All Hail the Corporate Anniversary

‍Phillip: [00:00:00] And I'm very scared that the music parodies are now coming in waves that SEO companies are going to just flood, just flood the zone with SEO.

Brian: [00:00:11] The Weird Al-ification the world.

Phillip: [00:00:14] Yes. {laughter}

Brian: [00:00:14] That's what's going to happen. We're going to become a Weird Al world.

Phillip: [00:00:22] Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:50] I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:51] And I don't know if we left all that stuff in the beginning, but we had a really sad demeanor, and we also forgot how to do this podcast.

Brian: [00:01:58] Sad sad demeanor. That reminds me of something.

Phillip: [00:02:01] It reminds me too. Today, we have a lot to cover. We're going to talk a little bit about AI music and some of the interesting and unexpected ways that that's being used in content creation. We're also going to talk a little bit about a weird thing that we have both witnessed and taken separate note of this week, Brian, and that is corporations' birthdays are apparently an important thing that we need to care about now.

Brian: [00:02:28] Yeah. True.

Phillip: [00:02:29] In particular, retailers of the footwear variety. We're also going to talk a little bit about, at the end of the day, everything becomes an ad network. And then finally we're going to circle back around, Brian, to this right to disconnect law and how states continue to impose a worse Internet on everybody, but maybe creating a different type of a workforce expectation for the next generation. Interesting stuff.

Brian: [00:02:59] Very interesting stuff. This is going to be a fun episode. I can already feel it in my bones.

Phillip: [00:03:04] I can too.

Brian: [00:03:04] In my Terminator bones.

Phillip: [00:03:07] {laughter} Before we get to any of that, you can find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com. You can get add free versions of this podcast by joining Future Commerce Plus. That's our membership for just $20 a month, you get access to a private GPT. Search all of our content insights and research from the past 8 years by joining, and also you get 15% off. That's a discount for print and merch. You can get it at futurecommerce.com and what's more? I mean could there possibly be more? You get all of that with ad free episodes. So ad free episodes and bonus content. That's futurecommerce.com/plus, and drop us a line at hello at futurecommerce.com. We love when you speak back to us, and there's probably going to be some stuff to talk back to about today. In the world of commerce, probably the biggest story this week, Brian, is Amazon just walked out on its own Just Walk Out technology. And there's a lot to talk about there. But for those who are not in the know...

Brian: [00:04:06] They walked out on two legs. That's for sure.

Phillip: [00:04:08] Brian, give us a little bit of the primer on this story.

Brian: [00:04:12] I think the thing about this story is that it's not working at scale. They're actually not fully walking out on it as someone recently pointed out.

Phillip: [00:04:20] Sucharita Kodali actually.

Brian: [00:04:25] Yes. Of course. Sucharita is always on top of that stuff. Catching the gotcha that no one else is looking at, which is why I love her. She's so smart. The interesting thing is so they're consolidating it to airports and high traffic areas where it makes a lot of sense to have something like that where people need a speedier thing than the horrific self checkout that everyone hates that's now at all the Hudson News. Oh my gosh. No. Thank you. I think the funny thing that came out and actually came out a year ago that no one was paying attention to for some reason and probably should have blown up... The discourse should have been running on this already, but the news was that it's not actually that sophisticated. It's just a bunch of cameras that are watching you shop, and those cameras are being ported back to people all over the world. I think mostly in India that they suggested at least, 1000 people that were watching what you would pick up and then charging you accordingly for the things that you picked up and walked out with. There was no true magic here. This is the store was a PDF. People watched you interact with it, and there was...

Phillip: [00:05:52] {laughter} So cynical. Alright. So just to source the references here, there was a story that Gizmodo reported on the news and the announcement that Amazon put a press release out that they were going to abandon Just Walk Out technology on its Amazon Fresh stores. So large format grocery, as you mentioned earlier, Brian, large format grocery, it seems to be really difficult for them to accomplish the Just Walk Out technology there.

Brian: [00:06:21] I wonder why. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:06:22] It will stay at small format stores, including Just Walk Out stores. It will also stick around at the third parties where it's already being used, like at the BrightLine station here in South Florida, and it's already being used at Hudson News and some other locations like at airports. So it will remain there. But to your point, it back referenced a story in the information, which is a paywall tech news scoops site that is known for breaking news, but somehow had this report that blew the lid off of well, it's not actually computer vision. It's a lot of people in a room in India working. Okay. So we've now said that two different ways. What is the impact of this knowledge? I think one is that the announcement itself was eclipsed by the meta conversation of people wanting to dunk on Amazon throwing bodies at a hard problem.

Brian: [00:07:21] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:07:21] You'ree an ex Amazon employee.

Brian: [00:07:23] Well, briefly.

Phillip: [00:07:25] I love how you always qualify that, but you did work for the company.

Brian: [00:07:28] I did. I did. I did work for them. Yes.

Phillip: [00:07:31] So I don't know what you are allowed to say or not say.

Brian: [00:07:34] I think I'm well past whatever knowledge I had at the time.

Phillip: [00:07:40] Something that I believe is true is that Amazon throws lots of people at specific problems. And maybe the hope here was that technology would catch up to the manual effort, and maybe it has to some degree. Who knows how many people actually were employed working on this from the very beginning and how much automation has come in in the intervening time? It's been, like, almost 6, 7 years since Just Walk Out first debuted in 2018.

Brian: [00:08:09] I mean, I'll say this. I do think it's better than self checkout. Self checkout's the worst. Does anyone listening to this enjoy self checkout? I'm willing to bet that every single person would say, "No. I do not enjoy self checkout."

Phillip: [00:08:26] It has less friction than waiting in line for the two cashiers that are ever employed anymore.

Brian: [00:08:32] Dude, the last place I did self checkout, there was one person running a checkout stand, and they were also supposed to provide support to the people in self checkout.

Phillip: [00:08:44] Oh, that's the worst.

Brian: [00:08:45] It was bad. It was really bad.

Phillip: [00:08:49] Well, so what is the implication here of the Just Walk Out discourse, and then we can sort of move on? Is the implication that this idea that frictionless technology as I sort of posited in The Senses... There's this frictionless idea that works really well in ecommerce and has been, you know, spoken about for a decade now as "Remove the friction," "Remove the friction." Is it that we tried to impose these digital truisms IRL, and we're finding that there's a different type of friction that's incurred when you take cashiers out of the mix, when you make people in charge of their own checkout, when you move those cashiers to somewhere in India? What is the big so what here, and what is it that we should be thinking about or learning?

Brian: [00:09:39] There are two so whats. So one's the technological so what, and that is that technology hasn't, even from one of the most advanced retailers in the world... Right? Amazon, you could say that they've been the best at applying technology to retail for the past 20 years.

Phillip: [00:09:57] Yeah. That seems demonstrably true.

Brian: [00:10:00] Yes. Even they can't create something that's 100% technology driven in this range and had to hire a whole bunch of people to help out with it. So technology still hasn't advanced as fast as we thought it had, and just knowing what I know about retailers in general, this is true across the board pretty much. Everyone's freaked out about having their data collected by retailers so that they can sell them more stuff effectively. And the truth is, I don't really believe that retailers are sophisticated or good enough or that the technology is good enough to be as manipulative as people think it is. Now culturally, ideas-wise and culture-wise, absolutely. I fully believe in the power of how brands have been able to leverage culture to manipulate people. But the pseudo conspiracy theories about how technology is being employed, I think this is a good example of a retailer who's the best at technology falling down or at least not being as advanced as people think that they are. The second piece is that maybe in certain formats, people just don't care about this. It's not actually that important to them. In fact, it may be that they want the slow line as we saw some grocery stores in, I think the Nordics somewhere. I want to say they introduced a slow line at the grocery store because...

Phillip: [00:11:37] For people who don't want to feel hurried. That's right.

Brian: [00:11:40] For people who don't want to feel hurried. [00:11:41] People actually want the friction in their local community of chatting with their checker and chatting with people that are in line and living life in their community because they probably bump into people that they know and it's part of their daily routine or their weekly routine or whatever to engage with the people in their communities as they go about doing their business. [00:12:05] If you could do all your business just from an efficiency perspective and not have to involve people in it at all, you live an isolated life. Or you could live an isolated life, and I think that's what often happens. And so people are like, "Actually, I made friends this way. I want to be connected to the people that I'm buying from." So I do believe that there's a subconscious element to this even if people wouldn't be able to articulate that out loud as maybe they did where those grocery stores exist. I forget which country that happened in. But I do believe even in America, there's actually a subconscious desire or need to have new human interaction in the day to day tasks of our lives.

Phillip: [00:12:56] There is a misconception that they're abandoning automation in checkout processing altogether. They're actually changing the technology from the camera based system to a smart cart. So this is the other part of the story that people are missing is that the frictionless is changing modality. But the frictionless isn't just going totally away.

Brian: [00:13:21] Right. Right. And I do believe so I believe there's a whole set of other people who are very, very ready to just fly in and fly out of grocery stores, and there's always been a split. You know the grocery store meanderers, and you know the grocery store speed runners. Right? Yeah. And sometimes the same person can be one one day and one a different day.

Phillip: [00:13:42] That's true. I am always the speed runner. So I am a high speed runner.

Brian: [00:13:46] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:13:46] I don't browse in a grocery store. I'll browse in other stores, but not in a grocery store. So I highly optimize my list by the journey that I know in the store. So the list is ordered, and this is true between Costco and Publix, which are my two primary stores that I do grocery shop, food shopping in. It is highly ordered on the list, which is a shared family list of things that we need from the grocery store that we compile throughout a week, and I optimize that journey. I do not want to spend more time in the store than I need to, but I often will skip the self checkout because it looks like it's more of a pain.

Brian: [00:14:27] It is more of a pain. Oh my gosh.

Phillip: [00:14:28] Especially if I'm keying in stuff like fruit and produce. That's just it's too much.

Brian: [00:14:34] It's too much. You don't have a bagger on hand, and there's never enough room in the bagging area.

Phillip: [00:14:39] Ugh, and then it never weighs the thing properly. "Please place item in the bagging area." "Please place item in the bagging area." Shut up.

Brian: [00:14:47] Yes.

Phillip: [00:14:47] Anyway.

Brian: [00:14:48] Yes.

Phillip: [00:14:49] Okay. So apologies to families. By the way, I got a note. Apologies to families. I said balls a lot in the last episode, and some people listen to this on the way to school in the mornings with their kids.

Brian: [00:15:04] You said it again.

Phillip: [00:15:07] I was talking about, you know, rubber, the balls that you might like a basketball. Okay. You mentioned something that was a really natural shift over. So, you know, there's a lot of these retailers are adopting retail media networks, and the latest retail media network, but it's neither retail nor is it a traditional, like, garden variety media network. The latest of which is JPMorgan has announced that it will be utilizing customer transaction data for the first time in delivering targeted and segmented advertising to its partners. There was a report that came out this week that sort of broke the story. And my first sense was I think they already do this really effectively for their credit card offer.

Brian: [00:16:07] Chase offers.

Phillip: [00:16:09] Right.

Brian: [00:16:09] Chase offers is phenomenal targeting. It is one of the most smart ad platforms out there, I would imagine.

Phillip: [00:16:18] So according to the reporter, I had a back and forth on Twitter with them. And according to the reporter, she was insistent that that is all sort of manual offer segmentation. It has nothing to do with your actual transaction history. It has more to do with other factors, like past offers that you have signed up for. So it's more about your behavior with the offers platform and some other ranking criteria, which could be signals like your annual income, for instance, when you report your annual income to get credit limits increase or something like that.

Brian: [00:16:56] You're going to get offered the Tesla discount if you've got a high income, and you're going to get offered...

Phillip: [00:17:02] Or maybe they take the discount away. I don't know.

Brian: [00:17:04] Yeah. Good point.

Phillip: [00:17:06] One of those interesting things. So this is actually using transaction data, which means, you know, Lammer's law, once again, Brian, holds true. Lammer's law

Brian: [00:17:16] If anything is eating the world, it's probably Lammer's law.

Phillip: [00:17:20] Yeah. And for those that aren't familiar, it's a running gag now for almost two years on the podcast. We call this thing Lammers' Laws. Every available pixel, every available inch of space in the real world, everything eventually will become an ad unit.

Brian: [00:17:37] Anything that has attention on it. Anything that's ever looked at or consumed.

Phillip: [00:17:42] Yeah. Eventually, it becomes an ad unit.

Brian: [00:17:44] Yeah. Exactly.

Phillip: [00:17:46] So you wouldn't be surprised where. Where is it coming next?

Brian: [00:17:49] It's going to be on our cross bread fruit that we have that's or they're already, like, their branding apples. Well, why don't they just throw someone else's brand on the apples too?

Phillip: [00:18:05] This is going to be a great YouTube short because there was a minions tie in to the chiquita bananas on the banana sticker. That is an ad unit.

Brian: [00:18:13] That's an ad unit.

Phillip: [00:18:14] Already exists.

Brian: [00:18:15] It already exists.

Phillip: [00:18:16] Sorry to tell you.

Brian: [00:18:17] They're branding, they're cross promoting on fruit.

Phillip: [00:18:23] That's trans media storytelling if I've ever seen it. Okay. So we just wanted to basically, you know, touch on that and come back to it one more time. It's something that... We like to check in on Lammers Law every now and then.

Brian: [00:18:36] I do want to just add on the Chase front. I just said that, you know, things aren't manipulative, but that seems like a very strong place to actually get more targeted than ever. You talked about offers and how that works, but yeah.

Phillip: [00:18:54] I want to be bullish on that though, Brian?

Brian: [00:18:55] Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:18:58] I've repeatedly had conversations with people about their happiness post iOS 14 with the ads they get served in various platforms. And they'll say, "Oh my gosh. My ads are terrible. Oh, they're terrible. Oh, I get catheter ads all the time," and when you go in and you look at ad preferences, the reason is because they've opted out of personalization so they only get broad targeting. And the truth is and we all hate this. [00:19:32] We all hate this idea, but the truth is that ads, good ads, and contextual ads actually add to a discovery mechanism in many many platforms. Good ads actually heighten the experience of Instagram, I would argue. The good ads on Instagram make my experience of Instagram better. I think Instagram is a little bit worse if it has no ads because I discover things.  [00:20:00]

Brian: [00:20:51] It's definitely better with good ads, targeted ads than not targeted ads. If you're going to have to have ads, then having targeted ads that make sense for you are better, way, way, way better than just broadly blasted ads.

Phillip: [00:21:10] Yeah. One of the things that makes this a little strange is when people reign it with like, I don't know how you segment your spending, especially with rewards tiers. I don't know if you think about it so much, but some people do. And one interesting thing that might come out of this is, "Well, where does this ad targeting show up?" Okay. Well, let's think about all the display units that this could come through. It one, it could be in the Chase mobile app. Right? It could be. It could be in partner emails to you, which is very highly likely.

Brian: [00:21:54] Isn't that already happening?

Phillip: [00:21:54] It does, but it's usually contained to the offers email. I'm sure that somewhere along the line an update is going to happen where you're going to get a promo partner email segment that you have to opt out of.

Brian: [00:21:58] Yeah. Targeted emails.

Phillip: [00:22:02] Maybe when you log in to your JPMorgan account, you'll get a partner pop up or something. But I can't imagine where else could this possibly go?

Brian: [00:22:12] The rewards experience. No question. The Chase Rewards, like, its own site. It's its own incredible travel site. The Chase Rewards site.

Phillip: [00:22:22] I just used it to book travel to Vegas.

Brian: [00:22:26] Yeah. It's very good. It's a very good site. Not as many tools as some of the booking sites out there have, but it's still pretty good.

Phillip: [00:22:41] Brian, I want to play you a song. Are you ready?

Brian: [00:22:46] I'm ready for this.

Phillip: [00:22:49] This song is a certified bop. Here we go.

Music Clip: [00:22:54] Permission is hereby granted free of charge to any person obtaining a copy of this software, associated documentation files, the software to deal in the software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the software.

Phillip: [00:23:33] Who do you think that is singing that?

Brian: [00:23:37] Is it Sarah McLachlan? {laughter}

Phillip: [00:23:44] It could be. It's almost as sad as those ASPCA ads or whatever... {laughter}

Brian: [00:23:48] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:23:50] It is as depressing. No. In fact, that was Suno AI, and this was brought to my attention through Tobi Lütke, the CEO and Co-Founder of Shopify, not Spotify. Although there was a great April Fools gag that I think...

Brian: [00:24:14] They did a good job.

Phillip: [00:24:15] Yeah. That I believe was created by our Future Commerce buddy, Tim. Tobi shared this amazing new, AI-generated music platform called Suno. And Suno has, you know, basically, I don't know where it gets its training data. There's no way that it got it in a legal or ethical way. And but it's creating bonkers music. And this particular piece of music is reading the terms of service from, I believe, the Apple or Itunes or the terms of service that you might get with bundled software. I regret to inform you that this in my mind is a gimmick, and it's actually garbage music. It's not good music by any means, but it is a really cool magic trick that you can, in under a minute, generate a two minute song based on a prompt. And the song is very genre specific, and you can give it really detailed information like beats per minute, minor key, in the style of, with the artist referencing.

Brian: [00:25:39] So many ads now. No one needs to go get a song anymore. They're just going to have it generated. But you know what? You know who's going to feel the hurt the most from this is our buddy, Scott Elchison.

Phillip: [00:25:53] Oh, dude. Yes.

Brian: [00:25:56] Poor Scott.

Phillip: [00:25:58] For those who are not familiar, our friend, Scott Elchison, formerly of Yotpo. Right?

Brian: [00:26:05] Yep. I believe... Where's Scott now?

Phillip: [00:26:09] I think he's at I'm going to say Zendesk. I think he's at Zendesk these days.

Brian: [00:26:13] That's correct.

Phillip: [00:26:14] So Scott was on the podcast for VISIONS back in 2022, but his sort of claim to fame was that he created a podcast that was, like, an ASMR podcast during the pandemic where he read the terms of service or other legalese legal contracts with a sort of breathy voice to put you to sleep. And the name of that podcast was called Ts&Zzz.

Brian: [00:26:44] Scott's the best.

Phillip: [00:26:46] Oh, he's incredible. And I have some Ts&Zzz merch, but sorry, Scott. I think sad Sarah McLachlan singing the iTunes click wrap agreement is way better.

Brian: [00:27:00] After listening to that for a while, I'd be like, "Get this out of my ears."

Phillip: [00:27:03] I've got another song for you, by the way.

Brian: [00:27:06] Oh. Let's go.

Phillip: [00:27:06] There's another class of content creator that can also use this music. Are you ready?

Brian: [00:27:12] I'm ready.

Music Clip: [00:27:13] Ooh yeah. Future Commerce. Future Commerce. Ooh yeah. Can you feel it in the air?

Phillip: [00:27:13] Drop that beat.

Music Clip: [00:27:13] Ooh yeah. Future Commerce. Future Commerce. Ooh yeah. We're gonna take you there.

Brian: [00:27:13] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:27:28] They took us there.

Brian: [00:27:43] That had a very all-in sort of feel to it right there.

Phillip: [00:27:48] Yeah. Their music does sound like it's AI-generated. Suna.AI. You know what the sad thing about this is? Their home page is so freaking good. Suno.AI has an amazing UI for their marketing landing page. Their homepage is just so good, but the music is terrible.

Brian: [00:28:24] Well, hold up. It's bad.

Phillip: [00:28:27] No. It's terrible.

Brian: [00:28:29] It's terrible. It's the opposite of what I would ever want to listen to. And yet just like the writing by ChatGPT is terrible, it's mind blowing that we're able to actually do this.

Phillip: [00:28:43] This is the fallacy though is that we tend to believe that because this is one of the first examples that we're seeing that we believe it only gets better and better from here. But I would make the argument that the experience of using ChatGPT, other chat based AIs has gotten markedly worse. The magic wore off after about a year because they become encumbered, and there's the dismantling of the thing, especially when they start facing legal challenges. There are issues that creep in along the way where red teaming people breaking the platform. They start locking pieces down to where the creativity gets hampered and the rains start to come in around it. So this is [00:29:35] in my mind, this is as good as Suno will ever be. It doesn't only get better from here. Maybe the fidelity gets better. Maybe it can create stems. Maybe you can do more editing. Maybe you could go in and tweak things, and you'll have more creator tools, but it doesn't mean it gets more creative over time. [00:29:51]

Brian: [00:29:51] This is why Sora's had a lot of criticism as well.

Phillip: [00:29:57] Sora being the AI video platform that hasn't actually released to the public yet.

Brian: [00:30:00] Right. And it's not something that has a lot of tools to be able to control what happens or edit it in a meaningful way. And so it's cool, but it's not going to be that useful until people are given a higher level of control over what's included in editing the footage that's built or footage, ha, the video that's built. And, also, I think to your point, you made the point about Suno. This was probably trained on data that it shouldn't have been trained on. And Sora just bumped into this with YouTube. And YouTube just recently sort of said that it was an infraction to have Sora train on YouTube content.

Phillip: [00:30:55] I think the way that they framed it was if it had been trained on YouTube content, that that would be a violation of the YouTube terms of service.

Brian: [00:31:04] So Yeah. That's got...

Phillip: [00:31:07] It's a good thing they have Microsoft money bags behind them because they're going to need it.

Brian: [00:31:12] Well I guess they can always go to to Bing Video. You know what's going to get really good, though, eventually is sales bots because, oh my gosh, the amount of data that Microsoft has as a result of LinkedIn is insane. This is what the name of the game's going to be coming up here, rights to data, retraining data. And whatever you have really, really good data on is going to be the thing that your AI is going to get really good at. A point that a lot of people are making, although I think this is not as simple as some people are saying it is. It's like AI, it's actually not that much code. It's actually remarkably simple. And so it's going to be all about the fidelity of the data that it's trained on, and the weight of that data is going to be the biggest challenge. Also processing it. I don't know if you saw the article about how AI is causing more energy usage than that of a small country.

Phillip: [00:32:31] This happens every generation. Every 10 years, there's always some bombastic claim about something that would you know, we're going to run out of. Right now, it's we're all going to run out of energy. Georgia is 900% above its, you know, forecasted energy capacity for this year based on their infrastructure. When I was a kid, my parents were concerned about overpopulation and global overcrowding. And there was this whole euthanasia movement around...

Brian: [00:35:02] There's still some of that around.

Phillip: [00:35:04] No. Because people thought that there was a global productivity crisis. Like, we're never going to produce more food. We're never going to be more productive. We're never going to have jobs for all these people. Where are they going to live? There were some sociologists that thought there's a global maximum and that we can't exceed it.

Brian: [00:35:24] The one child policy.

Phillip: [00:35:26] We have blown past that by 2.5 X since the late 1960s when that was all the rage. In fact, the back to the land movement was partially started by those points of view. I don't know. We go through these panics. I'm in no way an eternal optimist, but I wonder maybe this is a progressive, maybe I need to put EACC in my bio now.

Brian: [00:35:52] {laughter} Oh, wow. Wow.

Phillip: [00:35:54] But it's a wonder... Doesn't it make you wonder that, we have always had just enough technology to get to the next leap to meet the needs of what society needs? We're just making it.

Brian: [00:36:14] It's a supply and demand thing. Like, oh, wow, nuclear was really dangerous when we first started using it, and it caused all kinds of huge, huge problems. And, you know, Chornobyl.

Phillip: [00:36:30] Sure. I know. I know the stories.

Brian: [00:36:31] We realized we needed to get a lot better at it, and now it's a heck of a lot safer than it was. I am not saying by any means that...

Phillip: [00:36:39] We could be building, energy crisis notwithstanding, we could be building all kinds of things. Here's, let's go back to the Sunu AI one more thing. There was a an SEO piece that made the rounds a few weeks ago. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a an SEO agency who represented some B2B company. And, yeah, and one of their clients had a link that was removed from Bloomberg. So hugely authoritative, huge domain authority. Their client lost all kinds of SEO rank because of the removal of this link. So what they did was they created a Nothing Compares to You, Sinead O'Connor parody song talking about this problem and asking Bloomberg to put the link back, and then Bloomberg wrote an organic story about this video, this music video, which organically linked back to their client. And I'm very scared that the music parodies are now coming in waves that SEO companies are going to just flood, you know, flood the zone with SEO.

Brian: [00:38:02] Weird Al-ification of the world. That's what's going to happen. We're going to become a Weird Al world due to the fact that organic SEO is massively boosted by parody songs.

Phillip: [00:38:14] SEOs ruin everything. That's what they do. Anything that works, SEOs will jump on top of. So just one more time...

Music Clip: [00:38:24] Oh yeah. Future Commerce. Future Commerce...

Brian: [00:38:30] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:38:34] When the beat drops, Brian.

Brian: [00:38:36] Yeah, it's going to really gotta get down. I think we should just use this as our music now.

Phillip: [00:38:48] No. Just kill me, actually.

Music Clip: [00:38:49] We're gonna take you there.

Brian: [00:38:51] {laughter} I agree. I agree. Don't get me wrong.

Phillip: [00:38:56] I said I wasn't going to say anything more about this, but I'll say one more thing. My kids, before we made the Future Commerce bumper music just now, my kids and I were playing around with Suno and they gave us a couple prompts. I'll tell you about a couple of the songs that we made. You're going to love this.

Brian: [00:39:18] Were you able to recreate the Temu bop?

Phillip: [00:39:22] {laughter} I would not be surprised at all. I would not be surprised at all. If it came out, it definitely came out of Suno. It's in the same sort of vein.

Brian: [00:39:36] They probably have their own music generation tool. It's like, what was it?

Phillip: [00:39:40] Oh my, of course. For sure.

Brian: [00:39:42] Yeah. When Ali Express came out with their own AI generation tool that they released. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:39:48] My kids generated two songs. So you get 50 credits when you first sign up for Suno. And with that, you can generate five songs. Each song generation based on a prompt gives you two versions. So it gives you a couple options. If you don't like the first one, you check out the second one. So my oldest, who just turned 13, Camille, she is obsessed with French fries. She's made that her whole identity. And so she made a song called Fries Are My Life, but for whatever reason, it turned the song into Fries Are My Life Savers. I don't know why. And then my youngest daughter, she is really into two things. Well, she's into a lot of things, but she's into Axolotls and Sonic the Hedgehog. And they both made up songs about those respective things. The Sonic the Hedgehog song and the Axolotl mashup is them dance battling under neon lights, and Axolotl and Sonic, and then at the end of the dance battle, they eat a chili dog.

Brian: [00:41:08] Who wins the dance battle?

Phillip: [00:41:10] It doesn't say. The song doesn't say.

Brian: [00:41:14] I'm going to use this on my kids. I'm going to freak them out.

Phillip: [00:41:17] Dude, you should do that. My kids loved playing with this. They were so excited and then about 20 minutes later when it's all done and they made me listen to the stupid song like 25 times.

Brian: [00:41:31] Of course.

Phillip: [00:41:32] When it was all said and done afterwards I said, "Hey, sing the Sonic Axolotl song to me." Now my youngest has, like, an eidetic memory when it comes to music. She can listen to a song once or twice and be able to sing it back to you.

Brian: [00:41:47] Wow.

Phillip: [00:41:48] She could not remember the song to save her life.

Brian: [00:41:51] That's...

Phillip: [00:41:51] And I think [00:41:51] there's a really interesting amnesiac effect with this AI-generated music is it's incredibly forgettable. There's nothing remarkable or memorable about any of it. And I almost feel the same way about all AI-generated content. AI-generated art, AI-generated writing. There's nothing memorable or remarkable about it ever. The thing that's memorable is the discourse around it. [00:42:24]

Brian: [00:42:24] Have you ever been moved by a piece of AI art or a piece of AI writing? I know that people have used AI to help with original works of art or with original pieces of writing.

Phillip: [00:42:38] Yeah.

Brian: [00:42:39] And I think there was some award that was just given to a writer in Japan. I don't even know what the award was, but she used AI to help kind of move things along and and called it an unlock. I think the answer is that it does help with creativity and prompts and moving past.

Phillip: [00:42:57] Sure.

Brian: [00:42:57] When you get stuck, but I think you're dead on. Stuff that's generated fully by the Algo, you know, whatever it is machine, writing machine, song machine, whatever it is, it's remarkably forgettable, and I think back to, like, Brave New World and all the music they listen to is machine-generated, and they have to be on drugs to enjoy it. It's probably the case here.

Phillip: [00:43:37] {laughter} Alright. Quick little segue because we mentioned it at the top. My oldest celebrated her birthday this week, and she turned 13. She wanted for her birthday as, you know, as you do. What do you want for your birthday present? She wanted to celebrate commerce, Brian. I was so proud of her. We went to the Doc Martens store.

Brian: [00:44:01] Happy Commerce to you?

Phillip: [00:44:01] She got her first pair of Docs. It was the greatest in-person retail experience. We went inside.

Brian: [00:44:09] That is a move.

Phillip: [00:44:10] It so is. And we went in and spoke with just the greatest salesperson. I think her name was Mary Jane. She was just so awesome, got out multiple pairs in multiple sizes, had a real try on for my daughter. Just had such an awesome in-store retail experience. Got all the things. We got the shoe leather cleaner, the little upsells, got the laces, the lace swaps. You gotta get all that stuff. But what I thought was memorable and it's funny because you also mentioned this in the pre show and I was like, "Oh, let's talk about that." On the way out the door, they were like, "Oh so which one did you wind up getting? She said, "Oh the 1460 boot," and she's like, "Oh you know why it's called the 1460? And she's like, "Wow. Why?" She goes, "Well, that's Doc Martin's birthday." You know, in England, they put the day before the month. So it's 1/4/1960 or April 1, 1960. And I thought that that was interesting and clever. And, also, why are we celebrating corporations' birthdays? {laughter}

Brian: [00:45:30] Well, actually, it's not really a birthday, but I'm excited because I'm a Wallaby guy now. Tara McRae converted me to one.

Phillip: [00:45:41] The Clarks silhouette. Yeah.

Brian: [00:45:43] Wallaby silhouette, which is, as I learned recently based off of, it was inspired by a German moccasin called the Grasshopper released from 1968, but there is going to be a Wallaby Day coming up here on April 26th. That's when everyone's going to break out their Wallabies and wear them around. And I think I'll probably participate because, hey, I'm wearing them now.

Phillip: [00:46:11] Wow. I mean, Nike has Air Max Day. Right? Star Wars has May 4th. Right?

Brian: [00:46:21] They just walked right into that one. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:46:27] Are there other big retail birthdays?

Brian: [00:46:32] I think a lot of retailers celebrate their birthdays. In fact, I think Woot just celebrated its 20th birthday this week.

Phillip: [00:46:41] Oh my gosh. I didn't even know that it still existed.

Brian: [00:46:44] 20 years. Amazon owns them. That's why they're still around.

Phillip: [00:46:51] That's insane.

Brian: [00:46:52] Flash sites started about 20 years ago. That's wild.

Phillip: [00:46:57] Remember when that was, like, the next big thing?

Brian: [00:46:59] Oh. The valuations. It got crazy.

Phillip: [00:47:08] So, yeah, corporate anniversary. I'm looking at Wikipedia for corporate anniversaries and corporate celebrations of anniversaries. And what I'm finding is there's actually no real collection of the days when a company celebrates its birthday. We should probably put that together. That would be a really good SEO piece. The SEOs ruin everything, but maybe this one would be really good.

Brian: [00:47:41] Disney got to celebrate their birthday recently by releasing Mickey Mouse into the public domain.

Phillip: [00:47:49] Yeah.

Brian: [00:47:49] Once you get to a certain age, birthdays aren't fun anymore, I think. That's what I learned from that.

Phillip: [00:47:55] That's for darn sure. I don't know. Maybe, okay. I don't know. Maybe I'm going to do an SEO piece on this. It's funny there's so much of this aggregator content that needs to exist in the world, which feels like the culture and commerce piece of this is isn't it interesting that companies sort of do this lore building. Also, if you made it into minute 45 or 50 here, I'll give you one other weird advice or one fact of this trip. So we walked out of the store, and she wanted to walk out wearing the Docs, which I just think is the coolest thing ever. Have you ever walked out of a store wearing the shoes, Brian? You ever do that?

Brian: [00:48:45] No. Never done it.

Phillip: [00:48:47] Really?

Brian: [00:48:47] Not once.

Phillip: [00:48:47] You never wore them out?

Brian: [00:48:49] Maybe... No. No. I've never worn them out. I don't think.

Phillip: [00:48:54] Oh my gosh. You've never lived. You need to wear out a pair of shoes.

Brian: [00:49:01] Does it feel freeing? Is it like a swag moment?

Phillip: [00:49:04] It is a swag moment. It feels really good.

Brian: [00:49:08] I feel like I've bought a lot of my shoes online lately. I think that's the problem.

Phillip: [00:49:13] Ugh.

Brian: [00:49:14] I know. I know. Well, because once you figure out what size you are in a specific brand, then you don't really have to go do the try on thing as much.

Phillip: [00:49:25] That's true. So she wanted to wear them out. I was like, "Oh, yeah. Oh, she's going to wear them out. This is great." So we're walking out of the store and she goes, this is my oldest daughter. I was so proud of her. She's like, "Dad. A lot of pictures of celebrities wearing Doc Martins on the wall." And I was like, "Yeah." And I kid you not, Brian, you're going to think I'm making this up. She goes, "Here's a question. Is that ethos, logos, or pathos?" And I said, "What?"

Brian: [00:50:01] {laughter} Nice. Nice.

Phillip: [00:50:03] She's like, "I think that's pathos because what they're trying to do is make me feel like I can identify with that person who trusts this brand and supports this brand, and they make me feel like I could be that. I could be Shakira wearing Doc Martens, or I could be Gwen Stefani wearing Doc Martens." And she's like, "An ethos is like, oh, they have all these sustainability messages in there or they're recycled leather or they have all these other." She's, like, now looking for the ways that marketers and brand builders use philosophy and psychology.

Brian: [00:50:42] You've taught her well.

Phillip: [00:50:44] I don't even know that I taught that to her. She just had philosophy and psychology this year, and she's finding it in places.

Brian: [00:50:51] That and she listens to every episode of Future Commerce, which is why you had a complaint from a parent it was Jaci. {laughter} And she's like, "My children listen to this. You can't say balls, like, 20 times."

Phillip: [00:51:08] By the way, I honestly, this was totally unprompted. She went into this whole, you know, analysis of the experience. We were looking for logos, and were thinking about the the sort of, like, logos, aspect of it. And I'm like, "Well, you wearing it is like you're showing the world that you identify with the brand, and that is kind of the like, it is part of your signaling ability. I don't have the cheap Docs. I have the OG Docs."

Brian: [00:51:38] Yeah. These aren't the Target knockoffs. I have the 1460s.

Phillip: [00:51:40] Yeah. The 1460s, baby. I thought that that was just the greatest. I don't know. Have you, like have your kids ever surprised you like that in the way that they look at and analyze the world?

Brian: [00:51:58] Dude, when one of my kids was 2, he's like, "Hey, dad. The moon's not the same all the time, and it changes based on the day." He analyzed the phases of the moon when he was 2, and I was like, "Okay. This is crazy." Kids are fast learners, I guess. I've noticed there were a lot of births in DTC Twitter recently.

Phillip: [00:52:26] Oh, yeah.

Brian: [00:52:27] Lot of babies coming. It's going to be a new wave of wisdom that hits the discourse.

Phillip: [00:52:33] That's freaking funny. I actually think there will be a new wave of people shutting the hell up. That's what's going to happen.

Brian: [00:52:41] For the ones that are actually, like, learning and wise, that's probably true.

Phillip: [00:52:48] You can tell who's recently had kids because they are not online as much.

Brian: [00:52:53] Yep.

Phillip: [00:52:53] There's this interesting thing that you notice where people kinda go through this phase of life where now I see someone in their mid to late twenties or early thirties, and they're mouthing off, and they're single. And then they get really quiet, and then you see the engagement post, and I'm like, aha.

Brian: [00:53:12] There were a lot of those too recently, I feel like.

Phillip: [00:53:14] Yeah. Life growing up comes for everybody. Right? So all this bravado

Brian: [00:53:21] Yep.

Phillip: [00:53:22] Especially in certain, you know, sectors, there are young person's games and young person's roles and jobs, and those come in waves. Right? We went through a round of layoffs. We went through a round of self employment. We went through a round of people becoming much more mature and oing through crises of what am I doing with my life? Where am I going? Now we have a wave of people having kids. I don't know. Kinda nice.

Brian: [00:53:47] It's kinda funny to watch.

Phillip: [00:53:49] Kinda nice.

Brian: [00:53:49] The older crowd, you know, has a little bit of mimetic action going on toward the younger crowd for a while.

Phillip: [00:54:01] Say more about that, like, older people acting younger?

Brian: [00:54:05] Yeah. Like, the culture is driven by the younger people, and older people feel like they have to play a role in it, so they try to absorb into it, especially as you see different generations kinda take over. But now perhaps there's a weird moment where some Z's are kind of graduating into a next phase of life, and they start to be like, "Oh, wow. Those millennials, maybe they learned something along the way. You know? They went through the GFC. They had to scrimp and save." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:54:40] Great financial crisis for those aren't aware of the acronym.

Brian: [00:54:45] But, yeah, weird cycles of mimetic desire where you have old people kind of thirsting after the younger culture, and then the younger culture looking at the older people being like, "Man, maybe there are some things to learn over there too."

Phillip: [00:55:00] I'll confess something. This isn't the After Dark, but I'll confess something. Once upon a time I'm going to say this is probably around the pandemic like 2000, or sorry 2020 maybe 2021.

Brian: [00:55:15] 2020. Yep. 2000 you know. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:55:17] Yeah. It feels like the year 2000.

Brian: [00:55:19] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:55:20] Somewhere around 2020 or 2021, I saw a snide remark from Emily Singer on Twitter, which is rare for her. She didn't say stuff like this, but she was thinking about...

Brian: [00:55:33] She's usually pretty chill.

Phillip: [00:55:34] Yeah. But she said something that I thought was interesting. It was, "You can tell the relative age of people because they haven't disabled the auto capitalization on their phone."

Brian: [00:55:50] That's not that spicy. That's cute.

Phillip: [00:55:53] I thought it was spicy because it's there are two things actually I didn't realize and this tells you my age. One, I had no idea that the kids were turning off the capitalization on purpose during every text. When you go in and type I thought they went back and fixed it so that it was all lower case. No. They went in and disabled the actual global setting. So that was the first thing to me is, like, "Oh, there's a setting for that." {laughter} Then the second thing was, "Oh my gosh. People judge me for that?"

Brian: [00:56:31] {laughter} They do.

Phillip: [00:56:32] They do. It was, like, 3 seconds, and I disabled that 4 years ago, and I've never looked back. I do not capitalize by default.

Brian: [00:56:40] Oh, I do. But then again.

Phillip: [00:56:43] That's the default.

Brian: [00:56:44] Well, no. I mean, I think the truth is I probably am somewhere between a Gen X and Boomer. Like, I belong in a different world, to quote the Beach Boys. I guess I just wasn't made for these times.

Phillip: [00:57:02] That is true on so many levels, Brian.

Brian: [00:57:05] I know. {laughter} Wasn't it in, was it a Dirt article that I read recently about how you could almost feel someone on text? Maybe it wasn't Dirt. I think it was Dirt, but the author, and I don't think it was Daisy, Daisy Alioto, the Founder of Dirt, who wrote this, but they said that you could actually get someone's vibe through text. Maybe it wasn't on Dirt. Now I'm actually losing where I read this, but the ability to assess someone's...

Phillip: [00:57:43] This is great content.

Brian: [00:57:44] Well, I guess they're disembodied vibe through text messages. You have to, people the discerning and the very online can actually kinda tell if they gel with someone just through the simple little quirks to their texting patterns. Yeah. It's interesting.

Phillip: [00:58:14] It's interesting that that is an insight in 2024 because I feel like I was doing that in 1997.

Brian: [00:58:23] Right.

Phillip: [00:58:23] On AOL Instant Messenger.

Brian: [00:58:25] I think that there might have been some reference back to that. It's just there are a lot more people now that are having to deal with this because more and more people are becoming...

Phillip: [00:58:33] And that's the default mode of communication.

Brian: [00:58:35] Right.

Phillip: [00:58:36] Right? And not just with human beings, with AIs, with I don't know, with brands. Right? So the vibe is really important. Right?

Brian: [00:58:49] Yeah. The vibe is really important. The ability to meet up with them in person could be fully determined by the vibe you get from their text messages, I really wish I remembered who wrote this. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:59:01] I wish you did too because this wouldn't make this whole segment way better.

Brian: [00:59:04] It would.

Phillip: [00:59:05] Let's close it out. You have the right to disconnect from a text message with your employer.

Brian: [00:59:13] Oh, do you? You don't right now. You don't. There are no rules around this.

Phillip: [00:59:19] Well, that's what's implied.

Brian: [00:59:20] However...

Phillip: [00:59:22] Set it up.

Brian: [00:59:23] Yeah. California recently introduced some legislation around right to disconnect, a right to disconnect bill during nonworking hours, whatever that means, which reminded me of a piece that I wrote. It would have been last year in July about how online language works and what was happening, how sort of nostalgia was being created and how nostalgia works online, but I got into really where AI and where digital work fits into everything. And so I wrote this back in July of last year. "In the Industrial Revolution, people push their bodies beyond healthy limits. We now, in our new industrial revolution, to quote Norbert Wiener, are pushing our minds beyond healthy limits. How will we protect ourselves? As we mastered the Industrial Revolution, we created laws, penalties, and oversight systems to protect people's physical health, and in this world, do we need an OSHA for the mind? At the same time, it seems that the further we focus on mental health, the more depressed we become as a society. Is this correlated?"

Phillip: [01:00:47] The California law would propose that there is a limit to which employers can contact employees during a specific set amount of working hours. And I haven't really read the law, so I really can't speak to it. I know the headlines exaggerated the effects of the law to an opposite effect of what you might expect. More about, like, employers are being stripped of their rights to be able to have visibility, especially into remote workers. But that's really not the intention here. It's actually quite reasonable as I understand it, but I've not read it in full.

Brian: [01:01:32] Yeah. And I think what's interesting is that there have already been other countries that have enacted laws to this effect, which include Australia, Italy, France, Spain...

Phillip: [01:01:45] Well, that's not surprising at all. Italy and France having rules around workers' rights? That seems very on brand for them. California, you know, continues to lead the nation in this sort of legislation. This always comes down to more software features. There's going to be very soon an HR panel in pretty much every single piece of software that will allow you to set your HR policies for communication preferences at a global corporate level that will just block all communication at a certain time of the day.

Brian: [01:02:34] Probably.

Phillip: [01:02:35] And that that just I mean, that's the bull case for investing in Gusto because...

Brian: [01:02:44] There are a lot of bull cases for investing in Gusto, actually.

Phillip: [01:02:47] Well, yeah. Did you see this report that HubSpot might get acquired by Google?

Brian: [01:02:55] I did not see that.

Phillip: [01:02:55] Just broke today. But, yeah, Gusto or Justworks, you know, shout out to our friends at Justworks who sponsored Muses. These management platforms like payroll and HR benefits administration for small businesses, that's where you set corporate policies. Right? That's where you manage things like time off. There needs to be native integration with messaging apps in the 21st century.

Brian: [01:03:26] This is why I'm kind of bullish on Teams because...

Phillip: [01:03:29] Microsoft Teams.

Brian: [01:03:31] Yeah. I think that, on this podcast, I professed my love for Teams.

Phillip: [01:03:39] You're the only person on the planet.

Brian: [01:03:40] I think it's the greatest piece of collaboration software that's ever been invented. It is clunky, and it is, you know, the medium of the message. It feels like corporate America, but it is also extremely impressive in terms of integrations. And if you start to think about some of the other tools that Microsoft has it really could become the disembodied infrastructure of the modern business. And I so, yeah, I think you're dead on is a long way of saying that. I do think this is important because one of the reasons I was writing about this is because [01:04:29] the issue that we have right now is actually AI is driving this even further, but we are getting to a point now where we're hitting Norbert Wiener's prediction around "the world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves." That direct quote from Norbert Wiener, I think what we're bumping up right now against is pushing our minds further as far as they possibly can go, and it's going to actually, this is I think there's a lot of burnout that's happening as a result.  [01:05:20]It's not the only thing contributing to burnout. I know there's a lot of rounds and discourse going on right now about hate's new thing about the smartphone and children, and I understand that there's a lot at play right now. It's interesting that this is Marc Andreessen's whole thing, EACC. You just mentioned it earlier. Like, technology is pushing humanity forward and not backwards. Our future is best served by technology, it's not marching us towards our doom. It's marching us towards our saving, and it's probably one of the biggest points of discourse on Twitter that I've seen recently. My viewpoint on this is that it is generally good. The effective technology at every stage has allowed us to move forward. However, I'll take Andrew McLuhan's and Marshall McLuhan's stance as well. The environment that it's creating for us is fundamentally changing who we are and how we exist, and there needs to be ways for us to address that as we go. And so maybe we should just hand over the keys of technology policy over to Andrew McLuhan and make him the mind czar of America. I'm all for it. He's Canadian, so never going to happen. But there we go.

Phillip: [01:06:56] Wow. I mean, never have I heard someone argue for the philosophies of a prolific modern philosopher to hand the digital reigns over to their progeny, to their grandchildren based on the exploits. Do you also argue for a monarchy, a bloodline? Are you pro-monarchy?

Brian: [01:07:23] I am pro-monarchy, as well. {laughter} I do believe that the McLuhan family is an intellectual dynasty.

Phillip: [01:07:34] Oh, yeah. That's for sure.

Brian: [01:07:35] The dynasty the dynasty of thought that they've brought to bear in the modern age is kind of unmatched.

Phillip: [01:07:45] Yeah.

Brian: [01:07:45] And I'm blown away that something like that's even able to happen. There's rare a time in history when you've seen that level of intellectual contribution be passed down to multiple generations of children. That's unbelievable, and hats off to the McLuhans.

Phillip: [01:08:03] Okay.

Brian: [01:08:08] {laughter}

Phillip: [01:08:09] You had me at OSHA for the mind, and then the last little bit, I was like, "I don't know." But I do think that we'll only continue to see legislation like this. Should this pass, it will set a new, you know, precedent for the kind of thing that we, you know, as California goes, so does the nation in a lot of respects, especially when it comes to consumer protection and privacy. Florida has a very similar issue. I know we covered this on the last show, but the Sephora Kids breakdown. But, you know, signing into law, Governor DeSantis shielding kids whether you like it or not, needing parental permission and digital online verification with digital ID checks and AI based ID checks for children that want to interact with social media and a hard cut off at the age of 16. I think that those sorts of things, they have broad impact for states that aren't Florida.

Brian: [01:09:13] A lot of commerce runs through Florida.

Phillip: [01:09:15] Yeah. Well, I mean it is really difficult, and it's becoming more so this, like, a Swiss cheesification that's happened to the way that you serve content experiences. Like, forget the personalization 1 to 1. You know, just managing a website based on compliance requires you to have to do specific things in specific states. Just ask the adult entertainment industry who have had to do this for the past few years too. It's like we're just seeing states turn off certain types of content.

Brian: [01:09:43] Talk about network states.

Phillip: [01:09:46] And that is, I mean, literally and figuratively. Right? Such an interesting time to be alive, and that's what makes this phase of the web so wild. It's really, really hard. Yeah. The mild, mild west. Here we are. It's just become very difficult. Alright. I think we'll leave it there. Let's roll our new theme song on the way out as I do our outro.

Brian: [01:10:11] Yeah.

Phillip: [01:10:12] Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Oh, I turned it down too much. Here, let's bring it back.

Music Clip: [01:10:17] Ooh yeah. Future Commerce. Future Commerce...

Phillip: [01:10:18] There we go. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Find more episodes of this podcast and other Future Commerce properties at futurecommerce.com. Get ad free episodes of Future Commerce Plus by joining membership futurecommerce.com/plus, and check us out on YouTube. Subscribe to Future Commerce Media on YouTube, Future Commerce everywhere else on social media. Thanks for listening. I actually like this as the outro music.

Brian: [01:10:41] I do too. I think this should be the outro.

Phillip: [01:10:45] It's Future Commerce.

Brian: [01:10:46] Let's go.

Phillip: [01:10:46] Commerce is culture. Thank you for listening.