Why Immersive Events Succeed, the Rise of Negative Energy Pricing and Launching the New InfoWars

Dear Fellow Non-Obvious Thinker,

It was a whirlwind start to the week as I made it on a last-minute trip to LA to see the World Cup match between Canada and South Africa. Lots of excitement, a late goal and dancing celebrations with Canadians on the street were all part it, as it was a chance to turn watching way too much soccer on TV over the past few weeks into a real-life experience.

In between the matches, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on Future Words as we head towards our publication deadline, and of course, reading plenty of stories this week to share with you. In the newsletter this week you’ll read about a formula for creating memorable immersive experiences, the negative energy prices crisis and a new book about how to live a positive life. Next week I’ll be on a short holiday, so we’ll be back in two weeks with the next edition of the Non-Obvious Newsletter. Until then, enjoy the stories and always stay curious!

This Week’s New Videos …

Why the Best Immersive Experiences Succeed

What makes a great immersive experience? It’s a relevant question right now as we see more brands trying to find the right way to both capture attention and bring their products and services to life. Beyond marketing, it’s also a question getting lots of attention now in the world of entertainment to bring franchises to life and allow people to live inside stories too. This week ​HBR offers an answer to this question​ through a model shared by authors of a story all about what makes immersive experiences succeed while others don’t:

As people enter a new experience, they seek answers, consciously or unconsciously, to six questions: Where am I? Who am I with? What can I do? What is happening? Am I making progress? and Why does this matter?

Each question reflects a distinct psychological dimension. Together they create the underlying structure through which immersion takes hold. For companies, addressing all six questions can be challenging. Most experiences tend to focus on answering certain questions while overlooking others. True success lies in ensuring visitors can answer all six in order, even if some are addressed more effectively than others.

The model is one worth considering for anyone who is trying to make any experience or gathering work, whether it’s immersive through technology or just through the act of bringing humans together in the same room. The world needs more people who can design experiences like this to remind us about the power of connection and what unexpected magic might happen when these strategic questions have equally thoughtful answers.

Summer Heat Waves Create the “Problem” of Negative Energy Prices

Here’s a “problem” you don’t hear that much about yet: negative energy prices. This is what happens when a green energy initiative such as solar power produces so much energy that you end up with an excess capacity and people who have opted into it actually get paid for generating a net positive energy surplus. That may seem like an optimistic future to hope for, but it’s ​already happening in some places across Europe​. Of course, a system working too well like this is also creating some losers, namely the venture capital firms that have invested based on the assumption of higher prices. With negative energy prices, those margins drop steeply.

As ​Bloomberg reported this week​, this means that you now have situations like Spain where over $80 billion in investment is generating powerful impact for people and the environment … but not so good financial results for investors. As a result, this is a case study that offers us two lessons. The first is that the most profitable endeavor and the one that offers the greatest benefits for mankind may be in opposition to one another. The second is that the ideal entities to invest in this sort of initiative may never be private companies but rather international governments who should be focused on creating impact for their citizens without the motive of profit.

InfoWars Is Back, Run by the Team from The Onion

How do you deliver karmic justice to one of the most evil media personalities ever? For the team behind the satirical website The Onion, the path to comedic retribution comes in the form of taking over the brand assets for InfoWars, a toxic right wing conspiracy theorist website previously run by disgraced host Alex Jones, and turning it into an entertaining piece of social commentary on all of the lies that Jones put into the world:

InfoWars.com is still in limbo, but a new InfoWars website is launching today all the same, as a sort of pirated brand. Spending time on the site is like looking at a simulated head-on crash that collides the visual urgency of a 24-hour news cycle with the low-fi, low-res graphics of desktop-era websites, print tabloid ads, and overnight infomercials for Bowflex or Magic Bullet. The resulting website is, at launch, a vehicle for making [Alex] Jones and his insidious website a (very funny) punch line. But that satire is in service of a greater long-term ambition. Eventually, the new InfoWars wants to become a challenger to social media—one that could someday look like a Netflix of comedy.

While the takeover of the InfoWars URL is still in litigation, the new Onion-produced parody site features banner ads to “turn your piss into gold,” an intro video from The Onion’s Tim Heidecker in the sensationalist style of Jones and an interesting longer-term vision to maybe get people off social media news altogether. The whole thing is in service of getting compensation to the families of the victims of a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School who also successfully sued Jones for defamation leading him to declare bankruptcy and go off the air.

Aside from the entertainment value, the site offers a reminder that sometimes the best path to expose deceit is using humor as the spotlight. As long as people get the joke.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

What to Make of a Life

Writing about what a life well lived looks like is a pretty intimidating topic for any writer. Jim Collins is one of the few who can do it justice. You may know him already from Good to Great, one of the most legendary (and bestselling) business books of all time. What you may not recall is just how much data this book and most of his work is built upon. For this latest book, Jim uses a similar discipline to tackle the ambitious topic of how any of us might find more value and meaning in our lives. Plenty of the stories in the book come from his own experiences, many of which I was lucky enough to hear in person at a ​book launch event here in DC which I posted a video about​ a few months ago. His insights are original and useful, and the book is an easy read filled with the learnings of a writer who has that rare ability to take something that feels complex and break it down into the sort of insight that really gets you thinking.

Buy-on-Amazon

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads 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:

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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