What’s up, America? My name is Noah Conradson. I’m a surfer, a father, a husband, a surfer, a disciple of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, a surfer and a property manager and co-owner at Conradson Property here in southern Orange County. We live in San Clemente which—and I know it’s a big call—but this is easily the raddest town on Earth. On Earth, dude! Check it, my average Sunday is: dawn surf with the homies at Trestles, breakfast, morning service with the fam at Paradise Fellowship, lunch, golf and beers with the boys, then sunset beers and tacos at Los Molinos. Paradise, dude. What more could you want?

My wife Kayley was a big fan of Life Swap, Season One, so when she saw the call-out for Season Two applicants, we were definitely interested. After some prayer, some discussion and a chat with Pastor Mike, we decided to send in an application. It was fun making the video. Our boys are super into it whenever Kayley goes live—Fin is ten, Stringer is seven and Leash is five—and she’s a natural after all these years building her fitness brand. So we sent in the video, and then kinda forgot about it until your email showed up announcing we’d been selected to swap lives with the Lee family.

To be honest, the first thing we did was look up Pyongyang on a map. We were super stoked for about 20 minutes, until Kayley posted about it and some of her followers got worried and reached out. Like, it turns out that North Korea is kinda sketchy?

Okay so according to Pastor Mike—his algorithm is super dialed, dude—the deal with communists is that they hate Christians. See, that’s why he always said that Governor Newsom is a communist: he closed the churches for Covid. In North Korea it’s like Covid but, like, all the time.

So it was just a week before our trip and, I gotta say, Kayley and I were pretty bummed about this communism thing. She wanted to pull the plug completely, but Pastor Mike asked us to stay back after worship one Sunday and he totally shifted our perspective. Homie sat us down and was like, “Dudes? I sense great care and responsibility from the production team at Life Swap. And with the protection of our Lord Jesus, you and your children are going to be totally safe during your six weeks in North Korea.”

I was all like, “I don’t know, dude. Did you know there’s also a South Korea?”

“Noah, Jesus has given you this mission. And I know you and your family: you’re true warriors for Christ. So carry that warrior’s spirit in your hearts, and perhaps your Christian example may help that evil nation to see the light of Jesus. Plus: you’re getting paid to participate in the show, and we all know that the Lord Jesus wants his followers to prosper.”

Dude. Talk about flipping the script. Pastor Mike gave us this whole reset, and he was even kind enough to invite you guys to film during worship. Usually he only lets his own camera crew in there. Plus he hooked us up with a box of Paradise Fellowship-branded scripture t-shirts and stickers to hand out when we got to Pyongyang—and with a 20 percent discount!

So Pastor Mike had us feeling good, and things got even better when I had a closer look at the map of North Korea. Dude? It’s got this huge exposed coastline. I couldn’t find anything online about surfing in North Korea but you know what that means: uncrowded waves. So we were stoked. We packed our bags, the boards and the merch, and headed for the airport.

After two long flights and a layover in China, we were bummed to learn that the airline had lost all our Paradise Fellowship merch. No-one at the Pyongyang baggage claim seemed interested in tracking it down, much less a refund. Kinda bad vibes all around until Stringer reminded us that we carry the Word of Jesus in our hearts and minds, so overall it was chill. We wandered outside to meet our guide, Mr Park, who wore a boxy suit and smiled a lot. He strapped our gear to the roof of his little sedan and Familia Conradson piled into the back seat.

Driving into the city, I could see that Pyongyang is clean. I mean, like, super clean. I didn’t see a single tent or really any homeless at all, nothing like LA or even San Francisco. I asked Mr Park where all the homeless live in Pyongyang, and he said something about executing landlords to destroy the evils of capitalism, which definitely got my attention. I mean, I’m a landlord back home—maybe I should watch my mouth. But then again, maybe I missed something because doesn’t capitalism mean you have money? To, like, afford a house?

But Mr Park was a homie, overall. He helped us lug our gear up to the Lees’ place, which was on the eighth floor of this big apartment block near downtown Pyongyang. There were elevators in the building, but Mr Park said they only had electricity for a few hours in the evening.

The pad was so clean that Kayley was worried what the Lees would think about our place back in San Clemente. That said, their furniture’s a little old and a bit different. No couches or anything, just mats where you sit and also sleep. Like I guess North Koreans don’t like to be comfortable? Let me put it this way: the Lees are gonna be super stoked with the Conradson king bed and white leather L-shaped sectional.

Anyway, the first thing we noticed when we entered our new home were the photos of these three dudes on the wall in the main room. Mr Park was excited to introduce us. First off there’s Kim Jong Un, the president of North Korea. Honestly? Homie needs a new barber ASAP. The flat-top combed-back do is just not working for him. The second looked like a real player: Kim Jong Il. Goofy glasses, bomber jacket, frizzy hair, it’s a crazy vibe but it kinda works for him? And then there was this chubby dude who I’d already seen in statues and portraits all over the city on the way from the airport: Kim Il Sung.

Kim Il Sung is definitely the big dog of the three. He was Kim Jong Il’s dad and Kim Jong Un’s granddad and he, like, started this country. He’s basically the George Washington of North Korea.

As an American, I know that communism is totally bogus, right? But look, we’re hardworking people. Kayley runs a small business and my dad started Conradson Properties back in the 90s—still proudly helping investors maximize their returns to this day. What I’m saying is that we Conradsons know what it takes to get a company off the ground, so I have mad respect for anyone who starts an entire country, even if it is communist. It’s kinda like how I’ve never really vibed with Rip Curl as a brand, but I have hella respect for the dudes that started it, you know?

Kim Jong Il was my favorite of the three. Because, like, my dad started Conradson Properties, his dad started North Korea… I just felt like I could relate. And my dad’s also named Noah, so there’s another similarity: Noah and Noah, Kim and Kim.

Before he left, Mr Park was super excited to show us another framed photo which, it turned out, was of President Trump! He was shaking hands with Kim Jong Un, both of them cheesin’ it up. I was like, “No way.” Good vibes, dude, but then Mr Park did get pretty bummed when we tried to move the Kims into the hallway. Like sure, I’ll hang out with these dudes, just maybe not in my living room? There was a lot of heavy chat with the Life Swap camera crew and eventually the producer said we shouldn’t move the pictures. “Not allowed,” is what she actually said.

It totally wasn’t a big deal, and from then on we were just chillin’ with the Kims in our Pyongyang crib every night. It was actually kinda dope. Cultural, you know? Like, we had this little white cloth stored in a special box, and every day the groms took turns wiping away the dust. Leash was always super proud to show off his handiwork when the inspectors came around.

Because look, if Trump and Lil Kim could be boys, I could definitely get past the furniture, the weird food, Mr Lee’s ancient little car, the missing merch and the fact that Instagram didn’t work on our phones, which meant that Kayley couldn’t see what Mrs Lee was doing with her fitness brand. I could give this country a chance.

Things went pretty well for that first week as we settled into our Life Swap. During the day, the boys would go to school while I learned the ropes at Mr Lee’s job at a wig factory on the outskirts of town. Kayley took Mrs Lee’s job as a kind of organizer in our apartment complex—she was the leader of this thing called an inminban, which sorta looks out for everyone in the building and keeps it all humming. And at night we practiced new words and phrases in Korean, read On the Juche Idea by candlelight and ate kimchi and rice for dinner. It took me a minute to come around on the kimchi but it does grow on you. And dude? Maybe this is TMI for TV, but I’ve never been more regular in my life.

On Sunday we had the day off, so we all headed outside and there was Mr Park waiting for us, smiling hard and wanting to know where we were going. “Uh, duh? It’s Sunday, dude!”

But I guess they take that Christian-hating thing seriously because we couldn’t find a single church anywhere. We were scratching our heads until Kayley had a brain wave. She’s like, “Dude, the first Christians didn’t have churches either. They prayed in caves and fields and stuff. It’s just like Stringer said: we carry the Word of Jesus in our hearts and minds.”

My wife, dude. Total babe, total brainiac.

So we wandered into this park a few blocks from our place, which was full of families out enjoying the sunshine, and found a sweet little clearing to kneel down and pray. I was just getting to the “as we forgive those who trespass against us” part of the Lord’s Prayer when I heard some distant shouting and the camera crew all kinda muttering. I opened my eyes and saw that everyone had cleared out of the park, and a pack of dudes in these jaunty nerd suits was heading our way. Lots of shouting, the boys crying, and suddenly they just bundled us into this van. Bags over our heads, the full shabang, like a movie. Super scary, dude. And it got worse because I couldn’t hear Kayley or the boys or the camera crew anymore, and when they finally took the bag off me I was in this filthy, windowless room, sitting on the floor, hands tied behind my back and a bunch of suits yelling at me in Korean.

Mr Park came in, smiling so hard that it seemed to hurt his face. He stood near me and began translating for the main suit, who was screaming and waving his peaked cap around.

“Your imperialist superstitions will never poison the minds of the valiant workers in their struggle against the tyranny of world capitalists, landlords and warmongers, and their lackeys, spies and running dogs,” that kind of thing.

I was just sitting there saying, “Mr Park, it’s me, Noah. You know me, dude, and I don’t know what we did but we weren’t trying to hurt or offend anybody and I’m super, super sorry, please just let me see my kids and my wife.”

And Mr Park? He kept translating this babble about running dogs, whatever they are. This was even more stressful than that two-wave hold-down I had at Upper Trestles a few winters back.

Eventually the shouty guy left and another suit came in, and he seemed way chiller. He gave me a chair and explained through Mr Park that Christianity is a tool of oppression, welded to the machinery of capitalism and imperialism to control the masses. Like, woah dude. You’re talking about my Lord and Savior there. This was all news to me.

But then he asked, “When you pray to your imperialist god, what do you say?”

Dude! Super personal question. But at this point I would’ve done anything to get outta that hole and back with my family. So I told the truth: I pray for Kayley and the groms, that they’re safe and happy, and that Fin’s surf career continues to progress. I pray for a solid four-to-six foot south-west swell with an offshore wind and nobody out but me and my boys. I pray for Pastor Mike. I pray that my tenants pay their rent on time, because evictions are always a major bummer. I pray for Jesus to watch over me, and help fill the weird hole I feel in my chest whenever I wake up from this recurring dream where I’m barbecuing in my backyard with Kayley and the kids and my boys and their chicks and we’re having a great time, and then I look down and kick up this tuft of grass, and when it comes loose it turns out that just under the surface the ground is actually a mountain of human skulls. 

Mr Park translated it all for the suit—though I’m pretty sure he left out the part about me being a landlord, because he’s a homie—and the suit’s response was short and simple. Mr Park spoke extra slow as he translated: “Jesus cannot hear your prayers here,” he said. “Here, Kim Il Sung is in charge.”

The suit wore this encouraging smile.

“Mr Park, is this dude saying I can pray, so long as I tell you I’m praying to Kim Il Sung?”

Mr Park nodded. “In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it is the Eternal President who answers our… prayers,” he said. His smile had slackened a little, which I took as a good sign.

“I mean, sure. Copy that, boys. Whatever you say, it’s a deal.”

And that was that. Next thing I was back with Kayley and the groms and the camera crew, and Mr Park was driving us all back to our apartment. Super weird, we agreed, and very scary. But—and I didn’t say this at the time—but I was starting to feel like North Korea and I had come to an understanding.

So we were allowed to pray, so long as we did it in front of a picture or a statue of Kim Il Sung. The North Koreans were super stoked about this. They encouraged us to do it in public, and they had their own camera crew show up every time. But the thing about prayer is that it’s private—they didn’t know that in our head, we were actually praying to Jesus. Like stealth warriors, you know?

The groms were super into it. I was so proud of them. Pretty soon, I noticed that they did the sign of the cross any time they walked past the portraits in our house. One morning I heard Leash say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Sons, and of the Revolution.” Then, as he pressed his palms together, he squeezed his eyes shut and whispered, “Rain violent death upon the treacherous capitalist pigs.”

“Attaboy Leash,” I said, and winked at him. He just kinda squinted at me.

The Conradson boys were taking to Life Swap, but after a couple of weeks I started to worry about the lack of surf in Pyongyang. See, before we left home Fin was getting pretty close to a Volcom sponsorship. I know he’s only ten, but he rips in the water and I can fully see him snapping turns in one of those cool Volcom wetsuits with the logo on his board. And then there’s his name: Fin Conradson. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a pro surfer’s name?

But with all this time out of the water, it was going to be so much harder for him to pick it up again when we got home. So… I prayed. One afternoon, while Kayley was out leading some kind of investigation for the building and the groms were hauling our weekly bucket of poop to the local fertilizer plant, I knelt down and prayed aloud. And out of habit, I prayed to Kim Il Sung. I asked this old, dead leader of the Korean revolution to watch over Fin, to help him throw his fins on every turn and land every crazy air, and to gift him the lucky break that would help him reach our—his—dream of going pro. Weird, right? Well get this.

A few days later, Mr Park rolled in to tell me about this youth surfing contest that was coming up on the east coast of North Korea. Would Fin be interested in competing? My heart was beating fast but I played it cool: “Sure Mr Park, but we’ve got big quotas down at the wig factory and I’m not sure if I have any PTO.”

Mr Park said it was chill, it could all be arranged and Fin would represent the United States against surfers from North Korea, China, Russia and Mongolia. He said there would be scouts from major international surf brands.

I was like, “Say less, we’re there.”

So after this long drive through the mountains we showed up at this little beach town which was really just a mini version of Pyongyang, only more tired-looking and with less electricity. Drab high-rises, clean streets. At the end of the main drag there was this sandy beach about a mile wide with these long points on either side. There was a fence between the town and the dunes, which was weird, but soldiers had opened the gate for the contest. And there was this nice little beach break right out front. The groms were stoked.

The tournament started the next day and, I mean, the other surfers were fine and I don’t want to throw shade or anything but… look. Fin is from San Clemente, dude. He grew up surfing Lower Trestles. The Colapinto brothers know his name. It was basically a wrap.

Things did get kinda close in the final, though. There was this one Korean kid from Chongjin who was kinda ripping even though his board was super ancient. With thirty seconds left in the final heat and the scores basically tied, this absolute bomb came through and Fin was way out of position. So the Chongjin kid took off looking like he was about to totally smoke this wave and win the comp. But then suddenly, just up the beach, this soldier dude in one of the nerd suits started barking into a bullhorn. The Chongjin kid perked up like he was listening for a second, and next thing you know he stepped right off his board. Maybe that was his coach or something? I couldn’t quite follow. Didn’t matter anyway, because Fin caught the next wave, surfed it pretty well and won the contest.

We were so stoked, dude. Fin had won an international surfing competition! There was this neat little ceremony where they gave Fin a red star medal and everything, and then he gave a short speech in Korean thanking the spirit of Kim Il Sung for imbuing him with enough Juche spirit to hit the lip and shred the waves to the judges’ satisfaction. And then, right after, Mr Park brought this dude over saying he’s a talent scout for Volcom Korea.

I was like, “What?” I mean, first of all: I didn’t know they had Volcom in North Korea. Like all I’d seen since we got here was jumpsuits and military uniforms and the occasional super-square khakis like Mr Park wore. There were no brands on anything. Even our wig factory didn’t have a brand, besides these “Made in China” tags which Mr Park said is a cheeky little trick to get around export controls. It’s a country with no advertising whatsoever except for, like, billboards about Kim Il Sung and the country itself. I don’t even know how that works. How do you know what you wanna buy?

Anyway, Mr Volcom was all like, “I represent the Volcom surf team here in North Korea, and it would honor us greatly to recruit Comrade Fin to our illustrious ranks.”

So Fin was a sponsored surfer. I couldn’t wait to tell the boys back home. Next stop: World Surfing League!

The following Monday, I was back at Mr Lee’s job at the Taebo-dong Glory to the Victorious Fatherland Wig Manufacturing Complex. And I don’t wanna brag or anything, but my homies at the Taebo-dong Glory to the Victorious Fatherland Wig Manufacturing Complex make the most lustrous, exquisite and lice-free wigs you’ll find anywhere this side of the Yalu River. Don’t even get me started on the slackers over at the Kwangmyong 10th of October Synthetic Coiffure Plant. Compared to ours, their product is straight trash.

When I returned from the surf competition, everyone was super stressed and working even longer hours than usual. Mr Park said we had this huge quota, and that we were falling behind schedule. He even said that President Kim himself was getting updates on our progress.

My job was to check the shipments of hair coming in, help oversee the count of wigs we’d finished by the end of the day, write reports for the big wigs—hah!—up at Party Headquarters and, most importantly, inspire the workers to fill our quotas and hit our deadlines.

See, there were very few machines in the wig factory—just rows and rows of workers sitting on stools, making the wigs by hand. By hand, dude, it’s crazy. But I guess it’s the perfect industry for a country like North Korea, where the power goes out pretty often.

So while the workers—who were all women, because I guess their hands were nimble enough to tie knots in individual strands of hair all day—stayed late, I was right there with them. “Come on comrades, you can do this! President Kim is gonna be super stoked with all these wigs! Let’s show those Kwangmyong goons how it’s done!” That sort of thing.

I was seriously stressed about this quota and I definitely took that stress home with me. By Wednesday night I found myself kneeling in the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed. And, well, I prayed aloud again.

I prayed for the workers to push extra hard, for us to fill the quota on time. And it’s weird to admit this, but you have to understand that I was fully caught up in things at work, and the president is a big part of the work culture… I guess I feel the need to explain myself because, well, I prayed that our good work would put a smile on the radiant face of President Kim. Weird, right? I fully did that. Like, pictured Kim Jong Un’s chubby face cracking a big smile. And I was praying to his granddad, Kim Il Sung. Y’know, instead of Jesus. Crazy, I know. But there it is.

Well, it gets weirder. The very next day, Mr Park pulls me aside to huddle with the other honchos. He turns to me with this grave look on his face and he’s like, “Comrade Noah, I know you’ve been struggling with the current quota, and you know the Dear Leader has been watching the Taebo-dong Glory to the Victorious Fatherland Wig Manufacturing Complex very closely.”

I was like, “No shit, dude! I’m majorly stressing over it.” Well, I didn’t say that. I actually said something like, “Anything to make the Dear Leader smile.”

But then Mr Park grinned and was all like, “Dude, we found a saboteur.” I mean, he didn’t say “dude.” But he did say that other word: “saboteur.”

I followed him into this little windowless office, where we found one of our comrades sitting in a chair. This poor woman looked pretty out of it. Her glasses were broken. (All the wig-making comrades wear glasses, because the work is pretty gnarly on the eyes.) I turned to the other honchos, who were crowded into the doorway, and asked, “Since when do we keep handcuffs at the wig factory?”

Mr Park stepped forward and said, “This is a bad comrade. She has been destroying product after-hours, seeking to sabotage the revolution with her treachery.”

So by now I was already getting the heebie-jeebies, right? Because just last night I had prayed about hitting our quota. At the time I’d felt stupid. Not any more.

But it’s important not to get carried away with this stuff. So I asked, “How did you figure it out? What’s the evidence?” I mean, you can’t just lock someone up without due process or whatever. I’ve seen Law & Order, dude.

“This comes straight from the Dear Leader himself,” Mr Park said. One of the honchos gasped, and the rest were all nodding. “The president’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, appeared to him in a dream. He said, ‘The 76th comrade to arrive for work tomorrow at Taebo-dong Glory to the Victorious Fatherland Wig Manufacturing Complex is conspiring with imperialists.’” Mr Park turned and glared at the comrade in the cuffs. I’d never seen him so angry. “This is the 76th comrade to arrive this morning. Under interrogation, she has confessed to her crime.”

Right? I know! But hold on, hold on. There’s even more, dude.

Mr. Park turned away from the bad comrade and fixed his eyes on me.

“In the dream, the great Commander of the Revolution told his grandson, the Dear Leader, that his attention was drawn to the situation by you, Comrade Noah.”

Chills, dude. Goosebumps. I got ‘em right now, feel my arm.

Even though we were super behind on our quota, the honchos announced later that afternoon that we all had to stop work and go outside. One of the honcho comrades told the assembled wig-making comrades that they would carry out the saboteur’s sentence immediately. And dude? They don’t mess around in North Korea. They had a bunch of soldiers on standby who blindfolded her, put her up against the factory wall and bang, shot her. Just like that, right there in front of us. Then they dragged her away.

I was bummed. Like, so bummed, dude. Words can’t describe. I mean, it’s just wigs, right? How are a few wigs gonna harm a revolution that happened 70 years ago? And what’s more, I felt responsible. Because of my prayer, dude. Like maybe I had accidentally sicced Kim Il Sung onto her.

Look, I’d been praying to Jesus my whole life. And things didn’t always work out exactly how I wanted them to because, like Pastor Mike always said, “God works in mysterious ways.” In fact, in all my years of praying to Jesus I had never seen any direct correlation between my prayers and what actually happened. Like, I still had to evict tenants all the time, and I could not stop having that dream with the skulls. And that made sense because Jesus, he’s balancing a lot of competing priorities, right? He knows what’s best both for me as an individual and for, like, the greater good. He hears what I want, takes it on board and answers my prayers if he can, in a roundabout way.

So when the North Koreans asked us to pray to Kim Il Sung, I was kinda like, “Okay, obviously you can’t worship false idols, so I’ll just mouth the words and think of Jesus,” right?

Except by this point, I’d been surrounded by Kim Il Sung for a few weeks and I actually had started to think of him when I prayed. And look at what happened! Like, you say a prayer to Kim Il Sung and he doesn’t just hear it—he is on the case, dude.

I was starting to think that maybe these North Koreans were onto something, especially when we came back to work the next day and, without the saboteur, production had literally doubled. Doubled, dude. We were back on track. We smashed the quota and by Friday afternoon Mr Park was back at the factory, announcing that tears of joy had rolled down the sun-like face of President Kim Jong Un when he heard the news. The comrades were stoked, and so was I.

At some point, you’ve got to look for points on the board. I had prayed to Jesus my whole life and never saw anything for it. Then I sent two prayers to Kim Il Sung and boom: my son had a Volcom sponsorship and my factory had put a smile on the face of the Dear Leader, just like I asked.

I still felt bad about the comrade who got executed, but when I mentioned it to Kayley that night she totally set me right. “The only good class traitor is a dead class traitor,” she said over dinner. Fin, Stringer and Leash all nodded as they munched their kimchi.

“Simple as that, huh?”

“We’ve already executed three of our neighbors for counterrevolutionary activity,” she shrugged.

“What! Who?”

“Mrs Ga was listening to radio broadcasts from the South after curfew. Mr Yong knew about it and didn’t report her. And the Chons’ eldest boy was engaged in black marketeering—he was selling shiitakes he’d grown in his apartment.”

I was stunned.

“We’ve sent five more to labor camps. Honestly, I think Mrs Lee herself might need to visit a labor camp when she gets back from San Clemente. Under her leadership, this inminban has been letting all sorts of treasonous activity go on right under its nose.”

So everything was going great. The wig factory was humming again, Kayley was obviously killing it at her job and the kids were having fun at school. Stringer and Leash were basically fluent in Korean by now, and Fin had a Volcom sponsorship, even though the Korean Volcom gear did seem a little off-brand. We were happy. And then, later that night, I had the dream.

Like I said before, dreaming kinda sucks for me. It’s only ever that dream with the barbecue on the mountain of skulls. But this one was different. After we put the kids to bed I sat up to enjoy the last few minutes of electricity, reading one of my favorite Kim Il Sung speeches: On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work. I know it’s the famous one but it’s a banger, dude, hits every time. After lights-out, I immediately fell into this deep, black sleep.

And then I woke up. Well, like, woke up in a dream. I was lying in some grass. It was nighttime. I could feel dew on my hands and body. There was this dim orange light. I couldn’t see very far at first, because all these kids were running around me trailing streamers. Dead silence, and these little kids in their jumpsuits with these long, thick ribbons of pink and blue and red silk billowing out behind them. I could feel the silk brushing my face. And then, like a school of fish making way for a dolphin, they sort of circled out and away from me. The orange light faded and everything went black again. For a moment I was fully, like, suspended in darkness, looking up at the stars.

Suddenly there was this slamming sound and all these lights went on at once, flooding out the stars and revealing these big bleachers in front of me—I was in a stadium, dude! And the stands seemed to be full of people, except they were all holding these colored cards that they held up above their heads, and every card was like a single pixel in this gigantic picture of a face: Kim Il Sung. He was glaring down at me. The thousands of people who made up his face started switching their individual cards so that his mouth began to move, and it was unclear where they ended and the spirit of the Eternal President began, and a booming voice rang out in Korean-accented English: “Noah Conradson.”

I answered, “Yes?” My voice was small and weak, so I repeated myself, shouting this time: “Yes!”

“You have been asleep in the imperialist machinery your entire life. You were a parasitic landlord, a superstitious follower of a false religion, a petty tyrant blindly leaching from your comrades just to lift the litters of your plutocratic masters.”

I felt scared, dude. But Kim Il Sung’s face split into this wide, warm grin. He’s so jolly and joyful when he smiles.

“I cannot blame you for this. You knew no different. And now that you have left the empire and entered the realm of resistance, you have become a good comrade.”

The warmth of his smile and his words touched my body, as if there really were heaters just beyond the edge of the little patch of spotlight that illuminated me. My chest heaved. I felt tears in my eyes. Up in the stands, the familiar faces of Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un emerged from behind their patriarch: the holy trinity. They were all smiling.

“My dear Comrade Noah,” Kim Il Sung said, and the warm timbre of his voice reached right into my chest and held my heart. “You have come so far, and yet you have such a long way to go. Will you join me to spread the gospel of revolution and emancipation?”

Movement caught my eye, and a figure stepped into the spotlight with me. He wore a loincloth, a crown of thorns, a beard that seemed slightly askew and what looked like real scars on his hands, his feet and beneath his ribs. He pulled me to my feet. He held me by the shoulders, staring into my eyes, and nodded. Then we turned and looked toward the Kims together. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Return to America,” Kim Il Sung’s booming voice commanded. “Spread word of my miracles among your people. Build me a church. And await further instructions.”

Next thing I knew, it was morning and I was on the mat on the floor of the Lees’ bedroom. I was panting hard. I felt changed. Energized. Kayley was already up fixing breakfast, and as I rolled over and planted my feet on the cold vinyl floor, I noticed a single blade of grass stuck to my big toe.

#

Life Swap was a transformational experience for me and my family. Some folks from the government interviewed us when we got back to America—even the kids—but we told them nothing. They’re enemies of the Lord, of course, but you can’t hold it against them. They don’t know better, not yet.

Construction on the church is going well. The ten-storey golden statue of Kim Il Sung has been a little controversial here in San Clemente, especially because it replaced a bunch of parking on Avenida Del Mar, but the one thing America has going for it is religious freedom. And property rights. Helps to be a property manager, you know? I just point to the Constitution, dude. The same “We the People” stuff my boys have stickered on their Rams and their F-350s.

Pastor Mike kicked up some fuss online when most of his flock started showing up at our Kim Il Sung church, but it wasn’t long before Kayley’s new inminban found a bunch of gnarly stuff on his harddrive. He kept spreading bad vibes for a few days after, saying it wasn’t true and all that, but then suddenly he went dark. I’m still not sure what happened, but Kayley says we won’t have to worry about him any more. My wife, dude. Total babe. Total warrior.

We already had a pretty big congregation by the time we got home, thanks to Mrs Lee’s work with Kayley’s fitness brand. It turns out that pairing photos of organic breakfasts, latte art and Mrs Lee’s bikini butt alongside nuggets of Juche philosophy—centered around independent politics, a self-sufficient economy and self-reliant defense—was pretty popular around here. And if any of Mrs Lee’s fans needed housing, Mr Lee was leasing out our Conradson Properties rentals for free. He’d even rigged them up with cameras and microphones to bring the Dear Leader close enough to hear and answer their prayers. And now the church is growing super fast because when you ask Kim Il Sung for a miracle, homie delivers.