Japan

“Our allies, South Korea and Japan, the next two largest shipbuilders in the world, they're actually, on the commercial side, they're actually getting a lot of their modules from China. They're getting a lot of their labor from China.”

“And he told me, he's just like, yeah, well, for my Japanese, like the Japanese versions of my videos, it's like, he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire like a voice actor. That's like the voice is famous in that country.”

“The information revolution, I think, enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more, I think Japan is becoming more Japanese…”

“Our allies, South Korea and Japan, the next two largest shipbuilders in the world. They're actually on the commercial side. They're actually getting a lot of their modules from China. They're getting a lot of their labor from China.”

“Last five years in a row, number one direct foreign investor in the United States, Japan. Last five years in a row, number one direct foreign investor in Japan, the United States.”

“In the early eighties, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine were going, and they'd come back, and they'd call me, and they said, my God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I'm going to close. And I'd start laughing, and th…”

“People in Japan tweeted six times more often than people in western markets, and it was largely when we spoke to them because kanji lets you say heaps more in the same number of characters than you know, a romance language did.”

“We run self-driving trucks right now in Japan. They carry commercial loads. They're, you know, they're safety drivers there, but they're, Autonomously running. And, but you won't know that because the brand is Isuzu.”

“We have eventually bought big. We're invested in Japan.”

“Countries have started doing this work and you see this in Japan and Korea announced the same thing you see in other parts of the world where they're investing a significant, significant amount of money to actually train from scratch. Train their own national …”

“And then this week, Japan is investing six billion dollars in a consortium. It's called the Neo Terra, N-E-O-T-R-A consortium. And they're doing that and skipping ahead to physical AI, ie robotics.”

“So as Japan thinks about building a capable military, in order to deter aggression in the region, it is looking to partner with new firms building autonomous ships, building AI for an integrated battle space. And they want to build with us.”

“At this time, there's a lot of other people in Japan trying to petition the government to essentially stop importing foreign goods and essentially protect their goods. And Honda is the only one of these manufacturers that doesn't vote for this.”

“Japan and Korea in a slight panic have already committed to a much faster build out of renewables to get away from gas as quickly as possible. Almost all of their gas is imported LNG.”

“Japan was the first country that affect, that was affected by this ban, and I believe that they are in a far better position now, because they've diversified, they figured out what to do. They're in a slightly better position than all the other countries now. …”

“In terms of the big markets, yeah, there's a lot going on in Korea, Taiwan, Japan. I'm Probably more bullish on just in terms of a hunting ground to find great companies. The European markets are just tough right now, given the regulatory environment. They jus…”

“On bags, in Japan, they spent At the time, six times as much as the average American spent.”

“I went after the young female professional who Was looking to be emancipated, not get married right away, but travel, be independent, break the glass ceiling, and I was able to offer her a bag at 40,000 yen while the European competitors were a 100,000 yen, an…”

“Japan has come in and now is training caregivers from here and taking them to Japan.”

“So like, let's go to Mexico and Brazil and Japan and Idaho, where we have these inbound customers that, that need cloud seeding and that want cloud seeding.”

“They just went from zero percent of GDP to three percent of GDP spent on defense.”

“We run like, as an example, we run driverless trucks in Japan right now, like as we speak, we can't have errors that are L four trucks.”

“In fact, interestingly enough, the bullet trains of Japan were financed by the World Bank. Nuclear power plants in France were financed by the World Bank early on.”

“In Japan, the number of nursing homes has risen nearly 50% over the last decade”

“There's over, there's tons of articles on this, over eight million IKEA's that are being given away by the government or again, sometimes for very cheap.”

“We are, we have driverless trucks running in Japan right now.”

“It's like a month or two behind, you know, like obviously super hyped about Open Claw and all, you know, personal AI.”

“And like everyone's perspective on AI is quite positive here versus in the U S it's like so negative, you know, AI is less popular than ice in the U S like all kinds of terrible things. And in Japan, they're just like, oh yeah, like it seems it's fine. Like ob…”

“So, so we started in Japan and like as a test market, and it's essentially exactly what we just discussed. It is if you verified with an orb, you get a little batch that You know, signals to other people that you are in fact a human.”

“Like in some areas, it is like 200,000 dollars, like per megawatt, with a service called FCR in Tokyo.”

“Do you know the twenty-year-old cohort in Japan is 50% of what it was in 1948?”

“I remember when Facebook had to go into Japan, Japanese cultural norms were that all the Japanese social networks back then were incognito. You couldn't, for some reason, maybe saving face or something. You could not share your real name or your photo. So ever…”

“What they also really envy is our risk appetite here in the United States where people are, have an equity investment culture, and that is really largely absent in Japan. And in Europe”

“If things are on the current path, well, maybe South Korea or Japan will have nuclear arsenal in their backyard.”

“If you take the poor state, Mississippi, the average household income there is still the same or higher than it is in the UK, Germany, South Korea, Japan.”

“But I find in the history of American corporations, and for Westworth, I think this is a uniquely like North American problem because it's not true in Japan, for example, but in history of American corporations, you get these significant moments of alpha follo…”

“Japan's probably gonna become a military power at some point in the future again”

“Japan and Korea were not well positioned for the last 20 years because it was just, like, digital companies, but when it comes to, like, actually hard assets and good engineering, they, Germany, Korea, Japan have a lot of companies that have excellent physical…”

“I might catch some flack for defending private aviation, but it just doesn't seem that crazy. The entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is, is, like, they're doing deals in Japan. They're doing deals in, in the Middle East.”

“And later on, I found out I still need a bachelor's degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to one, this is like the doc, this is 2000, this is the dot com, like height. So I went to an online education program called the American College of Compute…”

“I mean, I think that the Chinese helped Takeichi because their reaction to her comments in, in early November, which again, she said, she reiterated the Japanese position on sort of a Taiwan contingency, so to speak. She said it in a setting where it hadn't be…”

“I think Anthropic does not sell AI access to China. You know, they loop it through, and you can see this in the traffic data. They go through Korea and Japan and other places, but like, and so they get it.”

“In the Philippines, or in Mexico, or in Brazil, or in Japan, and other markets, or Australia, Korea, there are stablecoins coming”

“For the first three quarters of last year about 42% of all passenger vehicle manufacturing is in China last year. That's higher than the ratio for Japan ever was back in its heyday.”

“Now we are going to, as part of our growth and expansion efforts we're going to open some sales offices. Probably Japan, Korea Portugal, and Switzerland.”

“What they don't have, and they recognize is a culture and an ecosystem where this talent can go from being a researcher, winning Nobel prizes, which they do, to startups going to market, and that's what they're working to change.”

“So, the Japanese market for cars, as an example, 94% of cars driven in Japan are Japanese. They don't drive German cars, they don't drive Korean cars, they don't drive American cars.”

“So what we came up with was Five hundred and fifty billion dollars. That this is not foreign direct investment. This is not Toyota building a factory in America. This is, they literally will finance Any project we want to build in America, as long as it's like…”

“Korean stock market of 70%. Japan up like twenties or thirties. Europe up more than 15.”

“The Koreans are gonna play here. For sure the Japanese are gonna play and then you know, the Chinese in a major way as well, and, you know, they have their own, you know, native chip ecosystem that they're building up, and so they're going to be many choices o…”

“So finally on the very second to last day, we find a factory that had a vacuum and it wasn't very big. It was kind of the size of a motorcycle, which isn't huge for the vacuum world. And they were doing these little vacuum insulated Japanese milk bottles.”

“Another one we do is a yearly retreat where we bring everybody to a remote, exciting, typically exotic destination for seven, eight, nine days on the company's time and dime. it's just a vacation, but with colleagues. The last one, so I don't remember in whi…”

“This is why Japan is a leader in robotics because they can't hire anybody.”

“We have a KV. We invested in a sovereign AI company in Japan called Sakano.”

“They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world. It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan. Any longer.”

“By contrast, China has been much more open than Japan. China, most famously, is well known for building Apple's iPhones and Tesla's vehicles, and it, the communist system recognized that it was so far behind technological leaders, mostly through open the doors…”

“China right now has some of the control paranoia of the Soviet Union some of the manufacturing excellence of Japan, and some of the American entrepreneurial hustle. You combine all of that, and I think that is part of the reason that I think that China is goin…”

“By one count 14,000 millionaires departed from China in the year 2023 to move to Singapore, to move to Japan, to move to the UK and the US, in part because the Communist Party has smashed a lot of their businesses.”

“And then Japan was probably 40% of that first year's wholesale business.”

“And actually, all the things you just cited, like the Galapagos Syndrome and the making things only for the Japan market, Not being welcome to foreign direct investment were probably the reasons why Japan is not the leader in electronics today.”