Chris Hall — the Ecomm Cowboy, former All-American offensive lineman at UT Austin, and the guy who scaled Bruce Bolt to one of Shopify's fastest-growing stores as a team of one — is as entertaining as he is tactical. But underneath the hat and the accent is a marketer who has been thinking hard about what separates the people who survive this AI moment from the ones who don't. His take: the button-pushers are already gone. The marketers who build and manage agents — and who also make bold analog bets — are the ones who get more valuable every quarter.

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Inside the episode:

• Why the "team of one" marketer is actually more viable than ever — and the Claude-powered workflow Chris used to handle ads, email, SMS, reporting, and organic social simultaneously at Bruce Bolt
• How BattleBox turned Whatnot into their #2 revenue channel (surpassing Amazon) — with net-new customers, not cannibalized .com sales — and why most DTC brands are still completely asleep on it
• The AI stack Chris is actually using: Claude for strategy and execution, Wideframe for agentic video editing, Kive for AI product imagery so clean that seven-figure brands are running it as their entire Instagram feed
• Why "get sweaty on camera" is one of the highest-leverage moves a marketer can make right now — and the skill it builds that AI literally cannot replicate
• The two anti-AI bets Chris thinks every brand and operator needs to make in 2026 — and why they work because of AI, not in spite of it

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters: 

[00:00] Intro & Meet the Ecomm Cowboy

[00:23] Chris Hall's Background: UT Football & National Championship Run

[02:55] From the NFL to Nonprofits to Ecommmerce

[05:33] Building a Coffee Brand & Breaking Into Ecommm

[06:52] Bruce Bolt: The Batting Glove Unicorn Story

[08:39] The D2C Supper Club & How "Ecomm Cowboy" Was Born

[09:07] The Future of Marketing Teams & Agentic AI

[14:26] How to Build Your Agentic Workforce with Claude

[19:01] Why Claude? Getting Started With AI Agents

[20:39] Building Board-Level Reporting & Automating Tasks

[27:34] Chris's Full AI Stack: Wideframe, Higgsfield & More

[31:36] Personal Productivity Hacks & Daily AI Workflows

[35:31] Making Anti-AI Bets: Live Streaming & IRL Activations

[38:36] Live Shopping on Whatnot: The BattlBox Case Study

[43:54] Shopping as Entertainment & the Future of Selling

[48:19] Where to Find the Ecomm Cowboy Daily Show

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Connect With Brett: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGw
Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

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Relevant Links: 

• Chris's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislukehall/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript: 

Brett Curry (00:00):

I think the wise move is to own that, not like, "Hey, you're putting too much work on me. " No, no, no, no, no. I can do it. I can do it. That's the way that you keep your job.

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Chris Hall (00:23):

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the Ecommmerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today have I got a treat for you? I don't just have an Ecommm guru. I don't have just a former all- American football pro at the Universe of Texas. I don't just have one of the greatest Ecommmerce personalities on the internet today, but I have the Ecommm Cowboy himself, Chris Hall, Chris, welcome to the show. How's it going,

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Brett Curry (00:55):

Man? It's going even better now that I'm with you, Brett. I have known of you for so long, but now we finally get to meet and talk and all the things I'm doing even better now.

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Chris Hall (01:06):

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things where we know all the same people. We do. We're in all the same circles on the internet and never fully connecting until right now. And so super excited to do this. So here's what I want to do. We're going to dive into how to build an agentic workforce, how you as a marketer can manage agents to become a superhero level. Marker, that's what you're passionate about. It's where you're seasoned with. I've got a perspective here too that I can add to the discussions. We're going to do that. We're also going to talk about live shopping, how we can get into more free traffic because if we know anything as ad people and as an ad agency, like ad costs are going up, that'll always be true. But I think people want to know, Chris. I know people want to know.

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(01:53):

Ecomm Cowboy, how did you get that name? How did you get here? And would also love to hear your football story as well because I'm a football guy, but wherever you want to start is beautiful.

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Brett Curry (02:04):

Yeah. The name Ecomm Cowboy is somehow stuck around 2020. Coming from being born here, being raised here, one of the first things that people

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Chris Hall (02:15):

Always- And here is Austin, Texas, correct?

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Brett Curry (02:17):

Here is Austin, Texas. Here is Austin, Texas. One of the first things anybody ever asks me, Brett, when they meet me is, where did that accent come from? Where is that from? I don't hear that very often. I said, actually, it comes from here. I'm from Texas. And anyway, growing up here, born and raised, I actually went to school down at the University of Texas. I was an all- American football player there. 2005 to 2009, we won a national championship, lost another one. Played against guys like Von Miller and Doma Kung Su, et cetera,

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Chris Hall (02:55):

Et cetera. So you were blocking these guys. I was. First of all, you hear someone say play college football. That's impressive. Play any level of college football, don't care what it is, that's impressive. You played for the University of Texas All American during the national championship run and you blocked some amazing athletes, Von Miller and Dominican Sue. Come on. That sounds like a name there.

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Brett Curry (03:18):

It wasn't very easy. It wasn't very easy. And there's a reason why Dominican Sue's name means House of Spears. Okay. He's hard to block. He's hard to block.

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Chris Hall (03:28):

Who was the hardest though? Who was the hardest person you ever had to block?

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Brett Curry (03:32):

I would say probably Sue, especially his senior year. We played him in Lincoln, Nebraska. No, no, no. We played him in Austin, Texas in 2007. Now that was a different time. Two years later, I think he had kind of hit a whole nother level on whatever was happening there, genetics, et

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Chris Hall (03:51):

Cetera. Yep. Still growing, eating.

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Brett Curry (03:54):

Yeah. Yeah.

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Chris Hall (03:55):

We're training all that. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (03:57):

I had just gotten my first team all American tag and then we played them in the conference championship and Nebraska got nine sacks that day. So anyway, they had a day of days.

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Chris Hall (04:10):

Your offensive line coach was not having a day. You were not. No. The next practice was probably not fun for you either.

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Brett Curry (04:17):

No. Yeah. And you know what? There are even some of those clips that are still around that get brought up every now and again. Yeah, he was the hardest. I would say I had ... So I started at all five positions when I was starting at Left Tackle, had a little easier time with Vaughn, but he was young. He was young. He was a freshman, so I had a little bit of an advantage. But anyway, that was a great experience. Amazing

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Chris Hall (04:42):

Story.

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Brett Curry (04:43):

It was actually through that that I stumbled my way into eCommerce on the backside. The Cowboys had me the number one center coming out my senior year and I decided to not do that. I just decided to skip the NFL altogether and go into nonprofit work. It's amazing. I traveled a bit, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, but mostly here in central Texas, mostly working with young men. High schools, college age. Amazing, man. And then in the midst of all that, one of my former teammates and I, we started a little coffee company together and figured out how to sell it on the internet. This was 2014, no subscription brands back then. What

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Chris Hall (05:33):

Was unique about your coffee brand? What was the angle?

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Brett Curry (05:37):

Yeah. So what was unique about it, we went all African beans. We had a connection with a farm in Ethiopia. Oh, dude. I love Ethiopia

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Chris Hall (05:49):

Coffee.

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Brett Curry (05:50):

Love it. Me too. Me too. We were all African beans. He was employing people that were basically cast out and could not get work. He would employ them specifically on his farm. And so we were going African beans and we were hipster third wave. If I had a little more market research about me, I'd have probably just sold heavily chemically flavored coffee that was already pre-ground. But anyway, this was a different day. And so there was nobody doing that in Austin especially. And so that was the route that we went and thrillist gave us some pats on the bags said we were one of the top 15 new roasters in the country, et cetera. That was really where I just kind of muddled my way into Ecommm. I eventually got hired on with a friend at his agency. That's where I really cut my teeth and then just kept going from there.

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(06:45):

It was at Bruce Bolt thereafter. Once I got hired at Bruce Bolt, I was the entire marketing team for a period of time.

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Chris Hall (06:52):

And for those who don't know, Bruce Bolt, explain that product. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (06:56):

Bruce Bolt, for those who don't know, Bruce Bolt was a kind of a, and still is, kind of a unicorn in the baseball world. Okay. So a little different than football. But what they did was they took the commodity of batting gloves, made them with Cabrera leather, okay, fancy leather, and charged four or five times more for them. Now that sounds like, oh gosh, that's another D2C play. Just charge a whole lot of money. But the thing is that real baseball players burn through batting gloves every few weeks.

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Chris Hall (07:29):

Interesting.

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Brett Curry (07:30):

And so if you can make a better batting glove and charge more dollars for it, there's plenty of baseball parents that will happily pay. Oh

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Chris Hall (07:37):

Dude. Yeah. Baseball, baseball parents, it's probably as expensive as golf or any other expensive you can think of. Travel baseball, travel baseball parents, come on, that's like 80% of your budget goes to baseball. Exactly. Rent and then baseball, those are your top two expenses. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (07:54):

Exactly. And it was during that time for about 24 months we were quite literally one of the fastest growing stores on Shopify. And because we were growing at a scale that I had never seen and was doing my best to manage, what I needed to do was I needed some help. Yeah, I needed some help. And so I started organizing these dinners downtown. We called it D2C Supper Club. And essentially what I was doing was getting the best available people together and getting advice from them. And that's where the whole Ecomm Cowboy thing just stuck, Brett. I just decided, let's just ride with it. We'll just keep the accent.

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Chris Hall (08:39):

Keep the accent. Did the hat come first or the hat just add to the mystique and add to the persona?

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Brett Curry (08:46):

Well, I've been wearing Cowboy hat since I was a kid, but I did revive them because whenever people would meet me, they'd be like, "Brother, where's the hat? I want to see the hat." You got to have the hat. All

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Chris Hall (09:00):

Right. The people ask for the hat, the people will get a hat. You give them what

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Brett Curry (09:03):

They want. Exactly. What

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Chris Hall (09:04):

People always remember, for sure.

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Brett Curry (09:06):

Exactly.

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Chris Hall (09:07):

That's amazing. Well, one, love the baseball scene. Baseball was my favorite sport as a kid. Then I kind of transitioned to basketball football. But love that. Love carving out those niches there and a better baseball glove. Super cool. But you were a team of one. Chris, I see that as the trend moving forward as well. There's going to be a lot more brands with the team of one or a limited team. I mean, I guess we work with a lot of eight, nine figure brands that are omnichannel and almost all of them have a multi team member team. So I don't know that's necessarily going away, but I do think that teams are going to be able to do much, much more. And I think we're going to see potentially less hiring, maybe- I think so. ... even some jobs going away, but less hiring for sure.

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(09:55):

So let's transition. What are you seeing? What do you see in the future here with Agentic AI and marketing teams? Paint the big picture, then we'll get tactical and practical.

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Brett Curry (10:05):

Yeah. The big picture is, and anyone who would say otherwise I think is purposefully hiding their head in the sand. The big picture is that there's a significant amount of white collar jobs that are going away. And we all love working from our laptops. It's a lot better than

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Chris Hall (10:24):

Working with a shovel. It is, it is.

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Brett Curry (10:27):

But the sad part about that is that there are a lot of things that AI is simply better than you at. And one of them is never needing to sleep. Another one is accurately uploading ads. And if we're frank, even though copywriting gets a bad rap with AI with the right context, a lot of times it writes words better than- It's getting too.

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Chris Hall (10:55):

So much better. Unbelievably better with the right context, the right framing, the right inputs, the right structure AI, copy AI writing is pretty phenomenal.

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Brett Curry (11:07):

Especially everyone in our industry, and this is a big reason why I was burdened to start the daily show that we have is because when your job requires you to be at the bleeding edge of the internet, then you need to know what's going on. Anybody who's been on the internet realizes that there are new tools and capabilities that I couldn't even keep up with to try if I wanted to.

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Chris Hall (11:37):

Right.

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Brett Curry (11:37):

I think what's going to happen, especially in marketing, is that very quickly hiring will slow. That's already

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Chris Hall (11:44):

Happening. Absolutely. Agreed.

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Brett Curry (11:45):

And then people who are now, let's just say you're middle of the rung organizationally, or let's say you're early on somehow you graduated and you snuck in and you're associate social media manager or whatever, whatever the title is, you snuck your way in, those kind of people very quickly will need to become managers of machines rather than future managers of humans. If the job today mostly consists of doing things told very quickly somebody in your organization is going to figure out it's much cheaper and faster for me to tell an agent to do it instead of you and I can cut you. And so the incentive is if you want to have a future as a marketer, founders, they're going to be fine. Directors of departments and large organizations are going to be fine, but everybody who's in the middle and toward the bottom, they're going to need to upskill this year hardcore as if their future depends on it because it does.

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Chris Hall (12:58):

And that means doing all things.

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(13:01):

Yeah. I think it's very clear that if your main contribution to the marketing team is more button pushing and completing tasks that you're directed to complete, that stuff is going away, largely has gone away. If you can think strategically and you are very smart and you become a pro with AI, then you can become kind of superhuman and then you become very, very valuable. I think there are going to be some organizations. If you listen to Jensen Wong from Nvidia where he's like, "Hey, we're going to still maybe have, we're going to grow our workforce by 30%, 50% and they're the most profitable company ever type of thing." A little bit different, but he's like, "But each employee is going to be doing more and more. And we're going to start increasing our expectations for the token usage of our employees." And we're going to measure that.

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(13:55):

If you're not using a certain amount of tokens, meaning if you're not leaning into AI in a big, big way, then why do we have you? Exactly. And of course that's an AI company, but I think that same kind of approach, that same kind of structure is going to be prevalent across all industries. It's like, "Hey, what kind of token usage are you using as a marketer?" Meaning what kind of AI outputs are you able to generate for my brand or for the agency or whatever?

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Brett Curry (14:23):

Absolutely.

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Chris Hall (14:24):

Yeah, that's where it's headed, for sure.

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Brett Curry (14:26):

Absolutely. And I would consider Ecommmerce not exactly the same as tech, but for sure we're tech adjacent. Everything that happens in Ecommmerce is because of what is developing and happening inside of the tech world.

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Chris Hall (14:41):

For sure, for

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Brett Curry (14:41):

Sure. And so whatever's happening there is sure to come here. It's just a matter of time. We're talking months, we're talking quarters and a few things that I want marketers to pick up now that were, especially ones who aspire to go forward in their careers, what I want them to pick up is what I was endeavoring to do at Bruce Bolt, barely holding it all together while we scaled to the moon

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Chris Hall (15:18):

There.This was pre-

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Brett Curry (15:22):

It was pre all of that. It's pre all of that. But what were my responsibilities? Ad creative, that's coming from me. Copywriting, that's coming from me. Email and SMS marketing, that's coming from me. Board level reporting that's coming from me. What's happening inside the ads manager? That's coming from me. What's going on with organic social? What content should we be making there? Are we going to be able to carry out this in real life event? How are we going to tell people about that? What should that be like? What should we capture while we're there? All that's coming from me.

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Chris Hall (16:00):

Not quite as scary or as painful as are intimidating as blocking in Dominican Sue, but- Not quite. That's pretty intimidating. It's a pretty hefty load for one person, for sure.

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Brett Curry (16:10):

It's a load. It's a load. And eventually I did get some help, but still when you're up until two or three multiple nights every week, it's hard to hold it all together. But the good thing is that now that requirement is actually doable. It is. Yes. It is doable. It just takes working inside of Claude or working inside of whatever tools or network of tools

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(16:42):

To knit those together in such a way that not only can you do it for a brand, but you can do it for multiple brands. This is already happening and it is reality. And so I think the wise move is to own that, not like, "Hey, you're putting too much work on me. " No, no, no, no, no. I can do it. I can do it. Yes.That's the way that you keep your job. Absolutely. That's the way that you get more opportunities is, "Hey, not only have I done this here, but look, if I go there, I bring this team of agents with me that have already produced X result, they will get Y for you. You bring me, look at what I bring to the table." So this is the now and it's the requirement in 2026 to upscale. This is really my belief.

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Chris Hall (17:32):

Love it. Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. We're going to take just a minute and tell you a little bit about my agency, OMG commerce. Now we work with some of your favorite eight and nine figure D2C and Omni channel brands and our specialty is profitable scale. We love taking great brands and amplifying their growth profitably. We've helped a number of brands go from zero on YouTube to spending as much as a million dollars in 90 days while hitting a CAC or CPA Target. We've also helped multiple brands launch on Amazon or just add scale to Amazon. We took Boom Beauty from zero to almost $6 million in sales their first 12 months on Amazon. So if you're not satisfied with your current level of growth, if you're looking to diversify channels, maybe you're a little too dependent on Meta and you want to add YouTube or you're not pleased with your Amazon growth, then we need to chat.

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(18:35):

So visit us at mgcommerce.com, click the Let's Talk button. We'd love to schedule a complimentary strategy session with you and with that back to the show. So you mentioned before we record, it's maybe time to get Claude pilled. So why should we get Claude pilled and where should we start here building our agentic team? Where do we begin?

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Brett Curry (19:01):

Yeah, very simply, very simply. I would recommend Claude simply because they're executing right now faster than anyone. Does it seem like that to you, Bret? I

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Chris Hall (19:12):

Mean, it doesn't make 100%. It seems like they're disrupting, displacing, totally upending industries left and right. Every time they make an announcement, someone's stock is going down because people are like, "Oh, well, Claude's going to replace that. " Exactly. And we're a little bit of hyperbolic maybe, but not really. Yeah, exactly. I think I've got some friends that are playing with Open Claw. I'm this close to buying a Mac Mini just to start playing there. I'm

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Brett Curry (19:33):

Intrigued.

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Chris Hall (19:34):

I am. I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. And I think there's a lot there, but there's a lot of safety concerns there and you need some guardrails. And so if you're a little bit more tech savvy and you want to take the time and you're open to the risk, I think that could be amazing. But Claude's got all those safety mechanisms built in. So probably just start with Claude. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (19:53):

Yeah, absolutely. Start with Claude. And the first thing that I would say is, because I know this response will be pretty immediate is like, I don't know how to do command line interface. I'm non-technical, that's scary. Okay. Then what you do is you talk with Claude. Yeah, exactly. And you say, "I'm non-technical. This is scary. What do I do? " And that proces, be it a half day, be it three days going through that process, I've been teaching myself OBS right now in terms of live streaming and how to navigate scene transitions, to create all the things, et cetera.

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Chris Hall (20:38):

Amazing.

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Brett Curry (20:39):

That process will enable you to do what? Set up board level reporting that you and your bosses and your team can know, "Hey, here's how things are going. Here's the recommendations I would change inside the ads manager based on your philosophy that you have imbued inside of Claude. Okay, this is the reason you don't go buy a wrapper. You actually work with Claude to create the thing itself inside of that system based on those recommendations. Okay. Now we're talking to ad management. Now let's talk about website. Okay. As far as website is concerned, PDPs can be changed, banners can be changed, changing out the heroes on the homepage. All of those things can be done from your laptop without ever having to leave. You're okaying, you're agreeing. You say work from this folder, not that one. And then beyond that, you get to email and, hey, we need to spin up a new campaign based on past performance, what would you recommend if you get these suggestions?

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(21:44):

No, let's go with this one. Okay, spin that up for me. Start with this copy, et cetera. And so you start making your way down the list and what you realize really quickly is that

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(21:55):

Not only can you manage Shopify, not only can you evaluate ad management, ad account performance and have it upload your ads, you check them, you give the green light, not only can you run your email SMS retention program, you can even have it start doing research, "Hey, what creators do we need to work with? " Given these limitations working inside of this amount of followers. And what you realize is that very quickly you have developed what would have taken multiple days to do. You have enabled yourself to execute in a morning every morning type way, give the thumbs up and then we keep cruising. So this on top of specific tools like Kive is a specific generative tool that Bart at Dad Game specifically loves. Who is himself a one-man marketer

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Chris Hall (22:53):

Over at Dad Day? What does Kive do?

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Brett Curry (22:56):

Kive very simply enables you to say, "Hey, this product with this kind of model, this is what I'm looking for, make it.

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Chris Hall (23:04):

"

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Brett Curry (23:04):

And gets your product details at a cellular level exactly such that you can take that, put it inside of your Instagram feed, put it on your PDP and nobody knows. Nobody knows that it wasn't from AI. And there are actually seven figure brands that we've talked to where now their entire Instagram feed is from Kive. Holy cow. And nobody knows. Nobody knows. Crazy. And so this is an example of, "Hey, Chris, instead of organizing a photo shoot for Bruce Bolt coming up, what assets do we need? What needs to happen there?" I can make that from my laptop now and we're good to go for the upcoming launch in 60 days. Wow. So these kind of processes and putting them inside and equipping yourself with them, I think it makes you a person who is unfireable and a person who is very hireable.

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Chris Hall (24:02):

Very hireable. You're the person that everybody wants and then you show that you can consistently execute. You're going to get more work and get more pay. Like you do the job of five people, maybe I'll pay you like three and then- I'll take that.

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(24:16):

Yeah. And then now you're the most valuable person on the marketing team. It's amazing. There's probably a few ways we could go, few directions we could go next. I've been Claude pilled for sure using it to rebuild some of our financial models as an agency, using it to rebuild our comp structure for our ICs, for our individual contributors across the agency. We're really just tying it to revenue expectations and retention of that revenue and where it's going to be really easy for our team to see kind of their base and bonus potential. But Claude helped me build all of that in a very complex way, but it was all just done through chatting with Claude. Exactly. I've used it for some YouTube stuff, which I'm happy to unpack a little bit. But what I found that this really key here is like you start to explore with Claude and you can use co-work or code or whatever, you just chat with both of those, but then it starts building you stuff and then as you build stuff, you want to capture that as a skill, right?

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(25:16):

Capture that as a skill, that way that can be rerun to those specifications again and again and again.

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Brett Curry (25:23):

Absolutely.

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Chris Hall (25:23):

But talk through that a little bit. Is that kind of the MO or the approach you're teaching and you're taking as well for all of these things from PDPs to email campaigns to Instagram ad to Instagram posts, we're building skills for all of these and now we can just deploy.

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Brett Curry (25:42):

Yeah, absolutely. And taking that route, saving that knowledge and making them a repeatable task via skill is definitely what you want to do

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(25:52):

So that you can have the context saved there, et cetera, and be able to go back to them again and again. Something that we have coming out that I think should be crucial for all of us to know just at a, I would say at an industry level is taking for example, the top 250 brands inside of our space, organizing them by vertical health and supplements, apparel, sporting goods, et cetera, et cetera. This is something I've been working on as of late that should debut sometime this month and then organizing from there. Okay, what's happening with them marketing calendar wise? What promos are they running when? Okay, organizing that. And then from there, what collaborations have they run with what creators and what were the results, et cetera. Okay. How many ads have they launched, boiling that down and then making all that, like you're saying, into a repeatable skill such that we can continually deliver that content and get gleanings from that.

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(26:57):

Not that that's an exact fit for everyone in the industry, but to know those who are ahead of you and what they are doing, that becomes a great value for a person who is, I would say Brett at brands, a lot of times you are a frog in a well. You only see the sky that you have and you don't have the view advantage of someone who is operating at an agency and sees across verticals, across brands, what's working and what's not. That becomes increasingly valuable to a person who is doing their very best to hold it together in one single spot focused on one brand and product every day. So that's something that we're working on right now.

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Chris Hall (27:34):

Very true. I love that. So I know you talked about being Claude Pill, you're a Claude fan as am I, but what does your AI stack look like? Are you playing with other tools like Akai? Are you playing with Gemini and other tools, you're stitching stuff together? Because you strike me as like an AI master, what are you doing?

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Brett Curry (27:54):

Well, one that I think everyone should look into that I think more marketers will need to become equipped with, I referenced this one specifically is Wideframe. Widestream. Wideframe AI is wideframe.ai. I believe I hope Daniel Pearson doesn't get me in trouble because I'm citing his domain wrong. But what Wideframe does is it takes the agentic capabilities and it applies it to video editing specifically. So I can come back from a shoot, we just did it. I can load all that footage into my laptop or from my Google Drive and I can say, "Okay, based on this footage, here's what I'm looking for. I want it to look like this. I want you to get me 80% of the way there on the cut and then after that I will come in and fine tune." And then it will literally start going inside of your timeline and recreating all of that footage that you're looking for.

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(28:55):

You can say, "Hey, this ad worked really well for us. I want to change out this hook. I want to modify the body, pull from here based on the body, and then I want to change the CTA at the end." And then it will start

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Chris Hall (29:05):

Operating.

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Brett Curry (29:07):

Wow. And so video editing is entirely time consuming.

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Chris Hall (29:12):

It's crazy. It's

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Brett Curry (29:12):

Crazy.

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Chris Hall (29:13):

It's most time consuming. We're working time consuming graphic design and things like graphic design.

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Brett Curry (29:19):

So much. And it is like the bare bones of creating ads now. I mean, it's the foundational piece.

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Chris Hall (29:26):

It is. It is.

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Brett Curry (29:27):

And so in addition to Claude, what I'll do is I'll work with Wideframe. Obviously there's a number of other things there when it comes to actually generating content. Higgsfield I think is the simplest place when it comes to bringing all those models together generatively. That's what I'm operating inside of a lot when it comes to actually generating content. But what I'm most excited about right now is Wideframe because of the capabilities that it gives me to produce video like this. Give me 80 to 85% of the way there, hop back into the time ... Line and then get that thing out the door.

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Chris Hall (30:02):

Wow. Wow. Yeah. My wheels are turning and spinning on that for sure.

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Brett Curry (30:07):

You need to get on that one, brother. I'm telling you. It's so good.

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Chris Hall (30:12):

It's so

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Brett Curry (30:12):

Good.

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Chris Hall (30:13):

And we've got so many specifications and I've built so many skills in Claude for this is how we want a YouTube ad, to be able to execute on some of that would be pretty amazing. Always juicy. Higgsfield. So that's pulling in different generative model to then craft the right copy for you?

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Brett Curry (30:31):

Well, so it'll be more in the sense of making said video or making said frames. So it'll pull in vo, it'll pull in cling, it'll pull in all of those various image and video models. And then what we're able to do is I can say, "Hey, take this image of Brett. Okay, put him in this kind of setting. And what do I do to get the right prompt?" I literally just go in and I talk to Claude. I say, "Hey, Claude, I'm prompting Nano Banana and I want it to look like this. What should I tell Nano Banana?" Exactly. Brilliant. And then get that prompt, upload your image and then all of a sudden things have changed. This is how we create all of our thumbnails now. And then thereafter, hey, first frame here, last frame here, I want you to make everything in between and inside of this ad I want him to be doing this.

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(31:24):

I want this podcast read to look like this, et cetera. So Higgsfield is a great shortcut for anybody that needs to actually make with AI because it amalgamates them all together.

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Chris Hall (31:36):

Nice. Nice. Amazing. Amazing. What about any personal productivity hacks? What are you doing? Is Claude running your Slack, checking your email, doing your schedule, all those things? Walk me through that.

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Brett Curry (31:52):

So one thing because we have our daily live show and what we are endeavoring to do is to be at the bleeding edge of everything that's happening in the timeline. What I have Claude doing every single day is pulling together a report. Number one, hey, what are the biggest stories? Any commerce, what happened in the past 24 hours? Giving me a full report on that, giving me a summary, why it would be important to operators, what are questions to ask regarding that content that wasn't answered in the articles. And then same with the tweets. Hey, based on what's happening on X over the past 24 hours, what are the most relevant tweets and things that are happening to operators that we need to be glued in on right now?

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Chris Hall (32:38):

And are you giving Claude specific candles for people to follow on X or looking into one? Yeah. Okay,

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Brett Curry (32:44):

Cool. No, I am. I am. I'm saying, "Hey, the best content and the most relevant content I've found are coming from these 10 websites and newsletters." I want you to read them every day. Stay plugged in on what's happening there. Love it. Here are the follows that I consider to be top and bleeding edge. It's David Herman when it comes to ad buying. Absolutely. It's Rock ladnick. When it comes to what is there to complain about on Meta today, all of those kind of things. And then give me a report and we want to be able to feature those and talk about them. In terms of productivity on writing, you tell me your thoughts. I have still yet to take the plunge on Whisper or Whisper Flow or ... Have you taken the plunge on this one? Yes. Okay. You got to sell me because I've yet to go all in on it.

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Chris Hall (33:41):

Yeah. I mean, what I've found, so a couple things and for those who don't know, Whisper, Whisper Flow, it's a way to just talk to your computer or to your phone. But I'm an auditory processor so sometimes I like to talk. I like to process my thoughts as I speak. I enjoy doing that. I mean, if you ever use something like voice to text on your iPhone and I love Apple, it's absolute garbage. It's horrendous. It's pure trash. It makes all kinds of weird mistakes. It's just almost unusable. What I've found with Whisper Flow is I can talk for a long time and it gets it right. You can also say things like, "Hey, you know what? I need to get this thing out to Chris Lang. I mean, I know I actually need to get out to Chris Hall and I'm going to do these things." But then when you hit go, the text is perfect.

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(34:35):

It corrected your mistake. And so it's pretty sweet. So you combine that where now you can just kind of talk to Claude in that way.

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Brett Curry (34:44):

It's true.

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Chris Hall (34:45):

Or I've also, I try to do some things while I drive. I still keep my eyes on the road, but just using Whisper Flow, it's magical. So yeah, I still find myself typing and then I'm like, "Shoot, what did I just talk after?" Oh, you just

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Brett Curry (34:58):

Talked at this thing.

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Chris Hall (34:59):

You can also say things like, "Okay, hey, these are the four things we need to do, or these are the most important things. It's this, it's this, it's this. " And it'll put it in bullet point format. It formats it. So yeah, I think you'll like it and do the free trial and stuff like that. Just see how that works for you. But I remember my buddy, our mutual friend, Andrew Ferris, on his podcast, he's talking about Patrick, his partner, business partner, and Patrick's like, "I talk to my MacBook. I don't ever type." And so I'm not to that level, but I am communicating verbally more.

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Brett Curry (35:31):

Let me ask you this, Brett. I am convinced that everyone in our industry, and this is true for the individual and it's also true for brands and agencies, software, et cetera. I think that we need to be very strongly making AI bets in the sense of, "Hey, I'm going to equip myself with this. I'm going to upskill my processes, the teams of agents I'm building and managing all of that. " I'm also convinced that there are significant anti-AI bets to be made in order to stand out, in order to stand out in all this way. Do you think similarly?

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Chris Hall (36:11):

Yeah. Well, just to make sure I understand what you're saying. So like Gary V, I've heard him talk about this recently where like, hey, there's going to be a resurgence of analog. There's going to be people hungry for real analog human experiences that are not AI in any way.

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Brett Curry (36:26):

Absolutely.

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Chris Hall (36:27):

Yeah, 100% agree. And I feel myself craving that as well. I love AI. I'm super excited about it. I'm thinking about Claude a lot, but yeah, give me some real human connection as well.

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Brett Curry (36:40):

Two things that I think ring that bell that you're getting at so clearly two bets there that I hope everybody makes and I've been thinking about so much are number one, going live live streaming. That's why I'm live streaming every single day.

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Chris Hall (37:00):

What a great move.

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Brett Curry (37:02):

Yeah. Going live, number one, live streaming content, live selling. I think two examples ... Well, let me finish. Number two is IRL activations. In real life, getting face to face with your customers, your best customers, your potential customers, et cetera. Those two things which require presence, they require sweat and they require energy, but they also allow you to do things that the robots can't do. 100%. And they also allow you to get, I mean, traffic and eyeballs and dollars that you don't have to pay somebody else for at the end of

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Chris Hall (37:44):

The day. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And I think those in real life activations for brands for agencies is something that we're really good at at OV. I love speaking on stage. We do a couple of events at Google. You do events a Google a couple times a year. I speak at other events. I think that there's going to be more of a premium on things like that as we move into more of an AI world where I want to go talk to experts, I want to have that experience and I'll pay a lot for it and those connections are going to be super valuable. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (38:17):

As a buyer, because I've been agency, I've been brand side, I've been founder, I've been operator, et cetera. As a buyer, if I can get in person with you and I like you, man, you got me 85% of the way there. You got me in the door.

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Chris Hall (38:36):

No like and trust like that. You can't build that any faster than in the same room or the same physical space or like on a real Zoom call or something with humans. And so love that. Talk to me about live shopping because I think I've always loved infomercials. I used to really like just the sales aspect of QVC. Sometimes most time I can't watch it because I hate the product or hate whatever, but I love the salesmanship of it. I love the boardwalk sales guys.That's just fascinating to me. But talk live shopping, live selling. Why is that going to be valuable?

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Brett Curry (39:11):

So right now everyone in our space, I'll just say in the Shopify ecosystem, how about that? Everyone is completely asleep on whatnot. For those who don't know, when I say whatnot, some of the best and brightest in our industry still don't know what I'm talking about when I say whatnot. Whatnot is a live selling app. That's all it is. It is QVC in 2026. Love it. Okay. Gary V's behind it. The Paul Brothers are behind it. They've already made bookouts of money on it. But

‍

(39:49):

What you'll see a lot of there is anytime anybody's in there, all it is, is live shopping. People have their credit cards out. They don't come for anything else. They come to buy. Yeah. They're there to buy. And I know that there are a lot of operators in our space when they see it, they'll think, "This is for reselling. This is below me. It's not for me. It has nothing to do with our business. And I want to pop that bubble hardcore because Battlebox, John Roman, CEO of Battlebox, they sold their company for boucous of money. They've got multiple seasons on Netflix of content that they've created. Okay. I'm talking about a big boy brand. They came back and actually bought the business back. Okay. So they're back at the hell. They are running it. They're running it again.

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Chris Hall (40:38):

I want to pay attention to. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (40:40):

So it's a subscription brand. Okay. They've got a box of manly stuff that they're going to send you. Okay. What in the world are they doing on whatnot? Because they're not resellers, right? I mean, they're not resellers. What are they doing there? You see like, oh, $1 reselling, what, what? What are they doing there? Okay. They started on whatnot last year, last April, actually a year ago. Very, very native. I mean, very nascent, very recent when it had launched. They have been there. They started one session a week and they started doing two sessions a week, three sessions a week. Now they have started deploying their TikTok creators that they have relationships with to come and host sessions on whatnot.

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Chris Hall (41:24):

Wow.

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Brett Curry (41:24):

They've developed a backend system. Hey, here's all our products. Here's what they can go for. Okay. Here's what they can't go for. Are there any offers that we can create? Now they are to the point. They're definitely on there more than three times per week. They're on there several times per day and whatnot has become their number two channel in terms of revenue generation. Number two, we're talking about a big boy brand that has already exited and they bought it back. Okay. It has surpassed Amazon. And I know the other thing that people will be thinking is, "Oh, well, they're cannibalizing sales on their dotcom by doing that. " No, they're not. No, they're not. And John will tell you this. Net new. Net new. People that never discovered them, bought on whatnot, will come back and buy on their website. Okay. So I say all this to say, especially in our age of rising ad costs of Ecommmerce talent needing to show, "Hey, I am worth more than just pushing buttons." One thing that you can do right now is say, "I am willing to get sweaty and embarrass myself on camera and let me get on there and sell to these people.

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(42:33):

Let me make some dollars. Get me on that camera." That kind of energy will keep

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Chris Hall (42:39):

Working. Are you for hire, Chris? Can we hire you for ... You be the pitchman for our brand. That's a little lovely

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Brett Curry (42:47):

Thing. The thing is I actually do, I've been talking with my wife. I was like, "I just want to get on whatnot so bad. We got to figure out something to get on whatnot and start selling here."

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Chris Hall (42:57):

I'm with you. I would love to do that myself. That sounds super fun, but that's such a big barrier to entry. And so as AI becomes the way to deploy so many things, even video and static images and great copies coming from AI, things like that. Well, one of the bigger barriers to entry, one of the strongest human elements is can you get on a camera and sell people and convince them to woo them and charm them and get them to want to watch and then buy what you've got. And I love this so much and I was kind of reminded of this, this is separate but still related. There's a new site that's new to me that allows for the liquidation of Amazon returns and now I'm completely blanking on the name of it, but it's like my wife, this has become her form of entertainment.

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(43:54):

Amazon returns. And for a while I was like, "This could get bad." There's always Amazon boxes in my house all the time. I show up and I got there's like these giant boxes of cabinets and stuff for our family. I'm like, "Okay, this is interesting." But then this is when it was okay with me. She was like, "Hey, look at this coffee maker that I found." And it's like a $400 coffee make. This thing is sick. Current bid is 45. And so I can't remember the brand, but it's like a $450 brand of coffee maker and we got it for 75 bucks. And so I'm like- Exactly. "This is good adiction. Let's keep this going. " But here's what's funny. We were at a soccer game last night for my daughter Molly and I started talking about this, then this other mom over here started talking about it.

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(44:38):

Then my wife came over and everybody just started talking about shopping for deals. And I think there's just something about, we love buying stuff and we love talking about what we're buying. And so I think live shopping deals, some of these things have a viral component. I'm a coffee guy. I never heard of this brand, but I mean, they didn't benefit because I got it from a discount site, but maybe I'm going to buy their coffee filters and stuff like that. And so yeah, there's something about this live element that I really like.

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Brett Curry (45:10):

This to me is so important to hammer home because it's a piece of everyone in our industry making an anti-AI bet and in the context of our K-shaped economy, Americans still want to buy for entertainment.

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Chris Hall (45:30):

They

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Brett Curry (45:30):

Do. Just because their dollar doesn't go as far, they still ... I mean, all of our holidays are surrounding large shopping experiences. The Americanness has not gone away and one of the ways

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Chris Hall (45:45):

That- The funny joke that I love is like, "Oh, President's Day, what's that to celebrate?" It's like, "It's to buy furniture." Exactly. Exactly. Our founding father buy a mattress. Okay.

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Brett Curry (45:56):

Exactly. We're going to Lowe's or we're going to wherever. We're going to take advantage of this big sale. Exactly. And this is a way for everyone to still tap into that shopping as entertainment experience, but do it in a way that is new and fresh that you don't have to pay Zuck for to do it in a way that surprises and delights. And here is my challenge that I would give to everyone who styles themselves as a marketer. In some sense, it's easy to sit behind a computer and click a few keys and complain about all of the cold emails that I got and to put a few things out in the world and then we just read the numbers and, "Hey, it went good and I'm so smart." In some sense, that's easy. You know what's riskier is putting your face on the screen.

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Chris Hall (46:52):

Absolutely.

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Brett Curry (46:52):

And you becoming the salesman, that's a little riskier. Now you got people in your comments who are remarking on you and how you positioned it, but the reward is there too. The reward is there and that's Battlebox has taken it. They're at 55,000 followers on whatnot now and man, they're live selling pilled and I am convinced this is another route that everyone can take in order to equip themselves and survive and thrive in the new age, the new era of Ecomm that

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Chris Hall (47:29):

We're in. I love it. I believe you got to go all in on both, right? How can you become this AI enabled AI superpowered marketer, agency leader, brand owner, but also make some analog bets because that's going to be at a premium. So love that, love that contrast, love that tension and they actually go very, very, very well together. So it's amazing. Chris, it's been super fun, man. I could keep going, keep chatting with you for hours on end and now we definitely got to hang out in person, but where can people connect with you? And if people are like, "Hey, maybe I do need to hire Chris." I know maybe you're not actually for hire. I'm not really for hire,

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Brett Curry (48:11):

But yeah.

‍

Chris Hall (48:11):

But if you do, but yeah, what is your offer? How can people benefit from you or should they just tune into your show? What can we do here? Come

‍

Brett Curry (48:19):

To the show. Come to the show every day. We are live at 12:00 PM Central on X and on YouTube. Of course, you can sign up for their newsletter and all of that, but I've basically pushed in all my chips. I turned down the biggest and best job that was ever offered to me,

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Chris Hall (48:40):

Best

‍

Brett Curry (48:40):

Opportunity I've ever had. And I turned it down to push my chips all in on being live and in living color every day. And yeah, we're having the best and brightest in D2C on. Brett, you are coming very soon. You will be

‍

Chris Hall (48:57):

On

‍

Brett Curry (48:57):

Show.

‍

Chris Hall (48:58):

I'm pumped about that. Thanks for the invite. And dude, you got the energy, get the personality. You're born to do this thing.

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Brett Curry (49:06):

Appreciate that.

‍

Chris Hall (49:06):

So it's- At

‍

Brett Curry (49:08):

Ecomm

‍

Chris Hall (49:08):

Cowboy.

‍

Brett Curry (49:09):

At Ecomm Cowboy, come find us. We're there every day. Tune in, type in and come on the show.

‍

Chris Hall (49:15):

Sweet. Chris Hall, Ecomm Cowboy, ladies and gentlemen. Chris, thank you so much. Ton of fun.

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Brett Curry (49:22):

Thank you, man.

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Chris Hall (49:24):

Awesome. As always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you and if you found this episode helpful, which I know you did, share with someone who you think would benefit from it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to mention, if you're a great brand, if you're scaling high seven, eight, nine figures in D2C or Omnichannel, we should potentially talk. We've worked with some of your favorite brands and we'd love to consider working with you as well. We are masters at unlocking new channels like YouTube, unlocking new scale on platforms like Amazon where we can add up to eight figures in new growth and we've got multiple ways we can work with you. So we can do the full service thing and work like a partner with your team and really run everything, or we can offer consulting.

‍

(50:11):

So maybe you've got an internal team that really knows their stuff, but there's an area they don't know really well and they'd like to get some consulting, we can do that. We also have tons of free guides, free resources, free materials you can check out. All of that gets started at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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