Gm. Over the weekend, I finally watched the finale of Attack on Titan. Wow, what an ending, and what a series. I have no idea how many of you like anime, but if you do, what should I watch next?

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🏠 TECH

Esports Are In Trouble

I don’t know about you all, but my apartment has been full of Fortnite lately thanks to the return of the OG map. 

All that Fortnite is reminiscent of when it seemed like Esports was primed to break into the mainstream. Streamers pulling in hundreds of thousands of viewers, teams were going public on the Nasdaq, and FTX was spending $210M in naming right deals (lmao).

That luster is now long gone, and an excellent Decrypt investigation dives into why:

• Like everything else, the industry was massively overvalued during the pandemic.

• Investors brought into the hype and sunk a ton of cash into the industry even though there was no real revenue.

• And there was no real revenue because nobody has figured out how to monetize Esport viewers. Barely 10% of viewers have ever spent money on Esports.

• On the player side, there’s a lot of turnover due to most players “retiring” around 23.

The result has been widespread layoffs, team foldings, and a whoooooole lot of money lost.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear how the industry moves forward. Web3 is potentially interesting, but nobody plays a blockchain game for more than a week. Game publishers could take a bigger role, but who knows if they even want to.

Whatever happens, at least we still have Fortnite.

Cold Water: With things not even going super well for streaming giant Twitch, it’s hard to see how Esports will make a comeback anytime soon.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Starship is taking flight again as early as Friday.

• Apple is already working on a 2nd generation VR headset. 

• iOS 18 looks to be absolutely massive. 

• SpaceX, hazardous work environment?

AI

• AI might be able to help find Alzheimer’s genes. 

• Google is considering plowing a ton of cash into Character.ai.

• Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

• One thing is for certain: nobody knows how fast AI will move. 

SCIENCE

• Glowing green monkeys. 

• Organic electronics mimic retinal neurons. 

• Artificial DNA can now be used to make yeast. 

• NASA found a record-breaking black hole. 

CRYPTO

• SOL is hotter than fish grease. 

• Bitcoin fund holdings are at an all-time high.

• Hong Kong keeps wading deeper into the ETF waters. 

• Binance’s wallet has picked up GMX. 

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Matic, a developer of AI-driven indoor robots, raised $29.6M. 

Stat: $50,000: How much Tesla will sue you for if you sell your Cybertruck in the first year. Jokes on them, I can’t afford one to begin with.

Rabbit hole: 67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn’t Want You To Know (Alan Norbauer)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

Deal with your problems by becoming RICH.

🧠 POLL

Razor thin margins on last week’s poll:

Let’s see if this one is as controversial:

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Why is this so true?

@itskatesteinberg

Based on a true story #millennial #nostalgia #2000s

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