1.

This country is obsessed with order, ritual and precision. Everyone wears a uniform. Security guards and cleaning staff are decked out head-to-toe in custom uniforms. The salarymen all wear variations on the same suit. Even the teenagers here all seem to collapse into the same look.

This also manifests itself in odd ways. For instance, the construction sites here are the cleanest things you have ever seen. Note the equally spaced barriers ringing the sites:

Similarly, I watched a security guard at another construction site walking around picking up individual cigarette butts with tongs; no broom for him.

Equally baffling is the habit of staff on trains to bow as they enter and exit each car. The process of selling you coffee or checking your tickets involves endless rounds of bowing.

2.

This country is incredibly safe and crime free.

You see almost no graffiti. There are no guards in the museums (versus one per room in most North American museums). There are fire extinguishers everywhere on the smaller streets (would have been stolen ages ago in Canada). They even print your room number on the key to your hotel room:

3.

When it rains in Shinjuku at night you are forgiven for thinking that, just for one second, you might actually be in Blade Runner .

4.

The toilets here are out of control. Not only do they have bidets and a spray built in, some also make a flushing sound on demand, enabling you to avoid some of the less delicate human noises. Many have warming seats.

Also, one toilet I used actually robotically controlled its lid. I flushed it (lid up) and it closed the lid and then raised it again before flushing it. I’ve no idea why, but, I for one, will work with our future robot toilet overlords.

5.

The Tokyo metro is an experience in and of itself.

No one talks and it is almost preternaturally quiet. People may be listening to music on their headphones, but they keep the volume so low that you can’t hear.

Many people sleep. Others read. Sometimes they read manga porn. That’s okay and no one judges (or, if they do, they’re doing it in their own silent Japanese way). Here’s a photo of a guy reading his manga porn next to a sleeping woman:

The service is also impeccable. We were in the train when a guard ran on and picked someone’s suit jacket off the rack above the seats (yes, they have racks). He asked anyone if it was theirs; upon hearing ‘no’, he ran off the train and began speaking frantically into his walkie talkie.

Seemed like someone had mentioned that they’d forgot their jacket on the train and mere minutes later it was being picked up for them. MTA, you’ve got a long way to go.

6.

There are no garbage cans anywhere. You’re supposed to bring your own trash home – even if you’re at the park. You can find some garbage cans next to vending machines or in convenience stores, but that’s it.

7.

You can eat at any restaurant in Japan and you know the food will be clean. A chef would be permanently dishonoured if one of his guests got sick from his food.

Despite that, just about every restaurant we’ve eaten at would fail a health inspection in North America.

The kitchens are crowded nasty affairs. In a noodle bar, raw food sits in bowls astride the patrons waiting to be cooked. Cigarette smoke ventilates into the kitchen. There’s only one sink in the kitchen and it’s used for everything. And none of that matters.

8.

The alien nature of Japan is hammered home to you most notably when you experience something Western that’s been redone through a Japanese lens. I went into Fedex Kinko’s to print some paper and all was normal until they handed me my printed documents.

In an envelope that was sealed with a special Kinko’s sticker:

I had a similar moment when I saw an ad for Coke Zero:

I’m pretty sure that you will never see Coke Zero positioned as “wild health” in North America (or that anyone would want to see that).

9.

There is more unnecessary packaging here than anywhere else I have ever been. Everything is double wrapped in plastic.

10.

We went in to a supermarket. In an effort to sell different foods, they were sampling salad. Nobody here eats Western food.

11.

People in Tokyo are immaculately put together. There is nary a loose end or a frayed cuff in sight. Even their jeans are perfect: I didn’t see one single rear pant leg that had ever come into contact with pavement.

12.

There is an obsession with labour-saving devices here. If you lived on a tiny island with an aging population, you’d probably think that same way too. The most bizarre example of this so far is a machine that automatically puts plastic sheets over your wet umbrella. I didn’t even know I needed it (see unnecessary packaging above).

13.

We were walking through Ginza (Tokyo’s fashionable shopping district) and drifted past an Abercrombie & Fitch store. For those who haven’t seen one, they represent the pinnacle of confused adolescent hormones run mad.

When we were in NYC, the Fifth Avenue flagship shop had a queue outside and inside it was all black with pounding music – meant to mimic a nightclub. The entrance was framed by a huge shirtless black & white photo of a perfect American youth with chiseled abs. Guarding the entrance were two equally good looking all-Americans wearing A&F’s traditional jeans-and-plaid outfits.

They’ve got exactly the same setup in Tokyo. Same queue. Same poorly lit shop with bad music. Same photo of American Boy ™. Even the clothes on the ‘bouncers’ are the same.

Except they’re Japanese and waif thing, making the whole thing even more ridiculous.

14.

Napkins are the garbage cans of restaurants; they are nowhere to be seen. In fact, I have yet to see a Japanese person spill anything while eating. It’s no that they’re perfect at eating, it’s that if you held your bowl to your face and slurped noodles from an inch away you’d be hard pressed to spill too.

15.

There are maps all around Tokyo. North is usually down. It’s hard enough to find your way around Tokyo (what with the medieval layout and non-Latin script), but holding your map upside down to orient yourself with the “you are here” pin on the sign is just punishing (and probably quite amusing for the locals).

16.

Many utility trucks (e.g., the phone company’s service trucks) drive around and broadcast messages continuously from a speaker mounted on the truck. I have no idea what they’re saying, but I’d like to imagine that it’s something like “Remember that the Emperor’s greatest virtue is his filial piety. All Japanese youth should…”

17.

Many Japanese restaurants display plastic replicas of their meals outside their doors:

And it’s not just the main course; dessert too:

I want to bring this tradition to my apartment in North America. When I have guests over for a dinner party, I will prepare a tray of plastic dishes. I’ll walk from guest to guest, showing them the tray and bowing in front of them as they acknowledge the presence of the plastic trinkets.

18.

We went out for dinner at a traditional izakaya (think Japanese pub; lots of wood and sake bottles everywhere). It could have been a scene from 500 years ago, until a couple sat down next to us and whipped out their iPad and cellphone. He placed the iPad in front of him and surfed the web for the entire meal. She did the same on her cellphone.

I think they exchanged maybe thirty words, and even then it was only to show each other stupid things they’d found on the Internet.

Oh to be young and in love in Japan…

19.

This country loves manga. We went to the manga museum (more a library than a museum…) and learned a bit more about it.

Did you know that in 2008, the Japanese spent roughly as much on manga as fast food? That’s a serious commitment to Shonen Jump.

Here are some interesting milestones:

• 1917: first domestic animation
• 1932: Norakuro (also called Narkuro Jotohei) is published by Tagawa Suiho
• 1947-1955: akahon (little red book) pulp fiction boom in Japan. Coincides with rise of book rental stores
• 1963: creation of Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka
• 1960s/70s: Fujio Akatsuka pushes the boundaries of what can be in a manga. Introduces many new graphic styles
• 1973: first anime classes at Kyoto University
• 1983: word otaku is defined

The museum inadvertently betrayed a bit about Japanese culture:

• A section describes the varying thickness of mangas in different areas of Japan. They state “the thickness of the books is not unrelated to the reading speeds of readers from each national region“. It’s very competitive here.
• There’s a section on fanzines (fans creating their own manga based on popular characters) and the section on fanzines aimed at adults is basically porn. However, the museum shows one group aimed at men (two girls on the cover) and one aimed at women (two guys holding each other on the cover). Come on Japan, I’m pretty sure that women do not want to read about guys making out. It’s for gay people. You should feel comfortable saying that (which, the Japanese are not – I haven’t seen one openly gay person yet).

Another great point learned: manga is not all about samurai, spies or intergalactic travel. Most in painstakingly mundane stuff like tennis or seeing a girl on the subway.

20.

When you arrive in Japan nothing makes sense. When you leave, it all retrospectively makes total sense. It’s because Japan is a cultural and technological Galapagos. They’ve literally created everything themselves and it’s totally obvious to them how it works and they can’t understand why anyone would (or would want to do anything differently).

For example, consider the machine below:

It’s the ticket machine for the subway. It looks bafflingly complex – and it is the first time you use it.

The trick is that you need to put your money in first before it will do anything. This is the complete opposite of how it works everywhere else in the world, so non-Japanese spend most of their time quivering in front of the machine.

Once you put your money in, the black buttons light up to show you which fairs you can choose based on the money inserted. Want more than one ticket? Select the number at the upper right and the black buttons refresh to show you any changes as to what you can pick.

All completely unintelligible to a non-Japanese but retrospectively makes a lot of sense.

21.

Male vanity is everywhere in this country. In Harujuku you’ll see lots of guys lined up for store sales. On the train we saw a guy putting on makeup. In fact, there was even a line of makeup aimed at men. It’s hilarious to see; what would the shogun of yore think!

22.

How much of a premium is space in this super-dense country? Check out these seats at the Mickey D’s in the Kyoto train station:

23.

This country has a real sweet tooth and some of the absolute best candies. I recommend any of the following:

• Crunky: think puffed rice in chocolate, not southern hip hop
• Lotte Chocolat (sic) Dessert: science has managed to recreate the taste and texture of a chocolate banana crepe inside a tiny marble-sized ball of chocolate
• Plus Mint Chocolate: heavy chocolate wrapped in a minty shell
• Muji Yogurt-Covered Cherries: simple compared to these other foods, but they do the trick

Jr. was asked what he thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule: if you do something for 10,000 hours you’ll be an expert.  His response was quite nuanced.

He suggested that no one sets out to do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert. Rather, lots of people set out to do something and after 50 hours, 90% give up. After another 50 hours, another 90% give up, et cetera. As a result, the only people left after 10,000 hours are the fanatics – and the have the benefit of great pattern recognition as they’ve been through many cycles.

Another good question was around what is the biggest lever to improve health care systems. Jr. stated that there are actually two:

• Rising living standards. As people’s income rises, they spend more on health care
• Childhood vaccinations. In 1960, 20M kids under 5 died per year; now we’re down to 9M. The eradication of Smallpox alone reduced this by 3M. That’s why he’s funding a TB and malaria vaccine.
  • One interesting addendum: he stated that when you increase vaccination rates and reduce childhood mortality, people start having fewer children as they know they’ll be there to care for them in their old age. This was something I always wondered about: does increased childhood survival lead to a population bubble and a lower standard of living for a society? Bill’s answer: no

Sr. closed with some wise words: remember that the only reason you’re successful is because you’re part of a huge, interconnected society. We often think that our success is due exclusively to our selves, but if our society wasn’t so vastly networked, we’d never achieve success on such a scale. A great closing thought.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s, these sort of songs abounded: The Message. Fight The Power.  C.R.E.A.M. It Was A Good Day. And one of the best written and most ambitious concepts ever: Nas’ One Love.

Unfortunately, in the mid-90’s, hip hop became really commercially successful and instead we got mindless drivel like It’s All About The Benjamins and more recently Roll Call. These songs might get people on the dance floor, but you won’t be listening to them five years after they’re written.

In fact, the only song with any soul that might have come out this century was probably Hate It Or Love It.  What’s more, is I’ve found myself wondering how we could have just gone through the worst economic crisis in generations and there hasn’t been one hip hopper who’s written a song about it. After all, this was originally protest music, and there’s a lot to protest these days!

Thankfully, there’s finally a hip hop song that captures all the confusion of these past few years. Unfortunately, the original version is almost unlistenable – despite it’s great lyrics – but a few weeks ago it was repackaged in a fantastic form.

What song am I talking about? Dizzee Rascal’s Dirtee Cash performed as a mash-up with Florence + The Machine’s You’ve Got The Love at the 2010 Brit Awards:

The lyrics to this song are awesome. Dizzee spits them so fast that you might not notice them at first, so give them a read here – especially verse 3 – and reflect on why no one else is singing about this today:

[Dizzee Rascal]
Let’s go
Everybody wants to be famous,
Nobody wants to be nameless, aimless,
People act shameless
Tryna live like entertainers,
Want a fat crib with the acres,
So they spend money that they ain’t made yet,
Got a Benz on tik that they ain’t paid yet,
Spend their pay cheque
In the West End on the weekend
Got no money by the end of the weekend.
But they don’t care cause their life is a movie,
Starring Louis V, paid for by yours truly,
Truthfully, it’s a joke, like a bad episode of Hollyoaks,
Can’t keep up with the cover notes,
So they got bad credit livin’ on direct debit in debt
they still don’t get
Cause they too busy livin’ the high life, the night life
Huggin’ the high when livin’ it large
And they all say

[Florence]
Sometimes it seems that the going is just too rough
And things go wrong no matter what I do
Now and then it seems that life is just too much
But you’ve got the love I need to see me through

[Dizzee Rascal - Verse 2]
Let me take you down to London city
Where the attitude’s bad and the weather is shitty
Everybody’s on a paper chase
It’s one big rat race
Everybody’s got a screw face
So many 2 face,
Checkin their high just like their ready to ride
I’m on the inside looking at the outside
So it’s an accurate reflection
City wide, north, east, west and the southside
Everywhere I go there’s a goon on the corner
Guns and drugs cause the city’s like a sauna
And it’s getting warmer, and out of order
Tryna put a struggling mother to a mourner
Mr politician can you tell me the solution
What’s the answer, what’s the conclusion
Is it an illusion, is it a mirage
I see young’n’s die because they tryna live large
And they all say

[Florence]
Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air
I know I can count on all of you
Sometimes I feel like saying “Lord I just don’t care”
But you’ve got the love I need to see me through
(Check it, check it, come on, come on)

[Chorus]
You got the love
(Who’s got the love)
You got the love
(Who’s got the love)
You got the love
(That’s right, thats right, thats right)
You got the love
You got the love
You got the love

[Dizzee Rascal - Verse 3]
We are living in the days of the credit crunch
Give me the dough
I’m tryna have a bunch
But I cant have rice for lunch
Its not there ain’t enough to share
It ain’t fair never dreamed that he could be rare
Who cares who dares to make a change
Everybody in the club trying to make it rain
But not for famine just for the sake of having
15 minutes of fame and everywhere’s the same
Again and again I see the same thing
Everybody acting like they their plane sailin’
I see rough seas ahead maybe a recession
And then a depression in whatever professon
This is my confession I can’t front I’m in the forefront
Living for money ready to start like a bungee jump
With no rope but I ain’t trying to see the bottom
Because thats where I came from, I ain’t forgotten,
[Chorus]
[End]

Note: lyrics grabbed from KillerHipHop.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

I love this quote but have always been frustrated by it. The ex-consultant in me thinks “you’ve only described three quadrants of a 2×2 matrix!” After all, what is an “unknown known”?

Today, I got an inkling of what that might be.

I was catching up on reading some John Mauldin Frontline Thoughts and noticed this graph:

John’s hypothesis is that we’re at the end of 60 year debt supercycle (1950-2010; preceded by 1880-1933) and it’s going to be a vicious delevering that’s going to reshape the world.

The interesting point in the graph below is where the kink upwards started: 1980, just a couple of years after I was born. Moreover, the damn line’s been going up pretty much ever since I’ve started thinking about things more complex than what to do after the school day ended.

And this brings me back to the unknown known. If John is correct (and I think he is), then everything I know about the world is tinged with the fact that I learned it going through the biggest credit bubble anyone alive has seen. A lot of the ‘facts’ I learned growing up (you’ll always be wealthier than your parents, social programs can be paid for, etc.) are going to be challenged over the next 30 years and I’m going to have to unlearn what I knew. My pattern recognition is going to be skewed because it was trained on a pretty crappy underlying dataset.

It won’t be easy, but now I think I finally know what a unknown known might be…

• The difference between a fool and a saint is timing
• If a problem is too hard to compute, the outcome is essentially random
• Black swans are not black swans for everyone: only for ’suckers’. To be crass, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a black swan for Americans; for the terrorists were exactly what they were expecting
• Debt levels map one-to-one with forecasting overconfidence
• If I told you that you have a 3.4% chance of losing everything on a trade, you probably wouldn’t take it. If I told you that a catastrophic failure only occurs every 30 years, you would
• Religion is not about beliefs, it’s about creating heuristics for people who otherwise couldn’t think them up themselves
• The best science is done by independents (Einstein, Darwin), not by people associated with institutions – those people try to please the tenure committee. There probably isn’t a perfect institution for creating better science, but abolishing tenure is likely a good start. (This feels very akin to how innovation in business occurs)
• ‘Forecast’ is ‘prophesize’ in Arabic – but how would you feel about next year’s business ‘prophecy’?

Basically, everything he said could boil down to the following:

• Almost everything that’s interesting in the world is nonlinear
• And no one really understands how nonlinear dynamics work
• So if anyone tells you they do, don’t believe them
• Instead, always compute the likelihood that something will happen…
• …and make sure that you’re never the ’sucker’ based on those probabilities

He closed with an interesting comment that he wants to move from a world of true/false to sucker/non-sucker. An interesting thought; if you get a chance to see him speak, do so.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

This made it all the more ironic for me when I read this sentence in the book this morning, pertaining to an email where a character talks about a plane he has found during a dig on the steppes outside Stalingrad/Volgograd:

It’s a whole plane and for some fucking reason it wound up under four feet of muck, but this Guru character knew where it was. He claims its dreams and visions but I think he walks around in the winter with a metal detector. So he’d said here, this plane is here, dig, and before we came back to London they’d sunk a trench and hit it. But bribery and threats prevailed, at least till we got back with the extra cameras and crew, because I wanted this plane emerging to be the climax of the film. No idea it would be a Stuka; blew me away; it’s just this most Nazi-looking aircraft, amazing. Dive-bomber, they used them on the Spanish, Guernica and that.

Now, pivot to a New York Times article I’m reading just a few minutes later, recommended by someone I follow on Twitter:

Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go.

The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the first time to track in the brain.

They hope to figure out precisely which biochemicals, electrical impulses and regions were used when, say, Picasso painted “Guernica,” or Louise Nevelson assembled her wooden sculptures.

I love it. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for his life. Teach a man about apophenia and he’ll see meaningless connections everywhere.

If you want to skip the article, I created an Amazon Wishlist where you can see all the books.  As  I was building the wishlist, I noticed an interesting phenomena.  These books are almost always bought together.  Take a look at the screenshot below.  All seven of those books are in the list:

I wonder if these were always bought together or if the New Yorker article caused them to be clustered together.  Ah, the magic of Amazon and collaborative filtering…

The first article talks about Millennials in America entering the workforce:

Millennials want more vacation and time for themselves away from the job than young people did 30 years ago, and they also value compensation more, according to a recent study.
…

Millennials, the youngest generation in American workplaces, may see time off as necessary because of how hard they saw their parents work, said San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge.

Today there’s an article talking about how young Chinese workers are getting pickier about the jobs they’re looking for:

Their attitudes and expectations are vastly different from those of their parents, who hunkered down onassembly lines for little pay and helped turn China into a manufacturing juggernaut. Many younger workers won’t do the sweatshop jobs their parents did. They grew up with greater prosperity in families limited by theone-child policy. They are more used to getting their way.

“It’s true that we’re less willing to eat bitterness,” Chen said with a chuckle, using a popular Chinese phrase for enduring hardship. “We’re better educated. We know we have rights. Times have changed.”

Very interesting to see these similar attitudes emerging amongst similar aged people in wildly different countries.

When I was in high school, you applied for three different university programs in descending preference.  I didn’t get into my first pick – computer engineering at the University of Waterloo.  Instead, I did engineering at Queen’s.  If I’d gone to Waterloo I likely wouldn’t know my current set of friends and almost certainly be married to Wen.  In fact, I’d argue that not getting into Waterloo is the best thing that ever happened to me (and that’s no knock to Waterloo as a school).

When I was at Queen’s every engineer did a common first year and then had to pick a discipline to specialize in over the next three years.  I had no idea what I wanted to do, but knew that I liked computers and math and physics.  Each discipline made a presentation and the Engineering Physics department invited a grad named Kamal Hassan to present.  He talked about how he had studied Eng Phys and learned lots of interesting math/physics/engineering but didn’t want to be an engineer and therefore became a management consultant.  I had no idea what a ‘management consultant’ was, but the program sounded like something interesting so I decided to do Eng Phys.  The training I received there continues to help me on a daily basis.  (And, in a weird twist of fate, I ended up becoming a consultant like Kamal and, freakishly, ended up at the same business school he went to)

After my 2nd year of school, I went overseas to London on a work exchange program.  There was a central organization that helped you find a job.  A list of positions were posted; you applied; and if you were to be interviewed, a notice was placed for you in a book (this was pre-cellphones).  This book had a very odd structure.  There were tabbed pages (by students’ last names), but the tabs weren’t rigid and you could open the book but it would be collapsing under its own weight if your last name started with a “w”.

One morning I went to check if I had any interviews and I had one-for a 150 quid/week job at Merrill Lynch. However, due to the collapsing book, I missed one for a 250/week at some publishing company. When I found out I missed out on a job that paid 66% more I was crushed (and I spent the summer living in pernury) – but years later I was  in a job interview and saw “Merrill Lynch” circled on my CV and knew that it had been worth it (if you ever meet me, ask me about that job at Merrill).

Finally, I didn’t get into any of the American grad schools I applied to.  Instead, I ended up at INSEAD.  Again, I met some truly unique people who I otherwise would not know.  More importantly, I got a special chance to work with a serial investor and startup in Silicon Valley.  This gave me the confidence to strike out on my own after school, and while that business wasn’t a success, it directly led to me getting my current job.

All of which led to us having dinner at Gramercy Tavern.  I don’t pretent that the only reason I was able to have dinner there was because of the decisions made above (after all, there are an infinite number of paths that could have led to me eating there), but at least I know which points in my life have made the biggest impact.

And as for the meal.  It was delicious.  The appetizer was a lamb papardelle with olives, lemon confit and swiss chard.

This was followed by venison loin and sausage in a Bourbon sauce and with a potato pancake:

We quaffed it down with probably the best bottle of wine I’ve ever have – a 2001 bottle of Oddero Barolo:

Finally, they gave us a little amuse bouche for the next morning – a piece of cocount cake with pear inside: