That sounds like a great lineup of shows. It makes me wish I were local. I can say from experience that you’re an extremely talented interviewer, and people desperately need sane, decent radio shows, so I wish you all the best for BBR. Since you asked for suggestions and comments, here are a few ideas all jumbled together in no particular order.
• I love what you describe for the “Thursday night reality check”. (Is that the show title? It’s catchy.) It’s so hard to find a news roundup that is realistic and hopeful without peddling false hope. I’m sure those shows are hard to put together, but at least the world regularly provides you with things to talk about. But really, I think all your show ideas sound good.
• Might I also suggest a local news feature that would allow people to vote their conscience for your local representation? People often say that local representation is what matters most, but it is very hard to get a sense of what is going on in local politics, and you might provide this. For example: a friend of mine complained that local politicians only show up at his farmer’s market when elections are near. I suggested to him that if he ran a blog tracking their appearances, these visits would probably get more regular. He agreed, but figured that building an audience for the blog would be a lot of work. But if an outlet like BBR is willing to give you a platform, it might change that calculation for people in a similar position.
• Another possible show: “The Gun Show” A feature, possibly interview style, on the basics of shooting, new ammunition, gun news, gun law. Possibly sponsored by local ranges who might tie it to promotional events featuring the new ammo/guns being profiled.
• Another possible show based around Joel Salatin’s pitch that “You Can Farm”. This could be an interview with a homesteading family, but it might also be shorter and consist of homestead hacks aimed at an audience who don’t have a lot to spend and are looking to supplement their food and become more resilient and want practical tips to start buying and hatching some eggs or get relatively quiet backyard chickens or buy some small livestock or whatever.
• Chesterton is one of those public domain authors that you might consider. He had novels and such, but he also has a vast archive of articles and essays, many of which are delightful and relevant today.
• Another possible idea might be a homeschooling show. I think you could interview homeschooling moms and an older generation of successfully homeschooled kids. Homeschoolers are always interested in how people handle the transition from homeschooling to work or university or college. Also there’s a lot of variation in curricula that might make it interesting to interview widely.
• Yet another possible show might be a book club. I’m a former sci-fi fan but I pretty much gave up on the genre when every book became a leftist sermon. I learned recently that a group of libertarian/anarchist/vaguely conservative authors have started up their own book club and distribution hub (sadly only available in the USA) complete with a book of the month: https://basedbookclub.com/ If you were looking to do a niche book club, that would offer you/your host a monthly source of books to review and discuss.
Damn, a few minutes after midnight, was just headed for bed, and Fukushima got smacked with a 5.8 temblor — big enough to feel here in Tokyo. As you probably well know, it's more a matter of when, not if, things drastically go south here. Meh, nobody gets out of this room alive.
I like Hugh Hunter's suggestions, especially about books and homeschooling ... with one caveat. As a former Associate Prof. for a Japanese college (R.I.P. — resigned in protest), and adjunct at an American college (biology lab director, writing and public speaking instructor at TUJ) ... I am of the mind that the colleges and universities of this era are to education what NPR is to radio journalism. Case in point ... https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-tramples-the-truth. Ironically, this was brought to my attention just yesterday as a trending topic on Japanese Yahoo News.
"Higher" places of learning are increasingly corrupt beyond redemption, with faculty containing only a scattered ephemera of diamonds here and there. JMHO, but institutionalized 'education' (in the deepest sense of educational ideals), is an oxymoron, and to aim home-schooling towards preparing the kids for college might be the equivalence of providing healthy cannon fodder to Moloch, only so they can graduate to an even more Molochy Moloch as 'institutionalized professionals'. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc&t=171s).
I may have become cynical beyond redemption, or it is just the pro-social anarchist in me, but I've come to the conclusion that institutionalization (medicine, corporations, education, think-tanks, NPOs, politics, journalism, etc.) demands, by definition, a trade-off of at least a bit of moral autonomy in exchange for the where-with-all for survival in modern society.
Though not of the same political persuasion as Maggie “socialism for the rich, austerity for the working class” Thatcher, I do agree with her comment in the 1987 interview " ... who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families ".
The only thing I would add to that is that we social primates are capable of small, (under Dunbar's number), relatively egalitarian, empathy-driven communities as opposed to more hierarchical, rule-driven institutions. Otherwise I would not be writing here, and you would not be striving to build a community in your own way.
A cross-cultural historical pattern I’ve gradually discovered that applies to both East and West, especially since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is that those dark-triad personality types who are predisposed to be good at building and gaming institutions are well aware that the morally autonomous individual, the family, and local communities are the biggest threat to self-entitled would-be god-kings. The lock-step nature of those plandemic NPI’s (non pharmaceutical interventions) were precisely aimed at weakening those three threats to their game of thrones.
Despite my lengthy time here in Japan (41 years and fading fast), I think you are good to go for news from Japan via Guy Gin and Kitsune — not only because of their specialized expertise, but because to some extent, their families and livelihoods are held hostage by the same institutions that most Japanese are bound, otherwise, they would not need to write under pseudonyms. As such, their voices may be as close as most Westerners can get to what dissident, educated, and would-be morally autonomous Japanese are trying to share before silenced.
Having dumped my career and never married nor made my own family, I am not enough of an insider or professional specialist to be a voice for Japan. But as a human, cross-culturally and from the stone-age onwards, I see my life as a microcosm of the forever-war of mankind against its own worst nature, a fractal of human group dynamics in general.
As I am still struggling to secure and sustain a post-institutionalized life in Japan, how about aiming an hour or two ... if not your entire journalistic endeavor, towards helping wean people from depending on institutions for survival and identity ... growing gardens, becoming safer and less dependent on the grid, prepping, decentralized financial assets, local community activism, and so on. As we have seen from the plandemic, what civilians would never accept from the government can be easily thrown into the corporate court and accepted as employees. Even with the musical game of chairs between Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Agra, Wall Street, etc. and the tax-funded government agencies that claim to be regulating them, few people realize that national governments and 'private' corporations are two arms of the same beast. The 'Public Private Partnership' is just another euphemism for 'cartel'.
Another substack writer who I suspect is based in Japan but is not specifically Japan-centric is Aussie17 … and though retired from the pharmaceutical industry, may be wise to write under a psuedonym, othewise, he might get Boeinged … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gdm-zUlqHo
Similar to James in scope, I am also a big fan of Whitney Webb. Myself, growing up in North Carolina, I hear she still has a bit of that Carolina-twang (Davidson graduate) to her voice. Love it (I do) or loathe it (some above my pay grade do) , what she says is up there with James and her sometimes co-conspirators at The Last American Vagabond.
Another voice way above my pay grade, but distinctly qualified to speak for autonomy is Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Renewal. I particularly enjoyed her chat with substack hero Sasha Latypova.
For the prepping thing, though I haven't followed him lately, Canadian Prepper (https://www.youtube.com/@CanadianPrepper) can be good, though sometimes a bit too sensationalist for my taste. And Chris Martenson is a very good all-rounder I've been following since the earliest days of the plandemic ... https://www.youtube.com/@PeakProsperity.
For post-hoc analysis of when the shit hits the fan, the deep-state, globalist blob has its tentacles in too many pockets and on too many battlefronts to list in detail ... Greta "Doom Potato" Thunberg? Imagine the minuscule probability of a Japanese 3rd year Junior High kid skipping class to protest climate change and then being invited to speak before the U.N. Ukraine as a proxy war against a Russia surrounded by 'dual-purpose' biolabs and nuclear tipped missiles? I guess neither Russia nor China are allowed to have their version of the Monroe Doctrine. And 70% of the close to 40,000 dead in Palestine being women and children? Lee Camp is one of many who does a pretty job covering that atrocity.
And my particular itch? As if it made any difference to those with other priorities, I was a professional fire fighter for 3 summers in the mountains of Arizona, and once you see the unnatural similarities between the recent fires in Chile, Texas, Canada, and particularly Maui ... you can't unsee 'em.
For the Maui Massacre, I've been closely following podcasters Eric West (Hawaii Real Estate), Michelle Melindez (Blossom Inner Wellness), and particularly Traci Derwin (Brush Junkie) ... who shared a video of what was likely one of the Maui 'arsonists' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRXiX1HmXjY at :46 and again at 8:28) later identified as a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk with its identifying number deliberately hidden (https://rumble.com/v47zq1l-weve-identified-the-craft-seen-flying-over-maui.html). It is fitted with a Raytheon Multi Spectral Electo-Optical Targeting System. Now why in the hell would a 'search and rescue' helicopter be fitted with a targeting system ... unless what looks like a spare fuel tank is a DEW? The technology has been around and deployed on warships in multiple countries since at least 2009. But I digress.
I think you have a good plan, and have the makings to form a good tribal-community with your program. I hope you stay the course, and stay true … while keeping wary that those who depend on identity politics to save their souls, but depend on Moloch to feed their families are bound to struggle, or may even succumb to the less savory temptations that come with trying to reconcile cognitive dissonance.
Empathy does not scale very well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIffz-72B8Y). When, not if, our species reaches the end of its shelf-life, I suspect a combination of tribalism and Moloch-as-metaphor for zero-sum games will be a major contribution to yet another inevitable extinction of an ‘apex’ (ha) species. Back when the Chomsky of old was only beginning to lose the path, he made a pithy introduction to his 2011 Chapel Hill speech when he referred to Ernst Mayr’s compelling argument that our reign may be just about over. https://chomsky.info/20100930/. The first 3 paragraphs sum it up.
If we are lucky, rather than ‘end’, our species may evolve, though I suspect not in the bluntly artificial way most transhumanists-who-would-be-god aspire. Until nature takes its course, I would not write off YouTube or Facebook as avenues to reach a wider audience. As do some, maybe think of offering a “Bud-Light” (horrors) version of your show to entice more of the working class to take the red pill and head over to your unfiltered platform.
As compromised and corrupt as the Facebook platform is, I've managed to find ways to speak truth to power, avoid spending most of my time in FB jail, and still garner over 5K followers. I like to flatter myself in thinking that sharing Anne’s substack with about 50 “private” Facebook groups had something to do with the popularity of her post and sales of the book. And I’ll be the first to admit I am addicted to YouTube — but educated enough to use my bullshit filter and spend more time with podcasts packed with information, insight, or incite.
Just my 2¥ worth, and I regret not chatting with you during your recent trip to Tokyo. But then again, I would not have had much to offer as either a specialist or insider to Japan. Still, things have a way of working out, hopefully for the best.
That sounds like a great lineup of shows. It makes me wish I were local. I can say from experience that you’re an extremely talented interviewer, and people desperately need sane, decent radio shows, so I wish you all the best for BBR. Since you asked for suggestions and comments, here are a few ideas all jumbled together in no particular order.
• I love what you describe for the “Thursday night reality check”. (Is that the show title? It’s catchy.) It’s so hard to find a news roundup that is realistic and hopeful without peddling false hope. I’m sure those shows are hard to put together, but at least the world regularly provides you with things to talk about. But really, I think all your show ideas sound good.
• Might I also suggest a local news feature that would allow people to vote their conscience for your local representation? People often say that local representation is what matters most, but it is very hard to get a sense of what is going on in local politics, and you might provide this. For example: a friend of mine complained that local politicians only show up at his farmer’s market when elections are near. I suggested to him that if he ran a blog tracking their appearances, these visits would probably get more regular. He agreed, but figured that building an audience for the blog would be a lot of work. But if an outlet like BBR is willing to give you a platform, it might change that calculation for people in a similar position.
• Another possible show: “The Gun Show” A feature, possibly interview style, on the basics of shooting, new ammunition, gun news, gun law. Possibly sponsored by local ranges who might tie it to promotional events featuring the new ammo/guns being profiled.
• Another possible show based around Joel Salatin’s pitch that “You Can Farm”. This could be an interview with a homesteading family, but it might also be shorter and consist of homestead hacks aimed at an audience who don’t have a lot to spend and are looking to supplement their food and become more resilient and want practical tips to start buying and hatching some eggs or get relatively quiet backyard chickens or buy some small livestock or whatever.
• Chesterton is one of those public domain authors that you might consider. He had novels and such, but he also has a vast archive of articles and essays, many of which are delightful and relevant today.
• Another possible idea might be a homeschooling show. I think you could interview homeschooling moms and an older generation of successfully homeschooled kids. Homeschoolers are always interested in how people handle the transition from homeschooling to work or university or college. Also there’s a lot of variation in curricula that might make it interesting to interview widely.
• Yet another possible show might be a book club. I’m a former sci-fi fan but I pretty much gave up on the genre when every book became a leftist sermon. I learned recently that a group of libertarian/anarchist/vaguely conservative authors have started up their own book club and distribution hub (sadly only available in the USA) complete with a book of the month: https://basedbookclub.com/ If you were looking to do a niche book club, that would offer you/your host a monthly source of books to review and discuss.
Sounds good.
Damn, a few minutes after midnight, was just headed for bed, and Fukushima got smacked with a 5.8 temblor — big enough to feel here in Tokyo. As you probably well know, it's more a matter of when, not if, things drastically go south here. Meh, nobody gets out of this room alive.
Part 1 (breached the substack comment limit)
Hi D.W.
I like Hugh Hunter's suggestions, especially about books and homeschooling ... with one caveat. As a former Associate Prof. for a Japanese college (R.I.P. — resigned in protest), and adjunct at an American college (biology lab director, writing and public speaking instructor at TUJ) ... I am of the mind that the colleges and universities of this era are to education what NPR is to radio journalism. Case in point ... https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-tramples-the-truth. Ironically, this was brought to my attention just yesterday as a trending topic on Japanese Yahoo News.
"Higher" places of learning are increasingly corrupt beyond redemption, with faculty containing only a scattered ephemera of diamonds here and there. JMHO, but institutionalized 'education' (in the deepest sense of educational ideals), is an oxymoron, and to aim home-schooling towards preparing the kids for college might be the equivalence of providing healthy cannon fodder to Moloch, only so they can graduate to an even more Molochy Moloch as 'institutionalized professionals'. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc&t=171s).
I may have become cynical beyond redemption, or it is just the pro-social anarchist in me, but I've come to the conclusion that institutionalization (medicine, corporations, education, think-tanks, NPOs, politics, journalism, etc.) demands, by definition, a trade-off of at least a bit of moral autonomy in exchange for the where-with-all for survival in modern society.
Though not of the same political persuasion as Maggie “socialism for the rich, austerity for the working class” Thatcher, I do agree with her comment in the 1987 interview " ... who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families ".
The only thing I would add to that is that we social primates are capable of small, (under Dunbar's number), relatively egalitarian, empathy-driven communities as opposed to more hierarchical, rule-driven institutions. Otherwise I would not be writing here, and you would not be striving to build a community in your own way.
A cross-cultural historical pattern I’ve gradually discovered that applies to both East and West, especially since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is that those dark-triad personality types who are predisposed to be good at building and gaming institutions are well aware that the morally autonomous individual, the family, and local communities are the biggest threat to self-entitled would-be god-kings. The lock-step nature of those plandemic NPI’s (non pharmaceutical interventions) were precisely aimed at weakening those three threats to their game of thrones.
Despite my lengthy time here in Japan (41 years and fading fast), I think you are good to go for news from Japan via Guy Gin and Kitsune — not only because of their specialized expertise, but because to some extent, their families and livelihoods are held hostage by the same institutions that most Japanese are bound, otherwise, they would not need to write under pseudonyms. As such, their voices may be as close as most Westerners can get to what dissident, educated, and would-be morally autonomous Japanese are trying to share before silenced.
Having dumped my career and never married nor made my own family, I am not enough of an insider or professional specialist to be a voice for Japan. But as a human, cross-culturally and from the stone-age onwards, I see my life as a microcosm of the forever-war of mankind against its own worst nature, a fractal of human group dynamics in general.
As I am still struggling to secure and sustain a post-institutionalized life in Japan, how about aiming an hour or two ... if not your entire journalistic endeavor, towards helping wean people from depending on institutions for survival and identity ... growing gardens, becoming safer and less dependent on the grid, prepping, decentralized financial assets, local community activism, and so on. As we have seen from the plandemic, what civilians would never accept from the government can be easily thrown into the corporate court and accepted as employees. Even with the musical game of chairs between Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Agra, Wall Street, etc. and the tax-funded government agencies that claim to be regulating them, few people realize that national governments and 'private' corporations are two arms of the same beast. The 'Public Private Partnership' is just another euphemism for 'cartel'.
One asset I would suggest, who happens to live in Japan, but only tangentially refers to Japan, is James Corbett. This is a particularly memorable sample of his work for me, because at 29:11, Political Cartoonist Anne Gibbons reads from my comment to her “What the Nurses Saw” podcast. https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/winning-the-meme-war-solutionswatch?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
My comment … https://corbettreport.com/solutionswatch-memewar/#comment-162260 And in more detail under Anne’s substack … https://annecantstandit.substack.com/p/what-the-nurses-saw/comment/50746000
Part 2
Another substack writer who I suspect is based in Japan but is not specifically Japan-centric is Aussie17 … and though retired from the pharmaceutical industry, may be wise to write under a psuedonym, othewise, he might get Boeinged … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gdm-zUlqHo
Similar to James in scope, I am also a big fan of Whitney Webb. Myself, growing up in North Carolina, I hear she still has a bit of that Carolina-twang (Davidson graduate) to her voice. Love it (I do) or loathe it (some above my pay grade do) , what she says is up there with James and her sometimes co-conspirators at The Last American Vagabond.
Another voice way above my pay grade, but distinctly qualified to speak for autonomy is Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Renewal. I particularly enjoyed her chat with substack hero Sasha Latypova.
For the prepping thing, though I haven't followed him lately, Canadian Prepper (https://www.youtube.com/@CanadianPrepper) can be good, though sometimes a bit too sensationalist for my taste. And Chris Martenson is a very good all-rounder I've been following since the earliest days of the plandemic ... https://www.youtube.com/@PeakProsperity.
For post-hoc analysis of when the shit hits the fan, the deep-state, globalist blob has its tentacles in too many pockets and on too many battlefronts to list in detail ... Greta "Doom Potato" Thunberg? Imagine the minuscule probability of a Japanese 3rd year Junior High kid skipping class to protest climate change and then being invited to speak before the U.N. Ukraine as a proxy war against a Russia surrounded by 'dual-purpose' biolabs and nuclear tipped missiles? I guess neither Russia nor China are allowed to have their version of the Monroe Doctrine. And 70% of the close to 40,000 dead in Palestine being women and children? Lee Camp is one of many who does a pretty job covering that atrocity.
And my particular itch? As if it made any difference to those with other priorities, I was a professional fire fighter for 3 summers in the mountains of Arizona, and once you see the unnatural similarities between the recent fires in Chile, Texas, Canada, and particularly Maui ... you can't unsee 'em.
For the Maui Massacre, I've been closely following podcasters Eric West (Hawaii Real Estate), Michelle Melindez (Blossom Inner Wellness), and particularly Traci Derwin (Brush Junkie) ... who shared a video of what was likely one of the Maui 'arsonists' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRXiX1HmXjY at :46 and again at 8:28) later identified as a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk with its identifying number deliberately hidden (https://rumble.com/v47zq1l-weve-identified-the-craft-seen-flying-over-maui.html). It is fitted with a Raytheon Multi Spectral Electo-Optical Targeting System. Now why in the hell would a 'search and rescue' helicopter be fitted with a targeting system ... unless what looks like a spare fuel tank is a DEW? The technology has been around and deployed on warships in multiple countries since at least 2009. But I digress.
I think you have a good plan, and have the makings to form a good tribal-community with your program. I hope you stay the course, and stay true … while keeping wary that those who depend on identity politics to save their souls, but depend on Moloch to feed their families are bound to struggle, or may even succumb to the less savory temptations that come with trying to reconcile cognitive dissonance.
Empathy does not scale very well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIffz-72B8Y). When, not if, our species reaches the end of its shelf-life, I suspect a combination of tribalism and Moloch-as-metaphor for zero-sum games will be a major contribution to yet another inevitable extinction of an ‘apex’ (ha) species. Back when the Chomsky of old was only beginning to lose the path, he made a pithy introduction to his 2011 Chapel Hill speech when he referred to Ernst Mayr’s compelling argument that our reign may be just about over. https://chomsky.info/20100930/. The first 3 paragraphs sum it up.
If we are lucky, rather than ‘end’, our species may evolve, though I suspect not in the bluntly artificial way most transhumanists-who-would-be-god aspire. Until nature takes its course, I would not write off YouTube or Facebook as avenues to reach a wider audience. As do some, maybe think of offering a “Bud-Light” (horrors) version of your show to entice more of the working class to take the red pill and head over to your unfiltered platform.
As compromised and corrupt as the Facebook platform is, I've managed to find ways to speak truth to power, avoid spending most of my time in FB jail, and still garner over 5K followers. I like to flatter myself in thinking that sharing Anne’s substack with about 50 “private” Facebook groups had something to do with the popularity of her post and sales of the book. And I’ll be the first to admit I am addicted to YouTube — but educated enough to use my bullshit filter and spend more time with podcasts packed with information, insight, or incite.
Just my 2¥ worth, and I regret not chatting with you during your recent trip to Tokyo. But then again, I would not have had much to offer as either a specialist or insider to Japan. Still, things have a way of working out, hopefully for the best.
Cheers from the Far Side of the Far East,
steve