Phillip and Brian get deep on a week when everything felt a little unhinged: Shopify's AI sidekick started building custom apps, Iran allegedly took out AWS data centers mid-Claude-outage, and the McDonald's CEO went mega-viral just days after Phillip prophesied it. Underneath the chaos, a throughline emerges: the things we've used to measure value (view counts, credit card rewards, third-party apps, and AI contracts) are quietly expiring. Culture is first. Then comes commerce.

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Key takeaways:

Shopify Sidekick can now build one-off apps on demand, raising real questions about the future of third-party SaaS.
AI geopolitics is here: data centers are now strategic infrastructure, and the "human in the loop" question has military stakes.
Meta's move to invoicing ends years of free credit card rewards for brands running paid social, — and that party's been winding down anyway.
MrBeast's long-form view counts are down 50% YoY, even with heavy paid promotion; the algorithm has shifted to interest-based, not subscriber-based.
Media buyers optimizing for CPMs are chasing non-real traffic. — Rrecovering a sense of propriety is the only way back.

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McDonald's CEO Ate a Burger Like He Was Defusing a Bomb

Future Commerce

McDonald's CEO Ate a Burger Like He Was Defusing a Bomb