The Disappearing Dining Room, Notes from Tribeca and a Surprisingly Diabolical Marketing Tactic 

I’m in New York this week for the Tribeca Film Festival and attending several filmmaker events featuring South Asian creators and indie filmmakers. A big topic of conversation here is how hard it is right now to get projects funded and what it takes to stand out in a world where the barriers to creation are practically non-existent. It’s an eye-opening conversation whether you’re in the business of entertainment or just a curious onlooker like me.
For stories this week, you’ll read about the irresistible new facts behind the Titan tragedy, why psychedelics have a new hurdle to overcome, the disappearing dining room and the fascinating tactic of flipping a brand spokesperson. Plus, an important reminder for seemingly adrift young people.

Enjoy the stories and stay curious!


Why the Titan Submersible Sub Tragedy Is One We Can’t Look Away From

It has been nearly a year since the OceanGate Titan submersible submarine imploded, killing its five passengers which included Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate. The details that emerged in the aftermath of the disaster painted a tale of overconfidence, ill-advised cost cutting and plenty of ignored warning signs and safety messages.

This week WIRED magazine published a long exposé featuring new details that are even more disturbing. Yet much of the following commentary and coverage seems to be people taking pleasure in seeing an arrogant CEO fail and meet the end he seemed to deserve. Aside from the schadenfreude, there is the sad fate of the unwitting passengers. Not to mention the setback his failure will create for the entire field of ocean exploration.

So, on the one-year anniversary of the accident, if you’re paying attention to this story, how do you choose to see it? As a satisfyingly necessary come-uppance for an egotistical CEO or as a tragic example of a man whose outsized ego led four innocent bystanders to their untimely deaths?

What the Disappearing Dining Room Reveals About American Culture

There is a room in my house that is known by everyone as the “Thanksgiving Room.” According to the blueprints for the house, it was originally designed to be a dining room — but its revised name reflects its utility. Used mainly once in November for actual dining, the rest of the year it is never used that way. Instead, it’s an organizing table for large book mailings, or a worktable for curating trends that I’ll write about, or some other family project.

The waning need for a room specifically for dining, with or without guests, isn’t just something happening in our family. It turns out there are plenty of homes and apartments that are skipping this once necessary room and dedicating the space to other pursuits. This may not just be a young person’s choice for a crowded apartment either. As new stories of boomers who’d rather spend $100k to renovate their homes start to emerge too, this trend towards losing the very concept of a formal dining room with place settings and tradition may be an early signal of a larger shift in American culture. As the popularity of mukbang continues and loneliness rises, perhaps the dining room was an inevitable casualty of a modern lifestyle that keeps many people too busy or isolated to share a meal at home together.

Even if we were to fight to keep the tradition of a dining room, unfortunately it’s clear this would be unlikely to reverse this cultural shift.

Psychedelic Treatment for PTSD Sees a Setback with FDA Rejection

Despite years of promising results with using psychedelic treatments to help people with conditions such as depression or PTSD, the treatment finally saw its day in front of the FDA. It didn’t go well. Citing concerns about safety, the FDA rejected the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD.

While the rejection is a serious setback for the promising pace of psychedelic research, the main reason for the rejection is even more interesting. Typically, a drug is tested through a series of controlled blind experiments where patients taking a drug are compared against patients who received a placebo. With psychedelics, this method doesn’t work because anyone who received the behavior altering drug would know it immediately. All of which presents a classic innovation problem. You want to launch a breakthrough idea, but in order to do so you need to prove to stakeholders that it works using an outdated testing method that is impossible to apply accurately.

How could we fix this? The only solution is to rethink how a clinical trial to prove its efficacy could work. Short of doing this, it’s unlikely any psychedelic treatments will get an approval and the research into this promising category of treatment for mental health issues will once again stall, as it did nearly 50 years ago.

A Surprisingly Diabolical Marketing Strategy: Flip Your Competitor’s Brand Spokesperson

Joey Chestnut is about as modern of an American hero as you can imagine. He is a household name for being the 16-time champion of Nathan’s hot dog eating competition. Nathan’s even considered him an unofficial brand spokesperson … until they found out he took a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods to promote their vegan hot dogs. Now he’s banned from the competition unless he renounces his allegiance with the vegan dogs.

The whole media firestorm is generating some brilliant PR for Impossible Foods at Nathan’s expense. This same week, I read a story about how Qualcomm enlisted the help of Justin Long, the actor who portrayed Apple’s Macintosh computers in the famous “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” series of ads. Now he’s going to be talking about how great PCs are.

Both are perfect illustrations of the dangers for any brand in having a spokesperson without locking them into a long-term non-compete agreement. Eventually, you’re just setting them up to be perfect flipped spokespeople for a competitor. State Farm, are you seeing this? Time to lock down Jake on an air-tight non-compete.

A Promise to Graduates with “No Promise”

During these weeks of graduation, you are probably seeing lots of commencement speeches hit the web. They are filled with advice about how young people can fulfill their dreams, discover what they want to do next and achieve their potential. This weekend, there was an op-ed in the NY Times that offered a different  perspective,   reaching out to the high school underperformers. The kids who may have been voted least likely to succeed. The ones who showed little or no promise.

Perhaps you remember people like that from your own school years. Have you kept track of them? If you had, the way their lives actually turned out might surprise you and more than a few young people too. Most of them are probably doing just fine. They aren’t living in cardboard boxes or desperately hating life. Quite the opposite in many cases. They may be happily married, living where they want, doing the sort of work they like and not even remotely resembling those losers you might remember them to be. The point is people grow up and make new lives for themselves.

Your success isn’t defined by what people thought about you in high school. So, share this article with any young graduate you know. Whether they are heading to college and know what they want to do next in life or not, this is an equally useful reminder they should hear.

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:


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? 

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This Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter is curated by Rohit Bhargava.

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