00:00Now, Kat, you and your team have looked into this economic windfall for North Korea in the past several years.
00:05How much money are we actually talking about?
00:08I wonder if you can put that into context for us.
00:11So we have crunched the data on this, and it could be as much as 22 billion U.S. dollars
00:18that Kim has earned in the last four years.
00:22Now, just for context, the North Korean economy was about 34 billion in 2025, right?
00:31So it's a huge amount of money, and it's four times the amount of money that Kim had earned in
00:37the preceding four years from that.
00:39So it's been a record-breaking windfall for North Korea, and it's come from multiple sources.
00:45The most important source is Russia, is the arms sales to Russia, which make up the bulk of this earnings.
00:53However, Kim also has a huge cyber program.
00:58He's got an elite team of crypto hackers, of hackers who are now responsible for up to 70% of
01:06global crypto thefts.
01:07So that's just bringing in billions, literally 2 billion last year, the estimates say, of effectively free money for the
01:16North Korean regime.
01:17And they also have a kind of rejuvenated relationship with Beijing, with China, which has always been their traditional ally
01:25and their longest-serving friend.
01:29A relationship that both sides emphasize was forged during the Korean War in the 1950s.
01:35And that relationship has really flourished in recent years, largely because of growing tensions between Beijing and Washington.
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