[00:00:00] Phillip: Welcome to Future Commerce After Dark. Actually, I've forgotten what to say. We've been... it's been so long. Welcome to Future Commerce After Dark, a bonus episode of the Future Commerce program with a variety of content topics we didn't make in the regular show. I'm Phillip.

[00:00:14] Brian: I'm Brian.

[00:00:15] Phillip: And it's been a little while since it's just the two of us, and I'm toying with, do we put this on the main feed at some point? Because I don't think we've done one of those this year. Have we done, like, a bonus that's been on the main...

[00:00:28] Brian: I think so. Maybe one.

[00:00:29] Phillip: I don't know. I don't know. At some point, this has to make it onto the main feed probably, because there's definitely some stuff to talk about.

[00:00:36] Brian: Yeah. True. True. True.

[00:00:38] Phillip: I... this is in no way committing to talking about this, but...

[00:00:45] Brian: We'll tease it.

[00:00:46] Phillip: Well, I'm just saying, the end of Jay Powell is very near.

[00:00:51] Brian: Yeah. Oh, supposedly.

[00:00:52] Phillip: That's the thing that's in the back of my mind, mostly because I paid $6.10 a gallon at the pump. And I'm like, you know? Yeah. I know that this is a bad thing, but I feel like... some... we could stop the wars. Let's stop the wars. Let's actually just change all of the government. But in the short term, we could do something about interest rates.

[00:01:18] Brian: Yeah.

[00:01:18] Phillip: I'm playing.

[00:01:19] Brian: It might be time.

[00:01:21] Phillip: This is... I'm leaning on my Kroger gas discounts. Like, I drive a lot. In my family, we live outside of the world. We... that's true. We live in a different time and space that requires a lot of driving to get out of our little bubble. Yeah. And the gas prices have hit my family in a big way. Let me tell you.

[00:01:50] Phillip: Oh my goodness.

[00:01:50] Brian: So my Kroger savings and my Costco gas are getting me through right now.

[00:01:56] Phillip: What's wild is Tesla should be on a boom.

[00:02:05] Brian: It should be. No. In fact, I've heard a lot of people say, I should just switch, because actually, my car payment right now... yeah... is less than the savings that I would get from switching to electric.

[00:02:17] Phillip: Oh, a 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And they were doing a lot of incentives at the beginning of the year before this, you know, whole... you know, thing before all of this... gestures broadly. And instead, there's a 14% quarter over quarter... I feel like it should be on the upswing. You know what I mean? I feel like we should be looking... I'll check back in in Q3 because I really feel like this, our predictions, I think we could probably, if we wanna make some Future Commerce tieback, I think we're coming up on, I think, July, first week of July, Alicia and I have planned to do a check back in on predictions. But if you wanna talk about autonomy and sovereignty, there's, like, two main things to look at, is, like, the SpaceX IPO and sort of the roll-up of, like, Tesla, X, xAI, SpaceX, what have you. All of these, like, autonomy companies, and potentially OpenAI may be going public, and Anthropic. So you look at this... like, Tesla to me is the ultimate autonomy company. And the tracking of autonomy in the world, I think in pushing people into autonomy, there's, like, the commercial lever there is gas prices. So we will be looking at that really closely. The other thing is the Fitbit Air, the Google product...

[00:03:57] Brian: Yeah.

[00:03:58] Phillip: But...

[00:04:00] Brian: Body data, baby.

[00:04:02] Phillip: And, you know, people are gonna say, well, we've had, like, ECG on Apple Watch for ages, on the Ultra and things like that, right? But... again, it's been price prohibitive.

[00:04:15] Brian: Yep.

[00:04:16] Phillip: And these things have generally, for the top end of the market for things like heart rate variability, etcetera, have required subscriptions, right?

[00:04:25] Brian: Yep.

[00:04:27] Phillip: So expensive products required subscriptions. So, anyway, I'm gonna check in on a lot of that, but the gas prices, I think, are part of the larger story that's driving a lot of the consumer behavior. To your point, I'm looking at a Tesla.

[00:04:44] Brian: Yeah. No. I mean, that's the right thing to do. I have paid off all my cars, and so I'm like, now all I look at is my gas. And so I'm like, should I invest... if prices come back down, I'm not gonna look so smart anymore. The thing is, for a lot of our driving, it requires our whole family. I don't know if Tesla has a car that can fit my whole family.

[00:05:22] Phillip: They don't?

[00:05:23] Brian: No. They don't. So that's been the biggest... yeah. Yeah. I think also, it's interesting, and we may have talked about this a little bit just briefly earlier, but, like, it does feel like certain categories of prices are actually falling right now, and that inflation looks worse mostly because of gas. And if prices are starting to decelerate and, you know, the question is, you know, is it time for... I really think it is time for an interest rate drop. So...

[00:06:02] Phillip: It's an interesting, pun intended, question, because if you look at the... gosh. It feels like we really need a normal Future Commerce episode to... yeah, we're overdue. I'm gonna write a piece tomorrow, which is... May... we're recording this May 26. I'm gonna write a piece for... the collective tenor of developers is that the more autonomy that we have in models and the more intelligence that we have in models means that we're paying three times as much for the latest frontier model as we were this time last year. And so, where last year the cost per million tokens went from 2024 to 2025... the cost per million tokens went from 40 cents per million tokens output to $1 per million tokens output, which was, like, a three-x jump. Again, from 2025 to 2026, the frontier models are tripling up again, from a dollar to $3 per million tokens output. And, again, the million tokens output isn't, like, output that you can see. It's reasoning, right? There's, like, a lot of stuff that's happening behind the scenes that you don't actually get insight into. Yeah. And the more powerful the model, the more that it makes assumptions about what you want. Part of my research in the Google I/O keynote was they released their new, like, version of... I wanted to create something. So I was like, I wanna create an Android app, which is the thing it can do out of the box. So I asked it to do something. It had a little bit of back and forth, very similar to, like, Claude Code on the desktop. A little bit of back and forth, and then it started working. And this thing crunched on my computer for, I'm gonna say, the better part of an hour.

[00:08:13] Brian: That's wild.

[00:08:14] Phillip: And it made an Android app, but it's like, you don't have an Android dev environment installed. No big deal. We'll install the CLI tools for you. I had to accept a bunch of things. But it was like... and because you can't visualize anything right now, we made you a little visualizer. Well, you... Antigravity. So it popped it up in a web browser, and I took a look at it, and it, like, recreated an entire phone. It created fake apps. It created, like, a fake Gboard app. And I'm like, what is this tool...

[00:08:50] Brian: That you... testing...

[00:08:51] Phillip: ...this testing environment tool for the web that you've created for Android apps? And it's like, oh, that doesn't exist. I just made it. And I'm like, how many tokens did you use for this? And it's like, oh, it's like... just the, like, fake iPhone... fake Android phone experience itself was something like two to four million tokens. And I'm like, that was $12. Yep. Like, just the phone was $12. Thank you for not even asking for my permission for that.

[00:09:22] Brian: Yep.

[00:09:22] Phillip: So that's the world that we live in now. And you can see where the costs are just accelerating. It's becoming very cost prohibitive. So to your point, some things are getting cheaper, everything else is getting more expensive, and then, you know, Facebook starts laying off, you know, 7,000 people.

[00:09:38] Brian: Well, that was always gonna happen, I think.

[00:09:40] Phillip: The...

[00:09:42] Brian: The funny thing is, you know, there was, like, leaderboards for, like, how many tokens people were using.

[00:09:47] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:09:48] Brian: Now, like, that used to be like a, oh, I'm using the most tokens... Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be like... it's most expensive employee. Like, million-dollar employee.

[00:09:58] Phillip: It's so true. Do you remember CodeGolf? I don't know if you remember this. In the developer ecosystem, this was a big thing.

[00:10:05] Brian: I don't remember CodeGolf. That's it.

[00:10:07] Phillip: So... this was such a thing. There was even, like, a Stack Exchange for it for a little while. There was a, like, computer competition for many, many years called CodeGolf, and it was... or it's basically, like... you go look at the Wikipedia for CodeGolf because it's really fascinating. But they would make these competitions of things that you, like, visualizations or fun little desktop screensavers or games you could play, all kinds of things that you could do, and then people would take the thing that you made, and they would golf it down. In other words, they'd try to recreate the exact experience or very similar experience in as few... in as few bytes as possible.

[00:11:03] Brian: Like... yeah.

[00:11:03] Phillip: Do it... get that down to as small as you could possibly get. And so much so that they wrote a whole computer language for golfing the computer code down, because part of the issue, it used to be, was storage size, right? Like, every character took up so much space.

[00:11:26] Brian: Storage was so expensive. Right.

[00:11:28] Phillip: Yeah. And now we're kind of getting there, I think, with tokens.

[00:11:32] Brian: Yeah. It's like, how few prompts... like, how can you be more efficient with the machine? And... no, I think that's actually... that's probably dead on. In fact, someday, we're gonna be like we are now, where it's like storage is so cheap. We just all... you know, we're all blessed with a wealth of riches, and we can use it as much as we want. But in the future, like... we're gonna have the same sort of thing with storage, where it's like the token thing will not be an issue anymore. It's just gonna be highly, highly efficient. That's... we're gonna get really efficient with it, one. And two, we're gonna get a lot better at being able to, like, process tokens, and, like, it's gonna... like, the hardware power and, like, the processing side is gonna get more efficient. And then the, like, sort of the efficiency of the models is gonna go up. And it's all gonna happen at once. And so, while we're in maybe the trough of disillusionment right now, where, like, Microsoft is now telling people to, like, cut their token usage, I think, or cut their cloud usage...

[00:12:33] Phillip: That's right.

[00:12:33] Brian: We'll see it return... as we typically see, because people are working so hard, and there's so much money tied up in this, where, like, that trough and that, like, break point where it starts to become more efficient again, like, those are gonna meet faster than the typical, like, ten-year cycle it takes to get out of other troughs.

[00:13:16] Phillip: It's funny because I think we accelerated our way into the trough of disillusionment really quickly, mostly because of the expense and the... right. And I don't wanna say...

[00:13:26] Brian: Diminishing returns. Push this. Yeah. Diminishing returns. I think that's kind of...

[00:13:30] Phillip: I don't know, because... yeah, the diminishing returns just depends on what your applications are. If you look at, like, Gemini Omni, which came out at this Google I/O event, which, again, I think... today, I don't know, tomorrow, we'll put out our third interview slash podcast there, live at the show.

[00:13:52] Brian: The first summary that we... a way to get a recap.

[00:14:00] Phillip: Yeah. And that's all at futurecommerce.com if you haven't caught up. But I think... I suspect that Plus subscribers... if you're not a Plus subscriber, I don't know what we clip for the teaser, but if you're not a Plus subscriber, go get it. Futurecommerce.com/plus. But there's a pretty comprehensive recap on many parts of the show, especially the commerce implications, which I think we could probably touch on here. But the Omni model is probably a good example of the, oh, shoot, we still have a long way to go for wild improvements in things like video model improvement. Like, you can do a lot still. People are doing some pretty nuts things. Like, they're uploading videos of somebody, like a YouTuber, and he's, you know... the one I saw was him, quote unquote, like, demoing smart home lamps. Like, oh, here's my smart bulbs, right? And it would be, like, me in my room here, which you're probably... saying, oh, and, you know, I'm gonna turn this light on, and he's pointing. I'm turning this light on, and he's pointing, but, like, there's not actually any smart lamps behind him. And then the room isn't changing any colors, again because there's no real smart lamps behind him. And then, when he puts it into Gemini Omni and he puts a prompt there, it's like, the YouTuber is pointing to smart lamps. Then that's all he says, and then it understands what it wants, and then it's changing the whole scene and relighting the whole scene and doing it on cue to when he's pointing, and then, like, putting the lamps to where he would point to them. And, like, it's crazy what it can do contextually and what it can think contextually. It's pretty bananas.

[00:15:59] Brian: So it's not bananas... return is probably the wrong way to put it, but the answer...

[00:16:04] Phillip: In some ways, yes. But I think in other ways, there's...

[00:16:07] Brian: We're still seeing all of the benefits of it. It's just... perspective. That's... yeah. That's the answer. But we... yeah. Yeah. But that's why people continue to use it, because it's, like, so incredible what it's able to accomplish without human labor. And I think that's the part that, like, gets people really excited, is that while it's not efficient right now, the ability to add all that lighting, which you could do manually, right?

[00:16:38] Phillip: Yeah. There would definitely be... the amount of visual effects... and visual effects are...

[00:16:46] Brian: Right.

[00:16:46] Phillip: Artists and time and input. Yeah. For sure.

[00:16:49] Brian: Right.

[00:16:49] Phillip: It would be so prohibitive that a normal person would never do that.

[00:16:53] Brian: A normal person would never do it. That's right. So, you know, it's interesting. You know, a lot of this has to do with eliminating human labor, right? That's the exciting part. It makes it faster and more efficient from, like, a one-person-can-do-a-whole-bunch-of-things perspective, and we... capabilities, that actually gives them more autonomy. And we can actually become more insular in what we're able to accomplish, a.k.a. siloed. Now, silos are smaller, but they can become, like, deeper silos, actually. So...

[00:17:37] Phillip: I...

[00:17:37] Brian: ...am curious about how this is gonna affect the future of the organization and the future of work, because silos right now generally are a really bad thing. What is this gonna do to communication? Like, if someone can accomplish more stuff, how are they gonna communicate that out to a bunch of people? I think we might need new communication tools. I don't think... and I think people are actually feeling this already with the communication tools that we have. Like, Slack, people just mute channels like crazy. They have to. They try to get out of channels as fast as they can. There's too much communication. And when you have a whole bunch of people doing a bunch of individual stuff, like, that's how that organization's gonna evolve, then I really think that our communication channels right now and our communication flows are, like, vastly insufficient for that future.

[00:18:35] Phillip: So what's the... where do you think that that's heading then? Because there's a... there's a version of... you said communication channels, right?

[00:18:46] Brian: Yeah.

[00:18:46] Phillip: There's a version where people... certain people in certain organizations have as many, like, literal communication channels... they have as many agents in their Slack as they do employees, or, if not, they have agents outnumbering actual employees in Slack right now.

[00:19:06] Brian: Totally. Updates... updates are like all... I mean, if you think you're notification-overwhelmed right now, it's gonna get worse. Now, the agent could help with this, like summaries of notifications and giving you the most important information, and that may be the answer. Like, having an agent that can prioritize things for you and, like, sort through that communication and, like, give you rundowns and briefings on all of those notifications. But I'm not sure that... the problem right now with a flood of information that's, like, hitting us... it was already a problem, and it's only gonna get worse.

[00:19:49] Phillip: Yeah. Oh, let's... I feel like there's a lot to say still, but... there's a lot probably still to cover. There's...

[00:20:00] Brian: I have so much.

[00:20:01] Phillip: There's a lot of things I do...

[00:20:02] Brian: ...wanna cover. Things I wanna get into. The pope's letter, which I'm...

[00:20:05] Phillip: Oh, there's that. Also, there was a whole fake thing that went around about his watch this last week that I was like, oh, I already covered that on the newsletter. Yep. But yeah. What... let's talk about that, because I feel like that's a thing that's been bubbling up for a little while, and something we touched on very briefly as a tangent, probably also to his watch. But yeah.

[00:20:30] Brian: Yeah. I mean, I'm only through the introduction of the first chapter. So... and... I mean, it's long. The encyclical letter is, like... it's interesting because, you know... how the church interacts with new things, the Catholic church. And I know it's interesting because, you know, I'm not a Catholic, but I do believe that this is, you know, a large group of people that are being led by, you know, the pope, and it's gonna have, actually, like, sort of a very large impact. Like, we should be paying attention to things like this as a larger sort of, like, leadership play for a large group of people. And so... I'm really interested to see where that goes. Now, what I've tried to avoid is, like, just reading people's takes on it. So I've actually been kind of avoiding Twitter for the last two days because there's a lot of takes going out on it, and I wanted to kind of get my own opinion of it before I got there. But one take that I did read... and I felt this way through the first, like, two parts, the introduction and the second part, was, it feels like almost there. Like, it's... there's a lot of, like, we wanna protect the dignity of... humans. But it doesn't... and this is... and I'm not all the way through it by any stretch of the imagination yet... that it just... it doesn't feel like a very hard direction or movement in any particular way. It just feels like general guidance around, like, we want to take people's dignity into account as we develop technology, and just, like, general guidance around that.

[00:22:26] Phillip: It feels like... it falls into the class of things that you kind of knew would be coming. Yep. And I see... there's been a lot of memes.

[00:22:42] Brian: Yep.

[00:22:44] Phillip: One of the memes was what people think that men want.

[00:22:53] Brian: See, I haven't been looking. So...

[00:22:55] Phillip: Okay. It was, something to the tune of, like, Anthropic releasing a new model or, like, lowering costs or something like that. What men actually want... and it was, you know, the pope declaring holy war against, you know, the technocratic state or something like that.

[00:23:18] Brian: I don't feel that. I definitely did not get that vibe when I read this. It doesn't feel like a crusade against tech so far.

[00:23:29] Phillip: Oh, oh, here it is. I found it. There's actually, like, so many of these. The funniest of which is Sydney Sweeney on the left. And what girls think guys want is Sydney Sweeney. What guys actually want is Pope Leo. And breaking news: Pope Leo declares holy crusade against the machines.

[00:23:49] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:50] Phillip: Yeah. That's the funniest one. There's, like, very, very... there's, like, 20 versions of this. You know what's really funny? And I have to figure this out. We shipped back the STRATA installation, the mural... yeah... which I don't think we've actually recounted how funny that was. And we actually got that. We...

[00:24:15] Brian: We MacGyvered it.

[00:24:18] Phillip: Yeah. We got that all the way back here, and it was completely unscathed. That thing... back here, because we had zero plan that we were even gonna make that mural with five days to go to the show in the first place. Yep. So, like, we were gonna trash that mural.

[00:24:40] Brian: It's so sick too. I'm really glad we figured...

[00:24:42] Phillip: ...it out. It's so good. It's so good. One of the features of the mural... maybe we just make the mural the actual, like... I'll take a picture of the mural. Maybe the picture of the mural... this is what I'll do. Because the funny part of this is I have to look at Sydney Sweeney's face every time I open my garage now. That is the funniest part of this, is that every time I open my freaking garage, it's sitting on the back of the wall of my garage. I have to find a better place for this. I look at Sydney Sweeney's dumb face right next to, like, the Duolingo owl holding a Brita water filter. And I think to myself, I need to find a better place for this.

[00:25:21] Brian: You literally, it's like the watch... pointed out to look to the road. Me. Lots of books and Sydney Sweeney in it.

[00:25:31] Phillip: Everyone in my neighborhood, because we leave our garage open sometimes. Like...

[00:25:37] Brian: They're all like...

[00:25:38] Phillip: They all see Sydney Sweeney's face as they're driving by.

[00:25:41] Brian: It's like right next to a Costco hot dog. No one... don't...

[00:25:44] Phillip: ...wanna see. You know, that's... I'm just now thinking that it's probably not great to have a Sydney Sweeney and then, like, a giant, like, glizzy dog right next to... like, you've got this... it's not the... all of the imagery makes sense in the context of the book. It's probably not great to have this giant mural in my garage.

[00:26:02] Brian: If there is any main character in our book, it is Sydney Sweeney. Yeah.

[00:26:06] Phillip: You've got Sydney. You've got Mamdani. You've got... Sydney's features prominently in the book.

[00:26:11] Brian: It's like four times throughout all 10 trends.

[00:26:14] Phillip: Go get STRATA, futurecommerce.com/strata. But... I opened my garage. So here's what we should do. I'll make the episode art my open garage with Sydney Sweeney's face.

[00:26:29] Brian: Now we're talking.

[00:26:30] Phillip: But goodness gracious.

[00:26:31] Brian: The guy is low.

[00:26:33] Phillip: We don't even need to... I know we always make it the, like, what it normally is, but I think it would just be funny to just show you what my dumb garage looks like with Sydney Sweeney's face. It's got...

[00:26:43] Brian: Pointed out to look to the road. Me. Lots of books and Sydney Sweeney in it.

[00:26:46] Phillip: I am trying to create more space for my rock wall, and, like, I've got a bouldering wall on the one side of my garage, and I'm trying to create more space for working out, because I need to get back to running. I've got a running plan for the summer. But...

[00:27:01] Brian: I have a running plan for the summer too.

[00:27:03] Phillip: Do you...

[00:27:03] Brian: Is it... are...

[00:27:04] Phillip: ...you planning to actually run?

[00:27:05] Brian: Yes.

[00:27:06] Phillip: Okay... I want to get back into it. But it's... I really wanna get to the trail run. That's part of the plan, because I have trails behind my house. I literally have trails. I can go on a trail run whenever I want.

[00:27:22] Phillip: You do. You've got, like, really nice, like, wooded situations going on behind you. I would be terrified to actually run in the, like, wooded trails and not, like, a paved trail or, like, a really cleared trail, because you've got ticks in Washington.

[00:27:38] Brian: Not really. Those are mostly on the eastern side of the state. So they're minimal. They're minimal over here. I've never got a tick in Washington... I think. For real? Yeah. In Western Washington.

[00:27:50] Phillip: I see.

[00:27:52] Brian: So... yeah. It's... they do exist, but it's...

[00:27:56] Phillip: They exist.

[00:27:57] Brian: ...pretty rare.

[00:27:57] Phillip: I know they exist.

[00:27:58] Brian: They're rare. They're, like... it's not like some of the Northeast states. Like, one of the reasons we are, like, in a tick crisis is because we stopped having chickens. Like, everyone used to have chickens, and they're, like, the best...

[00:28:16] Phillip: That's true.

[00:28:17] Brian: ...tick predator. And so they would just have chickens out in their yards all the time. Sure. And now we... so the tick... I've always wondered, like, what's the deal with the tick crisis? There's obviously the conspiracy theories about it. But, like, the tick crisis is bad.

[00:28:35] Phillip: Wait. What is the conspiracy theory around the tick crisis, and does it have anything to do with the UFO files?

[00:28:41] Brian: Kind of. I mean, basically, there's talk about, like, how the ticks have, like, been injected or genetically modified to include a disease, like... like, diseases...

[00:28:55] Phillip: Right.

[00:28:55] Brian: ...Lyme disease and so on. And that they were also made to be resistant, like, more resistant to death and predator resistant, so that they sort of escaped containment effectively. And now we're suffering the consequences. I don't know if I believe any of that, but I do believe that we have fewer chickens out and about.

[00:29:22] Phillip: That is a demonstrable fact.

[00:29:25] Brian: Yes. Bring back chickens. That's my take.

[00:29:30] Phillip: Can I take a, like, hard left turn here?

[00:29:32] Brian: Yeah. Let's go.

[00:29:33] Phillip: This has nothing to do with anything. Although, I do just close the loop real quick on STRATA. Yeah. The mural is that I've... we've got a giant Sydney Sweeney picture in my house, and that's all I have to say about that. It's just... we'll post the picture.

[00:29:47] Brian: Five seconds almost.

[00:29:49] Phillip: Which is just... it's its own thing. Hard left turn. I have been complaining about this now on Twitter for maybe a year and a half, but it... it bites me every few weeks.

[00:30:07] Brian: You. Like a tick.

[00:30:08] Phillip: Crazy. I don't know. I'm sure that we have subscribers who could fix this. I guarantee we do. For some reason, Abercrombie and Hollister. Those two companies, their websites... I am permanently... my user account is permanently locked to the Spanish language. I'm cookied. I cannot not have the Spanish language. I go and I change... What?

[00:30:53] Brian: Yeah. Weirdest. So first of all...

[00:30:55] Phillip: Hollister and Abercrombie are the same company.

[00:30:57] Brian: Website. What is that? How often are you going to Hollister's website?

[00:31:01] Phillip: Well, I go and try to unsubscribe from their emails, and for some reason, I keep getting them again. Well, that's me. I'm account shaming now.

[00:31:10] Brian: That is... guys. That is bad. Guys. Bad news.

[00:31:13] Phillip: And then what happens is... I do have a little bit of ADD, probably not diagnosable, but I will hit the unsubscribe button, which is impossible to find on their emails. Okay? I hit the unsubscribe button... at Abercrombie, I have only ever bought male clothing. I'm a male. I signed up as a male in their loyalty program, and I get female emails all the time. I do not understand this. Somebody fix it. But I hit unsubscribe... like, you're leaving money on the table, you guys. I don't understand it, but okay. So I click unsubscribe. I just don't want to get your dumb emails anymore. I'm at that point. I don't mind being a customer, but you keep sending me irrelevant emails. I hit it, and boom. Spanish language on the website. And it doesn't matter where I'm at. I could be on mobile. I could be on desktop, but I am cookied based on my behavior, because my email is fingerprinted, right? And if I've ever been on their website on my device, screw me. Even in incognito, it's like, we know who you are. Like, you are scarlet-lettered, Phillip. Like, you are always going to get the Spanish language. But I cannot not have the Spanish language website.

[00:32:39] Brian: Dude...

[00:32:39] Phillip: You can't even go down. You go to the bottom of the website, and you go to, like, the change-the-language option or change your country, and it doesn't do any good. And I use the Chrome function to translate the website. And for whatever reason, you have to redo that on pretty much every page.

[00:33:04] Brian: Hold on. I'm just trying to fix... I'm double checking what happens if I go there right now.

[00:33:11] Phillip: Don't even bother. Don't even try. By the way, if you go... it's Hotel California for you, Brian. If you get the Spanish language, you're never getting back.

[00:33:19] Brian: I don't have it, and I'm not gonna try to switch it. So I'm just...

[00:33:23] Phillip: ...telling you. I don't know how it happened, but it's... I'm just saying.

[00:33:31] Brian: Well, I'm sorry, man. That's really terrible for you.

[00:33:36] Phillip: Yeah. It's pretty awful. And so what happens is I go to unsubscribe, and then I realize I have this problem again. But that... not today.

[00:33:51] Brian: That's their secret.

[00:33:52] Phillip: I break the cycle today. I break the cycle today. May 26.

[00:33:55] Brian: Live on...

[00:33:56] Phillip: ...the May 26 live on the After Dark. Subscribe. Breaking the cycle. And I'm going to... I'm calling them out. This is what we're clipping. I'm calling them out. And then I'm going to put this on every freaking social media. So I'm going to blast them. I'm going to make this a collab post. We're gonna turn this into a reel, and I'm gonna invite them to collab on this on their Instagram. Fix it.

[00:34:19] Brian: Yes. Collab... this is the future of the novel. I will write an article this...

[00:34:24] Phillip: ...this week. Of the novel. The great American novel.

[00:34:27] Brian: The great American novel. I was just trying to escape the Spanish language hole on the Hollister website. I read this article by a guy named Will Self. I don't even know how I got fed... this is called "The Novel Is Dead." It's... there's some... it's funny. There's some Potemkin Village references, and there's also some Marshall McLuhan references in here. So I...

[00:34:56] Phillip: That's not as funny.

[00:34:57] Brian: Brian bait right here. And also... but he, you know, he talks about how, like, it's not that the novel, like, has anything wrong with it. It's that we're in an environment now where, like, the novel is not actually... people don't believe in it sufficiently to sort of defend the conditions under which it remains possible to make novels. And so they'll just become more and more niche, and the reason for writing and publishing a novel is changing. If we think of a novel as for entertainment or for making money or for turning something else into merch, then that novel is dead, which is absolutely true and probably always was true. It didn't produce a lot of great literature. That's for sure. But the one thing he does say is that, like, now... it's a multiplayer brand. Basically, I think what he's saying is things like what you're experiencing right now are the future of the novel. Like, these real-life moments where we're, like, you know, extreme sort of, like, self experience that we can then pass out on the Internet and get other people to contribute to and sort of co-storytell around, maybe that other people are experiencing the same thing, is how we end up with stories that become sort of these shared stories across the web. And some of them will have really niche audiences, like Hollister, ClickHole. But other ones will be a little bit more accessible to larger crowds, and that's how we're gonna source our stories.

[00:36:53] Phillip: Yeah. That's... it's kind of like... okay. This is maybe not exactly the same thing, but... what were we watching recently? My oldest daughter is 15, and she remarked that we watched a couple movies recently where they basically sideline the characters'... it's really hard to tell a modern story because cell phones kind of break...

[00:37:32] Brian: Right. They really do.

[00:37:33] Phillip: They break stories, right? So you kind of have to break communication in order for...

[00:37:39] Brian: ...it works better in a novel than it does on screen. It's really hard to sort of, like, depict on screen.

[00:37:46] Phillip: Right. And she's an aspiring writer. She was also kind of thinking about this phenomenon too, right? She reads a ton of young adult fiction and, specifically, like, teen romance... romance fantasy, that sort of thing. And the ones that have, like, modern technology in it, she says are basically... they're just far less engaging. Like, the modernity that's baked into it is just far less engaging, and you don't miss anything, right? There's no inherent nostalgic value. There's no, like, navel gazing around the past when you don't have the technology baked in. You just take it as... it's just a story, right? And I think that that's really interesting. It feels like we're in the... you have Marshall McLuhan, that you constantly reference, and I'll constantly go back to, static pile up. Baudrillard. Is it?

[00:39:04] Brian: Baudrillard.

[00:39:06] Phillip: No. No. No. It's not Baudrillard. It's Paul Virilio.

[00:39:11] Brian: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. He was influenced by Roger Caillois.

[00:39:16] Phillip: Yes. For sure. And so, you know, this idea that we just continue to feed off of our own aesthetics over and over and over again, I think in this case, it's sort of a necessity for... it necessitates it for maybe the storytelling device. But anyway, we were remarking about that, and I was like, that's not true. I feel like there's a lot of modern stories that still have technology at the center of them. I feel like we're starting to learn how to tell stories in the modern sense with technology at the center of them. And I remarked to Jackie, I was like, wasn't... I mean, one battle... whole of the movie. Like, the cell phone is dead. Leo's cell phone is dead the whole movie for the most part. And then the daughter's cell phone... spoilers, by the way, for One Battle After Another. But, you know, then the daughter's cell phone gets found and tossed out the window. Like, it's kind of there, but they sideline it as a means of getting rid of it, because the inability for the characters to communicate drives the plot forward. Yep. Anyway.

[00:40:34] Brian: I think...

[00:40:35] Phillip: Anyway, my inability to communicate with Hollister and Abercrombie is driving me crazy.

[00:40:43] Brian: Yes. By the way, Eddington is one of my favorite movies of the modern era.

[00:40:48] Phillip: Yes.

[00:40:48] Brian: ...which does tell that story really well.

[00:40:50] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:51] Brian: It's incredible. And I'm not just saying that because Mark Andreessen tweeted it recently. I think I probably said this a few... like, when I first came... and, like, the living through a screen and, like, the influence of technology, and it's all there. It is an excellent movie. Ari Aster is a genius, actually.

[00:41:33] Phillip: There's... I do wanna come to... do you have anything else on deck? Because there's just a couple, like... I mean, it's like retail and ecommerce.

[00:41:48] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. You hit it. I mean, I was gonna just talk about movies that I've been watching. I ended up going to see a few movies recently. Well, "The Devil Wears Prada 2"... I know it's been kind of done to death at this point, but that was... I'll leave a couple of comments.

[00:42:03] Phillip: Did you guys see that?

[00:42:05] Brian: Yeah. Oh, nice. In the theater.

[00:42:07] Phillip: I was gonna guess that you went to see Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft.

[00:42:12] Brian: I mean, that just... seems very, very up your...

[00:42:15] Phillip: ...very up your alley.

[00:42:19] Brian: No. The Devil Wears Prada 2... my wife was like, you know more about this movie than anyone in this theater does.

[00:42:31] Phillip: What theater do you go to? Do you have an AMC near you?

[00:42:37] Brian: We have a Regal kind of in the town over. We also actually have, like, a historic local theater in our town, which is really cool. Single screen, old school. You can buy, like... that's cool... cheap wine and beer and take it to your seat. It's awesome. Candy is not unreasonable prices anymore. And it's, like, $8 for an adult ticket, $5 for a child ticket. It's amazing.

[00:43:08] Phillip: What do you think of the film?

[00:43:09] Brian: The Devil Wears Prada 2?

[00:43:11] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:43:11] Brian: I liked it. I think that, you know, it continues to sort of lionize and canonize a certain type of person and era of culture. The thing that I liked about it was... a lot of the things that the characters themselves espoused as ideals in the film are, like, really good. And the relationships are, like, a fun thing to watch, and, like, I feel like what the film stands for is, like, actually, generally, like, pretty high ideals. But what I don't like... that... the actual people... represent the raiders and the, like, the petty people. Like, the very things that they're sort of villainizing are the very things that the generation they're lionizing actually did to get lionized. So I think that it's a very hypocritical... as a result.

[00:44:28] Phillip: Can you be more specific?

[00:44:30] Brian: Yeah. So the people who are, like... the two sort of, like, bad guys, if you will, of the movie are, like, the corporate raiders. Like, the guy...

[00:44:46] Phillip: ...who inherits the... inherent... so... so BJ Novak's...

[00:44:49] Brian: BJ Novak's character is, like, gonna come in and bring in the McKinsey consultants and just, like...

[00:44:54] Phillip: ...which, by the way, only happens, like, five-eighths through the movie. Right.

[00:45:00] Brian: Yeah. They're gonna, like, bean count and, like, turn it into a McKinsey property and kill everything that's good about it, which I agree. Like, this is real. These... who is a surrogate for who?

[00:45:24] Brian: Musk, of course.

[00:45:25] Phillip: No. That's a Bezos character. The guy's laughing his head off the whole time.

[00:45:29] Brian: Oh, you're right. It is Bezos. Totally. Totally. Oh, yeah.

[00:45:32] Phillip: Good...

[00:45:32] Brian: ...point. So, yeah, he's coming in and acquiring and, like, spinning off and so on.

[00:45:36] Phillip: And he has a glow up. He gets all buff.

[00:45:38] Brian: That's right. I guess I was totally...

[00:45:40] Phillip: ...totally buff. Hair thinning and fat, and then he gets a...

[00:45:44] Brian: Buff. So good. Yeah.

[00:45:45] Phillip: Yeah. It's a great... it's like not even subtle, in my opinion.

[00:45:49] Brian: That's right. Yeah. Or Dario. Yeah. And so the long and the short is, like, I feel like this is kind of what the Miranda Priestleys did in the first place in coming in and, like, taking over institutions that sort of already existed for culture making. When they came in, they were... in so many ways, I feel like the raiders of the past were the raiders of the future. And so I do feel like it was a little bit hypocritical. These things have happened before. These things happen in cycles. It's not the way... it was a fairy tale. It was told as a fairy tale, and that fairy tale's big hole is that the way that the Miranda Priestleys of the world took over is through those very raiders that it was so lambasting and villainizing. So that's my only gripe, is that I think it's a little bit hypocritical. Otherwise, I really enjoyed it.

[00:47:19] Phillip: I like the meta-criticism. I have a bunch of thoughts about it. I think it was... aside from the other critiques that you've probably read, which are, you know, it's a legacy sequel that's, like, why did it need to exist?

[00:47:39] Brian: Yeah. I...

[00:47:43] Phillip: ...personally feel like it's one of the legacy sequels that does... if you watch the two together, it actively ruins your... it softens your sense of Miranda Priestley's character...

[00:48:10] Phillip: ...yes... from the first film.

[00:48:13] Brian: Right.

[00:48:13] Phillip: Right. We have the benefit of having twenty years in the culture of what you believe her, like, hard-driving nature to be. But if you were to watch them back to back, and, right? And you don't have that benefit of twenty years, right?

[00:48:30] Brian: Yeah.

[00:48:31] Phillip: You have this sense of she's not as hard as she presents because of the way that they present her in the second film.

[00:48:41] Brian: Let me sort of give you a little bit of another perspective on that. If you take... was it Andy, the main character?

[00:48:51] Phillip: Andy. Yeah.

[00:48:51] Brian: Yeah. Andy's... if you're living through Andy's perspective from the first film, you're actually looking at Miranda through her eyes. And the way that it felt when she interacted with Miranda the first time in the first movie...

[00:49:10] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:49:11] Brian: ...was...

[00:49:28] Phillip: ...in an extremely literal fashion. And so in the literal fashion, no pun intended, in... again, like, putting it through Andy's eyes, like, there's a certain level of affection that she develops for Miranda in the process anyway. Yeah. You can see it when she comes back. That's sort of the point. And so the sentimentality is... they actually give you Andy's feelings towards her. Like, you are Andy, right, through the whole series. And so your point... the point of it is to have you...

[00:51:09] Phillip: So when... when does it turn? Like, they replay all the same beats from the first movie.

[00:51:15] Brian: Yeah.

[00:51:15] Phillip: Right? The first movie, it was she's gotta get the Harry Potter book, right? Yeah. It's this impossible feat. And then the second movie, it's she's gotta score the interview with, like, Mackenzie Scott.

[00:51:26] Brian: Right.

[00:51:28] Phillip: Or whatever. Yep. Whoever... the Lucy Liu character. So I don't know. I... like, I guess that's the turning point, is, like, she earns respect. Is that the turning... yeah. I think it's like... you look back on some of those early bosses you have, and you were... think they were so hard. And then when you get older, you just don't... you see them with more affection than you did before because you realize what they made you.

[00:52:03] Phillip: Oh, you know what? It's actually making me think of somebody now.

[00:52:06] Brian: Yep. Yeah. That, you know, that sort of... that was my take on it. I do see your perspective, and I also agree with it completely, because I don't believe that... like, I... so, you know, Anna Wintour even said, I am worse...

[00:52:20] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:52:20] Brian: ...than... for sure... than Miranda Priestley. Like, you do not want to have been in my office. And I actually believe it. I actually think that, again, this is what it lionizes and it sentimentalizes, that whole industry, and she actually is a worse person than Miranda Priestley is. And the industry she built and the way that she built it represents a raider more than it does the high ideals that were espoused in the film, and that's my criticism.

[00:52:57] Phillip: Yeah. The actual Lauren Weisberger novel is, like, essentially... was written based on the Weisberger experience as being a personal assistant to Anna Wintour. Like, it is literally the actual experience that then sets up the events of The Devil Wears Prada 2, theoretically.

[00:53:33] Brian: Yep.

[00:53:34] Phillip: Like, she gets given this offer to write this novel... anyway.

[00:53:37] Brian: Yep.

[00:53:39] Phillip: A lot of womp womp there. I do think that there's a really good piece of insight. Brian probably should have led with this, actually, because I think it would have been more germane to the conversation, because I think that this is maybe something that we could identify here, is there's a really great analysis of media as a whole. And the sense of what has happened in media as an industry, and the arc of where media might need to go, and sort of, again, the, like, Bezos character. It's like, oh, I don't even know if we even need photographers. We just see AI at all. Like, this whole... yep... mentality around his idea of progress, which I thought was actually a phenomenal little monologue.

[00:54:35] Brian: It was. It was excellent.

[00:54:37] Phillip: It was, like... that's probably the best part of the whole film, if you haven't seen the film. It's worth watching... is essentially that we're all kind of just passing through, and it's pointless to fight it. And progress, like... basically, the future comes for us all.

[00:55:01] Brian: Yeah. No. And he's not wrong.

[00:55:05] Phillip: There is a... oh, it's... you know what? It's really hard to actually find, because the Devil Wears Prada 1 monologue is so prevalent in culture, the cerulean monologue is so out there. But you should go... we should find it. I'm sure it's clipped somewhere. But it's effectively replaying the same beat as the cerulean monologue did in the first movie, but he gives this speech to Miranda Priestley in this movie. Like, it's flipping the script.

[00:55:43] Brian: Yes.

[00:55:44] Phillip: If you understand what legacy sequels do, this is just replaying the same beat as the first movie. But he's telling her about what... that she was saying happens with fashion and trends with the cerulean, you know, sweater and how... and, you know, so... and so I had found that kind of profound.

[00:56:16] Brian: And... yep.

[00:56:18] Phillip: You can't really fight it, right? You can't really fight it.

[00:56:22] Brian: The environment changes, and there's nothing you can do about it.

[00:56:24] Phillip: That's exactly right.

[00:56:25] Brian: Yeah. This is actually the Marshall McLuhan thing, which is, like, you can... you know, if you can contemplate the environment, there is no inevitability. But if you don't contemplate the environment, then there is no hope. And he... like, for instance, when Marshall McLuhan was debating with Auden, Auden wouldn't own a TV.

[00:56:47] Phillip: W.H. Auden? Yep.

[00:56:49] Brian: Yeah. And Marshall basically said, well, you're in the environment without enjoying the benefits. Like, basically, you can't avoid the environment you step into. The world just moves on. The future comes for us all, and there's no escaping the total environment. But you can take a sort of a stand and, like, have ethics and morals and, like, a point of view on that future, in order to get above it. And this... we talk about this all the time, but, like, being above and below the algorithm. Like, you can either give yourself over to that future and just say, I am all in. Take me over. Transform my identity. Or you can say, my identity is rooted in something beyond that environment, and I will engage with that environment, but I have an identity outside of it. And that's a really, like, difficult thing to do, because in order to take advantage of the environment, you kind of have to give yourself over to it to some degree. And so there's more money in it, and it's easier to, like, navigate if you just give yourself over fully, and you run the bleeding edge.

[00:58:18] Phillip: Oh. Oh, the best quote in the whole film. You're not a visionary. You're a vendor.

[00:58:26] Brian: Yep. Oh...

[00:58:28] Phillip: ...dude. That was... that was what she was saying. There's actually... the movie has a lot of really great one-liners. Maybe "the bridges I burn light my way."

[00:58:48] Brian: It was fine.

[00:58:49] Phillip: There are some fun moments. I had a lot of eye rolls. There were... it's a... yeah. There were some really good ones, but the "you're not a visionary, you're a vendor"... and I do think that it really does capture the thing that has happened. Or has always existed, but I don't think has been examined well. And I think people in media understood it. Is how media... and this is where, like, the technocrats have, like, co-opted the word "taste."

[00:59:25] Brian: Yes.

[00:59:25] Phillip: Okay? But media really has been... media has defined culture for... and really does still define culture, but it's more multiplayer now. The media defines and captures and maybe reflects culture back to people, and it used to be gatekept by a lot of certain types of tastemakers and gatekeepers. What this film does really... we need to clip that, right? We need to give it to the clippers. Like, there were some parts that felt, like, really of this moment and really salient for right now, of, like, how the actual media environment works right now. Also, the incredible focus on analytics of certain editorial pieces.

[01:00:27] Brian: Yeah.

[01:00:27] Phillip: Right? And how the actual performance of editorial doesn't matter if some people... I felt this way hard. Oh, it felt... oh, it's so hard.

[01:00:37] Brian: Yeah. This is why Elizabeth was like, you know this. You know this better than anyone else in this theater.

[01:00:44] Phillip: Yeah. And that to me was like... there were some, like, real gripping moments for me. It's like writing a piece that matters so much to you because you know it's an important piece to write, and then you know it just doesn't perform. But in the long run... yes... in the long run, it pays off for you.

[01:01:07] Brian: Yes. It does. I...

[01:01:09] Phillip: ...right. Not just in the one piece, but the whole arc of it, right? It actually was worth it in the end, because the whole arc of it and the body of work proved valuable.

[01:01:23] Brian: Yep.

[01:01:24] Phillip: And that to me was like, oh, okay. So actually, the media was actually the visionary part of it. The vendors, they coexist. It's the actual crux of the film.

[01:01:36] Brian: It is.

[01:01:36] Phillip: You can't have the vision without the vendor, but the vision is actually the most important piece. It's the tip of the spear. And I think that, to some degree, it's the...

[01:01:48] Brian: ...embodies this.

[01:01:49] Phillip: It really does. It's really powerful, actually, in that way. I find that really, really cool. Very few things can capture all of those little moving parts.

[01:02:01] Brian: That's why I like this film in general. Commerce works really... basically... no. It did. It captured how commerce works really well, even in some ways actually better on this one, because the reality of media is, like, yeah, it dominated before, but, yeah, Miranda Priestley's out there scraping for ads and giving away and cutting deals with vendors to put their stuff in the pages.

[01:02:33] Phillip: Oh my gosh. Like...

[01:02:35] Brian: It just kill... I was like...

[01:02:36] Phillip: ...so hard.

[01:02:37] Brian: I need to watch this movie, like, 10 times as therapy. I'm sure that's how a lot of people feel about the first movie.

[01:02:46] Phillip: That's probably true. Although there's probably a, I don't know, happy balance there, is that the first movie was a little underfunded. This movie was a little overfunded, I think.

[01:02:58] Brian: Yeah. Totally. I mean, the whole Gaga bit was honestly kind of annoying.

[01:03:04] Phillip: Yeah. It's like, do we need the entire song? Yeah. Do we... the entire Gaga song?

[01:03:09] Brian: Like, to have it be kind of like this running... it was almost like Lady Gaga was like, I'll only be in this movie if you turn... going there, but that was fun. I...

[01:03:29] Phillip: ...don't blame The Mandalorian and Grogu. I... hey. You know what? It was fun for the kids, and it wasn't like I was, like, hating it the whole way through.

[01:03:39] Phillip: Any commerce whatsoever to be had in The Mandalorian and Grogu?

[01:03:43] Brian: No. No. Well, actually, yes. But... well, I'll leave it there.

[01:03:47] Phillip: Brian, I need to see your Letterboxd. Do you have a Letterboxd?

[01:03:51] Brian: No. I've actively avoided having a Letterboxd.

[01:03:53] Phillip: You need to have a Letterboxd.

[01:03:55] Brian: I really...

[01:03:56] Phillip: I need you to just write one. It's like what Marshall McLuhan would say about this movie.

[01:04:00] Brian: Someday, someday I will have a movie podcast, because I actually... I have so much stored up. You don't even know. That's so good. Yep. And I have watched a lot of movies.

[01:04:14] Phillip: Alright. So we got a lot coming. I'm 90% sure I'm gonna be at Cannes. So if anyone made it this far, if you're listening, look me up. We're likely activating with the PayPal Ads team. We have... Amazon's ads team is also pinging us to do some stuff with them. The ElevenLabs folks, who we recently partnered with, are also doing some stuff on the beach. So we've got a bunch of, you know, friends that we're doing some rad content build with. So if you're at Cannes Lions, give us a ring. Let us know. Memberships at futurecommerce.com. Let us know what you're up to. Also, we'll be in London from, I believe, I'm gonna say safely, I'm gonna say from around June 29 to the 31st, or to July 1. So if you're around, give us a ring. We'll try to put something together, but I'll be around for Klaviyo London. The K:London event is there again this year, and... I think it's all sold out at this point, but it's at the Battersea Power Station, I think, one more time. They have this really interesting... it's kind of like their K:BOSS event. It's, like, an annual that they put on. It's really great, and we're gonna do a little coverage of that show, and we're... it's going on for the summer, we'll be there, and we've got a few other announcements and some other things we're cooking up. So stay tuned. If you wanna follow us everywhere, futurecommerce.com/events. Any other... anything else to cover, Brian?

[01:06:14] Brian: No. We got through a lot today. Alright. That was great.

[01:06:18] Phillip: Great? Alright. Accidental review of "Deborah Woolf's product" too. When you read the full of the encyclical, I guess that'll be the next...

[01:06:33] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta finish it. Looking forward to chatting.

[01:06:37] Phillip: That's it. Until next time.

[01:06:40] Brian: See you.