On this episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Jordan was joined by Yeonmi Park. Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector and human rights activist trying to shine a light on the atrocities still being committed in North Korea by the current Kim regime. She wrote her experiences into a bestseller, ‘In Order to Live.’ She tells stories of her childhood and escaping to remind the world of how terrible things are for North Koreans. Jordan and Yeonmi discussed various topics: her escape from North Korea, her slavery in China, and the frustration and disappointment she experienced pursuing a humanities degree at Columbia.
Comments:
- Humbled is a gross understatement of how I feel watching this interview. I’m privileged to have access to this content.
- Did you guys notice? He’s giving her psychotherapy during the interview. The conversation itself was therapeutic to her trauma. Really warmed my heart.
- When he asked her “why did you speak out” and she said “because I know the price of silence” for me, this is the most profound thing I have ever heard someone say. Why would you fight for freedom if you don’t know you are a slave.
- Coddled western kids: “I’m oppressed! I’m traumatised! Someone didn’t use my entitlement pronoun!”
- “a room full of books isn’t small” What a great quote.
- “I felt like it’s a suicide of civilization.”
- “I didn’t even know the word ‘oppression’. If you know that you are oppressed, you are not oppressed.”
- When she said she was thinking “was she a psychopath” and being desensitized, her voice starts breaking and she’s clearly starting to struggle for a moment. Peterson takes over a little to tell her that it isn’t her fault, that she does show empathy and just remind her that it was a bad situation but she is not a bad person.
- I lived in a communist Soviet Union, but that was nowhere near the nightmare she described. This is beyond powerful. Understand what socialism really is. Its so hard to explain to people who never lived it.
- This is the first time in a very long time that I sat through a 2 hour video on YouTube.
- When a North Korean defector who has escaped to USA starts to worry about USA’s own freedom..it terrifies me.