🔪 Matthew Lillard’s character Stu Macher Is Back In The New Scream 7 Movie

In today’s newsletter we discuss Matthew Lillard’s character Stu Macher is back in the new Scream 7, the Federal Reserve leaves rates unchanged, TikTok’s traffic returns, wanna buy a Super Sub for $5.5 million dollars, sadly we’ll never get to see a fight between brothers Jake Paul and Logan Paul, and OpenAI could be worth $300 billion dollars.

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WHAT WE’RE READING

🤷‍♂️ 𝐈𝐧 𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐤𝐲 𝐈𝐬 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞 - 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐔𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐁𝐚𝐝 𝐍𝐞𝐰

On Wednesday, January 29, 2025 Jerome Powell, head of the Federal Reserve, held interest rates steady in a move that is sure to upset the current administration. While this is a good move by the Federal Reserve in light of lingering inflation, it goes against Donald Trump’s stated desire that he wants interest rates to come down immediately. He told reporters earlier this month that "interest rates are far too high", and that he would "demand" lower rates.

That's not how anything works, but good luck explaining that.

The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate between 4.25% and 4.5%. As of December 2024, the inflation rate in the U.S. was 2.9%, which is higher than the Federal Reserve's target of 2%, but I think that 2% is more aspirational than realistic in the current economic climate. 

While leaving rates unchanged will continue to make it more difficult for people to borrow in order to finance new cars, homes, or pay off their credit cards, it does help to send a message to the markets that the Federal Reserve will continue, against all pressure, methodically lower interest rates as they interpret the data.

🕺 Business

The wheels of justice might be able to shut off access to TikTok in the app stores, but they can’t keep TikTok’s traffic from bouncing back to pre-shutdown levels despite all the uncertainty surrounding the social media app’s future.

If you downloaded TikTok ahead of its momentary ban then you’re in luck, but both Apple and Google’s app stores have still not relisted the app for new downloads. Now you have what are being called “TikTok Phones” with the app loaded on them selling for as high at $3,000 dollars online.

Nothing like profiting off of other’s lack of access to the #1 social media app in the world!

📺 Entertainment

Don’t Scream yet, but what if I told you that Matthew Lillard’s character Stuart ‘Stu’ Macher, from the very first Scream movie that debuted in 1996, is coming back for the new Scream 7 movie coming out on February 27, 2026.

Forget about the facts from the original Scream movie, where Matthew Lillard was stabbed by his co-conspiritor Billy Loomis, played by Skeet Ulrich, and then had a TV dropped on his head by Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell.

The original 1996 movie Scream, made on a budget of only around $15 million dollars, grossed $173 million dollars worldwide, and was a surprise success despite being released as a slasher film during the 1996 holiday season.

This is the world of horror movies - small details like that don’t matter. We’ve seen “dead” characters brought back to the silver screen before, and I’m not talking about in a supernatural way. Horror movie literature is littered with cheesy plot lines and even cheesier lines.

No word yet on if Matthew Lillard’s character will scream “Scooby-Dooby-Doo!” when he appears on screen again.

🤖 AI

OpenAI, the company who seems to raise new funding every week, is reportedly in discussions to secure a massive new round of funding led by SoftBank that could see OpenAI valued at an insane $300 billion dollars. That’s a pretty pricy valuation, considering that a Chinese upstart named DeepSeek just matched OpenAI’s ChatGPT on a reported budget of $5.6 million dollars to train their large language model, even if it turns out they just stole the data they used to train the model from OpenAI, who stole it from other U.S. companies in the first place.

🌊 Submarines

There’s a new submarine out from the Dutch company U-Boat Worx, called the completely unoriginal name of Super Sub, that first turned heads at the Monaco Yacht Show in 2023. The new Super Sub, which has been described as "the most hydrodynamic sub on the market" (whatever that means) has entered production. You too can pick up your very own Super Sub for the low-low cost of $5.5 million dollars.

🥊 Sports

We almost got the fight literally no one ever wanted to see, Jake Paul vs. Logan Paul, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. What it was meant to be was a social media announcement promoting their new series on Max, which will consist of old and unseen footage of the brothers (boring). The series is slated to air eight episodes, and debut on March 27.

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irl Media NEWSLETTER is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.