Wrapped in Together — As you’ve seen if you’ve been on Instagaram, Snapchat, literally any other social media, or Spotify itself recently, the music streaming service released the legendary summary of it’s users streaming habits for the year, known as Wrapped, this week. 

National and global data from Spotify is likely a much better view at how the world jams out vs. Apple Music, as Spotify boasts 381mm users while Apple had 60mm last time it reported user figures.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the highlights Spotify revealed on our globally collective streaming habits:

Top Streamed Artists: 

1. Bad Bunny (9.1bn streams without an album drop...)

      2. Taylor Swift

      3. BTS

      4. Drake (really??)

      5. Justin Bieber

Top Streamed Songs:

1. “driver’s license”, Olivia Rodrigo

      2. “MONTERO”, Lil Nas X (c’mon y’all…)

      3. “STAY”, The Kid Laroi & J-Biebs

      4. “good 4 u”, Olivia Rodrigo (banger)

      5. “Levitating”, Dua Lipa & DaBaby

Top Podcasts:

1. The Joe Rogan Experience (obviously)

      2. Call Her Daddy (what is wrong with you guys?)

      3. Crime Junkie

      4. TED Talks Daily

      5. The Daily

Cool Playlist Facts: 

1. “Plant playlist” music grew by 1,400% during the pandemic

      2. “Vaccine related playlists” hit 42mm streams (think, ‘Hit me with your best shot”             by Pat Benatar

      3. There are >187,000 Sea Shanty playlists all generated by users (shoutout to                The Tendieman)

As you can no doubt see, it was an interesting year for streaming. Just keep in mind when you go and look at your that you really don’t “need” to post it all over social media. Literally no one cares, I promise. 

Manufacturing — We just received word from the North Pole, and it looks like your holiday gifts are gonna be fine as Santa has taken a page out of Bezos’ playbook and is forcing the elves to work overtime while removing any and all forms of bathroom breaks. As a result, production of goods is on pace to check every box on your wish list.

That’s right, the production of goods, aka manufacturing, continued to grow last month. We’re not sure just how much of that Santa is responsible, but safe to say it’s meaningful. November’s PMI reading came in at 61.1, a 0.3% increase from October’s 60.8 reading. That marks 18 months straight of gains - meaning the economy’s manufacturing sector has grown continuously for longer than any one of your relationships have lasted.

All in all, supply chains are healing. A ratio of new orders compared with inventory levels, remains low, indicating there is plenty of inventory to meet demand from these orders. Like I said, Santa’s working overtime.

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Asking for Trouble — Get ready to scream “WTF?!” and run to show your roommates what we’re about to say: the scientists out of Harvard, Tufts, and the University of Vermont that developed the world’s first living robots (did not even know this was a thing) have announced that apparently those living robots can now independently reproduce.

If that doesn’t make you sh*t bricks, you might be a living robot too. But please, allow me to elaborate.

Apparently, in 2020, U.S. scientists used stem cells from African clawed frogs to create “xenobots”, the official name of these living robots. Roughly 0.04 inches long, the xenobots serve no purpose right now and are basically just an example of scientific curiosity pushing the boundaries further than ever. This allowed those scientists to observe an entirely new method of biological reproduction in which the parent xenobot essentially sucks up loose stem cells (think Pacman) and bakes them inside their bodies until they mature into full xenobots themselves.

I don’t have to explain how “WTF” this is right? I mean, just wow.