TR.BIZ: 6.11.2026

From Goop's waning capital to Tyra's return to Modelland, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking Goop’s tour of embarrassments, on the business culture “pivot to AI,” the pope in Spain, and a new-old album that I’ve been loving.

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🤩 Hollyweird Insider: How bad are Goop’s financial problems?

It appears the sun may actually be setting for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. It may not look like it, but there are a few signals that the buzz around her lifestyle brand is beginning to tarnish. Some examples!

• First, at the top of the year, the brand started incorporating gray-market peptides into products, a questionable trend that is still en vogue but feels culturally less strong six months later. Is this very Goop-y? More or less! It makes sense, given their playing in beauty.

• Second, the beginning of May marked layoffs for her brand as it “pivoted to AI,” which could literally mean anything. Is this very Goop-y? Layoffs trend with them, but “pivoting to AI” is a trend red flag.

• Third, she recently welcomed Trae Stephens — an original Palantir employee and military weapons start-up founder — onto the Goop podcast, which had a breakout in her revealing centrist politics (Ew.) but was an hour exploring drone warfare. Is this very Goop-y? No, it’s more frightening than anything else.

• Fourth, Gwyn is going viral for starring in an Israeli luxury housing ad, where she literally runs around and waxes to a stomp-clap Millennial song that ends with her saying “Israel!” in the most adorkable way. Is this very Goop-y? No, but it is incredibly desperate.

Obviously all of these things represent what Goop is now, as such pivots and brand deals tie into something we should have been suspicious of when she did that Astronomer PR video last year or even when — despite so-called great successes — the brand decided to open a ghost kitchen: these are not things a “successful” brand does, nor a successful actor/business leader does. These are signs something is very wrong in their organic sauce. If you dig around just a little, 2024 signalled this current era of floppery as layoffs and declining sales bubbled to the surface. As Puck reported in January, the company has rarely been profitable and is saddled by “twin burdens”: investors sinking millions into a company, all of which is at the whims of a distracted founder. Goop swerving from selling beauty products at Ulta to trying to make fashion week happen isn’t them max-maxxing their portfolio but instead a throwing of identities at the wall in a time when it’s easier than ever to disappear. Yes, the star still has plenty of pull, but this over-diversification is a tell that short term profitability is your priority as you squander what was once a spotless name. Grab a bottle of white wine because we may be pouring one out for the brand very soon (or, more realistically: we are about to see Gwyn go full private equity and blast this brand into the great asshole of American capitalism as if a smart suppository).

📲 Tech Talk: Are these big “pivot to AI” pushes going to pay off?

Goop, AllBirds, Groupon, GitLab, Korean media company K Wave media, computer science education platform Code.org, biotech company Hoth Therapeutics: what do all of these have in common? They have all “pivoted to AI” in one form or another, playing into the decade’s long trend that started in tech, spread into marketing, dipped into media, flirted with entertainment, and now has spread to almost all industries. This isn’t surprising, given that AI went from some little tool some people used to a so-called short-term economic driver that any failing company is trying to cash in on — which is why this is hugely concerning, as everyone cannot possibly become an AI company and AI leader. The obvious comparison is something that happened a decade ago: media’s pivot from “writing” to video, thanks to the great Facebook-driven “pivot to video” push. The now infamous idea resulted in outlets from the New York Times to Buzzfeed pushing into content, resulting in mass layoffs and the end of many new and legacy companies — and media never recovered from this so-called shift, one that Vanity Fair rightfully recapped as a lie given Facebook inflated viewership metrics by up to 900%. This situation cost hundreds of journalists their livelihoods, thanks to venture capital pumping up a space with no longer term plan. While video “did win” in the end, the pivot to video did not as most media remains the same but operating on a skeleton budget of money and resources while also doing video too. As you can tell by the rise of Substack and the loss of 2010s era media properties, everything as video didn’t end well for most people and most companies, instead dissolving and reforming landscapes into even more desperate and more precarious situations. Times should change, yes, but history should not repeat itself. Brands pivoting to AI are revealing that they are not profitable and that they are desperate to survive by adding economic lipstick to their impoverished pigs: we all know that, especially as companies start speaking up about how AI isn’t working out for them (Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Uber, etc.). As “AI-washing” continues, shifting in ways like the White House considering regulations to Altman and Amodei’s constant flip-flopping, it’s more and more apparent that all this is deeply uncertain — hence why it’s problematic: single houses are not being built on sand but entire communities are being relocated wholesale, en masse, to the beach. A seaside property is a fabulous thing, that is until the tsunami of a lifetime comes to sweep everyone away.

🗺️ Localized: El Papa is in España