It feels like yesterday that I was writing about the dead of winter and now here we are in the dog days of summer. My kids are walking reminders of what summer was like as a kid - camps, daytime television, sleeping in until the afternoon, running around until the street lights came on. Most of that stuff they don’t do but man, summers in the 90’s were different.

Then you grow up, get a job, and realize it doesn’t make a difference if it’s summer or not because you’re working anyway! The only thing that reminds you to take a break in the summer is the back sweat from your “business casual” shirt, that hopefully keeps you warm because the AC blasts in the office. And then the entire corporate world takes off the final weeks of August as the yearly ritual to take an official break from the two laziest months of the year.

A study conducted on worker productivity found that productivity plummets 20% during the summer, while attendance at work drops 19%. I’m not so sure a study was needed to know people don’t like working or even showing up to work in the summer. Although, I recently found out from my neighbour that July and August are actually the busy season when it comes to filming commercials - the whole world shuts down but Monday.com continues to come up with ads on productivity! This stuff writes itself.

This week's issue is a 4 minute read:

🏫 College Smollege

🇸🇦 It’s going down in the Middle East

👫 The Roaring 20’s

Money buys happiness & college entry

If Lori Loughlin’s scandal with her daughter getting into USC through a $500k bribe didn’t tell you how messed up the college admissions process is, then a recent report showing elite schools prefer rich people should do the trick. A group of economists, based out of Harvard (of course), recently released a report about admissions at elite colleges in the US. The report goes into great detail comparing SAT scores of all students alongside their family/parent’s economic and alumni status across schools like MIT, Harvard, and Duke to name a few.

In essence, regardless of your SAT scores, kids who go through the admissions process that have alumni parents, affluent parents, or basically just come from a lineage that the school deems successful were 34% more likely to be admitted into the school than kids who came from a lower or even middle class background. This comes at a time where the Supreme Court in the US ruled that affirmative action cannot be used in US college admissions processes, kind of like a double whammy for smart kids who are minorities and don’t come from an affluent family.

MEANWHILE - in 2021 one out of eight of the Forbes 400 dropped out of college, basically the 400 wealthiest people in the world. And the screw school trend continues as we see companies like Google and IBM not requiring college degrees to get a job. So as much as we want to ask WTF is going with college admissions, maybe we should be asking how necessary is higher education to begin with?

Saudi Arabia: the world’s cultural hub (?)

There’s a new kid on the block when it comes to acquiring professional athletes and sports leagues and they’re in the Middle East. It all started when Qatar won their bid for the World Cup, which was controversial AF at times - especially if you’re Budweiser. One had to think it was only a matter of time before the oil money Death Star was pointed at pro sports though, especially with several pro football clubs being owned by Gulf wealth.

And then there’s the world’s largest investment fund

The Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, tops out at about a cool US$700 billion so one would think pro sports and entertainment would have to fit within there somewhere. With $40B earmarked specifically to build a global hub for gaming…yes gaming…the Saudis aren’t playing around, yet they are playing? You get what I’m trying to say!

In the latest reminder of just how much money is in the Gulf, Saudi football club, Al Hilal, offered Kylian Mbappé $1B to come and play in the Saudi league. Mbappé, arguably the best footballer in the world currently, turned down the offer as he has his sights set on Real Madrid. After what we saw with Liv golf luring PGA players over for hundreds of millions of dollars before flat out buying the PGA itself, I think this isn’t the last we see of Saudi leveraging their fund to lure more top talent, leagues, etc to the Middle East.

Flirting in the 20’s

And I’m talking about 100 years ago, we already know there’s no such thing as flirting in the age of dating apps. I mean I don’t know, it’s just what I heard from my single friends 🤷‍♂️ 

I think none of us reading this next piece can ever compare “back in my day” stories to what I’m about to tell you. Firstly in order to explain this, I need to tell you what a pneumatic tube is. Think of a hamster tube. Now think of you having a cylindrical object. Now think of the hamster tube having this vacuum system that sucks up the cylinder and transports it somewhere else in the pneumatic tube network. That’s basically what a pneumatic tube is. Or just this.

Now picture these tubes at your favourite happening restaurant/bar/club. This is how people in 1920’s Berlin flirted. For shy people who couldn’t bare walking up to someone at the club, they could sit at their table, write down a message, select the table number, and toss their message in the tube network. The network even came complete with “comment censors” who sat in the switchboard room reviewing what people were saying to each other before helping the message along its route.

One of the clubs went beyond messages, having available gifts for flirty singles who could send things like perfume, cigar cutters, and depending on who you asked, cocaine. Given 30% of Americans, 15% of Canadians, and a staggering 65% of men and 51% of women in Japan were single as of 2021, you would think we should bringing back pneumatic tubes for everyone around the world!

Who needs dating apps and the internet when you can get more personal from a distance through a complex network of tubes. Also, did you know the Hyperloop is basically a giant pneumatic tube?