The first half of the book is more or less an ad for the company, where Tancer explains his predictions about when people will search for a given thing or his detective work to understand seemingly aberrant search phenomena (like searches for prom dresses months before the traditional US prom season).

If you’d invested in Titanic (1998) you would have received a little over $9 for every dollar you put in (900 percent ROI). For Crocodile Dundee (1986), USD$13 (1,300 percent ROI). For The Blair Witch Project (1999, the first sleeper hit of the web age), a whopping USD$7,103 (710,300 percent).

Achieving the environmental gains that built in natural processes offer seems like a huge task after our history of high waste, factory-style production, but it can start with the simple question ‘how would nature do this?’ Next time you turn on a light at home (which probably uses about 120 volts of electricity) consider that the Amazon electric eel can produce three times as much power using chemicals that also are found in the human body.