Nowism - Edition 30

Living in the Year 2030, AI Companies Don’t Actually Like You Using AI, Amazon is a Mess, TV Ads Are About to Get Worse, and Trump Wants to Sell Everything.

Big Ones

Separating the silly from the sinister.

I’ve totally redone this newsletter 8 times now; things keep on changing, or at least it feels that way.

It’s all a bit of a blur these days because it’s designed that way:

1. The Trump-induced swirl, the shock and awe, the lack of coherence, and the randomness provide a cover to allow sinister things to hide behind the silly distractions and allow wild lapses in judgment to seem like a cunning strategy.

2. The media has no interest in covering what matters, only what’s likely to get clicked on.

So to kick things off, here’s a way to keep your sanity in 2025 and beyond.

Your job or your role as a good human being is not dependent on knowing everything in real time; a certain level of ignorance is a good thing these days.

Historically, for better or worse, almost all of Trump’s policies have faded away under pressure, judicial scrutiny, or the complexities of the real world. The media seems to forget this.

The big thing to worry about is that the media environment makes it hard to know what’s actually important. It’s hard to distinguish the impossible from the likely, the trivial from the existential, the silly from the sinister, and the mistakes from the misdirections.

We probably need to step back more and see the news in a slower, calmer, broader way.

Stargate — A portal to something, somewhere, someday.

Part of Trump’s attempt to grab all headlines was the announcement of a concept of a plan to build a lot of AI stuff. Literally, everything about this was vague. What is it, wasn’t this already happening, who was doing this, why, and where? It was at the most extreme end of declarations of intent vs. actually anything happening. It seemed like a great chance for people to talk about big numbers, knowing that they would never ever be held accountable.

One of the funny parts is that the only clear detail we have is that ‘it’ will be built in Abilene, Texas. A place made famous for the Abilene paradox, a story about a group of people who drive for hours to visit a town that nobody actually wants to go to but because they each think each other wants to go to it. A lot of AGI talk seems like this, there is a presumption that somebody wants this.

Tarif’fic News

Under Trump, the world suddenly seems to have shifted to a business, or more precisely, the property business.

Suddenly everything is for sale—Greenland, canals, the Gaza Riviera. Everything is treated as a transaction; religion, politics, history, and basic morality need not impede the flow of money.

On the one hand, the everyday changes in policy seem erratic, unpredictable, volatile, and random. If you take a step back, there is some consistency to an ambitious, clear, long-term vision, MAGA, and all that; the only problem is that everyday tactics seem erratic.

If there’s one thing businesses don’t like, it’s uncertainty. If there’s one thing they dislike even more, it’s uncertainty without reason.

We’re now in an environment where threats seem so ever-present, but empty, and people will stop bothering to take them seriously. One wonders how companies can prepare for an age where extremely significant policy changes can be enacted extremely quickly with so little thought.

Why is Digital Transformation So Slow? (Sponsored by Spinnaker Support)

It’s a question I can’t stop thinking about.

Why do so many companies still use bad software? Why aren’t airlines competing with world-class apps? Why don’t banks dominate the digital landscape and showcase their brilliance?

For years, I chalked it up to resistance to change, apathy, and a lack of ambition. Three big culprits seemed obvious:

1️⃣ The End-User Problem: CEOs often don’t see how clunky tools hurt employees.

2️⃣ The Business Case for Change: Overhauls are costly, and better apps don’t always feel “core” to the business.

3️⃣ Lack of Talent: Many organizations simply don’t have access to the expertise needed.

But recently, I’ve uncovered a deeper, less-discussed factor: the fear of software license audits.

To read more, click here.

Amazon GOne

I’ve said this before, but Amazon is an incredible logistics company, but a truly lousy retailer. Shutting even more stores this week is more proof.

It can be explained by an uncomfortable truth: retail is largely about people. It's about why we buy things, how we buy things, and when we buy things. People are weird: They are unpredictable, irrational, and whimsical. For me, genius in retail is something like Aldi’s/Lidl’s middle aisle. It’s the idea that people like surprises; they get excited by a combination of 95% predictability and the temptation of something unexpected. Retail is TJMaxx ; it’s the maze of Flying Tiger; it’s the store design of Zara.

Tech people are incredible at tech, but they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t want to know it and don’t value it. They think data is more powerful than empathy or imagination. Every Amazon store I’ve been to, and I’ve been to many for years, was painfully soulless.

To be fair, amazon.com is quickly turning into a joke. We live in an age of abundance; one of the strongest needs that people have is to be able to navigate decisions with confidence quickly. The most powerful way to do this is via brands; the other is through curation or filtering. Try buying almost anything from Amazon these days, and you get 60 identical products with the same photography, different random brands, at different prices with different delivery speeds, arranged in order of how much they bribed Amazon. It’s a mess.

TV advertising is about to get awful, but will look effective.

It's no secret that TV viewing has been destroyed by digital streaming. I spent years telling TV channels their competitors weren't other TV channels but instead YouTube and social media, and they genuinely laughed at me. I think now they're about to make another massive mistake.

Finally waking up to the idea that TV is now largely streamed, and streamed content doesn’t need advertising and content to be welded together and instead can be “inserted” locally, TV companies are about to foolishly try to copy the same mistakes that digital media companies did and open up ads to all. First, it was Comcast; now it’s Disney.

A big theme for today is that technology always democratizes access. This means you get more customers, but it also tends to lower quality. One of the defining features of TV advertising has been its quality. The signal of running TV ads always added to the impact of the ad. The quality of other advertisements ensured we paid a modicum of attention. Opening up TV to everyone will, without a doubt, spoil it for everyone. The promise of personalization, of real-time placement, of interactivity, will end up with precisely incorrectly targeted ads rather than wonderful, seductive broadcast ads with weight and class.

De minimis me

In 2024 1.36 billion parcels under $800 were shipped to the USA, in 2020 it was 637 million.

I'm guessing most of this was complete crap, bought on a whim from China, via impulse from ads served on Instagram and TikTok.

The $5 light that broke on first use, the oddly slow Apple Watch charger, the “dupe” designer dress that fell apart just before being washed for the first time. A business model I believe was predicated on the idea that anything under $25 is not worth bothering to send back, and anything under $9 isn’t worth moaning about.

Well, finally, the de minimis exception, a loophole that allowed these products to enter the US without inspection, or import duty is now being closed.

Boom or Bust

The year is 2030; we will fly at 3000 mph to wait for a bus to take us to a long immigration line.

Boom flew at supersonic speed a prototype, of a prototype, of a prototype of a plane that probably won't ever fly, but everyone got very enthusiastic. 99% of me wants to be incredibly bullish on what Boom will mean. I love the audacity, I love the ambition; it's the Elon-like channeling of “We can do it, the incumbents are lazy, it’s not THAT hard.”.

But two things hold it back.

1. The huge challenge is to design and develop an engine that can be unbelievably powerful, extremely reliable, and ultra-efficient. No large engine maker agreed to be involved. The engine development is currently led by Florida Turbine Technologies, a company that looks like it’s operating from the back of a hospital in a strip mall, with a website barely updated in the last eight years. I guess they've been busy.

2. The idea seems quite stupid.

Supersonic speeds can only be maintained over water, and the plane only fits 60 people, making staffing costs, landing slot costs, capital costs, and fuel costs enormous when amortized over such a small load and with no cargo.

One of the strange consequences of a post-pandemic working environment is that time and space take on a new meaning. Even if you're one of those hyper-stressed, productivity-obsessed, hustle culture types, it's much better to work with good Wi-Fi on a plane than to rush yourself. Frequent planes are less important than flights that are less likely to be delayed. Everything becomes about how well you can work more than time.

Podcast of the week.

Lukas Böni tells me how Meat alternatives will dominate the food market.

Little ones. 

1. “The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to upsell you 3 times”. I absolutely love this rant on getting people to care.

2. Really annoying ads on fridge doors are on the way out, an idea that never seemed remotely smart, and sold on the idea that all data must be useful because it just is.

3. Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has. Depends if absolute or relative.

4. At this rate, we’re going to be teaching coders how to mine.

5. Loved this new deck from Zoe Scaman. Looking at growth from quantity vs quality, shifting to better, not more, superb stuff.

6. You’d never guess how much of GDP growth in the US is down to just more people, not more productivity. Some immigration stats.

7. Big companies never seem to be able to do startups, HSBC in with example #1032, and another weird attempt to copy a competitor with a massive head start with something identical.

8. I’m trying to understand agentic workflows; to me, they still seem like an automatic button pusher. But I'm going to get stuck into some of these new products and report back one day, or my AI will.

9. “What breakfast can I make with the ingredients in my fridge?” I ask. The use case for every lost technology, this time it's face computers.

10. Check this out. We’re quick to assume computers or robots will take our jobs, but it’s far more complex. Look at this piece on the pretty slow take-off of self-checkouts. Part of the reason is that where technology meets psychology and business and logistics, the math gets fussy.

11. The best tweet I think I did all month, but not many people read it. What a book or the news was a conversation?

12. Lessons from Zepto, Rebel Foods, and the Dabbawalas: a superb view of the world from India, where innovation is everywhere, as is labor.

13. What would the world look like if we started it today, well, for one education would be very different. Here we see chatbots impact on schooling. It's always interesting to look at what happens in the developing world because they have to destroy to change.

14. 650 Slides on the state of internet and media consumption. I don’t find the format very useful personally, but people love data. I’d prefer to know what’s interesting. I'm still confused by many things; why do such reports so rarely feature OnlyFans or Twitch as social networks? In fact, what is a social media network? Is it YouTube? Is Pinterest? Why is TV still considered different from streaming, which is considered different from social media? It’s all just video from the internet.

    This is my favorite chart from the slide deck. I do wonder why Anglocentric markets spend so much more than other nations.

    

15. ARK Invest, a company obsessed with the idea that everything is always changing, launched its 2025 trends deck. Never before have so many very smart people drunk so much tech; it will change everything, Kool-Aid. Their work is always batshit crazy and utterly wrong and thus useful to look at. Do the opposite? Like these people.

16. Super smart piece about China and industrial coevolution.

17. Was the Metaverse a legendary misadventure? I think it’s always been obvious it was a deeply odd fantasy pursued by some of the world's most out-of-touch people.

18. It’s funny that AI companies are asking applicants to not use AI when applying for jobs there. I guess it’s not good enough for them.

Me now.

After spending an enormous amount of time working with a large car company on how to rethink the entire customer experience in almost every single way, I’m now focusing on starting a company that can entirely rethink how advertising is done. That’s all!

After clearing things out a bit, I’m also open to new consulting opportunities and advisory roles. My consulting website is here. I’m dialing up the degree to which I help companies navigate what generative and other forms of AI actually, truly, and pragmatically mean to their business and what to do about it.

That’s it for now.
Thanks

Tom