I listened to Mike Gordon on Rick Rubin this morning. You all should absolutely listen to this.

One thing he told Rick is that the magic of Phish is that you as the fan never know what’s coming. The setlist is never the same, you miss songs, you chase songs, sounds combat and converge in the open air and the whole thing could collapse or become transcendent at any moment. “It’s like a herd of buffalo running full speed and then turning left together.”

In business, risk is the price of potential. And that’s the point above. With Phish, you don’t go to hear what you expect; you go to chase what you can’t predict. That principle, uncertainty as value, is what I believe is the foundation of every modern experience economy.

A market of goods has a price floor and a price ceiling. A market of experiences has neither. Goods operate within cost, distribution, and supply. Experiences operate within emotion, participation, and meaning. You can replicate the product, but never the perception, and the network effects of this being done right transcend any actual physical product. Everyone at a concert hears the same song but no one leaves with the same memory. The elasticity of value in experiences, how much someone feels something, is what defines their worth.

The past decades optimized goods through logistics, pricing, efficiency. The next years are about optimizing experience through feedback loops that convert feeling into equity. Disney, Nike, and Taylor Swift understand this better than most. Disney sells narrative immersion that bilaterally feeds its rides. Nike sells the data and achievement around every run. The Eras Tour turned a concert into an economy, ticketing, friendship bracelets, livestreams, an entire market powered by participation, not product.

Technology is the scaffolding that lets experience scale. Media gives it form, things like crypto give it ownership, and AI now gives it personalization. TikTok shows how discovery becomes creation, audiences remixing culture in real time. Peloton built its business on interaction, not instruction. Even Starbucks uses routine as a loyalty loop, turning coffee into daily ritual. These are not just companies selling things, they’re systems that monetize repetition and belonging.

There are challenges. Emotion doesn’t scale in unison like manufacturing. Ownership alone doesn’t create meaning. But the best systems solve this through structure. Disney, Fortnite, and Spotify Wrapped use managed surprise, the framework stays constant, the variables evolve. Soho House and LEGO IDEAS prove that participation deepens attachment. AI tools like Midjourney or Runway scale with interaction, not just automation. The constant across all of them is rhythm, rituals that make emotion renewable.

The market of goods runs on limits. The market of experiences runs on belief. There’s no floor to meaning, no ceiling to memory. The more people participate, the more valuable the network becomes, not because the thing is rare, but because the feeling is. Value now compounds through resonance. I'm excited about an economy that doesn't just trade objects, but structure markets can "trade" on moments as well.