 Thank you. Thank you so much. I got to say it is a huge huge huge honor to be speaking at the Fee mansion Before it closes down for good to be one of the last and objectively the best speaker Is an honor I will always carry and I'm being a little glib about it But I'm not because as most the people in this room know this is where the Liberty movement started the Fee mansion was basically a lighthouse in a very dark world in 1946 I believe when Leonard Reid started it and to be standing in the room in the same building where you know Leonard Reid got a series of increasingly irate letters from mine Rand accusing him of Stalinism is to be part of Libertarian history and also to realize that the infighting you know is not something that's new to us It's been here since there are only four people in movement and five perspectives on what Liberty really means So let me talk a little bit about the book and this project and and how it came to be I was working on a I'm a celebrity ghostwriter by trade and what that means is I'll sit down with the celebrity And I'll help them craft their autobiography or something like that in effect how I look at it is I'm writing a novel about a character that happens to be real and just like someone on top chef to project one way I have to you know engage in my creativity given certain very real constraints In those cases the facts of reality, you know in their personal history in their perspective So I was working on one project with the celebrity who will be left unmentioned. It was not going so well And my friend Justin ash who is the inventor of such products as bacon salt Bacon a's bacon coffin and bacon lube It took me to his house to give me food, which the celebrity was not providing at the time And he said you should write Kim Jong-il's autobiography and This you know was something that appealed to me immediately and profoundly for several reasons God bless you Ed One of the things is everyone in this country and indeed the Western world is aware of who Kim Jong-il is is Aware of what he represents and has absolutely no understanding of who he really is and what he really represents We have a very visceral glib outsider perspective on him and on North Korea and As someone who is a passionate advocate of liberty I thought this was both an opportunity and a problem because if we move the needle here in the States Regarding freedom. It's not really it's not really going to have that much of an effect But if we move the needle in the least free nation on earth, which North Korea Objectively and certainly is that might have the effect of saving actual lives One of the things that most people are aware of is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps there right now As we speak they have been these camps have been there for decades if you go on Google Earth You can see them for yourself and yet much of the mainstream media seems to be interested in some crazy and or drunk Ender stupid basketball player paying a visit there and it is I Think almost kind of obscene that this is where the focus is and then at the same time We'll sit in our you know history classes and wring our hands and wonder how the world let the Holocaust happen And somehow, you know, it's funny that they have this wacky system so I Knew this was a very very big project and it would be a very difficult project I knew very little about North Korea, you know, just the usual visceral stuff Kim Jong-il's a great golf player Things are really bad over there. You know, he's got this wacky sense of self-importance and so on and so forth And I thought it'd be kind of a little bit of a joke but I thought it'd be something I could really stick my teeth into and It really hit close to home for me personally because I am Jewish I was born in the Soviet Union and those were two cases where bad things could have happened to me very easily Should the circumstances of my life had been very different But because my family and I you know all escaped the Soviet Union late 70s and moved to the States You know, I was given opportunities and now that I'm at a point in my career as an author where I can work on a project That might not be as profitable, but certainly Pass something I'm passionate about it might have positive effects. I felt it was my kind of obligation To do something about it So I said a book proposal sent it out to all these different editors and their reactions were all the same. You're crazy What are you talking about? How are you going to write an autobiography about someone who's dead and who you've never met? You know publishing is very regimented if you take any book at the bookstore and you flip it over and look at the back At the upper left, you're going to have a subject about where to place it. It'll say fiction philosophy self-help Are they going to put this under Korea? Are they going to put this under autobiography? Are they going to put it under satire? They didn't know what to make of it. So they all said no So I said in the same sense as John Galt. I'm going to do something about this once and for all There's no reason for me to go through somebody else's, you know, emperor tour. I can do something about it myself So I went to North Korea. I did not realize how easy it is to go to North Korea I was looking at Facebook one day and my friend Ed, who's extremely well traveled Had put up a you know series of photographs and there's one I'll never forget There's the tanks, you know going through Pyongyang in the background and he's got his dim-witted grin in the foreground smiling at the camera and I'm like Ed's in North Korea and North Korea it is legal to go and the reason it is legal to go to North Korea is North Korea has the very dubious distinction of being the first communist nation to declare bankruptcy as a result As Rand always says you can escape the laws of reality, but you can't escape the consequences of ignoring the rules laws of reality They are credit rating is nil on the international scene. So they are desperate for hard currency Their one is worthless and you know extremely inflationary. So they want the Chinese RMB. They want the euros They want the dollars they produce almost nothing of value So they want tourists to come in and give them those dollars. So it's it's legal. It's expensive But you have absolutely the best party cred I live in New York City So if people are talking about where they went to their summer vacation and you say I've been to Pyongyang and You know, then you could be like, oh, you've never been. Oh You have to go Milan is so over You have to say it like that Otherwise you lose the effect So, you know, I got in a plane. There's only one flight in and out Every day I did not know if I was still gonna do this book But I thought the regime's not gonna be around as is for much longer and there's no place on earth That would I would find more interesting and more Kind of exciting and it's just kind of funny the first trip I decide to take as an adult outside of the States is to North Korea instead of like Bermud or something So you land when you land in Pyongyang You don't like it's near Pyongyang the airport is impossible to describe what it's like Because as most people know The iconography of North Korea is everywhere in the country You see giant portraits of the great leader who is the founder of North Korea Kim Il-sung Kim Jong-il's father and of Kim Jong-il the dear leader side-by-side and you see it everywhere And you're in the airport and North Korea because of their lack of currency has very little electricity So you're in this airport Which is basically a giant like hangar with no lights on and there's one little conveyor belt And there's one metal detector in the back and it's like the size of a football field And if you look at the very back at the very top wall our giant portraits You know that are like a yard tall and you're like holy crap I'm in North Korea and then you're like I don't want to say or do the wrong thing Because bad things happen to people in North Korea who say or do the wrong thing and as we you know You have to go as a group and there are tour guides, you know with you at all times which is regarded as somewhat ominous I think it's completely not ominous at all Because it's not unusual for any country if you visit for them to have a tour guide who's going to show you around The guides speak perfect English the cadence is a little off, but their accents are superb and as we were driving from the airport to our hotel There's something in North Korea called the rug young hotel. I'm pronouncing a plea wrong It's by far the tallest building in North Korea It was left unfinished in the late 80s and now it's nicknamed the hotel of doom because it's also structurally on sound It it's hunkers this giant edifice. It's been called the world's worst building in the world And supposedly they can Photoshop it out of some of their postcards unless they'd be you know admitting that they messed up pretty badly and My guide pointed to that hotel and she goes there's that hotel. That's our latest rocket launch So the fact that she was being glib and about both about geopolitics and about the state of nature in North Korea really was kind of Shocking to me and I wrote about my trip for reason if you go to Kim Jong-il book.com you can read about it there But briefly I really wanted to understand what the people in North Korea think of themselves and the outside world Are they aware? Do they care because you're not allowed to use a computer? They have no electricity if you have foreign materials you'll be executed and You know the regime is notorious even by communist standards where their brutality and arbitrary detentions and things like that So using the skills I have when I work with celebrity to write their life story I'm always kind of picking at them and trying to break down their barriers and I was doing this with my guide and spoiling the article but a Big moment, you know it was towards the end well He was there's a couple of moments one is one of the people on my tour had an accordion camera and I'm like oh, you're such a hipster and My guide says what does that mean hipster now try things to explain what hipster is to some to someone in North Korea Was difficult but as someone who's language for living I roast the challenge and I remembered my friend's definition Which is a hipster someone who likes anything old-fashioned just because it's old-fashioned so I said no hips That's what they like. She's like okay, and then you know kind of she made a mental note and then later in that trip I was at there's a tailor in the hotel where you stay at the hotel you stay at is on an island It's nicknamed the Alcatraz of fun because you're not allowed to leave The guides are not allowed on your floor every floor you're segregated by your nationality And in fact the guides floor is the windows are blacked out or apparently because it's pitch black They just step off the elevator into darkness. It's just creepy as hell But there's a tailor in the hotel But it turns out was a sweatshop they live in the hotel and they'll make suits for you And I go in to get a suit made and they're pointing out all these lovely You know Western style suits and I got none and then I know I want a suit like you know Kind of song the great leader I want it with that collar where but like the now suit and the old boxy and military style and she goes oh hipster And of course as a real hipster I denied being a hipster But she didn't get that joke, but they they custom made the suit And it was a very funny moment because as I was trying on the suit my last day my guy just looks at me side at she goes Oh, you look good. It was very very very odd moment, but What really kind of affected me The last day I was they have something in there called Chalima and Chalima is this Pegasus And it's their symbol of speed right and they had this Chalima movement in the late 60s early 70s about Revolutionizing everything so I was revolutionizing making things faster and better And I was talking to my guide I said if I can mail you anything from the outside world, what do you want me to send you and she goes a Porsche? And I said lady I'm not sending you a Porsche And I said and don't ask me to send you a Chalima either and she goes we have the original one here Why do I need you to send it to me? so she was very very quick in a language that was not her own and she was very very relaxed and she was very very human and One of the things we often forget well, maybe not the people in this room But the press often forgets is that these people who are living in these situations, you know Gerald Ford in 1976 was castigated when he said that there's no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe And what he later said in his autobiography, which may have been a lie I don't know but he claimed that the domination is not in their hearts. Yes They are you know under this dictator regime, but they're not broken They are human beings and you see that constantly when you're in North Korea You see people skipping down the street. You see kids giggling. You see grandmas doting over their grandkids And that to me makes the cause that much more important and it's that much more heartbreaking If communism had the ability to change human nature and to turn humans into robots Maybe it would be more effective, but it doesn't have that power. So, you know These people are really suffering and they are deserving of our empathy I do not know what we can do But I did the only thing I knew I could do which is write a book and talk about it. So what did I do? I came back to the States and There's a pro there's a website called Kickstarter, which is a kind of a recent innovation Four years ago or five years ago even if I chose to self-publish a book my career would be absolutely ruined You know, I write best sell New York Times bestsellers for living to self-publish your like a wacky crank You know forget it. You're it's like a scarlet letter, but Kickstarter how it works is you put forth a video This is what I want my project to be they have them for movies albums, you know You know like candy bars anything you name it and people give you a little bit of money And you set what your goal is ahead of time and if you reach your goal you get all that money So I so I filmed the video in this very building Chuck Grimmett in the back Filmed it and I made this kind of tongue-in-cheek video and I said this is the project I want to do and I raised more money than I would have gotten as a book advance if I'd gone through a publisher And this is the power of the market and this is you know Just another way that you know the internet is taking away gatekeepers ability to so to speak God bless you to so to speak, you know allow worthy Worthy projects to reach the market and the Liberty Movement was very very key To helping with this and it was just a great great feeling to be able to you know get that funding Now I had to write the thing Okay, so when I was in Pyongyang, I brought back armfuls of their propaganda their propaganda is Translated into several languages English French German Spanish Arabic Chinese Japanese Couple of others because they are under the conceit that everyone the world is fascinated with North Korea And we can't get enough and and their philosophy which is known as juce is the guiding light of the 21st century And people are obsessed with it So they have many many books and I read all of them and let me tell everyone in this room if anyone is interested in reading North Korean Communist propaganda It is much worse than you think and I know you think it's pretty bad But I assure you it is much much worse and if I wanted to be really Machiavellian about it I would even gather that the point of these books is to destroy critical thought as opposed to an unintended consequence because the stories are all plotting and boring in the same There's a problem in the factory Kim Jong-il shows up. Did you try this very obvious thing? No, none of us thought of it Try this very obvious thing. Oh my god. You're amazing. Well, I heard there's a problem in school. Stay tuned And that's really this story is over and over because it's supposed to beat into people's heads that The leaders the great leader Kim Il-sung and the dear leader Kim Jong-il are the ones running the show and But for them North Korea would be a complete disaster So they are very much obsessed with inculcating this Arab authority in North Korea And one of the things I wanted to do in this book is write it almost like a murder mystery We know who the victims are which is the North Korean people 24 million. How did it get to this point? How did the Kim family? You know managed to finagle the situation to get to this point and how the rest of the world Allow it to happen and it mapped out perfectly to Kim Jong-il's life because he was born in the early 40s during World War Two when Korea was becoming split into two nations and he died in 2011 So his life maps out perfectly to the history of North Korea's a nation So if you read the book you're going to get an understanding of how things got to the way they are But let me just give you the very quick since my talk is North Korean one lesson a very quick synopsis of how things got to be You know where they are today. So, you know post World War two North North Koreans very much resent and for some reason correctly the fact that they were the only nation dividing into two other than Germany They were not combatants enemy combatants They were on this, you know, they were colonized previous to that by the Japanese who by all accounts did not treat them very well The Japanese, you know tried to destroy Korean as a language itself Everyone had in Japan Korea had to take a Japanese name that takes speak Japanese in school and so on and so forth and then, you know, any kind of colony Is really in general not treated that well by those who colonize it and come World War two It was like well they the Russians were going to have the north and and several other places and the Americans were going to have custody over the south in several other places and They basically sat down with the map the the Americans very much wanted to have soul Which is was the which is the capital currently of South Korea. So they just basically cut it down the middle just north of Seoul and You know, you had the Russians on the top and the Americans in the south and One of the things that, you know, North Korea criticizes the south about which is valid is that America has a very nasty habit of invading a nation Causing bad things to happen there as wars want to do and then installing some strong man who is might might be you know Have loyalties to the states, but it's hardly libertarian And it's hardly in the long term really going to be great for the people so the Russians in their on their half installed Kim Il-sung and The Americans in their half installed Sigmund Rhee and Kim Il-sung who is the great leader is 100 times more important Kim Jong-il even though a few Americans know about him compared to Kim Jong-il It's like comparing Frank Sinatra to Nancy Sinatra No one would care about Nancy Sinatra, but for Frank Sinatra So the thing is Kim Il-sung was you know, the leader of this ragtag band of communist rebels fighting in Manchuria There is almost no historical record of him doing anything which North Korea very brilliantly points out as proof of The extent of Japanese censorship You can't find any evidence that he did anything because the wicked Jap devils Wiped it all out from the historical record and that just shows how pernicious and pervasive their control and censorship was and the idea was he was going to be a puppet of Stalin and Follow suit like all the other Communist nations and come 1950 come, you know come the post-World War two area era excuse me Kim Il-sung decided he was going to unify Korea under his rule. He invaded the south. He caught at one point He had 95% of the Korean Peninsula under his control, you know the US and the UN counter-attacked and you had the Korean War Which is basically a proxy war between the US and one hand and Western democracies and the other hand you had the Soviet Union in China and Korea which North Korea which often describes itself as quote a shrimp among whales When you have that small country in between these gigantic powers the people themselves, you know suffer enormous casualties You know, you had dams being destroyed and and and just the Bassacre was just absolutely horrific on both sides and basically at the end of the Korean War You it was backward started and you had North Korea and South Korea career and was driven into and what's very very funny If you go to North Korea, there's a museum right by the DMZ, which is the demilitarized zones divides the two Koreas and They will point to you to the UN flag and the UN dossiers that the Americans left and this of course is proof That the Americans are so embarrassed at their humiliating defeat by the great leader Kim Il-sung that they left it behind to flee With their proverbial or maybe literal tales between their legs And in fact one of the other things that was very very shocking to me while reading all the propaganda And I had to read 60 six zero books in order to craft your reader is that every criticism of North Korea They tackle and they address they don't sweep things under the rug the most horrific and kind of Ironic and Orwellian of them is you know the UN very recently attacked them for the human rights abuses and having concentration camps And they say we don't use the term concentration camps. Therefore. We don't have any And it's it's the only alternative we have is to laugh because if you understand the reality is just so horrific that they Could say something like this with a straight face So, you know in the book I have him defending censorship because at one point it you know in 19 I think it was 56 Khrushchev started to liberalize the Soviet Union and most of these satellite states followed suit and Kim Il-sung found this to be absolutely outrageous because he was a Stalinist He believes in absolute totalitarianism and there was an attempt to remove Kim Il-sung from power He got wind of this attempt and there was a plenary Congress and he literally stacked You know people who were disloyal he sat the people around them with people who were loyal to him And as soon as any of these people got up to speak those around them literally started shouting them down They were not given a chance to speak at all Those who were wavering saw how things were going and sided with Kim Il-sung and of course all those people who wanted North Korea to kind of liberalize and follow the Soviet model were taken to the camps with their families And were never seen again And and after that you know all sorts of other things happen Korea both Koreas have a very long history of xenophobia You know extreme racism So he stopped banning Russian learning Russian at schools any foreign literature any news of the outside world Korea has for centuries been known as the hermit kingdom in fact You know it was illegal for foreigners to step foot in Korea even the 19th century and it really became the case that any Anything foreign had to be completely eliminated Korean was good foreign is bad now This is a very difficult thing to pull off because Korea did not have many Accomplishments to its name. So of course the the Orwellian revisionism began Which is all these great accomplishments that the Japanese had were actually originated from Korea In fact even Mount Fuji is taken from the word Korean and pottery and all these other things the Korean people That sells invented and there's no greater exemplar of this than the great leader Kim Il-sung And when you have this sort of absolute dictatorship People very quickly, you know learned what's politically correct and what's not and and they mouth what they need to mouth and they smile and nod and they do what they have to in order to keep themselves and their families safe and Kim Il-sung played China versus the Soviet Union like a fiddle and they basically became a literal will for a state getting friendship prices meaning The Chinese would send them let's suppose gasoline or you know Machines and they would send back like useless disgusting socks and they would say that that's a barter and it's equal and and for a long time North Korea was actually doing better than the south because the south was regarded as this agrarian backwater and Things kind of came to a head with the states in 1968 there was an American ship called Pueblo and It was off the coast of North Korea the North Koreans captured them. They kept the men prisoner for a year And as they negotiated with quote-unquote war maniac Lyndon Johnson Of course informing his negotiators that John F. Kennedy is already rotting in hell and that they will soon be joining them and you know In typical North Korean bombast if we you know kind of attack North Korea, they'll destroy the world and all these other Doomsday things will happen so the negotiations went on for a year and at the end of the year They came up to a compromise the Americans just I can only imagine throwing their hands up said How about because the North Koreans said you have to admit you're spying and apologize and the American says absolutely not We're not admitting to spying and apologizing. That's crazy. You have to admit now They go what if the Americans put this forward we admit we were spying and apologize in writing But as we're signing it we say this is all a lie and the North Koreans like oh, yeah, it's fine and That literally happened there is the ceremony where the general is like The quotes in the book where he says the document. I'm about to sign claims the following Anything that it says is that variants with the facts does not contradict the facts I will sign this document to free the men and only to free the men and he signed the document and that Document is on display in Pyongyang and the men were set free the boat is still there is the only u.s. Navy ship Commission ship that is not under possession of the u.s. Government, but that kind of speaks to a little bit of the craziness Of what is going on there and what is going on here? And the fun part of writing this book was all the crazy stuff I didn't need to edit at all. I played it at face value and you read it and you're like, okay Whatever and then you go in Wikipedia and it's verbatim. This is exactly what happened And come the late 60s is when Kim Jong-il Started, you know working behind the scenes He was put in charge of the propaganda department for the workers party, which is their equivalent communist party He reinvented the movie industry He invented a completely new form of opera called pangchang because under Greek opera, for example You have the Greek choir behind you, you know, speaking at singing excuse me and moving the action along But in Korean opera the choir is off stage Which is completely different and completely revolutionized and it's more important than the Copernican Revolution if you ask them So all these superlatives are just absolutely amazing They will tell you that Kim Jong-il's college thesis the role of the county in establishing socialism was more important than Columbus Discovering America something which even given communist premises. I doubt it to be true But there became this big power struggle behind the scenes between Kim Jong-il and his uncle To see who would become the successor to the great leader Kim Il-sung and one of the crowding achievements was building this I think it's like a 10-story statue in Pyongyang of Kim Jong-il looking just like the Walt Disney statue Played it in gold until Deng Chao Deng Chao Ping said, you know, you're supposed to be a communist country Maybe a 10 foot 10 story tall gold-plated icon is not really what we're about. So they changed it to bronze Which is much more of course, you know populist have a 10-story bronze statue And to this day everyone who visits Pyongyang has to go in front of the statue and bow down and lay flowers And if you're getting married you bow down for the statue and every town in North Korea has a giant statue of Kim Jong-il or Which is only recent or Kim Il-sung the great leader or Kim Jong-il's mother Anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong-suk. They're this holy trinity That kind of governs the nation And all these other insane kind of personality cult things started happening Everyone in North Korea has to wear a badge with either the great leader the dear leader or both at all times Everyone in North Korea has to have a photograph that the government issues of the great leader and the dear leader on a wall It's the only thing allowed on that wall and the glass is angled so that it doesn't you know glare have glare in the sunlight But this is how pervasive the totalitarian is like we totalitarianism in North Korea We think it's kind of like, you know, don't do this. Don't do that Every aspect of your life in that country has been you know, kind of dictated by the state In fact early in the book I have Kim Jong-il railing Again spare time because spare time leads to liberalism and hooliganism and after that You're gonna fail the revolution and in fact if you're speaking on behalf of the people Anything is allowed you and and there is nothing beyond the state and the state is the masses and if you transgress against the masses You've cede your humanity and therefore anything that can happen to you is your fault Kim Il-sung said Explicitly that the enemies of the revolution should be exterminated to three generations So what they have in North Korea is something called the family purd the yang gojie So if something that if someone in your family does something bad, they will take three generations of your family They will not tell you what the crime is they will not have a trial You will be rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to a camps and since the whole family is going you have no way Of knowing which is the one who sent you there This is something even Stalin in his wildest dreams never dreamed of and this is happening to this day And they brag about it. They are proud of this because they're quote-unquote purifying the blood Although North Korea is often regarded as communist because of its roots. It's far far closer in its ideology to Nazi fascism They speak constantly of how the South has had their blood ruined by the fact that they are intermarrying with the US Imperialist apes, you know, let alone other minorities. It's just absolutely outrageous there's a metaphor they use that not one drop of ink shall be spilled in the Han River and Yes, they will admit now that the South is wealthier than they are but they are saying that they're the ones who are holding on to North Korean purity and Everything in North Korea has to be Korean based and for Koreans. They philosophy Juche is usually translated as self-reliance In actuality as I often say it means smurf Because it's a word with no meaning in every meaning and you'll have Juche architecture and Juche literature and Juche Acrobatics and Juche anything and it translates to that which the great leader and the dear leader wants all literature has to be about glorifying the great leader and the dear leader and I have to make this ironic comment in this book that People condemn North Korea if you go to a bookstore There's only books about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. That's not true We have a book about another person and that really is the case There's one book about the North Korean Nelson Mandela Rian Mo Who was held prisoner in the South for 35 years. So everything has to be about The leaders at all times. They are not taught geography. I met a couple of refugees They did not know about Hiroshima. They did not know about Nagasaki They were told only, you know, if any school in the States, you're gonna have that world map on the wall there They are only taught about Russia China Japan the US imperialists And South Korea, maybe there's one or two others and that's it because if it's not Korean you don't need to know about it Excuse me Sorry, okay And it's it's what's really tragic is now you're having a lot of people who are escaping to the south Are having being completely unable to adjust to life there. Their accents are regarded as guttural and low class They have no skills. They've never seen a computer Their entire lives have been regimented so that they don't know that they have to have an alarm clock and get to work on time They're treated completely terribly and being from a militaristic nation They're often prone to violence and anger and we're even seeing recently some cases of people repatriating to the north So it's it's even if tomorrow the regime vanished It would still be a very very long road to hoe for the north and let me talk about a bit about Kim Jong-il and and and why he really is Is you know truly a Horrific figure so after Kim Il-sung died in 1994 or even a little bit for they died food was becoming an issue at the collapse of the Soviet Union those friendship prices went away. North Korea did not have Any electricity because they didn't have gasoline and there was this amazing inversion in the literature of Leonard Reed's story I pencil Because North Korea ran out of pens because they ran out of the metal to make the pens and they ran out of metal because they Didn't have the railroads and they have the railroads because they have the railroad ties for the wood for the railroad ties This was actually in the literature and this was driving Kim Jong-il crazy So food was starting to become scarce and Kim Jong-il launched a campaign called let's eat two meals a day instead of three Because eating three meals a day is unhealthy. So it's good for you that you don't have food and In 1994 it was not at all clear that you know, he would take over he kind of vanished from power for a little bit And when he reappeared his campaign slogan was do not expect any change for me the probably One of the more bizarre political slogans of our time And in fact, it was very very unusual that Kim Jong-il would be the successor when he was declared the successor publicly in 1980 the rest of the Soviet bloc thought this was absolutely insane and obscene it contradicts every element of communist ideology and even you know a bit practice and they actually address this and go into it and I'll leave that for the book if for those who are interested But all these criticism they address about why Kim Jong-il should have taken over so he takes over and you know food is becoming more more scarce and he's worried about there's a Korean breed of dog is that breed of dog being driven to extinction and One of the things that that they did in North Korea, which is also completely much more fascist than communist is they had something called The understanding people project now I don't know anyone who could be opposed to understanding people and that's the beauty of Orwellism is everything sounds perfectly nice And then you learn about it and it's really not that nice So what did they do they interviewed every single person in North Korea? And there were several iterations of this and you were assigned a cast rating There's the hostile cast the wavering cast and the favorable cast and then there were 51 Subdivisions based on what your family was doing during the Korean War. Were you a landlord? Were you a Christian? You know, you know, were your farmer or laborer this determines whether you can go to college It determines who you marry it determines what job you have it determines whether you can join the army And it determines where you live and the people with an unfavorable cast and you're not told your cast You can only kind of glean what it is by how people in power treat you those with an unfavorable cast were sent to the northeast They're not allowed to live near a city or near the near the sea They're not certainly not allowed to step foot in Pyongyang and when the famine hit This was great for Kim Jong-il because he said oh good all the unreliable people in the Northeast We don't have to send food there And he said explicitly having too many people makes socialism difficult And rather than making the UN come in and give them food, which the rest of the world was more than happy to do He said if the UN and these outside charities are giving them food They're not going to need the government so we can't have that So you had UN people come in and they would take them to the same town literally three days in a row pretend They're new towns bring out the healthiest people say we don't have a problem here They were not allowed to have any UN inspectors who spoke Korean Because they wanted to have absolute control of the process and the UN and Associated agencies were eventually like to hell with this. This is nonsense and they pulled out So this is the level of you know people ask me What's it going to take for a for the regime to fall if you are willing to have 10% of your population? Starve in order to maintain your hold on power I don't know what it's going to take to get you out of there a huge portion of North Korea is literally Subterranean their Metro and Pyongyang which they're very proud of all communist nations are very proud of the subway systems because it's where the people Is the deepest in the world because it's a bomb shelter These people are taught since they are birthed that as soon as the leaders drop their guard the US imperialists And they can only say US imperialist They notice the Americans the US imperialists are going to evade and kill them all just like they did during the Korean War so Many of the people there still remember The Korean War and and and with you know with good reason they're worried about that happening Again because war it you know it's pretty awful in this libertarians We tend to realize it's really really a bad thing to happen So if given their kind of fastest obsession with blood it was not at all unusual that the follower to Kim Jong-il Was Kim Jong-un the people at the very top in the north are there simply because of their loyalty They are not there because of their skills or anything like that They are there because they have pleaded loyalty to the regime and to the Kim family Only the loyal people are allowed to step foot in Pyongyang and within Pyongyang itself There's a city within a city where the party meets and and runs the show and that none of the buildings have signs If you want to know where a building is you would know about it otherwise mind your business When you go through Pyongyang you see all these amazing monuments You know like the Soviet Union symbol of course was very famously the hammer and sickle In North Korea it's completely different because it's the hammer and sickle in a writing brush Because north they add the writing brush for the intellectuals once again And they're completely unlike Marxism and you go there and you see these huge monuments that are several stories high But fist holding up a sickle and a fist holding up the the writing brush and you realize this was built at the expense of food People are not allowed to leave the country even if you're a diplomat you have to have family staying behind So that you make sure you come back or else they are going to be punished for your transgressions The only good thing is that recently during the famine starting with the 90s is the government has not been able to provide food for the people Which means the border between north korea and china. There's a river the two man river is very porous So those guards are not getting fed so people go across the china They smuggle ginseng or whatnot they come back the guard gets a cut And the thing that brought down the servet union and will hopefully bring down the north korean regime was this creeping sense of cynicism Very famously during the 80s, you know, russian women watched dallas and dynasty and tv Saw how the maids were dressed and were like why am I putting up with the de-electrical materials and nonsense When I could have nice clothes it doesn't make any sense and and People in north word of mouth travels very very quickly. They see how poor people live in the south They see how dogs in china have meat when they haven't even seen meat in years is a very famous story And they start to realize this is not all it's cracked up to me It's very easy to convince a captive nation that they are wealthy and happy It is almost impossible to convince a person that they have more food on their plate this year than they had last year Or that their children aren't really hungry or that that hunger is a good thing So these are the only kind of cracks that are possible in the regime However, north korea is an absolute surveillance state Everyone in the country is assigned into a group based on your school the union the late the communist women something like that Once a week everyone in the country everyone has to get up and have a criticism session They have to say this is what I did wrong this week. I was late to work I didn't pay attention to the phone the phone or something like that Then your colleagues have to get up and say I saw carl coming in late to work I saw what he wouldn't be and something like that So you are constantly under surveillance by everyone else and they're looking for things to say about you So the idea of people colluding and starting some underground is absolutely impossible You will be rewarded very handsomely for turning people in and when you're hungry that is a very big incentive to do this So I don't know what's going to help the The the north korean people I just felt it was very important for me to present what's going on there in a package that is both coherent logical and entertaining Because there's books out there that are very very very good, but they're dark and depressing as hell and there's books that are you know Kind of histories, but it's they're collegiate and it's not for the lay reader And my background is writing popular books And I thought it absolutely behooves us to have a book that anyone can read on the plane or something like that And by the time they're done they're going to understand what's going on there The one thing I would want people to take away even if they don't read your reader is When you say that north korea is crazy There's two senses that that means one is when you say someone's crazy that their their actions are completely random and Coherent and they're not that there's also crazy in the sense of once if someone is delusional if I have the belief That I um if I am in a room with celery it will give me cancer It'll be very easy to address this craziness. Just don't put celery around me. Everything else will be perfectly normal So their actions are very coherent uh predictable and follow a logic Which by looking at it from the west seems completely incomprehensible But if you go back and figure out how it got to be this place it makes perfect sense And I'll give you one very good example before I it's time for questions Before open the floor questions They have a constitution and this is an artifice for western eyes They also but that doesn't it's not what governs north korea The idea that north korea had this kind of system of laws, of course absurd to us They have a ten commandments of kim il sung and it's like you shall have no leader above kim il sung is literally the first one The last one of which is you know the the mount pic two bloodline shall be continued through the generations Until the revolution is done, which is what sets up the order of succession so You know much of what they present for the outside world is gamesmanship like they know You know communist nations have these constitutions you want a constitution will give you one But we're going to do what we please and operate under our way Which is what juche means and they gloat in the fact that they can flout the rules of the outside world And from their perspective, we're the only ones holding on to You know the status ideal and the rest of the world is being poisoned by the toxic yellow winds of capitalism So that's what we're up against and and i'll be glad to you know afford any questions for sure. There'll be several Thank you Go ahead Great talk. Thank you I would imagine that the military is treated very well that they eat well And that's sort of the police because they need them to keep the people in mind. Is that true? Well, uh, no one eats well The military is a huge percentage of population north korea is like the fourth largest military in the world even if 24 million people What's amazing about them is the military does all their construction So instead of sitting around waiting for a war they're actually putting up these buildings But they don't have gasoline so a lot of these buildings Come up a rough shot and crappy and in true egalitarian style I it's my understanding that women have to work as hard as the men and produce equal results Because of course why let the facts of reality, you know violate your philosophy. So, uh, they no one's eating well in that country whatsoever Yes, you want to pass the mic pass of the mic Yes, oh, yes, yeah Yeah, I I want everything I never wrote the actually the one essay that of hers that I could not get out of my head the whole time Was the monument builders Because you're seeing all these monuments and she always talks about the more rinky dink and pathetic a dictator the bigger the You know accomplishments they claim and the bigger the monuments and you're standing there looking at it You're like, okay. This is what she meant, you know in the flesh Go ahead The prospects of overthrowing the regime in the next several years are nil Uh, I don't I can't even imagine a scenario how they would be overthrown externally. They 100% have nukes They would have absolutely no compunction about using them Again, they're hugely subterranean. They've been kim jong-il boasts that he turned the nation into a hedgehog By which he means something that cannot be attacked from the outside They've been planning for this for a very long time and Something I talk about in the book is if you look at most of these nations when the dictatorship falls down the dictators themselves And their and their regime are personally murdered So there's a huge incentive for those people at the top like, you know To not go the chakjesku or the kadafi route And even if they don't believe it as soon as they liberalize there will be killed with good reason So that's just another reason for them not to fall. So the prospect It's very very dark and very very fighting, but the book's hilarious as the cover That that was the what I kind of set out to do. Yes, can you fasten the mic? They were not american so the trip the tour people were just tourists from all around the world is very cosmopolitan The suit $140 cash and she and here's something interesting. So they want the us currency as much as possible Currency has an inflation incentive. It goes if it gets ripped or old So she wanted the new 20s Not the 20s that had wear and tear So and and she was just the tailor was looking at my wall. I'm like lady. I only have these two 20s left And she's like, I don't know which one So it was a kind of if hornian and interesting moment and I would encourage anyone to go It's just an absolutely fascinating thing and and hopefully I want it to be where people can't go to north korea Because it won't exist in the near future. Yes. Go ahead I'm a bit of a numbers person. I don't understand the numbers if nobody's producing anything How could they have such a powerful army and such powerful armaments? Because all the numbers work all the all the money is going to armaments and the food is coming from outside sources And there are these little markets that are springing up and again You had 10 percent of the population die and pretty much everyone's still hungry there So it's and they do they do these weird things like they'll retrofit Like they'll turn cars to be you can drive the cars with wood instead of gasoline Which is very inefficient and they do other things like You know, everyone in everyone everyone in north korea during the fall and during the fall Goes to the fields and helps with the rice harvest And my guide was telling me about so I'm like, oh, that's very nice because I think about it in this american You know nice everyone's teaming up and she's like, yeah, and I realize you know, she's this, you know, bougie City dweller and she's got to be in the mud with these dirt farmers And for her it's just like are you kidding me? You know, don't you know who I am So it they very much, you know look down in the rural people there, which is something else I found very interesting the proper again. It didn't get to her. Yes So let's say I wanted to travel there with my life Stay stay three star hotels about how much Does that run? Oh, how much it costs. I I mean you're not having your choice of hotels. You understand I mean there's there's two hotels and you have to go through a established western tour group And everything's included, of course I would encourage anyone to come to bring a lot of like five dollar bills and just hand them out to people Because that's going to be giving them food. You just slip them in the palm. They know what to do So that that's what I would encourage and I would encourage anyone to go and I mean go online and and look I don't I mean I'm not in orbits We got a question in the back You're next Okay, the the people in the concentration camps the people in the concentration camps are told explicitly If the us and perilous invade we are going to kill all of you and burn these camps down They are it's much more horrific. I don't like comparing tragedies. So let's just leave it that My point is they do things like they will send men into mines and the men will literally never leave the minds And the skin will fall off because of vitamin D deficiency They gloat that women are much better snitches than men So they encourage the women to get extra food by by sleeping with men and turning the men in There's things like you know women being raped by the guards, which is you're forbidden to have sex with the guards And since you had sex with the guard, they will cut your legs off running you over But you still have to report to work. So she's pushing herself along in attire Um, this is what we're dealing with. So these people have but the insane thing is there's a book called aquariums of pyongyang Which is very famous people are not given life sentences Sometimes they're given a finite sentence. You're not told and after 10 years you're released Into north korea and you have to sign a paper saying I will never tell anyone what happens here That I spoke to refugees the refugees absolutely know that people get vanished So they are aware that this kind of and the one thrill I'm you know, I'm kind of a little bit of a twisted person The one smile I got in my face was in the book aquariums of pyongyang the family that got sent to the camps the ants They had emigrated from japan to korea the grandmother. Excuse me. She was a hardcore communist You know, this is going to be great and they get sent to the camp and she couldn't reconcile She goes this shouldn't be happening under communism and it's like brother. You asked for it You know, this is what that means when you have no semblance of human rights And your only justification for living is being a function of the state Guy behind you Yes I am korean Contrary to my appearance That's the alcatraz of fun. Yes No, no the tallest building is not structurally sound the rug young So you stay at the yangado which is on an island, but this one is in the middle of pyongyang Yes, and no one stepped foot in there Right Well, what happened later kim jong-il and I talk about this in dear reader He launched what he described in his terms as a crybaby operation Uh, he's like, you know what let's start showing them the worst places A lot of the food went in, you know, they got food and they got money and all that food and money got subverted by kim jong-il to feed the military And he's like, this is great You know, you want to see the poor kids go look at the poor kids. Send me the rice So, I mean, but what but what choice do you have, you know, if he's controlling everything I mean, it's very easy to make the argument that we got to send them some rice in the hope that the rice gets Divert into the people and that often happens. I mean it gets sent to the people at hugely inflated black market rates But I mean the only alternative is I don't know what the alternatives are. I mean, it's just so bad on every level Well, yes, so he started getting that for an aid and and putting in his pocket and going to the military, you know Yes Yes kim jong-il was the world's largest importer of hennessey and And and hennessey is on the record of saying they can tell how well the regime was doing by how big the orders were that year He was not a playboy So north korea is very very chased so they would have these parties with strippers But you would never allowed to touch them and they were very they're very kind of puritanical in that sense He didn't uh, parasail and I've never heard that story and that's that's not something was uh, sure go ahead Let's get you the mic And he's a doctor and he created this initiative to bring So Wait, can I say one thing things got so bad during the 90s. They even had polio come back in the north Yeah, so he had several experiences and I know this firsthand because So one of the things that happened was he got out to some of these Institutions where they had tuberculosis patients and they gave them seeds They talked about raising their consciousness the bad green foods because that's one of the things that you can use But in addition they worked inside with the doctor And here's the equipment that the doctors were using They were using x-ray equipment that actually caused the x-rays to go onto the doctor. Oh, yeah And I mean this this is a bona fide story And I think it's To say oh look at all these aids that are coming our way and we you know Reluctantly, that's my perception. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely go ahead Um 300 300 unfortunate young women were kidnapped in Nigeria a few days ago and You would think this is the great new cause. It's a terrible event, but 24 million have been imprisoned For decades, not that I want Hollywood to take up a cause that that's significant of nothing But it would seem to be helpful if we could make the cause that you've exposed Popular and relevant and covered in the media Is there some some trick to make the story more more publicized? I'm doing what I can You know, I mean, that's my whole point with this book. I've gotten an enormous amount of press. I was on Carson daily I had a piece in the Guardian today. I'm going to be in the Atlantic wire next week I I can only hope that people buy the book and recommend it and especially people in the liberty movement They very much are interested in this. This is the lowest hanging fruit and it's something that you know I mean, how do you affect change in another country? South Korea versus North Korea. Yes There's a very famous picture of this Korean peninsula at night and North Korea is just black void and South Korea is this bright sunlight thing So, yeah, it's Okay, he's got the mic. I'm sorry Oh, we got a patriot There's absolutely no way I would go back to North Korea and here's why you're only given your visa the day of I couldn't believe I was I was going to be allowed in until actually stepped foot in there So I I don't want to spend thousands of dollars to go to beijing and then I'm in beijing and they're like sorry about it So I I'm not even going to roll those dice They they're aware of this because I was in North Korean news and they're a hundred percent aware of this book So so that's that so now we're going to go now we're going to Michael It will move to the back room back there. Let me just say if you want more just go to kim jong il book.com It's on amazon. It's on kindle and I'll be glad to sign whatever you want right now. Thank you