Confessions of North Korea's Most Wanted YouTuber | @YeonmiParkOfficial Ep. 578

i'm honestly i still don't think i can be completely honest with the therapist because i still have that trauma because in north korea you don't talk about how you feel you know nobody asks how you feel what do you think so it's a really new thing for me to talk about your feelings here [Music] let's start with a bit about how how kind of crazy north korea is because most people have heard of it people who've seen and heard you on other shows know a little bit about it but i think it's really hard to imagine a country that doesn't have food right we americans think poor countries are like mexico or uh a southern state that the roads are really bad you know they don't understand sort of the deprivation in in dprk or in north korea yeah i think it's it's the only place that modernity hasn't touched right their lifestyle is to like in the 15th or 16th century in the dark age you can't imagine you don't have benefit of technology you have electricity i mean you can have transportation ninety seventy percent north korean rules are not paved the only paved roads are in pyongyang in the capital i never even see the crosswalks because we didn't have cars yeah you know so fans is transporting people to have is like ox cart or bicycle if you're really rich in the city wow so i've seen cars in north korea because i i went there a few times for journalist journalism purposes and uh sort of tour tour purposes uh which is a whole other question of like the ethics of giving money to a horrible regime uh and we can get down that road later but the the amount of cars you see in all of north korea is like the amount of cars in a normal suburban neighborhood in the united states yeah but i'm sure you were only going through the highways that only tourists can't go to yeah where to one time or the dmz from pyongyang right yeah i mean we did go to the country a little bit oh where did you go it's hard to say because we didn't really know we would do things like once when we were there there was um it was during this like 100 years celebration that was probably 2013 or something and a lot of the roads were closed because for whatever reason uh probably they were flooded i think yeah and we went into the country and what we would do is if we saw something interesting a bunch of us would say oh i have to go to the bathroom or i feel sick and the bus would stop and we would all get out and and use the bathroom on the side of the road but we would really just be looking around yeah oh what a good tactic that is it was pretty good yeah they definitely caught on after a while and they're like if you guys want to see something just ask but no photos and we were like oh yeah so we saw some country houses where the doors are like probably up to my nose and you have to duck to get in because the house is 100 years old or whatever or like i mean in north korea in the countryside it's hard to see the windows you don't have windows oh yeah the best we can do is put some like plastic bags on it if it's freezing cold winter i didn't even think about that yeah there's not a whole lot of glass so did you grow up then in the country no i was growing in a city called hezhan it is one of the bigger cities in europe is a border town the north square does everything they could to put up the show on the border so other countries don't judge them but even that is like unheard of less than instead of living and i was grew up in the mirror later when my father got arrested the the idea of putting on a show for the world what you're saying is it makes a lot of sense from den dong in china you can look over the i think the tuman river right and you see like a ferris wheel and colorful houses but it's very clear when you use zoom lenses on cameras that they're rusted and they haven't been used in ever yeah they have this other village in dmz too it's a shelf village like ghost village where nobody's inside there's lights never come off yeah penman and there's a village too so north korea does really good at showing i mean pretending and manipulate the narrative pyongyang is also like that uh the stores they put all the products in the front window but then if you notice after a while it's always the same product and it's always one in each row after you see like 50 stores with one bottle of soju it's always the same you kind of figure out that nobody's actually buying anything no no we can afford to buy in the stores in general but even in pyongyang so this is funny when there's a bus of like foreign tourists passing by then they let the that town know two hours before so it turned like electricity and then they give them a call when they pass like they can turn down the electricity that's wild i know and then actually before you guys come i was in penang some time with my father they called like self-reliant so they ask us to buy the paints and go paint the roads and maintain the whole thing for free for the regime that's the thing how you see yeah wow yeah so all the paints everything is like people do it with their own money that is so that the so this is that's the juche philosophy right for reliance yeah right like we don't need anyone's help we can do it all on our own but except we can't but like that's a slavery this time north korea just had a military parade in order to be participate in the parade dating mandurism is older that you have to practice more than nine to six months of a year without getting paid they don't feed you and you will pay for your own uniform and shoes and everything gear it's vr it's like beyond exploitation right especially because it's not like you're getting it's you're busy trying to literally find food in your as you mentioned in your book you're finding bark and cooking insects to survive and they're like by the way focus on being really good in this marching band or whatever and you're like are you kidding me right now yeah right but it is not in our thoughts we can like say no to and that's how they became like almighty god it's funny you should mention uh the the the regime leaders being god when i on one of the trips one of the women that i was with she brought her baby they were from like denmark or something in the bay it was a toddler probably three years old and he pointed to a big picture of course there's these huge photos or paintings of kim il-sung and kim jong-il on buildings and he said is that mommy is that god the propaganda works at such a deep level that even this toddler was like oh that person must be really important because he's everywhere it must be god yeah the mother was like no but also don't say anything because this could get this is like tread lightly yeah i mean like in north korea we don't have advertisement all we got is the monuments and statutes of kim's so we don't have the people saying like look at this show look at this none of that i never even knew the word advertisement when i got out that's when i was like what advertisement was in nursery they don't do that what do you think of the commercialism in the west in the united states where we have ads on like this podcast has ads there's ads on the bus that you ride there's ads on the outside of the bus there's ads that pop up when you're using an app it's a bit much right well i would rather live in a conditioner's eyes ads and freedom and food versus no ads okay fine that is obvious i just wonder if it's jarring coming from a place where you'd never seen an advertisement to being bombarded with it constantly no i mean like everything has a cost there's a trade-off and nothing is free and people the problem now in the west too now people think their things are free but nothing is free and like when you go on spotify or podcast or youtube you watch free videos why do you watch with someone pay the work for it so seeing ads is like of course you have to watch it but i think once you understand that you're just gonna stop complaining yeah and i think once i understood it's like okay it makes sense right and i think in north korea the biggest problem is that everything seems like everything is free free health care free education and turns out nothing is free yeah yeah that uh that's certainly the case i saw a hospital when i was there just as a tour and it was grim it was gross and that was the hospital they were willing to show us imagine what the hospital that everyone goes to yeah looks like there was no patience there so you knew that was like for show only yeah equipment from the 80s stains on things no bustling you know in a hospital here it's busy there it was like they just opened it so we could look in there and there was probably nobody even working in there i mean the country where even hasan is one of the major cities in the hospital they ask us to bring us our own leaders if you cannot for the needle right we are very poor the user won't need to inject everybody oh gosh and we don't have actually drops they use a beer butter from the trash and they use it as a drop as like an iv so you're getting an iv from the beer from an empty beer bottle yeah and also people don't have beds we don't have the sanitary pads on any of that so you just rip up your clothes or any anything you can find and like make sure that you don't bleed and that's how we are like free healthcare looks like right and you know in the operations in north korea they don't give you anesthesia i removed my appendix without anesthesia and in north korea it's very common to have a surgery without painkiller oh my gosh so this is like what free health care does to you yeah yeah okay so you've had a child here in the united states was the i was the appendix surgery more painful than giving birth of course yeah i mean like it has to be right right there's no i think they gave me some painkiller because my mom bribed them but it was a very weak one it was not a weird like anesthesia for surgery yeah you got like a headache medicine like something like that i don't mean horrible i mean now i'm thinking about it it is kind of funny in 21st when you go something like that right yeah it must be really tough though i mean like you if the pain is too much you lose your conscious and then you come back lose it and come back and you know it's just but like in north korea that's why they use crystal meth and opium as a cold medicine as a cold medicine yeah does it work it does have time have you tried it i haven't but all my friends became drug addicts oh really that's how the regime makes money right they sell the missiles nukes to syria iran other countries and they sell their people and one of them is selling those drugs christian math and opium have you seen the mole yeah yeah so he was on the show as well oh yeah he's amazing he is really uh like a crazy brave guy yeah um sorry for people who haven't seen that it's a i'll list the episode in the show notes but this guy went undercover talking with north korean arms dealers in china and in other countries about selling drugs missiles and things like that to countries like syria iran yeah so all the middle eastern countries they buy missiles from north korea yeah yeah it's how they generate hard currency for the regime so a lot of people probably don't really understand why there's no food right it's like you have some farmland how can there be no food what about food aid why was there a famine uh it's complicated but can you take us through why that might be the case because it wasn't always the case there that there was no food right so 60 70 there were some people dying from starvation but not in like millions the millions of deaths began in the 90s from starvation that's when i was born after soviet union collapsed so north korea the nature is a collective collectivism right there you do not own anything there's no private property it's socialist country socialist paradise so anybody cannot own anything therefore entire even land is owned by the regime so when you farm in a collective farm after the harvest the regime takes the entire crop away from you and they supposedly give you the public ration right but they don't give you so you worked in the farm entire year right i mean that's like that we call job replacement and then takes the harvest away then regime don't give you food and then tortilla you be self-reliant find you you always to survive but if you trade is illegal so they send you prison and kill you right and then while the knight feature is because i mean kim jong-il said during the famine that it's easy to do socialism and there are less people so he was thinking let's just kill a bunch of people and then socialism will work better and also it's and then people when they're starving right you're not going to thinking about the meaning of life right or like freedom if you are starving right now like in north korea how daily life goes that if you eat breakfast you worry about lunch if you make it to dinner you think okay i made one more day here how i'm gonna survive tomorrow so every constant second you're thinking about you're surviving finding food so people are so occupied and that's why it's better for the regime to having a population that is constantly starving like hunger games yes exactly hunger games exactly yeah it's it's keeping people on the back foot kind of yeah and when i was there one of the times that i was there there were no students anywhere and then when we went on a bus trip to once on or wherever we were going you could see the fields were full of people whereas the last time i was there there were no people and our guide sort of told us in confidence that all of the people in the fields were the college students because they have to leave school and go harvest yeah it's like the mobilization yeah mobilization even seven years old have to start work seven years yeah we don't have the word for minors we have a word for revolutions everybody's revolutionary so even when your kids like five years old you need to work in the farm and the railways so even elementary school pre-k middle school high school college adult every single one of us have to do the first labor every single day that's why entire countries are labor camp yeah entire country is a camp so they will have to go several months in the harvest season and also where the plant the seeds since in the in the summer and in the winter we have to go hunting the poop because they don't have the harvest fertilizers people want to know what the poop hunting is i've heard you talk about this but people are like she didn't just say hunting poop right yeah tell us about hunting poops so i know like in north korea literally nothing to throw away including your poop and pee so governments give this quota they don't they are so poor they cannot even afford the fertilizer the country makes long mistake like test icbm they cannot make the fertilizer so they ask people give them quota like in your family if you have four people in the family bring one ton of poop in january how is that possible i mean does a family of four make one ton of poop each no and you're not you don't even put once a month if you're starved there you don't poop at all there right so weird what are they expecting so that's why we have to go steer poop yeah and hunting for poop and thief there are poop thieves and in the black market they sell poop so that you can make your quota so rich people the government officials they have money they go black market and buy the poop and then give me their quota otherwise they're going to get punished that is so like letting that sink in is so frigging bizarre right like the idea that you have to collect something that most of us would never want to touch and you're stealing it from other people yeah it just doesn't it's that that is a perfect sort of uh analogy for the economic state of north korea it's like completely hell like what the if there's a hair that's what it would look like yeah imagine 21st century human beings you're looking for like finding poop hunting an entire day right and if you don't meet your quota you get punished imagine that it just i mean that is the contemporary world that we are living in that's why the u.n says it's a holocaust it's a modern day holocaust the u.n doesn't seem like they're doing a whole hell of a lot to help north korea i remember you saying that you gave a talk or were giving a talk and they sat you next to the north korean delegation which is horrific to even think about but they thought it's geographically very close unbelievable so did the delegation say anything to you of course there's these five something guys yeah their delegation or maybe three guys in north korea everybody have to spy on each other so it's got a minimum three people because if i'm spying on you so you are spying on that person that person have to be spying on me so it's gotta be that way i'm like i'm spies and i'm spying on somebody so they always send three people not two people because if it's two is to like come spy and then one or some things and three people always and that's why i think the delegation got three to five people next to me and they were swearing i mean north korea and nobody understood north korea yeah that's unbelievably callous and unthinking of them too i assume you're not super big on the united nations bailing out the people of north korea i mean of course i mean like this morning uh the queen and elizabeth in the britain they congratulated for north korean regime to finding their party like on the i mean september 9th this week when during the military parade the queen says congratulations so imagine if there's a dictator alive but the hitler is alive right now these these people in the leader of this free world sending the congratulations or not that's crazy how have we not isolated this whole thing the sunshine policy has just not proven effective right treating them with the kid gloves has never worked so you're when you're a kid and you're and you're still in north korea you're collecting bugs and roasting them with lighters and things like that to to feed yourself right to eat dragonflies and grasshoppers out of desperation that's sort of like the the picture of this i assume you have to turn your heart off when you're there to the plight of people around you i mean when you are born seeing is suffering is in front of your eyes so you don't even think that's unusual right it's like it's a very so that's like exactly the georgia vs animal farm in the first generation they know they lived before the revolution they knew the time that was different but when you come to third ones the new animals they have no idea what the alternative life would be look like that's why like if you don't know you are slaves how do you fight to be free like north korean people now who's living there have no clue i mean they i've never even seen the map of the world when when you were there you never saw a map of the world i i never even knew that i was asian they told me that was kim you're someone you know now though they told me that was keemerson race and the north korean calendar begins when kim your son was born i don't even know what jesus christ is right so you're completely completely isolated and that's why i just never even knew that seeing the other bodies on the streets and people are starving was something unusual you know i thought that was a normal thing the amount of privation and desperation that it you grow up seeing does it make you question whether it's possible to bring a country like that out of i mean how can let's say magically tomorrow everything is reunited south and north are reunited it's going to take generations for people to start thinking differently or do you think that they'll adapt just quickly like you did hear their heart does not take many many generations i think even their children gonna carry that trauma but adjusting to modernity is very quick i mean look at how even people i came here i came here when their smartphone but people said when they grow up did not have a smartphone and now look at how everybody is so well adjusted to it that's why i think humans are very adaptable but i think the traumas and take a time to hear but not though like you know adjusting to electricity of course north korean people love to have some shower i love them some tv don't you think so well yeah i've seen tv in north korea and it's uh it's not that interesting it's two channels yeah in the countryside the one outside of characters one channel begins at like 5 p.m and ends at like uh like something like after 11 but we don't even have electricity anyway right so what's the point yeah this uh so if people don't know what the map of the world looks like or where other countries are or anything like that then it seems difficult to believe that they would also know of their own situation right you said they don't know that they're enslaved they don't know their eyes already they don't know they are oppressed we don't even have the word for oppression that's the thing like we don't have world over stress because how can you be stressed in the socialist paradise is it georgia vs double speak right who controls the language controls the thoughts so regime got rid of the words like human rights really yeah gay they don't have the word for gay when did you find out what like gay people were like i mean i assume not in north korea there's no i mean i came to america okay yeah i remember somebody came and said they hugged me and they're like don't worry baby i'm gay right that's what he said but yeah what the heck is gay i went home to hotel room and looked it up i was like what like he's really happy i don't understand yeah but they don't have order for love in north korea because they don't want us to love other people other than the dear leader so the only love the north koreans know is reaching forward for the dear leader kim's and we don't have word for like you know individual liberty i mean all those concepts that we take for granted they don't know wow so it's so funny in america when people are talking about how they're oppressed and i'm like you know you for your oppressed you don't know you're oppressed right it's invisible yeah north korea has no clue they're oppressed so if you don't have love what about the concept of love what about parents and children i mean that has to be or is it different they care for you but they they don't say that they never told me that my parents never told me they loved me nobody like there's no proposed there's no word for romance because the romantic relationships are not celebrated is a very shameful thing the only reason you marry is because you want to glorify the revolution of the party and the dear leader right so like we don't know what shakespeare is there's no romeo and juliet every single movie is about propaganda and therefore we we know the word like you know written form love but we don't think that was something we can use to another human hmm that's interesting i've seen weddings there yeah and the people are really happy and also they drag us in their photos which is really weird like i mean it will set up those always said i thought the monuments on those holiday things yeah i mean we're like i'm we're like in north korean wedding photos holding the bride in the groom it's so every tourists get that photo so don't worry okay i thought it was very strange and i thought like i hope these this is like a real thing but it's obviously it doesn't make any sense that it would happen every single time that we go every oh no you go there and then get the wedding photos with the people at the monuments yeah yeah right at the monument they're in like a park and they're just happening places yeah there's five weddings at the same time and it just happens to be enough for all the groups that are here yeah that's funny that that's that's all staged but it is true though when you get married you need first thing you have to go is monuments to the kim's and then pay the respect because you marry not because you love each other you're married because you're gonna serve the party right serve the revolution so you you do you have to go to monuments for sure so when did you first experience what you now know as love i mean really later when i came to america a while later yeah but i did not know what love was until i don't know even if i know what it is but the romantic love is like definitely numeric i did not know what that was until coming to the west you have a child now obviously that's special i have a i also have a half asian baby very cute uh the best mix in my opinion yeah very biased yeah it's slight bias yeah um i wondered about that because i thought you know maybe it's hard to adapt to romance or concepts of romance if it's literally foreign to you i mean people grow up in america thinking about it when they're in elementary school and we see it in movies and you read about it i can't imagine learning about it when you were like 15 or 16 years old yeah i mean people do like you don't say like i love you but they say i like you you know but that's also south but that's a south korean word so only teenagers who watch the k-pop dramas we say i like you so in north korea uh they don't even say i like you so usually because it's been arranged marriage the party arranges your marriage parents runs your marriage your town arrange your marriage it was never like voluntarily you can fall in love because in north korea they have 51 different classes 51 do you have to memorize those in school those big three classes are like you know the the lawyer and the middle is like you know waivering the lost is the latest like hostile three big categories loyal wavering and hostile yeah and then they divided subdividing them and that is only government information okay so when you try to go to university when you try to join a party the government has that information they have they track you what happened to your great great great grandfather they tried every line of your family your cousins of course and your in-laws of in-law who did you marry your cousin who's today if somebody gets in trouble if it's elite even three to eight generation get punished yeah we'll talk about that in a second because that is that's mind-blowing it's like this medieval aristocracy rules where it's like people you don't even know you're related to could do something and then you get punished for it along with everybody else in your family you mentioned that there was an official that defected and they punished something like thousands of people over 30 000 like 35 000 people got punished because of one guy and most of them they did not know even they were related to this guy it's called geared by association i'm like exactly exactly are you white in america now you're in america you're supposed to be guaranteed because you're white because you're somehow some white people own the slaves in the back end so it's a give to my association it's interesting yeah my family came here after that so whenever but you're white yeah so you you're guilty yeah i suppose that's interesting it's exactly the same concept eight generations is wild right because maybe you know your grandfather or even your great-grandfather and that's three but then it's gonna be your kids and then their kids and then maybe even more but then that's not only it even among the three generations that you're in-laws if you're married the inlaws of their children their fathers their children goals so even the in-laws the blood not the bloodline get affected if you're married then you get affected so the whole point is just to keep people in fear right it's like multi-level marketing but it's like yeah well maybe maybe not quite but it's like the multi-level marketing of punishment yeah and also get rid of the seat of rebellion that's the thing right rip it out at the root you know yeah they get the reader i get out of the route so if somebody challenging the party ideology they don't just go after killing you or your son or grandma they really go after a generation like get rid of entire that clan and that's how they prevent the revolution it's called a zero tolerance zero tolerance yeah so what this means is then if you're sent to a work camp because of a relative your kids could even be born in there your grandkids people are born in these like concentration camps and they die there uh i think they're called total control zones or something right this is like uh shin dong hyuk they've been there yeah that's one of the crime when you're there the first crime you get killed is asking why am i here really yeah so you just don't even know why you're there you'll never know never know they don't even tell you why you're there that's how you get cared what i don't even understand the logic behind this but of course the whole thing just comes down to fear and control so it doesn't say all about because they can they can say because i can like that's the authoritarians because they can they do whatever they want it's not about being right doing the right thing or the right regulation because they can't simply tell them just you end the concentration camp and then don't ask us why the book about the concentration camp i think it's called escape from camp 14. so we'll link that in the show notes for people in that your mom growing up your mom told you your tongue is the most dangerous weapon even the birds and mice can hear did i get that right yeah so this is kind of what you're talking about right you can't say anything to anyone everyone is spying on each other and the punishment is so catastrophic that it's not worth letting it letting anything slip ever yeah it's the destiny like the if the birds and my mice can hear you whisper the most dangerous thing that i had in my body was my tongue that's how they control your speech but who controls speech they consider like you're thinking right so the regime prevents even as a dog crime even thinking about crime even thinking is a treason so i was afraid to think i didn't even know what thinking was until i escaped south korea you didn't know what thinking was because you thought the leaders could read your mind yeah so you don't even know what critical thinking was when i was south korea i was open my sister thinking that kim's were starving and hungry and working so hard for us and that was what the regime told us right they were working so hard they don't eat they don't sleep and i was like telling the south korean people and they were like what are you talking about like he's the fattest guy in the picture and i was like what do you mean he's a fan look that picture because he was yeah and that's the thing like someone had to teach me that he was fat even though you've seen him with your own eyes all my life every single day on tv on the newspaper he was a big big guy how can he be possibly starving but he didn't register to me that he was not starving what what's going on with him now he lost a bunch of weight kim jong-un he's like it's it's unusual because that's not really i mean he was very fat when i saw him on tv and i think 2015. no even last until earlier this year it was over 330 pounds for like five seven feet guy was very big wow yeah say maybe he's sick that's what they're saying no i think he's really working out working out yeah so that he doesn't die too early yeah that's possible i think that's what's going on because uh he's uh like you know you he he looks very energetic it's not like he's a breeder by sickness it's interesting to see the changes in somebody like that like his first speech in public in north korea was on television and i happened to be there at that time and he was shaking like this over here yeah and he was yeah it was like 29 years old or something when he gave this speech or or less that's 27 or something yeah the guides we were with were like oh he's so charismatic and i thought no this is like a c-minus if you're in a class in high school giving a speech this is legit terrible shaking and staring at the paper never looking up i'm like you would you have to redo that speech if you do that [ __ ] in high school and here he is in front of 25 million people on tv yeah who's supposed to be a guy yeah some god you are man you need to memorize the bullet points here like no ted talk for you kim jong-un so when you live there the calendar is different the numbers are different the years start you sort of touched on this earlier the years start with the birth of the first leader yeah yeah so the idea that you didn't know you were asian though that's new right i guess did you just think everyone in the world was the same except for americans who did you tell me what the word was i mean like i didn't even not even know there were different planets i did not even know the word the cult of space space even though there's there's rocket launch well i guess after you left they launched rockets right into space yeah but after i left but i was so in the countryside i don't see the news on tv right sure because even only the news the newspaper one newspaper that people can read as only the officials can read right so commoners we don't get to even have the newspaper it's not like everybody can go by like new york times if in the morning if you have money it's only approved the people get the government newspaper and buy it and in the people in pyongyang because only only the top people there are the subway stations there's a newspaper right yeah i've seen that but people in pyongyang they're elites they can but not us we are not listening we are like in the countryside so we don't even get to see though even if it's a rocket thing we don't get to read the newspaper so how do i know what the space is right right yeah i remember asking a friend of mine in north korea one of the guides who i've seen a few times and i said where would you go if you could go anywhere in the whole world and i think she said like mount pektu or something like that that's the only right answer to that question oh like our captain that's where she lived uh or worked already and uh i feel like i was like no what about like africa or something and she's just doing africa and then her mind drifted off and she was like staring into space for minutes at a time and and she was really happy because i think she had never actually even thought about that it like never occurred to her yeah ever and then quietly at dinner she told me canada so she could work on her english which i thought was interesting but not america because this sworn enemy no why would you come to the place in the world right america yeah it's funny um there's signs in china i assume you saw when you went to china there are signs that say don't let defect uh don't let north koreans into your home don't give them any food yeah that's gonna be the report on them yeah there so there's like refugee hunters in china yeah the slave hunters like it's uh give you 5 000 one chinese one but for these farmers that's what they make entire year oh man this is a lot of money so that's how they incentivize the people to be pulled on north koreans and that's how these people make money too why for a lot of people it's just a mystery why china would send north koreans back from china back to north korea right because they could easily send them to south korea because south korea wants to accept them or america canada japan australia all the western european countries won't accept north korean refugees but china doesn't want nursing korea to crumble they don't want someone like me escape and speak out against them yeah you must be making a lot of uh friends in the communist party of china i assume north korea has i mean are you worried about ending up on the kill list i have been on the killing you know this already to be a fact oh south korean intelligence like casually holding me up was like casually okay you're like yeah you're on the killing list how about we have a conversation about this it's like wow yeah it's been many years and it was before kim jong-un got assassinated in malaysia yeah so so for people who don't know kim jong-nam was the brother half-brother of kim jong-un yeah and these two women were tricked into spraying him in the face with what turned out to be the vx nerve agent he died at the airport in malaysia so that when you saw that that must have been like okay they're actually doing this i mean it was a big middle finger to the world yeah because i mean for dictators when they murder people there's zero accountability right the world is not just right so he was like who's he whatever i do there's no i mean look at drama khashoggi he got chopped off inside the consulate in turkey nothing happening to them right nobody in america is standing up against saudis yep so it's a shame i mean it's shameful that's that's a word like is it really we think that good wins in this world that they don't so kim jong-un's are going to show us all of us this is what happened yeah does that make you worry at all or change your behavior but that's the thing so when your enemies kim jong-un is quite liberating experience so if you are like fighting against some gang maybe there's a room to run away go somewhere on earth but there's a nation with the nuclear capability reaching america even america cannot handle them then like if kim jong decides to kill me then my life is up to him not up to me there's no way i can escape from him on this earth and that's liberating oh yeah unless i go to mars with elon musk right right yeah that's true nothing gonna happen like it's kim jong-un gonna come after me no matter what as long as i'm on this earth yeah i guess you could go to mars you thought the internet was bad in north korea try try mars yeah um actually he'd probably make sure that you had internet before you you go there yeah i just think that is that is a good way to look at it it's the only way to look at it otherwise what are you gonna do grow up and be fearful of this and i think your enemy is so much bigger than you so it's in a way like well i guess if he decides i get killed well i will just make sure that i speak what i want to believe in and that's all i can do ironically though you know i've seen your instagram you go to italy you go to australia or you go to canada you go all over the united states that guy can't go anywhere he can't leave north korea that's true he's in prison and you've been to you lived there there's not a whole lot going on over there that guy the best thing he has to look forward to is our parties and maybe playing some xbox like he can't even go to mcdonald's if he wants to that's true but he he kidnaps his chef from japan and makes sushi for him right that's awful he'll he just kidnaps people if he wants dude can't even get chipotle so who's who's really got it rough right i mean this is yeah he he he may try to intimidate you or come after you but you're right i mean so then what you can't worry about that your whole life no that's true yeah interesting it's perspective it is yeah yeah so i heard that you don't have any concept of like pornography in north korea not none of that or even sex we i didn't even know the word is sex because of conservative society i know there is no word for rape either because on news everything is happiness did you look at the news when you're in north korea yeah but i don't understand anything everything is like we are winning a victory you know everything is amazing yeah it's like wartime propaganda yeah the only thing the bad is like you know our enemies americans but we are destroying them we we are gonna win this war right so never about someone died from car accident there's a fire somebody got raped somebody got murdered like none of those news so you are so scared from the word that i did not know what human trafficking was i did not know what sexual thought was a rape was so when i was seeing my mom being raped in china i did not know even that was sex or rape i just thought oh my god that looks so horrible that's all i knew so we'll get to your your trafficking story in brief because you've told it in a lot of places it's in the book which i recommend i wanted to have a little bit of a different kind of conversation on this show just because i feel like you've told your story so well in so many places that it'd be a shame if we just redid that um but of course i wanna i i do wanna talk about your your journey first though even the propaganda runs so deep in north korea that i think a lot of people you really do have to go there to understand it not that i recommend going there and you shouldn't especially now but uh when i was in the countryside once there was a loudspeaker blasting something and i said to our guide that sounds like an emergency and he said no it's just the news and then the next day it was the same thing and the next day is the same there's always this feeling of like we're being surrounded by the enemy we have to work really hard when you translate the quote-unquote news it's just fear fear porn yeah constantly it's like everything is a battle let's finish our 30 like 100 i mean three years like battle or 100 days of the harvest battle like you know or something like a spring battle everything is a battle everything is you know about like fighting and winning i've heard that even when you're learning something like math there's propaganda is it really like the example i think i saw once is if there are four american bastards and you kill two american bastards how many american bastards are left is that real yeah that's real even the physics even the chemistry everything they teach user is a it's a propaganda so they use every medium they can every song is a propaganda in north korea right like no songs that were dedicated about country music there's no genre in north korea i never knew the genre of the music you never knew because of different types of music genre yeah so when i'm in south korea what types of music do you like what they mean there are different types of music right it's like oh classical jazz hip-hop pop i mean like indie i was like what are those because i know there's just one type right there's like the the wartime sort of revolutionary stuff aren't there old songs though like are we wrong or is that also the adidas is the only song that from the old times that we know of but that is also about like how we are suffering in the in the under the you know previous kim yourself when we were suffering because we did not have kim so that's why they were letting us know that song because it's about someone going and you know missing and so a lot of suffering so they are trying to brainwash that life was a dark age before kim and song got here and he liberated the whole universe that he is a captain of our earth that you know we are so grateful to be in this country therefore we have nothing to envy in this world right that's nothing can visit their song title yeah nothing to envy is also the title of a book uh by barbara demeric about north korea i assume you've read pretty much every book written by these these folks too yeah it has to be very weird finding out things about your own country that you lived in that you realize was just like a you when you realized the whole thing was just a web of lies like kim jong-un is just an overweight young privileged horrible guy he has no magical powers his father who was also just a horrible guy also had no magical powers and the guy before him was just a liar who spent most of the korean war hiding in russia yeah like it said you really gotta just rock your whole world right it's it is the thing but then the evil always disguised with this thing about like providing you the quality of outcomes providing with you know safety and prosperity and justice so they disguised themselves as they were the revolutionaries killing the oppressors killing the capitalists right and so and now i see how they were disguised but back in north korea of course i was so grateful that kim jong kim zhang was defending us from our enemies which was like american bastards sure sure yeah i i heard that suicide is illegal in north korea is that also true yeah so the in the penalty is death which yeah like wrap your mind around that i guess it's so paradoxical isn't it someone so because they are they want absolute obedience from you they do not want to have any control over your life whatsoever even death so only regime are allowed to kill you but not yourself right so you're basically property of the state you can't you are owned by the state so that's like before you are born you're abducted by the state so the only thing one thing that north korea is allowed to do by themselves guess what it is i mean if you have to collect your own poop and you can't kill yourself i don't know is there anything left breathing breathing that is the only thing you can do using your unreal nothing and not what you think what you see what you listen to how even you move your body how you dance get you in trouble go to prison if you move your body in a more like maybe sensual way no you're in trouble wow even like how you move your body how you look what you think every well your hair cut right yeah the haircut thing is kind of weird like the guides are just you'd basically have like two or three choices of men's haircuts right that's it no more than two inch long and yeah and women too so everybody was laughing like why kim's own requires his haircut to be everybody meant to have his haircut it was a joke because they won't control they don't want you to taste that your own like freewheel yeah you know they don't want you to think for yourself the government tells you what to do what to listen to what to watch what kind of haircut to get what to wear even right women get i mean the regime tells you what to wear so you never learn how to think for yourself and that's why when i was in south korea someone told me so what's your favorite color i was like what the heck is that you mean you because you don't have you don't get to have a favorite anything no no i just never thought of they told regime towards me my favorite color was a revolutionary color red right everyone in the whole country has the same answer yeah what's your favorite food as a korean like kimchi is our national food but in south korea they're like they somehow you have to think for yourself and that's that's why regime control freak they make sure they control every aspect of your life what was it like having what was it like eating until you were full after being hungry for your whole life i mean that the first time you ate until you were full probably in china had to just be like a out of body experience right it was really sad really it wasn't very happy experience like i mean a lot of north koreans like what we wanted is like eating boiled egg boiled eggs because that's a fanciest food that we can have so we never like i never ate until i felt i full so i thought like i would elicit a bucket of boiled eggs right the whole bucket like like 50 boiled eggs 100 i thought i could eat but when you actually eat them after five it's very hard after five yeah yeah i was like 13 years old i was like i'm like 80 pounds i was like 60 57 pounds i was a little less smaller just escaped so my stoma was so strong too and my son was not used to processing the fat food and like a lot of oiliness or protein in it so i got so nauseous and throwing up a lot sure stoma was not just the food that chinese was eating mine was like always like no you know ingredients just pure plants so a little anticlimactic to eat until you're full and then be like uh actually i wish i hadn't done that yeah like in the movies you would be like that's amazing awesome but actually if you're starved all your life you cannot really digest the food or wire it took many years for me to eat the you know food like here that has so much different calories and fat and everything in it do you love eating now of course yeah right i live for eating i mean any time like my wife is also like a very small asian woman and there's you you all have like a hollow leg or something i mean the amount that like an 80 90 pound asian woman can eat is like my it's mind-blowing because i evaporate you know evaporates it's like it's coming out her ears or something i just don't know it was so funny just to see like we'll go out with a bunch of her friends and i'm just like where are you putting this food yeah yeah that's funny of course you love eating now who doesn't right yeah that's very funny the first foreign movie that you saw i heard was titanic and you can get in trouble for watching foreign movies right yeah sometimes death sentence death sentence sometimes yeah so it's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around risking your life for titanic don't do it it's not worth it yeah well it's it's in a way that in a country you have really nothing to lose there even if you get killed in a way that you want to get killed sometimes right like i mean even if you don't get executed might die from starvation or something so it's easier for north korea to risk their life than americans do because in america people like to lose but north koreans are not and also it shows when norse kids watch those movies it is the only time they can escape from their misery their suffering so yeah that that actually makes a lot of sense i were you surprised at all watching titanic that in 1912 that people had more and better things than you did in 1994 in north korea okay remember what are all those like force and knives like the order right the copyright does not i'm i don't know either and then i'm seeing all the plates i've never seen those plates in my life and but also the whole movie there's no propaganda and guy just dies for a woman for his like love it's very confusing in the beginning i wasn't even touched it's confusing even if you it depends on who you are but it's confusing for us too yeah like oh you're going to freeze to death you just met i know it's yeah i think it was i mean the funny thing is that was a long movie so we were watching with this like big big cassette thing so you need at least five of them it's wait like a real or a vhs tape vhts tape so it's a huge tape and they only like usually have maximum 30 means 40 minutes each tape is like actual film going like one run oh okay so if you want to watch a titan it's like one box of tape so this is like a chinese movie format yeah okay because i've never seen anything that we you could fit titanic on one vhs tape i think no like back in north korea wasn't you need hundreds of the things and also you don't have electricity it comes only the holidays of kim jong-un's birthday kim your son's birthday or maybe the new year right only holidays the electricity comes so finishing one movie can take months oh yeah it's not like you're just thinking like you sit there looking at hanging entire thing no it takes always a it's a battle once they call oh man yeah it's so that makes you appreciate it even if it's a corny movie whatever you watch like i remember people you said like don't you not like the ass so i remember i like watching ads a lot so sometimes i go just like turn on tv i don't have like the cable but when i go like hotel rooms i just look at like ads and so i store chinese uh a signal in north korea when i was living in haiti and the occur supporter looked at this like a milk strawberry milk strawberry milk adds and i've never seen the strawberry like that i never even see the milk i did not know that cow made milk so i was looking at what the heck is that isn't drinking strawberry looks so delicious and even looking at for north koreans is like the most like mind opening thing experience because we don't know what strawberries we don't know what milk is so yeah because you can't really get fruit fresh fruit or anything like that and yeah i mean we don't have a refrigerator where do you keep it right and i mean we don't know what watermelon is and we don't know most of food like i never knew what steak was you know what like none of the food pasta pizza i mean i've never heard about it even in the black market though in your border town they must have had some candy and clothes and things snuck in from china live market but those like perishable goods oh yeah like i mean like cherry nowhere and also the difference is that we do have wild strawberries wire the wired the one that grows up actually in the mountains oh wild strawberries little tiny things sure not the one like this one is big so i did not know that was like a strawberry freak fruit yeah food looks very different here when i go to grocery stores in the beginning i had no clue what they were like the cherry tomatoes because north korea's a farm is so behind they don't do genetic modification at all yeah so like what the heck tiny thing is called like a tomato right yeah yeah that must have been such a a trip as well to see all these things i mean even now i don't know what a lot of the fruits are so i can imagine if you've never seen anything like that like the whole grocery store is just overwhelming yeah jeez what's the deal with the radios in the home right so when i was there there's these the the radio in the wall and you can't turn it off and it's like straight out of orwell's 1984 and it plays the news but it's just propaganda being piped into your house but what are they saying like is it just the same thing that's on the tv so it's not radios that they give out for free thank god right but because it's like they in the window used to be you have more electricity when i was younger even then every home have to put it on and you can turn down the volume but you cannot turn it off it's like connected to the wall and also to make sure that people's unit record the people's unit everybody has been this people's unit they come and check on it and make sure that we are maintaining one so this is when they tell you like okay do you know at noon it's like yeah which means lunch time so you don't do not do individualism you eat lunch all together oh and in the morning they they wake you up yeah that's so weird they wake up i was in a countryside hotel and they're playing this weird music at like the morning am i tripping right now what is that there's this ghostly music playing in the morning and then there's like you know something that sounds very spirited and everything that's the work time yeah work at 5 00 am everybody have to go this collective mobilization so the families the moms cannot go are sick and children go out so that's the time in the music blast we work and then 7 a.m you come home eat breakfast and then go to school everybody go to work and then we go to class and then like lunch time it beeps again and then when it goes home like it turns the entire schedule everybody moves in the same schedule there's uh if you don't have electricity then those things don't work is that what those vans are with the loudspeakers on them oh yeah exactly so they're doing the same thing they just do it for the whole village yeah okay yeah i thought that was probably what that that exactly that's a they use actual humans so in north korea they pick the people who has a good voice and that would be like my job in north korea is just yell at everybody in a village to go to work and eat lunch you have to feel them inspired you have to feel them like really brainwashed gosh that's so depressing yeah oh my goodness all the accordions right north korea we don't have instruments that needs electricity so accordions and guitars are the most common instrument so every music is used to be brainwashing yeah yeah have you ever seen those kid performances those like those are so creepy because the kids are really good at dancing or guitar or singing but then also it's like their whole life it's like the olympics of being good at propaganda and having no artistic flair for the thing that you're practicing your whole life and they're like six i know like there was a documentary i really recommend just watch it's called under the sun and he's a russian like director goes to north korea and say like oh i'm gonna like make a documentary about how you put up this some parade or something and then like they do it but they he did not add he filmed before the thing and after the thing so which was everything was show oh so it was like b-roll the b-roll turns out to be the actual the bts behind the scenes is the actual documentary exactly that's interesting but what shakti this is like nine years older girl it's like uh it's in me right she this time she was holding kim jong-il's actually arm at the parade the other day because everybody thinks you should get killed so she was like used as a character who was very blessed in the socialist paradise having a wonderful life and then she was like okay she's like why don't you just like maybe read a poetry and then she does not know what poetry is so she reads the you know her commitment all through their leader and then and then she at the end asked like because she was not happy but she was not like doing good job so i could see me are you happy and then like what's that she does not know what that is what happened even emotions are off limits yeah north korea that is wild and yeah so these kids are so brainwashed and they're like become robots because all robots yeah yeah i noticed that there's a lot of sort of robotic tired people well actually i should i should say i assumed it was because they're tired um there would be people who when they're standing in there like at a bar uh serving food yeah like a restaurant wow and they're standing there but when they're not interacting with anyone they just do this and my friends and i were like is she sleeping while standing up and we learned shortly that she was actually like sort of sleeping because you could see her moving like losing her balance gradually and we realized that she was so tired and so malnourished that she was literally falling asleep while standing up and working and i think like to live your whole life like that and to not be able to have access to your own emotions you're right they're like robots people don't live after 60. most of people like that in north korea you never hear that people died from stroke or people died from like cancer we don't wait that long to get killed by disease like other things kill us first so north korea is a life are extremely low my grandmother died i think around american age like 58 or 59 wow almost starvation and everybody was like oh she'd live a long life which is crazy because at 59 you're like in your pri in america you're probably in some of your prime your kids maybe are grown so you're you're kicking ass at work and you're doing your thing you're maybe going to retire pretty soon you're not winding down no no unbelievable i know that uh people have asked me this before they say oh is it true that if you fold the newspaper wrong you can get in trouble and i think it it we should highlight some of the things that you have to do in north korea to the performative nonsense right um so if you fold a newspaper incorrectly if there's a photo of the leader that's it right you might get a concentration camp but if you reap it so every front newspaper in north korea is a kim's photo but back page you don't see it so sometimes you do not see the front page and you rip it that's how you get executed ah okay so of course it can be accidental you know it's not at all yeah in a hotel once there's these magazines they give you on the flight and it had every single one obviously has like kim jong-un's face on it before it was kim jong-il so i had a magazine with kim jong-il's face on it and i put it on the table in the hotel because i wanted to keep it and then there's an ashtray and i put the ashtray on and i put my coins in it and i put it all on top of the magazine because of course in the united states you never think about this who cares it's a magazine when i came back all my stuff was arranged neatly and the magazine was gone oh my god and on the way home on the flight i was they seated me in the back next to i think like in some sort of north korea usually they separate the foreigners and the north koreans they couldn't i had to seat next to this tough-looking guy in the back which is a little scary and i wanted to borrow a pen and he gave me a pen and i had the in-flight magazine and i wanted to write something down except for kim jong-il's picture was on the cover and i was writing on the back and he grabbed my arm and he was like no because if you write on it it makes little indentations on the other side that damages the photo and i just did nothing for the rest of the flight because i thought what happens to me if this guy gets really pissed off like right or wrong beer you're going to torture that's too right yeah and this is before that well before that i i haven't gone since but that kind of thing is if you feel if i feel that level of fear and i'm like look man i live in the united states what are you gonna do we're on a flight we're leaving the country i can only imagine what you feel when you're when you've seen people's parents disappear that must be happening at school right someone's parents or even the kids you're with they're just oh yeah i mean the old family goes like the three generation goes so if the north korea your house get fired and caught on fire the first thing what you do not rescuing your children or your mom or parents you rescue the portraits of kim's the portraits that you keep in your house yeah everybody have to have portraits of kim's so if you let that get caught on fire that family clan is dead and then the prison camps yeah so you're supposed to save these stupid printed photographs of the leaders instead of your own kids and there are so many not just the portraits maybe portraits look at this picture there was a tree a tree that kim jong-un looked at or back then kim jong-un looked at and then those trees are like you know like you trash in national just because i already looked at it at one point not touching it just looked at it so that thing was caught on fire so somebody held it and protected it i think so maybe me they created and that's like what a national hero looks like for sure yeah yeah so even a tree that's how you have to give your life for i've seen this that's right that it's funny you should remind me of this this is such nonsense right because you'll go to like an ostrich farm or some dumb stupid tourist thing that you don't even want to go to but they make you go it's all on the itinerary the ostrich farm is literally an example of it or like some sort of glass plant that or chemical factory that has never been that thing hasn't run since 1968 like it's been off you can tell it's not a working factor it's really obvious and you're going there and you can see like oh this is the chair that the great comrade general kim jong-un sat in when he was inspecting the factory and then there's like a huge mural that took months to create and it's like they call it on-the-spot guidance have you heard of this yeah it's where he like walks into although water like letters on the wall what he said yeah when he visited yeah it's like he's here's this guy who's never seen a chemical factory and he's like hey why don't you put that tank closer to that thing and they're like wow what a genius he's revolutionized the way we make chemicals and i'm thinking to to show up and tell other people how to do their job must be the most annoying thing in the world and they're just like well paint up paint the entire wall write down everything he said gold plate the chair that he sat in for five minutes and then make like a golden tile on the floor and then never step there again it's just so ridiculous the whole thing is myth but like even when you really even north korea magazine newspaper the description of kim's like this one paragraph video like the greatest leader of our people the army of something the party of the something and something the use a little something so the introduction takes a paragraph so it's like grand marshall leader of the free yeah goes it goes it's going down and then actually content begins there it's like uh it's like reading a post on forbes.com it's like all fluff one one sentence of content the rest of it's nonsense buzzfeed buzzfeed journalism oh they've turned it up lately so all right you thought the leader could read your mind i know that there's these self-criticism sessions as well we are kind of like i guess it's kind of like catholic confession where you air your you air your own failings but you also have to kind of knock on other people right yeah that's the difference so it's not like so it's more like i think chinese people also during the cultural revolution they denounce people exactly the same thing uh even children have to do it this is where they completely teach you how to how to teach you that you don't matter and make sure to like get the dignity of human being gets rid of that at the point where you're not even a being anymore only reason you exist because of the kins that is the only life purpose so you write down the verses that kim jong-un said which is maybe student's job is studying hard and working hard for the party but i think this week based on his like it's like a bible verses we have the bible verses it's like you know that kim said i don't know who's that maybe party wrote it for him right sure and then we said he said this but compared to his words i was not faithful revolutionary so dear later like for his merchness he forgave me my sin now this is a difference it's maybe catholic church you can do that too maybe god said this this week i didn't do a good job but at the end but also thing is you can never say what i did right it has so it's only one one direction you always have to be a sinner you always have to be guilty you always have to feel great friends sorry for being you right like that's how make you they make you feel like you are not worthy of anything degrading you after that you have to pick somebody and that is called even kids so entire week saturday the self-criticism coming in so you have to look for people's fault because you cannot get away not criticizing somebody oh wow so it's a real thing that you look at other people so you're only going to learn how to look at other people's behaviors spying on them and their faults so you're programmed to find the distrust is programmed from the jump in in your classmates right because you you won't say oh i didn't do my homework last night because i was watching something with my parents it's like someone will narco someone will tell on you and then you look bad in front of everyone so yeah right and you get punished and if it if you did anything actually bad yeah then you're in even worse trouble so so it's just finding any reason to denounce anyone yeah for any reason including yourself and there's a kind of quota you have to criticize somebody so it's a real job to finding it the real job anytime you spend on who is doing what who's doing what what are they doing wrong because you have to do safe criticism with other people oh my gosh it's exhausting to think about it but imagine being in school like middle school high school is like six years program but during the 60 years how many times do you think you're going to criticize somebody thousands of times by a fair artist and official every two days because they think artists and minds are more vulnerable to change and corrupt by collapsible yeah they're right yeah so they have to do every two days then you how many times you have to hate somebody and criticize your friend your comrades so that's how they make sure everybody hates each other everybody do not trust each other so you and you can't since there's no trust you can't agree with your friend like all right today you complain about my dirty uniform tomorrow i'll complain about you you can't even make any kind of paper yeah so when everybody's divided who wins the party wins the party wins yeah yeah that's how they they divide you because the division is helping them so they do everything they could to divide every single one of you and that's why i was so shocked when i came to america like people are so trusting like they are so trusting and like unbelievable how trusting these people are i mean talking about your feelings with your therapist how do you trust it's like completely based on trust wasn't it your therapist here even if they aired your dirty laundry people would just go wow that's really unprofessional they wouldn't be like oh yo me has trauma that's terrible we're gonna laugh at her no we would think the therapist is a terrible human for sharing that right it's the opposite though yeah therapy is a little bit weird coming from a place where you're supposed to denounce and not have any secrets to with anyone right i guess yeah it was weird i don't i i'm honestly i still don't think i can be completely honest with the therapist because i'm gonna still have that trauma but with the friends i'm becoming more like open just tell them how i feel that has been amazing because in north korea you don't talk about how you feel you know nobody asks how you feel what you think so it's a really new thing for me to talk about your feelings here yeah that's it's got to be so hard to i mean looking at a relationship in north korea versus a relationship here you have no model for a healthy like marriage for example zero zero it's been very hard yeah yeah when you were married before did you find it hard to share actual feelings and secrets with your ex-husband yeah i think communication was the main issue yeah it was very hard because if it's like what do you think and you're like i have no opinion because you know you're not used to having or you'd never thought about it yeah things can bottle up right over time also i think you know giving the benefit of doubt in north korea if somebody says anything oh my god you're reporting on me you're something doing bad at me right but here in america even people really give you benefit of that yeah we're supposed to sure not in politics not in politics not on twitter right yeah everywhere else yeah when it comes to personal relationship people do in general i think people are very charitable here when it comes to interpretation yeah like you you said oh can i be a little bit later to the interview i didn't think oh she doesn't want to do it yeah you're right okay she's got a lunch it's far away i don't know yeah that's that's interesting you're right we are as a culture and in fact it's more it's almost a virtue here to trust trust people yeah it wins when you trust everybody wins right and not the dictators though they lose right they lose right they want you to not to that's why it's so scary now in america's house seeing everything philippines is just so unbelievably scary what do you think of china heading more towards authoritarianism too it was i mean ccp has never been kind of like a global leader in human rights but it's it's definitely getting worse i mean china at this point you don't even need a human sources to report on them they got the facial recognition they got social credit system so what you write online you know what you throw on the street the traffic lights that you don't obey you know how you park everything how you spend what you spend on what you watch they calculate all your score already for you so in a way china is more like um it's not a brave new world in a way like if somebody asking me would you choose a georgia west 1984 or a brave word i would choose a great word i'm so sorry because i want to be rather be dumb and happy and be fed and healthy right because i know what it feels like the opposite i mean there's of course i want to be free and suffering like what we are right now but china is it's not like becoming brave new world they are in a way like 84 like big brother and i don't think that regime's ever gonna make you want to happen and take care of you no i mean even uh i study chinese on online and my teachers have told me things i'll ask them about the social credit score often they don't want to talk about it but if you know you develop a little rapport with somebody they told me that um one of their colleagues who is a man when you use wechat which is like their whatsapp version it'll say underneath his profile photo like this person does not pay his debts or something and his social credit score is low i forget the exact phrase but basically like imagine i'm sending you a text message like all right we're ready for you now and below my profile photo it says like this guy never pays his friends back and isn't allowed to fly on airplanes it's so creepy right and you're just like do i want to do this interview jordan's not allowed to fly because he's a bad parker yeah i mean it's just unbelievable like how yeah this world is changing so fast it though we thought that democracy was winning the freedom was winning yeah apparently not no apparently not yeah hey if you like what you're hearing and seeing check out the jordan harbinger show podcast feed there's a lot more just like this you can find the jordan harbinger show in apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts now back to the show i think a lot of people are wondering how you ended up in the united states right because you can't just walk out of north korea very easily in fact now it's very it's almost impossible now you don't hear about people escaping now because the border's been fortified by china and north korea from what i understand yeah north korea literally put the the country cannot afford electricity puts the highly electrified wire fences entire entire border of north korea so the entire country became a concentrating camp not only that they put the machine i mean with the machine guns with the guards every 10 meters and every 10 meters on top of that they bury the land mines oh that's really extreme when i uh the last when i was in china a few years ago in den dong which i mentioned earlier we took a boat trip into the onto that river and the captain was like it's all chinese people and then me and my friend and they were like don't uh take pictures of the north korean guards who are stationed on the water's edge because they'll get aggressive it's a chinese tour nobody listens to anybody so these old chinese people are raising up their camera and we saw the north korean guys doing like wave waving us off and finally one got so pissed he raised up his rifle and aimed it right at the boat and all those chinese people just started laughing and me and my friend were like oh my god we're gonna die we're gonna die and the boat captain comes on and he's yelling in chinese you know and i said what's he yelling and he said oh something about don't take photos these guys have no sense of humor on the north korean border these guys are not gonna play around i mean they captured a lot of american journalists they were at the border and then the investigation on north korea they came across the board and captured them send back to north korea and put them in the prison and clinton had to go and rescue them eventually yeah wasn't that lisa ling's sister she said though she was trying to run across the river or something like that she wasn't at the north korean side oh she wasn't she was she was on the chinese side oh that's even that's pretty that's when the cars yeah wow i didn't know that i thought she had sort of like screwed around by going over there to take photos there was a guy who was like robert park one of the missionaries he thought he wanted to bring uh god's gospel to north korea so he walked over from that to north korea with the fire in his hand oh that's horrible and then they tortured him to the point where he cannot function as a as a man and he tried to kill me his suicide many times afterwards it was yeah there's a guy who used to listen to my show named kenneth bae do you know that guy oh yeah the canadian yeah so he was in prison for like a dozen years or something like that for bringing leaving bibles around in hotels it's just the the country is extreme as we've discussed here so so the border is more fortified now i don't want to get too tied down to that how do most people escape in the past how did most people escape from the from north korea most people escape in nine days when the when the great famine began so that's when the regime also kim jong-un didn't actually really care i mean if they don't want to stay here why would you not let them like go right so okay let them go and he was fine with that but then he realized these people do not just want to go china they go to south korea they go to america they go to other countries and they are they became weighted what they thought they are exposing us now right that's how north korean defector came out and giving the testament to the u.s the department and the white house yeah doing what you're doing right so they were like exposing the regime so now north korea is keep condemned by the u.n about the human rights situation so now they're okay now we cannot let the defectors escape anymore and there's no screens when they go they don't just escape they go and they make money and send the money back to their family members nobody north korea escapes saying i'm gonna have a good life myself they escape because they can sacrifice themselves and make money and send it back to north korea and their family members so then they when they send money they don't just get money they get information right and that is where like the biggest killer for the regime like their lies being exposed right of course because if i if i escape from north korea and i'm a waiter in south korea and i'm sending back the annual salary that my family makes every month and it's only part of my income and i have a low-level job people start to go wait a minute so he works at a restaurant in south korea and he's basically a millionaire compared to how we are we got to get out of here right that's not good and then word travels fast like how come that family bought a new ever you know has a car now or whatever right yeah so that's really changed the system so they stopped the defection and that's when so eventually they started putting more pressure on the border but when kim jong took over oh my god i mean how can you worsen his father but he was a lot worse apparently it's a lot evil so how did you escape from the dprk i think a lot of people by the way do if i don't if i say north korea or dprk does it matter it matters it matters because the dprk is the democratic people right it's a joke of a name yeah yeah and that's what north korea wants to be called okay well then i screw them north yeah so i mean i don't really care about it when it comes to that i think that i don't respect the regime at all yeah of course yeah yeah so i crossed the frozen river from north korea to china and that was actually right before the wire fences went up so i got very lucky yeah yeah charles rue told me he basically swam through a river and they were shooting at him but they probably either didn't have enough bullets or they couldn't see him yeah and so he made it out as well now it seems impossible no it's impossible and also when you go to china chinese or the border is like very secure like back then they were like okay there are poor people coming over maybe we give them some food and they're gonna go back right usually they did they go to china when north korea is capable from north korea we are not like a syrian like mexican refugees there's a democracy somewhere that we want to go where the freedom is right we're like we're starving so we just want to go somewhere they give us food and if we get food we want to go back to our homeland so a lot of north koreans would eat and go to china bake the food and come home and feed their family members and their friends and china had no problem with it but then they also saw that how north korean women were going after and then started condemning the human trafficking that they face so china also north korea complained to them this is our national security issue if you let north korea go out it hurts us so can you catch them send us back that's hard so china wants a buffer state between south korea and the united states presence in south korea and north korea is that buffer state and also i think there's an tell me if you agree with this there's an element of the chinese communist party saying hey you think we're terrible but at least we're not north korea look how bad it is over there and as long as that regime exists they can sort of say like we're the only ones who can control them but that's the thing they are using as a leverage with the usa because north korea is only served by china right north korea only exists because of china like kim jong-un cannot exist without cnn ping so when they when the u.s want to discuss about north korea's threat they have to go back to chinese so that's why they are using it as a leverage diplomatic leverage that is it's so sociopathic to me that there are politicians going we're just going to let all these people suffer because it keeps this guy in power which keeps us from having to worry about other issues it's so crazy to me that that even is it just sort of shows you like how how much [ __ ] we tell ourselves about caring about the the uh integrity of people and like human rights i mean it's just pure nonsense it's laughable yeah it's just a joke it's pure not like we can see the concentration camps we know that there are people in there that are miserable we have countless accounts of this and it's like oh we'll we'll talk about it again maybe later yeah i mean kim jong-un this year said like 11 million of his population are severely managed he's not even bothered to lie at this point he used to lie like oh look at us we are happy strong country like this year like yeah they're starving so what wow exactly i was like yeah so what no accountability at all anymore yeah not that they're everywhere they don't even pretend right no yeah no pretense you don't have to pretend anymore he said what can you do we got the nukes we have the power so what can you do my god how did you get the idea to escape was it just you were hungry i was hungry and then if you see north korea at night from the satellite picture it's like the darkest place in the world it got no electricity so in the border town i was looking at chinese side and they had the lights coming out and they had a high road like waves where cars going by so we also had the rumors in north korea saying that china dogs eat rice like so kim your son promised us that i'm gonna make sure that my people are gonna eat white rice with like the meats too and meats do okay yes so all north korean wanted all their life and dying for the revolution was eat the white rice and the mystery it wasn't like if you want to get private jet the power is pretty low very very low right any country in like some southern east asia they can feed all these people chicken and like rice that's like nothing and that's what we promised and that's the communists cannot achieve that dream at all they're so poor so the in north korea so we we heard that like dogs eat rye rice in china and i thought like the most bizarre thing i've ever heard honey there's a place the dog is rice right like how can that be how can that be it's like almost like somebody telling you oh their aliens came and took you and then they you know they come visit every night like that kind of most absurd thing you hear right like why would you feed a dog rice it just doesn't compute yeah no i mean in north korea dogs eat poop literally that's how they survive yeah that that uh and then people try and steal it from them to get their food as you mentioned that's oh my gosh so you're hungry and you just say hey look if they've got electricity in cars they probably have food right that's right i guess maybe there's a food but it's like i was watching this documentary at about like 9 11. there were people were jumping out of that building exactly that situation i don't know if i jump out there is a life for me but what can you do the burning is burning and burning like you have no way out so you gotta jump and see what happens that's how north koreans do it that's how you felt just i might die doing this but i'm definitely gonna die hungry here so yeah i mean there's no chance of me surviving in that country if i didn't escape so why don't i just jump and see what happens wow and so how did you hatch the plan i my older sister i was 13 and i had sister i was 16 in 2007 she escaped first few days before me and she left me a note saying go find this lady she's gonna help you so i went to her with my mom and then she said like yeah i can help you to go to china but i look so desperate it was no point of me even asking why are you helping me right and also if you already don't trust anyone this is a desperate sort of hail mary move anyways yeah so why why bother getting the details yes it doesn't matter if she kills me i'm dead anyway like it just didn't it didn't occur to me i had to ask why are you helping me so because you're so desperate like what everything's gonna get you out you you want to get out wow okay and you you end up being trafficked and sold in china and the whole story is in the book by the way which we'll link in the show notes i'm not gonna make you go through it again because you do talk about it a lot in uh other shows as well but this situation is by all accounts horrifying and harrowing and and you you end up having to sell your own mother for food it's just like the sneak preview is it's some of the most terrible things that you can imagine happening and it happens over and over and over and the people that you meet are all universally exploiting you and everyone who they come into contact with it's like this is like the underbelly of sort of chinese mafia human trafficking right so how do you eventually get away from that situation so when north korea may go to china uh because of the one child policy right now there are 40 million men cannot find women especially in the rural areas and that numbers keep going up so women being sold into four different places one is human trafficking is where you sort to a man in the village who have a disability or crazy or whatever it is so sometimes they buy one girl and rotate entire town or what their entire brothers in that family oh wow so you're basically a sex slave at that point not like a regular wife no no you're not a wife they watch you when you go to bathroom you don't want to run away so that's one second place if you're the prostitution they put you you know these brothers get raped like 20 times all day and then women's refuse so they give you drugs so they make you become drug addict so women just do it because they want a drug so you have to get raped 20 30 times a day in these like brothers third is where you go the organ harvesting china's the biggest expert of organs yeah i did a whole show about this yeah so they also use north koreans just kill kill them and take the organs out the last place is a chat room where these brokers put in a setting under this facility will lock the door and bring these girls in from the camp and the customers are south koreans and then show their body sex camp so among the four why would you choose i would i mean like all jokes aside i would obviously choose the cam girl option because at least i'm not getting touched by it actually get raped by right nobody comes to your room right you just show them your body so i chose that yeah i initially was sold by man i was raped and then at the end of the journey i was finally able to go to chat room there i heard about south korea and i heard that there is a way out of china but you already knew south korea existed right but not like they hamming like nanjos and the sodor of north korea they are fighting the language so much so joseon is korea like it's the south korea they cross north korea like uh like just like north of korea okay south korea but their name is deihan mingok and we call them like south of north korea really so so north korea just calls south korea southern north korea yeah that's ridiculous and north korea south korea like northern south korea oh gosh so the language difference was huge and then i did not know that i was a north korean they said that they in north korea told me did you hear that yeah i heard that yeah so joseon is what we knew of so south korea did not have the name joseon at all he has like hamingo is like what the heck is damning right i did not that was like our southern part of north korea was and then i was talking to these people and they said i'm from the ming was like what is the amino and then we had a defector friend who was working in the chat too and she said i know the missionaries and then if you go study bible with them and then they're going to help us to escape to south korea so that's i like that was by that i was 15 years old 15 yeah so i was there in three two years in china two years two years of unspeakable sort of treatment and then and then bible study and this is your introduction to sex right you said before you had no idea the concept of sex until your mother was sexually assaulted essentially right in front of you and then that became your daily existence for those few years so you're doing this bible study with the missionaries and then how do they prepare you to escape like what's their plan pray and fasting pray in fact did you tell them you already spent your life fasting and it didn't help yeah a lot of fasting and praying and memorizing the fiber verses so there's no practical training for like here's how you're going to escape no they don't give you a physical train they don't give you gear they don't give you the right clothing it's your you need a miracle to do it which is because you are going to go across the gobi desert into mongolia from china in the minus 40 degrees you're going to cross the gobi desert on foot in the minus 40 degrees in negative 40 degree and just hope that you end up in mongolia yeah and then discovered by human beings in the middle of the gobi desert what kind of plan is that so your survival rate is very very low like 99 you're not gonna make it oh my gosh and you're gonna get caught by soldiers so you need a miracle that's why they make you pray and truly like waiting for god to sign to go this is uh and i know you help people escape now and i assume you have a better slightly oh we don't usually we use cars and transported them to thailand yeah yeah yeah yeah but we didn't have money these people we have to raise money to transport them drive them by going to mongolia you don't need a broker they just give you a compass why don't you walk follow the north and uh like the west part and then cross eight wire fences and hopefully that's gonna be mongolia or something that is just mind-blowing so you're you're crossing the gobi desert how long does it take it only took one day one day because uh we chose the coldest time of the year so the guards would think like who's gonna be crazy enough to because other times the security is so tight and there are guards in china preventing nobody can escape they're going to shoot you so if you choose a cordless time then even though it's a very high secure the tight border that people think oh nobody's crazy enough to cross right now they're watching movies yeah it's so freezing they don't want to go outside even themselves so we chose that time and then uh we crossed one day but the hardest thing in the desert is that you don't know if you're going straight or backwards on the side or like yeah circle because nothing tells you indicate you you're going forward you just have a compass and you're like i hope this thing works just a vat is actually in the middle of the ocean right nothing tells you where you're going there's no landmarks on the horizon it's nothing so that was like where i shouted like i'm not sure if i'm just keep going circle and circle right now we did rumors where does some defectors do that gold days and circling the same thing again again come back to the same spot so when we go like okay let's leave a stop here so when we come back maybe we came back here that's how we went moved along leaving some stuff and knowing we've been here and thankfully we only got discovered next day by mongolian soldiers so the mongolian soldiers are used to seeing north koreans crawling crossing the border over these wire fences so then is it a warm welcome or is it kind of like you just get arrested they use a gun like put your hands up and you cross the border illegally so it doesn't matter you're a child or not and then they told us they're going to send us to china back and then send north korea which they're not really going to do they have done that they have done that because it's so inconvenient for them to go back to base call the top people getting started so much work for them so if it's just if they can hide i mean usually south chinese soldiers don't even bother to already shoot them all and the animals come at you they just shoot you yeah oh my god in a border is a shoot to kill order they don't bother to arrest you you gotta shoot them if you see any foreign object there and so they just don't wanna be about too much work for them too much paperwork they have to fill out when we cut them how we caught them right so they just shoot you and then like animals gonna do the job for them that's awful okay so obviously that didn't happen to you you got uh taken in by mongolian military borders yeah the border guards and then they said they were going to send us back so we are going to kill ourselves right your plan was to kill yourself oh we i mean north koreans it's like the jewish people and there is holocaust right we already die when we get caught and then they eventually swayed in and helped us to go to south korea the thing that i don't understand and that i don't i can't quite wrap my mind around is they've seen refugees come across the border over and over it's not like this is the first time they've seen it i don't know why they can't have a plan for this or they're saying oh we're going to send you back i mean they must know that what they're doing is heartless and cruel and they just don't care yeah i mean for them this is fun it's so fun for seeing people begging for their life and so that's pretty scary that's the thing human nature is horrible when humans are not being educated and civilized you can become barbarians and this is the thing about human nature that you know people not the special people became the guards in the consumption camp in that germany normal people did that and i think that's why we need to aware of our nature that is kids were just never knew what compassion was i guess so they just it was really fun for them and we didn't get cared about one of my friends mom's friends she swallowed a peers and then they after had to take her to hospital and then she never came back fully so she tried because she thought they were going to send her back so she yeah because that's what they said right so a lot of pure evil yeah what separates you someone who escaped north korea versus somebody who decides to stay what do you think the difference is somebody if they can afford to stay behind you guys like they were not as desperate as me for me was if i didn't escape i would not even make a few more days there because i just didn't have food so you weren't thinking like freedom you're just thinking rice just food yeah anything yeah wow i mean you know getting starved is worse than being raped the biggest the worst torture is being starved because if you don't you die and before you die from starvation you hallucinate you you lose your mind that's how most undignified way of dying from starvation that's why cannibalism happening in north korea because they hallucinate cannibalism yeah so some mothers eat their children because they thought their children were dogs because they go crazy when you don't eat and then they wake up and then like what happened to my child and then they just it's it's the real stories you're getting these stories i assume through the network of other defectors and it's a united nation documents at the cli report and it's based on true story there's a director made a movie too and in nursery when we were there we are actually the policeman was saying there was a he followed some mom was holding their baby going near the river and then making a fire and then boiling the water and then she was brought her baby there some parishman cause so these things you hear when you're north korea so i mean it's we here like just don't go by the meat at that in the black market there's somebody selling meat very cheap price and then like we all know like what they're selling i mean you can tell by the bones also in the meat if it's yeah i mean thankfully i was so poor that we couldn't afford the meat so we didn't have to go there wow yeah so people are selling like their own children's meat in the market a lot of people die from starvation so you can just grab them like their body is flooding on the rivers and the train station when you go there tons of bodies stacked so they can just get them and sell the bones and make the broth right what's up with the dead bodies at the train station because i've i've seen dead bodies in north korea and the weirdest part is i'll see it and 15 other people will see it and our guides will say i don't know what you're talking about like they're pretending that they can't see it wow yeah so on the road into the transition in north korea training from one city to the other city in south school take 30 minutes takes months sometimes because electricity you have to push your train because you have to push the train yeah i mean that's not possible how do you do that you do hundreds of thousands people come i'm gonna show you the picture later after this yeah what that you can use in the video if you want to what it looks like yeah we'll link it in the show notes if you want to just like text it to me afterwards yeah you can push the train i guess if there's hundreds of people pushing the back of a train it'll move a little bit that's wild though you're not going up a hill that's for sure you sometimes yeah you you uh there's a here that train cannot go electric is so low then people have to go help the train out this is just unfreaking believable i mean this imagine you gotta think if you're running that country you know that it's a horrible place and you've done nothing to improve the situation what do you think about do you think kim jong-un is evil himself or is he just part of this system that's set up by his father and grandfather and he's trapped he had because he know he's got to know what's going on he went to school in switzerland exactly so he knows exactly what's going on he knows what human rights is yeah how humans supposed to be treated but that's why he's a pure evil yeah like he's not brainwashed he he has seen the real world so you cannot say that like he was brainwashed you know he has no choice like no he has seen the world the elites of north korea study they go shopping in paris literally they they go ski in switzerland i mean they go to the best places in the world and travel and study they live like the kings and queens and kim jong-un has his own pleasure squad yeah what is the pleasure squad because i've read about this and it's a pervy question so pardon me but people are curious about this so pleasure squad is every year the officials have to meet their quota again as everything is called out the order from the party every region have to submit a girl who is a virgin and who is pretty and meet all governments data like the major high look all of it right and also family backgrounds so day each year they collect older words from entire country and only the ones pretty enough and the good backgrounds and the virgins going to pyongyang from there they they also select giving kim jong-un the picture like who do you want this year so he picks 25 for a year each year he gets only 25. i'm like only 25 women girlfriends like that's a lot yeah it seems like a lot especially for a guy who like kim jong-un not in great shape and his father was even worse shape i mean these are old dudes they're probably not well i won't go there but yes and then other girls going to other type of fishers then they divide these girls into different groups like satisfaction group is a the sex group the happiness group is a massage group third group is like healthcare they give him the like you know other health issues all these girls being trained for that and their primage is from from 16 or 17 to 20 to 23. what do the parents think do they know that this is what's happening or are they like oh you're going to learn how to dance or something the most glorious thing that you can serve your nation but not only that the north koreans is that when you go i mean you don't get paid but you get fed if you fed three times a day in north korea you are the most previous person in america i mean in there so in america all these people get fed and talking how hard it's like i don't get it oh you mean all of us are fat because we're eating too much and we can't stop no no you know here in america like to be happy it takes a lot more oh sure yeah in north korea being fat is the the biggest previous you can get in your life so when these girls go there they're going to be fat so their parents are so happy i thought you said fat bed okay because it must be weird coming from look you're in the united states you look around you're in the midwest here in chicago there's a lot of fat people around and they're i can't lose weight i can't stop eating i mean that's got to be kind of that that must have been jarring to see when you arrived here i did have some like a sympathetic issue in the beginning coming to america right like i just never knew having too much could be a problem right like i just never knew in the world this like diet in north korea the most desired the man is kim jong-un like big belly and bald hair that means if you are bored you're you're eating fat food or something okay and if you big belly you have a status you're very powerful because most of people are starving and in america now they're talking about is oscar to obsess with diet and the water has diet right and here also people say like food is a problem there's too much the obesity is killing us i'm like just don't eat nobody forcing me to eat here oh my gosh i know it's interesting it's all about perspective so this this squad of girls they're young and then they end up doing this for until their marriage age or something oh yeah and then they just go back home no because they have seen too much so the regime they they are like when they take your daughters like you gave it to your nation so don't ever look them back so these girls don't ever reach out to their parents ever again in their lifetime so when you take these girls and then when they like why we say graduate then they match them with the girls who guard kim jong-un guard the type of elites called people those guys also see a lot so they are forever sealed from the public and then they marry did the regime make them marry each other uh what a miserable existence yeah you don't even choose your partner just give you the like just being chosen and then you get grouped and marry and then forever you cannot talk about what you have seen and did yeah and you're never gonna i mean you can never so you never see your family again never you don't even hear back from them ever again i've heard that when people escape their extended family i mean we talked about the three generations eight generations so if someone escapes or is a defector what happens to their family in north korea depending on the status of your family so also the punishment was a lot lower during the kim jong-un time the second kim i thought kim jong didn't really care in the beginning that people escaped in the 90s they're like oh if they don't like it just go let them go why do we bother right and then so back then like my family was also lower class and nobody i mean they got like interrogated and tortured a little bit in the beginning but they all got them free a lot of north korean defectors like now in america very low number over only 200 north koreans made it to america during the last almost 80 years really yeah 200. 207 or something like that and somehow america doesn't want a lot of north koreans to come either so oh really i didn't know that yep they don't like the northern refugees that much so they i had to come here as a south korean oh i can get all the working visa like exactly it's impossible to come to america if you're south korean so uh north koreans usually go to south korea so now there are 33 000 north koreans made it to south korea during the last 80 years and so most of them are not high class but the top class when they do the family like three to eight generations that does get like punished so is this a complex issue for you like do you know what happened to your family back in north korea yeah so when i spoke out against the regime in 2014 that's when they use all my families including my neighbors to denounce me and these videos on the youtube and then they got all disappeared i precise to have those people in the network that i use to get information out they all got vanished so those people are probably dead then most likely yeah that has to be a complex issue for you yeah i mean that was thing like when i was speaking i knew i was risking my life but i really didn't think that the regime was going to be threatened by 13 years old who escaped north korea who does not even have a military like secret all i was saying is what you see on the google satellite pictures with concentration camps and starvation days well documented by the u.n so i thought like what am i revealing that is new i did not know but because you do not obey that's the treason right you escaped do you feel a sense of duty to these people to spread the message far and wide because they they essentially have made a sacrifice unwilling sacrifice i mean that's the thing freedom is not free i i i mean paid the immense price to have this voice and i don't know when i'm gonna get killed but the thing is there are so many people dying to be free and freedom is not free i think that we see that like it's impossible it's so hard to be free from the dictator is there anything that they say in north korea about the west or about america that you that turned out to be true oh well yeah one thing was true was when i was in san francisco they said like the america is filled with the homeless so i was i mean back then i mean north korea you don't even have the freedom to be homeless you go to prison if you want to be homeless or you have to work for the party but it was true when i came to america there's so much freedom just everybody can decide to be homeless and nobody arrested you for that so i was like wow i guess it was true but then i did the volunteering work at the homeless like a shelter i mean they had a refrigerator yeah they have sodas in there sure yeah they had a mattress in their bed bunker beds right and they had electricity so i was thinking why when homeless life is much better than north korean elites life yeah that's true internet on your phone and they have like computers in the chair they're like what they have internet so yeah that was the only thing and the other thing was uh they said like oh americans don't even have water so they eat snow i've seen the same propaganda thing you're limited to one cup of snow per day yeah i saw that in north korea and then watch that as stupid there are no birds in america because people eat the birds they say that about the united states yeah no that's totally it's north korea but now i comment there's so many pigeons if you see one pigeon in north korea everybody go after the vision right you never see them ever again so there's really no birds in us because we all catch them eat and in america so many birds i mean there's a lot people complain about the birds yeah in new york oh there's stupid pigeons everywhere it's amazing nobody eats them oh is it so you thought white people were cold-blooded as well right like literally yeah i mean they so they say when they're americans we we don't think americans are like american mexicans or hispanic or like african market we don't know like just there's a american which is one type because they don't teach us about race so i didn't even know that i was asian so how do i know there are different ways in america so they draw the painting for you yeah the americans have these giants with green eyes yeah and they go to usa and they look like monsters and they say they're like snakes cold blooded they they don't even have a heart they're like monsters pure monsters so when i came to america i was like really shocked yeah i mean at that point you realized they lied to you about everything else so that right yeah i mean by then but it it until though until the animal found by georgioa it was really hard like how do i trust again because i mean they told me everything that i believed was a lie right then i'm like so how do i know what you're telling me is not like that's a valid point yeah it's like it in the matrix right it's like you just don't know right the matrix yeah exactly you just don't know am i in the thing or not right right so it wasn't i had a few years of that time where i couldn't trust yeah that would be really difficult to come here and make friends while trying to also reconcile that maybe these are reptile people with cold blood or that you're not sure if they're lying to you now and you're just caught in another version yeah matrix like you said yeah yeah do you miss anything about north korea like some of your friends and family sure but is there anything any element of the lifestyle or the country that you miss other than the people i don't miss though how close i was to other people in the community like we say well it's not a good thing but it's very creepy that i even know how many chopsticks and spoons my neighbors had like that's how close we were really even though there was no trust yeah but like we go over and hang out but you don't talk about politics you don't talk about those things but like talking about you know crops or your kids like those problems that's the truth that's a very north korean topic right how the crops looking geez that's what we talked about yeah and nobody has device so everybody is looking at each other's eyes but here like i have no clues my neighbor is no when you love your instagram though now i see i think that yeah so this well i do try to like control that though i know the what the social media is like does is really horrible so i use it to try to raise awareness yeah yeah of course i follow you on there enough no no but you do a good job of balancing it oh thank you yeah it's it's very tempting and it's so hard i feel like i didn't understand like when i was living in new york i was going to university there a lot of my friends are like working in finances like manhattan right in the consulting investment bankers all very successful and like biggest law firms in the world and like at least 60 to 80 percent of them go to therapy and then they were like you need to go to there because you're traumatized it's like what do you mean trauma all right and then it was really weird in the beginning why does these people are not happy they're living on the top of the world having everything they need why you're not happy and eventually i do understand some parts but i think the isolation is um quite quite something i didn't expect it to be this much you are lonely and alone here it's true i mean we are like the loneliest generation or something like that and a lot of it does probably have to do with social media yeah that's a whole uh that's a whole different show i think right there exactly yeah do you ever have have dreams or i should say do you ever have nightmares of like waking like you wake up and you're in north korea yeah i mean i said i get up and i get beaten and i try to escape and the only very unique game with the north koreans whenever you ask them in their dream is always north korea and that's the thing you never escape in your subconscious you're there forever like my mom every night she's there every night on there like nobody escapes in your dream i've heard you say that you can tell a north korean by their voice on the phone what is what is it that you hear oppression oppression yeah i can totally tear so i work with a lot of chinese brokers i rescue people i send money i get information out like some products out too and there are some sketchy korean ethnic chinese right like there are different ethnicities in china there are some koreans who can do some north korean accent they try to lie to you say oh i'm a nurse king when i help you let's work together send me cash or something then when i hear them like oh no you're not north korean interesting it's the exact same accent with north korean broker even their broker they're oppressed you hear it right away like when before my family got punished i was sending them money a lot of money and then talking to a lot of my friends mothers too and you just hear the oppression right there how are you talking to them on like a smuggled phone yeah it's a whole operation so we smoke the phone the boulder area to north korea and north korea jams the phone so they have to be in the bicycle building a food hiding it and then moving around 30 seconds then 30 seconds later they have to go all the way the other time and then call me for like 30 seconds and then we have to use a lot of words like sugar and candy i'll call it the words could they hear you oh because they're using technology to listen to the goal yeah yeah oh so sugar and candy is like people or or whatever we are trying to get out or like information is all about like a lot of grocery store cabbage has a rice how the corn has like the weed you know like what am i so that's all called the words all right but it's not is it a smartphone because i feel like encrypted chat is so much easier we don't they don't have usually the internet in north korea so we get just all these those sliding from the chinese one that we have some of them do have smartphones but the internet is not connected so we we call the chinese phone in america but the chinese call from david smuggled in gonna answer it so it only works when you're like right on the border or if i want to talk to somebody inside indoor the inner corner of korea then we turn the call the north korean phone and chinese phone and then turn the speaker phone right what an operation you're right it's quite complication you're right it's quite complicated but then this north korea is even more dangerous so you gotta be like sound like north korean you gotta completely talk in a way but usually you just wanna verify like if somebody's there are they still alive because a lot of people that i love the family then they know so they try to get money from me so there's like oh your aunt is there i'm you on can i get money and the brokers want to get money make money from me so oh you aren't asking for money so i want to just verify this is my aunt or not so i said like oh how's the maybe your child has what grade is in the school or like what's the name then they tell me like if they don't know of course they have no clue like do you remember that like the the birthday when we went to this river and then when we saw this what do you remember there's no banks people don't know like you can't venmo someone in north korea there's no banks there's nothing so how do you even get money to them you just have to have somebody carry it there right no we we have to send the money to chinese brokers bank in china they get the money out the commissions are sometimes fifty percent sixty seventy percent you don't have a choice yes the biggest banking business you can get in is so high then they get the money out and then they roll it and then like we do hide with the plastic bag and then you put a stone and the one like string and then you throw as hard as you can to the north korean side you're kidding or flying on tube and then let the tube to go and let the with the rock you have to really get throwing the rock and then with the thing that you can like do this or somebody's going person and going out in a lot dangerous that but you do that so the two man river is just full of like rocks with money wrapped around it no it's very impossible not hard because the security is so hard so you have to bribe the guards so these guys take the money out of it the north korean broker gets the money out of it chinese broker gets money out of it and then when you end up in your family it's like very little amount what a crazy operation that is you've you've been through so many different circumstances in your life you must feel like it must feel like you've lived a hundred lifetimes yeah i feel like alice lived 2000 years at this point yeah i haven't seen it all right so how does helping people escape north korea work like what does it cost to get someone out yeah i mean i cannot say exact route they take no no yeah yeah yeah mostly we take them through thailand now i mean north korea knows it too not everybody knows it's like yeah it's the government yeah but we know the location but how we do is that it costs around less than two thousand dollars like eighteen hundred to get a person out yeah from china to but from north korea is impossible no oh so you can't get people out of north you can only get them out of china even with the 50 000k or 100 000k you cannot get out oh right because it's secure so secure how many people how many north koreans are in china waiting to escape now in your estimation approximately they say around 300 000 people 300 000 yeah mostly women are being trafficked and being sold and raped we met a lot of korean women they said korean chinese but it's what do i know when i was in dan dong on the border and i i to this day wonder how many of them are actually just north korean and they were and they were always with old guys which i thought was really unusual and creepy yeah all of them are north koreans usually they say they are the ethnic because they cannot speak perfect chinese so like why do you have accent then like oh because i'm ethnic chinese then they the ones that escaped very early on in the 90s they were able to buy the id so in china called hookah somebody's haka right so if somebody dies the family do not report on the police and then sell that id because a lot of children left the city work right right in china rural areas a lot of young people go work in the city so their huko their id from their village or whatever is just sitting in the drawers yeah and then so those farmers sell the hookah and then you buy it but then like nowadays the social credit system and everything's on digital it's really hard to fake it but back in 90s even the internet wasn't that widely used so unless the police really go that town asking the town around the round do you think that child is alive or dies can't even know but then police not gonna go travel all the way to the countryside and then check it so it was those people actually hiding in china and then do those things is is the bottleneck then just funds to get these people out if you can get them out it's the best thing right imagine like if there's at least 100 000 escaped that power is going to be unbelievable and that many people want to speak out and have information when north koreans come out as i said it's not like they are only escaping themselves most of the north koreans reach out back to their family and send money information so imagine how many people getting fund from the free world and hearing about the world yeah this is useful look we speaking of ads and capitalism what if we use the the the ad profits from this episode to get north koreans out of china can we do that not from north korea but china from china yeah yeah that is absolutely let's do that like can we can i text you after this and we'll figure out how to do it i have no idea how to do that okay yes let's do that okay let's end right there because that's a that's a happy note on the end of this crazy crazy saga thank you so much for your time and for coming in this has really been i don't even know if there's not one word i can describe it so thank you so much for sharing this has just absolutely been incredible oh thank you for having me it's an honor

Channel: The Jordan Harbinger Show

Views: 571,308

Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, podcast clip, escaping north korea, north korean defector, korea summit, what is life like in north korea, famine in north korea, north korea dictatorship, korea news, north korea news, news, yeonmi park, yeonmi park interview

Id: ONHtzdLGWl0

Length: 122min 9sec (7329 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021