5 under-the-radar trends (+ our business ideas)

we all run into these stats throughout our lives, and most of us are just like, oh, that's cool. But I think there are some where it's like, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100+ of these, and we can talk about some of them today.

Steph Smith, this is your 10th time on MFM, is that right? 9th. 9th.

Is your 9th time? Not quite the tenner.

And Steph Smith, the background, if you're just now listening for the first time, she used to work with me at The Hustle where she ran this thing called Trends, Trends.co. And then she went and joined a16z, one of the most prominent venture capital firms. And your whole thing right now is finding up-and-coming trends, but you do it by looking at the data. Is that right?

I try to. I try to. But yeah, I, I guess now after Trends, I run this thing called Internet Pipes and that was kind of like trends in the way that you want to surface things that other people don't know about, but it's also about how do you show people how to catch their own fish, if that makes sense.

And you come on every once in a while and you just basically have all of this data that you rattle off a story behind the number, a story behind the data, and you explain why it's an interesting trend. And sometimes you'll say like how different people are pouncing on this trend. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lately I, or recently I compiled this digits database. I call it digits. You guys call them like one chart businesses, but basically these generation-defining stats, like we've all talked or heard about when Bezos saw the internet was growing at some crazy rate and he was like, what does that mean? Well, it means that people will be buying stuff online in the future. Let me go create this crazy thing called Amazon. And so we all run into these stats. Throughout our lives, and most of us are just like, oh, that's cool. But I think there are some where it's like, okay, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100+ of these and we can talk about some of them today.

And the guy who— one of the two guys who started your firm, Mark Andreessen, he, he has this famous quote or this famous story where, you know, people are like, you know, Mark, what's most important? Is it having a good team? Is it having a good product or is it picking the right market? And he goes, it's picking the right market. That's easily the most important thing because if you pick the right market, you can have a bad team and a bad product and you still like the market pulls the, the success out of you. So for example, you could have the world's greatest team who are brilliant, who are smart, and they come up with this amazing product. But if it's in a tiny market that people just don't want, then you're going to lose. But if you are Coinbase in 2014 and crypto is all the rage, which is what happened, Coinbase.com crashed all the time. It wasn't that good of a website, but people were begging for it. And so they put up with it and they used it and they pulled the company into fruition and made it a success. And so you are going to show us potentially some of these markets.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. But I mean, I think that's the perfect setup because if you think about it, a bunch of other people saw that exact same data point and he was like, oh, well, I should go create this company called Coinbase. And a bunch of other people were like, oh, I'm just gonna go for a run. I'm gonna like, you know, go to my 9 to 5 and ignore that same thing. So let's start with one that you, I think, know pretty well, hearing loss. So the stat or the digit is that nearly 2.5 billion people by 2050 are expected to experience hearing loss with over 700 million requiring rehabilitation. And then I saw this interesting quote that kind of was just like a frame to take away, which is that some project that hearing aids are about to become as common as reading glasses. So you think about just like how normalized reading glasses are. People wear them all the time. You have all these optometrists. Like, it's a very normal thing, even if you think about the benefits that companies offer, right? Vision is often part of that. And then if you think about where hearing is in that equation is nowhere near that on the same trajectory yet. But if it's true that billions of people are going to require hearing loss, and you even think about some of the other signals, like the fact that today we have AirPods in our ears, or many people at least in our circle, how many hours a day?

Like, 8.

Exactly. That was not true 10 years ago, right?

Wait, so why First of all, I wear a hearing aid. I wear a hearing— I've had probably 10 or 12 surgeries on my ears. I was born with bad ears and I fought putting a hearing aid in because I didn't wanna look old. And a lot of times on this podcast, people see me where I'll do this, uh, and I do it instinctively cuz I'm always leaning in with my good ear. Um, and so I wear a hearing aid and it was, uh, it's— they all suck. But why are more people needing a hearing aid? Is it because something's going on or is this a normal number and there's just more people?

No, I mean, I think the technologies that we use are influencing a greater number of people who experience hearing loss. Like, if you think about, even as you said, there's a cultural element to it too. Like, I go to SoulCycle. The first year I went, no one's putting in the earplugs. Like, it's so uncool to put in the earplugs. And then as, you know, I've been doing it for a few years now, it's like maybe 10, 20% of the class is putting in the earplugs.

People put earplugs in because the class is too loud.

The class is way too loud. And by the way, even think about the technologies that we have that now signal to us some of this stuff. Like, your Apple Watch will tell you when you're in a SoulCycle class, this is damaging your ears. Like, if you do this for more than 10 minutes, you will impair your ears in a permanent way. And so the point around the cultural side is interesting because I don't know if you experienced the same thing, but I grew up in the '90s, like glasses were not cool. And then now you see like some people when you're like, man, you look so much cooler because of the glasses you wear. Like, I wish, I almost wish I needed glasses.

That's how I used to feel like when I was in third grade about braces. If you had braces, you were cool. It's like, I need braces.

I don't know if I ever felt that way about braces.

Well, that's probably why I didn't have a girlfriend until I was 21 years old. Are there any interesting, um, companies in the hearing aid space that you've seen? Because when I was trying to get a hearing aid, there was all types of like promises of like, this will listen to the words that people are saying and it's going to repeat it in your hearing aid. And it was stupid. And, and honestly, I think I paid $2,000 for a hearing aid. They're really expensive. And the app is horrible. Like it's, these are not good products. One time, in fact, my hearing aid broke and got stuck in my ear and I had to go to the hospital just to get part of it out. So I've had all types of— Yes, it was horrible.

Oh my God, you should, you should found a company in this space because you know of all the problems. But I don't know the hearing aid space as well. I have been seeing a lot of people who have been getting— Have you heard of Loop? The earplug company? It's just these kind of like nifty looking earplugs, which again, you go to something like a workout class and they give you these disposable like bright yellow earplugs that you can't even get into your ear. And so I do think there's going to be like, again, on the cultural side, how do you create products that not only, to your point, are solving the problem, like they have utility, but they also shift in this direction of, oh, I look cool, I feel cool, I want to wear this thing.

Dude, this company Loop is going to kill it. They sell $50 earplugs. Oh my God. This is good.

Yeah, and it's super smart marketing. Like if you go, if you just search Loop earplugs, like they've got a page and they're like earplugs for events because again, they're not, they're not marketing to like, oh, the everyday user necessarily for this stuff. Um, it's like, oh, you're going to a concert, you're going to the Super Bowl, it's going to be really loud and these look really cool. People don't even realize they're earplugs.

All right, my friends. So a lot of you guys who listen to the show, you listen because you want to start a company, but you're not sure what idea to choose, or you may not even have an idea and you like our podcast, My First Million, because we've done a lot of the work for you on researching all these business ideas. Well, my friends, we've made life a lot easier for you because HubSpot, they just put together an entire list of all the resources that you can use to find a market opportunity to validate for your next business idea. So if you're looking for a market size calculator or tools to identify market trends or a huge list of ideas to get started, So if you're interested, there's a link below, click it, and you could have access to the whole thing. It's completely free. Now back to the show. All right, let's move on from hearing stuff. But one last fact. Did you know, this is one of the reasons why I succumbed and got the hearing aid, is if you have a hearing loss and you don't address it, the increase of getting dementia jumps significantly.

Yeah.

Like 4 or 5 times. And I believe. There are two reasons. One, that part of your brain that hears stuff because it's not working, it begins to atrophy and that's correlated with dementia. But also the second reason, and I find myself doing this all the time, is when I'm at a restaurant or something, I cannot hear the difference between someone talking to me and the background noise. And so I usually just zone out. And yeah, if you zone out all the time, like you're, you're gonna be like mentally like, or, uh, permanently kind of zoned out. Uh, I believe those are the two theories as to why that happens. But, uh, so yeah, getting your hearing fixed is, is a big deal. What's another one you want to do?

Okay, so rounding out the hearing loss thing, by the way, um, something we didn't quite touch on there is the fact that they went over-the-counter in 2022, which means like you don't need to get a prescription. And that also I think is, you know, opening the aperture. And you guys often talk about these like policy or legislation-related shifts or unlocks.

Yeah, we call them, um, I call them regulation inflections. So there you go. Something changes drastically. So for example, one negative inflection is like New York bans Airbnb. So there's like an inflection where like short-term rentals are just going to go to zero versus if they were to— there would be an inflection where they now say it's allowed. There's a massive change.

Yeah, exactly. So one of them is the FAA, um, has made a few changes recently, and I want to call out two. And one of them is around drones. So consumer drones have existed for quite a while. I have a DJI drone. People use them for anything from like just filming your neighborhood. Real estate agents use them to like capture better imagery of their assets. But recently the FAA changed regulation for some companies where they can fly drones beyond line of sight. And that doesn't sound like a big change, but if you can fly a drone beyond your like visual aperture to actually see what it's doing. Well, it enables things like drone delivery. There are companies like Zipline. I'm sure you've heard of Amazon playing around in this space. That changes the game. Another change that the FAA made recently is they started approving these electric vertical takeoff and landing companies, the eVTOL companies. And again, that was in the news. But what wasn't covered as much was the fact that this was the first new category of aircraft in nearly 80 years. And the one just before this was called light sport aircraft. You know what light sport aircraft is?

No.

It's helicopters. It's small business jets. These are things that like each individual is a massive industry. And if you think about like how, you know, if you take like super wealthy people who take helicopters, who take these business jets, like that's meaningfully changed their life. And each one of those is a vertical, um, eVTOL. Again, this is the first new category of aircraft in 80 years. You can only imagine, like, how do you say that word? eVTOL. So again, it's like electric vertical takeoff and landing. So there's some companies who are playing in this space, obviously, like I think Joby Aviation is one.

Archer's another one. Um, we had Brett Adcock on the pod and he started a thing called Archer, which is publicly traded, and they've Uh, I think they have some huge deals with United, um, things like that.

Yeah, so I mean, if you think about— this is like thinking more long-term, but these are designed specifically to be, you know, operating within cities, taking people from like one end of New York to the other, airport trips. If you think about like what that kind of is a parallel to is not the like mega, you know, Boeing air jets. It's actually more like cars, right? And if you think about how cities have been oriented around cars, what businesses have been drawn up from there, I think, again, these are two legislative changes that are, uh, in the long term going to meaningfully reshape the way that we all engage.

One of our friends, um, or Nikita, who a lot of people know, uh, who he is, he was telling us— I have to get it right, but I believe he told me that he invested in a company where if you are in LA and you call 911, the police will take however long to get there. Let's say 20 minutes or something, because LA is really big, 30 minutes, uh, or even just 10 minutes, but they send out a drone right away to go and see what's going on. Have you seen that?

Yeah, we at a16z invested in a few of these companies. So they get there more quickly, but they also have a safety angle from the perspective of, you know, if someone calls 911, they're telling you something. Sometimes they're just reporting like, "Hey, I think there's this scary person like on the highway doing X," or, "I think there's someone in this alley and they have a gun." And the ability for these drones to not only get there more quickly, but to validate the statement and say, "Oh, actually like that's not a gun, that's a poster." in a, you know, in a tube or something. Like, that's it. That changes their ability to actually react to the situation more safely.

Yeah, you just got a guy like wanting to show off like his Lamborghini poster from like the Scholastic Book Fair instead of like a gun. Yeah, that makes sense.

Happens all the time.

Yeah, no, yeah, been there, been there. What are some other ways people could pounce on this?

Well, I, I think the thing that I'm trying to drive home here is like, these are obviously going to take years, if not decades, to influence us in major ways, but is for people to ask questions like, for example, if there is drone delivery at scale, think about even the ways that we package goods and the fact that you package a good to sit in a truck to travel across the country, and it needs to have certain levels of padding of, you know, to make it unbreakable. All of those things potentially change if we're able to you know, pick something up and drop it off a mile away, right? So I think it's just encouraging people to ask about, you know, if this is true, what are those second, third order effects? If it's true that there's gonna be a lot more autonomy, like how quickly does that ramp up? You take like Waymo, which is a lot of people think of as in like Phoenix or San Francisco. I just read an article the other day saying that Waymos are already taking up 20% of Uber rides in Austin. And so this stuff can like move pretty quickly.

I had a— I don't, I don't smoke weed anymore or do anything like that, but I had like this thought the other day because I had to send someone a letter in California. Isn't it insane that for— what's a stamp cost, 40 cents, 50 cents— that I can send a letter 3,500 miles and it will reliably get to pretty much any house I want to in a matter of like 4 or 5 days. I think that is insane. That is, that is so crazy. And to think that, like, so there's that type of delivery that I think of all the time and I'm like, the post office, USPS, UPS, FedEx, these companies are wild. That's got the biggest moat ever to build that. That is so freaking hard. But then there's the last mile component and that's this whole other thing. And to think that drones, that that's what's going to be happening is that drones are going to be flying everywhere. It's pretty wild to like imagine like the moat that a company in this space has. It is. It's, it's, it's, it's hard to like comprehend because if you think 50 years ago to try to explain to someone, no, you're not going to go to Walmart and you're not going to go anywhere, everything's going to come to your door. To think how is that going to change in the next 20 or 50 years? It's hard to comprehend.

Totally. And I think to your point, it's like, are people on this podcast gonna go create like the next Waymo or the next Zipline, these companies that have been working on these problems for years and years and years? Maybe not, but okay, if all the, or if a significant number of cars on the road are autonomous, who's cleaning those cars, right? Who is creating the LiDAR that goes into the cars so that they can actually drive safely? Who is, you know, actually coordinating the cleaning and the use of these cars, the degradation of them? Who's the person that gets called if there's an issue in a Waymo? Like, all of these are new businesses, the same way that, like, when Airbnb was big, the answer wasn't go create another Airbnb. It was like, go create the cleaning companies and the operations companies to run an Airbnb, right? Like, there's still, I think, a lot of opportunity on, you know, on the edges of these major trends.

All right, let's do another one. Let's go to the psychedelics thing.

So this one is just— is pretty simple. Like, psilocybin has been illegal for a long time in the United States and elsewhere, and it was decriminalized in the first state, which was Oregon, in 2020, and has subsequently become decriminalized in a host of other states and cities with, you know, lots of legislation pending. And this is another one where we're talking like what's gonna happen not in the next year, but several years, if not decades. But people are already jumping on this. Some people are doing psychedelic retreats, you know, again, a policy change that we're seeing.

I think we have a few Hampton members that have these psychedelic retreats, and I've seen some of these. Did I ever tell you that I tried to go to one? I think it was in 2018 or something like that, like right when this stuff was getting popular. I knew this person it was a friend of a friend. Jack introduced me to this person, my friend Jack, who was like hosting— he said it was a shaman. And I was thinking it's going to be some brown dude in like, like a, like a, like a sheet. Like he's going to say like namaste as I walk into their house and take off my shoes. And they ask us to go to this meeting in advance to see if it was a good fit. So I go to the meeting and it's just this like normal looking white lady in San Francisco in a condo, a fancy condo building. And we sit down for, for dinner. And so she can get to know us to see if it's a good fit, if we actually want to go through with this, like, psychedelic experience with her. And she, like, does a few things, but she's like, so where are you from? And she was like, I was like, oh, Missouri. And she's like, oh, flyover country. And I was like, bitch, what the fuck? Are you insulting me right now? And she said, like, 3 more things making fun of, like, where I was from and, like, mocking me. And she was like, what do you do, uh, for a living? And she— I was like, oh, I, I like kind of work in like technology and the internet. And she's like, oh, capitalism really bothers me. And I looked at her LinkedIn in advance. She worked at Lehman Brothers. That's where she worked out. She worked at Lehman Brothers before she became a shaman.

Now doing psychedelic—

I go, lady, you worked at Lehman Brothers. You were literally a venture capitalist. What are you talking about? And then, uh, at the end she was like, Uh, by the way, it's gonna be $2,000. I'm like, lady, you just said you hated capitalism. All right, what the hell is going on? Uh, and so I got asked that night not to come back, and I was disinvited from my psychedelic experience, which probably shows that I need this more than anything.

But yeah, well, I was gonna say, you definitely— like, those are some pretty bad vibes, and you definitely do not want to be on psychedelics, you know, with that. With that introduction.

I got, I got kicked out of my psychedelic group. So that was my only experience. I wanted to— I forget what it was, like ketamine or MDMA, I don't know, but everyone said it was dope and I was like, let's see what this is about. I got kicked out of the group. But, um, I have seen a bunch of these like retreats. I do think it's cool. I have friends that are like— I've got a couple vet buddies who have done it and it's like changed their life. And we had Scott Galloway on here and he says that it's been really helpful. So I'm on board with them. I'm just not on board with it for me. You know, it's kind of like I say cornrows, you know, it's cool for other people, but not for me. Cornrows and face tattoos and psychedelic retreats. Yeah. Uh, any, any other interesting opportunities with the psychedelics?

I mean, I think maybe the marketer in me— not that I'm trying to like push psychedelics, but I think a lot of people think of them as either you do it if you're like just a druggie and you just, you know, you do these all the time, or you do it if you're in an impaired mental state and you need to like get past something. Like let's say you were a vet and you had some terrible experiences. Like there's a lot of ketamine-assisted therapy that's popping up, psilocybin as well. But again, it's often to solve some kind of negative experience in your life and get past that. If this does become more normalized, I think some of this at like a much lower dose, um, you could imagine being very helpful in smaller life decisions. Or for example, you're starting a new job, you're trying to decide if you want to join one company versus another, you're trying to decide if you want to quit, you're trying to decide if you want to have a child. Those are not things, um, that like have any direct relationship to psychedelics. But are things that people have a really hard time understanding their perspective, understanding how they relate to, you know, let's say their partner or their family. And I think that could be a future scenario. Like, imagine if you had someone guiding you through a psychedelic experience specifically related to your career, specifically related to, again, like the difficult and very meaningful decision of having kids. I think there's something interesting there.

I completely agree. That's actually a really cool idea. Where, like, for example, if you like are in a certain social class, like you don't have the same problems as someone who, who's not in that class. So like when I quit drinking, I went to basically like a mental clinic in South— like in Soma. And it was like me and like everyone else was homeless. And I was like, what am I doing here? But the reason I went was because I didn't have any income because I had just started my company and I was like, I saw it on Yelp and I went to this place and I stuck to the same doctor for like 10 years. She was amazing. And then there was at one point where I remember telling her like certain problems that I had and this woman had never worked with anyone else that had similar types of problems because she wasn't used to a client like mine. And I was desperately seeking like a therapist who had like people who were at like maybe a higher, higher tier on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it was so hard to find like a person who could serve that need, you know what I'm saying? And so that is very interesting to have like a different genre of psychedelic guides or whatever the hell they call them, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, because to your point, even within therapy, for a long time people thought therapy was only for when you're kind of about to divorce, right? They're like, we only provide therapy for when there is a clear issue. And then now therapy has expanded a lot, right? Like people do it preventatively. People do it because they just like their therapist and just need someone to talk to. Like, there are many different reasons now that people do therapy. And I think obviously in the, you know, people on their own do psychedelics for many different reasons. But you could imagine that if this is going to be something that is no longer illegal, people are building businesses around, that they can build those businesses for kind of these, these other needs. It does—

there doesn't need to be a problem Is this going to become like a whole therapy session for me? I'm telling you about these doctors that I used to go like when I was homeless, or like, uh, about my psychedelic getting kicked out and how I'm deaf. Oh my gosh, every time you come on here, man. Uh, can you talk about this job stuff? I find this the most interesting.

Okay, so a few things. I think the most, you know, relevant thing to the listeners would be that AI is here, a bunch of people are freaking out about jobs. They're wondering, you know, do I still have a job? Are my skills still relevant? And so I think it's just interesting to discuss, number one, like, what are the new jobs that are on the horizon? What are the existing jobs that are going to become more important? Um, and then I have some other, you know, some other ideas that we can talk about, but like First, did you know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports all the time, every year, or I think more frequently, what the, um, fastest growing jobs are? And do you know what they are?

Fastest growing jobs?

Yeah.

Uh, white collar stuff, so like in, uh, computer engineers, graphic designers, anything involving computers.

Yeah, so there's like Of the top 5, there is data scientists, there's security analysts, but there's also wind turbine service technicians, there's solar panel installers. Nurses are also on there further down the list. I think some of the interesting ones are certainly in the, like, again, climate installation, um, operation space. Like, one interesting thing that I didn't realize, because I've never owned a house with solar panels, is that You don't only need to install them, but in order for them to be efficiently used, they need to be cleaned. And some, you know, if you want to get the max efficiency out of them, they need to be cleaned like every 6 to 12 months. So it's like, who's cleaning those solar panels? Like, that's an opportunity on its own. Other things on the list, I'm just scrolling down it— physician assistants, actuaries. But over the last two decades, some of the fastest-growing jobs were manicurists, HR managers, event planners, massage therapists, and compliance officers, which is also interesting.

I have a, uh, I have a, this small website called Sam's List where, uh, you can— it's like Yelp for accountants. And, you know, we— it's a tiny website, but I think we have 300 or 400 accountants on the website. And the woman who runs it, Kimmy, has talked to like all 400 of them, and the common complaint that they all have. And it's like horrible for my business because Sam's List, like the way it makes money is a user who needs an accountant for their business or for their personal life. They go on and they can submit their information. And then also we allow other accountants to pay us money to go and like basically like bid on that client's, like, you know, you, this person is looking for this. Can we also pay money for them to, for us to be shown or introduced to them? And it's a horrible business for me because what we've noticed talking to 400 Accountants is that they don't need more business. They, they go, we have enough business. What we need is more accountants. They're like, I can't hire fast enough. Like it's, no one wants to be an accountant and we just simply do not have people who want to work here.

Yeah. And by the way, those are exactly the industries that people should be looking at for building AI products. right? If you think about even just the selling motion that you need to do for any new product, if you're going to a company and they have ample demand and there's like a very, very liquid market for talent, well, that means that they can probably get talent for cheaper. They have to worry about like, oh, am I gonna bring in this AI tool and then fire or lay off a bunch of my existing staff? Like, those are all considerations. But in the world of accounting where, let's say, like you said, there's a firm and that firm is like, I can't hire fast enough. I literally don't have people. I have clients who want to pay me and I don't have the staff to actually facilitate that project. Well, then it's an easy sell, right? To be like, I can support you in this way. So I think that's just like AI is obviously being applied to a lot of the obvious areas, but a lot of these industries where there is not enough talent, there is. And, you know, that is, in my opinion, where, where folks should be looking.

There was two different members in Hampton who had companies. So in nursing, there's a huge shortage of nurses in America. And it's a great job. It pays really well and you get good benefits oftentimes. I mean, there's the downside is like you're obviously working with sick people and it's probably it's a tragic— can be tragic sometimes. But there's a huge need and you have relatively secure, you know, you will always be able to work. They have these things, um, called travel nurses. So a lot of hospitals are lacking nurses and so they'll pay, you know, extra money to have someone come and stay there for 3 months or to stay there Monday to Friday or wherever, like, you know, the 5-day block or a 3-month block. And there's this, there's a bunch, I think Trusted Health is one of them. Where they build these massive businesses all around facilitating getting a travel nurse to the hospital in need. And I believe Trusted Health— I have no connection with these guys, I just saw them online— I believe that they are a unicorn. I think they've raised funding in the billion-dollar-plus range.

I mean, I've heard that that's a huge industry. And the fact that, like, again, we talked about it last time, silver tsunami, a lot of A lot more nurses are needed, and the concentration of that talent is not always where it needs to be. And so it makes sense.

All right, let's do one or two more. What else? Tell me some other interesting ones.

Well, one note about the, just the world of jobs, um, I want to get your take on this is we've talked before about pay transparency, and there are, I think, over a dozen states that have also, you know, put pay transparency law in action. And that's why California is one of them. You go to a website, you see a new job posting, and you see how much that job makes. One super simple opportunity for folks that I haven't seen, but I'm sure someone's building this, is basically just the Glassdoor for open salaries. Like there's levels.fyi, kind of a more aggregate level. But if you take what Glassdoor did, Glassdoor basically became the they had a bunch of other features, but like, why did people go to Glassdoor? One, they wanted to see if a company had like good or bad reviews. TBD on if that was actually useful. But then they also mostly wanted to see how much am I going to make at this company? Like if I'm negotiating, what should I ask for? And that relied on people who worked at that company to submit their salary, right, to Glassdoor. And then they built up this database and that was their moat. Today, all of that is online. Right? All— every time a company is posting a job posting, they are saying how much they pay. And I have not seen anyone aggregate this information in a meaningful way where if I'm— again, if I'm trying to join a new company or if I'm trying to negotiate, I'm still going to Glassdoor, which is crazy to me because even Glassdoor has really limited data, in my opinion. And so someone should just go and— again, like, you would need to build this up over a little bit of time. But someone should be scraping these salaries off of different websites or different companies and building up this database, completely usurping again the, like, requirement of people, uh, needing to submit their salary themselves.

Is that like— is the range huge? Like, so for example, A16z, I assume they're California-based, uh, so like, would they list the sal— let's see, do they list their salaries there?

They do, and lots of other companies do too. And people only notice this when they are in the job process. And so they have a snippet of time and often jobs that are not the same as the one that they're applying to, right? Wow.

Sorry. So I just went to Andreessen Horowitz. I clicked a fund assistant controller. I assume that that is, uh, related to accounting. They're going to work closely with assistant controllers and fund— so it's a finance accounting job, it says the expected pay for this position is between $216,000 and $252,000, but the actual starting pay may vary based on a range of factors, which include experience. They have to say that.

They always say that. Yeah.

Interesting. So, wow, that is very intriguing. I did not think, but would it say, like, in order to be like a legit partner at A16z or something, like, will they even list, like, the jobs that, uh, are paid potentially millions of dollars?

They have to. But the thing that is worth calling out is that they are only required, as in through law, to my understanding, is to put base pay. So obviously a lot of these jobs, not just at A16z, have other mechanisms for rewarding people. And so that— this is only one part of the story, but also if you've ever gone to Glassdoor, Glassdoor has been terrible at capturing that other segment in any case. And so at the very least, again, a lot of this information is out there. And I think you take this like age-old company— well, actually, I don't know, when was Glassdoor even founded?

It's not that old. It's not age-old.

2007.

Age-old.

I would say, I would say it's internet—

what does age-old mean? It's as old as age?

It's, it's in my opinion, you know, it was great for the first version of the internet. And now again, like, there are, there's a change in legislation here, uh, fitting with our theme, but also it's like the technology exists in a way for us, for someone to be able to scrape this really easily and aggregate this information across, you know, not a few companies, but many, many companies. What else do you want to cover here?

I, uh, I read a book that you suggested because of this whole animal thing. It was called like The Five Senses or what's the, the animal one?

It's called An Immense World.

And a Men's World.

You have heard me give this spiel so many times, but I— okay, so there's this book, In a Men's World. It's by this guy called Ed Yong, and whenever I explain it, it sounds really obvious, but, you know, obviously does not do the book justice. But it's about the fact that we as humans are familiar with 5 senses. Like, this is how we interpret the world. Even within those 5 senses though, they are not equal. We talked about hearing, for example. But sight for sure is the, the sense that not only humans tend to use the most to interpret the world, but also if you benchmark that versus other species other than birds, we have the most precise vision, um, of, you know, again, the animal kingdom. We have really strong vision. And again, that drives the way that we see the world. I say that because this book is about recognizing that yes, this is how humans see the world, but every animal, again, this is not surprising, is uniquely tuned to their environment, their prey, you know, how they survive. And for many it's, you know, sight is not the most important way that they interpret the world, but there are senses that we don't have that they use, again, to engage. And then again, within the 5 that we're familiar with, it's just, it's worth acknowledging that, for example, the way that, you know, the spectrum of light that we see or the spectrum of temperatures that we're comfortable in are just simply not the way that, you know, other animals exist. If you take an Arctic squirrel or if you take a camel and you put them on hot plates, they will not move at temperatures that we think are crazy and uncomfortable because they are comfortable. For example, or if you take UV light, which we can't really interpret, other animals or creatures will react to that. So that's my spiel about like what the book is about, and it obviously does a better job of making that interesting. But this is my first million, and the reason that I'm bringing this up is because there is this, this, I think, converging world of nature and technology which has always existed to an extent, But at the same time, I think for a long time people thought that technology was kind of adversarial to nature because it's like humans were like moving forward and we're progressing and we're leaving nature behind and sometimes even destroying, you know, that natural world. But I think there are tons of examples, whether it's— whether it's Velcro being, you know, modeled off of burdock burrs, whether it's bullet trains being inspired by the kingfisher's beak, whether it's NASA learning how to design airplane wings to be more like birds. Like, we not only learn a lot from nature in the way that we build technology, and I think that's an interesting thread we can pull, but also there's a really interesting space of how technology is actually getting us closer to understanding the animal kingdom and communicating with it. So we can pull any of those threads, but that, that's my nature technology rant.

Keep going. Uh, I'm fascinated. Keep, just keep talking. What were you— now you on, on this document, you were talking about a trip you took, but does that weave into this?

Yeah, so I just came back from the Glavkos Islands. Have you ever been there?

No, I, and I'm super ignorant. Um, I, if I'm being honest, I don't even know where it is. Uh, but I know it's related to Darwin. That, I mean, I'm, I'm incredibly ignorant of Galápagos.

Yeah. So, okay. The Galápagos are, um, I think it's 600 miles west of Ecuador. Um, so they're in the, in the Pacific. There's a set of islands that—

So Central America, right? I mean, I, I—

South America, but yeah. So over there.

I'm not, I'm not the biggest, uh, South America, Central America expert. I don't even know.

In your defense.

I don't know too much about it.

Ecuador is on, you know, the north end of South America.

Okay.

Um, so basically they're part of Ecuador, but a lot of people know them again because of, like you said, Darwin. They are this, at least from my perspective, and I've been to 50 or so countries, the most kind of, uh, nature scape trip I've ever done where you actually feel like you're entering their world versus the opposite. Right? And so the reason it fits into Darwin's story is when you have a bunch of islands, uh, the way that these different species evolve across the different islands, especially land-bearing or land creatures who can't make their way, you know, from one island to another, they end up evolving differently due to the unique fauna, due to the unique environment. Set of predators, etc., on that particular island. And so he was like, wait a minute, why are there, for example, blue-footed boobies, which are a type of birds, and red-footed boobies on two different islands? Um, and that was him witnessing some of these. He did a lot with finches, and I think some of the giant tortoises. Like, he, he noticed these things, and then That was his kind of like aha to understanding evolution.

That's why it's like in all the textbooks. Like, I, I knew nothing about Darwin. This is actually the first time that I've ever like heard like the— I'm sure there's a lot more to the, uh, you know, the aha moment story, but I have never heard that before.

Yeah, and he, he did a lot of his research there, and I think in particular with the finches, I think there's like 17 kinds of finches And the interesting part is, like, when does an animal become a separate species, right? So you take these two finches that exist on different islands, and then, like, they're evolving. At what point do they become a new species? It's when they no longer mate with each other, right? So one interesting thing, fun fact, is just they had these— you know, one example is lava lizards. And these lava lizards would do these mating dances, but in the case For them, they're doing these push-ups. At least that's how humans, like, describe this mating dance. But because they're different species that have evolved on their unique islands, it's like one lizard might do, like, 3 push-ups, another one might do 5, another one might do it, like, a little bigger or funkier than the others. But what's crazy is that, like, they will not mate with each other. Like, if you take one lava lizard from one island and the other one's doing, you know, the male's doing the push-ups for the females, just slight differences in how it's being done, it's like, nope, sorry, like, we no longer mate. And one interesting takeaway for me, and this is just me again, like, this is nothing to do with business, is just that's never happened to humans. Now, there are some, like, bad historical examples of, like, segregation and stuff, but for the most part, like, we've existed on different continents evolved, right? And over long, long periods of time, like, you still— like, someone from Australia will still mate from some— with someone from North America, which— who will still mate with someone from Europe, etc., right? Like, I just thought that was— that was an interesting— like, I wonder why that is.

I've heard of a bunch of friends of mine doing push-ups to impress some lot lizards, but never lava lizards. Steph, do you know what a lot lizard is?

I don't. Is that embarrassing?

No, it's— it means you're— it means you're much more sophisticated than me. A lot lizard is a prostitute that serves truck drivers.

Oh, that makes sense.

I feel like if you know what a lot lizard is, that sort of says what part of the tracks you're from, you know what I'm saying?

I hear you.

So you're talking about Galápagos Islands and Darwin and, you know, the 8 senses that animals have. But if I know a few people that know a few things about lot lizards, if you want to talk about that, uh, just saying. Uh, what's this, um, Ask Nature thing?

So if people want to go down the rabbit hole of exploring kind of not just like, let me go look at pictures of animals, but understanding like, how do animals produce color? What are the examples of technology being inspired by natural design? For example, like a search algorithm that was inspired by ants.

This is so fascinating. So AskNature has this, um, they have this like, there's all stuff you can click on. So there's one about The African darter. Apparently that's a type of bird and it has a very special feather that is incredibly water resistant. And then it tells you like different applications that this potential feather or like inspiration of this feather could have. And it talks about like the strategy of how it works and like the potential for copying this feather. This is amazing. How did you find this website? This is really cool.

So someone shared it within Internet Pipes. We have this survey whenever people join, which just asks like, what's your favorite tool? A lot of it ends up being what you expect, ChatGPT, Ahrefs, etc. But there are a bunch of gems that come through like this.

And so by the way, is Internet Pipes, it's literally just tons of different resources for finding these things?

So what the product started as, it was, I hate the term course, but it was a course that existed to say, It's called a book.

It was a book.

It was a book. It exists in Notion and there's videos and there's text and now there's a community and now there's things, databases like the Digits database. But the origin was, okay, the most common question I get asked is you find all this cool stuff online, how do you find it? Um, and so Internet Pipes was showing people how to find this information through a series of tools. And that's why it's called Pipes, right? It's like, use this tool to to make sense of all of the purchases that are happening on Amazon, all of the pages that exist on Wikipedia, all of the searches that are happening on Google. And you know, you go down the line, this data exists. And by the way, we're at a unique period where like it didn't quite exist 15 years ago. And 15 years from now, probably everyone will know it exists. And so it's like this Internet Pipes is a course, a book, whatever you want to call it. To learn how to do that.

And you've made a lot of money off of it so far, haven't you?

Yes.

That's pretty dope. When you answer just yes, that means I'm not going to ask how much.

It's 6 figures. There's a pretty wide range of, you know.

Does the 6 figure include the.00? So it could really be like $1,000.00?

It's 8 figures now.

Got it. This is a really, really cool website. I could spend hours just looking at this. Like there's an article about like camel's fur, uh, and how, uh, it keeps people cool or it keeps camels cool in the desert, but also warm at night and why that particular type of fur is special for this. Like it's so, and the reason it's kind of interesting is like the, the two that I've named are, are clothing related, but like if you had a clothing related brand, like some type of like, it's stealing the story for you. Like it's like, or not stealing, it's giving you the hook. Do you know what I mean?

Exactly, exactly. And by the way, like, people in our world in business tech are always talking about the, like, Lindy-ness of something. How long has something existed for? And it's like, you are learning from millions of years of evolution, right? Um, of these, these animals that have become purely optimized for this purpose. And to your point, I think, like, the marketer in both of us is like, What could, you know, what products could you make off of this?

Like, there's one like otters where it's like it keeps, it keeps heat in and cold water out. So otters. And I'm sure every single wetsuit company has like stolen this marketing for their branding or whatever. But like, so it's like really fascinating. Sorry, go ahead.

Well, did you ever see, you know, Mischief, right?

Mischief the brand? Mischief is, uh, the company that does like weird projects. Like they did like, uh, a blood shoe for— with Lil Nas X or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. So they've, they've done a ton of shoe collabs. They did one, I think it was— I don't remember if it was with Jimmy Kimmel or they just announced it, but it was called the Gob Stomper. Did you ever see this?

No.

I thought they were kind of cool. They basically— the bottom of the sneaker comes gray at first, and then as you wear it more Basically, like, as your shoe wears away, it looks like a Gobstopper. And it was just like—

Which is the candy that you suck on, and each shell, layer of shell, it turns colors. Okay, cool.

Yeah, exactly. And so my, like, you might think this is the silliest idea ever, but when I went to the Galápagos and I saw these red-footed and these blue-footed boobies, and by the way, fun fact for the listeners, the reason that these birds have different colored feet is because of what they eat. Which I just thought was like so strange and interesting. Basically like the two different birds on different islands eat different things and that ends up impacting the pigment in their feet. But imagine a sneaker brand that was, again, stick with me here, this might be a really awful idea, that's related to health in some way. So like let's say you're wearing a CGM and on your shoes, your shoes change color in some way based on like if you're in range or some other metric that you care about. But basically you're able to signal something in a way that changes through your feet. Awful idea.

Oh, it could be like if, you know, we could show you're fertile or something. It would help with the whole lot lizard thing.

It's like those parties, right? Where you wear like, what are they called? The stoplight parties where you wear red.

Yellow, red, or green. That's pretty funny.

So we could stoplight shoes. Maybe that's a better version of the idea.

We just put all of our blood work on our, you know, like, I don't have a thyroid issue. I'm good.

Yeah. You're like, your function health results show up in your, in like a pendant around your neck or.

Let's, let's, let's end here. I think we got a ton of stuff. Steph Smith. Thank you very much. Internet Pipes. StephSmith.io, is that your website?

Technically, yes. I, I haven't updated it in a while, but yeah, if people are interested in internet pipes, I think we dropped a code last time, MFM, if people want to use, and they can get that, that digits database of 100 stats. We talk about shipbuilding, disaster insurance, you know, tech literacy, nomad visas, all that good stuff.

All right. God bless America. We're done. That's it. That's the pod.

Thanks, Sam.