My guest today for our 31st episode is Nicholas Benes, who is speaking to us from Tokyo. Mr Benes, or should I say Benese-sensei studied Japanese at Stanford, Sophia and Keio as the Japanese miracle began to unfold in the mid-seventies, just before another guest on our podcast Ezra Vogel wrote his famous book, Japan as Number One. He then earned a joint MBA and law degree at UCLA. He worked for more than a decade at JP Morgan in corporate finance, M&A, capital markets, swaps & derivatives, equity research, and real estate in New York, Tokyo, and London. He served as senior managing director of Kamakura Corporation, a risk management firm and then founded his own advisory firm, JTP Corporation, an M&A and corporate governance firm, and in addition is CEO of a non-profit, The Board Director Training Institute of Japan. Nick will be explaining a bit more about BDTI later in our podcast.