I spent last week at a keynote-speaking retreat, sharpening talks for Content Marketing World and gearing up to teach “breakthrough storytelling IP.” After roasting each other’s presentations, I emerged with new material I’ll debut at the conference and a plan for a subscriber meetup. If you plan to attend, use Code Lazer200 for $200 off your pass. On the podcast Art of the Zag, Shane Snow and I zeroed in on five big ideas of 2026. The first, “friction-maxxing,” flips Silicon Valley’s obsession with ease into a deliberate embrace of inconvenience. Mark Zuckerberg’s 2011 “frictionless sharing” on Facebook—automatically broadcasting every article or song you consumed—proved creepy and invasive. Now some advocates argue for reintroducing friction: vinyl sales are climbing, nearly half of UK kids wish the internet never existed, and early AI users worry that auto-generated art and writing dull our skills. Studies from Nature, MIT and Oxford show even brief AI use can erode problem-solving and persistence, hinting that a little struggle is essential to creativity. The second big idea is the “Unicontext,” coined by philosopher Agnes Callard on Derek Thompson’s Plain English podcast. Historically, our behavior shifted with each setting—a field, church, bar—but today we live in one vast, online room. That single set of norms pressures us to act the same way everywhere. Callard argues this flattening fuels online negativity, comparison-driven depression and a bland cultural sameness. For writers and media makers, the Unicontext makes it impossible to tailor tone, voice or persona to different audiences—everyone’s watching the same channel.