# Transcript: Featured Session: 5 Non-Obvious Secrets of Human Connection (For Love & Profit)

**Date:** March 13, 2026 · 10:30 PM  
**Session:** [Featured Session: 5 Non-Obvious Secrets of Human Connection (For Love & Profit)](/sessions/2026-03-13/pp1148500-featured-session-5-non-obvious-secrets-of-human-connection-for-love-profit)

## Summary

Rohit Bhargava, bestselling author and 'Non-Obvious' trend curator, delivers his annual SXSW keynote on the power of human connection in an age of AI-driven disconnection. Through personal stories — from winning 'Miss Congeniality' at engineering camp to ushering theater — he builds the case that understanding people is the ultimate competitive advantage, while introducing invented words for modern phenomena like 'algorhythm' (using rage for engagement) and 'credentialing' (erosion of trust in experts).

## Topics

`human connection` · `non-obvious thinking` · `ai and society` · `trust crisis` · `algorithmic rage` · `personal branding` · `empathy` · `disconnection`

## Key Takeaways

1. The people who understand people always win — this mantra applies across business, creativity, and personal life regardless of technological change.
2. 'Algorhythm' is the system designed to use rage as a reliable method of engagement — recognizing this pattern is the first step to breaking free from manipulative feeds.
3. The best creative energy comes from 'understudy night' dynamics — when people feel surrounded by supporters who genuinely care, performance and connection amplify dramatically.
4. We're entering an era of personal cloaking devices and AI-first dating where chatbots pre-screen compatibility — the scarcity of authentic human interaction makes it more valuable than ever.
5. The 'believability crisis' means credentials and expertise alone no longer build trust — connection and authenticity have become the new credibility signals.

## Full Transcript

Warm and then you give them to people, right? That was the job of an intern. But the other thing I did was ushering, and ushering, then taking people to their seats at a show. And after I finished ushering, I would sit in the back, and I would watch the show, the same show 30 times. Now, most of us, unless we work in the theater, we don't get to see the same show 30 times.

That's a pretty unique experience. And for me, it was a very unique experience. And I realized small details, like, one time in the production, one of the actors was supposed to throw a prop and the other one was supposed to catch it, and he doesn't catch it, or he slightly catches it, and then they leave it on the side. And I learned that if you drop something in the theater on the stage, you never leave it on stage, because that's all anyone will be able to look at for the rest of the show. So no matter who sees it on stage, whether it's your prop or not, you got to take it off stage, right?

Basic, Basic, I learned all of that kind of stuff. But what surprised me most was there was one night of that performance that was not like any other night, like the show was funny, it had funny stuff, and people laughed. But this one night, people were out of control. I mean, they were laughing so hard at things that were only slightly funny, they were into it in a way that no other audience has been on no other night. And the thing that was different about that night, that Monday, was that it was the understudy night, the night when all the people who were the backups got to perform.

And so, of course, they called all of their friends and all of their family, and they said, Come and watch me. This is the one day when I get to perform. And so the audience was filled with friends and family, and the energy of that was amazing, doing one of the most amazing nights of theater I have ever been to. And if you ever get a chance to go and see a show on understudy night, I highly recommend you do that, because you will feel that energy. And the first thing that came to mind when I thought about that story and thought about coming here is that that's the energy I feel here at South by Southwest, I feel like I'm surrounded by family, and that is so comfortable for me, because I was and I'm thinking about this thing that's really deep for me, which is human connection and the power of human connection, and what are the secrets of being able to do that?

And how do I tell you something that you don't already know? Because I'm supposed to be the obvious guy, right? So I can't just come in and be like, well, you want more human good answer. You should really put your phone down and be like, well, thanks a lot for the insight, right? I have to go further than that.

So when I thought about how I was going to do

that, I thought about the moment, how I was going to do that. I thought about the moment right after I did this thing in the theater, because the only part of the story that I didn't share yet is that when I was fully into the theater, and I was doing this ushering, and I was doing all this stuff, and I knew for sure that I was going to have this in my life, I had one problem. The problem was that I had to explain this vision of my future to my dad, and I didn't think he was going to be on board with having his oldest son be a playwright, because it's a risky profession, right? It's in the arts, and that's not typically in a South Asian household, what a parent considers when they move their family over, when their son is one year old from India, to have a new life, I would imagine that their oldest son is then going to want to want to be a play. So, you know, even at that age, because I was eventually going to go into market, they had some of those skills at that moment.

So 17 years old, I thought, well, let me figure out, like a pitch, and my pitch to my dad, I think he's pretty good. I said, Look, I'm really good at this. I love doing it. I think I'm going to be awesome. This is why I love it.

I want to have passion. And what the work is that I do give the whole

listen to the

whole thing,

and at the end of it,

he said, one more. Okay, not bad, right? Come on. 24 hours later, he comes to me, he said, I figured out what you should do this time the summer and senior years of high school.

I said, Great. Tell me about you, what I should do. They said you should go to engineering camp. So okay, then let me think of what I'm going to tell him, and then I'm going to tell him something different so that he doesn't become a starving artist. Okay, now, then I'm a dad.

I realized when he's trying to correct, you know that at the time, it was kind of curveball, but I was okay at science. And so I thought, three weeks away from my family, engineering him. How bad would it be? So I say this, and I

show up in India,

in the first game, they take us home, put us into these groups, and they say, this is your team for the next three weeks, and you're going to be working on this challenge. And so all of the engineers, aspiring engineers, they do what engineers do, which is they start to discuss solutions, right, follow up the solution.

So they start to talk about, like, how are we going to approach this, and what we're going to try first, and what the experiment is going to be. And at some point during that conversation, I said something to my team that revealed to them that I was not going to be an asset,

because after I said that, they said to me, You know what we got? We don't need you. I was abandoned by my team on day one of engineering camp, and unfortunately for me, this was way before streaming. I couldn't just go back and watch a great show or something like that, right?

So I had nothing to do. So I went back to the dorm that night, and I thought about, well, what am I going to do? And I decided in that moment that I was going to become cruise director of engineering, which meant I was going to organize fun activities. We had open websites, we played Ultimate Frisbee. We went cave

export, I mean, all of this fun stuff.

I put myself in charge of fun because I had nothing else to do, and I had a great time. Of course I did, because all the work was being done by somebody else. And at the end of these three weeks, we presented our our projects, and I was along with my group, and I had one of those that some of you might have had where like your group is presenting what you've done for the last three weeks, and you've kind of pretending like you've done something, when

actually, obviously I hadn't. And after that presentation, they had a few individual awards that were voted on by the 120 other words there. And one of the awards was something they called The Good Citizen Award, and it was voted on individually.

Now remember, on day one, they put us all into these groups, right? So most of the people didn't know anyone outside of their group, except for the cruiser. They all knew me, so I got a little votes for this good citizen award. I was so excited, and I showed up, and I took that prize, and I got to the airport, and we're at Dallas airport, right in DC, and I'm all the way over here, the baggage home, and my dad's all the way over here, and we, like, lock eyes, and he sees my face. He's trying to read it.

He's not start playing, working, right? And I'm can't wait to tell him about this award. It's like we lock eyes, and he sees a smile on my face. So then he starts smiling. Then we have, like, his Bollywood reunion in the middle of the airport, right?

And, and, and he's like, so how was it? It was great. So you're going to be an engineer. No, I hated engineering. Are you smiling?

Smiling? Because I won the award. What award, Good Citizen Award? He's like, Okay, I don't know what that is, but it was years later that I told that story, and someone said, so you went to engineering camp for 17 year old boys, and you won this Congeniality. I mean, yes, technically, but it actually taught me something super valuable.

And every year that I come back to this stage, I bring this lesson back again and again and again, which is that the people who understand people always win. That is my mantra. That is the thing that unites all of this work, and even if I give a new talk, no matter what the new talk is, this insight is still true, and it remains true in the context

of this talk. One of the challenges is that it's not

so easy, because we're living through a modern state of disconnection, where we're disconnected from each other, and there are a lot of things that we could blame for this disconnection. I mean, we see AI in this ad that many of you saw from platform called friends, that is AI friend.

And they intentionally created these ads and put them in subways with lots of notespace, inviting people to write their free video on them about how angry they are that AI has to be your friend now instead of actual people. And they created this whole thing for that. We have aI daily apps that allow your chatbot to go and interact with someone else's chatbot to see if the chatbots get along before you get along. So you can send them out to do the pre dating before you actually start dating. There are entire platforms that are meant to try and confuse the AI logo calls by pretending to be a grandma who keeps them on the line for an unreasonable amount of time.

These are the sorts of things we need now. There was a platform just announced last week that asks your voice so that you don't get surveilled. Public Sector one so you can prevent things from listening to you, because there's always listening devices, and everyone now has a pen or a thing on their phone, or, like, glasses that can listen to your voice and record everything. And so we're going to need these personal cloaking devices, right? It's one of the trends that people are following.

We're going to have personal folks, because we need a way to, like, prevent all this stuff from capturing all these things we don't want about ourselves. And in the process of figuring out all this stuff, we're just angry. We need public punching bags because we're angry. Randomly on the street, there's entire tourism campaigns from Iceland that said running out, where they say, call this number, record yourself screaming, and we will play it in the wilderness of Iceland. So your screen gets out into the world.

That's a tourism campaign. And then people responded in the comments. I don't know if I want to go to ISIS, because all I'm going to hear is people screaming. So you haven't kind of backfired,

but we see this in so many examples, right? There's now platforms where the robots hire people to do the stuff that they can't do.

This is the human disconnection that we're seeing, and I'm the only one talking about this. I mean, throughout South by Southwest, this entire week, you're going to hear this scene right at lots of different sessions. These are just a couple of the session titles that are out there right now about this intermixing between AI and humanity and forth, or the imbalance, depending on who you talk to, and it's an equation in some cases, right? Is AI going to win? Is the AI going to be greater than x?

Are we going to be greater than AI? Can we connect with AI and amplify what we create? Can they be plus one to the other? Is it going to take away from us? Right?

These are simplified ways of thinking about it, but these are the

questions that's all we want, this human connection. People don't know how to take technology to a place it should act. Who should make those decisions. These are questions right now, and they're big questions. In many cases, they're questions that you or I don't have the control to be able to answer so yes, can we have influence?

For sure? Can we vote with what we choose to pay for? But

what is under our control? How do we create? What does it take?

Those are cool things that we all kind of know that we should right? There's some obvious advice. There's the Puget form gallery advice we all know, right? There's a beef and a lisp mirror advice, we all kind of know that, like, we should pay more attention to people. We got two ears and one one mouth, right?

There's lots of cliches that basically talk about this. We should probably go in more stuff, just sitting at home doing

something. We should publish it off, right? But there's a few things that make this super fun,

and as I was thinking about this, I decided to

trust them in the way of information, which is to describe these modern situations of words that don't exist. And this is a project that I actually started with a co author of one of my books, who some of you saw speak this morning,

Henry Katina,

and one of the things we started lending on is, yeah, there are situations right now that don't have a word, but they should like, for example, the angular the Anglo rib is a system designed to use rage as a reliable method to create engagement.

So it's basically making you angry algorithmically. And we see this happening through rage bait, through all of these stories about that. We see it happening through disturbance stories of how quickly a feed can turn negative just based on feeding it something. So you get some education. All of a sudden it

starts and it becomes terrible.

We see this all the time, and this is one of the problems of making human connection barriers. Credentialing. Credential Bay is the erosion of trust, institutions, experts and credentials. I have often called this in most of our talks, the believability crisis that we just don't know. Is this water actually coming from the Swiss Alice?

Is it just remodeled from somewhere else? Could you taste the difference? Conspiracy theories get into this too. You know the crazy guy who said birds aren't real, and then that whole thing went viral because people like, yeah, birds are a CIA conspiracy. They don't exist anymore, and people believe that, even though he was trying to make it a

joke, no, this isn't just people who deliberately change the vision.

Manufacture chaos because it helps them in some way, there are people like that. In the world, you know who they are, you see them. And maybe in your country, wherever you come from, there are other people, but these are the chaos makers, and that is an impact that keeps us from one another. There's also this optimism, which is people who are unable to tell whether something that can generate advice is good or not. And so now we have telltale words, right?

People create these words where they say, Oh, these are the words that you should look for. Because if these words are used, that's going to be AI, which is an unreliable way to tell us something we're looking for,

some way to try to understand what is real advice, and this is one of the things that keeps us from believing each other. It keeps us skeptical of one another. And.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6*

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