*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”*

This episode looks at a piece of Japanese slang spreading among Gen Z and younger students — "gyurareru," derived from "singularity," meaning to have your skills, your work, your accumulated knowledge quietly taken away by AI. It touches on how the word carries both anxiety and a kind of lightness — used self-deprecatingly, even with a hint of welcome, as in "I kind of wan...

This episode picks up a thread from the day before — the observation that major tech companies are now spending as much on AI tokens as on engineer salaries — and uses it as a starting point to look at why so much corporate AI adoption produces no measurable result. The central finding, drawn from a report on AI in corporate finance departments, is striking: 95% of AI rollouts have had no impact o...

This episode looks at a line attributed to Jensen Huang that stopped the reader mid-scroll: if an engineer earning $500K a year isn't spending $250K on AI tokens annually, an alarm should go off. It works through what that framing actually implies — token spend as a proxy for effort, measured against salary — and sets it alongside a run of related stories: Salesforce freezing engineer hiring w...

This episode looks at a couple in San Francisco earning $380,000 a year who feel they may no longer be able to afford to stay — and what that actually says about the city AI is building around them. The detail that lingers is a line from the article: "Because I don't work for an AI company, I sometimes feel like I've lost the right to live in this city." It's a quiet sentence...

This episode looks at the story behind WeatherNews — a company that has grown its revenue for seventeen consecutive years — and what that growth reveals about the real value of weather information. It traces the company's origins back to a cargo ship that sank in 1970, and the founder's belief that better information might have saved lives. From there, it explores how what WeatherNews actu...

This episode looks at a remarkable and unsettling case: eBay executives and employees who, in response to critical journalism from a couple running a small e-commerce news site, sent live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a blood-soaked pig mask to their home — and reportedly planned physical surveillance. The FBI eventually intervened, convictions followed, and eBay paid fines. It was no movie p...

This episode takes the most famous joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — a supercomputer that thinks for seven and a half million years and returns the answer "42" — and uses it as a lens for thinking about what AI can and can't do. The point isn't that the computer failed. It's that the people who made the request never understood what they were actually asking....

This episode starts with something small: a link from a wife, a purchase application for a new MoonSwatch, and the Swatch phrase "Time is what you make of it." It traces back to 2005, when a space travel company called Ginga Hitchhikers was founded, watched it fail, and notes that more than twenty years later — now at 48 — not a single bit of that dream has faded. There's also a quie...

This episode takes a close look at the LEGO Technic life-size Koenigsegg build — 327,906 pieces, 9,407 hours, 43 professionals, and a finished car weighing 1,800 kg that actually drove at 111 km/h — and what that project suggests about the value of doing things the hard way. It touches on a specific detail from the build that's hard to forget: the challenge of connecting a black part to a blac...

This episode looks at a conversation with a photographer who now delivers AI-generated images instead of photographs — same job title, entirely different work — and what that shift means for a small eyewear shop trying to communicate something real. It touches on the three things an eyewear business actually deals in: the frames and lenses as objects, the experience of fit and feel, and the ongoin...

This episode looks at a book by a young Bay Area entrepreneur, and the way reading it surfaced something that felt less like startup advice and more like a quiet set of operating principles. It touches on Paul Graham's often-quoted line — "do things that don't scale" — and how one team, after losing half their revenue during the pandemic, put that idea to work by simply talking t...

This episode looks at a wave of physical theft hitting AI data center construction sites — not hacking, but people driving up to job sites at night and loading copper wire, networking equipment, and power infrastructure onto trailers. One case in the United States involved materials worth around two million dollars. It touches on a tension that runs through the whole AI moment: the technology gets...

This episode takes up a question encountered in a newsletter: if humans stop dying, what happens to religion? It traces the idea that every major religion — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism — is built on a single shared premise: that humans die. The suggestion is that religion functions as the operating system humanity developed to cope with mortality, and that this OS may now be starting t...

This episode reflects on a book about small business strategy — and what it means to deliberately subtract, not just add. The book in question was found through a newsletter review, written by the founder of a uniform company who grew revenue two hundredfold by deciding exactly what his company would refuse to sell: commodity products, things priced too low to defend, anything easily purchased thr...

This episode looks at a video from cave explorer Yoshida Katsunori, and two ideas from it that refuse to stay underground. The first is his definition of panic — not just fear, but the moment you lose control of yourself. Inside a cave, the instinct to move, to search, to breathe harder is exactly what kills you. His method is the opposite: close your eyes, slow down, narrow your focus to the sing...

This episode looks at what a failed backflip attempt revealed about how the body maintains only what it's asked to maintain — and how quietly everything else stiffens in the meantime. The neck, it turns out, had never been asked to tip backward that far. Swimming keeps the shoulders and core moving, but extreme extension in an unfamiliar direction is a different thing entirely. That night, the...

This episode looks at what a wearable ring reveals that a wrist-based tracker doesn't — specifically, how wearing the Oura Ring 5 brought sleep data into sharper focus first thing in the morning, and confirmed a vague bodily sense that sleep hasn't been going well lately. It touches on a finding that stood out: with the same six hours of sleep, the recovery score shifts noticeably dependin...

This episode looks at what comes up during a sourcing trip to Seoul — specifically an unannounced visit to a brand's head office that turned into an unexpected meeting with the founder. She started the brand fifteen years ago. Her co-founder left within six months, and she spent the next two and a half years making things alone. Fifteen years later, the brand is in twenty countries. It touches...

This episode reflects on an idea encountered while reading: that the goal isn't to eliminate anxiety, but to be able to move forward while carrying it. It touches on the familiar trap of waiting until the fear is gone before acting — and the recognition that for most people, the fear never fully goes away. The example of someone wanting to speak English but staying silent out of embarrassment...

This episode looks at the gap between how a place appears and what it quietly depends on — prompted by a visit to Singapore's Changi Airport, with its glass ceilings, open greenery, and the famous waterfall at Jewel. It touches on a surprising fact: despite receiving 2,000 to 2,500 millimeters of rain each year — roughly one and a half times Tokyo's annual rainfall — Singapore has long bee...

This episode follows a thread of curiosity that began with spare time in Bangkok — a casual look into the Golden Triangle that kept unraveling long after the trip ended. It moves through the story of Khun Sa, who at his peak controlled an estimated 50 to 60 percent of the world's heroin supply, commanded a private army of up to 20,000 soldiers, and ended his days not in a prison cell but in a...

This episode looks at a recent news story — OpenAI apparently proposing to transfer five percent of its equity to the U.S. government — and follows the thread back to an unexpected place: Alaska in the 1970s. When a massive oil field was discovered there, Alaska took an unusual path. Rather than extracting the value and moving on, the state built a fund around the idea that oil belongs not just to...

This episode reflects on a single idea from musician Takeshi Kishiro: that a morning routine isn't about doing the same things every day, but about holding the same intention — waking up with a high sense of happiness. What stands out is the distinction Kishiro draws between fixed actions and a fixed center. The music changes with the weather, the coffee changes with the mood, but the aim stay...

This episode looks at Jiddu Krishnamurti — the man raised from childhood to be a global spiritual leader, who in 1929 stood before his followers and dissolved the entire organization built around him, declaring that truth is a pathless land. It traces what that act meant: that any road built by someone else belongs to them, not to you. There's a particular line that surfaces more than once — &...

This episode reflects on a passage from designer Junko Koshino's book — specifically her mother's habit, even at 80 and 90, of saying "my life is just getting started" — and what it quietly does to the feeling of being "already 47." It looks at Koshino's idea that continuing isn't really a matter of willpower: you continue because it's enjoyable, and it beco...