Steph Smith: “This opportunity is totally overlooked”

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, Steph Smith here.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
Steph is back.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
And your whole thing is finding up and coming trends.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
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.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:10)
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.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
There's so many here.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:19)
I love this one. Breakup cake, nerd neck, the Dyson mask, a search algorithm that was inspired by ants.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
I need to write this down.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:27)
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, I think there's a growing business here.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:45)
We use this phrase, one-chart businesses, because you just see this chart and you said, well, that thing's obvious. Just get into that industry. You have one here. You say, 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. Talk to you about this nursing thing.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:12)
Yeah. Well, again, it's a pretty clear trend that 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 65 plus that are just going to need physical human support? Nursing is one area. Also, the rest of that stat talks about in Japan, the number of nursing homes has risen nearly 50 percent over the last decade. Japan is interesting because it's like this early case study where they've hit this silver tsunami a little earlier than a lot of other countries.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:47)
Why Japan?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:48)
I think they just hit the declining birth rate earlier than many other countries. So another interesting, you could say an 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 AKIAs, A-K-I-Y-A. 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're like, see this house, and it was in the middle of Osaka. It was a little rundown for sure, but they were like, this house is free. 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 AKIAs 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 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.
There's tons of articles on this, over 8 million AKIAs that are being given away by the government, or again, sometimes for very cheap.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:06)
Well, have you heard the theory about Osaka and how a lot of people are lying about their age?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:14)
Oh yeah, the Blue Zones and how.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:16)
Yeah, there's a book called The Blue Zones, and basically, I read it 10 years ago or something, and 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 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, that 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 old people and 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 actually have the data and the stats instead of just guessing.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:12)
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, just small paragraphs and each paragraph has just like one statistic. And I like his because some of them are really important, like 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.