*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”*

This episode sits with a quote attributed to Takeda Shingen — the sixteenth-century warlord — about what emerges depending on how fully you give yourself to something: wisdom, complaints, or excuses. A specific image appears: climbers above 8,000 meters, where the thought "that's enough for today" causes the body to stop and the mind to fill with reasons. But at the true edge, when n...

This episode looks at SpaceX — not through the lens of its current scale, but through the earlier atmosphere when almost no one believed it would amount to anything. It returns to a session at an International Astronautical Congress around 2006, where a nearly empty room listened to Elon Musk speak, at a time when space startups were seen as companies that formed and collapsed in cycles. Two figur...

This episode looks at the Sagrada Família — currently in its 144th year of construction — and what it means that a building has been continuously built across generations, with full completion not expected until the early 2030s. There's a surprising detail at the center of it: the construction isn't funded by the Spanish government or the city of Barcelona, but by ticket sales, donations,...

This episode looks at Dreams of Violets — a 75-minute feature film depicting Iran's 2026 pro-democracy movement, made for $2,000 by two brothers who fled the country in 2009, using generative AI because live-action production would have put everyone involved at risk. It reflects on what that number actually means: a short self-produced film can easily exceed $2,000 on equipment rental and edit...

This episode looks at the investors who were already sitting in the best seats long before SpaceX became a $1.7 trillion story — specifically, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, which put roughly 30 billion yen into SpaceX in 2019, when most of the world was still skeptical that Starlink could become a real business. It traces how OTPP became the kind of organization capable of making that be...

This episode looks at the SpaceX IPO — one of the largest in history — and why the feverish energy around buying shares on listing night might be worth pausing before joining. It walks through the numbers with some care: at $1.75 trillion, SpaceX enters the market already larger than Tesla, already equivalent to five Toyotas stacked together, already controlling roughly 90% of the commercial rocke...

This episode follows the process of building a LEGO NASA lunar rover, and the thoughts that surface while putting it together piece by piece. It looks at the three rovers left behind on the moon after Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17 — vehicles that were never meant to return, still sitting exactly where they were parked in 1971 and 1972. With no atmosphere, no rain, and no rust, they're likely...

After spending time with several AI glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, Rokid, and Even G2, an interesting realization emerged: displays may not be the most important feature. While much of the conversation around smart glasses focuses on augmented reality and visual overlays, the day-to-day experience suggests something different. What matters most is often how quickly and naturally a...

This episode looks at a first hands-on experience with the ROKID AI glasses — a wearable device that overlays information directly onto the lenses. After a few hours of use, a right eye began to hurt. Wearing the ROKID over prescription glasses, the double-glasses situation, may be part of the cause — though whether it's that alone, or something about staring at a display that close to the eye...

This episode looks at the moment of discovering Universal Control — the ability to move a cursor and keyboard seamlessly between a MacBook and a Mac Pro across multiple screens — and the quiet surprise of realizing it had been there for over three years. It touches on the specific friction that disappeared: the daily routine of switching machines when coming home, swapping the mouse, reorienting —...

This episode returns to a theme that has come up a few times recently on the blog: companies that seemed finished, only to turn out to be quietly building something in the background of the AI era. This time, the focus is Nokia — a name that still immediately calls up the image of a Finnish mobile phone maker that missed the smartphone wave. The surprise is how completely that picture has been ove...

This episode reflects on a shift in thinking about how meaningful connections actually happen — not through luck or timing, but through the accumulation of small, consistent actions over time. It touches on the pattern that real encounters tend to arrive on days when something was already in motion: a blog post written, a thought put into words, an effort made without any particular audience in mi...

This episode looks at the story behind Dell's recent stock surge — and what that story actually reveals about how reinvention works. It traces how Dell went private in 2013, largely disappearing from public view, then made a $67 billion acquisition of storage giant EMC in 2016 that drew sharp criticism at the time. From the outside, it looked like a company in retreat. From the inside, it was...

This episode looks at a small experiment that started with Araki Hirohiko — the creator of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, famous for appearing decades younger than his age — and the decision to borrow one piece of his routine: a daily smoothie, no added sugar, vegetables and fruit. The version here isn't strict. It started with convenience store smoothies from 7-Eleven, not fresh ingredients. A...

This episode looks at the specific friction that appears before beginning — not a lack of ability, not a lack of motivation, but something closer to the weight of that first instant before anything is set in motion. There's a story here about a piece of work that felt untouchable, and a quiet experiment: just one minute, genuinely meant as only one minute. Thirty minutes later, the work was st...

This episode looks at the daily habits of remarkable people — and what those routines might reveal about how an interesting life actually gets built. The detail that anchors it is Beethoven's morning ritual: waking at dawn to compose, drinking only coffee for breakfast, and counting out exactly 60 coffee beans per cup — sometimes one by one. He then spent much of the day walking, pencil and st...

This episode looks at a theory that reframes nightmares not as disturbances to escape, but as something closer to training runs — a neuroscientific idea called Threat Simulation Theory, which proposes that dreaming exists to rehearse dangerous situations before they happen in waking life. The analogy at the center of it: dreams as flight simulators running quietly every night, no real consequences...

This episode looks at trust as a form of compound interest — built through seventeen years of running an eyeglass shop, one careful fitting at a time. The turning point arrives when a long-time customer asks if they can refer a friend, and also bring their child in for glasses. A small moment, but one that carries the weight of a decade of accumulated care. There's a comparison drawn between f...

This episode looks at a book encountered by chance at a bookstore — *To Everyone Who Couldn't Become a Genius* by Kappy, creator of Left-Handed Ellen — and the idea at its center that stuck: "MP consumption," borrowed from video game logic. The frame is simple but pointed. Use a powerful spell and your MP drops sharply. You win the fight, but you can't move until you've reste...

In this episode, we talk about the 2026 Enhanced Games in Las Vegas — the controversial sports event where performance-enhancing drugs were openly allowed. The idea sounded extreme: break human limits, create super-athletes, and reinvent sports. But after all the hype, the actual results were more modest than many expected. We discuss why only one major world record was broken, why some clean athl...

This episode takes a single scene from the TV series *Billions* — a wife snapping "How are we supposed to live on that?" despite sitting on tens of billions of yen — and uses it as a lens for thinking about why financial anxiety doesn't scale the way we expect it to. It touches on a piece of research suggesting that even people with savings over 100 million yen often still carry mone...

This episode turns over a quote from Isaac Newton — one that surfaced again almost by chance — about the nature of knowledge and how much remains unknown. The quote imagines Newton as a boy on the seashore, delighting in smooth pebbles and pretty shells, while the great ocean of truth stretches out undiscovered before him. This episode sits with that image and considers what it actually means. It...

This episode looks at the experience of losing track of time inside a book — that sudden awareness that two hours have passed — and what that feeling might actually be doing for us. It touches on the tension between keeping a wide view of life and the quiet cost of that wideness. Work, family, the direction of a business, old age, the planet — when all of it stays visible at once, it wears on a pe...

This episode looks at the moment Eric Schmidt was booed at a University of Arizona commencement after invoking AI — and what that reaction says about where we are right now. It touches on the historical pattern of technology displacing labor, from steam engines to personal computers, and the quiet observation that booing at a wave has never stopped the ocean. There's also a specific analogy ab...

This episode looks at Intel's sudden 24% single-day stock surge on April 23rd, and what it might actually mean for how AI infrastructure is shifting. It traces the gap between perception and reality — the sense that Intel had become a dinosaur, especially vivid for anyone who switched from an Intel Mac to Apple Silicon and felt the difference immediately. The episode works through a quiet anal...