2022-10-28 Conversation with Noah Smith

Great to finally meet you. You said you read my blog?

Of course. Each and every new post.

Really?

I paid for it.

Do you have time to read it?

Of course.

Impressive. This protocol is really interesting…

Yeah. The protocol…

It’s radical openness.

Radical transparency, yes.

Nice.

Here.

Oh, thanks man.

Yeah.

Are you from UK?

I lived here for a long time, but Australia originally.

Oh, Australia. Your accent is a little UK-ish.

Feel free to sit here.

It’s turning into a group meeting.

Yeah, I know.

That’s cool.

The recorder is just to make sure that we can make the corrections to the transcript for 10 days, as part of the protocol. Feel free to edit away anything you don’t want to publish.

Got it. If I admit to international terrorism.

Exactly. You can make corrections.

Very good.

Hey.

Hi. I’m Ya-chi, and I’m in the new media group…

If Noah suddenly starts to speak Nihongo, Ya-chi can interpret.

[Japanese]

[Japanese]

[Japanese]

It’s nice to know this. I just wanted to meet and, just find out what is going on in Taiwan. This is my first time here. I wrote a pretty well-read blog post about Taiwan last year.

“Taiwan is a Civilization.”

Yes.

As in the video game. [laughs]

Yes. I try to give my posts dramatic titles to get attention, when it’s really about…If I titled that post “Americans don’t pay enough attention to Taiwan,” the readership would be much smaller.

I know.

I’ve got to dramatize it. It was good. Much of that was, of course, sourced from Taiwanese people I know. Everyone said, “Why don’t you go to Taiwan?” [laughs] The pandemic made it a little difficult, obviously.

You arrived after October 15th?

Yes, I arrived on October 18th.

Excellent. Post-pandemic flights.

I saw that it was opening up, so I decided to come right over.

That’s smart.

A couple of my friends got the gold card, and they spent a lot of the pandemic here. Very cool. I’m leaving tomorrow morning.

How do you feel so far?

Great. Did anything surprise me? I was surprised at how chill it is, laid back.

Yeah, the very relaxed attitude.

Yeah, it’s not really like Japan. Japan is very friendly, but it’s also incredibly high energy. Everyone’s always extremely obsessed with the details of everything. Taiwan seems much more relaxed.

I think it’s a good cue for me to take off the jacket…

It’s cool.

I know.

I just came for a vacation, but I suggested to my Silicon Valley friends that they come. They came, and then some VC people started doing VC deals here. Then my other friend came. He’s doing electronic sourcing. We turned into a group trip.

Excellent. How large is the group?

Just four.

Just four? OK, pretty decent size.

We’ll be back. Let’s see. Taiwan needs to electrify all the scooters.

Yes.

The scooters are a little noisy and pollute-y.

Ah. That’s right, and the Gogoro charging stations counts as a reverse energy store for decentralized preparation.

What’s that company called, Gogoro?

Gogoro.

Are they still on the outside of Taiwan as well?

A little bit, but mainly in Taiwan.

Germany.

Yes.

Israel.

There’s lots of countries where scooters are pretty popular.

Mm-hmm.

I also visited Amsterdam, and there were a lot of scooters there.

More bicycles.

Of course, more bicycles, but a lot of scooters. Scooters use the bike paths, not the roads. That’s very odd.

It’s just all dangerous over there in that path.

It really is.

Seriously.

Like you’re going to get run down by bicyclists and scooters.

I feel like I’m about to get…

The less solarpunk side.

The less solarpunk. It’s a little cyberpunk.

Very much so.

I do feel like I’m going to be run down by scooters here sometimes. They’re very good at avoiding people, but still. Eventually, luck has to run out.

That’s true.

What about e-bikes? I feel like that would be a little less…

Yes. Also e-scooters. We’ve got testing sites within the campuses for them. vTaiwan helped to consult to make the E-scooter Bill Amendment. I think it’s already passed. It’s awaiting the results from the experimental campuses before municipal governments adopts them into general regulation, but the legislature already passed that amendment.

Very cool. What did the amendment do exactly?

Basically making sure that e-scooters have their plate…

Just regulations?

Yeah, clearly… It’s basically e-bike-ifying the e-scooters.

Very cool. Any other observations? Let’s see. Very laid back. Many buildings in Taipei are new, but many buildings look extremely old and dilapidated. Why is this? What are these old, extremely…?

It stems from Noah’s blog post on “Taipei urbanism”….

Which you read.

…which is…

Very cool.

You’re contrasting to Japan?

Right, because the infrastructure and building materials are so similar to Japan that some time I naturally contrasted it, and then…

I think it’s only really taken down and rebuilt if there’s a serious earthquake risk.

Got it. They can retrofit it to…

Yeah.

I see. They don’t redo the outside?

No, there’s no social pressure for that.

Interesting. People just don’t care?

We’re post-modern.

They don’t really care so much about the external look of the house, but the internal…

I did notice that the internal stuff is pretty nice.

The social pressure to make a cultural landscape, things like that, simply wasn’t there. There was a little bit during the flower expo, but other than that, no.

Got it. I do feel like Taiwan has extremely good skill at interior arrangement and design and that this should be exported to the world somehow. Any other observations? Not really.

Did clkao take you to hot springs?

I didn’t go to hot springs, although I want to go. I’ve been to lots of hot springs in Japan, but I think that Taiwan has more natural hot springs.

That’s right.

Just outside, but I don’t think that’s a geologic difference. I think it’s just because Japan insisted on building something over every natural hot spring and turning it into a non-natural hot spring, turning it into a bath.

Or a Zen garden.

Right, or just a hotel.

Or a hotel.

They commercialized every nature spot, and that’s sort of the downside of Japan, just too much construction, too much overdevelopment of a lot of natural stuff. I think Taiwan gets that right. It’s a lot more greenery. I really liked that.

The eastern side, even more so.

All right, next time. I do intend to come back. It’s not just one…

Of course, and we’ll still be around.

I’ve met a lot of expats too. I don’t speak Chinese, unfortunately. I feel very embarrassed traveling in a place where I don’t speak the local language. I met some expats or sort of international people who will go back and forth. They’re some interesting people, just looking at the businesses that they do. It feels like it’s sort of a mecca for Asian American expats.

Yep.

That’s really interesting. Maybe they have some language skills.

There’s that, and then there’s this whole diversity. It’s beyond just tolerance, it’s collaborative diversity, and people celebrate the diversity here.

Nice. It really is kind of The Netherlands of Asia.

A little bit.

It could even be the California of Asia.

No.

[laughs]

No, because they actually build things.

California is all about exclusionary land ownership. It’s always been, since the very beginning, the California dream is to get a plot of land, and then exclude everyone else as much as you can. This is, of course, not good. I think it was only World War Two that motivated a lot of development in California.

After that, there was about 15 or 20 years when the momentum of that built a lot of the modern California. After that, they passed Prop 13. As you know, it limits property tax and a lot of other statutes and regulations to limit development. Now, California is the central battleground for America’s struggle to build more stuff.

Build back better.

Build back better.

And more.

And more, yes. It’s time to build.

It’s time to build.

I’m trying to think of questions that I have. I didn’t necessarily expect…

We’ve got an entire hour.

…a group meeting. We’ve got an entire hour? All right.

Afterwards, feel free to have more open conversation with John here. [laughs]

As you wish.

One thing that’s a little sensitive to talk to people about is how worried are people about…

Earthquakes?

…a war.

Ah, sorry. [laughs]

Well, how worried are people about earthquakes? How bad are the earthquakes here? Is it like Japan?

Really, really bad. Some of them much worse than…

Than Japan?

Not that one.

The big one.

Around the turn of the century in 1999. Not as bad as Tōhoku – without the nuclear plant situation – but in some places almost as bad.

Oh, wow.

On average, there’s three felt earthquakes per day in Taiwan somewhere.

I didn’t feel any.

The eastern side’s got more natural earthquakes.

That’s amazing.

Yes.

How many big ones? When was the last big one that knocked something down?

Three weeks ago?

The last couple weeks. Remember, we had three or four a couple weeks ago?

Noah, you narrowly missed them.

I’ve been in just one big earthquake ever. It was in Japan a long time ago.

If you’d arrived just a week earlier, I think you would have experienced three.

Sorry, I missed it.

How worried are people about war?

The same as earthquakes.

The same as earthquakes?

A big earthquake is going to come…

…eventually.

Eventually.

That’s really interesting.

We had an earthquake in ‘99, really, really bad. We, of course, still build buildings after that. It’s not like we don’t build buildings because of earthquakes. We’ve just got to build with resilience in mind.

Of course, Taiwan hasn’t had a war since the Nationalist occupation or whatever that’s called.

I don’t know… We field a million or so cyberattacks every day.

A million cyberattacks a day?

And maybe three felt ones, same as earthquakes. [laughs]

Wait. How do you measure the number of cyberattacks?

Port scanning and so on, things that are actually recorded by the log.

A million cyber attacks and, I assume, essentially all coming from China.

We know that it’s foreign because foreign packets travels through submarine cables somewhere. It could be a botnet.

Right. I see. Does Russia really have any idea to cyberattack Taiwan?

Right now we’re pretty resilient, with all those zero-days we had to deal with, hybrid cognitive warfare, you name it. So it’s exactly like earthquakes.

With all this experience defending against cyberattacks, is cybersecurity a major Taiwanese export?

Yes.

Cool.

It is, with Trend Micro and so on. There’s also a new, young generation who consistently places second in DEFCON CTF, right after the US team, of course.

The US team is good?

The US team is pretty good. Yeah, we’re doubling down on cybersecurity.

That’s pretty cool.

There’s an area that we may excel in cyber security, the semiconductor supply chain. The E187 semiconductor supply chain cybersecurity standard came from Taiwan, and we’re trying to export that in the sense of mutually compatible lab…

Security at the hardware level?

Yeah.

That’s really interesting.

Was Bloomberg’s article bullshit or not?

Which one?

The one about the Chinese chip exploit. There was an article. It was a big feature story. They didn’t retract it. A lot of people claim that it was wrong. This was years ago when I was working at Bloomberg. I was at Bloomberg Opinion. This was at Bloomberg News.

I heard everyone talking about and arguing about it, but I didn’t know anything about it. Then I asked some people, but nobody really knew whether this was likely to be true or not. Bloomberg stuck by it, but then a lot of people got mad at them.

What was the claim?

I’m trying to remember. The claim was some chip that had been sourced from China had an exploit built in…

…but I don’t remember what. I think it was for servers.

Yeah, I think in one of the servers used by public cloud services. It was long ago.

This was 2018 I would say, maybe ‘17. It was a while ago.

I think that’s it.

I was always curious.

Sure. I don’t know about that particular incidence for sure, but similar stories were the prompt during the Sunflower Movement in 2014 to say that, if we use PRC’s so-called private sector product in our telecommunication – at the time not 5G – 4G infrastructure, then it cost a lot more to do system risk analysis as compared to sourcing with European counterparts.

The Sunflower Movement, you were involved in that, right?

Providing broadband service, yeah.

Was it coincident with the umbrella protests in Hong Kong, or was it before or after? I don’t remember.

It’s immediately before. Some of the people who participated in Sunflower happened to be visiting Hong Kong sharing some of the Sunflower stories when Umbrella happened.

Interesting. Taiwan may have inspired Hong Kong more than…

I don’t know about that, but there’s people who participated in both.

That’s interesting. I was in Hong Kong for a little while during the protests and saw some protestors.

Wow.

I wrote a blog post about it. One of my first blog posts I ever wrote was about that same…

What brought you to Hong Kong?

I knew that China was going to crack down, and I knew that the city would be really changed. Of course, I couldn’t predict COVID, but I knew that something was going to happen, and the city was going to be changed. I’d never been. I’m really bad at traveling. I almost never travel.

I just wanted to see what it was like while I still could. I felt it had already changed a lot. The Hong Kong that I’d seen portrayed in media as a kid in the 90s, it’d already been changed a lot.

There’s a couple bookstore in Taipei that tries to snapshot that moment and transport it here, run by Hong Kong expats and with the Hong Kong community currently in Taipei. Have you been there?

No.

To document the ‘90s era?

Not just document, but to keep it alive.

China’s now retroactively editing a lot of the Hong Kong cinema and stuff like that. Did you see “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?”

People keep telling me that I should see it, but no.

It was sort of an American homage to Hong Kong movies.

Yes?

It’s very silly.

It gets very silly.

A goofy movie.

It’s very silly. We’ve got a Department of Democracy Network within moda now. Within that department, there’s a division dedicated for we would call it Plurality, or web3-enabled decentralized social technology.

Its Mandarin name is very similar to the movie’s title, it went quite popular for a while. People kept telling me that I should hire Michelle Yeoh, the actress, to head that division.

She was good. Because one of the, small spoiler, alternate realities that her character experiences is actually just her being herself, her real self. That’s one of the alternate.

I read about her being a stone. The translation for that is very interesting.

I do like the talking rocks. That’s good.

Wang Anshi, a stable rock.

Very philosophical. One thing that I haven’t heard much about is Hong Kong immigration to Taiwan. I know that lots of Hong Kong people are leaving. It’s not a great place to live so much anymore.

Many of them are here either by investments or education.

I’d heard that there was like a two year wait for a lot of these people to be vetted.

Indeed?

Someone told me that. Is that…?

It depends on whether you joined by investments or by employment or things like that. It’s…

Oh, interesting. It’s pretty open.

There’s something like whether you joined the Chinese Communist Party and worked in the Hong Kong government there, things like that…

Oh, I see. Of course.

If there’s a flag there, then maybe it takes longer.

I really feel like I’ve been a big immigration advocate in the United States. I think like also true of Taiwan.

“Immigrants, we get the job done.”

They get what?

Get the job done.

They get the job done. Yeah, exactly. Taiwan’s, birth rate is extremely low and so of course you’re going to need a lot of immigrants, right?

Yeah. Some of them here may even naturalize at some point.

Yeah…

I’m under intense pressure.

It’s a free society.

It’s a free society. You don’t have to naturalize… today. Let’s talk tomorrow. [laughs]

Do people just use as the gold card system, like from residency?

They do. Yes. The idea is that the gold card, because it’s renewable, if you renew by that point maybe we try to convince you to naturalize. Because you get to keep your original passports if you make significant contributions, like if you’re a gold card holder…

I’m afraid I could never make a significant contribution. I don’t think blogging is significant enough.

No, I think it’s very significant. There’s a three-year period. Get your gold card, blog for three years and then it’ll be sigifiant.

Welcome to you too.

You can wear this “Also Taiwanese” badge.

Nice. I’ll consider it.

What are you going to post?

Universal healthcare for you and your family.

Universal healthcare. I don’t speak the language.

That’s fine. We have 20 national languages. Pick one to learn. John here doen’t speak any of them either.

Are you serious?

Yeah.

What? How?

Very carefully.

This interview is about me?

We’re interviewing you now.

You’re here for how many years?

Since I arrived in November 2007.

Oh wow, a long time. 15 years.

I feel like so few people here speak English.

I’ll just give you some perspective on it. I lived in Korea, South Korea before I came here.

Oh, you did?

I lived in South Korea for six years. No one speaks English in South Korea.

Also I noticed that.

Coming to Taiwan felt like a completely open and international society where people were speaking English and they were prepared to speak English to you. there are pros and cons with that. Because the con is that you are comfortable.

You never actually social pressure, there’s utopia again. You’re not actually forced. You learn basic, but you’re not forced to do it. In Korea, you don’t speak that language and you don’t speak enough of it, you’ll be in conflict constantly.

Here is more like Texas, I feel like, which is where I am originally from.

Oh really? Where in Texas?

College Station.

Where is that?

It’s nowhere. Have you heard of Texas A&M University?

Yes.

That’s where that is. It’s just a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Friday Nightlights.

We would play them in football every year and there would be fights between us, and our fans, and their fans would give them fist fights because they both cared about football so much. That’s Odessa for me, it’s Friday Nightlights.

They were more corrupt. They did a lot of crime and we didn’t, so that’s why they got the show about them. Because they did crime.

Makes sense. So, you don’t have to learn Mandarin. We have 19 other national languages, including the sign language.

Including sign language, which I also don’t speak. That just feels weird. I don’t know. I feel like such a jerky American going everywhere in the world expecting people to speak my language. I just feel it’s like a little imperialist, I don’t know.

As long as you learn 1 of the 20, you’re fine, it’ll be mutual.

As long as I learned 1 of the 20…

And you speak Nihongo too.

When I lived in Japan, I had taken Japanese in college, but then my Japanese was still really bad. For the first year I was there, I made sure to not interact with any English speakers at all.

Among the very senior population and the junior population, Nihongo can take you very far.

Oh, really? Oh, yes. Went to a tea house that caters to Japanese customers. They spoke Japanese. It was very useful.

You’re already half way here.

The younger generation, because they need to watch anime.

Exactly.

Here’s the real policy suggestion that I have, and of course this…

About anime?

Yes. This comes too late. I should have come to Taiwan in the ‘90s, but I was a kid so I couldn’t. I didn’t think of this until now, but Taiwan should cultivate pop culture industry. I know there’s Taiwanese pop culture industry that’s domestically focused, or even focused on the sort of Chinese speaking world.

You know Jay Chou or whatever is popular…

Yes. Cinema too.

…of course beyond Southeast Asia, Chinese people know Jay Chou and stuff. I really feel like South Korea has… Of course Japan succeeded by accident. It was really interesting because I interviewed someone from Kodansha, the Mongo publisher in 2014 or 2015.

I was talking about cultural exports and he said, “Americans don’t want to see Japanese people on screen.” I said, “Are you crazy? That’s all Americans want to see.” their stuff got exported by accident. Whereas Korea, it was very intentional.

It was like, “Everyone’s going to watch.” They even have K-pop groups that are oriented toward various countries. Twice as a K-pop group with Japanese members, that’s styled more like J-Pop. Whereas Black Pink is styled like hip hop. It has a Thai, a New Zealand member, and etc. They do this intentionally.

It’s really interesting how they promote the Stuff. Do you know anything about that from having lived…?

We create different aspects of it, but not to the extent you…

Then Taiwanese do this. Realistically it’s going to take 10 to 15 years, so it’s maybe 10 years at the shortest. It’s a little late of a…

Which form do you think we should take, aside from bubble tea?

Aside from bubble tea, everybody knows that. Which form? See, I don’t know because I’m not an entertainment industry person. If Korea had asked me for advice, I would say I don’t know.

There’s suggestions that maybe the web3 NFTs are it, maybe we we should just double down on that metaverse thing.

Definitely not the metaverse, that’s garbage.

Not the metaverse, not bubble tea, what else?

Oh, food is great. The thing is that food gets disassociated from the place. Then it’s just…

…like the California roll of sushi?

Invented by a Korean chef in the East Bay. A California roll. That’s really interesting because American sushi was all invented by Koreans. Because when Korea was occupied by Japan, they wanted to eat sushi, but they couldn’t get enough vinegar, and their ingredients were more stale.

They just added extra ingredients, used softer, less vinegar in the rice, and then they baked it sometimes. Of course this was just like… Japanese people would be like that’s awesome. When you actually then add in the same techniques with the good ingredients, it’s better than Japanese sushi. Now it’s taking over.

The hack that made it.

Let’s see. The basics are TV, movies, video games, comics, cartoons. Those are the main…

Video games?

Video games. Video games are huge. I would argue that more than anime, manga, or anything, or fashion or cosplay is the, or however you pronounce that, cosplay, is…

Cosplay is right.

Cosplay.

Of all these, only video game is within our ministerial portfolio.

I would say that, are there video game studios in Taiwan?

Yes. Quite a few. They actually cross-pollinate. They take good ideas from video games – like Detention – and make movies from it, make comics about it. There are pretty good video games studios here.

I would do that. I would also try to focus on something with live action. Live action includes TV, movies, and music because you actually see the person.

Ah, performance.

Performance. There some sort of thing where you see the people. The least connected is…

Pizza has arrived.

Sorry about the delay.

That’s fine. Go ahead.

Howdy.

I’m fine.

My bodyguard.

Nice. You kill with a pen.

Dangerous.

Oh boy.

I’m not dangerous at all.

This is nice to know.

Only my jokes are dangerous. Noah’s principle of pop cultural exports. I will just make it up. Source? “I made it up.”

My principle is that the more… Oh, thank you. Nice.

The more packaged and separated from the people a product is, the less it connects forward it is to the country. The least are like, for example, Sony products. I would say that probably 90 percent of Americans think Sony is an American company. Nobody even had…Which was part of the reason they named it Sony.

They thought Americans would want to buy domestic products and so they knew it. Manufacturing products than food, then things like video games and comics that depict stylized representations of a culture and a people.

Then music, TV, and movies are the most, because when Americans watch “Parasite” the Korean movie. which I thought started good but got bad at the end.

With Parasite, you see Korean people living in Korean ways, and then suddenly everyone in America wants to go to Korea. Hopefully they don’t expect Squid Game.

That’s a good one.

I don’t want anyone to go to Korea expecting to play Squid Game. It’s not good. I guess you see the principle. Video games, comics, and cartoons are in the middle. Good but not the very best because they don’t show the people themselves. What’s the Taiwanese TV and movie scene like?

Pretty good. There’s also some public TV projects that collaborating with Netflix and the like. The thing is that, as you mentioned, the Koreans made it a national project to convey this whole cultural diplomacy thing. Every art form, pop culture form, links back to this Korean tourism or Korean cultural image thing.

In Taiwan, we’re only seriously starting to coordinate that with the forward-looking infrastructure budget, starting in 2016. That’s when “The Worlds Between Us” were made and so on. Actually, Ya-chi may be more qualified…

…to talk about this than I am.

I follow manga and anime, and because of manga and anime I learned of Japanese. I think maybe now real people could also transfer culture to the other countries involved, to the whole cultural life and lifestyle foods.

Americans have no consciousness of Taiwan at all. They have some consciousness of China, but not much, because China produces very few pop cultural things. Hong Kong, they have some because of Hong Kong movies, but that was only a short era.

Japan a lot and Korea a lot, but then I think Taiwan has a real opportunity here. China’s closed itself off. Xi Jinping is not making TV shows for Americans to watch, and he doesn’t care. In terms of Chinese-inspired things, and now Hong Kong is not going to make it anymore either…

That’s right. Are people still learning Mandarin at all nowadays?

Not right now.

They don’t?

Like 90 percent reduction. I don’t know. It’s huge part.

I know.

Maybe they can learn some of the other 19. [laughs] That’s a good question. It’s startling how little cultural product China’s created that resonates with not just American but people from various countries. Japanese people I know don’t know any Chinese products. It’s not because of some sort of national enmity. Otherwise, they wouldn’t like Korea stuff so much.

Look, Xi Jinping has been cracking down on TV idols, video games. I feel this goes beyond simple national promotion or whatever. It goes to a very deep value of self-expression and being who you want. Pop culture, a lot of it’s created by corporations and industry, but through fandom and through indie creation and through things like that, people can self-express using the pop cultural stuff.

Now, Xi is telling people, “You can’t be fans of these TV idols. We’re just cracking down all the fandoms.”

Especially if they are effeminate.

If they’re effeminate, right. He’s like, “No, you gotta be manly men.” You’ve got to forgive him. He grew up in a cave, so he’s a caveman.

A true story.

It is a true story?

It is a true story.

Probably the only caveman leader in the world.

Still alive.

Still alive. Here’s the most important blog post I wrote and probably the blog post I’m most proud of that I’ve ever written or the thing I’m most proud of that I have ever written was about weebs, W-E-E-B-S. Can you call up that blog post? If you speak Japanese, you might recognize the quote at the beginning…

Oh!

…which is from a cartoon, and you may get the pun. Weeb culture is not Japanese. Japan has geeks who love fantasy stuff, but they’re just like American geeks who love Star Wars or Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the same thing. Weebs are different.

Weebs have used Japanese cultural products to create for themselves a subculture that fixes many of the problems that Americans have. I would say, if I have any insight to offer about what sort of pop cultural products offerings will work in America, it’s contained in that blog post.

Good. I’ve read it.

Really?

Those are my thoughts on what matters in terms of how it works. I didn’t do a follow up on K-Pop fans, but I think that you can easily see the extension of the same principles that I wrote about too, like K-pop.

It facilitates appropriate appropriations. That’s the main idea.

If I had one sort of policy suggestion to come and deliver it, is that. The pop culture.

Let’s incorporate that into our #FreeTheFuture strategy.

I also wrote a post about cultural superpower. What makes a cultural superpower. Just about how stuff I already said, like Korea demands.

“What makes a cultural superpower?”

I would say that’s the only blog post that you should read for new insights on top of what I’ve already said is the one about weebs. It’s a pretty short blog post, but I spent a day and a half writing it. Normally a blog post will take two hours. This one took more like 12.

Truly distilled.

I had to think very carefully about what I wanted to say. Anyway, those are my thoughts on policy stuff.

How’s the substack treating you? Good?

I’m not one of the top substackers, but I’m slowly linearly increasing linear growth. I don’t have to have a real job anymore, so that’s useful. I can blog in my pajamas.

That’s your job.

With my rabbits.

Your rabbits?

Yeah.

That’s cute.

Yeah. I hope to eventually make it into the top tier of sub stackers on…Some of the top sub stackers I really like and some of the top sub stackers are people that I don’t really like. The only solution is to be more popular.

Easy.

Yeah.

Aww. It’s so cute.

It’s so cute.

Ooh. It’s so cute.

Yeah. They’re cute.

You love your pet.

Love my pets.

So cute.

This is Cinnamon and Giggles.

Oh, Giggles.

Giggles. He’s actually Constable Giggles.

He’s beautiful actually.

Isn’t he beautiful?

Yep.

Anyway, those are my pets. I just sit around, blogging in my pajamas with the rabbits. That’s fine.

Do they travel with you ever?

No. They’re like cats. They would get freaked out by traveling. Then no. They’re at a hotel. Do you have any pets?

Used to, but my parents took care of the dogs. Dogs and cats.

Oh, nice. I always had dogs and cats, but then I decided to try something different this time. Do you have any questions for me? I just speechified, I don’t know.

I don’t know. What comes to mind? Questions from the floor?

I have more thoughts about pop culture stuff. Japan had a project called Cool Japan. It was a disaster. Had a complete failure. You know why?

Why was it?

Yeah, why?

First, the approximate cause, the immediate cause of the disaster was that all this program did was give money to big advertising agencies. They had some capital which they thought these big companies must have the expertise in selling stuff.

Those companies had no idea how to sell Japanese stuff overseas, because they’d never tried. They had no expertise. They didn’t know what overseas people liked. They just ate the money and that was it. Then finally, after many years of failure, the Cool Japan program shifted to partnering with Netflix.

Then they got a slight victory. Then meanwhile, the Japanese cultural products succeeded completely accidentally. Because what they didn’t do was follow the demand. They didn’t try stuff and see what the foreigners liked. Companies like Nintendo did.

They made some games and they saw what the foreigners liked and wasn’t always what Japanese people liked. For example, Japanese people would prefer Dragon Quest – Dragon Ball, and then Americans would prefer Final Fantasy.

Oh, really?

Oh yeah. Final Fantasy Seven was the most popular game in America in the 1990s. It was just explosion, huge explosion. I would say that game introduced a lot of people to Japanese culture in America who would never, ever watch anime, read manga, or stuff like that. Final Fantasy sell.

Having individual companies doing their best entrepreneurially to search for things that Americans like. I think K Pop did this too. Of course the government had its strategy, whatever, but the production studios thought, “How can we sell this to other people?”

For a long time they failed because for a long time those production studios tried to do stuff that was very like J-Pop. J-Pop just wasn’t selling much. Then they thought, “OK, so well let’s try a different cat then.” Some started experimenting with more hip hop sounds, and that turned out to be much more successful.

It was because they experimented and they followed what people liked. In terms of movies, Korea produced a lot of movies about revenge, murder, death, and killing. Boring. Then, those didn’t really become popular in America. Americans weren’t interested in that.

Then some Korean filmmakers made movies about inequality. Americans went, “Whoa, we want to see.” Which is ironic because Korea is much more equal than America. Then Americans wanted to see this movie about stuff about inequality because they felt like this was a problem in their own society. That was a thing.

In terms of Korean dramas, those haven’t caught on in America, but those have caught on in other countries. Most countries want to watch Korean dramas. Anyway, there was a lot of experimentation. I’m not actually sure how much the government of Korea actually helped.

Companies intentionally planned it, whereas in Japan, even the companies didn’t plan it. The video game companies did, but then the publishers and cartoon, like animation studios did not plan their appeal. For decades you technically had to pirate them. You had to steal it because the companies wouldn’t sell it.

Only recently with Netflix have they realized that there’s an opportunity there, but then there must be some way to prod… I assume there are entertainment companies that exist.

Yes, of course.

There must be some way to prod them, incentivize them to start looking for overseas opportunities. Some sort of policy subsidizing cultural exports or something. I don’t know exactly what the word.

Did you meet ipa, clkao’s wife?

No. Who?

Chia-Liang Kao, who you’ve met yesterday…

Oh, yes. No. At the time, she wasn’t at the…