Hey.

Give me two minutes, because we NEED to talk about worldbuilding (and no, I don’t mean spending six months inventing an imaginary language for a fantasy novel). I mean the very real, very URGENT process of making your work feel human before the machines take over everything else.

To define it simply:

And it matters to you right now for two very specific reasons:

Professional survival

No matter how amazing, groundbreaking, fresh, or cool your work is (even if you pour your heart and soul into it) if nobody sees it, it won’t make an impact. In an era where a single person can build an AI agency and everyone has access to incredible tools and startup capital, marketing is still king. You might cringe and think, “Ugh, marketing again? That’s so old school.”

Old-school marketing sold features and benefits. New-school marketing builds a universe and invites you inside. Dyson doesn’t sell vacuums or hair dryers; they sell an initiation into a high-status, futuristic universe. Taylor Swift doesn’t just drop records; she traps millions of people in multi-layered rabbit holes where they willingly buy fourteen versions of the exact same vinyl just to feel part of the lore.

Human survival

Now let’s zoom out to the bigger, more terrifying picture. We are sprinting toward an era of total automation where corporations operate entirely without human labor. Agentic software rewrites its own code, robotic arms replace assembly workers, and algorithms generate content at scale without a single human break needed.

What’s important to remember is that an LLM can optimize a product, but it can’t manufacture the soul. It can’t create the visceral sense of belonging that makes a human care deeply about a community, a movement, or a physical space.

Here’s my hill to die on:

To see what total, uncompromised worldbuilding looks like in the wild, you don’t have to look far:

Look at filmmaking, where The Backrooms mutated from a creepy 4chan forum post into fan games and, ultimately, an A24 smash hit. Look at gaming, where Undertale breached the non-gamer world entirely through its soundtrack and unhinged character memes. Or look at the creative agency world, where MSCHF started as a chaotic side project meant to provoke the internet and spiraled into a global brand selling oversized, cartoonish red boots.

For the sake of this summer’s zeitgeist, lets look at how 2 different generations of pop icons handle worldbuilding:

Charli xcx (the post-brat pivot)

Music is almost the least interesting thing about Charli xcx right now — and that’s coming from a fan.

Her entire worldbuilding runs on four distinct pillars:

1. obsessively pursuing her current fix

2. keeping her real-life group chat at the center of the work

3. staying vulnerably provocative even when it gets ugly or annoying

4. refusing to let the culture trap her in a box.

Most pop stars find a winning formula and milk it until the audience begs for mercy. Charli does the exact opposite — the second you think you have her mapped out, she detonates the frame.

Look at her pivots over the last year (!!!) alone:

The moment the world tried to box her into the lime-green brat summer algorithm, she didn’t double down to play it safe. Charli xcx did the most unpredictable thing possible: abandoned the formula entirely and pivoted into cinema > > > directing a satirical mocumentary “The Moment”, starring in 6 indie films, and spending months publicly reviewing movies on Letterboxd to construct her own film degree in real time. Yes, diva.

Then came the ultimate left turn: composing a brutally theatrical, method soundtrack for Wuthering Heights alongside John Cale of The Velvet Underground, pairing a full orchestra with raw, gothic drama that completely outshone the film itself. And just when that goes viral, instantly pivoting to a completely different music record titled “Music, Fashion, Film”.

Charli follows her obsessions ruthlessly, treating public opinion like background noise.

Her second pillar is using her real-life group chat as her creative engine.

She ruthlessly solicits intros to her childhood heroes (yep Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg are up in her text messages), produces tracks with her husband George Daniel of The 1975, has her BFF Aidan Zamiri direct all videos, and lets Vincent Cassel bleed out on a camera dolly for a two-minute track.

No marketing agencies in sight to manufacture an aesthetic; she simply turns the camera on her actual life and lets the rest of us peer through the keyhole.

Charli jumped straight from gothic literary scores into a horny, self-aware version of 2016 pop that winks at the camera: “I promise I’m not a bad girl anymore.” It’s catchy, messy, intentionally polarizing, and completely unapologetic. She doesn’t ask for permission, and she certainly doesn’t ask for approval.

You either get the joke or you don’t — and that exact friction is what makes Charli’s world so magnetic.

Madonna (the 2026 comeback)

Coming off a string of quieter commercial eras where Gen Z barely knew her beyond Like a Virgin or her Sex book, Madonna faced a massive strategic challenge: how does she capture a new, global, cross-generational audience without faking it?

Her answer was Confessions II (a follow up to her iconic 2009 Confessions on the Dancefloor that carried me through so many years), built on four distinct, un-automatable pillars:

1. the undeniable wisdom of a mature woman

2. a relentless body of self-referencing work

3. fluid cross-generational global collaboration

4. an insatiable need to challenge social taboos.

Let’s start with wisdom.

On the opening track, over heavy dance beats, she drops PhD-worthy philosophy (“the club is not a physical space, but as a spiritual threshold where movement replaces language”…..like, what? that is soooo good!).

Thank God, Madonna isn’t trying to awkwardly play a Gen Z influencer. Instead, she steps in with the undeniable stance of the True Mother who has something to teach you. She grounds her authority in pure archival heritage: sitting next to Anna Wintour with Vogue playing in the background, resurrecting ’80s Danceteria energy, and casting her longtime Studio 54 friend Debi Mazar in her launch film.

Time and time again, Madonna proves that dance music can be trend-agnostic and her wisdom is the anchor.

Now, her second pillar is engaging the gays, the straights (Benedict Cumberbatch! Soccer stars Cole Palmer and João Pedro!) and the girlies who carry her torch into the new age — and every single collaboration was a hyper-intentional lore loop.

Madonna launched the lead single by storming Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella set to claim her blonde iconography heir, did back-to-back club takeovers with Charli xcx to pass the baton from brat to Confessions II, cast the shapeshifting blonde Julia Garner (the Inventing Anna / Ozark / Weapons actress slated to play her in her shelved biopic) in her short film, and had her very own daughter Lola Leon serve an interpolation to “Ray of Light”. To Madonna, nobody is competition, they are collaborators who can help translate her heritage to a brand-new audience and expose her influence on them.

She knows, of course, that the world is bigger than just America, so Madonna went GLOBAL from the get go: tapped Feid for Latin America and took the FIFA World Cup stage alongside BTS and Shakira (tbh that whole halftime show was a flop, but let’s carry on), dropped physical vinyls packed with K-pop-style trading cards, ran underground “Club Confessions” takeovers in London, Paris, Times Square, and aligned with iconic brands that actually make sense for her history as an unapologetic Mother of the dancefloor — like Grindr and Absolut Vodka.

And this time, the conversation starters aren’t the cone bras, but lasers shot from between her dancers’ legs and a listening party entryway where you are… basically entering inside Madonna.

It’s a titan showing the world that age isn’t a limitation to be hidden, but an ultimate creative flex.

The worldbuilder method, applied:

I’m watching these cultural shifts closely because I’m applying them directly to my own universe in real time.

When I started The Goods Social Club, I refused to make it just another girly journaling circle where people politely cycle through canned psychology prompts. I wanted something tactile. A place where people exhausted by digital noise could sit on the grass or at a long table, turn off their analytical brains… and actually feel present with others.

We built a monthly residency at fishcake in Honolulu and online, but we refused to stay static. Every single gathering was a pivot: from live Pinterest to summer side-quests to creative writing workshops with my favorite author Bex <3

My gut kept telling me this was bigger than quiet reflection. And so, we’re building something alive: venue takeovers, immersive IRL experiences, spicy panels, local case studies, DJs, cocktails, and that electric, collective feeling of: “Fuck it, I’m jumping in with both feet.”

We are doing it! Here are my events, finally announced (Luma here):

After years of working in design and innovation, my baseline rule hasn’t changed: colliding totally different worlds (aka cross-polinating: mixing high tech with analog paper, or design strategy with underground nightlife) — is the only way to make something so distinct that it forces people to stop scrolling and touch grass.

In the next issue, I’m breaking down the exact step-by-step blueprint I’m using to scale this universe, and how you can apply it to your own work before the algorithms swallow it whole.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading,

xx

Liya

If this is your first introduction to The Goods newsletter, we cover culture, innovation and how to keep your soul in the age of soulless tech. Here are some of the latest and greatest:

• How I accidentally started a club

• IRL is the new URL

• Have you heard of the Dead Internet Theory?

• Get ready for the future with no apps

• How to not get laid off, a provocation

Turns out, we’re at 54%.

When I showed it to my boyfriend, he stared at the screen and suggested a darker iteration: revise it to calculate how many years I have left based on the median life expectancy of American women. So I did.

Now I know that I am exactly 46% into the finite timeline of my life.

Knowledge is a strange thing.

Lately, life has been speeding up, operating at a high-speed frequency that my nervous system can barely keep up with.

I spend my days in Hawaii working remotely with the team at Google, designing Youtube and Maps for smart glasses, and my dog, Marnie, is still living her best life catching rats in local parks after dark. This year alone, I took 15 flights to speak at conferences, see my family halfway across the globe, and keep up with a beautiful network of friends that sometimes requires a 20-hour flight.

And yet, I roughly estimate I am operating at about 50% of the daily energy I possessed in my early twenties.

I still try to live as intensely as I did then (consider this my public admission of a deep fear of missing out on life) but I am just so profoundly tired.

My brain constantly feels like a browser window with fifty open tabs running simultaneous videos. I am being pulled in every direction, completely addicted to quick digital dopamine. I’ve become so consumed by managing the chaos that being present feels almost torturous.

I’ll be honest with you guys, instead of existing in the current moment, I default to a frantic internal script:

• Looking forward → hyper-fixating on the next trip, the next event, the next movie coming out, or the next project to build.

• Macro anxiety → getting paralyzed by the state of the world – data centers, AI acceleration (yes, even though I work with it every day), the rollback of women’s rights, the reality of my mom getting older, and the fact that as an immigrant, I can’t easily go back to my home country.

• Nostalgia loops → mourning the past because I crossed some invisible line from being excited about the future to being deeply nostalgic for the 90s and 2000s.

It turns out that making the present moment not boring requires hard, tedious, invisible work. My dog, Marnie, understands this instinctively. Her current life’s passion is hunting down and catching over 300 rats in local parks after dark. It is her absolute passion. She isn’t really thinking about the timeline… she’s just entirely there, in the grass.

I, on the other hand, had to go all the way to Japan to figure out how to turn off the noise.

Earlier this year, I was in Tokyo on a dream trip: omakase, sakura blossoms, taking the stage to nerd out on my favorite topics, hot springs, and skiing. But the happiest I felt during the entire trip wasn’t while doing any of that. It was every evening in my Shibuya hotel room, sitting on the floor, mindlessly gluing collected receipts and konbini store trash into my scrapbook…

For the first time in a long time, the analytical brain completely shut down. I was just... quiet. I was at peace.

Every self-help guru tells you to journal, but I never understood the “Dear Diary” format. I already know how my day went – I was there.

The absolute unlock is realizing that functional journaling isn’t about documentation – it’s an act of defiance against the digital noise. It’s a way to wade through the weird fears and plant the seeds for a reality you actually want to happen.

That Shibuya hotel room was my private cure for burnout. But a few weeks later, I realized this wasn’t just my personal crisis.

At the end of March, I attended the HumanizeHer podcast panel here in Honolulu.

I’ve been working in the Hawaii tech scene for a while, but it suddenly clicked that our three heaviest hitters in the accelerator space – Chenoa Farnsworth (Blue Startups), Meli James (Mana Up), and Dawn Lippert (Elemental Impact) – are all women. I don’t think any other tech ecosystem in the country can say the same.

When asked to share a message with the audience, they all said kind of the same thing: “Literally, just do it. Our communities need it.”

So, I did the most impulsive thing possible: I posted a casual video on Instagram inviting total strangers to come sit in the grass at a local park and journal with me.

I thought maybe three people would show up to sit in the dirt.

Instead, my DMs turned into a digital stampede. People from other cities were asking for Zoom links to join remotelyn— and over 20 people actually materialized on the grass with just one day’s notice on a weekday.

I realized I had accidentally started a movement.

And I named it after this newsletter: The Goods.

The very next day, I led a facilitated session for a group of female executives and mentors at Blue Startups. The feedback was unanimous: “energizing,” “unexpected,” “a total reset.”

It turns out that in a world where we are all glued to our screens and feeling incredibly isolated, people are desperate for a simple ritual that brings them together in real life.

Four months later, The Goods Social Club now has a monthly residency at an art shop here in Honolulu, alongside online gatherings for a nationwide community spanning from New York to Colorado and Montana.

If you want to clear the browser tabs in your brain and do a real Sunday reset with us (no matter where you are in the world) join us tomorrow.

RSVP for tomorrow’s online event here, it’s free!

And if you’d like to follow my journey, check out @thegoods.club on IG.

Thanks for reading,

xx
Liya

If this is your first introduction to The Goods newsletter, we cover culture, innovation and how to keep your soul in the age of soulless tech. Here are some of the latest and greatest:

• How to not get laid off, a provocation

• IRL is the new URL

• Have you heard of the Dead Internet Theory?

• Get ready for the future with no apps

• Building the future while praying it doesn’t eat us

CAMP 1: People using ChatGPT just to aggressively polish their corporate emails or summarize PDFs they don’t actually want to read.

CAMP 2: Absolute AI-maxxers building multimillion-dollar empires with exactly 3 employees on the back of a completely automated stack. (True story: I actually mentor one of these exact entities here in Hawaii.)

The way we build is completely shifting, which means the way we consume is about to look entirely different, too.

If you think about it, the way we interact with phones hasn’t materially changed in twenty years (!!!). Lock screens, home screens, list of contacts, and tapping through apps like we’re using a glorified Palm Pilot that launched in 1996.

Got a problem?

There’s an app for it.

So, here is my somewhat terrifying prediction for the immediate future:
the traditional ~smartphone app~ is going to completely evaporate.

This means we’re moving toward a world where devices won’t even have an interface designed for humans to navigate.

One of the most interesting CEO’s of our time, 36 year old Carl Pei — who founded Nothing, a new company that builds smartphones, audio products and AI tools that look good and make life easier — seems to agree that change is near:

“It’s very hard to get things done on a phone. Let’s say we want to grab coffee. That’s an intention. But to execute that intention, we have to go through so many different steps and so many different apps. It’s probably like four apps to grab coffee with somebody — some messaging app, some kind of maps, Uber, calendar.”

He continued: “I think the future of smartphones or operating systems should just be: ‘I know you very well, and if I know your intention, I just do it for you,’ instead of having to go through all the apps manually.”

Survival for tech companies means shifting focus away from the [process of creating apps] and toward directly [executing the end goal] for the user.

Naturally, OpenAI is already hovering.

There are plenty of rumors about their hardware plans — everything from smart earbuds to a full-blown smartphone collaboration with MediaTek and Qualcomm.

They’re reportedly working on a mix of small, on-device models and cloud models to handle all your different requests.

Memes are ahead of the game, as always:

But let’s look at the actual intent here:

By owning the physical glass and metal in your hand rather than a mere app on a competitor’s screen, Sam Altman and OpenAI can harvest an entirely unprecedented level of data regarding your baseline human habits.

And as we all know, more data equals a beautifully inflated valuation.

We also know they are in a life-or-death-race with Anthropic for a battle of IPOs sometime soon.

Good old capitalism.

Side note: if you’d like to better understand how decisions are made about your future, AI, and data, watch “The Audacity” on AMC+ (get a free week-long trial — it’s worth it). It’s funny until it makes you cry, plus, we always love some Zach Galifianakis.

Where was I?

Regardless of the corporate cash-grabs, the takeaway is the same:

The future of user experience design is not teaching an AI agent to politely use a human interface.

The future is, in fact, rebuilding the entire interface for the agent itself.

Just do it?

Just do it (for me).

Behind the scenes of forecasting the near term future of tech (you’re invited):

While I was writing the above, I jotted down a few more thoughts and predictions about future of tech, work and code.

Leaving them all here for good measure:

1. Code itself is the bottleneck to human software creation.

2. The ultimate goal of modern programming is removing the need to write code entirely. We can see this change happening right now.

3. Because of this, all application software will become dirt cheap.

4. Nobody will make money on traditional SaaS software anymore, except for AI and chip companies.

5. Building agents that can write code is actually the easy part.

6. The hard part is building the infrastructure around them, which we can call an “agent habitat.”

7. To truly scale without human handholding, agents require native financial accounts. If an agent needs an external tool to finish a project, it must have a digital wallet. This wallet lets the agent autonomously sign up and manage billing cycles without human intervention.

8. To stop AI agents from breaking existing code, we must build fully transactional, reversible protective systems: agents will instantly copy an entire environment multiple times in parallel, test different ideas, select the best-performing version, and merge it back.

9. We first saw this with Digital Twin simulations, like the ones I worked on for Toyota’s Woven City. Soon, these simulations will be part of our everyday lives.

10. This immediate need for simulation power is why people are racing to build quantum computing.

11. I tell my team we must be okay with building crappy products today. Two months down the line, the models will improve, and your product will suddenly become viable.

12. Corporate silos like marketing, QA, engineering, and design are outdated artifacts of assembly-line manufacturing.

13. When any employee can command agents to execute any task, corporate structures will shift completely.

14. Hiring full-time employees will become much less necessary. Getting an engineer or a specialized agent will feel like ordering an Uber.

15. Backgrounds in liberal arts, critical thinking, broad worldviews, and scientific testing will become incredibly valuable. These human traits will allow workers to think clearly, generate new ideas, and direct agent workforces.

16. But to be honest, I don’t really want this future; I just understand it quite well.

Take me back to the world of Nokia.

xoxo, Liya

The night that changed everything:

It was 2012 in New York, and I walked into a converted warehouse and immediately found myself in a pitch-black, winding corridor.

The only light came from these tiny tea candles on the floor - just enough to keep you from walking into a wall, but never enough to see what was actually ahead.

Hitchcock’s Vertigo score was playing pretty loudly, and with every turn, I felt like I was falling further down a rabbit hole.

Then, suddenly, I emerged into this perfect 1940s jazz bar.

Men in tuxedos, women who looked like Jessica Rabbit, prohibition-era details, noir film accents, jazz singers, drinks appearing out of nowhere... After my first glass of champagne, I was handed a mask and ushered into a shaky elevator by a creepy bellhop who separated me from my friends.

You get out on the 5th floor, your friends get lost on the 3rd.

Just like that, I was gone.

For the next three hours, I explored a 360-degree world that was (and I don’t use this word lightly) completely immersive. A hotel, a graveyard, a psych ward, a ballroom that somehow turned into a forest. I was opening every drawer, touching every object, and every smell and sound just reinforced the illusion.

IYKYK.

It was nothing like movies where we just watch them with our eyes and ears.

But here, I was a part of this universe.

Every shelf could be opened. Every letter on a desk was a real note or a bottle of whiskey. 1920s hotel keys. Restaurant menus. Spaces that smelled like I would imagine the Prohibition era smelling. I discovered there was a whole different level to storytelling, transforming people, and impacting lives.

That night, my life changed. I became obsessed with ‘multi-sensory immersive.’

It set me on a decade-long journey exploring hundreds of immersive spaces - from Secret Cinema in London and experimental student shows in New York to Meow Wolf in Vegas, Sleep No More in Shanghai, and Anemoia in Tokyo.

I had to ask for recommendations, join Discords, and hunt these shows down. They were limited-run, rare, and not commonly known.

This birthed a series of questions I couldn’t quite shake:

• Why is this level of transformation limited to theater?

• Why aren’t there more places that transform your reality into an altered state of being?

• Why can’t we use these principles to make learning powerful, to help us empathize, to refresh our lives, and to stop living in just one fixed identity? To stop ‘selling’ to people and start ‘motivating’ them to find a sense of wonder?

As designers and strategists, we’ve been blinded.

We follow ‘best practices’ and clichés. We think a ‘brand’ is a logo and a hex code. But a world - a true, immersive world - is a proprietary language. It’s a set of rituals.

This investigation brought me to global measures… take Japan’s latest ‘Alice in Borderland’ immersive IRL game.

What I experienced that night wasn’t a high-budget New York theater, but they did one thing that was genius: they put shock collars us participants. If we failed a task, we felt a physical current. It wasn’t enough to hurt, but it was enough to genuinely scare the living shit out me. In the actual Netflix show, these collars exploded if a character failed, leading to their ultimate demise. In this game-based experience, it simply yanked us out of our daily identities and forced us into the ‘now.’

I started trying to decode these experiences. What are the rules of ‘the architecture of presence’?

Here is the hypothesis I presented at the Spectrum Tokyo festival in February.

Blueprints of presence: (According to Liya’s obsessive analysis of 100+ immersive experiences around the globe)

1. Emotional transformation is the ROI. Who are you before your experience, and who are you after? Design for the ‘Aha!’ moment, even if it’s uncomfortable. Every sensory experience makes a dent, nudging the visitor to rethink their world. Put intention behind that shift, and suddenly, you’re a changemaker.

2. Sensory coherence is non-negotiable. True worldbuilding uses ‘anchors’ to make every touchpoint cohesive (digital, physical, sonic, auditory, etc.). Sleep No More uses the 1940s. Severance uses the familiar dread of an office. Vacation sunscreen uses ‘90s childhood nostalgia. You take what people know, and you twist it. You make it mysterious. You don’t reveal every secret - you invite the user to investigate.

3. Participation builds meaning. When you buy a Lego set or a puzzle, it doesn’t come pre-assembled. The act of building it - figuring out the order and putting in the work - is what makes it gratifying. The process creates the meaning. A cohesive world shouldn’t unravel all its secrets at once. Find ways for people to become co-authors of the experience, inviting them to bring their own spin and interpretation.

4. Safety as a bridge to the unsafe. To get someone to try something radical (like willingly putting on a shock collar), they must feel safe first. In Japanese dating apps, we see facilitators used to break the ice between a couple. In Sleep No More, it’s the mask. The mask gives you the ‘permission’ to be someone else. We must design ‘permission’ for our participants to try on a new identity.

Remember last month when Timothée Chalamet successfully talked himself out of an Oscar? Between dating a shell-of-a-human named Kylie Jenner and being generally exhausting during the Marty Supreme press tour, he casually told Matthew McConaughey that “no one cares” about opera or ballet.

This, of course, was all over the news.

Meanwhile, McConaughey has quietly pivoted into being an investor for the AI voice-cloning software ElevenLabs, which feels less like a deep belief in the future and more like a “let’s make a quick buck” situation.

This, funnily enough, was not in the news.

Why?

Because in Gen Zs eyes, the digital world as we know it is becoming a total sinkhole. It’s filled with “slop” content and a sea of deepfakes where nobody knows what’s real anymore. When that happens, the pendulum doesn’t just swing... it snaps. People are reaching a breaking point and simply stepping away.

Everyone is turning back to real human expression - things you can actually touch and feel right in front of you. People crave IRL experiences, and that’s where your brand must show up.

• Run clubs.

• Zine making.

• Theater.

• Crafts.

• Live music.

• Cinema.

• Physical letters.

This is why I’m obsessed with worldbuilding.

This is why, back in February, I didn’t get on a stage in Japan to talk about smart glasses or tech specs. I talked about immersive theater.

Because in an era of deepfakes and capitalistic algorithms, the only thing that matters is getting off the URL and building for IRL.

And now I’m sharing this talk with you.

Whether you are a CEO, a designer, a social media manager, a PM, an engineer, or a visionary, your new mission is to engage in better worldbuilding.

Design for presence. Create emotional transformation. Mix the familiar with the novel. Create safe, alluring, cohesive worlds that invite participation. Use technology like XR not to capture digital moments, but to design for sensory presence. Let’s return to our physical world with a renewed sense of wonder.

Go and build a world.

Thanks for reading The Goods. If you’re ready to stop just marketing and start building a world people actually want to live in, let’s talk.

If you can’t get enough, here are the most popular newsletters from earlier:

• Have you heard of the ‘Dead Internet’ theory?

• Have you hear of ‘Move 37’?

• Building the future while praying it doesn’t eat us

• How to build a world: HALFDAYS

• How to not get laid off, a provocation.

Okay, you twisted my arm, I’ll tell.

Last week’s edition of The Goods raised a serious provocation:

This newsletter is becoming a playbook for turning passion into durable leverage. My goal is to help my reader become someone who is difficult to copy, ignore and compete with. In a nutshell a “worldbuilder”.

Today we’ll do just that, starting with a case study.

I spend a lot of time writing about far-future tech. But frankly what’s even more electric right now is the near future of e-commerce and brand worldbuilding (yes, one word) – where taste, emotion, and technology actually collide.

That’s why I joined Verbal+Visual as ECA (Executive creative advisor), and why I’m obsessed with our early partnership with Halfdays.

This brand is it:

The cultural gravity of Rhode or GANNI, minus celebrity cosplay, plus real technical credibility (Halfways is cofounded by Olympic skier Kiley McKinnon and led by CEO Ariana Ferwerda). From day one, their goal has been simple: to bring more women to the mountains, and make them feel good in what they’re wearing.

Together, Verbal+Visual and Halfdays built a digital flagship that makes outdoor sports feel desirable, emotional, and radically approachable for women.

I sat down with Ariana and the Verbal+Visual team to talk why Halfdays is poised to become the next reference point in women’s performance wear.

Read the conversation below.

xoxo,
Liya

1) Ariana, let’s start with the founder backstory — and what gap did you see that no one else was filling?

Ariana Ferwerda (CEO, Halfdays): My co-founder Kiley and I met in 2019 and launched Halfdays in 2020. Kiley is a former Olympic skier who competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics. After she retired, she told me she’d never found a brand she felt excited to wear from a ski perspective. As a recreational skier, I felt the same. Shopping at places like REI or North Face felt incredibly male-dominated; the clothes were ugly, they weren’t designed for women’s bodies, and you ended up feeling like the Michelin man.

When we were launching the brand, we interviewed and surveyed over 200 women; what we uncovered was that skiing and these intense sports are highly unapproachable if you didn’t grow up doing them.

It’s a really high-barrier-to-entry activity that we wanted to bring to more women. So, that was the insight and the mission that we’ve built the entire brand around.

We have tens of thousands of people tagging Halfdays on Instagram. For the normal person, you’re not necessarily tagging where your jacket is from, but for us, women are going skiing, posting, and tagging Halfdays. It’s interesting to see this thing that we’ve built has become more of a movement.

-

Liya’s note:

Five years in, and despite everyone from Kith to Balenciaga trying to plant a flag on the mountain, the divide between Halfdays and the rest remains massive. Take the recent SKIMS x The North Face drop. It treats the mountain like a high-stakes sculpture gallery. The vibe is disciplined, anonymous, and emotionally cold. This is dominance through distance. It’s “aspirational” in the way a locked door is aspirational; you’re meant to admire the geometry from the outside.

Halfdays views the mountain as a social space rather than a pedestal. The imagery is warm, colorful, dynamic and intentionally relational — women aren’t just posing; they’re laughing and taking up space. One asks you to measure yourself against an idealized form; the other quietly signals that you already belong.

2) How do you translate this mission into brand execution?

Ariana: The way we talk to our customers, the way that we have a variety of models in our imagery, and the way that we talk about the technical features — it’s all about how we tell a really technical performance story in a way that makes a ton of sense to someone who’s never been skiing before.

Historically many of the ski brands would sponsor athletes — mostly men doing things like backflips — and it was so intense, and “insidery”. We wanted to do the exact opposite of that. It has been a weird thing to balance: leaning into the technical credibility and, at the same time, ensuring everybody’s welcome. With Kiley, the message is, “I’m an Olympian, but I want everybody to participate; I want everyone to feel welcome on the mountain.”

Next year, we are launching a more technical, “top of mountain” ski collection, and with that, we’ll start to work with athletes, but they’ll be very Halfdays — a little less intense. I don’t think we’ll ever sponsor Olympic athletes because it just feels so inauthentic to the brand.

-

Liya’s note:

In a category defined by severity, Halfdays’ most radical move is making joy feel structurally legitimate. This approach also comes alive in Halfdays’ art direction and visual language, which I love. Through warmth and color, the brand reframes the mountain.

3) You mentioned before you have a “hot take” on community. What is it — and what do most brands get wrong?

Ariana: Community building, to me, is a byproduct of building something worth rallying behind. Most brands are asking, “How do I build a community?” and not, “Am I building something that is worth following or rallying behind?” Sure, they might want to buy your product, but it doesn’t mean you need to build a community for it. So, my hot take is that I don’t think every brand needs to build one.

Take one of our latest collection launches, “The Glazed Cherry Chalet” 🍒

Two days before the launch, we took over Pearl Box NYC and transformed it into our dream ski lodge: wood-paneled walls, cherry-red carpeted floors, perfect black leather vintage chairs, and all. Over a hundred editors, influencers, and friends of the brand gathered to preview the new collection, sip perfectly on-theme cocktails, and take extremely chic photos with “The Glazed Cherry Chalet” branding surrounding us in every direction.

For one night, we turned a bar in New York City into the coolest après-ski destination — where the espresso martinis are frothed to perfection, the playlists are highly curated, and the vibe sits somewhere between vintage glam and cozy cabin. It was the perfect embodiment of everything Halfdays stands for: community, confidence, and a little bit of chaos.

4) How do you think about extending the Halfdays’ world through your physical retail and why did you choose Denver as your flagship location?

Ariana: We have one flagship retail store in Denver and we are planning to expand our retail presence into more owned stores over the next two years or so. We’re hosting events all the time, such as product launches, collaborations, fall launch parties, happy hours, and “sip and shops.” Every Wednesday in the winter, we do “wax and wine” events where you can come get your skis waxed while enjoying drinks and shopping; that’s been really, really successful for us.

Colorado’s startup scene is quietly stacking wins. The recent Ibotta + Voyager IPOs didn’t just ring a bell for Denver — they proved that companies here can build, scale, and exit on a national stage. It also pulled more investor attention toward the Rockies, where the energy has been building for years.

And if you zoom into the outdoor space specifically, the momentum is even stronger. Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy hit $17.2B in 2023 and leads the nation in snow sports’ economic impact. For brands like mine, that cultural and economic tailwind isn’t just a fun stat — it’s pushing us further, faster.

Plus, in Colorado, the access is more direct, more human, and more helpful.

5) Halfdays has such an interesting portfolio of collaborations – what makes them work?

Ariana: With both HOKA and Parks Project it kind of just happened so naturally — we had a call or got coffee and started riffing on ideas, which also happened organically. With Hoka, we were trying to build a more collaborative platform in the outdoor and sports space.

A collab like ILIA Beauty might seem unexpected (a beauty brand collaborating with a skiwear brand) but it made so much sense for a younger customer that cares about beauty. I think for us it’s like trying to build a world.

-

Liya’s note:

By partnering with brands like HOKA and the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, the brand lowkey builds deep emotional alignment. Every puffy sneaker and pastel camo print reinforces the same thesis: the outdoors is a site for delight and pleasure. In worldbuilding terms, these partnerships function as portals. They offer multiple, non-prescriptive ways into the same universe. And we’re begging for more!

-
It’s a wrap on my interview with Ariana. Thanks for reading!

Before you close this, there’s a final, personal point:

Halfdays is a client, yes, but their mission actually worked on my human brain in a way that felt less like marketing and more like a permission slip. While I was planning my trip to Tokyo to speak at the Spectrum Festival, my conversations with Ariana actually inspired me into taking a two-day detour to Hakuba to ski.

I didn’t grow up skiing (I’m a total flop on the mountain, frankly) but diving into the Halfdays world-build taught me that you don’t actually have to be “good” at a thing to belong to it. So I sucked it up, booked a bullet train, hired an instructor, and just leaned into the chaos. It was a visceral reminder that while AI can simulate the “what” of an experience, it can never replicate the sweaty, vibrating, individual “why”. Thanks, Halfdays.

Cheers!

P.S. If you’d like to keep up with Halfdays, check out Ariana’s substack.

Welp, the tech world is shaken again.

The scary thing that everyone said would be coming in the future is here ahead of the schedule as the FIRST HORSEMAN:

Financial tech giant Block (parent company of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey) has laid off 40% (!!!) of its employees like a surgeon removing a healthy limb to save on the cost of anesthesia.

The kicker, of course, wasn’t just the scale of the carnage, but the justification: AI.

Also a kicker in the balls: Block’s stock went up 24% right after.

Many moons ago, the first time I had to let someone go from my UX team at Red Antler, I was so distraught I chugged a bottle of wine afterward just to stop the guilt. I’d bet you that after his third and most massive layoff at Block, Jack Dorsey feels close to nothing:

Whether you’re a contributor/manager tethered to a salary or an agency performing for a corporate client… it doesn’t matter. Your ability to survive collapses the moment a billionaire has a mid-life crisis and decides to “pivot to AI,” you never had leverage.

You had a lease.

And the landlord just doubled the rent.

So, if knowing AI won’t save you, what does?

There is a specific, modern brand of horror in the realization that “upskilling” has become a dead term. Clinging to the hope that your technical proficiency will protect you is now more dangerous than the leap toward something else. Even if terrifying.

Allow me to share a personal example of a scary leap:

8 years ago I made a conscious decision to go freelance full-time. Since then, I’ve had dozens of job offers dangled in front of me like shiny, golden handcuffs. I looked at each of them (seriously, deeply) and time and time again, I decided to stay a free agent.

I’ve contracted for boutique studios and massive agencies; I took a gap year to disappear into the rabbit hole of blockchain; I became an angel investor, a board member, and an executive creative advisor. I still contract - I’ve been with Google for two years now - but there is a fundamental difference in our power dynamic.

My curiosities, my quirks, and my addiction to being globally present across different continents and interests - these aren't just personality traits. This intersection of experiences is what makes me feel stable and confident in a world that feels increasingly like it's made of sand.

I want more people to feel that kind of groundedness and stability.

I’m not saying everyone should immediately go freelance - god knows most people still yearn for the sedative comfort of a 401k and the gilded cage of a dental plan. We’ve been socialized to crave the illusion of stability that a full-time offer provides, even as the floor falls out from under us.

But I want to propose a pivot: start seeking projects over positions. Better yet, start creating them yourself. When you stop waiting for an institution to validate your existence with a desk and a badge, you stop being a variable in their equation. You become the equation itself.

The goal isn’t to be a perfect cog; it’s to become someone who is difficult to copy, ignore and compete with.

1. Difficult to replicate:
   AI replaces pattern repetition. It cannot replace cross-domain synthesis, taste or the visceral “I” that serves the “We.”

2. Difficult to ignore:
   Building a narrative gravity so internally consistent and psychologically transporting that people have to enter it to understand the problem you’re solving.

3. Difficult to compete with:
   The machine can simulate the “what,” but it can never replicate the unique and individual “why.”

What actually holds ground is authority. And I don’t mean the kind of authority that comes with a LinkedIn banner or a corner office. I mean the kind of creative ecosystem that functions like a personal myth engine. It’s the difference between being a “content creator” (a term so hollow it makes me want to pull my teeth) and being a worldbuilder.

World-building as a survival strategy

This newsletter started as a place where I dove into my curiosities - blockchain, smart cities, spatial computing glasses, a POV of a designer working inside the machine. But said machine is hungry now, and commentary isn’t enough.

From now on, the mission of The Goods is changing.

I’m no longer just observing the collapse. I’m helping you build the lifeboats.

Build the leverage to become a world of your own - one with its own audience, its own authority, and its own survival tools.

They promised us that AI would lead to Universal Basic Income (UBI), freeing us to pursue our passions. Guess that was a lie. But we can take the “passion” part and turn it into a weapon. I will be building my world publicly, right in front of your eyes, and teaching you how to build yours.

After all, you need to be seen to be paid.

Old The Goods: Tech analysis. Cultural commentary. Philosophical reflections from inside the machine.

New The Goods: A live case study in becoming economically antifragile. A playbook for turning passion into durable assymetric leverage.

Starting this March.

Cheers,

Liya

P.S. And if you have been affected by the layoffs, please reach out and I’ll try to help!

Sometimes I think about how everyone keeps talking like the future is already set in stone.. like there’s this inevitable slide into the Black Mirror universe, where all the bulky tech we’re fussing over right now melts down into something microscopic and inescapable.

Glasses >> become lenses >> become implants >> become brain-level push notifications, and suddenly your inner world is just… another API endpoint.

And I’ll ask people — especially people who build this stuff — “if everyone got a Neuralink, would you get one?”

And the number of yeses makes something cold settle in my stomach.

Maybe it’s because I spend all day around tech people, but I feel like the designated luddite in the room, the one who still believes that my thoughts and memories and half-formed ideas and stupid tender feelings should be allowed to live and die inside me without a software license attached.

Like the tiny personal rituals — my dog’s ears smelling like warm cornchips and what that does to my brain chemistry — should stay mine because they’re the last pieces of humanity nobody has figured out how to monetize yet.

But also: maybe I’m wrong?

Maybe we’ll pull back at the edge of the cliff. We’ve done it before — putting fences around things like alcohol and cigarettes, small imperfect victories that say “you can exist, but you don’t get to run the whole show.” We didn’t exactly win, but we got something like boundaries. And maybe that’s what will save us again.

It’s funny, because I’m designing for AR and smart glasses right now.
I’m inside the belly of the thing I’m afraid of.

And out there (amid the hype and the money and the fever dream of “the next platform”) there is something beautiful. Real time translation that actually helps people. Heads-up displays that don’t trap your hands. The promise of these tiny, quiet tools that make the world feel less heavy and more… permeable.

This idea that computing might someday feel like air instead of chains.

And maybe that’s the paradox we’re stuck with: building the future while praying it doesn’t eat us. Hoping that ambient tech can stay gentle, that usefulness doesn’t metastasize into domination, that we remember the difference between connection and capture.

Maybe we will. maybe we won’t. but the story isn’t finished yet.

Aloha everyone! 👋 This is Liya Safina reporting as always from Hawaii with The Goods: Trend Briefing — a newsletter read across 25 American states and 41 countries.

Our monthly newsletter gives you a window into how we’re thinking about the creative industry’s frontier opportunities and it’s most pressing challenges.

This month’s essay dives into the scary but important issue of synthetic internet and biometrics safety.

Seriously, don’t skip it, your safety depends on it.

Lots of tea 🫖 spilled below.

Love,

Liya

Captcha no longer works.

There’s been a slow replacement of real people with bots, AI-generated slop, and engagement farms pretending to be your old favorite site.

“Now, the internet feels strangely… hollow. Scrolling through social media feels like wandering through a replica of a city that looks familiar but feels wrong. Generic articles that seem to say a lot while saying nothing at all. Comment sections filled with eerily similar phrases. Has the internet really been taken over by something else?” - Menna Shanab, Yung

It isn’t paranoia; it’s economics.

Engagement (no matter how shallow or artificial) generates revenue.

The Dead Internet Theory refers to the idea is that much of the content online will soon be created, interacted with, and fed to us by bots.

Not to be dramatic, but we’re almost there:

Cloudflare estimates that nearly one-third of internet traffic is already bots.

Most are invisible, crawling sites, indexing content, or more recently, harvesting data to train AI models.

Sometimes actual models too:

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last month:

“I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of [bot]-run Twitter accounts now.”

The irony of Sam Altman warning us is hard to miss: OpenAI built the very tools driving the synthetic surge.

They also declared that AI has “fully defeated” most authentication services humans use to verify identity (aka “captcha”).

Scams are about to explode.

Altman seemed to have zero interest in slowing his company’s activity to stop this. This isn’t a new problem either: a four-year-old article (pre-GPT) from The Atlantic already flagged it.

Fear not: Sam Altman has another startup to solve a problem he created.

It’s Sam Altman’s World, and we live in it.

In a digital world drowning in bots, one company is making a provocative play to verify who’s a real human -- and it’s turning heads on Wall Street. 📈

Here’s a headline from this weeks financial news: “Why Sam Altman’s identification-authentication cryptocurrency, WorldCoin, is skyrocketing”.

Let’s dig into the idea and process behind his new hot ticket:

WORLD, the biometric identity verification company (and home of the corresponding WorldCoin) uses a spherical eye-scanning device called the Orb to scan people’s eyes.

The Orb works by scanning a person’s face and iris and then creating a unique code to verify that the individual is a human and not an AI.

Once someone has created their iris code, they are then gifted some of WORLD’s cryptocurrency and can use an anonymous identifier called WORLD ID to sign into various applications.

It currently works with the likes of Minecraft, Reddit and Discord.

WORLD is many things. It is a biometric identity verification system. It is a cryptocurrency project. It is a super app promising ID integration with financial services, dating, gaming, and betting platforms. It also claims to be a humanitarian project with the goal of eventually (maybe!) providing a universal basic income to all the ‘real’ human beings. - Techpolicy.press

In practice, it creates new risks while solving little.

Would you give up your fingerprints for money?

The relentless pursuit of wealth and power is a normal American pastime nowadays. Edward Snowden warned us back in 2021:

“Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”

MIT Technology Review’s investigation into WORLD shows why:

Reporters spoke to 35+ people in six (mostly low income) countries who were recruited by the WORLD project. They found a gulf between company’s polished privacy messaging and the lived reality of users.

Turns out, the orb didn’t just scan irises. It took high-resolution images of bodies, faces, and eyes, and even monitored vital signs through “contactless doppler radar detection of your heartbeat, breathing, and other vital signs.”

WTF.

The project used deceptive practices to sign people up in countries like Indonesia, Kenya and Chile. Spanish-language speakers, for instance, were given terms of service notices in English, and people in Sudan were enticed with AirPod giveaways without being told what exactly they were scanning their eyeballs for.

Meanwhile, local WORLD orb operators, often working without contracts or guarantees, were paid by commission per scan, incentivized to push hard and fast. If not ponzi, why ponzi shaped?

So why did people sign up?

Out of curiosity, because the orb operator “seemed nice,” or because they had lost jobs or income during the pandemic. Some were desperate as civil war threatened to reignite around them. Many just wanted the free money -- at least one only wanted to buy lunch.

And crucially, some of the recruited villagers in Indonesia were not told that some of their officials were being paid to promote WORLD; many thought the event was government-run. Company officials brushed this off as a one-off incident (company response).

For WORLD, these legions of test users were not the intended end users.

Their eyes, bodies, and very patterns of life were simply grist for WORLD’s neural networks. When MIT put seven pages of reporting and questions to the company, the executives replied that nearly everything negative uncovered were simply “isolated incident[s]” that wouldn’t matter anyway -- because the next, public iteration would be better.

World and Match Group also announced they’re pairing up on a pilot project in Japan so Tinder users can verify their identity using World’s technology. The goal is to combat the rise of dating app scams. As with almost all of the other World use cases, this will require a person to not only be signed up for the World app, but to go through the process of sharing their biometric data in order to be officially verified.

Stronger data protection laws in Europe wouldn’t allow this:

Under GDPR, people must be fully informed why their data is collected, how it will be used, who processes it, where it will be transferred, and how they can erase it or stop its processing. Failing to comply can cost up to 4% of global revenue.

But US doesn’t quite care.
Except New York state, they are overprotective, and we love it.

Privacy protections in the US got weaker under the current administration. So WORLD now launched in America.

After the announcement, WORLDCoin skyrocketed nearly 50%, from $1.03 to $1.53.

“For companies looking to make an advertising push, they’ll shell out a lot more for ads targeted to verified humans,” said an investor.

And that’s just the near-term goal.

Believe it or not, making money is secondary.

The priority is power and control.

Sam’s OpenAI bots are now scraping AI-generated content and it’s causing the models to get worse and worse. They desperately need to know who we are so they only steal our content and not their own. WORLD ID, which could soon become a way for many users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous.

Sam Altman is effectively building what could become two of the most powerful infrastructure layers of our digital future:

• One for AI-powered interaction

• One for biometric-based global identity and financial access.

Did the internet die? Did we notice?

Here’s the uncomfortable symmetry: the Dead Internet theory is coming true because bots now dominate engagement. WORLD steps in as the “solution,” harvesting human bodies to prove we’re not bots -- while building its own empire on desperation, opacity, and the same extractive incentives.

In the end, the internet isn’t dying because of bots.

It’s dying because of what companies will do to keep squeezing value from us, whether through clicks or corneas.

Be safe out there, friends.

Aloha everyone! 👋 This is Liya Safina reporting as always from Hawaii with The Goods: Trend Briefing — a newsletter read across 25 American states and 41 countries.

What’s on your mind?

Let’s do some late-fall readers Office Hours!

I’ve just added some slots to the calendar for November 10 and 14. As always, these 20-minute Zoom sessions are off-the-record by default, and the time is yours — I’m here for advice, ideas, feedback, a quick pitch, whatever is most useful.

➡️ Book here. I look forward to speaking!

This month’s 2 part essay dives into the complex debates around smart glasses and here’s a link to part 1 if you missed it. I was fortunate to work on Google’s new Android XR ecosystem as an independent collaborator, and have lots of thoughts to share about the state of the industry.

As always, thanks for reading and if you enjoy this type of analysis, please forward this to your friends, colleagues or fellow geeks who might fund this amusing!

I still remember my first pair of smart glasses — the Meta Ray-Bans 1.0

The leather case felt luxurious, the setup effortless.

They paired with my phone as easily as Bluetooth speakers, no activation, no friction. I could slip them on and just talk — play a song, snap a photo, make a call, ask a question.

The hands-free part changed everything:

I’d ride my scooter through Honolulu, wind roaring past, and still hold a crystal-clear phone call. My voice, crisp on the other end. Spotify at my command, no screen, no pause.

The frank downsides:

• Meta. I couldn’t stomach supporting them.

• And the AI felt like Siri’s awkward first draft — technically there, spiritually absent (I’m sure they’ve slightly improved by now).

• The photos looked like they were shot on a flip phone from 2005: flat colors, soft edges, but still magical in their way.

• One-minute limit to videos, enough to catch my dog mid-run, but wishing they could be longer.

After a month, I returned them. Nevertheless, the experience left a mark. It was useful, easy, habit building. I was hooked.

So, the tech industry is bullish on smart glasses. Why would they stick this time around?

As we covered in part 1, Google Glass launched in 2013 as a phenomenal piece of tech — ahead of its time. But people refused to adopt it.

Privacy concerns dominated:

Am I being filmed?

Are people secretly recording me?

Google listened and evolved it’s approach. They work with trusted tester groups across different countries, understanding that cultural contexts matter enormously. In America, people often assert “it’s my right to take a photo — move if you don’t want to be in it.” In Asia, people prioritize not disturbing others, sometimes sacrificing their own photo opportunities to ensure everyone feels comfortable. Privacy is not only top of mind, it’s also culturally relevant.

Over a decade after the initial Google Glass release, five key factors suggest smart glasses might finally achieve true stickiness:

1. Enterprise proved the value

2. Immersive entertainment & on-the-go uses are strong

3. AI is the glue (+ brings natural ways to interact)

4. Accessibility is the hero feature

5. Adoption will land on the spectrum

Let’s dive into the details of each factor.

Factor #1: Proven enterprise value

Spatial computing and headsets have been quietly proving themselves in enterprise for the past decade:

• Car diagnostics and maintenance

• Surgery support and education

• Urban planning and architectural visualization pre-construction

• Warehouse logistics optimization

• Training & education for hight stakes situations

• Product visualization in retail and e-commerce

…and many many more.

These applications saved time, improved safety, reduced errors, and streamlined revisions. The technology has proven its value — now it’s ready to do the same for everyday consumers.

So what might that layman value be?

Factor #2: More natural screens & interactions

For the entire history of computing, we’ve been constrained to rectangular boxes:

🟦 TVs and cinema screens,

🟪 laptops and monitors,

🟧 phones and tablets.

We’re used to experiencing everything through a DAMN RECTANGLE 🟦 🟪 🟧 .

With this upcoming transition to smart glasses we will finally have the power to extend beyond these boundaries.

Picture this:

• You’re on your couch. Watching the latest season of a gritty, high-production pop culture sensation drama like Severance. You’re not just watching the Lumon office — your living room is giving peak corporate eerie aesthetic, surrounding you in 360 degrees, filling the volume of space around you.

• Or rooting for your NBA team with a customizable dashboard featuring multiple camera angles, live player profiles, real-time comments, and 3D visualizations.

• Or browsing old photos of your late grandma or first ever pet come to live in volume and motion, bringing tears to your eyes…

Okay, okay, back to more pragmatic content.

This new tech drastically changes how you work on the go.

Forget being stuck staring at your tiny laptop screen. Smart glasses solve the problem of fixed, limiting screens. Why try to work on one small monitor when you can have infinite, flexible virtual screens floating all around you?

It lets your brain organize information in 3D space (spatial intelligence), which is way more powerful than juggling a few physical monitors when you’re traveling or away from your desk.

Factor #3: AI was the missing piece until now

In many ways, smart glasses adoption was never possible without a truely smart assistant (sorry Siri). AI supercharges what’s possible in three key ways:

1. Ambient sensing and contextual awareness enable proactive information delivery through heads-up displays

2. Natural, hands-free input unlocks new productivity possibilities. Voice commands, eye tracking, hand gestures — all working together to create interactions that feel instinctive rather than learned.

3. In-line-of-sight displays augment how you interact with the physical world in real-time

Amazon’s new delivery glasses are an interesting love/hate case study:

They use uniquely trained AI and cameras to see the world, showing drivers real-time directions and instructions right in their sight. This means drivers can stop looking down at their phone and pay more attention to the streets and what’s around them while they work.

The catch is that in Amazon’s case: this is a 100% a data collection tool to replace humans with robots (we do not support this here at The Goods). However, in terms of general eyewear adoption, they solve utility by drastically narrowing the problem domain (rather than “general purpose useful”).

Factor #4: Accessibility is the KILLER feature

Critics ask: “Who is this actually for? Is this a solution without a problem?”

For the blind and low-vision community, smart glasses with AI features have been absolutely life-altering.

There’s an equally compelling story for captioning glasses and the deaf and hard of hearing. “During a recent bout of hearing loss, we had my mother on the Even Realities G1s [smart glasses brand] for live captioning”, comments one of the Vergecast listeners.

But accessibility isn’t just for those with disabilities — we all need assistance sometimes:

• Travelers need real-time translation in foreign countries

• Professionals need hands-free guidance during complex tasks

• Parents need navigation while carrying children

• Drivers need directions without looking away from the road

Accessibility is the hero use case that makes smart glasses essential, not optional.

Factor #5: Where will we land on the adoption spectrum?

The revolution depends on active participation from you — the reader, user, consumer, and builder. If people don’t buy in, the technology won’t survive.

We’re looking at a spectrum of possibilities:

• Low End (Smartwatch Scenario - 40% probability in the next 2 years):
  Useful for specific niche, but doesn’t fundamentally change how we interact with the world. A nice-to-have accessory.

• High End (Smartphone Scenario - 99% probability in the next 20 years):
  Everything changes. The way we live, navigate, plan, work, and interact with people transforms completely. A paradigm shift in human behavior.

Soon enough we’ll land somewhere along this spectrum—but where exactly remains uncertain.

Sometimes adoption requires a trigger event.

QR codes existed for years, but it took COVID-19 to make them ubiquitous in restaurant menus and business cards.

What could trigger mass smart glasses adoption?

• Medical breakthrough: real-time health monitoring becomes essential

• Post-truth era solution: instant fact-checking in a world where truth feels impossible to verify

• Entertainment phenomenon: a Disney experience or blockbuster film that requires glasses to fully enjoy

• Safety innovation: how do you make eye contact with a self-driving car to ensure it’s safe to cross the road? Smart glasses could bridge this gap

• Enhanced accessibility: Features that transform daily life for millions with disabilities.

The black swan events are hard to predict, yet we do know they are coming.

The Bottom Line

We can’t predict adoption with certainty, but we can influence it. The technology is more mature than ever. The AI integration is unprecedented. The use cases are compelling. The emotional barriers are better understood.

Whether smart glasses become the next smartwatch or the next smartphone depends on all of us — the choices we make as consumers, the applications we build as developers, and the policies we shape as a society.

I’m excited to be part of this moment. Are you?

Thanks for reading The Goods!

Hey hi hello! 👋 This is Liya Safina and “The Goods: Trend Briefing” — a newsletter read across 25 American states and 41 countries.

(+2 states and +7 countries since last time!)

We’ve had nearly 200 new subscribers join us since the last issue. If you’re one of these folks, welcome! Feel free to reply directly to this email to introduce yourself — I read everything that comes through.

Our monthly newsletter gives you a window into how we’re thinking about the creative industry’s frontier opportunities and it’s most pressing challenges.

This month’s 2 part essay dives into the complex debates around smart glasses and Google’s new XR ecosystem that I was fortunate to work on as an independent collaborator.

Lots of tea 🫖 spilled below.

Thank you so much for your support!

Warmly,

-Liya

Today we’re talking about the next big thing in wearable tech: glasses.

I know what you’re thinking:

"Wait, didn’t Google already do this? Didn’t they try the whole smart glasses thing like… ten years ago?"

And yes. They did. We did. And like most things a decade early, it was a little weird, a little clunky, and very ahead of its time. Like wearing a concept car on your face.

The vision never left.

It just took the rest of the world a minute (or ten years) to catch up.

Fast forward to today and everyone — and I mean everyone — is suddenly back in the wearables race.

1. Apple dropped the Vision Pro 2 like it’s the second coming of sliced bread.

2. Amazon quietly launched Echo glasses (Alexa, enlarge. Alexa, enhance)

3. Meta is investing heavily in its Ray-Ban / Oakley collab and the not-so-secret Project Orion (in addition to their previously acquired Quest ecosystem).

4. There’s also a whole cohort of edge-case dreamers — Snapchat, Xreal, Viture, and other fringe-glamorous early adopters.

And TODAY,

Google officially got back in the game…

…when their favorite collab partner Samsung released “Galaxy XR”: the very first device built on Google’s own new operating system for next-generation headsets and glasses.

I got to work on it (*proud mama*), more below.

What was released today?

A new operating system for next-generation headsets and glasses called “Android XR” (first device: Samsung’s headset rivaling Apple Vision Pro at half the price and double the intelligence — as pronounced by the Verge). Eventually it will scale to multiple devices the same way Android did on phones.

Here’s all the cool stuff that you can do:

• Travel anywhere in the world with the immersive Google Maps, cruise through 360 Street View and even go indoors (yesss I worked on that!!)

• Navigate the interface naturally with your voice, hands and eyes

• Circle to search anything you see

• Turn your photos and videos into 3D experiences and step into your memories (it doesn’t matter whether you took that picture on your phone from 2005, it still works!)

• Immerse yourself in larger than life movies and shows from almost every streaming service on Google TV (yours truly worked on this as well!)

• Watch immersive 360 degrees videos on Youtube (your private Las Vegas Sphere)

• Multitask seamlessly in an infinite workspace, create and edit 3d videos, prototype apps, watch Netflix and interactive gamified movies (e.g. Asteroid from visionary director Doug Liman - responsible for The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith), play games from the headset or stream from your PC …and much much more.

I could bore you with tech specs and pipeline decisions, what I really want to do is help you understand why this moment matters.

So, yeah, why does this matter?

Here’s the state of things:

The industry is trying to shrink an entire supercomputer, plus camera, display, speaker, and AI assistant — into a pair of glasses that won’t make you look like an off-brand Robocop. We’re not all the way there yet. We’re still constrained by power, compute, cost, size, weight, and battery life.

AI is getting faster, smaller, smarter. AR is becoming more useful (finally). And the UI— the interface between you and all this power — is shifting from screens to everything else: your voice, your gaze, your intent.

The glasses will become a kind of co-pilot for daily life, sitting in the background until you need it, and then showing up exactly when you do. There’s much much more to do from privacy and adoption standpoint, and we’re going to tackle it next week in part 2.

The Bottom Line

• The decade-long hiatus in smart glasses is officially over: the entire tech industry, led by Google’s new Android XR, has decisively committed to building the “iPhone moment” for your face.

• This isn’t just about a new gadget; it’s a massive, foundational pivot from the screen-based mobile era to an AI-first, spatial computing reality.

• The goal is to evolve the tech from a clunky headset into a sleek, safe, everyday pair of glasses that functions as an intuitive “co-pilot,” and 2026 is about to be the year of change.

Next week, in Part 2, we’ll move past the cool features to the crucial questions for the layman: what will trigger mass adoption, how likely is it that these glasses become an everyday item, and what are the major, lingering hurdles — like privacy, comfort, battery life, and social acceptance — that must be solved before we trade in our phones for a pair of smart specs?

Hey hi hello! 👋 This is Liya Safina and The Goods: Trend Briefing — a newsletter read across 25 American states and 39 countries.

(+2 states and +5 countries since last issue!)

Our goal is to help you cut through the noise, see around the corner and actually make sense of what tech’s doing to culture (and vice versa).

Today we’re talking about the next big thing in online shopping.

Part 1. Product Isn’t the Product — Trust Is

Beauty is the one category where culture, identity, and consumption have completely fused.

Dan Frommer and Coefficient Capital dropped a report that should be required reading for every VC-backed “shopping assistant” startup pitching tomorrow.

It’s all here: loyalty, price sensitivity, trust, values, the anatomy of a “splurge,” and why people are still repurchasing TikTok Shop bundles even when they know they’re being algorithmically targeted.

And maybe that sounds dramatic, but tell that to the Americans who spent $34 billion on prestige beauty in 2024. Or the 40% of Gen Z who plan to spend more on beauty this year. Or the ones reordering collagen-laced beef tallow moisturizer from TikTok Shop because it worked.

Welcome to commerce now:

• Young shoppers want product reviews, video testimonials, and transparency about who made it, why it matters, and why it costs $34. (They’re not anti-spending. They’re anti-BS.)

• They really care about ingredients — not just that they’re clean, but that they’re specific. Not “moisturizing,” but “contains ceramides, niacinamide, and alpha hydroxy acids.”

• They are loyal — but not stupid. Over 71% will stick around if the product’s good, if the brand is responsible and speaks clearly, consistently, across all channels, without making them feel sold to.

• And when they splurge? It’s on experience. On scent. On formula. Fragrance. Serums. But a serum isn’t just a serum. It’s a little plastic bottle of self-expression. (And 29% of younger consumers would gladly spend more than $100.)

And TikTok Shop? It didn’t just sneak in. It exploded.

In two years, it’s done what took Ulta twenty. Not by selling cheaper. Not by pretending to be a department store. But by selling better. Smarter. More aligned with how people actually want to shop — impulsively, influenced, and while watching someone with incredible lighting and chaotic eyeliner application skills scream, “I swear by this, trust me.”

They buy the idea that someone — whether it’s a friend, a favorite influencer, or a brand that’s been whispering sweet nothings into their algorithm for years — gets them.

The Takeaway 1:

You’d think, by now, we’d have learned: people don’t just buy things. They buy trust.

For anyone selling anything online (yes, even car parts, carpets and pet cars), the visuals and product details might get the click, but it’s the emotional follow-through — aka “does this actually work the way it said it would?” — that earns the purchase. The repurchase too.

And for Gen Z? That repurchase is where the real loyalty kicks in.

Part 2. The $2 Hermès Bag and the China Trade War — Discovery Is the New Storefront

If we look at luxury brands’ Spring 2025 campaigns, it seems like nothing has changed: still the same nepo-babies, music and TV stars of seasonal relevance, a token splash of Jane Fonda’s silver hair, and some performative diversity in the form of Alex Consani.

Under the hood, something interesting is happening (and was extensively highlighted during this month’s ShopTalk in Vegas):

• Luxury brands like Swarovski are segmenting their offerings into tiers. Think: accessibility without dilution. Experiences, rentals, even digital extensions are on the table.

• Brands are embracing the de-logo movement. Over-reliance on logos weakens brand power over time. Hermès stays strong because it designs for the long term and doesn’t rely on ambassadors to speak for it.

• From tariffs to TikTok bans, brands are on high alert. Diversifying supply chains and prepping contingency playbooks is now just good hygiene.

And for a good reason:

In one video with nearly 12 million views (yes, million), a young woman stands in front of what she claims is the actual factory that makes Lululemon leggings in China.

“$5 instead of $100,” she says, smiling like she’s handing out secrets.

The comments?

Ironic and iconic. “Now this is how you do a trade war,” says one with 80,000 likes. It’s part retail hack, part propaganda, part existential crisis for anyone trying to sell things online for more than five dollars without invoking the words “artisan” or “limited drop.”

DHgate just hit #2 on the U.S. App Store. Taobao’s at #7. Chinese OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) are skipping the middleman — and the markup — and flooding the feed.

One guy in front of a wall of Birkins says: just buy from me.

He’s not wrong.

(He also might be very wrong. But that’s not the point.)

And sure, you could buy ten $2 purses and pretend your rent isn’t unpayable and that the minimum wage hasn’t been frozen since Obama’s first term. Call it coping. Call it soft power. Call it a PR win for China, who’s now not just exporting goods but vibes.

The Takeaway 2:

Build experiences that reflect consumer tensions rather than avoid them.

The New Consumer wants sustainability (in theory), but also overnight shipping. Supply chain transparency, but fun packaging. To feel like they’re part of something, but also like they discovered it before everyone else.

This is not contradiction — it’s culture. Help people shop like real humans — messy, curious, loyal-ish, with a tendency to follow vibes over logic. Because when they feel seen, they buy. And when they don’t? They scroll right past you.

Part 3. What the Tech Gets Wrong: The Secret Ingredient is Not AI (But It Could Be)

Exciting, smart, logical things are happening with AI x E-commerce (there’s a “but” coming shortly):

As unveiled at this month’s NEXT conference, Google’s new AI agent is basically a hyper-competent assistant that can ID your houseplants, swap stuff in your cart, and negotiate discounts (watch the linked video, it’s cool) — while somehow remembering the fact that you tried to grow basil last summer. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Shopify are collaborating to turn ChatGPT into a full-blown shopping assistant, with in-chat checkouts and product recs built right in.

It’s all very futuristic, but still misses the point.

TikTok Shop wins not because it’s fast, but because it’s fun. Because it feels like being in on something. Because it mimics the thrill of Sephora, minus the bad lighting and overwhelming wall of lip glosses.

So here’s what I’d build (in case anyone’s listening):

AI Shopping, If It Were Actually Good; A Modest Wishlist from Liya:

1. Context-aware recommendations
   Not just “you bought this,” but why you bought it. Did the seaweed toner remind you of a beach vacation? Did that rug work because your living room gets golden-hour light? Great shopping AI needs to connect the dots between purchase history and human motivation.

2. Ingredient / materials / supply chain clarity without the jargon
   Translate “ceramides” into “helps your skin hold up through winter.” Think of it as a product sommelier (breaks everything down, minus the condescending look).

3. Cultural fluency, not just trend detection
   It's one thing to spot what's trending. It's another to explain why Polène bags, butter yellow outfits, and peel-and-stick wallpaper are everywhere and help decide whether you should care (spoiler: maybe not).

4. Personalized context
   Move beyond “people who bought this also bought that.” Know my size, skin type and budget before I start browsing. Smart AI should say, “This is the same laundry detergent your favorite trad wife creator used in a Sunday morning reset video, 112 comments agree it works”. Personalization, but also social proof.

5. An empathy switch
   Some moments call for speed and automation. Others call for care and conversation. The best shopping tools will know the difference — and offer both.

The Takeaway 3:

The magic of AI isn’t in the checkout — it’s in curating the why behind the purchase.

Shopping in 2026 means your AI knows your space, your vibe, your budget and your threshold for visual clutter. You can easily opt out too.

It recommends a new rug only when yours looks tired and you’ve got guests coming. It shows it in your actual living room, styled three ways — and yes, it’s thrifted. Checkout is seamless, but the real win is feeling like someone finally gets your aesthetic. And values.

Thanks for reading.

Hey hi hello! 👋 This is Liya Safina and The Goods: Trend Briefing — a newsletter read across 23 American states and 34 countries.

I’m writing this from a plane on the way back from San Francisco, where I spent the week workshopping new interfaces for what might be my favorite Google product of all time (MapsXR, be still my heart) and pitching what can only be described as a completely unhinged but maybe genius idea to Björk’s manager (no notes, just vibes — more on that later this month).

Until I can share more, here’s a recap from SXSW — where tech’s crystal ball got a little foggy, a little sparkly, and maybe accidentally revealed what the next five years of your life might look like.

🔮 The rise of the futurist as a serious profession was undeniable at this year’s SXSW.

What was once a field of trend reports and speculative hype has sharpened into something more analytical, grounded, and urgent. Museum of the Future, Scott Galloway, Sarah Owen, Patrick Noack and Applied Futures Lab all underscored one truth:

People no longer want a laundry list of “Top 10 Technologies of 2025.”

What they want — what they actually need — are predictions that mean something in the real world. Something that makes sense in the context of rent, layoffs, and a rapidly decaying sense of certainty.

The blind optimism? It’s not landing like it used to.

Don't take my word for it.

Here's an actual question Michelle Obama was asked by an audience member:

"Do you have any advice on how to plan for a future that feels so different from the one we were promised without becoming apathetic, or just resigning yourself to things getting worse?"

"It's better not to try to figure that stuff out alone," Obama responded. "Share those concerns. We're not going to figure this stuff out on our own. We need each other. We need to step out of our loneliness and start talking to each other."

😵 OUT: The Futurists We’re Tired Of

Amy Webb’s annual trend report, once a beacon of possibility, felt like a parade of dystopian inevitabilities.

• AI agents making complex decisions independent of human input

• Bio-integrated intelligence evolving beyond our control

• Quantum computing finally reaching its tipping point

• CRISPR modified livestock 🐷

• Small modular nuclear reactors rising to meet AI’s insatiable energy demands

• Private industry staking its claim between Earth and the Moon

Even the climate crisis, once the rallying cry for innovation, was reframed as a catalyst for market opportunity rather than a planetary emergency (yuck!).

The problem?

None of this feels real to most people.

Where past SXSW audiences might have felt energized by visions of AI-powered abundance, today’s audience is more fatigued — wary of corporate overreach, data privacy invasions, and the growing chasm between high-tech optimism and everyday struggles.

There’s a deep, bone-level skepticism setting in:

Because if we’ve learned anything, it’s that “the future” tends to arrive half-baked, overfunded, and weirdly obsessed with taking your data.

And Webb, for all her brilliance, might’ve just reminded us why we’re not clapping anymore.

✳️ IN: The Futurists We Need

Professor Scott Galloway’s brutally honest reality check.

Then there was Scott Galloway — less futurist, more cultural shock absorber.

His talk didn’t orbit in deep space; it landed right in our daily lives.

So, Scott Galloway got up at SXSW and basically did what Scott Galloway does best, which is say a lot of things in a way that makes you feel like you’re being yelled at, but in a caring, dad-who-reads-The-Economist kind of way.

It was part economics, part morality play, part aggressively caffeinated TED Talk.

There were charts.

There was swearing.

I kind of loved it.

Let’s start with the drama (because of course).

Professor Galloway called out tech CEOs for what he charmingly termed a game of “cowardice dominoes” — where one CEO does something spineless, and then they all fall in line like overpriced dominos in Patagonia vests.

Exhibit A:

Billionaires attending Trump’s inauguration while texting Kara Swisher that they “hate it here” but hey, shareholders.

Exhibit B:

Elon Musk giving what Professor called a “Nazi salute” (!!!) and the world politely pretending it didn’t happen because, well, vibes and market cap. It’s a whole thing. A sad, expensive, and very influential thing.

Then there’s the loneliness part, which — surprise! — Scott thinks is a crisis.

Specifically, young men.

Lost boys, all of them.

Vaping, gaming, drifting into conspiracy theories, uninvited subreddit opinions.

While women have gained ground in education and careers, young men are in freefall — economically, emotionally, and socially. They feel hopeless, squeezed out of homeownership, hesitant to start families, uncertain about their futures.

Four out of five suicides are young men.

According to Professor Galloway, they need help. Maybe a hug. Or at least one person in their life who tells them they matter. (Consider this your nudge to text your cousin who just got really into cryptocurrency and lifting.)

Now for the “tech is everything, but also nothing” bit:

• NVIDIA is apparently a country now, or at least has the GDP of one.

• OpenAI is valued at 91x earnings, which sounds fake but is somehow very real.

• Meta owns all the data and therefore all the power, and if you think you’re logging into Facebook “just to check,” you are already the product.

• AI is accelerating faster than you can say “do I still need a liberal arts degree?” and yes, he thinks it’ll give you your time back but also make the IP lawyers cry.

Also, apparently the biggest business flex in 2025 is YouTube, not Netflix. Sorry, prestige drama. Hello, Mr. Beast.

Other hot takes (and they are hot):

• Shein is the next IPO to watch (a sentence I hate, but fine).

• Phones should be banned in schools because they’re rotting our collective brains.

• Podcasts are the new platforms for political campaigns.

• And Europe might become the next economic powerhouse, fueled by military spending and our own American withdrawal from literally everything that isn’t… TikTok.

He wrapped it all up with a surprisingly earnest plea:

Governments should make it easier to have kids. Not in a weird handmaid’s tale way, but in a “we need actual humans to keep the economy from collapsing” kind of way. (Honestly, fair.)

Was it unhinged?

Slightly.

Was it doomscroll-core with a splash of MBA optimism?

Absolutely.

Did it make me want to delete Instagram, have a child, and invest in European defense stocks all at once?

Kind of.

Anyway. I came for the economic forecast and left thinking about my high school boyfriend who really did peak during the Xbox 360 era. Call your cousin. Drink a glass of wine. The dominos are falling.

One last thought:

Do you agree with the results of this poll?

Interesting reads for the week:

• Freelancer vs. full-time — who’s making more? Compare the earnings for graphic designers and short-form content creators in Adobe’s latest study.

• Hustle's SXSW activations report speculates that brands are taking fewer risks with big experiences and installations.

• Scientists create skin-like hydrogel that heals wounds 90% in 4 hours, fully in 24.

• People worry that AI is enabling people to get dumber. Well, the questionably good news is that people were getting dumber already?

• A new Chinese AI agent called Manus is going nuts. Video here. The demo is absolutely eye-popping and the team claims the model is the holy grail — a general model.

• How to design while the world is on fire.

What’s your most unhinged prediction for 2025? (Bonus if it involves AI, conspiracy theory moms, or niche IPOs.) Share your thoughts in the comments!

Thanks for reading.

Hi, it's me, the balloon lady. I have a delivery from Google for you.

I honestly thought it was a prank, a joke, or even an attempt to serve me a lawsuit (idk over what, I’m a bit psycho)—but not what it actually was. A delivery of a huge silver balloon that said one and a bunch of black balloons. It was cool.

Attached was a note: Happy one-year anniversary Liya.
-Your friends at Google.

How time flies.

Over the past year contracting with an amazing team at Google AR/VR, I didn’t just learn from the brilliant people around me—I also learned from the math, the tech, the algorithms and the game theory.

In this special edition of “The Goods” I wanted to share some life hack ideas inspired by that science-first approach 🙃

Have you ever heard of “Move 37”?

Move 37 is that wild, unexpected move an AI makes—something people claim no human would think of—but turns out to be new, surprising, and secretly brilliant—even to experts.

It’s an emergent phenomenon.

The name comes from AlphaGo’s Move 37 against Lee Sedol—an unlikely move (1 in 10,000 for a human) that proved creative and game-changing:

“That's a very strange move," said one commentator, himself a nine dan Go player, the highest rank there is. "I thought it was a mistake," said the other. Lee Sedol, after leaving the match room, took nearly fifteen minutes to formulate a response.

It’s the moment when AI stops just mimicking us and starts thinking differently.

We've seen Move 37 in structured games like Go, but new AI models (e.g., OpenAI-o1, DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking) are showing early signs of similar breakthroughs in open-ended tasks.

However…

I’d like to challenge the fact that “human wouldn’t think of that”.

Throughout history, "Move 37"-like breakthroughs—unexpected, brilliant strategies that defied conventional wisdom—have emerged by humans for humans across various domains (game theory, cryptography, theory of relativity!). Way before AI.

Today, I’d like to offer my interpretation of how this can apply to your daily life.

It’s hack time, baby!

7 ways to “Move 37” your life, exponentially 📈

Un-gatekeeping a few strategies I reverse engineered to apply this to IRL:

1. Goal Setting:
Stop being productive.

Instead of setting a goal, define what you absolutely want to avoid, and work backward.

• Example: Instead of aiming to "be more productive," define what wastes your time most and eliminate it (meetings, new season of “Bridgerton”, Temu on your phone, etc.).

• Why It Works: Humans are better at avoiding mistakes than choosing the right path outright.

2. Business:
"The Pre-Mortem"

Instead of analyzing failures after they happen, assume your project has already failed and brainstorm why in advance.

• Example: Before launching a business, list all the possible reasons it might fail (bad pricing, wrong audience, Meta cloning your idea…👀) and address them first.

• Why It Works: Forces you to see blind spots before they become real problems.

3. Productivity:
Do a shit job on purpose.

If stuck on a task, do it in the worst possible way first before correcting.

• Example: Writing a Linkedin post? Write the worst possible draft on purpose. This removes perfectionism.

• Why It Works: Reduces fear of failure, speeds up iteration. Yada yada.

4. Social interactions:
Make people curious.

Instead of over-explaining in pitches or when introducing yourself, summarize what you do in one sentence and let people ask for more.

• Example: If someone asks what you do, instead of a long answer, say "I make AR feel like magic." (or whatever fits your work).

• Why It Works: Makes people curious, not overwhelmed.

5. Marketing:
Self-selecting audience.

Instead of traditional approach where you convince customers to buy, market by actively discouraging them unless they fit the ideal audience.

• Example: Equinox actually already did this “Move 37”, by banning new members on January 1, sparking criticism for shaming people making New Year’s resolutions. PR gold!

• Why It Works: Creates exclusivity and attracts a more committed, self-selecting audience.

6. Entrepreneurship:
The UNO Reverse

Instead of testing a new idea by slowly rolling it out, deliberately launch it in a high-stakes environment first and scale down based on results.

• Example: A new café enters a barista competition before even opening, showcasing their coffee quality in front of industry professionals rather than just local customers.

• Why It Works: Forces rapid iteration and stress-tests viability under pressure. Use deliberate constraints and opposites to unlock results.

7. Networking:
Generosity first, connections follow.

Instead of transactional networking, give away way more help than expected with no expectation.

• Example: Instead of sending a casual LinkedIn message, send a mini-audit of their website or offer a valuable insight first.

• Why It Works: Most people are self-serving. Unexpected generosity builds stronger connections.

I can keep going forever, but by now you got the idea:

“Move 37” moments happen when we break assumptions.

And I’m excited to break some more of those in 2025. Cheers!

Happy 2025, y'all!

👋 This is Liya Safina and The Goods: Trend Briefing—a newsletter read across 23 American states and 34 countries.

Our goal is to help you navigate through the hype to get a nuanced view of tech innovation and its cultural implications. Let's go!

As a digital society, we’re trying to move away from the phone, and are desperately searching for the best new everyday device.

Most importantly, we’re still looking for a use case—how will this new device solve a practical problem in a way that makes our lives cheaper, easier, faster, and more delightful?

Is it rings 💍?

ŌURA is betting on this.

Is it watches ⌚?

Apple threw spaghetti at the wall until it stuck.

Is it glasses 👓?

Meta has a $300 product and a $10,000 prototype.

One thing is clear. Phones aren't going to be around much longer, we're moving towards the next wearable.

After a few years working in extended reality, or XR (an umbrella term that includes virtual and augmented reality) I believe everything we’re building is leading toward everyday use with glasses.

And.. probably contact lenses after that.

The catch is that nanotechnology is progressing slower than expected, headsets are too heavy and expensive, and the experience (for now) demands too much effort.

Plus, just like with QR codes that have been around since the mid-90s but only caught on after COVID-19, sometimes the technology needs a trigger event to achieve stickiness and widespread usage.

People have short attention spans, so the industry mostly operates outside the limelight.

Nevertheless, it's worth paying attention to.

How do I know this?

A pinch me moment: for the last year or so, I've been very fortunate to collaborate with Google on building the newly announced XR experiences.

Apart from being surrounded by geniuses with multiple patents, frontier thinkers with faster-than-light reaction speeds, and amazing skills, it was really cool to be part of the team (as a contract design lead) bringing our favorite phone apps to a new type of experience.

And it was finally announced last December!

If you were too busy picking a perfect present (understandable), here's a quick recap of everything announced:

• Android XR, which will fully launch in 2025, promises a whole new operating system for headsets and glasses of all types and a bridge to Android phones.

• Google is also reimagining some of our favorite apps for headsets: watch YouTube and Google TV on a virtual big screen, or spatialize your old pictures in 3D (!!) with Google Photos. You’ll be able to explore the world in new ways with Google Maps, soaring above cities like a bird.

• Also announced: glasses with Android XR will provide helpful information right when people need it—like directions, translations or message summaries without reaching for your phone. It’s all within your line of sight, or directly in your ear.

• Given that keyboards are unlikely to become a primary interface for XR, Gemini AI plays a vital role in providing a seamless and high-quality user experience based on voice, gaze and gesture commands.
  

  

While AI is it's killer app, entertainment is XR's stickiest use case—and with that immersive media is on the rise.

How do you explain immersive media to someone who never tried it?

Here's my best take:

Imagine standing next to Billie Eilish at the piano (or Frank Sinatra, or Kendrick Lamar—whatever rocks your boat), seeing the goosebumps on their skin as they sing, feeling as if you’re creating a moment in real time together. Just inches away from you. Concerts from home are about to go bonkers.

Or here's another example:

While watching "Squid Game", transform your living room to match the show's colorful environment. See every detail of the "Avatar" universe up close and larger than life—did you know Ikran have glowing scales? Feel as if you're right there, courtside at "Challengers", or almost swept away by "Twisters"(with hyper immersive sound too).

Early feedback on XR cinemas has led Reddit threads among film enthusiasts to explode with praise. People who once spent thousands of dollars on home cinema setups are now letting them collect dust.

Here's why:

• XR display quality rivals most movie theaters, from the comfort of your home.

• You can recline or lay down for a more comfortable viewing experience.

• Screens are adaptable and personalized.

• Unique movie-inspired environments enhance the sense of immersion and calm.

• Surround sound is a key player too, making you really feel the experience.

And it's visceral power isn’t just visual—it’s emotional, resonating deeply even with skeptics, and poised to reshape industries from sports to entertainment.

Here's a lesser known quote from Steve Jobs:

"Headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right? There's no such thing as headphones for video."

Well, now there is.

What's next?

Tech industry is relentlessly committed towards making XR a “general computing platform”, investing deeply in 2 core user value verticals:

Productivity:

Practically speaking, headsets are moving towards becoming head-worn computers. These devices are built to be carried along while traveling, enabling multitasking and deep focus on work with infinite, customizable screens that support any web and phone app.

Entertainment:

Apart from the benefits outlined above (blow up any video to a massive size!), the headset's passthrough feature gives you the ability to see the world around you while using it.

Glasses:

With all the benefits of contextual support to help answer questions, the glasses are still an uncharted territory.

For now, I'll leave you with this amazing exploration of AR- and AI- powered agents by Keiichi Matsuda 's Liquid City in collaboration with Niantic, Inc.

👋 Thanks for reading!

Every time I speak at a conference or on podcasts about AI, I get a question about this technology destroying us in one way or another.

While I wouldn’t say I’m a blind optimist, I do have a secret mantra that can empower anyone to think about innovation with optimistic realism.

And I’m here to share it with you.

A bit of context first:

I consider myself an AI power user. Since ChatGPT's release to the public, I’ve used it daily, and it's not the only one I use. Midjourney, Claude, Runway, Descript, Subtxt, Gamma, Google’s Gemini, Tome, Apollo, Relume—are all part of my day-to-day arsenal, as I work, play, create and connect.

So far, it has improved my life, allowing me to save time, communicate more eloquently as an ESL person, and even create my first short film—something I thought was never possible without proper film industry education, expensive hardware, and a team of paid collaborators.

Here’s a glimpse of what I was able to create for Runways Gen48 film festival:

We all deserve to feel empowered and informed about technology, and we all deserve to be invited to the conversations about our own futures, don't we?

I’m writing this to include you in one.

Sometimes I’m fortunate to be hired by companies to consult on AI, and sometimes I speak about it at conferences. Time and time again, my core mantra stays the same:

Extensively educate yourself about the risks, but hurry to seize the opportunities.

Let’s start with that first part: education.

Security risks and rights ownership are still murky waters. Environment stays top of mind (I wrote about AI’s impact on climate a few months ago during the Climate Week), and with all the deepfakes there’s a very big question mark about the misinformation, especially given the devastating ongoing conflicts globally, elections and increasing societal divide.

(Don’t worry, we will get to the optimistic part in a bit)

Not too long ago, my personal hero Tristan Harris (the one who produced “Social Dilemma” on Netflix) was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, where he outlined three main horizons of AI harm:

1. Things that are existential for marginalized people right now—like predictive policing and AI moderated loan applications

2. AI that generates disinformation which undermines trust in democracy.

3. AI that can recursively self-improve, for example generating new scientific hypotheses.

Every minute we're online, we're teaching AI. It picks up what we know and what we've been through, getting smarter and seeing more and more.

In 2019 GPT-2 couldn't reliably count to ten.

Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand and advise on intellectual topics.

The possibility of an AI takeover, like the one depicted in WALL-E or the Terminator series, is no longer purely science fiction but a real concern that experts in the field are struggling with.

Believe it or not, I have some good news:

1. Big Tech (kind of) agreed to be held in check

2. Governments invest in preventing the threats

3. Serious funds are committed to AI guard railing

Big Tech commits with receipts

We’ve all heard whispers about the meetings with lawmakers in Washington, where Elon Musk warned of civilizational risks posed by artificial intelligence.

The Forum’s big names—Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI— shook hands at the White House, agreeing to play by new AI rules that bring in academics and independent researchers as watchdogs to sniff out flaws in their systems.

They’ve poured over $10 million into an AI Safety Fund to tackle advanced AI’s wild risks, pushing for smarter, risk-aware development and launching challenges to spot potential trouble spots early.

Global governments step up

With more checks and balances kicking in, AI’s future is looking brighter:

• United States:
  President Biden's executive order aims to establish safety standards, protect privacy, prevent bias, and hire AI experts via AI.gov

• Europe:
  The European AI Act aims to regulate it by categorizing systems into risk levels, preemptively blocking social scoring by governments, and requiring explicit disclosure for AI interacting with humans (e.g. chatbots).

• China:
  Launched Global AI Governance Initiative. As Oxford PhD candidate Sihao Huang points out, China is trying to position itself as Global South’s standard bearer on AI.

One bit of nuance lost in some of the headlines:

As always with governments, this is a double edged sword. We know that once regulators step in, it’s not only about our safety, but also about control, limitation of rights, opportunities and basically a “great” way to keep people where they are, and where they can be controlled.

We will be watching closely.

Key Takeaway:

We're at a turning point with AI—companies and governments are finally stepping up to keep this tech in check, but there's still so much unfolding.

In Part 2, we'll dive into what OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has to say about the future of AI, his views on regulation, and why he's not just another tech CEO but a key player shaping the rules of the game. Stay tuned!

If you’re inspired by innovation and would like to work together, drop me a line.

The Goods is a newsletter by Liya Safina helping you navigate through the hype to get a nuanced view of tech innovation and its cultural implications.

Subscribe now

Today’s Issue:
Brands' online communities have a bigger voice than ever, and one direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce founder has found a way to productize this.

The e-commerce landscape has faced its share of challenges and misconceptions in recent years. And rightfully so—consumers refuse to stay loyal to mediocrity.

Most brands are stuck in old assumptions and outdated tactics for retaining customers: 10% off for an email, 100 points for a birthday, 10 points per dollar spent—snooze fest.

Loyalty isn’t something a brand is entitled to—it’s a privilege they must continually earn. And if their audience feels the brand is no longer reflecting their values or sense of responsibility, they can—and will—take that loyalty away.

Even huge corporations aren’t immune: when Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian felt the pressure from their angry customers, he had to tweak many of the negative elite status and lounge access changes Delta announced earlier this year (and practically beg for forgiveness via their newsletter).

Conversations about loyalty programs—especially at the C-suite and executive levels—span a wide range of perspectives, balancing between prioritizing profit and investing heavily in rewarding consumers.

But let’s back up ask a fundamentally charged question:

Is brand loyalty even possible in this "post-growth" era?

From OV scandal to “Mother of brands”

To Ty Haney, founder of cult DTC retailer Outdoor Voices (OV), community building is at the heart of brand success and fan engagement.

After leaving OV (in a fairly dramatic way) Ty is using her own experience to test this theory with her new loyalty and community management platform called Try Your Best (TYB). The point of TYB is to make companies less reliant on ad platforms to attract customers, seems kind of a no brainer?

Urban Outfitters recently launched a closed in-house R&D initiative called UO Insiders (invite only for most dedicated fans), but smaller brands find platforms like TYB to be a low-effort, high-reward way to achieve similar results in loyalty and consumer research.

A simple premise for engaging thousands

Initially, TYB launched as a Web3 offering, inspired by the punk spirit of DAOs, building on the mind-blowing success of curated beauty Discord channels and the hype around digital artifacts. Ty Haney was smart enough to pivot once the blockchain hype died down. She leveraged all her connections in the DTC world to enlist ambassadors and have cult Sephora newcomers move their loyalty programs to TYB.

Glossier, Topicals, Rare Beauty, OUAI, and even Paris Hilton's brand are all part of the TYB roster and have used the platform to reward their top customers with exclusive perks and in-app currency airdrops.

TYB users can complete “challenges” (such as product testing, sharing selfies, answering R&D questions, and sharing their thoughts) in exchange for nice things. And brands, meanwhile, can grow an audience on a platform that isn’t Instagram.

In fact, Glossier deserves a special shoutout here: in recent years, they’ve emerged as the blueprint for what brands are just now realizing is the future of successful customer loyalty (with over 30,000 members joining their TYB hub). Investing time and resources into paying customers creates a deep fan connection with true longevity.

Case in point: Glossier has gone as far as to recently change its OG product’s formula based on fan requests, and this fan-Reddit screams "WE DID IT!!!" in celebration.

Is the future of brand loyalty… a giant group chat?

Part loyalty program, part fan club, “community commerce” platforms are the latest tech trend gaining traction with beauty’s biggest players.

TYB’s competitor, Kiki World, is another beauty brand platform that uses Web3 for customer co-creation and ownership, raised $7M from a16z. Since it’s not uncommon for cosmetics companies to find themselves with large piles of inventory they can’t sell, another benefit of Kiki’s on-demand approach is that it uses less capital and resources.

These platforms’ rise comes as beauty brands, facing stubbornly high ad and customer acquisition costs, are shifting their focus to customer retention. In it seems (at least for now) the fans are here for the vibes, the new friends and the rewards. At the end of it all, what TYB creates is that giant group chat feeling 💕💬

Beauty first, fashion second, and who knows—maybe by this time next year, you’ll be rewarded for your noodle and soda purchases via TYB.

In my deep dive into this topic, I researched how major brands like Starbucks, Nike, Skims, and others have radically shifted and evolved their loyalty programs to stay ahead of changing consumer expectations.

It seems they are moving beyond simple rewards and creating immersive, community-driven experiences that truly engage their audience. Click here to discover how they’ve transformed loyalty into something far more powerful (further reading, baby!).

Key takeaway:

Yes, brand loyalty is still possible in the post-growth era, but it requires a shift in strategy. Platforms like TYB and Kiki World show that fostering genuine community engagement and co-creation is the new frontier.

Brands that invest in building meaningful relationships, reflect their audience's values (and this one is VERY key for the increasingly growing Gen Z consumer), and create a sense of shared ownership will thrive, while those stuck in old models will lose relevance in a rapidly evolving market.

If you’re inspired by innovation and would like to work together, drop me a line.

The Goods is a newsletter by Liya Safina helping you navigate through the hype to get a nuanced view of tech innovation and its cultural implications.

Subscribe now

Today’s Issue:
Forty million of American women over 50 hold over $15 trillion in purchasing power and represent the healthiest, wealthiest, and most active mature generation, yet feel largely ignored by marketers. Read on to find out why this is happening and how to get ahead.

Aging makes women invisible in society's eyes.

Think back to the last ad, website, or billboard you’ve seen.

Who’s pictured there?

It probably featured:

• One or several young, diverse people under 35-40.

• A fun millenial social scene or an outdoor activity.

• A perfect mix of youthful energy and cuter-than-average looks.

Here are some of the most viral campaigns of 2024 so far:

According to the Harvard Business Review, brands dedicate just 5-10% of marketing budgets to engage women over 50.

Unless…

It’s a medical ad with faster-than-light readout of side effects.

This is were we see our older women. Media stereotypes them as frail, dependent, or asexual, which suggests that aging for women means decline rather than continuing an energetic life:

Mature women are interested in travel, fashion, architecture, business, marathons, and music, yet they are often marketed companionship services, meds and cemetery plots. I wish I was inventing that last point…

But here’s a data point that can turn everything on it’s head:

Women 50+ account for a whopping $15 trillion in purchasing power in America. That 27% of all consumer spending.

These women statistically live longer than men — and they are the healthiest, wealthiest and most active this generation has ever been in history. Forbes even calls them “Super consumers”.

And there’s over 40 million of them.

Here’s a viral TikTok predicting that age representation in advertising would become “table stakes” in the next few years, gained 100,000+ views and 24,000 likes.

@sarbak3Tag the brand you want to hear this 💓 #fashion #photography #artdirection #trendforecasting #aging

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The gap between the spending power of mature American women and the minimal attention they get from marketers is a long-standing issue.

In fact, an analysis of Cannes Lions found that only 7% of the characters in advertising were older than 60, and men outnumbered women two to one across all age groups.

The cover image of this issue is borrowed from Allure Magazine’s provocative article suggesting that ageism is rampant on New York Fashion Week runways as well. Indicating that the issue extends beyond just the world of advertising.

There’s clearly work to be done.

So where do we start?

Marketing to mature women isn't new, but the methods have evolved significantly.

I’ve been collaborating with an amazing e-comm agency Verbal+Visual for a few years now, and we’ve partnered with a number of brands tailoring their digital ecosystem to mature female consumer.

Here are a few learnings and tactics we’ve identified along the way:

1. Identify and target sub-segments of this demo with customized campaigns. Learn and iterate.

Research and in-market validation are super important. Focus on the segment's interests in travel, health, wellness, and high-end brands, and consider using influencers over 50.

I’ll share an example.

Most recently, we collaborated with Andie, “the quintessential cross-generational brand,” who wowed the world with a stunning campaign of swimwear with 61-year-old Demi Moore, take a look:

Seeing women of their own age featured in marketing makes women over 50 feel both inspired and acknowledged.

This visibility affirms their relevance in society and encourages them to engage more confidently with products and services that cater to their needs.

2. When it comes to your website, simplicity is key

Improving navigation, clarity, and accessibility specifically for a mature audience enhances their user experience and reduces abandonment rates.

• Navigation should be straightforward, with clear clickable elements and prominent task completion buttons.

• Simplifying the user experience reduces abandonment rates.

• Writing simple, stereotype-free copy is crucial, as patronizing language can alienate users.

• Implementing a zoom-and-filter information structure can guide older users through complex tasks, allowing them to filter out irrelevant information and focus on their goals.

• Providing contextual clues, like breadcrumbs and changing the color of visited links, helps users navigate and build confidence in using the site.

Larger fonts ≠ lame design. Here’s some inspo from 19/99 Beauty:

3. Involve mature users in research and testing

Prioritize unique consumer behaviors, technology adoption trends, and specific interests of women over 50 to better tailor effective strategies and campaigns to meet their needs. Empathy mapping and card sorting can help understand their habits and expectations.

What comes out of these sessions, are campaigns with truly unqiue and authentic POV. Here are a few examples:

• 19/99 Beauty successfully reached older women by promoting age neutrality and creativity, showing that older women are not invisible and can enjoy colorful, expressive makeup.

• Fashion shows, like those by Batsheva and Miu Miu, featuring age-diverse casting, highlight the growing trend of embracing older models, showcasing authenticity and relatability in fashion.

• Laura Geller Beauty made the bold decision to exclusively feature women over 40 in all of its marketing and social media messaging. By casting mature women who embrace their age, the brand is offering a refreshing alternative to the status quo.

Ate and left no crumbs:

The takeaway:

Put more gray hair on your campaigns, you cowards!

Tapping into this potential can win millions of consumers with more spending power than their children. The first brand to transform its outreach to the 50+ set will make a significant impact on market trends and change society’s perceptions of beauty and power. We’re here for it.

If you’re inspired by innovation and would like to work together, drop me a line.

If you know me, you know I get a lot of joy from sharing my story in person.

This summer, Aaron Schorn and Auston Stewart invited me to speak at Nalukai Foundation -- during a Startup Camp that brings together a group of Hawaii's most ambitious and inquisitive teens to give them entrepreneurial tools.

As we shared our knowledge, they unleashed their raw creativity and taught me too along the way.

Here are 5 ways in which the world seems to misunderstand Gen Z ↓

#1. Originality is unachievable

"We are painted to be too dramatic, which is far from reality. This could also be caused by the lack of originality in our generation. Everything has been done before, so the only way to create entertainment is to lean into an unrealistic…" - quoting one of the teen participants, who balances over 12 side hustles simultaneously.

Perhaps, that’s why Gen Z tends to align with niche subcultures or nostalgia-driven concepts. Brands that understand and resonate with these passions, even if they're less mainstream, can build strong, fresh and authentic connections.

#2. They care a lot. With a pinch of jaded.

Women's health, climate change, sustainable consumption, rapid death of ʻōhiʻa trees, and political polarization - Gen Z is much more articulate and informed than we were at their age, but they know that no one is coming to save them. There's a certain degree of disillusionment while they remain passionate. Explosive mix.

#3. But they also see through you.

Greenwashing and PR-friendly headlines don’t work. Gen Z knows that behind every loyalty campaign is a suite of marketers, and behind every sustainable initiative is a stock-price-aware board of directors. Big companies will have to find ways to *actually* be genuine to earn their trust. Oatly is a great example.

#4. Nerds are in. Mean is out.

Gen Z has embraced a shift in societal perceptions, valuing traits like intelligence and ambition over outdated stereotypes, such as viewing "nerdy" as uncool (ex: Dressing Gen Z for “White Lotus”). Which has led to a redefinition of popular cliques.

This generation may not grasp the appeal of Mean Girls.

“Mean cliques are quite straightforward; they revolve around gossip, complaints, and negativity.” - quoting another teen from the Nalukai program. The new popular cliques tend to form because the kids within them possess genuinely commendable qualities, such as intelligence and ambition.

#5. Anxious Opulence

Gen Z's financial insecurity is palpable. More than half worry about not having enough money, and making money is a growing priority. It's not just a passing concern; it's a constant source of stress.

Simultaneously, Gen Z is reshaping the luxury market, already representing a significant share of sales and poised to be the dominant customer group in the next few years.

BONUS #6 that blew my mind:

When asked why the majority of teens wear sneakers instead of open-toed shoes in hot climates (such as Hawaii), here’s one answer I got:

"So that no one [with a certain fetish] takes unsolicited pics of my feet."

Duh.

Regardless of fashion choices and deeply rooted anxieties, this is the generation that’s been found to be socially and environmentally responsible, loyal-ish, self-aware and enthusiastic about promoting mental health.

“We are more demanding, driven to succeed, and ambitious. We value diversity and equality, family and success, and we worry about terrorism, gun violence and the economy. We are a generation for the people, and we tend to gravitate toward brands that align with beliefs similar to our own.” (Forbes).

Innovation Headlines - TL;DR

🤖 AI continues to stir the pot …with both positive and negative consequences, debates over ethics, responsibility, and legal challenges. Causing accidents via navigation (Google sued for negligence after a man drove off collapsed bridge following map directions), more copyright infringement (George RR Martin among authors suiting OpenAI), and deepfakes stealing some jobs, already (Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7).

The Modern Independent Podcast

Here's one thing I know about staying ahead of the curve: ⏩ Equip your team with the skill of balancing REACTIVITY and PROACTIVITY.

We unpack this and much more (threats! opportunities! neuroscience!) together with Jan Almasy in this episode of 🎙️The Modern Independent🎙️ via IndeCollective.

Listen here 🎧

Thanks for reading (and listening). Until next time!

A lot has happened since I last sent an issue of The G000DS; here are a few things that have been keeping me busy:

• 🗣 I got to present my first keynote (!) at the Pacific Marketing Conference 2023

• 🎷 Coached a few creative teams on use of AI in their work-streams

• 📰 Served as a featured expert commenting on Meta’s VR for ReWorked

• 🛒 Consulted Faherty, Decked, Proclamation Goods, Andie on e-commerce innovation

• 🧿 Got to work on a few amazing (undisclosed) concepts for modular omnichannel AI tech @ GameOn
  

If you’re inspired by innovation and would like to work together, drop me a line.

Aloha from the garden island of Kauaʻi — I have a confession to make: I’ve neglected this newsletter for a few months.

But I have a reasonable excuse.

My AI assistant(s) de-prioritized the task because I had some client work due. Yep, I let several machine learning models decide the priority of my tasks: from working out to paying taxes…

I've been experimenting with three digital assistants so far, and in this edition, I'll share my experience with each one to see which stood the test of a freelance baddie (so humble, eh?).

- Liya

Humans vs Bots (the early days)

Do you remember the chatbot craze of 2016?

Before then, personal assistants had been considered a luxury reserved for the elite.

The market was disrupted by Magic, a company that allowed users to text a phone number and get anything they wanted on demand, hassle-free.

Magic marketed itself as an army of "trained operators standing by 24/7 to answer every request." However, it faced tough competition when numerous chatbot assistant startups emerged, leading Magic to make a pivot (more on that later).

Luka was one of the chatbot assistants that seemed to integrate directly into your text messages with friends — and contextually recommend restaurants and takeout.

What’s interesting is that Luka started as a Black Mirror episode.

Its Russian founder, Zhenya Kuida, resurrected a dead friend (from my hometown Minsk), and made him into a chatbot. Which in return made a big splash in 2016.

Based on that experiment, she founded a recommendation service (pictured above) and recently changed their business model again — to offer an infamous AI companion called Replika (pictured below).

Things got weird.

Just as Spike Jonze predicted in his beautiful movie HER, somewhere out there, Replika users are falling in love and getting sexually harassed by their virtual soulmates. In 2023. Fascinating.

My first (human) virtual assistant

Anyway, back to Magic:

Having switched their business model from purely texting to holistic assistant services (via video calls), they moved on to hiring a younger, cheaper workforce from the Philippines and South-East Asia.

As someone who is always juggling multiple projects, I decided to give a Magic assistant a try. I hired Adonis (yes, that's his real name) at $10/hour, 10 hours a week to help me with research for innovation work and conference talks. He mentioned that this rate was incredible for Manila.

After a few months, I ran out of tasks to give to Ado, and managing him became a chore on its own.

I had to cancel.

I'll always treasure the memory Adonis gave me—the first time I felt like a badass CEO. Reviewing work from my personal assistant, I sat in my business class seat, flying from Hawaii to speak at a European conference. Maybe a couple of Mai Tais were involved.

It was a memorable career moment, second only to co-facilitating a workshop with 20 mayors of Russian cities, including a relative of the ruthless Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Scary.

But that's a tale for another time.

My experience with AI assistants

Ok, enough is enough. This is what you came for. I put Motion (AI), Reclaim (AI) and Sunsama (non-AI) — to the test, and here's what I found.

Motion AI

7-day free trial. $19 per month, billed annually.

Motion's "Happiness Algorithm" is an interesting concept. It uses an ML model to analyze your work patterns and goals. It aims to prioritize your tasks and helps you focus on meaningful (arbitrary) work, not with 100% success so far, though.

Pros:

• Motion's meeting scheduler is outstanding.... So much better than Calendly.

• Adding and editing tasks is easier compared to other platforms.

• Provides the option to create multiple schedules, offers a kanban board for task management and the ability to display teammates' calendars for collaborative work.

• Also includes a dark mode, which I love.

Cons:

• The interface is buggy, especially on mobile app (I heard they are fixing it).

• Their customer service has been criticized for being unresponsive during downtime incidents. I heard they are fixing that too.

• Motion may not integrate as extensively with other applications compared to Reclaim (below).

• Certain interactions in Motion are less intuitive, e.g. deletion of tasks.

Reclaim AI

Choose from Lite (free), Starter ($8/mo), Business ($12/mo), or Enterprise ($18/mo) plans, depending on your calendar management needs and org requirements.

Reclaim pushes its users to block time for creative activities, defend "no-meeting days" for deep work, manage multiple job calendars, and make time for personal wellness habits. Overall, it’s superior for collaborative / team work.

Pros:

• Your calendar is your one source of truth; just move tasks like you would with any event and it works sooo smoothly.

• Works within the existing calendar infrastructure, marking events as free/busy, rather than trying to build a new thing from the ground up.

• Reclaim's customer service is exceptional.

• Slicker UX and provides better guidance (but nothing can match Sunsama - read below). Integrates well with Google apps, Todoist etc.

Cons:

• Reclaim is not very good at categorizing events by color (which is super important for me) and has limitations on the types of schedules that can be created.

• It lacks certain features like a kanban board and dark mode, which could be deal breakers for some.

• Overall, both Reclaim and Motion have the same AI feature that I personally find a bit annoying - it automatically moves stuff around in your calendar, filling the free time slots you failed to mark as protected.
  
  Anxiety overload for me, heaven for someone else.

Sunsama

Free for 2 weeks. $16 per month after, billed annually.

Sunsama takes a guided planning approach instead of relying on AI. With step-by-step routines, it aggregates tasks from various tools like Trello, Asana, and email clients into one helpful view. Also love: dark mode, focus mode and analytics.

Pros:

• Offers a well-designed user experience that feels intentional.

• Appreciate the clarity of Sunsama's vision re: daily planning, also great onboarding.

• Drag and drop tasks from Asana, Trello, etc. Synced task updates across multiple tools automatically.

• Email integration and slack follow up: convert emails and DMs into actionable tasks.

• Dark Mode, Focus Mode, and Analytics included.

Cons:

• It isn't as powerful as Motion or Reclaim in that it won't automatically reschedule something if you weren't able to do it.

• Requires building a habit to take full advantage of it.

Honorable mentions (aka other apps I didn’t try):

• Taskable

• Atomic

• Brite App

• Obsidian (allows mindmaps!)

• Fantastical App

• Skedpal

TL;DR

Lowkey, Sunsama is my favorite of all. Well designed, intentional and makes you focused. One thing I learned with AI-led calendar managers is I don’t enjoy events randomly self-rescheduling.

All-in-all if you haven't yet tried digital assistants, now might be the time to explore their potential. Love it? Have it? Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

(Not bad for only 4 issues, eh?)

While you’re taking a much-needed coffee break during the first work week, take a look at Part 2 of megatrends I believe will alter the power dynamic between brands and people in the coming 12 months and beyond.

👉 Find Macrotrends 1-3 in the previous issue 👈

And if you like my newsletter, please send it to your friends and colleagues—the best present I could ever wish for (apart from ending the wars and overthrowing dictatorships).

Cheers, I’m excited to spend 2023 together with ya’ll.

- Liya

Loyalty programs are experimenting with tokenization, which allows for more personalized and engaging experiences, such as Starbucks Odyssey's "Journeys" and Nike.SWOOSH.

Looking back on when I worked on the ASICS loyalty program, our team had two big questions at the time:

(1) how do we ensure we bring relevant and personalized benefits to different types of fans?
(2) how do we engage the most loyal ones to co-create with ASICS… easily, globally, and fast?

Web3 technology has solved both problems while also revolutionizing how businesses reward customer loyalty:

• 👛 Digital wallets are increasingly recognized as a payment medium by companies like Twitch and Burger King (and are expected to be widely used by 2026).

• 🆔 By connecting their shopping history and identity to a digital wallet, the consumer will be able to enjoy greater personalization of experiences and rewards (plus more control over their data as a side dish).

• 🛋️ Even IKEA's research lab, Space10, is getting in on the action by connecting physical furniture to NFT 'trees' to encourage people to take care of their stuff.

• 🏎️ And Alfa Romeo is using tokens to track a car's life cycle and has even linked their new SUV to an NFT. I guess that means if you don't take care of your car, the value of your tokens will suffer too.

• 🎫 Porsche is building a community through the use of an allowlist and a Porsche POAP to engage with its customers and reward them with NFTs.

As loyalty programs adopt more of the Web3 tech, we will see a universal digital wallet system that lets users carry their identity, money, possessions, and loyalty all in one place.

The future of virtual retail is expected to be co-creative, with brands offering creative control to consumers.

Spotlight on: Nike.SWOOSH

Nike has launched a new digital community platform called .SWOOSH, which allows users to collect, co-create, and interact with digital objects, shoes, and jerseys, eventually trading these goods and unlocking special access to perks and events.

The company wants to understand how people engage with virtual products and eventually bring highly sought-after products like Jordans to the platform. And as a 🍒 on top, curated a lineup of artists and athletes to bring the first wave of Nike's virtual goods to life, with creators receiving royalty splits for their work.

Hybrid work means not only creating new models that blend work from home, remote, and in-office but also supplementing human efforts with machine automation.

A recent study found that when people had to stay at home because of COVID-19, they stopped being able to do things spontaneously, and this affected innovation.

Companies are having a hard time making sure their teams are still productive and profitable when everyone is working from home, but new ideas are leading the way:

• 👩‍💻 This includes reframing what an office could be in hybrid environments and seeing where AI can assist as well.

• 🏢 Hybrid work is reshaping cities, some even creating car-free neighborhoods, green hubs, and dedicated routes for children to get to school.

• 🦫 Workplace design is reimagined to address both tangibles (such as salary and benefits) and intangibles (such as work culture and community) in order to meet the expectations of the modern workforce.

• 🤖 Amazon is using AI and machine learning to automate various boring human tasks at its corporate headquarters through a program called Hands off the Wheel.

• 🚀 This initiative, called Project Yoda, aims to use algorithms to perform tasks such as forecasting, pricing, and purchasing that were previously done by human vendor managers — putting humans to better use.

Automation doesn’t just create or destroy jobs, it transforms them, — and reframing what an office could be is key to ensuring employee happiness and retention.

Spotlight on: Miro 1 Hybrid Office in Amsterdam

Miro, a digital collaboration software leader (think interactive whiteboard sessions) brought more than 500 new job positions to its new Amsterdam HQ.

Its new office is a playground for hybrid work: each room is equipped with an interactive screen, cutting time and friction from idea to board in a significant way. Check out the video above to see their interiors and hear the team’s opinions on hybrid work.

2022 was all about hiring Chief Metaverse Officers — but the term was a decoy. 2023 is about bringing every major brand to the gaming market — Meta or another matter.

Major companies are expected to roll out more gaming collab initiatives as the underlying technology, like VR headsets and console-quality game rendering on mobile, improves.

Current branded metaverse experiences are just the tip of the iceberg, with most companies still building underwater:

• 🦠 The expansion is being driven by social and casual gaming after millions of people picked up their controllers to escape the boredom and isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns. If you’re not gaming already, there’s a chance you might be soon.

• 🛍️ Brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger are entering the space to produce high-profit margins, secondary market profits through royalties on resold items, and the ability to avoid overproduction and inventory issues.

• 💎 Tiffany & Co. partnered with League of Legends to redesign their iconic Summoner's Cup trophy, Forever 21 is inviting shoppers to create and operate their own virtual storefronts on Roblox.

• 👾 Chief Metaverse Officers are leading the way, but their roles evolved — now it’s not only about VR and Web3, but more about helping clients understand and capitalize on the space while seeking investment opportunities.

• 🎓 This goes beyond marketing and into the realm of education: e.g. Roblox has partnered with the Parsons School of Design to create a new metaverse elective course for students (with a focus on creating hyper-realistic, 3D digital apparel, encouraging students to create inclusive looks that suit any body type).

An estimated 2.9 billion people — more than 1 out of 3 people on the planet — played a video game in 2021.

Spotlight on: Roblox and Gen Alpha

Kids fill their 🐖 banks with Robux, the in-game currency in Roblox, not cash. This allows them to show financial independence and purchase items themselves. Brands are looking to attract young customers by creating in-game experiences, such as Chipotle's Burrito Builder, Walmart Land, and Nikeland Kids.

What’s mindblowing is that children aged 12-17 spend an average of $92 a month online, mostly on video games, so in-game experiences become way more effective than traditional advertising.

Liya’s favorite 2023 reports (pt 2):

Deloitte Tech Trends 2023

WeTransfer Ideas Report

Dept Trends 2023

Vayner3 2023 Web3 Trends report

Wunderman Thompson Trends 2023

Best End-of-Year Lists:

Year 2022 Summarized in 7 Minutes (YouTube)

The Best Podcasts of 2022, According to People Who Make Podcasts

PornHub’s Year in Review

Tinder’s Year in Swipe

Mashed Hottest Food Trends of 2022

Thanks for reading! Please leave comments with topics you

’d like to explore deeper, as well as things that resonated most. Until next time!

-Liya

Now for the boring stuff:

This content is for informational purposes only. Such information should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Phew!