Steph Smith: “This opportunity is totally overlooked”

Introduction to Steph Smith

0:00All right, Steph Smith's here. Steph is back. And your whole thing is finding up-and-coming trends. I call them gold mines. Some people just come back and show you a little piece of gold. Steph shows you where the mine is. We all run into these generation-defining stats throughout our lives, and most of us are just like, oh, that's cool. And so I compiled 100 plus of these. There's so many here. I love this one. Breakup Cake. Nerd Neck. The Dyson Mask. A search algorithm that was inspired by ants. I need to write this down. If you want to go down the rabbit hole,

0:30I think there's a growing business here.

One chart businesses

0:43We use this phrase, one chart businesses, because you just see this chart in it like you said, well, that thing's obvious. Just get into that industry. You have one here. You said, in the United States, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that nursing will be the fastest-growing occupation between 2020 and 2030, growing in number by 275,000 jobs. That's insane. That's insane. Talk to me about this nursing thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, it's like a pretty clear trend

1:16that comes with a bunch of people getting older. Everyone's talking about AI, and that's great. But what about the billions of people around the globe that are, you know, 65-plus that are just going to need physical human support? So nursing's one area. Also, the rest of that stat talks about in Japan, the number of nursing homes has risen nearly 50% over the last decade. And Japan is interesting because it's kind of like this early case study where they've hit this silver tsunami a little earlier than a lot of other countries.

1:47Why Japan? I think they just hit the declining birth rate earlier than many other countries. And so, you know, another interesting, you could say, opportunity, maybe just an interesting thing for individuals to explore. But because Japan hit the, like, silver tsunami a little earlier, they have this interesting thing where they're giving away free houses or super cheap houses, sometimes free. They're called IKEAs, A-K-I-Y-A. I was in Japan this summer, and we did a walking tour and they took us around

2:18and they were showing us these houses and they're like, see this house? And it was like in the middle of Osaka. It was a little run down for sure, but they were like, this house is free. And we were like, what do you mean? But because there's so many of these people who have grown old, unfortunately passed away, and then there's also some social aspects of the IKEAs where, in some cases, not all, because Japanese people really care about status. If, let's say, they grew up in a poor neighborhood, their parents passed away,

2:49and then they've moved into, you know, a different social strata, they don't want to claim the house because they're like, I don't want to be associated with that neighborhood. And there's over, there's tons of articles on this, over 8 million IKEAs that are being given away by the government, or again, sometimes for very cheap. Well, have you heard the theory about Osaka and how a lot of people are lying about their age? Oh, yeah, the Blue Zones and how... Yeah, there's a book called The Blue Zones. And basically, like, I read it 10 years ago or something,

3:21and I was like, this is my Bible for living a long, healthy life. But the idea is that someone studied Osaka's population, and they found that too many people claimed to have the same birth date in Osaka to the point where the only way that this could be possibly true is if many of them committed fraud in order to say that they are of a certain age so they can start receiving Social Security and other, like, benefits that you get when you hit a certain age. And so it potentially puts a lot of, like,

3:52this idea of we study this particular population for old health or, you know, old people and, like, looking at, like, wow, they're so healthy when they're just liars and they're actually a lot younger. They're a lot younger, potentially, than they've said they are. What are some other stats about those? I love talking to you because you just have, like, you actually have the data and the stats instead of just, like, guessing. Okay, so we didn't really drill down as much on the, I mean, you talked about nursing homes and assisted living. So let me give you one more from NumLock, which, by the way, is a great newsletter.

4:22Walt Hickey runs it. And people, I feel like MFM listeners would love it. It's great because you talk about these one-chart businesses. I've done a thread on something similar, and I call them digits, but he calls them just numbers, right? So basically, every single day, actually, he sends a newsletter of maybe five or so different, just small paragraphs. And each paragraph has just, like, one statistic. And I like his because some of them are really important, like, you know, the silver tsunami and how that's going to impact things much greater than ourselves.

4:52But then sometimes it's like there's this random gerbil that has infested homes in South Carolina or something like that. This is awesome. Yeah. He sent this paragraph about assisted living. So let me just read this out. This is directly from NumLock. From 2004 to 2021, the median annual price of assisted living increased 31% faster than inflation and has hit $54,000 per year. This is the crazy stat to me. There are 31,000 assisted living facilities in the United States.

5:23Four out of every five are run as for-profits and half of all the operators in the industry are clearing annual returns of 20% or more than it costs to operate. With 850,000 older Americans living within assisted living, the rents are getting jacked up. So I don't actually know how assisted living businesses are valued. Like, is it considered, like, a real estate valuation where it's just, like, a way to finance or pay for real estate? Or is it considered, like, a proper operating business?

5:54Like, I guess, you know, like hotels are classified as real estate. I would assume that's the case of which 20% is fantastic. 20% were operating profit on a proper, like, internet business. That's not that great. But if it's on real estate, that's really great. However, when I read this, I think, yeah, that's lucrative. I don't want to operate this. That sounds like the worst thing ever. You'd have a funeral a day. I would love to invest in a nursing home fund, but I would not want to operate a nursing home.

6:25Well, what I'll say is, I mean, I have parents that are getting older, and there's also tons of assisted living for not just elderly, right? People with mental illness or who need other support. And I think what I've seen from, like, exploring this space anecdotally is that most of the options really suck. As in, like, you don't really feel great about sending your parent or loved one to these places. And so I haven't explored this deeply enough. This might exist. So if folks are listening and they know of this, I would love to hear about it.

6:55But, like, imagine the premium version of assisted living where you feel really, really good about sending your grandparent, your mom, your sister, whatever it is, to one of these places. And obviously, you know, the price would have to go way up. But people are already, like, this stat is saying they're spending $54,000 per year as the average. And so, you know, for the wealthy, like, wouldn't you pay five times that to send your loved one to something a lot better? Yeah, and I think people do.

7:26Like, I know people who have people in nursing homes and they spend $20,000 or $30,000 a month. It's insane.

7:34It's absolutely insane. Okay, so you're eight minutes into this episode and you already can tell that Steph's superpower is spotting generational defining trends. She has spent hours pulling the most surprising under-the-radar stats and data, all for the purpose of basically uncovering interesting business ideas. She's put it all together in a thing called the Digits Database. And for you guys, the MFM audience, she has decided to give it away for free. And so if you want it, just click the link below in the description and grab it.

8:04All right, back to the show.

Sports data and trends

8:05What do you guys want to do next? Let's do the sports one. What's the sports data thing? Okay, so there's this website that aggregates a bunch of reports on sports, which obviously people love. Americans love sports. So they have like a state of pickleball report, a state of the industry report. I want you guys to guess what the fastest growing sports are. The 25 fastest growing sports according to this SFM. FIA research,

8:36which is the sports and fitness industry association. What do you guys think were the top fastest growing sports in America? I already opened it and I could tell you I wouldn't have guessed one of them. I already opened it as well. So the game is over, but I would have said pickleball and I would have said that game paddle. Isn't there like another game that's just like pickleball? That's what I would have guessed. It does seem like pickleball is number one, but number two, I would have never guessed alpine touring. I don't even know what that really is. I think it's just like off country skiing.

9:09And then I have never heard of it. What is winter fat biking? It's awesome is what it is. It's like, so I need to research. These fat tire bikes are really popular right now. So it's basically a bike with just a really fat tire is what it is. And they are, they're sick looking. Is this a sport? Yeah, it's just mountain bike riding, but the tire is particularly fat. That's all it is. You know, what do we say? We like big and small things.

9:40Imagine a bicycle that could drive on a beach. Got it. Number four, off course golf. Interesting. And then number seven is trail running. I can definitely see that. That is, I get so many videos on my Instagram of trail running. Dude, I was at a dinner and somebody said something as a joke and I put up my finger to my lips and I said, shh, I need to write this down because it was an incredible idea. The guy goes, you put your finger on his lips and then my own lips bash back and forth.

10:11And I was like, say no more. I don't want to lose this idea. Let me write this down. He said something. He goes, yeah, I do the suburban triathlon. And I go, what? And he goes, yeah, the suburban triathlon. you walk a half mile to this bar, you drink two beers and then you go play nine holes of golf. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, it's the suburban, I forgot he said the suburban Ironman or the suburban triathlon.

10:42And I was like, this has legs. And I really think that if somebody created some kind of thing for, you know, out of shape, middle-aged guys to do, they'll do it. And I think if you make it, if you brand it almost like as the non-fit person triathlon and it's got to have like some version of eating and drinking being one of the legs, dude, that's the next tough mudder. I think that could be a massive, a massive trend that people start doing.

11:13This is, this is definitely something that I think would appeal to people. What do you guys think? Yeah. Yeah. And that's beautiful branding.

11:21We're working backwards from the brand. We really don't even know actually what goes underneath. It's just the idea of the suburban triathlon. It's like you bike to the grocery store, you chug a beer, and then you like, I don't know, run an errand. And that's the suburban triathlon and you got to do it on Saturday morning. Next, goldmine.

Air pollution and health trends

11:43So I love this one, Our World in Data. So people have maybe heard of this website. It's a website that tries to aggregate data that is a reflection of what's really happening in the world. So it includes things like data on poverty. It includes really niche things. Like I found, I went through the website and there was a graph that related to the day of the year with peak cherry tree blossoms in Kyoto. Right? Like so random, but they're collecting data on this. And I checked this website a few years ago and I want to say

12:14there was maybe 200 graphs on here. And if you go to their ourworldindata.org slash charts page, I want to say there's thousands of different data points now. I just clicked on one. It's adjusted net savings per capita from 1970 to 2020. And you can see like how much per capita a variety of countries are saving. So like it's just like literally thousands of like different charts. You know, Sean talks about these like one chart businesses. One of them is this

12:45population of the world distribution. So basically this is a chart that is looking at how many, of all the people in the world, how many are young right now, meaning under 15, how many are working age, 15 to 65, and how many are elderly, 65 plus. And the shocking thing about this chart, this is a one chart, this is a one chart business right here, which is the elderly curve goes from today, right? Like kind of like the 2020, early 2020s, where it's under 1 billion. It's by far the smallest line

13:16to it's going to cross over the young population and be at, you know, by the end of the, where this has it projected, 2.5 billion. And so that's the biggest grower, the working, the working age one kind of flattens out, the young one kind of goes down and the elderly one has this huge spike. And so if you're building anything that's in the elder care that you're going to own for let's say 10, 20 years, you have this immense tailwind behind you, which is just that the population of people who fit, you know, the customer base is going to grow

13:47dramatically. We're going to go from under 1 billion people to over 2.5 billion people that are in that market. And so that's a, it's, you know, a case to say, you know, if you go there, let's say, let's say it's like real estate, like if you owned senior living facilities or something like that, you would be able to just benefit from the fact that, oh, occupancy is going to go up over time in this, in this way. Now, of course, technology may, may, may completely upend things and AI and all that, but you could see these like huge trends that are going to be very hard to reverse. So it's hard to imagine

14:17a scenario that we, we change the direction of these lines. It would take like a whole societal shift, population level shift to change where these lines are going. There's so many here, which ones stick out to you, Steph? So I just linked another one that I think, again, is this like one chart business. This one's hard to get involved with, but I think it's, it's the lithium production. If you pull that up, I just linked it in the document and you can see that lithium production, which obviously is the core ingredient in many of our batteries,

14:48is concentrated in just a few countries. A lot of it's in China. A lot of it's in a few countries in South America. That's another example of just as you're browsing through a bunch of these, these charts, I think that one jumps out. But the one I wanted to dive into in depth is air pollution. So if you click the, the, the stat in here in our document that says air pollution is one of the world's leading risk factors for death, which maybe is obvious to some people. But to me,

15:19when I think about it's like, what are, what are the key causes of death? What am I afraid of? Air pollution is not at the top of that list. However, I also stumbled upon Patrick Collison's pollution page. He's got a bunch of cool pages on his website. He's got a page with just a bunch of questions. One of them's on pollution and he says that the World Bank indicates that 3.7 billion people, so about half the world's population, are exposed to this metric of PM 2.5

15:49that has to do with like the size of particles in the air. They're exposed to around five times the unit of measure that he correlates with a bunch of things, which include lower GDP, it includes stock market returns being lower, people making worse decisions like chess players making mistakes, politicians using less complex speech. So those are just some fun facts, but I think what's really important is obviously the health side of things. And there's another stat that I'll just quickly share, which is from

16:20a newsletter called Charter, which says that India's capital, this was recently, breached the 450 mark on the air quality index over four times the healthy level and basically they're in this hazardous zone, which is akin to smoking 25 to 30 cigarettes a day. And obviously it is an outlier, but I wanted to call this out because I think air quality is something that is a problem in a lot of places, clearly, some more than others, but it's something that I think people are going to be caring about a lot more and maybe

16:52one product that came out in the last year or so that's indicative of that that a lot of people made fun of was the Dyson mask headphones. So I'll stop there. What were those? Yeah, I never saw those. They are headphones that have a basically a mask, an air purifier attached to them. Wow. And they're expensive. They're $1,000, I think, right? They are $700 from what I can see. And what, this came out and people just made fun of them? Well, if you Google images,

17:22it's like a white guy in like the New York subway wearing it. You know what I mean? Like it's a little off on because you're talking about India and a few other countries, not maybe the New York subway. So it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a misleading ad they have. But that's pretty fascinating. Is this, are these taking off? No, I think they're in that zone of a lot of people making fun of them. However, the reason I'm calling this out is because I think there is this understanding that, you know, it's just a new deli.

17:53It's not, you know, anywhere close to home. But I think, have you guys ever used like a, an air quality index measure in your home or like a CO2 monitor? Yeah, I have multiple times. And I bought like these air purifier things that also measure the air quality in my house and I have them and it's like shocking whenever it'll like, it basically turns red and it's like, oh God, there's something going on. You know what, we need to air this place out or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, air quality changes over time and I don't know, I've been noticing more even in San Francisco a few days

18:24where people are like, oh, I'm wearing a mask to work not because of COVID but because like, oh gosh, like I, have you checked the air quality and a lot of people aren't doing this still today but I think that'll change and I think if you use some of these like the CO2 monitor for example, you literally, like if you go to bed with your door closed and you wake up and you check that thing, it is wild how high it is and you know, all you need to do is open a window or you know, circulate the air in your home but I think it's the stuff I guess is people are more educated on it.

18:55I think some of these devices like the air quality monitors are going to take off and you can see some of this data in Jungle Scout as well of just like the kinds of products that people are buying. Do you see, what did you see I think in Jungle Scout that stood out? Any product that stood out? Okay, so there's one product which is, has to do with an AC furnace and an air filter but guess how much this thing sells every single month? What is it? It's an AC furnace air filter and an air quality monitor.

19:26So I'm seeing four entries in Jungle Scout and they are 17 million, 12 million, 8 million, and 8 million. So what is that all total? That's like over 40 million dollars per month. What? This is what Jungle Scout is saying. So you know, take it with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how they measure but they tend to be pretty accurate and so that's an example of I think as people again like try to understand the air quality around them I think there's a there's a growing business here.

19:57I feel like one missing gap with air quality readings and devices and all that is it's not obvious. As in I feel like most people would be surprised to be like, oh my gosh, I inhale all this stuff and it has these adverse effects and it's, you know, it ranks here on, you know, the likelihood of death but it's not obvious, it's not in your face like let's say like the GLP-1s people see themselves every day and they're constantly trying to improve their image and how other people interpret them. So I think maybe one thing that if someone was going

20:27to go figure this out you guys have talked about the air, the water filters people go into your home and they're like they say like did you know like you're drinking like this much of like basically like rocks and other sediment and lead in your water can you believe it and they show you and so I feel like there's an element of that where as it's going to take a while for people to really care about the air quality stuff but there may be some middle ground where some company is able to effectively give people that aha. Yeah, I would put it differently.

20:58I don't think it's going to take a while. I think it's going to take a marketer for people to care. It's just going to take a marketer and a product design that puts it in your face and that educates you about this and kind of scares you about it but then says don't worry there's a solution and that's how a lot of things get done is you know a great marketer or product designer figures out the way to put it in your face. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot and unless you're using HubSpot,

21:28the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. I spend way too much time online. I think a lot of people do too. So I've got a bad case, hopefully improving case of nerd neck. Some people call it forward head posture.

21:59But basically, it's just because we're hunched over at a computer all day long. And I haven't done a ton here. Like I'm kind of on the like very early part of this curve. But I have played around with, I'm not using it right now. Hold up. There's this thing I don't know if I'd vouch for it or not yet, but this thing called Better Back. I'm looking at it. I think any, any time that you have to use one of these devices, I tend to get nervous that it's legit. But go ahead. What is it? Well, that's why I don't know. So it has helped me sit up more. It basically like

22:30it runs around your knees and your back. And I like it better than something. There's things you can put on your back that like zap you and stuff. And I feel like that's really unnatural. But this actually just because it's like fixated around your knees, you just sit up straighter. So for those listening, it's basically like a strap that when you're sitting down, it wraps around your back and then attaches to your knees. And in doing that, it kind of forces you to sit up. Yeah, exactly. There's other for the women, your four female listeners,

23:01there's a sports bra that I haven't tried yet called Form, which apparently like folks like Taylor Swift have used. If you look at her posture a decade ago, it was way, way worse. So there's a small part of me that believes that something like that works. Can I use this?

23:17You can. You're telling me just like this shirt? I mean, for me, it would be a shirt. That's going to make me have better posture. What is this thing? I haven't tried it, but it's a sports bra that people vouch helps your posture. But I think generally, as I've explored this a little bit, it is a function of your muscle, right? Like if you have strength in your abdomen and your back, like you're going to sit up straighter. But there's a video I shared.

23:47We can include all this in the show notes. This is actually just like an email I sent or I'm going to send to the Internet Pipes crew this month. But like it's, a video from Brian Johnson around his posture. He worked with a posture coach for several months and then Tim Ferris has recommended something called the Ego SKU method, which I have not tried. And what's this Brian Johnson video? How do I just make my posture better? There's three different exercises that he does every single day and he shares them in this video that improved

24:17his posture. And what's this Ego SKU method? It's a method that I think you need to work with a practitioner for which is why again, I'm not I don't think I'm vouching for this in any way but it's just something that came up. Dude, there's this great TED talk that you should watch it. Why Sitting Down Destroys You. I think it's by Roger Frampton. I believe that's the one. But it's a TED talk that has millions of views and he basically goes through this idea

24:48of how he worked I think he worked in the Amazon he worked with some like indigenous tribe where they didn't have a they didn't use like a lot of chairs or something like that and what he found was that basically the people who in today's age we don't really do this but we used to where if you stand a lot you squeeze your ass like imagine you got a you got a little penny in your butt cheeks that you're trying to keep from falling down on the ground. That's basically what you do you like squeeze your butt together when you're standing and there's a reason

25:19why our glutes typically tend to be our largest muscle it's because we're supposed to use them a lot and how we don't really use them too much anymore and so instead when we stand we kind of lean forward and he was like no you should actually when you stand he was like a lot of babies actually if you watch