"The Balenciaga Pope"

Phillip: [00:00:00] I think that to understand why we would burn an image of the Pope and this specific one, you would have to understand that brands are at the center of a moment that is displacing both the religious artifacts and behaviors and belonging sense and community in some people's lives, but also that the generative AI of it all is creating an opportunity for people to make a bigger cultural critique of both the nature of brand and religion in our world.

Brian: [00:00:28] Yes.

Phillip: [00:01:30] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast exploring the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:35] And I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:36] And we burned the Pope. We burned a picture of the Holy Father. And we're going to explain why here today on this episode of Future Commerce. Also out now everywhere, you probably heard it at the top of the show, The Multiplayer Brand, our new zine. And it covers some of our thoughts on why we would ever think of burning an image of the Pope. Now that's not in there, but a picture of the Pope in Balenciaga is in there holding it up. If you're not watching our YouTube, go check it out on YouTube. But TheMultiplayerBrand.com is an easy place to go pick up our new zine 100 pages on the future of commerce participatory economies and the age of critique. $20 free shipping, same-day shipping in the lower 48. And Brian, you've had a busy week. Tell me...

Brian: [00:02:24] You had a busy week. We've all had busy weeks. It's been a busy week at Future Commerce in general.

Phillip: [00:02:30] It really has.

Brian: [00:02:31] It's nonstop. We've got some new stuff coming that we'll be releasing shortly. Future Commerce Learning will be out soon and we've been recording some of the series for that or some of the modules for that series over the past week in our homes because that's how we roll.

Phillip: [00:02:56] I think people learn more about our industry when they break bread together. Certainly, you and I have grown our network and grown our influence by sitting across the table from brilliant people. It's kind of how we've built this whole thing was getting to know people and sharing an experience with them. And what better way to share an experience than Brian taking you on a tour of Pacific Northwest Wines for 4.5 hours around a dinner table?

Brian: [00:03:31] {laughter} Well, it's not so much... We don't go that far in the series.

Phillip: [00:03:36] It's not far off.

Brian: [00:03:36] We do get into some... Yeah, we get into some good wine and some good food and some good times. So I am very excited about the upcoming series, so get ready, Future Commerce Futurists. We will have that coming soon.

Phillip: [00:03:53] We've learned a lot over the years by breaking bread together. We've become known at Future Commerce for hosting salons, and now we have this new Future Commerce learning offering. If you are an agency operator or you're building high-performance teams in a brand, if you're a brand operator side, if you're wanting to go deeper down the rabbit hole as a brand operator on the topics of retention or new customer acquisition and learn more about things like loyalty, this is for you. And they are incredibly deep. But something new too. An overlooked portion of the eCommerce ecosystem is the software providers that make it all happen. And so we've been critical in the past about the middleman economy in the eCommerce ecosystem. The truth is that software powers customer experience and one of the ways that software businesses find their scale is by growing their channel organization. And so you'll see in the next few months. You're hearing it here first on the podcast. But we are building education for software companies, for agencies, and for brand operators to help them in the hardest parts of their business. And so if you are a software company, if you are in the SaaS industry and you want to launch a channel partner program and connect with agency partners to grow your influence and grow your revenue, we're going to teach you how to do that. And it's our first foray into education. But we have the brightest minds in the ecosystem coming around us to help.

Brian: [00:05:29] We do.

Phillip: [00:05:29] And you'll see a lot more about that in the weeks to come. But it's been a busy week here at Future Commerce. It's also been a busy week in the world of CPG. I don't know if you saw this, Brian, but Campbell Soup, Campbell's Corporation acquired a beloved spaghetti sauce brand. I guess that's... It's sauces of all kinds. Rao's.

Brian: [00:05:52] They're in Costco, by the way. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:05:58] Have you ever bought Rao's before?

Brian: [00:06:00] No. No, actually, we're pretty... Well, we're into doctoring our own. So spaghetti sauce is like one of my signature moves and I got a whole thing behind it. If you ever come over to my house and you want to sit across the table from me and you want me to cook for you, my spaghetti sauce is part of that magic. And no, it's not truly authentic Italian, but it is delicious.

Phillip: [00:06:34] Yeah. That's a bummer. I've never tried Rao's. I'll tell you, this is one of those things that happens in the ecosystem where a brand is supposedly beloved, but nobody can take the time to talk about it online ever, especially for way insanely priced products. So Rao's might be the most expensive sauce brand in its category that is at a normal grocer. The first time I remember...

Brian: [00:07:06] That's why they went for so much money.

Phillip: [00:07:07] I'm sure it's why. 2.7 billion.

Brian: [00:07:09] 2.7 billion.

Phillip: [00:07:10] There was something that happened in the public discourse. Of course, it happens on X, formerly known as Twitter, on a post formerly known as a tweet and a thread of posts. {laughter} And in that in that discourse, it was people saying Campbell's, please don't ruin Rao's.

Brian: [00:07:33] Yep.

Phillip: [00:07:33] And I know so little about this brand and could not tell you a single thing about this brand. I've never seen anyone publicly come out in support of their spaghetti sauce and the history of ever.

Brian: [00:07:45] I have. I have. No, no. I've seen a few. I've seen a few out there. I've seen people be like, "Yeah, Rao's is the best of all time."

Phillip: [00:07:51] Really?

Brian: [00:07:51] On Twitter, now known as X. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:07:57] {laughter} X... The one to go to for Twitter. Yeah, I've never seen anything of that sort. It was very surprising for me but there is a canonical thread that did make the rounds yesterday. Alexis Ohanian, the Founder of Reddit and now the VC, the well-known VC, also Palm Beacher, kind of tagged on to say brand matters, especially in commodities. What's great is that readers added additional context saying well Campbell's didn't really purchase Rao's. They purchased Sovos Brands which is the parent company of many brands. Rao's is one of them. You know what nobody's saying is, "Don't mess up my Noosa yogurt, Brian. I love my Noosa," so I find this interesting. If we want to maybe look into this for a second. This also, by the way, I'm going to conflate this with another story and juxtapose them. Almost nobody is mourning the loss of Mr. Beast Burger, which there was a news story this week of Mr. Beast now suing the Ghost Kitchen that operates under a license for Mr. Beast Burger for failure to deliver on a quality product or service that he was happy with, and he's trying to get them to discontinue using the Mr. Beast brand in the operation of their product. You heard it here first on Future Commerce back in February. We did a community challenge where we had, I think, 8 or 10 people in our community all order Mr. Beast Burger on the same day at the same time to do a distributed taste test. And the results were resounding. Not only is it overpriced, but the product was middling. Almost all of them arrived cold and soggy, and we just thought it was not an experience. No matter how stellar the brand or how much you want to be connected to Mr. Beast, not an experience worth replicating at $16 to $18 a person delivery only. And so it's no surprise to me that Mr. Beast is now discontinuing Mr. Beast Burger after having publicly come out against it on Twitter. Why is it that people can bandwagon for one brand? In both cases, we've seen bandwagoning on both sides of the spectrum, one in a successful exit and sort of support of the brand and petitions for the parent brand not to ruin it and quiet as one winds down that was formerly lauded. So I'd love for you to maybe think about this, Brian.

Brian: [00:10:39] Here's my quick viewpoint on that very hot take is that Mr. Beast is the brand. The Mr. Beast brand is amazing. The problem is that as Mr. Beast tried to spin that brand off into other things, some of those things work, and some of them didn't. And so the brand wasn't really the burger. It was Mr. Beast himself. And so really, people were bandwagoning on Mr. Beast doing a burger, which sounded awesome. It just wasn't good.

Phillip: [00:11:15] You could say that again.

Brian: [00:11:15] Yeah, exactly. Whereas like Rao's and actually, Noosa is actually one of my favorite yogurts. It's delicious. There's no influencer. There's no other part to the brand other than the product itself. Whereas with Mr. Beast, the product is Mr. Beast, the product with Rao's and Noosa is the food itself. People are fans of those foods and they're in. I think you see this happen in the founder ecosystem all the time. The founder actually is the brand. The founder is the product. And the things that the founder creates may or may not be good, but that's not the product. That's not why people are bandwagoning. They're bandwagoning on the founder themselves. And so I think that's what you're seeing here is Rao's went well. If Mr. Beast himself sold to another company, he would go for a lot of money. If he's trying to sell his burger brand, he wouldn't go for much at all.

Phillip: [00:12:25] For what it's worth, Rao's has never been mentioned on Future Commerce prior to today. However, Noosa yogurt has been mentioned at least once. In Episode 242 entitled Conspicuous Consumption. You mentioned having at least three in the fridge at all times.

Brian: [00:12:44] I love lemon Noosa yogurt. Actually, I love all Noosa yogurt. I love yogurt in general.

Phillip: [00:12:50] I find it really interesting that there is a kind of a person who wants to be part of a moment. So the moment here, it has nothing to do with the exit, and I almost believe it has nothing to do with the product quality. And I would even maybe question the validity of how many people are in this Twitter thread, sorry X thread... I would question how many of them have ever actually bought Rao's sauces. And I'd put the number, I'd set the line at 20% having actually ever even tried the product where maybe 5% are loyal, and think that that's on the high end. I don't believe that people engaging in this discourse on this particular social media app are actual customers. I think they are people who like to participate in moments, especially brand moments.

Brian: [00:13:46] Bandwagoners.

Phillip: [00:13:46] And so there's a bandwagon that forms around a brand moment, especially in a slow news cycle, because apparently between our last podcast recording and this one, the economy is good now. We like the economy. The economy is great. So what else are we going to talk about?

Brian: [00:14:01] If a spaghetti sauce and yogurt brand parent company can go for 2.7 billion, the economy is doing pretty great.

Phillip: [00:14:09] Yeah. Then if they can do that, you can do anything.

Brian: [00:14:12] You can do anything.

Phillip: [00:14:13] You can do anything. And well, this is where we're starting to see more of this type of activity now. There's M&A certainly is heating up. It's back. We saw a Ninja Brands went public just about a week and a half ago now, and this is an interesting one. I was actually when we were at the Retail Innovation Conference, we had a happy hour event, Brian, that we put on at Future Commerce and Brendan Witcher... Is it Brendan Witcher? Who's the Forrester guy?

Brian: [00:14:52] Yep. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:14:53] Witcher. He and I got into a long conversation about the areas of your budget that you don't consciously plan for, but everybody seems to spend for, and there seems to be a 2 to 3 year cycle for spending money on the "it" appliance. What is the "it" appliance? There was a Dyson vacuum had a moment and iRobot intelligent vacuums had a moment and then we had the Ring doorbell or the Nest thermostat and then it was the Instapot, and then it was the Ninja Creamy is probably the most recent one, right? You see these...

Brian: [00:15:34] Instapot went bankrupt.

Phillip: [00:15:36] But it doesn't mean that... That could have just been the financial management of the organization.

Brian: [00:15:42] There's a lot of commentary on this. People to bandwagon on commentary around failing companies as well.

Phillip: [00:15:51] Well, here's the so what of it all. I've heard more people talk about "it" appliances in real life than spaghetti sauce, and that's why I don't believe... And they are large and considered purchases. That's why I just don't believe that people actually care all that much about the spaghetti sauce or the quality of the spaghetti sauce, or would even notice a decline in quality of the spaghetti sauce if they're frequent buyers of it.

Brian: [00:16:17] I think you're right. Especially with something like this, where like I am a Noosa super fan, genuinely. Did I tweet about this acquisition? No, although we are talking about it on our podcast that serves over 50,000 executives within the retail ecosystem.

Phillip: [00:16:34] It has nothing to do with my love for Noosa.

Brian: [00:16:37] Yeah. Oh yeah. Thank you. Sorry, I talked over your total amazing...

Phillip: [00:16:41] Love it. No, I like the cross-talk. That's very modern now. Us talking to each other.

Brian: [00:16:45] Yeah, totally. No, but honestly, we're not talking about this because I love Noosa. We're talking about it because it's a moment. And I do love Noosa.

Phillip: [00:16:56] We have room in our lives for moments and I think moments can be reserved for things that provide us some discourse. And if you notice the pitter-patter of conversation and small talk that happens in the world, it is they are monocultural. But with your own perspective, everybody experiences weather, but yours might be different. Everybody experiences a weekend, yours might be different.

Brian: [00:17:24] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:17:24] Everybody experiences the "it" appliance. Yours might be different, but nobody cares about their spaghetti sauce. I'm convinced that this is the thing.

Brian: [00:17:35] Oh, man, I don't know about that. I think people care deeply about their spaghetti sauce. I just don't think that those are the people that are posting. Like you said, about 80% of the people that are posting about it right now are not the ones that deeply care about it. But I think that people deeply, deeply care about their spaghetti sauce. This guy included.

Phillip: [00:17:55] Whatever. What did Campbell's ever do? Why is Campbell's so hated? What is the deal with that?

Brian: [00:18:01] Because Campbell's canned soup is objectively not that good. The original Campbell's was kind of nasty.

Phillip: [00:18:15] I think it's just fine. I think it's just fine. It's just fine. There's nothing wrong with it.

Brian: [00:18:18] You must not be good at making soup. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:18:23] How much soup does a normal person eat anymore?

Brian: [00:18:26] We eat a lot of soup in my household. Like, a lot.

Phillip: [00:18:29] Dude, I must be...You know who's not eating soup? South Floridians. We're not eating a lot of soup.

Brian: [00:18:36] True, true, true. Maybe this is. Maybe you're just...

Phillip: [00:18:38] Global warming is going to kill the soup trade.

Brian: [00:18:41] The soup trade.

Phillip: [00:18:43] Hottest summer on record and everyone's caring about their spaghetti sauce. Guys, you got to get on the light and refreshing stuff. You're going to be drinking a lot more Suja.

Brian: [00:18:53] True, I do have a moment I want to talk about at this moment. Like now. Because it actually is a moment that's affecting a lot of people.

Phillip: [00:19:00] Our producer, Erika, says gazpacho instead. This is a very small sample size but we did do a for FC Learning last week in our filming, we did do a team dinner and gazpacho was on the prefix menu at Cafe La Ropa. Not a single person at the dinner chose the gazpacho and it was 97 degrees outside. That tells you everything you need to know about.

Brian: [00:19:24] It's not my first choice. It's not my first choice.

Phillip: [00:19:27] I don't think it's anyone's first choice.

Brian: [00:19:30] Yeah, I've had good gazpacho, but usually, there's something that appeals to me a little bit more when I'm... I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking about. Great restaurant, by the way. Love that restaurant.

Phillip: [00:19:43] Oh. La Ropa? Yeah, Yeah. It's great.

Brian: [00:19:45] There was a moment that affected a lot of people throughout the US and the world. And that moment was when I walked into my Costco the other day. The Suja that they had was not my typical green Suja, and it was some ginger lemonade thing instead with little cayenne, which is delicious.

Phillip: [00:20:05] This affected everybody.

Brian: [00:20:06] I actually went to a Costco further away because I was like, "What if they stopped carrying the Suja that I wanted? The green one."

Phillip: [00:20:16] You got in the car and you took yourself to a different Costco?

Brian: [00:20:18] I took myself to a different Costco. Thankfully they stocked it there, but I'm concerned that they're trying to replace it with this other lemonade one. And I'm going to pull out all of my Costco fan cards and be like, "You cannot stop carrying this Suja," if I have to. If I have to pull that out, I will.

Phillip: [00:20:39] One way that you could affect change on Costco is by participating in hyperstition, which would be for you to imagine what a Costco of your liking could look like. And you can do that now because we have tools to do that. And hey, you could create a moment out of this change in merchandising and product offerings by drumming up a media moment online around it in much the same way that we've seen around Rao's and Campbell's Soup.

Brian: [00:22:03] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:22:04] But that's how I'm doing our little bridge over to today's topic.

Brian: [00:22:09] Well done.

Phillip: [00:22:09] One way for us to take stock of the way that the future of commerce is shaping up is what we've been saying consumers hold more power than ever before. I think you would agree. Consumers have an unprecedented amount of power in the way that brands market to them, shape the products and their offerings for the customer, and you've worked at Amazon.

Brian: [00:22:36] Briefly.

Phillip: [00:22:36] You worked at Amazon. What is Amazon's perspective on the customer and the importance of the customer?

Brian: [00:22:44] Oh yeah, the customer is number one. Having an empty chair at the table. Empty chairs, empty tables.

Phillip: [00:22:49] Like Elijah. We save a seat for the customer. We're going to keep the door open for them. You see how I'm doing the little religious tie in there?

Brian: [00:22:57] There it is.

Phillip: [00:22:57] Don't let it go unnoticed. This is how we explain all of our artwork. It's funny how religious some brands are about their customer and how absent the customer is in some other brands. So what we did in writing our zine this year as part of our Visions content is we imagined what the future, the near future, might look like and tried to explain the existing moment and what the future of commerce might look like. And we call it The Multiplayer Brand. And Brian, you want to give a little pitch on what The Multiplayer Brand zine is all about?

Brian: [00:23:34] Yeah, The Multiplayer Brand is about, I mean, you've already kind of covered it, Phillip. We're in living in a time where brand is evolving. It used to be that brand was a fixed point that was developed by a company and their agencies and then pushed out through channels that they controlled and they controlled how that brand was consumed in very fixed, fixed places and fixed ways in channels of their choosing. But now with tools and the Internet and AI and faster feedback loops from customers and online communities, brand is no longer your own. You do not own your brand the way that you used to. You may start it. You may provide narrative. You may provide viewpoint. But when you bring that viewpoint to the market, all of a sudden it takes on a life of its own in communities, in critics, in multiple places throughout the world, in places that you don't control, and therefore hyperstition, which is a term you just referred to, Phillip, which we've talked about before on the podcast, is happening in the world of commerce by people now taking a brand and making it part of their own story and fashioning it in their own liking. And when people do that in concert together, they're actually a more powerful driver of that narrative than you as a brand are on your own and can actually manifest where your brand heads as a result of this collective power through these tools and through these ways of electronic communication. And so that is The Multiplayer Brand in a nutshell. And if you want to understand how this is going to affect you as a brand, you should reach out to us because we can help teach your team and give you real-world reasons why you're going to have to change what you do and how you do it as a brand, as a retailer, because of this new way that brand exists in the world and we can actually help you with that and can contextualize it to your business.

Phillip: [00:26:11] I think this rabble-rousing around Rao's route online, has rooted our discussion in this idea that there is a public discourse and the public discourse begins with critique. So this is what The Multiplayer Brand starts out with is we believe that our economy is becoming much more participatory and people are raising their hand saying, "I want to be part of the story, not just of the brand, but in everything in culture." And if brands are a bigger part of culture, and they have displaced some place where people find belonging, community, and likemindedness with other people, then brands have a higher order of meaning in people's lives. And that means that people want greater control of the cultural artifacts that brands produce. So let's say last year's Visions report covered this, actually. And you'll actually be able to buy this for the first time coming soon. We've never made our physical print versions of our prior Visions report available to anyone outside of our contributing team and our advisory panel. But that will be coming soon. But what we said was we call this the sacraments of commerce. This idea that there are things that brands do that take the shape or follow the playbook that other large systems of belief and community organizations have historically done. One of which might be religious affiliation. So it's why we use the word sacrament. It is finding parallels to belonging, membership, communion or communal experiences. Customs. Rituals. Things that brands try to impose or bring about in response to their own customers' demands of them. So this year we're exploring this idea of hyperstition and sort of the creation of a relationship with your customer where they have more power than ever before. And part of that is this idea of generative AI and that customers can actually imagine what your products would look like. They're no longer just saying bring back an old product. In times past, it might have been, "I miss Kellogg's cereal straws. Why can't you make that again?" And there might be reasons why and there might be a lot of lead time. But generally, brands tend to listen to their customers. And a couple of years ago, I think we saw this. Someone wrote a petition on Change.org, also mentioned here in The Multiplayer Brand book, but they wrote a petition and got hundreds of thousands of signatures to bring back this nostalgic treat. And Kellogg's eventually gave in to it and said, "Yeah, we will listen to our customers and we'll recreate that and bring that back." That happened contemporaneously to the Snyder cut, which was another moment of hyperstition where customers were able to bring back something that never existed in the world and create something that never existed based purely on rumor and speculation. So now we live in an era where they can do that with everything, not just this idea of a concept of a film and not just this idea of a nostalgic product. But what if we could bring about the idea of a line of papal wear by Balenciaga? And we can imagine what the Pope might look like. You know, the Holy Father dressed head to toe in Balenciaga. What might that look like? And we can do it now with such stunning fidelity that it can trick a certain person into believing that that is a real image.

Brian: [00:30:09] And this is a huge issue. It's not just brands on Popes.

Phillip: [00:30:18] {laughter} Brands on Popes.

Brian: [00:30:22] Brands on Popes. If everyone is a brand, this could be you. This could be Balenciaga on you, which most people may want, I guess.

Phillip: [00:30:37] We actually had somebody so we, we did in part of our marketing for this book. We had this incredible photographer, Gabby Perez, who did this just incredible series of photos of the book. And one of them, she takes a number of pages from our zine and lights them on fire. One of them, Brian, is this picture. If you're watching on the YouTube, you'll see it. If you're not, maybe subscribe to us on YouTube, but you'll see it's this picture that was created in Midjourney of the Pope. And, you know, it's called the Balenciaga Pope and it's a Midjourney image. It's also next to other Balenciaga fashion runway send ups and culture, including what, you know, Snape and other Harry Potter characters might look like decked out in Balenciaga. The Pope one was mistaken and mistakenly reported as being a real shot in a couple of outlets. And what we actually mentioned here in this book is that... This quote from Henry Jenkins I want to read this to you, Brian, and then we can talk a little bit about this, us being called out about burning the Pope because...

Brian: [00:32:06] It wasn't actually the Pope.

Phillip: [00:32:07] Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll get there. Henry Jenkins, who's a prominent media scholar, created this idea of the participatory culture. And this is what we said here, "As a prominent media scholar, Henry Jenkins' concept of participatory culture highlights the active involvement of consumers and creating, sharing, and engaging with digital content." He says, "Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." Let's link up a bunch of disparate ideas here now. We talked a little bit about the the place that brand has in everyday life now and potentially the sharing of brand with the system of belief and finding a system of belonging. We've talked about the idea of critique and hyperstition and creating an environment to have a moment. And I can't think of anything more subtextual than Balenciaga of all brands being the one portrayed as being on the Pope.

Brian: [00:33:17] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:33:17] Right?

Brian: [00:33:17] Just considering the recent scandal they've had around basically, like sexual misuse.

Phillip: [00:33:28] Yeah. Sexualizing children in a recent campaign in the last year.

Brian: [00:33:35] Teddy bear campaign. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:33:38] So a lot of people, Kim Kardashian, and a bunch of others sort of came out as former spokespeople for the brand for Balenciaga and said this is unacceptable. Unacceptable form of marketing. It has its own subtext. It's creepy. Not only is it creepy, but it's unacceptable. And we will not sexualize children in bondage wear as part of an aesthetic that we say is acceptable in our culture. So to put the Pope in Balenciaga has its own contextual meaning that requires, and going back to Henry Jenkins' quote, it "shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." So we're moving to this idea of the discourse being not, hey, look at what generative AI can do, but we're juxtaposing your literacy of a number of things having to... You have to be caught up in the discourse to understand the subtext, and the discourse is Balenciaga canceled the Pope wearing Balenciaga and the Catholic systematic cover ups of sexual abuse of children over decades. And that scandal is also something that you should be aware of if you're aware of Balenciaga's use and the reason why Balenciaga would be used in this way.

Brian: [00:36:05] This is where things get really tricky, though, because the question is how much do you need to know for art to make sense to you before the art itself starts to become something else? And so then all of a sudden now there are multiple people out there who may have a misunderstanding of what that image was all about. And so media literacy is at the center of this and understanding how much information do we need to know to be able to participate in current discourse? What happens when an image like that gets proliferated out through a set of people that don't actually know all of the history and back story here?

Phillip: [00:36:56] Well, let's go one layer deeper and then we'll zoom out just a hair. What we did and what our artists that we commissioned to create some art about The Multiplayer Brand did was take it a step further and reference through the burning of this one page in the book and made a reference, which is now a cultural reference, and this is now over a month and a half ago at the time of this recording, we set out to make our photography of this book happen well before Sinead O'Connor passed. There was a very, very clear cultural moment with the then Pope, John Paul, where Sinead O'Connor tore a picture of the Pope as an act of critique and protest at the end of a Saturday Night Live performance in the 90s speaking out specifically about the systematic cover up of child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church decades before it actually became a culturally relevant conversation. And she was made fun of and turned into sort of a poster child for some sort of a...

Brian: [00:38:00] An anti-religious...

Phillip: [00:38:01] Right. Anti-religious fervor and maybe even to some degree being sort of crazy. So people sort of depicted her as having some sort of mental breakdown or someone that has embarrassed themselves on a public scale until she was wrong until she was right, until the culture decided that she was the forebearer of a coming enlightenment that we would have around at a future date. And not to like piggyback on Sinead, but I think that to understand why we would burn an image of the Pope and this specific one, you would have to understand that brands are at the center of a moment that is displacing both the religious artifacts and behaviors and belonging sense and community in some people's lives, but also that the generative AI of it all is creating an opportunity for people to make bigger cultural critique of both the nature of brand and religion in our world.

Brian: [00:39:08] Well, not only that, but this also gets back to the training data that the AI has, so this has been pointed at a number of different assets in public images to create this moment. And I think in this case, maybe Balenciaga would not be okay with this. Certainly, the Catholic Church is not okay with it. How far can you control how your images and how things are being used? Well, actually, a lot of companies right now are suing OpenAI for training on their data and images. And there's a big case coming up with Sarah Silverman that could drastically impact how AI is allowed to be trained on data. And so I think this is a big open question right now. Are we going to be able to have a singularity in the future or are we going to be living with a bunch of unique AIs that are trained on a more specific set of either clearly public data along with like a specific catalog of data?

Phillip: [00:40:37] Well, this is where the platforms and social media platforms and places where people aggregated human knowledge have now become publishers. And the publishers see this content as we're now in a new era, I think, 20 years post-Myspace. We're in a new era where we're seeing the participants in these social media networks as content creators. Not just as normal people sharing what's happening and engaging in conversation, but people who actually derive value and eyeballs to these platforms need to be compensated for their creation. So this need to commercialize that model and to keep people coming back to create content on those platforms... We're seeing X just did their first creator payout. Obviously, other platforms. Youtube has probably the highest margin or the highest payout for creators of any platform and continues to pay out at a great scale and share profits with its creators. These platforms would not exist in absence of the creators themselves, right? People who create compelling content. And that's why all of these companies like Reddit and Quora want to prevent companies like OpenAI from training on their data because they have an unbelievable amount of human knowledge in their walled gardens, so why would they not want to capitalize on that for themselves? They are publishers. They want to monetize their content. It is their right to do so.

Brian: [00:42:17] So fair use starts to come into play here. That's what's happening in this Sarah Silverman case.

Phillip: [00:42:21] We're going to have to... I mean, who knew that an older female comic known for crash jokes about her vagina would be the one protecting intellectual property for an entire industry around content creation, training, data and public use, and fair use. Who knew? But here's what I will say...

Brian: [00:42:48] Anything's possible.

Phillip: [00:42:49] Anything's possible.

Brian: [00:42:51] {laughter} You think of something crazy and it probably will exist. Just Google it. It already exists.

Phillip: [00:42:57] But this is where I believe that this is its own, we're in a devolving landscape as far as the capability with AI because it is getting markedly worse. These experiences are getting markedly worse as the retraining has to happen because of cease and desist. As AI content has a very specific cutoff because of the nature of homogeneity in the content because you don't want AI to be training on other AI-generated content, you get into this homogeneous, devolving loop. And interestingly enough, I saw this recently FWB Fest happened this week and a bunch of folks were sort of live tweeting and there are live streams available publicly on YouTube where you could go watch these. But there was a talk by HipCityReg on Twitter, and in this sort of conversation one of the quotes or the pull quotes that I saw that really just resonated with me was this idea, well, if algorithms and in particular OpenAI and its ChatGPT feature, if that gets worse because it's being fed itself, it's eating its own tail, it's training on content that's come from itself and maybe even AI art having a similar thing where it just becomes regurgitating other things that the algorithm had created, what does that mean? Are we sort of at the end of history of unique things being created? And from here on we'll just continue to recycle old things in some new and novel form? And the response is, well, that's literally what mass media has done to culture.

Brian: [00:44:52] Yes. 100%.

Phillip: [00:44:53] That's been happening in culture forever, like for the last 100 years. Well, maybe 50 years. We're sort of doomed to keep repeating certain eras over and over and over again because culture has become its own training data.

Brian: [00:45:09] Eating its own tail. Yeah, totally.

Phillip: [00:45:10] Yeah.

Brian: [00:45:10] Yeah. I think it's not new, right? Once we started creating images of things we were bound to continue to repeat them because they aren't going away and we can only consume so much. This is another thing. People can only take in so much data and so right now there's so much good stuff out there. I was just talking to our videographer. He watched 12 Angry Men for the first time. Blown away by it. And we've talked about our top five favorite movies. It made his top five favorite movies.

Phillip: [00:45:42] That's funny.

Brian: [00:45:43] And I think this is the crazy thing. There's so much content that's actually quality out there. There is no possible way that we can consume it. We're pretty prolific content consumers, you and I are, and I feel so overwhelmed by how much more that I want to get to. It is impossible for a human, not even close to possible, to consume the amount of good content that exists in the world already.

Phillip: [00:46:18] But I would make a distinction, not to nitpick your words or police your words, but I would make a distinction between content. A movie. Film. And cinema. There are levels to art form and people can get really finely grained about it.

Brian: [00:46:35] Okay. Whatever the word is.

Phillip: [00:46:37] Content is fundamentally modern.

Brian: [00:46:38] Sure, sure, sure. Content whether it's literature, art, music...

Phillip: [00:46:46] Media.

Brian: [00:46:46] It's been cataloged and it exists. All things now exist. Not forever, because we know that about the internet. But there's so much that's out there. We are never going to get to all of it that's readily available. We're only going to get to the things that are put in front of us at that moment. That's why things can get recycled because there's too much good stuff already.

Phillip: [00:47:12] But I also believe that there's a nature of... There are two things that happen that seem to be inexplicable in the human experience. One is there's nothing new under the sun. You can unintentionally recreate something that already existed in the world and have never known about it. That is a fact.

Brian: [00:47:31] Totally. It already exists. It already exists.

Phillip: [00:47:33] There's another thing of simultaneous inspiration where multiple people are all pursuing the same thing independent of each other without really having the same context. It just happens in the world.

Brian: [00:47:45] Because we're all getting fed all of this data at once. And it's natural that simultaneous inspiration will happen because people are all focused on these things that are being fed to them at one time.

Phillip: [00:47:58] And I believe probably some of that's very subliminal. I was just talking with Zoe Scammon, who recently subscribed to our content and found us through Matt Klein, who is a new contributor of ours. We love Matt and ZINE, and the work he does over there. But he recommended this to us because she apparently was working on a new talk that she called The Multiplayer Brand. She had never heard of us, never knew anything about us, and she wasn't following us on Twitter or anything of that nature. She just thought this thing is a thing that she sees happening and she wanted to name it and she came up with the same name. He said, "You need to go get this zine by Future Commerce." So she orders the zine. What she and I had a conversation about was in the time of Isaac Newton, you would have individual multiple people who would happen upon the same fundamental laws and come up with the same solutions for things. The integral and calculus, the modern calculus independently was created in both Europe and in India, near-simultaneously in the world. Right? And so you had cultures that would create things in the realms of science, art, literature, and mathematics. Classics that were simultaneously all occurring at the same time independent of each other. Today, that's happening in fashion and in cultural discourse and in brand. It's happening on a different level. And that makes me really wonder if those things are now being elevated to some, you know, this is my hot take is that brand is a form of art. And there's certainly there are brands that are content and there are brands that are cinema. And certain brands have been able to create something truly superlative that become works of art unto themselves. Those are the multiplayer brands of the future. Not every brand, not every Shopify mall like drop shipper brand is going to be... They're more akin to content. They're a podcast that will never be consumed in the future. They're a blog post that will never be reread ever again. They're a tweet from 20 years ago that will never, ever be seen. But that doesn't mean that there aren't truly artistic forms of that type of thing. And that's where I do think that there is true originality left in the world, but we're not going to see it from AI.

Brian: [00:50:38] Not from AI, that's for sure.

Phillip: [00:50:39] But we can use AI to make the critique and to make the kind of...

Brian: [00:50:43] Well, I think you can use it for certain level of inspiration. But I recently wrote a short story for Future Commerce called The Wrong Part. And actually, to start the story, I went to OpenAI and I prompted the heck out of it and refined the prompt over and over. And I extended the story and I had it write a 3000-word story based on the premise that I had come up with and refined it over and over. And the best that I could get to was unoriginal and boring and something that I would not want to read. And maybe that's my lack of skill in using OpenAI to write the story that I wanted to write. But if I combine the two, if I compare the two stories, the one that AI wrote and the one that I wrote, I at least found my original story that I wrote to be a hundred times more compelling than the one that AI put together. Now, what AI did was incredible. The fact that it could write C-level high school work, maybe even B minus, is astounding. And yes, we're going to use AI for the critique. We're going to use it to do a bunch of grunt work that no one wants to do. But yeah, for original art creation, we're still the center of that. Humanity has to be the one to bring the new ideas to the table. It can't come from just retraining on the rearview mirror, as Marshall McLuhan would say.

Phillip: [00:52:29] Yeah. And if you enjoy the work of Marshall McLuhan, if you've ever read The Medium is the Massage or Understanding Media or anything else that he's created, then I think you'll like The Multiplayer Brand out now by Future Commerce. 100 pages. A zine, our first zine, but our first piece of print. Pretty soon you'll be able to get this along with our other pieces, all in a bundle, and save a little bit of money. But for now, you can get this for $20, free shipping in the lower 48, same-day shipping. TheMultiplayerBrand.com. And I'd love to know your critique about what we've just talked about because we do live in the age of critique, as we just said here, and what The Multiplayer Brand covers. Give us your critique. You can drop us a line at Hello@FutureCommerce.com or if you want more to critique about what we're creating, you can subscribe to our newsletter, which will be in your inbox three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with our perspective on the things that help you see around the next corner. If you are in retail, eCommerce marketplaces, or direct to consumer ecosystems, then you need to understand what the future holds, and we can help you see that and make it clearer at Future Commerce. You can get all of that and more at FutureCommerce.com. And if you want to subscribe... FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. That's it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.