YouTube as an Option

The success I want has two parts. One is financial freedom, and the other is social recognition. Neither has a precise threshold. I want to be able to refuse choices I do not want for financial reasons, and to be known and respected for the work I have done.

The two reinforce each other. Financial freedom makes longer-term research and larger risks possible. A name and a reputation, in turn, create access to better positions and economic opportunities. I do not want to achieve only one. I want to build a structure in which each strengthens the other.

The most orthodox route to social recognition is overwhelming achievement in one’s primary field. For a researcher, that means becoming one of the people who define a field and being entrusted with an important position as a result.

A recent example is Hongkun Park, a professor at Harvard University.¹ He is a leading researcher in quantum science and nanoscience who spent more than twenty-five years in Harvard’s chemistry and physics departments. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher in the top one percent and was the youngest recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in Science. In 2025, Samsung recruited him from outside the company to lead SAIT, its Advanced Institute of Technology—the first such appointment in twenty-six years.² He became known by doing exceptional research and was eventually recruited to lead a major research organization.

This is perhaps the most elegant route, but it is also extraordinarily unlikely. My research ability is not that rare. I can become a good researcher and perhaps reach a fairly high level. But becoming widely known through research alone requires an achievement closer to one in a million. It cannot be my only branding strategy.

The route through corporate leadership has the same problem. In the United States, I am a Korean immigrant without a strong ethnic community or alumni network that carries weight in Silicon Valley’s organizational politics. POSTECH is an excellent university, but its name will not automatically pull me upward inside Google. I can survive and do well as a researcher or engineer, but reaching the level of vice president at the American headquarters appears close to impossible.

The most attractive workaround I can imagine is founding Google Research Korea. The idea is not to become a vice president in the United States and then return to Korea. It is to build a career in Google’s systems research organization and, before reaching the ceiling of that promotion path, shift the arena to Korea. I could connect Korea’s hardware industry with Google’s systems research under the rationale of hardware–software co-optimization, create a new research organization in Korea, and return as its head. An identity and network that are disadvantages in the United States could become assets on this path.

This route is also unlikely. It would require persuading the company to establish a research organization in a new country. Whether through research or corporate rank, I cannot place every chance of social recognition on my primary career alone.

The highest-probability direction, then, is not to wait for my career to make me known. I can continue building my credentials as a researcher while creating a separate public brand in Korea. YouTube seems like the most suitable medium.

I have another kind of strength besides research. I am good at telling stories, and I have many stories to tell. I was encouraged to leave my science high school almost as soon as I entered, yet forced my way into early university admission. In graduate school, I endured countless rebukes from my advisor. I arrived here only after a great deal of pain.

Fundamentally, I struggled because I was never exceptionally capable. I could not clear each obstacle through ability alone, so I had to suffer and endure. In the process, I accumulated experiences that are unusual but still recognizable to many people. This is not a story about a genius solving everything with overwhelming talent. It is the story of someone with ordinary ability being broken repeatedly and somehow surviving.

Because I could not solve these problems easily, I repeatedly had to understand why they were happening and explain them to other people and to myself. Over time, I became better at tracing the causal structure of a complicated situation and explaining it in terms other people could understand. Those experiences and that explanatory ability are a different kind of rarity from a publication record. Combined with technical expertise and my tendency to think about everything for a long time, they make YouTube a natural medium for showing what I can do.

The goal is not advertising revenue. I want to make my name and thinking known in Korea while I am researching or working in the United States, and to build trust that will remain useful whether I later become a professor, corporate leader, investor, or founder. Economic opportunities may follow if the channel succeeds, but its primary purpose is social recognition and a wider set of options. That is why a Korean-language channel makes more sense than starting with the much larger English-speaking market.

The first channel name that comes to mind is Jaehyunseol, or 재현설. In Korean, it can suggest Jaehyun’s stories, Jaehyun’s account or theory, and the reenactment of an earlier experience. It does not need to be final yet.

These are some of the videos I can imagine making.

My stories:

• The story of being encouraged to leave science high school almost as soon as I entered
• The story of declaring war on my homeroom teacher at science high school
• The story of earning early university admission despite being encouraged to leave
• Why I chose POSTECH
• The story of being told that I was at an elementary-school level in graduate school
• The most absurd thing I had to endure during my PhD

Choices and ideas:

• Why do we fail at making choices?
• What should we compare when making a good decision?
• What is a good life?
• Which suits me better: founding a company or investing?

Technology, money, and people:

• Who will win: Google or OpenAI?
• Why did Google build the TPU?
• Who buys good technology?
• Why did SQL win?
• Why did PostgreSQL win?
• Why was Google China created, and why did it disappear?

The format does not need to be complicated. I can sit in front of a camera, tell one story, and connect it to what I learned from the experience. Technical videos should not feel like lectures. They should connect technology to the problems the public already cares about: money and people. The interesting question is not the technology alone, but why one technology won and which people and organizations moved behind it. In other words, the politics of technology.

I do not need to narrow the channel to a single subject from the beginning. Its consistency will not come from any one category—science-high-school stories, life choices, or technology analysis—but from how I interpret what I have experienced.