Is your new co-worker secretly North Korean?

And do you have a sense of like...

Weirdly, North Korea is something that I read a lot about.

I've read a lot of the books that are the accounts of defectors.

I've read sort of the journalists just trying to understand how Kim Jong-un has been so successful at maintaining power long after people thought he would be able to.

And it seems like one of the things that has really changed is that This idea that people in North Korea have no idea about living standards in the rest of the world is just much less true than it was.

And particularly for these workers, they're getting exposed via the internet to how different Living standards are, you know, liberty is in other places.

How does the regime keep them from...

If you're working out of a dormitory in China or Russia, isn't there just a temptation then to defect? Like, you're aware of how valuable your labor would be if you weren't giving a huge percentage to Kim Jong-un.

That's a question that I had a really hard time wrapping my head around when I first got into this, especially when I was... on the crypto end, there was so much money flowing around.

It's also like this terminally online culture where for these people to be working at these companies, they needed to know not only what these companies were, these crypto projects, but they needed to be versed in a sort of weird online culture with like Lambos and, you know, NFTs and, you know, just money.

I found

crypto to be a second language as an English speaker.

Yeah.

And they're approaching English as a second language, then crypto as a second language within the second language.

Yeah, and it's like a language of excess.

Yes.

But they were fluent in that language.

So clearly they know the culture and they're seeing – the culture, that was hard for me to wrap my head around at first.

Like, why do they not defect? And the answer that I hear time and time again from experts really comes down to the system of punishment in North Korea, which is focused more on the family.

So if you do something wrong, it is not necessarily you who is going to bear the consequences.

It's whoever is back home still in North Korea who might also suffer from whatever your perceived trespass is.

And

what I know just from reading is there's so much we know about North Korea, but what the international humanitarian community seems to assume is that they have something like a constantly running death camp that is just completely shrouded to us.

So I can imagine a world where even if you were tempted to escape your job, The idea that unspeakable horrors can be visited on your family seems like a pretty strong incentive for not doing that.

Yeah, I think so.