 There used to be a Japanese TV show in which two young hosts, a male and a female, would scream, blank, yadita, which means I want to blank. They always filled in the blank with some crazy thing like, I want to sing a duet with Yasser Arafat. Then they'd go out into the world and try to do what they screamed about with one catch. They had to go aponashi without an appointment. Among the show's best-known episodes were, I want to eat Akashi-style dumplings with United Nations representative Akashi. I want to officially change my first name in honor of the Barcelona Summer Olympics to Barcelona. And I want to get treated to sushi by the wife of the manager of the New York Yankees. In their most famous adventure, the hosts screamed, I want to trim Prime Minister Moriyama's eyebrows. And Japan's then highest official, an aging member of the Socialist Party, let them do it. I was thinking of that show as the train sped from Kansai International Airport toward downtown Osaka, birthplace of Nissan food products. I was certainly arriving aponashi. It had been two months since Mr. Yamazaki, a low-level employee in Nissan's public relations department, stopped answering my emails. His silence suggested there was very little chance that I would get to meet Momofuku Ando, the 94-year-old billionaire who in 1958 invented instant ramen in his backyard. As for why I wanted to meet Ando, I was not entirely sure. I suspected, though, that it had something to do with the fact that I had cheated in every single relationship in my life. So this is a book about infidelity and about instant ramen. And those are two things that are hard to bring together. And in most of my talks, I talk about one of the other. I think I'm going to talk about the ramen today. So part of this book is the quest to meet Momofuku Ando and how he, and it's about how he came to help me in my love life, and particularly with this issue of infidelity. Infidelity is a very difficult thing to write about and still have your reader like you. And so anyway, I give myself kudos for that, anything. I love this shot of him because it's taken around 1970, 1971, right after Cup Noodles came out. He invented Cup Noodles as well, by the way. And what I love about it is it sort of implies that maybe he needs to be like a chemist or something to invent a cup, a Styrofoam cup of noodles. The central legend of Nissan food products and of him is that he in 1957 lost all of his money. He had been one of the richest men in Japan. For reasons that were not clear to me at first, he loses all of his money. He only has his house. He decides to build this shack in his backyard and spend as long as it's going to take to invent an instant version of ramen noodles. It wound up taking about a year. And you can go in there. And this is from actually, this is the catalog to the Instant Ramen Invention Museum, which is across the street. He built across the street from his house. It's really phenomenal. It's like SF MoMA is nothing compared to this building. Anyway, you can go in this house and he talks to you about how difficult it was to find the ideal noodle and figure out how to dry it. Eventually he saw his wife making tempura. And she was frying the vegetables. And so he thought, oh, yeah, they get all these little holes and very absorbent. So he fried the noodles, and that worked. And that's how most instant ramen is made, at least so more recently. This is one of the walls in the museum. It starts out with this timeline. Each line represents noodle developments in one part of the world. And so it starts on the left-hand side from the birth of Jesus Christ. And it goes all the way to it. So there's like the macaroni. There's some Asian things. There's the ancestor of gnocchi is here. And it ends in 1958, which is on the other. I'm showing you the different walls as they go around. And this is in the middle of the bullseye the original chicken ramen that he invented in the shack after a year of development. And then it goes on for wall after wall of the brand extensions of the various ramen products. So we had 2,000 years on one wall. And then we have all these various ones on all the other walls. Up to 2,000 when the museum was started. This is the page in the catalog for Ando's birth. So he was born in 1910, which was a year that Haley's Comet made it one of its flybys. It comes by around every, I think, 76 years. And Nissan has always made a big deal about this connection that Ando came from the heavens along with the comet. And that maybe even instant ramen itself is from above. And they make a lot of it. I went to his funeral, which was in a baseball stadium in Osaka. And it was all designed as outer space. Like they made this whole dome stadium that way. Is that my six minutes? OK, my time's up. I know we have one speaker not here, so can I go 30 seconds? OK. This is a room in the museum where they show instant ramen developments in context with other developments in the world. So in the late 60s, you have Neil Armstrong's Steps on the Moon, the Beatles play a concert in Japan. And up there, Ando has served a tin of Royal Hawaiian macadamia nuts. And he realized that the foil lid could be the top of a revolutionary new packaging design cup of noodles. This is every summer they take, time's up, every summer they take all their new managers to this deserted island in the middle of the Japan Sea. And they force them to live on three days with nothing more than chicken ramen so that they will get in touch with their true desires and express those through new ramen products. This is, I got this at the, these are things I got at his funeral. Every one of the funeral got a goodie bag with these things, including the thing on the left is a book called, So There's Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is Thus Spake Momofuku. It's his famous sayings. And if you go to ramenadvice.com, I'll answer any, any Dear Abbey style question based on wisdom in that book. Thank you very much.