The Hottest Trend in Travel, Detroit’s Resurgence, and the Invisibility Shield That Makes You Disappear

Next week I’ll be back on the road for events, so this was a week filled with writing for me. I’ll be sharing an advance preview of my new book with our early reader list next week, so if you haven’t already, be sure to join the list here!

For stories this week, we will explore the hot new travel trend of industrial tourism, review the new invisibility shield that can actually make you invisible (and you can buy one for yourself now too), how Detroit reinvented itself from bankruptcy into boomtown, what the new ban on non-compete clauses really means and why the future is all about water. Enjoy this week’s stories!

Stay curious,

Why Industrial Tourism Is One of the Fastest Growing Trends in Travel

Portugal is one of several countries investing big into industrial tourism – a term that describes experiences where travelers can visit factories to see how products get made. Of course, vineyards and liquor distilleries along with many food manufacturers have long offered this sort of experience. But Portugal is taking it one step further. In São João da Madeira, you can visit a pencil making factory, a hat factory, or a facility that makes high end belts. The entire idea is a perfect twist on the usual sterile tourist experiences offered in gift shops where you can buy “artisan” products without any real experience of how those things were created.

Industrial tourism bridges that gap, and is one of the factors that helped Portugal achieve record profits from the tourism sector last year. The idea is perfectly on trend, and actually encompasses a lot of experiences that reach every sector – from touring a BMW factory in Germany to seeing how perfume is made in the famous French town of Grasse. If you’re thinking about your next trip or planning it now, there’s probably a fascinating industrial tourism experience you could add to your itinerary too. 

The Invisibility Shield Can Help You Actually Disappear … Now Available on Kickstarter

Hiding during a game of paintball. Doing a magic trick. Avoiding detection by real-life spyware. These are just a few of the potential uses for a new invisibility shield 2.0 that’s taking pre-orders on Kickstarter right now. This “portable cloaking device” works by bending light around you.

The more scientific explanation is “the lenses diffuse the ambient light that’s reflected by your body across the entire front surface of the Shield. That said, the lenses also diffuse the light reflected by the user’s background across the whole front. Because the user is much narrower than their background, the light from their body is essentially drowned out by the light from the background.” Got it? In addition to the mini 3ft by 2ft version (currently $68), they also have the “Megashield” which is 6 ft by 4ft and runs nearly $900.

This might seem like a fun, but relatively unnecessary diversion. There could be some fascinating applications of it, though. Imagine how it could offer more creativity for experiential retail or new staging options as part of live theater productions. And it’s probably going to allow lots more scary moments at haunted houses. What else could someone do with this sort of invisibility shield? Hit reply and let me know your best ideas! 

Detroit Rides “Post Bankruptcy Energy” To Become America’s Most Unlikely Boomtown, According to WSJ

About ten years ago, no one would have said the city of Detroit would be sitting at the perfect crossroads of multiple urban trends. Around then, the city was in the midst of declaring bankruptcy. That moment created a new sense of urgency among those wealthy enough to do something about the future of the city, and many of them stepped up. Dan Gilbert, the billionaire co-founder of home lender Rocket Mortgage, moved the company headquarters to downtown Detroit and bought more than 130 buildings downtown.

This billion-dollar investment opened the doors for other families and companies with old and new money to also invest in the city as well. Additionally, as the WSJ writes, “rock-bottom office rents long ago forced developers to come up with other things to build. They added casinos and sports venues and restored aging theaters. That made downtown less office-dependent, an advantage in the age of remote work.” Finally, the urgency to rebuild also incentivized many tax breaks which then attracted more investment.

Altogether, experts are starting to point to the city as an example of how a dying city can turn its fortunes around and win the future. As Gilbert himself noted in the article, “If somebody would have told you there was going to be a Gucci store in Detroit 10 years ago, I mean, I would have laughed at them.” Now they have one … and probably more to come.  

How Water Flipping, Excess Solar Energy and Shifting Hydropower Stations Show Us the Future Is All About Water

The skies were orange above Athens and that was just one of several climate and energy related stories this week that offered a glimpse into stories we will see more frequently in the coming years.

The first example is a concerning story of a tiny Arizona town where a private company purchased land and water rights only to flip the property and sell back the water rights to a local town for a huge profit. The concern is that more water speculators will “scavenge agricultural land” and engage in lucrative water flipping real estate deals making an already scarce resource even worse. Also related to water was the news that China’s data centers may use more water than the entire population of South Korea by 2030.

On the positive side, there was a story about how California is generating so much solar power that it’s driving electricity prices to go negative and creating issues about where and how to store all this excess solar. And in Costa Rica, a country where 99% of energy comes from renewable sources (mainly through hydropower), climate change is likely to create less rainfall in some areas and more in others … which means authorities are already thinking about how power stations may need to move over time.

The theme here seems to be that the real scarce resource of the future is going to be water more than energy. Since the ability to control and flow water relies on geographic restrictions, land rights and physical distance – that will make it harder to source independently or divert to places far from it. As a result, water scarcity may be the biggest problem for humanity in the long term future.

What The New Ban on Non-Competes Actually Means for Companies

This week the FTC issued a rule this week that bans non-compete clauses, estimating that up to 8,500 new startups will be created as a result of the ban. The federal agency describes the downsides of non-competes this way: 

“Noncompetes are a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business. Noncompetes often force workers to either stay in a job they want to leave or bear other significant harms and costs, such as being forced to switch to a lower-paying field, being forced to relocate, being forced to leave the workforce altogether, or being forced to defend against expensive litigation.”

Critics of the ban describe it as unnecessary government intervention. Regardless of who is more in the right, there is a bigger and more obvious implication here. The best way to make this issue irrelevant is to focus on employee retention. Give them more ownership over their work. Don’t steal their ideas or shut down their ingenuity. In other words, make the issue of non-competes irrelevant … which it would be, if your best people never leave. 

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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