Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park
Uploaded: 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1691 - Yeonmi Park

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
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.
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.
And it's hard to believe for people that don't know what life is like in North
Korea,
the reality of you growing up in North Korea.
But just talking about how you essentially had no food,
and you would go looking for bugs to eat.
Yeah.
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 a dream, it hurts, right?
Right.
When you 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 going to wake up in my living room in North Korea.
So it's, sometimes that line is very blurry to me.
And because the one common thing that North Koreans all have is actually in our
dreams,
when you 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, like she tells me about a 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 our 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 a different planet could be like.
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 was born.
That's like Jiu-chai-won, 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.
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?
You know, 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 like 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's in-laws.
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 big Marxist and Leninist, and he was a communist.
So in the, before the Korean War in 1948, that's when he began this, 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.
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?
Right?
Yeah.
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 I've 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
content.
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 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, we, so, the land is government, right?
The house is, there's no private property.
And, but those farmers in the working in the collective farm,
they smuggle it out and stay in the black market secretly.
So, those food, we, if we have money, we go to black market, buy, you know,
corn, starch,
those things, but mostly we just go to mountain to pick up plants, flowers,
and, like, grasshoppers is the biggest protein source for North Koreans.
But the government doesn't provide any food for the people?
So, 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 the population dies.
Wow.
It's still there, 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, does starvation.
So, there's no effort whatsoever to get food to the people?
They, it's not like effort.
They're actually actively preventing people to get resources.
Preventing, right 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 as a 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 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, it's 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, 4, 10 feet.
4, 10.
Yeah.
Wow.
And so, so they just allow people to forage for themselves.
That's the idea.
Yeah.
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.
That is, everything is owned by the state.
In North Korea, you don't even own yourself, right?
So, I remember going to South Korea, people, 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, like, there's, you don't plan your day.
You, you don't get to plan what you do with your life.
Like, a week before, or a day before, there's announcement from the government.
How you're going to spend your day.
When, 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.
Yeah.
And you're not allowed to have your own animals.
So, 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, it wasn't?
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.