Latest / "Mise En Place" Culture First™ / PULSE! Today’s Hotel, Restaurant & Bar Industry News Deep Dive | 08/28/2026 Episode
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news. A deep dive from HRB Universal, navigating your industry. With insights from leaders ⁓ so in twenty twenty six you can walk into a gas station, bypass the packaged chips entirely, and just order like made to order gourmet sushi. Right. And then later that day, you might check into a hotel that acts less like a place to sleep and more like a well a hospital grade longevity clinic. Yeah, it's wild. Meanwhile. Your favorite local sit-down restaurant is adopting these hyper efficient tracking systems from like an industrial manufacturing plant just to keep its doors open. I mean, the clean borders of the hospitality industry haven't just shifted, they've completely collapsed. We're looking at the absolute definition of a structural convergence here. And ⁓ operators aren't blurring these lines just to be trendy or to get a few viral social media posts. Yeah. Right. Every single one of these shifts is a calculated defensive response to, you know. Severe macroeconomic pressures and radically shifting generational demands and a workforce that is just fundamentally changing. The old rules of what a building is supposed to do, they simply do not apply anymore. And that is exactly the mission of our deep dive into the sources today. Right. We have this massive stack of twenty twenty-six industry intelligence sitting in front of us. ⁓ yeah, it's a lot. We're talking granular data from Data Essential, the National Restaurant Association, Morningstar DBRS, Hotel Dive. consumer edge and ⁓ a few surprising niche reports too very surprising yeah so our goal is to synthesize this mountain of info, get past the headlines, and figure out the actual mechanics of why these industries are colliding and you know how everyday consumers and operators are navigating this scrambled reality. Aaron Well to really understand the scale of this I think we have to start with what is arguably the most aggressive disruption in the stack, which is the metamorphosis of the convenience store. ⁓ absolutely. We're looking at the data central and Morningstar DBRS reports and the shift from fuel centric business models to food centric business models is just staggering. ⁓ forty percent of consumers are now reporting that Sea Store food variety is actively improving. Wow. And they're demanding legitimate restaurant quality meals. It it's a total rebrand of the American road trip, really. I mean gas station sushi used to be a punchline. Right. Now, according to the category trends, it's a highly sought after item. Consumers are walking into sea stores expecting, you know, bobote, steamed pot stickers, complex noodle dishes. But looking at the Morningstar data, this isn't just about giving the people what they want, right? It's an existential necessity for these companies. It absolutely is. ⁓ the Morningstar DBRS outlook outlines a fundamental decline in long term fuel demand. Okay. Now the transition to EVs has slowed down slightly compared to the, you know, hyper aggressive projections we saw a few years ago. Right. But the overall trajectory for traditional gasoline is still pointing downward. Yeah, that makes sense. So key store operators are looking at the pumps outside, which is their historic core revenue driver, and realizing that business model has a hard expiration date. To survive the next decade and maintain their profit margins, they have to pivot massive amounts of square footage to food service. So they're basically forced to become QSRs. Exactly. They have to become quick service restaurants that just happen to sell fuel on the side. And when you look at the demographic data driving this new food demand, the generational divide is just profound. ⁓ it really is. The data central report breaks down ⁓ condiment and customization preferences, and it tells a fascinating story about. Who is actually buying this food? Gen Z and millennials are demanding these intensely bold, adventurous flavor profiles. Like 13% of Gen Z consumers want tagine available for their food, compared to only 2% of boomers. Right. That's a huge gap. The younger crowd expects dry herb shakers, Asian chili sauces, craft ketchups, while boomers, conversely, are heavily indexing toward traditional standard condiments, like Plain yellow mustard and mayonnaise. And that divide extends directly into how these generations interact with the physical store, too. ⁓ right. The data shows younger consumers expect an entirely frictionless digital experience. They want to customize a breakfast burrito on a mobile app, walk in, scan their phone, and just grab their food from a heated locker without making eye contact with a single human being. Right. The dream for Gen Z. Exactly. But the older demographic, the boomers, who still provide a massive reliable baseline of daily foot traffic, they show only about a twenty-one percent interest in using apps. Wow. So low. Yeah, they want the traditional checkout experience. They want to pour their own coffee from a traditional urn and pay a cashier. So if you are a C store operator, you are stuck in this incredibly delicate balancing act. You have to invest millions into, you know Build your own pizza kiosks and seamless app integrations to capture the younger demographic and secure your future. But you can't rip out the traditional coffee station or you alienate the reliable customer base that's keeping the lights on today. Which is exactly why we are seeing such massive aggressive consolidation in the space right now. The smaller, independent operators, they simply cannot afford the capital expenditure required to run a dual track tech and traditional operation. While simultaneously upgrading their kitchens to serve high-end food. It's just too expensive. Way too expensive. So the Sea Store Dive reports detail some jaw-dropping MA activity designed to instantly build this infrastructure. The numbers are wild. I mean, Racetrack, a company primarily known for highway gas stations, dropped five hundred and sixty-six million dollars to acquire Potbelly, a dedicated QSR sandwich chain. Right. That isn't just a partnership, that is a total paradigm shift. And then Alimentation Couch Tard, the parent company of Circle K, buying the Polish chain Opka for eight point six billion dollars. Huge. Plus the impending twenty twenty six IPO of seven eleven NO's North American operations following CEO Joseph DePinto's retirement announcement. They are spinning off their North American arms specifically so it can be agile enough to fight this food service war. Well, think about the mechanics of that racetrack and potbelly deal, right? Right. When a gas station buys a sandwich chain. They aren't just buying the recipes. They are buying an entire pre-existing supply chain optimized for fresh produce and deli meats. They are buying real estate footprints and most importantly, they are acquiring a specialized workforce and management structure that actually knows how to run a profitable food operation, which is a completely different skill set than managing retail inventory and underground fuel tanks. Okay, but let's ground this in reality for a second. We've seen traditional fast food chains. Fighting back, stepping up their dispense beverage game with like premium refreshers to defend their turf. True. Can a gas station, even a beautifully renovated one with a great supply chain, ever truly beat a dedicated restaurant on the quality of the experience? Well, on pure culinary artistry or ambiance, unlikely. But the data shows they don't need to win on ambiance. Right. They just need to win on convenience and human psychology. A consumer was walking through a store and saw something visually appealing. ⁓ Yeah, that impulse trigger is a structural advantage. Traditional restaurants simply do not possess. I mean, you don't pull into a McDonald's just to use the restroom or buy a charger for your phone and then accidentally buy a meal. Right. Right. But millions of people walk into C stores for non food reasons every single day. So if you can just get the visual cues right, you capture that revenue. The reports highlight that visual quality signals are the entire ball game for Sea Stores. If the coffee station is meticulously clean with clearly labeled brew times, the consumer's brain projects that same level of care and safety onto the sushi or the hot food roller. That makes total sense. Cleanliness is essentially their most powerful marketing tool to bridge the trust gap. It's fascinating that sea stores are playing aggressive offense right now, expanding their territory. Because when we turn to the second stack of sources, the traditional restaurant industry, they are playing pure defense. ⁓ absolutely. They are using every tool available just to stay afloat. It is a severe economic squeeze. ⁓ if you just look at the top line projections from the National Restaurant Association's twenty twenty six report, you would think the industry is in a golden age. They are projecting a massive one point five five trillion dollars in sales nationwide. But top line revenue is vanity and bottom line profit is sanity. Exactly. And the bottom line is getting absolutely crushed. The NRA report breaks down the brutal math operators are facing. Food costs are up thirty four percent compared to six years ago. Yeah. The sources attribute this to lingering supply chain shocks, specifically noting the compounding effects of the twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five avian flu outbreaks, alongside the economic realities of increased tariffs on imported goods. Right. And then you have labor, which is the real crisis here. Labor costs are up a staggering 39%, driven by an incredibly tight labor market and the macroeconomic impacts of tighter immigration enforcement shrinking the available workforce pool. And when your prime costs, which are your food and your labor spike by roughly 40%, the fundamental math of a traditional restaurant just breaks down. It has to. If a chicken breast costs you 34% more to purchase, and the cook on the line costs you thirty-nine percent more to employ, You cannot simply raise the price of that chicken dish on the menu by forty percent. Yeah, well consumer will just walk out the door. Exactly. So when our listeners are wondering why their favorite local pub suddenly swapped out their classic thick half pound burger for a double patty smash burger, it also's not because the chef got nostalgic for a retro trend. Right. It's a mathematical survival tactic. Menu engineering has become a matter of life and death. The Consumer Edge Outlook and Nation's Restaurant News describe the current mandate as offering value without looking cheap. It errs this psychological tightrope. Really is. Let's actually look at the mechanics of that smash burger because it perfectly illustrates the strategy. A thick pub burger requires a massive, expensive patty. It takes ten to twelve minutes to cook on a flat top. But a smash burger uses two much smaller patties, drastically lowering the raw food cost. Because the meat is smashed paper thin, it cooks in about two minutes. That means you are using significantly less electricity or gas, and the cook can push out five times as many burgers in the same amount of time, drastically lowering the labor cost per ticket. It is operational efficiency disguised as culinary innovation. Yeah. And the consumer doesn't feel shortchanged because the smash burger is highly customizable, it gets that great crispy crust, and frankly, it looks fantastic on social media. It does. We are seeing this same math applied to proteins across the board. Instead of a massive expensive steak sitting in the center of the plate, proteins are being relegated to premium add-ons. Right. You see it with smoothie bowls or protein boosted pancakes. It allows the restaurant to strictly control the portion size of their most volatile, expensive ingredients while the consumer still feels they are getting a nutritious high value meal. But the sources also highlight a bizarre contradiction happening on these menus. They call it The premiumization paradox. Yeah, this is interesting. While the food on the plate is getting intensely practical, cost controlled, and smaller, the beverages behind the bar are going in the exact opposite direction. They are getting hyper premium and wildly expensive. Beverages have become the vital growth engine right now. The bar and restaurant news reports track a massive premiumization in spirits, particularly tequila. We are seeing viral luxury cocktail trends trickling down from exclusive events. into mainstream everyday consumption. The prime example in the sources is the honeydews cocktail from the US Open. It went so viral that even Duncan rolled out a riff on it. Right. Why are consumers whose own household budgets are squeezed by inflation pulling back on a $15 burger, but enthusiastically dropping $15 on a trendy iced beverage? It comes down to accessible luxury. A premium beverage feels like a treat, a status symbol, an experience you can hold in your hand. Okay, yeah. And for the operator, this psychology is a lifesaver. Coverages carry exponentially higher profit margins than food. So leaning heavily into premium, highly visual drinks subsidizes the razor thin margins coming out of the kitchen. Still, menu tricks and expensive cocktails aren't enough to magically erase a thirty nine percent increase in labor costs. You can't smash burger your way out of a deficit that deep. No, definitely not. Which brings us to the operational reality on the floor. Right. The insights from restaurant coach David Scott Peters and our sources address this head on. His core argument is that the restaurant industry doesn't actually have a people problem, it has a systems problem. He argues that out of control prime costs are almost always the result of bad habits and a lack of daily oversight. He is incredibly blunt about this. He advocates for what he calls the ten minute daily money meeting. Yeah. Instead of a manager waiting until the fifth of the following month to look at a P L statement. When it is entirely too late to fix the fact that you overspent on produce three weeks ago. You track waste and key inventory items every single day. Exactly. He calls checklists the most underrated profit tool in the entire industry. Yes, he does. Wait, let's play this out in the real world though. Peter says checklists are a profit tool, but with labor up thirty-nine percent, and a workforce that is constantly turning over, forcing an overworked, stressed-out line took to fill out a 50-point clipboard checklist. Seems like a fantastic way to get them to quit midshift. Yeah. How does a paper checklist actually offset macroeconomic labor inflation? Well, it's about the microeconomics of waste. Let's do the math on that checklist. If a prep cook doesn't follow a precise portioning system and accidentally over preps or ruins five pounds of chicken every day, that might only look like twenty dollars of waste. Right, which doesn't seem like a big deal. Exactly. It's easy to ignore. But twenty dollars a day over a year is over seven thousand dollars. Bleeding directly out of the restaurant's net profit. Wow. The checklist forces the habit that saves the seven thousand dollars. I see. But to your point about the friction of implementing this with an exhausted staff, that is exactly why twenty twenty six is the year of strategic tech partnerships. You don't rely on paper clipboards and human memory anymore. The consumer edge report points to integrations like Spotton teaming up with benchmark sixty. They aren't just processing credit cards, they are actively managing labor productivity. So the technology acts as the enforcer. Exactly. Instead of a manager manually guessing how many servers they need for a Tuesday night, the point of sale system analyzes historical data, weather patterns, and local events to mathematically predict staffing needs. That's incredible. It prevents you from burning cash on overstaffing while protecting the guest experience from understaffing. Right. And on the ordering side, partnerships between companies like Deliverect and Bounteous. Are automating the entire digital intake process. Right. When the tech flawlessly handles the digital orders, routes them to the kitchen, and processes the payments, the limited human staff you actually have on the floor is freed up from staring at screens. They can actually focus on cooking the food and looking the guest in the eye. Tech becomes the invisible manager. It's fascinating that restaurants are using technology defensively like a life raft just to shave pennies and save labor. But if we turn to the hotel sector and our sources, they aren't playing defense with tech at all. They're using it offensively to redefine what a hospitality space actually is. The transformation in the lodging sector is profound. The ADA Cosmetics and Hotel Trends reports outline a complete departure from the idea of a hotel as just a bed and a shower. Right. They're shifting toward highly personalized, wellness driven, immersive environments. The evolution of the room itself is incredible. The sources detail smart rooms 2.0. Like we passed the era of just controlling the TV with an iPad. All the way past. We are talking about AI memory. You walk into a hotel room in Chicago and the AI already knows your preferred ambient temperature from a stay you had in a completely different city six months ago. It's amazing. It knows you prefer the lights dim to forty percent with a warm color temperature at nine PM. It actively adjusts the room's environment to your biometric preferences before you even scan your digital key. It is the ultimate invisible service. But the integration of technology goes far beyond comfort. It is pushing directly into preventative health. We are seeing a massive boom in what the industry is calling longevity hotels. This was the most surprising concept to me. This isn't just putting a slightly nicer stationary bike in a basement gym, right? Not at all. Longevity and biohacking are becoming core pillars of the standard hospitality experience. These properties are outfitting rooms. With circadian lighting systems designed to actively regulate your sleep cycle. They're installing hospital-grade air and water filtration systems. The traditional mini-bar full of candy is being replaced with functional beverages, probiotic snacks, targeted supplements. That is wild. Some are even integrating wearable tech into the stay, allowing guests to track their overnight recovery, oxygen levels, and wellness goals. It has checking into a clinic disguised as a luxury resort. And this evolution is being driven by very distinct demographic shifts in travel, right? Very distinct, yeah. If we look at the generational travel trends for twenty twenty six, Gen Z is driving a massive surge in solo travel. Roughly a quarter of Gen Z travelers are taking multiple solo tricks a year. And when they travel alone, their priorities shift. They demand hyper reliable digital convenience, meaning flawless high speed Wi Fi is a utility as essential as running water. But above all, they demand a highly secure, technologically monitored environment. And on the other end of the demographic spectrum, you have the baby boomers, which the reports are referring to as the Silver Society. Right. The Silver Society holds the bulk of the disposable income for leisure travel, and they demand high physical comfort. But they also require an accessible digital journey. Okay. If a hotel implements an app for room entry or ordering service, the interface cannot be frustrating, tiny, or exclusionary. It has to be incredibly intuitive. Right. And sandwich right between these two groups, you have the permanent entrenchment of bleisure travel, the blending of business and leisure. Hybrid work is no longer a trend, it is a permanent fixture of the economy. Yeah, that's just life now. So a single hotel property now has to function as a quiet co-working space by day, a vacation spot by evening, and a longevity clinic by night. It is a staggering amount of operational complexity to ask of one building. But the hotel industry is getting some massive unexpected help from the regulatory side. They really are. Reading the hotel dive sources, it seems like local governments are passing legislation that is basically handing massive amounts of market share back to traditional hotels. The regulatory landscape in 2026 has become a massive tailwind for the hotel sector. The most consequential shift is happening in Europe with EU regulation twenty twenty-four-one zero twenty-eight. Which officially takes effect in May of twenty twenty six. This is the crackdown on short term rentals that cities have been trying to pull off for a decade. How does this law actually work where previous ones failed? Well, for years, major tourist cities implemented strict caps on how many nights an apartment could be rented out on platforms like Airbnb, where they required specific licenses, but they couldn't actually enforce those laws because the tech platforms simply refused to share their host data with the city governments. Here's a black box. This new EU regulation shatters that black box. It legally forces short term rental platforms to seamlessly share their registration and booking data directly with local public authorities. So the enforcement gap is just closed. Completely closed. A city algorithm can now instantly flag an apartment that is being rented illegally without a license or one that has exceeded its ninety-day annual cap and pull the listing down. It means the massive shadow supply of unregulated short-term rentals in major European gateway cities is going to be systematically wiped out, constraining supply and driving millions of travelers right back into traditional hotel rooms. And we are seeing similar, albeit different, regulatory shifts stateside too. Right. New York City's ban on hotel junk fees has taken full effect, forcing absolute pricing transparency. The era of booking a room for two hundred dollars a night, only to arrive and be hit with a mandatory forty five dollar urban destination fee, just access a printer and a bottle of water is ending. Which forces hotels to compete on the actual value of their core product and experience rather than relying on deceptive pricing algorithms. Ultimately, that transparency builds much stronger long term trust with the consumer. But looking at all of this, AI, remembering how I like my lights, apps replacing the physical front desk, robotic waiters navigating hallways to deliver amenities. I mean, if my entire stay is dictated by algorithms, automated texts, and machines, are we killing the actual hospitality part of the hospitality industry? Where's the empathy? Where is the human connection that defines great service? It's a completely valid fear, but the data inside these reports suggest the exact opposite is happening in practice. The sources include insights from Hilton addressing this specific anxiety. Their research shows that both the hospitality workers and the guests still overwhelmingly prefer a human centered approach. So if everyone wants a human approach, how does the robot delivering my extra towels fit into that equation? Because the automation isn't being deployed to replace the human connection, it is being deployed to protect it. Think about the daily friction in a hotel. Okay. By automating the menial, repetitive, time consuming tasks, like an AI processing a standard digital check-in or a robot navigating the service elevator at two AM to drop off a toothbrush, you free up your actual human staff. ⁓ I see. Instead of a concierge being trapped behind a desk, staring at a monitor and processing credit card authorizations for twenty minutes, that human being can be out on the floor. They can provide the high touch, empathetic, problem-solving interactions that an AI simply cannot replicate. That reframes it entirely. The robot handling the mundane towel delivery is the exact mechanism that buys the human concierge the 10 minutes of free time they need to have a meaningful conversation with me about finding the best local restaurant for my family. Exactly. The tech absorbs the friction so the humans can deliver the hospitality. It is the perfect synthesis of high tech and high touch. Which bridges us to an incredibly important underlying reality. Because whether you were running a high-tech smart hotel, a gourmet convenience store slinging sushi, or a hyper efficient smash burger joint, there is one invisible engine that dictates whether you succeed or fail in twenty twenty six. And that's the B2B supply chain and the specialized workforce required to manage it. Exactly. We touched on the pain of thirty-four percent food inflation earlier, but the sources dive deep into how operators are actively navigating these supply lines. Is a fascinating dual strategy. On one hand, operators absolutely rely on the massive scale, logistics, and predictable reliability of broadline B2B giants like Cisco for their bulk essentials. I mean, you cannot run a commercial kitchen without a massive, unbroken supply line of flour, frying oil, and basic proteins. But those bulk essentials don't allow you to charge premium menu prices. Right. To get the unique, hyper-seasonal, high-quality items that justify the prices they need to charge to survive, restaurants are increasingly engaging in CSA models or community-supported agriculture. Yeah. This is where a restaurant essentially buys a subscription or a financial share of a local farm's harvest up front at the start of the season. It's a beautiful symbiotic economic model, really. Yeah. The local farm gets guaranteed much needed working capital upfront to run their operations. And the restaurant gets a weekly delivery of incredibly fresh premium produce. But it comes with massive operational friction. ⁓ definitely. If you rely on a CSA, you don't get to dictate exactly what shows up at your back door on Tuesday morning. You get what the Earth produced that week. It requires an incredibly nimble, highly skilled culinary team to rewrite the menu on the fly, substituting ingredients without throwing off those rigid prime cost systems we talked about earlier. And if we zoom out from hospitality for a moment. We realize that this extreme reliance on complex supply chains, paired with the absolute necessity of a highly adaptable, continuously trained workforce, isn't just a restaurant problem. It is the defining macroeconomic narrative of the entire 2026 economy. This is where those niche sources in our stack finally make sense. At first, I couldn't figure out why we were looking at data from the ADA publishing group on dentistry or heavy manufacturing reports in a deep dive about hotels. But the parallels are undeniable. The universal through line is specialization and adaptation. Look at the dental industry report. It highlights that 72% of dental assistants are now taking on complex, highly specialized clinical roles, like taking physical and digital impressions for advanced intraoral appliances. This is no longer basic administrative work. It requires a workforce that is committed to constant, ongoing, continuing education just to keep pace with the diagnostic technology. And it scales all the way up to heavy industry. The Smart Brief Valve News report details how Baker Hughes is deploying high-tech compression and liquefaction equipment for a massive low-carbon ammonia plant in Indiana, a facility designed to capture 1.67 million tons of carbon dioxide. So what do these wildly different sectors have in common with our smash burger joints and longevity hotels? Right. What's the connection? Absolutely everything. Just as a restaurant operator is being forced by the market To adopt eco-friendly packaging and utilize tech-driven labor checklists to survive, heavy industry and the medical fields are adapting to the exact same macroeconomic pressures. They are all racing to lower their carbon footprints. They are all battling an incredibly tight, expensive labor market. And most importantly, they are all facing the absolute necessity of continuously upskilling their existing workers to handle advanced integrated technology. It is the exact same script, just played out on different stages. A hotel general manager trying to train their staff on an AI biometric room system is dealing with the exact same fundamental workforce challenges as a clinic manager, training assistants on new entry oral scanners, or an industrial plant manager implementing low carbon compression systems. The 2026 economy demands technical fluency from everyone, from the front desk to the factory floor. Which loops us perfectly back to David Scott Peter's foundational point. Yeah. Systems beat talent. Yes. In an era where technology and operational complexity are advancing far faster than the general workforce's baseline skills, relying purely on raw human talent is a recipe for bankruptcy. It really is. The only way to maintain quality, safety, and profitability, whether you are flipping a burger, cleaning teeth, or capturing a million tons of carbon, is to have ironclad tech supported systems in place that guide the human hand and catch the errors before they hit the bottom line. Okay, let's pull all of these massive threads together. We've covered an incredible amount of ground today. We started by looking at the staggering metamorphosis of convenience stores, how they are looking at the long-term decline of fuel demand and pivoting hard into food service, utilizing billions in MA capital to buy up supply chains and become our new impulse-driven quick service restaurants. We then explored how traditional restaurants are playing fierce defense against forty percent cost spikes. They're re-engineering their menus with highly efficient items like smash burgers. Utilizing premium beverages to subsidize food costs and adopting rigid, tech enabled tracking systems to wring every possible drop of efficiency out of their daily operations. And we saw how the hotel industry is looking past basic lodging, utilizing AI memory, longevity focused room design, and automated robotics. Not to replace their human staff, but to handle the operational friction so that humans can deliver actual empathetic hospitality, all while new data sharing regulations effectively clear out the unlicensed short-term rental competition. And finally, we saw that across every single sector of the economy, the ultimate battleground is managing an unpredictable B2B supply chain while racing to upscale a workforce to operate alongside rapidly advancing technology. So as we wrap up this deep dive into the sources, we want to leave you with a final, slightly provocative thought to chew on. Based on everything we've unpacked today, a very clear, slightly terrifying pattern is emerging for the traditional hospitality model. If convenience stores Armed with their massive physical footprints and built in impulse buying advantages, successfully conquer the quick convenient meal space. Right. And if smart hotels, armed with their longevity clinics and deep AI personalization, successfully conquer the wellness and escape space. What exactly happens to the traditional mid tier sit down restaurant by the year twenty thirty? If they cannot compete with the Sea Store on raw speed and price, and they cannot compete with the hotel on immersive wellness and luxury, will they be forced to abandon food as their primary process? It is the ultimate question for the industry. Will the neighborhood restaurant of the twenty thirties have to evolve into a purely experiential entertainment venue where the actual meal is completely secondary to some sort of immersive, social, theatrical, or digital experience just to justify its real estate? That is absolutely something to ponder the next time you find yourself ordering a plate of gourmet made to order sushi while you wait for your gas tank to fill up. The old borders are gone, the map is being frantically redrawn, and the clean categories we used to use to define these industries are officially broken. We are navigating a wildly complex, gloriously messy new landscape. Thanks for joining us for this deep dive into the sources and keep unpacking the world around you.