Tokyo Citadel Builders

Doomer Dash reports from his bunker in Bhutan

A: Japan

Richard Katz of “Japan Economy Watch” with blog post on Japanese companies struggles to implement information technology. https://richardkatz.substack.com/p/company-ability-to-use-technology
SHOGUN wins some emmys
LDP LARPs a presidential election
Japanese give up on going on holiday overseas (but a record number are choosing to live outside Japan)
Rice shortage becomes political

B: Bitcoin ~ 44 mins

Builders

Timechinindex.com Bhutan: Government Of Bhutan is rising, now with over 13k BTC,1 of 2 known governments who acquired all their bitcoin legally and not by theft, the other is El Salvador with 5,874 BTC.

Bitcoin is now a stablecoin. And is the 58k gang meme the most annoying ever?
Nayuta LN wallet closes down
Japan conference this week. (Nomura as sponsor, Junichi Kanda for cabinet office to speak, Nifty Nei Base58 to do dev workshop)

C: World news ~1 hour 9 mins

Trump assassination attempt. Cathedral blames the victim highlighting Trump’s anti gun regulation stance.
Hezbollah targeted in gangster attack on pagers
Amazon demanding employees return to office for a 5 day work week
Taylor Swift is with her. NFL execs regretting the Kelce pysop now?

Broadcast on:: 18 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

I'm looking for Skyline, as I drive my Skyline, I'm rockin' baby nape, like Neo went away I'm around Tokyo drifting, what Nakimoto gifted These dollars don't make sense, no longer On the fence, no, Bitcoin only homie, Michael Sailor told me, ain't no second best, no It's my one and only, fear takin' else, yeah, Bitcoin doin' well, yeah, I'm in Tokyo, yeah As it said, deal, a- Welcome, welcome, welcome Another beautiful morning here in Japan It is currently the 18th of September, so this should be going out soon, keep everybody updated on what we're talkin' about when, the tryin' to be somewhat timely, Dash, how's it goin'? Good, thanks brother Any exciting goin' on? Ah, no, it's shaping up to be a quiet day today, so looking forward to recording the pod, and uh, not doin' much else, yeah Maybe you live an interesting time, I think The, oops, damn it But anything before we jump into it, or just jump into it? Yeah, I think we can jump into the list, so for listeners who called us last week, you'll already be familiar, just to sort of reiterate, we've modified the format a little bit, and we're going to be focusing more on current affairs going forward, and so we've got a list of topics they'll typically be, you know, we'll start with Japan, we'll go on to Bitcoin, and then we'll finish with some sort of world, world new stuff So starting with Japan, they're quite an interesting list this week, quite a mix First item on the list was an article or a sub-stack I'd seen from a guy called Richard Katz, wasn't familiar with him before, he wrote, he writes a sub-stack Japan economy watch, were you familiar with him at all? Um, has that name, I don't know, no, I was going to say yes, but no, I actually, now that I really drill in, I don't think so It's amazing the amount of information on Japan has increased, just even in the last like five years, because I remember when I came over, it was like there was maybe one web forum online, back in the day, if anyone remembers, I'm going to put a shout out big Dicon with, oh yeah, actually I do remember that one, you remember that one, that was a bit, that was a bit of a dark corner of the internet, but it wasn't too bad, but it was, I mean, it was probably 90% fake news or exaggerations or whatever, the most important kind of news Yeah, it was entertaining at least, it was hard to get good information on Japan now, I don't know, you just do it in a Google search, sorry, Google or like YouTube or whatever, and it's like there's a million different like vlogs and blogs and whatever, so it's just amazing that sort of information's out there. What do you think that's a consequence of? I think it's a consequence of, it's this kind of Gutenberg press like thing that Jordan Peterson spoke into where, you know, with podcasting and with the internet, it's just lowered the bar where even a couple of idiots like me and you can have a podcast, right? So it's just like everybody's a content creator now it seems, and out of that, I guess, you know, the algorithm can help, but I mean, I still find like kind of word of mouth to be the way you find out about good sources of information, and that sort of pushes things up to the top for me, you know, I'll typically find these kinds of things from curated lists, you know, people who do that kind of curation on a weekly basis, and yeah, and there's just, it's amazing because like a stop clock can be right twice a day kind of thing, right? Whereas, you know, you might be an idiot, but you probably know something like there's a certain corner, a certain niche, there's something that you know better than anyone else in the world, and certainly at certain times, you're going to have timely information or whatever. So it's just it's interesting that now to go out and get that information from those kind of sources is I would argue making you far more well informed than for example reading the New York Times or whatever. Yes, I'd be curious if somebody studied that actually as to why that is the case, but I don't think either one of us can come up with a different event at the moment, so I won't push it too far. I mean, have you any ideas or? No, it doesn't make sense to me that now I mean over the past few years as opposed to before, Japan would have become particularly more attractive. Well, I don't think it's Japan though, right? Because I think it's just everything, isn't it? I mean, whatever nice you're into. Yeah, that could be. I suspect that's the case because I think Japan was always kind of people were interested in it, but it was just like actually having the means to even get here was more difficult. Now you can get here and you can sort of, you know, vlog the whole experience right in real time, so. Yeah, that's a good point. We'll go with your explanation. So anyway, Richard Katz, he was just he was writing on the Japanese companies are still struggling to incorporate technology. So I think the sub-stack link will be included in the show notes, show notes, encourage listeners to check it out. One thing, one idea that was interesting, you know, he listed a couple of kind of technological revolutions of the past. One was Ed Edison popularizing the use of electricity and industrial contacts in the US. And the other was the sort of information revolution, essentially the PC, you know, PC's being incorporated into workforces. And what his his interest in, you know, observational take on that was that it took a couple of decades from the invention of the technology until you actually saw the productivity gains come later. And you know, how that's shown up in the US, you know, in the factories in terms of, you know, the electrification of those or, you know, obviously now in terms of professional services, financial services, etc. Incorporating, you know, information technology over the last couple of decades. And it's just, you know, US has been pulling away from Japan. I mean, we've, I think we've seen it, you know, and it totally can sort of see it. But it's really showing up in the in the productivity data. One of the reasons, you know, the sort of main, I guess, idea of this blog post was that Japan just hadn't done a good job at incorporating IT into its workflows, something we've spoken about on them, you know, on the show in the past. One thing I thought when reading this, though, and I'd like to get your take on it, or you know, whatever your thoughts. But, you know, I think, I think we're living through this kind of, you know, I spoke to about the electrification, and then there's the sort of information age, the PC, you know, I, and I know there's a tendency to over-high AI. But I really think like the open AI kind of generative AI incorporated into workflows, which we're starting to see accelerate now. Microsoft's announced they'll be bringing the open AI capability into Word and Excel. You know, that's just going to be massive, you know, increase on productivity, I would argue, as the sort of white-collar staff get, you know, a lot of the sort of lower-level work is just going to be automatically done by the AI. And I think the Americans and Europeans are going to be the ones who incorporate this quicker into their workflows than the Japanese. I think the Japanese are going to drag their feet again. I think Japan is, they have this kind of policy with AI where they're trying to get their own domestic champion, this Sakana AI. I don't know if you've seen much of this. I just think that's going to be a massive waste of time and money. I think the net result, and I'm sorry, it's a bit of a black pill, is I think, you know, we're going to see that gap between Japan and the rest of the G7 just widen to an extent, it's probably unimaginable. I mean, it could even, I mean, it could even, I'm maybe being hyperbolic, but it could even put Japan back, you know, to to sort of pre pre major status with in relation to those, you know, what have been to date peers, you know, going forward, it might, you know, Japan might really struggle to maintain that kind of peer status. But any, any thoughts on this? Well, just quickly, I don't think Japan loses out to or is that any worse trajectory than someone like Germany self-immolating at the moment, you know what I mean in terms of G7? Maybe the distance between Japan and the US rises or something, but the mighty nation of Spain, right, doesn't seem to me to be like kicking ass and taking names, the French, you know, they have some sectors, but I mean, a lot of like, so when you look at Japan as compared to some of the other places, they haven't gone full retard yet. So there is some hope, I don't know that the Japanese technology thing is great, but it's hard because you look at, you know, you try, I try, I have a hard time, I try and play both sides of this one because there are some times when you look at like the video production capacities that have exploded on AI stuff, you know, you can see the death of Hollywood imminently approaching, you know, soon I'll be able to make a movie with, I'll be able to make a Matt Damon movie, you know, Oceans 75 or whatever, just my typing shit in, I can make rocky movies until the end of time now, have Stallone starring in them. So that's a big deal, but when you, so that seems like, oh man, we're all, you know, we need to be on UBI and that dude from the US that's always that ran for president that's always banging on about it is right and we're all screwed, but then you listen to a Peter Thiel and he's like, eh, this is not so exciting. I mean, it'll do a bunch of stuff, but it's going to be a while before it really says to play out, right, this all seems like over I'd crap it at the moment. And I'm not one to really bet against Peter Thiel, you know what I mean? But then, you know, the counterpart to him is he got, you know, Elon is like, we're all going to be fucking dead next, next week because of AI. So it's really hard to maneuver this space. I tend, this might just be a personality thing than an analysis thing, but I tend to think Peter Thiel is a more reliable source of just kind of like how the things are going because Elon is like, we're going to have robo taxes next week. You don't get any fucking robo taxes. Not the shit on Elon, but I mean, like, he's he's a hype man. Elon's a rich man's Donald Trump. He's just going to generate headlines. Yeah. He's so, I mean, like, is it, you know, is it really going to do all this stuff tomorrow? I don't know. Well, this is one of the things in the article. It wasn't, it went out, it was, sorry, one of the key ideas was that it takes a couple of decades for these things to really show up in the productivity. Yeah. So, yeah, that, so I think it might be quicker than with electrification and the PC. I suspect it will be because people are very self-consciously trying to pull this into workflows now, but it won't show up for probably, you know, five, 10 years at the very least, as people should get used to how to, how to take advantage of it, you know. Is this one of those market things though? Like everyone says it's going to happen. So, therefore, it's not, I mean, because true disruption and true innovation just kind of slapped people upside the head. This one, everyone sees it coming and. I don't think it's a shame though. You know, I imagine the guys at Toyota in the, in the, in the boardroom, they're probably skeptical. They're probably like, eh. And what I'm seeing of smart exec people, execs I respect is that, well, my, you know, Microsoft is one good example is that they're being very proactive to, you know, get a get ahead of this. And maybe, like you say, could be, it could end up being hype. I don't think so though. I don't, I don't, I don't think it this like, I don't think it takes all our jobs. But what I, what I think it does is it makes certain people, certain workers, a lot more productive, it increases the dollar per head, the revenue per head. So you could scale, for example, potentially, this is one, one thing that could happen is, you know, if you look at the trend of tech companies versus old economy companies, you know, one of, one of the striking things is the revenue per head of the employee. You can actually look at that, right? That's all publicly available data. So you can see that the guys at Facebook produce a lot more revenue per head than, I don't know, some, some old economy company, right? So why is that? It's because they're more productive. They're just, they're just producing more with the, with the, with the head count they have. Now, if you add AI to that, where a lot these workers, you know, 90% of the day, maybe could be automated, that doesn't mean that that worker goes away. It means that worker just produces a lot more. It means you can scale the company without having to hire new people, which means there's more, again, there's more revenue per head, which means those guys are getting richer and richer and richer. Right. So I think if anything exacerbates the sort of wealth gap, you know, we'll definitely see that. We'll see real winners, and then the losers who are always with us. But, you know, so that that's the trend I see in it. But I see the Japanese as usual twiddling their thumbs, you know, not just not with the program, not at the races even. And I, you know, and I see that being the case in five and 10 years time. And then they're asking themselves, Oh, why is Japan behind? Why is Japan, you know, why is our industry falling behind? And what it's because you're not aggressively embracing these productivity, increasing technologies? Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with that. Like I said, I don't really have a strong opinion just because the guys that I would look to on this are kind of falling on various sides of it. So, you know, when mom and dad are fighting, I don't really know where to go. I mean, I'm not really in a position to have a strong opinion on this just because, you know, I see what it does. Your chat GPT is minimally helpful. In my life, like I'll use it just because it condenses search down. But really, at the end of the day, it gives me a quick, you know, this is whatever it says, it gives you a quick overview of a bunch of different stuff. But if you really want to know what's going on, you got to go and look at the various things yourself and see what it is. So it's minimally helpful. But if you were to take it away tomorrow in that regard, it wouldn't bother me any. It doesn't do much for me. So I haven't seen it impact my life personally yet. Now I'm also a bit of a person that kind of stands outside this. Like I don't have a number crunching kind of job where I could implement it necessarily, right? So I don't disagree with you. I just don't see it showing up yet. Now looking forward, you know, if I, if I, you know, you could imagine X, Y, and Z. But imagination, this is where Peter Teal comes in. It's like, you know, I, you know, the way he describes it and his, his look on it just doesn't seem as bullish as, as others. So I think it, I think it takes a bit more time to really see how this plays out. And I'm waiting, you know, I'm waiting for, for Daddy to tell me that it's time to be either worried or happy or, you know, green communist revolution is coming before I have a definitive stance on it. Yeah. Well, fair enough. And again, you know, that is the point of the article, right? It takes time for people to really see the use cases. So that's fine. I think that's normal. For me, the most actionable thing, probably if you have kids is to be like, look, you got either get into a trade, which isn't going to be impacted with by this, you know, like a more manual labor, for example, or you've got a, you've got to double down and you've got to understand that professional in the future in the near future is going to be, is going to have to be a master of AI. And it's almost, I think in the, for example, programming world, I believe from, from what I've seen from programmers, it's where they're, they're kind of there already in that, you know, their job now is just kind of, you know, understanding how to prompt the AI, how to kind of fix what the AI comes up with, right? Because, you know, it's not perfect. And so you're more like, I don't know, an architect putting pieces together, using the AI as a tool to generate these blocks, which then you use your human intelligence to put together. So, you know, that's, I think that's the two paths where the paths diverge. The problem, you know, that the problem is things like entry, entry level, like legal entry level programmer. I mean, there's just less need for those guys, right? I mean, typically, like law is a big Ponzi scheme, right, where you've got the partners at the law firms who, you know, you've worked your ass off your whole life. And what you need is just a flow of young people to come in and actually do the work or the research, the reading, the, you know, etc. Now, if you can do all that with, you know, one junior lawyer and an AI tool, then you don't need to hire a team of 10. So it becomes harder to get into these professions as a junior. But once you're in, you know, and if you're the one who's manipulating the AI, you know, so the guy who's replaced 10 junior lawyers, he's maybe now making the salary of five of them. You know, so he's richer plus the company's richer because they've lowered their costs. So, you know, everyone's, everyone within that company's a winner. But the problem is that, you know, there's just not enough, there's not the same number of opportunities for everybody to become a lawyer, right? It's the way I say it. But yeah, like you say, well, we'll just have to, I mean, time will tell with these things. Well, I want, as soon as AI can help me build my drone defense army, then, then, then I'll be excited until then, we wait and see. Future warlord using AI using chat GPT, I like that. Yeah, so, okay, on to the next story. So I know you're going to be going to be really excited about this as I was Shogun, the movie, the Netflix show. Yeah, won some Emmy, Emmy Awards. I didn't even know they'd made this show. I hear about it. Yeah, I heard about it. You know, this, this one gets, gets played time because you have pretty naked Asian women all over. There's the only thing I knew about it. Well, one of the first things that, so I saw it through the Japanese media. And it's, this is everyone who lives in Japan for a while, know this, how sometimes the Japanese like to claim certain things, overseas things as, you know, as if they did it or whatever. I mean, I understand there was a lot of Japanese citizens involved in the project and whatever actors. And I think believe 70% of the movie was filmed in Japanese. So I'm absolutely not disputing the sort of credentials, but, but I believe this was an American, essentially an American production American company who's produced and, you know, well, shot like a daytime soap opera that most definitely was an American production, right? Right. Exactly. And, but, but it's, but it's sort of been claimed, claimed as in the media as sort of a Japanese cultural success. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. One of the things I would say is if I, like, if I was in Japanese, the Japanese media landscape, I would be like asking myself, why the hell are we doing this? Yeah, no, it's like, yeah, okay, great. The, the, like, and I hate to use, I hate to, like, invoke the words of the left, like the cultural appropriation stuff. But it's like, just, just from a hard-nosed business perspective, it's like, well, hang on, this is our, this is our culture. We should be making money out of this. Well, the book, the original book was England was an American book. You know, it's not a butterfly, right? Like, so, it's hard for the Japanese to look at themselves with the, with the lustful eyes of the white man from the U.S. at the 70s, right? So, in all fairness to the Japanese on this one, it's going to be hard for them to, like, put this one together, because they're like, so how do, you know, put, you know, the, the finish, the fetish eyes of a, of a white man on a Japanese filmmaker is going to be hard to, to reproduce. So I'll give them some credit for that one. The, it's also, I mean, like, to a certain extent, too, it's like, they just don't have the fucking money. I mean, like, the production value on, on something like this gets into the, what, hundreds of millions of dollars. They just don't, they just don't have the cash to do this, you know, which I understand probably not, probably not the skills either. Yeah, they don't have the, I mean, apparently they have some, I mean, they're acting there like, I'm sure they could, you know, acting is not that complicated, but yeah, I think it's just the, putting it all together, the production value is also, I mean, the Japanese don't invest their heart and soul and TV, which it's really hard to criticize them on because like, you know, who the fuck care? I mean, at the end of the day, who cares? So I'd prefer that the US be known for something else besides Coke, McDonald's, and good TV. So I think, you know what I think of what, I think also this thing got so big, because it was, I mean, it's, it's that we're at the, the, the other tip in top of possible LGBT, well, garbage, and this was just kind of like hot chicks, swords, and, and samurai, and all the, all the characters look like the samurai is in black. The main character guy isn't, isn't gay or something, you know what I mean? So everyone just kind of looks the way they look. So I don't even know if it's as good as just a matter of like, yeah, it's normal. Yeah, I think Top Gun Maverick was like that to a sense, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you were like, I was dreading it when it came, I was like, no, it's going to be woke. But you just watch it. It was like, wow, this is just a normal movie. I fucking loved it. I watched it like 19 times. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, but I, I would hope that Japan gets out there and starts kicking ass in terms of selling its own culture a little bit. You know, the Koreans have done a good job of that. The Koreans in many ways have kind of leapfrog Japan, which isn't, isn't the natural order of things. If you ask me, I think, I think Japan should be the dominant, you know, power of the region at least out of those two. So, and apparently the government, and this is, where this is a good thing or bad thing, I don't know, but they put, they put together some sort of committee to, with this in mind, right, to try and go out. And yeah, as I'm saying this, I'm thinking that's what that is. It's going to, it's going to be terrible. But at least they're trying, at least they're trying. Well, the, the other thing too, though, is that it goes in, it goes in spurs because back in the, the early 2000s, late 90s, right, Japan had all the underground cinemas and had all the, all the, you know, J-pop had taken off and that, you know, it was, it was what Korea is doing now, but you just can't do that forever, right? Like it comes in waves. Comes in waves? Okay. Yeah, no, I remember. Yeah, Japan was just like, yeah, around about that, like the 90s, right? It was, I would say it was the peak of like Japanese kind of, what do you call it? Soft power or cultural power? Yeah. And I'm not sure how they got there, and I'm not sure how it, how it waned. But do you think it was almost like, from, from what I, my impression anyway, I don't really have the data to back it up, but it's, it's almost, was almost accidental, where sometimes they would make things for the domestic market, then they wouldn't even plan to release it overseas. And then for whatever reason, like some, some, some, some one from overseas, like company from overseas, like I wanted to license, I came, came to beg the Japanese to license something and sell it. And it ends up being like a global, massive success, like, like the final fantasy game franchise was like that, I believe, you know, there's a, there's a ton of examples like that where the Japanese had just made things for the domestic audience and hadn't even thought about taking it overseas. And then it, but, you know, but it, but then it took that overseas company to sort of come and get it and, and, and, and sell it. And when they did, it took off. So I don't, I don't know, I don't know if there's something, some lessons there or, or not, but, you know, here's hoping that wave comes around again anyway. So future to the future. So talking about the, the government, as we just briefly alluded to there in that, in the committee, there is a big election happening in Japan right now. Not to be, not to play second fiddle to the US, we're having our own presidential election out here apparently. Don't if you've seen this, I saw a headline in the Japan Times actually claimed it was a presidential election. I think technically it is because it's the, it's an election for the president of the LDP, the ruling party, the party that has ruled Japan. But I believe it's like four years since the, since the end of the war. And they are having a leadership election completely internal to the party. They don't go to the ballot. You know, it's not like the people vote on it. But they're acting as if they do, you know, and they're having debates and they've even like, and I'm not even making this up. They're like, they have, they've made this billboard, almost like you'd use for a boxing promotion and they're calling it the match. Yeah, I've seen that. Right. In English. It's English. It's in English. They've got a billboard. Like they're putting this throughout, you know, their media networks. And it's like, to me, it just looks like a laugh. It's like, yeah, we can do that too. We can have a presidential debate too. We've even got a female in ours too. And it's like, yeah, but it's not, it's like, it's essentially, it's like the Chinese, you know, it's the way the Chinese are like to lead. It's just, it's just a party matter. They've been, they've been talking about all sorts of policies, well, like tax, increasing taxation, increasing defense, spending, all these important issues, which are far too important for the, for the people to vote on. Yeah, I guess. But I don't know. Is it just me or is this completely bizarre? Well, I think, you know, it just reflects the ever increasing religion of politics, religion of government that's kind of sucking over the world at the moment. Like ever, you know, the world, you must be involved in politics now because, you know, state religion has ballooned to, you know, leviath and levels, which is unfortunate that it would make its way in here. It was only a matter of time before, you know, this kind of ridiculous, you know, pretense made its way over here. I think the, the spectacle of it makes for, for fun, you know, just like the US, one, having, you know, people involved in that. I think it's a good way for the regime to keep its power because if you're so invested in its, in its life cycles and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that, you know, really, they have control over the hearts and the minds. And if they can do that, then they, they, they, they win regardless to, to, to the outcome. It's actually the kind of the courtesy of and to take, you know, this disengagement, which, which really, which really kills them. And whenever a government has the least amount of power, you can tell because it's people are the least interested in what it's doing, you know, they might care about their local mayor, but, you know, the president, who's the president, who cares, doesn't matter, it doesn't really affect you. So I mean, it's ridiculous, but I think it, it, it, it portends things to come. National election will become increasingly popularized and increasingly visual mimicking the US one. I think the, the other reason that they're doing it now is I think the, those at the top see what's going on hints of, of the people not cooperating in, in, in the US and in Europe. And, you know, if they're, they're wise, they'll get ahead of it and start to, and start, and start to divert attention from some unpleasant realities that are domestic and, and get people wrapped up. And as you said, it's even more ridiculous because you can't even vote on the damn thing anyway. So there's even investing yourself in this whole charade is even more retarded because what difference does it make that they're going to choose anyway has no, your opinion. I mean, it doesn't mean much in the US either, but it means fuck all here. So it is, it's brilliant if, if they get ahead of it that way, and they get you super invested in, and it's like getting, getting super invested in a, in a sports, a sports ball match, because it's not like you can play. You have, even if it is real, you have no fucking ability to change the, change the game one way or the other. You're just watching. So, yeah, I think it's an unfortunate reality, but one which I assume will continue for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I almost wish like Curtis Yavin could speak Japanese or read Japanese because I think even he would be surprised at the level that the cathedral controls the things out here as well, because it's, it's, it's almost as if, you know, there's just a trial in the media constantly, right, as to prime prime ministers popularity in the, in the polls and if they drop below a certain number, they have to res, res, they resign and, and, and, you know, and that's all determined by the, by the media, it seems in, in, you know, all the time I've been here at least. So, and it's just, yeah, the people, the people don't get to say, as you say, I guess that's a double edged sword. I mean, on one hand, yeah, it's, it's meaningless, but on the other hand, at least, I mean, it's kind of meaningless in the US and the UK, et cetera as well. So at least there's no pretense, at least there's a little bit less lying to ourselves, I guess, in, in Japan, that it is just a fast. But yeah, I don't know, it's just, I guess it's always been, obviously it's like with all of these things, you know, pre-COVID, it was always there, it was always like this, things have never been different, but it's just so much more egregious. And in your face, now I guess because of maybe some accelerating trends, maybe things like technology just make, like exposing things, just making it very hard to ignore something. I'm not, I'm not sure why it's so obvious now, so much more obvious now than it, than it, than it was in the past, or I don't know, I don't know what the answer is there, but did you, I don't know, do you feel that that has changed? That is a different thing in Japan. Just like globally. Oh, yeah, I mean, I, I do think where, you know, some of our more, what are they? Volatile and do-maristic Bitcoin guys have things right. Like there is a, the cycle, you know, these cycle things are, are, are coming to a typical point, things are, are hitting kind of rocky. We're, we're in for some, some turbulence here and whatnot, and just being all of that, being the case, people are just a bit more attuned to what's going on, even if they don't think about it proactively. It's just everything seems to be off a little bit, everything seems to be changing a little bit, everything seems to be different than it was. It's just not some kind of un, some intuitive level people are, are more aware and more interested. Perhaps they're being led, they're, they're, they're interest and they're, they're pro-act, they're, they're intuition, they're being directed towards stupidity or being directed away from the target, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still interested and the, and the flip side of that, the, the people running the game have to make sure to direct them appropriately and they can't just pull off watch another soccer game because people are like, you know, I'm fucking poor now, like I don't really want to watch soccer anymore, you know, kind of thing. They can't verbalize it, but they're like, things kind of suck in ways that I don't understand and I know it's something to do with my governments, you know, so they can't, they have to have some kind of outlet that allows people to pretend in every, every, in every arena and it can't just be, like I said, another Billy Eilish concert because that just doesn't, that works less and less. Yeah, I mean, well, I think that's a great point. You know, in terms of like the Premier League in the UK, that's the one I'm most familiar with, the soccer there, that, you know, like, especially since I politicized that, right? So that used to be a little escape, you could go and forget all about these, you know, worldly troubles. Now they'll have, they have like regime sort of, or you said rituals, the most games like they'll, they'll, they'll do, they still do the kneeling thing in the UK, by the way, the Black Lives Matter thing before the game, all the players know, right? And it's like, and you know, that didn't even happen in the UK and how long has it been and why are we still kneeling? And it's just, I think that adds the sense of people's discomfort. As you say, I mean, you, you're, you're right about the kind of, it's just an intuition thing. It's not something that's easy to verbalize, because it's like, you know, kneeling on its own, it's not like, okay, well, it's not, that's not a say a bad thing, right? But, you know, it just make, it kind of makes you uncomfortable because you're like, where's this going? Why are we doing this? What's the, what's behind all this? And then also the fact that your former sacred space for a lot of people, right? The soccer game where they just, they can, they can be kind of free from the troubles of the world for two hours is, it's been taken away from them. I think that's a very good point. And but, but also like, you know, when I was back in the UK, I got, I got to a soccer game and, you know, it used to be that that was a real connection to your local community, you'd support your local team, you would, you know, and, and, and, and that was part of your belonging. Now you go to the average Premier League game, and seriously, it's like United Nations, it's just like, I don't want to say half, but like a good, a good percentage of the crowd are tourists. So you're here like Chinese and whatever. And so again, it's like, you can't, it's like, whatever people, maybe discomfort people feel about globalization, for example, is like, again, that's kind of intruding now on, on, on your soccer game and whatever. So I don't know, that's, that's just a couple, couple of interesting points you raised. And I think that's, that's worth watching going forward. Absolutely. I agree. So yeah, in terms of, yeah, next, next item on the list, we've got, I think we covered this before, but like Japanese are, continue to be bearish on holidays overseas. The number of Japanese holding passports is at a record low, it's at 17%, one seven. The reasons stated are, you know, obviously it's too expensive, economic, concern about safety is one that they, they put forward. And that, well, I guess, I guess they were the main two. And yet on the other hand, there's a record number of Japanese people who are choosing to live outside Japan. So a record number of young people, for example, who are taking advantage of the Australian visa, there's a working holiday visa you can get for like one year, pretty much no questions asked, I think. And the Japanese can, can earn, the young Japanese can earn like two, three times the minimum salary in Japan by doing that and have a much better work life balance. So it's something like half a million Japanese currently living overseas. So it's this kind of interesting divergent thing where Japanese not holidaying, but they are, they're sort of going overseas and you, and you wonder, you know, you wonder about countries like the Philippines probably have similar trends, right? Not many Filipinos sort of, you know, whatever, holidaying around Europe, but there are plenty who are sort of, you know, doing the dirty work of the Europeans and sending money back, etc. So are we, are we, is this, is this a bearish trend for Japan? Oh, yeah, it's a good one. That's hard. I mean, you don't like to see new young people forced, or seemingly forced into a mindset where opportunity is elsewhere, it can't be here and the good life is elsewhere and not here. And the divergence is obvious because it's going to be Gen X and older millennials that have the money to vacation because they've been working for a bit and they don't earn, and, you know, older boomer types, they have them, you know, obviously they have the money, but they don't want to go because it's scary over there and I speak Japanese and everything. So you can see why they didn't go, why they aren't traveling as such, but the youngins there, as you just said, can make 17 times more over in Australia and they have, you know, all kinds of cool shit over there. And that's where, if you're an up-and-comer, you got to go elsewhere in the empire to stake your claim, which is, that is, I think, that is very worrisome for the future of the locals there. You're just training people to think outside of their country, their town, their city, and I don't know where that stops or how to get that back. But yeah, that's probably, of all the things that we've talked about, that seems to me the most unpleasant reality that is staring Japan in the face. Well, I think the trends do look ultimately like something like the Philippines, right? I'm not saying it'll get that extreme. But, you know, it'll look more like that than it does now, and I don't think that's great for Japan. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, we'll be front and center watching it unfold. All listeners for updated trends on the decline of Japanese society. We'll be here for it. Yeah, okay. Well, listen, we're pressing time here, so I'm going to finish with one final item on the Japan news segment. The rice shortage that we discussed last week, and we were not sure why it had... Yeah. Well, we're not sure why it wasn't a big deal, like a political-y, a big deal. I noticed campaign posters this week from the Japanese Communist Party. You're a member of the Japanese Communist Party, right, Andy? I have been... No, it will be. They're making a political thing out of this. They're, you know, rather incendiary posters, but fair enough. I mean, it is a big deal. I think that there's not rice on shelves. Andy, have you seen any of these posters? Do you notice any shortages in your own neighborhood? Oh, yeah. That's funny. I was like, what the hell is this talking about? No rice. And then I went into the... I don't know why. I just had never really looked at the rice. I went into the store and I looked at it. There's no fucking rice. Holy shit. There's like two little bags of rice. This man is correct. Holy fuck. This is the end of the world. And then, yeah, that that's a little hope that makes sense. I was just saying stop clock, right? Yeah, but yeah, no, I was... So you were spot on on that one. So now, just because of that, I don't want rice, have no reason to eat rice, generally, and now I'm going to start buying it just because I'm afraid that it's going to be gone. Not only buying it, but... Buying it. Holding it. So, yeah, you were right on. You were spot on that one. I hadn't even fucking noticed at all. Now, they only have selected expensive rice sitting in the store from... I don't know why it's expensive rice, but it's like higher end rice, which is sitting there. And only a couple bags. And limited, right? You can only buy one bag or something, one bag for customer. Oh, that one they've had something like that. Yeah, it's... So we got rationing, we got empty shelves, you know? I mean, that starts the bingo. The Weimar bingo card is starting to fill up here. Your ramen thing is going to come through. It's going to have 5000 yen ramen. Well, I got my haircut in this week, just before the price rises. So, I don't know. I was interesting to see that the Communist Party, you know, who are a big joke out here, thankfully, thankfully, but with things like rice shortages ongoing and inflation and stuff, I don't know. You know, it's kind of a concern. And I don't blame them, I suppose, for jumping on it and taking advantage of it, trying to score political points. I'm not sure how much impact that'll have. I would have thought, though, people are going to start paying attention. But we'll see. I don't know. I don't know if they're going to get traction with that or not. But, you know, and obviously, they don't get to vote on the leadership election either because it's all within the LDP. But going forward, you know, could the Communist start, you know, getting more traction out here? I don't know. It's a concern. Obviously, if you want rice shortages, the best people to vote are the Communists. And so, it's kind of rich for them to criticize that. But it is an issue. And it's not surprising that it's being politicized, I would say. I like the idea of putting the Communists in power just because I'm sick of the gay enemy that we have now. And the Communists are always good for putting the gays and the wokes up against the wall when it's their time because they know they're irritating. Yeah. Okay. Well, like that concludes the Japan part of the feed that we got here. So, I guess we're going to build this. If we start in the Bitcoin segment. Yep. Yep. Bitcoin, there's some stuff going on. It's been a weird kind of price week and one not. But what I think we got to give a shout out to the great Kingdom of Bhutan. The Kingdom of Bhutan is rising. They have 13,000 Bitcoin. Now, it has been known for a little bit that they were they were mining, but I don't think people knew how much they had, but they are the largest holder. I don't like to call the U.S. a Germany or China holders because they have it, but they're not purposely holding it. It's just they got it from criminals and now they're waiting to sell it or whatever until it changes. But Bhutan and El Salvador both have it, hold it, know what they have it and are acquiring it for purpose. So, they have they are the largest government holder of it with 13,000 still kicking El Salvador's ass who only has 5,874. Got all this from timechainindex.com. And the brother that runs that doing good work out on what is his Sony EXPD on X there. He's doing good work calling out bullshit on Black Rock Fudd, Coinbase Fudd, and also keeping up with what the government of Bhutan is doing. Any thoughts on Bhutan? Yeah, I don't really know anything about Bhutan. I knew they were doing some sort of their energy mining, etc. Is there why what's the, I guess, like, politics of the government there? Because, you know, Bikalay is pretty, pretty based, right? He's like young. I think he's well aware of things like the petro dollar and the sort of, you know, the dollar hegemony is kind of an exploitative system and Bitcoin is one way to potentially get leverage back for them. Is Bhutan similar politically? Do you know that in terms of their motivations and their kind of, you know, more right-wing leanings? Yeah, I have to look into it. I assume so because it's a monarchy and they usually tend to be much more in that vein. But I don't know that specifically. It's such a small country that no one has ever heard it. I had, you know, I had never heard of Bhutan, honestly, before. I still couldn't find it on a fucking map. I'm curious to check it out now because they have a wallet. And see, if you look at their holdings, really funny, they have like, it's kind of like all of us have to be when we're doing the Bitcoin thing. It's like you end up with having a bazillion Bitcoin and then you've got all these other weird shitcoins that you have like $5 of fucking matic and $17 of Cardano and shit like that. And if you look at what they hold, it's very similar to that. They actually have like, they have 13,000 Bitcoin in like 70th and, you know, half a matic. They have this kind of weird, this is like they were looking at various things over the course of time and like, let's see what this does. And they would buy it and they're like, this is fucking useless. But they don't sell it because why would you? It's like $5. So they just have these holdings of this worthless garbage surrounding their massive 13,000 Bitcoin wallet, which is really funny to see, you know, essentially. The next, I think the next phase of the evolution there is you go on to what's it called? Like shapeshift.io or whatever those swap services are and you swap it all into BTC. So yeah, they better hurry up because those things are getting more and more worthless as time goes on. Good to see Bitcoin in this grind. The Bitcoin dominance is going up again, which is always nice. Oh, is it? Well, that's good. I noticed it's $58.59. Yeah. Oh, $58.59. Okay. So, well, I noticed Bitcoin. One of the next items on the list here was that we become a stable coin now. I missed the meeting, obviously, or a soft fork or something. But yeah, Bitcoin is now a stable coin. It's $58,000. No, it's not motherfucker. It is 61,000 this morning. Is it going to 61? Yes, it has. It'll be 58 again by the end of the day. Come on. Don't you dare. Don't you dare take away this 3% pump for me, gentlemen. Yeah, but this is just the pre-fed pump. And it's, of course, it's going to crash on the news, whatever, you know, John Palka come out and say you were slashing 5% and it still would still crash. Isn't it? I mean, isn't that what always happens? It creeps up before the announcement, then it's going to crash. Yeah, I think they're the efficient market hypothesis, bullshit, where it's like, "Oh, we're sniffing out this and now it's degenerate more on hoping for a rate of time." Exactly. So I don't know. I'll put my flag in the ground. We will never see $58,000 again. So we are now beyond that. I hope so. I find the $58,000 gang meme, the most annoying ever. Yes. And so I've had to unfollow many people on Noster over the last few weeks because I'm not on Noster to get depressed about the price. But you know, you get all sorts of people thinking they're funny with that. And I'm probably down to, I think I'm following like three people now, one of them is myself and this is my feet. It's not just an Noster thing. This is the pattern for me on social media. It's like the same thing happened to Facebook. I end up muting or blocking everybody. And then there's nothing on my feet. And then I just stop using them. And I know I'm a measurable, like, you know, crumpy person. And so probably social media is not for me. But this meme has done it for me on Noster. Well, the interesting thing with the social media part of it is it's like, everyone gets to have an opinion, but then you realize like, "Oh yeah, you're all fucking stupid." And none of you say anything that is of the slightest bit of value to my life. And there's very few people that are actually saying anything interesting. And I need to get rid of all of you. And it's worse on Noster because everyone's like making an F. They think that, "Oh, what? We need content on Noster." But you know, so they think they're helping Noster by posting things. But it's so obvious, like Odell's doing a thing now where he's posting pictures of him and his family. And it's like, "That's not why I'm following you, man. I give a blank fuck about your kids." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and not only that, it's like, but it's like this, it's like an Instagram thing now. What he's posting, but he then he blanks out all the faces, of course. So it's like, "Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, that's great." Yeah, that's not. So I think people really need to think about, you know, before they post a lot of the time. But of course they don't. Anyway, so that's, yeah, that's the Bitcoin price talk. I do, I don't know. What do you think? So you really think this could be at this time? We could be up to the races? No, I don't. No. I was just saying that because I'm tired of this range. I want it to go up. I have, I've had for fucking what, 17 years now, I don't even remember how long this plan with a buddy of mine to go out when the thing hits 100,000. And this is never going to fucking happen in this. We all get together and decide that this fucking thing needs to go up. I don't even care about the price anymore. I just want to have this fucking thing with my friend because we've been planning it forever and I can't do it until it hits this number. So I want it to be decided. At least you haven't forced yourself into singing "Don't Stop Believing" every day on. What a terrible fucking idea that was. He deserves that smart ass that he is. Yeah. So yeah, I will say, I mean, I think we've discussed this before, but it's like, I don't know, Bitcoin has a habit of doing the exact opposite of what you think it's going to do or what you need it to do or whatever. So it's better to put yourself in a position where you really don't kind of need it and try not to think about it as much as possible. But it is hard. Well, Sam told me it'll be two and a half dollars in the next week. So we're good. He promised nation state adoption. We've got it now. We just discussed Bhutan and it's still not going up. And Michael Salas, he's trying to buy another 700 billion, is it? Or 700 billion, sorry. He doesn't move the price at all, right? I think the latest one is, I actually don't think it's to buy Bitcoin with that one. I think he's just he's getting rid of some debt with this. Oh, okay. Fair enough. Yep. All right. So another Bitcoin related news item here, non price related, but the nayuta lightning wallets, Japanese lightning wallet. I think it was the only one announced they were closing down the owner there. I think we've met, right? I think he's been at a few events. He's had some health issues. He said in his post, and he also he also kind of alluded to the fact that the market kind of had rejected a little bit the self custodial model. Like it was converging around custodial. I think my I guess he had things like Wallops, Toshi and mine, maybe and one of the LSPs as well, like I forget the name of it now. What's the name of voltage? Maybe he was talking about that. So yeah, they they had given everybody, I think it was till the end of the year to do your own research guys, because I haven't checked that to get their funds out. But any any thoughts on this? Were you sad to see this project die? I didn't know anybody was using the thing. So, I mean, good on your brother for giving it a shot, I guess. I mean, it doesn't affect my life at all. I mean, one of it's hard. I mean, I don't know why so many wallets get made. I mean, you're not going to make any fucking money on a wallet. I'm not entirely sure the business model that these people had in mind why they why there's so many fucking wallets. You know what I mean? Like what I you know, what what usage where you see, you know, were there eight billion people using lightning that I'm was unaware of? Like you have three transactions a week or something like what is it that you're going to make any money off of? So, stop doing that. Like build shit for Bitcoin that is actually going to get used and not the 97th wallet, which nobody's going to use because the tax structure doesn't allow us to. Yeah, I I read I read a great line once was in a book about Solomon Brothers in the in the 80s, I think, and they were talking about how, you know, there's this magical moment when treasure exchanges hands from one person to another. And if you're smart, you can sort of get in the middle of that, take a little bit of the treasure and pass it on. And that that was that's that's the that's the business model of the banker essentially. That's that's the sort of smartest way to make money. And so in that sense, lightning, you know, could potentially be very good, right? If you're providing people with the application and liquidity and, you know, the kind of rails and you're just taking a little piece, you know, it's the Visa Mastercard, our next play, whatever, you can make yourself very rich doing that. Now the problem is, of course, there's a lot of regulatory stuff that comes with that. And if you can try and try to be entirely self custodial, like you like you're saying, you know, kind of the incentives aren't really there, because you don't get to take the piece, right? And so I think that maybe explains why there's so many wallets, but also why they're trend trending towards custodial. Because that's, you know, that's that's how you incentivize businesses. Now, on the other hand, it's obviously not good for lightning to become like that, become custodial, become centralized, become like two or three, you know, you got like wallets, Toshi and a couple others, because then it becomes a target for regulators. However, I do feel that's inevitable with lightning. I do like long term with lightning mid to long term, I feel it, you know, you're not going to be like their average person is not going to be using lightning network to do anything. It's going to be, you know, it's almost going to be like a B2B thing, where, you know, it's just the glue that kind of connects everybody together who's using kind of Bitcoin plumbing to do financial things on the internet. But the average player should just be using fiat money when they're spending things. The government will never allow people just to be self sovereign, you know, Bitcoin users, you know, and of course, there'll always be a niche that will be able to do that, because they'll have the technical chops to get around all the inconvenience that there will be, because there will be not be an incentive for a business to come along and make it easy for you. And also normies won't use it. So, you know, it'll be forever a niche thing. And, you know, this kind of self sovereign, you know, this mountain man, you know, lightning network user. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but you're just never going to be going into Walmart and doing your shopping with lightning. And I think a lot of people have kind of woken up to this and also woken up to the sort of limitations of lightning in the last couple of years, in terms of scaling, in terms of security model, you know, heavily reliant, being heavily reliant on the chain and things like assumptions around low fees, etc. So doesn't surprise me that we're starting to see people give up on this. As you say, probably net didn't make much sense in the first place anyway, in terms of, you know, monetization. So shame to see them go. But I think I think that's just going to be a natural trend we see going forward. No, it's not a problem. Just build something better. Which is, you know, I don't know, which is, which I think is servicing businesses for someone like that. And I think the mutiny guys have done a, like, essentially the mutiny guys, they should down their wallet, as I think most people know, listening to this. And, but they've pivoted to doing that kind of B2B stuff now. So that team is still, I think, largely together, I think one of them might have left. But they're going to be, they're going to be doing things for for businesses, which I think is, you know, if you're an engineer who's involved in lightning, it just makes a lot more sense. That's how you're going to make your money. And I think, yeah, like I said, going forward, I think lightning is going to be kind of regulated, B2B payment rails, technology to just just help sort of manage, you know, a bit Bitcoin ledger balance between between companies, not between individuals and shopkeepers. So anyway, we will see, we will see how that plays out. On that note, just finishing off here with the Bitcoin segment, we've got the Japanese conference this week, which we'd mentioned last week. It's going to be the, I think it's the Saturday and the Sunday in Japan. There's a couple of interesting things I'd seen on the website. So just wanted to bring those up. I saw Nomura as a sponsor there on the website. I'm not sure if you'd seen this. I actually thought was maybe interesting. I don't know if like Koji has any connections to Nomura, or are they doing anything with Bitcoin? Have you heard about Nomura doing anything with Bitcoin? Didn't they have something, I forget what it, didn't they have something come out a couple of months ago that they were doing something with Bitcoin as well? I thought, I thought I remember they had something. So that doesn't surprise me. There was some kind of sub, one of their, one of their sub, you know, one of their sub business, I don't know how you'd call it, like one of their, one of the things under there, Umbrella, that was, that had some kind of new product that they were going to be all, some kind of Bitcoin product that they were going to be offering. So I'm, I'll be curious to see if that actually gets any legs, or if that, you know, that kind of dives in the vine. Yeah, I think Nomura are interesting. They're the company that picks up the, at least the Japanese assets of Lehman Brothers after the, you know, post Lehman bankruptcy. And so a lot of like ex Lehman people ended up working for Nomura back in the day. You know, I think they're a fairly smart player, but I'm not sure how much they don't understand Bitcoin or what they're doing with Bitcoin, but it was just interesting to see the code you've managed to get them as a sponsor. Also, there was a, again, I'm not sure on the details, but it's this guy called Junichi Kanda, who is apparently like involved with the cabinet office, the government. He's coming to speak. So it's interesting to see Japanese government even, even though, you know, I think Kishida, the Prime Minister, formerly the Prime Minister spoke, was it Webex? Yeah. The shit coin conference, right? So it's not, it's obviously a couple of levels down from that, but I think Kojis doing well to get someone who I assume has the ear of prominent people. Yeah, I mean, that's by far the most important thing at the moment to be doing is to have, is to be getting these, getting these government officials, speaking and talking and around, trying to pave a way so we can, we can do our thing without being taxed into oblivion or sent to jail and shit like that. So I, you know, more than, you know, wallet makers and kind of relevant shitty toys, the coin toy that I'd like to see this as a point, like I said, as much as you hate to see like a tennis porter and that kind of where he goes and he goes as much of a schmuck as he can be him going out and bothering every politician in the world and going to state capitals and shit like that and getting them all on board or at least getting them to make official kind of probate coin statements as vastly, vastly more important than any of the kind of gimmicky shit that we'd normally do. So hopefully coaching is more of that in the future. Yeah, agreed. And finally on that, so I know that Nifty May is out here. So she works, I think it's for lightning labs and people should fact check that. I'm not sure if that's 100%. I know she's like something to do with lightning. She's doing some sort of base 58 like dev work shop out here, which sounds like if you're interested in getting into lightning, that could be a good thing to attend if you're an engineer. And I know this because I had been following her on noster and she had decided in the last week or so to turn noster into some sort of TikTok for her. So she's been like, well, what'd you call that when you were kind of v logging her trips? I think she's in Taiwan right now and just like v logging herself eating a bowl of ramen and stuff. So like she was one of the ones I had to unfollow. Why would I be following you? So what'd you eat ramen, you know? But I imagine there's a number of thirsty Bitcoin asympts who probably appreciate female sort of doing that. So I'm sure she'll do fine. But yeah, but she's in Japan, I think, to do that next week. So good luck to her and anyone who's attending that workshop. Yeah, so that concludes the Bitcoin for this week, bit of a quiet week. But we can probably wrap it up here with a couple of, you know, big stories that broke last week in terms of sort of global politics. Number one on the list, of course, is the Trump assassination attempt. Second one in what a month? A few weeks, a matter of weeks. Right. Right. And one thing, what my takeaway was the cathedral is doing its best to go on like vixen blaming. So one of the articles I saw was talking about how Trump has an anti gun stance. So kind of blame blaming Trump for his own assassination attempt. Another was talking about how Trump had criticized Harris for, you know, you know, not obviously being behind the attack. But by, you know, the Democrats not being careful enough with their words, maybe maybe leading to miss, you know, whatever. What we heard you say, like, certain, certain members of their supporter base to become, you know, rather unhinged and to maybe see that as a viable way to solve the issue and they had been led on somewhat by by Kamala. And Trump was being criticized for this as well by in the articles I had seen because, you know, Kamala is obviously she's perfect. We're with her and she's perfect and she's never done anything that warrants criticism. So that was my takeaway. It was quite interesting to see the reaction from the cathedral. How about yourself? What have you noticed here? Yeah, I mean, the, you can see the competency crisis really starting to bubble up here. It's like, you took two shots, you couldn't get either of them. Come on, guys, like, you got to do better than that. And also the, the, the, the medius kind of just blatantly retarded and ridiculous kind of response, response to it, disingenuous bullshit. And just their, their inability to really convince anybody, like, they're really, except outside of the, the white men for Harris group of I don't even know what you'd call them, just the, the refuse of western civilization types, some chicks and true believer is nobody. And I mean, fucking nobody believes any of this crap anymore. They just talk to people on the street and they're like, as soon as you tell them that they don't have to speak the appropriate approved government line, they're like, oh yeah, that's all fucking dumb. You know, I mean, all of them, like, jabbing, you know, even the, even the Japanese who only get like NHK kind of propaganda, they're, you know, I was talking, like, you talked to the youngins there and they're like, yeah, it's almost, you know, Trump's got to win. He's, he's a strong man and very, very, very brave and shit like that. Like, just nobody, nobody believes this crap anymore. And I am glad to see that. I'm curious to see if they can pull something, pull something together because they're, they're, their silliness is just does not, it does not portend well when the ruling group, you know, like the Boeing thing, you know, you know, I, you know, I'd really like to see people running shit, even if they're my enemies, like, at least not be retarded. So I am somewhat concerned about my own, you know, drinking water and whatnot at the moment. So hopefully they we can get to get this, this crew out and get a crew that can run shit in there pretty soon because they're, they're, they're, they're, they're weirdness, they're, they're blatant, you know, awfulness and whatnot. And they're, you know, subversion of reality is coming home to roost and we all would like, we should all be praying that we can avoid them having power but too much longer left, you know, the train stop working entirely. Unfortunately, it seems the left kind of fears competence, it sees competences, whatever, like man's blaining kind of, you know, it's, it's like, yeah, I was listening to the libertarian show and he's railing against, you know, misbehaving tourists, which often does in the first 10 minutes of his show. He hates the more than me. But any, the latest story was some tourist misbehaving on the chin cancer and they're refusing to honor, honor the kind of this apparently is a reservation system for luggage and some guy was just putting his luggage where he hadn't reserved and basically told the guys, you know, on the train, I haven't seen the video but told, told them to go go F themselves, you know, and nothing obviously no consequences, etc. You know, people can just come over here and take, take the piss, as we say in the UK. And as I was listening to that, I was thinking that would be a really easy fix and, and the libertarian man was even, he was comparing it to, I think it was Singapore, where they don't have these problems. Why? Because the law, the rules are enforced and they do not mess about now, it's just thinking, well, it'd be very simple to do that in Japan too, wouldn't it? I mean, if, if you're a tourist and you misbehave, hey, spend the night in jail, deportation the next day, and we put you on a blacklist and you're never coming back and you could fix it overnight, right? And I think the Japanese would obviously welcome that but also like the not sensible, if you're, you know, if you're a foreigner living here, you don't want to be tarnished with that brush of misbehaving foreigners. So I think if any, if any group would want these people kicked out, it would be the foreigners living here, or the tourists who do behave themselves, right? So everybody would want this if you ask me, but why don't we have it? It's because of agitating left-wing US-funded NGOs who would rather we live in chaos and they're afraid of competency and they see competency as like this, oh, this, you know, we're hit look at a merge from, from this. I don't know what it is or maybe it's just, it's, it's beneficial because, you know, if you're going to be cynical, it keeps people kind of scared and dependent, you know, feeling that they need to depend on the state or something, I don't know, if there's nefarious kind of motivations behind this as well. But it seems that that is the problem is the left fears competency and the left does anything it can to drive competency away. Is that, I don't know, is that too extreme a take? No, I think it's more of just the constant revolution and subversion, which why don't use the word revolution to describe anything that I do anymore. But when, when that is that, when that is the base driving motivating factor of your, of your life revolution, right, you can't have any kind of set, any kind of competence set that maintains because competence requires a certain, a certain level of stability and certain, a certain level of, of training, all these different kinds of things. And, and, and revolution must overthrow that in every area, everything must be overthrown all the time. So there's no ability to set and to build and to grow. Thankfully reality, you know, constrains a lot of these people, but at, at its root, it's, it's just what must be done. It, it must destroy it must uproot it must take down. And at the end of the day, it must undo humanity. It's really anti-human. It's anti-life. It's, it's, it's a suicidal ideology. It's, and it's extreme. So, no, no, I don't think this is, is ever surprising. You see, whatever, every time leftism gets, you know, a foothold and gets power that just nothing gets built to get, just get destroyed, the front revolution, you know, 1917, all this kind of shit. So this is just the, the dumbest and weirdest version of it that we've seen today. But I'm sure something in the future will, will rear its ugly head and be even more ridiculous. Hmm. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I'm, I'm glad to see the, the incompetency stretches to their shooting as, as you say, left, the left can't mean, the left can't shoot. So long, long, long may that continue because, you know, hopefully we can get, you know, I'm, like I say, I'm a little bit black-pilled on the whole election. I've, you know, in the US election, I'm not sure how much will change even if Trump gets in, but I think we're going to have any chance of peace in the, in the Ukraine. It's probably that's going to have to be Trump, I imagine. And that's kind of one of my big concerns right now. So for that reason alone, I'd kind of favor Trump getting in. But anyway, we will see, we will see. Okay, a couple more items here on the list. So one, breaking news, the Israelis have pulled off some sort of gangster, they're playing a Hezbollah ball. Yeah. I mean, just the audacity of it. So for anyone who hasn't seen it's a, they, they're a number of pages that Hezbollah leadership apparently were using to communicate. They did this deliberately because they were wary that smartphones could be kind of monitored, infiltrated by the Israeli secret forces, which I'm sure they probably could, probably write to think that. But what they had, you know, may have stood that apparently the Israelis can, you know, infiltrate supply chains and put bombs in pages. And you know, it's almost like this Don, I don't know if you remember from the Godfather when Michael Corley only does that, like sort of night night of the long knives when he takes out all his enemies. And I think that was the second, but it was, it's, I mean, just like apparently nine, nine of the leadership have been taken out. Pretty brutal, pretty brutal. We're living in a brutal world and that's a brutal part of the world. I don't know, pretty, pretty shocking. But if I was, you know, Hezbollah, you're kind of at this point, you're scared to, I mean, can you imagine the psychological damage that would inflict? Like people can't even trust their own communications devices. Do they know? I mean, is there you being the better one to know about this? Is it definitely like a man in the middle attack? Like they got, they got a supplier and they put a bomb in there and then wasn't, they didn't just like figure out a way to like overheat the fucking thing. So it pops? They don't know. I've seen some analysis, which is kind of speculated that it's a Taiwanese manufacturer based on like scraps that they've seen that you can kind of make out certain like product numbers and things like that. And so I have no idea if they just, yeah, I mean, if they if they worked out how to do that without like supply chain, like just some sort of software book that can blow things like that, that is even more, that is even more gangster and kind of makes me very afraid. It really makes you think about things like electric cars, right? Like how anyone is, you know, if you were, if you were like a person of interest, as they say, like the last thing you want to do is being in a Tesla, right? So yeah, I mean, it's the details have yet to come out, but whichever way it is, man, if they've just manipulated the firmware or if they've like infiltrated the supply chain, however they've done this, it's a incredibly chilling, like it's one of the most gangster things I've ever seen in my life. And yeah, I'm not making moral judgments on either side. I'm just saying I'm glad I'm not on the shit list of they of Mossad, you know, because those guys do not mess around. Yeah, they do not fuck around. And you got to give, you got to give, you got to, you know, you got to tip your hat where you see shit done well and blowing up, blowing up massage or blowing up the balls of the various Hezbollah leaders. I, you know, in such a, because it all happened at once too. So it was like all around the country, like they sent out a radio signal and they all felt popped at the same time, right? Yeah, that's, that's what seems to have happened, correct? Which, can you imagine being around, you know, you just in wherever the fuck and there's like three dudes there, just all of a sudden explode, like that's fucking wild. Well, there's a video on the BBC, go check it out. And they got some supermarket footage of one of the guys being blown up. You can actually see it in real time. So it's, it's very, in this video, at least it was very localized. Like the guy just collapsed and there was an kind of explosion, but everyone around him was fine. So just, oh, that's pretty fucking, like what if the motherfucker was driving, you know, or like, yeah, no, I mean, there has been collateral damage. Like some guys, daughter died, I assume she was sitting in his lap or something got lost. But it's not like this was a surgical as, you know, you know, there's definitely collateral damage, but like I say, this is just, I mean, and anyone who's like, I've just started to listen to the murder made fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem series. And so I would recommend anybody go and listen to, I mean, I think I'm three shows in, but to realize the extent of just how complex that whole situation is and how volatile and all this, you know, just go and listen to that podcast, because they'll talk about the whole formation of the whole project, the whole Zionist project. But yeah, it's, listen, this is, you know, Ukraine, Israel, these are, these are flash points and historical flash points. And, you know, it seems that we are entering into pretty, you know, the Pax Americana sort of starting to crumble. So I hope not, you know, I definitely praying for peace here, but, but it, you know, if anything, things just seem to be escalating. Absolutely. All right. So finish off with a couple of stories here. I think we're on time. So just rush through these. One, I thought was interesting was Amazon have demanded that for their employees to return back to the office. Yeah, no more. Lazing around at home and you're in your pajamas on Zoom calls, tech workers. Very surprising. I don't know why he would do that, but I don't know. I have my thoughts. Like, I think, I think that you probably do want to get people back in the office. I think it's just a lot more efficient for people to be in the office. Now, I think this is a good way of finding out who's really down with the cause and who isn't. And the thing about the tech companies, which Mayo made on notice, but there's been a huge number of layoffs this year, I think we're getting up, I think we're tracking to about half a million jobs lost by the end of the year. Something like that in the in tech I'm talking about, right? So like the Microsofts, the apples, the Amazon's, et cetera, they've all been lame people off. So this is like a great shedding of jobs that's happening. And like one of the ways to find out who's who's down or not is is just to force everyone to come back. You know, people will leave. Well, they probably weren't fully committed anyway, right? Now it's not like you can't maybe make exceptions. It's like, look, if you ask, get permission from your manager, you can work from home on these days, et cetera, et cetera. But like, if you're in the office, it's like, it's just so much easier to speak, to collaborate, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So I think it makes sense from a management point of view. And I think Amazon probably have the ability to drive it through if anyone, if anyone does. But it'd be interesting to see because if they succeed, you know, a lot of, I think a lot of tech companies will follow and, you know, I've been doing this for like a year now, right? Like he had no use for this. So I mean, if both Bezos and Elon are doing it, like I'm not in a position to be like morons, you know, I think they know better than me. I mean, I don't get it. I don't know why this is to be preferred, but yeah. Yeah, I think, well, I think it's because, you know, if someone's working from home, they end up just doing, you know, podcasts and things, recording podcasts and they're not. Amen. They're not fully committed to the cause. I'm not speaking about anyone on this podcast, of course. I'm talking about other people. So yeah, so finish off here with a bit of a, I don't know if it's a fun story, but Taylor Swift, you're a Swiftie, right, Andy? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I thought so. So she's come out. She's with her. She's with Kamala. She felt the need to go public about this. And I just, I wondered a couple of things like, I don't, I don't remember the kind of, I know people overuse the word scyop, right? But maybe you can tell me a better word to use, but the whole like Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey, bullshit from the Super Bowl last year. I don't remember that or this year, sorry. Like, and I know why the NFL wants to do that because the end, like, if you think about the, like the NFL has kind of been the epicenter of these, these political things for the last several years, like the whole kneeling thing, which is now happening in the English Premier League, all started as, to my knowledge, it was Colin Kaepernick in, in the NFL who started that. You know, we, we went from Kaepernick kneeling and everyone kind of criticizing that was joined the anthem to, I remember a few years later, there was a baseball player from, I think it was the San Francisco Giants or someone who didn't kneel and he was criticized. I think, I think we were talking like five years or something. So, you know, we saw the Overton window really, really shift. But the NFL has been the epicenter of a lot of this stuff. And I don't think the NFL likes that, right? The NFL is just in business to make money. I mean, to give credit where it's due to the NFL, they're very good at doing that. I thought they finally saw this Kelsey Swift thing as a, as, it was like the good, good, good, like, cross partisan, non partisan sort of feel good at all American story. And that's now blown up in the face, I think, because welcome to the culture wars, right? Now, now half the people, half the fans of the league, now, now, now I hate this story and feel bad about it. So I don't know, it's, I thought that probably that probably blew up in the NFL's face. It shows how difficult it is to avoid politics these days. But the, the only thoughts on this is like swift, stupid to do this. Is it a deep, do you care or are we even more on excited to be talking about this? I think this is, this is the, the, they're going back to the competence thing. Like, they tried this with, I remember, like, I'm old enough to remember the Bush, the lesser, and his 2000 thing, and, and 2000, and 2004 election awards, like, we're, you know, we're going to get every fucking band in the world to go out and tell their fans to not vote for this guy, and that they need to vote for Gore or, and, or Carrie the next time. And that made fuck all of difference. Like, nobody, I'm sorry, not only does nobody care, you're talking to people who aren't going to vote, like it makes, I mean, who, even, I mean, even if you are a Swiftie, like, are you, do you give a flying rat to ask really that she's like, go vote for Kamala? You probably, I mean, if you're in her demographic, you were probably going to vote for her anyway. Her telling you to do it is going to make zero difference in you going to do it. The only way it works is if it, if it's kind of like on the other side. So when Kodak Black, 50 cent ice cube, those kind of spic guys come out for Trump, right? That kind of comes out of nowhere. And it kind of is a green light to some of the, to, to their, to their followers. Like, you don't have to hide it anymore. You can actually do it. But no one, you know, when you're the regime in power, having regime apparatus come out and say anything is, is of no consequence. So Taylor Swift or Billy Eilish this morning or, Billy's come out on you with her. Like none of these, I mean, like, fucking what's the whole, the whole guy or, you know, nobody gives, you know, like, of course, like nobody, nobody thought anything else. You know, the only time it makes a difference is if you go, if you cut across people's expectations, not that it, and it doesn't even make people vote, what it does do is it just allows people to be in public saying, I'm, you know, we're to rock a mega hat or something. But this, the, I don't know, you know, it, it does surprise me that they thought that this was going to be a, this, this with this was news, man. Who, if you knew who Taylor Swift was, what the fuck did you think she was going to vote for Trump? You know, like, obviously, I mean, she's been, she's been, she's been kind of a left-wing pain and he asked for as long as she'd been around, like, who, who thinks otherwise, you know, I don't understand what this was supposed to do. Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. I just, yeah, for me, I was just, I was just thinking from the NFL angle as well, or like, like Travis Kelsey, like, what, what a cook that guy looks now. Well, I mean, I get it. I mean, I'm not surprised. And if you were to tell me that Kelsey and her were, were, were, like, that was a contractual thing to try and bring people in, business, co-op business is, is always going to, you know, going to be, you know, it's kind of, you have to have it, you know, this, we're not an Randy in here, like, we're always have that somewhat of a, a, a confrontational stance with business because they're always going to try and do shit to make money. And if, you know, who watches football traditionally, it's men, you know, and they drink a beer and all that kind of thing. And how do you increase your base when you've got basically all men in the US watching the NFL, either you can try and bring the US, you can try and bring the, the NFL to other countries, which is hard because they're expensive and stupid sport. And most people don't want to do what they already have soccer and cricket or whatever the hell. And in the US, so you have to expand your US base and how do you, you're going to get women, it's, it's through shit like this, because they don't want to, I mean, what, what woman, I mean, like, look at, look at any professional sport, like what, what, what women really watch, I mean, they'll watch the gymnastics shit in the Olympics a little bit or ice skating or something, but they don't watch sports, you know, they're not going to do that. And even, so they try and, but if you can convince them with Taylor Swift and shit, like to pay attention to it, that, that ups their, that ups the business, but it degrades everything about it. So, you know, and you're not, it's not a surprising thing that they would, they would do it to try and increase their, their, their user base or, their, their customers. It's just, you know, as consumers ourselves, we need to look at this and be like, no, fuck you get back and do what you're supposed to do. Nobody gives a shit about any of the other stuff that we do not wish to have more kids involved, more whatever. This is, you know, this is kind of a, a 35 year old plus male thing. Actually, I'd like to see the destruction of it all. I think it's somewhat of a, it's the, I've never been a big supporter of the amount of effort and time that goes into sports generally. I'd like to see that kind of take, take a backseat a little bit, you know, to something a bit more productive than basketball or whatever. 100%. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, that's one of my, uh, vices, you know, I, I do like, I do like the sports ball. Um, I, but I have, I've been like intentionally cutting a lot of it out and feeling good about doing it. Well, one of the powers you've got is that you would, you were talking about it a little bit earlier in, with regards to politics is like the, the biggest f you can give them is just not to pay attention, not to getting engaged. Um, you know, maybe I'm miss miss, you know, I'm paraphrasing obviously what you said, but you have that power with the sport as well, right? So, you know, the NFL, whatever, I, you know, um, am I subscribing to the games this year? No, am I, you know, am I missing anything in my life? No, it feels, it feels great not to watch that crap. Um, and all, all it is is really just, you know, at the end of the day, it was all government propaganda anyway, right? When you think about, you know, now it's left this stuff, but it used to be all about the military and, you know, uh, let's go on Veda Rack. So, you know, it's always kind of always been that way. It just, it's kind of flipped sides to the currently, you know, leftist regime. But, um, so yeah, good, good, great, great, just to just turn off the damn TV, right? And not watch it, don't pay attention. Um, but yeah, well, um, it's, it's, it's, I guess, yeah, that'll be the positive take. Let's, let's take this as positive. You don't have to buy Taylor Swift albums. You don't have to watch Netflix. You don't have to watch the NFL. You can turn all that crap off and, and you can do more productive things with your time. Amen. Amen. Okay. Good. So that is the end of the list. Um, so yeah, I think I'll hand it back to you to close off. All right, brother. It was a good one. Uh, hopefully you go out and join the rest of your day to follow up with what you said. Go out, live. Don't watch too much for the ball. Have a little bit, but, um, and don't, don't watch the the Bitcoin price. It will do nothing until it does something. So don't worry about it. Get out. Enjoy life. Enjoy the sun. Later brother. Cheers. [inaudible] Yeah. My life, my life, my life, my life, my life, my life, my life, my life. Tokyo said, Tokyo said, yeah, yeah, I'm looking at skyline. I got to drive my skyline. I'm rocking, baby, name like Neil went away, bro. Tokyo drifting, what Nakimoto gifted. These dollars don't make sense. No longer on the fence. Bitcoin only homey. Michael Salato me. Ain't no second best. No. It's my one and only fear taking nails. Yeah. Bitcoin doing well. I'm in Tokyo. Yeah. As I said, they'll. Hey, Cornichua, white, like red duck, GTI, DC, A2BTC, stock and sack is my nature. Hey, Cornichua, white, like red duck, GTI, DC, A2BTC, stock and sack is my nature. 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