(upbeat music)
It’s pretty common that old
people struggle with new technology.
And people like to make
fun of that, but you have
to think in the days to
come, you will get old.
And in the days when you get old, are
you going to struggle with technology?
And the answer is yes.
I try to keep up with technology, but
I’ve also already seen that in some ways,
I’ve fallen off like there’s
some things I know about.
And then there are huge swaths of
technology that I don’t understand at all.
I used to think of myself
as fairly tech savvy.
Now I’m functional.
So I’m assuming in the next decade
or two, I’m going to be struggling.
I mean, you have to imagine when
I talk to my grandkids and I’m like,
why in my eyes does my
neural link show that it’s the
time in Greenwich Meridian,
instead of local time.
And my grandkids are like, oh my God,
grandpa, you’re so dumb, you’re so useless.
You don’t even know how to reset
your neural link with the extra net,
because the Internet
is not a thing anymore.
It’s all external.
That we’re all connected to all the time.
And I had my USB in my
neck installed backwards,
making it always very awkward
to put the USB in my neck.
And that’s what’s coming.
And so I’m just trying
to stay abreast of
technology so that I can
not be a complete idiot.
Now because I enjoy technology,
I’m hoping it lasts longer.
Like I play the video games, I make
the podcast, I like to learn things.
If I can just keep that spirit
alive, all at least no stuff.
I maybe I don’t, not proficient,
but I will understand things.
And that’s kind of the most important part.
A lot of older people in Japan, and
that’s most people, for being honest,
they don’t want to apply
for the My Number Card.
My Number Card is basically
a social security card of sorts.
It’s not because you already have
one of those if you’re Japanese.
It’s a different card.
The government wants
to unify its information.
So your health card.
So if I go to the
hospital or I go to a clinic,
I have to bring my
national health card.
I use that to get my national rates.
I’m like, I don’t want to
pay full price for medicine.
I want to get my whatever
percentage I’m supposed to get.
So socialized medicine in Japan, very good.
I can get medicine at reasonable rates.
It’s cheaper to go to the
doctor and get medicine,
and then go to like the proper pharmacist
than it is to buy over the counter drugs.
So if I buy allergy medicine,
something I buy every year,
I can get 30, 40 days worth of
allergy medicine for about 1,000 yen.
If I buy over the counter,
it’s going to be like
10, 15 days for more
than that, probably 1,500.
The reason older people don’t
want to apply for the My Number
Card is they find it difficult
to remember the password.
And so this is it when you create this
card, you have to create a password.
And if you forget it, that could
cause you problems down the line.
So you know what, I
just don’t want to do it.
I just don’t want to create
the card in the first place.
I’m not obligated to.
The government really wants
everyone to have a My Number Card.
From November, you can
choose not to set a password.
Now, as I said, I’m not
a technological expert,
but I do have a base proficiency with
technology, and I do follow the news a lot.
I can see absolutely
no problems with having
a password unprotected
information connected to your knife.
I have to, how do I, how do you phrase it?
I can see no problem with having
your national health insurance
and other personal information
non-password protected.
Now, they’re saying that if there’s no
password, you won’t be able to do stuff.
You won’t be able to use the stuff online,
which these old people
wouldn’t be doing anyways.
But a lot of that in the
news, Japan is scams.
And those scams prey upon old people.
And so if we know the old people have cards
that are unprotected, there’s got
to be a way to abuse that system.
And that is going to be, I
was literally my first thought,
not that I was coming up
with a scheme to abuse them,
but my first thought was
someone’s going to find cards
without passwords and
then try to find a way
to abuse the system to either
get medicine they could resell
or get medicine at such
a discount or something.
It’s scams, that’s what they do.
I’m waiting for this to
go through in November
and then January, the
story start coming out
of old people losing
a bunch of money or
something via the my
number card with no password.
Recently, one of the
problems is the people in charge
of my number were
investigated as some of the cards
were registered with
other people’s personal
information like
they’re addressing stuff.
So that with the password
is already showing, there’s
already problems and mistakes
with the my number card system.
Then a lot of stories recently
about the Pokémon thefts.
And Pokémon cards have become
a common target for thieves.
Stories get broken into
last week, we did the
guy who got scammed,
but like reseller, website.
And the guy who resoled
the stuff had filled real boxes
with juice boxes and I
made like a very extended
joke about just using
the word box too much.
It’s very well done considering
it’s not scripted, very well done.
I think she’ll go back
and listen to that one.
A company executive
sold five fake Pokémon
cards at a second hand
store for 283,000 yen.
They were specifically from
a Tokyo Art Museum event,
which actually shows the
level of Pokémon in Japan that
you, they have Pokémon
events with national museums.
Like that’s, I guess they
would have other events,
but it’s just, it shows the
level of Pokémon in society
when they have like
art exhibits for Pokémon.
It like not just a
museum, like a local one.
Oh, that’s neat.
This is like Tokyo Art Museum.
That’s a big deal.
The owner said these seemed
off, maybe the quality of the paper,
they were little grainy,
something like that.
So he called the police
and he got the police.
The police got the Pokémon
company to send out someone to
appraise the cards, which is a
whole world I was unaware of.
There are people who work
for Pokémon, who’s, I don’t know
about singular job, but
probably primary job is to be able
to appraise the reality
and value of Pokémon cards.
Because of the rarity of
the cards, some of these
cards are selling for 100,000
yen, maybe even upwards.
So you can make a lot of money if
you can get the rare, rare, rare cards.
The suspect was then contacted because
the appraiser for the Pokémon company,
said these were not real,
these were counterfeit cards.
He claims he didn’t know
they were counterfeit
and the police are
still investigating.
I’m interested where this ends up,
because either he
committed a crime and got
caught, or he legitimately
bought these cards,
thinking they were real,
and he got screwed over.
So Japan, Korea, the United States, there,
working together, they’re
trying to work together more.
I’m very happy about South Korea
and Japan working together more,
because I really think these two countries,
I know they have a very hard history,
but I think together they would
be a force to be reckoned with.
And values-wise, they
actually both countries
have very, what I
consider positive values.
And the United States,
sort of that backing of the
United States is making them
more stable in the economy.
We will get better in this.
I just think it’s a good stuff.
A lot of this actually comes down to China,
keeps trying to exert pressure
and create tension in Asia.
So Japan, South Korea
and the United States,
we’re talking to like, hey,
China’s all very up-body.
Maybe we added together
and take care of stuff.
We share information and stuff like that.
And everyone’s like, yeah, this is great.
Except China’s like, hey, that’s not cool.
So recently there was
a summit of some sort.
I actually stopped carrying so many
summers, the G7 summit, all these summers.
I don’t really care anymore.
This Chinese ambassador
guy comes out and he goes,
no matter how blonde you die your
hair, how sharp you shape your nose.
You can never become
a European or American.
You can never be a Westerner.
You must know where your roots lie.
So he’s, oh, I mean, further.
Japan and South Korea
should work with China
to prosper together and revitalize East
Asia, revitalize Asia and benefit the world.
Weirdly, none of them
have taken this seriously.
South Korea and Japan have not
taken this call to their roots seriously.
And it might be because China
keeps more exclusionary attitude.
When it comes to every other instance,
they have flown airplanes
over Japanese airspace.
They have taken like aircraft carriers
and sailed them really close to Japan,
like just right out of
legal limits and stuff.
They’re always banging
heads with everyone in Asia
and then here they
are saying like, hey,
man, why don’t you guys
want to work with us?
And it’s like, dude, you keep
kind of kind of the blow is up.
There have been stories
in Indonesia, Japan of
Chinese diplomats and
high level politicians,
basically threatening
to wipe everyone else
in Asia off the map on
more than one occasion.
They aren’t taking it
primarily this seriously
because of the nature
of China towards Taiwan.
Taiwan is an independent
nation, it’s part of China.
Nobody knows.
Taiwanese people, they think they’re
independent and they want to keep it that way.
That’s not working out for them.
North Korea, very supported by China.
Japan and South Korea may all sort
of have their issues in North Korea.
North Korea keeps shooting missiles
over Japan if you want to be specific.
And there’s the abduction issues.
There was a bunch of
people, this is sort of history.
North Korea abducted a
bunch of Japanese nationals
and South Korean nationals and
brought them back to North Korea
and they haven’t returned
them and no one knows
if they’re alive or dead
and it’s a big problem.
China in its conflict, oh,
China Russia in its conflict
of Ukraine, China’s
kind of on Russia’s side.
And so basically the fundamental
philosophical differences
Japan and South Korea are
diametrically opposed to China.
So this call to remember your roots.
I don’t see how that’s
really going to work out.
I don’t see how you can say, hey,
look, you and I, we disagree on everything.
But we come, it’s actually
like maybe my sister and I.
So if you met me and
then you met my sister,
you would see two people
who are very different.
We are, we just, we have different values.
Now she’s not a bad person.
I hope I’m not a bad person.
I don’t want to talk about it.
And unless I got to get some
like someone to back me up.
But our fundamental philosophies about
life and how you should live life differ.
And I essentially, we just
stay away from each other.
And it works out fine.
Because she doesn’t try to impose
her lifestyle on me and vice versa.
I don’t tell her how to her live her life.
China on the other hand
is telling other Asian nations
how to live their lives and that they
should sort of succumb to China’s power.
But it would be like
going to me and saying,
you, despite the fact
you agree with everything
your sister thinks,
should align yourself
with your sister because
you come from the same family
because you come from the
same house, that kind of thing.
And that’s just not how it works out.
China then went on to declare
that the US is exaggerating
ideological differences to
so confrontation and division.
Now Japan and America have had
a very positive relationship overall.
There’s issues, of course,
there’s always going
to be issues between
two different countries.
But overall, they have a
very positive relationship.
And this sowing ideological differences
in confrontation, again, if you
go back through the vast library
of Ninja Ninja Japan stories
and just go through everyone
where China has
mentioned, I think you’re going
to see a lot of stories of
China almost purposefully
sowing confrontation and division
when they don’t even have to.
So while Baffy did a story
about a kid who had cornrows.
So one of his parents
was black, one of his
parents is Japanese,
he has kind of puffy hair.
And he was going to go to
his high school graduation.
So he said to his daddy,
he’s going to look neat.
What’s a good hairstyle?
He goes to cornrows, sort of
traditional hairstyle for our people.
So let’s do that.
So he went to a salon, got cornrows.
I have never had cornrows.
I think it’s illegal for a man of
my complexion to get cornrows.
But he went to a salon.
I do know it takes a long time.
So he put a lot of effort
into making his hair look good.
He shows up at graduation.
The teachers are like, no,
man, I don’t like that haircut.
So you don’t get to graduate today.
So when they put them
in a different room upstairs,
so when they call your name, you
don’t come downstairs, and he just left.
And then they tried to like,
well, he decided to leave.
Well, he decided to leave
because you guys stuck him
in a room and told him he wasn’t
going to be allowed to graduate.
I really like the follow up
to this story just recently.
A group of volunteers for Juneteenth
decided to have their own ceremony.
And it was better with way cooler hair.
I could get into the details.
You don’t really need–
they basically got up.
They had a graduation.
They had a whole thing going on.
And they’re like, hey, we’d
like to celebrate this kid.
He graduated from high school.
He came to the front.
He said, thank you.
I feel special.
I feel more accepted in his story.
He’s kind of made it clear that,
again, Japan is a country is changing.
You got more and more mixed kids.
Japan is a society’s less homogenous.
And progress is going
to have these hiccups,
but it is going to happen, especially
with supportive people out in the world.
So I think that is a very
nice palette cleanser,
a very nice little story about
people saying, that kid’s important.
Since we’re talking about
schools, the city of Yuruma
doesn’t want to standardize school
uniforms as abolishing schools traditions.
And let me start the whole thing again.
City of Aruma doesn’t want
to standardize school uniforms
as abolishing schools traditional uniforms
would have a negative effect on students.
But I was like, what negative effect?
Because I know school
uniforms in Japan high
school to high school
are technically different.
But for the boys, it’s a blazer.
They might be slightly different colors.
The girls do talk about
the skirts and stuff.
But if you standardize them all, there’s
not really anything you
can play about anymore.
You just need, again, like a symbol or
something to show what high school you go to.
If that’s important, the fact
that you go to high schools
enough, again, this like
tiered system of this high
school is better than
that high school and stuff.
I don’t see any value in that.
So I was like, what are
the negative effects?
And then someone else
actually quite smartly asked
the same question said, it would be
diminishing pride and their sense of belonging.
But again, they could belong to the high
school group, the high school demographic.
The reason they started talking about this
is they were talking about the differences
in price in different school uniforms.
So in 2023, there was
a 16,000 yen difference
between the highest and
lowest priced school uniform.
For boys, the expense of
the cheap end was $50,930.
Yeah, not always.
And the high end was $66,700.
So depending on what uniform you
get or what school you go to, you’re
going to spending more or less
money, these things are expensive.
And so what this is actually about
is if we can standardize the price,
we could buy and bulk, we can
make more, we can make the cheaper.
And that would help out
mid to lower income families.
Not spend a ton of money.
They have another thing
in Japan where all the kids
have to get this backpack,
this leather backpack.
It’s called land sale.
I don’t know where that name come from.
I should actually look into
that because it is interesting.
But now my kids are too old.
They don’t use them anymore.
They’re stupid.
They’re like 50, 60,000 yen.
They’re ridiculous.
Now they do use them for a long time.
So they got to be sturdy,
but– man, give me 20,000 yen.
I’ll get you a backpack
that’s going to last five years.
Girls, the low end is 70,543 yen.
And the high end is 84,838.
So if you are a boy and you get the
cheapest uniform, you get 50,000 yen.
If you’re a girl and you get the
cheapest uniform, it’s 20,000 yen more.
If you are a girl and you get the
most expensive uniform, it’s 84,000 yen.
This was justified
because they all wear vests.
They vests come with the female uniform.
And justified because of the
fabric, the high end uniform.
In another prefecture, they
standardized the uniforms,
and it brought the price
down to 6 to 8,000 yen cheaper.
So the low end, 50,000
yen uniform, you could
drop that by 6,000, even
time for like 45,000 yen.
So, again, these uniforms,
they’re important in one way,
but it’s so stupid because the importance
is constructed, and I don’t believe it.
But I went to a high school or I
wore t-shirts and jeans every day.
So maybe that was my uniform.
I don’t know.
I just don’t put value in this.
I understand.
I actually am okay with the uniform system.
I think the uniform system
should be designed to be affordable.
I like when the school
has decided to go unisex.
So everyone just got
pants in a shirt and a jacket.
And if the girls wanted skirts, that
was extra, but that was a choice.
I liked when they made them from uni-glow,
so they were like 10,000, 20,000 yen.
Because, yes, we paid
for it, but it was expensive.
And it’s soft.
OK, so the story, big international
story, is that a guy vandalized the policy.
And he put his name– I think
him and his girlfriend’s name on it.
I did like when I read
that story that his excuse
was he didn’t know the call of
see him was of historical importance.
That’s what his lawyer said.
So he did it, and he got in trouble.
He’s looking like five years in prison,
and he’s crying, going like, no,
please don’t try and make the prison.
I don’t want to go to prison.
Well, dumb shit.
Not only did you vandalize it,
you put your stupid name on it.
Well, this thing happens
all over the place.
And in Japan, pretty much every
building is a historical site of some sort.
A 17-year-old boy violated the
cultural properties protection law.
So that’s the law of, if it’s
historically important, don’t touch it.
So this is kind of like, keep
your hands to your self law.
He carved letters using his fingernails.
So he was at a temple.
And temples are made of
wood, so if you have a strong
fingernail I was looking
at mine, I couldn’t do that.
But I cut my fingernails
all the way down for
judo, so a different
story, and you don’t care.
So he was used to,
maybe at a long fingernail
or a strong fingernail, and
he started carving his name.
He carved a big J, and then he wrote Julian,
making it incredibly clear who it is.
Now, here’s an idea.
What if you’d written someone else’s name?
So you get the thrill of vandalizing
and making your Mark in a historical site.
OK, so this is something I did.
I, my first year of university,
I fucked up housing.
I didn’t get an apartment.
I thought I was going
to get campus housing,
and then it was full, and I didn’t get
it, and ended up in a lottery system.
It didn’t look like I was going to get it.
My university has a frat
system, the Greek system.
So they had frat houses.
Now, I had no intention of joining
a frat, but they had empty rooms.
And it’s better for them to
have people in those rooms
paying a little rent
than it is to have those
rooms empty and not
making any money at all.
So I ended up for my
first year of university
living in a frat house where I was not a
member of the frat, which is a really weird.
But when I say the whole sentence out loud,
I just think that is one of the
weirdest things that’s ever happened.
They did spend the entirety of the
year trying to get me to join the frat.
I was not interested at all.
And it was a very–
I mean, as far as I yet
to live with another
guy, but it was fair.
I think they pressured my
roommate to get me to join.
So it’s like, hey, Peter likes judo.
You should join the judo
club and be really close
friends with Peter, and
then he’ll join the frat.
And then we’ll get $365 a year.
Because he got to pay a dollar a
day for these guys to be your friends.
That was back when I went to university.
So it’s probably a lot more now.
So this guy joined judo.
But he– I don’t know if he
had any real interest in judo.
And so basically, he
also has a weird attitude.
And I’m now gotten into judo stories.
I explained, don’t do this
step or you’ll get thrown.
And he was looking at me like, ha, ha.
I’m going to do this step.
And then he did this step in my through.
I said, this is just going to get worse.
The more you do this one,
move, the harder the counter gets.
And he was like, ha, I got you now.
And then he did it really big.
And he did it three, four, five times.
And I got really frustrated.
Because I was trying to help him.
And so then I just threw
him super, super hard
and just ran him into the floor
and he lost his breath for a minute.
But he didn’t get hurt.
But he was shaken and put it that way.
He didn’t last very long in judo.
Again, because I don’t think he
wanted to be in there in the first place.
Anyways, I was living this frat house.
Overall, not the worst experience.
Not as bad as I certainly
thought it was going to be.
Because I thought I would live
there and look for another place to live.
And then I ended up just
riding it out for the entire year.
The guys were fine.
They didn’t have any–
it wasn’t like the movies.
Like the Greek system in
American comedy movies.
But I was on– they had a little balcony.
It was wood.
It was really cheap.
And I was standing there.
And I started very much
like this kid just scraping.
I think I had a fork or an knife.
I just took scraping into it.
I was like, oh, I should vandalize this.
Because I don’t really like
the Greek system or whatever.
And someone in the house had pissed me off.
I was like, but if I write my
name, they can track it back to me.
Because it’s my name.
If I write Chuck Me Veest on something,
I’m like, hey, I think I know who did that.
So I wrote Fuzzy
Zellwager, which is a golfer.
I don’t know anything about golf.
I’ve played golf with my uncle once.
And I’ve gone to driving rain.
I’ve gone to driving ranges a few times.
But I don’t really follow golf.
So I don’t know why this golfer’s
name was in my head at that moment.
Maybe it just seemed to connect to
the frat system for me or something.
So I vandalized their house
with the name of a famous golfer
who never had been there, figuring
that if they were like, who wrote this?
And then you can just look at it and go,
well, apparently, Fuzzy Zellwager wrote it.
And that’s my vandalization story.
And I never got in trouble or went to jail.
Because I’m smarter than the two
fucking idiots who did it elsewhere.
Dave just moved in the background.
He was in his little bed.
And it’s hot.
So he goes in the bed.
And then he goes and he
stretches out next to that big pillow.
Sometimes he lies on top of the
pillow, but he stretches out his lines.
He’s a very long dog for how small he is.
He’s got very long sexy legs.