Based Camp - Why South Korea's Fertility Crisis is Unsolvable (Unless They Make This One Change)

00:00:00.000 A lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being almost antithetical to each other, when that really isn't the case.

00:00:10.080 What South Korea is a collection of North Koreas competing against each other under a capitalist broad economic rule system. 0.79

00:00:19.700 And that's what the chaibals are. And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.

00:00:34.780 And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable. 1.00

00:00:40.860 And we'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing.

00:00:44.020 You want to fix the entire Korean system? I'll tell you how you fix it. 1.00

00:00:49.700 You can fix it in one generation. Korea, listen to me here. People will freak the fuck out if you do this, but it would fix things. 0.70

00:00:57.000 Would you like to know more?

00:00:58.420 Hello, Simone. We are so excited to be joining our audience today with the newest member of our family.

00:01:05.960 Many people know that I worked in Korea. I lived in Korea for a year, and it was where I started caring about fertility rate issues.

00:01:12.540 But before I get further on that, I want to introduce our audience to an alternate country.

00:01:17.780 Now, in this alternate country, they've done everything right. In this wonderful, conservative country, same-sex marriage is still illegal in the year 2024. 0.86

00:01:30.200 Porn is illegal in the year 2024. Abortion was illegal until just three years ago.

00:01:37.980 There's almost no immigration and total ethnic homogeny. Women are permanently underclass citizens. 1.00

00:01:46.280 And for the last 20 years, the government has spent over $200 billion trying to increase fertility rates.

00:01:53.920 In this wonderful country, companies will pay their citizens $75K to have kids.

00:02:01.540 Of course, this is a joke. The wonderful country I'm describing here is, in fact, South Korea.

00:02:07.960 All of these things are true about South Korea.

00:02:12.180 They have tried both the fever-dream fantasies of the right and the left, and it has not worked.

00:02:19.400 From cash handouts, to ethnic homogenous state, to banning abortion, to banning pornography.

00:02:26.660 This is why I always laugh when people suggest these things.

00:02:29.060 I'm like, these things were institutionalized in Korea before their fertility started to collapse,

00:02:33.400 and have been there throughout the entire process.

00:02:37.420 And people will be like, well, how bad is the situation in Korea really right now?

00:02:42.240 The average number, and this I'm quoting here, the average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman

00:02:48.880 during her reproductive life cycle fell to a record low of 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022.

00:02:56.440 Data from statistics on South Korea showed Wednesday.

00:02:59.740 And if you project this forwards, South Korea is now projected to have a fertility rate of 0.68 in 2024.

00:03:08.060 And they are on track to meet that.

00:03:10.040 That means that for every 100 South Koreans alive today, there will be 11.6 grandchildren.

00:03:19.200 Not great-great-children, grandchildren.

00:03:21.700 For great-grandchildren, it's less than four.

00:03:25.480 And this is assuming it doesn't continue to fall.

00:03:27.800 And keep in mind, it's falling by like, it felt like 11.5% last year.

00:03:32.520 Like insane.

00:03:33.100 And where most of the country is collated now, in Seoul, the fertility rate's only 0.55.

00:03:41.580 That means you are shrinking the population to a quarter of its size basically every generation.

00:03:48.940 That is insane.

00:03:50.480 For every four South Koreans, there is one kid in Seoul.

00:03:53.520 Now, if you think, oh, because I love demographers, they're always like, things shift.

00:03:59.420 And like, yeah, but you can look at the trailing data, okay?

00:04:03.620 In South Korea, only, I found two statistics here.

00:04:06.720 It's either only 2.9% of Koreans are born out of wedlock, or only 2% of Koreans are born outside of marriage.

00:04:13.480 This was a statistic done in 2022, so fairly recently.

00:04:16.320 But the number is very low.

00:04:18.680 So if you want to get a projection of the number of Koreans that are going to be born,

00:04:23.060 you can look at the number of marriages that are going to form as being the absolute upper limit to that number.

00:04:32.700 Only 27% of women in their 20s considered a marriage essential last year.

00:04:39.980 This is a 53% decline from 2008 in South Korea.

00:04:44.080 This was in 2023.

00:04:44.860 23%.

00:04:45.300 23%.

00:04:46.920 So only 23% of the young population even could have a kid.

00:04:54.840 That is absolutely wild when you consider that the population already has 60% of their population over the age of 40.

00:05:05.000 And if you take that statistic and you go, okay, what about that 22 billion that they gave out, right?

00:05:09.560 What is that per person in South Korea?

00:05:11.180 Because I decided to do a calculation.

00:05:12.600 Like how much of that per family, given the percent of the population that is under the age of 40.

00:05:17.500 And I calculated that out to be about 28K per male-female pair, assuming that everyone was getting married in that under-40 demographic.

00:05:25.280 That's an insanely high number.

00:05:27.780 Yeah.

00:05:29.060 In terms of what's being paid out.

00:05:31.540 And another interesting thing that we are seeing, though, that is worth noting in the statistics, is a rise in the acceptance of out-of-wedlock kids.

00:05:39.080 With 20% expressing a positive perspective on it in 2020, up from 11.1% in 2015.

00:05:47.440 So in half a decade, almost double the acceptance.

00:05:50.520 Now it's still low, but you can see a change in perception as society is beginning to become desperate.

00:05:57.520 But from what we see with numbers in Sweden, for example, that acceptance doesn't necessarily correlate with higher fertility.

00:06:06.260 Like fewer couples than ever are getting married in Sweden.

00:06:10.220 More are having kids while staying unmarried.

00:06:14.960 But their birth rate is also going way down.

00:06:16.760 So that's not even a sign of hope.

00:06:18.400 Yeah.

00:06:19.980 So what I want to elevate here is in the thesis of this particular video, because it's something I was meditating on recently.

00:06:26.300 What do you need to change about Korean society to actually fix their fertility crisis? 0.98

00:06:33.100 If you ask Koreans, you are going to get two broad answers. 1.00

00:06:39.760 And they're both wrong.

00:06:41.380 Now, generally, the first answer they're going to say is it's just the economics.

00:06:44.320 I can't afford to have kids, which is partially right, but not in the way they mean.

00:06:49.120 And what's really interesting is I saw some studies done recently on like space, because people always try to work like nimbyism, building more housing, interplanetalist policy, right?

00:06:57.420 And what you see actually is a correlation between the number of people who live around you and your fertility rate in the United States.

00:07:04.340 So did you know that your average United States citizen or family that lives in a house that they are either renting or own, but like a house, not an apartment or a subdivided house,

00:07:13.200 is above replacement fertility.

00:07:15.340 But as soon as you get to apartments where houses are subdivided, it goes down to 1.8.

00:07:20.080 And then it continues to go down the more people live in that apartment complex.

00:07:24.280 Now, this is a big problem in South Korea, where the majority of the population lives in these ultra high rises, even when they're living in rural areas.

00:07:32.840 Yeah, we've talked about this before.

00:07:33.860 For example, we took a train out literally, actually, ironically, to a baby convention, where they sold lots of baby products.

00:07:41.800 And in this town outside or city outside Korea, there was nothing around except for a couple high rises of apartments, a giant mall, and then this convention center.

00:07:51.360 So there weren't spread out suburbs like you'd expect to see in the United States or even Europe.

00:07:58.500 It was just...

00:07:59.180 It's very weird to go along the Korean countryside, as you'll like. 1.00

00:08:03.480 It's farms and then a collection of three skyscrapers clustered next to each other.

00:08:08.880 Now, there are obviously exceptions for this.

00:08:10.480 We did visit some towns outside Seoul that had houses, but...

00:08:15.360 They were small.

00:08:16.540 They were like town towns.

00:08:17.620 They were little villages, yes. This is not where a huge swath of people are living, for our understanding.

00:08:23.420 But...

00:08:23.900 So people will blame that.

00:08:25.080 But the problem is that a lot of countries have that, and not a lot of countries are quite as extreme as Korea in fertility rates.

00:08:30.480 The other thing that people will blame is the gender wars in Korea. 1.00

00:08:33.360 And this is definitely a phenomenon.

00:08:34.920 I'll put a statistic on screen that shows that while you have a political difference between women and men in the United States, 1.00

00:08:41.380 there are two conservative men for every one conservative woman in the U.S. 0.89

00:08:44.740 and one progressive man for every two progressive women in the United States.

00:08:48.420 So the odds there are not good if you're looking for a partner that is politically aligned with you.

00:08:52.000 But in Korea, it is dramatically worse and more extreme and becoming more extreme over time.

00:08:57.660 But if you want learning about that, there's a great YouTube series on it called The Gotcha Gang Wars, parts one and two.

00:09:03.240 Both fantastic if you want to get an understanding of Korea's history.

00:09:05.380 And I could focus on that and say maybe if they could fix their gender problems, it would fix their fertility rate. 1.00

00:09:11.740 But there is actually a bigger problem in Korea, which means even if you could fix a housing situation,

00:09:18.140 even if you could fix the gender wars situation, 1.00

00:09:21.740 I still don't think they would come anywhere close to fixing their fertility problem. 0.57

00:09:26.800 And it is interesting to note because it is not a problem that we have in the United States.

00:09:31.000 And we have it a little bit in Europe, but not nearly as bad as Korea has it. 0.99

00:09:36.720 Oh, yeah. Although I wonder, we'll get into this later, but I wonder if this is also a major issue in Japan.

00:09:42.800 Yeah, I think it is a partial issue in Japan.

00:09:46.040 So Korea is not a capitalist economy.

00:09:49.620 And I need to be extremely clear about this to our listeners.

00:09:52.860 It is an economy that allows for capitalism, but has not sorted itself capitalistically.

00:09:58.860 In the same way that when many people think about communism, for example,

00:10:04.420 it would be possible for under capitalist rules,

00:10:08.240 one company to basically dominate all of daily life and pay everyone a UBI

00:10:12.880 and then basically end up with a communist system under a capitalist hierarchy.

00:10:18.080 In the same way that people often see communism as fundamentally at odds with democracy.

00:10:23.500 And it's like, no, you can vote communists into power.

00:10:25.260 You can vote fascists into power, for example.

00:10:27.340 These things aren't in conflict with each other.

00:10:30.220 You can set up a capitalist system and have another system develop under it.

00:10:35.020 And the chaibold system in Korea is fundamentally very different from the way capitalism works in any other country.

00:10:47.040 And it is also fundamentally why Korea cannot fix its fertility crisis.

00:10:51.780 Can you first, just for people who aren't familiar with it, sorry, define the chaibold system?

00:10:57.700 I'm going to go deeper into all of this because a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being almost antithetical to each other.

00:11:08.160 When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Koreas competing against each other under a capitalist hierarchy or capitalists, the broad economic rule system.

00:11:22.560 And that's what the chaibolds are. 0.97

00:11:24.960 When you go to North Korea, you will see these shrines and these museums to the dear leader and everything like that.

00:11:33.120 And they deify him and they come up with all sorts of stories about him and they have these strict hierarchy-based systems.

00:11:38.540 If you go to any of the chaibolds, which I'll get to a deeper explanation in just a second, but just for example, chaibolds would be like Hyundai, Samsung, et cetera.

00:11:47.440 You will find the museums dedicated to the founder of the chaibold and it will be almost as mythical as the museums you would see in North Korea.

00:11:57.300 They will have his little shoes from when he was a kid up on a golden shrine.

00:12:01.760 They will have, it is weird if you are coming from an American system.

00:12:06.540 So people who are broadly familiar with chaibolds, they are like, so chaibolds are like big economic conglomerates, like 3M in our country or something like that, or GE in our country.

00:12:19.540 And it's no, that is not really what chaibolds are.

00:12:23.120 They are much, much bigger than that.

00:12:25.400 Just let me paint a picture of what it's like to live under a chaibold system.

00:12:28.420 I can go as a Samsung person to my Samsung day job, go home to my Samsung apartments, which will say Samsung in giant letters on the side of them, go shop at the Samsung grocery store, buy Samsung insurance, watch Samsung TV on my Samsung phone.

00:12:55.420 The one where I would see it in everywhere.

00:12:57.060 Yeah.

00:12:57.460 Yeah.

00:12:57.660 Samsung is the one with the apartment building.

00:12:59.360 Every aspect of your daily life is under this company.

00:13:06.100 It is not like there are like 20 of these that really matter, that compete, but there's more to begin with.

00:13:11.820 And so you can think, okay, if they try to be capitalistic, how did companies gain this much power?

00:13:17.020 The answer is twofold.

00:13:19.320 Part one has to do with when they converted to capitalism, they were under a fascist dictator.

00:13:25.420 So a fascist made them a capitalist system before they became a democratic system.

00:13:30.600 As he converted them to capitalism, he used state resources to hyperspeed this conversion by pouring resources into individual competent families who had companies to grow those companies at a super fast speed.

00:13:46.420 And this created the birth of the original Chibals. 1.00

00:13:50.880 But this system would have fallen apart without Korean culture, which is the second thing at play here. 1.00

00:13:57.600 When I mentioned that South Korea is actually more like North Korea than you would imagine, and people were like, well, why aren't people starving in South Korea?

00:14:03.900 And it's competition.

00:14:05.180 And people were like, well, competition can't be it.

00:14:06.960 No, we wrote a book on governance, bestseller in the Wall Street nonfiction section, top of the list.

00:14:13.020 And so we know what we're talking about when it comes to governance structures.

00:14:17.120 For a governance structure to maintain efficiency, really all you need is for the possibility of it to fail and be replaced by a competitor,

00:14:23.720 and for it to compete with consumers against competitors in a relatively free economic system.

00:14:28.100 What Korea is essentially multiple fascist dictatorships that are competing against each other for the population to join them. 0.62

00:14:37.400 It's almost, if you think of seasteading, the initial seasteading thing, they were like, what we'll do is we'll create like modular cities where people can split off and go join other cities if they're not being run well.

00:14:46.920 And so you could even have a fascist city that could be desirable. 0.55

00:14:50.000 That is basically the way the Korean economy works.

00:14:52.880 Although people build a huge degree of loyalty to their companies as well.

00:14:56.680 So even when the companies are treating them as well, they don't split off as frequently as you would see in other systems.

00:15:01.240 And it hasn't led to inefficiency.

00:15:02.960 It's actually a decent system if all you're caring about is capitalistic output.

00:15:09.560 However, if you care about quality of life, this is a totally different thing altogether, which we're going to get to in a little second here.

00:15:17.460 But the other reason why chaibals have persisted after they were originally set up is because within Korean culture, you do have this strong predilection for strict hierarchical structures.

00:15:33.020 And I want to give you an idea of how hierarchical Korean culture is. 0.99

00:15:36.280 When you are in Korea, if you're there for even a short time, people are sure to ask you their age, your age, because the way they talk to you changes like the grammatical structure changes.

00:15:47.140 If you are even a few months older than them, it matters that much.

00:15:52.740 And when you leave your company, go home or hanging out with your friends, your title, in the same way in the U.S. that we use terms like Mr. and Mrs., is often your position at the company.

00:16:06.840 Like CEO would be like your title in a social setting.

00:16:11.060 CEO Malcolm.

00:16:11.740 That is how much this stuff matters in Korea.

00:16:15.340 It is baked into every layer of the culture.

00:16:19.480 Some startups in Korea have tried to get around this through doing things like insisting that everyone uses English all the time and only English names because it causes people to use different grammatical structures so they don't fall back on these, which leads to less hierarchy.

00:16:34.040 Like it is that bad.

00:16:35.660 It is.

00:16:36.600 People are like, okay, so we've got to get to why all of this matters.

00:16:40.840 And I would say this is even a trope.

00:16:42.320 I'm watching a Korean drama now on Amazon Prime that is about a dating coach, actually, a female dating coach.

00:16:48.240 And it begins with a bunch of meet cute situations.

00:16:51.240 And then the individuals involved, like the man and the woman in each situation, not following through and not dating, which is so South Korean. 0.76

00:17:00.520 But there is like a small publishing company, like a startup in this drama.

00:17:05.820 And it's the CEO of it keeps giving these speeches about how we like we should not we should have an open office.

00:17:13.040 We should only address each other by our first names to have open and easy communication.

00:17:17.800 So I think it's even become a trope or a joke for visionary or self-aggrandized trying to be visionary people in South Korea, trying to break down these barriers and it being seen ironically by the culture is cringe, which is really interesting to me.

00:17:36.560 And this to understand how much the tribal system matters in Korea, you are like not a person of equal status to other people. 0.94

00:17:43.740 If you don't work at one of the tribal's, the tribal's are extremely important to your social status was in Korea.

00:17:51.600 They are, when you are dating somebody, when you are like your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score, so you can get into the perfect tribal.

00:18:01.440 And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.

00:18:13.360 And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, really. 1.00

00:18:22.740 And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing.

00:18:25.740 Why is the meritocratic thing so important?

00:18:30.200 Because in Korea, and when I say meritocratic in the extreme, there is a test.

00:18:35.520 One day each year.

00:18:36.780 You can only take it this one day.

00:18:38.320 If you're sick, you have to wait until next year.

00:18:40.480 This is the test that determines what colleges you get into.

00:18:43.640 It is so important they ground all of the planes on that day.

00:18:47.580 This test is the most extreme, so there's no potential distractions.

00:18:52.220 That's why they do it.

00:18:52.820 They ground traffic that day.

00:18:54.720 That just sounds like it would make me extra bad at taking the test because it makes a chipping deal out of it.

00:18:59.180 It sounds so good.

00:18:59.880 Oh yeah, it is nightmarish.

00:19:01.340 Is there a spike in suicides right before the test?

00:19:04.160 A huge spike.

00:19:05.280 And after.

00:19:06.440 Gosh.

00:19:07.000 There's lots of things. 0.77

00:19:08.140 Parents like killing their kids even. 0.65

00:19:09.520 Like I've seen, they didn't get high enough scores or kids killing their families because they didn't get a high enough score or it's horrible.

00:19:17.240 To give you an idea of just how horrible it is, one in three students in Korea feel suicidal, according to this poll I found.

00:19:24.780 Everything is based around this one meritocracy.

00:19:26.780 And this is a problem with statistics-based meritocracies instead of efficacy-based meritocracies.

00:19:32.140 In America, you can fail out of college and still start a company.

00:19:36.520 Yeah, it's almost a badge of honor.

00:19:37.680 In America, we install the entrepreneur.

00:19:41.680 These people are all politicians.

00:19:44.220 They're America's greatest strengths as a small business owner.

00:19:46.200 You do not have this mindset in Korea at all.

00:19:49.600 I remember I was looking because at Korean matchmaking things, I wanted to see like what rank I would get on a Korean matchmaking website to see who I'd get matched with as like a partner.

00:19:58.680 And they give your job a status, right?

00:20:03.300 Being an entrepreneur is right under being a fisherman in status.

00:20:08.840 Wait, so you're better, you're more of a marriage catch if you're a fisherman.

00:20:13.920 If you're a fisherman than an entrepreneur in Korea.

00:20:16.020 But it needs to be understood how demonized this is.

00:20:18.760 So at my VC, we were the number one early stage venture capital firm by government survey.

00:20:23.460 So this meant that when the government did a survey of where early stage startups wanted capital from, like what was considered the most prestigious capital to get, that was my firm.

00:20:31.000 And I was their director of strategy.

00:20:32.440 And people kept getting arrested at my firm.

00:20:35.080 They basically ruined the founder's life.

00:20:37.280 This was a man who made a lot of money, tried to pour that money back into making the Korean economy better.

00:20:42.300 And he spent, I think, five years in jail over this.

00:20:46.180 And it was all overturned.

00:20:47.520 It was all proven to be political.

00:20:49.480 It really genuinely, like this experience in Korea, having them raid our office and stuff like that, kind of makes me hate the Korean government and the Korean culture. 1.00

00:20:57.600 But like part of me loves the Korean culture.

00:20:59.340 But seeing the way that they targeted and what was the sin of this company?

00:21:03.400 Yeah, they made up some trumped up charges that were mostly proven to be trumped up as time went on.

00:21:07.920 But what was the core sin of this company?

00:21:10.340 And I remember being told, like by other Koreans that I talked to, that this company was bad news because of what it was doing.

00:21:15.260 We found an arbitrage opportunity.

00:21:17.440 We would invest in people who went to non-top-tier colleges.

00:21:23.920 So it was a lot like Peter Thiel's thing with encouraging kids to not go to college and instead just pursue a business.

00:21:33.540 Yeah, that was it.

00:21:34.240 Yeah, we also invested in some people who dropped out of college, which was seen as particularly bad.

00:21:37.480 In the U.S., if you can't understand why people would hate this so much, it would be like in the U.S. if there was a VC firm that like disproportionately invested in only meth addicts.

00:21:47.980 You'd be like, that's a very bad message for children to invest in meth addicts.

00:21:52.700 Like obviously our society, because in Korea, in the U.S., when we look at rich people who have gotten rich because of institutional mechanisms, like their parents were rich for many generations and they were born into the ownership of 3M or something.

00:22:06.460 We're like, they don't deserve that money.

00:22:08.700 That is society not working properly because they didn't build that wealth themselves.

00:22:13.340 Right.

00:22:13.620 In Korea, it's actually the exact opposite.

00:22:15.720 If somebody gets rich out of nowhere, it's something fishy must have happened.

00:22:19.840 They must have cheated in some way because this isn't how our society works.

00:22:24.240 Our society is this strict incremental meritocracy.

00:22:27.420 Now, what does all this have to do with fertility rates?

00:22:32.600 Okay, because we're going to get to that.

00:22:34.040 And I think it's very, very interesting.

00:22:37.340 So, it came to me because I was actually meditating on this topic for a while.

00:22:42.940 Korea low fertility rates.

00:22:43.920 How do I fix it?

00:22:44.500 How do I fix it?

00:22:45.520 And somebody was talking to me recently and I was like, oh, you know, I want to have 12 kids.

00:22:49.980 And they were going, you better start saving now to pay for them.

00:22:52.380 I think it was my dad actually who said this to me for college.

00:22:55.200 I was just laughing.

00:22:57.420 I was like, obviously, I'm not paying for my 12 kids to go to college.

00:23:00.760 That's comical.

00:23:02.280 You can't afford that.

00:23:03.540 No realistic person, no matter how wealthy you are, could afford 12 kids in college.

00:23:07.900 In the U.S., that is not damning those kids to a life in the middle class.

00:23:12.780 If you look at, and there's been some great studies at this, of, so you've got to be able

00:23:16.760 to sort by the people who could get into the top colleges, which is one of the problems.

00:23:20.860 If you're just sorting by the people who got into and went to top colleges, then you're

00:23:24.200 partially sorting for the people who got in.

00:23:25.820 And there's been some studies who did a good job of, like, blind testing this through, like,

00:23:29.420 accidentally not admitted people or something like that.

00:23:32.100 And it found marginal differences between the people who got into Harvard and didn't

00:23:35.740 get into Harvard.

00:23:36.780 This is more true in wealthier individuals and for non-wealthy individuals.

00:23:40.540 Typically, if you're from a less wealthy family, elite colleges matter a lot more to you

00:23:45.320 than less selective colleges or no college at all.

00:23:48.080 But if you're from a wealthy or above average income family, they really don't matter that

00:23:53.880 much.

00:23:54.700 American society is actually very good at uplifting people who are competent and didn't go to

00:24:01.280 top universities.

00:24:02.500 Because in America, if you start a small company or something like that, is seen as the most

00:24:07.460 legitimate way to rise up in society, the most legitimate way to make money.

00:24:11.800 And it is the most culturally grandized way.

00:24:17.060 In Korea, you can't do this at all.

00:24:20.780 In Korea, because of this meritocratic system, it means that when I have additional kids, those

00:24:28.280 are resources not going to the kids I already have.

00:24:33.800 And those are resources.

00:24:34.900 So my family, like what I have in America, there's been some great studies on multiple

00:24:38.080 kids.

00:24:38.360 Because a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that going to hurt your kids' prospects in life?

00:24:41.880 And you didn't think to look like people have done studies on this.

00:24:45.060 I think it's like up to three kids.

00:24:46.780 Every kid actually helps all of their siblings' prospects in life in mental health.

00:24:50.740 And then after that, it is a marginal decline with every additional kid.

00:24:54.620 It's not that important.

00:24:56.040 In something like South Korea, you're basically halving their life prospects with every kid 0.99

00:25:00.840 you have.

00:25:02.040 So you pulled up some statistics here.

00:25:03.880 Do you want to go over them, Simone?

00:25:04.780 Or do you want me to?

00:25:05.400 Yeah, just to give a picture of just how much people are spending in this case.

00:25:10.020 I found one article on Korea Junang Daily that reported, and I'm just going to quote

00:25:21.780 here, spending on children's private education nearly equals what these families paid for

00:25:26.480 food and drinks.

00:25:27.840 That's 636,000 won.

00:25:30.840 And housing and utility bills, that's 539,000 won.

00:25:35.260 But that's just an average.

00:25:36.320 In reality, parents in their 40s and 50s spend millions of won a month on sending their children

00:25:43.360 to middle and high schools to after-school academies.

00:25:52.020 Now, these are just an aside, the ones that helped them prep for this insane test and other

00:25:57.180 assessments that are big bottlenecks to getting into major universities that Malcolm mentioned.

00:26:01.740 The article continues.

00:26:02.940 Relatively poor families are no different.

00:26:05.600 Monthly private education costs, 482,000 won for the bottom 20% income group, more than

00:26:12.260 their food and beverage costs.

00:26:14.140 It cannot be a normal society if lower-income families spend more on educating their children 1.00

00:26:18.920 than living costs.

00:26:21.280 If so, what is the need for public education?

00:26:23.920 So I think that article gives you a picture of just how much parents feel like they have to

00:26:28.860 spend.

00:26:29.200 Can you imagine spending more on...

00:26:32.380 And this is not your child's school.

00:26:34.420 Parents obviously complain in the United States, oh, I spend $40,000 on my kid's private middle 0.65

00:26:40.020 school every year.

00:26:41.020 And it is insanely expensive.

00:26:42.760 But these are kids who go to public school in South Korea.

00:26:46.340 And these are good schools.

00:26:47.700 It's not like school in South Korea is terrible.

00:26:49.860 But parents feel like they need to spend incrementally on top of that.

00:26:53.440 Which I should say, there's an underrated side effect of this, which I do see show up in

00:26:58.280 a lot of documentaries and other pieces on low fertility rates in South Korea, is not

00:27:04.360 only is this really expensive for parents, it's pretty miserable for children.

00:27:07.660 They are not enjoying...

00:27:09.400 They have the highest suicide rate in the world by far, last I checked.

00:27:12.380 It's so bad that 42.3% of deaths among teenagers are due to suicide, and over 50% of people in

00:27:23.520 their 20s are due to suicide, with 47.9% of the deaths of people in their 30s are due to suicide.

00:27:30.520 That is insane.

00:27:32.280 When you're dealing with about half of all deaths among young people are due to suicide.

00:27:35.880 And for those just listening, I had posted above a statistic which showed that now South

00:27:41.660 Korea has the least happy students in the OECD.

00:27:44.920 Oh, and yes, South Korea does still appear to top the world's suicide charts.

00:27:50.200 Yeah, throughout middle and high school, which is when you are most prone to having serious

00:27:54.340 depressive issues, being really emotionally unstable, right?

00:27:56.960 It's like when you're most vulnerable emotionally, you are having zero fun.

00:28:01.740 You're going to a cram school after school.

00:28:03.780 Your parents are paying through the nose for it, so they really expect you to do well because

00:28:07.700 they are sacrificing a ton.

00:28:09.400 You can't just blow it off.

00:28:10.680 It's not like some free program that they're not sacrificing for as well.

00:28:14.520 So your parents are straining, you're straining, no one's doing what they want to do. 0.95

00:28:18.520 It's ridiculous. 0.97

00:28:19.940 And it doesn't get better as you get older.

00:28:23.800 So this is from the Zvi Malkiewicz piece, the most recent one, friend of the show, love

00:28:29.020 the guy.

00:28:29.440 Every time I read about South Korea, the situation seems worse.

00:28:32.740 The linked post has women working nine to six, saying they have no time for anything 0.81

00:28:37.380 else, often studying and getting an IV drip on weekends to be able to keep working and

00:28:42.740 acting like that is normal.

00:28:44.860 Talk of women forced to leave their jobs or pass promotions due to having a child is common.

00:28:51.660 Yeah.

00:28:51.920 And from a quote that I found where you also see this is one 28-year-old woman who worked 0.67

00:28:57.740 in HR said she'd seen people who were forced to leave their jobs or who were passed over

00:29:01.920 for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her to never 0.88

00:29:06.620 have a baby.

00:29:08.340 Both men and women are entitled to a year's leave during the first eight years of their

00:29:13.140 child's life.

00:29:13.920 But in 2022, only 7% of new fathers use some of the leave compared to 70% of new mothers.

00:29:19.380 You can see how geared this is against women here. 0.95

00:29:24.020 And I think that this, you're like, what, people are really like on IV trips, so they

00:29:29.180 don't have time to eat, so they just study all day, work all day.

00:29:32.520 Yes.

00:29:33.440 This is real when you build a meritocratic system that isn't based on efficacy.

00:29:39.360 So consider the differences in the American system and the Korean system and why the Korean

00:29:43.860 system always leads to this outcome.

00:29:46.840 The American system is about building systems that genuinely improve the lives of other

00:29:55.120 people as measured by other people wanting to pay for those systems.

00:30:00.660 Yeah.

00:30:01.240 And that's why you have notes like Tim Ferriss's foundational four-hour workweek, right?

00:30:06.240 We extol that.

00:30:07.360 We don't care that he works four hours.

00:30:08.960 We care that he makes so much money and gets so much done.

00:30:11.060 So the goal of the American system is to, with the minimum amount of effort, produce the

00:30:18.200 maximum amount of social good as measured by what people will pay for.

00:30:24.280 This is the fundamental goal of capitalism.

00:30:27.680 It is why I love capitalism.

00:30:30.760 It is a great system for efficiency and reducing suffering overall, whereas most other systems

00:30:38.780 and people are like, what about the people who aren't producing things that improve the

00:30:42.860 quality of other people's lives?

00:30:44.080 And I do believe that we should have some level of safety net for those individuals, but it

00:30:48.140 should be fairly minimal.

00:30:49.780 Like, I am okay with the people who are not improving the lives of other people suffering

00:30:55.960 to some extent.

00:30:57.120 Now, the problem with capitalist systems is that they do not do a good job of motivating

00:31:00.840 long-term goods, i.e. good for the environment or having kids because they can't use the kids

00:31:07.000 immediately, at least in the short term.

00:31:08.980 Eventually, they will start making their own kids or having their own family towns and stuff

00:31:13.680 like that.

00:31:14.440 But that is only when the economic pressures begin to affect the companies, right?

00:31:19.760 But outside of that, within this American system, what I am focused on with my kids, like

00:31:26.560 when I think about educating them, when I think about raising them, it's how do I make them

00:31:33.420 the type of people who can produce something that other people are going to want?

00:31:36.960 Right.

00:31:37.820 In the Korean system, it is also a true meritocracy, but in a completely different context.

00:31:43.700 Yeah.

00:31:43.960 It is the currency.

00:31:44.660 The currency is totally different.

00:31:46.520 Yes.

00:31:47.000 Based on work hours and score, measurable things.

00:31:53.160 And to a lot of people, at the surface level, this can appear more just because they haven't

00:32:00.620 thought about the downstream consequences of establishing things in this manner.

00:32:06.420 Right.

00:32:06.700 Because everyone can compete in an open system that isn't directly tied to the output of these

00:32:13.880 individuals in terms of goods that other people want.

00:32:17.060 You lead to everybody rushing towards these incremental improvements, which means that there

00:32:26.520 is never an economic case to be made for having seven or 12 kids.

00:32:30.820 And a lot of people, like when we talk about seven kids, and we'll do another episode on

00:32:34.140 this, they're like, that's an insane number of kids.

00:32:36.200 The average American had seven kids in the 1800s.

00:32:40.440 Okay.

00:32:40.820 Average, average.

00:32:41.960 That meant for every American who didn't get married or had no kids, there was another 0.77

00:32:45.760 American having 14.

00:32:47.580 Okay.

00:32:48.300 That meant for every American who decided to have a family of three kids, there was another 0.91

00:32:54.960 family having 11.

00:32:56.720 This is a, it is normal to raise large families in this sort of mindset, but you've got to

00:33:03.120 build a mindset around this.

00:33:04.940 A mindset of abundance and of true efficacious capitalism.

00:33:11.220 Because even if you solve all these other problems in Korea, you don't solve the basic 0.84

00:33:14.560 economics of having a kid, nor do you solve the terrible quality of life.

00:33:19.620 When you look at Koreans much more than the U.S., in the U.S., it is the apocalyptic thinking, 1.00

00:33:26.020 which I think is core to the American identity, which people use to justify why they won't

00:33:30.600 have kids.

00:33:31.300 Or we can say frontier thinking.

00:33:33.300 Yeah.

00:33:33.520 Don't you know the world's about to be destroyed?

00:33:35.540 Don't you know that the climate's about to crash?

00:33:38.740 In South Korea, they say, don't you know that my life is terrible?

00:33:41.700 Why would I bring somebody else into this?

00:33:43.880 There was one story I was reading about a woman who told her husband, I just cannot justify 1.00

00:33:47.720 it given how low the quality of life is in this country.

00:33:52.320 And that's heartbreaking, but it's also true.

00:33:55.960 Korea as a society, and I do not think that you might think that I'm anti-tribal here.

00:34:00.300 I'm not.

00:34:00.820 I think that the tribals are the only thing that can fix this.

00:34:04.040 Interesting.

00:34:04.720 Wait, how do you think that?

00:34:05.380 One, politically speaking and philosophically speaking, we are anti-tribal in general because

00:34:11.980 we're anti any concentration of power in one organization or any organization that gets

00:34:17.000 too large because it starts to grow cancerous growths that are very wasteful.

00:34:20.020 I think to get rid of the chibal is to get rid of the core of Korean culture. 1.00

00:34:23.700 Okay.

00:34:24.020 So yeah, basically you're against cultural erasure more than you are efficient markets.

00:34:27.840 But how could chibals fix this problem? 1.00

00:34:31.280 So chibals need to change what they are judging the job candidates on that they are accepting. 1.00

00:34:38.300 So if they change it to market-based forces rather than performative forces, you would

00:34:44.580 see better.

00:34:45.320 If you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it. 1.00

00:34:51.320 You can fix it in one generation.

00:34:53.240 Korea, listen to me here.

00:34:54.140 People will freak the fuck out if you do this, but it would fix things.

00:34:59.500 How do you fix the entire...

00:35:01.240 The tribals wouldn't even need to do this.

00:35:02.480 A politician, a single president could do this if they could get this passed.

00:35:07.420 Students' scores on this single exam that they do should be modified by the number of siblings

00:35:14.380 they have.

00:35:16.680 So you apply a modifier like they get multiplied by 1.3 or something like that.

00:35:24.140 If they have a sibling.

00:35:25.880 1.5 if they have two siblings.

00:35:27.740 1.6 if they have three siblings.

00:35:29.460 That would offset the cost downside to having additional kids in terms of how well they do

00:35:36.260 on this test.

00:35:38.240 Now, people would say that's not the kid's fault.

00:35:41.320 Shouldn't you be modifying people's career prospects based on how many kids they have,

00:35:48.360 right?

00:35:48.560 Wouldn't that do more?

00:35:50.020 And the answer is no, not really.

00:35:51.660 And I'll explain why.

00:35:52.740 One, that would take an intergenerational time to have an effect.

00:35:55.840 But two, there you are forcing companies to do something that is fundamentally against

00:36:00.240 their best interest, which is searching, like unfairly raising the status of people who

00:36:06.700 are not necessarily more productive within the company.

00:36:10.060 However, in a system where these kids didn't do worse because they were less competent, it's

00:36:17.760 not that they're going to be worse at picking up company skills or anything like that.

00:36:21.180 But it was because they had less resources due to how many kids their parents had when

00:36:25.520 contrasted with how their parents could have deployed resources.

00:36:28.400 This system now allows parents to essentially work to change the system for their kids by

00:36:32.560 having more kids.

00:36:34.360 You very quickly would get families having five or six kids if you made this one change.

00:36:39.640 But there is another change that I would add on top of this that could be done from the

00:36:44.460 perspective of Chibels, which is to stop hiring people based on these scores and start hiring

00:36:51.420 people based on proven efficacy in real world environments.

00:36:56.380 In the US, this is largely how hiring works.

00:36:59.560 This isn't like an insane system.

00:37:01.160 When I applied to a company in the US, yeah, my GPA matters a little bit, but they're looking

00:37:09.640 at my extracurriculars.

00:37:11.560 How many clubs did you run?

00:37:12.760 How many things did you do?

00:37:14.100 Have you started a company before?

00:37:15.620 Have you started any sort of business making venture before?

00:37:18.440 Even a common convention in resumes when one adds bullets under the description is something

00:37:26.280 along the lines of increased sales by 14%.

00:37:28.500 Like people definitely sell themselves based on tangible achievements made for previous

00:37:34.220 employers or independently.

00:37:36.300 Yeah.

00:37:36.860 So I have an MBA from Stanford, which is in terms of graduate degrees, the hardest, I

00:37:41.180 think still the hardest graduate degree program to get into in the world.

00:37:43.840 Much harder than most PhDs, at least PhDs at Stanford or Harvard.

00:37:46.280 We've done another video where I went over the stats on this because a lot of people aren't

00:37:48.860 familiar with how hard top tier MBA programs are to get into.

00:37:52.320 And while this helps me with jobs, it more opens doors for phone calls and talking

00:37:58.420 to people.

00:37:59.220 It's not like getting in.

00:38:01.280 And it's the same with Simone graduate degree from Cambridge.

00:38:04.520 So we have these top tier degrees and they definitely open doors and they definitely help.

00:38:09.860 But even now the system's beginning to transition away from them, especially if you're talking

00:38:14.300 about top tier jobs.

00:38:16.060 And this also, we need to be realistic about the way the American system works.

00:38:18.900 In America, GPA does matter if you're going to work for one of these giant bureaucracies.

00:38:25.140 Okay.

00:38:25.880 But the giant bureaucracies are increasingly becoming less and less palatable places to

00:38:31.180 work in America.

00:38:32.260 As the gig economy rises, you are entering a world where more and more your actual ability

00:38:39.260 to create things that people want to pay for is your value within the economic system.

00:38:43.600 And when you're dealing with the elite part of the economy, like the part that the Stanford

00:38:47.740 MBA opens up to me, that part values education the least.

00:38:52.220 The other part that values education pretty low is the small local part of the economy.

00:38:55.720 If I'm going to work for like local whatever business owner, he cares much more about what

00:39:00.860 things I've started in the past.

00:39:02.240 Same with if I'm starting like a local landscaping company or something like that.

00:39:06.100 It is only this middle bureaucratic part that really no one wants to work in anyway.

00:39:09.580 That middle bureaucratic part is the high part of Korean society and is their entire system.

00:39:15.040 That's why you'll have people on these IP trips where they will go into work.

00:39:18.240 And this is true in Japan and Korea.

00:39:20.220 Workplace theater is everything in these countries.

00:39:22.940 You can't leave until your boss has left, even if you're no longer working. 1.00

00:39:26.320 It's stupid. 0.98

00:39:29.100 Anyway, so any final thoughts, Simone? 0.99

00:39:31.260 Yeah, I do think this is an important discussion to have because we often point to the gender

00:39:40.700 wars, but the gender wars, while real, are not as pronounced as you might think.

00:39:47.400 And I think this is a much bigger factor when people are looking at what they're going to

00:39:51.320 do.

00:39:51.820 I'd actually say that the gender wars are currently why fertility rates are low. 1.00

00:39:55.760 If you look at that low marriage rate, what was it?

00:39:57.600 27% of women in their 20s, only 27% think that marriage is essential.

00:40:03.700 A decline from 53% in 2008.

00:40:08.420 So a really quick decline there.

00:40:11.700 And that means that those women aren't getting married. 1.00

00:40:14.460 Yeah.

00:40:15.280 The truth, so people want to say, how do you save Korean culture?

00:40:19.660 When a Korean moves to the US, their fertility rate increases by about 50%.

00:40:24.020 The way we save Korean culture is through multiculturalism.

00:40:29.640 It is through the Koreans that had the gumption to leave their country and set up ethnic communities 1.00

00:40:35.240 that can intergenerationally maintain a sense of cultural identity, but within ecosystems

00:40:39.960 that value them for their productivity.

00:40:42.240 In America, like what are the classic Korean businesses?

00:40:45.780 It is entrepreneurship.

00:40:47.500 That is what Koreans are known for in America.

00:40:49.360 People may not know this, but I think it's actually the majority of sushi restaurants

00:40:52.940 are run by Koreans in America.

00:40:54.680 So they often do Japanese food in America, but they also often, the Korean laundromat,

00:40:58.960 the Korean, so often do you see disproportionately the entrepreneurial spirit because they are pushed

00:41:05.140 out of their own country, but it's not rewarded in their country in the way it is in America.

00:41:09.160 And it creates an excellent opportunity for us to focus on helping those communities because

00:41:16.920 I don't think there's anything we can do for Korea at this point unless some figure in the 1.00

00:41:21.620 country decides to want to change the culture instead of thinking the solution is just to

00:41:25.820 go more conservative or to side with one side of the gender wars.

00:41:28.940 Because both sides of the gender wars have genuine grievances in Korea right now. 0.99

00:41:32.640 And there's really no fixing it within Korea that I can see without, as I said, simple 1.00

00:41:38.480 fix.

00:41:39.280 All you have to do is change their score on that major exam based on how many siblings

00:41:44.500 they have, and you're going to see a flip like that.

00:41:49.180 You're going to see riots.

00:41:50.900 You're going to have a change of attempts, but you will see a flip.

00:41:56.620 Yeah, I couldn't imagine seeing that ever actually happen.

00:41:59.960 But because people don't want real solutions, they want lip service, they want handouts,

00:42:04.240 they want ethnic homogeny.

00:42:06.300 I've heard that Korea is becoming more diverse in the countryside these days, people have told

00:42:10.460 me.

00:42:11.080 And I'm like, oh, that's great.

00:42:12.060 You're bringing in like seasonal migrants. 1.00

00:42:13.760 That is not, I've been in Seoul.

00:42:15.300 Seoul is not a diverse place.

00:42:16.420 Go to Seoul.

00:42:16.940 You won't see, I could go a day without seeing anyone who wasn't of Korean.

00:42:21.520 Yeah.

00:42:21.940 I had people who I invested in.

00:42:25.460 Like I chose their company for investment.

00:42:27.160 Tell me that they weren't fully comfortable with me being in the country for aesthetic

00:42:31.940 reasons.

00:42:33.180 I mean, it makes the country gross to have too many ethnicities here. 1.00

00:42:38.020 Koreans are so beautiful though.

00:42:39.680 I think it's more just that we're just not beautiful enough.

00:42:42.220 Beautiful enough.

00:42:43.080 Yeah.

00:42:43.400 It's sad.

00:42:44.140 This is why we have people who are trans Korean, but the surgeries just don't work out.

00:42:48.900 So don't try guys.

00:42:50.520 Just don't try.

00:42:51.580 It's not going to, can't pull it off.

00:42:52.980 Oh, I feel bad because I love South Korea.

00:42:56.940 I think Koreans are awesome.

00:42:58.920 Really cool people.

00:43:00.340 And I also think that they, I don't know, the non-chable system is pretty amazing.

00:43:05.880 When you look at the creatives in Korea, when you look at the small startups, they're actually

00:43:10.660 doing really amazing things.

00:43:12.900 And I think the reason why we don't see them is this dynamic that you have spoken about

00:43:16.400 in other podcasts, whereby the Korean market is just big enough to keep startups within

00:43:22.280 it, meaning that they're not forced to be global first.

00:43:26.080 But then that means that we never really, it's very hard for them to jump out of that

00:43:29.400 economy once they've optimized themselves around it because it's so idiosyncratic.

00:43:33.060 So I just feel as this nation slowly dies through its low birth rates, we're also losing this

00:43:40.660 immense creative talent that is blossoming there and empowered by...

00:43:46.600 Oh, it's so true.

00:43:47.620 Yeah.

00:43:48.120 Because they've destroyed the lives of their youth through this system.

00:43:52.140 And not just that, I need to, if we're just going to talk about Korea, their culinary...

00:43:57.060 So if you're in America and you have eaten Korean food, you don't get it.

00:44:00.540 Korea has a whole diversity of foods that we don't have in the...

00:44:05.620 I'll explain this differently.

00:44:07.140 In the US, you can go to restaurants that are very different.

00:44:09.620 I could go to an Indian restaurant or an Italian restaurant or an American gastropub type restaurant,

00:44:15.220 right?

00:44:15.540 And you would say this is a big diversity of food types.

00:44:18.440 Within Korea, there are as many diverse food type restaurants that are totally unique to

00:44:27.040 the country.

00:44:27.620 When you get Korean food in the United States, you are getting just one of those food types.

00:44:33.760 Yeah.

00:44:33.880 Like typically Korean barbecue or something related.

00:44:37.220 Yeah.

00:44:37.500 Like these hot pot places you can go to where they only serve these giant hot pots of dishes.

00:44:44.300 There's other type that I absolutely love where it's like a ring of egg around the outside

00:44:49.540 of a dish and then inside, it's like this caramelized meat that you dip in the egg and it's fantastic.

00:44:57.000 Then there's those fantastic meat restaurants where it's like meat specialists and then you

00:45:03.040 dip them in this fermented bean paste as well as a few other things before eating them.

00:45:07.640 You're not even mentioning all of the Italian inspired food, all of the French inspired food.

00:45:13.120 Which is totally different than French or Italian food.

00:45:14.860 Like in the same way that it's like-

00:45:15.860 Right.

00:45:15.880 But it's just like with Japan, they put their own spin on it. 0.98

00:45:19.020 Like Eddie would catch up.

00:45:19.400 Yeah.

00:45:19.940 They put their own spin on it and it's so freaking good.

00:45:22.420 It's so much better than real Italian food or real French food.

00:45:26.080 It's insane.

00:45:26.780 Yeah.

00:45:27.340 Or their ice cream places.

00:45:29.420 There's a special type of dessert you can get there that they have restaurants to specialize

00:45:33.280 in, which is like a shaved ice thing, but it's like really smooth and I've never seen

00:45:40.060 it in the United States or anywhere else.

00:45:41.540 It's really fascinating.

00:45:42.620 Oh, one type of Korean restaurant that has made it into the United States and people might

00:45:46.180 not know that this is a specialty food that came from Korea.

00:45:48.900 If you want to get an idea of Korean food diversity is Paris baguette.

00:45:52.420 If you've ever eaten at a Paris baguette and you're like, I have never seen food like this

00:45:57.540 before.

00:45:57.900 What is this weird decorated hot dog device?

00:46:01.180 That is not from Paris.

00:46:02.720 That is a Korean chain and it is a type of food, like their cool croquet buns that have

00:46:08.380 the curry inside of them.

00:46:09.800 That is not from Europe at all.

00:46:11.420 That is a specialty dish in Korea that could not be more different than I think what most

00:46:15.000 people think of when they think Korean food in the United States, which is more just

00:46:17.560 Korean barbecue, which is honestly, when I'm in Korea, I almost never eat.

00:46:21.140 I think it's one of the worst types of Korean food, which is just so sad.

00:46:24.640 Oh, and bibimbap, which is like weird because people in the West eat bibimbap.

00:46:29.480 And yet at Korea, it's like something you would only have at like a corporate cafeteria

00:46:33.220 or like a school.

00:46:34.460 Like you don't go to bibimbap restaurants that I've seen in Seoul, at least.

00:46:38.400 Oh God.

00:46:38.760 And they're boiled chicken restaurants.

00:46:40.280 They have some that's even worse than that.

00:46:42.680 So one of the things just to rag on Korea a little bit here.

00:46:45.720 So you go to Korea and one of the weird things about Korea is everyone there intuitively 1.00

00:46:50.220 believes that like food is like really important to your health.

00:46:54.360 Like even though they've gotten over all of this like ancient medicine and stuff like that,

00:46:58.060 they like actually haven't.

00:46:59.720 And they're like, if you're down, then you need to eat this sort of food.

00:47:02.340 Or if you're feeling this, you need to eat this sort of food.

00:47:04.060 Or this sort of food is good for this season.

00:47:06.180 So the two garbage tier Korean restaurants that they have in Korea, one is Korean style 0.99

00:47:11.060 sushi, which is different than Japanese style sushi. 0.99

00:47:13.780 It is garbage. 0.85

00:47:15.300 Oh, the other type is Korean boiled fish that you'll get everywhere in the country. 0.97

00:47:19.680 Oh, see, I thought we're going to have your more controversial take, which is very popular

00:47:22.820 among some people, but not you, which is Korean pizza.

00:47:26.760 Eyes and skin and stuff.

00:47:28.100 And they'll send it to you.

00:47:29.040 You hate Korean pizza, which is both very expensive.

00:47:31.920 Oh, Korean pizza is.

00:47:33.060 Oh, talk about Korean pizza.

00:47:34.280 This is fascinating.

00:47:35.280 It has all sorts of stuff on it.

00:47:36.940 It seems very fancy and it seems really cool.

00:47:39.540 And it seems incredibly modern and futuristic.

00:47:43.220 What is the stuff that it'll have on it?

00:47:44.960 It'll have, we have cheese stuffed crust.

00:47:46.780 They'll have all kinds of stuffed crust.

00:47:48.700 They will have layers of stuff.

00:47:50.680 There are all these crazy gimmicks.

00:47:52.440 While you're pulling that up, I'm going to talk about the medicinal food that like I've

00:47:57.040 been to restaurants there and it is so bad.

00:47:58.920 It is boiled chicken.

00:48:00.500 And what they do is they put like a whole chicken in like boiling water and then you

00:48:07.500 just eat the boiled chicken from like the full chicken.

00:48:12.840 They'll take the head off and everything. 1.00

00:48:14.200 So it's not like super gross.

00:48:15.400 Oh my God.

00:48:15.640 But it is just blandest and you eat it with salted water.

00:48:19.800 That is what you eat it with.

00:48:21.060 It is the blandest food I have ever had.

00:48:24.940 Yeah, that does not, that does not sound good.

00:48:27.780 That does not sound good at all.

00:48:31.720 Yeah, I'll let you separately, like in post, go find examples.

00:48:36.020 I'm not finding.

00:48:36.400 Something to definitely try when you're in Korea, by the way, is Korean fried chicken.

00:48:40.560 One opened up near us and it is not okay.

00:48:44.240 It's not as good as these stuff that I would get in.

00:48:46.700 Now here you might be thinking, Korean fried chicken, that can't be that dissimilar from

00:48:50.100 American fried chicken.

00:48:51.580 One, it's generally much better when you get it in Korea than American fried chicken.

00:48:55.640 It's like dramatically more moist.

00:48:57.560 I don't know the difference in how they cook it, but also just the whole routine around

00:49:01.860 eating it is very different.

00:49:03.340 For example, the appetizer that you get at the table, you know, instead of like nachos

00:49:07.860 or something like that beforehand, or not nachos, but you know, chips and dip, like you'd

00:49:11.800 have at a Mexican restaurant.

00:49:12.700 So at the place that I used to go, it was raw pasta.

00:49:16.000 They had like a thing, like a cylindrical thing filled with raw pasta you would, you would

00:49:21.300 munch on while waiting for your dish.

00:49:23.100 You know, like crunchy, crack, crack, raw pasta.

00:49:25.540 Yeah, that.

00:49:26.060 So sweet potato pizza, for example, is common in Korea.

00:49:29.140 Oh, that was sweet potato is actually really interesting in Korea.

00:49:31.940 So you can go to a Korean 7-Eleven and in the winter, they will have warm potatoes.

00:49:38.620 You can buy, just buy a potato and snack on it as you're walking.

00:49:42.700 And I get them all the time.

00:49:43.780 It's actually really good.

00:49:44.620 Yeah, sweet potatoes were also a big thing in Japan.

00:49:49.220 Just selling them from the carts.

00:49:51.100 Really nice and warm and steamy in the winter when it's cold.

00:49:52.780 I haven't even talked about street food yet.

00:49:54.200 But yeah, all the things we're looking at, I guess what I was trying to get with this

00:49:57.680 is I think we can think that South Korea has successfully exported the best parts of

00:50:01.700 their culture overseas because of K-pop and everything like that.

00:50:04.180 And they just haven't.

00:50:04.880 When they go extinct, we are going to lose things that our grandchildren will never be

00:50:10.860 able to fully recreate or recognize as a unique cultural contribution.

00:50:15.480 And that saddens me.

00:50:17.200 Yeah.

00:50:18.180 Oh, OK.

00:50:19.360 OK.

00:50:19.620 I'm on the Korea Pizza Hut website.

00:50:22.160 So one example of a typical fancy Korean pizza is a Seafood King, which has tons of shrimp

00:50:33.580 all over it.

00:50:34.480 There are some prawns.

00:50:35.880 And then you can always get like a special edge to your pizza, like a special crust or

00:50:40.640 just the original dough crust.

00:50:42.260 But special crusts are not like special crusts in the United States where they're like cheese

00:50:46.340 stuffed.

00:50:46.680 Each crust in the Seafood King pizza that I'm looking at, it looks like a pastry, like

00:50:53.980 a cheese filled pastry.

00:50:55.620 I don't know how else to describe it.

00:50:58.160 You can also get.

00:50:59.660 I'm looking at one here.

00:51:01.220 So this one has things like egg tart pizzas.

00:51:04.080 Yeah.

00:51:04.960 Which has barbecued meat and egg tart.

00:51:07.960 Or this one here is sweet and sour pork pizza.

00:51:12.060 Which right here, they, this is the description of somebody who's reviewing it.

00:51:19.360 Finally, truly stretching the limits of what qualifies as a pizza fusion and ultimately food

00:51:24.180 is culinary Frankenstein's monsters.

00:51:26.420 With no crust or bread to speak of, this pizza is built upon layers of breaded sweet and sour

00:51:31.720 pork, which is covered in kimchi and mozzarella cheese and then sprinkled with olives.

00:51:38.340 And these all seem like they would taste really good.

00:51:41.480 The bread of this pizza is breaded sweet and sour pork.

00:51:47.540 It is a pizza where the bottom layer is essentially a, what's the word for that, where they, it's

00:51:53.220 that German dish schnitzel, but like sweet and sour schnitzel for the bread.

00:52:00.060 Yeah.

00:52:00.600 See, like I'm done with that, but then you order in it and it's, it's not good.

00:52:05.580 No, it's not good.

00:52:06.200 It's like soggy often and not very tasty.

00:52:08.360 Yeah, I think when you get that complex, you just can't make it work the same way.

00:52:14.400 You'll get an idea of this if you go to Paris Baguette.

00:52:17.040 Like if people want a genuinely unique Korean dish in their local area, go to Paris Baguette.

00:52:22.040 The croquettes are what I would suggest as the best dish because it's one of the most simplest.

00:52:26.180 But if you go for the dishes that are really meant to be visually appealing, like the hot

00:52:30.680 dog style dishes, you'll see that they're tasteless and plasticky.

00:52:34.520 And this is not uncommon in Korea.

00:52:38.340 Anyway, I love you to death them on.

00:52:40.320 This has turned out to be one of our longer episodes, but worth it to talk about a place

00:52:44.640 that is, I think, really important to me.

00:52:46.840 And I think that there are real solutions to Korea's fertility rate that the government 0.99

00:52:50.440 could really implement, but it needs to understand that the problem is more systemic than they

00:52:56.520 are giving it credit for.

00:52:57.560 And the way that they fix it is with the families that are having seven or eight kids, not the

00:53:01.280 families having three kids.

00:53:02.500 And so they need to find systems that people can cheese that will lead to that and that can

00:53:08.360 end up saving Korean culture and Korean ethnicity from being a footnote in history.

00:53:13.760 While the other thing that we need to do is support our local Korean communities and prevent 1.00

00:53:20.260 them from losing their cultural distinction, which would be, I think, truly sad.

00:53:26.200 Yeah.

00:53:26.520 And I have to say, once again, you have surprised and delighted me.

00:53:30.780 I love that I've read so many explanations as to why there are fertility problems in South

00:53:37.300 Korea.

00:53:38.100 Never before have I read, look at the chables and also look at the performative merit of

00:53:43.720 the democratic sorting system for talent.

00:53:45.860 So thank you for finding more interesting angles to look at these problems.

00:53:51.320 I love you so much, Malcolm.

00:53:52.640 I love you too.

00:53:56.740 This episode is likely going to go live interspersed with old episodes that we filmed for the backlog

00:54:01.900 during the birth.

00:54:03.300 So thank you.

00:54:18.600 We take it over for the moment.

Based Camp - April 19, 2024

Why South Korea's Fertility Crisis is Unsolvable (Unless They Make This One Change)

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