First post of the new year. Every year my first post was an on-site RIZIN report — but I've lost much of my interest in RIZIN, so I skipped going and just hung out at a close friend's place watching the RIZIN livestream. This post isn't about RIZIN.
Recently a conversation video between Atsuhiko Nakata and Hiroki Takahashi went up on the YouTube channel ReHack. Very interesting talk.
[Atsuhiko Nakata vs Hiroki Takahashi] Shocking confession! Hyogo governor race & LDP leadership race… behind the scenes of big-name appearances [ReHacQ & YouTube University collab]
The theme: Nakata has reached a state where, as talent, he can keep doing what he wants — but he feels "bored" with the current situation, and how he thinks about that.
Even a top-runner influencer who seems suited to what he's doing can feel that way — I was caught off guard.
He can probably do whatever he wants now, and — this may sound rude — I had a biased assumption he wasn't the type to carry anxiety about the future.
Presumptuous as it is, I felt a kind of kinship and started liking him. (※ I hadn't disliked him either.)
I don't watch every ReHack episode, but there's a lot of good content.
Takahashi as interviewer is skilled at digging deeper while enjoying himself without unnecessary asides, and at helping the guest say what they mean and expand.
TV producers like Sakuma have been more visible lately too — are they strong as performers because of TV experience, or their nature?
PIVOT also has lots of interesting content, but on interviewer skill plus the angle of the theme, ReHack still feels several steps ahead. (Also PIVOT has way too many sponsored videos, and those sponsored ones are very dull.) That said, a recent PIVOT interview with MLB pitcher Yusei Kikuchi was brilliantly interesting — largely because Kikuchi is a sharp, highly capable storyteller.
[Asking pitcher Yusei Kikuchi about the cutting edge of MLB] Evolution with the Astros / different data volume / 5kg more muscle / not repeating the same mistake / the 15-second rule / keeping your mental game / not looking at SNS / sleep and nutrition / reading and action
On net media: for a long time NewsPicks was the early mover and held the crown among business media. With Minowa, Yoichi Ochiai, and many business influencers, NewsPicks had a long one-strong era. Now YouTube as a platform is overwhelmingly strong, and most users have probably moved to ReHack and PIVOT. Again I feel how hard platform businesses are.
NewsPicks shifted from business-news curation toward a content platform — and like Netflix, original content can be a competitive edge, while subscription tends toward winner-takes-all. NewsPicks made lots of original articles and video, but video still can't beat YouTube, and articles can win certain domains against big media with networks — yet becoming mass-level media is still hard.
That digressed a lot.
Back to Nakata's video. He said SNS like YouTube will come to demand compliance the way TV does. In fact his own channel apparently has a compliance team.
Unlike TV penalties for compliance breaches: on SNS a few US companies hold platform power. That influence is huge — mostly, the moment AI judges something inappropriate, account ban, ad revenue stopped. Getting banned isn't a debate about being blacklisted by rigid power — instant ejection. The platform can change the rules anytime.
People who say "the right things" remain, and audiences get used to that. Compliance violations aside, people who say "unpleasant things" get disliked and lose support. "Nasty people" get pushed out and things become "healthy."
Even a statement that includes a correct point can be denounced if it has one unpleasant bit. Conversely, even a rebuttal that misses the point becomes "correct" if it says something that sounds right.
People who already have huge follower bases say surface-correct things to grow support further — bad remarks risk pile-ons, but existing supporters basically affirm them, so impact is limited.
Then whoever holds the numbers becomes correct. Even if they hold negative motives underneath at key points, if they say "the right things," supporters believe on autopilot.
I'm 29 this year. Generationally I grew up when 2ch and Nico Nico were big, so I'm a somewhat conservative person with anxiety like: show your face and you'll be exposed online forever. Hiroyuki, the 2ch founder, said something like "If you can't tell a lie from a lie, (using the board is) hard" — and even as eras change, that still hits.
(※ Hiroyuki himself now holds numbers, and with his rogue / cynic character he's near invincible — rare talent as a performer. Meanwhile he's become a business influencer taking corporate PR gigs left and right, which may be the kind of character old net users hated. I'm neither fan nor anti, but some of his extreme statements causing negative effects look painful to watch. Probably because too many people want that now. (His fights with Horiemon constantly hitting net news are, honestly, a bit entertaining.)
I'd like to hear how he feels about his own current situation — properly interviewed on ReHack or the like. Thinking that way, Toshio Okada seems to keep a good balance on this stuff.
Essential debate about "what's right" should be hard — yet "what's right" as judged by influencers and platforms can get simple, and will likely converge and become uniform. At the same time it turns exclusive and denounces different values. More values get cut away. Screen time will keep rising, and chances to meet different values through conversation will shrink.
Also: shifting from trusting what "TV" said to trusting what influencers say isn't brand new — it's been that way for a while. TV and influencers both fund on ad spend, so "what's right" aligns with corporate money either way — but influencers own their media power, so influence is more direct and stronger than TV.
The importance of "understanding values" gets discounted; having numbers — more bluntly, making money — becomes the only guarantee of correctness. Holding "your own value axis" gets harder. Even wanting to establish that axis has always been hard to cultivate. Change your mindset today and you won't have your own values tomorrow. If you could, self-help books wouldn't exist.
Cultivating your own value axis needs long time and experience — yet the world's big value axis is always "followers / money," so strongly that your own values can collapse before they've formed.
In the opening video, Nakata — skipping the details — was somewhat bored with business platforms and content-as-product fun, and chose to cultivate values on another axis: find a "niche love" only he recognizes, and work on it on a long time scale. I thought that was a stunning answer.
Concretely for him: he wants to try tea ceremony.
Tea ceremony: hours of setup for cups and space for a one-off 1-on-1 tea meeting and dialogue that exists only then. At such a gathering he'd like to hear at length, closed and off-camera, from someone wild like a "political fixer" — that wish as a communicator is genuinely interesting. Learning tea ceremony takes a decade-scale span — and his take is "isn't that fine?"
Retconned a bit, but this ZUUHE BLOG is a similar effort. Finally five years since I started. Yet daily visits are maybe ten on a good day — basically unseen. In this era, quietly keeping a blog in this original HTML format — there probably aren't even a thousand people in Japan doing that.
And to "What have you gained from this blog?" the answer is: "Nothing in particular." No practical benefit at all — I don't even feel my writing or thinking got better. (※ On individual posts' interest, my older blogs feel clearer and more fun in theme and prose.)
Still, I find writing this blog very fun, and I've never wanted to quit. When I started I thought putting what I think into words on a ten-year span might become a big asset for me. I have GA and Search Console because I was interested in the data, but I've never cared about SEO, so organic traffic won't suddenly spike. As I wrote on the about page, I still want to enjoy the internet. I write for myself.
Finally: I criticized money/follower values, but I have to admit part of that is because I don't have talent for making money. Of course I want to earn more. And if I start earning a lot more, I might retract everything here and become the kind of operator who says "it's money! it's numbers after all!" (That might make for an interesting blog too.)
But what sits better with me is more of a wish: better to cultivate your own values over a long time. That way, before I die, maybe I can think "Ah — I didn't really achieve much, but I managed to make myself happy," and go.
Tweet© 2025 ZUUHE