Jiliac Podcast

A sixteen-year-old walks south out of the mountains with the money from his father's cow in his pocket — and no intention of ever going back to the field.

A young contractor stands in a country reduced to rubble and sees not ruin but the largest order book in the world.

A man carries a photograph of an empty beach to London and asks bankers to lend against the ships it does not yet hold.

The first Pony — plain as a workman's shoe — on an expressway built before the country had a car of its own to run on it.

A retired supertanker swung broadside across a tidal gap and deliberately sunk — used as a single colossal stone to stop the sea.

A construction man works a room of Olympic delegates the way he works a tender — and wins his country the Games its diplomats could not.

The richest man in Korea promises to run the nation the way he runs Hyundai — and the nation declines the offer.

A column of white trucks packed with cattle idles at Panmunjom, and an eighty-two-year-old man crosses the line on foot into the country he fled as a boy.

An old man with many sons and one empire, unable to perform the single act his whole life was arranged so he would never have to perform — letting go.

A dying founder dictates an order that fires all three of them — himself and both his warring sons — and a son refuses to obey it.

A twelfth-floor office window, and the favored son who inherited his father's grandest gesture and was destroyed by what it carried.

One empire becomes a half-dozen separate kingdoms, each ruled exactly as the father ruled and none ruling the others — the method reproducing itself in the act of breaking.

A routine car-export contract on the nephew’s desk, under a nameplate reading 현대 — the last fragment of the empire still openly called by the founder’s name.