Mid-Season Highlight Special

Ingrid: [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Infinite Shelf, the human centric retail podcast. I'm your host, Ingrid Milman Cordy and well, we've gotten a bunch of episodes out, and I want to welcome Brian and Phillip back to come talk about it. Hey, guys.

Phillip: [00:01:00] Yay.

Brian: [00:01:01] Yeah, we're back.

Phillip: [00:01:03] I've always wanted to do like a mid-season catch up kind of a show.

Ingrid: [00:01:08] I love that we're just getting to fulfill all of your podcast dreams with my podcast.

Brian: [00:01:13] That's true. How jealous have I been listening to Infinite Shelf? I'm like, Oh my gosh.

Phillip: [00:01:22] How jealous have you been?

Brian: [00:01:23] Very jealous. I want to interview those guests. They're cool guests.

Ingrid: [00:01:27] I have had some cool guests.

Phillip: [00:01:28] It's been a great format for a show. Ingrid, you're doing an amazing job. You never know that this would be a first season. The quality is just unbelievable.

Ingrid: [00:01:35] Aw, thank you.

Phillip: [00:01:36] And I'm personally looking forward. I've missed the last one or two. I'm looking forward to using this opportunity to catch up just like the rest of the audience. I want to catch up on what I might have missed in this season.

Ingrid: [00:01:48] Yeah, the last couple have been pretty amazing. I've listened to them a couple of times. My biggest fan who is my dad. Shout out to Sam. His favorite episode just to kick it off. His favorite episode of all time is the Garrett episode on Amazon. He was just like, incredibly blown away, but he has so much good feedback. He actually... Do you want to hear the cutest thing in the world? He actually listens to the episodes with like a pen and paper and a notepad next to him so that he can write down some of his thoughts as he's listening so he doesn't forget when we are talking about it later.

Brian: [00:02:26] That is really cute.

Phillip: [00:02:28] That's the coolest thing I've ever heard.

Ingrid: [00:02:30] I have the best dad in the whole world.

Brian: [00:02:31] Ingrid's dad, you're amazing. You're a good dad.

Phillip: [00:02:36] The note he's writing right now is, "Didn't realize that you were going to just repurpose a bunch of content for this end of the year show. I've already heard all of this."

Ingrid: [00:02:46] {laughter} Well, here's the thing is that I've actually myself listened to them multiple times, and I actually would love to hear what you guys think. And let's just, let's get into it.

Brian: [00:02:56] Wait, wait, wait, hold on. What I just heard you say was I have listened to them several times and I have so much that I want to say about them.

Phillip: [00:03:02] You should. And you should. I think their additional context, especially a few days or weeks after you have time to sort of marinate on a conversation.

Ingrid: [00:03:12] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:03:12] I think that that's something we don't do enough of. We can't think in the age of Twitter, we can only react.

Ingrid: [00:03:21] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:03:21] Only reacting, no thinking.

Ingrid: [00:03:23] That's not my jam. I'm a marinater.

Phillip: [00:03:25] I love it. I love it.

Brian: [00:03:27] Me, too.

Phillip: [00:03:27] Well, what's the first clip that we can marinate on? Where should we start?

Ingrid: [00:03:32] Well, let's go. You know, let's go in time order. Phillip, you had a pull from the Madison episode, didn't you?

Phillip: [00:03:38] Yeah, I thought this one was really good. Let's jump in and then we can muse on our thoughts. This is Madison Semarjian from The Mada App, right? Here we go.

Ingrid from Episode 3: [00:03:46]  [00:03:47]I think that the need for that connection completely far surpasses just what Gen Z expects from brands and services. I think that we all are aching for that. I think Gen Z has the most raw filter for it because they can kind of, they grew up like sort of smelling the BS and then also being excited by brands that are less bad, or are less good at the BS. And so I think it's universal. [00:04:15]

Madison from Episode 3: [00:04:16] Oh, one hundred percent. And I think that's why you're really seeing my age group craving this like one on one communication with brands. Even if you look at Alistair with Hero. They knew people were going to want to digitally talk to a sales associate. [00:04:32] There's something about actually communicating that makes you feel closer with the brand, too. And so that's really what we're looking at as we move into this new phase of our company. We might not walk into Bergdorf's and have the dressing room all set up for us like they used to do, rumor has it, or they still do for some of their clientele, but we still want some sort of that clienteling, schmoozing, whatever. [00:05:00]

Ingrid from Episode 3: [00:05:00] Democratized clienteling. Can we not make it just for those Bergdorf people?

Phillip: [00:05:05] Oh, "Those Bergdorf people." We're othering Bergdorf people.

Ingrid: [00:05:10] Shout out to the Bergdorf people.

Brian: [00:05:11] How do I become one of those people? I kind of wish that I was.

Phillip: [00:05:14] Of the three of us, how many of us have done tea at Bergdorf?

Brian: [00:05:18] I haven't.

Ingrid: [00:05:18] I have. That's such a fun thing to do with visitors.

Phillip: [00:05:22] I haven't done it.

Brian: [00:05:23] I've tried to convince Phillip to do it and he's like, "Tea?"

Ingrid: [00:05:27] I've taken my mom to tea at Bergdorf for her birthday.

Brian: [00:05:32] That's fun.

Phillip: [00:05:32] What struck me here is it reminded me of a conversation that we had in a simpler time, Brian, of the The Age of Clienteling and how digital can bring clientele to anyone. And yet so many brands don't even bother.

Brian: [00:05:49] I know, I know I've been on the clienteling hype train for a long time. Add that friction back in. Talk to people, get to know them, interrupt them. Give them a better sense of who you are. Build a relationship. I'm all about it.

Ingrid: [00:06:10] Definitely. And the interesting thing, so thinking far back, we had, the three of us. We had Alistair, who gets mentioned in this clip on the show. Alistair Crane, who's the CEO of Hero, and he had since they've been bought out by Klarna.

Phillip: [00:06:27] Oh I didn't know that.

Ingrid: [00:06:29] Yeah, he got bought out by Klarna. He's still on and working. Hi, Alistair, we'll see you on Season 2 of Infinite Shelf. But anyway, the whole thing was, I think that he has unlocked so much information on the power of activating your store associates with the people that are shopping for your product online and developing that relationship. It's been incredible for so many brands that they've been working with.

Brian: [00:06:57] Yeah, that's so true. I think that the store associate is probably one of the most under appreciated assets in all of commerce.

Ingrid: [00:07:06] Yeah, definitely. The good store associate.

Brian: [00:07:08] Yeah, yeah. The Good Store associate. Exactly.

Phillip: [00:07:12] I think the problem in my mind is that we don't look at the store associate itself could be a channel.

Brian: [00:07:22] Right.

Phillip: [00:07:22]  [00:07:22]If you saw a client list, you see this actually in certain professional services firms, a rock star lawyer or a really great accountant, or even maybe even web developers, they have a clientele. They have people they've worked with in the past that if you were to get them, you open up just a great new channel for new business to come through your doors. We discount that in the world of retail now, and it's actually quite sad. I feel like it's due for a comeback. [00:07:57]

Ingrid: [00:07:58] Fully agree. Shout out to the store associate. We love you and appreciate you.

Phillip: [00:08:03] We see you.

Ingrid: [00:08:04] We see you.

Brian: [00:08:05] What I loved about this, though, I actually pulled the clip that's just you talking in it. It was talking about the discount drug and what that's not. I've written a lot about discounting and pricing, and I loved what you had to say. And I think it leads to the bigger conversation about ok, if we're not going to discount, and I'm not saying that there isn't a place to do it because there is. No doubt. But what replaces that? Like, how do we engage customers? And I thought that conversation with Givs about giving as a replacement and how that factors into the overall value that you provide to your customers and that changes the power structure of the transaction. Anyway, let's get to the clip.

Phillip: [00:08:52] This is from Season 1, Episode 4 of Infinite Shelf.

Ingrid from Episode 4: [00:08:56]  [00:08:56]What ends up happening is you have this idea, "Wow, we need to boost sales by X percent. Let's just put a discount in, and here are the margins and it actually is ok." But then what happens is you find yourself in that exact day and week in the following fiscal year and you're like, "Huh, I have to anniversary the thing that I did last year or else my numbers are going to get all screwed up." And so it really is this like heroin of a drug that everyone gets addicted to on the retail side and on eCommerce and everything. And so it's not just like the one time that you do it, you do kind of like get into bed with the discount devil eventually. [00:09:36]

Brian: [00:09:36] That was like right on point. I think that the idea that like you have to do it over and over and that's sort of what makes it a drug... Your customers expect it, and it gets worse and worse. And I think you even talked about this example later where like you were waiting to make a purchase and it went from like 10 percent off to 30 percent off to 70 percent off. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:10:00] {laughter} There's nothing worse than that.

Ingrid: [00:10:01] Yeah, how am I ever going to expect to pay full price at that brand ever again? Well, so you said something interesting in that the customer expects it, which is very true. However, speaking from just like the deep, deep trenches of being in these planning meetings, the sales expect it too. So there's an internal pressure to make sure that you're hitting those same numbers during that same fiscal week the following year. So it's this double expectation of your finance team and your CFO or whoever you're reporting performance into and the consumer. So it's this like much more complicated web of expectations for discounts.

Brian: [00:10:48] It's like mixing drugs. It's like you've got both of them, the uppers and the downers.

Phillip: [00:10:54] The straightest person I've ever known Brian Lange talking about what drug addiction is...

Brian: [00:11:00] Probably true.

Ingrid: [00:11:01] That needs its own podcast.

Brian: [00:11:02] I think it does, actually. There may be a forthcoming Insiders piece from our creative director, Jesse Tyler, who may be doing such a thing.

Ingrid: [00:11:13] Oh my gosh, yes.

Phillip: [00:11:15] Anyway, I love this. Love this. Love this conversation. I feel like, you know, we talk about it a lot. I'm really interested to hear more about some of the effects of that in future episodes of like, how do you wean yourself off of it and how do you sort of turn the tide? I think those are all things that we heard a lot about during this last Black Friday/Cyber Monday buildup is like, "Well, supply chain is going to be constrained, so we're not going to see discounts," and that just didn't turn out to be true at all.

Ingrid: [00:11:46] Totally.

Phillip: [00:11:47] Maybe not the 40 and 50 percent discounts, but we definitely still had discounting. But anyway, what a great episode.

Brian: [00:11:54] Yeah, that was good. Can I pick the next one too?

Phillip: [00:11:58] Yeah, go for it.

Brian: [00:11:59] Yes. Ok, so the next one was my favorite episode. That's why I wanted to do it. So I think that the episode with FindMine and Michelle was so eye opening to me about how organizations actually accomplish innovation.

Ingrid: [00:12:20] Or don't.

Brian: [00:12:21] Or don't. Exactly. And so Michelle, just an absolute genius about how to get people on board with things. Innovation is more about relationship than it is about anything else. So let's dive into clips actually also from you. But yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Ingrid: [00:12:40] And well before you dive into the clip, I just wanted to preface the perspective of this conversation comes from Michelle, who has spent many years on the inside at organizations, but now has spent a lot of her years as a CEO and Founder of software. And so she has had so much exposure to the inner workings of organizations trying to implement something that is really, really going to help them and just watching themselves either do that efficiently and effectively or not do it at all because of how much red tape there is and how disempowered their employees are. And so it was such an interesting take, and I agree. Michelle is one of the smartest people that I know. Go ahead. I just wanted to give the preface of who Michelle was and her perspective.

Brian: [00:13:27] Nice.

Ingrid from Episode 5: [00:13:31] I love that, and I think that speaks to those of you who are putting together innovation teams or reorganizing innovation teams internally is you need the people that are ears to the ground and open to finding the FindMines of the world, but then also are connected enough and have strong enough internal relationships who can actually make things like this happen. Not just like, "Oh, it's a great idea. We piloted it and here you go, boxed up and ready to use and drop whatever else you're currently doing and use this," and no one's going to fall into that. Everyone's going to be a little cranky or be a little bit confused and not have been brought along on the same journey that that innovation team was a part of. And so [00:14:18] creating that innovation team that has both the eye on what is going on technologically as well as those connections and how to then sort of mobilize, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, mobilize a team like yours, your actual FindMine sales team, to then go and speak to that supply chain manager or go speak to that email manager that's going to be a little bit cranky, but needs to feel like they're a part of this journey. I think that that is probably the best advice I've heard in a really, really long time. [00:14:51]

Brian: [00:14:54] Yeah, that might be some of the best advice I've heard in a long time, too. It's great, great, just like teasing out of the details there with Michelle, Ingrid. Nice job.

Ingrid: [00:15:05] Thanks. She made it easy.

Phillip: [00:16:07] Again, I think [00:16:12] when we were talking about channels, one under leveraged resource in any business is a team that trusts each other and can work together cohesively and [00:16:23] has those, and we call this culture a lot. But I think we usually mean it in like the macro sense, like a corporate culture. But teams have culture, right? And this idea that like we can accomplish a lot more together when we don't have to explicitly communicate everything, when we all have shared experience, and that shared experience helps us to have some shorthand. And there's depth there, and that only comes with time and experience and working together and in that level of trust that you have that everybody executes to the best of their ability. But we lose that, I think in our current era and our current environment, I think we lose that because there's just, you know, the amount of growth that's happened in our industry, the opportunities that are cropping up everywhere, people sort of the gravitational pull to like to go chase something. And yeah, I think that those things are... Yeah, we succeed together.

Brian: [00:17:25] And I think also agencies, they build out this whole world of like becoming trusted advisors of their clients, right? That's a whole thing for agencies is building trust and being able to speak in, and when you get into that role, you're beyond just you're a consultant or like someone that's giving advice or giving tips or whatever. You actually care about the other people on the other side and you're working towards their good, and you're doing your best to do that. And so being able to do that within an org, I think it's the same thing.  [00:18:05]You want everyone that's in that org to know that you genuinely care about their success and their goals and the things that they care about. And that is how you get things done. [00:18:17]

Ingrid: [00:18:17] Totally. And from the inside. So people have probably heard me on my soapbox about this a lot, but I think it's worth repeating is that whenever I hire an agency, whether they're a dev agency or a media agency or creative agency, whenever I hire an agency, I treat them as though they are full time employees of the brand. I give them their own access to our Slack channels and I fully fully integrate them. And I find that that is literally the only way to have a really successful, fully embedded partnership with an agency where they just feel like they're part of the the brand. And the great thing is, now, like with one of the agencies that I brought in at Nuun Hydration, our CEO and people who are not even like on my immediate team talk about them in public forums like, "Oh, the agency did X, Y and Z. They're doing this now," and I'm like, wow, you know that that combination and that integration is successful when people outside of your team are talking about what that agency is doing at the company.

Brian: [00:19:24] Awesome.

Phillip: [00:19:26] Another friend of ours, Alex Greifeld, would say, "Don't do anything of the nature if you can't hold out test it because you never if those results can be trusted. If they're influenced by other, by other external factors, you kind of have to test things in isolation. Very few people are willing to do that because nobody wants to, you know, take a step back to take three steps forward. And it's a shame.

Ingrid: [00:19:51] That's true. Alex is so smart. Hi, Alex.

Phillip: [00:19:54] Hi. All right. What do we have next?

Ingrid: [00:19:58] Ok, well, next is a conversation that I had with Garrett, who is one of the smartest people I know also. Man, we really have had some great guests on this season.

Brian: [00:20:09] Jealous. I'm jealous.

Ingrid: [00:20:10] So good, so good. Garrett is brilliant, and he is what I think he's the Amazon whisperer, and what he does is partner with companies to help them understand what the opportunities are on Amazon. And because they've developed a lot of these proprietary tools to be able to analyze Amazon businesses, they also actually help run Amazon businesses, which is what they do with us at Nuun. But so, yeah, the clip from Garrett, do you want to just go ahead and play it, and we can chat through it?

Phillip: [00:20:37] And as usual, because we're such fans, you have such a great way of setting up this part of the conversation. So it starts with you.

Ingrid from Episode 7: [00:20:45]  [00:20:46]Rule number one, two, and three in any type of consumer facing business is please don't assume that your consumer is stupid. {laughter} And if you're going to change the actual quality of either the ingredient or the item, or even just the shipping experience and all of that, just the whole lesson that we've even observed from Amazon is when you are singularly focused on the consumer experience, that is pretty much the key ingredient in a recipe for success. [00:21:19] And so that's just a good lesson. I think that applies broadly, but I love that that's a component in your analysis for determining whether a brand is going to continue growing or is having a tougher time.

Garrett from Episode 7: [00:21:35] Yeah, I think we've codified out over a thousand different kind of data points that can be just pulled from raw data, right? And then there's also taking a look with an analytical lens of what trends have been happening. So, you know, seeing a review count drop that makes a ton of sense, and that's just straight data numbers and bullets.

Phillip: [00:21:59] Data numbers and bullets. There's that part, but there's the other side. There's the emotional part and the emotional connection, and it's got to be good products, right? That's the other thing I think we always miss for every twenty great marketing interactions, they're only meaningful if you have a great product at the end. Ingrid, always great hearing you sort of lend your expertise in the context of another conversation

Brian: [00:22:26] And just call it like it is. That was funny.

Phillip: [00:22:30] Ain't that the truth?

Ingrid: [00:22:34] The next episode is one that it did what I hope almost any piece of content that I either create or consume does, which is spark intellectual curiosity and just trying to think about things even more and just kind of going back to that initial thing that we talked about in this episode, which is, you know, there's no time, there's no time to think and we just have to go and create and consume and react. And I think you're right, there's so much emphasis on creation and new in our current environment, but that's kind of opposite to how I operate within the world. I'm much more of a marinater. And after having published this and having had the conversation, this major light bulb came up for me around crypto and blockchain and Web3, and I just completely fell down the rabbit hole. So, you know, I'm less than probably two weeks from having had this conversation, and I've already like fully red pilled my way into... {laughter} In this clip, we are talking about how people exist within the blockchain or metaverse or Web3 environment, as opposed to in the real world or the physical world. So, yeah, here you go.

Ingrid from Episode 8: [00:25:01] While at the same time, [00:25:03] the things that are driving it, which is a sense of self-expression, community wanting to feel like you can belong or wanting to represent who you are, whether that's through showing how cool you are in knowing which NFT artists you're going to buy something from or how maybe rich you are because you're able to spend this much money on this thing that is clearly very expensive. It's all grounded in such human emotion, [00:25:40] and so many things that just drive are frankly, like still ape brains. But now we've been able to find and design and develop this thing that feels very out of this world, but all the things that we want to do in it are still so incredibly like cavemen.

Michael from Episode 8: [00:26:00] Totally, yeah. It comes just back to human behavior, right? Like that's really what drives anything, whether it's tech or cultural or anything. It's the same core wants and needs

Brian: [00:26:15] Probably nothing.

Phillip: [00:26:16] There. I knew you were going to say that. I just knew it. GM.

Brian: [00:26:22] GM.

Ingrid: [00:26:23] GM.

Phillip: [00:26:24] Let me ask you this. Ingrid, in the two weeks that in the intervening two weeks, what was your sort of gut reaction six months ago to all of this? Let's call it nonsense, but I'm absolutely as red pilled as you are. Maybe I've come back to Purple Pill a little bit. But I do think that this is the future. I do think we're extremely early, and so everything looks like an opportunity, which feels very exciting. But I'm curious where you were six months ago to where you are now in this whole world of crypto.

Ingrid: [00:26:57] Yes. So I was six months ago, so I actually owned crypto six months ago. I owned crypto. I bought it back when it went in like, bull, in what was it, 2015 or something like that. So that was when I initially just kind of was like, "Oh, I'm willing to lose this much money in learning about this," right? So that was kind of the impetus. It wasn't like, "Oh my God, everyone's getting rich and I have to get rich around it." It was definitely fueled by curiosity. And what better incentive to continue on that curiosity path than to put your own money into it? So I put aside enough money that it was interesting, but not enough that it would, I wasn't willing to lose it, right? And so here I am at the casino, the crypto casino. And then I kind of forgot about it, and every like once a year, once every six months or so, I'd like check my coin base and figure out what that had accumulated to whatever. And then I had listened to a few podcasts from like Scott Galloway around just the Metaverse. And you know, it was this year when Facebook turned into Meta and I was just and you know, anyone who is tangentially even involved in technology was kind of brought along for this conversation. So that definitely sparked my curiosity. And so I started learning a little bit more about, ok, what is blockchain and how is it verified and how is it different than the ordinary way that the internet works currently like Web 2.0? So that was kind of where I went. I was definitely I'm predisposed to being interested in technology. I also work in technology. I've been in technology my whole life and had the conversation with Michael. He's so incredibly smart. There was like another forty five minutes of conversation that we had after the recording where I was like, God damn it, I wish this was recording. This is so good.

Phillip: [00:28:56] So this conversation is actually like kind of what tipped you this go around?

Ingrid: [00:29:01] Oh yeah.

Phillip: [00:29:02] Oh wow.

Ingrid: [00:29:02] I mean, this conversation was so eye opening for me because it sparked all of these things that I'm just genuinely interested in. So [00:29:11] those things are just human behavior and what triggers us, what inspires us, how we create value around things, how we connect with other humans, that's the whole reason why we have a human centric retail podcast because I'm in retail, but I really care about the human experience. Also I'm an economics person. I love the way that human behavior impacts and changes the value of things and currency and the macro landscape of what this can all mean. [00:29:43] So it was just super, super interesting. And then the other piece is the technology piece. And I was talking about this with my husband, actually, and it reminded me of like early early internet days and how I would just spend an embarrassing amount of hours in front of a computer, just like trying to figure out, like taught myself HTML code just so I can have like the coolest AOL profile and just that like really, really exciting curiosity, red pill of meeting people that are like minded online and never having met them in person, never planning to meet them in person. But just creating these connections and friendships with people online, this is now like the adult me version going through that exact same experience. And it's super, super interesting and fun

Brian: [00:30:39] And nostalgic, apparently.

Ingrid: [00:30:39] And nostalgic in a really weird way. Yes.

Brian: [00:30:43] That's interesting.

Ingrid: [00:30:44] Deeply nostalgic.

Phillip: [00:30:46] That's so fascinating actually to hear you say it that way because it is. It's nostalgic for me too. And it feels like there's this opportunity again in our lifetimes to see something completely transformational happen all at one time.

Ingrid: [00:31:04] For the first time.

Phillip: [00:31:05] Right? And to now appreciate it from the perspective of, well, now I have, you know, it feels like an eon ago, 15, 20 years ago. It feels like, you know, like almost a dream. Oh, now I get to be lucid for this dream, right?

Ingrid: [00:31:20] Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Phillip: [00:31:23] It really is. And that's such an interesting like almost I'm going to say, like a sociological perspective to say, oh, look at how my own perspective is shifting. I'm watching myself in the way I take this in the way I react to it. I find that to be the most fascinating of all is how not just me, but in the people around me, how they're coming around to becoming amenable to the idea that monkey pictures might, you know, have some bearing on our future. But anyway, Brian, you had some final thoughts. I think you wanted to interject.

Brian: [00:32:01] Not really. {laughter}

Ingrid: [00:32:02] Brian is so not into this.

Brian: [00:32:06] No, no, no. I am into it. I just haven't explored it as far as probably either of you at this point. I think it's interesting, I think, Ingrid, you've nailed something here. There is like a very human element to this. This is more than just a technology thing. This is a cultural thing. This is like a we want to engage in new ways of doing things sort of thing. It's people want to get on board with like something that's new and interesting. The internet's been kind of the same for a while. And it has so much more potential and we're looking for ways to find that potential and. And so Web3, like all of the stuff, you know, eth and Bored Apes and all of this stuff, it's interesting. It's interesting.

Ingrid: [00:33:04] And you bring up a really good point that is actually, I'm going to combine Phillip's observation and yours into, I think another thing that I've witnessed here is the same individual experience that I am having in creating a new, more lucid experience of something I've had in the past and taking the things that I've learned and experienced into this new world, I think we are collectively as a society doing that with capitalism and government and centralized banks and financial systems. And it all just was developed in real time where it was like, "So we're going to have a currency, and now we're going to create, or we're going to create countries and we're going to have currencies and then we're going to create banks and then we're going to create the Fed and then we're going..." And we've stacked all of these things into our collective world experience. And [00:34:08] now we're in this place where we actually have with this new internet or this new existence, frankly, like this new universe where we can actually take, collectively, those lessons and that history and what worked really, really well and what actually didn't work so well and at least try to collectively create something much more lucid than we did the first time around. And that, I think, is both on the individual experience level and collectively as a human society. [00:34:41]

Phillip: [00:34:42] Wow. Whoa. That was deep.

Brian: [00:34:46] Shoot. That even supersedes the point I was going to make, I think which was that, like Pascale said, that everything happens because people can't stand being bored. Like literally everything happens because people can't stand being bored. And so by the time when we kind of cycle through technology and we've done it long enough, we have to do something new. We have to. We literally cannot even.

Ingrid: [00:35:12] Cannot even.

Brian: [00:35:13] Yeah. I think that that Web3 is basically us saying, "We can't even with the internet." It's become a drag. Shopping on Amazon is a drag. Everything has been a drag lately on the internet, and this is exciting.

Ingrid: [00:35:30] Yeah, we just need something with all the new, all the bullshit. We need something fun and exciting. And hey, if we can change the world while we're at it, then why not? Let's do it.

Phillip: [00:35:41] Exactly. Well, as a means of excitement. And you're to celebrate your new foray, your entrance into Web3 and all things crypto, you don't own an NFT yet, but you do have an ENS address, which I found by stalking your Twitter. You're finally following me like five years later, but that's a whole other thing.

Ingrid: [00:36:01] {laughter} My dormant Twitter

Phillip: [00:36:02] Took you five years to follow. It's fine. I'm not upset about it. I am sending you your very first NFT right now. It's a pirate dude.

Ingrid: [00:36:11] I'm so excited. Can I make it my Twitter profile so that I can be really legit.

Phillip: [00:36:16] You could. I mean, he's he's kind of ugly. That's your prerogative. I am spending $15 in gas to send this to you right now. So Merry Christmas, and many happy returns.

Ingrid: [00:36:30] Now I just have to figure out how to accept it. And then we're good.

Phillip: [00:36:34] Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of of this new web is that you don't get to accept anything. It just shows up. And now you've got a bunch of spam sitting in your... That's every new technology. It's just a new way to spam people.

Brian: [00:36:48] Also, true, also true.

Ingrid: [00:36:51] How hopeful, Phillip.

Brian: [00:36:52] Oh I like that. The only reason technological progress happens is so that people can spam people.

Phillip: [00:36:59] For cold outreach.

Brian: [00:36:59] Yes, it is. {laughter} Oh, that's what's going on.

Ingrid: [00:37:04] We can't end on that note. We can't do it.

Brian: [00:37:05] Oh no, that's true. We've built up too many filters at this point. It's all about the spam. Let's find a new way to do it. I love it.

Phillip: [00:37:12] We need new filters. That's what we need. But I think you're going to really enjoy this guy, Brian. I think you have to go. I think you're going to enjoy this little pirate dude. I'd love to see you. You can make it your Twitter avatar. Let's see what happens. I don't know.

Ingrid: [00:37:25] Perfect. Perfect. Well, I'm really excited. We're not done with the first season yet. Season 2 is going to be really exciting. I'm not even going to tease it here. You got to listen to the last episode of the first season first.

Brian: [00:37:39] Yeah.

Ingrid: [00:37:40] But yeah, thank you so much. This has been super, super fun, and happy holidays, everyone.

Phillip: [00:37:45] Yeah, same to you.

Brian: [00:37:46] Happy holidays.

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