We’ve rounded up our 2024 highlight reel in one year-end finale episode. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Future Commerce!
This year was a great one for the Future Commerce podcast. We vision-casted with fellow futurists at exclusive events across the nation, launched podcast specials like Spooky Commerce and FC Radio Theater, and were joined on the podcast by many of our industry muses, including Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler and Walmart’s Justin Breton.
We’ve rounded up our 2024 highlight reel in one year-end finale episode. All featured episodes linked below.
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce, Brian. I'm here. I'm Phillip. This might be the last time we do that intro. I wanna change it.
I know. We're we're lots of change coming in 2025. All so fun and exciting.
Got a lot for you today. It's gonna be a great show. I have a banging tweet thread that I just wanna talk about up front here.
Recap of 2024 includes Phillip's tweet from 2 seconds ago.
Dude, the thought leadership industrial complex eventually comes for everyone.
For everyone.
This year was the highest of highs and lowest of lows for many industries and many devices, especially for my wallet because I was one of the few that bought a VisionPRO and really liked it. And I felt really bad about my purchase until, like, 2 minutes ago when some news just dropped. We're gonna talk about that in a minute.
Your ego is just going up by the second.
Dude, I'm like the wild swings. The swings that have been swung upon me in the last few weeks. {laughter} But you were just down here. We actually hung out for our Miami event.
I was. Live at the Moore at the end of Art Basel/Miami Art Week, whatever we're calling it these days. It was so cool. What a venue. What a time. Future Commerce Live had incredible talks. Nick Susi. So good.
Yep. That was probably talk of the year for me.
It's up there. It's up there. Nick is on fire. I love that we get to chat with Nick whenever. Like, we just get to chat. So cool.
And people don't know Nick Susi, he's Director of Strategy at Dot Dot Dash, which is an agency owned by TBWA. They do incredible, experiential, big, big, experiential delivery work, creating digital design and all kinds of rad stuff, dot dot dash. He has a mind like no other. I really am impressed by his essay work. He's contributed to the upcoming Lore journal, which is our new Future Commerce journal for 2025, and he'll be at our launch party at NRF Big Show. But he gave this talk based on this recent essay that he just put out, and it's asking the question, "Chat, is this real?" And I really loved it. It was a very long and incisive and deep dive into the real and fake beefs online and offline that are meant to garner attention. And I think that's really, really cool because brands engage in this all the time.
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I think that's the first time we've talked about the party on the podcast.
Oh, yeah.
Just to reemphasize, we're having a party. Yeah. January 14th at the NeueHouse Madison Square. Be there or be square.
Be Madison Square? Oh my gosh. We're so old, Brian. It'll be great. We're gonna be there with a couple hundred of our friends, and we'll be celebrating the launch of our annual print journal. If you don't have one, go grab one of the few remaining copies of the last couple years' journals. I think we're gonna do a reissue of those sometime in 2025. But you can get 20% off with the Future Commerce Plus membership on everything at the store, shop.futurecommerce.com. And, like I said, 15 contributors to the series journal, and it's clocking at nearly 300 pages, hardcover, soft cloth bound, foil pressed, gorgeous piece with lots of surprises in store.
I just cannot wait for all the content around this. Let alone the actual, like, book itself. The content around the book is incredible.
It's gonna be... We actually we're learning how to be marketers.
We're still being content creators here. This is still... It's like the content about the content is content.
That's right. Just on the Future Commerce Plus side too, by the way, being at the Moore, which is a private members club in Miami where we held this event, Tom Goodwin was there, by the way. I know we banged on about Nick Susi, but Tom Goodwin was our headline speaker.
Tom Goodwin. Man.
He's rated marketer of the year for LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. Really cool to have him in person. I've never met him before in person. And what a delight. Very, very charming guy. His online voice really translates well to IRL, which is something that you can't say about a lot of people. He calls himself sort of a pragmatic futurist, and I really like his lens on the world. You had a really great follow-up to his keynote. We will be dropping some of this content sometime in the new year for general subscribers to the podcast. But if you're a Plus subscriber, you'll get a first look at all of that a few weeks before everybody else, and that'll be on the private feed pretty soon. But speaking of Plus subscribers, I got a lovely note from one of our Plus subscribers, Armen. And Armen Alajian, he is, and I probably pronounced that incorrectly. Sorry about that, Armen. He dropped me a note and said that his business, ARTO Brick manufactured all of the floors, like terracotta tiles and these gorgeous, like, luxury tiles at the Moore, which is not a small facility.
No.
Not a small facility. It's four floors. And The Moore, just to give our audience here, some kind of a frame of reference. The Moore has owned a minority stake in The Moore by LVMH. There's a Dior cafe opening in 2025 in the Moore. This is in Miami's design district, right next to Tiffany and next to Gucci and next to everything. It's a very exclusive club, and we had just such a lovely time to be there. We got a tour of their private galleries and their artist in residence. And our friend, Tam Gren, who is now our multi time collaborator and curator of many of our Art Basel adjacent experiences over the years. She was our lovely host and helped make all of that possible.
She's incredible. She's incredible.
I don't know why you all listening right now don't come to this thing you need to. And the way you can stay up to date on that is subscribe to the email. So futurecommerce.com, and go get on the list and join us at our next Miami event, which should be coming sometime next year. And that's that. Can we talk about this tweet thing, Brian?
Tweet thing? Yeah. We can talk about this tweet thing. {laughter}
{laughter} Okay. And then we're gonna look back on 2024 because a lot happened this year. But this might be one of those things that that happened this year. Couldn't believe. Ryan Peterson of Flexport. Remember he was ousted and then returned this year. In our predictions episode next week, I have some predictions about ousted CEOs and triumphant returns. That's foreshadowing, subtle foreshadowing. But Ryan Peterson did return to the CEO spot at Flexport this last year, and he put out on ex formerly Twitter a post today, December 17th, that Houthis, the rebel organization, is putting on a shipping security webinar. This is an article from Tradewinds...
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. The Houthis
Yeah.
As in the pirates.
The pirates.
Pirates.
Yeah.
Putting on a webinar.
That's right.
About security.
The Yemeni Pirates. The Houthi rebels.
Oh, wait. Hold on. They're giving them the playbook that they know so that they can go pirate. It's like, okay, "We'll give you the playbook to go run all of your shipping and be safe."
That's right.
"Don't mind the man behind the curtain who knows everything about your plan."
That's it. This is it. {laughter} This is shocking to me. So the headline on Tradewinds, which is a trade magazine for the shipping industry, the headline says, "After a year of attacks, Houthi's planned shipping security seminar, the scourge of commercial shipping welcomes insights for discussions on navigation in the Red Sea."
So, wait, is this like reform. Is this a reform? My brain is boggled right now at every level. First of all, thought leadership is just... Thought leadership's taken over the world. Everyone does thought leadership.
Everybody does thought leadership even rebel militias that turn into... But it is not uncommon, by the way. We don't have to go down this path now, but it is not uncommon for rebel groups that are labeled as terrorists to eventually become legitimized political movements that become ruling political parties and then accepted governments. That is a thing that is repeated over and over in history. Maybe the thought leadership angle is an attempt to try to accelerate that. I don't know.
Wait. Wait. Wait. I think I get this now. It's like hackers who were black hat and got caught, and then the government flipped them to be good people.
Remember yeah.
It's good.
It's the free Kevin movement. Do you remember Kevin Mitnick from the nineties? Do you remember that?
Very vaguely. It's just this pushing way back. But yeah.
So, yeah, this might be an interesting keynote topic for me at some point, but very few people remember it. Kevin Mitnick was a telephone hacker. They called them Freakers back in the day. And I think he's since passed recently in the last few years, unfortunately. But he did some jail time. There was a movement to free him because he was sort of this guy that became sort of a poster child for a technological, or a technophile, very online sort of a person. And then became an FBI expert, like, expert, you know, embedded person helping the FBI solve a bunch of things in the dawn of the Internet. Maybe the Houthis are trying to execute the Kevin Mitnick playbook. I don't know. I hate to make light of this because it's actually really horrible. But here's what makes this so funny, if you can find any humor in this whatsoever. So friend of the pod, Aaron Orendorf, these days over at FERMÀT Commerce, is very well known in the ecommerce and DTC industry for hosting these mega webinars. So he hosts these hour to hour and a half long webinars where each person, he'll though there will be how many people are on these things, Brian?
Oh, it's, like, probably 20 speakers.
20 speakers? 20 plus speakers coming up on these webinars, and they get, like, five minutes a piece, maybe less because that would be 200 minutes.
Yes. Speaker speed dating, but that does it's 2 minutes. It's gotta be, like, 2 minutes.
Yeah. It's, like, 2 minutes per it's really fast. I tagged him in this Houthi post on on X, and I said, "Hey, Aaron. {laughter} For your next mega webinar, here's what you should do. You should pull in Hezbollah. Right? You gotta pull in Al Qaeda and maybe ISIS. Let's turn this into a mega thought leadership webinar. That's what you gotta do. Let's Aaron Orendorf this thing. Let's really blow it up."
Oh, sheesh. Did she just say blow it up?
Let's just really blow it up.
Get banned from whatever podcast platform we're on right now. Oh my gosh.
So, yeah, that happened. I think that's the...
The state of the thought leadership industrial complex.
It really is interesting though that the information economy is useful, and the attention economy is necessary, I think, for at all levels. It's incumbent on everybody to be creating content. I really think that's true. This is a great signal of that.
Totally.
Yeah.
Anyway.
All companies become media companies.
Even pirates.
Even pirates.
Yeah. Yeah. Pirates are doing it. Alright. Well...
I could make another joke here. I'm holding back. There's other jokes to be made. I'm done.
Why are you holding back?
I'm done.
That's fine. Nobody listens to this, Brian. Go ahead. Say it.
No.
Okay. Alright. Well, that's awkward.
But I'll tell you the joke later.
Well, that's all. That's even more awkward.
After dark. I'll tell it on After Dark.
There it is.
You know what? If you wanna hear this joke, go subscribe to Future Commerce Plus. In fact, there's content we're gonna talk about on this podcast that you can only get on Future Commerce Plus. And so I'm just throwing in an ad for our subscription service.
No one's heard at least one of these pieces that we're gonna talk about. We're gonna take a look back here over the next, I don't know, 45 minutes, an hour. We're gonna take a look back at some of the content from this year, some of the highs, the highest points of the podcast over the year. We did celebrate our 8th year podcasting, Brian. And this is my 10th, I think, year podcasting, and it's just gone through so many changes. It's been such a incredible year. We've had some really incredible moments in the history of the podcast, but we are trendsetters. There was a news piece that just came out, Blackmagic Design, which creates cinema cameras and pro consumer cameras for content creators, for filmmakers, and for people in the cinema and filmmaking industry. They just announced that they're coming out with a new spatial camera that has two optic lenses that are set up specifically for Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest.
So you can feel good about your purchase.
So that I can feel good about my purchase, which is what I just teased a little bit earlier. And so it's sort of you know, when you look at what Apple is doing in the space of now putting out more films for spatial video, it kind of makes sense that we're gonna have more creator tools that are going to deliver native content for that medium. And that's a really fitting way to end the year because that's kind of how we started the year talking about that.
This is on the heels of the Android XR announcements. So we're not just seeing Apple. This is like Apple and Android, Google and Apple, whatever.
And Meta as well. Don't forget Meta had a big their AR goggle announcement earlier this year as well. We have a lot of signals that visual and optical computing is the future. It's one of the many futures of commerce and maybe spatial computing as well. So there's something really interesting about that.
It makes me laugh because, as usual, Microsoft got left out of the hardware play even though they really were the first ones to it with the...
As usual.
Yeah. As usual. They almost always get in there upfront, and they're the sacrificial lamb. Somehow, they still end up making money on things.
Satya is probably crying into his billions of his investment and OpenAI. I'm sure he's very upset about HoloLens not being the one to really create the cultural moment for spatial computing. But let's take a look back. This clip is from when technology changes, context changes from February 6th this year. Let's take a listen to what we were saying about VisionPro at the time.
Trendsetters. Well, it'd be bad if we were Future Commerce and we didn't somehow predict the future in any way. This is also strangely, and there's no other reason to bring this up other than my own excitement, but this is the last time that you and I will talk on this podcast in the era before I owned a Vision Pro headset.
There will be a lot of Vision Pro content.
Really excited for that, you know, content. But the world is, I think, on an accelerating path towards, you know, more channels and more ways to buy things and various levels of immersion and engagement, and relationship to either a brand or the parasocial relationship to the person who introduced you to the brand. And those things just make the world so much more complicated.
Not totally quite sure where I was trying to go with parasocial relationships and VisionPRO, but...
I think I do. I think you were talking about immersive connections with influencers and creators and social stars giving people a way to interact that feels even more lifelike and more...
Oh, more channels. That's what I was saying. More channels. Yep. So yeah. Well, it definitely didn't mature as a full fledged...
Well it didn't get killed. In fact, we just said, like, we're definitely seeing people start to build around it. I mean, think about the PC and how long it took things to really kinda get going. It actually went from almost like a hobbyist sort of investment. People who were networkers or people who had to do technology at their job were, like, "I need a home computer so that I can stay up to date on the things I have to do for my work." You know what I mean?
Yeah. That's true.
And so I think our first computer, when my parents bought it, was 1,000s of dollars for, as we mentioned many times, like, something that was almost a shrine. We had, like, a little tiny computer room in our house that was like a tower of stuff that was all dedicated to technology,
Dedicated furniture. Yeah. Right? With its own dedicated media. Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. And so, you know, we look at the Apple Vision Pro right now and its price point and the types of giant pieces of technology, that new camera that that Blackmagic just released, it looks like a camcorder of old.
It does.
Do you remember that big old camcorder you have to throw onto your shoulder? We definitely had one of those. This is where we're at right now. The consumer stuff is expensive, and it is for people who are super into it. And everyone else is like, "Why would I need that? I'm just gonna go to the movies."
You've seen me carry around my Vision Pro. I would say it's a for me where I settled with it, just bluntly, I do not use this thing when I'm home.
Right.
It's a travel device.
You're only using it on the plane. You don't even really use it once you get to your destination. It's a plane device.
Let me say this.
Be honest.
I'm gonna be honest. I use it. Yes. You also only see me when we're traveling in a specific context, and I don't know that I have time to use it. So I have used when I was at the All In Summit and some other...
Right. Personal travel.
You know, solo travel. Yeah. I've used it quite a bit. It's really handy to have a very large format screen for doing creative work. And so I've done quite a bit of that. It's the best home theater experience that I own, and I have a very nice home theater system at home. We can keep moving, but that was a big moment this year. I feel like that was a really big moment. I think culturally and technology wise, we're gonna remember it, and that happened this year. That is a thing that is a thing, Brian, that happened in 2024. Alright. Let's move on. Another thing we did this year that I was really, really proud of was, well, we hired a brand new producer. Sarah Roulette joined us, and we launched a first segment of its kind. We introduced something called Spooky Commerce during spooky season on the Future Commerce podcast, and we might have given you, Brian, a little bit too much of the heebie jeebies. Let's take a listen.
Okay. Here, Brian, this is the link to the haunted duck. If you want to see the duck.
Alright. I'll click the duck. I'll click on the duck.
I couldn't have told you before you sent me this link what a haunted duck might look like. But now that I'm looking at it, that is the most haunted looking duck I've ever seen.
Right? There's just something about it. I don't know.
I mean, there's something about it is that it has the devil in it. That's the something. What is the deal?
It's a creepy looking duck.
It's menacing.
Mister Quackers. {laughter} That's what it says. It's pontic vessel relic, paranormal investigation. That's the SEO part of the title. Mister Quack.
I'm reading the description.
Yeah.
Can I read some of this?
Please.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Okay. A college student bought a vintage rubber... Oh, it's a rubber duck. It's not porcelain. That's, like, worse. Okay. Bought a vintage rubber duck, Mister Quackers, at a thrift store. She thought it was a quirky addition to her bathroom, but strange things started happening. Her roommates would find the duck in odd places, and some even reported seeing it grin at them.
It's grinning at me right now.
No. It would stare at her with cold dead eyes. She would hear eerie quacks in the night. {laughter}
What does an eerie quack sound like, I wonder? {eerie quack impression}
Please stop. Don't do that.
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard on the show as you doing an eerie quack in the night. Thank you for that. That was a good moment.
I think a bathtub hunting would have been an appropriate title for that.
That's true. You are now the Chief Title Officer. You're the CTO of of Future Commerce. I hereby renounce my position at titling shows. I'm actually looking at these. I feel like it's pretty apparent that I'm not titling for click rate. {laughter}
I don't know. I don't know. You've had some banger... I feel like you crushed The Senses titles. Those are fun.
The people that listen to this should be familiar with Omnichannel, and we need you to be omnivorous in your content consumption from Future Commerce. Go subscribe to the newsletter. You you need that. Let's keep moving. Another moment for us, um, is my love of Starbucks, obviously, comes up over and over.
And my hate.
I know you hate Starbucks, Brian. I did force you to go to Starbucks multiple times when you're in Miami this last week.
There are some good Starbucks... I like the Reserve Roasteries that they've got some great coffees. Like, Starbucks is, they're like Nike. They're, you know, they've got their high and their low.
I'm gonna show this to the YouTube channel. I got my Starbucks wrapped. What because, you know, every single thing on planet Earth now must have a wrapped. Do you know what a wrapped is?
The stats. We must consume them.
The data analytics, the data consumption, the datafication of everything, the dashboardification of everything.
Even data becomes a media company.
So Starbucks Blend 2024. This is my year in review. I'm gonna show it on the feed. I is this coming through? Can you see it okay? Yeah.
No. That's a little blurry. Yeah.
You can't see it. Hold on.
This is great. This is great radio. Here we go. We're gonna focus. We're gonna focus. Oh. We're gonna focus. No. There we go.
Nope.
If it's not working, I'm gonna have JT throw it in on the screen. Here, I'll read it for the listeners at home. My top drink: nitro cold brew.
Fair.
Top food: Egg white, egg bites. These are not surprises to me. Here's what's surprising. I visited 48 stores, Brian.
That's like a store in every single state in the continental US.
On my notebook, in my journal, my written journal...
Sufjan Stevens Starbucks.
{laughter}
Oh, wait. He only made it through his two states.
I went to 48 Starbi this year.
The Starbi. What is the plural of Starbucks? It's certainly not Starbuckses.
It's not. No. It's Starbucksin.
Starbucksin. Starbucks. And then that actually that's pretty good. I like Starbi. Oh, man. What do you what do you even call somebody who's a frequenter of Starbucks?
I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't matter. 10,500 stars redeemed.
That was an inside joke.
There's a lot of things. 10,500 stars redeemed. I'll bet you some people didn't even earn 10,500 stars this year, and I'll tell you right now.
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Are you at, like, the McDonald's leaderboard level?
I think I am. I was in the .02 percent. I was in the .02 percent of star earners this year.
Weren't you in, like, the 0.1% last year?
I was. I kinda slacked this year. Yeah.
I feel like you've dropped off.
So Starbucks did all these things, and this is kinda what happened and this is where our clip is going. We caught this really early on, right before Brian Niccol came in, who is the new CEO, taking over from the interim CEO Howard Schultz, who had his triumphal return when they ousted the last CEO. We had a real interesting run at Starbucks with a lot of issues at the company. And actually, fact check me on that, Brian. I think I got the terms wrong on that. There's there's been a couple missed opportunities and a lot of tenure. I think people in and out of that CEO lead role.
Yeah.
I think Howard Schultz might have been two terms ago. Anyway, we caught this really early on. Back in February, February 21, 2024, we had an After Dark, where I noticed that traffic was down a little bit.
Keywords keywords keywords. After Dark. You would need to go subscribe so you can listen.
Afterwards. Let's isten to the clip right now.
This thing showed up for me the other day, Brian, and I got, like, a chill down my spine. It was a notification that said, "Starbucks triple star day starts now." So first thing, the first concern there for me was they usually give you a couple days notice. Okay? So that's the first thing is, like, I had no notice. And I'm kind of a I'm weirdly and, like, almost ashamedly a Starbucks every day kind of a guy. Yeah. I go to Starbucks, sit down, have my coffee, and I respond to emails for about 2 and a half, 3 hours. That is my routine.
It's funny because I, like, avoid Starbucks, like the plague.
Maybe you would respond to your emails, Brian, if you went to Starbucks in the morning.
Maybe. Potentially. I don't know.
So anyway, so I get this notification. It says triple star day starts now. So I go into the app. It's not just today. So usually, like, double star day was a thing. Right? Double star day and there were fewer and far between. Then they did a triple star day once, and I was like, "Wow. They're down bad." And then, Brian, this just happened this week. Three days of triple star day in a row. Okay? Today was the last day of triple star day, and I'm thinking surely they were running this because it's a holiday weekend. Right? Maybe they're trying to prop up their Monday that they know is probably gonna be down. Brian, I went in to the Starbucks today. It is the 1st day back at school after a three day weekend. No reason for no one to not be in Starbucks. That place was empty. Triple star days can't even heal our nation. Something's up. Something is up.
My feeling on this is that Phillip's economy, the world in which Phillip inhabits is down.
That might have been the truest thing said.
Yeah. I just didn't know it yet. It was a leading indicator.
It was. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. Okay. What's your take? So we saw what happened to Starbucks. Starbucks actually did. They posted a really two, I think three then consecutive quarters of stagnating growth in the United States. Really taking a backseat in China, I think, a couple quarters of 2% and 3% losses. So and then bringing in a new CEO who his big idea so far don't charge extra for oat milk. So some changes happening over there. And yet again, you were ahead of the curve by listening to Future Commerce because of my intense cultural awareness and analysis and poor financial decisions by going to Starbucks every day. Don't tell Dave Ramsey.
The funny thing about that is you knew something was up with Starbucks. You were concerned about the entire economy.
And I was right. Of that. I'll have you know.
Well.
Yeah.
Well, I mean... Okay. Here's my take on that. Everything this year has been there there there is a vibe session that happened this year, and the economy has been pretty mixed. Like, it felt like an extension of of last year
Mhmm. Sure.
But so I don't know. There's still people who think big crash is coming. It's on its way. There's other people that don't.
I've been hearing that for three years.
Yeah. Exactly. And there's people that say there's gonna be a big crash every year. Every year. And I'm not saying that there won't be a big crash sometime. Obviously, that happens.
Yeah.
But, like, big crash people say it every year. They're wrong, like, 9 out of 10 times or more. More. It's like small crash happens. Anyway, yeah, interesting. Interesting. I think Starbucks is certainly down, and I would attribute that to their coffee being disgusting, to be frank.
The olive oil coffee that they thought would save the business?
Olive oil coffee, their mainstay, their flagship roast is haunted. We should have brought that clip in about me talking about how Pike Place Market is haunted and so is Pike Place Roast.
That is just gross. If we're talking about Halloween, I honestly think it is worse than McDonald's coffee. I think it's worse. I think it's worse than, like, it's worse than Chick Fil A coffee. It's worse than... I've had gas station coffee that's better than Pike Place Roast.
Alright. Alright. So Brian's developed a palate that's sophisticated enough to taste the ghost in Pike Place roast.
Yeah. It is haunted. It is haunted with over roasting.
You heard it here first, folks. Pike Place roast is haunted. You wanna queue up this next one? Kyle's in the journal. This is gonna be good.
Kyle Chayka, one of our best interviews of the whole year. We had him on talk about his book Filterworld. He got into all kinds of stuff that is near and dear to Future Commerce hearts. Stuff we've been talking about for years that I think he did a great job of distilling. He even hit on Emily in Paris, something we've chatted about before on the podcast. Let's get into the clip.
We had the TikTok shopping, which really does make shopping much like consuming content. You're watching a video and frictionlessly buying the thing you see in the video. And we had the most recent season of Emily in Paris, which was basically sponsored content. There were so many brands partnerships in Emily in Paris that it just it was staggering. The whole thing appeared to be a commercial. There are car brands in it. There were real fashion brands in it wrapped up in this story that's about marketing. About a woman who is a marketing person and a Instagram influencer. It was I mean, the snake really ate its own tail with that season where the content glorified the consumption, and the consumption produced the content. It was crazy, crazy thing.
The sneaking in of the ad break and talking about how the content was an ad, the whole it's like, it is itself self referential. How meta, Brian?
It's very meta.
And then Kyle actually joined us at the VISIONS Summit a little later on that year. We had Kyle at VISIONS. He keynoted with us and talked a lot about this. He talked about the Sabrina Carpenter of it all and sort of the the five versions of Mi espresso. He talked about this idea of Filterworld being the lens through which we view the world and algorithmically kind of flattening culture. There's been a lot of reactions to this too. People don't like this idea. They like to say we've blown it out of proportion.
Yeah. Yeah. They wanna say that we're actually have very diverse experiences. It's interesting. I think there's maybe some truth to both in that we're kind of getting algorithmically filtered, and that's even happening in real life through Google and so on. The things that we want to go to, we're gonna find the places that fit our vibe, and so we're gonna live in a world that feels all the same. And I think that might be a lot of what's happening on the Internet. It's actually there are a lot of diverse things on the Internet. It's just you're gonna naturally you'd only have to go to things or engage with things that you enjoy. And so everything starts to feel the same. It's a self selection process. Whereas in the past, there were a lot of things that you may or may not have liked that you had to interact with, and, eventually, you might realize the merit in some of those things.
What if I want my Airbnb to look like, you know, a torture chamber? Like, what if I want that? I don't want it to look like...
As long as it's in millennial pink, it works. Right? {laughter}
Oh, man. We had another opportunity then to, you know, to catch up with some other, you know, types of content this year. We do some really awesome miniseries that I really love, and they give us an opportunity to create a different mode of of conversation. One of my favorite things that we do all all year is something called Decoded. The only bummer is that you're usually not part of it, Brian. Sorry. I love this, but I wish there was a way to get you in.
Although, this particular Decoded, I would have enjoyed a lot.
Yes.
It was a good series, and then talking about philosophers and polymaths. It is very much something I enjoy chatting about.
We teamed up with just after our VISIONS summit at South by Southwest. So we went to South by Southwest for the first time. Brian, you and me. We took our video team, we went over there. We checked out the show for the very first time, took in some content. We hosted a dinner, and we put together our first VISIONS summit in Austin. We also visited Boys Club, in their event called Brand New and, checked in on what's going on in the Web3 community. Made friends with the new CEO of FWB, Greg, and his crew and what they're building over there. Of course, we met up with Dina and Natasha, Boys Club, and really interesting watching all these communities and media brands building in their own little ecosystems. And in that particular event, we were able to put together a really awesome idea for a series around decoded where the folks from FERMÀT were talking about how people like Pierre de Fermàt were polymathic. They had a particular way of viewing the world. They were multitalented. They had expertise in so many areas, and they created massive impacts on society by creating through innovation, new ideas and putting those new ideas into industrial practice and creating new things that could change everyday life for the better. What's great about Decoded is every year, we get to cohost it with one of our partners. And so Rabah Rahil, who's the CMO and I think an incredible generational marketer, and an incredible person who can really speak about all kinds of topics. He's a polymath in and of himself. He's like a king of one liners, and has maybe invented his own language. He joined me for this season to talk about the idea of being polymathic. And so in this particular episode of Decoded, we were talking about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and his polymathic tendencies. And here, we're gonna listen to a clip where Rabah is talking about how all of this leads back to how funnels are changing and how this ties into our changing nature of buying.
There's this guy named BJ Fogg. He's the fog behavior model, wonderful dude out of Stanford. But, anyways, there's a exercise he has in there called Starfishing. And, basically, he would plot all the paths to a conversion. And so I think the funnel's actually gonna become eradicated, and you're gonna start to have this hub and spoke model where the spokes are all these different conversion paths that then terminate at the center, which is the conversion. I think that's gonna be a much more meaningful way to look at the funnel than this OG conversion consideration or awareness consideration conversion where now you can have all these different pathways for all these different people to come on a journey and all roads end in Rome kinda thing.
I love that. We talked a little bit about this in our Future Commerce Learning series. Shout out to Future Commerce Learning, futurecommerce.com/learning, where we talk about the loyalty loop as sort of someone's always in the consideration process of buying something, and where you enter and exit the loop is where you, is the job today. And that's also made up of a ton of funnels. So there's a bunch of ways of thinking about this. Here's you can talk about branding problem. The funnel itself, everybody can visualize the funnel. I love that there's a direct tie to the marketing funnel. If you follow me backwards here. The marketing funnel was created by a guy who nobody would ever know by name. His name is Elias Saint Elmo Lewis, who was inducted into the marketing hall of fame posthumously in 1951. It's a crazy story.
I didn't even know there was a Marketing HOF, but let's go.
How many times are you gonna hear a story like this nowhere else other than decoded? No one knows where the marketing funnel, the idea of the marketing funnel came from. Although, it is ubiquitous, and we talk about it all the time. This man came up with this idea because he was a calculator and adding machine salesperson, and he was trying to visualize the journey of a customer and getting people to get to adding machines. Do you know what the fundamental thing that made an adding machine work was binary digits? The marketing funnel, we could trace it all back to mister Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz the polymath.
So from tornadoes to stars, it's funnels to tornadoes to stars. That's what I think I just heard there.
Oh, my lord. The tornado thing that also happened this year. That was online discourse that I don't think anybody is aware of.
Oh my gosh.
This is something that happens in the early stage thought leader space. Like, people are always trying to attract attention, and that is something that FERMÀT came up with after our episode together is that, okay, what is better than a funnel which sucks things down? Right? It's a tornado, which sucks things up. {laughter}
Sounds good. It sounds cool.
You don't wanna push things down a funnel. You want the funnel to suck things up. That's what we're trying to do.
Tornados were culturally relevant later in the year with Wicked.
Oh, I didn't even think... I was thinking about Twisters, which was a reboot.
I know. Twisters is when they came out with that idea, and then Wicked.
Wicked brings it back.
Yeah. Wow.
Did you see Wicked part 1?
I haven't yet. I probably will see it when it hits the old Amazon Prime.
Yeah. You're gonna do it on VOD. I don't know, man. I really it's one of those weird things. I really wanna see it.
Wait I thought you didn't want to see it.
Every time there's an opportunity...
I thought you didn't wanna see it.
I did wanna see it.
I thought you said prior to seeing reviews, I distinctly you remember you saying, "I don't think I really wanna see this."
Okay. Ever since I saw good reviews of this thing, I really wanna see it.
I don't know. I'm still take it or leave it. I know the play is supposed to be amazing.
Oh it's incredible. Yeah.
Take it or leave it. And I like plays. I'm a play guy. I don't know.
Yeah, the Twister thing, you kinda blew my mind just now with Wicked and Twisters. One of the other things we do really well is we bring experts on you've heard from some of them already, but we we bring experts on. We've done a lot of expert interviews based on books they've written over the years, really have developed great relationships over the years through author outreach. And we got to sit down this year with someone who really, I think, I was very intimidated by it. I'll just be honest. Very intimidated by. Dr Anastasia Karklina Gabriel joined us to talk about her book, and it's sort of like how it's made for building culture shaping brands. The book is called Cultural Intelligence for Marketers. I think it's the back half of the title of the book that was one of the things that I was really intrigued by and sort of the timing of the release of the book of something that was like, how do we have a conversation about this in this moment? And the subtitle of the book is Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy. And a lot of the conversation around in the crux of the book is, you know, around this idea of diversity, equity, inclusion. And so, you know, I had one very specific kind of perspective of who this person that we'd never met might be. When we had her on the show, I met her and I was like, "Wow. We have a really similar outlook on the power of commerce, around the nature of commerce and culture and how they are uniquely intertwined and how important those two things are in shaping the world around us." And I really had a great time talking to her. Let's take a listen to the clip from the episode from May 17th, Building Culturally Intelligent Brands.
We have the saying of Future Commerce, which is commerce is a form of culture. But in this more holistic view of, you know, an ideology, maybe it's a little bit darker than I originally had conceived it to be is that maybe commerce being culture is is actually, like, quite a capitalist and very western mentality as the things we buy and consume are a facet of our ideology and our being. Anyway, that's a sidebar between you and me because I find that it reframes the way that I've thought about that as, like, a tagline, and that might be a lot. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe.
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if that's true or if commerce is just an inherent part of life in general.
The state of human interaction.
You can't get away from it. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Yeah. Exactly.
I have a funny historical fact that I find really fascinating. Recently, I learned that the Greek word for marketplace, agora, refers to the ancient Greek marketplace, which combine kind of both commercial side of ancient Greek life and the social political part of Greek life, and so that was the marketplace where both commercial and social forces came to be and coexist together. And so this idea of the marketplace really fascinated me because I now work in social media, And what I learned from my research was that two words arose in the Greek language from the word agora, which refers to this marketplace, and both verbs are translated... Well, one of the verb is translated as "I shop," and the other word is translated as "I speak in public." And so I really love that interplay because linguistically from this idea of the marketplace, these two other ideas emerge, from the same root of the same word. I shop. I exchange goods. I consume, and I speak in public, and I engage with culture and society. And I find that really fascinating to think about social media, for example, now or in digital cultures where I do most of my work, engage with online audiences on a social platform, and we see how brands are now part of these social media networks where people literally speak in public and debate issues of the day and bond over passions and hobbies and things that they value while also exploring brands and etcetera. So I actually have a more positive outlook on the intersection of commerce and culture because it seems that they're kind of inseparable, and people speak in public and exchange ideas in the same spaces where they shop and pick up products and discover brands. So as a sidebar, that's just something I've been really fascinated by.
Oh.
Best to always hear validation from your guests. {laughter}
That's especially ones that did homework on who we are before they show up. And also, like, maybe I should have been more intimidated too. It's like, oh, well, there's an academic who can say it better than I can. We should actually coop some of this. We'd see a "trademark TM Anastasia," but also, you know, the Michael Scott thing, like "and also Phillip and Brian."
Speaking of Phillip and Brian, not only do we have great guests, we also just have great interplay between the two of us. A lot of our episodes are just the two of us chatting, and I feel like those are often some of the most fun. At least I have the most fun. Some of our guests are really fun too, I guess. {laughter}
I think so too. I think so too. But we get serious sometime. I like the being serious because I think that a lot of the work that people are doing is taken seriously too. Right? I think there's a lot of the not serious in the social media sphere of ecommerce, but our professional audience takes their jobs very seriously.
Something that we've really got into this year is Gen Alpha. I think that Gen Alpha is actually kind of being overlooked. We've been so focused on Gen Z that Gen Alpha hasn't had that much study, and it's difficult to study too. So people are a little bit afraid to try and figure out what's going on, and a lot of that has to do with, like, feel about the generation or being able to actually talk to kids.
For sure.
Yeah. I think we we had some great insights about Walmart strategy around Gen Alpha that were ended up being validated by Justin Breton later on.
Extrapolated. No. No. No. Extrapolated.
Extrapolated.
They won't fess up to this. I mean, but when you're building game, when you're building shopping inside of gaming platforms that a lot of Gen Alpha use every day, whether or not that's actually accessible to them directly or not because the shopping part sort of gated off to under 13, but that's you know, obviously, the strategy is there. Right? Like, obviously. Yeah.
Totally. And we covered that in in an episode, but it's been a theme for the whole year. Like, I think what are kids up to? You have kids that are Gen Alpha. I have kids that are Gen Alpha. How do we look at this though without just being the executives without being like, "Well, my kid did..." We've had some great moments sort of thinking through what that looks like. We've explored that when we're talking about Walmart realms, and in particular, this is important because the metaverse as an idea has been sort of poo pooed. It tipped the trough of disillusionment. And Walmart said, wait a minute. Actually, kids really are using online experiences and made some investment and did it in a really unique way, like and actually sort of custom outside of any gaming environment, like their own environment. And that, that, I think, led to some interesting ideas around how Gen Alpha is actually shopping, engaging with content.
How is Walmart going to turn this into something that makes financial sense or drives actual dollars through this platform? And I think the answer to that is they won't and they will not. It doesn't... It's never gonna make financial sense, and it's never going to transact real dollars.
The point of this as well is maybe not even for people necessarily to experience this, but to leverage the creators that were involved. This is content for them. Right?
Precisely.
So this is an activation that brings them together to talk to their audiences about what they did. And their audiences may or may not even ever go into the experience, but to see their creator that they like doing something with Walmart is like it's a total brand play at every level.
What does the creator bring to Walmart, and what does Walmart bring to the creator? K? And when you're looking at the scale of a particular creator, like, partnering with Walmart either has to be sweet center for you. It's like my audience is going to be a Walmart shopper, or Walmart has to be elevated by being next to that creator who would never partner with Walmart.
Okay. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna play a little bit of a clip out of order because that was June 7th. And then we actually got the Head of the Innovation Team and Brand Marketing Team, Justin Breton, Brian, on the podcast to come talk about that. So you just heard us say it makes no financial sense, and will they ever drive any actual dollars through the platform? And then Justin had this to say, let's now listen to that.
Because we always have a learning agenda with all that we do, we have a good understanding of, like, what is it that we've tested to date? What have we learned? And then how do we use those learnings to inform, of course, what we're doing in our existing platforms like Walmart discovered on Roblox, Walmart Realm, our AR experience for Walmart Discovered, and use those to inform where do we go next? Do I think that any of these introductions of real world commerce on these new platforms are going to be, you know, a $1,000,000,000 industry next year. Probably not next year. But if we're early and we test and learn in two, three, five years, it could be a $1,000,000,000 industry. And it might not just be the sale of real world goods, but the sale of virtual goods because we've started to dabble in both, meaning we're learning now. We're testing now. And we can use both of what we've learned and tested to inform again that platform expansion.
This is how big smart companies win. They get out of front of things. Like, dabble, test, dip your toe in the water, find out what's going to happen, how people are interacting with this stuff, know what's coming on the pipeline. This is... Brands and retailers that abandon this strategy are abandoning their future. If you'd stop experimenting, you don't have a future ahead of you.
I like that you're taking the lesson out of that. I was going to say, I was really wrong. {laughter} Because I said just two months prior to Justin that, you know, I don't see them actually driving real dollars through this platform that it feels like it's a wonderful way to partner with creators to get wonderful earned media. Right? They're getting earned media by partnering with creators. No. No. No. No. It seems like they really care about trying to turn this into a transactional platform.
It's possible. Yeah. No. I think any opportunity, any investment they make is gonna be something that may turn into $1,000,000,000 opportunity. I think that the key is being out there in all of the channels.
That's right.
That when one of them does, it's almost like being an investor. You just put your money in the the cash cow. The cash cow is gonna end.
Gotta diversify. Yeah.
Yeah. You gotta diversify and and be early to things. And I think we even talked about this in a totally different episode. Maybe it was even in 2023. It's like, it's smart. Oh, I know where it is. It's in an article that I wrote in 2023. And I said if you don't have your toe in the water, you're never gonna have a chance to be out in front when that channel pops off. Walmart is being really smart by having your toe in the water in the places that should be. And not all of those bets are gonna work out, and people are gonna laugh at them sometimes or whatever. But then when it does pay off, they're gonna have the next $1,000,000,000 channel.
And they'll be years ahead of everyone else.
I learned the lesson the hard way.
The lesson that people... People take the wrong lesson away from the Gartner hype cycle. So let's suppose for a moment that the Gartner hype cycle is true. K? So the hype cycle supposes that there is a big drop off after a peak of inflated expectations. Right? That's the thing everybody focuses on. What everybody misses is that in the trough of despair is when real companies are launched and built, and they're the ones that prosper and benefit afterwards.
That's right.
And so if we're in the trough of despair of the metaverse, seeing who's launching and sustaining an effort and building there, Walmart Discovered this year launched in June and has had three releases since. They have all been, the original launch was in June, with I think three realms at launch. There were five realms that were added for a back to college sort of push, and then they did a push for Halloween. They're doing a seasonal rev. Right? So there is a cadence here, and that's just that. They launched real world shopping, both in their Walmart discovered and with elf Beauty. So they have done in in Roblox alone, that's two big launches and three big launches on Walmart realm. Like, their metaverse strategy is itself diversified.
And nobody can fess up this. Not Walmart, not Amazon, not anybody, but Amazon 100% copied them.
Their holiday shop. Yeah.
Holiday shop. Yep. Yep. They tried to do something similar. And by the way, it was not as good.
Oh, it was not great at all. It was, like, it was basically just a Matterport experience with a point and teleport. Not great. That's my 2¢. Okay. So let's think a little bit too because the summer was really excellent. I will do a retro in writing, but I spent the summer in London. I've talked a lot about it, both on the podcast and off, launched a new written series. But before I bugged out for the summer, I had the opportunity to go to Chicago, and meet one of my marketing heroes.
It's such a =full circle moment for you.
And a marketing hero from a few years ago. I think whether or not it's a good thing in the world, I think time will tell, and we'll find out when they write the history books. But Liquid Death has certainly changed the way that we think about marketing. I think they are a new type of a company that's really focused on the drop strategy as a creative studio that happens to have a commercial product behind them, and they really think about their brand differently. They don't have giant budgets. They think of themselves as sort of an artistic collective, and they don't hire traditional marketing people. They hire comedians, and they don't have traditional marketing calendars. They have a writer's room. And so they look a lot more like Saturday Night Live than they do, like, a traditional marketing organization. And in that way, you know, like, one of their hires, this kind of blew me away, in meeting Dan Murphy, from Liquid Death, who is their, effectively is VP of marketing. I don't think they have C level titles over there, but effectively, their CMO. And Dan Murphy and I had an interview at Retail Innovation Conference and Expo in Chicago. And when I sat down with him, he was like he told me, you know, he got to hire one of his heroes, the guy who is behind Nihilist Arby's, the anon account on Twitter. Like, that guy works for Liquid Death now. Right? So they hire a different kind of a person. And because they have that sort of lens on capturing attention, they don't need to spend a ton of money. Here's what he had to say about that.
I mean, our budgets are so micro, they would be unbelievable to most. To say our incumbent competitors is, like, a 1,000 x our budget. And I think budget haiku is part of our superpower. You know, the fact that we are so limited in what we can spend. We spend virtually no media. I mean, it's all earned. It's all stuff that people write about, share about for free. It forces you to focus on the idea, which is 80% of the success. It's not the production. Most people are looking at your content on a phone about yay big. So if you hired an expensive post production company and rented a Phantom, it is all for naught. Could have been shot on an iPhone.
It's funny because a lot of DTC brands do the same and have nowhere near the same impact.
Totally. No. It's a 100%. And you hear sort of a lot of the opposite wisdom sometimes too. It's like if it's not shot on the perfect... Yeah. It's interesting. I think you said something to the effect during that interview also of, like, we're not really a brand. We're a postmodern, we're a metamodern art collective, I think is what he basically said he was.
Basically what he said. And I see that too. Right? Very of this moment. There's a lot of content that I think supports that too is, like, the shift of what is a brand after vibes. Some Plus content that you may wanna check out if you did join the Plus membership is a talk by Emily Siegel at our VISIONS Summit Los Angeles, which you can get in the member account section. So if you are a Plus member, just log in to futurecommerce.com, click on my account, and you'll see exclusive content on the left side. Find VISIONS Summit LA, Emily Siegel's talk, Emily Siegel of Nemesis, formerly of K hole, she talks about what brands are supposed to look like in the post vibe world. Vibe being that brands are no longer just a a singular specific thing, like a particular lens in which you view the world. A brand like Liquid Death is merch. It is canned water, but it's also giant, you know, giveaways of a Harrier jet. It is partnerships with the likes of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. It's a lot of things. Right? It's makeup kits with elf beauty. It's some stunt marketing. I think there's so much more to it.
I think also, the this is Liquid Death is foreshadowing. It's foreshadowing actually into what Yancy Strickler talks about in our episode with him later, later on in the year where he said that the money and power is actually going to filter up to creatives in the future. That was sort of his prediction for how the future of commerce was gonna go. And so I think that Liquid Death is an early, an early leading example, a little bit of a canary in the coal mine. This is where things are headed.
There's a bunch of other things we're just not gonna get to this year. This has just been such an incredible collaborative year. I think we've probably had more guests and more collaborators and folks to join us. This year, we've had more events this year than we ever have. We did a lot. We had a live podcast event, Brian. If we just think about our live events, we had live events in New York, Austin. Where were we? LA, obviously. We had a live recording in one of the coolest venues I have ever been in in my entire life in Salt Lake City, in a botanical or no. In an aviary.
Yeah. That was So cool.
Wild. Live events really bring the community together. And there were a ton of live events that actually powered a lot of discourse in the world. Obviously, the Olympics were some of those, and those created a lot of commerce and brand moments this year. Some folks came on the pod to come talk about it. Friend of the show, Alexa Lombardo, joined us at a bunch of those live events. She joined us at South by Southwest at our Austin event, at the bookstore to kinda, you know, talk about this sort of outrage or or shock marketing that FaceGym was doing to sort of get into the face literally of their consumer, the way that they create Instagramable experiences. But she, during the Olympics, brought her friend, Candace, former D1 athlete and Olympian and just a rad person all around, now is Head of Brand Advocacy and Future Innovation and Digital Commerce at a major sporting organization. And they kinda came together to talk about the moment that was happening in women's sports on the podcast with us during that Olympic moment. And now why women's sports were having a moment? Let's take a listen.
There are storylines in the WNBA that could never exist in the NBA as we know it today. Like, for instance, the number of queer athletes and the relationships between them seems to be a thing that just could not exist in the NBA as we know it today.
But, also, you're invested. Right? And I think to go back to an obvious example, like, you know, the surge in women watching the Super Bowl this year. Right? That you know, because they're invested in the relationship between Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift. Right? Like, there are a lot of stories like that that to get invested in women's sports. And that's because it's like a cycle because they're better at telling the stories, then people get more invested and then more people tune in.
I think taking sexuality out of the play and talk about relationships. I like how Alexa kinda talked about Travis Kelsey and Taylor. There's so many relationships in sports between athletes in general, just relationships between athletes, like, Mel Swanson. Mel Swanson is dating a MLB player. Simone Biles is dating a NFL player. The stories are more coming out on the women's side because it's also think that we like to tell stories around relationship.
And the stories around relationships, I think, is kind of the story around everything. It's the story around the relationship in commerce with your customer, and it's the story in your career within your organization. And it's the story of a brand. Everything is about story.
It's a 100%. Yeah. The relationships are limited, though, and that's something that I think a little bit of foreshadowing in the 2025. Like, how many relationships can you actually have, and what counts as a relationship that you're investing in, and how much time and how much management does a relationship take, and how much space do you have for that relationship. I think these are important things to think about as we look ahead at the future of commerce and the onslaught of digital content that flows on at us all the time. This is gonna be an important theme for 2025.
For sure. And I think one of the bigger themes of 2025 too are how those stories become, I think, more macro and also more insular. I think there's this atomization. At the same time, things are becoming more universal, and they're becoming highly adamant atomized. It is incumbent on everybody to be like you said, many, many years ago, this is probably one of the bigger predictions you've ever made, that we will probably revisit in next week's episode is it has never been more true than now that everybody must be a business owner. You have to be a corporation, basically. And I think that the story of how people are making their living, the story of how people are using commerce to enable that and becoming entrepreneurs, I think is an evolving story line. And one that I also think is being exploited in the commerce industrial complex for shareholder value. Let's say it that way. Being exploited for shareholder value. That's all I'll say about that, which doesn't seem so chill of them, if you ask me.
Well, you know, it's interesting because Yancey Strickler talked about how there's really not a system built right now for how artists can see their just due for the work that they do. And I think that, if we look ahead, like, we're going to need better systems. We're gonna need better structures. We're gonna need better ways of engaging with, directly with, original content that's not just slop. And so and we're gonna be able to need to reward those people that are creating those things. And so I think Yancey, for me, that interview that we did with him recently is probably the highlight of our podcast year. And so I think it's fitting to end with a little bit of Yancey here.
He did this thing that I love when people do. He taught me something, but he rooted it in terms that I understand. He said a brand that I know. But he brought it home in a very Future Commerce way of sort of linking up the thing that I identify in the way I see the world in how people say things, Brian, that I believe to be true, but I don't know if they really are. Every company in the future will be a media company. Or that we live in an attention economy. He had a very keen way of bringing that home on the podcast, and this I think, is gonna ring in my head for years to come. Let's take a listen.
So in 1664, they started making the first zine called Philosophical Transactions. And that is where Isaac Newton's writings were published, where Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, the Babbage machine was funded. Like, everything. Everything started in the zine, and it was 30 people who were all like, yeah. Let's prove facts through evidence. And I came to see that in both, like, a punk label or the Royal Society or projects like MSCHF, it's a group of people uniting around some shared vision, not making a product, but just releasing work by themselves or anyone else that fits whatever that vision is. And that actually that has been the most powerful and consistent means of producing culture for, like, 500 years. And it's a form that is so out of fashion now because the Internet is so individualized us and a lot of those labels are extractive and are reached late capitalism stage or not the dynamic things that they once were to believe in. But that form is actually what I needed to feel less lonely and is actually something that could be repurposed to make a whole new status quo. And so that but that all started with, like, why's Yancey sad, you know, and just trying to solve that question. But my brain, this is where you end up four years later, like, okay. There's an artifice to make Yancey not sad.
And Brian. I'm waiting for the artifice to make Phillip not sad. {laughter}
No. But the good news is we did launch on that artifice Metalabel, it's where we launched our next annual journal, Lore.
Yup.
And so, I think if you go check that out, that is a great way to connect with original content, Metalabel and Lore both.
I think so. And I know all these threads sort of intertwine, and I think that it's really fitting because this year has been a lot of synchronicity. I think a lot of things came together that we've been talking about over the years. We certainly saw a lot of things coming. We got a lot of, I'd say a lot of social signals and a lot of feedback from people that we admire that what we are doing and the business that we're building, this podcast, this community is on the right track. And I really believe in this. I really believe in what we're doing. And eight years in, I am all in. You know? All in. {laughter} We're all in. And so it's it's really cool. And, also, our team has grown this year. And I think that that's really cool to see is being able to do things like this and scale this podcast, scale this business. What a cool thing.
And I'm so excited for the look back next year because we have so much so much coming in 2025. I cannot wait to kick this thing off.
The predictions episode. The annual predictions episode.
Annual predictions episode is just the beginning.
That's right.
Yeah. So much cool stuff ahead. Some of which you've already started to see shades of with Future Commerce Radio Theater, which has been so cool. So so cool to see.
That's it. We had a great year on the podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for coming out to our events. Thank you so much for giving us all your attention, and thank you to the Future Commerce Plus subscribers for growing this year and making it happen, speaking back, being so vibrant. What a great community. And our team really has loved working on this podcast. This podcast is where it all began, and is near and dear to our hearts, and we cannot wait to up level this thing next year. We are working ahead, working ahead to make next year even better and some great things to come. Have a wonderful break. There's gonna be a lot more to come, but have a happy holidays and a happy New Year to all of you.
