Think Forward Ep 120 - Non-Obvious Thinking with Rohit Bhargava

🚀Episode 120 of the Think Forward Show is ready for you! 🚀

What if the key to seeing the future was learning to notice what others miss?

🎙️ Welcome to the Think Forward Show Episode 120: Non-Obvious Thinking with Rohit Bhargava 🔍

I'm Steve Fisher, your guide on this futurist journey, and in this enlightening episode, I sit down with Rohit Bhargava, author of the Non-Obvious series and the new book "Non-Obvious Thinking." We explore how developing a non-obvious mindset can help us spot opportunities others miss and build a more open-minded future.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• How operating on different time scales can lead to unique insights

• The evolution from trend spotting to developing a non-obvious mindset

• The importance of being a "noticer" in our increasingly digital world

• Why ethics and diverse perspectives are crucial in shaping our future

Rohit's approach challenges us to look beyond the immediate and obvious, teaching us how to cultivate a mindset that can transform both our personal and professional lives. After following his work for 15 years, this conversation was particularly special.

What do you notice that others might miss? Join the conversation!

#ThinkForwardShow #Innovation #FuturesThinking #NonObviousThinking #Leadership

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🔗 Steve’s Site: www.stevenfisher.io

Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.

Transcript

Steve F: 0:00

Rohit, welcome to the podcast.

Rohit: 0:01

Oh, thank you. It's good to talk with you.

Steve F: 0:03

I've been reading your stuff for years. I've known you for a long time. I don't know how many have read the non obvious books, and there's so much more than that about you. Let's start with your story.

Rohit: 0:14

Yeah, what what should I tell you it's it's funny. We've probably known each other for, I don't know, like 15 years? Yeah. Something like, relatively long time. Longer than some people who's listening have had a career for, probably. That's a really interesting way of framing it. That's

Steve F: 0:28

a yeah.

Rohit: 0:29

Yeah. But yeah, it's it's one of those things you realize over time that You've known someone for a long time, and we've had conversations, probably over a beer or something at some point, but to spend time together like this, I don't know that we've really done that, so this is a fun chance for me, too.

Steve F: 0:45

Yeah, you travel a lot, you're, you're a very in demand and popular person, which is a good thing to be in the speaking and author world these days. I got to meet you when you were first, starting out with non obvious. The one thing I remember very vividly is your room with all the post it notes, all the articles, all the captured information, like I am a ADHD. So for me it would overwhelm the system.. How did you get into this idea of the non obvious way of thinking? How did that kind of come about?

Rohit: 1:16

I suppose I've always first of all, I've always been a writer. I did an English major. I was writing plays. And and I was really interested in the creative side of that writing.

Steve F: 1:27

Yeah.

Rohit: 1:27

And I think non obvious for me came about because I was doing what many writers do at some point, which is You've got a commitment to write something, and you've got to come up with something interesting to say. And so I started this method that you mentioned, where I'm constantly looking for ideas, saving ideas, and I created my own method for doing that. And one of the secrets that I uncovered in the process of doing that is that sometimes the best ideas come from operating on a time scale that others don't. And what I mean by that is a lot of times, especially with blogging, you've done this, I've done this you're looking for what's the story this week that I can respond to, right? And what hardly anyone does is, what's the interesting story nine months ago that I saved and now I'm coming back to and relating to something that's happening today, or maybe even not, relating it to something that happened nine months ago. Three months ago. So now you're taking a nine month old story along with a three month old story and projecting forward Like what does this mean for the future? And to me like that gave me unique insights that no one else had because I was just operating with different information And that kind of became my signature thing and when people ask me what sort of ideas do I look for? What do I look for to write about? I started describing them as non obvious In fact, you'll find this interesting. So when I did my first book, which was in 2008, so this was really probably three years before I even started talking about non obvious and definitely before non obvious became like a brand and I trademarked it and all of that stuff like came later, right? But in 2008, I wrote this book called personality not included. And the forward, the introduction to that book says the non obvious way to read this book. So I was using that as lingo before I even turned it into a brand and before I even realized what it could become, right? Because I was just using it as a way to describe the sort of ideas I wanted to write about.

Steve F: 3:18

I think that's where I met you. I have to shout out Shashi Billimkanda on the podcast here. Yeah. Mutual friend. I think that I met you through that because you were in heavily, I would say you were a marketer branding like that was your. Yeah.

Rohit: 3:31

I was at Ogilvy at that time.

Steve F: 3:33

You were at Ogilvy. Yeah. When you were at Ogilvy, would you consider the non-obvious way of thinking as a trend spotting or curation method for people, 'cause a lot of trend spotters, that's how it started a bit. It's a bit much mystical is how people like, search for trends. It's a bit non-obvious. Yeah. I would say in a way, yeah.

Rohit: 3:49

Yeah. It's interesting because that is definitely where it started. That was where the heritage of non-obvious thinking was. And for literally a decade, as I was writing these books about trends, a new one every year I talked about non obvious trend curation, exactly what you said. And it was like, the non obvious way of thinking could help you to see the future, anticipate what's coming next, and identify trends. And it was only in 2020, right around when the pandemic hit and I'd released, two months before the pandemic, I released the last edition of the non obvious trend report, which was a 10 year project, a new book every year, non obvious megatrends came out in January of 2020. And at that point, a lot of things changed, obviously. But for me, non obvious was no longer just about trends. And now I was faced with this challenge that I think some of us may have. are faced with it at a certain point where we've been talking about something for a while. We've established some ownership over it. We're maybe known for that thing. And now we're faced with this question of what do we do next? Do I just do 2. 0 of that thing? Do I pivot and do something entirely different? Which I did do. Or do I come back to it? Which is now what I'm coming back to. And so now the new book, Non Obvious Thinking Takes this method and says well, it's not just about trends if you can be a non obvious thinker You can be more open minded and see these opportunities and really change your life and it's more of a mindset so what it's evolved to now 15 years later is a mindset and The brand is around that whereas before what it started with was trends

Steve F: 5:23

Yeah for a while there. I felt like you were making what is your parachute? Every year, you're like doing the every year. It's that's do that at

Rohit: 5:30

a certain point, right? Especially when we leave, like when I left Ogilvy, that was a big moment for me. When I'm like, okay am I going to do my own thing? Am I going to go find another agency job? Am I going to go client side, the dark side, right? Could I do that? So we're faced with these moments, I think in our careers, and we have to try and do the best we can.

Steve F: 5:48

That's great. I think there's many people out there considering, especially with the advent of generative AI, what it means for their careers. I'm one of them, right? It's I've spent 30 years in technology, many pivots, many in navigation through changes and new technologies. And, it's a, it's very, this is a big shift, big super shift. I think, getting out there, people have to consider what they're going to do, and, I like the mindset itself, when people think about, changing the world, they are very, there's a lot of short sightedness, and it's people to get into that framework. What would, if you were to distill it into one sentence, what is the mindset of non obvious, being non obvious?

Rohit: 6:26

I believe it. If I were to distill it, it would probably be how to see what others miss. That's the subtitle we chose for the book, but it was very intentional in the sense that a big part of non obvious thinking is learning to pay attention to these things that other people just walk past. Whether it's an opportunity, or a connection to someone. And the busier we get in our lives, and the more digitized everything gets, and the more our attention is, according to several people, being stolen from us. By the addictiveness of the technology. The more important it becomes to train yourself to be a noticer. Someone who sees these details. And I think the methodology behind non obvious thinking can help you do that. But the benefits of doing that to your life are huge. I mean it could be as life changing as like meeting the person that you fall in love with as opposed to walking past because you're too distracted. Or it could be on the professional sense, meeting that person or making that connection to whoever the next role is or having the idea that launches your new startup. All of these things come from us paying attention so that we can ideate and not dismissing our brain and saying we don't need you anymore because we're just doom scrolling.

Steve F: 7:35

Yeah. That's a whole nother conversation. I think especially of those of us in any sort of branding role or communications role, it's what is the doom scroll? What is the social space done to our attention span? Viewpoint of, views of the world, our tribal bubbles, it's it's, this is important because it's trying to, I think from your book, what I got from it too, is getting you outside your normal mores, biases, and to think differently. Truly, it's the Think Differently book, right?

Rohit: 8:03

Yeah. I would say so. That's what we tried for.

Steve F: 8:06

What's a good example in the book, you think to, as people, obviously you want to encourage people to buy it, and I read it, it's a great book. What do you think it's an example in it that would help, that helps solve a problem or drive innovation? Rohit: I think, There's a, as the So it's very tip oriented. It's meant to be a super quick read. It's probably my shortest book I've ever written. It's an easy read, though. That's the important thing I want to emphasize to people. It's a great airplane. It's the most important thing. It's the beach read. As a fellow author, it's if you can get it so people can consume it in a couple of days, away, and take a, along with. Frosty, sugary drinks, alcoholic drinks, and they can get something. That's what I love about it. It's very accessible in that way.

Rohit: 8:50

Oh, thank you. Yeah, we did work really hard to make it that way, so you could literally jump in and read a three page chapter and get something useful out of it, and then put the book down, and then when you came back to it a week later, or a month later, or however long later, you wouldn't feel like, Oh, I lost the flow. It's not that style of book. It's a very jump in, jump out, if you need to. Or you could just have a flight and read the whole thing and make a couple notes. But, to answer your question, what is an actionable thing from the book? One lesson that I was just thinking about recently for a call I was on earlier today, actually, was the permission that we should give ourselves to come up with option C. Because a lot of times we're presented with situations where it's like either this or that. Option A or Option B.

Steve F: 9:33

They're very binary. And

Rohit: 9:34

we feel like, oh, we gotta pick. We gotta choose Option A or Option B. And then you end up with Option C being that brilliant outpouring of creativity. And the example we use in the book is, Option A is someone comes to stay with you and you have a guest room and you give them a bed. Option B is they sleep on the couch. Option C is the futon. Which was invented by a woodworker named William Brewer, who spent time in Japan where he saw that people were rolling up mattresses and then unrolling them and putting them on the floor when guests would come over to stay. And he thought to himself there's got to be a better way. And he invented the futon. So that's option C thinking. Now, you're probably not a woodworker, and maybe you don't come up with the invention, but the mindset to do that's the important thing.

Steve F: 10:16

I remember in your talk at South By about two years ago, you brought up a, and I know you give a lot of talks, so if you don't remember it, but I do very vividly, because you were in, I was in the audience, this is, it's a personal relationship, because you actually had a, it was unrelatable to you, But it was like, you described like, why did, you had, I have a, I have the banana cutter. My son loves a banana cutter. You brought, gave those out. But you had an example of, and this is the option A, B, C, right? It's like, when things are, food goes bad, or there's, something, milk goes, we have dates, we have other ways to do it, right? But at the same time, I just lost you over there. Yeah. But when you, sorry, I'm just trying to remember. I don't know what happened here. The Elgato, The technology died on me for a second. Let me go back. You were talking about an example of like when food goes bad, what it smells. And you were like, why wouldn't you just smell it? But I suffer from osmosia. So I can't really smell.

Rohit: 11:18

Wow.

Steve F: 11:18

So there are people out there. So I think, and I've, my wife was like, can you smell the milk? Is it okay? Or can you smell this food? Is it okay to eat? Cause I wouldn't know. I could eat something that could kill me. So when I'm like, if I'm old and by myself, I want that device. So it's like the option C that nobody thinks why don't you just smell it? Or why don't you just look at the date? But then as the option C is there's people that can't do either. Or, that may be the look of the day, but. Dates are a little like when you have to learn the sell by, best by, eat by, do by. But that's a great, it's

Rohit: 11:45

Or you look at the you look at the day, but you don't look at the year. And you're like, oh, October 20th, that's good. But then you're like, oh crap, that was October 20th 2014.

Steve F: 11:53

Oh, these pickles are, these are pandemic pickles. Like I can't eat these.

Rohit: 11:56

Wait, pickles last forever though. You should be good, right? It's true, it's

Steve F: 11:59

canned. Okay, this is pick, this is pandemic cereal. Yeah. Now that's I just remember that. I wanted to come and tell you that. That's interesting. Yeah, cause it's you probably don't think like who, but yeah. Yeah, wouldn't have thought of that. But then COVID came. COVID came and a lot of people lost their sense of smell. Or take like they lost different sensors, right? Yeah, that's right. So I think especially for old people, there's a device that will also dispense your medicine because if you have forgetfulness, you could take your medicine twice. Bad. It could be very bad. So

Rohit: 12:27

yeah,

Steve F: 12:27

we get you late. So I think you're, and I, as a futurist here and we interview a lot of futurists, one thing I love when we, you and I have talked like you consider yourself on a reluctant futurist, Because you don't even, because I don't want everyone to put labels on themselves. But I love that.'cause I I consider myself, for a long time I was a stealth futurist.' cause I've been practicing as futurist for 20, years. But I brought it into my work and innovation and product. It was not like this overt, let's do futures projects.'cause a lot of times, but the methods and the tools. But how would you define that? How would you define a reluctant futurist? I want to hear this term. I've been waiting for this one. So

Rohit: 13:03

yeah so that was one of the reasons why my coauthor for my last book, The Future Normal, Henry Coutinho Mason and I came together because we both had independently been describing ourselves this way. And we're like, wait, you use that too? And then we aligned and then we're like, Oh, we should probably write a book together now. But the reason we call it reluctant futurist is because. When you say I'm a futurist, it comes with some baggage. Yes. And the baggage is It used to

Steve F: 13:27

be you couldn't call yourself that. You had to be bestowed that. It was like calling yourself sexy. Yeah,

Rohit: 13:31

there is that. There is that. Now there's a lot of people who are not. Do people believe it?

Steve F: 13:36

Yeah. Buy

Rohit: 13:36

it, right? But there is that. But I think also when you put that lens on it, people think you're going to be looking into the far future. And that you're not necessarily going to offer them anything practical for right now.

Steve F: 13:48

Yes. Because a lot of

Rohit: 13:49

You're gonna do futurism theater, right? And be like, oh, in, 2050 this is what's gonna happen and Poland is gonna take over Europe. And you're like, okay. Based on what? Based on guessing based on like George Freeman, like what's, going on here. But for us, the reluctance was like, we didn't want to project too far into the future. We wanted it to be more authentic and it wanted to be based on now. What the kind of related term we landed on was now ists. And now ists is we're looking at the future that's already happening right now. And what we're trying to do with our work is showcase it because if it's going to if it's going to have as much of an impact on our collective future as it could, it needs funding. It needs media. It needs celebration. It needs an awareness that it's even happening, right? So if you just see stories about the, great Pacific garbage patch and you'd be like, Oh shit, we're screwed. There's going to be all this garbage and plastic in the ocean and everything's going to be microplastic and we got nothing. But if you see efforts that are cleaning it, that are working, and stories of people who have these amazing innovations, and you have the, microplastic eating bacteria that eats it up, basically these are the sorts of stories that are things that exist that are being researched right now, and I think the challenge is that we have to showcase and celebrate them much more, and not allow the stories of doom to, Take over the entire narrative. It's not that there aren't bad things happening in the world. We're not oblivious to that, but when you have a media environment that, that celebrates and showcases the bad all the time, you lose focus of the things that are happening that are positive. And so they don't get the attention.

Steve F: 15:24

That's interesting. Cause I was thinking about how let's look what I can edit this later. I was gonna, so as a futurist myself, I have to do a lot of literacy training. There's a lot, for parts of this, of the futurist research, the future foresight profession. I would say there are those who are, it's a little more there's ivory tower, research, but there's a little more elitism in the, are you trained in this or, there's a lot of terminology that is unique to the space, right? Scenarios or backcasting. But I feel sometimes I'm, it's 95 and I'm trying to teach people not only what you can do on the internet, but how to get, I have to dial, I have to show them how to dial up. And, one of the personal, my mission is the next 10 years is to teach a million futurists. To get them, get the literates literate. Create futures literacy for the, over the next 10 years. When you talk about, we do things like backcasting, we talk about horizons, right? There are different horizons and different rates of change for different industries. And it's not so obvious. And to your point, people just look at, I don't care about 2050, I need to keep my job and I'm retiring in 10 years. Like I need to get my bonus. And, there, there's a that framing is hard for a lot of people. Backcasting helps, but I like the nowest view. I love that I would like to co op that term sometime. But I, cause when I was at McKinsey, we created the futures practice and it was a lot of challenge because McKinsey gets paid a lot of money to tell people what to do tomorrow and the next right, so the nowest view is important. Now, We had good timing because COVID changed the fragility mindset, the resilience, it was very, they needed insights, right? But over time, it's still, you have to be able to couch something in that frame, in that, you have to frame it so that people can consume it and use it, right? You've been doing this for years and you talk, we talk about change. How have businesses responded to trends and how have the, how have trends changed over the last decade or 15 years since you've been doing it?

Rohit: 17:23

You talk about futurist lingo. One of the futurist lingo elements is signals. And signals are often confused for trends. Signals are this idea that there's a story of something happening somewhere. Someone's doing something. Some startup launched. Some new app got created. There's a behavior that people are latching onto and starting to do more and more.

Steve F: 17:45

Yeah.

Rohit: 17:45

And these are the signals that may indicate a broader trend. And I think that what was true in the past with futurist work specifically, is that if you wanted to get a great breadth of these signals, you had to create some sort of a network of people who would be spotters. Difference. Yeah. And basically transpotter is more

Steve F: 18:06

sexy than signals researcher.

Rohit: 18:09

Yeah, it's catchy. Yeah, it's catchy. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think what's different now is that, first of all you can get access to those databases where they used to be closed. Second of all you can start to do some of the signals research on your own because of social media, and because of the things people are sharing and posting, and because of how media is responding to what's happening on social media and then writing about it. So now you have all of these sources of media and insight, and the challenge becomes to treat those as their own form of signal, right? So once something is popular enough that it gets written about in the New York Times, for example, that means it's jumped to a certain level where it's received mainstream media attention. Which, by something like that. Versus something that's just individuals that are part of a subculture who we pay attention to. It can be really difficult to pay attention to enough of these signals to do meaningful trend and futures work because none of us has an unbiased look at what the world is. We all have our lenses of how we see things and we come at it from how we come at it. And so the challenge I think is to diversify as much of the sources of media that we have to things that we would not ordinarily be interested in so that we can start to see these signals in places where we would never have otherwise seen them. Like these signals, if you're doing this right, are things that are happening in communities where you don't necessarily know anyone. You don't have friends in that community who you would hear this from. These would be things that you hear externally. And now you're trying to assign meaning to them.

Steve F: 19:44

We, it's funny we could talk for hours about this stuff. So talking about, that mix of creativity and research, have you changed your process in i in doing this type of work over the years? Is there a method that helps you stay ahead of the curve methods that you do?

Rohit: 19:59

Yeah. Yeah. I think probably the, I don't know if there's a good way to say this without it. Sounding it's okay. my ego. But I would say that the biggest thing that's changed over the years is that before I would read about or hear about something and now I actually get to see it. Yeah. Like I'm in the room, I get access to the meeting, or I get invited to the innovation lab or like the place, so I get to meet those people or there's a fellow, they're a fellow speaker at an event and I can interview them., like the direct access I have now. based on where I am in my career is something different than what I had 10 years ago. And I think that's really interesting too because when you get to be in the room with these people projecting forward or being at one of these kind of think tank salon type events where literally the whole reason for being there is to project forward what you think the future is going to be and then talk about that. That's a different, experience than reading a great article from the MIT review about it.

Steve F: 20:54

It's very true. And I've been reflecting on my own, like how I look at trends and do signals work as a futurist and the impact of artificial intelligence, because there's all, there's a human element to, to doing all of this, but you'd you said the thinking obvious part, it's a lot of empathy. It's a lot of creativity. It's a lot of, but then again, I find certain areas like ideation or scenarios like if you have the right data sources, because that's always what I preface with people, you're only as good as your data because you can have bias. It's only what it, what is, how is it taught? What is it taught? Is a AI going to give you all social justice answers when it really needs to be balanced? It's like, how do do that? And. I think as it becomes more prevalent in this kind of trend work, how do you see How do you see this space? Changing like for you like he seems like you've set a philosophy in place like as you look outward in these next You know say five years because I can't even go beyond that the rate of change in this thing is so fast But because let me preface before you answer LLMs are trained with a certain date They're not like live from New York at Saturday night in the moment like you can look and have it analyze signals and we you could do it with other ways to gather and create rags, but you can't just go out to, chat GPT and ask, and do this kind of work. But how do you see it? Changing involving,

Rohit: 22:13

I think some of the methods behind this. It's not necessarily that the methods will change. It's that the thing that is happening, the technology, the new insight, that's always changing. And so I think the challenge is to continue to listen in as effective ways as we have before and not get distracted by more noise being out there. I think that's the challenge.

Steve F: 22:36

That's great. One of the things I talk a lot about, especially with this type of work, is ethics. What do you see the role with, this method and this kind of mindset what do you think ethics plays in, in this?

Rohit: 22:49

I think it's always going to be important in the work that we do as futurists to present. The negatives along with the positives to elevate the people who maybe are doing the work more ethically as opposed to the ones who are making the most money, which is rarely the ones who are doing it the most ethically. Yeah. And if I can finding that balance between the things that we talk about as a potential future. I do think that one of the challenges. And this is very central to the work as a futurist, but also to science fiction.. Because what futurists are doing and what science fiction writers are doing are imagining a future. And when you imagine that future lacking ethics or where the winners are the ones who have the least ethics and therefore we end up in a dystopia of some. Then that's the future that the next generation of technologists and of geniuses are seeing and making into reality. And when you have imaginings of that negative future that become, the de facto way that we see the future, then that's what we end up building. Like what the line I use in my keynote is, the only future we can make is the one we can imagine. And so it's our responsibility as people writing about the future, whether it's fictional or research based, it's our responsibility to build the ethical considerations into the way that we write about it. Because otherwise, that part will just get forgotten. And it's even more important when you have all these LLMs being trained on the things we write. Because you want it to be trained on thinking about the ethical considerations too, right?

Steve F: 24:22

I'm a design futurist, and I do a lot of design fiction work. That can be prototyping, but it can also be a lot of narrative work. Creating the worlds, doing scenarios, but I call people the future, right? And there's their stories. The kind of, the real texture of the day to day and the moments of the things that they live, living in the future, right? But I can do, so far, my experiences, things I might ask, there's things I don't consider. It's about the reach to other people that you might want to get other experiences or talk to people and that to get a better perspective, because it's only limited, right? What am I going to write about? Things that influence me, of course I will, but I also don't, I also want to have just this tapestry of diverse voices and, putting that into a system is hard and it requires, I think, constant vigilance in that way. I think about your work, which has been amazing to watch the last 15 years that you work your butts off. You're, I think, the busiest. You are the hardest working man in, in in the trend world. And I, Hey, listen, I'll,

Rohit: 25:26

I might take that testimonial and put it on my website. You are the hardest working man. That's pretty

Steve F: 25:30

good. You are. Yeah. I want to be where you want to grow up. I think it's funny when you look at these years, cause you have this perspective that like you said, some people haven't had careers as long as you and I've known each other and you and I've been doing this. What's one of the things in the non obvious and especially in the kind of we'll call it the I call it the yearbooks, the years. What's one that, what's one you thought would take off, but it did not? What was one you were like, this is going to be huge and it was like,

Rohit: 25:56

pew. Oh man there's quite a few. If you think about the numbers I did 15 trends a year, every year for nine years. And then the 10th year was 10 megatrends that were basically elevating a bunch of different trends from the previous years into the 10 megatrends, right? So I've got more than a hundred predicted trends. And I would say that some of the ones that were not predicted There was a theme, actually. It's hard to single out like, Oh, this one was like the biggest failure ever. Because, when I was writing these trends, they were reflecting what was already happening. Based on the way I wrote about them, none of them were wrong in the moment that I wrote them. The thing that was wrong about them was my prediction that they would accelerate to continue to be a trend. That's the piece that didn't work out, right? And if I look at what was common amongst the ones that didn't turn out, it was that I was looking on too small a scale for where they were happening. For example, I wrote about pointillist filmmaking. Which was this idea that we would have, like it was back when, I forget, you're going to forget what the platform was called, but it was like you could do those seven second videos. Do you remember that social media platform where you did seven second videos? Steve F: Yeah, vaguely. And it any longer than that?

Steve F: 27:09

Yeah.

Rohit: 27:10

Yeah, it was like, it was around for a while and it was like super big and then it went away. But like in that moment there was like a huge watch brand that did the four second film festival. And so like people submitted films, quote unquote, that were four seconds long. And then there was like one or two other examples of that. And I was like, oh man and they were launching that network where it was like those episodes of vertical video and it was like episodes of shows. And each episode was like, Four minutes long and you could watch it like during a bus stop and it was vertical and there was a whole network that was created around these. Like again, you could, anybody could look up the names of these things. Like they were all things at a certain point.

Steve F: 27:45

They were birth, that was the birth of the shorts. That was the precursor to shorts. And

Rohit: 27:50

now we have YouTube shorts and all that stuff. So it's not like it's going away. But the way that I thought it would evolve in terms of like dramatically affecting filmmaking and marketing and all of these things, like it just peaked and then it went back down. And I think the reason why it wasn't a great prediction is because it was too responsive to what was happening in the moment without being reflective enough of how that would go. Because if I had thought about it longer. I would have realized that watching a four second film is not a fulfilling human experience.

Steve F: 28:25

That's true. In

Rohit: 28:26

general. It's just not long enough. That's true. And so trying, plus doing a four second film requires a level of creative genius that most people don't have. To tell a compelling story that would be something you could even call a film in four seconds, you need some pretty epic talent to pull that off. Most people don't have that.

Steve F: 28:45

I agree.

Rohit: 28:45

So your quantity of content that would be delivered in that format would be limited. Now, all of these things seem perfectly logical now that I'm looking back on it. But in that moment, I didn't see that stuff. I just saw, Oh, all these videos are getting shorter. This is going to be the trend. And I reacted to it. So that's the way that not just me, that's the way that I think people who write about the future and trends can sometimes get it wrong.

Steve F: 29:10

It's interesting that you talk about it in that frame, because I think about you had it, you got, but there was also an extension as your reluctant futurist thing. You saw the benefit, but you were like, it wasn't your world to live in. You saw its potential. But if you probably lived in it, you're probably, you know what, like you, you had just said, like it needs longer. What if it was 30 seconds, like the short people probably saw that and we're like, you know what, this is too short. Like everything you said, even tick tock, how do I do this differently? Or how do I learn from this? I'll cite a current example is a I filmmaking. I've been diving deep into this doing a lot on different. There's luma platform rev. There's so many different like runway. I'm fascinated. People do like these recreations of sci fi films and 50 eight. Panavision 70 millimeter, like they're just, they're amazing. I even did I did a talk and I did a mock up of a Nike shoe for 2035 called glow. And I, it was women and I did everything AI generated a lot of art. If there was a lot of issues with it, do I think over time, I think it will add to it, but I think there's something missing in it now that everyone thinks it's going to be like, it's going to, can, get rid of. Filmmaking forever. I don't think it will. I think it'll help other indie filmmakers do certain shots or certain things, but I, again it's only the limitations. I don't think it'll have the impact right now. Mark my words, we could be talking five years and be like, I was completely wrong. But I think, like your point, it's like, you have to have a lot of creative energy and a lot of genius to make this thing work. The technology is going to improve. But what will it produce? So don't know. But looking at it now for you, what is things you're seeing in the non obvious realm, things you talk about in your talks that you think now, what do you think will change? What's something that's blowing your mind? Like over the next 10 years, let's take AI out of The gen AI is the given one, but what are the things you're seeing like of the next decade? I have one but I'll I want to share I want to see what you think

Rohit: 31:11

Yeah, I mean I do think that the the learned ability to completely augment What a creative professional can do Yes technology. Yes We haven't even seen the potential of that yet. I agree. And, if you go back to that famous cliche from Steve Jobs about the computer being a bicycle for your mind and apply it to what AI is going to be for creative professionals who have talent already. Yeah. That is huge. And I think that there's way too much attention we spend on people who don't necessarily have talent, who are looking for AI to be the one button solution to stuff they don't know how to do. Oh, one button, it can build my website. Oh, one button, it'll, create the poster for me. Oh, one button, it'll make a film for me. Oh, that's what we're seeing and hearing about. What we're not seeing and hearing about so much is what is the Hollywood studio who creates Pixar level content? Shows and films going to be able to do now that they have this technology to make a film that used to take five years of post production in three months,

Steve F: 32:22

right? I agree because Sora isn't out to the public yet, but it's definitely beyond the enterprise for a lot of film company. They're showing its power. If you have the server farm, right? If you have the server and the render farm. This is what I think is going on right now, is that they're training their systems with their images, their characters. It's not maybe even the first one they create, but say they create like Toy Story. They could create whole new Toy Story stories because they have all the models, all the systems, everything's in there. All they need to do is prompt it and create the world because they've now built that environment.

Rohit: 32:58

And it takes away the necessity to do the

Steve F: 33:02

Grunt. The

Rohit: 33:02

tedious thing before the creative thing. That's right. And the equivalent of it, is, there's equivalents in world's will outside of Hollywood, right? Think about when we first started using spreadsheets and the ability to like, take numbers and fill that whole spreadsheet for a thousand lines. Someone used to have to type that or handwrite that. Now you just press the thing and it fills the whole thing, and then you can spend your time analyzing the numbers, figuring out the patterns, doing the sort of insight work on it, because you don't have to do that entry. It's the same thing with this creative with these creative tools. If you can get past that basic, like you said, the world building the basic aspect of it, you can really focus on the creative.

Steve F: 33:42

Yeah. And I agree with you. I think over these years doing film 15, 16 years ago and cobbling together resources and the journey that what we could do now is, and it's only going to get better. Yeah. I think it, it's going to completely change. The other thing, my, the one that I was going to talk about was air taxi. I had a company 20 years ago for a different kind of aircraft and it was an air taxi company. And now we have. the right aircraft to do it, I think the mode in which we travel is going to change dramatically over the next 10 years. And it's going to come fast and quick. It's going to be in big cities, but I think it's going to change the way we think about how we travel, unless everyone forces everyone to return to the office. But I think I think it's going to change how we think about where we live and the places we want to go in a, instead of just in the car. But I'd like to look at some of the things that have influenced you and inspiration. When you do all this research, you read a lot of books, you've read a lot of things in your life what's one book that profoundly influenced your thinking about the future, the kind of work you do that's really had a real impact on you?

Rohit: 34:53

Oh McGonigal's work is yeah, amazing. Yeah. I just find her to be very, first of all, she's female, which is, different in the world of futurism because there's so many men.

Steve F: 35:03

She's likable as a, as a futurist. She's approachable, yeah, likable but also very insightful. She's a good communicator of this kind of work. I like that a lot.

Rohit: 35:13

Yeah, and the work is quite I find it to be very filled with insight. Yes. As opposed to filled with ego. Yeah, sometimes what it can be

Steve F: 35:22

it's true.

Rohit: 35:23

It's

Steve F: 35:23

true,

Rohit: 35:23

but I mean I read pretty diversely as you know I host a book awards program. So I get a thousand books sent to me every year. So I'm always reading I'm always consuming content not always future content, I'm always reading

Steve F: 35:35

How do you read that? You really go through you speed read. Do you? What are the methods you

Rohit: 35:40

read all these books? Of course not. I know. There are signals we look at is this an original idea? Is it well done? Is it, described? Is the author really, excellent. And then there's a panel of people who read these books as well for me. And so it's not, there's no way I could but usually every year we'll pick 15 winners who are on the short list. And those 15 books I definitely read.

Steve F: 36:01

That's great. And when, we earlier spoke about when you were at Ogilvy, you're transitioned into, stepping off into this, which, not everyone can do. It's like you had a lot of choices in those roads. So what do you wish you knew when you started the career, your journey? What do you think you, what would you have, what's the one thing you've learned that you wish you knew?

Rohit: 36:21

What do you want? There's big picture stuff, maybe. Yeah,

Steve F: 36:24

Just something that's telling your younger self. The most

Rohit: 36:26

tactical one is I should have less focused on social media and blogs and more focused on my email list. From the beginning. Yeah. That's definitely, I started my email list maybe 12 years after I'd been blogging and building an audience and like building people on all of these other social media platforms. Yeah. Building, I built I don't know, 30, 40, 000 people on Twitter, which was a total waste of effort. Yeah. Not that I had that much effort. I was just around early, I think, but that's just a waste. I don't use Twitter anymore. Nobody does. Yeah. Some people do, but. I can't even call it X now. Like it's just useless. So there are things like that where you spend all this effort and you have a huge audience or, not huge, but a decent sized audience, and then it becomes useless. And that's sad. That doesn't happen to email. I have an email list of subscribers now, and I write an email and publish it every Thursday. My open rate's usually 50%, and people are, like, really engaged. I get great comments back. People share comments, they ask me questions, they, when I pose a question, they're like, oh, let me tell you about this. And I learn something from this amazing pool of people every time I send one.

Steve F: 37:29

That's great advice. I think a lot of young people. Would dismiss email. And I agree with you, not just young

Rohit: 37:34

people. I dismissed it for a long time. I didn't realize the value of it. And now I'm coming back to it. And people who are big into digital marketing, they'll all tell you the same thing. I am as well, your email list

Steve F: 37:44

I am as well.'cause there's concepts, things I want to communicate and I, you can't, you could use it as a announcement platform, but you ultimately will point them to the e like the email will be the core. of it, in a way, to get to people.

Rohit: 37:57

Yeah. So anyway, I wish I knew that. And then the other thing I do wish that I did more often earlier in my career, which I do now, a lot, is bring people together and be the convener of that. Because I know a lot of people now. And I'm lucky enough to travel to a lot of cities, so I'm going to Houston this week. And we're just bringing together people. People who I'm connected with. I brought another friend of mine who lives in the area, and she's inviting people, and a lot of them don't know one another. And I haven't seen some of them in a long time. I just did an event a couple weeks ago in Chicago, and one of the guys who came was someone I used to work at, work with, at Leo Burnett in Australia when I lived there 20 years ago. And I hadn't seen him for 20 years, but he was living in Chicago now, and I reconnected with him. And it was just because I stayed connected and I asked. So I think in our lives, we need someone to ask us to, Hey, I'm going to be here. If you can come, it would be great. No pressure, right? I'll already be here at this time at this place. If you could show up great. And I am at the point, I think in my life where I can be that person. And so I want to, because not only do I get to reconnect with them, but I get to introduce them to other amazing people who maybe they'll work with, maybe that'll lead to their next job, maybe that'll be an investor for somebody It's just a thing that is important for us to have people in the world doing, and if you get to do what I do and travel around, then you should do that, I wish I did that earlier, like I do that now with intention, but it's a relatively recent thing for me. And I wish that I had done it earlier.

Steve F: 39:30

It's a wonderful quality. And I look at the networking pyramid, I like to call it. There's the passive, the active, and then the top of the tiny one is the connector. People that, they put people together versus just actively, trying to meet other people. See, that's the real value in it. And I don't think a lot of people realize it. is, it takes time, but it's very rewarding. I wanted to give people who haven't read the book an opportunity to if they want to start applying this kind of thinking to their life, like, where's the best place to start? This book? This book and another one of your series? How would you roadmap the reader to help them in learning the mindset? Things like that.

Rohit: 40:07

So this is where you do get into a little bit of the, the chicken, the eggs, right? So this is like asking which star Wars movie should you watch first? Should you watch the ones that were done in the seventies and eighties because they were done first or should you watch the ones that chronologically come first because like in the storyline, then you watch the chronological way. So some people are like, okay, traditionally. So if you want to experience non obvious, the brand as it evolved, you'll read the trend work first and then you'll read non obvious thinking. But if you were to ask me, I say non obvious thinking is the prequel. Okay. It's the mindset, it's the thinking that then resulted in all of the trend work, right? All the things you're reading now make sense. Yeah, I ended up writing it last, last meaning it just came out a couple weeks ago, so it's like the most recent one, right? Yeah but you could easily read it first if you're unfamiliar with any of my other work and it would maybe make a little more sense to do it that way. So if you are that sort of purist with the books where you're like, I gotta read law and the witch in the wardrobe first I can't start with Magician's Nephew or you know any of those then okay But if you're like, okay with the reading it the answer a the way that it did it unfolds then Yeah, I would go start with non obvious thinking. That's probably the

Steve F: 41:19

You're obviously busy promoting the book So is there anything for you in 2025 kind of what's you know? What's next for you with this continuing the journey any new projects? Things you're excited about?

Rohit: 41:28

Yeah, I can't share too much about it, but Non Obvious Thinking is my tenth book. And so my next book is not going to be a business book. In fact, it's not even going to be non fiction. Cool. It'll be fiction of some sort. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah I need a new creative challenge, and Non Obvious Thinking, this book, will be Perfect fodder for all my speaking and everything for the next couple of years, so I won't really need another book in that sense. And I've been on this treadmill. I've written a new book every year for the last ten years. So, that's a lot.

Steve F: 41:58

That's a lot. I share the, yeah, it's a lot. But worth it. If people are looking to be an author, it's absolutely worth it. And you have a publishing company as well.

Rohit: 42:07

I do. Yeah. Yeah. And I built that because I wanted to control the whole ecosystem. And so we built Idea Press, which is a publishing company. And now we've done nearly 100 books with other authors. So it's been very successful.

Steve F: 42:21

It'd be good to have you back and do an episode on the future of publishing. And the future. Gen AI's impact on writing. That's a fun topic. Yeah. Let's, I think we should definitely do that for people.

Rohit: 42:29

Yeah. You should make that a panel. You should get like one or two others. That's what I

Steve F: 42:33

was thinking. Exactly. And cause I look at the impact of somebody gave me really good advice, like control the audible, right? Like your audio rights, control certain things, or especially your, One piece of advice is a couple years ago was writing a book with a publisher and then doing some self publishing in between kind of there's different models, but it's interesting to talk in 2025. What does it mean to, to publish and yeah,

Rohit: 42:59

I don't even think it's one answer. I think that it's not depends on what you would do and how you want to do it.

Steve F: 43:04

I just think a lot of people don't, there's a lot of don't know you don't know. And I think it would be fun to just change that for, Oh, I didn't know I could do that. Right. Looking back, you've had 10 years of books great career. When you're looking back on things, this is that reflective time. Like, how do you want the work to be remembered? What kind of impact do you want this to have for people?

Rohit: 43:23

I would love to be, to have this work remembered as being a force for helping people be more open minded. For helping them be more accepting and understanding of people who don't have the same perspective that they do. Okay, yeah. To understand diversity and to celebrate that diversity. And for each of us to be willing to change our minds, to overcome any sort of cognitive biases, which we all have. And to just become better people and therefore create better communities that we live in. That's probably too elevated to think from a business book but I do feel like when I get a chance to influence how people think, I have a chance to make this mission turn into reality. And that's really exciting.

Steve F: 44:10

That's wonderful. So life well lived. So how do people find you? Obviously, we talked about newsletters. You have a website. So let's talk about the book. Obviously, buy it. Do a review, as you say. Yeah,

Rohit: 44:20

the it's all pretty easy. Nonobvious. com. We paid good money to get that URL, so we definitely leverage it. Nonobvious. com slash subscribe is where you can get to the newsletter. And if you want to see, if you're not sure and you want to see past editions, just go to nonobvious. com slash newsletter and you could read the past editions. And if you like it, then you can subscribe. And then nonobvious. com slash thinking is the new book. And then if you want to consider me as a keynote speaker, which I do a lot, then I have a personal site with videos and all that stuff. And that's just my full name.

Steve F: 44:54

That's great. All right. Thanks for being on. That's we'll have you, on again soon. Yeah, great conversation. Thank you.

Rohit: 44:59

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me.