The Tsunami Is Coming Podcast

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Most images of Japan are not accidents: the samurai, the cherry blossoms, the geisha, the kawaii cuteness, or the pink everywhere. They are not exactly foreign impositions (at least not anymore). Increasingly, this is what Tokyo wants the world to see.Pierre-William Fregonese, a political scientist and lecturer at Kobe University, calls this self-orientalism: the moment a country stops resisting the stereotypes foreigners hold of it and starts producing them on demand. We talk about Cool Japan and its 2025 cabinet upgrade, Aratana Cool Japan: a strategy of asking the world what it expects from Japan, then delivering it.He has written two books on this feedback loop. L’Invention du rose (PUF, 2023) is on the rise of pink as Japan’s color. Japonaises. Dans l’archipel de l’injustice (PUF, 2026), co-written with Madoka Serizawa, looks at what this image does to the women who live inside it and are paying the price of the transformation.In February 2025, Prime Minister Ishiba handed Donald Trump a samurai helmet. It was theater, but it worked anyway. This is what happens when a country decides its identity is a product, and the world is the customer. This rebranding effort may be the most striking response of one country to global transactionalism pushed to the extreme we are witnessing.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Souheil Ben Slimane is a former mobile app developer who is now a licensed Paris tour guide. He builds his own museum tours for families, including a hand-illustrated booklet, designed with his wife and another guide, that turns the Louvre into a deciphering game playable only in person, with him.ChatGPT, he says, does a hell of a good job describing artifacts. The famous ones, anyway: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. On pure description, the machine wins.What it can’t do is be present. After COVID, the consensus inside his profession was that virtual tours and live-streamed visits would permanently reshape demand. The opposite happened. Bookings came back stronger, and the pattern shifted in a specific direction: visitors who used to book a single guide for several tours now book five different guides for five different tours. They want to meet locals. They also want to skip the line and see rooms without crowds. Human connection, but in low-density form.The booklet is the tell. Ben deliberately built a product that can’t be played without a human officiant: kids receive a coded letter from one of Napoleon’s officers, and only the guide holds the key to decipher it. Apps were cheaper, more scalable, easier to ship. He gave them up because they didn’t teach the kids anything. The deciphering only works if someone is standing there, with you.We also get into how children see the museum differently from adults (not as masterpieces but as birds, angels, things that haven’t been named yet) and what that says about the inner child every adult still drags into the Louvre. We close on AI, where Ben makes a distinction worth keeping: the future museum will have bots that decipher your emotions and adapt to you. They will be better than him on content. Not on presence.This is that conversation.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Has AI transformed your organization? Look around. The same people, the same processes, the same reporting lines. AI has changed absolutely nothing.Now look again. Knowledge work that used to cost time and money is becoming free. Software that took weeks to build takes hours. The assumptions underneath everything you do have been falsified. AI has changed absolutely everything.Eirik Knudsen, professor of strategy at NHH Norwegian School of Economics, joins me to sit inside this paradox. (I recommend you check out his Substack here).We talk about why most companies are essentially handing Copilot to the elevator operator, why the real gains come from reorganizing the system rather than optimizing the role, and what happens when one group of people has fundamentally repriced the opportunity cost of their time while another group hasn’t noticed yet. We also get into what this means for hiring, for education, and for a world where everyone’s LinkedIn profile measures exactly the wrong things.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Julien Jourdan is a professor in the Management and Human Resources Department at HEC Paris. He studies organizational scandal: not the explosion, but the long silence that precedes it. His research, conducted with Alessandro Piazza at Rice University, grew out of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis in the United States. The question that drives his work: how misconduct can persist for decades without ever becoming a scandal.It turns out that in most cases, the information was already available. People knew about misconduct but didn’t speak out. Information stayed local, circulated as rumor, and never reached the threshold where it became public outrage. Julien identifies three structural reasons for this: the social cost of speaking against your own community, the absence of bridging ties that would carry information beyond closed networks, and the sheer power of the institution accused.This conversation isn’t about the Church per se, though. Julien has spoken about other scandals like Wirecard, here. We also talked about the Epstein case, a scandal that has been “happening” for over twenty years and still isn’t fully resolved. And we talked about political polarization: the possibility that in a society fractured into tribes with no shared moral framework, scandal becomes structurally impossible. Not because misconduct is hidden, but because outrage can no longer coalesce.Food for thought on a topic that we are unlikely to exhaust anytime soon.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Layal Naban is Global Head of Sustainability for Financial Institutions at Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking. She works at the intersection of large-scale capital and climate investment. Her job, in practice, is to convince the people who manage our pensions, sovereign wealth, and insurance reserves to channel money toward the energy transition. The capital she’s talking about is very real: pension funds alone hold $60 trillion worldwide.When I asked her what keeps her up at night, she didn’t talk about climate denial or political backlash. She talked about plumbing: the financial plumbing that determines where money actually flows and the structural reasons it keeps flowing to the safest, most familiar destinations while a billion people still lack access to electricity.The numbers she lays out are striking. $2.3 trillion was invested in low-carbon energy in 2025. That’s a record. But nearly all of it went to established developers in advanced economies. Meanwhile, adaptation (includong flood protection, water infrastructure and resilience) requires $230 to $300 billion a year in investment that generates no cash flows. A flood wall protects your asset. It doesn’t pay you back.That’s the quiet contradiction at the center of this conversation. The investments the planet needs most are the ones that make the least sense on a balance sheet. And the people managing our money have a fiduciary duty to the balance sheet.Layal frames this as a channeling problem: the solution is structural, not moral. That’s worth sitting with…This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Shirin Golkar is the Secretary General at the Swiss MENA Chamber. We met when she was completing her Executive MBA at HEC Paris. She knows Iran’s business community not as an abstraction, but as a network of entrepreneurs. Many of them are women who spent years trying to scale businesses against the wall of sanctions, compliance regimes, and banks that wouldn’t pick up the phone.When I first reached out to her, Iran looked different. The war hadn’t started. The checkpoints weren’t up.By the time we recorded, massive casualties had been announced. People were evacuating from Tehran. The economy faced sixty percent inflation. Banks closed. Iran is a country, as Shirin puts it plainly, that is not working.And yet the conversation didn’t stop there. Because Shirin understands something most headlines don’t reach: that underneath the catastrophe, a society’s economic aspirations point stubbornly in one direction, even as its government pulls in another. Some people may want North Korea, she says. The Iranian people want South Korea.One question in particular stayed with me. When formal diplomatic channels collapse, can business fill the gap? Can trade be a form of conversation between countries that aren’t speaking? Shirin doesn’t have a straight answer. But she has a view, and it’s more grounded than most of what you’ll read today.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Alastair Newton is a political risk analyst who has spent decades advising financial institutions on geopolitics — starting at Lehman Brothers in 2005, where he launched a series called “What Keeps You Up at Night.” (I borrowed the phrase. He knows.)Newton has been writing about hegemonic transition since 2008. He wanted to talk about Europe, but not the version you’d expect.He’s optimistic. That’s the through-line, not a twist at the end. Europe, he argues, has regained something it lost after the Cold War: the ability to take advantage of crises. Brexit was a shock. Trump is a bigger one. And shocks, Newton believes, are what Europe needs to move.The question is whether it can move fast enough, given how much time its leaders spend, in his phrase, “bickering about angels on pinheads.” Given how hard the United States is working to pull it apart.Newton thinks it can. Far-right parties get found out when they govern. Pragmatism wins. And Trump, paradoxically, may be the best enemy Europe could have asked for.“If you have the opportunity to choose your enemy,” he said, “you probably wouldn’t have managed to come up with something as helpful as Donald Trump.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Frederic Raillard is the CEO and co-founder of Fred & Farid, an international advertising agency, and the founder of [Ai]magination, where he’s exploring the intersection of branding, storytelling, and artificial intelligence. We met on a TV set during the 2024 US elections.When I asked him what keeps him up at night, I expected something about AI disruption or the attention economy. I got something else entirely.Frederic talked about clairvoyance. About the tension between his accelerating professional life—selling, persuading, performing—and a private search for something he calls “verticality.” He’s learning to distinguish imagination from what he describes as “downloading” information, working with people who, as he puts it, access what he calls the invisible world.This conversation went in directions I didn’t anticipate, and I let it run. But underneath the unexpected territory, there’s a diagnosis worth hearing. “The society we live in is losing sense completely,” he said. Brands succeed when they provide meaning—because we’re starving for it. And when I brought up the international success of Stranger Things, we landed on something that’s stayed with me: the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle, you solve, like an Agatha Christie murder. A mystery, you don’t even know what you’re looking at, like when you’re watching a Stranger Things episode.The world, right now, looks more like Stranger Things than like Agatha Christie’s stories. Some people build new analytical models. Some people turn to something older.This is the unedited conversation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. Here’s the very first edition!Leslie Palti-Guzman is a leading expert on global gas markets and energy geopolitics. She’s the founder of the advisory firm Energy Vista and host of the Energy Vista podcast.In this conversation, she tells us why the U.S. may be squandering its greatest strategic advantage: America's energy leverage, built on the shale revolution, may be at risk.The tech wobbles a bit at the start, but the conversation picks up quickly. Consider it the charm of a debut…Leslie’s Substack:This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

It’s way too early to determine the long-term effects of the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities yesterday. Here are a few brief thoughts to get this conversation going. Long story short? Now may be a good time to start doubting if you never had any doubts about the regions future. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Recent concerns about Joe Biden's health and the broader challenges facing the Democratic Party shouldn’t feel normal — and here’s why:* They highlight growing questions about transparency and leadership within a party that seems increasingly out of touch with the U.S. electorate.* These U.S. developments reflect a global pattern: as the world grapples with rapid, disorienting change, the supply of new political ideas is dwindling — just when they’re most urgently needed.Share your thoughts. The road ahead promises to be as painful as it is prolonged… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is in Italy to meet with President Donald Trump amid heightened tensions between the United States and the European Union over trade tariffs and broader transatlantic tensions.The official joint statement from the White House emphasized the commitment of both countries to deepen cooperation on security, defense, and technology, as well as to address issues such as illegal immigration and organized crime. The leaders also reiterated their support for ending the war in Ukraine and strengthening NATO. In addition, the trip was conducted with significant consultation with EU partners, and she has publicly committed to representing European interests. Nonetheless, skepticism remains within the EU about whether this approach can truly serve the collective European good, or if it risks fragmenting the EU’s position in critical negotiations with the US.I wrote about Italy’s temptation to engage alone with the US a little while back, and I stand by it: There is a real risk for European countries engaging on bilateral terms with the Trump administration to be completely steamrolled by the US. This is a hallmark of a transactional globalization. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

When a top U.S. official accidentally added a journalist to a group chat about Yemen war plans, it revealed more than just operational details. This isn't merely about incompetence—it exposes the fundamental tension between Trump's "common sense" governance and the complex realities of national security. More critically, the dismissive language about European allies ("parasites") signals a definitive break in transatlantic relations. Europeans must move beyond shock and recognize this new reality. The West as we knew it no longer exists—this is Europe's moment to create a viable alternative path forward while the world watches. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe