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One more time that's Give Well G-I-V-E-W-E-L-L, givewell.org to learn more or donate. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. An you're all. 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. He has an impeccable record. In this particular sit down, we are in person in Seoul, South Korea. 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. Korea exceeded every expectation on every level in every dimension. It really blew my mind. I wanted to do an episode
discussing all things Korea. 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 handi-capped, economically handicapped country to being an incredible export economy with a global presence, not just an entertainment, but in hardware, in all sorts of technology, etc. A number of concepts like
Han, must see movies, and much more. Before we dive into Steve's bio, I wanted to share his top must see Korean movies. I'm just going to list them out, give you some Scooby snacks in the very beginning. Here we go. Old boy, whaling, that's W-A-I-L-I-N-G. So old boy, whaling, the handmaiden, memories of murder, parasite, many of you will have seen this, and this comes up in the conversation. Burning, Minati, M-I-N-A-R-I, broker, which is from 2022, 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-Midest List of top venture capital investors, and was ranked number 45 in 2023. He is also a Korean American, a Guilbo, we'll explain what Guilbo is, who is 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, Bluebottle Coffee, and Humane, the AI device platform that is getting a lot of buzz right now. In fact, he helped Uber, Coinbase, and Bluebottle 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 a documentary, Nam-June Pike. 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. So, SteveJang, nice to see you, sir. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I saw a talking to him. Welcome to the Tidarsia.
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, on 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.
It was strongly recommend. Amazing. And then, watched, since I was getting tapped for the Korea High, after watching that movie, I went to a K-pop documentary, which was also in the Inflite Menu. Very well done. And as soon as I got off the flight, I think that's when I texted you, and I was like, Steve, when you're taking me to Korea, and you're like, actually, I'm going to be in Korea. 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 has happened recently.
Very recently. I mean, I think people have been fascinated by going to Japan, and going to on-sense in Kyoto, and Tokyo, and experiencing all of that for three or four decades now. Yeah. And it's become a favorite for people who love eastern culture. They love design, food, and 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. Right. 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, right? 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 80s. 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. And so I think in the 90s, 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, and there's a lot of Koreans in South America. And then in Europe, France and the UK or in Germany, we're also a landing spot. So all of this is happening
more recently in time. Yeah, the main actor or one of the main actors, Korean actors in past lives, name is, tail, tail. Yeah, tail was born in Germany. Yeah. And what do you call Koreans overseas? Gopo. What is it? Gopo. Gopo. It was kind of a, I don't want to say a derogatory term that Koreans had 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 80s and 90s
as a kid. And then now it's become like fully accepted. It's an accepted and used practical term, right? It's not something that is considered negative anymore. 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, those sort of being defended by the bodyguard from, I guess, the KTS or KBS, or other. 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. 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 penetrations 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. 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,
and 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 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 onto the past. There are cafes that are beautiful cafes that are built and bombed out shoe factories, and it has so much character in 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. 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, like you said, the taxi cabs are classic cabs, but they are immaculate. They are immaculate. In Korea, the taxi cabs are changing by the days. 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. There's this rush or need to constantly innovate and improve here that doesn't hold onto the classics very well. I actually like to see a lot of the old school classic things still thriving here. I hope it doesn't go away because it's part of the history. 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 Gopal, has fanned out globally, and we're always sort of in between. We're not fully American or British or French or Korean American or Korean French. We're 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 up by how you walked, not even how you spoke, but how you walked and looked at people in your body language, your hairstyle, how you dressed, and they could pick you out as a foreigner. Now it's become a lot more of an out-revolving door of different influences and foreigners,
so it's become a lot more modern. But still, there's very much a Korean way to that, and I think that what's become very interesting over watching 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 a.m. to 1 p.m. I went to Van Nai's high school, public school,
and this Korean school rented it from the LA Unified School District. We'd go there, we'd learn Hungo. We'd learn how to write and read, and then you had a choice of an elective abacus, calligraphy, tecondole, and the fan dance. So I picked tecondole, and I tried abacus. I tried calligraphy, really enjoyed it. So the things that stuck for me were tecondole 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, and then more recently in the times than 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. 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 to,
especially in the younger generations. 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 went 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. Interestingly, they're also quite a bit older, but they've been their personal experience which is so different from mine.
They have really like fresh memories, super fresh of the annexation and the colonial rule. So let me throw out a couple of things that stand out to me here as super interesting and fascinating facets in Korea. The demonstrations, which maybe we'll get to. 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? I think other than the Philippines is the only predominantly Christian Asian country. Okay, so that's point one, which is certainly true, like if you drive around LA, right? A number of Korean churches, buses taking Korean stature, they're 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 confusion country in Asia. That's right. So maybe what does that mean for people who are like, what does that actually mean? 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. Yeah. And then everything changes on
the origin continent. Right. And then somehow the strain of plant or this species of animal has continued to exist. It continues to be a very unique thing now, right? And because it hasn't been influenced from the outside, like the origin point. And so Korea received the Confucian value system, Philly O'Pyty, a strong, strong focus on education and academics and scholarship, which came from China. But China went through its changes in the 20th century, right? 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. 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 LA, 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 hug ones, 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 hug one, which is the Korean word for a tutoring center, a tutoring school. When school is done, you go to another school. Also, just to underscore when school is done. So I was listening to this interview with a
Korean language teacher somewhere in the Oxford, I think. And they asked her, how should you describe the difference between school in, say, the UK and school in Korea. She said, oh, students in the UK are English pretty rough. And she's like, there's so much happier. She said, they in 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 really intense hug one, but the cramp school, which also exists 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 9, 10. Then go to cramp school, come home at 1 a.m. And then just repeat that sounds very extreme. That was her five. That is extreme. Well, I mean, even the Kyo-po 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, 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. That makes sense. But the hug ones are a very particular Korean thing. And I have a friend Minjin Lee, who's the author of Pachinko, which is an incredible book. I've heard great
things about the multiple people. 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. 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. No kidding. Yeah. I did not know that.
And so I have a different view and experience with that Korean-Japanese relationship through history. All the pictures, all the photos, we have old photos in my parents' home of my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. My dad's side, they're a 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 is wearing a three-piece suit with a fedora, a boulder hat, and a neatly trim mustache and is
clearly living in Japan. And they lived in Tokyo and Kyoto. And so I have a very sort of ambivalent complicated thing. 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 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. But the word diverges is it's these unique phrases and words that capture part of the feeling or the psyche and the soul of those people that is really
fascinating. Totally. And we were talking about this. So explain what Natsukashi in Japanese language. Yeah. So Natsukashi is a beautiful word. I love your pronunciation. Oh, thank you. Yeah. It's better than a lot of the same in the US. Yeah. So Natsukashi, you'll run into this a lot in Japan. And when someone comes across something that is nostalgic, which nostalgic is not a word
that gets used much in the US. But it's a literary word. Yeah. Exactly. In the US, you might say, oh, man, that brings back the memories or something like that, which is a little bit closer to Natsukashi. It's also a little closer to Sao Daiji in Brazilian Portuguese. It has a similar feeling to it. But Natsukashi, they'd be like, ah, that's Natsukashi is pleasant nostalgia when something brings back the memories. Positive. Positive. Right. That word doesn't exist in
the world. So you need to say more. So we have things that revolve in Korean language around suffering and pain, sorrow, regret, sorrow, rage, oppression, angst. It's the way I described to people who have been to Tokyo a lot and they asked, 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 when it's
going to be unrecognizable five or 10 years from now. Right. It's just moving so quickly. I mean, I come like three, four times a year and I don't feel the differences between each of those times. But I can look back and say, oh, three, four years ago, these things did not exist. These things have been going on some of our walks in these neighborhoods they hadn't been to.
Yeah. I mean, I walked in that neighborhood that I took you to Samsung dong. I brought the blue bottle, brought one of the blue bottle coffee founders and we had both invested in that company a long time ago and they were interested to come to Japan and create. So I met up with them in Japan, walked around different Tokyo neighborhoods with them, came to Seoul, did the same. They fell in love with that neighborhood because it had that very classic old school vintage. This is real
Korea, real Seoul. It's a beautiful walking area. Really nice. And you saw it, there's actually real painters out with their easel painting nature and streets and life. 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. Unbelievable clean. Awesome. But there are some butts.
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 outside look like you're walking into Tokyo, but it's actually the other side of the coin. They exist in the same dimension, but it is a very different vibe. I think you were talking, were we talking this might have been after a little bit of Soju, but
always. It's like the bizarro. When I used to watch the Superman cartoons in the mornings before going to school or whatever, there was like a bizarro Superman who was like, look just like Superman. Yeah. But I was like, wait a second. That's not Superman. Yeah, it's different. Yeah, it's like that in Stranger Things, they called it the upside down. Yeah, right. Yeah. So the culture here is less polite in the protocol definition of the word.
Yeah. In Japan, it is very difficult for a Japanese person to say no, very directly and bluntly to you. Very hard. Because it's very impolite for them to do that. It's almost a dishonor for them to behave that way towards you. Yeah, so just side note for folks. If you ever have Ask a Japanese person to do anything, this could be at your hotel or whatever. If they scratch their head and they go, they breathe in like that or they go, just, just, just, I'm a
guy. If they say it's difficult, that means no. That means impossible, generally. If they start apologizing right away, then you know, it's not going to happen. Like the word, yeah, like, yeah, where which gets translated literally into English and know, like you almost never hear that word. It's very rarely heard. When I'm in Japan, I have to definitely take on a much more reserves and polite stance.
More than I would in the US, more than I would even in Korea. Because of that, and I respect that. In Korea, there's still a little bit of that. I'm smirking so hard because I'm thinking, you're doing less child's pose than the T houses when you have a low back pain. It's so cute. Adorable T houses, just how with this little like, so you know, like a little courtyard in the middle with manicure trees and poor Steve. His low back was killing him and so he's stretching,
but it's kind of in the hallway. And these two women just glitched so hard because I didn't know how to count with it. But yes, I enjoyed it. It's my fault. And because I'm still an American Edward. And so what we're talking about here is the other part of my family's history. But so I have to try, right? Yeah. Because it's that different. And so in Korea, they're much more likely to say no. They're much more likely to challenge you directly.
Which more likely to say, Mr. Chairman, you need to be less. Yeah. In a sarcastic way. Call me me Mr. Chairman, you probably should go on a diet so your back doesn't hurt. Which is, you know, I love my food, but I really didn't need to hear that from the well-meaning Ajima with the Yakuza Perm. So the experience that people will have is that it's not as lonely as it might be when 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 their expats are foreigners. But one part sort of they're not part of main society.
Right. And so in Korea, and especially in cities, and you have to make a distinction between the countryside in Korea, rural areas, in smaller towns, and then Seoul, and it was on the big cities. It's a very different experience. You may not enjoy living in a small town in Korea because it really is, you know, still stuck in that 60s and 70s environment, both from a material aspect and utilities and just lifestyle. 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. Yeah, but the foreigners feel like it's easier to integrate here. Maybe integrates the wrong word, but they feel more welcome. I think it's still difficult to
integrate in any of these cities. You're always going to be the other. But I think that you can get more direct response and that blunt energy of an actual response rather than a polite response. Yeah, it's 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, I was like, you know, I've studied so much Japanese and also just living in Japan when I was 15,
15-year-olds were 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 or whatever, and 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, Hone and then Tate, so Hone is like, I'm very simplistically translating here, but it's like, how you really feel and how you really are and then Tate 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 Tanigyo, which is like, stranger formality,
where at your polite, but there's a wall, right? And my experience just in a week, and like, what do I know? But my experience here, and you have to be careful if you're staying at hotel, you can't be like, oh, people are so friendly, it's like, well, if you're staying at a nice hotel, of course, they're paid to be friendly. So you got to get outside. But as I've been walking around, which we have been, we have been. And people are friendly. My feeling is friendly, maybe opens,
a better word, like a bit more open. Yeah, they're more open. Direct. But it's direct, positive, direct, negative, maybe, like, I'm not talking a lot, but I'm excited to be here. When I was in high school, and I met my first Korean career, and I was like, my first interact. This was in New Hampshire. That's right. At St. Paul's. And nice guys, until they flipped, until that switch flipped, and their eyes got really big, and the K-Rage came on the scene.
Which is not something you see as much in Japan. People get pissed everywhere, but a wise man once said to me that you're going to Japan, and a lot of people get drunk. It's a drinking culture, but they get drunk, and then they tend to like, people fall asleep on the subway and so on. You don't see a lot of fights, but maybe that's different in Korea. It's just a different vibe. I think that might be part of the exports, right? There's K-Beauty, K-Pop, K-Dramas, and there's K-Rage,
I don't know. 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 US 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,
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The beautiful meaning incredible. When I first heard it, I think it was, yeah, my wife who had lived in Japan for 10 years, she had used it with a friend and she had explained it to me and I was like, that's so idealistic and just lovely, right? But I was like, there's no such thing in Korean. The experience of the Korean people, you know, it has not been an independent and whole country since 1905. It has divided since the Korean War and there's a lot of pain and struggle that happens
with families divided by North and South. The side note will put this in the show notes. You sent me some YouTube videos. Yeah. Which were old broadcasts. A family's being reunited. That shit. That's not reunited. We were united for like an hour. An hour and then they're separated again. Yeah. And I'm not Korean. I don't have the background. Just the holy shit, the emotion and the facial expressions. I was tearing up just watching. It's brutal. It's not relief of trauma. It's
new trauma on top of longstanding trauma. Yeah. What we're talking about is you'll put it in the show notes. But the North and South Korean governments had, it's certain times when they get along, they'll try to do some great like all of branch moves through unite families. And they had the the TV station, film it and they set up a whole area and they brought buses down. And it turned out to be not cathartic at all, but reopening pain. One of the things I noticed was in the notes. I
guess it was in text on one of the YouTube videos that you sent me. It indicated that initially this television special was supposed to be 45 minutes long, but there was such an outpouring. 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. 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 Korean 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 for an hour and then separate an hour. Oh, God. So is that cathartic or is that actually more trauma? Yeah. And so I remember watching this as a child. I was in LA and my parents were watching it. LA had a big enough Korean American community where you had Korean TV. You had a channel. I remember watching it and my parents 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 120 years, they have not had their own whole country and people. It's north and south. Before that, it was Korean war. Millions of Koreans died in that war between Russia and China and the 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 really talk about it. I appreciate the fact that there's something about like 10 million Chinese soldiers came across and at some point or something like that. They're just numbers that people don't really think what 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 impressive. It was a forced assimilation and there were a lot of deaths that occurred as part of that and impression. And there are a lot of movies, by the way, that detail this. You know what? This is, I don't want to take us to Kovtrak because I know we're headed towards Han. Yeah, first. Yeah. But what are the main storylines that you see in
movie and dramas? Because these say a fair bit. Yeah, this is, this is what we're talking about, which is in language and in stories. You get a sense for the people, maybe without even meeting in real life, a person from that culture and society. The tropes are the themes, the storylines that you hear in movies. One is about North South Korea. There's literally romcoms about it. There's action thrillers about it. It's by 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. Another one is the class struggle. You've probably seen Parasite, which I obviously want to account me word and I've seen globally, but that is director Bong, Bong Joon-Hol is one of the greatest Korean directors of all time. A lot of his films are very intense psychological thrillers. Parasite's pretty good. 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. And is that mean putting another way of lack of upward mobility? It's about the wealthy and the entitled and their mistreatment of the poor working class that are immobile, but also there's complexity. It's not just good versus evil in that dichotomy.
Both sides in those character sets are doing weird, crazy, off-putting things to each other, right? And so that's why I think Korean movies are really well embraced because they don't follow a formula. They're nuanced. They're swimming in an ocean of gray. Yeah, it's like swimming in the human mind where there's nothing totally pure and it's not a marble movie. Right. And it's not a sort of like a, 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 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 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 fried chicken. Oh my god. Stevesy meats. So much fried chicken here. Korean fried chicken. It's the true KFC. Oh my god. The end is so good. Korean culture, I think when Westerners or outsiders come and they actually experience it and they see it in movies and K-pop and they come
here and what they see is something that's a lot more realistic and nuanced. Well, we went to have fried chicken but not heavily breaded fried chicken rather very lightly fried. And that's the original. The original. 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 had on very calm. Most likely, let's just say the daughter of the owner or somebody who'd 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 talk. This last 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 up-recruist 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 Bung-Jun Ho's all of his films. They're all very different. Some feel like a horror thriller. Some feel like a psychothriller. Another one feels
almost like comedic sci-fi fantasy. Like the host. If you see this like original film, it's 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 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. They call them chables outside. But the employees of those chables will always
call themselves conglomerates. So you gotta be careful. I mean, this is I'm sure they're different, but reminiscent of Japan with like Sony Mitsubishi, etc. But I think there's more control of the economy from the conglomerates in Korea. I'll just sort of try to parapack things that I think you've said to me and then you can fact check or expand. And then we will eventually get down because I know what we should do that. But a couple of things that struck me is super
interesting. One is that these table, I guess the equivalent in Japanese vacated, just sort of like a chain of related companies, a 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, that privately held, but they're still family-old. They're still old. Just mind-blowing to think about. 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, ten years, and they act in this concerted way, which would have to contribute to how Korea punches above its way class, right? Because what's, I mean, I don't know the population of
Korea, but it's not a huge place. You know, it's under 50 million people. It's not. I mean, to think about what Korea has done on the global stage and continues to do and will do with that population
that's kind of, I mean, it is incredible. That's the, I don't want to say the underbelly or the dark side, but it is really the tradeoff of having on one side a very optimistic and progressive growth mindset for the economy and society, which is pound for pound per capita, probably the most innovative, high growth in terms of GDP country in the history of the planet in the last
50 years. I mean, it is a leader in wireless technology, it's 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. There's not a lot of upper mobility and that's changing
for sure, but it's still very much and you see this in the stories that are told. These stories are told in their 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 a career style of politics. Well, we'll leave it at that because I don't like politics, but I am recognizing this, which is that the populism here is about class struggle and about workers' rights and about having a little bit more of a flattening out so that people have opportunities to be up really low. 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.
Bung Jin-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 in it's a Korean family, two Korean families, basically fighting with each other for the entirety of the film and quiet and sometimes loud ways. But you empathize with both and you're critical of both. There's not a good versus bad. There's no hero versus villain and you take that out into the US, you take that out into Europe, you take
that out into any country. Yeah, residents. It's universal. Now, it's universal and the writing is good and the syndrome song was 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 though, a lot of people listening to this are probably, they're like, oh, Korea, they're listening to this because they saw a parasite or they're like, why is K-pop so big? What the hell happened in the last few years? What is going on? None of my friends speak Korean. Why are they listening? How can they listen to K-pop? What is going on? Why is Blackpink on like all over the place? Why is Blackpink
at Coachella? Yeah, what is the hell is going on? And then you have also these streaming shows on Netflix, right? Yeah. Squid Game. You've got the, I can't remember, I can never remember the name. These Jacked Men and Women, just physical 100. Physical 100, right? It's like American gladiators, but elimination challenge with Koreans, it's amazing. So what is going on? When I watched this doc, I was like, oh, wait a minute. Behind the scenes, there is a lot of very clever strategy. Look at
Squid Game. Class struggle. Right. But in this intense, crazy dystopian game, makes 100 games look like a kid's show. It really does. I remember watching 100 games. I hadn't seen it actually, until very recently. And I was like, oh, this is kind of boring. Yeah. Let me play 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 Jevls, the conglomerates, the production companies, the hind 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. So also a bit a lot of government support, right? Yeah. So originally, in the 1980s, Venture Capital, which is the industry I'm in and you're familiar with too, as an angel investor, in the 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, entertainment movies. You're talking about in the US?
No, it could create. I see. And so K-pop and Korean movies and all of this, it's not controlled by the government or supported by the government today directly. And oftentimes the sensors are coming down on things and it's lightened up, but you should not see people kissing in movies. The Korean sensors are pretty strong, just like the Japanese sensors. Yeah, the Japanese sensors are just wrong. Although anything goes in the collect books. Yeah. We're talking about
national broadcasts. National broadcasts is different. But what you see as the K-wave today, a lot of it came originally from the Korean Venture Capital industry, which was supported by the government and funded largely by the government. It was initially focused then on what we would call now today, soft power. Now, look, there's a Korean semiconductor chip industry and a whole bunch of technology areas that are now excelling well, but that was not the main focus or the main success
area for Venture Capital. 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 resonated is that it feels like the most irreverent and authentic and weird, sometimes crazy, but really raw, powerful movies out there and TV series. And it's very different from any other formulaic tropes that you see out there.
Like sometimes Korean movies take twists and turns. They'll start out like a rom-com and it turns into a zombie thriller. That ends up in like a political thriller mode and you're sort of confused. Like old boys like Ghee, 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 ring. So the
movies are easier for me to wrap my head around than say K-pop, right? Because there's good music all over the world. And there are entertainers and boy bands and girl bands in a lot of places. Most people outside of Korea do not speak Korean. Well, hey, 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 beach. 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. Oh, I get it. I'm just wondering. And learning Korean language. I'm wondering how that happened. And is this like beanie babies? Okay, it's gonna like burn twice as hot and flame out. Yeah. Or is there sort of more to the story? I think it's here, Stan. 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. Yeah, 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... 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. Yeah, actually boys. 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 to hyperdial it in. We're gonna take American automobile engineering culture and we're gonna we're gonna use like a kai-zan approach and make more reliable cars faster.
Crazy story on that. I think it was Edward Deming who had something like scientific manufacturing scientific management. This American efficiency social scientist who was basically ignored in the US was then embraced by Japan and led to like the Toyota Way and on the custom subs. 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 you're like okay we're gonna sort of like spinal tap right like when we
really need a little extra and turn it to 11. Let's go away to put it. Turn it to 11. So on that front the formula of the pop band was taken and it was turned into a 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. 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 it 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 crib of the crop. If you take that and it's like an industrialization of this very 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. It's popular. 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're supposed to be doing as this. They just love their normal life too. 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 at a lot of things that are not pristine and polished in society. So you have K-pop which is still as 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 self-power is this very polished and industrialized pop culture. And there's very intense and raw entertainment culture around movies. Yeah you get the polar extremes just because I've teased it so much. What is Han?
Just like Natsukashi is quite Japanese. Super Japanese. For Koreans, Han is probably the most talked about recent collective trait of Koreans that Koreans talk about but then now people outside are talking about 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. 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. That collectivism in Korea is Han. And is it generally you mentioned suffering? There are a lot of different descriptions of this I was doing a little bit of reading. It's really hard to explain in English actually. It seems very hard. Is it a type of so sadness would
be a component of that? Yeah. And also anger and anger. I was talking to David Chang from Momofuku, his old friend. He asked me about Travis Kelleyek. He had never met him and he said, you know, he seems like he has a lot of Han. 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 the care rage that you're talking about, which channeled correctly allows you to build an entire industry and succeed on a global level to create
what is the chips on the shoulder make chips in the pocket pop culture phenomenon 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. But Jung. And these are like very simple Chinese characters and Korean characters. So I wonder what that I don't know the hunt for any of them. So Jung is this connection or affection is bond that you feel.
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. 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. It means a thing that isn't translatable. And then if I were to take
two words that would describe Korean people. And again, I'm not Korean. I'm Korean American. I'm a GoPro. Someone inside but someone outside. And so I can compare it to how we are in America or other countries. And Han and Jung would pretty much cover. What is Nunchi? So Nunchi, I mean, you know a Bobby Kim. Bobby Hundes. Yeah. 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, Nune 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. It's a very critical. Yeah. Critical. Yeah. There are things that come up when you talk about people. 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. Nunchi, right? He just like didn't read the room. Just kind of came in. Like a bull in the chat. Yeah. Yeah. There there isn't. Nunchi. And then you know with Han, that's something that I actually have not heard a lot of Koreans talk about it. I feel like a lot of Korean Americans and Gopal talk about it. So it's an interesting thing. I think it's a more recent
modern definition in 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 like guys now. Yeah. And then also with Jung, that's something that my parents talk about a lot. Yeah. And my parents don't talk about Han. It's like maybe the people that really feel it don't want to talk about it. Yeah. Totally. And the people that want to find some reason or some rhyme to why they feel a certain
way or something is happening to them, they'll create a concept. But I think it is very interesting to look at those two concepts Han and Jung. And then that'll help you understand a lot in Korean society. It helps me a lot actually. Yeah. I'll give you one one example. If you're a visitor to Korea, there's a host mentality in Japanese called Moutanashi. And Korean, there's a concept of your my son name, my guest. And it's very strong. Very similar to Japanese Moutanashi, right?
They want to exceed in treating you well. They want to give you food. They want to take care of you. They want to do that. They want to create this concept of Jung and not to create the concept, but to have Jung with you. And that would be the idea. Because Koreans, most Koreans, not all, maybe. But Koreans want to have that connection, that deep connection. They want to drink with you. They want to stay out late with you. They want to wrestle with you. They want to argue with you.
They want to put their arms around your shoulder and sing a song after 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, 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. This is a bad time. 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. I'm trying to find the character for Jung. It's really bothering me that I don't wait. Okay. Jung is good. Jung is positive. Jung is optimistic. Yeah. I'm more in feeling of attachment. Yeah. Han, not so much. Yeah. Jung, you see that character, the Chinese character, in pretty sure, in concepts like sympathy, those types of sort of feeling, emotive concepts,
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 or an emotional thing, or maybe if you guys were drinking beers at night as teenagers, we're flipped. Yeah. Usually I could tell it's the eyes got really big. I'd be like, oh boy, here we go. Red. Red phase big eyes. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I think we're getting into the Hulk
series. Energy frequency has changed. Yeah. So that, I mean, I wanted to, yeah, that's, that's well, think about what I think about, like how to whittle it down to something basic. Before coming to Korea, I was trying to do a bit of reading. I didn't want to do too much reading. People asked me a lot. What did you expect? I'm like, I didn't expect anything. I could try 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 I 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? So first off, developed countries around the world have a relatively low birth rate,
reproductive rate. Germany, Japan, even right now in 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, you have to put down a year or two of your rent as a deposit. And what you get is maybe a one-bedroom apartment and one of the these large concrete high rises that you see just stacked around Seoul. And so to start a family is quite expensive. So there's that cost of
living to start a family. I don't know if you have an answer to this, but why so much deposit? Why a year or two of deposit? The consumer credit culture is not in good shape. It's never been in good shape in Korea. As long as I've been like, we're laughing because we had to pause earlier, so I got a phone call from the hotel. You've exceeded your incidentals. Can you come down and make your deposit? I'm like, you have my credit card. 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. So I just find answer my question. Asia Financial Crisis 1997-1990. Yeah. Because of Thailand and Japan went down, Korea went down, right? And this is a good example, actually, of Han and John together. I'm trying to make connect dots here, right? To simplify the audience. But there was a austerity program.
Korean government went out through media and said, we need every citizen, 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. So wild just to think about how poorly that would go down in the US would not go down at all. No, Christian. 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 from jewelry and contribute to the good, melt it down. But the other side of that is that there is a speculative gambling culture in investments and real estate and stock spawns real estate that was so bad in Korea that people were taking out credit cards at like 30% interest rates. And buying consumer goods. 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 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 a lot of it is on borrowed money.
And so in the 90s they had this problem, the subprime credit market for consumers. They even stopped derivatives trading in Korea because of it because people were getting so upside down on their investment
speculation. There is a speculative almost gambling problem in investments. It got to the point where the left wing government that was in power in the last administration during COVID a lot of wealthy people were buying properties and they limited people from buying more than one second property. So that you can buy a third. Can you imagine that in the US again? Something that would never happen
in the US. So there is this sense of like, 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? And 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. 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 say. And I see that among like extended family members, friends is a very expensive proposition because
you want them in the best schools. You're going to put them in the baseball hug one. You're going to put them in the swimming hug one, the math hug one, the piano lessons, like all of that from 3 p.m. all the way to 9 p.m. So you were spending a lot of money per year for each child because you want them to have the very best. And in Korea, the competitiveness around this is incredible. If you're not putting them in the hug one, who are you as a parent? And that's
incredible pressure. And that's incredible, like, exorbitant cost for someone who is not operating 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 is like the carrot of entrepreneurship and risk. They don't have that here. And it's changing. There are more and more startups. There are unicorns that are coming out of Korea, couping, toss. There's a lot of consumer marketplaces and
fintech companies. It's becoming sort of a Silicon Valley of Korea. And it's exceeding the speed in Japan. It's not quite what China is. China's very, very advanced and 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.
So I think it is a problem. I mean, we all know the economics around population decline. That hurts GDP and 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 won't 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. Because it was hard in Korea in the 60s, 70s, even 80s. So if people are moving out to find that upper mobility, to do better for their families. And then here you're somewhat still confined. That's a tough thing.
And there's one last thing that is really challenging about Korea. There's a civil service examination that you take to get into. That score really decides whether or not you get into a top university. I see that's the equivalent of an entrance exam. But it's more than that. It's like you could not do on the SAT, but you have a good GPA. Yeah. You interview well. Then you have all these tiers of junior college for your college. Technically, you have a lot of off liberal arts colleges, whatever
whatever you're looking for. Here, you're then a top college or you're not. And if you do not go to college, it is highly unlikely that you will have ability to provide for a family, a large family well in a healthy way. You're definitely not going to all these huggalons and things like that. So you're right in saying that K-pop and K-pop is like US is like pro sports. 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 in New York. In New York. Yeah. In New York. I mean, it's just it's like an entire playing field full of people down there engaging with League of Legends. And those PC bungs, right? Where are they playing? There was a guy walking out with a huge sword shirtless and it was snowing. That is dedication. Let's switch gears to a little bit more about
like what's happening in self-power. What was your take on all of this entertainment media, the beauty industry, this K-wave? What was your opinion of it before coming here? I've been paying very close attention to it for the last few years because I'm always curious to distinguish between trends and fads. Right? I brought up beanie babies. Not to throw beanie babies out of the bus, but there are certain things that become fashionable because maybe a handful of celebrities
are using X fill in the blank like a boots has been had many lives. It's like a Phoenix or I can certainly list many, many different things. But how do you distinguish between that and not to get too financing, but like a secular till when with some type of trend that is inevitable? Right like penetration of broadband and smartphones. Also trying to identify the flywheels at play or the elements that contribute to momentum. So for instance, feel like a podcasting.
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, 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 are like, wow, how did it become that everyone is now on a podcast
with a podcast talking about podcasts? Seems like five years ago there was nothing. 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. There's news and your friends are talking about it and their 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, but kind of the New York literati crowd. And since the New York literati run the mass teds of these huge media outlets, it gave the impression of serial being huge, which it was. It was huge. 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 cream medium, like, okay, where did this start? What set the snowball in motion? And I haven't figured it out. I have not. Although certainly Paris, I was a huge. That was huge, but I'm like, that can't be. I feel like that's the result of some proceeding things that I have missed.
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 Game, Squid Games. Okay. I was mess up if it's singular or plural, but anyway, you see that explode. I'm like, okay, that's interesting. Based on that success, I would imagine Netflix because this seems to be what Netflix does to be like, let us double down on whatever this is algorithmically. What makes
this show this show big part of its career? It changed Netflix. Yeah. 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 is the only one when they launched in Korea in Japan. It was like, great. It'll bring up subscriber numbers. Yeah. But then when it hit in Korea, yeah. 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, the entertainment, and they accelerated it until 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. Right. It was emergent over the course of several decades and then there are these accelerants. COVID almost certainly was an accelerant. You people at home watching Netflix looking for something to bond over. And boom, around the same time, you've got a bunch of this Korean stuff coming in that's very high quality, really compelling, and it's new. Also people are very different. Yeah. Very different. What is this?
Like Americans reading subtitles. And even though I've never really been involved with film, a little bit of television, I'm very interested to see which dominoes tip over a lot of other dominoes. Right. And how the macroeconomic stuff factors into it and geopolitics, but it's more
the economic side. So for instance, seeing how film production has changed both in terms of funding for films, but also main protagonists in the US where almost I'm not going to say without exception, but if you look at a lot of the blockbusters, whether it's the mission of possible movies or Marvel movies, it's like they always want to have a Chinese at least one Chinese man 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? Oh, good. Victorian like a biopic in the Chinese. It's totally just like she wore it in a lot of the time. But part of the reason that paid so much attention to Korea is that Korea's small. Yeah. Right. So it's like an export game. The US is not looking for like total addressable market in Korea. It's the opposite, which is a lot harder to pull off as a smaller player. And
I've been tracking it. 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 as a aesthetic is super sharp. And the best book design, I want to be fair, there are a couple of really good ones in terms of publishers who have published my books in foreign languages. The Korean publisher, maybe publishers for my books have done an exceptional job with book design.
And as you know, and as we've been discussing education, important literacy, very high, voracious readers in Korea, also true with Germany. It's disproportionately the case where you look at how my books are performed in Germany and it outperforms the UK plus Australia plus like almost everywhere outside of the US because the culture itself values education 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 Ryan Aria just ago. I was like, okay, how did Ryanair suddenly seemingly become ubiquitous? How did this happen? Because if I can study that and I can study what's happening with K-pop and then Korean entertainment, maybe there's something I can learn that will allow me to, as an investor, predict this earlier, where you have converging trends that are coming.
For instance, Shopify, we were talking about Shopify earlier today, as far as I know, the first advisor to Shopify when they like 10 employees is like, if you just look at tech trends, if you were able to bet on the right team in e-commerce and setting up that kind of back end plumbing for websites to be able to sell things, it's like, this is a trend that is going to continue. It doesn't seem to be any reasonable possibility that they could be interrupted outside
of 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 see where things are converging over, right? In our case, it would be another example of that. Where it's like, okay, let's not look at that. And this parallels to create 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 people are like, what, this is ridiculous. This is for black cars. So the 1% is in San Francisco, it goes Boo, Lamb, Tech Bro, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of the professional investors who said no, said no, because they were like, well, let's look at the total addressable market for people who are going to use black cars. 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? And 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. I'm 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 podcasts coming up on my 10th anniversary, and I'm using that as an opportunity to think about what's next for me. And generally, after five to 10 years of doing something, it gets really crowded. If I pick it correctly, the game gets harder. Oftentimes, I end up enjoying it less, even though I'm still enjoying the podcast.
And I'm like, all right, what's next for me? In which case, maybe there are techniques, maybe there are things I can look for, levers I can pull that would allow me to also build momentum on a micro level that I've seen at the macro level. So with this Korean entertainment stuff. So yeah, I've been paying a lot of attention. But I'll be honest, I don't know how to pay proper attention because I don't think the way to pay proper attention is to read the mainstream
US media coverage of the KWIF. I don't think that's the right way to do it. No, absolutely not. Right, I'll give a shout out to some books that have been very helpful. There's a great outfit. 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. I will say in the week that we've been here, I was really honestly surprised at not only your ability to read Korean angle 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? You're like two days. So even as a long time friend, I was very surprised. So that's a skill that is not only about finding a great method or playing yourself, but the fact that you would insist to order by yourself and you have a conversation with someone. There's a part of like throwing yourself into the mix to be able to do that. So quesh back to you on that because I admire that. That's amazing. Thank you. Like I've had to do that in Beijing and
Shanghai with Mandarin. Because I look Asian, I can pass a little bit more when I'm speaking, you know, I'm like, you know, I said, I'm a jitter, I'm going in, right? And so, and I'll get a little bit of a pass, right? But you're a white guy. Yeah. And you're coming in here confident. So I know that you've learned a lot of Asian languages and you're fluent into them. Tell me about what you are doing when you were 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. So I want to give a heart felt 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 it's not like
France. It's not like France. I mean, there's some great people at France, but they're less supportive. In Japan, they're very supportive, right? Like if you can introduce yourself to like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, Joe, Joe, Joe, but I wasn't sure what to expect here. And it gives me the impression, and I don't know if this is accurate, but gives me an impression that a lot of foreigners just don't
try here because people are like, oh, I can't get my order. Sparkling water and Korean, they're like, oh, wow. So the approach that I've taken and part of the challenge in learning any languages, 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, but like Duolingo has become this incredible resource worldwide. 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 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's either
born in Switzerland or Germany. He was in the military. I believe he was Jewish, taught himself a million different languages. And I think he was in intelligence for a good period of time. And what I like about his method is that it is for most people the opposite of what they experienced in school that is very unpleasant for most people who are subjected to it. Most people stay languages in 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, hey, it's unpleasant. Be 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? They can ask where the bathroom is or say, good day. That's about it. Michelle
Thomas asks you to take no notes whatsoever. It is purely auditory. Interesting. Okay. Listen to the method. No reading. No reading. Okay. Zero reading. Okay. There are some shortcomings associated with that, which is why I've added other things. But with the Michelle Thomas, I started, I read this cartoon, which is how to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes, which is really well done. And I'll put this in the really well done. I'll put this in the show notes. Then I watch
a couple of YouTube videos on how to read Korean. And just to get the reading up to speed again, in this particular case, it's not true for Chinese. It's certainly going to be harder for something like Arabic. Greek, you can do it pretty easily. Cyrillic. It's a 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 ambiantly 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 PIMSLA method, where it introduces vocabulary. And then it basically functions almost like Anki, there's an app called Anki, which means wrote memorization in Japanese funny enough, or I think it was super memo way back in the day, which had some type of, I want to say, it was like an
algorithmically driven space 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 Guanggu Hill, 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 it's taking the
same word that you're just got to forget. Yeah. And then it pops it back up to the top in your short term memory. And so you'd say, all the other Korean, 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, Hajiman, I'm going to work today, Irokiyo. 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 generous as fuck, which I loved. Like he would get all pissed off at the students, because the format is somebody is teaching to other students, right. And they're live. Like the other students are screwing up. 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 the combination. And I thought that did a very nice job. The one critique I would have is that in the original recordings, Michelle Thomas would say something like, how do you say, I want to eat Kierokometsch in Spanish, right. And then it go, boop, and there'd be a beep. And that meant your spoof 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 then you was going to be doing less sit down studying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you really haven't had any time. I have a night. So 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. No, I haven't had much time. But I will say also what I've tried very hard to do. And this is a question I get a lot from folks. There are many people who are better at learning languages than I am, but because it's not my full-time thing, like there's some people who are online and their brand is language learning. It's like, okay, well, you better be better than I am. And you have the space to
do that because it's your job. And that's not a swipe. 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. So for instance, I used Spanish to then learn German by using one piece of the comic book. One piece of 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 try to read them in Spanish to benefit being in 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 months later, which I've totally forgotten, unfortunately, German's gone. So sorry about that guys. It's too busy. I lied, but I've
forgotten it all. Then I used the Spanish one piece to learn the German one piece. This is a Japanese manga comic book that is legendary. It's the highest grossing franchise out of Japan as far as manga above Dragon Balls E and all of those. And with the Korean, I knew reading was the key unlock. Reading 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 and Korean. A lot of strong similarities, strong
similarities. So for instance, even though they wouldn't admit it. No, exactly. This is where I have to be so careful. Because now I'm coming here and not like I can know the history, but I'm like, shit, I don't want to get, I don't want to piss people off. It was really interesting is a lot of Koreans speak Japanese. Yeah, yeah, very well. Yeah, you have a lot of tarot cart 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. That's probably because of there are a lot of Japanese turrets. Oh, for sure. A lot of Japanese women love coming for tour guided trips in Korea going to the locations in the storyline of Korean dramas and movies. It's like the Americans who go to Dubrovneck or wherever to see the Game of Thrones places. No, it's a whole travel tourist sector. Wow. And it's not just Japanese. It's other Asian groups and Europeans. Actually,
here's a funny interesting fact. Someone from neighbor, which is one of the big public internet companies here, kind of like Yahoo or Google. Side note, if you think you're going to use Google maps here, you're not. You have to use the neighbor or the cow maps. So the super app thing is real here, by the way. What Elon wants to do with Twitter is only been done really in Asia and maybe Latin America. You're talking like a wechat type of thing. Yeah, we can do everything in one
out there. So someone from neighbor told me in a meeting that K-pop is so big and all the different like the digital artwork and media and content and all the things that you can buy and consume around that type of artist. I think about all the merch, digital merch. So France is actually a larger market than the domestic market. Wow. By dollars. And I said, are you sure? Do you mean
by some other metric, some other thing? I said, no, by by gross dollars, we do better with all of the licensed partner content around K-pop bands and artists in France than we do in Korea. So that might be just their business around K-pop, digital content. But it is interesting that Korea is almost wholly across the board to your point about Netflix, to your point about what to learn. It is an export society. It is an export economy. They are shipping things like steel.
They're shipping things like chips. Yeah. Wireless smartphones. They're now starting to ship a software. Marketplaces are moving out and they're also in that other side of soft power. They're exporting movies, books, TV series, music, fashion, beauty. Korean beauty products are growing like wildfire, not only in the US where that's understandable because you have a diaspora,
Korean American group and Asian American. But Europe where French and Swiss beauty, that's the stronghold of the Eurocentric beauty, because of the beauty, Korean products are becoming luxury products there, next to the LVMH and the carrying group products. 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 falling 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 better. Like the story of Japanese whiskey. Yeah. Is incredible, right? They sent one guy to go learn from the masters in Scotland and he came back and started some toady. Yeah. Right? It's wild. And I think a lot of that was learned by Koreans and they started learning that in heavy industry. The main street in Canada is called
Tehranno. Okay. So just it's quick footnote for people. So if you remember the, that's another breakthrough moment kind of like cereal, Gangnam style. That music video, pass a billion views and people are like, what the hell is going on? Gangnam style. Toe breakthrough moment for Korean culture. Yeah. So Gangnam is a neighborhood. Yeah. Gangnam is the most modern district in Seoul. It's the newest modern area of office buildings. We went there the other day. A lot of LED walls
and fancy stores, things like that. It's the new Seoul. Korea's 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. 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 Tehranno. And the reason why it's called Tehranno is that Iran, when it was a capitalist liberal country in the 70s and the 60s too, hired a lot of Korean workforce. So it's out of
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 in domestically wanted to be a miner because you had a high likelihood of death and Fissima. So the reason why it's called Tehranno 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 Tehranno.
And if you look at like the history of Korea, it was we will export our men and our women as nurses 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. 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 Beko. They are like the big tech companies that have software. News telling me that singtell and other regional wireless companies, mobile carriers in Asia often come to them to ask them about the newest technology, how they should approach their own strategies around this, around LTE, 5G, and now around AI. And so wireless telecom companies here are building their own language models.
Yeah, that's what you would never expect AT&T and Verizon to go compete with open AI. 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-ajang, I'm going to try to bring this all together in a theory and a grand theory. But this grand theory is also that tomorrow is not guaranteed for South Koreans.
There is 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 is not guaranteed, they're living in the moment to do exactly what they want as fast as possible with an impatience that expresses itself as so industrious, so productive. Look at them cranking out.
Such a small country cranking out films that are winning a Cannes Film Festival, the Palm Door there, Oscars here, largest, the most successful artist, music artist in the world, most high growth, cosmetic beauty brands, largest mobile smartphone manufacturer other than Apple. Why is this coming from a small country? My opinion on this and people can disagree and many would say, 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 or millions of soldiers and artillery and missiles pointed at them. I'm glad you brought up the 17 miles away, because in most people's minds, at least I shouldn't say most, whatever Diculous statement, in my mind and in the minds of certainly many of my friends, Seoul has this huge cosmopolitan city
exists. It is far away from North Korea. No, it is not far away. It is right there. It's very close. Well, frame it in terms of people can understand. It is closer than San Francisco is to San Jose. That's 28 miles. So, it's so stanchly close. 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 upper mobility and being able to achieve that pushes cranes out in the
diaspora to become gyo-po 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 the 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. 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, well, LA people are so moving so slowly, physically moving slowly. And in New York, you're like, you feel tired after like a couple days in Manhattan. You come to
Korea. I think only New Yorkers can really understand living in Seoul because you have to move fast. It's kinetic. It is hyper kinetic. 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 hunger 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 fah is F. I. S. A. S. A. S. and then enough is O of Fah. Same sound OUGH. It's like, oh my god, this language. It's a mass. It's a complete mass. And Korean is super regular. And what I would say also about language just as an addendum to what we're talking about is if you learn 10 senses, anybody can learn 10 senses, 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 senses. It's not that hard. And there's going to be stuff. Friends, I love sparkling water. I know every day. I'm going to ask for sparkling water. So it's like, tons of senses just so. Learn how to ask for sparkling water. And then every time I get nominated, it's like, oh, yeah, there's no salt and pepper. Why is there
no salt and pepper in this country? And then I'm like, I know I'm going to have to ask for at least salt. It's like, they're not as they salt. And there are a couple of other just fun tips for folks. Like you can come up with a couple of, because you're going to be entertaining as a foreigner trying to learn a foreign language like Korean to learn a couple of things that are like off menu. Because like, where's the bathroom is on menu? Like they would expect that something you would learn.
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? 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
brought directly from Chinese. How do you open yet? Long time no see. But you can, you know, always say something like Japanese or here like what have I got my name? Do you know? Like use a really polite form and they're good. Wow, that was good. 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, chin chin, they have to go like
just like, ah, like no rush. Take it easy. Like, dude, slowly. So learn a couple of things like that. And you'll just have a better time. Korean food is fucking amazing. It's so good. It's so good. And I did have a funny experience. So I'll be honest, I have not had much Korean barbecue, but I wanted to of course have Korean barbecue. 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.
Like, catch me like, ah, that's not an appetizer. It's a side dish. When the beef comes out, I was like, oh, okay, great. So the beef comes out. And in number one, I know it was kawbi. Kavi. Ah, I'm not sure. Korean barbecue. Korean barbecue. It was short rib. It was different cuts. It wasn't short rib in this case. It wasn't kawbi. However, the meat comes out and I was like, oh, because you can't eat in Japan. It's like, if you have meat, it's rice. And I was like,
oh, we're going to eat rice with it. And they're like, well, no, you kind of have the rice like a dessert. And I was like, huh, okay, 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. And one of the guys with me was like, yeah,
we, this is kind of our olive oil. We did a beef into the sesame oil, which I'd never done before. I was like, okay, the sesame oil was sort of like a condiment. I 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 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. The other thing unique in my experience with Korea versus anywhere I've been in East Asia, even Central Asia is, you guys use scissors a lot. Scissors for me. Scissors for cutting stuff. Yeah. And by the way, that annoys my wife so much, because I will just, I cook a lot of barbecue. Yeah, I'm a self-professed
grill master for my family. Yeah, I have meat scissors. Oh, yeah, and I'm constantly clipping. Yeah, why the hell would you use an eye for me? It makes so much sense. Have you seen the Korean meat scissors that have the bottle cap opener for beer? Oh, genius. Right in the middle. That makes all the sense in the world. Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world. So Korean barbecue has been amazing. And I would say I was surprised and I shouldn't be, but I came in blank slate,
right? 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, like low end car. But if you go to the Hyundai department store, which is super locks, 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's just this never ending sea of culinary delights of every variety. And the ice cream, the qualsals, the pastries, Korea really knows how to do food. The food is spectacular. And I think that that is actually the most important part of Korean soft power. If we're talking about this as an export economy, it is the first thing that people left, even for K-pop food. There's not one person that I've taken to Korean barbecue for the first time
that hasn't said, I cannot believe I've never eaten this before. 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 therapist just launched 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. I said, what do I need to do? Well, you need to go out and get your own materials at
the grocery store. And then we're going to compete and we're going to grow. 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 don't only know how to cook one type of barbecue, but I'll try. So I basically did an American barbecue recipe and I took a Korean barbecue recipe, which my mother taught me. And I knew like the back of my hand. I could do that in my sleep.
So I got soy sauce, that sesame oil, I got pears, I got like Bartlett Pears because they didn't have the Asian pears in Austin. And then brown sugar, Coca-Cola, 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 in a pot, I didn't describe it to
anyone. So I made a Korean barbecue marinade in a Texas style. And I 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 chicken drumsticks and these baby back ribs that were unsauce and unseasoned, but grilled and people would go try it. And everyone loved it.
My pot, the whole thing was like, whose pot would get lower first? And everyone said, what's in that? I said soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, right? I said, I'm sorry, I don't have any kimchi for you, but it would just top it off. And so I really feel like of all the soft power things, of all the exports, culture 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 would say that Korean food is the best food on the planet. I've tried everything. I love Japanese food. I love Mexican food. I love Italian food. French food, obviously, fine dining. But I think Korean food is the original export other than the skilled labor from the 60s and 70s. And whenever you see a Korean restaurant, if you go there, this is like learning Korean when you go to Seoul and 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? Mm-hmm. Sunnubu-jige, denjang-jige. Jige. And these stews, Korean food is comfort food.
There are a lot of people trying to make up-scale food and there are people like Kory Lee, Beno, San Francisco, and David Chang and Momofu Koo that have perfected an upscale version of Korean food. But Korean food is comfort food. It's home cooking food. We had food the other day. And I was like, gotta eat the stuff. That's like, this is a poor country's food. And that's the best stuff. The other stuff is great. So anyways, I wanted to give kudos to the original Korean export
that everyone loves, which is Korean food. Korean barbecue and Korean food. And this stews, I didn't expect to be broadsided about this stew as they're so delicious and fair warning, can get pretty spicy. Korean food can get pretty spicy. So do you get murky? You can get murky. Like, unless you're Korean or unless you've looked at the recipe and the preparation, kind of don't know what's in there. murky. And you can definitely earn points also just by
speaking a little bit of Korean. You can just say like, how go go and shake. Oh, do you, child? 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. Just a word, just a word or two, right? Thank you. I guess it's delicious. It's like, yeah. It is. So you can say, if you, if you want to say it's really good
or very good, it's very good. It's a good one. It's a good one. It's a good one. It's a good one. Or a gangjang. Yeah, that's a good one. And when you, when you're eating, if you don't finish it, yeah, that's a silent way of saying it wasn't good. I learned this the hard way going to, I flew, this is of course, this is the one I do. I flew to LA, then I went to San Diego, so I wanted to train with a Korean archery coach. Because there are a couple of things I'll
just mention in passing. We got to talk about why the sports that Koreans are particularly good at. Yeah, I mean, for a long time, maybe even still, break dancing, 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 Korean started competing. I mean, it's like, 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, I still had all this food in front of me. And he's like, yeah, you can't leave that basically. You gotta eat that. Okay. Yeah, that's like, yeah, that's like, he's like, you can't leave rice. I mean, take off your shoes. Bow. Say the food is good. Finish your plate and bowl. Yeah, and all is good. Everything's good.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the Big Thumb Jun film. The Dumb Jun film. Oh, it's just talking a little bit about film. We were at Sundance together in Utah, Park City, great city. Great place. Best time to go skiing or snowboarding is during Sundance. Because nobody's skiing there all of it. All the festival and then the locals don't want to get anywhere near the place. That's right. Because it's mayhem. We premiered our documentary on
just to be clear, our is not me and Steve's. Oh, no, sorry. The collective we are our is the great director and team, including Steve Yoon actor, but also executive producer on this film with me. And he came to that. But I would love to hear some of your thoughts on this because he is the most famous Korean artist. Well, why don't you tell people the title? The title of the documentary of this Korean artist is Moon as 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 Pek or in Korean, we would say Baek Namjoon. Because we say the last name first. Baek Namjoon is the most famous Korean artist of the 20th century. It was the father of digital and video art. So whenever you see like TVs, I'll set up in an array like a human display. Yeah. And he did the TV Buddha, which is probably his most famous work with a camera constantly taking video
on a cathode ray too of a sitting Buddha statue. And the Buddha is looking at himself. And he coined the term information super highway 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. Yeah. I knew very little about him. I mean, really just
what you had told me. And I really enjoyed the window into his personal story, his creative process, his insanity on some level. It's in the sense that he was highly experimental. Also, this is true for so many artists and innovators deeply tortured might be too strong or worried, but I went through some very difficult times had very little money at points. I remember the footage of his one of his apartments just caving in like water coming through the ceilings.
And the difficulty in forging a path and experimenting when you're not getting a lot of applause from any majority whatsoever. And how incredibly trying that is because it's one thing to be say an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in a culture where the risk taker is lionized and
even failure on some level. Many levels is accepted where you'll be applauded for trying versus what he was doing, which is true, I think for most people and most cultures and most times, which is really operating at the fringe with other people who are doing this type of experimentation, not just artists, but also technologists and taking the path less traveled, which is really, really painful at times. And in many instances, not financially rewarding. 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 lines was even numbed to bike, spoke many languages, none of them well. He spoke a lot of languages, but they were all broken. He spoke pikes. He spoke pikes. And I found that so endearing, real endearing guy as well.
Well, his story is really interesting. He is one of those breakthrough moments for Korean culture and society in that he was the only internationally known artist in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even into the 2000s in the New Past away in that decade. He was the ambassador or the representative as crazy as he might have seen to everyone. That in the art world, he was appreciated, admired, and followed for that. And it's very uncrean for that time period.
You have to remember that at that time period, Korea was under essentially a dictatorial, a somewhat elected administration. And to clarify for folks also, I mean, he was outside of 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 our 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 blocked up. Yeah. When he visited much later. Right. But they embraced them, which is really interesting because if he had done all that here, he would have been shut down. But the fact that he did it out in the world and became well-known and did these live broadcasts that ended up looking like the future YouTube variety show. I forgot about some of those. Oh my God.
In the show, as you got to put a link to this, there's a free streaming, I think, somewhere. So it won't be about a commercial thing. But he became such a popular figure in Korea, despite doing that out there. And it was something that if he had done it here, it would have been panned. Right. Yeah. And maybe censored. Right. And I think that that is part of that Han. He struggled with mental health. Yeah. Big time. With relationships with his own art and his
own identity and failure. And in a weird way, it's sort of a, he represented the unexpected hero to a lot of artists and thinkers of the time. There was a thing in Korean music before K-pop. There was an extremely underground small, but amazing jazz and rock scene, especially Cycloc. 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 Cycloc band. What is Cycloc? It's just a genre that I'm
not familiar with. Cycloc is psychedelic rock. Oh, I got it. Okay. And in the logical rock. In 60s and 70s, when that was popular in the US, Koreans were doing that. But here's the thing. Government sensors back then, which shut down anything that looked a little suspect. Edgy and counter to the counter culture. Yeah, represented counter culture at the time. So they would put out these album covers on the LPs that looked like flowers and
blue sky and clouds and just really weird, fluffy covers. But the music inside was serious. And it was trippy. It was intense. And so it was like a little house on the prayer on the front and then Ramstein and the inside. It's like, judge this book by its cover
please. Yeah. Because inside, it's some really like, you know, some personal stuff. Not only subversive, but they were dancing to this, enjoying this inside of small clubs and bars and apartments because this couldn't be a thing that you could do in a big concert hall. The government sensors are there, right? Yeah. So I want to call out that the diaspora is
really important to a lot of what's happened to. So if you look 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. Yeah. So a lot of the dance groups, I actually sponsored the first world B-Boy Championships called R-16 Insol in 2008. Oh, kidding. Yeah. And all the best B-Boy crews from around the
little France, it was all country-based. It's like in other bigs, like France versus Japan, US versus Korea, right? And everyone convened Insol, outskirts of Seoul. It was government supported, which was 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 K-pop 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, and come back to Seoul. So there's this export, but then there's also this reverse immigration happening, or they're coming back. So it's a really exciting time to be in Seoul, startups are rising, and that's now a new career option. There's still huge problems with
North and South Korea, the tension and the geopolitical, 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 the danger of geopolitical stuff, but also because of does it get dialed in like Tokyo one day? And it becomes everything gets really locked in, defined in a mobile state. Yeah. And right now it feels really like transitional.
Yeah. I mean, it feels to me at least, and look, I've only been here five days. So what do I know? But I pay a lot of attention to first impressions, and it just has a very alive feeling to it. And it has similar to the way that in a sense, like the way that Austin feels right now, has like an adolescent growth feeling to it. There's a lot of energy, and there's a lot of velocity. There's many things being built, many, at least I'm speaking
about Austin, and I have restaurants being open. 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 these neighborhoods. I'm like, okay, yeah, I bet if I come back here in three, five years, like totally to 70% of these
stores will have changed. I mean, there'll be a lot of differences. The director, Amanda Kim, of the documentary, the Dungy Impact documentary, she lived in New York and she lives in Paris now. We did a premier screening here, and she said that it was so emotional, even though she hadn'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 that not only a mind-blowing experience for her as a director, but as a Korean kyo-po coming back to present that. And so this is something that I think a lot of, you know, any of your listeners who are Korean American or Asian American or even from India, and thinking about that reverse brain drain as they call it. Yeah, the cycle, like the cycle back, the feedback load. It's 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 used mandu, Korea used mandu, Turkey used mandu, Pakistan used mandu. Food is the original spice. That's true. Food. Carried by Mongolians, Romans. It's the original cultural export. Yeah. Korean food, Korean film, Korean music, Korean beauty. All of this is the only thing that will keep Korea
alive in perpetuity. This could all be gone. It's too small of a country, too small of a population on two tenuous of a peninsula, literally in the geographic center of all the tension in the region. So that export, that pollen, that is the existence, right? Yeah, totally. And so it's and some on the concept of, you know, whether it's what's happening right now with the technology industry here, arts, food, like all of that, it feels really like it's peaking. 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. Yeah. And for the next five, 10 years, if I didn't have a family that's in schools and a fund that is headquartered in San Francisco, this would be the best place, definitely in Asia. It's like groaning and squeaking and screaming as it is. First thing that seems. Yeah. Yeah. I really encourage people to check it out. And also to paint a picture, we're sitting in this hotel room
looking out beautiful sunny day, which is crazy because it was snowing earlier. You were saying, as soon as you think you got to 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. It's a stunning city. And hopefully this puts it on the map for some people as a possibility for visiting. I will also say a huge difference experientially for a native English speaker here, say compared to Japan, all the respect of Japan. I love Japan. I've said 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 my Korean as hard as I might try in a handful of days, still pretty limited. So I do need to lean on the English. Anything else that we should cover before we wind to a close anything else you'd like to say before we land the plan. I think we're good. I think we're good, man. And thanks for having me.
Oh, so fun. It's been a fun week. It's been a great week. We've covered a lot with a short amount of time, but still some more to come. Yeah, we've got some more adventure to do. And to everybody listening, as always, I'll put links to you everything that we can pull from this conversation. Links to everything we discussed in the show notes, a Tim Doppelog slash podcast. And also, as always, until next time, be just a bit nicer, a bit kinder than as necessary, not just to other
people, but to yourself. And come something though. Thanks. Come something though. Let's make. 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 subscribed 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 on reading, books on 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 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 slash friday. Type that into your browser tim.blog slash friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Give
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