corps is striking, even though the credentialed press’s assigned role here is to serve as bitcoin’s public relations organ. “Are you guys on Rumble?” a Robinhood employee asks me at a dinner when I introduce myself as a reporter. “Or do you have a show on X?” When I tell him my deal and ask him about his, his face falls; he inches his wrist-banded hand behind his back and quickly leaves the table. His questions are based on a sensible set of assumptions: Most of the people wearing press passes are bitcoin podcasters or NewsMax or Rumble apparatchiks, the sort who’d stand and clap as JD Vance promises, “We’ll do great things together for our industry, but most importantly for the cause of personal freedom and the United States of America.”
Not everyone here is a bitcoin maxi. The most interesting person I meet is a producer named Leeland who hustled his way into working with YouTubers like this diving guy through sheer force of skill and intelligence; he says that MrBeast’s team came to him with the challenge of figuring out whether he could throw a Tesla into a volcano (there were too many hurdles, though he did help out with a different video and he did figure out which pairing of Tesla vehicle and volcano would have been the most feasible). He is not a bitcoin hardcore; he is networking, trying to hustle his way in front of Donald Trump, rightly figuring this for a good place to start. He says crypto people make great investors because they love to gamble. In my experience poking around the casino floor, this is not quite as true in the classical sense as in the financial.
The structure of the Bitcoin Conference is implicitly hierarchical, mirroring the sucker-exploiter dynamic of crypto itself. Attendees could spend a couple hundred dollars of U.S. fiat currency for a ticket or five figures for a whale pass. Both press and prole are barred from whale events; from talking to several whales, the pass’s purpose and appeal is as a passage to premium networking opportunities. The first day was for the people who matter, and the second and third days were for the masses. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the tone and message differed between the days, as did the composition and vibe of the parties.
Tuesday, which is themed Code + Country day, fetes Donald Trump as crypto’s savior, most oleaginously in the Sacks and Winklevii panel, which concerns itself exclusively with a dinner Sacks held for Trump. He lists his boss’s achievements: Trump pardoned Ulbricht (among many other people imprisoned on various crypto-adjacent charges); formalized the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve; dismantled Gensler’s regulation-by-enforcement regime; and was pushing the GENIUS Act, which, per Vance, is essential because “regulatory uncertainty in this country has pushed way too much stablecoin activity overseas.”
Every government insider talks about stablecoins, which is mildly contradictory for a conference about a different cryptocurrency. Think of stablecoins as casino chips. In theory each stablecoin is backed by some hard currency in reserve, as a casino chip is backed by cash, and the stablecoin can be used to buy other cryptocurrencies or store value. The GENIUS Act would provide clear rules on the collateralization of stablecoins, incentivizing stablecoin issuers to back their products with dollars and buy tons of U.S. treasuries. “We view them as a force multiplier of our economic might,” Vance says. “Dollar-pegged stablecoins, particularly once GENIUS is enacted, are only going to help the American economy.”
The largest stablecoin in the world is Tether, which holds 70 percent of market share and is theoretically backed by $153 billion in reserve. Things have shifted: Six months ago, Tether founder Paolo Ardoino would not have set foot on U.S. soil, due to the threat of prosecution; now he gives two talks at the Bitcoin Conference. He says nothing about the audit that people have demanded of his company for years, though he does compare bitcoin to Goku and Tether to Vegeta.
While categorically pro-crypto, the GENIUS Act is not bitcoin maximalism. It’s an attempt to use cryptocurrency to prop up the dollar. “That’s a very different proposition than the libertarian one that this is an alternative to the dollar,” says Mike Benz—former Trump State Department official and alleged psuedonomyous espouser of takes like, “If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West, white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do”—on Thursday. “I think there’s this schism between a lot of folks in the retail part of the bitcoin community and the institutional and government layers.”
This tension explains the relationship between the bitcoin people and Trump, a guy who was a big-time crypto hater until he learned that it’s one of the most efficient mechanisms for yoinking people’s money. He and his wretched sons conceive of the crypto community as their shock troops. An industry that owes both record-high prices and its continued existence to his acceptance will do anything for him, even if its leaders don’t necessarily love everything about him. I got the sense that while the majority of bitcoin people were down with the broader Trump agenda, some loathed him or were only in as far as supporting his agenda of vulgar desovietization.
“Crypto got Donald Trump elected,” says Greg Grzesiak, an agent and manager who works with many of the biggest people in crypto and personally favors more political balance. “110 million crypto people voted for him.” Dubious math aside, Grzesiak points to Trump’s talk at Bitcoin 2024 as the most important factor in the election. He also tells me a story about meeting the then-candidate before that speech, which came two weeks after a would-be assassin winged (or eared) Trump at a speech in Pennsylvania; Trump was apparently going around the room wagging his mangled ear at people and doing a little comedy routine about it.
We’re talking at the America250 VIP reception, which is held at a fancy pool club on Tuesday night. The first thing you see when you enter is a wall with two disembodied hands, each offering you a glass of champagne. Over one is the logo of TRON, a cryptocurrency minted by the notorious fraudster Justin Sun, a man who, like Ardoino, is here in Vegas but would not have returned to U.S. soil before Trump got the SEC to drop its lawsuit against him this past February. One might wonder how the world’s preferred cryptocurrency for lawbreaking might legally be affiliated with a theoretically bipartisan birthday party commission. For no reason at all, here I will mention that Sun also happens to own some $23 million in $TRUMP, the president’s corruption mechanism/memecoin.
Bathroom attendants offer two flavors of Zyn for the discerning gentleman. The open bars are sparsely used, and I don’t see anyone tip the bartenders. Most people are here to network, not to party—not even when surprise guest Bone Thugs-n-Harmony comes out for a set. The crowd views the venerable hip hop group, to the extent it views them at all, with bland indifference, ignoring repeated requests to put their hands in the air. Adjacent to the stage, a group of stern men in business costumes all but smoke their cigars at Bone Thugs. A compatriot reports that these men are the executive team of Steak ‘n Shake, who have recently made a big right-wing cultural pivot by announcing their restaurants will cook their fries in beef tallow and accept bitcoin as payment. In a final indignity, 21 dancers in cow costumes dance around on stage with Bone Thugs as they rap “1st of Tha Month.” The point was ostentation: not to enjoy the music, but to be seen in possession of it.
It’s a useful visual metaphor for the bitcoin community’s relationship to culture and, more broadly, taste. So many presenters gleefully embrace the busted aesthetics and uncanny smoothness of AI art. My first instinct upon arrival in Vegas was to sneer coastily at the prevalence of business casual–via-Burning Man outfits and note how many attendees are dressed like they are at the airport, even at the parties. I feel a familiar vertigo in the museum section of the expo, viewing paintings depicting scheming cabals of elites sneering at bitcoin symbology. They may as well have had the word JEWISH written above them.
What I was seeing was not bad taste—or, not only or exclusively bad taste—but, taken collectively, an assiduous rejection of the tenets of popular art and mass culture in favor of an internally defined, idiosyncratic suite of cultural and aesthetic values. It’s not that the bitcoiners don’t know that many people would think an AI rendering of a giant bitcoin resting against the pillars of the Supreme Court building looks like shit. They consider mainstream revulsion a feature, a sign that the image is made by and for those who get it. Their goal is not to reconcile bitcoin culture and aesthetics to the mainstream, but to reaffirm the barrier between them, and eventually to replace the mainstream altogether.
Las Vegas—the Las Vegas Strip’s busted simulacrum of America, specifically—thus seems like the perfect venue for the Bitcoin Conference and the chintzy revolution it proposes. The Strip presents a narrow, forced-perspective illusion of freedom, a tiny strait threaded through massifs of exploitation that leaves you with only the freedom to consume, and only for as long as it takes for you to be consumed. It is in theory walkable, though it’s a grotesque vision of accessibility: the would-be pedestrian forced to undertake an odyssey through various casinos and luxury shopping malls, and onto permanently broken escalators populated by people who do not understand you can walk on a moving staircase or faster than 0.1 miles per hour. The underpinning logics of both the strip and of bitcoin are equally extractive.
If the America250 party was for the whales, the party we go to on Wednesday is for regular people. It’s being thrown by a bitcoin-mining hardware company and supposedly is sponsored by Maxim, though a fellow reporter learns that organizer Scot Johnson has merely paid Maxim‘s owner—Sardar Biglari, who also owns Steak ‘n Shake—to license the name. I ask Johnson what he was going for with the party, and he grins and says, “Bitches and alcohol.”
The bar is not open but it is slammed; hired models are taking pictures with people in front of a Maxim-branded background. Everyone seems to be there to party and talk about bitcoin mining in equal measure. As for the latter: All you need to know is that nobody offers a very compelling answer to my stupid question, “What happens when all the bitcoin gets mined?” We all have to hurl ourselves back out onto the Strip at midnight, as the venue is only rented out for a few hours.
A variety of speakers throughout the conference repeat a story Trump told in that 2024 speech: that they, like he, came to embrace crypto because the financial and social structures of the normal world punished them. So many speakers had endured criminal or regulatory scrutiny. Saylor paid $40 million last year to settle a tax fraud case. Nigel Farage had a bank account briefly shut down because he was too racist. Adams was of course indicted for loving the nation of Turkey and its state-owned airline too much. The theme is that the dominant financial/political regime is breaking its own rules to target crypto people because their worldview represents a fundamental threat.
Any prosecution is proof—not of guilt, but of purity of heart. To be punished is to be or have been a threat to the supposedly evil, arbitrary logic of the institutional system; the punishment proves that the system can’t coexist alongside the entrepreneurial wizardry of the bitcoin set. This cancelation-as-badge-of-honor logic follows that of their aesthetics. “Every single person in here got those calls,” Eric Trump says of his accounts being shut down, to a room full of people who definitely did not get those calls.
“You guys are the Betsy Ross of today,” Eric Adams tells a confused room of people at a private dinner-club party hosted by former child star, alleged sex criminal, and Puerto Crypto kingpin Brock Pierce. In Adams’s gnarled formulation, he and apparently also “you guys,” like America’s most legendary upholsterer, came from the working class and yet achieved greatness. He underscores this in his talk by going line-by-line through the “Star Spangled Banner”—a song, after all, written about the flag Betsy Ross famously stitched and somewhat less famously did not stitch—and connecting it back to his personal journey from prosecution to the welcoming arms of bitcoin. After Adams wraps up, Pierce sets about attempting to film an episode of his Shark Tank ripoff CryptoKnights in the crowded restaurant space, interrupting filming multiple times to scream at everyone to please shut the fuck up.
Silicon Valley creature Bryan Johnson spoke on stage on Tuesday and then at the same club on Wednesday, talking through the tenets of his quest for immortality. He began with some crowd work, going around the room and lightly admonishing the attendees for eating carbs, before expounding at length on the need to get good sleep, measure and index everything about your body, and exercise. If you’re wondering whether he talked about his son’s erections, and whether he brought up the topic himself without being explicitly asked about it: Yes he did, and yes, he did.
Johnson is, at first blush, a curious inclusion at the Bitcoin Conference. He owns some bitcoin, though his work has nothing to do with crypto and even—where that work concerns mobile and web payment systems such as Venmo—clashes with crypto’s ideological pillars. Someone at the talk asked him how to square one’s need to live, have fun, and of course grind to build the bitcoin future with a desire not to die; in response Johnson basically said everyone in the room was a delusional addict who needed to get serious about immortality right now before it was too late. I asked him if he dreamed, and he said he had all his best ideas while dreaming, which made sense to me, as that’s the only time he’s free from his all-consuming obsession with death. He characterized his whole deal as performance art designed to get people to take the rise of a mega-powerful artificial intelligence, the sort that could (?) make him immortal (??), seriously and greet it as a savior.
That’s when his presence here make sense. Like the coin devotees, Johnson’s commitment is total. He is already preparing himself to live in a hyper-optimized future. Oh also, perhaps just as relevantly, he is the subject of a series of unfair labor practice complaints. Like Adams, he sought refuge in a place where that alone would serve as a sort of credential, a certification of his values. Like Adams, like the Trumps, he is guilty only of being too different.
The bitcoin world makes a convenient landing spot for cheaters, scammers, and freaks because it represents a source of power and money built on the logic of fraud, existing outside of the cultural and political norms of regular society. This explains the conference’s pervasive persecution complex better than anything else. To be welcomed here all one has to do is bend the knee, exalt Trump—the patron saint of persecution complexes—say that you’re super bullish on the space, and declare the moon your destination. You are not expected to believe any of this stuff, but rather to believe in the predatory utility of saying it.
To the audience of normal people, who have probably not been de-banked, this rhetoric is useful: It stokes and gratifies a collective paranoia that has been seeking a means to express itself since coagulating in 2020. Since so many of the attendees I talk to say they started getting into crypto in 2020 and ’21, and several speakers make similar points, I think it’s worth considering what happened during those years, and how that might shape the character of a movement galvanized in their heat.
The second crypto boom came at the beginning of 2021, trailing the meme-stock bubble, the George Floyd protests, and the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The legacy of 2020 is that of a profound and still totally unhealed rupture—of a society that failed a stress test, continuing to limp along without ever resolving or even acknowledging any of the horrors it experienced and inflicted upon itself. The promise of the George Floyd protests met with a swift and harsh counterrevolution, which convinced millions of soft-brained capitalists in the center that to have expressed any sort of awareness of structural racism was akin to being piloted by the parasitic woke mind virus, and opened a window for the right wing to finally seize the means of cultural production.
Social atomization was already increasing before the pandemic. A year of all human interaction being funneled into the alienating and distorting prism of the social internet only accelerated the process. The nation limped out of the worst of the (still-ongoing) pandemic paranoid and depressed, newly aware of many of its contradictions and injustices but, critically, left without means to address them. If anyone younger than, say, 24 did not emerge stunted and fearful, they beat the odds. The election of Joe Biden represented not so much a resolution of all that pain as an agreement to forget about it, which left everything to pickle for four years.
George Bataille writes in his 1949 opus, The Accursed Share, “The extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them.” He may as well have written it 70 years later, as crypto generally and then—after the NFT bust and the FTX collapse—bitcoin specifically promised tremendous growth and a corresponding overhaul of ethics, and delivered on both. The crypto boom of 2021 was a direct result of a bunch of Americans being cooped up, too online, and also, critically, having a bunch of extra cash thanks to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and a series of temporary relief checks. The crypto bust of the years that followed can be thought of as something like a gold rush, where that specific pile of cash is the gold and innumerable small-time suckers, taken collectively, are the landscape laid waste by frenzied extraction. By the 2024 election, the majority of the American public were skeptical of the stability or legitimacy of crypto.
But bitcoin didn’t bust like the others. Saylor, whom I’ve referred to as the Bitcoin Pope for the messianic fervor of his bitcoin evangelism, pioneered the strategy of the corporate bitcoin treasury. Most of the recent rise in price has come not from normal people buying bitcoin, but from corporations and institutions buying it, essentially following Saylor’s catechesis. That explains why nobody at the conference felt the need to make a use case for bitcoin outside of its value as an asset. The regulatory scrutiny of the Biden administration has given way to full-throated governmental endorsement and an increasing number of financial institutions are getting involved. Does anybody still need to make, or hear, an argument that bitcoin is real?
Saylor lays out the complete case for bitcoin in his Thursday keynote. This is the grim nadir of the Bitcoin Conference. He defines bitcoin as “capital, perfected,” “the greatest idea in the history of the human race,” and “half of everything.”
To extend his definitions, I’ve begun finding it useful to think of bitcoin not as a currency or as a religion, but rather as semi-sentient entity representing the purest possible manifestation of exploitation, one that arose when capitalism applied its internal logic to itself. Taken all the way to its endpoint, this organism’s goal, for lack of a better word, is a hyper-individualized world, one in which the only meaningful verbs humans have for interacting with each other are those of transaction. It is a dream of mediated immortality via universal corporate personhood.
Where Trump is using bitcoin to further his aims, so is bitcoin using him to inject itself, virus-like, into the cellular structure of the economy. Saylor is not concerned with the future of the U.S.; at one point he encourages the audience to emigrate to whichever country offers the most favorable regulatory environment and earning potential. This is what makes the Trump and bitcoin partnership both internally productive and potentially quite outwardly destructive. He is both the head of state and aligned against it, articulating bitcoin’s goal of destroying the bureaucracy and ushering in a grim, deregulated future. His cronies, and the bitcoin establishment, will surely make a ton of money in the process. Sure, the American economy will suffer and most people’s lives will get worse. But both Trump and bitcoin, rather than allay suffering, create a social and financial structure which squares that contradiction by reframing the suffering they cause as service to a noble cause. How do you close that loop? Buy bitcoin and join the winning team.
Saylor urged people to spend every dollar they had on bitcoin, to take out a second mortgage on their house and buy bitcoin, to encourage everyone in their families to buy bitcoin. The theory is that the price of bitcoin will rise forever, because it represents pure capital, undiluted by government currency’s ties to the real world. The theory occasionally draws on some half-correct critiques of the financial system, and at its most strained can even acknowledge structural inequities, though even then, it rejects the idea of improving or changing anything. Instead, it proposes getting yours. Saylor warns that every bitcoin you don’t buy, every iota of capital you withhold from the pursuit of bitcoin, is a potentially crippling blow to your future.
That fear of regret is extremely powerful. What Saylor offers is the chance to not miss out again. “Every single new crisis recruits a new class of bitcoin believers,” Saylor said in a recent podcast appearance. The train is leaving the station, and if you stand around wondering where it’s going, you risk being left behind. This is textbook multi-level marketing stuff, charged by totalizing Universal Paperclip logic. What is the cost of missing if you miss out on bitcoin? He warns in his keynote address: “If anybody can’t figure it out in two to four days, they’re going to get exited from the gene pool.” The crowd breaks into raucous applause.
“Satoshi started a fire in cyberspace,” he says, “and while the fearful run from it, and fools dance around it, the faithful feed the flame, dreaming of a better world bathed in the warm glow of cyber light.” It is striking that even at Saylor’s most ambitious, his vision and language are fundamentally destructive. Fires burn. This better world is necessarily a cruel and pitiless one; the utopian dream on offer at Bitcoin 2025 is one in which bitcoin imbues the most powerful individuals with godlike powers, and those who miss out wither and die. It’s barbarism manifested. The power structures in Saylor’s world cannot be improved, only discerned and obeyed.
Drill down to the core of his argument, and what you find is chilling: There is nothing, either material or abstract, in bitcoin’s digital heart. There are no secrets. It is valuable to those who value it, because they value it. All you have to do to become wealthy is want to, and believe in bitcoin enough to trade everything for it. Argue with the circularity of that logic if you like, but it has made a lot of people a lot of money. The greatest idea of all time that Saylor references, then, is the belief that the atomic unit of human interaction is competition, that the essence of our experience is as individuals. It is that belief made into a coin, and that coin made into the only thing that matters in the entire world.
Do you want to live like that? I don’t.
After the Saylor keynote, we finally leave the anoxic confines of the Strip. Ditching out on another night of taking psychic damage by asking partygoers about bitcoin, we go instead to watch the Las Vegas Aviators play some AAA baseball. Foul balls are sponsored by a local real-estate guy; one teen suffers such a severe brain-freeze during a between-innings ice-cream eating contest that he begins to cry; another asks someone to be his girlfriend on the Jumbotron. It’s goofy, easy fun, and there we are, having it together. The game does not go to overtime.