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This Week in Dulture…
Approx 5 minute read:
🏀 The world sleeps on this team
💰 World Cup doing World Cup things
🔈 OpenAI’s walking speaker
🍺 1M Beers
Dulture weekly mix
I was going for a particular vibe with this week’s mix and then I just got carried away. I think it all transitions fairly well still, with a good variety of stuff.
Originally I was like, lemme take a peak at Future’s new album and maybe there’s some gems in there that will inspire this playlist. After going through all TWENTY TWO tracks, I arrived at some conclusions, which I’ll save for next week. But I pulled out one track because it’s named after my wife 🤷
I also forgot how much I lowkey like Lil Uzi Vert. It took YEARS but his music eventually grew on me. It was like the Spotify algo saying, here try again, here try again, here try again.
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I need to tell you about this hidden gem we have here in Toronto.
Obviously you’ve heard of Toronto through dribs and drabs from Drake. We were also an inch away from winning the World Series last year, and of course there’s this whole Kawhi coming back to the Raptors thing going on at the moment.
If you’re a J Cole stan then you know he played a few games on the Scarborough Shooting stars a few years ago - the other pro basketball team in Toronto that plays within the Canadian Elite Basketball League (Canada’s pro ball league).
I’m here to tell you that if you’re in Toronto, you need to go to one of these games.
Don’t let the size of the venue and amenities fool you. This is like a blend of a college basketball atmosphere, mixed in with a ton of Scarborough vibes aka dance hall music mixed in with Toronto culture —> you can get Jamaican beef patties from the concession stand!
Also, no other pro basketball court is going to have what’s circled below 🤷♂
The team is co-owned by Niko Carino, the Niko you you know from a flurry of different Drake verses. Niko being born and raised in Scarborough, you immediately get how he’s turned Scarborough’s team into a vibe.
Ngl, the CEBL’s league branding doesn’t exactly inspire you to want to drop everything and buy a t-shirt, especially if you’re not Canadian and could care less about a Canadian basketball league (I get it, trust me, I do).
Because of Niko, you get the OVO collabs with the team - a new official OVO x SSS capsule comes out later this month, either on July 24th or July 26th. And yes, this is an exclusive, you’ll probably see this on Hypebeast or whatever at some point, it’s supposed to be a pretty big deal.
Also, my kid sang the national anthem at the game yesterday. Again, they’re worth checking out if you’re in Toronto.
Amurican World Cup
Don’t get me wrong, this year’s World Cup has been A LOT of fun to watch.
It’s basically the first tournament in our lifetime where all the major teams had their star players front and center for the entire tournament while actually performing at their peak ability.
…except Ronaldo.
But chill iShowSpeed, I’m a Ronaldo fan!
This is also the first year ever where I don’t even care to watch the final - the 3rd place match looks way more interesting to me.
And it’s not even just because of the two teams involved…don’t get me started on how bogus Argentina’s path was to get to the finals 😡 .
At what point did someone think it’s a good idea to do a half time show for the World Cup final?
This year’s World Cup has also been one of the most ironic ones. While you had a ton of amazing games, lots of goal scoring from players you wanted to see, you also had the most commercialized tournament FIFA has ever run.
And it’s not even close
From the additional ad opportunities with the hydration breaks, to the insane ticket prices, to now FIFA changing international football rules so that halftime is doubled from 15 to 30 minutes in the final, FIFA absolutely saw dollar signs the whole way through planning this tournament.
Part of me doesn’t blame them. If you’re going to run a global event in North America, you better believe sponsorship, ad revenue, broadcasting, etc is all going to come at a premium - things like the Super Bowl and NBA Finals have set precedents now where FIFA saw that and jumped on the bandwagon.
We’re used to it here, we expect ads, we expect sponsorship placement, delays in games because of corporate interest. But soccer? It was always the one sport where you knew you could keep watching til the end of the half without Steve Carrell getting in the way trying to lure you into his van with a bag of chips.
While we’re getting the likes of BTS, Shakira, and Justin Bieber to perform for free and FIFA is branding the half time show as a charitable thing, this year’s WC revenue will set a new all time high at an estimated $13B, a 71% increase from Qatar 2022.
So are we really getting a nice performance in the middle of the sport’s most important match to help those less fortunate or is FIFA playing the charity card to justify one last substantial financial bump before the tournament is over.
I dunno man, this year’s World Cup has made me raise more eyebrows than ever before over how FIFA operates - I can only imagine what it would be like if I was also Egyptian.
Yet Another Smart Speaker
If you haven’t already done it, there’s an update you can do with Google home where the “AI” becomes Gemini and so when you speak to it, it actually does something useful besides playing music.
I have one of those OG Google home puck looking things in the kitchen that’s been collecting dust outside of December when Mariah Carey unthaws and graces us with her music.
Truthfully, the hype for smart speakers has long come and gone. I remember back in 2019 talking to someone about the future of voice and how we’re all just gonna talk to things and that’s how we’ll live our life.
Who’s still buying smart speakers tho??
Don’t get me wrong, people are still buying smart speakers but growth has slowed down on things like the Amazon Echo and Google home pod from crazy triple digit growth in 2019/2020 to like 4% growth in revenue on these things today and somewhat declining.
Enter: OpenAI’s smart speaker (possibly with legs).
So you look at the number of smart home devices starting to plateau in the world and you decide, YUP, I too am going to make one!
Meh, I’ll believe it when I see it
OpenAI’s smart speaker is rumoured to be an advancement from the current ones on the market such that it learns about you proactively over time as you speak with it more.
So don’t worry, it’ll definitely learn your guilty pleasure music while you wash the dishes.
You can give it access to your digital life - emails, socials, whatever you share online (gulp) and it can pick up on these things and become that much more personalized for you.
And it’s gonna have legs.
Supposedly this thing will walk around and be your companion.
Yes, a speaker with legs will follow you around and ask you “What’s on your mind right now?” No word on when this will see the light of day but it’s currently being built by a team of ex-Apple engineers who have worked on Apple products in the past so don’t be surprised if you confuse this thing for an oversized AirPods case with feet.
Beer O’Clock Daily
When you go beyond the fact that a cold beer is simply refreshing, you get into this nether world of what seems like an infinite amount of reasons why one should drink a (cold) beer.
In my 20’s said reasons ranged from it paired well with a giant burger to it paired well with a bunch of red cups on a ping pong table.
I still remember the night I tried to join the century club but tapped out at beer shot #83.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from Heineken, it’s that beer unites us all.
This couldn’t be more true than what’s going on in what is now an international Whatsapp chat of 1024 (max number in a group chat) beer drinkers. Started back in August 2025 as joke in a pub in London, the group set out to drink 1 million beers and log and track every drink via a sophisticated dashboard and backend spreadsheet.
The rules are very simple:
Strict Format: You drink a pint, snap a picture of it, and post it to the chat with the next consecutive number in the tally.
No Texting: Standard text messaging is banned. Members are strictly required to interact only through emojis.
Intense Data Tracking: Administrators manage a master spreadsheet tracking "Key Beer Indicators" (KBIs). This dashboard logs leaderboards, peak drinking hours, and algorithmic forecasts.
The "Culls": Admins ruthlessly ban inactive users, double-counters, or people posting non-beers (like milk, cider, or coffee cocktails) to free up space for fresh, thirsty participants.
Milestones: Reaching milestone numbers (like every 1,000th beer) requires users to submit highly creative or comedic photos to be "immortalized" by the group.
Joining isn’t very easy as you need to firstly wait for space to open up and then take a photo drinking a beer with someone who is already in the group.
A few copy cat type groups of sprouted up inspired by the heroic drinking efforts this main group. has gone through. But let’s be honest, to get through 100K beers in like a year is no small feat.
The group is currently at over 100K beers drank. There’s a guy in Germany, Marcus Wright, who is averaging 4.1 beers per day and has had over 1500 beers to contribute to the tally. Iunno, dude might be an alcoholic.
Based on their current pace, they’re expected to drink 1M beers by 2034.