Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 5

A Lesson In Marketing Strategy From the Cheetos Shape Hunt

Searching for Cheetos that are shaped like anything is a fairly idiotic way to spend your time. It’s also surprisingly popular despite its idiocy. The thing about Cheetos is that people love to see things that aren’t really there in the shape of their Cheetos. At one point, the brand famously created an entire museum to house the most unique discovered Cheetos shapes.

Now in a newly launched campaign there’s a cash prize attached for someone who gets picked because their Cheetos discovery bes...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:

All the Living and All the Dead by Hayley Campbell

The first time I read All the Living and All the Dead, it was an easy pick for the Most Original book winner in the 2022 Non-Obvious Book Awards. Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, the author tells the story of “people who have made death their life’s work.” In a time when the most frequent depictions of death we see are the fictionalized stories of near-heroic serial killers in TV shows and movies, this book offers a unique and no...

How To See Through a Manipulated Headline (A Retailwire Case Study)

One thing I often talk about in this newsletter is honing our media literacy. This week I found a perfect case study to illustrate how you can do this. Let’s start with the story headline from a site called Retailwire.com:

Majority of Americans Aware of New Tariffs, but 40% Aren’t Making Any Changes to Purchasing Behavior: Will This Trend Continue?

Right away, I noticed the numbers seem off: 40% is not a majority. It also therefore seemed suspicious that this was already declared a “trend....

The Secret of Optimism and the New Peruvian Airport

Earlier this week when I arrived in Lima, it was in their brand new airport that is less than two weeks old. People in the city had lots of questions. Did I have issues? All the local news apparently was focused on reporting about the problems. My experience was flawless. The airport was new, fast, easy to navigate and delivered a simple travel experience. That, unfortunately, is a boring story. So the opposite gets reported … and people assume everything is worse than it is.

On stage, after ...

The Consequences of Being An Asshole While Flying

Sometimes life seems to offer sadly few consequences for being an asshole. And rarely are they irreversible. Unless you happen to exhibit that bad behavior when flying.

This interesting piece looks at four examples of passengers who got banned for life from flying due to bad behavior. It shows the extreme consequences of making a poor choice while getting aggravated or drunk or simply having a bad day. While the punishments do seem extreme when it comes to banning them from flying (and nearly...

Why Boys Are Falling Behind In School (And How To Fix It)

American schools and kindergarten specifically are not designed for boys … But they should be. That’s the conclusion from a piece in the New York Times this weekend that focuses on why boys are regularly falling behind girls when it comes to their performance in primary schools:

“Kindergarten has become significantly more academic because of the effects of a national law passed in 2001, with children expected to spend more time sitting still and learning math and reading — and many boys do no...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan

Ask anyone if they describe themselves as a tourist or a traveler and most people will say the latter. Seeing yourself as a “tourist” has become something of a bad word. Author Paige McClanahan dives into this topic and aims to reclaim the word and concept of being a tourist in her new book that is a timely read just before many of us head off on our summer travels. In her definition, a new tourist “engages with the people who live in the place they’re visiting, and ideally does activities o...

The Real Question About AI: How Many Decisions Do We Want It To Make?

Is AI really better than nothing? That is the question we are immediately going to be asking as two stories emerge this week about some potentially concerning uses for AI. In one, the FDA announced it would be using AI to speed up the process for approving various products as being safe for human consumption.On the same day, Meta announced they would be using AI to assess the potential risk of its upcoming products to humans.

Meta plans to shift the task of assessing its products’ potential h...

The Doing and Undoing and Redoing and Undoing of American Policy

Being outraged used to be easier. You could look at a policy or an announcement or something happening in the world and if you disagreed with it, you could voice your opinion or join a march or write a blog post. The thing you were unhappy about, though, was pretty unlikely to change within 24 hours. We don’t really live in that world anymore.

A recent piece from The Atlantic talks about the rapid undoing of policy that has become a hallmark of the current administration:

“The administrati...

The Man (and Book) That Might Actually Change the World

What if the greatest problem in the world was a lack of moral ambition among the best and brightest people? As a ​recent interview​ with author Rutger Bregman notes, “the world is full of highly intelligent, impressively accomplished and status-aware people whose greatest ambitions seem to start and stop with themselves.” This is the audience Bregman writes for in his new book Moral Ambition which is paired with an organization he started called ​The School for Moral Ambition​. The idea is simpl...