The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park

00:00:12.000 Well, very nice to meet you, first of all.

00:00:14.000 Thanks for coming here.

00:00:17.000 Is this your first time in Texas?

00:00:19.000 No, I've been here before.

00:00:20.000 You've been to Austin before?

00:00:21.000 Yes.

00:00:22.000 So for people who don't know your story, I'm just going to give them a primer just to sort of establish your history.

00:00:30.000 You were born in North Korea and you escaped North Korea when you were 13. Is that how old you were?

00:00:39.000 I 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,

00:01:06.000 but I Yeah.

00:01:15.000 Yeah.

00:01:24.000 Now that you live here in America and you can kind of eat whatever you want, when you look back on that, what does it seem like to you?

00:01:32.000 Does it seem like reality?

00:01:34.000 Does it seem like a dream?

00:01:35.000 What does your childhood seem like?

00:01:40.000 Sometimes this feels like a dream.

00:01:42.000 This feels like a dream?

00:01:43.000 Yeah, so I pinched myself a lot in the beginning.

00:01:47.000 Because they say if it's not dream, it hurts, right?

00:01:50.000 Right.

00:01:51.000 When you pinch yourself.

00:01:52.000 So a lot of times I pinch myself.

00:01:54.000 Because sometimes I'm really horrified if I wake up from this that I'm going to wake up in my living room in North Korea. 0.85

00:02:02.000 So sometimes that line is very blurry to me.

00:02:07.000 And because the one common thing that North Koreans all have is actually in our dreams when we sleep, it's back in North Korea. 1.00

00:02:15.000 So in our dreams, we somehow never able to escape it.

00:02:18.000 So every day my mom wakes up.

00:02:21.000 She tells me about a story how she was back in North Korea.

00:02:24.000 And I have the exact same thing.

00:02:26.000 No matter what, how many years we left afterwards, in our dreams we are still in that country.

00:02:31.000 So that's the nightmare.

00:02:33.000 The nightmare is that you're still trapped in North Korea.

00:02:35.000 Mm-hmm.

00:02:36.000 When you lived there, you didn't know that there was another way to live.

00:02:41.000 No.

00:02:43.000 It's like here right now, we cannot imagine a life in some different planet in the universe, right?

00:02:50.000 We just don't know what that life looks like.

00:02:52.000 Exactly the same thing.

00:02:54.000 I never knew the life in a different planet could be like.

00:02:58.000 And where you lived in North Korea, there was no internet.

00:03:02.000 There's very little electricity, right?

00:03:06.000 And how much education did you get?

00:03:11.000 I never even seen the map of the world.

00:03:14.000 So as an Asian, I did not even know that I was Asian.

00:03:18.000 So the regime told me I was a Kim Il-sung race.

00:03:22.000 Kim Il-Song race.

00:03:23.000 Yeah, and then the North Korean calendar begins when Kim Il-Song was born. 0.65

00:03:28.000 That's like to say one that our history begins.

00:03:31.000 So I don't even know what Jesus Christ is.

00:03:34.000 And I don't know anything before Kim.

00:03:38.000 So there was everything before Kim Do history was re-raised for us. 0.62

00:03:43.000 But the thing is that we are hungry, we're starving.

00:03:46.000 If you eat breakfast, you worry about lunch.

00:03:49.000 If you make it to dinner, you are not sure if you're going to make it to tomorrow.

00:03:54.000 So in that scenario, who thinks about history?

00:03:58.000 Nobody 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.

00:04:18.000 So 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.

00:04:25.000 It's a Hunger Games.

00:04:27.000 It's like when I was reading this book, Hunger Games, I literally like, oh my God, this person copied North Korea.

00:04:33.000 There's a capital.

00:04:34.000 You divide into 13 different districts.

00:04:37.000 Capital, people have everything they need.

00:04:39.000 And on other provinces, their own purpose, they're being starved.

00:04:44.000 So the only thing you can think of is your survivor.

00:04:47.000 If 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.

00:04:54.000 You can do all of that higher thinking when you are full in your stomach.

00:04:58.000 But when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger.

00:05:02.000 When did North Korea become what it is now?

00:05:06.000 When did it shift to this totalitarian regime that's starving its people and puts people in these classifications?

00:05:14.000 For 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.

00:05:26.000 Everyone in your generation, your next generation, all of them are guilty.

00:05:31.000 Yeah, forever.

00:05:32.000 There's no redemption.

00:05:33.000 If the one person commits a crime in that family clan, three to eight generations gotta be purged.

00:05:40.000 How many generations?

00:05:41.000 Three to eight generations.

00:05:42.000 Three to eight?

00:05:43.000 Yes.

00:05:44.000 Mostly commonly three, but the people like who challenge the regime or challenge the leader, then eight generations get purged.

00:05:51.000 Eight generations.

00:05:52.000 Yeah.

00:05:52.000 And then after the eighth generation, are they absolved?

00:05:55.000 No, they're all gone.

00:05:56.000 They're all gone. 0.81

00:05:56.000 By eight generations, you even kill in-laws of somebody in-law. 0.81

00:06:01.000 So not even the blood you get purged.

00:06:03.000 If your cousin, somebody marrying the in-law of somebody, so there was one official who escaped, 35,000 people were purged.

00:06:13.000 A lot of them, 80% of them, did not even know that they were related to this person.

00:06:18.000 Wow.

00:06:19.000 Yeah, cousins of cousins, somebody, somebody, that's how they find, they get rid of the root of entire this clan.

00:06:27.000 When did this all start?

00:06:29.000 When Kim Il-sung came into power, so he was a big Marxist and Leninist, and he was a communist.

00:06:36.000 So before the Korean War in 1948, that's when he began this, in the name of equality, right?

00:06:44.000 Let's take everything back from the capitalist.

00:06:47.000 Let's nationalize the land, get rid of private property.

00:06:51.000 But he made North Korea into very unequal society, dividing people into 50 different classes.

00:06:59.000 50?

00:06:59.000 Yeah.

00:07:00.000 And the way the classes worked, you couldn't marry up.

00:07:04.000 Say, like, if you were a higher class and a man wanted to marry you, if he was lower class, you would then become a lower class as well.

00:07:13.000 That's how they prevent the mixing with the class.

00:07:15.000 So there's no marrying up.

00:07:17.000 You only go down.

00:07:19.000 So no matter what happens, if you are at a lower class, you stay there forever. 0.99

00:07:23.000 Forever.

00:07:24.000 No chance of moving out of that zone.

00:07:26.000 And it's not based on merit, it's not based on your performance, it's not based on anything other than the way you were born.

00:07:36.000 No.

00:07:37.000 This is when I was confused when I went to South Korea.

00:07:40.000 People say, if you work hard in South Korea, you are going to get rewarded.

00:07:45.000 And that's when I thought, wow, that is justice.

00:07:48.000 Because in North Korea, it doesn't matter what you do, what you want to do, what your dreams are. 0.72

00:07:53.000 It's already determined by what your ancestors did.

00:07:58.000 But the thing is, how do you choose your ancestor?

00:08:01.000 You can never choose your parents.

00:08:05.000 And you had no idea that there was any other way to live when you're growing up like this?

00:08:09.000 Because I've never seen the map of the world.

00:08:11.000 I didn't even know, like, the Americans, how they looked alike.

00:08:14.000 Because we don't have internet, first of all.

00:08:16.000 We have only one channel that government, you know, controls every single content.

00:08:22.000 We don't even have any, we don't even have a cookbook.

00:08:25.000 That's the thing, as a Korean, I don't even know what cookbook is.

00:08:28.000 I mean, first of all, we don't have ingredients.

00:08:29.000 Like, how do you find half pounds of pork, scallion, blah, blah, right?

00:08:34.000 So cookbook is, like, pointless.

00:08:36.000 And not only that, there's no fashion, because, I mean, we don't have freedom to what we wear.

00:08:42.000 So even when I heard the job called modeling, I was like, what is that?

00:08:47.000 So everything that I learned here is, like, a new concept to me as a North Korean.

00:08:52.000 So when you would eat, where would you get your food from?

00:08:57.000 So, the land is government, right?

00:09:02.000 There's no private property.

00:09:04.000 But those farmers working in the collective farm, they smoke it out and stay in the black market secretly.

00:09:12.000 So those food, if we have money, we go to black market, buy corn, starch, those things.

00:09:19.000 But mostly we just go to mountains to pick up plants, flowers, and grasshoppers is the biggest protein source for North Koreans.

00:09:28.000 But the government doesn't provide any food for the people?

00:09:31.000 I heard they did in the 60s, 70s.

00:09:34.000 But I was born in 1993 in October.

00:09:38.000 And that is right after Soviet Union collapsed.

00:09:40.000 So until then, Soviet Union was subsidizing North Korea's economy heavily.

00:09:45.000 And China did the same.

00:09:46.000 But when they collapsed, they stopped helping North Korean regime.

00:09:49.000 So the regime policy was, if we as long as keep the 10% alive who are in the capital, Our rule is successful. 0.98

00:09:59.000 So they were not going to do anything until 90% of the population dies.

00:10:04.000 Wow.

00:10:05.000 Still, they are the same rule they have.

00:10:07.000 Until the 90% dies out, as long as we keep the 10% alive, we are not going to do anything, intervene the starvation. 1.00

00:10:15.000 So there's no effort whatsoever to get food to the people?

00:10:18.000 It's not like effort.

00:10:19.000 They're actually actively preventing people to get resources.

00:10:24.000 Right now, even last time, Biden was calling Kim Jong-un, can we give you a vaccine?

00:10:30.000 And Kim Jong-un said, no.

00:10:31.000 South Korea was calling.

00:10:32.000 North Korea last year, there was a big flood.

00:10:35.000 Can we give you at least some medicine?

00:10:37.000 And Kim Jong-un said, no, we don't want any medicine.

00:10:40.000 Because they don't want any aid from the West?

00:10:43.000 Even South Korea.

00:10:44.000 They want to keep people as weak as possible.

00:10:47.000 Exactly.

00:10:49.000 Today 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.

00:10:58.000 You 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.

00:11:10.000 Yeah.

00:11:10.000 So as you can see me, I'm like very small.

00:11:12.000 I eat a lot.

00:11:13.000 I'm like still 80 pounds.

00:11:15.000 But when I was escaping, I don't even know how rich I was.

00:11:18.000 And North Korean men, about four, ten feet high, they have to go to military.

00:11:25.000 Women is mandatory. 1.00

00:11:26.000 Men have to serve in the military 13 years, mandatory.

00:11:30.000 And women is 10 years. 0.99

00:11:32.000 And most men are very small because of malnutrition?

00:11:36.000 Yeah, 4'10 feet.

00:11:38.000 4'10.

00:11:38.000 Yeah.

00:11:39.000 Wow.

00:11:40.000 And so they just allow people to forage for themselves.

00:11:45.000 That's the idea.

00:11:46.000 Yeah.

00:11:46.000 Like, find your own food.

00:11:48.000 Yes.

00:11:48.000 Are you allowed to have a garden?

00:11:50.000 Can you grow vegetables?

00:11:51.000 Can you have animals?

00:11:52.000 Yes.

00:11:53.000 One 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.

00:12:05.000 Everything is owned by the state.

00:12:07.000 In North Korea, you don't even own yourself, right? 0.91

00:12:10.000 So I remember going to South Korea.

00:12:13.000 I got a gift one day, and it was a planner.

00:12:16.000 So what you do, what you're trying to do is a notebook.

00:12:19.000 And in North Korea, you don't plan your day. 0.81

00:12:24.000 You don't get to plan what you do with your life.

00:12:26.000 Like a week before or a day before, there's an announcement from the government.

00:12:31.000 How are you going to spend your day?

00:12:34.000 What to eat?

00:12:35.000 Where to go to work?

00:12:36.000 What to do?

00:12:37.000 When to go to sleep?

00:12:38.000 Everything is determined by your own state.

00:12:41.000 So this guy was executed because he killed one of the state's cows.

00:12:45.000 Yeah.

00:12:45.000 And you're not allowed to have your own animals.

00:12:48.000 You can't have like chickens or something along those lines.

00:12:51.000 They might hide it, but last year Kim Jong-un confiscated entire dog from the population.

00:12:57.000 All the dogs?

00:12:58.000 Yeah.

00:12:59.000 That was because of COVID-19, right?

00:13:01.000 No.

00:13:01.000 Because he said it was a corrupt Western sentiment where we have pets.

00:13:07.000 So he ordered to kill the entire dogs for the meat. 0.99

00:13:10.000 To get rid of dogs. 0.98

00:13:12.000 Because he just didn't like that it looks like Western having a dog.

00:13:16.000 Having a friendly relationship with animals.

00:13:18.000 So everyone's dog in all of North Korea was confiscated and killed.

00:13:23.000 Yeah.

00:13:23.000 And what did they do with the dogs?

00:13:24.000 I don't know what the regime leaders did.

00:13:29.000 Wow.

00:13:30.000 Yeah.

00:13:30.000 So do they provide you with any food?

00:13:33.000 No.

00:13:34.000 So you have to find food on your own and most of the food is wild food?

00:13:38.000 Like grasshoppers and flowers that are edible?

00:13:41.000 Yeah.

00:13:42.000 So this is why the most bizarre thing is that regime initially said, oh, give us your land, give us your freedom.

00:13:50.000 We are going to provide free health insurance, right?

00:13:54.000 For education, free housing, free of everything.

00:13:58.000 You don't have to worry about anything.

00:14:00.000 The state is going to be taking care of everything.

00:14:02.000 But after Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea came idea like this idea is called self-reliance.

00:14:09.000 So you relying on yourself.

00:14:12.000 But you can't farm.

00:14:15.000 No, you don't have land.

00:14:17.000 How do you farm?

00:14:17.000 You don't have freedom.

00:14:18.000 There's no free market.

00:14:20.000 My father was sent to prison camp because he sold metals.

00:14:25.000 Initially he sold rice, dried fish, clocks.

00:14:30.000 And trading is illegal.

00:14:31.000 It's not like he was selling weapons or drugs.

00:14:34.000 Trading is illegal.

00:14:35.000 So how do you be self-reliant?

00:14:39.000 Yeah.

00:14:41.000 So the whole idea is just to keep everybody weak.

00:14:45.000 Yeah.

00:14:47.000 It 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.

00:15:02.000 I heard that.

00:15:03.000 Isn't that crazy?

00:15:04.000 I was shocked.

00:15:06.000 I never understood having too much can be a problem because I just never knew that it could be a possibility of a problem.

00:15:12.000 It's the number one problem here.

00:15:14.000 Exactly how having too much is a problem.

00:15:16.000 I don't get it.

00:15:17.000 I think the...

00:15:18.000 What is the percentage, Jamie?

00:15:19.000 What is the percentage of people in America that are obese?

00:15:22.000 I think it's large.

00:15:23.000 I think it's more than 50%.

00:15:24.000 I think it's...

00:15:28.000 And it's a huge factor with diseases and...

00:15:31.000 I mean, 78% of the people that are in the ICU for COVID are obese.

00:15:35.000 What is it?

00:15:38.000 43%.

00:15:38.000 So almost half of the people in the country are obese.

00:15:43.000 Yeah.

00:15:44.000 Meaning they eat far too much food.

00:15:46.000 Yeah.

00:15:47.000 And for you, that concept must be insane.

00:15:51.000 You're in the upside-down world.

00:15:54.000 Right?

00:15:55.000 That's the thing.

00:15:56.000 It's like a different planet.

00:15:59.000 The common law that I knew in North Korea doesn't apply here anymore.

00:16:04.000 And it is just so confusing to me how hard it is not to eat.

00:16:09.000 It's hard when you don't have food, when you cannot find it.

00:16:12.000 And to me, I don't know why that is so challenging.

00:16:16.000 Can you do me a favor and just push the microphone forward?

00:16:18.000 Yeah, like this.

00:16:19.000 Yeah, so it's right in front of you.

00:16:20.000 There you go.

00:16:21.000 So, yeah, it must be like another planet, the idea of having too much food.

00:16:27.000 Yeah, and that's the source of, I mean, they're complaining about it.

00:16:32.000 So I'm like, even that is a reason for a complaint.

00:16:36.000 That's something unbelievable.

00:16:38.000 I just don't get it.

00:16:40.000 It's so easy.

00:16:41.000 If you have too much, you don't eat it.

00:16:43.000 You just don't put it in your mouth, right?

00:16:45.000 No one is forcing you to eat a lot.

00:16:48.000 Yeah, but food is addictive.

00:16:49.000 And people like to comfort themselves with food when it's everywhere.

00:16:54.000 And it's also, it's a strange problem, right?

00:16:59.000 The problem of excess.

00:17:00.000 It's a strange problem.

00:17:02.000 Like, you have too much.

00:17:03.000 But this is, I mean, humanity, all our humanity, we've been starving.

00:17:08.000 It'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.

00:17:18.000 I went to school there, and, like, my friend's complaints, I couldn't sympathize in the beginning.

00:17:24.000 I literally, because their problem is, like, some guy, they went on a date, they don't call them back.

00:17:29.000 And they call me and complain, like, you know, like, there's people with actual problems like life and death.

00:17:34.000 Yes.

00:17:35.000 This is not a problem, but...

00:17:37.000 Well, it's an issue of perspective, right?

00:17:39.000 Like, 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.

00:17:48.000 Yeah.

00:17:49.000 Yeah.

00:17:50.000 When you were talking about going to the doctor when you were a child, and that...

00:17:57.000 This is a very disturbing story, but I want you to try to explain it to people, how...

00:18:03.000 People 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.

00:18:14.000 And then the children would die, and the rats would eat the children.

00:18:18.000 Explain what this was like.

00:18:21.000 How did you see this?

00:18:24.000 Well, I mean, seeing that the bodies on the streets is like an everyday thing.

00:18:27.000 It was numb.

00:18:28.000 Where were the bodies?

00:18:29.000 Like just laying around on the streets?

00:18:31.000 So they are floating in the rivers.

00:18:34.000 And then they also, train stations somehow had a lot of dead bodies because North Korea is very cold. 0.63

00:18:40.000 And there's a train waiting area.

00:18:42.000 And North Korea has one train go to one distance like once a month.

00:18:47.000 And like here it would take like one hour to go the other place.

00:18:51.000 In North Korea it would take a month at least to go because there's no electricity.

00:18:55.000 And sometimes people have to push the train.

00:18:57.000 They have to push the train.

00:18:59.000 Yeah.

00:19:00.000 Traveling in North Korea is an unbelievably difficult thing within North Korea.

00:19:07.000 So, I mean, anyway, so in train stations, that's when people die mostly.

00:19:11.000 And 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.

00:19:20.000 If 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. 1.00

00:19:31.000 You should never know how to find people.

00:19:34.000 So in the morning when you go walking the train station, they just put the piles of dead bodies and they all become rigid, right?

00:19:43.000 They're almost like wood.

00:19:45.000 Piled down and taken away.

00:19:48.000 But the thing is, for me, I didn't even know the word compassion.

00:19:51.000 Nobody told me, you have to feel bad for it.

00:19:55.000 Because for me, fish in the water don't notice the water, right?

00:19:58.000 That was something every day I saw as a child.

00:20:02.000 So you never went days where you didn't see?

00:20:05.000 This is a normal thing to see dead bodies.

00:20:07.000 It was everyday as normal as breathing the air right now.

00:20:12.000 And one thing that I still remember is, my sister and I was walking by the well.

00:20:19.000 Like in North Korea, we don't have a sewage.

00:20:20.000 We don't have running water, obviously.

00:20:22.000 We have to go to well or river to bring the drinking water.

00:20:25.000 And there's a young teenage boy, I think, lying down, and his intestines coming out of his back.

00:20:33.000 When you're really malnourished, that thing all opens up.

00:20:37.000 You got zero, zero fat.

00:20:38.000 Every hole all opens. 0.58

00:20:41.000 And you see dogs looking at his organs coming out.

00:20:46.000 And he was just somehow conscious begging for food at the time.

00:20:49.000 He was begging for food while his organs were hanging out of his body.

00:20:53.000 Yeah.

00:20:53.000 And I don't know why he was like pants were off.

00:20:58.000 And I feel nothing.

00:20:59.000 That still haunts me to really say, like, I don't know how I feel nothing at that point.

00:21:06.000 And that just looked horrible.

00:21:08.000 And because of the fact that he's alive and so many flies flying by on his organs, and how he's somehow consciously begging for food.

00:21:19.000 And I didn't feel anything.

00:21:21.000 You have felt no compassion?

00:21:23.000 No.

00:21:23.000 It was just normal?

00:21:25.000 Yeah.

00:21:27.000 Yeah, so that was like daily life thing.

00:21:30.000 And then in the hospital when I was 13 years old, my parents took me to hospital because I was a bad stomach ache.

00:21:37.000 And then we don't have like x-ray machines.

00:21:39.000 We don't have MRI, none of that.

00:21:41.000 Dr. Robson Belli, and then he said, oh, we need to operate on her. 0.97

00:21:46.000 I think her appendix was bursting or something.

00:21:49.000 So that afternoon, they cut me open without any anesthesia.

00:21:54.000 But it's a normal thing.

00:21:55.000 People in North Korea operation without anesthesia.

00:21:58.000 But the chances of you going through surgery is a lot higher for you getting infected because we don't have penicillin.

00:22:05.000 The nurse is using a one meter to inject every single patient. 0.97

00:22:10.000 So who do you know what the other person has?

00:22:13.000 You get from actually most sick by being in the hospital.

00:22:16.000 Right.

00:22:17.000 And this is where we don't, of course, have indoor bathroom for the patient.

00:22:22.000 We have to go outside.

00:22:23.000 And in between there, there's piles of dead human bodies.

00:22:27.000 And that's when I was seeing somehow rats eating human eyes first for some reason.

00:22:35.000 Because they're probably soft and doesn't eat. 0.95

00:22:38.000 And these women, I don't know, my age probably, short hair, wearing these flower pants. 1.00

00:22:45.000 And when they're dead, their mouth is somehow open.

00:22:49.000 And their eyes are hollow.

00:22:51.000 And you see children looking at the rats and laughing and chasing them.

00:22:56.000 And adults telling them, don't eat those, you're going to get sick from it.

00:23:00.000 But of course kids don't care. 0.63

00:23:01.000 Even finding a rat is delicacy.

00:23:03.000 Because even finding a snake is a big prize.

00:23:07.000 You don't find those often.

00:23:10.000 So they were finding the rats and then just trying to eat them?

00:23:13.000 Yeah.

00:23:13.000 Were they eating them raw?

00:23:15.000 Sometimes if you find the skin, you do, but they do find some fire and roast them.

00:23:22.000 So they were excited to find a rat to eat.

00:23:24.000 So they were catching them with their hands.

00:23:26.000 Yeah, of course they were catching them with their hands.

00:23:30.000 And these pirates of human bodies, she was on top. 0.64

00:23:33.000 That's why I was able to see her wearing these flowers and pants. 1.00

00:23:37.000 And then her eyes were so hollow.

00:23:40.000 It's like, when you look at the human body, nothing is left.

00:23:43.000 I think that's what...

00:23:45.000 It's not like just death.

00:23:46.000 It's just like how it becomes nothing.

00:23:50.000 So empty inside.

00:23:51.000 She does not know the shame or pain.

00:23:54.000 She was lying there like that.

00:23:56.000 And you see children just chasing them and laughing and try to catch the rats.

00:24:00.000 And the children didn't feel anything being around the dead bodies?

00:24:04.000 No.

00:24:05.000 It's our daily normal thing.

00:24:07.000 Seeing death is like our daily life.

00:24:10.000 And they would eat the rats and then they would get sick and some of them would die.

00:24:14.000 Yeah.

00:24:15.000 A lot of them die.

00:24:16.000 And then the rats would eat them.

00:24:17.000 Yeah.

00:24:18.000 So the cycle we talk about.

00:24:19.000 It's like that's a spring is for North Carolina season of death.

00:24:23.000 And so the diseases that they would get from the rats, they were willing to risk those diseases just because of hunger.

00:24:29.000 Because there's a North Korean proverb.

00:24:33.000 There's no wish for the person who died after their stomach is full.

00:24:39.000 So even in the middle of the earthquake, the North Koreans not try to run.

00:24:44.000 So my mom was talking about the tale when she was in the university.

00:24:47.000 There's an earthquake happening.

00:24:49.000 And do you know what these students are doing?

00:24:51.000 They're not running out of the building and trying to survive.

00:24:53.000 They go to the kitchen.

00:24:55.000 So before they die, they eat at least.

00:24:57.000 So they can die.

00:24:59.000 So if you have the promise of eating one meal, they're gonna risk everything for that.

00:25:06.000 So it's just an entire country in a perpetual state of starvation.

00:25:10.000 Yeah.

00:25:11.000 I remember playing with this game with my sister.

00:25:13.000 As a young girl, I never ate till I felt full.

00:25:17.000 So I would compare myself.

00:25:19.000 I tell her, like, I can eat 100 bread.

00:25:21.000 And she's like, I can eat mountains of bread. 1.00

00:25:23.000 I can eat, like, 10,000 more than what you just said.

00:25:26.000 Because I don't know the limits of my stomach.

00:25:29.000 I never tasted it.

00:25:31.000 So you always were hungry.

00:25:33.000 Always hungry.

00:25:34.000 Never felt full.

00:25:39.000 So you escaped.

00:25:41.000 So your father was arrested for trading in metals, right?

00:25:46.000 And he was just trying to find resources, trying to get money for the black market for food and things like that.

00:25:54.000 Is that what it was?

00:25:55.000 To get us alive.

00:25:57.000 Because regime does not provide food for the people.

00:26:00.000 So they had to break the law, which is trading, to survive.

00:26:04.000 Without trading, how do we even survive?

00:26:07.000 So he was trading these matters.

00:26:09.000 And he got caught, and that's how he's in the prison camp.

00:26:13.000 And how long was he in prison for?

00:26:16.000 Several years, but he was sentenced to more than 10 years.

00:26:19.000 So I think he was totally imprisoned 34 years.

00:26:23.000 But he got out for sick leave, which is had to go back once he got better.

00:26:28.000 But of course, in North Korea, that's like, who cares if you die? 1.00

00:26:31.000 He was a very smart guy.

00:26:33.000 So he tricked the guard saying, if you get me out for the sick leave, I'm gonna get you money.

00:26:40.000 Because North Korea is the most corrupt country that you can find right now in today's world. 0.94

00:26:45.000 So corrupt.

00:26:46.000 So he tricked the guard, told him that he'd get him some money, and so he was in, for how many years?

00:26:52.000 You said four years?

00:26:53.000 Three, four years, yeah.

00:26:55.000 And what was it like when he got out?

00:26:58.000 I didn't recognize him when he came back to me.

00:27:01.000 I did not know that was my father.

00:27:04.000 Even his voice changed.

00:27:08.000 When I call North Korea, even till this day, I do have people underground. 0.88

00:27:12.000 I get information.

00:27:15.000 Their voice is different.

00:27:17.000 It's like their voice is so oppressed.

00:27:21.000 You can tell this is North Korean speaking.

00:27:23.000 You can tell just by their voice?

00:27:25.000 Yeah.

00:27:26.000 That's the thing.

00:27:26.000 When some Chinese, like, we have the brokers try to trick us, by voice we can tell.

00:27:32.000 If you're Chinese, like, Korean ethnic Chinese living in China trying to trick us, or actually North Korean is speaking to us. 1.00

00:27:40.000 So you can actually hear the oppression in their voice?

00:27:42.000 Yeah, you can.

00:27:43.000 What does it sound like?

00:27:47.000 It's a complete fear.

00:27:49.000 Like...

00:27:51.000 I'm terrified to the point they don't even know they're terrified.

00:27:55.000 They're like, I don't think even a bug would be that scared.

00:28:00.000 Like he was calling me on me in his voice.

00:28:04.000 I didn't see my father and he was so scared and I could see he was so scared.

00:28:09.000 I was like only nine something, ten.

00:28:11.000 I don't even know.

00:28:11.000 I was like young and I could say, why is he so afraid?

00:28:19.000 And so he does get out and they never put him back in jail again?

00:28:24.000 Because I rescued him after I went to China.

00:28:27.000 I got him out, so he had to go back.

00:28:29.000 He had to go back to jail, but he died in China.

00:28:36.000 So you were 13 when you and your family, was it you and your mother that escaped?

00:28:43.000 Yeah.

00:28:44.000 How did you get out?

00:28:46.000 So that hospital, initially my sister and I was going to escape.

00:28:50.000 But 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.

00:28:59.000 Luckily I was living in this border town of North Korea by then. 0.99

00:29:03.000 So at night, if you see the satellite photo of North Korea, it is literally the darkest place on earth.

00:29:10.000 We don't have electricity.

00:29:11.000 So I was seeing these lights coming from China.

00:29:15.000 So I thought if I go with the lights, we would be finding some bottle of rice.

00:29:22.000 So at 16, my sister left with her friend, and she left me a note while I was in the hospital and got my, removing my appendix.

00:29:31.000 And then as soon as I got out of the hospital, I found a note.

00:29:34.000 And initially, my mom and I went to look for a sister where she went.

00:29:38.000 But when we found the lady, she told me that she could help me to go to China that day.

00:29:45.000 And so this was you and your mother, and you were 13 years old.

00:29:48.000 Yeah.

00:29:48.000 So how did you get across, and what was that experience like?

00:29:53.000 So I told my mom, like, come with me to China.

00:29:58.000 And my mom was like, you know, my father was home.

00:30:02.000 He was waiting.

00:30:03.000 But the thing is, the tragic thing for North Carolina, we cannot even say goodbye to our loved ones.

00:30:09.000 So if we got caught on the journey, and if my father knew that we were escaping...

00:30:14.000 He's going to be punished so much.

00:30:16.000 It's better off that he does not know that we are escaping for his own safety.

00:30:22.000 Because they're going to torture you to the point that you're going to say anything.

00:30:26.000 Because they do this all subconscious torture that they make you not sleep in a single room that has no air, much air.

00:30:36.000 If you put there for 40 days alone, you go crazy.

00:30:40.000 You say whatever they ask you.

00:30:42.000 So if he actually knew that we were escaping, it wasn't good for him.

00:30:46.000 He would be dead.

00:30:47.000 So I told him, I'm like, you cannot tell father that we are escaping.

00:30:51.000 So that day we climbed up several mountains and then we went to the riverside.

00:30:58.000 But she had a connection with the guards.

00:31:01.000 Why did you not bring him with you?

00:31:03.000 Because he's a man and he was sick.

00:31:06.000 And somehow she said only women can go. 1.00

00:31:09.000 Only women can go. 1.00

00:31:10.000 I did not know what she meant by that.

00:31:13.000 She said you should just go with your mom. 0.99

00:31:15.000 And don't even tell those people that's your mom. 0.77

00:31:17.000 She said you are like 18 or something.

00:31:20.000 And my mom was something 30. So she told me that our age was different.

00:31:25.000 So this would somehow or another help you when you were going across?

00:31:29.000 Yeah.

00:31:30.000 How would that help you?

00:31:32.000 I don't know.

00:31:33.000 Or she told me, well, this is going to be helpful.

00:31:36.000 Well, part of the issue is in China, there's a disproportionate number of men in comparison to women.

00:31:45.000 And so they want as many women to come across that are of legal age, like women that can be married. 0.97

00:31:56.000 Right?

00:31:57.000 Is that the idea behind it?

00:31:59.000 It's a smuggling.

00:32:01.000 So you got it right.

00:32:03.000 Because of one child policy, a lot of girls got aborted in China. 1.00

00:32:08.000 So they kept boys.

00:32:10.000 So there's many, many men that have no chance of ever finding a woman because there are no women. 0.93

00:32:15.000 Yeah, over 30 million men in the rural areas cannot find wives.

00:32:20.000 30 million?

00:32:21.000 Over 30 million.

00:32:23.000 And this number is going to keep going up right now.

00:32:25.000 So that's a big problem for the Chinese regime.

00:32:29.000 But the thing is, even that, they don't allow North Korean women to stay there. 0.98

00:32:33.000 They catch us.

00:32:35.000 And they send us back to North Korea.

00:32:37.000 Last month, China repatriated 50 North Korean defectors back to North Korea.

00:32:43.000 It's sending them our suits.

00:32:45.000 Literally, they are sending them to death camp.

00:32:47.000 But the Chinese regime still do catch us and send us back because they think we are posing a threat to the regime.

00:32:54.000 And they don't want the regime to collapse.

00:32:56.000 So they are catching all the defectors.

00:32:58.000 But the human traffickers seized the opportunity here because we are so vulnerable, right?

00:33:03.000 We are running away from Chinese authority. 0.99

00:33:06.000 So even they rape us and kill us. 0.98

00:33:08.000 The last place that we are gonna go is going to police and then report on them. 0.97

00:33:14.000 Why did they think that women coming over from North Korea are gonna somehow or another collapse the empire? 1.00

00:33:21.000 Because that's what Kim Jong-un believes.

00:33:24.000 He thinks they're going to collapse through the defection, through the defectors.

00:33:27.000 So after Kim Jong-un came into power, he literally, the country cannot afford electricity, electrify the fence, the entire border.

00:33:38.000 Not 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. 0.81

00:33:45.000 They just shoot you right there. 0.98

00:33:46.000 And not only that, he buried the land mines.

00:33:50.000 On top of that.

00:33:52.000 So there's an electric fence, and then there's guards shooting to kill, and then past that there's landmines.

00:33:57.000 Yeah.

00:33:58.000 Entire country became a concentration camp. 0.68

00:34:01.000 Entire country.

00:34:03.000 When did they start putting the landmines in?

00:34:05.000 A few years ago.

00:34:06.000 So this is after you had already escaped.

00:34:08.000 Yeah.

00:34:08.000 Now you don't see North Korean de facto escaping from North Korea anymore.

00:34:13.000 It's impossible to escape at this point. 0.57

00:34:16.000 One 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.

00:34:31.000 Yeah.

00:34:32.000 And this is the first time you had ever even seen what sex was?

00:34:37.000 So I didn't even know that was sex.

00:34:39.000 I did not know even that was rape because we didn't have the vocabulary in North Korea.

00:34:43.000 So in North Korea, there's no word for stress.

00:34:46.000 There's no word for stress.

00:34:48.000 Because how can you be stressed in the socialist paradise?

00:34:51.000 So there's no world trauma.

00:34:53.000 There's no world depression because you cannot be simply depressed in socialist paradise.

00:34:58.000 There's no world for liberty.

00:35:00.000 There's no world for human rights.

00:35:02.000 There's no world for rape or even sex.

00:35:06.000 So I just thought something I was seeing was horrible. 0.90

00:35:10.000 But later they told me that was rape.

00:35:13.000 I did not know that was rape.

00:35:15.000 But you also said that you never heard the word love.

00:35:19.000 Yeah, no.

00:35:19.000 There's no word for love in North Korea.

00:35:22.000 So your mother never told you she loved you.

00:35:24.000 You never told your father you love him.

00:35:26.000 Yeah.

00:35:27.000 None of that.

00:35:28.000 So in North Korea, there's even no word for I. So they don't want people to be individualistic, right?

00:35:34.000 That's the worst thing you can be.

00:35:35.000 It's all a collective vision.

00:35:37.000 So when North Koreans say, I like water, I say we love water.

00:35:41.000 We love kimchi.

00:35:43.000 So 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. 0.85

00:35:56.000 And South Koreans get so frustrated that we are keep misusing I and we.

00:36:01.000 And that's how regime controls your minds through language.

00:36:05.000 It is George Orwell's 1984. They create double-speak, while language is so important, because it controls your thoughts.

00:36:13.000 So that's how I got rid of the romantic love.

00:36:16.000 We don't even know possibly another human can love another human.

00:36:20.000 Only love that neurosurgeons know is like, we transform love that when we describe our feelings towards the leader.

00:36:27.000 And we don't know that word can be used to describing our feelings to another human.

00:36:33.000 When 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,

00:36:50.000 where people were performing.

00:36:51.000 They were not really crying.

00:36:54.000 They were wailing in this very theatrical way to let everyone know that they were complying.

00:37:03.000 Your life is on the line.

00:37:05.000 People watching you.

00:37:06.000 If you don't mourn enough, that's the thing. 0.95

00:37:09.000 If you don't mourn in the most extreme high, they're going to send you to prison camp and execute you.

00:37:15.000 So we are doing it to survive.

00:37:17.000 Did you see anyone who didn't mourn enough?

00:37:20.000 No, I mean, it's impossible.

00:37:23.000 How do you not mourn enough?

00:37:25.000 How do you not possibly?

00:37:27.000 Your life generation is depending on you when you mourn.

00:37:30.000 So everyone knows this.

00:37:32.000 Of course we all know.

00:37:33.000 And everyone knows it's a threat.

00:37:34.000 Even babies know.

00:37:36.000 Even babies know.

00:37:37.000 When you born in North Korea, you know what it is.

00:37:40.000 You don't, like, start questioning.

00:37:42.000 It'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.

00:37:50.000 She would say, be careful of your tongue, because that is the most dangerous weapon you got in your body.

00:37:56.000 Don't even whisper, because the birds and mice couldn't hear you.

00:38:00.000 So that's the first thing you hear from your parents, how dangerous what you say is going to be.

00:38:06.000 Did you personally see people that you knew get imprisoned because of things that they said?

00:38:12.000 They just disappear.

00:38:13.000 Like one of my sister's classmates, her mom, when they executed.

00:38:18.000 And then because they're accusing her to receiving money from the foreign CIA or the South Korean intelligence.

00:38:25.000 But a month later, they said, oh, it was not a problem.

00:38:28.000 She was not a spy.

00:38:30.000 So they brought the family members back out of the concentration camp.

00:38:34.000 So they killed her for nothing?

00:38:35.000 And they don't even say sorry to that.

00:38:37.000 It's like we don't even know that's a concept.

00:38:39.000 The government can be sorry or they can ever make a mistake.

00:38:43.000 So how did they find out that she wasn't really a spy?

00:38:46.000 We just don't know.

00:38:47.000 Just one day that classmate came out and my sister, classmate came out and then she, they said like her mom was not a spy.

00:38:55.000 So they got out of the prison camp.

00:38:58.000 And that's it.

00:38:59.000 There's nothing, nothing we were, none of that.

00:39:03.000 And so this was a common thing.

00:39:05.000 Yeah.

00:39:05.000 And you just lived in constant fear.

00:39:08.000 This is the thing.

00:39:09.000 We are three people sitting here, right?

00:39:11.000 I'm watching you.

00:39:12.000 And Jamie's watching me.

00:39:13.000 And you're watching somebody else.

00:39:15.000 So even though I'm being a nice person, I'm not going to report on you.

00:39:18.000 I know Jamie's been watching me.

00:39:20.000 He's not going to report on me.

00:39:22.000 But even if you try to be nice, but he knows he's being watched by somebody too.

00:39:26.000 So you're being spied on and you're spying on somebody.

00:39:29.000 So no escape.

00:39:31.000 And everybody has to report anything that they find.

00:39:35.000 Like if you said something negative about the government, I would have to tell on you, otherwise I would get in trouble.

00:39:41.000 Yeah.

00:39:41.000 And the other person don't report on you, that person get in trouble.

00:39:45.000 There's no way out of it.

00:39:46.000 That's how they create distrust.

00:39:49.000 Like one thing that shocked me when I came to the West, like how trust exists.

00:39:54.000 In North Korea, there's a saying like, don't even trust your own back.

00:39:58.000 Because you don't know who is a spy.

00:40:01.000 You don't know who is listening, who is watching.

00:40:06.000 And people just disappear.

00:40:08.000 Yeah, just disappear.

00:40:10.000 And public executions happens in a stadium next to market where most people go.

00:40:15.000 And in our school, there's no concept of minor, right?

00:40:19.000 There's no concept like minors cannot do labor.

00:40:21.000 Like that's another thing.

00:40:23.000 As a child is seven years old, you go to school, you work.

00:40:26.000 You go to work in a dam, construction, in the farm.

00:40:29.000 And you are a minor, so therefore when there's public execution happens, you are on the front line because you are the shortest.

00:40:37.000 They line up five, six years old in the beginning, and then in the age going, it's mandatory to attend.

00:40:44.000 So it's mandatory to attend public executions?

00:40:47.000 Yeah.

00:40:48.000 And how do they kill the people? 0.88

00:40:50.000 After Kim Jong-un got in power, he became more brutal how he kills people.

00:40:55.000 He used the air missiles that shoot down the airplane, that kind of powerful weapon. 0.89

00:41:03.000 So when he kills people, they blow up into pieces.

00:41:07.000 Like they literally become just red pieces and fireworks.

00:41:11.000 That's how it, that's what I hear from nowadays executions.

00:41:14.000 But my time was more the guard standing and shoot you here, here, and three times, nine shots.

00:41:21.000 And then the body becomes like rolled, rolled, rolled.

00:41:24.000 And then like they just put in luggage and take it out.

00:41:28.000 But nowadays I heard they are using way more.

00:41:31.000 They are starting hanging too.

00:41:33.000 Before my time was just execution. 0.95

00:41:36.000 But Kim Jong-un said even the bullets, we don't want to waste on this like trash. 1.00

00:41:41.000 They call us trash and so just hang them and like or like stone to death. 1.00

00:41:46.000 So bring the people around the town and hit them with the rocks until they die. 1.00

00:41:50.000 So the people in the town would contribute to the execution. 0.98

00:41:54.000 They would be the ones throwing the rocks.

00:41:56.000 Yeah.

00:41:57.000 Otherwise you get punished, you have to.

00:41:59.000 And what are the crimes that you could be sentenced to death for?

00:42:05.000 It's as little as...

00:42:07.000 So in North Korea, every room has to have a portrait of Kim's.

00:42:12.000 And the inspector comes out of nowhere in the middle of the night and then touch the portraits if they see any dust.

00:42:18.000 They say your royalty is not high enough.

00:42:21.000 And then you can get executed and send to prison camp three generations of your family.

00:42:26.000 So if the picture is dusty, you get executed.

00:42:29.000 Yeah, and if your house gets on fire, the first thing is not you run with your family or your children or parents.

00:42:35.000 You have to protect the portraits of your life.

00:42:38.000 Otherwise, the three generation gets punished for that. 0.54

00:42:41.000 Even murderers, rapists in North Korea don't exist.

00:42:44.000 We don't even know what rape is. 1.00

00:42:45.000 I mean, they have pleasure squad, right? 0.98

00:42:49.000 Every 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. 0.98

00:42:59.000 Every year they do that. 0.94

00:43:00.000 So 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. 0.67

00:43:11.000 So when they kiss him down there, he has more pleasure.

00:43:17.000 So these things are not a crime in North Korea. 0.65

00:43:19.000 Literally, when women walk down, if the guys stand you and rape you, you cannot go to police. 0.78

00:43:25.000 You got raped. 0.99

00:43:25.000 It's your fault. 0.99

00:43:27.000 So this country, I mean, every wife gets beaten by husband in North Korea.

00:43:32.000 This is not a crime.

00:43:34.000 But if there's a newspaper, there's a portrait of Kim Jong-un, right?

00:43:37.000 Or Kim Jong-il.

00:43:38.000 You didn't see the front page.

00:43:40.000 In the back page, you ripped it by mistake.

00:43:42.000 That's how you get executed.

00:43:45.000 That is why we call crime in North Korea. 0.98

00:43:53.000 Wow.

00:43:56.000 Having escaped that and looking back on it now and knowing that it exists right now, what can be done?

00:44:05.000 What could the rest of the world do?

00:44:07.000 I mean, North Korea has nuclear weapons.

00:44:10.000 They have a powerful military.

00:44:12.000 What can the rest of the world do to stop this from happening?

00:44:15.000 Because it seems like this is horrific.

00:44:19.000 It's a form of genocide, and it's happening right now.

00:44:22.000 It's a holocaust. 0.98

00:44:23.000 In 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.

00:44:36.000 So Holocaust is happening again. 0.98

00:44:38.000 And of course, we're denying it again.

00:44:41.000 When Holocaust was happening, a lot of people said, how is that possible?

00:44:45.000 It's so hard to believe that.

00:44:47.000 And North Korea, using this concentration camp, these people do the biology test. 0.57

00:44:52.000 They put them in the gas chambers.

00:44:54.000 Right now, they do that.

00:44:56.000 A biology test?

00:44:57.000 Of course.

00:44:57.000 What's the biology test?

00:44:59.000 They test a lot of the weapons, biology weapons.

00:45:06.000 North Korea spends entire their GDP on developing nukes and weaponaries. 0.76

00:45:13.000 They are the biggest provider to the Middle East.

00:45:16.000 When there's war, they buy missiles from North Koreans. 0.94

00:45:19.000 North Korea makes money by selling the crystal meth and opium.

00:45:25.000 That's how Kim Jong-un makes money in hacking, right?

00:45:28.000 He steals a lot of Bitcoin and ghetto banks, ATM machines. 0.98

00:45:32.000 That's how he makes money.

00:45:33.000 Because they don't export anything other than drugs and weapons and hacking and human trafficking.

00:45:40.000 So they experiment on their own people to find out if these biological weapons work?

00:45:44.000 Yeah.

00:45:45.000 And also, they need a lot of concentration, like prisoners, because they have to clean the nuclear debris.

00:45:52.000 Because they do a lot of tests.

00:45:55.000 Since 2017, North Korea conducted almost 30 missile tests.

00:46:01.000 The one test missile cost to feed 25 million the entire year.

00:46:07.000 So if we chose to do four less tests, nobody had to die in North Korea from starvation.

00:46:15.000 And right now, Kim Jong-un recently admits that 11 million North Koreans are severely malnourished, and he's proud to say that. 1.00

00:46:21.000 And he's not even bothering to hide in the past.

00:46:25.000 Yeah, they are starving. 0.94

00:46:26.000 And he's fat. 0.74

00:46:27.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

00:46:27.000 That's his problem, being too fat. 0.99

00:46:34.000 Wow.

00:46:37.000 They're forced to clean up nuclear waste from these test sites.

00:46:42.000 And of course they die from radiation.

00:46:44.000 Of course.

00:46:45.000 They don't last three months.

00:46:47.000 Normal life expectancy when you go to a concentration camp is three months.

00:46:51.000 Three months.

00:46:52.000 Yeah.

00:46:52.000 So they need a lot of those people.

00:46:54.000 And they just use those people for fodder. 0.94

00:46:57.000 Yeah.

00:46:58.000 How many people, do they know how many people are in these concentration camps?

00:47:02.000 Nobody knows exactly, but several hundred thousand of them.

00:47:06.000 But there's also prison camps, concentration camps, prison camps, and labor camps.

00:47:12.000 And some people are born into these camps.

00:47:14.000 Yeah, those are people in the concentration camps.

00:47:17.000 And they don't even get to know the name of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-un.

00:47:21.000 They are too below the level.

00:47:24.000 They don't even bother to tell them who the leader of the country is.

00:47:28.000 And what did someone in their family do that would allow them, that would make them get put into these concentration camps?

00:47:35.000 So 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.

00:47:48.000 Or they were, they're like cousins of nephews of like some in-law was a Christian.

00:47:55.000 Because North Korea is the number one Christian persecution country, because they copied the Bible, right? 0.98

00:48:01.000 They said, oh, Kim Il-sung loves us so much.

00:48:03.000 He's a god.

00:48:03.000 He gave us his son, Kim Jong-il.

00:48:06.000 And he dies, but he speaks with us all the time.

00:48:09.000 That's why they can read my thoughts.

00:48:12.000 He knows how much hair I have, and that's how...

00:48:14.000 So when you become a god, you need to explain.

00:48:17.000 You don't need to make sense.

00:48:19.000 So they essentially use the story of the Bible for Kim Jong-il and...

00:48:25.000 Kim Il-sung.

00:48:25.000 Yeah, they copy the Bible.

00:48:27.000 Exactly copy the Bible.

00:48:28.000 Wow.

00:48:29.000 That's why, like, I believe that Kim was reading my mind.

00:48:32.000 And 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? 0.96

00:48:40.000 So 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.

00:48:49.000 Yeah.

00:48:50.000 And that's happening right now.

00:48:52.000 It's been happening for the last almost 80 years.

00:48:56.000 Yeah, this has been going on and as users ask what can be done.

00:49:01.000 Kim Jong Un cannot last even one week without Chinese regime support.

00:49:07.000 The only reason the regime exists is because of Chinese Communist Party.

00:49:12.000 How do you test missiles without oil?

00:49:15.000 Kim Jong-un cannot even drive his bench in Pyongyang.

00:49:19.000 China refused to not help the regime.

00:49:22.000 They keep helping Kim Jong-un.

00:49:24.000 Keep sending the oil.

00:49:25.000 Even last year, the New York Times covered it.

00:49:27.000 The ship is full of gas oil going to North Korea.

00:49:32.000 So Kim Jong-un could test missiles, even amid the pandemic.

00:49:36.000 Why does China support North Korea?

00:49:40.000 I really, really, I think one is they don't want that democracy come to next door, right?

00:49:48.000 That South Korea, Japan, America is all right next to North Korea geographically. 0.69

00:49:53.000 And North Korea is like this almost like a buffer zone for them, for this Western movement coming into their country.

00:50:00.000 And also they think of North Korea more like Tibet or Xinjiang.

00:50:04.000 If they let North Korea go, then Xinjiang people are going to want to go. 0.99

00:50:08.000 Tibet is going to be independent.

00:50:10.000 Hong Kong is going to be independent.

00:50:12.000 So they cannot give up any one of them.

00:50:15.000 So because of the stability and symbolic thing for the Chinese people within the country wants to be independent.

00:50:22.000 So they all want to maintain North Korea forever. 0.96

00:50:26.000 And Mao said that relationship between China and North Korea is that the relationship between your lips and the teeth.

00:50:34.000 Without lips, you cannot really close your mouth and eat.

00:50:37.000 Without your teeth, you cannot chew.

00:50:39.000 So you need each other to survive.

00:50:42.000 And that's how Mao's son died in Korea, by defending the Communist Party in the North. 0.80

00:50:47.000 That's how Mao lost his son.

00:50:50.000 That's how he believed that they need North Korea. 0.90

00:50:54.000 And so the Chinese Communist Party today shares a sentiment and they're using it strategically.

00:51:01.000 Yeah.

00:51:01.000 They run the dictatorship in North Korea.

00:51:03.000 They run the whole thing.

00:51:05.000 And that's the thing.

00:51:07.000 We have not been serving North Korea because we just never named accountability.

00:51:12.000 Who is responsible for this crisis?

00:51:14.000 That is China. 0.90

00:51:16.000 And, of course, in American mainstream.

00:51:18.000 They do not want to call out North Korea and China committing, you know, genocide.

00:51:24.000 That's why I've been having so many attacks from Marxists, communists, and Maoists, and Leninists, all these people.

00:51:33.000 And North Korea is almost this last country that holds ideological socialism.

00:51:38.000 So it's a very symbolic country.

00:51:41.000 So a lot of empathizers of communism and anti-Western civilization people, they defend North Korea like hell. 0.54

00:51:50.000 But 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?

00:52:02.000 Do they change the narrative?

00:52:05.000 Do they have a story of North Korea that's false, that makes it seem like North Korea is a nice place?

00:52:12.000 No, they know exactly what's going on.

00:52:15.000 They know?

00:52:15.000 Even Chinese people know.

00:52:18.000 So there's no defending it?

00:52:19.000 No, no.

00:52:20.000 Even Chinese people see it.

00:52:21.000 Like when North Koreans get captured, Chinese is still better nice than North Korean guards. 0.99

00:52:29.000 They like handcuff off, sort of eye blinds us.

00:52:32.000 But North Koreans come and put the wire in between here, in between your bones. 1.00

00:52:37.000 So connecting all the prisoners together so they cannot run.

00:52:41.000 Like cows. 0.75

00:52:43.000 They put a wire through their collarbone?

00:52:45.000 Yeah.

00:52:46.000 So they prevent us to escape.

00:52:49.000 So while we're in China, that's when the outsiders are watching.

00:52:53.000 But imagine what they're going to do inside the country when there's no camera.

00:52:56.000 So this is what China does to North Koreans?

00:52:59.000 China catches us and gives us to North Korean guards, and they watch it.

00:53:04.000 And they watch them do that?

00:53:06.000 And then they even horrify, but of course they don't do anything about it.

00:53:10.000 You don't have to go that far, but of course North Koreans do not accept defection, right?

00:53:16.000 That's why we are defectors, we are not refugees.

00:53:18.000 When we escape, we defy the ideology.

00:53:22.000 That's why North Koreans are not just refugees, they are political prisoners. 0.98

00:53:26.000 They are political refugees.

00:53:28.000 They should be covered by Geneva Convention and international law.

00:53:32.000 So China catching a sentence back, that is a crime against humanity. 0.81

00:53:36.000 They're breaking the international law.

00:53:38.000 But no one will punish them for that.

00:53:41.000 And nobody gonna talk about it even here in the West.

00:53:45.000 Why?

00:53:46.000 I mean, there's a Michelle Obama, right?

00:53:48.000 Nobel Peace Prize giving the girls like captured by ISIS or like Taliban, like Malala.

00:53:55.000 Michelle Obama stands up for the girls who were captured by, you know, ISIS and Boko Haram.

00:54:00.000 Who is standing up for North Korean girls being captured and raped in China right now? 0.86

00:54:05.000 There are 300,000 North Koreans right now when we are speaking in China and are sexual slaves. 0.99

00:54:13.000 300,000? 0.98

00:54:14.000 Yeah.

00:54:15.000 And most of them are women and girls.

00:54:19.000 China has incredible power.

00:54:21.000 Yeah.

00:54:23.000 And 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?

00:54:38.000 And 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.

00:54:45.000 And you speak about it as often as possible, but yet there's not a lot of support, especially from political leaders.

00:54:55.000 No one is stepping up to say your story.

00:54:59.000 Yeah. 0.92

00:55:00.000 It's total hypocrisy.

00:55:02.000 I mean, all these people in America talk about how slavery is wrong.

00:55:06.000 I agree slavery is the worst thing that we can do to another human being.

00:55:10.000 But why some slavery matters over some other slavery?

00:55:14.000 I mean, all these corporations talking about how they do not support the bigotry and racism and slavery.

00:55:21.000 It's happening right now in China and they have business with China.

00:55:25.000 And they don't say anything about it.

00:55:26.000 No, this is the thing.

00:55:28.000 When Hulu made a movie about assassins, about Kim Jong-nam's assassination three years ago in Malaysia.

00:55:37.000 Remember Kim Jong-un's half-brother, God?

00:55:39.000 Yes.

00:56:07.000 Because it would offend China. 0.84

00:56:09.000 Yes.

00:56:10.000 Why there is not even one single movie coming out of Hollywood about North Korean people suffering?

00:56:15.000 They made about Congo genocide.

00:56:17.000 They made all about genocide, not about North Korea. 0.60

00:56:21.000 That is a strange hypocrisy, isn't it? 0.52

00:56:23.000 Of course it is.

00:56:24.000 And it's about money, right?

00:56:25.000 Absolutely.

00:56:26.000 It's all about money.

00:56:27.000 All these people talking about justice, what they care about.

00:56:30.000 I mean, none of them do when it's real life.

00:56:34.000 And this is not, these are not secret stories.

00:56:36.000 It's not.

00:56:36.000 I mean, so this is the thing.

00:56:38.000 Oh, don't make it up. 0.95

00:56:39.000 And Kim Jong-un kills his uncle. 0.83

00:56:41.000 Right?

00:56:42.000 That was on the national newspaper. 0.69

00:56:43.000 He kills his half-brother.

00:56:45.000 And look, do you remember the older one year, the American 21-year-old student?

00:56:50.000 Yes.

00:56:50.000 He was accused of stealing the banner.

00:56:53.000 He was brain dead.

00:56:55.000 By the time he got to America, he was beaten to death, right?

00:56:58.000 Yeah, and he was sentenced for 15 years in the labor camp for trying to steal the banner.

00:57:04.000 But this is a country that did to white American mayor, to the most powerful country citizen.

00:57:10.000 Imagine what they're going to do to their own citizen.

00:57:14.000 You can't even imagine what they do to their own citizens.

00:57:18.000 So North Korea, this nationalism is to the highest. 0.98

00:57:21.000 So 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. 0.90

00:57:30.000 They don't let the baby leave. 0.98

00:57:35.000 It's just unbelievable.

00:57:38.000 This is happening in the 21st century, and still, we somehow don't talk about it.

00:57:44.000 Not just don't talk about it, but it keeps going generation after generation.

00:57:49.000 I mean, if it's been happening like this for more than 80 years, what's going to stop it from happening for another 80 years?

00:57:55.000 And if people are quiet, nothing.

00:57:57.000 It's going to keep going.

00:57:58.000 And this is what is to me as an activist, right?

00:58:02.000 I'm a dissent.

00:58:03.000 I'm fighting against this regime.

00:58:05.000 We know when Jamal Khashoggi get killed in Saudi consulate, there's no accountability for the dictator, right? 0.86

00:58:12.000 Saudi prince, he didn't get anything.

00:58:14.000 When Kim Jong-un killed his hot brother in Malaysia, nothing they were like, there's no accountability that we are asking of these people.

00:58:22.000 So standing up fighting, It doesn't incentivize people anymore, right?

00:58:26.000 So you don't see justice being served.

00:58:30.000 And I think that is why it is so hard to fight now.

00:58:35.000 Because people think justice is there, but I don't think it is that it's something I don't see in real life.

00:58:43.000 When 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.

00:58:52.000 What can be done?

00:58:54.000 I 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.

00:59:03.000 When they talk about the problems of the world, North Korea is rarely discussed.

00:59:07.000 And the horrific crimes of the North Korean regime against their own people, rarely discussed by politicians.

00:59:15.000 They'll talk about Afghanistan.

00:59:17.000 They'll talk about Iraq.

00:59:18.000 They'll talk about all the problems we have with Iran. 0.98

00:59:21.000 They don't talk about what's going on right now.

00:59:24.000 What you're describing in North Korea with these concentration camps and these people, they don't talk about these things.

00:59:30.000 What can be done?

00:59:32.000 I think this is the beauty of living in democracy.

00:59:39.000 When I go to Whole Foods, coming from North Korea, I'm shocked by how many hand washing is all about environment-friendly products.

00:59:51.000 Right?

00:59:51.000 And that means a lot of people want to support this cause.

00:59:55.000 Right.

00:59:56.000 That they want, I mean, look at how many vegan restaurants are popping up in New York.

01:00:01.000 So a lot of people demand that now.

01:00:03.000 So if individuals are being educated...

01:00:07.000 On 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.

01:00:15.000 If 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.

01:00:26.000 I have stopped trying to talk to UN. I don't even give talks anymore at the UN. Did you give talks in the past?

01:00:33.000 Yeah.

01:00:33.000 What was the response?

01:00:35.000 They, in Geneva, in September, the Human Rights General Assembly meeting, how dumb of them. 0.87

01:00:41.000 They literally put me alone to right next to North Korean delegation team because geographically we are somehow close. 0.73

01:00:48.000 So these five guys from North Korean delegation team are sweating at me.

01:00:53.000 And the UN, that's what they do. 1.00

01:00:55.000 That's how dumb they are. 1.00

01:00:56.000 They sat them next to you. 1.00

01:00:57.000 Yeah, they put me right next to North Korean delegation team.

01:01:02.000 And no protection?

01:01:03.000 No.

01:01:04.000 I was so scared of going to a hotel room that night because I don't have anybody protecting me.

01:01:10.000 So I have tried, of course, but at the UN, who decides the human rights violators?

01:01:16.000 Chinese and Putin and Saudis do. 0.99

01:01:18.000 They decide who actually violates human rights.

01:01:22.000 That's crazy.

01:01:23.000 Yeah.

01:01:23.000 So I have to go ask Chinese who actually committing this crime and complain, of course, they're not going to listen to me.

01:01:30.000 So what is the even point of the UN for this?

01:01:34.000 And of course, I met Nancy Pelosi.

01:01:36.000 I met a lot of politicians.

01:01:37.000 And on the surface, like, oh, that's really horrible.

01:01:40.000 Let me think about what can I do.

01:01:41.000 But of course, this is not what they care.

01:01:43.000 They care about the systemic oppression that is happening in America more.

01:01:47.000 They care about what's going to get them votes.

01:01:49.000 Yeah.

01:01:51.000 And what's popular, what's on people's minds right now.

01:01:54.000 And whatever the narrative is that they're currently pushing.

01:01:58.000 It's going to allow them to get elected again.

01:02:00.000 Yeah, it's all about their own interests.

01:02:02.000 So when you spoke at the UN, what was the reception like?

01:02:08.000 Oh, they are saying like this is the West propaganda trying to interfere other people's autonomy.

01:02:13.000 North Korea is a state of their own. 0.97

01:02:16.000 You should not interfere the other people's affairs.

01:02:20.000 That's like still to this day Chinese narrative, right?

01:02:23.000 They don't ask us what we are doing to Xinjiang Uyghurs or Falun Gong or like organ trafficking, all of that. 0.92

01:02:28.000 It's our own business.

01:02:29.000 Organ trafficking.

01:02:31.000 So when North Koreans go to China, we're ending up like several different sources.

01:02:37.000 Worst case is they take us and they take our organs out and suddenly we die.

01:02:43.000 Like which organs?

01:02:45.000 Everybody, your eyes, heart, lungs, kidney, liver, all of it.

01:02:49.000 They sell them?

01:02:50.000 Of course, in China, you order the organ, it gets to you within three hours.

01:02:55.000 How is it possible?

01:02:56.000 How somebody dies miraculously in three hours for you?

01:03:02.000 Do you know how many hospitals are being built for organ transfer in China?

01:03:08.000 How many?

01:03:09.000 This is the biggest revenue right now being built in China.

01:03:13.000 So do people from other countries go to China for organ replacements?

01:03:17.000 A lot of the Middle East and those countries go to China to get the organs.

01:03:21.000 So they just turn a blind eye to it?

01:03:23.000 Yeah.

01:03:23.000 They don't think about the origin of the actual organs themselves?

01:03:26.000 Yeah.

01:03:27.000 They just go, oh I need a lung replacement and China says well if you go here we can get it for you. 0.82

01:03:33.000 Yeah. 0.61

01:03:33.000 And they go and then they kill someone and take their lungs. 0.61

01:03:36.000 Yeah.

01:03:37.000 It became a biggest now like a new industry that is rising in China.

01:03:41.000 And those people are generally North Koreans?

01:03:45.000 Those are, a lot of them were Falun Gong practitioners in China.

01:03:49.000 Okay.

01:03:49.000 Uyghurs?

01:03:50.000 Yeah.

01:03:50.000 Now the Uyghurs.

01:03:52.000 But Falun Gong is different, like a peaceful religion they were wanted.

01:03:56.000 Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and not as much Tibetans, but more like Xinjiang now with the Falun Gong and North Koreans. 0.87

01:04:03.000 And so they have them in some prisons somewhere.

01:04:06.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:04:07.000 And they feed them and just wait for someone to come along that needs their organs and they kill them. 0.95

01:04:11.000 Yeah. 0.92

01:04:13.000 This is proven?

01:04:17.000 A lot of other things are proven because when these people die, how do we ask them, how did you die?

01:04:24.000 They are dead.

01:04:25.000 A lot of Falun Gong survivors do testimony.

01:04:29.000 They have told about this.

01:04:31.000 It's very well known.

01:04:32.000 The UN even condemned China for that.

01:04:36.000 Even they couldn't turn the eyes blind on.

01:04:39.000 It was too evidence. 0.55

01:04:41.000 And another thing North Korean school is prostitution, brothers, right? 0.95

01:04:46.000 And these girls resist. 1.00

01:04:48.000 So what they do?

01:04:49.000 They give them drugs.

01:04:50.000 So they make them become drug addicts.

01:04:53.000 So now all they want is drug.

01:04:56.000 So that's how they go to brothers.

01:04:59.000 And then these men I said in these villages cannot afford women in these little towns. 0.99

01:05:03.000 So they buy one girl and they rotate the entire men in that town. 0.94

01:05:10.000 And then like me, some of them just being sold, like my mom was sold for just like mentally retarded family, the farmer's family. 0.99

01:05:20.000 And we go became a free labor for them and being a sex slave for them. 0.99

01:05:26.000 And then... 1.00

01:05:28.000 Being a sex slave for a mentally retarded family? 1.00

01:05:30.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:05:32.000 I mean, because if they're normal and they can't find wives. 1.00

01:05:36.000 The older, like, mentally retarded and not functioning people, those people cannot find wives. 1.00

01:05:43.000 So that's why we're ending up in the most horrible places.

01:05:47.000 We don't just go and fall in love and meet some normal person.

01:05:55.000 So when you were 13, you escaped.

01:05:59.000 Tell us what it was like.

01:06:02.000 First of all, where did you escape to?

01:06:04.000 You escaped to China?

01:06:04.000 Yeah.

01:06:05.000 And how did you get across?

01:06:07.000 It was a frozen river in March, end of March in 2007. So you travel on the frozen river?

01:06:15.000 Yeah.

01:06:16.000 And we luckily didn't get shot by the guards. 0.92

01:06:19.000 And when we got into the other side of the riverbank of China, that's when mom got raped. 1.00

01:06:25.000 And then they took us in a house. 0.65

01:06:27.000 And they were like turning me around, like a slave market, right?

01:06:31.000 They check my teeth and my body structure.

01:06:34.000 And somehow being virgin is very precious in China.

01:06:38.000 So they sold my mom for around $65.

01:06:42.000 And it's 21st century.

01:06:44.000 And they sold me less than $300.

01:06:47.000 And they sold us separately.

01:06:49.000 But the...

01:06:51.000 Thing is, they didn't even try to force us.

01:06:54.000 They were asking, if you don't want to be sold, you can go back to North Korea, right?

01:07:00.000 And even the North Korean regime doesn't punish me, I couldn't find food to eat.

01:07:06.000 I was going to die anyway.

01:07:08.000 Even if the regime doesn't kill me, the starvation was going to kill me.

01:07:12.000 And for the first time, I remember that night in the traffickers' house, I saw a trash can.

01:07:20.000 And I did not know what it was.

01:07:22.000 So I asked this lady, like, what is that?

01:07:24.000 And then I heard one thing. 0.99

01:07:25.000 I said, oh, that's trash. 0.99

01:07:27.000 Like, what is trash? 0.94

01:07:28.000 I said, oh, the things that you don't need to throw there.

01:07:31.000 Like, you can throw a bin away.

01:07:32.000 And I said, what do you mean you have things to throw away?

01:07:36.000 Because we never needed a trash bin in North Korea. 0.78

01:07:39.000 We had nothing to throw.

01:07:41.000 Even these hairs, it comes down.

01:07:42.000 We don't have heating like that.

01:07:44.000 We have to start a fire.

01:07:46.000 And starting fire takes the paper.

01:07:48.000 It's very precious.

01:07:49.000 So we burn hair there to try to start a fire.

01:07:54.000 Literally nothing was thrown away.

01:07:56.000 Even human poop, right?

01:07:57.000 Yeah.

01:07:57.000 I mean, that's the thing.

01:07:59.000 The regime cannot have a fertilizer.

01:08:01.000 They don't even have the technology to have a fertilizer.

01:08:04.000 So they demand us to bring the poop.

01:08:07.000 And as a kid you go to school, the teachers beat you and then go home and look for poop.

01:08:12.000 So I would go on the streets and looking if anywhere like a dog pooped or something.

01:08:17.000 Of course like all those dogs or poops gone.

01:08:20.000 So finding a poop and you don't eat much.

01:08:23.000 You don't poop like in North Korea like few times a month.

01:08:26.000 It's a very precious thing.

01:08:28.000 Yeah, of course.

01:08:29.000 A few times a month.

01:08:30.000 Yeah.

01:08:31.000 And it becomes very precious and you have to give it over to the regime.

01:08:34.000 Yeah.

01:08:36.000 So that's nothing.

01:08:38.000 It's being wasted.

01:08:39.000 So do they have toilets or do you go to the bathroom in outhouses?

01:08:43.000 Oh, we have all outhouses.

01:08:45.000 But we have to lock it because some people come and steal it.

01:08:49.000 They come to steal the poop?

01:08:50.000 Yeah, it's a government quota.

01:08:52.000 You get punished if you don't bring poop.

01:08:54.000 Everything is punishment in that country.

01:08:57.000 So how much, what is the quota?

01:08:59.000 Like how much poop do you have to give them?

01:09:00.000 So sometimes per family they say one ton.

01:09:03.000 How do you find that?

01:09:05.000 A ton?

01:09:05.000 2,000 pounds?

01:09:07.000 I do the kilograms, so like a thousand kilograms, right?

01:09:11.000 It's like a ton, one ton.

01:09:13.000 Yeah, it's about right.

01:09:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:15.000 So per family or they give you the color.

01:09:19.000 So that's per year?

01:09:20.000 Yeah.

01:09:21.000 And then we have to bring them in usually January.

01:09:25.000 So 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.

01:09:41.000 And even then, you don't get any of the food that they're growing?

01:09:44.000 No, it's a collective farm.

01:09:45.000 So they take the 98% of the food to the regime, and then that 2% is spread among the elites who's running the farm.

01:09:53.000 So you work an entire year in the collective farm.

01:09:56.000 You get nothing from it.

01:10:00.000 There's also cannibalism.

01:10:02.000 Yeah.

01:10:03.000 How does that happen?

01:10:06.000 It's really like people say, oh, don't dehumanize people of North Korea because they say, oh, just tell us nice things, right?

01:10:15.000 That's just too much for us to handle.

01:10:20.000 This is the thing.

01:10:24.000 People go to black market, you sell meat.

01:10:28.000 People don't ask what meat it is.

01:10:32.000 We don't ask.

01:10:33.000 It's like pork or like it's just a rabbit.

01:10:35.000 We don't.

01:10:37.000 And we just sometimes we go find a very, very cheap meat and we don't ask.

01:10:43.000 And luckily I was poor to afford the meat.

01:10:46.000 I didn't get to eat them.

01:10:48.000 A lot of children just disappear.

01:10:51.000 But the thing is, there's no evidence.

01:10:53.000 Usually everybody dies in some corner, get drowned.

01:10:57.000 So we go to river to bathe.

01:11:00.000 We only bathe a few times a year.

01:11:02.000 In wintertime we don't even bathe.

01:11:03.000 And during the winter, we have to go to wash our clothes.

01:11:06.000 So we make a small hole in the river.

01:11:08.000 And sometimes you fall and slip through and you die like that.

01:11:12.000 So it's just so easy to...

01:11:14.000 Murder is not a thing.

01:11:16.000 So it's so many causes killing you.

01:11:19.000 So some people, you lose your children.

01:11:21.000 We just don't even know what killed it.

01:11:24.000 And nobody bothered to go out and, like, find it for you.

01:11:27.000 So, so many people die.

01:11:29.000 So that's why it's easy to sell the human meat.

01:11:33.000 So either they're killing the children or they'll find them dead and then just cook their meat and sell it.

01:11:40.000 Yeah. 0.94

01:11:40.000 This is common. 0.94

01:11:42.000 Yeah.

01:11:46.000 So when you escaped to China, what is the process like when you're in China before...

01:11:55.000 How did you eventually go to South Korea?

01:11:59.000 Yeah.

01:12:00.000 How long were you in China for?

01:12:02.000 Almost two years.

01:12:04.000 And what was that like?

01:12:05.000 What was the process like?

01:12:07.000 Well, living in two years of China, I feel like I lived a thousand years on this earth. 0.75

01:12:13.000 I feel like very old.

01:12:15.000 Yeah, 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?

01:12:25.000 Like making it one day was such a struggle.

01:12:28.000 Whenever you let one day live, you think like, oh my God, I made one more day on earth.

01:12:33.000 In China?

01:12:34.000 Yeah.

01:12:34.000 So it was that hard in China.

01:12:36.000 What was so hard about it?

01:12:37.000 Because one, you don't know when you're going to be arrested.

01:12:40.000 So you always put your shoes on tight, shoe races, and whenever you get into some indoor, you look for a place to run.

01:12:48.000 If you are invited to somebody's house, you see all the checked doors.

01:12:52.000 Where can I run?

01:12:53.000 Which route do I run?

01:12:54.000 When you even sleep, you know how to run.

01:12:57.000 You get ready to run from the police.

01:13:00.000 And that is a constant threat. 0.99

01:13:02.000 And, of course, you're raped every single day by these human traffickers. 0.98

01:13:08.000 And they even can't follow you to the bathroom. 0.96

01:13:10.000 There's no human dignity in it.

01:13:12.000 They beat you, and they, I mean, you're not your own person. 0.98

01:13:17.000 And the common things that they tell us, tell us that our lives are even not valuable like pigs. 0.94

01:13:24.000 Because even if they kill us, they know that we cannot go to police.

01:13:28.000 How did you escape from all that?

01:13:31.000 This is, so the man who bought me, he was very impressed because by then I went through two human traffickers prior to me. 0.85

01:13:42.000 So by the third human trafficker, nobody's virgin, they all got raped. 0.84

01:13:47.000 So he was Han Chinese and couldn't believe that I made it to him as a virgin. 1.00

01:13:53.000 Because the first trafficker my mom covered. 0.54

01:13:55.000 Second trafficker I felt like a hell.

01:13:58.000 I would literally lose my mind.

01:14:00.000 And thankfully he had his mistress in the next room. 0.90

01:14:04.000 So I didn't get raped. 0.94

01:14:06.000 He tried so hard. 0.54

01:14:07.000 I didn't. 0.73

01:14:08.000 So by the third time, Han Chinese, I always tried to kill myself. 1.00

01:14:12.000 And then he said, oh, if you become my mistress, I'm gonna help you to get your family to you. 0.99

01:14:19.000 But before that, he showed me the phone he had.

01:14:23.000 Because I've never seen a phone in my life as a North Korean.

01:14:25.000 And he showed me, oh, this phone can take pictures and look at these pictures I took.

01:14:30.000 And one picture I saw was my mom in it.

01:14:33.000 And I started telling him, that's like, my mom, my mom.

01:14:36.000 And that's how he knew that I had that the woman that he sold was my mom. 0.99

01:14:40.000 And obviously he raped her too. 0.98

01:14:42.000 So he said, if I become his mistress, he's gonna help me with my family. 0.99

01:14:50.000 So he took my virgin, he raped me, and thankfully he did help me. 0.99

01:14:55.000 He brought my mom back from a farmer that he sold, and he brought my sick father from North Korea. 0.99

01:15:02.000 That's how I brought my parents back to me.

01:15:05.000 How did you escape from him?

01:15:07.000 After almost two years, he became a gambling addict.

01:15:11.000 He was a big gambler.

01:15:13.000 He's spending all his money.

01:15:15.000 And somehow, this evil man was letting me go because he couldn't even afford to give me food at that point.

01:15:21.000 He was so broke.

01:15:23.000 So he said, like, I'm letting you go.

01:15:25.000 And in some ways, in his most evil way, he loved me.

01:15:30.000 So after two years, I was let go.

01:15:33.000 And then I went to this chat room.

01:15:35.000 So this is another thing.

01:15:37.000 A lot of North Korean girls are capturing these chat rooms where we do body cams. 1.00

01:15:44.000 Clients are South Koreans.

01:15:46.000 So we chat and then we show our body.

01:15:49.000 But North Korean women, we choose that route because it's better than being touched by men in person. 1.00

01:15:55.000 Right?

01:15:55.000 You're not raped in person.

01:15:57.000 So this is all on the internet with web cameras?

01:15:59.000 Yeah.

01:16:00.000 That's the number one thing that North Korean women do in China. 1.00

01:16:04.000 All this nightlife.

01:16:06.000 So in that room, I heard about something called South Korea for the person because the clients are South Koreans.

01:16:12.000 You didn't know what South Korea was?

01:16:13.000 I knew the different name, like different name, but I knew that country was colonized by Americans. 0.95

01:16:20.000 I heard that in South Korea, the South Korea was very corrupt capitalist and raped by American soldiers every day.

01:16:28.000 And they are like, kids cannot go to school and they all want to come to North Korea.

01:16:33.000 That's what you learned from North Korea?

01:16:35.000 Oh yeah, that's what I thought.

01:16:36.000 Wow, they all want to go to North Korea.

01:16:38.000 Yeah, they all want to come to North Korea.

01:16:40.000 The entire humanity wants to be like North Korea. 1.00

01:16:42.000 So we are so fortunate.

01:16:44.000 They tell us that we have nothing to envy in this world.

01:16:50.000 Wow.

01:16:51.000 Yeah.

01:16:52.000 So you find out about South Korea from these chat rooms and you start to get a different idea of what South Korea must be like.

01:16:59.000 Yeah.

01:17:00.000 And we met this defector lady in that chat room. 1.00

01:17:03.000 She told me she knows some missionaries.

01:17:06.000 And if we become Christians, they're gonna help us to go to South Korea and be free.

01:17:12.000 And that's when I heard like free for the first time.

01:17:15.000 I asked like, what do you mean free?

01:17:17.000 And she said, oh, you can watch TV and you can wear jeans and nobody gonna arrest you for that in South Korea.

01:17:24.000 So that's what I thought about freedom.

01:17:26.000 Watching TV and wearing jeans.

01:17:28.000 That's what you thought of freedom.

01:17:30.000 It was never like freedom of speech or none of that.

01:17:32.000 I was like, that's cool.

01:17:34.000 I can wear jeans.

01:17:36.000 But I was a teenage girl.

01:17:38.000 I wanted jeans and North Korea, you get sent to prison camp for that. 1.00

01:17:41.000 You get sent to prison camp for wearing jeans.

01:17:43.000 Yeah, it's just a joke for Westerners that North Koreans even haircut is like ordered by the regime. 0.82

01:17:51.000 Like the only thing that North Koreans allowed to do that in that country fully, freely is breathing. 0.99

01:17:59.000 Everything else is controlled.

01:18:01.000 What we wear, what we watch, what we listen to, how we dance, what haircut that we get, every single thing is controlled by the regime.

01:18:11.000 So you're working in these chat rooms and you meet this woman and she says you just have to become a Christian?

01:18:18.000 No, we have to go to the shelter that Christians had. 0.72

01:18:22.000 So we have to go in their study, Bible, and we have to prove our faith to them.

01:18:28.000 Then they're gonna rescue us.

01:18:29.000 That was a condition to be rescued by Christians. 0.91

01:18:32.000 So it's a Christian missionary from South Korea.

01:18:37.000 So did you have to go to South Korea in order to prove yourself to them?

01:18:43.000 Or did they do this all through online?

01:18:45.000 No, we couldn't go to South Korea, obviously.

01:18:47.000 So they had a shelter in China, in some house hidden.

01:18:52.000 So we went to their shelter and then we joined them as a group and studied the Bible every day.

01:18:58.000 So we would go fasting.

01:19:00.000 I 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.

01:19:09.000 And we pray together, and then once they think we are actually Christians, then they tell you how to go to South Korea.

01:19:16.000 How long did that take?

01:19:17.000 Several months.

01:19:20.000 But when you're so desperate, I'm going to believe in rocks if somebody asks me to believe.

01:19:26.000 You believe in anything, literally.

01:19:29.000 And it was so easy.

01:19:30.000 North Korea's regime was Bible. 0.99

01:19:33.000 I was like, what the heck is this thing called Jesus and God?

01:19:35.000 And North Koreans are like, don't worry, baby.

01:19:38.000 Just plug God to Kim Il-sung and Jesus to Kim Jong-il.

01:19:41.000 And it perfectly makes sense.

01:19:43.000 God loves us so much.

01:19:44.000 Gave us his son.

01:19:45.000 He's there to protect us.

01:19:47.000 We gotta suffer and go to paradise with him later in life.

01:19:51.000 So I did become a Christian.

01:19:54.000 So it made the same sense to you because it was so similar to the story that they taught you in North Korea.

01:19:58.000 Exactly.

01:19:59.000 The logic was so similar.

01:20:02.000 So you became a Christian.

01:20:03.000 Yeah, I did.

01:20:04.000 And several months of studying the Bible.

01:20:07.000 Yeah.

01:20:07.000 And then they eventually got you to South Korea.

01:20:10.000 They told us how to go.

01:20:12.000 How'd you do that?

01:20:14.000 Which was literally walking across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia from China.

01:20:21.000 You walked?

01:20:22.000 Yeah.

01:20:23.000 Wow.

01:20:24.000 So they gave us one compass.

01:20:26.000 We had even toddler in our group.

01:20:28.000 We had one father and his father and the seven ladies and few teenagers.

01:20:33.000 They told us...

01:20:34.000 You went by compass?

01:20:36.000 Yeah.

01:20:36.000 Did they give you a map?

01:20:38.000 I mean, you cannot look at the map in the desert.

01:20:40.000 You don't have GPS. How do you know?

01:20:42.000 Nothing tells you if you're going circle or straight or backwards.

01:20:46.000 That was the horrifying thing about desert is that it looks all the same.

01:20:52.000 Nothing tells you what you're doing.

01:20:54.000 You can just keep going circle all night.

01:20:57.000 And then so they told us go follow the west and the north between in that direction.

01:21:04.000 And if you cross the eight wire fences, hopefully that's going to be Mongolia. 1.00

01:21:10.000 Hopefully.

01:21:11.000 And then you find the Mongolian soldiers and tell them that you want to go to South Korea, not North Korea.

01:21:17.000 So that means it's so dangerous.

01:21:18.000 The chances of you making in the desert is not even like 2-3%, right?

01:21:23.000 Like 90-80% of time you're going to fail.

01:21:26.000 So they cannot lead us there.

01:21:28.000 It's random luck.

01:21:29.000 That's why they believe that God is going to show us miracles.

01:21:32.000 How long did it take you to walk from the Gobi Desert?

01:21:34.000 It was just only one day.

01:21:36.000 One day.

01:21:36.000 But we chose that in February 2009, after Beijing Olympic.

01:21:41.000 And in the frozen Gobi Desert, it's like minus 40 degrees.

01:21:45.000 So the soldiers is thinking, nobody's crazy enough to cross right now in this freezing time.

01:21:52.000 So that's how you can do it?

01:21:54.000 That security is lower.

01:21:56.000 Other times they're gonna shoot you because in that desert nobody knows if you got killed or not.

01:22:00.000 So who would be shooting you? 0.92

01:22:02.000 Chinese or the Mongolians. 1.00

01:22:04.000 Both of them can just shoot you. 1.00

01:22:05.000 They would just shoot anybody walking through the desert? 1.00

01:22:08.000 It's called a shoot to order. 0.99

01:22:09.000 It's like a shoot to kill order. 1.00

01:22:10.000 So they don't like bother ask who you are just gonna shoot them right there and kill them. 0.99

01:22:16.000 So we don't even have ID, none of that.

01:22:18.000 So we chose a time it was frozen and cold, and even guards don't want to come out and look around.

01:22:25.000 So we were walking from the Chinese side, but they took us to the border of China, Inner Mongolia, which was still China.

01:22:33.000 From that border, we started walking towards Mongolia.

01:22:37.000 And the entire day of walking, we got there.

01:22:39.000 Somehow, miraculously, we didn't die from the cold.

01:22:43.000 Did you bring food?

01:22:44.000 Did you bring water?

01:22:45.000 What did you bring with you when you were walking?

01:22:47.000 Like in minus 40 degrees, you cannot even stand still for 3 seconds.

01:22:51.000 Like if you stand still for 10 seconds, you're going to die right there.

01:22:54.000 You're going to get a heart attack, frozen to death.

01:22:57.000 So you don't even need to eat.

01:22:59.000 You just have to.

01:23:00.000 Only thing I remember was moving, moving, moving.

01:23:03.000 Keep going.

01:23:04.000 Keep moving.

01:23:04.000 Whatever I was doing, I had to keep moving.

01:23:07.000 Otherwise, you don't get enough oxygen, so very hazy and not clear.

01:23:13.000 You get very sleepy.

01:23:15.000 That's the thing, dying from cold wasn't bad as I thought.

01:23:19.000 You become very numb, and you don't really desensitize, and you become very, very sleepy.

01:23:25.000 And that's when you know you're dying in the cold.

01:23:28.000 How many people were with you?

01:23:30.000 We had one baby and seven people.

01:23:33.000 And 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.

01:23:41.000 But in the desert, he had to wake up because he's going to die frozen to death in the desert.

01:23:46.000 So this baby keeps falling asleep.

01:23:48.000 So we had to keep shaking our passing around between us.

01:23:52.000 And he made it eventually.

01:23:54.000 So he has to stay awake because if he falls asleep, the cold will kill him?

01:23:59.000 Oh yeah, of course.

01:24:01.000 But he's not walking, right?

01:24:03.000 You're carrying him?

01:24:03.000 Oh yeah, he's a toddler.

01:24:04.000 He cannot walk.

01:24:06.000 But he still needs to be awake.

01:24:08.000 So we had to keep shaking him and massage his feet and hands and shake him up and down so he could be conscious.

01:24:16.000 Because he would keep falling asleep.

01:24:18.000 What kind of clothes are you guys wearing?

01:24:20.000 We didn't have gloves.

01:24:22.000 You didn't have gloves?

01:24:23.000 Four degrees below zero?

01:24:25.000 Yeah.

01:24:26.000 So my mom didn't have shoes at that point. 0.99

01:24:28.000 So she eventually borrowed the shoes from a guy and robbed it so big.

01:24:33.000 And I was like, you just wear a thin coat.

01:24:36.000 And somehow, that's why I guess we needed a miracle.

01:24:42.000 That's why we had to pray.

01:24:43.000 I don't know.

01:24:44.000 It's a very low chance making it.

01:24:46.000 So nobody is not escaping through Mongolia anymore.

01:24:50.000 So you walk through Mongolia, it takes you 24 hours?

01:24:54.000 Just roughly one day, I think.

01:24:56.000 And then what happens when you get to the other side?

01:24:59.000 We didn't get to another side.

01:25:01.000 One just suddenly in the morning, the guards with the guns coming at you and asking to put your hands up.

01:25:07.000 So we were like lifting our hands up, right?

01:25:10.000 And then they were like saying, they're going to send us to China and then back to North Korea to get killed. 0.81

01:25:17.000 So North Korea is going to bring the laser and poisons with us to kill ourselves. 0.92

01:25:23.000 Because I mean, going to North Korea to get killed is way worse than killing ourselves right there. 0.99

01:25:28.000 So we So you brought poison with you to kill yourself? 0.97

01:25:31.000 And a laser, yeah. 1.00

01:25:32.000 And a laser?

01:25:32.000 What kind of laser?

01:25:33.000 Very, very thin laser.

01:25:34.000 That's like China and North Korea said it.

01:25:37.000 Like very, very thin laser.

01:25:39.000 A razor?

01:25:40.000 Like blade, yeah.

01:25:41.000 Blade, metal.

01:25:42.000 Yeah, metal thing.

01:25:43.000 Very thin one.

01:25:44.000 Yeah, right, right.

01:25:45.000 It's razor.

01:25:46.000 Oh, razor.

01:25:46.000 Yeah, we hide in the belts like everywhere.

01:25:48.000 So to cut your veins.

01:25:49.000 Yeah, like right here, right here.

01:25:51.000 It's very easy to cut.

01:25:53.000 So 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.

01:26:05.000 So that's what they were playing with us, right?

01:26:08.000 For us it's like life and death.

01:26:09.000 For them it's like a joke.

01:26:12.000 And thankfully they would not let us kill ourselves.

01:26:15.000 Like very last minute they stopped us and turned the car back around to the Mongolian side.

01:26:20.000 But the next team that crossed the border got all arrested and sent back to North Korea.

01:26:24.000 But the following team, they were doing that and Mongolian soldiers went too far.

01:26:29.000 So one of my friends, she swallowed the entire sleeping pills to kill herself.

01:26:35.000 And then they took her to ER and they revived her, but forever her brain got damaged.

01:26:41.000 So this was a joke to them.

01:26:44.000 So they thought it was funny to scare the refugees? 1.00

01:26:47.000 Yeah.

01:26:48.000 It's funny to see how we fight for our lives.

01:26:53.000 Yeah, but thankfully nobody's cheating their heart anymore.

01:27:00.000 So when they capture you and they threaten to send you to China and then back to North Korea, how did you get out of it?

01:27:09.000 I remember telling my mom that we did everything to survive.

01:27:16.000 It was like, because in China, in the prisons, they even get rid of the buttons.

01:27:21.000 Everything is all like, you cannot swallow to kill yourself, right?

01:27:24.000 They don't even give you a spoon. 0.62

01:27:26.000 So that's how prevent a suicide because all North Koreans kill themselves before they go because they know the fate. 1.00

01:27:33.000 So I know like if I missed the opportunity to kill myself in the car on the way to China, we are never going to get the chance back.

01:27:41.000 So we were ready to cut and then swallow the thing and that's when it stopped.

01:27:47.000 And sometimes they just go too far with it.

01:27:50.000 So it's always a joke to them?

01:27:52.000 Yeah, we did not know.

01:27:54.000 But later, when we were leaving Mongolia, that's when they told us, actually we didn't mean to send you guys to China.

01:28:00.000 We just do that every time when you arrive here.

01:28:02.000 And some people wind up killing themselves anyway.

01:28:05.000 Yeah.

01:28:08.000 So eventually they let you go?

01:28:11.000 Yeah, they did reach out to South Korean embassy and then South Korean embassy comes, right?

01:28:15.000 They interrogate you to make sure that you're actually North Korean.

01:28:19.000 So several months in Mongolia, we do different detention centers.

01:28:23.000 They move us around and interrogate us.

01:28:26.000 And when they confirm that we are North Koreans, that's when they gave us a fake passport.

01:28:32.000 And from Ulaanbaatar to South Korea, we flew there.

01:28:36.000 And so when they determine that you're North Korean, what are they trying to find out?

01:28:42.000 They're trying to find out if you're actually a refugee, if you're a spy, like what are they trying to find out?

01:28:49.000 So they're in China, there's a Korean ethnic Chinese.

01:28:53.000 Who were Koreans back then, but they became Chinese, the ethnic Koreans.

01:28:58.000 So, you know, China has 56 different ethnicities.

01:29:02.000 It's a very diverse country, right?

01:29:04.000 So one of them are Korean ethnic Chinese.

01:29:07.000 Those people tried to go to South Korea.

01:29:09.000 So they rule out those people and also spy.

01:29:13.000 So everybody's defectors when you escape, you become defector right away.

01:29:18.000 So they rule out the spies and also rule out if you are actually North Korean or ethnic Chinese, ethnic Korean Chinese.

01:29:26.000 That's what they try to investigate you.

01:29:28.000 And so you finally eventually get to South Korea and then what happens?

01:29:35.000 And then what happens?

01:29:36.000 I hear about this thing called freedom.

01:29:41.000 And then hear about this country is obsessed with competition and hard work and studying.

01:29:49.000 The vigorous academia that these kids study English when they're in their mother's tummy. 0.97

01:29:56.000 Right? 0.77

01:29:57.000 And they study like crazy people.

01:30:00.000 And then I'm like, almost like, you know, high schooler.

01:30:04.000 And they did a placement test on me and I'm like, I need to go study with seven years old.

01:30:09.000 I don't even know what continents are, right?

01:30:12.000 I don't even know what Africa is.

01:30:14.000 I don't even know what different races.

01:30:16.000 I don't even know the map.

01:30:18.000 So, I'm like blank paste, like adult baby.

01:30:22.000 Adult baby.

01:30:24.000 Yeah.

01:30:24.000 How old are you?

01:30:25.000 I was Korean age.

01:30:26.000 I was 17. You were 17, but you're really about 10 years behind.

01:30:30.000 Yeah.

01:30:30.000 At least.

01:30:31.000 At least.

01:30:32.000 That's what it is.

01:30:33.000 And so, what kind of education did they give you in South Korea? 0.96

01:30:38.000 They told us that South Korea was a free country, that Americans are not bastards. 0.98

01:30:45.000 Because they told Americans were cold-blooded snakes in North Korea. 0.96

01:30:50.000 So I remember one of my friends I took to South Korea, she was a white lady. 0.69

01:30:54.000 My mom got drunk with Soju and touching her, right?

01:30:58.000 And then, like, I just want to make sure that you are, like, actually warm-blooded.

01:31:02.000 Because that's what they...

01:31:03.000 And in school, we have posters of Americans.

01:31:06.000 Posters?

01:31:07.000 Because we don't have actual pictures of them.

01:31:10.000 So our enemy is Americans, right? 0.98

01:31:12.000 They are, like, our sore enemy.

01:31:13.000 So we got to know how they look like. 0.94

01:31:15.000 So they are cold-blooded, huge nose and blue eyes, green eyes, monsters.

01:31:21.000 Yeah. 0.85

01:31:24.000 Wow.

01:31:24.000 Yeah.

01:31:25.000 So where did they educate you in South Korea?

01:31:29.000 There's a re-education center.

01:31:31.000 Oh, so they have a place where they take in people from North Korea?

01:31:34.000 Yeah, for three months.

01:31:36.000 So they take you to ATM machine.

01:31:40.000 So we never had a bank in North Korea, right?

01:31:43.000 In the past, I heard there was a bank, but the regime asked you to put the money and they don't give the money back to you.

01:31:49.000 So nobody uses bank in North Korea.

01:31:52.000 So I literally thought ATM machine, there's somebody inside the machine handing the money out to you through the window.

01:31:58.000 Because I don't know automation.

01:32:00.000 And they teach you how to take a bus, how to even go to movie theater, order a ticket, because we never seen the digital devices.

01:32:09.000 How to take the elevator, what is escalator, you know what I mean?

01:32:13.000 So you're just landing in a completely different planet.

01:32:17.000 What is that like?

01:32:19.000 Overwhelming.

01:32:20.000 It's very...

01:32:22.000 having that choice, like when you go shopping and you have 10 different pants, right?

01:32:27.000 And it's up to you to choose what you wear.

01:32:30.000 And North Korea was chosen by the regime. 0.84

01:32:33.000 Freedom was difficult.

01:32:35.000 I was literally saying, if I had enough frozen potato, had at least minimum food to eat, I would go back to North Korea. 0.98

01:32:42.000 Really?

01:32:43.000 Yeah.

01:32:43.000 Why?

01:32:45.000 Because I was not used to thinking.

01:32:47.000 Thinking was hard.

01:32:49.000 Thinking was not something I'm used to.

01:32:52.000 I never had to think.

01:32:54.000 But not only that, you have to think for yourself.

01:32:56.000 What do you want to do in your life?

01:32:58.000 And I was like, do I have to know?

01:33:00.000 Can't you just not tell me what I need to do?

01:33:02.000 Because I'm so good at following the orders.

01:33:04.000 But they go, like in South Korea, they were asking me, so what do you want to do?

01:33:08.000 And what do you think?

01:33:09.000 And what I thought never mattered.

01:33:11.000 I couldn't believe what I think matters to you.

01:33:16.000 So really thinking for yourself was very difficult.

01:33:19.000 I would have been so tired after thinking for five minutes.

01:33:22.000 I would get exhausted all day.

01:33:24.000 I literally get like, working out with thinking is so hard.

01:33:28.000 I would get so exhausted.

01:33:30.000 How do people keep thinking here all day long?

01:33:33.000 They say the same thing happens to people when they get out of prison.

01:33:37.000 That when they get out of prison, they call it being institutionalized.

01:33:40.000 When they get out of prison, they want to go back to prison.

01:33:43.000 And oftentimes they'll commit crimes just so they can get arrested and go back to prison.

01:33:48.000 Because in prison, they're told what to do.

01:33:50.000 And they become accustomed to it.

01:33:52.000 That's what it felt like for you.

01:33:54.000 For me, when I was born, that was my lifestyle.

01:34:00.000 Thinking was not a natural thing.

01:34:03.000 A lot of North Koreans do have a hard time to adjust to freedom.

01:34:09.000 When you first went to South Korea and you were able to eat whatever you wanted, what did you eat?

01:34:16.000 Eggs.

01:34:18.000 Bored eggs.

01:34:19.000 That's what you wanted?

01:34:20.000 Yeah, because even beef was too fenced.

01:34:23.000 I did not know what a cow was, right?

01:34:25.000 You didn't know what a cow was? 1.00

01:34:26.000 I never knew the milk came out of cow because I never had milk in my life.

01:34:32.000 So all North Koreans, we know it's like chicken and eggs. 1.00

01:34:36.000 So in North Korea, egg is the most fenced thing you can imagine.

01:34:41.000 So I literally thought I could eat a bucket of eggs.

01:34:45.000 Egg is the most fancy thing that you can imagine.

01:34:48.000 Yeah.

01:34:48.000 So at North Carolina we boiled eggs and we like, let me see actually how many I can eat, right?

01:34:54.000 But after five, you cannot eat more than five boiled eggs.

01:34:58.000 So that's when I realized, I mean, not that much it take for me to fall.

01:35:02.000 How I wasn't able to do that in that country.

01:35:06.000 So that was, do you remember the first time you ate until you were full?

01:35:10.000 Yeah, in China.

01:35:11.000 But the thing is, you think you're going to eat everything.

01:35:15.000 It's that in China, our stomach is not used to seasoning, like oil or fat.

01:35:21.000 So I was getting nauseous a lot.

01:35:23.000 I couldn't eat the normal food that the Chinese, even South Koreans eat. 0.99

01:35:30.000 Because, I mean, our system was eating without seasoning.

01:35:33.000 Just all the wild, like, you know, plants and flowers and, like, not much going on.

01:35:40.000 So going to China eating for the first time that was seasoned food was very hard on my stomach.

01:35:46.000 And so it was actually not that great.

01:35:49.000 Like, you would think, like, oh, my God, it's a paradise.

01:35:51.000 Your system doesn't take a while for you to adjust to the new kind of food.

01:35:56.000 How long did it take in South Korea before you felt comfortable?

01:36:00.000 Eating a hamburger, I think?

01:36:02.000 Yeah.

01:36:02.000 At least like two, three years.

01:36:04.000 Wow.

01:36:05.000 Yeah.

01:36:06.000 It's two, three years.

01:36:08.000 Even getting used to Coca-Cola, I literally thought some fire was happening when I never had a bubble in my life.

01:36:15.000 So learning about not champagne is like...

01:36:18.000 In the beginning, I couldn't...

01:36:19.000 What is going on in my mouth?

01:36:22.000 They're popping everywhere.

01:36:25.000 You had never had anything carbonated.

01:36:26.000 No, so it was shocking.

01:36:28.000 It hurts me in the beginning.

01:36:31.000 It took a while.

01:36:31.000 Now I drink a few sips of Coca-Cola, but I couldn't do it for a long time.

01:36:36.000 I still don't drink sparkling water.

01:36:37.000 I don't know why anybody does that, to torture themselves.

01:36:41.000 It's very painful.

01:36:43.000 Really?

01:36:44.000 In your throat, yeah.

01:36:45.000 They're pounding you with something.

01:36:48.000 I don't know.

01:36:49.000 Wow, that's crazy.

01:36:51.000 What about alcohol?

01:36:53.000 People make alcohol illegally from corn.

01:36:57.000 In North Korea?

01:36:58.000 Yeah.

01:36:59.000 But they are like very...

01:37:00.000 Moonshine?

01:37:01.000 Like very strong.

01:37:03.000 Very strong. 0.99

01:37:03.000 Nasty. 0.99

01:37:04.000 And like very thick and not diluted at all. 0.94

01:37:07.000 Right, right.

01:37:07.000 You get like the worst hangover from it.

01:37:10.000 Yeah.

01:37:10.000 That kind of alcohol they drink.

01:37:12.000 I never knew what wine was.

01:37:14.000 So I went to Napa with my mom last year.

01:37:18.000 And they will keep telling us what do you smell like.

01:37:21.000 How do I know?

01:37:22.000 Oh, they're so crazy with all that wine tasting stuff.

01:37:25.000 I know.

01:37:25.000 It's like, I just heard about wine.

01:37:27.000 Right.

01:37:28.000 Oh, they're saying hints of nutmeg and oak.

01:37:31.000 Exactly, oak, yeah.

01:37:32.000 And they're smelling, yeah, it's the strangest thing in the world.

01:37:35.000 Yeah.

01:37:36.000 For someone who's coming from North Korea to go to, that might be the polar opposite of North Korea, is a Napa wine testing. 0.80

01:37:43.000 I don't know.

01:37:44.000 I was like, and a lot of people tried to get me Burning Man.

01:37:48.000 They wanted to take you to Burning Man.

01:37:50.000 I saw some pictures.

01:37:51.000 I was like, I don't think I'm ready for this.

01:37:54.000 I might go crazy there.

01:37:56.000 That's hilarious.

01:37:58.000 That's hilarious.

01:37:59.000 Burning Man.

01:38:00.000 That might be the opposite.

01:38:02.000 Well, there's probably like multiple polar opposites of North Korea, but Burning Man is probably one of them. 0.57

01:38:07.000 But the fancy people of Napa.

01:38:09.000 That's gotta be up there.

01:38:10.000 So, somebody was treating me to this restaurant called Single Thread.

01:38:15.000 Single, like the French laundry, same restaurant in Napa.

01:38:18.000 Oh, okay.

01:38:19.000 And then they did a tour at their, like, front yard farm.

01:38:23.000 They grow on their tomatoes and peppers.

01:38:26.000 And, like, my mom was like, we've been eating this every day in North Korea organic.

01:38:31.000 We did not know we were having like $500 a meal, you know?

01:38:35.000 Because here people keep telling us it's organic.

01:38:37.000 It's like everything was organic in our country.

01:38:39.000 Right, right.

01:38:40.000 Like what I want is a big portion.

01:38:42.000 Right.

01:38:43.000 But here people really obsessed like a North Korean lifestyle.

01:38:47.000 So yeah, my mom would never do this to me ever again. 0.99

01:38:51.000 She's like, you're told you don't ever do this to me.

01:38:54.000 That's funny.

01:38:55.000 That's funny.

01:38:56.000 So your experience in South Korea, they're educating you.

01:39:01.000 Are you working?

01:39:02.000 Do you start working?

01:39:04.000 You're 17 years old, right?

01:39:05.000 So what did you do while you were there?

01:39:07.000 So I started, I learned, I mean, I remember this interrogation man was asking me, so what are you going to do in South Korea?

01:39:16.000 I was like, I don't know, maybe study?

01:39:19.000 Because I'm still young.

01:39:20.000 And he's like, why do you think you can study? 0.85

01:39:22.000 Because he thought I was a hooker in China. 0.98

01:39:25.000 Because all North Korean women are them. 1.00

01:39:28.000 And a lot of North Korean women ending up doing the same thing in South Korea because they don't even know how to turn on the computer. 1.00

01:39:36.000 They don't know even what Gmail is.

01:39:39.000 Creating an account online is an impossibility for them.

01:39:56.000 So they hear the North Korean accent?

01:40:01.000 What is the difference?

01:40:02.000 What does it sound like?

01:40:03.000 Like, in South Korea, we say, 안녕하세요 is a hi, by North Korea, very formal.

01:40:11.000 More like, we call our friends, there's no friends in North Korea, comrade.

01:40:17.000 Comrade.

01:40:17.000 Only comrades exist.

01:40:18.000 So they know by the way you talk?

01:40:21.000 Yeah.

01:40:22.000 But is it an accent?

01:40:24.000 Are you saying the same words?

01:40:26.000 No.

01:40:26.000 Are you saying them in a different way, or are you using different words?

01:40:29.000 No.

01:40:29.000 Both of them different.

01:40:30.000 It's bigger difference than British and American English is that in North Korea, as I said, there's no bank.

01:40:36.000 So for me to understand credit card, what the heck, you build your credit.

01:40:41.000 They give you money, you pay back and debit card.

01:40:45.000 Right.

01:40:45.000 Like saving.

01:40:46.000 I mean, for me to understand hedge fund...

01:40:51.000 It took 10 years.

01:40:52.000 I still don't get a lot of parts.

01:40:54.000 But that's the thing, like, we don't have the vocabulary.

01:40:57.000 Right.

01:40:57.000 So, learning from South Korean to English is a lot easier.

01:41:00.000 Because I know what credit cards, you know, South Korean means and America means. 0.97

01:41:04.000 But, like, gay. 1.00

01:41:05.000 What is gay?

01:41:06.000 You didn't know what gay was?

01:41:08.000 Of course there's no dictionaries. 0.89

01:41:09.000 I 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?

01:41:24.000 You didn't know what gay was?

01:41:25.000 How old were you when this was happening?

01:41:27.000 I was like 20, 20. Wow so there was no gay people in North Korea?

01:41:32.000 We don't know the word.

01:41:33.000 So now tell me about the sexual, non-binary, or like, whatever, how many pronouns that I found later.

01:41:39.000 I was like, this is a different planet.

01:41:41.000 Oh, wow.

01:41:42.000 We don't know the concept.

01:41:44.000 And we don't know the concept of romance or love.

01:41:46.000 How do you expect us to know what gay is?

01:41:49.000 How do people find their husbands and wives and relationships in North Korea?

01:41:54.000 Usually government assigns a marriage or the family, like families, the parents to the assigned marriages.

01:42:04.000 So the South Koreans are racist against the North Koreans, even though you look very similar. 0.96

01:42:11.000 Can you tell a difference by looking at someone?

01:42:13.000 Height difference.

01:42:14.000 Height difference.

01:42:15.000 So we are...

01:42:16.000 Because of malnutrition.

01:42:17.000 Yeah, on average, three to five inch shorter, on average.

01:42:20.000 But the younger generation in North Korea gets shorter.

01:42:23.000 That's the thing.

01:42:24.000 Our grandpa was the tallest, and my father and me.

01:42:27.000 He keeps getting smaller and smaller.

01:42:29.000 South Korea is the opposite, keep going up.

01:42:31.000 And North Korea keeps getting smaller and smaller.

01:42:33.000 So in South Korea because of nutrition.

01:42:36.000 And so when you are learning, where do they have you stay?

01:42:43.000 I had to find this like thing called a one-feet room where like very cheap in Seoul.

01:42:50.000 So I was working at this like one dollar store in Korea.

01:42:55.000 So I was a teenager.

01:42:57.000 American age was 15 years old.

01:43:00.000 South Korea is a different way of counting age.

01:43:02.000 So you're going to be confused.

01:43:04.000 So in South Korea, North Korea, when you're born, the day you are born, you are one.

01:43:08.000 You're one when you're born?

01:43:10.000 Yep.

01:43:10.000 And then January 1st, you're two.

01:43:13.000 So if somebody was born December 31st, they're one.

01:43:16.000 Tomorrow, January 1st, they become two.

01:43:19.000 Even when they're a baby?

01:43:20.000 Yeah, they're two days old and they're two years old.

01:43:23.000 Really?

01:43:24.000 Yeah, so they count age like that.

01:43:26.000 So when you're born, you're one, and you gain age not on your birthday, January 1st, you gain one year.

01:43:31.000 This is only North Korea? 0.72

01:43:33.000 And South Korea both.

01:43:34.000 South Korea too?

01:43:35.000 Really?

01:43:35.000 Yeah.

01:43:36.000 So if you're born in December, You're one years old, and then in January, you're two, even though you're only a month old.

01:43:44.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:43:45.000 Wow.

01:43:46.000 So I was born in October.

01:43:48.000 So I was born, I was one.

01:43:50.000 And then December, two months later, I became two years old.

01:43:53.000 So you were two years old when you were two months old.

01:43:55.000 Yeah.

01:43:55.000 So 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.

01:44:01.000 When I escaped from North Korea, North Korean age, I was 15. So in South Korean press, I had to tell them Korean age.

01:44:09.000 Right.

01:44:10.000 Then it translates to English article.

01:44:12.000 So why was I 15 and 13?

01:44:15.000 Because the age counting is different.

01:44:18.000 So I arrived there at the American age I was 15, but South Korean age I was 17 years old.

01:44:25.000 Wow.

01:44:26.000 So you're really 15 years old, American age.

01:44:28.000 Yeah.

01:44:28.000 And you are working in a dollar store.

01:44:31.000 Yeah, the dollar store.

01:44:32.000 And so you're supporting yourself?

01:44:33.000 Yeah.

01:44:34.000 And learning?

01:44:35.000 Yeah.

01:44:36.000 I taught myself.

01:44:37.000 I took GED. So I crashed from one year to elementary, middle school, high school, everything within a year.

01:44:45.000 So that's how I went to university when I was 17 years old, American age.

01:44:51.000 Which 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.

01:45:02.000 But you were obsessed, right?

01:45:04.000 Yeah, I was obsessed.

01:45:05.000 You were obsessed.

01:45:06.000 You had gotten to the point where you were malnourished because you weren't eating, because all you were doing was studying.

01:45:12.000 Yeah, I know.

01:45:14.000 I ended up in the ER, somebody called, and they were like, you're malnourished.

01:45:19.000 So I'm still like 79, 80 pounds, but way smaller than this.

01:45:24.000 So right now you're 80 pounds.

01:45:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:45:26.000 But back then you were like...

01:45:27.000 I didn't have the scare.

01:45:29.000 I was too poor enough for the scare.

01:45:31.000 But you weren't even thinking about food.

01:45:33.000 You were just trying to learn.

01:45:34.000 And there was food that was expensive.

01:45:36.000 So it was, you know, in South Korea as a student working in the dollar store and studying, everything was expensive.

01:45:42.000 So it was, you know, I couldn't really afford three meals a day, obviously.

01:45:47.000 Right.

01:45:48.000 Yeah.

01:45:49.000 And so what were you studying and how were you doing it?

01:45:54.000 I was doing all the school requirement projects for GED, right?

01:45:58.000 Biology, physics, math, English, history, all this writing, everything.

01:46:03.000 But on top of that, I was reading books.

01:46:07.000 I 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.

01:46:16.000 So because I was, I mean, I did not know what Shakespeare is.

01:46:20.000 How embarrassing is that?

01:46:21.000 People talk about Romy and Juliet.

01:46:23.000 I'm like, who the heck is Romy and Juliet?

01:46:25.000 I remember I got to South Korea.

01:46:27.000 This guy, somebody called Michael Jackson died, right?

01:46:32.000 It's on TV and there's some funerals.

01:46:34.000 Like, who the heck is Michael Jackson?

01:46:36.000 And then sometime later, this guy called like Apple Steve Jobs died.

01:46:41.000 I'm like, is that a big deal that Steve Jobs died?

01:46:45.000 Steve Jobs.

01:46:46.000 Steve Jobs, oh.

01:46:47.000 So I don't know what Steve Jobs is.

01:46:49.000 Right.

01:46:50.000 So like, that's amusing why these people are so upset.

01:46:55.000 And like, obviously, there's like, some days later, Nelson Mandela dies.

01:46:59.000 Who's Nelson Mandela, right?

01:47:00.000 Right.

01:47:01.000 It'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.

01:47:16.000 No.

01:47:18.000 That's the thing.

01:47:20.000 When I came to America, I did not even know what Arab is or Hispanic is.

01:47:25.000 I have no preconception of race.

01:47:28.000 So that was great.

01:47:29.000 I don't know the difference.

01:47:31.000 For me, you guys are all strangers.

01:47:36.000 So I remember I had a talk in Charleston, South Carolina, or North Carolina, I don't know, Charleston, in a room.

01:47:45.000 For the first time I was there, and then like a thousand people, all white people, and they looked all the same. 0.96

01:47:55.000 I just couldn't believe they all looked the same to me.

01:47:58.000 That's hilarious.

01:47:59.000 That's funny.

01:48:01.000 So 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.

01:48:10.000 And I listened to a lot of your podcast.

01:48:16.000 Did you?

01:48:16.000 I'm sorry.

01:48:17.000 No, it was wonderful.

01:48:20.000 I mean, even to this day, English, I learned even when I was 21, like, five years ago.

01:48:25.000 So it's still, like, a struggle for me.

01:48:29.000 So 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?

01:48:45.000 It's amazing, first of all, that you read whatever you want.

01:48:49.000 The one point that changed me as a child was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm.

01:48:55.000 That was random.

01:48:56.000 I literally went up and picked up the book, the thinnest book.

01:49:00.000 And I thought, okay, it takes the least time for me to finish it.

01:49:04.000 And reading that book made everything sense to me because after North Korea, of course, I mean, learning what subways is challenging, right?

01:49:13.000 Learning what hamburger is is like a learning experience.

01:49:16.000 But learning how to trust again, I think that was the hardest thing.

01:49:21.000 Like, obviously, I don't trust guys.

01:49:22.000 I didn't, right?

01:49:24.000 And not only that, like they say, everything that you believed in North Korea was a lie. 0.93

01:49:29.000 They are dictators.

01:49:31.000 They are not gods.

01:49:32.000 They didn't love you.

01:49:33.000 They are dictators.

01:49:34.000 You've been lied to entire life.

01:49:36.000 And I was thinking, so how do I know what you're telling me is not a lie then?

01:49:40.000 Right.

01:49:41.000 That was so scary.

01:49:42.000 How do I trust ever again?

01:49:44.000 So only reading George Orwell's 1984 and the animal farm, that's when I understood what happened to my people.

01:49:53.000 Then you understood doublespeak and propaganda.

01:49:56.000 Yeah.

01:49:56.000 And then the price of silence.

01:49:59.000 The Price of Silence.

01:50:00.000 Until that point, I was blaming the dictator.

01:50:05.000 Why did you do that to us?

01:50:06.000 But I started thinking, what all those people, like my grandma, she knew life before Kim's.

01:50:13.000 She knew the alternative life.

01:50:16.000 Like in that animals, you see the revolution generation, then next, and the new ones don't even know what the world could be like.

01:50:24.000 So that's the thing, like when people say, why there's no revolution in North Korea?

01:50:28.000 I'm like, I mean, how do you fight to be when you don't know you're a slave?

01:50:32.000 It's impossible.

01:50:34.000 In America, everybody talks about how they're oppressed systemically.

01:50:39.000 You know people in North Korea don't even know they're oppressed.

01:50:43.000 If you know you're oppressed, you are not oppressed.

01:50:46.000 Not knowing is a true definition of oppression.

01:50:49.000 Unfortunately in this country they've made oppression a valuable thing.

01:50:55.000 Like if you can say that you're oppressed and people look for oppression that sometimes doesn't exist.

01:51:02.000 For sure there is oppression in this country and for sure there is racism in this country.

01:51:06.000 But 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.

01:51:17.000 It's a real problem.

01:51:20.000 After all of that, I ended up at Columbia University in New York.

01:51:25.000 As you can see, I love learning.

01:51:27.000 I'm a very curious person.

01:51:29.000 I go there.

01:51:31.000 Truth doesn't matter.

01:51:33.000 It all matters to your feelings, how you feel.

01:51:38.000 Well you caught Columbia University at a terrible time, right?

01:51:41.000 Like what year was this?

01:51:42.000 2016 I joined after Trump became president.

01:51:45.000 The worst time you could ever join, right?

01:51:48.000 Because 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. 1.00

01:51:56.000 This 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. 0.97

01:52:06.000 And so everything that you can possibly do to stop a person like that must be justified, including distorting truth. 0.99

01:52:15.000 Yeah.

01:52:16.000 It was unbelievable.

01:52:20.000 I couldn't believe it.

01:52:22.000 I came out, after four years later, scared more than ever.

01:52:26.000 What'd I say?

01:52:27.000 I was seeing myself censoring every day again.

01:52:31.000 And it was like I never thought America had to go censor myself.

01:52:37.000 What was it like, the contrast between learning in South Korea and then learning at Columbia?

01:52:43.000 So South Korea is like I was too little I knew about the world.

01:52:49.000 So everything they told me was truth.

01:52:52.000 Like everybody who I met was a teacher.

01:52:55.000 Do you know what I mean?

01:52:55.000 In South Korea, my knowledge was so little.

01:52:58.000 I was like one year old, right?

01:53:00.000 Everybody told me, do you know Africa?

01:53:03.000 I mean, that's new.

01:53:03.000 What's Africa?

01:53:06.000 Do you know I've been to Australia?

01:53:07.000 What is Australia?

01:53:10.000 That's new.

01:53:11.000 Like, so everybody was my teacher in South Korea.

01:53:13.000 Right.

01:53:14.000 So I never, like, questioned anybody.

01:53:16.000 Just everybody was my teacher.

01:53:18.000 Everything was new.

01:53:18.000 Yeah, everything was new.

01:53:20.000 And everybody taught me something new, for sure.

01:53:23.000 And coming to America, it was a bit different because by then I read, like, a lot of books.

01:53:27.000 And I was a bit advanced than when I was in South Korea.

01:53:32.000 So now going to Colombia, I mean, as soon as I tell them my view, they say, oh, you're brainwashed. 0.95

01:53:38.000 You're brainwashed.

01:53:39.000 They said you were brainwashed because of what? 0.87

01:53:41.000 What was your perspective?

01:53:42.000 So, my professor was arguing that, she was asking, so how to, the sensitivity training, why you gotta be sensitive to all findings, hidden oppression.

01:53:53.000 And what do you think about men holding a door for you?

01:53:56.000 And I was thinking, okay, that's a sign of decency.

01:53:59.000 Like, I hold a door for other people.

01:54:02.000 And she, no, that's a sign of toxic masculinity. 1.00

01:54:05.000 That's like how to show you the overpowering you.

01:54:08.000 Holding a door open is overpowering?

01:54:10.000 Yeah, it's a man when men does that.

01:54:12.000 What kind of class was this?

01:54:13.000 What was the subject?

01:54:15.000 I took a junior or something.

01:54:18.000 It was humanity class, of course.

01:54:20.000 And then she was like, I told her, no, I think that's sign of distancing.

01:54:24.000 That's over, like, you're brainwashed.

01:54:27.000 You're brainwashed? 0.84

01:54:28.000 Yeah. 0.84

01:54:28.000 How rude is that? 0.84

01:54:30.000 For me, a safe place meant where you can express your views. 1.00

01:54:38.000 Especially in the universe, you can be dumb to search for truth. 0.66

01:54:42.000 But here, in the name of safe space, no other than the mainstream view, you cannot have them. 0.88

01:54:49.000 But 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.

01:55:08.000 Yeah, because there are people like that.

01:55:10.000 But also, some people will open the door to be polite because they're nice.

01:55:15.000 And to deny that is to deny reality and to deny nuance.

01:55:19.000 And that's what's really scary, is the sacrificing of nuance to promote a narrative that fits your needs.

01:55:26.000 Exactly.

01:55:27.000 I think if things are so complex, why humans do what is very complex.

01:55:32.000 Yes.

01:55:33.000 And they lose entire complexity.

01:55:35.000 Right.

01:55:36.000 And also seeing that how this thing called white guilt or privilege was so new to me.

01:55:42.000 It's like, how are you guilty for what your ancestors did?

01:55:46.000 Right.

01:55:46.000 That's exactly what North Koreans did to us.

01:55:49.000 Exactly.

01:55:50.000 And I was like, why?

01:55:52.000 You didn't choose to be born as white. 0.96

01:55:54.000 I don't choose my birthplace.

01:55:57.000 It's again the same thing.

01:55:59.000 It'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.

01:56:09.000 Or maybe they have some hidden bias that they're not even aware of and they're going to search it out.

01:56:13.000 And so you have these paranoid people who are like, oh my god, am I secretly a bigot?

01:56:18.000 Am I secretly a racist?

01:56:20.000 And they'll reaffirm it with you.

01:56:22.000 And then in order for you to get points, you have to say, I will do better.

01:56:27.000 And then I'm going to be not just not racist, I'm going to be anti-racist.

01:56:32.000 And then they'll say, well, now you're a good ally.

01:56:34.000 And it's this really strange way of communicating.

01:56:37.000 And When we were complaining about it years ago, people would say, why are you complaining about this?

01:56:42.000 It's just a few random fringe people in universities.

01:56:46.000 And the people that I knew that were professors that were secretly terrified of this, they would talk about it.

01:56:52.000 This is like before Jordan Peterson started talking about this openly.

01:56:56.000 When they would talk about this, they would get chastised by the people in the university.

01:57:00.000 Because these people had a vested interest in continuing this type of thinking and behaving.

01:57:08.000 They had gold in this.

01:57:11.000 There was profit in this.

01:57:13.000 There were some social brownie points in this.

01:57:16.000 And they were going to continue to mine this vein of gold.

01:57:21.000 And when everybody was stepping in and talking about the dangers of this, people were saying, no, no, no.

01:57:26.000 This is the future.

01:57:27.000 This is progressive.

01:57:28.000 This is all about love and trust and anti-racism and all these things.

01:57:31.000 And then the people that were scared of it, they were sort of silenced in the universities until it started trickling over into corporations.

01:57:39.000 And then when it started trickling into corporations, people started getting genuinely scared.

01:57:43.000 And 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.

01:57:51.000 I think that's the thing.

01:57:53.000 Initially I was thinking maybe only the academia is just crazy, right?

01:57:59.000 But then last year I spoke at TED and then these people who run social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, all these people come.

01:58:08.000 And I told them I had an engagement in Texas.

01:58:11.000 And they were saying, why do you go to Texas?

01:58:14.000 I was like, well, because America is America?

01:58:17.000 And I said, that's a Trump country.

01:58:19.000 I decided not to set a foot below a certain line of states that supports Trump.

01:58:26.000 And these are the people who run biggest media companies in the world. 0.96

01:58:32.000 It's ridiculous. 0.90

01:58:33.000 Especially ridiculous in a place like Austin, which is a progressive city. 0.98

01:58:37.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:58:38.000 And then last year during the looting in Chicago, I was robbed by these three black women. 1.00

01:58:47.000 And robbing is okay. 0.98

01:58:48.000 Anybody can become a murderer.

01:58:50.000 Anybody can be a thief. 0.99

01:58:52.000 But just they happen to be a black woman. 1.00

01:58:54.000 And I have a nanny who is Muslim in the nation with a hijab carrying my stroller behind me. 0.99

01:59:01.000 And 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.

01:59:13.000 And I became...

01:59:14.000 Wait a minute, wait a minute. 0.99

01:59:15.000 So you got robbed by these three black women? 1.00

01:59:17.000 And I got punched. 0.99

01:59:18.000 You got punched and robbed?

01:59:19.000 Yeah.

01:59:20.000 And so you called the police.

01:59:22.000 I tried to call them and they prevented me from not calling the police.

01:59:25.000 Who was trying to tell you not to call the police?

01:59:27.000 All the people on the street, on the Michigan Avenue.

01:59:30.000 People that saw the crime?

01:59:32.000 Yeah.

01:59:33.000 They said you're racist for calling the police?

01:59:35.000 Yeah, and accusing these girls of being robbers, right?

01:59:40.000 How does that make you a racist by accusing them of being... 0.94

01:59:43.000 Because I'm not black and they are black. 1.00

01:59:46.000 So calling a black person a thief is a racist, even though when they are a thief. 0.99

01:59:51.000 So, of course, I got punched. 0.97

01:59:53.000 I couldn't call the police.

01:59:54.000 And later I called.

01:59:55.000 Thankfully, these girls took my car to spend the money on the Saks. 1.00

01:59:59.000 And then police got the footage of them.

02:00:01.000 Saks Fifth Avenue?

02:00:02.000 Yeah, in Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

02:00:05.000 And then, of course, they are not going to prosecute these girls.

02:00:08.000 There's so much crime in Chicago.

02:00:09.000 They are not going to prosecute somebody who drops.

02:00:12.000 And that's when I was thinking, this country lost it.

02:00:16.000 Like, 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. 0.68

02:00:26.000 They're not gonna just out of nowhere scream that you're a racist.

02:00:30.000 So they were screaming you were racist because of the phone call that you were making?

02:00:35.000 No, because I heard their arm.

02:00:37.000 I told them, I'm not accusing you of anything.

02:00:40.000 I'm just going to call the police.

02:00:41.000 Can you wait here until the police comes?

02:00:43.000 You were holding whose arm?

02:00:45.000 The girl who robbed my wallet.

02:00:46.000 Oh.

02:00:47.000 So the girl who robbed your wallet, you were trying to hold on to her? 0.67

02:00:50.000 Yeah, because she was trying to run.

02:00:52.000 Okay. 0.86

02:00:53.000 So I was trying to call the police, and then she was like, you're a racist.

02:00:57.000 A skin of color person doesn't make me a thief. 0.67

02:01:01.000 And then she was punching me here. 1.00

02:01:03.000 And this is after she already robbed you?

02:01:05.000 Yeah.

02:01:06.000 Yeah.

02:01:07.000 Wow.

02:01:07.000 And then the people gathers.

02:01:09.000 And I remember there's a bus station.

02:01:12.000 There's one white mom with teenagers. 0.98

02:01:15.000 And I became the lifetime example for her to show her children how racism exists in America. 0.98

02:01:22.000 Like, me became a bigot and calling this black girl a thief. 0.83

02:01:26.000 So she didn't look at that kind of racist. 0.98

02:01:28.000 That's the problem that we have.

02:01:30.000 How many people were around you?

02:01:31.000 It's like, I don't know, some 20 people.

02:01:33.000 And they were like...

02:01:33.000 20 people.

02:01:34.000 They're circling me around so I cannot call the police.

02:01:36.000 Circling you and calling you a racist even though this girl just stole from you.

02:01:40.000 These girls still ran away. 1.00

02:01:42.000 And they let the girls run away. 1.00

02:01:43.000 Yeah.

02:01:44.000 Just go, go run, right?

02:01:46.000 They told the girls to run. 1.00

02:01:47.000 Yeah.

02:01:47.000 Wow.

02:01:49.000 So that's when I started speaking out and now I became the enemy of the woke. 0.95

02:01:56.000 I got the North Koreans going on. 1.00

02:01:59.000 I became the Kim Jong-un's killing list few years ago.

02:02:03.000 And South Korean intelligence like you are on the kids killing list right? 0.90

02:02:06.000 And I'm like cool I expected that and now I'm Chinese like enemy Chinese regimes and now in America I got so many enemies. 0.91

02:02:19.000 Jesus.

02:02:20.000 Yeah.

02:02:21.000 That's when you realize that this stuff spills over into real life, right?

02:02:25.000 That's when I knew that my son is American.

02:02:29.000 I have a son in America.

02:02:30.000 And on his birth certificate in Chicago, my father's birthplace is America, USA, and mom is North Korea.

02:02:39.000 Right?

02:02:40.000 On birth certificate, mom is North Korean.

02:02:43.000 And to me, giving him that American citizenship was bigger than winning the lottery.

02:02:48.000 I thought I did everything I could to give him a better life, making him American.

02:02:53.000 And seeing that last year in America, I was like, this is not a safe country.

02:02:58.000 Because he got half Asian who wants to work hard and we believe in meritocracy.

02:03:05.000 And he got half wife who's supposedly oppressive because of their... 1.00

02:03:08.000 So he's so screwed! 0.99

02:03:13.000 His cast is so low right now. 0.99

02:03:16.000 That's funny.

02:03:17.000 That's funny.

02:03:18.000 It's sad.

02:03:19.000 It's truly sad.

02:03:20.000 Unfortunately, in some circles, it's true.

02:03:23.000 I think there's a lot of people that are waking up to this problem.

02:03:28.000 I hope so.

02:03:28.000 There are.

02:03:29.000 And 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.

02:03:45.000 What do they gain from me?

02:03:47.000 I don't get it.

02:03:48.000 They gain social status.

02:03:51.000 If there's a narrative that's being pushed and they go along with it, people say, oh, you're on the right side.

02:03:59.000 You're doing the right thing.

02:04:01.000 You're saying the right words.

02:04:02.000 If you go against it, they'll chase you down and yell at you.

02:04:07.000 You will be on the outside.

02:04:09.000 You'll be an outcast. 1.00

02:04:10.000 People are cowards. 0.99

02:04:12.000 They're terrified. 0.98

02:04:13.000 Even if they know something is true, they're terrified of saying it because they don't want the blowback for it.

02:04:18.000 So you see a lot of that going on in this country.

02:04:23.000 And 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.

02:04:38.000 And they'll give up those freedoms to the government. 0.84

02:04:50.000 We're good to go.

02:05:06.000 Can suck resources out of gigantic corporations that are funding their campaigns.

02:05:10.000 That's what they're doing.

02:05:12.000 And they're going to continue to do that if we let them.

02:05:14.000 And we're going to slide further and further away from freedom and democracy, freedom and the ability to express yourself openly.

02:05:25.000 And all of these things, people are willing to give up.

02:05:30.000 If it supports their side.

02:05:33.000 And that's what's so terrifying.

02:05:35.000 They don't understand.

02:05:35.000 If 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?

02:05:49.000 Because that's probably going to happen, unfortunately.

02:05:52.000 We're going to have this teeter-totter back. 0.99

02:05:54.000 We'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.

02:06:06.000 And when that far right person comes into office, they will have access to all of those powers that you so willingly gave up.

02:06:14.000 Because you wanted to stop this idea that you didn't agree with.

02:06:19.000 And they've done this in this horribly short-sighted way.

02:06:25.000 And they've done it in the name of the woke. 1.00

02:06:28.000 They'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. 0.99

02:06:40.000 It'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? 0.99

02:06:51.000 Right.

02:06:52.000 Think of us, I mean, molecular 60 million Chinese people.

02:06:56.000 Right.

02:06:56.000 Stalin, Hitler, they drive us to go to the war.

02:07:00.000 And our biggest threat is governments.

02:07:03.000 I mean, big governments.

02:07:05.000 Yes.

02:07:06.000 And it's so unbelievable how people just keep wanting for someone to take care of things for them.

02:07:13.000 People are scared and they get delusional.

02:07:17.000 They have this bizarre idea that someone's going to come along that has power that's a benevolent dictator.

02:07:23.000 It's going to take care of things in the right way.

02:07:25.000 And you just give them the power.

02:07:26.000 Give them the power to shut these people up.

02:07:29.000 Freedom of speech is not the end-all be-all.

02:07:32.000 Maybe it's more important to just say what I want you to say.

02:07:36.000 It's just strange.

02:07:38.000 The short-sightedness is so strange because you hear people on CNN. It's supposed to be the news.

02:07:44.000 And they're espousing these ideas.

02:07:47.000 And 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.

02:07:55.000 This was the thing about the Patriot Act that people were so terrified of in this country that were aware of the consequences.

02:08:00.000 They were saying, well, Obama's never going to do this.

02:08:03.000 Obama's not going to be in office forever.

02:08:05.000 He's going to be in office for eight years.

02:08:07.000 You love Obama and you trust Obama.

02:08:09.000 That's great.

02:08:09.000 Look what came after Obama.

02:08:11.000 Trump. 0.79

02:08:11.000 And now you have a dead man. 0.79

02:08:13.000 Now you have Joe Biden who doesn't know what the fuck is going on. 0.98

02:08:15.000 Well, what are you gonna have after that? 0.97

02:08:17.000 Well, you're probably gonna have someone on the right, and it's gonna be someone that is a reaction to what you have on the left.

02:08:23.000 I mean, this is what we do in this country.

02:08:25.000 We go left, right, left, right.

02:08:27.000 And we pretend, well, this guy has our interest in mind. 0.99

02:08:29.000 Ah, he fucked it up too. 0.95

02:08:30.000 Let's go with someone who's polar opposite. 1.00

02:08:32.000 Ah, he fucked it up. 0.99

02:08:33.000 And you give him eight years each side, or four years each side. 0.99

02:08:36.000 And it just keeps getting worse.

02:08:38.000 And for whatever reason, people are constantly willing to give up powers.

02:08:42.000 They're constantly willing to ignore the core principles that this country was founded on, which is freedom and liberty.

02:08:48.000 And you need those things.

02:08:49.000 You 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.

02:08:57.000 But 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.

02:09:11.000 It's bizarre.

02:09:12.000 It's very, very strange.

02:09:14.000 Very strange.

02:09:15.000 I'm not a Christian, but one day I was like, Asking if there's God, right?

02:09:21.000 He says everything has a sort of reason.

02:09:24.000 Why does North Korea exist?

02:09:26.000 Makes no sense.

02:09:28.000 Why does it exist?

02:09:30.000 Why does China exist?

02:09:32.000 Or why does the Communist Party, I should say, exist?

02:09:34.000 Why do they have the power to run the country that way? 0.99

02:09:37.000 It's because of that delusion, ignorance in the people, to not learn from history.

02:09:45.000 I don't know, do you think, do we have hope in this country?

02:09:48.000 Or how do we get out of even this?

02:09:50.000 I'm worried.

02:09:51.000 I'm worried because it just seems to be sliding further and further in this direction of totalitarianism.

02:09:58.000 And these people are willingly giving up these rights because they believe that that's going to support their side.

02:10:09.000 And 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.

02:10:27.000 It's strange.

02:10:29.000 It's very strange because it's an anti-racism.

02:10:35.000 It's an anti-objective perspective.

02:10:37.000 They're not looking at all of the – and we're so polarized with the right and the left in this country.

02:10:43.000 We're so polarized with Republicans versus Democrats in this country that there's no middle ground anymore.

02:10:48.000 The 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.

02:10:56.000 It 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?

02:11:25.000 And I was like, I'm still waiting a call from New York Times.

02:11:27.000 If they call me about workism in this country and danger of it, I'm going to talk to them.

02:11:33.000 Wait a minute, the New York Times has never called you?

02:11:35.000 Absolutely.

02:11:35.000 I mean, they only called me when I was criticizing Trump about meeting Kim Jong-un without preconceptions.

02:11:42.000 They never wanted to talk to you about your experience in North Korea?

02:11:45.000 No.

02:11:45.000 Only when I was talking about Trump, they wanted me.

02:11:48.000 Who has tried to talk to you about this?

02:11:52.000 Some British newspapers still do, like Daily Telegraph.

02:11:57.000 They 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.

02:12:06.000 Really?

02:12:07.000 Yeah.

02:12:07.000 That's the only time they want to talk to you?

02:12:09.000 Yeah.

02:12:10.000 So that's the thing.

02:12:11.000 But the thing is, you know, Fox never accused me, why did you get on New York Times and criticizing Trump?

02:12:17.000 Therefore, we don't want you.

02:12:18.000 But the people in the liberal mainstream media, why did you get on Fox?

02:12:23.000 So I'm like, there are people too.

02:12:26.000 They're both newspapers.

02:12:28.000 So it is unbelievable.

02:12:30.000 I just...

02:12:31.000 There'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.

02:12:44.000 And people are furious at them.

02:12:46.000 But they're saying all the same things that they would say on MSNBC or CNN. They're not saying right wing talking points.

02:12:55.000 No.

02:12:55.000 They'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.

02:13:03.000 These are progressive people, but they're being chastised and they're being attacked.

02:13:07.000 It's very strange.

02:13:09.000 It's really dark.

02:13:11.000 I'm happy to talk to anybody.

02:13:13.000 I want to go on CNN and talk about this, but they just don't give me a platform to talk about it.

02:13:18.000 They don't just call me.

02:13:19.000 Well, it's in support of this narrative that's occurring now where it's okay to, air quotes, de-platform people.

02:13:26.000 This is the idea.

02:13:28.000 You'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.

02:13:34.000 He's critical of the way the government and the FDA and everyone is handling COVID, right?

02:13:39.000 Or the CDC or the World Health Organization.

02:13:42.000 And 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.

02:13:53.000 And they removed him from Twitter for a week.

02:13:56.000 They removed him from Twitter recently for discussing the actual CDC's reports on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness or whatever on COVID vaccines.

02:14:29.000 Wow.

02:14:31.000 Is to counter it with what you think is a more sound argument.

02:14:35.000 It's not remove someone from social media.

02:14:37.000 But everyone's like, yes, he should be deplatformed.

02:14:41.000 You see people from the left just calling out, willingly calling out for censorship.

02:14:45.000 It's a disturbing trend.

02:14:48.000 And I don't think they understand that it's going to come for them.

02:14:51.000 Because censorship is a monster that is never full.

02:14:56.000 And it's gonna come for you.

02:14:58.000 It's gonna find, it's gonna, it'll keep pushing the boundaries and go further and further left until you can't be woke enough.

02:15:06.000 And then it's gonna come for you.

02:15:07.000 Exactly.

02:15:08.000 I think that's the thing.

02:15:09.000 In North Korea, right, even though one top janitor in the meeting few years ago, he was falling asleep.

02:15:16.000 And that afternoon he get executed.

02:15:19.000 And this guy was working for this system entire his life to supporting the system.

02:15:24.000 But he was tired.

02:15:25.000 Yeah.

02:15:26.000 And his uncle, right?

02:15:28.000 He did everything to make Kim Jong-un to succeed a line and be secure.

02:15:32.000 He got executed.

02:15:34.000 Was the uncle, did they think that the uncle was planning to overthrow Kim Jong-un?

02:15:39.000 No, that was an accusation.

02:15:40.000 It was just an accusation.

02:15:40.000 Was it true?

02:15:41.000 No, it wasn't.

02:15:42.000 So it was every time when they do it, like that thing, they get killed.

02:15:47.000 What was the thing that happened recently where Kim Jong-un was missing and they said that they thought he was sick?

02:15:53.000 Was that a trap?

02:15:54.000 No, 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.

02:16:07.000 And Kim Jong-un does have health issues at this point.

02:16:11.000 What kind of health issues?

02:16:12.000 I mean, he's over 330 pounds and he's like 5'7".

02:16:16.000 And he gained weight very rapidly.

02:16:19.000 And he drinks like 13 bottles of wine like a night.

02:16:24.000 Wow.

02:16:25.000 And he has insane parties every single day.

02:16:27.000 So he's not healthy.

02:16:29.000 He does not know how to control himself.

02:16:32.000 So recently Kim Jong-un lost weight dramatically in one month.

02:16:36.000 But people say that's like, oh, is he becoming healthy?

02:16:38.000 No, he just became very, very ill.

02:16:41.000 So they are preparing who's going to succeed him afterwards now already.

02:16:46.000 How old is he?

02:16:47.000 He's 36. In Korean years or American years?

02:16:50.000 American years, I believe.

02:16:55.000 Wow.

02:16:57.000 But it doesn't seem like there's any hope for North Korea to get out of their current situation. 0.79

02:17:02.000 As long as China, the CCP is there, it's not going to be out.

02:17:06.000 Whoever gets in next, China maintained exactly the same thing.

02:17:11.000 So without changing the Chinese Communist Party, we never get to change North Korea. 0.92

02:17:16.000 But 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. 0.66

02:17:27.000 But that's the thing also.

02:17:28.000 We thought economic freedom is going to bring the political freedom.

02:17:31.000 But that's the unique thing about freedom.

02:17:33.000 Unless you fight for it, you don't get it.

02:17:36.000 Right.

02:17:36.000 They don't have political freedom.

02:17:38.000 Like right now, the censorship, the social credit system.

02:17:41.000 If you don't have the highest credit, you cannot even buy a bus ticket to see your mom in the countryside.

02:17:46.000 Right.

02:17:47.000 You cannot even get on an airplane and bus and public transportation.

02:17:50.000 Well, that's what comes next after vaccine passports.

02:17:53.000 Yeah.

02:17:53.000 It's like what you say on social media.

02:17:55.000 They'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. 0.51

02:18:03.000 I think to me is that this is the last time that humanity ever tried to be free as individuals.

02:18:11.000 Being an individual is such a unique thing to me, that I can be different than you.

02:18:17.000 It's the people talking about comparing, the biggest difference that people have between individuals.

02:18:24.000 The difference you and I have is unthinkable.

02:18:27.000 And the difference that I have with my mom is unthinkable.

02:18:30.000 That's the beauty of America, that you can be different.

02:18:33.000 You can be an individual.

02:18:35.000 But now you cannot be an individual.

02:18:36.000 That's what North Korea did. 0.78

02:18:39.000 So when the North Korean regime criticized me, they said she was, as a young girl, very individualistic and ambitious.

02:18:47.000 That's hilarious.

02:18:48.000 That was the worst thing that came up with.

02:18:49.000 Because in North Korea, that's the worst criticism to give somebody.

02:18:52.000 So they did not know that thing was embraced here.

02:18:56.000 So North Korea propaganda channel on YouTube, you can see they say...

02:18:58.000 And this is another amazing thing about YouTube is that...

02:19:02.000 I talk about women getting sold in China.

02:19:05.000 And those old videos get demonetized.

02:19:08.000 Because, I mean, some others meet the YouTube guideline.

02:19:13.000 And they're letting North Korean regime to have their propaganda channel on YouTube.

02:19:18.000 So they give a platform to dictatorship.

02:19:21.000 But they do not want to give a platform to the people who is fighting this human rights justice fight.

02:19:27.000 And this is a thing, like one video I made about the Second Amendment.

02:19:32.000 It 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. 0.99

02:19:39.000 75% of the population went on the street demanding they want to be independent.

02:19:43.000 Right?

02:19:43.000 One country, two systems, they wanted that.

02:19:45.000 But China took it over because these people did not have any self-defense.

02:19:49.000 Right. 0.80

02:19:50.000 Imagine North Korea, even if 20% of population had guns, We would assassinate them. 0.98

02:19:56.000 We would not let our children die like that.

02:19:58.000 So to me, you can't have crimes with the guns.

02:20:02.000 Accidents happen.

02:20:03.000 But it's very important when people have the ability to defend themselves from the governments when they become corrupt.

02:20:10.000 And of course, sharing this is just one perspective.

02:20:12.000 You get blocked.

02:20:14.000 So this is a country that I am in now.

02:20:17.000 I have to fight for freedom of speech in America.

02:20:21.000 And I thought my journey to be freedom ended.

02:20:27.000 The 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.

02:20:35.000 But what they don't want to talk about with mass shootings is pharmaceutical companies.

02:20:39.000 They 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.

02:20:49.000 Most of them.

02:20:50.000 And they want to conveniently ignore that.

02:20:53.000 Whether they're disassociatives or SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication or anti-psychotic medication.

02:20:59.000 And it doesn't mean that that medication is causing them to do that, but they don't even want to address it.

02:21:05.000 It never even gets discussed.

02:21:06.000 The only thing that gets discussed is the actual weapon itself.

02:21:08.000 The ability to do that is so beyond most people.

02:21:12.000 The ability to kill random strangers in horrific acts of violence, most people are not capable of doing that.

02:21:24.000 Right. 0.97

02:21:38.000 And 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.

02:21:48.000 And one of the things that I read was that as they're doing this, only nine people have died from COVID over the last...

02:21:55.000 See if that's true.

02:21:56.000 How many people have died recently from COVID in Australia?

02:21:58.000 Because they have full-on government lockdowns where the government is flying helicopters over the streets and go back indoors.

02:22:05.000 You're not allowed to be outside, which is crazy.

02:22:08.000 It's like this disease doesn't even transmit well outside.

02:22:11.000 It doesn't make any sense.

02:22:12.000 Being outside and getting vitamin D from the sun is probably one of the best things you can do.

02:22:17.000 Exactly.

02:22:18.000 I mean like babies that born last year and during the pandemic, like my son is like three over three.

02:22:23.000 They didn't go outside the house for a year and a half.

02:22:27.000 Right.

02:22:27.000 And I told their mom, your baby might die from not getting a son once even in their life than getting a COVID and die.

02:22:35.000 Right.

02:22:35.000 It's not a dangerous thing for children.

02:22:37.000 But the thing is like not going outside for a year and a half is actually very dangerous.

02:22:43.000 Wow.

02:22:44.000 Zero deaths.

02:22:45.000 Oh my God.

02:22:48.000 Okay, so in July there's a couple.

02:22:50.000 So you have zero deaths from literally from October 20th.

02:22:58.000 October 20th you have zero deaths until July 11. Yeah, July 11, you have one death, and you got a little spike there.

02:23:08.000 What's that spike?

02:23:08.000 How many people is that?

02:23:09.000 One or two, actually.

02:23:10.000 Oh, that's crazy.

02:23:12.000 So 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.

02:23:22.000 Testing has gone up, but...

02:23:24.000 Yeah, of course.

02:23:25.000 But the deaths have gone down.

02:23:27.000 That's the thing.

02:23:27.000 It's like, folks, people die from heart attacks in staggering numbers every year.

02:23:32.000 You're not...

02:23:34.000 Making the government force people to exercise and put down cheeseburgers.

02:23:38.000 I mean, we have to decide.

02:23:40.000 They say, oh, well, the heart disease is not infectious.

02:23:44.000 Okay.

02:23:45.000 But the actual cause of death is pretty staggering.

02:23:48.000 The 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,

02:24:04.000 what'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?

02:24:13.000 It's crazy!

02:24:14.000 And a lot of it is lifestyle choices, and the government does nothing to stop those deaths.

02:24:18.000 Nothing.

02:24:18.000 Did you read that, like, on Guardian, that talking about fitness is a sign of white supremacy now?

02:24:23.000 Fitness?

02:24:24.000 Fitness.

02:24:25.000 Fitness.

02:24:25.000 Sign of white supremacy?

02:24:27.000 Yeah.

02:24:27.000 I know a lot of black people that are really fit.

02:24:30.000 They need to talk to David Goggins. 0.99

02:24:33.000 He's a white supremacist. 0.99

02:24:34.000 He doesn't even know it. 0.98

02:24:35.000 Well, that's just people looking for things to be upset about and to call things racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever or bigoted.

02:24:45.000 They're just looking for things to target.

02:24:48.000 But this is in North Korea.

02:24:50.000 In North Korea, when they said, this is our sworn enemy, death Americans, doesn't mean much.

02:24:56.000 There are so many words that doesn't mean anything.

02:24:59.000 And now in America, it's the same thing.

02:25:02.000 Everybody's Hitler. 0.95

02:25:04.000 Everyone's a Nazi. 1.00

02:25:05.000 Everyone's a racist. 1.00

02:25:06.000 And I'm a racist. 0.99

02:25:07.000 I'm a bigot. 0.97

02:25:08.000 I'm a Nazi now, too.

02:25:09.000 But I didn't even know what the Nazi was.

02:25:12.000 The problem is they're just trying to shut people down by using those words and those words are horrible.

02:25:18.000 If someone is an actual racist and you call them a racist and everybody else sees that they're a racist, it's a horrible accusation.

02:25:24.000 So they're using that so freely that they're distorting the meaning of it and it doesn't work anymore.

02:25:32.000 It's like crying wolf.

02:25:33.000 The old expression of the boy who cried wolf, the story.

02:25:36.000 That's literally what's happening right now in this country.

02:25:40.000 It's very strange.

02:25:41.000 I know.

02:25:42.000 This is what people told me.

02:25:43.000 This is new to them, too.

02:25:45.000 Because I came here in 2016, January.

02:25:48.000 And I thought this was always what America was like.

02:25:50.000 And I go, what was the country that I dreamed of far away?

02:25:55.000 It's still here.

02:25:57.000 The ideals that built this country are still here with a lot of people.

02:26:00.000 A lot of people that support freedom and the freedom of expression and the ability to speak freely and to debate thoughts openly.

02:26:09.000 All that stuff still exists with a lot of people here, but there's a lot of people that...

02:26:16.000 Are willing to give that up.

02:26:18.000 They're willing to give that up if their side can win.

02:26:20.000 And it's very confusing.

02:26:21.000 Because it's a mixture of toxic tribalism and short-sightedness mixed with ideology.

02:26:28.000 And it's a disturbing moment in time.

02:26:31.000 It really is.

02:26:32.000 So how do you, what do you think, how can we oppose Chinese regime?

02:26:38.000 It's infiltrating everywhere.

02:26:40.000 That's a good question. 0.99

02:26:42.000 You know, when you see John Cena from the WWE apologizing for calling Taiwan a country, and you're like, holy shit. 0.99

02:26:48.000 LeBron James. 0.99

02:26:50.000 Yeah.

02:26:50.000 This guy talking about justice all day long in America.

02:26:53.000 Yeah.

02:26:54.000 So what do we do with China?

02:26:57.000 Well, they're corrupted by money.

02:26:59.000 That's the problem.

02:27:00.000 The problem is China. 0.97

02:27:01.000 Look, 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.

02:27:13.000 $136 million of it was from China.

02:27:17.000 Yeah, it's terrifying.

02:27:19.000 So when he had to apologize and said, I'm so sorry, I made a mistake, I was really tired, all he did was call Taiwan a country. 0.99

02:27:26.000 I mean, it wasn't something where he said, you know, China's a terrible place, it sucks, I hate the Chinese people. 0.96

02:27:34.000 He didn't say anything like that. 0.99

02:27:35.000 He didn't say anything like that.

02:27:36.000 All he said was he called Taiwan a country.

02:27:42.000 It's crazy.

02:27:43.000 It's crazy that people are willing to give a country like China that much power because of money.

02:27:50.000 But that's the reality of this world that we live in.

02:27:53.000 We don't manufacture anything in America anymore. 0.98

02:27:55.000 I 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.

02:28:08.000 And 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.

02:28:30.000 No one even brings it up.

02:28:32.000 Convenient.

02:28:35.000 Yeah.

02:28:35.000 Strange.

02:28:36.000 It's a strange form of hypocrisy.

02:28:40.000 Yeah.

02:28:41.000 Do you think, I mean, I don't think capitalism is a problem.

02:28:45.000 Because then people say, oh, because of the capitalism makes people greedy, right?

02:28:50.000 Because people in capitalist countries are way better than people in communist countries that I've ever seen.

02:28:55.000 And way less corrupt.

02:28:57.000 I 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.

02:29:07.000 I mean, you've seen that with people like John Cena apologizing for China, right?

02:29:11.000 I mean, that's the kind of thing that is a form of capitalism that you're seeing, apologizing to Yeah.

02:29:32.000 You're seeing that with these subprime mortgages that cause the housing collapse.

02:29:38.000 You're seeing that when you see corruption in the stock market or when you see any kind of savings and loans corruption.

02:29:45.000 And there's financial corruption and stealing money and the corporate influence that they have on politicians and lobbyists and special interest groups.

02:29:53.000 That's all capitalism run amok, right?

02:29:56.000 But the bare bones of it The idea that there's many parts of this country that are still a meritocracy.

02:30:05.000 There'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.

02:30:16.000 And that gives people incentive to do well.

02:30:19.000 The foundation of that still exists.

02:30:21.000 We just have to be very careful that we don't give that up.

02:30:24.000 We have to be very careful that we don't give that up and give the power over to the government.

02:30:29.000 Because the government is ultimately, they're human beings.

02:30:33.000 And people, human beings, when they have unchecked power, it's very dangerous.

02:30:38.000 And it has been throughout history.

02:30:39.000 The 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.

02:30:49.000 All of it.

02:30:50.000 It's always been the case.

02:30:51.000 It's always been one group that's in power.

02:30:53.000 The best way to be in power is to be ruthless and to attack anytime you're challenged and confronted and punish people in open air. 0.98

02:31:03.000 Execute them publicly.

02:31:04.000 Any dissent gets shut down instantaneously.

02:31:08.000 Censor any speech that doesn't go along with the speech that the government is projecting.

02:31:14.000 That's always been the standard.

02:31:16.000 That's been the standard throughout human history.

02:31:18.000 Every king, every emperor, they all did the same thing until the United States.

02:31:24.000 And there's people in the United States that are willing to give that up.

02:31:27.000 They're willing to give that up because they want their side to win.

02:31:30.000 And it's terrifying.

02:31:32.000 It is.

02:31:33.000 It's terrifying.

02:31:33.000 Because once you give it up, you're never getting it back.

02:31:35.000 Unless we go to war again.

02:31:37.000 Unless we have a civil war in this country.

02:31:39.000 And then if we have a civil war in this country, get who's going to sneak in?

02:31:42.000 China.

02:31:43.000 China's going to sneak in and they're going to take over all sorts of corporations by buying them out. 1.00

02:31:48.000 They'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.

02:32:02.000 They're going to change the way people vote.

02:32:04.000 They're going to change all kinds of things.

02:32:05.000 And this is just...

02:32:07.000 It's almost what the founding fathers somehow or another knew that this could happen.

02:32:14.000 When 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.

02:32:27.000 They understood what has happened in the past.

02:32:30.000 When people have organized, what has happened in the past when free speech has been stifled?

02:32:35.000 What 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?

02:32:45.000 It's very dangerous.

02:32:46.000 I 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. 0.87

02:32:56.000 Because the Constitution itself is a bigotry written by white supremacists.

02:33:01.000 So that is, I mean, I don't know, that's every conclusion of every class that I took. 0.96

02:33:06.000 It's crazy.

02:33:07.000 What's the alternative?

02:33:09.000 The alternative is socialism, and they always say that socialism hasn't been done correctly.

02:33:13.000 Okay.

02:33:14.000 But the problem with socialism is what Jordan talks about all the time.

02:33:17.000 Jordan Peterson, he says, you cannot have an equality of outcome.

02:33:20.000 And it's true. 0.56

02:33:21.000 You can't.

02:33:21.000 It's very dangerous.

02:33:22.000 North Korea tried.

02:33:24.000 Yes.

02:33:25.000 They tried, and one guy became a god.

02:33:27.000 And everybody don't even know they are slaves now.

02:33:30.000 And 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.

02:33:42.000 And then...

02:33:44.000 Make it no different than every other government that's ever controlled the people throughout human history.

02:33:51.000 We have a chance to not have it like that in this country.

02:33:55.000 That's why when people oppose universal restrictions, when people oppose widespread government powers to do things, that was one of the big Yeah.

02:34:24.000 What is essential and what is not essential?

02:34:27.000 Who can work and who can't work? 0.99

02:34:28.000 What chances you can take and not take?

02:34:32.000 And they're not being honest about all sorts of aspects of the disease.

02:34:37.000 They 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.

02:34:46.000 And 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.

02:34:59.000 What if Fox News was right?

02:35:02.000 Do you care about the truth or do you care about supporting your side?

02:35:06.000 Do you care about your tribe?

02:35:08.000 And more people are terrified of being rejected by their tribe than they are of the truth not getting out.

02:35:17.000 You should be terrified of lies.

02:35:19.000 You should be terrified of the truth not getting out.

02:35:21.000 You don't know what the landscape is unless you're allowed to assess and analyze all the aspects of life.

02:35:29.000 All of them.

02:35:29.000 And people are terrified of doing that today.

02:35:32.000 And a lot of it is because of social media.

02:35:34.000 Because there's so many people that just live on social media all day long.

02:35:40.000 And they're on there just constantly going to war in the worst way possible with text messages.

02:35:47.000 Get triggered by every single thing they see.

02:35:50.000 Didn't they talk to you about that in Colombia too?

02:35:52.000 They tell you about things that triggered you?

02:35:55.000 So 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.

02:36:06.000 If it hurts, it triggers your feelings.

02:36:09.000 Do not even do the reading and don't even come to class.

02:36:12.000 And before the class, they announce, even at any point during this class, it triggers your feelings.

02:36:17.000 Leave the class and don't even tell me what you feel.

02:36:20.000 And the people are emotionally not stable, so they bring the comfort dogs in the classroom.

02:36:27.000 They bring dogs?

02:36:28.000 Yeah.

02:36:29.000 So dogs are licking around the people because they need the comfort from the animals, right?

02:36:33.000 They cannot even sit in the...

02:36:35.000 How many dogs?

02:36:36.000 Several dogs that are per class, right?

02:36:38.000 What if the dogs start fighting?

02:36:39.000 They bark and they lick and they chew.

02:36:42.000 And I asked one day, like, can I take my baby?

02:36:44.000 He was going to take a nap in the straw.

02:36:46.000 I said, no.

02:36:47.000 So they said no to the baby, but it's okay with the dogs.

02:36:50.000 No babies, but you can have a dog.

02:36:52.000 Yeah.

02:36:53.000 Wow.

02:36:54.000 It's my emotional support baby.

02:36:57.000 Exactly.

02:36:57.000 What if I said that?

02:36:59.000 I get triggered easily, so I get a baby.

02:37:02.000 I wonder.

02:37:02.000 Why can't you do that?

02:37:03.000 Why can't you say that?

02:37:04.000 But this is so madness. 0.99

02:37:06.000 The problem is your baby's half white, and so your baby might be racist. 0.99

02:37:09.000 Exactly. 0.98

02:37:10.000 The baby might be a part of the patriarchy. 0.81

02:37:12.000 But what is self-loathing?

02:37:15.000 Why are they committing suicide by themselves as a civilization?

02:37:19.000 In North Korea, we have a gun next to our head.

02:37:22.000 But in this country, you have freedom to learn and read and think.

02:37:28.000 Why are they doing this?

02:37:30.000 Think about human nature.

02:37:32.000 We chose Hitler. 0.99

02:37:33.000 We voted him.

02:37:34.000 People did that.

02:37:35.000 You know, there's an expression that I've said on this podcast many times, but I'll say it again, is that hard times create hard men.

02:37:43.000 Hard men create soft times.

02:37:45.000 Soft times create soft men.

02:37:48.000 Soft men create hard times.

02:37:51.000 We are now around soft men and hard times.

02:37:55.000 We're in the time of toxic masculinity, right?

02:37:59.000 Where you could be toxically male.

02:38:01.000 And then if you're suppressing masculinity, you're going to bring on hard times.

02:38:10.000 Masculinity doesn't mean you're mean.

02:38:12.000 It doesn't mean you're angry.

02:38:14.000 It means strength.

02:38:15.000 It means...

02:38:17.000 Discipline.

02:38:18.000 It 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.

02:38:29.000 If 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.

02:38:38.000 That's what's happened.

02:38:39.000 I mean, look what's happening to Hong Kong, right?

02:38:41.000 I 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.

02:38:52.000 And during the pandemic, they've ramped it up, and it's gotten even worse.

02:38:55.000 It's exactly what we talked about.

02:38:57.000 Mm-hmm.

02:38:58.000 You can't be weak.

02:39:00.000 And in this country, being weak is thought of as a virtue.

02:39:05.000 Jordan Peterson has a really interesting way of looking at this and he said it to me once and it made a lot of sense.

02:39:11.000 He said, people think that you should be weak and you should be Docile.

02:39:17.000 And then you should be a pacifist. 0.98

02:39:19.000 He goes, no, you should be a monster. 0.99

02:39:22.000 He said you should be a monster. 0.96

02:39:24.000 You should be ruthlessly ambitious and then learn how to control it. 0.57

02:39:30.000 And it's that old expression.

02:39:31.000 It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.

02:39:38.000 It's an old expression, but it makes sense because it doesn't mean that you can't be kind if you're strong.

02:39:45.000 But it does mean you can't be strong if you're weak. 1.00

02:39:49.000 If you're weak, you're fucked. 1.00

02:39:51.000 And there's a lot of weak people in this country right now that are trying to take control. 1.00

02:39:54.000 And they're gathering up all the other weak people and they say, yeah, let's all be weak together.

02:39:59.000 And they're willing to embrace all sorts of ideas that have been disproven.

02:40:04.000 Not just disproven, that have caused the deaths of untold millions of people.

02:40:08.000 And Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia, and It's crazy.

02:40:14.000 And they're short-sighted.

02:40:15.000 And they're short-sighted because in the short term, they want their tribe to win.

02:40:21.000 And there's so many weak people that'll join along with them. 0.99

02:40:24.000 There's so many simple-minded dullards that just want to promote their tribe. 1.00

02:40:31.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:40:31.000 I mean, they encourage you to be triggered. 0.99

02:40:34.000 They encourage you to be weak, right?

02:40:36.000 When you go, they try not to expose you to any reality.

02:40:40.000 That's the thing.

02:40:41.000 Universities, they scare you, and you are never getting a real sense of the world.

02:40:46.000 I 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.

02:40:54.000 Well, 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.

02:41:05.000 Like, if you're going to learn about Stalin, you're going to...

02:41:08.000 I 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.

02:41:20.000 And people were eating their own children.

02:41:23.000 I mean, that's...

02:41:25.000 It's the same sort of thing.

02:41:26.000 They were starving these people to death in order to keep control of them.

02:41:30.000 And the results were horrific.

02:41:33.000 If you don't hear that, if you don't hear that in all of its terrifying, brutal detail, Then you're not going to be aware.

02:41:42.000 And even then you're not going to really be aware.

02:41:44.000 Like you're aware.

02:41:45.000 You are absolutely aware of what can happen when things go horrifically wrong because you were born into a society that was horrifically wrong.

02:41:56.000 You were born into this terrifying dictatorship.

02:42:00.000 That exists right now.

02:42:01.000 While 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.

02:42:12.000 And if that doesn't get discussed, people don't understand.

02:42:15.000 If you say, oh, are you triggered by this?

02:42:18.000 Well, you don't have to hear it.

02:42:19.000 You're not going to learn.

02:42:20.000 We're not going to expose these things.

02:42:22.000 We're not going to learn.

02:42:23.000 And even then, just the abstract concepts, the way you're discussing it, It's resonating. 0.99

02:42:30.000 I understand what you're saying, but I don't know what the fuck you experienced. 0.98

02:42:33.000 I'd have to go there. 1.00

02:42:34.000 I would have to live your life.

02:42:36.000 You would have to physically experience it in person in order for it to really get into your head. 1.00

02:42:43.000 And we're not even allowing kids to read words that fuck with their heads. 0.99

02:42:47.000 Yeah, no. 0.99

02:42:48.000 It's almost you are so capable.

02:42:50.000 And by going to this school system, they make you almost a handicap.

02:42:55.000 They disable you.

02:42:57.000 They change your potential.

02:42:58.000 And as you say, we're born as warriors.

02:43:00.000 Who knows?

02:43:01.000 But they make us incapable of anything.

02:43:04.000 And the biggest problem you have is somebody calls you wrong pronoun.

02:43:08.000 And this triggers them.

02:43:09.000 This makes them depressed.

02:43:11.000 And this is the thing they think is the biggest injustice they've ever seen.

02:43:15.000 Yeah, we've weaponized people being offended too.

02:43:19.000 When people are offended, they get a massive amount of extra attention.

02:43:23.000 All 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.

02:43:28.000 I feel you when you're saying this and it makes them special.

02:43:32.000 You'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.

02:43:42.000 To look at it from someone else's viewpoint, from someone else's life, from someone else's learned experiences.

02:43:48.000 You 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.

02:43:58.000 So you need to go see somebody called a therapist, right?

02:44:02.000 So I was like, what the heck is a therapist?

02:44:06.000 And 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.

02:44:16.000 $700 an hour?

02:44:17.000 Really?

02:44:18.000 That's what they get?

02:44:18.000 Yeah, in New York City, but then, like, she's going to give me a discount raise, so $200 per hour.

02:44:23.000 Basically, go talk to her how hard my life was.

02:44:28.000 And 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.

02:44:39.000 Right. 0.86

02:44:40.000 This is ridiculous. 0.93

02:44:41.000 And I was like, I mean, what is the point of me then surviving all of that? 0.88

02:44:45.000 Now I'm just going to complain how hard it was.

02:44:48.000 What is the point of me surviving any of it?

02:44:51.000 So someone can tell you you're gonna be okay.

02:44:53.000 It's okay to have these feelings.

02:44:55.000 Exactly.

02:44:56.000 You know what I mean?

02:44:56.000 It's okay.

02:44:57.000 It's okay to have these feelings.

02:44:58.000 Yeah, it's okay to hate men.

02:44:59.000 It's okay to be bitter, right?

02:45:01.000 It's okay to be complaining and blaming everything else.

02:45:05.000 Did you go to therapy?

02:45:06.000 Did you do it?

02:45:06.000 Absolutely not.

02:45:09.000 But I mean, 80% of my investment bank are consulting friends in your go-to-therapy.

02:45:14.000 And I suppose that they should.

02:45:16.000 They can afford it.

02:45:17.000 It's a thing.

02:45:18.000 But the fact that I couldn't fathom in the beginning that you need to go to therapy to survive in Manhattan.

02:45:27.000 I think people need to be able to talk to people about things to try to work through them.

02:45:34.000 And 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.

02:45:43.000 And that's a sad testament to the kind of relationships that a lot of people have.

02:45:48.000 A lot of friendships and romantic relationships that people have in their life.

02:45:53.000 That they can't talk openly about the real live experiences.

02:46:00.000 We have so much versions of ourselves inside us.

02:46:05.000 I can see why people become the guards of concentration camps.

02:46:10.000 That's the thing.

02:46:11.000 Humans are not initially good or bad.

02:46:14.000 It's all about how we shape them.

02:46:16.000 When 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.

02:46:26.000 That's because of the way you grew up.

02:46:28.000 Yeah.

02:46:29.000 That's the thing, like, humans are most adaptive, suspicious.

02:46:33.000 We are so adaptable.

02:46:34.000 Yeah.

02:46:35.000 And that's also good and bad, is we can adapt.

02:46:38.000 We can adapt to the concentration camps, right?

02:46:41.000 We can be the guards and not feel guilty about it.

02:46:44.000 And I think not talking about that, not talking about the evil, or what we are capable of the darkness.

02:46:50.000 That's like everything in North Korean news is wonderful things.

02:46:53.000 Now in this country, because they say there's no room for hate speech, they want everything to be happy flowery words.

02:47:01.000 But the thing is, we have dark side.

02:47:04.000 No matter what you do, they're gonna be murderers, they're gonna be rapists.

02:47:08.000 Even we don't talk about rape. 0.98

02:47:10.000 Rape is gonna happen. 1.00

02:47:12.000 So getting rid of these people and deplatforming and canceling them, we don't get rid of actual problem.

02:47:17.000 So in a way, it's better for us to talk about our full nature, what we are actually capable of, right? 0.98

02:47:23.000 We 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. 0.99

02:47:31.000 And we have to learn why people think differently than us. 0.99

02:47:35.000 And the only way you can do that is by talking to them.

02:47:37.000 Exactly.

02:47:38.000 And there's a lot of those people that think in a way that you find problematic.

02:47:42.000 They can be converted.

02:47:43.000 They can be talked to.

02:47:45.000 But not if you treat them like they're the enemy and cast them aside and block them from communicating.

02:47:52.000 Yeah.

02:47:53.000 That's the thing.

02:47:55.000 I would rather know if Hitler exists. 0.92

02:47:57.000 When we do the genocide, I wouldn't know about it.

02:47:59.000 Would you not want to know about it?

02:48:01.000 I wouldn't know if somebody's planning that.

02:48:04.000 There are people in the past where on Facebook they're posting, I'm going to commit a murder in some church.

02:48:10.000 They post on Facebook.

02:48:12.000 Isn't it much better for the FBI to know that than not giving them the platform so we don't know who's planning the mass murder right now?

02:48:18.000 Right.

02:48:20.000 When 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.

02:48:30.000 When do you think you started to feel things?

02:48:35.000 With my son.

02:48:38.000 Because the hardest thing wasn't like learning about the system or none of that.

02:48:44.000 Even China, like, I was always numb.

02:48:48.000 Like even when I was raped, I was like looking at myself, someone's roof, like someone's in the corners and like, Oh, that's not me.

02:48:56.000 How can it be happening to me?

02:48:58.000 Right?

02:48:58.000 I was completely ignoring that.

02:49:03.000 In North Korea, you're so numb in your brain. 0.99

02:49:07.000 When I had my son in America in 2018, that's when I was feeling things.

02:49:13.000 And I was so grateful that I felt even sadness.

02:49:17.000 You were worried that you wouldn't feel it?

02:49:19.000 I was very worried.

02:49:23.000 Feeling something was very challenging.

02:49:26.000 And giving birth to my son brought a lot of new feelings to me.

02:49:31.000 And of course the compassion is one of them.

02:49:34.000 I want the world to be a beautiful place for him.

02:49:37.000 I actually care about the humans.

02:49:41.000 I don't know, this part is like this is edited the first time that I knew what love was and unconditional love was.

02:49:50.000 I saw that you had Rick Doblin here.

02:49:53.000 Yes.

02:49:54.000 I had one of those experiences like unplanned.

02:49:58.000 Nobody knew.

02:49:59.000 MDMA? Is that what it was?

02:50:01.000 In California.

02:50:05.000 But until then, people told me, oh, I love you. 0.98

02:50:07.000 I was like, if you don't sleep with me, rape me, want something, why would you love me?

02:50:11.000 I never understood that unconditional love between humans. 0.97

02:50:16.000 Never felt safe.

02:50:18.000 You never felt love with friends?

02:50:20.000 No.

02:50:21.000 I learned love later in life, so I knew the word, but I did not actually ever felt it.

02:50:30.000 So when I was on that, for the first time, all I felt was love and zero, zero fear.

02:50:37.000 And that sounds like, I know that when these people say they love me, actually this is how they feel actually.

02:50:43.000 Is it possible to love somebody unconditionally?

02:50:47.000 And after that I became pregnant because I wasn't able to get pregnant.

02:50:51.000 From 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.

02:51:05.000 I think a lot of people could benefit from one of those experiences.

02:51:08.000 I 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.

02:51:16.000 A lot of the misplaced anger.

02:51:20.000 Unproductive, unhelpful, corrosive, dangerous anger for no reason.

02:51:26.000 There's so much of it.

02:51:29.000 It's so confusing.

02:51:30.000 And so much of it is based on our own insecurities and our fear that other people won't love us back.

02:51:36.000 And 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?

02:51:45.000 Exactly.

02:51:45.000 The world can be so different, isn't it?

02:51:48.000 Everything can be understood.

02:51:50.000 That's the thing.

02:51:52.000 In the center of everything, there is love.

02:51:54.000 And I did not know what love was the entire of my life.

02:51:57.000 That's the thing.

02:51:58.000 When people ask me, if you can be on North Korean television, what would you tell them?

02:52:03.000 I think I would tell them I love you.

02:52:05.000 Because they never heard that before.

02:52:07.000 They might not know even what I'm saying.

02:52:09.000 What the heck is she saying?

02:52:09.000 She loves me, right?

02:52:11.000 Right.

02:52:12.000 But I think that's the thing.

02:52:13.000 I did not know what it was.

02:52:15.000 But everything that we do for love, we have children for love, right?

02:52:19.000 Why do we even live everything?

02:52:21.000 The point of life is like love.

02:52:22.000 Right.

02:52:23.000 And I did not know that until I had a point.

02:52:27.000 So, I mean, that's why I cannot be bitter.

02:52:29.000 I love men.

02:52:30.000 Like, my son is a man.

02:52:31.000 My father was a man.

02:52:32.000 Like, even though a lot of experiences I had with a man was negative, that I was able to overcome it, right?

02:52:39.000 But I think a lot of people cannot overcome that trauma because they are just not able to make that connection.

02:52:45.000 It'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.

02:52:56.000 And you know better than anybody alive because of the country where you were born.

02:53:03.000 That's happening right now that there's a place where there is no love and everyone's afraid.

02:53:08.000 And there's just this horrific regime that's running this country and keeping people starving.

02:53:15.000 And 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.

02:53:25.000 It's the worst example of human life and it exists simultaneously.

02:53:30.000 I know it's a thing.

02:53:31.000 I thought if I can show them, tell them what's happening, I thought something's gonna change, right?

02:53:36.000 But of course not.

02:53:38.000 It's not.

02:53:39.000 And there's a reason why these problems keep existing.

02:53:42.000 But the thing is, I saw that one of the interviews we did with Elon Musk, right?

02:53:48.000 I have to be hopeful because what's the alternative?

02:53:52.000 Yes.

02:53:52.000 What is the alternative to being hopeful?

02:53:54.000 Nothing else.

02:53:55.000 That's the thing.

02:53:56.000 That'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. 0.74

02:54:04.000 I don't know that's going to happen.

02:54:06.000 But I got to be hopeful.

02:54:08.000 That's the only thing we have as a humanity.

02:54:10.000 We got to be hopeful.

02:54:11.000 And we can do so much when we keep that hope alive.

02:54:15.000 It's just terrifying that it's ignored by the powers that be in not just this country, but many countries.

02:54:21.000 That they're not all just standing up and saying that this is an atrocity that's happening inside of our lifetime.

02:54:26.000 We're doing nothing about it.

02:54:28.000 It'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?

02:54:36.000 I remember when I was in South Korea.

02:54:39.000 This is, like, on TV, there's a national concert with the celebrities and singing and crying.

02:54:44.000 I thought like, okay, big disaster happened, right?

02:54:47.000 Why are these people all in motion and crying?

02:54:49.000 And it was a fundraising for the dogs and puppies and animals.

02:54:55.000 People eating animals?

02:54:56.000 No, no.

02:54:56.000 It was just like their environment, how shelter, like environment is hard for these animals.

02:55:01.000 How it's not clean, how they don't, you know.

02:55:04.000 Okay, animal shelters, right.

02:55:05.000 So they were crying and I was initially shocked.

02:55:08.000 Like, what do you mean animals have rights?

02:55:11.000 Right?

02:55:13.000 As a human being, I did not know I had the rights as a human.

02:55:16.000 Right, right, right.

02:55:17.000 And what the F, really?

02:55:18.000 Like, animals, puppies have rights here?

02:55:21.000 And 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.

02:55:35.000 But they do not want to rescue these girls who are raped every single day.

02:55:39.000 And somehow, I think this anti-human sentiment, I don't know even what that is.

02:55:45.000 The fact that we care about animals is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

02:55:49.000 We care that something cannot speak for themselves.

02:55:52.000 They are vulnerable.

02:55:53.000 And there are people, a lot of people cannot speak for themselves right now.

02:55:57.000 As you said, being free is an exception.

02:56:00.000 This is a very unusual thing.

02:56:01.000 Even to this age, like 4 billion people living under some authoritarian dictatorship countries.

02:56:08.000 So what we got is really unique.

02:56:11.000 And people somehow refuse to speak for another human being.

02:56:14.000 They would rather speak for a little puppy.

02:56:16.000 And it's very the hypocrisy that doesn't make sense.

02:56:20.000 Like if someone's suffering that bothers you, why the human suffering doesn't bother you?

02:56:25.000 I 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.

02:56:32.000 And so they don't speak about it, because to actually do something would require an enormous effort.

02:56:39.000 To do something to change the regime of North Korea.

02:56:42.000 Like, 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?

02:56:55.000 They can tweet about what's happening that China does to North Koreans.

02:56:59.000 Yeah, they're scared to even tweet about China.

02:57:01.000 They'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.

02:57:17.000 It seems too big.

02:57:19.000 It seems like they can't put a dent in it, so they leave it alone.

02:57:22.000 But that's a lie, though, they are telling themselves.

02:57:25.000 Little thing, even little tweet would help.

02:57:27.000 I think a lot of people don't even know about it.

02:57:29.000 Exactly.

02:57:30.000 That's the thing.

02:57:30.000 Like, the mainstream doesn't give a platform to the people who want to challenge the CCP. Right.

02:57:35.000 So, I mean, these girls who were captured by Taliban, ISIS, few hundred thousand people were oppressed gets Nobel Peace Prize, right?

02:57:43.000 Yeah.

02:57:43.000 There are like 25 million people oppressed.

02:57:46.000 When did you hear anybody world recognizes from North Korea or anything for this cause?

02:57:51.000 What did you think when Trump met with Kim Jong-un?

02:57:55.000 Well, with Trump, that's a thing.

02:57:58.000 It seems like Trump got everything to do wrong or everything got to be right, right?

02:58:04.000 I mean, everybody, nobody's perfect.

02:58:06.000 I do think Trump was really right on calling out China.

02:58:10.000 He was the first president to actually talk about to Xi Jinping that you got to fix North Korea because you enabled it. 1.00

02:58:16.000 That was the first president ever mentioned China with North Korea.

02:58:19.000 That was great.

02:58:21.000 But sitting down with Kim Jong-un without any preconcession.

02:58:25.000 Because think about it.

02:58:26.000 Inside North Korea, there are military powerful men.

02:58:29.000 And they think if Kim Jong-un is backed by American president, they're not going to start a coup or do anything about it.

02:58:37.000 So for Kim Jong-un was a very good opportunity to legitimize his power within a country, inside North Korea to consolidate that power.

02:58:45.000 Because until that point, even Xi Jinping didn't invite Kim Jong-un to China over, even once.

02:58:51.000 So Kim Jong-un was more like this young man, nobody accepted.

02:58:55.000 But Trump wanted to meet with Kim Jong-un, so Xi Jinping invited Kim Jong-un to over first before Trump meeting.

02:59:00.000 So that's how he went to China for the first time, meeting Xi Jinping.

02:59:04.000 Because he knew that Trump was going to meet him.

02:59:07.000 So, I mean, of course, China won't have influence beforehand.

02:59:10.000 So right before the meeting, he went to China first.

02:59:14.000 And until that point, China didn't even invite Kim Jong-un.

02:59:17.000 It was too low for them.

02:59:18.000 Really?

02:59:19.000 Yeah, they were like a little brother of the puppet state.

02:59:22.000 So they would not treat Kim Jong-un like a leader.

02:59:25.000 He didn't even get the invitation to visit China.

02:59:28.000 Is there a real possibility that someone could overthrow him from inside the country?

02:59:33.000 It's impossible because China is behind it. 0.54

02:59:36.000 China is fully behind.

02:59:38.000 You know, China lent this land for 200 years, 50 years on this mine towns, mining, blah, blah.

02:59:47.000 Everything is lent to China.

02:59:49.000 So North Korea is not Chinese. 0.96

02:59:51.000 And the labor is free for the Chinese to use. 1.00

02:59:56.000 So everything is now Chinese in North Korea. 0.81

02:59:59.000 It's China, basically.

03:00:00.000 Nothing is North Korea's anymore. 0.82

03:00:02.000 Wow.

03:00:03.000 These mines, everything is land like 200 years.

03:00:06.000 That's the least they have.

03:00:08.000 I mean, how many generations did that change in 200 years' time?

03:00:11.000 Right.

03:00:12.000 So it's China. 0.91

03:00:13.000 North Korea is China. 0.98

03:00:15.000 There is really no distinction at this point.

03:00:17.000 And 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.

03:00:29.000 It's like all through economic power.

03:00:31.000 That's how they disable them and enslaved to their ideology and then they cannot speak up and that's happening to American.

03:00:37.000 Even Ivy League schools get funding from China.

03:00:40.000 So all these researches, like papers, they don't do things that challenge their narrative.

03:00:46.000 And the media, Hollywood, they need money from China, so they're not gonna do anything about it. 0.79

03:00:52.000 So that's how slowly they infiltrate every sector that we have right now.

03:00:57.000 You know, part of me is very upset that more people have not talked to you. 0.73

03:01:03.000 Well, because I'm a liar. 0.98

03:01:08.000 Because I'm a liar. 0.99

03:01:10.000 I'm the propaganda puppet of the West. 0.99

03:01:13.000 CIA trained me.

03:01:16.000 That's what they say?

03:01:18.000 Oh, yeah.

03:01:18.000 So when I was starting giving interviews in the beginning, they're like 15 and 13, the age difference that I did not know, right?

03:01:26.000 Right.

03:01:26.000 And then the mountain that I climbed, they went to Google Maps somewhere and checked the altitude.

03:01:33.000 So basically, silent altitude I should not have said it was a mountain.

03:01:38.000 It was a high hill.

03:01:39.000 But as a child, I don't know what altitude is a hill or a mountain.

03:01:43.000 I still don't know the difference.

03:01:44.000 So I said the mountain, then she's alive because what she climbed was a hill.

03:01:48.000 So 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.

03:01:55.000 So she's trying to change her neck. 1.00

03:01:57.000 But one thing I did hide was that I trafficked in China.

03:02:02.000 Because in South Korea, still girls, virginity is everything. 1.00

03:02:06.000 And I wasn't planning to come to America, right?

03:02:08.000 I didn't even have a right to come here.

03:02:10.000 I was South Korean.

03:02:11.000 I wanted to have a child.

03:02:13.000 I wanted to have family. 0.58

03:02:14.000 And if I say I was raped two years by a human trafficker, who's in any normal same family gonna take me?

03:02:22.000 So I had to lie that I said I was okay. 0.96

03:02:26.000 My mom only raped and she covered me. 1.00

03:02:28.000 And when I was writing my book, I knew, I mean, of course, Penguin is not stupid. 0.98

03:02:33.000 They 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.

03:02:41.000 So they got the live recording in the legal team.

03:02:44.000 So 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.

03:02:51.000 So it was all everything before the book.

03:02:53.000 And also the thing is, I mean, a lot of Maoists, Leninists, they sympathize with the North Korean regime.

03:03:02.000 So many people hate America.

03:03:04.000 And I'm here saying America is the best country in human history.

03:03:09.000 Of course, I now became the symbol of this bigotry.

03:03:14.000 But I'm just shocked that more people in America are not talking to you.

03:03:17.000 More of these mainstream outlets don't want to hear your story.

03:03:21.000 Because of China peace.

03:03:22.000 My story is very inconvenient.

03:03:24.000 Because I'm a slave.

03:03:26.000 Actually, I was a slave. 0.66

03:03:28.000 And I was bought by Chinese and exploited by them. 1.00

03:03:32.000 So how do they cover my story without including China peace?

03:03:36.000 It's an impossibility.

03:03:38.000 I can't believe that that's keeping people like the Washington Post or the New York Times.

03:03:42.000 Of course it is.

03:03:43.000 I 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.

03:03:59.000 Having 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.

03:04:07.000 It's an incredible story.

03:04:09.000 But no, because they expect me to become now a victim, right?

03:04:13.000 Because they expect me to hate all the men and the system.

03:04:18.000 But I do not tell, I'm not a victim.

03:04:22.000 I'm very grateful.

03:04:22.000 My book starts that there are two things I'm grateful for, that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped.

03:04:29.000 So I don't feed the narrative they are trying to portray in any way.

03:04:35.000 That'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.

03:04:49.000 Certain 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.

03:04:59.000 Your story, it's impossible for anyone that hasn't experienced it to tell.

03:05:05.000 It has to be you.

03:05:07.000 Yeah, but that's why I'm grateful despite all that, you know.

03:05:12.000 North Korea did everything they could to character assassinate me.

03:05:16.000 Because that's what they have the biggest hackers.

03:05:20.000 And they have the armies of hackings and go harass people and hack the Sony studio.

03:05:26.000 Remember when they made a movie?

03:05:28.000 So they exactly the same thing.

03:05:29.000 They were reaching out to Penguin.

03:05:31.000 My editor is like, we're gonna blow Penguin if you write this book.

03:05:36.000 And there was so much harassment.

03:05:39.000 And internally, we were so scared.

03:05:40.000 Penguin people were like, we don't want to lose our job.

03:05:42.000 We don't want to blow up.

03:05:43.000 They don't even talk about in the public that you get attacked from North Korean regime.

03:05:48.000 North Koreans diplomat in London was reaching out to my editor to sit down and meet them in person.

03:05:54.000 Wow.

03:05:54.000 To stop the book.

03:05:57.000 And of course, everything is written on media.

03:05:59.000 That's all believable, right?

03:06:01.000 Everything is written, then people just believe whatever it was.

03:06:05.000 Yeah.

03:06:05.000 So it's now that's what North Korea is so good at.

03:06:08.000 Like creating this narrative and character assassin people. 0.98

03:06:12.000 And eventually it doesn't work, they're gonna kill you directly.

03:06:14.000 And that's what they did.

03:06:15.000 Initially they were like threatening me and stopped talking about it and then I still did.

03:06:19.000 So they put entire three generations of my family on that North Korean propaganda channel.

03:06:27.000 And they made them to denounce me.

03:06:29.000 And they were gone.

03:06:32.000 So...

03:06:32.000 They're gone?

03:06:33.000 Yeah.

03:06:34.000 Because I still have agents in North Korea and they all disappeared.

03:06:39.000 So they were all killed?

03:06:41.000 Yeah.

03:06:42.000 Consentation game means death. 0.53

03:06:44.000 Even including my neighbors.

03:06:46.000 And that was so unbelievable.

03:06:48.000 I mean, what's the crime of being a neighbor?

03:06:51.000 They were not even that close to me.

03:06:53.000 But these neighbors, the fact that they knew me, that was their crime.

03:06:59.000 And this video is on YouTube.

03:07:02.000 So they went after everyone you knew?

03:07:05.000 Yeah, everybody I knew.

03:07:07.000 Everybody I knew.

03:07:08.000 In my entire town and my father's side and mother's side, entire generation and my cousin that I raised and Yeah, that's the thing.

03:07:20.000 I knew this is an evil regime.

03:07:22.000 But I somehow thought, how can they be threatened by 13 years old?

03:07:27.000 I'm not even sharing how North Korea develops their missile program.

03:07:31.000 All I'm saying is what the UN says.

03:07:34.000 There is a public execution.

03:07:36.000 You see from satellite photos, you see.

03:07:38.000 And there's 33,000 North Korean defectors made to South Korea.

03:07:42.000 They talk about starvation.

03:07:44.000 And then that we get captured in China and being sold, and there's documentaries about it.

03:07:49.000 So I'm not even sharing the first-class information.

03:07:52.000 I just didn't think they were going to be threatened.

03:07:56.000 I just really didn't think that I was going to be threatening to them at all.

03:08:02.000 They don't allow any dissent.

03:08:05.000 What do you think is going to happen with that country?

03:08:10.000 Like China, they can last a lot longer. 0.82

03:08:13.000 They might last longer than us.

03:08:15.000 They might beat us.

03:08:16.000 Because...

03:08:18.000 That's the thing.

03:08:20.000 As you said, people become soft and they do not know how to be resilient, right?

03:08:27.000 And also, as you said, people here surrounding such a goodness of the world.

03:08:33.000 They don't recognize, they don't even know how evil can be a man be like, a regime can be like.

03:08:40.000 They don't know how cruel these regimes are.

03:08:44.000 They don't even recognize the darkness they see.

03:08:48.000 So I think because our inability to recognize this crime and darkness, I think they might outlast us.

03:08:55.000 So that is my biggest fear.

03:08:59.000 So you have a genuine concern that this country could collapse?

03:09:04.000 I mean, every civilization collapsed.

03:09:07.000 Persians, I mean, how many civilizations before us came?

03:09:10.000 Right.

03:09:11.000 The Greeks, the Romans. 0.97

03:09:12.000 Exactly.

03:09:13.000 So there shouldn't be any exception to Western civilization if we do not appreciate and guard this civilization, the alignment that we got.

03:09:21.000 Especially if you pay attention to what's going on right now.

03:09:23.000 Of course.

03:09:24.000 And 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.

03:09:34.000 This foundation is corrupt.

03:09:36.000 The only way that is to us to change is getting rid of the Western civilization, getting rid of American constitution.

03:09:46.000 I'm not saying like every class you set up at Columbia, that's how they end the class, right? 0.96

03:09:51.000 Every problem goes going back to root, getting rid of white men. 0.99

03:09:54.000 They are the problem. 1.00

03:09:55.000 They are the source of every single problem that we have. 0.74

03:09:58.000 They mess up Africa, they mess up Asia, they mess up every single thing. 1.00

03:10:02.000 And like one class I remember at the end of senior year, taking the music class, right?

03:10:07.000 It should be the least political.

03:10:09.000 Western music is a core, one of the core curriculum.

03:10:12.000 And the professor asking, who has a problem studying Western music?

03:10:16.000 And of course, everybody raised their hands.

03:10:18.000 Because of these bigots like Mozart and Beethoven, they silence all the minority groups.

03:10:23.000 We have to listen to these bigots right now.

03:10:25.000 And it's the fact that Columbia having this core is like a shame.

03:10:30.000 So I'm like, I'm studying in the West.

03:10:32.000 What's the problem studying music in the West?

03:10:36.000 Right?

03:10:37.000 Well, not only that, you're studying musical history.

03:10:39.000 You can't deny the history.

03:10:41.000 You can't deny that these people made this music.

03:10:45.000 It doesn't absolve anyone of any crimes that they committed, if they committed crimes.

03:10:50.000 Yeah.

03:10:51.000 But to deny it all.

03:10:52.000 Yeah.

03:10:54.000 Reading 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.

03:11:01.000 So the fact that you read Jane Austen is you get subconsciously brainwashed.

03:11:06.000 This is how you need to look for hidden oppression.

03:11:11.000 Oh my god.

03:11:15.000 It's so disturbing.

03:11:17.000 It's so real, though.

03:11:18.000 I mean, that's really what's happening right now.

03:11:20.000 And people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their children indoctrinated into these ideas.

03:11:25.000 Yeah.

03:11:27.000 I don't know where we're going to end up in 10 years.

03:11:31.000 I don't know.

03:11:31.000 I don't know either.

03:11:32.000 But I really enjoyed talking to you.

03:11:35.000 Thank you very much.

03:11:36.000 You're a very, very brave person.

03:11:37.000 And I think that your message is...

03:11:39.000 It's very important.

03:11:43.000 And it's also...

03:11:46.000 There's no one else who can tell it.

03:11:48.000 It 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.

03:11:56.000 It's incredibly significant and I hope more people want to talk to you.

03:12:02.000 No, 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.

03:12:12.000 And he died and I had nobody to call, right?

03:12:16.000 He died in the morning, 7 a.m.

03:12:18.000 Waiting till night so I can bury him in the middle of a mountain.

03:12:23.000 And I couldn't even cry because if you cry, people are going to, neighbors are going to hear.

03:12:28.000 So I'm numb, sitting next to the dead body.

03:12:31.000 And I was thinking, wow, being a human means nothing.

03:12:35.000 Even if a dog dies, you go to your neighbor and ask them, your dog died.

03:12:40.000 And in that desert, that's the thing, I wasn't afraid of dying.

03:12:44.000 I was thinking, nobody knew that I existed.

03:12:48.000 Nobody knew that I came to this earth and left in this middle of desert.

03:12:53.000 And that's the thing.

03:12:53.000 Nobody knows that North Koreans exist.

03:12:57.000 Nobody knows our stories.

03:12:59.000 So I think the fact that people know my father and my people is the biggest comfort for me.

03:13:07.000 You know, I think that's not even given to us.

03:13:10.000 They don't know we exist.

03:13:12.000 So I'm so grateful that you gave me this opportunity.

03:13:16.000 Well, I'm very grateful that you came here just to talk about it and to tell people.

03:13:20.000 And I'm glad a lot of people are going to hear this.

03:13:23.000 Thank you.

03:13:24.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 03, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript