January 27, 2026
The secret to this $8.5 trillion economy? Let’s talk about cake.
In 1998, two Harvard Business Review consultants used birthday cakes to map American economic history. The story can be told generationally.
A great grandma spent 3 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀(!) baking birthday cakes from scratch in the 1930s. Her daughter spent 30 min with a box of cake mix from Betty Crocker in the 1950s. The grandkid spent 3 min booking a Chuck E. Cheese party in the 1980s. Now the great-grandkid spends 30 sec in an app, booking an all-inclusive, Instagram-ready party in the 2000s.
I’m dying to know how this evolves.
The Future of Experiences
Ray Kurzweil, the most famous futurist we have, predicts we’ll have nanobots create a cloud to brain connection by the early 2030s. Those nanobots will shutdown signals from our real brains and replace them with signals from a virtual environment. A birthday party could include friends from all over the world, having a vivid experience of a virtual cake at a party in their minds.
Going from baking from scratch to using cake mix saved time. Then the cake became an afterthought. All the attention shifted to the experience.
They called it the “Experience Economy”
Have you paid attention to dollars spent on experiences? They are substantial. (Data from the World Travel & Tourism Council and Global Recreation Markets). In 2010, the public spent $5.3 trillion on experiences. In 2024, it rose to $8.5 trillion globally.
Gen Z will continue to fuel growth.
→ Projections put the explosive growth at $12 trillion in 2028.
→ Sports & music tourism will balloon from $571 billion to $1.5 trillion by 2032.
→ 78% of millennials would rather spend money on an experience than “a thing.”
I don’t think most people realize the magnitude of this trend. But here’s a question I’m thinking about:
How resilient will these trends be when faced with bumpy macro-economic trends?