Greetings Grasshopper!
Today’s story finds us in a greenhouse in Hokkaido, Japan, in the cold blue hour before the sun commits to anything. (More coffee, please.)
Nobody’s inside. And yet — the vents move. They lift on their own, quiet as breath, because the building knows the temperature better than any human checking a thermometer ever did.
Out past the glass, satellites slide overhead and take notes on the fields like diligent students. Somewhere, a phone buzzes: it’s the farm’s group chat, where a chatbot reports weather conditions like a junior farmhand who never sleeps and never complains.
The man who built all of this has never written a line of code in his life.
How’d it all happen? Let’s rewind ten years.
Hiroki Tomiyasu sits at a government desk outside Tokyo, pushing paper for a living. No farmland in the family. No agriculture degree. Not one engineering bone in his body. And this is where most stories like his quietly end — because the desk is comfortable. The desk is safe. The desk asks nothing of you, and pays you back in the same currency.
Hiroki had an idea. Then did what most of us have already done: he left the desk.
He went to the countryside, to fields that needed someone. He learned farming the only way that actually counts: badly at first, then less badly, then well. Tractors. Crop rotations. The thousand small dooms a Hokkaido winter promises and mostly delivers. Today he runs roughly 100 hectares — broccoli, pumpkins, green onions, soybeans.
But the fields aren’t the plot twist. The plot twist arrived the way real magic always does: quietly, disguised as a question.
How would I watch my fields from above? ChatGPT and Codex walked him through pulling satellite imagery.
What’s wrong with this leaf? The photo became a diagnosis.
Could the greenhouse open its own windows? Now the vents answer to a text message.
Question by question, task by task, the former paper-pusher assembled what he calls “an ultra-talented engineer always by your side.”
No expensive hire. No code. Just pure nerve and curiosity.
(House rule disclosure: OpenAI told this story first, and of course they did — it makes them look magnificent. So I went and pulled the receipts myself before writing you a single word. The farmer is real. The farm is real. The vents really do open by text. A true story is still true even when the teller has something to sell. Fair warning: so does this email.)
Now hold this man up next to the things we whisper to ourselves.
“I’m not technical.” Neither was he. He was a civil servant.
“I don’t have the resources.” He didn’t inherit a single hectare.
“I’m a creative, not an engineer.” Darling, he’s a farmer. His hands are in actual dirt all day.
What separated him from everyone still saying I could never wasn’t talent, money, or credentials. He asked the machine a question. Then another. Then ten thousand more.
You’re a creative visionary. You’ve already built something real out of imagination and pure stubbornness.
And somewhere in your world sits your version of those greenhouse vents — the tedious thing you still do by hand, the system you wish existed, the “I’d have to hire someone” project gathering dust in a corner of your mind.
You don’t need to become technical. You need what Tomiyasu had: the nerve to ask — and ideally, someone who’s already bumped her head on every low ceiling in this cave so you don’t have to. (That’s me.)
That’s what NO BS AI™ is. No hype, no bro-marketing, no “10x your funnel” theater. A working education in making these tools do real things for your real work, taught by someone who builds with them every single day.
Come join us here, when you’re ready.
See you in the Goblin Mines,
RJ 🥷🏼❤️🤖
P.S. The detail I can’t stop grinning about: Tomiyasu runs his entire farm hub in Airtable. The same humble little tool I teach with. Not the flashiest. Just the one that works for him.
P.P.S. Don’t take my word for any of this. Here’s the fact-checked source — the full interview, including his actual chats: A broccoli farmer in northern Japan shares his chats. I walked the whole trail before I wrote you a word. That’s the no-BS part. ❤️