Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are very excited to have Noah Smith with us. Noah is a renowned economist, writer, and commentator known for his sharp insights into economics, technology, geopolitics, and culture. He is the founder and writer of Noahpinion, a widely-read newsletter with nearly 400,000 subscribers that distills complex topics into engaging, digestible reads.

With a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan and a background in physics from Stanford, Noah combines academic rigor with a unique ability to communicate big ideas clearly. And previously, Noah was a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. And today, we will dive into Noah's perspectives on the global economy, the role of AI in discovery, and the cultural forces shaping our future. Thank you for joining us, Noah, today.

Well, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. So, first of all, we are a huge fan of your newsletter and your content, but we are curious about your background and career. So, it seems like you studied physics at Stanford, and then switched to economics, so later. But I see that there is a three-year gap. And when you graduated, finished from Stanford in 2003, and you started a PhD program in economics

in 2006, what made you switch from physics to economics, and what happened to you at that time? Oh, so what happened was actually depression. So, when I was in college, my mom died of an aneurysm, brain aneurysm. And I forgot how to say that in Japanese, but it's like a burst blood vessel in your brain. And I became clinically depressed after that, during my middle or later years of college. And so, because of that, I decided I had to have a life change.

I didn't want to go back to physics. I was actually very good at physics, actually better at that than I am at economics. And I really liked it, but then I decided that associations for me were very negative, because I had been very depressed. And so, I wanted to make a change and do something else in life. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. So, I then decided to go take some time, live in a foreign country, and then think about what I wanted to do with life.

So, I went to Japan, because I had studied some Japanese in college and because it seemed like a great place. And so, I lived in Osaka for those three years. And then, during that time, I applied to grad school and then returned. I see. And you said you studied Japanese in college, but what made you to study Japanese, and what made you interested in Japan? Good question. So, actually, I didn't have to do a foreign language requirement, because I had taken Latin in high school, and I passed out of the

foreign language requirement by being very good at Latin. However, I kind of did always want to take a foreign language, you know. So, my senior year, I took an intensive Japanese course for the whole year, because I wanted to do that. And then, it was a little too late. I wish I had done it earlier, so I could have done study abroad, but I didn't. I came, I did it too late to do study abroad. So, the reason I did it was because I saw this movie, Battle Royale,

and I thought that is like the most beautiful movie. I really loved it, and so I decided, oh, I'll take Japanese. And so, I thought that was very fun to study a foreign language, and then I took a spring break trip to Japan my senior year, and that was my first time I'd been overseas, and I thought, wow, this is incredible. And so, anyway, that's why I picked Japan. Were you interested in Japanese anime, because Japan is famous for anime, animation, manga?

Not really, no. I mean, I had seen some, like I occasionally enjoyed watching some anime with friends of mine. We watched, like, Berserk, or Cowboy Bebop, or some other ones like that. Or, have you ever seen one called Vision of Escaflowne? Old one from the 90s? I mean, we saw it in the 2000s, but then, yeah, so we saw that. But anyway, we saw a few of these, but then I didn't, I wasn't really that much into it.

I thought, oh, this is cool, but I wasn't, like, you know, otaku style. The stuff I liked from Japan was more kind of punk and underground stuff, things like movies, like underground movies, or like indie movies, kind of like, do you know Ishii Sogo, like the movie director, or Nakashima Tetsuya, or like Miike Takashi, or some guys like that. Or then some fashion, so like the street fashion in things like Fruits Magazine.

I thought that was so cool. Or like, maybe like underground, like rock music, or just like indie rock music, or something I really liked. And then, yeah, or some that was not indie, but stuff like Shina Dingo, I really liked, or The Pillows, or some other bands. And so, I just thought, I like all this underground culture stuff. So that's what I was excited about to see in Japan. I see. But was that, that made you to, but what made you to study economics, and especially in

University of Michigan? You could have studied in Japanese university, like Tokyo University, Kyoto University, if you wanted to study economics. Maybe I could have. But then, in fact, I even thought about doing that. But then I decided that going to the US would be more, like the US is definitely the center of like economics research. And I wasn't confident enough in my Japanese ability to do like academia in Japanese.

But maybe in retrospect, maybe I should have considered that it might have been more fun. I don't know. But Michigan was great. You know, it was, I really liked my advisor. I, one reason I picked Michigan was because I got a really good advisor. I found him searching through a whole bunch of professors. His name is Miles Kimball. I really liked him. And so that was one reason I chose Michigan.

Also, much of my family, like a lot of my family goes to Michigan for undergrad. So my sister, my dad, lots of others went to University of Michigan. I went to Stanford, but I was unusual in my family. Most go to Michigan. And so then I thought it would be cool to live in Michigan for a little while. But if I could do my life over again, I might go to like a university in Japan for graduate school. I see. Yeah. There are a lot of universities in Japan, so access like only English.

So language, not like Japanese. I'm not sure if, you know, at the time, but how was it? At the time it was a lot harder. There were a couple that I looked into it and there were a couple who did it, but I was not, I was not confident that, that, you know, it would really work, you know. I see. How was learning Japanese? Was it difficult for you? No, Japanese is a very easy language, which is good for me because I'm lazy. And so it was very easy to learn.

The grammar of Japanese is very simple. Yeah, well, the grammar of written Japanese, like if you read a novel or book, something that's high, high class, I guess, or advanced, the grammar is a little more difficult because they have many dependent clauses. But then if you, the way people talk in Japanese is just run on sentences. It's just like, you know, nantoka nantoka toshite, nantoka nantoka de, you know, like it's very easy

grammar, I think. And then the pronunciation of Japanese is very easy because there's no sounds that we don't have in English. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That made us, you know, Japanese people speak English harder, right? Right. We don't have our sounds. But like speaking like Hindi, for example, is more difficult because they have all these sounds we don't have. Even Korean has a few sounds we don't have. They have some vowels we don't have.

But Japanese, it's all just like very simple vowels, you know, sounds that we have. And so that was very easy. And then I guess, you know, memorizing kanji is hard, but it's not that hard. But then that's the hardest part of Japanese is kanji. But it's really not that hard. It's not as hard as like Chinese because you have to do more kanji in Chinese. Interesting. Because, yeah, we talked to many foreign people learning Japanese.

All of them say Japanese is the hardest language I learned. But you are the first one. It's easy. I don't have any basis for comparison. I've never learned another foreign language. But you learned physics, so you just dive into principles and apply to it. maybe that's why it's easy for you maybe yeah you think japanese has some uh physical principle yeah physical you say that grammar is easy maybe yeah principle and apply yeah maybe i don't know

anyway i just loved it it was really fun yeah so and i went uh back to the topic but you finished phd in 2012 and then you became a writer and i was always wondering what inspired you to transition from academia to writing full-time oh so actually i started doing my blog in graduate school i started doing my blog in in um uh 2011 and yes sir uh what was the platform so it's like a world craze a blogger okay yeah so you can see my my blog uh you just look for no opinion blogger it

was still called no opinion and i just did it for free it was fun it was my hobby and then i didn't really want to do academia to be honest my professor my advisor convinced me to try it for a couple of years because he said oh you might like it but i didn't really like it but i did it just because he is very convincing and also you know i uh to do something else for money um you know there was nothing that i was very excited about i could be like a consultant or something

really what i loved doing was my hobby of blogging but i didn't think i could ever get paid to do that so i was just needed a job but then academia is you know it's kind of interesting i like uh it's okay but it's not really my thing so i tried it a little bit like he recommended and then but then while i was there bloomberg came to me and offered to pay me to be a writer for them while i was working as a professor so i said okay i'll do it

um because i can live anywhere i want and just do my hobby as a job because it's fun and so that's how that happened and then so you started writing on sub-circle not immediately no so i start i was writing for bloomberg uh just on and i in my spare time i would keep writing on my own blog so i wrote many things every week uh so i wrote on my own blog and bloomberg at the same time i wrote five things a week for bloomberg and then maybe three things a

week for my own blog and so i was writing a lot and it was fun though i loved it and i i still love it you know and so um i uh i did that for years uh excuse me starting in uh 2015 um and then moved to san francisco in 2016 kept doing that and then i didn't get on substack until the end of 2020 right oh so yeah i saw on your link you know you started uh liking no opinion uh november 2020 yeah i see yeah well so the my old blog was called no opinion also i just moved it

i just moved it to substack and that's this is the first time i ever charged money for it and actually at first i didn't charge money i was just doing it for free but then when i decided to leave bloomberg i started charging money i see and you said you were writing like uh two to three articles for bloomberg and then two to three for your own blog how five for bloomberg three two three of my for my own blog

oh sorry so so how did you choose oh this is for bloomberg and this is for my blog and does it compete with each other or it's not really no so the way i chose was basically um most things i would write for bloomberg but something that would be speaking to a narrower more academic audience or be unrelated to the topics that i wanted to write for bloomberg i would write on my blog so there are many times i wanted to like discuss some data problem or some

paper or some very nerdy stuff and then i would do my that on my own blog and then or i wanted to respond in detail to someone's post that they made so i do responses on my own blog because that's not how bloomberg posts are written but if i just wanted to give some opinion on some issue then i would do bloomberg and i know you've been writing a lot of articles uh a week but i was always curious how do you choose the topic to write oh do you is that based on the feedback

from your readers or or from news you consume i was curious how do you come up with ideas to write oh so actually that's the easiest part i come up with way too many ideas i come up with more than twice as many ideas as i write and you don't i don't have any method of coming up with them i just read things and then i ideas pop into my head but how do you yeah keep the ideas then because you have a lot of ideas

and did you do you keep the ideas in google docs or yes google docs but nice yes but if you kept keeping the ideas in google docs and does it go super long and is it how you look at how long it is now i have a document called blog post to write how many pages now it's 22 pages long 20 pages 22 yeah just filled with topics to write oh i could count the number of topics but it will probably be about 100 and when you chose like what made you do like a switch from blogger to

substack is that because of the pay payment payable system no email so blogger so blogger is just a website you publish it and it appears on a website substack will send out emails to all your followers so the distribution was just much much better and now you have around four yeah four hundred thousand subscribers so how did it grow so were there any like posts going you know went by now or like it's kind of like linear growth linear very linear i think

and i remember maybe you or someone told me that the the first subscriber was mark zuckerberg i don't know if you can share but he wasn't the first but he he did subscribe at some point yeah or at least someone in his team subscribed i don't know if i don't know if he ever reads it but someone at his office is you know reading it in his name oh he probably just him uh i've never met him no he probably just um you know he probably has his office subscribe him to a

million newsletters but i don't know how much he actually reads because i've never met him so i don't know if he read has ever read it himself so you don't get any feedback from him never never i should i should go meet him yeah so in the newsletter you cover so many topics like economics geopolitics and culture and so on and one thing i'm curious about is that ai ai's and an impact of ai and yeah you recently wrote

about ai and so how do you see the ai truly impacting jobs and productivity in the coming years are we over estimating that the robots will take all the shop narrative well probably because we um people are really fixated on this idea they really are thinking about it a lot and they can't stop thinking about it evidence to the contrary just bounces off people's heads boo you know like it doesn't go in um so for example for many years people said

there will be no more trucking jobs trucks will be automated and all the truckers will lose their jobs and i had a bloomberg another bloomberg writer yell at me he said these people aren't gonna have a future he how can you how can you say we don't know what's gonna happen it's obvious what's gonna happen he yelled at me very strongly at lunch and i was taken aback um i said well we just don't know um we don't know whether we'll still decide we need drivers you know human

drivers he just yelled at me and thought i was stupid and i he thought i was being intentionally stupid intentionally ignorant he thought i was pretending that he thought everybody knows the truckers will all be out of a job soon everybody knows it it's an obvious fact and he thought i was being dishonest by not admitting the obvious fact that was in 20 2015 that was 10 years ago it has been 10 years since then the number of truck drivers employed is larger than ever

and there is a shortage of truck drivers now there they need so many truck drivers that they're having to raise wages a lot within the industry just to get humans and all the self-driving truck companies have gone out of business including a company my friend was doing. So, called Embark. They went out of business or got acquired for their technology or, you know, just something that it's not working. Will it ever work?

Maybe it will. Will we still have humans in the loop just in case of some problem? Maybe we will. And truck drivers will just sit there while the truck drives and just be a monitor. I don't know. But here's the point. The truck driving apocalypse that this guy predicted, that my colleague predicted, never happened. It didn't happen in 10 years. And, but there's no learning. He doesn't learn. Nobody learns. Nobody's learned from that.

Nobody apologizes. Nobody says, I was wrong. I didn't understand how technology affected the economy and jobs. And maybe I don't understand the next time either. Maybe this is more complicated than I can understand. Maybe I am fundamentally ignorant and my knowledge is limited and I shouldn't be so confident about things that I don't know. I should understand why economics is so complicated and I should look at the history

and look at the, you know, theory and understand why these things are complicated. And I can't just use common sense to decide the answer. But I don't, that's what people should have taken from this failure of prediction. But here's another, Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel prize for helping to invent AI. He declared that within five years, radiologists will be gone because AI will read scans. But it's been five years.

There's more radiologists than ever. And there's a shortage of radiologists. He was totally wrong. And yet they never ever learn. They just keep making the same prediction again and again and again. And it keeps being wrong and wrong and wrong. Now, I'm not telling you that they'll never be right because I'm not so arrogant to assume that I know that they'll never be right. But what I do know is that they are overconfident.

They don't really know all the things they think that they know. And they keep making these confident predictions. Everybody's obsessed with this idea that AI will take away jobs. It keeps not happening. Does that mean it will never happen? No, I don't know. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. I don't actually understand enough to make a prediction. But I understand that they also don't understand. And so I keep saying, we don't know.

And then they keep being wrong and they never learn. They never become less confident. They just keep making the same confident prediction again, ignoring the fact that they were wrong. Yeah, but we don't know. Yeah, as you mentioned, we don't know the future. So it could happen, but couldn't happen. Exactly, exactly. It could happen, but might not happen. Do you use any AI tools for writing for, yeah, whatever?

I use O3 to proofread my posts and it catches most of my posts. I use O3 to proofread my posts. I use O3 to proofread my posts. I use O3 to proofread my posts. And it catches most, but not all typos. When I use it, then I'll use it to do like background research. So I do my own literature search, but then I have it do a literature search too, O3. And it catches a lot of papers I miss, but then I catch a lot of papers it misses.

So actually me plus the AI is currently good. I do not use AI to create text for me. Okay, but have you tried it? Yes, many times. Many times. Every time a new model comes out, I try it. I see. It doesn't work? Well, the quality is okay. It's, you know, the quality is what an undergraduate working for an online news site would write. It has confident hallucinations. It makes hallucinations that it then never admits

we're wrong and it just keeps running with them and keeps inventing new lies to cover up its old lies. So it's like a liar who doesn't want to get caught. Just keeps making up new lies to cover the old ones. Never admit you're wrong. It does lots of other problems too. It's useful. It's good. You know, I would, if I were writing a high school essay, I would certainly use that. Yeah, I know. Yeah, my friend is working on something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. But then it's not for what I do. It's not yet useful enough to just push a button and generate something. Maybe it will never be. Maybe it will be. I don't know. But hallucinations seem like a problem that's not solved by scaling. So maybe we'll solve it with some other algorithmic innovation. That should be, yeah. And I recently read an article that there are many like AI-generated articles. And so AI learns from it.

Then there are many garbage. So garbage in, garbage out. So I'm not sure if it's, yeah, there are many hallucinations in the future again, but. Right. And what, very soon, we might actually see AI training become more difficult because the web is getting filled. The basic datasets are all getting filled with LLM-generated content. And one thing that's a pretty consistent conclusion from research findings is that training LLMs

on LLM-generated content makes them worse. It's called model collapse. But it used to be called modal collapse. And people just started, they changed the word and started calling it model collapse. But anyway, yeah. So we could see that be a problem in the years to come of AIs not being able to train correctly because they're training on their own output. Yeah, totally. And you mentioned you are researching with, you know,

Chatty Vita 03. And so you are writing many topics and covering many topics. What is your source of information usually? So what kind of article, but you can list up some. Yes. Many things. So news articles, blog posts, especially now on Substack. Papers, economics papers, a lot of them. Sometimes other papers, but mostly in economics because those are the ones I understand. Sometimes Twitter, although it's getting much worse.

So now I don't use it much. And then private research reports from like McKinsey or something. How much do you spend for researching or reading usually a day? Oh, it really depends. You know, only occasionally will I do a lot of research for a post that I'm writing. Usually I read stuff because interesting and then I write about it later when it's important. And so it's very difficult to tell my leisure research

from my work research. And after you read something interesting, so do you keep those newsletters or papers somewhere like notional Google? Still Google Doc or how do you keep ideas? Google Docs. Google Docs. Okay, interesting. So when I see an interesting article or paper or something, I copy the link and I put it under the correct heading in Google Docs corresponding to the post I want to write in the future.

Interesting. And now it's like 22 pages. It's currently 22 pages. Are you asking a question? Yeah, asking a question. Yeah, 22 Docs pages. What's the question? Yeah, now your Google Doc has 22 pages, right? That's correct. Okay, yeah, thanks. So regarding the AI and the leadership, so it seems like US is leading in this space, like AI space nowadays, but China is catching up and they release a lot of open source projects and products.

And do you think the US can continue to maintain its top position in this field in the future? Oh, I'm not sure. I feel like, I'm not 100% sure, honestly. Yeah, no, I'm the wrong person to ask about this, especially because I think that it's, there are different areas of AI. So I think China's now number one in computer vision, but then US is number one in large language models. And then there's a bunch of other AI things

and I'm not sure who's ahead. But in your book, you talk about the fact that AI is a big part of the future. But in your, like, how I would regulate AI essay, you warned that heavy-handed rules can backfire. It's hard to predict what rules will make tech safer, but easy to, in adversary, stifle, like progress, right? And what kind of, like, regulation can reduce the risk, in your opinion, without smothering innovation, sorry.

So the thing about regulation is, we should make rules for things we understand. With AI regulation, people are very eager to make rules for something that they don't understand yet, that no one understands yet. So I would say, watch to see how the thing works in reality and then make rules. your rules around that. And be prepared to change the rules as the capabilities of the technologies change quickly.

But trying to anticipate where the technology will go in five years and making a rule now that will apply in five years and keep us safe is stupid. Like that just doesn't make sense. You can't predict where it's going to be in five years. So you can't really make rules that will apply in five years. The only thing you can do is be nimble and adaptable. You have to be willing to change the rules quickly. Unfortunately, America is less like this than Japan. Japan actually has better adaptability in terms of rulemaking because in Japan rules are made by

commune, you know, bureaucrats, whereas in America they are made by laws and lawsuits. We do too many things by the courts. We should have a bureaucracy instead for some of those things. Do you occasionally check the regulations of each country? I know you were catching up. Oh, that's something you can really ask AI about. AI will describe the regulations in each country. And once in a while it'll get it wrong.

So if you write something where you have to get this thing right, you should check carefully first. But I think in terms of backgrounders on regulation, it gives very good backgrounds on regulatory environments in different countries. Excuse me. Oh, no. And I think some people, oh sorry, another topic, but some people are concerned about current tariffs. And we've seen a lot of like major tariff announcements lately, including 35% tariff on Canada, which is America's top trading partner, and 25% tariff on Japan and

South Korea. They are both U.S. allies. But the inflation hasn't really gone up. And I read your blog post, but why is that? And should we be worried about it? Yeah, I would be worried, but then we don't really know what's going to happen. America is being ruled by a crazy king. Imagine an old king who goes crazy. Maybe he started out a little crazy, but he's getting very, very old. He's older than Biden was at the same time in his presidency.

He's the oldest president we've ever had. And he's going mentally downhill, but he's so popular among Republican base. They love him so much that no other Republican can stand up to him. Even Elon Musk tried and failed. And was basically kicked out of the movement because even Elon Musk could not stand up to Trump. And so we have a mad king in America. Should we prepare for or brace the impact, like inflation for the future? Inflation? Maybe. But I think Japan doesn't have to worry about inflation as much.

Oh, because first of all, Japan structurally has forces pushing you toward deflation, so it's harder to get as much inflation as in America. But also because if the U.S. puts tariffs on Japan, that raises prices for America. But for Japan, it doesn't really raise prices because Japanese exporters will then sell their domestic prices will match the after tax price they're getting overseas, not the pre-tax price.

So they will actually have an incentive to drop prices in Japan. So tariffs in America are deflationary for Japan. I see. And how do you see the U.S. future after 3.5 years, after incumbent president? Even more stupid than now, man. How come? Well, because the real problem with America isn't Trump. I mean, Trump is a problem, but the real problem is social media. America was always a country that depended on people with different ideas and different

lifestyles being able to spread out and all coexist by not living next to each other. When the internet, when social media came, it took all the different kinds of Americans and basically put them in one room together. And our country is not built for that. Japan is built for that, because you guys, you already knew what it was like to, you know, you knew what other Japanese people were like 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but Americans didn't know what other Americans were

like. It was so big and diverse. Then they found out all at once. And so now the social conflict is just happening across every level of society because Americans have been forced together, whereas Japanese people were already used to living together. I see. That's my theory anyway. Yeah, but there shouldn't be any regulations. So for like social media companies, internet companies.

So what kind of regulation should be, do you think? I don't know what kind of regulation can help this. Okay. Sorry. I mean, the question could be like the issue is algorithm. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt you. I do know one regulation that can stop this, which is ban phones in schools. Only schools? Because it's the only time we're able to ban phones. Other times it's not legal. We can't ban phones in companies. That's illegal. Ban phones in schools.

Get kids off the internet for most of the day. So do you do it for your kids as well? If I had kids, of course. Yeah. Ban all phones in schools. But is the issue more like the algorithm on the social media or the people who believe in the information? Or both? Both. Both are a problem. In fact, I wrote an interesting article about this a while ago where I showed research papers showing that both of these

effects are important. One more thing I'm curious about is the US-China decoupling and how far do you think US-China decoupling go and how should founders prepare for that? Well, US-China decoupling is mainly a Chinese initiative. Most of the decoupling has been China's goal. So China has imported a lot less, a lot fewer imported components from the US because they want to be economically independent of the US. And this will also be Chinese decoupling from Japan.

So Japanese companies are now not as able to sell things to Chinese companies. Because China has been working, has been basically pushing its companies to make all the stuff at home and to basically separate themselves from the global technological ecosystem. So the most of the decoupling is that so far. But what people talk about is America buying less stuff from China. But really, what's more important so far is China buying less stuff from America

and from Japan and Korea and Europe and those places. This is hitting Germany really hard right now. Because Germany was selling a lot of machinery and components to China and now China is aggressively trying to push out German companies. Can these relationships, like international relations get better in the future or will it be worse? They will be better at some point in the future.

But as long as Xi Jinping is in power in China, it will be difficult to get better. Xi Jinping is, honestly, he's kind of stupid, if I'm being perfectly frank. Because he's not a smart guy. He's not good in his education. And he grew up during a time of poverty, when his worldview was very limited and narrow. But at the same time, he is extremely overconfident. He's self-confident. He believes he should control everything. He should rule everything. So now sometimes he does delegate.

He sometimes assigns some other people to work to be the head of some of these party commissions and groups that he's officially the head of. So guys like Kai Qi or whoever. The problem is that those guys are all old, not very smart, and they're just 100% loyal to Xi Jinping. He prizes loyalty above all else. And so he surrounds himself with all these people who just say, yes, sir. You're right, sir. You're so brilliant, sir.

Everything you say is right, sir. You're winning. And this is why he's dumb, because he can't, he doesn't get the perspective to understand when he makes mistakes. And so he made a big mistake with zero COVID. He made a big mistake with the IT crackdown, crackdown on tech companies that later they worked very hard to try to reverse. He did the real estate bubble in a bad way. He hasn't done stimulus. He hasn't done enough bailouts.

He's not fixing property taxes. He's not fixing the local governments. Belt and Road has been a disaster. Chinese diplomacy has been bad. I mean, he's not as bad as Trump because he's not just this insane old guy who's trying to wreck his country for fun, right? But then, he's not as bad as Trump, but he's not great. But he's also 72 years old. And leaders usually start going downhill around 75 to 78. That's usually when they really go downhill.

And when leaders get older, they start getting paranoid. They start thinking, oh, the younger people are going to push me out. I have to fight hard against the younger people to push me out, who want to push me out. I got to stay in power. And so, once they get into that mode, they focus fully inward and not outward. And so, I think Xi Jinping may be starting to get in this mode. We've seen a little bit of evidence.

We don't really know what's happening inside China, I think. But we've seen he's taking many fewer meetings and doing less travel. He's firing a lot of people in the military that he hired. He's firing his own guys that he hired earlier. That's kind of crazy, right? He's disappearing from view, making fewer public appearances, doing very short meetings instead of long meetings. His health could be bad. But he's increasing his purges and attacks on other people.

You know, Japanese government has many problems, but you haven't ever had this problem. Because in Japan, no one person ever gets very strong. But then, when one person gets very strong, you get this kind of thing. I think Deng Xiaoping was the great master of politics in China. The system he created was supposed to prevent people from getting too strong, so that they wouldn't be like Mao Zedong, right? He didn't want them to be like Mao.

So, he made a system that he thought would prevent power from being centralized under one guy. So, if you look, Jiang Zemin, you know these guys, right? It's not the Japanese name, but you know who I'm talking about, right? Okay. So, Jiang Zemin was less powerful than Deng Xiaoping. Hu Jintao was even less powerful than Jiang Zemin. Those guys were picked by Deng Xiaoping. He picked them in advance to be his successors. But after that, he didn't pick anyone.

So, Xi Jinping was picked, and he became the kind of dictator that Deng was afraid of, centralizing all power within his own individual person. And so, because of that, China now has the classic problems of dictatorship. And as Xi Jinping gets older and older and gets less and less secure, he may worry about fighting the other people. Also, they have realized that he's not competent. But he's so good at internal politics that they can't do anything about it. This is also true in the Republican Party in America.

All the Republicans know Trump is stupid and crazy. The conservative writers, even the right-wing guys, even the most Uyghur guys, they know Trump is a complete idiot and just old. He's going mentally downhill and he's kind of crazy. But there's nothing they can do about it. They can't challenge him in public. Elon Musk tried and he failed. So, this is the problem when you have these leaders who seem very, very strong and are very, very good at crushing internal enemies, but then are not effective leaders

for the outside. So, this is a big problem. I see. And I was wondering if you were, or you could become the president of the United States. I don't know if you want to be. How would you handle the situation? Never. If you were. If I was the president of the United States, I mean, there's lots of different things I would do. But yeah. I mean, I would do, you mean if I could just control policy myself? Yes.

Oh, I would try to make it easy to build things in America. That would be my most important policy. Housing, factories, infrastructure, things like that. And I would make close alliances with, you know, of course, Japan, Korea, India, Europe, and all these countries so that we can all have complete free trade between us. And then I would coordinate our industrial policy so that we make sure that every industry doesn't depend on China.

Every important industry doesn't depend on China, that we can do it somewhere within our system of alliances. And I would make that system as big as I could, even include like Indonesia, Philippines, you know, Vietnam, if I can. You know, Turkey, obviously. Include all these countries, and then Latin America, if I can. Maybe they wouldn't do it, but then maybe they will. But then, and I would try to make this system as big as possible and make sure that together we make sure we're not dependent on China.

And I would have it be so within this alliance system, nobody fights anybody else. We don't have any trade arguments. We're all friends. We all cooperate. And that would be what I would do. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And I was, this is sort of a random question, but I was, since the kid, I was wondering, like, there are some people who won the Nobel Prize in economics, right? And I was wondering, because politics is not all about economics, but economics is a,

it's a large part of politics. And can, like a Nobel winner, prize winners in economics become the president so that can undo the situation better or, sorry, this is a dumb question. Yeah. I don't know that Nobel prize winners in economics are right to be the president. I like Paul Krugman. He's amazing, but I don't think he'd be good as a president or any Nobel prize winner that I know of. I can't think who would be a good president.

Nobel prize winners do research. They're not, you know, that doesn't mean they're good at administrating. Now a Fed chair maybe could be a good president because they're used to running stuff. So in Canada, you now see a former central bank head becoming president or prime minister of Canada. And so Mark Carney, he's really good, smart economist. So a smart economist can do it, but they have to have experience in managing a large organization.

So it's just an academic researcher will believe in theories too much. I see. Thank you. So switching the topic to your book and Weave Economy, and we've read your book, Weave Economy, and we really enjoyed it. And, but I was curious, why did you write the Weave Economy? And also you publish it in only in Japanese, right? Could you tell us, our audience that about the book and also why did you write it? The book is about, so a dream

of mine was always to write a book that could give some economic ideas for Japan. And so I've finally achieved my dream. Although there will be a second book and maybe a third, but definitely a second book. Probably next year I'll write it. But I'm going to write an English language book in the meantime. But anyway, the reason I wrote it was because I sensed that in Japanese economic policy and in the Japanese economy, there was a gap.

And that gap, I thought that gap should be closed. And that gap was greenfield investment. There's almost none in Japan, but it would be a great place for greenfield investment. And, you know, I met with the head of the Economic Development Board of Singapore. Singapore is a very rich country, much richer than Japan or America. Although they're just a small city, but, you know, they still are extremely rich.

And so I asked this woman, you know, she's the head of the EDB, head of Economic Development Board in Singapore. How do you do industrial policy? She said, all we do is FDI. That's our only thing. She said, you can't name a Singaporean company, except Temasek, but that's just does domestic stuff. They're not a real like high-tech company. You can't name a Singaporean company because Singapore is an extension of the economy of the United States of America.

We just invest there and do things there, and then that's how they get rich. But Japan can't be that, and it shouldn't be that. It's too big to be that. But you can add that as one piece. You know, economy should have many pieces, right? You can have domestic investment for export. You can have domestic investment for selling domestically. You can have all kinds of pieces. You can have government. You can have private sector. You can have universities doing research.

You can have all of these sectors of the economy. But foreign companies using your country to make things to export to the rest of the world is an important piece of the economy that Japan doesn't really have. But you'd be so good at it, right? Actually, America does have a good amount of this. U.S. has this. But Japan doesn't have that much of this. And Japan is a great place to make things. You've got great planning.

You know, you can build stuff quickly. Not as quickly as China, but much more safely and much more quickly than America or Europe. You can, and for low cost, Japanese costs are low, but productivity is high. You have a good supply chain. There's good talent in Japan. And it's a, you know, it's a liberal country where you don't have to be afraid that your company will be seized by the government. Property rights are protected.

And it's safe. It's a great place to live. Everybody loves living in Japan. It's the perfect place for greenfield investment. And yet there's almost none. We could fix this. This can be fixed. I'm sure it can be fixed. Yes. And we, in the book, as you wrote in the book, you know, we see some example, like a TSMI created a new plant in, yeah, created a plant in Kumamoto prefecture. Yeah. Two plants, I think. Oh, yes, yes.

But how should we push that forward and more, like invite more foreign companies to build cities? Well, you need, first, you need the people in the government to agree that this is good. And the way to get them to agree that it's good is to stress the purpose of this is for exports. Inviting foreign investment, the purpose of foreign investment should be exports. Once they understand that, they will encourage foreign investment.

The people in the government need to stop thinking about FDI as being about selling things in, about imports, selling things into Japan. They have to stop that. They have to think about greenfield investment for exports. The purpose of foreign companies investing in Japan should be so that Japan can make things for the rest of the world. And doing so, you get foreign technology and you learn all the foreign technology.

Learn how to do all the things. And so that's the purpose of FDI. And so Japan, Japanese government people should understand that. Once they understand that, the motivation will be there. Next, we need a marketing campaign. We need the Japanese government to tell everybody Japan is the place to make things for the rest of the world. Japan is the best platform for manufacturing, for research, for, you know, whatever you

want to do. In the future, you can even do software. Right now, Japan is very weak in software, but I have a plan for this too. I have a plan for everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, do you want to talk about software? Yes. Yeah. Okay. To learn that. The reason why Japan has bad software is because Japan doesn't have software engineers. Software is not, well, so AI is capital intensive because of data centers, but software itself

is not capital intensive. It's labor intensive. It's human capital intensive. You need software engineers, everything. Engineers are like the oil of software. The raw material. They are the material you use to make software, is software engineers. That's still true in the age of AI. So Japan doesn't have many software engineers because most Japanese people don't go into software and if you hire software from overseas, there's no good software people within the

Japanese companies to lead them and to use them. So it doesn't, it doesn't help much. It only helps a little bit. It's not about hiring coders. You need software people in the organizations who go up and up and up and know how to incorporate software into the product and into the production process and into the business models and into the business processes. You need software people. Japan doesn't have software people.

So it's time to train them. Train software people in Japan. Create elite coding schools at every good university in Japan. Todai, Kyodai, you know, Keio, Waseda, everywhere, all right? Everywhere should have an elite coding school as part of the school. Elite software engineering school. This will make software prestigious. But you need jobs for these people. I have an idea for the initial job. The initial job should be national security.

Japan should create an elite cybersecurity unit to block North Korea and China and Russia. And Japan should create an elite AI unit to make sure Japan has the best AI. The government should do these things. And it should hire people from the top coding schools to do it. This will create demand. And even more importantly, it will create prestige. In the old days, why did Todai become prestigious? Because if you graduated from Todai as a law major, you could go, you could become a komuin

and you could be in charge of the whole country of Japan. And then after you were done with your career, you could go work at some big company and make a lot of money. That was prestigious. The government created the demand for these schools. And so it became very prestigious. Why did engineering become prestigious in Japan? Because these big engineering companies would hire the engineers from the top schools.

Software companies can hire in Japan. So you could get Google or Facebook or Amazon or these software companies to hire people from these schools. But foreign invested companies are not quite as prestigious in Japan as local companies. And local companies aren't as prestigious as the government. Government is probably still, it may be less prestigious than before, but still elite government unit would be the most prestigious thing you could do.

Honestly, America did this already. We did this. We have Sandia National Laboratories. Do you know Sandia? It's a national laboratory run by the government for cryptography. Actually our national cryptography labs came from World War II. You know, they were trying to break the codes. And then eventually that became in the Cold War, it really scaled up to become a lot of cybersecurity, cryptography, all kinds of things like that.

And they hired the best applied math people, the best software people. And then those people became really, really good software engineers. And then some of them went into like finance, hedge funds and high finance. Some of them went into private industry. But they became the base of a really amazing generation of software engineers in America. And Japan can do the same thing. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that.

That's my idea. Yeah, idea. What do you think? Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I know some business leaders in Japan and their background is from business side and they don't know much about software technologies. And so that sometimes they, it depends on the situation, but sometimes they underestimate that, oh, you know, this is, and especially like now, thanks to AI, you know, anyone can build anything in five minutes.

And business leaders who don't have any engineering background could build something in five minutes. They assume, oh, maybe engineers could do the same, or do we need engineers? So it means like it could reduce the software engineering skill set and also understandings, I think. Yeah, we should change the situation, I think. Right. You need software talent. Japan lacks software talent. But you could get it with prestige.

Prestige is the key. It's how to motivate people. It's true in America too, although in America, people are more motivated by money. In Japan, people are less motivated by money. People would like to be rich, but they don't need to be super rich. No one in Japan cares about being a billionaire. Because why would you? Life doesn't get better in Japan past being a millionaire. Like if you're a millionaire in Japan, that's it.

That's the best life you can have. A billionaire doesn't actually get you extra. But in America, you get lots of extra. Sometimes people envy. Pardon? Yeah. Sometimes there are some anti-fans to billionaires. So if you have more money and power, some people criticize and hate you so that you get more attention from those people. And yeah, the billionaire is, I think, the right place for some people. Right. Right.

But anyway, so would you? When these ideas, like a software engineer talents and also like a greenfield investment to other countries, not only Japan, other countries should do follow the same thing? Yes. Yes. Poland is a great example of a country that Poland, I think this year is becoming richer than Japan. Yeah, they went from a poor communist country to richer than Japan in just a few decades, 30 years. What happened to them? Greenfield investment. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Basically, everyone in the EU builds all their factories in Poland. And so then Poland learned all these technologies. And now people do their research in Poland, too. So everyone just invested in Poland. And now it's rich. I mean, Poland is smaller than Japan. Poland has about 40 million people. So maybe one third the size of Japan. That's a lot smaller, but it's not as small as Singapore. And yet using mostly FDI, I mean, there are some Polish companies or Polish brands,

but could you name any? Could you tell me a Polish brand of something? No, I can't think of any. Me neither. I can't think of a single one. I looked up a large list and I immediately forgot them because you don't buy anything from them. Poland doesn't even have brands. But with only Greenfield investment, basically from other countries, they managed to become richer than Japan. Pretty amazing. Yeah.

So I don't think Japan should copy that and do only try to only do Greenfield investment. But I think if you take that, it's a missing piece. If you take that and add it to your economy, I think Japan's GDP could increase by 25% or more. Well, it's huge. Maybe one third, increased by one third. It's huge opportunity. It could just be enormous. Look, everyone wants to get out of China, not because of tariffs or any policy, but just because they know that China is going to push

them out anyway. They know China is a bad place to do business. Japan's a great place to do business. I know Japan's much smaller than China, but if you could get only 10% of the people leaving China, you could increase Japan's income by a huge amount. And not just income, but technology. Japan could be at the center of global technology ecosystem again, like it was in 1994. 30 years ago, right? Yeah, 30 years ago. You could go back to that level of technological importance.

But you need that Greenfield investment because you need to absorb the technology from the foreigners and then build on that to make things for the whole world. And then everybody has to use the technological standards that Japan makes. I see. Yeah. So yeah, that's the way to do it. Yeah. Thanks for sharing the ideas. Anyway, I love this idea. I think it's really... Yeah.

Did you give those ideas to politicians in Japan? I have said these ideas to some politicians in Japan. Was it changing? Is it changing or no? It'll take a long time to change. Politicians are important, but bureaucrats are also important. So I'm talking to people in Keisansho and maybe Zaimusho as well. And then Jetro, of course, whose actual job is this. So I'm talking to those people. Hopefully we'll change some things. I'm meeting a bunch of people in the startup world.

Hopefully going to meet people in the big company world to tell them that politicians are important. And I met Tamaki from the National Democratic Party. Yeah. And he liked the idea. And then I met some Jiminto guys. I don't know if they liked the idea or not, but they agreed to read it. So I need to just meet more people. I don't think Sanseito is going to like my idea. Oh, yeah. So exclusive.

Anyway, so your latest post was about Sanseito, right? And so do Japanese politicians understand that Greenfield investment to Japan is for export, not for entering Japanese market? And what is an important thing or key to convince those politicians that Greenfield investment is for export? Well, I don't think they understand it yet. And as for how to convince them, I think Japan has a huge market. Then after they entered as a Greenfield investment, they can enter Japanese market later, right? Not exporting.

Yeah, as well as exporting. Sure. But you can give incentives for exports. So you can give tax breaks if they export. China did that. You can say if you do Greenfield investment, if you a certain percent of your products are sold overseas, you get no taxes or not, maybe low taxes, low taxes. I see. So then and then you also not just low taxes, you get expedited permitting, you get to build things faster. You get access to certain services.

You can do so many things for countries, say, if you if you export this much, you get low taxes. I see. And there are many fields for Greenfield investment. So like semiconductor or AI software, whatever. But so what kind of field or industry should match the best with Japan? Oh, well, so semiconductors are obvious. Big one, right? That's huge. And there are many other industries connected with semiconductors in the electronic components industry. Robotics.

Japan should have robotics companies, but they don't. They need better robots. Industrial, you know, machine tools, industrial machinery kind of things. That's an important one because it connects pretty closely. AI, obviously, AI is important. Japan can build data centers and get, you know, get energy for data centers. And you'll need to turn on all the nuclear power plants. But I think they'll do that.

But then then in terms of other other industries, those industries. Oh, drones. Yeah, we have no drone. We have some drone industry should be a big target for Japan. Of course, EVs should be big. But then, you know, the legacy companies are for that, like Toyota needs to make EVs. And I don't know how to get them to do that. But then, um. Well, I do, but it's another topic of conversation, so it's not related to this.

But in terms of FDI, I would say semiconductors, electronic components, machinery, robotics, AI and drones. Those all go together. And then once you get software talent, then you can start doing software industry as well. This is beyond only AI. I see. But then that's for the farther future. Right now, Japan has lots of strength in manufacturing type industries. But then these, the talent and the capital and these things are not being used effectively by existing companies.

Japan's exports are not very high. It's higher than it was, actually. It's 22%, maybe 21% of GDP. Which is higher than before. Before, it was only 15% of GDP. But Japan can do better, export more. You could raise that. I believe you can raise that to 30%, at least 30% of GDP. And that would make Japan 10 times richer, not 10 times, sorry, 10% richer. And then there was the multiplier effect where other things, then once people sell more to the world,

then they can do more stuff at home. So then the rest of GDP goes up too. So I think overall, this could make Japan 25% richer. That's my guess. I see. Yeah. And we will see the results in the future in 10 years, 20 years, I think. We may change, I think. Yeah. So get started now. It took the tourism campaign 10 years to make everybody start visiting Japan. An investment campaign would take 10 years, but it would start working within two years.

But it would only reach maximum level within 10 years. And regarding the future innovation and which upcoming technologies do you think the most underrated for the next couple decades? So if you have any ideas. Um, well, I think that whether it's underrated depends on which country we're talking about. So for example, America, in America, I would say that batteries and electric, like anything powered by electricity, like robots, you know, highly underrated.

But in China, these things are correctly rated. China understands that these are important. So it's overrated, it's underrated in America, not. underrated in China. Why is it underrated in the US? Is it because of the- That's a really good question, and I'm not 100% sure of the answer. But I think one reason is because those new technologies threaten to be disruptive to many people's old way of life, and people are scared of change.

In China, people see opportunity. In America, they see a threat. That's the main reason, I think. It's like we are now in the position that China was in in the 1800s. In the 1800s, the European countries had all this industrial technology, steamships and manufacturing and mining. And in China, everyone was afraid of this technology. They didn't use it because they said, if we use this technology, our powerful, rich families

will be less rich because there'll be disruption. New people will get rich. The old people will fail. Also, people might use the new technology to challenge the government, and the government would be in trouble. So everyone who had power in China in the 1800s, they were afraid of change because they were afraid that it would lead to different people having power. So they ignored the industrial technology for so long

that then the European powers were able to take advantage of them and even invade them in the opium wars. And so then this was a big mistake for China. But in America now, we are in that position. People who are in the fossil fuel industry are afraid that electric technology could displace fossil fuels. People who are in the, yeah, utility industry are afraid that new kinds of power could displace utilities.

People who make old types of machine tools are afraid that robots could displace those. People who are workers are afraid that robots could change their jobs or displace their jobs. They don't see opportunities, they see threats. And because they see threats, they resist new things. And because they resist new things, China is beating us. In the old days, we always embraced the new, new, new, new. And we still do it in software, we do it with AI.

We're embracing new things. But we're not embracing new things in physical technology. Before we embraced like the semiconductors, we really tried very hard to get semiconductor industry. And we did all these things. And hold on one second, sorry. Hold on one second, sorry. And then, sorry. So we tried very hard to be on top of semiconductor manufacturing. And then a lot of other things too. We embraced novelty.

Aerospace manufacturing, we tried very hard to be number one in aerospace. But we've lost that in America. We no longer see opportunities in new technologies. We see only threats. Even AI, you know, we're doing it, but then people in America are the most negative in the world about AI. Everyone's terrified of AI. In Japan, I think people are not terrified. No one's terrified of AI that I ever talked to. It seems like we are repeating the same history.

It's a rhyme, you know, there's a rhyme in history always. But if so, why can't people change their mindset? Oh, this happened, you know, 200 years ago. We learned from in the history class. Or we shouldn't be worried about, you know, changing physical space. Why doesn't that happen? Because an individual human can understand history. An individual human is smart. A group of humans is not so smart. When humans get in a group, political pressures

and competition and kind of power dynamics and poor communication and rivalries and all kinds of things, and groups of people are not as good at making decisions. Individuals can make good decisions or they can make bad. They're very high variance, right? You can get someone like Xi Jinping or, you know, Donald Trump that makes stupid decisions. Or you can get a very good leader who makes really good decisions, but it's risky.

But when you have groups of people, you can make good decisions. You can make bad decisions. But it's risky. But when you have groups of people make decisions, it's very hard for them to change. Who takes responsibility? Who exercises power? Who has the ability to get things done? If I want Japan to get a lot of greenfield investment tomorrow, who can I talk to? Who should I talk to? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, before I would talk to the advisors

of Abe-san 10 years ago. But now the Abe-san is gone and his advisors are gone and the leaders are back to the sort of like party insider type of guys. Like, who don't have a strong, you know, ability to get things done. So who can I talk to? I'll talk to everyone. I'll give this idea to everyone. But even if I give the idea to everyone, it doesn't mean that someone will do anything. Because someone has to take responsibility.

Someone has to exercise power and take responsibility and say, you know what, this Noah Smith guy, he's right about this. Let's do it. You know, maybe if I can meet the like vice ministers of like Kei Sancho and Zaimu Sho and the head of JETRO also, maybe together those guys could do something. Traditionally in Japan, a strong bureaucracy helped to compensate for weak political leadership. But I don't know if that's still true.

So anyway, when you figure out who I should talk to, please let me know. Yeah, yeah. I talked to many people from, yeah, Ministry of Economy and Industry. So we'll let you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, thanks for sharing a lot. But I think you share a lot already, but if you have any, since you know our audience are founders, writers and content creators, if you have any advice to those people in this situation,

you know, world economics, if you could share some advice. We'd love to. Advice to writers or to founders? Both if you could share some. Well, to writers, I think, don't be afraid to say what you think, but be friends with all the other writers and talk to them a lot. Interact with them in a community of writers. Too many writers fall into, there's two big traps I see. The first trap is to only write your own things

and don't listen to what other people write. Don't do that. You should engage with the community. The second trap is to, is almost the opposite trap. It's to fight, fight, fight with everybody. Don't do that. Yes, if you disagree, you can argue, but then usually you should be building on other people's ideas. Be constructive. So that's my advice to writers. Also, of course, write more. Just please write more. Would you write more?

Because you said you have hundreds of ideas. Would you write more? You could technically ship like one to two posts per day, right? Technically. When AI helps me more, I'll write more. No, I've been focusing on fewer but longer pieces. When I write shorter things, I can write 10 a week. If I write 1,200 words, but if I'm writing 2,500 or 4,000 words, I can't write as many per week. So it depends on what I think people wanna read.

But lately I've been enjoying writing longer pieces, but then I might go back to shorter soon. Remember, it's my hobby. I'm doing my hobby as a job. To founders in Japan, this is my advice. Oh, not only in Japan, but U.S. or any countries, I think. Yeah, if you have any advice. Well, I have very different advice to people in the two countries. So to founders in America, to founders in America, my advice is don't go through the standard procedure of being a founder.

America has standardized entrepreneurship too much. Seed round, series A, series B. Go through Y Combinator. Here's your comparables. Here's how much traction you should have at series A, blah, blah, blah. Incubators, accelerators, all these things. In the old days, entrepreneurs would just venture into the wilderness. Bill Gates didn't know how likely it was to succeed. he'd just totally fail. He had no idea.

He didn't know about Series B or, you know, he didn't go through Y Combinator. He just went into the wilderness. Mark Zuckerberg too. Or a lot of these people, the Google people, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk didn't have any, you know, he was just trailblazing. You know, he just hacking into the woods, just venture off into the woods. Now, too many entrepreneurs, too many entrepreneurs just do a standard procedure. You have to explore. Explore.

Yeah, I know some founders, their goal is like getting into YC so that once they get into YC then, okay, we're done. And so they forgot what to do next. They shouldn't be like that. Yeah. Yes. Go into the wilderness. Be a true entrepreneur, not just a founder. To Japanese founders, my advice is dream very big. Not so you can be a billionaire, but so you can build up society. Like Matsushita, you know, like he was a guy a long time ago, like 1910s. Matsushita, was it Konosuke? Yes. Yeah. He really, he didn't care about being super rich. He cared about Japan.

So, you know, he cared about his country, but I think more he wanted society to have a lot more stuff. And he just wanted to build this big organization that could give society what it needed. That is a good reason to build a big organization. And I think, honestly, even if you look at the people who get very rich, like Yanai-san, right? Or, you know, Mikitani-san or these Japanese guys who get rich, they didn't do it to get rich.

I mean, maybe they wanted to be rich, but they didn't want to be that rich. That was accident. That was an accident. What they wanted was to build a big organization, you know, to give everybody good food, good stores, you know, or something like that. They wanted people to have stuff. So they wanted to build a big organization to give stuff for the world. And I feel like Japanese entrepreneurs or founders have lost this dream to some degree.

Instead, they just, they want to get rich, but they only want to get rich enough to live a good life in Japan. You know, you IPO for, you know, $100 million on mothers or something, and then you're rich enough to afford like a good house in Yogyakarta or wherever you want. And then you can, you know, go to some nice bars and get like, you know, whiskey with ball ice for like, you know, nimen yen per glass. And then you're done. That's all the money you need in Japan.

Because they want money, but they're satisfied with only a little amount of money. Like the amount of money they make, I can make just writing a blog. But what they should be motivated by is build something bigger, build organizations. That's what I think Japanese founders have forgotten is to build something big to help the world. Anyway, that's my advice. Yeah, thank you so much. All right. Last question. I gotta go. Yeah, yeah. Last question is, since Glasp is a platform where people share what they're reading,

learning, a strategic legacy, we want to ask this question. So what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for future generations? I would like people to be a little more reasonable. I want people to, you know, think about ideas, instead of just taking, you know, doing what their own political side says they should do, or just repeating what other people say.

And I think that's a really important part of the doing what their own political side says they should do, or just repeating what other people say. Or just, I want people to think about ideas, instead of trying to sound smart, or trying to sound politically correct. I want people to not be extreme in their thinking and to be to understand the limits of their own knowledge. I just want people to be reasonable. Because the purpose of society is not to be reasonable.

The purpose of society is for everyone to be happy. But if your reason is a good tool, it's the most powerful tool that we have as humans. And that will continue to be true in the age of AI. Just people need to just be reasonable. And I hope I leave the world a more reasonable place than I found it. Oh, yeah, we should read more about your content. I think newsletter. Yeah. Well, thanks.

If you do, I thanks in advance, but you don't have to, but if you enjoy it, please do. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you so much for joining today. Yeah. We learned a lot. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Until next time. Yes. Yeah. Thanks.