Sunday Special Newsletter Sunday Special Newsletter

Hey guys,
I’m taking a break from article writing this week, but I do have a new podcast for you all to check out. I sat down with my friend Elliott and we discussed Fortnite’s business model. He dropped a lot of great insights and it’s definitely worth a listen.
Anyway, I know I’ve been talking about Epic Games a lot. I promise I’ll have something for you next week that isn’t Fortnite-related. Happy Sunday y’all.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sundayspecial.substack.com

A beginner-friendly conversation about what’s going on in the cryptocurrency space.
Sorry for the minor audio issues throughout (Comcast sucks).
If you liked this conversation, check out our full article about the cryptocurrency crash. Also, subscribe to our weekly newsletter on business and tech.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sundayspecial.substack.com

Nothing in this post should be considered financial advice and I am not telling you to buy any specific cryptocurrency. 
If you hate the idea of cryptocurrency, the last few weeks have probably been great for you. The price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and joke currencies like Dogecoin have all tanked. You might feel like you have the right to laugh at your friends who fell for the hype and tell them that the whole concept of crypto is stupid and it’s all just a Ponzi scheme by Internet nerds. 
Of course, it’s important to take a long-term view of the cryptocurrency space. Just last year, the price of Bitcoin was around $9000. Even with the recent price crash, it’s still worth around $35000. If you invested last May, you should be seeing 4x returns.

Back then, the price of Ethereum was just around $200. Now it’s worth around $2350. If you invested last May, you should be seeing 12x returns. 
So if you hate the idea of cryptocurrency, please recognize the fact that you’ve been repeatedly wrong before and that this “price crash” really doesn’t prove your point. Because I’m a petty person, I’m writing this article to discuss why even if this crash in prices lasts several months, you people are going to be wrong again. 
The price of Bitcoin is a leading indicator 
The first time that I bought Bitcoin was back in May 2020. However, I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really start getting into crypto until the end of last year when Bitcoin’s price started rising again. That made me do more research on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Chainlink. 
I’m definitely not the only person who became obsessed with crypto in the past few months. It’s undeniable that the recent crypto boom has brought tons of new people into the ecosystem. As you can see the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrency communities have all seen huge gains in subreddit members in the last few months, as the crypto market has become more and valuable. 
Notice the last time that these subreddits saw an exponential increase in new users? It’s right around the end of 2017, which was the last time that Bitcoin saw a huge increase in price. 
There’s a reason why this is important. Chris Dixon, who leads the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency fund, has said that the price of Bitcoin is a leading indicator in the cryptocurrency world. A rise in the price of Bitcoin means that smart people get sucked into the crypto rabbit hole and start building cool projects. Of course, it usually takes a few years for these projects to be up and running and attracting new users. 
Even though Bitcoin crashed in 2018, Andreesen Horowitz had faith that the crypto projects getting built would eventually revive the entire space. In 2019, the firm doubled down on their bet by buying more shares in a company in their portfolio, Coinbase. Meanwhile, other venture capitalists were desperate to get out of the investment because many of them believed the narrative that crypto was a fad and that its time had passed. As a result, Andreesen Horowitz was able to buy shares in the company for just $23 apiece. 
Now, Coinbase is a publicly traded company, and its shares are worth $236 each. 
In just two years, Andreesen Horowitz managed to make a more than 10x return on their investment. It all happened because while the media was saying that crypto was dead, the firm stuck to its thesis and recognized that it would take multiple years for cool projects to emerge from the 2018 price crash. They turned out to be right. Last year, we saw multiple projects in decentralized finance and NFTs finally came to fruition. 
We will see this same dynamic play out again. This time, even more people fell into the crypto rabbit hole and many of them have already started to build new projects. 
Why saying there’s a crypto bubble isn’t necessarily a bad thing...
Cryptocurrency might be a new technology with no precedent in human his

This is my conversation between me and my friend, Ben. He works in a front office for a professional sports team and he’s an incredibly smart dude. He breaks down the data revolution in sports and why Tobias Harris gets paid almost as much as Lebron James.
If you like what you hear, subscribe to our weekly newsletter on tech and business. We write so that it’s actually something you’ll want to read, not some boring Boomer shit like Bloomberg.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sundayspecial.substack.com

The day the NBA’s season was suspended because of COVID-19, my company’s CEO sent an email saying that all employees were to work from home indefinitely. It was a really sudden transition — one moment America felt completely normal. Next thing you know, we were in the biggest global crisis since World War II. 
Back then, people were still deluding themselves into thinking this pandemic thing was going to blow over in a month or two. My boss called me the next day to let me know that belief was b******t, and that COVID wasn’t going away anytime soon. She also told me that by the time all of this was over, we would be living in a different world. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. 
Now it’s been more than a year, and the end of the pandemic is in sight. More than 30% of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Soon enough, we’ll be having concerts and festivals again.
It’s easy to picture the world going back to normal, just the way we remembered it before the lockdowns started. Still, the more I think about it, the more I realize that my boss was right. As Peter Thiel said, 2021 might go down in history as the first year of the 21st century. 
We’re not going back to 2019 
Studies show that when human beings try to imagine the future, we’re often biased to imagine it being very similar to the past. So it makes sense that when we imagine what the world will look like after the pandemic’s over, we often imagine it as the way things were in 2019, except with a little bit more work-from-home. 
Of course, work-from-home policies can have a bigger impact on our world than we might realize. But before we go into that, we should talk about why it took so long for remote work to be commonplace. 
Why were we still in the past for the last 20 years? 
Back in the 90s, the Internet was mostly used by normal people only for email. Still, there were true believers that thought that the Internet could one day change the way people worked. At the time, they were mostly mocked. Here’s an article from Newsweek back in 1995. 
As you can see, the writer mentioned how believers in the Internet talked about how “commerce and business will shift… to networks and modems”. However, broadband speeds at the time were so incredibly slow that the idea seemed ridiculous to the writer. 
Broadband speeds got faster and faster every year and the smartphone made the Internet a constant presence in people’s lives. Of course, it didn’t happen right away. The original iPhone was released in 2007 but it dropped calls all the time, usually didn’t have reliable access to the Internet, and the original camera was so bad that it required Instagram filters to be invented just for pictures to be passable. 
Eventually, the technology got better. Over time, smartphones got better chips, better cameras, and better access to the Internet. As a result, the average person started spending significantly more time on the Internet. 
The Internet wasn’t just for nerds anymore — it was something that literally everyone used constantly. That means if employees needed to get on the Internet for work, there was no learning curve they had to go through. At the same time, companies like Zoom and Slack built the tools that were needed to make work from home a viable option. 
Of course, even when Internet infrastructure was fully developed, the vast majority of companies still required their employees to go into the office. After all, that’s the way human beings worked since basically the dawn of time. A CEO would have to be incredibly open-minded to let a large portion of the workforce not be in the office. 
Then, COVID-19 came around and changed everything. Almost every business in the country was forced to accept work-from-home, and many of them found that everything worked out just fine. Now, businesses have to ask themselves whether paying rent for an office is actually worth it. After all, a study by

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs for short. It got a lot of traction right off the bat. It’s one of the most-viewed articles in the history of this newsletter. 
Since then, NFTs have really moved into the mainstream, especially after the artist Beeple sold one of his artworks as an NFT for $69 million. Still, outside of the crypto community, most people seem to really hate the concept of NFTs. Here’s a Tweet that I saw the other day. 
It’s not just Twitter. I’ve had friends and family reach out to me and tell me that they don’t really understand the point of NFTs either. They also don’t really understand why I’m so excited about them. 
So today, I’m going to do my best to explain why NFTs are revolutionary and why my friends and family should stop being concerned about me. 
A super-simplified explanation of NFTs 
Most NFTs are blockchain versions of art you can easily find online (that’s the joke in the Tweet above). They might be jpegs, mp3s, or gifs. 
The blockchain does provide one benefit that normal jpegs, mp3s, or gifs don’t have: It shows proof of scarcity and authenticity. Blockchain can show the full transaction history of where the NFT came from and provides evidence that the owner of an NFT holds one of the few “verified” copies of the piece of art.  
NFTs are often compared to physical collectibles like trading cards, and they do share some similar characteristics. Recently, a holographic Charizard card from 1999 sold for more than $300,000. While anyone can get on their computer and print out a picture of a Charizard, it’s been estimated that there are only 122 authentic copies of that specific card in the world. Personally, I’d never drop that much money on a Pokemon card, but scarcity and authenticity mean that there’s some fanboy out there who would. 
What’s interesting about NFTs is 95% of them are minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a completely decentralized crypto network, which means that there’s no one person or one organization that’s in charge of it. It’s open-source and “owned” by the Ethereum community as a whole. 
That’s a big deal: getting rid of the middleman can be a game-changer for creators. 
Why NFTs are great for creators 
During the weekdays, I work full-time as a marketer for a tech company. I can tell you that the biggest struggle for any marketing department in the world is figuring out how to build a direct relationship with your audience without having a platform like Google or Facebook in the middle. Relying on the kindness and compassion of the tech giants is dangerous — one small algorithm change might mean that nobody in your audience sees your content anymore and your entire business is destroyed. 
For years, creators have gone through a similar struggle. Artists, comedians, and actors needed to go to record labels, television networks, and movie studios just to make a living. Then, they’d be at the mercy of a few people who held absolute power over their hopes and dreams. Most of the time, these gatekeepers would end up taking most of the profits of the artists’ labor. 
Nowadays, it’s easier than ever for creators to get their work directly to fans. But they still aren’t seeing the rewards for their art — middlemen and gatekeepers are. After Spotify and record labels take their cut, it’s estimated that musicians typically get to keep just 10% of the revenue from the art they create.  
What about Patreon? 
Right now, the best way for creators to get around Facebook, Google, and the other middlemen of the world and directly monetize their fanbase is through platforms like Patreon. The platform offers low fees in exchange for allowing creators to deliver exclusive content to their subscribers. It sounds like a great deal, but there are a few problems. 
Problem #1: No direct relationship 
Because Patreon is a centralized platform and a for-profit compan