Asianometry

At its peak, Daewoo Group had been Korea's fourth largest business conglomerate along with Hyundai, Samsung, and LG. 

The sprawling company rocketed upwards on the back of a favorable political environment and heaps of debt. 

Then in a shocking two year span, the whole group broke apart under the weight of its liabilities, a crushing recession, and widespread fraud. 

Daewoo's collapse tarnished the legacy of founder and chairman Kim Woo-Choong, who had to flee the country until he received a pardon. 

In this video, we will look at the rapid rise and startling collapse of Korea's Daewoo Group. 

In this video, we are going to look at the rise, near-complete collapse, and recent comeback of Japanese whisky. 

Along the way, we will look at one of the world's largest distilled beverage companies - Suntory. Their histories are intertwined. 

Japanese whisky has a relatively short history. It has borrowed a lot from Scotland. Yet the industry has also managed to come into its own. 

Pour one out guys, and follow along with me. But please drink responsibly. And if you are like me and can’t drink alcohol, then get a soda or something. 

A Field Programmable Gate Array or FPGA is an integrated circuit that can be reprogrammed after manufacture to emulate a digital circuit.

These are great for prototyping new functionalities before mass production. Or serving rare use cases that aren't economical for a custom chip. 

FPGAs aren’t the first with this capability, but they are by far the most commercially successful. And the story of their development is a fascinating mix of technology and business. 

For decades, people have searched for ways to make a chip that you can reprogram after manufacturing. In this video, let us explore the industry’s quest for the ultimate flex. 

In 1979, the Soviet Union was the world's leading producer of oil, pumping 11.5 million barrels of oil each day. 

At the end of our last video on this, the Soviet Union finished the 1960s as the second biggest oil producing nation in the world. 

Even so, the country's most plentiful bounties of oil and natural gas were still yet to come, hiding beneath Siberia's frozen swamps and lakes. 

In this video, we look at how the Soviet Union became an energy superpower and how that contributed to the country's eventual dissolution. 

At the time of Japan's opening up, almost all of the world’s watches came from either the United States or Switzerland. 

The Swiss sought to keep their secrets from leaking out to other countries. But those secrets still got out, and with them Japan became one of the biggest makers of watches in the world. 

At the start of the 1960s, the Soviet Union was the world's second largest oil producer - trailing only the United States. 

By itself, the Soviet Union nearly matched oil production from the entire Middle East. Many European countries depended on Soviet oil, and the Communist Party used that to their own advantage. 

In this video, we will look at the beginnings and rise of the titanic Soviet oil apparatus. From its start with the Russian Empire in the late 1880s to its ascendancy after World War II.