“Doing it for the content” just reached a whole new level.
British travel vlogger Harry Jaggard isn’t exactly hurting for YouTube support.
His channel boasts an impressive 2.4 million subscribers, putting him on par with many other notable independent content creators.
(For reference, Discovery has over 6 million subscribers and TMZ has 4.7 million subscribers. Fox News, meanwhile, has over 13 million subs.)
Yet those numbers can always go higher, and Jaggard took quite an interesting gamble to get them up: He fibbed his way into North Korea.
As the New York Post noted, Jaggard saw the perfect opportunity to slip into the largely mysterious Hermit Kingdom when North Korea announced that it was opening up a marathon to allow international competitors.
The one catch? Jaggard’s not a runner — but he refused to let this opportunity slip by.
“I made all the preparations and made it happen,” Jaggard told the Post.
He added that “North Korea has been on my radar for years.”
Would you ever visit North Korea?
It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a surreal experience for a number of reasons.
One of the creepiest parts of the whole thing to Jaggard was the uniformity with which the North Korean people all praised country head Kim Jong Un.
“It seems like people are indoctrinated for sure,” he said. “Maybe a few of them do know that the outside world is a lot more developed, but there’s just nothing they can do about it, or their whole family will be put through a lot of pain.”
Ominously, Jaggard told the Post that he couldn’t delve too much into that last bit because of possible reprisal against those who spoke off-camera.
“There was tons and tons of propaganda,” Jaggard added. “It’s literally everywhere you look. I couldn’t read it, but what I got translated is pushing this one ideology that the leader is the best and keeping the country protected from the outside world.”
The YouTube vlogger also noted that whatever he was shown of the country was highly curated.
“They showed us the tour that they wanted to show, it was definitely the highlight reel. It’s like going on a tour of America but only seeing Las Vegas — like the shiny parts,” Jaggard said.
Ultimately, Jaggard admitted that his tour guide was right about the whole country.
“My tour guide said that you’ll go into North Korea with 100 questions and you’ll leave with 1,000 questions, and it’s so true,” Jaggard confirmed.
You can view the entire thing (or at least the parts North Korea allowed him to film) below:
Other activities during his North Korean stop included getting a haircut and competing in the marathon he was there for.
(Jaggard completed the Pyongyang Marathon in 3:40:34 and was absolutely gassed after it. He did beat his own expected time of four-and-a-half hours, though.)
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