Zoe Chase
speaker
252 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 19 Aug
Zoe Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Most recently when he visited the cafe of one of his students in Pyongyang.
There was also more money coming in from other countries, from overseas businesses.
Political economist Nicholas Ebersett says all of that money was going straight to one place.
Nuclear weapons.
The economic prosperity the Donju helped bring to North Korea made the nuclear program possible for Kim Jong un.
And all this subversive seeming capitalism, the marketing training, the international relationships, all of it had ultimately gone to support the military ambitions of Kim Jong-un.
Jesse, our North Korean entrepreneur, Kam Bootlegger, also caught this entrepreneurial spirit.
Her business grew and expanded, and she started trading products back and forth with China, smuggling things across the border.
She would send medicinal herbs, animal skins, and pine nuts over to China across the Yalu River in these boats, and she would bring very in demand items back to North Korea.
And what we would get in return is sausages.
And we would get soaps and there's something called sakkarengi.
That is an artificial sweetener that North Koreans like to use in desserts.
This was one of Jesse's biggest sellers.
Her business was booming, she was making more money, and people close to her started to notice.
My uncle realized that I was doing all this business and he didn't approve of it at all and
and he reported me so it felt like everything vanished and everything just evaporated in a snap of a moment and basically what I had was almost all gone.
Years and years of work just went up in smoke.
And Jessie says she was actually lucky she wasn't sent to prison.
Jesse decided to leave North Korea.
She had relationships with border guards in China and North Korea from working as a smuggler for all those years.
Showing 161–180 of 252 · page 9 of 13
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