6 under-the-radar trends (+ our ideas)

25:29Recycling is 100 % bullshit. It should be reduce, reuse, get rid of the recycle. And you're saying it because what? It all gets thrown away in the trash. Like recycling is nonsense. But there's even more to it that he told us about. I want to get him on to do his recycling rant because he's got like a great recycling rant. But I believe that one of the core things is recycling is a psyop. You ready? Recycling is a psyop, which was that the companies that make all the plastic products were like under some heat. They're like, oh shit, this is like really bad. And they're like, what do we do? What do we do?

26:03What do we do? What do we do? We blame the consumer. And they were like, blame the consumer. That's brilliant. How do we do that? And they were like, what if we made it their job to deal with the plastic? And they're like, how would we do that like we convinced them that they it's the obligation is on them to recycle these products and so they they funded the like recycle movement knowing that it's like most of it's not getting recycled anyways it doesn't really work dude the blue bins are bullshit they're bullshit yeah they're totally bullshit it's like they cotton cotton's next they convince you i can feel it coming they could you know what i often would do with the blue bands and it would like freak out people i remember people at my office the hippies that like the uh like typical like granola people at my company would like complain to me, but I'm like, just throw the trash in the recycle bin.

26:47It doesn't matter. It's all going to the same place. And they would like flip out to like, it was like, I could tell they were like, we're losing sleep over this because they base their personality on this blue bin has always been my like, it's okay to consume this and throw it away. But it all goes to the trash. And instead we should just reduce the stuff we consume or we should reuse what we can. The blue bin, I can't stand the blue bin. So Joe and I are the same on this one. So I'm on board with Plastic Everything. So Plastic Free Everything, I think this is going to extend into clothes. I think it's going to extend into homeware, pans, everything, like cups that you use.

27:25I think it's going to extend into baby products, all baby products. I think there's going to be a... The way that Honest came out with Jessica Alba and was like, these juices are full of sugar. So they're like Honest juice. And I think that... And they have wipes and they have diapers and they're like, oh yeah, you need to use these products. I think there's going to be a plastic-free big brand that gets built in the baby space. Well, you know what that used to be, right? I grew up using this because my parents were a little hippie. It was cloth diapers that you threw into a hamper and then you had to wash them.

28:00It was disgusting. And for that reason, I'm out. It was honestly filthy, but my mother... My wife tried to propose that, by the way. She was like, I think we should cloth diaper. It is like cool. The look of disgust I gave her, I mean, I was just like, listen, you can cheat on me. You can abuse me. You can do whatever you want. You will not bring cloth diapering into my lifestyle. There's usually, my parents used to do, and we were poor. And so they said it was cheaper, but they had a service that would come and pick it up once a week. But it's still just like the idea of using cloth that other kids have shit in.

28:35It's filthy. Like, we're animals. Wait, wait, wait. So the cloth diapers are not even just your cloth. It's a mixed pool of cloth? It was like a wash and fold service, except the stuff, the clothing, had poop in it. And so it was basically you throw it into this bin and they come and pick it up and then they bring you new cloth diapers that are clean and you're just like reusing them. Yeah, it's disgusting. But that's how it used to be. Which now that I'm saying this, by the way, this is kind of an interesting uh you know we had um jake on or whatever the the young guy the other day who talked about how he thinks of ideas the exact same thing the kid we had uh what was his zach was his name um we had zach on and he was talking about how um when you ask him how he comes with ideas and he's like i just think about what would be awesome in an ad and a cloth diaper is like revolting, but it is clickable and it is interesting.

29:36So I actually am on board with cloth diapers now. I just talked myself into it. Okay, sounds good. I also think, by the way, for Plastic for Everything, that there's got to be a supplement that people are going to try to sell that's going to remove the plastic from your balls and your bloodstream. I think people are going to get on the... Every category is going to try to take this angle. And I think that it's sort of like protein. how protein, you know, became a thing. It's like, great, eat more meat. And then they're like, or take this powder or you want protein chips? How about protein cookies?

30:11How about protein brownies? How about protein everything? Protein waffles, protein pancakes. And so protein just made its way into everything on the protein wave. I think somebody's going to do that with me. I had protein water yesterday. It was amazing. What was protein water? It was basically water with like, it was a scoop that looked like lemonade mix and it was high protein and it sounded filthy and disgusting and it was delicious. That's how I drink my protein shakes. It's just a scoop of water. Yeah, but there's something because that tastes nasty. There's something cool where you think creamy and protein that for some reason that's okay, but fruity and protein, that's just unacceptable.

30:47Do you know what I mean? So this was fruity or this was? It was fruity. It was lemonade. But you said unacceptable, but you liked it. Yeah, I loved it, but I had to like get over that barrier. Right. Was that really hard for you? Yeah, like I had to like watch it, like a motivational, like talk to like figure out. Yeah, like David Goggins, like definitely had to hype me up. How bad do you want it? We fight for these inches. All right. So next one. Ready? There's another health trend that I think is going to be big. Have you ever heard of anybody who's doing nervous system work? our most popular retreat at Hampton is called Nervous System Reset.

31:32And people go to the woods and we have a facilitator who guides these things. It's very, this is totally a niche thing. And it was really smart of you to call this out. So go ahead. Okay, great. So you're already on this. This was, I've just, my spidey sense is tingling. I'm hearing a little things. It's the new leaky gut. It's the new leaky gut. Because who doesn't want your nervous system to be reset or to be calmed down? right? It's like this thing that's so central. Literally, it's your central nervous system. It's so central to you. You have your vagus nerve and like all this stuff. So I first got hooked on this because my trainer was telling me about this.

32:08He was talking about like, when you work out and what you eat, it's not just about what you do. It's about the state that you're in, that your nervous system is when you do it. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, well, you have these two modes or modalities for your nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. You're familiar with this? Yeah, I know what those, I've heard those words before. I can't teach a class on this, but I vaguely. Here's my bro science, okay? My bro science for this, which is probably half wrong. But basically you have two core modes that you could be in. One is your fight or flight, your fight or flight response.

32:45So this is where adrenaline, cortisol, you have these hormones that get released and they're not just bad, right? People say cortisol is the stress hormone. Well, stress is good in certain scenarios. Adrenaline is good in certain scenarios. You don't want to be in that all the time. That's the problem, but you need it when you need it. If there's a lion chasing you, you want to be in fight or flight mode, right? The problem is there's no lion chasing us. It's just Slack and email and scrolling on Instagram and feeling like you're not good enough and looking at your body in the mirror and feeling like you're too fat.

33:16Then when you eat, you're stress eating or you're working too hard, then you're stress eating or you're not sleeping, things like that. So if you're operating in that sympathetic system, which is that fight or flight, your body's secreting certain hormones, but then also your body shuts down other functions. So like, let's say you stress eat. One of the problems with your stress eat is not only do you overeat or you make poor choices, but your body literally digests less poorly, digest more poorly during that, when you're in that system, right? Because if you're in fight or flight, the body's gonna take its resources and say, guys, we're not digesting food right now.

33:49That's not what's important. We got to be doing these other things. The lion is chasing us. And so then you have the parasympathetic system, which when you're in, it's more rested, more relaxed. Your body can do things like digest. It can recover. It can do other things. And so literally being able to shift your mood or your state from one to the other is really important. How do you do that? Some people get that from exercise. Some people get it from the sauna, from the cold plunge. Some people get it from breath work. Some people get it from meditation. There's a bunch of different ways. And all of these are a means to an end, which is to calm your nervous system down.

34:24And a lot of good things happen, both health-wise, but also decision-making, creativity. You operate differently when you're in different states. Okay, cool. So that's the theory. That's where I first got on my radar, and I believed it, and I started paying attention to it. Well, you've been about breath work for like four years now or five years now. Yeah, and the breath to me is like, because I'm always like, I'm not trying to supplement or like I'm very skeptical of the flashy hard things. So I always look for advice that nobody could sell me. No, you're not. You love that. You love that. No, no, like in the health space, let's say.

35:00Yes. Right? Like I like, why did I talk about rucking? Because I'm like, oh, it's walking with a little extra weight. Cool. That kind of resonates with me. That makes sense. Cold plunging, I never really was able to get into because I was like, I just think this is like this extreme thing that seems like it's for show. I don't know. It didn't really resonate with me in the same way. Breath work did because it's like, oh yeah, I could tell that literally just controlling my breath for a couple of minutes, I will feel much differently at the end of it. And it also makes sense to me to work on my breathing system because I'm going to do that, I don't know, 50 ,000 times a day.

35:37I went to a breath work class in San Francisco and it made me kind of high. It was awesome. Yeah, well, that's like the Wim Hof stuff. You can literally hyperventilate yourself and you'll get high. You'll pass out. You could do a lot of things. Yeah, it was great. That goes more into the category of the extreme, but okay, fair enough. So our buddy Jack Smith had come on. Remember that thing he told us about on the podcast where he's like, I went in this room with 50 ,000 screens of different colors. And he's like, basically, they flash things. I sit in a lawn chair and I paid these guys thousands of dollars and it healed me.

36:11And I was like, well, we were both just like, okay. Okay, so we were both like, what? Dude, there's one down there. Like he came to visit me in my house. I live in a tiny suburb in Connecticut. There's one, I'm not joking, 200 yards of my house. And we went to it. How was it? Was it amazing? I forgot to bring this up. It was insane. So basically to everyone listening, this is like 90 % of the people are going to be like, you're crazy. And 10 % of the people are going to be into this. It's very fringe shit. You go to a room and you're surrounded by literally 20 TV screens. and it looks like it's playing white, like snow, you know, like when you're - White noise, yeah.

36:49Yeah, like where your TV wasn't working. And so, and then the room is about the size of, let's say, it looks like a mini bunk room. It was like 50 feet long, 20 feet wide, just a plain room with reclining chairs in it. I go and I sit in the chair and I just like fall asleep. That's all I do. And so I go home - Are you supposed to fall asleep? You're just supposed to do whatever you want. You're supposed to relax. Are you supposed to close your eyes? or are you supposed to wash the screens? You're supposed to close your eyes or just relax. And I fall asleep. And part of me was like, did I just do like a Ron Swanson thing where they're like, where I'm just standing there meditating and he's like, this is so stupid.

37:22I just stand here and I'm thoughtless. Like, yeah, that's the point. I was like, is that what I'm complaining about? It's like, I just fell asleep and I actually did achieve it. I wasn't sure what happened. But I go to Jack and I say, you know, I did kind of like how they had vibrating chairs there. Like the vibrating massage chairs they had were amazing. And he goes, dude, those chairs weren't plugged in. They were not vibrating. They were not, the chairs didn't vibrate. And I was like, no, like I vibrated the whole time and it made me relax. And I felt so calm. And he goes, brother, I talked to the owner.

37:53I saw the whole thing. Here's a photo. It was not a plugged in chair. There was no electricity in this chair. It did not vibrate. And I swore that it was vibrating me the whole time. So something happened. So that's my story with this place. And how is it to be a Scientologist? It went, you know, it felt crazy. Like it did. And I was so turned off because the guy who, the guy who owned the place explained how like his wife had cancer and he went into debt to start this place. And this cured the cancer. And I sort of felt like these people took advantage of you, man. Like, you know, you didn't use modern medicine.

38:31You're so like delusional. I feel sad for you, which is silly for me to judge. But that was my judgment. And yet I left thinking my body was vibrating. And so maybe there was something there. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. So I'm kind of fascinated by this. And it does feel like something that like someone would, like a YouTuber would make up to make like a cool YouTube video or something like a prank video. It also feels like the hatch in Lost, like the Dharma Initiative created this thing. So, you know, there's definitely a part of me that's like, oh my God, this is bullshit. However, I do believe that nervous system work makes sense.

39:10And who am I to say that that's not one of the methods that would, you know, reset, rewire, calm, change the frequency? I don't know. I don't know all that stuff. But people are really into grounding. You've seen grounding? Go stand on the grass? Grounding isn't saying to me. My college friends used to be into this. So they would, after playing sports, all the basketball players would do it. They would take their socks off and they would go and they would stand in the grass because they said, they used the word ions. something about negative ions or negative electrons were going from the earth to their body and that was going to heal them it was the same thing to me as like do you remember brett farve promoting like copper the balance bands the balance band it's and i don't know man i don't know about i absolutely don't know about these and i'm not i i have no i don't know the science i don't know if this worked what i'm saying is i think there's market demand i think this is a trend i I think there's pull.

40:05I think this is an area where when you talk about it, it has that leaky gut type of thing where people say, you know what? I think I have that problem. I think I want that improved. And whether it's through this room with screens, whether it's through grounding, whether it's through breath work, I don't know what it is, but that's a trend. And I see it, it's a wave. And I think a lot of people are gonna go surf that wave. You should go check out one of the, what's the screen thing called? It's called the electromagnetic therapy or something like that. Maybe. And let me know if you have a similar experience.

40:34I'm a hater on it, but I'm telling you, I left, my body felt different.

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41:33You will not regret it. It's amazing. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. All right, let's do something that's not a health hack real quick. I have another one for you. Religion? AI social network? Which one? Dumb phones? Let's do biohacking and plants, which I don't have a lot here. I'm just going to say it out loud. but there's a moment in time right now. So this is, what is this? Trend number three, four? We did. Five. This is five? Okay, five. Trend number five. So trend number five is biohacking plants.

42:12So there's a moment in time right here where I think biohacking has never been as popular as it is now, thanks to Brian Johnson, thanks to Ozempic, thanks to people, real peptides, people realizing like, oh, I can just kind of take this, stab this, do this, eat this, drink this, whatever, and I'm going to improve my own health. So biohacking is a thing. And AI has changed the game of science because AI is now doing kind of remarkable things. I don't know if you've paid attention to AlphaFold or some of the stuff that's coming out of Google where it's basically like, AlphaFold is basically an AI breakthrough where AI was able to predict how proteins fold, which is really important for a couple of reasons, but I think the simple explanation is like the shape of proteins really matters.

43:02It matters how other things can connect to it. It matters how it can connect to other things, how the building blocks can link. And it was something that we didn't, as humans, know how to do. We didn't know how to, we knew what it was made up of, but we didn't know how it would fold. We didn't know the shape of the protein. And AlphaFold was like beat all the, like won the competition of modeling protein folding. And so let's assume this is only going to get better. And the implication of this is what? We can make new drugs? Yeah, exactly. Therapeutics, drugs. So you have all these different technologies.

43:36CRISPR, you have protein folding stuff that's going on. You have, in general, an interest around biohacking. But the problem is biohacking in humans is really hard. And when you biohack in humans, you have to worry about all kinds of health concerns. You have to worry about getting approvals for things. It's going to be a long, hard road. And so in the same way that I think the longevity startups that are focused on dogs are going to do well because who doesn't want their dog to live longer? I think that's a problem everybody has. The background of that is that we had Kevin Rose on and he was trying to create, or he invested in a longevity drug company and their model, their phase one was using it on dogs because that's an easier way to get into it.

44:16Easier way to go to market and to test your products. I think the even easier version of this is plants. And I know that David Freeberg is doing this for a hollow, which is basically like, it's basically a biohacking, but for different crops. So how do we make a strawberry that does, has certain properties? Maybe it's resistant to certain bugs, or maybe it can be riper. Maybe it could be bigger. Maybe it can be juicier. Maybe it can grow in different weather conditions. And therefore, certain places can now grow their own crops that don't have to import, right? So it's like all these like implications if you could biohack plants, because plants are food.

44:53And so how do you do biohacking in plants? And plants for a long time, like a lot of the breakthroughs in people's understanding of genetics was because of plant experiments. Like you breed true crops with each other and oh, this is how we figured out like the little punnett square about how genetic combinations work and combinatorial effects of crossbreeding. And so I think that there's gonna be some really successful startups that take AI and the concept of biohacking and then use plants as their focus, as their target market, rather than humans. What's David Freeberg's thing? It's called a company.

45:35Oh, hollow. And so it's accelerating evolution to unlock nature's potential. That sounds like a great mission. And so they're basically creating new seeds or new style plants, yeah? I don't know. They haven't been super, they're not in stealth, but it's not super obvious exactly what they're doing. But they have this thing like boosted breeding. So it's basically like, how do you get more yield on your crops? Or they'll have value-added traits, which is like, how do you take a crop, but then add a trait that you want? Gain a function, but not for viruses, but for your strawberries, for your almonds, for your potatoes, for corn, for core crops.

46:18And so this is going to become technology that they're either going to be able to vertically do themselves or they're going to sell this to farms. And that's kind of what he did with his other thing, climate or whatever. This is so much better than working on creator economy software. Like when you're telling me about this, I'm a dumb-dumb. I will never be able to start anything in this space. But part of me is like, if I had a friend that started something like this, I would quit everything I'm doing to go work there because this is such an easy mission to get behind. You know, like this is so much more important than creating a new link tree.

47:01And so much more exciting. And so I love this. I think this is really a really interesting thing to call out. Yeah, so that's a trend I'm watching. I'll give you another one, AI social network. So what does this mean? Every decade or so, a new social network comes out. So you had Facebook, which was 2004. And then roughly 2012, you had this next generation of social networks. Those were Snapchat, Instagram, and they were taking off. And so what did they do differently? They took advantage of the new tech. So the new tech was your phone. The phone that had a camera, the phone that had a GPS, the phone that was with you at all times.

47:42And so it unlocked a new social use case. and I think that the new social use case that's coming out is AI. So what is AI going to be able to do here? I don't know exactly what this is going to look like, but I would bet with very high probability, this is a bit of a safe bet, I guess, but I would bet very high probability that the next breakout social app is going to be based on AI. Arguably, it already happened. Arguably, that TikTok is the breakout, it was the first breakout AI app, right? What do you mean? You mean that I'm following AI people as opposed to real people? There's a few ways that I could take it.

48:20So the most obvious one was TikTok, which was basically everybody thinks TikTok's big innovation was short form video. But actually short form video was around before that Vine, Musical.ly, others. What TikTok did was TikTok was like, hey, how about this? How about the AI just tells you what to follow instead of you? So every social network up until that point was based on the user creating a graph. So going and following people or friending people. And that following or friending people, this was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of them, that you would choose content that's interesting to you.

48:53And then you would keep coming back to the app because you have content that's interesting for you. And that worked to an extent. And then TikTok came out and was like, let's never let the user say what's interesting. Let's see if the AI can figure out what's interesting. at a higher rate, like almost like we were talking about this crops thing. Like what if you got higher yield of interestingness if you used AI for the feed instead of the human choosing what to follow? And so, and that's what it did. And TikTok is super addictive. And TikTok has a higher usage rate than every other social platform because the AI is serving you the content instead of you picking yourself.

49:27So that was like the first breakthrough, but it's under the hood. You don't see it. It's the algorithm. Okay, cool. And now, by the way, Everybody copied it in Instagram and others. Everybody's moved to this for you feed. The real innovation of TikTok is the for you page. Okay, so what's coming next? So now I'm thinking that the next breakthrough is probably going to be that up till now, all social networks were based on content that humans make. And now I think it's going to be based on content that AI makes in some way. That sounds a little far-fetched. Like, why would I want to follow an AI influencer?

49:57Well, let's first start with one example, Lil Mikaela. We've talked about her years ago when they started this. Lil Mikaela is an Instagram influencer that is just AI generated. It's a girl that's like, she's an AI image, basically. And they put her, she's an Instagrammer and she posts photos. Do you know how much money Lil Mikaela makes? Last we talked about it, it was like interesting, but not wild. It was like 800 grand a year, I think. I think we started talking about her in 20 or so. I don't have this confirmed, but I heard it's over$10 million now. That's insane. Okay, so that's a little Michaela.

50:33I like Michaela. Yeah, you and a few million other people like Michaela. It's just likeable. All right, so that's one. But here's a more interesting version of this, because I think people have heard the AI influence, but I'll even pitch you a different style of AI social product. It's actually in the music space. So I think there's an opportunity to create the AI version of Spotify. What I mean by this is I started listening to like a non-trivial amount of AI music. So like in my pie chart of my market share of music, it used to be 100 % just like artists, right? That I know. So like Spotify or wherever, right?

51:10Let's just say that's where I started. And now I started adding in a little bit of AI generated music. You go to Suno. So Suno has a lot of music there. But also there's these YouTube channels. Like there's this one called Golden Age Hip Hop, which I don't think is AI. I think he might use AI in the making of it. But Golden Age Hip Hop is a great YouTube channel. And what he does is he makes these mashups, right? Like if you go to the YouTube channel. Dude, I listen to it too. And then like Mac Miller lo-fi or like main character playlists. Exactly. I'm getting recommended all of these. And at first I was like, this is weird.

51:43And lately I'm attracted to them even more. It's like what I listen to all day when I work. This is my new workout track. So Golden Age Hip Hop is, if you look at the channel, so it's got 730 ,000 subscribers. every thumbnail is ai generated yes all of the concepts are like things that don't even make sense it's like wait so this is uh it'll be like somebody from the like 80s and then like somebody from the 2000s collabing on a song or like all the top top songs are like you know like if it's sort by popular so this one has 11 million views it's snoop dogg ice cube dmx or snoop dogg m &m dr dre uh 50 cent exhibit and and ice cube all on one track and you're like what that that never happened.

52:26And that song has 8 million plays. And I think what the person is doing is I think they're just like a mashup artist, more like Girl Talk, where they're just sampling from different songs and overlaying them well together. But I think there's a little bit of a sign to come. I wouldn't be surprised if they're using AI to do this or if they're just going to take a voice, artist voice, and just use AI to make a song from it. I think you tweeted something out. Didn't you tweet out that the number one song right now was an AI song? It was the Beatles won a Grammy this year, and it didn't get talked a lot about.

53:03But basically, they had lyrics from when John Lennon was alive, and they used machine learning and AI, and they finished the song, and it won a Grammy, and it's a great song. Like, that's crazy. It's crazy. Nobody's even met you. You're the only person I know who talked about that. I saw it and I was reading about this and I was like, this is a huge deal. Why isn't anyone discussing this? I felt like it was a totally undercovered story. And the song is great. It's not that nobody's talking about it. You're right. Like less underreported story. So here's what I think is going to happen. I think you're going to have a service that's sort of like a Pandora or a Spotify where you're going to prompt it or you're going to tell it what songs you like.

53:42And it's just going to start generating AI music on the fly. And what's going to happen is it's going to generate music that's in the genres you like. It's going to figure out, it's going to basically train on the songs that exist, and it's going to create net new songs. And I think the last piece of what's going to happen there is, in the same way that today you have what's called like vibe coders, you know what vibe coding is? I'm still trying to figure this out. This got on my radar on Monday. This is how new I am to vibe coding. All right. So there's a couple of startups like this. It's because of Peter Levels is how I know about it.

54:17Okay. So there's a couple of startups like Cursor, which is like absolutely blown up. I think it's become like a two or$3 billion company or$10 billion company in a very short period of time. Cursor is basically like a coding terminal, but you can, but AI is built in, right? And so you can code, but you can basically like just tell the AI, it'll write the code for you. They can tell it to debug it for you. You can tell it to build for you. Replit is doing the same thing. You go to replit.com now and it just says, what would you like me to build? And you just tell Replit like, hey, I'd like an app that does blah, blah, blah, blah.

54:46and then it starts spitting out code on the screen, just scrolling huge amounts of code. And then you'll see it thinking, it's like, hmm, the initial screen's not loading properly. Let me see what's wrong. Ah, I found it. And then it just continues on. It's kind of amazing to watch. And I've built a bunch of little Red Blood apps that way. And so this is like, you know, basically what's happening now is that people are going to be able to make software without knowing how to write code. Well, I think what's going to happen next is I'm going to be able to make music without knowing how to make music, without knowing how to play instruments or sing.

55:15So what's going to happen is I'm just going to be able to prompt the music or tell it what I want or tell it how to tweak the songs. And then I'm going to make it. And then, by the way, you ready for me to just go full-blown idiot here? I'm going to say three letters that you're not going to like. Okay. NFTs. They're coming in here. So here's the business model. Here's where this actually pairs up. And this is not so crazy. But listen to this. Do you remember when you used to celebrate like ding, ding, we found a use case. We did now. We found a use case. Exactly. Ladies and gentlemen, we did it.

55:52What is an NFT? NFT is basically any kind of digital collectible, digital art, digital property that's unique. It's a way to say that this is unique and I own this, I made this and if you bought it, now you own this and it shows who made it and the royalties are attached to it. This is kind of a, actually like a kind of a cool thing. If I make art in Photoshop, which I think both of us would agree is art, right? Of course. I think being able to say that I made this and nobody can say that they made it, that's important. Being able to sell my art, also important. And if you sell it, me being able to capture a royalty of subsequent sales, also cool.

56:25So I think we all agree that's actually pretty cool as obnoxious as NFTs became to be. Now, what's going to happen in the music case is I'm going to be generating music with AI and I'm going to be able to mint that song. So I'm going to be able to say that song, I helped create that by prompting it. I'm going to create it. All of the artists whose music was used, I think they're going to get personal ownership of that. And now I'm going to be able to upload that track as a musician. But in the same way that like, you know, a lot of musicians today, they're using like auto-tune and like, you know, just like basically digital program.

56:59They're not sitting there with a guitar strumming. They're in a piece of software making the computer strum the guitar and they just type in the notes, A, B, C, D. And then, you know, they'll type in the chord and the guitar just plays it. It's kind of like to a pure musician. They're like, that's not music. That's, you're just cheating. I think that's what's going to happen next, I think with AI. And so I think the next version of Pandora or Spotify, so the next big social product that's around music is going to be about creating music using AI, being able to mint it as a curator, saying, oh, this is cool.

57:29I like this. I'll pay to create this and to own this. And then I'll share that with other people. And then I will get, like the way this golden age hip hop guy is getting 10 million streams on his songs. I think somebody who's a non-musician would be able to get that. Did I just go crazy? or what just happened? No, I think that's very smart. I think you're doing a good job of looking ahead and I agree with the future that you're painting. I think that I'm shocked. I'm shocked so far that music has been as not... With AI, it's been... And I guess this makes sense because the guys making AI are also into this other stuff.

58:03But AI has been coding and just a variety of other tools and I'm shocked that it hasn't impacted art and particularly music as much as... as little as it has. And I think the future of your painting makes a lot of sense. I think that if you were to play me like an AI Post Malone song and a real Post Malone song, I don't think anyone would know the difference. Which is unbelievable. We're already there, right? Yeah, we're already there. We're already there. And also, if I were to go to a concert, like I would be into going to a concert of a fake person. Like, do you remember the gorillas? Mm-hmm.

58:39I loved the gorillas. I listened to the gorillas. what's their story i mean i've only heard their songs but never been to a concert the guy who created the gorillas is a genius so the gorillas for those listening who are below the age of 30 the gorillas was a band it was created by do you remember blur remember the band blur so it uh like kind of a punk rocky uh guy but he created the gorillas as like a weird like hobby like a side project where he wrote and this was in the 90s he wrote songs and then he had a music and he sang it He was the musician. He played all the instruments. And then he had a music video where it was cartoons and it was animations.

59:16And so for years, and this was before the internet was popular, so we couldn't Google who was behind it. It was like rumors. And it was like, you didn't actually know in that age how it was. You didn't totally know. You're like, I heard it was this guy. I heard it was this guy. I don't know who it is. And the Gorillaz was the band that he made. It was a fake band. It was all cartoons. They went so far as to being on talk shows. And so they would like, at the time, the tech wasn't great, but they would do holograms. So they appeared on David Letterman and shows like that. And then eventually they would do concerts where they would play.

59:47At first it was simple and janky. It was basically just a movie theater. And then eventually they figured out how to hologram it. And then now he'll go out and perform. Now we all know who the guy is and he'll actually go and perform. And it's like amazing. But he did all of this before all this technology was a thing. And I loved the gorillas. I loved him before I knew who the person was. I just thought I knew the characters, and I actually liked them, and I got to know their personalities. It was very strange. But because I was into that when I was a kid, and even as an adult, I like it, I can now see how it doesn't seem crazy that I'm going to like the AI stuff.

1:00:22Totally, totally. I mean, dude, I was so into WWF growing up. It's like you get into these things that sound on the surface, silly, stupid, illogical. Why would you care? It's all fake, right? It's fake wrestling. And then guys are like, you know, paying thousands of dollars to sit front row and scream their heart out to like watch it, right? It's like these things seem on the surface, if you just described it to somebody, it would seem like it wouldn't work, but it does. And that's the, I think the point I'm trying to make with this episode is that these are all trends that today sound small, sound weird, but I think in the future are going to be bigger.

1:00:59And knowing that is good for two reasons. Either A, you're the type of person who just likes to be in the know. You like to know things before. You maybe like to try products early on before they become cool. I like to do that. That's one reason do you want to know these? And the other reason is jumping on trends early is the way to make a lot of money, right? There are as riches in these niches if you actually like go pursue them. Or you're just going to be the guy that always waits for something to be proven out and then you're going to feel like you're too late every time, right? So like those are your options as an entrepreneur.

1:01:30And so I think being early to trends is, trends that are going to last or be big is a great way to get rich. All right, so the ones we mentioned, number one, short drama apps. So mini dramas, these apps that basically are like Netflix, but the episodes are 90 seconds long. They're taken off. Four apps that are doing over 100 million a year in revenue. Today, they're all Chinese apps. I think there's an opportunity for somebody to make this both like made in America, but also for really every geography, like make the biggest one of these in Brazil, Make the biggest one of these in India. These are going to be very, very big.

1:02:03The next one, fitness trends. So rucking we had, which is walking with weighted vests, go ruck, doing over 50 million a year in revenue. Shirtless ripped guys are going to just tear you up in the comments saying, Sean, we've been here. Of course. We've been doing this. And I say, congratulations on being early. Plastic-free everything. So I think just microplastics being something that people, the next thing people are going to be afraid of and then figuring out how to sell solutions to that fear. nervous system work we talked about. So the parasympathetic nervous system, people who create solutions that are marketed towards calming or tuning or resetting your nervous system, a reboot for your nervous system.

1:02:44We talked about biohacking for plants. So AI plus biohacking, but using plants as a go-to-market because it's a lot safer. You can kill plants and nobody cares. And ultimately, there's a huge market of improving crops and the food that we all eat. And then the last one that we talked about is the AI social network. So every decade or so, there's a new big hit social product, Facebook, then Instagram, Snapchat, now TikTok. It's time we are due for a new one and the twist will be that the content is somehow generated with AI. I pitched a music one, but there's probably many other variations of that.

1:03:18That was very educational. Good job. You came with the goods. You carried us on this one and I think you did a wonderful job. So thank you. Thank you. Let us know in the comments which trends you like in the YouTube comments, and I'll be replying to all of them. All right, that's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:04:01All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:04:29It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:04:54For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.