The most legendary soccer player in history once shared that the best goal of his career was never captured on video. It was August 2, 1959, in São Paulo, Brazil and of the thousands of goals scored in his career, Pelé always felt this was his best ever. Three sombrero kicks in a row, with a knee flick and a header to beat the keeper … and all that remains apart from the memories of the fans who saw it live is a single black and white photo taken at the end.

Taking the photo and the eyewitness descriptions, Google partnered with an FX agency to use Gemini Omni to recreate that memory. Alongside AI, they actually sent local actors to recreate the scene and even brought a leather ball to match the gear used at the time. The resulting footage is now on display at the Pelé Museum in Santos and the video is live online for anyone to watch.

The story is a perfect example of a feeling that we write about in Future Words and call fauxstalgia. When technology allows us to recreate memories (both real and imagined) that many of us never actually lived through, it creates whole new ways to experience and recall the past.

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As people enter a new experience, they seek answers, consciously or unconsciously, to six questions: Where am I? Who am I with? What can I do? What is happening? Am I making progress? and Why does this matter?

Each question reflects a distinct psychological dimension. Together they create the underlying structure through which immersion takes hold. For companies, addressing all six questions can be challenging. Most experiences tend to focus on answering certain questions while overlooking others. True success lies in ensuring visitors can answer all six in order, even if some are addressed more effectively than others.

The model is one worth considering for anyone who is trying to make any experience or gathering work, whether it’s immersive through technology or just through the act of bringing humans together in the same room. The world needs more people who can design experiences like this to remind us about the power of connection and what unexpected magic might happen when these strategic questions have equally thoughtful answers.

InfoWars.com is still in limbo, but a new InfoWars website is launching today all the same, as a sort of pirated brand. Spending time on the site is like looking at a simulated head-on crash that collides the visual urgency of a 24-hour news cycle with the low-fi, low-res graphics of desktop-era websites, print tabloid ads, and overnight infomercials for Bowflex or Magic Bullet. The resulting website is, at launch, a vehicle for making [Alex] Jones and his insidious website a (very funny) punch line. But that satire is in service of a greater long-term ambition. Eventually, the new InfoWars wants to become a challenger to social media—one that could someday look like a Netflix of comedy.

While the takeover of the InfoWars URL is still in litigation, the new Onion-produced parody site features banner ads to “turn your piss into gold,” an intro video from The Onion’s Tim Heidecker in the sensationalist style of Jones and an interesting longer-term vision to maybe get people off social media news altogether. The whole thing is in service of getting compensation to the families of the victims of a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School who also successfully sued Jones for defamation leading him to declare bankruptcy and go off the air.

Aside from the entertainment value, the site offers a reminder that sometimes the best path to expose deceit is using humor as the spotlight. As long as people get the joke.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

As ​Bloomberg recently reported​, this means that you now have situations like Spain where over $80 billion in investment is generating powerful impact for people and the environment … but not so good financial results for investors. As a result, this is a case study that offers us two lessons. The first is that the most profitable endeavor and the one that offers the greatest benefits for mankind may be in opposition to one another. The second is that the ideal entities to invest in this sort of initiative may never be private companies but rather international governments who should be focused on creating impact for their citizens without the motive

All you need to do is enter what you really want, and the prompt generator will revise it to be in the style that can be used with any AI tool. You can even have it customized based on the AI tool you’re using for optimal results. Many frequent AI users are already publishing their notes on which tools are best for which tasks. Built into these are the assumption that each of us will have the right knowledge and skill to prompt each tool with the right syntax, depth and language for it to perform best. That’s rarely the case.

So despite the inherent oddity of turning to automation to help automate another automation (did I lose you?) … these prompt generation tools are not only inevitable, they might actually be useful too.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

There’s a new flower discovery that has been shifting perspectives in India. Well, actually, it’s not really a new flower but rather a closeup of a “flowering” toothbrush which is badly in need of replacement. This clever campaign to use the metaphor of “India’s newest flower species” was a public awareness campaign from Colgate India that reached millions of people in a way they couldn’t unsee to remind them to replace their toothbrushes for better oral health. Watch the full ad below:

This is just one of the memorable campaigns from the Cannes Lions winner announcements last week. For anyone fascinated by some of the world’s best advertising creativity, check out the big winners who offer you plenty of good creative talent to watch.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve attended two graduations in person and watched more than a dozen clips from others that have been circulating online. The ones that go viral seem to share one quality: they are usually delivered by comedians. Here’s the thing about this modern commencement moment that we all need to realize: students are worried. They have angst about their future prospects and the world they are graduating into. They also want to celebrate this day of achievement and aren’t really in a moment when they can process deep complex advice. Most comedians don’t really deliver that anyway.

Instead, they avoid the poison pills that have tanked many other graduation speaker’s performances this season. Comedians generally don’t rave about the upside of AI. They rarely resort to platitudes about following your passion. Most of all, they don’t take themselves too seriously. Right now (and maybe for the foreseeable future) that’s a winning combination. So here’s my brief pitch for why leaning into the funny is ideal for commencement speeches.

1. Laughter breaks the tension of an otherwise serious and solemn event, which gives everyone permission to lean into the celebration.

2. Comedians know how to keep it short – so at an event where success and brevity often go hand in hand, they are an ideal choice.

3. Funny commencement speeches are easier to share, remember and go viral – which has great impact AND is good for marketing too.

So consider this an open letter/plea to graduation ceremony planners. Next year, let’s see more comedians and less of everyone else. Everyone will be happier, the students might actually remember something and at the very least it won’t be boring.

What do you think – would this work?

First of all, anyone can sue anyone regardless of merit. This leads to lots of lawsuits that have no resemblance to the actual reality of a situation. Sadly, much of this meritless litigation ends with some sort of settlement as one party decides that the truth is too much trouble to fight for, and it’s easier to just pay for the issue to disappear. This is the second problem because it obscures the issue and detaches the truth from the victor. It’s a system that routinely allows the bad guys to win.

Finally, tracking the lawsuits themselves can effectively bury the real story that deserves more attention through the gag orders and NDAs that prevent the truth from ever emerging. If you have a solution for this, I’d love to hear it. Until then, I’ll probably retain my skepticism for any stories that emerge about lawsuits in the future too.

One factor may be the growing fragmentation of the industry that makes it harder for any single sound or artist to break through to stand out. Add the fact that aging stars continue to perform and tour for decades after their “prime” – and reliably still fill stadiums. So for any lover of new music, what can we do to fix this? As my friend and fellow futurist Nikolas Badminton shares, it starts with music findability. Given how much data our preferred streaming music generates about our listening habits, we all have the ability to use that data to explore and discover new music. We just need to choose to ask for that instead of listening to the same music over and over.

For a deeper dive into this topic and even more suggestions for how we might contribute to discovering that signature sound for this decade, you can read the longer report from Resident Advisor magazine writer Gabriel Szatan who explores the issue further.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

The biggest theme that emerged from the event for me was the joy and hope that comes from sharing a room with people who are actively DOING deeply human things with technology. Many events feature professional speakers or researchers who are skilled at describing what’s happening from the outside. In the room at Times Center in NY yesterday, the invited participants were the ones actually creating those futures and applying those tools.

The energy and optimism from those experiments infused every conversation and their passions became infectious. Unlike many future-focused events, it was impossible to walk out of this one feeling anything but positive about the potential for how smart, capable artists will be able to intersect creativity with humanity to create new art forms without destroying those of the past.

These are the voices we need to share, celebrate and elevate because they are the counterbalance to the megalomania and psychopathy of the world’s biggest tech founders. The day was also a perfect reminder that to truly understand the impact of all this technology, there is no substitute for being in a room with people who can help you experience the wonders of what is possible with your own eyes.