The Joe Rogan Experience - #1691 - Yeonmi Park

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Yeonmi Park is a North Korean Human Rights Activist, and author of “In Order To Live: a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.”

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Well, very nice to meet you, first of all. So nice to meet you, too. Thanks for coming here. Is this your first time in Texas? No, I've been here before. You've been to Austin before?

Yes. 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. You were born in North Korea and you escaped North Korea when you were 13. Is that how old you were? 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 incredibly moving and it was incredibly disturbing and eye-opening. 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, but just talking about how you essentially had no food and you would go looking for bugs to eat. This was the reality of your existence as a child,

that there was no protein. Yeah. What, when you, 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? Does it seem like reality? Does it seem like a dream? What does your childhood seem like?

It's sometimes this feels like a dream. This feels like a dream. Yeah, so I pinched myself a lot in the beginning because they say if it's not dream it hurts right right I pinch yourself so a lot of times I pinch myself because sometimes I'm really horrified if I wake up from this that I'm gonna wake up in my living room in North Korea so it's sometimes that line is very blurry to me. Because the one common thing that North Koreans all have

is actually in our dreams when we sleep, it's back in North Korea. So in our dream, we somehow never able to escape it. So every day my mom wakes up, she tells me about story how she was back in North Korea. And I have the exact same thing. No matter what, how many years we left afterwards, in our dreams we are still in that country. So that's the nightmare.

The nightmare is that you're still trapped in North Korea. When you lived there, you didn't know that there was another way to live. No. It's like here right now, we cannot imagine a life in some different planet in the universe right we just don't know what that life looks like exactly the same thing i never knew the life in different planet could be like and and where you lived in north korea there was no internet. Yeah. There's very little electricity, right? Mm-hmm. And how much education did you get?

I never even seen the map of the world. So as an Asian, I did not even know that I was Asian. So the regime told me I was a Kim Il-sung race. Kim Il-sung race. Yeah. And then the North Korean calendar begins when Kim il-sung race kim il-sung race yeah and then the north korean calendar begins when kim il-sung was born that's like to taewon that our history begins so i don't even know what jesus christ is and i don't know anything before kim so there was everything before kim the history

was re-raised for us and but the thing is that we are hungry, we're starving. If you eat breakfast, you worry about lunch. If you make it to dinner, you are not sure if you're going to make it to tomorrow. So in that scenario, who thinks about history? 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. 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.

It's a Hunger Games. It's like when i was reading this book hunger games i literally like oh my god this person copied north korea there's a captar you divide into 13 different districts captar people have everything they need and on other provinces their own purpose they're being starved so only thing you can think of your survivor. If you are full in your stomach, right, you're going to start thinking about meaning of life, art, what's out there in the universe. You can do all of that higher thinking when you are full in your stomach. But when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger. When did North Korea become what it is now? When did it shift to this totalitarian regime that's starving its people and puts people in these classifications?

Like 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. Everyone in your generation, your next generation, all of them are guilty. Yeah, forever. There's no redemption. If the one person commits a crime in that family clan, three to eight generations got to be purged. How many generations?

Three to eight generations. Three to eight? Yes. Mostly, commonly three, but the people who challenge the regime or challenge the leader, then eight generations get purged. Eight generations. Yeah. And then after the eighth generation, are they absolved?

No, they're all gone. They're all gone. By eight generations, you even kill the in-laws of somebody in-law. So not even the blood you get purged. If your cousin, somebody marrying the in-law of somebody in law. So not even the blood you get purged. If your cousin, somebody marrying the in law of somebody, so there was one official who escaped, 35,000 people were purged. A lot of them, 80% of them did not even know

that they were related to this person. Wow. Yeah, cousins of cousins, somebody, somebody, that's how they find, they get rid of the root of entire this clan when did this all start when kim il-sung came into power so he was a big marxist and leninist and he was a communist so in the before the korean war in 1948 that's when he began this uh in the name of equality right let's take everything back from the capitalist.

Let's nationalize the land, get rid of private property. But he made North Korea into very unequal society, dividing people into 50 different classes. 50? Yeah. And the way the classes worked, you couldn't marry up. And the way the classes worked, you couldn't marry up. 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.

That's how they prevent the mixing with the class. So there's no marrying up. You only go down. So no matter what happens, if you are at a lower class, you stay there forever. Forever. No chance of moving out of that zone and it has no 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 no this is when i was confused when i went to south korea people say if you work hard in south Korea, you are going to get rewarded.

And that's when I thought, wow, that is justice. Because in North Korea, it doesn't matter what you do, what you want to do, what your dreams are. It's already determined by what your ancestors did. But the thing is, how do you choose your ancestor? You can never choose your parents. And you had no idea that there was any other way to live when you're growing up like this because you never seen the map of the world i didn't even know like the americans how they looked like because we don't have internet first of all we have only one channel that government you know controls every single contents we don't

even have any we don't even have a cookbook that's the thing as a korean We don't even have any, we don't even have a cookbook. That's the thing as a Korean, I don't even know what cookbook is. I mean first of all, we don't have ingredients like how do you find the half pounds of pork, scallion, blah blah, right? So cookbook is like pointless. And not only that, there's no fashion because I mean we don't have freedom to what we wear. So even when I heard the job called modeling, I was like, what is that? So everything that I learned here is like a new concept to me as a North Korean.

So when you would eat, where would you get your food from? So the land is government, right? The house is, there's no private property. But those farmers working in the collective farm, they smuggle it out and set it in the black market secretly. So those food, if we have money, we go to black market, buy corn, starch, those things. But mostly we just go to mountain to pick up plants, flowers, and grasshoppers is the biggest protein source

for North Koreans. But the government doesn't provide any food for the people? I heard they did in the 60s, 70s. But I was born in 1993 in October. And that is right after Soviet Union collapsed. So until then, Soviet Union was subsidizing North Korea's economy heavily. And China did the same, but when they collapsed, they stopped helping North Korean regime. So the regime policy was, if we as long as keep the 10% alive who are in the capital,

our rule is successful. So they were not going to do anything until 90% of population dies. Wow. Still, they are saying the same rule they have. Until the 90% dies out, as long as we keep the 10% alive, we are not going to do anything, intervene the starvation. So there's no effort whatsoever to get food to the people? It's not like effort. They're actually actively preventing people to get resources.

Preventing, not now, even last time, the Biden was calling Kim Jong-un, can we give you a vaccine? And Kim Jong-un said no. South Korea was calling North Korea last year. There was a big flood. Can we give you at least some medicine? And Kim Jong-un said no.

We don't want any medicine. So because they don't want any aid from the West? Even South Korea. They want to keep people as weak as possible. Exactly. They want us. Today I was on the way here thinking getting up in North Korea, the child was challenging because every day you get dizzy from the starvation. You get like hear noise every single morning when you wake up.

It takes like 30 minutes to gather your thoughts to be able to walk straight because everybody's in that mode of starvation yeah so as you can see me i'm like very small i eat a lot i'm like still 80 pounds but when i was escaping i don't even know how rich i was and north korean men above 4 10 feet high they have to go to military women to some mandatory men have to serve in the military 13 years mandatory and women is 10 years and most men are very small because of malnutrition yeah 410 feet 410 yeah wow and so so they just allow people to forage for themselves. That's the idea.

Like, find your own food. Yes. Are you allowed to have a garden? Can you grow vegetables? Can you have animals? Well, one of the executions that my mom saw was a young man was eating beef, a cow, because he killed a collective farm cow, and he got executed for that. Everything is owned by the state.

In North Korea, you don't even own yourself, right? So I remember going to South Korea, I got a gift one day, and it was a planner. So what you do, what you're trying to do is a notebook. And in North Korea, you don't plan your day. You don't get to plan what you do with your life. Like a week before or a day before, there's an announcement from the government. How you're going to spend your day.

What to eat, where to go to work, what to do, when to go to sleep. Everything is determined by your own state. So this guy was executed because he killed one of the state's cows. And you're not allowed to have your own state. So this guy was executed because he killed one of the state's cows. Yeah. And you're not allowed to have your own animals. You can't have like chickens or something along those lines. They might hide it, but last year Kim Jong-un confiscated entire dog from the population. All the

dogs? Yeah. That was because of COVID-19, right? No. No? Because he said it was a corrupt Western sentiment where we have pets. So he ordered to kill the entire dogs for the meat. So get rid of dogs. Because even he just didn't like that it looks like Western having a dog, having a friendly relationship with animals.

So everyone's dog in all of North Korea was confiscated and killed. Yeah. And what did they do with the dogs? I don't know what theated and killed. Yeah. And what did they do with the dogs? I don't know what the regime leaders did. Wow. Yeah. So do they provide you with any food?

No. No. So you have to find food on your own and most of the food is wild food, like grasshoppers and flowers that are edible. Yeah. So this is why the most bizarre thing is that regime initially said, oh, give us your land, give us your freedom. We are going to provide free health insurance, right?

For education, free housing, free of everything. You don't have to worry about anything. The state is going to be taking care of everything. But after Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea came idea like this idea is called self-reliance. So you're relying on yourself. But you can't farm. No, you don't have land.

How do you farm? You don't have freedom. There's no free market. My father was sent to prison camp because he sold metals. He sold dry. Metals, right. Initially he sold like rice, dried fish, clocks. And trading is illegal.

It's not like he was selling weapons or drugs. Trading is illegal. So how do you be self-reliant? Yeah. So they just let you figure. So the whole idea is just to keep everybody weak. Yeah. 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, like one of the big problems in America is that people eat too much. Yeah, I heard that. Isn't that crazy? I was shocked. I never understood having too much. Yeah, I heard that. Isn't that crazy? I was shocked. I never understood having too much can be a problem because I just never knew that it could be a possibility of problem. It's the number one problem here.

Exactly how having too much is a problem. I don't get it. I think the, what is the percentage, Jamie, what is the percentage of people in America that are obese? I think it's large. I think it's more than 50%. I think it's, and it's a huge factor with diseases.

And I mean, 78% of the people that are in the ICU for COVID are obese. What is it? 43%. So almost half of the people in the country are obese. Meaning they eat far too much food. And for you, that concept must be insane. You're in the upside-down world.

Like you're in, right? That's the thing. It's like a different planet. The common law that I knew in North Korea doesn't apply here anymore. And it is just so confusing to me how hard it is not to eat. It's hard when you don't have food. You cannot find it.

And to me, I don't know why that is so challenging. Can you do me a favor and just push the microphone forward? Yeah, like this. Yeah, so it's right in front of you. There you go. So, yeah, it must be, yeah, like another planet, the idea of having too much food. Yeah. And that's the source of, I mean, they're complaining about it.

So I'm like, even that is a reason for a complaint. Yeah. That's something unbelievable. I just don't get it. It's so easy. If you have too much, you don't eat it. You just don't put it in your mouth, right? No one is forcing you to eat a lot.

Yeah, but food is addictive. And people like to comfort themselves with food when it's everywhere. And it's also, it's a strange problem, right? The problem of excess. It's a strange problem. Like you have too much. But this is, I mean humanity or our humanity we've been starving yeah it's the very first time humanity having this much excess and I have some

compassion for the but you know a lot of problems like I met American friends in New York I went to school there and like my friends complaints I couldn't sympathize in the beginning right literally because their problem is like some guy they went on date and they don't call them back and they call me and complain like you know like there's a people actually problems like life and death yes this is not a problem but well it's an issue of perspective right 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 yeah yeah when you were talking about going to the doctor when you were a child and that this is a very disturbing story but i want you to try to explain it to people, how 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, and then the children would die, and the rats would eat the children. Yeah. Explain what this was like. How did you see this? Well, I mean, seeing that the bodies on the streets like everyday thing it was numb where were the bodies like just laying around on the streets

so they are floating in the rivers and then they also train station somehow had a lot of dead bodies because north korea is very cold and there's a train waiting area and North Korea has one train go to one distance like once a month and like here it would take like one hour to go the other place in North you take a month at least to go because there's no electricity and sometimes people have to push the train. They have to push the train. Yeah. Yeah.

Traveling in North Korea is an unbelievably difficult thing within North Korea. Yeah, traveling in North Korea is an unbelievably difficult thing within North Korea. So, I mean, anyway, so in train stations, that's when people die mostly. 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 phones, we don't have letters. If I say goodbye to her, I don't know when I'm going see her again or if I'm ever gonna see her again. Because she could have cared and like raped and starved. You just never know how to find people. So in the morning when you go like walk in the train station, they just put the piles of dead bodies and they're all like become rigid, right? They're almost like the like wood piled on them

and taking away and one, but the thing is for me, I didn't even know the word compassion. Like nobody told me you have to feel bad for it. Cause for me it's like, like fish in the water, don't notice the water, right? Like that was like something every day I saw as a child. So you, you never went days where you didn't see, this is a normal thing to see dead bodies.

It was every day as like normal as like breathing the air right now. And one thing that I still remember is my sister and I was walking by the well. Like in North Korea, we don't have a sewage. We don't have running water, obviously. We have to go to well or river to bring the drinking water

and there's a young teenage boy i think lying down and his intestines coming out of his back when you're really malnourished that thing all opens up you got zero zero fats every hole all opens and and you see doggy like dogs looking at his organs coming out. And he was just somehow conscious, begging for food at the time. He was begging for food while his organs were hanging out of his body. Yeah. And I don't know why his pants were off. And I felt nothing.

That still haunts me to this day. I don't know how I felt nothing at that point. And that just looked horrible. Because of the fact that he's alive and so much flies flying by on his organs and how he's somehow consciously begging for food. And I didn't feel anything. You felt no compassion? No.

It was just normal. Yeah. Yeah, so that was like daily life thing. And then in the hospital, when I was 13 years old, my parents took me to hospital because I was a bad stomachache. And then we don't have like x-ray machines. We don't have any of that. Just doctor wraps your belly. And then he says, oh, we need to operate on her.

I think her appendix was bursting or something. So that afternoon, they cut me open without any anesthesia. But it's a normal thing. People in North Korea operate without anesthesia. But the chances of you going through surgery is a lot higher for you getting infected because we don't have penicillin. The nurse is using a one meter to inject every single patient.

So who do you know what the other person has? You get from actually more sick by being in the hospital. Right. And this is where we don't, of course, have an indoor bathroom for the patient. We have to go outside. And in between there, there a piles of dead human bodies and that's when i was seeing this uh somehow rats eating human eyes first for some reason because they're probably soft and these women i don't know in my age probably show hair wearing these flower pants,

and when they're dead, their mouth is somehow open, and their eyes are hollow. And you see children looking at the rats and laughing and chasing them. And adults telling them, don't eat those, you're going to get sick from it. But of course kids don't care. Even finding a rat is delicacy. Because even finding a snake is a big price.

You don't find those often. So they were finding the rats and then just trying to eat them? Yeah. Were they eating them raw? Sometimes if you find the skin you do, but they do find some fire and roast them. So they were excited to find a rat to eat. Yeah.

So they were catching them with their hands. Yeah, oh yeah, of course they would catch them with their hands. And these piles of human bodies, she was on top, that's why I was able to see her wearing these flower pants. And then, like her eyes were so hollow.

It's like, we need to look at the human body like nothing is left. I think that's what, it's not like just death itself. It's just like how it becomes nothing. So empty inside. She does not know the shame or pain.

She was lying there like that. And you see children just chasing them and laughing and try to catch the rats. And the children didn't feel anything being around the dead bodies? Just normal? It's our daily normal thing seeing a death is like our daily life and they would eat the rats and then they would get sick and some of them would die yeah a lot of them die and then the rats would eat them yeah it's like the cycle we talk about it's like that's a spring is for north korea's season of death and so the diseases that they would get from the rats, they were willing to risk those diseases just because of hunger.

Because when you are, there's a North Korean proverb. There is no wish for the person who died after their stomach is full. So even in the middle of the earthquake, the North Koreans not try to run. So my mom was talking about the day when she was in the university. There's an earthquake happening. And do you know what these students are doing? It's not running out of the building and try to survive. They go to the kitchen.

So before they die, they eat at least so they can die. So if you have that promise of eating one meal, they're going to risk everything for that. So it's just an entire country in a perpetual state of starvation. Yeah. I remember playing this game with my sister. As a young girl, I never ate until I felt full. So I would compare myself. I'd tell her, like, I can eat 100 bread.

And she's like, I can eat the mountains of bread. I can eat, like, 10,000 more than what you just said. Because I don't know the limits of my stomach. I never tested it. So you always were hungry. Always hungry. Never felt full. So you escaped.

So your father was arrested for trading in metals, right? And he was just trying to find resources, trying to get money for the black market for food and things like that. Is that what it was? To get us alive. Because the regime does not provide food for the people. So they had to break the law, which is trading to survive. Without trading, how do we even survive? So he was trading these matters and he got caught and that's how he's in the prison camp. And how long was he in prison for? Several years, but he was sentenced to more than 10 years.

So I think he was totally in prison 34 years, but he got out of for sick leave, which is had to go back once he got better. But of course, in North Korea, that's like who cares if you die? He was a very smart guy. So he tricked the guard saying, if you get me out for the sick leave, I'm going to get you money. Because North Korea is the most corrupt country that you can find right now in today's world. So corrupt. So he tricked the guard, told him that he'd get him some money, and so he was in for how many years? You said four years?

Three, four years, yeah. And what was it like when he got out? I didn't recognize him when he came back to me. I did not know that was my father. Even his voice changed. When I call North Korea, even till this day, I do have people on the ground. I get information.

Their voice is different. It's like their voice is so oppressed. You can tell this is North Korean speaking. You can tell just by their voice yeah that's the thing is when some chinese like we have the brokers try to trick us by voice we can tell if you're chinese like korean ethnic chinese living in china trying to trick us or actually north korean is speaking to us wow so you can actually hear the oppression in their voice? Yeah, you can. What does it sound like? It's like complete fear.

Like, terrified to the point they don't even know they're terrified. They're like, I don't think even a bug would be that scared. Like, he was calling me, like, on me. In his voice, I didn't see my father. And he was so scared. And I could see he was calling me, like on me, in his voice, I didn't see my father. And he was so scared. And I could see he was so scared. I was like only nine, something, ten. I don't even know.

I was like young. And I could say, why is he so afraid? And so he does get out and they never put him back in jail again? Because I rescued him after I went to China. I got him out. So he had get out, and they never put him back in jail again? Because I rescued him after I went to China. I got him out, so he had to go back. He had to go back to jail, but he died in China. So you were 13 when you and your family, was it you and your mother that escaped? Yeah.

How did you get out? So that hospital, initially my sister and I was going to escape. 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. Right. Luckily, I was living in this border town of North Korea by then. So at night, you know, if you see the satellite photo of North Korea,

it is literally the darkest place on earth. Yes. We don't have electricity. So I was seeing these lights coming from China. So I thought if I go where the lights were, we would be finding some bowl of rice. 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. And then as soon as I got out of the hospital, I found a note.

And initially my mom and I went to look for sister where she went. But when we found the lady, she told me that she could help me to go to China that day and so this was you and your mother and you were 13 years old yeah so how did you get across and what is that what was that experience like so uh this is uh so I told my mom like come with me to China and she my mom was like you know father is like my father was home he was waiting but the thing is that the tragic thing for norris can see we cannot even say goodbye to our loved ones so if we got caught on the journey and if my father knew that we were escaping he's gonna be punished so much so it's better off that he does not know that we are escaping for his own safety because they're gonna torture you to the point that you're gonna say

anything because they do this all subconscious like torture that they make you not sleep in a single room has like no air much air if you put there for 40 days alone you go crazy you say whatever they ask you so if you he actually knew that we're escaping it wouldn't good for him he would be dead so i told him i'm like you cannot tell father that we are escaping so that day we climbed up this several mountains and then we went to the river side but she had a connection with the guards why did you not bring him with you because he's a man and he was sick and somehow she said only women can go only women can go i did not know why what she meant by that she's like you should just go with your mom and don't even tell those people that's your mom

she said like you are like 18 or something and my mom was something 30 so she told me that our age was age was different so and this would somehow another help you when you were going across yeah how would that help you i don't know or she told me what this is going to be helpful and well part of the issue is um in china there's a disproportionate number of men in comparison to women. And so they want as many women to come across that are of legal age, like women that can be married, right? Is that the idea behind it?

It's a smuggling. So you got it right. Because of one child policy right a lot of girls got aborted in china so they kept boys now there's many many men that have no chance of ever finding a woman because there are no women yeah over 30 million men in the rural areas cannot find wives so they million over 30 million and it's number gonna keep going up right now 30 million. Over 30 million. It's number going to keep going up right now.

So that's a big problem for Chinese regime. But the thing is, even that they don't allow North Korean women to stay there. They catch us and they send us back to North Korea. Last month, China repatriated 50 North Korean defectors back to North Korea. It's sending them our suits. Literally, they are sending them to death camp. But the Chinese regime still do catch us and send us back because they think we are posing a threat to the regime and they don't want the regime to collapse.

So they are catching all the defectors. But the human traffickers seize the opportunity here because we are so vulnerable, right? We are running away from Chinese authority. So even they rape us and kill us, the last place that we are going to go is going to police and then report on them. Why do they think that women coming over from North Korea are going to somehow or another collapse the empire?

Because that's what Kim Jong-un believes. He thinks they're gonna collapse through the defection through the defectors so after kim jong-un came into power he literally the country cannot afford the electricity probable electrified the fence entire border not only that putting the machine guns with the guards have a shoot to kill order. Whoever crosses, they don't even bother to ask you to stop. They shoot you right there. And not only that, he buried the land mines on top of that. So there's electric fence,

and then there's guards shooting to kill, and then past that there's land mines. Yeah, entire country became a concentration camp. Entire country. When did they start putting the landmines in a few years ago so this is after you had already escaped yeah now there's no you can you don't see north korea defect escaping from north korea anymore it's impossible to escape at this point um one of the more horrific things that um jordan and you discussed was you seeing your mother raped and that your mother

sacrificed herself because they wanted you. Yeah. And this is the first time you had ever even seen what sex was. So I didn't even know that was sex. I did not know even that was rape because we didn't have the vocabulary in North Korea. So in North Korea, there's no word for stress. There's no word for stress. Because how can you be stressed in the socialist paradise? So there's no word trauma. There's no word depression because you cannot be simply depressed in socialist paradise. There's no word for liberty. There's no word for human rights. There's no word for rape or even sex. So I just thought something I was seeing was horrible. But later they told me that was rape.

I did not know that was rape. You also said that you never heard the word love. Yeah, no. There's no word for love in North Korea. So your mother never told you she loved you. You never told your father you love him. Yeah. None of that.

So in North Korea there's even no word for I. So they don't want people to be individualistic, right? That's the worst thing you can be. It's all a collective vision. So when North Koreans say, I like water, I say we love water. We love kimchi. So that's how, when I'm in South Korea we 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 and South Koreans get so frustrated that we are keep misusing I and we and that's that's how regime controls your minds through language it is georgia 1984 they create double speak yeah why language is so important because it controls your thoughts so that's how i got rid of the romantic love we don't even know possibly another human can love another human only love the nurse clearance know is like written from love that when we describe our feeling towards the leader. And we don't know that word can be used to describe our feelings to another human. When Kim Jong Il died and people were crying in the streets and people were sent to prison for not crying enough yeah what it was the strangest thing for us to watch as

americans because it was performative where people were performing they were they were they were not really crying they were they were wailing in this very theatrical way to let everyone know that they were complying it's uh Your life is on the line. People watching you. If you don't mourn enough, that's the thing. If you don't mourn in the most extreme high, they're going to send you to prison, come and execute you.

So we are doing it to survive. Did you see anyone who didn't mourn enough? No, I mean, it's impossible. How do you not mourn enough? How do you not possibly? That's your life generation is depending on you when you mourn. So everyone knows this. Of course everyone knows it's a threat. Even babies know. Even babies know. When you're born in North Korea, you know what it is. You don't like start questioning. It's, I mean, the first thing my mom told him as a young girl was not even be careful of strangers, be careful, you know, call like none of that.

She would say, be careful of your tongue because that is the most dangerous weapon you got in your body. Don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you. So that's the first thing you hear from your parents, how dangerous what you say is going to be. Did you personally see people that you knew get imprisoned because of things that they said? They just disappear. Like one of my sister's classmates, her mom, when they executed. And then because they're accusing her to receiving money

from the foreign CIA or the South Korean intelligence. But a month later, they said, oh, it was not a problem. She was not a spy. So they brought the family members back out of the concentration camp. So they killed her for nothing? And they don't even say sorry to that. We don't even know that's a concept. The government can't be sorry or they can't ever make a mistake.

So how did they find out that she wasn't really a spy? We just don't know. Just one day that classmate came out and my sister's classmate came out and then they said her mom was not a spy. So they got out of the prison camp. And that's it. There's nothing, nothing, we were none of that.

And so this was a common thing. Yeah. And you just lived in constant fear. It's like, this is the thing. And we are three people sitting here, right? I'm watching you. And Jamie's watching me. And you're watching somebody else.

So even I'm being a nice person, not going to report on you. I know Jamie's been watching me. He's not going to report on me. But even if you try to be nice nice but he knows he's being watched by somebody too so you're being spied on and you're spying on somebody so no escape and everybody has to report absolutely anything that they find like if you said something negative about the government i would have to tell on you otherwise i would get in trouble yeah and the other person don't report on you that person get in trouble

there's no way out of it that's how they create distrust like one thing that shocked me when i came to the west like how trust exists in north korea there's a saying i don't even trust your own back because you can you don't know who is a spy you don't know who is listening who is watching know who is a spy. You don't know who is listening, who is watching. And people just disappear. Yeah, just disappear. And public executions happens in a stadium next to market where most people go. And in North Korea, there's no concept of minor, right? There's no concept like minors cannot do labor. That's not a thing thing as a child is seven years old you go to school you work you go to work in a dam construction in the farm and you are a miner so therefore when there's public execution happens you're on the front line because you are the shortest

the state line of five six years old in the beginning and then like in the age going to like or it's mandatory to attend so you it's mandatory to attend public executions? Yeah. And how do they kill the people? After Kim Jong-un got in power, he became more brutal how he kills people. He used the air, like, missiles that shoot down the airplane, that kind of powerful weapon. So when he kills people people they blow up into pieces like they literally become just red pieces and fireworks that's how it that's what i hear from

now now there's executions but my time was more the guard standing and shoot you here here and three times nine shots and then it body becomes like a world world world and then like they just put in a luggage and take it out but nowadays I heard they are using way more they they are started hanging too before my time was just execution but Kim Jong-un said even the bullets we don't want to waste on this like trash they call us trash and so just hang them and like or like stone to death. So bring the people around the town and hit them with the rocks until they die. So the people in the town would contribute to the execution. They would they would be the ones throwing the rocks. Yeah otherwise you

get punished you have to. And what are the crimes that you could be sentenced to death for? It's as little as, so in North Korea, every room has to have a portrait of Kim. And the inspector comes out of nowhere in the middle of the night and then touch the portraits if they see any dust. They say your loyalty is not high enough. And then you can get executed and sent to prison camp, three generations of your family. And- So if the picture is dusty, you get executed. Yeah, and if your house get on fire,

the first thing is not you run with your family or your children or parents. You have to protect the portraits with your life. Otherwise, the three generation gets punished for that. Even murderers, rapists, in North Korea don't exist. We don't even know what rape is. I mean, they have pleasure squad, right? 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. Every year they do that. So these officials, now the guy who's in the second power in North Korea, his name is Chaeryeonghae, he has his own pleasure squad. And he takes entire teeth out of these girls. So when they kiss him down there, he has more pleasure. So these things is not a crime in North Korea. Like literally when women walk down, the guys stand you and rape you, you cannot go to police, you got raped. It's your fault. So this country, I mean, every wives get beaten by husband in North Korea. This is not a crime.

But if there's a newspaper, there's a portrait of Kim Jong-un, right? Or Kim Jong-il. You didn't see the front page. In the back page, you ripped it by mistake. That's how you get executed. That is why we call crime in North Korea. Wow.

Having escaped that and looking back on it now and knowing that it exists right now, what can be done? What could the rest of the world do I mean North Korea has nuclear weapons? It's they have a powerful military. Yeah, what can the rest of the world do to stop this from happening because it seems like This is horrific. It's a it's a form of genocide and it's happening right now 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. So holocaust is happening again, and of course we are denying it again. When it was holocaust, it was happening. A lot of people say, how is that possible? It's so hard to believe that. And North Korea, using this concentration camp, these people do the biology test. They put them in the gas chambers. Right now, they do that. A biology test?

Of course. What's the biology test? They test a lot of the weapons, biological weapons. So they, you know, keep trying to... North Korea spends entire their GDP on developing nukes and weaponaries. I mean, they are the biggest provider to the Middle East. When there's a war, they buy missiles from North Koreans. North Korea makes money by selling,

I mean, the crystal meth and opium. That's how Kim Jong-un makes money in hacking. He steals a lot of Bitcoin and get up banks, ATM machines. That's how he makes money. Because they don't export anything other than drugs and weapons and hacking and human trafficking.

So they experiment on their own people to find out what these biological weapons were? Yeah. And also, they need a lot of concentration like prisoners because they have to clean the nuclear debris. Because they do a lot of tests. So since 2017, North Korea conducted almost 30 missile tests. If the one test missile caused to feed 25 million the entire year. So if he chose to do four less tests, nobody had to die in North Korea from starvation. And right now Kim Jong Un recently admits that 11 million North Koreans are severely malnourished and

he's proud to say that. And he's not even bothering to hide in the past. Yeah, they are starving. And he's fat. Oh, yeah. That's his problem, being too fat. Wow. Wow. So they're forced to clean up nuclear waste from these test sites? The debris and everything, yeah.

And, of course, they die from radiation. Of course. They don't last three months. Normal life expectancy when you go to concentration camp is three months. Three months. Yeah.

So they need a lot of those people. And they just use those people for fodder. Yeah. How many people are, do they know how many people are in these concentration camps? Nobody knows exactly, but several hundred thousand of them. But there's also prison camps, concentration camps, prison camps, and labor camps.

And some people are born into these camps. Yeah, those are people in the concentration camps. And they don't even get to know the name of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-un. They're too below the level. They don't even bother to tell them who's the leader of the country. And what did someone in their family do that would allow them, that would make them get put into these concentration camps? So they find out later their great-great-grandfather

was working with the Japanese for like a week when Japan was colonizing or the Korean was starting. they were talking to American soldiers or they were they're like like cousins of nephews of like some in law was a Christian because North Korea's number one Christian persecution country because they copy the Bible right they said Oh Kim Il Sung loves us so much he's a God he gave us his son kim jong-il and he dies but he speaks with us all the time that's why they can read my thoughts he knows how much

hair i have and that's how so when you become a god you need to explain you don't need to make sense so they essentially use the story of the Bible for Kim Jong Il and... Kim Il Sung. Yeah, they copy the Bible. Exactly copy the Bible. Wow. That's why I believe that Kim was reading my mind. If the people believe in the Hebrews,

like Jesus knows what you're thinking, why do you think it's surprising the North Koreans believe that? 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. Yeah. And that's happening right now. It's been happening for the last almost 80 years. Yeah, this has been going on.

And as you just asked, what can be done? Kim Jong-un cannot last even one week without Chinese regime support. The only reason the regime exists is because of Chinese Communist Party. How do you test missile without oil? Kim Jong-un cannot even drive his Benz in Pyongyang. China refused to not helping the regime. They keep helping Kim Jong-un. Keep sending the oil. Even last year, the New York Times covered it. The ship full of gas oil going to North Korea. So Kim Jong-un could test missiles, even amid the pandemic.

Why does China support North Korea? I really, really, I think one is they don't want that democracy come to next door, right? That South Korea, Japan, America is all right next to North Korea geographically. And North Korea is like this almost like a buffer zone for them, for this Western movement coming into their country. And also they think of North Korea more like Tibet or Xinjiang. If they let North Korea go, then Xinjiang people are going to want to go. Tibetans are going to be independent.

Hong Kong's going to be independent. They cannot give up any one of them. Because of the stability and symbolic thing for the Chinese people within the country wants to be independent. So they all want to maintain north korea forever and mao said that relationship between china and north korea is that the relationship between your lips and the teeth without lips you cannot really close your mouth and eat without your teeth you cannot chew so you need each other to survive and that's how

mao's son died to korean war by defending communist party in the north that's how Mao's son died to Korea more by defending Communist Party in the north that's how Mao lost his son that's how he believed that they need North Korea and so the the Chinese Communist Party today shares a sentiment and they're using it strategically yeah they run the dictatorship in North Korea they run the the whole thing. And that's the thing. We have not been solving North Korea because we just never named the accountability who is responsible for this crisis. That is China. And of course, in America, mainstream, they do not want to call out North Korea, China to committing genocide. That's why I've been having so many attacks from Marxist, communist, and Maoist, and Leninist, all these people. And North Korea is

almost this last country that holds ideology called socialism. So it's a very symbolic country. So a lot of empathizers of communism and anti-Western civilization people, they defend North Korea like hell. 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? Do they change the narrative? Do they have a story of North Korea that's false, that makes it seem like North Korea is a nice place? No, they know exactly what's going on.

They know? Even Chinese people know. So there's no defending it? No, no. Even Chinese people see it. Like when North Koreans get captured, Chinese is still better, nice than North Korean guards. They like handcuff off, sort of blinds us.

But North Koreans come and put the wire in between here, in between your bones. So connecting all the prisoners together so they cannot run. Like cows. They put a wire like through their collarbone yeah so they they prevent us to escape so why we are in china that's when the outsiders watching but imagine what they're going to do inside the country when there's no camera so this is what china does to north koreans china catches us and give us to north korean guys and they watch it and they watch them do that and then they they they even horrify but of course they don't do anything about it there's like you

don't have to go that far but of course north koreans do not accepting defection right that's why we are defectors we are not refugees when we escape we defy the ideology yes that's why this is north koreans are not just refugees. They are political prisoners. They are political refugees. They should be covered by Geneva Convention and international law. So China catching a sentence back, that is a crime against humanity.

They are breaking the international law. But no one will punish them for that. And nobody going to talk about it even here in the West. Right? why? I mean, there's a Michelle Obama, right, Nobel Peace Prize giving the girls like captured by ISIS

or like Taliban, like Malala. Michelle Obama stands up for the girls who were captured by ISIS and Boko Haram. Who is standing up for North Korean girls being captured and raped in China right now? There are 300,000 North Koreans right now when we are speaking in China and are sexual slaves. 300,000? Yeah.

And most of them are women and girls. China has incredible power. Yeah. China has incredible power. Yeah. And when you see the power that China has and that they're supporting North Korea and that there's no pushback from America. Yeah. What does that feel like to you when you see this, knowing what you went through?

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. And you speak about it as often as possible. But yet there's not a lot of support, especially from political leaders. No one is stepping up to say your story. Yeah. It's total hypocrisy. I mean, all these people in America talk about how slavery is wrong. I agree slavery is the worst thing that we can do to another human being.

But why some slavery matters over some other slavery, right? Like, I mean, all these corporations talking about how they do not support the bigotry and racism and slavery. It's happening right now in China, and they have business with China. They don't say anything about it. No, like this is the thing. When Hulu made a movie about dissent, no, about assassins, about Kim Jong-nam's assassination

three years ago in Malaysia. Remember the Kim Jong-un's half-brother got? Yes. So they made a movie. Hulu was supporting to make that movie. He killed his half-brother and someone else too, right? And his uncle. His uncle.

Yeah. So his brother is more shocking because he got killed in the international territory. In a VX nerve, the poison. And they made a movie. But when the Hulu was bought by Disney, Disney wanted Hulu to drop that movie. So that movie couldn't be shown in Hulu. Because it would offend China. Yes.

Why there is not even one single movie coming out of Hollywood about North Korean people suffering. They made it about Congo genocide. They made it all about genocide, not about North Korea. That is a strange hypocrisy, isn't it? Of course it is. And it's about money right? Absolutely. It's all about money. All these people talking about justice, what they care about. I mean

none of them do when it's real life. And this is not, these are not secret stories. It's not. I mean so this is the thing. Oh don't make it up. Kim Jong-un kills his uncle, right? That was on the national newspaper. He kills his half-brother. And look, do you remember the other one year, the American 21-year-old student? Yes. Who was accused of stealing the banner? He was brain dead.

By the time he got to America, he was beaten to death, right? Yeah, and he was sentenced for 15 years in the labor camp for trying to steal the banner. But this is a country that did to white American mayor, to the most powerful country citizen. Imagine what they're going to do to their own citizen. You can't even imagine what they do to their own citizen.

So North Korea, this nationalism is to the highest. 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. They don't let the baby live. They, yeah, it's just unbelievable. This is happening in 21st century, and still, we somehow don't talk about it.

Not just don't talk about it, but it keeps going generation after generation. 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? And if people are quiet, nothing. It's going to keep going. And this is what, to me, as an activist, I'm a dissent. I'm fighting against this regime. We know when Jamal Khashoggi get killed in saudi consulate there's no accountability for the dictator right saudi prince he didn't get anything 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 so standing up fighting it doesn't incentivize people anymore, right? So you don't see justice being served. And I think that is why it is so hard to fight now because people think justice is there, but I don't think it is that. It's something I don't see in real life. 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. What can be done? 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. When they talk about the problems of the world, North Korea is rarely discussed. And the horrific crimes of the North Korean regime against their own people, rarely discussed by politicians.

They'll talk about Afghanistan. They'll talk about Iraq. They'll talk about all the problems we have with Iran. They don't talk about what's going on right now, what you're describing in North Korea with these concentration camps and these people, they don't talk about these things. Yeah. What can be done?

I think by talk, I think this is a beauty of living in democracy. Like when I go to Whole Foods, right, coming from North Korea, I'm shocked by how many hand washing is like by, I mean, all about like environment-friendly products, right? And that means a lot of people want to support this cause. Right. That they want, I mean, look at how many vegan restaurants are popping up in New York. So a lot of people demand that now.

So if individuals are being educated 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, 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. I have stopped trying to talk to the UN. I don't even give talks anymore at the UN. Did you give talks in the past? Yeah.

What was the response? They, in Geneva in September, the Human Rights General Assembly meeting, how dumb of them. They literally put me alone right next to North Korean delegation team because geographically, we are somehow close.

So these five guys from North Korean delegation team are swearing at me. And the UN, that's what they do. That's how dumb they are. They sat them next to you. Yeah.

They put me right next to North Korean delegation team. And no protection. No. I was so scared that going to like hotel room that night. So I don't have like anybody protecting me. So I have

tried of course but at the UN who decides the human rights violators Chinese and Putin and Saudis do. They decide who actually violates human rights. That's crazy. Yeah. So I have to go ask Chinese who actually committing this crime and complain of course crazy. Yeah. So I have to go ask Chinese who actually committing this crime

and complain that, of course, they're not going to listen to me. So what is the even point of the UN for this? Right. And of course, I mean, I met Nancy Pelosi. I met a lot of politicians. And on surface, like, oh, that's really horrible. Let me think about what can I do.

But of course, this is not what they care. They care about the systemic oppression that is happening in America more. They care about what's going to get them votes. Yeah. And what's popular, what's on people's minds right now. And whatever the narrative is that they're currently pushing, it's going to allow them to get elected again. Yeah.

It's all about their own interest. So when you spoke at the UN, what was the reception like? Oh, they are saying like this is the West propaganda trying to interfere other people's autonomy. North Korea is a state of their own. You should not interfere the other people's affairs. That's like still to this day Chinese narrative, right? They don't ask us what we are doing to Xinjiang Uyghurs or Falun Gong or like organ trafficking, all of that. It's our own business.

Organ trafficking. Yeah. So when North Koreans go to China, we ending up like several different sources. Worst case is they take us and take our organs out and suddenly we die. Like which organs? Everybody. Your eyes, heart, kidney, liver, all of it. They sell them. Of course, in China, you order the organ,

it gets to you within three hours. How is it possible? How somebody dies miraculously in three hours for you? In China, do you know how many hospitals are being built for the organ transfer in China? How many? This is the biggest, like, revenue right now being built in China. So do people from other countries go to China for organ replacements? Yeah.

A lot of the Middle East and those countries go to China to get the organs. So they just turn a blind eye to it. Yeah. They don't think about the origin of the actual organs themselves. Yeah. They just go, Get it. Oh, I need a lung replacement.

And China says, well, if you go here, we can get it for you. Yeah. And they go, and then they kill someone and take their lungs. Yeah.

It became a biggest now, like a new industry that is rising in China is organ transfer. Those people are generally North Koreans? Those are, a lot of them were Falun Gong practitioners in China. Okay, Uyghurs? Yeah, now the Uyghurs.

But Falun Gong is different, like a peaceful religion they were wanted. Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and not as much Tibetans, but more like Xinjiang now with Falun Gong and North Koreans. And so they have them in some prisons somewhere. Yeah. And they feed them and just wait for someone to come along that needs their organs and then they kill them. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. And this is proven? I mean, a lot of other things are proven because when these people die, how do we ask them, how did you die? They are dead. So that is a lot of Falun Gong

survivors do testimony. They have told about this. Yeah, it's very well known. Like Jamie can look it up. It's a very, UN even condemned China for that. Even they couldn't like turn their eyes blind on it. It was too evidence. And another thing North Koreans go is prostitution, brothers, brothers right and these girls resist so what they do they give them drugs so they make them become drug addict so now they all they want is drug so that's how they go to brothers and then this man i said in these villages cannot afford women these little towns so they buy one girl and they rotate the entire men in that town.

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 and we go became a free labor for them and being a sex slave for them and being a sex slave for them and and then being a sex slave for a mentally retarded family yeah I mean because if they're normal and they wouldn't they can find wives they order like mentally retarded and not functioning people those people cannot find wives so that's why we ending up in the most horror places we don't just go and like fall in love and meeting some normal person

so when you were 13 you escaped when tell us what it was like. First of all, where did you escape to? You escaped to China? Yeah. And how did you get across? It was a frozen river in March, end of March in 2007. So you travel on the frozen river. Yeah. And we luckily didn't get shot by the guards. And when we got into the other side of the riverbank of China, that's when mom got raped. And then they took us in a house.

And they were like turning me around like a slave market, right? They checked my teeth and my body structure. And somehow being virgin is very precious in China. So they sold my mom for around $65 in the 21st century. And they sold me less than $300. And they sold us separately. But the thing is, they didn't even try to force us. They were asking, if you don't want to be sold,

you can go back to North Korea, right? And even North Korean regime doesn't punish me, I couldn't find food to eat. I was going to die anyway. Even if the regime doesn't kill me, the starvation was going to kill me. And for the first time, I remember that night in the trafficker's house, I saw a trash can

and I did not know what it was. So I asked this lady, like, what is that? And then I hear one thing. I said, oh, I asked this lady, like, what is that? And then I hear one thing. I said, oh, that's a trash. Like, what is trash? She said, oh, the things that you don't need to throw there. Like, you just throw a bin away. And I was like, what do you mean you have things to throw away?

Because we never needed a trash bin in North Korea. We had nothing to throw. Even these hairs, it comes down. We don't have, like, heating like that. We have to start a fire. And starting fire takes the paper. It's very precious. So we burn like hair there

to try to start a fire. Like literally nothing was thrown away. Even human poop, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. That regime cannot have a fertilizer. They don't even have the technology to have the fertilizer.

So they demand us to bring the poop to have a fertilizer so they demand us to bring the poop and as a kid you go to school the teachers beat you and then go home and look for poop so i would go on the streets and looking if anywhere like a dog pooped or somewhere of course like all those dogs are poops gone so finding a problem when you don't eat much you don't poop like in north k North Korea like few times a month It's very precious thing. Yeah, of course few times a month. Yeah And it becomes very precious and you have to give it over to the regime. Yeah So that's nothing is being raised. Do they have toilets or do you go to the bathroom and outhouses?

Oh, we have all our houses digging a hole but we have to lock it because some people come and steal it they come to steal the poop yeah it's a government quota you get punished if you don't bring poop everything is punishment in that country so how much what is the quota like how much poop do you have to give them so sometimes per family they say one ton how do you find that a ton yeah so two thousand pounds i do the kilograms so like a thousand kilograms right it's like a thousand one ton so yeah it's about right yeah yeah yeah so per family or they give you the color so so that's per year yeah and then we have to bring them in usually january 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 bearing it and then when the dough happens and they start the farming process in the spring and even then you don't get any of that food no it's a collective farm so they take the 98 percent of the food to the regime and then that two percent is spread among the elites who's running the farm so you work entire year in the collective farm you get nothing from it there's also cannibalism. Yeah. How does that happen? It's really like people say, oh, don't dehumanize people of North Korea because they say, oh, just tell us the nice things.

That's just too much for us to handle. And this is the thing. There's people go to black market, you sell meat. People don't ask what meat it is. We don't ask, it's like pork or like it's just rabbit, we don't. find a very very cheap meat and we don't ask and luckily i was to a four portal for the meat i didn't get to eat them a lot of children just disappear but the thing is there's no evidence usually everybody dies and on some corner get drawn so in the we don't have we go to river to bathe we only bathe a few times a year winter time wintertime, we don't even bathe. And during the winter, we have to go to wash our clothes. So we make a small hole in the river. And sometimes you fall and slip through, and you die like that.

So it's just so easy to... Murder is not a thing. So many causes are killing you. So some people, you lose your children. We just don't even know what killed them. And nobody bothered to go out and like find it for you. So, so many people die. So, that's why easy to sell the human like meat. So, either they're killing the children or they'll find them dead and then just cook their meat and Yeah. This is common. Yeah.

So, when you escaped to China, what is the process like when you're in China? You eventually got to South Korea. Yeah. How long were you in China for? Almost two years. And what was that like? What was the process like? Well, living in two years of China,

I feel like I lived a thousand years on this earth. I feel like very old. 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? Like making it one day was such a struggle. Whenever you let one day live, you think like, oh my God, I made one more day on earth. In China?

Yeah. So it was that hard in China. What was so hard about it? Because one, you don't know when you're going to be arrested. So you always put your shoes on tight, your braces. And whenever you get into some indoor, you look for a place to run, right? If you are invited to somebody's house, you see all the checked doors, where can I run? Which route do I run? When you even sleep, you know how to run, you get ready to run from the police. And that is a constant threat. and of course you're raped every single day by these human

traffickers and they even come follow you to bathroom there's no human dignity in it they beat you and they i mean you're not your own person and they the common things that they to set us tell us that you our lives are even not valuable like pigs. Because even the killers, they know that we cannot go to police. How did you escape from all that? This is, so the man who bought me, he was very impressed. Because by then, I went through two human traffickers prior me. So by the third human trafficker nobody's virgin they all got raped so he was han chinese and couldn't believe that i made it to him as a virgin because the first

trafficker my mom covered second trafficker i felt like hell i would literally lose my mind and thankfully he had his like mistress in the next room so I didn't get raped even he tried so hard I didn't so by the third time Han Chinese I was trying to kill myself and then he said oh if you become my mistress I'm gonna help you to get your get your family to you but before that he showed me the phone he had because'd never seen a phone in my life as North Korean. And he showed me, oh, this phone can take pictures, and look at these pictures I took. And in one picture, I saw my mom in it.

And I started telling him, that's my mom, my mom. And that's how he knew that the woman that he saw was my mom, and obviously he raped her too. So he said, if I become his mistress he's gonna get me help me with my family. So he took my virginity raped me and thankfully he did help me. He brought my mom back from a farmer that he sold and he brought my sick father from North Korea. That's how I brought my parents back to me. How did you escape from him? After almost three years he became a gambling addict. He was a big gambler. He was spending

all his money and somehow this evil man was letting me go because he couldn't even afford to give me food at that point. He was so broke. said like i'm letting you go and in some ways in his most evil way he loved me so after two years i was let go and then i went to this chat room so this is another thing a lot of north korean girls uh capturing these chat rooms where we do body cams. Clients are South Koreans. So we chat and then we show our body. But North Korean women, we choose that route because it's better than being touched by men in person, right? You're not raped in person.

So this is all on the Internet with web cameras? Yeah, that's the number one thing that North Korean women do in China. Or this nightlife. So in that room, I heard about something called South Korea for the person because the clients are South Koreans. You didn't know what South Korea was? I knew the different name, like different name, but I knew that country was colonized by Americans.

I heard that in South Korea, the South Korea was very corrupt capitalist and raped by American soldiers every day. And they are like, kids cannot go to school. And they all want to come to North Korea. That's what you learned from North Korea? Oh, yeah. That's what I thought. Wow. They all want to go to North Korea. Yeah. They all want to come to North Korea.

The entire humanity wants to be like North Korea. So we are so fortunate. They tell us that we have nothing to be like North Korea. So we are so fortunate. They tell us that we have nothing to envy in this world. Wow. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. And we met this defector lady in that chat room. She told me she knows some missionaries. And if we become Christians, they're going to help us to go to South Korea and be free. And that's when I heard like free for the first time. I asked like, what do you mean free? And she said, oh, you can watch TV and you can wear jeans. And nobody can arrest you for that in South Korea. So that's what I

thought of freedom. Watching TV and wearing jeans, that's what you thought of freedom. It was never like freedom of speech or none of that. I was like, that's cool. I can wear jeans. Because I was a teenage girl I wanted jeans and in North Korea you get sent to prison camp for that.

You get sent to prison camp for wearing jeans. Yeah, it's just a joke for Westerners that North Koreans, even haircut is like ordered by the regime. The only thing that North Koreans allowed to do in that country really is breathing.

Everything else is controlled. 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. So you're working in these

chat rooms and you meet this woman and she says you just have to become a Christian? No, we have to go to a shelter that Christians had. So we have to go and they'll study Bible and we have to prove our faith to them. Then they're going to rescue us. That was

a condition to be rescued by Christians. So it's a Christian missionary from South Korea. So did you have to go to South Korea in order to prove yourself to them? Did they do this all through online? No, we couldn't go to South Korea in order to prove yourself to them? Or did they do this all through online?

No, we couldn't go to South Korea, obviously. So they had a shelter in China, in some house hidden. So we went to their shelter, and then we joined them as a group and studied the Bible every day. So we would go fasting. 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, and we pray together. And then once they think we are actually Christians, then they tell you how to go to South Korea. How long did that take?

Several months. But when you're so desperate, right? Like, I'm going to believe in rocks if somebody asks me to believe in it. Like, you believe in anything, literally. Right. So, and it was so easy. Like, North Korea regime was Bible. Like, I was like, what the heck is this thing called Jesus and God?

And, like, North Koreans, like, don't worry, baby. Just plug God to give me your song and Jesus to give me your song. And Pope Francis made a saying, like, God loves us so much, gave us his son. He's there to protect us. We got to suffer and go to give him the mirror. And Pope Philip made a saying, God loves us so much, gave us his son, he's there to protect us, we gotta suffer and go to paradise with him later in life. So I did become a Christian. So it made the same sense to you because it was so similar to the story

that they taught you in North Korea. Exactly, the logic was so similar. So you became a Christian. Yeah, I did. And several months of just studying the Bible. Yeah. And then they eventually got you to South Korea. They told us how to go.

How'd you do that? Which was literally walking across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia from China. You walked? Yeah. Wow. So they gave us one compass. We had even toddler in our group. We had one father and his father

and the seven ladies and a few teenagers. They told us You went by compass? Yeah. Did they give you a map? I mean, you cannot look at the map in the desert. You don't have GPS. How do you know? Nothing tells you if you're going circle or straight or backwards.

That was the horrifying thing about desert is that it looks all the same. Nothing tells you what you're doing. You can just keep going circle all night. And then so they told us go follow the west and the north between in that direction. And if you cross the eight wire fences, hopefully that's going to be Mongolia. Hopefully. And then you find the Mongolian soldiers and tell them that you want to go to South Korea, not North Korea.

So that means so dangerous. The chances of you making it in that desert is not even like 2%, 3%, right? Like 90%, 80% of the time you're going to fail. So they cannot lead us there. It's random luck. That's why they believe that God is going to show us a miracle. How long did it take you to walk from the Gobi Desert? It was just only one day. One day. But we chose that in February 2009 after Beijing Olympic. And in the frozen Gobi Desert,

after Beijing Olympic. And in the frozen Gobi Desert, it's like minus 40 degrees. So the soldiers is thinking nobody's crazy enough to cross right now in this freezing time. So that's how you can do it? That security is lower. Other times they're going to shoot you because in that desert, nobody knows if you got killed or not. So who would be shooting you?

Chinese or the Mongolians, both of them can just shoot you they would just shoot anybody walking through the desert it's called a shoot to order it's like a shoot to kill order so they don't like bother ask who you are just gonna shoot them right there and kill them so we don't even have id none of that so we chose a time it was frozen and cold and even guys wouldn't don't want to come out and look around so we from walking from chinese side but they took us to the border of china inner mongolia that which was still china from that border we started walking towards mongolia and entire day of walking we got there so miraculously we didn't die from the cold and did you bring food did you

bring water what did you bring food? Did you bring water? What did you bring with you when you were walking? In minus 40 degrees, you cannot even stand still for three seconds. If you stand still for 10 seconds, you're going to die right there. You're going to get a heart attack, frozen to death. So you don't even need to eat. You just have to... Only thing I remember was moving, moving, moving.

Keep going. Keep moving. Whatever I was doing, I had to keep moving otherwise you get very like you don't get enough oxygen so very like hazy and not clear you've get very sleepy that's the thing like dying from cold it wasn't bad as I thought it was me you become very numb and you don't really think desensitize and you become very very sleepy and that's when you like desensitize and you become very very sleepy and that's when you know we are dying in that court how many people were with you we had one baby and seven people 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 but in the desert he had to be wake up because he's not to die frozen to death in the desert. So this baby keep falling asleep. So we had to keep shaking or passing around between us. And he made it. Eventually. So he has to stay awake because if he falls

asleep the cold will kill him? Oh yeah. Of course. But he's not walking right? You're carrying him? He's a toddler he cannot walk his fears but he still needs to be awake so we had to keep like shaking him and like massage his feet and hands and shake him up and down so he could be like conscious and up because he was keep falling asleep what kind of clothes are you guys wearing well we didn't have gloves we didn't have anything you didn't have gloves four degrees below zero yeah so he my mom didn't have gloves. We didn't have anything. You didn't have gloves. Four degrees below zero.

Yeah. So my mom didn't even have, like, shoes at that point. So she eventually borrowed the shoes from a guy and robbed it. It was so big. And I was like, just wear a thin coat. And somehow, that's why I guess we needed a miracle. That's why we had to pray. I don't know.

It was a very low chance of making it. So nobody not escaping through Mongolia anymore. So you walk through Mongolia, it takes you 24 hours? Just roughly one day I think we took. And then what happens when you get to the other side? We didn't get to the other side. One just suddenly in the morning, the morning the guards with the guns coming at you and asking to put your hands up so we were like lifting our hands up right and then they were like saying they're gonna send us to china and then back to north korea to get killed

so north koreans very much gave me bring the laser and poisons with us to write to kill ourselves because i mean going to north korea killed is way worse than killing ourselves right there so we so you brought poison with you to kill yourself laser yeah and a laser what kind of very very thin laser that's a good china only north korea said it like very very thin laser a razor like blade yeah blade metal yeah metal thing yeah very thin one yeah Yeah, it's razor. Oh, razor. Yeah, we hide in the belts like everywhere.

So to cut your veins. Yeah, like right here or right here. It's very easy to cut. So we were, this is like what still shocks me is that these Mongolian soldiers didn't have the sense to China, but they want to see how we react. So that's what they were playing with us, right? For us, it's like life and death. have the sense to China, but they want to see how we react. So that's what they were playing with us, right? For us, it's like a life and death.

For them, it's like a joke. And thankfully, they will not let us kill ourselves. Like very last minute, they stopped us and turned the car back around to Mongolian side. But the next team that crossed the border got all arrested and sent back to North Korea. But the following team, they were doing that and Mongolian soldiers went too far so one of my friends, she swallowed the entire sleeping pills to cure herself

and then they took her to ER and they revived her but forever her brain got damaged. So this was a joke to them. So they thought it was funny to scare the refugees. Yeah. It's funny to see how we fight for our lives. Yeah. But

thankfully nobody's choosing their route anymore. 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? I remember telling my mom, like, we did everything to survive. And it was like, because in China, in the prisons, they even get rid of the buttons. Everything is all like, you cannot swallow to kill yourself.

They don't even give you a spoon so that's how prevent a suicide because all nurse can kill themselves before they go because they know the fate so i know like if i miss the opportunity to kill myself in the car on the way to china we are never gonna get the chance back so we were ready to cut and then swallow the thing and they that's when they stopped and sometimes they just go too far with it so it's always a joke to them yeah that's we did not know but later when we were leaving mongolia that's when they told us actually we didn't mean to send you guys to china like we just do that every time when you arrive here and some people wind up killing themselves anyway. Yeah.

So eventually they let you go? Yeah, they did reach out to South Korean embassy. And then South Korean embassy comes, right, and they interrogate you to make sure that you're actually North Korean. So several months in Mongolia, we do different detention centers. They move us around and interrogate us. And when they confirm that we are North Koreans, that's when they give us a fake passport. And from Ulaanbaatar to South Korea, we flew there.

And so when they determine that you're North Korean, what are they trying to find out? They're trying to find out if you're actually a refugee, if you're a spy. What are they trying to find out? 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? So they're in China, there's a Korean ethnic Chinese who were Koreans back then, but they became Chinese, the ethnic Koreans. So, China has 56 different ethnicity. It's a very diverse country. So one of them are Korean ethnic Chinese. So those people tried to go to South Korea. So they rule out those people and also spy.

So everybody's defectors when you escape, you become defector right away. So they rule out the spies and also rule out if you're actually North Korean or ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Korean Chinese. That's what they try to investigate you. And so you finally eventually get to South Korea, and then what happens?

And then what happens? I hear about this thing called freedom. And then hear about this country is obsessed with the competition and hard work and studying the the vigorous academia that these kids study english when they're in their mother's tummy right and they study like crazy people yeah and then i'm like almost like you know high schooler and they did a placement test on me And I'm like I need to go study with seven years old. I don't even know what continents are right? I don't even know what Africa is. I don't even know what different races

I don't even know the map so I'm like blank pace like adult baby Mmm, adult baby. Yeah, how old are you? I was Korean age. I was 17. You were 17, but you're really about 10 years behind. Yeah. At least. At least that's what it is. And so what kind of education did they give you in South Korea? They told us that South Korea was free country. The Americans are not bastards. Because they told the Americans were cold-blooded snakes in North Korea. So I remember one of my friends I took to South Korea. She was a white lady.

My mom got drunk with soju and touching her, right? And then, like, I just want to make sure that you are, like, actually warm-blooded. Because that's what they... in school we have a posters americans posters because we don't have actual pictures of them good so our enemies americans right they're like our sore enemy so we gotta know who they how they look like so they are called the bloody huge nose and blue eyes green eyes monsters it's like wow yeah so what so where monsters. Wow. Yeah. So where did they educate you in South Korea? There's a re-education center.

Oh, so they have a place where they take in people from North Korea? Yeah, for three months. So they take you to ATM machine. So we never had a bank in North Korea, right? In the past, I heard there was a bank, but regime asked you to put the money and they don't give the money back to you So nobody uses bank in North Korea. So I literally thought ATM machine there's somebody inside the machine handing the money out to you through the window Because I don't know automation and they teach you how to take a bus

How to even like to a movie theater, order a ticket, because we've never seen the digital devices. How to take the elevator, what is an escalator? It's like you're just landing in a completely different planet. What is that like?

Overwhelming. It's very... Having that choice, like when you go shopping and you have 10 different pants Right, and it's up to you to choose what you wear and in North Korea was like chosen by the regime Freedom was difficult. I was literally saying if I had enough frozen potato Had at least minimum food to eat. I would go back to North Korea. Really? Yeah. Why? food to eat i would go back to north korea really yeah why because i was not used to thinking thinking was hard like thinking was not something i'm used to like i never had to think but not only

that you have to think for yourself what do you want to do your life and i was like do i have to know can't you just not tell me what i need to do because i'm so good at following the orders but they go like in south korea they were me, so what do you want to do? And what do you think? And what I thought never mattered. I couldn't believe, like, why, what I think matters to you. So really thinking for yourself was very difficult. I would be so tired after thinking for five minutes.

I would get exhausted all day. I literally get like, okay, working out with thinking is so hard. I would get so exhausted. How do people keep thinking here all day long? They say the same thing happens to people when they get out of prison. That when they get out of prison, they call it being institutionalized. When they get out of prison, they want to go back to prison. And oftentimes they'll commit crimes just so they can get arrested and go back to prison

because in prison they're told what to do. Yeah. And they become accustomed to it. Yeah. That's what it felt like for you. Yeah. But for me, when I was born, that was my lifestyle. And I wasn't able, I mean, thinking was not a natural thing.

So a lot of North Koreans do have a hard time to adjust to freedom. When you first went to South Korea and you were able to eat whatever you wanted, what did you eat? Eggs. Eggs. Boiled eggs. That's what you wanted? Yeah, because even beef was too fancy.

I did not know what cow was, right? You didn't know what a cow was? fancy i did not know that like what cow was right you didn't know what a cow was i i never knew the milk came out of cow because i never had milk in my life so uh all north koreans we know is like chicken and the eggs so in north korea like egg is like the most fancy thing you can imagine so i literally literally thought I could eat a bucket of eggs. Egg is the most fancy thing that you can imagine. Yeah. So at North Carolina we boiled eggs and we were like, let me see actually how many I can eat, right?

But after five, you cannot eat more than five boiled eggs. So that's when I realized I mean, not that much it takes for me to full. How? I wasn't able to do that in that country. So that was, do you remember the first time you ate until you were full? Yeah, in China.

But the thing is, you think you're going to eat everything. Is that in China, our stomach is not used to seasoning, like oil or fat. So I was getting nauseous a lot. I couldn't eat the normal food that america like that chinese even south koreans eat because i mean our system was eating without seasoning just all the wild like you know plants and flowers and like not not not much going on so going to china eating for the first time that was seasoned, was very hard on my stomach. And so it was actually not that great.

Like you would think like, oh my God, it's a paradise. Your system doesn't take it, take a while for you to adjust to the new kind of food. How long did it take in South Korea before you felt comfortable? Eating like a hamburger, I think. At least like two, three years. Wow. Yeah. It like two, three years. Wow. Yeah. It's two, three years.

If not, like getting used to Coca-Cola, I literally thought some like fire was happening where I never had a bubble in my life. So like learning about now champagne is like, in the beginning I couldn't like, what is going on in my mouth? They're popping everywhere. You'd never had anything carbonated.

No. So it was like shocking. It hurts me in the beginning. It took a while. Now I drink a bit of few sips of Coca-Cola, but I couldn't do it for a long time. I still don't drink sparkling water. I don't know why anybody does that to torture themselves. It's very painful.

Really? In your throat, yeah. They're like pounding you with something. I don't know. Wow, that's crazy. What about alcohol? People make alcohol illegally from corn. In North Korea?

Yeah. Yeah? But they are like very... Moonshine? Like very strong? Very strong. Nasty? And like very thick and not diluted at all.

Right, right. You get the worst hangover from it. Yeah. That kind of alcohol to drink. I never knew what wine was. So I went to Napa with my mom last year. And they would keep telling us, what do you smell like?

How do I know? Oh, they're so crazy with all that wine tasting stuff. I know. It's like I just heard about wine. Right. Oh, they're saying hints of nutmeg. Yeah. And oak.

Exactly, oak. Yeah. And they're smelling. Yeah, it's the strangest thing in the world. Yeah. 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. I don't know.

I was like, and a lot of people try to get me Burning Man I saw some pictures I was like I don't think I'm ready for this I might go crazy there that's hilarious that's hilarious Burning Man to go that might be the opposite well there's probably like multiple polar opposites of uh north korea but burning man's probably one of them but the fancy people of napa that's gotta be up there so if somebody was treating me to this restaurant called a single thread single like the french laundry same restaurant in napa oh okay and then they did those tour at their like a front yard

farm they grow on their tomatoes and peppers. And my mom was like, we've been eating this every day in North Korea organic. We did not know we were having $500 meal. Because here people keep telling us it's organic. It's like everything was organic in our country. What I want is a big portion. But here people are really obsessed with North Korean lifestyle.

So my mom would never do this to me ever again. She's like, you're a torture. Don't ever do this to me. That's funny. That's funny. So your experience in South Korea, they're educating you. Are you working? Do you start working?

You're 17 years old, right? So what did you do while you were there? So I started, I learned, I mean, I remember this integration man was asking me, so what are you going to do in South Korea? I was like, I don't know, maybe study because I'm still young. And he's like, why do you think you can study? Because he thought I was a hooker in China because all North Korean women are them.

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. They don't know even what Gmail is. Creating account online is impossibility for them who never grew out of it. So they cannot get nice office jobs, right? So only job they can take is, like, washing dishes.

They cannot become even the waitress because we have an accent. And South Koreans are very racist. They discriminate people who have an accent. So they hear the North Korean accent? Yeah. What is the difference? Like, what does it sound like? Like, in South Korean, we say,

안녕하세요 is a hi. But in North Korea, 안녕하십니까. Very formal. More like, we call our friends, there's no friends in North Korea. Comrade. Comrade. Only comrades exist.

So they know by the way you talk? Yeah. But is it an accent? Are you saying the same words? No. You're saying them in a different way or are you using different words? Both of them different.

Both of them. It's a bigger difference than British and American English is that in North Korea, as I said, there's no bank. Right. So for me to understand credit card, what the heck you build your credit,

they give you money, you pay back and debit card. Right. Like saving. I mean, like for me to understand hedge fund it took 10 years i still don't get a lot of parts but that's the thing like we don't have the vocabulary right so learning from south korea to english a lot easier because i know what credit cards in south korea means in america means but like gay what is gay you didn't know what gay was of South Korea means and America means. But like gay, what is gay? You didn't know what gay was. Of course, there's no dictionaries.

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 then he said, don't worry, baby, I'm gay. Like, what the heck is gay? You didn't know what gay was. How old were you when this was happening? I was like 20, I'm gay. Like, what the heck is gay? You didn't know what gay was? How old were you when this was happening? I was like 20, 20. Wow.

So there was no gay people in North Korea? We don't know the word. So now tell me about the sexual non-binary, but like whatever, how many pronouns that I found later. And I was like, this is a different planet. Oh, wow. We don't know the concept. And we don't know the concept of romance or love.

How do you expect us to know what gay is? How do people find their husbands and wives and relationships in North Korea? Usually governments assigns also marriage. Or the families, the parents assign marriages. So the South Koreans are racist against the North Koreans, even though you look very similar. Can you tell a difference by looking at someone?

Height difference. Height difference. Because of malnutrition. Yeah, on average, three to five inch shorter, on average. But the younger generation in North Korea gets shorter. That's the thing.

Our grandpa was the tallest, and my father and me. South Korea is opposite, it keep going up. And North Korea keep getting smaller and smaller. So in South Korea because of nutrition. And so when you are learning, where do they have you stay? I had to find this thing called a koshite, like a one-feet room where, like, very cheap in Seoul. So I was working at this, like, daisoo.

It's like a $1 store in Korea. So I was a teenager. Like, I was American age. I was 15 years old. South Korea is a different way of counting age. So you're going to be confused. So in South Korea, North Korea, when you're born, the day you are born, you're one. You're one when you're born?

Yeah. And then January 1st, you're two. So if somebody was born December 31st, they're one. Tomorrow, January 1st, they become two. Even when they're a baby? Yeah, they're two days old and they're two years old. Really? Yeah, so they count age like that.

So when you're born, you're one, and you gain age not on your birthday. January 1st, you gain one year. This is only North Korea. And South Korea both. South Korea too. Really? Yeah. 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. Yeah, exactly So I was born in October. So I was born I was one and then December two months later. I became two years old So you were two years old when you were two months old? Yeah, so even though you're 17 you were really 15 Yeah, so America that's why there's some confusion when I was giving interviews in the beginning when I escaped from North Korea North Korean age I was 15. So in South Korean When I escaped from North Korea, North Korean age, I was 15. So in South Korean press, I had to tell them Korean age.

Right. Right? Then it translated to English article. So why I was 15 and 13? Because the age counting is different. Oh. So I arrived there as American age, I was 15. But South Korean age, I was 17 years old.

Wow. Yeah. So you're really 15 years old American age I was 15, but South Korean age I was 17 years old. Wow. Yeah. So you're really 15 years old American age. Yeah. And you are working in a dollar store. Yeah, the dollar store. And so you're supporting yourself? Yeah.

And learning. Yeah. I taught myself. I took GED. So I crashed from one year to elementary, middle school, high school, everything within a year. from one year to elementary, middle school, high school, everything within a year. So that's how I went to university when I was 17 years old, American age.

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. But you were obsessed, right? Yeah, I was obsessed. You were obsessed. Like you had gotten to the point where you were malnourished because you weren't eating because all you were doing was studying. Yeah, I know. It's like I end up in the ER, somebody called, and they're like, you're malnourished.

So I'm still like 79, like 80 pounds, but way smaller than this. So right now you're 80 pounds yeah but back then you were like i don't even didn't have the scare was too poor not for the scare so but you weren't even thinking about food you were just trying to learn and there was a food that was expensive so it was you know in south korea as a student working in the dollar store and studying everything was expensive so it was uh you know i couldn't really afford three meals a day obviously right yeah and so what were you studying and how were you doing it i was doing the old school requirement project for ged right biology physics math english history

all this writing everything but on top of that i that, I was reading books. I read, like last year, 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 require to read. So because I was, I mean, I did not know what Shakespeare is. How embarrassing is that? People talk about Romeo and Juliet. I'm like, who the heck is Romeo and Juliet? Yeah. I remember I got to South Korea. This guy,

somebody called Michael Jackson died, right? It's on TV and there's some funeral. It's like, who the heck is Michael Jackson? And then sometime later, this guy called like

Apple Steve Jobs died. I'm like, is that a big deal that Steve Jobs died? Who was it? Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Oh. So I don't know who Steve Jobs is. And like, is that a big deal that Steve Jobs died? Who was it? Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, oh. So I don't know who Steve Jobs is.

Right. So like, that's amusing why these people are so upset. And like, obviously, there's like, some days later, Nelson Mandela dies. Who is Nelson Mandela? I don't know. It's 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 no i think that's so that's the thing like when i came to

america like i did not even know what arab is or hispanic is right i have no preconception of a race so that was great like i don't know the difference for me it's like you guys are all strangers so i remember like i was i had a talk in charleston south carolina or north carolina i don't know charlest, like in a room for the first time I like there and then like thousand people all like white people and I they looked all the same 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 like TED speeches. TED Talks and PR News. Yeah.

And I listened to a lot of your podcast. Did you? I'm sorry. No, it was wonderful. I mean, even to this day, English, I learned even when I was 21, like five years ago. So it's still like a struggle for me. 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 this information at such a frantic pace?

It was, I mean pace it's it was i mean it's amazing the first of all that you read whatever you want like the one point that changed me as a child was reading georgia where's animal farm yeah that was random like i literally went up and then pick up the book the thinnest book and i thought okay it takes this time for me to finish it. And reading that book made everything sense to me because after North Korea, of course, I mean, learning what Subway is is challenging, right? Learning what hamburger is is like a learning experience, but learning how to trust again,

I think that was the hardest thing. Like, obviously, I don't trust guys. I didn't, right? Right. And not only that that like they say everything that you believed in north korea was a lie they are dictators they are not gods they didn't love you they are dictators you've been lied to entire life and i was thinking so how do i know what you're telling me is not lie then right that was so scary i how do i trust ever again so only reading georgia was 1984 and the

animal farm that's when i understood what happened to my people then you understood double speak and propaganda and then price of you know silence the price of silence yeah that's when i knew i until that point i was blaming the dictator. Why did you do that to us? But I was started thinking what all those people like my grandma she knew life before Kim's She knew the alternative life like in that animals you seen the the revolution generation then next and the new ones don't even know What the world could be like. So that's the thing. Like when people say, why there's no revolution in North Korea, I'm like, I mean, how do you fight to be when you don't know you're a slave?

It's impossible. And this is the thing, like in America, everybody talks about how they're oppressed systemically. I'm like, you know people in North Korea don't even know they're oppressed. If you know you're oppressed, you are not oppressed. Not knowing is a true definition of oppression. Unfortunately, in this country, they've made oppression a valuable thing. If you can say that you're oppressed and people look for oppression that sometimes doesn't exist.

For sure, there is oppression in this country. For sure, there is racism in this this country 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 It's a real problem. I know like I went to right after all of that. I ended up at Columbia University in New York and As you can see, I love learning. I'm a very curious person and go there. And truth doesn't matter. It all matters your feelings, how you feel.

Well, you caught Columbia University at a terrible time, right? What year was this? 2016, I joined after Trump became president. The worst time you could ever join, right? Like what year was this? 2016 I joined after Trump became president. The worst time you could ever join, right? 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,

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 anything and so everything that you can possibly do to stop a person like that must be justified including distorting truth yeah it was it was unbelievable I I couldn't believe it I came out after four years later scared more than ever. What I say, like,

I was seeing myself censoring every day again. And it was like I never thought, right, America, I had to go censor myself. What was it like, the contrast between learning in South Korea and then learning at Columbia? So South Korea is like I was too little I knew about the world so everything they told me was truth like everybody who I

met was a teacher you know what I mean in South Korea my knowledge was so little I was like one year old right everybody told me do you know Africa I mean that's new what's Africa? Do you know i've been to australia like what is australia right that's new like so everybody was my teacher in south korea right so i never like questioned anybody just everybody was my teacher everything was new yeah everything was new and everybody taught me something new for sure and coming to america it was a bit different because by then I read a lot of books. And I was a bit advanced than when I was in South Korea. So now going to Colombia, I mean, as soon as I tell them my view, they say, oh, you're brainwashed.

You're brainwashed? Yeah, that's the reason. They said you were brainwashed because of what? What was your perspective? brainwashed because of what what was your perspective so like the my professor was arguing that the she was asking so how to the sensitivity training why you gotta be sensitive to all findings hidden oppression and like what do you think about men holding a door for you and i was thinking okay that's a sign of decency like i hold the door for other people right and you know that's a sign of toxic masculinity.

That's like how to show you the overpowering you. Holding a door open is overpowering you? Yeah, it's a man when man does that. What kind of class was this? What was the subject? I took a junior or something. It was like, it was humanity class, of course. And then she was like, I told her, no, I think that's sign of distance. And that's over,

like you're brainwashed. You're brainwashed? Yeah. How rude is that? Well, I mean, for them, it's,

I mean, that's the thing, like for me, a safe place meant where you can express your views, right? And especially in the universe, you can be dumb

to search for truth. But here, in the name of safe space no other than the mainstream view you cannot have them 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 yeah because there are people like that but also some people who will open the door to be polite because they're nice

and to deny that is to deny reality and to deny nuance and that's what's really scary is the sacrificing of nuance to promote a narrative that fits your needs exactly i think if things are so complex why humans do what is very complex yes and they lose entire complexity right and also seeing that how this thing called like white guilt yes or privilege was so new to me it's like how are you guilty for what your ancestors did? Right. That's exactly what North Koreans did to us. Exactly.

And I was like, why? You didn't choose to be born as a white. I don't choose my birthplace. It's, again, the same thing. 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 or maybe they have some hidden bias that they're not even aware of and they're going to search it out and so you have these paranoid people who are like oh my god am

i like secretly a bigot am i secretly a racist and they'll reaffirm it with you and then in order for you to get points, you have to say, I will do better. I'm going to find that I'm going to be not just not racist. I'm going to be anti-racist. And then they'll say, well, now you're a good ally. And it's this really strange way of communicating. And when we were complaining about it years ago, people would say, why are you complaining about this? It's just a few random fringe people in universities. And the people that I knew that were professors that were secretly terrified of this, they would talk about it. This was like before Jordan Peterson started talking about this

openly. When they would talk about this, they would get chastised by the people in the university. Because these people had a vested interest in continuing this sort of this type of thinking and behaving. And this was like, they had gold in this. Like there was profit in this. There was some social brownie points in this. And they were going to continue to mine this vein of gold. And when everybody was stepping in and talking about the dangers of this, people were saying no, no, no, this is the future, this is progressive, this is all about love and trust and anti-racism and all these things. And then the people that were scared of it,

they were sort of silenced in the universities until it started trickling over into corporations. And then when it started trickling into corporations, people started getting genuinely scared. 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 so to speak i think that's the thing initially i was thinking maybe only the academia is just crazy right i thought it's but then last year i spoke at ted and then like these people who run social media companies like first for, Facebook, Twitter, all these people come.

And I told them I had an engagement in Texas. And they were saying, why do you go to Texas? I was like, well, because America is America. And I said, that's a Trump country. I decided not to set a foot below a certain line of states that supports Trump. And these are the people who run the biggest media companies in the world. It's ridiculous. Especially ridiculous in a place like Austin, which is a progressive city.

Yeah. And then last year during the looting in Chicago, I was robbed by these three black women. And robbing is okay. Anybody can become a murderer. Anybody can be a thief. But just they happen to be black women. And I have a nanny who is Muslim in the nation with a hijab carrying my stroller behind me. And then I was trying to catch and call the police and these people on the street, the bystanders,

the white people calling me I'm a racist, telling me that the color of skin doesn't make them a thief. And I became a- Wait a minute, wait a minute. So you got robbed by these three black women. And I got punched. You got punched and robbed. It was a violence, yeah.

And so you called the police and who- I tried to call them and they prevent me not calling the police. Who was trying to tell you not to call the police and try to call him and they to prevent me not calling the police Who was trying to tell you not to call the police all the people on the street the Washington Avenue? Yeah, people that saw the crime. Yeah Because they said you're racist for calling the police. Yeah, and accusing these girls of being a robber robbers, right? How does that make you a racist by accusing them of being... Because I'm not black and they are black. So calling a black person a thief is a racist, even though they are a thief.

So, of course, I got punched. I couldn't call the police. And later I called. Thankfully, these girls took my car to spend the money on the sex. And then police got the footage of them. Saks Fifth Avenue? Yeah, in Michigan Avenue in in chicago and then of course they they're not gonna prosecute this girls right there's so much crime in chicago they are not gonna prosecute somebody who drops and that's when i was thinking this country lost it like even in north korea if you see somebody one smoker being robbed and being punched by three big

big girls they're gonna have the victim but they are not gonna just out of nowhere scream at you're a racist so they were screaming you're a racist because of the phone call that you were making because i i was i heard their arm like i told them i'm not accusing you anything i'm just gonna call the police can you wait here until the police comes and you're holding whose arm? The girl who robbed my wallet. Oh, so the girl who robbed your wallet You were trying to hold on to her because she was trying to run Okay, so I was trying to call the police and then she was like you're racist The skin of a colored person doesn't make me a thief and then she was punching me here

And this is after she already robbed you. Yeah. Yeah. And then the people gathered. And I remember there's a bus station. There's one white mom with teenagers. And I became the lifetime example for her to show her children how racism exists in America.

Like me became a bigot and calling these black girls a thief. So she didn't look at that kind of racist. That's the problem that we have. How many people were around you? I don't know, some 20 people. 20 people. They're circling me around so I cannot call the police.

Circling you and calling you a racist even though this girl just stole from you. This girl just ran away. And they let the girls run away. Yeah, just go, go run, right? they let the girls run away yeah just go go run right they told the girls to run wow so that's when i that's why when i started speaking out and now i became the enemy of the woke so i got the world i got the north koreans going on and i became the killing list years ago and south korean like, you are on the Kim's killing list.

Oh boy. And I'm like, cool. I expected that. And now I'm Chinese enemy. Chinese regimes. And now in America I got so many enemies. Oh boy. Jesus. Yeah. That's when

you realize that this stuff spills over into real life, right? That's when I knew that this stuff spills over into real life, right? That's when I knew that my son is American. I have a son in America. And on his birth certificate in Chicago, like, father's birthplace, America, USA, and mom is North Korea. Right?

Like, on birth certificate, his mom is North Korean. And to me, giving him that American citizenship was the bigger than winning the lottery. I thought I did everything I could to give him a better life, making him American. And seeing that last year in America, I was like, this is not a safe country. Cause he got the worst, he got half Asian,

he who wants to be work hard and we believe in meritocracy. And he got half white who's like supposedly oppressive because of their... So he's so screwed. His caste is so low right now. That's funny. That's funny. It's sad. It's truly sad. Unfortunately, in some circles, it's true. I think there's a lot of people that are waking up to this problem i hope so there are yeah and a lot of 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.

What do they gain from it? They gain social status. They gain status. If there's a narrative that's being pushed and they go along with it, people say, oh, you're on the right side. You're doing the right thing. You're saying the right words. If you go against it, they'll chase you down and yell at you. You will be on the outside.

You'll be an outcast. People are cowards. They're terrified. Even if they know something is true, they're terrified of saying it because they don't want the blowback for it. So that's what a lot. You see a lot of that going on in this country. 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 security. And they'll give up those freedoms to the government, which will never give them back to you. When the pandemic is gone

and you've given them vaccine passports and allowed them to track your whereabouts and allowed them to contact trace you, that's not going to go away. They're going to use it for other reasons. They're going to find other reasons to control you and keep you scared and keep you compliant so they can suck resources out of gigantic corporations that are funding their campaigns. That's what they're doing. And they're going to continue to do that if we let them. And we're going to slide further and further away from freedom and democracy, freedom and the ability to express yourself openly. And all of these things, people are willing to give up if it supports their side. And that's what's so terrifying.

They don't understand. 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? Because that's probably going to happen. Unfortunately, we're going to have this teeter-totter back. 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. And when that far right person comes into office, they will have access to all of those powers that you so willingly gave up because you wanted to stop this idea that you didn't

agree with. And they've done this in this horribly short-sighted way. Yeah. And they've done it in the name of the woke. 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. It's like, to me, I've never been to American public school system like on to universities that Like nothing has been more dangerous than government To individuals right? Think of us. I mean Mao killed 60 million Chinese people, Stalin, Hitler

They drive us to go to the war and Our biggest threat is government. I mean, big governments. Yes. And it's so unbelievable how people still just keep wanting for someone to take care of things for them. People are scared and they get delusional. They have this bizarre idea that someone's going to come along that has power, that's a benevolent dictator. It's going to take care of things in the right way. And you give them the power yeah you know give them the power to shut these people up give them the freedom of speech does it's not the end all be all maybe it's more important to just

say what i want you to say yeah it's just strange the short-sightedness is so strange because you hear people on cnn it's supposed to be the news, and they're espousing these ideas. 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. This was the thing about the Patriot Act that people were so terrified of in this country that were aware of the consequences.

They were saying, well, Obama's never going to do this. Obama's not going to be in office forever. He's going to be in office for eight years. You love Obama and you trust Obama. That's great. Look what came after Obama, Trump. And now you have a dead man. Now you have Joe Biden who doesn't know what the fuck is going on. What are you going to have after that?

Well, you're probably going to have someone on the right and it's going to be someone that is a reaction to what you have on the left. I mean, this is what we do in this country. We go left, right, left, right. And we pretend, well, this guy has our interest in mind. Oh, he fucked it up too. Let's go with someone who's polar opposite. Oh, he fucked it up.

And you give them eight years each side or four years each side. And it just keeps getting worse. And for whatever reason, people are constantly willing to give up powers. They're constantly willing to ignore the core principles that this country was founded on, which is freedom and liberty. And you need those things. 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.

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. It's bizarre. It's very, very strange. Very strange. I'm not a Christian, but I was one day asking if there's God. He says everything has a reason. Why does North Korea exist?

Right. Makes no sense. Why does it exist? I think... Why does China exist? I think it... Or why does the Communist Party, I should say, exist?

Why do they have the power to run the country that way? It's because of that delusion, ignorance in the people to not learn from history. It is... I don't know. Do you you think do we have hope in this country or like how do we get out of even this i'm worried i'm worried because it just

seems to be sliding further and further in this direction of totalitarianism and these people are willingly giving up this these rights because they believe that that's gonna support their side 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 and kindness and anti-racism all the whatever whatever concepts that they are willing to you know subscribe to that they think that giving up these rights will promote. It's strange. It's very strange because it's an anti-objective perspective.

They're not looking at all of the... And we're so polarized with the right and the left in this country. We're so polarized with Republicans versus Democrats in this country that there's no middle ground anymore. 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. It was funny the other day when I was after Jordan Peterson interview about he, I don't know, like randomly asked, how did you like Colombia? And 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?

And I was like, I'm still waiting a call from New York Times. If they call me about workism in this country and danger of it, I'm going to talk to them. Wait a minute, the New York Times never called you? I mean, they only called me when I was criticizing Trump about meeting Kim Jong-un without preconceptions. They never wanted to talk to you about your experience in North Korea? No, only when I was talking about Trump, they wanted me. Who has tried to talk to you about this? Some British newspapers still do, like Daily Telegraph.

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. Really? Yeah. That's the only time they want to talk to you? Yeah. So that's the thing.

But the thing is, you know, Fox never accused me, why did you get on New York Times and criticizing Trump? Therefore, we don't want you. But the people in the liberal mainstream media, why did you get on Fox? So I'm like, they are people too they're both newspapers so it is unbelievable i just there's a 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. Yeah. And people are furious at them.

Yeah. But they're saying all the same things that they would say on MSNBC or CNN. They're not saying right-wing talking points. No. 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. These are progressive people. Yeah. But they're being chastised. Yes. And they're being attacked. It's very strange. It's really dark.

I know. Like, I'm happy to talk to anybody. Like, I want to go and CNN talk about this. But they just don't give me a platform to talk about it. They don't just call me. Well, it's in support of this narrative that's occurring now where it's OK to air quotes, de-platform people. This is the idea. You're de-platforming people off social media that say things you don't agree with. Like Alex Berenson, who used to work for The New York Times.

He's critical of the way the government and the FDA and everyone is handling COVID. Right. Or the CDC or the World Health Organization. And so he's got a lot of stuff that he talks. It's critical about the COVID response in this country, critical about the vaccine effect of effectiveness, critical about all sorts of different things in the health care system. And they removed him from Twitter for a week. Yeah. And he's not I mean, he removed him from Twitter recently for discussing this, the actual CDC's reports on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness or whatever on COVID vaccines. It's very strange. And you can't, I mean, maybe they think he speaks in a

way that's inflammatory or in a way that's causing people to distrust certain institutions. But then then oppose him, oppose him, debate him. The way to answer speech that you don't agree with is to counter it with what you think is a more sound argument. It's not remove someone from social media, but everyone's like, yes, he should be deplatformed. You see people from the left just calling out, willingly calling out for censorship. It's a disturbing trend. And I don't think they understand that it's going to come for them because censorship is a monster that is never full and it's going to come for you. It's going to find, it's going to, it'll keep pushing the boundaries and go further and further left until you can't be woke enough

And then it's gonna come for you In in North Korea, right even though one top janitor in the meeting years ago he was falling asleep and that afternoon he get executed and This guy was working for this system and tires life to supporting the system I was working for this system my entire life, to supporting the system. But he was tired. Yeah, and his uncle, right, he did everything to making Kim Jong-un

to succeed the line and be secure, he get executed. Was the uncle, did they think that the uncle was planning to overthrow Kim Jong-un? No, that was an accusation. It was just an accusation, wasn't it true? No, it wasn't. So it was every time when they do it, like that thing, they get killed. What was the thing that happened recently where Kim Jong-un was missing

and they said that they thought he was sick? Was that a trap? 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 and kim jong-un does have health issues at this point what kind of health issues i mean he's over 330 pounds and he's like five seven and he gained weight very rapidly and he eats he drinks like 13 bottles of wine like a night. Wow. And he has insane parties every single day.

So he's not healthy. He does not know how to control himself. So recently Kim Jong-un lost weight dramatically in one month. But people say that's like, oh, is he becoming healthy? No, he just became very, very ill. So they are preparing who's going to succeed him afterwards now already. How old is he? He's 36.

In Korean years or American years? American years, I believe. Wow. Yeah. But it doesn't seem like there's any hope for North Korea to get out of their current situation. As long as China, the CCP is there, it's not going to be out. And whoever gets in next, China maintains exactly the same thing. So without changing Chinese Communist Party,

we never get to change North Korea. But what's crazy is the Chinese Communist Party has 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. But that's the thing also, we thought economic freedom gonna bring the political freedom.

But that's the unique thing about freedom. Unless you fight for it, you don't get it. They don't have political freedom. Like right now the censorship, the social credit system. If you don't have the high credit, you cannot even buy a bus ticket to see your mom in the countryside. Right. You cannot even get on the airplane

and bus and public transportation. Well, that's what comes next after vaccine passports. Yeah. It's like what you say on social media. 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. The thing to me is that this is the last time that humanity ever tried to be free as individuals. And being an individual is such a unique thing to me, like that I can be different than you, right? It's the people talking about like,

oh, comparing the biggest difference that people have between individuals. Like the difference you and I have is unthinkable. Right. And the difference that I have with my mom is unthinkable. That's the beauty of America, that you can be different. Right. You can be an individual.

But now you cannot be an individual. And that's what North Korea did. So when the North Korean regime criticized me, they said she was, as a young girl, very individualistic and ambitious. That's hilarious. That was the worst thing that came up. Because in Norway, that's the worst criticism to give somebody.

So they did not know that thing was embraced here. So Norwegian propaganda channel on YouTube, you can see they say, and this is another amazing thing about YouTube, is that I talk about women getting sold in China. And those old videos get demonetized because it somehow doesn't meet the YouTube guideline. And they're letting North Korean regimes have their propaganda channel on YouTube. So they give a platform to dictatorship, but they do not want to give a platform to the

people who is fighting the civil rights justice fight and this is a thing like uh one video i made about the second amendment it was like my thoughts on second i thought like if every hong konger had a gun in their hands chinese would not take them over like that 75 percent of population went on the street demanding they want to be independent right one country two system they wanted that but China took it over because these people do not have any self-defense right imagine North Korea even if 20% of population had a guns you'd assassinate them you not let our children die like that right so to me it is you can have a crime through the guns accidents happens but it's a very important when people have

a ability to defend themselves from the governments when they become corrupt and of course sharing this is just one perspective you get like blocked right so this is a country that i am in now i have to fight for freedom of speech in america and i thought my journey to be freedom ended coming here but of course not no not even yeah 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 yeah but what they don't want to talk about with mass shootings is pharmaceutical companies they don't want to talk about the fact that most I mean, of the people that are committing mass shootings are on some kind of psychotropic drugs.

Most of them. And they want to conveniently ignore that. Whether they're disassociatives or SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication or anti-psychotic medication. And it doesn't mean that that medication is causing them to do that, but they don't even want to address it. It never even gets discussed.

The only thing that gets discussed is the actual weapon itself. The ability to do that is so beyond most people. The ability to kill random strangers just in horrific acts of violence. Most people are not capable of doing that. But most people want the ability to defend their family if someone's trying to break into their home and kill them or steal from them or kidnap a child or whatever it is. When you see what's going on right now in Australia, Australia confiscated all of their guns in the 1990s. Right. 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.

And one of the things that I read was that as they're doing this, only nine people have died from COVID. Yeah. See if that's true. How many people have died recently from COVID in Australia? Because they have full-on government lockdowns where the government is flying helicopters over streets and zone go back indoors you're not allowed to be outside which is crazy like it's like this disease doesn't even transmit well outside like doesn't make any sense like being outside and getting vitamin d from the sun is probably one of the best things you can do exactly i mean like the babies that born last year and during the pandemic like my son is like three over three they didn't go outside the house

for a year and a half right and i told their mom your baby might die from not getting a son once even in their life then getting a covid and die right it's not a dangerous thing for children but the thing is like not going outside for a year and a half is actually very dangerous. Wow, zero deaths. Zero deaths. Oh, my God. There are a couple in July. Okay, so in July there's a couple. So you have zero deaths from literally from October 20th. October 20th you have zero deaths until July 11th.

Yeah, July 11 you have one death. And you got a little spike there. What's that spike? How many people is that? One or two, actually. Oh, that's crazy. 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. Testing has gone up. Yeah, of course. But the deaths have gone down. That's the thing. It has gone up. Yeah, of course. But the deaths have gone down. That's the thing. It's like, folks, people die from heart attacks in staggering numbers every year. You're not making the government force people to exercise

and put down cheeseburgers. I mean, we have to decide. And they say, oh, well, the heart disease is not infectious. Okay. But the actual cause of death is pretty staggering. 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, what's the what's the amount of money that's The burden the financial burden on the health care system because of people that are obese because of heart disease because of cancer

It's crazy and a lot of his lifestyle choices and the government does nothing to stop those deaths They're talking about fitness is a sign of white supremacy fitness Fitness fitness sign of white supremacy now. Fitness? Fitness. Fitness. Sign of white supremacy. Yeah. I know a lot of black people that are really fit.

They need to talk to David Goggins. He's a white supremacist. He doesn't even know it. 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 they're just looking for things to target but this is in north korea is that in north korea when they said this is our sworn enemy death americans doesn't mean much like there's so much worse that doesn't mean anything and now i mean america is same thing like everybody's Hitler after is it everyone's a Nazi everybody's

a racist and I'm a racist I'm a bigot right I'm a Nazi now too like I did not even know what the like Nazi was the problem is they're just trying to shut people down by using those words and those words are horrible if someone is an actual racist and you call them a racist and everybody else sees that they're racist it's a horrible accusation So they're using that so freely that they're distorting the meaning of it, and it doesn't work anymore. It's like crying wolf, the old expression of the boy who cried wolf, the story. That's literally what's happening right now in this country. It's very strange.

I know. This is what people told me. This is new to them too because I came here in 2016, January. Yeah. And I thought this was always America was like. And I go, what was a country that I dreamed of far away? So it's still here. You know, the ideals that built this country are still here with a lot of people.

You know, a lot of people that support freedom and the freedom of expression and the ability to speak freely and To debate thoughts openly all that stuff still exists with a lot of people here, but there's a lot of people that Are willing to give that up they're willing to give that up of their side can win and it's very confusing because it's a mixture of toxic tribalism and short-sightedness mixed with ideology. And it's a disturbing moment in time. It really is. So how do you, what do you think, how can we oppose Chinese regime?

It's infiltrating everywhere. That's a good question. You know, when you see John Cena from the WWE apologizing for calling Taiwan a country. And you're like, holy shit. LeBron James. Yeah. This guy talking about justice all day long in America. Yeah.

So what do we do with China? Well, they're corrupted by money. That's the problem. The problem is China. 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. $136 million of it was from China. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. It's terrifying. Oh, man. 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. Right. I mean, it wasn't something where he said, you know, China's a terrible place, it sucks, I hate the Chinese people.

He didn't say anything like that. He didn't say anything like that. All he said was he called Taiwan a country. It's crazy. It's crazy that people are willing to give a country like China that much power because of money. But that's the reality of this world that we live in. We don't manufacture anything in America anymore. 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 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. 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. No one even brings it up. Convenient.

Yeah. Strange. It's a strange form of hypocrisy. Yeah. Do you think, I mean, I don't think capitalism is a problem. Because then people say, oh, because of the capitalism make people greedy, right? Because people in capitalist countries were way better than people in communist countries that I've ever seen. And way less corrupt.

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 I mean you've seen that with people like John Cena apologizing for China right and that's the kind of thing where that is a form of capitalism that you're seeing apologizing to the Chinese Communist Party but it really is about capitalism it's about his ability to make money and the chance that he might lose money or that his film might not be distributed over there anymore. It's like a real problem that he had to apologize for.

You're seeing that with like these subprime mortgages that cause the housing collapse. You're seeing that with when you see corruption in the stock market or when you see any kind of savings and loans corruption, and there's financial corruption and stealing money and the corporate influence that they have on politicians and lobbyists and special interest groups, that's all capitalism run amok, right? But the bare bones of it, the idea that there's many parts of this country that are still a meritocracy, 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. And that gives people incentive to do well.

The foundation of that still exists. We just have to be very careful that we don't give that up. We have to be very careful that we don't give that up. We have to be very careful that we don't give that up and give the power over to the government. Because the government is ultimately, they're human beings. And people, human beings, when they have unchecked power, it's very dangerous. And it has been throughout history.

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. All of it. It's always been the case. It's always been one group that's in power. 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, execute them publicly.

Any dissent gets shut down instantaneously, censor any speech that doesn't go along with the speech that the government is projecting. That's always been the standard. That's been the standard throughout human history. Every king, every emperor, they all did the same thing until the United States. And there's people in the United States that are willing to give that up. They're willing to give that up because they want their side to win.

And it's terrifying. It is. It's terrifying. Because once you give it up, you're never getting it back. Unless we go to war again. Unless we have a civil war in this country. And then if we have a civil war in this country, who's going to sneak in? China.

China's going to sneak in and they're going to take over all sorts of corporations by buying them out. 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. They're going to change the way people vote. They're going to change all kinds of things. And this is just, it's just, it's almost what the founding, the founding fathers somehow or another knew that this could happen. 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.

They understood what has happened in the past when people have organized, what has happened in the past when free speech has been stifled, 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. It's very dangerous. 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 because the Constitution itself is a bigotry written by white supremacists.

So that is, I mean, I don't know. That's every conclusion of every class that I took It's crazy. What's the alternative the alternative is socialism and they always say that socialism hasn't been done correctly Okay, but the problem with socialism is what Jordan talks about all the time Jordan Peterson He says you cannot have an equality of outcome and it's true. You can't it's very dangerous and people don't try it Yes, they try and one guy became a god and everybody don't even know they are slaves now 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 and then make it no different than every other

government that's ever controlled the people throughout human history we we have a chance to not have it like that in this country that's why that's why when people oppose universal restrictions when people oppose uh widespread government powers to do things. One of the big oppositions, one of the big things that people opposed about lockdowns was not that we shouldn't be careful with vulnerable people during a pandemic. The problem is you're giving the government the ability to decide what is essential and what is not essential. Who can work and who can't work. What chances you can take and not take.

And they're not being honest about all sorts of aspects of the disease. Like they didn't even, 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. 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. But even if Fox News was right, do you care about the truth or do you care about supporting your side? Do you care about your tribe?

And more people are terrified of being rejected by their tribe than they are of the truth not getting out. You should be terrified of lies. You should be terrified of the truth not getting out. You don't know what the landscape is unless you're allowed to assess and analyze all the aspects of life all of them and people are terrified of doing that today they're in a lot of it is because of social media it's because there's so many people that just live on social media all day long you know and they're on there just constantly going to war in the worst way possible with text messages. Get triggered by every single thing they see.

Didn't they talk to you about that in Colombia too? They tell you about things that triggered you? So before the class, they send you email and say, in this material we're going to talk about maybe racism or rape or any kind of oppression, whatever it is, if it hurts you, it triggers your feelings, do not even do the reading and don't even come to class. And before the class, they announce, even at any point during this class, it triggers your feelings, leave the class and don't even tell me what you fear.

And people are emotionally not stable, so they bring the comfort dogs in the classroom. They bring dogs? Yeah. So dogs are licking around the people because they need the comfort from the animals, right? They cannot even sit in the... How many dogs? Several dogs at a per class, right?

What if the dogs start fighting? They bark and they lick and they chew. And I asked one day, like, can I take my baby? He was going to take a nap in the shore. I said no. So they said no to the baby, but it's okay with dogs. No babies, but you can have a dog. Yeah.

Wow. And, yeah, this is the... It's my emotional support baby. Exactly. What if I said that? I get triggered easily saying the baby. I wonder. Why can't you do that?

Why can't you say that? But this is so madness. The problem is your baby's half white. Yeah. So a baby. I wonder. Why can't you do that? Why can't you say that? But this is so madness. The problem is your baby's half white. Yeah. So your baby might be racist. Exactly. Your baby might be a part of the patriarchy. I know.

But what is this self-loathing? Why are they committing suicide by themselves as a civilization? Like this is the thing. In North Korea, we have a gun next to our head. Yeah. But in this country you have freedom to learn and read and think why are they doing this it's so think about human nature right we chose hitler we voted him right people did that you know the 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. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. We are now around soft men and hard times. We're in the time of toxic masculinity, right? Where you could be toxically male. And then if you're suppressing masculinity you're you're going to bring on hard times you're going there's it doesn't mean masculinity doesn't mean you're mean

it doesn't mean you're angry it means strength it means discipline it means the ability like 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. 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.

That's what's happened. I mean look what's happening to Hong Kong, right? A city 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, and during the pandemic, they ramped it up, and it's gotten even worse. It's exactly what we talked about.

You can't be weak, and in this country, being weak is thought of as a virtue. 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. He said people think that you should be weak and you should be docile and then you should be a pacifist. He goes no, you should be a monster. He said you should be a monster, you should be ruthlessly ambitious and then learn how to control it.

And it's that old expression. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. It's an old expression, but it makes sense because it doesn't mean that you can't be kind if you're strong, but it does mean you can't be kind if you're strong but it does mean you can't be strong if you're weak yeah if you're weak you're fucked and there's a lot of weak people in this country right now that are trying to take control and they're gathering up all the other weak people and they say yeah let's all be weak together and they're willing to embrace all sorts of

ideas that have been disproven not not just disproven, that have caused the deaths of untold millions of people. And Mao is China and Stalin is Russia. And it's crazy. And they're short-sighted. And they're short-sighted because in the short term, they want their tribe to win. And there's so many weak people that will join along with them. want their tribe to win and there's so many weak people that'll join along with them there's so many just simple-minded dullards that just want to promote their tribe yeah i mean they encourage you to be triggered yeah encourage you to be weak right when you go and they try not to expose you

to any reality that's the thing why universities like scare you and you are never getting a real sense of the world i mean the fact they cannot they triggered by the hearing the word rape what they're gonna do when they get raped they're never gonna revive again afterwards well it's the disturbing thing is that when you're learning things if you're gonna learn you you're gonna be exposed to some horrific truths yeah like if you're gonna learn about stalin you're gonna i learn, you're going to be exposed to some horrific truths. Yeah. Like if you're going to learn about Stalin, you're going to, 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. And people were eating their own children. I mean, that's. The North Koreans. And it's the same sort of thing. They were starving these people to death in order to keep control of them. And the results were horrific. If you don't hear that, if you don't hear that

in all of its terrifying, brutal detail, then you're not gonna be aware. And even then you're not gonna really be aware. Like you're aware, you are absolutely aware of what can happen when things go horrifically wrong because you were born into a society that was horrifically wrong. You were born into this terrifying dictatorship

that exists right now 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 the country where you were born. And if that doesn't get discussed, people don't understand. If you say, oh, are you triggered by this? Well, you don't have to hear it. You're not going to learn.

We're not going to expose these things. We're not going to learn. And even then, just the abstract concepts just the way you're discussing it i it's resonating i understand what you're saying but i don't know what the fuck you experienced i'd have to go there i would have to live your life there's there's only you would have to like physically experience it in person in order for it to really get into your head. And we're not even allowing kids to read words that fuck with their heads. Yeah, no.

It's almost you are so capable. And by going to this school system, they make you almost a handicap. They disable you. They change your potential. And as you say, we're born as warriors. Who knows? But they make us incapable of anything.

And the biggest problem you have is somebody calls you wrong pronoun. And this triggers them. This makes them depressed. And this is the thing. Or they think it's the biggest injustice they've ever seen. Yeah, we've weaponized people being offended, too. Yeah. When people are offended, they get a massive amount of extra attention.

All they have to do is yell about it and scream about it and talk about how horrible it is and everybody's like oh my god i hear your truth i i feel you when you're saying this and it makes them special you're encouraging people to act up instead of encouraging people to to change their perspective and to see things for what they are or to look at the way other people see things. To look at it from someone else's viewpoint, from someone else's life, from someone else's learned experiences. It was really funny. While I was writing my book, my

agent was telling me, my editor was telling me like, Yeonmi, you're traumatized. So you need to go see somebody called a therapist. So I was like, what the heck is therapist? And then they were 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, $200. $700 an hour? Yeah. Really? That's what they get? In New York City, but then, like, she's going to give me a discount, raise the $200 per hour. Basically go talk to her how hard my life was.

And 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. This is ridiculous. And I was like, I mean, what is the point of me then surviving all of that? Now I'm just going to complain how hard it was. What is the point of me surviving any of it? So someone can tell you you're going to be okay. It's okay to have these feelings.

Exactly. It's okay. It's okay to have these feelings. Yeah, it's okay to hate men. It's okay to be bitter, right? It's okay to be complaining and blaming everything else. Did you go to therapy? Did you do it? Absolutely not. But, I mean, 80% of my investment

bank are consulting friends in New York go to therapy. And I support that they should. They can afford it. It's a thing. But the fact I couldn't fathom in the beginning that you need to go to therapy to survive in Manhattan. I think people need to be able to talk to people about things to try to work through them.

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. enough with their true feelings and their real thoughts. And that's a sad testament to the kind of relationships that a lot of people have, a lot of friendships and romantic relationships that people have in their life, that they can't talk openly about the real live experiences. Mm-hmm. It's like, people, we have so much versions

of ourselves inside us, right? Like, I can see why people become the guards of concentration camps, right? Like, that's the thing. Humans are not initially good or bad. It's all about how we shape them. When you were talking about experiencing dead bodies on the street but feeling nothing or feeling that boy with his intestines hanging out his back and feeling nothing. Yeah. That's because of the way you grew up yeah that's the thing like humans are most adaptive species we are so adaptable yeah and that's also good and bad is we can adapt we can adapt to the concentration camps right we can be the guards and not feel guilty about it

and i think not talking about that not talking about the evil or what we are capable of darkness that's that like everything in our screen news is a wonderful things now in in this country because they say there's no room for hate speech they want everything to be happy flowery words yeah but the thing is we have dark no matter what you do they're gonna be murderers they're gonna be rapists yeah even we talk don't talk about rape rape gonna happen so getting rid of these people and deplatforming them canceling them we don't get rid of actual problem so in a way it's better off us talk about our full nature what we are actually capable of

right we can be so resilient compassionate beings or We can be so resilient, compassionate beings, or we can be complete like asshole, like not caring about anything at all like Kim Jong-un. And we have to learn why people think differently than us. And the only way you can do that is by talking to them. Exactly. And there's a lot of those people that think in a way that you find problematic. They can be converted.

They can be talked to. But not if you treat them like they're the enemy and cast them aside and block them from communicating. Yeah, it's like, there's a thing like, would you rather, like I would rather know if there's a Hitler exists. When I do the genocide, I wanna know about it. Would you not wanna know about it?

I wanna know if somebody planning that. Right, there are like people in the past where on Facebook they're posting, I'm going to commit a murder in the Psalms Church. They post on Facebook. Isn't it much better for FBI to know that than not giving them the platform so we don't know who's planning the mass murder right now? Right, right. When do you feel like, because you had this time in your life

where you could see that boy with his intestines hanging out of his back and it didn't bother you you didn't feel anything when do you think you started to feel things with my son um because the hardest thing wasn't like learning about the system or none of that the even china like i was always numb like even when i was raped i was like looking at myself some of the roof like someone's in the corners and like oh that's not me how can they be happening to me right i was completely ignoring that and in north korea you don't, you're so numb in your brain. When I had my son in America in 2018, that's when I was feeling things.

And I was so grateful that I felt even sadness. You were worried that you wouldn't feel it? I was very worried. Feeling something was very worried like um it's yeah feeling something was very challenging and giving birth to my son brought a lot of new feelings to me and of course the compassion is one of them right like i worry about the i want the world to be beautiful place for him right i actually care about the humans and i don't know this part is like this is edited the first time that i knew what love was and unconditional love was did you i saw that you had a rick dublin here yes i had one of those

experiences like unplanned nobody knew the mdma which was that what it was in california and that's but until then people told him all love you as a kid I was like if you don't sleep with me rate me when something why would you love me right? I never understood that unconditional love between humans never felt like safe So you never felt love with friends? No, it was so I mean I learned the love later really very in life So I did not i knew the word but i did not actually ever felt it so when i on that for the first time i was like all i felt was love and zero zero fear and that sounds like i know that when these people say they love me

actually this is how they feel actually yeah is it possible to love somebody unconditionally and that after that i became pregnant because i wasn't able to get pregnant from all the my trauma i had i had three ivf cycles at 22 and after that medicine something i don't know relaxing my body i was able to conceive and I had my son. I think a lot of people could benefit from one of those experiences. Yeah. I think it would change a lot about the way we look at life, the way we look at each other and would just eliminate a lot of the anger that people have. A lot of the misplaced anger, unproductive, unhelpful, corrosive, dangerous anger for no reason.

There's so much of it. So much of it is so confusing. And so much of it is based on our own insecurities and our fear that other people won't love us back. 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. Exactly. The world can be so different, isn't it? Yeah. It can be, everything can be understood.

Like that's the thing, like in the center of everything, there's love. And I did not know what love was in the time of my life. That's the thing, when people ask me, if you can be on North Korean television, what would you tell them? I think I would tell them i love you because they never heard that before they might not know even what i'm saying what the heck she's

saying she loves me right right but i think that's the thing like i did not know what it was but everything that we do for love we have a children for love right why do we even live everything the point of life is like love right and i did not know that until i had a point so i mean that's why i cannot be bitter i love men like i my son is a man my father was a man like even though a lot of experience i had to be the man was negative that i was able to overcome it right but i think a lot of people cannot overcome that trauma because they're not just not able to make that connection 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

and you know better than anybody alive because of your the country where you were born i mean that's happening right now, that there's a place where there is no love and everyone's afraid. And there's just this horrific regime that's running this country and keeping people starving. 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. It's the worst example of human life and it exists simultaneously i know it's a thing i thought if i can show them tell them what's happening i thought something gonna change right but of course not it's not and there's a reason why these problems keep existing but the thing is i saw that one of the like interview we did with elon musk right yeah i have to be hopeful because what's the alternative yes what is the alternative to nothing else that's the thing that's why even though i don't know people are gonna now listen to me and help me to raise awareness and condemn chinese regime

to stop supposed to sponsor Kim Jong I don't know that's gonna happen but I gotta be hopeful that's the only thing we have as a humanity we gotta be hopeful and we can do so much when we keep that hope alive it's just terrifying that it's ignored by the powers that be in not just this country but many countries that they're not all just standing up and saying that this is an atrocity that's happening inside of our lifetime we're doing nothing about it it's a thing like i have no problem when people going like at the canada good store bring the like blood on them like in new york soho right i remember when i was south korea this is a on tv there's a national concert to the celebrities and singing and crying I thought like okay big disaster happened right while these people all emotion and

crying and it was a fundraising for the dogs and puppies and animals eating animals no no it was just like their environment how shelter like environment is hard for those this animals how it's not clean how they don't you know animal shelters right so they were crying and i was initially shocked like what do you mean animals have rights right as a human being i did not know i had the rights as a human right right right and what the f really like animals puppies have rights here and then on top 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, but they do not want to rescue these girls who are raped every single day. And somehow,

I think it's anti-human sentiment. I don't know even what that is. The fact that we care about animals is a beautiful thing, I think it's anti-human sentiment. I don't know even what that is. The fact that we care about animals is a beautiful thing, isn't it? We care that something cannot speak for themselves. They are vulnerable. And there are a lot of people who cannot speak for themselves right now. As you said, being free is an exception. This is a very unusual thing, even to this age.

Like 4 billion people living under some authoritarian dictatorship countries. So what we got is really unique. And people somehow refuse to speak for another human being. They would rather speak for a little puppy. And it's very hypocrisy that doesn't make sense. Like if someone's suffering that bothers you, why the human suffering doesn't bother you? Like if someone's suffering that bothers you, why the human suffering doesn't bother you? 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.

And so they don't speak about it because to actually do something would require an enormous effort to do something to change the regime of North Korea. 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? It feels like they can't do anything about it. They can tweet about what's happening that China does to North Koreans. Yeah, they're scared to even tweet about China. They'd rather tweet calling some white guy racist inherently or some this person or that or that person or this and come up with some sort of insults

for people that don't agree with what they agree with. It seems too big. It seems like they can't put a dent in it so they leave it alone. But that's a lie that they are telling themselves. Later thing, that even later tweet would help. I think a lot of people don't even know about it. Exactly. That's the thing. The mainstream doesn't give a platform to the people who want to challenge the CCP.

Right. So, I mean, these girls were captured by Taliban, ISIS. A few hundred thousand people were oppressed, gets Nobel Peace Prize, right? Yeah. There are like 25 millions people oppressed When did you hear anybody world recognizes it from North Korea or anything for this cause? What did you think when Trump met with Kim jong-un?

Well, we did Trump, right? That's a thing. It seems like It seems like a Trump gotta everything do wrong or everything gotta be right, right? I mean everybody nobody's perfect I do think Trump was really right on calling out China He was a first president actually talked about to see Jinping that you gotta fix North Korea's a you enables it That was the first president ever mentioned China with North Korea He was that was great, but sitting down with the Kim jong-un without any preconception because think about it inside North Korea, there are military powerful men and That was great. But sitting down with Kim Jong-un without any preconception. Because think about it. Inside North Korea, there are military powerful men.

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. So for Kim Jong-un, it was a very good opportunity to legitimize his power within a country, inside North Korea, to consolidate that power. Because until that point, even Xi Jinping didn't invite Kim Jong-un to China over even once. So Kim Jong-un was more like this young man nobody accepted. But Trump wanted to meet with Kim Jong-un, so Xi Jinping invited Kim Jong-un to over first before Trump meeting.

So that's how he went to China for the first time, meeting Xi Jinping. Because he knew that Trump was gonna meet him. So, I mean, of course China won't have influence beforehand. That's why right before the meeting he went to China first. And until that point China didn't even invite Kim Jong-un. It was too low for them. Really? They would not even recommend. Yeah, it was like a little brother's puppet state. So they would not treat Kim Jong-un like a leader.

He didn't even get the invitation to visit China. Is there a real possibility that someone could overthrow him from inside the country? It's impossible because China is behind it. China is fully behind. You know, China lent this land for 200 years, 50 years on these mine towns, mining, blah, blah. Everything is lent to China. So North Korea is not Chinese. And the labor is free for the Chinese to use. So everything is now Chinese in North Korea.

It's China, basically. Nothing is North Korea's anymore. Wow. I mean, these mines, everything is lent like 200 years. That's North Korea's anymore. Wow. These mines, everything is like land, like 20 years. That's the least they have. I mean, how many generations that change in 20 years' time? So it's China's.

North Korea is China. There is really no distinction at this point. And China is very clever in the way they've they have all these interests in all different parts of the world, in Africa and all these different mines. It's like all through economic power.

That's how they disable them and enslave to their ideology and then they cannot speak up. And that's happening to Americans. Even Ivy League schools get funding from China. So all these researches, like papers, they don't do things that challenge their narrative. And the media, Hollywood, they need money from China. So all these researches, like papers, they don't do things that challenge their narrative. And the media, Hollywood, they need the money from China, so they are not gonna do anything about it.

So that's how slowly they infiltrate every sector that we have right now. You know, part of me is very upset that more people have not talked to you. Well, because i'm a liar because i'm a liar i'm the propaganda puppet of the west cia trained me that's what they say oh yeah so when i was starting giving interviews in the beginning that like 15 and 13 the age difference that i did not know right

and then like uh the mountain that i climbed they went to google uh map somewhere and checked the altitude so basically scientific altitude i should not have said it was mountain it was a high hill but as a child like i don't know what altitude is a hill or mountain i still don't know the difference so i said the mountain that she's alive because't know what altitude is a hill or mountain. I still don't know the difference. So I said the mountain that she's alive because what she climbed was a hill. So they try to get you on a technicality. Yeah. With that, with the altitude of the hill, and then also on a technicality with the age, which you explained.

So she's trying to change her life. But one thing I did hide was that I trafficked in China. Because in South Korea, still girls, virginities, everything. And I wasn't planning to come to America, right? I didn't even have a right to come here. I was South Korean. I wanted to have a child. I wanted a family. And if I say I was raped two years

by a human trafficker, who's going to normal same family going to take me? So I had to lie that I said i was okay my mom only raped and she covered me and when i was writing my book i knew i mean of course penguin is not stupid 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 so they got the live recording in the legal team 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. So it was all, everything before the book. And also that is the thing is, I mean, a lot of Maoist, Leninist, they sympathize North Korean regime, right? So many people hate America.

And I'm here saying America is the best country in human history. Of course, I now became the symbol of this bigotry. So I'm just shocked that more people in America are not talking to you. More of these mainstream outlets don't want to hear your story. Because of China peace, my story is very inconvenient because I'm a slave. Actually, I was a slave and I was bought by Chinese and exploited by them. So how do they cover my story without including China peace? It's impossibility.

I can't believe that that's keeping people like the Washington Post or the New York Times. 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 like the education that you've had, the experiences that you've had, the way you've changed and evolved and 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. I mean, it's an incredible story.

But no, because they expect me to become now a victim, right? Because they expect me to hate all the men and the system. But I do not tell, like, I'm not a victim. I'm very grateful. Like, my book starts that there are two things I'm grateful for, that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped. So it's like I don't fit the narrative they are trying to portray in any way. Wow, 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 is being run certain parts of it like north korea or like china it's this is this is from a person like yourself no one else is going to be able to tell that story your story is it's impossible for anyone that hasn't experienced it to tell it has to be you yeah but then that's why i'm grateful despite all that you know uh there's i mean north korea did everything they could to character assassinate me because i mean that's what they have the biggest hacker hackers and they have the the armies of hackings and go harass people and hack the Sony studio,

remember when they made a movie? So they're exactly the same thing. They were reaching out to Penguin, my editors, like, we're gonna blow up Penguin if you write this book. And there's so much harassment. And internally, we were so scared, like Penguin people, like, we don't wanna lose our job. We don't wanna blow up.

So they don't even talk about in the public that you get attacked from north korean regime like north koreans diplomat in london was reaching out to my editor to sit down meet them in person wow to stop the book so and of course like everything is written on media that's all believable right everything's written then people just believe what it whatever it was yeah so it's now that's what North Korea is so good at like creating this narrative and character assassin people and eventually doesn't work they're gonna kill you directly and that's what they did initially they were like threatening me and stopped talking about it and then I still did so they put entire three generations of my family on that North Korean propaganda channel.

And they made them to denounce me. And they were gone. They're gone? Yeah. Because I still have agents in North Korea and they all disappeared. So they were all killed? Yeah. Or concentration camp means death.

So even including my neighbors. And that was so unbelievable. I mean, what's the crime of being a neighbor? They were not even that close to me. But these neighbors, the fact that they knew me, that was their crime. And this video is on YouTube. So they went after everyone you knew? Yeah, everybody I knew.

In my entire town, my father's side, mother's side, entire generation. My cousin that I raised, and yeah, that's the thing. I knew this was an evil regime, but I somehow thought like how can they be threatened by 13 years old I'm not even sharing how North Korea develops their missile program right all I'm saying is what the UN says like there is a public execution you see from satellite photos you see and there's like 33,000 North Korean defectors made to South Korea they talk about starvation. And then we get captured in China and being sold

and there's documentaries about it. So I'm not even sharing the first class information. I just didn't think they were going to be threatened. I just really didn't think that I was going to be a threat to them at all. They don't allow any dissent.

What do you think is going to happen with that country like china they can last a lot longer they might last longer than us they might beat us because that's the thing like it's um as you said people become soft and they do not know how to be resilient right and also as you said people here been surrounding such a goodness of the world they don't recognize they don't even know how evil can be a man be like right a regime can be like they don't know the how i mean how cruel these regimes are they They don't even recognize the darkness they see. So I think because our inability to recognize this crime and darkness, I think they might outlast us. So that is my biggest fear.

So you have a genuine concern that this country could collapse? Yeah. I mean, every civilization collapsed. Persians, I mean, how many civilizations before us came? Right. The Greeks, the Romans. Exactly. So there shouldn't be any exception to Western civilization

if we do not push and guard this civilization that we got. Especially if you pay attention to what's going on right now. Of course. And especially the way it's emanating from the universities which is what's teaching and and you know putting ideas in the minds of young people who will then go on to run things this foundation is corrupt the only way that is to us to change is of getting rid of the western civilization getting rid of american constitution great every it rid of American Constitution. Wait, every, it's not, I'm not saying,

like every class you set up at Columbia, that's how they end the class, right? Every problem goes, going back to root. Getting rid of white men. They are the problem. They are the source of every single problem that we have. They mess up Africa. They mess up Asia.

They mess up every single thing. And like one class I remember at the end of senior year, taking the music class, right? It should be the least political. Western music is a core, one of the core curriculum. And the professor asking, who has a problem studying Western music? And of course, everybody raised their hands. Because of the bigots like Mozart and Beethoven, they silence all the minority groups. We have to listen to the spigots right now. And it's the fact that Colombia having this call is like a shame. So I'm like, I'm studying the West.

What's the problem studying Western music in the West? Right? Well, not only that, you're studying musical history. You can't deny the history. You can't deny that these people made this music. It doesn't absolve anyone of any crimes that they committed, if they committed crimes. But to deny it all.

Yeah. They say like 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. So the fact that you read Jane Austen is you get subconsciously brainwashed. This is how you need to look for hidden oppression. Oh my God. It's so disturbing. It's so real though.

I mean, that's really what's happening right now and people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their children indoctrinated into these ideas. Yeah. I don't know where we're going to end up in 10 years. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know either.

But I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much. You're a very, very brave person. And I think that your message is very important. And it's also there's no one else who can tell it. 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. It's incredibly significant.

And I hope more people want to talk to you. No, I think I'm so grateful 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. And he died, and I had nobody to call, right? He died in the morning, 7 a.m., waiting till night so I can, like, bury him in the middle of a mountain. And I couldn't even cry because if you cry people gonna neighbors gonna hear so i'm numb like sitting next to dead body and i was thinking wow like being a human means nothing like even dog dies you go to your neighbor and ask them

like your dog died and in that desert like that's the thing, I wasn't afraid of dying. I was thinking, nobody knew that I existed. Nobody knew that I came to this earth and left in this middle of desert. And that's the thing, nobody knows that North Koreans exist. Nobody knows our stories. So I think the fact that people know my father and my people is um it's biggest comfort for me you know i think that even that's not even given to us they don't know we exist so i'm so grateful that you gave me this opportunity well i'm very grateful you came here just to talk about it and to tell people and i'm glad a lot of people are going to hear this. Thank you. Thank you.