Daniel Yi covered a serial killer's trial for the LA Times. Years later a LinkedIn ad popped up for a company he'd never heard of. He looked it up, realized it was a weed company, and turned it down — then took it anyway after one phone call. That job led to the next one. The label behind BTS.

We also get into what actually killed newspapers, and what AI keeps getting wrong about his own name... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

Hyepin Im was an MBA student in 1992, in Koreatown for meetings days before it burned. What bothered her afterward wasn't only the destruction. It was watching store owners who'd lost everything get talked about as perpetrators rather than victims.

So she did something almost nobody was doing then. She went to First AME, a Black church in South LA, and asked how to help. That decision turned into more than thirty years of building between two communities the riots were supposed to have set permanently against each other — and into FACE, the organization she still runs.

Along the way she's spent those decades getting Asian Americans into rooms they'd never been invited to. The part that will stay with you is what she found once she got there. Agencies publish outcomes by race and simply leave the Asian numbers out. She shows up with the figures they didn't print, and they're not what anyone expects.

Also: what she calls her best choice, and the small habit she spent years too embarrassed to practice... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.

No guest this week. Just Sid and Han on the Korean wave - where it came from, and why they think K-food is the last piece to fall.

Han has spent his career advising K-pop companies, starting with a JYP internship in 2009 when the Wonder Girls were selling their own CDs at the merch table. He has a theory about why BTS broke globally that has nothing to do with the music.

Sid comes at it from food, and he has a number that reframes the whole thing. America has around 85,000 Mexican restaurants. Guess how many Korean ones. Millions of people now know what gimbap is, but not everyone can buy it.

We also get into trainees as athletes, what it actually costs to break a group, virtual idols, and the ambitious project Sid is trying to launch right now... here on the Drink of Choice.

Drink of Choice is a long-form interview podcast hosted by restaurateur Sid Kim and entertainment lawyer Han Kim. Every guest arrives with a drink that means something to them, and that drink becomes the doorway into a much larger conversation. Built around Asian and Asian-American voices that don't always get a seat at the table, Drink of Choice is intimate, unhurried, and long overdue.