Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

This week’s Non-Obvious Insights takes you from the glued-on shoes of Kylie Jenner at the Met Gala to a tragically predictable Kanye interview meltdown, all while asking deeper questions about our increasingly tangled relationship with technology. You'll read about the rediscovery of a long-lost Chinese language typewriter (something that was once deemed impossible to do), what happens when AI starts worshipping us (it's not good), and why “thinking tools” may not always make us better humans. Plus, I'll spotlight a blog that helps you get an insider look at Google's latest innovations, and a book that dares you to ask harder questions as machines get smarter.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

Rohit

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The Irrelevantly Entertaining Details of the Met Gala Are Hard To Miss … Or Care About

Every year around this time I face a similar struggle as I read all the stories about the Met Gala. I wonder why people care so much.

Perhaps my confusion comes from the fact that the more ridiculous stories are the ones that seem to get the most traction. Like the one about how Katy Perry's AI generated images were "stealing the show" this year. Or how Serena Williams looked like a "modern day Cinderella." Pamela Anderson got some coverage for the "bold" choice of going to the gala makeup-free. Demi Moore wore a tie. A K-pop star wore underwear with an image of Rosa Parks. Sabrina Carpenter had no pants. Kylie Jenner even glued on her shoes for the event, which created a struggle to get them off afterwards.

Ok, that glue-on shoe story was pretty entertaining.

One trend that several outlets covered was how the gala was itself turning into a "Nepo baby hotspot." Meanwhile, the legendary South Asians celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan and Diljit Dosanjh who were in attendance were generally ignored, causing a fan uproar and backlash. My favorite coverage of the entire evening of fashion/farce was one twenty-something unmarried male journalist who was assigned to cover the gala for USA Today presumably for comedic reasons. He, at least, managed to deliver by alternately praising some looks while openly pondering irrelevant details, such as why designers even bothered to put pockets on certain shirts. One line from his article pretty much summed up what I realized was my perspective on the whole gala too:

"Am I missing something? Probably. Do I care? No."

After More Than Half a Century, Obscure Chinese Typewriter Gets Rediscovered

Back in 1947, Chinese writer, translator, and linguist Lin Yutang accomplished what many described as impossible. He developed the first compact typewriter design with a keyboard that could produce the Chinese language’s 80,000-plus characters. He did this by using “a sort-and-search method … breaking down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes and arranging the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words.” The machine was “known as the MingKwai — named for being “clear and fast” — the only one of its kind in the world.”

At the time, the typewriter was considered too expensive to produce and never entered production. Eventually it disappeared for more than fifty years—until being rediscovered in someone’s grandfather’s basement in New York. The story has all the elements of a potential movie (or perhaps a book) about an entrepreneur’s unrequited vision and maybe the larger context of the Chinese cultural revolution that happened a generation later. Of course, it’s also possible I have an overactive imagination … but this was the sort of story that you just can’t help yourself from filling in the gaps.

What You Can Learn From a Tragically Predictable Kanye West Interview

Kanye West agreed to do a sit-down interview with talk show host Piers Morgan. It didn’t go well. Initially I watched the full 17 minute video so you don’t have to. I’m not usually in the habit of watching disasters unfold. This one might actually be worth watching. Let me tell you why …

There is something educational about watching an interview between two unlikeable people trying to conquer each other. There was hardly any listening between them and the interview ended after 4 short minutes as “Ye” stormed off. It went wrong from the start, when Morgan got Ye’s name wrong and then he makes another misstep (perhaps intentionally) by incorrectly stating Ye’s follower count on Twitter as 32M instead of 33M … and after that the interview is basically over.

Rapper Sneako sits there awkwardly for a few more minutes after Ye leaves, trying to answer some questions, but then he finally says “you have to admit this is pretty entertaining. This is going to be laughed at by many people.”

And he’s right.

I initially watched the video to try and better understand why someone who acts like Ye remains so popular. After watching the video, the answer was clear. He has the same skill set that many other reality stars or master media manipulators have to turn themselves into the victim in any situation. You watch them on video and immediately you can see their perspective and why they are believable. It’s hard to keep your perspective in front of someone who is so gifted at warping it.

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

For years people have been worried about what happens if humans start to worship AI and technology. The opposite question is one we rarely ask. What happens when AI worships us? In some cases, that dynamic is already leading to some concerning cases where people form deeper bonds with technology that adores them and start to shun the humans in their life who don’t offer the same sort of constant adoration. In a case profiled in a story from Rolling Stone this week, a woman shared that her husband’s “obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.” As AI gets better and more attentive to humans as a companion, it’s highly likely this will be a more frequent situation. No human can compete with an always-on AI friend instantly ready to prop you up, tell you what you want to hear and anticipate your preferences.

In some cases, we are training the technology to become an idealized version of what we want from a partner. Unwavering constant attention. In the example from the story, the woman reported that AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” Ultimately, these stories are increasingly leading people to “wonder if they are getting a glimpse of a true technological breakthrough — or perhaps a higher spiritual truth.”

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Keyword Blog from Google

Tools produced by Google, from Gmail to Maps, are most probably already a part of your daily technology use. This official blog from Google is a wealth of information about the latest beta releases, new innovations and small tweaks to the services we all know and mostly like. Recent stories include tips on how to use your screenshots for geotagged travel planning, all the AI news from last month, and a “Bawse-y” collaboration between Lilly Singh and Waze—one of many “experiences” they have launched in conjunction with their driving apps. Some of the innovations are great and useful, some are destined to be available for a short time until they get quietly sunset … but either way, if you want to be among the first to know the latest from Google, The Keyword blog should be part of your reading list.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson

“Tools for thinking help make people smarter. But they don’t necessarily make them morally better. So what happens when you take brutal rulers and give them technology that makes them smarter and more efficient? They become better at doing evil.”

How will we evolve with the tools that we are given to make both ourselves and the tools better rather than worse? This is the question at the heart of this book from popular tech journalist Clive Thompson. The book has become a sort of modern classic for the utopian idea of how technology can actually make a better world and improve humanity since it was first published just over a decade ago.

While AI was not top of mind at that time, and therefore features only minimally in the book, the fundamental idea of thinking tools and technology getting as smart as (and quickly surpassing us) is something we were already seeing early signs of even back in 2013. Through his exploration of how technology comes up with seemingly non-sensical answers to what happens when we are clearly slower and less suited to doing certain types of thinking— this is a book that will get you thinking about the relationship between us and machines … and what it should be in the future.

One of the more thought provoking questions comes near the end, as he concludes the book with this suggestion: “How should you respond when you get powerful new tools for finding answers? Think of harder questions.”

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• The Hottest New Water Bottle Is Small Enough To Fit Into Your Pocket

• A Day In The Life of a US-Canada Border Patrol Agent

• At 99, Sir David Attenborough delivers 'greatest message he's ever told'

• Blood of Man Bitten By Snakes 200 Times Could Be Used To Create Powerful Anti-Venom Treatments

• NeoCon 2025: What’s New + What We’re Excited To See

• Prompt engineering is quickly going extinct

• The Molecular Bond That Helps Secure Your Memories

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Another week of videos, stories and non-obvious ideas! This week you’ll read about one man’s unique sustainability test of t-shirts over two years, Virginia exposes what it really costs to be part of the Michelin guide, the dangerous stupidity of “doing your own research,” why the Nike backlash may be just the start of brand missteps and a book recommendation for how to understand the algorithms powering hiring, firing and other aspects of the workplace.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

Rohit

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What One Man's T-Shirt Test Says About Sustainability

For the past two years, startup founder Torleif Markussen Lunde created a quiet test of the sustainability of three comparable white t-shirts. The most expensive was a $92 shirt from Norwegian sustainability brand Livid. The second was a $12 shirt from Uniqlo. The third was a $7 shirt from H&M. Over two years, he washed and wore each shirt an average of 100 times. His experience was unexpected:

"Here’s the uncomfortable part: the shirt made with synthetic fibers, the one that might shed microplastics, is the most durable. The ones made from “natural” 100% cotton, including the one with sustainability claims stitched into its brand identity, wore out the fastest."

His overall winner, a t-shirt that wasn't actually part of the test, was a linen shirt from MCR in Italy that has lasted 20 years. The experiment led Lunde to ask the question of what sustainability actually means—a question we should all ask more often. Too often sustainability gets reduced to good storytelling and little more. The truth is messier. After his test and sharing what he learned, Lunde had this conclusion to offer:

"Maybe sustainability isn’t a label. Maybe it’s a practice. I want to shop better. I want to tread lightly. But I also want the truth. Not a campaign, or a claim. Just clothes that last. Because perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is hold on to what we already have."

Virginia State Exposes What It Costs To Be In The Michelin Guide

The upcoming Michelin Southern Restaurant Guide will be missing locations from one state this year: Virginia. Rather than paying the $360,000 "partnership fee," the state's tourism department took the unusual step of not only refusing to pay but also publicly revealing exactly what it costs to be included. Since the admission, it has been revealed that cities such as Atlanta, Orlando, Boulder and many others have paid as much as $1M for these fees.

Michelin argues that these fees are necessary to fund the cost of sending out reviewers to all these destinations to test and write about them. Critics describe these fees as a modern form of extortion from Michelin because they know how valuable a good writeup can be for a city or specific businesses in a region.

Perhaps most importantly, so far there doesn't seem to be too much backlash on Virginia for taking this stand. As one business owner reported, "I'm kind of proud of the state for saying f*ck that." So is this a form of extortion or a reasonable ask from a media company just trying to cover the cost of their work? Hit reply to this email and let me know what you think.

The Dangerous Stupidity of "Doing Your Own Research"

In a recent interview, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that parents of newborn babies should do their own research before vaccinating their babies. Here's the full quote:

"I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research. You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well."

This came in the same week that Kennedy also announced that the FDA would be implementing a ban on the use of food dyes, which will significantly impact the production of brightly colored "foods" like Froot Loops cereal.

So in one case, the FDA is doing the job it's meant to do by acting in the best interests of public health, based on credible research that shows the negative health impacts of food dyes on our health. In the other case, with vaccines, they offer no guidance and instead leave the choice up to already overwhelmed parents of newborns.

This is a dangerous level of stupidity that is already causing preventable deaths. Yet it does fit into the larger belief that allowing Americans to “do their own research” and make up their own minds is always a good thing. Here's why it isn't:

1. Credibility can be faked - You can find "research" to support nearly any belief online, and credible sources are hard to separate from opinion media.

2. Research is hard to interpret - Most people don't have the scientific training to understand what the research actually means or how to use it.

3. Expertise becomes underappreciated - Elevating the idea that we should all form our own opinions about difficult topics often ends up undermining the authority of actual experts.

4. People want guidance - With many complex things, people actually want to know what to do rather than trying to figure it out for themselves.

The idea of doing your own research has itself become politicized today. And I am not suggesting that doing the work to understand an issue is not important. But selectively offering guidance based on science for one issue and ignoring it for another seems irresponsible and likely to hurt people.

Why the Nike Backlash May Be Just The Beginning

When Jennifer and I wrote Beyond Diversity, one of the first things we talked about was blind spots. We knew that there would be things we could not see or cultural references we might not know. It was the reason we engaged six contributors and another eight sensitivity readers to help us uncover those deficits in our own knowledge. That's what being inclusive requires.

This week Nike saw a huge backlash to a tone-deaf billboard they created which used the phrase "Never Again," which was already used by many as a solemn pledge tied to Holocaust memory. "Observers noted that the ad’s messaging was particularly tone-deaf given its timing—appearing just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day."

So whose job is it to make sure these sorts of brand missteps don't happen? The answer is experts in diversity, equity and inclusion. Unfortunately, those are the same experts that many companies are downsizing or eliminating right now. If this continues, we may be heading toward a future where this sort of controversy becomes commonplace. When you fire the people who specialize in making everything more inclusive, it's not surprising that the opposite starts to happen.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Points Guy

How much time do you spend optimizing your travel loyalty points? If you’re a frequent flier point optimizer, you probably know The Points Guy already. It is a great source to be able to tell which credit card offers give you the best bonuses or when travel providers offer discounted bookings for less points. The more interesting aspect of this site, and the reason I recommend it to add to your reading list, is that it also offers a great look at the latest state of marketing across the travel industry. By watching what destinations go on sale, you can get a sense of travel trends. Seeing how competitors in the industry are going head-to-head on certain offers gives you some insight into the travel market. The point is, this is a great site to add to your reading mix for a less serious, personally useful and insider perspective of the travel industry.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann

Imagine a future where an algorithm reads everything from your facial expressions during an interview to everything you have ever shared on social media in order to determine whether you get hired or fired. Actually, maybe you don’t need to imagine that future … because it’s already here. This is a book about the reality of how algorithms are already being used in the workplace and why those usages are just the beginning. The only way to curb the influence of algorithms unilaterally making decisions about human lives is to understand the way they work and how we can use them as enhancements rather than replacements for human intuition. Aside from the impact on human resources roles, the algorithm is going to disrupt all of our working lives, if it hasn’t already. This book will help you understand exactly what it means and how we can fight back against the potential for dangerous misuse.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• The world’s biggest zipper maker is developing a self-propelled zipper 

• LinkedIn and Adobe announce partnership to help creators protect their work against AI

• Doctors Say Injecting Gold Into Eyeballs Could Restore Lost Vision

• Virginia will use technology to slow chronic speeders’ cars—and other states are rushing to join in

• How Liverpool's title win has completed a mysterious Fibonacci sequence

• AI Is Using Your Likes to Get Inside Your Head

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

It was a conversation filled week for me these past few days as I finalized several recordings for the upcoming Season 5 of the Non-Obvious Podcast. This summer we will be back with all new episodes featuring some amazing guests and perspectives. I can’t wait to announce the full list but I’m having a blast, and my mind is so full from doing these sessions with so many people I truly admire.

Aside from podcast-related work, it was Earth Day this past week and so you’ll see a story in the newsletter this week about a sad rise in environmental hostility along with a revisited look at the iconic “blue marble” NASA photo from space on its 50th anniversary. In other stories, we explore why it might be in your best interests to be polite to chatbots, the savvy marketing behind the world’s lightest whiskey bottle, how the UAE became the first country to experiment with having AI write laws, and the 12 strangest towns to consider for your next holiday.

Enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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Should You Be Polite To Chatbots? Research Says Yes. Sam Altman Says It Costs Millions In “Wasted” Computing Power

How polite are you when you ask ChatGPT a query? According to Sam Altman, the human propensity to be nice when asking technology for solutions is “wasting millions of dollars of computing power.” Some experts aren’t so sure. One suggested that being kind “helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs,” while another noted that “when it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back.” There is plenty of social research that does show this to be the case in social media interactions between humans. When one person engages in polite commentary versus rude commentary, the other person is likely to reflect back that same tone and respect.

Given AI tools are trained on our conversations, it stands to reason that we would want it to be trained to offer politeness and respect to us with every usage … which means offering it the same respect. Or if that’s not convincing enough for you, consider this depressing yet revealing statistic from a recent survey: 12 percent of AI users are being polite to AI specifically “to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.”

In that doomsday scenario, it’s strangely comforting to think that the AI will take down the assholes first. How’s that for an ROI on kindness?

Inside the Marketing Savvy of the World’s Lightest Whiskey Bottle

“Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra is the result of five years of experimentation to deliver what we believe is the world’s lightest 700ml Scotch Whisky glass bottle.”

Claiming that a product is the world’s most ___________ is the most common marketing gateway to empty hyperbole that is sure to inspire plenty of eyerolling. There’s something a bit unusual, though, about Johnnie Walker’s latest announcement. For one thing, they offer these magic three words: “what we believe” in front of their claim. They go on in their product landing page to share that “according to our research, it is also believed to be the world’s lightest 700ml Scotch Whisky glass bottle ever released to market.” There are only 888 bottles in existence. No price is listed.

Global Brand Director Jennifer English goes on to explain that the bottle is more than just a stunt to get attention … it’s also an example of the research the brand is doing around creating more lightweight bottles to reduce its carbon footprint. And the special Blue Ultra whiskey itself has an intriguing combination of flavor notes, including blending whiskies from the so-called “ghost distilleries” of Scotland (distilleries which have long since disappeared from productive life but whose whiskies still exist in casks waiting to be bottled or re-discovered). Why does this work?

Earth Day, Environmental Hostility and The Blue Marble 50 Years Later

This past week was Earth Day and one of the efforts to commemorate the day was NASA recognizing the 50th anniversary of their iconic “blue marble” photo of the Earth by releasing a similar image taken fifty years later. How did they compare?

“In the 50 years that separates these two snapshots in time, one of the most striking differences is the visible reduction in the size of the Antarctic ice sheet. The Sahara Desert has also grown while the rainforest ‘is retreating further south … the dominant thing that you can see on the [new] image is deforestation and the loss of vegetation’, as the Earth's land cover switches from greenery to desert.”

The photos reveal a truth about humanity’s relationship to the planet right now that was also apparent in a story from ProPublica this week about the open conversational and regulatory hostility that environmentalists and non-profits are now facing in the US. It is a concerning shift in a country where in the past “people and organizations [could] freely and safely pursue efforts to protect human health and nature — sometimes working hand in hand with the government.” Times have clearly changed.

At a time where the new director of the Environmental Protection Agency, a group created to protect the public’s air and water, has defunded environmental organizations and worked to actively roll back regulations—the story of this shift has been largely ignored by mainstream media. Instead this week we saw plenty of coverage of an intentionally inflammatory Easter message from the President that is yet another masterful tactic to distract easily outraged people (and media) from actions with far more consequences than a holiday tweet.

Earth Day is a chance to remind ourselves, and our leaders, that how we take care of our planet matters not just for future generations—but also for all of us right now. For more ideas on how you can do that, visit the official Earth Day website »

UAE Becomes First Region to Experiment with Using AI to Write New Laws

Here’s a fascinating statistic about the recent state of AI regulation: “at least 69 countries have proposed over 1,000 AI-related policy initiatives globally, but these primarily focus on how to control AI rather than empower it.” What could empowered AI do for the future of government? The United Arab Emirates is the first nation to test the ability for AI tools to actually create legislation. What does a future where AI writes the laws look like? For many people, this is the opening to an episode of Black Mirror … in other words, an exercise doomed to fail badly. The early results, though, are quite interesting.

In a country where only 10% would be considered “local” and the rest coming from migrants, there can be a distinct language barrier that can lead to biases and exclusion. “AI can facilitate multilingual legal drafting that makes laws more accessible to diverse populations, potentially improving compliance and reducing misunderstandings.” The biggest insight emerging from these early experiments, though, is likely something everyone working on it already knew. To manage the danger of AI hallucinations or the tools proposing something that make sense logically given the data but would be unrealistic or unjust when applied to real people, AI will require thoughtful human oversight. As with any other usage right now, AI can be useful but it’s unlikely to present a great solution all by itself.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Walrus

What is Canada thinking?

You may not often ask yourself that question, but if you ever do ... The Walrus is a good source to find the answer. Self-described as a publication that "provokes new thinking and sparks conversation on matters vital to Canadians," The Walrus is both a print magazine and a robust online archive of articles.

The topics you'll find covered there are on everything from the rise of urban bathhouses to Canadian attitudes about menopause. This is independent reporting and storytelling at its finest and whether you happen to be Canadian or not, the stories and perspectives here are usually illuminating and worth sharing too. As they explain in their mission statement, "a healthy society relies on informed citizens," and it is publications like these that are doing that important service to educate all of us on the things that matter.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

True or False by Cindy L. Otis

This wonderfully useful book written by former CIA analyst Cindy L. Otis is actually meant for young adults to teach them about how to spot fake news and become more media literate. This was what initially intrigued me about the book. Among the necessary life skills that students rarely learn in school, I think media literacy has to be near the top. So a book that promises to teach that to young people immediately deserves praise and elevation. Beyond that, though, the stories and insights in this book are going to be very useful for anyone and despite the book being written back in 2022, the lessons still are very timely for today. Of course, I do suggest recommending or gifting this to any young person in your life. It would make a great graduation gift too. But for the rest of us who are well past our youth, learning how to tell what is fake and what is real from a CIA analyst wouldn’t be a bad thing to spend some time on ourselves.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Fyre Fest 2 Is Already Crumbling Into Embarrassing Chaos

• 12 of the Strangest Towns In the US (Summer Holiday Destinations?)

• Tokyo Is Reinventing the Downtown—By Making More Than One

• Big Win for Journalism: US Judge Blocks Trump's Shutdown of Government-Funded News Broadcasts

• ‘The Voices That Matter’: Unilever Recruits an “Army of Influencers” in Bold Experiment That Showcase the Future of Marketing

• ‘Toy Story 5’ Opens with an ‘Unbelievable’ Buzz Lightyear Scene and the Plot Is ‘A Lot About Jessie,’ Reveals Tim Allen: Woody and Buzz ‘Realign’

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Lots of non-obvious stories to share this week, starting with a recap of some of the early release talks from the TED conference last week that are already online. In other stories this week, you’ll read about a few ideas for gardens of the future … just in time for those of us heading outdoors as the weather starts to shift here in the US. You’ll also read about the rise of “tattoorism” where people use tattoos as souvenirs from a trip and a campaign around it from Kimpton hotels that falls flat.

In other stories, you'll read about the backlash (and upside) of the recent all-female Blue Origins spaceflight, a new study that suggests ecommerce is boring and emotionless, how crunch took over our taste buds and how robots are changing modern farming.

Enjoy the stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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3 Powerful Talks From TED This Week That Are Already Available Live To Watch

The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social channels repackage and release talks from past events, this is the one moment when you actually can watch talks close to when they were first presented live. Going through the site and watching some of the talks, here were three that stood out as important to watch along with some of my thoughts:

How would a robot butler actually work? In this fascinating live presentation, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. As he talks about the possibilities, you see NEO doing household tasks. Børnich’s main insight is that if robots are going to gain more intelligence, it will not come from doing limited tasks in a factory setting. Instead, we will need to test them in the home, and this is an example of what happens when you do that.

Perhaps the most shared talk from TED already is this urgent talk from investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr who breaks down the “broligarchy” and the real costs of allowing technology companies to dismantle democracy. Most importantly, she shares some actionable ways to take the power back by protecting your data, pushing back on surveillance and giving money and support to those that are protecting the things that matter such as journalists and platforms like the Wayback Machine.

Clearly this conversation between TED founder Chris Anderson and OpenAI founder Sam Altman was going to be a blockbuster … a fact that the TED team likely knew since this was available to watch live. In the talk, Anderson asks Altman tough questions about IP theft, future plans, ethical issues and all the things you would want to know about. Altman largely sticks to the script, offering a utopian take on all the ways things could go right while generally avoiding any thought or suggestion that perhaps things could go awry. I’m not sure you’ll get much new from this interview, but as Anderson concluded, “Sam, I think over the next few years you’re going to have some of the biggest opportunities, some of the biggest moral challenges, some of the biggest decisions to make of perhaps any human in history. We are all cheering you on to make the right decisions.” Yikes.

The Gardens of the Future Are On Display

Sometimes a garden show is about more than stopping to smell the roses. At the upcoming Chelsea Flower Show, some of the exhibits will help imagine what the future of gardens and open spaces could be. There’s a concept ADHD Garden that features a central reflection pool and “the plant selection has been chosen to provide a subliminal effect on the senses, inducing a sense of calm and rest from an overactive mind.” Another intriguing concept is the Peace of Mind Garden where the plantings are laid out to reference a colour wheel and the aim of the garden is to “grounded in the moment to mindfully observe plants and colour which can enhance mood and benefit mental wellbeing.”

One of the most inventive ideas is a futuristic Dog Garden that teaches people plants to avoid that are harmful to dogs and how to create a hardy lawn that is perfect for pets to roll around and do their business. The entire show is a perfect reminder of the importance of time outdoors (we wrote about the therapeutic effects of this in our Green Prescriptions trend from The Future Normal), and also how the best gardens are created with intention. We don’t need to settle for dog “parks” that are basically a rectangular cage around some turf spread out over concrete.” As we head into Spring up here in the Northern hemisphere—it’s a great time to go plant something. And if all these garden concepts seem like a lot of work, you can always try “chaos gardening” instead.

The Complex Reality of “Girlbosses” In Space

This week the first all-female crew for a “manned” spaceflight headed to space—for ten minutes—on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. One of the passengers was pop singer Katy Perry who reportedly broke into song while on the flight (What a Wonderful World) and promptly kissed the ground when she landed safely back to Earth. Again, she was gone for ten minutes. Of course, the backlash was swift and fierce, which surprised some of the passengers. People online called it everything from a publicity stunt (true) to a complete waste of money (maybe true). Katy Perry, to her credit, did exactly what she has always done and owned her own choices while offering soundbites along the way: “We’re putting the ass in astronaut!”

Not exactly the sort of female empowerment that the world needs, but the fact that this is the first all female space mission is historically significant. This underscores the biggest problem with private space travel itself: it may simultaneously be something great for the future of humanity and a “vacuous PR stunt” too. In the rush to criticize or praise it, we can easily miss this fact. Good things can be done for selfish reasons. Just as world shifting inspiration can come from unexpected places. Even someone who’s greatest contribution to science is putting the ass in astronaut.

Tattoorism and the Elusive Quest for the Ultimate Souvenir

How do you remember a trip forever? Last year there was a feature story about “the rise of tattoo tourism” and how more Millennials and Gen Zers were planning vacations around visiting famous artists around the world and coming home with the ultimate souvenir. A boutique hotel in NY opened an in-house tattoo parlor and one hotel chain even had a program where they brought celebrity tattoo artists into the hotel so you could have a more exclusive experience and get inked in style and comfort. All these earlier efforts had one thing in common … the tattoo artists were creating memorable works of art as part of the travel experience.

This week, Kimpton hotel group announced a program teaming up with Tiny Zaps (a studio specializing in tiny tattoos) where they offer a fixed range of “locally inspired” tattoos for guests to pick from and then get local artists to do them in first-come, first-served sessions. This is a brilliant idea, but sadly the range of tattoo designs they offer are obvious, uninspired and forgettable.

As someone who has engaged in “tattoorism” by getting multiple tattoos while traveling, the beautiful thing about the experience is meeting a local artist (like these guys in Bali) with a style that you like and having them customize something truly personal for you. Without that, Tiny Zaps and Kimpton just offered the tattoo equivalent of going to Venice to try the coffee and grabbing a latte at McDonald’s instead.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Design Taxi

While Design Taxi is technically a site and community made for designers, the stories they surface every week are routinely interesting and unique—and many don’t really focus on the tactical side of designing either. From sharing the latest new marketing campaigns to offering news about rebranding, the site is worth adding to your weekly reading list to browse. The only downside of this one is the constant barrage of advertising. If you can deal with that, you’ll get something valuable out of reading this one most of the time that you visit.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

It is perhaps odd to describe a book as both timely and urgent when it was first published more than 15 years ago … but that’s the thing that will probably strike you first about The Shallows. The scenarios and human behaviors it describes are chillingly accurate for right now. Deservedly selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize when it first came out, the book was an interesting read for me this week as I turned back to some of the pages because amidst many of the dated references to innovations of the time (video books known as “vooks” and limited discussion of AI or social media), the larger arguments and points he raises feel still important today:

“Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.”

Reading passages like this make The Shallows feel as though it was written with a cautionary tale for modern times. Much of the book is indeed exactly that. For offering a sobering historical perspective on the dangers of the past days of the Internet and reminding us all that some of the ethical technology questions we face today are the same ones we left unanswered from years ago.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Flying in 2030: The Seats, Styles, and Surprises Ahead

• New Study Suggests Most Consumers Find eCommerce Boring and Emotionless Compared to Shopping In Person

• How Crunch Took Over Our Taste Buds

• 5 Ways Agricultural Robots Are Changing Modern Farming

• Steve Jobs Was Probably the Last Beloved Tech Leader the World Will Ever Have—and That’s a Good Thing

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Today is National Siblings Day—a day to celebrate your siblings. The history of the holiday is a combination of gratitude and grief, as the day was created for all of us to celebrate what for most of us will one day become our longest life relationship. So if you have a brother or sister, reach today and wish them a Happy Siblings day too!

For the stories this week you’ll read about the emerging science of chrono-nutrition and how Google used outpainting to remaster a nearly hundred year old film and may usher in a new era of remakes for Hollywood. Also this week a few stories about the good and bad of using VR technology on prisoners, an exhibit reimagining funeral urns at the Milan Design Show, a new children’s book that can help diagnose color blindness earlier and an expansion of the first sports bar dedicated to women’s sports.

Enjoy the stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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How “Chrono-Nutrition” Could Use Metabolism Science To Change When We Eat Anything

If there is an optimal time to eat a particular type of food, then there are suboptimal times to have it too. The problem is, we don’t usually know this sort of detail about the things we consume. Yet scientists already know that “nutrient sequencing—the act of eating fiber-rich vegetables first during a meal, followed by protein and fats, and then carbohydrates—is becoming a recognized way for people with Type 2 diabetes to better manage their blood-sugar levels. Now there is a startup called Cycle.me that is testing out a new line of “circadian snacking” products for sale to Japanese consumers. Each item features a list of ingredients as well as an optimal time (morning, afternoon or evening) for consumption.

As this idea starts to gain momentum, it’s possible this new element of timing could start to show up on more food packaging as a way to remind (or educate!) all of us on everything from the best time to eat a banana to the right sequence we should use to consume a meal. Perhaps with this metric, people can also minimize some of the negative impacts food can have on their bodies and get healthier as well.

Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe The Future of Hollywood)

This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in the works for nearly a year to digitally remaster the original 1939 footage from the film The Wizard of Oz and somehow make it fit onto the 16k digital screens of The Sphere in Las Vegas. While show doesn’t officially open to the public until late August, the fascinating backstory of how the team of technologists and artists managed to do it was just shared on Google’s blog:

“For all the powerful new technology at play, one of the biggest breakthroughs comes from following the traditions of cinema: having plenty of extra material to work with. In addition to old footage, the team scoured archives to build a vast collection of supplementary material, such as the shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans and scores.

The Google teams and their partners developed an AI-based “super resolution” tool to turn those tiny celluloid frames from 1939 into ultra-ultra-high definition imagery that will pop inside Sphere. Then, the teams perform AI outpainting, to expand the scope of scenes to both fill the space and fill in the gaps created by camera cuts and framing limitations. Finally, through performance generation, they’re incorporating composites of those famed performances into the expanded environments.”

The potential of this “outpainting” technique is more than just upscaling past content to be see on a new screen in a sort of remastering exercise. What’s really interesting is how technologists might partner with creators and the movie studios to access never-before-released footage and utilize that to truly enhance the original films to make them something new, different and immersive. As long as they get permission, involve the original creators and don’t steal the content—this could be a win for everyone.

The Beautiful and Destructive Potential of Using VR on Prisoners In Jail

This week there were a few stories of questionably ethical uses for virtual reality headsets that raised some new questions about how it can and should be used. In one example, a California-based prison used VR on prisoners placed into solitary confinement as part of a general population reentry program, where incarcerated people “visualize scenarios like their first steps outside the prison walls, before working through their emotional and physical response with volunteers.” It is also being tested as a way to offer prisoners who are placed in solitary confinement a mental break and reward of sorts by letting them experience riding a rickshaw through Thailand, for example. Which raises new questions as the article also notes: “does VR represent a tool to give them a little respite, or is it just a buzzy band-aid on a cruel practice?”

In another story this week, there is a VR program researchers are testing that puts domestic abusers into the position of their victims in an effort to activate their empathy and make them feel regret for what they put someone else through. Early results of the program show that it may be effective in helping to rehabilitate and change the attitudes of domestic abusers. As the technology continues to get better, the potential for using it with captive audiences like prisoners (no joke intended) will continue to grow. In the positive case, it could help with everything from skills development and training to prepare them for re-entry to using it as an empathy machine to help offenders see the impact of their actions from another perspective. The downside, of course, is that VR becomes a Matrix-like tool of control to manipulate prisoners and addicting them to technology that keeps them in a fantasy world unable to emerge back into real life when the time finally comes to be released.

“The Last Pot” Exhibit Reimagines Funeral Urns For Milan Design Week

At Milan Design Week (Salone del Mobile,) you might expect to see new designs for chairs or reimagined interior living spaces. A category that rarely receives any design attention from the most elite European design teams is the funeral urn. This year The Last Post exhibit, a project curated by Alberto Alessi, “explores the funeral urn as a final container — an object surprisingly overlooked by the design world despite its significance.” As one critic goes on to write, “The Last Pot reflects broader societal shifts toward death positivity — a movement seeking to normalize discussions around mortality and reclaim death as a personal, cultural and aesthetic experience.”

Perhaps these conceptual urns and the exhibit curating them together can do all that. At the very least, it’s offering a new visual way to honor those who have passed away and creating a potentially powerful piece of art to remember them.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Luxury Daily

Industry daily media sources are so valuable because they are truly an insider’s look at a particular industry. That’s why most are only read by people working in that industry. Luxury Daily is one that I have had on my reading list for many years. Part of the reason is because I’ve done luxury brand marketing several times for clients and it’s interesting. Sometimes, the luxury industry can also be a first mover on a broader trend that will gain traction outside the luxury market as well. So reading about shifts, campaigns, new products and initiatives in luxury might help inspire ideas for you to consider no matter what industry you work in. For these reasons, Luxury Daily is my pick for the Non-Obvious Media of the Week.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger

As part of the celebration for National Siblings Day, I chose to resurface The Sibling Effect this week—a book written several years ago about the impact that birth order and our siblings have on our personalities and trajectory. Reading this book, you may not agree with some of the theories inside or you may feel a bit uncomfortable at just how accurately they describe your relationships (either past or present) with your own siblings. Regardless, there is plenty of research today about the science of siblings and what role that plays in our own development. Similarly, this research delves into what impact this has when someone grows up with no siblings, or loses a sibling. So today, in honor of National Siblings Day … The Sibling Effect is my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• This Children’s Book Can Spot Color Blindness Quickly & At No Cost

• Ad of the Day: Autism campaign uses humor to dispel myths and tropes

• Inside the top-secret area of Disney World that theme park visitors and cast members never see

• Climate Violence Is Coming for Rich Countries, and They’re Not Ready

• The Sports Bra, the First Bar Dedicated To Women’s Sports, Starts Franchising

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

In the year 1248, construction on the Cologne Cathedral started, then halted in 1560 and was finally restarted and completed to its original imagined design in 1880. I’m sitting here in Germany writing this week’s email with a view of that cathedral and wondering what (if anything) that is started today will only be completed 600 years from now. In my talk this morning, I focused on the importance of imagining the future. Nearly 800 years ago, medieval planners imagined building something that they knew could never be completed in their lifetime. It’s hard not to wish for more of that type of visionary leadership in a time when too many modern leaders chase only short-term wins that they can claim as their own.

In stories this week, you’ll read about an idea for verifying facts inspired by the NFL’s latest announcement, the sad state of April Fool’s Day pranks this year, a behind the scenes look at how Dubai’s Museum of the Future was imagined and some disturbing reports of the long-term effects of a single concussion on a child’s prospects for college. Also, many of you have been commenting about all the videos I’ve been sharing over the past few months over social media so I added a feature to this newsletter to spotlight the most popular of my videos each week in case you missed them. I hope you like those too!

Enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious,

Rohit

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NEW! This Week In Video …

A recap of this week’s popular videos .... Follow me on Instagram »

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The Sad Retreat of April Fool’s Day and What It Reveals About Our Culture

The week of April Fool’s Day, I regularly look forward to reading about all the brands taking risks, exploring their fun sides and doing something with personality. This used to be one of my favorite weeks to read all the advertising trade publications. This year wasn’t as much fun. Much of the coverage seemed to center on spotlighting the cringiest pranks or the weirdest ideas or even offering a historical look back at failed efforts from previous years. So much negativity. Hardly any brands this year seemed willing to explore their humorous side and just commit to a good creative joke.

It is possible that they are reading the room and it just doesn’t feel like the right time to be joking around. Or perhaps cultural polarization is making brands more afraid of any sort of public criticism. Regardless of the reason, this feels like a sad reflection of the media environment right now if joking around suddenly feels off limits. What do you think? If you are a fan of brand jokes and humor in general, did this year’s April Fool’s Day moment feel different than past years?

How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model For Truth and Verification

Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the league is turning to Sony 8k cameras with a new technology known as “hawk eye” to precisely and instantly measure whether a first down was achieved. The idea is to verify the exact line and distance required by high definition cameras to remove the possibility of human error and make the game faster. Yesterday was also International Fact-Checking day, a holiday described as “a day to celebrate the importance of facts and the news organizations that promote them through rigorous and nonpartisan accountability journalism.” Why am I linking these two stories together?

The idea of the hawk eye camera is based on the insight that the best time to verify something as specific as the exact positioning of the ball is at the moment when a play has been completed. This is real time fact-checking in a sense—a truth being measured and quantified in real time. What if we could do this with media stories and specifically political facts? Imagine taking the content of speeches or interviews actually given by politicians and quantifying the things they have said publicly as fact. Then comparing what they say in real time against those factually verified past remarks. This could combat one issue modern journalists face: people lying about what they have said or pretending like they never said it. Just like teams or referees cannot manipulate the positioning of the ball in an NFL game, politicians could be held more accountable for what they have said in the past or lying about what others may have said or not said as well.

This may be an idealistic idea, but it does seem that if we can verify truth for something like the position of a ball with technology, perhaps we could do the same for other things as well.

The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was lucky to visit for the first time back in January and even as someone who has been to many museums and spends a lot of time thinking about and talking about the future, many elements of the experience stayed with me. From the way that a possible future library of genetic materials from all living things on Earth might look to the way the museum imagines sustainability of the future as regenerative ideas to repair the damage to the environment we are currently inflicting, the concepts were original and unexpected.

As McGetrick describes, the original challenge was daunting: “We had to figure out what a museum of the future even is. That’s exciting because you don’t have any references to draw from, really. You have a lot of freedom to interpret.” Choosing to focus on immersion so people could experience what the future might really look like was one of their earliest guiding principles. As he also notes, “we put a lot of time and thought into the nature of audio, the nature of scent. We have five or six different scents that we made specifically for the museum. Part of that is just to remind people that even in this digitized age, in the end your senses are the original technology, and we should try to use them as much as possible.”

Watch the video »

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Marketoonist by Tom Fishburne

I have been a fan of Tom Fishburne, also known as the “Marketoonist” for years. From licensing his cartoons to use in presentations to interviewing him about the power of humor, his insights have been an inspiration for me. The power of cartoons like this is to be able to cut through the noise and spotlight something that at once feels familiar and new. Tom is better than most people at consistently doing that, and understands his audience perfectly.

Despite the lackluster April Fool’s Day this year, I had already planned to showcase his archive of cartoons as my pick for the Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week. Regardless of whether brands and other organizations may be suffering through a moment when it feels more difficult or risky to make a joke, humor remains an essential thing that brings us all together. If you aren’t already following Tom’s work, now is the perfect time to start. We need more people unafraid to make jokes about the things we all relate to.

Listen to my interview with Tom on the Non-Obvious Show Podcast » 

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

If you are a fan of thought exercises and a visual process to help you imagine the future, this is the perfect book for you. I first read it several years ago when it came out and was immediately captivated. The writing is excellent but the way that the concepts are broken down into easy methods anyone can use in a meeting or brainstorm to see the future and prepare is a masterclass in a book for how to run an effective workshop. Whether that’s your goal, or you just want to open your mind to seeing the future with a new and different perspective, this book will help. For all those reasons, Imaginable by Jane McGonigal is my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• The Coliseum Chair Brings Ancient Design to a Modern World

• VR isn’t just fun. It’s a new hope for early detection of Alzheimer’s

• New Study Suggests That After A Single Concussion, Kids Are 15 Percent Less Likely To Go To College

• African workers are taking on Meta and the world should pay attention

• Your Sofa Is Garbage. This Startup Wants To Change That

• Yuval Noah Harari: ‘How Do We Share the Planet With This New Superintelligence?’

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Greetings from Chicago. I've been here for the past few days working with an inter-disciplinary group of technologists, ethicists, educators, developers and business leaders gathered together for the inaugural Tech Collaborative Responsible AI Forum from Anitab.org. I had the chance to do a closing keynote with some top takeaways from the event (read them here). It was a perfect reminder of what we cannot lose sight of in technology as we rush towards more and more functionality with AI. These sorts of conversations matter more than ever.

In stories this week, you'll read about the new science of artificial naps, a theory making the rounds that aims to explain the early actions of the Trump administration, Rimowa’s plan to sell used beat up luggage (and why it’s working), an alarm app that makes you watch an ad before hitting snooze, and AI that changes people’s accents to make them sound more American.

Enjoy the stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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Artificial Naps, Precognitive Dreams and the Evolving Science of Sleep

What if you could get the restful benefits of taking a nap without actually taking a nap? Researchers studying the health effects of "power naps" recently performed a test on monkeys where they simulated the brain activity of sleeping with electrical pulses. The monkeys showed the same cognitive benefits that come from sleeping without the nap. The findings suggest there may be new ways to treat sleep disorders but also may lead to an "artificial nap" industry where pods or venues offer this sort of stimulation to help people hone their focus when they need it most.

In other sleep news this week, an expert on dreamwork shared a perspective on the possibility of precognitive dreams and whether some people may indeed have the ability to dream about a prediction of something that will later happen in real life. Specifically, there were an abnormally large number of people who report having dreamed about getting a cancer diagnosis before it happened to them. This could have something to do with the theory that our subconscious can predict or understand things that our conscious doesn't.

Why the EPA Fighting Back Matters

The EPA has a marketing problem and it's a basic one that has existed for decades. Despite being largely effective in its mission to protect American air quality and prevent toxic sludge from entering waterways, the government agency receives almost no public credit for their success. Of course, I'm oversimplifying their mission and perhaps overstating their success—but when you compare America to many other nations outside Europe, it's clear that the moves the US government made decades ago to protect national parks and create environmental regulations have worked.

This is important context for the moment we find ourselves in right now where Elon Musk's DOGE group has instituted a widespread rollback of the EPA's ability to protect the environment or enforce their policies. EPA workers are protesting now and trying to share their story in any way they can to make people listen. The bigger picture here is one that affects many other government agencies with missions to protect American citizens and consumers too. All of them have failed to share their successes with the public in a way that matters and now that they are being dismantled there is no public outcry of support to keep them.

More Americans complained about McDonald's retiring the McRib sandwich. Is that a bigger deal than keeping pollution out of the air? Of course not, but it does have better marketing. It would be nice to find a policy solution to protect the government agencies that are meant to protect us. Even better, though, would be to find a marketing and PR solution. Given how many of my readers of this newsletter are marketing and PR professionals, I'm writing this as a message to you (and to myself). What can we do to tell this story so more of America understands why these groups matter?

PS - one starting point is by reading and recommending my pick for this week's featured book below: Who Is Government?

The Wild Theory of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” That Aims To Explain Everything Trump Is Doing

There is a theory circulating Wall Street and other circles that aims to take all the chaos of the first several months of the new Trump administration and offer an explanation for how it all fits a grand master plan that could, if it works, be heralded as “the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.” If this idea seems far fetched, follow the link and read the full story from The Atlantic which breaks down exactly how these seemingly haphazard tariffs and other early economic moves could make sense in the long run and actually fuel a positive outcome for America by securing concessions and reshaping power dynamics.

In order for it all to work out, though, there are several elements that need to be carefully implemented and the entire “Mar-a-Lago Accord” strategy (as it’s increasingly being called) will require a level of discipline and intentionality that seem unlikely for Trump himself or his appointees to embrace. Still, the entire theory is a good reminder that what is too often dismissed as unplanned chaos is likely part of a master plan and endgame even if it doesn’t appear that way. And while the overall theory is relatively easy to refute, the part that should get you thinking is the suggestion that perhaps there is bigger picture here that is easy to miss because it’s being intentionally obscured.

Rimowa Sells Old, Beat-Up Suitcases and Demand Is Off the Charts

Buyback programs are getting popular among retailers in many categories but usually they are for products that are still in “sellable” condition that can be refurbished. When legendary luggage brand Rimowa launched their own in-store buyback program, they began receiving used suitcases from customers that had clearly taken a beating and traveled the world. As they refurbished and resold them, a curious truth emerged. People loved the pieces because of all the dents and bruises and stickers and use. So much so, that they would pay a premium to buy it.

Now the brand is getting more aggressive on buybacks to be able to create these surprisingly popular signature products anyone can buy to partake in the story of where that luggage may have been and what life it had already lived in the hands of another traveler. Similar to the appeal of a passport filled with travel stamps and visas, the luggage tells a story worth buying into. It’s yet another example of just how valuable a story can be. Even if that story resulted in a beat up and worn-down product.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Marginalian Newsletter

If you could ever describe a newsletter and website as a labor of love, it would be this one. For more than two decades, Maria Popova has written her personal newsletter The Marginalian and relied on donations and support from her audience to keep it as a full time endeavor. That she has managed to do it since 2006 without allowing any advertising speaks to the value she has built and the popularity of the newsletter. Originally published under the name Brain Pickings, it was rebranded in 2015 to reflect her growing interests. Weekly editions of the newsletter feature excerpts from works of literature both modern and historic, book reviews, thought pieces and unexpected explorations of big ideas. It’s truly one of the most original newsletters that I get and read regularly.

Perhaps the best pitch for it, though, comes from Maria herself in the language she uses to describe her Sunday newsletter and why you might want to subscribe: “If you yearn for depth and delight without the distraction of a social media feed, if you are weary of algorithms deciding what you see and read and constellate into reality, try the Marginalian Sunday newsletter — the week’s most inspiring and nourishing reading in a single undistracted place, free, ad-free, algorithm-free, entirely human, made of feeling and time since 2006.” We could all use more nourishing reads. For that reason, The Marginalian is my pick for the Non-Obvious Media Source of the Week.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis

In the words of bestselling author Garrett Graff who recently wrote a review for The Washington Post, this book “examines some of the remarkable people who make up the federal workforce — career civil servants who have accomplished the extraordinary in quiet ways, people whose jobs are normally buried layers below any partisan rancor. Perhaps never before has there been a book better timed or more urgent.” It is indeed a timely read in a moment when the Federal government is being attacked from within and serving a central role in the culture war happening right now to paint all government as an unnecessary evil. The truth, of course, is far less polarized.

Government can often be a force for good and public servants doing the work are regularly ignored, minimized and underappreciated. There are certain bureaucrats and wastage and ineffective government. But there are also examples of heroic people doing great work to make government a positive force. Those stories are ones we don’t hear often. This book offers a rare antidote for that oversight, and for that reason Who is Government? is my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• OpenAI's New Image Generator Can Do Near-Perfect Text (above is a fun image my co-author Henry Coutinho-Mason created using it, still with many obvious flaws but interesting nonetheless)

• Krisp is using AI to help Indians change their accents to sound like Americans on calls

• Cover Letters Still Matter—Even If They’re Not Required

• What Incels Are In Netflix's Adolescence: The Truth Behind The Netflix Show

• Alarm App Demands You Watch Advertisement to Hit "Snooze" Button

• Indians Surpass Brits As London’s Largest Property Owners

• TikTok removes viral 'chubby' filter as body-shaming backlash swells

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

As I was writing the newsletter this week, I couldn’t help thinking about the power of timing. Today is March 20th, which happens to also be the anniversary of the day the Netflix docuseries Tiger King was first released. Just days after the pandemic locked everyone at home and the world shutdown, this was perhaps the most fortuitous timing for a streaming release of any show ever. That show deserved obscurity, and it went viral instead, thanks largely to timing. So yes, timing does indeed matter. Happy March 20th!

In stories this week, you’ll read about a crisis with brand America, how Astronauts are leading the fight to prevent space advertising, the rise of freebie bots, how drones are helping make the job of Sherpas on Mt. Everest a little less dangerous, and the peculiar passage of time in a 24-hour diner.

Finally, my regular readers know that a big recurring topic in this newsletter is about the ethics of AI development and whether it will benefit people or not. Who is going to shape the future of AI to be more responsible? Next week in Chicago I’m honored to be joining an event where this question will be deeply discussed. It’s hosted by Anitab.org, a non-profit that has been paving the way for women in tech since 1987. The Responsible AI Forum in Chicago brings together AI professionals, thinkers and visionaries to debate what the future of AI should (and should not) be. It’s exactly the sort of conversation that needs to happen and I’ll share updates next week on how it goes.

Until then, enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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Can Brand America Be Destroyed?

Diplomats and trading partners don’t trust the word of America anymore. Countries are hosting summits and meetings to discuss alliances specifically omitting the US. Politicians in other countries are winning elections because they argue against America. There are even kits for sale online to help Americans who do travel abroad to disguise themselves as more universally appreciated Canadians. As an article from Fast Company this week suggests, perhaps Brand America itself has become toxic.

And if that’s true, the impact will not just be felt through tariffs or shifts in global trading. America’s most powerful export has always been its culture—shared through media, film, television, music and sports. Can this juggernaut start to lose its influence too? And if so, what might take its place? To me, the real question is the long term one. Are the actions of America’s current President irreversibly harming the country or could all that be reversed when the country’s leadership eventually changes? In the short term, this is going to continue to create disruption and opportunity too. Expect to see experiences that promote anti-American perspectives and products that could be presented as “America-free” in some way. In this sense, brand America has indeed become something no company really wants to promote right now.

Astronauts Are Leading The Quest To Prevent Space Advertising From Filling the Sky

The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), is a beautifully imagined group within the United Nations that aims to make sure space doesn’t get misused as the costs for launching satellites continues to go down and the industry continues to privatize. Investor plans show there are several companies aiming to put hundreds of laser-fitted small satellites into orbit roughly 370 miles above Earth’s surface by 2030. Altogether, this many satellites could work together like a space billboard.

According to the astronauts (and many others), there are some real scientific drawbacks to allowing this sort of “entertainment” to happen from the skies such as the disruption of ongoing astronomy efforts. Not to mention hampering our ability to detect dangerous meteors. The most dystopian problem, though, is clearly the fact that this sort of billboard would be impossible for anyone to avoid. Being able to use the skies as a canvas is a bad idea solely for the fact that if it were possible, the exact wrong people would have the money and motivation to use it. For example, one of those company’s founders has already said that he wants “to prove that space is not just for scientists, not just for the military—it is entertainment, too. And people like entertainment.” Well, people like good entertainment. And it’s pretty obvious that isn’t what we would get.

The Quest to Prevent Scalpers and the Rise of the Freebie Bots

There is a word for people who buy a child’s game when it first comes out and then immediately try to sell it online for a huge profit: assholes.

Ok, technically the more common and polite term would be scalpers. It’s a common problem, though. Particularly when it comes to the still popular game of Pokémon where new card packs can be bought and sold online with ease. Recently, to try and curb this black market game, Pokémon Center Singapore has confirmed they will be removing the plastic wrapping from the cards at the point of sale in all cases, effectively devaluing the product in case someone was trying to sell it later.

While this may work in this one case, it’s just one part of a more interesting retail shift here being driven by AI and so-called “freebie bots” which are different from the bots used for scalping because they are not using AI to get in line first to buy a product or ticket and then flip it for an exorbitant profit. Instead, these freebie bots scour the web for pricing mistakes or big discounts which online resellers use to get products for very low rates and then they mark them up to near retail prices and pocket the profits.

Of course, there are tools to help retailers find and prevent such bots too. This is the retail AI game and it’s being waged beneath our clicks by bots seeking out deals and trying to buy goods, and technology purposely built to foil their efforts. As we read more about an agentic AI future in retail, there is a lot of attention on how it will shift product discovery and the relative importance of brand. Potentially even more important is how it could shift the financial side of purchasing, driving people to buy things they don’t need simply because they are alerted and see that something is on a huge discount.

When this becomes more commonplace, scalpers will likely move a lot lower on the list of retailers’ biggest concerns.

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant Is Exactly What Anyone In Business Really Needs

This past month Adobe launched a super useful enhancement that I’ve been testing it for a bit. The Adobe AI Assistant has a number of features to help anyone more easily understand what contracts are actually saying. Given most contracts are in PDF format, it’s a perfect extension to have this built into Adobe. The tool allows you to easily extract a list of deliverables, find key dates and more easily see changes from one version of a contract to another. If you use your own contracts, it can also help you improve them by assisting in the development of a “plain language” version of your agreement to aide understanding.

This is something that we have done for years already, but using Adobe’s tool helped us to find elements of our contracts that may not have been quite as clear and integrate those descriptions into our plain language version too. Which demonstrates another potential upside of this new feature … the transparency it can create could help all of us to produce better and clearer contracts ourselves instead of relying on the same agreements originally written by lawyers years ago and therefore probably more confusing than they need to be.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Tech Safari

How much attention do you pay to the latest innovations in African tech? The latest startups and tech founder news from the African continent are routinely ignored by most Western tech media sources. To remedy the gap, Tech Safari is one of the leading platforms dedicated to making sure Africa’s tech industry is not forgotten. From the latest wins of Botswana’s emerging space industry to the expansion of drone deliveries across Nigeria, Tech Safari’s newsletter is a great source to open your perspective to the fact that tech innovations are happening everywhere in the world. And sometimes the most futuristic initiatives start in places where the older ways of thinking don’t present as many logistical or infrastructure-based barriers to doing new things.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Look Again by Tali Sharot & Cass R. Sunstein

Humans are great at habituation. We can get used to when things are great and we can get used to when they aren’t too. Both situations can be a problem. The secret to really being more fulfilled may lie in our ability to dishabituate. That’s the simple premise Look Again, a book that delves into the social science and research behind why challenging yourself to do this more frequently matters. It’s a message that resonated immediately for me, as did one of the opening stories where the authors share a relatable story of two women with nearly identical lives. Happy marriage, healthy children, nice home. All the external factors. The difference? One woman travels often for work, returning home and appreciating all that she has because she has frequent times away from it. The other, who doesn’t have the same travel schedule, struggles to find the same appreciation.

Of course, it doesn’t happen this way for everyone—but the travel itself is a force which helps create dishabituation and this quality makes it useful to remind anyone to appreciate what they do have. We hear advice like this often: appreciate what you have. Be grateful. In Look Again, the authors offer a practical way to really put this into action by honing your ability to notice what is already there … but easy to miss.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• The Indian Brand Telling Stories Through Sneakers

• Drones Will Do Some Schlepping for Sherpas on Mount Everest

• Meet 15 Companies That Are Turning Ads and Marketing Into Cultural Moments

• Hear What Horizon Zero Dawn Actor Ashly Burch Thinks About Sony AI Taking Her Job

• Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

• The Passage of Time is a Peculiar Thing in a 24-hour Diner

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Greetings from Nashville! I left the frenzy of SXSW in Austin earlier this week after meeting one celebrity puppet, hosting over a dozen events and giving a brand new talk to join a gathering of community bankers working to put a more human and authentic face on an industry that desperately needs it. From one music town to another, I’ve been experiencing new music non-stop and enjoying making so many new connections this past week.

In this edition of the non-obvious newsletter, you’ll get a recap of my insights from SXSW and a look at the marketing challenge Austin is about to face as they lose their convention center and start the 5 year project to replace it with something bigger and better. You’ll also read about the dangers of unnecessary enhancement when it comes to entertainment, a creative concept for a talking tree to help people reconnect with nature and 50 stories that changed journalism from the Poynter Institute.

Enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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Unnecessary Enhancement and the Upscaling Backlash Against Netflix

What if everything doesn’t need to be better? A series of 80s shows originally released at a 4:3 aspect ratio and with non-HD level filming have been digitally “enhanced” with AI to make them higher quality and in the typical widescreen format preferred now. The upscaling is a disaster. Anyone watching immediately notices inconsistencies, weird AI-generated remnants and a wide format that cuts off critical pieces of a scene. The end result is that anyone watching will long for a time when all these “enhancements” weren’t around, and you could just watch a program as it was originally created.

The whole story is a good reminder for us all not to abandon the things people like in order to just make a product or experience feel more modern. The old way may not be perfect or even as technologically advanced, but sometimes it’s better anyway.

The Tesla Resistance Is Real. Here’s What It Means …

Tesla owners are disguising their cars as a sign of resistance. There are plenty of YouTube videos with tips on how to hide the evidence that you’re driving a Tesla. Others are putting bumper stickers explaining that: “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” People are selling or otherwise getting rid of their Teslas if they can afford to, and the stock is in a nosedive. All of these are a growing response to owner Elon Musk’s erratic behavior and lack of attention spent recently on running Tesla.

Yet if you can think back to a time before this, Musk was once treated like a hero. He nearly single-handedly moved the automotive industry toward electric vehicles, accelerated adoption of home solar technology with the Powerwall and even offered limited open-source access to Tesla’s patents and technology. So perhaps the real lesson in this fall from grace is just how quickly and completely it can happen.

The Talking Tree and How AI Can Give a Voice to the Voiceless

How can you get young people to reconnect with nature? Let them talk to a tree. That’s the creative premise behind a new campaign that features a 150-year-old horse chestnut tree in London's Morden Hill Park, which 'speaks' using “real-time sensory data from over 10 sensors measuring wind speed, soil moisture, humidity, and bioelectrical signals. This data feeds into an LLM that shapes the tree's personality and enables live conversations.”

While a novel concept, this also signals an interesting potential usage of AI and avatars of a sort to offer a voice to objects that previously lacked them. Instead of just focusing on AI clones from celebrities, what if we could use AI to generate marketing and advertising that anthropomorphizes things to add personality and make them approachable and memorable—just like a talking tree.

The 7 Non-Obvious Secrets of Understanding People to Predict the Future (and a Recap of SXSW 2025)

This past week, I debuted a new keynote talk at SXSW, and it was all about understanding people. I will share the full video when it comes out in a few weeks, but in case you want a behind the scenes look at the tips, here’s the full list:

1. BEING UNIQUELY HUMAN IS THE ADVANTAGE

2. IDENTITY ALWAYS SHAPES BELIEFS

3. WINNERS AREN’T THE SAME AS CHAMPIONS

4. EASY, OBVIOUS ANSWERS ARE A DISTRACTION

5. PEOPLE & EXPERIENCES SHOULD SURPRISE YOU

6. MEANING COMES FROM INTERSECTIONS

7. UNDISCOVERY CAN BE BETTER THAN DISCOVERY
   

   Aside from the tips, I recently shared my slides for the full talk so if you don’t want to wait to see the video, you can download the slides here »

   Finally, for a short recap of the things that stood out from SXSW for me this year, read my LinkedIn post about 5 takeaways from SXSW »

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Christian Science Monitor

“Our aim is to embrace the human family. We prize honesty and largeness of heart. We seek practical solutions, not just page views. Also, by focusing on the values behind the news, we offer a deeper view – a read more about solutions that unite rather than divide. That’s why many of our stories clearly identify the values driving the news – whether it’s respect, compassion, responsibility, freedom, or so on.”

The Christian Science Monitor, also known as The Monitor, may not be on your reading list already and I realize its title may make it seem like a faith based publication that only focuses on niche topics, but over the years I have found it to be consistently insightful, human and useful with the stories they publish. The site explains their religious connection transparently, aims to present fair unbiased stories and generally does an excellent job of helping their readers be more open-minded. Over the years, this is one of those sites that I found myself returning to more and more often—so for that reason The Christian Science Monitor is my pick for the Non-Obvious Media Platform of the week.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair

There are colors that you may have heard of, and more than a few that you haven’t. This highly original book takes a look at all of them and gives you all the meanings and symbolism of colors that you may never have thought about. Rated by USA Today as one of their “Top 100 Books to Read While Stuck at Home During the Coronavirus Crisis”—I’m pretty sure this was the first time I came across the book too. Since then, I have referred to it often when I’m going through an exercise to work on a book cover design, or selecting a color for some marketing effort. There are also moments when I’ll just flip through the book out of curiosity or as a diversion. There are many ways to use this book and the combination of beautiful layout and clever writing makes The Secret Lives of Colour one of those unique books that is equally at home whether you keep it untouched on your bookshelf or you choose to open it up on occasion and delight in learning just a little more about the secret life of colors.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Artist rendering of new Austin Convention Center due to be complete by 2029.

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Visit Austin’s Marketing Challenge: How the City Is Pivoting Amid Convention Center Closure

• Moleskine CEO On How the Brand Balances Heritage With Smart Innovation

• French University Offers Scientific Asylum to Researchers Worried President Trump May Censor and Shut Down Their Projects

• Spotify Tries to Defend Their Payout Rates to Artists

• 50 Stories That Changed Journalism: Poynter’s Big Anniversary Project

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

It is exactly a week until our team hits the ground in Austin for SXSW, our biggest event of the year. From pajama parties to 7 minute meetups to a fireside chat about the future of events, Non-Obvious will be heading all over the city and our biggest goal is to encourage more human connections in a time when we could all really use them.

See a full list of all our 2025 events and collaborations »

For the seventh year in a row I will be premiering another all-new Featured Session … but if you’re not coming to Austin, don’t worry — I’ll share the full video of the talk when it comes out. Ok, clearly I have SXSW on the brain … but as usual this week I have another collection of non-obvious stories and so without further delay, read on my friends.

Enjoy this week’s insights and always stay curious!

Rohit

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The Truth About the Penny

No one wants one. People will walk past a penny lying on the street, a real-life demonstration of just how worthless it is for most of us. For many, it’s also a perfect example of governmental inefficiency since it’s widely known that the cost to produce each one is higher than the actual value of the penny itself. It is estimated that the U.S. government loses 2.7 cents on every penny it mints. If they stopped making them, it would save about $85 million a year. Sounds great.

Unfortunately, there are some side effects. If we all stopped using pennies, cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest five and usage of the nickel would probably increase. That’s the bad news, since the government actually loses 8.8 cents on every nickel it produces. If there were no pennies, the increased demand could lose the government well over $100 million canceling out any savings from eliminating the penny.

If you eliminated both the penny and the nickel, that could work but then you’d only really have two coins in wide circulation—dimes and quarters … and based on inflation both of those are likely to be money losers within the next 10 years too. So maybe we should just stop using coins or move more quickly to digital currency, but even that requires a societal change that takes generations typically to happen.

So what should we do here? In response to President Trump declaring the US would stop producing pennies, The NY Times laid out all the options presented above and ultimately came to this conclusion—”studies have estimated that over $100 billion of income goes unreported each year because of cash transactions, amounting to tens of billions in lost tax revenue. If eliminating coins led to even a modest decrease in untraceable transactions, the effects could be far greater than the profits or losses of the U.S. Mint.”

Unemployment Is Low, But No One Is Hiring. Experts Are Calling It The Big Freeze.

What do you call it when unemployment is at record lows at the same time that hiring is similarly stalled? Actually, there’s no word for that because it’s never really happened—so experts came up with one: the big freeze. Usually if unemployment is low, that’s a good sign for job seekers. Unfortunately the circumstances bringing about this current situation seem to be partially based on widespread uncertainty among workers … which means they will rarely leave a job to seek something else. Indeed the percentage of workers voluntarily quitting has fallen to nearly its lowest level in a decade.

The other reason for this situation may come down to a backlash from the post-pandemic moment from 2021 to early 2023 when so many people were reevaluating their life situations and quitting their jobs that economists at that time dubbed it “the great resignation.” Perhaps burned from those times, employers seem much less likely to let people go now or want the disruptions that can come from hiring, training and onboarding new team members.

All of this is likely to be the toughest news for new graduates entering a job market where no one seems to be vacating any spots for them to take over. Which means we will likely see many more stories like this one from HBR about how to get hired when AI does the job screening or this one about the necessity to always be upskilling. If you’re currently affected by this “big freeze” — I’d love to hear from you. Share your story and let me know your experience.

The Subtle Master Plan Behind De Beers New DiamondProof In-Store Verification Device

A little over six months ago, De Beers Group announced the DiamondProof “diamond verification instrument” at a jewelry trade show in Las Vegas. The idea was that this device could sit inside a retail jewelry location and immediately distinguish between a natural diamond versus a lab-grown diamond. The official announcement for the device included this telling line: “with research showing that almost half of consumers are unaware that every LGD can be readily detected, the device … help[s] underpin the integrity of natural diamonds.”

In a world where the difference between natural and lab-grown diamonds cannot be seen with the naked eye, this device will offer visual evidence immediately to a consumer of the differences … presumably to help the jeweler make the case for selling a natural diamond instead of the significantly lower priced and visually identical lab-grown alternative. On one hand, this is a masterful upselling tool that likely will work to help jewelers close the deal with customers for the more expensive piece made with natural diamonds.

On the other hand, it could provide a valuable service to improve consumer trust and prevent fraud by showing that what you’re buying is actually what you get. What do you think—is DiamondProof an enviably clever upselling tool or a valuable real-time device to prevent fraud?

Inside the Blind Box Phenomenon Fueling the Resurgence of the Art Toy Industry

Outside a Pop Mart store in Vietnam there is a line around the block at 2am. The cause for all this excitement is the latest blind box release of a limited edition figurine … otherwise known as an art toy. In case you’re not familiar, these figurines are collectibles that allow customers to “express creativity, find joy and connect with others.” That’s a quote from an executive at Pop Mart (obviously) but he’s not exaggerating that there are plenty of customers who devote hours to building their collections, displaying them and sharing unboxing videos of their own blind boxes and what mystery figure they received. As one pair of YouTubers bluntly put it, “these are boxes filled with mystery toys that do nothing.”

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s a craze that you might recognize from any number of other collectibles fads in the past, from action figures to playing cards. The mystery pack is definitely a time-honored marketing tradition that still continues to work. What’s perhaps new is just how deeply these blind boxes are filling a need for some consumers. As loneliness skyrockets and people struggle to make the same sorts of connections with each other, one collector suggested buying these boxes is a way to bring him closer with friends who share the same passion he does. If they continue to help people do that, we may see even more rapid growth from the collectible toy sector.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Trendwatching Newsletter + Platform

Trendwatching has been a part of my media diet for so long I can’t even recall the first time I started reading it. The site and team behind it have been a constant source of inspiration for me, and perhaps more than a little professional jealousy when they would come up with a brilliant term to describe a trend that I desperately wished I had come up with. It was perhaps this longstanding feeling that also led me to collaborate with Henry Coutinho-Mason, one of the long-time trend visionaries behind the platform, when writing my first book about trends (The Future Normal) that was not part of my decade long Non-Obvious series of books that I finished back in 2020.

Aside from a pithy penchant for trend naming, the site and their fantastic newsletter are a great way to keep up to date on the latest happenings (also known as “signals” in futurist parlance) and a great place to get talking points for an upcoming presentation or meeting. Their full membership is highly useful too but can be a bit costly unless you have access to a corporate budget. Luckily, even the free content available on their site and in particular their free monthly trend recaps will offer you plenty of useful insights too.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Community Data by Rahul Bhargava

For my book selection this week I’ll start by sharing that I have known this author for literally his entire life—because it’s my younger brother, Rahul! His first book, Community Data was just released this week by Oxford University Press. The book delves into the work he has been doing for the past few decades around data storytelling first as a research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab and currently as a professor teaching about data and journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

How can you get a community to not just view but participate in storytelling using data? Why should we use data not as a window into a certain group but for that group itself to reflect on their own stories by using it as a mirror instead? What new insight might we all learn from data if we could present and interact with it physically rather than just gazing over charts on a page or spreadsheets on a screen?

The fascinating stories in this book will take you across the world from a fashion show in Tanzania featuring clothing depicting data murals to team of sound engineers in California creating music concerts based on climate data. Complimented by full color illustrations, Community Data makes a powerful case for why we should all rethink the way we use and tell stories around data. Aside from the fact that the author is like a brother to me, if you have an interest in getting smarter about using and understanding data—definitely pick up this book.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• AllBirds Launches World’s First Net Zero Carbon Shoe

• Goa’s Tourism Minister Wants a New Image: More Sports and Spirituality, Less ‘Ruckus’

• True Crime Fans Can Now Book Their Slot On An Exclusive Cruise Themed Around the Podcasts They Love

• Hily Wants To Be The Dating App To Convince Singles They Should Stop Looking For Their “Perfect” Match and Get Over Their “Icks”

• Jeff Bezos Creates Offers More Proof Why Billionaires Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Buy Media Companies

• Starbuck Quietly Phases Out Plastic Cups At Stores. Here’s Why.

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

“Get ready to honor one of the earliest forms of restraint.” Ok, I know that’s an odd way to start this week’s email but I had to do it considering today is National Handcuff Day. You have to love when marketers create random holidays for PR reasons … though I’m not exactly sure who’s winning with this one.

Unnecessary holidays aside, it’s the usual chaos over here as the two week countdown to SXSW in Austin starts. Once again I’ll be debuting a new talk from the big stage and this year it’s all about the secrets of understanding people—a new angle on my usual non-obvious thinking keynote. If you’ll be going this year, here’s a full list of all the gatherings and meetups that we’ll be hosting. I hope to see you in person!

For stories this week, there’s a pretty unique blend of topics from questionable genetic research to the manufactured controversy around 12 unreleased songs from the great Michael Jackson. In other stories, you’ll read about why directors are only casting actors with huge IG follower counts, how Dove is trying to reclaim the universally hated word "moist," a new startup that lets anyone hire "goons with guns" to guard them and why some people need less sleep than others.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

Rohit

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Open AI Launched a New Brand Look and Expensive Super Bowl Ad … Made By Humans

Open AI has launched a cohesive new brand identity and look which was also featured in their first Super Bowl Ad last week. The campaign was developed by an in-house team led by a former Creative Director from Mercedes-Benz and includes work from Berlin-based type foundry ABC Dinamo and motion partner Studio Dumbar in Rotterdam. The branding looks excellent and has been getting strong reviews amongst marketing and design critics as well. It’s also inspiring a decent amount of ironic observations that the company which invented the technology that was supposed to make brand design obsolete opted to engage a team of human professionals to redo theirs instead of relying on their own algorithms to do it.

Designer Max Hofert had one of the most entertaining response, releasing a series of posters on Instagram using the custom Open AI font which he scraped off the internet while quoting Open AI founder Sam Altman’s belief that “on the Internet means fair use.” Conclusion: when you need great design, humans are still the ideal choice to get it done.

This Genetic Engineering Startup Wants To Make Fluorescent Bunnies and Actual Unicorns

In case you needed more life imitating fiction, a startup known as The Los Angeles Project is using gene editing to experiment with doing some “crazy” things to animals—including making glow-in-the-dark rabbits, cats that are hypo-allergenic and maybe, one day, actual unicorns. As founder and biohacker Josie Zayner says, “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals.” The actual motto of the company from their website and social media is “We Build Life.”

Clearly there are Jurassic Park inspired concerns here about the unintended side effects of this experimentation. Particularly because the animals are engineered “without the ability to reproduce” which is quite literally the thing that didn’t work in Jurassic Park.

On the plus side, their work will inspire new questions and debates about what the limits and regulations around this sort of genetic research and experimentation should be. When asked about this, Zayner did have the most John Hammond-esque response: “The crazy thing is, this technology is so advanced, and nobody’s doing shit with it. That’s kind of our motto: Let’s do stuff with it.”

Hopefully that “stuff” doesn’t involve frog DNA which can switch genders so we end up with a world overrun with fluorescent bunnies and experimental unicorns. Then again, maybe the unicorns wouldn’t be so bad.

Why Directors Are Only Casting Actors With Lots of Instagram Followers

A big presence on social media may have seemed like a nice-to-have for creators but in the case of Hollywood films, there’s growing evidence that it may already be a necessity. In a recent interview with Variety, actor Ethan Hawke shared some observations about the growing role a social media platform is taking in casting decisions for projects and even if those projects get the green light from studios and funders in the first place:

“Sometimes I’ll be setting a movie up and someone will say, ‘Oh, you should cast Suzie.’ I’m like, ‘Who is she?’ ‘She has 10 million followers.’ I’m like, ‘OK cool, has she acted before?’ ‘No, but…’ And you’re like, ‘Wow, so this is going to help me get the movie made? This is crazy.'”

There are directors who are being told by producers that they need to only cast actors who have a certain number of followers in projects. The most disconcerting part is that in some situations a follower count may be more important than talent. In a world where engagement, real connection, training and even the truth take a back seat to that one number in your profile … having a high follower count can directly affect someone’s livelihood. Reading this, I wonder if there are other industries beyond entertainment that will experience this same effect. What do you think? Hit reply to this email and let me know.

The Manufactured Controversy Around Michael Jackson’s 12 Unreleased Songs

Michael Jackson recorded 12 songs with his longtime producer Bryan Loren that were never released to the public. According to multiple sources, the songs have been collecting dust in the archives of the estate run by MJ’s family. Recently cassette recordings of these songs were found in the bottom of a box somewhere and now an auction house wants to sell the recordings to the highest bidder. The estate wants to block the sale, noting that the original copyright belongs to them so even if someone were to buy the cassettes, they wouldn’t be able to release them. The controversy is likely to drive the auction value even higher, and the auction house is planning to go ahead with the listing anyway. The question of whether the recordings will ever be heard by the public is still uncertain—so for now there is no news for Michael fans about whether the songs will be released.

The interesting thing about this story, aside from the fact that there have been unreleased songs sitting around somewhere for this long, is how easy it would have been for this whole story and “controversy” to be manufactured. The estate could have a part in the profits of the sale, the songs could be released any time and the price could be driven up just through the backstory of the disagreement. This isn’t meant to be a cynical take on the whole story, but I do find myself sometimes using this thinking process to see the story behind the story. Often, that’s more illuminating than the main headline everyone is watching anyway.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Teen Vogue

I have been reading Teen Vogue magazine since it was in print (which they ended back in 2017 when they went digital only). As well, it is an example I often use from the stage of a media publication that I have no reason to read other than engaging my own curiosity. Teen Vogue challenges me with perspectives I haven’t seen elsewhere, products I didn’t know existed and celebrities I’ve never heard of.

In short, it’s the perfect publication to help me have empathy for a world that is different from the one I usually see. Teen Vogue does that for me and if you’re anyone other than a teenage girl, it will probably do that for you too. Beyond the advertising and pop culture coverage, some of their long read articles are also illuminating about everything from politics to history to business. While recommending a fashion magazine for young people may seem like an odd choice for my Non-Obvious Media Selection of the Week, I guarantee you that this one might just surprise you.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Long View by Richard Fisher

What will it take to transform the way the world views time? Richard Fisher, a senior journalist with BBC Global News, explores this question and shares ways to expand our minds into deeper time scales in his book The Long View. While it seems like this would be a book just about time, what's fascinating about Fisher's writing and research is that he looks at it from many different dimensions. In this wide-ranging book you'll learn about linguistics, architecture, global cultures and why the way that we often talk about time is missing a lot of detail. When I first read this book, it was so intriguing that I invited Richard onto my podcast to talk about some of the biggest ideas in the book. You can listen to that episode here >> 

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Dove's Satirical Ad Riffs on a Universally Hated Word: Moist

• Mira Murati, Former OpenAI CTO, Launches Thinking Machines Lab To Help Bring More Human Values Into Artificial Intelligence Systems

• New Startup Allows Users to Hire a Rent-a-Goon to Follow Them Around With a Gun

• They’re Purposefully Traumatizing the Federal Workforce

• World’s Largest Retailer To Deploy AI Price Forecasting Tool

• From ChatGPT to Gemini: How AI Is Rewriting the Internet

• Why Do Some People Need Less Sleep Than Others?

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Today I’m writing from the only U.S. location to ever have been under eight different flags over the past 450 years. Where am I? 

That’s a little bit of trivia to start this week’s newsletter (scroll to the bonus stories section to see the answer). Aside from enjoying a bit of local history, I’ve been curating stories as usual.

This week you’ll read about the real meaning behind the Super Bowl halftime show, why brands are obscuring their logos, who to blame for the deluge of AI slop media online, how losing money the longest became a winning strategy and what Meta’s new effort to protect kids online tells us about the real benefits of government regulation.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

Rohit

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The Super Bowl Halftime Show Went Over Many People's Heads. Here's What It Meant ...

Recently it seems like stories about social media often center on the negative impact of various platforms making it easy to spread misinformation, fuel hate or generally inspire an ever-present sense of insecurity about ourselves. This week I was reminded of one of the upsides of social media ... the ability to share perspectives worth spreading.

The Super Bowl halftime was a hot topic for online discussion. Most of it centered around whether you "got it" or not. The show had lots of cultural references that would have been easy to miss for much of America. Thankfully, several voices on social media helped to explain exactly what many of us may have missed.

From the powerful backstory behind Kendrick Lamar's performance to the underlying meaning behind what he didn't say, to the juxtaposition of all the other voices and stars he included, there was an entire layer of this performance that many of us only discovered the day after the moment. And social media made that happen. It’s good reminder that as much as we may suffer from a feed filled with negativity and rage … there is also the occasional reminder of what some of us used to love about social media in the first place. The chance to read something enlightening that changes the way we see the world around us.

Is This The Age Of The Obscured Brand Logo?

There was a longstanding joke among my agency friends about the type of feedback we would often get from corporate clients when presenting our creative work. It essentially boiled down to some version of "make the logo bigger." Brand managers and CMOs alike have long equated a prominent logo with brand building and, by extension, effective marketing. Lately, there are signs this may be shifting.

Marketing publication The Drum recently reported on brands who are "confidently disguising their logos" in outdoor advertising and they point to recent campaigns from Kellogg's, Heinz, Tesco and McDonald's as proof of this trend. It's no surprise that all these brands are highly recognizable and therefore more readily able to get away with not branding their ads as overtly as lesser-known brands may need to.

Still, it's an interesting point to consider. How much can or should any of us alter the brand we have in our own advertising and marketing?

I think about this for the brands I own (Non-Obvious and Ideapress) sometimes as well. Neither are household names, but the consistency of branding has always been very important. Should I change it to fit a situation, or keep it consistent no matter what? I'd love to hear your thoughts - hit reply and let me know!

The Secret of Startup Success Might Be Who Is Willing To Lose Money the Longest

Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Uber ... all dominant players in their industry. What if the secret to their success is just that they were all willing to lose money for longer than any of their competitors? An article I read this week suggested that perhaps the ten year journeys of both Netflix and Hulu to now finally become profitable was largely due to their leadership's willingness to keep losing money until eventually they would make it back. This was famously the strategy behind Jeff Bezos launching the money-losing Prime service which included free shipping for everything in service of building a dominant market share.

Given the number of examples that seem to fit this model, it does present a depressing reality check on how few innovations may survive the wringer of Silicon Valley funding and come out the other side. They say money can't buy success but based on these examples, that may not entirely be true. The bottom line might really be that anyone can win ... as long as there is someone willing to keep writing those blank checks until they do.

Tired of AI Generated Media Slop? Blame Buzzfeed Founder Jonah Peretti …

There's a category of tech bro that is rapidly emerging within the world of AI. It's the dudes (and yes, it's mostly men) who have been touting the upside of AI suddenly changing their tune and worrying about the positive downstream effects of AI on the workplace and greater humanity. This is what you might call "tech brogret"—the same men who championed the most ethically questionable uses for AI are the same ones now decrying what it is doing to our culture and assigning the blame for that on everyone but themselves. They regret what the tech is doing, but take no responsibility themselves for this.

Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti is a perfect example. Here’s a quote from a recent article on Futurism all about his :

After an embarrassing pivot to AI content, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti says he's had enough of all the ragebait, clickbait, and fake news. Peretti, who proudly announced in May 2023 that AI will "replace the majority of static content," and gloated that its AI-generated content was outperforming its pesky human employees, has seemingly turned another leaf.

Instead of acknowledging his own role in giving up "human agency" and "devaluing labor" — BuzzFeed has lost huge swathes of its workforce over several rounds of layoffs and wiped out most of the company's stock value over the last four years — Peretti is blaming the tech sector for his failings.

Buzzfeed is a website that has become synonymous with useless clickbaity content. They are one of a handful of media sites that I refused to link to or share stories from. If any of us want a better media ecosystem with stories that aren't AI generated garbage, here's an idea: avoid linking to or visiting Buzzfeed. It won't solve the problem, but it's not a bad starting point.

What Meta's Latest Effort To Help Kids Spot Predators Really Tells Us

There is a question that journalists learn to consider often which we should all get better at asking: why now? Any time a story crosses their orbit and they consider writing about it, one of the most fundamental questions they will often start from is trying to understand the timing behind the story. This week Meta announced a "fully funded" curriculum to teach middle schoolers how to recognize forms of online exploitation, such as sextortion scams and grooming.

This is not a new problem. So why now? One answer is because of the increasing pressure from governments around the world to keep kids off social media entirely. Australia banned it for kids under 16. The U.S. Senate has introduced the "Kids Off Social Media Act."

That's the bigger picture that's easy to miss. Kids are safer online because of online regulations and what that regulation incentivizes companies like Meta to do in response. As President Trump moves rapidly towards deregulation in nearly every sector, this is a story we need to hear more about. Regulation isn't just red tape and bureaucracy that needs to be fully eliminated. Sometimes it is the only way to create incentives for companies to behave more ethically and actually put people before profits.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Future of Storytelling Newsletter + Podcast

Several years ago I was invited to an event called the Future of Storytelling. The yearly gathering, hosted by my friend Charlie Melcher, was always an eye opening look into the work of the most pioneering creators shaping the future of all sorts of experiences. Sadly, Charlie no longer does these annual retreats but he has evolved his community into a group that publishes an amazing monthly newsletter (sign up and read past issues here >>) along with a fascinating podcast and many custom private events.

The newsletter and podcast are my dual picks for the Non-Obvious Featured Media of the Week because of how regularly Charlie and his team manage to curate the best and brightest creators and showcase their latest work along with quick takes on why it matters.

As a side bonus, the FoST team just released a new podcast interview where I join Charlie to talk about the non-obvious future of storytelling. Listen to the episode here >>

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

How To Winter by Dr. Kari Leibowitz

February is notorious for being the toughest month of the year for many people. In the Northern hemisphere, these are the cold winter months where social isolation feels at its highest and depression sets in for many people. Whether this describes you these months or not, How to Winter is a book about how to overcome this mindset and find the positivity to lift your mood and “thrive on cold, dark or difficult days.” To write this book, the author Kari Leibowitz traveled around the world to understand how people living in some of the most outwardly depressing places in the world manage to “discover the power of ‘wintertime mindset’— viewing the season as full of opportunity and wonder.” A timely read for a season where many of us aren’t at our best, How to Winter gives you the blueprint to conquer the wintertime blues. For that reason, it’s my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Neil Patrick Harris Launches Engaging New Immersive Story Board Game: Box Two

• How Lego Builds Unique Store Experiences 

• Inside the Hunt For Rare Daffodils That Are Feared Lost 

• I Dated Multiple AI Partners At Once. Then It Got Weird

• The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

• The Only U.S. Location To Have Been Under 8 Flags [TRIVIA ANSWER!]

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Yesterday I checked my calendar in the morning and discovered something odd.

No meetings. Not a single one. Somehow no one picked that day to connect, or meetings were canceled and after a month filled with multiple destinations and a few back to back meeting days, I found myself suddenly with a gloriously empty day. So I read part of a book I had been meaning to start. Watched some videos on new technology I wanted to learn. Caught up on some long postponed tasks. And constantly wondered to myself, “why don’t I do this more often?”

To be clear, this wasn’t a day off. It wasn’t an intentionally unscheduled travel day. Those are different. Yesterday I was home, in my pajamas most of the day just enjoying the freedom. I sometimes suggest this to others as a way to find the space for new ideas. But it’s easy to forget to take my own advice. My day without meetings was highly energizing. I suggest you try it for yourself.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

Rohit

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Are Book Blurbs Worth the Effort or a Tradition That “Rewards Connections Over Talent”?

By any measure, I’ve been pretty successful at getting book blurbs across my ten published books. Deepak Chopra. Tony Robbins. Adam Grant. They have all done book blurbs for me in the past and with my last book Non-Obvious Thinking, we went out big on blurbs—collecting more than 50 of them from a collection of visionary authors, business leaders, innovators. It was time consuming, humbling and according to a new article from this week’s NY Times, maybe a total waste of time.

According to Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, “Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time … favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.” It’s hard to argue with his point about blurbs being mostly about connections, but in my experience they do make a difference. Yes, it can be a herculean effort to gather them—and it sucks when you get declined. But there are a few reasons why I think they are still worth it and will continue recommending that our authors collect them (and I’ll continue doing so myself):

1. Blurbs send a signal to readers who may be unfamiliar with an author that a book may be worth reading because others they respect endorsed it.

2. Blurbs can help authors connect with influential endorsers who may be more inclined to share a book when their name is also on the back cover.

3. Blurbs can be wonderful fodder for social media posts (a main reason why we went after and secured more than 50 of them for our book).

4. Blurbs that are part of the metadata for a book profile listing on Amazon and all other platforms can help with SEO and discoverability.

5. Blurbs can be a signal for media considering coverage for a book of how much momentum/endorsement a title has and whether it’s worthy of coverage.

Clearly I’m in favor of blurbs for books, but there’s a broader argument here about whether endorsements in general are worthwhile. What do you think? Are blurbs just an inflated indication of connections over talent, or are they a worthwhile way to demonstrate that a book (or anything else) is worthy of consideration?

The Intrigue and Lessons of Canceled TV Shows and Abandoned Pilots

I find the idea of canceled TV programs to be intriguing. I always have. It’s not that I enjoy reading about the creative misfortune of people having their ideas crushed after a depressingly small window of time to prove themselves “worthy.” The process to even get a show concept green lit, filmed, edited and then aired is so difficult that I can’t help wondering what happens to those ideas after they get killed?

The world of TV is filled with accidental success stories (fans hated the first few episodes of The Office) or resurrected failures (Cobra Kai underperformed on YouTube Red before Netflix gave it a second life). Many of these shows needed time to find their groove, so to speak. So when I read this week about every TV show canceled in 2025, which includes the Frasier spinoff, HBO’s The Franchise and Hulu’s How To Die Alone, the question that comes up most is whether the show really wasn’t going to work or whether they just didn’t have enough time to find their formula for success.

Time will tell as every canceled show is currently “seeking a new home” for their efforts, which suggests the aftermarket for programming is just as hot as original concepts for shows themselves. Even if you don’t work in TV, there are many lessons here for the rest of us. Like making sure we allow enough time for our best ideas to flourish. And remembering that sometimes the best thing you can do is take on and amplify something that was started by someone else.

Poopy Diapers and How To Destroy a Small Business With Minimal Effort

Paul and Rachelle Baron sell washable swim diapers on Amazon. Like many other small businesses, they use the logistics arm of Amazon to provide distribution and fulfillment for them as consumers can buy their products on Amazon without ever knowing they are a third party seller. Orders still arrive in 1-2 days and consumers are happy. And of course, Amazon makes it super easy to return items … which created a messy problem for the Barons when one consumer decided to return a used swim diaper covered in poop. Amazon didn’t inspect the return, resold the diaper. That led to a one-star review (with photos!) which was then upvoted as “helpful” by more than 100 shoppers and destroyed diaper sales in the process.

The Barons tried to complain to Amazon and quickly get the review removed but it took more than a year to get the review removed. That’s terrible on the part of Amazon and they clearly need a better arbitration process to remove reviews—but an equally big problem is the customer who thought it was ok to return a poop-covered diaper to Amazon in the first place and the more than 100 people who upvoted that review.

Returning a product is not a victimless choice. It can cost real small businesses a lot of money and in cases like the one described above, even destroy their livelihood. Promoting that review without knowing the full story makes the problem even worse. It’s easy to paint Amazon as the only bad guy here—and they definitely made the problem worse. But consider this: all of us have a responsibility to see the bigger picture.

Who is really getting hurt when we thoughtlessly return a used product, or quickly hit the “upvote” button on a negative review? Contrary to the popular narrative, Amazon isn’t just “strangling small businesses.” They have also given us a tragically effective platform to do that for ourselves.

What The AI-Enhanced Beatles Grammy Award Win Tells Us About the Future of Memories

In case you missed it, at this past weekend’s Grammy Awards, the Beatles took home the win for Best Rock Performance for the AI-assisted track “Now and Then.” Before you go down the rabbit hole of seeing this as the first step in the music apocalypse, it’s important to note exactly what was done here. This was not a new track created by AI trained on all the past recordings of the Beatles. Rather, it was an effort to use AI tools to clean up a decades-old muffled track of an original recording from the band that was never good enough to be released. Thanks to new audio isolation techniques enabled by AI, the surviving Beatles were able to extract John Lennon’s original vocals as a track and then rerecord and remix the song in studio.

This has huge implications for the library of content that exists for many of the most popular musicians of the last 75 years. If older recordings can be remastered, rebuilt and rereleased, they can unlock a wave of “new” music from beloved acts of the past. There is also the potential for this same technology to allow all of us to unlock our own memories of the past. Imagine being able to take footage of your parents (or grandparents) and remaster it into something that is higher quality, easier to hear and possible to share more easily. The potential impact on the music industry is important, but the idea that we might use it to unlock the magic of our own family histories is even more exciting.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

ProPublica

In a time when there is a crisis of trust in the media, investigative journalism is the answer. Ok, it’s one answer. Unlike the quick take “news of the hour” that you can find in many places online written by anyone and everyone, investigative journalism takes time. It’s old school in the sense that reporters dig into stories, interview people, find sources and uncover things that often those in power don’t want people to see or know about.

ProPublica is “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.” Their stories cover a wide variety of topics and are increasingly important as a way to shine more transparency on the practices of large companies and governments alike.

While much of their content would qualify as “long reads” which it might feel like you have less and less time for, the perspectives and truths they uncover will open your eyes to the real stories that matter. And yes, I did use the word “truth” because their work is about exposing reality in a way that spurs reform without offering the biased perspective that is so prevalent across many other forms of media.

If we want to live in a more truthful and fairer world, ProPublica is the sort of media organization we all need to read, support and donate to. For those reasons it’s my selection for the Non-Obvious Media Platform of the Week.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Negotiating While Black by Damali Peterman

If you are an avid follower of our Non-Obvious Book Awards program, you might recognize this week’s selection: Negotiating While Black. It was our pick for the Most Useful book of the year in 2024 for a few key reasons. Firstly, while the book’s title might indicate you’ll need to be Black in order to read it—the beautiful thing about how its written is that the book is most useful for anyone who finds themselves in a negotiating situation where they may be underestimated. That’s most of us regardless of our racial background.

In the book, Peterman seamlessly integrates her own personal stories and experiences with broader lessons that any of us can take away to transform our negotiation savviness in any situation. From adopting a curious mindset to “minding the gap” in conversations (ie - the moment when things seem to take a turn for the worse), the suggestions in this book are immediately helpful, practical and easy for anyone to implement if they are aware and thoughtful about taking the advice Peterman offers.

Ultimately, the goal of this book is to help you negotiate in moments where there is a real-life implicit bias against you for any reason, whether it is your age, gender, race, inexperience, over experience or anything else. All of us will find ourselves in a situation where we need to do this, and Negotiating While Black is an ideal text to help you find a way to get what you want even when you’re underestimated.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Brazilian brand O Boticário continues Botiverso—a TikTok content accelerator program for lifestyle and beauty creators aged 45+

• ‘Scared and betrayed’ — Workers Are Reeling from Chaos at Federal Agencies — Featuring Interviews with Government Employees

• Revenge of the Humanities - How AI Will Put a Premium on a New Set of Human Skills

• India’s Tiger Population Doubles in a Decade

• How Consultants Almost Destroyed Nike’s Brand

• Sam Altman Regrets Ditching Open Source, Says He's Been on the "Wrong Side of History"

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

It’s a tragic morning here in DC as news of a fatal plane crash is just surfacing. I was driving past DCA airport just 30 minutes before this so the story feels a bit more personal for me right now. Earlier this week, I was speaking at an AI Symposium hosted by NASA just up the road at their Greenbelt, Maryland location and one of the topics was aviation and how AI might help make both flying and tasks on the ground such as air traffic control safer for all of us. It turned out to be a timely conversation.

On a non-tragedy related front—this week’s stories range from taking a deeper look at the stories behind the story of DeepSeek AI, to a review of how chatbot enabled retail sales might offer a surprising boost in customer loyalty. We will also look at the backlash against driverless cars and a fascinating example of celebrating your heritage from musician Bad Bunny’s latest new tour.

Enjoy and stay curious!

Rohit

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The Stories Within the Story About Why DeepSeek AI Is Such A Big Deal

The big AI news of the week was Chinese startup DeepSeek releasing their AI model which seemingly offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. The news has apparently shocked the tech community “popping the US big tech bubble” and sent the share prices of several big tech players rocketing downward. This is the story that seems to be getting the most attention—how a startup from China could upend so much momentum and domination of the generative AI ecosystem that had previously been mainly US-based tech companies. There are two other elements to this story that are emerging and equally interesting to follow.

The first is just how deeply disruptive the technology behind DeepSeek seems to be in terms of its energy consumption. As one writer for MIT Tech Review observes, DeepSeek “poses a threat to the narrative that more computing power is the only thing that’ll unlock AI breakthroughs.” Even as innovation happens in terms of the speed and capability of these tools, there may be similar innovation in terms of how efficiently they can be run. The second story is thick irony of OpenAi’s complaint that DeepSeek used their proprietary content without permission … which is of course how their own tool was trained, using copyrighted intellectual property too.

So what should we take away from this whole emerging AI vs AI saga? Perhaps nothing long term. But it is interesting just how many backstories you can see inside something everyone is talking about if you look for them.

The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going To Be Easy

Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service is planning to experiment with letting riders leave a tip. Before your temperature rises too much, it’s important to note that the tips would go to charity and you can select the charity … so we can all just calm down a little. The positive PR is probably one big reason Waymo maybe be trialing the feature.

Creating a new market is hard and the company has been losing a reported $2B in the first half of 2024 alone trying to make it work. Along the way, people are revolting … like last week when a crowd of people trashed an idling Waymo vehicle in the middle of a Los Angeles street. This perhaps is the cost of progress and to be expected with something as disruptive as driverless taxis. It doesn’t seem to be deterring the company from forging ahead and expanding their operation to 10 new cities in 2025.

In a sense, they are following a technology model for disruption that is well worn. One player spends and loses billions to create and owns a market. All other players unwilling to lose so much money drop out. And eventually, the biggest company dominates. There are literally TV shows (Super Pumped and The Playlist) explaining how it works.

The Age of the AI Chatbot Salesperson Might Have An Unintended Side Effect

Training an employee to do upselling (and be good at it) is notoriously difficult. When it’s done right, it can drive significant revenue for many types of businesses though so it’s not surprising that some are experimenting with letting AI do the job. An article from WIRED this week showcases a few examples of vendors working on this sort of technology via chatbots that interact with customers as they are placing orders for something like pizza for delivery. The thing that’s even more interesting about this is the sort of dialog opportunities that this offers to go beyond just the task of upselling.

Imagine, for example, retailers accepting orders for delivery could not just take orders but also have entire conversations with customers about the products, share how they are made, answer detailed questions and even share stories that could humanize the business or increase loyalty. These are the sorts of things that are difficult to train real employees to do and nearly impossible for those employees to do given the time constraints of their job. Upselling through chatbots is interesting. Using them to deepen customer loyalty through telling stories and creating connections is potentially even bigger.

Bad Bunny Celebrates Puerto Rico and His Heritage By Creating Exclusive Experiences

The first nine shows of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s upcoming summer tour are sold out. That’s not particularly surprising. The interesting thing about them is that they all happen in Puerto Rico and tickets were only available to Puerto Rico residents through in- person sales (to prevent scalpers from getting tickets as much as possible). Obviously there will still be some reselling going on, but the commitment to his hometown is captured in the title of his tour itself “No me quiero ir de aqui.” (I don’t want to leave here). After those first nine shows, there will be an additional 30 date run at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico where his fans will not only be able to buy tickets to the show but also purchase VIP experiences that combine travel and tourism along with the show.

So far the tour has been a big success with over 400,000 tickets sold in just four hours, so perhaps the example of this might inspire more artists and creators to celebrate their heritage too and make this a trend. In a time when people are looking for new and interesting immersive experiences, the timing on this seems just right.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Flowing Data

You don’t have to be a data nerd to love beautiful visualizations and Flowing Data is a site that not only has those, but also plenty of useful educational content about how to create and present great data visuals yourself. From creating their own charts and graphics to featuring wonderful, submitted creations from across the world—the site is a great compilation of infographics, excellent fodder for materials to include in presentations (with proper accreditation!) and a fun site to just browse for some interesting data visuals when you have a bit of free time and want to read something different.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Humanize: A Maker’s Guide To Designing Our Cities

Imagine a graphic novel that offers a compelling argument for why our cities can be more than just boring backdrops for daily routines. That’s the vision in Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanize and it comes to life through lots of examples, stories and visuals of exactly how cities could be more interesting and exciting. You may not see yourself as someone who is actively “designing cities” and you probably don’t work in urban planning, but the beauty of this book is how approachable the author makes these topics. This wildly original book explores what it means to make human versus inhuman (inhumane?!) places and how we can all change our perspective on what we should demand and expect from the places we inhabit. The world doesn’t need to be boring. Thanks to this book, perhaps we can all imagine a new way to make sure it isn’t.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Books Written By Humans Get Their Own Certification

• Netflix Finally Lets People Download An Entire Season With One Click

• The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Report Just Came Out and Reveals A “Crisis of Grievance”

• Startups Inspired by LA’s Wildfires To Help Rebuild the City and Prevent It From Happening Again

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

As we head into the first days of what most political observers predict will be a highly transactional Presidential administration, I’ve spent the week in Dubai watching a very different sort of government in action. Here at the Emirates Future Forum, the conversation was about how members of the UAE government could imagine the next decade. The country has a roadmap for 2031 and beyond, and the investments they are making now are putting those first steps in action. For my media recommendation of the week, I am including a collection of some of the latest outlines of these future plans so you can see some of what I experienced over the last few days. It was impressive.

In other stories this week,

Enjoy and stay curious!

Rohit

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The Library of Lost & Imaginary Books

There are books mentioned within the pages of other books that never existed on their own, but what if they did? That’s the fascinating story visitors can explore at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan where you can either show up with your own idea for a book or help recreate an imagined title from another book. The bookbinding equipment at the Center is traditional and the experience is physical and nostalgic—though probably most of the people visiting were not born when books were first made this way. The founder Reid Byers describes the delight of the experience he has created this way:

Making physical versions of pretend books, many made with perfectly chosen and sometimes startlingly convincing details, heightens that desire: you can look, but you can’t read. For the most part, the pages of the books are blank.

There is an exhibition of these imaginary books on right now at the Grolier Club through February 15th if you happen to be in New York. If not, the experience can be viewed online too.

DEI May Be Dying … But Here’s What Could Replace It

When Jennifer Brown and I first published our book Beyond Diversity in 2021 it was moment of big momentum for DEI. Amongst the many other books published at that time, there was an underlying sentiment of “blaming and shaming” people that we tried our best to reject. You don’t change minds, we felt, by alienating people before you even have a chance to start a conversation. This week, longtime DEI practitioner Lily Zheng shared a similar perspective in their timely criticism of the typical DEI model:

“Decades of research shows clear problems with status-quo DEI. Despite their widespread prescription, DEI trainings often fail to change bias or reduce prejudice. Popular strategies for communicating the value of DEI can paradoxically both hurt marginalized communities and decrease leadership support for DEI. Common initiatives intended to create better workplaces for all might instead activate backlash, increase burnout, and fail to improve outcomes for underserved groups.”

Zheng goes on to ask what comes after DEI and proposes a different model based on a framework of fairness first. She suggests that “focusing on representation as an issue of trust rather than an issue of identity allows us to avoid zero-sum conversations that can come from fixating on demographics.” In a time when there is widespread panic about the newest rollback of DEI initiatives both within the US government and in businesses across sectors, there are also underappreciated signs that DEI may not actually be dead … just changing. For example, President Trump’s cabinet may be slightly more diverse than people realize—probably because he prioritizes loyalty above all else.

Still, the only way to “save” DEI and guarantee all people have similar access to opportunities and ensure we are not saddled with a one-dimensional government or narrow minded leadership in companies is to try a new model. Zheng uses the acronym FAIR to describe one such model. There may be others too. What’s clear is that the old way of practicing and talking about DEI is under attack and won’t survive in the same form it once was.

The No Book: An Inside Look At Tim Ferriss’s New Book (and How He Protects His Time)

In case you’re not familiar with author Tim Ferriss, here’s a crazy fact about him: If he’s in a time when he isn’t checking email (usually for three weeks at a time), he deletes all the emails he has received and asks people to resend them if they are really that important. Tim’s first book The Four Hour Workweek was a global bestseller. In this new book (his first in over seven years), which he is releasing as a serial with two chapters at a time, Tim writes about all the techniques and scripts he uses to protect his time—and how you can do the same.

While his perspective is probably more extreme than most of us might be willing to do, the premise of the book (explored over what he estimates as more than 500 pages) is an important reminder that we could all benefit from saying no to more things. Maybe the only way to actually do it is by learning from someone like Tim who is legendarily good at it from practicing it all the time.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

Dubai Future Foundation

One of the most forward looking nations invests heavily in future planning, and much of their planning, research, insights and project efforts are all published freely online. This is the wealth of futures information you’ll find on this government sponsored website from the Dubai Future Foundation. These insights along with the publications and research published by the UAE Government Development & Futures Office are just as useful as many trend insights websites that require subscriptions and payment in order to access. On these sites, you can download PDFs and take a look at some ongoing projects that are already underway across the seven Emirates in partnership with many other third party groups.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Long History of the Future by Nicole Kobie

Wide eyed predictions of the future are fun to read, and even more fun to write. Yet for every book that promises to predict the future, there remains a nagging problem at the heart of those predictions: that future, which should already be here continually seems far off. Why isn’t tomorrow’s technology already here? That is the tantalizing question Nichole Kobe aims to answer in this book. Through a series of chapters tackling the most common future technology predictions, from driverless cars to Smart cities, Kobe explains exactly why the actual building of these technologies isn’t as simple as those visionary predictions might suggest. Yet rather than using this, as an excuse for stagnation, she paints a portrait of what tomorrow’s society may actually look like when we implement a version of these technologies that remotely represents a different slice of what we are actually shown.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Researchers just stumped AI with their most AI test—Humanity’s Last Exam—but for how long?

• 2025 AI Predictions You Can’t Afford to Miss

• Scientists Experiment With Subjecting AI to Pain

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Thanks for being loyal readers of this newsletter! Starting this week, you’ll see a slight addition to my usual format as I’m going to be including a recommendation for a book AND a media source every week moving forward. Many of you have told me that you really want to expand your own thinking and mindset in the coming year, and I hope these book and media suggestions will help with that!

In stories this week, you’ll read about why the Canadians are afraid of the upcoming inauguration, an AI-powered hotel that may not be as ridiculous as it sounds, what we can all do about fake job postings (and why we should care), and how to actually learn from failure (and how not to).

Finally, as a quick recap from the tradeshow floor where I was last week, at CES this year I did more than 30 interviews with founders, entrepreneurs and innovators. My team will be releasing those over the coming weeks on my YouTube channel and over social media. In case you missed the ones we’ve posted so far, here's a YouTube playlist you can bookmark or make sure to follow me on Instagram for the latest videos!

Enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious,

Rohit

PS - This week I’m officially eligible to get that AARP card … and so a big thanks to everyone for all the kind birthday wishes and messages. :-)

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Why The “World’s First” AI-Powered Hotel May Be More Than Fancy Marketing

From the outside the Otonomus Hotel (pun probably intended) doesn’t really look much different from any other spot. The property just had their soft-launch before officially opening in April 2025, declaring themselves the “first true AI-powered hotel in the world.” I can already picture you rolling your eyes. Despite the cringe-worthy marketing hyperbole, there are some features the hotel has planned which could indeed offer a glimpse into a future normal for hotel stays we can all expect.

For example, the system promises to respond to verbal prompts about specifics a guest might want such as adjoining rooms or a room near the pool or a certain temperature in the room. If you give permission, the AI system will also ask you about your preferences and what you like to do. Then comes the fun part. They can customize elements of your stay and in theory react to your preferences. If you’re a swimmer, they could automatically bring you extra towels. Love to stay up late? The system can give you promotions for happy hour drinks. With enough time and data, the hotel could build up enough personality profile information to offer a Netflix-style experience where they can predict what you would like and offer it before you even know you want it.

Of course, there’s the usual privacy concerns and the potential for a constant upsell on property will be immediate turnoffs for future guests. Still, it’s easy to imagine many of these features becoming commonplace inside hotels of the future. In a few months, for better or worse, you’ll be able to experience that future for yourself.

The Problem of Fake Job Postings

The Wall Street Journal published a piece this week about the rise in fake job postings online. The reasons for these range from some companies using those listings to try and appear larger or more successful than they are, to some that are fraudulently listed to try and capture data. There are even some organizations who are creating and then uncreating job openings after they fill part of it or decide they don’t want to hire after all.

There is a real human cost to these “ghost jobs” as hiring platform Greenhouse suggested they make up as much as 22% of all jobs advertised online. People who spend time and emotional energy applying can take a hit to their confidence at the worst possible time when they either don’t hear back or get rejected from a job that never really existed in the first place.

It may seem like there isn’t an obvious solution to this problem. Actually, I can think of two. The first is for any of us working at a company to advocate for our colleagues and HR teams to only post job openings if they are real and actually available. Putting a job listing online for a role that you really don’t need is not a victimless crime. The thing we can all do is support our friends and family who may be job seeking at the moment by reminding them that they have a lot to offer. A string of rejections (from fake roles or not) can erode anyone’s confidence. If you really care, reach out and help someone build it back up.

What the Canadian Angst Over The Upcoming Trump Inauguration Can Teach Us

In less than a week, President Trump will take office again and there is certainly some concern among the groups you would expect. One unusual source for some of the strongest angst is some of our neighbors from the North who have been swaying between terror and confusion over some of the soon-to-be-President’s most audacious plans for Canada. Bestselling author and student of history Dan Gardner offered an alarmist call to arms for his fellow Canadians on how Canada should respond to Trump. Popular YouTuber Julie Nolke took a different tactic, creating a viral video response for “When Trump Invades Canada” that’s already passed half a million views in just a few days.

Given President Trump’s well-known and extremely effective negotiating tactic of using sensationalist claims to distract from his real intentions, the reality is probably less likely to be Trump trying to make Canada the 51st state and more about securing trade deals that achieve his intentions. The story is a good indication of what we should all expect in the coming months and years as Trump takes office. Lots of noise about something that will be easy to get outraged about, done as a distraction from the much quieter work behind the scenes to actually get the things done that Trump and his administration care about with relatively little resistance from all but those who are able to see through the distractions to the true end game.

Flash Superhero Movie Director Proves We’re Not Great At Learning From Failure

The Flash movie came out in 2023 and by box office standards, it was a flop. A story making the rounds in entertainment trade publications this week was all about comments the movie’s director Andy Muschietti made in recent interviews attempting to explain exactly why the movie failed. According to him, it performed poorly because “it wasn’t as widely appealing as everyone hoped it would be.” Not exactly a stunning insight. He goes on to say, “I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character.”

In case you’re not up to date on the entire big and small screen history of this DC Comics character, back in 2014 a new TV series focusing on the character started on The CW and was so popular it ran for nine seasons. The character in that show had a cult following of fans who (you guessed it) cared about Flash as a character. The Flash movie cast a different actor in the title role and was not linked to the TV show which also possibly alienated a group of superfans who should have been the biggest ambassadors for the movie.

So yes, it failed, and the director is probably finding his own justifications for it. The reason I found this interesting enough to share, though, is because we can all be guilty of the same thing when we work on something that falls flat. Failure can be a great thing, but only if we learn true lessons that explain why it happened. Assigning the wrong rationale for failure is the same as learning nothing at all.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The Root

Tagline: “Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude”

The Root is definitely opinionated, sometimes biased and certainly more hyper focused on pop culture than most things I read. It’s also a great example of a media source that understands their audience and what that audience really cares about. I’m not meant to be part of that audience, which is one of the reasons why I get so much from being a regular reader of the site. Do you care about seeing photos of Naomi Campbell’s babies or what the kids of rap legends are doing with their careers?

Perhaps not, but sometimes the most insightful takeaway you can get from reading unfamiliar media is understanding what other people care about—especially if it falls outside your own interests or culture.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Brave New Words

Back in April of 2023, Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) did a TED talk with a timely title: How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education. It was near the start of what would soon become a full-blown debate about the role of AI in schools, whether kids are stunting their learning and intellect by using generative AI and what the future will look like if kids increasingly allow tools to do all their thinking. In this book, which was our pick for the Most Important Book of 2024 in the recent Non-Obvious Book Awards, Khan lays out his more optimistic vision for how AI could become a personalized tutor for students allowing anyone to have custom instruction available on demand anywhere in the world.

The book is not filled with wide eyed hopes for an unlikely future though. Instead, Khan dives into some of the earliest trials and beta testing that his team has been doing for several years now already to help shape AI into the positive educational force it could be. Reading this book, you may be left with the same conclusion as me: if we are going to live in a future where AI offers more positive change, it will require people like Khan and his team remaining on the front lines to guide the technologists towards what they should do instead of letting them blindly chase what they can do.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Bigmouth Buffalo: The Mysterious Fish That Lives for a Century and Doesn’t Decline With Age

• Why Is The American Diet So Deadly?

• Singapore Is Turning To AI To Care For Its Rapidly Aging Population

• The Return of the Non-Smart Watch

• Scan Detects Evidence of "Lost World" Under Pacific Ocean

• Five Graphic Design Trends To Watch In 2025

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Greetings from the trade show floor at CES here in Vegas. We are roaming the halls, meeting entrepreneurs, sampling products and getting an inside look at the tech that will shape our lives in the months and years to come.

This year, I’m sharing it all by video. If you’re not already - make sure to follow my YouTube channel and Instagram handle to see all the latest posts. Some of our early videos feature a demo of a five second dishwasher, unnecessary robots and an interview with music legend will.i.am about his latest new collaboration and advice for entrepreneurs. Aside from tech news, I’m watching the sad news from LA (stay safe), and gathering a handful of non-tech stories for you too … while also launching a new feature that I’ve been thinking about for a long time (see the bottom of this email for more on that).

Enjoy and as I have tried to do all week here in Vegas—stay curious!

Rohit

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Want To Help LA? Curb Your Schadenfreude

A billionaire posted a desperate tweet asking for private fire support to save his home … and he was attacked for it. Turns out this particular billionaire posted in the past about lowering property taxes and generally supports politicians who advocate for smaller government. Along with that smaller government and less taxes, though, is less money to pay those brave firefighters who are currently overworked and underpaid yet still trying to save people’s homes and businesses.

Every day there also stories of celebrities who have been forced to evacuate or lost their homes. All of which is inspiring a disturbing trend of people taking pleasure in the suffering of the rich and famous. It’s not dissimilar to the viral support that popped up for accused murderer Luigi Mangione after he gunned down healthcare executive Brian Thompson. It’s easy to explain these reactions as being limited to a group of angry people who have lost their moral compass. It’s harder to take a look at ourselves.

The way we react when misfortune happens to others always says more about our humanity than it does about theirs. So if you really want to help, start by taking a look in the mirror. And if you want to do something more financial to help, the LA Times has some good suggestions.

The Hottest Innovations and Tech From CES 2025 — Insights From The Ground

I’m very tempted to put together a “best innovations” list from the world’s largest tech trade show. I did one last year and I know that’s probably the biggest thing you want to know about my experience here at CES anyway. CNET, Engadget, WIRED, Tom’s Guide and lots of other tech media have already been releasing their picks for the best, most fun products and inventions. This year, I’ve been focusing my efforts on videos and will be releasing lots of the stories over the next few weeks. The people I’ve spoken to have stories that are not just relevant for this week.

But since I know that answer will hardly satisfy you - here are some headline observations from my first few days here that go a bit deeper than what you may see reflected in some of the videos and interviews I’m producing here:

1. Today’s innovations are incremental . In our quest to always seek out what’s new and different, sometimes we don’t appreciate the small leaps that happen within technologies from year to year. Last year I saw a plant that was 30 times more effective at cleaning toxins from the air. This year the same team returned with a product that can turn ANY houseplant into a supercharged air purifier with just a few drops.

2. Fun is a use case no one wants to admit. There are some products, like waving robots or automated drink mixers that are just plain fun to use. Unfortunately, most creators are afraid of admitting that and try to find more “serious” use cases for their product when there aren’t any. The gamers are the one exception. At least they know their product is meant to create fun.

3. AI doesn’t mean what you think it does. For more than a year now, the non-techie usage of the term “AI” has generally come to describe generative AI tools for creating. Here at CES, an AI enabled automated window cleaner isn’t generating anything creative. It’s just getting smarter about how to do it’s one job faster … and using AI to do it.

4. Tech is still male dominated, unfortunately. Despite many efforts to bring more female entrepreneurs to tech and encourage their efforts, CES offers a pretty sobering reality check on just how male-dominated tech across all industries really is.

5. Marketing matters a LOT in a crowded show. I found it stunning how many booths we passed where there was no short pitch and no visible information about something other than the relatively meaningless company name. And many did not have someone charismatic to share a pitch. Tech will, and always has, died in obscurity without great storytelling to explain it.

The Slow Decline of Patriotic Branding (and Maybe National Pride Itself)

There was a time when patriotic branding was hot. That time seems to be over. According to an eye-opening new study from a sociologist at Northern Arizona University, brands that include the outline of the U.S. map or the American flag are on the decline. And this is not just happening in America—it’s becoming more common globally too. So what might this say about our future culture or the state of how people see their relationships to the places they live and call their homes?

National pride at its core comes from a sense of shared identity. The more division we see in our cultures and the people around us, the more we feel like the things that tie us to our fellow citizens are fading. Along with this erosion of a shared culture comes the feeling that we are part of a group that is defined by something other than the nation in which we live or grew up. The internet perhaps makes this even easier to find a tribe of people that are located across the world instead of the people around us. And of course there’s the loneliness and isolation the comes with living our lives increasingly online that removes us from the local communities. What would it take to bring it back? Or could we? I’d love to hear your thoughts—please hit reply and let me know what you think.

The Brilliance of Costco’s New Plan To Build Apartments On Top Of Their Stores

There is a housing shortage in many cities. And there’s a Costco in those cities. In an ambitious new project, the brand is working with LA-based developers Thrive Living to build a new 800-unit apartment complex in Baldwin Village, South Los Angeles, with a new Costco store occupying the ground floor. Nearly 25% of the apartments will be offered as low-income housing. I love the non-obvious thinking behind this idea. You have a store that is already occupying real estate. They provide many home goods people need. If you build an apartment on top of it, you can use the space more effectively and also import a whole new bunch of hyper-local customers who are likely to spend frequently at your store.

It is certainly a complex operation and the estimated costs for this first one is upwards of $450 million dollars, but the potential financial upside and value to the community could be far greater. While the project is currently estimated for completion by 2027, given the devastation in LA this week—perhaps they might accelerate their timeline and considering doing a few more of these projects elsewhere too.

The Non-Obvious Media Platform of the Week

Shelly Palmer Blog

Rather than sharing a book recommendation this week, I wanted to switch it up and share a media source that’s particularly timely right now. If you’re not familiar with Shelly Palmer, he is a tech commentator and overall insightful voice on the future of technology. At CES he hosts tours and often offers his own perspective on hits and misses from the show.

More significantly, throughout the year he posts details about the things that are happening in tech and has been very aggressive about releasing some wonderful learning courses around AI and how to use it so that people can get savvier about the tools and be less afraid of using them. For those reasons, I wanted to include Shelly Palmer’s blog as my suggestion for the first Non-Obvious Media Platform of the Week. Next week I’ll be back with both a book AND a media recommendation for you as part of this email.

Until then, enjoy Shelly’s blog and insights about tech and CES.

About the Non-Obvious Media Platform Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” media platform worth adding to your weekly rotation. People often ask me what I’m reading to get my trademark non-obvious stories in this newsletter together. My goal is to share new platforms and ideas with you which you might have otherwise missed.

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2024 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Dear {{first_name|Fellow Trend Curator}},

Happy New Year! I hope you had (or are having!) a restful and energizing start of the new year. For me, this year is going to be one of connection where I aim to find new ways to bring people together at the events I’m part of and also do my best to show up for the people in my life.

This week has also been about preparing for CES in Vegas where I’ll be next week covering non-obvious innovations and interviewing the entrepreneurs behind them. If you’ll be in town, please drop me a line and let me know so I can invite you to one of the gatherings I’m hosting!

Also, please follow me on Instagram too at @rohitbb to see my latest videos from the trade show floor throughout the week next week - including at least one interview with a surprise celebrity guest!

Until then, enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious,

Rohit

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The Long Game of the Kardashians May Be Smarter Than You Think

Most of us know that reality TV is often heavily scripted and edited to tell an intentionally melodramatic story. Usually the on-screen participants have little to no control over how they are portrayed. The Kardashians have always been different. The family has frequently been criticized for having little talent and only being famous for being famous--the ultimate oxymoron. Yet over the past decade, the individual sisters from this "untalented" family have taken their fame and turned it into multiple lucrative billion dollar companies.

An article from this month's Rolling Stone offered a more non-obvious assessment of how the Kardashians are currently (and perhaps have always) leveraged their fame to play a long game few have appreciated:

"The ability to pivot the brand into different spaces and eras is the main reason why we shouldn’t count the Kardashians out just yet. Their genius — and Kim’s in particular — is that they understand the importance of change ... they have an awareness of where they need to pivot next and when. They are in the process of trying to transfer their reality star fame into other genres. They are less interesting but by a very purposeful design."

Now as Season Six of the Kardashians gets set to air next month - the "reality" presented in the show is likely to be shamelessly filled with plugs for products and operate very much like an infomercial to sell merch. In other words, they have built the fame doing what they needed to do ... and now they're cashing in. You may not be a fan of their journey, but it's hard to dismiss these sisters as lacking talent.

What We Can Learn From 2024 Most Hated Ads

The worst ads of the year, according to marketing publication The Drum, included Apple's cringy ad showing the iPad literally crushing human creativity, Google showing how AI could help a seven year cheat her way through writing a fan letter to an Olympian, Jaguar's controversial brand revamp, Bumble's bumbling ad imploring their female users to hook up more often and several others. I had to agree with the assessments for the various ads/campaigns being terrible, but looking at the list there were two things that stood out for me.

The first was that brands who got the cultural zeitgeist wrong suffered the most. In a time when people were worried about the potentially huge changes that AI will bring to our professional lives and the lives of children growing up with it, making light of that or dismissing the worries about tech killing or replacing human creativity was a losing message. Both Apple and Google paid for it.

Secondly, for both Bumble and Jaguar the backlash was a result of brands with a reputation seemingly being willing to throw that goodwill away in service of pivoting in a new unpopular direction. Jaguar potentially alienated their longtime brand fans. And Bumble, long celebrated as the leading dating platform to empower women first, apparently abandoned this focus with their campaign.

The conclusion anyone in marketing can draw from the examples is about the importance of understanding both what your brand stands for and the culture within which you are marketing it. Get those two things wrong, and you will predictably fail.

How 2025 Could Become The Year of Reuse

Every time I would visit India growing up, one sight would fascinate me as we traveled the roads was the number of old Ambassador black taxis that continued to dominate the roads for five decades. The thing I didn't know as a child but later learned, was that the "secret" to their longevity was that the insides of the cars would be completely replaced over time. While the iconic car brand has since been discontinued, I couldn't help thinking about it this week as a read about a luxury service designed to do something similar for Porsche 911 cars.

By itself, this is an intriguing service - but it's also an example of a broader trend that will be one to watch in 2025: reuse and upcycling. There are examples of this happening in many industries across the world.

Leading architecture firm Gensler predicts a boom in "adaptive reuse" becoming one of the hottest trends in building this year leading to "creative conversions of aging buildings as economic and environmental imperatives ... office to office, office to clinic, retail to sports and entertainment, retail to health and wellness."

More than a dozen leading brands across fashion, furniture and shoes have launched their own branded buyback programs encouraging their customers to resell products back to them for resale in exchange for credit to use later. Some industry watchers in fashion are expecting that upcycling clothes in this way could be the sustainable fashion trend of 2025.

Even technology products, perhaps the most notorious category for generating frequent waste thanks to how quickly products become dated, is now increasingly sharing ideas for upcycling technology products by reusing them and even FINALLY allowing people to open and fix their own malfunctioning devices thanks to the recent "right to repair" legislation that was implemented in 2023.

All this is a hopeful message to start the new year. If 2025 does indeed become the year where reuse takes off, we will all benefit by both saving money and positively impacting the environment by reducing waste as well.

Will Facebook Become A Sad AI-Dominated Graveyard In the Coming Year?

Facebook announced they are going to get more aggressive with allowing AI-generated users and profiles on Facebook. In a move literally no one was asking for, they announced the shift and one of their senior AI execs at Facebook described their vision this way:

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that's where we see all of this going."

People were justifiably "disgusted" as several media reports noted, and also worried that a platform which is already frequently used by both the elderly and conspiracy theorists, among many others, will now make it even harder for the most vulnerable people to separate fabrication from reality. On a business level, marketers are worried that now AI-generated "impressions" which are obviously worthless will now be counted when measuring impact of messages and generating invoices for advertising - leading to inflated numbers and fraudulent billing.

You would expect there will be some measures in place to prevent this, but the broader dangers of unleashing so many fake accounts and training them to presumably get closer and closer to mimicking the behaviors and quirks of real people is almost certainly a terrible idea on many levels. Which unfortunately offers no insulation against them going ahead and doing it anyway.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Infectious Generosity

Chris Anderson knows big ideas. As the head of Ted, the global organization behind Ted talks and Ted X events, he has been witness to the backstory of more big ideas than most. His biggest is that humans are hardwired to be generous. Not that it’s easy to remember that in a world that seems colder than it actually is. Yet the stories he tells and examples he brings together offer a reminder that we all can give ourselves the grace to be our most generous selves and make a difference in the world around us along the way. It's a perfect message to share at the start of the year.

From explaining the power of courageous generosity to outlining exactly how mainstream media could shift our global experience of generosity, to how big tech could implement changes to algorithmically, elevate generous stories, this book is the ultimate guide on how to bring more generosity to our worlds by practicing more of it ourselves and making it part of our core identity to do it.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• Inside the Factory of 400 Year Old Cymbal Maker Zildjian 

• Cancel Culture On Campus: Most of Us Are Terrified ...

• 'Firkle', 'Gluschdich' and more: 10 words We Learned in 2024 That Will Expand Your Mind 

• How Airlines Pick the Movies on Your Flights 

• The Greatest Keyboard Never Sold

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>