Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Steve Jang (@stevejang), the founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. Steve is also a longtime friend and one of the founder-now-investor generation of VCs that arose out of the last technology cycle. He is one of the top 100 venture capital investors in the world, according to Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors, and was ranked #45 in 2023. He is also a Korean-American, a gyopo, who is deeply invested and involved in both the technological and cultural worlds in the US and Asia.
Previously, Steve was an early advisor to, and angel investor in, Uber, and then an early-stage investor in Coinbase, Postmates, Poshmark, Tonal, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Humane, the AI device platform. He helped Uber, Coinbase, and Blue Bottle Coffee, among others, to expand into Korea and Japan. As an entrepreneur, Steve co-founded companies in the consumer internet, mobile, and crypto space.
In the film and music world, he is an executive producer, and his most recent film is Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, which tells the story of the greatest Korean artist, and father of digital video art, and which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. His next film is a documentary about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Steve Jang, nice to see you, sir.
Steve Jang: Good to see you, thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. [inaudible] Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show.
Steve Jang: [inaudible].
Tim Ferriss: I’m thrilled to be here because I’ve wanted to visit Korea for 20-plus years.
Steve Jang: It’s wild that you haven’t been here yet.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been in the Seoul Airport multiple times en route to Japan.
Steve Jang: Doesn’t count.
Tim Ferriss: 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 an excellent movie, strongly recommend.
Steve Jang: Amazing.
Tim Ferriss: And then watched, since I was sort of getting tapped for the Korea high after watching that movie, I went to a K-pop documentary, which was also in the in-flight menu, very well done, and as soon as I got off the flight I think that’s when I texted you and I was like, “Steve, when are you taking me to Korea?” And you were like, “Actually, I’m going to be in Korea,” 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. What don’t we just maybe start there and we’ll see where things go?
Steve Jang: It’s really because of that K-wave that you described, has happened recently.
Tim Ferriss: Very recent.
Steve Jang: I mean, I think people have been fascinated by going to Japan, and going to Onsen and Kyoto and Tokyo and experiencing all of that for three or four decades now, and it’s become a favorite for people who love Eastern culture, they love design, food, and Tokyo and Kyoto are amazing. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Steve Jang: And so it was a poor country, it was in an oppressed state. So it wasn’t a state that you’d want to visit 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, there’s a lot of Koreans in South America. And then in Europe, France and the UK are — and Germany were also landing spots. So all of this is happening more recently in time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the main actor — or one of the main actors, Korean actors in Past Lives‘ name is —
Steve Jang: Teo.
Tim Ferriss: Teo. Teo was born in Germany.
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And what do you call Koreans overseas?
Steve Jang: Gyopo.
Tim Ferriss: Gyopo.
Steve Jang: 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 and practical term, right? It’s not something that is considered negative anymore.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to highlight something that you said, which is this rate of growth. I’ve observed, for instance in Seoul, that the taxis, the actual cars, look like something out of Blade Runner in many cases, they’re very futuristic, this is a very futuristic town, and you put a post on Instagram with a video of this robot that was sort of being defended by this bodyguard from I guess the KTS — or KBS rather, and it is very much a glimpse, I feel, into the future of sorts when you visit Seoul, certain portions of Seoul.
In contrast, if you go to, say, Japan, the taxis look like they’re many, many, and they are, many, many decades old. So if I compare my experience when I was, say, in Japan in 1992, to my experience in Japan now, my perception is, because I’ve been back many times, not that much has changed. Certainly things have changed, but it’s not dramatic. How would you compare like the last 10, 20, 30 years in Korea — and maybe technology penetration’s one way to unpack this, but you were talking about, for instance, even from socioeconomic perspective, some of the poorest people will still have technological access that would trump most of what people experience in the US.
Steve Jang: 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. And it’s a city in transition, it’s a country in transition. You’ll see — we walked around neighborhoods where these were buildings that were a hundred 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. 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 in bombed-out shoe factories, and it has so much character and history, it kind of reminds me of when I visit Berlin, that old, that vintage classic architecture, almost brutal, right, from that era, and then very modern progressive concepts of architecture and culture coexisting together.
And I see a lot of similarities between Berlin and Seoul, more that I would see it in, let’s say, Hong Kong and Seoul. In Tokyo, it’s — like you said, the taxi cabs are classic cabs.
Tim Ferriss: Classic.
Steve Jang: They are immaculate.
Tim Ferriss: They are immaculate.
Steve Jang: In Korea, the taxi cabs are changing by the days, you know it’s this new Hyundai car, this Kia car, and they’re very modern, but they’re almost disposable at this point because they’re cycling through cars very quickly. And so there’s this sort of rush or need to constantly innovate and improve here, that doesn’t hold onto the classics very well, and so I actually like to see a lot of the old-school classic things still thriving here, and I hope that it doesn’t go away, because it’s part of the history, and it’s what makes Koreans really interesting today because they’re so — 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 gyopo, has fanned out globally. And we’re always in between. We’re not fully American or British or French. We’re Korean-American, we’re 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 out 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 a in and out revolving door of different influences and foreigners. 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.
Tim Ferriss: I heard that.
Steve Jang: I remember going to Korean school in Los Angeles when I grew up. Every Saturday, when everyone else was watching cartoons or playing soccer, I went to Korean school from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. I went to Van Nuys High School, public school. And this Korean school, rented it from the L.A. Unified School District.
And we’d go there, we’d learn Hangul. We’d learn how to write and read. We’d learn — and then you had a choice of an elective, abacus, calligraphy, taekwondo, and I think the fan dance. I picked taekwondo. And I tried abacus, I tried calligraphy, really enjoyed it. The things that stuck for me were taekwondo and calligraphy. This is my Saturday for eight years. You’re trying to preserve some of that learning and culture as you go out.
Now imagine in Korea as historically in the shadow of China, and then in more recent times in the 20th century under like 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 their trading partners, they’re their neighbors. They’re allies when it comes to outsiders. But there’s a lot of historical beef between them. But there’s a lot of appreciation and love too, especially in the younger generations.
Tim Ferriss: Especially in the younger generations. I mean, when I was in high school and moved from a public school to a private school and I had the chance to start studying Japanese, a number of my friends in high school were Korean and pretty Korean-Korean, not Korean-American. 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.
I didn’t have the historical context, but the fact that I was studying Japanese really bothered some of my friends’ parents. I remember when we went on a drive and the fact that I was so excited to be studying Japanese was not exciting to one of my friend’s parents.
Steve Jang: Interesting.
Tim Ferriss: That’s just an example. But this, they’re also quite a bit older. But they had been —
Steve Jang: Right. They had their —
Tim Ferriss: Their personal experience was just so different from mine.
Steve Jang: Yeah. They have really fresh memories.
Tim Ferriss: Super fresh.
Steve Jang: Of then annexation and the colonial rule.
Tim Ferriss: Let me throw out a couple of things that stand out to me here as super interesting facets in Korea, the demonstrations, which maybe we’ll get to. That’s something I don’t see as much of in a place like Japan. 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, or at least a handful of preachers with megaphones. You have a, is it predominantly Christian society here?
Steve Jang: It’s, I think other than the Philippines, is the only predominantly Christian Asian country.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. That’s point one, which is certainly true if you drive around L.A., the number of Korean churches, buses taking Koreans to churches, there’s that component. I have no education related to this, but I’ve heard Korea described as I was coming here and doing reading as the most Confucian country in East Asia. Right? Maybe what does that mean for people who are like, what does that actually mean?
Steve Jang: It’s 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. And then everything changes on the origin continent. And then somehow this strain of plant or this species of animal has continues.
Tim Ferriss: Continues to exist in this new place.
Steve Jang: It’s a very unique thing now. And because it hasn’t been influenced from the outside, like the origin point. And so Korea received the Confucian value system. Filial piety, a strong, strong focus on education and academics and scholarship, which came from China. But China went through its changes in the 20th century, the 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 I think really comes from that.
Even growing up in L.A., I was born in Korea and we immigrated over to Los Angeles. I remember being a — and it was very much this very pedantic academic thing that was forced. And you see hagwons, which are Korean tutoring centers. That is, you won’t see this anywhere else. I’ve seen — we have friends in different cities that have kids. There’s nothing like the Korean hagwons, which is the Korean word for a tutor or a tutoring center, a tutoring school. When school is done, you go to another school.
Tim Ferriss: Now also, just to underscore when school is done, I was listening to this interview with a Korean language teacher somewhere in Oxford, I think. And they asked her how she would describe the difference between school in, say, the UK and school in Korea. And she said, “Oh, students in the UK,” her English is pretty rough. And she’s like, “They’re so much happier,” she said. “They end school at 3:00 p.m.” She said, “In Korea, I ended school at 10:00 p.m. and then I went to,” I think the hagwon.
Steve Jang: It’s really intense.
Tim Ferriss: The cram school, which also exists in Juku in Japan. But it seems more intense here actually.
Steve Jang: It’s more intense.
Tim Ferriss: It seems it’s more intense here because she was saying, “I would come home from my regular school nine, 10, then go to cram school, come home at 1:00 a.m.”
Steve Jang: Oh, wow.
Tim Ferriss: “And then just repeat.”
Steve Jang: That sounds very extreme.
Tim Ferriss: That was her vibe. That is extreme.
Steve Jang: Well, I mean, so even the gyopo, the 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 hagwons that are owned and operated by Korean-American immigrants. And the churches are the landing point to connect with your community. 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, Ellis Island of that city meeting point to get connected to people that look like them and spoke like them and understood them.
Tim Ferriss: That makes sense.
Steve Jang: But the hagwons are a very particular Korean thing. And I have a friend, Min Jin Lee, who’s the author of Pachinko, which is an incredible book.
Tim Ferriss: Which I’ve heard great things about from multiple people.
Steve Jang: I mean, I will admit this wholeheartedly that it’s one of the few books where I just immediately am in tears reading because it touches not only the history of Korean people, but also Koreans who moved out.
Tim Ferriss: Moved.
Steve Jang: Gyopo. It takes place in Japan. It’s a very, it’s during the earliest 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.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding.
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I did not know that.
Steve Jang: 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 in the 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 bowler hat, and a neatly trimmed mustache, and is clearly living in Japan.
And they lived in Tokyo and Kyoto. And so I have a very 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. 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 L.A. 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, in Chinese culture and language, you’ll see that their influences, you may not know the origin point, but you’re like, “That word sounds very similar.” But the way it diverges is it’s these unique phrases and words that capture part of the feeling or the psyche and the soul of those people that is really fascinating.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Steve Jang: And we were talking about this, so explain what natsukashii is in Japanese language.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so natsukashii is a beautiful word.
Steve Jang: By the way, I love your pronunciation.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
Steve Jang: Better than a lot of me saying in the US.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, natsukashii, yeah, 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 —
Steve Jang: It’s a literary word, not a spoken word.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. In the US, you might say, “Oh, man, that brings back the memories,” or something like that, which is a little bit closer to natsukashii. It’s also a little closer to saudade in Brazilian Portuguese. Has a similar feeling to it. But natsukashii, they’d be like, “Ah, [inaudible] natsukashii.” Is pleasant nostalgia, when something brings back the memories.
Steve Jang: It’s positive.
Tim Ferriss: Positive.
Steve Jang: Right. That word doesn’t exist in Korean language.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You need to say more.
Steve Jang: We have things that revolve in Korean language are around suffering and pain.
Tim Ferriss: Sorrow, regret.
Steve Jang: Sorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Rage.
Steve Jang: Oppression, angst. And it’s the way I describe to people who have been to Tokyo a lot. And they ask, they go, “Should I go to Seoul?” I’m like, “Absolutely. It’s so fun. It’s so electric right now. The ideas are new. They’re embracing outside influences. You should go now because you will miss it when it’s fully dialed in.”
Tim Ferriss: And it’s going to be unrecognizable five or 10 years from now. It’s just moving so quickly.
Steve Jang: I mean, I come 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 didn’t exist.
Tim Ferriss: Even going on some of our walks in these neighborhoods that you hadn’t been to in a handful of years.
Steve Jang: Yeah. I walked in that neighborhood that I took you to, Cheongdam-dong. I brought one of the Blue Bottle Coffee founders, and we had both invested in that company a long time ago. And they were interested to come to Japan and Korea. And so I met up with them in Japan, walked around different Tokyo neighborhoods with them. Went to, 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 soul.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a beautiful walking area, really nice.
Steve Jang: And you saw it. There’s actually real painters out with their easel painting nature and streets and life. And it’s so fun to see that. And so when you see that, you’ll think, oh, it’s just like Tokyo. Because it’s very quaint, it’s very precise, it’s very safe.
Tim Ferriss: Unbelievably clean, also.
Steve Jang: But, but.
Tim Ferriss: There are some buts.
Steve Jang: If you spend more than a few days here in Seoul, you’ll realize that what you are looking at is a city that might on the outset look like you’re walking into Tokyo. But it’s actually the other side of the coin. They exist in the same dimension, but it is a very different vibe.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I think you were talking — where are we talking? This might’ve been after a little bit of soju.
Steve Jang: Always.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s like the Bizarro. When I used to watch the Superman cartoons in the mornings before going to school or whatever, there was Bizarro Superman. Who was like, looked just like Superman, but it’s like, wait a second, that’s not Superman. It’s different.
Steve Jang: It’s like the, what is it in Stranger Things, they call it the upside down. The culture here is much more, it’s less polite in the protocol definition of the word. In Japan, it is very difficult for a Japanese person to say no very directly and bluntly to you.
Tim Ferriss: Very hard.
Steve Jang: Because it’s very impolite for them to do that. And it is almost a dishonor for them to behave that way towards you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just a side note for folks, if you ever have to ask a Japanese person to do anything, this could be at your hotel or whatever, and if they scratch their head and they go — and they breathe in like that — or they go, “[foreign language].” If they say it’s difficult, that means no, that means impossible, generally.
Steve Jang: If they start apologizing right away, then you know it’s not going to happen.
Tim Ferriss: But the word [foreign language], which gets translated literally into English, and no, you almost never hear that word. It’s very rarely heard.
Steve Jang: When I’m in Japan, I have to definitely take on a much more reserved and polite stance more than I would in the US, more than I would even in Korea because of that. And I respect that. In Korea, it’s a lot more. There’s still a little bit of that. And because East Asian cultures, they don’t —
Tim Ferriss: I am smirking so hard because I’m thinking you’re doing less child’s pose than the tea houses when you have a low back pain. We went to this, it’s so cute, adorable teahouse. It was just, ah, with this little [foreign language], little courtyard in the middle with the manicured trees. And poor Steve, his low back was killing him. And so he’s stretching. But it’s in the hallway and these two women just glitched so hard because they didn’t know how to contend with it. But yeah, so I enjoyed it.
Steve Jang: Let’s be honest, it’s my fault because I’m still an American at heart. And so what we’re talking about here is the other part of me, my family’s history.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so great.
Steve Jang: But yeah, but so I have to try because it’s that different.
Tim Ferriss: Totally.
Steve Jang: And so in Korea, they’re much more likely to say no. They’re much more likely to challenge you directly.
Tim Ferriss: Much more likely to say, “Mr. Chairman, you need to do this.”
Steve Jang: Yeah. In a sarcastic way. Call me, “Mr. Chairman. You probably should go on a diet so your back doesn’t hurt.” Which is, I love my food, but I really didn’t need to hear that from the well-meaning ajumma with the Yakuza perm.
The experience that people will have is that it’s not as lonely as it might be with being an expat in Japan. My wife lived 10 years as an expat in Tokyo. And when we were dating, I’d visit her a lot. And before that, I would visit Tokyo a lot because I had an investor there, and we were working on something.
And so I was there frequently for years. And I got to understand a little bit about the experiences of her and her expat friends. It’s one part elevated because they’re expats, they’re foreigners. But one part —
Tim Ferriss: Excluded. Yeah.
Steve Jang: They’re not part of the main society. And so in Korea, and especially in cities, and you have to make a distinction between the countryside in Korea, rural areas and smaller towns, and then Seoul and Busan, the big cities, it’s a very different experience. You may not enjoy living in a small town in Korea because it really is 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.
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. The experience that you have here —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. But the foreigners feel like it’s easier to integrate here? Maybe integrate is the wrong word, but they feel more welcome.
Steve Jang: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just for people who might be interested. In Japan, they’ve got this expression — I feel this in Japan too, which is a real bummer for me, because when I was 15 as an exchange student.
Steve Jang: I feel like you’ve paid your dues.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, I’ve studied so much Japanese and also just living in Japan when I was 15. 15 year olds are 15-year-olds in most places. 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 the kids are kind of kids, and they’re curious too, and shameless.
When I go back to Japan now, I’m still very close with my host family, 30 years later, whatever, I’m 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 [foreign language] and then [foreign language]. So [foreign language] is, I’m very simplistically translating here, but it’s like how you really feel and how you really are. And then [foreign language] is like what you put in front as your forward-facing thing with someone else. And there’s also something in Japanese called [foreign language], which is like a stranger formality where you’re polite, but there’s a wall.
And my experience, just in a week, and what do I know? But my experience here, and you have to be careful if you’re staying at a hotel, you can’t be like, “Oh, people are so friendly.” It’s like, well, if you’re staying at a nice hotel, of course they’re paid to be friendly, so you’ve got to get outside. But as I’ve been walking around —
Steve Jang: Which we have been.
Tim Ferriss: We have been. And people are friendly. I’ve got to say, my feeling is friendly. Maybe open is a better word, a bit more open.
Steve Jang: Yeah, they’re more open.
Tim Ferriss: Direct. But it’s direct, positive direct, negative maybe. And I’m talking a lot, but I’m excited to be here. When I was in high school and I met my first Korean-Koreans, that was my first interaction.
Steve Jang: This was in?
Tim Ferriss: This was in New Hampshire.
Steve Jang: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: At St. Paul’s. And nicest guys, until they flipped, until that switch flipped. And their eyes got really big and the K-rage came on the scene, which is not something you see as much in Japan. People get pissed everywhere. But a wise man once said to me that you go to Japan, and a lot of people get drunk. It’s a drinking culture, but they get drunk and then they tend to, 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.
Steve Jang: I think that might be part of the exports. There’s K-beauty, K-pop, K-dramas, and there’s K-rage. I don’t know. I want to go back to natsukashii.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, let’s do it.
Steve Jang: That is a beautiful word with a beautiful meaning. Incredible. When I first heard it, I think it was 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.” But I was like, “There’s no such thing in Korean.” I think the experience of the Korean people, it has not been an independent and whole country since 1905. It is divided since the Korean War, and there’s a lot of pain and struggle that happens with families divided by north and south for decades.
Tim Ferriss: Side note, we’ll put this in the show notes. You sent me some YouTube videos, which were old broadcasts of families being reunited. That shit messed me up.
Steve Jang: Not reunited. Reunited for an hour.
Tim Ferriss: An hour, and then they’re separated again. And I’m not Korean, I don’t have the background. But just the holy shit, the emotion and the facial expressions, I was tearing up just watching. It’s brutal. Brutal.
Steve Jang: It’s not relief of trauma. It’s new trauma on top of longstanding trauma. What we’re talking about is you’ll put it in —
Tim Ferriss: I’ll put in the show notes.
Steve Jang: Put it in the show notes, but the North and South Korean governments had at certain times when they get along, they’ll try to do some great olive branch moves to reunite families. And they had the TV station film it, and they set up a whole area and they brought buses down. And it turned out to be not cathartic at all, but reopening pain.
Tim Ferriss: One of the things I noticed was in the notes, I guess it was in text on one of the YouTube videos that you sent me, it indicated that initially this television special was supposed to be 45 minutes long, but there was such an outpouring. There were like a hundred thousand 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 a hundred plus days.
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That it kept going. Just —
Steve Jang: There’s that many families that — I try to explain this to people who, so first off, this is the last of the divided countries by Western capitalism and Eastern communism. So Germany, they’ve sorted it out. Vietnam, they’ve sorted it out. At this point, North Korea and South Korea is the last sort of evidence of the really caustic, divisive Cold War. And so there are families, it’s not two different people. It’s not by religion, which we see a lot of today, unfortunately. It’s the same people and it’s the same families that are split and torn from each other. So imagine if you have an opportunity to be reunited —
Tim Ferriss: For an hour and then separated again.
Steve Jang: So is that cathartic or is that actually more trauma?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Steve Jang: And so, I remember watching this as a child. I was in L.A. and my parents were watching it, and L.A. had a big enough Korean-American community where you had Korean TV, you had a channel. And I remember watching it and my parents were broke down crying. And for me it was like, I was sort of absorbing it as a child, but understanding it for the first time. That history and what that would feel like. And I think that’s a very strong, moving example of how Korean people feel. They’ve never had, 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 that.
Tim Ferriss: Appreciate the magnitude.
Steve Jang: There’s something about 10 million Chinese soldiers came across at some point or something like that. And there’s just numbers that people don’t really think about. We talk about World War II and we talk about Vietnam, but there’s not much about the Korean War. And then the Korean civilians and families that died. Right before that, they were liberated from Japanese rule, just like five years before that. And so five years before that, they spent 40 years, 1905 to 1945 under Japanese rule. And we’ve already talked about that. That was very oppressive. It was a forced assimilation and there were a lot of deaths that occurred as part of that, under oppression. And there are a lot of movies, by the way, that detail this.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t want to take us too off track, because I know we’re headed towards han first, but what are the main storylines that you see in movie and dramas? Because these say a fair bit.
Steve Jang: Yeah. This is what we’re talking about, which is in language and in stories, you get a sense for the people maybe without even meeting in real life a person from that culture and society. The tropes are the themes, the storylines that you hear in movies. One is about North, South Korea. There’s literally rom-coms about it. There’s action thrillers about it, spy thrillers. There’s historical film 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. So you’ve probably seen Parasite, which obviously won an Academy Award, and was seen globally. But that is Director, Bong. Bong Joon-ho is one of the greatest Korean directors of all time. A lot of his films are very intense psychological thrillers.
Tim Ferriss: Parasite‘s pretty intense.
Steve Jang: 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.
Tim Ferriss: And does that mean, to put another way, sort of lack of upward mobility?
Steve Jang: Yeah. It’s about the wealthy and the entitled, and their mistreatment of the poorer working class that are immobile, but also there’s complexity. It’s not just good versus evil in that dichotomy. Both sides in those character sets are doing weird, crazy, off-putting things to each other. And so that’s why I think Korean movies are really well embraced, because they don’t follow a formula.
Tim Ferriss: They’re nuanced. There’s a lot, it’s like swimming in an ocean of gray. There’s a lot. It’s not —
Steve Jang: It’s like swimming in the human mind, where there’s nothing pure and there’s nothing totally pure —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not a Marvel movie.
Steve Jang: Right. And it’s sort of like it comes to a conclusion, act one, act two, act three, and now I feel good. And actually, one of the things I would say consistently about Korean film is that it’s both, and this is a conflict that can exist together, at the same time. It’s both entertaining, and moving, and inspiring. And you can also walk out feeling terrible. You can walk out feeling confused, and you need to go outside and get a breath of fresh air. Sit down. If you’re a smoker, you probably need a cigarette. If you’re not a smoker, you probably need to take a walk and listen to some happy music.
And that’s 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. 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. They take —
Tim Ferriss: Fried chicken.
Steve Jang: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. Steve has seen me eat so much fried chicken here.
Steve Jang: Korean fried chicken. It’s the true KFC.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. It’s so good.
Steve Jang: In 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.
Tim Ferriss: Well, we went to have fried chicken, but not heavily breaded fried chicken, rather very lightly fried.
Steve Jang: And that’s the original.
Tim Ferriss: The original.
Steve Jang: It’s the OG fried chicken.
Tim Ferriss: The OG fried chicken. We also had some ugly potatoes as written on the menu. Ugly potatoes. They’re basically tater tots. And you mentioned to me that the woman who was running the show that day, very smart, really had her operator hat on. Very calm. Most likely, let’s just say the daughter of the owner, or somebody who would hand it down. But she may end up working there for the rest of her life, or working career. And that’s a lot of the stuff that’s invisible if you’re only here for a brief time.
Steve Jang: This class struggle is — this is the theme of so many movies, books, TV series. It’s the suffering and the struggle to move out of their condition, and that society and the upper crust of society won’t allow it. And this tension is in music, it’s in movies, it’s in literature, it’s in TV shows, it’s all around. And you might say, “Oh, no, it’s around every country.” Sure it is. But it’s really strong and consistent in Korean movies and literature. Parasite is an example of that. You look at Bong Joon-ho’s, all of his films, they’re all very different. Some feel like a horror thriller, some feel like a psycho thriller. Another one feels almost like comedic sci-fi fantasy, like The Host. If you see his original film, it’s like a giant monster moving around Seoul and killing people. But from a Western mindset, you’re like, “What is going on? This is almost silly,” but it’s actually, if you look at everything that’s happening, it’s talking about class struggle.
This is part of what Korea has been since the very beginning of its own sort of political self-control, or 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.
Tim Ferriss: At the chaebol.
Steve Jang: Yeah, so they call them chaebols outside, but the employees of those chaebols will always call themselves conglomerates, so you’ve got to be careful. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, this is, I’m sure they’re different but reminiscent of Japan with Sony, Mitsubishi, et cetera, and —
Steve Jang: But I think there’s more control of the economy from the conglomerates in Korea.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just sort of try to parrot back things that I think you’ve said to me, that you can fact check or expand, and then we will eventually get to han, because I don’t —
Steve Jang: Yeah, we should do that.
Tim Ferriss: But a couple of things that struck me as super interesting. One is that these chaebol, I guess the equivalent in Japanese would be keiretsu, probably.
Steve Jang: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Which is sort of like a chain of related companies, right? 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 they’re privately held, well, they’re not privately held, but they’re —
Steve Jang: They’re still family.
Tim Ferriss: Family-owned, which is 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, 10 years, and they act in this concerted way, which would have to contribute to how Korea punches above its weight class, right? Because what’s, I don’t know the population of Korea, but it’s not a huge place.
Steve Jang: No, it’s under 50 million people.
Tim Ferriss: It’s nuts. I mean, to think about what Korea has done on the global stage and continues to do, and will do with that population, it’s kind of, I mean, it is incredible.
Steve Jang: That’s the, I don’t want to say the underbelly or the dark side, but it is really the trade-off of having on one side a very optimistic and progressive growth mindset for the economy and society, which is pound for pound, like per capita, probably the most innovative, high-growth in terms of GDP country, in the history of the planet in the last 50 years. It is a leader in wireless technology, it is a leader in chip manufacturing. It’s a leader in heavy industrials, steel, and it’s also now a leader in entertainment, media, fashion, beauty industry. So it’s doing a lot. It’s accomplishing a lot. Great.
The underside of that. The other side of that is that there’s still a class divide. There’s not a lot of upper mobility. And that’s changing for sure, but it’s still very much, and you see this in the stories that are told, these stories are told and they’re popular not because they don’t exist. It’s because that people feel that, they empathize with that. They feel that in their bones, that this is their condition in their life. So the populism here is different than in the US. The political spectrum actually is different. There’s not a left versus right, in the way that we think about it in the US. Though the US is turning more into Korea-style of politics. Well, we’ll leave it at that, because I don’t like politics, but I am recognizing this, which is that the populism here is about class struggle and about workers’ rights, and about having a little bit more of a flattening out, so that people have opportunities to be upwardly mobile.
The thing that you’re seeing today in film, the thing that makes Parasite become a global phenomenon and win Oscars is that story. It’s a great film. Bong Joon-ho is a great storyteller and cinematographer, but it is the writing and the acting. You can take that story, as different as it is, in it’s a Korean family, two Korean families, basically fighting with each other for the entirety of the film in quiet and sometimes loud ways. But you empathize with both and you’re critical of both. There’s not a good versus bad, 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it resonates.
Steve Jang: It’s universal.
Tim Ferriss: Now, it’s universal, and the writing is good, and the cinematography is great. And what I did not realize is this K-wave is not entirely an accident. It’s not like people just threw a bunch of things at random times, independently into the works, and then Korea landed on the global stage with entertainment. There seems to be a lot more to it, right? 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, if they’re like, “Oh, Korea,” they’re listening to this because they saw Parasite, or they’re like, “Why is K-pop so big?” What the hell happened in the last few years? What is going on? None of my friends speak Korean. Why are they listening? How can they listen to K-pop? What is going on? Why is BLACKPINK all over the place?
Steve Jang: Why is BLACKPINK at Coachella?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What the hell is going on? And then you have also these streaming shows on Netflix, right?
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Squid Game. You’ve got the, I can’t remember, I can never remember the name. These jacked men and women just, it’s basically —
Steve Jang: Physical: 100.
Tim Ferriss: Physical: 100, right? It’s like American Gladiators, but elimination challenge with Koreans. It’s amazing. So what is going on? Because when I watched this doc, I was like, oh, wait a minute. Behind the scenes, there is a lot of very clever strategy.
Steve Jang: So, look at Squid Game. Class struggle.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Steve Jang: But in this intense, crazy, dystopian game, it makes Hunger Games look like a kid show. It really does. I remember watching Hunger Games, I hadn’t seen it actually until very recently, and I was like, “Oh, this is kind of boring.”
Let me put it this way. If you were to take all of these stories and you were to look at them as, these are commercial activities where you want the audience to engage with it, and to pay for tickets, where does it come from? Who is producing and paying for that? The money is coming, the capital is coming from the chaebols, the conglomerates. The production companies behind K-pop, they’re all publicly traded companies. The movie studios, the production companies, the labels, they’re all huge businesses worth billions of dollars.
Tim Ferriss: It’s also been a lot of government support, right?
Steve Jang: 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 and 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.
Tim Ferriss: You’re talking about in the United States?
Steve Jang: No.
Tim Ferriss: Or in Korea?
Steve Jang: In Korea.
Tim Ferriss: I see.
Steve Jang: And so K-pop and Korean movies, and all of this, it’s not controlled by the government or supported by the government today, directly. And oftentimes the censors are coming down on things and it’s lightened up, but you used to not see people kissing in movies. The Korean censors are pretty strong, just like the Japanese censors.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the Japanese censors are strong, although anything goes in the comic books. Good lord.
Steve Jang: We’re talking about national broadcast.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, national broadcast.
Steve Jang: National broadcast is different. But what you see as the K-wave today, a lot of it came originally from the Korean venture capital industry, which was supported by the government and funded largely by the government. It was initially focused in on, what we would call now today, soft power. Now look, there’s a Korean semiconductor chip industry and a whole bunch of technology areas that are now excelling well, but that was not the main focus or the main success area for venture capital. So it’s really interesting now.
It’s probably problematic for a lot of politicians to see a lot of this stuff depending upon what side of the spectrum you’re on, on the partisan side. But I think that that’s what has resonated is that it feels like the most irreverent, and authentic, and weird, sometimes crazy, but really raw and powerful movies out there and TV series. And it’s very different from any other formulaic tropes that you see out there. Like sometimes movies, Korean movies take twists and turns. It’ll start out like a rom-com and it turns into a zombie thriller.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I mean, Parasite did that.
Steve Jang: And ends up in a political thriller mode. And you’re sort of confused. Like, Oldboy is probably the most famous movie before Parasite, and you do not, 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.” And that is, I think that’s the value that Korean soft power starts to bring.
Tim Ferriss: 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, right?
Steve Jang: Well, hey, sometimes I’m in Hawaii or I’m in L.A. in a Hispanic neighborhood, and I will see posters of BTS up on the walls, and there’s a whole learning —
Tim Ferriss: BTS is a group.
Steve Jang: Yeah. There’s a whole group of younger people in the US, in Latin America, in Europe that are following their favorite band, which is BTS or BLACKPINK.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I get it. I’m just wondering —
Steve Jang: And learning Korean language.
Tim Ferriss: I’m wondering how that happened. And is this like Beanie Babies, okay, it’s going to burn twice as hot, and flame out, or is there sort of more to the story?
Steve Jang: I think it’s here to stay. 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. I mean, their hats, their shirts. You think about how many hip hop groups would include things from Chinese kung fu movies. And there’s always been this —
Tim Ferriss: Wu-Tang Clan.
Steve Jang: There’s always been this crossover of culture from Asia on that level. And it’s been a little bit more like, let’s take the caricature of it or the themes of it and let’s include it. But now it’s become part of global pop culture. And I think that the K-pop stuff is really interesting, because they actually copied American pop boy bands, and girl bands.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Backstreet Boys.
Steve Jang: But, they just took it to the next level. The way Japanese say, “We’re going to do French food or Italian pizza, and we’re just going to take it to the next level.”
Tim Ferriss: Take it to hyper dive —
Steve Jang: And dial it in. Right? “We’re going to take American automobile engineering culture and we’re going to use a kaizen approach and make more reliable cars faster.”
Tim Ferriss: Crazy story on that. I think it was Edward Deming who had something like scientific manufacturing, scientific management. This American efficiency social scientist who was basically ignored in the US, was then embraced by Japan and led to the Toyota way, and this kaizen stuff.
Steve Jang: You keep bringing up these great —
Tim Ferriss: Wild. It’s wild. But to your point, Japan, and it seems like as you’re describing it, Korea, are really good at taking something that’s good and being like, “Okay, we’re going to sort of Spinal Tap when we really need a little extra, we’re going to turn it to 11.”
Steve Jang: That’s a good way to put it. Turn it to 11. Yeah. So on that front, the formula of the pop band was taken, and it was turned into a boot camp where there were auditions and you would be trained, and you would learn how to dance, you would learn how to sing. You would be assigned a role as if you were sort of 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.
Tim Ferriss: I’m connecting something that I’ve never connected before. Tell me if this is totally off base, but you’re talking about class struggle and lack of upward mobility. If you go to the US, how many people are aspiring to be in a boy or a girl band? Not many, right? Furthermore, there isn’t really, there’s not much of a discovery mechanism or a talent development program for that. Sure, you can go to L.A. and there are people who put these bands together, but in Korea you’ve got these dance training studios where people pay money, and basically create their own American Idol vetting system. And then the scouts can pick from the cream of the crop. Right?
Steve Jang: 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, it’s pop, it’s manufactured. Now it doesn’t mean it’s not good, it just means that they’ve been put through boot camp. They have coaches for every single aspect of what they’re supposed to be doing, as this modern —
Tim Ferriss: Not just on stage, in their normal life too.
Steve Jang: Yeah. Everything’s very controlled. Then you look at the film industry, I think it’s quite different. The 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, feels utopian, sometimes a little plastic. And then you have these films that are talking about North and South Korea. You’re talking about colonial history between Japan and Korea, and you’re talking about class struggle internally in Korea, you’re talking about the mental health issues. You’re talking about all of these much darker and much more real and raw topics.
Tim Ferriss: It’s gritty.
Steve Jang: And so it’s odd that included in this picture of Korean soft power is this very polished and industrialized pop culture, and then this very intense and raw entertainment culture around movies.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you get the polar extremes.
Okay, so just because teased it so much, what is han?
Steve Jang: Okay. So just like natsukashii is quite Japanese.
Tim Ferriss: Super Japanese.
Steve Jang: For Koreans, it’s, han is probably the most talked about recent sort of collective trait of Koreans that Koreans talk about, but then now people outside are talking about. And what it essentially boils down to is this idea of this collective suffering that the Korean people have through history, and manifests in this sort of, it’s very complicated feeling of we are suffering and we share that pain with each other, but it’s somehow, 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, and is something that we revere in the US. That collectivism in Korea is han.
Tim Ferriss: Han. And is it generally, you mentioned suffering, and there are a lot of different descriptions of this. I was doing a little bit of reading.
Steve Jang: It’s really hard to explain in English, actually.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It is hard. It seems very hard. Is it a type of — so sadness would be a component of that?
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Steve Jang: And also anger and angst.
Tim Ferriss: Anger.
Steve Jang: I was talking to David Chang from Momofuku, he’s an old friend, and he asked me about Travis Kalanick. He had never met him, and he said, “You knew him. He seems like he has a lot of han.” And I said, “Yeah, he’s intense, and it expresses in a drive to succeed.” Obviously we all know that story, but for Koreans, han can be a drive to do great things, to bond together, to understand each other, to empathize. But it can also just be, like you said, the anger and the K-rage that you’re talking about. Which, channeled correctly, allows you to build an entire industry and succeed on the global level to create —
Tim Ferriss: What is it? Chips on the shoulder make chips in the pocket?
Steve Jang: — pop culture phenomenons that win Grammys, and 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. So where does that come from? So I think a lot of Koreans, romantically will describe it as, “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 Korean movies. That’s what you’re seeing in industries, right? The positive energy that can come out of it, not just the negative energy, so it’s very complicated.
But jeong, and these are very simple Chinese characters and Korean characters.
Tim Ferriss: I wonder what that — I don’t know the [inaudible] for any of these.
Steve Jang: Jeong is —
Tim Ferriss: Jeong.
Steve Jang: — this connection or affection, this bond that you feel. A lot of people will say that they don’t have jeong with someone, or that a person does not have jeong. This is a much more bonding, affectionate thing. And it’s a very simple word, but it means a lot. But jeong 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.
Tim Ferriss: Jeong.
Steve Jang: 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 gyopo so I’m somewhat inside, but somewhat outside. So I can compare it to how we are in America or in other countries, and han and jeong would pretty much cover it.
Tim Ferriss: What is nunchi?
Steve Jang: Nunchi, I mean you know Bobby Kim, Bobby Hundreds.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Steve Jang: You had him on the show.
Tim Ferriss: I did.
Steve Jang: A friend of mine as well.
Tim Ferriss: Great conversation.
Steve Jang: Yeah, and he really got it right, which is, it’s reading the room, it’s being able — but nunchi is like, nun is your eyes, and it’s the ability to see what’s really going on, reading between the lines or reading the room. This is really important. This is not a happy, positive thing. Again, it’s a defensive, inquisitive, analytical skill, right?
Tim Ferriss: Discerning eye.
Steve Jang: Right? It’s very critical.
Tim Ferriss: Critical eye.
Steve Jang: There are things that come up when you talk about people and you talk about your connection with them. So if I come in and bluntly or obtusely am rude in a group, I walk into a dinner or a room, I change the topic really obtrusively. “[foreign language] nunchi [foreign language],” right?
Tim Ferriss: Nunchi [foreign language].
Steve Jang: He just didn’t read the room, just came in like a bull in a china shop.
Tim Ferriss: [foreign language] is the — yeah, yeah, there isn’t nunchi [foreign language].
Steve Jang: Then 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 gyopo talk about it. So it’s an interesting thing, I think it’s a more recent, modern definition and term. I don’t think it’s an old, classic phrase or term, so my sense is anecdotally that it’s something that’s been a little bit created —
Tim Ferriss: It’s like in the zeitgeist now.
Steve Jang: Yeah. And then also with jeong, that’s much more — that’s something that my parents talk about a lot?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Jeong.
Steve Jang: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.
Steve Jang: 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, that they’ll create a concept. But I think it is very interesting to look at those two concepts, han and jeong, and then that’ll help you understand a lot in Korean society.
It helps me a lot, actually. I’ll give you one example. If you’re a visitor to Korea, there’s a host mentality in Japanese called omotenashi. In Korean there’s a concept of you’re my son-nim, my guest, and it’s very strong, very similar to Japanese omotenashi, right? They want to exceed in treating you well. They want to give you food, they want to take care of you. They want to do that.
They want to create this concept of jeong. Not to create the concept, but to have jeong with you, that would be the ideal. Because most Koreans, not all maybe, but Koreans want to have that connection, that deep connection. They want to drink with you. They want to stay out late with you. They want to wrestle with you. They want to argue with you. They want to put their arms around your shoulder and sing a song after downing some soju, right? They want to feel that real visceral connection with you.
Tim Ferriss: Bonding.
Steve Jang: 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 5:00, 6:00 in the morning. And in the US we’re like, “Hey, this is just way too much. This is bedtime.” They want to do that to know that they have a bond with you. They want to create that, somewhat abruptly, but you see that, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m trying to find the character for jeong. It’s really bothering me that I don’t — oh, wait, wait. Okay.
Steve Jang: Jeong is good.
Tim Ferriss: Here it is.
Steve Jang: Jeong is positive. Jeong is optimistic.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, warm feeling of attachment.
Steve Jang: Yeah. Han, not so much.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Jeong you see that character, the Chinese character, pretty sure in concepts like sympathy, right? Those types of feeling, emotive concepts.
Steve Jang: Empathy, sympathy, affection, bonds. In every movie, in every TV series, they’re moving in and out of han and jeong in the narrative, in the storytelling. And if you were to whittle it down, if you had to really simplify and reduce it to something very at root level, I think it would be that Koreans are moving between jeong and han in their storytelling, in their life, their business. There’s a moment probably with your friends in high school where it’s all happy and positive. Then maybe after a critical moment or an emotional thing, or maybe if you guys were drinking beers at night as teenagers, where it flipped.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, usually I could tell if the eyes got really big, I’d be like, “Oh, oh, boy, here we go.”
Steve Jang: And red.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Red face, big eyes, I’m like, “Oh, oh, uh-oh. I think we’re getting into ‘Hulk smash!’”
Steve Jang: Energy frequency has changed. Yeah, that’s what I would think about when I think about how to whittle it down to something basic.
Tim Ferriss: Before coming to Korea — I was trying to do a bit of reading. I didn’t want to do too much reading. People have asked me a lot, “What did you expect?” And I’m like, “I didn’t expect anything, I tried to come in as blank as possible.” But I did a little bit of reading, I didn’t want to come in completely ignorant. And it seems like the government has either earmarked or committed, maybe already spent, who knows, something like $200 billion — maybe those are tax incentives, I have no idea. But US$200 billion for increasing birth rate. What is the, I guess, status of birth rate in Korea? In this case, in South Korea, and why is it so low? How would you explain that?
Steve Jang: First off, developed countries around the world have a relatively low birth rate, reproductive rate. Germany, Japan, even right now, China is having that problem, so there’s that. But what I think is happening, 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, 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.
Steve Jang: — as a deposit. It is very hard to —
Tim Ferriss: Why?
Steve Jang: And what you get is maybe a one-bedroom apartment in one of these large, concrete high rises that you see just stacked around Seoul. So to start a family is quite expensive. So there’s that, cost of living to start a family.
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if you have an answer to this, but why so much deposit? Why a year or two of deposit?
Steve Jang: The consumer credit culture is not in good shape. It’s never been in good shape in Korea, as long as I’ve been aware.
Tim Ferriss: I’m laughing because we had to take a pause earlier because I got a phone call from the hotel who was like, “You’ve exceeded your incidentals. Can you come down and make your deposit?” I’m like, “You have my credit card.”
Steve Jang: They don’t trust it.
Tim Ferriss: “The way this works is I charge stuff and then I pay at the end,” and they’re like, “No, you have to come down and put down a further deposit.” I’m like, “Okay, all right, fine.” So I guess I answered my own question.
Steve Jang: Asian financial crisis, 1997, ’98, because of Thailand, and Japan went down, Korea went down. And this is a good example actually of han and jeong together. I’m trying to connect dots here to simplify it for the audience.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, I dig it.
Steve Jang: But there was an austerity program. Korean government went out through media and said, “We need every citizen of the country to take their personal jewelry and contribute it to the national cause,” to the IMF austerity program that was laid upon them, to get bailed out, essentially. And people donated their jewelry. They melted it down for the sake of the greater good, the common, collective good.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so wild just to think about how poorly that would go down in the US.
Steve Jang: Would not go down at all, right?
Tim Ferriss: No, of course not.
Steve Jang: 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, your jewelry…”
Tim Ferriss: “Give us all your gold for the greater good.”
Steve Jang: “…and we’ll melt it down.” But the other side of that is that there is a speculative gambling culture in investments, in real estate, in stocks, bonds, real estate, that was so bad in Korea that people were taking out credit cards at 30 percent interest rates, and buying consumer goods. Still happening today. The Korean consumer luxury market is the per capita highest market on the planet.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Steve Jang: 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, but there’s this consumer goods culture here. And this consumerism, materialism, that is problematic, because a lot of it is on borrowed money.
In the ’90s, they had this problem, this 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 couldn’t buy a third. The government — can you imagine that in the US? Again, something that would never happen in the US.
There is this sense of one, there’s a class divide and it’s very expensive. It’s a high cost of living to start a family, and it’s also very hard to move up that, so why even go there? My other theory on this is that not only is it expensive and things like that, 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. Now 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. So I think 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 extended family members, friends, it is a very expensive proposition because you want them in the best schools. You’re going to put them in the baseball hagwon, you’re going to put them in the swimming hagwon, the math hagwon, the piano lessons, all of that from 3:00 p.m. all the way to 9:00 p.m. So you are spending a lot of money per year for each child because you want them to have the very best. In Korea, the competitiveness around this is incredible. If you’re not putting them in the hagwon, who are you as a parent? And that’s incredible pressure, and that’s incredible, exorbitant costs for someone who is not upwardly mobile, does not have an opportunity to have stock in a company and have it exit, like we love in Silicon Valley. We put out stock options and equity as the carrot of entrepreneurship and risk. They don’t have that here.
And it’s changing. There are more and more startups. There are unicorns that are coming out of Korea, Coupang, Toss, there’s a lot of consumer marketplaces and FinTech companies that 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’s 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.
I think it is a problem. I mean, we all know the economics around population decline, that hurts GDP, it correlates. It’s causal too, but at least it correlates, we can agree on that. So I think it is a real problem. I don’t know how it’s solved, not that I’ve thought a lot about it or someone’s asked me to solve it. But can you imagine a small country like this, shrinking, and what that does again to all these things?
And a lot of people want to move out, they want to go. So my family and everyone else’s family — everyone who moved to the US, I would say 99 percent 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 upward mobility, to do better for their families, and then here you’re somewhat still confined, that’s a tough thing.
And there’s one last thing that is really challenging about Korea. There’s a civil service examination that you take to get into — that score really decides whether or not you get into a top university.
Tim Ferriss: I see. That’s the equivalent of an entrance exam?
Steve Jang: But it’s more than that. It’s like you could not do well on the SAT, but you have a good GPA, you interview well. Then you have all these tiers of junior college, four-year college —
Tim Ferriss: Technical, Ivy League.
Steve Jang: — Ivy League, state schools, so you have a lot of options, liberal arts colleges, whatever you’re looking for. Here, you’re either in a top college or you’re not. And if you do not go to college, it is highly unlikely that you will have the ability to provide for a large family, well, and in a healthy way. You’re definitely not going to all these hagwons and things like that. So you’re right in saying that K-pop — and K-pop is like US’ pro sports, right? It’s the side route out. And I think K-pop and movies, and entertainment, and gaming — eSports is huge here. We saw as they were setting up League of Legends stages downstairs.
Tim Ferriss: Enormous. Yeah, enormous. I mean it’s like an entire playing field full of people down there, engaging with League of Legends.
Steve Jang: And those PC bangs, right? Where they play —
Tim Ferriss: Cosplaying, there was a guy walking around with a huge sword, shirtless, and it was snowing. That is dedication.
Steve Jang: Let’s switch gears to a little bit more about what’s happening in soft power.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s do it. Shift away.
Steve Jang: No, I’m going to ask you a question.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Steve Jang: 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?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been paying very close attention to it for the last few years because I’m always curious to distinguish between trends and fads. I brought up Beanie Babies, not to throw Beanie Babies under the bus, but there are certain things that become fashionable because maybe a handful of celebrities are using X, fill in the blank. Like Ugg boots has had many lives, it’s like a phoenix, or I could certainly list many, many different things. But how do you distinguish between that, and not to get too financey, but a secular tailwind with some type of trend that is inevitable, like penetration of broadband and smartphones?
Also trying to identify the flywheels at play or the elements that contribute to momentum. For instance, if you look at podcasting, and for a lot of people who have not had the engagement that I’ve had for 10 plus years now — or no, it’s not 10 plus years. But as a listener, 10 plus years, but as a producer of podcasts, going to be 10 years next April, it seems like podcasts went from nothing to everywhere. Is the perception for someone who’s only engaging with it now, but they heard about podcasts, and they’re 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.” Well, there was something five years ago, just like there was K-pop five years ago, but it suddenly seems like there’s surround sound stereo where it’s on magazine covers and it’s online everywhere, and there’s news, and your friends are talking about it, and there are documentaries.
Sometimes that comes together as an emergent property of a bunch of unrelated events, but sometimes there’s orchestration and architecture behind it. Or there’s an example of a standout success, for instance, in the case of podcasting, Serial was that. Serial became a phenomenon. It was the show that everybody had to listen to and it gripped — maybe not the entire nation, but the New York literati crowd. And since the New York literati run the mastheads of these huge media outlets, it gave the impression of Serial being huge, which it was.
Steve Jang: It was huge, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And people were like, “Podcast? How do I even listen to a podcast?” And suddenly it —
Steve Jang: It introduced people to the medium.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. It introduced people to the medium, it introduced them to platforms. So looking at this explosion of Korean media, I’m like, “Okay, where did this start? What set the snowball in motion?” And I haven’t figured it out. I have not, although certainly Parasite was a huge — that was huge, but I’m like, “That can’t be — I feel like that’s the result of some preceding things that I have missed.” But I just haven’t known how to dissect it, so I’m like, “Okay, well let me keep an eye on things.”
Then I see Squid Game. Okay, so Squid Game, Squid Game, Squid Games? I always mess up if it’s singular or plural. But anyway, you see that explode and I’m like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” Based on that success, I would imagine Netflix, because this seems to be what Netflix does, to be like, “Let us double down on whatever this is.” Algorithmically, what makes this show this show? Big part of it’s Korea, right? So it’s like —
Steve Jang: It changed Netflix.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Steve Jang: 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 in on international. Netflix was the only one. When they launched in Korea and Japan, it was like, “Great, it’ll bring up subscriber numbers.” But then when it hit in Korea, they increased the budgets many times over because they saw that it was not only the Korean market that loved this programming, but it was the global markets. So it was the content, the films and the TV shows coming out of the market, and that they could distribute all across the planet.
I almost look at the Netflix, they were carrying the pollen of Korean culture, this pop culture, this media culture, the entertainment, and they accelerated it to a level where it probably felt like a sudden, overnight thing. But you’re absolutely right, it’s not only emergent, but it was emergent over the course of several decades.
Tim Ferriss: Right, so it was emergent over the course of several decades, and then there were these accelerants, right? COVID almost certainly was an accelerant.
Steve Jang: Yeah, 100 percent.
Tim Ferriss: You have 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.
Steve Jang: It’s different.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, people are like, “What? What is this? Americans reading subtitles?” And even though I’ve never really been involved with film, a little bit with television, I’m very interested to see which dominoes tip over a lot of other dominoes, and how the macroeconomic stuff factors into it. And geopolitics, but it’s more the economic side. For instance, seeing how film production has changed, both in terms of funding for films, but also main protagonists in the US where almost — I’m not going to say without exception, but if you look at a lot of the blockbusters, whether it’s the Mission Impossible movies or Marvel movies, it’s like they always want to have at least one Chinese main character. Why? Because it is very important that you get the Chinese market, super important financially.
Steve Jang: Yeah. It almost feels like just jammed in there, though.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s totally jammed in there. It’s like, “What? Okay, Victorian, like a biopic, and there’s a, hey, it’s a Chinese guy.” It’s totally just shoehorned in a lot of the time. But part of the reason I paid so much attention to Korea is that Korea’s small, so it’s like an export game. The US is not looking for 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 very impressed, and I don’t think this gets enough airtime, so hopefully this podcast will make people explore a bit. Korean design and aesthetic is super sharp, and the best book design — I want to be fair, there are a couple of really good ones in terms of publishers who have published my books in foreign languages.
The Korean publisher, maybe publishers for my books, have done an exceptional job with book design. And as you know, and as we’ve been discussing, education, important, right? Literacy, very high. Voracious readers in Korea, also true with Germany. It’s disproportionately the case, where you look at how my books have performed in Germany and it outperforms the UK plus Australia, plus almost everywhere outside of the US, because the culture itself values education and reading.
But to your question about Korea, like K-pop, I mean pop music in general, especially boy bands, girl bands, is not really my jam. But as a study, it’s interesting for me because I feel like it could be anything, right? I read a book on Ryanair ages ago, because I was like, “Okay, how did Ryanair suddenly seemingly become ubiquitous? How did this happen?” Because if I can study that and I can study what’s happening with K-pop and then Korean entertainment, maybe there’s something I can learn that will allow me to, as an investor, predict this earlier, where you have converging trends that are coming.
For instance, like Shopify, we were talking about Shopify earlier today. That was, as far as I know, the first advisor to Shopify when they had 10 employees. And it’s like, if you just looked at the tech trends, if you were able to bet on the right team in e-commerce and setting up that kind of backend plumbing for websites to be able to sell things, it’s like this is a trend that is going to continue. Doesn’t seem to be any reasonable possibility that it 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 — Uber in our case, would be another example of that —
Steve Jang: Yup.
Tim Ferriss: — where it’s like, okay, let’s not look at — this parallels to Korea, where in the beginning, and you remember this, I mean, how many hundreds of people said no to Uber. Uber ended up on AngelList early days and people are like, “What? This is ridiculous. Black cars for the one percenters in San Francisco? Boo! Lame! Tech bro,” blah, blah, blah. A lot of the professional investors who said no because they were like, “Well, let’s look at the total addressable market for people who are going to use black cars and then look at what percentage Uber can manage to secure,” and it’s like, no, that’s not the right way to look at it. It would be looking at Parasite and these various TV shows and being like, “All right, well what’s the population of Korea? Oh, it’s declining. Well, what percentage of Koreans can you get to watch this?” It’s like, no, no, no, you can expand the market.
I know I’m meandering a bit all over the place, but so one is a predictive mechanism like, all right, well, can I see things that two, three, five years from now are going to be obvious, but I’ll just see it earlier because I’ve learned to look for the precursors. Then secondly, because I write, because I have a podcast coming up on my 10th anniversary and I’m using that as an opportunity to think about what’s next for me, and generally after five to 10 years of doing something, it gets really crowded, if I pick it correctly, the game gets harder, oftentimes I end up enjoying it less, even though I’m still enjoying the podcast and I’m like, “All right, what’s next for me?”
In which case, maybe there are techniques, maybe there are things I can look for, levers I can pull that would allow me to also build momentum on a micro level that I’ve seen at the macro level, say with this Korean entertainment stuff. I’ve been paying a lot of attention, but I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to pay proper attention because I don’t think the way to pay proper attention is to read the mainstream US media coverage of the K-wave. I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.
Steve Jang: No, absolutely not.
Tim Ferriss: 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, but —
Steve Jang: I will say in the week that we’ve been here, I was really honestly surprised at not only your ability to read Korean, Hangul, wherever we went, but to also deliver it and enunciate it in the right way. 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. I remember I asked you, I said, “How long have you been studying?” You’re like, “Two days.” Even as a longtime friend, I was very surprised. So that’s a skill that is not only about finding a great method or applying yourself, but the fact that you would insist to order by yourself and you would have a conversation with someone, there’s a part of throwing yourself into the mix to be able to do that. So question back to you on that, because I admire that. That’s amazing.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Steve Jang: 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. I’m like, [foreign language], and then I’ll get a little bit of a pass. But you’re a white guy and you’re coming in here confident. I know that you’ve learned a lot of Asian languages and you’re fluent in two, tell me about what you are doing when you are learning. 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.
Tim Ferriss: I want to give a heartfelt high five and thank you to the Korean people first because I will say the 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.
Steve Jang: Which is not like France.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not like France. I mean there’s some great people in France, but they’re less supportive. In Japan, they’re very supportive. If you can introduce yourself, they’re like, “[foreign language].” 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, “Whoa.” If I order sparkling water in Korean, they’re like, “Oh, wow.” The approach that I’ve taken, and part of the challenge in learning any language is you don’t know which textbooks or sources are going to be good. Now, there are tools, and full disclosure, I invested in them in their series A, but Duolingo has become this incredible resource worldwide. I did use some Duolingo, I then supplemented that — I wanted to look at methods that I had applied to previous languages, and there are a few methods that off the shelf other people can use and then I have my own kind of eclectic freestyle approach that I use with most languages.
There is a method called the Michel Thomas Method, M-I-C-H-E-L, Thomas Method, and Michel Thomas way back in the day, I think he taught languages to Barbara Streisand and all these celebrities. If I’m remembering correctly, he was either born in Switzerland or Germany. He was in the military, I believe he was Jewish, taught himself a million different languages. I think he was in intelligence for a good period of time. What I like about his method is that it is for most people the opposite of what they experienced in school. That is very unpleasant for most people who are subjected to it. Most people who study languages at school, they’re like, “First of all, I’m never going to use what they’re teaching me. Second of all, they’re trying to get me to read tables of conjugations.”
It’s so foreign, not just in the language but just in the format that A, it’s unpleasant, B, people don’t retain anything. A lot of people who are, say, American listening to this will have in school been required to study multiple years of Spanish, and nonetheless, they basically don’t speak Spanish. They can ask where the bathroom is or say “Good day.” That’s about it. Michel Thomas asks you to take no notes whatsoever. It’s purely auditory.
Steve Jang: Interesting.
Tim Ferriss: You listen to the method.
Steve Jang: No reading?
Tim Ferriss: No reading, zero reading. There are some shortcomings associated with that, which is why I’ve added other things. But with the Michel Thomas, I started listening — I read this cartoon, which is “How to Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes,” which is really well done. I’ll put this in the show notes. Then I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to read Korean, and just to get the reading up to speed. Again, in this particular case, it’s not true for Chinese, it’s certainly going to be harder for something like Arabic. Greek, you can do it pretty easily. Cyrillic, so Russian, you could also learn to read and sound out in about an hour.
Once you have that, your goal is to get to the point where you can absorb things ambiently by walking around and seeing menus and so on on a trip like this. But with the Michel Thomas Method, it’s similar to what some people would be familiar with as the Pimsleur Method where it introduces vocabulary and then it basically functions almost like Anki. There’s an app called Anki, which means rote memorization in Japanese, funny enough. Or I think it was SuperMemo way back in the day, which had some type of — I want to say it was like an algorithmically driven spaced repetition system. So when you’re just about to forget a word, it prompts you to recall it and it’s very effective at helping you to retain this material because it’ll introduce something like [foreign language], to study, and then they won’t use it for 30 minutes and then it’ll be like, “I’m going to study Korean today.”
Steve Jang: You’re using it in a different way, but the same —
Tim Ferriss: You’re using it in a different context, but it’s taking the same word that you’re just about to forget, and then it pops it back up to the top in your short-term memory. So you would say, “[foreign language],” 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 [foreign language 02:18:09], I’m going to work today. [foreign language].” Then it’ll be like, “All right, you learned how to say…” and I was very impressed with the way they did it because hard to — Michel Thomas was like the Michael Jordan of language teaching.
So I listened to his original recordings before he died for Spanish, German, Italian, and he was cantankerous as fuck, which I loved. He would get all off at the students because the format is somebody is teaching to other students and they’re live, the other students are screwing up and sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, and you’re the third student, so you have to try to answer. You answer before the other students and then the other students answer. I listened to the Michel 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.
I thought they did a very nice job. The one critique I would have is that in the original recordings, Michel Thomas would say something like, “How do you say, ‘I want to eat?’” “Quiero comer,” in Spanish. And then it’d go “Boop” and there’d be a beep and that meant you’re supposed to reply. There was a space, and then it would go back to the recording and the other two students would answer. With the Korean, you have to hit pause a million times because if you just hear the other students repeat, you’re training your recognition, but not your production. I was using the Michel Thomas method and I only got through four or five of those before you arrived and I knew I was going to be doing less sit-down studying.
Steve Jang: You really haven’t had any time.
Tim Ferriss: I haven’t had any time. We’ve been back to back.
Steve Jang: 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.
Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t had much time, but I will say also what I’ve tried very hard to do, and this is a question I get a lot from folks, and there are many people who are better at learning languages than I am, but because it’s not my full-time thing, 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.” That’s not a swipe. There are some amazing people out there who speak 10 plus languages and did it as basically 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 learned.
For instance, I used Spanish to then learn German by using One Piece, the comic book, because One Piece has a gazillion volumes, so you can read it in Japanese, and then when I learned Spanish, I had the same volumes in Japanese and Spanish. So I’d try to read them in Spanish, the benefit being it’s almost all dialogue. If I couldn’t figure it out before I went to the dictionary, I would go back to the Japanese version. Panel for panel, it’s the same thing. I’d be like, “Oh, okay, okay.” 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. Es tut mir sehr leid, but I’ve forgotten it all.
Then I used the Spanish One Piece to learn the German One Piece. This is a Japanese manga comic book that is legendary. It’s the highest-grossing franchise out of Japan as far as manga go, above Dragon Ball Z and all of those. 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 Korean.
Steve Jang: A lot of strong similarities.
Tim Ferriss: Strong similarities. For instance —
Steve Jang: Even though they wouldn’t admit it.
Tim Ferriss: No, exactly. This is where I have to be so careful because now I’m coming here and I can know the history, but I’m like, “Shit, I don’t want to want to piss people off.”
Steve Jang: You know what’s really interesting, is a lot of Koreans speak Japanese. Like very well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You have a lot of tarot card reading places here, which I did not expect at all, and a lot of them say that they can also do the readings in Japanese. I’ve seen a number of signs.
Steve Jang: Well, that’s probably because there are a lot of Japanese tourists.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.
Steve Jang: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, their favorite K dramas. It’s like the Americans who go to Dubrovnik or wherever to see the Game of Thrones places.
Steve Jang: No, it’s a whole travel tourist sector for — and it’s not just Japanese, it’s other Asian groups and Europeans. Actually, here’s a funny, interesting fact. Someone from Naver, which is one of the big public internet companies here, kind like Yahoo or Google.
Tim Ferriss: Side note, if you think you’re going to use Google Maps here, you’re not. You’re going to have to download Naver —
Steve Jang: Naver and Kakao Maps. The super app thing is real here, by the way. What Elon wants to do with Twitter has only been done really in Asia and maybe Latin America.
Tim Ferriss: Like WeChat? You’re talking like a WeChat type of thing? Where you can do everything in one app?
Steve Jang: Yeah. So someone from Naver told me in a meeting that K-pop is so big and all the different — the digital artwork and media and content and all the things that you can buy and consume around that type of artist, think about all the merch, digital merch, said France is actually a larger market than the domestic market by dollars. I said, “Are you sure? Do you mean by some other metric? Some other thing?” They said, “No, by gross dollars, we do better with all of the licensed partnered content around K-pop bands and artists in France than we do in Korea.” 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’re shipping things like steel. They’re shipping things like chips, wireless smartphones. They’re now starting to ship software in marketplaces. They’re moving out. 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, a Korean-American group and Asian-American, but Europe where beauty — I mean French and Swiss beauty, that’s the stronghold of the Eurocentric concepts of beauty. Korean products are becoming luxury products there next to the LVMH and the Kering Group products.
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 it better. The story of Japanese whisky is incredible. They sent one guy to go learn from the masters in Scotland, and he came back and started Suntory.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s wild.
Steve Jang: I think a lot of that was learned by Koreans and they started learning that in heavy industry. There is the main street in Gangnam, the main street in Gangnam is called Teheran-ro.
Tim Ferriss: Just a quick footnote for people. If you remember the — that’s another breakthrough moment, kind of like Serial, “Gangnam Style,” that music video passes a billion views and people are like, “What the hell is going on?”
Steve Jang: Total breakthrough moment for Korean culture as an export.
Tim Ferriss: Gangnam is a neighborhood.
Steve Jang: Gangnam is the most modern district in Seoul. It’s the newest modern area of office buildings. We went there the other day. A lot of LED walls and fancy stores, things like that. It’s the new Seoul.
Korea has shifted from an economy of contract manufacturing. Samsung was a contract manufacturer for Japanese companies, electronics companies, as well as having all these other businesses in the larger conglomerate. But in the beginning, a lot of this was shipping, import, export, heavy industry, things like that. 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.
The main road in Gangnam is called Teheran-ro and the reason why it’s called Teheran-ro is that Iran —
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say, it sounds like Tehran.
Steve Jang: When it was a capitalist liberal country in the ’70s and the ’60s too, hired a lot of Korean workforce, so did Saudi Arabia and other countries, to come be the skilled labor. In other countries, Koreans were the miners. In Germany, they got exported there to be the miners because no one domestically wanted to be a miner because you had a high likelihood of death, emphysema. The reason why it’s called Teheran-ro 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.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Steve Jang: That’s why it’s called Teheran-ro. If you look at 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. They started creating original chip designs, working on broadband and being the leaders in broadband, both wireless and fiber broadband. I was speaking with one of the leading wireless telcos here, and they’re not like AT&T and Verizon back home. They’re like the big tech companies that have software and he was telling me that Singtel and other regional wireless companies, mobile carriers in Asia, often come to them to ask them about the newest technology, how they should approach their own strategies around this, around LTE, 5G, and now around AI. Wireless telecom companies here are building their own language models.
Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.
Steve Jang: Which you would never expect AT&T and Verizon to go compete with OpenAI.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Steve Jang: There is this accelerated sense of “We must achieve something tomorrow because we’re already behind.” That is a very Korean mentality and what we were talking about with han and jeong, I’m going to try to bring this all together in a theory, in a grand theory, but this grand theory is also that tomorrow is not guaranteed for South Koreans. There’s a well-understood tension with North Korea that at any moment this could all be over. I don’t truly understand it because I’m an American, I live in California, but my parents, the older generation, they feel it, they talk about it, they obsess over it. If you look at newscasts, you look at books, you look at YouTube, this is the hot topic, “What to do about this? How do we reunify or do we not?”
I think because tomorrow’s not guaranteed, they’re living in the moment to do exactly what they want as fast as possible with an impatience that expresses itself as so industrious, so productive. Look at them, such a small country cranking out films that are winning at Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’OR there, Oscars here. The most successful artists, music artists, in the world, most high-growth cosmetic beauty brands, largest mobile smartphone manufacturer other than Apple. Why is this coming from the small country? My opinion on this, and people can disagree and many would, is that they are designed in their mindset and raised with, “If you don’t do it now, you may never have a chance to do it again later.” They are living in the moment knowing that 17 miles away are millions of soldiers and artillery and missiles pointed at them.
Tim Ferriss: I am glad you brought up the 17 miles away because in most people’s mind — at least I shouldn’t say most. What a ridiculous statement. In my mind and in the minds of certainly many of my friends, Seoul has this huge cosmopolitan city, exists far away from North Korea. It is not far away. It is right there. It’s very close.
Steve Jang: I’ll frame it in terms that people can understand it. It is closer than San Francisco is to San Jose. That’s 28 miles.
Tim Ferriss: Substantially closer.
Steve Jang: This living in the moment or achieving for just tomorrow, this impatience, that to me is this han that’s looming in the background of everyone’s mind and this is angst about upward mobility and being able to achieve that pushes Koreans out in the diaspora to become gyopo because they can’t do it here because the system won’t allow it. It’s kinetic and it’s sometimes ugly and painful, but it’s kinetic and it’s the craziest thing. When people come here, even for me who understands this somewhat, and I come in as a half insider, half outsider, I get this sense and it’s very emotional for me actually. In the US I feel very stoic about all that’s happening. I feel like I was raised in that. But when I come back here, it’s like I’m going into this other dimension where everyone here is moving twice as fast.
It’s like the feeling like when you go to New York, the physical kinetic aspect of what’s happening there. You’re like, “Wow, L.A. people are moving so slowly,” physically moving slowly. In New York, you feel tired after 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.
Tim Ferriss: It’s kinetic. It is hyper-kinetic. I think people should visit, man. I really do. I think people should visit and learn some Korean. It’s such a beautiful language. The writing — especially if you’ve only ever read Romanized alphabet, what a fun thing to stretch your brain and learn some Korean Hangul because it’s so, as you said, regular. Once you have it, you have it. It’s not like English where you can have fish, like “fuh” is F-I-S-H and then enough is “oh, uff” “fuh, fuh,” Same sound, O-U-G-H. It’s like, “Oh, my God, this language, it’s a mess. It’s a complete mess.” 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 will learn 10 sentences, anybody can learn 10 sentences, anybody, it will fundamentally change your experience in a country.
Steve Jang: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Full stop. People will respond to you differently, you’ll also be a better guest in that country, and it’s fun. You can learn 10 sentences. It’s not that hard. There’s going to be stuff — for instance, I love sparkling water. I know every day I’m going to ask for sparkling water. It’s like, “[foreign language].” Learn how to ask for sparkling water, and then every time I get an omelet, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, there’s no salt and pepper. Why is there no salt and pepper in this country?” Then I’m like, “I know I’m going to have to ask for at least salt.” It’s like, learn how to say salt. There are a couple of other just fun tips for folks. You can come up with a couple of — because you’re going to be entertaining as a foreigner trying to learn a foreign language like Korean, so learn a couple of things that are off menu because “Where’s the bathroom?” is on menu. They would expect that’s something you would learn.
Steve Jang: Well, asking for food — what’s been your thought about Korean food so far? I mean, you’ve had Korean food in the US or that version of it, so what do you think so far?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, man, Korean food is incredible. I’ll just give a couple just on the language thing. I’ll wrap it up real fast, which is learn a couple of phrases that are kind of funny. For instance, in almost any language, you can learn to say something like, “Long time no see,” which, by the way, in English is borrowed directly from Chinese: hǎojǐu bújiàn. Long time no see. But you can [foreign language] in Japanese or here, [foreign language], use a really polite form and then people —
Steve Jang: Wow, that was good.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks. People are like, “What?” Then I’m like, “I’m just kidding. It’s not that long,” and people get a good laugh out of it. You can learn a couple of things like that or [foreign languag], just like, “No rush, take it easy. Do it slowly.” 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. I did have a funny experience, so I’ll be honest, because I’ve not had much Korean barbecue, but I wanted to, of course, have Korean barbecue and went out to Korean barbecue and there were a bunch of side dishes, and I started eating the salad because it looked like an appetizer. The guys were like, “That’s not an appetizer. It’s a side dish that you eat when the beef comes out.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Great.” So the beef comes out and it’s just — number one —
Steve Jang: And it was Kobe?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure.
Steve Jang: Korean barbecue?
Tim Ferriss: Korean barbecue, yeah.
Steve Jang: Short rib?
Tim Ferriss: It wasn’t short rib. It was different cuts. It wasn’t short rib in this case, it wasn’t kalbi. However, the meat comes out and I was like, oh. Because in Japan it’s like if you have meat, you have rice. And I was like, “Oh, we’re going to eat rice with it?” and they were like, “Well, no. You have the rice like a dessert.” And I was like, “Huh, okay. Never would’ve guessed that.” So you have the rice at the end, at least we did, and 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, I think it was sesame oil. And one of the guys with me was like, “Yeah, this is our olive oil. We dip the beef into the sesame oil,” which I’d never done before, and I was like, okay.
The sesame oil was like a condiment, it was like how you dip bread. And so you eat this, it’s basically just all meat all the time for a section. You have a little bit of kimchi, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And what I loved was also in this particular case, and I think this is not true everywhere, but they were using charcoal instead of 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, right? Scissors for the meat, scissors for cutting stuff?
Steve Jang: Yeah. By the way, that annoys my wife so much because I cook a lot of barbecue. I’m a self-professed grill master for my family. I have meat scissors, and I’m constantly clipping —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, why the hell would you use a knife? It makes so much sense.
Steve Jang: Have you seen the Korean meat scissors that have the bottle cap opener for beer —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s genius —
Steve Jang: — right in the middle —
Tim Ferriss: 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. 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 low-end car. But if you go to the Hyundai department store, which is super luxe, super deluxe, beautiful, and trust me, I’m not a department store guy, but this is 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 croissants, the pastries. Korea really knows how to do food. The food is spectacular.
Steve Jang: 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 loved. Even before K-pop —
Tim Ferriss: Food.
Steve Jang: 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.”
Steve Jang: I’ll give you a funny story about Austin, your current city. Back in 2011, I was down there for South by Southwest. My startup business just launched, it was a music app startup, and a friend from Food & Wine magazine asked me if I wanted to be a contestant in a barbecue sauce contest in Austin as part of South by Southwest. I said, “Sure. What do I need to do?” “Well, you need to go out and get your own materials at the grocery store, and then you’re going to compete and we’re going to 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 system.”
So I was like, “I only know how to cook one type of barbecue, but I’ll try.” So I basically did an American barbecue recipe and I took a Korean barbecue recipe, which my mother taught me, and I knew like the back of my hand. I could do that in my sleep. So I got soy sauce, I got sesame oil, I got Bartlett pears because they didn’t have the Asian pears in Austin, and then brown sugar, Coca-Cola —
Tim Ferriss: Wow, Coca-Cola.
Steve Jang: — garlic, sesame seeds, everything, and I made a Korean barbecue marinade. And then I put in the tomatoes and I got some molasses, put that in there, and I made this whole big pot. And I put some onions in there too, just to give it a little bit more kick. I put it in the pot. I didn’t describe it to anyone. So I made a Korean barbecue marinade in a Texas style, and I put it 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. And everyone else had done some sort of Carolina barbecue or Memphis barbecue.
You’d go up and you’d take these grilled chicken drumsticks and these baby back ribs that were unsauced and unseasoned, but grilled, and people would go try it. And everyone loved it. My pot, the whole thing was like, whose pot would get lower first? And everyone said, “What’s in that?” I said, “Soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic.” Then I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any kimchi for you, but it would just top it off.” And so I really feel like of all the soft power things, of all the exports, cultural exports, Korean food is the most important one because —
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredible.
Steve Jang: Look, I will not be that overly proud Korean-American and say “This is better than everyone else.” I will say that Korean food is the best food on the planet. I’ve tried everything. I love Japanese food, I love Mexican food, I love Italian food, French food, obviously, and fine dining, but 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, I would go there. If you go there — this is like learning Korean when you visit Seoul, if you find a Korean restaurant in your town, wherever you are, go up to them and practice your Korean and 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?” [foreign language] And these stews, Korean food is comfort food. There are a lot of people trying to make upscale food and there are people like Corey Lee at Benu in San Francisco and David Chang at Momofuku that have perfected an upscale version of Korean food, but Korean food is comfort food. It’s home-cooking food. And we had food the other day and I was like, you got to eat the stuff that’s like — this is a poor country’s food, and that’s the best stuff. The other stuff is great. Anyways, I wanted to give kudos to the original Korean export that everyone loves, which is Korean barbecue.
Tim Ferriss: Korean barbecue and Korean food. And the stews, I didn’t expect to be broadsided by the stews. They’re so delicious. And fair warning, it can get pretty spicy. Korean food can get pretty spicy —
Steve Jang: You can get murky. Unless you’re Korean or unless you’ve looked at the recipe and the preparation, you don’t know what’s in there.
Tim Ferriss: Murky. And you can definitely earn points also by speaking a little bit of Korean. You can say like, “[foreign language].”
Steve Jang: 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 at least try.
Tim Ferriss: Just a word or two, right? Thank you. I guess [foreign language], it is —
Steve Jang: If you want to say it’s really good or very good, [foreign language].
Tim Ferriss: Oh, [foreign language] is a good one.
Steve Jang: Or [foreign language]
Tim Ferriss: [foreign language]
Steve Jang: And when you’re eating, if you don’t finish it, that’s a silent way of saying it wasn’t good.
Tim Ferriss: I learned this the hard way going to — of course, this is what I do. I flew to L.A., then went to San Diego because I wanted to train with a Korean archery coach, because there are a couple things I’ll mention in passing —
Steve Jang: We’ve got to talk about the sports that Koreans are particularly good at.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For a long time, maybe even still, breakdancing, Koreans were many levels above everybody else. They were by far the best in the world. Archery, by far the best in the world. Somebody can fact-check this, but I think the women’s archery gold medal has been taken by Koreans for every Olympics since the Koreans started competing. I actually know a lot about why that’s the case on the archery side, because it’s systematized at every level of education and it’s a very big deal.
But I went out to — he was like, “You and me, we’re going to have dinner,” and that’s not really the thing you say no to, so I’m like, “Of course we’re going to have dinner.” So I go out to Korean barbecue and he ordered so much food. I’m 170 now. I used to be at my highest, and I wasn’t fat, 220. I can eat. And he buried me in food, but then he said to me, I still had all this food in front of me and he’s like, “Yeah, you can’t leave that.” Basically, he’s like, “You’ve got to eat that.” I was like, “Okay.” He’s like, “You can’t leave rice uneaten.”
Steve Jang: Yeah. Take off your shoes, bow, say the food is good. Finish your plate and bowl and all is good. Everything’s good.
Tim Ferriss: Everything’s great.
Steve Jang: I wanted to talk a little bit about the Paik Nam June film. We were at Sundance together in Utah. Park City, great city.
Tim Ferriss: Great place.
Steve Jang: Best time to go skiing or snowboarding is during Sundance.
Tim Ferriss: Because nobody’s skiing. They’re all at the festival, and then the locals don’t want to get anywhere near the place —
Steve Jang: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — because it’s mayhem.
Steve Jang: We premiered our documentary on —
Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear, “our” is not me and Steve’s —
Steve Jang: Oh, no, sorry. The collective we or ours, the great director and team, including Steve Yeun, actor, but also executive producer on this film with me. And you came to that, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts on this because he is the most famous Korean artist.
Tim Ferriss: Well, why don’t you tell people the title?
Steve Jang: The title of the documentary, of this Korean artist, is Moon Is the Oldest TV. It’s on Apple, and it’ll be on Netflix probably by the time this podcast comes out, which will be great. The quick background, the high-level background is Nam June Paik, or in Korean we would say Paik Nam June because we say the last name first. Paik Nam June is the most famous Korean artist of the 20th century. Was the father of digital and video art, so whenever you see TVs all set up in an array like —
Tim Ferriss: Like coordinated displays.
Steve Jang: Yeah. And he did the “TV Buddha,” which is probably his most famous work with a camera constantly taking video on a cathode ray tube of a sitting Buddha statue, and the Buddha is looking at himself. And he coined the term “Information Superhighway” and kind of predicted social media. He is well-regarded in the art world, but not really known outside, which is interesting. It was a film out of passion for his story, and you got to see it so I would love to hear you coming in without knowing — I don’t think you knew about him?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I knew very little about him, really just what you had told me. I really enjoyed the window into his personal story, his creative process, his insanity on some level in the sense that he was highly experimental. Also, and this is true for so many artists and the innovators, deeply tortured might be too strong a word, but I went through some very difficult times, had very little money at points. I remember the footage of one of his apartments caving in and the water coming through the ceilings, and the difficulty in forging a path and experimenting when you’re not getting a lot of applause from any majority whatsoever and how incredibly trying that is.
Because it’s one thing to be, say, an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in a culture where the risk-taker is lionized and even failure on some level and many levels is accepted, where you’ll be applauded for trying, versus what he was doing, which is true I think for most people, in most cultures, in 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 such a character. Now I said this to you the other day, but one of my favorite lines was, “Nam June Paik spoke many languages, none of them well.” He spoke a lot of languages, but they were all broken. All broken.
Steve Jang: He spoke Paikish.
Tim Ferriss: He spoke Paikish, and I found that so endearing. Real endearing guy, as well.
Steve Jang: His story is really interesting. He’s one of those breakthrough moments for Korean culture and society in that he was the only internationally known artist in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and even into the 2000s, and then he passed away in that decade. He was the ambassador or the representative, as crazy as he might’ve seemed to everyone, that in the art world, he was appreciated and admired and followed for that. And it’s very un-Korean for that time period. You have to remember that at that time period, Korea was under essentially a dictatorial, somewhat elected administration.
Tim Ferriss: And to clarify for folks also, he was outside of — he was in Germany, he was in the US, east side.
Steve Jang: He was part of the diaspora.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, he was part of the diaspora.
Steve Jang: If he had done what he was doing in Korea, he would’ve been censored. It was too weird. It was too out there. It was too counter-political on all respects. Even when he visited, you saw that footage, he was nervous that he would not be able to leave Korea and that he would get locked up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, when he visited much later.
Steve Jang: Right, but they embraced him, which is really interesting because if he had done all that here, he would’ve been shut down, but the fact that he did it on the world and became well-known and did these live broadcasts that ended up looking like the future YouTube variety show —
Tim Ferriss: I forgot about some of those, oh, my God.
Steve Jang: In the show notes, you’ve got to put a link to this —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’ll put in a link.
Steve Jang: There’s a free streaming link I think somewhere, so it won’t be about a commercial thing. But he became revered. 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’ve been panned and maybe censored. And I think that that is part of that han, is he struggled with mental health —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, big time.
Steve Jang: — with relationships, with his own art and his own identity and failure, and in a weird way, he represented the unexpected hero to a lot of artists and thinkers of the time. There was a thing in Korean music before K-pop, there was an extremely underground, small but amazing jazz and rock scene, especially psych rock. There was a band called He5 and He6.
Tim Ferriss: What is psych rock? What is that?
Steve Jang: The best version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is an obscure Korean psych rock band.
Tim Ferriss: But what is psych rock? This is a genre that I’m not familiar with.
Steve Jang: Psych rock is psychedelic rock —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I got it. Okay. It’s like psychological rock?
Steve Jang: In the ’60s and ’70s when that was popular in the US, Koreans were doing that. But here’s the thing, government censors back then would shut down anything that looked a little edgy and counter to their —
Tim Ferriss: Counterculture.
Steve Jang: Yeah, represented counterculture at the time. So they would put out these album covers on the LPs that looked like flowers and blue sky and clouds and just really weird fluffy covers, but the music inside was serious. And it was trippy, it was intense.
Tim Ferriss: So it was like Little House on the Prairie on the front and then Rammstein on the inside?
Steve Jang: It was like, judge this book by its cover, please, because inside is some really —
Tim Ferriss: Subversive stuff.
Steve Jang: Not only subversive, but they were dancing to this and enjoying this inside of small clubs and bars and apartments, because this couldn’t be a thing that you could do in a big concert hall. The government censors are there. So these moments where you have these artists that can go out and do something out there. I want to call out that the diaspora is really important to a lot of what’s happened too. So if you look, 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. So a lot of the dance groups — I actually sponsored the first world b-boy championships called R16 in Seoul, in 2008.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding, didn’t know that.
Steve Jang: And all the best b-boy crews from around the world, France — it’s all country-based. It’s like an Olympics. It’s like France versus Japan, US versus Korea. And everyone convened in Seoul, the outskirts this whole, and it was government-supported, which is the craziest thing. It was an incredible moment, but it was very clear that dance culture here, which is very strong today, came from the Korean gyopo that had come back. They brought it from New York, they brought it from L.A., and they brought it back and improved it. And cooking the same thing, there’s a lot of chefs that have come back from the US or France or UK, come back to Seoul whole.
So there’s this export, but then there’s also this reverse immigration happening where they’re coming back. And so it’s a really exciting time to be in Seoul if your startups are rising and that’s now a new career option. There’s still huge problems with North and South Korea, the tension and the geopolitical fear and anxiety that happens, but there’s something really dynamic and it feels like we don’t know how long this will last, not just because of the danger of geopolitical stuff but also because of — does it get dialed in Tokyo one day and becomes — everything gets really locked in, defined —
Tim Ferriss: Just in terms of stasis.
Steve Jang: Yeah, and right now it feels really transitional.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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 has a very alive feeling to it. Similar to the way that, in a sense, the way that Austin feels right now has 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. At least I’m speaking about Austin now, restaurants being open, companies being started, people moving companies there. Lots of people moving there for the cultural stuff, and it has a feeling of being pregnant with possibilities, which is the vibe that I get here. Walking through these neighborhoods, I’m like, I bet if I come back here in three, five years, 70 percent of these stores will have changed.
Steve Jang: There’ll be a lot of differences. The director, Amanda Kim, of the Nam June Paik 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 hasn’t spent a lot of time in Korea, so emotional to have been the director to present to Koreans this film about the most important artist of all Korean people in the modern era, to present that back. And she said it was not only a mind-blowing experience for her as a director, but as a Korean gyopo, to be back to present that. And so this is something that I think 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the cycle, like the cycling back. The feedback loop.
Steve Jang: It’s so important. One thing, we were eating mandu the other day. Mandu is a Mongolian word. Certain parts of China use mandu, Korea uses mandu, Turkey uses mandu, Pakistan uses mandu. Food is the original spice, food carried by Mongolians, Romans. It’s the original cultural export. Korean food, Korean film, Korean music, Korean beauty, all of this is the only thing that will keep Korea alive in perpetuity. This could all be gone. It’s too small of a country, too small of a population, on too tenuous of a peninsula, literally in the geographic center of all the tension in the region. So that export, that pollen goes out. That is the existence, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.
Steve Jang: I think on the concept of what’s happening right now with the technology industry here, arts, food, 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 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 to live right now. It’s groaning and squeaking and screaming —
Tim Ferriss: Bursting at the seams.
Steve Jang: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I really encourage people to check it out. And also, to paint a picture, we’re sitting in this hotel room looking out. Beautiful sunny day, which is crazy because it was snowing earlier. You were saying, as soon as you think you got it figured it out, 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, huge difference experientially for a native English speaker here, say, compared to Japan. All due respect to Japan, I love Japan. I’ve spent a ton of time there, but the English level is higher here so it’s easier to get around and interact and make requests and solve problems and so on. So that is also a huge benefit to the international community, is I’ve just found it much easier too, because my Korean, as hard as I might try in a handful of days, is still pretty limited, so I do need to lean on the English.
Anything else that we should cover before we wind to a close? Anything else you’d like to say before we land the plane?
Steve Jang: I think we’re good. What do you think?
Tim Ferriss: I think we’re good. I think we’re good, man.
Steve Jang: Thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, so fun.
Steve Jang: It’s been a fun week.
Tim Ferriss: It’s been a great week, man.
Steve Jang: We’ve covered a lot with a short amount of time, but still some more to come.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’ve got some more adventuring to do. And to everybody listening, as always, I’ll put links to everything that we can pull from this conversation. Links to everything we discussed in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And also, as always, until next time, be a bit nicer, a bit kinder than is necessary, not just to other people, but to yourself. And gamsahamnida, thanks for listening.
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