Sam Konnert: We have spent the past few months reminiscing on all the great interviews we had to leave on the cutting room floor. In the biz, we like to call it “killing your darlings.” All of these interviews didn’t make it to air for one reason or another, but there’s definitely something interesting there to learn, even if it’s not quite enough to fill out an entire episode.
So today we are going to learn all about Canadian missionaries in North Korea. We are going to learn about why living in a fire tower is kind of a dreamy life, and about the celebrity wine business: I’m looking at you, Drew Barrymore, Fergie, Cameron Diaz, Martha Stewart, and Snoop Dogg, and I’m most definitely looking at you, Kevin O’Leary. And to guide us through all of these topics, we are letting producer extraordinaire Tristan Capacchione out of his cage, because he has heard basically every word spoken into a Canadaland mic.
The Interview: Noor Azrieh and Jonathan Cheng
Noor Azrieh: You are the China Bureau Chief of 월스트리트저널 (WSJ), but you also wrote a book about North Korea, The Korean Messiah. Tell me a little bit about this book, and why this book.
Jonathan Cheng: Sure. Well, it’s pretty simple. Before I was the China Bureau Chief, I was the Korea Bureau Chief. And there was a time, during Trump’s first term, when North Korea was the big foreign policy question du jour. It was arguably Trump’s biggest foreign policy adventure, I guess you could call it. He believed, and, by the way, he almost did become the first U.S. president in 50 years to actually bring about some genuine, dramatic change in North Korea.
North Korea is different from almost every other country in the world, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. I think even many of its erstwhile socialist allies looked at it and said, “There’s something strange going on here.” It’s very different. It’s not a Marxist-Leninist state in that traditional sense. It had always marched to the beat of its own drum. It went off very early on, after its founding, in its own direction. It built up this cult of personality that is unlike anything else the world has ever seen.
And once it put itself on this nuclear path, it became sort of the problem that nobody could really fix. It didn’t matter whether you were George Bush, or Obama, or Biden, or Trump, there was just nothing you could do. If you look at what Trump has done this year, with Venezuela, with Maduro, and seizing him, and then with the Ayatollah in Iran, and the decapitation strike, and all the rest of it those are pretty daring moves. And just taking those two very narrow operations — I’m not talking about everything that’s happened in the Strait of Hormuz since — those were pretty breathtaking, and pretty spectacular, in the sense that I don’t know that there’s any other country in the world that could pull off an operation like that twice in a matter of a couple of weeks or months.
Noor Azrieh: It’s only May
Jonathan Cheng: I know, it’s only May. We’re only four months and change into 2026, and the U.S. has already pulled off two of these incredible operations. You’re not going to see that happen in North Korea. What happened with Iran was driven in large part by a concern that Iran was getting close to a nuclear capability. With North Korea, that ship has sailed. The ship sailed a long time ago, arguably, when Trump, in his first term, tried to make a deal with Kim Jong Un. He met him three times. He was the first sitting U.S. president to meet a leader of North Korea, and he did it three times in his first term. He put a lot of political capital into trying to solve the North Korea question. And he almost did. It was almost too late when he got into it, and that was part of why it was so difficult.
But at this point, I don’t think it’s a terribly controversial statement for me to say, it is kind of too late now. North Korea does have a nuclear deterrent, and it’s never, ever, ever going to give it up. We look at Iran, and we look at the mess the U.S. is now in there, trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear capability. And we have North Korea sitting on the other side, probably saying to itself, “This vindicates everything. This is why we got this.”
And so I think one way to think about North Korea is this. My focus in the book is really to write about this cult of personality. I think anyone who’s seen pictures of North Korea, who’s read about North Korea, who’s watched YouTube videos about North Korea, the cult of personality is, in my mind, the most striking feature of North Korea.
Noor Azrieh: Describe it to me. You were there.
Jonathan Cheng: I was there. I went in 2013 as a tourist. I went again in 2017 as a journalist, invited by the North Korean state.
It is absolutely bonkers, to use the technical term. It’s just the ubiquity of seeing the Kim family everywhere. I don’t know that it’s matched anywhere else in the world. You see his face absolutely everywhere. You walk down the street, there are no billboards, there are no advertisements. All you see are murals, mosaics, images of the Kim family, statues of the Kim family on street corners. You open the newspaper, there he is, on the front page. You look at anyone’s lapel badge; they’ll be wearing one, and it’ll have a picture of Kim Il Sung, the state founder, pinned over their heart.
You walk into any room, if we were in North Korea right now, on the most prominent wall in the room, whatever that would be, there would be two portraits: Kim Il Sung, the state founder, and his son, Kim Jong Il. And the first task every day for every North Korean citizen is to get up and use their government-issued duster to reverently dust that portrait. This is the sort of state that we’re talking about.
And these are not exaggerations. Truly, you will hear Kim Il Sung’s name on the tongues of almost every North Korean person you encounter. It’s almost as if he’s integrated into their daily lives. And, by the way, Kim Il Sung, the state founder, has been dead for more than 30 years. Of course, it is now his grandson, Kim Jong Un, who is in charge, and yet Kim Il Sung remains, by the way, the eternal president of North Korea. After he died, they rewrote the constitution and made him the eternal president. So you will see his face absolutely everywhere. He is present everywhere. He may have been gone for more than 30 years, but he’s still with us in many ways.
And so, to me, it was always a source of fascination to understand this cult of personality. In some ways, you can compare Iran and North Korea and look at how similar they are, but also how different because North Korea does have nukes. Iran, perhaps, one day, was trying to get nukes; we don’t know. But we know that North Korea definitely has nukes, and we know that that has effectively insulated them from external threats. I don’t want to say 100 percent, but more or less.
Internal threats? Well, that’s where the cult of personality comes in, because they’ve had one now for 81 years and counting. Same family, different Kim, but you’ve got three generations of this family that have never had any loosening, never had any slackening, in their control over their people and over this cult of personality. And so I wanted to understand this a little bit more. And the thing that really threw me for a loop, the thing that just put question marks over my head, was this notion that Kim Il Sung, the state founder, you know what he was raised as? He was raised as a devout Christian. He was raised as a Presbyterian. American missionaries got to Korea and converted his grandparents, and his parents were devout. And I don’t mean, “Oh, yeah, we’ll go to church on Christmas, we’ll go to church on Easter.” No.
Noor Azrieh: My version.
Jonathan Cheng: Yeah. This is full-on, no holds barred. He was steeped, steeped, steeped in the church. So the founder of the state that has arguably the greatest personality cult we’ve ever seen was raised in the church. He learned to play the organ in church. He taught Sunday school. He spoke at the YMCA. He performed in church plays. Yes, all of the above. He did all of these things.
And so my question was really just to ask: is there some connection between the fact that the guy who built this state, he ran it for 49 years, basically absorbed the teachings of American missionaries? Is there some connection there? Because what I see in North Korea today strikes me as fundamentally very religious at heart.
Noor Azrieh: Huh.
Jonathan Cheng: The first thing you’re supposed to do when you get there is go before this massive bronze statue of Kim Il Sung standing in the middle of Pyongyang, the capital, and you’re supposed to bow before it. You’re taken to his mausoleum, where he is embalmed in formaldehyde and put under glass, and you’re supposed to bow three times before his corpse. You’re supposed to present flowers before his statue every time you have any big life occasion: your wedding day, your graduation day, New Year’s Day, his birthday, April 15th, which is like Christmas in North Korea. It is the holiest day on the calendar. You go to his statue, and you lay a bouquet of flowers, and you bow before it.
To me, all of this is just incredibly religious. You memorize his sayings. You literally sing praise songs to him. To me, it was no accident. It couldn’t have been an accident that the same church boy who was raised steeped in the church would grow up and create a state that looked so much like it that had all these trappings of religiosity that kind of echo Christianity in a weird way. And so, to me, I was just trying to figure out this mystery. Is there some connection? When we look at North Korea today and we think to ourselves, “That is the strangest cult of personality you’ve ever seen. It’s so different from what I’m used to,” and yet it has its roots. It’s sort of drawing on this heritage from, by the way, not just American missionaries. Also Canadian missionaries. Canadian missionaries were a huge part of this.
Noor Azrieh: Talk about that. That’s interesting.
Jonathan Cheng: Many of the first missionaries who got to Korea in the 1880s — Protestant missionaries, I’m talking about here — came out of the University of Toronto. Genuinely, they did. And so, as I walk around downtown here, I’m walking by U of T, I’m walking by these grand old stone churches that were built back in that era. They’re a lot quieter these days, but still, you had young men and women, young Canadian and American men and women, who would go to the finest universities in North America, including the University of Toronto. They would get medical degrees, in some cases, and they would ship off to countries like Korea. And many of the most prominent missionaries who helped share this Christian message with the family of Kim Il Sung, the family of Kim Jong Il, were Canadian missionaries. And so you have this whole strange backstory to how North Korea became the way it became. It blew my mind. I couldn’t believe what I was finding. I studied history in school, and I’m a big history nerd. If I weren’t a journalist, I’d probably be a historian or something like that. This was a bit of a passion project on the side for me, but I just couldn’t believe what I found. The book is 768 pages.
Noor Azrieh: Whoa!
Jonathan Cheng: I hope that doesn’t scare anyone. But really, I mean, I wrote it like a journalist. It’s a fun, light, breezy read. It’s not quite a beach read, but I really do hope it’s lively. It got so long in part because what I found was every page I’m writing, I couldn’t believe what I was discovering. It was one of those things where you want to go, “Hey guys, I’ve got to show you this too. I’ve got to show you this too. You wouldn’t believe what I found.” And I just sort of packed the book that way. And I think it tells us a lot, by the way, about how politics and religion can merge in pretty powerful ways. That is something that, in the year 2026, I think we can see all around us: that religion, far from being something increasingly obsolete or irrelevant to modern life, no, that’s not the case at all. I think we see politics becoming more religionized. I think we see religion becoming more politicized. And whether you like it or not, it’s pretty striking, what’s happening right now.
Noor Azrieh: This sounds like the perfect summer read. I don’t know about you that’s a book I’d read on the beach.
Jonathan Cheng: Take it to the beach.
Noor Azrieh: Jonathan Cheng, thank you so much for making the time. It’s been so much fun.
Jonathan Cheng: Thanks for having me.
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