Rohit Bhargava's Blog

What do you do when your AI generated text or image comes out not quite right? A growing number of people are ​turning to writers and designers to fix that AI-generated slop​ and turn it into something useful. For several years, some people have predicted that the future of these sorts of creative tasks will involve some fusion of AI and talent. In The Future Normal, Henry and I wrote about the trend we called “Augmented Creativity” as a way of exploring this idea too.

This is a related, but ...

You should go out and have a beer. And just in case you need a bit of encouragement, Heineken wants you to go and have a beer too. That seems like a pretty obvious positioning for an alcohol brand, but their ​latest #socialoffsocials campaign​ is just another reminder of how the brand has consistently been sharing this message for decades. I worked on Heineken’s marketing when I was at Leo Burnett Sydney in the year 2000. Back then, they sponsored many live events and focused on how their beer e...

Last Thursday was the opening of the NFL season and a big deal in my house, as well as across America. After twenty years of inept performances, last year our Washington Football Team / Commanders / Redskins made it all the way to the final round of the playoffs and like all NFL fans, we have nothing but hope for the season to come. We are undefeated as of today. The faith in our team, or any other, can feel a bit like religion. That’s the topic explored in my pick for this week’s Non-Obvious Bo...

It’s September and pumpkin spice everything is there. Coffee, candles, cereals, Oreos, dog treats, gum, ​hummus​ and even ​butt wipes​ (entertainingly rebranded as “Dumpkin Spice”). The inescapability of this random ingredient may leave you wondering why exactly it’s so popular … especially since it doesn’t actually include any pumpkin (the term “pumpkin spice” is used to describe an aromatic blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger).

The credit for its modern appeal ​often goes to Starb...

No one cares what you hate on social media. Or at least they shouldn’t. But as the anonymity of the Internet offers up permission to people to be the worst versions of themselves, the exact opposite may be happening to professional critics of music, film and culture. In other words, they are getting nicer. In the New Yorker, this shift of ​how music critics “lost their edge“​ is explored in an article this week:

“The idea that people’s tastes have a right not to be criticized is, of course, q...

A new restaurant in Manhattan called the ​Community Kitchen​ is doing a pilot test through November of a business model where people choose to pay what they can for a fine dining experience. The restaurant promises to use sustainable locally farmed ingredients, offer their workers a high wage and predictable hours, and a dining experience that rivals that of other establishments which might charge $100 a plate for a meal.

The dinner pricing is based on a fixed-menu meal on a sliding scale: $1...

If you thought, like I did, that many of the negative impacts that Facebook has had on our culture from failing to curb the spread of misinformation to offering evil people a platform was all about the money … this book will offer you a sobering reality check. Written by someone who was instrumental in that “growth at any cost” ethos that always defined Facebook, this is the ultimate highly readable tell-all memoir. From stories of crashing parties with Zuck to revealing stories of invitations f...

What happens when all the good TVs that you can buy in the market are automatically programed as “smart” TVs, ready to connect to the Internet to stream shows from all platforms? For some people, it’s leading them to figure out how to turn that smart TV into a dumb one by removing all connectivity. This desire to go more basic when it comes to the technology we use isn’t new and it’s on the rise.

For anyone who has driven a rental car with overactive steering correction or endured constant un...

Cracker Barrel announced they were ditching their old logo for a forgettable generic new one. The news got people to pay attention. Lots of them condemned the switch. Then predictably a few weeks later, they backtracked and brought back the old logo. I suspect that was always the plan. Here’s the one headline that should tell you everything you need to know about the ideal outcome of this strategy.

The Washington Post ran an article with this headline: “Cracker Barrel is trying to modernize. ...

The first line of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina offers this observation:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Based on a recent research study, there may be some science that actually proves his point. Neuroscientists studying key brain patterns among people who imagined positive events with a feeling of optimism versus those who did so with pessimism found that the optimists brain patterns were largely similar. For pessimists, those sam...