The 6 Most Interesting Ideas Halfway Through 2026
Friction-maxxing, the inauthenticity tax, and more surprises from an already crazy year...
With a shout-out to Derek Thompson who my Art of the Zag co-host Joe Lazer obsessively talks about (meanwhile I, um, play it cool… and just read everything of Derek’s the second it comes out), we decided to do a whole AOTZ episode on the most interesting ideas in media and business at the midpoint of 2026.
Watch here, listen on Spotify or Apple, and/or scroll below for the highlights.
Idea 1: Friction-Maxxing (You’ll Be Hearing About It)
Making things easy is not always good. If a workout is too easy, your muscles don’t grow. If their schoolwork is too easy, kids don’t get smarter. If getting tiny hits of dopamine is too easy, we don’t stop scrolling and get depressed.
I am so into this emerging idea of Friction-Maxxing that I plan to write a lot more about it shortly. But it jibes with my work on cognitive friction in Dream Teams, and Joe and I jammed on it as the first Most Interesting Idea of Mid-2026:
Watch this part of the episode at 4:03
Idea #2: The Unicontext (Is Why The World Is So Weird Right Now)
Check out this section for our discussion of a fascinating concept from philosopher Agnes Callard. The upshot: humans behave differently in different places and with different people. But now that we are all always together with the internet and phone cameras… we’re starting to behave weirder.
Watch this part of the episode at 16:35
Idea #3: The Experience Economy (Is A Budding Rocketship)
Supply of digital stuff is up—way up due to AI. That means supply of in-person, real-life human experiences is relatively more scarce. And people are starting to pay more for those in-person things… and leave their phones when they hit the dance floor.
Watch this part of the episode here: 31:16
(P.S. Do rocket ships bud? Am I great at mixing metaphors?)
Idea #4: The Inauthenticity Tax (It’s Bipartisan!)
Remember how it used to be cool to write stuff with AI? Well that’s already over. People are really voting with their feet (er, mouses? mice?) when it comes to words written by the machines. Moments before we had this conversation, Substack released a feature that tells you if a post was written by AI. And moments after the episode dropped, LinkedIn added a button to let people mark posts as “Seems like AI slop.”
Oh how the authenticity pendulum hath swung!
Watch this part of the episode here: 38:09
Idea #5: SaaS is F*cked (At Least In The SMB Market)
AI coding is so good and so fast right now that any moderately savvy internet user can replicate many of their $99/mo subscription software tools while casually watching Hulu. I created a cap table management tool over the course of 4 episodes of Only Murders In The Building, saving my company $8,000 a year.
At the enterprise level, SaaS is still safe—for now. But when small businesses look at all their subscriptions and how easily they could have an intern re-create them for free… some crazy things are about to happen.
Watch this part of the episode here: 47:59
Bonus Idea #6: The American Workplace Is No Longer Psychologically Safe
During the heyday of DEI and “belonging” a few years ago, American businesses were putting a lot of effort into making the workplace safe for different people with different ways of thinking. The political landscape of the last two years has shifted that, and whatever strides were made have been wiped out.
This week, I published a study of over 1,200 US corporate teams which shows that only 10% of American workers and executives feel safe to speak up at work when they see problems or disagree with the way things are going. The downstream effects of this will be devastating. But the good news is, the study also shows some very effective ways for teams to overcome and break through.
Check out my writeup on the study here, and get the slides themselves here:
I’m curious what you think the most surprising or “big” ideas of 2026 are so far. My world is so focused on media (tv, theatre, etc) and tech land that I’m surely missing some important ones in other sectors. Please share your thoughts.
Make a great day!
–Shane
Shane Snow is a 3x bestselling author, award winning journalist and media executive.
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