There's a saying on American social media: "Be the American that Japanese people think you are." I'm Japanese. I've lived in Tokyo my whole life. So let me tell you what we actually say about you, when you're not in the room. "When someone falls down on the street, we pretend not to see. We're protecting their pride. Americans run straight at them. They don't care about the pride. They care about the knee." (Office worker, 38) "An American will stop four lanes of traffic for a family of ducks. And then everyone in the cars claps for the ducks." (Taxi driver, 61) "If you lend an American a pen, you will never see it again. If you need a kidney, they'll ask your blood type." (Nurse, 45) "At kids' soccer games, they cheer when the other team's kid scores. The other team's parents look confused. Then they cheer too." (Youth soccer coach, 52, lived one year in Ohio) "A man sneezed on a bus in Chicago. Eleven strangers said 'Bless you.' He said 'thank you' eleven times. Nobody on that bus thought this was strange." (University student, 21) "At an airport in Texas, I watched a soldier try to pay for his lunch. The cashier said someone already had. He asked who. She said, 'Somebody who didn't want you to know.'" (Retired teacher, 70) "American fathers cannot braid hair. But they will watch a video at midnight for an hour so their daughter's hair looks right on picture day." (Hair stylist, 33) "I ran the Chicago Marathon once. Strangers stood in the cold for hours holding signs for people they will never meet. At mile 20, a man I'd never seen read the name off my bib and screamed it like he'd raised me." (Runner, 48) "When Americans get lost, they ask a stranger. If the stranger is also lost, they become a team." (Tour guide, 39) "They ask the waitress her name. And then they remember it." (Restaurant owner, 66) And one more. From my father. He's 76. He doesn't say much about anything. This is the longest thing I have ever heard him say about another country. "Every time something terrible happens in America, I watch the news, and I look for one thing. The people running toward it. There are always so many." So, America. You don't have to become the Americans we think you are. We're not imagining you. We're remembering you.

I met so many incredible people today! 🥳 The community meet and greet was my absolute highlight. 🔥 The one thing that stood out to me the most was how down-to-earth and approachable everyone from Ripple always was. Especially @bgarlinghouse and @MonicaLongSF ❤️ Many people asked me about some alpha and "The word on the streets"... It can really be summarized as "2027 will be the year where things will finally move on chain in small but meaningful amounts". Heard this not only from @Ripple but everyone building on the XRPL and using @XRP. Earning yield on RLUSD and XRP, tokenizing real world assets and settling on XRPL will become the norm. It can't get anymore exciting than this!! 🔥🔥

Hispanic father and daughter were part of a street takeover on the sixth street bridge in Los Angeles, California Officers stopped the takeover, but the Hispanic fathers says they should be allowed to do have these takeovers “She's 13, I'm her dad. i allow her to ride 'cause I'm right next to her — As long as we ride together with them, as a parent, it shouldn't be a crime and it shouldn't be illegal” He says that the law is “subjective” and it’s “not against the law” “Police have said multiple times that they don't want these street takeovers, especially for younger kids” “We're not, it's not a takeover. It's a rideout” They believe having a massive crowd of obnoxious mini bikes blocking traffic and causing chaos should be allowed His daughter says “They zippy tied my wrist, and I have scars and all that” Let me just straighten this out. The father says it’s not legal but it is 100% ILLEGAL California Vehicle Code § 21720 prohibits operating a pocket bike and mini motorcycle on a roadway, sidewalk, highway, bikeway, or trail ‘These vehicles are not designed or manufactured for highway use, do not meet federal safety standards, and generally cannot be registered with the DMV for street use’ ‘Also, A 13 year old cannot legally ride one on a public street. To operate a motorcycle or motor driven cycle on a California highway you need a Class M1 license or a restricted instruction permit. The minimum age for a motorcycle instruction permit is 15½’ The “rideout” on the Sixth Street Bridge not a ‘rideout’ it was a street takeover.

Testing out the outfit for Cosmaniac tomorrow on Bangkok street. Did anyone see me? 😆 Menu in comment! Meet me at CM72 - CosMANIAC 4 28 October 2023 (SAT), 12:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. (12:00 - 18:00 O’Clock) Meeting Room 3-4, 7th Floor, Union Mall Shopping Center, Bangkok.

I head the Market Access department at Truth Social, even though that is just another way of saying that I'm selling the head start. I provide the President with free access to 340 million Americans. I sell the ten seconds before the post to ten companies at a rate of $100,000 a month each, and the only thing I have ever needed to sell is the gap between those two figures. For most of the thirty years before I came to be here, I sold this service on Wall Street under forty different names. The name that I now use is the Truth API, and it is the most honest title that the business has ever had, and I'll explain why in a moment. People are always referring to this as corruption. I'm going to show you, step by step, why it isn't, since I happen to enjoy doing so and because my lawyers required me to memorise the terminology. Begin with the part that is solid. The President is not engaging in any form of sale. He publishes free of charge, for all people, at every hour, out of a love that I can only describe in those terms. The man cannot stop telling you precisely what he is about to do to the world. I do not sell his words; his words are free. I sell the gap between his words and your eyes, and that gap has never been free in this country, not a single time, not for anything deserving of being crossed. However, it is a mistake to think that this started with him; someone has always been the one to sell the head start. Thirty years ago I disposed of a server. Not the server itself, but the position: my client's order reached the matching engine a few millionths of a second before the rest of the market became aware that an order was in existence because the cage was 40 feet closer to the exchange's matching engine than yours. The exchange paid me for the distance. I charged a premium for it. No one regarded that as corruption. They called it colocation and included it in a brochure. Twenty years ago I sold two seconds; a research organisation gave the nation's consumer-confidence figure to its paying elite two seconds before giving it to the general public, and in that two seconds a quick desk could turn a coin toss into a definite decision. I also sold those two seconds. I have sold the lockup room, in which reporters hold the job report behind glass until the clock hits and a pipe that works quickly turns the embargo into a starting gun. I have sold the analyst's note before it appeared in print. I have sold my proximity to those who draw up the laws and then buy the companies which are the subject of those laws, and when they were caught they passed a law bearing their own name on it and continued to trade, and I kept on selling. People always manage to secure the head start. I am the most skilled at doing so that has ever existed, and the Truth API is my finest achievement since, for the first time, the source is no longer leaking, whispering, or arriving two seconds early; he is now shouting for free to everybody, and yet I am still able to charge one hundred thousand dollars a month for the ten seconds that come before the shout. If you want to call it a loophole, then call it one; I refer to it as artistry and I have the profit margins to win the argument. The point on which the critics are wrong is also the one for which I am most proud. They believe that a head start requires a crime, whereas it in fact requires the opposite. I have no use for a liar since he is unpredictable and I don't sell surprises. All I sell is certainty accompanied by a timestamp. His conviction constitutes my inventory. All I need to do is stand next to the loudest man living at the moment he exhales, and by so doing I have made the square foot next to him the most expensive in the world. See how much the exhalation is worth. He announces that Iran has agreed to delay. The price of oil falls by $4 a barrel before the wire desk has finished phoning the Pentagon. My subscribers are already in long positions. You pick this up from a push notification. They found out from the lungs. He announces that the tariffs are on hold. The market increases by nearly $1 trillion within the course of an afternoon. Now he has the role of the weather, so I sell the one umbrella that opens before the rain falls. Corruption is a favour carried out in the dark. I carry out my favours through a subscription portal, using a dashboard, a rate card, and a customer-success manager called Brandon who sends you a fruit basket as soon as your funds clear the first $1 billion from the feed. They took legal action against me, of course. A press foundation and a magazine, being very serious about it, described the situation as corrupt and unconstitutional in the headline. That headline resulted in the best sales week of my career. Nothing sells a table like a velvet rope and a judge standing beside it. This is exactly the point that I have been working towards in my entire speech, so I want you to imagine yourself in it. A head start is of no use if nobody is staying put. You can't have a fast side without a slow side to compare with. And you have already decided, in a comfortable manner, that the slow side is a pension fund in a state you have never been to. It is you. Throughout your life you've always been the slower part in a fast-paced trade. The layoff—that your vice president became aware of in March and you found out about in June. The increase in rent that took place the month the building changed hands, even though no one had informed the tenants weeks earlier. The plant closing the week after the executives had quietly sold it. The diagnosis code that your insurance company had already priced before your doctor had said the word out loud. You regarded all of this as bad luck. It was a product and it had a department; I manage that department. A shop teacher who has now retired, aged 71, has one entry on page 30 of the pension fund and each Sunday morning checks his balance while having a cup of coffee, since on that day the market does not move and he is able to look at it without feeling any anxiety. In the best month of my career, the month when oil prices reached $90 as a result of the blockade, he awoke on a Sunday poorer than he had been on Saturday by an amount greater than the sum he had earned in his final full year as a teacher, and he never managed to work out which sentence had caused it. He did not receive an alert because alerts are a paid feature; he obtained the figure in the same way that the slower side always does, in a complete and finished form and far too late to be anything but a matter of arithmetic, at the speed of a citizen, that is to say, the speed of last. Once a child who was sitting on my desk asked me whether it kept me awake. I explained to him that everybody receives the same messages. He replied to his screen without looking up, "They receive them only after it's all over; the delay is the result. You just don't include it on the invoice." After that he entered his figure for the quarter and stopped asking, just as all the others do, just as I stopped asking, just as you will stop reading this in a minute and go to check your own balance. My own money is in a blind trust. I never trade on any of it, and here is the beautiful part: I do not have to. I sell shovels to a gold rush, and the shovel never has to find a single flake of gold. It only has to reach the dirt first. I have gotten quietly, enormously rich standing perfectly still, in daylight, with my name on the door. All Americans have the freedom to hear the President's words, and the ten seconds prior to them cost $100,000 a month and are increasing, since there is no upper limit to the amount a person will pay in order to cease being a citizen. All people pick up the news, with someone always being the first to do so; someone is always the one to capitalise on that early advantage, and the only difference in thirty years is that at last I've discovered a source loud enough to be able to sell the silence that comes before him and charge for it as a subscription. There is a level higher than the one that I deal in. Although I have not been authorized to find out how much it costs, I know that it exists, that someone whom you'll never meet is already paying that price, and that on the day it becomes publicly known you'll see about it right here for free, many months after it has stopped being relevant. At the speed of the previous one.

My coworker Hirai has called more than three hundred strangers in America. Always at night. Always the same five questions. He works in HR at our office in Tokyo. When we hire someone in America, he checks their references by phone. In Japan, a reference check takes two minutes. The old boss says, "He caused no problems." That is the highest praise we have. You hang up. In America, Hirai says, you do not hang up. You get comfortable. Some of his notes: "Is she reliable?" "Sir, in 2019 her car died in a blizzard and she walked four miles to open the store. Then she apologized for being late. Next question." "Would you hire him again?" "Hire him, adopt him, put him in my will. My wife is telling me to calm down. I won't." "Any weaknesses?" "He can't make coffee. We all tried to teach him. It isn't coffee. It's a cry for help." "How do you know her?" "I was her fourth-grade teacher. Haven't seen her in nineteen years. She was the one who sat with the new kid. Hire her." "Why did he leave your company?" "We closed. He was the last man out. He swept the floor of a building we'd already sold." Then came Tobias, applying to our office in Nashua, New Hampshire. His résumé had a two-year gap. In Japan, a gap ends the conversation. He had listed one reference. "Gwen Barlow (Mom). She'll tell you the truth." Nobody in our department had ever called somebody's mother. Hirai called anyway. 11 p.m., Tokyo time. She talked for forty minutes. He wrote down all of it. "He was in the Army. Two deployments. He came home and didn't say much for most of a year. He slept in his truck, in my driveway. I left the porch light on every night. Some mornings he came in for breakfast. Those were good mornings. Then one morning in June, I heard the mower. He did my lawn. Then the neighbor's. Then the whole street. No one asked. He just needed to finish something. That's what the gap is, honey. Him finding his way back to the lawn. He's back now. Please. Just meet him." Under her last sentence, Hirai wrote one word. "Hire." Tobias runs second shift now. Best attendance in the building. Every Saturday, he mows the strip of grass in front of the office. Nobody asked him to. Hirai has a note taped above his phone. He wrote it the night of that call. "In Japan, references tell you what a man did. In America, they tell you who he is." (Gwen has mailed our Tokyo office a Christmas card two years running. It is addressed to "Hirai, the Nice Man Who Called." HR has no idea where to file it.)

Over the past month, there has been no shortage of headlines about struggling exchanges. Some of the founders involved are people I’ve crossed paths with. This is a sobering reminder of how unforgiving every crypto downturn can be. Most conversations today focus on which exchange survives or which project fails. But after spending the past month in the US and Europe meeting with Wall Street traders and institutional clients, I came away with a different perspective. What surprised me is that the institutions many people see as the backbone of market liquidity aren’t exactly having an easy time either. Many are going through painful adjustments of their own. A few observations that stayed with me: 1. The scars from last year’s 10.10 market shock are still healing The decline in crypto liquidity wasn’t temporary, but structural. Comparing notes with several institutional trading firms, even the largest venues have generally seen liquidity decline by around 30-40% since the market turmoil. Lower liquidity isn’t just about lower trading volumes. It also raises the cost of trust. Higher volatility, more fragmented liquidity and greater sensitivity to market manipulation have made institutions much more cautious about deploying capital. One lesson has become very clear: don’t overestimate how quickly markets recover, and don’t underestimate how long it takes to rebuild confidence. Everyone is repairing balance sheets. That process takes time. 2. Long-term conviction hasn’t disappeared, but the playbook has changed Despite a difficult market, institutional interest in digital assets hasn’t gone away. If anything, more firms are quietly preparing for the next cycle while prices remain subdued. The biggest change is how they think about crypto. It’s no longer viewed as a standalone speculative asset class. It’s increasingly becoming one component within a broader global portfolio. Multi-asset strategies, tokenized real-world assets, cross-asset collateral and hedged portfolios are becoming standard discussions. That also helps explain why some of the crypto trading volume lost over the past year is being replaced by equities, FX and commodities. Institutions aren’t leaving. They’re evolving. They’re optimizing for more stable, diversified return profiles rather than relying on pure crypto beta. Platforms built only around crypto trading may find it increasingly difficult to meet those changing needs. 3. More than ever, institutions want peace of mind From FTX to the more recent incidents across the industry, every exchange crisis has reinforced the same lesson: safety is the minimum requirement for staying at the table. When I speak with institutions and VIP clients today, the conversation is no longer just about generating alpha. Asset security, risk management and capital efficiency now matter just as much. They don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket. At the same time, they don’t want their capital sitting idle or becoming fragmented across different platforms and accounts. What they are looking for is fairly straightforward: transparent third-party custody, clear risk controls and an account structure that allows capital to move flexibly when opportunities arise. This is also why products such as rToken are attracting more attention from professional investors. The same position can provide market exposure, be pledged to access liquidity and be used as margin. The goal is not to take more risk with the same capital. It is to make every dollar work harder while keeping safety at the centre of the equation. ------- The financial industry has always rewarded scale and trust, and crypto is no different. I’ve often told our team that many offshore exchanges outside the top 10 group may not survive the next few years. But even being among the largest players is no reason to become complacent. Bear markets are uncomfortable, but they have a way of forcing everyone back to fundamentals. The companies that emerge stronger won’t simply be the ones that cut costs or survive another cycle. They’ll be the ones that manage short-term risk while continuing to build infrastructure, discover genuine product-market fit and solve real customer problems. That’s what we’re focused on. And I believe that’s where the industry’s next chapter will be written.

A small town held a fall parade. Floats came down Main Street. People threw wrapped candy into the road. Children took it off the pavement with their bare hands. I cannot pick things up off the ground. This is not pride. It is simply not done. I asked a man who protects the candy. He said, "Nobody, buddy." I asked what happens to the pieces in the gutter. He said, "Squirrels eat good." I went home and worked. I laid nineteen feet of clean white canvas along the curb. I called it the Landing Zone. I sewed thirty-one small flags to mark the boundary. I ordered a grabber with a rubber tip. Then I ordered five more grabbers. No one asked me to do any of this. A woman named Deb saw the canvas at six in the morning. She said, "Oh, I love this." She brought two folding tables and a whistle. Her husband Gary brought a leaf blower. He used it to sweep loose candy onto my canvas. He was helping. He was also making it much worse. We worked four hours. Eleven children joined us. Deb gave them titles. I said, "Not one sweet shall meet the earth of this county today." Gary said, "Heck yeah." Then the parade committee came to me. I asked if I would be removed. A man said, "You're on float six." In my country you wait to be included. You are asked years later, by someone older. Here a stranger hands you a bucket at nine. I took the bucket. I wanted to be one of the men in the truck. I have technique now. The candy must arch. Never throw flat. The law is this. You throw to the child at the back. The front row is already rich. I throw twenty-three feet. Over the tall ones. To the small one behind the stroller. Deb reloads my bucket. Gary drives. Next year we take two trucks.

My girlfriend asked me one strange question three weeks before our wedding. “Would you still marry me if you found out I had been lying to you?” I laughed. I thought she was joking. “Depends on the lie.” She didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked down at her coffee and whispered, “That’s what I’m afraid of.” I asked her what she meant. She changed the subject. For the next three weeks, she became distant. She stopped leaving her phone on the table. She started taking calls outside. She’d smile at messages and immediately lock her screen when I walked into the room. I didn’t accuse her of cheating. I wanted to trust her. Then, five days before the wedding, I found a hotel receipt in her car. Two nights. Paid in cash. I confronted her. “Who were you with?” She started crying. “Please don’t ask me that.” That answer hurt more than any confession could have. “Were you cheating on me?” She shook her head. “Then tell me the truth.” “I can’t.” “Why?” “Because if I tell you, you’ll hate me.” I walked out. I didn’t call her that night. The next morning, she sent me one message: “Meet me at the hotel.” I almost didn’t go. But I did. When I arrived, she was standing outside one of the rooms. She handed me an envelope. “Open it.” Inside was a photograph. It was me. Sitting at a restaurant. With another woman. My face went pale. “What is this?” She started crying. “You don’t remember her?” I stared at the photograph. Then I realized something. I did remember her. She was my mother. The mother I’d told my fiancée had died when I was sixteen. My fiancée looked at me. “She’s alive, isn’t she?” I couldn’t speak. She pulled another photograph from the envelope. This one showed my mother. Standing beside a little boy. A boy who looked exactly like me. Except he was about six years old. She whispered: “You didn’t just lie about your mother.” “You lied about having a brother.” I sat down. And suddenly, her strange question three weeks before the wedding made perfect sense. She wasn’t asking whether I’d forgive her for lying. She was asking whether I’d forgive myself for lying first.