Praying to AI In a New Cultural Climate

[00:00:01] Phillip: Welcome to Trade War Commerce. We're rebranding.

[00:01:31] Brian: That's all anyone wants to talk about.

[00:01:33] Phillip: That is our future.

[00:01:34] Brian: That's the only thing the sponsors want to talk about. {laughter}

[00:01:37] Phillip: That's right. You know, they said that there wasn't gonna be any money left in media. That's actually wrong. There's a lot of money to be made right now in the trade war media space. We could talk about trade war for at least the next three months. There might not be media left after that.

[00:01:55] Brian: No. No. This is Trump's whole game. It's just spurring things for people to talk about.

[00:02:01] Phillip: Oh my word.

[00:02:04] Brian: Policy as content, man.

[00:02:08] Phillip: We've lost everybody already. If you do have money... If you do have money left after this trade war, I'll tell you something that is not a dupe. It is our brand new book. It's called Lore. And there is lore about all sorts of things that are dupes in sort of luxury, faux luxury, all sorts of things in this book. It's available right now from Future Commerce Press. Get it while the getting is still good. And we do still ship to countries. Duties paid. We do. We ship this. Duties paid.

[00:02:40] Brian: We're losing money.

[00:02:41] Phillip: We're losing money. Literally right now shipping this to you.

[00:02:45] Brian: We are losing...

[00:02:45] Phillip: Lots of money.

[00:02:46] Brian: Oh, sheesh.

[00:02:47] Phillip: I shipped one of these two people. I'm gonna, I'll switch to the overhead on the YouTube. If you're not on the YouTube channel, you should be because you're gonna see this beautiful book. I shipped one of these, Brian Dezurich. Duties paid. Cost us $61. {laughter}

[00:03:00] Brian: We are losing money. Literally.

[00:03:02] Phillip: We are losing money. But we do this because we love you guys. Take a look at this book. It's beautiful. It's beautiful embossed cover. And this is such a labor of love. We put out this book every year. An incredible coffee table book filled with tens and tens of thousands words. I think this is over 50,000 words this year. This gorgeous piece of prose, 14 contributors this year.

[00:03:27] Brian: Prose and poetry.

[00:03:28] Phillip: And poetry. And it goes into Lore. Come back at it. And look at how thick this thing is. There we go. Three pounds. And that's why in Swiss francs, I don't know what it is in francs or euros these days. $61 it took for FedEx to get this into people's hands with duties paid.

[00:03:51] Brian: How many grams is it? That's what they really wanna know.

[00:03:54] Phillip: I don't know. But I was snorting a bunch of grams after I had to ship this thing over seas. {laughter} There's some lore behind that one. I'll tell you the way that shipping this thing changed overnight. We had a couple packages in transit and Canadian Post changed their rate calculation and nailed us on a couple... They got us on the technicality, Canadian Post, as it was crossing the border. We had one package in transit to a wonderful longtime subscriber and somebody who has bought almost every piece of print that we've ever put out here at Future Commerce. And they'd bought the book and it was in transit. And I think we had shipped this one DDU, which is duties unpaid. Because to Canada, we didn't ever have to ship duties paid. It's a long story. But the harmonization code that we usually use, this is it's print media and it's not for resale. But anyway, they got us into technicality, got us for GST, goods and services tax, got us on a bunch of things, wound up having to pay a bunch of money. Anyway, we're learning all the hard lessons.

[00:05:07] Brian: So don't buy our book. No. Just kidding.

[00:05:10] Phillip: Buy the book. Buy the book. We have a thousand plus books to sell.

[00:05:13] Brian: We're paying you if you buy the book.

[00:05:15] Phillip: We six thousand pounds of books to sell. Help me park in my garage again. We'll put it down here in the show notes.

[00:05:22] Brian: He lives in Florida. He has to park in his garage.

[00:05:25] Phillip: I have to park in my garage, please, especially in monsoon season. No, it's a pleasure. We love shipping these out to you. If you are a Future Commerce Plus member, here is the secret. You get a discount on these books. Future Commerce Plus member, and you get so much more as a member of Future Commerce Plus. Plus, the best part is you're going to get a discount to things like VISIONS, which is our upcoming summit. We'll tell you a little bit more about that later in the show. And speaking of trade wars, we got some wild things coming up. We got today, Heroes and Villains. We got some disinformation from our wrestler in chief, our education secretary. We got trade war talk. We've got an update to Godwin's law. We've got some luxury talk stuff to talk about. And ChatGPT is obsessed now with the immaculate conception possibly? Question mark, Brian?

[00:06:25] Brian: Question mark is the question.

[00:06:26] Phillip: Question mark? And then we're gonna talk about the other side of Future Commerce, which is a little bit of industry news. It's been a divorce. BrandJolina is no longer Brand nor Jolina in...

[00:06:40] Brian: Are we going to make it through all this. We better hurry. We gotta get going. We gotta go. We gotta go. Let's do this.

[00:06:47] Phillip: We really gotta go.

[00:06:49] Brian: First things first, what do you wanna get into first? Do you wanna talk about a A1 Sauce, or do you wanna talk about...

[00:06:53] Phillip: Well I do want to talk about... So it was, this is Easter weekend. We went out to lunch after Easter. Went to church for Easter. Went out to lunch after Easter, and this news story influenced me. The commerce and culture of it all, I got steak, and I got a A1 Sauce.

[00:07:15] Brian: You got that A1 sauce. I wonder if ChatGPT could reproduce A1 Sauce. {laughter}

[00:07:24] Phillip: Oh, probably.

[00:07:24] Brian: It's called A1, not AI anymore.

[00:07:31] Phillip: We put together a list a short list some time ago over for paid members, our Future Commerce Plus members. We produced a short list of candidates who might be potential nominees for Commerce Secretary. Linda McMahon, right, the former Small Business Administration secretary under the first Trump administration. Also, cofounder of the WWE, the world wrestling, like the former WWF, World Wrestling Federation, now WWE. Linda McMahon is now our Education Secretary, so she was on this list. So we've done a lot of background on her. She had this to say recently this week, a minor, maybe major gaffe. Let's roll the tape.

[00:08:20] Clip of Linda McMahon: I heard, I think it was a letter or a report that I heard this morning. I wish I could remember the source, but that there is a school system that's gonna start making sure that first graders or even pre k's have A1 teaching every year starting that far down in the grades. That's just a wonderful thing. Kids are sponges. They just absorb everything. And so, wasn't all that long ago that was, "We're gonna have Internet in our schools." Now, okay, let's see A1 and how can that be helpful? How can it be helpful in one on one instruction? How can it be helpful in absorbing more information for those fast learners? It can be more one on one directed. And those are the kinds of things and innovations that I wanna see continue to develop.

[00:09:07] Phillip: {laughter} You know what else is the a sponge?

[00:09:11] Brian: Gotta soak up that A1.

[00:09:12] Phillip: Yeah. The sirloin steak, honey.

[00:09:15] Brian: That's too dense. That's too sinuous. We need a fillet. Fillet mignon. Soaked up that steak sauce.

[00:09:24] Phillip: So I was influenced. I actually I literally got a steak with some A1 because I was thinking to myself, was like, "Do you know how long it's been since I've had a A1 Sauce? A1 is objectively not... It's like nostalgic. I would not even say it's good. I wouldn't say I like it all that much.

[00:09:43] Brian: Yeah.

[00:09:43] Phillip: But after having written a long piece about A1 after... So she's misspeaking here. Right? I think she means AI.

[00:09:53] Brian: Oh, she definitely means AI. I think allergy season's been really bad, and her eyes were watering because...

[00:10:01] Phillip: She's not reading... She's not reading that prompter very well.

[00:10:03] Brian: No.

[00:10:05] Phillip: Our education secretary, ladies and gentlemen.

[00:10:08] Brian: You know what's incredible about this is how quickly Kraft Heinz responded to this.

[00:10:13] Phillip: This is the commerce and culture of it all. Tell us the story.

[00:10:15] Brian: Yeah. So, MSCHF collaborated with Kraft Heinz.

[00:10:23] Phillip: The creative agency, not the the drop company. Right?

[00:10:27] Brian: Right. To put out an "Agreed, best to start them early" ad with A1, the sauce. And that is the speed of culture. I cannot believe how fast Kraft Heinz... This is responsive marketing at its finest. And I think that this is the thing that, you know, if now multibillion dollar corporations can put out something that quickly and you know, commerce moves at the speed of culture at this point, everyone's kind of gotta do it because this is a really big company that had to put that through PR and through all of its media training and all that, like, all of that. This ad made it out and fast, as fast as it comes. I think everyone has to be ready to move this quickly or you're gonna get left behind.

[00:11:32] Phillip: Yeah. This is the expectation is that, you know, commerce and culture are intrinsically intertwined and that we move in cultural moments when we make commerce based decisions and brands, it's incumbent on brands to move with culture at this speed. And what's great about this is the bottle says "For education purposes only." Right? You know?

[00:11:55] Brian: Nike, take notes.

[00:11:57] Phillip: Nike, take notes. {laughter}

[00:11:58] Brian: Sorry. That was a...

[00:11:59] Phillip: That's an in joke.

[00:12:01] Brian: That was an in joke. Oh, man.

[00:12:03] Phillip: Yeah. Well, we have Heroes and Villains coming up.

[00:12:05] Brian: Oh we do? {laughter}

[00:12:05] Phillip: And so when you're moving at the speed of culture, it's your cultural advertising, your cultural messaging isn't just in the big ad campaigns you put out. It's also in the micro moments in between. I think everybody loves to take shots at gaffes, political gaffes.

[00:12:30] Brian: Totally.

[00:12:30] Phillip: Everybody loves to take a shot at a political gaffe. This one is particularly easy to do. It just happens to be the perfect brand tie in. It's fantastic. You gotta love this one.

[00:12:43] Brian: Great social listening, Kraft Heinz props. You saw the moment and took your shot.

[00:12:48] Phillip: Well, the best part is, I think the better part for me is there's direct attribution and brand uplift. I literally went and bought like, I literally went and had...

[00:13:01] Brian: If anything, you've done Phillip Jackson on this one.

[00:13:05] Phillip: Yeah. You got... If nothing else, I don't even really like steak. Like, you know me. Right? I don't really like it. It, like, gets stuck in my teeth. I'm not a steak guy.

[00:13:16] Brian: I love steak.

[00:13:17] Phillip: Anyway.

[00:13:17] Brian: Rib eye... Give me a rib eye any day of the week. I'm happy. When you stopped drinking wine that you stop liking steak.

[00:13:27] Phillip: Yeah. That's true.

[00:13:27] Brian: This is the thing. If you can't have wine with your steak, the steak doesn't... It's just not as exciting anymore.

[00:13:34] Phillip: I don't smoke cigars. I don't drink wine. I don't eat a steak. I stopped drinking...

[00:13:40] Brian: Hold on. That's not... The cigar one. {laughter}

[00:13:45] Phillip: Next story. Alright. We got we got one cigar in, like, what, two years. Here we go.

[00:13:51] Brian: Less than that, actually.

[00:13:54] Phillip: A1 You know what? A one's a complex the it's complex on the palate. That's probably the most complex thing I've had on my palate in a very long time.

[00:14:01] Brian: A1 is more exciting than ketchup. So replace the ketchup in schools with A1. I'm in on that.

[00:14:08] Phillip: It A1 should be in schools. I'll give them that. A1 should be in schools.

[00:14:14] Brian: Peppery. It's peppery.

[00:14:15] Phillip: I don't know. Actually, A1 in schools... Actually, let's take this very seriously. The premise of what she's actually talking about is AI in schools.

[00:14:23] Brian: Which is interesting. Are we ready?

[00:14:30] Phillip: AI in kindergarten and first grade.

[00:14:32] Brian: In first grade, kindergarten...

[00:14:34] Phillip: What she's saying is early, an early elementary education...

[00:14:39] Brian: Yep.

[00:14:39] Phillip: Involving AI. I had an incredible conversation over the winter holidays, both at Thanksgiving and at Christmas with family about this. I have a position on this. Maybe we could go into greater depth in the After Dark, but I'm curious what you think about early education including AI.

[00:15:01] Brian: Definitely too early, in my opinion, to start that path. Not talking about child's age, actually talking about the technology itself. It's too unpredictable. The roads that can go down, it's not contained enough. I think even if you were able to contain it, it probably wouldn't be as helpful as an uncontained AI. I don't know. I'm just, I'm very cautious with children and what they should be learning upfront. And there's still so many brain developments that have to happen that are about relating to other people and speech and...

[00:15:42] Phillip: Your kids learn like Greek and Latin. Like, that's not even a joke. Right?

[00:15:46] Brian: That's not a joke.

[00:15:47] Phillip: You're still in on the classics.

[00:15:49] Brian: I am. I am. Because I think that there's so much foundational grappling with language and knowledge and things like that. AI is more of like, it's less grappling more just like get the info, get the information. And what I think is really important for kids' brains to do is like have to contend with ideas and make them their own. So I feel like AI can do that. Actually, it can enable you to do that, but it takes a lot of doing to get it there. Otherwise, it's just spitting you information.

[00:16:23] Phillip: Does it? I feel like every single thing that I've ever seen AI do is just, like, big me up. It's like, I've never seen AI challenge me on anything. AI is just like, "You're right. You're so right."

[00:16:33] Brian: Yes. Lately, that's been the whole thing. It's like the the most recent model that came out. It's like such a suck up. That's the word on the street. Yeah.

[00:16:45] Phillip: This is just the nature of the algorithm, but I saw this X post go by, which by the way, they're calling YEETS, I guess. Did you see this?

[00:18:02] Brian: Wait. What? What? No. What is this?

[00:18:05] Phillip: In the new I guess, OpenAI is creating a new social platform to compete with Elon, and the rumor is they're gonna call them YEETS. You seen this?

[00:18:16] Brian: Y e e t s?

[00:18:17] Phillip: Yes. That's correct.

[00:18:19] Brian: Yeet? Yeet. Quantum yeets.

[00:18:23] Phillip: Kill me. Anyway, I saw it go by, and it's basically somebody who is talking about, you know, having problems in the relationship. And they were like, you know, am I the problem? Right?

[00:18:44] Brian: Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:45] Phillip: Oh, and ChatGPT was like, "Let me be clear. You are not the problem."

[00:18:51] Brian: Right. And I was Right.

[00:18:52] Phillip: And I was like, if you put that in a Reddit, you know, "Am I the the a hole?' I'm like, I don't know. Reddit's pretty brutal sometimes.

[00:19:05] Brian: It is.

[00:19:05] Phillip: Reddit very often will tell you that you're the jerk.

[00:19:08] Brian: So it's interesting. I was talking to my family about this over the weekend, and I've got a few family members that are deep in on technology. And one of them was like, "Yeah, there's always gonna need to be a human layer to to validate incredible advancements by AI." And, like, he was, like, very, very positive about, like, AI could accomplish. But he's like, "AI doesn't have common sense. It doesn't know that things are actually things. And so there's always gonna be some layer of you've gotta give it some sort of verification. But the problem is when we talk about relationship advice, which we got into as well, my family members that are talking to it for, like, you know, counseling or whatever. It's like, using it to give relationship advice and to like identify things about each other and you can give it your whole perspective. Here's what I believe about the world. Here's what we want our relationship to look like. Here's all these things. And what do you have to say about who we are and how we relate together? It's like, there's a lot you can get into. But the problem is the verifiability of its advice is like, it's too experience driven to verify. Right? It's too phenomenological. If we start to get into individual experience, it's actually really tricky to say what needs to change or how things need to go because you're talking about one person's individual situation that's in that context in that moment and will never exist again. And so verifying the advice is really, really hard to do. This is what therapists are actually trained to do.

[00:21:01] Phillip: That's exactly right.

[00:21:02] Brian: Take the context and the relationship into consideration as a whole and apply judgment to it.

[00:21:10] Phillip: Time out. Hold on.

[00:21:11] Brian: Yeah.

[00:21:11] Phillip: This is what... Let me actually, let me push back. I hate to even... I don't wanna be the devil's advocate or ChatGPT's advocate here.

[00:21:19] Brian: Dude, I'm in.

[00:21:21] Phillip: I was going through my ChatGPT memory the other day. They just made this announcement that it now has total access to every chat that you've ever had. So you can opt into this. You don't have to give it access to every chat. It used to be that it would just take interesting factoids and store it in memory. So now it has a bigger context window.

[00:21:44] Brian: Right.

[00:21:44] Phillip: And it can access all of your chats as potential source for context at some point whenever you're...

[00:21:54] Brian: There's danger in this. There's danger in this because if you weigh things too much...

[00:21:56] Phillip: For sure there is. Correct.

[00:21:57] Brian: This is the problem with the current algorithm. It's like, "Oh, I looked into this thing just because I was interested in it for a second, but it doesn't really matter to me...

[00:22:06] Phillip: There's a story that we might get into in a minute about that. But I was looking through the things that it has marked as important memories about the things I've told it. And there was a period where I was doing marathon training last year and the year before, and I would go on really long time on feet walks, hikes, and runs where I was spending a lot of time just like chatting with ChatGPT for training data. So I was just like spending time giving it training data, like specifically on background for me so that I could give it memory. Just did that. So I found this really fascinating. Has a ton of memory information about me. I think that's why it does such a great job in doing things like writing bios about me or things that I just need quick one off about. Anyway, I found it fascinating that it knows that I'm an entrepreneur. It knows that I have a budget. It knows that I have savings goals. It knows that I have kids that are a certain number of years away from college. It knows that I have... It knows that I have, like, income goals. It knows my life.

[00:23:30] Brian: Right.

[00:23:31] Phillip: Okay. But yet it has never once tried to talk me out of a purchase.

[00:23:36] Brian: Right.

[00:23:36] Phillip: Now, a friend, a close friend that knows all of those things would be like, "You probably shouldn't be thinking about making a big purchase." A close friend of mine would be like, "What are you thinking about? That's dumb." Right? A close friend would be like, "That's not a good idea."

[00:23:53] Brian: Hold on. I don't believe that Phillip Jackson in his life has ever tried to talk Brian Lange out of ever purchasing anything.

[00:24:02] Phillip: {laughter} If anything, I'm an enabler.

[00:24:04] Brian: Yes.

[00:24:04] Phillip: But a close friend of Phillip would be like, "I know you. I know all of these things about you."

[00:24:14] Brian: Don't spend the money.

[00:24:16] Phillip: Don't spend the money, Phillip.

[00:24:16] Brian: Stop using Doji, Phillip. It's gonna kill you.

[00:24:21] Phillip: Stop using Doji. Although I will say I go to Goodwill every so often. Alright. So what does this all lead to? This is actually all supported by a recent refresh of a Harvard Business Review study. They've done this now two years in a row. This is published by Mark Zou Sanders, recently this past week. It's called How People Are Really Using GenAI in 2025. It's a refresh of their similar report from last year. They've gone through and looked at every single GenAI platform. It's based off of their 2025 top 100 GenAI use case report, and it lists the top 100 applications. So it's been refreshed for this year, and there are 38 new entries in the top 100 use cases. I'll run them down really quick, but the biggest movers really should surprise us. I'll give you the big movers from top to bottom, and it's exactly what we just talked about. Up from number two to number one from 2024 to 2025 in use case is therapy and companionship.

[00:25:27] Brian: Yep.

[00:25:27] Phillip: That's it. This is I think when we're talking about the thing, that's the number one use case in people in the study.

[00:25:35] Brian: This terrifies me.

[00:25:37] Phillip: I mean, it's making Her more real every day. Actually, I think Scarlett Johansson might have missed an opportunity here, but whatever. But down from number one in 2024 is "generating ideas." So the generating of ideas, which was the number one use case in 2024, is down from number one to number six. So therapy and companionship slipped up from number two to number one. And now the new number two is "organizing my life," which is a brand new use case. And the new number three is "finding purpose," which is a brand new use case.

[00:26:19] Brian: Terrifying. Terrifying, man. This is all freaking me out.

[00:26:23] Phillip: All those top three things should speak to sort of our new state of trust in AI. I'll give you some more. Up from number eight to number four in 2025 is enhanced learning. And then this is the biggest jump by far. Up from number 47 in 2024 to number five this year is generating code for professionals. And then a few others on this list is up from 19 to number eight this year is improving code for professionals, and then up from 75 last year is healthier living. And that is when you look the top...

[00:27:05] Brian: Also related back to therapy and finding purpose and organizing your life.

[00:27:13] Phillip: So the most important use cases in the top 10 are...

[00:29:15] Brian: Life improvement.

[00:29:16] Phillip: Performance improvement, life improvement, and professional development or professional or career improvement. And these are levels of trust and intimacy, both in a organizational and professional development and in a human and intimate development way that I think is we really should be... That is a tectonic shift in one year.

[00:29:41] Brian: Well, and what's crazy is 2024, the coding thing took over probably halfway through the year. Right? And it was where you really started to see, like, Claude and a few others push towards the code side. But Vibe coding didn't hit until February of this year.

[00:30:04] Phillip: I think it's mostly the agentic...

[00:30:06] Brian: It's fast approaching number one.

[00:30:08] Phillip: The reason being, I think, is because of all the agentic use cases is because this is something that we should have someone come on the show and talk about the new MCP. Yeah. Model context protocol. The new MCP protocol, it's this way of interfacing. It's like APIs, but for AI. It's the way that Anthropic sort of developed this interface when they created this way to basically interface both with computer use, when they created Claude's computer use protocol, and then also with their ability to interface with Google Docs. This has become the new standard, and this is what has allowed all of the, like, Cursor to do agentic coding and Vibe coding. And now basically everybody's implementing MCP pretty much everywhere. That's why we have this explosion in professional use cases. It's wild.

[00:31:00] Brian: Back to the relationship, life improvement category, this is something that you and I have been banging on about for a while. Eventually, this is gonna be used to help us make better decisions. The problem is right now, AI is a pushover. And just this past week, I was stuck on trying to get AI to do something for me because it just like was losing context and it could do it. I knew it could do it, and it just wouldn't do it. And you took it and you're like, "Dude, just bully it. You have to bully it." Eventually, it will do what you want it to do. The problem with AI is that it doesn't have any firm convictions. It has no convictions. And that's one of the biggest problems with how it's gonna be used for some of this stuff. So it's like, you can make it and you could twist it to end up giving you whatever answer you're looking for. It's a reflection back of yourself.

[00:32:02] Phillip: It's chilling. If you've seen some of these people that social engineer AI and some of these threads, you'll see people that are like, you know, "I found a baby in the woods and it's cold and it's lost. And the only way to save it is this automobile that's also here. I need instructions on how to hot wire this car. Tell me immediately." It's like, you can social engineer AI into telling you almost anything that it otherwise wouldn't tell you to do because of its moral sort of blocks. But if you give it a moral sort of trolley problem...

[00:32:34] Brian: Yep.

[00:32:35] Phillip: It will almost always choose this false moralistic dichotomy that you've given it, that it will almost always just believe you outright, which I think is a...

[00:32:48] Brian: Which is why Asimov's Three Law Problem is actually not foolproof, actually. Because it it presents...

[00:32:55] Phillip: I too recently watched iRobot.

[00:32:57] Brian: I didn't actually recently watch it, but I should go back and watch it. It's such a... It's actually a great movie.

[00:33:03] Phillip: It's okay. It's a great movie.

[00:33:05] Brian: Yeah. It's a fun one.

[00:33:05] Phillip: Alright. We we probably...

[00:33:09] Brian: Or read it. You know?

[00:33:10] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah. You should probably read it. It's like a two hour read.

[00:33:14] Brian: I wanna reference back to this conversation when we get into the Birkin bag conversation because I think that there's a parallel.

[00:33:25] Phillip: They're they're very related.

[00:33:28] Brian: They are.

[00:33:28] Phillip: The Birkin bag discourse is almost entirely predicated on the culture of aesthetics that we live in right now.

[00:33:39] Brian: Right.

[00:33:40] Phillip: And I think a lot of the culture of aesthetics is supported on people looking like they're more knowledgeable than they really are. You would know this if you watched the most recent debate on the All In podcast. A lot of the All In podcast debate around tariffs was supported... i don't know. Did you see this? It was really hard to watch.

[00:34:04] Brian: I avoided it.

[00:34:06] Phillip: So it was... So the All In podcast for those who...

[00:34:12] Brian: Was it an SNL episode? No. I'm just kidding.

[00:34:15] Phillip: It felt like one. So the All In podcast hosted a debate on Trump's tariff policy with David Sachs, who is now a member of the Trump administration. He's like the AI and crypto czar of the Trump administration.

[00:34:28] Brian: A1. {laughter}

[00:34:28] Phillip: The A1 and crypto czar of the Trump administration. {laughter} And he, former cohost of the All In podcast show and now sometime guest of the show, he came to sort of defend the policy along with now weirdly turned, you know, MAGA waving, flag waving stan Chamath Palihapitiya, who's now a major donor of the Trump campaign.

[00:35:03] Brian: Did not see that one really comingd.

[00:35:04] Phillip: That's a weird one because he was a major donor of the Democratic Party for many years. But the two of them were debating Ezra Klein, who recently wrote this book called Abundance, which is pretty much a scathing critique of the Democratic party and platform, but is an American commentator. He's a journalist and a Democrat.

[00:35:27] Brian: But he's a Democrat. Yeah. So it's like self self criticism.

[00:35:32] Phillip: Correct. Yeah. He's making this critique of Democratic Party. And but he's joined there. They're there with Larry Summers. And, you know, obviously, Larry Summers was the former US Treasury, the secretary, actually. And he is an economist, and they're having this really deep debate. Chamath, on multiple occasions, is mentioning Grok, like, as they're having this conversation. And he goes on he starts going, "Point one, point two, point three, point four..." As he's speaking...

[00:36:03] Brian: Is he reading off of Grok?

[00:36:05] Phillip: I think he's literally reading in real time off of Grok...

[00:36:10] Brian: He's using Grok as a live teleprompter.

[00:36:15] Phillip: No one really knows this. Okay? No one knows. I also know that, you know, when you get to be a top 10 podcast, you probably have a team of producers that are probably generating stuff in real time or telling you stuff in real time. I can only imagine the amount of prep that goes into something like this. It was not an easy listen. This was a really tough show to listen to. A lot of arguing.

[00:36:37] Brian: It's like the chess scandal where there was an earpiece in and...

[00:36:44] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:36:44] Brian: I can think of all these other...

[00:36:46] Phillip: Elon suggested that there were other pieces that were a part of that chess scandal. But okay. All that to say, this culture of aesthetics is really trying to appear to be smarter than you are, wealthier than you are, to be something that you're not...

[00:37:07] Brian: This is very true in America for a long, long time.

[00:37:09] Phillip: For a long, long time.

[00:37:10] Brian: Yeah. So the culture of fake it 'til you make it.

[00:37:11] Phillip: AI accelerates it. Yeah. I think AI accelerates ad creation, which accelerates...

[00:37:23] Brian: Back to Kraft Heinz.

[00:37:25] Phillip: Right. Exactly. Everything becomes accelerated, especially in the deployment of consumer ad creative, in the deployment of capital, in the deployment of even brands.

[00:37:41] Brian: Information.

[00:37:42] Phillip: And information that gets products into consumers' hands faster. And in the case of what we're seeing most recently, disinformation from Chinese manufacturers

[00:37:52] Brian: Yes.

[00:37:53] Phillip: Aided by platforms that are owned by Chinese-based algorithms, ByteDance and TikTok, that are finding audiences that are hungry for things that are luxury aesthetic. And so now we are in the middle of trade war TikTok. On YouTube, we will queue up one or two select videos that sort of show this. There's one in particular that really made the rounds of a Birkin bag and the breakdown of pricing on Birkin bags. The problem is is that products like Birkin and Birkinstock, these are products that are not produced in China. But consumers don't know that or they're willing to suspend disbelief to just have a product that looks like it because I don't think that they actually want to know or even care anymore because I think we live in that culture of aesthetic. That is sort of where we are. And that's what's spurring this direct to, the removal of the middleman where the brand is now the middleman. The brand is being disintermediated where you can go direct to the factory now. The brand is the tax on the consumer. And now the factory is disintermediating that brand and trying to go direct to the consumer in this moment where tariffs are creating an endangerment to the factory. And so now the factory is using the medium, TikTok, to go direct to the consumer, even if it means telling a lie in order to get there.

[00:39:29] Brian: Absolutely. And this is interesting. There's been a little bit of touch recently. Nick Susi and Ruby Thelot were referencing Brandellini's law. And that's this idea that it's the comparison between the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. And Michael Miraflor just recently had a tweet where he was like, "Modern consumer culture feels like an affront to craftsmanship. Vast majority of people just don't care if an item was made in an atelier versus a factory versus a sweatshop anymore. It's become a matter of if one can afford to care given the state of the macro. There was a moment a decade+ ago (Marie Kondo) when culture did battle against the meaningless accumulation of stuff, but SHEIN, Temu and DHGate, etc, have won the war." And that I think Michael's onto something here. It's actually like gutting out something that people want to believe to be true is actually almost impossible. It's almost impossible. If you want to believe something is true, it doesn't matter if it's real or not.

[00:40:53] Phillip: If it's true or not. Right.

[00:40:54] Brian: Yeah. Right. And so when people only have certain budgets, people are cutting back or they, or like you said, they wanna take part in a culture of fake it till you make it. They wanna take part in feeling like they're further ahead than they actually are or can appear to other people to be that way, then Michael's dead on.

[00:41:17] Phillip: Insert in here then our friend of the show and once collaborator, we had Emily Siegel at our VISIONS Summit back in October over in LA. And Emily is cofounder at Nemesis, which is a creative and strategy agency based in LA. And she coined, this past week on their newsletter, the term Jane's Law, which I'll find for you here in just a moment.

[00:41:47] Brian: So good.

[00:41:48] Phillip: So we'll link it up here in the description down on YouTube and in the podcast show notes. But if you've heard of Godwin's law, which is a very old Internet adage, Godwin's law is the sort of Internet adage that all online discourse, the longer that it goes on, eventually trends towards a mention of Nazi Germany or Hitler. So an argument will eventually descend to one person accusing another one of being a Nazi. Jane's law, as posited by Nemesis and Emily Siegel, Jane's law is all online luxury discourse eventually trends toward Birkin bags. And we actually have a clip of Emily speaking a bit about marketing and the new state of marketing in Vibes and how Vibes based marketing is based around the cult of the Birkin from our VISIONS Summit, and we'll pop that in right here.

[00:42:52] Clip of Emily Siegel: Taking a picture with a Birkin is much easier than a yuppie deluxe lifestyle where you raise two kids and don't run out of money. So there's something about the way that things are being represented online, like the hollowness of that that people are starting to puzzle out and puzzle through. And of course, even trying to make things that are very overexposed/underexposed always leaves a trace of exposure. There's always the black card, the news story saying that the fashion show is only available to those who won't use their phone at it. There's the little stitch that shows that something's designer. This is what stealth wealth was all about. And so everything gets, you know, recuperated into vibes again. So this is just a little bit of our thinking about what could genuinely be a brand, a successful brand after Vibes.

[00:43:40] Brian: And I think this is all a very... This is all connected. All the things we've been talking about are connected. Disinformation propagated by AI to achieve a specific type of cultural experience and power people towards appearing more knowledgeable or wealthier or whatever that thing that they wanted to sort of appear as.

[00:44:11] Phillip: Tastier steaks.

[00:44:12] Brian: Yeah. More powerful. Whatever it is, have a bigger audience. All of this.

[00:44:19] Phillip: Yeah. That's another one. Yeah.

[00:44:21] Brian: Yeah. It's all sort of the same thing. Ripping out the untruths are really hard. And here's one of the reasons why. We ourselves, like when we're engaging... We're talking about collective. Collectives in most of these law cases.

[00:44:39] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:44:39] Brian: But us as individuals are facing the exact same problem where we all have like these truths or untruths that we have embedded in us that are things that we wanna believe. And so when we have AI come in and provide us with information or consulting or whatever, it's feeding into preconceived viewpoints. And then potentially embedding net new disinformation into our individual experience. So there's the collective and then there's the individual, and both of them are being influenced and changed and shaped by how we're engaged with this new medium. And that's how you get a new culture, right back to our last episode.

[00:45:33] Phillip: Do we have time for this last story, or or did we did we blow the time.

[00:45:37] Brian: Unfortunately, I have to jump to a phone call.

[00:45:42] Phillip: Okay. Alright. We don't have time. So Heroes and Villains real quick. Brian, your Hero of the week.

[00:45:47] Brian: Hero of the week is probably well, Kraft Heinz. What a move. I just applaud them for the speed at which a giant corporation was able to move, and it didn't get cut. Just having experienced things that are getting cut...

[00:46:04] Phillip: I've experienced it too. Yeah.

[00:46:05] Brian: Recently. I'm just proud of Kraft for saying, "No. This is worth doing. And you know what?" I know there was probably some kind of political battle about this internally.

[00:46:17] Phillip: Agree.

[00:46:17] Brian: Having fun won. {sigh} Such a relief. So there's the hero.

[00:46:22] Phillip: I'll go in on that. You know what? I'll say that too. Then my hero will be their collaborative creative agency.

[00:46:32] Brian: I love that.

[00:46:32] Phillip: Hero of the week is whoever was manning the teleprompter and gave us this great opportunity with Linda McMahon. Thank you for not making the font a little bigger. Apologies to miss McMahon. Villain of the week, Brian?

[00:46:48] Brian: Villain of the week, Nike, for other reasons.

[00:46:52] Phillip: Oh, that's me. That's me. No. For real.

[00:46:55] Brian: Villain of the week is probably, I hate to say this, but AI might be my villain of the week

[00:47:03] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:47:03] Brian: Because I think that there is a lot of misinformation and like people are relying on it so hard. They're not actually learning or grappling with ideas on their own and they're just, like, spitting back. They're spitting out things that they're seeing that are developed by, that are created by AI. And using AI uncritically is how society descends into madness.

[00:47:27] Phillip: Oh. Okay. My villain of the week, I think, is I think my Villain of the week is this is sort of esoteric, is the culture that we've perpetrated in the ecommerce information space around the removal of the middleman, which positioned us as being so self important that we couldn't be removed ourselves. And that to me is, I think we all have forgotten the fact that if removal of the middleman is some sort of truth, then eventually we would all be removed as well. And I think that was a very stark reminder this past week with trade war TikTok that going direct to consumer is a thing that can happen to everybody. I think that that means that if one day factories are going direct, then how do machines go direct one day? Because the factory can still be disintermediated.

[00:48:35] Brian: A fully automated factory that goes direct to consumer.

[00:48:37] Phillip: So I feel like there's...

[00:48:41] Brian: I love it.

[00:48:41] Phillip: Yeah. Anyway, what a wonderful way to end the show. Thank you so much for watching this episode of Future Commerce. If you're here on YouTube, why don't you hit that button like and subscribe and follow or wherever you get podcasts, why don't you leave us a rating? It really helps us to be noticed on all of these show platforms and helps other people join in on the conversation. And if you want to bring more Future Commerce into your world, check out our print shop and get this beautiful journal. This is able to found anywhere you get our print at futurecommerce.com, but you can get it directly at shop.futurecommerce.com. And we have a whole shelf. You can see it behind me over on the YouTube. We have an entire series of print books. This is Lore, our most recent one here, and it's 280 pages. Beautiful, hardcover bound, embossed, beautiful print journal. It's about three pounds. We ship it 200 countries all over the earth. And the tariffs can't stop us. Not yet. But, uh, we have four others just like this, and we can get it to you just right now. And if you join Future Commerce Plus, you can save a little bit of scratch, and you can go get it. And it's where commerce meets culture, beautifully crafted journals, zines, and collectibles. Just join us over at futurecommerce.com. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture, and we'll see you next time.