The Liquid Tree, SXSW Sydney and the Search For The Realest Person On Earth

It has been a sad week of global news filled with disturbing images. If you’re struggling with how to talk about it or understand what’s happening in Gaza right now, I found this article on how to talk with children about the violence in Israel and Gaza to be helpful – whether you’re trying to talk about it with kids or not.

For the non-obvious stories this week, you will read about how a liquid tree might help solve urban pollution, an ironic search for the “realest person on Earth,” highlights from SXSW Sydney coming up next week, the opening of the wildly ambitious Sphere venue in Las Vegas and a new concept for a flat-packed car. 

Enjoy the stories and always stay curious,

SXSW Sydney and a Sneak Peek at the Non-Obvious Podcast

Next week I’ll be back in Australia speaking at the international edition of SXSW in Sydney. It will be my first visit back in quite some time but I spent 5 years living there in my 20s so it was the ideal chance to do something different and launch a new project from the stage while down under.

In addition to doing a Featured Session, I’ll be recording two episodes LIVE from the stage for my upcoming Non-Obvious Show podcast (launching later this year). Every episode invites two guests to debate the “future of” a different fascinating topic and these two episodes will focus on the Future of Exploration (interviewing experts on both space and ocean exploration) and the Future of Boredom (interviewing a comedian and a scientist).

You’ll be hearing more about the podcast in the coming months, but for now, if you’ll be traveling to Sydney or are based there – let me know so we can connect in person next week!

Will The “End” of Junk Fees Actually Save People Any Money?

A new rule by the FTC is proposing to “stop bogus and hidden charges.” The long-awaited rule has widespread support from almost everyone who doesn’t directly profit from those so-called “junk fees.” This goal of making it harder for companies to hide fees or charge surprise penalties is an admirable push toward transparency and fairness. It also, unfortunately, might not actually save people any money.

Perhaps coincidentally this same week, Disney announced they will be increasing prices for theme park tickets and brands like Chipotle and Pepsi have both announced they will be raising prices. The reason fighting junk fees may not deliver on lower costs is because these fees offer an easy target but are often “not a huge component of the price” of goods or services. Eliminating these junk fees may simply lead sellers to do more price bundling or turn to sneakier pricing models overall … which isn’t the great news consumers might be hoping for. 

The Las Vegas Sphere Could “Change Live Entertainment Forever”

I don’t often buy into the cringe-worthy hyperbole you often get from press releases, but the opening of The Sphere in Las Vegas might not be exaggerating (much). The Sphere is a huge dome structure covered by LED lights and large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty inside. The opening show is a new live set from rock band U2 and the ambition among those involved is to reinvent live entertainment itself.

The venue cost more than $2B to build and features a “3D Audio-Beamforming technology to ensure that listeners anywhere in the venue hear identical mixes at identical volumes.” On the visual side, the in-house creative and production unit created a new high-resolution cinema camera system called Big Sky specifically for the massive screens. The most interesting aspect, though, is the business model they are using for what experiences they offer.

U2 live at Sphere

Instead of adopting the usual practice of treating their venue as space for rent to shows or artists who then take up residences, they are commissioning and running their own exclusive content – which offers a higher margin. The early success of U2’s opening show (with tickets averaging more than $1000 per seat) is a good sign – as is the band’s quote suggesting that they “would not have played Vegas if it weren’t for the Sphere.” While they haven’t announced the rest of their 2024 calendar, lots of people will be watching and waiting to see what comes there next. 

The Search for the Realest Person on Earth Starts with … Social Media?

Social media today is often the home of negative emotions and addictive outrage. It’s no wonder many surveys are showing a mass exodus with shrinking usage on the top platforms alongside observations that “social media is falling apart.”

One platform trying to shift this perception is BeReal, a popular app that sends users prompts once a day to share an image within two minutes of what they are doing at that moment. The urgency discourages staging photos or trying for perfection and instead rewards people for being real (which explains the name). Taking their efforts one step further, now BeReal has launched a campaign to search for the “Realest Person On Earth.”

If you can put aside the irony of a platform promoting being real and authentic turning authenticity into a competition, the fact that there are tools that encourage more authentic sharing is a good thing. Their challenge, and ours, will be to resist falling into the same feedback loop of approval seeking and insecurity that made so much of social media toxic in the first place. 

How the Liquid Tree Might Be a Game-Changer for Urban Air Pollution

“We are not trying to replace trees. We are trying to replace benches.”

That’s the clever pitch of a project imagined and created by Serbian scientist Dr. Ivan Spasojevic who invented an urban photo-bioreactor called a “Liquid Tree” which uses a combination of water and microalgae to produce pure oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. As Dr. Spasojevic explains:

“Microalgae are 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees in binding CO2. This is equivalent to the CO2-binding capacity of two 10-year-old trees or 200 square meters of lawn. The goal of the liquid tree, however, is not to replace forests but to fill urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees.”

There are plenty of places across the world where space is at a premium, so this is a brilliant solution to a tough problem. Even better, it’s highly visual and the more the microalgae clean the air – the greener the liquid gets. The Liquid Tree is already being tested in Belgrade with plans to expand the idea to replace benches in New Delhi, Paris and New York. 

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?  Watch my new 2023 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Want to share? Here’s the newsletter link:
https://mailchi.mp/nonobvious/389?e=e4ada04396

Copyright © 2023 Non-Obvious, All rights reserved.

Get this newsletter directly in your inbox every Thursday! Subscribe here >>