Doomed to Fail - Ep 150 - North Korea: Where did it come from?

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Journey with us today into the mysterious world of North Korea, why is Korea split in two, and who are the leaders of the North Korean Government? We'll chat about how it all began and some of the ways that North Korea keeps its people separated from the rest of the world - including the giant empty hotel in the middle of Pyongyang and the death of Otto Warmbier. Imagine sharing a border with BTS and being unable to listen to them!?  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back, Taylor, yet again. How are you doing today? I'm good. How are you? Good. It dawned on me that between the release of the first episode and the release the second episode, a lot is going to happen in this.

country um so yeah if you're listening to this on thursday just know that we don't know what happened two days ago yet nope so um but again it'll be fine it'll all work out um you can look into this way into the future you know this night you know if you're finding this airwave in space try your best you know what's funny you mentioned that because i just started watching like yesterday the three body problem have you seen that no my husband read it and he loved it and he didn't like the show so i didn't watch it but i should read it anyway yeah i definitely was going to read it but i did watch the show and um and i don't i don't know what it's about yet i just i can i gather that it's about like physics and aliens in the past and the president in the future but like

i don't actually know i don't know enough but it the production wise it's really good i realized that it was actually um produced by the guys who did um game of thrones and so you get a sense where this doesn't feel like a cheapo Netflix show this feels really like over the top done you know and it makes sense now

so anyways on to my do you have anything else before we hop in up oh we have to introduce a show yeah you just kept talking so I just letting you talk um

hello everyone welcome to doomed to fail we have a podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week every week I am Taylor joined by

Fars. I'm Fars. And it's your turn. And it's my turn. So I'm pretty excited about my topic today. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Every now and then I go down these like YouTube rabbit holes and I just like sometimes it lasts

for like that night but sometimes it's like the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. And this was one of those like the whole week where I was obsessed with concert around this and it's something that like we all are very familiar with and are aware of. But learning going to the details of it was super, super fascinating. So I learned a lot. I hope you learn a lot. I'm going to talk about North Korea. Oh, okay. Cool. It's fun. I'm ready. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay. So I'm going to give you the very, I'm going to break this down to several pieces. One is like, what is North Korea?

Like, why do we have a North and South Korea? What, what are we doing? What is this one thing? Then what are the, what's the life like of somebody in North Korea? and then I'm going to go through probably the most famous recent example of something horrific happening there and then I'm going to top it off with a little dessert of another horrible thing I read about that I legitimately couldn't believe that it was real and it is real. I'm literally reading about it on this screen in a bill passed by Congress literally like right now. So when you go into this? Again, I'm going to give you all the TLDR version of the formation of North Korea because

technically the history of the country goes back like 700, 800 years, and I'm not going to go all the way back there. But I will start by saying that Korea started out as what's called the great Joseon state in 1392, and that state lasted until 1897 when the Korean Empire was officially formed. So the first history of the word Korean or Korea starts in 1897. throughout this history there was a lot of international interference in their affairs mostly this came from Japan, Russia, and China all countries were highly

active powers within that region in 1904 Russia and Japan went to war mostly to figure out who should assert the most control over Japan or sorry over Korea as well as access to trade routes to the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea

Japan would ultimately win and a treaty was signed in 1905, which asserted that Korea, the entire state of Korea, country of Korea, was a protector of Japan and basically pushed Russia completely out of this equation. So this basically means, like, they're under the protection of Japan, and that's, I equated to Article 5 of NATO where, like, if you attack one country, all others comes to your perception. It was like that. If anybody attacked Korea, Japan was obligated to go and defend it.

But in 1910, Japan formally annexed Korea. so we've all heard of the horrible stories of these atrocities they're like very well renowned for some of the cruelty throughout their history and this is this is a great example of that so under japanese rule they were banned from using korean names or using the korean language at all they removed all koreans from official roles and government rules and replace them with Japanese counterparts. They banned the teaching of Korean history

in favor of teaching Japanese history. Generational land was confiscated by the government. And during World War II, Koreans were the ones use a slave labor to produce fortifications on the Japanese mainland. And probably the most important in world history or for world history is the slave laborer Koreans

to fortify the island of Iwo Jima before the U.S. invaded. also a very very gross aspect of this was a thing known as comfort women which was where young girls were forced into sex slavery to the Japanese military the Korean ones and this particular atrocity has it like still has foreign relations problems between South Korea and Japan like even today like it's like it's the one thing one aspect of their like total control of the country that like persists and is like a part of you know like they still do it no as in like they're still seeking a formal declaration that they did do it and a formal apology which it partially came in 2019 with a settlement of like a hundred i forgot what it was like a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars it was like what is that supposed to do like there's probably a lot of, like, people that are part Japanese in Korea because of that.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. So all in all, nobody was having a good time. But in 1945, Japan surrendered World War II to the Allied powers. And as a result, gave up Korea as part of that. So Korea fell under the control, namely of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

the way so if you look on a map like Russia is on the northern tip so Russia wanted the north side obviously and so the South ended up becoming part the U.S. and part of the U.S. and allied powers in theory this control

was only supposed to last for five years and the idea was after a five year period the Koreans would build up muscle memory to self-govern the U.S. and the Soviets obviously had a very different idea of what self-governance would mean here. The U.S. wanted a democratic capitalist society,

whereas the Soviets wanted a communist state. This along with, like, the general distrust that ended up leading to the Cold War between the two countries, resulted in this, like, ultimate division within Korea. So that's the reason why there's a north and the South Korea is entirely based on Soviet versus U.S. control. So it's like east and west Berlin, but like it's still there.

Precisely. Yeah, that's exactly it. in 1948 south korea held its first election to start the process of self-governance and then right after that basically is a response to it the ussr formed the democratic republic of north korea and established a communist government with kim il sung as its leader so it was tit for tat kind of a thing between that time 1948 and 1950 kim basically pled with Stalin to support his unification plan by invading South Korea, which Stalin said he could only support if he received backing from China, because at that time, Stalin was convinced

that he's about to get drawn into a direct war with the U.S. if he invades directly, or if he supports him directly. The U.S. also thought that Truman also was like, well, if we do this, then we're going to get, we could get drawn into war with Russia, but decided we're going to try it anyways. and the U.S. got involved as the 21 other U.N. countries and pushing Kim's army back to the 38th parallel, which is a dividing line between the two, where an armistice was reached

and what's called the demilitarized zone was established as a buffer between the north and the south, which is still there today. So I'm going to go through like what life there is like, which I think most of us know, but knowing some details. It's fascinating, though, you know, because you're like, how, interesting keep going that that's what i mean it's like wild to be like they live in a place that

is separate from the rest of the world it's crazy it's a extreme way it made me think of things that i never even thought of like as part of life and i'm gonna i'm gonna break that down here in a second so life in north korea is mostly punctuated by poverty and lack of resources and a major focus on loyalty towards the government and the leader kim jung un who's the grandson of kim il sung Wait, I'm so Why do they pick Kim Il-sung? Like, what was the, why him? He was the head of the Communist Party in North Korea, I guess.

Okay. Yeah. So by comparison of the two countries, North and South Korea, so South Korea's per capita GDP is around $35,000. The North Korean per capita GDP is around $1,000. It is a dramatic disparity between the two. And looking at things through the lens of money is like that's when we got the wheels in motion here so money means something i never

thought about this before if you actually think about it like you're going to it's going to kind blow your mind if you dwell on this but money literally means something different in a communist country as opposed like a capitalist country because in a total communist and an ideal communist country what what's money for like you don't need money because everything's given to you by the state right it's all who i'll share it so doesn't matter yeah And that's actually mostly, that is mostly the case formally in North Korea. Formally, North Korea had what was called a public distribution system or PDS, which is just the method of distributing goods to the population. And we don't have a ton of visibility into it or how it really works.

It sounds like the system was more formalized before a famine hit the country in 1994. 1994 is about the time when the USSR collapsed and several. Everd Relations had no resources to send to North Korea. I was also struck by a famine of crop as well. So during that time, basically people were just starving to death and the government could do nothing about it. And there was no resources for people to spend money because they had no money to give to other places to bring in food.

To give to, like, import in other food. Yeah, yeah. I just looked it up. BTS is responsible for 0.3% of the South Korean GDP. That's incredible. They bring in one out of every In 2017 So this is in 2017

One in every 13 tourists to South Korea Came because of BTS That's very cool BTS is also strictly banned As is any K-pop from North Korea And if you are caught with it That is considered a hostile act towards a state And you were sent to an internment camp

That is really uncool Not fun It's not a good place to be Super uncool you guys So going back to the PDS, not the BTS system, going back to the PDS system, so there's an informal economy in North Korea that sprung up during this famine or shortly there after it, which is referred to as Jiangmeadong. These are markets, local markets, where you can trade North Korean dollars, sort of, but there really isn't North Korean dollars. mostly it's euros and U.S. dollars for goods that you would want.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so as a result, pretty much anybody who works and does any sort of regular work in North Korea also has a side hustle so they can actually get money because they don't get money from working.

Yeah. Are they allowed to you, though, like with the interval? So what, my understanding of it is that the government is aware that this goes on, but they try to blind eye to it because they realize that they don't have

the production resources to actually supply the entire country and this is the only way for the country to supply itself so there is another factor

that kind of plays into like what happens to you if you are living in North Korea and that has to do with the cast or class system which is called Songbun there are three categories of songbun one is the core class

the other is the wavering class and then there's the hostile class so within those classifications there's further stratifying you said you sound like you're going to say something okay basically all elements of your life from how much food you get how nice your home is um what part of the career you live in by by the way north korea doesn't call itself north k it calls itself korea or the dprk interesting yeah they don't they see themselves of the entire thing basically uh it also determines the opportunities your family gets like where your kids are

going to school all that stuff it's all based on that class system um the core class consists of basically the party officials and party loyalists like that's it like that's it the wavering class that's like the middle class for them that's like the bulk of the citizen citizenry um and the hostile class are the most undesirable people uh these are basically formal former landowners or descendants of former landowners before the 1948 establishment of the constitution of the communist state. These are former Christians or people with ancestors who had a religious background.

Lawyers, by virtue of their job, fall into the hostile class since any legal challenges in North Korea is basically an adversarial challenge to the state, which again, I never thought of before, but of course it is. But like, if the state says you did something wrong

and you defended, then you're adversarial to the state. Totally. But you can't litigate against someone else, just person person? I never looked into whether there's civil litigation there. What I did look into is that the entire country has somewhere around 200 lawyers. And from what I've read, the legal process there is entirely like a formality.

And it's just done for optics purposes. That makes sense. So when you are downgraded in class, you're subject to a ton of enhanced scrutiny by the government. and I don't know like I've been thinking about this in terms of like the U.S. too which it's the exact same thing here like this is why you never want the IRS like you never want the IRS to like pay attention to you because they'll always find somebody if they go really wants to do something to you they can always find a reason to do it to you and it's something it's the same here except the punishment is dramatically different right than it is in the US so the difference in your class can be the difference between life and death so in times where food is scarce and you can't be part of the black market. The lower class is the most prone to starvation since rations are basically saved for the higher class citizens. You're also subject to potentially severe imprisonment conditions. So I looked at this one prison. It's called Kchan and Kachon is a labor camp. So North Korean General is pretty well known for the labor camp. It's just another way for

them to be able to generate products and resources without having the inputs required to do so because they keep these people on basically starvation rations to do not have to allocate resources elsewhere. They are designed to exploit labor from the members of the hostile class who the government is trying to isolate from society. So if you, like I said earlier, if you had any Western content like BTS music, then that's labor camp. If you speak, out against the regime, that's obviously labor camp. Yeah. If you're a descendant of somebody who's

done anything that the government didn't like, then you are either born in the labor camp. I mean, you're either born in the labor camp and they kill you or you just live your life in the labor camp. Yeah. So because of the impoverished nature of North Korea, food rations here always have to be

supplemented. So prisoners do this by catching insects and rodents. Apparently, the most desirable job at a labor camp is working with livestock so you can steal the animal's food or pick through their shit for undigested grains to eat. Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about this in the context of like living conditions across the entire globe for humans. And outside of like little spikes like you would have, for example, in Gaza right now, this has to be the worst in terms of sustained

ongoing survival and misery. Like it sounds horrible. I'm looking at photos and there's like a satellite image of korea at night and north korea is totally dark yeah like they just probably don't they don't even have electricity in most places so there's a lot of show with north korea that we're going to go into that prevents people from seeing that kind of stuff firsthand so let me get into that we're talking about the most famous person that um that uh kind of first brought this story to mind for me. I'm going to talk about Otto Warmbier, whose name I'm sure you're familiar with. I don't know. Okay. So before July of 2017, U.S. citizens could just use our passport freely to travel North Korea. Freely isn't from the U.S. like the U.S. wasn't going to stop you

from going to North Korea, right? So North Korea had a number of restrictions themselves. So Namely, that travel could only be done if one of four state-approved agencies were the ones who organized a guided tour. You couldn't just go to North Korea as an American and say, I'm here, I'm just going to wander around and see what I can see. Can't do that. It has to be a guided tour. So all aspects of travel are coordinated for foreigners by the government through these agencies. Typically, entry into North Korea happens by train or by plane from China with routes directly into Pyongyang, which is the city capital. Upon arrival, you will be taken by your handlers to either the Corio Hotel, which is a luxury hotel there, or to Yangakdu International Hotel.

So both of these are specifically designed hotels for international tourists. The whole thing is specifically designed for international tourists. So you'll be shown grocery stores that are abundant in food and smiling faces. you'll be shown parts of the town that are lit up like a Christmas tree because all the electricity is being pushed there instead of to the outstress of the city. Like, it's all orchestrated.

And if you watch these YouTube videos of people who are there recording, first off, they're risking their lives doing that. Like, you are not allowed to do any documentation of anything that is not approved by your guides. And a lot of times, when I watch these videos, you guys just walk around the GoPro inside these hotels and around the city.

and they're just recording everything. And I'm just like, how do you have the courage to do this? It's like, it's, no. I think I know who you're talking about now. I didn't look it up, but I think I know you're talking about it. Yeah, no. It's very scary. So one YouTube video I watched this guy who was there.

He was in the same hotel, Yangakdu International Hotel. And, you know, one thing that you see is like the place is empty. It's like a giant hotel. I think it's like 500 rooms. and it's like empty that's only staff and like the international tourists that are there with you and there's probably no one like 10 of them in the entire hotel it's like yeah creepy because like north koreans can't stay there no no you know definitely not it's cool though it's cool looking and um this guy would walk around and to the like the depths of the hotel and there's like a gym

and pools and bowling alleys and all this kind of fun stuff that like nobody's there except the staff and it just has this eerie feeling to it so weird yeah and then and then there's also scenes where he goes in for breakfast or dinner or something and he's literally the only one there and they just set the plate like you're sitting like a giant ballroom and you're the only one there and there's like 50 staff walking around like it's a weirdest thing yeah so auto in this case was also taken to this hotel which contains a mysterious fifth floor, which doesn't actually have a button on the elevator for the fifth floor. So obviously, people are super curious about it.

The official story about this floor is that it's kind of like a back office kind of a space for like a service floor for staff working at the hotel. The unofficial narrative is that the floor is full of all kinds of security and spy operations to keep tabs on the people that are staying there. So Otto himself grew up in Cincinnati and graduated high school in 2013 as salutatorium salutatorian. Salutatorian. Thank you. You're welcome.

I did not graduate that high up. So he would go on to attend the University of Virginia studying Econ. He was super into travel. He'd visited Israel, given his birthright citizenship from his mother's side, Europe, Cuba, Ecuador. And he would have been part of a foreign exchange program with the London School of Economics. So the picture is very studious kid, very goal-oriented, like very, very, very, very, very, into like other cultures and travel and all that stuff he was in hong kong in december 2015 when he decided to visit north korea as part of one of the authorized guided tours along

with 10 other u.s citizens i think it was like 2 000 bucks was all it took to kind of get there and stay there and again there's no money there's no constant money so everything's paid for like it's on an all-inclusive vacation basically vacation in quotes so at some point i saw videos of the near z party and looked pretty awesome actually it was like i think it was like a rooftop bar or something of this luxury hotel. It was all these Americans and international tourists and they're all just drinking

and getting hammered having a good time. At some point auto veers away from the group and either using an emergency staircase or pushing the numbers four and seven buttons on the elevator at once, he was taken to the fifth floor where he kind of explored around a bit.

Oh my God, I'm so scared. Imagine? No. I just like come on. I mean, I feel like drunk me, you could be talking into it. I hope not. I mean, definitely don't go to it. If you think you can be, never go to a place like North Korea. Yeah, no.

Actually, general rule, never go anywhere that doesn't have a U.S. embassy, just like as a general rule. Like, it's not good. It will not be good for you. Yeah. So on his way out, he noticed one of the many propaganda posters that are up on the hallway. This one says something to the effect of, quote, let's arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong Il's patriotism, and he tore it down to take it home as a souvenir.

It wasn't like he was tearing it down so I'd be like, fuck this. He was trying to take it home as a souvenir. He ultimately actually abandoned it and left it on the floor because he realized it was way too big and it would be too obvious walking around with this thing. And so he just let it be. The next day, because it's happened at 2 a.m. on January 1st. So the next day, January 2nd, 2016 is when he, along with his group, are at the airport, waiting to depart when according to eyewitness testimony two guards approached him

tapped him on the shoulder and led him away so right before the plane departed guards boarded the plane to announce that auto had fallen ill and was on his way to a hospital and that was the last time anyone heard from him until february 29th when he was marched out during a press conference to confess his wrongdoing and say that it was due to pressure from the u.s government in his local church he was crying he was clearly terrified he admitted that it was like the worst sake of his life

also as a reminder he was Jewish apparently US officials told his family not to raise to stink about the religion thing because they're like what are you talking about church

like and so he's like dude it's bad enough like it's bad enough they think he's a Christian we don't need to drag Israel and Judaism

into this at the moment so they're like just let this sit ultimately he had a sham trial and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for subversion was the official charge he starts

his prison sentence and his family starts working with first the Obama and then the Trump administration to get him home because it's like right in that overlap period 17 months after his sentencing the North Korean government agrees to release auto but said that he had contracted botulism

shortly after being sentenced it was seriously ill so this medical team ends up taking off from the U.S. going through China to Pyongyang apparently it was a whole to do as well because they thought they had the clearance to go from China into North Korea when somebody didn't have the paperwork or something and so they literally had to like call the most senior people in the federal government to get somebody to Robert Stamp this trip they were almost about to turn back because of this so eventually they

get to him and they realize they do an inspection of him there he's being held at what's called the Friendship Hospital and apparently from what like the doctors reported he was getting really good care there I think the narrative was we got like a whale here like a very studious all American looking kid

you know like it was they thought they had something special here with this kid but whatever they did to him it really messed him up because he was in a coma when they visited him so he would be taken to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center to assess his condition he was basically

in a vegetative state, medical evaluations could not conclusively determine what happened to him, but scans of his brain showed significant loss of brain mass. His brain was like mush. Because of it was it botulism?

Or was it like? So sort of maybe, but probably not. All they know is that the kind of damage his brain sustained is only doable with a very, very prolonged period of time,

without any oxygen. There's some speculation from others who reported later on that they think he was like waterboarded or was like temperate like drowned or something.

Like there was something that might have gone on with him. But the U.S. said that there was no signs of torture. And originally they said

there was no signs of botulism either but they also said like there's a chance he could have gone botulism and then it was mistreated or mishandled

and then he overcame the botulism on his own and we got him when he didn't have botulism but there was no signs of it when the U.S. got him. So about a week after arriving home, his parents decided they would just pull the plug since he was vegetative at that point. He was 22 years old. He ended up dying on June 19th of 2017.

A few weeks after his death, the U.S. government would ban all U.S. travel to North Korea without verification, which was almost only given for humanitarian aid purposes. Yeah, that's a good idea. Apparently, when the U.S. officials landed in North Korea to take his, at that point, basically his body back home, the North Korean government handed them a bill for $2 million for medical care. Can you believe that?

Isn't that amazing? Oh, my God. That's terrible. Yeah, it was a really, really weird, horrible. horrible situation. Yeah. There's one other story I came upon that is like the little dessert story that is crazy if it's true.

We don't know. But, and this is a quick one. This has to do with the disappearance of a guy named David Lewis Sneddon. So this guy was 24 years old in 2004 when he vanished in China or was reported. reported to have vanished in China. So the Chinese government said he most likely fell into what's called Tiger Leaping Gorge and died. But in 2016, this is what I'm looking at right now on Congress.gov forward slash bill. This is a legitimate thing from Congress. So in 2016, House Resolution 891 was sent for consideration.

in the house and in it gave a potentially different narrative on what happened to this this guy David so the house resolution is basically just advocating the government spend resources and money to further investigate this is this appearance instead of saying he's gone he's dead we don't know what what happened to him because there was evidence that was reported and found that he might have been kidnapped by North Korea so yeah tell me more why was he there so so well he was there because he was just traveling like he was just like one of these like uh wonder wonder kid kind of people he was just traveling to china um what's interesting is that this part of china is a very popular path for north korean defectors to escape the country through and as a result it is riddled with north korean agents who are basically there to find defectors and take them back to north korea it is also They have also had a history of abducting foreign nationals before in the past. So the theory right now is that he was kidnapped by these agents and taken into North Korea

so that the North Koreans, their military, their officials, everything else can understand Western dialect, mannerisms, culture, and also so that David could help teach Kim Jong-un English. Yeah. I have so many thoughts about that. That's incredible. Why don't they just get a TV? Yeah. Maybe it's easier.

So, yeah, technically he's on it. This guy, David, is on his 20th year of being missing. Wow. Nobody knows. Where is he from? Where is he from? I don't know. And I just closed the house bill, which probably had it on there.

Let's see. And like, yeah, like I was saying, like, why don't you just get like a TV? yeah you know if you want to like learn english well i'm sure that like is banned there right so there's that aspect so how do you actually get access to the content when nothing is wired in the country for you receive that content cell phones also don't work so like i feel like the supreme leader could figure that out but maybe that maybe he can't i don't know hamburgers did you know that oh he did well that's when i said no i've definitely watched like I watched one documentary one time when people were going in and like fixing people

like eye disorders and they would do it and they'd be able to see and then they would go right to the picture and be like thank you supreme leader for this and you're like you wouldn't have even gotten there if you were allowed to have good health care in the first place so weird it's so crazy that's also why when people talk about like socialism in the u.s it's like this is this is like pure communism and like yeah Because about democratic socialism, like Sweden. You know, we're not talking about North Korea. Yeah, like, Bernie Sanders is not Kim Jong-un.

Like, I don't know where the two kind of overlap, but. So, anyway. And didn't Kim Jong-un? He left for a while, didn't he? So, yeah, I think that he... Like, Bin Laden. Like, they both, like, spent time in Western places. I want to say it was Paris.

He's crazy, man. Like, he has to be bad shit insane. I can't imagine who the... poor woman is that he's married to like he like he so he also ended up killing his half brother at the airport was like a poison right yeah yeah someone that's crazy literally killed him and then they were killed in the process like and then like he killed his uncle with like some 50 caliber gun that just liquefied him or something it was the guy's nuts I hope he doesn't get this if you get this we love you supreme he's not going to get it he can't even get the internet

yeah that's good point um i read what did they do during covid so i know that they were in lockdown during covid as well as the rest of the world was um and that a big reason why tour the why they were like invested in tourism in the beginning had to do with um what i mentioned earlier the kind of the black market because they had no way of generating money the only money coming into the country due to embargoes had to do with foreigners visiting um and so i think i think they went to a shutdown during covid and that they just restarted that because they literally just needed the revenue it's funny i looked at up the u.s the GDP the per capita GDP is like $81,000 per person

our economy is so freaking huge i know i know i know like crazy i've also seen this stuff like the fake um like grocery stores and like the fake department stores and stuff where people are just like standing there and they're There's like no one that they're like, look how prosperous may have this beautiful store, but like no one's ever, it's not a real store. Yeah. So like what do they think that they're cosplaying when they're doing that? Like what are, what are you thinking when you are at that job where you're fake working in a department store to make someone think that you have a department store? Are you like, we're better than you because we don't actually have a department store or like maybe we should have a department store or you're like what?

You don't need a department store because the government takes care of? But why pretend to you, though, you know, then? I think the thing is that it just, this whole thing, maybe you think differently about money, for example, when it was like, money's just, can you imagine a world where like money's not a thing? Like, money's just not a thing. Like, you don't, yeah. The government, there is no currency. I mean, technically there's a Korean, the Korean one, which is the North Korean dollar, but it's like valueless and like it's like nothing. It's like a piece of paper and also there's no reason to have it.

So it's so weird. The whole thing is so weird. And that's why they have such a strict control over engagement interactions with the West. So one person somehow got like a SIM card and was in touch with like a sibling or a relative in South Korea. And it was found out and they were like sent into prison because if you hear about BTS, you're going to be like, what the fuck? If you're exposed to it, if you get exposed to it, then like that's where the, like, can you imagine you know, like I did that. story forever ago about that one family in Vegas where they just locked their kids and their kids

literally had no idea what anything was and like yeah listen to Justin Bieber once I was like what? Like it's like that like you don't even know what you don't know and that's why the government keeps the kind of lit on things that they do but one fun thing the funnest thing I learned about all this was that for the longest time

North Korea and South Korea at the demilitarized zone they had these giant megaphomes aimed at each other and on the North Korean side they were funneling in all this like talk about the supreme leader towards south korea you know in south korea they're like playing k-pop and shit yeah i want to be in the k-pop side a thousand percent and then at one point south korea sends like a balloon full of like flyers about what life is like in south korea over i think you wouldn't even believe it you'd be like i don't it'd be like going to like a medieval

peasant and being like look at this vr can you believe it we have vr now can you believe this can you North Korea retaliated that time by sending balloons full of their trash I think weren't they sending balloons of poop recently? Probably they probably added that tacked that on. There was multiple times during heightened tensions when they would stop and then they just resumed. I don't know, man. It's good. It's not like again

there's something happening in the world right now between like Russia, China, North Korea that is like not good and is all leading towards like something it feels like i heard that north greens are not fighting in on russia side in ukraine like yeah i heard that too happening here that's like really bad it's bad i think this i think my my take on is like man like when china's economy surpassed the u.s economy which is inevitable for it to happen that's when we're like kind of not in a great spot yeah so anyways We'll have to, we'll have to figure it out.

But it's also a good reminder that things could be, things could be worse. Things could be worse. Yeah. Yeah. It could always be worse. Also, I never knew all this history about Korea. I never even knew what the Korean War was about, if I'm being honest. I have no idea.

No, uh-uh. Me either. And then, and then like knowing that that's the reason why the North Korea country, the state was fully crazy and then like Japan what is up why are there so many atrocities

I know what's that one camp you know that camp the man behind the sun the movie they made yeah I don't know man but yeah I mean

some very very bad things yeah unit 731 yeah Yeah There's a yeah Oh my God Those Rape of Name King

Yeah Rough I feel like I've read things about that It's absolutely terrible I know It like it like goes back To the uniform truth

Which is like Humans Have a lot of capacity To be horrible to each other Yeah There's just I don't know There's a lot going on over there

So, anyways, that's my fun little story. Write to us if you've been to North Korea. Yeah. I think there's other countries that, like, are smaller that people barely go to as well. It's kind of, it's weird to think about that. There's people just, like, living a totally different life, wildly different. Yeah.

Anyway, let us know what you think. Let us know anything you think we should talk about. Doomed to fail pod at gmail.com. By and that's all social media. Doomed to fail pod. Tell your friends. everything's probably going to be okay it'll all work out as long as we don't live in north korea

we'll be fine yeah cross out of your list um sweet taylor anything else that's it thank you thank you um no that's it cool we'll go out and log off great Thank you.