Shadowing Practice: What’s ACTUALLY Happening in North Korea - Learn English Speaking with Video

Testing one, two, three, four, five.

If you point a camera at the earth, 600 kilometers above the surface, it's pretty mesmerizing.

But pointing at the Korean Peninsula and you'll see this.

South Korea is ablaze, but North Korea is almost totally dark.

You've got this little point here for Pyongyang, the capital, but it's mostly a void.

The Black Void tells a story of how the 25 million people live in this secretive kingdom of North Korea.

But as the sun rises, we get to fill in the details, we get to see more.

We get to see cities designed to control.

We get to see an unfathomable amount of military installations, many of them burrowed into mountains where they protect nuclear weapons.

Where the over one million soldiers endlessly prepare for war.

There's over 10,000 manned military installations.

So air defense, bases, naval sites, you know, all that squeezed into Pennsylvania.

We see factories, lots of factories.

We see these little islands of dense housing, which are the homes of the workers who are assigned here.

We see barriers, lots of barriers.

Barriers meant to keep people in.

And not just on the borders with neighbors, but also within the country itself checkpoints and barriers between provinces.

I've been looking at every inch of North Korea because I want to understand how it actually works.

I want to understand how the all-powerful leaders have designed this place and why.

And I've been stumbling upon stuff that I never thought I'd see in North Korea.

Ski resorts, an international children's camp, lots and lots of water slides, markets where people buy and sell things, schools and fields, fruit factories,

Coal shipments, limestone mines, burial grounds, prison camps in the cities and the mountains, lots of strange looking buildings, stadiums and tracks, sports fields,

empty roads and empty squares, Christian churches, a turtle shaped building, apartment blocks where rich people live.

I mean you stumble upon some pretty wild stuff when you just scour every inch of the satellite map.

I've also been talking to experts who spend their time looking at the map of North Korea, analyzing it day by day for decades.

Their data has been really useful in all of this, And honestly, I'm starting to see North Korea in a totally different way.

I think I've been exposed to a very specific version of this country.

And that doesn't mean it's an inaccurate version, but it's just one version.

Today I want to show you a deeper version.

Now the map can't tell us everything, but I'm seeing how it can fill in the blanks in my knowledge of how this country actually works.

Broadening my perspective on this most secretive kingdom in our world.

So buckle up and let's get ready to look at this map.

I mean this whole country is under one giant surveillance.

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And with that, let's dive back in to the map.

I mean, first things first, North Korea is a beautiful country.

North Korea is usually viewed as, you know, this hellscape of a place.

But it's actually really beautiful.

Lots of mountains and hills and rare animals and everything.

It's home to this huge mountain range.

Among these rugged mountains, you've got this volcano, Mount Pek-tu.

It's kind of a sacred spot for North Koreans.

It's where their legends say their great leader, Kim Jong-il, was born.

Incidentally, it's right on this border, actually.

Half of Mount Pek-tu is on the Chinese side.

China, North Korea.

North Korea can get really cold and snowy.

It's home to between 20 and 30 million people.

It's about half as many as live in South Korea.

And it was the war in the 1950s that created these two Koreas, and in the process turned what is now North Korea into dust.

Today, North Korea is built around a few major cities.

Here's the ten most populous.

Some have ports, some are up on the border with China, and then there's this river city of Pyongyang.

This is the capital.

A lot of this had to be redesigned from scratch because the country was destroyed in the Korean War.

The country itself is designed in line with this North Korean communist ideology of a human body.

The great leader is the brain

and then the members of his single party government represents the nervous system that connects his will to the masses.

The masses are the bones and the muscle, the ones who carry out the work of building this country.

The country is supposed to act as one, serving the will of the brain, the great leader.

And what I'm seeing is that this kind of body configuration allows them to do some pretty unique things.

First and foremost, military.

Most countries spend like between 1 and 4% of their GDP on military.

North Korea spends like between 20 and 25% of their GDP on their military.

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And we've got the data on what that looks like.

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Whoa, okay, settle down big boy.

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Oh god.

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Look at this.

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Oh my lord, look at this.

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I don't think I've ever seen so many yellow push pins in my life.

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It kind of reminds me of that map of like saunas in Finland.

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Places like a fortress.

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You can see that a lot of this is concentrated down here on their southern border.

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This is the DMZ.

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It's actually a four kilometer thick border and technically within this four kilometers, there's supposed to be no military stuff.

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That is if you don't count the thousands of landmines

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that are there left over from the Korean War and that North Korea continues to plant.

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But in terms of weapons, most of it is right here on the border of the DMZ,

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where North Korea has 900 artillery guns that are aimed right at Seoul.

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Seoul, South Korea.

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In the event of a conflict, these guns could fire 10,000 rounds a minute at South Korea,

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which would make good on their promise to turn South Korea into a sea of fire, which they often make towards their southerly neighbor.

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Now, reminder, it's not Not just North Korea.

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If we were mapping American or South Korean military assets, you'd see a lot of those too on the southern side, down here.

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But we are looking at North Korea right now.

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You've got underground bunkers, missile launch sites, nuclear reactors, airstrips, naval bases.

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So you've got the thousands of landmines, and of course, this little pavilion where soldiers from both sides stand meters apart.

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This is where the countries have their diplomatic talks.

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You've got a thousand observation posts, 300 checkpoints and roadblocks, tons of military facilities that support the soldiers here, and then of course tunnels.

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Man, you're going to see a lot of underground stuff here.

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North Korea is covered with these things, and this is just the ones we know of.

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One explanation for these tunnels is that during the Korean War, this country was basically flattened.

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Almost every building was turned to dust by American bombs.

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A huge part of the North Korean psyche is this paranoid fear of air power.

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They designed their defense strategy to be ready for if that ever happens again.

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So you have a lot of these fortified bases and tunnels.

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Some of them are for weapons storage, and some of them are for invasion.

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Like down here on the DMZ, they secretly dug a bunch of tunnels that are kilometers long, that go under the DMZ.

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This would allow them to move troops into South Korea very quickly actually went into one of these tunnels

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that had been discovered by South Korea.

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But these tunnels also have another purpose and in fact the military itself, a big portion of it, is dedicated to protecting one family.

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You'll see this in the capital.

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This is the barracks that houses some of the 100,000 bodyguards meant to protect the Kim family.

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This hill is like a giant bunker.

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It's home to a bunch of military installations, some of them deep underground, a lot of them connected through tunnels.

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And this is one of the many escape plans

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that the Kim family has in case of an attack They can escape on an armored train

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or in one of the helicopters that is stored inside of this hill There's rumors

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that there is another huge tunnel system on the northern border

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that would allow the Kims to sneak into China if they needed to.

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Just the amount of effort put into the security of the Kims themselves versus, you know, helping out your average person.

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I don't think people really realize the amount of security infrastructure that they have.

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But it's not all underground.

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The country is littered with 1500 guns and missiles that are meant for shooting down aircraft.

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A third of those, by the way, are concentrated around Pyongyang, the capital.

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Like, look at this one.

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Pretty funky looking from above.

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Here in the middle of this field.

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You've got the Air Force.

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The Air Force is one of their larger military branches.

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And then you've got their Navy, which has a bunch of submarines.

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A lot of them not totally operable, experts think.

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But in a recent video we made on submarines, we calculated at least 36 operable submarines hanging out in bases like this.

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Now look at their missile sites.

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Missiles, rockets, nuclear weapons are a big deal for this regime, especially the most recent leader, who, as you can see from this graph, has really ramped up the testing of all of this.

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These missiles have all kinds of different ranges

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but the longest ones can go 12,000 kilometers away and

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that puts a lot of the world in range including the United States.

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Many of those are up here in these mountain bases where they store these missiles and where they can launch them.

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But lately they've also been trying to send up non-weapons into space.

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This launch pad is where, over the last couple of years, they've tried to put satellites up into space.

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It's put a satellite in orbit.

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There's only about 11 or 12 countries around the world that have ever put a satellite in orbit.

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The military is core to keeping the Kims in power, which is why they often show it off.

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I love this video from The Guardian.

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Aaaaaahhhh They

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know when one of these things is gonna happen because there's like a replica of the Kim Il-sung Square,

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the big central square, where all of these soldiers get together and practice.

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And so whenever they see activity in that practice square, they know that they're getting ready for one of these.

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So the military is a very important part of keeping the Kims in power.

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It's used as propaganda, it's used as actual defense, and it's often used to actually build stuff.

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And you've got one of the largest militaries in the world, a million plus active duty.

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They're able to command that to do all sorts of projects, including construction projects, which we're gonna look at.

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One thing you'll see a lot of in North Korea is fences.

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And not to necessarily keep people from coming in, but more so to keep people from going out.

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They've spent years building a fence around the entire perimeter of the country, at least 1,400 kilometers, bordering China alone.

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Here's all the security outposts.

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I mean, this fencing goes through all kinds of terrain, including dug into the beach.

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And a lot of this was built recently as more and more people have been trying to escape.

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And then within the country itself, there are barriers that control people's movement.

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The country has checkpoints at the province borders to make sure people aren't moving around without permission.

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So yeah, a lot of people can't get out of North Korea, but some can.

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In fact, there's a whole network of IT professionals, North Korean engineers, who interview for Western tech jobs,

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get hired, and then pass money and information back to the North Korean regime, all without their employer knowing it.

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Okay, I'm about to try to conduct a job interview for the first time in my life.

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I reached out to David Wenski, a senior software engineer, and he responded to me three hours after I reached out.

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But I'm not actually hiring anybody.

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And I don't think David Wenski is actually who he says he is.

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This is a big rabbit hole that is very juicy.

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And my colleague Christoph went down that rabbit hole in a new video that's live right now over on his channel.

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His show is called Tunnel Vision.

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It's very good and this story about IT espionage and money funneling back to North Korea is incredibly wild.

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How deep Kristoff was able to get.

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So you should go check that out.

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The link is in the description.

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Okay, so a lot of this stuff probably isn't that surprising to you.

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This is the kind of stuff we see on the news, the stuff that gets covered a lot.

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The military, the missiles, the control.

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But now I want to get to the part of this country

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that really led me to this video in the first place, which is the stuff that we don't see very often.

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To try to expand my understanding of what it is like to live in North Korea.

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What is life like in these cities out here in the rural areas?

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How do they make stuff?

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Where do they get their food?

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Entertainment, community...

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Turns out that between defector testimony, state news, and the satellite map, you can actually learn a lot about this stuff.

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A lot of North Korea cities were designed from scratch after the city was turned into rubble because of the Korean War.

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And because of that, they have very unique design design

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that is meant to fulfill a certain objective that is in line with North Korean ideals of controlling people,

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unifying people, and continuously celebrating their leaders and the struggle of their continuous revolution.

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So many of us have seen the capital, we'll get to that, but I want to look at these other cities.

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A lot of North Korean cities are built around a big central square like this.

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A lot of them have these circles that look like they're hand-drawn.

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The square is kind of the middle of the city.

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Then you have these massive boulevards that kind of frame out the city.

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Now you'll quickly notice in a lot of these cities that these boulevards are pretty empty.

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You see a lot more buses than you see private cars.

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Oh and you see a mosque every once in a while.

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I tried to get to the bottom of what the deal is with these mosques.

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North Korea has a couple of these churches or mosques that are mostly there for optics, from what I can tell.

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More on that in a little bit.

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So yeah, you've got these empty boulevards, lots of empty squares that lead to these kind of grand spaces.

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Now, these spaces are often punctuated with some kind of monument.

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Here's one.

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Here we go, Central Square.

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I mean, we can go back in time too and sort of look at the historical imagery.

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Huge boulevards, often very empty.

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Oh, boom, look.

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Someone's visiting.

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So when you see people, you often see them in huge groups like this.

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At least that's what I've noticed from above.

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When there's people, there's a lot of them, and they're all very close.

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But oftentimes this stuff is empty.

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Oh, look.

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Here's a bunch of people lined up in near-perfect geometry on this square.

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Every major city has a stadium.

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Now, some of these are in kind of bad shape, but some are really nice.

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Sports is a big deal in North Korea.

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Some of the sports that are popular in North Korea, they do very well.

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So they're definitely in some areas sort of hitting above their weight.

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Yeah.

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Though defectors do report that sometimes a stadium like this one in particular has been used for public executions or public shamings.

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A big part of the control regime in North Korea is to publicly punish, to keep people in line.

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Okay, and then recently the government declared that every city needs to have one of these.

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Check this out.

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There are around 170 of these traffic parks, and these are new, but these are very important to North Korean cities.

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Remember all those empty streets?

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Like, most people don't own cars in North Korea.

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They go on buses.

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But recently that's kind of changing.

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There's even a car company that puts together like kit cars and sells them in North Korea.

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They're one of the few companies that actually advertise.

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And so because of that, there is more traffic in residential areas, which has led to more accidents for kids who are not used to dealing with cars.

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So this was an initiative to teach kids the rules of traffic to promote public safety for children.

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One thing that's going on.

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Okay, so those are some of the design patterns and kind of common ingredients in a North Korean city.

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But let me show you some specific cities because as we do that, you start to see how this country works, how its economy works.

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Ham Hong is one of their bigger cities.

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You've got your standard big, giant, empty squares with statues of the leaders.

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This is actually a big economic hub for chemicals.

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Here's an area that some experts believe is a chemical facility where they actually store this stuff underground.

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Remember how they love to put everything underground to protect it?

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These little white dots sort of represent that there is something buried there

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and potentially chemical weapons or other sensitive chemicals that they don't want the world to know about.

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You see these big industrial facilities, they make a lot of chemicals like fertilizer, pesticides.

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It's home to this pretty wild looking amusement park.

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I don't know what is going on with these slides.

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Now I've never seen it full of people even when I go to a weekday in the summer.

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But I want to show you this one factory.

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This is a really important building in North Korea because this is where they make vinylon.

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Vinylon is a fabric that you can make not with wool or cotton, but with coal and limestone, which is something they have a lot of in North Korea.

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So as a part of the push for self-reliance, North Korea produces this synthetic material called vinylon.

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They use it for uniforms.

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A lot of clothing in North Korea is made with this really tough, scratchy, durable vinyl on material.

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They use it for curtains, they kind of use it for everything.

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It's the North Korean national fabric.

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So this is their biggest vinyl on factory right here.

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And it's so important that the leader came to the reopening when they renovated this thing.

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So yeah, vinyl on is made with coal.

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They mine a lot of coal in North Korea.

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If you zoom into this port in Hamheng, you'll see really gnarly looking yellow pollution.

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But you'll also see ships, ships with coal aboard.

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You'll see all this coal getting ready to be shipped out, basically all of it going to China and potentially violating sanctions, but that's not what we're looking into right now.

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Let's go to another city, but this one is interesting.

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It's up north, right in the shadow of Mount Pektu.

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This is a nice looking city.

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It's home to this ice rink.

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It's got a ski hill up here.

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There's of course the required children's traffic park.

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This was a big construction project for Kim Il-sung.

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And it's meant to show the world that North Korea is open for tourism, especially here in the shadow of their holy mountain.

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And look, this thing went up really fast.

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There's evidence that to make this thing go so fast, they used this youth construction brigade,

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which is a bunch of young people who do construction labor for like 10 to 12 hours a day

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as a way to show their loyalty to the party and potentially move up in the ranks, to move out of their social class, which is something we'll talk about in a little bit.

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This district was pretty much empty before it started.

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And in the space of within a couple of years, or even a year, all of this was built.

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We don't know much about the construction standards, but they do build very fast.

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But yeah, when you control every human in the country, you can build this stuff really quick.

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Now, whether or not this is good quality stuff is another question.

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Like I've seen videos of some of these houses in the mountains that like have ice on the inside of the window.

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So we're not sure if this is, you know, good construction, but boy, they're building stuff fast.

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Okay, let me show you a few more of these cities.

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Okay, let's go to Chongqing, port city here on the East coast.

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It's gnarly industrial stuff going on here, home to these very cookie cutter looking homes.

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Here they produce textiles, rubber, steel, they build trains, they've got a big power plant.

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And you can see out here in the water, this is where a lot of shipping comes in and out of the country.

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Look at all these vessels.

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I mean, not a lot relative to most countries, but you know, got all this gnarly industrial stuff doing steel.

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You can see that they're shipping stuff out.

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There's coal, some of these minerals.

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A lot of mining happens, which, as we will see,

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usually is the work of political prisoners deep in the mountains working a life sentence of hard labor.

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But yeah, for now, let's just look at this.

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I mean some of this stuff just looks like a wasteland, but you know, that's industry for you.

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But then all of that steel production is happening right next to these tightly packed homes.

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Just endless, endless homes.

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You've got your required empty boulevard, traffic park.

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Here's their train station.

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Here's the big central square.

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This one's really or neatly designed.

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Let's see if anything happens if we go back in time.

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Oh, they just built this.

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This is 2020.

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Look at this thing go up.

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Looks nice.

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Statues of the two leaders, sports stadium, and if you look at these big blue roofs, you will see something that you wouldn't expect to see in North Korea.

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This is the home to a market where thousands of vendors buy and sell things all day here in the socialist,

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communist, anti-capitalist utopia of North Korea.

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So the story here is that back in the 90s, when the Soviet Union fell, North Korea was hit very hard because they were very reliant on aid from the Soviet Union.

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Mass famine spread throughout the whole country and this region was very deeply hit.

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So it gave rise to this really resourceful black market.

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Homemade goods, smuggled goods, sort of bartering, trading between a couple hundred thousand to a couple million people died during this famine.

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And the black market was the only way that a lot of people lived and still live today.

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So in 2008 the government tried to crack down on this.

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This is like very anti-North Korean, like letting people buy and sell and smuggle stuff in.

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This is like not North Korean.

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They cracked down and the mostly women merchants in this city protested.

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You don't see that in North Korea.

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They marched to the city government office and there was like a big confrontation

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and they basically said like we won't be able to live if you cut us off of this.

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Where North Korea has started to change has been the sort of underground economy.

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It has become somewhat tolerated under Kim Jong-un, these kind of illicit markets.

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And today, the government continues to let this happen.

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This one we're looking at with the blue roof is a big example of that, but it's not the only one.

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Not even close.

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These markets are now all over the country.

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So a lot of people get their stuff on this kind of black, gray, informal market, which has turned into a massive network of trafficking stuff in,

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usually from China, and almost always illegally.

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Individual smugglers that will bring stuff literally across the river that divides North Korea and China.

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Sometimes those trading companies will, in the back of the truck, in addition to the shipment, they're meant to be bringing in, bring a few other things in as well.

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And then that will kind of flow into the black market that way.

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Back in the famine days, it was just the essentials.

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It was just rice and corn, just basic food.

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But with time, it started to become a more sophisticated private market.

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And today you can get all kinds of cheap Chinese products.

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I mean China is like the manufacturing powerhouse of the world and they are right there next to North Korea.

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There's a lot of ships and trucks coming back and forth between the two countries, which serves as the arteries for this black market.

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A lot of these goods end up in these markets.

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Here's one in Pyongyang.

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There's a part of me that wants to do a whole video on these markets because they are very interesting.

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The whole informal economy of North Korea is something I might do a video on.

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If you're interested in that, let me know because man, I want to pull on that thread.

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But real quick, there's two things that I feel like I'm learning about North Korea because of this informal market system.

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Number one, North Korea's very survival is thanks to the presence of China.

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China, this massive manufacturer, rapidly developing country,

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is a lifeline for North Korea both in the formal trade as well as the informal black market.

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And the second thing

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that this kind of confirms for me is just how much the centrally planned communist government does not work.

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It does not actually work to allocate goods and services to the people.

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This country would not be able to survive without the black market.

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So in addition to China, the black market is the only way that a lot of North Koreans survive.

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But you can see how risky this can become, these informal markets, because the regime only works because it controls every aspect of people's lives.

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So these black markets are relinquishing some of that control.

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So every once in a while they crack down, they go in, they break up the markets, they They make sure to extract fees.

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They make sure that this doesn't get too out of control.

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Anyway, the markets are endlessly fascinating.

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One other thing you see in Chongqing is up here.

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This is a prison camp.

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Prison camps always have economic activity attached to them.

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And further up the valley, you've got this re-education camp deep in the valley.

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For anyone who shows disloyalty to the regime, this one's for just over a thousand men who don't live in these homes, that's for like the officials,

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they live within these walls and they spend their time mining copper and iron, cutting logs, making bricks and farming.

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This is where we should talk about the prison camps, because this one that we just saw in the city, there's a lot of those, they exist in cities, some are just typical prisons,

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some are re-education camps, but there are way bigger ones, and they're up in the mountains,

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and they represent what I see as the most egregious version of North Korea's many human rights abuses.

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What's happening inside of these shapes is some of the worst stuff we can imagine.

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This is pretty upsetting stuff.

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I'm not gonna go into like super detail, but let me just show you these four major prison camps, where they are, what they have inside of them, and who gets sent to them,

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and why and how and everything we know.

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You get sent to a prison camp for kind of anything.

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If you show any rebellion or or disrespect to the party or the leader.

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If you're a public official who messed something up, you get sent to one of these.

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Just being accused of wrong thinking can get you sent to one.

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And it's not just you and your family, it is also your children and your grandchildren that aren't even born yet.

401

This system detains multiple generations of someone they've deemed a political prisoner.

402

Now officially, none of this exists.

403

North Korea laughably says that they do not have any such political prison system, but here they are.

404

There's actually around 700 penal facilities.

405

Okay, now that goes from short-term detention sites, you know, that you're there for a weekend, to those massive, you know,

406

50,000 people concentration camp style sites.

407

And they have these names like Camp 14, Camp 11, and they're often on these huge tracts of land.

408

Here's one up in the north.

409

Like, this is like, we are deep in the mountains here, like look at this.

410

This is the prison camp.

411

There are guard posts and fences.

412

Some of these aren't completely fenced in 100%, but if you look closely, you will see fences here cut into this forest.

413

If you look real close, you can see a guard post.

414

And within these camps, not just adults, you've got a lot of children.

415

Any of them were born in the camp.

416

They know nothing different.

417

And what you'll see inside these prison camps is a lot of economic, productive activity being done through forced hard labor.

418

So like up here, you've got this coal mine.

419

That's a big one.

420

That's one of the reasons all this stuff's in the mountains.

421

Then you have a lot of farmland up here as well.

422

Livestock.

423

There's even a distillery here.

424

Maybe making some kind of hard alcohol to be shipped to Pyongyang.

425

Got a factory here.

426

You've got a school, probably for the guards' children.

427

The children in these camps are made to work from the time they are four to six years old.

428

And the work hours are 10 to 12 hours long for everyone in this camp, unpaid, forced prison labor.

429

The conditions are horrific.

430

People are on the verge of starving and often have to fight for resources.

431

But you'll also see that even within these prison camps, it kind of feels like a North Korean city.

432

It's like a little microcosm, a little mini version of the North Korean cities.

433

Like look, you've got a central square With a monument, you'll see murals of the great leaders.

434

You'll have these indoctrination centers, a school.

435

I want to know more about these schools.

436

It's like a little mini city.

437

These big ones, there's like 20,000 people who will live here.

438

They are fenced in for the most part.

439

Most people who come into this prison camp never leave.

440

The people who were born here will never leave.

441

These are life sentences, and it really gets its roots from the old Soviet days,

442

where so much control and power was wrought from just having the threat of this,

443

this thing that the UN has called a human rights abuse with no parallel in modern times.

444

Like this is a level of control and deprivation that doesn't really exist anywhere close to this degree.

445

20 odd million people that are basically prisoners to a system that they can't change.

446

This is kind of like a condensed version of that, a prison within a prison.

447

Now there's obviously a lot more study that's been done and visual analysis from satellite imagery.

448

In our sources, you can read some of the human rights groups' reports on this, where they've done sort of a deep dive and annotation.

449

I've just done a quick overview here.

450

And to contrast the prison camps, let's go to Wonsan, where I found one of Kim Jong-un's palaces.

451

We can really show you what Kim Jong-un does with this power that he's extracted from his people.

452

So this is Won-san, and up here, you've got your empty square with the circles, you've got a port, then up here,

453

you've got this international children's camp where kids from all around the world come to partake in North Korean fun

454

and sport every year.

455

And then right here is the Kim family compound.

456

Look at this, right on the beach.

457

It's got this private beach with all kinds of security barriers.

458

It's got all of these massive structures.

459

Big yard, a shooting range, and right here next to it,

460

of course, a railroad just in case the guy has to scurry away in case of an invasion or something.

461

So he's always got an escape plan.

462

So while the 100,000 North Koreans are imprisoned up in the mountains,

463

Kim Jong-un has his Residents here on the beach

464

You know I've known this I've known that North Korea is crazy

465

But to see the prison camps and then to see this is just it's fairly sickening to me So

466

when you're out here in rural North Korea like I've been

467

a lot lately you stumble upon a few weird things Check this out like

468

if you get this like this looks like maybe an anti-aircraft battery like a military installation

469

and maybe you're in this red, red earth then you get these like really peculiar looking housing blocks

470

that are just eerily symmetrical.

471

They're kind of everywhere out in the rural area and they are often built next to a farm.

472

I just I've never seen villages like this anywhere in the world from the sky.

473

They're just so clearly deeply planned but what I'm learning is

474

that this is how a lot of stuff gets made in rural North Korea, a lot of the farming.

475

Like look at this.

476

See all these houses?

477

All of these houses which look identical to each other, they're all a part of this factory.

478

This is a factory that makes.. let's find out.

479

Boom.

480

There we go.

481

Fruit.

482

This is a fruit processing factory.

483

Out here, way out in rural North Korea, and all of these homes are the people who work in the fruit factory.

484

Something Jacob pointed it out to me is that a lot of these are duplexes, meaning two families live here and you can see this is their backyard

485

and they have kind of a separator so they have this little plot of backyard.

486

This is their community.

487

You are assigned a job here and you work here.

488

I don't see a car anywhere on these roads.

489

You mentioned cars, of course you know private ownership of vehicles isn't really a thing in North Korea

490

so there's no no need for parking spaces.

491

You are living here and working here your whole life.

492

See some people biking, some people walking, but the other thing you see are these vast complexes of greenhouses.

493

Kim Jong-un has been going nuts on greenhouses, building as many as he can.

494

This was an airport for some reason, but over time, this airport got turned into a massive greenhouse complex.

495

Kim Jong-un has been doing this, and in fact, just a short time, this is 2022, And this is today.

496

Like man, they built stuff fast, it seems.

497

So one way that North Korea works is by just assigning people jobs

498

and having them live and work in the exact same place.

499

But man, I get really mesmerized out here in rural North Korea looking at the configuration of the housing.

500

Okay, but we have to talk about the capital.

501

I know everyone's wondering, like the capital, the capital, it's the most interesting.

502

I've been holding off because I feel like the capital gets so much coverage and I'm interested in these rural backwaters, but let's talk about the capital.

503

In order to understand Pyongyang and what it is, you have to understand this concept of songbun, basically the caste system for North Korea.

504

It's how they subdivide the people.

505

And once you're in one class, you're in one class, and your kids are in that class too, and you can maybe move up or maybe move down.

506

If your grandpa was like supportive of the Japanese or wasn't super loyal during the revolution,

507

then you are a part of the hostile class.

508

Like you are not to be trusted, you are not loyal, you will have the worst jobs, the worst opportunities, you will get the worst punishments.

509

The wavering class are kind of the middle ground and they are more trusted.

510

They're still on thin ice like everyone, but they have more opportunities.

511

They get better healthcare, they get better schools, better food.

512

But the core class, those are the top dogs.

513

They're party officials, they're the elites.

514

Those are the people who live in Pyongyang.

515

They live in a completely different world than the rest of the country.

516

The capital, which is a pretty wild looking place.

517

Here on Google Earth, they've put these little 3D renderings of like the big super wild hotel at the center of town

518

that actually looks really awesome and cool and wild, but it's totally empty.

519

At least that's what the reports say.

520

It's just a big piece of propaganda.

521

Part of it is that with these buildings, because electricity is so flaky in North Korea,

522

you actually don't want a high rise penthouse because if you're at the 30th floor and the power goes out, you're walking 30 floors of steps.

523

So the most desirable apartments, according to Martin, the expert interviewed, are the ones on the bottom floors.

524

Okay, so Pyongyang has big old stadium, monuments, big grand boulevards, lots of buses.

525

So much transportation happens on buses in North Korea.

526

And as you're rolling around here, you see a lot of like pretty peculiar architecture.

527

A throwback to Soviet era, when cities were laid out on a template and you had,

528

you know, brutalist architecture and everything and just rows of apartments and no real like suburban landscape.

529

Now these theme parks are empty, empty parking lots all the time.

530

It is like, you know, just a snapshot in time.

531

So we don't actually know, but I have never seen any one of these.

532

Although, check out this promo video from this water park.

533

You start to see that a lot of this stuff is built to show the outside world

534

that North Korea can do this, and to show fellow North Koreans that North Korea can do this.

535

That is a massive part of construction in this country.

536

It's not about serving the broader people as much as it is about telling a story.

537

So many sports, like sports, sports, sports, sports are a big part of North Korean culture.

538

Kim Jong-un's got his little signature buildings here.

539

Every leader has a different style and Kim Jong-un is just doing it with these curvy apartment buildings.

540

One thing you see here is churches.

541

There's a bunch of random churches in Pyongyang.

542

One of them is this Eastern Orthodox Church, which North Korea built for their good friend Russia.

543

Here's Vladimir Putin in this Eastern Orthodox Church.

544

Oh, but here's a Protestant one.

545

Founder of the country Kim Il-sung had a mother who was a Protestant.

546

And apparently she was a deacon here in this church.

547

So they restored this church, and it's sort of like a symbol that, like, look, North Korea believes in freedom of religion.

548

But they, to be clear, do not.

549

Religion is not widely practiced in North Korea for obvious reasons.

550

Now what I love about Pyongyang is it takes the whole like big boulevard, grand streets that are empty to a whole new level.

551

I mean look at this.

552

Here's where the great leader used to live.

553

This was their palace.

554

And coming off it is this big grand square empty and coming off that there's this grand boulevard that is

555

just so grand and so empty.

556

It goes down through this big beautiful roundabout,

557

keeps going through a tunnel to another big beautiful mostly empty roundabout.

558

There's a car, there's a car.

559

And now it enters into this massive grand like this is

560

you would expect a urban design like this in like Mexico City or something.

561

One, two, three, four, five,

562

six, seven, eight, nine, ten lanes going into this grand intersection for the four cars that are here.

563

I mean, it's mesmerizing to look at, right?

564

So anyway, that is the Grand Boulevard that leads up to this palace that the leaders used to live in.

565

The leaders don't live here anymore now.

566

Kim Jong-un lives instead up here.

567

See if I can find his house from memory now that I've been staring at it non-stop.

568

Boom, there it is.

569

Found it.

570

Okay, here he is.

571

He lives up in this big compound up on the hill.

572

This big boy.

573

This is his main residence in the city.

574

I'm looking at my data set from Jacob and you see potential underground entrances to these heavily secured compounds and bunkers.

575

For how much we know these folks like to dig, you can imagine that behind Kim Jong-un's house there are tunnels and bunkers.

576

We don't know that, but I presume there probably is.

577

Now Google Maps being what it is someone put a concentration center label right over the hill from Kim Jong-un's house.

578

I asked the experts about this

579

and they're like no that's not a constant That's like there's

580

not a concentration camp on the other side of Kim Jong-un's house.

581

It's probably a barracks where his bodyguards live.

582

Don't believe everything you see on Google Maps folks.

583

So yeah, Pyongyang is a place that could look fairly developed

584

and nice and indeed the imagery from from Pyongyang does look fairly nice in some views.

585

Because this is where the elite live, the core class.

586

This is where the output from all of the horrific abuse and slavery that's happening out in the countryside comes to benefit.

587

And this is the center of power for the regime.

588

Oh, and something you can't see here, but that you see in a lot of tourist videos is the very deep underground train system.

589

They've got a subway that is very nice looking.

590

And boy, I wish I could go there and visit and see it sub day, but I probably will never do that for obvious reasons.

591

OK, I want to finish this video talking about the thing we can't really see on this map, which is the people.

592

They are regular people like you and I.

593

And they have dreams and ambitions.

594

They just want to have some food and enjoy themselves

595

and go out with friends and just kind of have a happy life.

596

Despite all the horrors of this place, there are wholesome, meaningful traditions and rituals that still endure.

597

The Lunar New Year, or the Harvest Festival, brings people together to celebrate.

598

The extreme poverty limits their feasts, but they often consist of homemade alcohol,

599

simple rice cakes, and something poverty and totalitarianism can't totally take away, which is community.

600

The nourishment of relationships.

601

As we've seen, most people can't really move around in the country, so they stay in one place,

602

which defectors have reported leads to a sense of intimacy and connection with the community they live next to.

603

They lean on each other, they survive because of each other, they celebrate together, and they seem to find meaning despite all the limitations and all of the control.

604

One defector went so far as to say, Everything was suffocating and pitiful in North Korea, but it is a country that I have many positive memories from.

605

So if someone asks me what is North Korea like, I say, North Korea is a nice place with plenty of love.

606

And that's, I think, one of the things that's often forgotten

607

when we look at North Korea in the traditional media because people having a happy life is not newsworthy,

608

but a military parade or a nuclear test or a missile launch or something is newsworthy.

609

So just leaving you with a reminder

610

that there's more to this country than the horrible realities

611

that we've seen here or that we often see on the news

612

if you want a deeper look on this angle of the country, there's a book called Nothing to Envy, which is a great human level account of life in North Korea.

613

So thank you all for being curious with me as we looked at this map to understand more about this secretive country.

614

Let me know what you want me to cover next and I'll see you in the next one.

615

Don't forget to check out our new channel, Tunnel Vision, where we published that video about North Korean IT professionals taking Western jobs, funding the regime with money and secrets.

616

It's a deep dive and I think you'll like it.

617

Thanks for watching.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 617 sentences and 8082 words to shadow. The speech runs for 45:31. The speaker talks at a natural 178 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

tunnel /ˈtʌn(ə)l/ (noun) — An underground or underwater passage.
underground /ˌʌn.dəɹˈɡɹaʊnd/ (adjective) — Below the ground; below the surface of the Earth.
missile /ˈmɪs.aɪl/ (noun) — Any object used as a weapon by being thrown or fired through the air, such as stone, arrow or bullet.
regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/ (noun) — Mode of rule or management.
barrier /ˈbæɹi.ə/ (noun) — A structure that bars passage.
satellite /ˈsætəlaɪ̯t/ (noun) — A moon or other smaller body orbiting a larger one.
informal /ɪnˈfɔɹ.m(ə)l/ (adjective) — Not formal or ceremonious.
boom /bum/ (verb) — To make a loud, hollow, resonant sound.
fence /fɛns/ (noun) — A thin artificial barrier that separates two pieces of land or forms a perimeter enclosing the lands of a house, building, etc.
boulevard /ˈbuː.ləˌvɑːd/ (noun) — A broad, well-paved and landscaped thoroughfare.
potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/ (adverb) — In a manner showing much potential; with the possibility of happening in a given way.
communist /ˈkɑ.mjə.nɪst/ (noun) — An advocate of a society based on the common ownership of property; a proponent of communism.
concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — The act, process or ability of concentrating; the process of becoming concentrated, or the state of being concentrated.
prisoner /ˈpɹɪzənə/ (noun) — A person incarcerated in a prison, while on trial or serving a sentence.
surveillance /sɚˈveɪ.ləns/ (noun) — Close observation of an individual or group; person or persons under suspicion.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

look at (verb) — To observe or watch.
live in (verb) — To reside on the premises of one's employer (used especially of domestic staff such as nannies, cooks, maids, etc.)
talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
see in (verb) — To show (someone) in: to introduce (someone) to the inside of a place.
turn into (verb) — To become.
back in (verb) — To reverse a vehicle into a space.
check out (verb) — To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
come in /ˌkʌm ˈɪn/ (verb) — To enter.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 155 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you've, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: clothing /ˈkloʊðɪŋ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, thick /θɪk/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, installation /ˌɪn.stəˈleɪ.ʃən/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/
Long words — get the stress right: potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, installation /ˌɪn.stəˈleɪ.ʃən/, architecture /ˈɑː.kɪˌtɛk.t͡ʃə/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like tunnel, underground, missile.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been looking · I've been stumbling · I've also been talking
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to actually · used to dealing · used to live
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if you look closely, you will see
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have designed · has been · I've been exposed

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?