438: Jan Jekielek—The Terrible Truth About China

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of "American Thought Leaders https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/american-thought-leaders." He has extensively covered the issue of forced organ harvesting in China, particularly concerning Falun Gong practitioners. It is estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 organs annually have been involuntarily extracted from political prisoners in China. Jan's investigative work has brought international attention to this human rights atrocity.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  Hey guys, it's Mike Rowe. This is The Way I Heard It. My guest today is Janja Kelik. Chuck, did I get it right?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you said it exactly right. That's the way he says it.

• 0:11Mike Rowe?

  Full disclosure. This is the second time I'm doing this, and as you know, I hate to do anything two times, but as a rule, I hate to mispronounce my guest's name.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  And likewise, you hate when I correct you.

• 0:21Mike Rowe?

  I do hate that a lot, too.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  So we did cut that out.

• 0:23Mike Rowe?

  You know what? There's something here to hate for everyone. Except for Jan, who is a terrific guy. He works for the Epoch Times.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Sure. Let's go with Epoch.

• 0:34Mike Rowe?

  Where you like epoch.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  I think what he said was epoch, yeah, epoch, or?

• 0:38Mike Rowe?

  Oh, God, here we go again.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Ah, gosh.

• 0:40Mike Rowe?

  Whatever it is, I called them the Epoch Times for like five years.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  That's what their advertising says, I believe, so.

• 0:46Mike Rowe?

  I think it does, too.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:47Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, we don't spend a lot of time talking about pronunciations in this episode, but we do spend some, because the language matters an awful lot. And the Epoch Times interviewed me years ago, and I met Jan, who does a terrific series called American Thought Leaders.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05Mike Rowe?

  And he's also the senior editor over there at the Epoch, or the Epoch, or the Epoch Times. I've been wanting to have him on here for a while, because I didn't really give these guys the credit I think they deserved for creating a really fantastic journalistic enterprise. They really have put their money where their mouth is, and there's not a ton of money to go around. It's a subscription-based model. But this newspaper, unlike the Journal, or the New York Times, or really any other newspaper I can think of, began like 20 years ago in Georgia, and it was published entirely in Chinese.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  In Chinese, for an American-Chinese audience.

• 1:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah, because, well, some of you are old enough to remember Tiananmen Square, and the full-on gong, and the persecution that happened to something like 70 to 100 million. This conversation is gonna blow you away. It's called The Terrible Truth About China, because there are many terrible truths, but how familiar, Chuck, were you with this one?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Not as much as I, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't as, as aware. Although I was aware of the organ harvesting, but only through Jan's work.

• 2:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, spoiler alert, that's what's been in front of me now for the last couple of months. The more I've read about this, the more it's just become something I can't not look at.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31Mike Rowe?

  It's 60 to 100,000 human organs a year are being taken from dissidents.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  From living people.

• 2:41Mike Rowe?

  Prisoners, people who have been put in prison, really because they're political enemies of the state.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:48Mike Rowe?

  Anyway, we're talking about hearts and livers and kidneys and lungs and all sorts of things. And it's a $9 billion business and it's happening right in front of our noses. And no one except the Chinese government is really denying it. It's just one more thing we don't quite know what to do with. And it just seems like now as we're looking at these tariffs and trying to figure out how to talk about the economy and how to talk about the future and how to talk about our reliance and our dependence on countries that don't share our values, it just seems like a good time to maybe push this out in the sunlight a bit.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he has a lot to say about very important things. It's going to make you look at China a lot differently. And if you're not aware already, it did me.

• 3:36Mike Rowe?

  Let me say a thing that I hate to say, not because I don't believe it, but because I just hate the fact that I have to say it. The Chinese are a wonderful people. The Chinese culture is an amazing culture. I'm talking about the Chinese government.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:50Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about the communists. I'm talking about the fact that we have for a long list of, well, people will say complicated reasons, but actually they're not complicated, they're economic reasons. We're in business right now with people that I don't think we want to be in business with. And I think most Americans would agree. It's just that things get a little wobbly when our individual 401Ks.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:15Mike Rowe?

  And the cost of our sweatshirts and the cost of everything.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 4:19Mike Rowe?

  Hits us right smack between the eyes. So you got some situational ethics to contend with as we dig in with Jan Yekelik in an episode called The Terrible Truth About China, right after this.

• 4:39Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising.

• 5:19Mike Rowe?

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• 6:02Mike Rowe?

  here in these United States, and that's guaranteed. Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row.

• 6:28Mike Rowe?

  Thank you so much for doing this. I'm in your debt. I've got many questions. I'm tempted to dive right into this tariff thing, but before I do that, congratulations on... What is it, thought leaders?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, American thought leaders. Made a show six years ago and people liked it.

• 6:54Mike Rowe?

  It's so good, and I'm not saying that because I've been on it twice. I thought I did pretty well when I was on, but people loved it. And it's such an interesting mix of guests and your perspective, I think, is. I mean, it must be fun to watch a thing grow the way this has.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Well, for me, it's been, frankly, you know, six years of educating myself about all sorts of things I didn't really know about, trying to figure out the madness of our world, you know, because these last years have been some of the most eventful, it seems, in quite some time.

• 7:27Mike Rowe?

  I think we're living in the most, certainly the most interesting time in my life. It's not for me to say about, you know, the whole, you know, last generation or two, but I just can't imagine how more interesting things can get.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  I think what happens over the next few years is for all the marbles. So I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think China, and I'm biased, of course, because this has been my focus for the last 25 years. I think China's at the center of it with the Communist Party at its helm.

• 7:55Mike Rowe?

  Well, I think you're right. I think a lot of people in this country are in various stages of denial, or maybe it's the five stages of grief. I don't know, but to be so reliant on a country that is so fundamentally, at least from the, you know, policy side, at odds with so many of our tenants, it just, I feel like, I feel like America has really been the frog in the pot of boiling water. And it's starting to bubble over the sides right now. But before we get to all of that, epoch, epic, what's the correct?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  It took me a great many years to figure out how to simply explain the answer. But, well, so here's what I usually say to people, okay? You know, we're obviously for freedom of speech at epoch, right? And we're for freedom of belief, for freedom of conscience. I mean, this is a core, core value, in fact. We're also for freedom of pronunciation.

• 8:57Mike Rowe?

  Because even when I was on the front page of your publication, I was handing out copies to people saying, "Check it out, I'm in the Epoch Times," which of course, you know, was wrong. Until I heard other people further up the food chain than me pronounce it the same way. And I thought, "Well, maybe I'm right. Maybe you guys just spelled it wrong."

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Here's the weird thing, okay? The correct way to pronounce it in American English is epoch. But nobody does that. No one even knows that's the case. One of our editors once, you know, explained this to me. Around the world, a lot of, I'm Canadian like me, we say epoch. But it's also phonetic. So you think epoch, you know what it's spelled like. You know how to get to the website. But if you say epic, that's not the website I want to be sending people to. But it's perfectly fine to use that, too.

• 9:44Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, and I guess I should officially start with an apology of sorts because I didn't... Well, I didn't really understand the level of subversion, really, that you guys embraced. I knew a little bit about Fulong Gong from what I had read. I knew it was a big persecuted group. But I had no idea you're the senior editor over there, right? And so this whole thing has grown into a really sizable organ. But it started by some Chinese Americans who were publishing The Truth in Chinese, in Georgia, if I recall?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  That's right, in Atlanta. So, I mean, it's kind of an incredible story because it is, you know, I know how much you love the American dream, Mike. And this is the American dream at work. You know, you have people that, a number of whom had been involved in the student movement in 1989, right? And you know what happened? Some people watching might not even happen, so I'll just mention it, right?

• 10:45Mike Rowe?

  Tiananmen Square was talking about it.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. There was a giant movement for democracy of students all across the country, all across China, and many, many cities. And then the regime came in and decided to crush it. And they made a point. They made an example of the place where it was centered, where the kind of leadership of the movement was. And there was a massacre. They sent in the military to do it. And we don't know how many people died. The number that is on my mind is about 5,000 were killed by the PLA. What happened afterwards was a bunch of things in a good way, and a bunch of things in a terrible way. The West kind of said, well, that wasn't too good, but we're not really going to hold you to account in any way, Communist China, right?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  A good thing that happened is some of these students that were in the movement managed to get scholarships to Georgia Tech in this case, right? We're talking about Atlanta, Georgia here. And yeah, they ended up there and they found freedom and just never went back, which is what a lot of people did, that were kind of more, a little more quietly in the movement or weren't sort of, the authorities weren't aware of them.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And when the Chinese regime started persecuting the Falun Gong, which was in 1999, this is now 10 years later, these people thought to themselves, hey, we're in a, we're in a free country, we have the First Amendment, we can do something, right? We can actually tell this story, which we weren't able to tell effectively last time that all this happened, because Communist regimes always pick an enemy, it's just how it works. You have to blame all the ills of society, which you're creating mostly on someone else, right? Because it obviously can't be the Communist Party that's responsible.

• 12:23Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  So, so 1999, Falun Gong becomes the group that's, that's targeted. And of course, to justify this, there's always a massive media campaign, or you could call it propaganda, you know, state media, all media in China are controlled. And you take a group of, you know, people who were, it was growing really, really fast in the 90s, right? Up until, I think we, the government estimate was 70 to 100 million people by the end of the 90s.

• 12:53Mike Rowe?

  So, that, that's the first thing I'm apologizing for, right? When I, when I, I think of Falun Gong, I, I don't know, it was bigger than Heaven's Gate and maybe not as crazy, but some culty kind of thing that just existed somewhere over there in the shadows. You're talking about 100 million people, this is massive. And it's a, I mean, it's not a cult, but it is certainly a concentration of like-minded people who seem to, I mean, the more I read, the more embarrassed I was, because it feels like truth, justice and the American way.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Well, perhaps you're alluding to truthfulness, compassion and forbearance being the core principles, right? And the Falun Gong practitioners take those very seriously, it's kind of the centerpiece of, of the practice, at least as I understand it. But, you know, Hate propaganda slander is very effective, especially when it's dished out on a, you know, kind of all country, whole of government scale, like whole of propaganda organ scale. And that's what happened. So, one of the other things, one of the reasons why Falun Gong became so popular, I think, is that it had these health benefits, right?

• 14:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, there was like, almost like a Tai Chi component.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Correct. So, there's these exercises that you do. Really, the whole thing is, is, you know, in traditional methods, you can think, think of it like a Chinese yoga. It's a yoga traditionally, or qigong traditionally, which is what Chinese is called, it actually means energy practice. It's not just, it's never just physical exercises traditionally. It's always the three parts, mind, body, and spirit. You're cultivating yourself, you're cultivating your body, you're cultivating your mind and your spirit all at once. So, really, when you're a Falun Gong practitioner, you're practicing those principles, and that manifests in your body as well. And there's these exercises that kind of support you in doing that, at least that's how I understand it.

• 14:42Mike Rowe?

  So, at some point, this practice really comes to the attention of the Chinese government, and for whatever reason, they see, is it the tenants that they were so opposed to, or just the, the critical mass of people, the number of people who were practicing that freaked them out?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  You're hitting on something really important. I hadn't really thought about the tenants themselves being responsible. I mean, communist parties are very jealous, you could say. They don't like anything that's not directly under their control. And Falun Gong is very unusual, actually, as a system. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why it's kind of misunderstood in the West. It doesn't, it, there's a lot of teachings written by a man named Li Hongzhe, who's the teacher, or the master. Some people don't like that term, but you can think of it in the eastern sense, right? There's a lot of teachings, but there aren't a lot of rules. There aren't a lot of things that, that you absolutely have to do, right? You know, one of the things would be, for example, that you're not allowed to enrich yourself by sharing it with people, right? That would be a rule. Another one is-

• 15:43Mike Rowe?

  Sharing the practice with people.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or, or, yeah, or in any way, frankly, you know, associated- With it, that would be one of the rules. Another of the rules would be that there's, there's no hierarchy. You have an internal level which you're raising as you cultivate, as you do this practice. But there's no black belt or anything like that. There's no, and there's no kind of priest or some kind of person like this. No, you actually have to find your own way through the teachings and that's the way, that would be another rule. At least, you know, again, these are, these are, this is Yan's version, right? But another rule would be, let's say you're a great Falun Gong practitioner. You practice truthfulness, compassion, tolerance really well, right? I can't emulate you.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I would need to understand the teachings and find my own way to live those principles, right? So you, so it's very self-directed, right? In a lot of ways, I think it actually promotes, you know, individual agency. And that is something the communists do not like.

• 16:41Mike Rowe?

  What the persecution looked like once it became a thing?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  So one of the reasons that we know it happened was that the dictator at the time, his name was Jiang Zemin. He was very jealous of Li Hongxia. He, you know, basically here was someone, a man who had the genuine love of the people. It changed a lot of people's lives, a lot of, there were a lot of these health benefits that I was mentioning. So people were getting healthy. There was even awards, some were even getting awards, you know, from their local governments for, for helping do things. So, yeah, like basically it was this emergent movement that grew basically right from the ground up. Another rule, I just, I'm kind of deviating a little bit from your question would be that there's no kind of official roster.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  You're a practitioner because you choose to be.

• 17:32Mike Rowe?

  Cause you say you are.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Cause you live, well, not entirely, because you're really trying to live it that way. It's an internal, like I could say I am, but if I'm not really living the teachings, then I'm not one.

• 17:41Mike Rowe?

  I just find this so interesting because it's like, like you could look at the Boy Scouts. You could look at the Kiwanis Club, the J C's. You could look at, you know, these civic organizations. And if you sprinkle in a little physicality and then, you know, lean into whatever their tenants happen to be. And then suddenly it grew, like in this country, if you had, I don't know what the relative corollary would be, but tens of millions of people all doing the same thing.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:05Mike Rowe?

  So with the persecution, do they come over here en masse? Did they come over here at the same time as the Tiananmen Square uprising? Were those two things sort of conflated or juxtaposed?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  No, so this is, we've got about a 10-year period. Things in the 90s in China, the healthcare system kind of really crumbled. And at the same time, there was a little bit of internal opening up after the Tiananmen Square massacre. So people started going back to these old methods. Qi Gong was just a name. It just means energy practice. That, you know, all these things were called, basically, had very religious sounding names. So you didn't want to use that.

• 18:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Because communists don't like that. So, and they named them different things and they started doing them en masse. And Falun Gong was just by far the most popular, the most effective, arguably, and so forth. And sort of a combination of the government saying, hey, this is bigger than the Communist Party. Right? So I think there were 60 million Communist Party members at the time. Right? It was bigger than the Communist Party on one hand.

• 19:02Mike Rowe?

  Wow.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Grassroots, so it's not sitting underneath a lid and on, and basically kind of the lid of the party. And at the same time, there's this kind of jealousy that the dictator knows he can never, he has his iron fist, he can rule, but he'll never have the love of the people like this man does. And so the combination of that, that's how I always viewed it, okay? That's what caused this, what caused it. I mean, basically, he outlawed it. And he imagined, and we know this through documentation, that he thought he could eradicate the group. And he didn't mean kill everybody, it just meant crush it, right? You know, basically, re-educate the people, get them to renounce it. That was the purpose, I think, initially.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Turned out that people don't re-educate easily that do this practice. Because of this internal agency that's grown, because of the benefits they got from it, they wouldn't. And that's when unwritten rules started being laid down into the, remember, they put millions of people into the prison and labor camp system, right? This is, this is a massive thing across the entire country. And now the rule becomes unwritten. Unfortunately, we just know again from testimony, all Falun Gong deaths in these places will be ruled suicides.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So the real thing was, you can work on these people, whatever way to break them. And they tried really hard. That's when this thing really went, went bad. And the, and I think the organ harvesting piece is kind of the most pernicious. In communist societies, this is difficult for people to understand. But if you end up on the enemy of state side of things, or you're not, you know, you're not sort of sanctioned by the regime, or the regime doesn't kind of agree to what you're doing, you are not really human anymore. It's arguably, I don't even know if anybody is, but you can be basically dealt with in whatever way, in whatever means. It's a twisted, twisted way of thinking. So someone, and I have a theory who this is, but I'm not gonna, I don't have evidence of this part, said, hey, look, we're just growing our organ industry.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  We're just, we've just started it. We've been using these death row prisoners to do this. Now we have millions of people in the system. This is perfect. We can, we can do whatever we want now. And they're healthy. And on top of that, where they're healthy, early 2000s.

• 21:14Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so what we know about organ transplants, at least what I know, is that you can't, you need a living person who's basically brain dead.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 21:25Mike Rowe?

  Right?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  In most cases, corneas would be the exception, but yes.

• 21:28Mike Rowe?

  Okay, but you can't take a heart from a cadaver, or a liver, or a spleen, or whatever, a kidney. So you've got millions of people, many fallen gong, imprisoned. And the reason I reached out to you was I, I read somewhere that there was just a, and one, it's just one of the most baffling coincidences. How come there's so many hospitals built right next to prisons in China?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:56Mike Rowe?

  I mean.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I, well, it's crazy. I mean, listen, I, when I was doing human rights work, I, for a couple of years, I represented the International Society for Human Rights in Poland. This was during the time of the, the Beijing Olympics. We actually made a map where we showed all the Olympic venues, and then the forced labor camps and re-education camps that were right beside those venues, unbeknownst to the world, unbeknownst to the world's people. We didn't get a lot of play with that, unfortunately. I was thinking it would be like, that would be the most interesting thing for people. The suggestion was, go, go knock on the door there and find out what they do at this place. See what they tell you. At the very least, you could do that, right? But the whole thing was just totally nuts.

• 22:45Mike Rowe?

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• 24:07Mike Rowe?

  So, frame it for me then.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:10Mike Rowe?

  What kind of business are we talking about? How many organs do you think are being harvested in this way from China? Then, to be clear, we're talking about a market where people can schedule a procedure in order to get their new heart, which really is the first heads-up. Wait, you can't, you can't schedule that. You're on a list, and you have to wait, at least over here. But for a few hundred grand, you can go to China, you can schedule, and set it up, and you get a heart.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  That's right. There's been quite a large body of evidence that's been developed about this. And I'll tell people right away, you know, this is to some of you, it's going to sound crazy and unbelievable, and it's, it is unbelievable, in fact. So that's a fair reaction. Chinatribunal.org is the repository of a year-long tribunal that assessed all the available evidence a few years back, and it's, it's pretty compelling and pretty damning. But I'll, I'll give you kind of a thumbnail, a bit of a picture, okay? The situation you just described, Mike, Jacob Levy, the head of the Israeli Transplant Association at the time, he had a patient, they have socialized medicine, they pay for people to get necessary work done outside of the country, right? Health, health-related.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  So he, he said, look, I'm, I'm waiting for a heart and I'm gonna go and I, they're gonna, they've scheduled it for me. And Jacob, Dr. Jacob basically said, that's impossible. There's no ethical way that could be done. Because you, as you said, you can't transplant from a cadaver, but the guy goes, gets the heart, comes back and here I am. Right? And that's when Jacob realized this is real, there's something terrible is happening. And Israel was, I think, the first country to enact legislation that in some way countered this terrible situation by saying, we're not going to pay. There's a bunch of states now that are enacting legislation like that, but it's really only now. And we're talking

• 26:04Speaker 02

  about 2006, 2007, something like this, right now. But we know that this has been happening since the early 2000s. The growth of this industry has been basically kind of almost exponential growth, has been since the early 2000s.

• 26:19Mike Rowe?

  What am I looking at there? The China tribunal?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  That's right. So Sir Jeffrey Neese, who was the prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic back in the day, he was asked to convene a people's tribunal. What that is, is basically, they went and found all the experts, anybody related to this issue, and tried to establish, is this real? And for that, because this is the question everybody is asking themselves as they're watching this show, unless they already know, right? How could this be a thing? How could this be real? And by the way, you asked me about the scale, Mike. The scale, the best estimates that we have are still, and these came from Ethan Gutman, who wrote an amazing book called The Slaughter, one of the best journalists that have in-depth reporters on this issue over the years.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  About sixty to a hundred thousand a year transplants from no ethically provided donor. Okay, a year.

• 27:17Mike Rowe?

  No, not, not, not okay. Sixty, oh, wait, sixty thousand organs are being removed probably from prisoners.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 27:26Mike Rowe?

  And through a-

• 27:27Speaker 02

  There's no, there's no credible organ donation. They only instituted a supposed organ registry in 2015. Okay, in response to people asking these inconvenient questions. And there's a paper in one of, I forget which journal it is right now, that shows that their growth of that organ registry is a perfect quadratic equation, which means they fudged the data. So that, to our knowledge, whatever credible organ donor in situation there is, is tiny. It does not account for even a small portion of the annual organs being transplanted.

• 28:02Mike Rowe?

  And I assume the market is global. This isn't just-

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Well, the, the people come from all over, but it's, you know, as far as we can tell, it's obviously Chinese the most. Then there's Taiwan, that these countries around there, um, you know, there was actually a South Korean film crew that went in and actually went to some of these hospitals, got some very interesting information. What they tell people is they say it's a death row prisoner because no one really is going to believe that this is entirely ethically sourced, but to assuage people's guilt, they would say, well, it's a death row prisoner. To me, that's not cool. There's no way a death row prisoner is voluntarily surrendering their organs. But that's how they would make you feel better about it. But, you know, even the most aggressive estimates of the death penalty in China, it's still ten, you know, orders of magnitude more transplants happening.

• 28:47Mike Rowe?

  I don't even know how to think about this. So, I mean, is there a dollar figure you can put on it? Sixty to a hundred thousand organs times what? A hundred thousand?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Um, it ranges, like, we've seen different numbers. On the low end, it was something like sixty thousand for kidneys. This is just off the top of my head. Up until two hundred thousand for hearts, livers, things like that. The estimate David Matus, who is one of the, probably the person who understands this issue the best in the world, he's a human rights lawyer from Winnipeg, fellow Canadian, actually was hunting down the last Nazi war criminals in Canada as part of his work as well. Amazing human being. His estimate is, I believe it's a nine billion dollar a year industry. Yeah.

• 29:33Mike Rowe?

  You're just throwing some numbers around that are just so consequential.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  It's hard, it's hard to fathom, right? But why is this so important? Okay. Because we're going to talk about other things too. This helps you understand the nature of the government, the people who purport to govern this country, how they operate and what they allow for. Right? My theory, and I, based on my understanding of the regime and so forth, is that even more so than this, that nine billion dollars a year, that's, tells you about the scale. It's not small. But the real reason is that of the 200 odd families that make up the people, the, the super elite that rule that country, kind of like the, you know, like you could think of it like the, the polyp, right? The, the mafia. Right?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  It's in a way, it functions a lot like the mafia. Right? They have an unlimited source of organs at any time. Imagine how much that is worth to people. Right? That is-

• 30:34Mike Rowe?

  Decent people who become desperate. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine a moneyed person in this country with a sick kid who's on the clock. This person probably spent their whole life with snappy answers to ethical questions. They would never blink. They would never, no, no, of course not. But you get in a situation, you know, desperation plus means equals, uh, let's call it situational ethics. And, and you're right, that's, what, what would you need to hear as a parent to somehow assuage your guilt? Well, it's a death row prisoner. Well, you know, if not you, somebody else. If not your kid, somebody else is going to get it.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  I even had a friend in Poland, uh, tell me, you know, I, I was explaining this whole thing to him and he said, you know, if it was me, I might do it. And I was like, that is extremely honest of you. But, um, uh, you have a really perverted sense of ethics, my friend.

• 31:39Mike Rowe?

  You're both right, or both of those things are right. You know, I, um, we're, we're probably gonna hopscotch around a little bit because I think what's going on with the tariffs right now, to your point. It, the, the, these things rhyme. And when you look at, you know, the Uyghurs, you know, I've talked to Ennis Freedom, he's been here, I've talked to, I, I. When you look at the whole Free Tibet thing, when you look at how righteous so many Americans get when they are confronted with the inescapable truth of what's going on over there versus this poll I just saw, I think it was in National Review. But the percentage of Americans who will turn a blind eye when their own 401ks, when their own businesses,

• 32:23Mike Rowe?

  when their own supply chains are revealed to be so inexorably wrapped up with the Chinese. It's like 52% of people affirmatively say what your friend said. In a way, they just say, look, all things considered, life is short and I'm an ostrich and I'll put my head in the sand.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  But let's talk about the Uyghurs for a moment, or Uyghurs as, uh, I, I once said Uyghur with a, with an Uyghurs right beside me and she said, Uyghur. I said, yes, you're right, but that's not what people, that's not what people understand. No, um, but to me, Ethan Gutman right now, I hope I'm allowed to say this, Ethan, um, is working on a follow-up book to the slaughter, which is how this whole industry has now shifted to the Uyghurs. Now, I, I don't have the evidence around that, um, but everything I know about how the regime operates and how vulnerable, okay, let, let, let me paint a picture for you, okay, why is it?

• 33:21Mike Rowe?

  What's his name, Ethan, the author?

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Ethan Gutman.

• 33:23Mike Rowe?

  G U T M A N?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  One T double N, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Why is it so easy to do this organ harvesting from Phalangong? You pick people up, you're picking them up en masse, okay? They're not telling their names because they would implicate their family members and their family members are gonna get picked up, okay? So you have these people that just disappear into the system and you don't know what happened to them. If they get harvested, they, they just don't, they never come out. Then maybe they died because of torture, maybe, I mean, they did horrible things to them too, that's well documented. But you just don't know. So with the Uighurs, or Uighurs, I'll try to say it correctly. This is a much smaller population than the Fellen Gong in a fairly remote region, very mountainous

• 34:09Speaker 02

  region, very hard to get to, okay, ethnically different, and I won't even talk about, you know, sort of this Han supremacism that the CCP has been pushing on the nation as well, which makes it easier to victimize people that are different. It's a similar sort of situation, a very vulnerable population in an isolated area. And one of the things that Ethan found, because I remember I was talking about it at the International Religious Freedom Summit a couple of years back, a situation where there's hospitals that are, that were more recently built right around these labor camps, right? And there, I think the estimate is something like 2 million people are in the, I forget what the euphemism is for it, but in the basically concentration camp or labor camp

• 34:54Speaker 02

  system. So. Re-education. Here's, here's the key. You don't deal with it. You say to yourself, hey, look, you know, this is something far away from us. It's happening in China. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Let's not think about this. But there's a reason when the genocide convention was signed, okay? There was this whole idea of never again, the Holocaust, my father-in-law's a Holocaust survivor, this is very close to me. The whole point of the genocide convention was never again for real, right? And meant, don't do things of this nature, right? Crimes against humanity, genocide, we could, we could argue about the nuance. But when you allow for that to happen, when you say, because this is the one, you know, people, a lot of, there's a lot of folks in America these days that are like, America should pull

• 35:39Speaker 02

  back too much adventurism. They want to be, we should be a little more inward focused. I think that may be right. However, when it comes to this level of crime, if we don't hold others accountable, what do we hold people accountable on, you know? Right. And so by allowing this Fellen Gong persecution, and then this whole organ harvesting to go, it wouldn't, it's not that hard to investigate it, really. There's people, some people have tried, but at a larger scale. Now we have it moving to another vulnerable group. And here we are, right? And so this is why, this is why we can't be entirely focused on ourselves, right? Especially when it comes to things of this scale.

• 36:22Mike Rowe?

  But what do we do with our standards when the people we're in business with don't comport? This is an extreme example. It seems to me a no brainer. It's like, wait a minute. If we have incontrovertible proof that the Chinese government is behind a scheme to sell 60 to 100,000 organs harvested from living people. This is Michael Crichton. This is coma.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Let me give you the two closest things to a smoking gun. I think they're pretty smoking gun, okay? That we have. It's very hard because remember the crime scene is a hospital room cleaned up, you know? There's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation titled "Execution by Organ Procurement." Okay? They found, they did a literature search of the Chinese transplant literature and they found 71 instances, and this was by no means exhaustive, 71 instances where the dead donor rule was violated. In other words, the Chinese researchers, transplant people, they wrote into their methods that they had killed someone by extracting their organs without realizing it. And the way I interpret this, okay, horribly, is that it's just become so normalized over

• 37:32Speaker 02

  there that they just, that people write it in because this is just how it's done. Okay, that's one thing. The second thing, and I never in a million years thought we'd ever see this, someone like this, but there's a survivor. There's a guy, Chang Fei Mei, who's missing part of his liver and part of his lung. And the Chinese regime admits they operated on him. They say they did it to save his life. That's, there's a whole, we could, I'm not going to go into the nuance of all this. The point is, the guy's alive by multiple miracles, as is the case with, you know, the many Holocaust survivors that I've interviewed over the years. And he's missing part of his liver and part of his lung.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  The scans show it and it was done there, so.

• 38:19Mike Rowe?

  How'd he get away?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  The quick answer is by multiple quirks of fate, as is the case with Holocaust, every Holocaust survivor, including my father-in-law that I've talked to. They just made certain decisions where if they had made the other decision, it would have been certain death.

• 38:35Mike Rowe?

  Sliding doors.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  For whatever reason, they picked this. And in the end, they got to the finish line and they made it somehow. This is the same thing with him. He was almost dead at least twice.

• 38:46Mike Rowe?

  Where is he now? Is he out of China?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Here, well, in the US. And he's hiding out because there's an effort right now to repatriate him. You know, this Operation Fox Hunt. So the Chinese regime, I mean, we could talk for a very long time about the stuff it does. But among other things, they put bounties on people's heads and they try to get them back into China so they can deal with them. And that's, there's a whole project, Operation Fox Hunt. You can look that up. And there's a young woman named Frances Hui, who is a Hong Kong, a young, I mean, this is actually an amazing, I'm getting a shiver up my spine thinking about it. This young woman was a Hong Kong freedom activist, right? As a teenager, basically. And eventually she basically came to the US, especially after this national security

• 39:30Speaker 02

  law was going to come into place because she would have been picked up immediately. She came here and they put a bounty on it. They put a million dollar Hong Kong dollar bounty on her head. And more recently, they're harassing her family.

• 39:41Mike Rowe?

  Her family's there or here?

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Her family's there. But this is, but this is what has, so you know, we could talk about Hong Kong. I was there right before the national security law came down. Many of the people I interviewed are in prison. Why? Because they were advocating for freedom, right? So how quickly can a society change from one of the freest societies in the world, economically at least, right? But also quite free from a basic civil liberties perspective overnight turns into, you know, something a lot closer to Communist China.

• 40:13Mike Rowe?

  In all your investigative work, all the interviews, all the projects that you've been involved in over the years, where does this rank in terms of holy crap, America? If I could grab you by your metaphorical lapel and shake you, right? This is the thing I want you to pay attention to. Where's it rank?

• 40:36Mike Rowe?

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• 41:21Mike Rowe?

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• 41:59Speaker 02

  I think it's right at the top of my list, but I have to qualify that. Okay. People don't deal with well with crimes against humanity. There's a famous anecdote with Jan Karski. Jan Karski was a Polish nobleman who saw what was happening and he understood the Holocaust was happening during World War II. And he got out of Poland, traveled to the UK, to the US and tried to explain to people, they are killing people en masse. People would not believe him. There's a famous line, you know, that Felix Frankfurter, who was the AG at the time in the US, has this famous line where he says something, this is a paraphrase. I'm not saying that the guy was lying.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  I'm saying that I was unable to believe him. Okay, but I and and people, you know, have say all sorts of bad things about Frankfurt or this, but I thought it's a it's a very telling and honest line. I think it's I think he was being honest. We don't want to believe that people do such things. By the way, another anecdote, this is just from a few days ago. In Arkansas, there's a one of these laws to that they won't pay, they won't let Medicare pay for anything with transplant related in China and also to stop genomics collection. That's the second part to that law that they're working on over there. Okay. One of the the one of the the Democratic senators, Arkansas senators, explained that he actually, why is he for this law? Because he had a friend

• 43:28Speaker 02

  who's an ophthalmologist who was working in China. And, you know, they they needed uh, they were they did like 13 patients. They were going to do some sort of experiment around a cornea for right. And he's like, oh, we don't have the corneas. And he just mentioned it to them. And the next day, 13 corneas magically appeared. Right. And this guy and that guy was shocked and stunned and didn't know what to say when he was there. But the point is like, this is this is what can happen. Basically, on order, you can do stuff like that over there.

• 43:57Mike Rowe?

  I'm just so struck. I kind of just glossed over it a minute ago, but it is Michael Crichton. It is coma. When I look at Star Trek sometimes, it's amazing how how fantasy and fact, reality and, you know, science fiction can just come smashing together.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I remember coma too. And and also, there's a newer kind of coma like film called The Island, which was more more more sci fi, which again, kind of same.

• 44:26Mike Rowe?

  Was that Leonardo DiCaprio? Was that The Island?

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Ah, The Island was Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. I don't know why I remember that. Maybe because I found I found. Fair enough. Fair enough.

• 44:40Mike Rowe?

  If I went on an island with Scarlett Johansson for a while, yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Let me answer your question about is it number one. So it's number one, because if you understand that this regime does that to its own people at scale, is perfectly happy to do it, and is completely uninterested in stopping it, who is our trade partner?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Who are we working with? Do we, can we assume that we have the same shared values? Does it make sense for us to still be pumping money into Chinese military companies through index funds? I mean, I could talk about, does it make sense for us to, and basically entrust the lion's share of our genetic drug supply chain to that country, which is where we're at at this moment? Does that make sense? If you know, if you understand that this is what this regime sanctions and frankly, profits of and services it's super elite with?

• 45:38Mike Rowe?

  Well, obviously, the answer to that question is simple, until, at least for a lot of people, that you attach the consequence to it. So, in a vacuum, I mean, who among us today doesn't look back 170 years and say, isn't it crazy how we wrestled with this whole slavery thing? Isn't it crazy how it tore the country in half? Isn't it crazy that we had to fight a war? What, what the heck was wrong with us? And yet, you know, 170 years ago, I think the conversation was probably very similar. If you, if you framed, in other words, the entire conversation around the economic impact

• 46:20Mike Rowe?

  of outlawing slavery on this country, any economist in that, in that silo would conclude, this is a horrible idea. It's going to impact, obviously, the triangle trade, but the North as well as the South, it's going to be a disaster for our economy to get rid of a giant unpaid workforce. Therefore, we can't do it. That was the analysis and that was the conclusion, right up until the point where we just couldn't, we just couldn't live with it anymore. So I, you know, Obviously, I wasn't around then, but when I think about that, it's hard not to think today about fill in the blank capital punishment, abortion, 150 years from now, maybe it's meat eating.

• 47:04Mike Rowe?

  Who knows? But it sure seems like if you really want clarity, your example is the best one. We're in business with people who are selling organs harvested without the permission of their owners and sold for billions of dollars.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Or, you know, it's a murder. I mean, I call it sometimes a murder for organs industry, which is really kind of non euphemistically what it is. It's particularly, I think, reprehensible that the people that are being killed are, you know, entirely innocent, but frankly, it would be the same whoever it was that was being used.

• 47:39Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Okay, well, then how?

• 47:43Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I'm just thinking I, I just had dinner the other night with a, with a friend who runs a big Fortune 500 company and whose stock is crushed right now. This person is upset, you know, with this economic policy. And a big part of their supply chain is rep. That's the person you should be asking the question to. Cause I can sit here and tell you, of course, we shouldn't be in business. Look, my skin crawled when I saw those officials go into the stands at the NBA game and take the banners from people who were saying free Uyghurs. That's how captured the NBA is. And that's how captured, I'll just say it, people will hate me for it, but

• 48:25Mike Rowe?

  if you're a diehard fan of the NBA, how much of this do you want to know about? You come home, you just want to watch the game. You just want to watch a great game. Do we really have to see this on that guy's sneakers and these banners and thing? That's what I meant before. When push comes to shove, half the country, they don't want to hear what you're saying and they don't want to see what we're, what we're talking about.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Because the answer is it means that you have to do something. That's the corollary, right? If you really believe this is real, if you accept it.

• 48:55Mike Rowe?

  Now you know.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Right? Either or, you could be like, well, like there's nothing I can do. I'll live with it. I suppose you could, but I, I think for a lot of people. We got to do something here. This is crazy. This is too. And and why do you think that it's going to stay over there? That's that's that's my question to you, right? If you're going to work, you know, sort of hand in glove with with a regime like that, what makes you think that that's not going to come here in some form, right? I mean, this is this is the we worked with Nazi Germany, right? When you first were talking about slavery, I thought you were talking about that example. It's very analogous. There was a lot of trade. I mean, you know, the famously IBM punch cards, you know, computing punch cards were used in some of their documentation of of what they were doing in the in the concentration camps, right?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  As if I if I recall correctly, but certainly IBM was deeply invested there and many other companies.

• 49:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I don't even know how to think about it. You're not an economist and neither am I. But but when you look at when you come at the whole tariff question through that lens, I call it like a tier one lens. And then there's the tier two lens. The tier two is just economists all basically agreeing that tariffs wreak havoc. There's no real disagreement. They can be used here and there, they say. But by and large, if the economy is the most important thing in your conversation, you'll conclude what everybody seems to have concluded. But it's this other thing that I don't think anybody wants to talk about. And when you start to talk about it, at least in the press and in the headlines I've seen, things get real wobbly real quick.

• 50:30Mike Rowe?

  People don't want to be shown that our primary partner is up to its neck in any number of things that we simply wouldn't tolerate over here. It's just denial.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Well, here's the terrible truth, right? The terrible truth is that the Chinese regime wages what can be called unrestricted warfare. This is a. A little bit, a book that's gotten a little bit of fame more recently, people have been writing about it. It was written by two Chinese colonels about how to take anything, basically anything that is weaponizable outside of actual kinetic war and use that to wage war.

• 51:12Mike Rowe?

  Okay. For instance.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  For instance, I mean, we can talk, there's a doctrine of three warfares. Okay, so one is by changing public opinion, right? Another one is by launching lawsuits. Okay, another one is by getting the US to fund you massively for your military growth, for example. Right, so you know, until not too long ago, the thrift savings plan, which is where all our military's pensions are located, was actually invested in multiple Chinese military companies. If you can imagine that, if you can imagine that being true and lasting for years, even with people knowing about it.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Right, there's all these, you know, MSCI, there's multiple index funds that possibly you, you want to buy in. You want to get, most of these funds have what are called emerging markets components, which have a big Chinese component. And there's an undisclosed amount of Chinese companies in there. And in many cases, they're Chinese military companies. So we're, if you're invested in these funds, there's a really good chance, unless you specifically get a fund that says, we don't do this, which is very rare, you're invested in that. So that you want to talk about, I can't speak for President Trump, but Trump might say, you know, they're very smart to do that. Right?

• 52:31Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  This is very cunning, this is very, what an amazing approach. How is it that, how is it that all the stocks listed on US exchanges of Chinese companies don't require a proper audit? And it's the only country that gets that exemption. You know, and there's a reason because you want to believe that the thing that you're buying is really worth what you say it is, right?

• 52:50Mike Rowe?

  How can you not sue a pharma, pharmaceutical company?

• 52:53Speaker 02

  So listen, there's a instrument called a VIE. Okay, what is a VIE? If you actually buy that stock, that unaudited stock, Chinese stock on a US exchange, okay? You're not actually buying that stock even. You're buying a piece of a company in the Cayman Islands, which has a contract with a Chinese company, which the SEC itself, based on Chinese law, believes it might be illegal. And you've invested by doing that about the estimate is something like $700 billion over the years, okay, in that. And the actual value of those companies, we don't really know. It's what the prospectus told us.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Now, how embarrassing is that to a company that did that to think that what they actually have there is just on paper and not real and can be seized at any moment?

• 53:44Mike Rowe?

  How much IP do you think the Chinese steal year over year?

• 53:49Speaker 02

  There's various estimates, okay? But some estimates are a trillion dollars a year. I mean, averaged out across, you know, the time period that that IP would hold. I've seen between 500 billion to a trillion a year as estimates.

• 54:05Mike Rowe?

  So, smart people in our government know this. And what's the analysis? They just put that into the calculus and say, you know what? It's a toll. It's the cost of doing business. And in the end, in the end, it's still in our favor to do this?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, what I, what I think happened, and this, you know, this actually speaks to a topic which is very close to both of our hearts, Mike, which is, you know, the hollowing out of the middle class and the working class, right, over these last, since the 19, probably the heyday was the, you know, early 70s, right, where a lot of that wealth was held in that, in that group. We developed what's called a financialization economy, in my mind. I don't know if others call it that. But basically, cheap credit allowed for people who have access to capital, which is the upper rung of society, right, to basically take inordinate risks with money. And in that process, and this is obviously way more complicated than what I'm, than

• 55:04Speaker 02

  what I'm painting here, but people made a ton of money just by manipulating money. And a lot of, you know, a lot, this is a lot of Wall Street money is kind of of that ilk. My suspicion is, is that that sort of... Moving out of a place, do you know, actually, you know, Pretty Woman.

• 55:22Mike Rowe?

  Uh huh.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Right. It's such an interesting film from years ago, but this is, this is actually the theme there. Right. The guy is this guy.

• 55:28Mike Rowe?

  Richard Gere.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Richard Gere, who, by the way, China blacklisted and killed his career, but that's a whole nother discussion.

• 55:34Mike Rowe?

  Free Tibet.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. Exactly. Um, he's this guy who does financialization stuff and he's about to take apart. I think it was a shipbuilding company, if I recall correctly. I have a terrible, terrible memory for most things. Fantastic memory for movie plots. I don't know why. Anyway, that's the point. It was this shift into doing the kind of stuff Richard Gere was doing as opposed to the guy he was gonna crush. But in the end, because of the intervention of Pretty Woman,

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Julia Roberts, he changed his mind and decided to build things. So we stopped actually having to make meaningful things to make money. Just it became this weird casino game. And if you get, if you could game the system, if you were, if you had loaded dice in some ways, and so of course you could, you could do even better. And then you could also make a lot hand over fist money by just off the fees of doing this. Right. And I think that's where things went wrong because you started invest at initially, there was this big, you know, Kissinger Doctrine time. Basically, you were told you have to invest all the money in Communist China right now. That's where the market's gonna be in the future. If you don't do it now, someone else will get it. And there's this group thing, mania to do that. And what, what did you give away?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Well, if you actually tried to move your manufacturing over there, right? You actually have to give away all your IP in the process. That's part of the deal. Right. So, so not only was there the theft that we were just talking about that trillion dollar, there's all the kind of legal, let's call it legal theft, right? Because you agree. In order to get the market, I'm gonna sacrifice my, my intellectual property.

• 57:08Mike Rowe?

  This is really, um, yeah, I mean, I'm, I guess I'm saying something obvious, but a big part of this conversation simply comes down to what, what part of the animal are you unwilling to look at? Right. Back to slavery. It was easier to tolerate it, even though you knew your clothes were spun from cotton picked by slaves. Maybe you're up in Massachusetts or Maine or whatever, right? It's like once removed. Or if you're right down there on the plantation, you're, you're so used to it, you grew up with it. Right. So. Pretty Woman is like weirdly analogous for me. Gary Marshall, charming movie for all the reasons you said.

• 57:51Mike Rowe?

  Just don't spend too much time thinking about the fact that she's a prostitute. Right? And the movie certainly doesn't spend too much time showing you in the act of what a daily prostitute does. There's not too much business with her pimp and there's not too much time spent, you know, with the whole underlying debasement of the whole thing. So as a viewer, right? You pay your eight bucks back in the day and you go in and you sit down and you watch this movie and you're either charmed by it because you're willing to look away from certain ugly parts or you're appalled by it because you're being told, wait a second,

• 58:33Mike Rowe?

  don't spend too much time thinking about the reality of prostituting yourself. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's a stretch, but I look at the tariffs, I look at China and I hear people on the air every day saying, yeah, look, they're not, they're not perfect, the Chinese, right? I mean, wonderful people, wonderful people, the government. See, I remember the argument too that went, well, part of the reason we're gonna wade in with these characters is because we want to export American values as well as American products. We think it'll be good for the global world order for, you know, hundreds of millions of Chinese to get a load of our stuff.

• 59:16Mike Rowe?

  But China's doing the same thing. Who do you think has exported more of their philosophy successfully into the other country?

• 59:31Mike Rowe?

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• 1:00:16Mike Rowe?

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• 1:00:57Mike Rowe?

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• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  You know, I've talked with many well-meaning people, and former senators, present-day congressional members and senators said, "I believed it." Who said, "I believed we were exporting the greatest things about America," right, over there. But really, what happened was, they changed us. Again, let's go back to this, right? That the nature of the thing that is most important, and that's why I put this organ issue at the top of the list, even though it's so difficult, is you have to understand, if you understand the nature of the regime, you would treat it differently, right? If you understand, like, if I knew that the person I'm dealing with is a psychopath and has a, you know, great record of behaving...

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  As a psychopath, I would treat that person different. I would maybe not ask them to babysit for my kids, right? I might not do business with them because what would happen? Well, it would kind of be predictable, wouldn't it, what would happen, right? You see what I'm saying? Like, this is the part that we've had the hardest part, and it's not the Chinese people. I'm with those people that you mentioned earlier, by the way, that say, "Oh, it's not the people, it's the government." Yeah, absolutely. Chinese people, unbelievably industrious, right? Good-hearted. I mean, this truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, this is ancient Chinese culture. Come back. And Ethan Gunman actually describes the Fellenkong as a kind of a revivalist movement, Buddhist revivalist.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if I quite agree with that, but it's an interesting way to characterize it, right? And this is actually a Western ideology that's been foisted on them. Communism, communism with Chinese characteristics, still communism, as they euphemistically call it. So, no, it's the regime that you have to understand the nature of. And of course, and it does co-opt people into behaving, some people. But then there's this huge, I mean, this is the untold story, actually. This is, I don't think we've done as good a job as we should have at epoch times to tell this story, but the Fellenkong have actually changed a lot of people's hearts and minds through their grassroots effort to explain to people that we're not the things

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  this hate propaganda is telling you, that actually communism isn't good, you should quit the Communist Party. There's over 400 million people that have decided to do that, that have decided to quit the Communist Party over 25 years. It's one by one, it's over a long period of time, but it's not even a public thing. But somewhere inside, someone said, "You know, I'm kind of done with this. I'm done with this system, and I'm ready for a better future." I think there's hope in that, you know?

• 1:03:49Mike Rowe?

  What do you think we should do vis-à-vis the tariffs? Should we be doing business with China?

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Well, the answer is, if we are going to be doing business, we have to do it with an understanding of what they're about and that they're seeking to subvert us. The problem with communist regimes is that...

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Any free society, okay, this is why you know you keep hearing about Taiwan. The China, the People's Liberation Army has been inculcated with the idea that Taiwan is Chinese and that we're gonna take it one day and you're gonna be a part of that. Why? Well, a big part of it is because it's a great shining example of a very successful emergent democracy. And it says, the Chinese regime's propaganda says, the only way to deal with the Chinese people is with an iron fist. They can't really, you know, do freedom. But here we have, hey, in some ways, Taiwan is more successful as a democracy than we are here in some ways.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna say it across the board, because actually, all of these, every single democracy came out of this one. You know, really.

• 1:05:01Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  And same with Hong Kong, right? Hong Kong now being turned into, day after day, into something much closer to what Communist China is, actually quite quickly. Similarly, it's not, it can't exist because it's an anathema. It proves the, it shows that we don't need to do things in this totalitarian way and be incredibly successful. Maybe even if China, and this is, you know, maybe even if China didn't have it, maybe China would be more successful than we'd have, you know, maybe. It would be a problem we would wanna have, wouldn't it?

• 1:05:37Mike Rowe?

  I would think so.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  It would be a problem where it would challenge us to, you know, work our butts off. To, to, instead of, instead of having this sort of pathocratic, you know, system, which has to steal its IP, basically take advantage of free nations to grow itself, kill a lot of people in the process, to do things like organ harvesting. I don't know, I think a free China would be a, would be an incredible thing. And of course, there's plenty of people who believe that there.

• 1:06:08Mike Rowe?

  What's baffling is that people will push back against that and tell you why.

• 1:06:16Mike Rowe?

  Right? I mean, there's it just seems like such an obvious thing to want. But I, again, when I look at the conversations that are happening around the trade thing, it's way more tier two than tier, tier one. So I'm still not clear what to say to my friends, you know, at polite dinner parties.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:35Mike Rowe?

  I, I, I really don't.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Well, what, as I said, I'm not, I'm also not an economist. I've talked with some really great people on this. Some are not sure, some, what I can talk about is, for example, okay, I was over at the White House when, uh, you know, liberation day, on liberation day, there was more press there than I've ever seen in my life. You know, it was just like everywhere, press everywhere in the, in the sticks as they're called. And I looked at those tables that were published, right? And in two minutes, it was very clear to me that this whole thing was all about China. Why did I think that? I didn't, I mean, this was just my, you know, instant response.

• 1:07:12Mike Rowe?

  You're talking about the charts with all the individual countries listed with all the different tariffs applied.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Correct. The thing that I noticed, just looking, I have, I have a mind, I was a, you know, back in the day, I was biologist and I would, I liked dealing with data and it would jump out at me. But the highest tariffs by and large, okay, were all for countries which were what you would call high transshipment countries for Beijing. So what happened, right? The first time in 2018, when Trump imposed the first sort of, you know, let's call it economic hardship on Communist China. To my, to me, this was the first time, the first time they had ever been forced into a position,

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  like, I mean, in probably since 1949, I don't know, that they didn't want to be in.

• 1:08:03Mike Rowe?

  Because we're so worried about the whole face-saving thing. It's like there's this narrative that says you do not want to put the Chinese government in a corner if they don't have a way out without looking bad or foolish. It's going to be bad for everybody else.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  What a crazy way to do business or have a relationship. Does that make any sense?

• 1:08:25Mike Rowe?

  Only if you're so reliant and so dependent, right? And even then, ethically, there's not much of an argument. But what in the world are we so scared of if not that?

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  So the effect of that action was that the Chinese economy diversified and went out. There's more of it outside of the US right now. We're talking about this massive export economy into the US. It's still massive, but it's less as a result of that.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  But what they did, and part of what they did, was they set up, you know, a glib example would be I set up a warehouse in Vietnam, which was an example, or Cambodia, which are example of countries that had these super high tariffs, right? And I call it a factory and then I send my stuff from Vietnam or from Cambodia. But it's actually the Chinese, you know, production just isn't called that. So now I don't have the problem anymore, right? So there's a lot of that, that transshipment. And then, so there was kind of debate. I saw there's a few people that I really, I think, had really good takes on this. There's Christopher Balding. He was a former professor from Peking University economist. He had kind of had to get out of there because he was a little too honest publicly while in China, very interesting guy.

• 1:09:38Mike Rowe?

  What'd he say?

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Well, he basically called out the regime for some of the things that it was doing, that it didn't want to have be called out on. And I'd have to think, he said a few different things. I'd have to think back exactly. But the point is, he would explain the realities, which are very, frankly, are not pleasant, right? Like Chinese economy is in shambles as we speak. And that's a whole different discussion that, you know, I weighed on a number of people that I really trust to talk about this, to discuss. But so Christopher Balding's one. Another one is a Singapore professor named Henry Gao, who was just pointing out. So what I thought, when I first saw it, I thought, oh, maybe all these other countries are kind of camouflage.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Because you don't want to go out and say, yes, we're coming after China, right? That was my initial thought. What Henry Gao was saying, well, no, actually, all these, all these different tariffs are really there to help bring everybody in to not offer the loopholes.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Into the US system. Okay, basically, so this is Trump and the Trump administration saying, we want to have a relationship where you're not gaming the system. The gaming of the system stops. And the entirety of our effort right now is to, is to manifest that.

• 1:11:07Mike Rowe?

  Have you seen that clip of Trump with Oprah, like back in 1988?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I saw that too, and I shared it. This is where he's saying that, that, that, yeah, it'll be easier to, to extract concessions from our allies. Who knows about the others? Yeah.

• 1:11:23Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  I think there's probably truth to that, but ultimately, look, we let Communist China into the World Trade Organization. They never, ever followed the rules. Isn't that crazy? There was no consequence.

• 1:11:36Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  It's wild, right? You kind of let the fox in the hen house. And you saw what they were doing, and you said, okay. Right? For, for, for, for the whole time, right?

• 1:11:49Mike Rowe?

  Right, but it's the same rationale as like, eh, border? Whatever, whatever. Yeah, it's a border, but what's a border that's not enforced?

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:59Mike Rowe?

  Right?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:00Mike Rowe?

  And so.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  That, that, that's a very interesting point. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah.

• 1:12:04Mike Rowe?

  I just think people by and large are, are looking around and your point, not to make this a polemic, but you're right. Trump in 2017, 2018? That was really the first time, he just didn't seem to care if he hurt China's feelings. And I think a lot of people looked at that and said, right, good.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  He, he, he did more than that, okay? With that, and it was, I mean, it was stunning to me because I'd never seen anything like this happen. He put a chink in the whole, I mean.

• 1:12:38Mike Rowe?

  I don't think you can say that.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  I see what you've done here. Oh, boy. This is now now I'm gonna be in big trouble, right? He

• 1:12:51Mike Rowe?

  A notch.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  A chink, a notch in the armor.

• 1:12:54Mike Rowe?

  A wrinkle. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  The CCP has been insinuating itself into the global economic order. Okay, making itself a part of everything, very difficult to extract. Okay, and in the process, enriching itself. Okay, while using lawfare to prevent others from doing the things it doesn't want to do, because now it's part of these, you know, multilateral organizations, but completely ignoring, not applying those rules to itself. That is a little bit of a, maybe a slight oversimplification, but very close to reality. Okay, this was the first time where someone said, no, we're gonna, that this is not a good way to do things. In effect, I don't know if that's exactly what they were thinking,

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  but that was the effect of it, right? And it actually changed the economic relationship quite substantially between the US and China. Even that, right? So, to me, right, if if it was me, right, which it isn't, clearly, but this is

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  this is a difficult thing to do. This is a complex economic system that's developed, emerged over time with, you know, a lot of, let's say, a lot of people lining their pockets along the way, and a lot of wealth being, you know, kind of concentrated up in the process. And so now, to change that, well, you know, it's it's difficult. There's, is there gonna be pain? Absolutely, there's gonna be pain. But if you did, if we didn't change the status quo, I would argue, we're gonna end up basically a vassal, vassals to a

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  A murderous regime. I mean, and I mean that very seriously. Like, people don't like when you say things like that, right? Because it's seems bombastic or inflammatory and stuff. No, this is like, it's really bad. There, it's a gross dereliction of any sense, the basic sense of ethics that any normal human being had, would have, right? That's who we're dealing with.

• 1:15:03Mike Rowe?

  You personally are 100% certain that the organ harvesting thing is is clear and present and huge. And if people listening want to go somewhere and do some research for themselves, where would you send them? Is there, is there an objective place?

• 1:15:24Mike Rowe?

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• 1:16:06Mike Rowe?

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• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  I think the Oregon Tribunal, right? I said the website earlier, now I'm blanking on it, but the

• 1:17:00Mike Rowe?

  Was it the China Tribunal?

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  ChinaTribunal.org is a really good place to get an overview. Let me mention another thing, which I think is quite important, right? How does this affect us here?

• 1:17:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Right? I talked a little bit about how there's these Operation Fox Hunt things where, see, from the perspective of Communist China, if you're Chinese, they kind of own you.

• 1:17:24Mike Rowe?

  So if you're over here-

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  That's how they believe it. Doesn't matter if you're Chinese-American, doesn't matter, as long as if you're Chinese, they're kind of, you're kind of under their, under their jurisdiction. They kind of imagine that, okay? So, you know, we have this, right now, we have this crazy situation. I was just in New York last week. There was an 18-show run of Shenyun, you know, the, the dance performance. My wife and I go every year. We've been going for, for, for a long time. It's a kind of a new show every year, it's an incredible thing. Bomb threats, okay? Threats on people's lives, harassment of family members that might still be back there, lawfare, 10 hit pieces by the New York Times in the last six months.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  It's all being basically foisted on what's essentially an American dream success, an American dream success story. People who built a dance company out of nothing and, you know, service a million audience a year now out of upstate New York.

• 1:18:24Mike Rowe?

  That's it, yeah. I've, I've, I've been meaning to see it, but why is the New York Times, like, where's the meat on the bone in an article about this that is so problematic?

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's, again, a few things off the top of my head. One, you're familiar with the Trump hush money? You remember there's this Trump hush money scandal, so to speak?

• 1:18:48Mike Rowe?

  Was it around-

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Years ago? Stormy Daniels?

• 1:18:52Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Okay? So, Dershowitz has described this like the worst case he's seen in 60 years of his, you know, practice as a lawyer or something like this, right? But it seems like the model of that case was, there's a whole bunch of articles that are written by a media, in this case, it was the Wall Street Journal, that trigger an investigation. And then-

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Demonization occurs, okay, so to speak. That's the model. And, you know, two people that did that investigation moved over to the New York Times, and they're doing that investigation on Shenyuan now. And seemingly with a similar, also multiple articles, also things that are, you know, very difficult to prove or disprove.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  There's a woman that actually was a Shenyuan dancer and ended up going to Taiwan after she, I guess, retired, right? Started her own dance school, sent multiple dancers back to Shenyuan to participate and so forth, got married with somebody who was connected from, I think, from Taiwan, connected to Communist China, started working with the Beijing Dance Academy, which is, of course, a CCP outfit, and subsequently launched, you know, civil lawsuits against Shenyuan. How did this happen? It's not clear. She seemed to have had a really, you know, amazing experience to the point where, you know, she was providing these, you know, wonderful dancers.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  But what we do know is that Communist China has a particular interest lately, in the last couple of years, and they've made this, codified this in a kind of raising it to the level of the Minister of State Security to basically, I don't know, handicap Falingong activities overseas. So this is how it's manifesting. And my guess is it's because they're effective, effective in exposing the regime for what it does, effective in China, getting people to quit the Communist Party. They're trying to do, we're talking about the Free Tibet Movement, right? The Free Tibet Movement, they put a huge effort into crushing it years ago.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  I think they're trying to do the same thing to the Falingong right now.

• 1:21:10Mike Rowe?

  So what about the Epoch Times? Are they coming after you?

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  They've been coming after us for 25 years. You know what, you know what Russiagate is when I say Russiagate, right? So there's this idea that the president, current president was a Russian agent.

• 1:21:27Mike Rowe?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were, I mean, there were, there were, there were multiple people, to be fair, that were writing about it. But we were very early in the game, okay? And because why, it wasn't even that difficult to figure out that this is not a reasonable narrative, right? And there was nothing to it. And then later we discovered it was, you know, basically oppo research and a whole Clinton campaign thing. But anyway, so forth. But until that time, we were used to being attacked by the Chinese Communist Party for years. Cyber attacks, attempts to get rid of all our advertising. At one point, before we switched to a subscription model, we were basically advertising driven. They would always try to block, you know, talk to people and tell them, hey, don't advertise with these guys. They're against China.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  You're going to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, all this kind of stuff, right? But it was only in, you know, this mid, probably around 2018 again, that time, that, that suddenly it was like Americans that started writing hit pieces against Deepak. It was kind of shocking, but we were used to it. This is, this is what I'm getting at. We're kind of used to being attacked, but it was shocking and really dispiriting to see that now it's Americans that are doing this, you know?

• 1:22:38Mike Rowe?

  I got to admit, man, I, I was a little confused because you guys were writing a story on me around that time, the, the first one. And I've, I've been interviewed a couple of times by you since then and, and come to see that I, I think what you're doing is not only really important, but I'm a, I'm a genuine fan of how it started. You know, because I don't know of any other newspaper that has that story. I mean, you were printing in Chinese for Chinese Americans. It became popular and then it's English and then it's multiple countries. Now it's all over the place. So, I mean, you've got to feel enthused or at least optimistic for that.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Listen, it is the American dream story. It's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, they got funded, government money or something like that for doing any of this, right? This is, this is people working their butts up. I know, Mike, you know, I know a little bit about, you know, how you're trying to do it with your organization, right? They built it from nothing. We're actually 95% supported by our individual subscribers. We're, the US Epoch Times is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, but, and it's, you know, let's just say that, that, that funding, funding is very diversified, lets us stay quite independent, right? Of course, we're, we're open to, to anybody who wants to support us, for sure, but, but that, that, that's where we're at right now. So I, I, I think it's a pretty good place.

• 1:24:02Mike Rowe?

  Last question. I saw this interview with Tim Cook, Apple, and the question put to him was, it's just simply not fair. The labor's so much cheaper, you're doing all this work over there, and, you know, it's a criticism I'd heard before. But what he said was interesting. He said, no, it's, the labor's actually not that much cheaper. Yes, we're aware of the human rights things, and that's a calculus that everybody has to kind of balance, but we're not there because the labor's cheap. We're there because the labor exists. We need tens of thousands of people doing very specialized work in manufacturing, and that doesn't exist in this country right now.

• 1:24:47Mike Rowe?

  You just can't find those people. As of January, I think you and I talked about it, back in, wherever we were, DC, there are 500,000 open positions in manufacturing as we speak. If the president is successful and reshores all this, and we start bringing manufacturing back, you know, that's a couple million new jobs, and the assumption is, if we build it, they'll come. But that's what Obama assumed in 2009, too, with 3 million shovel-ready jobs, you know? You're talking to a country who's not that crazy about picking up a shovel, it seems. So I just wonder if you have any thoughts on how that plays out?

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we have, we, we have to change our culture. I mean, maybe return, return back to the, I don't know, the past culture, which is, you know, I guess, a lot more entrepreneurial. By the way, this still exists in America. People still flock here, right? Because this is the one place where you can, you can have this upward mobility, you know, in society, if you work your butt off, right?

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  It's a, it, this, this is a problem, like part, the, the side effect of this. And, and partially, I think it was very deliberate. You know, was that, that we have a society which is a bit demoralized. Maybe doesn't even believe in America sufficiently anymore. It doesn't believe that these trades, I mean, this is what you're working on, right? You're trying to make the trades cool again. I, this, there's no future without that. Whatever, however this plays out, however many robots are going to be doing things. I mean, who would have guessed that? I, I had no idea that it would be the white collar jobs which would get her hit first with AI. There's so many white collar jobs that are basically disappearing now. That's so interesting, right?

• 1:26:30Mike Rowe?

  Right in front of us.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Right in front of us, but it actually, the skilled labor is going to be a lot harder to change, frankly, right? Like, but, but yeah, so I don't know. This is, this is why I love, you know, this is why I was so thrilled to have you on the show before, right? Because this is, you're actually trying to put a dent in this. I think we need an, you know, all hands approach and explain to people, no, the trades are where it's at. This is where the future is at. We need to re-industrialize, re-manufacture as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This is the name of the game. And I think, I think when I look at all these actions that are happening with the travel transition, I, I think they're trying to do that. Will it be successful? I think it's a very difficult task. I don't know the answer to that, but if you don't try, there is no hope, is there? Right?

• 1:27:17Mike Rowe?

  You've got to try. You've got to try, man. Look, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm hopeful that people poke around and learn more about the organ harvesting thing. I think it's better to know. It's not pleasant and people aren't going to want to see it, but it's better to know. Not just for the whole never again mantra, which I completely support, but it, these are our partners. These are the people that are making stuff we rely on. And it's not just cheap little trinkets and toys and stuff, you know? We're talking about everything from steel to lumber to aerospace, all of it. Medicine, it's a big deal. I don't know how we unravel it, but it feels like, uh, it feels like you're trying.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the key is maybe conversations, more conversations like this, frankly. I think if more people understand what's at stake, right? What stake is, what's at stake? It's not bombastic to say this, freedom is at stake. The reason I'm here, partially, right? And not in Canada, because what happens here is so consequential to everybody else, to everybody. And we can see that. And I think the president just demonstrated this with this tariff regime. Look, look how the whole, everybody is reeling from this reality, right? This, this, this tariff regime, everyone's asking these questions. What the US decides to do is so important, right?

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  If we really understand the nature of this, the Chinese Communist Party threat, we can, we can counter it and we can guarantee a much better world. I mean, America, Canada, I think in the world.

• 1:29:02Mike Rowe?

  There it is, folks. It's only freedom and Western civilization as we know it. Thanks, Jan. Oh, people want to get the Epoch Times, best place to check it out, subscribe?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Theepochtimes.com. On the top right, you'll see a subscribe button. And Mike, this has been a fantastic conversation, really appreciate it.

• 1:29:20Mike Rowe?

  I really appreciated it too. I enjoyed it. Who's your next guest on American Thought Leaders?

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Let me see. Who do, who do I have coming up? Gosh, you caught me at a, give me one sec, you'll have to cut this part.

• 1:29:36Mike Rowe?

  Sorry, American Thought Leaders is no longer in production. I'll be back again. No, you've had so many, man.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to kind of get you one that is, one that you'll know.

• 1:29:48Mike Rowe?

  No, no. Aside from me, who should people go listen to you interview? What's your favorite interview in the last year or two?

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you my favorite interview, okay? My favorite interview was with a guy who is the only medical doctor known to have survived the Cambodian genocide.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  He's a fascinating man and it's shocking because what did they do? They actually just killed all the educated people. If you had glasses, they would kill you. If they knew you were a doctor or professor or anything, they would kill you. Right? This was the, this was the revolution. It's hard to imagine, right? That's why it's so shocking. Like, how would you know it's the only medical doctor? Well, they, they went after all of them. And he ran off into the, he pretended to be a workman, eventually ran off into the forest and lived to tell the tale. But he's also a philosopher, just like an unbelievable guy.

• 1:30:43Mike Rowe?

  What's his name?

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Nal Om.

• 1:30:46Mike Rowe?

  Nal Om, alright.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, on American thought, you can look, you can look it up on, I think we have that one in, in full on YouTube. So you can check that out.

• 1:30:54Mike Rowe?

  Well, you got the best guests ever. Present company, somewhat excluded. Please come back sometime, appreciate it.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Well, and I, and I hope to have you back too, Mike. If you're done, please subscribe, leave some stars, ideally five.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  Five lousy little stars.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  My fresh detector.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  Uh, your what?

• 1:31:33Speaker 04

  There it is.

• 1:31:34Speaker 03

  What is it detecting?

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Apparently we celebrate.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

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