Everything Must Merge

[00:00:00] Phillip: Hey, everybody. Philip Jackson here. I just wanna pop in for a second and let you know that the episode you're about to hear was recorded right before the Google IO 2025 keynote, so it's a little bit out of date. What you're about to hear is a very brief check-in ahead of our mid-year episode where we're going to formally check in on our 2025 predictions. Brian, during this episode, does lament that he chose Google as his tech winner of the year back in January. And, of course, he usually goes with Microsoft, which is the safest bet for him. He chose Google this year, and you're gonna hear a little bit of sour grapes from him. I think most people would have said that Google was down and out, up until the Google IO keynote. Of course, nobody would say that now. Over a hundred product updates and features were announced, including, but not limited to, Google XR, which is an incredible partnership for multimodal AI glasses in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. There's, of course, Project Astra, which looks incredible. There are so many demos that I think are making the rounds, including this mountain bike demo of Gemini working with somebody to help them fix their mountain bike. I saw a lot of discourse on X and on Threads about people in the Apple ecosystem saying, if this is real and it works the way that it's said to, they would leave Apple in a heartbeat, which I think is what Android has needed for a long time is that new cutting edge. So, Pixel looks like it's really gonna come out on top. There are so many new shopping features, including what people are calling a Doji Killer, which is a try-on app. Of course, there are more updates to Gemini 2.5. There's Gemini Ultra, which is a new subscription app, that gives you credits for VO3, which is the new generative video. I think that there's a lot of excitement around generative video and generative audio. So, yes, we are aware of all of the announcements, and a lot of that will be coming in analysis on Friday when you get our newsletter. If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, it's called The Senses. You can get it right now at futurecommerce.com. Go subscribe. And without any further ado, yeah, listen to Brian. Brian is usually right. He's... I think he's a futurist. I think he's the real deal. But let's listen to him whine for a little bit. Let's get into the episode.

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[00:00:01] Phillip: These acquisitions are Skechering me out, Brian.

[00:01:30] Brian: Well, it is a little uncomfortable. I'm not gonna lie.

[00:01:37] Phillip: They're aging like Chobani milk.

[00:01:40] Brian: Oh.

[00:01:41] Phillip: Oh, that's not very good. There's a lot of acquisitions that are happening. In fact, too many to count, and we're gonna cover them here today.

[00:01:49] Brian: Too many to count. It's crazy.

[00:01:50] Phillip: Too many to count.

[00:01:51] Brian: Cox Communications.

[00:01:55] Phillip: Got Dick's acquiring Foot Locker. And the one that I just can't get over, which I'm sure we'll unpack here later today, is a hand sanitizer company. Touchland goes for $880,000,000. 700,000,000 of that is cash, which I think is just bananas. So Church & Dwight, I think making out not like Church and State. They're making out like bandits in a big way. So we're going to cover all this today on the pod. Also, we're gonna talk about how Netflix is weaponizing your attention yet again by weaponizing your bathroom breaks. And now they're gonna turn that Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones into a thing that you'll wish was just a mistake. I know they're going to turn that into an ad unit. So that is the new wild future that we all have for you. And hey, that's just the future now. Everything is an ad unit. And that's what we have for you on Future Commerce this week. But before we get there, we have to invite you to the VISIONS summit. We're just a couple weeks away. We're gonna invite you and 200 of our closest friends, the smartest people in the world, speaking to the smartest people in the world on our stage at the MoMA, that's Museum of Modern Art on the greatest stage in New York City. It's our fourth year, I think. Third official year back or fourth VISIONS event, and it's our greatest ideas in the whole world. Right, Brian?

[00:03:34] Brian: Oh, yeah. It's the best.

[00:03:36] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:03:36] Brian: It's the greatest. It can't get any better. {laughter}

[00:03:39] Phillip: And we have incredible minds. People like Dami Lee, who is a renowned architect and incredible thinker who's going to come and tell us about how world building and architecture helped create brighter futures for people and how they think about how optimistic AI might create new challenges for us in humanity. And so Dami is gonna share with us a little bit. Andrew Huang, a renowned musician and artist and really prolific world builder on YouTube as well is going to bring an incredible keynote for us and many, many other thinkers like Katherine Dee. And also Justin Breton, the Head of Brand Innovation over at Walmart, talking about how their spatial innovations and all of their new brand innovations like on Roblox and Minecraft and, of course, their new Walmart Discovered platform. And now that storytelling content and commerce in partnership with spatial, that's all gonna take place on our stage, and it's one day only. It's coming up at the MoMA. Join us. It's on June 10, and you can get an early bird discount down in the description below. Go to futurecommerce.com/visions and check it out and join us June 10 at the MoMA Museum of Modern Art for VISIONS Summit, New York City. Alright.

[00:05:00] Brian: Phillip, you're about to lose your mind. You actually just called something into being or connected into the deeper consciousness here. You ready for this?

[00:05:11] Phillip: {whistling}

[00:05:11] Brian: No. You did. You did. You ready?

[00:05:14] Phillip: Let's do it.

[00:05:15] Brian: Skechers was also acquired this month.

[00:05:18] Phillip: Like, for $9,000,000,000?

[00:05:20] Brian: Yes. Oh, you forgot about it. So you did know about it.

[00:05:23] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah. And that's why it was Skechering me out.

[00:05:26] Brian: Okay. I thought you were making a reference to Foot Locker. Okay.

[00:05:31] Phillip: {laughter} Yeah. It was a take private. It was a $9,420,000,000 acquisition deal from 3G Capital. And I think when you look at all of that contraction, we're gonna do an official middle of the year check-in for our 2025 predictions. Remember back in January?

[00:05:50] Brian: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Phillip: But I'm gonna say...

[00:05:52] Brian: Mine are not trending that well this year. Usually...

[00:05:55] Phillip: My prediction well, your Costco prediction is always correct. Directionally correct.

[00:06:00] Brian: Okay. But usually, I'm like 90% accurate on my predictions. This year, I would say it's not so...

[00:06:09] Phillip: Let's say you're a late bloomer.

[00:06:12] Brian: It could be. It could be, actually. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. I usually pick Microsoft as my tech winner, and I picked Google this year, which was a pretty bad choice. Although, interestingly enough...

[00:06:25] Phillip: I don't know if that's true.

[00:06:25] Brian: I don't know if that's true either because there was something crazy. Google had, like, a random additional $800,000,000 in profit in Q1. They've made some really smart investments, and I think maybe the smartest of them all is Waymo, and we just don't know it yet.

[00:06:42] Phillip: Yeah. We're gonna come back to the predictions thing, but I don't know if you caught it, but All In Podcast recently had Sundar on, who was the CEO of Google and then Alphabet,  had Sundar Pichai on the podcast. They don't let the whole crew interview people like him. I don't know if you've noticed this recently. They only let Dave Friedberg, the normal one. They only let David Friedberg interview people like Sundar.

[00:07:17] Brian: He's media safe. He's media safe.

[00:07:19] Phillip: He is very media safe because he's a normal person unlike the rest of them. But he sat down with Sundar for over an hour and they talked about how Google, for some reason, looks like they're wrong until they're right over and over and over and over again. It happened with AI and their investment in DeepMind. And that was like a, what, ten, eleven year investment until all of a sudden the transformer paper came out in, I think, 2016, 2017. And now look at all the AI explosion that's happened in the world since. Waymo, now hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that's coming out of that division. That's been a ten plus year investment.

[00:08:05] Brian: It's probably still losing money, but it's not going to.

[00:08:08] Phillip: Yeah. I don't think it's going to.

[00:08:10] Brian: It's very clearly not going to lose money. And what's crazy is everyone else kinda gave up.

[00:08:16] Phillip: For sure.

[00:08:17] Brian: Waymo and then Tesla didn't give up, and there's a couple of others out there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Waymo won.

[00:08:27] Phillip: Yeah. And when you look at the future of commerce as it pertains to, like, mobility, I think that five years from now, the default, the de facto default will be automated delivery happening on automated platforms like Waymo for most things. Five years is a long time. And in five years, I can see a transportation company like Waymo being de facto for many things. It's like it will displace DoorDash. It will displace human transport like, you know, the Ubers of the world, for sure. That's where they began. But it could do a lot. It could be USPS. It could be UPS. It could it could do a tremendous... Actually, I sat down last night, i interviewed, the CEO of City Furniture, which is the number 10 furniture retailer... I'm sorry. Number 18 furniture retailer in United States, and I think the number one furniture retailer in the state of Florida for outside of, like, IKEA, big global brands. They're huge here and a big employer here in the state of Florida. Twenty five hundred employees here locally in South Florida. And we are doing the CEO and founder series here at this nonprofit that I'm a part of and really focused on entrepreneurship, and they do a lot of investment in nonprofits. So I was speaking with Andrew Koenig, and we were talking about their green investments and all of their sustainability investments over the last ten years at City Furniture. And he's talking about how their investments ten years ago are starting to pay off now. Five years ago, he bought five Tesla semis. Still hasn't taken delivery of them. But he's also invested in LEED certified buildings. He's invested in liquid natural gas. He's invested in carbon free and carbon offsets, 70%, methane based delivery fleets. And he's invested in a deal with Florida Power and Light, FPL, for a 30% power generation in a solar farm. All of this has contributed to them actually generating money. They are generating money from energy. And so as like, it makes good business sense to be in the sustainability business. And, you know, his fuel costs, which for anyone else would be extraordinarily volatile. His fuel costs are not volatile. It's like a dollar a gallon where if you were paying for diesel with a delivery fleet like he would have would be like, what, three fifty a gallon or $3.70 a gallon, and it would be extremely volatile. His is pegged to a dollar a gallon. He says when the Tesla delivery fleet comes, it's gonna change everything, especially when it pertains to automated delivery and automated mobility. So everybody's gonna be thinking like that pretty soon. It's not just the forward thinkers.

[00:11:42] Brian: Yeah.

[00:11:42] Phillip: I think everybody's gonna be thinking about that pretty soon. He has one person on his staff, and this is a small company in comparison to other companies around the world. This is one person who's a forward thinker and has one person in his company thinking about how they are trying to future proof their business. This company, City Furniture, they're partnered with Toyota as a lean certified, like Toyota certified lean certified business. And I think that sort of type of thinking and finding, like, more efficiencies in business is the kind of thing that's coming to every business pretty soon. Tariffs notwithstanding, I think that automation is the way of the future.

[00:12:26] Brian: Yeah. And Toyota's been the leader in that in many ways. And it's interesting that, you know, Toyota certified is the standard. I kinda love that. It's like we've talked about before. In many ways, brands often lead the way in terms of setting standards and pointing people to good practices and how to do business right. It oftentimes comes from not regulation or even classic institutions, but from other brands, which is super interesting.

[00:13:05] Phillip: Yeah. Totally. And that's, I think, when it comes back to you said Tesla, Waymo, you look at Google. Google might be a directionally really good bet. Now they did take, like, I think, 7% hit last week stock wise because of the announcement that I think...

[00:13:29] Brian: Apple announcement.

[00:13:29] Phillip: The Apple announcement that their search is probably going to be pulled out default in some regions, if not now, then sometime soon. But I think Google is also piloting an AI first default search. So we might see the Google 1 box start to go away.

[00:13:51] Brian: That's probably a mistake by Apple in many ways. And I know that that deal has been heavily criticized and scrutinized and split...

[00:14:00] Phillip: It's a lot of revenue for Google.

[00:14:01] Brian: Causing Google to... No. Well, it puts a lot of revenue out for Google too. They're paying Apple, like, $20,000,000,000 to be there annually or something like that. You know? So it would be a big deal to lose. I think it's also a huge mistake potentially for Apple because you talk to anyone that's using Apple and that's not us, so maybe we shouldn't be talking about this...

[00:14:26] Phillip: Yeah. Maybe we should yeah. We don't use Apple.

[00:14:28] Brian: Yeah. Apple's intelligence is not where it needs to be.

[00:14:33] Phillip: No. Yeah. And that's for sure. {laughter}

[00:14:38] Brian: You know what I also think is super interesting and this is also derivative of All In, but they're talking about like overall being online is increasing. Overall number of queries is just increasing as a general bucket. It's not that people are... It's not fighting for a fixed amount of queries. That bucket is going up. And so would you rather have 80% of a larger bucket or 95% of the same bucket?

[00:15:09] Phillip: This is like that would you rather have a penny a day doubled or would you rather have a million dollars now? {laughter}

[00:15:15] Brian: Right. What I think is really interesting, though, is just there aren't very many options in general right now for doing anything in the world. There's Pixel devices and Android devices, which Google has got their fingers in and that's what they're being under scrutiny for.

[00:15:34] Phillip: Sure.

[00:15:35] Brian: There's Apple devices. And then there's this whole other world of business devices that are running Microsoft products. Azure ecosystem. The Azure ecosystem...

[00:15:49] Phillip: That's true. Still blows my mind.

[00:15:50] Brian: Giant.

[00:15:52] Phillip: It's huge.

[00:15:52] Brian: It's huge. Yeah.

[00:15:54] Phillip: Yeah. That's why you typically bet on Microsoft as being your tech choice. You chose Google this year.

[00:16:06] Brian: That's right. Yeah. I should have bet on them again.

[00:16:09] Phillip: But I do see that just coming back to like we'll do an official mid year check-in probably in July. We'll do a mid year check-in on predictions. But all of this M&A does make me feel very good about my age of agglomeration. The one thing that hasn't really come true just yet that maybe the Skechers piece plays into, but the thing that I was hoping to see more of hasn't happened just yet is more of the divestiture

[00:16:41] Brian: Divisional sell offs. Actually, there was one. You don't hear about these as often. They're not as visible.

[00:16:47] Phillip: Right.

[00:16:48] Brian: But I saw something. It was like... Where'd it go? It's like Boeing just sold off a division. Yeah. A General Motors stake in the Michigan battery plant. You know how much that went for? $2,000,000,000.

[00:17:04] Phillip: That's a lot.

[00:17:06] Brian: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:10] Phillip: There are there are signals. Right? And we're seeing other... I also... Yeah.

[00:17:16] Brian: Intel lost 51% of it's Altera stake to Silver Lake. These are the kinds of things that are happening right now that no one's really paying attention to because it's not like full company acquisitions. Erste just bought Santander's Polish unit for $7,700,000,000. {laughter}

[00:17:41] Phillip: {laughter} So, yeah, suffice it to say, you know, there's a sort of like a global reordering. Something that has happened even since the pandemic that wasn't like on my radar. But do you remember the company United Technologies?

[00:17:57] Brian: Of course.

[00:17:58] Phillip: UTC.

[00:17:59] Brian: Yeah.

[00:17:59] Phillip: Right. So UTC, United Technologies was up until 2020 was like a house of brands that, you know, had like Otis, which was the elevator company and did escalators and stuff like that. It had at the time, I believe it had Carrier or a division of Carrier, which air conditioning and some others within it. In fact, UTC had an innovation center here in Florida that I had visited on a number of occasions and done some business with in one of their divisions in a prior era back when we worked together at Somethingdigital back back in our old agency days. That ceased to exist. The global reordering, it's like now that's part of Raytheon and like Pratt & Whitney, which is like aerospace and defense and some other stuff like these things have been like split up and reorged multiple times. And that's stuff that you just, I don't know, unless you're really tapped in and paying attention to certain things. Some of these things are consumers. Some of these things are private and defense, and some of these things are industrials. And there's a lot of these things that happen a lot in the commerce space, especially in consumer commerce. So many people are focused really on discretionary, consumer discretionary and in particular, goods that go on marketplaces like Amazon. But when you really zoom out and how much of the economy really depends on a lot of the structures of businesses and corporations that need to reorganize, especially under regulatory environments that are shifting right now, that's where our predictions were really shifting toward.

[00:21:04] Brian: Want to hear something funny.

[00:21:06] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:21:06] Brian: So now that I'm just in the data, there's a company called Global Eggs. Did you know that?

[00:21:14] Phillip: No. This is gonna be a great short.

[00:21:16] Brian: Yeah. And they just acquired a company called Hillandale Farms for $1,100,000,000, and now I know where all of that extra egg money went. {laughter}

[00:21:25] Phillip: Global eggs. Hillandale Farms, oh I know Egglands Best.

[00:21:30] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

[00:21:33] Phillip: Wow. Is that why eggs are so expensive now?

[00:21:35] Brian: No. No. No. They took all their profits and they acquired Hillandale Farms. They're like, "Oh, wow. We've got money now."

[00:21:43] Phillip: They took all the money they made from eggs...

[00:21:45] Brian: They have more money than they've ever known what to do with.

[00:21:49] Phillip: Have eggs gotten cheaper yet? Whatever happened to that?

[00:21:52] Brian: Oh, definitely. You can buy two dozen eggs at Costco for $8 now. That's extremely reasonable.

[00:21:59] Phillip: Yeah?

[00:22:01] Brian: Yeah. And people are still kinda desperate to get their hands on them. And I'll say I think the price of farm fresh eggs went up as a result of all this, and it's probably not gonna go down by much.

[00:22:11] Phillip: Prices usually don't come down as much as they went up. Right?

[00:22:15] Brian: Well, yeah. Exactly. And it used to be around my neighborhoods, my neck of the woods, and I'm out in the kind of the middle of the country. You could get a dozen farm fresh eggs for like $4 to $6 direct from the little chicken farm, your neighbor's backyard chicken farm. And then people just got to the point where they stopped selling them. It wasn't even worth it to them anymore. They were like, "I don't want to sell my eggs." And so the price of eggs was like at $8 to $10 to $12 a dozen. And I have a feeling no one's going back to that $4 mark. It's gonna be more like $6 to $8, maybe even $10.

[00:23:08] Phillip: Wild.

[00:23:09] Brian: And I say this because I'm a total price nerd. Ever since I was a kid, I was obsessed with pricing. I would literally follow grocery ads and tell my mom where to go shop because...

[00:23:24] Brian: Wow.

[00:23:24] Phillip: Yes. And to this day, in many ways, I still have a very strong internal sense of what things cost. I don't know. I'm a nerd.

[00:23:36] Phillip: Meanwhile, I'm like Lucille Bluth, and I'm like, "How much could a banana cost?" {laughter} Go watch...

[00:23:44] Brian: A star war. Yeah. I have a Costco.

[00:23:49] Phillip: I don't have a very keen sense of what a gallon of milk should cost these days, mostly because I don't consume a lot of those types of things. I don't think I consume staples like that.

[00:24:03] Brian: You're not drinking milk?

[00:24:04] Phillip: I don't drink milk. I used to eat a lot of cereal. I used to eat a bowl of cereal almost every day.

[00:24:10] Brian: Ugh. So good. That's the problem with cereal. It tastes so good.

[00:24:14] Phillip: It's not good for you.

[00:24:15] Brian: It's not good for you.

[00:24:16] Phillip: It's very not good for you.

[00:24:17] Brian: It's very bad for you.

[00:24:18] Phillip: It's very bad for you.

[00:24:19] Brian: We go through a lot of milk in my household, but then, I mean, I have four boys, almost four teenagers.

[00:24:26] Phillip: Oh my word. Speaking of acquisitions

[00:24:31] Brian: Yes.

[00:24:32] Phillip: There was a... You know Ghost Nutrition was acquired earlier this year by Keurig Dr Pepper.

[00:24:39] Brian: Right.

[00:24:42] Phillip: Top of mind for me. So the acquisition seemed to have been... It looks like it sort of wrapped up. Part of that acquisition is Keurig Dr Pepper is actually as a holdco competes with other brand licensing that Ghost Nutrition held. So it held licenses with companies like Mondelez, which poses a real challenge because I think one of the real benefits that you and I had talked about is, like, what made Ghost popular in the beginning as a nutrition brand before it became an energy drink brand was that it created Ghost as its own lifestyle brand was created on the back of its licensing. Right?

[00:25:27] Brian: It was. Yeah. It was a partner centric brain. The whole goal was to license it as far as it possibly could, far and wide. And we talked about how it got licensed on to other things and then other things started licensing on top of it. There was a flippening.

[00:25:50] Phillip: Yeah. The flippening. We called it the flippening. Right? So this was, this is part of the how it ties back into cereal. So there's an announcement that they will be sunsetting, or what they called soft landing. There's a soft landing over twelve months. Over the next twelve months, they're not going to produce any more of these Mondelez based licenses. So that means no more Ghost supplements bearing official logos or branding of things like Oreo, Nutter Butter, Chips Ahoy, or any of the candies like Sour Patch Kids or Swedish Fish.

[00:26:31] Brian: That's what makes Ghost so popular. They're killing the brand basically.

[00:26:39] Phillip: But, you know, I mean, the Oreo and the Nutter Butter proteins are the only ones... I don't know. Those seem to I think they're probably the most popular. That being said, you know, Keurig Dr Pepper does have probably a lot of compliments. So they've got, like, Swiss Miss, Krispy Kreme, Hawaiian Punch, Sunkist.

[00:27:04] Brian: {laughter} Oh wow.

[00:27:05] Phillip: I don't know. So I feel like there's you know, we'll probably see a lot of those, like, lateral moves. But if you want your Ghost nutrition stuff, you better stock up, which I know a lot of people do stock up on things like that when they see it's like going out of stock. The flippening did happen, though. Ghost is in the cereal aisle, and you don't see the Ghost cereal. It is a really interesting thing because it is a product I wanna say of General Mills. You don't see a General Mills logo on the front of it, but it is a General Mills product. And I bought this to try it out.

[00:27:47] Brian: Speaking of cereal.

[00:27:48] Phillip: And it's pretty good. It's not bad. It has marshmallows in it, which defeats the purpose of it being healthy, if you ask me.

[00:27:57] Brian: Yeah. Let's add all these supplements and lots of sugar. That's sort of the Ghost promise.

[00:28:06] Phillip: But that's I guess that's all functional. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. Ghost has kind of always sort of been like, "Healthy?" But anyway. That's out check in today on the acquisition/conglomeration CPG space.

[00:28:12] Brian: Wait, we didn't talk about Dick's and Foot Locker. We never got there really.

[00:28:12] Phillip: Oh that is a big deal. This is a really big deal. Have you ever gone to Dick's once to buy shoes?

[00:28:42] Brian: I think I have purchased shoes from Dick's, but it was probably twelve years ago. It was a long time ago. I back when I was in Missouri.

[00:28:49] Phillip: In Missoura?

[00:28:50] Brian: No. That was probably an Academy, not a Dick's. I bet you it was an Academy.

[00:28:55] Phillip: Got it. So Dick's Sporting Goods does a lot of volume in shoes, not just in sporting goods shoes, which you would assume. Right? So because sporting goods, you would assume that football shoes or soccer shoes, that sort of thing.

[00:29:12] Brian: Yeah, cleats...

[00:29:12] Phillip: Right. You would assume that that's, any sort of division of sports would be well aligned. But they actually have done a ton of fashion shoes over the last five years, especially since the pandemic. So there was a number of because of the size of a retailer that they are they have footprint, pun intended. Dick's Sporting Goods became a location where they were a retailer where a lot of drops would happen. And, you know, Foot Locker is also one of those types of brands where there would be a lot of shoe drops. Of course, the sneaker hype has subsided over the last few years. And so if you look at, according to ChatGPT, and this is just ChatGPT. So it's an '03 search. Take it for what it's worth. Net sales of footwear, and this is again, take it for what it's worth. The share of total company revenue that footwear comprises of the net sales of Dick's Sporting Goods is about 28%. So Dick's Sporting Goods 2025, which fiscal year ended in February 1. So 2025 fiscal was 4,000,000,000 in net sales, and the total company revenue share of footwear was around 28%.

[00:30:48] Brian: That's insane.

[00:30:50] Phillip: That's pretty bananas. And that's according to ChatGPT and its search of SEC filings. And so when you look at things like brand concentration too, Nike is the top vendor across the chain. In fact, footwear, according to SEC filings as well, which means this is probably sourced from earnings calls, footwear grows faster than other hardlines and other apparel, which means that this directionally is a big commitment to the category.

[00:31:26] Brian: So do you think that that is due to rising prices, like, more margin out of it, or do you think that's due to people just owning more shoes?

[00:31:39] Phillip: It's an interesting question. Well, I think that footwear, not just as a fashion category or as, like, hype sneakers as a category, which I think the wind is definitely out of those sails.

[00:31:50] Phillip: Yeah. But I think, generally, people are buying more shoes now than they were before, and they're investing in higher end shoes than they were before. Footwear is, according to this report, is Dick's single fastest growing merchandise bucket, and it outpaces the top line growth of the company overall. So it's growing faster as a category than Dick's three and a half percent top line growth. So investing in a vertical retailer like Foot Locker makes sense. It also gives them more doors. But you could probably expect that if they're doubling their doors by buying another retailer, they're probably gonna contract at the same time. So you could probably expect that Foot Locker closes doors.

[00:34:33] Brian: Yeah. That's what I was thinking. I heard, you know, "Oh, Nike is gonna be the winner here and Nike is the biggest part of this."

[00:34:39] Phillip: Yeah. For sure.

[00:34:40] Brian: But actually, this might be bad for them.

[00:34:45] Phillip: For who?

[00:34:47] Brian: For Nike.

[00:34:48] Phillip: For Nike.

[00:34:48] Brian: Yeah.

[00:34:49] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:34:49] Brian: Because usually there is contraction in a merger. The footprint got insane here. The the physical footprint, it's huge between the two of them now. Probably almost unnecessarily huge. And I bet you there are Foot Lockers next to Dick's in more than one spot. You think that they're gonna wanna cannibalize? I think that there's gonna be contraction.

[00:35:18] Phillip: Such a good question. I don't have the Foot Locker numbers, but I know Foot Locker has a really big digital investment, especially around, you know, post COVID when you had all of this, like, hype sneaker culture that was really invested in things like sneaker drops. Again, according to an '03 search on ChatGPT, which sourced a number of things from SGB media online, Q4 capital... There's a lot of things that Dick's has been talking about that are really directionally important. For instance, more than 100 stores were refitted with larger specialist shoe areas through the years 2023, which means that Dick's has better allocations from brands like ON and HOKA and Adidas and Nike. So it's not just like Nike when you're thinking about new rising brands.

[00:36:20] Brian: Yeah.

[00:36:21] Phillip: And then by the way, Nike, with the Gen Z crowd and Gen Alpha, Nike's dominance is waning.

[00:36:30] Brian: Lost of lot of credibility.

[00:36:31] Phillip: And Samba and other shoes that, like, Adidas is on the rise.

[00:36:37] Brian: Yep.

[00:36:38] Phillip: And then when you're talking about other generational affinities, like, ON and HOKA are very dominant. Right?

[00:36:46] Brian: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's gonna continue. And New Balance is out there too, constantly just sitting there doing cool collabs and but I do wonder... Okay. This is gonna sound like a weird question, but what's the effect of Ozempic on footwear?

[00:37:05] Phillip: This is a huge this is a phenomenal question.

[00:37:07] Brian: Because I think that the types of shoes that people wanna wear when they lose weight change.

[00:37:15] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:37:15] Brian: Also, do you wear three year shoes as fast if you're not as heavy? These are important questions. And so it's interesting. I was at, you know, a trade show not long ago as I'm prone to be. And like I was sitting there chatting with a friend and he was like, "Look, we're more casual than we've ever been. Look around, sneaker, sneaker, sneaker, sneaker. Oh, wait, there's a pair of dress shoes. Only one." Oh, then we looked down the line. "Oh, there's more than one actually." And the question is now, we've gone so casual. Are we now back to a point where I wouldn't say formal shoes or even classic brown derbies, in fact, which were skewered recently in GQ, I think it was, which I think is kinda funny because I actually think the reason they did that is because they might be coming back. They might be on the rise again. And it's gonna be, like you said, sort of like that mid range, the Samba, the Puma, the Clarks, the sort of like in between shoe that's not extremely formal or classic business wear that's still cool, that's doing good collabs. And like you said, it's a higher price point. People are spending more on their shoes, but it's not an unreasonable price point like we saw with some of the sneaker hype. So it's like $150 to $250 people aren't batting an eye at anymore. And that's crazy. I think that's actually a reset coming out of the hype sneaker era.

[00:39:06] Phillip: I think there's a reset, but I think that the reset is oh, I mean, $150/$200... Yeah, $150/$200 is definitely a skew toward... Is a very high end shoe. Don't get me wrong.

[00:39:24] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:39:24] Phillip: But I think that a Jordan, like a Jordan basketball shoe has always been in the high end of that range. There were sneaker drops that were in the $250/$300 range, which I think was pushing the higher end of that range, which is where I think a lot of high end, high heels for women started.

[00:39:48] Brian: Right. Correct.

[00:39:49] Phillip: So you're also in this other place where there's strata where you were taking certain categories of customers who never bought footwear like that ever and moved them into a new... You're right. You flex them into a category spend where other people have always been.

[00:40:11] Brian: Right. That's right. Yep.

[00:40:13] Phillip: So but you're doing it at a retailer that they weren't spending money at before.

[00:40:18] Brian: That's correct. But now with Ozempic, I can't help but think that heels are gonna be on the rise.

[00:40:27] Phillip: I see. Okay. Now I see the correlation. I understand what you're saying.

[00:40:30] Brian: Yeah. You're gonna wear shoes that weren't necessarily comfortable to you before, but now they don't bother you as much. And that's true for men as well. Men that were heavier wanting more cushioning, especially if they're...

[00:40:43] Phillip: It's just true.

[00:40:44] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. And so now it's like, "Well, maybe I don't need ON or HOKA. Maybe I don't need my Børns anymore. I can move into a like a Clark or a pair of dress shoes, Italian leather dress shoes." Venetian loafers. The Venetian loafer, that's been kicking it lately. I think that's sort of what... I think that's actually partially due to the slimming of the American waistline.

[00:41:21] Phillip: I would, if not Ozempic, I would just agree purely based on just how we go through wild swings culturally.

[00:41:35] Brian: Yeah.

[00:41:35] Phillip: We just do the opposite.

[00:41:38] Brian: Right. We just do the opposite.

[00:41:40] Phillip: We just do the opposite. We go through wild swings of not liking what's in our wardrobe. I'm starting to see that in myself. I have a lot sneakers.

[00:41:52] Brian: Yeah. You're transforming. You're transforming.

[00:41:54] Phillip: I've got a lot of sneakers,

[00:41:57] Brian: I feel your whole wardrobe changing.

[00:41:58] Phillip: I have, like, a lot of sneakers, and now I'm like, I'm kinda I had a capsule wardrobe for eight years where it was mostly like a black T shirt and it was basics. Right?

[00:42:13] Brian: Mhmm.

[00:42:13] Phillip: You know, like a black T shirt or like a basic T shirt and a jogger pant or jeans. And you could accessorize and may dress that up with a shoe. So the shoe was the...

[00:42:28] Brian: Right.

[00:42:29] Phillip: The whole outfit, basically. And I spent money on shoes because I spent no money on anything else. And that feels now anachronistic. That feels like it's from a prior time. So now I'm kind of I'm playing with other things. Doji. Doji is now out of beta. And, you know, Doji is this virtual try on app. It's available on the App Store now. You do still need an invite, but it is available on commercially like it's available on the app store. I've had an incredible experience with this, notwithstanding some of the... I've had some bad experiences with it. I wrote about it on Future Commerce.

[00:43:20] Brian: You haven't had that problem in a while.

[00:43:22] Phillip: No, I have. I have actually.

[00:43:23] Brian: Oh you have?

[00:43:25] Phillip: Not since upgrading to the new app, but the old app in Alpha, one in every 20 generations, which is a lot if you ask me...

[00:43:38] Brian: That's a lot.

[00:43:39] Phillip: ...would accidentally misprofile me racially as a black man. For those who aren't familiar, I wrote about this on Future Commerce, The Senses, on one of my couple reviews of this app. Otherwise, it's a phenomenal app. It does an uncanny valley digital twin likeness of you. It scans your body, takes pictures. You take pictures of yourself. It does an incredible job of really picturing clothing on you. So they've just raised fresh $14,000,000 in their seed round. And I think Alexis Ohanian and folks and some others are back, coming back again to come alongside them. I think apps like this are also... It's definitely changed how I'm thinking about fashion, and it's pushing me and making me think a little bit differently about how I dress myself. I have to... It's AI based, obviously. I have to believe that this will also be the kind of assistive technology that will keep pushing people to making new types of purchase decisions.

[00:44:55] Brian: Body as platform.

[00:44:57] Phillip: You've been talking about this for nine years.

[00:45:00] Brian: Yes. And I think this is just gonna get more pronounced, and the interesting thing is I actually don't think asics is going away, and I don't that that HOKAs are going away either.

[00:45:16] Phillip: No. On the YouTube. On the YouTube. I'll stand up.

[00:45:19] Brian: Yeah. You're wearing HOKA's right now. Oh, asics. asics.

[00:45:22] Phillip: I'm wearing tennis shoes. I'm wearing a black T shirt and jeans.

[00:45:29] Brian: I just bought HOKA's, actually.

[00:45:34] Phillip: There you go. You did.

[00:45:35] Brian: I did. I'm getting back to running. I'm picking it up. I'm saying this publicly so that I actually do it. But, no, that's why you buy shoes.

[00:45:44] Phillip: You're going back to running. Brian.

[00:45:47] Brian: I know.

[00:45:48] Phillip: Let's do it.

[00:45:49] Brian: I'm going to be doing some trail running as I bought some sneakers.

[00:45:52] Phillip: Can I do myself too? I signed up for a 50K?

[00:45:57] Brian: Woah. Dude. That's great. I'm not doing a 50K for a while. {laughter} I will be at some point doing maybe something, something in that range. Maybe not 50K.

[00:46:09] Phillip: Nice.

[00:46:09] Brian: I wanna get back up to halves. If I can get to a half, I'll be happy.

[00:46:13] Phillip: That's good. No. No. No. And I didn't mean to, like, I didn't mean to outdo you there.

[00:46:20] Brian: No. No. No. You're running again.

[00:46:22] Phillip: I'm excited.

[00:46:23] Brian: You haven't done a race in a while.

[00:46:25] Phillip: Haven't done a race in a while. I've been, like, off and on running for the past year.

[00:46:29] Brian: ON running. {laughter} The thing is we're post... The point I was trying to make with that is that we're post a style being in style.

[00:46:42] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:46:43] Brian: It's like dress yourself well. It's like this is my thing. You know, wine has been through series of cycles where certain styles of wine have, picked up favorability and therefore prices. But my whole thing with wine has always been just find the really good wine in a specific region or in a category or a varietal or whatever. And I think people are starting to do that with anything as long as it's composed from a specific angle or it's quality or whatever. That's sort of how people are thinking about style. And also and finally, and finally and maybe people are starting to rethink about context and clothes. I think this is the thing that's been missing from fashion forever is context got lost. Everyone was just doing the thing as opposed to thinking about the context in which the thing happened. And I think content was king, not context, but I actually think for fashion, context is taking dominance again. It used to be the way that everyone thought about fashion. You wore the thing that was appropriate to the situation or the thing that would work in that situation. And so I think that's our next move in fashion is context being the ultimate indicator of of how you dress, and you could work within the confines and sort of the constraints of that moment and push up against them. I'm not saying that people won't break those, but that will be part of the fun.

[00:48:24] Phillip: You know, Parkinson's law, which is work expands to fill the time available.

[00:48:29] Brian: Yeah.

[00:48:30] Phillip: The same exists for everything else. Your wardrobe expands to fill the space available in your closet.

[00:48:40] Brian: And beyond.

[00:48:42] Phillip: And beyond. {laughter} Storage units and all the rest. I think other things exist as well, like where there's... This is kind of off topic, but it's weirdly adjacent in my brain. We make purchase decisions based on things that we perceive as pressing needs. And I think that a pressing need can be, well, it could be like an upcoming event. It could be that I sense a change or a shift coming in the way that I want to carry myself in the world. It could be that I'm losing a lot of weight because of Ozempic, right, or something like that. I want to get healthy. People are always wanting to work on themselves. And I think people do buy things aspirationally. Like, "I'm going to buy that dress so I can fit into that." Or I bought jeans definitely because I'm like, "Oh, they're on sale, and I'll definitely work out to fit into those," which didn't always happen. So people have, this is definitely a thing that is a like one mode of buying. This is one way of purchasing. And I think especially in the West, especially in in The US, if we didn't have the space, we probably couldn't afford or wouldn't afford ourselves the luxury to do it.

[00:50:21] Brian: Yeah. Potentially. That's one thing America does have is space. That's always...

[00:50:26] Phillip: Yeah. Unfortunately.

[00:50:28] Brian: Well, not exactly. It's actually one of our greatest strengths as a country, something that people don't realize. I wrote about this back when Marc Andreessen posted his Time to Build thing. I did a whole addendum to it.

[00:50:39] Phillip: Sure.

[00:50:39] Brian: I think that one thing that he missed, you know, shining cities and flying cars is, like, one of our greatest assets as a country is our space, actually. And people are... There's actually less density than people realize often. And so there's lots of talent and opportunities that come with having as much space as we do, and that's a net add. It's just people forget how to use it wisely and know what to do with it. So they just fill it up with random crap instead of thinking about it strategically.

[00:51:21] Phillip: Oh, it just reminds me, well, I mean, fill it up with random crap. We had a salon in LA last week, and the funniest thing I've ever heard was someone's answer to an icebreaker question.

[00:51:37] Brian: Oh my gosh. This is great. Tell the story. Tell the story.

[00:51:40] Phillip: So you ask this question sometimes, which has had the greatest answers I've ever heard.

[00:51:45] Brian: It's a pretty fun one. It's been good.

[00:51:49] Phillip: Tee it up. Tee it up. What do say?

[00:51:50] Brian: So here's my question. Oh, man. I'm giving away some serious...

[00:51:54] Phillip: Nobody cares. We're at forty seven minutes into the podcast.

[00:51:57] Brian: I know. So the question is, tell us about an experience that no one else at this table has. Something you've done, something that's happened to you, something that you've been a part of... It can be over a period of years. It could be a single moment. But no one else at the table is allowed to have that experience.

[00:52:19] Phillip: Could have never had. Right?

[00:52:20] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The craziest thing is we've actually had three people that have been kidnapped. That one has blown my mind.

[00:52:29] Phillip: Not one.

[00:52:30] Brian: No. We had two at the same table once.

[00:52:33] Phillip: I was at the table when someone was like, "I got kidnapped," and someone else was like, "I was too."

[00:52:38] Brian: Yeah.

[00:52:38] Phillip: Which creates a problem at a dinner because now they both have to come up with something different.

[00:52:43] Brian: Which is pretty awesome. We found out two stories about them.

[00:52:46] Phillip: That's insane.

[00:52:47] Brian: That was funny. Yeah.

[00:52:48] Phillip: That's insane.

[00:52:48] Brian: We had a kidnapping at a prior dinner.

[00:52:51] Phillip: That's wild. I was there for both of those events, by the way.

[00:52:55] Brian: Yes.

[00:52:56] Phillip: Which, by the way, both were in LA.

[00:52:59] Brian: Oh, man. People in LA.

[00:53:00] Phillip: What's with people in LA going abroad getting kidnapped?

[00:53:04] Brian: Yikes.

[00:53:05] Phillip: Don't go to China.

[00:53:06] Brian: Don't live in LA.

[00:53:07] Phillip: Don't live in LA and go to China.

[00:53:09] Brian: Wait a minute. Actually, you know what? Michael's story is basically a kidnapping story.

[00:53:15] Phillip: Oh my gosh. It kind of was. So four people maybe.

[00:53:19] Brian: And, actually, you know what's so funny? I had someone else who was illegally detained in China. That's the second time I've heard that.

[00:53:25] Phillip: Okay. Wow.

[00:53:26] Brian: Woah.

[00:53:27] Phillip: But that's not what I was gonna say. This is more on the materialism side. There was an answer that was given at the dinner that was a total mic drop moment, which was, "An experience that I've had that no one's ever had, is I sold all of my worldly possessions, and I lived in an empty apartment for many years. Just me." Just alone, basically.

[00:53:53] Brian: It was 18 months. Eighteen months he did this.

[00:53:56] Phillip: Yeah. Well, for over a year.

[00:53:58] Brian: Yeah.

[00:53:59] Phillip: And then he met his, what, now fiance?

[00:54:03] Brian: Yeah. I think now wife.

[00:54:05] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah. And she made him buy all the stuff again.

[00:54:08] Brian: Can't be too much vocal. Yeah.

[00:54:18] Phillip: I broke Brian. That's why it was muted. Oh my gosh.

[00:54:25] Brian: You got me laughing too hard.

[00:54:27] Phillip: Parkinson's law.

[00:54:29] Brian: Full residual coffee.

[00:54:30] Phillip: Parkinson's Law can't come for Buddhist minimalism.

[00:54:36] Brian: The only way to actually be a Buddhist minimalist is to not have an apartment.

[00:54:40] Phillip: Yeah. You can't even have that. That's too much of a worldly possession. This is a great place to end it. We will in the After Dark, we're gonna cover the commerce implications of the movie Sinners. If you haven't checked out our After Dark, it's part of Future Commerce Plus. Future Commerce Plus is our membership. You get exclusive access to bonus content, but also data insights to our partnership with Faring, which is access to data of word-of-mouth for over 5,000 Shopify stores and an exclusive dashboard. You also get discount on events like our Future Commerce events, our salons, obviously, priority access to our salons, but events like VISIONS that are ticketed events. You're gonna get the first priority access, and you're gonna get discounts to them. And you're gonna get discounts on merch and print like our book, Lore, our brand new journal from Future Commerce. I'm knocking my mic here. If you're watching on the YouTube, I'm holding up the book. It's beautiful. And a hard cover bound, linen cloth, 280 pages, and this is three pounds. It's beautiful. And 14 parts and many contributing authors this year. Brian and I put in a ton of work. The whole team labored for over a year to pull this together, and you can get a discount when you join Future Commerce Plus for $20 a month, and you get all of Future Commerce learning along with that for you to take your career to the next level. That's over twenty hours of guided learning and a learning management system along with that to help you take your career to next level. Learn along with us and the world's top educators in the space of CRO, acquisition, retention, and many, many other courses, how to build a high performing team, all of that for one price. And it's all available right now at futurecommerce.com/plus, and you can join us at VISIONS on June 10. Would love to see you at MoMA. Join us. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture.