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 a hundred plus of these and we can talk about some of them today i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back steph smith this is your tenth time on m m is that alright no you're not not the 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 the single called trends trends dot c and then she went and join a sixteen z one of 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 tried to i tried 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 bouncing on this trend is that right 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 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 mark teresa 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 fit 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 and they come up with this amazing product but if it's isn't in a tiny market that people just don't want then you're gonna lose but if you are coinbase base in two thousand fourteen and crypto all the rage which is what happened coinbase dot com crash 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 in you are gonna show us potentially some of these markets yeah maybe maybe but i mean i think that's the perfect setup up 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 i'm just gonna go for iran 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 no pretty well hearing loss so the stat or the digit is that nearly two point five billion people by twenty fifty are expected to experience hearing loss with over seven hundred million requiring rehabilitation and then i saw this interesting quote that kinda 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 opt like it's a very normal thing even if you think about the benefits that company's offer right vision is often part of that and then if you think about where hearing is in that equation this 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 eight exactly that was not true ten years ago right wait so why first of all i wear hearing aid i wear here 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 wanna look old and a lot of times on this podcast people see me where i'll do this and i do it instinctively because i'm always leaning in with my goodyear ear and so i wear a hearing aid and it was it's they all suck but why are more people needing hearing it 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 soul cycle the first year i went no one's putting in the ear plugs like it's so un cool to put in the ear plugs 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 ear plugs people play ear plugs 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 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 experience 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 and you look so much cooler because 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're were cool was like i need braces i don't know if i ever felt that way about braces well that's probably why i did have a girlfriend 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 they was stupid and and honestly i i think i paid two grand for hearing aid they're really expensive and the app 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 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 ear plug company it's just these kind of like nifty looking ear plugs which again you go to something like a workout class and they give you these disposable like bright yellow ear plugs that you can't even get to 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 ear plugs oh my god this is and it's super smart marketing like if you go if you just search loop ear plugs like they've got a page and they're like ear plugs 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 their ear plugs alright let's move on from hearing stuff but one last fact did you know this is the one the reasons why i succumb 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 in the background noise and so i usually just zone out and yeah if you zone out all the time of like you're you're gonna be like mentally like or permanently kind of zoned out i believe those are the two theories as to why that happens but so yeah getting your hearing fix 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 com i call regulation inflection so go something changes drastically so for example one negative inflection is like new york bans air airbnb so there's like an inflection where like short term rentals are just gonna go to zero versus if they were to there'd 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 wanna call out too 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 while it enables things like drone delivery there companies like zip line i'm sure you've heard of amazon playing around in this space that changes the game another change that the faa i made recently is they started approving these electric vertical takeoff and landing companies the e 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 at 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 tool again this is the first new category of aircraft in eighty years you can only imagine like what the how that word e 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 job aviation is one archer is another one we we had brett ad hoc on the pod and he started thinking called archer which was just publicly traded and they've 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 you know operating within cities taking people from like one end of new 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 in the long term going to meaningfully reshape the way that we all engaged one of our friends nikita who a lot of people know 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 is really big thirty minutes 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 asics sixty z is 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 sup 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 you know you know in a tube or something like that's it that changes their ability to actually react to the situation more just got a dial to show off like his lamborghini poster from like this sc book fair and set up like a gun yeah that makes sense it happens all the time yeah no yeah i've been there it's been there what are some other ways people could pounce on this it 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 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 un unpredictable 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 way moe which is a lot of people think of is in like phoenix or san francisco i just read an article the other day saying that way 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 do anything like that 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 the stamp cost forty cents fifty cents that i can send a letter but 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 p 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 his 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 the 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 any you're not gonna go anywhere everything's is gonna come to your door 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 way moe 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 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 way mode 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 the 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 alright 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 else square and it was d in the first state which was oregon in twenty twenty and has subsequently become d 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 i 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 the stuff is 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 is gonna be some brown dude like like a like a like a sheet like oh gonna say like nam day as i walk into their house to take off my shoes and they asked 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 in a condo a fancy condo building and we sit down for dinner so she can get to know to see if it's a good fit if we actually wanna go through with this like psychedelic experience with her and she like just a few things but she's like so where are you from and she was like i was like oh missouri and she's was like oh fly over country and i was like bitch what the fuck are you insulting me right now and she said like three more things making fun of like where i was from it like mocking me and she was like what do you do for a living and she i was like oh i i like kinda working like technology in the internet and she's like oh capitalism really bothers me and i looked at her linkedin in advance she worked at le brothers that's where she worked out she worked at le brothers before she began why she out doing is he psycho i lady you weren't that le brothers you were literally a venture capitalist what he talking about and then at the end she was like by the way it's gonna be two thousand dollars i'm like lady you just said you hated capitalism alright what the hell is going on and so i got asked that night not to come back and i was dis disinfected from my psychedelic experience which probably shows that i need this more than anything but wow i was gonna say you definitely like those are some pretty bad vibes and you definitely do not wanna be on psychedelics you know with that 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 md mma 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 so that buddy's is who have done it and it's like changed their life and we had scott gallo 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 corn rose you know it's cool for other people but not for me corn and face tattoos and psychedelic retreats yeah 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 drug 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 so psilocybin 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 at like a much lower dose you could imagine being very helpful in smaller life decisions or for example you're starting new job you're trying to decide if you wanna join one company versus another trying to decide if you wanna quit you're trying to decide if you wanna 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 i reason i went was because i didn't have any income because 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 remembered 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 mas hierarchy he 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 hell they call 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 preventative 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 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 gonna become like a whole therapy session for me i'm telling about these doctors that i used to go like when i was homeless or like about my psychedelic getting kicked out and how i'm deaf oh my gosh every time you come on here man can you talk about this job stuff i find this sure the most interesting okay so a few things i think the most you know relevant thing to the listeners would be that ais is here bunch of people are freaking out out about jobs they're wondering you know do i still have a job are my school 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 reports 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 the white collar stuff so like in computer engineers graphic designers is 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 wanna get the max efficiency yet out of them they need to be cleaned 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 at physician assistance act but over the last two decades some of the fastest growing jobs were manic curious hr managers event planners massage therapists and compliance officers which is also interesting i have a i have a the small website called sam where 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 kim has talked to like all four hundred of them and the common complaint that they all have and it's like horrible for my business because sam's like the way it makes money is a user who needs an accountant for the 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 in like basically like bid on that clients 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 while that means that they can probably get talent for cheaper they have to worry about like oh am i gonna bring in this ai cool and then fire lay off 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 is like i can't hire fast enough i literally don't have people i have clients you wanna 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 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 is 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 always be able to work they have these things called travel nurses so a lot of hospitals are lacking nurses and until they'll pay 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 there's 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 i have no connection with these guys i just saw them online i believe that they are a 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 alright let's do one or two more what else what to make 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 dot fyi kind of an more aggregate level but if you take what glass door did glass door basically became the they had a bunch of other features but like why did people go to glass door one they wanted to see if a company had like good or bad reviews tb on if that was actually useful but then they also mostly wanted to see how much am i gonna 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 glass door 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 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 glass door which is crazy to me because even glass door 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 us surfing again the like requirement of people 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 are california based yeah so like would they list the sell 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 the not the same as the one that they're applying to right oh sorry so i just went to introduce in h i clicked a fund assistant controller i assume that that is related to accounting they're gonna work closely with assistant controllers in front so it's a finance accounting job it says the expected pay for this position is between two 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 always say that yep interesting so wow that is very intriguing i did not make but would it say like in order to be like a legit partner at asics z or something like well they even list like the jobs that are paid potentially millions of dollars they have to but the thing that is worth calling out is that they are only required as and through law to my understanding is to put base pay so obviously a lot of these jobs not just 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 glass door glass door 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 class or even found it let's that old it's not age thousand seven age old i would say i would say it's internet what is age old beat 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 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 wanna cover here i 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 called in immense world world you have heard me give this feel so many times but i okay so there's this book of and men's 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 use 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 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 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 and 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 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 bur whether it's bullet trains being inspired by the king fishers 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 throughout that 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 i'm fascinated keep just keep talking what reason 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 gl coast islands have you ever been there no i and i'm super ignorant i if i'm being honest i don't even know where it is but i know it's related to darwin i mean i'm i'm incredibly ignorant of gala yeah so okay the gala are i think it's six hundred miles west of ecuador so they're in the in the pacific they're the set of islands america right i mean i south america but yeah so i'm not i'm not the biggest south america central america expert i don't even need i don't much about it ecuador is the north end of south america okay 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 fifty or so countries the most kind of 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 story is when you have a bunch of islands the way that these different species evolve across the different islands especially 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 etcetera on that particular island and so he was like wait a minute why are there for example blue fitted boob which are a type of birds and red foot boob on two different islands and that was him witnessing some of these he did a lot with finch and i think some of the giant tortoise like he he he noticed these things and then that was his kind of like u to understanding evolution that's why like in all this stories 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 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 finch i think there's like seventeen kinds of finch finishes and the interesting part is like when does an animal become a separate species right so you take these two finishes they 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 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 three push ups another one might do five another one might do it like a little bigger or funky 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 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 from me and this is just me again i'm like this is nothing 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 long periods of time like you still like someone from australia will still make with someone from north america which who will still mate with someone from europe etcetera 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 lizard you seth do you know what a lot lizard is i don't is that embarrassing no it's these are it means are 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 sorta of says what part of the tracks you're from you know what i'm saying i hear you and so you're talking about gala eyelids and darwin and you know the eight senses that animals have but if i know a few people that know it few things about lot lizards if you wanna talk about that just saying what's this ass nature thing so if people want to go down the rabbit hole of exploring 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 ass nature has this there's all stuff you can click on so there's one about the african dart apparently that's the 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 asked like what's your favorite tool a lot of it ends up being what you expect chat ahrefs etcetera but there are a bunch of gems that come through like this and so by the way 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 called a book it was a book if was a book it exists in notion and there's videos in their 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 in fifteen years from now probably everyone will know it exists and so it's like this internet pipes is of course a book whatever you wanna 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 years there's a pretty wide range of you know this a 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 spend hours just looking at this like there's an article about like camels fur and how 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 soon the reason it's kind of interesting is like the the two that i've named are clothing related but like if you had a clothing related brand like some type of like it's stealing the story for you and 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 and business tech are always talking about the like lin ness 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 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 of like the otter where it's like it keeps it keeps heat in and cold water out so otter and i'm sure every single wet suit company has like stolen this marketing for their branding or whatever but like so it's like really fascinating so i go ahead well did you ever see you know mischief right mischief the mischief is the stunt like weird projects like they did like a a blood shoe for with lil na or something like that yeah yeah so they've they've done a ton of shoe collab they did want i think it was i don't remember if it was with jimmy kim or they just announced it but it was called the go stomp do you ever foresee 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 gold stopper and it was just like this is the candy that you suck on in each shell layer of shell it turns colors okay cool yeah exactly and so my like you might think this is a silly idea ever but when i went to the gala ghosts and i saw these red footage and these blue foot boob 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 cg 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 like that awful full idea oh it could be like if you know we could we could we could show your fertile or something it help but the whole lot was your thing have it's like those parties right where you wear like where they called the stoplight parties where you wear red yellow red yellow green that's 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 let's let's let's send here i think we got a ton of stuff steph smith thank you very much internet pipes steph smith dot io o is that your website technically yes i i haven't updated it in a while but yeah if people are interested in our internet pipes i think we dropped a code last time m m if people wanna use and they can get that that digits database of a hundred stats talk about shipbuilding disaster insurance you know tech literacy no mad visas all that good stuff alright god bless america we're done that's it that's a pod thanks them i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back