“Total Eclipse of the Cart"

Phillip: [00:00:00] And so for every Huberman that gets cut down, there will be 300 that rise in his place. You're not going to stop that.

Brian: [00:00:08] {laughter} The hydra. Yeah. The Huberman hydra.

Phillip: [00:00:15] Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of the moon and commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:46] {laughter} I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:49] Today is a special lunar edition. We have gone loony. Lunartoons.

Brian: [00:01:53] We're always loony.

Phillip: [00:01:56] Lunartoons, the American eclipse, the US North American eclipse is happening on April 8th. You're listening to this if we've done our jobs right on April 5th. And so we're going to have a little bit of a lunar edition. We'll also dive into a little bit of content that has been over on our newsletter, The Senses recently, including the Sephora Kids trend or as I put it, the Sephorafication of American youth. And Brian, you're going to talk about a rising new cult and how media shapes philosophy and the things we choose to buy. But before we get there, if you want to add free episodes of this podcast, you can get them at futurecommerce.com/plus by joining our Plus membership. You can also email us at hello@futurecommerce.com and give us your feedback insights. And, of course, we have our newest event coming up, June 11th at Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, in New York City. VISIONS New York City edition is coming your way. You can be the first on the list by joining Future Commerce Plus. You'll get an exclusive invite to that, and we want you to be there as soon as the rope drops at Moma. futurecommerce.com/plus. Get ready New York City. We have some incredible surprises in store.

Brian: [00:03:13] So much.

Phillip: [00:03:14] Yeah. But none will change you as much as the eclipse. Brian, have you seen an eclipse?

Brian: [00:03:19] I have. Do you remember eclipse mania when the moon went in front of the sun and everybody got all their glasses and it was the whole... It was wild. It was so crazy.

Phillip: [00:03:31] When our Commander-in-Chief looked directly into the sun after being told repeatedly not to.

Brian: [00:03:37] Exactly. Yes. That's when he went blind. But yeah, I looked directly at the sun, but, thankfully, I had the special glasses on, special spectacles.

Phillip: [00:03:51] 2017

Brian: [00:03:52] Did you just look directly at the eclipse, Phillip? You didn't get the special glasses?

Phillip: [00:03:56] I did not look directly at the sun. I did do something stupid. I took a picture of the eclipse.

Brian: [00:04:04] Oh, whoops. Also a bad idea.

Phillip: [00:04:05] With my phone.

Brian: [00:04:07] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:04:07] And it created a little sunburn spot in all of my pictures for as long as I had that phone for the next couple years, which is now my youngest daughter's phone, and all of her pictures still have that little spot on them, which is kind of an interesting momento.

Brian: [00:04:21] The eclipse filter. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:04:27] Sunspot. Oh, I know that this is the lunar edition, but the sun is the thing that gets blocked out. You said the moon goes in front of the sun. That's like, yeah, that's how the eclipse works.

Brian: [00:04:39] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:04:39] But what's really interesting about that is how much media really there is in the world. Angelica Frey who recently wrote a piece for Future Commerce, featured in the Muses journal and had a piece about mid-market Muses, how brands do storytelling and inspire entire categories, over on the Muses Journal. We'll link it up in the show notes. She was asking presumably for her own eclipse piece the fear of the sun. And what are things that instill some fear and awe and maybe even some dread about the immensity of the sun? And I'm like, what? It's funny because in that same eclipse period, the productification of the ability to look at the sun... So Amazon had all these products that were trending. It's because there's such a fear of the ramifications of staring at the sun.

Brian: [00:05:36] I mean, they're justified. Maybe don't stare at the sun. I think that I have a fear of staring at the sun, whenever my kids are... I'm always like, "Kids, it's a beautiful sunset, but don't look at the sun."

Phillip: [00:05:53] Don't look directly at the sun.

Brian: [00:05:55] Yeah. Yeah. Which I don't feel like... I mean, I feel like... I don't know. Maybe this was just my extended family culture. My parents used to say, 'Don't look directly at the sun," and that was clear. Don't do that. That's going to make you go blind. But then we would go see these incredible sunsets in the Puget Sound, and I don't remember them giving me any warning about the edge of the sun.

Phillip: [00:06:22] I mean, the sunset is a little bit of a different thing. Sunrise/sunset.

Brian: [00:06:25] Once it's fully down you're not looking at the sun anymore. You can just look at the beautiful sky. Right? But there's a moment where the sunset's happening and the sun's still above the horizon.

Phillip: [00:06:39] You can look at the sun when it's setting, Brian.

Brian: [00:06:41] You can look at the sun when it's setting? How long can you look at the sun when it's setting?

Phillip: [00:06:44] 100%. I don't know until it hurts. {laughter} You can look at the sun while it's setting. I've done it.

Brian: [00:06:53] Oh, I'm sure. I am sure you have. I have too. I have too. But is it good for your eyes, though?

Phillip: [00:06:59] Speaking of looking directly at things, some of the lunar edition of our newsletter that'll come out later today. If you're listening to this on April 5th, on the day of launch, later today on the newsletter, we're going to do sort of a roundup of all of the lunar content that we've been covering, including how commerce actually has shaped private industry and allowing new companies to take private industry to space, and specifically, some of the lunar launches and lunar landings and failures thereof of the most recent few weeks. But really interesting how that's a sponsorship opportunity now. You know?

Brian: [00:07:40] Ooh. Ooh, lots of that for sure.

Phillip: [00:07:43] Yeah.

Brian: [00:07:44] Come sponsor us. While you were plugging our newsletter, I looked up, is it dangerous to stare at the sun even during sunrise or sunset? And Google said, "It is dangerous to stare directly at the sun even during sunrise or sunset."

Phillip: [00:07:57] This is the problem is that Google's woke now. That is a woke narrative to that you can't look at the sun. You can look at the sun during sunrise and sunset, Brian. It's totally okay.

Brian: [00:08:09] This is misinformation right now. We're being misinformed. Unless, of course, this is some chat GPT answer that Google has ranked really highly, and now Chat GPT is guiding us around looking at the sun or not looking in the sun.

Phillip: [00:08:23] Our producer Erica makes a really great point here that the fans of Huberman and the Huberman Labs sort of content in a podcast might beef with you about not being... And so you need a certain number of minutes of daylight, certain number of minutes of non UV covered exposure to the sun. That's what you need.

Brian: [00:08:46] Out here in Seattle, we know that's true.

Phillip: [00:08:49] Oh my gosh. Yeah. Don't you ever. Also reminds me of the Danny Boyle film, Sunshine. Did you ever see that?

Brian: [00:08:56] Oh, man. That's such a good movie. Cillian Murphy. That's one of the best Cillian Murphy performances. Actually, every Cillian Murphy is the best Cillian Murphy performance.

Phillip: [00:09:08] That movie takes a wild left turn in the last act.

Brian: [00:09:11] Really does. No. Yeah. That Danny Boyle, great director.

Phillip: [00:09:16] Really gives you the awe and the majesty and terror of the sun. The sun's a scary thing. You'll get a little bit of a break from it on Monday, April 8th. You'll have a little bit of a reprieve from the sun provided that you're right in that path of total, what do they call it? Total obstruction? There's a name for this. Right?

Brian: [00:09:39] Yes. The path of total obstruction.

Phillip: [00:09:41] Right. So the path of total... Anyway, but on our lunar edition, I think that we have a lot to cover. You know what else you can't directly stare at? You can't stare directly at the commerce. I think that that ruins you as well. We do have this trend.

Brian: [00:09:59] Don't look directly into the commerce ever.

Phillip: [00:10:02] If you look directly into the commerce, you'll never recover. Like the sunspot on my kid's phone, it will stick with you for some time.

Brian: [00:10:10] I know a few people that have done this, actually.

Phillip: [00:10:13] True. It's true. And, you know, maybe we could be accused of staring directly at the commerce for too long. It it sort of changes you. This is kind of what's happening with American youth. I have a piece that we just published on The Senses, which is our newsletter, comes out twice a week, and we sort of make sense of the news of the day and put it into the context of what people that are leading brands and creating brand experiences of tomorrow can take from broad commerce and consumer trends. So I had this thing I wanted to break down, Brian, here on the podcast and kinda talk about it with you because you and I have very different worlds. Right? My kids are definitely a little more algo pilled than yours. Yours are collecting acorns out in the forest.

Brian: [00:10:57] True. True. True. This is real.

Phillip: [00:10:59] So have you heard of the Sephora Kids trend?

Brian: [00:11:02] Yeah. Well, I mean, one, you wrote about it. But, no, I had heard of it before that. Sephora Kids. I mean, most people that I've talked to with daughters who are a little bit algo pilled are in on this trend. It is a common occurrence among households with with daughters.

Phillip: [00:11:27] Well, there is a certain age where this type of content seems to be pretty instrumental in forming brand preferences, and that age seems to be getting younger over time, which is interesting because it's coinciding with other consumer behaviors that are happening in preteen boys and girls. So I wanted to unpack a little bit of this. The first place I noticed it was I wrote a piece for The Senses in 2021 about mini brands, which was a new product that was sort of a blind box model toy that was a small version, like a miniaturized version of a vinyl toy, which we've all seen. But it was following the vinyl toy blind box trend, but inside of the box was a mini brand. And so you would have a small KitKat or a little Lysol bottle. And these brand license partnerships actually grew to a full blown toy frenzy trend. Now there's hundreds of skews of mini brands. They are also co licensed products. There's Disney mini brands. There's Lego mini brands. Mini Brands was a $1,400,000,000 business in 2023.

Brian: [00:12:49] Which is just wild. That blew my mind. You all thought digital twinning was the future, but it was actually mini twinning. {laughter} But the idea makes sense. Right? Kids love to copy parents. Parents are more brand pilled than ever. If you want to play grown up, which is something that kids generally do, this is the new way to look at the future. It's not Barbies. It's mini brands.

Phillip: [00:13:23] There's this thing that you wrote about recently too about mimesis and how a formidable portion of being a child is mimicking what your parents do.

Brian: [00:13:35] 100%.

Phillip: [00:13:36] I have this theory that [00:13:40] part of the consumer education of a child has changed dramatically since the closure of Toys R Us. So I grew up in a world where there are a lot of independent toy stores or game shops, or there were franchised models of those. For instance, when I grew up, we had KB Toys or FAO Schwarz or we had Toys R Us. These were places where you could go that had very specific merchandising that was literally just for me as a kid, and it was the endless aisle. [00:14:19] It was the infinite shelf of choice and selection of things that were just for me.

Brian: [00:14:24] You never got to the end of a Toys R Us. It felt like there were infinite toys in that store.

Phillip: [00:14:31] And you could be in a Toys R Us for hours much longer than your parents would ever want you to be. Right?

Brian: [00:14:37] That's true. That's actually a really good point. You can't do that, like at a Target or a Walmart. You can make it through all the toys. I've been through all the toys at both Target and Walmart.

Phillip: [00:14:51] Yeah. And we often still go. I have kids that are sort of in that preteen hump. It's not as exciting, the toy aisle, as it used to be. But the toy aisle at my Super Target is all of maybe 6 or 7 aisles worth. And the merchandising of that, curiously, these days, is more licensed products that tie into larger pieces of media, and it's these things like mini brands which give children this sense of a type of an experience that they're experiencing in the broader Target store. And so this is the theory that I have is that a lot of this brand preference around things like mini brands is really coming from mimeses where they're shopping at fewer purpose built children's stores, and they're spending more time with their parents grabbing a Starbucks. Right? Why are kids having Starbucks so much earlier? Why are they drinking caffeinated beverages so much earlier in life and forming preferences to things like Frappuccinos? This is because [00:15:57] there are fewer places for kids to be kids, and there are more places for kids to parrot the behaviors and consumer preferences of the adults. [00:16:06]

Brian: [00:16:06] Let's be honest. Frappuccinos are basically just milkshakes, so that's one reason why I like them.

Phillip: [00:16:12] Amen. I don't drink frappuccinos.

Brian: [00:16:14] Oh, man.

Phillip: [00:16:14] It's very true.

Brian: [00:16:16] I mean, that's how I got hooked on coffee as a kid was Frappuccinos. No question. And I do think you're on to something big here, which is that mimesis, well, I mean, copying, mimicking is really one of the biggest ways that kids learn. I wonder if this is actually not a reflection of children, but a reflection of us. Think about this. Toys are becoming a smaller and smaller part of childhood. And even the toys that are there are reflections of grown up brands, maybe we've become more serious as a culture, and we don't have as much fun.

Phillip: [00:17:09] I would say that we are a terribly unserious culture.

Brian: [00:17:13] Oh, that's true. That's true. But maybe the fun that we have isn't as much fun as it used to be.

Phillip: [00:17:19] Possibly. Yeah.

Brian: [00:17:20] What I'm getting at is people are pretty focused on things that stress them out now. And maybe the shrinking toy aisle is a reflection of what parts of their lives parents are letting their kids into.

Phillip: [00:17:41] Here's a thought. What if it's not that kids are growing up too fast? It's that adults never grow up at all.

Brian: [00:17:49] Right. That's exactly right.

Phillip: [00:17:50] What we have now is the video game platform system. It doesn't matter which one...

Brian: [00:17:57] That's not targeted at children.

Phillip: [00:18:00] Right. But there are specific publishing studios like Sony or Microsoft that may skew more towards adults, but how do you get them into the adult gaming trend? They are gamers from a very, very young age.

Brian: [00:18:14] Right.

Phillip: [00:18:14] And even Nintendo Switch has done a pretty remarkable job of bringing in more adult titles to have more retention. This is a retention strategy. As you grow up, you don't want to age out of the platform. And even if you do age out into more mature content, which we're seeing a lot of mature content being ported to the Nintendo Switch.

Brian: [00:18:33] True.

Phillip: [00:18:34] It's that you still want a format of a device that gives you the feeling of whimsy and the nostalgia hit. You need a little bit of that dopamine hit of nostalgia even if you're an adult of having the platformer or it doesn't all have to be FPS games. Here's the interesting thing. When you're thinking about the failure to launch, parents never have to grow up, we're seeing a strong agreement in brand preferences and in shopping channels between children and adults. And why is that? Well, what I said is  [00:19:13]you look at the Sephora Kids trend as an overarching reflection that there is a strong agreement between both older generations and younger generations about what is interesting, what's trending, what's cool, things that are exposed to different audiences, but native to those audiences in their media channels. So whether it's short form video or it's social share or messaging between friends, kids are parroting what their parents are doing. [00:19:40]

Brian: [00:19:40] They're consuming the same content.

Phillip: [00:19:43] Yeah. And that's never really happened until this moment.

Brian: [00:19:45] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:19:46]  [00:19:46]Which I would say is a new form of monoculture. Sephora is both for kids and adults. Ulta is for kids and adults. The video games that you play are for kids and adults. You watch the Super Bowl, and Nickelodeon is for kids and adults. They become multigenerational institutions that I feel like is a new establishment of a multiplayer monoculture. [00:20:09]

Brian: [00:20:10] It is true. No. I love that take. I think it's dead on. I had an idea while you were talking and have you ever heard the idea that there's a certain age at which you stop engaging in new music?

Phillip: [00:20:27] Yeah.

Brian: [00:20:27] Maybe there's a certain age at which you stop engaging in new brands. So all of your brand preferences are formed by, you know, 25 or whatever it is, and after that, it's over. You have a hard time absorbing net new.

Phillip: [00:20:42] I agree with that. That is very true. Yeah.

Brian: [00:20:44] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:20:45] Those loyalties are formed at a specific age. They become nostalgic. You hold on to them for sure.

Brian: [00:20:50] So if you can get in and I think, if you look at brands like Clarks and what they've done coming into the metaverse and a number of other brands, obviously, but Roblox, really. But I do think that there's some forming that goes all the way up through, like, college age and beyond. When people are having formative adult experiences, I think that there is stuff that's still happening. For some people, they've established strong ties before that they graduate from the Nintendo to the Xbox, and then they don't go any further than that because they play Xbox until they're 25, and then that's it. That's the brand.

Phillip: [00:21:39] This is actually a really good point that you're making. The Florida legislature just passed a law that was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, who loves being a culture warrior. He originally vetoed a bill that would have limited social media access and banned social media for everyone under the age of 16 but just signed an amended version of a bill that anyone who is under the age of 14 or 15 would need to get parental consent to have a social media account in the state of Florida. And as we've seen with other states that sign sort of privacy law, what goes for one state has to kind of go for all of them because adhering to state-by-state regulations and rules creates really fragmented Internet experiences. So social media businesses and I know we've had the argument whether TikTok is actually social media or not. Social media businesses, we may find ourselves that the Sephora Kids trend itself may be corrected by the virtue of more third-party verification systems being required to screen out underage viewers of short form video content. So that's wild.

Brian: [00:23:52] Yeah. It could happen. I mean, if TikTok gets banned, which I think we covered on our last episode, probably not going to happen. But if it did, I think that could play into this as well.

Phillip: [00:24:10] You don't think they'll just shift into a different...? I mean, there's so many choices now. Instagram or YouTube Shorts

Brian: [00:24:14] Right. Yeah. YouTube Shorts. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Channel shift on social platforms is a weird thing that I don't think I understand very well. Would you go... Kids do love YouTube, so maybe it'd be a very natural thing for them to jump straight to YouTube.

Phillip: [00:24:32] And my kids have been on YouTube Kids for a few years now.

Brian: [00:24:35] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:24:36] Where, you know, we have some parental controls. Part of this piece that I wrote here too is, like, I don't have enough parental controls. And as my kids get older, Google has decided that according to federal law, COPPA, the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act, that my kid at 13 years old is capable of making some of their own decisions around tracking and privacy and analytics and marketing. So, you know, it's tough.

Brian: [00:25:03] It is tough. Yeah. And there are some brands that are kind of providing a little bit of backlash as well. You mentioned the Kiehl's brand campaign about...

Phillip: [00:25:15] Oh, that's a good one. Yeah.

Brian: [00:25:16] Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's really powerful. The one thing that I think could cause issue...

Phillip: [00:25:20] Could you give more about that? What Kiehl's did there?

Brian: [00:25:23] Oh, yeah. Kiehl's did a whole Instagram campaign around how there's no reason for kids to have a 10 step skin care routine. Their 10 step skin care routine should look something more like playing at the beach. Obviously, you should just go look at it. Go subscribe to The Sensus, futurecommerce.com/subscribe, and learn more about that campaign. But, yeah, what I liked about it is and I think [00:25:54] one of the dangers of marketing to children is there is something that happens in this mimesis process where kids, when they become a certain age, want to reject the things that they did when they were children. [00:26:14] And so while perhaps the video game industry has strong enough staying power to be able to capture them all the way through, there's going to be a set of kids who were Sephora Kids that are going to look back and be like, "Man, I was such a baby wanting to be a part of that." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:26:39] {laughter} That is definitely part of the maturing cycle is, you know, having disdain for things that were cringe that you did in your teens and twenties. But don't you think... And here's a good question. Don't you think that the way that the current environment is that we are coming back to more monocultural expressions? I don't know if you've seen some of this stuff. Monocultural media has is on a four year winning streak. The Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Super Bowl, and big affairs where people can have agreement on the way that they're consuming, at least media, seems to be having an effect on the things we buy too.

Brian: [00:27:27] Perhaps it never left. The thing that we thought was a bunch of countercultures was really just a bunch of subcultures of a larger monoculture. I believe that, you know, there's not a lot of true rebellion. I've made this argument for a long time. Uh, I think I even remember telling Jesse Tyler something like this, like, 8 years ago, our Creator Director. I was like, "Man, your generation didn't really rebel, did they?" And maybe that's unfair of me, one generation looking at the next generation being like, "Hey, you guys did nothing."

Phillip: [00:28:08] Yeah. No one's ever said, "Something's wrong with the kids" before.

Brian: [00:28:14] No. But it wasn't even like kids. It was more like the people just a little bit younger than me. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:28:19] That's true. The trend works both ways though because I feel like there's a type of a marketing now that would have felt more youthful in times past that seems to be, I don't know, it seems to be like it is actually more spanning generations now. For instance, I thought it was interesting sort of an April fools run up that Sour Patch Kids put out an apology letter and said that it's time to grow up. And that they are now to be known as Sour Patch Adults, which I think is a really interesting way to look at this too is that's a fun way of bringing the adults who very much enjoy Sour Patch Kids, i would say, you know, probably a good mix of people who buy Sour Patch Kids are actually adults. It's a great way of doing multigenerational marketing, which might be really the game right now.

Brian: [00:29:22] Yeah. Multigenerational marketing, and I think it's interesting. You mentioned media earlier. I think media is a key part of this. I think you were on to something like most of the toys in the toy aisle are media focused. And so it feels like media is playing a role in the intergenerational marketing as well. Marvel is something that both kids and adults can enjoy. It's had an insane run over the past 20 years now, right, roughly?

Phillip: [00:30:05] Yeah. I mean, maybe 12 or 13 years since Iron Man, but I would maybe also make the argument that that all kinda jumped the shark and people are done with that...

Brian: [00:30:18] I agree.

Phillip: [00:30:19] There's not a new thing to be excited about.

Brian: [00:30:21] It was a run. Yeah. There's no Marvel content that, like my kids are still kind of into it, but there are other things available now. But media in general, though, I think, is having a huge effect. We talked about on the last episode about the Omega Mart, which is in itself media.

Phillip: [00:30:44] Oh, Omega Mart from Young Wolf, the installation in Las Vegas.

Brian: [00:30:48] Yep, And then I just wrote about this trend of Dudeism, which is driven 100% by media as well. So this this is crazy, for those of you that didn't read about this. There's a religion called Dudeism that is probably the fastest growing religion in modern times, last 20 years, that has 700,000 Dudas priests, and it was just started less than 20 years ago.

Phillip: [00:31:28] Dudas priestd.

Brian: [00:31:30] And is based off of the dudes from The Big Lebowski, the incredible cult film from the Cohen brothers based on their character, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, and his beliefs. So it's wild to me. Media is having a huge effect on toys. It's also having a huge effect on religion. If you don't think that media isn't fully shaping how we live our culture, then I think you've lost it, which is why I think brands need to pay attention to lasting power. What has lasting power. And I would argue that something like The Dude, the idea of The Dude has actually now spanned generations and will continue to span generations actually. I think The Dude's got the kind of staying power where the ideas in that movie and that character are going to be rediscovered by generation after generation.

Phillip: [00:32:37] Well, and maybe defined specifically by the aesthetic of what he wears and the things he owns, like a rug that brings the whole room together. There's a really interesting, while you might look at it and say, "Oh, commerce doesn't have a role to play in the philosophies of Dudeism," it very much has a role to play in the goings on of how the story is propelled along by possessions and aesthetics and brand preferences, like the way that he makes a white Russian.

Brian: [00:35:19] Even beyond brand references in the Pendleton Westerly, his sweater is a big part of it. But even beyond that, I don't want to say that it was necessarily intended to draw attention to those commercial and brand aspects. I do believe that  [00:35:39]the lesson to take away is that world-building has a huge effect on what we buy, and there are a lot of people out there who believe that all this stuff doesn't matter to commerce, but I think that's the whole charter of why we've made Future Commerce. [00:36:01]

Phillip: [00:36:02] I mean, if you don't think that the media shapes commerce, then let's go back to June of 2023 and see your merchandising plan and how much pink is in it, and then we'll have a conversation.

Brian: [00:36:15] Yep.

Phillip: [00:36:16] Or how much red you merchandised when Taylor and Travis went public with their relationship. [00:36:26] There are a lot of ways that people and consumers expect brands to participate in the cultural discourse now, and we have to merchandise at the speed of culture. That is the job and in particular, eCommerce can move that fast. So it's expected that we do. [00:36:42]

Brian: [00:36:42] But the problem is that speed of culture is also a little bit fraught. I wrote in my mimesis article about how if you chase things too quickly and too heavily, especially if that's your all-in strategy, you can get lost. And is that authentic? Will you be lost? Are all brands just supposed to chase Travis Kelsey Red and Barbie Pink?

Phillip: [00:37:14] Well, but, again, coming back to the multigenerational piece of this, and how kids are becoming consumer build. While millennials started the Stanley Cup trend, it was the 10 year olds that drove it to frenzied heights.

Brian: [00:37:36] 100%.

Phillip: [00:37:37] When you're looking at the growth of these trends, they don't necessarily start with kids, but the broad market agreement of the way that a product can be generally agreeable by multiple generations kind of lends itself to that generational expression. Hydro homies, but make it for Billy and Susie.

Brian: [00:38:02] {laughter} Yeah.

Phillip: [00:38:03] I don't know that kids need to be doing, you know, cold plunges.

Brian: [00:38:12] Please no.

Phillip: [00:38:12] So maybe picking and choosing how a particular product is marketed in a trend-centric nature. Not that you can even control that necessarily all the time. Here's a good example. When we sat down with one of our friends who works at Stanley, and I asked them, "Do you ever get criticized or someone says conspiracy theories about you set that vehicle on fire?" Sayig the Stanley viral video of the vehicle being on fire was, you know, a plant.

Brian: [00:38:46] Staged.

Phillip: [00:38:46] Right. Right. Exactly. It's totally staged. He's like, "Okay. I mean, fine. You can believe that. But in order to have a Stanley Cup, you must first be in business for 110 years." So which is harder, manufacturing the virality or being in business 110 years before the virality hits? And that is, I think, actually, the challenge is you kind of a lot of these brands are only viral because of their ubiquity. We've lived with them. We've grown up with them. Our grandparents grew up with them. There's some recognition to what it is. And it's a good product that keeps your ice in the middle of a fire.

Brian: [00:39:30] That's dead on. The quality of the product. And then, I mean, that's what Terence Reilley's so good at is picking products that last and are high quality. Crocs are pretty much impossible to kill. Stanley Cups are impossible to kill. If you pick products that have some level of enduring nature to them, those are actually perfectly set up for these moments. I think that's a really good point.

Phillip: [00:40:02] Yeah.

Brian: [00:40:03] And also, like you said, there's a level of authenticity to Stanley compared to some of the newer drinkware brands that will probably persist even when the trend dies away. And I think this is something that I also wrote about in the mimeses article, which is do you just keep going? Do you just keep chasing the mimesis all the way to its bitter end, its logical end, which is do you fulfill all of that demand all the way and just keep the cycle going?

Phillip: [00:40:41] You ever play the game Cookie Clicker?

Brian: [00:40:45] Is that when you just keep click clicking and the cookies keep appearing? Yes. I did, actually.

Phillip: [00:40:51] Right. But as Cookie Clicker became like, there are levels to Cookie Clicker where eventually the whole job of an entire galactic civilization is to produce cookies. You're terraforming Earth into, all of Earth's resource production goes into just creating cookies. It's like this biggest fear of artificial general intelligence is that somehow it will decide that the only thing that matters is producing something as mundane as a paper clip. And we'll steer all of Earth's resources into, you know, one red paper clip becoming the most important thing to create for humanity. But that is effectively what brands suppose is their job.

Brian: [00:41:39] It's their job. My point is that that's going to flip. That mimesis cycle is...

Phillip: [00:41:43] Well, it's already flipped because I'm sick of talking about the Stanley Quencher.

Brian: [00:41:46] Right. Exactly. No. No. No. Totally.

Phillip: [00:41:48] Do we not have a better example right now? Maybe Sephora Kids is the current example. Having birthday parties at Sephora.

Brian: [00:41:56] It's going to flip. That mimesis cycle will flip something else. And then all of a sudden, you know, all of that purchasing power is going to go somewhere else because people are going to find it to be vastly uncool to do their birthday party at Sephora. Kids will. At some point, kids are going to be like, "Oh, that's gross. Why would I ever do that?" Like, [00:42:19] there's going to be some level of disgust that happens at some point in that mimetic cycle. And then you've built up production and you've pursued this strategy for so long and it's going to disappear overnight. And I think the job of businesses isn't necessarily to grow. The job of businesses is to be predictable. [00:42:46]

Phillip: [00:42:48] Predictable growth. Right?

Brian: [00:42:50] Predictable growth is the most... So if you know you're chasing growth that's going to disappear at some point, is that actually responsible leadership?

Phillip: [00:43:06] Yeah. That's a good question. We stayed on this topic so much longer than the lunar discourse was allowing us to. So I don't know if we got to the lunar edition in the same way that I wish that we had. I thought that that's where we would go, but we followed the energy. Here's kind of a breakdown of the way that the cycles tend to go. You have some sort of inciting event that creates a discourse. So something happens in the world that allows people to become participatory. Now this can take really dark turns. It can be, you know, Kate Middleton and theorizing about where she is, and maybe it starts with a humorous take. You could go further. I mean, it could be, oh, is she gone? We can't find her because she got a Brazilian butt lift. Or rewind to last year when it was, you know, the chess tournament where the reigning Grand Master Magnuson refused to participate because he accused his opponent of cheating. And the most humorous take was maybe he was cheating with a vibrating butt plug. Is that a way that he could have been cheating in what the next most optimal game theory optimized move would be? So that's maybe where the discourse always begins. But, generally, what happens is backlash overwhelms the discourse. And that's where things typically take a very dark turn because the two warring factions over a particular side of, "I'm just trying to have fun," and "I'm trying to think about funny things to say" is met up against people who are like, "You're not allowed to joke about that or be unserious about this."

Brian: [00:45:00] Yep.

Phillip: [00:45:01] And [00:45:01] the same thing happens with viral product trends. There's an inciting incident that creates a discourse and then there's a backlash. What happens is for it to exit the trend cyclical nature, for us to exit that, there has to be a backlash to backlash. [00:45:19] And some trends just happen and come so quickly, and there's certain global events that take over whether it's the Suez Canal, Evergrande, you know, getting beached, and there's a meme moment. There are certain things that happen that sort of disrupt product trend cycles too, and that's where backlash is where we are right now with Kiehls and this campaign versus the Sephora Kids.

Brian: [00:45:48] The counterpunch is coming? Is that what you're saying?

Phillip: [00:45:50] I think the counterpunch is coming of, like, just let the kids have fun or the backlash to the backlash is the next piece of that, but it can only exist if we have a moment of a break for us for that discourse to be able to thrive. If something else happens and grabs our collective attention, then Sephora Kids is allowed to persist.

Brian: [00:46:12] That's a really good point. That's actually a really good point. The way to keep a trend going is to pull attention elsewhere the discourse to go talk about something else. That's interesting, though. That assumes that we have a monoculture discourse, which I think is your point.

Phillip: [00:46:35] I think we do.

Brian: [00:46:36] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:46:36] I think we do.

Brian: [00:46:37] Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:46:38] As much as everybody likes to say that we don't have a monoculture anymore, the new monoculture is saying we don't have a monoculture.

Brian: [00:46:45] Do you think that the media cycles follow discourse on social? So social sort of is now the spur for the media follow-on.

Phillip: [00:46:56] Well, this is a good... So here's a question. The Barbie mania... I guess the question is, do we have something that is as influential as mass media anymore? Because the place where mass media would have been most effective is well, for at least a decade, things like Twitter were really easy to create new stories off of for legacy mass media. But today, we have similar effects, but it doesn't happen in a concentrated powerful media organization like big global media brands. It's happening on Substack where things that grab attention, for instance, one particular story on the cut about someone being duped into putting $50,000 in a shoebox can create its own narrative in 50,000 sub stacks the next day. So the Think Piece industrial complex is the new mass media that creates a frenzy of discourse. It's not necessarily a monocultural mass media.

Brian: [00:48:09] And this is interesting because what you're seeing is there's the media, the broad market populous media cycles that are driven by social media attention, wherever that discourse is on social media, and those things are driven by niche pieces that are think pieces or longer pieces that specific people write that become the topic of the day or the weekend. And Huberman's a great example of this. I feel like this is exactly what this is, the perfect example. An expose was written that hit social. Social went nuts over it. People taking sides over things or whatever.

Phillip: [00:48:53] "Is he good?" "Is he bad?" "I knew it all along." "Wow. I'm so disappointed."

Brian: [00:48:58] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Well, maybe is bad, but this is still a hit piece. Yeah. Blah blah blah. The talk of the town that circled back now to larger media who's, you know, blowing up about Huberman. If that piece had been released and social had said nothing about it, then I don't think it would have hit broader media cycles as much as it did.

Phillip: [00:49:19] I find it interesting because people make purchasing decisions based off of things like influential authoritative published figures who have amassed cult followings, especially when it comes to things like physical appearance or performance maximization or athletic prowess. All of these things kind of hit back on the same things that make the Sephora Kids trend really interesting because it comes back to how you look, how you present yourself to the world, and the things that you buy that enable that. And so, you know, for every Huberman that gets cut down, there will be 300 that rise in his place. You're not going to stop that.

Brian: [00:50:04] {laughter} The hydra.

Phillip: [00:50:05] Yeah. {laughter}

Brian: [00:50:06] The Huberman hydra. I agree with that 100%, especially the way that if you look at how Huberman rose, I feel like he's on the back of other giants. Rogen went before him. I think that's dead on, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:50:25] I would love to talk more about this. Maybe we could do that in an After Dark.

Brian: [00:50:28] That's what this lunar cycle is all about. You know? This whole eclipse thing, total media cycle just based off of social... No. I'm just kidding. Kidding.

Phillip: [00:50:39] Actually, I think that this is a really... That's a really clean way to end it, and it could've even been better if we'd planned it. Yeah. Hey. This actually wound up going in a really cool direction, and that's what you get with Future Commerce, the podcast. And we'd love for you to subscribe and find out more about all the properties that we have. Thank you so much for listening to Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com. And if you want ad free episodes, join the membership, futurecommerce.com /plus.