*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”*

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*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”* Makoto Hoshino, CEO of Makoto Co., Ltd. and Galactic Hitchhikers, shares his journey of pursuing heart-moving experiences and embracing the unknown. In 2017, he summited Everest and all Seven Summits and completed the 250km Gobi Desert Ultramarathon. His future goal: to stand atop Olympus Mons on Mars by 2049. Through this podcast, Makoto reflects on his life’s adventures, celebrating family, global friendships, and the joy of trusting intuition and living freely. Join him as he explores the excitement of breaking free from conventions

  1. 2d ago

    The Future Arrived in My Mailbox

    This episode looks at an unexpected encounter with the future — a paper flyer in the mailbox announcing that a nearby building would be inspected by drone, operated by Rakuten Drone Co., Ltd. It touches on the gap between knowing something exists and actually having it arrive at your doorstep. Drone inspections, AI-analyzed footage, autonomous systems — all familiar from the news. But a single sheet of paper making it local and immediate is something different. There's also a brief look at why drones and building inspections are such a natural pairing: no scaffolding, no workers climbing to dangerous heights, cameras that can get close, and AI processing the images afterward. Technology stepping in where the work has always carried real physical risk. The detail that sits at the center of the episode is the quiet irony of it all — that what announced this arrival of new technology wasn't an app or an algorithm, but an ordinary piece of paper dropped into a mailbox. A small reflection on how the future doesn't always announce itself with fanfare, and how sometimes you only realize something has shifted when it turns up, printed on a flyer, among the ordinary mail.

  2. 3d ago

    Queenstown, the Doomsday Retreat I Visited Just Two Months Ago

    This episode revisits Queenstown, New Zealand — a place visited just two months ago — through a completely different lens, after coming across a newsletter describing the area as a favored doomsday retreat for the ultra-wealthy. It looks at Peter Thiel's acquisition of New Zealand citizenship after just twelve days in the country, and his purchase of roughly 193 hectares of land near Lake Wānaka — part of a broader pattern of billionaires quietly treating certain beautiful places as insurance policies against collapse. There's also a look further back: the land around Queenstown was originally home to the Ngāi Tahu, the indigenous Māori people of the South Island, who sold an enormous area to the British Crown in 1848 for two thousand pounds. The protections promised to them were never fulfilled. A formal apology came only in 1998 — about a hundred and fifty years later. Today, housing prices in the same region are a serious problem for the people who actually live and work there. A parallel surfaces in Hawaii, where a large estate under construction on Kauai — reportedly including an underground shelter — sits alongside growing concern about local and native Hawaiian residents being priced out of their own communities. A quiet reflection on what it means to visit somewhere beautiful, and how the same view can hold entirely different realities at once — a few days of scenery for a traveler, daily life for a resident, and an escape hatch for someone who may never need to use it.

  3. 3d ago

    When Someone Says "That's Not Like You"

    This episode looks at a phrase that seems harmless but carries a quiet weight: "that's not like you" — and what it might actually be doing when someone says it. It touches on an idea from a newsletter by Takashiro Go: that the phrase might function as a kind of preemptive defense, a way of resisting change in someone else because it would require rethinking a familiar image of them. There's also a reflection on how roles form — the quiet one, the funny one, the one who never says no — often starting from something said offhand, until eventually the person themselves begins to believe it and holds back accordingly. Study abroad comes up, not just as a practical question but as a specific kind of freedom: going somewhere no one knows you, where the role that hardened around you in a long-standing circle of relationships simply doesn't exist yet. A quiet look at the difference between the self others have defined and the self that hasn't appeared yet — and the possibility that wanting to change isn't a contradiction of who you are, but part of it.

  4. 5d ago

    Hikaru Utada's "Human Activities"

    This episode takes Hikaru Utada's phrase "human activities" — the term she used to describe her 2010 hiatus from music — as a starting point for thinking about the gap that can quietly open between a social role and the self living inside it. It touches on how Utada described feeling that her true self and others' image of her had grown further and further apart, to the point where she had lost a sense of what situation she was actually in — and how that experience, while hard to fully imagine for a global artist, might not be entirely unfamiliar to anyone. There's also a reflection on what happens when expertise deepens in one place: the longer you do the same work, the more others rely on you for it — but step outside that domain, and suddenly you don't know much at all. An unfamiliar country, a new tool, a project started alongside a child. The episode sits with the idea that a job title captures something real, but something much larger and harder to name also lives alongside it — something that isn't optician, isn't father, isn't any single label. A quiet look at that unnamed remainder, and why it might be worth remembering it's there.

  5. 6d ago

    Your Nighttime Self Is Drunk

    This episode looks at what came up at a daughter's parent-teacher meeting — specifically, the part about sleep that ended up feeling more personal than parental. The detail that lands hardest: by midnight, after waking at seven, cognitive function has dropped to the equivalent of a 0.1 percent blood alcohol level. Legally drunk. And it doesn't even require an all-nighter — six hours a night for eight days gets you there just the same. There's a small but significant shift described here: the move from "I should probably sleep more" to "if I don't, I am losing performance." Not guilt, not resolve — just clarity. The foggy feeling that gets written off as a bad day may be something more like a chronically impaired brain. It also touches on weekend sleep catch-up and why that tends to backfire, borrowing a phrase — "social jet lag" — that compares irregular sleep schedules to flying overseas and back every single weekend. A quiet reckoning with something long half-known: that what shapes a day — at the shop, with family, on a project — might have less to do with willpower or effort than with what happened the night before.

  6. Oct 9

    What I Heard at My Daughter's Parent Meeting About Studying and Smartphones

    This episode looks at what came up at a school parent meeting about studying and smartphones — specifically the idea that the problem isn't a shortage of study time, but a shortage of mental room to actually study. It touches on the concept of "brain drain" — research suggesting that simply having a smartphone nearby reduces available cognitive capacity — while also noting that the evidence is more complicated than it first appears, with small effects on working memory but less consistent results across other areas. There's an analogy here that runs throughout: the mind as a workbench, where you line up a problem, set down an intermediate step, plan the next move. If the thought "I want to check my phone" is sitting in one corner, there's a little less room for everything else — even without touching the screen. The reflection turns inward too. Checking email mid-task, drifting from a search to a news item to social media, wearing an Apple Watch so notifications arrive even without a phone nearby — the same patterns that come up in a conversation about children and focus. A quiet look at what it means to actually clear space for thinking, and the small, practical step of moving the phone away before sitting down to work — not as an act of willpower, but as a way of making willpower unnecessary.

  7. Oct 9

    If the Other Person Always Adapts to You

    This episode reflects on a simple observation: that the advice given to a second-grader about getting along with others — listen, be flexible, admit when you're wrong — turns out to be identical to what's on the handout at a high school parent information session, and identical again to what fills the relationship shelves at any bookshop. At every age, people are still working on the same thing. It touches on a recent article about AI being used as a romantic companion or emotional support — always present, always understanding, never sulking or going silent — and the quiet unease that came from reading it. The central idea is a simple one: if the other person always adapts to you, there's no need to become flexible yourself. Real friction with real people — saying something that lands wrong, being misunderstood despite good intentions, having to explain and apologize and listen — is exactly what builds that flexibility. Without it, the practice doesn't happen. There's also a brief callback to an earlier experiment of asking AI to argue against one of its own blog posts, and arriving at the thought that AI can deepen your thinking, but can also function as a very sophisticated machine for generating self-satisfaction. This feels like the same thing, one layer deeper. A quiet look at what might quietly erode as AI gets better at understanding us — not anything dramatic, just the ordinary friction of other people, and what we lose if we stop having to meet it.

  8. Oct 7

    The Inefficiency of Carrying Everything Can Become a Barrier to Entry

    This episode reflects on a piece about Muji, and what it means that a single store sells furniture, clothing, food, stationery, and cleaning supplies all at once — an approach that runs against the usual logic of specialization and efficiency. It touches on the idea that carrying everything creates its own kind of barrier to entry. Any one Muji product might be imitated. But threading a single aesthetic through thousands of products, consistently, over decades — that's a different kind of difficulty entirely. There's also a personal thread running through it: eighteen years running a small eyewear shop, and the choice to stock vintage frames, rare constructions, and little-known labels alongside things that simply sell. The customers who say "I've never seen glasses like this" — that reaction, it turns out, comes directly from the inefficiency. A brief thought on AI and inventory optimization closes the loop: the more every shop chases the same sales data, the less it matters where you shop. Which suggests there may be real value in going the other way. A quiet look at how accumulated inefficiency, over enough time, can become something no one else can easily copy — and why that might be a form of strength.

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*“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”* Makoto Hoshino, CEO of Makoto Co., Ltd. and Galactic Hitchhikers, shares his journey of pursuing heart-moving experiences and embracing the unknown. In 2017, he summited Everest and all Seven Summits and completed the 250km Gobi Desert Ultramarathon. His future goal: to stand atop Olympus Mons on Mars by 2049. Through this podcast, Makoto reflects on his life’s adventures, celebrating family, global friendships, and the joy of trusting intuition and living freely. Join him as he explores the excitement of breaking free from conventions

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