There's a whole bunch of stuff that we didn't actually get to cover in the North Korean
Weave video. As much as I would love to talk more about this, there's not really a whole
lot more to say about this, but I did find a lot of other stuff about North Korea that is just
absolutely fascinating. So they have an entire line of tablets and phones and you can find these
online or at least some information about it. You'll find pictures of Kim Jong-un looking at a
cell phone factory. You can also find the tablet itself listed on a couple different North Korean
websites. There are North Korean websites, so that's something to also note. The phones themselves
that are used a lot in North Korea because they have had smartphones since 2014, I think, so a
decade of having smartphones, the phones that they use are technically made in North Korea.
Technically. A lot of stuff is technically made in North Korea, but really they're getting parts
in from China or elsewhere in the case of other objects. They're getting them into North Korea,
then they're just assembling them there. Part of that whole Soviet idea of being completely insular
and doing everything your society needs within that society, it's a great concept in theory.
The phones themselves are just called Pyongyang phones, which is really confusing, but also North
Korea does not know how to name their electronics very well. This thing is called Moranbong,
which is like moran hill, not moran, m-o-r-a-n. That is also the name of a North Korean girl group
which is much more popular than this thing. That's a tangent aside though. The Pyongyang
phones, we know what is on them and the answer is not very much, but we only sort of know what's on
them. There are a couple of dumps on archive.org about it. In there you can find just some simple
dictionaries, and I think there's like a cookbook in there. Don't really know why that was included,
but they decided to include it. The apps that we don't get to see though are the ones that are
spread around over Bluetooth. Yeah, I think there was a Boy General game. It was very popular in
North Korea, but there was no download available for it because it was at one point available
within North Korea's internal internet, but their primary way of actually transferring games
is a peer-to-peer network of Bluetooth, which is an interesting use of Bluetooth. I support it,
but Bluetooth, that is the first time I think I've ever heard of Bluetooth being extremely
useful. Every other time it's like, couldn't you have done this a better way? And there the answer is
sort of. Unfortunately, it's not really useful for getting apps that they wouldn't have access to
normally because all of the apps still have to be signed by the North Korean government.
They have their own security signature that they put on everything. North Korea puts their own
security codes on all sorts of applications, on any application that they want to run on their
various phones and tablets and whatnot, which kind of makes it surprising that there is sort of an
external internet for North Korea. Like there are a bunch of websites out there for North Korea,
and that's, I mean, that's how we found out about this. It came up on Ari Rangmiri, which is,
or I guess was, one of their propaganda news outlets. It was their primary propaganda news
outlet, but you know Kim Jong-un has been shutting all that down. We cover that in the video. We
don't need to get to that. What we don't cover in the video though is that there's a phone number
on these various external websites. Did you know that it costs 75 cents a minute to call North Korea?
That's what it is in Canada. I don't know if it's cheaper or more expensive or completely prohibited
in the United States or parts of Europe. I mean, parts of Europe have been pretty open to trading
with North Korea in the past. French cartoons have just been widely animated by North Korea,
and Mondo TV out in Italy actually dubbed Squirrel and Hedgehog. Not a great dub,
but they did do a localization of Squirrel and Hedgehog for the Italian market. For anything that
wasn't handled by Mondo though, and even for some things that are, you can actually find full episodes,
full series, subtitled in English, Japanese, German, probably Italian and French as well,
on YouTube. And they are on channels that look like they're North Korean. They all have the
same kind of description to them. They all kind of follow the same concept. They know how title
thumbnail works. That's impressive for a government. Most governments don't know how title thumbnail
works on social media, but North Korea, they took some time to learn. And if you start reading the
comments, it gets even a little weirder because they've got a very specific way of talking that
makes it kind of seem like they learned English by just reading various translations of Karl Marx
in English. You can find sort of the same idea from books like On the Art of Cinema by Kim Jong-il.
I'm just going to open up a page and read some of this for a second because you can get an idea
of what it sounds like. Oh yeah, that's English. This is the English version. And for anybody
thinking that, oh, you spent money on stuff from North Korea, no, that's so illegal, like incredibly
illegal. This one is published, I think out of a publishing house at a university in Oregon.
Here, here's just a title. Processed by which a revolutionary outlook on the world is established
should be clearly demonstrated. It's kind of convoluted language. Like this could be easily
pared down to much fewer, smaller words so that it would make a lot more sense to a lot more people.
It doesn't really matter in these kinds of books, though, because if everybody kind of speaks that
exact same dialect of English, then everybody understands each other. And for the most part,
English speakers will understand this sort of dialect. But it gets real weird when you start
hearing it in YouTube comments over and over again. So yeah, that's a thing. Just North Korean
YouTube. But there is a very sizable number of North Koreans who live in Japan. And like,
they're not refugees. Yeah, there's something like 25,000 North Koreans, active North Koreans,
loyal to North Korea living in Japan. They have their own schools, their own university,
their own banks, their own insurance companies. They're like, they still speak Korean, they still
interact with North Korea. They're North Korean. And you can find some uploads of North Korean TV
and movies on some of their websites. The group is collectively called the Cheongryong.
Don't speak Korean, I'm very sorry. You can also find a weird collection of just children's soccer
tournaments. Just a lot of videos of children's soccer tournaments. I'm trying to think of what
else we didn't cover. I mean, I would love to talk more about the Pyongyang Zoo. Pyongyang Zoo is wild.
Look at this picture on the screen right now of this entrance to a zoo. Now imagine you're going
in through that tiger's mouth and somebody says to you, hey, have you seen the smoking monkey yet?
That's a real situation that can happen at the Pyongyang Zoo. They have 5,000 animals. They have
an entire lineage of elephants that are just inbred from Ho Chi Minh's grand elephant that he gave to
Kim Il Sung. There's a parrot that speaks English, but the only thing he says is glory to the great
leader Kim Il Sung or something along those lines. The Pyongyang Zoo is wild. Everything in Pyongyang
that's made for tourists just sounds otherworldly. Like it's a bizarro land kind of thing, which is
what you hear about North Korea all the time, but that's not necessarily what life there is like. I'm
sure it is its own form of that, but the tourist aspect is wild. I mean, there's a bowling alley
that still uses equipment from the 1960s, which for some people living in parts of America, I'm
sure is not that weird of a thing. But as somebody who really likes 10-pin bowling and lives in Canada
where 5-pin is all we can really find, hearing about a bowling alley that's super old and still
active really makes me feel some things. Also in that bowling alley is a bunch of gambling
and imported video games. Kind of a weird thing to find in North Korea, but if you've only got
foreigners there, I guess it makes sense. Let's talk about some of the books I've got here,
a Kim Jong Il production. This is about the kidnapping of a South Korean film director and
actress, two separate people. This is a really popular book. You can find this on Amazon under
North Korean books. This is probably number six or number seven, but what you can't find on most
Amazon, but you can on Amazon Japan, is the complete encyclopedia of North Korean anime,
which is something that I am currently not able to read. They do not make a PDF version of it. I
tried to contact the publishers to get some PDFs of their books, because this is the tip
of the iceberg on this publisher and I wish I could read their name here somewhere, but I can't.
Look at some of this. It just keeps going too, and this is probably the most complete encyclopedia
you can find on this. Look at how it looks like they've got, I don't know, Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer, but it's everybody's dressed like they're in North Korea. Some more squirrel and hedgehog
here, but not quite squirrel and hedgehog. I'm seeing what looks like one of the raccoon dogs
there and a rabbit and some sort of wolf. They love to use wolves and say that they don't symbolize
anything, but they almost always symbolize either Americans or South Koreans. Oh, I think this is
one of their kaiju movies. When they kidnapped that director and actress couple, the last movie
that they had to make was sort of like a Godzilla movie. It was a kaiju movie, so it was a giant
monster, and I think they actually might have made more than one of those, but the big one was their
last one. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to do that in the next 48 hours before this video
comes out probably even. The animation quality of North Korea's just animation works. You can see
it over the course of Squirrel and Hedgehog because they only released one or two episodes a year,
so you can go from episode one and see, oh yeah, this looks like it was made in the 1970s, up to
like episode 32 or 33 where the wolves are flying these things here, and it's all like
pseudo 3D animated. It's probably 3D animated. I've heard that they were using Toon Boom or Flash or
something like that, but I think at some point they got their hands on Maya or 3DS Max and started
really kind of integrating that into some of their workflows. Overall, not bad for people who make
$1 a month. Yeah, I haven't actually finished this book, so I don't know too much about it.
Yeah, I'm pretty much illiterate at this point, so it's going to be a difficult read for me overall,
but not nearly as difficult as this. It's so hard to get through. His sentences are so long,
and his word choice is so needless. Like as a writer, but also as an illiterate, the word choice
is too large. Like the words are this long, and they could be this long, or there could be two
of them that are that long, and it still wouldn't match. So I think that's pretty much all I've
got for today. Listen, if you really like this video, please go down below and say such so that
we keep making them. And if you've got any facts of your own, please share them. Like I would love
to hear many more facts about history's most powerful furry Kim Jong-il.