All 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, I think there's a growing business here.
We use this phrase, one-chart businesses, because you just see this chart and it's like you said, well, that thing's obvious, just get into that industry. You have one here. You said in the United States, the US 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 that comes with a bunch of people getting older. Like 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 is 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.
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 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 akiya. I was in Japan this summer and we did a walking tour and they took us around and they were showing us these houses and they were like, 'See this house?' And it was like in the middle of Osaka. It was a little rundown 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 akiya 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 and 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 tons of articles on this, over 8 million akiya that are being given away by the government, or again, sometimes for very cheap.
So, 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 and I was like, this is my Bible for like living a long, healthy life. But the idea is that someone studied Osaka's population and they found that too many people claim 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 benefits that you get when you hit a certain age. And so it potentially puts a lot of this 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, potentially than they've said they are. What are some other stats about this? I love talking to you because you actually have the data and the stats instead of just 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. Walt 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 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. But then sometimes it's like there's this random gerbil that has infested homes in South Carolina or something like that.
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. Four 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? Like, I guess you know how like hotels are classified as real estate. I would assume that's the case, of which 20% is fantastic. If 20% were operating profit on a proper 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. This 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.'
Well, 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 the 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. But 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 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. Like, I know people who have people in nursing homes and they spend 20 or $30,000 a month. It's insane. It's absolutely insane.
Okay, so you're 8 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. All right, back to the show.
What do you guys want to do next?
Uh, 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, 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 SFIA research, which 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-piste skiing. And then I have never heard of what is winter fat biking.
It's awesome is what it is. It's like—sounds like something I need to research.
Have—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're sick looking.
Yeah, it's just mountain bike riding, but the tire is particularly fat. That's all it is. You know, we like big and small things. Imagine a bicycle that could drive on a beach.
Got it. Number four, off-course golf. Interesting.
And then number seven is trail running. I could definitely see that. 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 bashed back and forth. And 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, you go 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 suburban Iron Man or the Suburban Triathlon. And 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 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 trend that people start doing. This is definitely something that I think would appeal to people. What do you guys think?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's beautiful branding.
It's the brand. We'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 mornings.
Next, gold mine. So 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 there was maybe 200 graphs on here. And if you go to their ourworldindata.org/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 different charts. You know, Sean talks about these like one-chart businesses. One of them is this population 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, to it's going to cross over the young population and be at, you know, by the end of where this has it projected, 2.5 billion. And so that's the biggest grower. 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 dramatically. 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 case to say, you know, if you go there, 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 way. Now, of course, technology may completely upend things and AI and all that, but you could see these huge trends that are going to be very hard to reverse. So it's hard to imagine a scenario that 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 the lithium production. If you pull that up, I just linked it in the documents. And you can see that lithium production, which obviously is the core ingredient in many of our batteries, is 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 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 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 when I think about it, it's like 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 that 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, you know, 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 a 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 that 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 one 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.
They are headphones that have 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 when this came out, people just made fun of him. Well, if you Google images, it's like a white guy in like the New York subway wearing it. You know what I mean? Like it's a little off because you're talking about India and a few other countries, not maybe the New York subway. So 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 in New Delhi. It's not, you know, anywhere close to home. But I think, have you guys ever used like an air quality index measurer 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 basically turn red and it's like, oh god, there's something going on, you know, we need to air this place out or whatever.
Yeah. 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 where people are like, 'Oh, I'm wearing a mask at work, not because of COVID, but because like, oh gosh, like 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 as this stuff, I guess as people are more educated on it, I 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—did you see anything in Jungle Scout that stood out? Any product that's—
Okay, so there's one product which has to do with an AC furnace and an air filter. But guess how much this thing sells every single month.
It's an AC furnace air filter and an air quality monitor. So 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 per month. 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 try to understand the air quality around them, I think there's a growing business here.
I 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 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 to go figure this out, you guys have talked about the water filters. People go into your home and like they say like, 'Did you know like you're drinking like this much of 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 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. I 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.' Yeah.
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.
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. But basically it's just because we're hunched over at a computer all day long. And I haven't done a ton here at like—I'm kind of on the very early part of this curve, but I have played around with—I'm not using it right now. Hold it up. There's this thing—I don't know if I vouch for it or not yet, but this thing called BetterBack.
