Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe. Wasn't thal So, Joe.
Speaker 1: You know, I went to South Korea for the first
Speaker 1: time a month or twear ago, I know, and I
Speaker 1: was super jealous of it because you posted a bunch
Speaker 1: of awesome food picks and it's just a place I've
Speaker 1: always wanted to go, So thank you for rubbing it in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I did eat a lot of Korean fried
Speaker 1: chicken and I sort of I sort of regretted it afterwards,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was a really good idea. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what's the point. What do you try other than
Speaker 1: other than reminding me that because of where you live,
Speaker 1: you get to eat much better food than me all
Speaker 1: the time, you're always posting about it. What is the
Speaker 1: what else you're trying to tell me? Okay, Well, it
Speaker 1: was my first time in South Korea, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that I grew up in Asia and spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in the region, and I learned a lot
Speaker 1: in just a few days in Soul and one of
Speaker 1: the things I learned, and this, this probably won't come
Speaker 1: as a surprise to anyone with the teenage kids, is
Speaker 1: that K pop is really really big in South Korea.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm not really surprised that it's really really
Speaker 1: big in South Korea, but what I am struck by,
Speaker 1: and it's one of these facets of modern pop culture
Speaker 1: that I feel incredibly ignorant on. Obviously, as one gets older,
Speaker 1: particularly when it relates to music, you sort of grow
Speaker 1: more and more out of touch. But the degree to
Speaker 1: which K pop is this global phenomenon kind of blows
Speaker 1: my mind. I saw there was like I think I
Speaker 1: saw this, like there was like this piece on Axios
Speaker 1: I saw a week or two ago. There's a band
Speaker 1: called BTS right that they're really huge. Oh my gosh, Joe, Yes,
Speaker 1: there is a band called BTS. They had a little
Speaker 1: story about how any time and any news organization does
Speaker 1: a piece on them, their traffic absolutely goes through the roof.
Speaker 1: So a as an editor, I was like, Oh, we
Speaker 1: should probably write more about them, be we should probably.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we're sort of hitting on this in the
Speaker 1: podcast because maybe we can include it in the title
Speaker 1: and maybe we could get tons of listeners from their
Speaker 1: gigantic global fan base, like we deserve some of that
Speaker 1: some of that traffic bump. Oh, you're so machiavellian about
Speaker 1: this whole thing, Joe, so so listen. So I went
Speaker 1: to Seoul, learned a lot about K pop and K culture,
Speaker 1: came away with a minor addiction to a certain K drama,
Speaker 1: and then I started encouraging everyone in our newsroom to
Speaker 1: actually write more about this stuff. And I got a
Speaker 1: little bit of a reputation for like, for being obsessed
Speaker 1: with K pop. But the reason I'm obsessed with K
Speaker 1: pop is not because of traffic, as you point out.
Speaker 1: It's because there's actually a really interesting economics and market
Speaker 1: story behind how K pop got so popular, both within
Speaker 1: South Korea and globally. I'm really fascinated by this because,
Speaker 1: even excluding K pop or Korea's cultural exports in general,
Speaker 1: Korea has a history of sort of turning conventional wisdom,
Speaker 1: particularly around economics, on its head, and so all of
Speaker 1: the so called rules about how a country is supposed
Speaker 1: to develop its economy tend to die when you look
Speaker 1: at the Korean story of the country that's gotten very
Speaker 1: rich by at every step of the way, flouting expectations
Speaker 1: about how things are supposed to be done, how you
Speaker 1: nurture a new industry, and so this idea of cultural
Speaker 1: exports fitting into a sort of broader Korean story is
Speaker 1: an incredibly fascinating one, right, And not just nurture any industry, right,
Speaker 1: we're talking about creative industries. So how does a country
Speaker 1: or government actually go about encouraging people to be more creative?
Speaker 1: That's what we're going to talk about today. So to
Speaker 1: do that, we have the perfect person. She's a journalist
Speaker 1: and the author of a book that I read a
Speaker 1: few months before going to Soul. Her name is Uni Hong,
Speaker 1: and the book is the Birth of Korea Cool, How
Speaker 1: one nation is conquering the world through pop culture. So
Speaker 1: really everything we were just talking about. Uni, It's so
Speaker 1: nice to have you on the show. Hi, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. How are you good? Thanks? So, I guess
Speaker 1: just to lay the groundwork, it might be nice for
Speaker 1: you to give us an overview of where South Korea
Speaker 1: was a few decades ago, because I think nowadays most
Speaker 1: people are used to talking about it as this sort
Speaker 1: of tech powerhouse, you know, Samsung manufacturing of a big
Speaker 1: proportion of the world semiconductor chips. That's how most people
Speaker 1: know it. But just a little while ago it wasn't
Speaker 1: actually at anything close to that. Well, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: I mean, right after the Korean War which ended in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three, South Korea was actually one of the
Speaker 1: poorest nations on the planet. It was poorer than most
Speaker 1: of the South Saharan Africa uh and for decades it
Speaker 1: was actually even poorer than North Korea. And that didn't
Speaker 1: really change until the sixties when President Parkdung he, who
Speaker 1: was the father of the former female president that was
Speaker 1: his daughter Park but parked On, he had this policy
Speaker 1: that basically was the birth of the birth of Korean cool,
Speaker 1: if you want to put it that way, and he
Speaker 1: was the guy who came up with the idea of
Speaker 1: the Korean government cooperating closely with Korean private industry. So
Speaker 1: Ever since then, the government has assisted in the ecosystem
Speaker 1: that propped suth Chanday and Samsung and more recently, I
Speaker 1: mean President Park has been did for a long time,
Speaker 1: but his legacy continued well. Recently, the government is also
Speaker 1: propping up K pop, uh and uh K dramas and
Speaker 1: all of the what you would associate with the Korean
Speaker 1: wave cultural products, including makeup and movies and even food.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I didn't even mention the face masks. I
Speaker 1: should have mentioned I bought so many face masks and
Speaker 1: soul so I made. I said at the beginning that
Speaker 1: what I love about the Korean development story is the
Speaker 1: degree to which it sort of flouts conventional wisdom about
Speaker 1: how a country can develop. And I think that if
Speaker 1: you talk to most Western economists, there's this view of,
Speaker 1: you know, open up free markets, don't try to pick
Speaker 1: winners and losers within the economy, don't try to have
Speaker 1: centralized planning of key industries. And as you mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: starting in the sixties, Korea's success and going from one
Speaker 1: of the poorest countries in the world to one of
Speaker 1: the richest countries in the world involved a heavy degree
Speaker 1: of intertwinedness between the government and the private sector. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: well that's spot on, Zo. And basically, South Korea is
Speaker 1: the only capitalist country in the world that can, when
Speaker 1: necessary behave like a command economy. So, for example, in
Speaker 1: the US, you can't have President Trump forcing Apple to
Speaker 1: you know, stop making watches or that. You know, he
Speaker 1: couldn't say to Jeff Bez I was, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't understand this throne thing. Can you please focus
Speaker 1: on books or something like that. But in Korea, the
Speaker 1: president and the government has always had the capacity to
Speaker 1: do that, and it's not by coercion or force. It's
Speaker 1: because Koreans on the whole belief that as the expression
Speaker 1: goes a rising tide, boys all six. So that's the
Speaker 1: rule breaking that you're referring to just now about how
Speaker 1: they broke all the rules of capitalism. So with that
Speaker 1: sort of basis in mind, you actually wrote in the
Speaker 1: book that after the Asia financial crisis, South Korea made
Speaker 1: some of its best decisions ever. Can you walk us
Speaker 1: through that thought process and how they ultimately came to
Speaker 1: the conclusion of, Hey, we're going to make a bunch
Speaker 1: of cultural exports and make that a key part of
Speaker 1: our economy, right exactly. I mean, um, most of Asia
Speaker 1: wasn't horrible debt after that financial crisis, and Korea was
Speaker 1: really hard hit, and it kind of doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: that they would conclude from that that they should then
Speaker 1: focus on popular culture. But the way that they got
Speaker 1: to that thinking is the crisis made them realize that
Speaker 1: they hit put too many eggs in one basket. And
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that Korea was so hard hit
Speaker 1: economically is that their economy was overly dependent on the
Speaker 1: large corporations, which they called TiVos, and these are the multinational,
Speaker 1: highly diversified companies like Ken, They, Samsung and ld Samsung
Speaker 1: for example, I believe still makes up about twenty pent
Speaker 1: of the GDP of South Korea. And after the financial crisis,
Speaker 1: the Korean government realized this is way too much. There's
Speaker 1: a way to us hanging on like two or three
Speaker 1: companies and if they default, which is what happens in
Speaker 1: a financial crisis, and the entire country this faults. And
Speaker 1: they said, well, what can we do prevent this from
Speaker 1: ever happening again? And what they came up with was,
Speaker 1: we have to change gears to do something, but we
Speaker 1: don't have to buy new equipment or machinery where we
Speaker 1: can act on it pretty much right away. And they decided, okay,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a pop culture. The inspiration apparently was
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park. There was actually a whole white paper presented
Speaker 1: to the Korean government on Jurassic Park and how in
Speaker 1: order to make the same proceeds as Jurassic Park, you'd
Speaker 1: have to sell fifteen million ten day cars. And they
Speaker 1: said we're in the wrong business. Well, I see what
Speaker 1: you're saying. So Jurassic Park, the movie, the enterprise of
Speaker 1: making Jurassic Park, not the enterprise of bringing dinosaurs to life,
Speaker 1: was the inspiration. Well through that's happening too. I mean,
Speaker 1: genetics is a big thing. But the basic gist is
Speaker 1: cultural exports can be gigantic money makers and ultimately, if
Speaker 1: you nail it, do not require a lot of capital,
Speaker 1: so incredibly high margin. And so the basic idea is,
Speaker 1: whether it's music, whether it's TV shows, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: if you can find that secret sauce to replicate that,
Speaker 1: that is an extraordinary efficient way to get in dollars
Speaker 1: or money from the rest of the world. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: basically what it came down to. Low, low overhead, a
Speaker 1: fast learning curve, and the rest is luck and hard work.
Speaker 1: So what did they do to kick it off? I mean,
Speaker 1: so it's like, Okay, the math makes a lot of sense,
Speaker 1: We're going to make a fortune on cultural exports, but
Speaker 1: how do you actually jump start that? What? How did
Speaker 1: the plan take shape? Right? And the question that you're
Speaker 1: probably thinking but haven't asked it is what were they thinking?
Speaker 1: This is every thing? Well, the number one off obviously
Speaker 1: that all Korean pulps. Top culture is in Korean and
Speaker 1: it's only spoken in Korea. And uh what it started
Speaker 1: with dramas. I mean, right now, it's the music that
Speaker 1: gets all the attention, but the Korean waves started with
Speaker 1: the soap operas. And what happened was in the ninety nineties,
Speaker 1: the South Korean Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong tested
Speaker 1: the waters and thought that it might be a good
Speaker 1: time to experiment with showing a Korean drama in Chinese. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean, now, there's so much med for k dramas,
Speaker 1: but at the time, there was zero interest in it.
Speaker 1: So they approached the Hong Kong TV networks and the
Speaker 1: networks said, well, there's no audience for this, you know.
Speaker 1: The Korean Chamber of Commerce said, well, we will pay
Speaker 1: for the sun titling, we will pay for the dobbing,
Speaker 1: we will pay for everything. And they said, okay, that's
Speaker 1: just the production costs. You know, there's also the question
Speaker 1: of advertising. So the Korean Chamber of Commerce said, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll take care of that. To all you have
Speaker 1: to do is press play. So the Korean government basically
Speaker 1: subsidized the translation of these of this drama into Cantonese
Speaker 1: and also Mandarin, I think, and they sold all of
Speaker 1: the ad times so that the Hong Kong TV network
Speaker 1: would not have to do anything. And then, to everyone's surprise,
Speaker 1: or at least some people's prize, the drama did really well.
Speaker 1: And then the government started paying to translate more and
Speaker 1: more and more dramas, and now it's sort of a
Speaker 1: self feeding deaf. But the government never really completely got
Speaker 1: hands off, and that's why the Korean waves didn't end,
Speaker 1: you know, ten years ago. Um, they're still paying to
Speaker 1: translate them into languages that are more obscure because that
Speaker 1: they sort of see these emerging markets as being extremely important.
Speaker 1: So they're not just focusing on the languages that have
Speaker 1: lots of speakers. They're focusing on areas where people will
Speaker 1: someday be able to I Samsung phones and L the
Speaker 1: TV and they'll already have built loyalty to the brand
Speaker 1: that is Korea. So the culture, the cultural exports are
Speaker 1: basically a sort of like first step towards other types
Speaker 1: of exports. Is that the idea, Yeah, that's right. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's not that the pop culture feed into industry or
Speaker 1: that industry feed into pop culture. It's actually everything. At
Speaker 1: the same time, it's considered to be a whole ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So it's not that K pop is a delivery system
Speaker 1: to sell phones. I mean that's also true, but the
Speaker 1: phones are a delivery system to sell k pop, and
Speaker 1: the makeup is the delivery system to still all of
Speaker 1: the above. And it's kind of like a snake binding
Speaker 1: its tail, which actually is sort of the business model
Speaker 1: for the chip. But they have they don't have wholy
Speaker 1: owned substidiary in Korea for these big companies. It's sort
Speaker 1: of this company on its part of that company. If
Speaker 1: you draw the structure, it's not a pyramid, it's a wheel.
Speaker 1: And that's actually how the whole economy operates, and that
Speaker 1: is how the whole Korean wave operates, in tandem with
Speaker 1: the government, in tandem with heavy industry. So if you
Speaker 1: think of it not as a pyramid but as a wheel,
Speaker 1: I think it starts to make more sense. So I
Speaker 1: have a question about how some of the cultural exports
Speaker 1: play on the ground in South Korea, because I heard
Speaker 1: when I was having lunch with some colleagues and Soul that,
Speaker 1: for instance, BTS wasn't even considered that popular domestically until
Speaker 1: they sort of enjoyed great international success and then they
Speaker 1: were recognized as as a group that was doing something
Speaker 1: for South Korea as a whole, and then they started
Speaker 1: to get really big in South Korea itself. Is that
Speaker 1: how these things generally happen. Mostly it's the other way around.
Speaker 1: I would say BTS and Thigh, of course, are examples
Speaker 1: of musical acts that we're not everyone's first choice when
Speaker 1: they imagined what would be the breakthrough. One big surprise
Speaker 1: to me and everyone else was that the acts that
Speaker 1: became really popular were not the girl band because I
Speaker 1: think that the Korean industry. I can't prove it, but
Speaker 1: I'm pretty for that they were angling to make the
Speaker 1: you know, the cute, sexy baby whoever, bubblegum pop girl band,
Speaker 1: like you know, girls generation. I think I think that
Speaker 1: that was what they were pushing for, like the the
Speaker 1: you know, the pussy Cats dolls, but minus ten years
Speaker 1: or something. I thought they were not thinking that it
Speaker 1: was the boy bands that we're going to be popular for.
Speaker 1: So here's what I'm having a hard time wrapping my
Speaker 1: head around. And I think your answer just now sort
Speaker 1: of gets at it. You know, when you think about
Speaker 1: like sort of developing a homegrown semiconductor industry allow the
Speaker 1: growth of Samsung, you're like, okay, well, if the chips
Speaker 1: are a very high quality and they're of competitive price,
Speaker 1: someone's probably going to buy them. Like that's clear. If
Speaker 1: you can show on the specs that the chip is
Speaker 1: fast and you can make it cheaper than some competitor,
Speaker 1: it'll sell internationally. With cultural exports, you know, there's no
Speaker 1: way to be objectively sure that the taste is going
Speaker 1: to connect. So I mean, you know, the big size
Speaker 1: song that blew up, it could have just been a
Speaker 1: novelty that people talked about for one day and then
Speaker 1: moved on. Like there's nothing objective you could say, Okay,
Speaker 1: this song is better than others, and this song deserves
Speaker 1: to have major market share. Or as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: maybe they thought the girl bands were gonna do better.
Speaker 1: It turns out that it was the guy band. Beyond
Speaker 1: even the language question, which is its own issue. Why
Speaker 1: did they think their aesthetics would resonate and do well internationally?
Speaker 1: I admit that that's kind of a black box, and
Speaker 1: everyone anyone who says they know exactly how this happened
Speaker 1: is actually just lying, because you know, the quest how
Speaker 1: to make something viral is like how to make you
Speaker 1: know the immortality pill. It's if everyone nobody really knows
Speaker 1: for sure? How how did death Didymota become a millionaire
Speaker 1: before she was twenty? If you if you said that
Speaker 1: you knew that was going to happen, I don't believe you, right,
Speaker 1: But I think that what they did have that was
Speaker 1: going in their favorite is that it's sort of the
Speaker 1: advantage of the underdog because South Korea has been as
Speaker 1: they like to complain and or bragg they claim that
Speaker 1: they have been invaded eight hundred times in their five
Speaker 1: thousand year history, and that they have never attempted to
Speaker 1: colonize anyone else. And they spent most of their history
Speaker 1: being um ransacked by Mongols and Manturion and of course
Speaker 1: there was a long period of colonization by the Japanese
Speaker 1: and they didn't have any autonomy over their fate. Roosevelt
Speaker 1: basically decided that Korean would go to Japan instead of Russia.
Speaker 1: He signed this this tree d and names the hotel
Speaker 1: somewhere and Rioms didn't even really know about it a
Speaker 1: layer um and so obviously this is you know, sort
Speaker 1: of getting kicked around a lot. I mean that that
Speaker 1: happens to you kind of pay attention. It's a survival thing.
Speaker 1: As a result of this underdog status, they had to
Speaker 1: always pay visual attention into what was going on. So
Speaker 1: for example, when they were a colony of Japan, they
Speaker 1: couldn't just do whatever they wanted, but they also wanted
Speaker 1: to retain some Korean autonomy, and in order to balance that,
Speaker 1: they had to just pay attention to nuances, to reading
Speaker 1: the room um on a global and national annox the
Speaker 1: global scale. And that's what they did when they were
Speaker 1: trying to develop these k pop songs and how could
Speaker 1: we make this catchy? How could we make this global?
Speaker 1: And they just I mean the answer is kind of boring.
Speaker 1: They just studied. And there are books that I was
Speaker 1: given published by the Ministry of Trade in various government
Speaker 1: sponsoring industries explaining how to approach different cultures based on
Speaker 1: their own local more So, for example, there was a
Speaker 1: sext and on the Muslim world thing. So for example,
Speaker 1: if you're going to air a drama in a prey
Speaker 1: dra predominantly about the Mason, these are the times that
Speaker 1: they pray so don't air it during those times. This
Speaker 1: is rama done, so this is when they're eating some
Speaker 1: you know, in the evening, so maybe it's not the
Speaker 1: best time to premiere in evening drama. They're not gonna
Speaker 1: show lots of kissing and stuff, so don't have any
Speaker 1: of that. And they just make careful and careful, careful
Speaker 1: studies of all of this in order to distill what
Speaker 1: they what people wanted. And in the k dramas, the
Speaker 1: formula is they realized that there was need for people
Speaker 1: to feel things and actually have people crying a lot
Speaker 1: and being really miserable and not everything having a happy ending,
Speaker 1: and which is sort of the opposite of you know,
Speaker 1: the Hollywood formula. And until the popularity of things like
Speaker 1: cream dramas and also telenovelas, I guess most people didn't
Speaker 1: realize that there was this yearning for stories that would
Speaker 1: make people cry cathartically and you know, na every everything
Speaker 1: being okay in the end. And with K pop, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's one formula, but they they just
Speaker 1: sort of buy things from different sources and they package
Speaker 1: things extremely well. So you probably know that the world
Speaker 1: songwriting factory is Sweden. Yeah, I mean, not just everyone
Speaker 1: thinks ABBA, but I'm not talking ab. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: people who write there like Britney Spears of most famous
Speaker 1: hits and stuff wore they're they were They're all written
Speaker 1: by Swedes, so Korea bibes the tunes from them, and
Speaker 1: then they do the lyrics, like you stuff from somewhere else,
Speaker 1: and they get choreographers from America or you know, the
Speaker 1: French ballet or something, and you know, they're not afraid
Speaker 1: to mix and match. They're not worried that this is
Speaker 1: gonna look like a Frankenstein, you know, like piece together songs.
Speaker 1: They're just like, no, no, this is gonna work. We're
Speaker 1: just gonna do this. Yeah, the genus is in the packaging.
Speaker 1: I would say people forget as well that before k pop,
Speaker 1: there there was j pop, right, there was Japanese pop
Speaker 1: in the indies which was incredibly popular. So it's not
Speaker 1: like K pop came out of nowhere. There was a
Speaker 1: little bit of inspiration, let's say, for it to graft
Speaker 1: itself onto and then adapt. But that kind of brings
Speaker 1: me to my next question, which is, I guess when
Speaker 1: you're talking about creative industries, they're constantly changing and people
Speaker 1: are constantly trying to one up each other, and recently
Speaker 1: we've seen China in particular make a lot more effort at,
Speaker 1: for instance, coming up with dramas. We've seen Netflix signed
Speaker 1: some deals for for various Chinese dramas recently as well.
Speaker 1: How long can Korea maintain its edge when it comes
Speaker 1: to cultural exports. I don't know, and I don't think
Speaker 1: it matters from their point of view because they're I mean,
Speaker 1: just the Korean expert metal, extremely adaptable. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that even they think that the Korean wave is
Speaker 1: gonna last forever. Historically, no music or pop cultureure and
Speaker 1: really last that long unless you constantly constantly reinvent yourself,
Speaker 1: you know, like mcdonna or something. Um, I don't think
Speaker 1: that they're counting on this to put bread at the
Speaker 1: table for a very long time, if I'm honest. It's
Speaker 1: just what they want to do now, and it's basically
Speaker 1: about building Korea as a brand, not necessarily a K
Speaker 1: pop or any of those things as a band. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you wanted my honest opinion, I would
Speaker 1: say it's probably gonna tie out. I mean, the creawave
Speaker 1: is probably gonna die out. In terms of pop culture,
Speaker 1: and the Korean industry will simply adapt whatever the next
Speaker 1: need is. It's you know, it might be biomedical engineering,
Speaker 1: and it might be continuing and entertainment, but focusing on technology.
Speaker 1: I know that there's some government sponsored labs that are
Speaker 1: trying to develop really hyper realistic hologram for example, so
Speaker 1: like you know, it's like if you look behind the hologram,
Speaker 1: you can see the person's back, and if you look
Speaker 1: in front of the hologram, you see the front where
Speaker 1: his current hologram technology, if you look to the side
Speaker 1: of the hologram, you can't see anything. But so Korea
Speaker 1: is trying to make fully three D holograms so that
Speaker 1: you know, not only can you have like Michael Jackson
Speaker 1: appear from the dead as a hologram, but you can
Speaker 1: also have a surgeon. You know, Mount Fine of Hospital
Speaker 1: and new are demonstrate open heart surgery to people all
Speaker 1: over the world via holograms, and you know they can
Speaker 1: sort of it's almost like they're they're in there in
Speaker 1: the room with him. So you know that maybe you know,
Speaker 1: is less interesting to teenagers then BTS. But Korea will
Speaker 1: will always be trying to reinvent themselves, and they don't
Speaker 1: hold onto things. I think it's a very important national
Speaker 1: chage in terms of their ability to adapt. Um. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking up emotionally, I mean emotionally. They're really no
Speaker 1: for holding on in terms of industry. If something doesn't work,
Speaker 1: they're the first to abandon it and pretend it never happened.
Speaker 1: Tracy mentioned in the intro issue just in soul and
Speaker 1: had some great Korean fried chicken ten years ago. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I've never heard of Korean fried chicken, and
Speaker 1: now I love it. And there's all kinds of change
Speaker 1: that have opened up in New York City that sell
Speaker 1: Korean fried chicken. Everyone I know like that. How much
Speaker 1: has U This sort of the emergence of Korean food
Speaker 1: internationally also been part of the same government effort. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean people would be surprise to learn that I
Speaker 1: think Korean food is good, and then when people try
Speaker 1: it they often like it. But the fact before you
Speaker 1: have people try, you have to have it available. The
Speaker 1: supply has to be there, and that is where the
Speaker 1: government steps. Then they put a lot of money to
Speaker 1: sponsoring food fairs. A big program that they have is
Speaker 1: these staff scholarships. I guess you could call them the
Speaker 1: government sponsors international stuffs and not the state of one,
Speaker 1: but of any level to come to Korea for free,
Speaker 1: stay there for free, and learn Korean cooking techniques for free.
Speaker 1: And the idea is not necessarily as they go back
Speaker 1: to their home country and open a Korean restaurant. But
Speaker 1: maybe you'll see Korean cold flaw or something or real
Speaker 1: I state, but you know, a standard American restaurant quote unquote,
Speaker 1: but with Kim t doue. And guess what, I've seen
Speaker 1: all of these things, you know, And um that about
Speaker 1: saying those stuffs actually went on these trips. But that
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing that can only happen if
Speaker 1: somebody is making it available to them. I have a
Speaker 1: big picture question, which is how much of the sort
Speaker 1: of special Korea economic model is replicable in other countries,
Speaker 1: Like how much does the South Korea miracle, this idea
Speaker 1: of cultural exports depend on the particular nature and structure
Speaker 1: of Korean society or could any emerging market do what
Speaker 1: South Korea essentially did well? That is sort of the
Speaker 1: big question is that can you bob in stellds and
Speaker 1: I mean I kind of to minds about that because,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, if it were that easy, somebody
Speaker 1: else would have done it already. You know, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of underdeveloped countries that could have done this and
Speaker 1: they didn't. But does this mean that only Korea could
Speaker 1: ever do it? I mean probably not. What does make
Speaker 1: them have an advantage that would make it hard for
Speaker 1: other countries to do it is, as I said, they
Speaker 1: have this hybrid capitalist command economy mentality. I'm not aware
Speaker 1: of any other country that has that structure where the
Speaker 1: government could state, Okay, we want a pop industry tomorrow,
Speaker 1: so we're going to requisition funds immediately to build a stadium.
Speaker 1: I mean here, you'd have to have so many here
Speaker 1: meeting the United States, you have to have so many
Speaker 1: levels of approvals and vote and it goes to the
Speaker 1: n e A and then you reply and it would
Speaker 1: take you know, years, and then you have the requisitions
Speaker 1: this fund and that fund in that license. And in
Speaker 1: Korea it happens very very fast because industry and government
Speaker 1: are in cooperation. Nobody else has that. I mean, China
Speaker 1: has a command economy, but they don't have the cooperative spect.
Speaker 1: It's just too big a country. It's centralized. They don't
Speaker 1: all speak the same language, they're not all the same religion,
Speaker 1: they're not even all the same ethnicity. Hind of the
Speaker 1: country that would be most likely to do it, but
Speaker 1: they can't for sort of the honest lack of you
Speaker 1: know how much. So I have a related question, and
Speaker 1: it gets back to what we were saying in the
Speaker 1: very beginning about Korea having broken all the rules of development.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons that people are economists in
Speaker 1: particular are skeptical of centralized command decisions from the economy
Speaker 1: is because they figure that bad actors or inefficient actors
Speaker 1: will get propped up. Chrony is m essentially so maybe
Speaker 1: some company gets big and it gets in with the government,
Speaker 1: and even if their products start losing competitiveness, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because there's so much corruption and there employ all
Speaker 1: these people and they can't be let to die. And
Speaker 1: one way that I know that Korea helped solve this
Speaker 1: problem is by sort of using the export market as
Speaker 1: the test. So the companies that thrived in export industries
Speaker 1: were given more help, and companies that couldn't find a
Speaker 1: compelling export markets they didn't get the same level of aid.
Speaker 1: And so the export market was sort of used as
Speaker 1: the ultimate test of who should get aid or who shouldn't.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious about the cultural front, some of the
Speaker 1: same tactics were used, so that whether it's directors of
Speaker 1: soap operas or writers of songs, where's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing where you nurture the winners and if they show
Speaker 1: some formula to work, then they get more support. And
Speaker 1: if a writer or director couldn't find make it click,
Speaker 1: then they sort of over time didn't get the same
Speaker 1: support from the state. Oh, I think it's absolutely a
Speaker 1: rich get richer kind of situation. And what you're saying
Speaker 1: is exactly right. They used the export figures as the
Speaker 1: litmus test for the viability of something. Um, the country
Speaker 1: is too small for them to rely on local consumption
Speaker 1: cleric economy. They almost don't even care about that at all.
Speaker 1: And like I said, because they're a small country, because
Speaker 1: of their history, they've always been very, very very outwardly
Speaker 1: focused for their survivals. So what you're saying is exactly right.
Speaker 1: Like if you can't make it outside Korea, you can't
Speaker 1: make it in Korea, even if you are making it
Speaker 1: in Korea kind of thing. All right, Well, Uni Hung,
Speaker 1: the author of the birth of Korea. Cool. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on. Thank you, and that was
Speaker 1: really great. I really enjoyed it. Thank you was the
Speaker 1: pleasure to be here. So Joe I found that conversation
Speaker 1: really fascinating, not just because we got to talk about
Speaker 1: pop culture for once on this show, but also because
Speaker 1: it kind of it did put me in mind of
Speaker 1: the conversation. Do you remember the one we had about
Speaker 1: China made in initiative and whether or not China could
Speaker 1: sort of encourage or sort of foster and innovation economy
Speaker 1: when it came to tech. It reminded me a lot
Speaker 1: of that. You know. What it reminded me of was
Speaker 1: not that episode, but the one we did recently with
Speaker 1: a Fottle kaboob about MMT within the emerging market context,
Speaker 1: because so much of what he was saying was again
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff that like really flew in the
Speaker 1: face of conventional wisdom about how a country developed, and
Speaker 1: he was making the point He's like, Okay, first, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you have to become food self sufficient and so forth.
Speaker 1: And I just think that, like, there are so many
Speaker 1: areas in which we accept conventional wisdom about economic development
Speaker 1: or commerce, and one of them absolutely. I would have
Speaker 1: never imagined that you could have sort of by design,
Speaker 1: manufacture a successful cultural export category. And yet there you go,
Speaker 1: Korea did it right. And if you think, like if
Speaker 1: someone had written, you know, post the Asia financial crisis
Speaker 1: in the late early two thousands, that South Korea was
Speaker 1: trying to develop a cultural export economy because it was
Speaker 1: trying to replicate the success of Jurassic Park, I think
Speaker 1: there'd be plenty of people out there that would have
Speaker 1: thought they were absolutely crazy for a number of reasons. No,
Speaker 1: I mean it's crazy. Like I listened to like a
Speaker 1: BTS song this morning and I wasn't in English, and
Speaker 1: your verdict, it just wouldn't never occurred to me that
Speaker 1: that could be for the language reason alone. It would
Speaker 1: not have occurred to me that it could be one
Speaker 1: of the highest charting songs on Spotify's global hit list.
Speaker 1: It just it boggles the mind that it's real, and
Speaker 1: yet it is real, and all these other things that
Speaker 1: Korea has done aren't supposed to be how it's done,
Speaker 1: and yet they continue to do it. So I just love,
Speaker 1: like how many preconceived notion Korea is destroying. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: So if there's one takeaway from this entire episode, it's
Speaker 1: that K pop is a serious end economic matter, right,
Speaker 1: and I hope BTS is millions and millions of fans.
Speaker 1: I'll listen to this episode. Yes, BTS, BTS Army. Sign
Speaker 1: up to odd Lots, subscribe on your choice of player.
Speaker 1: This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at the Stalwart. And you should follow our guests,
Speaker 1: the author of Birth of Korean Cool, Uni Hong on Twitter,
Speaker 1: She's at Uni and don't forget to follow our producers
Speaker 1: Laura Carlson, She's at Laura M. Carlson. To for Foreheads
Speaker 1: is at four Hest and the Bloomberg head of podcast,
Speaker 1: Francesca Levy at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening.