75: Become a Trend Curator + Non-Obvious Trends for 2018 with Rohit Bhargava

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am super duper excited to be here today with Rohit Pargava. He is a near futurist, master storyteller, and the chief trend curator of the Non Obvious company. You can see why I had to have him on the show the second that I met him. He is a global leadership and innovation consultancy. That's what Non Obvious Company does. And Rohit is a former brand strategist at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. He's the author of five best selling business books, a popular keynote speaker, and adjunct professor of storytelling at Georgetown University. Rohit, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So part of the reason I brought Rohit here is to enlighten us and help us all kick off 2018 with a bang. This book series that he does is called Non Obvious how to Predict Trends and Win the Future. And each year, every year since 2012, Rohit has put out a new version. So I got like the Christmas book bundle of several of these at once. Thank you, Rohit. And today we're here talking about trends for 2018, but also what does it mean to be a trend curator. So Rohit, I'd love to kick that one over to you. What is a trend curator? I just love that phrase.

Yeah, thank you. I mean, I think for me, trend curator was a term that I landed on because I heard everybody talking about trend spotters and that was such a popular term. And I personally don't believe that trend spotting is a thing. I think that's like a false idea. I think there's idea spotters, people who are great at seeing ideas and things that people are doing that are interesting, which I love. But to make that into a trend, you actually need a little bit more effort. A trend isn't just walking down the street and you're like, oh, my God, that's a trend. There it is. Wow, I saw it. I think that idea spotters are great because you find those ingredients, but in order to make a trend, it's kind of like baking a cake. You can't just put flour, sugar, and eggs on a shelf and be like, there's the cake. Can you picture it? I don't think that's how it works. I think that you have to curate those things into something more powerful. This idea of curation, which I know has kind of become a popular term now because of the growth of content marketing. But curators in a museum, if you think about what they do, they decide what to show you and what not to show you. And so a museum never puts all of their art on display. That wouldn't make sense. They create a story and they tell you themes and they make it meaningful. Because of that, they curate noise into meaning. And I think that's the idea of curation. That's what I love about it.

I loved reading that definition in your book because I did always use the term trend spotter or trend analyst, which maybe analyst is an improvement. But when I would think about trendspotting, it was something I was always curious about, but felt like, oh, well, I must not be cut out for it. I've never been the most fashion forward. I don't catch trends when they're early. But that's really the spotting. It's not the meaning and the analysis that you're describing.

Yeah. And, you know, the beautiful thing is that when you think of yourself as an idea spotter, you can actually take a little pressure off yourself to be the only place that you get ideas from. Because if you are someone who's an idea collector, an idea spotter, I mean, I use the analogy of how we tend to use frequent flyer points, right? I mean, you spend the whole year or multiple years traveling, you gather these points, and then eventually you have enough points and you cash them in to take a trip somewhere. You don't use the points as you get them. And I think that we have to think about ideas the same way. Like, what if we started to collect ideas, save them, and then find a way to make them meaningful over time and come back to them and see the connections between them so that we could then elevate our thinking, come up with better and bigger ideas. And in a nutshell, that's the process that I try and teach people.

Do you think anybody can become a trend curator, or is it only for certain special people with the right kind of brain?

I do think anybody can. I mean, I really believe that. Not only because I think it is an empowering message, but because I've seen it. I've seen people kind of take those blinders off and see what they didn't see before. And a lot of times when people think about this, they're like, well, you're trying to change people's worldview, which is a notoriously different, difficult thing to do. Right. I mean, you can't change the way people see the world. But that's not really what I'm trying to encourage people to do. Your view of the world, your view of, like, what your religion is or what your politics are like, I mean, those things are. It's not that you can't change them, but they tend to be difficult to change because they've. Those beliefs have come up over years and years. But to encourage people to be more observant, to see the things that they're not seeing, that's something you can take people and show them. I mean, that's why you have experiences like virtual reality that are so transformative, because people who don't have the chance to see outside of the world that they usually see don't see outside the bubble of stuff that they usually read. If they are challenged to see outside of that and experience something different, their world opens up. And it's an awesome thing to see someone go through that.

I can imagine. I would love to come back to how you help people open up and be more observant and curious. But first, when I saw your work, it also made me think about the term futurist. And I think there's a misconception that what you're doing is trying to predict the future. You've talked about this in your books, and I just find the idea of people who consider themselves futurists interesting. And technology has always fascinated me. But what I love is that you say the secret to predicting the future is to get better at understanding the present. How does focusing on what's here now relate to trend curating rather than trying to look 5, 10, 20 years out?

Yeah, I very much admire people who are futurists in the traditional sense of the word, because they're picturing and trying to imagine the world 20, 50, 100 years from now. I don't really put myself in that category because, first of all, that's not how I see the world or how I tend to think, I think much more in terms of the near future. And so one of the things you shared in my bio is this hyphenated idea of a near futurist. Oh, I love that. The proof of that for me is every year I do the dumbest thing. I mean, you'll appreciate this. As an author, I do the dumbest thing any author can ever do, which is I rewrite 40% of the same book and then release it every December.

It's either the dumbest or the smartest. Because I was thinking, this is amazing. Every year you update this ongoing growing body of work. And then even for professional speaking, people have a reason to bring you back year after year for very valuable new trends that you've curated. And yet you don't have to rewrite the whole thing all over from scratch. But it's incredible the amount of work that you do every single day, single year that goes into these.

Yes, you have successfully seen through the strategy. It is dumb as an author, but strategic as a business person. Yes, that is correct. Super strategic.

I actually was that on purpose because it is brilliant. I mean, because then people think, well, we gotta have Rohit back this year. We don't wanna miss out on what the trends are for this year. So it seems like you found this incredible way to snowball your speaking career.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it was really a. It's been an eight year journey. I mean, I've been doing this Trend report for eight. And so every year for these past eight years, I've had 15 new trends predicted. And so what ends up happening when you do that is you have this huge body of work that you've put out. And this is particularly relevant now because one of the big underlying stories of the World Series was that guy who wrote the Sports Illustrated article three years before predicting that the Astros were going to win. And we love hearing stories of that because we look at that cover and we're like, wow, three years ago he knew that, like, he predicted the future for real, right? But a lot of times, like, when you hear about predictions of the future, like, it's not as clear cut whether it came true. And the natural thing, everybody wonders is, hey, man, you've been doing this for eight years. Like, did you ever get stuff right? Did you ever get stuff wrong? Did you ever admit that you were wrong? Which is a major problem with futurists. I mean, if you ask a futurist, did your predictions come true, usually they'll only say either yes or not yet. They'll never admit that it didn't come true. And so for me, like, one of the big components of this book is at the end of the book, there's a huge appendix that grades every single one of the past trend predictions along with a rating for whether it came true or whether it didn't, whether it continued to accelerate and why. And so there's a lot of transparency behind what these predictions are, the process that has gone into how they've been predicted and then how people have used them that I think doesn't exist enough in the world of futurists and predictions.

I really loved that section of the book. It was so interesting to flip through and see there are a lot of A's and B's in there, I might add. And I'm curious what happens when it's a C? I didn't even see that you got many Cs, but a C or a D or an F? Have you yet figured out what goes wrong or what happens? Is there anything that you would do differently to flip those that get a lower rating? Or is it just circumstances totally beyond your control?

No, I mean, I think that when it gets a low rating, it's usually because the thinking wasn't elevated enough. It didn't describe enough of the world. It described something that was happening in one place. And I think if you think about the way that trend predictions at the end of the year are usually shared, it's very industry specific. Here are the five trends in the financial services industry. Here are the five things affecting consumer and retail. And the trends that I predict and that my team puts together every year are not based on industries. In fact, every single one of the trends has examples in multiple industries. And when you do that, you force yourself to elevate your thinking. Because if you find something that's happening in healthcare and you can't find any examples of it happening anywhere else, then it's not a trend in the way that we report the trends. And so when something becomes a C or doesn't really.

Exist outside of the year that it was predicted, what happens is it stops accelerating. Because really what we're predicting with trends is acceleration of an idea. And so when it's first predicted, it's non obvious, right? Like that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to find ideas that people aren't all talking about. If it's a well predicted trend a year or two years or three years down the road, someone would read it and be like, duh, I'VE heard that so many times. Everybody knows that that doesn't mean it's not a trend anymore. It just means it's obvious instead of non obvious because it continued to accelerate a lot of the trends. If you look backwards, like three years or four years, you'd look at something like that and be like, well, duh, of course everybody's using content for marketing.

But when we first talked about it, it wasn't that obvious. Yeah.

What a fascinating concept that trends that you're curating, they have an acceleration rate of their own that if it's really a trend and it's growing, it's accelerating every year and building momentum and not consensus, but becoming more and more mainstream than when it's on the fringes and you spot it.

Yeah, for sure. And I should say that one of the things that is very central to how these trends get rated is not me looking back and saying, wow, how smart was I three years ago? It's very much based on I do a lot of workshops and keynotes and put these trends in front of people and organizations and they try and use them and put them into action. And my team does the same thing and they report back to us. I mean, one of the things we do all the time is we put these trends out and we have a group of people in like let's say a large company, and they will immediately look at those trends and say this trend is immediately applicable, maybe applicable or not really applicable. And so we're getting this real time feedback on all of these trends that then goes into the ratings at the end of the year, which are updated each year.

So we're going to get into some of the trends for 2018. We won't go through all 15 in this conversation, but before we get there, I'm really curious. I talk a lot about systems, delegation, automation. I can just geek out on tools and systems with the best of them. So I would love for you to share both how you have a curator's mindset and specifically what is your process for collecting and spotting ideas. How do you, Rohit, save things? Is it analog or digital? Like, please just give us all the technical just juiciness.

Absolutely. So I do tend to use a very physical process. I have a bunch of photos in the book of what that process looks like, but I'm ripping stuff out of magazines, I'm printing articles out, physically moving things around. When I start doing the whole process, which I call the haystack method for like finding the Instead of searching for the needle in the Haystack, like, I'm gathering the hay. That's what the haystack method is all about. It's like being systematic about gathering more hay so that you can then see the patterns between things. So it is very physical in terms of tools, because I want to give you, like, a real insight into how I do this every week. I review, in general, 312 stories every week. And I know that it sounds like an odd number, but I know that it's 312 because for whatever reason, I use Feedly. And I have hundreds of news sources that go into Feedly. And every time I make it through 78 stories, it says these stories are marked as read. Would you like to go and see more stories? And I go through four cycles of that. So I know that it's 312 stories through Feedly. And then I'm reading other materials and magazines and stories and everything like that all throughout the week, each week. And the reason why it's such a weekly process for me is because every Thursday morning, I'm publishing an email called the Non Obvious Insights Newsletter. And the point of the email is to share five underappreciated stories of the week. And so every week, I share five stories that you might not have heard about, but that I think are significant, along with a short analysis of why. So every week for the whole year, I'm doing that. You multiply all those stories by all of the books that I'm often getting and reviewing by all the magazines and all of these sources of input. Everything comes into this annual process. And I started every January for the whole year, and I really just collect information. I don't really do any analysis until August. So that's eight months of just gathering stuff, interviewing people, reading articles, saving things, putting it in my folder. So you can imagine at the end of eight months of reading that much stuff, I have a lot of information saved up.

That is incredible. It reminds me, my dad, when I was writing Pivot, we were talking about writing and writer's block, and he was saying, you know, there are three distinct phases of writing a book. Harvesting, thinking, and writing. So harvesting is like what you're doing eight months out of the year, and then thinking is looking at it, and then writing. After Pivot came out, I had all these really organized notebooks in Evernote where I was saving articles. Whether it was like, like people, Pivot models, Pivot leaders, you know, I had every segment of what I was harvesting, but then I just renamed a notebook Curiosity. And I've been dumping Stuff in there for two years. I have no idea what's in there, but it sounds like I could use my own. Like, I love the haystack method of just pile all the hay and then go in and see what themes are there.

Yeah. You'll find that when you do that, a couple things start to happen. One is you force yourself to elevate your thinking because you're seeing the result of eight months worth of things you saved instead of just a particular week and whatever was hot that week. The other thing that starts to happen is you start to see connections between industries that maybe you wouldn't have seen before, because you're starting to group things based on themes.

And then the last thing that it starts to do is it says to you, look, I, as an individual, have to make sure that I don't lose my best ideas. And I think a lot of us go through our lives writing down things we find interesting on a scrap of paper that we never find again. Taking notes at an event where we look at our notes that are hastily scribbled and we can't really remember why we wrote it down in the first place. And what we're doing over and over again is we're losing our best ideas. We're spending all this time going to an event, hearing about stuff, listening to smart people writing something down that we thought would be useful for us, and then three weeks later, it's gone because we didn't save it in the right way. And so one of the biggest things I try and teach people is like, how do you get better at taking notes in such a way that they're useful for you when you look at them eight months down the road? Because that's how you make value out of your best ideas. And it's a shame.

That's one of the biggest wastes in the world that all of these smart people are having these smart ideas and then doing nothing with them? That sucks.

How have you gotten better at taking notes?

One of the things I use all the time is something I call note boxes. And so basically, I do a lot of handwritten notes. I'm not an evernoter or anything like that. But, you know, it doesn't really matter what you use. What matters is how do you make sense of what the topics are? And so note boxes for me are, for example, in my notebook, if you were to tell me about a book that I should really read, I will write down the title of that book, and then I will write the word book, and I will put it in A box, and I'll put it right next to that so that when I'm skimming my notes months later, I can see every single book somebody recommended to me, because it's always got a little box next to it that says book. And now I can go onto Amazon or wherever and I can order all of those books all at once. And one of the big questions I ask people is, look, could you remember every book somebody had recommended you for the last six months and order them all at once? Most people's answer would be no, because they don't have a way of doing that. Now take that note box's concept and multiply it out. You know, if you put a box next to to dos, if you put a box next to things you should read, if you put a box next to websites that you should subscribe to, whatever the things are that you write down and whatever your lingo is that you use, putting it in those boxes creates this kind of tagging system, which Evernote or all of those things also have. And that's how people organize their stuff in digital platforms as well. But that's what makes it useful to then go back to later on.

And what happens in August, once you do sit down to start curating?

I take over the room in our house that my kids call the Thanksgiving room, because we only use it once for Thanksgiving, but it has the biggest table, and that's what I need. So I take over that room, and I spread out all this stuff physically, and I start aggregating it together, and I clip it together, and I.

Literally start figuring out themes for what these are, and I clip stories together based on those themes. And at the end of that whole process, which takes a couple of weeks of just going through and sorting things out.

I will usually end up with about 80 to 85 possible themes that could be trends. At that point, I start to aggregate ideas together. I start to elevate my thinking, because eventually I'm getting down to 15. And so at the end of that whole process, when I come down to what I think the 15 trends are going to be, I'll usually have at least 25 or 30 stories as examples for each one of these trends. And at that point, I'll then go out and do more research. I'll interview more people, I'll find more stories to see if I can support the idea of what this trend is and how I'm describing it. I'll go through a process of naming the trends. So I'll brand the trends, because the name of how you describe the trends as you see from the book and we'll talk about once we get into the trends is very important because it has to be memorable enough for people to remember what that trend is. And then I develop with the design team icons for each one of the trends. So they all have icons, they all have names, and they all have at least 35, 40 stories, interviews, all sorts of proof behind the trend. And all of that happens before I ever start writing anything.

It's so impressive. It's so impressive. Rohit has the coolest table. It's like a visual table of contents that outlines outlines. So let's jump into a few. We could even do lightning round. I'll call out. In fact, I curated a list of five trends from your trends.

Oh, okay, great. Awesome. And this will be, by the way, this will be good because you are one of the first people that I'm talking to about the trend. So I am internalizing the way that I describe them verbally still. So this is going to be. It's going to be like watching a, like, if you've ever seen, like Jay Leno, when he had his show, used to do his, like, comedy bit on Sunday nights before his show to kind of practice material so that eventually when he was going to do the show, it'd be like he'd done it before. So for the next couple weeks, I'm still doing my. You're in that phase. So I'm still like working out stuff. So anything you bring back and you're like, I don't get this or I do, that'll be great.

Well, that's great. That makes me feel happy that we're riding the front of your trend wave of getting this message of 20.

You are. Yes, you are. Yes, you are.

Exciting. Great. Okay, cool. Well, a few that jumped out to me. One, of course, this is the Pivot podcast is Lightspeed Learning. Say more about that one. And note to everyone listening. Hear that cool two word name, Lightspeed Learning. Okay, over to you.

Yeah. So Lightspeed Learning is really about how there are more tools than ever to not just learn on demand, but to learn things faster. And one of the great stories that I uncovered that really kind of led to me start thinking about this was what Fender was doing, the maker was doing around helping people learn how to play the guitar. Because one of the biggest problems that they have is a lot of people start playing the guitar and then they give up. Myself included. I mean, I'm a drummer who wanted to try and play the guitar. I Started and then I kind of just gave up. Right. I'm too busy, whatever. And so in order to help people stick to the guitar, their big insight was you have to feel like you're getting good fast, otherwise you won't play. Which, you know, is not really surprising. I mean you could probably guess that that would help. But in order to help people get good faster, you couldn't just teach them scales or chords. You have to actually teach them songs. And so what Fender worked to create was a whole platform through an app that you can subscribe to that will teach you, through high quality 4K videos from professional guitarists, how to play some of your favorite songs. And so immediately, as soon as you pick up the guitar, they start teaching you in a simplified way how to play some of the songs that you love so that the first thing you're learning is how to play the song that you love. The idea being yeah, and you could get reward. You know, you would feel the value and the reward of wanting to play the guitar. And it reconnects you with like why you started playing in the first place.

Man, that's sparking so many ideas. Any of us who are creatives creating anything could put ourselves in the same user shoes and say, how do you give someone the experience they most want? Or one nugget. I'm learning Arabic at the moment. And yeah, at first I started with flashcards. There's no do, there's no duolingo for Arabic. It's very hard. I'm learning Lebanese Arabic. So it's not. It's different in every dialect, every part of the Middle East. In any case, I finally landed on a book called Conversational Arabic. And from the get go he teaches 15 words and then 10 sentences that you would use in conversation. So instead of learning how to say like my teacher is nice that I would never say, I'm learning how to say good morning, how are you? And you don't get to move on. But that giving these tangible outcomes more quickly. Because it's true with we all have such shorter attention spans now. And not just that, if we're going to invest time in learning, why not give people an immediate reward? Life. Now you know your favorite song. You might not know every single aspect of playing guitar, but you could at least impress people around a campfire.

Yeah, and I think that's what what people are increasingly used to also. I mean I remember in my research I found.

Interview actually it was like a stage presentation from one of the heads of BuzzFeed's Tasty video series, which I'm sure everybody's kind of seen, where they show you how to prepare different meals and recipes through these like viral videos. And they were sharing some of the numbers behind these videos. And I think that like some of their more popular videos get like 20 million views. And they've had like more than 500 million people watch these videos. And it's really a 30 second. Here's how to go from like a one pot, stick all your stuff in the pot, put these spices in, and then it turns into a meal. And it's so much more of a powerful way of learning how to cook something than going to a recipe book. I mean, you think about like, I had this experience with my kids that was so funny where we were traveling in San Francisco and my younger son wanted to pick up this, you know, those like clearance books in a bookstore where it's like the origami paper and then the origami designs in the book and you get it kind of all in one package. And it's like seven bucks or something. And so I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll pick this up. And as you're going through, like, I don't know if you've ever tried to do origami from a book, but you always hit that one point, like when you're 80% done, where you totally screw it up and like, you can't possibly go any further. And it's like impossible to figure out whether you should flip the paper this way or that way. I'm like, why would anybody ever do origami through a book instead of a video? It's the most idiotic thing ever because you'll never finish it. You'll always screw it up. And that's what we're used to now. Like, we're used to being able to get that video on demand when we want it to learn how to do anything.

Right. It reminds me. Your example reminded me too, Tim Ferriss, I think he said one of his most popular YouTube videos of all time is how to Boil in a Hard Boiled Egg.

Yeah, that's right. I remember that. I remember that.

There it is. So micro nuggets. Why I think his work is so popular for our chef, like give you the impressive output before, like 8020ing it, essentially. Way to go. I love that trend. Rohit. That's an awesome one. Okay, next one that I thought was fascinating. Approachable luxury. What's that?

Yes, Approachable luxury is this beautiful idea that luxury products, luxury experiences and how unreachable they used to seem is no longer the priority. Every luxury company that makes luxury experiences is trying to find a way to focus on experiences instead of products. Because what they're finding and what they already know is that the new generation of consumers is spending more money on experiences than they are on the old model of luxury, the $8,000 handbag. And so the more I dug into this, the more I found all these interesting examples of, for example, the huge multi year decline in people buying luxury Swiss watches and how that's created this whole industry crisis really, because they're trying to figure out, well, if people aren't buying luxury watches because there's so many other things to wear on your wrist and, and connected devices, and the fact that most of us have the phone in our pockets, so we don't technically need a watch anymore if we ever needed one in the first place, what does that mean for how they sell products? And this idea of approachable luxury really came from the fact that the trend is not that luxury products are too expensive and people don't want to spend money. The trend is that when we experience something that we find luxurious, it's because it has this human connection in a way that we don't usually think of when we think of a luxury product. We think of a luxury product as buying status. And yet if you look at some of the latest research, when people start to make more money and they get a new job, for example, or they get a promotion, the first thing they do is not go out and buy an expensive handbag to celebrate. They go out and have some sort of amazing experience and that's how they celebrate. When you look at a product like for example, the peloton bikes, which have been taking off, which, which are pretty expensive, right? I mean, you're paying for this device, which is an exercise bike, and then you're paying a monthly subscription fee. But it's a very human connection because you have this instructor on this big screen that's in front of you that's teaching you the class and you're part of this class. And if you want, you can turn on the video and literally see the other people who are in the class with you. That is the experience that people want to have and what they're spending money on.

And in that case too, the bike is not just to look nice when they go out riding with their friends. It's functional. So.

It'S actually helping them exercise every day. And what you said about having the instructor, because peloton, they live stream spin classes essentially, and the Instructor can even yell out, I went to the opening of the shop in New York, the peloton location. In any case, they'll call out. They'll be like, rohi, I see you're out there. Way to go. Keep going. They'll call out to people in their living room or wherever they're biking from home. It kind of seems to remind me of another trend I picked, which was human mode. Do those relate at all? And even if not, what is human mode?

They do. And one of the things that you're spotting immediately here is that these trends really don't live by themselves. I mean, there is crossover between them.

I'm bringing that up because the fourth one I chose was touchworthy. And now I feel like, wait, maybe I picked not a diversified enough range for everyone listening. But clearly there must be something, because I focus on people and the people development side of things. But anyway, sorry to interrupt. Continue.

No, no, no, no, no. No problem. I think that, yeah, one of the things that you'll find is the way that these trends describe the world is not in compartments that never overlap, because people overlap all the time. And so the reason why I spend so much time on trends at all is not to say, well, you belonged. It's not like the old personality test where it's like, okay, you're an ENFP and you're enft, and therefore you guys are different like this. That's not really the way that I believe trends work, what I think the value of trends are. And this kind of speaks to the idea of, like, okay, well, why is this useful at all? Like, what do you do with these trends besides the theater of, oh, these are interesting stories. And, you know, that's kind of cool. That's fun. But a lot of the usefulness of these trends come from treating them as sparks for idea generation. And so when I'm doing a brainstorming, when I'm facilitating brainstorming, we use the trends as sparks to try and get people to think about their world or their universe in a different way. Just as back when I was at Ogilvy, one of the things we used to do is we'd go into a financial services company and we'd say to them.

How would you imagine that you had to sell what you sell, but you had to sell it in the way that you would sell if you were Starbucks, what would you do? How would you change your business? What would you do differently if you were putting their business model on top of your products and services? The reason why we would do that is to get people outside of their frame of thinking and outside of their industry into a different industry. I think trends can also do that, because you look at a trend and you say, okay, well, human, for example, which is this idea that sometimes in a world of increasing technology, we want the more human version. And in fact, sometimes we're willing to pay extra for humans. I mean, how often would you call up that customer service line and if they said, would you like to pay 25 cents to speak to a person right now instead of a robot? You'd be like, yeah, here you go. Here's my 25 cents. Please let me speak with a real person.

Right there should be, like, clear for airports or TSA PreCheck for that.

Yeah, totally. Right?

This is our new business idea. We got this.

There are. Yeah, there are. I remember there are apps that have, like, the secret code where it's like, if you call up Citibank, like, one, then six.

And then you'll get to a person faster, Right? Like it's trying to hack the system. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, it's this idea that, like, sometimes we want that human connection, and even to the point where we are seeking it out as a preferential way of interacting with certain categories of products because there isn't that much humanity in some of them.

It strikes me that part of the reason podcasts are taking off in the way that they are is because it's human mode. People are kind of sick of being inundated online. At least I am. I even stopped blogging. I'd been blogging for 10 years, and I realized I prefer just having a conversation like this one. And then I love listening to them. I don't always have time. The cue tends to pile up way faster. There's no way I can listen to as many as I subscribe to. But I like that it's real and in the moment and authentic, and someone can't edit out their personality for the most part, you know, you kind of, like, really get more of an authentic sense of both the host and the guests, of who they are and what's going on for the them.

Yeah, and you didn't. You didn't yet ask about this one. But one of the trends in the. In the book is something I call truthing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So truthing was in response to the fake news epidemic that we have, where it's just, like, everything out there. It seems like it's not trustworthy, and so we just think everybody's lying to us. And in response to that, people are engaging in finding the truth. And truth has kind of become a verb now that they're engaging in something I call truthing. And truthing is going out and saying, okay, in a world filled with fake news and all of these profiles that may or may not be written by a real person or a robot, I'm going to go and find the podcast of the person that I trust because that is more authentic to me. Or I'm going to go and have that face to face conversation because that's the thing that I can believe in much more than any of this other fake stuff. Because everything online may or may not be real. The person behind it may or may not be real or a fake profile. I don't know. And so if I'm going to get smarter, because nobody describes themselves as dumb, right? So everybody wants to be smarter to get smarter. They don't want to be misled or just believe something and follow it blindly because we don't want to identify ourselves that way. And so the response to that is, well, let me find what I can believe in. Let me find what I can see as the truth.

I used to have a goal for myself to write one truth post for every useful post. Like, sometimes I would give tips and tools and templates and then I would set myself, okay, what is my truth of the moment? And I think that's a question we can all ask ourselves. What's my truth of the moment and am I sharing it or how can I share it? There's one more that I want to ask you about, which is enlightened consumption. And then I would love to know if I missed any that are like your other number one favorite that I didn't ask you about.

Okay. So, yeah, enlightened consumption is essentially in response to how much more it matters to us what a company believes and what they do to make the world better, as opposed to just making a good product.

Also pause real quick. It kind of made me want to cry when Amazon acquired Whole Foods. It broke my heart. And it occurs to me only in this moment that this is falling into this. And for better or for worse, like we want enlightened consumption and yet this consolidation.

Okay, sorry, Rohit, continue. I just had to. Had to grieve for a moment.

Yeah, no, it's. I mean, it's. It's more and more common, right? I mean, this whole consolidation thing for like small brands to get swallowed up by. By bigger ones. I mean, I think it was blue. Blue Bottle Coffee had the same. Was it blue bottle or Blue I can't remember the exact.

I just found out Tom's, too, is Procter and Gamble.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, like, every time we see one of those things, we're like, oh, come on, like, you sold out what happened? Right.

But it is this hardwired sense of, like.

We want to believe that the things that we're buying and the way that we're buying them is making a positive statement about the world that we want to live in and a positive statement about ourselves. And when those messages get mixed, you know, when it's like, okay, I believe in the environment and all this stuff, and therefore I'm a Whole Foods customer, but now I'm an Amazon customer. Well, wait a second.

Do I buy that or do I not buy into that? It really does fit this model of we are becoming enlightened about what we have the right to demand from companies.

I think what ends up happening in that world is, first of all, there's more visibility about how a company behaves and what they do. Therefore, it matters more to them, which we're seeing across board. But also there's this empowerment, the symptom of empowerment. Because when you talk about consumer empowerment, a lot of times.

If someone said consumers are empowered and you ask them the next question, which is, why do you think that they would say, because they have access to information and so information has empowered them. That's why people don't buy the rust proof coating on cars anymore, because they can Google that and figure out that it's a scam and so they don't buy it. But I think that consumer empowerment has now kind of moved to the next level, which is not just we have access to information, but we can decide on a deeper level whether this company or this brand or this product is worth supporting based on how they do business, not just based on what they make.

This empowerment isn't just, I'm not going to pay for extra for something because I know what your margins are. It's. I'm not going to get that because I don't like the way that you guys do business.

Yeah, I don't think I could be vegan because I really do like cheese and eggs. But it reminds me, this is kind of, I don't know, it's so hard to know. Even with something like eggs. I'll go find which is the most expensive one, actually, and which one is like where the chickens are petted, you know, you know, like pasture raised. Free. Free girls, free hens. Like, it says something on the box and the sad thing is I read a New York Times magazine article about how none of that's actually regulated. Every time we try to put on regulations, the meat industry and farming industry basically lobbies to have it all removed so there are no checks. So anyone can write anything on these boxes. But there is this desire to at least say, ugh, okay, you know, I'm gonna. I'm sad for these chickens, but if I don't stop eating eggs altogether, I'll go try and find the most ethical ones or reduce consumption. But it's. Do you think that this applies? I mean, it must apply kind of across the board, I think. Do you think enlightened. I guess what I'm trying to ask is if enlightened is just about ethical considerations or is there more to this trend around just how we purchase or work with choose our service providers more broadly?

Yeah, it's much more. I mean, think about the side of enlightened employment. Right. The whole idea that, like, where we want to work has to reflect our identity. Yeah.

Or is that like 2015?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, totally. I mean, it's. You know, there's this idea that, like, where we work has to reflect our way of seeing the world. Otherwise, like, we're not really happy working there.

And so you do see this real sense of, well, in order to recruit the best people, we have to have a point of view about the world that goes beyond just, hey, we have a great workplace and you can, you know, play ping pong and have free meals catered in like that. It's more than that Silicon Valley surface.

Bro culture, you know, that gets criticized. But also, like, people, you know, generally hold that up and say, wow, how cool is that office compared to like the old school cubicle offices.

Okay, Rohit, which trend did I miss that is your, like, secret favorite? If we didn't already get to it.

Which one is my secret favorite?

Well, maybe it's not a secret. This must be hard. It's like choosing among your 15 trends.

Yeah, it is. You know, I tend to. I tend to pick based on what I think will be the most valuable or useful as opposed to, like, favorite. So maybe I'll pick based on that. Yeah, there was a trend I wrote about, so there's one thing I didn't mention is there's five categories for trends.

Thank you.

And there's three trends in each category every year. And so the categories are culture and consumer behavior, marketing and social media, media and education, technology and design and economics and entrepreneurship. And one of the trends that really shaped the way that I think we're looking at media today was a trend I called manipulated outrage. And I really just. That was one of the first ones that I wrote about in this report. And in general, what I find is the first trend that I write about or the first ones I write about are the ones that were easiest to find supporting information for. Like, there were so many stories that I just, like, it was just, it almost wrote itself because there was just so much out there. And manipulated outrage is basically what it sounds like. I mean, it's this idea that there are people and entities that are profiting from making us feel outrage. And you see this on the political spectrum, you see this on the media side. When it comes to media that people pay attention to, social media gets more likes social media. Totally. And, you know, I had this beautiful story of this great guy who's a designer and he, he was sort of. His daughter was diagnosed with a serious condition. And so he, you know, and she's fine now, but back when they were dealing with that, he wanted to add a little bit of fun to their lives. And so he started posting on Instagram these photos of his one year old daughter in dangerous Photoshopped situations. She'd be like, hanging on like a railing on a two story staircase about to fall, or she'd be in the kitchen holding like a, a 12 inch chef's knife in one hand. And he photoshopped all of these situations just to, you know, have a little fun. And all these people started getting really outraged, like he was the worst parent ever. And they were, because they didn't know it was a joke. And it was this perfect symptom of how easy it is to jump to outrage without knowing any of the detail, without knowing anything. Because we're primed to feel that outrage based on the way that stories are positioned, based on the manipulation of those stories. And there's a business model behind it because those eyeballs and the way that people are looking at it is creating profit. And one of the most dangerous things I saw was actually because we tend to think it's easy to think manipulated outrage. Well, this is a very anti Trump message, right? Because Trump stokes outrage through his tweets and that's what he's good at and that's what he's doing on purpose. Somebody once quoted that Trump doesn't really care whether you believe him. He just wants you to not believe that anything, anyone's telling you the truth, that's his end game. Maybe that's true. Maybe that isn't. But one of the most fascinating things I found was actually on the other side, the people who describe themselves as more liberal, more anti Trump and feeling like their responsibility was to be outraged. And the question that I started exploring was, well, if your identity is tied up in being outraged, what does that do to your ability to understand somebody who's different than you? If everything you believe about yourself is, I have to be outraged every single moment because that's my reason for, you know, that's my resist hashtag. Right. Then you're not seeing the world either, because you're only seeing one side of the world based on your desire to feel this outrage because that's your identity. And that's not good either.

It reminds me of the Buddha saying, at least it's attributed to Buddha, that if you hold on to anger or resentment, it's like taking a poison pill and hoping the other person will die.

Yeah, that's really apt. It's a good description because I do think there are people holding on to those. Exactly. Those poison pills and not letting it go.

You kind of become like the first. And you're so outraged at. If you live in that state of rage and resentment and anger and venting and it becomes quite toxic.

Yeah. The division is what's toxic. I mean, I really, I see that all the time.

Rohit, I could talk to you about trends all day. Thank you so much for being here. I would love to know if you could give listeners one action item, one piece of homework when they stop listening to this episode, what would it be?

I will share the one thing that I have found most useful in helping people see the world from a different perspective, which is something anybody can do. It's super simple. It is immediately available to any of us, which is you go into either an airport or a bookstore or anywhere where they sell magazines and you buy a magazine that's not targeted towards you. So me as a, you know, as a 41 year old dad of two, I would buy Teen Vogue magazine because that's not targeted to. And when I do that, I see the world from a totally different perspective.

Do you have a stack of Teen Vogues at home that we don't know?

I do. I actually subscribe. I mean, unfortunately, they just said they're going to stop doing the print edition. So now I'll have to go to the. But I'm a subscriber to Teen Vogue because I want to see the world differently. I'm a subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine. Right. I'm not a modern farmer either. Right. But yeah, that's what it's about. It's about choosing to see a different viewpoint and not immediately judging it or being outraged because of it, but saying, look.

People enjoy reading this. Why do they enjoy reading it? Let me pick it up. And a magazine is great because it's not expensive, it's highly visual, it doesn't require huge intellect in order to just flip through. And you have the karma benefit of like, if you go on a plane and you read it, you leave it in the pocket. Maybe the next person is somebody who the magazine would have been targeted to and they're thrilled that they got it.

Okay. I love this homework. If any of you have listened this far, one thing you two tweet to us and report back. I would love to know what random magazine you pick up as your homework assignment. So you can. I'm Jenny underscore Blake and Rohit is Rohit. R O H I T Bhargava B H A R G A V A this would be so fun. What a great assignment. Thank you, Rohit.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is a great conversation.

Thank you so much for being on the show and for unveiling your 2018 themes for for us on the early side. We're honored.

Thanks. That's great.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates. By way signing up for Pivotlist, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.