[00:00:00] Phillip: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce. This is for all the bots out there. I feel… do they… I feel like they expect… the agents expect an opener now. I think we were doing…
[00:00:09] Brian: Like this. So…
[00:00:10] Phillip: Just a dead open and then… yeah.
[00:00:12] Brian: What is a… what is a bot opener sound like? It’s like, “Hello, dude.”
[00:00:16] Phillip: “We’re all committed commerce.” That’s… what a boomer way to do a bot voice.
[00:00:21] Brian: The year 2000.
[00:00:23] Phillip: The year 2000. The distant future. Actually, that’s not in the distant future so much anymore. Every day, I’m feeling more like a boomer, though, because every day, I’m…
[00:00:34] Brian: Like, I mean, millennials basically are what boomers were…
[00:00:38] Phillip: It’s so true.
[00:00:39] Brian: …in the world.
[00:00:40] Phillip: Oh, man. We’re not gonna get into it today, but I am jamming on a bunch of AI stuff. So I will… I will say I’m very much trying to stay ahead of becoming the boomer in the room.
[00:00:53] Brian: You’re… well, no. But boomers are using AI more than Gen X is.
[00:00:58] Phillip: Yeah. That’s… I think so. There’s like… it’s… it’s one to skip a few generations. Right? Because that’s sort of like…
[00:01:06] Brian: Weirdest generations.
[00:01:08] Phillip: It really is. Gen Xers are not into AI, and then Gen Zers not into AI. That’s how we’re going these days. Welcome to Future Commerce. We have a pretty full docket today. And as we’re recording this, I’m getting ready to be at Cannes Lions, International Festival of Creativity. We’ll be bringing you a bunch of content from the festival there, and I’m excited to sit down with a bunch of our partners. So you’ll hear from some folks. We’ll be sitting down with Fluent and PayPal Ads and some friends of ours over on the other side of the pond. So the next few weeks, we’ll be creating a little bit of content and give you a little bit of perspective on what that show is all about. As you know, and Brian, we’ve experienced this quite a bit. The world of, like, retail media, commerce media has drawn the world of commerce deeper and deeper into the world of advertising and media. And so…
[00:02:08] Brian: Well, as the point of transaction gets closer to, like, intent and desire stoking… yeah. Like, it’s natural. It’s only natural.
[00:02:18] Phillip: Creator economy and social commerce and the world of traditional advertising media and brand, they’ve all sort of converged, and that’s the place where it’s been… the traditional place where it happens. There’s been a lot of criticism. We covered it last year on the relevance of the event in modern times. I wanna go see for myself. I’ll bring back a report and digest on what’s going on there. And yeah. And we’ll see. We’ll see. Looking forward to that. And then we’ll be in just two weeks’ time at the end of June. We’ll be joining up with our friends at Klaviyo and covering their London event again this year. And I hear that there’s some really interesting developments in the world of AI for automation, marketing automation, CRM, and I’m excited to understand how some of the biggest brands in the world are using that to change their business for the better. I’ve got a lot of interesting conversations… to futurecommerce.com. There’s a whole world of content over there, including one of our most recent Insiders pieces. It’s an incredible follow-up to our annual prediction this year, and it’s called “The Process Is the Product.” We’ll link it up here in the show notes, by contributor Sophia Epstein, and she makes the case and shows us how this year alone, the backlash against AI and slop are because we desire to see the work from humans. And, basically, proof of work is what we’re looking for now from brands and from creators and artists alike. Yep. And so work for work’s sake, you know, intent of work and putting in human work, going over and above just for the sake of the art and the creative, for its own merits is like the value of waste. That is a thing that we highly prize now in the age of AI when anything can be generated with a few prompts. And I think it’s a phenomenal piece, and you can easily digest it nowadays because the…
[00:05:20] Brian: …it’s been the “show your work,” build-in-public thing for a long time. Yeah. But even that felt kind of performative. Right? And now it’s like, alright. People agree you made something cool. Show us how you got there. There was the whole Lady Gaga thing… controversy that happened regarding her trailer for her show or live show. Right? And like… right. And it’s like, you know what? Maybe the things that we thought were cool online, like, we no longer can trust that there actually is some sort of, like, human, like, effort behind them, and we wanna see the suffering artist, you know, make it and pour theirs… themselves into it as opposed to have it just be some gloss. Which… the funny part about that is, like, we’ve been doing this with human labor for a long time. Like, we’ve been glossing pop stars with, like, the best producers and, like, this whole machine around them, a machine of people. And now the machine is no longer a machine of people, and all of a sudden we’re like, wait a minute. Maybe what we thought was cool wasn’t cool all along. I don’t know. It’s interesting just to see how, when people aren’t making up the machine, we start to question everything now.
[00:06:50] Phillip: It’s so interesting. Right? This… the organism that is the corporation. Mhmm. Right? We’ve talked about this. There’s a book that I read a couple years ago that blew my mind. Basically, like, is sentient from some observer’s point of view. Everything is organized, and everything is alive from some observer’s point of view. It just depends on who the observer is. And so a corporation is an organism. Right. It is alive and it has a will. It’s just made up of many parts. And, right? So it just depends on who the observer is. Right? If we are working within the corporation, we don’t see it as such. But if you are, you know, if you’re some sort of, like, omniscient, omnipotent being sitting outside of who we are, and we’re observing something like a corporation, then it seems to be highly organized and, you know, has… it has a goal. It has a purpose. It, you know, has a will. And those are really interesting things to think about when you start to think about life in terms of things like AI and how you start to classify things like that in that world. But I do think that, like, your point is, like, the Overton window has shifted on what is cringe… mhmm… right, versus what is, and maybe crass.
[00:08:33] Brian: Yeah.
[00:08:33] Phillip: Right? And now what is just required, as we… we demand this of you in order to participate. And some of those are set up in this piece, like, Kesha basically did the exact same thing that Lady Gaga did. And if you separate them by a sufficient window, it doesn’t matter what the technological medium was. You know, one was a 3D model. One was, you know, questionably AI. Who knows? It could have been a 3D model as well. One was, like, actually a 3D model of Kesha’s head and then potentially, like, actual wax pour and then a melted wax. But it doesn’t really matter how it was done. Anything that’s plausibly AI today, even if it’s not AI, is derided. Right? People don’t want it. Right?
[00:09:23] Brian: Yeah. They don’t want it.
[00:09:24] Phillip: So seeing the process is the important part, and that’s the thing I’ve been arguing for. It’s not even just… and this is where brands need to get the story and the PR right… it’s not enough for Hermes to put out a website that is created entirely by artists and illustrative. Right? That’s interesting.
[00:09:43] Brian: Mhmm.
[00:09:43] Phillip: It’s the entire PR campaign around it that shows you all of the discarded drawings that weren’t used. It’s showing you all of the art assemblage and the behind the scenes that shows you that it’s real artwork by a real person. It’s sitting down with that person and showing you the process by which they come up with it. And you’re seeing this more and more in build-outs like what Stripe City did for Black Friday. You’re seeing it in, like, what Apple TV did for their new, like, sound bumper that they do at the beginning of their shows. All of those things are elements of craft that isn’t just the outcome of the product. It’s showing you the process that went into it.
[00:10:29] Brian: There was that moment when HBO switched every single show to have a “making of” that just rolled right into… right afterwards.
[00:10:35] Phillip: Oh, yeah. I remember that.
[00:10:37] Brian: Yeah. And I think that that’s part of it. There’s a set of people, it’s not everybody, that wants this. Right? And there’s some people actually don’t wanna see behind the scenes. They just want the finished product. And if it hits for them, it hits for them, and they don’t care how it’s made. And, actually, there are a lot of people like this. In fact, I think that there are still, like, maybe more people that just don’t care. In fact, I think that the online crowd, the very or even terminally online crowd, they care more about this than the average consumer does. And there’s also, like, the nerds for any given, you know, thing, the ones that geek out, the ones that are passionate about it. And they end up having a really loud voice when it comes to those things, and oftentimes that voice can set perception. And the overall perception, you know, it’s built off of the super nerds that are super into the thing. And not everyone can be a nerd about everything. So even though some people try. And so they’re willing to either do one of two things: just enjoy the finished product or listen to the nerds that are really in the industry and trust what they say. And so I think there’s an interesting thing here, like, where a certain amount of the process has to be built in just to satisfy those people that actually care, and then to satisfy the people that care about what they say.
[00:12:21] Phillip: Oh, that’s all. Yeah. It’s 100%. It’s… it’s “blah, something, something, the man in the arena.” Yeah. Right? Yep. Okay. Hold on. This is gonna drive me crazy. I’m gonna look for this book. Stay there. Alright. Here we go. It’s James Bridle, “Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence,” by James Bridle. That was his follow-up to “New Dark Age,” which was a book that went, like, viral. It was written in 2018. “New Dark Age” gave me severe panic attack. I stopped reading that one.
[00:12:52] Brian: Oh, my gosh. This reminds me, though, of, like, the new Platonic movement that’s happening right now too. Like, the Iain McGilchrist sort of crowd that believe that, you know, there are ideal forms for sort of things, since those things will eventually kind of emerge, if you will, based off those… that existence that’s sort of beyond. It’s in some other space, and those things are going to eventually find their way out potentially and emerge, and we’ll see them for what they are. But yeah, what an interesting thought. And it makes you think, like, maybe there are brands that represent the ideal form better than others for the category that they’re in. Hermes may be a good example of that. They’ve sort of perfected the handbag, if you will, and have stuck to that. And you know, there’s probably an ideal material. It’s made out of an interior… an ideal production process and yeah. And this might frighten some brands, you know, the idea of having to show their work. And if it frightens you, that’s probably a really good sign that you need to make some changes. Because you’ve been winning off of sort of the secrecy component, which means you feel like you have a competitive edge. Actually, this leads me to the discussion about the whole Mythos and Fable coming off the market idea because…
[00:14:43] Phillip: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s…
[00:14:45] Brian: Yeah. In many ways, like, the US government is saying, “Don’t show your work.” Like, we don’t want this in the hands of everyone. We don’t want this to be something that can be reverse engineered or leveraged, you know, by other people, and they have to guard it. Kinda like a brand guards their trade secrets. Like…
[00:15:07] Phillip: It’s a nuanced discussion because I think that there’s a lot of takes here that become a little… we could probably have 20 different types of conversations here. So pick the conversation you wanna have about, like, I don’t know, did Anthropic do too good of a marketing job on how dangerous their model was? Or is it a regulatory capture conversation? Yes and yes, probably.
[00:15:38] Brian: It’s certainly an attention capture conversation.
[00:15:40] Phillip: Absolutely. But I think the bigger… the more interesting conversation here is the unbelievable power that the Department of Commerce has sequestered unto itself… yeah… or has gathered unto itself for the past two administrations for sure, but maybe for three. I think since Penny Pritzker and the Obama White House, the Department of Commerce used to be sort of a backwater, like, sort of an, like, runner-up, consolation prize. If you didn’t get the Treasury Secretary job, you got the Department of Commerce job. Like, it has a lot of authority or has a lot of jobs underneath it. A lot of things that nobody wants gets shoved in commerce, like, I don’t know, the post office or the patent trade office.
[00:16:34] Brian: I feel like this happens in software too and also for brands. Like, it’s…
[00:16:39] Phillip: Oh, 100%.
[00:16:39] Brian: …a job that… nope. Like, they’re like, “Give them… give them ecommerce.”
[00:16:45] Phillip: Oh, 100%. It’s like there’s so many people that… this… and talented people too, right, that, like, have, you know, that probably want some other job, and then they get, you know… someone’s… but then they try to do as best a job as they can. And, right. What has happened is… actually, we wrote this up. We can link this too. But you get someone who’s pretty ambitious and wants to make a name for themselves like Howard Lutnick and has tried to make commerce the, you know, the most important newsmaking… I mean, agency.
[00:17:25] Brian: Is probably the wrong word.
[00:17:27] Phillip: It has made. Yeah. First in being the enforcement of the tariff policy and rollout of the tariff policy and also the spokesperson for the tariff policy for the United States government, which after… it’s been a failed policy and unenforceable apparently and potentially having to refund. Yeah. Not a good look. Now switching over to being the AI guy, AI enforcer, and you’ll notice that they gave… if you… they gave, like, 90 minutes for Anthropic to, you know, to answer their order of, you know, an export ban, basically, on this. And so I think it’s just because throwing our weight around is what this story is really all about.
[00:18:19] Brian: Yeah. It… probably. Who knows? Who knows? Let’s just step back a little bit from it, though, because it does get to, like… if we’re in a software race, right, if that’s what the race is about, protections are pretty weak. Like, protections on something that can be immediately copied upon… like, it’s digital. It’s digitally instantly everywhere. Like, the moment you get one link, you have instant leak for everyone. It does beg the question, is software actually the moat? Like, is that the thing that sets people apart? Or if everyone’s sort of going after it, is it pretty much guaranteed that the moment you release it, you then give up the ability for it to be your moat anymore? And so I actually think a lot of this is a little bit of, like, a red herring, a little bit of a distraction. It seems like software actually isn’t the moat. It’s like all the things that are really, really hard to make to make software possible for people.
[00:19:40] Phillip: Yeah. I mean, if all of software is being eaten by AI, then AI is the software. It’s the user software. Right? So I…
[00:19:52] Brian: It’s still the software, though. Like, the models are digitally constructed. It’s… yeah. Algorithms. And so that doesn’t change my point at all, which is software is no longer a moat when it comes to, like, your country’s dominance. There’s no software race.
[00:20:18] Phillip: Yeah. Well, there is a chips race.
[00:20:20] Brian: There’s a chips race.
[00:20:21] Phillip: Right. And then there’s a power race.
[00:20:23] Brian: There’s a power race.
[00:20:24] Phillip: Right. And I think there’s an… also the race.
[00:20:26] Brian: Okay. There’s a lot of other races, but the software is actually not the race.
[00:20:30] Phillip: So that’s… well, it is when… don’t make me argue the inverse. Don’t make me make their argument for them, but it is when you have been told, and you’ve been… and it’s been proven you’ve been pulled into a consortium or, like, a private consortium and working group with, you know, 36 companies and shown that you have built a super weapon that can hack every single piece of software and create… basically disclose a massive supply chain risk. Like, this is… they pulled the Department of Commerce into this thing. So, I mean, that is the… so okay. But putting all that aside for a second, this is where this story, I think, makes perfect sense in our coverage. Coming out of the Semafor World Economy Summit, there’s a lot of conversation about the role that the US government does take in trying to regulate these sorts of areas. Right? Like, dynamite used to be sold in hardware stores. Right? So there’s just a level at which we have to make a decision to, like… there’s weapons-grade tools that could be available at some future state that we have to make a decision as to what gets evaluated and cleared by some government agency. And Anthropic has been… making a really… beating the drum and making a case for a very long time, saying we should be regulated in the same way that aviation is regulated. And that’s what they’ve been arguing for, and it’s looking like that this… because it would benefit them greatly to be the de facto provider of that. It would also kill the open source industry…
[00:22:22] Brian: Yeah.
[00:22:22] Phillip: …which, by the way, I think would be the main competitor to anyone who is getting hammered on token pricing. Like, if you can own… if all you have to pay for is power and you can own hardware, and let’s say hardware gets better and better and better over time, you don’t need to pay someone to generate tokens for you. And, right. And they know that. So okay. So I think going back to the, like, history lesson here, this comes back to the CHIPS Act. Yeah. Right? And it comes back to the establishment of the National AI Safety Institute, which was then renamed and rebranded because the Trump administration didn’t like the word “safety” in AI. So… but both of these were situated… both of these programs were situated under the Department of Commerce to be carried out by Gina Raimondo’s Commerce Department and now are being, you know, are now programs that are being administered by Howard Lutnick’s…
[00:23:30] Brian: Commerce was effectively discontinued. Like, it… no. I mean, it’s… it wasn’t…
[00:23:38] Phillip: No. But the dollars… no. Not really. So you have TSMC building fabs here in the United States. They’ve used some of that money to invest in US corporations. Like, they’re buying a good portion of, like, Dell or IBM. So there’s, like… they’re buying their way into and they’re, like, in, quote unquote, investing in the United States. We actually have a hub that we’re launching. It’ll be live, I believe, by the time this comes out. We can link it up here, but it’s futurecommerce.com/ai-agentic-commerce. Terrible URL. Great for SEO. Terrible URL to tell people. But there is a whole AI policy read-back. But, basically, you know, the Commerce Department itself has a lot of dollars invested in US policy, and we have a whole hub around that, which comes back to, like, CHIPS Act dollars, but also dollars that they’re getting other companies like TSMC to invest in fabs in the United States. And then Masa, remember that whole thing?
[00:24:46] Brian: Vaguely.
[00:24:47] Phillip: Where, um, when Masayoshi of SoftBank was, like… he was gonna commit some… like, was it $200 billion in investment into the United States for AI? And it was 100 billion, and then it was gonna be doubled, and it was gonna be AI infrastructure in the United States. It was kind of… it’s, like, the week after Trump took office, and it was, like, Sam Altman was there, and Tim… Tim Cook was there. Like, everybody was there.
[00:25:23] Brian: That’s right.
[00:25:24] Phillip: Elon was there. That’s not happening now anymore. I think we’re just buying companies now. What’s up next?
[00:25:33] Brian: I mean, you had an interesting chat with the patent office today around…
[00:25:39] Phillip: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, this is wild. So okay. There’s… here in Florida, Florida is one of the rare places where there’s a lot of tech innovation happening. You could say that it’s probably because there’s other places in the country that are creating tax policy that other people are deciding they wanna leave and move their businesses here, maybe temporarily. We’ll see. Who knows? But something that’s really interesting that’s happened is in the last number of years, they’ve opened sort of a field office for the USPTO in Florida. And it’s not like an official field office, but there’s sort of a Southeast regional outreach. And Florida Atlantic University is one of those areas that has a tremendous amount of technology oversight and leadership here. There’s a technology innovation hub and an AI research lab that’s based now out of Florida Atlantic. And so Boca has become this sort of, like, place where a lot of innovation’s happening, and it attracts a lot of folks to come through. And today, I got the awesome opportunity to sit down with the USPTO undersecretary, director Squires. And John Squires was sworn into office back in September of last year.
[00:27:13] Phillip: He hasn’t been around too, too long, but he’s the 60th director of the USPTO. And he talked extensively about the department inheriting a wild backlog of patents that had… the prior leadership and administration had just been backlogged with… I’m gonna have to go back to my actual notes, but something to the tune of, like, 75 or 80,000 applications that they couldn’t get out in front of. They’re now using AI to help to clear the backlog. They’ve built their own LLM within the US Patent Trade Office, which, by the way, USPTO, the largest budget line item in the Department of Commerce. It’s pretty important. Yeah. It is. It’s a $5 billion organization. They have 8,500 examiners now. That’s up from 5,500 examiners about ten years ago. And they’re working really hard to keep ahead because, because of AI, they now have a deluge of innovation that’s coming their way. Just two… I think he said just two years ago, President Trump signed the ten millionth patent in the United States, patent number 10,000,000.
[00:28:38] Brian: Wow.
[00:28:39] Phillip: Today, they’re on patent 12,000,000.
[00:28:42] Brian: Oh, wow.
[00:28:43] Phillip: And so the scale of innovation…
[00:28:45] Brian: That’s fast.
[00:28:47] Phillip: …that is happening is at such a pace that they… like, them keeping up… it can’t be done by hand really anymore.
[00:28:56] Brian: Actually, the backlog doesn’t look that big now. Completely accomplished.
[00:29:01] Phillip: So… yeah. What they’re really working through now is… he said they hire 900 or so patent examiners, which are all specialized lawyers. You know? They’re all these patent examiners.
[00:29:18] Brian: Their little budget line’s so big.
[00:29:21] Phillip: Yeah. But these people are working for the government. Remember? So they’re passing up, like, other jobs in legal professions to work for the US government. I mean, you have to be convinced of some sort of, like, duty to the United States. And really interesting stuff, by the way. It’s something I should probably write up for Future Commerce Insiders because I learned a lot today in sitting in a roundtable with him. But the first patent was signed by George Washington. It’s covered in the US Constitution. It’s written in the US Constitution that inventors and authors are granted patents, and Thomas Jefferson was the first patent examiner. These are… it’s just something that’s unique to the United States. And I think that it’s a… the fact that they’re building LLMs within your patent office, but also trademark… trademark has it even worse because trademarks are about two and a half times the backlog. And what’s crazy is…
[00:30:28] Brian: Makes sense.
[00:30:28] Phillip: It does make sense. And this is the thing that I really wanted to get more information out of him on. I really wanna… we should probably try to figure out if we can get him to sit down with us, director Squires. But most of what our audience deals with is most of their brand. Like, most of their IP is the brand. Like, most of what… mhmm… our…
[00:30:55] Brian: Some people have patents on products, but mostly…
[00:31:00] Phillip: Very few. Right? Most of it is wrapped up in the brand. Right? And so, but as the cost for a patent is driven down to zero, not just intellectual property, but actual, like, invention, because now we have this capability of maybe researching things that don’t exist now, or the labor at which to help to create new things is deferred or driven down by this innovative tool with AI. But also he says that over the last five or six years, the number of people that are named in a patent filing has gone up and up and up, where there’s 50 or something… to the tune of, like, 10,000 patent applications had three or four named, like, co-inventors, which was rare 15 years ago. But there are some with as many as 10 now, and that has never happened before, like invention by committee. That’s just a thing that never ever existed in the past, and that can happen now today because of tooling. And also, before you even get to the point of filing a patent or putting together a patent, you can find people with prior invention and prior art that you’ve been building on that you didn’t even know that you would name in your patent application.
[00:32:22] Phillip: And so these are things that are really interesting. And I also think that it’s sort of a precarious place because the same tools that the patent office would be using… and trademark too… to combat all of these… this deluge of filings are the same tools that inventors and brands would be using to create new filings. So I think that at some point, you have to also think, and this is… I don’t have a satisfying answer yet on this. And, again, this is why I think we should probably sit down with someone from commerce on this to talk about it, because I think it’s an interesting challenge. We should be promoting new founders, new creators, new innovators in the United States. But what ultimately will probably happen is the system favors people that are incumbents with large amounts of capital with legal frameworks and legal backing behind them that have defensible frameworks, that know how to use the system. And AI does not make this more of a level playing field. If anything, it makes the incumbency allow them to sort of, like, you know…
[00:33:44] Brian: Maintain their lead.
[00:33:45] Phillip: Absolutely. The lead. They can box the small guys out even more effectively. They can basically carpet… the filings. Right.
[00:33:51] Brian: It’s sort of always been the case in…
[00:33:52] Phillip: Right.
[00:33:53] Brian: …in many ways. Like, it’s always been sort of a way to maintain leads. And if you have a factory focused on creating patents and trademarks and so on, like, you can sort of stay ahead and get ahead of, like, upstarts. Anytime you see a bubble of something, you can get ahead of it. Yeah. It’s hard to know if the tooling will actually empower people, because I think it will get easier for a single person to go after, you know, this… or if it just means that people who have, like, the ability to spend on tokens at a max level… like, it actually… the tooling just makes them stronger and, like, it’s harder to get ahead of them and, you know, speed to market actually is a symptom of scale and not what we typically think, where scale actually prevents speed to market.
[00:34:48] Phillip: Yeah. Something that I’ll be spending a little bit more time on looking into. Again, this is probably an undercovered topic in our space, especially around the elements of trademark, and I think it’s such an interesting area. It’s one that I think folks probably don’t consider to be very important, because it doesn’t impact directly the point of transaction. But I do think that… yeah… when it comes down to, like, defensibility and the enterprise value in your company and your brand, like, means everything. And so I think especially when you’re in the startup space or if you were in the enterprise space, these are things that those folks think… and capital allocators, they think a lot about this sort of thing. It’s probably something that deserves a little bit more coverage.
[00:35:45] Brian: Well, you know what? What’s really interesting is this isn’t that far from the taste discussion, because in many ways, like, people that have taste get copied so fast, they can’t trademark taste. And so this whole discourse around tasteslop actually has some parallels. That’s so true.
[00:36:04] Phillip: That’s true. Have we talked about tasteslop yet on…
[00:36:08] Brian: Not really, because I don’t think we’ve podcasted it since this really kinda blew up, and Emily Segal wrote that… yeah…
[00:36:15] Phillip: Give it…
[00:36:16] Brian: …piece about it.
[00:36:16] Phillip: Yeah. Do the… give us the definition and catch…
[00:36:18] Brian: …the supplement. Basically, like, using different items that would be considered tasteful and collecting them and putting out something that would signal taste as a result of having collected those items and showing them off in a specific way. And I think…
[00:36:36] Phillip: Examples would be like a Rimowa suitcase or, right, you know, a Fellow, like, a gooseneck kettle, or potentially, like, Tabis. Something that’s, like… looking… was…
[00:36:50] Brian: …the one that caught everyone. Like, that was a… that a lot of…
[00:36:53] Phillip: Well, that one had some discourse around it recently. The kettle discourse. Why… it’s not… it’s not that the kettle. It’s why the kettle? And I’m like, oh my gosh. Gag me. I don’t wanna have that conversation.
[00:37:05] Brian: Because I had had some thoughts right around the time, or right before Emily posted her piece. I swear, synchronicity sometimes happens. Of course, she published a piece about it. I just thought about it. But I had been thinking about how there are people in my life… actually, I’ve had this stuff for a while… that, you know… so most of the tasteslop discourse is related to online behavior. Like, it is absolutely online signals that are very easy to manufacture.
[00:37:32] Phillip: Performative signaling around you having good taste, because for whatever reason, you…
[00:37:39] Brian: …you are able to craft…
[00:37:40] Phillip: …everybody thinks is tasteful.
[00:37:41] Brian: Right. The perfect Instagram. Right? Correct. Right. But it’s interesting because I felt this with certain people. You ever encounter those people who have maybe the right clothes, and they go to the right coffee shops and the right restaurants, and they have, like… they talk about depth. They talk about things of depth and how it affects them or the world or whatever. But for some reason, when you’re talking to them, you’re like, I don’t feel like this is actually depth. Like, you just get the general sense that this is pasted-on stuff that, like, they’ve collected and they haven’t really grappled with these things themselves or thought about them in a way that you could call ownership or discovery. And it’s funny because they’re, like, really nice people often. Like, it’s really tough because you’re talking to this person, you’re like, this person’s nice. They seem to care a lot about things that are good, but for some reason, it just doesn’t feel like it’s fully… it’s not fully there. Maybe they haven’t pressed it far enough, or maybe they haven’t made it their own, or maybe they aren’t comfortable with it, or I don’t know what it is. But you’re like, no.
[00:39:16] Phillip: Why do I feel like you’re talking about me?
[00:39:19] Brian: I was not talking about you.
[00:39:22] Phillip: Sarah’s face says it all.
[00:39:26] Brian: There is an element, I think, of, like, adopting… there’s so much that happens online, but I think it’s even more pronounced in person when you feel like people are putting something on and they think they’ve come… they think they’ve got it, but they don’t have it.
[00:39:44] Phillip: Yeah. There’s always… so I think this sort of thing comes in waves, and I feel like there’s… the reason that this discourse hits people in the brand space is because… you always reach a level of the, like, meta discourse and then the meta meta discourse. And I think that we’re in the meta meta discourse. Like, the meta discourse is around virality and trends. Right? And the meta meta discourse is when virality and trends become a trend unto themselves. And I think that that’s where we were…
[00:40:29] Brian: Trends are trending.
[00:40:30] Phillip: Right. Trends are trending. We’ve had that conversation before. Yeah. And when you want to critique the people who behave in the “trends are trending,” like, conversations, like, to stay ahead of that, you have to continue to change, like, move the goalpost of the nature of that conversation, because you actually, at your nature, you were the person who used to like those things. So, like, there’s a hipster mentality to this. It’s like, the things you used to like are now liked by people who you don’t want to like them.
[00:41:04] Brian: Totally. You know? And you want to be associated… I have a lot of things like this. Dostoevsky. Trended like crazy. I’ve been talking about Dostoevsky…
[00:41:13] Phillip: …since ten years ago…
[00:41:14] Brian: …talking about…
[00:41:15] Phillip: Dostoevsky. Right.
[00:41:16] Brian: And I’m like, come on. Like, this…
[00:41:19] Phillip: …is… now people now are talking about The Brothers Karamazov. You were, like… you were all over…
[00:41:23] Brian: …that…
[00:41:24] Phillip: …ten…
[00:41:24] Brian: …years ago. I was all over that ten years ago. I know. Before that, actually. But it’s tough when you have something that you know is cool. It actually is good. It is cool, and then it becomes pop culture, if you will. Like, it becomes part of the slop culture to post about Dostoevsky, is exactly what happened. And, you know, people are arguing about, you know, what the role of Father Zosima is, and you’re like, did you even read this book?
[00:42:07] Phillip: Alright. Alright. And in an effort to get us to a good place before we have to end, I do want to make sure that we mention… I mean, like, there’s so many things that we could cover. Alright. So here’s a good feel-good. Well, you know, it feels good to…
[00:42:25] Brian: I don’t know if…
[00:42:26] Phillip: I’m not feeling…
[00:42:27] Brian: …bad, man.
[00:42:28] Phillip: It feels good to feel bad. Matthew Benson, writing over at Dexerto. You ever go to dexerto.com for your news, Brian? Matthew Benson, writing about viral dopamine sites in South Korea that let users shop without actually buying anything. This is what he writes. He says, South Korean shopping addicts can now experience the thrill of online purchases without actually spending any money in a new viral dopamine site trend. And, in fact, actually, you can even get fake deliveries. Like, when you click order, a fake courier will accept the order and the site launches a tracking window. This is amazing.
[00:43:22] Brian: It’s the new window shopping.
[00:43:24] Phillip: It is. It is. It’s a responsive window on your cell phone. One of the sites… I can… we can link here. You can choose your delivery type, rabbit delivery or turtle delivery. Some of the sites are food deliveries. This is a food delivery site. I don’t know why food delivery of all things…
[00:43:52] Brian: Placebo effect. Yeah. I ordered food, and it showed up at my door. Therefore, I have already eaten. Like, it’s a diet.
[00:44:01] Phillip: Yeah. This is, like, the new viral diet trend. I can’t even pronounce this, so I’m not even gonna try. So, yeah, I’m gonna add something to my cart. I’m gonna check out. Place demo order.
[00:44:21] Brian: It’s gonna ask for your real credit card. Just kidding.
[00:44:24] Phillip: Oh, customer wallet. There it is. Yeah. Lightning arrival in eight minutes. It’s on…
[00:44:28] Brian: …its way. Lightning arrival. Man, that’s better than a nice average purchase.
[00:44:33] Phillip: That was a fast checkout, y’all.
[00:44:34] Brian: Yeah. Forgot.
[00:44:35] Phillip: So that’s one example. That’s an example of a site. I found a site like this many years ago that I wrote about. So I wanted to come back around to, okay, why are we talking about this? This is something I feel like we need to go a little deeper into. There are many examples of this sort of thing, and I wanna close the loop on many things that we have actually touched on over the years that cover this. I called this “straw man brands” back in 2019. I found a site like this from an Instagram ad that was transactable, but it never actually took your credit card. It let you check out as, like, pay on pickup or pay with cash, but, like… or yeah… when you went to check out, it would give you an error. And it was brands that were using meta ads, or at the time Instagram ads, to basically test brand, like, brand creative that they haven’t committed to yet. So they were spending some money on the platform to see what brands would actually… like, what brand creative might work and what brand mockups, like packaging mockups, would convert better…
[00:45:55] Brian: Back when…
[00:45:55] Phillip: …that time.
[00:45:56] Brian: …took some work to do.
[00:45:58] Phillip: Right. Now that’s not a… yeah. And it was way cheaper back then too. I mean, you’re talking seven years ago. So probably wouldn’t do that now. I mean, maybe people do that now. If you are doing that and you know of people that do that, it’s probably cheaper than actually creating much of product that doesn’t sell. Tell me about it. I’d love to hear. I’m sure there’s creative strategists out there that do that kind of thing all the time. Let me know about it. But you mentioned this in “Shop Like It’s Your Job.” Yep. Many, many years ago, you had a piece back in Insiders.
[00:46:34] Brian: Long time. Number four. Yeah. It was early.
[00:46:38] Phillip: That…
[00:46:39] Brian: That was not a very good record.
[00:46:40] Phillip: Consumption… consumption is, like, our hardwiring. Right? And that, basically, like, itself is, like, dopamine. It’s the path to dopamine, and that we buy before we reflect on even wanting the thing. And so dopamine sites, anything that can exist… like, you make the argument that anything that can exist in service of that, like a dark pattern. In that case, you were making an argument of, like, of course dark patterns exist… mhmm… because they serve the dopamine. And so you sort of make the argument that anything that can exist will exist. Murphy’s law. And the Murphy’s law pattern, anything that can exist will exist. It’s like the dopamine site is just that same mechanism. But, anyway, I think that this is fascinating stuff. Could this happen in the US? Do you think people would do this in the US?
[00:47:51] Brian: You know, I think it could, but it would be like… we do it in videos. Like, performative art projects more than, like, an actual thing that people do on a regular basis. Like, we just buy things anyway. You can buy stuff on Amazon haul for, like, nothing. So it’s almost… we can get the same thing. I think people get the same thing for such a small amount of money that they just buy… like, this is… you can spend dollars and get the same effect and actually have something show up at your door, which we really like. So I think it’s not really something that I see taking off like crazy in the US. We like to get something for our money. And, true. Like… window shopping itself is interesting. It’s its own art form now, and I think that a lot of people would just passively window shop on websites like crazy. Like, that happens all the time.
[00:48:53] Phillip: But isn’t… isn’t unboxing a form of that? Like, isn’t watching other people buy things and unbox something? Same thing.
[00:49:04] Brian: Part of the window shopping experience. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it’s, like, maybe just a little bit too much of a stretch for a lot of US shoppers, like, to… like, I could see that being an installation at a museum, like an art show… in an art show, sorry, where someone created, like, a shopping app terminal that you can walk up to and do a fake purchase. But I don’t see it as, like, something that people would do on a regular basis to get dopamine from.
[00:49:44] Phillip: Yeah. There’s a…
[00:49:45] Brian: We just buy something.
[00:49:47] Phillip: I’m gonna look a little deeper. I’m very certain that I have had a… we did some insights work back in the agency days about cart abandonment behavior. Mhmm. And especially with certain types of sites, like footwear in particular. There’s certain footwear, intimates. And I think we all… we would, like, chalk it up to, oh, these are complex purchases or they’re experiential. Like, you have to feel them. Right? Like… but in some customer surveys, when we talk to people, you actually talk to an actual person. And some people will say, no. I like to just add things to my cart. Like, mhmm. It’s window shopping. I like putting things in my cart. It’s not that I have an intention to purchase it. I just like the feeling of putting it in my cart.
[00:50:51] Brian: They may eventually, potentially, or they may not. Like…
[00:50:55] Phillip: Yeah. Well, not with the ecommerce platforms we were using back then. They come back and that thing is gone, baby.
[00:51:00] Brian: I wanna have…
[00:51:00] Phillip: …to… it’s not gonna be on your cart.
[00:51:01] Brian: …sitting in my, like, saved cart in Amazon that just got pushed out. Like, it’s probably a pretty big number of stuff that just got… I just hit save for later.
[00:51:11] Phillip: Oh, I have hundreds of items in save for later.
[00:51:14] Brian: Hundreds in save for later. And…
[00:51:15] Phillip: …that are, like, probably 10 years old, eight years old.
[00:51:18] Brian: Exactly. Totally.
[00:51:20] Phillip: Yeah. I’m never buying that crap.
[00:51:21] Brian: You know what’s interesting, though? I think the dopamine hit that we’re getting now in the US is, like, these bidding sites. Like, a lot of…
[00:51:29] Phillip: Whatnot?
[00:51:30] Brian: Yeah. Whatnot. And now eBay has their version. And I think that we’re getting so much dopamine from that sort of behavior.
[00:51:42] Phillip: We’re so… the structure maybe is that we’re more of a consumer society just by default. Right. We consume more by default. So we don’t need these. We don’t need the synthesis of it.
[00:51:56] Brian: We don’t need the synthesis of it. Yeah.
[00:51:57] Phillip: But we can… we’ve got the…
[00:51:58] Brian: …real thing. The… we’re in the potential to buy something. Like…
[00:52:02] Phillip: Gaming is the synthesis of that. And I think that, right? So, like, the buying of things in the gaming environment to me is that synthesis.
[00:52:13] Brian: Yeah.
[00:52:13] Phillip: Right? Yep. I think we might have talked about this at some point. What?
[00:52:20] Brian: Well, it just kills me. We’re just training…
[00:52:23] Phillip: Oh, I’ve definitely written about this about, like, the training of the young consumer is to be a…
[00:52:30] Brian: Game one addict.
[00:52:32] Phillip: Yeah. Well, no. Not to be… not need to be a consumer. Yeah. You’ll learn to consume, and you’ll learn to online shop in your first experiences through gaming now. Like, and I’ve written and spoken a lot about that specifically in a bunch of our Roblox coverage. Yep. Anyway, dopamine sites, get on them.
[00:52:55] Brian: It’s interesting what trends make their way over, you know, from Korea and from Japan. Like, this is one that I don’t know if it will make its way over.
[00:53:07] Phillip: Yeah. I mean, we’ve got Studio Ghibli… exactly… stores now. That’s something that is opening up, I guess, pretty soon. We’ve got a…
[00:53:19] Brian: That’s pretty cool, by the way.
[00:53:21] Phillip: Pretty cool.
[00:53:22] Brian: I’m into that.
[00:53:23] Phillip: The number one…
[00:53:25] Brian: I have to say, like, the Ghiblification thing that happened, I think that paved the way for this, actually.
[00:53:32] Phillip: Yeah. Probably. I could see that, like, the image trend on ChatGPT.
[00:53:37] Brian: Yeah. It was a cultural moment… yeah… that drew a lot of awareness to it, but…
[00:53:43] Phillip: The last thing I’ll say, and right as we wrap, we are… our culture now, especially, I think… this gross generalization, but I think Gen Z in particular is coming into their peak, you know, spending years. They’re getting older. They have more discretionary income. They can spend those dollars on whatever they feel like. They grew up with anime. They’re spending money on anime. Yeah. Yeah. Things are, like, $500 million global box office for things like Demon Slayer.
[00:54:22] Brian: Yep.
[00:54:23] Phillip: You have the worldwide phenomenon and things like KPop Demon Hunters, like the rise of experiential, like Asian dining all over the place. I mean, this is anecdotal at best, but these conveyor belt sushi bars are popping up all over the place now. But I think that’s just fueled by folks who are just primed and ready to spend dollars on it. And we’re just… yeah… there’s an audience now for this specifically.
[00:54:58] Brian: Mhmm.
[00:55:00] Phillip: And so, yeah, not everything leaps over from Asian culture…
[00:55:05] Brian: Artwork does.
[00:55:06] Phillip: …to the US.
[00:55:07] Brian: But music.
[00:55:08] Phillip: Yeah. Potentially.
[00:55:09] Brian: I mean…
[00:55:09] Phillip: Stray Kids is huge right now. Yeah. But if you look at what does leap over, when it leaps over, it has a big cultural impact. And, yeah, maybe dopamine sites is the…
[00:55:20] Brian: No. I don’t know about that.
[00:55:22] Phillip: I’m the guy who’s been saying live… just because livestream happened in Asia won’t happen here.
[00:55:27] Brian: So… yeah. Uncut Gen Z.
[00:55:32] Phillip: Alright. On that note, is that it? Alright. Thanks for watching this episode of Future Commerce. If this conversation sparks something for you, like, follow, subscribe everywhere where you get podcasts. It helps more people to join the conversation. If you wanna bring more Future Commerce into your world, we have beautiful print books. Go check them out at futurecommerce.com. And we have our brand new book. It’s called Strata, 10 aesthetics that are impacting culture and commerce. You can go get that at futurecommerce.com/shop. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We will see you next time.
