Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 14

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Negotiating While Black by Damali Peterman

If you are an avid follower of our Non-Obvious Book Awards program, you might recognize this week’s selection: Negotiating While Black. It was our pick for the Most Useful book of the year in 2024 for a few key reasons. Firstly, while the book’s title might indicate you’ll need to be Black in order to read it—the beautiful thing about how its written is that the book is most useful for anyone who finds themselves in a negotiating situation where they may be underestimated. That’s most of us rega...

Poopy Diapers and How to Destroy a Small Business with Minimal Effort

Paul and Rachelle Baron sell washable swim diapers on Amazon. Like many other small businesses, they use the logistics arm of Amazon to provide distribution and fulfillment for them as consumers can buy their products on Amazon without ever knowing they are a third-party seller. Orders still arrive in 1-2 days and consumers are happy. And of course, Amazon makes it super easy to return items … which created a messy problem for the Barons when one consumer decided to return a used swim diaper cov...

What The AI-Enhanced Beatles Grammy Award Win Tells Us About the Future of Memories

In case you missed it, at this past weekend’s Grammy Awards, the Beatles took home the win for Best Rock Performance for the AI-assisted track “Now and Then.” Before you go down the rabbit hole of seeing this as the first step in the music apocalypse, it’s important to note exactly what was done here. This was not a new track created by AI trained on all the past recordings of the Beatles. Rather, it was an effort to use AI tools to clean up a decades-old muffled track of an original recording f...

Bad Bunny Celebrates Puerto Rico and His Heritage by Creating Exclusive Experience

The first nine shows of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s upcoming summer tour are sold out. That’s not particularly surprising. The interesting thing about them is that they all happen in Puerto Rico and tickets were only available to Puerto Rico residents through in-person sales (to prevent scalpers from getting tickets as much as possible). Obviously there will still be some reselling going on, but the commitment to his hometown is captured in the title of his tour itself “No me quiero ir d...

The Age of the AI Chatbot Salesperson Might Have an Unintended Side Effect

Training an employee to do upselling (and be good at it) is notoriously difficult. When it’s done right, it can drive significant revenue for many types of businesses though so it’s not surprising that some are experimenting with letting AI do the job. An article from WIRED this week showcases a few examples of vendors working on this sort of technology via chatbots that interact with customers as they are placing orders for something like pizza for delivery. The thing that’s even more interesti...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities, by Thomas Heatherwick

Imagine a graphic novel that offers a compelling argument for why our cities can be more than just boring backdrops for daily routines. That’s the vision in Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanize and it comes to life through lots of examples, stories and visuals of exactly how cities could be more interesting and exciting. You may not see yourself as someone who is actively “designing cities” and you probably don’t work in urban planning, but the beauty of this book is how approachable the author makes t...

The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going to Be Easy

Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service is planning to experiment with letting riders leave a tip. Before your temperature rises too much, it’s important to note that the tips would go to charity, and you can select the charity … so we can all just calm down a little. The positive PR is probably one big reason Waymo maybe be trialing the feature.

Creating a...

The Stories Within the Story About Why DeepSeek AI Is Such a Big Deal

The big AI news of the week was Chinese startup DeepSeek releasing their AI model which seemingly offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. The news has apparently shocked the tech community “popping the US Big Tech bubble” and sent the share prices of several big tech players rocketing downward. This is the story that seems to be getting the most attention—how a startup from China could upend so much momentum and domination of the generative AI ecosystem that had previously been mainly US-based ...

The No Book: An Inside Look at Tim Ferriss’s New Book (and How He Protects His Time)

In case you’re not familiar with author Tim Ferriss, here’s a crazy fact about him: If he’s in a time when he isn’t checking email (usually for three weeks at a time), he deletes all the emails he has received and asks people to resend them if they are really that important. Tim’s first book The 4-Hour Workweek was a global bestseller. In this new book (his first in over seven years), which he is releasing as a serial with two chapters at a time, Tim writes about all the techniques and scripts h...

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week: Dubai Future Foundation

One of the most forward-looking nations invests heavily in future planning, and much of their planning, research, insights and project efforts are all published freely online. This is the wealth of futures information you’ll find on this government sponsored website from the Dubai Future Foundation.

These insights along with the publications and research published by the UAE Government Development & Futures Office are just as useful as many trend insights websites that require subscripti...