#707: Live from South Korea — Steve Jang on Korea’s Exploding “Soft Power,” The Poverty-to-Power Playbook, K-Pop, “Han” Energy, Must-See Movies, Export Economies, and Much More

27:51I love going to Tokyo. I have a lot of Japanese friends. I have Japanese startup portfolio founders, and I love chatting with them. So for a younger generation of Koreans and Japanese, there's great harmony and diversity in that. And people move back and forth between Seoul and Tokyo as easily as we move between like San Francisco and LA or New York and San Francisco. but it's interesting to see those influences. And I think when you look at the things that you've seen in your deep understanding of Japanese culture and language and Chinese culture and language, you will see that there are influences.

28:28You may not know the origin point, but you're like, that word sounds very similar. But the way it diverges is it's these unique phrases and words that capture part of the feeling or the psyche and the soul of those people that is really fascinating. Totally. And we were talking about this. So explain what natsukashi is in Japanese language. Yeah, so natsukashi is a beautiful word. By the way, I love your pronunciation. Oh, thank you. Thank you, yeah. Better than a lot of Nisei in the US. Yeah, so natsukashi, you'll run into this a lot in Japan. And when someone comes across something that is nostalgic, which nostalgic is not a word that gets used much in the US.

29:12It's a literary word. Exactly. In the US you might say, oh man, that brings back the memories or something like that, which is a little bit closer to natsukashi. It's also a little closer to saudaji in Brazilian Portuguese. It has a similar feeling to it. But natsukashi, they'd be like, ah, that's natsukashi. Natsukashi is pleasant nostalgia. when something brings back the memories. Positive. Positive. Right. That word doesn't exist in Korean language. Yes. You need to say more. So we have things that revolve in Korean language around suffering and pain. Sorrow. Regret. Sorrow. Rage. Oppression.

30:00Angst. It's the way I describe to people who have been to Tokyo a lot, and they ask, they go, should I go to Seoul? I'm like, absolutely. It's so fun. It's so electric right now. The ideas are new. They're embracing outside influences. You should go now because you will miss it when it's fully dialed in. And it's going to be unrecognizable five or 10 years from now, right? It's just moving so quickly. I mean, I come like three, four times a year and I don't feel the differences between each of those times, but I can look back and say, oh, three, four years ago, these things did not exist. Even going on some of our walks in these neighborhoods that you hadn't been to in a handful of years.

30:43I walked in that neighborhood that I took you to, Samcheong-dong. I brought the blue bottle, brought one of the blue bottle coffee founders, and we had both invested in that company a long time ago. And they were interested to come to Japan and Korea. So I met up with them in Japan, walked around different Tokyo neighborhoods with them, came to Seoul, did the same. They fell in love with that neighborhood because it had that very classic, old-school, vintage, this is real Korea, real Seoul. It's a beautiful walking area. Really nice. And you saw it. There's actually real painters out with their easel painting nature and streets and life.

31:21It's so fun to see that. But when you see that, you'll think, oh, it's just like Tokyo. Right? Because it's very quaint. It's very precise. It's very safe. Unbelievably clean. Awesome. But there are some buts. If you spend more than a few days here in Seoul, you'll realize that what you are looking at is a city that might on the outset look like you're walking into Tokyo, but is actually the other side of the coin. They exist in the same dimension, but is a very different vibe. I think you were talking, where are we talking? This might've been after a little bit of Soju, but it's like the bizarro, like when I used to watch the Superman cartoons, in the mornings before going to school or whatever, there was like Bizarro Superman, who was like, look just like Superman.

32:10Yeah. But I was like, wait a second, that's not Superman. Yeah, yeah. It's different. Yeah, it's like in Stranger Things, they call it the upside down. Yeah, right. Yeah. So the culture here is less polite in the protocol definition of the word. Yeah. In Japan, it is very difficult for a Japanese person to say no very directly and bluntly to you. Very hard. Because it's very impolite for them to do that. It's almost a dishonor for them to behave that way towards you. Yeah, so just a side note for folks. If you ever ask a Japanese person to do anything, this could be at your hotel or whatever, if they scratch their head and they go, and they breathe in like that, or they go,

32:53if they say it's difficult, that means no. That means impossible, generally. If they start apologizing right away, then you know it's not going to happen. Like the word, which gets translated literally into English, you almost never hear that word. It's very rarely heard. When I'm in Japan, I have to definitely take on a much more reserved and polite stance, more than I would in the US, more than I would even in Korea, because of that. And I respect that. in Korea, there's still a little bit of that. I'm smirking so hard because I'm thinking you're doing less child's pose than the tea houses when you have a low back pain.

33:38We went to this, it's so cute, adorable tea house. It was just, ah, with this little like, like a little courtyard in the middle with the manicure trees and poor Steve, his low back was killing him. And so he's stretching, but it's kind of in the hallway and these two women just glitched so hard because they didn't know how to contend with it. But yeah, so I enjoyed it. It's my fault and because I'm still an American at heart. And so what we're talking about here is the other part of me, my family's history. But so I have to try, right? Because it's that different. Totally. And so in Korea, they're much more likely to say no.

34:19They're much more likely to challenge you directly. Much more likely to say, Mr. Chairman, you need to eat less. Yeah. In a sarcastic way, call me, Mr. Chairman, you probably should go on a diet so your back doesn't hurt, which is, you know, I love my food, but I really didn't need to hear that from the well-meaning Ajima with the Yakuza perm. Yeah. So the experience that people will have is that it's not as lonely as it might be with being an expat in Japan. my wife lived 10 years as an expat in Tokyo. And when we were dating, I'd visit her a lot. And before that, I would visit Tokyo a lot because I had an investor there and we were working on something.

35:00And so I was there frequently for years. And I got to understand a little bit about the experiences of her and her expat friends. It's one part elevated because they're expats, they're foreigners, but one part sort of, they're not part of main society right and so in korea and especially in cities and you have to make a distinction between the countryside in korea rural areas in smaller towns and then seoul and puissant the big cities it's a very different experience you may not enjoy living in a small town in korea because it really is you know still stuck in that 60s and 70s environment both from a material aspect and utilities and just lifestyle.

35:47It's very modern in the cities. So there's a really harsh divide to the point where everyone wants to move to the big city. And so these smaller towns are emptying out. And there's a big problem with that. There's some pluses to that, but there's some really strong minuses as well. Yeah. But the foreigners feel like it's easier to integrate here. Maybe integrate's the wrong word, but they feel more welcome. I think it's still difficult to integrate in any of these cities. You're always going to be the other. But I think that you can get more direct response and that blunt energy of an actual response rather than a polite response.

36:26Yeah. So just for people who might be interested. So in Japan, they've got this expression. So I feel this in Japan too, which is a real bummer for me because when I was 15, as I exchange dues, oh man, I've studied so much Japanese. And also just living in Japan when I was 15, 15-year-olds are kind of 15-year-olds in most places, right? They're goofy, they're loud, they're fun, they're open-minded. And I felt welcomed with open arms, by and large, by the kids around me, right? Because that kids are kind of kids, and they're curious too, and shameless. When I go back to Japan now, I'm still very close with my host family, 30 years later or whatever, and still really close with my host family.

37:08And if they introduce me to their friends, everything's great. But as an adult going to Japan, there's a much stronger line that I feel separates me as an other. It's very hard. And there's an expression, there's like, and then. So is like, I'm very simplistically translating here, but it's like, how you really feel and how you really are. And then is like what you put in front as your sort of forward facing thing with someone else. And there's also something in Japanese called tanin gyogi, which is like a stranger formality where you're polite, but there's a wall. And my experience just in a week, I'm like, what do I know?

37:49But my experience here, and you have to be careful if you're staying at a hotel. You can't be like, oh, people are so friendly. It's like, well, if you're staying at a nice hotel, of course, they're paid to be friendly. So you got to get outside. But as I've been walking around. Which we have been. We have been. Yeah. And people are friendly. My feeling is friendly. Maybe open is a better word. Like a bit more open. Yeah, they're more open. Direct, but it's direct, positive, direct, negative, maybe. I'm talking a lot, but I'm excited to be here. When I was in high school and I met my first Korean Koreans, I was like my first interaction.

38:27This was in? This was in New Hampshire. That's right. At St. Paul's. Yeah. And nicest guys until they flipped. until that switch flipped and their eyes got really big and the K-Rage came on the scene. Which is not something you see as much in Japan. People get pissed everywhere. But a wise man once said to me that you go to Japan and a lot of people get drunk. It's a drinking culture, but they get drunk and then people fall asleep on the subway and so on. You don't see a lot of fights, but maybe that's different in Korea. It's just a different vibe. I think that might be part of the exports, right?

39:07There's K-beauty, K-pop, K-dramas, and there's K-rage. I don't know.

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40:08There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So why wait? Visit wealthfront.com slash Tim to get started. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. So I want to go back to Natsukashi. Okay, let's do it. that is a beautiful word with a beautiful meaning incredible when i first heard it i think it was yeah my wife who had lived in japan for 10 years she had used it with a friend and she had explained it to me and i was like that's so idealistic and just lovely right but i was like there's no such thing in korean the experience of the korean people you know it has not been an independent and whole country since 1905.

40:58It is divided since the Korean War, and there's a lot of pain and struggle that happens with families divided by North and South. Side note, we'll put this in the show notes. You sent me some YouTube videos, which were old broadcasts of families being reunited. That shit messed me up. Not reunited. Reunited for like an hour. An hour, and then they're separated again. And I'm not Korean. I don't have the background, but just the... holy shit, the emotion and the facial expressions. I was tearing up just watching. It's brutal. It's not relief of trauma. It's new trauma on top of longstanding trauma.

41:38Yeah. What we're talking about is, you'll put it in the show notes, but the North and South Korean governments had, at certain times when they get along, they'll try to do some great, like olive branch moves to reunite families. and they had the TV station film it and they set up a whole area and they brought buses down and it turned out to be not cathartic at all, but reopening pain. One of the things I noticed was in the notes, I guess it was in text, on one of the YouTube videos that you sent me, it indicated that initially this television special was supposed to be 45 minutes long, but there was such an outpouring.

42:19There were like 100 ,000 plus people who came and stood in front of various government offices and stationed out trying to petition to be part of this program that ended up lasting. I don't think I'm getting this wrong. I think it was like 100 plus days that it kept going. So first off, this is the last of the divided countries by Western capitalism and Eastern communism. So Germany, they've sorted it out. Vietnam, they've sorted it out. At this point, North Korea and South Korea is the last sort of evidence of the really like caustic, divisive Cold War. And so there are families. It's not two different people, right?

43:00It's not by religion, which we see a lot of today, unfortunately. It's the same people and the same families that are split and torn from each other. so imagine if you have an opportunity to be reunited for an hour and then separate an hour oh god so is that cathartic or is that actually more trauma right yeah and so i remember watching this as a child i was in la and my parents were watching it la had a big enough korean-american community where you had korean tv you had a channel i remember watching it and my parents were like broke down crying. And for me, it was like absorbing it as a child, but understanding it for the first time, like that history and what that would feel like.

43:47And I think that's like a very like strong, moving example of how like Korean people feel. In the last 120 years, they have not had their own whole country and people. It's North and South. Before that, it was Korean War. Millions of Koreans died in that war between Russia and China and the U.S. And the battleground was their country, their homes, their farmland, their cities. So the number of people that died in that war, I don't think people really talk about it. I appreciate the magnitude of that. There's something about like 10 million Chinese soldiers came across at some point or something like that.

44:31There's just numbers that people don't really think about. we talk about World War II, we talk about Vietnam, but there's not much about the Korean War. And then the Korean civilians and families that died. Right before that, they were liberated from Japanese rule just like five years before that. And so five years before that, they spent 40 years, 1905 to 1945, under Japanese rule. And that was, we've already talked about that, that was very oppressive. it was a forced assimilation and there were a lot of deaths that occurred as part of that and impression and there are a lot of movies by the way that detail this you know this is i don't want to take a toot off track because i know we're headed towards hun yeah first yeah but what are the main storylines that you see in movie and dramas because these say a fair bit yeah this is this is what we're talking about, which is in language and in stories, you get a sense for the people, maybe without even meeting in real life a person from that culture and society.

45:39The tropes are the themes, the storylines that you hear in movies. One is about North South Korea. There's literally rom-coms about it. There's action thrillers about it, spy thrillers. There's historical film detailing in a biopic, something that happened in the past. There's every kind of genre, but applied towards the North, South Korea history and conflict. Another one is the class struggle. You've probably seen Parasite, which obviously won an Academy Award and was seen globally. But that is, director Bong, Bong Joon-ho, is one of the greatest Korean directors of all time. A lot of his films are very intense psychological thrillers.

46:29A lot of them, you might look at it and say, oh, this one's like a murder mystery. This one's a psychological thriller. This one is something else. But if you look at a lot of his movies, it's about class struggle. Does that mean, put another way, sort of lack of upward mobility? it's about the wealthy and the entitled and their mistreatment of the poor working class that are immobile but also there's complexity it's not just good versus evil in that dichotomy both sides in those character sets are doing weird crazy off-putting things to each other right and So that's why I think Korean movies are really well embraced, because they don't follow a formula.

47:18They're nuanced. It's like swimming in an ocean of gray. Yeah. It's like swimming in the human mind, where there's nothing totally pure. It's not a Marvel movie. Right. And it's not a sort of like, it comes to a conclusion, act one, act two, act three, and now I feel good. And actually, one of the things I would say consistently about Korean film is that it's both, and this is a conflict that can exist together at the same time. It's both entertaining and moving and inspiring. And you can also walk out feeling terrible. You can walk out feeling confused and like you need to go outside and get a breath of fresh air, sit down.

48:02If you're a smoker, you probably need a cigarette. If you're not a smoker, you probably need to take a walk and listen to some happy music. The intensity of Korean film then is also balanced with this polar opposite of these crazy rom-coms that are so sugary and saccharine but funny. And that's really Korean culture, right? It's this crazy, full of friction opposites that you didn't think would coexist in one culture. because I think people, Westerners, outsiders look at Japan and they say, this is ideal culture. This is ideal society. This is utopia almost to a lot of Westerners. Everything is clean.

48:41Everyone is polite. Everything is in its right place. And they do things like take Italian pizza and actually make it better. They take - Fried chicken. Oh my God. Steve is eating so much fried chicken here. Korean fried chicken. It's the true KFC. Oh my God. It's so good. Korean culture, I think when Westerners or outsiders come and they actually experience it, and they see it in movies and K-pop, and they come here, and what they see is something that's a lot more realistic and nuanced. Well, we went to have fried chicken, but not heavily breaded fried chicken, rather very lightly fried. And that's the original.

49:22The OG fried chicken. The OG fried chicken. We also had some ugly potatoes, as written on the menu. Ugly potatoes, they're basically tater tots. And you mentioned to me that the woman who was running the show that day, very smart, really had her operator hat on, very calm. Most likely, let's just say the daughter of the owner or somebody who had handed it down. But she may end up working there for the rest of her life or working career. And that's a lot of the stuff that's invisible if you're only here for a brief time. The class struggle is, this is the theme of so many movies, books, TV series.

50:00It's the suffering and the struggle to move out of their condition. And that society and the upper crust of society won't allow it. And this tension is in music. It's in movies. It's in literature. It's in TV shows. It's all around. And you might say, oh, no, it's around every country. Sure, it is. But it's really strong and consistent in Korean movies and literature. Parasite is an example of that. You look at Bong Joon-ho's, all of his films, they're all very different. Some feel like a horror thriller. Some feel like a psycho thriller. Another one feels almost like comedic sci-fi fantasy, like The Host.

50:44if you see his original films, like a giant monster moving around Seoul and killing people. But from a Western mindset, you're like, what is going on? This is almost silly. But it's actually, if you look at everything that's happening, it's talking about class struggle. This is part of what Korea has been since the very beginning of its own political self-governance post-Korean war, is the populism here. You saw that in the demonstrations. It's a demonstration activist society, and it's constantly battling with the fact that there are very large companies that own so much of the economy. And your success to raise a family and to have a nice apartment and to put your kids in great schools and things like that all reside on whether or not you can get a job and keep it at these large companies.

51:37At the chebor. Yeah. So they call them chebos outside, but the employees of those chebos will always call themselves conglomerates. So you got to be careful, right? Yeah. I mean, this is, I'm sure they're different, but reminiscent of Japan with like Sony, Mitsubishi, etc. I think there's more control of the economy from the conglomerates in Korea. I'll just sort of try to parrot back things that I think you've said to me, and then you can fact check or expand. and then we'll eventually get to Han. Yeah, we should do that. But a couple of things that struck me is super interesting. One is that these I guess the equivalent in Japanese would be which is sort of like a chain of related companies aka conglomerate that here they are publicly traded but they float a very small percentage of the shares so they're kind of like the Mars company in the US in the sense that they're privately held well not privately held but they're They're still family-controlled, which is mind-blowing to think about, just given the size of these things.

52:42Secondly, that, and we didn't cover this yet, but the broadband penetration and the technological access here is such, in part, it seems like, because these large conglomerates will coordinate with the government to focus on, say, one or two things for five years, ten years. and they act in this concerted way, which would have to contribute to how Korea punches above its weight class, right? Because what's, I mean, I don't know the population of Korea, but it's not a huge place. You know, it's under 50 million people. It's nuts. I mean, to think about what Korea has done on the global stage and continues to do and will do with that population, it's kind of, I mean, it is incredible.

53:26That's the, I don't want to say the underbelly or the dark side, But it is really the trade-off of having, on one side, a very optimistic and progressive growth mindset for the economy and society, which is pound for pound, per capita, probably the most innovative high growth in terms of GDP country in the history of the planet in the last 50 years. I mean, it is a leader in wireless technology. It is a leader in chip manufacturing. It's a leader in heavy industrials, steel. and it's also now a leader in entertainment, media, fashion, beauty industry. So it's doing a lot. It's accomplishing a lot.

54:06Great. The other side of that is that there's still a class divide. There's not a lot of upper mobility and that's changing for sure, but it's still very much. And you see this in the stories that are told. These stories are told and they're popular, not because they don't exist. It's because that people feel that they empathize with that. They feel that in their bones that this is their condition in their life. So the populism here is different than in the U.S. The political spectrum actually is different. There's not a left versus right in the way that we think about it in the U.S., though the U.S.

54:41is turning more into Korea style of politics. Well, we'll leave it at that because I don't like politics, but I am recognizing this, which is that the populism here is about class struggle and about workers' rights and about having a little bit more of a flattening out so that people have opportunities to be upwardly mobile. The thing that you're seeing today in film, the thing that makes Parasite become a global phenomenon and win Oscars is that story. It's a great film. Bong Joon-ho is a great storyteller and cinematographer, but it is the writing and the acting. You can take that story as different as it is.

55:23It's a Korean family, two Korean families. Thank you. basically fighting with each other for the entirety of the film in quiet and sometimes loud ways, but you empathize with both and you're critical of both. There's not a good versus bad. There's no hero versus villain. And you take that out into the US, you take that out into Europe, you take that out into any country. It resonates. It's universal. Now it's universal and the writing is good and the cinematography is great. And what I did not realize is this K-wave is not entirely an accident. It's not like people just threw a bunch of things at random times independently into the works and then Korea landed on the global stage with entertainment.

56:10There seems to be a lot more to it. And I would expect, though, that many people listening to this, a lot of people listening to this are probably like, oh, Korea, they're listening to this because they saw Parasite or they're like, why is K-pop so big? What the hell happened in the last few years? What is going on? None of my friends speak Korean. Why are they listening? How can they listen to K-pop? What is going on? Why is Blackpink on, like, all over the place? Why is Blackpink at Coachella? Yeah, what the hell is going on? And then you have also these streaming shows on Netflix, right? Yeah.

56:45Squid Game. You've got the, I can't remember, I can never remember the name. These jacked men and women just. Physical 100. Physical 100, right? It's like American Gladiators, but Elimination Challenge with Koreans. It's amazing. So what is going on? When I watched this doc, I was like, oh, wait a minute. Behind the scenes, there is a lot of very clever strategy. Look at Squid Game. Class struggle. Right. But in this intense, crazy, dystopian game, makes Hungry Games look like a kid's show. It really does. I remember watching Hungry Games. I hadn't seen it, actually, until very recently. And I was like, oh, this is kind of boring.

57:27Let me put it this way. If you were to take all of these stories and you were to look at them as, these are commercial activities where you want the audience to engage with it and to pay for tickets, right? Where does it come from? Who is producing and paying for that? The money is coming, the capital is coming from the jevels, the conglomerates. The production companies behind K-pop, they're all publicly traded companies. the movie studios the production companies the labels they're all huge businesses worth billions of dollars it's also been a lot of government support right yeah so originally in the 1980s venture capital which is the industry i'm in and you're familiar with too as an angel investor in the u.s venture capital is focused on technology maybe biotech but mostly technology software venture capital started out as a government supported industry focused in not only on technology but mainly on media entertainment movies you're talking about in the u.s no or in korea i see and so k-pop and korean movies and all of this it's not controlled by the government or supported by the government today directly and oftentimes the censors are coming down on things And it's lightened up, but you used to not see people kissing in movies.

58:48The Korean censors were pretty strong, just like the Japanese censors. Yeah, the Japanese censors were just strong. Although, anything goes in the comic books. Yeah. We're talking about national broadcast. National broadcast is different. But what you see as the K-wave today, a lot of it came originally from the Korean venture capital industry, which was supported by the government and funded largely by the government. it was initially focused in on what we would call now today soft power. Now, look, there's a Korean semiconductor chip industry and a whole bunch of technology areas that are now excelling well, but that was not the main focus or the main success area for venture capital.

59:29So it's really interesting now. It's probably problematic for a lot of politicians to see a lot of this stuff, depending upon what side of the spectrum you're on, on the partisan side. But I think that that's what has resonated is that it feels like the most irreverent and authentic and weird, sometimes crazy, but really raw, powerful movies out there and TV series. And it's very different from any other formulaic tropes that you see out there. Like sometimes Korean movies take twists and turns. They'll start out like a rom-com and then it turns into a zombie thriller. that ends up in a political thriller mode, and you're sort of confused.

1:00:15Old Boy is probably the most famous movie before Parasite. And no one leaves watching that movie saying it was bad. You say it was intense and it was incredible, but you also say, I felt sick to my stomach. I think that's the value that Korean soft power starts to bring. So the movies are easier for me to wrap my head around than, say, K-pop, right? Because there's good music all over the world. And there are entertainers and boy bands and girl bands in a lot of places. Most people outside of Korea do not speak Korean. Well, hey, sometimes I'm in Hawaii or I'm in LA in a Hispanic neighborhood.

1:00:53And I will see posters of BTS up on the walls. And there's a whole learning of - BTS is a group. Yeah. there's a whole group of younger people in the u.s in latin america in europe that are following their favorite band which is bts or blackpink oh i get it i'm just wondering and learning korean language i'm wondering how that happened and is this like beanie babies okay it's gonna like burn twice as hot and flame out yeah or is there sort of more to the story i think it's here to day and i think it's tied in with why anime japanese anime is also very globally popular which is it feels like a fantasy world that is an escape from their current world and that they can aspire to so it's like you see in the hip-hop community in the u.s they love naruto yeah i mean their hats their shirts you think about how many hip-hop groups would include things from like Chinese Kung Fu movies.

1:01:54And there's always been this... Wu-Tang Clan. There's always been this crossover of culture from Asia on that level. And it's been a little bit more like, let's take the caricature of it or the themes of it and let's include it. But now it's become part of global pop culture. The K-pop stuff is really interesting because they actually copied American pop boy bands and girl bands. Yeah, Backstreet Boys. But they just took it to the next level. The way Japanese say, we're going to do French food or Italian pizza, and we're just going to take it to the next level. Take it to hyperdrive. And dial it in, right?

1:02:26We're going to take American automobile engineering culture, and we're going to use a Kaizen approach and make more reliable cars faster. Crazy story on that. I think it was Edward Deming who had something like scientific manufacturing, scientific management. This American efficiency social scientist who was basically ignored in the U.S. was then embraced by Japan and led to the Toyota way. I know that. It's wild, but to your point, Japan and it seems like, as you're describing it, Korea are really good at taking something that's good and being like, okay, we're going to sort of like spinal tap, right?

1:03:00Like when we really need a little extra, we're going to turn it to 11. That's a good way to put it. Turn it to 11. So on that front, the formula of the pop band was taken and it was turned into a boot camp where there were auditions and you would be trained and you would learn how to dance. You would learn how to sing. you would be assigned a role as if you were in a military outfit of some sort and you're the rapper you're the lead singer you're more of a dancer and so there's a whole formula and institutionalization that happened around pop culture that koreans really took on right i'm connecting something that i've never connected before tell me if this is totally off base but you're talking about class struggle and lack of upward mobility okay if you go to the u.s like how many people are aspiring to be in a boy or girl band not many furthermore there isn't really there's not much of it like a discovery mechanism or talent development program for that i mean sure you can go to la and and there are people who put these bands together but in korea you've got these like dance training studios where people pay money and basically create their own like American Idol vetting system.

1:04:19And then the scouts can pick from the cream of the crop, right? If you take that and it's like an industrialization of this very like creative artistic culture that we revere the authenticity of that in the US, like the unknown musician that rises up and you love that, right? You love that authentic story. In Korea, that's not really a thing because K-pop, it's pop. It's manufactured. Now, it doesn't mean it's not good. It just means that they've been put through bootcamp. They have coaches for every single aspect of what they are supposed to be doing as this admired and loved band. Not just on stage in their normal life too.

1:05:02Yeah. Everything's very controlled. Now, then you look at the film industry, I think it's quite different. Film industry is much more about a real look at a lot of things that are not pristine and polished in society. So you have K-pop, which feels utopian, sometimes a little plastic. And then you have these films that are talking about North and South Korea. You're talking about colonial history between Japan and Korea. And you're talking about class struggle internally in korea you're talking about the mental health issues you're talking about all of these much darker and much more real and raw topics and so it's odd that included in this picture of korean soft power is this very polished and industrialized pop culture and then this very intense and raw entertainment culture on movies yeah you get the polar extremes just because i've teased it so much what is Han?

1:06:05Just like Natsukashi is quite Japanese. Super Japanese. For Koreans, Han is probably the most talked about recent collective trait of Koreans that Koreans talk about, but then now people outside are talking about. And what it essentially boils down to is this idea of this collective suffering that the Korean people have through history and manifest in this sort of, it's very complicated feeling of we are suffering and we share that pain with each other. It's not always a negative. It can sometimes drive us to express ourselves in strong ways. It can drive us to suffer together collectively. So collectivism is a very Asian thing.

1:06:59and independence is something that we revere in the U.S. That collectivism in Korea is Han. It's Han. And is it generally, you mentioned suffering. There are a lot of different descriptions of this. I was doing a little bit of reading. It's really hard to explain in English, actually. It seems very hard. Is it a type of, so sadness would be a component of that? Yeah. And also anger and angst. I was talking to David Chang from Momofuku. He's an old friend. And he asked me about Travis Kalanick. He had never met him. And he said, you knew him. He seems like he has a lot of Han. And I said, yeah, he's intense.

1:07:39And it expresses in a drive to succeed, right? And obviously, we all know that story. But for Koreans, Han can be a drive to do great things, to bond together, to understand each other, to empathize. but it can also just be like you said the anger and the the k-rage that you're talking about which channeled correctly allows you to build an entire industry yeah and succeed on a global level to create what is it chips on the shoulder make chips in the pocket pop culture phenomenons that win grammys and that movies that win oscars and light up the world to what's happening in this little country that used to be a poor developing country that was broken after colonization and a war.

1:08:25Where does that come from? And so I think a lot of Koreans romantically will describe it as like, we have this Han that drives us, but it's not perfect. It's not always positive. It can just result in chaos and destruction too. But it's this thing that feels very real. And I think that's what you're seeing in like Korean movies. That's what you're seeing in industries, the positive energy that can come out of it, not just the negative energy. So it's very complicated. But jang, and these are like very simple Chinese characters and Korean characters. I wonder what that, I don't know the hanja for any of these.

1:08:58So jang is this connection or affection, this bond that you feel. And so a lot of people will say that they don't have jang with someone or that a person does not have jang. This is a much more bonding, affectionate thing. And it's a very simple word, but it means a lot. Jang is also a complicated thing too. It's hard to describe without using a lot of words and adjectives and feelings and emotions in English. But when you say that in Korean, it's very simple. It means a thing that isn't translatable. And then if I were to take two words that would describe Korean people, and again, I'm not Korean.

1:09:42I'm Korean American. I'm gyupo. So I'm somewhat inside, but somewhat outside. And so I can compare it to how we are in America or other countries. And Han and Jung would pretty much cover. What is Nunchi? So Nunchi, I mean, you know Bobby Kim, Bobby Hunter. Yes. You had him on the show. I did. A friend of mine as well. Great conversation. He really got it right, which is it's reading the room. But Nunchi is like nun is your eyes. And it's the ability to see what's really going on, reading between the lines or reading the room. And this is really important. This is not a happy, positive thing. This is, again, a defensive, inquisitive, analytical skill.

1:10:32Discerning eye. It's very critical. Yeah, critical eye. There are things that come up when you talk about people and you talk about your connection with them. And so if I come in and kind of bluntly or obtusely am rude in a group, I walk into a dinner or a room, I change the topic really obtrusively.

1:10:56He just like didn't read the room, just kind of came in like a bull in a china shop. Yeah, there isn't. And then, you know, with Han, that's something that I actually have not heard a lot of Koreans talk about it. I feel like a lot of Korean Americans in Kyopo talk about it. So it's an interesting thing. I think it's a more recent, modern definition and term. I don't think it's like an old classic phrase or term. So my sense is anecdotally that it's something that's been a little bit created. It's like in the zeitgeist now. Yeah. And then also with Jung, that's something that my parents talk about a lot.

1:11:36Yeah, Jung. And my parents don't talk about Han. It's like maybe the people that really feel it don't want to talk about it. Yeah, totally. And the people that want to find some reason or some rhyme to why they feel a certain way or something is happening to them, they'll create a concept. But I think it is very interesting to look at those two concepts, Han and Jung. and then that'll help you understand a lot in Korean society. It helps me a lot, actually. I'll give you one example. If you're a visitor to Korea, there's a host mentality. In Japanese, it's called omotenashi. In Korean, there's a concept of you're my son-nim, my guest.

1:12:19And it's very strong, very similar to Japanese omotenashi, right? They want to exceed in treating you well. They want to give you food. They want to take care of you. They want to do that. They want to create this concept of jeong. Not to create the concept, but to have jeong with you. And that would be the ideal. Because Koreans, most Koreans, not all maybe, but Koreans want to have that connection, that deep connection. They want to drink with you. They want to stay out late with you. They want to wrestle with you. They want to argue with you. They want to put their arms around your shoulder and sing a song after downing some soju.

1:12:59right? They want to feel that like real visceral connection with you. And people often, I don't really enjoy it, but people often in business, even in technology, which is somewhat of a more cerebral industry, they want to go out late and have drinks until five, six in the morning. And in the US we're like, Hey, this is just way too much. Like this is bedtime. They want to do that to know that they have a bond with you. They want to create that somewhat like abruptly, right? but you see that yeah i'm trying to find the character for jung it's really bothering me that i oh wait wait okay jung is jung is good jung is positive jung is optimistic yeah warm feeling of attachment yeah han not so much yeah jung you see that character the chinese character in pretty sure in concepts like sympathy those types of sort of feeling, emotive concepts.

1:14:00Empathy, sympathy, affection, bonds. In every movie, in every TV series, they're moving in and out of Han and Zhang in the narrative, in the storytelling. And that's, I think, if you were to whittle it down, if you had to really simplify and reduce it to something very at root level, I think it would be that Koreans are moving between Jung and Han in their storytelling, in their life, their business. There's a moment with probably with your friends in high school where it's all happy and positive. Then maybe after a critical moment or an emotional thing, or maybe if you guys were drinking beers at night as teenagers, where it flipped.

1:14:51yeah usually i could tell if the eyes got really big i'd be like oh boy here we go i'm red yeah yeah red face big eyes i'm like oh oh i think we're getting into hulk smash there's energy energy frequency has changed but yeah so that i mean i wanted to yeah that's that's what i would think about when i think about like how to whittle it down to something basic before coming to korea I was trying to do a bit of reading. I didn't want to do too much reading. People have asked me a lot, what did you expect? I'm like, I didn't expect anything. I tried to come in as blank as possible. But I did a little bit of reading.

1:15:27I didn't want to come in completely ignorant. And it seems like the government has either earmarked or committed, maybe already spent, who knows, something like$200 billion. Maybe those are tax incentives. I have no idea. But$200 billion U.S. for increasing birth rate. So what is the, I guess, status of birth rate in Korea, in this case, South Korea, and why is it so low? How would you explain that? So first off, developed countries around the world have a relatively low birth rate, reproductive rate. Germany, Japan, even right now, China is having that problem. So there's that. But what I think is happening in Korea is that this class divide, the economic condition in Korea is that the haves have a lot and the have-nots, it's hard for them to move up.

1:16:26It is very expensive. It is a high cost of living in Seoul. Maybe not in the countryside, but everyone wants to live in the city. to get an apartment. In the US, you put down maybe a month, two months, maybe three months of deposit, and then you can get a pretty nice apartment if you have a job. In Korea, you have to put down a year or two of your rent as a deposit. And what you get is maybe a one-bedroom apartment and one of these large concrete high-rises that you see just stacked around Seoul. and so to start a family is quite expensive yeah so there's that cost of living to start a family i don't know if you have an answer to this but why so much deposit why a year or two of deposit the consumer credit culture is not in good shape it's never been in good shape in korea as long as i've been like laughing because we had to take a pause earlier because i got a phone call from the hotel.

1:17:25It was like, you've exceeded your incidentals. Can you come down and make your deposit? I'm like, you have my credit card. They don't trust you. The way this works is I charge stuff and then I pay at the end. And they're like, no, you have to come down and put down a further deposit. I'm like, okay. Alright, fine. So, Asian financial crisis 1997-98 because of Thailand and Japan went down, Korea went down, right? And this is a good example, actually, of Han and Zhang together. I'm trying to connect dots here, right? To simplify it for the audience. But there was an austerity program. Korean government went out through media and said, we need every citizen of the country to take their personal jewelry and contribute it to the national cause, to the IMF austerity program that was laid upon them to get bailed out, essentially.

1:18:27And people donated their jewelry. They melted it down for the sake of the greater good, the common collective good. It's so wild just to think about how poorly that would go down in the U.S. Would not go down at all. No, of course not. Like, we can't even do that with guns, right? It's like, there's no sense of gun control. Imagine now, take all of your valuables for jewelry. Give us a little gold for the greater good. And contribute and melt it down. But the other side of that is that there is a speculative gambling culture in investments and real estate and stocks, bonds, real estate that was so bad in Korea that people were taking out credit cards at like 30 % interest rates and buying consumer goods.

1:19:12It's still happening today. The Korean consumer luxury market is the per capita highest market on the planet. That's why you see all of these European luxury brands. Every single mall, they have huge stores. Luxury brands have been focused in on marketing to Koreans for now 5, 10 years. There's this consumer goods culture here, this consumerism, materialism that is problematic. Because a lot of it is on borrowed money. And so in the 90s, they had this problem, the subprime credit market for consumers. They even stopped derivatives trading in Korea because of it, because people were getting so upside down on their investment speculation.

1:20:02There is a speculative, almost gambling problem in investments. It got to the point where the left-wing government that was in power in the last administration, during COVID, a lot of wealthy people were buying properties. And they limited people from buying more than one second property so that you can buy a third. Can you imagine that in the US? Again, something that would never happen in the US. So there is this sense of like, one, there's a class divide. And it's very expensive. It's a high cost of living to start a family. And it's also very hard to move up that. So why even go there? My other theory on this is that not only is it expensive, but social values are changing.

1:20:49Women have largely been unable to enter in the professional workplace, but that is changing. And that's a good thing. They can go work at a company and rise up and become an executive. so careers are now not just service employee careers but actual executive careers company careers corporate careers in these conglomerates are now possible and so as that shifts to be more balanced and fair there's less young couples getting married early and having babies so i think there's two things there that i would i would say and i see that among like extended family members, friends, is a very expensive proposition because you want them in the best schools.

1:21:36You're going to put them in the baseball hug one. You're going to put them in the swimming hug one, the math hug one, the piano lessons, like all of that from 3 p.m. all the way to 9 p.m. Yeah. So you are spending a lot of money per year for each child because you want them to have the very best. And in Korea, the competitiveness around this is incredible. If you're not putting them in the hug one, who are you as a parent? And that's incredible pressure. And that's incredible, like exorbitant costs for someone who is not upwardly mobile, does not have an opportunity to have stock in a company and have it exit like we love in Silicon Valley.

1:22:20We put out stock options and equity is like the carrot of entrepreneurship and risk. They don't have that here. And it's changing. There are more and more startups. There are unicorns that are coming out of Korea, Coupang, Toss. There's a lot of consumer marketplaces and fintech companies. It's becoming sort of a Silicon Valley of Korea and it's exceeding the speed in Japan. It's not quite what China is. China's very, very advanced and forwarded there. But Korea is finally having a startup culture where risk is appreciated. and admired and rewarded in some cases. But outside of that, it is very expensive and it's very difficult.

1:23:01And a lot of young couples may not want to get married right away. They may want to make their way in their career. So I think it is a problem. I mean, we all know the economics around population decline. That hurts GDP. It correlates. It's causal too, but at least it correlates. We can agree on that. So I think it is a real problem. I don't know how it's solved. Not that I've thought a lot about it or someone's asked me to solve it. Can you imagine a small country like this shrinking? Yeah. And what that does, again, to all these things. And a lot of people want to move out. They want to go. So my family and everyone else's family, everyone who moved to the U.S., I would say 99 % of them moved for a better life.

1:23:45to go to America and to be able to live a better life and provide just a higher quality education and lifestyle for their families. Because it was hard in Korea in the 60s, 70s, even 80s. So if people are moving out to find that upward mobility to do better for their families, and then here you're somewhat still confined, that's a tough thing. And there's one last thing that is really challenging about Korea. There's a civil service examination that you take to get into. That score really decides whether or not you get into a top university. I see. That's the equivalent of an entrance exam. But it's more than that.

1:24:26It's like you could not do well in the SAT, but you have a good GPA. Yeah. You interview well. Then you have all these tiers of junior college, four-year college, Ivy League, state schools. You have a lot of liberal arts colleges, whatever you're looking for. here, you're either in a top college or you're not. And if you do not go to college, it is highly unlikely that you will have the ability to provide for a family, a large family, well in a healthy way. You're definitely not going to all these hug ones and things like that. So you're right in saying that K-pop and... K-pop is like... US is like pro sports.

1:25:10You know, that's the way... It's the side route out. And I think K-pop and movies and entertainment and gaming, e-sports is huge here. You saw they were setting up League of Legends stages downstairs. Yeah, enormous. I mean, it's like an entire playing field full of people down there engaging with League of Legends. And those PC bungs, right? There was a guy walking around with a huge sword shirtless and it was snowing. That is dedication.

1:25:42let's switch gears to a little bit more about like what's happening in soft power let's do it what was your take on all of this entertainment media the beauty industry this k-wave what was your opinion of it before coming here i've been paying very close attention to it for the last few years because i'm always curious to distinguish between trends and fads I brought up Beanie Babies, not to throw Beanie Babies under the bus, but there are certain things that become fashionable because maybe a handful of celebrities are using X, fill in the blank, like a boots has had many lives, it's like a phoenix, or I could certainly list many, many different things.

1:26:28but how do you distinguish between that and not to get too finance-y but like a secular tailwind with some type of trend that is inevitable, right? Like penetration of broadband and smartphones and also trying to identify the flywheels at play or the elements that contribute to momentum. So for instance, if you look at podcasting and for a lot of people who are have have not had the engagement that i've had for 10 plus years now or no it's not 10 plus years but as a listener 10 plus years but as a producer as a producer of podcasts going to be 10 years next april it seems like podcasts went from kind of nothing to everywhere is the perception for someone who's only engaging with it now but they heard about podcasts they're like wow how did it become that everyone is now on a podcast with a podcast talking about podcasts, it seems like five years ago, there was nothing.

1:27:27Well, there was something five years ago, just like there was K-pop five years ago. But it suddenly seems like there's surround sound stereo, where it's on magazine covers, and it's online everywhere, and there's news, and your friends are talking about it, and there are documentaries. And sometimes that comes together as an emergent property of a bunch of unrelated events, but sometimes there's orchestration and architecture behind it. Or there's an example of a standout success. For instance, in the case of podcasting, Serial was that. Serial became a phenomenon. It was the show that everybody had to listen to, and it gripped maybe not the entire nation, but kind of the New York literati crowd.

1:28:13And since the New York literati run the mastheads of these huge media outlets, it gave the impression of Serial being huge, which it was. And people were like, podcast? How do I even listen to a podcast? It introduced people to the medium. Exactly. It introduced people to the medium. It introduced them to platforms. And looking at this explosion of Korean media, I'm like, okay, where did this start? What set the snowball in motion? And I haven't figured it out. I have not. Although certainly Parasite was a huge, that was huge, but I'm like, that can't be, I feel like that's the result of some preceding things that I have missed.

1:28:52Yes. Right? Yes. But I just haven't known how to dissect it. So I'm like, okay, well, let me keep an eye on things. And then I see Squid Game. Okay. So Squid Game, Squid Game, Squid Games. I always mess up if it's singular or plural. But anyway, you see that explode and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. Based on that success, I would imagine Netflix, because this seems to be what Netflix does, to be like, let us double down on whatever this is. Algorithmically, what makes this show, this show, a big part of it is Korea. It changed Netflix. Yeah. Their whole international strategy was a good strategy.

1:29:30It was very unique to them. No one else was doing Hulu, Disney. They're not focused on international. Netflix was the only one. When they launched in Korea and Japan, it was like, great, it'll bring up subscriber numbers. But then when it hit in Korea, they increased the budgets many times over because they saw that it was not only the Korean market that loved this programming, but it was the global markets. It was the content, the films and the TV shows coming out of the market and that they could distribute all across the planet. I almost look at the Netflix. They were sort of carrying the pollen of Korean culture, this pop culture, this media culture, entertainment, and they accelerated it to a level where it probably felt like a sudden overnight thing.

1:30:23But you're absolutely right. It's not only emergent, but it was emergent over the course of several decades. Right. And so it was emergent over the course of several decades, and then there are these accelerants, like COVID almost certainly was an accelerant. of people at home watching Netflix, looking for something to bond over. And boom, around the same time, you've got a bunch of this Korean stuff coming in that's very high quality, really compelling, and it's new. Also, people are like, what? What is this, right? Like, Americans reading subtitles?

1:30:57And even though I've never really been involved with film, a little bit with television, I'm very interested to see which dominoes tip over a lot of other dominoes, right? And how the macroeconomic stuff factors into it and geopolitics, but it's more the economic side. So for instance, seeing how film production has changed, both in terms of funding for films, but also main protagonists in the US where almost, I'm not going to say without exception, but if you look at a lot of the blockbusters, whether it's the Mission Impossible movies or Marvel movies, it's like they always want to have a Chinese, at least one Chinese man character.

1:31:37Why? Because it is very important that you get the Chinese market. Super important financially. Right? And... It almost feels like just jammed in there, though. Oh, it's totally jammed in there. It's like, what? Okay. Victorian, like a biopic, and there's a Chinese guy. it's totally just like shoehorned in a lot of the time. But part of the reason I paid so much attention to Korea is that Korea is small, right? So it's like an export game. The US is not looking for like total addressable market in Korea. It's the opposite, which is a lot harder to pull off as a smaller player. And I've been tracking it.

1:32:19I've also been impressed, very impressed. And this does not get, I don't think this gets enough airtime So hopefully this podcast will make people explore a bit. Like Korean design and aesthetic is super sharp. And the best book design, I want to be fair, there are a couple of really good ones in terms of publishers who have published my books in foreign languages. The Korean publisher, maybe publishers for my books, have done an exceptional job with book design. and as you know and as we've been discussing education important right literacy very high voracious readers in korea also true with germany it's disproportionately the case where like you look at how my books have performed in germany and it outperforms the uk plus australia plus like almost everywhere outside of the u.s because the culture itself values education in reading.

1:33:19But to your question about Korea, like K-pop, I mean, pop music in general, especially boy bands, girl bands is not really my jam. But as a study, it's interesting for me because I feel like it could be anything. I read a book on Ryanair ages ago because I was like, okay, how did Ryanair suddenly seemingly become ubiquitous? How did this happen? Because if I can study that and I can study what's happening with K-pop and then Korean entertainment, maybe there's something I can learn that will allow me to, as an investor, predict this earlier, right? Where you have converging trends that are coming.

1:33:54For instance, like Shopify, we were talking about Shopify earlier today. That was, as far as I know, the first advisor to Shopify when they had like 10 employees. And it's like, if you just looked at tech trends, if you were able to bet on the right team in e-commerce and setting up that kind of backend plumbing for websites to be able to sell things, it's like, this is a trend that is going to continue. doesn't seem to be any reasonable possibility that could be interrupted outside of like nuclear holocaust. So let's find the right team. And that maybe in retrospect seems obvious, but so do a lot of great companies.

1:34:32But if you can kind of see where things are converging, Uber, right, in our case, would be another example of that. Where it's like, okay, let's not look at, and this parallels to Korea, where it's like in the beginning, and you remember this, I mean, how many hundreds of people said no to Uber, right? Uber ended up on like angel list early days and like people are like, what? This is ridiculous. This is for black cars for the one percenters in San Francisco's boo, lame, tech bro, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of the professional investors who said no, said no because they were like, well, let's look at the total addressable market for people who are going to use black cars.

1:35:08Look at what percentage Uber can manage to secure. and it's like, no, it's not the right way to look at it. It would be like looking at Parasite and these various TV shows and being like, all right, well, what's the population of Korea? Oh, it's declining. Well, what percentage of Koreans can you get to watch this? And it's like, no, no, no. You can expand the market. So I know I'm meandering a bit all over the place, but so one is like a predictive mechanism. Like, all right, well, can I see things that two, three, five years from now are going to be obvious? But I'll just like see it earlier because I've learned to look for the precursors.

1:35:43And then secondly, because I write, because I have podcasts coming up on my 10th anniversary and I'm using that as an opportunity to think about what's next for me. And generally after five to 10 years of doing something, it gets really crowded. If I pick it correctly, the game gets harder. Oftentimes I end up enjoying it less even though I'm still enjoying the podcast. And I'm like, all right, what's next for me? in which case maybe there are techniques, maybe there are things I can look for, levers I can pull that would allow me to also build momentum on a micro level that I've seen at the macro level, say with this Korean entertainment stuff.

1:36:23So I've been paying a lot of attention, but I'll be honest, I don't know how to pay proper attention because I don't think the way to pay proper attention is to read the mainstream US media coverage of the K-wave. I don't think that's the right way to do it. No, absolutely not. Right? I'll give a shout out to some books that have been very helpful. There's a great outfit, I guess a publishing company called Talk To Me In Korean. I've got Talk To Me In Korean Level 1. I've got real life Korean conversations for beginners. I'm hoping to improve my Korean enough that eventually at some point I could actually do some Korean language reading on this stuff or listening.

1:37:00I will say, in the week that we've been here, I was really honestly surprised at not only your ability to read Korean, Hangul, wherever we went, but to also deliver it and enunciate it in the right way. And so I was kind of surprised. I mean, we've been friends for a long time, and I've seen you speak Japanese and Mandarin. But I was really surprised because I knew you've never been here and never studied any Korean language. And I remember I asked you, I said, how long have you been studying? And you're like, two days. So even as a longtime friend, I was very surprised. So that's a skill that is not only about finding a great method or applying yourself, but the fact that you would insist to order by yourself and you would have a conversation with someone.

1:37:49There's a part of throwing yourself into the mix to be able to do that. So question back to you on that, because I admire that. That's amazing. Thank you. Like I've had to do that in Beijing and Shanghai with Mandarin. Because I look Asian, I can pass a little bit more when I'm speaking. You know, I'm like, you know, I say, I'm Korean, right? And so, and I'll get a little bit of a pass, right? But you're a white guy. Yeah. And you're coming in here confident. Yeah. So I know that you've learned a lot of Asian languages and you're fluent in two. So tell me about what you are doing when you are learning.

1:38:28How do you think about the material? And how do you think about your method on both those? Because I think that's really interesting. I've never seen someone do this with a Korean this fast. And I've had a lot of people try. So I want to give a heartfelt high five and thank you to the Korean people first. Because I will say part of the reason I've been so excited to do it, now I'll get into the method and what I'm doing, is people here are so supportive of it, and they're surprised, and the positive feedback is great. Which is not like France. It's not like France. I mean, there are some great people in France, but they're less supportive.

1:39:07In Japan, they're very supportive, right? Like, if you can introduce yourself, they're like, oh ,すごい ,すごい ,すごい, you know, oh, joe, joe. But I wasn't sure what to expect here, and it gives me the impression, and I don't know if this is accurate, but it gives me the impression that a lot of foreigners just don't try here because people are like, oh, like if I order sparkling water in Korean, they're just like, oh, wow, yeah. So the approach that I've taken, and part of the challenge in learning any language is you don't know which textbooks or sources are going to be good. Now, there are tools, and full disclosure, I invested in them very in their Series A, but Duolingo has become this incredible resource worldwide.

1:39:46So I did use some Duolingo. I then supplemented that I wanted to look at methods that I had applied to previous languages and there are a few methods that off the shelf other people can use and then I have my own kind of eclectic freestyle approach that I use with most languages there is a method called the Michelle Thomas method M-I-C-H-E-L Thomas method and Michelle Thomas way back in the day I think he taught languages to Barbra Streisand and all these celebrities. He was, if I'm remembering correctly, he was either born in Switzerland or Germany. He was in the military. I believe he was Jewish.

1:40:27Taught himself a million different languages. And I think he was in intelligence for a good period of time. And what I like about his method is that it is, for most people, the opposite of what they experienced in school that is very unpleasant for most people who are subjected to it. Most people who study languages at school, they're like, first of all, I'm never going to use what they're teaching me. Second of all, they're trying to get me to read tables of conjugations. It's so foreign, not just in the language, but just in the format, that A, it's unpleasant. B, people don't retain anything.

1:41:04A lot of people who are, say, American listening to this will have, in school, been required to study multiple years of Spanish, and nonetheless, they basically don't speak Spanish. They can ask where the bathroom is or say good day. That's about it. Michelle Thomas asks you to take no notes whatsoever. It is purely auditory. Interesting. Okay. And you listen to the method. No reading. No reading. Okay. Zero reading. Okay. There are some shortcomings associated with that, which is why I've added other things. But with the Michelle Thomas, I started, I read this cartoon, which is how to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes, which is really well done.

1:41:41And I'll put this in the, really well done. I'll put this in the show notes. then I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to read Korean and just to get the reading up to speed again in this particular case it's not true for Chinese it's certainly going to be harder for something like Arabic Greek you can do it pretty easily Cyrillic so Russian you could also learn to read and sound out in about an hour once you have that your goal is to get to the point where you can absorb things ambiently by walking around and seeing menus and so on on a trip like this. But with the Michelle Thomas method, it's similar to what some people will be familiar with as the Pimsleur method, where it introduces vocabulary, and then it basically functions almost like Anki.

1:42:30There's an app called Anki, which means rote memorization in Japanese, funny enough. Or I think it was SuperMemo way back in the day, which had some type of, I want to say it was like an algorithmically driven spaced repetition system. So when you're just about to forget a word, it prompts you to recall it. And it's very effective at helping you to retain this material, because it'll introduce something like, gong buhyo, like to study. And then they won't use it for like 30 minutes, and then it'll be like, I am going to study Korean today. And so you're using it in a different way, but the same - in a different context, but it's taking the same word that you're just about to forget.

1:43:11Yeah. And then it pops it back up to the top in your short-term memory. And so you would say, 오늘 한국말을 공부해요. And then later on, it'll be like, you already learned how to say, I studied Korean today. How would you say, I studied Korean yesterday? But, 하지만, I'm going to work today. 일까요? And then it'll be like, All right, you learned how to say, and I was very impressed with the way they did it. Michelle Thomas was like the Michael Jordan of language teaching. So I listened to his original recordings before he died for Spanish, German, Italian, and he was cantankerous as fuck, which I loved. Like he would get all pissed off at the students because the format is somebody is teaching to other students, and they're live.

1:44:01Like the other students are screwing up, and like sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. And you're the third student. So you have to try to answer, you answer before the other students and then the other students answer. And I listened to the Michelle Thomas original recordings and I was very skeptical that they could take his method and have another teacher use it with students. But the way they did it in this Korean is they had an American guy who lived in Korea, speaks Korean, and then they had a native speaker. And it was a combination. And I thought they did a very nice job.

1:44:33The one critique I would have is that in the original recordings, Michelle Thomas would say something like, how do you say, I want to eat? Quiero comer in Spanish, right? And then it'd go boop, and there'd be a beep. And that meant you're supposed to reply. There was a space. And then it would go back to the recording, and the other two students would answer. With the Korean, you have to hit pause a million times. Because if you just hear the other students repeat, you're training your recognition, but not your production. So I was using the Michelle Thomas method, and I only got through four or five of those before you arrived, and I knew I was going to be doing less sit-down studying.

1:45:12Yeah, yeah. I mean, you really haven't had any time. I haven't. So you're actually giving samples of correct grammar to Korean right now. I'm still impressed because you haven't really had much time to do this. No, I haven't had much time, but I will say also what I've tried very hard to do, and this is a question I get a lot from folks. there are many people who are better at learning languages than I am, but because it's not my full-time thing, like there's some people who are online and their brand is language learning. It's like, okay, well, you better be better than I am. And you have the space to do that because it's your job.

1:45:42And that's not a swipe. There are some amazing people out there who speak 10 plus languages and did it as adults. It's mind-blowing. The only way that I can maintain my other languages is if I tie them to the next language that I learn. So for instance, I used Spanish to then learn German by using One Piece, the comic book. One Piece has a gazillion volumes, so you can read it in Japanese. And then when I learned Spanish, I had the same volumes in Japanese and Spanish. So I'd try to read them in Spanish. The benefit being, it's almost all dialogue. if I couldn't figure it out before I went to the dictionary, I'd go back to the Japanese version.

1:46:23Panel for panel, it's the same thing. I'd be like, oh, okay, okay. And then I'm tying the Japanese to the Spanish. And then when I learned German a couple months later, which I've totally forgotten, unfortunately, German's gone. So sorry about that, guys. It's too, it's too, but I've forgotten it all. Then I used the Spanish one piece to learn the German one piece. This is a Japanese manga comic book that is legendary. It's the highest grossing franchise out of Japan as far as manga go, above Dragon Ball Z and all of those. And with the Korean, I knew reading was the key on luck. Reading was number one.

1:47:01The second piece was that I had to tie it to something else I already knew, and I did that with Japanese and Korean. A lot of strong similarities. Strong similarities. Even though they wouldn't admit it. No, exactly. This is where I have to be so careful because now I'm coming here and I can know the history, but I'm like, shit, I don't want to piss people off. You know what's really interesting is a lot of Koreans speak Japanese. Yeah, yeah. Very well. Yeah, you have a lot of tarot card reading places here, which I did not expect at all. And a lot of them say that they can also do the readings in Japanese.

1:47:35I've seen a number of signs. That's probably because there are a lot of Japanese tourists. Oh, for sure. A lot of Japanese women love coming for tour-guided trips in Korea, going to the locations in the storyline of Korean dramas and movies. Korean dramas. It's like the Americans who go to Dubrovnik or wherever to see the Game of Thrones places. No, it's a whole travel tourist sector. Wow. And it's not just Japanese. It's other Asian groups and Europeans. Actually, here's a funny, interesting fact. Someone from Naver, which is one of the big public internet companies here, kind of like Yahoo or Google.

1:48:18Side note, if you think you're going to use Google Maps here, you're not. You're going to have to download Naver Maps. Naver or Kakao Maps, yeah. So the super app thing is real here, by the way. What Elon wants to do with Twitter has only been done really in Asia and maybe Latin America, right? You're talking like a WeChat type of thing? Yeah. You can do everything in one app, yeah. So someone from Naver told me in a meeting that K-pop is so big and all the different, like the digital artwork and media and content and all the things that you can buy and consume around that type of artist. I think about all the merch, digital merch.

1:48:55Said France is actually a larger market than the domestic market. Wow. By dollars. And I said, are you sure? Do you mean by some other metric, some other thing? I said, no, by gross dollars, we do better with all of the licensed partnered content around K-pop bands and artists in France than we do in Korea. So that might be just their business around K-pop, digital content. But it is interesting that Korea is almost wholly across the board, to your point about Netflix, to your point about what to learn. It is an export society. It is an export economy. They are shipping things like steel. They are shipping things like chips, wireless smartphones.

1:49:45They're now starting to ship software in marketplaces. They're moving out, and they're also in that other side of soft power. They're exporting movies, books, TV series, music, fashion, beauty. Korean beauty products are growing like wildfire, not only in the US, where that's understandable because you have a diaspora Korean American group and Asian American, but Europe, where French and Swiss beauty, that's the stronghold of the Eurocentric beauty, concepts of beauty. Korean products are becoming luxury products there next to the LVMH and the caring group products, right? So I think if there's anything to learn from that export mindset, I mean, you mentioned about how you felt like the book publishing and the design, there's bakeries that are, and this is really following suit of what Japan did over the last 40 or 50 years.

1:50:49It was a contract manufacturing economy that became an original OEM design economy. They leveraged what they had learned and they did better. Like the story of Japanese whiskey is incredible, right? They sent one guy to go learn from the masters in Scotland, and he came back and started Suntory, right? It's wild. And I think a lot of that was learned by Koreans, and they started learning that in heavy industry. The main street in Gangnam is called Teheran-no. Okay, so just a quick footnote for people. So if you remember, that's another breakthrough moment, kind of like cereal. Gangnam style. That music video passed a billion views and people were like, what the hell is going on?

1:51:35Gangnam style. Total breakthrough moment for Korean culture. Yeah. As an export. And Gangnam is a neighborhood. Yeah. Gangnam is the most modern district in Seoul. It's the newest modern area of office buildings. We went there the other day. A lot of LED walls and fancy stores, things like that. It's the new Seoul. Korea has shifted from an economy of contract manufacturing. Samsung was a contract manufacturer for Japanese companies, electronics companies, as well as having all these other businesses in the larger conglomerate. But in the beginning, a lot of this was shipping, import, export, heavy industry, things like that.

1:52:18And then there were contract manufacturers for Sony. Sony was originally a contract manufacturer for American consumer electronics companies. So there was a transition. But there was a moment in Korean history where the export of labor, this skilled industrial labor, was what helped bring revenue and country alliances to Korea, which was a very poor country at the time. So the main road in Gangnam is called Teheran-no. and the reason why it's called Teheran though is that Iran when it was a capitalist liberal country in the 70s and the 60s too hired a lot of Korean workforce so did Saudi Arabia and other countries to come be the skilled laborer in other countries Koreans were the miners in Germany they got exported there to be the miners because no one domestically wanted to be a minor because you had a high likelihood of death emphysema.

1:53:22So the reason why it's called Teherano is that it's in tribute to their friends in Iran who gave them all this economic uplift through labor and revenue, and they named it after Tehran. Wow. And so that's why it's called Teherano. And if you look at the history of Korea, it was we will export our men and our women as nurses and are men as hard labor in these industrial roles. And then it was shipping, then it was steel, and then they moved up the pyramid in terms of becoming a service economy into a manufacturing economy, and then to a knowledge worker service economy, right? And they started creating original chip designs, working on broadband and being the leaders in broadband, both wireless and fiber broadband.

1:54:16I was speaking with one of the leading wireless telcos here, and they're not like AT &T and Verizon back home. They are like the big tech companies that have software. News telling me that Singtel and other regional wireless companies, mobile carriers in Asia, often come to them to ask them about the newest technology, how they should approach their own strategies around this, around LTE, 5G, and now around AI. And so wireless telecom companies here are building their own language models. Yeah, that's wild. Which you would never expect AT &T and Verizon to go compete with OpenAI. Yeah. And so there is this accelerated sense of we must achieve something tomorrow because we're already behind.

1:55:03And that is a very Korean mentality. What we were talking about with Han and Jang, I'm going to try to bring this all together in a theory, in a grand theory. But this grand theory is also that tomorrow is not guaranteed for South Koreans. There's a well-understood tension with North Korea that at any moment, this could all be over. I don't truly understand it because I'm an American. I live in California. But my parents, the older generation, they feel it. They talk about it. They obsess over it. If you look at newscasts, you look at books, you look at YouTube, this is like the hot topic. what to do about this?

1:55:43How do we reunify? Or do we not? And I think because tomorrow is not guaranteed, they're living in the moment to do exactly what they want as fast as possible with an impatience that expresses itself as so industrious, so productive. Look at them cranking out such a small country, cranking out films that are winning a Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d 'Or there, Oscars here, largest, most successful artists, music artists in the world, most high growth cosmetic beauty brands. largest mobile smartphone manufacturer other than Apple. Why is this coming from the small country? My opinion on this, and people can disagree and many, many would, is that they are designed in their mindset and raised with, if you don't do it now, you may never have a chance to do it again later.

1:56:36And so they are living in the moment, knowing that 17 miles away or millions of soldiers and artillery and missiles pointed at them. I'm glad you brought up the 17 miles away because in most people's mind, at least I shouldn't say most, what a ridiculous statement. In my mind and in the minds of certainly many of my friends, Seoul as this huge cosmopolitan city exists far away from North Korea. No, it is not. It is not far away. It is right there. It's very close. Well, frame it in terms that people can understand. it is closer than San Francisco is to San Jose. That's 28 miles. Yeah. Substantially closer.

1:57:19And so this living in the moment or achieving for just tomorrow, this impatience, that to me is this Han that's looming in the background of everyone's mind. And this is angst about upward mobility and being able to achieve that pushes Koreans out in the diaspora to become gyopo because they can't do it here because the system won't allow it. It's kinetic and it's sometimes ugly and painful, but it's kinetic and it's the craziest thing. And when people come here, even me, for me, like who understands this somewhat, and I come in as a half insider, half outsider, I get this sense and it's very emotional for me actually.

1:57:58Like in the US, I feel very stoic about all that's happening. I feel like I was raised in that. But when I come back here, It's like I'm going into this other dimension where everyone here is moving twice as fast. It's like the feeling like when you go to New York, the physical kinetic aspect of what's happening there. You're like, wow, LA people are moving so slowly, physically moving slowly. And in New York, you're like, you feel tired after like a couple of days in Manhattan. You come to Korea, I think only New Yorkers can really understand living in Seoul because you have to move fast. It's kinetic.

1:58:33It is hyperkinetic. and I think people should visit, man. I really do. I think people should visit and learn some Korean. It's such a beautiful language. The writing, especially if you've only ever read Romanized alphabet, what a fun thing to stretch your brain and learn some Korean. Because it's so, as you said, regular. Once you have it, you have it. It's not like English where you can have fish, like pho is F-I-S-H, and then enough is O-U-F. same sound O-U-G-H it's like oh my god this language it's a mess it's a complete mess and Korean is super regular and what I would say also about language just as an addendum to what we're talking about is if you learn 10 sentences anybody can learn 10 sentences anybody it will fundamentally change your experience in a country full stop people will respond to you differently you will also be a better guest in that country and And it's fun.

1:59:34And you can learn 10 sentences. It's not that hard. And there's got to be stuff. For instance, I love sparkling water. I know every day I'm going to ask for sparkling water. So it's like, learn how to ask for sparkling water. And then every time I get an omelet, it's like, oh, yeah, there's no salt and pepper. Why is there no salt and pepper in this country? And I'm like, I know I'm going to have to ask for at least salt. It's like, learn how to say salt. And there are a couple of other just fun tips for folks. You can come up with a couple of, because you're going to be entertaining. as a foreigner trying to learn a foreign language like Korean.

2:00:06So you need to learn a couple of things that are off-menu. Because where is the bathroom is on-menu. They would expect that's something you would learn. Well, asking for food, so what's been your thought about Korean food so far? I mean, you've had Korean food in the US, or that version of it. So what do you think so far? Oh man, Korean food is incredible. Let's give a couple, just on the language thing, I'll wrap it up real fast, which is learn a couple of phrases that are kind of funny. So for instance, in almost any language, you can learn to say something like long time no see, which by the way, in English, is borrowed directly from Chinese.

2:00:39How do you see? Long time no see. But you can, you know, like in Japanese or here, like use a really polite form. Wow, that was good. Oh, thanks. And people are like, what? I'm like, I'm just kidding. It's not that long. And people get a good laugh out of it. So you can learn a couple of things like that or like, you know, like just like, no rush. Take it easy. Like do it slowly. So learn a couple of things like that and you'll just have a better time. Korean food is fucking amazing. It's so good. It's so good. And I did have a funny experience, so I'll be honest. I have not had much Korean barbecue, but I wanted to, of course, have Korean barbecue.

2:01:18And went out to Korean barbecue and there were a bunch of side dishes. And I started like eating the salad because it looked like an appetizer. The guys were like, that's not an appetizer. it's a side dish that you eat when the beef comes out I was like oh okay great so the beef comes out and number one and it was kalbi I'm not sure Korean barbecue short rib it wasn't short rib it was different cuts it wasn't short rib in this case it wasn't kalbi however the meat comes out and I was like oh because in Japan it's like if you have meat you have rice and I was like oh we're going to eat rice with it and they're like well no you kind of have the rice like a dessert and I was like huh Okay.

2:02:00Never would have guessed that. So you have the rice at the end, at least we did. I'm two for two at this now. And had some, what was it? It was like fermented soybean soup towards the end. But another aspect that I had never run into, and this leads to a couple of open questions for me, is I think it was sesame oil. Yeah. And one of the guys with me was like, yeah, this is kind of our olive oil. Yeah. We dipped the beef into the sesame oil, which I'd never done before. And I was like, okay. The sesame oil was sort of like a condiment, right? It was like how you dip bread. And so you eat this. It's basically just all meat all the time for a section.

2:02:37You have a little bit of kimchi, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And what I loved was also, in this particular case, and I think this is not true everywhere, but they were using charcoal instead of just, say, some kind of burner with gas. and the heat was so high that these thick cuts were cooking pretty much completely within a handful of minutes yeah the other thing unique in my experience with korea versus anywhere i've been in east asia even central asia is you guys use scissors a lot scissors for me scissors for cutting stuff yeah and by the way that annoys my wife so much because i will just i cook a lot of barbecue I'm a self-professed grill master for my family.

2:03:27I have meat scissors. And I'm constantly clipping. Yeah, why the hell would you use a knife? It makes so much sense. Have you seen the Korean meat scissors that have the bottle cap opener for beer? Oh, that's genius. Right in the middle? That makes all the sense in the world. Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world. So Korean barbecue has been amazing. And I would say I was surprised, and I shouldn't be, but I came in blank slate, right? And I really didn't know what I was going to experience here. But if you go to where you took me, for instance, people hear the word Hyundai and they think car.

2:04:03Yeah. Like low-end car. Yeah. But if you go to the Hyundai department store, which is super luxe, super deluxe, beautiful. And trust me, I'm not a department store guy. But this is like the most beautiful department store I've ever been in. and the entire basement, which is like a city, is this food court, but food court is a bullshit term for what this is. It is just this never-ending sea of culinary delights of every variety. And the ice cream, the croissants, the pastries, Korea really knows how to do food. The food is spectacular. And I think that that is actually the most important part of Korean soft power.

2:04:54If we're talking about this as an export economy, it is the first thing that people loved, even before K-pop. Food. There's not one person that I've taken to Korean barbecue for the first time that hasn't said, I cannot believe I've never eaten this before. Yeah. This is incredible. I'll give you a funny story about Austin, your current city. back in 2011. I was down there for South by Southwest. My startup has just launched. It was a music app startup. And a friend from Food & Wine magazine asked me if I wanted to be a contestant in a barbecue sauce contest in Austin as part of South by Southwest.

2:05:33I said, sure. I said, what do I need to do? Well, you need to go out and get your own materials at the grocery store. And then we're going to compete and we're going to grill. Everyone's going to be around there. There's going to be a whole audience and it's going to be an audience participation and vote. So I was like, I only know how to cook one type of barbecue, but I'll try. So I basically did an American barbecue recipe and I took a Korean barbecue recipe, which my mother taught me. And I knew like the back of my hand, I could do that in my sleep. So I got soy sauce, I got sesame oil. I got pears.

2:06:05I got like Bartlett pears because they didn't have the Asian pears in Austin. And then brown sugar, Coca-Cola. Wow, Coca-Cola. Garlic, sesame seeds, everything. And I made a Korean barbecue marinade. And then I put in the tomatoes. And I got some molasses. Put that in there. And I made this whole big pot. And I put some onions in there, too, just to give it a little bit more kick. And I put in a pot. I didn't describe it to anyone. So I made a Korean barbecue marinade in a Texas style. And put in this big pot. and I had a friend there, Michael Galpert, who was from New York at the time. He was watching me do this whole thing.

2:06:44Everyone else had done some sort of like Carolina barbecue or Memphis barbecue. And you'd go up and you'd take these grilled chicken drumsticks and these baby back ribs that were unsauced and unseasoned, but grilled, and people would go try it. And everyone loved it. My pot, the whole thing was like whose pot would get lower first. And everyone said, what's in that? I said, soy sauce. sesame oil, garlic, right? I said, I'm sorry, I don't have any kimchi for you, but it would just top it off. And so I really feel like of all the soft power things, of all the exports, cultural exports, Korean food is the most important one.

2:07:26Oh, that's incredible. Look, I will not be that overly proud Korean, Korean-American and say, this is better than everyone else. I will say that Korean food is the best food on the planet. I've tried everything I love Japanese food I love Mexican food I love Italian food French food obviously and fine dining but and you know I think Korean food is the original export other than the skilled labor from the 60s and 70s and whenever you see a Korean restaurant if you go there this is like learning Korean when you go to Seoul when you visit Seoul if you find a Korean restaurant in your town wherever you are go up to them and practice your Korean, and say, ask them, what would you eat?

2:08:11You can speak English to them, it's fine. But say, what would you eat? And say, I heard that Koreans have great stews. Do you have a stew? Sundubu Jigae. Denjang Jigae. Jigae. And these stews, Korean food is comfort food. Yeah. There are a lot of people trying to make upscale food, and there are people like Corey Lee at Bennu in San Francisco and David Chang at Mokufuku that have perfected an upscale version of Korean food. But Korean food is comfort food. It's home cooking food. We had food the other day and I was like, gotta eat the stuff that's like, this is a poor country's food and that's the best stuff.

2:08:47The other stuff is great. So anyways, I wanted to give kudos to the original Korean export that everyone loves, which is Korean barbecue. Korean barbecue and Korean food. And the stews. I didn't expect to be broadsided by the stews. they're so delicious. And fair warning, it can get pretty spicy. Korean food can get pretty spicy. It can get murky. It can get murky. Unless you're Korean, or unless you've looked at the recipe and the preparation, you kind of don't know what's in there. Murky. And you can definitely earn points also just by speaking a little bit of Korean. You can just say like, 한국 음식 아주 좋아요 you get a thousand points of credit from any Korean if you try to speak the language they love it it'll smooth all rough edges on anything that you're talking about with them if you try just a word just a word or two right thank you I guess it's delicious so you can say if you want to say it's really good or very good 아주 맛있어요.

2:10:02아주 맛있어요. 참. 자주 or 참. Oh, 참 is a good one. Or 굉장히. 굉장히. Yeah, that's like a lot. 굉장히 맛있어요. And when you're eating, if you don't finish it, that's a silent way of saying it wasn't good. I learned this the hard way going to, I flew, this is of course, this is what I do. I flew to LA, then went to San Diego because I wanted to train with a Korean archery coach. Because there are a couple things I'll just mention in passing. We got to talk about why the sports that Koreans are particularly good at. Yeah, I mean, for a long time, maybe even still, breakdancing, Koreans were many levels above everybody else.

2:10:48I mean, they were by far the best in the world. Archery, by far the best in the world. Somebody can fact check this, but I think the women's archery gold medal has been taken by Koreans for every Olympics since the Koreans started competing. I actually know a lot about why that's the case on the archery side, because it's like systematized at every level of education. And it's a very big deal. But I went out to, he was like, you and me, we're going to have dinner. And that's not really the thing you say no to. So I'm like, of course, we're going to have dinner. So I go out to Korean barbecue and he ordered so much food.

2:11:28I mean, I'm 170 now. I used to be at my highest and I wasn't fat, 220. Like I can eat. And he buried me in food. But then he said to me, like, I still had all this food in front of me. And he's like, yeah, you can't leave that. Basically, you got to eat that. I was like, okay. Yeah, that's like, yeah. He's like, yeah, you can't leave rice. Take off your shoes, bow, say the food is good, finish your plate and bowl, and all is good. Everything's good. Everything's great. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Bek Namjoon film. Oh, yeah. Just talking a little bit about film. We were at Sundance together in Utah.

2:12:11Park City. Great city. Great place. Best time to go skiing or snowboarding is during Sundance. Because nobody's skiing. They're all at the festival, and then the locals don't want to get anywhere near the place. That's right. Because it's mayhem. We premiered our documentary on... Just to be clear, our is not me and Steve's. Oh, no, sorry. The collective we are our is the great director and team, including Steve Yoon, actor, but also executive producer on this film with me. And you came to that. But I would love to hear some of your thoughts on this, because he is the most famous Korean artist.

2:12:48Well, why don't you tell people the title? The title of the documentary of this Korean artist is Moon is the Oldest TV. It's on Apple, and it'll be on Netflix probably by the time this podcast comes out, which will be great. And the quick background, the high-level background is Namjoon Park, or in Korean we would say Baek Namjoon, because we say the last name first. Baek Namjoon is the most famous Korean artist of the 20th century, was the father of digital and video art. So whenever you see TVs all set up in an array like a human. The coordinate displays. Yeah. And he did the TV Buddha, which is probably his most famous work, with a camera constantly taking video on a cathode ray two of a sitting Buddha statue.

2:13:36And the Buddha's looking at himself. And he coined the term information superhighway and kind of predicted social media. He is well regarded in the art world, but not really known outside, which is kind of interesting. So it was a film out of passion for his story. And you got to see it. So I would love to hear kind of you coming in without knowing. I don't think you knew about him. Yeah, I knew very little about him. I mean, really just what you had told me. And I really enjoyed the window into his personal story, his creative process, his insanity on some level, in the sense that he was highly experimental.

2:14:18also and this is true for so many artists and innovators deeply tortured might be too strong a word but I went through some very difficult times had very little money at points I remember the footage of his one of his apartments just caving in like water coming through the ceilings and the difficulty in forging a path and experimenting when you're not getting a lot of applause from any majority whatsoever and how incredibly trying that is because it's one thing to be say an entrepreneur in silicon valley in a culture where the risk taker is lionized and even failure on some level and many levels is accepted where you'll be applauded for trying versus what he was doing, which is true, I think, for most people in most cultures and most times, which is really operating at the fringe with other people who are doing this type of experimentation, not just artists, but also technologists, and taking the path less traveled, which is really, really painful at times, and in many instances, not financially rewarding.

2:15:44So I was just impressed with his tenacity. And he's also just such a character. And I said this to you the other day, but one of my favorite lines was, Nam Choonpike spoke many languages, none of them well. He spoke a lot of languages, but they were all broken. He spoke pike-ish. He spoke pike-ish. And I found that so endearing, real endearing guy as well. Well, his story is really interesting. He is one of those breakthrough moments for Korean culture and society in that he was the only internationally known artist in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even into the 2000s. And then he passed away in that decade.

2:16:28He was the ambassador or the representative. As crazy as he might have seemed to everyone, that in the art world, he was appreciated, admired, and followed for that. And it's very un-Korean for that time period. You have to remember that at that time period, Korea was under essentially a dictatorial, a somewhat elected administration. And to clarify for folks also, I mean, he was outside of, he was in Germany, he was in the US. He was part of the diaspora. Yeah, he was part of the diaspora. If he had done what he was doing in Korea, he would have been censored. It was too weird. It was too out there.

2:17:07It was too counter-political on all respects. And even when he visited, you saw that footage. He was nervous that he would not be able to leave Korea and that he would get locked up. Yeah, when he visited much later. Right. But they embraced him, which is really interesting because if he had done all that here, he would have been shut down. But the fact that he did it out in the world and became well-known and did these live broadcasts that ended up looking like the future YouTube variety show. I forgot about some of those. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, in the show notes, you got to put a link to this.

2:17:44Yeah. Well, there's a free streaming link, I think, somewhere. So it won't be about like a commercial thing. But he became such a popular figure in Korea despite doing that out there. And it was something that if he had done it here, it would have been panned, right? Yeah. And maybe censored, right? And I think that that is part of that Han. he struggled with mental health yeah big time with relationships with his own art and his own identity and failure and in a weird way it's sort of a he represented the unexpected hero to a lot of artists and thinkers of the time there was a thing in korean music before k-pop there was an extremely underground small but amazing jazz and rock scene especially psych rock there was a band called high five and high six what is that i mean the best version of in agada davida is an obscure korean psych rock band what is psych rock this is a genre that i'm not familiar with psych rock is psychedelic rock right oh i got it okay and psychological rock in the 60s and 70s when that was popular in the US.

2:18:57Yeah. Koreans were doing that. But here's the thing. Government censors back then would shut down anything that looked a little - Suspect. Edgy and, yeah, counter to the - Counterculture. Yeah, represented counterculture at the time. So they would put out these album covers on the LPs that looked like flowers and blue sky and clouds and just really weird, fluffy covers. But the music inside was serious. And it was trippy. It was intense. So it was like Little House on the Prairie on the front and then Rammstein on the inside. It's kind of, yeah. It's like, judge this book by its cover, please.

2:19:42Because inside is some really like, you know. Subversive stuff. Not only subversive, but they were dancing to this, enjoying this inside of small clubs and bars and apartments, because this couldn't be a thing that you could do in a big concert hall. The government censors are there, right? Yeah. So I want to call out that the diaspora is really important to a lot of what's happened too. So if you look at a lot of K-pop, a lot of K-pop people are coming back from the US and coming back from other countries where they've learned something, another culture. and they're bringing it back and they're adding to it here.

2:20:21So a lot of the dance groups, I actually sponsored the first world B-Boy championships called R16 in Seoul in 2008. No kidding. Yeah. Didn't know that. And all the best B-Boy crews from around the world, France, it was all country-based, like in Olympics, it's like France versus Japan, US versus Korea, right? And everyone convened in Seoul, outskirts of Seoul, and it was government-supported, which is the craziest thing and it was an incredible moment but it was very clear that dance culture here which is very strong today came from the korean gyopo that had come back they brought it from new york they brought it from la and they brought it back and improved it yeah and cooking the same thing there's a lot of chefs that have come back from the u.s or france or UK, come back to Seoul.

2:21:17So there's this export, but then there's also this reverse immigration happening where they're coming back. So it's a really exciting time to be in Seoul. Startups are rising, and that's now a new career option. There's still huge problems with North and South Korea, the tension and the geopolitical fear and anxiety that happens. But there's something really dynamic, and it feels like we don't know how long this will last. Not just because of the danger of geopolitical stuff, but also because of, does it get dialed in like Tokyo one day? And it becomes everything gets really locked in, defined, and immovable.

2:21:59Just in terms of stasis. Yeah. Yeah. And right now, it feels really transitional. Yeah. I mean, it feels to me, at least, and look, I've only been here five days, so what do I know? But I pay a lot of attention to first impressions and it just has a very alive feeling to it. It has, similar to the way that, in a sense, like the way that Austin feels right now, has like an adolescent growth feeling to it. There's a lot of energy and there's a lot of velocity. There's many things being built. many, at least I'm speaking about Austin now, but like restaurants being open, companies being started, people moving companies there, lots of people moving there for the cultural stuff.

2:22:45It has a feeling of being pregnant with possibilities, which is the vibe that I get here walking through these neighborhoods. I'm like, okay, yeah, I bet if I come back here in three, five years, like - Totally different. 70 % of these stores will have changed. I mean, there'll be a lot of differences. The director, Amanda Kim, of the documentary, the Damjoon Peck documentary, She lived in New York and she lives in Paris now. We did a premiere screening here and she said that it was so emotional, even though she hasn't spent a lot of time in Korea, so emotional to have been the director to present to Koreans this film about the most important artist of all Korean people in the modern era, to present that back.

2:23:28And she said it was just not only a mind-blowing experience for her as a director, but as a Korean gyopo coming back to present that. And so this is something that I think a lot of, you know, any of your listeners who are Korean American or Asian American or even from India and thinking about that reverse brain drain, as they call it. Yeah, the cycle, like the cycling back, the feedback loop. It's so important. The one thing, we were eating mandu the other day. Mandu is a Mongolian word. That's a Mongolian word. China uses, certain parts of China use mandu. Korea uses mandu. Turkey uses mandu.

2:24:10Pakistan uses mandu. Food is the original spice. The food. Carried by Mongolians, Romans. It's the original cultural export. Yeah. Korean food, Korean film, Korean music, Korean beauty, all of this is the only thing that will keep Korea alive in perpetuity. This could all be gone. It's too small of a country, too small of a population, on too tenuous of a peninsula, literally in the geographic center of all the tension in the region. So that export, that pollen, that is the existence, right? Yeah, totally. And so it's on the concept of whether it's what's happening right now with the technology industry here, arts, food, like all of that, it feels really like it's peaking.

2:25:10There's this K wave across all these things. And I can't think of a more exciting time to be here than literally right now. Yeah. And for the next five, 10 years, if I didn't have a family that's in schools and a fund that is headquartered in San Francisco, this would be the best place definitely in Asia. It's like groaning and squeaking and screaming. Bursting at the seams. Yeah, I really encourage people to check it out. And also, to paint a picture, we're sitting in this hotel room looking out, beautiful sunny day, which is crazy because it was snowing earlier. You were saying as soon as you think you got it figured out, like Korean weather really fucks with you.

2:25:52It's all over the place, but it's this beautiful sunny day right now. And there's this gorgeous mountain range right outside the window. And so it has this feeling of, reminds me in a sense of, say, a Salt Lake City where you have the Wasatch and this beautiful range, which I also did not expect. And it totally changes the feeling in the city, knowing that you can look up, at least in this neighborhood, and see these mountains. It's a stunning city. And hopefully this puts it on the map for some people as a possibility for visiting. I will also say a huge difference experientially for a native English speaker here, say, compared to Japan.

2:26:38All due respect to Japan. I love Japan. I've spent a ton of time there. But the English level is higher here. So it's easier to get around and interact and make requests and solve problems and so on. So that is also a huge benefit to the international community. is I've just found it much easier to because my Korean, as hard as I might try in a handful of days, still pretty limited. So I do need to lean on the English. Anything else that we should cover before we wind to a close? Anything else you'd like to say before we land the plane? I think we're good. What do you think? I think we're good.

2:27:21I think we're good, man. Thanks for having me. Oh, so fun. It's been a fun week. it's been a great week yeah we've covered a lot with a short amount of time but still some more to come yeah we've got some more adventure to do and to everybody listening as always i'll put links to everything that we can pull from this conversation links to everything we discussed in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast and also as always until next time be just a bit nicer a bit kinder than is necessary, not just to other people, but to yourself. And 감사합니다. Thanks. Thank you. Listening.

2:28:21It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

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