What happens when a cultural figure with 20 years in the limelight decides to become a brand operator? Adam Domian, SVP & Head of Commerce and Audience at 11:11 Media, joins Phillip and Brian to break it down. From Walmart shelves to TikTok lives, Adam shares how Paris Hilton's portfolio balances licensing cash flow with equity-driven brands like Parive, and why "founder energy" is becoming a moat in an AI-saturated marketplace, especially with someone “sliving” such a dynamic and coveted life.

• The licensee-licensor era is giving way to the celebrity-as-majority-owner era.
• US social commerce lags Asia because of consumer habits, not the technology itself.
• Trust travels with the person—platforms just shape the dialect.
• Once everyone has AI, cultural instinct becomes the differentiator.
• Archive footage is the new commercial inventory for legacy IP.

[00:14:31] "She is the same person across those platforms; it just allows us to lean further into different aspects of her life." — Adam Domian

[00:19:15] "She was in the labs with the chemists from day one. [Parivie] product development took two and a half, three years." — Adam Domian

[00:23:44] "We have Paris and her cultural pulse as an asset to these businesses, but 80% of it is running a traditional playbook." — Adam Domian

[00:26:16] "When everybody's leveraging AI, there's a moment of parity. The humanness becomes the differentiator." — Adam Domian

• 11:11 Media
• M13
• Parivie

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People will let AI be their therapist but not their partner, their assistant but not their manager. Gillian Katz of Hannah Grey VC joins Phillip and Brian to unpack the firm's newest Cultural Vibrations journal and the qualitative study behind it: a read on how people are actually negotiating AI's role in their lives, domain by domain, role by role; from anthropology to sommelier frameworks to Goodhart's Law.

Key Takeaways:

• People accept AI in almost every domain, but reject it in specific roles within them.
• Naming a cultural signal may be what stops it from moving.
• Qualitative research captures what dashboard culture flattens.
• The next frontier isn't the technology, it's the governance around it.

Key Quotes:

• [00:11:04] "No one wants to be managed by a machine, but they're okay to sort of put control over one." — Gillian Katz
• [00:27:08] "It's exactly like the way you wish every person interacted. But if you did actually have that experience time and time again, you would be so frustrated." — Gillian Katz, on AI sycophancy
• [00:29:22] "We give people the benefit of the doubt, but we expect a hundred percent accuracy from AI." — Gillian Katz
• [00:40:56] "If you only use AI to go build your business, you're gonna lose the discernment that's required to actually use AI well in the first place." — Brian Lange

• Learn more at hannahgrey.com
• Read the latest issue of Cultural Vibrations, featuring Brian Lange

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"There will be a lot fewer people employed doing existing work in not just insurance, but in all business." Phillip reports from the press pool at Semafor World Economy 2026, where 500 CEOs, a quarter of the US Senate, and 20 G20 finance ministers spent two days in Washington DC sketching out the next decade. Inside: why the AI race is really the electricity race (and why we may have already lost it to China), the $10 trillion and 250 gigawatts Meta says AGI will cost, Senator Mark Kelly on the new commercial space economy, Levi's 50% DTC milestone, Ralph Lauren's experience-economy flex, and why Balzac saw the "exterminator economy" coming 200 years ago. Plus: white smoke from Apple Park.

• Space is getting a concentric-circle economy. NASA hands low-Earth orbit to private industry; the moon is next; Mars is the horizon. Sen. Mark Kelly laid out the vision at Semafor.
• AGI has a price tag, and it's $10T. Meta's Dina Powell McCormick framed the path forward: trillions in capital, 250GW of power, and geopolitical fallout to match.
• The AI race is actually the electricity race — and the US lost it five years ago. Chips and lithography aren't the bottleneck. Power is, and China builds more in a year than the US builds in a decade.
• NIMBY has evolved into BANANA. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone is the new posture from Virginia to Maine, and the quiet threat to American AI competitiveness.
• The heritage brand isn't dead; it just needs a thesis. Levi's built a three-layer AI framework — process, product, people — and is posting 16 consecutive quarters of DTC growth to prove the strategy works.
• Everyone's becoming an exterminator. The age of sovereignty is producing a wave of DIY micro-entrepreneurs using ChatGPT as their back office. Every job AI takes, it seems to hand back, just in a flat-brimmed hat.
• The American consumer is less bearish than the algorithm suggests. Ralph Lauren, Kickstarter, and Chime all reported data at odds with recession narratives. Spending is healthy, savings are up, and creators are launching.

• The Commerce Department is a hedge fund now
• Dispatch from Semafor: Pritzker on what beats fear
• [POLICY BRIEF] The Halo Effect of the New Economy
• Future Commerce Podcast: Marcus Collins

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