Sam and Shaan sit down with Steph Smith, who compiled a database of 100+ generation-defining data points she calls “digits.” They walk through five under-the-radar trends — hearing loss, drone and eVTOL regulation changes, psychedelics decriminalization, the fastest-growing jobs, and pay transparency — riffing on the business opportunities inside each one. The episode closes with a wide-ranging tangent on nature-inspired technology, Steph’s trip to the Galapagos Islands, and a hypothetical sneaker that changes color based on your health metrics.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Steph Smith (guest, Internet Pipes / A16Z)
Introduction: Generation-Defining Data Points [00:00:00]
Steph: We all run into these stats throughout our lives and most of us are just like, “Oh, that’s cool.” But I think there are some where it’s like, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100 plus of these and we can talk about some of them today.
Sam: Steph Smith, this is your 10th time on MFM. Is that right?
Steph: Not quite the tenth.
Sam: Steph Smith — the background, if you’re just now listening for the first time — she used to work with me at The Hustle, where she ran this thing called Trends, trends.co. And then she went and joined a16z, one of the most prominent venture capital firms. And your whole thing right now is finding up-and-coming trends, but you do it by looking at the data. Is that right?
Steph: I try to. I guess now after Trends, I run this thing called Internet Pipes. And that was kind of like Trends in the way that you want to surface things that other people don’t know about, but it’s also about how do you show people how to catch their own fish, if that makes sense.
Sam: And you come on every once in a while and you basically have all of this data — 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 how different people are pouncing on this trend. Is that right?
Steph: Yeah. Yeah. Lately — recently — I compiled this digits database. I call it digits. You guys call them “one chart businesses.” But basically these generation-defining stats. We’ve all heard about when Bezos saw the internet was growing at some crazy rate and he was like, “What does that mean? Well, it means that people will be buying stuff online in the future. Let me go create this crazy thing called Amazon.” And so we all run into these stats throughout our lives and most of us are just like, “Oh, that’s cool.” But I think there are some where it’s like, okay, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100 plus of these and we can talk about some of them today.
Sam: And the guy — one of the two guys who started your firm — Marc Andreessen, he has this famous quote where people ask him, “Marc, what’s most important? Is it having a good team? Is it having a good product? Or is it picking the right market?” And he goes, “It’s picking the right market. That’s easily the most important thing, because if you pick the right market, you could have a bad team and a bad product and the market will still pull the success out of you.”
Shaan: So, for example, you could have the world’s greatest team — brilliant, smart — they come up with an amazing product, but if it’s in a tiny market that people just don’t want, you’re going to lose. But if you are Coinbase in 2014 and crypto is all the rage, Coinbase.com crashed all the time. It wasn’t that good of a website, but people were begging for it and they put up with it and they used it and they pulled the company into fruition and made it a success.
Steph: And so you were going to show us potentially some of these markets.
Shaan: Yeah, maybe. But 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, I should go create this company called Coinbase.” And a bunch of other people were like, “I’m just going to go for a run. I’m going to go to my 9-to-5 and ignore that same thing.”
Trend #1: Hearing Loss [00:04:30]
Steph: So let’s start with one that I think you know pretty well, Sam — hearing loss. The stat, or the digit, is that nearly 2.5 billion people by 2050 are expected to experience hearing loss, with over 700 million requiring rehabilitation. And then I saw this interesting quote that kind of frames the takeaway: some project that hearing aids are about to become as common as reading glasses. You think about just how normalized reading glasses are. People wear them all the time. You have all these optometrists. It’s a very normal thing. Even if you think about the benefits that companies offer, vision is often part of that. And then if you think about where hearing is in that equation — it’s nowhere near the same trajectory yet. But if it’s true that billions of people are going to require hearing rehabilitation, and you even think about some of the other signals — like the fact that today we have AirPods in our ears. Many people in our circle, how many hours a day?
Sam: Like eight.
Steph: Exactly. That was not true ten years ago, right?
Sam: Wait. So first of all — I wear a hearing aid. I’ve had probably 10 or 12 surgeries on my ears. I was born with bad ears and I fought putting a hearing aid in because I didn’t want to look old. And a lot of times on this podcast people see me doing this — I lean in with my good ear instinctively. So I wear a hearing aid and they all suck. But why are more people needing a hearing aid? Is it because something’s going on or is this a normal number and there are just more people?
Steph: No, I think the technologies that we use are influencing a greater number of people who experience hearing loss. If you think about it, even as you said, there’s a cultural element to it too. I go to SoulCycle — the first year I went, no one’s putting in the earplugs. It’s so uncool. And then as I’ve been doing it for a few years, maybe 10 to 20% of the class is putting in the earplugs.
Sam: People put earplugs in because the class is too loud. The class is way too loud. And even think about the technologies we have now that signal some of this — your Apple Watch will tell you when you’re in a SoulCycle class, “This is damaging your ears. If you do this for more than 10 minutes, you will impair your ears in a permanent way.”
Steph: 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 and glasses were not cool. And then now you see people and you’re like, “Man, you look so much cooler with the glasses you wear.” Like I almost wish I needed glasses.
Sam: That’s how I used to feel about braces when I was in third grade. If you had braces, you were cool. Like, I need braces.
Shaan: I don’t know if I ever felt that way about braces.
Sam: Well, that’s probably why I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 21 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 were all types of promises like, “This will listen to the words people are saying and repeat it in your hearing aid.” And it was stupid. And honestly, I paid two grand for a hearing aid. They’re really expensive. And the app is horrible. These are not good products. One time 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.
Steph: You should found a company in this space because you know all the problems. But I have been seeing a lot of people getting — have you heard of Loop, the earplug company? They’re just these kind of nifty-looking earplugs. If you go to something like a workout class, they give you these disposable bright yellow earplugs that you can’t even get into your ear. And I think there’s going to be — again, on the cultural side — how do you create products that not only solve the problem and have utility, but also shift in this direction of, “Oh, I look cool, I feel cool, I want to wear this thing.”
Sam: Dude, this company Loop is going to kill it. They sell $50 earplugs.
Steph: Yes. And it’s super smart marketing. If you search “Loop earplugs,” they’ve got a page and they’re like, “Earplugs for events.” They’re not marketing to the everyday user necessarily. It’s like, “Oh, you’re going to a concert, you’re going to the Super Bowl, it’s going to be really loud, and these look really cool. People don’t even realize they’re earplugs.”
Sam: All right, let’s move on from hearing stuff. But one last fact — did you know this is one of the reasons I finally got the hearing aid? If you have hearing loss and you don’t address it, the increase in risk of getting dementia jumps significantly — like four or five times. And I believe there are two reasons. One, that part of your brain that processes sound — because it’s not working — 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 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, you’re going to be mentally permanently zoned out. I believe those are the two theories as to why that happens. So yeah, getting your hearing fixed is a big deal.
Steph: Rounding out the hearing loss thing — something we didn’t quite touch on is that hearing aids went over the counter in 2022, which means you don’t need to get a prescription. And that also, I think, is opening the aperture.
Sam: And you guys often talk about these policy or legislation-related shifts.
Shaan: Yeah, we call them regulation inflections. Something changes drastically. So for example, a negative inflection is like New York bans Airbnb. There’s an inflection where short-term rentals go to zero. Versus if they said it’s allowed — there’s a massive change.
Steph: Yeah, exactly.
Trend #2: Drone Regulation and eVTOL Aircraft [00:16:00]
Steph: So one of them is the FAA has made a few changes recently and I want to call out two. One of them is around drones. Consumer drones have existed for quite a while. I have a DJI drone. People use them for anything from just filming their neighborhood to real estate agents capturing better imagery of their properties. 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 visual aperture — beyond what you can actually see — well, it enables things like drone delivery. There are companies like Zipline. Amazon has been playing around in this space. That changes the game.
Another change the FAA made recently is they started approving these electric vertical takeoff and landing companies — the eVTOL companies. And that was in the news, but what wasn’t covered as much was the fact that this was the first new category of aircraft in nearly 80 years. The one just before this was called light sport aircraft. You know what light sport aircraft is?
Sam: No.
Steph: Helicopters, small business jets — these are things where each individual category is a massive industry. And if you think about super wealthy people who take helicopters, who take these business jets — that’s meaningfully changed their lives and each one of those is a vertical. eVTOL — again, this is the first new category of aircraft in 80 years. We’re in the early stages. The word is “EVTOL.” Electric vertical takeoff and landing. There are some companies playing in this space — Joby Aviation is one, Archer is another.
Sam: We had Brett Adcock on the pod and he started Archer, which is publicly traded. I think they have some huge deals with United and things like that.
Steph: Yeah. So if you think about this more long term — these are designed specifically to operate within cities, taking people from one end of New York to the other, airport trips. And if you think about what this parallels — it’s not the mega Boeing air jets, it’s actually more like cars. And if you think about how cities have been oriented around cars and what businesses have been built from there — I think these are two legislative changes that are going to meaningfully reshape the way we all engage, long term.
Sam: One of our friends — Nikita, who a lot of people know — he was telling me that he invested in a company where if you’re in LA and you call 911, the police will take however long to get there. Let’s say 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe even just 10 minutes. But they send out a drone right away to see what’s going on. Have you seen that?
Steph: Yeah, we at a16z have invested in a few of these companies. They get there more quickly, but they also have a safety angle. If someone calls 911, sometimes they’re just reporting like, “I think there’s a scary person on the highway doing X” or “I think there’s someone in this alley and they have a gun.” And the ability for these drones to not only get there more quickly, but to validate the statement — “Oh actually, that’s not a gun, that’s a poster in a tube” — that changes their ability to actually react to the situation.
Sam: Yeah. Just some guy wanting to show off his Lamborghini poster from the Scholastic Book Fair instead of a gun.
Steph: Happens all the time.
Sam: Yeah. Been there. Been there. What are some other ways people could pounce on this?
Steph: Well, the thing I’m trying to drive home is that these are obviously going to take years if not decades to influence us in major ways. But I want to encourage people to ask questions like — for example, if there is drone delivery at scale, think about even the ways that we package goods. You package a good to sit in a truck to travel across the country and it needs to have certain levels of padding to make it unbreakable. All of those things potentially change if we’re able to pick something up and drop it off a mile away. So I think it’s just encouraging people to ask: if this is true, what are the second- and third-order effects? If it’s true that there’s going to be a lot more autonomy, how quickly does that ramp up?
Take Waymo — a lot of people think of it as just Phoenix or San Francisco. I just read an article saying Waymos are already taking up 20% of Uber rides in Austin. This stuff can move pretty quickly.
Sam: I had this thought the other day — I had to send someone a letter in California. Isn’t it insane that for what — 40, 50 cents? — I can send a letter 3,500 miles and it will reliably get to pretty much any house I want in a matter of four or five days. That is insane. USPS, UPS, FedEx — these companies are wild. That’s got the biggest moat ever. That is so freaking hard to build. But then there is the last-mile component, and that’s this whole other thing. And to think that drones — that’s what’s going to be happening. It’s pretty wild to imagine the moat a company in that space has.
It’s hard to comprehend because if you think 50 years ago to try to explain to someone, “No, you’re not going to go to Walmart anymore. You’re not going to go anywhere. Everything’s going to come to your door” — to think how that’s going to change in the next 20 or 50 years is hard to comprehend.
Steph: Totally. And to your point — are people on this podcast going to go create the next Waymo or the next Zipline? These companies that have been working on these problems for years and years? Maybe not. But okay — if a significant number of cars on the road are autonomous, who’s cleaning those cars? Who is creating the LIDAR that goes into the cars so that they can actually drive safely? Who is 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?
All of these are new businesses. The same way that when Airbnb was big, the answer wasn’t “go create another Airbnb.” It was “go create the cleaning companies and the operations companies to run an Airbnb.” There’s still a lot of opportunity on the edges of these major trends.
Trend #3: Psychedelics Decriminalization [00:31:00]
Shaan: All right, let’s do another one. Let’s go to the psychedelics thing.
Steph: So this one is pretty simple. Psilocybin has been illegal for a long time in the United States and elsewhere. It was decriminalized in the first state — Oregon — in 2020, and has subsequently become decriminalized in a host of other states and cities, with lots of legislation pending. And this is another one where we’re talking about what’s going to 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. Again, a policy change.
Sam: I think we have a few Hampton members that have these psychedelic retreats. Did I ever tell you that I tried to go to one? I think it was in 2018. Right when the stuff was getting popular. I knew this person — friend of a friend — Jack introduced me, this person who was supposedly a shaman. And I was thinking it’s going to be some brown dude in a sheet saying namaste as I walk into their house. They asked us to go to a meeting in advance to see if we were a good fit. So I go to the meeting and it’s just this normal-looking white lady in San Francisco in a fancy condo. We sit down for dinner so she can get to know us, to see if it’s a good fit for this psychedelic experience.
And she does a few things. She’s like, “So where are you from?” And I was like, “Oh, Missouri.” And she’s like, “Oh, flyover country.” And I was like — bitch, what? Are you insulting me right now? And she said three more things making fun of where I was from, mocking me. And she was like, “What do you do for a living?” And I was like, “Oh, I kind of work in technology and the internet.” And she’s like, “Capitalism really bothers me.” And I had looked at her LinkedIn in advance — she worked at Lehman Brothers. That’s where she worked before she became a shaman doing psychedelics. I go, “Lady, you worked at Lehman Brothers. You were literally a banker. What are you talking about?” And then at the end she was like, “By the way, it’s $2,000.” I’m like, “Lady, you just said you hated capitalism. What the hell is going on?”
And so I got asked not to come back that night and was disinvited from my psychedelic experience — which probably shows that I need this more than anything.
Steph: Well, I was going to say, those are some pretty bad vibes and you definitely do not want to be on psychedelics with that kind of introduction.
Sam: I got kicked out of my psychedelic group. I wanted — I forget what it was, ketamine or MDMA or something — but everyone said it was dope and I was like, let’s see what this is about. And I got kicked out. But I have seen a bunch of these retreats. I think it’s cool. I’ve got a couple vet buddies who have done it and it changed their life. And we had Scott Galloway on here and he says it’s been really helpful. So I’m on board with them. Just not for me. It’s kind of like cornrows — cool for other people, not for me. Cornrows and face tattoos and psychedelic retreats.
Shaan: Any other interesting opportunities with the psychedelics?
Steph: I think maybe the marketer in me — and I’m not trying to push psychedelics — but I think a lot of people think of them as either: you do it if you’re just a druggie and you do these all the time, or you do it if you’re in an impaired mental state and you need to get past something. Like you were a vet with terrible experiences. There’s a lot of ketamine-assisted therapy and psilocybin therapy popping up. But it’s often to solve some kind of negative experience and get past it.
If this does become more normalized, I think at a much lower dose you could imagine it being very helpful in smaller life decisions. You’re starting a new job, you’re trying to decide between two companies, 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 on — understanding how they relate to 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, or specifically related to the difficult and very meaningful decision of having kids. I think there’s something interesting there.
Sam: I completely agree. That’s actually a really cool idea, because for example, if you’re in a certain social class you don’t have the same problems as someone who’s not in that class. When I quit drinking, I went to basically a mental health clinic in SoMa and it was me and everyone else was homeless. I went because I didn’t have any income — I had just started my company, saw it on Yelp, and went. I stuck with the same doctor for like 10 years. She was amazing. And then at one point I remember telling her certain problems I had and this woman had never worked with anyone who had similar types of problems because she wasn’t used to a client like mine. And I was desperately seeking a therapist who had clients at maybe a higher tier on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It was so hard to find someone who could serve that need. So it’s very interesting to have a different genre of psychedelic guides for people with different needs.
Steph: Yeah. 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. Like, “We only provide therapy for when there is a clear issue.” And now therapy has expanded a lot — people do it preventatively, people do it because they just like their therapist and need someone to talk to. There are many different reasons. And you could imagine that if this is going to be something that is no longer illegal, people are building businesses around it, and they can build those businesses for these other needs. There doesn’t need to be a problem.
Sam: Is this going to become like a whole therapy session for me? I’m telling you about doctors I used to go to, my psychedelic getting kicked out, how I’m deaf…
Shaan: Every time you come on here, man.
Trend #4: Fastest-Growing Jobs and AI [00:44:00]
Steph: Okay. So a few things. I think the most relevant thing to listeners is that AI is here, a bunch of people are freaking out about jobs, wondering if they still have a job, if their skills are still relevant. And so I think it’s interesting to discuss: what are the new jobs on the horizon? What are the existing jobs that are going to become more important? And I have some other ideas we can talk about.
But first — did you know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports every year on the fastest-growing jobs? Do you know what they are?
Sam: Fastest-growing jobs. White collar stuff. So like computer engineers, graphic designers, anything involving computers.
Steph: So there’s like of the top five — there’s data scientists, security analysts, but there’s also wind turbine service technicians, solar panel installers, nurses are on there. Further down the list, some interesting ones are in the climate installation and operations space. One interesting thing I didn’t realize — 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 if you want max efficiency out of them, they need to be cleaned every 6 to 12 months. So who’s cleaning those solar panels? That’s an opportunity on its own.
Other things on the list — physician assistants, actuaries. But over the last two decades, some of the fastest-growing jobs were manicurists, HR managers, event planners, massage therapists, and compliance officers, which is also interesting.
Sam: I have this small website called Sam’s List where you can find accountants. It’s like Yelp for accountants. It’s a tiny website, but I think we have 300 or 400 accountants on it. The woman who runs it, Kimmy, has talked to all 400 of them, and the common complaint — and it’s horrible for my business — is that they don’t need more business. They say, “We have enough business. What we need is more accountants. I can’t hire fast enough. No one wants to be an accountant and we simply do not have people who want to work here.”
Steph: And by the way, those are exactly the industries people should be looking at for building AI products. If you think about even just the selling motion for any new product — if you’re going to a company that has ample demand and there’s a very liquid market for talent, well, that means they can probably get talent for cheaper, they have to worry less about, “Am I going to bring in this AI tool and then fire a bunch of my existing staff?” Those are all considerations. But in the world of accounting where there’s a firm that literally can’t hire fast enough — they have clients who want to pay them and they don’t have the staff to facilitate the work — it’s an easy sell to say, “I can support you in this way.” So AI is obviously being applied to a lot of obvious areas, but these industries where there’s not enough talent — that’s where folks should be looking, in my opinion.
Sam: There were two different members in Hampton who had companies in the nursing space. There’s a huge shortage of nurses in America. It’s a great job — pays really well, good benefits. The downside is you’re obviously working with sick people and it can be tragic sometimes, but there’s a huge need and you’ll always be able to work. They have these things called travel nurses, where a lot of hospitals lack nurses and so they’ll pay extra money to have someone come and stay for 3 months — a 5-day block, a 3-month block. There’s a company called Trusted Health — I have no connection with these guys, I just saw them online — I believe they’re a unicorn. I think they’ve raised funding in the billion-dollar-plus range.
Steph: Yeah, I’ve heard that’s a huge industry. And the fact that — we talked about it last time — the silver tsunami. A lot more nurses are needed and the concentration of that talent is not always where it needs to be, so it makes sense.
Pay Transparency Laws: The Glassdoor Opportunity [00:52:30]
Steph: All right, let’s do one or two more. One note about the world of jobs — I want to get your take on this. We’ve talked before about pay transparency, and there are over a dozen states that have put pay transparency laws into action. That’s why, in California for example, you go to a website and see a job posting with how much that job makes.
One super simple opportunity I haven’t seen — but I’m sure someone’s building this — is basically just the Glassdoor for open salaries. There’s levels.fyi, which is a more aggregate level. But if you take what Glassdoor did — Glassdoor basically became the place people went to for two reasons. One, to see if a company had good or bad reviews. But mostly, people wanted to know: how much am I going to make at this company? If I’m negotiating, what should I ask for? And that relied on people who worked at that company to submit their salary to Glassdoor. They built up this database and that was their moat.
Today, all of that is online. Every time a company posts a job, they’re saying how much they pay. And I have not seen anyone aggregate this information in a meaningful way. 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. So someone should just go and scrape these salaries off of different company websites and build up this database, completely bypassing the requirement of people needing to submit their salary themselves.
Sam: Is the range huge? So for example, a16z — I assume they’re California-based, so they’d list their salaries?
Steph: They do. And lots of other companies do too. And people only notice this when they’re in the job process. So they have a snippet of time and often the jobs listed are not the same as the one they’re applying to.
Sam: Oh, sorry — I just went to a16z. I clicked “fund assistant controller.” I assume that’s related to accounting. It says the expected pay for this position is between $216,000 and $252,000, but the actual starting pay may vary based on a range of factors including experience.
Steph: They have to say that.
Sam: Yeah, they always say that. Interesting. Wow, that is very intriguing. Would it say — like in order to be a legit partner at a16z — will they even list those jobs that are paid potentially millions of dollars?
Steph: They have to. But it’s worth calling out that they are only required, through law as I understand it, to put base pay. Obviously a lot of these jobs — not just at a16z — have other mechanisms for rewarding people, so 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, this information is out there, and you take this company — when was Glassdoor even founded?
Sam: 2007.
Steph: So it’s not that old. It was great for the first version of the internet, and now there is a change in legislation here — fitting with our theme — but also the technology exists for someone to be able to scrape this really easily and aggregate this information across not a few companies but many, many companies.
Trend #5: Nature-Inspired Technology and the Galapagos [01:01:00]
Sam: What else do you want to cover here? I read a book that you suggested because of this whole animal thing. It was called — the animal senses book?
Steph: It’s called An Immense World. It’s by this guy called Ed Yong. And whenever I explain it, it sounds really obvious, but “obvious” does not do the book justice. It’s about the fact that we as humans are familiar with five senses — this is how we interpret the world. Even within those five senses, they are not equal. We talked about hearing, but sight, for sure, is the sense that not only humans tend to use most to interpret the world, but also if you benchmark that versus other species — other than birds — we have the most precise vision of the animal kingdom.
I say that because this book is about recognizing that yes, this is how humans see the world, but every animal is uniquely tuned to their environment, their prey, how they survive. And for many animals, sight is not the most important sense. There are senses that we don’t have that they use to engage. And even within the five we’re familiar with, it’s worth acknowledging that, for example, the spectrum of light that we see or the spectrum of temperatures we’re comfortable in are simply not the way other animals exist. If you take an arctic squirrel or a camel and put them on hot plates, they will not move at temperatures that we think are crazy and uncomfortable, because they are comfortable. Or UV light, which we can’t really interpret — other animals will react to that.
That’s my spiel about 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 I’m bringing this up is because there is this converging world of nature and technology, which has always existed to an extent. But at the same time, for a long time people thought technology was kind of adversarial to nature — humans were moving forward, progressing, leaving nature behind, sometimes destroying it. But I think there are tons of examples — whether it’s Velcro being modeled off of burdock burrs, whether it’s bullet trains being inspired by the kingfisher’s beak, whether it’s NASA learning how to design airplane wings to be more like birds — we not only learn a lot from nature in the way we build technology, but there’s also 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’s my nature-technology rant.
Sam: Keep going. I’m fascinated. Keep talking. Now on this document you were talking about a trip you took — does that weave into this?
Steph: Yeah. So I just came back from the Galapagos Islands. Have you ever been there?
Sam: No. And I’m super ignorant. If I’m being honest, I don’t even know where it is. But I know it’s related to Darwin.
Steph: Yeah. So the Galapagos are about 600 miles west of Ecuador — they’re in the Pacific. They’re part of Ecuador. But a lot of people know them because of Darwin. They are, at least from my perspective — I’ve been to 50 or so countries — the most nature-focused trip I’ve ever done, where you actually feel like you’re entering their world versus the opposite. And the reason it fits into Darwin’s story is that when you have a bunch of islands, the way that different species evolve across them — especially land-bearing creatures who can’t make their way from one island to another — they end up evolving differently due to the unique fauna, the unique environment, set of predators, etc. on that particular island.
And so Darwin was like, “Wait a minute, why are there bluefooted boobies and red-footed boobies on two different islands?” He noticed these things — he did a lot with finches and some of the giant tortoises — and that was his kind of aha moment for understanding evolution.
Sam: I never heard this story. I knew nothing about Darwin. This is actually the first time I’ve ever heard the aha-moment story. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it.
Steph: Yeah. He did a lot of his research there. With the finches in particular, I think there are like 17 kinds. And the interesting part is — when does an animal become a separate species? So you take two finches that exist on different islands and they’re evolving. At what point do they become a new species? It’s when they no longer mate with each other.
One fun fact — they had these lava lizards. These lava lizards do mating dances, which for them are push-ups — at least that’s how humans describe it. But because they’re different species that have evolved on their unique islands, one lizard might do three push-ups, another one might do five, another one might do them a little bigger or funkier. And what’s crazy is they will not mate with each other. If you take one lava lizard from one island and the male is doing push-ups for the female with just slight differences in how it’s being done, it’s like — nope, we no longer mate.
One interesting takeaway for me — and this has nothing to do with business — is that that’s never happened to humans. Now, there are some bad historical examples of segregation and stuff, but for the most part, we’ve existed on different continents, evolved, and over very long periods of time you’ll still see someone from Australia mate with someone from North America, who will still mate with someone from Europe. I just thought that was interesting — I wonder why that is.
Sam: I’ve heard of a bunch of friends of mine doing push-ups to impress some lot lizards, but never lava lizards. Steph, do you know what a lot lizard is?
Steph: I don’t. Is that embarrassing?
Sam: No, it means you’re much more sophisticated than me. A lot lizard is a prostitute that serves truck drivers.
Steph: Oh, that makes sense.
Sam: I feel like if you know what a lot lizard is, that sort of says what part of the tracks you’re from. So, you’re talking about the Galapagos Islands and Darwin and the eight senses that animals have. But I know a few people that know a few things about lot lizards if you want to talk about that.
Ask Nature: Technology Inspired by Biology [01:14:00]
Sam: What’s this Ask Nature thing?
Steph: So if people want to go down the rabbit hole of exploring — not just “let me go look at pictures of animals,” but understanding how animals produce color, what are the examples of technology being inspired by natural design, for example a search algorithm inspired by ants — there’s this website called Ask Nature. And they have this whole database you can click through. So there’s one about the African darter, apparently a type of bird that has a very special feather that is incredibly water-resistant, and then it tells you different applications that this feather or inspiration from it could have. It talks about the strategy of how it works and the potential for copying it.
Sam: This is amazing. How did you find this website?
Steph: Someone shared it within Internet Pipes. We have this survey whenever people join, which just asks, “What’s your favorite tool?” A lot of it ends up being what you’d expect — ChatGPT, etc. But there are a bunch of gems that come through, like this.
And by the way, Internet Pipes is literally tons of different resources for finding things. So what the product started as — I hate the term “course” but it was a course — it exists in Notion, there are videos and text, and now there’s a community and databases like the digits database. But the origin was: the most common question I get asked is, “You find all this cool stuff online — how do you find it?” And Internet Pipes was showing people how to find this information through a series of tools. That’s why it’s called pipes — use this tool to make sense of all the purchases happening on Amazon, all the pages that exist on Wikipedia, all the searches happening on Google. This data exists. And by the way, we’re at a unique period where it didn’t quite exist 15 years ago, and in 15 years from now, probably everyone will know it exists. So it’s this course — book, whatever you want to call it — to learn how to do that.
Sam: And you’ve made a lot of money off of it so far, haven’t you?
Steph: Yes.
Sam: That’s pretty dope. When you answer just “yes,” that means I’m not going to ask how much.
Steph: Six figures.
Sam: There’s a pretty wide range there. Six figures could be like $100,000.
Steph: It’s eight figures now.
Sam: Got it. This is a really cool website. I could spend hours on this. There’s an article about camels’ fur and how it keeps camels cool in the desert but also warm at night, and why that particular type of fur is special for this. And it’s kind of interesting — the two examples you’ve named are clothing-related. If you had a clothing brand, this is like stealing the story for you — or not stealing, it’s giving you the hook.
Steph: Exactly. And by the way, people in our world in business and tech are always talking about the Lindy-ness of something — how long something has existed. And it’s like, you are learning from millions of years of evolution. These animals have become purely optimized for this purpose. And the marketer in both of us is — what products could you make off of this? Like the otter — it keeps heat in and cold water out. Every wetsuit company has probably stolen this marketing for their branding. It’s just really fascinating.
The Color-Changing Sneaker Idea [01:20:00]
Steph: Did you ever see Mischief? Mischief is the company that does weird projects — like they did a blood shoe with Lil Nas X.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. They’ve done a ton of shoe collabs.
Steph: They did one — I don’t remember if it was with Jimmy Kimmel or they just announced it — but it was called the Gobstopper. Did you ever see this?
Sam: No.
Steph: I thought they were kind of cool. Basically the bottom of the sneaker comes out gray at first, and then as you wear it more — as the shoe wears away — it looks like a gobstopper. Which is the candy that you suck on, and each shell layer turns colors.
Sam: Okay, cool. Yeah, exactly.
Steph: And so — you might think this is the silliest idea ever — but when I went to the Galapagos and I saw these red-footed and blue-footed boobies… and by the way, the reason these birds have different colored feet is because of what they eat. 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 — stick with me here — related to health in some way. Let’s say you’re wearing a CGM, and your shoes change color based on whether you’re in range or based on some other metric you care about. You’re able to signal something in a way that changes through your feet. Awful idea?
Sam: Well, it could be like — we could show your fertility or something. It would help with the whole lot lizard thing. Those parties where you wear — what are they called? Stoplight parties, where you wear red, yellow, or green. We could do stoplight shoes.
Steph: Maybe that’s a better version of the idea.
Sam: We just put all of our bloodwork on our bodies. Like, “I don’t have a thyroid issue, I’m good.”
Steph: Your Function Health results show up in like a pendant around your neck.
Sam: Let’s end here. I think we got a ton of stuff. Steph Smith, thank you very much. Internet Pipes — steph smith.io — is that your website?
Steph: Technically, yes. 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 that, and they can get that digits database of 100 stats. We talk about ship building, disaster insurance, tech literacy, nomad visas, all that good stuff.
Sam: All right. God bless America. We’re done. That’s it. That’s the pod. Thanks, MFM.