0:00 There's a gay who gayed so hard he's gay. My favorite. There's a gay that All right, guys. That's the end of the video. That's the video. No, here we go. All right. Three, two. [Music] There is a type of Japanese beef that is so popular, there's a 30-year wait list. Have you heard of this? It's probably like Do you already have Kobe beef? And it's probably the Kobe of the Kobe beef. It is. It is frozen Kobe beef in in croquette form. Oh wow. Asai, which is a family run butcher shop in Sak Taka. Holy ████
0:50 He's like help. Oh, Asahya. Yeah. Takasago City in western Japan. Hyogo Prefixure. Yeah. If you ever want to stump Steve, we make him read some 30 years. What's that word? Sensation. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. So, a croette. Yeah. That's like u those fried potato. It's like Japanese hash browns. It's like mashed potato in the middle and it's battered. So, this place I said a croette is a Japanese hash brown. This place was founded in 1926. They sold meat products from Hugo. H you go pre like this. Say it like this. Um my wife's half Asian. Give me a
1:40 break. Kobe beef included for decades. So like um Kobe Kobe beef beef was sold from place for decades before adding these beef criettes to the shelf in the years following World War II. But it wasn't until the early 2000s that these deep fried potato and beef dumplings became an internet sensation resulting in the ridiculously long wait that buyers now face. So like we're talking you order it right now and you got to wait quite a ████ long time. See, you know why this happens? Why? Cuz in Japan, they find the most complicated ways to do the simplest ████ And the reason why things take forever is because they don't want to hire new people. Yeah. They keep it in the family. And then in the right way, it's handmade, you know? It's the best ████ though.
2:30 But they're like the diamond industry where they build the hype and then they refuse to change. So they control supply. There we go. Oh, dude. I waited a whole year and a half for a pair of boxing mits that this old Japanese man makes. Is it the hype the It's called winning. Winning. I gave you a pair of the small ones. Yeah, but it's a pair of mits that I had to get custom made and it took him a year and a half to make it and it came from all the way from Kyoto cuz I bet you they only have three employees that's been working there since the 80s, dude. But it's the best ████ It's the best ████ Floyd Mayweather gets all that ████ from him. You watch them go like this while you got knocked out because you're winning. But and I look at the gloves. I'm like, "Man, those are sweet." Like, "Whoa, these are sweet gloves. Sweet worth it." He's just laying there going, "Oh, man. At least these are cool."
3:20 They do. They have that, too, for for ████ golf irons. They have like the In Japan, you get the most expensive golf irons. All of them are ████ handmade. You have to be like working at that company to be a specific like uh you know creator or or artist that like makes them and like fine-tunes them yourself like weighs them out and everything like that and take forever to make and each club's like over $1,000. You going to get them? Like same ████ ████ no. Yeah, you are. Maybe one day when Luna hits it, baby. Uh I don't know. Do you know what happened with Luna? Oh, no. We'll talk later. We'll talk after. um got into it. So, they had to stop selling them in 2016 outright because the waiting time became over 14 years. And they were thinking about stopping orders, but they got so many calls who were complaining about doing that that they're like, "Fine, ████ it. We'll make a bigger list." I wonder if the pre-sale is like 20
4:10 bucks cuz they're just potato croats. They So, they said at the time we raised the price to JPY500, which is like threeucks three and three and a quarter dollar. Yeah. um or like between three and a half and $4 with a consumption tax and then but since the the export of Kobe beef begun the price of beef have doubled so that that also hindered this the production of the croettes but dude the the you put a five you put like less than five bucks down for a 30-year-old hold isn't that funny like just raise your prices more dude the ████ get them pre-sales man you would just forget about it by that time. Oh, that's true. Or you might die. Which one's going to die? Yeah. Which one? Who's going to die before you even try it? Which your kids can inherit your 30-year weight and they can eat it.
5:01 So, you're ████ securing these for your future. That that experience. That is a dumb system, right? It's wild, dude. It's like NFL season tickets. Like, you're your family's on the list, dude. For life. By then by then we'll probably have beef two or three. Yeah. How would you run it if that was your business? Well, what's the I'd hire a ton of Chinese folks that could make it in 30 seconds cuz Chinese people are fast. Japanese people are slow. They don't like ████ working, dude. They like take breaks too much. Really? Look at a sushi restaurant. They're only open for ████ lunch and dinner. What kind of breaks they take? Is it smoke breaks? They Yeah, they're probably pounding like a pound like a bunch of alcohol and then a pack of cigarettes and then they go, "All right, now it's time to work." So, what is the story behind what makes Japanese restaurants have that closed gap? Uh, cleaning and prepping
5:52 fresh ingredients. Yeah. Oh, but how come it's such a Japanese thing? How come it's not like a I think it's like what's the point of serving in the middle if all of your rushes are happening in these two times and in the middle you could just prep better. So then every single time Are they prepping though? Cuz I see every single time I try to go to Japanese restaurant, like, "Oh ████ they're closing next time." I see the guys just like sleeping. Maybe sleeping. Recharging. Cuz that seems funny to me that if they're open in a western culture place, that kind of wouldn't that be sort of counterproductive? I don't know. They sushi restaurants are notorious for like doing their own thing, right? They're just like, "You come into my house, I'm going to just That's where the Alakasa is." Like, it's like, "What do you want?" No. What do I want to make for you? For some reason, pay me 220 bucks, I'm making you something. You don't know ████ I feel like when I see a Japanese restaurant that takes a little midday break, I go, "Oh, they're legit. That's
6:43 true. True enough. True. No, it's true. Oh, they got some high quality ████ dude. So, um, do you guys remember when the new Star Wars movie, the first one was coming out with like Harrison Ford back and all that stuff and like there was like a guy who was terminally ill and he reaches out and he's like, "Hey, can I just see this ████ cuz I'm not going to make it." And they like show him a bunch of footage and and ████ like that and he dies. No, no, no. He Yeah, he thought it sucked. No, I'm kidding. No, but but that's kind of like how this is for people. There's a guy who had um cancer and he was on the wait list for these this meat, these croquettes, and he he he reaches out the restaurant. He's like, "I just want you to know that you guys are getting me through my surgeries and through like what I'm going through cuz I'm so looking forward to having some of this s███." And they still didn't bump him up on the ████ list. Yeah, dude. You got to wait, bro. Dude, rules are rules, man.
7:34 That's kind of what's up, though. Isn't that ████ hardcore? That's high quality, dude. It's kind of tight. number 500 on the list for a reason. Well, maybe they don't even want to give it to him at all cuz they're like, "Your taste buds are probably not good." Oh, no. Or or they're like, "Hey, let's not bump him up. Let's push him back so he lives longer for it." A lot of That's good. That's motivation. A lot of the high quality like craftsmanship though is dying because of how labor intensive is. So like they were doing they do a lot of stories about like how people maintain like let's say tofu making or soy sauce making or all these different OG crafts that are handmade. It's been in the family for like let's say over 100 years. Same family keeps it together and they pass it down, right? But the thing is modern society so like instant and
8:24 like also the payoff sucks. So, this tofu maker, he took over the business from his dad. He's already in his like early 60s, late 50s. His kids didn't want to take it. And he was showing the process. He has to wake up at like 4 in the morning, all this ████ He makes like a couple blocks of tofu and he makes like 20 to 30 grand a year. And then he's like, "Yeah, obviously no one's going to want to do this. They're going to want to get an education and they could make double what I do working for a company." So, he's like, Why should people want to continue the craftsmanship in Japan? So, it's for the love of the game. That's one part of it. But then a lot of them, you know, the the towns are getting deserted too. So, there's a lot of ghost towns now because like they're also not um repopulating enough. So,
9:14 like they're doing all like the craftsmanship is dying. So, that's what sucks cuz there's a lot of dope ████ out there. Yeah. Yeah. But then the the families aren't taking it over. It's also it's like that one guy who knows how to machine a perfect sphere. Have you seen that dude? No. He said like he um it's like a family passed down skill. He can make a perfect sphere out of what? Metal or whatever the ████ He just has this technique that it takes forever to learn it but no one else wants to learn it from him because he's like you could just make it with another machine in a second. Well, no wonder the ancient aliens guys can't figure out that the ancient the ancient Egyptians couldn't make a ████ sphere. There's no way to do it with machine tooling. You couldn't do it. But he did it with his hand. Yeah. This guy's like, "I can teach people." And then they're like, "Oh, that's so hard. I'll just build a machine." That's literally That's literally what it is. Innovated out of a job. Yeah. But that's everything. It's like
10:05 blacksmithing for a lot of things. There's like tons of things you can't make anymore by hand because it's like why, you know, and in how long? Blacksmithing is cool though, you know? It is cool. Well, there are still dudes, but like blacksmithing itself has like 50,000 different ways to make ████ and not all of them are still around. Like very few of them are, right? Dude, what a bummer. Imagine you like you spent your whole life trying to make the perfect sphere but no one's like Well, that's why that's why it breaks their heart when they're next of kitten is not interested cuz that's the only person that might have done it. And if they're just like, I want to go be a doctor. No, but the sphere. It won't live on. Yeah. Oh, there was another cool uh dying art. So, you know those plastic food displays that they have at like Japanese restaurants? Oh, yeah. This guy makes a bunch of dope ones,
10:55 right? But like no one's buying them anymore. Plastic. Plastic like you know when you see those ramen bowls or like curry rice bowls and it's like all plastic food art. But they look good. Yeah, they look good. And we can make this into a a refrigerator magnet. Like that's probably the only thing else you can do with that. Yeah, but no one's doing that ████ or like buying it anymore as much. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Sucks. Do you guys want to end on that? Yeah. [Music]
// end of tape