Dear Newsletterest,

I’m traveling in Europe today for an event and so my story selections this week have a bit of an international flair including a deep dive into a leading Dutch paint maker, a unique new jewelry platform, the rise of smart highways, why city branding matters and whether too little government might be worse than too much.

For my book selection on this day to celebrate the 4th of July U.S. Independence, I picked a real American hero and his memoir about being at the helm of one of the most iconic and world-changing brands in the past century history of media: Gilbert Grosvenor from National Geographic. Enjoy the stories and remember to always stay curious!

Rohit

How Miracle Paints Might Save The World

Apart from a few home renovation moments, you probably don't think much about paint. Yet the occasional story about painting rooftops white or clothing brands embracing natural dyes offer a glimpse into the potential transformative impacts of rethinking how we think about paint. A deeper dive into the business of Dutch paint brand Hempel offers some fascinating detail into many other aspects of rethinking paint that are not as widely appreciated.

For example, a "super-slippery, self-polishing, silicone-based external paint" can reduce drag on cargo ships and create 17% fuel savings. Another one of their "miracle paints can help to maintain the integrity of burning buildings by puffing up to 50 times its original volume." Able to stand up to temperatures of 500 degrees, it's used in oil refineries among other buildings.

On the consumer side, the brand along with many others in the paint industry are turning toward paints with low volatile organic compounds (VOC) so the air we breathe in homes and offices can be better. Altogether, these stories paint a hopeful picture of how the way we coat surfaces can make a positive impact in the world.

Porto and the Importance of City Branding

As I write this, I'm just off the stage here in Portugal at one of the largest business conferences of the year in Europe at the QSP Summit in the city of Porto. Aside from it's picturesque location on the Northern coast, the country's second largest city also enjoys a reputation as an award winning destination due to a combination of its experiences, food and branding.

Longtime readers may not be surprised to hear that it's the last element that I find the most intriguing. Many destinations compete with one another based on individual experiences. For Porto, a key part of this journey goes back exactly ten years to June of 2014 when a design agency was enlisted to create a new visual identity for the city, describing their challenge in this way:

"We felt like we needed to give each citizen their own Porto. We needed to show all the cities that exist in this one territory. We needed to represent Porto, a global city, the city for everyone."

Today here in the city, this brand is across much of what you can see here from the buildings to the experiences and has become a case study in Place Branding. It makes sense that branding should take such a central role in tourism considering the country's rapidly evolving design and branding industry. As the city continues to move forward and it's reputation continues to grow, this brand will no doubt be a critical element to help. Landmarks are one way to help a city stand out. Branding is clearly another.

A First Look At America’s Smartest Highway

Driverless vehicles are obviously going to be part of humanity's future, but they aren't experiencing a great PR moment right now. Every day it seems there is another story about an incident involving a driverless vehicle hitting someone, mistaking something on the road or generally malfunctioning. Not to mention the justifiable fears of hacking that will be more top of mind when (not if) a higher profile example of this actually happens.

One rapidly emerging solution to at least some of these problems is smarter roads. Imagine a highway that could provide real-time data and insights about traffic, weather, potholes, obstacles and other road conditions. That's exactly what a new 3 mile stretch of highway I-94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit in Michigan aims to offer in what is being described as America's first smart highway. The technology works by placing smart "technology poles" every 200 meters along the highway.

While its a potential game changer for people to adopt driverless vehicles, it's potentially even more impactful for autonomous driving systems in trucks to make them safer by helping these trucks to "see" a mile or more ahead on the road for potential obstructions. This feature alone, which would be useful as an early warning system for trucks and cars driven by humans too, may ultimately provide the biggest short term benefits of these sorts of smarter highways. Now all they need to do is combine this with highways built from rain-absorbing porous pavement and they will really have the smart highways of the future.

How 7879 Is Transforming the Jewelry Resale Market

Putting your money into buying gold has long been considered one of the most stable investments. Buying jewelry, though, is rarely as safe of a bet because of all the marketing and impurities that go into the products. New fashion ecommerce site 7879 (the name comes from a combination of the atomic element numbers for gold and platinum) is trying to change that. The platform only sells products that are 24 karat purity and certified.

More interesting is their ambition to allow customers to view their own jewelry collections much like you might login to see a stock portfolio shifting in value day by day. With this feature, they are aiming to do the same thing for jewelry that StockX did for collectible high-priced sneakers and later other products too. Clearly the site understands the appeal of what it’s selling, describing a 24k gold bullion bar as “a distinguished investment asset that serves as a hallmark of your financial intelligence and refined aesthetic sensibility.”

To celebrate the 4th of July maybe I’ll buy myself a bullion bar. To tell you the truth, I have been looking for a way to demonstrate my refined sensibility so this seems just perfect.

Too Little Government

Is there such a thing as too little government? This feels like a loaded political question in a time when trust in government is historically low. Government and business are usually positioned as enemies.

The current fear is that more government regulation will stifle business, while too little regulation incentivizes the greediest companies and criminals to take advantage of a world with no oversight. Most citizens in any nation would agree that striking the right balance is essential.

What makes it near impossible to make this balance is a sad irony that governments around the world are really bad at taking credit for their wins while politicians are too good at it. The end result is politicians manage to celebrate themselves while government dysfunction and government itself gets the blame for anything that goes wrong. Lost in the debate is the very real concern that a lack of regulation in the right places can quite literally kill people.

Recent rulings in the U.S. by the Supreme Court shifting regulatory power away from government agencies and to the courts are already being described as a "big gift" to companies in a variety of sectors. Many industries are quietly and not-so-quietly celebrating.

The fact that most U.S. cities are not choked by unbreathable air from pollution, people can eat healthier thanks to nutrition labels and lives are saved due to policies against gambling for minors are rarely seen as victories of government. Each of the agencies responsible for these wins will see their power reduced thanks to this new ruling.

Meanwhile government trudges along, trying desperately to educate children in public schools, prevent price gouging from junk bank fees and prevent industry monopolies. All while having their budgets cut and prestige destroyed. Government certainly isn’t the solution to every problem, but it's not the cause of them all either. And sometimes, many times, having a little more of it might be a good thing for us all.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

A Man of the World: My Life at National Geographic by Gilbert M. Grosvenor

The birthday of a nation is a perfect moment to celebrate heroes and the American hero I pick to honor on this 4th of July is Gilbert Grosvenor.

While his name might be unfamiliar, the brand his family has managed for more than a century has left an large yellow-bordered mark on the world. National Geographic Society and their iconic magazine have illuminated every corner of the world for decades. In this "swashbuckling memoir ... filled with pirates, royalty, treasures, frostbite, shipwrecks, impenetrable jungles, hidden tombs, and ancient temples."

This could be fiction, but it isn't. Reading one man's journey through the world and his related quest to build an entire media empire out of stories is one of the most fascinating life stories you'll ever read. If you could invite any person living or deceased to dinner, Grosvenor would be a great choice. His life is one that will inspire you to try just a little harder to be a man (or woman) of the world yourself.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

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

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?