The Future of Timelessness

[00:00:00] Phillip: Intros are dead, man. We're in the show. This is the show. Oh, we need cold opens. That's what you need in 2025. You know what you need in a cold open is to open a cold one.

[00:02:26] Brian: It's true. A lot of podcast people open beers or light cigarettes now. They do something to signify that they're in person, that they're real. There's gotta be a signifier that you're a real person these days.

[00:02:40] Phillip: That's true. I would really love to not be a real person. {laughter} I would have so much more time in my day.

[00:02:48] Brian: It's true. Honestly, you know, that big Meta announcement that came out. I think the real story behind that story is that that video of Zuck is actually a 100% an AI version of him.

[00:03:02] Phillip: Oh, oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll get into it. Today on the show, we are gonna talk about a bunch of stuff. We're gonna talk about holiday shopping report that's finally in. Adobe put out its annual report on how the holiday shopping season came to a dynamic close. We'll cover that at the top of the show.

[00:03:20] Brian: Can't wait to talk about that.

[00:03:21] Phillip: Brian is amped to talk about Meta. We've got some theories. We've got some Zuck bucks to spend, and hopefully, Zuck can spend some bucks at Future Commerce this year. {laughter}

[00:03:36] Brian: {laughter} That's a good idea. Yeah.

[00:03:37] Phillip: He's got some extra bucks to spend.

[00:03:39] Brian: You know, I had his back long before anyone else did.

[00:03:44] Phillip: I know you did. I knew. Okay. So we'll get to that. Brian did allude... At some point, I've become time capsule guy, and so I don't know if that made it into the cold open, but I've become, like, fascinated with time capsules. We'll probably touch on that in the show. I got into a try-on app that does deep fakes. We'll talk about that.

[00:04:06] Brian: We'll talk about that for a second.

[00:04:07] Phillip: We'll maybe close on my new thought leader... I'm a think boy now on LinkedIn.

[00:04:14] Brian: It's the only way to get attention anymore. Rally. Twitter is just so like, it's it's hard to cut through, and it's just all, I don't know.

[00:04:23] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:04:24] Brian: It's hard. It seems like LinkedIn's the last place to get attention from people. But the only way to do that is to become a think boy though. That's the problem.

[00:04:33] Phillip: That's it.

[00:04:34] Brian: Or just like an attention hog. You just have to mention every person in your network.

[00:04:40] Phillip: Hog? You paused there. I think you almost said a different word.

[00:04:45] Brian: I did. Don't wanna lose that PG rating on Apple Podcast.

[00:04:48] Phillip: I kinda feel like we need the... Maybe that's the problem is we need to lose the PG rating. Every time we have Matt Klein on the show, our PG rating is at stake.

[00:04:56] Brian: It gets at stake. Yeah. That's true.

[00:04:58] Phillip: We have to have Matt Klein back. Love that guy. Alright. Well, this is 2025 on the Future Commerce podcast. This is our 8th year running. We're coming into the 9th year of the show. We've done 651 of these, Brian, and we continue to build on our success. We do have a couple things coming up I want people to take note of.   We have our launch party for our 2025 journal.

[00:05:26] Brian: Yeah.

[00:05:26] Phillip: At NRF. That's Tuesday, January 14th. Join us, and you can go to futurecommerce.com/events, and it should be one of the top links there on the page, futurecommerce.com/events. Join us. We are on a wait list, and we have few   hundred of our closest friends and futurists from the Future Commerce community that are joining us for the launch of our new journal. Dare I say, I think we're already pretty much sold out of the 1st edition. You can prepurchase an edition of that that will ship here in the next 30, 60 days or so. You can go to,   futurecommerce.com / events. Go to the event site and register for the event.

[00:06:12] Brian: Dare I say, this might be our best journal of all time.

[00:06:15] Phillip: I don't know if we're ever gonna top this one. This one is incredible. It's called Lore, and we're asking the bold question. Do you write the story, or is it already written? Hey. I'm having a free will crisis. That's what I'm having.

[00:06:31] Brian: {laughter} I already solved that years ago. I already told you all my theories on that. If you wanna know if there's free will, just talk to me. I'm not gonna talk about it in the podcast, but I solved it in high school.

[00:06:44] Phillip: Come to our event. Come to our event at the NeueHouse Madison Square and join us in our community of futurists. Come check it out, and we'd love to see you at our launch party, January 14th. One other thing, keep on radar. We are doing our second ever, and this is where I became time capsule guy, we're doing our second ever role play event for executives. It's our roundtable event. We call it THE FUTURE NOW. And we get together with 10 executives and leaders in the retail industry to have a different kind of a roundtable done entirely through Zoom, and we role play as folks in the future unearthing a time capsule. I know that this blew people's minds the last time that we did this.

[00:07:38] Brian: Next level. It really was. There's nothing like this in the industry. If you're tired of the same old round tables, as if you're tired of just hearing blah blah blah content, this is the kind of thing that's the opposite of that. Yeah. Literally the opposite.

[00:07:52] Phillip: I have been on so many of these things. Nobody pays attention to them. Nobody's even camera on.

[00:07:57] Brian: Second screening.

[00:07:57] Phillip: Yep. And this is a totally immersive, fictional, collaborative fiction environment. If you've ever wanted to dip your toe into playing D and D online or if you've ever thought to yourself that it would be fun to at least kind of try something like this, or maybe you're a seasoned player and you just wanna, you know, goof off at work a little bit. Hey. This might be for you. Go over to futurecommerce.com/events, and it's happening on January 28th. Brought to you in partnership with our friends at Bloomreach. Futurecommerce.com/events. In fact, our whole calendar is up there for the year, and we have all kinds of events coming through the year, including both of our VISIONS events that are already on the books for the year here in the US and maybe one more coming at the end of the year. So okay. That's it. A couple plugs there, and can't wait to get into it some more. Brian, what was all this hubbub about people saying that we were gonna have a really bad Black Friday/Cyber Monday?

[00:09:02] Brian: Yeah. Dude, this is the Vibe Session Network, and it feels like it the Vibe Sessions on Twitter. Elon basically even said this.

[00:09:10] Phillip: This is why I'm on LinkedIn now.

[00:09:12] Brian: Yeah. He said, "Hey. Everyone on here is super negative. Can we post post more positive things?

[00:09:19] Phillip: Yes, dear leader.

[00:09:21] Brian: Yeah.

[00:09:21] Phillip: Yes. We'll we'll be more positive, dear leader.

[00:09:23] Brian: Yeah. Totally. Now the whole vibe's gonna switch because people are just gonna gain for that positive algorithm. That was you Elon telegraphing hate.

[00:09:31] Phillip: Signaling what the... {laughter}

[00:09:32] Brian: Yeah. I just want you all to, like, think about making things more positive. Yeah. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.

[00:09:41] Phillip: Yeah. {singing} "Think of a wonderful thought." It's like the Peter Pan. Yeah. He's like Peter Pan. He's got Peter Pan syndrome. That's what the guy's got.

[00:09:52] Brian: Hopefully, it works. I don't know if it's going through. It doesn't feel like it's going through. Down in the DTC Twitter world, which friend of the show,   recently came back on Twitter for a minute, tried to get back into DTC Twitter, was like, "Nah. I'm out."

[00:10:12] Phillip: I don't know. I think his algorithm is just bad. He's following a bunch of the wrong people. He's following a bunch of charlatans who like to, you know,   pedal fake weight loss products on the Internet. There's probably the wrong people to have followed in the first place.

[00:10:25] Brian: Probably. Well, even the people that weren't charlatans or aren't charlatans were pretty down on this recent...

[00:10:32] Phillip: As a person who has worked in the snake oil industry, I can tell you I already knew who those people were before you ever followed them. And, you know, you just mute and block judiciously, and DTC Twitter isn't so bad if you know who those... I know those people's vibes before the vibe session was ever named.

[00:10:51] Brian: {laughter} As long as you very strongly curate your DTC Twitter, it's cool. {laughter}

[00:10:58] Phillip: I heard somebody say... So back in the olden days of Twitter, back in, like, the Leo Laporte days of this week in tech. I'm talking 2008, 2007. He said something that I still hold to be true. He said, "Follow quickly. And unfollow even quicker."

[00:11:23] Brian: I like it. I like that.

[00:11:25] Phillip: And I think that that is still true to this day.

[00:11:27] Brian: I'm thinking about redoing my whole follow list. I'm gonna wipe out all of my follows and then start all over again.

[00:11:35] Phillip: Here's what you do. Just get off Twitter. {laughter}

[00:11:38] Brian: Oh.

[00:11:39] Phillip: I'm moving to LinkedIn.

[00:11:40] Brian: I cannot believe that I ever would hear you say that.

[00:11:44] Brian: I know. I know.

[00:11:44] Phillip: This is like new Philip. This is 2025, baby. We're looking back now. Could you have predicted 2025 philip would say, "Just get off Twitter?"

[00:11:55] Phillip: Yeah. I don't know. It's 15 years of my life, but, you know, whatever. At this point, hey, listen. I'm a proud rethink retail expert. I have a reputation to uphold now, Brian.

[00:12:13] Brian: You do. You have to walk the party line.

[00:12:16] Phillip: Yeah. I have a thought leadership banner to uphold. I have to go where the audience is, and that means I have a place to be. Can we talk about the retail numbers, though? You went right to the vibe session.

[00:12:29] Brian: Sorry. No. Just so back to this. Yeah. It was a 100% vibe session on DTC. It was all fake. We had one of the best year to year increases in recent black Black Friday history.

[00:12:48] Phillip: Yeah. According to Adobe Analytics who put out a report every year of this nature, in the last few years have been quite rosy in this regard. Holiday shopping season drove... This is the headline from Adobe. "Holiday shopping season drove a record $241.4 billion online, rising 8.7% year over year." And then the subtext was "the 2024 holiday season was the most mobile of all time with smartphones driving 54.5% of online purchases and 79.1% of buy now pay later transactions were made through a smartphone." And there's a lot more data there. We'll link it up in the show notes. Adobe tracks a ton of Internet traffic, not just for folks that pay for the Adobe Analytics product, but they track a large portion of Internet traffic overall, especially ecommerce traffic, and they have their finger on the pulse of online purchasing. Brian, you do some ecommerce shopping. You've written a lot about it. You like to cite how sometimes buying   products in Black Friday/Cyber Monday can be a little bit of an alienating experience. But I think that...

[00:14:04] Brian: Interesting. So Black Friday was way up this year compared to... Like, normally, I think it's like Cyber Monday, it sees more gains. Yeah. Cyber Monday saw gains, but Black Friday was up even more. I actually did a lot of my shopping on Cyber Monday. It was over the whole weekend. I really backed off on Thanksgiving, which was also up. But a lot of people shopping on Thanksgiving, I think it's a problem actually because I think Black Friday shopping is one of the most isolating things you can do now. It used to be a team sport, something you'd all go out and do, could get out to the malls or staying in long lines, you get up early, you get the coffee and the hot chocolate in your warm coats, and you go out and you have a good time together in the midst of consumerist madness, consumerism madness. And there's something sort of endearing about that, and now it's sort of nostalgic because now Black Friday shopping means sitting on your phone, scrolling passively as you passively pay attention to your friends and family that are around you. And in fact, Derek Thompson just wrote this incredible article for The Atlantic about how this next era is going to be the loneliness era. Like, the aloneness era. And I think we, you know, I've been saying this for a few years now. There was that documentary about the Jasper Mall that we watched. We did a little live watch of way back when, and it was showing sort of how depressing it was to go to this mall, and the older generations were there. It just felt lonely, empty, kind of down in the dumps.

[00:16:02] Phillip: Sure.

[00:16:03] Brian: But, actually, that reality looks more interesting and exciting to me than the reality for us when we get older because of what our older shopping and mall experience is gonna look like is us scrolling on our phones passively alone in our own room while we sort of pay attention to some low rent AI...

[00:16:25] Phillip: You're always on about this.

[00:16:26] Brian: Yeah.

[00:16:27] Phillip: Now who's on the vibe session? I don't see it this way. To be honest with you, it looks like the volume of shopping according to this report took place mostly not on Thanksgiving Day, although it was up year over year. It takes place on the hump. It takes place on the shoulders of those days. And in fact, the biggest shopping day of all by volume was Cyber Monday. So people are goofing off at work. If anything, let's celebrate that people people are buying still. Yeah.

[00:16:57] Brian: Well, in Cyber Money makes sense because the challenge now is you don't know when the best deal is gonna come along, and so it's really hard to know when to buy. But Cyber Monday is, like, last call.

[00:17:09] Phillip: Sure.

[00:17:10] Brian: For good deals.

[00:17:11] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:17:11] Brian: And so I think people kind of hold out that they're gonna get a good deal on Cyber Monday, and they're like, "Okay. If I buy anything after this day, it's not gonna be as good of a deal as it was on Cyber Monday."

[00:18:52] Phillip: Alright. So from a cultural perspective, if we're sort of forecasting a bit of where things are going, I've never seen physical retail and shopping malls as busy in the last 5 years as they were this go around.

[00:20:24] Brian: Yeah.

[00:20:25] Phillip: I think the return to physical connection and this loneliness epidemic is driving people back to real life connection.

[00:20:33] Brian: I hope so.

[00:20:34] Phillip: And we're seeing this in a lot of weird, interesting ways. We're seeing a lot of live events and live sporting events are on the rise and live television and live broadcast, The Pop Tart Bowl being a great example of such a thing. So we're starting to see this return resurgence and nostalgias, I think, is powering a good deal of that. This, of course, is an online shopping report, but I think that the online shopping is buoying a lot of omnichannel behavior because a lot of online shopping does return to in store return behavior. So I'd love to see what the in store returns look like, and I think we'll start to see that in some,   Q4 reports in retail season. And this year at Future Commerce, especially on the podcast, we're gonna be doing a lot more retail returns, and you can look forward to that in some segments in the future. Any last words?

[00:21:35] Brian: Last note is I think I believe that NRF had projected between 2.5 and 3.5% growth overall in retail over the holiday season in total. And I think based on this   brief that I found by Retail Dive, that was powered by data from Mastercard. It   looks like it it increased overall by 3.8%, which was above the high end of what NRF predicted. And so that is phenomenal. And a lot of people are saying our economy continues to show resilience and is strong despite what people are feeling and saying about it, and I think that's accurate.

[00:22:25] Phillip: One little tidbit too. I love that, Brian. I love to see the BOPIS bump, the BOPIS Bumpis {laughter} on this chart. You'll see there's a chart, Order Share by Shipping Method. There's a BOPIS Bumpis on the 23rd December. Love to see it. Great data.

[00:22:46] Brian: BOPIS Bumpis sounds like something that it belongs to, what was George Costanza's holding? Festivus. It sounds like it belongs to Festivus.

[00:22:57] Phillip: Yeah. Festivus. And you ever see the, what's the holiday horror movie? Krampus.

[00:23:04] Brian: The Krampus. The Krampus belongs to Festivus, which includes the BOPIS Bumpis.

[00:23:10] Phillip: There it is. Wow. Those are some dad jokes right there. Okay. Oh, man. I really, I wanna go back to the archives, and I wanna talk about this Meta AI bot story because this is something that we saw coming in 2019. I think we first called out, in 2019, when there was a rise of online sneaker stores that were trying to fend off sneaker purchasing bots, and they were using all kinds of tricks to cause bots to purchase the wrong shoes. In particular, there was one story where,   I believe, one store caused them to buy an overstock pair of a wheat colored Jordan 1 Highs, and they sent them, like, hundreds of pairs of this. And I think it, like, threatened a lawsuit.

[00:24:16] Brian: Yup.

[00:24:17] Phillip: It was a very large story at the time. And so there's been this contentious relationship with bots, especially in commerce for the longest time. Shift into 2020, and we started seeing a lot of deep fakes on the Internet. And so this bot relationship and then celebrity overlay, we started forecasting more relationships with bots and deepfakes celebrities. And then we had an episode 300 special, Brian, about how these things would all fuse together into more parasocial relationships online, and how that would influence our buying and purchase behavior. And this came true this week with the announcement, and very harsh subsequent backlash by the public, with a new story that broke on 404 Media. 404 Media just broke a story. Jason Koebler over at 404, which is an independent journalism outfit, broke a story that Meta and it's sort of ongoing flirtation with artificial engagement launched a new initiative where this AI  bot that was modeled after a real person would have a real profile that's unable to be blocked, and that profile would be a a woman that is a single black,   mother who is queer identifying on the Internet as sort of a Facebook and Instagram profile, that would engage with you in both chat and with a profile that has pictures of herself and her children. And it's sort of, like, there to live life and keep things real. It received a lot of backlash and a lot of folks had interacted with it and posted pictures of their interactions with it before it was taken down. Between this 404 Media write up and Connor Hayes's Financial Times interview where the Meta executive sort of outlined a vision of AI characters of these bios and profile pictures and generating content alongside human users. I think a lot of people are fearing that maybe these bots are already here and in the wild, and maybe they've been interacting a lot. And it's interesting because I feel like this has been... This is kind of already the Twitter experience for a lot of people anyway.

[00:26:49] Brian: Yep.

[00:26:50] Phillip: {laughter} So I'd love to have a conversation about this and sort of the subsequent backlash and how maybe it's already what we think maybe the future of the Internet looks like. Because I think we built the Internet for humans, and now we're coexisting with bots. And maybe there's a future where maybe we have to seed the Internet to the bots because that's where it seems like it's going.

[00:28:15] Brian: There's going to continue to be bots. There's no way to avoid it. I think that there's probably gonna be some sort of verified bot program. I think that there's gonna be the verified Internet and the unverified Internet. I've been calling this for years, and there has to be this split because we can't have a world in which you're supposed to be verified, where you expect things to be real and certifiable to have an unverified component because it will always cause problems, lawsuits, confusion, and other issues. You need to have the actual Trader Joe's bot that is verified as the Trader Joe's agent. Right? And interact with it, you know that it is verified and that it is safe to work with, and it's not the Trader Joe's joke account. Right? Or a scam or if it is, there's going to be a lot of joke accounts, but even those will need to be verified as this is not the Trader Joe's official, but we're allowing it to exist. {laughter} But there has to be a place, and there will be a place for an unverified world as well. And the thing is, and I believe this to be true, I think the verified world is going to feel a lot smaller than people realize because I think there is so much unverified activity on these massive social media networks. And so I actually think that a curated verified Internet, well, maybe it starts with LinkedIn. That's sort of the closest thing we have to it right now. They use Clear to help verify identity. Anyway, I wrote about this back in 2016, and this whole agent thing, is something I also called back in 2016.

[00:30:27] Phillip: I think we have lots of tools that sort of verify human activity at this point. This has been talked about, like, ad nauseam, but...

[00:30:34] Brian: But isn't that the point of this article, that it's really hard to distinguish when something is not a person?

[00:30:42] Phillip: Well, so think of it this way. There was some discourse around this when the story first broke. I think people feel really lonely on the Internet when no one engages with their content. Right? So there's a lot of people that I know who post into the void. Nobody engages. Nobody likes their content. Nobody responds to their content. Even negative responses are at least some kind of engagement.

[00:31:09] Brian: Right.

[00:31:09] Phillip: Right? So having some engagement, I think that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter have learned that even automated engagement is engagement and makes people feel good. So I think what we have learned is that some engagement makes people feel good and less lonely. So I can understand how we would get to the decision around well, the future of the Internet is bots are going to happen whether we like that or not. So I understand how we get to that decision so we feel less lonely. The second thing is I feel like people just generally aren't very creative. And when people make content, I'm just being very flat honest, when people make content, most people are just not that engaging.

[00:31:54] Brian: Right. Yeah.

[00:31:55] Phillip: You can tell people to just make better content. I think most people just aren't capable of making great content that's worth engaging with. And so some people are really good at making content. Some people are really great at creating  divisive content or engaging content or really creative content, and they are like magnets for algorithms. They get they're magnets for engagement, and that's who people engage with. And so everybody else is left with no engagement. So I understand why something like this would exist in the world. I think it is dystopic. I think it's sort of scary.

[00:32:33] Brian: Do you think that that's why these bots exist, though, is to provide that ego boost?

[00:32:38] Phillip: I think it is companionship at scale. But I also think that from the kind of, I think it is companionship at scale, and I think it comes from a twisted... It is a twisted and maybe distorted compassionate view of the world is that we are doing an altruistic and positive thing by giving people some form of engagement and positive experience of the platform. That's what I think.

[00:33:12] Brian: That is a very actually kind of positive spin on this.

[00:33:18] Phillip: But I think that that's where it comes from. I think that that's how you arrive at this decision.

[00:33:23] Brian: I don't think that's how you arrive at this decision. I think most of this is just a bunch of spam work. People trying to get engagement on something so that they monetize it.

[00:33:33] Phillip: A project mangager says, like, "Let's make more spam?"

[00:33:35] Brian: "Let's make more spam. Let's build something that gets engagement that we can scale." In fact, maybe AI as a whole, its biggest use case is scaling spam. That's the number one use case.

[00:33:53] Phillip: By spam, I think you mean dopamine. It's the number one use case is scaling dopamine. To that end, to gas up my argument. I mean, Claude and ChatGPT make me feel good every day.

[00:34:14] Brian: Yeah. But...

[00:34:15] Phillip: They tell me I'm awesome.

[00:34:17] Brian: That's a clarified relationship. That's not spam. That's specific, "I'm going to use this tool to do things and make things, and it's gonna tell me I'm doing a good job along the way."

[00:34:31] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:34:32] Brian: Yeah, there is some dopamine that comes alongside that. But I mean actual spam.

[00:34:37] Phillip: But I'm talking about live the queer single mother of two on Facebook. The profile that, you know, it was launched as this test bed, it is meant to be the kind of person who is supposed to be some positive engagement force. It's meant to be a new archetype of a kind of a drive by positive, you know, role model of a bot. I think that there's a ton of negative bots that already exist that are already out there that aren't Facebook branded or verified. That are already out there in the wild and the and probably are most of the profiles that already exist on a platform like Twitter already. So much ado about nothing question mark?

[00:35:19] Phillip: I don't know.

[00:35:22] Brian: {laughter} Yeah.

[00:35:23] Phillip: Anyway. I guess the question... It begs the question, are platforms like Meta, are bots that already exist on these platforms interacting with things like ads?

[00:35:38] Brian: Probably.

[00:35:39] Phillip: And what is the impact to a brand? What is the impact to CPMs, and what is the impact to...

[00:35:49] Brian: Yeah. They're getting charged for it. If it's based off of impressions, then they're definitely getting charged. And if it's based off of clicks, they're probably getting potentially getting charged depending on how the bot's set up. Yeah. I think this is why there has to be a verified Internet and an unverified Internet because this doesn't work. This doesn't work in the long run, and it's causing all kinds of problems, and people are losing money. And I think there should be more of an uproar than there is. The problem is I don't think marketers necessarily want, necessarily want, to show their low engagement rates because I think that marketers love it when their stuff gets a bunch of clicks. They can show they can point to something and say...

[00:36:36] Phillip: It's just not converting. Yeah. It's because the marketer wants to attract attention. It's someone else's job to convert it.

[00:36:41] Brian: Correct. Totally.

[00:36:44] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah, acquisition or demand gen. Right.

[00:36:48] Brian: And that's changing. That's changing. Understand that those things are being merged. We're seeing more attention being paid to conversion. But that also results in a very specific type of product being marketed on these platforms. It has to be something as an instant purchase. It has to be something that does not include a long decision time before making a buy decision. And if it is or if it's something that you don't buy online, you just buy in the store, so it's all about impressions and not about conversions. Let's say, for instance, a can of beans, which I have seen cans of beans advertised on Facebook before, but you're not gonna buy beans.

[00:37:29] Phillip: We have very different Facebooks.

[00:37:31] Brian: I'm stretching back here. I've seen this once. My point is that there's not DTC purchasing of a lot of products that are, like, food products on these sites. Oreo doesn't do its volume on its direct to consumer site. Oreo does its volume in the store. My point is, if they're paying for all these impressions, the marketer says, "Hey. Look at I'm doing my job. We're getting impressions because that's what really matters to us," and they're actually not real. No one's gonna hold anyone to account for that.

[00:38:09] Phillip: So talk about Zuck's announcement because I think that that's an important thing. Give context for the Zuck announcement.

[00:38:14] Brian: The Zuck announcement was a well, it was a video announcement. I wanna talk about that for a second, saying that basically that Facebook's moving away from moderation that it was too political.

[00:38:26] Phillip: Content moderation on the platform.

[00:38:28] Brian: Content moderation on the platform, and moving to a community notes system, which I have to say, I do think community notes on Twitter are incredible. I think this is actually probably a really good idea, but he made it seem extremely political, and he actually talked about how the environment was changing and how it made sense to move with the environment in the video. He's not even, it's very blatant. He's like, "Yeah. This got really political, and the environment's changed now, and so we really be using community content moderation." Now everyone's saying there's the initial reaction, which is like, "Wow. Zuck is based and Zuck is like he's moved. He's put his political views," and blah blah blah. And then there was the counter reaction to that, which is, "This is a great way for Zuck to, like, save a bunch of money. They were planning on doing this anyway." Why not get a double win?

[00:39:26] Phillip: Yeah. Politicize it. And then there's my take. My take. Yeah. My take is that this is a phenomenally timed cover up so that we can distract from the bot story. {laughter}

[00:39:39] Brian: Which I actually really like as a take because Meta's really good at this. They're really good at distracting from the negative story or the troubling thing that they're facing. And that's a really big announcement.

[00:39:53] Phillip: The last time that they did this, the last time they did this incredible kind of a distraction effort was Frances Haugen...

[00:40:07] Brian: When they announced Meta.

[00:40:07] Phillip: Yeah. Frances Haugen and the whistleblower and the Instagram harm to teens story was happening. And they come out, and they're like, "We're changing our name to Meta."

[00:40:21] Brian: Yeah. No. The Wall Street Journal's, The Journal, did a whole, multipart miniseries just on Facebook and what a disaster it was.

[00:40:31] Phillip: Unbelievable.

[00:40:32] Brian: So I think Meta's got some great PR people. I think they treat these releases like Apple treats product updates. It's like feature of this. They're sitting on this pile of stuff they can release at any time.

[00:40:46] Phillip: Can I just say though? Can I just say, I think Meta, especially the VR team, I think Meta has, and I'm not just saying this because I do think that there's dollars for Meta to spend with a company like Future Commerce... {laughter} So I'm just covering my bases here. I think a company the size of Meta and the influence they have in the world, there is a lot of influence and a lot of challenges that a company of that size and scale has. And I heard an NPR, a pundit on NPR this morning talking about Russian and Iranian disinformation and Chinese disinformation, all the issues in the world that are going to be much more amplified because of the lack of human content moderation. And I have to believe that there's AI happening at scale that was assisting the already down sized human content moderation.

[00:41:44] Brian: There was. Massive. There's a big story about that, actually.

[00:41:47] Phillip: Yeah. So to me, it's like the human content moderation was already infantismally smaller than it was when they reduced head count three years ago. So this is a well timed announcement that's a really great PR move to help, you know, some comms at a great time where Zuck just spent a lot of money in a transition donation. So it's everything's very deft. I think it's a really deaf political move.

[00:42:17] Brian: It all worked together perfectly.

[00:42:19] Phillip: Yeah. It's a very deaf political move. Very few political operators of his sort, that goes from founder to CEO that can stay in the seat for almost for 20 years. That's crazy.

[00:42:32] Brian: So allow me to introduce my conspiracy theory here because...

[00:42:36] Phillip: Sure.

[00:42:37] Brian: That video from Zuck felt to me...

[00:42:41] Phillip: It has the aesthetic.

[00:42:42] Brian: Like it was AI generated.

[00:42:43] Phillip: It has the aesthetic of It

[00:42:45] Brian: Has the aesthetic of being AI generated.

[00:42:48] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:48] Brian: But let's look back to something. When Zuck introduced the AI program into Meta and allowed... It was in 2023, right? It was halfway through 2023. That was when Zuck got his glow up. Am I right? Am I right? I think so. I think so.

[00:43:13] Phillip: {laughter} Alright.

[00:43:13] Brian: Also it was when a whole bunch of those insane videos of him with  the flags on the surfboard or whatever it was came out.

[00:43:22] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:43:23] Brian: I do wonder if there's a little bit of something going on here where Zuck's been actually introducing AI videos of himself because he can that are approved extensions...

[00:43:35] Phillip: I love this as a theory. I love this as a theory.

[00:43:39] Brian: And at some point, he's gonna say, "Hey hey, everyone. Every single video announcement that I've made in the past two, three, four years," whenever you finally have missed this, "was actually something that I approved of my image to the public."

[00:43:57] Phillip: This is insane. This is the cold open. {laughter}

[00:43:59] Brian: These are officially approved. Like, "I approved my likeness to be used in these videos..."

[00:44:10] Phillip: Sure.

[00:44:10] Brian: That are extensions of Zuck so that he doesn't have to go film a video of himself. You can control tone. You can control everything that a PR person ever wanted. You can do with an extension, a self extension.

[00:44:27] Phillip: I love this.

[00:44:29] Brian: You won't miss the beat. You won't say things in a way that make you sound...

[00:44:33] Phillip: Whatever this is, I need this technology because it would be so much easier than, you know, doing two and a half hour long predictions podcasts. That would be...

[00:44:44] Brian: I mean, those are gonna be a thing in the past as well. Literally, you could extend yourself and just go through and approve content that's created for you on your behalf. And I think that that's what actually, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg has done that. Maybe not with everything, but I believe he's actually done that.

[00:45:03] Phillip: Alright. Let's come back around to the bot piece and tie it up with the BigCommerce bow. Here's what I think we're on the precipice of. We did this omnimodal report back in August, and we started to find a shift. And so omnimodal being the next great platform shift. So you've heard a lot of things of the new capabilities of AI becoming multimodal. Right? So AI is getting eyes. It can access a camera. It can see things. Right?

[00:45:40] Brian: Right.

[00:45:41] Phillip: It's getting ears like an access a microphone, and it can hear things. And we've talked a lot about omnichannel in ecommerce, where you can seamlessly buy from a brand in any channel you happen to be in. So we sort of fused these things together in a report that we did back in August, and we did some research about this coming shift of what is the new platform leap for AI and for customers and for the way that we'll purchase in the future. And I think that it's become more apparent to me now. And so I'm gonna spell out what I think the new platform shift is. Omnimodal is really a portmanteau. It's bringing these, it's not the sensory piece of AI coming together with the platforms. It's not just the sensory piece of AI coming together with commerce, and it's not just humans using AI for commerce. It is the coexistence of bots and humans purchasing

[00:46:54] Phillip: In the same platform.

[00:46:55] Brian: Yup. Totally.

[00:46:56] Phillip: So think about it this way. Think about it this way. We are going to be building from this point forward websites or ecommerce experiences, channels, APIs, anything that we build in ecommerce from henceforth will be done thoughtfully to assist both humans and agents to be able to seamlessly purchase from a brand. So omnimodal behavior is the new responsive web. So the responsive web was a leap so that you could seamlessly purchase on either the web on your desktop computer or on your mobile handheld device, or any size of device in between. This is the next platform leap. So an omnimodal experience is whether your agent is purchasing from you, or a human is purchasing from you or some mode of experience in between, a human assisted agent or an agent assisted human, there is a layer of experiences, and that is where we are headed. And I think that to be honest with you, Brian, I think this is already happening.

[00:48:04] Brian: I completely agree.

[00:48:04] Phillip: I think there are some brands that are already doing this to some degree, and there's already bots they're buying to some degree. We've been dealing with this in the sneaker industry. We've been trying to trick them for the longest time. I think we've already kinda given in. And some of us, in this industry relented a long time ago, and we're just we're actually just playing ball now. We're just trying to help help the bots. Perplexity, I think, is probably one of the most  omnimodal brands that channels that exist right now because they're partnering with the likes of Best Buy, partnering with the likes of Shopify, with some   smaller, or some very focused partnerships, I should say. And they're doing focused partnerships with big ad partners to really take this to the next level. And so we're gonna see this in 25 in a big way.

[00:49:01] Brian: And I guess the article I published about this was back in 2017, although I had been thinking and maybe talked about it a little bit in 2016 for sure. I actually said in my Your Body is a Data Land article, your bot will be able to accomplish things for you even up to budgeting, purchases, returns, and scheduling meetings. Your bot could even in fact act as a filter for relevant interactions with other proxy bots. I think that this is exactly where the future we're headed to. Bots are going to represent us. Now this is the big question, and this is the biggest challenge I have with bots in general and understanding how it's all gonna function together. Your bot could be broken up into multiple bots. So is it going to be a single bot that you use for everything, or are you gonna have multiple bots that you manage for other purposes? But then why would you do that? Why would you do that?

[00:50:13] Phillip: You got bots on bots on bots on... {laughter}

[00:50:14] Brian: It's a good question. I think people are gonna have personal bots and that companies are gonna have bots. And I don't think that they're going to have more than one. Why would you?

[00:50:26] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:50:27] Brian: So everything will have effectively a digital representative, I think, and you only need one. It's not gonna be a whole bunch of bots. Unless you... But maybe you do have specific bots within specific ecosystems. So you come into that ecosystem, and you claim a bot for yourself and you give it anyway, I know I'm using, but I actually do think this is the future. I'm curious how broken apart it will be or how consolidated it will be. I'm not sure.

[00:50:59] Phillip: I don't know. It seems like a lot of the various AI pursuits are all heading towards infinite context. That seems to be Sam Altman's view of the future. So I think we could get to a place where ChatGPT's, you know, picture of Brian is somewhat infinite and understands you, but that's not how humans work. Humans can sort of compartmentalize their behaviors. Right? So contextually, you may behaviorally want to thread certain parts of your life. And so you may want to have a certain kind of a context.

[00:51:52] Brian: This is what I wrote in 2017. I said, "And at this deeper level, the limits will become more important than the limitless. What you're not will be just as important as what you are."

[00:52:06] Phillip: Mmm.

[00:52:06] Brian: So limits are actually the most important thing for these. Because if you don't have the limits, then you will just absorb everything. And that's actually kind of like empty software, like the empty software of the past. It's like open source. You can do anything. Like, you can build whatever you want. We're gonna need to be able to find easy ways of building these. We're not that because it will be everything already. So how do you stop from being everything anyway?

[00:52:41] Phillip: Anyway, just fascinating stuff. You can be bot guy, Bot Guy, Brian. I love this  conversation. This really lends itself to the idea that the future is always here. It's just not evenly distributed. And the way that the public has reacted to this really comes back to the multiplayer dynamics. We still have control through multiplayer dynamics of telling large tech companies that we do not want something, and they'd still listen. But I don't know that that future where it's a top down dynamic of the tech corporation wants to implement something that people are already doing. Do you see what I'm saying?

[00:53:35] Brian: Yeah.

[00:53:36] Phillip: The tech corporation is just trying to legitimize something that the crowd has already done.

[00:53:42] Brian: Right.

[00:53:42] Phillip: And we can tell, we can speak back to the tech corporation and say, "We don't want this."

[00:53:48] Brian: Right.

[00:53:48] Phillip: But you can't speak to the crowd and say, "We don't want this."

[00:53:50] Brian: Right.

[00:53:51] Phillip: The crowd doesn't listen.

[00:53:52] Brian: Totally. I saw a tweet the other day. It's like, "It's easy to hate on elites,   but it's really hard to hate on the crowd." {laughter} You can't defeat the crowd. That's the...

[00:54:03] Phillip: Yeah. And that's the fact is that we already coexist with bots.

[00:54:12] Brian: Yep.

[00:54:14] Phillip: We can call them agents and and but I think bots is the derogatory term, and the derogatory term is that generally, our interactions with the automated, you know, things on the Internet are generally negative. And so that general negative feeling is the spam type feeling. And the agentic web would be a positive experience, and if we can get there, I think it would be really great for commerce. It would be really great for people.

[00:54:42] Brian: Great point. There's actually a language war going on around this. Saying, "You're such an agent," is like you can't turn that into an insult. But saying "You're such a bot," or "You're such an NPC," those are ways to actually insult a person, but you can't say that if you say "agent." So there is a language battle going on around this, and I think some of the early people kind of caught that.

[00:55:12] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:55:12] Brian: That's why the agent conversation's been such a a weird one because I think the people that wanna actually sell this have been saying agents. Salesforce has, not bots because that is actually easily directed.

[00:55:26] Phillip: Agentforce. Agentforce. 2,000 salespeople. Yeah. Listen, if Future Commerce doesn't work out, we can always go sell Agentforce. {laughter}

[00:55:34] Brian: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:35] Phillip: Yeah. Okay.

[00:55:36] Brian: Botforce. Botforce. No directory.

[00:55:44] Phillip: Benny bot. Okay. Let's shift gears. So I covered this last one. I do wanna talk about the time capsule thing because people are sending me unsolicited now... I became time capsule guy.

[00:56:02] Brian: You incepted yourself.

[00:56:05] Phillip: I mean, I'm like time capsule pilled.

[00:56:07] Brian: To get pilled, you only have to click on three articles and sorta like the subject, and then you're doomed. You're doomed. You become fully pilled at that point.

[00:56:17] Phillip: I want to do a really long After Dark about this because I think I could...

[00:56:22] Brian: I'm in.

[00:56:22] Phillip: I think I could blow your mind about this.

[00:56:24] Brian: I've not become time capsule yet.

[00:56:28] Phillip: So the way that I got here was we did The Future Now, a couple months ago, and we did this roundtable, collaborative event, role playing event. We had this fictional universe that we built where we opened a time capsule, and this happened last year, so it was from the year 2024, and we had this game board that we built, and we all pulled items out of this game board, and we collaboratively built the future world in this fictional universe.

[00:57:04] Brian: So cool.

[00:57:05] Phillip: Talking about items from 2024 as if they were antiquated. Really cool concept that we built at Future Commerce, and everyone had a blast. We built a story bible out of it and really just really incredible. In the prep for that, I sort of went down this rabbit hole around time capsules. And there are two time capsules in particular that I've found to be really, really interesting. I've done a whole series of this now on TikTok. We'll link it up in the show notes. I'd love for if you're listening and you made it this far in the episode, I'd love for you to follow us on social. So I'm doing the series on TikTok, and   it's @FutureCommerce on all social media platforms. But follow us on TikTok because we're doing a lot of this type of content and little bit longer form. But two time capsules in particular, I think, are the greatest example of preservation of the human race in our society that has ever existed, and they were both created by consumer brands. And so okay. One was created by the Matsushita Electric Company, which is now known as Panasonic, and the other one was created in two editions by the company Westinghouse. And they were about 40 years apart from each other. Westinghouse created theirs for the New York World's Fair in 1938 and then around 1969. And there were two editions because we're two New York ports.

[00:58:43] Brian: You know what I learned the most so far? Westinghouse has been around for almost a 100 years. {laughter}

[00:58:47] Phillip: Yeah. And what's interesting about Westinghouse is that they did theirs in the sort of pre nuclear age, and then they refreshed it in the nuclear panic.

[00:58:57] Brian: Wow.

[00:58:57] Phillip: So it was like during the Cuban missile crisis. So they buried two of them. And then the second one that Panasonic did was in just after that, in 1970 in Japan. And so there are these two versions basically of two different cultures, head up by two very large diversified consumer brand companies that have really interesting futuristic takes on what a 5,000 year glimpse into the future would look like. And they have to solve incredible challenges, not just of preserving a capsule for 5,000 years. Forget the fact that what does, how do you preserve something for 5,000 years? That's its own challenge, and they do crazy stuff. It's like, "Okay. It has to survive degradation, radiation. Has to be hermetically sealed. And what is an alloy that can survive underground for that long in the water table?" And okay. There's all that kind of stuff. But it also, if you can make a time capsule that can survive that long, then some futurists that they bring into the concepting of the time capsule, Westinghouse brings in a whole team, and they think, actually, the greatest enemy of a time capsule is curiosity. Because a future generation will dig it up early. Okay. So how do we combat that? And so it becomes actually a cultural issue. So I go down the rabbit hole on this. We're going to do a refreshed webinar roundtable and interactive immersive event. It's role playing at a great scale. Ten people, we're gonna go deep down the rabbit hole. We're gonna learn a little bit about The Future Now,   time capsule, this amazing time capsule project. We're gonna role play like we're in the future. They do crazy stuff, Brian. Panasonic and Westinghouse, I'm convinced that these are the two greatest consumer brands that have ever existed in human history. They might be the society's greatest contribution to the human race because...

[01:01:19] Brian: {laughter}

[01:01:19] Phillip: I'm not kidding. I'm totally serious.

[01:01:20] Brian: I know. I know. I know. I'm excited about this. This is actually part of, I think doing something like this, more brands should be looking at this and saying, "Wow. This is how you build a brand."

[01:01:32] Phillip: Yeah.

[01:01:32] Brian: This is part of Mythopoeia. This is how you build a myth that extends into the future. You do stuff like this that's actually extension of story. And Westinghouse may be revived 5,000 years in the future because of these time capsules. Someone will open these up and be like, "Westinghouse. Oh, this is a classic brand." Although I do have one thing to add to this in a second.

[01:02:00] Phillip: Yeah. Please.

[01:02:01] Brian: The brand might still exist then because there is a time capsule and everyone will remember. You can rely on things like this as ways to make your brand be sticky, generational, cultural for  ongoing. These are things that set you apart and give you a reason to revive the story even if the current iteration of the brand dies because of poor mismanagement. You can always bring it back.

[01:02:32] Phillip: I wonder. And I think what's so interesting about this is that they are pinned to these giant expos and world expos. And these are global, human efforts and human cooperations to show off innovation and technology and sustainability. And I think that there's something really powerful about that.

[01:03:03] Brian: Yep.

[01:03:04] Phillip: We are literally planting something in the ground for a future civilization.

[01:03:09] Brian: Yep.

[01:03:10] Phillip: And what's really fascinating about that is it's in every time capsule is its consumer goods. Its products that you buy, they are the identity of a snapshot of what our culture is. I think it's really poetic.

[01:03:30] Brian: Time capsules are maybe a little bit of a dying breed at the moment. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, but everything feels so digitally cataloged now that people, I think, are less inclined. It's not as interesting to run a time capsule because you're like, "Oh, I can just look it up on the Internet." And while there are things out there, we all know that digital content is actually not as durable as we think it is, it feels to most people like it is.

[01:03:59] Phillip: It is. Yeah.

[01:04:00] Brian: And so it's just we've I think one of the reasons why we're losing interest is because everything feels like we record it once, and it stays around for eternity even though that's not even close to the truth.

[01:04:15] Phillip: As somebody who has lost things in their Google Drive, I believe that to not be true.

[01:04:21] Brian: All of the Bitcoin people who had Bitcoin in a wallet somewhere also know that's not true.

[01:04:26] Phillip: Oh my gosh. Please don't remind me. Washington Post article from 2022 talks about how individual Americans are building their own time capsules and burying them. Great thing in this Brandon Sully illustration for the Washington Post is there's a cyber truck buried in this illustration before the cyber truck actually was out. I think that's really funny. Okay. We will see you at our launch party for our journal. The journal will be out in the next little while. Go preorder your copy of it at Metalabel. We will link it up in the show notes. Visit futurecommerce.com/events to get in on those things that we mentioned, and go subscribe to our newsletters so you always know what's happening. Well, just go to futurecommerce.com. That's what we want you to do, so you always know what's going on. And thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.

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