In this episode, I sit down with a man who was born in North Korea, grew up there, and escaped when he was 13 years old. He talks about his experience growing up under Kim Jong-un's oppressive regime and how he managed to escape. He also talks about what it was like growing up in a country where there was no internet, no television, and very little education. I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode if you listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some insight into what it's like to grow up under a totalitarian regime like North Korea. I know it's hard to imagine a world without food, and I know that when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger. When did North Korea become what it is now? When did it shift to this totalitarian regime that's starving its people and puts people in these classifications? If one person commits a crime, there's no redemption. You gotta be the one person in your family that commits no crime. You're gonna be stuck with them forever, no matter how many generations you do it. You can't be free until you commit no crime, no one gets a chance to redeem themselves. You have to do it in three generations, or else you're gonna keep committing crimes forever. I don't even have a chance at redemption until you're all of them are guilty forever, right? I mean, there s no redemption until the next generation does it, so you're stuck forever, you gotta do it forever, or you're not going to be a purist? you gotta be a victim forever or you are a victim of the classifications, you have to be punished forever, are you gonna be a sin, you can t do it so you are stuck forever? ? that s what I think of it, right?! What does it mean to be the victim of a regime that s starving people? . what does it look like in the Hunger Games? What is it like to live in a world where there s starving? How does it feel like in a place where you don t have enough food to eat enough to sustain your stomach to survive? or a place that s not enough to be full of food to survive how do you feel like you can be free from hunger? what do you think about the hunger that matters?
00:00:22.000So for people who don't know your story, I'm just going to give them a primer just to sort of establish your history.
00:00:30.000You were born in North Korea and you escaped North Korea when you were 13. Is that how old you were?
00:00:39.000I think we should start off with what it was like living in North Korea I saw your interview with Jordan Peterson and it was it was incredibly moving and it was incredibly disturbing and eye-opening and It's hard to believe for people that don't know what life is like in North Korea the reality of you growing up in North Korea,
00:03:38.000So there was everything before Kim Do history was re-raised for us.
00:03:43.000But the thing is that we are hungry, we're starving.
00:03:46.000If you eat breakfast, you worry about lunch.
00:03:49.000If you make it to dinner, you are not sure if you're going to make it to tomorrow.
00:03:54.000So in that scenario, who thinks about history?
00:03:58.000Nobody thinks about anything other than surviving and that is why precisely Kim Jong-un keeping us starving mode even though the UN, the international organizations begging to give food and formula to North Korean people but Kim Jong-un is saying no to this food aid because he doesn't want us to be fed.
00:04:18.000So he's purposely starving the people to keep them weak so that all they think about is surviving so they don't think about revolution.
00:04:34.000You divide into 13 different districts.
00:04:37.000Capital, people have everything they need.
00:04:39.000And on other provinces, their own purpose, they're being starved.
00:04:44.000So the only thing you can think of is your survivor.
00:04:47.000If you are full in your stomach, right, you're going to start thinking about the meaning of life, art, what's out there in the universe.
00:04:54.000You can do all of that higher thinking when you are full in your stomach.
00:04:58.000But when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger.
00:05:02.000When did North Korea become what it is now?
00:05:06.000When did it shift to this totalitarian regime that's starving its people and puts people in these classifications?
00:05:14.000For one example, one of the classifications is if your grandfather or great-grandfather committed some sort of a sin, you are perpetually punished for that.
00:05:26.000Everyone in your generation, your next generation, all of them are guilty.
00:10:49.000Today I was on the way here thinking getting up in North Korea as a child was challenging because every day you get dizzy from the starvation.
00:10:58.000You get like hear noise every single morning when you wake up it takes like 30 minutes to gather your thoughts to able to walk straight because everybody's in that mode of starvation.
00:11:53.000One of the executions that my mom saw was a young man was eating beef, a cow, because he killed a collected farm cow, and he got executed for that.
00:14:47.000It is so strange to someone who has been in America their whole life, like me, to even imagine that the same time I'm living here, one of the big problems in America is that people eat too much.
00:17:03.000But this is, I mean, humanity, all our humanity, we've been starving.
00:17:08.000It's the very first time humanity having this much access, and I have some compassion for that, but, you know, a lot of problems, like, I met American friends in New York.
00:17:18.000I went to school there, and, like, my friend's complaints, I couldn't sympathize in the beginning.
00:17:24.000I literally, because their problem is, like, some guy, they went on a date, they don't call them back.
00:17:29.000And they call me and complain, like, you know, like, there's people with actual problems like life and death.
00:17:37.000Well, it's an issue of perspective, right?
00:17:39.000Like, your life, you've seen horrific things, whereas so many people, the worst thing that's ever happened to them is someone broke up with them.
00:17:50.000When you were talking about going to the doctor when you were a child, and that...
00:17:57.000This is a very disturbing story, but I want you to try to explain it to people, how...
00:18:03.000People were dying in these hospitals, and rats would eat the eyeballs of the people who were dying, and children who were starving would eat the rats.
00:18:14.000And then the children would die, and the rats would eat the children.
00:19:00.000Traveling in North Korea is an unbelievably difficult thing within North Korea.
00:19:07.000So, I mean, anyway, so in train stations, that's when people die mostly.
00:19:11.000And in North Korea, the hardest thing as a child for me is that when my mom goes away to find food, like we don't have a call, like we don't have phones, we don't have letters.
00:19:20.000If I say goodbye to her, I don't know when I'm going to see her again or if I'm ever going to see her again, because she could have cared and like raped and starved.
00:19:31.000You should never know how to find people.
00:19:34.000So in the morning when you go walking the train station, they just put the piles of dead bodies and they all become rigid, right?
00:28:46.000So that hospital, initially my sister and I was going to escape.
00:28:50.000But when North Koreans say when you are escaping, of course we don't have phones, we don't have a map, we don't know what the outside world looks like.
00:28:59.000Luckily I was living in this border town of North Korea by then.
00:29:03.000So at night, if you see the satellite photo of North Korea, it is literally the darkest place on earth.
00:33:08.000The last place that we are gonna go is going to police and then report on them.
00:33:14.000Why did they think that women coming over from North Korea are gonna somehow or another collapse the empire?
00:33:21.000Because that's what Kim Jong-un believes.
00:33:24.000He thinks they're going to collapse through the defection, through the defectors.
00:33:27.000So after Kim Jong-un came into power, he literally, the country cannot afford electricity, electrify the fence, the entire border.
00:33:38.000Not only that, putting the machine guns through the guards, have a shoot to kill whoever crosses, they don't even bother to ask you to stop.
00:34:08.000Now you don't see North Korean de facto escaping from North Korea anymore.
00:34:13.000It's impossible to escape at this point.
00:34:16.000One of the more horrific things that Jordan and you discussed was you seeing your mother raped and that your mother sacrificed herself because they wanted you.
00:35:43.000So that's how when I'm in South Korea, they will keep saying in South Korea, there's difference between we and I. So when you say I like this, say I and then, of course, all the North Koreans keep saying we love this country.
00:35:56.000And South Koreans get so frustrated that we are keep misusing I and we.
00:36:01.000And that's how regime controls your minds through language.
00:36:05.000It is George Orwell's 1984. They create double-speak, while language is so important, because it controls your thoughts.
00:36:13.000So that's how I got rid of the romantic love.
00:36:16.000We don't even know possibly another human can love another human.
00:36:20.000Only love that neurosurgeons know is like, we transform love that when we describe our feelings towards the leader.
00:36:27.000And we don't know that word can be used to describing our feelings to another human.
00:36:33.000When Kim Jong Il died and people were crying in the streets and people were sent to prison for not crying enough, it was the strangest thing for us to watch as Americans because it was performative,
00:37:42.000It's, I mean, the first thing my mom told him as a young girl was not even be careful of strangers, be careful of, you know, call, like, none of that.
00:37:50.000She would say, be careful of your tongue, because that is the most dangerous weapon you got in your body.
00:37:56.000Don't even whisper, because the birds and mice couldn't hear you.
00:38:00.000So that's the first thing you hear from your parents, how dangerous what you say is going to be.
00:38:06.000Did you personally see people that you knew get imprisoned because of things that they said?
00:42:45.000I mean, they have pleasure squad, right?
00:42:49.000Every year they go around the country, pick up the virgin girls, bring them back to Pyongyang, make them call the satisfactory groups, train them to become sex machines.
00:43:00.000So these officials, now the guy who's in the second power in North Korea, his name is Chae Ryong-hae, He has his own pleasure squad, and he takes entire teeth out of these girls.
00:43:11.000So when they kiss him down there, he has more pleasure.
00:43:17.000So these things are not a crime in North Korea.
00:43:19.000Literally, when women walk down, if the guys stand you and rape you, you cannot go to police.
00:44:23.000In 2014, UN conducted this investigation for a year, and the conclusion was the only resemblance that we find in our history what is happening to North Korean people is a holocaust.
00:47:24.000They don't even bother to tell them who the leader of the country is.
00:47:28.000And what did someone in their family do that would allow them, that would make them get put into these concentration camps?
00:47:35.000So they find out later their great-great-grandfather was working with the Japanese for like a week when the Japan was colonizing or the Korean was starting, they were talking to American soldiers.
00:47:48.000Or they were, they're like cousins of nephews of like some in-law was a Christian.
00:47:55.000Because North Korea is the number one Christian persecution country, because they copied the Bible, right?
00:48:01.000They said, oh, Kim Il-sung loves us so much.
00:48:29.000That's why, like, I believe that Kim was reading my mind.
00:48:32.000And if the people believe in the Hebrew, like, Jesus knows what you're thinking, why do you think it's surprising that North Koreans believe that?
00:48:40.000So someone's great grandfather speaking to the Japanese would be the reason why they would be raised in a concentration camp and never even be told the name of the leaders.
00:51:41.000So a lot of empathizers of communism and anti-Western civilization people, they defend North Korea like hell.
00:51:50.000But do they, when they speak of it, like the Chinese Communist Party, when they speak of North Korea, do they have a distorted image that they project of what it's like in North Korea?
00:54:23.000And when you see the power that China has and that they're supporting North Korea and that there's no pushback from America, what does that feel like to you when you see this, knowing what you went through?
00:54:38.000And not only knowing what you went through, but the fact that you talk about this openly, you talked about it in your book that came out in 2015. Yeah.
00:54:45.000And you speak about it as often as possible, but yet there's not a lot of support, especially from political leaders.
00:54:55.000No one is stepping up to say your story.
00:56:55.000By the time he got to America, he was beaten to death, right?
00:56:58.000Yeah, and he was sentenced for 15 years in the labor camp for trying to steal the banner.
00:57:04.000But this is a country that did to white American mayor, to the most powerful country citizen.
00:57:10.000Imagine what they're going to do to their own citizen.
00:57:14.000You can't even imagine what they do to their own citizens.
00:57:18.000So North Korea, this nationalism is to the highest.
00:57:21.000So when North Koreans go to China, get raped, and we get pregnant, when we go back to North Korea, the guards kick our belly until baby dies.
00:58:14.000When Kim Jong-un killed his hot brother in Malaysia, nothing they were like, there's no accountability that we are asking of these people.
00:58:22.000So standing up fighting, It doesn't incentivize people anymore, right?
00:58:26.000So you don't see justice being served.
00:58:30.000And I think that is why it is so hard to fight now.
00:58:35.000Because people think justice is there, but I don't think it is that it's something I don't see in real life.
00:58:43.000When you actually fight against injustice, it's most likely you're going to be just like get killed and nobody cares and just keep moving on.
00:58:54.000I mean, if the United States and the relationship the United States has with China, they're unwilling to do anything or even speak out about it.
00:59:03.000When they talk about the problems of the world, North Korea is rarely discussed.
00:59:07.000And the horrific crimes of the North Korean regime against their own people, rarely discussed by politicians.
01:00:03.000So if individuals are being educated...
01:00:07.000On what is happening and who is actually responsible for supporting North Korean regime and how hard it is for the people who are being oppressed.
01:00:15.000If they start demanding the politicians and the world leaders and companies to be conscious and act, I think that is at this point my only hope is individuals.
01:00:26.000I have stopped trying to talk to UN. I don't even give talks anymore at the UN. Did you give talks in the past?
01:09:21.000And then we have to bring them in usually January.
01:09:25.000So because the farming starts around March, So they have to, you know, in like January, they collect them and pile them up, and then they started burying it, and then the dough happens, and they started farming process in the spring.
01:09:41.000And even then, you don't get any of the food that they're growing?
01:12:15.000Yeah, I remember after there for six months, one day, I was walking alone and then it's like, I literally felt like I lived a thousand years, right?
01:12:25.000Like making it one day was such a struggle.
01:12:28.000Whenever you let one day live, you think like, oh my God, I made one more day on earth.
01:19:00.000I mean, we've been starving all our lives, but they say, you know, God provides, so you go fast, you study Bible, you memorize verses, they come test you.
01:19:09.000And we pray together, and then once they think we are actually Christians, then they tell you how to go to South Korea.
01:23:33.000And the toughest thing is when we were going across China, we had to give him sleeping pills because he would cry and he doesn't speak Chinese.
01:23:41.000But in the desert, he had to wake up because he's going to die frozen to death in the desert.
01:25:53.000So we were, this is like what still shocks me is that these Mongolian soldiers didn't have to send us to China, but they want to see how we react.
01:26:05.000So that's what they were playing with us, right?
01:41:09.000I remember in San Francisco a few years ago when I came to America after my speech somebody came and hugged me and I get really stiffened because some guy hugging me and he said okay don't worry baby I'm gay like what the heck is gay?
01:43:55.000So even though you were 17, you were really 15. Yeah, so America, that's why there was some confusion when I was giving interviews in the beginning.
01:44:01.000When I escaped from North Korea, North Korean age, I was 15. So in South Korean press, I had to tell them Korean age.
01:44:37.000I took GED. So I crashed from one year to elementary, middle school, high school, everything within a year.
01:44:45.000So that's how I went to university when I was 17 years old, American age.
01:44:51.000Which is amazing, because a lot of people here don't even go to university when they're 17, and they're studying their whole life under normal circumstances.
01:45:49.000And so what were you studying and how were you doing it?
01:45:54.000I was doing all the school requirement projects for GED, right?
01:45:58.000Biology, physics, math, English, history, all this writing, everything.
01:46:03.000But on top of that, I was reading books.
01:46:07.000I read, like last I read like a few hundred books, but in South Korea, I was reading at least 100 books outside of the school curriculum books that you required to read.
01:46:16.000So because I was, I mean, I did not know what Shakespeare is.
01:47:01.000It's gotta be so strange to be 15 years old and learning about the whole world, not knowing anything that's happening in other countries, other continents, not knowing anything about pop stars and world leaders.
01:48:01.000So one of the things that struck me is that you were so obsessed with learning that even when you went to sleep, you would play TED speeches.
01:48:10.000And I listened to a lot of your podcast.
01:48:20.000I mean, even to this day, English, I learned even when I was 21, like, five years ago.
01:48:25.000So it's still, like, a struggle for me.
01:48:29.000So you were listening to podcasts, you were listening to NPR, you were listening to TED Talks, and what was it like for you to try to absorb all of this information at such a frantic pace?
01:48:45.000It's amazing, first of all, that you read whatever you want.
01:48:49.000The one point that changed me as a child was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm.
01:48:56.000I literally went up and picked up the book, the thinnest book.
01:49:00.000And I thought, okay, it takes the least time for me to finish it.
01:49:04.000And reading that book made everything sense to me because after North Korea, of course, I mean, learning what subways is challenging, right?
01:49:13.000Learning what hamburger is is like a learning experience.
01:49:16.000But learning how to trust again, I think that was the hardest thing.
01:50:34.000In America, everybody talks about how they're oppressed systemically.
01:50:39.000You know people in North Korea don't even know they're oppressed.
01:50:43.000If you know you're oppressed, you are not oppressed.
01:50:46.000Not knowing is a true definition of oppression.
01:50:49.000Unfortunately in this country they've made oppression a valuable thing.
01:50:55.000Like if you can say that you're oppressed and people look for oppression that sometimes doesn't exist.
01:51:02.000For sure there is oppression in this country and for sure there is racism in this country.
01:51:06.000But it's become a commodity and it's become a commodity that you can claim and you can use it to bolster and fortify your personality and your personal status.
01:51:42.0002016 I joined after Trump became president.
01:51:45.000The worst time you could ever join, right?
01:51:48.000Because this is like political correctness at the peak of its frenzy and also they feel justified because they feel they have this despot in the White House.
01:51:56.000This terrible person who's going to destroy people of color and gay people and he's a this and a that and a homophobe and a racist and a sexist.
01:52:06.000And so everything that you can possibly do to stop a person like that must be justified, including distorting truth.
01:53:42.000So, my professor was arguing that, she was asking, so how to, the sensitivity training, why you gotta be sensitive to all findings, hidden oppression.
01:53:53.000And what do you think about men holding a door for you?
01:53:56.000And I was thinking, okay, that's a sign of decency.
01:54:30.000For me, a safe place meant where you can express your views.
01:54:38.000Especially in the universe, you can be dumb to search for truth.
01:54:42.000But here, in the name of safe space, no other than the mainstream view, you cannot have them.
01:54:49.000But it's just so sad to me that there's such a lack of nuance because for sure some men will hold open a door for you because they want to pretend that they're stronger than you or they want to show you that they're better than you or they want to pretend they're being nice because they're trying to manipulate you.
01:55:08.000Yeah, because there are people like that.
01:55:10.000But also, some people will open the door to be polite because they're nice.
01:55:15.000And to deny that is to deny reality and to deny nuance.
01:55:19.000And that's what's really scary, is the sacrificing of nuance to promote a narrative that fits your needs.
01:55:59.000It's the commodity of accusations of finding people that are guilty for no reason of their own and may be guilty and they don't even know it.
01:56:09.000Or maybe they have some hidden bias that they're not even aware of and they're going to search it out.
01:56:13.000And so you have these paranoid people who are like, oh my god, am I secretly a bigot?
01:57:28.000This is all about love and trust and anti-racism and all these things.
01:57:31.000And then the people that were scared of it, they were sort of silenced in the universities until it started trickling over into corporations.
01:57:39.000And then when it started trickling into corporations, people started getting genuinely scared.
01:57:43.000And now we're at a point where I think the dam is broken and I don't know how they're ever going to put the genie back in the bottle.
01:58:52.000But just they happen to be a black woman.
01:58:54.000And I have a nanny who is Muslim in the nation with a hijab carrying my stroller behind me.
01:59:01.000And then I was trying to catch and call the police and these people on the street, the bystanders, white people, calling me I'm a racist, telling me that the color of skin doesn't make them a thief.
02:00:09.000They are not going to prosecute somebody who drops.
02:00:12.000And that's when I was thinking, this country lost it.
02:00:16.000Like, even in North Korea, if you see somebody, one small girl, being robbed and being punched by three big girls, they're gonna have the victim.
02:00:26.000They're not gonna just out of nowhere scream that you're a racist.
02:00:30.000So they were screaming you were racist because of the phone call that you were making?
02:03:29.000And a lot of it is because of people like you speaking up from a place of true oppression like North Korea in comparison to what's going on here where these privileged weirdos are attempting to distort reality for their own personal gain because that's what it is.
02:04:13.000Even if they know something is true, they're terrified of saying it because they don't want the blowback for it.
02:04:18.000So you see a lot of that going on in this country.
02:04:23.000And you see a lot of people Unfortunately, over this last year and a half because of the pandemic, you see a lot of people that are more than willing to sacrifice personal freedoms in order for a little bit of safety and a little bit of security.
02:04:38.000And they'll give up those freedoms to the government.
02:05:35.000If you give the government vaccine passports and if you let them censor social media posts that you don't agree with, the problem is, then what happens if someone who's far worse than Trump gets into office?
02:05:49.000Because that's probably going to happen, unfortunately.
02:05:52.000We're going to have this teeter-totter back.
02:05:54.000We've divided this country so thoroughly that there's going to be someone that's a far left person that makes people so angry that they're then willing to vote for a far right person.
02:06:06.000And when that far right person comes into office, they will have access to all of those powers that you so willingly gave up.
02:06:14.000Because you wanted to stop this idea that you didn't agree with.
02:06:19.000And they've done this in this horribly short-sighted way.
02:06:25.000And they've done it in the name of the woke.
02:06:28.000They've done it in the name of progressivism and wokeism and all this stupid shit that is this social contagion that's running through this country right now.
02:06:40.000It's like, to me, I've never been to American public school system, like, until universities, that, like, nothing has been more dangerous than government to individuals, right?
02:07:47.000And they don't recognize that if you give that power up to the people that are in charge currently, the next people are going to have it too.
02:07:55.000This was the thing about the Patriot Act that people were so terrified of in this country that were aware of the consequences.
02:08:00.000They were saying, well, Obama's never going to do this.
02:08:03.000Obama's not going to be in office forever.
02:08:05.000He's going to be in office for eight years.
02:08:49.000You need to be able to express ideas and debate them in full view of the world so that we get to see whose ideas are correct and whose ideas are incorrect.
02:08:57.000But in this society and today, You have people on the left, which are supposed to be the progressive people, the open-minded and intelligent people, supposedly, the people that are educated, supposedly, and they're the ones who are willing to censor people.
02:09:51.000I'm worried because it just seems to be sliding further and further in this direction of totalitarianism.
02:09:58.000And these people are willingly giving up these rights because they believe that that's going to support their side.
02:10:09.000And they think they're on the right side of history, they're on the right side of the truth, they're on the right side of Facts and kindness and anti-racism, whatever concepts that they are willing to subscribe to that they think that giving up these rights will promote.
02:10:37.000They're not looking at all of the – and we're so polarized with the right and the left in this country.
02:10:43.000We're so polarized with Republicans versus Democrats in this country that there's no middle ground anymore.
02:10:48.000The center is this weird place where no one wants to exist because they don't want to be attacked by people on either side, particularly people on the left.
02:10:56.000It was funny the other day when I was after Jordan Peterson interview about he out of nowhere like randomly asked how did you like Colombia and it's like it was terrible and then that wasn't we never discussed that we were going to talk about that and then Fox asked to ask me to have an interview about it so I did but then all my friends in the like liberal Why did you have to go on propaganda channel Fox to talk about the work culture in America?
02:11:25.000And I was like, I'm still waiting a call from New York Times.
02:11:27.000If they call me about workism in this country and danger of it, I'm going to talk to them.
02:11:33.000Wait a minute, the New York Times has never called you?
02:11:45.000Only when I was talking about Trump, they wanted me.
02:11:48.000Who has tried to talk to you about this?
02:11:52.000Some British newspapers still do, like Daily Telegraph.
02:11:57.000They still do want me to talk about China, but whenever in American media, it's whenever I talk about against Trump, that's when I meet their narrative.
02:12:31.000There's a big thing that's happening now where liberal people who are saying things that are outside of the narrative that you hear from CNN or MSNBC, they're going on like the Tucker Carlson show.
02:12:55.000They're saying things that they believe in, whether it's Glenn Greenwald or Brett Weinstein or whoever these people are that go on these shows and talk.
02:13:03.000These are progressive people, but they're being chastised and they're being attacked.
02:13:28.000You're de-platforming people off social media that say things that you don't agree with, like Alex Berenson, who used to work for the New York Times.
02:13:34.000He's critical of the way the government and the FDA and everyone is handling COVID, right?
02:13:39.000Or the CDC or the World Health Organization.
02:13:42.000And so he's got a lot of stuff that he talks that's critical about the COVID response in this country, critical about the vaccine effectiveness, critical about all sorts of different things in the healthcare system.
02:13:53.000And they removed him from Twitter for a week.
02:13:56.000They removed him from Twitter recently for discussing the actual CDC's reports on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness or whatever on COVID vaccines.
02:15:54.000No, it was CNN got some source from CIA saying Kim Jong-un was having some surgery and he was gone away for like a long time, disappeared, and didn't show up in the very important meetings.
02:16:07.000And Kim Jong-un does have health issues at this point.
02:16:57.000But it doesn't seem like there's any hope for North Korea to get out of their current situation.
02:17:02.000As long as China, the CCP is there, it's not going to be out.
02:17:06.000Whoever gets in next, China maintained exactly the same thing.
02:17:11.000So without changing the Chinese Communist Party, we never get to change North Korea.
02:17:16.000But what's crazy is that Chinese Communist Party recognized that they had a flaw in their own system and they allowed free market to run through China and it's only made China stronger.
02:17:53.000It's like what you say on social media.
02:17:55.000They're going to read your text like what China does already and give you the social credit and people rate you and you are forever controlled.
02:18:03.000I think to me is that this is the last time that humanity ever tried to be free as individuals.
02:18:11.000Being an individual is such a unique thing to me, that I can be different than you.
02:18:17.000It's the people talking about comparing, the biggest difference that people have between individuals.
02:18:24.000The difference you and I have is unthinkable.
02:18:27.000And the difference that I have with my mom is unthinkable.
02:18:30.000That's the beauty of America, that you can be different.
02:19:08.000Because, I mean, some others meet the YouTube guideline.
02:19:13.000And they're letting North Korean regime to have their propaganda channel on YouTube.
02:19:18.000So they give a platform to dictatorship.
02:19:21.000But they do not want to give a platform to the people who is fighting this human rights justice fight.
02:19:27.000And this is a thing, like one video I made about the Second Amendment.
02:19:32.000It was like my thoughts on the second, I thought like if every Hong Konger had a gun in their hands, Chinese would not take them over like that.
02:19:39.00075% of the population went on the street demanding they want to be independent.
02:20:14.000So this is a country that I am in now.
02:20:17.000I have to fight for freedom of speech in America.
02:20:21.000And I thought my journey to be freedom ended.
02:20:27.000The Second Amendment is a very contentious thing in this country and one of the interesting things about it is that people always want to cite mass shootings.
02:20:35.000But what they don't want to talk about with mass shootings is pharmaceutical companies.
02:20:39.000They don't want to talk about the fact that most, I mean most, of the people that are committing mass shootings are on some kind of psychotropic drugs.
02:21:38.000And I'm not saying that they should raise up against the government, but there's some crazy shit going on right now where the army is trying to keep people inside in Australia.
02:21:48.000And one of the things that I read was that as they're doing this, only nine people have died from COVID over the last...
02:23:12.000So I think it's nine deaths total since September, and they have a full-on government lockdown where the military is locking down the streets.
02:23:45.000But the actual cause of death is pretty staggering.
02:23:48.000The numbers of people that are dying from heart attacks and cancer from preventable decisions that people make that actively wind up costing the public untold numbers of I mean,
02:24:04.000what's the amount of money that's the burden, the financial burden on the healthcare system because of people that are obese, because of heart disease, because of cancer?
02:27:01.000Look, when that movie, The Fast and the Furious came out, I think the numbers, I'm roughly saying the numbers, but I think the numbers were, the box office weekend was $160 million.
02:27:43.000It's crazy that people are willing to give a country like China that much power because of money.
02:27:50.000But that's the reality of this world that we live in.
02:27:53.000We don't manufacture anything in America anymore.
02:27:55.000I mean, all these woke people tweeting on iPhones that are made at Foxconn in China where they have nets around the building to stop people from jumping off the roof because there's so many people that commit suicide that they have to have fucking nets.
02:28:08.000And the fact that people don't make that connection, they don't understand how crazy that is, that you're literally supporting this company that is making people work so much for so little and they're so desperate and so sad that they're jumping off roofs in numbers so high they have to put nets on them.
02:28:57.000I think they look at the worst examples of capitalism, and there are horrible examples of capitalism, and there are people that are willing to do anything for money.
02:29:07.000I mean, you've seen that with people like John Cena apologizing for China, right?
02:29:11.000I mean, that's the kind of thing that is a form of capitalism that you're seeing, apologizing to Yeah.
02:29:32.000You're seeing that with these subprime mortgages that cause the housing collapse.
02:29:38.000You're seeing that when you see corruption in the stock market or when you see any kind of savings and loans corruption.
02:29:45.000And there's financial corruption and stealing money and the corporate influence that they have on politicians and lobbyists and special interest groups.
02:29:53.000That's all capitalism run amok, right?
02:29:56.000But the bare bones of it The idea that there's many parts of this country that are still a meritocracy.
02:30:05.000There's many parts of this country where you can work hard and do better for yourself and accomplish things and provide a service that people enjoy and they give you money and the harder you work and the better your product is, the more you profit from it.
02:30:16.000And that gives people incentive to do well.
02:30:39.000The default position, if you go throughout history and you look at all of the governments that existed until America really came along, it's dictators.
02:31:43.000China's going to sneak in and they're going to take over all sorts of corporations by buying them out.
02:31:48.000They're going to take over all sorts of politicians by influencing their campaigns and changing the laws that they're willing to support and changing the amendments and the different ways that we govern the country.
02:32:02.000They're going to change the way people vote.
02:32:04.000They're going to change all kinds of things.
02:32:07.000It's almost what the founding fathers somehow or another knew that this could happen.
02:32:14.000When they put in place the Bill of Rights and all these amendments, when they were putting in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, all these amendments, they were doing it because they understood human nature.
02:32:27.000They understood what has happened in the past.
02:32:30.000When people have organized, what has happened in the past when free speech has been stifled?
02:32:35.000What has happened in the past when we allow someone to censor us and we allow someone to dictate what gets discussed and what doesn't get discussed?
02:32:46.000I mean, the only thing at Columbia entire four years that I hear is that the only way to solve the problem that we have is tearing down this foundation of this country.
02:32:56.000Because the Constitution itself is a bigotry written by white supremacists.
02:33:01.000So that is, I mean, I don't know, that's every conclusion of every class that I took.
02:33:27.000And everybody don't even know they are slaves now.
02:33:30.000And you can manipulate the truth to fit the narrative that allows you to stay in power and keep utilizing the tools that allowed you to get into power in the first place.
02:33:44.000Make it no different than every other government that's ever controlled the people throughout human history.
02:33:51.000We have a chance to not have it like that in this country.
02:33:55.000That's why when people oppose universal restrictions, when people oppose widespread government powers to do things, that was one of the big Yeah.
02:34:24.000What is essential and what is not essential?
02:34:28.000What chances you can take and not take?
02:34:32.000And they're not being honest about all sorts of aspects of the disease.
02:34:37.000They weren't even willing to discuss whether or not this disease possibly was leaked from a lab until long after Trump was out of office.
02:34:46.000And even to this day, liberals are terrified of bringing that up because they think that if you bring it up, somehow or another it can connect you to Trump or Fox News or you've said something that Fox News said.
02:35:29.000And people are terrified of doing that today.
02:35:32.000And a lot of it is because of social media.
02:35:34.000Because there's so many people that just live on social media all day long.
02:35:40.000And they're on there just constantly going to war in the worst way possible with text messages.
02:35:47.000Get triggered by every single thing they see.
02:35:50.000Didn't they talk to you about that in Colombia too?
02:35:52.000They tell you about things that triggered you?
02:35:55.000So before the class, they send you email and say, oh, in this material, we're going to talk about maybe racism or rape or any kind of oppression, whatever it is.
02:36:06.000If it hurts, it triggers your feelings.
02:36:09.000Do not even do the reading and don't even come to class.
02:36:12.000And before the class, they announce, even at any point during this class, it triggers your feelings.
02:36:17.000Leave the class and don't even tell me what you feel.
02:36:20.000And the people are emotionally not stable, so they bring the comfort dogs in the classroom.
02:38:18.000It means the ability like you need a military and if you don't think you need a military, you need to go and pay attention to the rest of the world because there's militaries all over the world that are doing horrific things.
02:38:29.000If you don't have a military in this country that can combat that, And at least act as a deterrent to them doing things, you're going to get taken over.
02:38:39.000I mean, look what's happening to Hong Kong, right?
02:38:41.000I mean, this is a city that essentially doesn't have a military, and they were a British colony for a long time, and they gave it back over to China, and they were kind of acting like they were independent until recently.
02:38:52.000And during the pandemic, they've ramped it up, and it's gotten even worse.
02:40:41.000Universities, they scare you, and you are never getting a real sense of the world.
02:40:46.000I mean, the fact that they're triggered by hearing the word rape, what they're going to do when they get raped, they're never going to revive again afterwards.
02:40:54.000Well, the disturbing thing is that when you're learning things, if you're going to learn, you're going to be exposed to some horrific truths.
02:41:05.000Like, if you're going to learn about Stalin, you're going to...
02:41:08.000I mean, I've talked to my friend Lex Friedman when he was talking to me about some of the experiences that his grandmother's people had when Stalin was running Russia.
02:41:20.000And people were eating their own children.
02:41:45.000You are absolutely aware of what can happen when things go horrifically wrong because you were born into a society that was horrifically wrong.
02:41:56.000You were born into this terrifying dictatorship.
02:42:01.000While you and I are sitting here in Austin, Texas, talking, drinking coffee, having a good old time, there's people in concentration camps for no fault of their own in a country where you were born.
02:42:12.000And if that doesn't get discussed, people don't understand.
02:42:15.000If you say, oh, are you triggered by this?
02:43:11.000And this is the thing they think is the biggest injustice they've ever seen.
02:43:15.000Yeah, we've weaponized people being offended too.
02:43:19.000When people are offended, they get a massive amount of extra attention.
02:43:23.000All they have to do is yell about it and scream about it and talk about how horrible it is and everyone is like, oh my god, I hear your truth.
02:43:28.000I feel you when you're saying this and it makes them special.
02:43:32.000You're encouraging people to act up instead of encouraging people to change their perspective and to see things for what they are or to look at the way other people see things.
02:43:42.000To look at it from someone else's viewpoint, from someone else's life, from someone else's learned experiences.
02:43:48.000You know, it was really funny, like, while I was writing my book, my agent was telling me, my editor was telling me, like, Yeonmi, you're traumatized.
02:43:58.000So you need to go see somebody called a therapist, right?
02:44:02.000So I was like, what the heck is a therapist?
02:44:06.000And then they're like, oh, you gave, like, pay her, like, she's normally $700 per hour, but she's going to give you a discount, so per hour, $20.
02:44:18.000Yeah, in New York City, but then, like, she's going to give me a discount raise, so $200 per hour.
02:44:23.000Basically, go talk to her how hard my life was.
02:44:28.000And then I was like, the fact that I know what trauma is, what PTSD is, the fact that there are people like right now, 25 million of my people don't even know what trauma is.
02:45:18.000But the fact that I couldn't fathom in the beginning that you need to go to therapy to survive in Manhattan.
02:45:27.000I think people need to be able to talk to people about things to try to work through them.
02:45:34.000And I think a lot of people feel like they can't find someone in their life that they trust enough with their true feelings and their real thoughts.
02:45:43.000And that's a sad testament to the kind of relationships that a lot of people have.
02:45:48.000A lot of friendships and romantic relationships that people have in their life.
02:45:53.000That they can't talk openly about the real live experiences.
02:46:00.000We have so much versions of ourselves inside us.
02:46:05.000I can see why people become the guards of concentration camps.
02:46:16.000When you were talking about experiencing dead bodies in the street but feeling nothing or feeling that boy with his intestines hanging out his back and feeling nothing.
02:46:26.000That's because of the way you grew up.
02:47:12.000So getting rid of these people and deplatforming and canceling them, we don't get rid of actual problem.
02:47:17.000So in a way, it's better for us to talk about our full nature, what we are actually capable of, right?
02:47:23.000We can be so resilient, compassionate beings, or we can be completely like an asshole, like not caring about anything at all like Kim Jong-un.
02:47:31.000And we have to learn why people think differently than us.
02:47:35.000And the only way you can do that is by talking to them.
02:48:20.000When do you feel like, because you had this time in your life where you could see that boy with his intestines hanging out on his back and it didn't bother you, you didn't feel anything.
02:48:30.000When do you think you started to feel things?
02:50:21.000I learned love later in life, so I knew the word, but I did not actually ever felt it.
02:50:30.000So when I was on that, for the first time, all I felt was love and zero, zero fear.
02:50:37.000And that sounds like, I know that when these people say they love me, actually this is how they feel actually.
02:50:43.000Is it possible to love somebody unconditionally?
02:50:47.000And after that I became pregnant because I wasn't able to get pregnant.
02:50:51.000From all my trauma I had, I had three IVF cycles at 22. And after that medicine, something relaxed in my body, I was able to conceive and I had my son.
02:51:05.000I think a lot of people could benefit from one of those experiences.
02:51:08.000I think it would change a lot about the way we look at life, the way we look at each other, and it would just eliminate a lot of the anger that people have.
02:51:30.000And so much of it is based on our own insecurities and our fear that other people won't love us back.
02:51:36.000And if you do one of those experiences with other people and you're all in it together, you realize, wow, so the world could be like this all the time?
02:52:32.000Like, even though a lot of experiences I had with a man was negative, that I was able to overcome it, right?
02:52:39.000But I think a lot of people cannot overcome that trauma because they are just not able to make that connection.
02:52:45.000It's one of the terrifying lessons of being a human being is that there can be wonderful, loving experiences at the same time where horrific things are happening somewhere else.
02:52:56.000And you know better than anybody alive because of the country where you were born.
02:53:03.000That's happening right now that there's a place where there is no love and everyone's afraid.
02:53:08.000And there's just this horrific regime that's running this country and keeping people starving.
02:53:15.000And it's happening at the same time as iPhones and the internet and electric cars and all the wonderful things that we're experiencing here in America.
02:53:25.000It's the worst example of human life and it exists simultaneously.
02:53:56.000That's why even though I don't know people are going to now listen to me and help me to raise awareness and condemn Chinese regime to stop sponsor Kim Jong-un.
02:54:28.000It's the thing, like, I have no problem when people are going, like, at the Canada goods store, putting the, like, blood on them, like, in New York, Soho, right?
02:55:18.000Like, animals, puppies have rights here?
02:55:21.000And then, on top of that, I go meet so many people, the philanthropists, and they are willing to give millions of dollars to save animals and dolphins and little ducks that don't die from Canada goose.
02:55:35.000But they do not want to rescue these girls who are raped every single day.
02:55:39.000And somehow, I think this anti-human sentiment, I don't know even what that is.
02:55:45.000The fact that we care about animals is a beautiful thing, isn't it?
02:55:49.000We care that something cannot speak for themselves.
02:56:11.000And people somehow refuse to speak for another human being.
02:56:14.000They would rather speak for a little puppy.
02:56:16.000And it's very the hypocrisy that doesn't make sense.
02:56:20.000Like if someone's suffering that bothers you, why the human suffering doesn't bother you?
02:56:25.000I think it's so big and so insurmountable that they don't feel like they can do anything about it, and so they're scared.
02:56:32.000And so they don't speak about it, because to actually do something would require an enormous effort.
02:56:39.000To do something to change the regime of North Korea.
02:56:42.000Like, what does a person who lives in Berkeley, who loves to support social justice causes, how is that person going to affect the dictatorship that's happening right now in North Korea?
02:56:55.000They can tweet about what's happening that China does to North Koreans.
02:56:59.000Yeah, they're scared to even tweet about China.
02:57:01.000They'd rather tweet calling, you know, some white guy racist inherently or some, you know, this person or that or that person or this and come up with some sort of, you know, insults for people that don't agree with what they agree with.
03:00:15.000There is really no distinction at this point.
03:00:17.000And China is very clever in the way they have all these interests in all different parts of the world and in Africa and all these different minds.
03:01:44.000So I said the mountain, then she's alive because what she climbed was a hill.
03:01:48.000So they tried to get you on a technicality with that, with the altitude of the hill, and then also on a technicality with the age, which you explained.
03:02:28.000And when I was writing my book, I knew, I mean, of course, Penguin is not stupid.
03:02:33.000They took a legal team, the people with me, and then got the live recording of people who cross desert with me, who grew up with me, everybody.
03:02:41.000So they got the live recording in the legal team.
03:02:44.000So that's why after the book, there's not even one single accusation, because they were going to sue afterwards, like we have entire evidence.
03:02:51.000So it was all everything before the book.
03:02:53.000And also the thing is, I mean, a lot of Maoists, Leninists, they sympathize with the North Korean regime.
03:03:43.000I know, but it's hard to believe that this isn't just a human story, a staggering human story, an amazing human story in terms of the education that you've had, the experiences that you've had, the way you've changed and evolved.
03:03:59.000Having escaped from North Korea into China and then to South Korea and then eventually to America and experienced all these things from this very unique perspective.
03:04:22.000My book starts that there are two things I'm grateful for, that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped.
03:04:29.000So I don't feed the narrative they are trying to portray in any way.
03:04:35.000That's very disappointing to me that there is a narrative that they want you to portray because your actual story is a very human story and it's a contemporary story that's very important when you look at the way the world is being run.
03:04:49.000Certain parts of it, like North Korea or like China, this is from a person like yourself, no one else is going to be able to tell that story.
03:04:59.000Your story, it's impossible for anyone that hasn't experienced it to tell.
03:09:13.000So there shouldn't be any exception to Western civilization if we do not appreciate and guard this civilization, the alignment that we got.
03:09:21.000Especially if you pay attention to what's going on right now.
03:09:24.000And especially the way it's emanating from the universities, which is what's teaching and, you know, putting ideas in the minds of young people who will then go on to run things.
03:10:54.000Reading Jane Austen is like a hidden oppression that we don't see because she was living in a time of white colonialism and white supremacy.
03:11:01.000So the fact that you read Jane Austen is you get subconsciously brainwashed.
03:11:06.000This is how you need to look for hidden oppression.
03:11:48.000It has to be someone like you who's gone through what you've gone through and I think it's huge for the world to hear.
03:11:56.000It's incredibly significant and I hope more people want to talk to you.
03:12:02.000No, I think I'm so grateful is that in the desert, when I was crossing the desert, my father died a few months from a cancer he had in the concentration camp.
03:12:12.000And he died and I had nobody to call, right?