WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.200 There's a whole bunch of stuff that we didn't actually get to cover in the North Korean 00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:07.600 Weave video. As much as I would love to talk more about this, there's not really a whole 00:00:07.600 --> 00:00:12.640 lot more to say about this, but I did find a lot of other stuff about North Korea that is just 00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:18.800 absolutely fascinating. So they have an entire line of tablets and phones and you can find these 00:00:18.800 --> 00:00:23.920 online or at least some information about it. You'll find pictures of Kim Jong-un looking at a 00:00:23.920 --> 00:00:29.120 cell phone factory. You can also find the tablet itself listed on a couple different North Korean 00:00:29.120 --> 00:00:36.320 websites. There are North Korean websites, so that's something to also note. The phones themselves 00:00:36.320 --> 00:00:41.360 that are used a lot in North Korea because they have had smartphones since 2014, I think, so a 00:00:41.360 --> 00:00:46.080 decade of having smartphones, the phones that they use are technically made in North Korea. 00:00:46.720 --> 00:00:51.360 Technically. A lot of stuff is technically made in North Korea, but really they're getting parts 00:00:51.360 --> 00:00:57.280 in from China or elsewhere in the case of other objects. They're getting them into North Korea, 00:00:57.280 --> 00:01:03.440 then they're just assembling them there. Part of that whole Soviet idea of being completely insular 00:01:03.440 --> 00:01:09.280 and doing everything your society needs within that society, it's a great concept in theory. 00:01:09.280 --> 00:01:14.560 The phones themselves are just called Pyongyang phones, which is really confusing, but also North 00:01:14.560 --> 00:01:18.240 Korea does not know how to name their electronics very well. This thing is called Moranbong, 00:01:19.360 --> 00:01:27.040 which is like moran hill, not moran, m-o-r-a-n. That is also the name of a North Korean girl group 00:01:27.040 --> 00:01:31.120 which is much more popular than this thing. That's a tangent aside though. The Pyongyang 00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:36.400 phones, we know what is on them and the answer is not very much, but we only sort of know what's on 00:01:36.400 --> 00:01:42.080 them. There are a couple of dumps on archive.org about it. In there you can find just some simple 00:01:42.080 --> 00:01:48.560 dictionaries, and I think there's like a cookbook in there. Don't really know why that was included, 00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:54.560 but they decided to include it. The apps that we don't get to see though are the ones that are 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:59.760 spread around over Bluetooth. Yeah, I think there was a Boy General game. It was very popular in 00:01:59.760 --> 00:02:04.320 North Korea, but there was no download available for it because it was at one point available 00:02:04.320 --> 00:02:11.360 within North Korea's internal internet, but their primary way of actually transferring games 00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:17.840 is a peer-to-peer network of Bluetooth, which is an interesting use of Bluetooth. I support it, 00:02:17.840 --> 00:02:23.520 but Bluetooth, that is the first time I think I've ever heard of Bluetooth being extremely 00:02:23.520 --> 00:02:27.440 useful. Every other time it's like, couldn't you have done this a better way? And there the answer is 00:02:28.320 --> 00:02:34.240 sort of. Unfortunately, it's not really useful for getting apps that they wouldn't have access to 00:02:34.240 --> 00:02:38.720 normally because all of the apps still have to be signed by the North Korean government. 00:02:39.360 --> 00:02:44.960 They have their own security signature that they put on everything. North Korea puts their own 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:50.640 security codes on all sorts of applications, on any application that they want to run on their 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:57.600 various phones and tablets and whatnot, which kind of makes it surprising that there is sort of an 00:02:57.600 --> 00:03:04.240 external internet for North Korea. Like there are a bunch of websites out there for North Korea, 00:03:04.880 --> 00:03:10.560 and that's, I mean, that's how we found out about this. It came up on Ari Rangmiri, which is, 00:03:10.560 --> 00:03:16.400 or I guess was, one of their propaganda news outlets. It was their primary propaganda news 00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:20.400 outlet, but you know Kim Jong-un has been shutting all that down. We cover that in the video. We 00:03:20.400 --> 00:03:25.520 don't need to get to that. What we don't cover in the video though is that there's a phone number 00:03:26.240 --> 00:03:31.600 on these various external websites. Did you know that it costs 75 cents a minute to call North Korea? 00:03:31.600 --> 00:03:35.760 That's what it is in Canada. I don't know if it's cheaper or more expensive or completely prohibited 00:03:35.760 --> 00:03:40.080 in the United States or parts of Europe. I mean, parts of Europe have been pretty open to trading 00:03:40.080 --> 00:03:44.560 with North Korea in the past. French cartoons have just been widely animated by North Korea, 00:03:44.640 --> 00:03:50.960 and Mondo TV out in Italy actually dubbed Squirrel and Hedgehog. Not a great dub, 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:56.800 but they did do a localization of Squirrel and Hedgehog for the Italian market. For anything that 00:03:56.800 --> 00:04:02.000 wasn't handled by Mondo though, and even for some things that are, you can actually find full episodes, 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:07.920 full series, subtitled in English, Japanese, German, probably Italian and French as well, 00:04:08.640 --> 00:04:14.800 on YouTube. And they are on channels that look like they're North Korean. They all have the 00:04:14.800 --> 00:04:20.160 same kind of description to them. They all kind of follow the same concept. They know how title 00:04:20.160 --> 00:04:24.080 thumbnail works. That's impressive for a government. Most governments don't know how title thumbnail 00:04:24.080 --> 00:04:29.360 works on social media, but North Korea, they took some time to learn. And if you start reading the 00:04:29.360 --> 00:04:34.240 comments, it gets even a little weirder because they've got a very specific way of talking that 00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:40.080 makes it kind of seem like they learned English by just reading various translations of Karl Marx 00:04:40.080 --> 00:04:47.920 in English. You can find sort of the same idea from books like On the Art of Cinema by Kim Jong-il. 00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:51.920 I'm just going to open up a page and read some of this for a second because you can get an idea 00:04:51.920 --> 00:04:57.360 of what it sounds like. Oh yeah, that's English. This is the English version. And for anybody 00:04:57.360 --> 00:05:05.520 thinking that, oh, you spent money on stuff from North Korea, no, that's so illegal, like incredibly 00:05:05.520 --> 00:05:14.880 illegal. This one is published, I think out of a publishing house at a university in Oregon. 00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:19.760 Here, here's just a title. Processed by which a revolutionary outlook on the world is established 00:05:19.760 --> 00:05:24.960 should be clearly demonstrated. It's kind of convoluted language. Like this could be easily 00:05:24.960 --> 00:05:31.680 pared down to much fewer, smaller words so that it would make a lot more sense to a lot more people. 00:05:31.680 --> 00:05:36.720 It doesn't really matter in these kinds of books, though, because if everybody kind of speaks that 00:05:36.720 --> 00:05:40.720 exact same dialect of English, then everybody understands each other. And for the most part, 00:05:40.720 --> 00:05:45.040 English speakers will understand this sort of dialect. But it gets real weird when you start 00:05:45.040 --> 00:05:50.800 hearing it in YouTube comments over and over again. So yeah, that's a thing. Just North Korean 00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:57.280 YouTube. But there is a very sizable number of North Koreans who live in Japan. And like, 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:04.240 they're not refugees. Yeah, there's something like 25,000 North Koreans, active North Koreans, 00:06:04.800 --> 00:06:09.120 loyal to North Korea living in Japan. They have their own schools, their own university, 00:06:09.120 --> 00:06:15.120 their own banks, their own insurance companies. They're like, they still speak Korean, they still 00:06:15.120 --> 00:06:22.800 interact with North Korea. They're North Korean. And you can find some uploads of North Korean TV 00:06:22.800 --> 00:06:30.080 and movies on some of their websites. The group is collectively called the Cheongryong. 00:06:30.800 --> 00:06:36.560 Don't speak Korean, I'm very sorry. You can also find a weird collection of just children's soccer 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:41.360 tournaments. Just a lot of videos of children's soccer tournaments. I'm trying to think of what 00:06:41.360 --> 00:06:48.240 else we didn't cover. I mean, I would love to talk more about the Pyongyang Zoo. Pyongyang Zoo is wild. 00:06:48.240 --> 00:06:51.920 Look at this picture on the screen right now of this entrance to a zoo. Now imagine you're going 00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:56.640 in through that tiger's mouth and somebody says to you, hey, have you seen the smoking monkey yet? 00:06:56.640 --> 00:07:02.480 That's a real situation that can happen at the Pyongyang Zoo. They have 5,000 animals. They have 00:07:02.480 --> 00:07:09.040 an entire lineage of elephants that are just inbred from Ho Chi Minh's grand elephant that he gave to 00:07:09.040 --> 00:07:16.640 Kim Il Sung. There's a parrot that speaks English, but the only thing he says is glory to the great 00:07:16.640 --> 00:07:23.360 leader Kim Il Sung or something along those lines. The Pyongyang Zoo is wild. Everything in Pyongyang 00:07:23.360 --> 00:07:30.000 that's made for tourists just sounds otherworldly. Like it's a bizarro land kind of thing, which is 00:07:30.000 --> 00:07:34.560 what you hear about North Korea all the time, but that's not necessarily what life there is like. I'm 00:07:34.560 --> 00:07:42.400 sure it is its own form of that, but the tourist aspect is wild. I mean, there's a bowling alley 00:07:42.400 --> 00:07:48.560 that still uses equipment from the 1960s, which for some people living in parts of America, I'm 00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:53.920 sure is not that weird of a thing. But as somebody who really likes 10-pin bowling and lives in Canada 00:07:53.920 --> 00:07:59.520 where 5-pin is all we can really find, hearing about a bowling alley that's super old and still 00:07:59.520 --> 00:08:04.960 active really makes me feel some things. Also in that bowling alley is a bunch of gambling 00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:12.800 and imported video games. Kind of a weird thing to find in North Korea, but if you've only got 00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:16.400 foreigners there, I guess it makes sense. Let's talk about some of the books I've got here, 00:08:16.400 --> 00:08:23.680 a Kim Jong Il production. This is about the kidnapping of a South Korean film director and 00:08:23.760 --> 00:08:30.640 actress, two separate people. This is a really popular book. You can find this on Amazon under 00:08:30.640 --> 00:08:37.360 North Korean books. This is probably number six or number seven, but what you can't find on most 00:08:37.360 --> 00:08:42.400 Amazon, but you can on Amazon Japan, is the complete encyclopedia of North Korean anime, 00:08:43.040 --> 00:08:49.600 which is something that I am currently not able to read. They do not make a PDF version of it. I 00:08:50.240 --> 00:08:55.520 tried to contact the publishers to get some PDFs of their books, because this is the tip 00:08:55.520 --> 00:08:59.840 of the iceberg on this publisher and I wish I could read their name here somewhere, but I can't. 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:07.840 Look at some of this. It just keeps going too, and this is probably the most complete encyclopedia 00:09:07.840 --> 00:09:12.480 you can find on this. Look at how it looks like they've got, I don't know, Rudolph the red-nosed 00:09:12.480 --> 00:09:18.000 reindeer, but it's everybody's dressed like they're in North Korea. Some more squirrel and hedgehog 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:24.400 here, but not quite squirrel and hedgehog. I'm seeing what looks like one of the raccoon dogs 00:09:24.400 --> 00:09:30.800 there and a rabbit and some sort of wolf. They love to use wolves and say that they don't symbolize 00:09:30.800 --> 00:09:35.840 anything, but they almost always symbolize either Americans or South Koreans. Oh, I think this is 00:09:35.840 --> 00:09:42.240 one of their kaiju movies. When they kidnapped that director and actress couple, the last movie 00:09:42.240 --> 00:09:47.520 that they had to make was sort of like a Godzilla movie. It was a kaiju movie, so it was a giant 00:09:47.600 --> 00:09:53.920 monster, and I think they actually might have made more than one of those, but the big one was their 00:09:53.920 --> 00:10:00.080 last one. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to do that in the next 48 hours before this video 00:10:00.080 --> 00:10:06.240 comes out probably even. The animation quality of North Korea's just animation works. You can see 00:10:06.240 --> 00:10:09.520 it over the course of Squirrel and Hedgehog because they only released one or two episodes a year, 00:10:09.520 --> 00:10:14.080 so you can go from episode one and see, oh yeah, this looks like it was made in the 1970s, up to 00:10:14.160 --> 00:10:21.920 like episode 32 or 33 where the wolves are flying these things here, and it's all like 00:10:22.560 --> 00:10:28.480 pseudo 3D animated. It's probably 3D animated. I've heard that they were using Toon Boom or Flash or 00:10:28.480 --> 00:10:33.520 something like that, but I think at some point they got their hands on Maya or 3DS Max and started 00:10:33.520 --> 00:10:39.760 really kind of integrating that into some of their workflows. Overall, not bad for people who make 00:10:39.760 --> 00:10:44.240 $1 a month. Yeah, I haven't actually finished this book, so I don't know too much about it. 00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:51.360 Yeah, I'm pretty much illiterate at this point, so it's going to be a difficult read for me overall, 00:10:51.360 --> 00:10:58.480 but not nearly as difficult as this. It's so hard to get through. His sentences are so long, 00:10:58.480 --> 00:11:06.160 and his word choice is so needless. Like as a writer, but also as an illiterate, the word choice 00:11:06.160 --> 00:11:11.840 is too large. Like the words are this long, and they could be this long, or there could be two 00:11:11.840 --> 00:11:16.320 of them that are that long, and it still wouldn't match. So I think that's pretty much all I've 00:11:16.320 --> 00:11:22.080 got for today. Listen, if you really like this video, please go down below and say such so that 00:11:22.080 --> 00:11:25.760 we keep making them. And if you've got any facts of your own, please share them. Like I would love 00:11:25.760 --> 00:11:30.160 to hear many more facts about history's most powerful furry Kim Jong-il.