#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

Brought to you by Nordic Naturals https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ Ultimate Omega fish oil, GiveWell.org http://givewell.org/ charity research and effective giving, and Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim high-yield savings account. Steve Jang (@stevejang https://twitter.com/stevejang?s=20) is the founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures https://kindredventures.com/, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. He is also a longtime friend and one of the founder-now-investor generation of VCs that arose out of the last technology cycle. Steve is one of the top 100 venture capital investors in the world, according to Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors, and was ranked #45 in 2023. He is also a Korean-American, a gyopo, who is deeply invested and involved in both the technological and cultural worlds in the US and Asia. Previously, Steve was an early advisor to, and angel investor in, Uber, and then an early-stage investor in Coinbase, Postmates, Poshmark, Tonal, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Humane, the AI device platform. He helped Uber, Coinbase, and Blue Bottle Coffee, among others, to expand into Korea and Japan. As an entrepreneur, Steve co-founded companies in the consumer internet, mobile, and crypto space. In the film and music world, he is an executive producer, and his most recent film is Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV https://www.amazon.com/Nam-June-Paik-Moon-Oldest/dp/B0B759LD2J/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which tells the story of the greatest Korean artist, and father of digital video art, and which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. His next film is a documentary about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/tim! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. 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Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor-recommended Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. Ultimate Omega is made exclusively from 100% wild-caught sardines and anchovies. It’s incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. All Nordic Naturals’ fish-oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form—the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Go to Nordic.com and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U. S. https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order of Ultimate Omega. * This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell.org https://www.givewell.org/! For over ten years, GiveWell.org https://www.givewell.org/ has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor recommended, and in fact, this brand was recommended to me by one of my doctors, Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula. So the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. So I have been taking Ultimate Omega for the last two months or so,

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  and this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me. And it's actually with other brands induced some nausea after a few days. And Ultimate Omega has been as clean as a whistle. I've had no issues whatsoever. And if you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate, I ended up alternating two products. And that is number one, the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula, and also the Algae Omega, which is plant-based EPA and DHA. That's also from Nordic Naturals. So I end up getting both of those products, and it has improved my recovery from workouts. It's improved my sleep. It has improved my mood. And I know that because I pulled out a lot of other variables. In any case, back to the read.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  All Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form, the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Their Ultimate Omega Fish Oil is offered in soft gels, liquid, and zero sugar gummies. Nordic Naturals fish oils are Friend of the Sea certified and sustainably made in a zero-waste facility powered by biofuel. They're also non-GMO and third-party tested, surpassing the strictest international standards for purity and freshness. Want proof? You can visit their website, where they provide certificates of analysis for every one of their products. So go to Nordic.com, N-O-R-D-I-C, Nordic.com, and discover why Nordic Naturals is the number Number one selling omega-3 brand in the US.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  And while you're there, use promo code TIM, T I M, for 20% off of your order. That's N O R D I C dot com and code TIM for 20% off of the fish oil with no fishy aftertaste. All upside, no downside. Try it out.

• 2:27Speaker 01

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• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  GiveWell does not take a cut. If you've never donated through GiveWell before, definitely check it out. You should absolutely take a look at it. You can have your donation also matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as Long as matching funds last. So to claim your match and to learn more, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss Show at checkout. Make sure that they know you heard about GiveWell from the Tim Ferriss Show to get your donation matched. One more time, that's give well, G I V E W E L L, givewell.org to learn more or donate.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Now would be the time.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Annyeonghaseyo. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is a bit of an anomaly, a bit of a highlight for me. It deviates from the usual format. I am interviewing a world-class performer, in this case, my good friend Steve Jang, who is one of those people, one of those tech founders and entrepreneurs and investors, who seems to be able to look around corners, to see things before they go mainstream. And he has an impeccable record, but in this particular sit-down, we are in person in Seoul, South Korea.

• 5:45Tim Ferriss?

  I had wanted to visit Korea for 20-plus years and had never pulled the trigger, finally did. I always wanted to go with a friend who could show me around, and Steve Jang is such a person. And Korea exceeded every expectation on every level, in every dimension. It really blew my mind. And so I wanted to do an episode discussing all things Korea. So in this conversation, we talk about the K-Wave, that is, the exploding soft power of Korea, which is not accidental, by the way, the poverty-to-power playbook, so to speak. How did they go from, I don't want to say a backwater, but a very handicapped, economically handicapped country?

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  To being an incredible export economy with a global presence, not just in entertainment, but in hardware, in all sorts of technology, et cetera. Number of concepts like Han, must see movies and much more. And before we dive into Steve's bio, I wanted to share his top must see Korean movies. So I'm just going to list them out, give you some Scooby snacks in the very beginning. Here we go. Old Boy, Wailing, that's W A I L I N G. So Old Boy, Wailing, The Handmaiden, Memories of Murder, Parasite, many of you will have seen this, and this comes up in the conversation, Burning, Minari, M I N A R I, Broker, which is from 2022,

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  and Joint Security Area. Alright, so who is Steve Jang? You can find him on Twitter at Steve Jang, J A N G. Steve is the founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. He is one of the founder, now investor generation of VCs that arose out of the last technology cycle. And he and I have been advisors to a lot of the same companies, invested in a lot of the same companies. He is very, very good at what he does. Steve is one of the top 100 venture capital investors in the world, according to the Forbes Midas list of top venture capital investors, and was ranked number 45 in 2023. He's also a Korean American, a Gyo Po, we'll explain what Gyo Po is, who is

• 7:57Tim Ferriss?

  deeply invested and involved in both the technological and cultural worlds in the US and Asia. He is often a bridge. Previously, Steve was an early advisor to and angel investor in Uber, and then an early-stage investor in some names you might recognize, Coinbase, Postmates, Poshmark, Tonal, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Humane, the AI device platform that is getting a lot of buzz right now, in fact. He helped Uber, Coinbase, and Blue Bottle Coffee, among others, to expand into Korea and Japan. He is very familiar with both places. As an entrepreneur, Steve co-founded companies in the consumer, internet, mobile, and crypto space. And on top of all of that, in the film and music world, he is an executive producer. His most recent film is

• 8:40Tim Ferriss?

  A documentary Nam Jun Pyeong, Moon is the Oldest TV, which tells the story of the greatest Korean artist and father of digital video art, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. His next film is a documentary about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. You can find Steve on Twitter, as I mentioned, at SteveJang. You can find Kindred Ventures at kindredventures.com. And you can find Steve on LinkedIn at SteveJang1. And now, without further ado, thanks for your patience, folks. Please enjoy this very wide-ranging conversation that I loved, held live in person in Seoul, South Korea.

• 9:23Tim Ferriss?

  So, Steve Jang, nice to see you, sir. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So, talk to me.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to the

• 9:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'm thrilled to be here because I've wanted to visit Korea for 20-plus years. It's wild that you haven't been here yet. I've been in the Seoul Airport multiple times en route to Japan. Doesn't count. Doesn't count. Doesn't count. And then I was on a flight, as I often am, and I watched a few things. I watched the movie Past Lives, which is excellent movie. Strongly recommend. Amazing. And then watched, since I was sort of getting tapped for the Korea high, after watching that movie, I went to a K-pop documentary, which was also in the in-flight menu. Very well done. And as soon as I got off the flight, I think that's when I text you and I was like, Steve, when are you taking me to Korea? And you're like, actually, I'm gonna be in Korea.

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And that is how I pulled the trigger, bought a ticket, and we find ourselves here. And Seoul has exceeded, and the Korean people and the Korean language on all levels have exceeded my expectations. And the question that kept popping into my mind is, why aren't more people coming here? Why aren't more people talking about Seoul in the same way that people talk about Tokyo, for instance? Why don't we just maybe start there and we'll see where things go? It's really because of that K-Wave that you described.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Has happened recently.

• 10:55Tim Ferriss?

  Very recent.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I think people have been fascinated by going to Japan and going to onsen in Kyoto and Tokyo and experiencing all that for three, four decades now.

• 11:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  And it's become a favorite for people who love eastern culture. They love design, food in Tokyo and Kyoto are amazing, right? And then Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong have been on the map for a century. Korea was a developing country. You have to remember that from 1905 to 1945, it was annexed and colonized by Japan.

• 11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  And so it was a poor country. It was in an oppressed state. So it wasn't a place that you would want to visit.

• 11:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  As an outsider. And then the Korean War happens and the country is destroyed and split into two. Again, not something you want to visit, but it had the fastest rate of economic growth of any country across three decades after that. And so what happened there is that it was an industrial country that was still rough, that was still trying to rebuild. And again, not a place that you would go for tourism, not a place that you would go to experience culture. But that really changed in the eighties. You started to see Korean movies and music become something that was very unique and very Korean and not something that was sort of formulaic from another country.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And so I think in the nineties is when K-pop really started to become a thing and expand outward. And there was a diaspora happening of Korean immigrants going outward, especially to the US, but also for decades going into the Middle East because of industrial jobs and the labor needs of those countries. South America has one of the largest Korean diaspora populations. You go to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, there's a lot of Koreans in South America. And then in Europe, France and the UK or in Germany were also landing spots. So all of this is happening more recently in time.

• 12:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the main actor or one of the main actors, Korean actors in past lives, name is?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Tae.

• 13:05Tim Ferriss?

  Tae.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:06Tim Ferriss?

  Tae was born in Germany.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 13:10Tim Ferriss?

  What do you call Koreans overseas?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Gyeopul.

• 13:13Tim Ferriss?

  What is it?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Gyeopul.

• 13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Gyeopul.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  It was kind of a, I don't want to say a derogatory term that Koreans have for Koreans who left, but it had sort of a negative connotation. I remember it was a little bit of a negative connotation when I was in Korea in the eighties and nineties as a kid, and then now it's become like fully accepted. It's an accepted and used and practical term, right? It's not something that is considered negative anymore.

• 13:36Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to highlight something that you said, which is this rate of growth. I've observed, for instance, in Seoul that the taxis, the actual cars, look like something out of Blade Runner. And in many cases, they're very futuristic. This is a very futuristic town. And you put a post on Instagram with a video of this robot that was sort of being defended by this bodyguard from, I guess, the KTS or KBS rather. And it is very much a glimpse, I feel, into the future of sorts when you visit Seoul, certain portions of Seoul. In contrast, if you go to, say, Japan, the taxis look like they're many, many, and they are many, many decades old.

• 14:19Tim Ferriss?

  If I compare my experience when I was, say, in Japan in 1992 to my experience in Japan now, my perception is, because I've been back many times, not that much has changed. Certainly, things have changed, but it's not dramatic. How would you compare like the last 10, 20, 30 years in Korea? And maybe technology penetration is one way to unpack this. But you were talking about, for instance, even from socioeconomic perspective, like the, some of the poorest people will still have technological access that would trump most of what people experience in the US.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  There are definitely modern parts of what is happening here in the economy and the society, but it's a city of opposites. I see the modern parts that you see, but I think that there's also a dichotomy between the old and the decay, as well as this very modern, very futuristic aspect in one city in one country. It's a city in transition. It's a country in transition. We walked around neighborhoods where these were buildings that were 100 years old. And then... We saw buildings that were recently put up with steel and glass and with giant LED screens. This balance or this sort of conflict that you see out there is really a function of

• 15:46Speaker 03

  something that didn't happen in Japan, really. I think Japan rebuilt very quickly after World War II and became modern very quickly. For Korea, it's really in the last couple of decades that this has happened. And it's happened in a way where Koreans are holding still on to the past. There are cafes that are beautiful cafes that are built and bombed-out shoe factories. And it has so much character and history. It kind of reminds me of when I visit Berlin, that vintage classic architecture, almost brutal from that era, and then very modern progressive concepts of architecture and culture coexisting together.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  And I see a lot of similarities between Berlin and Seoul, more than I would see it in, let's say, Hong Kong and Seoul. In Tokyo, it's, like you said, the taxicabs are classic cabs, but they are immaculate. They are immaculate. In Korea, the taxicabs are changing by the days. You know, it's this new Hyundai car, this Kia car, and they're very modern, but they're almost disposable at this point because they're cycling through cars very quickly. And so there's this sort of rush or need to constantly innovate and improve here that doesn't hold on to the classics very well. And so I actually like to see a lot of the old-school classic things still thriving here. And I hope it doesn't go away because it's part of the history.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  It's what makes Koreans really interesting today because, like all the K-pop and the movies that you see, they're all rooted in the past and they're trying to do something new in the future. This Korean diaspora, again, we're called Gyeopul, has fanned out globally, and we're always sort of in-between, where not fully American or British or French or Korean-American or Korean-French or Korean-British, you're always a hyphenated thing. And then when you're back here, it used to be that people could pick you out. They could pick you out by how you walked, not even how you spoke, but how you walked and looked at people and your body language, your hairstyle, how you dressed, and they

• 17:57Speaker 03

  could pick you out as a foreigner. Now it's become a lot more of an in and out revolving door of different influences and foreigners. So it's become a lot more modern. But still, there's a very much a Korean way to that. And I think that what's become very interesting over watching sort of the last 30 years of development has been this embrace of outside influences. Korea was called the hermit kingdom. I remember going to Korean school in Los Angeles when I grew up. Every Saturday, when everyone else was watching cartoons or playing soccer, I went to Korean school from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. I went to Van Nuys High School, public school,

• 18:39Speaker 03

  and this Korean school rented it from the L.A. Unified School District. And we'd go there, we'd learn how to write and read. And then you had a choice of an elective: abacus, calligraphy, taekwondo, and the fandance. So I picked taekwondo, and I tried abacus, I tried calligraphy, really enjoyed it. So the things that stuck for me were taekwondo and calligraphy. This is my Saturday for eight years. So you're trying to preserve some of that learning and culture as you go out. Now imagine, in Korea, historically, in the shadow of China,

• 19:21Speaker 03

  and then more recently in the times in the 20th century, under military rule and annexation by Japan. For them, in that time period, under Japanese rule, it was very harsh. Many Koreans were killed or forced to move to Japan to survive and make their way. But part of it was, they were not allowed to speak Korean. They were not allowed to write in Korean. They were forced to take Japanese names. And so there was a whole diaspora that went to Japan in the 19th century, but also largely in the 20th century. So there are a lot of Koreans, ethnic Koreans, that live in Japan. But it's a love-hate relationship today that I see with Japan.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  They're trading partners, they're neighbors, they're allies when it comes to outsiders. But there's a lot of historical beef between them. But there's a lot of appreciation and love too, especially in the younger generations.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Especially in the younger generations. I mean, when I was in high school... And moved from a public school to a private school and I had a chance to start studying Japanese. A number of my friends in high school were Korean and pretty Korean Korean, like not Korean American. Like they had come to the US just to go to school and then they went back to Korea generally or went to college and then went back to Korea. And the fact that I didn't have the historical context, but the fact that I was studying Japanese really bothered some of my friends' parents. I remember like we would go on a drive and the fact that like I was so excited to be studying Japanese was not exciting to one of my friends' parents.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  They were also quite a bit older, but they had been, their personal experience was just so different from mine.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  They have really like fresh memories.

• 21:03Tim Ferriss?

  Super fresh.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Of the annexation and the colonial rule.

• 21:07Tim Ferriss?

  So let me throw out a couple of things that stand out to me here as super interesting facets in Korea. The demonstrations, which maybe we'll get to, there's, that's something I don't see as much of in a place like Japan's. I would say almost certainly it's not something you see as much of in China. You may see demonstrations everywhere, but I've seen a lot of demonstrations here. There are also a lot of preachers with, or at least a handful, preachers with megaphones. So you have a, is it predominantly Christian society here?

• 21:40Speaker 03

  It's, I think, other than the Philippines is the only predominantly Christian Asian country.

• 21:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so that's point one, which is certainly true. Like if you drive around LA, right, a number of Korean churches, buses taking Koreans to churches, like there's that component. I have heard Korea described, and I have no education related to this, but I've heard Korea described as I was coming here and doing reading, as the most Confucian country in East Asia.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 22:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so maybe, what does that mean for people who are like, what does that actually mean?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  It's sort of when you talk about a species of animal that has gone off to cross the body of water and goes to a new continent or a new island.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  And then everything changes on the origin continent. And then somehow the strain of plant or this species of animal has

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Continues to exist.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Continues to exist, yeah. It's a very unique thing now, right? And, and because it hasn't been influenced from the outside, like the origin point. And so Korea. Receive the Confucian value system, filial piety, a strong, strong focus on education and academics and scholarship, which came from China. But China went through its changes in the 20th century. Cultural revolution and a lot of the classical Chinese concepts were removed for something more modern and populist. And so Korea is sort of the last bastion of this Confucian idealism in this way. And I think that's where you get a lot of this.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  People talk about the Korean education system and academics and the pressures. There's a lot of downsides and trade offs for people. And that really comes from that. Like even growing up in L.A., you know, I was born in Korea. We immigrated over to Los Angeles. It was very much this very pedantic academic thing that was forced. And you see haegwons, which are Korean tutoring centers, that you won't see this anywhere else. We have friends in different cities that have kids. There's nothing like the Korean haegwan, which is the Korean word for a tutor or a tutoring center, a tutoring school. When school is done, you go to another school.

• 24:01Tim Ferriss?

  Also, just to underscore when school is done. So I was listening to this interview with a Korean language teacher somewhere in Oxford, I think. And they asked her how she would describe the difference between school in, say, the UK and school in Korea. And she said, oh, students in the UK, their English is pretty rough. And she's like, they're so much happier, she said. They end school at 3 P.M. She said, in Korea, I ended school at 10 P.M. And then I went to the, I mean, the

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Really intense.

• 24:29Tim Ferriss?

  Haegwan, the cram school, which also exists, Juku, in Japan. But it seems more intense here, actually. It seems, it's more intense here because she was saying I would come home from my Regular school, like nine, 10. Then go to cram school, come home at 1 a.m. And then just repeat.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  That sounds very extreme.

• 24:48Tim Ferriss?

  That was her vibe. That is extreme.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, even the Kyopo, Korean diaspora, the Korean immigrants that move out, they create that in their landing city in Seattle, in San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta. Atlanta has one of the largest Korean American populations. New York is the second largest Korean American population, second to Los Angeles. But if you go to these cities, there's a whole network of businesses and hug ones that are owned and operated by Korean American immigrants. And the churches are the landing point to connect with your community. So when you move over, you may not have any friends or relatives. They would go to the church. They might not have even been very religious.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  But it was the immigrants, sort of Ellis Island of that city, meeting point to get connected to people that look like them and spoke like them and understood them.

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  That makes sense.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  But the hug ones are a very particular Korean thing. And I have a friend, Min Jin Lee, who's the author of Pachinko, which is an incredible book.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard great things about it from multiple people.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  I will admit this wholeheartedly that it's one of the few books where I just immediately am like in tears reading because it touches not only the history of Korean people, but also Koreans who moved out.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Moved.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Kyopo, right? And it takes place in Japan. It's during the early 20th century and it follows a generational story about a family that's living in hardship in Japan. My mother's side actually was educated and raised in Japan.

• 26:28Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:29Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know that.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  And so I have a different view and experience with that Korean Japanese relationship through history. All the pictures, all the photos, the old, we have old photos in my parents' home of my great grandfather and my great, great grandfather. My dad's side, they're in very southern tip of Korea and they're wearing very Korean peasant clothing. And you can tell it's 1800s Korea. And then my mother's side. He's wearing a three-piece suit with a fedora, a bowler hat, and a neatly trimmed mustache, and is clearly living in Japan. And they lived in Tokyo, in Kyoto. And so I have a very sort of ambivalent, complicated thing.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  I 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. You may not know the origin point, but you're like, "That word sounds very similar."

• 27:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:06Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  And we were talking about this. So explain what "natzukashi" is in Japanese language.

• 28:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so "natzukashi" is a beautiful word.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  By the way, I love your pronunciation.

• 28:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thank you. Thank you, yes.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Better than a lot of "nisei" in the US.

• 28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so "natzukashi", 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, but...

• 28:36Speaker 03

  It's a literary word, not a spoken word.

• 28:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 "natzukashi." It's also a little closer to "saudade" in Brazilian Portuguese. Has a similar feeling to it. But "natzukashi," they'd be like, "Ah, "sore natzukashina." "Natzukashi" is pleasant nostalgia. Something brings back the memories.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Positive.

• 29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Positive.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Right. That word doesn't exist in Korean language.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yes, so you need to say more. So, so we have things that revolve in Korean language around suffering and pain. Sorrow, regret. Sorrow. Rage. Oppression. Angst. 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 gonna 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,

• 29:54Speaker 03

  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. Yeah. I mean, I walked in that neighborhood that I took you to, Ssangchungdong. 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. And 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 like classic, old school, vintage, this is real Korea, real Seoul. It's a beautiful walking area. Really nice.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  And you saw that there's actually real painters out with their easel, painting nature and streets and life. It'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.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  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 it's a very different vibe.

• 31:17Tim Ferriss?

  I think you were talking, where are we talking? This might have been after a little bit of Soju, but

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Always.

• 31:22Tim Ferriss?

  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, looked just like Superman.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  But I was like, wait a second, that's not Superman.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's different.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the, in Stranger Things, they call it the upside down.

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the culture here is less polite in the protocol definition of the word.

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  In Japan, it is very difficult for a Japanese person to say no very directly and bluntly to you.

• 31:56Tim Ferriss?

  Very hard.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Because it's very impolite for them to do that. It's almost a dishonor for them to behave that way towards you.

• 32:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so just side note for folks. If you ever ask a Japanese person to do anything, this could be at your hotel, whatever, if they scratch their head and they go, and they breathe in like that, or they go,

• 32:17Tim Ferriss?

  if they say it's difficult, that means no. That means impossible, generally.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  If they start apologizing right away.

• 32:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Then you know it's not gonna happen, right?

• 32:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like the word "yeah", like where, which gets translated literally into English and no, like you almost never hear that word. It's very rarely heard.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  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 fan. We went to this, he's so cute, adorable tea houses, just ah with this little like, like little courtyard in the middle with manicured 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.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Well, it's my fault and because I'm still an American at heart. And so what we're talking about here is, is, is the other part of me, my, my family's history. So I have to try, right?

• 33:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Because it's that different.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  And so in Korea, they're much more likely to say no. They're much more likely to challenge you directly.

• 33:44Tim Ferriss?

  Much more likely to say, Mr. Chairman, you need to eat less.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  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 ajama with the yakusa perm.

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  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. And 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,

• 34:45Speaker 03

  and you have to make a distinction between the countryside in Korea, rural areas, in smaller towns, and then Seoul and Busan, the big cities. It's a very different experience.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  You may not enjoy living in a small town in Korea because it really is, you know, still stuck in that sixties and seventies environment, both from a material aspect and utilities and just lifestyle. It'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.

• 35:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but the foreigners feel like it's easier to integrate here. Maybe integrate's the wrong word, but they feel more welcome.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  You feel like you paid your dues.

• 36:01Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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, whatever, still really close with my host family. And 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 honne and then tate mai.

• 36:46Tim Ferriss?

  So honne is like, I'm very simplistically translating here, but it's like, how you really feel and how you really are. And then tate mai 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 stranger formality. Where you're polite, but it's there's a wall.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And my experience, just in a week, like, what do I know? But 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.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Which we have been.

• 37:24Tim Ferriss?

  We have been.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  And people are friendly. My feeling is friendly, maybe open is a better word, like a bit more open.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're more open.

• 37:34Tim Ferriss?

  Direct, but it's direct, positive, direct, negative, maybe like a, and I'm talking a lot, but the, 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.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  This was in?

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  This was in New Hampshire.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 37:52Tim Ferriss?

  At St. Paul's.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:54Tim Ferriss?

  And nicest guys until they flipped, until that switch flipped and their eyes got really big and the carriage came on the scene.

• 38:07Tim Ferriss?

  Which is not something you see as much in Japan, like people, people get pissed everywhere. But a wise man once said to me that, you know, you go to Japan and a lot of people get drunk. It's a drinking culture, but they like, they get drunk and then they tend to like, people fall asleep like 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.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  I think that might be part of the exports, right? There's K beauty, K pop, K dramas, and there's K rage. I don't know.

• 38:39Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the U.S. and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings. And that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest. Your money and right now you can earn 5% APY. That's the annual percentage yield with the wealth front cash account. That's more than 10 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. So why wait earn 5% on your cash today?

• 39:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:49Speaker 03

  So I want to go back to Natsukashi.

• 39:51Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  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 Korea. The experience of the Korean people, you know, it has not been an independent and whole country since 1905. It is divided since the Korean War. And there's a lot of pain and struggle that happens with families divided by North and South.

• 40:28Tim Ferriss?

  A side note, we'll put this in the show notes. You sent me some YouTube videos.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:32Tim Ferriss?

  Which were old broadcasts of families being reunited. That shit messed me up.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Not reunited reunited for like an hour.

• 40:41Tim Ferriss?

  An hour and then they're separated again.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:43Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm not Korean. I don't have the background, but just the, the holy shit, the, the emotion and the facial expressions. I was tearing up just watching it's brutal.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  It's not relief of trauma. It's. New trauma on top of longstanding trauma.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:28Tim Ferriss?

  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, there 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.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  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? It'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.

• 42:40Tim Ferriss?

  For an hour and then separate.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  For an hour. Oh, God. So is that cathartic or is that actually more trauma, right? 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 like broke down crying and, you know, 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. And I think that's like a very like strong moving example of how like Korean people feel. In the last hundred and twenty years, they have not had their own whole country and people. It's north and south.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Before that, it was Korean War. Millions of Koreans died in that war between Russia and China and the US. 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 will really talk about it.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  Appreciate the magnitude.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  There's something about like 10 million Chinese soldiers came across and at some point or something like that. There'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. So, 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 oppression. And there are a lot of movies, by the way, that detail this.

• 44:32Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this is, I don't want to take us too golf track because I know we're headed towards Han first.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:37Tim Ferriss?

  But what are the main storylines that you see in movie and dramas? Because these say a fair bit.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  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. The 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, you know, 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.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:53Tim Ferriss?

  Parasite's pretty intense.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  A 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.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  And does that mean, put another way, sort of lack of upward mobility?

• 46:10Speaker 03

  It's about the wealthy and the entitled and their mistreatment of the poorer 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, are really like well embraced because they don't follow a formula.

• 46:41Tim Ferriss?

  They're nuanced. It's like swimming in an ocean of gray.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's not. It's like swimming in the human mind where there's nothing totally pure.

• 46:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's not a Marvel movie.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Right. And it's, 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. If 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

• 47:32Speaker 03

  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. Everyone is polite. Everything is in its right place. And they do things like take Italian pizza and actually make it better, right? They take-

• 48:12Tim Ferriss?

  Fried chicken. Oh my god. Steve has seen me eat so much fried chicken here.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Korean fried chicken. It's the true KFC.

• 48:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my god. It's so good.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we went to have fried chicken, but not heavily breaded fried chicken, rather very lightly fried.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  And that's the original. That's the OG fried chicken.

• 48:46Tim Ferriss?

  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's 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.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  This class struggle is, this is the theme of so many movies, books, TV series. It'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.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Some feel like a horror thriller, some feel like a psycho thriller. Another one feels almost like comedic sci-fi fantasy, like The Host. If you see his like original films, like a giant monster moving around Seoul and killing people. But if, you know, 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 like its own sort of 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

• 50:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:00Tim Ferriss?

  The chebels.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they call them chebels outside, but the employees of those chebels will always call themselves conglomerates. So you gotta, you gotta be careful, right?

• 51:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I mean, this is, I'm sure they're different, but reminiscent of Japan, right, with like Sony, Mitsubishi, et cetera.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  I think there's more control of the economy from the conglomerates in Korea.

• 51:24Tim Ferriss?

  I'll just sort of try to pare it 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.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we should do that.

• 51:33Tim Ferriss?

  But a couple of things that struck me as super interesting. One is that these, I guess the equivalent in Japanese would be Kitas.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:41Tim Ferriss?

  Which is sort of like a chain of related companies, right? 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 like they're privately held. Well, not privately held, but they're.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  They're still family.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  Family owned, which is mind blowing to think about. It just given the size of these things. Secondly, 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, 10 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.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  You know, it's under 50 million people.

• 52:39Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  That'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, 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. Great. The other side of that is that. There's still a class divide.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  There's not a lot of upward 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 US. The political spectrum actually is different. There's not a left versus right in the way that we think about it in the US. Though the US is 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

• 54:17Speaker 03

  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, it's a Korean family, two Korean families, 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.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:10Tim Ferriss?

  It resonates.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  It's universal.

• 55:12Tim Ferriss?

  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. There seems to be a lot more to it. And I would expect, though, that many people listening to this, there's not really a though. A lot of people listening to this are probably, if they're 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?

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  Why is Blackpink on like all over the place?

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Why is Blackpink at Coachella?

• 56:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what the hell is going on? And then you have also these streaming shows on Netflix, right?

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  Squid Game. You've got the, I can't remember, I can never remember the name. These jacked men and women, just.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Physical 100.

• 56:15Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Look at Squid Game.

• 56:29Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Class struggle.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Let 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 jeffles, 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.

• 57:24Tim Ferriss?

  So it's also been a lot of government support, right?

• 57:25Speaker 03

  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 US, 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.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Entertainment, movies.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  You're talking about in the US?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:53Tim Ferriss?

  Or in Korea?

• 57:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And oftentimes, the censors are coming down on things and it's lightened up, but you used to not see like, you know, people kissing in movies. The Korean censors are pretty strong, just like the Japanese censors.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the Japanese censors are strong, although anything goes in the comic books.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're talking about national broadcasts. National broadcasts is different.

• 58:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  But the, the, 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, 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. So it's really interesting now, it's probably problematic for a lot of, 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, has resonated is that it feels like the most irreverent

• 59:08Speaker 03

  and authentic and weird, sometimes crazy, but really like raw and 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.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Parasite did that.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Then ends up in like a political thriller mode and you're sort of confused. Like Old Boy is like the, 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.

• 59:57Tim Ferriss?

  So the movies are easier for me to wrap my head around than say K-pop, right? Cause 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.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Well, hey, like sometimes I'm in Hawaii or I'm in LA. In a Hispanic neighborhood and I will see posters of BTS up on the walls and there's a whole

• 1:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  BTS is a group.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a whole group of younger people in the US, in Latin America, in Europe, that are following their favorite band, which is BTS or Blackpink.

• 1:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I get it. I'm just wondering.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  And learning Korean language.

• 1:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  I'm wondering how that happened. And is this like Beanie Babies? Okay, it's gonna like burn, twice as hot and flame out.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  Or is there sort of more to the story?

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  I think it's here staying. 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 US, they love Naruto.

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  I mean, their hats, their shirts, you think about how many hip hop groups would include things from like Chinese Kung Fu movies. And there's always been this

• 1:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  Wu-Tang Clan.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  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 like global pop culture. The K-pop stuff is really interesting because they actually copied American pop boy bands and girl bands.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Backstreet Boys.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  But they just took it to the next level. The way like Japanese say, we're gonna do French food or Italian pizza, and we're just gonna take it to the next level.

• 1:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  Take it to hyper.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Dial it in, right? We're gonna take American automobile engineering culture and we're gonna, we're gonna use like a kaizen approach and make more reliable cars faster.

• 1:01:57Tim Ferriss?

  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 US, was then embraced by Japan and led to like the Toyota way.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  I know that.

• 1:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  And this kind of stuff. It's wild. But to your point, Japan, and it seems like, as you're describing it, Korea are really good at like taking something that's good and be like, okay, we're gonna sort of like spinal tap, right? Like when we really need a little extra, we're gonna turn it to 11. That's a good way to put it. Turn it to 11.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  So on that front, the formula of the pop band was taken and it was turned into a bootcamp 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're 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?

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  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 US, like how many people are aspiring to be in a boy or a girl band? Not many. Furthermore, there isn't really, there's not much of a like a discovery mechanism or talent development program for that. I mean, sure, you can go to LA 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. And then the scouts can pick from the cream of the crop, right?

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  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 is pop.

• 1:04:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:23Tim Ferriss?

  In their normal life too.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  At a lot of things that are not pristine and polished in society. So you have K-pop, which is 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.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  And then this very intense and raw entertainment culture on movies.

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you get the polar extremes, just because I've teased it so much. What is han?

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Just like Natsukashi is quite Japanese.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  Super Japanese.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  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 manifests 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.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  It can drive us to suffer together collectively. So collectivism is a very Asian thing. And independence is something that we revere in the US.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  That collectivism in Korea is han.

• 1:06:31Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  It's really hard to explain in English, actually.

• 1:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  It seems very hard. Is it a type of, so sadness would be a component of that?

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also anger and angst. I was talking to David Chang from Momofuku, his 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.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  And I said, yeah, he's intense and 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 K rage that you're talking about, which channeled correctly allows you to build an entire industry.

• 1:07:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  And succeed on a global level to create.

• 1:07:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or is it chips on the shoulder or make chips in the pocket?

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  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. Where 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.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  But jang, and these are like very simple Chinese characters and Korean characters.

• 1:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder what the, I don't know the hanja for any of these.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  So jang is, is this connection or affection, this bond that you feel.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  And so a lot of people will say that they don't have Jung with someone, or the person does not have Jung. This is a much more like bonding, affectionate thing. And it's a very simple word, but it means a lot. Uh huh, yeah. Jung 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. Jung. It means a thing that isn't translatable. Uh huh. And then if I were to take two words that would describe Korean people, and again, I'm not Korean. I'm Korean-American. I'm Gopul. So I'm somewhat inside, but somewhat outside.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  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 like happy, positive thing. This is again, a defensive, inquisitive, analytical skill, right? Discerning eye. Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

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

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Ah, 진짜 눈치 없다. Right? Like he just like didn't read the room, just kind of came in like a bull in a china shop. Yeah, yeah, there, there isn't nunchi. And then, um, 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 Seoul talk about it. So it's an interesting thing. I think it's a more recent, modern.

• 1:10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:10:54Tim Ferriss?

  Like guys now.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then also with Jung, that's something that my parents talk about a lot.

• 1:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  I'll give you one, one example. If you're a visitor to Korea, there's a host mentality. In Japanese, motenashi.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  In Korean, there's a concept of you're my sonim, my guest. And it's very strong, very similar to Japanese motenashi, right?

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  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 Jung. And not to create the concept, but to have Jung with you. And that would be the ideal. Cause 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 like downing some soju, right? 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,

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:12:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm trying to find the character for Jung. It's really bothering me that I, oh, wait, wait. Okay.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Jung is, Jung is good. Jung is positive. Jung is optimistic.

• 1:13:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, warm feeling of attachment.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Han, not so much.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Jung, you see that character, the Chinese character in, pretty sure in concepts like sympathy, those types of sort of feeling, emotive concepts.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Empathy, sympathy, affection, bonds. In every movie, in every TV series, they're moving in and out of Han and Jung 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 like, 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

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  or an emotional thing, or maybe if you guys were drinking beers at night as teenagers, where it flipped.

• 1:14:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, usually I could tell if the eyes got really big, I'd be like, oh, boy, here we go.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  I'm red.

• 1:14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, red face, big eyes, I'm like, oh, oh, oh. I think we're getting into Hulk smash.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  There's an 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.

• 1:14:38Tim Ferriss?

  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? And 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. I 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 US 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? Why would you explain that?

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  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. It 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, you know, 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,

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  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 in one of these large concrete high-rises that you see, just stacked around Seoul. And so to start a family is quite expensive.

• 1:16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  So there's that, cost of living to start a family.

• 1:16:29Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if you have an answer to this, but why so much deposit? Why a year or two of deposit?

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  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 aware.

• 1:16:43Tim Ferriss?

  I'm laughing because we had to take a pause earlier because I got a phone call from the hotel. It was like, you've exceeded your incidentals. Can you come down to make your deposit? I'm like, you have my credit card.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  They don't trust you.

• 1:16:54Tim Ferriss?

  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, all right, fine.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  So Asian financial crisis, 1997, 98, because Thailand and Japan went down, Korea went down, right? And this is a good example, actually, of Han and Jong together.

• 1:17:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  I'm trying to make, connect dots here, right, to simplify it for the audience. But there was an austerity program.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  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. And 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 US. 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. Give us all your gold for the greater good.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  And contribute, melt it down. But the other side of that is that there is a speculative gambling culture in investments, in 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. It's still happening today. The Korean consumer luxury market is the per capita highest market on the planet. Really? That's why you see all of these European luxury brands. Every single mall, they have

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  huge stores. Luxury brands have been focused in on marketing to Koreans for now five, 10 years. There's this consumer goods culture here, this consumerism, materialism, that is problematic, because it's, a lot of it is on borrowed, 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. There is a speculative, almost gambling problem in investments. It got to the point where the left-wing government that was in power in

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  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 couldn't 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, you know, 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. Women have largely been unable to enter in the professional workplace.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  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 see. And I see that among like extended family members, friends. It's a very expensive proposition because you want them in the best schools. You're going to put them in the baseball hug one.

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  You're going to put them in the swimming hug one, the math hug one, the piano lessons, like all of that from 3:00 PM all the way to 9:00 PM. 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. Yeah. 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 cost 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. We put out stock options and equity as like the carrot

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  of entrepreneurship and risk.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  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, Ku Peng, TOS. 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 forward 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 is very difficult. And a lot of young couples may not want to get married right away. They may want to make their way in their career.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  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. So, 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 US, I would say 99% of them moved for a better life, to go to America and to be able to live a better life and provide just a higher quality education and lifestyle for their families.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  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. It's 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. It's like you could not do well in the SAT, but you have a good GPA. Yep. You interview well, then you have all these tiers of junior college, four-year college,

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  Ivy League, state schools. You have a lot of options, liberal arts colleges, whatever, whatever you're looking for. Here, you're in a top college or you're not.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  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. You know, that's the way, it's the side route out. And I think K-pop and movies and entertainment and gaming, esports is huge here. You saw as they were setting up League of Legends stages downstairs.

• 1:24:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, enormous. I mean, there, it's just, it's like an entire playing field full of people down there engaging with League of Legends.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  And those PC bongs, right? Where they're playing.

• 1:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  There was a guy walking out with a huge sword shirtless and it was snowing. That is dedication.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  Let's switch gears to a little bit more about like what's happening in South Power.

• 1:25:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  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. And 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 Ugg Boots has been, had many lives, it's like a phoenix, or I could certainly list many, many different things. But how do you distinguish between that and, not to get too fancy, but like a secular tailwind with some type of trend that is inevitable, right?

• 1:26:03Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, it's 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

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  podcast, talking about podcasts? Seems like five years ago, there was nothing. Well, 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. So 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,

• 1:27:30Tim Ferriss?

  but kind of the New York literati crowd. And since the New York literati run the mastheads of these huge media outlets, it gave the impression of Serial being huge, which it was. It was huge, yeah. And people were like, podcasts? 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.

• 1:28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Right? 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 Games, 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.

• 1:28:42Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever this is, algorithmically, what makes this show, this show, big part of it's Korea.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  It changed Netflix.

• 1:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Their whole international strategy was a good strategy. It 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, I was like, great. It'll bring up subscriber numbers.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  But then when it hit in Korea,

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  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 want to 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. But you're absolutely right. It's not only emergent, but it was emergent over the course of several decades.

• 1:29:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And so it's emergent over the course of several decades. And then there are these accelerants, right? Like COVID almost certainly was an accelerant. You have people at home,

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  100%.

• 1:29:59Tim Ferriss?

  watching Netflix, looking for something to bond over.

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:30:02Tim Ferriss?

  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,

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  Different.

• 1:30:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, people are like, what? What is this? Right? Like Americans reading subtitles?

• 1:30:20Tim Ferriss?

  And even though I've never really been involved with film, a little bit with television, I'm very interested to see which dominos tip over a lot of other dominos, 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.

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Almost, I'm not gonna 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 main character. Why? 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. Yeah. Right? So it's like an export game.

• 1:31:31Tim Ferriss?

  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. I'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.

• 1:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  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 US because the culture itself values education and reading. But 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. So I was like, okay, how did Ryanair suddenly seemingly become ubiquitous? How did this happen?

• 1:33:02Tim Ferriss?

  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. For 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 is 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

• 1:33:46Tim Ferriss?

  nuclear holocaust. So let's find the right team. And that maybe in retrospect seems obvious, but so do a lot of great companies. But 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 the black cars, for the 1%ers in San Franciscos. 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

• 1:34:29Tim Ferriss?

  for people who are going to use black cars. Look 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 be 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? It's like, no, no, no. You can expand the market. Right, right. 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. And then secondly, because I write, because I have a podcast coming up on my 10th anniversary.

• 1:35:12Tim Ferriss?

  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 have seen at the macro level, say with this Korean entertainment stuff. So 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

• 1:35:56Tim Ferriss?

  US media coverage of the K wave. I don't think that's the right way to do it.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right? I'll give a shout out to some books that have been very helpful. There's a great outfit, it's a publishing company called Talk To Me In Korean. I've got Talk To Me In Korean Level One. 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.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  I 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,

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  but the fact that you would insist to order by yourself and you would have a conversation with someone. There's a part of like 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.

• 1:37:21Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  Like, I've had to do that in Beijing and Shanghai with Mandarin. Because I look Asian,

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  I can pass a little bit more when I'm speaking, you know, I'm like, you know, I say, "Taebeutje, Hangouren," right? And so, and I'll get a little bit of a pass, right? But, you know, you're a white guy.

• 1:37:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  And you're coming in here confident.

• 1:37:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  So I know that you've learned a lot of Asian languages and you're fluent in two. Tell me about what you are doing when you are learning. Like, how 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 Korean this fast. And I've had a lot of people try.

• 1:38:06Tim Ferriss?

  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, and then 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, so.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  Which is not like France.

• 1:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's not like France. I mean, there are some great people in France, but they're less supportive. In Japan, they're very supportive, right? Like, if you can introduce yourself, they're like, "Oh, sugo, sugo, sugo," you know? "Oh, jose, jose." 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 and Korean, they're just like, "Oh, wow." 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, like, I invested in them, very in their Series A, but like, Duolingo has become this incredible resource worldwide.

• 1:39:09Tim Ferriss?

  So 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, taught himself a million different languages.

• 1:39:53Tim Ferriss?

  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. A 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, right?

• 1:40:37Tim Ferriss?

  They can ask where the bathroom is, or say, "good day", and that's about it. Michelle Thomas asks you to take no notes whatsoever. It is purely auditory. Interesting. 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 was How to Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes, which is really well done, and 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.

• 1:41:22Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  And then it basically functions almost like Anki. There'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 "공부해요", 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- You're using it in a different context, but taking the same word that you're just about to forget.

• 1:42:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And then it pops it back up to the top in your short-term memory. And so you'd 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." "일이까요?" 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.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  Like he would get all pissed off at the students because the format is, somebody is teaching to other students. Right. And they're live, like 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. But 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. The one critique I would have is that in the original recordings-

• 1:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  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 gonna be doing less sit down studying.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you really haven't had any time.

• 1:44:37Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't had.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  So you're, you're actually giving samples of correct grammar Korean right now. I'm still impressed because you haven't really had much time to do this.

• 1:44:45Tim Ferriss?

  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, you have the space to do that because it's your job. And that's not a swipe. Like there are some amazing people out there who speak, you know, 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.

• 1:45:23Tim Ferriss?

  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 tried 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, panel for panel, it's the same thing. I'm like, oh, okay, okay. And then I'm tying the Japanese to the Spanish. And then when I learned German a couple of months later, which I've totally forgotten, unfortunately, German's gone. So sorry about that, guys. It's too, it's too busy, but I've forgotten it all. Then I used the Spanish One Piece to learn the German One Piece.

• 1:46:07Tim Ferriss?

  This is a Japanese manga comic book that is legendary. It's the highest grossing franchise out of Japan as far as manga, above Dragon Ball Z and all of those. And with the Korean. I knew reading was the key unlock. Reading was was number one. The second piece was that I had to tie it to something else I already knew. And I did that with Japanese and Korean.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  A lot of strong similarities.

• 1:46:33Tim Ferriss?

  Strong similarities. So for instance.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Even though they wouldn't admit it.

• 1:46:36Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  What's really interesting is a lot of Koreans speak Japanese.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  Very well.

• 1:46:49Tim Ferriss?

  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. I've seen a number of signs.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  That's probably because of there are a lot of Japanese tourists.

• 1:47:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:47:17Tim Ferriss?

  K-dramas. It's like the Americans who go to Dubrovnik or wherever to see the Game of Thrones places.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  No, it's a whole travel tourist sector.

• 1:47:26Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  And it's not just Japanese. It's, you know, 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.

• 1:47:40Tim Ferriss?

  Side note, if you think you're going to use Google Maps here, you're not. You're going to have to download.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Naver Kakao Maps, yeah. So the super app thing is real here, by the way. What Elon wants to do with Twitter.

• 1:47:50Tim Ferriss?

  Has only been done really in Asia and maybe Latin America, right?

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Tim Ferriss?

  You're talking like a WeChat type of thing? You can do everything in one app, yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  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 artists, like think about all the merch, digital merch. Said, France is actually a larger market than the domestic market.

• 1:48:22Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  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're shipping things like chips.

• 1:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  Wireless smartphones. They're now starting to ship a 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

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 03

  of the Eurocentric beauty, concepts of beauty. Korean products are becoming luxury products there, next to the LVMH and the Kering group products, right? And 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. It was a contract manufacturing economy that became an original OEM design economy. They leveraged what they had learned and they did it better. Like the story of Japanese whiskey.

• 1:50:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:25Speaker 03

  Is incredible, right? They sent one guy to go learn from the masters in Scotland. And he came back and started Suntory.

• 1:50:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  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 Teheranol.

• 1:50:45Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so just a quick footnote for people. So if you remember the, that's another breakthrough moment, kind of like cereal, Gangnam Style. That music video passed a billion views and people are like, what the hell is going on? Gangnam.

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  Total breakthrough moment for Korean culture.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  As an export.

• 1:51:02Tim Ferriss?

  And Gangnam is a neighborhood.

• 1:51:04Speaker 03

  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 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. And then there were contract manufacturers for Sony.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  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 Teheranno. And the reason why it's called Teheranno is that Iran, when it was a capitalist liberal country in the 70s and the 60s too, hired a lot of Korean workforce.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  So did Saudi Arabia and other countries to come be the skilled labor. In other countries, like Koreans were the miners. In Germany, they got exported there to be the miners because no one domestically wanted to be a miner because you had a higher likelihood of death, emphysema. So the reason why it's called Teheranno 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 Teheran. And if you look at like the history of Korea, it was we will export our men and our women as nurses

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  and our 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. I 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. And he was telling me that Singtel and other regional wireless companies, mobile carriers in Asia,

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  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. 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. And that is a very Korean mentality. What we were talking about with Han and John, 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.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  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? How do we reunify? Or do we not? And I think because tomorrow's 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

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  out films that are winning at Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or there, Oscars here, you know, largest, the most successful artists, music artists in the world, most, you know, 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. And so they are living in the moment, knowing that 17 miles away are millions of soldiers and artillery and missiles pointed at them.

• 1:56:08Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:56:21Tim Ferriss?

  far away from North Korea.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  No, it is not.

• 1:56:24Tim Ferriss?

  It is not far away. It is right there. It's very close.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  I'll frame it in terms that people can understand. It is closer than San Francisco is to San Jose.

• 1:56:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's 28 miles.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Tim Ferriss?

  Substantially close.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  And so this living in the moment or achieving for just tomorrow is 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 Gyeopul 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. Like, in the US, I feel very stoic about all that's happening. I feel like I was raised in that.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  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 so, moving so slowly, physically moving slowly.

• 1:57:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:57:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's kinetic. It 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 Hangul because it's so, as you said, regular. Like, once you have it, you have it. It's not like English where you can have fish, like ph is F I S H, and then enough is 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,

• 1:58:38Tim Ferriss?

  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 it's fun. And you can learn 10 sentences. It's not that hard. And there's gonna be stuff. For instance, I love sparkling water. I know every day I'm gonna ask for sparkling water. So it's like. 탄산스 주세요. Learn how to ask for sparkling water. And then like 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? Then I'm like, I know I'm gonna 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.

• 1:59:22Tim Ferriss?

  Like you can come up with a couple of, because you're gonna be entertaining as a foreigner trying to learn a foreign language like Korean. So you know, learn a couple of things that are like off menu. Cause like where's the bathroom is on menu. Like they would expect that's something you would learn.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  Well, asking for food, I mean, so what's been your thought about Korean food so far? I mean, you've had Korean food in the US or, you know, that version of it. So what do you think so far?

• 1:59:46Tim Ferriss?

  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 like, 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. How jo bu jie. Long time no see. But you can, you know, always sashiburi janai, like in Japanese or here, like ore ga manimida. Like use a really polite form and their people.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  That was good.

• 2:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thanks. And people are like, what? Like, 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, chun chun hyasayo. Like just like, ah, 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've not had much Korean barbecue, but I wanted to, of course, have Korean barbecue. And 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, uh, that's not an appetizer. It's a side dish that you eat when the beef comes out. I was like, oh, okay, great.

• 2:00:57Tim Ferriss?

  So the beef comes out and in number one.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  And it was kalbi, kalbi?

• 2:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not sure.

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Korean barbecue.

• 2:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  Korean barbecue.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Short rib?

• 2:01:05Tim Ferriss?

  It wasn't short rib. It was, 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 you know, in Japan, it's like, if you have meat, you have rice.

• 2:01:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, oh, we're gonna 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, never 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?

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:43Tim Ferriss?

  And one of the guys with me was like, yeah, we, this is kind of our olive oil.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  We dip the beef into sesame oil, which I'd never done before. I was like, okay. The sesame oil was sort of like a condiment, right? It was like, you can, how you dip bread. And so you eat this, it's basically just all meat all the time for a section. You 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.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 meat, scissors for cutting stuff.

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:39Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 2:02:40Speaker 03

  By the way, that annoys my wife so much because I will just, I cook a lot of barbecue.

• 2:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:47Speaker 03

  I'm a self-professed grill master for my family.

• 2:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  I have meat scissors.

• 2:02:52Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 03

  And I'm constantly clipping.

• 2:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Why the hell would you use a knife? It makes so much sense.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  Have you seen the Korean meat scissors that have the bottle cap opener for beer?

• 2:03:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's genius.

• 2:03:02Speaker 03

  Right in the middle?

• 2:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  That makes, it makes all the sense in the world.

• 2:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  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? 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.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Tim Ferriss?

  Like low end car.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  And I think that that is actually the most important part of Korean soft power. If we're talking about this as an export economy.

• 2:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  It is the first thing that people loved, even before K-pop.

• 2:04:24Tim Ferriss?

  Food.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:04:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:32Speaker 03

  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 had just launched. It was a music app startup. And a friend from Food and Wine Magazine asked me if I wanted to be a contestant in a barbecue sauce contest in Austin as part of South by Southwest. I said, sure. And 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 you'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 you know, I'll try.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  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. I got like Bartlett pears because they didn't have the Asian pears in Austin.

• 2:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  And then brown sugar, Coca-Cola. Wow. Uh, garlic, sesame seeds, everything. And I made a Korean barbecue marinade and then I put in like the tomatoes and I put in, I got some molasses, put that in there and I made this whole big pot and put some onions in there too, just to give it a little bit more kick. And I put it 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. Everyone else had done some sort of like Carolina barbecue or Memphis barbecue. And you go up and you take these grilled

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  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, it would just top it off. And so I, I really feel like of all the soft power things, of all the exports, cultural exports, Korean food is the most important one. Because 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.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  I, I've tried everything. I love Japanese food. I love Mexican food. I love Italian food, French food, obviously, and fine dining. But, um, and you know, I think Korean food is the original export, other than the skilled labor from the sixties and seventies. 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. Yeah. Say, ask them, what would you eat? You 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? Sundubukji ge, danjangji ge. Ji ge.

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  And these stews, Korean food is comfort food.

• 2:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  There are a lot of people trying to make upscale food and there are people like Corey Lee at Bennoo in San Francisco and David Chang and Momofuku 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 saying, gotta eat the stuff. That's like, this is a poor country's food. And that's the best stuff. The other stuff is great. So anyways, I wanted to give kudos to the original Korean export that everyone loves, which is Korean.

• 2:08:20Tim Ferriss?

  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, can get pretty spicy. Korean food can get pretty spicy.

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  It can get murky. It can get murky. Like you don't, unless you're Korean or unless you've looked at the recipe and the preparation, kind of don't know what's in there.

• 2:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:08:57Speaker 03

  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. If you at least try.

• 2:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  Just a word, just a word or two, right? Thank you. I guess 맛있어요. It's like.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Tim Ferriss?

  It is.

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  So you could say, if you, if you want to say it's really good or very good, 아주 맛있어요.

• 2:09:24Tim Ferriss?

  아주 맛있어요.

• 2:09:26Speaker 03

  참, 아주 or 참.

• 2:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, 참 is a good one.

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  Or 굉장히.

• 2:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  굉장히.

• 2:09:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like.

• 2:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  굉장히 맛있어요.

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  And when you, when you're eating, if you don't finish it.

• 2:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  That's a silent way of saying it wasn't good.

• 2:09:43Tim Ferriss?

  I learned this the hard way going to, I flew, this is of course, this is what I do. I flew to LA, then I went to San Diego because I wanted to train with a Korean archery coach. Because there are a couple of things I'll just mention in passing.

• 2:09:58Speaker 03

  We gotta talk about why the sports that Koreans are particularly good at.

• 2:10:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, for a long time, maybe even still, breakdancing, Koreans were many levels above everybody else. I 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.

• 2:10:27Tim Ferriss?

  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 gonna have dinner. And that's not really the thing you say no to. So I'm like, of course we're gonna have dinner. So I go out to Korean barbecue and he ordered so much food. I 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 there, I still had all this food in front of me and he's like, "Yeah, you can't leave that." He's like, "You gotta eat that." I was like, "Okay."

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like, yeah.

• 2:11:11Tim Ferriss?

  He's like, "Yeah, you can't leave rice un-eaten."

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  Take off your shoes, bow, say the food is good, finish your plate and bowl.

• 2:11:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  And all is good. Everything's good.

• 2:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Everything's great.

• 2:11:25Speaker 03

  I wanted to talk a little bit about the Baeknamjin film.

• 2:11:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 03

  Just talking a little bit about film. We were at Sundance together in Utah, Park City, great city.

• 2:11:36Tim Ferriss?

  Great place.

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  Best time to go skiing or snowboarding is during Sundance.

• 2:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Because nobody's skiing. They're all at the festival and then the locals don't want to get anywhere near the place.

• 2:11:47Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's mayhem.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  We premiered our documentary on.

• 2:11:52Tim Ferriss?

  Just to be clear, our is not me and Steve's.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  Oh, no, sorry. The collective, we are ours, 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.

• 2:12:11Tim Ferriss?

  Well, why don't you tell people the title?

• 2:12:13Speaker 03

  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 Park Namjoon, because we say the last name first. Park Namjoon is the most famous Korean artist of the 20th century, was the father of digital and video art. So whenever you see like TVs all set up in an array like a human.

• 2:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  Displays.

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he did the TV Buddha, which is probably his most famous work with a camera, constantly taking video on a catheter ray tube of a sitting Buddha statue and the Buddha's looking at himself. And he coined the term information superhighway and kind of predicted social media. He is a 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.

• 2:13:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I knew very little about him. I mean, really just what you had told me. And I really enjoyed the window into.

• 2:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  His personal story, his creative process, his insanity on some level is in the sense that he was highly experimental. Also, 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 and like the 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.

• 2:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  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, on 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

• 2:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  also technologists, and taking the path less traveled, which is really, really painful at times and in many instances, not financially rewarding. So 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, my favorite lines was, "Hyeong-jin Pye spoke many languages, none of them well." He spoke a lot of languages, but they were all broken.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  He spoke Pyke-ish.

• 2:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  He spoke Pyke-ish. And I found that so endearing, real endearing guy as well.

• 2:15:32Speaker 03

  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 seventies, eighties, nineties, and even into the two thousands, and then he passed away in that decade. He 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.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  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. It 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.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

  I forgot about some of those. Oh my God.

• 2:17:05Speaker 03

  In the show notes, you gotta put a link to this. 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. It may be 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.

• 2:17:49Speaker 03

  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 Inagata 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?

• 2:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I got it.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Tim Ferriss?

  And It's like psychological rock?

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  In the 60s and 70s, when that was popular in the US.

• 2:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  Koreans were doing that. But here's the thing, government censors back then would shut down anything that looked a little

• 2:18:29Tim Ferriss?

  Suspect.

• 2:18:30Speaker 03

  Edgy and yeah, counter to the

• 2:18:32Tim Ferriss?

  Counter culture.

• 2:18:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  But the music inside was serious. And it was, it was trippy.

• 2:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:18:56Speaker 03

  It was intense.

• 2:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  And so

• 2:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  So it was like Little House on the Prairie on the front and then Rammstein on the inside.

• 2:19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like judge this book by its cover, please.

• 2:19:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:05Speaker 03

  Because inside is some really like, you know,

• 2:19:08Tim Ferriss?

  Subversive stuff.

• 2:19:09Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:19:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:19:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  So a lot of the dance groups, I actually sponsored the first world b-boy championships called R16 in Seoul in 2008.

• 2:19:53Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't know that.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  And all the best b-boy crews from around the world, France, it was all country-based, like an Olympics, it's like France versus Japan, US versus Korea, right? And everyone convened.

• 2:20:05Speaker 03

  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 Kyoipal that had come back. They brought it from New York, they brought it from LA, and they brought it back and improved it. And cooking, the same thing. There's a lot of chefs that have come back from the US or France or UK, come back to Seoul. So there's this export, but then there's also this reverse immigration happening, where they're coming back. So it's a really exciting

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  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 like 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 like the danger of geopolitical stuff, but also because of, does it get dialed in like Tokyo one day? And becomes everything gets really locked in, defined.

• 2:21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Just in terms of like stasis.

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And right now, it feels really like transitional.

• 2:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, like restaurants being opened, companies being started, people moving, companies there, lots of people moving there for the cultural stuff. It has a feeling of being pregnant with possibilities, which is the vibe that I get here, walking through

• 2:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  these neighborhoods. I'm like, okay, yeah, I bet if I come back here in three, five years, like

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

  Totally different.

• 2:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  70% of these stores will have changed.

• 2:22:20Speaker 03

  I mean, there'll be a lot of differences. The director, Amanda Kim, of the documentary, the Daimjin 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. And she said it was just a, not only a mind blowing experience for her as a director, but as a Korean gyeopul coming back to present that. And so this is something that I think a lot of, you know, any of your listeners who are

• 2:23:05Speaker 03

  Korean American or Asian American or even from India and thinking about that reverse brain drain, as they call it.

• 2:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the cycle, like the cycling back, the feedback loop.

• 2:23:17Speaker 03

  So important. The one thing, we were eating mandu the other day. Mandu is a Mongolian word, that's Mongolian word. China uses, certain parts of China use mandu, Korea uses mandu, Turkey uses mandu, Pakistan uses mandu. Food is the original spice in food, carried by Mongolians, Romans. It's the original cultural export.

• 2:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  And so it's, it's on the concept of, you know, whether it's, what's happening right now with the technology industry here, arts.

• 2:24:29Speaker 03

  Food, like all of that, it feels really like it's peaking. There'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.

• 2:24:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  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 as it's.

• 2:24:59Tim Ferriss?

  Bursting at the seams.

• 2:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  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 gotta figure it out, like Korean weather really fucks with you. It'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.

• 2:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  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, huge difference experientially for a native English speaker here. Say compared to Japan, all 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.

• 2:26:31Tim Ferriss?

  Anything else that we should cover before we wind to a close? Anything else you'd like to say before we land the plane?

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  I think we're good. What do you think?

• 2:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  I think we're good. I think we're good, man. And

• 2:26:45Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:26:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so fun.

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  It's been a fun week.

• 2:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's been a great week.

• 2:26:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've covered a lot with a short amount of time, but still some more to come.

• 2:26:53Tim Ferriss?

  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/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 kon samnida. Thanks.

• 2:27:21Speaker 03

  Kon samnida.

• 2:27:22Tim Ferriss?

  Listening.

• 2:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It 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. They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:28:07Tim Ferriss?

  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. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. There are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States and millions more around the world. It is very hard to separate the single from the noise. What I mean by that is, how do you know which few could actually make a big impact with

• 2:28:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:29:37Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:17Tim Ferriss?

  So to claim your match and to learn more, go to givewell.org and pick Podcast and enter "The Tim Ferriss Show" at checkout. Make sure that they know you've heard about GiveWell from "The Tim Ferriss Show" to get your donation matched. One more time, that's givewell, G-I-V-E-W-E-L-L. GiveWell.org to learn more or donate.

• 2:30:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:32:51Tim Ferriss?

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