(upbeat music)
Okay, in chunk of beef
chest, we have beef nation.
That’s all the people who
like chunk of beef chest.
An individual would be a chunk.
And I was like, oh, how do I
refer to a fan of Ninja News Japan?
And I was like, it’s
actually really obvious.
It’s a ninja.
A news ninja? I don’t know.
I think just Ninja is
not descriptive enough.
It’s not clear that you’re talking
about a fan of a certain thing.
I’m attempting to do
this so that I can appeal
to you directly because
my eye is still messed up.
And I’m finding it very
difficult to look at screens
and read and podcasting is
very much using the computer,
which is primarily a large screen and
reading my notes already a problem.
As you’ve seen in the
last 190 some episodes
that I do not take the time
to write properly, clearly,
cleanly, so that I can
read my own handwriting.
We’ve had that issue multiple times.
Fuck, I’m not happy about this at all.
(upbeat music)
It’s over at Seamik B, the podcast.
We got chunk of beef chest, beef nation.
And a fan of that is called a chunk.
And I was like, oh, we need a name for
someone who’s a fan of Ninja News Japan.
The honestly much
bigger of the two podcasts.
And I was like, well, I
mean, you could just say
a ninja, but it’s actually
not very descriptive.
And it’s just the way I
could address the audience
directly to make appeals
like I’m about to today,
’cause today’s episode very
likely is going to have some issues
because I still am
functionally blind in one eye.
So not only do I make poor notes,
it’s hard for me to look at
screens for an extended period
and since I can’t see very well
my notes that are already messy,
I mean, we’ve hit that issue multiple times
where I can’t read my own handwriting.
I’m so dedicated to all the
little news ninjas out there
that I was gonna skip this
week and not put out an
episode and I was like,
no, no, I’m gonna do it.
It might be shorter and it might be
shit, but they’re used to that by now.
That might be the only
way I can start this is
it’s pre-excusing a lower-quality problem
now is that if this is a good episode.
So it’s October, 2023 and
you’re out in Yokohama,
you’re drinking and you do
what everyone does when they
go out drinking, you’re like,
I’m gonna livestream this.
‘Cause everyone wants to see
my drunk ass out in the world,
real life IRL streaming.
Never actually been a
big fan of IRL streaming,
probably just ’cause I’ve
never tried it, never done it.
I don’t think I do anything
interesting enough to stream live,
but he fell asleep on the train.
So this guy’s live streaming
himself, he falls asleep on the train.
Then a gentleman sees an opportunity
to take advantage of the situation.
So he does what he does
and he steals the man’s
wallet and phone
while it is still streaming.
They then leap into a car
where there are two other people,
those two other people accomplices.
I did learn some
interesting Japanese today.
They start having a conversation,
the whole conversation is
being broadcast live on stream.
I was immediately thinking like, there’s
two people talking, do I do voices?
I hadn’t decided yet.
Thief, hello, good work.
I just got a tuna with
a set of mobile phones.
Tuna is slang for
stealing from drunk people,
I guess ’cause they’re
just flopped out on
the, on the bench or
on the seat of the train.
So if they’re passed
out drunk, thieves refer
to them as two in us,
which I learned that.
I was really happy to learn that.
So if I want to pretend to be a thief,
I now can use a cup a
little bit like, you know,
jargon that’s applicable
to the industry I’ve chosen.
The theft is a bank debit card.
And I heard that if it’s
attached to a phone,
you can figure out the pin.
This is a very thief way of thinking,
like I heard that if you have
A and B, you can figure it out.
Other people may be us not so much
because we’re having the conversation
if we knew how to do it,
we’d already be doing it.
So later, they meet at a hotel
and the live stream is continuing
and they discuss the
contents of the wallet.
And so the accomplice says,
well, there are a lot of money.
And he says, there’s hardly any money.
But if I tried buying, but I tried buying,
of course, IQOS is, I’m pretty sure that’s
doing a vaping gesture on the stream.
I know, I know if you
took away the sound,
it would have looked like something else,
but that’s because it’s
your dirty mind, not my.
I, of course, is I believe a
tobacco product or a vape.
They’re a little like charger
things that you can buy
at a convenience store, I don’t smoke.
I know they’re for smoking.
I don’t smoke, so I don’t actually
know what they are specifically.
But I tried buying an
IQOS, IQOS, IQOS, IQOS,
IQOS at a convenience store
with this cash card and it worked.
And then they picked up the smartphone.
This lot, it says something
about making a report.
And then the live stream abruptly ended.
So I hope you enjoy my
first foray into voice acting.
That was thief number one and accomplice.
Who is a couple steps away from goofy.
But here’s the problem.
At least in this case, unlike
many of the other cases
we’ve talked about in the last few weeks,
the live streaming, it was unintentional.
They didn’t intentionally broadcast
their crimes on the internet.
Whereas actually 90% of the
crimes we’ve been talking about
lately have actually
been purposely broadcast
to try to get internet fame
and led to arrests or fines
or any of the number of other things.
So these guys are just average criminals.
They didn’t know it was streaming.
The phone was on.
I mean, what are you going to do?
You just, that’s the situation.
So they were arrested.
I am interested
in, am I? I’m not.
I mean, they were arrested.
They deserve it.
That’s pretty much it right there.
See, I’m on the way here.
Wrong transition.
That is because I can’t
see that far away right now.
Since you’re talking about
streaming, there was a teacher who
thought, you know what, I,
you know, I teach full time.
It’s my full time job, but I
have a dream, a big dream.
I actually kind of relate to this.
I have a big dream.
I want to be a streamer and
I want to quit my teaching job
in just a stream full
time and do wacky antics.
I don’t know.
He was streaming while he was working.
So he was in the teacher staff room.
He would turn on a stream
and then stream himself working.
I assume just doing like admin
work, which does not seem
like a very interesting
stream to me, but I fall into this
old category where I want to see people
do stuff or talk about interesting things.
And then I see what gets popular.
People sleeping.
People eating massive amounts of food.
Like I found that
fascinating for a day or two.
But then after that, I
was like, I don’t really need
to see people just eating
massive amount of food.
I don’t, I don’t see the
appeal in it more than once.
The TikTok NPC thing,
did not get it at all.
Like I understood it as an
oddity, something I would see once.
I couldn’t see myself watching
it for an extended period.
Watching a teacher in a staff room
do his work seems really boring to me.
The problem is the live stream
was also picking up ongoing
conversations around
the teacher, which those
people hadn’t agreed
to have this on stream.
So there’s some privacy issues there.
He also was streaming the athletic field.
Now, they’re not saying if
anyone was on it, but that could
be super creepy because it
could be like, oh, I’m going to
stream the underage people
running around the field.
Maybe my intent is not
sexual, but then the people
who look at that stuff
might turn it sexual.
And that’s always the problem.
Like you might intend
it in an innocent way.
Here’s an interesting
slice of life day in a
Japanese high school
or junior high school.
I actually didn’t say it probably
didn’t one of the articles.
So I didn’t write it down.
Anyways, this is a school.
These are kids.
They should not be filmed
without their permission.
You shouldn’t be filming kids
and throwing it up on the internet.
The reason he was
streaming at the school was to
increase his streaming time
to gain some service perks.
So I stream on Twitch and you
get so many hours and then they’ll
let you keep your vod
longer or something like that.
Basically, if you show
a commitment to the
platform, the platform
will give you certain perks.
This is just people who stream
ones or twice and then just give up.
Don’t, you know, you
don’t give any sort of
storage space to them
for any length of time.
I get it.
The reason I related to this is
because I also tend to stream
in my free time.
But I never thought like would anyone
want to watch me at my desk working?
I don’t see that.
This is maybe my biggest
problem like Instagram.
I don’t look at something and
think I should take a picture of
that and post it on Instagram.
So my Instagram is basically empty.
I don’t look at a lot of things
in real life and go, this would be
of interest to other people
when, of course, that is often the
content that is super
interesting to other people.
So I need guidance.
So if you have something you would
like to see in Japan, let me know.
I probably will forget to do it
because that’s how I live my life.
What happened to this teacher
was students found live streams
reported to the school.
He received a 10% pay cut.
So he didn’t lose his job.
And I guess I think that’s pretty fair.
I don’t, it doesn’t sound like he was
doing anything malicious or creepier weird.
He wanted to boost his
amount of time streamed.
And then just was like,
well, I’ll have to take
it with me to the
places and I go the place.
I go all day, every day is work.
So I’ll have to stream from work.
It was pretty selfish.
But it didn’t seem like he
was intending to hurt anyone.
So I think I think a 10%
pay cut is pretty fair.
Still so close to being super creepy.
We have talked about part time terrorism.
I learned that the phrase a few
weeks ago, because we talked about
food terrorism for a long
time, that there’s also part time
terrorism as kids at part time
jobs last week was the kid who
picked his nose and
wiped it in the pizza dough.
And then the domino swap team
came down on that store, like the
rage of Odin turns out
there’s insurance for that.
This is another whole other
aspect of the world that I’m
interested in, things
you can get insurance for.
I’m very interested in contracts
and contract negotiations,
primarily famous people who
have like interest in contracts or
things in their contracts that a
normal human being like me would
not have or even consider
insurance, things you can ensure is
another subject that I find
vaguely interesting, because you
can ensure that, oh, that’s
weird, I immediately reminds me of
like things you can get blessed in Japan.
So like if you build a house,
you can have a priest come
to bless your house, that
seems pretty obvious, you
can take things to the
temple and get them blessed.
So I had a child took the child
to the temple and they wave
the leaf over his head.
Great.
You know, it’s just for
me, not being religious.
It was a fun, interesting
cultural experience.
Then the guy, the priest, not
just the guy, the priest goes
and he starts wiggling
the leaves over a van.
And I’m like, what is he doing?
He’s blessing the van.
Oh, he’s blessing the van, what are
you just asking him to bless anything?
They’re like, I mean, basically,
yeah, you pay the, the, the
temple money, the priest is
going to bless whatever you want.
And my first thought was like,
could I get my PlayStation blessed?
Like have him wiggle the,
the, the, the leaves over the
PlayStation and be like headshot,
headshot, headshot, something like that.
And basically it turns out if I gave
them the money, they would bless it.
So now we could run
a scientific experiment.
We could have two play stations.
One that has been blessed
and one that has not an alternate.
I think a fairest would be week to week.
So one week you play on the
blessed PlayStation, the second
week you play on the cursed
place, PlayStation, PlayStation,
and back and forth.
And then track the statistics
of each one and see if your
performance improves
on the blessed PlayStation.
Very interesting concept I just
had, uh, should I have enough money
to a pay for a blessing
and a second PlayStation.
And I have enough time to
make that worthwhile study.
I will do it.
Uh, you can send your
contributions to science.
If you want, please
don’t send money for that.
Cause if you sent me
enough money to buy a second
PlayStation, I wouldn’t
buy a second PlayStation.
I buy something else.
And then I would feel
like I’m ripping you off.
And the last thing I want, the
ninja news is, do you need a name?
I need a name for, for people
who watch nineties news Japan.
The little ninjas, little
ninjas was a video game.
I really enjoyed it was a kid’s game.
And once you’d played it
and you knew everything you’d
finished in like six hours,
I played a multiple time.
It was super fun.
You played as a very
small ninja, ergo the title.
Anyways, talking about
insurance, the part time.
Terrorism that goes on.
So these kids, they get bored
at their convenience store job.
It’s two o’clock in the morning.
They’re making dominoes pizza dough.
They get bored.
They start doing dumb teenage stuff.
I absolutely would have
fallen into this category.
I worked in dog food and university.
I can tell you that I’ve probably
eaten every type of dog food that was
available in just to
see what it tasted like.
I did not do anything
particularly bad, but
it’s hard to mess with
dog food in a fun way.
And then back when I
was at that age, we weren’t
videoing everything
and streaming it online.
And so there was far less
incentive for me to do stuff.
The worst thing I would do is probably
like lay out and make a bed of 40 kilogram
dog food things and
just lie down for a bit.
But I was young.
So I had a lot of energy.
So I actually spent a lot of time reading.
It was a great job.
I got to honestly say selling dog
food because customer service sucks.
Selling dog food.
I mean, basically people
bring their dogs into the store.
Give the dog a cookie.
The dogs really happy.
The owners that really
happy their dog is happy.
Their way more chill to deal with,
it was very rare to have a high,
strong, worked up dog food
owner dog food, a dog owner
come in and buy dog food
and like give you a hard time.
So that’s something just in my mind.
I was like, yeah, you know, of the
customer service jobs is probably best.
So it didn’t mean we had zero problems,
but I would say compared to like any
other industry customer service way,
way fewer because you could just pay off
the dog and the owner was happy.
And you’re, I mean, again, you’re getting a
ton of this stuff for free from the companies.
They want you to
promote their cookie.
So you’re getting out
that cookie that week.
So what you can get insured.
So you have a part time employee,
they mess around on the job.
You can have the insurance
that will cover the reputate.
Oh, it’s called reputation
expense insurance.
And it was started in April 2019.
So this has been going
on for like five years now.
It covers the cost of crisis
management consulting.
So they actually offer a secondary
service where they help you try to figure
out how to fix the issue.
So there was the story I remember the most.
I don’t know why and it was the kid.
It was in the summertime.
He opened up the thing that
has all the ice cream he got in.
And then I assume another his friend of
the other employee closed it and took a
picture of it as he was like
comfortably resting in the ice cream thing.
And then the one from
last week where the kid
picked his nose and
put it in the pizza dough.
How do you fix that?
It covers the cost of lawyers because you’re
going to have to like sue the family or
sue the kid or have lawyers to protect
yourself and have everyone’s got a lawyer up
the removal of online postings.
And I actually realize like
that’s going to be the hard part
because once these things
go viral, they go like spread out.
You need like a team
sending out DCMA things,
uh, just trying to like
quell it as hard as they can.
So that’s going to be a
whole team working on that.
And then help in the apology
press conference because of
course in Japan, even when
you were technically the victim.
So I like again, no big love for
companies that an engineer is Japan.
But companies can be the victim.
And in this case, it’s the
employees messing around.
They’re making the company
look bad, but the company
still has to apologize
because this is Japan.
So you have to stand up and say
like, sorry for the trouble we caused.
We’re going to train our employees better.
We’re going to make sure
this doesn’t happen again.
A reputation is hurt
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I’ve seen a billion apologies.
It’s essentially a script, but you have to
follow the script if you work for a big company.
They had 20,000 customers in 2023.
So that means 20,000 companies
have reputation insurance in 2023.
And with these things hitting the
news more, more often and much bigger.
Because like you got shows like the
engineer, Japan, who like, this is our
bread and butter, this is the stuff we
enjoy because this is the weird news.
This is going to become
a bigger and bigger thing.
I’m going to help propagate it.
So really, the insurance kickbacks should
come back to me so that I keep promoting this.
I think I’m very money focused today.
It’s a bit capitalistic.
I apologize.
The future technology has been a
very technology oriented episode today
with live streaming and
the insurance being basic.
Again, it’s part of viral videos.
Japan’s pushes itself towards the future.
It has certainly has an image.
I mean, there was a story that
I’m not doing this week about them.
Government agencies putting
away floppy disks forever.
They’re actually mandating that
you can’t use floppy disks anymore.
There are entire generations of people
who’ve never even seen a floppy disk.
So that is how weirdly
backwards Japan can be.
And yet also it tends to be at
the forefront of a lot of technology.
There was a city that wanted
to set up a drone delivery system.
That drone delivery system failed because
they had zero orders for the last year.
Now, their idea was I’m, I’m unable
to leave my house for some reason.
So I’ll call this office.
It’s kind of like a main train station.
They’ll have someone go
out going to the local shopping
area, load all those
shopping things onto a drone.
The drone will go to a designated area.
That was my first thought.
This is the problem.
They’re not bringing it to your house.
So if I can’t leave my house, the drone
system doesn’t help me because I still
have to leave my house to go to
the designated delivery area, which I’m
assuming is basically an open field, which
might be really far away from my house.
So the whole convenient aspect of a
drone delivering to you cannot happen
because of safety issues, the
drone is going to have to be massive.
Because let’s say it’s I buy a 40 kilogram
bag of dog food has going to have to be
able to carry that X
amount of kilometers away.
It’s not going to be able
to land outside my house.
Maybe the drones too big.
Maybe it would impede traffic.
Who knows what’s going to happen there?
So since it could only go from point
A to point B, it is then less viable
system for the actual
convenience and purpose of it.
So they had zero orders, which once
I learned about the system, I was like,
of course they did because I’m going
to go with the person who actually
brings it to my door, which is the
whole point of trying to get something
delivered is, is it too bad?
I don’t know if it’s too bad.
All the money that was going to the
drone delivery system is now going to go
to electric vehicle van delivery
systems, which I’m on board with.
I do, I know that there are
everything has its problems.
So like the nickel mining and
stuff in the lithium that goes
into batteries is not thing,
but again, it’s transitional.
It’s important to take steps
to try to improve things.
And I think electric vehicles is a
very good step in the right direction.
So let’s keep going with that.
So I’m glad the money is going
towards deliveries that’ll actually work.
And, yeah, of course, if I
have to leave my house to
go to the drone, I might
as well just go shopping.
It’s not a creepy, creepy story,
but it’s out of touch politicians.
I did have an idea.
So I was thinking about doing,
I did a series for a little while.
It wasn’t a series.
It was like every now and then I
would do international politics, but
like as high school students.
So it would be like Kim Jong-un,
Kim Jong-il, one of the Kim Jongs,
talking to president of a country
and they’re back and forth.
And I was, I was affecting sort of
what I would consider as essentially
Californian valley girl accents.
So it really snied towards each other.
But I was like, you know, it
would be really interesting.
It would be do international
politics as a kids show.
So like the actual countries
are represented by characters.
You get in trouble because if you did
Winnie the Pooh for Xi Jinping in China,
he didn’t like that very much.
But I was like, if you want
to, one of the problems as
international politics so
complicated, we need to simplify it.
The best way to simplify things is
to do it like you’re talking to kids.
It relevant to what I
was just talking about.
It was just a thought that happened to
enter my head at this moment in this time.
There were, there was a government
sort of conference and they were talking
about ways to tackle the
gender inequality in Japan.
And this is a big thing.
It’s actually a very big problem in Japan.
Gender inequality and pay
and everything is still very real.
They might say it’s
not real in other places.
I don’t know whether that’s true or
not because I don’t know statistics.
But in Japan, man and
woman does the same job.
There’s a very good chance the man
is getting paid more than the woman.
Miei is a prefecture in
Japan is not is eighth in the
country for city employees
getting paid if you’re a man.
It’s 24th for city employees getting
paid if you’re a woman, which implies
that the man is getting two, three times
more money for doing the exact same
job as a woman in Miei, which is
problematic because that’s exactly what
they’re talking about
saying we need to fix.
The mayor of one of the cities in Miei
had his own opinions about how to fix the
gender inequality problem and his idea
was to start a campaign and that campaign
would be live rich by marrying
a high earning man from Miei.
Now, you can, if you were, let’s
say one of the more female oriented
members of this conference, see some
of the core issues with that as tackling
gender inequality. One of the other
people there was like, it sounds like
you’re saying that women should rely
on men and he’s saying, well, what would
happen is with the population decline,
women from other prefectures would come to
Miei, they would marry a man in
Miei and have more babies and then the
population would go up and Miei would
be a better place and that’s a quality,
right? So I think I think the actual
core issue here more than anything else.
I don’t think this guy actually knows
what gender inequality is and I don’t
think he knew what the problems were.
So he just started saying stuff that was
going on in his head and he was trying
to make Miei sound good. So he tried to
make it sound good by like, hey, the
men in Miei make a lot of money, not
realizing what he’s saying is women
in Miei do not make a lot of money.
So if you want to be a happy woman, marry
for money, not love. So marry a man from
Miei, it’s just, it’s a tragedy in his
inability to understand what was actually
going on around him in the moment
at the time. And that is politics.
I mean, that’s it right there. A lot of
the, in seeming to be the last couple of
episodes, I’ve done a couple of Senate
hearings. And one thing I’ve noticed is
they constantly seem to not actually
talk about the issue that’s on the
docket, the thing they’re supposed
to be talking about in that day.
The last one I did was the president of
TikTok who as a person, I find him quite
interesting. I think I quite like him. I
don’t know him well enough to actually know.
He may be really evil. And that’s
part of the charm of evil people.
So you gotta be careful. But it was
about his social media dangerous for kids.
I think core element, you could probably
say yes. But they kept asking him if he
was communist and if he was Chinese, which
has nothing to do with protecting children.
I guess I could twist that. This is
where my brain starts to do the work.
You could twist that so you were
protecting children from communism.
And that is why I host my own podcast.
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