The Mind-to-Market Future is Infinitely Shoppable

Brian: [00:01:50] Phillip, I've got something to stump you. You ready? Ready for this?

Phillip: [00:01:53] Ready. I'm ready. Let's go.

Brian: [00:01:55] What movie features Adrien Brody...

Phillip: [00:01:59] Okay.

Brian: [00:01:59] Sigourney Weaver...

Phillip: [00:02:01] Mhmm.

Brian: [00:02:01] Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Jesse Eisenberg, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michael Pitt, and Cherry Jones?

Phillip: [00:02:21] Ugh. Argyle? I don't know. This is crazy talk. This doesn't even make sense. This is

Brian: [00:02:27] William Hurt?

Phillip: [00:02:28] This is some Netflix abomination that they came up with.

Brian: [00:02:32] No. Nope.

Phillip: [00:02:32] It's like an algorithmically generated click cast.

Brian: [00:02:34] People are screaming at their YouTube.

Phillip: [00:02:37] Okay. Give it to me.

Brian: [00:02:37] It is The Village.

Phillip: [00:02:40] Shut up. That's so... I forgot that Sigourney Weaver's in The Village. That's a phenomenal movie.

Brian: [00:02:46] The most star studded, heavy hitter movie. Jesse Eisenberg has a very, very old role in that. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:02:54] That's true.

Brian: [00:02:54] It is wild.

Phillip: [00:02:56] That's true. I forgot the big twist in that movie is that Jesse Eisenberg exercises his preference shares over Adrian Brody. And he's like, you know, "Always reads the contract." And then Adrian Brody runs away and falls in a pit.

Brian: [00:03:13] Yeah. He does. And to Michael Pitt. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:03:16] {laughter} He runs away. Yeah. And then Trent Reznor's soundtrack is, like, booming in the background.

Brian: [00:03:23] That sounds about right.

Phillip: [00:03:25] I would pay for that movie. I would pay for a social network remake of The Village. People hated that movie, by the way.

Brian: [00:03:35] They did. Here's why. Because it was supposed to be a big twist. It was supposed to be scary.

Phillip: [00:03:44] It was a huge twist. What are you talking about?

Brian: [00:03:45] No. I know. But it was supposed to be M Night's next scary movie. And everybody was like, "{whomp whomp} It's not real. It's fake." I've rewatched this movie a couple times with my kids now. It's actually not a bad movie. People hated it.

Phillip: [00:04:01] Let me tell you something. The Village might be the most prescient movie of our time in the next five to seven years because there will be communes who cut themselves off from civilization given the current state of things.

Brian: [00:04:16] Yes. One hundred percent. This is what I was thinking while I watched it.

Phillip: [00:04:19] The world as it stands right now, there will be people who are like, "We do not want to live in this world anymore." And they will create their own mythology, and they will cut themselves off from the outside world. And monsters will exist again because we will have to invent them because we have no world left of magic or myth. And that's what happens.

Brian: [00:04:40] Oh no, no. There is magic and myth. There is magic and myth. Imagine talking about like, let's pretend you were raised in that society, and you were told that there are magical objects out there that are evil...

Phillip: [00:04:54] Yes.

Brian: [00:04:54] ...that you could see into, and wait. Hold on. This is starting to sound like existing fairy tales.

Phillip: [00:05:04] Yeah. Yes. We have existing fairy tales.

Brian: [00:05:11] Magical spells. Magic mirrors.

Phillip: [00:05:14] We have them.

Brian: [00:05:16] Speak it, and it will be done. Think it, and it will be done. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:05:21] We have those today. I have my Alexa. It is a magical thing that works every single day.

Brian: [00:05:27] Yep.

Phillip: [00:05:28] People don't get enough use out of these devices, to be honest with you. I've had mine for ten years because we've been doing this for almost ten years. And I got mine right when we started this. And I use that thing for commerce all the time. I reorder stuff with it. I search for items with it. It's magical and powerful. Anyway, welcome to the show. We will not have a big twist, but we will do a little something new. We're gonna cover some news here right at the beginning. Got a bunch of news this week. It's been retail earning season, obviously. We have a check-in on our predictions. We got the age of agglomeration. Big news coming out of Klaviyo this week. I think a big pivot for their business. That's a twist. That's a Shyamalan twist we didn't see coming. And then we've got, it seems like everyone including, I don't know, it's like freaking manatees are getting the bird flu or something. We all have to stand in lines because of it. Netflix is trying to come into the real world while everyone else is plugging into the online. We're gonna check-in on a new piece written by Alex Greifeld for Future Commerce Insiders. At the end, we're gonna debut a new segment, so stay tuned to the very end if you wanna figure out who the heroes and the villains of the week are at Future Commerce. But before we do, wanna remind you, we got our brand new book. It's called Lore.

Brian: [00:06:54] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:06:54] It's the new journal by Future Commerce Press, and it is here. It's 280 pages. It's called Lore. Lore asks the bold question, do you write the story or is it already written? And I'll tell you right now, lots of people are very, very excited to get this into their hands. Lore is written by Brian and I and 14 of our closest, most brilliant friends and contributors from our Future Commerce ecosystem community. And Brian, dare I say your one or two pieces are my favorites in here.

Brian: [00:07:28] Aw sheesh.

Phillip: [00:07:29] This is our biggest best journal of all time, and I'm very, very proud of it. You can find this and many other of our print pieces over at shop.futurecommerce.com, and you can save 15% on everything you buy always if you join the Future Commerce Plus membership. That's right. You can get that 15% off every day when you join Future Commerce Plus. You can join today at futurecommerce.com/plus.

Brian: [00:07:54] No brainer.

Phillip: [00:07:55] Yeah. Go get Lore. Futurecommerce.com/lore. It's all there for you. Find your lore. Legend and myth. Legends and myth. A lot of things happening. A lot of legends and myths flying around this week, Brian. So we're gonna get to some news.

Brian: [00:08:14] The myths are being made right now because I'll tell you, when I went to my Costco last night, the dairy section usually has a center display. And it was gone. They didn't need it because they had space in the dairy section because there were literally no eggs at my Costco. Literally no eggs.

Phillip: [00:08:37] There's a gentleman who I've been following on X, formerly Twitter, which is the hell site that I'm slowly unplugging from. I've been following him since January 20, which is I don't know why that particular date, question mark. But he started a a price tracker of things because he said, "I guess everything's supposed to get cheaper now." Everything's not getting cheaper yet. Gas is ticking down just a smidge.

Brian: [00:09:08] Eggs are up. Up. Up. Up. Stupid bird flu.

Phillip: [00:09:12] Almost $10 in certain regions.

Brian: [00:09:15] $10? Are you kidding me? Out here, it's, like, 11 to 12 easy.

Phillip: [00:09:19] Are you kidding me?

Brian: [00:09:20] 11 to $12 a dozen.

Phillip: [00:09:22] What is going on in Seattle?

Brian: [00:09:24] Oh, man. I don't know. Because the bridge flu is not even hitting over here. It's hitting on the East Coast big time. It's hardly even a whisper. My chickens are safe. I mark my chickens safe from bird flu. {laughter} I thought my chickens were a bad investment. I was like, "I'm doing this as a hobby, not as a money saving activity."

Phillip: [00:09:44] Well, now...

Brian: [00:09:45] Turns out, I made a really good investment.

Phillip: [00:09:48] Brian, let me... It's probably your best. I have you on record as having invested in CVS at one point. Turns out not a great investment.

Brian: [00:09:57] No. It was a great investment. I made money on CVS. I sold that at the perfect time. I made, like I'm not even kidding you. I made a good chunk of money on CVS.

Phillip: [00:10:07] Imagine if you had put that into Dogecoin, though.

Brian: [00:10:10] Okay. Fine. Yes. I am not as risk tolerant as some people out there.

Phillip: [00:10:16] The bird flu is wreaking havoc on some people, including Costco members. The lines at Costco are getting longer and longer. Some signs I'm seeing on social media, lines specifically for people showing up at Costco. Some people in line are professing to be local business owners trying to get in every day for the egg shipment because they have no means of actually procuring eggs for their, you know, their local establishments, so restaurant owners and local business owners. So some folks are... And they're enforcing daily mandated, you know, limits on purchasing of eggs. So it's getting tough out there.

Brian: [00:10:58] It is.

Phillip: [00:10:58] Yeah. What's gonna happen here, Brian? What are you guys doing?

Brian: [00:11:05] Everyone is going to have to become... They're gonna have to domesticate birds in their homes or something because who knows what's gonna happen with this chicken flu thing, bird flu. I think, what's clear is eggs actually affect way more than you'd think. There's egg in a lot of stuff. Just ask friend of the show who has an egg allergy. Eggs are in a lot of things, and you don't even realize it. And a friend of the show, Brian Siro.

Phillip: [00:11:44] Yeah. Long time friend of the show. Shout out.

Brian: [00:11:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:11:48] We'll see him next week at... Well, actually, by the time you listen to this, we'll see him in just a mere day or two. You know what's really interesting about this is there's second and third order consequences here. Those are things that we actually examine in our new round table series. We had a group of people. This is our, I think, second time that we've done this now. It's called The Future Now. And if you haven't heard about this, we do these futurism based networking events where we bring 10 people around a roundtable. And it's like Dungeons and Dragons for executives where we bring people around, and we sort of make believe for about ninety minutes, and we set it in the future. And there's a conceit. We have sort of a digital game board, and everybody comes sort of in universe. We're in the future. We really play it up as if we're future archaeologists. We've uncovered a time capsule, and everybody knows by now, I think, everybody knows I'm time capsule pilled. So Brian and I are these future archaeologists leading this expedition. All of our Future Commerce members are along with us for this expedition. We're set in the future. And the time capsule that we've discovered is from the current year, so in 2025. And this last expedition, what we discover is each of the items in the time capsule we're supposed to sort of narrate in universe as coming from the year 2025. Well, it's in the far future. And in this case, it was, you know, a thousand years in the future. So we're supposed to talk about these, like, far future implications. And it gets everybody in this mode of thinking of talking about all the misconceptions of, like, what happened in the past and what this technology was supposed to do and what they got wrong. And then people really throw all caution to the wind, and they just make things up. And it's really creative. But what we saw happen is everyone's present fears are expressed through storytelling. And what happened, Brian, at that event was a number of people were talking about things like the impact of tariffs. Right? The impact of things like the bird flu.

Brian: [00:14:01] Closed borders.

Phillip: [00:14:02] Closed borders, hyper localization. And what we're seeing is almost... People talking about homesteading, people talking about all these things that they're starting to think about secondary and tertiary effects and long term effects of present environment. And that to me is a really interesting premise for a futurism centered workshop. Right? That is what we have done here is getting people to think about long term impacts of present scenarios. But they do it. We've done it creatively through this creative conceit. I think that, yeah, if you take it out to its logical conclusion, that is a very dark road. And we'll talk a little bit later. I think that's also the conclusion that Alex Greifeld gets to in her piece too that she wrote for Insiders this past week.

Brian: [00:15:01] Yeah. It's super interesting because this is what happens with a lot of specialists is they tunnel vision on what will happen if their industry or whatever they're specialized in continues on the trajectory it's going on without thinking about other ecological factors or other environmental factors or other things that could change in the world that could totally disrupt whatever that path looks like. And so I think that tunnel vision's super interesting, and I think there's a lot of this that happens in our world. Actually, people tunnel vision really hard, and they lose track of the larger picture. And there was a whole study of, and I don't mean this in the popular term usage, but generalists versus experts sort of thing. And generalists are generally better at figuring out what the future is gonna be because they're not tunnel visioned on the trajectory of a single outcome. It's interesting.

Phillip: [00:16:07] So recently, Travis Kalanick from Uber, the original Founder of Uber was on the All-In Podcast.

Brian: [00:16:17] He went on to do Ghost Kitchens at one point.

Phillip: [00:16:20] Still is doing it actually. And Ghost Kitchens is highly automated, almost fully autonomous, self contained system. So he says. Does like a two hour interview on the All-In Podcast. Really interesting listen, by the way.

Brian: [00:16:37] I was surprised because Jason was one of his first investors.

Phillip: [00:16:40] Yeah. I know. He likes to say that a lot. What's really interesting in that podcast is how he talks about how autonomous vehicles are going to have this massive societal upheaval.

Brian: [00:16:55] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:16:56] We think about right now autonomous vehicles as, well, your car is pretty much two thirds of the time of your ownership of your car is not being used. Your car is not being used two thirds of the time. Also, look at parking lots around the malls. Look at parking lots around at your local grocery store. Three quarters of that parking lot is not being used 99% of the time.

Brian: [00:17:21] They just sit there. Yep.

Phillip: [00:17:22] Everything is built for peak capacity. Right? Everything that we have is built for its maximum capacity.

Brian: [00:17:28] Yes because missing one person is worse.

Phillip: [00:17:31] Right.

Brian: [00:17:32] You have excess space, which actually now we don't.

Phillip: [00:17:35] Right.

Brian: [00:17:36] Real estate prices are so high. It's worse to miss a customer than to... Yeah.

Phillip: [00:17:44] Yeah. But imagine a world where those constraints aren't the constraints anymore if you had a network that everything was equally balanced and was able to bring those things to you and bring you to those things in a predictable way. How much... So this is Travis's prediction. It's like, you probably need 13 to 18% of the cars on the road that you do today. You need far fewer cars, and you probably need a quarter of the real estate that we use for parking today. That is how much of a societal impact that we need that this will have. Right? So autonomous vehicles change everything.

Brian: [00:18:28] They do. It's been on our minds. I think we should probably go back and look at some prior episodes and do...

Phillip: [00:18:36] This is one of our predictions this year.

Brian: [00:18:38] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:18:38] I talked about Evtol. I feel like these things have massive societal impacts. but, anyway, well, I digress.

Brian: [00:18:46] I don't think it is a digression at all because I think the desire to door cycle is going to be shortened in ways people can't even imagine.

Phillip: [00:20:19] A friend of the show, will be making some news and some waves in the next couple months.

Brian: [00:20:25] Yep.

Phillip: [00:20:26] And we'll keep him in stealth for now. but you heard it here first. We have a friend building in the autonomous vehicle space, who comes from ecommerce, and his main market for disruption is going after the big delivery companies. And I think that he's not alone. I think there are hundreds of people looking at AVs as the market for disruption for home delivery. And that, I think, is the frontier. So retail, I think, is still ripe for disruption. Also huge news this week. Not on our docket, but something worth talking about. Amazon just announced, right before this, it was, I think, last night's news, as we're recording this on February 18, that they're gonna start driving advertising off-site. So Amazon just announced that they're gonna begin allowing advertisers to drive traffic away from Amazon.com. I think that that's a huge change. Amazon might be the next great search engine for a lot of things. I think between Rufus, and between this and buy with Prime, you know, Amazon might be...

Brian: [00:21:41] I mean, Amazon's already disrupted Google big time. We've seen this trend forever. It's been the what was it? 40%. I remember when, like, when the 40% of all...

Phillip: [00:21:55] That was the number. Yeah.

Brian: [00:21:56] Yeah. That was the big, like, "Oh my gosh. 40% of all product searches are happening on Amazon. What's gonna happen at Google?" I think it turns out Google's just fine, actually. {laughter} I know it was a bit of a contraction, but I think Google's got some good stuff going on right now, and we might talk more about that in coming months as well.

Phillip: [00:22:15] That's true.

Brian: [00:22:16] But the disruption of Google buying Amazon, it makes sense. Amazon's like, "Well, I guess we don't need all of the attention as long as we are the first step in that attention." You know who else is making a step towards taking people's attention from where they think it may be? That might be Jeep. They're trying to take people's attention away from the road. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:22:45] Oh jeez. Oh oh oh, Jeepers.

Brian: [00:22:47] Oh, Jeepers creepers. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:22:52] {laughter} This is actually, this was news. I saw this on fortune.com, but it actually made big national news. So Stellantis, has a big plan to drive an extra $20,000,000,000 a year in making everything an ad network eventually. I think that the long term...

Brian: [00:23:17] Lammers' law.

Phillip: [00:23:18] Yeah. Lammers' law is what we call it is everything eventually becomes a surface for an ad unit. Some Jeep owners right now are seeing an ad, a persistent ad show up in their in-car entertainment, and this sets a pretty dangerous precedent.  This made news because of a bug. Not only was this ad a test pilot for some owners with a pop up ad inside their car, but the bug caused it to pop up and not go away. So you would dismiss it and then it would come back, and then you dismiss it and it would come back.

Brian: [00:23:57] The worst nightmare. This is dystopic.

Phillip: [00:24:00] Remember the old days of the web with the pop ups that would just keep popping up?

Brian: [00:24:03] They'd keep sliding across.

Phillip: [00:24:05] Yeah. Yeah. The real funny thing, the really funny thing is that you go to read the ad on fortune.com, and you get three pop ups. You get one that says...

Brian: [00:24:17] Oh, Fortune is the worst.

Phillip: [00:24:18] You get one at the top that's a banner from PandaDoc. You get one that says, "Would you like to allow notifications from Fortune?" And you get one that says, "To keep reading, you must subscribe to Fortune for a dollar a month," and then one that's like, "Please allow cookies." So, I don't know. Suck it Fortune.

Brian: [00:24:40] The gulf of fFortune brought to you by PandaDocs. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:24:46] {laughter} That's great. You really can't fault, all of these business models, advertising is this business model. This comes back to the Amazon... This is the Amazon story in a nutshell is that retail media is the future of any legacy business that has found its basically end of life. It's found its local maxima. These businesses have diminishing returns. They have no growth left in their legacy business models. There is really no incrementality left in the channels. So what do you have left to do? Legacy automakers also have these sort of entrenched monopolies because the US government has prevented competition from overseas coming in. Have you seen, Brian? Have you seen what Chinese automakers are capable of delivering for $9,000?

Brian: [00:25:46] I mean, if the thing is, it's not just Chinese. It's actually automakers everywhere. I am thirsty for the $10,000 Toyota truck that you can get down in Mexico. But guess what? I can't buy it here. Because of the way that things are set up with automakers. But that truck is sick. And it is $10,000.

Phillip: [00:26:11] If you get trapped in that truck, does that make it a thirst trap? That's a terrible joke. It's terrible. You're right, though. There's a challenge in...

Brian: [00:26:27] Everyone can make sick cars. There's no question about that.

Phillip: [00:26:31] A car costs, you know, minimum of $30,000 today, and they're trying to...

Brian: [00:26:36] Totally. Wink wink.

Phillip: [00:26:36] Everything's become a a subscription product. You remember there's a story we had on The Senses a couple years ago about BMW charging a $20 a month subscription for turning on the existing feature in the cars, like the heated seats.

Brian: [00:26:55] Yep.

Phillip: [00:26:56] This is the future, and this is the very crappy future that...

Brian: [00:27:01] Aw, man. Nosedive all over again.

Phillip: [00:27:07] Explain the reference for people that may not know it.

Brian: [00:27:10] If you don't know that reference, then...

Phillip: [00:27:12] Brian, don't insult our audience. Come on.

Brian: [00:27:14] Why are you listening to this show?

Phillip: [00:27:17] Explain the reference.

Brian: [00:27:18] It's Black Mirror. It's an episode of Black Mirror starring Bryce Dallas Howard, hence the reference earlier, that is about how society becomes all about how you interact with other people and winning stars and losing stars. And if someone doesn't like their interaction with you, you get rated down. If you haven't seen this episode, I'm not really giving anything away at all. That's the very clear premise. And honestly, they just take it to its logical conclusion. People can't live that way. Sorry. It doesn't work.

Phillip: [00:27:56] So it's a social credit system. You earn social credits and then you lose social credits based on...

Brian: [00:28:06] Based on how you behave in that community. And especially if that's the global village, it starts to get really complicated.

Phillip: [00:28:14] But, you know, not to throw shade, but there are B2B networking ecosystems within our very...

Brian: [00:28:23] That's true.

Phillip: [00:28:24] ...retail vertical that operate exactly this way.

Brian: [00:28:27] A hundred percent.

Phillip: [00:28:28] There are star systems.

Brian: [00:28:28] There are communities driven through star system within our very world, our very industry.

Phillip: [00:28:33] Yeah. That seems genius, actually.

Brian: [00:28:39] Yeah. It sure does.

Phillip: [00:28:41] Yeah. To be honest with you, this is how open sources work for a long, long time is what is it? It's the Whose Line is it Anyway?

Brian: [00:28:54] Keep going.

Phillip: [00:28:54] All the the points are made up, and they don't matter. But we're gonna do this anyway. We're all here and the points don't matter. It's all made up.

Brian: [00:29:04] It's good. It's good reference.

Phillip: [00:29:06] We're all participating fake Internet points. That's why we're here. Somebody's profiting from this. It's usually a giant corporation.

Brian: [00:29:15] Yeah. Like Netflix.

Phillip: [00:29:18] Wow. Dude, you with the segues today.

Brian: [00:29:20] I don't know.

Phillip: [00:29:21] These are great.

Brian: [00:29:22] Well, that was a terrible segue, to be honest. But Netflix is trying to make their way into the real world, and they really would do better, I feel like, to have a partnership with Letterboxd or something else that would feel a little bit more nose diving.

Phillip: [00:29:38] No. Because Letterboxd is an Amazon product, I believe, and that's...

Brian: [00:29:42] I don't know. Let's check this.

Phillip: [00:29:43] I think Goodreads and Letterboxd are both Amazon products. Someone check me on that. Fact check me. Someone do a drum roll.

Brian: [00:29:49] It is... No.

Phillip: [00:29:51] Is it not?

Brian: [00:29:53] It's not. It's actually owned by Tiny. Tiny, the Canadian holding company who...

Phillip: [00:29:58] Stop. I didn't know that.

Brian: [00:30:01] Its new owner, it was acquired by Tiny in 2023.

Phillip: [00:30:06] I have thought for years that this was an Amazon product. Goodreads was an Amazon product.

Brian: [00:30:10] Is Goodreads an Amazon product?

Phillip: [00:30:13] Goodreads is an Amazon product, a hundred percent. Why are you fact checking me on that one? I know that one for... I know. I know why you're fact checking me because I got the last one wrong.

Brian: [00:30:20] Well, yeah. Exactly. {laughter} Now I'm doubting. I'm doubting. No. It is on Amazon.

Phillip: [00:30:27] {laughter} Yeah. You're right. They should partner. I like that. I like that partnership.

Brian: [00:30:31] Yeah. Although, it's very nose nosedive-y. Like, let's get the review. Let's attach the reviews to the distribution platform. That starts to get a little bit...

Phillip: [00:30:41] Letterboxd doesn't own physical real estate, and they can't actually make things in the real world. So it makes sense why they would partner, you know, in this case...

Brian: [00:30:49] Digital and physical are the same thing.

Phillip: [00:30:52] They're now partnering with MGM Grand. They've come together with MGM to create the new dining experience. This one looks kind of cool.

Brian: [00:31:03] I think this is a fun idea.

Phillip: [00:31:09] Netflix Bites.

Brian: [00:31:09] They've been trying to get into the real world for a while, and to date, it's been pretty lame. This probably looks like the most interesting real world activation they've tried.

Phillip: [00:32:50] So Netflix Bites is, the subscript on this is "From your screen to your table,"  and Netflix Bites is an eatery. The location right now is at the MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas. Where else? And you can eat the food that your favorite characters in your favorite Netflix shows might eat. That's disgusting. But for instance, you know, if you wanted to pretend like you're in Stranger Things and eat the food that you might imagine might be on a menu at Stranger Things, you could have that.

Brian: [00:34:14] So Eggos?

Phillip: [00:34:16] No. You would think. You would think, but no. Nothing like that. The menu is missing from the website. You have to kinda dig around a little bit. So you can see some of the items on their Instagram. You can see it on their Instagram.  Some early pictures and influencer type stuff. Looks pretty cool. And they've had some celebrity chefs come through and do some really interesting stuff. They did a couple pop ups, and it looks pretty pretty rad. Squid Game...

Brian: [00:34:51] I'm surprised they haven't done gone further down this road. This seems like first steps towards a park. I feel like Netflix park would be pretty fun. A Stranger Things ride, Squid Games participatory experience.

Phillip: [00:35:09] That's what we all want. We all want to feel like we're being hunted down. But it's not so bad. The food looks pretty good. We'll link it up. It seems interesting enough. It looks like it's a bite for everybody. They have a little bit of the, a lot of the IPs. And some of the unexpected IP. It's not just the big hits. So I think there's a little French food from Lupin and just like a little bit of something. It seems like there's opportunity for it to be a rotating menu. So one menu choice per thing. Also seems like a little bit of a themed restaurant experience, like a Hard Rock Hotel, Hard Rock Cafe thing where there's a booth with...

Brian: [00:36:01] Rainforest Cafe.

Phillip: [00:36:02] Yeah. A booth with some Squid Games characters sitting at it. At least that's how it seems. I've not been.

Brian: [00:36:09] Well, maybe when we're at Shop Talk coming up here, we can pop over.

Phillip: [00:36:13] Hey. We should do that. That's a great idea. We are having our very first after party. You're hearing it first. At Shop Talk. It's at Rivea. You are going to have to apply to attend. I know. I know. I know. But if you're a Future Commerce Plus member, you'll have first access, and all retailers of all kinds will be admitted. And so go apply futurecommerce.com/events. Also, if you are on our email list, you already knew about this. We also are circulating an events registry list, a form that you can fill out to let us know what events you'll be attending this year, and that's been going around in our email. So if you aren't already on our email, go register at futurecommerce.com. It's on the front page.  go sign up for our email.

Brian: [00:37:00] Lots of cool stuff at ShopTalk, by the way.

Phillip: [00:37:02] So many cool things happening at ShopTalk, But this is the coolest by far, in my opinion.

Brian: [00:37:07] Totally.

Phillip: [00:37:08] So when we're at Shop Talk, we should go dip into this. Go check it out. What I haven't heard a lot about since is Netflix House. Do you remember this?

Brian: [00:37:17] No.

Phillip: [00:37:17] It was an immersive experience called Netflix House, and they were gonna {laughter}

Brian: [00:37:26] Like, SoHo House, but with Netflix?

Phillip: [00:37:27] It still exists. So Netflixhouse.com. You can still sign up there. It did say Bites inspired by your favorite shows. So it says opening in Dallas at Galleria Dallas and Philadelphia at King of Prussia in 2025. So I guess, yeah, maybe...

Brian: [00:37:44] Coming soon.

Phillip: [00:37:45] Yeah. I guess they're coming soon. You'll hear about that pretty soon, I guess. On the B2B side, news items to hit. There's a really big piece of news out of the industry, but I think we really quickly just wanna hit on a little bit of a reorg over at Kno, which is a WeCommerce business. What's happening over at Kno, Brian?

Brian: [00:38:04] Yeah. They combined with Stamped and Repeat. A really interesting rebundling. That's the rebundling again. And I think, it makes sense. There are a lot of tools out there now that I think it would be better served by being a larger platform. They kind of sort of smell the feature, not like products. And so as you bundle them up, it makes more sense, and they become like a more cohesive product. The question is, of course, how well will they all integrate? Is it gonna be... Some of these roll ups, basically, every product stays an independent product, and you have to buy and implement them individually. Curious how the data will flow between each product, and if they will do some sort of technical integration so that you can get them all at one time. That is the challenge for a lot of these roll ups is figuring out the integration problem. It's what Salesforce basically gave up on. They just said, "We're just acquiring a bunch of businesses. We're not gonna have them integrate." {laughter} In fact, "We're gonna buy software to help you integrate them so that we don't have to do it."

Phillip: [00:39:17] Well, the wild thing about all of it is, Jeremiah Prummer, friend of the show, go back a long ways, since the WeCommerce integration and acquisition of Kno. I think we had the inside scoop of that back when, I think Elise, a friend of ours over at WeCommerce running acquisitions and M&A over at WeCommerce. So we had the early PR inside track on that. These are, we're talking pre pandemic days. So Jeremiah has been running the team over there. And I think a really, obviously, a a great leader. You're right. A lot of feature companies that are kinda coming together. What's really interesting about it is watching folks that we know over the years. Leo Strychuski did a stint at Repeat, and watching that team sort of fold together with Stamped. So, yeah, we're seeing this prediction from earlier in the year. We said it was the age of agglomeration.

Brian: [00:40:23] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:40:26] I've been saying that that's coming for enterprise. I think this reorg of enterprise is something that we've been saying is coming.

Brian: [00:40:33] Actually, to that end, you were talking about big companies.

Phillip: [00:40:38] Giant, giant enterprise.

Brian: [00:40:40] Big brands.

Phillip: [00:40:40] Splitting and reorging.

Brian: [00:40:42] This is not huge, but Steve Madden just acquired Kurt Geiger, which I feel like it is a step up for them.

Phillip: [00:40:46] That's big.

Brian: [00:40:46] For them. Yeah. It was, like, a 300,000,000...

Phillip: [00:40:49] It was $350 million or something.

Brian: [00:40:49] Yeah. Yep.

Phillip: [00:40:50] Yeah. That's big. okay. Well, I'll take that one as a win. That's a big one.

Brian: [00:40:56] I definitely have seen a lot more of this news happening. Checks are being written and acquisitions are happening at a very quick rate this year. I feel like people are ready to get rolled up and to get rebundled. I feel like it's appealing right now. And I mean, people are willing to spend money too. So that's the other thing is I think the floodgates are about to or are actively opening around this.

Phillip: [00:41:30] The other huge news I think that a lot of people will be talking about this week is the announcement on Thursday that Andrew Bialeki, CEO over there at Klaviyo,  made a big announcement. They have sort of a cryptic Apple style event that they dropped the announcement of on Monday. They said, "We're doing a big event on Thursday called "Built for B2C." And they sort of dropped it on everybody. We're doing this big live event.

Brian: [00:42:03] Air fryers? We're getting Klaviyo air fryers?

Phillip: [00:42:07] I love the idea of Klaviyo building an air fryer. That would be awesome. "Big huge pivot. New direction, everybody. It's weird. We're a physical hardware company now, like Ninja. Who wants a margarita?"

Brian: [00:42:26] {laughter} Bundling and unbundling.

Phillip: [00:42:28] So their new, this renewed focus as Klaviyo has been, I think, moving further and further upmarket in their business. Right? So their roots are in, I think beginning in the the the DTC space and the mid market and really having, I would say, really dominated and saturated in that space. And then, really, I think in the last year or two, having made tremendous inroads in trying to move upward into enterprise, really understanding that the B2C space has been lacking the same kind of tooling that the larger dominant players have had for fifteen, twenty years in the SaaS industry, that the CRM tools have given where you have a single view of the customer and integrated tooling and management around that.

Brian: [00:43:30] There just has not been this for direct to consumer businesses.

Phillip: [00:43:33] Correct.

Brian: [00:43:33] This is the issue. And it's been a big issue. People have been trying to basically shoehorn products into this or was that the right word? Shoehorned?

Phillip: [00:43:43] Sure. Sure. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I... There's been a lot of talk for, I don't know, since at least the pandemic maybe before of best of breed. So, like, all of these integrated solutions were point solutions, and Klaviyo was part of that point solution ecosystem for a long, long time. I think Klaviyo now has kind of set a new bar. At this event, they've unveiled a brand new strategy and a new suite of tools that they've sort of dubbed as this, like, B2C CRM.

Brian: [00:44:16] And you're going to be there at the event.

Phillip: [00:44:19] And I think just having put eyes on it for the very first time, I think it's quite early. They have been trialing this for a very long time with a handful of customers, and the early returns sound almost too good to be true. A lot of folks are saying that this is changing their perspective on what is possible. I had a conversation with one of their early adopters. And I think one of the issues that folks have is that customers have an expectation that they're the only customer that a brand has. And customers also have an expectation that no matter where you are shopping with the brand, that the brand has a full understanding of your relationship with you as a customer. And that's just not true.

Brian: [00:45:11] I think back to our report we did with Gladly years ago, there was one of the most frustrating things to a customer was having to repeat themselves, repeat information they already provided because that information is actually precious and important, and it's something that it feels like if you give to a company that they should steward wisely.

Phillip: [00:45:31] I couldn't agree more. I think that's where a full rethinking of what a tool suite looks like that's not just messaging.

Brian: [00:45:39] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:45:40] Like a full, yeah. I think a lot of people have seen Klaviyo as a CDP for a long time. Like a customer data platform for a long time.

Brian: [00:45:51] They officially called it a CDP.

Phillip: [00:45:55] Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. But they've used it as that for a long, long time, but they haven't seen it as, like, a CRM, as a customer relationship management tool.

Brian: [00:46:03] I think they tried to, again, shoehorn as it was.

Phillip: [00:46:07] Sure.

Brian: [00:46:07] People are using Salesforce and Marketo and Klaviyo and all of these different products and trying to stuff them into a consumer mindset, and it's just not worked out.

Phillip: [00:46:22] Those tools aren't actually meant for B2C, though. Those tools aren't actually meant for consumer marketing.

Brian: [00:46:28] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:46:28] So let's see how this goes. You know, Klaviyo is a big company now. And I think one of those challenges, especially they're a publicly traded one that has to work on a quarter by quarter performance basis, has shareholders to report to. They don't make these decisions lightly. Also, it signals that they're growing up, and I think that this is a big move for them. And then full disclosure Klaviyo is an advertising partner of Future Commerce. And we work with them from time to time. We will be working with them, I think, at some point later this year too, in many capacities. I'm excited to support them in this effort. I'm also cautiously optimistic that this is the right move. I think that this also represents a little bit of a shift away from the marketing suite and marketing automation phase of Klaviyo's business. And I see them as...

Brian: [00:47:32] Well...

Phillip: [00:47:33] They still do that, and I think they're best in class.

Brian: [00:47:35] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:47:35] But I think that the aspirations of who is Klaviyo's direct competition, I think Klaviyo is like, "Oh, you know who we wanna go after now. We're going after the big boys." Who's the big boy? Their direct competition aren't the mamby pamby marketing automation tools anymore. They're going and they're looking at, like, is it the HubSpot to the world? Is it the Salesforces of the world? Twenty years from now, I think there's a path where Klaviyo is the consumer CRM equivalent of those giant orchestrated companies. But that's a long, long way away, and this is really early. This is something that happened technically yesterday.

Brian: [00:48:22] What's really interesting is Klaviyo dominated lower market. And then they made the move to the mid market, and they did a really very clean move to go dominate the mid market. And I think what's interesting is when you look around and you think where's the most money left to be had?

Phillip: [00:48:44] Yeah.

Brian: [00:48:44] It's in the up market. And their tool is also, they've kept adding features and adding features and changing the platform. And now they're launching another product, and it's an extension of their base product. It only makes sense to go upmarket. And I think it's the right play for them.

Phillip: [00:49:08] One last thing to say, just, you know, to be... Listen. I wanna at least come with a little fair critique, which is to say, man, Klaviyo has endured a lot of criticism as it's made this move, over the years.

Brian: [00:49:27] Yes.

Phillip: [00:49:28] I think they've had to endure. It's not been the smoothest transition as they've had to rebalance some pricing structures and had to challenge, change...

Brian: [00:49:38] Even recently, there's been some noise about this. And I think that it's because...

Phillip: [00:49:43] Some of it's fair, and I think some of it's unfair.

Brian: [00:49:46] Yeah. I think that people are not realizing what the endgame is for them.

Phillip: [00:49:52] I don't think some people are... This is the truth of all platform. Some people are not using most of what they're paying for.

Brian: [00:50:02] One hundred percent.

Phillip: [00:50:02] And that is so when you're paying for something...

Brian: [00:50:04] They feel like it's expensive.

Phillip: [00:50:05] Exactly. So when you're paying for something and you're not using it, you feel like you should probably not be paying for that particular piece of software, and that's probably the last thing that needs to be said about it. Anything else about that?

Brian: [00:50:20] No. I think I guess the last note would be this is smart. I think this is kind of a revolutionary tool, and I do think it's good. There's potential for this to displace a lot of enterprise contracts. {laughter} I know there are a lot of unhappy people out there in the enterprise who are like, "This is not how my job works anymore, or maybe it never did, and I need a tool that fits the job that I'm doing." And that conversation is not being had in individual, behind closed doors situations. This is happening out in the public.

Phillip: [00:51:05] Sure. And, also, but don't you think that there's, you're always gonna have an early adopter.

Brian: [00:51:11] Yep.

Phillip: [00:51:13] People who are all too happy to get a break and be a guinea pig on something. You'll have some early motions on things, but this is probably a few years before people are moving to this en masse.

Brian: [00:51:29] Oh, of course. Yeah. Because enterprise contracts and enterprise implementations take a long time to get through.

Phillip: [00:51:35] Oh yeah.

Brian: [00:51:36] So the effect that we're gonna initially, it's gonna be probably more noise, similar noise that we've been seeing until people realize, "oh, wow. This just got rolled out." In eighteen months from now, people are gonna be like, "Wow. This just got rolled out on some of the biggest brands in the world."

Phillip: [00:51:55] Well, congrats. I have a lot of friends over there. Expect big things from them, and we'll keep an eye on it.

Brian: [00:52:05] This only leaves one possible thing left for us to talk about, really.

Phillip: [00:52:10] I don't know. So see if you can read my mind on this one.

Brian: [00:52:14] Let's talk about reading minds. How about that? {laughter}

Phillip: [00:52:18] This is the thing I think that Mark Zuckerberg has always wanted. This is probably what his perverted little brain has always dreamed of and could never deliver. This is what he wanted in his dorm room.

Brian: [00:52:32] "If I only knew what people were thinking. I could figure out how to make more money from them."

Phillip: [00:52:38] Yeah. I could see Jesse Eisenberg playing him right now in his little Harvard dorm room. Like, "I just wanna know what that girl thinks about me for the Facebook.com." So Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.com, they put out a brand new piece of research. This should terrify everybody. This new piece of research put out in peer reviewed journal, but published specifically on Meta's new research labs, able to utilize magnetic therapy to analyze brain activity and then deep research with AI to analyze that brain activity with generative AI to recreate the thoughts and the contents of the thoughts in the subjects of the research.

Brian: [00:53:34] With 80% accuracy. Did I read that right?

Phillip: [00:53:41] Well, it's over, folks. We're done.

Brian: [00:53:44] Cooked.

Phillip: [00:53:45] Pack it up.

Brian: [00:53:47] Mark Zuckerberg knows if you like him or not.

Phillip: [00:53:51] It turns out all the things that we always thought were conspiracy theories... Last week, we talked about getting paid $20 because of the Siri lawsuit because it's been listening to us all along. Our phones can read our thoughts. This is what's all happening now.

Brian: [00:54:08] I think desire to door just took on a whole new meaning.

Phillip: [00:54:15] {laughter} Okay. So the the name of this paper at Meta AI is "Using AI to decode language from the brain and advance our understanding of human communication."  This was done in collaboration with the BASC Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language. This isn't just Zuck spending bucks to look at people's brains. They're using two different types of magnetic neuroimaging. So there's MEG, which is a sort of a magnetic imaging of the brain and EEG. And between these two types of recordings, they're noninvasive brain recordings, they take this neuro activity of the brain from 35 healthy volunteers while they type sentences. So this is part of one of the really important pieces of the study is that it's not like they're just passively thinking and they're recording that activity. Also, you have to take a look at the image. These people are strapped in. They are locked into this machine.

Brian: [00:55:29] Oh yeah. It looks like a scene from Black Mirror.

Phillip: [00:55:33] {laughter} This really does. We are a long way from people just scanning you from half a mile away and reading your thoughts. So these people are really locked in to machine for neural imagery. But while the subject in the study is typing, the AI is able to, in brand new sentences, reconstruct the sentence solely from brain signals and decode about 80% of the characters that were typed by their participants recorded with MEG, which is twice better than what could be obtained in a prior study under the EEG system. And this is why this is important is they believe that this could be used practically, I mean, practically, probably, let's be real, to serve you more ads at some point in the future.

Brian: [00:56:32] One hundred percent. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:56:33] But in a medical capacity to probably, according to this piece of research, to give people who have suffered from traumatic brain injuries new capabilities and to be able to communicate with them better in the future. And I think that that is an incredibly, powerful and noble cause. And so this seems, when you look at the depth here, it's really impressive. Also, there's two papers that they link. One is called Brain to Text, and one is From Thought to Action. And From Thought to Action was published on February 6, "How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production." And this seems like it has a lot of its own external research that's linked out from that. This seems like there's gonna be a wealth of patents that will probably come out of this.

Brian: [00:57:35] Oh, yeah. Powered by ChatGPT.

Phillip: [00:57:39] Well, Meta, you know, is really committed to open source LLM research.

Brian: [00:57:44] Yes. I meant that as a joke about the lawyers because we just did that.

Phillip: [00:57:49] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think that this is bold.

Brian: [00:57:54] It is bold. It's very bold, and it's not surprising that in the future, we will see more The Village-like situations going on because people are gonna be like, "I don't want my thoughts read." I think it's interesting in the future, and this is far future now, but how much of our existence is going to be navigating our own minds? Making sure that we understand exactly what our focus and what's being manufactured in our own brains is. We're gonna have to really get good at understanding latent and unconscious thought and how it relates to conscious thought. And can you process things in different ways? And I mean this, I know it sounds like I'm talking gibberish, but I really think that part of the future is the skill set that people are gonna need to have is understanding how they process their thoughts. Because if they don't have that, even if they're not hooked up to a brain thing in a Black Mirror type way, I think that there will be signals, and there are signals that are unconscious that people have about how they're thinking through things that will show up in technologies to monitor how people are feeling about things just even their facial expressions as one that we've already seen. We've literally walked into the NRF show floor and had sentiment analyzed based off of our expressions. You and I have seen that.

Phillip: [00:59:46] Oh yeah. But if we have already lived through... Think about it this way. Right? We have already lived through a time where, I don't know, heart rate, pulse, and other factors could be used as testimony in a court of law.

Brian: [01:00:13] Exactly.

Phillip: [01:00:13] As admissible evidence.

Brian: [01:00:15] Totally.

Phillip: [01:00:16] As one factor among many factors, as part of your testimony as to whether or not to prove your innocence or guilt, when presenting some kind of a case against you, that's the lie detector test. We've seen medical and medicinal uses of, you know, things like truth serums used in torture cases, and they've been outlawed in things like the Geneva Convention.

Brian: [01:00:52] Right.

Phillip: [01:00:53] Things that have... They're actual real life things that have been used in real capacities. I have to believe that things like this are not Black Mirror. They are actual legitimate real things that will be used in both positive and also in negative ways.

Brian: [01:01:14] And whether it's positive or negative, I think that being able to focus your minds and understand how it works is gonna be essential so you can leverage the benefits and also watch out for the dangers. It's gonna be a retooling of the way that we think.

Phillip: [01:01:36] Okay. So let's dig into that for just one second.

Brian: [01:01:45] {laughter} Here we are at minute 59.

Phillip: [01:01:48] Well, if you're you made it this far...

Brian: [01:01:51] Yeah. Keep going.

Phillip: [01:01:52] This is a really interesting. This is a really interesting point, and maybe this is a good point for this is cold open material. What you're saying is there's a future where the people who are able to self regulate their own thoughts are maybe the same people who are able to regulate and have an extreme amount of sort of self control and they're the same kind of people who are maybe they're the kind of people that are more immune to manipulation and marketing.

Brian: [01:02:30] Yep. Yep.

Phillip: [01:02:30] And they're the same kind of people who are more immune to emotional manipulation through the media, and they're the same kind of people... Maybe this whole, I don't know if it's the Darwin genetic supremacy, but maybe there's people who've just trained themselves to be able to tune those things out, and they have been become maybe it's the environment has just made them have to turn it all off.

Brian: [01:03:01] Or to be conscious of them. I don't know if that's like, they could still be affected by them, but they're conscious of them and any effect that they're having. Because I think some of these effects are really hard to avoid, but if you're conscious of them, you can make decisions around them. And so I think there's something to this, and I'm worried actually. My worry is that this is actually more algo training in some ways. We have to change the way that we think in order to address interacting with machines and systems that are built. And so people are gonna start to think differently. Obviously, they already have. But yeah. There's an element of if you wanna protect yourself and also be able to navigate this world, you're gonna have to actually build your own defense mechanisms.

Phillip: [01:04:03] We have that already. I mean, think about it.

Brian: [01:04:04] We already have it. You're right.

Phillip: [01:04:06] We've lost empathy because of the amount of suffering we see in feeds every day. We've become immune to marketing messages because of the amount of ad blindness we experience because it's around us in every, unless you're sitting in your Jeep and that ad can't be dismissed. There's very few things that we fall prey or victim to. I think, a certain kind of a person relents, and we become susceptible to a certain kind of a marketing message because we allow ourselves to.

Brian: [01:04:39] Yes.

Phillip: [01:04:39] Because we are treating ourselves. We are not, I think, as manipulated by marketing as marketers believe that we are. I think that we allow ourselves to to open ourselves up to the manipulation of the marketing message because we are treating ourselves. I think we're actually much more educated as as...

Brian: [01:05:04] Maybe.

Phillip: [01:05:04] Yeah. I think so. I think it's less about the dopamine. It's more about the dopamine today, and it's less about the...

Brian: [01:05:16] You think it's all choices?

Phillip: [01:05:18] I think it's choices.

Brian: [01:05:19] Choices people are making.

Phillip: [01:05:20] Conscious choices that people are making because we feel like we are worth it, and because it's more about a selfish pursuit of desire and self gratification than it is that we're being truly manipulated. but that's just that's a whole other hot take. Wow. Last words. Alright. I'll give you the final word, and then we'll move into our last segment.

Brian: [01:05:45] I mean, I think that's it. Let's go to the final segment.

Phillip: [01:05:48] Okay. A brand new thing at Future Commerce, something we are calling Heroes and Villains. So, Brian, who is your hero of the week?

Brian: [01:05:58] My hero of the week, well, I'd say it's Klaviyo for launching something so bold. I'm excited about a new type of product that doesn't exist before. I like the innovation that they're bringing to the market.

Phillip: [01:06:20] Okay. I like that. I'm gonna call my hero of the week. This is gonna be weird because I just made a ton of fun of it. I think that this Meta brain is weirdly heroic because I think that it could give a lot of really good and really incredible research to understand how our brains work and maybe give a lot of really positive outcomes to a lot of people who I think have experienced a lot of misfortune in their lives. And I have a lot of empathy for people who, you know, have probably experienced a lot of tragedy. So I think that for them in that particular situation, I think that's a pretty heroic thing.

Brian: [01:07:08] I can see that.

Phillip: [01:07:09] Yeah. Who's the villain of the week?

Brian: [01:07:11] Well, clearly, it's bird flu. That's a problem. That's a no brainer. Let me let me also take the reverse of yours. I'm gonna go ahead and say Zuckerberg who's got some pretty crazy things going on? No. Not really. I understand the research in the brain, and I appreciate that there there is a noble angle to it. There's also a freaky angle to it. And there are villain origin stories going on right here. Maybe it's not Zuckerberg, but there is somebody's villain origin story going on right now.

Phillip: [01:07:55] Yeah. My villain of the week, I'm just gonna call the turning every single thing in planet Earth into an ad unit is villainous to me.

Brian: [01:08:06] Fair.

Phillip: [01:08:07] I'll say also, Jeep and Stellantis is my villain of the week. Fix the bug, you guys. That's bad. And you know what? Can we just get advertising out of vehicles? I think that that seems like a slippery slope. Let's not do that.

Brian: [01:08:20] Oh, just wait. Just you wait till it's a hundred percent autonomous. I don't think they're coming out, man. You can't gut that virus out. There's no way to fix that bug. That's not a bug. That's a feature.

Phillip: [01:08:34] I've been staring at ads in the back of Ubers for a couple years now. I think you're right. I think we've got way more ads to see.

Brian: [01:08:42] Game over, baby. Yeah.

Phillip: [01:08:44] That's great. Well, this has been great. I love it. Thank you for listening to Future Commerce. If this sparked something for you, I want you to like and subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a rating. It costs you nothing, but it helps us out tremendously, and it helps more people to join the conversation. If you want to bring Future Commerce into your real world, you could check out our print shop at futurecommerce.com, and you can shop the store. Shop all of our real life print. I'm gonna show it to you one more time. Lore by Future Commerce. It's our new print journal. You can get it at futurecommerce.com/lore. Two hundred and eighty pages of beautiful print. And our print at shop.futurecommerce.com, it's where commerce meets culture and beautiful crafted journal zines and other things to collect like merch and beautiful T shirts.  Brian, you wear yours all the time, so do I.

Brian: [01:09:36] Yeah.

Phillip: [01:09:36] Check it all out at futurecommerce.com. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.