Rohit Bhargava: Storytelling's Future Normal

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling, and this is the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

As we begin this new year with excitement and some trepidation, I thought it would be a great time to welcome an old friend onto the podcast, Rohit Bhargava, who has the incredible ability to look into the future and identify insights that can be useful for the here and now. Rohit is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur, best known for finding non-obvious trends, forthcoming shifts that he predicts through careful research, observation, and keeping an open mind to the possibilities that others overlook. His areas of interest include the latest developments in technology, marketing, and storytelling, a perfect fit for us here at FoST. Rohit is a bestselling author of 10 books, as well as the founder of his own publishing company, IdeaPress Publishing. After the massive success of his 2015 book, Non-Obvious, he founded the Non-Obvious Company, a group dedicated to inspiring entrepreneurs to be more innovative through talks, workshops, a podcast and more.

He’s been invited to speak around the globe and has been tapped to teach non-obvious thinking to leaders of some of the world’s biggest organizations from Disney to Intel to the World Bank and many others. For today’s conversation, I wanted to focus on some of the most fascinating insights from his book, The Future Normal. Co-written with Henry Coutinho-Mason, The Future Normal examines 30 ideas and trends with an eye towards understanding what will become our everyday over the next decade. From generative AI to immersive entertainment and beyond, it seems fitting to begin the new year with an optimistic look at the future. That’s why I’m so excited to welcome Rohit Bhargava to the FoST podcast. Rohit, so nice to have you on the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Rohit Bhargava:

Oh, thank you so much. It’s always so much fun to just chat with you about these things we have in common.

Charlie Melcher:

We’ve known each other for many years. You’ve been an active participant and member of the Future of StoryTelling community, and I thank you for that. Our interests have always aligned in part because you are someone who’s always tried to understand the future, tried to predict it, to see the clues in every day that could suggest where things are headed. I’ve been a very big fan of the book that you published a little while ago called The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work, and Thrive in the Next Decade, as it was an opportunity where you brought together a lot of your thinking and insights about the future, and right at the beginning of the book there’s this wonderful chapter about immersive entertainment, and as you know, that’s something that’s very near and dear to our hearts at future storytelling. And I just thought I would ask you to share a little bit about your insights around immersive entertainment and where you think that’s headed and perhaps even some of the specific examples that you share in that chapter.

Rohit Bhargava:

Well, one of the things I think is interesting and the format of this book is that it features 30 trends and as you said, immersive entertainment. That’s first we talked about what would we introduce first, and when I say I have a co-author on the book, we thought, well, how should we introduce this idea of what’s going to matter in the future? And for me, it was always going to come back to stories. I was really inspired actually, you mentioned I’ve been a member of the Future of StoryTelling community for some time, and a lot of the things I’ve had a chance to attend and be part of in the conversations I’ve had were really deeply inspirational for me in a sense that it got me thinking about where we headed, how do we want to tell these stories? And so when it came to writing about immersive entertainment and writing about this idea of taking people inside the stories, there were just so many examples of both things I’d experienced, but also things that I had read about partially by being part of this community and the people that I talked to who were actually creating those experiences.

So it’s everything from walking through the virtual experience of a painting blown out into an entire room or multiple rooms to kind of experience that in a different way. It’s going to a sporting event, wearing a haptic vest and being able to experience the pain of getting hit through to the ABBA Avatar show and being in the audience listening to avatar versions of artists who you loved from decades ago. I mean, these are all forms of immersive entertainment that I think, especially in your audience, they’re very familiar. But we tried to point to was that this was going to become the future normal. This was going to be our expectation that entertainment would become more immersive.

Charlie Melcher:

In the chapter you quote David Sachs from his book “The Future is Analog” and say that as humans, we have some essential unspoken need to see a performance, to be part of the crowd, and to experience everything that comes with it. This idea that the future is somehow responding to these very core human needs that we have, that the things that are going to stick in the future are the things that actually are part of who we are as a species. And I love that you connect immersive storytelling, this idea that we’re going to be in the stories that we’re going to have an active role, an embodied role in our entertainment as a core human need.

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, I have to say, I mean one of the things you sort of point towards was a real struggle that we had when we were writing this chapter, which is that the word “entertainment” felt kind of inadequate because not every experience like this could be classified really as entertainment. I don’t know, entertainment just didn’t feel quite like the word, but it was the best we had. But I do think exactly what you said, I mean that immersive storytelling, that’s really what it is about.

Charlie Melcher:

That really resonates for me, that I also struggle with getting the right terminology. These are about creating new kinds of experiences and they don’t neatly fit into some of the old terms. Also in this section where you’re talking about immersive entertainment, you have a description of ABA voyage and the very impressive virtual concert that the ABBA crew did with the help of Industrial Light and Magic who did the VFX, the special effects work. People talk about it as a hologram concert, but in reality, this is movie magic. It’s a flat screen that just looks like it’s three dimensional, the characters seem lifelike. They largely cross over that uncanny valley. You forget that they are not real, that they are digital recreations of the real band members. And the fact that so many people can go there and feel like they’re in a live concert, suspend disbelief and just dance their hearts out for the evening with each other— do you think that that is a real beginning of a new trend? Is that the beginning of a new way that we’re going to be able to go to live experiences without necessarily fully live performers?

Rohit Bhargava:

I’d say yes and no. It’s a really interesting example because it brings together a lot of different elements. So I mean, it’s also in a purpose-built venue just for that show, which is quite unique. But I think that the level of immersion that show offers for people and the things you can do because they have this integrated avatars in the show is something that you’re going to see much more of. And you’re already seeing it to some degree when you look at the shows from the Eagles or U2 or some of the bands that have gone to the Sphere. The other interesting thing this raises is as music stars who we love age, or sometimes pass away, now we can bring them back to life, which on one level is really magical because now maybe a younger audience who could never have seen Elvis perform live can see that.

On the flip side, now you have musicians who’ve passed away sort of competing for attention with anyone who’s a new musician who’s trying to get people to come out. Now they’ve got to compete with every rockstar ever in history? And multiply that not just to music, but to other forms of entertainment and other forms of storytelling. It creates some big challenges as well. So as a futurist, I mean, I’m always paying attention to what the technology and the behavior is, but I’m also trying to look at what’s the human impact of this on people like creators on industries, on these spaces of people who make their living doing this, but who are passionate about it and want it to survive.

Charlie Melcher:

Wouldn’t you say though that that’s always been the case? Maybe not going to a live concert with Elvis, but you certainly always had his catalog available. You were competing for people’s attention with what they chose to listen to at home or even on streaming or radio. The current artists are always struggling with the father poets before them, the influences that came before them.

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s that. There’s also the shifting expectations, right? The more we see something happen somewhere, we then start wondering, why doesn’t this happen somewhere else? Why can’t I have this more frequently? So when you go to Disney for example, and you get your fast pass to get onto the ride first and you have your bracelet that opens your hotel room door, then you go to a regular hotel where you don’t have that, or you go to another place where there’s no fast pass and you’re like, well, I just had it over there. We understand, okay, some things are way more well-funded, but the perception for us as people starts to shift and the expectations start to shift, and that can sometimes create some unrealistic expectations.

Charlie Melcher:

It feels to me like you’re starting to also talk about that line between what is real and what’s not real. Do we hold different standards for something where we know it’s a fake, where we’re going to watch a recreation of Elvis versus we’re going to a YouTube concert and they’re live. And it just starts to raise a question which comes up in another place in your book about understanding what is real and what is fake, and that line between authentic information and misinformation or disinformation and the role that AI plays these days, blurring those lines. Can we get to knowing the difference between things that are deepfakes or synthetic media and things that are true and real?

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, there’s a whole section— so what we called the trend there was “certified media.” And the idea that we tried to write about there was that as the level of manipulation increases, the need for some sort of certification also will increase. And in many cases, the same people who’ve built the technology to allow you to create this manipulated content are also trying to build tools to allow you to detect it. And there’s some really interesting experiments that we uncovered as we did the research for the book that have some real potential. So for example, there’s more digital cameras being produced today that will tag and stamp an image when it’s taken from the camera so that anytime it’s altered from that point forward, so you’ll be able to tell. The other example—in theory, if you can use AI to create something fake, you can also use AI to detect something fake. And so there’s a lot of experimentation and research happening in that sense to use AI to detect things that are deepfakes and to detect things that have been manipulated. So there’s a lot of activity in this space and it hasn’t really kind of shaken out one way or the other, but it is something that is going to accelerate quite a bit.

Charlie Melcher:

And so that example you used a moment ago talking about cameras that would stamp the time and location into the metadata for both photos and videos. I think that company was Truepic? You mentioned in the book that they have a partnership with Qualcomm who makes a lot of the chips for cameras and are building this in. The question is, will we get to a place where we’re so hungry for a way to certify truth that we will build the technologies and build them in to our systems for creating content? So we will actually have a certification, verification method established to reestablish truth from fiction?

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, I mean, look: in the work that I do as a futurist, I’m really a student of both history and human behavior. And when it comes to something like this, the certification will come from a couple of different places. So what you just described is technology-based certification, which is we’ll tag the photo, we’ll tag the things with the metadata, and therefore we’ll be able to certify it through technology. The second certification will come from trusted sources. So is there a certain media platform that you trust that has journalists who will go through and certify or verify this for yourself? Is there some sort of a third party association, maybe an NGO, maybe a nonprofit, something that says “this is certified, you can trust this,” you know, sort of like a seal of approval. That’ll be another form of certification. And the last one is going to be what has always existed throughout human history, which is word of mouth.

So we will trust something and certify it based on someone who we trust in our circle who told us that this is real. And that has flaws obviously, but that’s going to continue to exist. We’re going to turn to the people that we trust and that we believe, and that we put our faith in to tell us what’s real and what isn’t. To me, the solution is that we have to teach better communications to these people who are doing all this amazing world changing work because you’re advocating for the power of storytelling and by its nature, part of that is to encourage more people to be better storytellers, not just to foster the community of people who already self-identify as storytellers.

Charlie Melcher:

And certainly there’s been such an explosion of tools to allow people to tell their own stories, to craft them at higher qualities, to disseminate them broadly. I think we have been living through a democratization, a big step forward in the ability for people to tell and share their stories. And this kind of leads naturally to another topic that you take on, which is in a way the future of learning. I think ultimately people make good moral decisions the more educated they are, the more they understand the world and how people interact in the world and the power of education. So you have a chapter called “stealth learning.” Would you describe what you mean by stealth learning?

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, we chose this word “stealth” very intentionally because there are more and more situations now where the things we learn are baked into the content that we consume. So much so that for a while, TikTok had an entire marketing campaign that was called hashtag “Learned on TikTok,” and it was specifically all of these life hacks and all of these things about, how to peel a pomegranate. And that’s a pretty innocent example, but there’s a lot of other stuff. And as we thought about that, one of the things we started to realize is that we’re living in this time where learning in many ways is on demand at a level that it really has never been before. If I wanted to right now, I could take a directing class from Martin Scorsese or I could learn how to play the banjo from Steve Martin directly just watching a video— he would be teaching me, I would be learning.

Not only that, but you have universities putting world-class content and courses online, in some cases freely available for people to learn from anywhere in the world. And then you layer on top of that technology that can allow you to retain or learn things more quickly. So for example, we were looking at passive haptic learning devices like gloves, where you could wear these gloves and they would use electrical impulses to teach people how to play the piano. And people would learn in 15 minutes, they would learn a song. So this is the future that seems super futuristic. It’s almost like that level of the Matrix where you plug the cartridge into back of your head and now you know, like, juujitsu, right? But it’s sort of headed that direction, in terms of access to content, great quality learning, and then the technology to allow it to sink into us even faster.

Charlie Melcher:

I know one of the examples you give in the book was one that we featured at the Future of Storytelling was the USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions In Testimony where they had interviewed a Holocaust survivor named Pinchas, and they had all this videotape of his having talked about his experience as a child and in the camps and after, but then they decided to make it a hologram that you could talk to. And so now instead of reading a book or watching a video, you could actually interact with this character, or a real person who was a virtual hologram, and ask him anything you wanted and he would answer in real time. And the level of engagement for kids in classes or anybody getting to interact with it was so much higher than other forms of education on that topic.

Rohit Bhargava:

This is the thing that is very counter to what I think we often hear people panicking about. Because people panic about, well, we’re losing truth. We’re not able to tell what’s true anymore. And yet when you think about examples like this, the avatar with Pinchas and the story he tells, or the fact that we now have biographies about people written by people who interviewed them while they were alive. The way we understand our modern history right now—project that forward 200, 300, 400 years from now. When someone’s learning about the Holocaust, they’re not going to read pages written by the victors the way we read about history today from 500 or a thousand years ago. They’re going to be able to listen to someone and interact with someone who lived in that time. And that’s a different way of recalling history.

I mean history at the end of the day is stories. And now that we have these levels of immersion, whether it’s something as deep as this New Dimensions in Testimony about the Holocaust, or as simple as— I just came across a story about this audio recording that they unearthed of all of the guns during World War II, that then once they’d signed the truce, they went silent and they had an audio recording of that. So that’s 50 plus years ago. But to be able to listen to that in a classroom to talk about the ending of the World War is a really powerful way of teaching it that goes off the pages and that exists right now.

Charlie Melcher:

You said something that really resonates for me, Rohit, you said that history is just stories and certainly I truly believe that. What is the future? Do you think the future is stories also, how do you think about the future in relationship to the past?

Rohit Bhargava:

It’s a topic I think about a lot and I talk about a lot. And when I get called in to talk about the future, people usually want two things. The first thing that they want is they want someone to tell them what the trends are, what’s important now, what’s going to matter for the future? Give me the research, tell me what the trends are. Second thing they want, which is kind of in the optimistic realm, is that they want to feel better about the future and that they can be prepared for it, that it’s going to be okay. And every time that I’m going in, whether it’s for one of these talks or for workshops or whatever, I always keep those two things in mind. If I don’t deliver on either one of them, people are disappointed. They’re like, wait, you told me just about what to think about for the future in a mindset, but you didn’t give me any actual meat. What about the research? What about the ideas? What about the experiments? But if I just focus on that, people are like, okay, you gave me a lot of stuff and that’s cool, but what do I do with that? How do I exist into the future? And so stories will continue to be important. You could easily argue there’ll be even more important, and storytellers and the people who tell the best stories are the ones who understand people. And as I often tell audiences, the people who understand people always win.

Charlie Melcher:

You say in the introduction that the real challenge isn’t predicting the future, but rather predicting what will become normal, which I guess is why you call the book the Future Normal. What do you really mean by that? What does it mean for something to become normal, and why is that important?

Rohit Bhargava:

It’s interesting because you know that a lot of my body of work focuses on non-obvious ideas. I’m coming in as the non-obvious guy. That’s what people expect of me. And to some degree, when you describe the future, and it’s something that becomes sufficiently common that a lot of people know that a lot of people have access to, that is what I would say normal. It’s not just for super rich, super elite, super connected people for more than that. It affects more of us. It’s normal, no big deal. I think that we have a lot of this belief that it’s always got to be like this futuristic thing that has to feel futuristic when the normal is, yeah, we’re living in this time where we have access to these things and we can wear a device on our wrist that will tell us if we’re having a heart attack.

I mean, that’s pretty futuristic, and it’s been around for 10 years also, which means it’s not that futuristic. So we have to redefine the lingo maybe a little bit. But I realized that this is what people really want to know and why they’re so passionate. I mean, that’s why I think my books and talks are so popular. I think that’s why the future of storytelling, the way you’ve branded this is so popular because people always want to think about the future. They always want to know about the future. And anyone who creates a community around that as you have or creates content around that as I have, is going to capture people’s interest.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s true that for us at FoST, we spent a lot of our year thinking about our role as curating the future. We thought that’s the job of the curator was to go out there, find the coolest new things happening in the worlds of communication and technology and storytelling, content creation, marketing, and bring it back to our community. And so we would go and find those things that we thought were super cutting edge. And I’ve been surprised at how many of them came and went. You know, I haven’t even been doing this that long—10 years—and I can’t tell you how many of these things that I thought were, look at this, everybody, look what we found! And now it’s like gathering dust someplace in a drawer, or it was the hot new thing, and then it’s a flash in the pan before you even know it.

I remember VR and everybody was going to be wearing Google Glasses. I mean, there’s just dozens and dozens of examples, but the things that are the sexy, new, shiny objects, often they come and go or their time wasn’t right. And then there are other things that just sort of crept up on you and then all of a sudden you don’t even think twice about. I mean, you and I right now are recording this podcast while we’re looking at each other on a Zoom call. Five years ago, we would not have been looking at each other on a Zoom call. Almost no one was doing that. Now we don’t even think twice about it— it’s just a call. It’s not a Zoom call, it’s just a call. So that’s become totally normal and the world does it every day. But I don’t see any of my friends running around with Google Glass on their heads.

Rohit Bhargava:

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that that has always existed in technology. There’s things become mainstream and take off, and there’s things that don’t. But I do think that when it comes to storytelling and entertainment in particular, I do think the needle has moved in the sense that the way we experience entertainment in the past is not the same as the way we experience it now. And I think people’s level of understanding of that and immersion in it on every level has gotten deeper. Even if you’re not physically there, I mean, you think about an NFL broadcast, for example, before it was done in a very specific way: they showed the field overall, they showed the sideline, it was a couple things. Now they’ve got, like, 30 cameras. Some of these cameras are on cables that are literally doing cinematic motion across as players are celebrating in the middle of the end zone, and you feel like you’re in the group celebrating with them. I mean, that’s a level of immersion just through broadcast, right? I’m not even there. I’m not wearing a VR helmet. I’m just experiencing this in a very deep way. That was not done that way before.

Charlie Melcher:

I definitely find it so interesting that you created a publishing company. Here you are as a futurist, an educator, a consultant, and you went to…. exposed to all these amazing new technologies and new trends, and you decided to start a publishing company. I mean, just help me understand or revel in that decision process for you.

Rohit Bhargava:

People love books, first of all. And second of all, I knew I wanted to write books, and I knew that the sort of publisher I wanted to work with just didn’t seem to exist, and that was what motivated me to create my own thing for me. So yes, it’s an old school industry. I mean, printing and binding books is super old, but we do a lot of things that try and embrace the future at the same time in terms of taking this content and repackaging it in different ways and helping our authors do all of the things that they want to do, whether it’s segmenting different aspects of the book and things that you typically can’t do when you have traditional publisher that’s done stuff the same way forever, right? Like, resegmenting parts of the book, having different pieces read by different narrators, breaking it up and putting it in different places, having multiple formats, having different covers, having different segments for different groups. All this stuff that you could do to really make this book that is a physical thing immersive in so many different ways. And I love being able to rethink that with something as well known and understood as a book.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I love that you’re able to take the creativity and innovation that you see and are inspired by in your work as a futurist and apply it to rethinking and reinventing what publishing means. Speaking of which you have a new book, “Non-Obvious Thinking,” based on your brand and your approach.

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, the new book was… after 10 years of writing about non-obvious trends in the future, one question I got over and over again is, can anyone learn to think in this way? And so this book was my answer to that question, which is yes. And the book really outlines the four key secrets to be able to do that, to be a non-obvious thinker. And it’s very different for me because first of all, it’s a super quick read. It’s probably half the length of most of my other books. It’s a little bit of a smaller format. It’s illustrated, so it’s got a lot of things to keep your attention. It was just very intentionally written to offer people some real advice and tips that would be useful for how to bring a little more non-obvious thinking into their day and to leverage that to better understand and get ready for the future. So that was the intention of it.

Charlie Melcher:

Rohit, what would you like to help people understand about thinking about the future? How can you give them some advice that’s helpful?

Rohit Bhargava:

I’ll try and offer a couple of things. The first one is to give yourself a chance to see the positive and the negative, because a lot of times the stories we hear are very centered on the negative. When people read The Future Normal and they read these 30 trends, sometimes the question I’ll get after a keynote is, you’re really optimistic. Why are you so optimistic? Are you not paying attention to the fires and the elections and, like, what’s wrong with you? I say back to them: one of the things I was lucky to do with this book is I was able to go in and interview dozens of people who are doing amazing world changing work— to create confetti out of something that isn’t plastic, to make regenerative t-shirts, to make food out of thin air, protein out of thin air, to change weather patterns— I mean, all of these amazing people doing this amazing work, there’s no way that you could talk to all of these people and not feel just a little optimistic. And when I go into events and I talk to people who have not been able to hear those stories, I see my role just as you are a curator of stories. I see my role as a curator of that sort of optimism where I can bring that to someone and say, look, I’m a futurist. This is what I’m seeing. And if these people who are trying to save the world actually succeed will be okay.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m left with this feeling that your definition of a futurist actually is an optimist.

Rohit Bhargava:

I think in my case, probably that is a little bit true. Not in every case though.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I appreciate that you do it. You and I share that goal, and I so appreciate your taking the time to come and speak with us about your approach, your non-obvious approach to looking at the future. And once again, thank you for being here, and thank you for being a friend to the Future of StoryTelling and look forward to many more conversations together.

Rohit Bhargava:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the invitation, and thanks also for just putting together such an amazing FoST community. I mean, I’ve stayed connected to people who I’ve met over the years in person, and it’s really a great testament to what you’ve built. And now with the Explorers Club, it’s just creating these amazing mind opening experiences. We need more opportunities like that. So thank you for all the work that you and your team do as well.

Charlie Melcher:

This has been the Future of Storytelling podcast. Thanks for joining me. We at FoST are committed to discovering what the future holds for storytellers. If you enjoyed this podcast, help a friend start their new year off right by sharing it with them. And be sure to check out our website at fost.org, where you can find more episodes as well as sign up for our free monthly newsletter.

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.