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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/0f43cb91bdb75064

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 a hundred plus of these.
And we can talk about some of them today.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my law in it like my day's all on the road, less travel, never looking back. Steph Smith, this is your tenth time on MFM, is that right?
Not quite the tenor.
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 uh 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 wanna 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 Bezo 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 a hundred plus of these.
And we can talk about some of them today.
And the guy who one of the two guys who started your firm, uh, Mark and Dreeson, he has this famous quote or this famous story where s 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
uh it's picking the right market. That's easily the most important thing because if you hit the pick the right market, you can have a bad team and a bad product and it you you still like the market pulls the
the the success out of you. So for example, you could have the world's greatest team who are brilliant, who are smart
Uh 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 gonna lose. But if you are Coinbase in two thousand and fourteen and crypto is all the rage, which is what happened.
Coinbase dot 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 gonna 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 nine to five 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 twenty fifty are expected to experience hearing loss with.
Over seven hundred milyen requiring rehabilitation.
And then I saw this interesting quote that kind of was just like an
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 compan, right? Vision is often part of that.
And then if you think about
where hearing is in that equation.
It's 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 eight.
Exactly. That was not true ten years ago, right?
Wait, so why?
First of all, I wear hearing aid.
I wear I've had probably ten or twelve surgeries on my ears. I was born with the bad ears and
I
Fought.
putting a hearing aid in because I didn't want to look old. And a lot of times on this podcast people see me where I'll do this.
Uh and I do it instinctively,'cause I'm always leaning in with my good ear.
And so
I wear a hearing aid.
And it was uh
It's they all suck, but w why are more people needing hearing it? 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 Soul Cycle.
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
Ten, twenty percent of the class is putting in the earplugs.
People put earplugs in because the class is 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 soul cycle class.
This is damaging your ears. Like if you do this for more than ten 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 nineties. Like glasses were not cool.
And then
Now you see like some people when you're like Man, you look so much cooler'cause of your 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 twenty one years old. Are there any interesting 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 gonna repeat it in your hearing aid. And it it was stupid.
And and honestly, I I think I paid two grand for a hearing aid. They're really expensive. And the app is horrible. Like it's the 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?
Yeah.
Your plug company.
It's just these kind of like nifty looking earplugs, which again, you go to something like a
A work out 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 fifty dollar earplugs.
Oh my god.
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. It's like, oh, you're going to a concert.
You're going to the Super Bowl. It's gonna be really loud.
And these look really cool. People don't even realize they're earplugs.
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. Like four or five 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 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 wanna do?
Okay, so
Rounding out the hearing loss thing, by the way, something we didn't
quite touch on there is the fact that they went over the counter in twenty twenty two, 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 unrelated. Yeah, um I call'em regulation inflections.
So something changes drastically. So for example
Uh one negative inflection is like New York bans Airbnb. So there's like an inflection where like short term rentals are just gonna go to zero.
versus if they were to there would be an inflection where they now say it's allowed. There's a
A massive change.
Yeah, exactly. So
One of them is the FAA
has made a few changes recently and I want to call up two in
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.
While 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 EV tool 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 eighty 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.
E V toll again, this is the first
new category of aircraft in eighty years. You can only imagine like
What's it called? How do you say that word?
E V Tool. 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. We had Brett. We had Brett Adcock on the pod and he started a thing called Archer, which is publicly traded and they
Uh I think they have some huge deals with United.
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 more
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 too, 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 sh reshape the way that we all
Engage. One of our friends, 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 nine one one.
the police will take however long to get there. Let's say twenty minutes or something, because LA's really big, thirty minutes.
Uh
Or even just ten minutes, but
They send out a drone right away.
To go and see what's going on. Have you seen that?
Yeah, we
At A sixteen Z has 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 nine one one
They're telling you something.
Sometimes they're just reporting like, Hey, I think there's a scary person like on the highway doing X, or I think there's a sub 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 slightly. 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
Wamo, 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
Waymo's.
are already taking up twenty percent 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.
'Cause I had to send someone a letter.
In California.
Isn't it insane that for what's a stamp cost? Forty cents, fifty cents?
That I can send a letter.
thirty five hundred miles and it will reliably get to pretty much any house I want to in a matter of like
Four or five 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, USP uh UPS, FedEx, these companies
are wild.
That's got the biggest mode 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 gonna be happening is that drones are gonna be flying everywhere. It's pretty wild to like imagine like
the moat that a company in this space has. It it it is it's it's it's it's hard to like comprehend because if you think fifty years ago to try to explain to someone, no, you're not gonna go to Walmart anymore. You're not gonna go anywhere. Everything's gonna come to your door. It it to think how is that gonna change in the next twenty or fifty years, it's hard to comprehend.
Totally.
And I think to your point, it's like
Are people in this podcast gonna go create like the next Waymo or the next zip line, 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 to 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
And uh
operations companies to run an Airbnb, right? Like there's there's still, I think, a lot of opportunity.
On
You know.
On the edges.
Of these.
major trends.
All right, let's do uh 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 date.
Which was Oregon in twenty twenty, 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 two thousand and eighteen 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

And I was thinking it's gonna be some brown dude in like uh like a like a like a sheet. Like he's gonna 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 uh in a condo, a fancy condo building.
And we sit down for dinner.
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 I was like, Oh, Missouri and she's like oh flyover country and I was like
What the fuck? Are you insulting me right now? And she said like three more things, making fun of like where I was from and like mocking me. And she was like, What do you
Uh for a living.
And she I was like, Oh, I I like kinda 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 now doing
This is psychedelic. I go, Lady, you weren't 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 gotta be two thousand dollars. 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, yeah.
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 early 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 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 of 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 kinda 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 uh 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 drugie and you just, you know.
You do these all the time. Or you do it if you're in a
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 assess assisted therapy that's
popping up. Slow Sybin as well, but again it's
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 uh
Like a much lower dose, you could imagine being very helpful in
smaller life decisions.
Yeah.
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 that
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 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'cause I had just started my company and I was like solid on Yelp. And I went to this place and I stuck to the same doctor for like ten 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 are 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 c'm. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah. I mean,'cause 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's 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 therapists 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 doesn't there doesn't need to be a problem.
Is this gonna become like a whole therapy session for me? I'm talking 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.
Uh can you talk about this job stuff?
I find this most 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.
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 gonna become more important?
And then I have some other ideas that we can talk about, but like
First.
Did you know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics
The ports.
All the time. Every year.
Or I think more frequently.
what the fastest growing jobs are.
And do you know what they are?
The fastest growing jobs.
Yeah.
Uh the white collar stuff, so like an uh computer engineers
Graphic designers, anything involving computers?
Yeah. So there's like
Of the top five, 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.
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 clean like every six to twelve 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 manicures.
HR managers, event planners, massage therapists, and compliance officers, which was
Also interesting.
I have a uh I have uh the small website called Samsless where uh you can it's like Yelp for accountants.
And
You know, we it's a tiny website, but I think we have three or four hundred accountants on the website.
And
the woman who runs it, Kimmy, has talked to like all four hundred of'em.
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 over the 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
B 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 four hundred 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 lay off a bunch of my existing stuff? 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
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
You know.
The
The staff to actually facilitate that.
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 uh AI's obviously being applied to a lot of the obvious areas, but
A lot of these industries where there is not enough talent, there is.
Yeah.
You know, that is
In my opinion, where where folks should be looking.
There was two different members in Hampton who had companies uh 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 uh can be tragic sometimes. But it there's a huge need and you have
relatively secure.
You know, y you'll always be able to work.

called travel nurses. So a lot of hospitals are lacking nurses and so they'll pay
uh you know extra money to have someone come and
Stay there for three months or to stay there Monday to Friday or like you know, the five day block or a three 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.
Uh, trusted help, I I have no connection with these guys. I just saw them online.
I believe that they are a
Uh a unicorn. I I think they they've raised funding a in the billion dollar plus range.
I mean I've heard that that's a huge industry and 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 well tell me some other interesting ones.
Well, one note about the
Just
the world of of jobs. I wanna 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 it's like 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 I'm sure someone's building this. It's basically just the glass door for
Open salaries. Like there's levels. FYI kind of a more aggregate level, but if you take what Glassdoor did.
Class door 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.
They're
Salary.
Right, to Glassdoor.
And then they built up this database and that was their mode.
Today all of that is online.
Right. All every time a company is posting a job posting, they're 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 website 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, A sixteen Z, the are the 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. So I just went to Jason Horowitz, I clicked
A fundamental.
Assistant controller. I assume that that
is uh related to accounting.
They're gonna work closely with assistant controllers and fun th so it's a finance accounting job.
It says the expected pay for this position is between two hundred and sixteen and two hundred and fifty two thousand dollars.
But the actual starting pay may vary based on a range of factors which include experience. They always say that.
Yeah.
Interesting. So wow.
That is very intriguing. I did not think but
Would it say
Yeah.
Like
In order to be like
A legit
partner at A sixteen C or something. Like will they even list like the jobs that
Uh
are paid potentially millions.
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 A sixteen Z 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 eight.
Well it is 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 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 the animal.
And a mint world.
You have heard me give this spiel so many times, but
I okay, so there's this book an immense world. It's by this guy called Ed Young.
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 five senses, like this is how we interpret the world.
Even within those five senses, though.
They're 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.
Of
You know, again the the animal kingdom.
We
have really s 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 five 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.

You know, other
animals exist. If you take an Arctic squirrel or if you take a camel and you put them on hot plates,
uh 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.
Our 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, modelled 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, uh 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 at
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 we s 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 Glovgos.
Islands. Have you ever been there?
No, I in f I'm super ignorant. I
If I'm being honest, I don't even know where it is.
Uh but I know it's related to Darwin. I mean, I'm I'm incredibly ignorant of Galapagos.
Yeah, so okay.
The Galapagos are
I think it's six hundred miles.
West of Ecuador.
So they're in the in the Pacific. There's a set of islands that a lot of people.
South America, but yeah. So I'm not I'm not the biggest uh South America, Central America expert. I don't even know I don't know too much about it.
Ecuador is the north end of
South America. Okay.
So
Basically
Yeah.
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 fifty or so countries.
The most
Kind of
Uh nature
escape 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.
Creatures.
who can't make their way acr 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. 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 uh
to understanding evolution.
I had never heard this story. Like I 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 I he did a lot of his research there. And I think in particular with the finches, I think there's like seventeen 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.
It's 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 pushups.
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 three pushups, another one might do five, another one might do it like a little bigger, uh 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 males 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
take away from me, and this is just me, again, like this has nothing to do with business. It's 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, long periods of time, like you still like someone from Australia will still mate with someone from North America.
Wh who will still mate with someone from Europe.
Et cetera, 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.
Set 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 I'm saying?
I hear you.
So you're talking about Galapagos Islands and Darwin and
You know.
The eight senses that animals have, but
Yeah.
I know a few people that know it.

Uh just saying.
Uh
Ass nature thing.
So if people want to go
Down the rabbit hole of exploring.
На часто
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
Ask Nature has this 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, chat GPT, H refs, et cetera, 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 coarse.
But
It was a course that existed to say.
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? 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 make sense of
All of all of the purchase that 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 fifteen years ago, and fifteen 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 gonna ask how much. There's a pretty wide range of
You know.
Does the six figure include the dot zero zero? So it could really be like one thousand dot zero zero dollars.
It's eight 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 camels' 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.
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
Yeah.
People in our world and business tech are always talking about

like Lindyness of something, how long has something existed for? And it's like you are learning from
millions of years of evolution.
Right, of these
These animals that have

purely optimized for this purpose. And to your point, I think like the marketer and both of us is like,
What could you know?
What products could you make off of this? Like there's one like a the 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 is uh the company that stunts 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
Grey 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 Galapagos and I saw
These red footed and these blue footed boobies and
And by the way, fun fact for the listeners.
The reason
That these birds have different color 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
H 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.
Like that's awful idea.
Oh, it could be like if you know, we could we could we could show you're fertile or something.
It'd help with the whole lot wizard thing.
It's like those parties, right? Where you wear like w were they called the stoplight parties where you wear red yellow, red,
So stop we could stop light 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, your like your function health results show up in your
In like a pendant around your neck.
Let's let's let's end here.
I think we got a ton of stuff. Steph Smith.
Thank you very much. Internet pipes.
Steph Smith dot I. O. 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 a hundred 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 then.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I'm putting my law in it like a
On the road less travel, never looking back