Vibecoding Our Way Straight into a Recession

FC - 390 - P&B - Episode Audio.mp3

Phillip: [00:00:01] Alright. Here's the question. Is there not a single person at Home Depot that has a middle schooler? Not a single one.

Brian: [00:01:35] Declining birth rates, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:01:39] {laughter} I think this is supposed to look like a nut of some sort.

Brian: [00:01:44] A nut? No. It looks like all of the other AI company logos.

Phillip: [00:01:50] Does it? Does it? Because I asked my middle schoolers what it looks like. Just hours after Lowe's introduced their branded chatbot, which is called Mylow, Home Depot came out swinging with their own branded chatbot, which they call Magic Apron. This thing looks neither like magic nor like an apron.

Brian: [00:02:15] Magic, maybe. I don't know.

Phillip: [00:02:19] It does. It looks like magic. So I put out on the newsletter, I said, "Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, Mylow," which Mylow is the name of Lowe's branded chatbot. "Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, Mylow, Home Depot's Chatbot Looks Like a B-Hole." I don't think that's any sort of a rhyme. It's not an interior rhyme, but it's funny.

Brian: [00:02:42] No. No. No. Hold on. Hold on. It's true. All of them do, though. Just go Google, "Why do all AI logos look like buttholes?"

Phillip: [00:02:55] Because we're at that point in the cycle.

Brian: [00:02:58] The top result is a tweet by Greg of Twitter fame, that Greg.

Phillip: [00:03:03] Yeah. Greg with all the numbers behind it?

Brian: [00:03:05] Yes.

Phillip: [00:03:05] Yeah.

Brian: [00:03:06] Yes. And he has compared them all and all of them. All of them. Every single one looks like a butthole.

Phillip: [00:03:12] Wow.

Brian: [00:03:17] I can't wait though for TJ Maxx to release theirs because apparently, everyone at TJ Maxx has to go poop.

Phillip: [00:03:28] This is the thing.

Brian: [00:03:29] Yeah. This is thing.

Phillip: [00:03:30] This is a real thing.

Brian: [00:03:30] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:03:31] Yeah. This actually was something that did hit on Reddit. We'll get into this a little bit later in the show. Apparently, there is scientific backing for people that go into retail establishments of some sort, and this has come up over and over again. I've seen this for years on TikTok and Instagram of people that say like when they go to TJ Maxx, when they go to Barnes and Noble, they have a sudden urge. What urge? The urge to purge. And so we'll get into that a little bit.

Brian: [00:04:03] I have thoughts. I have thoughts.

Phillip: [00:04:05] We have so many thoughts. There's so many things to cover today on the pod. We have... So we'll talk about branded chatbots. They're taking over everything. We're gonna talk about apparently pooping at TJ Maxx. Vibe coding hit big over the weekend. We're vibe coding our way straight into a recession. And I think our commander in chief is vibe coding the economy at the moment. We're going to talk about Tim Cook. Let him Tim Cook.

Brian: [00:04:32] The new iPad Air.

Phillip: [00:04:34] The new iPad Air is exactly the same as it always was again. And maybe a trend of I'm noticing more people, this is, hey, this is my own research. Everybody has an Android all of a sudden. That's weird. I think we're gonna close.

Brian: [00:04:52] Is it weird?

Phillip: [00:04:53] Everybody, maybe question mark. I think. It's quite a few people. And then we're gonna close out with our new segment, Heroes and Villains. So stick around. But before we get any further, Brian, our brand new book, it's called Lore. Lore is our two eighty page journal. It's our brand new journal from Future Commerce Press. It is our beautiful coffee table book. And this is our most incredible piece that we've ever done. This is from Future Commerce Press, and it's a collaboration between 14 authors. And it's taken us over a year to put together. It is an incredible piece of prose. It deserves a place on your coffee table or your bookshelf. It is of the style of these big art books like Assouline or Taschen. And it asks the bold question, on the YouTube, go back to the hero, asks you the question, do you write the story of commerce, or is it already written for you? Big existential questions in 280 pages and has everything that you could possibly want in a book of this sort. $75, shipping to 200 countries. Get it today at futurecommerce.com/Lore. And it's got a little bit of something for everybody: interviews, critique, criticism, a little bit of poetry from a renowned poet and some photo essay work and something really deep, something for everybody, asking big questions and demanding deep thought, which is something we do. Have you shown this to anyone yet, Brian?

Brian: [00:06:27] No. I haven't showed it to anyone yet.

Phillip: [00:06:29] You don't even have one. {laughter}

Brian: [00:06:30] I don't even... It just shipped. It just shipped.

Phillip: [00:06:34] I was at the local diner. I had one in my bag. And she goes, "What's that?" The server, she comes over. "What is that?" I said, "Oh, this is the book that I just wrote with a bunch of friends." She's like, "You wrote that?" And I was like, "Yeah." She flipped through it. She's like, "Yeah. Those words are too big for me." And I was like, "Yeah we do big words."

Brian: [00:06:53] {laughter} Whoops.

Phillip: [00:06:57] That's a frequent criticism for us.

Brian: [00:07:00] Yeah. That may be something that a lot of people in ecom have done.

Phillip: [00:07:05] A lot of people say we write big words.

Brian: [00:07:06] Whoops.

Phillip: [00:07:07] I think big words demand big dollars. 75 bucks. I think it's worth it. I paid a lot more for a lot less. I'll tell you that. But go get it today. Listen, there's a lot of things today I think that are tracking upwards in the ecosystem. Everything has a branded chatbot. I'll tell you a quick story. Have you ever used like a chatbot on a website, Brian?

Brian: [00:07:33] Yeah. I have.

Phillip: [00:07:34] Yeah?

Brian: [00:07:35] They're varying degrees of good.

Phillip: [00:07:41] I mean, varying degrees of bad as well.

Brian: [00:07:43] Yes. Exactly. I mean, that's implied.

Phillip: [00:07:45] In what context have you used them?

Brian: [00:07:48] Well, I've tested them out like on... A good one was product questions on evo.com.

Phillip: [00:07:57] Oh, really?

Brian: [00:07:58] Yeah. For like skis?

Phillip: [00:08:00] Yeah. Skis. Yeah. They did a really nice job of containing the chatbot to product questions. So instead of having like a Q&A section, you could ask it questions related to the product and it did a really good job. I even asked it "Why should I buy these when I have last year's model?" And they're like, "Look, that's a really good question and here are some good reasons why, but maybe you don't need to." So I loved the honesty of it. It was very refreshing.

Phillip: [00:08:38] The chatbots have often been used in sort of a CX context, right, if you're like Wizmo, like, "Where is my order?" Things that have a very clear start and finish to them.

Brian: [00:08:52] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:08:53] I've had really bad experiences. I'll call one out. Pepper, The Chipotle chatbot has just been broken for the longest time.

Brian: [00:09:03] Let me ask you a question. Why in the world did you use the Chipotle chatbot?

Phillip: [00:09:09] Man, I've had some bad experiences at Chipotle. I'll tell you.

Brian: [00:09:13] I mean, I think everyone's had an experience akin to walking into a HomeGoods or a TJ Maxx with Chipotle. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:09:23] Yeah. If you skipped to the cold open in the preshow, that's a poop joke that's hidden in there.

Brian: [00:09:31] I was trying to be subtle, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:09:32] I had a really bad experience at a Chipotle recently, and the only recourse that you have in those situations is, a one star review on Google.

Brian: [00:09:43] You could go, like, yell at the manager.

Phillip: [00:09:46] But you don't wanna be that guy. You don't wanna be that guy, especially if you're ever gonna go back.

Brian: [00:09:50] This is what chatbots have done. They've erased yelling in managers.

Phillip: [00:09:54] Yeah.

Brian: [00:09:55] People used to be like, "Let me speak to the manager."

Phillip: [00:09:58] They're like, "Go talk to Pepper." So you go and you talk to Pepper. You talk to the chatbot. The chatbot's like, "I'm sorry. I can't help you with that." And then it closes the chat on you. Just like, "I'm sorry. I can't help you with it." And it hangs up on you, which is something that a human would never do. A human would just sit there and just take it.

Brian: [00:10:17] I'm gonna have to ask you to leave now, sir.

Phillip: [00:10:19] Yeah. Well, the chatbot is like, "Sorry, I can't help you with that." And then it has ended the session and it just makes me so irate. I was so angry. Made me even, like, more angry.

Brian: [00:10:32] Who are you going to complain to now, Phillip? Corporate.

Phillip: [00:10:35] With Google Reviews, you can only leave one one star review in your lifetime for a given location. So you go back in, and you gotta go leave another one star review, and it's like "You've already left that review before." You can't leave it again. {laughter}

Brian: [00:10:49] Leave a two star. You can leave a one and a two. Right?

Phillip: [00:10:53] No. I think you just go in. It's like, "Would you like to edit your previous review?"

Brian: [00:10:57] Oh, jeez. Oh, jeez.

Phillip: [00:10:59] So then you go back and do it. "Updated for 2025. Same issues persist."

Brian: [00:11:02] I don't go and review enough. I just go and yell at the managers instead.

Phillip: [00:11:06] Anyway, I feel like that guy. I think it's just my age. So I've just decided I'm just gonna chill out. I'm just gonna take it out on the chatbot now.

Brian: [00:11:13] Yeah. "I'm so sick of Google and their one star reviews. I'm just gonna go rant to a chatbot."

Phillip: [00:11:20] That's right. So Home Depot and Lowes have decided to enter this race. You know what? Just as an aside, before we get to the news part of this, Rufus, which is my perennial joke that I'm saying this is Amazon's chatbot. Rufus rhymes with doofus. The dumbest name for a chatbot ever.

Brian: [00:11:42] It really is.

Phillip: [00:11:43] It's their AI chatbot.

Brian: [00:11:45] They're into dogs and Amazon, like a lot. Yeah. All their 404 pages used to be dogs and they have a very dog friendly policy in the office. It's a Seattle based company and there are more dogs in Seattle than our children. And yeah. Rufus is like one of those internal things where you're like, "Oh, wouldn't it be great if it was named after a dog? It could go fetch things for you," and someone needed to sit there and be like, "Yeah, that's so stupid. We're not doing that." But it got groupthinked in. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:12:21] So okay. We'll come back to this. It's just funny because when you're as old as I am in this ecosystem and we're always talking about lore. I'm old enough to remember eBay once upon a time acquiring a local shopping engine named Milo. And Milo's logo was a dog, and it was named after a dog named Milo?

Brian: [00:12:47] I remember that.

Phillip: [00:12:47] Remember that?

Brian: [00:12:48] Oh, yeah. Dogs are common...

Phillip: [00:12:50] There's a dog obsession culture.

Brian: [00:12:51] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You know what's funny about dogs? They poop.

Phillip: [00:12:57] Man, everything's about poop for you this episode. What's the deal?

Brian: [00:13:00] This is the poop episode.

Phillip: [00:13:02] Poopisode.

Brian: [00:13:03] The poopisode. The great poopisode of 2025.

Phillip: [00:13:07] Wow. We're never gonna recover from this one.

Brian: [00:13:10] It's in the toilet. Actually, that's a phrase my dad used to use when he thought something was...

Phillip: [00:13:14] It's in toilet?

Brian: [00:13:14] It's in the toilet.

Phillip: [00:13:17] Oh. No. I guess getting back to the the Rufus of it all. Rufus is integrated, like, everywhere on Amazon. You really can't go anywhere on Amazon without encountering Rufus now. So you have to see that stupid name everywhere. And there are prompts everywhere.

Brian: [00:13:32] You can get away, if you're on the app, you can sort of ignore it. It doesn't factor in as much.

Phillip: [00:13:39] I really like the outcome of it, though. I think the experience of it's pretty good. It summarizes reviews. It summarizes the reasons why people tend to return things. It summarizes the... It's basically that's what all of AI has just done is just summarize things for us. At the end of the day, that's all it does. That is what AI is doing. It used to be... That is the great funnel for AI is it's downstream of summarization was skimming. Right? We used to skim things. And then before that is, you know, what comes after skimming? It was we would basically browse. We'd browse things. Maybe peruse.

Brian: [00:14:27] No we just skim to AI.

Phillip: [00:14:29] Yeah. But now we just have things summarize it for us.

Brian: [00:14:32] I mean, that makes sense. Convenience is basically the ultimate aim of technology.

Phillip: [00:14:38] Yeah. But at this point, what's upstream of the summarization? It's like just autopilot, which is, I guess, what operator and agents should theoretically do for us.

Brian: [00:14:50] I guess. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:14:51] They bring in things to you.

Brian: [00:14:53] In many ways, this AI was a necessary next step for the Internet because it was too much information for our tiny little brains to absorb. So we had to find a way to make it more convenient to absorb so much information.

Phillip: [00:15:07] Okay. Now you sound like you're in the pocket of big AI. Now you sound like you're an AI sympathist.

Brian: [00:15:15] Well...

Phillip: [00:15:15] Are you sympathetic to the AI cause, Brian?

Brian: [00:15:20] Sympathetic to a bunch of buttholes.

Phillip: [00:15:22] I thought you were on the side of the pro poop union. You were the poopers. You're on the pooper side.

Brian: [00:15:27] I am pro embodiment. You know what AIs actually can't do is poop.

Phillip: [00:15:33] That's true. Wow. This episode is very, very far gone.

Brian: [00:16:37] Just go straight to it. Let's just get straight to the TJ Maxx things. Unless you had any more points you wanted to make about AI as being everywhere, the proliferation of AI.

Phillip: [00:16:45] Bro, you are so on this TJ Maxx thing. It's not even news. It's like years old, the story. Let's talk about the actual news. Let's talk about the Mylow thing. Let's talk about Home Depot, and then we'll talk about the poop.

Brian: [00:16:54] Alright. Fine.

Phillip: [00:16:55] The actual news this week was the order of events was as follows. Mylow is the new branded chatbot from Lowes and Lowes came out with this announcement, actually pretty thin announcement. If you look at the press release, press release we'll link in the show notes. We'll also link to the press center for Home Depot's announcement. Lowes got out ahead of Home Depot by mere hours just a little under a day.

Brian: [00:17:28] Classic. This is like how movies always come in pairs. They get released, and there's one studio has a...

Phillip: [00:17:38] Armageddon/Deep Impact

Brian: [00:17:38] Yeah exactly.

Phillip: [00:17:41] Yeah. Exactly. These things are this happened in twins. And so Mylow comes out, based on a partnership with OpenAI. And so it'll be a chatbot. It's supposed to be assistive in a home design centric fashion. Skimpy on details. It's a press release with very little in the way of visuals. So when you think of the Mylow experience, it's an announcement for a forthcoming announcement. So put Mylow to the side. Mylow to me is light on details.

Brian: [00:18:15] An announcement for a forthcoming announcement.

Phillip: [00:18:16] It's exactly right. As with all things with OpenAI, it's like, we're going to see probably a lot of partnership and a long press cycle of a thing that will come in the future. The Home Depot one looks very well realized, and it looks like it's been in the works for a long time, with the exception of the logo, which I take umbrage at. But it looks like they have some proof of concept, like UI UX, some user flows, user journey. Looks like they really have thought through how they want people to use and interact with it. It looks like it's used in much more of a self assist, I would say, product discovery centric way in the way that you described the way that you use it, Brian. So Magic Apron is the name of their branded chatbot.

Brian: [00:19:15] It makes sense that they would be better than Lowes because from 2020 to 2023, Home Depot grew from 132 million to 152 million and Lowes declined from 89 to 86. {laughter} So there's clearly a winner happening right now between the two. One of them has more money and is growing, the other one has less money and is declining.

Phillip: [00:19:40] What's really interesting about Home Depot is they make no, they're not making any public statements about how their the technology is being delivered, where Lowes came out and said this is in partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI, to my knowledge, did not say publicly that they are partnering with Lowes. So this could just be that they were building. Lowes just, you know, tapped into an OpenAI endpoint, and that's how they're doing it. And they're riding on the back of the name. I don't know how these things are actually being built. We've not talked to anyone. We should probably get someone on the show. Come talk about this. Magic Apron, really interesting drawing on some of the brand aesthetic. Mylow seems a little interesting from a brand term perspective. Magic Aprons drawing on some of the brand equity people wear the orange aprons in the store. If you are store associate and you're going around helping people and you're wearing an orange apron, theoretically, is a store associate online who's helping answer all of your questions. And a lot of the UI UX demos on their press center and like the company news page does show, maybe we're showing this on the YouTube right now. I don't know. But it's showing people asking questions and getting answers. And this is what I think Home Depot has always been about in their brand promise. And what we wrote about in The Senses was I feel like they had retired a bunch of their old brand promise in the past. Do you remember any of their old brand slogans like, "You can do it, we can help." Remember?

Brian: [00:21:27] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:21:27] That's like a couple generations old. And I feel like this gets us back to that. But it's like almost like you can do it and you can help yourself now.

Brian: [00:21:38] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You don't need us. You just use our technology to help yourself. That could be the next slogan, "Help yourself."

Phillip: [00:21:49] Help yourself before the robots take over. And the last two sort of brand slogans from Home Depot have been "More saving, more doing" was the the prior generation. And currently, it's "How doers get more done," which to be honest with you is probably the most awful thing I've ever heard. And now we just have this, you know, hexagonal nut shaped butthole. So that's fun.

Brian: [00:22:18] Why don't you go help yourself, Phillip?

Phillip: [00:22:21] Just go help yourself. So there we go. We have branded chatbots. I also did a little bit of a deep dive into other chatbot, branded chatbot impacts to brand, what we know from publicly traded companies or stated public impact and revenue impact to branded chatbots in the last few years, some data that was provided by Perplexity. So over on The Senses, which is our newsletter, I wrote up how other companies have been impacted by their branded chatbot interactions. And so Chipotle's Pepper supposedly reduced support costs by 31%. Not in my case, they haven't. And Domino's had Dom, which sounds very kinky. I don't know.

Brian: [00:23:15] That's where your mind went.

Phillip: [00:23:20] {laughter} Domino's reduced support costs by 42%. I would sub to their Dom any day over at Domino's. And then Starbucks has My Barista, not very creative in their naming. 38% support cost reduction. And then Wendy's had FreshAI, and that's a 29% support cost reduction. And all of them showed a double digit as much as a like, I think Starbucks had a ticket increase of about 22%, meaning this activity drives more engagement for people to self-service, which means they have higher satisfaction. Generally, I think people get to get problems resolved and they don't carry around frustration. I think generally, this is a good thing if more brands can do more of this. I think that we have way too... My big takeaway here, though, is that this is just the beginning.

Brian: [00:24:27] No question.

Phillip: [00:24:28] We're gonna have so much more of this. And it's like, do we need more branded interaction?

Brian: [00:24:33] This is how websites go away.

Phillip: [00:24:36] Yeah. Oh, that's true.

Brian: [00:24:37] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:24:38] Well, go on that. Go on that rant. I like that.

Brian: [00:24:40] Yeah. I mean, I don't think they're gonna go like fully away, but like this is how we stop using them the way we're currently using with the browse and pack and hunt. So we are going to just interact with a single point of contact in all channels. We talk about multi channel retail. We talk about natively embedded commerce. Why think about it in any other way than having a representative of every brand be available in every channel and be able to find exactly what people are looking for. And so when someone sees something, they can interact with a sales associate. This is another thing that I think is really important to think about these. It's like they're thinking about in terms of customer service. Eventually, you will be sales first. And you're absolutely right about seeing this multiple, everywhere, in all major corporate brands, anyone that's commercialized. You remember when McDonald's acquired Dynamic Yield?

Phillip: [00:25:39] Oh, yeah. The analytics... Yeah.

Brian: [00:25:41] Pre Gen Ai

Phillip: [00:25:41] Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: [00:25:42] Right? And they did end up spinning it back out because they couldn't figure out what to do with it.

Phillip: [00:25:47] To Mastercard, I think, of all companies. Right?

Brian: [00:25:50] Yeah. I think you're right. But the idea was like to add some personalization at the window or at the speaker, drive thru speaker. And in the menu, and I feel like this is gonna be fully realized once they invest in Gen AI. In fact, I would venture, and I do not have any knowledge about this, I would venture that they are actively working on a way to get Gen AI to be a part of the drive thru menu experience right now.

Phillip: [00:26:17] that's already happening. I think we wrote about that a few months ago, but what has happened as a result, I wrote about, I think, two months ago in The Senses. What coincides with this personalization effort is reduction in complexity in menus also drives revenue. So decision fatigue creates a lot of problems for these companies as well. And you just saw Starbucks reduce their menu size by about 22%.

Brian: [00:26:51] Makes sense. Their menu was insane.

Phillip: [00:26:53] Incredible.

Brian: [00:26:54] It's just been expansion expansion expansion ever since they started.

Phillip: [00:26:58] Yeah.

Brian: [00:27:00] I think getting a little smaller makes all the sense in the world for them.

Phillip: [00:28:21] Speaking of reducing their menu, the olive oil poop coffee was probably the worst choice they possibly could have made. That's when they knew they'd gone too far.

Brian: [00:29:52] When you're actively making something that will make people poop, then you've gone a step too far.

Phillip: [00:30:01] I think so. So reduction in complexity, I think, helps drive quote/unquote, personalization because there are fewer choices.

Brian: [00:30:12] Makes it easier for the AI.

Phillip: [00:30:13] It makes it so much easier

Brian: [00:30:14] "What do you want to have today?" "What are the options?" Like, three options.

Phillip: [00:30:19] Oh, wow.

Brian: [00:30:20] "It works so well." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:30:26] "It's so personal. It's incredible." Last thing I'll say about this is that it's driving a ton of conversation, this choice of this particular logo. I am sure that it'll see a revision. I hope it sees a revision. But if it doesn't...

Brian: [00:30:45] They're all gonna see a revision, but I think they'll all remain circles.

Phillip: [00:30:50] Concentric circles. I applaud the effort. I really like the boldness. Good on you, Home Depot. Actually, they have a really specific point of view in this world, and you have to applaud them for for leading from the front. I like it.

Brian: [00:31:08] Or leading from the back. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:31:11] Well, alright. You wanna talk about it. Let's talk about it. I have to ask you, Brian.

Brian: [00:31:18] You're the one that found this.

Phillip: [00:31:19] I did find this.

Brian: [00:31:20] It's not my fault. The poop counter on this episode, the word poop is about to go up.

Phillip: [00:31:27] Alright. We're gonna make life... for JT. We're gonna have a running poop counter throughout the whole episode, unfortunately. No.

Brian: [00:31:35] Have you ever seen the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David decides that he's tired of wasting time at urinals and peeing? He spends a significant portion of his life he spends peeing. And then he decides he's gonna memorize the Gettysburg Address while he pees. And eventually, he starts reciting it in public restrooms and people are applauding him while he's reciting it while he pees.

Phillip: [00:32:02] I have not, but we have to roll part of that clip right here. That's great.

Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm: [00:32:08] Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation. Conceived in liberty and dedicated the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are here to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives so that that nation might live. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. It is rather that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause and that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. {applause}

Brian: [00:33:05] He ends up at Ted Danson's civil war play and he's already insulted Ted at every level if you've ever watched the show. There's like some serious oh, well, Ted ends up with his ex wife. And then at one point in the play, the key part of the play, Ted Danson goes to recite the Gettysburg Address, and Larry David can't help but pee because he's so used to reciting it when he pees. When people go to HomeGoods or TJ Maxx, they have bought so many things for their bathroom. They cannot help but have a Pavlovian response.

Phillip: [00:33:51] This is conjecture. I'll go with it. I like this.

Brian: [00:33:52] Most things that end up in bathrooms come from Home Goods and TJ Maxx, like the little decor. And so people come there and they're like, "Oh my gosh. It's in my bathroom."

Phillip: [00:34:05] Wow. I love it. Okay. I'll go with it. I love it. There are so many TikToks about this. So many people have been talking about this for so long. We found this in particular on a Reddit post from five or six days ago on the subreddit TJ Maxx, which is don't ask me why I was on the subreddit TJ Maxx.

Brian: [00:34:34] Doing some research on that treasure hunt.

Phillip: [00:34:36] TJ Maxx subreddit. TJ Maxx HomeGoods. Half to... We'll keep it PG 13. "Half to crap. Is it me or is there something in the air at TJ Maxx and HomeGoods? I live down the street from both, and I have to stop in multiple times a week to browse or pick up little things. Nine times out of 10, I have to rush to the register because I'm going to crap myself. It comes on all of a sudden while shopping, and I find myself deep breathing until I get home."

Brian: [00:35:07] Crap counts against the poop counter. Just FYI.

Phillip: [00:35:10] "I am a coffee drinker, but this doesn't happen anywhere else." I love the context. Thank you, Meggy Meggy. Has this happened to anyone else? And there's a lot of theories and replies here.

Brian: [00:35:22] It could be scent driven as well. You get your diffusers...

Phillip: [00:35:24] Yes.

Brian: [00:35:25] Diffusers for the bathroom at TJ Maxx and that's probably what sends them. In fact, there are whole companies out there, and I'm sure most of the people listening to this podcast already know this, but dedicated to building scent for stores. And so it's probably the same scent that is in your bathroom or maybe in public bathrooms. People use scents to drive behavior...

Phillip: [00:35:51] I believe that. I believe that. In fact, there's an entire industry focused around that.

Brian: [00:35:56] Yep.

Phillip: [00:35:56] What was the name of that company that does that branded scents for retail?

Brian: [00:36:01] Oh oh, ScentAir?

Phillip: [00:36:03] Yeah. ScentAir. They do that. They do branded scents just for retail. That's a whole industry just for that.

Brian: [00:36:09] They're in a bunch of Marriott's, I think.

Phillip: [00:36:12] Okay. Let's go down the rabbit hole on this. So we did a little bit of research, and some of it stems from the comments on this Reddit thread. There's an article on Eating Well that was posted and authored by a dietitian, or I'm sorry, by Carrie Myers MS and reviewed by a dietitian, Annie Nguyen. And they talk about a Japanese concept of having to poop when you go to bookstores called Mariko Aoki. And this is like a well known Japanese folklore phenomenon, and this goes back decades, been long talked about, predates the Internet of a phenomenon that when you go to a bookstore that you have...

Brian: [00:37:00] A bowel movement.

Phillip: [00:37:01] That you have to have a bowel movement. And it this apparently may extend to other spaces too. If you go to Perplexity and you pop in like why this might be, and then some of this might come down to fluorescent lighting because fluorescent lighting may disturb some circadian rhythms. Some of it to your point, environmental factors. Some of it might be like a Pavlovian response to some of these things. Like you're saying you are conditioned to having been around certain things and certain items and certain smells, and maybe that's causing a certain type of response. So I have to ask you, Brian, does this happen to you?

Brian: [00:37:45] I don't think so because I try to get out of TJ Maxx...

Phillip: [00:37:49] You don't go in public.

Brian: [00:37:49] ...as fast as I possibly can anyway.

Phillip: [00:37:52] But if not TJ Maxx, where? That's the question.

Brian: [00:37:56] Oh anywhere?

Phillip: [00:37:57] Yeah.

Brian: [00:37:58] I don't know. I'm gonna have to observe and figure out if this is true for me anywhere in my life. That's a really good question. How about for you? Does this happen to you somewhere?

Phillip: [00:38:07] Oh, absolutely.

Brian: [00:38:08] Okay. Hit me.

Phillip: [00:38:09] Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure that I've not once been to a Hobby Lobby without having to go to the bathroom.

Brian: [00:38:18] A Hobby Lobby? I don't know about this. I feel like you're projecting right now.

Phillip: [00:38:23] I'm serious. I'm dead serious.

Brian: [00:38:24] You're projecting poop.

Phillip: [00:38:25] I think part of the problem is that when I go to a Hobby Lobby with my family, that is like a two hour minimum trip.

Brian: [00:38:32] Got it. Got it. The odds are high.

Phillip: [00:38:36] The odds are high.

Brian: [00:38:37] Got it.

Phillip: [00:38:38] The odds are high. Like, you're spending almost 10% of your day there, and a longer part of your waking hours.

Brian: [00:38:45] And you're like, "I don't wanna be here anymore. Is there anything I can do besides this literally anything? I will do anything besides walk around the store and look at these items anymore."

Phillip: [00:38:56] Guest producer Erica in the chat says, nothing makes me want to crap like a Live Laugh Love sign.

Brian: [00:39:02] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:39:02] I agree. There you go. Love it. Live, laugh, love it, actually.

Brian: [00:39:12] You know what's interesting about this is this is such a... People forget about how much they're affected by factors other than what they see or what they... All of our senses provide information to us and we've lost track of how affected we are by things.

Phillip: [00:39:36] Sure.

Brian: [00:39:36] Or by things like music affects our mood immensely. This is something that we can easily absorb as...

Phillip: [00:39:46] You're right. When I'm at Hobby Lobby

Brian: [00:39:48] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:39:49] And I'm hearing, like, smooth jazz Mercy Me. I'm hearing smooth jazz version of Christian top 40. Nothing makes me wanna poop more.

Brian: [00:40:00] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:40:01] Than Oceans in smooth jazz playing in the background.

Brian: [00:40:06] Smooth jazz Oceans.

Phillip: [00:40:08] When I'm at Publix and I hear Sarah McLaughlin singing In the Arms of the Angel, nothing makes me want to poop more. Blues Traveler just wailing on the harmonica makes me have to defecate.

Brian: [00:40:24] Blues Traveler.

Phillip: [00:40:24] Nothing makes me have to poop more than the sound of 10,000 Maniacs.

Brian: [00:40:32] I don't know. I think...

Phillip: [00:40:33] Over the sound of this tiny broken speaker at the Winn Dixie.

Brian: [00:40:35] Panic at the Disco... {laughter}

Phillip: [00:40:35] Nothing makes me have to release my bowels like Counting Crows singing Long December. That's the the feeling of retail, baby. {laughter}

Brian: [00:40:55] JT, when you edit this, you just have to sub poop in for every single one of those. Like, you should just replace every time we say bowel movement or any other euphemism for it.

Phillip: [00:41:07] No. No. No. No. Nothing... {laughter} Yeah. When I'm walking with my shopping cart down the aisle and I hear Natalie Merchant sing Carnival, I make a beeline straight for the men's room. I'm like, "Wow. I've gotta go, and I've gotta go right now."

Brian: [00:41:29] Oh, man. You know what else makes me just wanna just run away and go to the bathroom? The iPad Air.

Phillip: [00:41:39] Alright. That's a terrible segue, but we're get there. That's fantastic. I like that.

Brian: [00:41:44] Well I mean it to squish things out of you. I mean, it got squished. It got squished between two clamps.

Phillip: [00:41:50] Gross. Gross. Gross. Gross. Gross. Is that where we're going? We're gonna go right there in the show? Okay.

Brian: [00:41:56] I'm trying to run away from this topic. We've pushed it too far.

Phillip: [00:41:58] Well, you wanted to go there so badly. We went there, and we went there hard.

Brian: [00:42:02] Oh, well, I mean, when you have to go, you have to go.

Phillip: [00:42:05] Set up the story. This was really cringe actually.

Brian: [00:42:08] It was really cringe. Apple launched a big announcement about their new iPad Air. Their "new" iPad Air. Brand new. And when they did it, they did it with an image on the Internet. And that image had a screen that said #CorecoreTrendsReport on a new iPad Air that looked exactly like the last 50 iPad Airs that have been released.

Phillip: [00:42:37] Tim Cook, introducing the newest iPad Air, exclamation point. Packy McCormick.

Brian: [00:42:49] Oh, man. Packy killed it.

Phillip: [00:42:51] Went nuclear viral. He's like, "That crazy son of a bitch. He did it," which really got me. So we had a really great YouTube short that really encapsulated this about the nature of the trend reporting industry and how this is sort of a dead trend. This is almost two years old now at the time that this came out from Apple. I think the question here is the image doesn't really align to the Corecore trend research. Right? As a like, Corecore is not a really a fashion trend. I think that they're trying to show off collaboration tools as part of the stack for iPad. I don't know what they're trying to prove here, but the text, Brian, do you have it up? Could you read the text to us that's in there?

Brian: [00:43:48] I can find it.

Phillip: [00:43:49] You're gonna have to bring it up. You're gonna have to bring it up. But I think that the trend research PDF report and the way that you sort of mark it up on the new iPad is like, this is not how people collaborate in a business sense, especially in this industry. I think that that was... There's a fine line between conversation starter rage bait and demonstrable productivity tools for the design set and what I would call the oat milk elite, which is like who I think Apple has traditionally gone after and centered their products for. Basically, you and me. {laughter} This felt like it really missed the mark, and that was sort of sad to see. Alright.

Brian: [00:44:35] It has people actively working on a trends report, a trend research report, hashtag Corecore. Then it's got people writing on it and the text on the left, notes are like, "One, gathering insights. Two, how trends develop. Three, mass adoption. Four, the trend life cycle." Oh, it's... There's a bunch of quotes in there as cringey as, "In the past, a trend would return approximately every twenty years. Think of the way the 1990s received aesthetics from the 1970s or the resurgence of grunge during the Indie era of the 2010s," and it goes on with more cringey talk like that. I'm trying to read it because...

Phillip: [00:45:25] Yeah. Because it's like skewed sideways. Yeah.

Brian: [00:45:28] Read it while it's like squished like the iPad Air was at one point.

Phillip: [00:45:35] Wild.

Brian: [00:45:36] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:45:37] There's just so much that's packed in here. And I think it comes at such a weird time because they're trying to communicate something to a specific audience. They're communicating it at a time where they're also killing their AI efforts with Siri until 2027. And that feels a little discordant. I don't know. It feels a little strange. So yeah.

Brian: [00:46:05] Oh my gosh. There's another great one. Someone put "Apple's product releases," and it's got, like, a before and after of an overweight dude. And it's got the before, and he's overweight, and the after, and he's overweight. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:46:22] One thing that has not been talked about a lot that I feel like probably, you know, this is a something I think that is very indicative of the kind of thing that you would see. This is very, I think, on brand for Apple. But the subtle communication that Apple has had in the past in sort of the if you know you know to its audience inside of this kind of an image. They've done really well in the past in baking in subtext to their most ardent fans. And so when you go and you put an image like this on the screen, you're communicating so many things. There's so much context in here, like a ton of context. Corcore is a great example of context. Trend report is a great example of context. The names of the people who authored the report is also a fair bit of context. So Letitia and Fleur as the authors of the report are a fair bit of context. And I think that Apple is communicating a lot of things without really saying things here. There was a really interesting discourse that Palmer Luckey had on a podcast recently. I'll have to pull it up while we're talking.

Brian: [00:47:54] The thing I think you're referencing is about how to imagine the future. Is that the one?

Phillip: [00:47:58] That's correct. So he was on the Sean Ryan show recently. And on the Sean Ryan show, it was, like, a three and a half hour podcast, took forever to listen through. And he says a lot of things there, and I'm not endorsing any given thing that he talks about.

Brian: [00:48:13] He says a lot of things.

Phillip: [00:48:15] Yeah. I'm not saying that any one thing he said is, you know, particularly noteworthy or worthy of endorsement. But what he does talk about is how a company like Apple, which has, you know, $3,000,000,000,000 of market cap and has, you know, $300,000,000,000 of cash sitting on the sidelines. And someone as powerful as Tim Cook, is sort of beholden to the whims of someone like Xi Jinping. Right? And who he's ostensibly Tim Cook's one of the most powerful men in the whole world. And yet with a stroke of a pen or with the word of one person, his entire company will fall apart overnight. And this is a person who can't say much of anything in the world. He can't say anything. So the way that they communicate is in sort of subtext. And the way they communicate is like, "Tim Cook can't speak out for or against in this current climate against things like DEI." The only thing he can say is, you know, "I love Mother Earth." And he can make cringey ads about it. Right?

Brian: [00:49:23] And show up at inauguration.

Phillip: [00:49:26] I love saying that. One of the challenges with being someone like Tim Cook is being extremely hemmed in on a bunch of sides and sort of not being able to say much of anything anymore, at least from Palmer Luckey's point of view. So, yeah, you go looking for very specific things. And, you know, I read this report, I read this thing, and I'm like, "This is to me, a dog whistle for a very specific type of a person. But they actually don't know who that person is anymore."

Brian: [00:49:51] I think you're right.

Phillip: [00:49:52] They're trying to talk to that person in subtext, but they've actually lost sight of who that person is and what that person cares about anymore. And that's why it feels discordant. That's the thing I'm trying to say.

Brian: [00:50:03] Yeah. No. I'm trying to talk to consultants or...

Phillip: [00:50:09] I mean yeah.

Brian: [00:50:09] I think who's like the biggest buyer of Apple products? It's, you know, agencies and big consultancies and and other tech companies, but I think the problem is just like the Mother Earth ad was heavily criticized and felt super cringey. Apple seems to be behind the trends, or sorry, behind the discourse right now because trends are trending is over. Matt Klein was like, the New York Times finally covered trends are trending. And Matt Klein was like, "Can that be the final nail in the coffin?" People are done with trends and talking about trends and being a part of trends. I don't wanna hear another person say "trend." People have said the word trend more than we've said poop on this podcast. They might as well have been the same word. I think that's where we're at. And so to have this is to basically say we're completely out of touch with the current discourse.

Phillip: [00:51:21] And yet, they're gonna be phenomenally successful. And the next day, they put out a hundred dollar cheaper MacBook Air that's twice as fast and has twice the battery life, which I bought on the same day.

Brian: [00:51:31] That is a message all into itself. So forget marketing for a second.

Phillip: [00:51:35] Whatever. You know, like, we can sit here and rant and rave forever, and I'm still gonna give them my money. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen as many Android devices as I'm seeing right now. They're everywhere.

Brian: [00:51:47] We used to be the only podcast founders in the world where the two founders both had Pixels.

Phillip: [00:51:59] I mean...

Brian: [00:52:01] I've never owned an iPhone.

Phillip: [00:52:02] We were the only psychos who didn't have iPhones.

Brian: [00:52:05] That's right.

Phillip: [00:52:06] And now, I look around. I was at a dinner. I was at the Economic Club of New York. I got invited to an event last week. And I'm looking around, Brian.

Brian: [00:52:16] Talk about a dog whistle, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:52:18] I'm looking around at this table. Okay? And these are all, like, finance guys, you know, like Wall Street Finance guys. I'm looking around. Half of the table are Pixel devices or Samsungs.

Brian: [00:52:31] We've changed our company. That's exactly what's happened here. We went to hanging around from creatives to hanging out with financiers.

Phillip: [00:52:39] No. But then I go to 1909, which is, it's a lot of founders. A lot creatives.

Brian: [00:52:45] Yes. Young creatives.

Phillip: [00:52:46] I look around, and I'm like, every fifth person or sixth person, there's, a Samsung or a Pixel. It's happening. It's slow, but I feel like the stranglehold is slipping. Now I don't know that people stay when they switch. I feel like they try it, and then they're like, "Yeah. No. I hate this." {laughter}.

Brian: [00:53:06] Maybe.

Phillip: [00:53:07] It's an interesting thing to witness. This is anecdotal at best.

Brian: [00:53:10] Well, there's more than anecdotal here. No. There's really not any data to back this up. {laughter} IOS's market share has fallen slightly from 63% to 57% since 2009, but that's like not a very good measure because who who cares about what happened in 2009? Interesting.

Phillip: [00:53:31] It's all anecdotal. You are the product of your own filter bubble at all sections of society and strata. But I will say that I feel like there is a tide that is turning in people, especially after I'd say eighteen years and the last four or five years of diminishing returns in product quality and sort of failed promises and I would almost say, like, the Apple tax not having returned much gain to consumers. I feel like people are starting to wonder what the other side is like. What is it like? What else is out there?

Brian: [00:54:03] I think it's probably true. I think that Apple's lost a lot of its cool factor. It's just feels normal. And Android and experimentation and like the mind craft Robloxiness of the Android worlds, you can kinda build or do or mod or hack anything. That's actually exciting to the new generation as opposed to like sitting in a walled garden ecosystem you can easily understand. They wanna get their hands dirty. They wanna create. They wanna be in charge. And that's just not true with Apple. You're just inheriting whatever like slick device they wanna give you. And it also just feels like old, the millennials built their world on Apple devices and it came with a specific aesthetic. And that aesthetic dominated, dominated our world and changed how we did everything and everyone idolized it and tried to build around it and then wanted to be the Apple of whatever. And that still has repercussions. That happened when we were starting our careers. And it is finally petering out. It's a new world. Collaboration and creation are paramount in this new world. And Apple's just it's too biased in its approach.

Phillip: [00:55:30] I think that that's a fair point. I think we can sort of leave it there. I'd love to hear other people's point of view. I'm sure that other people have points of view. I think from an ecommerce or retail shopping experience perspective, homogeneity has benefit the ecosystem in a tremendous way. I think it's helped for distribution. It's helped for having stability in ecosystems, being able to distribute apps and having network effects and those things have been really great. So I think we're also leaving a lot of that behind as we head into sort of like a brandless ecosystem of chat based interfaces. I think apps are probably becoming a lot less, or have become a lot less experiential. Websites have become a lot less experiential. I'd like to see us reverse course on all of those things over time, but I think generally...

Brian: [00:56:27] Maybe it's not websites, though. Maybe it's like personal software because vibe coding works and you can create your own little personal apps pretty easily now. And people are gonna be able to start building software for themselves to build their own way of doing things and I think this actually gets back to what you were just talking about. Creation for self and being able to personalize and customize everything is gonna even get down to the software layer. It's vibe coding is something that a non developer can do. And when a developer does it, it's like they're unlimited in the amount of software they can create in some ways. I mean, we're just seeing the beginning of this. Vibe coding is a term that started in February of 2025. We are sitting in March, the beginning of March, and it has already taken the Internet by storm. And I'm not saying AI is gonna actually, you know what? I'm not gonna say what I was about to say. I think that AI is going to change the way we fundamentally interact with software. It already has.

Phillip: [00:57:38] Let's try to cut in a clip of Ruby Thelot at VISIONS Summit from last year talking about bespoke software.

Brian: [00:57:48] Totally.

Phillip: [00:57:49] Ruby talks about software made for Emily, I think was the name that he dropped. If I remember correctly. I might be misremembering. But here's the clip.

Ruby Thelot from VISIONS: [00:57:57] We did this forecast two years ago, and one of them was called An App for Emily. Right? This idea that suddenly, Emily, whom I love, of course, I can make an app only for her. And if you wanna use it, sure, by all means. But this shift may be less towards modernity and more towards this arts and crafts sensibility, this William Moore sensibility of making something for one individual in the digital. The difference and the important thing to note is that that's what happens when we try to scale personalization, when we try to do it on mass. The idea here is that we are able to do it on a one to one basis, me and Emily specifically, versus the sort of more general approach, which, of course, Facebook tried. This filterworld, to use Kyle's idea, happens when we try to do it scale. I think the future of software and digital experiences will resist scale. I think it'll be more custom and bespoke. When I am making an app for Emily, I am not in the business of generating venture scale returns. When I am in the business of making an app for Emily, I'm in the business of love. Completely different paradigm.

Phillip: [00:59:13] Okay. So I think he goes on to talk about love. We're making software for love. I think directionally, he's correct. I don't know that people have to make software for other people one of one. I think people are making software for themselves one for one in the future because we are self creating solutions, and we're doing that all the time. I'm doing that. I just created a little text demon for Lore. Buy the journal if you want to know what the heck I'm talking about. But we are able to make things now with very little effort. And you can multiply those efforts exponentially if you already had a background in software engineering, you already knew what you were doing. You become 1000x productive because you already know all the shortcuts. You know how to communicate better. You know how to fix the problems when they arise. But this vibe coding thing, if you just look and you see what people have done, there was person who created something that looks like sort of like dark souls esque. This was, "I vibe coded this game this morning with zero code edits. I just hit accept all in cursor with Claude Sonnet and Three.js." It's like a freaking dragon. He's fighting a dragon. Never seen anything like this. That looks... I almost don't believe it. It looks too good to be true.

Brian: [01:00:42] Maybe. Maybe. You know what? People have actually, they don't even realize it, but the whole Internet's been vibe coding lately with JD Vance's face. Effectively, that's what's happening right now. You know how much work it would have required to do what the Internet has done with JD Vance's face over the past few days?

Phillip: [01:01:06] That's true.

Brian: [01:01:07] It would have taken thousands upon thousands of hours, and everyone that...

Phillip: [01:01:12] I don't know if that's AI. That's human ingenuity. God bless America. {laughter}

Brian: [01:01:23] Dude, JD Vance has hacked the Internet. Actually, this is the first full on, I think, takeover by a person on the Internet that we'll see. We're gonna see a lot more of this.

Phillip: [01:01:35] I don't know if he's... I don't know if he loves it. I'll be honest with you.

Brian: [01:01:38] Oh, he loved it. Did you see? He made one himself.

Phillip: [01:01:40] He posted one, but you know? Alright. Well, that's sort of the week in a nutshell. {laughter}

Brian: [01:01:55] Yeah.

Phillip: [01:01:55] That's it. We're gonna get to Heroes and Villains. Before we do, we wanna invite you. We're like a week and a half away. Join us at our Shoptalk after party extravaganza. We want you to join us. It's gonna be amazing. You can register if you're a merchant and agency, if you're brand side, or if you're a Future Commerce Plus member, you have priority access. Go to futurecommerce.com/events and click the link for the after party registration. You can get to all of our Shoptalk activations at futurecommerce.com/Shoptalk. See what we're doing, what we're up to. We're gonna have a huge activation, a Lore pop up shop, a bookshop on the show floor. Hope to see you there. And yeah, grab the book. Here it is. 280 pages. It's called Lore. Beautiful. From Future Commerce Press, and it's yours. Shipping, I think our next batch of books will go out, I think, just after Shoptalk, first week of March or so. That's what I'm told. But get your orders in now because these things have sold out every time we put a new batch up. So get them up. Get your orders in futurecommerce.com/Lore. Let's get to it. Brian, hero of the week. Who do you got?

Brian: [01:03:18] Well, I could be a super millennial and be like, "The hero of today's episode is you."

Phillip: [01:03:25] Oh my gosh.

Brian: [01:03:27] But actually

Phillip: [01:03:31] Gag me.

Brian: [01:03:31] I think the hero of today's episode is probably I'm gonna go with Home Depot. I think launching Magic Aprons is a smart move. It doesn't feel too far behind. Like, actually kinda feels out in the front for a lot of these larger ones, I think. And the amount of work that appears to have gone into this looks good. I think it could be a fantastic assistant in the end. I actually believe that while we may have a tough time with robots in the future, that we will see gains from being able to have tools like the one that they just created. So as long as I keep investing in it, I'm all in. Home Depot's my hero.

Phillip: [01:04:32] Alright. Let me do...

Brian: [01:04:34] You going to do hero?

Phillip: [01:04:35] Yeah. My hero of the week. Jeez. I kind of love the... I love the anybody who bought an Android phone in the last eighteen months.

Brian: [01:04:50] I thought you meant, like, all time. I love that.

Phillip: [01:04:54] Long live the counterculture.

Brian: [01:04:56] Yeah. Exactly.

Phillip: [01:04:57] Long live the counterculture. That said, I will be waiting by my front door for M4 MacBook Air tomorrow. So I love the idea of an eighteen hour battery life, but a MacBook Air, not iPad Air. MacBook Air. But hashtag Corecore. Brian, villain of the week. Who's the villain of the week?

Brian: [01:05:19] Villain of the week, probably TJ Maxx. I mean, I don't think I'm gonna ever step foot in a TJ Maxx ever again. I don't wanna have artificial IBS.

Phillip: [01:05:35] Mariko Aoki hitting you hard this week. I'm gonna say, villain of the week... It's gotta be for me... I'm gonna say it's the design trend that has led us to the buttholefication of the logos in the Gen AI space.

Brian: [01:05:59] This is OpenAI's fault, I think.

Phillip: [01:06:01] Yeah. I think so too. I think so too. So I'm gonna say it's anybody who didn't have a middle schooler on staff at the Home Depot who didn't shop the logo around. That's the villain of the week.

Brian: [01:06:13] Villains, have children.

Phillip: [01:06:14] Yeah. Well, let's be pronatalist in this next era. Listen to Kieran Culkin.

Brian: [01:06:23] Hashtag kidcore. Alright.

Phillip: [01:06:25] That's it. That's it. That's it for Future Commerce this week. Thank you for watching and thank you for listening. You can find more episodes of this podcast, futurecommerce.com. And we are Future Commerce on all social channels: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reels everywhere. And if this conversation sparked something for you, like, subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. It helps more people to join the conversation. If you want more Future Commerce in your world, check out our print shop at shop.futurecommerce.com, where commerce meets culture and beautifully crafted journals, prints, zines like all these ones on the shelf behind me. And Lore, of course, futurecommerce.com/Lore, and get your collectibles and such. Display them beautifully on your shelf or on your book case. Hey. Maybe on your coffee table and take a picture of it, tag us on social. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.