If you view homebuying as a race, sorry, but you’re probably about to get lapped. Coldwell Banker Global Luxury surveyed its wealthiest customers and found ~40% are looking to buy a home in a foreign country in the next year, with hot spots including Europe and the Caribbean. Oh, and more bad news: We’ve already called dibs on all of their guesthouses.
In today’s email:
Mushroom school: Get your ~$9k in tuition ready.
Rubik’s Cube: A big anniversary for a titan of the toy world.
Digits: How much a Monkey King gets paid, top states for startups, and more newsy numbers.
Around the web: A trivia game, cool 8-bit art, a lost land that never existed, and more.
👇 Listen: Themodel railroad industry’s kryptonite: aging, thin wallets, and small apartments.
The Big Idea
Magic mushroom school is in session
Students in Oregon can now train to facilitate the psilocybin experience.
2024-01-22T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
A growing group of students is seeking out a different kind of cap and gown — a mushroom cap, to be exact.
In 2020, Oregon passed Measure 109, becoming the first US state to legalize supervised psilocybin use for people ages 21+.
Now, professionals — like midwives, hospice workers, and educators — can train to become state-licensed psychedelic facilitators, perThe Guardian.
To work at one of the state’s 19 service centers, students must first enroll in a government-recognized training program and apply for a license.
One such program, InnerTrek, was the first in the world to be recognized by the government.
The program takes six months to complete, and includes online and in-person learning across 120 hours of “core training” and 40 hours of hands-on “practicum.”
Facilitators offer support for clients experiencing a range of issues, from anxiety and depression to trauma, addiction, and grief — as well as those simply interested in the experience.
InnerTrek trains its students to create “containers,” or safe spaces, where they offer preparation and structure to clients.
The program is a major investment for students, with tuition totaling $8.9k.
Get psyched
There are now 24 state-approved psilocybin training programs like InnerTrek, as interest in administering psychedelics grows.
And the psychedelic trend is bringing with it a new crop of business opportunities:
Psychedelic retreats — for everything from soul searching to networking — are sprouting up globally.
The health care sector is increasingly experimenting with ketamine and LSD as treatments for PTSD and depression.
Plus, the non-trippy types of shrooms are being used for everything from chocolate to coffins, and could even be the answer to our sustainability problems.
Mushrooms really are magic.
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LandX Motors, a newly launched EV pickup truck startup promising “the future of mobility,” must first reckon with its dicey past: founder Steve Burns is recycling assets from bankrupt Lordstown Motors, which he was ousted from while under federal investigation for misleading investors. (BTW, Lordstown started with Burns salvaging assets from Workhorse, another struggling EV startup he was fleeing.)
SNIPPETS
Microsoftsaid Russian hackers accessed the accounts of some employees on its leadership, cybersecurity, and legal teams. The data targeted suggests one goal: the hackers wanted to know how much Microsoft knows about them.
JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines still believe in their union, even if a federal judge doesn’t. The airlines filed an appeal to save their $3.8B merger just days after the deal was rejected.
The US Postal Serviceupped the price of Forever stamps to 68 cents, its fifth cost increase in two years. The first Forever stamps, introduced in 2007, initially cost 41 cents.
GameStop is shutting down its NFT marketplace on Feb. 2, citing regulatory uncertainty in crypto — the same reason it stopped supporting its crypto wallets.
Sound the alarm: Following the actors’ and writers’ guild strikes, it’s now the American Federation of Musicians’ turn to negotiate with Hollywood studios. It’s seeking AI protections and fair streaming residuals for musicians who perform on soundtracks.
The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, is laying off most of its staff. Missed payments led to a severed licensing agreement, and now the legendary publication’s future is unclear.
Applebee’s is rolling out a $200 subscription date-night pass to get happy couples into the restaurant. The pass covers up to $30 per use and is valid 52x, enough to offer a year’s worth of weekly date nights.
Miller Lite is now selling “beer mints,” which are exactly what you’d think: breath-freshening mints that taste like beer. It’s the brand’s latest nonalcoholic extension, following weird beer-infused chocolate truffles.
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Olivia Heller
Rubik’s Cube turns 50 years, which is about as long as it’d take us to solve one
Decades later, the legend of the ever-confounding 3x3 color grid grows richer by the day.
2024-01-22T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
Forty-three quintillion. That’s the number of combinations a Rubik’s Cube has — and with a little more time, it’ll probably be the number of total Rubik’s Cubes sold.
One of the world’s most successful toys is turning 50 years old this year, and sales are still hot:
In 1974, Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor Erno Rubik created the puzzle (which initially took him a month to solve).
By 1979, the toy had sold ~300k units.
By 1980, sales were north of 100m.
In 2022, another 5.75m cubes were sold, bringing the current tally to 456m+.
Who’s seeing that windfall?
Erno Rubik is still with us: he’s 79 years old and living the good life — “reading sci-fi, playing table tennis, gardening” — in Budapest.
But today, the Rubik’s brand belongs to Spin Master, a children’s entertainment company with ~$2B in annual revenues and holdings like Etch A Sketch, PAW Patrol, Kinetic Sand, and Hatchimals.
In 2021, Spin Master completed a $55.2m purchase of the Rubik’s portfolio.
Seems like a savvy investment: The toy drove $75.3m in sales in 2022 and maintains 42% market share of the brain teaser category, according to CNBC.
To keep the legendary brand fresh, Spin Master has been quick to find new offshoots for the Cube, including extensions to the core product line:
Rubik’s Phantom is printed with thermochromic ink — it appears all black until a puzzler’s hands activate its colors.
Rubik’s Impossible has iridescent tiles that look different at every angle.
And yeah, before you ask: There isearly talk of a Rubik’s Cube movie. (After the success of Barbie, of course there is.) Now, take a whirl through throwback Erno pics — then join us in waiting for Deadline to drop that inevitable Zac Efron casting news.
FIT THE BILL
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: A Nordic powerhouse dating back to 1865, when a pulp mill and a rubber factory merged, its name comes from the town where said rubber (quite literally) first hit the road.
Clue 2: In the 1980s, it came into global prominence with products like the Talkman, Actionman, and Cityman, championed by their CEO man, a former paper industry leader whose work helped usher out the paper industry’s heyday.
Clue 3: If you were alive between the late 1990s and late 2000s, your ears know this brand all too well — its signature tone, pulled from four bars of classical guitar music, was heard an estimated 1.8B times per day, or 20k times per second, at its peak.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
By the Numbers
Digits: Elton’s EGOT, Colorado’s biz boom, and more bananas numbers
A salary fit for a Monkey King, Elton’s big win, no stopping in Vegas, and more.
2024-01-22T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
115%: YoY uptick in new business applications in Colorado between December 2022 and December 2023, per Axios. New business applications rose 7.4% across the US overall, but nowhere so high as the Rocky Mountain state where the cost of a new business filing temporarily dropped from $50 to $1. North Dakota and Iowa also saw growth at 37.7% and 33.7%, respectively, while Georgia (-9.9%) and Louisiana (-8.6%) saw the biggest drops.
19: Number of people who have nabbed an EGOT — AKA an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award. The latest inductee to this prestigious list is Elton John, whose Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert film recently won an Emmy for outstanding variety special. The first was Richard Rodgers; other winners include Viola Davis, Jennifer Hudson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Mel Brooks, and Whoopi Goldberg.
$1k: How much you could be fined if you stop walking in Las Vegas’ new “pedestrian flow zones,” per a new county ordinance. Lawmakers say such disturbances can cause disorder and pose a safety hazard in these high-traffic areas, especially when crowds form. Vegas is prepping for some serious crowds next month thanks to Super Bowl LVIII.
$842/month: How much you’d make as the Monkey King at Wuzhishan Scenic Area in China’s Hebei province. You’d need to chill in a cave dressed as the Monkey King of Chinese mythology — a superpowered monkey warrior who travels by cloud — and let tourists feed you bananas.
AROUND THE WEB
🚬 On this day: In 1908, Katie Mulcahey was fined $5 for smoking in public in NYC a day after the Sullivan Ordinance, which required management of public venues to forbid women from doing so, passed. She refused to pay, and the mayor vetoed the ordinance shortly thereafter.
🗺️ That’s interesting: All about the lost — and nonexistent — land of Lemuria.
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