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In our biggest episode of the year, we explore seismic shifts coming in 2025: from the return of Gen X leadership to a new wave of American counterculture.
In our biggest episode of the year, we explore seismic shifts coming in 2025: from the return of Gen X leadership to a new wave of American counterculture. We revisit our eerily accurate 2024 predictions while laying out bold forecasts for retail consolidation, AI evolution, and the changing media landscape. Plus, we dive deep into why Google might be poised for a massive comeback and how Walmart is transforming into a media empire.
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
Are you ready, Brian?
I'm ready.
This is a big one.
It's my favorite.
It's my favorite too.
And it's our audience's favorite too.
Unequivocally, according to the data this is the most popular episode of the year, which is sort of annoying because it means it's all downhill from here. {laughter}
{laughter} This has been the uphill. This is the up. Do we start at the top of the hill every year? We just start...
We start at the top of the... That's right.
We roll all the way down.
It's all downhill from here, baby. We roll down. I saw a T shirt the other day, and I was like, man, in another date and time, I would have bought that T shirt, and I would have proudly worn it. It was like, "That's not very data driven of you."
You know what I realized is? It's we are Sisyphys. We we push the boulder up, and then it just rolls down on us, and then we push it back up again.
Maybe our swag for 2025, Brian, should be, "That wasn't very culture and commerce of you."
{laughter} Oh, man.
"That wasn't very commerce is culture of you."
I think that's actually Shopify's swag of 2025. {laughter}
Oh no. No. It's not. I love... Let me say this. I love being the unofficial, uncredited and uncompensated brand creative studio for Shopify. That's my favorite part of being Future Commerce. {laughter} For those are who don't know what we're talking about, I got into a little back and forth with Shopify president, Harley Finkelstein, for taking my not yet trademarked term. He remixed it a bit. He put "culture plus commerce." He swapped the two, so I guess maybe, maybe he can get away with it there.
Very open source of him, to be honest.
Yes. Very open source of him. Very open. So it's not very data driven of him. Anyway, this is it. This is our predictions episode for the year. Should we officially kick it off? Are we gonna officially do it?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's great about this episode is I now know, after years of data, I know this is our most listened to episode. And so there may be opportunities for me to rant about things in this episode as we go that, you know, I just know that people are gonna listen to. {laughter}
And it's also usually our longest episode, so sort of buckle in. I have a little opening monologue, and I'd love for you to do the same too because I know everybody wants us to get into the predictions. We will. So for those of you who are new to the show, I do wanna set the stage a bit on how we do this episode, because it's a little different than other episodes. Every year, we start the year with our predictions of the year to come. So this episode conveniently precedes NRF Big Show, which is the first industry event of the year. So hopefully, you're getting this in before you get to the Big Show, and we make our predictions about a number of categories, like 10 to 12 categories of things like The Biggest Retail Winner, The Biggest Retail Loser, things like Tech Winners, Tech Losers, interesting trends, what have you. But year to year, Brian, now for four years in a row, I think this is our fourth year doing this particular format. Although we've done predictions now for, I think, seven, eight, nine years almost, this format is we revisit our predictions from the prior year.
Yeah.
So from time to time, we're gonna listen in to what we said in the past. We'll check-in on some data from our predictions from last year as we go.
And if you wanna go listen to that whole two hour episode plus After Dark bonus content, we actually it was so long, I think we added additional, like, hour and 20 minutes on the After Dark.
That's right.
It was three hours and 20 minutes of predictions in total or something like that. Maybe I'm overstating it, but it was a lot.
It was a lot. And we couldn't get out to all of it. I think we held over a bunch of the sort of health predictions sort of trends. So there was a lot of things that we got to... We might do the same here today. We don't know.
We'll see.
We haven't started. We haven't got into it.
We don't know how long this is gonna take.
And this year, we actually have helped because we have a team that's actually helping us focus our efforts, and we planned more for this year's episode than ever before. So I'm really pumped about that. Thank you, producer Sarah, for helping pull this all together with us. And I do have a little bit of an opening statement.
Cool. I love an opening statement. I can add one too. It's great.
Please. Alright. So here's I think a year in review for me. I think this year is probably best characterized as a U shaped year. I think we started this year with a lot of optimism, and the vibes were really high. I think a lot of things, especially even in our predictions episode, I think we were thinking that economically things were looking very exciting. I think what we said was, coming out of our NRF, it was like it sets the tone for the year. All of the ecom and retail folks seem to be very bullish for the year. Google seemed like it was poised to do a lot of great things, had a lot of promise for its Gemini product that was coming. Apple was on the verge of releasing its Vision Pro, and then a lot of things kinda went to crap. I think in February, Meta sort of fell apart, never really came back for the most part of the year for ecom brands. And so it had really poor performance for a lot of the year. Then I think in March, we had the TikTok bam ban was sort of a looming thing. So new channels, growth channels for a lot of early stage ecom started to look like they were going to be tightening up. Then we got deep into election discourse and a lot of, like, tumult in the summer. And it wasn't really until the end of the year where things started to kinda pull back around. Also, the Department of Justice and some other things happened around Google where it started to sound like they're gonna break up Google. Right? So even into the fall, Vibe's super low. And then what is the other part of the U? I think things really roared back in the last few months, especially since the election. Google apparently has broken reality with its new quantum chip. {laughter}
{laughter} I'm glad you mentioned that. I'm glad you mentioned that.
Yeah. The Google Willow chip, I think, is like, "You know what? Screw you guys. We don't need Chrome. Like, take Chrome. We've broken reality. Chrome? Where we're going, we don't need Chromes." So this quantum computing thing may be a reality and not just a fiction. Their Gemini 2 looks really promising. Also, Meta, their llama benchmarks look really impressive. They're doing some really, really interesting work in that space. Google has a new VR, XR, and a UI revolution coming that looks like it's parroting and upholding Apple's work in that space. And we're starting to see new spatial video and a renewed interest in a rev, finally, of the software interface, and interoperability in the Apple Vision Pro. So a lot of the things I was excited about this year, and a lot of the things that I think ecommerce and retail folks and new channels for investment were excited about are finally kinda coming back, and some optimism is come coming back into some of those channels. Meta came back toward the end of the year, and we see some excitement about new channels. And it does look maybe. I don't know, maybe TikTok doesn't get banned after all. So that's kind of it. For me, it's a bit of a monologue. I think we're in a U shaped year and maybe some new things on the horizon. I don't know. On prem AI. There's all kinds of things to maybe think through. So that's my opening monologue. It's 2024 in retro. Brian, what do you think?
Yeah. I think it's a great I do have to say, I did say, actually, that it was gonna be a choppy year. Literally, said that in our predictions episode. I said, "I do think it will be a choppy year. We're looking at more chop, and I think I said the same thing about last year. I expect there's gonna be a lot of traditional category losers that are getting left in the dust right now." And I think that that was dead on. I know looking ahead to this next year, I guess I'll telegraph a little bit already, but I don't think that's true this year. Less drop this year ahead. I love that you referenced Google. Google will make an appearance in here for me. But I do wanna look back at 2024 a little bit. And, yeah, I mean, we're gonna get into that in the episode, but something that kinda hit the discourse pretty hard in 2024 is this idea of taste. Right? And that's literally just now resurrected the conversation. It's all over Twitter again. I think there's something really important to be said right now about taste because I actually think it has to do with predictions.
And it has to do with commerce? That's I guess, is always the question.
Of course.
Your taste and your outlook in the world. Right?
Yeah. And so I think, something interesting, there's a lot of people it's like, okay. Taste matters. Like, there's a lot of, "Yeah. Taste determines status, and taste is the ultimate trough." Or "moat." Sorry. {laughter} And there's a lot of, like, what's underneath the taste discourse? How did we get here? Why is it the most important thing now? Why is everyone talking about it? Especially those people that aren't very taste oriented? And I think it has a lot to do with digging and zagging, and there's been a lot of definitions of taste and what taste is. I think that this is important when it comes to understanding how the future works because a lot of times, peoples are said to have taste when they are able to identify the next zag. When people are zigging, they zag. "Oh, they have taste." Right? And a lot of people have said, "Okay. That has to do with authenticity. People who are authentic understand taste because they are working from a position of of swag," or whatever it is. They've got a a sense as to, like, how they work.
And that was 2024 in a nutshell.
Right. I actually believe that is not what taste is. I believe that taste is the unique ability to recognize objective truth in situations where subjectivity reigns supreme. So when subjectivity is the sort of mood of the moment, and it's the wisdom of the crowd coming into its own voice, the thing that I think is happening is this gets actually back to people who have quantum intelligence. I wrote a piece about this a while back. What was it? 2020? End of 2020? End of 2021? Somewhere in here. About how there are certain people who can see backwards from things and have the ability to assess things from multiple angles and understand their longevity and understand and are able to look forward and work back as to how you get to that thing. And so when they look at the zigs and the zags, they're not actually looking at the trend lines. They're not looking at the linear approach to how things are going to move because if they only look at linear, they would just say, "What happened last year is going to be the thing that happens this year. Here's a trend of what's happening. Here's what's gonna happen next as a result. Here's where taste is going." Right? But it's people that have the ability to assess things from multiple angles, and look back at an outcome, and say, "Oh, that outcome's gonna happen," and here's all the things that I don't have the words necessarily to express how I got to that thing, but they're able to assess truths that exist outside of the current dataset of truth. And so I think that's how predictions work, and I think that that is how taste works as well. So there you go. I do believe in objective truth. I think subjective truths are real as well, and I believe that people who have quantum intelligence are the ones that actually have taste. Taste and predictions actually have a lot in common because it's usually people that have the ability to say, oh, that thing that no one else can see that I know it's there, but nobody else knows it's there because I'm not working from a linear perspective. And so I think there's a lot of actually parallel between taste and predictive ability.
Okay. I do like that as a framing. So you're saying you can weed out what people are saying is, there's a hype cycle that you have to sort of ignore. Right? There's something that you have to be able to tap into as what is zeitgeist versus your ability to tap into a broader trend line based on all kinds of inputs.
Right.
All kinds of social inputs, all kinds of macroeconomic inputs, things that you think are volatilities that need to be factored in.
Yep.
The world is about to change. So I spent a ton of time this year that I've never done before. We have tools today that we've never had before. I used, you know, tools like Perplexity to go back and mine our last year's episode for to catalog all of our predictions.
Yeah.
So I did a lot of that. I used GPT 01 with advanced reasoning.
Not 03? What? {laughter}
Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't there yet. We didn't have that. Still don't. So but I used 01 with advanced reasoning to spend a lot of time thinking through counterfactuals. Because I want to think about a world that doesn't exist yet. What is a world that we're about to step into? Because the world is about to change dramatically. It's not the same world that we have right now. So think about the factors of this new world, and this just comes back into your taste thing. Because it's all a matter of taste, I guess, is what you're trying to say. It's like our lens of the world is a matter of our taste and our ability to think about things in a...
Not exactly. But yeah. That's also true.
Then say it differently. Tell me what you think.
No. No. No. That's also true. It's not about a matter of taste. It's about how as people who can assess taste, it's actually the same sort of intelligence as people that can predict things. And while it's being applied in two different situations, it's actually the same sort of intelligence. It's just the people that are in the taste economy, as Daisy Alioto put it, they are applying their quantum intelligence towards a specific category.
There are some huge factors changing in the world.
Right.
I was on a call yesterday with somebody, and they're, "Given our incoming fascist government, what is Future Commerce gonna do to report on that and hold truth to power?" And I was like, "That's such an interesting perspective," because some people would say that is not the perspective that some people have. I don't even know that I have a perspective. I think that the way that this is all gonna play out is very different to the first Trump administration, very, very different. But we are seeing, generally, a much more technocratic approach this time around. So I'm thinking about some of those things, like a change in regulatory environment. Right? A change in tariff environment. Right? A change in, I don't know, call it American dynamism. Right? New tax policies. All these things come to bear when I'm thinking of making predictions, Brian. But you're talking about something else. Because I'm thinking about environment. Is that the same thing?
You are. No. I was talking about how things get done. How predictions get done and made, but I think we're actually edging up against each other here.
Let's talk about one particular prediction because there's something that you do that very few people really ever do. You see things way before anybody else does. Let's revisit one prediction as we get into this from last year that nobody would have ever said is true. In fact, when I plug this into any LLM today, they'll say that this is still wrong, but I think our listeners might have a different take. Let's play this clip from last year, about a certain owner of a social media network and your take on what their 2024 might look like.
{chimes} This is this is gonna feel so icky to some people, but I actually believe that Elon Musk is going to have a a bit of a comeback year. And you know what I stand on Elon. You've seen...
This is wild to me. Yeah.
I know. I was an early Elon hater. Again, when he was probably at his height of popularity. Here is what I think. Elon is a wild and bold thinker who transcends what is socially acceptable. And in even my ethical bounds, I don't think that Elon's a very ethical man.
You can say all of that again.
Uh-huh.
Yep.
What I did see out of Elon recently, were a couple interviews where I think he's eaten a little bit of humble pie. What I love about someone who's eating a little bit of humble pie that is as wild of a thinker as Elon is, is that it forces them to rethink what they're doing a little bit and reinvigorate and re go after things in a new way. And so what I believe, you know, Elon's been on the brink of bankruptcy before. Him being down is not an uncommon story for him. He's not afraid of being down. But what it does is it often ends up producing some of his best work. So I'm not necessarily endorsing Elon as a person or endorsing even maybe the success of X, but the idea of a super app existing at some point is something that I do believe is possible. So I do think this is... I'm gonna mark this moment. Maybe it's not 2024, but I do see Elon getting down to the bottom and then working his way back out starting in 2024. {chimes}
Okay, Brian. Not a single person would have agreed with you, but I think the cochair of the Doge administration, that's not an administration, Doge agency. That's not really an agency.
Shadow President Elon.
What a year for Elon Musk. You really called it. So you have a pension for being able to have this counter, you know, this countercultural prediction. You've got a couple of these that we'll sprinkle throughout. You got that dead on the nose, I think. It's a comeback year.
It was a comeback year. I think even if Elon, it wasn't necessarily his best financial year of all time. He as a person made a massive comeback probably with a totally new set of fans. I think Elon understands that attention and fandom is how you maintain and grow power. And he also understands that taking big swings and changing things up and making the world different is a way to do that. And he even believes, I actually think this, I think Elon fully believes he's attempting to make the world a better place in the process, and so he sees those two things as coinciding.
And lots of people would disagree with him, but I think that it's undeniable. There are moments this year of I think Elon is at the height of his powers right now. The absolute height of his powers right now.
Totally. And that is almost unthinkable when I've said that. When I said that Tesla's stock was in the dumps. X, everybody was like, "This is the worst purchase in history."
Clowning on it super hard. And they still are.
Yeah.
But he is turning that into a tremendous amount of political influence.
Correct.
And I think he doesn't really care necessarily what people in the world think about him. I think he really super cares about doing work that will change humanity. And maybe also being number one in the world at Diablo IV. I think that he super cares about that.
Yeah. I mentioned this. This is gonna sound insane. I actually said something, I forget who I was talking to recently. Somebody who's not involved in the world that I'm involved in at all, and I was like, "Look, I can understand some people see Elon as kind of a little bit of a faker or charlatan or whatever, but he's top 10 in the world in Diablo IV." Do you realize what level of skill that takes to do? Do you understand how intense it is to become a top 10 player in Diablo? That is actually a skill. I know that sounds insane probably to people listening to this as well. But I know that's the weirdest proof point. You have to spend 30 to 40 hours a week, and you probably won't even crack the top 100.
It's almost as hard as catching a super heavy rocket out of midair with chopsticks.
Almost. Almost.
Alright. Alright. Alright. Okay. If you tell me, Brian, that it requires taste and objective truth to come up with that kind of a prediction and quantum thinking, I believe you. I think that's great. We have another one of those...
That's just a zig and a zag moment. That was actually not quantum thinking. {laughter}
Let's get into it. So we'll take these sort of one by one. We'll revisit these as we go, and we usually start with Biggest Retail Winners. Hey. Last couple years, I think I started with you, Brian, because I always know what you're gonna say. So I'm hoping now, fourth year in a row, that you'll surprise me. Brian, The Biggest Retail Winner for 2024, you said Costco, and Costco indeed had a phenomenal year.
Phenomenal.
Phenomenal year. They kept that hot dog pegged at $1.50. They are changing, Brian, to a lot of people's cheers and I would say elated, excited surprise. They're changing from Pepsi to Coke products. A lot of excitement there. Some amazing things happening.
Yeah.
But beyond that, just incredible continued growth. What is your prediction for The Biggest Retail Winner of 2025?
Costco. {laughter} Here's why. Costco's international market, they have so much room. There's so much room. Costcos that get put into international places are swarmed. They're mobbed. People love Costco in international markets, and there's so much room left. In fact, I would say this is actually Costco, and other people have said this, represents the American dream probably better than any other institution.
Wow.
It is Americanism. It is American thinking. It's American thought pushed out through the world. It is Michael Jackson of now. It is the Michael Jackson of now. It is the blue jeans of now. It is actually America in the world.
Wow.
And so I actually believe that the American dream, the capitalist dream, the thing that we wanna show people in the world that commerce can do for them if it's stewarded properly in an era of freedom or in an environment of freedom, is best represented by Costco. I think there's actually a big push from even the government to help enable Costco to go into other places and put America's stamp on it.
That's... {laughter} Cool. I'm here for it.
{laughter}
I thought you had run out of things to say about Costco, but you obviously have not. Yeah. No. I like that as a prediction. Very good. Any last word about that? I think we spent 20 minutes last year on Costco. I think we know what you have to say about Costco.
Yep. And we don't need to say I mean, we all know it did well. There we go. Onto yours. Because we're done with mine.
And a lot of digital transformation left to have there too, by the way.
Totally. So much.
The ecommerce relaunch is something that's long been promised and never delivered. So we'll see what happens there. Biggest Retail Winner of 2025, I predicted last year. I agreed with you. I think I said Costco as well. I also said Walmart has a lot of room for growth, but had forecasted a down year due to Ozempic. So I had I said I couldn't in good conscience put it on my list, but I wanted to. Walmart kinda freaking crushed.
Yeah. Totally.
I should have listened to my gut. I should have listened to my gut. I really should have. My tummy that would have been upset had I been taking Ozempic.
{laughter} Is that how it works? You just feel sick all the time?
That's what I hear. {laughter} That's what I hear. This year, and this will be a theme that you're gonna see develop throughout, I am going to have a lot... I'm gonna take a lot of... I really explore the space and I will be liberal with my interpretation of these prediction categories this year. This year, I am predicting Biggest Retail Winner, I'm calling it mega brands.
I like this. I like this.
I think retail winner of 2025 is the age of agglomeration. I think retail as an entire category benefits from a lower threat of regulatory oversight because this administration has a big change. If Walmart and VIZIO is the template of a beginning of a new type of an exit for a vertical brand going into a retail owned channel, and then Microsoft and Activision is a signal of being able to pass regulatory muster, and Mars and Kellanova are on the way, and rumors of Nissan and Honda coming together hint at other problems where we are starting to see disruption in other parts of the industry, of old legacy businesses coming together, I think we can expect that a ton of other sort of breakups and reorganizations and mergers and agglomeration will start to happen. So we see giant holdcos. I'm just gonna predict for in the retail sector, this is probably not specifically retail doors and physical retail, but in the retail sector, we will see larger holdcos start to downsize by breaking off individual pieces into smaller entities so that they can reorganize and they can pass regulatory muster when they sell those divisions off at a later date.
I love that.
And I think that we have the template, and we have the mandate to get out of the way of business in 2025. Whether we like that or not, I think that's where we're heading. And so that's what I am calling mega brand. The Biggest Retail Winner of 2025, I'm calling mega brands.
Do you think that there'll be a certain amount of... So you mentioned consolidation cuts, things like that. Do you think there's gonna be a certain amount of layoffs that come with some of these? I'm just curious.
You know, maybe. I think there's always duplication. But I think when you look at Kellanova as one of the models here...
Yeah.
...you're looking at a distinct business unit being cleaved off from another. And that means that it becomes a necessarily smaller business. And that means it's not role deduplication. You have to actually create a smaller entity that's self sufficient that stands apart from the larger holdco now. So if you have a cereal division or a snack food division, like, remember Mondelez and Nabisco and that whole thing. If Mondelez is now rolling back up into another company, there are things coming down the pike in 2025 that I think will surprise all of us. And I think it's because tariffs change the calculus.
Yes. I think that's right.
It changes everything. Right? So that's kind of what I see, and I think that changes the retail environment. If anyone is gonna sit here and say the only people that you really can bet on in the retail sector to continue to grow is like, it's the Walmart, Amazon, Target of it all, when I mean, Target's a questionable one. We'll get to that. And, you know, Costco, like, there's only a handful that you can really say could be winners. So let's think about the broader sector is and I'm gonna do this a couple times over in this list. So that's The Biggest Retail Winner of 2025.
I like that.
Let's find the flip side, Brian. The Biggest Retail Loser of 2025. Last year, Brian, you said Joanne, Michaels, the craft industry. Brian.
Yeah. Traditional.
You called it.
I called it. Yeah. Joanne's bankruptcy in March. I was like, three months later. Boom. Done.
It's a penny stock. It's a penny stock now. So, oh, soothsayer, Brian, what say you? Who is The Biggest Retail Loser in the coming year 2025?
Yeah. So I think people that make really, really bad stuff, the cheap stuff has no place left in this industry because it's so available from overseas producers now. So it's the retailers that are kind of brought things in house a little bit. Like, Wayfair. I think Wayfair might struggle a little bit. They have, like, all their house brands. It's sort of not good furniture, and you can kinda just there's so many Chinese brands or other cheap brands that you might as well just buy it on Amazon or Walmart at that point. I think Wayfair has a lot of assortment, which is nice. And so you can kinda find the thing you're looking for, but Google Shopping has gotten better. I feel like there's a lot more opportunity to find things other places, and, ultimately, you want that Prime sort of style or Walmart Plus shipping experience, and there's just a lot more safety in it than buying it from Wayfair. Walmart to your point, and I think Walmart's got actually, a great year ahead still. Returns are so much easier at Walmart. I think that's that people are... Buying furniture is tough. Another one would be Big Lots. I think they've already kind of gone through some layoffs. They're gonna struggle and continue to struggle because it's cheap stuff in just done in a very nondigital way. And it's not good, and so you might as well just buy cheap Chinese brands or whatever.
Direct.
Yeah. Direct.
You could buy them elsewhere.
Yeah. Exactly. So I think that brands are selling kind of cheap stuff. There's just too much competition from overseas and the shipping's getting too good. So, yeah, that's mine. You're up.
Yeah. Alright. Biggest Retail Loser of 2025, I said Target.
Great call.
And Target. Wow. Target. My goodness. Target had a tough year.
Yeah.
Down, I think, 6% year over year. Had a really tough comeback. They really never made their way back post boycotts, and really interesting because they were the beginning of a very vocal group of people, or maybe even like the Bud Light campaign. I think there was a certain type of an archetype of person who just sort of decided that in the run up to this next election that they would be heard. And retail is one place to exercise that choice, and I kinda saw that coming. Target seemed like a natural place.
Great call.
That's where we saw it. I don't know that it's gonna be any better for them, to be honest with you this year.
Agree.
But they are not my choice for The Biggest Retail Loser of 2025. I have chosen well, I've chosen two. For Biggest Retail Loser of 2025 I'm gonna say on the traditional side, GameStop. And I don't think that this is a hot take by any stretch of the imagination.
Oooh.
This company is teetering and has been for a very long time. Had it not been for the stonks and the short squeeze I think there's areas where this company has been hanging in the balance for a long, long time. Other companies that I think were also imperiled are just starting to crumble. So this retailpocalypse that's been promised for a long, long time is starting to slowly play out. Party City just folded and will close all of its stores. I think GameStop is one that we will see go away in 2025, and it's unfortunate. It's sad because it is a place that you know, it's the last vestige of this kind of a thing that's a holdover from the eighties.
I could see some weird thing happen where someone acquires them for pennies on the dollar and then turns it into almost, like, Internet culture sort of brand. They could turn it into, I don't know. There's something there. There's something that could be done with it because it has such a strong brand with so many stories. I think there's actually, there's some mythic value in the brand, and that's...
Possibly. Yeah.
I think someone would probably buy it or bring it back to life and do something different with it.
Well the people that do such a thing usually, if you look at the Linens and Things, there are people that usually acquire these sorts of distressed assets, RadioShack. It's usually Tai Lopez and that holding group. And they usually turn them into a crypto pump and dump scheme. So you might be right. {laughter}
Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I think it's gonna... I think you're right. It's gonna hit the distressed and death cycle almost. But I actually see, I think it has a little bit more brand value than even some of those Linens and Things sort of style things. I think it has potential to be turned into almost like an Internet nostalgia shrine.
Sure. Inherently incombered by debt, and the brand itself is probably not worth a a ton. The assortment is something you can find in Target and Walmart.
Totally. Yeah.
So I hear what you're saying. I think without used games and used game trade, it's probably not long for this world. Sad.
Yeah.
But, anyway, the nostalgic value alone is probably not worth it. But, anyway, I that's my prediction. It's not saying that's what I want for this world. I love spending an hour or so in a GameStop with my kids, but anyway. We don't trade on nostalgia. I'm just making a call. And that's because I have quantum thinking and I have objective truth and taste, Brian. That's what I hear.
All three. Trifecta.
I have a second thing. I don't know where to locate this. I chose a traditional retail for Biggest Loser. I chose GameStop. I think if I had to choose a Biggest Retail Loser in ecom, I'm gonna say it's Temu and Shein as a category of Asian specific direct retailers. Shein, in particular, depends very heavily on a tariff, a lower tariff environment and physical mall retailers partnerships like Forever 21. And I think in a world where that... {sigh} I think the tide is gonna turn on that that makes it very difficult. Amazon Haul is also a competitive offering.
I was gonna bring that up.
Yeah. Sorry to take your thunder.
No. It's great. No. I love it. I love it. Dead on. Dead on. Haul. Have you bought anything off Haul yet?
I haven't on moral principle.
I bought something on Haul.
But pretty soon when the purse strings start tightening around the Jackson household, then I might. So yeah.
I think they're gonna expand Haul. They're gonna expand Haul significantly. There's just too much. There's too much opportunity there. In fact, I actually think Haul could eat into even the Ross and Marshalls a little bit. There's stuff that I bought on Haul that I actually like better than anything I saw in my Ross.
That's a brand new sentence that's never been uttered before in human history. Congratulations.
Thank you.
So that's The Biggest Retail Loser of 2025. I'm sure you're gonna cover it again in a minute. I said Temu or Shein or basically direct Chinese ecom retail, I think, is a thing that is gonna get readdressed.
Except for through Amazon potentially through Haul. I think that's...
Right. Yeah. That's I think that's where we're going to head. Alright. Brian, back to you.
Let's go to you first this time. This next one.
I like that.
You're up.
Let's do that.
You're up.
Alright. Modern Brand Winner of 2025. This used to be called DTC Winner. And as we all know, DTC is dead. {laughter} So I have retitled this. We have retitled this, Brian and I to call it Modern Brand. What's the difference between a modern brand and anything else? I don't know. But we're figuring it out.
What we were trying to say is there's new and upcoming brands that aren't less traditional...
Digital first.
Yeah. Not necessarily digital first even, but just modern thinking new ish.
Yeah. New like, founder led.
Yeah.
Probably probably venture backed, looking for an exit, high scale, meta dependent. It's probably all those things probably lend themselves to a modern.
Well ok... My prediction here is not necessarily in that...
Cool. You can undue me. I don't care. {laughter}
Yeah.
I'll tell you how I was thinking of it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Alright. I think modern brand might be as hard to define as DTC was. How's that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Okay. Modern Brand Winner of 2024, I said Soft Services, which is a beauty and skincare brand that was founded by Rebecca Zhou, and BK Beauty off of its strategy focused on growing through YouTube and TikTok shops.
What a call.
In fact, I have a clip, and let's hear what I had to say.
{chimes} I think beauty just generally is the DTC winner of 2024 and probably was the DTC winner of the last three years anyway.
Yeah.
But if I had to pick one that is not a trad DTC brand with a millennial aesthetic, I have to say the influencer brands that are TikTok Shop native are really fascinating to me. In particular, BK Beauty and our friend Paul...
Yeah. Paul.
I think BK Beauty having triple digit growth...
Wild.
...is the kind of thing that tells me that it's not livestream that is the thing that will change the influencer brand, or it's not the influencer integrated marketing in their own owned channel. It is the fact that short form content does spur purchase behavior, and buying in the channel where you're inspired is the shortest path to purchase. Now, hey, you know what could upend all of this is TikTok Shop rug pulling a 2% merchant fee and 4 x ing that to 8% with a 6 month notice period is kind of a rug pull. But I do think that TikTok Shop will continue to drive a lot of consumer purchase behavior. I just don't know if it is the future of commerce. {chimes}
Or the first bipartisan agreement in my lifetime of shutting down the first, you know, high growth channel for a new emergent high growth channel. {laughter} TikTok, obviously, a cultural phenomenon but seeing as how we have a just a you know, BK Beauty, obviously, friend of the show, Paul Jauregui. Brian, you sat down with Paul. We spoke about this, I think, the day after the TikTok ban was announced or that there would be legislation that would be pending that would be drafted around this. He said it would be business as usual, and he's not worried about it.
Yeah. And he made a smart move there because TikTok didn't shut down in the US yet. And you know what he did? He actually, it was business as usual, but he also expanded really smartly into YouTube commerce, and they helped pioneer that as well. And Paul and Lisa are just, I think they understand their audience really well, and they understand where they live, and they understand where they're gonna continue to live and where they're gonna go. And so I love that call. It's amazing. Great job on the pick.
Yeah. Thanks. January 19th. I guess we'll see where it actually lands up after the election. And I actually have a number of notable dates that we'll sort of cover here in a little bit. There's a lot to look forward to this year. So that was 2024.
Yeah.
My prediction for Modern Brand Winner of 2025, so we saw an exit already, two of them this year that I think set me up for my prediction. We saw an exit of Sour Strips, which is one of my kids' favorite gummy sour brands.
Yeah. Sour Strips are good.
Yeah. And it was acquired recently, for an undisclosed amount by Hershey. And if you're not familiar with the brand, you've probably see it, founder Maxx Chewning, started this brand as a young guy, very enviable. Ghost recently entered into a long term partnership with a majority equity stake purchased by Keurig Dr Pepper. I think these sorts of brands to me fit the bill for modern. It's a modern brand that had a sort of flavor profile is probably the wrong word, but sure. Why not? They are aiming at a younger demographic and while one of them is candy, one of them is sort of wellness or performance, I think they both sort of fit a certain type of aesthetic and lifestyle that they're aiming for. So my pick for The Modern Brand Winner of 2025 is a friend and listener of the show, Kanpai Foodz, which is a freeze dried candy brand.
Isaac.
Founded by a YouTuber, Isaac Madeiros, from Kanpai Foodz and founded by a creator, economy first founder led brand creator. And so I think that Kanpai is not a category innovator, and I don't think it takes category innovators to actually create enduring brands. I think it's people who actually understand how to create attention. So that's my pick for The Modern Brand Winner of 2025. Brian, over to you.
Yeah. So last year, I made a prediction, which hasn't fully panned out yet. I'm gonna say yes because I said anything Terrance Reilly touches, then Terrance Reilly in April got recruited over back to Crocs to lead, Hey Dude. Tough assignment. They were down the next quarter. They're predicted to be down again this quarter. That said, I feel like Terrance usually has a pretty... He has a healthy game plan. I would say it's an unfair thing to judge him by the first two quarters that he's in place. He usually has, I think the Crocs game plan took, like, three to five years, and I think Stanley was something in the same range. So the jury, for me, is out on that, but, technically, it looks like I'm down at the moment. Here's where I think, Phillip, you called something a while back, and it also played into some stuff that I've been talking about for a while, and that was Teenage Engineering. You called them as I think I don't know if they were in our predictions episode or not, but you've been kind of calling them as a brand that's gonna do well. It's gonna survive, and they actually had some really interesting collabs over this past year.
Yeah. I said a modern Apple, I think they had the design language and the spirit and ethos of Apple and Braun. Right?
Yep. I think and this plays into something I'm gonna talk about even more later, but we are headed into an era of hardware interest. And I think that we saw the the flash in the pan stuff, like, with Friend where, you know, people were like, "Oh, look at this." Great content. Great content. But I think that content excitement is actually representative of a deeper desire within people right now to get around bespoke technology, hardware technology that's well designed. And I think and I wanna save this for later. I will talk more about this later, but I'm gonna say, Teenage Engineering is gonna have a few moments this coming year that are going to help it break out, and they may even I think whether it gets disclosed this year or not, I almost guarantee you... I shouldn't say that. I am willing to bet that they get offers to be purchased. They probably already had them, but I think for this year, even more so, there's going to be people that come along and wanna buy it. Maybe they'll accept one even. Maybe it's too good not to accept, but maybe they pull a Facebook and say, "We're actually we're worth a lot more than that," and stick it out and grow. So I think this might be an interesting year for them.
I love that prediction because, you know, I stan the brand. You can see a device or two in my background if you're watching on the YouTube.
Yeah.
I love this too. So there's a few things that we may or may not touch on. You know, there's been this rumor circling for a little while of Jony Ive working with OpenAI on a hardware device that may or may not be coming in the future.
This is mine. You're getting into my stuff, man. {laughter}
But right. So I love this idea of resurgence of hardware. Teenage Engineering seems to be whetting the appetite of a lot of people that who want physical things in the physical world. Friend isn't a real product yet, but Rabbit was, and that was designed by Teenage Engineering, and that was a piece of trash.
Yes. The problem with it was that actually the interface was not good.
No. Yeah. I mean, the hardware was probably fine. I don't have one. And then the humane pin before that, not their device and not their device language, but I do see that, like, they are capitalizing on a world that people want to exist.
Right.
Those companies are on to something that people want to exist, and I love this idea of a surrogate. Like, who is the standard bearer? Why not Teenage Engineering? I love that.
Yep.
Cool. Brian. Okay. I love that. Let's keep moving then.
Yeah. So Modern Brand Losers.
Yeah. Let's keep moving. Modern Brand Losers. So I'll bring it back to me. Last year, I said celebrity brands. Celebrity brands would be the biggest loser of 2024. I looked high and low to figure out if I could find supporting evidence of this. I could not find supporting evidence of this, mostly because I don't think it's easy to find where celebrities take an L in public.
Yeah. That's probably true.
You know, the the Ryan Reynolds of the worlds just keep printing. They just keep showing up and launching more brands and gaining more social equity, and social capital, I should say. So good for them. I think I pooh poohed it on this one. I just want this to be over. Personally, I'm just tired of it. Modern Brand Losers, I think it'll be really easy for me to say this. Modern Brand Losers in 2025. I think it's any... I'll define it as this. Any Meta dependent, arbitrage chasing, ecommerce channel Shopify drop ship brand that is easily undone by tariffs.
Yep.
I think that describes an entire industry. It describes an entire podcast industrial complex. It describes an entire newsletter industry. It describes an entire agency delivery complex.
Oh man.
It describes an entire thought leadership industry. That whole business of SaaS industry depends entirely on cheap products from China, and that feels like a house of cards. And, also, I think that Meta has been slowly weaning the industry off for a long time. And this is where a lot of the post February whatever changed that nobody really knew. There has been a slow trickle down of poor performance in those channels for a very long time. And that is something that I think we're just gonna have to reckon with is the Modern Brand Losers of 2025 might just be modern brands.
My loser is Temu, which plays back to what you talked about earlier.
I blew it for you earlier. Yeah.
No. No. No. You didn't blow it. I think it's over because of the political environment, but also because what you said about Amazon Haul and there's just a lot of reasons why Temu is a tough business to be in over the next four years. And also it really connected with what you just said. Drop shippers connected to cheap stuff. It's tough to exist. Walmart, on the other hand, I think Walmart is uniquely positioned to offer people cheap goods that they trust. I think there's a general overall thing here that I wanna talk about. There's a lot of consolidation that's gonna happen. So you mentioned so it's either brands are gonna die or they're gonna get acquired, and everything's gonna get rolled up into bigger pieces now. Even in the traditional retail, like, traditional retail is getting rolled up. You mentioned the at the at the beginning of the show, like or beginning of the predictions part of the show, the combinations. I think there's gonna be a lot of rolling up, and this plays ahead to something else that I wanna talk about later in the episode. There's a lot of roll up that's happening right now. A lot of death, a lot of roll up.
I think that's, insert the circle of life like drumbeat. {singing} Circle of life. Don't quote me. That might have been right on key. I'm not saying I have perfect pitch, but okay.
Actually, that might have been on right on pitch.
I think it might have been. Somebody's gonna have to check me on that. Okay. Move over. Who's the guy with the crazy hair? Jacob, you know what I'm talking about? Jacob crazy hair.
I don't know. There's a lot of Jacob Crazy Hairs out there.
You know who I'm talking about? It's the guy on TikTok makes weird... There's a type of person that makes music for other musicians. Doesn't make music for a normal person.
Yeah. There's a lot of those.
You you know, he sings the Ave Maria, makes people he, like, directs the choir people.
I don't know, man. I'm not on TikTok.
You don't know what I'm talking about. Alright. That's alright. This is called engagement bait. We'll get everybody to shout it at the screen. Okay. He has perfect pitch. That's why I said that.
Oh, got it. Got it. Got it.
That's my associate of brain kicking in. You can tell what's in my algorithm. Alright. So this is where things take a little bit of a shift, and I will take a little sip of water. It's the only sip I have here. Alright. This is where we go a little far afield, and I have a little more creative liberty. Brian, Biggest Media Winners. Biggest Media Winners.
Yeah.
Alright. Biggest Media Winners for 2024. This is what I had to say.
Oh.
{chimes} I think Roblox might become the next massive commerce channel because Roblox had an announcement in October of '23 where they would be introducing what they're calling real world commerce. And this idea of real world commerce is that you'll be able to transact in real dollars directly as if it were ecommerce in the platform for the first time for real world goods. It is an actual real life transaction that gets fulfilled. And that seems to me to be a massive opportunity for brands that have been investing in that universe with a very young crowd that spends a stupid amount of money. I think Roblox is up to 80,000,000 monthly active users, which is absolutely preposterous. They flip the commerce switch, and it is as important as the launch of TikTok Shops if you ask me. {chimes}
What a move. That was awesome. That was a great prediction.
Well, I mean, they're a public company, so they talk about these things publicly, which makes things helpful.
It does.
On just as a note, Sarah found some data points to kinda uphold this. I did report on this all year long. So we stayed up on top of this. Every quarter, I did revisit the Roblox earnings, which was super helpful. They not only did Walmart launch, they they didn't just launch their own owned IRL shopping on Roblox in 2024. They also sort of syndicated what they built for themselves for another brand, elf Beauty in 2024. We had Justin Bretton on the show to come talk about that, and we wrote about it in our new print journal that we launch at NRF on January 14th. Link in the show notes.
Yeah.
That print journal is called Lore. Check it out. But it's not just, so at the time of this recording, that past recording where we just played the clip, it was 80,000,000 monthly active users. This year, they're up to 80,000,000 daily users and 300,000,000 active monthly.
That is exponential growth.
Yeah. It is. That's what they call a hockey stick. And I think that is something. That's a force to be reckoned with, and it is an entire generation of people that crave digital goods as a part of their identity and the way that they see themselves as their identity online.
They also announced their partnership with Shopify this year.
That's true. Something that I also covered, and that has not been... That was just an announcement of a forthcoming integration.
Correct.
So I when when when Walmart starts forecasting about digital goods transactions for itself in the future, when Shopify is partnering with them and you look at that economics, I think, I could easily have run back Roblox as my Biggest Media Winner of 2025. The other one that I said that we didn't clip was DTC Media, and I specifically said All-In. And that again, another great prediction.
Yes.
Because I think you could specifically credit All-In for three things. Number one, it was the first podcast that President-elect Trump visited before he did his historic podcast run.
Yep.
Right? So before he did Theo Vonn, before he did Rogan or anything like that, he did All-In. Right? And so did seven, I think, eight of the presidential candidates in the year preceding this last election cycle.
And Vance spoke at their conference.
And JD Vance spoke it at the All-In summit.
Yep.
Which was a huge nightmare, and I got a sunburn when I was there. Thanks, guys. But you can also credit David Sacks, one of the cohost of the show, is now the AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration, something that he said he would never do. {laughter} He parlayed that. Okay. That's a whole thing. And then Elon being best friend of the show also kind of plays into the current moment that we're having with his role in the Trump administration.
Yeah.
I think you can almost definitively say, you could draw a line back to, I think, All-In having the ear of the political centrist and the political right is kind of what has created the cabinet that we see forming and the adviser network that we see forming in the Trump administration. So on both fronts, I think both of my past predictions have held true. It's pretty cool.
Absolutely agree.
Okay.
Yeah. That was great. Those were great calls.
We spent a ton of time looking backward. Let me just I'll quickly hit on those. Just keeping the theme running. I say that The Biggest Media Winner of 2025 is podcast and creator economy is going to be the talk of the year. I think we had a really slumpy 2024. There were a lot of bad feelings around traditional podcasts, especially like the venture backed, big media brands that produce podcasts like a factory for the last 10 years. Anything that happened post serial and NPR, This American Life and and all the rest, Gimlet Media, Spotify Acquisitions, Joe Rogan, that's the old world. We're seeing a new brand of podcast creator, and I think it's true independent media content creators that are really breaking through. I'm fascinated with people like Jules Turpak. I'm fascinated with people that are even sub stackers, that are just they seem to be doing something tremendously different.
Emily Sundberg.
Yeah. Emily Sundberg in in particular, although not really podcaster. But, yes, these people are the people that I think are doing really phenomenal work. Um, super interesting stuff. And then my other side of this was, if I had to pick one, where does Walmart fit in any of my predictions, Brian? I put them here.
Media. Nice.
I think Walmart is a media brand. I think Walmart is a media brand now, And in a way that they are creating a form of media and entertainment through the way that they are enabling shopping, the way that they enable celebrity brand partnerships, the way that they do experiential advertising through entertainment. This ambient, they created the set. I haven't talked about it on the podcast yet. I wrote about it for The Senses. They created an ambient, like, Yule log type, like, lo fi girl, 12 hour YouTube, shoppable, wintry Christmas scene. They've done a number of these now. I think there's three of them or four of them that are more available.
Gilmore Girls collab?
But it's a Gilmore like, one of them is an IP centric Gilmore Girls, Luke's Diner thing that tells me that they have a very specific Venn diagram of the way that they are going after certain demos.
Mhmm.
And it is a very smart media hat that they put on to attract attention, and it's always shoppable. So we've seen NBCU do this a lot with shoppable content. I think we're seeing Walmart do it working back the other way.
Yeah.
So where NBC is trying to work from media going towards shopping, Walmart is working from shopping going toward media. And maybe they meet in the middle. I don't know. It's a really interesting thing, and that's why I put them here.
NBC acquires Walmart. Walmart acquires NBC.
Literally only way that could ever happen is in the upcoming administration environment. Maybe.
You're touching on something I'm gonna talk about.
Alright. So that's my picks. Plural for The Biggest Media Winner of 2025. Brian, let's look backward. Biggest Media Winner of 2024.
I had a few calls.
What did you say?
Yeah. I said lit focused pubs, and I think that there were some some interesting, independent lit focused publications and momentum there. And there was a little bit of data Sarah pulled on that, but we saw a lot of rise, like the rise of, Dostoevsky on TikTok. People know who Dostoevsky is now, which is cool. I like that actually. I've been a big Dostoevsky fan for a while.
Well Barnes and Noble is having a breakout.
Totally. And actually, this plays back to something that I said last year, and we didn't cover it earlier. But alongside my Terrance Reilly prediction, I said that the modern brands were actually going to be revitalizations of old IP. And I actually think that falls closer to a media prediction than it does actually a modern brand prediction. People are going to take things that existed in the world in the past, and they're gonna revive them into something new. And this actually is a part of my myth of poetic brand idea, and that is that there are stories that are stories in the world. They exist. They're real stories. They exist outside of whatever the zeitgeist is, and they belong in the world and they exist in our minds. Or if we forgotten about them, they could exist in our minds because they are good stories that belong in the canon of storytelling in our myths. And so there are enough of these out there now that you could consume the stories that already exist in our commercial canon your whole life and not get to the end of that.
Are you talking about IP that studios are mining forever? Are you talking about Twilight fan fiction or both?
It's both. It's both. You can either revitalize things that were done. Like, people can write new stories about existing IP, or they can take old IP and revive the image of it. So, like, Abercrombie was a good example of this. A couple years ago, someone took Abercrombie and a leadership team said, "We got something valuable here if we just can position it the right way."
Got it.
But it was a part of our minds. It was a part of our canon of brands that could be revitalized. The revival of IP, we saw this actually play out with Barnes and Noble. You brought this up already. Barnes and Noble opening a bunch of stores this coming year and opened a quite a few in 2024 as well. I think it was on pace, like, 60 or something like that in 2024.
I think it's 60 in 25 and 30 in 24, I think, was the number that I saw, but I'm usually fuzzy on certain ones of those.
I think I actually have the article, which we could refer to, but nobody really cares. Sixty openings planned in 2024. I think they were on pace for. So I think we're gonna see more of this, whether it's media IP that gets, you know, revitalized or brand IP that gets revitalized. Media and brand are merging to your point with Walmart. And so we'll see a lot of that. I'm gonna throw in a little bonus one. You said A24 would be The Biggest Media Loser of last year. I am gonna throw them in as a Biggest Winner in 2025. I also think similar to Teenage Engineering that people are gonna attempt to acquire them. I think they're probably gonna turn it down, and I think they're gonna keep crushing it, and they're going to write stories that are subversive to the environment that we're in. And that will play into another prediction I'm gonna get into a little bit later, but I think subversiveness is part of the upcoming cycle of this year.
I like that too. Alright. So we're into my thing around A24. Since we're there.
Yeah.
I'll talk about it. I'm over A24. I still am.
You said that last year. You're done.
Yeah. It wasn't so much as a prediction as just a positional statement. How's that? {laughter}
I think you you said Civil War is going to sink them.
I said it seems like a bad idea to predict the Civil War. And by the way, I stand by that. Seems like a bad thing to put out into the vibaverse.
The vibaverse. I like that.
Yeah. I predicted, yes. My Biggest Media Loser of 2024, I predicted A24. Obviously, that did not happen. I would like to point out though, does A24 have any Oscar contenders for 2024?
Who did The Brutalist? Well, that wasn't A24?
No. Oh, it is A24. I hate my life.
That's going to be nominated.
It never ends.
They just saved them for the ends. That's all. You know, you gotta see you gotta hold on to your Oscar winners till December.
Man. Man, Megalopolis happened this year. Can you believe that? Alright. So okay. Well, that sucks. You know?
You can't win them all. I also got destroyed on Biggest Media Loser.
Listen, I understand. You know what the problem is is that I really like A24 in everything that they do as a concept. Most of the content is not for me.
They do a lot of horror.
Yeah. Which is not... And to be fair, like, they're a distributor. Right? So I really dig that, like, they are more of a curator than anything else. And on the commerce side, they really do some smart stuff around zines. They do some really smart stuff around merchandising and, like, book creation. I dig everything that they do.
It's very modern.
Yeah. As a brand, as Emily Siegel would say or did say at our VISIONS Summit, they're probably the best example of a brand as a vibe that exists right now, and I think that that is cool as a concept. I just still believe and hold to be true that people love something until they don't.
Yes.
And something happens, and then one day people would be like, "Oh, I'm so sick of that." And then they just hate it. They hate it, and there's no coming back.
And I think it's actually a fair point because they do have a very specific vibe to their content. And that vibe is very metamodern. And people are kind of For sure. Dumping on metamodernism right now.
I think so. Yeah.
There's a whole thing about sincerity. Sincerity. It's not even it's where we move from, like, insincere to metamodern, which is sort of a mix of sincerity and and nonsincerity to back to sincerity being, like, the thing that people want to engage with potentially.
Alright. Well, anyway, I got it wrong, and I'm probably gonna get it more wrong after Oscar nominations come out. Anyway, A24 was my call for last year. I'm good. I'm doing a softball. Biggest media loser 2025? I'm calling TikTok.
I have the same one. {laughter}
TikTok. Yeah. I don't know that a ban necessarily is going to happen, but I have sensed a vibe shift on TikTok. I don't believe that TikTok is seen as a place that is easy to build a shop anymore. It's not easy to build and break through as a social creator anymore. I think that it is a place where a lot of people are trying to question their strategy around, especially as it revolves around ecommerce and especially as it revolves around channel mix. It is an amazing channel for a lot of people, especially in certain categories, like, especially in beauty. And I think that that is one of the, livestream also happens to be one of those things that's a pet peeve for me. It's kind of the exception that proves the rule for me. There are certain types of channels that, over time, the hype sort of wears off and you start to wonder why people spend a lot of time there. TikTok also, I don't think you need Chinese interference or security briefings or bipartisan agreement or even election campaign donations from people that are on the board of ByteDance. I don't think you need any of these things around the discourse for people to just sort of lose interest over time and get tired of being sold to. Also, we have a gambling addiction problem in the United States. I'm just gonna call that.
Yep.
Everything is gambling repackaged as some other service.
Yep.
Crypto is gambling straight up just, you know, TikTok blind box opening...
Robinhood.
It's all gambling in some form or fashion. And I think that there needs to be a real... {sigh} There needs to be, maybe this is another wishful thinking year for me, hoping that we would come to our senses around something just because I don't like it. But I abandoned TikTok as my main source of entertainment two and a half years ago, and I would implore others to do the same. But that's just me. Brian, why did you pick it as your Biggest Loser of 2025?
Yeah. Same reason. I think that they used to be what was the tagline? Culture is made on TikTok?
Yeah.
And it just it feels like the culture makers, there was a ton of culture made on TikTok, and a whole generation of performers found their way in through TikTok. But channels where people are finding interesting things shift all the time, and it just feels like it's so saturated now that breaking through feels hard.
Yeah.
It felt easy when it got going. It was like, wow. Like, people are paying attention to what I do quickly, and you could throw something out there and see wild success super fast because it just was a innovative format. The TikTok Shop thing, the commercialization of TikTok, may be it's very undoing.
We're a little past the halfway point.
We're well past that.
We have a lot of agreement on this one. I think we might diverge a little bit. Alright. Let's go to you first on this next one. Biggest Tech Winner of 2025, mister Brian Lange. Last year, you said Shopify's moved to the enterprise. You also that was where you mentioned the wild Elon call. Can I applaud you on I think you got the Shopify call right? 99% up this year, I think.
It all worked. I think Shopify still has a strong strategy. To your point from earlier, there's potential for them to lose some business over a lot of these modern brands that have made their... Like, they had a culture win. Shopify had a culture win. When they sort of empowered drop shippers and and sort of these modern importer brands and marketers that wanted to be product sellers. Right? The reason why I'm not gonna say Shopify is The Biggest Loser, I guess, we'll get into that later, but is because I think their strategy around where people shop is really good. And so I think that Shopify has some great hedges against losing that edge of the culture. So people are going to Roblox. They're going to Roblox. They're finding spots where people are going to continue to go, and I think they're gonna partner with a lot of other channels where people are gonna make and sell products. And so I don't think Shopify is my Biggest Winner of the year, but I don't think that they're gonna be a horrific loser either.
Who is your Biggest Winner of 2025 in the tech sector, Brian?
Google. Google, I think, has the opportunity to actually be a big winner here because...
Say more about that because that does not seem to be consensus.
No. No. It doesn't. I think here's why. They've cut a lot of jobs. They're slammed way down. They're tight as a team right now. They cut a lot of talent. They did cut a lot of talent, and there are still people there that I think do not get it. There are people that don't get it. But also there are people there that are extremely talented people that work at Google, who understand tech better than you or I do, and better than most of the people listening to this podcast. So I do think that there are people there that can take them back. And, also, Google has still so much default behavior. I don't think they're gonna get split up. We've got a new political environment coming in. They're not gonna get broken apart. I think that we're gonna see them swing back big time in actually their new AI models, the AI video model, the new Gemini model. They're looking really good. And Google is still a default search behavior for a lot of things, like, a lot a lot a lot of things. And the implementation of including AI search results at the top is working pretty well, and they're only gonna get better and better with that. I think the key that they're gonna need to do next, and I haven't seen this out of them, so I really hope they invest in it, is find a way to leverage that even better. So when there's a result, I think they need to emphasize even more than they have, even though it's at the top. It's actually a whole new UI that needs to break out and I actually think they have the ability to really capture this and drive a whole new set of behaviors that people associate with Google as a result. And I think they have the talent to pull it off. This is like my Facebook prediction from two years ago when Facebook was at the absolute bottom of their possible spot. They had talented people, though, and talented people eventually find a way through. And I think that's true for Google too. I believe in the power of smart, talented minds, and I think Google still has a lot of them.
I would love to agree all the way across the board. My only concern is I don't think that Google makes it out the other side without getting broken up. I think it's happening.
DOJ is gonna step in and just rip it up?
I think it's happening. Yeah. I think it's happening no matter what. I think Chrome in particular is gonna have to... It's gonna get cleaved off. I don't think it makes a ton of sense.
Okay. I'm curious. I'd love to see it happen. I think that even if it gets cleaved off, I think Google still has a lot of room. But I don't think it's gonna get cleaved off, but let's see. We'll see what happens.
Yeah. It's interesting. Google has done so much for browser standardization. Nobody remembers what the web was like. You don't remember.
Dude.
I remember.
Realize IE was the standard before, like, Internet Explorer.
I just remember JavaScript was not performant. I remember rendering was not standardized. Like, everybody has adopted Google's lens on the web in the world. Everybody. Safari uses the same renderer. They've done a lot for the web. It is also very much a monopoly on a lot of things, but maybe one that we kinda... This is not the thing I would have gone after. I think other podcasts could cover that in much greater detail. I think Google as a commerce impact and shopping has a really interesting opportunity, especially if it could just find a really good way to deploy its Gen AI product.
Yep.
Honestly, Gemini just doesn't do anything I want it to do. What I need Gemini to do is things in the Google universe. I don't want Gemini, honestly, to write things. I don't wanna ask Gemini questions that's not in the Google search bar. I don't wanna go to gemini dot whatever. I want it to organize my Google Drive. That's what I want it to do. And it won't do those things right now. So anyway, that's my... Sorry. I took the thing, and I made it...
Yeah. I will finish this with saying that...
Good for them.
American tech is on its way up. And I'll say this. You can see this. And I don't wanna call this what it's not, but it also feels like it to me. The $1,000,000 donations that happens at the end of post election felt like ring kissing at the highest level to me. Bezos
Yeah.
Zuckerberg.
Yep.
It was the same exact amount of money, and I just can't help but think tech has has said, we don't necessarily agree with all the things that you believe, Donald Trump Republican party, but we're better off with you than we are with Democrats.
I also think there will be a lot written about the congratulation message that's been written on social media too in this time is a lot of people have sort of bow the knee. Which is a really interesting thing to see. Right?
Totally. And so from that perspective, I think tech is up this year. Tech, American Tech has got a heck of a year ahead.
Yeah. I really hope that nobody's, you know, pissed off David Sacks. I think it's the question. If you pissed off...
Google probably has. Maybe I'm wrong with this Google thing. {laughter}
Yeah. Alright. Let's keep moving.
Okay. You're up.
Tech Winners.
You're up.
I'm up next.
Yep.
Biggest Tech Winner of 2025, I probably did too many things. I said, Perplexity, NVIDIA, Meta, Midjourney. I forget what I actually said. I was really high on a lot of things last year. This year, Brian, I have two takes. One is sort of rooted in something that is very AI centric. So Amazon just deployed Rufus. Again, rhymes with doofus. Rufus is the dumbest name for an AI companion on its website. Amazon's Rufus, I don't love. But Amazon is partnered and invested at the highest level with Anthropic. And Anthropic and its solutions, I really do love. Claude is a game changer AI.
Totally. It's amazing. It's unbelievable.
Daily use tool. I use it for all kinds of things, mostly for coding, which is the thing that's become a daily practice again for me, solving all kinds of problems at Future Commerce, writing solutions, writing code, doing all kinds of creative challenges, like finishing a lot of work and delivering things every day for this business. And I turn to Claude for that, and I think that Anthropic has a really interesting business. It also is doing a ton of edit and editorial oversight of the work that I write, and I write three to four times a week, and I deliver a lot of writing for Future Commerce. So I see it as a really helpful companion. And if Amazon is invested in Anthropic, then I can't help but say, I think Amazon has a really fighting chance to deploy AI in a really creative way. I'm also starting to depend on Amazon and Rufus,' I cannot say Rufus with a straight face, and it's summarization of the content in a particular product. What, in general, customers thought of a product, or why customers returned a product. I think that a summarization or summation of star ratings and reviews, content in those ratings and reviews, what a product's feature fit and function are, Rufus seems to be doing that so far, and turning a product into a chat is not a thing I'm asking for, but I can see it getting better from here.
Yep.
I can see Amazon and Anthropic being one of the tech winners. I'm gonna choose them both. I think they're necessarily sort of joined at the hip in a way because Amazon is a major backer of Anthropic. That way I'm sort of doing the spread here. If one wins, then... {laughter} If one or both wins here, then I win. I also think OpenAI could go into a challenging time. We'll talk about that in a moment. But in a world where we're seeing more challengers to OpenAI's dominance, I think Anthropic is probably a really good challenger. Although, I think Perplexity is the shopping challenger, which puts me in an interesting position to be betting against the one that I think is the clear commerce winner. And one that I would want to court Perplexity as a sponsor and partner, advertising partner of Future Commerce. So that puts me in a funny position.
Perplexity? Come on. Anthropic? Come on.
I also use Perplexity every day, but I use it for something different. I use it for data. I use it for insights. I use it for lots of things. Okay. So anyway and then I have another thing I wanna talk about about tech. And I had to go into the archives for this, Brian.
Yeah. Yeah.
In in 2017, you and I covered a story about an emerging technology that I was tipped off by through a really strange series of events. I got in episode 47 of the podcast in in 2017, I was telling you on the podcast about a survey I received from Uber asking me if I would be interested in a new technology that they were thinking about, and I pulled the clip. Let's play it here.
{chimes} The first question was, which of these technologies have you ever heard of? You know, self driving cars and solar in roadways and some other things. One of them was the electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, eVTOL. And I was, like, yeah. I've heard of that. I think we might have talked about it, you know, a year ago on the show or something to that effect. Well, this survey, which was no less than, like, a 100 questions, was almost entirely about how do you envision yourself using eVTOL. What would make you feel safe? What would make you feel safest? Having bomb sniffing canine or having metal detectors? Or does it does it have to be a pilot? Can it be autonomous? I'm like, hell, yeah. There has to be a pilot. Would you feel safe if you knew that there was a parachute on board? {laughter}
{laughter} I just imagine a world where everyone's getting picked up by these...
These drones.
They run out of power or there's a failure. They just have these people parachuting down.
{laughter} Then you call into work. "I'm running a little late. My eVTOL crashed. Sorry." Would the experience feel more like a first class lounge at, you know, at an airport? And it was really interesting. Like, do you expect food to be free? Do you expect to be able to purchase refreshments? Do you expect to be able to have access to your bag during flight? Really interesting to see what they're pulling for. I don't know how in the world I qualified for this survey, but I super wanna try this.
{laughter} With the parachute, especially.
Uber, if you're listening, Kalanick, if you have anything to do with Uber anymore, put me in one of those freaking things. I will pilot it. Pilot in the sense of I'll be first. I don't want to take control of the vehicle.
So hurry up, future. Get here.
I'm gonna call it right now, 20 years from now, there will be no eVTOLs. I'm just saying.
You don't think you don't think it's gonna be here in 20 years?
I feel like we are at an inflection point where we will either all have eVTOLs, and that's our primary mode of transportation, or we're all scraping for, we're all looking for scrap metal so that we can make our homes and shelter, fortify our homes and shelters from the zombies in the coming nuclear apocalypse that we're all on the brink of.
That's your vision of the future. {laughter}
There are only two paths. There are two options that we have. {chimes}
You got a better mic since then, and also my voice has changed dramatically.
I think you had a cold, actually.
The FAA finalized ruling on eVTOL use for commercial transport. And, also, for whatever it's worth, all of these New Jersey drone sightings are also eVTOLs, it looks like. So I think that tech deployed... There are four eVTOL startups that are all taking a bit of a different route to market right now. 2025 is the year where we will see these actually deployed commercially. I think eVTOL as a commercial transport is a huge tech winner of 2025 and would be a really interesting paradigm shift for short range transport in cities and will start as the luxury option that Uber forecasted to us in 2017. So that's one of my picks as one of the biggest tech winners at 2025 is just the industry of eVTOL. I think it's really cool.
Amazing. I like that a lot and plays into something else I wanna talk about later too, but I think it's a phenomenal next level prediction that is a necessary step in the vision in the vision for the future that I think is being currently implemented. So I like that as a prediction.
Can I set up one of the biggest things that has happened, I think biggest predictions you made?
Sure. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's go.
I put it out on LinkedIn that you sorta had a 90% batting average this year. You got a lot right. You got a lot right. But of the biggest things you got right, they were things that didn't look like... They were very counter narrative, like, very countercultural choices at the time. Two really big ones. We already played one at the top. Your Elon pick, I think, was a really big one. But last year, for The Biggest Tech Loser of 2025, you had this to say about Sam Altman's OpenAI.
{chime} I've got a really, really, really wild prediction on this though for the true loser. It's not a true loser. I think OpenAI is gonna have a tough year. {laughter} I know that's, like, pretty pretty contrary. It's just, like you said, there's a lot of other tools out there. We see Facebook going in a different direction. I heard someone recently say, why am I paying for OpenAI when I can go use Bing for free?
Wow. I wanna meet that person.
Uh-huh.
That's funny.
Google's just just laid off people not in their AI division. They're going all in. There's a lot of people coming out of them. They may be the sacrificial lamb for Gen AI. {chimes}
U shaped the year for OpenAI because the last week has been pretty banger for them, but a really, really tough year with exits, losing the team, lot of bad like, hard news for them throughout the year.
Yeah. I think that was maybe not exactly how I saw it playing out, but I kinda felt it in my gut because I also, truth be told, Sam Altman is not my favorite. I think he's kind of a weird dude, and I could feel sort of sense that there was some instability there.
Yeah. The objective truth quantum sense, you were like... Yeah. You knew it.
I think that also later on in the quote, I talked further about this just like there's gonna be more players that kind of rose up throughout the year. I also said AI would not experience the same kind of troughs of disillusionment like some of the other tech that we've seen. I said it's not gonna hit that hard. We've already seen it integrated into everything so much. And I ended it with saying there's just too much competition, and I think there's gonna be a tough moment, which is exactly what happened. There was a tough moment. That said, I think that OpenAI is gonna continue to be a part of the world of AI. And they've got some great partnerships, and there's plenty of room for them. And I think AI is gonna continue to get integrated into all kinds of things that we do. And so, I wouldn't say that this year, they're gonna see the same kind of bumpiness they saw last year. Sometimes things just have to shake out in a specific way. I do think that Perplexity, Anthropic, Google, and Meta all have extremely good products.
Yeah.
The Biggest Tech Loser I have for this year is also gonna be TikTok and actually just sort of foreign tech in general. Again, getting back to political environment, there's a lot of US based tech that is gonna get invested in. David Sacks sitting there and making calls. Elon sitting there making calls. We got a very big opportunity to invest in American tech and grow American tech. We have an America first president right now. I think American tech's gonna have a big moment, but companies like TikTok and foreign tech is gonna struggle at the highest level, I think.
Yeah. I think that's gonna be one of those, it's interesting. The challenges of the openness... Yeah. This is gonna be a challenging environment. It's gonna be a really challenging political environment, I think, too, because there's going to be a lot of deal making that's gonna need to be done globally. The European Union really likes to make it tough for American companies. And it's sort of the way that it sort of exercises retribution for American policy. So just in the same way we exercise tariffs to exercise sort of trade policy, and we throw our weight around, the EU makes it really tough on trade and ecommerce and tech in general by picking these companies apart. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook hates the EU's guts. {laughter}
{laughter} Yeah. Probably so. Yeah.
And so yeah. I think TikTok and or I think foreign tech is a tech loser in the US sorta has that it's a sympathetic influence. It's also coming back the other way too for sure. I can see that. Alright. Brian, most interesting trend let's get a little positive.
Alright.
Most interesting trend of 2025. You had some fun things to say about politics last year.
I did.
Also seemed like it was gonna be a countercultural take. Before we play, I think we have another clip, and I think this is one of our last clips here. Do you wanna, like, preface this at all? Because it sounded like it was a tough, like, what's your take on the political environment at the time of which we recorded this?
At the time we recorded this, we're looking at kind of an interesting, like, Biden versus Trump rematch. And a lot of people were kinda just done with politics. There was not a lot of energy around what was happening.
Very sleepy.
Very sleepy. But with that, I went ahead and said this.
{chimes} Going into this year, we're going into an election year. It could be the one of the craziest elections we've ever seen. I'd wrote about this for The Senses a little bit, but it's hard in election year to sort of get above the political noise. The political noise is gonna be so loud. {chimes}
{laughter} Little did we know, it would turn out to be one of the most historic elections in our lifetime. A sitting president losing and then rewinning a dropout candidate resulting in a another pretty wild and interesting pick. It was a weird it was one of the weirdest elections I can remember. It was one of the weirdest elections I can remember.
Well, yeah. I mean, that's understating. I think we saw a terrible debate performance.
What was considered maybe one of the worst debates in American history.
Yeah. A cringe worthy debate performance, and which maybe revealed that maybe Joe Biden wasn't all the way there. Then we saw the attempted assassination of then candidate Trump. And I think those two things happening within two weeks of each other...
Yeah.
Which happened in June. Those things happen late in the cycle. So you're right. Things really got heated later in the back half of the year. And you're right. It it turned out that it was really hard to rise above that noise in the back half of the year.
And so what I predicted was mergers would be up. We'd see a couple of big ones, and we did. We actually did. Mergers were up this past year. I think 14% is what I saw. And there were a couple of really big mergers and announcements. Kellanova was an interesting one. The recent Ogilvy announcement. I guess it's not actually official yet, but that was interesting as well. The synopsis one was also an interesting one, $34,000,000,000 combo there. There were a bunch of pretty big ones. Not as big as I was hoping for, though, so, actually, with that, I'm gonna say that what I thought was gonna happen last year, I could actually see happening this year. You know what was a really big one that could have happened was the Kroger/Albertsons one that got shut down. And I think you even said to me afterwards, I think there's a few that are gonna get shut down, Brian. And you were totally right about that. It was an attempt, though, it was an attempt. I think that there's gonna be a lot more attempts, and I think there's gonna be a lot more successes this year. These next few years are the years. In fact, you could argue that the next two years are really the most important ones coming up here because if your merger ends up dragging on a year and you end up going into the next election cycle, you're not entirely sure that's gonna pan out. And so the next two to three years are really the ones where we're gonna see massive, massive moves, and this is represented what you said at the top of the show, big spin offs, sell ups, buy ups, restructures. We're gonna see a lot of that this year. I have a lot to talk about in most interesting trends of 2025. So I'm gonna start with that, but I'm gonna actually flip things over to you, and then I wanna come back to a bunch of stuff that I wanna talk about.
Yeah. So yeah. I called my most interesting trend of 25 was spatial computing, And I still think that that was, if you expand the charter of spatial.
Yes.
Could you expand that to...
XR that yeah.
Well, I think even just anything that is a space in which things like commerce are taking place. So what we saw is more video game like experiences, Imperia powering the Walmart experiences, the sort of new mandate that we're seeing coming from Google and its XR computing platform and design language. So I think that spatial that was my 24 trend. I think everyone was really, really loved to dump on the Apple Vision Pro. I totally get that because I have one. But watching Apple continue to invest in it here toward the end of the year, really felt like they forgot about it around the middle of the year, but watching them invest in it in the end of the year and watching hardware manufacturers produce new... Blackmagic has come out with this new camera that, it's yeah. Now it's $30,000, so it's for filmmakers. But, you know, watching them invest in spatial video and and cinema, like, as a media consumption device, I think that there's a lot to be said about the Apple Vision Pro and spatial computing. So I think directionally correct. Most interesting trend... Okay. I'm gonna call something. I'm calling a shot. This is why.
You already gave me a good one, which was eVTOL. That was a good one.
I'm calling... This is a wild one. I'm calling it the rise of Gen X. I wrote about this.
Yeah. I like that.
I wrote about this in a member's only exclusive piece for Future Commerce Plus members. But I think that what we're seeing is we've seen a failure of Millennials to assume leadership across the board, and we've seen sort of a return of old leadership kind of time and again recently to come back in and right the ship. I don't know. The past generation was, you know, having to come back in and sort of take over for leaders that sort of drop the ball. A really good examples recently. You know, Howard Schultz had to return to Starbucks. There's Bob Iger had to return to take Bob Chapek's place at Disney. I'm thinking we start seeing this in the Gen X role. Now, does that mean Bezos comes back to Amazon? I don't know. But it might mean that Travis Kalanick comes back to Uber.
Makes a comeback. Woah. Interesting.
And I think that, you know, watching the new advisory circle around this Trump administration and watching the role that this forgotten generation are starting to play...
Yeah.
I think that there's a real thing happening around leadership in the world where we've had a lot of Boomer leaders who are actually starting to step out of the picture. So watching more media, even like the the DTC, all of the All-In podcast guys are all Gen Xers. Rogan is a Gen Xer. But beyond that, I think we're starting to see business leaders tend towards that generation of Generation X. So I think there may be a tend towards Gen X rise, I think preceded by maybe a return of some historic leaders and people moving back into leadership. And, potentially, we've seen sort of Millennials fumble the bag when it comes to exercising leadership in the world, especially when it comes to certain sort of policies that really centered on the way that people, that I think would be considered countercultural today. You know, whether it's wokeism or what have you, I think that that's going to be readdressed. And who better to step in than the people who probably didn't buy into that in the first place?
Interestingly enough, I feel like Donald Trump is sort of an a Gen X leader, if you will. I know he's not really Gen X, but in many ways, he represents the world that Gen Xers grew up in. Yeah.
Right.
He sort of yeah. It represents that that 1980s and the early nineties. Gen X, their childhood. We talked about this a little bit already, but sort of represents the childhood that they grew up in. And so yeah. I like this as a take, and I'm not gonna provide, it's not an counter to what you're saying at all. It's complimentary. So I've got a few additional interesting trends for coming this year. So I think there's gonna be a rise of counterculture that is new. So in the second Bush presidency, we actually saw a return to Americana. It's an interesting moment because Americana would seem to represent Bush a little bit in some ways, but also it represented to getting back to things that were more meaningful and lasting and things that were sort of counter to the the excesses of the nineties. They weren't necessarily pro Bush. A lot of the Americana that emerged was actually kind of left leaning Americana in some ways. But it was something that both the right and the left could sort of get behind at the same time. And in the second Trump presidency, I actually think we're gonna see kind of a return to a similar Americana. First of all, I think we're kind of due coming out of 2000s nostalgia. The move back towards Americana is reflective of coming out of that aesthetic trend anyway. The 2000 skater culture kind of gave way to the Americana culture. And so there's gonna be a little bit of echoing of that. But, also, I think that during the Biden presidency, we actually saw the kickback to the Biden presidency was actually kind of like Texas cowboy. We saw the rise of cowboy boots and sort of cowboy culture and very, more right leaning in some ways. That was the counterculture in some ways during the Biden presidency. And so I actually think there's going to be something that can be aligned to multiple sides of the aisle. And, actually, that is connected to the restructuring of the American political spectrum in general.
Gotcha.
And so what we're finding is actually a connection between the right and the left in a really, really weird moment here. And so I don't mean to touch any nerves here, but the Luigi Maggione moment, actually. So oddly enough, both the right and the left sort of hate big health care. The right because it's highly inefficient, and they find it to be offensive, and it's not consumer first. And left because it's actually a bunch of corporate people that are sort of screwing the small people. So there's actually this really aligned moment where both sides of the aisle find this to be, dare I say this, and I don't mean this. Actually, I don't believe this to be true, but kind of a folk hero in Luigi Maggione. And the pictures and the news and the people talking about it. And again, I don't find this to be true at all, but I do think there's something latent here around places where realignment is going to happen in how people think about the political spectrum coming out of the 2nd Trump presidency. And there are a lot of political orphans out there right now who don't really know where they fit into the world, both right and left. And so realignment.
That's very true.
Yeah. So, realignment is about to happen here. And so what is the kickback against the Gen Xers taking control gonna look like? I think that is the the question. The counterculture is it gonna be techno versus diesel? Is that the new dividing line? We've heard some talk about that. Is it gonna be Luddite versus technology? Is there going to be some sort of split there? I will say this, and I I don't know if it's gonna be exactly Luddite in the form that we've thought of it in the past. Is there gonna be a whole, like, Amish movement? Maybe. Maybe, actually.
I mean, Tradwife is, like, the on ramp.
On ramp, although it's sort of losing steam right now. I think that there's something new.
You don't have to have had it all figured out.
I don't.
I think these are signals. Right?
These are signals to a new way of thinking about things. Yeah. And I'm sorry that I'm, like, kind of spinning a little bit here, but I'm gonna keep track of this throughout the year. I think that we're gonna see a new counterculture. It's going to be subversive towards this new tech political alignment. And there's gonna be some kickback to it, and I don't know what it looks like completely yet.
If you think that we're getting through the first half of this year without a lot of protests in the streets, you're out of your mind. We went through this once before. We know what this looks like. This is why I said I agree with this as one of the biggest news stories of the year, and that's why I also said... You're touching on my biggest news story of the year, actually.
Oh, gotcha. Okay. So I have a few more things I wanna hit on just because I wanna hear these out now. Health and wellness, it's gonna get crazy because the new administration, if RFK Junior does come in, in fact, and make some changes, we're gonna see a big emphasis, not necessarily... There will be regulation. I actually think there will be regulation of of big food and, actually, again, some realignment of the American, middle America because middle America runs on ag, and ag provides a lot. A lot of the ways they get paid have to do with how corn gets injected into food. And so interesting things going on there. But, no I think that the interesting thing is while there will be new regulation or new disclaimers or things like that that happen, there's also gonna be a renewed focus and an opportunity to claim a lot of benefits that are not quite as tested, especially when it comes to food and wellness and interesting stuff. I know there's a lot I can get into there, but I do think the world's gonna get a little bit crazy around health and wellness products, and we're gonna see a new explosion of these coming up in these in the upcoming years. I also think that I've been on this kick for a while. Gadgets. I think we're gonna see an explosion of premium gadgets that are purpose built for richest rich people.
Oh, yeah. I love premium rich people gadgets. Get me a gadget.
Gadgets, baby. I do think there's gonna be so, like, for instance, we just saw the Kim Kardashian Optimus collab. We're gonna start to see some of this stuff rolled out for real. People are gonna... It's working its way into the collective consciousness. Maybe there will be some sort of commercial offering around this in this coming 2025. I don't know if it's gonna be a humanoid, but there will be... We saw also content at Trump's property with the Boston Dynamics dog patrolling.
Sure.
I think this is actually all content gearing up to start selling this type of stuff commercially.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You can buy those dogs. You can buy those kinds of dogs right now on Amazon. For 5 grand.
You can. Yeah. Absolutely. But weirder and wilder things closer to the giraffe thing we saw walking around doing the dishes or whatever. I think there's gonna be more bespoke stuff here or high end. And then finally, I've been saying... So I haven't talked about this in a long time.
Mhmm.
But I actually believe we've finally we're actually on our way up out of the trough of disillusionment around body as platform, and AI is gonna help enable using personal body data and personal data to drive more distinct and personalized and unique experiences for people and their bodies. It's coming back. We're gonna start to see it emerge this year and really take flight in 2026.
Yeah. I love it. I'm down for all of these. I think this is all spot on. I'll just add a little bit on the back of that. Actually, you know what? You've sort of... You kinda got into my biggest news story. So let's just go there. Biggest News Story of 2025... So last year, I said deepfakes, celebrities election 2024. I think we saw a lot of deep fake conversations specifically around Taylor Swift's deep fake. I think there was a lot of concern around AI safety post that happening. This year, I said The Biggest News Story of 2025... Yeah. Okay. Sure. Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Sure. Okay. Political upheaval. Yeah. Okay. Those are big news stories. Okay?
Yep.
Ones that probably aren't on a lot of people's radar that we need to be thinking about. This year in September, humanity will, for the first time since the 1970s, will return back to the moon and circle the moon in Artemis 2.
Yeah. I like that. It's a good one.
And so Artemis 2 is gonna be a huge moment for us. We are on track to return to the moon in 2027. I'm really on this kick right now covering some research that I'm doing for an upcoming Future Now roundtable. So we've been doing these series of role play around the concept of a time capsule with leaders, around this industry, around retail and ecommerce leaders. And time capsule is sort of at the center of it, so I've been doing a lot of brushing up on time capsules. Do you know there's a time capsule we just put on the moon? The lunar time capsule is like a big thing.
Yeah.
So really fascinated with a lot of these things that are happening right now. And so Artemis 2, I don't think it's on anyone's radar. Big news in September. But before that, there is a probe going to Europa, which is one of the moons of, I wanna say, Saturn or Jupiter. Europa, which is... It's one of Jupiter's moons. After 2 hours, I'm like, my brain is completely fried.
Yeah. It's good.
And that flyby is going to do a a scan for a search for life on Europa. There is a running theory about subsurface oceans that may have the type of environment that may provide a hospitable environment for a form of life on Europa. And both of these things, I think, are human stories that are things that we just, they capture our imagination when we learn more about our place in the universe. And so these are things for me that would be the biggest news, one of the biggest news stories of 2025. Another one that is not on anyone's radar is something that I'm gonna be covering on our YouTube channel as we shift our focus to video this year. I am covering, like I said, time capsules as a content focus. And there is a world fair expo happening in Osaka in 2025, and expo 2025 is returning to the site of one of the most prolific time capsules in the world that's ever been created that was buried in 1970 by the Panasonic Corporation. For me, that's a big thing, and you'll hear a lot more about that later in the year, but I wanna plant it right now right here so that we can reference back to it in the future. So Brian, Biggest News Story of 2025?
I kind of already covered all of my big, interesting trends, new story type things. I think that, what I think and maybe this leads into the end of the convo here, but I do expect positivity in 2025. And I think that, actually, that positivity will... Sorry. Not positivity in general, but financial positivity. So I expect you to be a lot of good vibes around financial outlook. And there's always nice cover for counterculture when things are going well. I think that's when you can actually provide the most criticism because it's from a position of a little bit more safety, actually. And so I think it's not that there won't be some tough moments because there will be. But I think that from a financial outlook perspective, we're gonna see some good headlines in 2025.
Amazing. And that's kind of getting us closer to the end of the list. We cover a couple things here. I think one thing that we've covered in years past is sort of a modern work trend. And I last year, I said, Gen AI productivity. I think, you know, I think Agentic would be the word for this year. Agents that are specifically coming for people's jobs. I have been playing with Cursor. Cursor as a coding assistant is really, really powerful. But I watch YouTube videos of people creating Claude agents that go and do things. There was an OpenAI demo for 03 that, you know, it just takes over the computer and does a bunch of things based on some commands.
I love this.
I think we're on a little bit of a trend. Salesforce is hiring 2,000 sellers just to sell Agentic solutions to all of its hungry buyers, I guess. So, you know, there's a new wave coming, and I think modern work is getting ready to change in a big, big way and productivity along with it. Modern work trends, Brian, words on modern work.
Yeah. I think because of that, there's gonna be a little bit of an exodus from corporate to some degree. So, like, I think the return to office is definitely has provided a lot of grumbles. People are gonna get really sick of it really fast. And a lot of, like, stuff is gonna get taken care of by agents, and so we're gonna see a lot of entrepreneurship actually. That's gonna be and there's gonna be a lot of incentive for that too. And so a lot of small services or small product type activity. I think people are gonna wanna get out from underneath. There's also gonna be a lot of restructures. And so just the perfect time people will get some kind of an exit package or whatever. They'll be like, "I'm gonna go off on my own. I've got all these tools at my disposal now. Why don't I just do my own thing? I can build what I've always wanted to build, and I've got a little bit of cushion to do it. And there's incentives to go build my own stuff." And so I do believe we're gonna see a rise of entrepreneurship. It's gonna be a big one. It's gonna be a really big one.
Yeah. I've been saying something for a little while. It's sort of incumbent on everybody to become an entrepreneur at some point. Whether you like it or not to live in this world, you sort of have to have some sort of way to escape just the the career loop. You know, the American dream, I think, is a thing that is gonna require a little bit of dreaming outside of the 401K. I agree with you. Building or utilizing technology to help you automate some part of that and not necessarily listening to thought leaders on the Internet who tell you to do drop shipping is probably the real solution for that.
Right. Correct. Totally.
Yeah. Yep.
I think that's exactly right. A lot of skill set that's gonna be available in an independent way, and it's actually gonna be good. I'm not saying, like, it's gonna be... There's gonna be some great talent that goes independent.
Yeah. I agree with that. And that's kind of the hope. Right? Like, if you have these, you know, Decacorn, Centacorn, you know, businesses, they should create wealth distribution and should create opportunities for people that are generational talents that take their talents elsewhere and start new enterprises and corporations. And not just those giant enterprises, businesses of all sizes. Everybody sort of has this ability now. Alright. Brian, this is sort of where we end it, and then I ask you a big question at the end every year. Highs and lows. Brian, what are you hoping we finally see the end of in 2025? Where do you sick of? What do you think is coming to an end this coming year?
Well, what do I think is gonna come to an end, or what do I hope ends? Because those are two different things.
Yeah. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Answer however you need.
What do I hope ends? Polarization, just extreme polarization all the time. And actually, maybe there's some of that that's true. It feels like some of the culture war is shifting. And so the vitriol around specific topics seems to be sort of maybe slipping a little bit. Maybe it gets transferred to other topics though. It feels like maybe there's a little bit of hope that we could see a depolarization around some of the main talking points where we've had polarization. People get a little bit on the same page about things or at least come to compromise. But I do think with that, it's gonna come very new lines that are gonna cause very big problems. So it's not like things are gonna get necessarily that much better from that perspective at least.
Gotcha.
What about you?
I'm in this weird doom loop in my algorithm. What do I hope ends? I hope that I'm... I hope my doomscrolling ends in 2025. I would like to take a break from my cell phone in 2025. I'll tell you that.
Luddites, baby. {laughter}
But generally, I would really like to see the doomerism and specifically the artificial general intelligence doomerism come to an end. I don't think we're going to. I don't think that's gonna come to an end. I'd really like it too. The reason why I don't think it will, I'm gonna undo my own prediction.
Yeah. It's not a prediction.
The reason why I don't think that we are capable of being positive about this future is because we have basically zero fiction that paints a rosy picture of a future where AI is a utopia. Like, we are incapable as a species of imagining a future where people don't have to work, and yet, that's the thing that everybody thinks they're building towards. However, the people that are building towards this future, for whatever reason, use every other piece of fiction as the template.
I love this. I love this. Yeah. This is great.
I'd really love for us to try to imagine a future that is absent of the doomerism. I'd love to see more fiction, more imagination around what a utopic future where less of us, fewer of us are having to toil and live through the stresses of the modern life where you're having to, you really do have to balance a lot of things that are cares of a world that wasn't necessarily made for us balancing so much complexity all the time and so much information all the time. I don't know that we're as chemically advanced in our brains and neurologically advanced enough to be able to compete with all of that. I think that's a lot of the source of a lot of our problems. So maybe Agentic AI takes some of that off of our plates so that we can take a breather. That would be really, really nice, but I don't think that we can actually build that world if we can't imagine it. So I'd really love to see us actually imagine it. So what maybe it's not what I'd maybe it's a hopeful thing. Maybe, hopefully, we can imagine that world. That's what I'd love to see.
Do you mind if I comment on this for a second a little bit?
Go for it. Yeah.
I know we're at the end. We're, like, so far in here, but it's interesting. I think that whenever we try to solve for primary problems, the secondary effects end up becoming the primary problems. So we've built machines to help with a lot of manual labor.
Yeah.
The secondary effects of that are now we're all sitting at computers looking down at screens and addicted to our machines. It's almost so whenever we try to solve a problem, we almost always inevitably lose. We miss the problems that our solutions will create. And so it's interesting to look at sort of I don't wanna say it's necessarily doomer. It's easy to walk into dystopia and think that it you're walking into utopia.
Yeah.
And so I don't wanna be a doomer, and I don't think I am a particularly bad doomer, but I do think that there are, are we already living in dystopia at this moment? In some senses, we are living in utopia because we have solved so many problems that the people from the past would look forward and be like, "I can't believe they did that. I can't believe that's fixed. I can't believe we don't have to deal with that." But at the same time, we've created a whole other set of problems that are very dystopic. And so it's always one hand and the other coming together, I think, a little bit. And so my viewpoint is, as we march forward towards solving problems, I don't wanna ignore the fact that there will be secondary like, what look like secondary effects that don't look as bad. It turns out they're actually quite bad. And so I think for me, looking ahead, I wanna see us solve things. It's good. It's a good thing to go solve those things. But what will happen to us when we solve those things? That's the real question. And so I think that... I like to write. You know this, and maybe I'll telegraph ahead here. We've got more cool stuff coming this coming this year. How do we walk with one hand and the other at the same time without killing our hope and our positivity? You know what I mean?
I 100% agree. I would love, I'd love nothing more for us to look back and be... yeah, we 100% have it so much better than generations prior. I'm in no way am I saying that we have it worse. But we definitely have second and third order effects that make modern life pretty tough too. I think there are a host of challenges geopolitically that seem like the world is a pretty perilous place. And I don't know that it's becoming less perilous as time goes on. So it's not just about everybody's sad all the time, and everybody has too much productivity that they have to deliver, and they doom scroll. And blue screens make people sad. I think there's lots of things that lead to lots of problems in the world. And if we could imagine what a brighter future looks like, if we could just imagine that, we have to start by being able to imagine it, not just building technology and hope it all works out. That's the thing I'm trying to say. Yeah.
Yeah. And I like that. If you think about all the greatest science fiction from the past 100 years...
Yeah.
There's almost always a brighter part, and there's also a darker part. And so we're seeing the effects of some of that imagining come to fruition right now. Literally right now. Of that bright imagining. We're also seeing some of the effects of that dark imagining come to fruition right now. And so I hope that I can help provide some of that look into the future. I hope that you can provide some of that look into the future. I hope that some of our collaborators this year can help provide a look into that future, and I'm excited about that.
Well, I am too, and if you've made it all the way through this, I'm even more excited. Brian, final word. What are the vibes? Sounds pretty positive.
Generally positive, but it's funny. Sincerity is the vibe. Sincerely happy and sincerely sad, sincerely inspired, sincerely dismayed. Can we see some actual sincerity, or does positivity come naturally with an insincere side? I think that is the question. The moment you bring a viewpoint into the world, naturally, someone else has a different one. And so let's see. I think there's gonna be a lot of positivity, and there might be some sincere negativity that comes right alongside it. We'll see what happens here in 2025. Generally, though, yeah, people are gonna be happy because I think people are generally happy when the economy is doing well.
I think so. And the problem is I don't think anything is, it's not always clear cut. Right? The economy, especially the stock market, has done extraordinarily well in the past year, year and a half for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people... There might be people that would say they don't feel that. So, you know, obviously, every person has their own experience. What I would say is the people that have the experience of being in our community at Future Commerce, we really couldn't do this without you. Really appreciate everything that you bring to this community, everything that you bring to our level of engagement with you. Future Commerce is built for you, and I really can't wait to see you at NRF's Big Show at our big party to celebrate the launch of our new journal. And the journal really is asking that question about the story. The story of brands, the story of ecommerce, and the story of our commerce industry, the story of the rise and fall of good times and bad times, but it's all about the Lore. And so would love to see there. We'll have a link to register to come to our party with 200 of our closest friends and climbing, and you can join us there at the Neuhaus Madison Square on January 14th. Join us at our launch party, and we'll drop it into the show notes. And that's it. That's a wrap for our biggest show of the year. 2025 predictions episode. Also, our longest episode in a very long time, I think, maybe ever.
Oh, I think of all time. This might be all time right here.
Keep pushing it, and big changes in store for this year. We'll announce our full calendar of events coming in the next week or so. Thank you so much for making 2024 so great, and 2025 is gonna be even better. Brian, buddy...
Yeah.
Love you. Love doing this with you.
Love you too, dude. This is great.
