Constraints and Limitations

Phillip: [00:00:00] I think we're going to see an explosion, a Cambrian explosion of technology that's trying to bring this AI into the real world. These devices are listening. And, you know, there's been enough conspiracy theory over the years that your phone is already listening to you. I don't know. Now it's going to be real.

Phillip: [00:01:37] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and Commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:42] And I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:44] We got a really jam-packed episode today. We're going to cover a lot, probably a lot of critique, actually. We've got so much to get through.

Brian: [00:01:53] When do we not?

Phillip: [00:05:12]  I do think that in the time the last few weeks since we've last had a recording, a lot has happened. I feel like things are weirdly accelerating, especially around AI. I went for a walk yesterday. Do you have ChatGPT? The app on your phone?

Brian: [00:07:45] No, I just use it on desktop.

Phillip: [00:07:47] So the new mobile app from OpenAI... There's been a few sort of rip offs that are acting as thin clients over the last few months, but the actual OpenAI app now is available for both iOS and Android. You can have a literal conversation. So there's like a voice mode where you can have a conversation with ChatGPT.

Brian: [00:08:09] Yes.

Phillip: [00:08:09] There is a completely... It is on a different level. I've never experienced anything like this, but having, first of all, the default voice is they don't say it. It's Scarlett Johansson. I don't care what anybody says. The voice is like I'm in the movie Her. Did you ever see that movie?

Brian: [00:08:29] I actually haven't watched Her. Kind of intentionally. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:08:34] You don't want to be sullied in your view of the future.

Brian: [00:08:37] No, no, no, not so much that it's just like everyone's like, "Oh, if you want to know about the future, you have to watch Her." I stand with Daisy Alioto from Dirt on this. Banshees of Inisherin.

Phillip: [00:08:54] Yeah. The Banshees of Inisherin.

Brian: [00:08:55] Yeah. Has a little bit more to do with the future than maybe Her does. Obviously, it was about AI and very specifically about AI. But the impact of communication between people is really the point. I will watch it at some point. I just haven't.

Phillip: [00:09:16] Well sort of in that movie it's effectively, it was sort of a near future story at the time of a man who falls in love or develops some sort of like an amorous or a very close relationship with an AI that was in his ears right through his headphones. This is literally that. I had a one hour conversation with ChatGPT yesterday that was wild. Brian, you've got to try this.

Brian: [00:09:46] I will. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:09:47] I need you to try this because I just said, "Hello, I'd love to get to know you. I'm on a walk right now. What do you want to talk about?" And it went from I'm going to call it she because the voice is, I'm telling you, it's Scarlett Johansson.

Brian: [00:09:58] Probably is.

Phillip: [00:09:59] But the voice starts asking me questions, asking me personal questions, and like, continuing the conversation, like, "Do you walk a lot?" "Yeah, I like to walk. I like to walk a lot. I run at least every day." "Oh that's great. How did you develop such discipline?" "Well, I've lost a lot of weight." We went down this tangent. The next thing you know, I'm unpacking all of my thoughts about how brands provide the inspiration to us to become our modern muse. And I'm talking about our Art Basel event. And the next thing you know, she's giving me ideas of things that should be in the journal. It was a legitimate conversation with somebody who is absolutely on my level, because it's sort of like mirroring.

Brian: [00:10:43] Iterating on your ideas, pulling in ideas from other places that might help. Yeah, this is actually...

Phillip: [00:10:50] Bonkers.

Brian: [00:10:50] So I was looking back at some of my old notes from back when we started Future Commerce and at the time we were trying to look ahead at technology, which we still do in many ways.

Phillip: [00:11:04] What's the year? What was the year on this?

Brian: [00:11:08] 2016. And, you know, I've sort of in a very aggrandized way, sort of titled it The Next Wave, which is very, very feels cringy to me now. But at the time I'd really been thinking about how people were going to interact with technology in the future, and I was really hooked on this idea of different capture of information about self. And I specifically focused in on body data. And [00:11:42] we talked a lot about body data early on and even for many years and sort of those biometric markers and things like that. And I still think that that's going to have a huge effect, like a huge effect on our future. Way more than people realize. I see our collection of data about ourselves, our specific bodies being the next frontier for how we're going to interact with technology. But along with that, we're also going to be collecting data on our minds, [00:12:16] which is one of the ideas that I sort of came across and talked about how we would all have our own personal bots. That would be something that we would invest in, in the way that you would invest in a relationship and you're kind of connecting...

Phillip: [00:12:31] Which sounded ridiculous.

Brian: [00:12:33] I think you were like, "Brian, you can't publish this."

Phillip: [00:12:35] And I am in love with ChatGPT.

Brian: [00:12:38] Yeah, yeah.

Phillip: [00:12:39] No, we can't publish this particular document.

Brian: [00:12:43] No, no, back then, I think you were like, "Brian, you're crazy. Don't talk about..." It sounded nuts.

Phillip: [00:12:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I still would tell you that that sounds crazy. You're like, "I don't know, it's your bot, it's your butler. It's your digital butler who will do things for you and it'll know you better than you know you." It's like these are things people are literally saying right now.

Brian: [00:13:05] I know, I know.

Phillip: [00:13:07] Unreal. I was like, new anxiety unlocked. Me, but better.

Brian: [00:13:11] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:13:13] I don't need that kind of noise.

Brian: [00:13:15] This is that fear. Was it? Andrew McLuhan had a tweet about how the technology that you fear now becomes the technology you love when it becomes mature? Something to that effect. This is not a fully self extension. I don't know if I fully got it correct. It's more like, yeah, extension of self than anything else. And actually I did say that in my doc, it was like, this is going to be, you're going to have more, you're going to be able to have more of you available to engage with. I like Dostoyevsky, but he's got a huge catalog of content, books that he wrote.

Phillip: [00:13:55] I love that that's the thing.

Brian: [00:13:57] That was the thing. I wrote that literally in my doc.

Phillip: [00:13:59] I see it. I saw it in the doc today. I was like, of course, Brian wrote that. You know, I should have seen this coming when you started pulling out the, when it became Lit Talk on Future Commerce. I should have known. Yeah, yeah, I should have known.

Brian: [00:14:14] Yeah. It was there all along. It was just, it was dormant.

Phillip: [00:14:20] We were too busy talking about open source. I didn't know what I was uncorking when I said, "We need to talk more about culture." You're like, "Oh, I got you, I got you, fam." 2016 I was talking about this crap.

Brian: [00:14:31] I think the thing that I actually did nail and this is something that I think will come up more and more is ChatGPT knows so much. The actual challenge is going to be limiting it. Limits are as important as... In fact, when you say you like something that is actually a limit, right? So placing limits on your knowledge base, your bot, whatever, your personal algo, whatever you want to call it. I think there are a lot of names we could give this personal algo, bot, you're whatever Brian Roemmele called it. Wisdom Keeper. Whatever you want to call the thing, limits are going to be harder than anything else because otherwise it'll just consume everything and it won't be relevant.

Phillip: [00:15:23] Consuming everything that's not relevant is basically my social media diet at this point.

Brian: [00:15:28] Right.

Phillip: [00:15:28] Especially on X, formerly known as Twitter. It becomes less relevant every day.

Brian: [00:15:34] No question.

Phillip: [00:15:34] I do think... So there are existing apps that do this. One is called Rewind. And Rewind is, what I'm going to say is it is the dawn of a scary new cyber security risk that we all haven't really taken full account of just yet. It's a it's a desktop app. I think there's a mobile app as well that records everything that you see so that you can have total recall always. It also sounds like a horrific security risk depending on which business you're in.

Brian: [00:16:16] Oh yeah. I think security and privacy... If I was going to recommend anyone go get into a job, like if you want job security into the future, that is the job.

Phillip: [00:16:29] Cyber security is a job.

Brian: [00:16:32] There's no question. You're going to make lots of money.

Phillip: [00:16:34] Weren't we just talking about this? Who was I talking about this with?

Brian: [00:16:36] Was it on the podcast? We already said this on the podcast. I don't think we have.

Phillip: [00:16:39] No, I don't think so. I don't think it has. I was having a conversation with someone a couple days ago and then I DM'd our friend, I sent a text to Paul Jauregui from BK Beauty because he came out of cyber security and into direct to consumer, and I DM'd him.

Brian: [00:17:00] Oh, I know who it was. It was Mags, I think.

Phillip: [00:17:04] Oh, that's right. Okay. That's right. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the story is we were at breakfast with a mutual friend, Magdalena Kala, who has been on the show a couple times. She has a fund that funds Web3 technology as it becomes more consumer-applicable. But what she said to us at breakfast a couple of days ago, Brian, was that if she had to start over, cybersecurity is probably the most durable and lucrative industry to be in now and probably in the next 15, 20 years. So anyway, I text Paul Jauregui, I said, "Hey, someone said this," and he says, "Yeah, she's not wrong. She's totally right." And it was the same was true for the last 20 years. Criminally understaffed, not enough talent. Incredible area for exploitation. And companies like Rewind, really interesting. But what they're doing is they're actually bringing that technology that's on the desktop, and they're trying to bring it into the real world. So now it's not just all of your digital life being able to be rewound and that way your AI has context for everything you've ever seen so that you can have instant, total recall of everything and never forget where that file is. Never forget another meeting date or time or the context around whatever LinkedIn message that you can't seem to find. All those things. But in real life, with this amulet device that they came out with, did you ever see that?

Brian: [00:18:28] Yeah, I did. I totally did.

Phillip: [00:18:29] In the last couple of weeks, they announced it.

Brian: [00:18:31] I hate it at every level. But yeah, it's not surprising that something like this would come out.

Phillip: [00:18:39] And it's funny because we mentioned on our last episode with the two of us about not consenting to a live stream, like having a t shirt that says, "I do not consent to your live stream."

Brian: [00:18:48] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:18:50] That was in context of Meta's live streaming sunglasses. So it's not just the big boys. I think we're going to see an explosion, a Cambrian explosion of technology that's trying to bring this AI into the real world. Right? These devices are listening. And there's been enough conspiracy theory over the years that your phone is already listening to you. I don't know. Now it's going to be real. Everything that you say to someone, actually finally, Brian, I might remember something for once. I have trouble remembering things. We'll never argue again because it'll just be very easy to recall.

Brian: [00:20:46] Thinking about your thing, about how you hate how bar arguments are over. You've always like, "Oh, man, the internet killed a bar argument."

Phillip: [00:20:55] Yeah.

Brian: [00:20:55] And I was like, "Oh, man, the last frontier for that is like on an airplane or whatever..." But I mean, now everyone gets free Wi-Fi, so it doesn't even matter. But you do get free drinks and sometimes the wifi is out.

Phillip: [00:21:09] You say that. Listeners, hold on. This is a man who refuses to work on planes.

Brian: [00:21:12] I hate working on planes.

Phillip: [00:21:13] He doesn't work on planes.

Brian: [00:21:14] I get sick.

Phillip: [00:21:15] Not going to work on a plane. It's not happening.

Brian: [00:21:16] No. I feel gross, it makes me feel like a car sick. Air sick.

Phillip: [00:21:22] You know, my kid has these glasses. Have you seen them? Where they create an artificial horizon with, like, water. Like a level. Like a little circular bubble level around your eyes that creates an artificial horizon so you don't get tummy sick. So your tummy doesn't huwt. Your poor wittle tummy huwts Brian.?

Brian: [00:21:46] Straight to baby talk now. That's where we've landed. We've descended from talking about our high minded ideas...

Phillip: [00:21:57] Dostoyevsky to me making fun of you not working on a plane. {laughter} So yes. It poses an incredible security risk. I think it's going to end a lot of friendships. I don't know how much longer we can go on with things like this existing in the world without having to have some sort of reckoning around it. But if we do, let's say that it does go on for some time, there are obvious utility for folks in the eCommerce space, specifically, I think eCommerce lacks context. This is something we talked about in our VISIONS report. I don't know if you remember this VISIONS report back in June. VISIONS.FutureCommerce.com. And then we put out this book called The Multiplayer Brand around some of the ideas in our VISIONS report, but it's our annual Audio Visual Trends report, and we go deep on a few topics. This year it was four trends, and one of them was this idea of context collapse. And what we see, especially in eCommerce, is ad-driven, sort of behavioral segmentation around your behavior. [00:23:03] Algorithmic segmentation is only constrained to that known person who picked up a cookie and is browsing around the internet, but it doesn't have context of everything else happening in their life. It doesn't have the context of when to give you the right thing at the right time. And as we know, advertising is the ultimate platform. It is the way that the world works and the way that things like maybe Rewind and other products in the future, like Meta's live streaming technology, these are things that will give eCommerce context, right? It'll be able to adapt the experience to what your present moment is, not what it presumes it to be, or someone else's behavior. [00:23:49]

Brian: [00:23:49] Correct. Yeah. And that's another benefit of this is why Google and and MSN Bing are trying to incorporate their AIs into search. Because that's another thing: if you're searching through AI, you usually have way more context than a single input prompt. Usually, it's a conversation that will lead to a more contextually obvious result. So if you combine always on recording plus some sort of AI input, results are going to become a lot more relevant to the things we're trying to get after. It should also help provide better waiting for our interaction with things because right now, everything that we do on the internet is recorded like it's of equal weight. This is a massive problem.

Phillip: [00:24:51] Right.

Brian: [00:24:52] You go do some random search for something for a bar argument that you're having and you want to prove someone wrong. And all of a sudden the algo thinks that that's the most important thing to you for the rest of the day or the week or beyond. And so this can, I think contextually how important something is, there's no waiting to what we do.

Phillip: [00:25:18] Well, not yet. I think that maybe that's where we're going. I had this conversation with ChatGPT. I'm going to keep coming back to it because it was pretty cool.

Brian: [00:25:29] Because you're in love with ChatGPT.

Phillip: [00:25:30] Yeah, exactly. Me and ScarJo. That's what I call her now. We had this conversation. One conversation. Incredible.

Brian: [00:25:38] Phillip actually has a whole deepfake set up on his phone.

Phillip: [00:25:43] Not yet, but, you know, it's coming.

Brian: [00:25:44] FaceTiming with ScarJo.

Phillip: [00:25:46] So perhaps what we're seeing is new layers of context that we keep adding on the existing layers of context. There are people in the room with me in the evening. My family's in my room. In my living room. We're sitting around. We might have something on in the background, right? It could be a YouTube video.

Brian: [00:26:09] I can't talk to ScarJo right now.

Phillip: [00:26:11] Well, I don't know. So like, think about the way that we keep adding in layers of context. We have ambient entertainment. There's something going on in the background. It is a form of audio or visual entertainment that's happening. That's for sure happening. We're having a conversation simultaneously, the family, we're carrying on a conversation, but each of us is adding to that conversation anecdotally with things that are populated from our phones throughout the day. Like we all have interesting links. We all have things that we found. My daughter's like 90 day streak on Duolingo, quizzing her on some of that stuff. She has a test coming up. She's asking me about the Shays Rebellion, and I have to pretend like I remember what that is. So I'm definitely looking that up. [00:26:56] An additional layer of context may be that these ambient devices, this ambient computing is happening, and that's where I think there is an opportunity for commerce because the thing that was promised to us with Alexa that never really happened was it's all there, we already have ambient devices, we're just not using them because they're not literally on our person. [00:27:20]

Brian: [00:27:20] This was what we all thought Alexa would become. We all thought that it would...

Phillip: [00:27:23] This is that. But Alexa crawled so that the amulet could hang around your neck and surveil your neighbors. That's where I feel like there's truly is opportunity for another layer of context, which is that which is fundamentally personal. Can only be in your ear. And one of the last episodes of She-Hulk, which, you know, listen, some people love that show. Some people hated that show. I thought it was really meta-modern. That's a whole other conversation.

Brian: [00:27:55] I should get back to it. I got like five minutes in and then I got interrupted.

Phillip: [00:27:59] There's a I mean, I don't know, I'll just give you the really good part here and that's all you need to know.

Brian: [00:28:04] Cool. All right.

Phillip: [00:28:05] But there is a scene where she sends in one of her sidekicks to infiltrate this group of comic book nerds mad about something. I forget what the issue was, but they've all become these incels turned into pseudo terrorists that are trying to take down She-Hulk and her law practice. It's a whole thing.

Brian: [00:28:26] {laughter}.

Phillip: [00:28:26] And he walks into the thing and she's like, "Here, put this in your ear. It's an AirPod." And he goes, "Well, won't they be suspicious that I'm wearing this into the thing?" She's like, "Everybody has AirPods in their ear," and she walks in like, everybody's got AirPods in. They're having a conversation. She's just telling them what to say, like Cyrano de Bergerac, or ScarJo in my case. So I think it's a really interesting new context layer. And the commerce implications, I think, should be pretty obvious. But if anything, maybe this idea of spatial computing isn't really a third, like it's not a 3D projection, but it's actually sort of that, you know, it's your disembodied conscience. It's like that thing that's already in my head telling me to buy something can now be literally in my ear telling me to buy something.

Brian: [00:29:13] We're back to Brian Roemmele part one.

Phillip: [00:29:16] Yeah, for those who don't have the context of 400 episodes, if you go back quite a ways, I think to 2017 or so, we did an episode with futurist Brian Roemmele. It was a two parter episode, I think 19 and 20 of Future Commerce podcast, and then we republished it last year. But he was talking about this way back then. Yeah, around the same time that you were talking about...

Brian: [00:29:39] AI Butlers. Yep.

Phillip: [00:29:39] I did have some gripes. I'm not sure if we have room to cover them.

Brian: [00:29:43] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:29:43] One fun little piece of news. Have you been to Costco lately, Brian? Costco is on a tear.

Brian: [00:29:49] Well, I feel like this is more of my moment to shine.

Phillip: [00:29:54] Brian's Costco Corner.

Brian: [00:29:56] Costco has been on a tear. This is what I'm calling hashtag Costco Mania. Costco Mania is sweeping the nation right now. It is. I know that I was beating that drum for a while, but I feel like it finally caught on and everyone else is on board now. People are spending money at Costco forever. I think the difference right now is Costco is like fire.

Phillip: [00:30:19] Culturally relevant. It's very culturally relevant. Well, it has a little something for everybody. You want luxury perfume? They've got that on their website. You want $1.50 a hot dog? You can go buy that in person. If you want a Monopoly game that is co-branded Costco edition, where the pieces are a flat bed cart and bulk toilet paper, you can have that. That exists right now.

Brian: [00:32:16] Costco is to the point now where it's actually entering like Multiplayer Brand territory.

Phillip: [00:32:23] Okay. Tell me more.

Brian: [00:32:25] Yeah, they've gotten to the point where their stuff is like taking on a life of its own. They've got Monopoly. People are taking Costco to extremes now. And I feel like anyone can take Costco and make it whatever they want it to be. Yeah. I think you nailed it. It's they're hitting every generation. In fact, this is my next thesis on Costco that actually, it gets back to that piece that I wrote on Costco for Archetypes, which is our last journal we launched at Art Basel back in 2022. We're into second generation territory, and actually we're pushing into third generation Costco shoppers now. So what Costco means to the next generation of shoppers is a place they grew up, where they got stuff that they really liked and spent a lot of time in with their parents, and now they're being reconverted back into Costco members. I actually think that is [00:33:37] really what's happening right now is the wave of nostalgia is meeting at the same time that millennials really, really are hitting peak Costco membership years. Their kids are becoming teenagers. They need to buy in bulk. And Costco has done an incredible job of continuing to make that membership worth its money, the types of products that they're putting in their store. [00:34:13] I remember when people were like, "Oh yeah..." Do you know the brand Siete? They do like the flourless chip. I remember when people were like, "Oh, I can only get those at Whole Foods." And I was like, "I just saw them at Costco yesterday." This was just a few years back. They're out in front of a lot of the direct to consumer CPG brands. You can buy Poppi at Costco.

Phillip: [00:34:42] And the half life... That brand notoriety to being stocked at your local Costco, sort of that like new brand to Costco brand is that that half life is getting shorter and shorter.

Brian: [00:34:56] Shorter and shorter. That's right.

Phillip: [00:34:58] I think that it really speaks to, well, it maybe speaks to a couple of things. Number one, I think social media really has played such a huge role in the resurgence or the mythology of Costco and this idea that there's a type of a shopper that wants something good but wants to feel like it's exclusive, and that, in the Supreme era, Costco is perfect for the kids that are growing up Supreme and want something fairly premium. I do find it interesting how many people, though, have turned Costco into... I don't think that they see it as the bulk store. The joke used to be that you'd have to get like a million units of something and that you were going to... The joke now is, it's like this expert curation. It's like almost a what's the what's the word, like a treasure hunt, right? You're going to find something new and exciting. You're going to let Costco tell you what you want. And maybe the same way that you did with Target once upon a time.

Brian: [00:36:08] I think more evidence of the Multiplayer Brand here. There was an article that came out in the Wall Street Journal recently about Costco clothing. And the reason why they even said it in the article that they did this is because they put out all these articles about menswear. The most common response was, well, "Have you tried Kirkland's clothes?" That is Multiplayer Brand in action.

Phillip: [00:36:35] That's true.

Brian: [00:36:36] The crowd is actually saying, "Hey, there's more going on here to menswear than you even understand." Costco is actually I mean, that's just extreme fandom, I guess. But like, I feel like the narrative about Costco is even maybe outpacing... The narrative among consumers is outpacing the narrative among media, which is crazy.

Phillip: [00:37:02] Well, before we run out of time, I mean, we hit Costco Corner every single episode these days.

Brian: [00:37:09] We do. My fault.

Phillip: [00:37:09] I do think that Costco is what Ana Andjelic might call a galactic brand, although she probably wouldn't say that. Definitely not. Actually, I feel like she would be insulted.

Brian: [00:37:19] We should have Ana on the show and see what she says.

Phillip: [00:37:23] So Ana Andjelic, who should need no introduction. She wrote a book called The Business of Aspiration. It's based on her newsletter, her Substack, The Sociology of Business, also probably the foremost master in this ecosystem of the two by two, I don't think I've seen anybody who does infographics better than Ana Andjelic. These days she's bringing Esprit, a classic brand from the 80s back to the United States. But she's also been the person who was sort of heralded as the turnaround agent at Banana Republic. So lots of street cred. She writes amazing pieces, but usually doesn't put them out for free on her Substack. It's usually behind the paywall. Today she dropped a piece called, sort of like, unpack this idea about galactic brands and the idea that brands are galaxies unto themselves. And when you think about galaxies, her canonical example was Ralph Lauren and how each of the brands within the Ralph Lauren universe sort of becomes self-referential. Every time you dig a layer deeper, there's something more to discover. And sort of related this back to this concept of a galaxy looks like one thing from far away. When you get up close, you'll realize it's a bunch of individual pieces, like individual stars that all have their own centers of gravity. And when you look even further, each one of those stars are their own solar system that are inhabited by these deep, rich populations. And so she goes deep into that. It's really interesting because the timing, friend of the show, Michael Miraflor also mused not so long ago about this idea that we do still maybe have a monoculture? Maybe, but the monoculture doesn't have a galactic center. It is a series of galaxies that are all ginormous and unto themselves. For instance, Taylor Swift may be part of the monoculture. She's a very big feature of our universe, and may be a very large galaxy and visible from many vantage points. So think this is a really interesting and timely conversation.

Brian: [00:39:31] It's really interesting as well. Daisy Alioto from Dirt, who we mentioned earlier, she also hit on this a little bit in a recent interview. And it was like actually the thing that disappeared was the mid. It wasn't the monoculture, it was the mid culture.

Phillip: [00:39:50] Okay. Yeah.

Brian: [00:39:50] Which I thought was really interesting. Like not mids like not that, not like mid that...

Phillip: [00:39:55] The way that I'm very mid because I'm still very much here.

Brian: [00:40:01] Aren't we all mids really? No.

Phillip: [00:40:05] Yeah.

Brian: [00:40:08] I'm not sure I totally agree with that. I think your contention has long been that Taylor Swift is the end of the monoculture, like it's the last bastion of the monoculture.

Phillip: [00:40:20] It's funny. It's funny, it's funny. Because I'll eat my words. Yeah, what I said probably on the show. But what I used to say was Michael Jackson was the end of the monoculture. Will we ever have another Michael Jackson or the Beatles? Taylor Swift is probably the closest will come and she's nowhere near. It's really hard to say that she's not firmly part of like... She is the culture now. I think that's a really interesting thing, too, because she is breaking records left, right, and center. You know, she just this last weekend went direct to consumer. She went direct to AMC theaters with her concert footage of the Eras tour with her concert film. Not only is it the number one concert film of all time, and that includes Michael Jackson's and Justin Bieber's concert film runs, which were, by the way, full-time lifetime earnings. She eclipsed them in her opening weekend, so that says something. But also, she might be, when you're looking at the way that the culture spreads, the sort of mythology of Taylor Swift, this might be the number one documentary of all time by the time it gets down to when she finishes her run and it's just after the opening weekend. So it's kind of incredible that we've been able to see yet another massive monocultural icon in our lifetimes. Everyone said that that was dead, but maybe... And maybe, to quote a good friend of ours, you know, maybe the fragmented niche ification of everything is the aberration. Maybe the monoculture is the new truth, I don't know.

Brian: [00:42:24] Wait. It was the opposite of that.

Phillip: [00:42:26] I know he was saying that. I'm saying that I'm flipping it on its head. That's why I didn't cite him. Yeah, yeah.

Brian: [00:42:32] Interesting. We should have Mike Lackman back on. I think it would be interesting to hear his viewpoint on Taylor Swift.

Phillip: [00:42:39] {laughter} We should do that. He would love it. Do we have anything else in the show notes? We had some good stuff, and it's like it's hard to get to all of it because I feel like we're going to open up yet another can of worms. I think really just the last part of the galactic brands is who could be a new galaxy unto themselves? I think certainly Mr. Beast is a galaxy in the universe of at least content. But I think it's really difficult to say. There's... This is like neither here nor there, but just because I like to take shots, I was at the All-In Summit a few weeks ago and Mr. Beast was on stage and talked about how old and ancient and decrepit and stodgy and incapable of being innovative all of these old chocolate brands are and, well, recently there was a report that just came out. It'll be in The Senses here on Wednesday that showed favorite candy purchases by state. And isn't it so funny? Feastables. Nowhere on that top 50 list.

Brian: [00:43:44] Nowhere on the Top 50. Yeah, it's funny how some brands can be old and stodgy and endure because guess what? They're really good. They're really good. Sometimes it's better not to change.

Phillip: [00:44:00] They also have the benefit. They have the benefit of that 100 years that you're deriding, they have the benefit of being third and fourth generation brands that are part of your like they're nostalgic to you. They're part of the fabric of your childhood. You know, something we're touching on right now for Muses, and talk about galaxies like this idea of world building. Part of world building is like you have to develop intense emotional connection to a brand, and that doesn't come easily. And it's usually formed in childhood. So one of those, you know, breakfast cereals have it. I talked about it on the VISIONS podcast last year when said the sacraments of commerce, it's like a daily ritual. I eat my Honey Nut Cheerios and it makes me think of my dad. And it's a daily ritual, and those kinds of things are hard won. They don't come easily. And to be a galaxy, to be a galaxy? I mean, it takes a long time to form that sucker.

Brian: [00:45:07] Costco in a nutshell right there. {laughterr}

Phillip: [00:45:10] What a way to bring it back around. I don't know, is that a good place to leave it?

Brian: [00:45:14] I guess so. I think maybe brands don't always have to change, but they do have to recontextualize. And that's an interesting... Or is it the other way around? Maybe they do have to change, but they don't have to recontextualize. I don't know. That said, there's something there. There's something there. [00:45:33] Brands and people who constantly try to change just to meet the moment often lose something along the way. And brands that don't change at all can miss out on opportunities. But sometimes that authenticity comes back around. [00:45:51] And maybe if there are galactic brands, I just need to rewrite my article and follow up my article. There's something called a Quantum Brand, and I'm telegraphing too hard. I'm telegraphing too hard, but maybe we'll revisit this shortly.

Phillip: [00:46:13] I love it. Well, we will revisit it and we hope you revisit us. Hey, will you do me a favor? I haven't done this in a long time. If you want to support the show, the best way you can do that is leave us a review. It takes like two minutes. You made it to the 44th minute? Well, actually, I don't know. 49th when you count in advertising. If you made it this far into the show, it would super duper help us if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Spotify has a new feature where you can engage in a Q&A on every episode, so if you leave us a question, we will respond. Promise. You can also drop us a line at Hello@FutureCommerce.com. If you have something very specific to say that you don't want to be emblazoned on Spotify for all to read, but yeah, leave us a review, that'd be wonderful. And you can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce properties at FutureCommerce.com, and subscribe while you're there. You can have our insights in your inbox to help you see around the next corner. Upskill your team. Cross skill your team. Get them subscribed too. Develop a little bit of foresight in your team by subscribing at FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. And yeah, until tomorrow, Brian, actually I kind of like that as an ending. We've never done that one.

Brian: [00:47:28] Until tomorrow?

Phillip: [00:47:28] Until tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.