We Are So Back: Yuppies, Starbucks, and Gen X

Phillip: Smooth operator. That's what Sam Altman was playing during the announcement this week.

Brian: I think he had to. The operator announcement was a must. It was a must.

Phillip: The operator announcement was amazing this week because, it was as if... Brian. It was as if a million retail media last click attribution marketers cried out in fear and then were at once silenced.

Brian: Dude

Phillip: I heard them cry out in terror.

Brian: Incredible.

Phillip: And they cried out in terror, and then they were at once silenced. If you're not familiar, quick background. This week in OpenAI announced a brand new product. It's called Operator. It is the first consumer... Well, I mean, let's be real. It's a $200 a month subscription at the moment, but if you wanted to pay $200 a month, you could have your very own consumer AI agent, and it's available right now. You just tell it to do stuff, and it just does it on the web for you. It literally works as advertised.

Brian: It's so funny. We literally just talked about how this was totally absent from NRF.

Phillip: Gonna happen one day.

Brian: Yeah. One day. Literally the next week.{laughter}

Phillip: Literally here. Yeah. Literally here. And it is headless in the different way. We talked about headless commerce for a long time, this is the other side of headless. It means your head is headless. It's the removal of your head.

Brian: It is.

Phillip: As a consumer.

Brian: Let it go. It's like Airheads from Walter Woodman.

Phillip: Yeah. Exactly, so really interesting stuff to see. I love every new tech demo. Every new tech demo. The canonical example is commerce. It's the thing.

Brian: One hundred percent. It's the thing.

Phillip: Why? Because commerce is culture. There you go.

Brian: And also, there's so much opportunity with commerce and Operator. I'm just thinking about this. It will eventually fundamentally change how we think about business. And along the way, all kinds of weird things are gonna happen because people, consumers are gonna find hacks and efficiencies through Operator that businesses have not accounted for in their strategies. For instance, and this is a really stupid example, and I'm not saying this is exactly gonna happen, but I was just thinking about this the other day. I have three or four grocery stores in my town. They all publish their ads for the week that are available online and in text. Right? And you never know which grocery store to go to because it's like, "Alright. Well, I saw an ad..."

Phillip: I see where you're going. Yeah. You can optimize now.

Brian: You can optimize now. And in fact, you can optimize so well that it will actually make up for the cost of having someone do it for you.

Phillip: It's not gonna optimize the $200 a month cost at this present moment.

Brian: It's not gonna optimize the $200 a month cost at this present moment. That is a 100% true unless you're using Operator to do other things for you as well.

Phillip: Apparently, it's very slow.

Brian: Yes. Again, I'm saying...

Phillip: It's so slow that it it may not but...

Brian: It's gonna get fast. Eventualities here are basically, like, loss leaders are gonna start to disappear. They have to disappear.

Phillip: For sure.

Brian: When you become this efficient

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: There's no longer a reason to run a sale that is side the norm of what a sale should be in order to attract people.

Phillip: Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Okay. Hold on.

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: Let me say what I think you're saying a different way or as I understand it.

Brian: Do it.

Phillip: What you're saying, what I think you're saying...

Brian: Yep.

Phillip: Is that a tremendous amount of incentive in the world for consumers is built on the friction that is required for a human.

Brian: Yes.

Phillip: To go out of their way and take up some part of their time to do it.

Brian: Correct. So that they do get them to...

Phillip: So if someone is able to optimize their life...

Brian: Correct.

Phillip: So that that friction was removed, it would break the system.

Brian: Yes. The system will break. It is over. I know it's not gonna... It's gonna take a while. It's gonna take a while or maybe not that long. But, like, all of the tools that we currently have...

Phillip: We have to evolve. Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh.

Brian: To think about how to get people into our stores so that they can discover and spend on normally priced products or whatever it is to our sites, whatever it is. Wherever it is...

Phillip: Yeah. Your turn closed off to all of the other outside world.

Brian: It's over.

Phillip: Well, not really because we've had, like, you know, we've had endless aisle for a while. You can do price comparison and but you're looking at one site at a time.

Brian: You can do price comparison.

Phillip: You're looking at one side at a time. It's finite.

Brian: Exactly. You have to do things in a sequential way that requires your time.

Phillip: I'm freaking out on the YouTube right now. If you see me, I'm throwing my hands all over the place. I'm, like, {gestures wildly} Agentic attention is infinite.

Brian: Right.

Phillip: Correct. Now Operator... Okay. You're probably screaming right now at me if you're listening and you know what you're talking about. You're like, but I've watched the Operator demo, Phillip, and the canonical example that you referenced a minute ago is it's literally one browser with one cursor. It is literally like me being autopiloted. It's worse than when I get remote help desk at work. It is a worse version of that.

Brian: Yep.

Phillip: Right? It's worse than that. It's slower than that, and it's worse than that. But this is yeah. It's, like, it's v(-1).

Brian: It's v(-1). Yeah. This is ground 0 of things.

Phillip: What's wild, though, is the way that they iterate so quickly on these technologies is, GPT3 or, sorry, GPT4 and then GPT4.0 were paid level products that became free level products inside of 6 months, and then Sam Altman, three days after Operator was announced as the pro level at $200 a month said, "Time horizon for operator at the $20 level, it's a few months away."

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: "We'll make it available to everybody." It's gonna be a thing very soon.

Brian: In fact, I actually can see why people would pay $200 just to get a jump on it because it's gonna move to the $20 tier, and then they can just move to the $20 tier. They only have paid a premium of, like, $600 to get an early start. For the people who are interested. Yeah.

Phillip: I know if you also know what you're talking about, then other people are probably also saying that, like, "Well, we can do this already." Run copycat can do the same thing already. There's other people who are, you know, if you can run content or if you know how to run code on your machine, you can hook up today to the API and run agents on your machine locally and have a very similar thing.

Brian: Totally.

Phillip: Computer use API is a thing that ChatGPT local can do. So we have examples of this to some degree already, but this is the dummy proof version. You just type into a box, and it just magically works.

Brian: Translation of that for humans, like, for human language.

Phillip: Yeah. For normal people. Okay. Well...

Brian: Well, this was a really important announcement because at the exact same time, we've had another AI narrative happening. So, yes, ChatGPT kind of needed this to go out at the very moment that DeepSeek started to get all the attention it's received. {laughter}

Phillip: So this is really interesting because it comes like, what is it? It was an incredible week for Sam Altman. Maybe a very bad week for Elon. It depends on who you are, I guess. So it depend it depends. Very, very big week. Sam Altman, you know, Inauguration Day. We have the day after day 1. You have project Stargate, $500,000,000,000. MASA, you know, SoftBank commits with Larry Ellison and Sam Altman standing there. Menswear guy tells everybody that Sam Altman doesn't dress very well. Don't wear brown pants with the with the suit, but, you know, all that good stuff. It's $500,000,000,000 to a fund that is... Did you not see that whole thing?

Brian: I did see that whole thing. The Menswear guy narrative in on Twitter just makes me laugh so hard. It's actually it just... He's so brilliant. He's just woven himself into the narrative.

Phillip: I love that.

Brian: Every narrative. He can weave himself into every narrative.

Phillip: I love it. I love it. I love that he mostly just takes down a certain kind of a political affiliation.

Brian: Totally.

Phillip: That's kind of his whole thing.

Brian: A 100%.

Phillip: I mean, whatever.

Brian: "These guys dress like trash."

Phillip: Yeah. It's my goodness. So you have that whole thing going on. Then they have the Operator announcement, which is its own thing. And then out of nowhere, over the weekend, the entire discourse, it's almost to the level of freak out on the weekend. It's like the level of freak out of the SVB collapse. That is the level of panic that Silicon Valley and the techno...

Brian: I mean, Nasdaq took a 3% hit because of the discourse over the weekend.

Phillip: 12% dip on NVIDIA, for DeepSeek. So DeepSeek, can we explainify DeepSeek for normies? Because I feel like no normal person has ever heard of DeepSeek.

Brian: The very, very, very, very high level is that DeepSeek is the Chinese competition for ChatGPT.

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: It is a very cheap, very good alternative that is actively available on Chinese servers, also doesn't recognize the statehood of Taiwan. So it's open source, which means you can run it on your own servers. And so you could actually take this extremely powerful AI and get it out of China and put it on your own stuff. And it's so cheap. It's so so cheap.

Phillip: Cheap to train, which is freaking everybody out. Apparently, $6,000,000 to train. You put that up against the, apparently, you know, years to train... Years. Years to train and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to train.

Brian: Maybe that's just the narrative. Now we're just finding out. Like, you know how enterprise stuff is only, like, 5% better than the consumer stuff often? And they charge, like, a 100 to a 1000 x multiple of consumer software. Maybe that's what this has been the whole time. {laughter}

Phillip: Yeah. I think the question really here is, how much of this is real? You're right. It might all be narrative. Yeah. Speaking of narrative do we really want to buy? Yeah. I guess it's like, what do you want to believe? I guess that's the question.

Brian: Totally. No. I mean, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about this. You were telling me...

Phillip: Okay. So the first one is the embargo theory is. This is one of the reasons that it sort of explains why NVIDIA takes such a hit is, there are two pieces here. Well, the first one explains that people have thought that NVIDIA had such a moat. Okay? So NVIDIA has such a moat. Nobody can compete with NVIDIA because only NVIDIA had the technology to run the kind of SOA or system architecture that was capable of running AI in the way that we have it today. First in model creation and then in inference. But DeepSeek runs on AMD. So that kind of breaks that whole narrative. Okay?

Brian: Right.

Phillip: So there's that. So that is the first big blow in the markets to NVIDIA. The second is there's a whole other conversation around at the same time of, well, I think some of this was trained on NVIDIA or some somehow illegally done in some, like, backwards deal where they were somehow trained in a way on chips that were sold through Shell Corporations. This is all conspiracy theory in hearsay. Okay?  Shell Corporations and sold off book. And in doing so, they got around embargos that you're not supposed to sell, you know, to competition. Like, we're not supposed to be selling these chips to China because we are in competition with China, on a global scale. And this is one of those issues. Right? Something I said on the podcast last year was the sort of narcissis mirror where there's this really interesting poetic conversation at the center of AI is that AI being a reflection of humanity and lithography and sort of the laser, focal point using a mirror to focus a laser making three nanometer chips being the center point of the embargo. Us having to control the mirror and us controlling the laser and the lithography and us controlling the chip making is at the end of the day, it's like, I think that's really poetic.

Brian: It is poetic.

Phillip: Yeah. Anyway, long story short, there's all of these conspiracy theories how this could have even happened. I have not played with DeepSeek. I've watched YouTube videos about it, and I've watched other people use it. I've seen a couple Twitch streams, and I've watched a bunch of TikTokers freak out about it. But I think the thing that's really funny is how many Gen Zers are using it just specifically to spite the government, and that is why it is number one on the App Store right now. I believe.

Brian: Yup. Exactly. It's crazy. And I have no idea. I mean, here's my real hot take. Who knows what kind of backdoor deals that were involved in this? I mean, I'm sure it matters. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. But did anyone think that the Chinese weren't gonna get ahold of code available on the Internet and use data of which the Chinese government has a lot of to train? It seems almost ridiculous that we wouldn't see this happen. Do you know what I mean? This was an inevitability.

Phillip: Hardware was always the thing. It's like saying everybody knows how to build a nuclear bomb, Brian, but you need the plutonium.

Brian: Right. Fair. But chips are are readily available. I mean, obviously, the NVIDIA chips, they ran it on AMD. Great. Okay. Cool. The chip war happens, and then people catch up, and things start to work in ways you didn't think they would.

Phillip: I went down this crazy rabbit hole too. They somehow started tinkering with these AMD chips that unlocked all this performance apparently. Supposedly... This could be true.

Brian: This reminds me of the days when we would overclock their R-Pentiums.

Phillip: Oh, I did it. Oh, I totally did it.

Brian: A 100%,

Phillip: I was in that every day trying to undo the change that I did that, like, whacked out my computer because I had to finish my homework.

Brian: I guarantee you, that's what the Chinese are doing occasionally. They're, like, trying to get in there and figure out what whacked out their hardware because they tinkered with it so much.

Phillip: I posted something on X, which I'm avoiding like the plague, by the way. I am trying to wean myself off of that platform in the same way I've weaned myself off of coffee over the past month and a half.

Brian: Your substitute is like an artificial sweetener. You gotta get used to it. You gotta get used to that flavor.

Phillip: Bro, I mainlined it for so long. I'm having to really, really...

Brian: You were on the high fructose, and now you're on Splenda.

Phillip: But I did post. I said, I get the same feeling about this, this whole discourse. I get the same feeling about this discourse that feels a lot like the whole room temperature superconductors conversation from last year?

Brian: Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The room temperature quantum processing.

Phillip: Yeah. The superconductor thing where it's, like, magnetic levitation and superconductor and we had supposedly one lab was able to do it and they had this breakthrough. But when push came to shove, nobody was able to reproduce it. And whether that's real or it was a fluke, it doesn't really matter because if it only happens once, it basically never happens at all. And that is... I kind of have the feeling... {laughter} I don't know if this is real or true or fake or what, but maybe DeepSeek is a fluke. It doesn't matter.

Brian: It kind of does matter.

Phillip: It's always bound to happen. We're going to make technological leaps and you will always have disruption in every industry, in every category. I don't know that we all thought it would come this quickly. And we're all better for it, to be honest with you. It's really tough when it's a rival, an economic rival, that we are provoking through economic sanctions. That is really tough. That's really tough.

Brian: The funny thing is, like, I don't know. It's open source. So everyone's gonna have it. Everyone's gonna have it. Maybe if this is a case of...

Phillip: That is their best defense. You're right. It's the best defense is flood the zone. Right? You can create no economic moat. Right. But let's see. That only worked in commerce, and it only worked in software for about 15 years.

Brian: True. We'll see.

Phillip: Yeah. It only worked in software for about 15 years because standards for some reason, and the altruism of people working in concert and unity and harmony only work as long as people, I think there's literally, these things go in cycles of generations, and there's a particular type of a generation who is selfless. And then a generation that proceeds them, that comes after them is a selfish generation.

Brian: Wait. Hold on. Okay. I think there might be some truth to this. Hold the phone for a sec.

Phillip: This might be After Dark content. I have a theory about this.

Brian: Recently, we had the the Gen X short...

Phillip: Which I got roasted for on TikTok, by the way.

Brian: Roasted. Roasted. But I love this because it's millennials, right, that are roasting you? And one of the things I posed a question to my a friend of mine, like, maybe a year ago, and I was like, you know, millennials are just as selfish as boomers. And she got kind of offended by it. She's like, "No. No generation's been so conscious about things as we have."

Phillip: And humble too.

Brian: And humble too. Exactly. It's funny. I think boomers felt the exact same way when they were cranking. "Oh, we're the best. We're the best generation. We're doing things that no one else has ever done. We're paying attention to things that no one else has paid attention to." They're the freaking sixties, man. They led the way, and yet we complain about all of them. But I think millennials might be worse potentially. {laughter}

Phillip: {laughter} Yeah.

Brian: Remember when we were younger and all the boomers were like, "Those millennials?" Ddo you remember?

Phillip: Yeah. We really showed them.

Brian: They were right.

Phillip: Yeah. We really showed them. There was an article that today came out. So yuppies are back.

Brian: Oh. Yeah.

Phillip: I don't know if you saw that.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Bring on the yupps.

Phillip: Yeah. The yuppies are back. The cruel kids table on New York Magazine.

Brian: Oh, yeah.

Phillip: Social studies column Brock Colyer, the cultural ascendancy of the new young right. They took Washington. Now they want the rest of America and it says the eighties are back. The the young urban professionals, the yuppies, tired of...moralism and ugliness of the 1960s leftism. They came back. And look. It's almost like history is repeating itself. You remember Alex P Keaton from...

Brian: No. No.

Phillip: You never watched that show? Family Ties. That's where Michael J Fox became famous. He was on a TV show.

Brian: Never watched it.

Phillip: You never watched that show?

Brian: Nope. I was a little later than you, and we didn't watch too much TV as kids. It was more movies than TV.

Phillip: Got it.

Brian: We didn't have cable.

Phillip: Got it. Well, he was sort of the archetype. His parents were hippies, and the intro of the show sure sort of shows their progression as a family as they're growing up through painted pictures and photographs and sort of like Olan Mills style portraits on the mantle as they're growing through the years. And now you see the family sort of, like, in their later years where daughter is older in college or son is older, graduated, daughter's in high school. So Alex P Keaton's in, like, college years, I'm guessing, by my recollection... It's been, like, 25 years since I've seen the show. Daughter's in high school and dating, and then the younger daughter is much younger and is early middle school age. And the two parents are ex hippies, and they're reconciling the fact that their oldest son is like a Reagan loving Republican...

Brian: Gen X is back, baby.

Phillip: Gordon Gekko loving. Yeah, absolutely. He grows up to be that sort of a guy. {laughter}

Brian: Wild.

Phillip: I think that's just funny.

Brian: It's funny. Man, Michael J Fox coming up a lot in my sphere. There's something going on.

Phillip: Yeah. It is.

Brian: There's something going on. We talked about Back to the Future recently. And then just random, I've been watching through Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I never finished. I'd watched, like, halfway through, and literally, the Michael J Fox episode was on just the other night. And so somethings is in the water.

Phillip: I mean, he was just given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I think that incepted everybody to have to remember Michael J Fox in the culture.

Brian: Totally random, though, for me. Completely random. I don't know.

Phillip: Him receiving the medal of freedom is the reason why we watched Back to the Future. I was like, "Oh, nostalgia."

Brian: Oh, okay. There you go. All right.

Phillip: That brought him back up because we watched that. Maybe that's why we're talking about it. Let's get back on track real quick. You can't play whack-a-mole with policy.

Brian: It's hard. People try. People try to play whack-a-mole with policy.

Phillip: I don't think that we can ban every app from the App Store.

Brian: No. In fact, that was actually the funny thing about the TikTok ban, right, as everyone jumped to another Chinese video app.

Phillip: So we're in a bit of a conundrum. And I understand. So the really interesting piece here is I believe the issue with TikTok is the concentration. So the the concentration of the media and the control of all how many people, and the network effect of how many people, 170,000,000 Americans spending two hours a day on it, that seems very dangerous.

Brian: Yes.

Phillip: So to me, the concentration risk of that alone, and the reciprocity in the United States, the fact that they ban our media.

Brian: Right.

Phillip: Right. That to me makes sense.

Brian: I guess yeah. I think there's... I mean, there's something very unAmerican...

Phillip: We're going to rehash the last episode all over again, but I think this is important to talk about.

Brian: It is. It's something kind of unAmerican about blocking out...

Phillip: Free speech?

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: Yeah. From the party that has been banging the free speech gavel for the past eight years.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Let's copy China so that we don't become like China. Oh, wait a minute. {laughter} Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: This is it's kinda wild.

Brian: But... But I think to your point, the problem is when you're mainlining something...

Phillip: It's true.

Brian: I think that's the danger.

Phillip: It's true.

Brian: My contention would be let's build better American stories instead of worrying about what people are... Don't consume garbage. Use agency. I don't know. I don't think banning TikTok is necessarily the answer. I actually don't.

Phillip: Here's a good one. You ready? So okay. Get the government out of my social media. How about... This is so far afield. This should have been After Dark. This is so far. It should have been. Maybe we'll cover this in the After Dark.

Brian: Yeah. Let's save the rest of this conversation for After Dark.

Phillip: Okay. So we'll hold it over. JD Vance. JD Vance stands up this week, says, "You know what I want? I want Americans having more babies."

Brian: Yeah. This is After Dark. {laughter}

Phillip: {laughter} That's commerce and culture, baby.

Brian: Oh, man.

Phillip: So I think to myself, I'm like, "Maybe if parents did a little more parenting." I don't know.

Brian: Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you.

Phillip: And at the same time, Brian, my kids, they'll come home from school. They're complaining about one of their classmates, and they'll be like, "You're such an iPad kid." And I'm like, "Got news for you. You are an iPad kid." {laughter}

Brian: No. That's not totally true.

Phillip: Not totally true. We ruthlessly limit screen time.

Brian: Yeah. Totally.

Phillip: Totally. Like, 20 minutes of screen time a day. That thing shuts down like Fort Knox. Alright.

Brian: Love that. You are actually stronger on that than even I am. We don't do screens except for school work on weekdays. But weekends, man, I let my kids go crazy if they... And then we'll kick them outside, and then they'll go play outside for, like, 7 hours.

Phillip: Speaking of which, TikTok, just covering the back half here. TikTok, apparently, there's an aftermarket right now for TikTok preinstalled on phones, are going for 100 of dollars because you can't get... Okay. And one phone being listed on eBay does not necessarily, a market price make, but I'll drop this in the show notes for you, Sarah. But there is a news story about one phone is listed at $25,000. I don't know how much any phone has actually sold for, but there was a Times news now times now news.com, a very reputable news source that I've definitely heard of, this news aggregator, definitely not a Taboola roll up affiliate blog. But, you know, there is a news sort of a story here that is very, very juicy about people needing their TikTok fix who have an opportunity to buy a phone with TikTok preinstalled. That sounds like a really juicy news story. And it feels like Flappy Bird all over again.

Brian: Yeah. Here's my viewpoint. You can find just about anything listed on eBay for an unreasonable price. Any and everything. My kids go on there, and they're like, "Do you realize this...is worth, like, $25,000?" And I'm like, "Guys, don't look at eBay. Don't look at eBay. You're setting yourselves up for disappointment."

Phillip: Once upon a time, eBay, eBay Enterprise sponsored some content from Future Commerce, I think.

Brian: I got a lot of stories about eBay Enterprise. There's still things in use that I made for Ebay Enterprise that are being used by other organizations that were acquired out of Ebay Enterprise.

Phillip: There's the lore. That's the truth. So, anyway, I don't think anyone's got the jonesing yet for $25,000 for a TikTok. But if you did, and you had that crypto money was burning a hole in your pocket, and you have the money to spend right now, go for it. We've got a couple other items on the docket. The Lady Gaga site. Here's what I gotta say about ladygaga.com. Shopify site, built with Hydrogen, headless site. Looks really pretty. Wanna dive into that for one second real quick. Has a dark mode switch, not a dork mode switch, has a dark mode switch. We're gonna talk about that for one second, but you gotta give her props for going full harlequin on this thing even though that movie was absolute like, it was panned left and right, and she still leans into it.

Brian: Yep. What a move.

Phillip: That takes guts.

Brian: It does. Yeah. I'm all in on it, actually, as a creative, like, creative move wise.

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: That's bold. And I feel like it fits Lady Gaga really well already.

Phillip: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: I don't know. It works.

Phillip: Well, that's the next album is March 7. It's called Mayhem. But the harlequin thing is still very up there. It's still up there. I would have taken that down. {laughter}

Brian: The thing about this site is, you pointed this out, you called this. It is cool on the front, and everyone was freaking out about it. They're like, it's headless. It's built on what was it? Hydrogen or something like that?

Phillip: Yeah. Hydrogen.

Brian: Yeah. It is. Okay. But if you to get into it, it's just a normal ecommerce site.

Phillip: Oh, okay. That was in pre show. So here's what you're gonna do. Maybe we can pull this off in the YouTube. But right now, I'm gonna do it, and you're not gonna be able to see it. If you're on the website and you go to the top bar and you click on "music" and you sort of hover over the album art, you get this sort of Apple Music sort of little album little scrolly deal. We've been able to do that since what, 1999?

Brian: Yep.

Phillip: And then if you click on the left side and you kind of thumb through the albums yeah. Okay. That, to me, is a level of depth in scroll. Okay. We've been doing this in apps for a long time. We have not been doing this in ecommerce experience ever, and we need that. But this isn't necessarily a shoppable experience. When you get to the shopping, that all goes away. So go to "shop" up top, and we're just in...

Brian: I'm kinda messing with it. It's actually kinda breaking for me.

Phillip: Oh, okay. Well, it's pretty. I like it. It looks pretty cool.

Brian: It does. No. It's a great site.

Phillip: It's fast. Congrats. Hey, Shopify. We were talking with a friend who shall not be named, who was saying that the word on the street at NRF was that the Shopify enterprise sales team has done such a job over the last year that the death by a 1000 cuts has happened so thoroughly and so methodically and so insidiously in this industry that over the next year and a half the number of deal closes and logos that Shopify will have announced over the next little while that they're, like, the level of winning that they'll have, like the game's over, that they have won. And I'm like, I love hearing the rumor. I wanna see it. I wanna see it actually play out. I hear the rumors. I wanna see it play out.

Brian: Totally.

Phillip: You know what I mean?

Brian: Totally. Well, it's been two NRFs since the Mattel site was announced.

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: And I am sure I think that there was a site that...

Phillip: There's sites.

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: There's so many sites. They've got sites.

Brian: Are they? Why has it not become like a...

Phillip: It's a thing. 78% of retail is it happens physically.

Brian: No. I know. But, like, you'd think that they would be shouting it from the rooftops. I don't know.

Phillip: I mean, they are. They're shouting Retail Media. Advertising is where everybody's making their money. They're not talking about ecommerce.

Brian: That's true.

Phillip: Where are they talking about ecommerce? Nobody's talking about ecommerce, Brian.

Brian: Upcoming at ShopTalk, actually, Retail Media, big deal. They've got a whole section dedicated to it.

Phillip: That's true. And shout out to our friend, Kiri Masters, who has a whole new channel. She just launched over on YouTube. It's the Retail Media Breakfast Club. You should go check it out. It's daily 6 AM. I get up now because I'm an old man. I wake up at, like, 5. So while I'm having my coffee, it pops in into my feed. I have a set to notifications. Notifications on, get my daily 10 minute fix of retail media every day, and I love her programming. 10 minutes. Super easy.

Brian: Kiri kills. She's great.

Phillip: Crushes it.

Brian: Yeah. She's back at it with renewed vigor. Very exciting for her.

Phillip: Like, she said she was retired, and I was like, "There's no way. Never."

Brian: You feel the call back to this industry. I think that's interesting. I rarely see someone, like, end up leaving that that really gets into it and builds a network in this industry. It's hard to get out. There's a lot of good people, and it's just fun.

Phillip: Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. {laughter} I want to cover one more thing, and then maybe you have a thing. I don't know. I wanna hit that Starbucks commercial here.

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: In the After Dark this week, which is only for members. You wanna hear it, you gotta go to futurecommerce.com/plus. Join the membership. If you had joined the membership, you wouldn't have had to listen to all these commercials. You wouldn't have had to listen to my pretty, pretty voice deliver all of the wonderful advertising partners and all of the messages that you have heard throughout this lovely 39 minute runtime. For all of the effort and support that you give to us, we love you for it. There's a lot of bonuses. You get a lot of benefits. Go to futurecommerce.com/plus and join the membership, and we do appreciate it if you do. Thank you for all for your support over the last eight years of Future Commerce coming up on nine. Almost nine years of Future Commerce. I want to cover this vicious, vicious attack of a Waymo in Los Angeles that they caught on film.

Brian: I cannot wait to talk about that.

Phillip: Hard to watch.

Brian: Especially given you and I, we've been in a Waymo multiple times now.

Phillip: Can you imagine being in a Waymo while that thing's getting attacked? That's scary. That's scary.

Brian: That's kinda freaky. Yeah. Also, I think there's just so much to say. This hits so many trends we've talked about already.

Phillip: We're also gonna cover the death of David Lynch. You wrote a beautiful piece on David Lynch's passing. I wanna cover that in the After Dark. So if you're not subscribed, you're not part of the membership, go get on there. That will drop this week.

Brian: So Starbucks. Is that our last topic?

Phillip: I think that's our last topic. Okay. I go to Starbucks every day. You know this. You know this about me.

Brian: You are the biggest Starbucks customer that I know.

Phillip: I probably am.

Brian: Yep. Yep. Yep.

Phillip: Unapologetically so. I don't mind Starbucks.

Brian: You've been cutting back. You've been cutting back, not just on Starbucks, but on coffee in general.

Phillip: Coffee altogether. I'm sad about it. I don't think I'm...

Brian: As I sip my coffee?

Phillip: {laughter} I actually as I started cutting back, I was getting the nitro. You know I was getting the nitro. I drink nitro exclusively for...

Brian: That is crazy to me because I drink a lot of coffee, and nitro messes with me.

Phillip: I was doing two a day.

Brian: That would mess you up, dude.

Phillip: I was doing two a day. And sometimes it would really mess me up because I would order one, and they would sometimes be like, they love me there. They're nice to me. I'm their regular. They know me by name, and then they'll, like, hook you up with things that you're not asking for. So then they'll give you a coffee on the way out the door, and I'm, like, "You guys, I think you're gonna kill me." And then you have a coffee that you didn't ask for it, and I'm gonna drink it. So then I have crushing anxiety now. So now I'm like, I don't know why my heart is pounding, and I feel like I'm gonna die. So I was like, I need to lay off.

Brian: Why do you think people combine cigarettes with coffee? Because you can slow it back down, baby.

Phillip: Basically I kinda got to the point where it was like, "I need to lay off the caffeine." So I've been slowly weaning myself off the caffeine, but I'd still go to Starbucks. And about a month and a half ago, a month ago, they started leaving little notes on my cup. It's really cute.

Brian: You just thought they were being nice to you, but really, it was a run up to a new campaign.

Phillip: Brian. Well, I didn't know it. I thought maybe they were hitting on me. I don't know. Today so this new campaign just launched. It was CEO Brian Nichols' first, like, big campaign came out by Anomaly, or created by Anomaly's brand studio, and the title of the campaign is called That's Not My Name, set to the eponymously named song That's Not My Name. And the Starbucks Sharpie is back, and today is the day after, and they're writing on the cups. I was in the test market. Apparently, I was in the test market when they started writing on stuff. I'll show it on the YouTube. Here we go. Today on my, oh that's not gonna focus. Hold on. So it says "thank you" on the bag, and I have my cup right here. You can see I've had exactly four sips out of it. It says, "You're awesome," on my cup. Look at that.

Brian: You are awesome.

Phillip: You're awesome.

Brian: They spelled "you're" right. That's a relief.

Phillip: And they spelled "you're" right, which they are awesome.

Brian: I mean, spelling "you're" is actually the true surprise and delight moment.

Phillip: That's the way to my heart. Yeah. That to me. I kinda love this campaign. I love it.

Brian: I like it too. So here's the thing. Starbucks commoditized itself to win some dollars. And you know that they saw a lot of competition in the craft space? And they knew they weren't gonna be able to outcompete those craft roasteries.

Phillip: Sure.

Brian: So they were like, "Well, if we're getting pushed out of that because we can't keep up with it, we can't do the micro thing as well as people can, we're gonna go two routes. We're gonna go insane roastery. We're gonna have the coolest roasteries in town and big cities and make people realize that we can make serious coffee." And let me tell you, they can in those roasteries.

Phillip: They are so cool.

Brian: So cool.

Phillip: The Reserve is so cool.

Brian: "And we're gonna go extremely mass, and we're gonna do the McDonald's thing, and Starbucks is gonna be everywhere all the time at once."

Phillip: Microwave food.

Brian: Yes.

Phillip: Crappy coffee. Yep.

Brian: Here's what I think is super interesting. I think the roasteries have done very well, very well. And now they acquired a company called Clover. And actually, I remember when they did this. I went into their offices. A friend of mine's dad worked at Starbucks at the time, and I got to try the Clovers after they acquired them, which was super cool, made one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had, and then they phased them out. They put them into a bunch of stores, and they pulled them. And you know why? It's because it took a long time. The Clover technology was slow.

Phillip: Yeah. Forever.

Brian: Was really slow. And so I think they've been working on perfecting it this whole time since then. And now in the new Starbucks and the one in I went to at your place because I think that they realized that you're their best customer in the nation, and they're like, "We need to put one of these next to Phillip because..."

Phillip: It says top 0.5%. So there's no way I'm the best customer in the nation.

Brian: You're pushing it, dude. These machines are taking action. So I have one near my kids' school as well. They are taking the Reserve roast coffees and putting them into Starbucks, and they are doing Clover coffee for all of these Reserve roasts, including single origin Ethiopia, which is my favorite coffee.

Phillip: That's nuts. That's pretty rad.

Brian: Dude. This is a return to competing with the craft coffee, and they're doing it.

Phillip: Okay. Well, they also are bringing back the cafe experience. I mean, listen. I'm already a fan, so it doesn't really count for much. But today, lots of people being asked, "Is this for here or to go?" And a lot of people confuse. They're like, "What do you mean for here to go?" Like, "Are you gonna stay in the cafe or are you gonna take it out?" And they're like, "I'm gonna stay here." And then they're getting real cups, like, real saucers and real cups.

Brian: Now we're talking. Let's go. They used to do this.

Phillip: Okay? So now they have people going around and bussing.

Brian: Yes.

Phillip: Okay? And then they have the bar has milk and stuff on it again. Like, we're back. We're back.

Brian: That's technology enabled back. That is the thing that I think is interesting.

Phillip: Yeah. That's cool.

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: That's cool. And they're called the Starbucks coffee company now. That's the other thing is that the brand is repositioned as the Starbucks Coffee Company.

Brian: If this CEO kills Pike Place, I am all in on Starbucks.

Phillip: {laughter} That's a great place to leave it because that would be the ghost of Pike Place Market.

Brian: If he can shake those ghosts. Shake those ghosts.

Phillip: Well, I can't have a ghost without something being dead. So if you just kill it, then there you go. Alright. True super fans of Future Commerce would understand that reference. Alright, Brian. Let's leave it there.

Brian: Thanks for listening.

Phillip: Thank you for listening. Check out the After Dark. Lots to come. I don't even know what's going on. We have June 10th. If you made it this far, June 10th is our to be announced MoMA VISIONS Summit.

Brian: You just went straight there. Let's go.

Phillip: I'm going for it. It's coming. I'm telling everybody

Brian: If you're still listening...

Phillip: It's not announced yet.

Brian: Most people probably were like, "Oh, it's over. I'm done." Good thing you stuck around. Good thing you stuck around.

Phillip: Go to futurecommerce.com/events and click on the notify me button to get on the list to be the first to know. If you're not on the list, get on the list. Go to futurecommerce.com, and sign up for our emails, and you'll have your favorite thing in the inbox just about every day.

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