The Pendulum Is Swinging Back to Real Life

Going all-in on the internet means showing up offline too

Everybody wants to talk to me about AI. Fair enough, I talk about it constantly myself. But there’s a second half to that conversation that I don’t get asked much about, and it’s the half I think could be more interesting for the next decade or so.

This explosion of AI is the precursor to the explosion of analog. People are going to really want to go to a physical, brick-and-mortar store. Here at Vayner, we are making a massive push to experiential. Physical stores, sampling, in person, restaurants, bars, cafes. I may start a business to bring back drive-in movie theaters. There’s a reason music festivals, sporting events, bar crawls, and run clubs are taking off. We’re yearning for it. We’ve tapped out a bit from the over-tech. Why do you think so many kids want the 1990s? It’s not just the fashion. It’s the simplicity.

So, now, it’s 2026. In 14 years it’ll be 2040, and I think 2040 is going to feel more like 2065. The speed of technology is about to really explode. Which means building businesses that were built like we’re in 1965 is a major opportunity.

That’s one reason why we just hired a “senior vice president of experiential,” Michelle Roguso, who joined the agency in June 2026 to build out our in-real-life (IRL) capabilities.

The Barbell

I wrote about this here on Substack back in March: the retail barbell effect. Here’s how I think about where we’re headed: We’re about to go into a barbell, one side of that barbell is extreme technology, AI, robots, weird stuff we’re not ready for yet. The other side is analog….Not a little bit analog, either. Extreme analog.

Sporting events. Live concerts. Running clubs. Hiking. Meditation resorts. Hotels. Restaurants. Experiences. Physical, not digital. Community. In many ways, we’re already going in this direction. It will only get bigger and bigger as technology keeps rising in usage.

Most people hear “AI is going to change everything” and assume that means the physical world matters less. I think it’s the opposite. As one end of the barbell gets more extreme, so does the other. The middle is what disappears. Average digital and average analog both get squeezed out. What’s left is AI at scale on one end, and human, physical experience on the other.

This isn’t a hedge against technology. It’s not me telling you to be scared of AI or to unplug. It’s a straight read on where the value is going to sit. AI is not going to set you back. A human using AI is going to. That’s still true, but so is this: the businesses that win over the next decade are going to be the ones that are either fully AI-native, or fully committed to giving people something no algorithm can replicate.

The Banks Already Know It

A few examples from the financial world to be aware of how this is playing out already…

• Capital One Cafés: a bank running ~65 cafés nationally, explicitly not to sell banking, but to be community hubs where people happen to also see a Capital One ATM.

• Capital One Lounges and Landings: the same logic taken to airports, five lounges and two Landings, including one at LaGuardia with a menu from chef José Andrés. A credit card company competing with Amex on hospitality.

• Ralph Lauren: over 40 cafes across the world, in cities like London, Barcelona, Hong Kong and Singapore, going back to 2014, so this isn’t even that new. Ralph Lauren figured out the barbell early.

• Coach: opened its first cafe in Jakarta in 2024, then four in the U.S. and over a dozen internationally, with double to triple digit sales at stores where it added a cafe. A handbag company using coffee as the loyalty play.

• Tiffany’s Blue Box Cafe: the model for doing it right, according to one retail expert: it’s about immersing you in the brand’s colors and values.

• Uniqlo, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Dior all now run in-store cafes too, so this has jumped from “quirky Capital One thing” to standard playbook across fashion and luxury. Expect it to only pickup from here.

People Are Googling Their Way Backward

You don’t have to take my word for the barbell. The data’s already showing it.

Chart Kid Matt Cerminaro flagged that Google search interest in “analog radio” is sitting at record highs…people are searching out a technology that predates the internet by half a century

• It’s not only “analog radio,” either. Google search interest has also skyrocketed for the following terms: boombox, in-person work, disposable camera, 1990s, vinyl, and live events.

It’s the same instinct as the Knicks strangers, the running club, the Capital One Café. People aren’t necessarily rejecting technology — look around, everyone’s still scrolling on social — but they’re using the most advanced tool they own to go find the least advanced one.

Why 2040 Will Feel Like 2065

I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but think about the compounding. AI is bigger than the internet, in my opinion. It’s more internet and electricity and the automobile put together. It’s not derivative of anything before it. The last thing that felt like this was the iPhone, the moment a mobile device became a true computer and changed everything downstream of it.

The difference with AI is that it’s moving faster than the internet did, because it’s building on top of the internet, on top of social. The internet had to build its own foundations first, websites, browsers, all of it, from scratch. AI doesn’t have to do any of that. We have a compounded effect now. Fourteen years of that kind of compounding doesn’t feel like fourteen years. It feels like forty, maybe more.

Which is exactly why the other side of the barbell becomes so valuable. When everything digital is accelerating that fast, the things that don’t accelerate, that can’t be sped up or automated or generated, start to feel rare. Rare is where the money goes.

The Store Was Always the Studio

People assume I’m a digital guy who happens to also like real life. It’s really the reverse. My original content, the first five years of the wine show, every early thought I had about business and life and perspective, came out of one liquor store. One physical location. I didn’t even own the business, it was my dad’s. I was the person who built the brand out of it. I talked to customers all day long. Real life.

I could have opened ten more stores, done some micro M&A, built a tidy little consolidated franchise that would look attractive to a PE firm today, since everything small is getting rolled up these days. That’s not what happened. What happened is the store became the studio. The physical place was the content engine before content was even a category.

That idea, store-as-studio, is something I’ve championed more privately than publicly. I think it’s a bigger idea than people give it credit for. If you’re sitting on a physical business right now, a shop, a restaurant, a gym, a laundromat, you are not behind. You are sitting on raw material. The number one thing I’d tell that person is get into content, because your personal brand built on top of that physical place is a moat. It’s the one true asset that doesn’t get commoditized.

Real Life Isn’t the Opposite of the Internet; It’s the Point

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument for logging off. IRL matters more than ever, and we’ve bet the farm on that being true. But the way I actually run it is that the in-real-life work is the substance, and the content is the distribution. You need both. The experience has to be real first. Then it becomes content, and the content is what travels.

It’s like when my videographer Train follows me around. I’m living my life. I’m not performing a life for the camera. I’m going to the game, going to the run, going to the restaurant, and the vlogging is downstream of that. It all ends up on the phone and it goes viral, but the phone didn’t create the moment. The moment created the phone footage.

The technology to fake presence has never been better. Which is exactly why real presence has never been worth more. What people are craving is the in-life connection that content used to be a byproduct of.

Tribalism Is the New Currency

The other day, I ran into ten people wearing Knicks stuff. Total strangers. It’s like we’re family. That’s not nostalgia, that’s not me getting soft, that’s tribalism, and tribalism is one of the oldest operating systems humans have. It never went anywhere. It just went quiet for a couple decades while everybody was staring at a feed.

Running clubs. Rec leagues. Church. A regular table at the same restaurant every week. A gym where people know your name. These aren’t throwbacks. These are the businesses to go into right now, because they manufacture the one thing that’s about to become scarce, which is the feeling of being known by other physical humans in a physical room.

If you have a business today, your job is to build that feeling on purpose for everyone around you, your customers, your employees, your vendors, whoever they are. Because pretty soon, the product and the price are going to be close to even across the board. What won’t be even is the experience you create and the emotion you generate. That’s the whole game.

Pick One, or Pick Both

The whole world is about to be a barbell, extreme technology on one end, and something closer to 1940s-grandpa stuff on the other. That’s actually good news, because it means you have nothing left to complain about. You don’t have to get on the new technology kick with me if you don’t want to. But you’d better be doing the old-fashioned stuff instead. If you’re not doing one of the two, that’s when you’re in trouble. You have to pick one.

If you’re disciplined enough to have your actions match your ambitions, you don’t pick one. You do both.

I’m not betting against AI. I use it every single day and I think everyone reading this should, too. But don’t mistake that for me thinking the physical world is losing. It’s the opposite. The last 10 years trained everyone to build for the feed. The next 10 are going to reward the people who build for the room.