475: Jan Jekielek—Killed to Order

Mike talks with Jan Jekielek https://janjekielek.com/, senior editor at The Epoch Times https://www.theepochtimes.com/ and host of American Thought Leaders https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/american-thought-leaders, to discuss his new book, Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary https://www.amazon.com/Killed-Order-Harvesting-Industry-Adversary/dp/1510786503/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CZY66HDNK0KM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cRoD4AkIiyodwq--Y8IK89c5XFBmtbbk62okT0Rh49a4fD1jy93WMvXwhEkTyrKSlqvKpCx3h-PhBuWq2lyb8V1rCNUac8NmMeOvxBLEGs0AXtqbnwPKgtqnC83372bizOcvcOUvkBDxQPKc9wZ5Xk4GySzehUVxGPrDpP77R2KVHZUgKt_kqHY_rb6WUBGJylsaONBzGbVkJ8JOyRfvYHxlqSSFtlyFZ4DtgB--ibk. F5YY7-mB3FugrAFbN7g6TUEfj5MfvaPShKqPN8_dUww&dib_tag=se&keywords=killed+to+order&qid=1773703097&sprefix=killed+to+order%2Caps%2C190&sr=8-1. It's an explosive investigation into allegations of state-sanctioned organ harvesting in China. Jan shares what he's learned from years of interviews with doctors, investigators, and even survivors of this gruesome industry where political prisoners are killed for their organs. The conversation is a rumination on good versus evil, raising urgent questions about human rights and medical ethics. Referenced in this episode is Jan's previous appearance on TWIHI 438: Jan Jekielek—The Terrible Truth About China https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/36723500

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

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  It's the way I heard it with me, Mike Rowe, Chuck Klaus Meyer, standing by to push all the buttons. Actually, that's not true. You've already pushed the buttons and you've already heard the conversation that's unfolded. And you, it appears, are no less gobsmacked than I.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  No, I love this guy. I love what he does. I love the honesty with which he talks about it. I love the heart that he has about this because he's really trying to save people's lives is what he's trying to do.

• 0:29Mike Rowe?

  Janya Kelik is on a mission, has been for as long as I've known him. He's, I think he's the chief editor over at

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Epic Times.

• 0:38Mike Rowe?

  And he has a show called American Thought Leaders, which I've been on once or twice. And I've gotten to know the guy over the last few years. And early on, he confided in me that the issue of his life is the organ harvesting that has been happening for a few decades now in China. And, you know, I don't know what to do with that kind of information. You think you know a guy and he tells you that 90,000 political prisoners are being killed to order, literally. You know, he's talking about the Falun Gong and the Uighurs and a giant population of people who have been incarcerated, whose blood has been typed, whose tissues have

• 1:23Mike Rowe?

  been tested, and who are essentially just standing by to be harvested for an unbelievably robust market of humans desperate for better working parts.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  These people are living in a place against their will. They're in prison and the prison they're in is right next to a hospital where their organs will be extracted. And here's the thing, Mike, it's not like they're murdered and they take their organs out. They take their organs out while they're alive still and just toss away the bodies afterwards. And then they take the bodies right next door to the crematorium, which all three are next to each other.

• 2:02Mike Rowe?

  If that sounds fantastical to you, it's because it is fantastical, but it also happens to be true. And I feel really lucky. His book is out today, on the 17th of March. He asked if I would write a blurb. I said, sure. Sure, a lot of other people have as well. I think we are in the phase that all truth eventually, you know, passes through on its way to general acceptance. Right now, people are gobsmacked, they're skeptical, but the evidence is overwhelming. And this book, Kill to Order, provides just page after page,

• 2:45Mike Rowe?

  testimony after testimony, eyewitness accounts.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Mike Rowe?

  It's happening. You know what? Go to your favorite AI assistant right now. Claude, Grok, ChatGPT.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:57Mike Rowe?

  Ask if organs are being harvested from human beings in China. The answer is yes, everywhere, everywhere. The only people who are saying no are the people who are doing it.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 3:10Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. And to be fair, a lot of people who are involved. There are whistleblowers out there, but not as many as you would hope. The reasons for that are several, and we get into it. Yan and I talk about it right out of the gate. Because of course, the consequences of talking about this are death.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:33Mike Rowe?

  Quick, immediate, do not pass go. So, look, China is a hot button for a whole bunch of reasons. Yan has never shied away from any of those reasons. What he's alleging is shocking, but he's been at it now for a long time and people are starting to pay attention. So, do you recall the episode he was on prior? That's probably worth a quick look. Because what I'm going to recommend you do, if you haven't heard it, it's worth listening to. Because we really dig in and talk in detail about many of the claims that are in this book now. But I didn't want to go over the same exact data again.

• 4:18Mike Rowe?

  So this conversation is really more about Yan and about the conditions on the ground and the conditions in the species that allow for this kind of catastrophe to unfold.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And the overall subject matter of, you know, being moral, being ethical, what you would do if you found yourself in that situation. By the way, it was episode 438.

• 4:42Mike Rowe?

  438.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  The terrible truth about China.

• 4:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, so that's where it started. Jan came on here, it wasn't even a year ago. The conversation we had went totally viral. Millions of people have either seen or listened to it, including the publisher, who reached out to Jan shortly after that appearance here and said, "You need to write a book about this." Yep. He did it. He did it quickly and compellingly. And we're here to talk about that book, but also, as we just intimated, to talk about the fundamental things that allow this kind of thing to happen, that allow it to persist, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's an important conversation, and I admire the guy. He's taken a lot of shots for taking the position he's taken.

• 5:28Mike Rowe?

  But it's an important one, and my guess is that he will be utterly vindicated in time. Oh, yeah. Because I know this is going on. I just know it. And I can't prove it, but I know it. Yeah. The book is called Ordered to Kill, or Killed to Order, which is a joke. Killed to Order. The book is called Killed to Order, and so is this episode, because it's a great title, and Janja Kelly is a great guest. He'll prove that right after this.

• 6:06Mike Rowe?

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• 6:48Mike Rowe?

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• 7:32Mike Rowe?

  Is this your first book?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  It's my first book.

• 7:35Mike Rowe?

  How's it feel?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  It's surreal, especially since we're doing the book launch at Kennedy Center with Rob Schneider.

• 7:43Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  In a room of 2,000 people at the concert hall in Kennedy Center. That's the book launch. Can you imagine? I think we've probably got 500 now, RSVPs, but we need a lot more than that.

• 7:53Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, that's great. And I got news for you. We're in the thing right now. It's happening. It's happening. You and I are doing this again, right now, in real time. I'm so happy for you because I know that this topic has been...

• 8:09Mike Rowe?

  How long did you feel like just a lone voice in the wilderness telling a story that everybody was skeptical of?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Mike, the thing that happened with most people, I mean, I say most, probably most is right. When I would talk about it 20 years ago, is that people would mentally leave the conversation. And I would see their eyes sort of change, you know? You can see that kind of look when someone is no longer there, right? That is no longer connecting, right? I sympathize with these people because this was... I was talking to them about real-life horror, so yes.

• 8:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mentioned that in the preamble, and we talked about it in some detail. Was it a year ago? Has it been a year since you were here?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  It's less. And so that's why what's amazing about this whole thing, right? Is that, you know, actually, this podcast, as you point out, and thank you for endorsing the book. So I don't know, deeply, I guess, is the word I'm looking for. But it played a major role because...

• 9:17Speaker 02

  The publisher was interested in me writing a book. And I said, this is the topic I'm interested in writing. What do you think, right? And so he was checking with, you know, different people about it as, you know, as you were checking before you had me on for the first time. But one of the things that he found that I shared with him for full transparency was our viral interview on this. And this was one of the things that made him think, OK, I think maybe we can do this. Right? Of course, the Skyhorse is keen to cover difficult topics. We know that. However, you know, this one is particularly difficult,

• 10:00Speaker 02

  especially since there's this massive, you know, effort by the CCP. And frankly, you know, using some even Western institutions to make it sound like it's not real. Right? Because it's so unbelievable. Right?

• 10:12Mike Rowe?

  The thing about our last conversation that I believe stuck with so many people was the thing that stuck with me. And it's just the question, why? If the allegations are true, as they certainly appear to be, why is there such resistance? And, you know, I just assumed the obvious answer was, you know, we have our head in the sands for the same reason fans of the NBA don't really want to know what China did to Annis Cantor Freedom and how they've locked down and how the NBA has become completely captured. You don't want to be a fan of that. You just don't want to have that pushed in front of you. It harshest your mellow.

• 10:57Mike Rowe?

  You know what I mean? It's a buzzkill. But this isn't that. There's something else happening that makes this so awful. And it's not just the dread of the topic or the horror of the accusation itself. I think it has to do with the fact that if you ask 99 out of 100 Americans, who would be horrified by this and would condemn it just as surely as any right-thinking person would. If you get that person in a corner and if you say, look, Let's be honest, your fifteen year old daughter has a month to live unless you get her a new heart. And a new heart costs two hundred thousand dollars.

• 11:43Mike Rowe?

  And I can get you one. But don't ask a lot of questions. Just give me the money. And then I'll get a heart in her. How many people who could afford it would do it? And I think the answer is probably an awful lot. So this, this thing reveals, I think, tacitly, something kind of awful lurking in us all.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Well, and it also highlights, I mean, one of the central themes of the book, as you well know, is how the CCP is very good at making everyone complicit, at weaponizing basically anything, in this case desperation. Right?

• 12:27Mike Rowe?

  How do they do that? How do they make the complicity so universal?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Well, they're very good at it and using all sorts of ways. I mean, internally, you know, my mother, even in Poland in the seventies, when she escaped to Canada ultimately, you know, experienced a situation like this where she, you know, you, you get called in by the commissar. And the commissar says, so I'd like to know what, you know, your friend or maybe your loved one, in my mother's case, it was what your friend was doing last night. Because it seemed to be a little bit off kilter. It's for the good of the party. For the good of the party, right? And my mother, so she, my mother was not one of these rub people who were actively publicly against the party. She was like a passive resister.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  But at this moment, she, they forced her hand because she said, and you could never say no to these guys. These were very serious, cold eyed people. She said, I'm not really made out to kind of do that. Right? They let her leave, but she lost her passport. She lost a lot of her privileges, et cetera, et cetera. Right? But in other cases, you know, if it's, say, your wife that was, is being asked about, the next comment that's made is, uh, well, so. My comrade over there, he's over there with your daughter over at the school, making sure she's safe. You wouldn't want anything to happen to her, would you? Right? And at that moment, you make the decision. You say, "Well, I guess I'm gonna tell you what my wife was up to last night,

• 14:00Speaker 02

  because I need to save my daughter." Right? A lot of people would do that, and this is just one example. They make you choose the lesser of two evils, and now your moral high ground has been lowered. You know you've done wrong. You were forced into it, but you did it. And now you have to live with that, and now they can control you a little bit more. That's just one example. That's internally.

• 14:20Mike Rowe?

  Well, I guess, I mean, for context, we're talking, what is it now, eighty thousand a year, you figure?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  You know, it's a very difficult thing to calculate, but sixty to ninety thousand transplants per year in the Chinese system, in this kill-to-order system, that's a conservative estimate. Those boundaries are conservative estimate, okay? In fact, I've reviewed for myself in intricate detail how we got to these numbers. You know, they were first described by Ethan Gutman, one of the heroes of this research project, so to speak, at the time. He testified, I believe it was in 2016, in front of Congress, and he explained exactly how he got to those numbers, right? And the bottom end of those numbers is a wildly conservative estimate. And even the top end of it, frankly, is a pretty conservative estimate.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  So it's a huge number, but I don't want to say definitively, because I just don't know. These numbers are secret. We get them through inference. But one thing I can tell you is that when Ethan came to that very conservative, he estimated sixty to a hundred thousand. The reason I take it down a bit, I go with Matthew Robertson, another one of the heroes of this research. I just want to be a little even more on the conservative side here. I mean, that's basically his thing, right? I say, "Okay, Matt, I'm gonna go with you. I'm gonna go with you on your numbers," even though Ethan vehemently contests this, okay? You know, this is the kind of insider baseball. That estimate was a hundred and forty-six hospitals active doing transplants in China. Okay? Organ transplants.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  The number today is two hundred, okay? And based on the way these numbers are calculated, it's incredibly unlikely that those hospitals individually are doing less.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Individually than what those 146 were doing before. So it seems like the numbers in the last 10 years have gone up significantly. But can I be absolutely sure? No, I cannot. But can I be absolutely sure they have no legitimate source of organs? Yes, I'm pretty darn sure of that.

• 16:25Mike Rowe?

  How?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Until 2015 or so, they didn't actually have any legitimate source of organs. Just for the record, right? They, what was said to people who are getting the transplants is like, oh, it's a death row prisoner. That was a common thing. Or another thing that we heard, actually, this was a South Korean film crew that went undercover with hidden cameras looking at it, right? I talk about them in the book as well. They were told, oh, there's a lot of people in China. That was the answer. I mean, also the death row prisoner answer. I believe it's 2015. I hope I'm not getting this wrong. They introduced an organ registry, the big flourish. And they say, look, now we have an organ registry. It's all legitimate.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  And we're no longer, and now they admit to not having used prisoners before, even though they didn't before, right? And say, we're not going to use prisoners, right? Again. Now, what the researchers found, and this is, when you look at this guy, Matthew Robertson, I mentioned, has an amazing PhD thesis that he published last year, has multiple, like amazing, one of the things he published is this, what I call part of the smoking gun evidence. But another thing that he published was an analysis of that organ registry, of the numbers that they presented. And they are a perfect, and you will appreciate this more than many people hearing this, right? Those numbers were a perfect quadratic equation. The growth, it's incredible how, you know, perfect that curve was.

• 17:56Mike Rowe?

  The supply and the demand, just hand in glove.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it just means that the data were obviously false. It wasn't even an elegant falsification, right? So to speak. It wasn't even an elegant fraud. It was obvious fraud.

• 18:09Mike Rowe?

  So to go back to the importance of this, your first point, complicity. You know, if there are 200 hospitals in China that are performing daily organ transplants, and there's a giant population of political prisoners, still in jail, still being used, harvested.

• 18:31Mike Rowe?

  How many people need to know what's going on over there? How many doctors? How many wardens? How many? I mean, you just go down the list. And like, part of my skepticism, the first time I heard about this, the first time you shared it with me, was just, I didn't... People are bad at keeping secrets, by and large. Humans are bad at it. You would need to be in a completely different kind of situation, in other words, to keep the lid on something that consequential. And yet, it, like, like, where's the videos? I imagine you must have gotten that question more than once.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's a few answers, okay? There's a few answers to the question. One of them is that, um, revealing this means death. And everybody knows that. Like, it's not an ambiguous thought. You know, every Chinese family has experienced personally the heavy hand of the regime on even trivial matters. Never mind exposing, you know, one of the greatest crimes against humanity in existence today. So institutional memory, okay? Or family history memory, that's part of it.

• 19:55Mike Rowe?

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• 20:40Mike Rowe?

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• 21:22Mike Rowe?

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• 21:35Speaker 02

  Another part of it, it is, there is a rumor around it, by the way, it's used as a tool of control in the incarceration, the massive incarceration system that China runs, all these different prisons, black jails, reeducation camps, all of it. One of the things they will tell people, and we've heard this a lot, is, you know, you better, you know, do the thing that I require you to do, or, you know, we'll take your organs. That's something that's commonly used. Of course, it's not, that doesn't prove anything in itself, right? It's just a kind of a coercive verbal tool. But this is one of the difficulties you actually have assessing the crime in the first place, because some of these people

• 22:17Speaker 02

  are being tortured to death, right? So the prisoners of conscience, they're disappearing for, maybe just because they were tortured to death, because they refused to renounce their faith, right? And then that person disappears, and you don't know, in the early days, like, people didn't even imagine that there was something like this happening. But you know, the other part is you where the crime scene is an operating room. Right? It's like meticulously cleaned every single time because you don't want people to become infected. Right? You want these, you want people to keep coming back. So you're making sure the organs are extra fresh. You're making sure the matches are really strong. And you're making sure that there's absolutely no evidence, right?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  So and this is the other part, you know, there's an example Ethan Gutman cites where there's, you know, in Xinjiang province, they built a hospital, a prison and a crematorium kind of side by side. Right? I mean, it's kind of crazy. You'd think they would maybe hide one of those three or something. But in this case, it's very plain to see.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Why would you leave any evidence when you have in effect disposable people? You know, one of the key theses in the book is the CCP instrumentalizes absolutely everything, bodies, right? In this case, human beings, right, to be used as fodder. If you're doing something like this, history tells us that when people are affecting, in most cases, these very extreme crimes against humanity, they tend to not want to leave the evidence. Right? So if you can just, you know, burn the body and you're done and you don't even in the, again, these are all incredibly vulnerable people, right?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  With the Falun Gong, they dehumanize them first, which has always happened preceding any atrocity. Right? There's always this huge dehumanization aspect, mass propaganda is pushed through the system. That's why for this type of organ harvesting, it has to be a state actor. Cause you have to be able to to dehumanize the people. You have to be able to convince the rest of the population. Like we're not, not everyone's a psychopath, not everyone's ready to do horrible things to their fellow man. Especially here, we're talking one in 13 Chinese back in 1999, right? So these people.

• 24:31Mike Rowe?

  Who were practitioners.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Who are practitioners of Falun Gong, practicing truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. Right? Uh, very grassroots, very bottom up. And you know, also very resilient to this re-education techniques, which the party has been so good at developing over decades, right? Transformation, I hate that term, but that's was with breaking, essentially breaking people. Right? Imagine how vulnerable this population is now, right? And they're just, they're basically, they're seen as somewhat disposable. There's this trick, we've been tricked in our minds into thinking that these people are dangerous or lesser than us than whatever. That's what these dehumanization things do. Now we can, it's easier for us to go along with the need to eradicate, to use the, you

• 25:16Speaker 02

  know, Jiang Zemin, the dictator at the time's term. And so that's happening. You know, people are, Falingong deaths are being considered suicides, right? This is now, we're talking, going back to 1999. And, you know, so it's kind of normal. It's now normalized to that people that are Falingong, it's okay for them to die.

• 25:35Mike Rowe?

  Is there a corollary in this country? I mean, can people?

• 25:41Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I understand conspiracies, I understand black markets, I understand big criminal enterprises that operate, you know, just underneath the surface. This isn't that, this is the government that we're talking about.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 25:55Mike Rowe?

  And that, I think, is the first thing that Americans need to wrestle with. We just don't have any corollary that I can think of on that scale. I also want to understand better how many Falingong are incarcerated at the moment, and Uighurs for that matter.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  So, this is the tragedy, right? The tragedy is that for 14 or 15 years, nobody really does anything. Major international institutions effectively run cover for all this. And the Chinese Communist Party finds another group that's convenient in exactly this way. They're already dehumanized, they're different, racially different, they have a different religion, they're Muslim, they're very isolated in the northwest of China, and Xinjiang province, strategically important region, by the way, to the Chinese Communist Party. They've been pushing Han culture and forced intermarriage and all sorts of stuff there already. And now they dehumanize them further, they incarcerate them. So now we have, you know, another group where frankly, the whole region itself is

• 27:00Speaker 02

  almost like a prison camp from what we hear. A huge part of the population has been, has had their vitals taken, not even just the incarcerated people over there, right? Because the whole area functions a little bit like a prison in itself.

• 27:13Mike Rowe?

  So.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Right? So you can get these blood, blood type, tissue type, all those measures, organ scans, on people that aren't even in actual prison, right? And this is what happens when you don't do it, when there's atrocity happening and you just say, hmm, I guess it's their problem, right? The problem spreads. And frankly, now, I was just talking with Pastor Bob Foo about this, actually, an episode of my show, American Thought Leaders, about to publish. I've been seeing increasing dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians. He's seeing that too, right? And what does that mean? Well, I don't know what it means. I just know that the CCP has utter contempt for human life, and particularly for any

• 27:54Speaker 02

  group, any person that doesn't say, yes, the Chinese Communist Party is supreme, at least performatively. And so we have the Zion Church being rolled up, we have Catholic clergy being put under stricter control, we have this increase in dehumanizing language. Where does it lead? I say, let's, how about we draw the line and just at least stop being complicit in our part, right, in this?

• 28:17Mike Rowe?

  Well, better to know, you know, better to look at it if it can be seen. I think maybe that's the other thing. It's so big. Like Nancy Guthrie's still missing in real time as we discuss this. This is one woman who has become a household word. One person has gone missing. And that seems to, you know, represent our capacity to worry about such a thing, right? In some kind of context. Meantime, during the period of time she's been missing, and I sure hope she's okay, you know? But ICE has found, what, 3,200 kids?

• 28:58Mike Rowe?

  That had been missing, that had been lost, had come over the border, right? Thirty-two hundred, we can't think about that. That's too horrible and too big. The idea that a few thousand kids were brought in here illegally and then just lost to the wind. It's just not even really reported on. This is so much bigger.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  It's bigger, but you know, there is one, I can tell you one change, which I think is very positive, okay? At least for me, it's a sea change, okay? And that is, when I talk to people, and I talk to people a lot, especially with this book now, all I'm doing is talking about forced organ harvesting with people, basically, okay? And everybody's saying, oh my God, this is horrible. People are not cluing out. I haven't had a single person do that thing that back in 20 years ago was frankly, the norm. Not everybody, but quite common, I would say the majority. They're not doing that anymore. Somehow, things have shifted a bit. I would love to see it to be, you know, key breaking news, right?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Sometimes just the fact that it's been happening for so long, it becomes normalized. This is the horror of it. This is the horror of it, right? Well, is it, how do we get breaking news? Well, when Cheng Pei Ming, the survivor, came out, public, went public for this time, we got a news cycle, at least in the UK. That, this is what was interesting. In Europe and in the UK, there was a significant news cycle around this. It was, there were articles written, I'm not gonna say I was jealous of it, I was incredibly impressed at some, you know, people I'd never heard of, wrote articles about this issue that were, you know, excellent, well sourced, well done, thoughtful. I think Telegraph UK comes to mind as one particularly notable example, okay? But, for some reason, not here.

• 30:47Mike Rowe?

  But then it's gone.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  But then it's gone.

• 30:50Mike Rowe?

  The article comes out, people read it, we clutch our pearls and we shake our head and we say, those doggone Chinese, what are they up to now? And then a new issue is out and some other headline. Do you know the story of, uh... Oh God, Chuck, what was his name? The guy who snuck into a concentration camp? Pilecki?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Pilecki.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  The Pilecki.

• 31:12Mike Rowe?

  Whitold.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Wito Pilecki.

• 31:14Mike Rowe?

  That guy.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:15Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:16Mike Rowe?

  So, it sounds like you know, I mean, you could certainly pronounce his name better than I can.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  He is Polish.

• 31:21Mike Rowe?

  He is Polish, of course.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Extremely, extremely Polish.

• 31:24Mike Rowe?

  You really are about as Polish as you're guessing, yeah.

• 31:28Mike Rowe?

  He sneaks into, or deliberately allows himself to be arrested. And was it Auschwitz or Berghain? Was it Auschwitz? And he gets in there to basically be an embedded reporter. Takes the notes, you know, sees what he sees, and then escapes. And tells the world. And I think he goes back, right? And he started, wasn't he doing some underground broadcast or something?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's in the volunteer, incredible book to read if you want to read about Wito Pilecki. Or, I don't know how you pronounce it in English, actually. It's unpronounce, it's unpronounceable. But, but yeah, I know, I mean, there's people that are heroes like this. But, right? They exist. There's not many, but they exist.

• 32:13Mike Rowe?

  But my point, I think, is your point. There is an arc. There's a chronology, like, on its way to becoming the truth. A claim has to go through various stages. And early on, those stages are incredulity, skepticism, doubt. And the people making the claim are dismissed as lunatics. And then less lunatic. And then, well, maybe, maybe not a lunatic, but, you know, we need more evidence. And then, okay, well, that's some evidence, but we're gonna need, there he is, Pilecki.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:50Mike Rowe?

  Wito.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Looks like a serious guy, right?

• 32:52Mike Rowe?

  Dude, all business. And by the way, the horror was, I think he was, I think he was executed.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was killed by the Soviets after the war.

• 33:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, for spying, I guess. Well, here, let me just land a plane real quick on this one point. Because I think there might be a corollary after all. There, that guy is blowing the whistle about what's going on in Auschwitz. A firsthand witness, he sees it. And he tells the world, or a chunk of the world. And the tail starts to grow. But people are still like, no, no, man, there's no way.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:28Mike Rowe?

  It can't be that. It can't be.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Very famously, another poll, Jan Karski, you know, actually traveled to the UK, traveled to America, talked with the AG, USAG, Felix Frankfurter, and there's this famous line that actually is, kind of speaks to this very directly. He said, the line is that when he's confronted later with the fact that he didn't do anything after Jan Karski exposed this whole thing to him. He says, it's not that I said that this young man was lying, it's that I was unable to believe him. And now, what's really interesting about this, right, is that this is interpreted in different ways, too. Right? Some people, I always interpreted it the charitable way, which is just like, I was unable,

• 34:14Speaker 02

  I just simply couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to believe that it was true, right? Some other people interpreted it in a more cynical way, which is that he was not allowed to accept that it was true by his, by the political reality of the situation. I don't know, I can't, I haven't had a chance to speak with him, you know? But, but it's interesting, right? In both cases, it's a case in point, however, isn't it?

• 34:43Mike 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.

• 35:14Mike Rowe?

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• 35:56Mike Rowe?

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• 36:18Speaker 03

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• 36:29Mike Rowe?

  I think, I mean, if you look at all truth going along that evolutionary bend, if you believe that's its journey, and I do, then it's always kind of instructive, maybe even fun every now and then, to try and check yourself and figure out, well, where are we on the... It's like the five stages of grief. You know, where are we on our path to acceptance? And obviously, I know the answer to this. You believe at some point in the future, the claims in here will be accepted not just as fact, but as a conclusion forgone.

• 37:13Mike Rowe?

  Obviously, right? How long you think that'll take?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Well, if we do our jobs well, a few years,

• 37:23Speaker 02

  isn't this what we're trying to do here? Like, to try to help people? This is one of these issues, Mike, that people coming, I mean, this is the whole purpose of the book, right? I feel like there's been a sea change in people's ability to conceive, maybe of evil, right? And maybe there's all sorts of reasons we could describe. Partially, I think it's the seeing the CCP welding people into their homes during COVID, right? Like, just barbaric and useless, just simply a nonproductive expression of power because they could, because they could be totalitarian. It was the, we saw the totalitarian mind at work for no benefit, actually,

• 38:06Speaker 02

  other than totalitarians being totalitarian, really. And just really, you know, harming their own population and... Yeah, I mean, it just, I think that played a role in helping people conceive of this, okay?

• 38:19Mike Rowe?

  I do, too.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Mike Rowe?

  I do, too. But I also don't want it to be so...

• 38:25Mike Rowe?

  Like, if we remember the Nazis as simply bad, right? And we put them into some sort of trope of just laughing maniacally and twisting their mustaches and just being villainous and bad and simple, we miss the point.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 38:41Mike Rowe?

  We just miss it, man. There's a great interview with, who played Christoph Waltz in, I guess it was in Glorious Bastards, maybe? Or?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Oh, the, the, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, I know, like, The Jew Hunter.

• 38:57Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  The Jew Hunter, yeah.

• 38:59Mike Rowe?

  Yes. And his, his interlocutor asks him, "How did you do it? How were you able to embody evil so incarnate that it leapt off the screen the way it did?" And his response was, appeared to be one of genuine confusion. He said, "I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about." He wasn't evil, not the way I played him.

• 39:28Mike Rowe?

  And that explains it all. He's like, that character was so compelling because he didn't play the trope. You really believed he was who he was because he didn't let the stereotype take it over. And so when I imagine the big, bad authoritarian state welding people into their homes, I look at that and I immediately go, wow, that's the personification of terror, right? That's about as bad as it gets. But I think there was probably, there were probably other people on the street and in the neighborhood who saw it happening. And while it may have

• 40:08Mike Rowe?

  been fearful, while it may have frightened them, I'd wager that it also elicited a certain level of comfort. Like, they knew that somebody was in charge. They knew that somebody was handling the situation. They were glad it wasn't them being welded in there. But you know what? Those people, they didn't follow the rules. And now, we can see a consequence for stepping out of line, and we can see the power come in. And even though we look at it and recoil, you know, why wouldn't the masses rush out and simply overpower

• 40:47Mike Rowe?

  the thugs and free those poor people? Something else is in us, and it sucks. It's the fault in our stars.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 40:57Mike Rowe?

  But it's real.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  No, it's extremely real. And you're just reminding me, I had a prominent Cuban dissident on my show, on American Thought Leaders, some time ago now. But he made this one comment that it kind of blew my mind, and it went, I clipped it immediately, and it went viral. To summarize, he says that there's something about totalitarian rule that certain types of people rather enjoy. Okay? It takes away your own power over yourself, okay? But strangely, it actually gives you a lot of power over others. I.e., if you want to make someone

• 41:41Speaker 02

  else's life a living hell, you can do that. Now, you actually have a kind of power that in a free society, you don't have. Right, because you can by by performatively saying the correct thing that would be politically correct or accusing someone of being politically incorrect, now you can have you can stick the whole power of the state on them.

• 42:02Mike Rowe?

  Yes, it's the little tyrannies that are in some ways the most terrible. And, you know, to keep the metaphor going, it's the ratting out the Jew next door in hiding. It's ratting out, oh, you know what, my neighbor is not wearing the mask. They did not get the vaccine. Right. It's once you can create that dynamic in the in the proletariat, within the hoi polloi, then you've got the then you've got the power. Because that's easy to manipulate. And that's the thing we're talking about.

• 42:44Mike Rowe?

  Why in the world aren't the many thousands of people, many thousands of Chinese people who are complicit in at least ninety thousand harvestings a year, how have they managed to remain quiet? And maybe that's as close as we can get.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Well, because they will have to they would have to go out and say, I'm murdering people for organs. And there's a few that have, by the way. You know, it takes a very special person. Listen, I remember one of the most horrifying, even thinking about it makes me want to cry, frankly. Horrifying, but powerful and courageous things I've ever read in my life was an essay in there's a group called PIT Parents, P I T T, PIT Parents, Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans. I believe that was the kind of it's a weird acronym, okay? They wrote a book of essays about parents and this one parent who transed their child, right?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  And there's this argument made that if you've done that, you're never going to admit to yourself that you did something wrong. Okay? For obvious reasons, I probably don't need to explain. But this woman does this in this essay, this woman understands, and I I don't know if I can tell this story while staying composed, because it's so heartbreaking and powerful. Because on the one hand, she knows what she's done, and she knows she got caught up in this Mania, right? And she thought she was doing good. And she did terrible things to her child. And then she has the courage to say, I did this. And I was wrong, and I did horrible things. And this should never happen again.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  So on the one hand, we kind of hate her. For what she's done, I mean. If you're reading this and you agree, right? On the other hand, you're shocked at the unbelievable courage it took to be the one person who dared to write it. To admit it publicly and try to share with people to stop others from making the same mistake. Right? So there are a few people like her. In this forced organ harvesting industry of came up Annie, right? Her, she came out, I mean, really, it was her husband doing it, but she risked everything to come out and tell the story. Um, you know, a surgeon, Enver Totti, um, you know, who before this whole industry scaled,

• 45:14Speaker 02

  operated on a living person, you know, with armed guards around him, to be fair, knowing what would happen if he decided to say no. But he killed someone by extracting their organs and he admits it. There's people like this. And those are the here, you know, I mean, they've done horrible things, but they're also heroes because they're trying to make peace with God, or they're trying to somehow. You know, find a penance, find a way redemption, looking for redemption, absolutely. But I think it's so rare. I mean, in all these, whenever it comes again to these atrocities. How many Nazis? People who were, you know, involved, I mean, think about the millions of people that were involved in

• 45:57Speaker 02

  exterminating Jews in World War Two. How many said later, oh, I did wrong? Right, and I mean, you know, and this is the horrible part, you know, I, it's incredibly important what you said. That we don't want to imagine these villains being like the, you know, the twisty mustache or whatever. Because, no, like, this is, well, okay, I'm gonna mix a whole bunch of ideas here, but Solzhenitsyn, right? The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. I always think about that, right?

• 46:24Mike Rowe?

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:27Mike Rowe?

  Gulag or Capello?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Gulag, yeah, well, that's his magnum opus, right? That's, yeah, exactly.

• 46:32Mike Rowe?

  And cancer ward.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  And if you're into a shorter version, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If you want to read a book in a day that'll give you a picture of what the Gulag Archipelago does. I would recommend that book. People have short attention spans these days. That's why I tend to recommend, recommend that one. But it's, what I was gonna say is, most of Germany was involved. And that's just the truth, right? That's, that's the truth that we have to face. It wasn't the Nazis, it was Germans. And, you know, my father-in-law, when he was in Germany, I know this because I had the conversation with him, right? When he was on one of these death trains. He wouldn't have dreamed of jumping from the train. That's how he, one of the reasons he lived of the many sort of near misses he had.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  During the Holocaust, he was traveling from Buchenwald, east. When the, the front was advancing, right? And they were moving the evidence, so to speak, of course, with a lot of people dying along the way. He wouldn't have dreamed for a second of jumping out of that train in Germany because he knew he would be taken in immediately to be killed, basically, because this is the problem with totalitarianism. They basically create this internal, external complicity. It doesn't mean there aren't lots of heroes. There are. There's lots of heroes in China as we speak, millions, doing amazing things, okay? But the problem is, is that these systems, they, they try to get at your soul, right? They get, they wear down your moral high ground.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  They make you participate, and then you feel like you're kind of going along. You don't have that energy anymore to say, no, this is wrong. I will not participate. And of course, but some people do.

• 48:09Mike Rowe?

  Some do.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  And those are the heroes. Those are the people that we want to think, you know, like, those are our heroes, right?

• 48:15Mike Rowe?

  What is that trait?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:16Mike Rowe?

  I mean, it's, I've, I've read conflicting things on this. I think we confuse it with courage. We just think, well, those people are very brave, but it's not quite that. It's, I think Gladwell talks about it in terms of disagreeability.

• 48:32Mike Rowe?

  You need to be disagreeable in order to be in that cohort that doesn't go along with the riot, right?

• 48:47Mike Rowe?

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• 49:32Mike Rowe?

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• 50:12Mike Rowe?

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• 50:29Speaker 02

  Do you know what another thing is, Mike? Eccentric.

• 50:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  This is Dennis Prager wrote a piece we had, we carried it a few years back. I remember he was commenting on, on this. What were the characteristics of the people who actually helped Jews during the Holocaust? One of those, and he, I forget what this, maybe disagreeableness was the second characteristic. I always forget what the characteristic was, but one of them, which really struck me because it's so obvious the moment you think of it, right? Eccentricity, why? It's just people that just don't do things like everybody else are much more prone to be heroic in situations where you're demanded to follow the crowd in doing something horrible.

• 51:06Mike Rowe?

  But this is the difference between a characteristic and a virtue. Right? Courage is a virtue. Eccentricity is a characteristic. But that's why Prager's, I know the piece you're referring to. It's so interesting to unpack somebody through their characteristics. It's adjacent to virtue, but you can start to understand why you have to have different cohorts. I take it back somewhat, this idea of villains. They're there for sure. Like Mengele, clearly, obviously Hitler. You can go down the list of Nazis who checked that box. Right?

• 51:48Mike Rowe?

  And then there are the other Nazis who are Nazis with a small n, right? But then there are the Germans. And it's much more interesting to talk about the good Germans and the Germans in general, the persuadables, I would call them. Right? They're the one, they're the fat part of the bad. That's why, like in China, obviously there's a surgeon. He knows what he's doing. I'd hold him to a different standard and there, maybe there are guards in the operating room. Yeah, okay, hold them to another standard. But there are people around who aren't directly in it who know.

• 52:24Mike Rowe?

  And that's why everything we're saying matters because they're the ones who are being.

• 52:30Mike Rowe?

  Shackled without chains, but nevertheless constrained. And they don't have that characteristic or the character.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Right. So you know, you're reminding me of a couple of things here. So there's an amazing piece in Tablet Magazine, which David Samuels wrote some years back called The Rower. I strongly recommend reading it. It's a story of a man named, let's see if I get his name right. I'm not good with names usually, but I think it's Nud Samuelson off the top of my head. Okay.

• 52:58Mike Rowe?

  How do you forget Nud?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  And I mean, it's just such a beautifully written piece. But the essential story is that Nud was an Olympic rower during the war. And he was the one that rode on his skiff, the Jews of Denmark to Sweden to safety. That's his claim to fame. And Nud, when you, I mean, I don't know. I think David was very meticulous in trying to stay true to Nud's real life story. It's, it's honestly unbelievable. You know, he actually, David met him as a kid in New York City. There it is. That's the piece. Exactly. Let's see if I, I hope I got his name right.

• 53:38Mike Rowe?

  Davidson.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Well, David, I definitely got right. But Nud Christiansen. Nud Christiansen. Sorry. Okay. But I've been struggling with this idea, right? I've been reading, there's a book that I reference in Kill to Order called Political Ponorology. And in it, a man named Anjay Wabachewski makes the case that communist systems are pathocratic. In other words, they elevate the psychopaths in our society, in particular, over any other political system. Like that's their problem. That's why you get the Gulag. And so it was a very compelling argument, a little bit difficult to read, but incredibly compelling argument. And I think there's truth to that. So I'm kind of living with this idea that there's just these people out there that are just structurally, I don't know.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  See, Wabachewski, this was fascinating. He defines evil as, he didn't want to go into the metaphysical stuff at all. He just said, people that have these psycho, antisocial personality disorder, now it's called psychopathic tendencies, that's evil. You just said, yeah, so you don't want a society, this is why communist societies are so horrible. Right? Because they empower evil people, right?

• 54:46Mike Rowe?

  They enable.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they put them in positions of power. And then those people push that through the society in different ways. Not only, this is just part of the story, but when I read the Rower. Right? What struck me, and I remember I called David after this, right? Because I was so moved by it, right? I was like, wait a second, if there's these people that are structurally evil. Maybe there's also people who are structurally good. They can't help themselves, and this guy was like this. Right? Like, he was a nobleman. I think he might have even been like in the royal family, maybe not the royal family. I don't remember, but anyway, the point is, this guy was kind of set. He could have just been sort of neutral, could have not done anything. But no, he was part of the resistance. He had to be like he, Jews, we're gonna save them all.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Okay, we're gonna roll them, you know, it's just, he couldn't help himself.

• 55:35Mike Rowe?

  But, well, here's the great dichotomy. He's clearly in the minority.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Oh, of course, of course.

• 55:42Mike Rowe?

  He's clearly, and yet, when you read the Rower. And this maybe is a testament to the power of literature and maybe another fault in our stars. But even though the vast majority of people who read that book would not do what Nut did. They think they would. The vast majority of people who read the Diary of Anne Frank. Figure, oh, you know what? She knocked on my door, nice little Jewish girl, you know, bad guys chasing her. Especially the super evil bad guys. Yeah, I'll save her, come on in, we'll get in the attic. Would you really? Would you really let Anne Frank stay in your attic if you knew? That the punishment is death?

• 56:26Mike Rowe?

  It's like sitting there watching Schindler's List, Jan. I'm guilty of it, I'm sitting there going, yeah. Yeah, that was brave, you know, I'd have done that for sure. But boy, it would have been scary. I don't know that I would have done that. What I do know is the vast majority of people didn't.

• 56:45Mike Rowe?

  And the vast majority of people today in China aren't.

• 56:50Mike Rowe?

  And that never changes.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Well, there's this famous photo, right, of the the one guy that's not doing the Zekiel in the picture, right? And everyone's like, I'd be that guy. It's like, I actually think in most cases, that's not even, you see, that's so interesting, because that's not something where you're, you know, you're saving somebody. You're just, you're performatively expressing obedience or allegiance.

• 57:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  What does it take for a human being to choose to not do that in the face of mass power being projected through a population and saying, this is what you need to do, right?

• 57:24Mike Rowe?

  But how was that guy, you know, A, what happened to him?

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 57:27Mike Rowe?

  I don't know. But how was he thought of in that moment? Because when you're in the moment, and you're the one who refuses to conform, you're not immediately lauded, you're not immediately seen as heroic.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  No, no, you're not lauded at all. You're, you just lost your job, which is what I, from my understand, happened to this guy. But it's sort of the cobwebs. I'm remembering a bit of his story. I don't want to say it because I don't remember exactly. But he had his own reasons for not doing that, making him disagreeable, perhaps, okay?

• 58:02Mike Rowe?

  Or eccentric.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  In this case, or eccentric.

• 58:04Mike Rowe?

  I think maybe the point of all this is that there's this other component that is really germane to your book and to Vital Pilecki and to

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Pilecki.

• 58:16Mike Rowe?

  Pilecki.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:17Mike Rowe?

  Um, and all of it. And that's the, as Kamala Harris would say, the passage of time. The time in passing and the passage of time.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Well, right, we, we, like, when I look at the protests in Minneapolis, at just the last couple of weeks, you know, I see those people in a very specific way. Personally, I see a lot of misguided sound and fury. I see a lot of performative acting out. That's just what I see.

• 58:49Mike Rowe?

  I don't think that's what they see. I think they see themselves as righteous and brave. And maybe the way the guy who did zig heil saw himself in that moment. And so it's very confusing.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  This is how the this is how the not Hitler and the Nazis sold it to the population. You know, listen, this is I keep thinking about.

• 59:11Mike Rowe?

  The one guy. It says be more like this guy.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Yes, correct.

• 59:16Mike Rowe?

  Easy to say 60 years later. Yes, right?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:20Mike Rowe?

  Easy to say.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  So Hannah Arendt, who kind of studied Nazis after the war, right, was, you know, there's this famous term that we hear, but the banality of evil book, right, of hers. And basically what she figured out was even some of these people that were, you know, monsters in effect, when she, you know, interviewed them and figured out what they were about and how they thought about things, they weren't monsters, actually, in their own thinking about themselves and what they were doing. They're just like, hey, that's just what we were doing.

• 59:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Look, that's such a great photo, Chuck. I mean, so I'm thinking of Colin Kaepernick. Okay, I'm not down with that. That whole kneeling thing, I struck me as performative and I didn't buy it. But if he sees that photo. He thinks he's that guy. He thinks he's that guy. And who am I to say he's not? A lot of people think he is.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  You're Mike Rowe.

• 1:00:18Mike Rowe?

  I'm.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  To say.

• 1:00:19Mike Rowe?

  You're daggone, right?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Mike Rowe?

  I'm Mike Rowe, damn it.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Because it's so obvious he's not that guy in any way, manner, shape or form. I don't. And again, I don't know him personally. The machine is behind him in doing that, right? The difference is that guy, very clearly, the machine is not behind him.

• 1:00:39Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 1:00:40Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. You can't even compare these situations other than on the surface.

• 1:00:45Mike Rowe?

  But if.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  But they've been convinced. You're right. The person has been convinced somehow.

• 1:00:49Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  That they're that guy. That's fascinating, right?

• 1:00:52Mike Rowe?

  Because in a sliding door universe, in an alternative universe, and Germany wins, right, and Japan wins, and the Nazis are elevated.

• 1:01:03Mike Rowe?

  Nobody's circling him and saying, be that guy. They're saying, that stupid bastard didn't get the memo. You know, what an idiot. There's one in every crowd. It'd be that. You know, and that's just another example of history being written by the winners. Right? And then we get to look back and we get to second guess everything. All of that is to say that this book is...

• 1:01:28Mike Rowe?

  Personally, I'm so delighted that it got written in part because you came here to talk about it. And I was honored to write the blurb in it. You know, apologies to those of you listening. We're not taking a deep dive into the details because we already did that. And if you want to go back and listen to that episode... No, no, no, don't listen to the episode. Buy the book. You should absolutely buy the book. But, but look, it's like, it's like that Tolkien quote. I forget which book it is, but it's like, you know, the tale grew in the telling. It wasn't a reference to, it became more fantastical or, or made up or exaggerated. It just took hold.

• 1:02:13Mike Rowe?

  Tales take hold. They have to be told and told again, and then people need to be shown. And then sometimes they have to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck. Their face has to be pushed in it. We're in, I think, the evolution of, of all of that. This is a new level because killed to order. You're not tiptoeing around this anymore. There's bodies and bones all over the front of this thing. I mean, you're, you're going for it.

• 1:02:45Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative. If I could for just a moment, here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants. But everybody wants it. I'm talking about the quality in a Lyft driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking, or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves, or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job, not just why they're qualified, but why they're interested. This

• 1:03:30Mike Rowe?

  is a way that allows the best candidates to distinguish themselves from the competition, and a great way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/row. ZipRecruiter is the number one hiring site, in large part because of this new initiative that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within one day. Try it for free, ziprecruiter.com/row. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  (SINGING) Build your team, build it sooner. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Try it free.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  When this cover was, you know, I asked a friend who I work with on a few projects to, because he's kind of been known to be good with getting books out, okay? So he made this cover for me, and I looked at it, I go, wow, that is intense. And I showed it to a whole bunch of people, and they thought to themselves. And people said all sorts of interesting things, right? But ultimately, I realized that what's on that cover is an understatement, not an overstatement, right? That was the key. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to ever pretend that what we're talking about, I don't want to make it bigger than it is. In fact, this 60,000 to 90,000 a year, it's horp, I mean, how can I be sure? Well, I mean,

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Let's game out the argument of how you come up with sixty to ninety thousand. You see, like, the point is, it's an under, it's actually, it's a very conservative estimate, ultimately. And so, similarly, the cover, you know, a lot of people have been killed to order, murdered for their organs in China. How many exactly? I cannot tell you. I don't know. It's a state secret. People will be murdered for trying to tell that number, and they don't even know themselves, because it's somewhat compartmentalized. No one's sitting there trying to figure out the total number, right? Of course, the official numbers are all, you know, just, they exist for propaganda purposes, nothing else. So, it's funny how this played out, because even our producer,

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Irene is my producer, is watching in the, over there, and, you know, she was vehemently against this cover. She's like, oh, it's gonna work, everyone's gonna hate it. I'm embellishing a little bit, but I think she understands, I think she's grown to appreciate it as well, and I, as I did. And I think it's, I think it will help people understand what we're talking about. We're talking about something that, you know, that some of the legislation that's now passed the House, actually, this bill passed unanimously, the, what was, I think they're working on changing the name a little bit, but the Falingon Protection Act, I think they're working to change the name to make it clear that this protection act is for anyone who would be organ harvested, even though the Falingon were the dominant group over the years.

• 1:06:29Mike Rowe?

  Keep that up, Chuck.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:31Mike Rowe?

  I mean, really, I'm, you know, listening to you talk, Jan, it's like, I, I think I was in the seventh or eighth grade when the teacher put on, was it Night, or Night and Fog, Eli Wiesel.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm not, uh...

• 1:06:48Mike Rowe?

  I think, I think it's Night and Fog.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  It's a war documentary, right?

• 1:06:53Mike Rowe?

  No, it's Eli Wiesel, W.I.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Eli Wiesel.

• 1:06:57Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Politic, Holocaust survivor.

• 1:07:01Mike Rowe?

  Very short book.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:03Mike Rowe?

  But just incontrovertibly, I mean, the evidence is there. It was the, and the film of the same name. Just had, I mean, look, when you see piles and piles of corpses, piles and piles of corpses, you know, I don't know that they would show that today in the eighth grade.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  You want, do you want to know a little bit, a little crazy anecdote? So my father-in-law, one of the reasons we made Finding Manny is we had footage of him opening up an old cigar box that he had collected of photos he had after the war. So what people were doing after the war, this is gonna sound really crazy and macabre, but you know, Warsaw had been completely blown out, like it was, it was, the city was just, you can see, it's just like piles of rubble and people trying to figure out what to do. Some people were taking photo, had taken photos of some of these atrocities and were actually selling these photos. And somehow he bought some of them, right? Like, it's just kind of a weird, it sounds so crazy, but you can imagine it was a very different situation.

• 1:08:07Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Right? And so he has this old cigar box with a bunch of these photos that were so, I was talking, who took these photos? How did you get them? He's like, yeah, people were just kind of selling them on the roadside, trying to get by, right? And he had this, so that's part of the reason we have this evidence. It's incredible, it's unbelievable, right? Is because of these, you know, people trying to be entrepreneurial after the war when they have nothing.

• 1:08:30Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, in, in some way, I mean, the guys up in the Eagles Nest, you know, taking whatever they could take, the strange mementos, you know, but piece of, I met a guy a couple of years ago who was a hundred and one, and he was over there and he went into his desk drawer and he pulled out a piece of carpet, just to, he, he had taken his knife and he had cut a piece of the carpet out of, what's the name of the Eagles Nest? Bu, uh, it starts with a, uh, some German name, it's no big deal, but it's, but it's

• 1:09:08Mike Rowe?

  like, you're right, it's so interesting when you know you're in a consequential time, place, moment, you want to grab on to, to something.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  Fury bunker.

• 1:09:23Mike Rowe?

  No. Oh, the one up in the, up in the mountains, at the end of Where Eagles Dare.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Oh, the Wolf's Lair, sorry. Oh, yeah, I visited that, actually.

• 1:09:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. And so.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Wielczeszany, it's in Polish, by the way.

• 1:09:37Mike Rowe?

  Of course it is.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Mike Rowe?

  We never, like, that tendency today, I think, might be called a selfie. It's become so homogenized and dispersed that anybody can. I mean, this, this idea of watching the present unfold through a monitor, as opposed to simply watching Metallica play on stage, right? If you're up to your James Hetfield and you look out and all you see are 10,000 people watching you through this screen, you know, and I find that amazing, our desire to grab on to mementos and talismans, you know? And in a way, you've got to do that with the cover of a book.

• 1:10:24Mike Rowe?

  You've got to get people's attention. You have to, you know, you've got a story to tell and the facts aren't enough. You've got to tell it in a way. And that's why I mentioned, I think, double check me, Chuck. I think it's Night and Fog. I want to get that right because it's famous.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  I'm aware of this, but I couldn't tell you the name credibly.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Well, Night and Fog was, was a French film, uh, made in 1956, and it was directed by Elaine Resnais, and it's about the Nazi concentration camps.

• 1:10:55Mike Rowe?

  Okay, that's it.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:56Mike Rowe?

  That's it. But what was Ellie's biography called? For some reason, Night is in my head. Sorry to be pedantic, folks. I just don't want people, I got a letter the other day from somebody.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  I'm blanking, although I shouldn't be.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  What's Ellie's last name?

• 1:11:13Mike Rowe?

  W E Vizel?

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Ellie Vizel, yeah.

• 1:11:16Mike Rowe?

  So W E I S E L. Super famous, lived, I mean, a long, long time.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  In fact, so this is what I was going to comment on, right? This Felon Gong Protection Act, which is being kind of updated. One of the things it requires America to do, right? One is. America's policy should be to stop all kind of cooperation around this stuff with Communist China. That's kind of a no brainer. Another one is to sanction people that are involved. But a third one is just to assess, under the Eli Wiesel Act, right? Which is Atrocity Act, whether this is in fact an atrocity. And of course, I'll tell you, absolutely, it's an atrocity. But it would be good to officially know that, right?

• 1:11:59Mike Rowe?

  No kidding.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Mike Rowe?

  No kidding.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  The book was called Night.

• 1:12:03Mike Rowe?

  Thank you.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  1960.

• 1:12:05Mike Rowe?

  Yes. Right. So at the top of the funnel, we must see it. We must acknowledge it. We must call it for what it is. And then we can go about the business of eventually accepting it, maybe doing something about it. And then, then we can go about the business of denying it, right? I mean, I just bring all this up because, look, how in the world can you have such a robust cohort of knuckleheads to suggest the Holocaust didn't happen? And yet, we do. After all this time, all that proof, all those firsthand witnesses, those biographies, all of it. It's there.

• 1:12:47Mike Rowe?

  And I mean, you're talking about six, seven million deaths. Not 90,000 a year, which is mind boggling, but exponentially more. And we still, we're still dealing with flat earthers. We're still dealing with it. So.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  And part of the reason is, quite honestly, that we, it's hard for us to fathom that such things can happen. I really, I'm not excusing that, by the way, just for the record, right? And of course, there's always massive propaganda operations that are looking to take advantage of this. And frankly, the CCP fuels some of this stuff. There's considerable evidence around that, too. But part of it is just simply, you know, decent human beings do not want to believe these things. It's part of our nature. I'm glad, and that's something I'm glad for, in a way, right? In a way. But it's extremely inconvenient when you're trying to expose atrocity. Yeah.

• 1:13:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah, it is. I want to go back to my thing, too, for a minute, because it's, um... The most uncomfortable thing about the book for me is that you don't really pose it. You don't really hit it on the head that hard, but if you really think about it, it's so personal. It really does come back to you. I don't mean you, you, but I mean, anybody who's listening to this, who feels outraged by this, needs to, in the same moment, really imagine what they would do if their son, or daughter, or mom, or dad, or loved one, wife, husband, whatever, could be saved by simply putting in the order. Simply putting

• 1:14:30Mike Rowe?

  in the order. You don't have to get your hands dirty. You don't even have to look at it. But if you knew, would you do it anyway? I don't know what the answer to that is, but it's not flattering.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  I know an answer, though. I have, like, I think this, it sort of crystallizes an idea that as we educate our young people, which is, by the way, something that everyone here knows you're deeply involved in yourself. We've forgotten that a key element of education is just teaching people how to be good. It's a central issue of education, right? Wherever it comes from, right? And so, teaching people to know deeply, right? Not just because in your gut, you know that this is wrong. You do, actually, I think, right? But to know

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  why, and why you could never do this, even though, you know, you might get some kind of pleading benefit from it, i.e. an extension of life. So, there are much more important things than that. We need to remember that. That needs to be a central part of our education. Virtue, right?

• 1:15:44Mike Rowe?

  Where is that in the Chinese curriculum?

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  I wish, I wish I could tell you that on the books officially.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  The greatest good in that society is maintenance of the supremacy of the Communist Party. That's how they view it. And that's how they teach it. And that's why when you're young, you get put in. Everybody basically becomes either a young pioneer or a youth league member or joins the Communist Party. You know, it's crazy. This, again, something incredibly important to understand, but hard to imagine, right? And this is why, so like, you know, you know how utilitarian bioethics is an important, you know, theme, theme in this book, right? Utilitarian bioethics is the medicine or the health of the greatest good for the greatest number, right?

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  But in that, the extreme of that is actually in a communist society, where that greatest good is the survival and supremacist of the Communist Party, of the vanguard, really of the extremely affluent people have taken the wealth of the nation for themselves and view them and are going to keep that power forever with using this ideology and this structure that's been developed. Somehow is incredibly effective at bamboozling everybody else that to think that there might be something good in this.

• 1:17:07Mike Rowe?

  What did you think? What did you think when you heard Mom Donnie talking about the

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  The warm

• 1:17:14Mike Rowe?

  The warm embrace of collectivism as opposed to all that rugged individualism nonsense?

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  The truth is, I don't know him personally. And I don't know if he believes it or if this is, you know, just something that is helpful politically. But

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  it's deeply wrong in a incredibly troubling way if you understand how these systems work and where it always leads to, right? And everyone, you know, this sort of socialism, right? Socialism is a stepping stone. The communists view socialism as the stepping stone to the, you know.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  The real system, right? Which is always having since Lenin, right? The ability to push massive coercive power through a population to ensure that it functions the way it does because people aren't going to comply otherwise. They're not going to participate. It's not, it's, it's an anti-human system. It's just so difficult because it sounds like if I say this to someone that's been taught that it's all about just being fair, right? That's how it sells itself, right? It sells itself by saying, the reason you don't have everything that you want is because the rich guy took it from you. Or the guy that, you know, the sort of the modern cultural variance or, you know, we

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  could debate that, but the, these, you know, critical theories all have an infusion of communism in them.

• 1:18:46Mike Rowe?

  The zero sum game.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  Oppressor, oppress, exactly. It's just, it's like, it's the, it's the person that's the different color that's the cause of it, or the person that's the different sexual orientation that's the cause of it, or whatever, or the person that's thin in one case, right? When it comes to fat studies, right? This part, if the thin person is oppressing the person that isn't thin, right? I mean, it's kind of crazy stuff, but it sets, going back to the original variant, right? The pie is fixed and the only reason the rich people are rich is because they took it from you. That's a horrible sales pitch, right? I mean, we've been, we've struggled, so many people have struggled with the idea prosperity is real. The pie gets increased. Why do people work for others?

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Well, it's because if you work for that person, you're better off yourself.

• 1:19:38Mike Rowe?

  So as some of you may have heard, I went to Congress 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later.

• 1:20:05Mike Rowe?

  I finally heard back from the government and I am delighted to tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a half now, and it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam finners and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships, it's only

• 1:20:50Mike Rowe?

  a matter of national security and it's a very big deal. And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand and work in the defense industrial base. I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to BuildFreedom.us, see what's available and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  Sure, that person is even more better off and someone will say, well, that's not fair. I want, I don't, why does he get to be more better off than I'm better off? Well, but can't you be appreciative of the fact that you're better off too? Like, you know, that guy gets, should get, should get some benefit from helping you with that too, right? None of that means anything, right? In the communist worldview, it's all about, but it's, the point is it's rhetoric, it's not true. It's a, it's a, it's a core falsehood from the very beginning, right? And this, again, it's like, it blows my mind, but I'll tell you something else. I didn't even understand where prosperity came from until the last 10 years of my life. I was a biologist, I was an evolutionary biologist. We didn't learn that. I never learned this.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  I never studied, you know, basic economics. Thank you, Tom Sowell, for, for helping me understand so many things, right? How incentive structures work, whatever, many, many things, right? But just, yeah, like division of labor creates prosperity, innovation creates prosperity, right? The pie gets bigger. We create that for ourselves, we help each other, right? It's not this, and this is, by the way, there's a book by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, okay?

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  All of these Marxian theories are cynical. They just, they believe that, they don't believe in the warmth of their relationship. You know, we enjoy each other's company, right? I hope.

• 1:22:45Mike Rowe?

  Don't. I'm hanging on every word. Keep talking.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  No, but the big point is that it's not, no, all, every relation, the only meaningful relationship in our lives, according to these Marx, you know, the communist and the Marxian way of life, is the power play, really deep inside, whatever people are seeing here, what's really happening is me angling to try to exert my power over you. And you, or no, actually, in this case, I think it's you, because you're the more, you know, prominent one, right? So, so you're the oppressor. So I'm actually struggling against you, because you're trying to oppress me, and I'm have to figure out how to, because I've achieved my critical consciousness, now I have to figure out how to take what's mine from you, Mike. That's what they teach. This is what this ideology is. It's not about fairness.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  It's about kind of enshrining the idea that if I'm jealous of someone else, if I envy what they have, it's saying, yes, you are right, you deserve to be. Get that, live that energy and take what's yours finally. And then guess what? The moment that those, the people that run the revolution take power, well-

• 1:23:52Mike Rowe?

  Meet the new boss.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:23:54Mike Rowe?

  Same as the old boss.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Well, frankly, in many cases, I think in all cases, actually, a lot worse.

• 1:24:00Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Right? So that's how it plays.

• 1:24:04Mike Rowe?

  I want to go back for a minute to something you said about, like, there's a difference between trying to teach a kid the difference between good and evil. It seems an obvious thing to say in most literature and, you know, great art grapples with that. But the more nuanced thing is, if I heard you right, is trying to understand why good people do good things. That's interesting, and I, I think it was Thomas Wolfe. I read an essay years ago that tried to answer that. And he gave an example of if you're with your kid today and you walk into the corner store

• 1:24:47Mike Rowe?

  and you see him palm a Snickers bar and slip it in his pocket. Well, clearly that's bad. It's time for a teachable moment. So you call him over, you call the proprietor over. Son, put it back. Listen, that's a bad thing to do and it's bad because if everybody did that, this poor guy would be out of a job and we would have chaos and our society wouldn't work right because stealing, you know, it's just economically, not in our mutual interest. I just don't do that, you know. A hundred years ago, the same kid would have got boxed in the ears, you know, they would have put it back on the shelf and say, look, you don't want to do that, son.

• 1:25:31Mike Rowe?

  Cause if you do, you'll go to hell. It's very simple. It's very simple. So, you know, how do you teach good today? Do you think of it in those extremes or terms or is it, is there something else to it?

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  There's, there's something that you're, again, I keep citing Thomas Sowell. He's just so awesome, I guess, but.

• 1:25:56Mike Rowe?

  I can't believe he's still around. He's still doing it.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  He's still doing it. I'm gonna totally mess up this one, but it's essentially that sort of the history of the last recent years is that of replacing what worked with what sounded good. Or something like that. Okay. And it's, it's beautiful. It's beautiful because that's kind of right. Like, you know, this 10 commandments in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Just a lot of really good ideas like this is not, these are not like exclusive even to the Judeo tradition. These are like basic rules for society to be able to function and that have been figured out over a long period of time. And so, you know, it seems to me like

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  this, the whole kind of progressive approach has been to say, ah, those things, do we really need those? You know, we have much better ideas, right? And in some cases, these people are serious. They think these are much better ideas. But it's like, so what, you're gonna push those through a society and just see how it happens without like, you know, thinking it through a little bit? And then think that there might have been some wisdom in these all that? I mean, this is, I call them kind of universal values. A lot of those things, they're not exclusive to the Judeo-Christian tradition at all.

• 1:27:11Mike Rowe?

  We've been in a trance, John, you know? We've been beguiled, I think, for the last five or six years in a lot of different ways. And

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Longer.

• 1:27:24Mike Rowe?

  Probably so. Probably, I mean, look, my own recency bias is just like, I, I think, you know, I, we will look back. I'm so curious to see how, like, when we look back 150 years, God, it's just so easy to dismiss, you know, like, what were you thinking? You know, with this whole slavery thing? What were you thinking? Same point as before. Like, well, I'll tell you, I wasn't there, but had I been alive back then, I, I certainly would have engaged in that terrible, terrible institution. Like, how do I know? How do I know how I would have thought, felt growing up in, in Georgia in 1840?

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  If I may, okay, I think if you had been taught decent values, okay, right? I think it's okay for us to say, I don't think we need to kind of create this moral equivalency with everything. I think we should be able to tell ourselves, you know what? If I may, okay, this is my thought here. I'm trying to articulate it, but we have to take that question, ask yourselves, how can I make sure that if I was in that situation, or my son, or my daughter, or someone in my field, how can I make sure that they would make the right choice?

• 1:28:40Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Right? Because there are tools for this, actually, right? Because what's implicit to the question is sort of like, well, you don't know, if you're faced with a tough situation, of course, everyone's gonna fold, right? But no, you don't need to. And actually, there's ways to educate people, I think typically through faith, through effective righteous faith systems, right? For people to know what the right thing to do is. And sometimes they might struggle with it. Sometimes they might make the wrong decision. But for example, and you know, if you know you're gonna have to face your God and be judged, you might make the right decision faster, because it's not just, the decision isn't just for right now. The decision is for all eternity, right?

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  And that becomes a different equation.

• 1:29:29Mike Rowe?

  Consequences. Yeah, I mean, it's teaching consequences.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  And I think you would have done the right thing, by the way.

• 1:29:35Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know, I like to think so. I also like to think I'd be brave in battle. I like to think that, you know.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  You are brave in battle. You're doing it. You're living it. I hope it's kind of probably obvious to the people watching, right? I mean, maybe it's not obvious to you. The point is just that, that no, we're not all gonna be the super most courageous person every time and every single issue like Nud Christensen, okay, which was unusually like that.

• 1:30:06Mike Rowe?

  The German who refuses to zig-hile.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. However, I do think, you know, you do mention these last five years, and I do think that there was a bit of a selection. I think a lot of people found a little bit of courage where they didn't know. They would have, maybe beforehand, they would have thought to themselves, yeah, I don't know what I would do. But I think a whole lot of people found out, maybe, maybe there was a little bit of that courage in there, even though we've been taught, we haven't been taught that this is a virtue, strangely, right?

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Unbelievably important, right, to be, though, this is like, you know, to figure out what you believe in, know why you believe it and try to live it, right? But your best, you're not always gonna win. I mean, it's not always gonna work. Sometimes you'll have fear. It all happen. That's, that's just the human condition. But try, try like hell, right?

• 1:30:54Mike Rowe?

  Try. Look, I don't, I don't think you can be courageous without fear. Courage is overcoming the fear. If you don't have the fear and you do a brave thing, you're just a lunatic. You're missing a synapse, you know? You're like Alex Pundled, that free solo.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  It goes back to these people that might be wired for just having to do good. That's very interesting, right? Maybe, actually, they're not really good, are we? This is, you know, this topic for another day, but no.

• 1:31:24Mike Rowe?

  This is the topic, Jan. This topic is central to your excellent book. I think very few books do the work they intend to do purely between the covers. They have to do something that make you, you know, in a Kierkegaardian way, you know, the unexamined life. You know, this, this book made me honestly ask myself, what in the world would I do? And I hate to even say that out loud because it should be obvious. You know, if I have a chance to blow the whistle and stop this deplorable thing from happening, I'll do it.

• 1:32:05Mike Rowe?

  But if my daughter's life is counting on it,

• 1:32:09Mike Rowe?

  maybe I'll just do one more. We'll just get one more kidney out of this whole awful thing, right? One more slave, one more, one more thing. And then, that's the thing in me that I'm most keen to overcome.

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  And it's all, and it comes back, right, right back to Solzahitz and that line between good and evil, right? And it's all, it's in us and we have to make those choices.

• 1:32:35Mike Rowe?

  Give me the quote again.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. It's one of the most beautiful things that I keep, I often think about it, actually.

• 1:32:45Mike Rowe?

  As we start to land the plane here. You mentioned Prager earlier. Are you friendly with him?

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  I haven't seen him since his accident. And yeah, but yes, we're friends.

• 1:32:57Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think we are too. I haven't talked to him since his accident. I did a commencement speech at Prager University. He did the first one, I did the second one. And I saw him interviewed the other day. And

• 1:33:17Mike Rowe?

  amazing grace. You know?

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  Well, and you know, courage, I think is a maybe the a good word to include here, right?

• 1:33:26Mike Rowe?

  Well, yeah, yes. But but humanity too, I mean, he he fell in the shower.

• 1:33:36Mike Rowe?

  It's like my guys up in the Bering Sea and the Deadliest Catch and you know, the after years, the people who watch that show, when somebody dies, you know, it's going to be because of a rogue wave or a fire off the Pribilov Islands, it's going to be some spectacular calamity and oh, but no, the, you know, I mean, that happens. But the star of that show, you know, Phil Harris, he had an embolism. He died slowly and awkwardly and commonly. And in the process, touched millions of people because it was just suddenly so human and so relatable.

• 1:34:17Mike Rowe?

  Dennis fell in the shower and now he's paralyzed from the larynx down. But his mind is still there. And there he is, propped up, being interviewed in prime time about his new book. What's it called, Chuck? What would something about?

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  The Case for God or something like that.

• 1:34:39Mike Rowe?

  Something like that. But you know. Still in the face of that adversity.

• 1:34:48Mike Rowe?

  I just was.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  If there is no God, the battle over who defines good. Oh, sorry. If there is no God, colon, the battle over who defines good and evil.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Seems sort of relevant to our conversation, doesn't it?

• 1:35:01Mike Rowe?

  That's why I bring it up, Jan.

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Mike Rowe?

  You know, the line for good and evil cuts through every. We get to decide, you know, a lot of people fall in the shower. A lot of people have their entire life upended. A lot of people are suddenly smote, smitten, redefined. And now they have all these decisions to make and some are rooted in, like you say, real courage, others in desperation. And it's just, it was amazing to see him rise.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  And I want us to live in a society where we teach people that these decisions are ones that you're going to have to make in your life very likely and all in different contexts, hopefully not catastrophic contexts, but sometimes that'll be. And you can learn, it's teachable, how to make the right decision. The morally correct decision, right? To figure it out. The best literature of history has been written to explain these questions. Read Dostoevsky, you want to, you know.

• 1:36:09Mike Rowe?

  Crime, punishment.

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, that's why your book's important. It's for all the obvious literal reasons. Attention must be paid and a travesty is unfolding. And you've blown the whistle, but right under the surface. You know, this is a macro cover and it's a macro problem. But there's a lot of micro.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  A lot of subtext.

• 1:36:37Mike Rowe?

  A lot of subtext and a lot of deeply, deeply personal

• 1:36:43Mike Rowe?

  queries that can be explored. A lot of tires to kick. So, look, I mean, we're in a world. Where it's very comfortable to put our heads in the sand on any number of things. And this thing exists today because of that. And you are this disagreeable eccentric who is inviting people to pull their head out of the sand. And, um, you know, perhaps my final question is, are you still being invited to dinner parties? I mean, are you still on the, are you on the circuit? Are you, oh, Jan's gonna come over and he's gonna bring his book, you know, the one with all the bones on the front.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Well, we'll, we'll have to see, cause I'm still on the front end of that, right?

• 1:37:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Like right now, as I was saying, you know, I, I wanted to say, you can do it, you know, because it's amazing that, you know, Rob Schneider, if I may comment a little bit about Rob.

• 1:37:42Mike Rowe?

  Please.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  I sort of imagined a lot of my life that he was kind of like his characters. It's stupid to imagine, I don't know why I imagined that, but.

• 1:37:50Mike Rowe?

  Like one dimensional, kinda clownish looking for the.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And it's just, it didn't make any sense because of course people aren't like their characters in most cases, right? And that isn't, he's a comedian and an actor, right? But just the humanity and like deep thoughtfulness of the man is astonishing.

• 1:38:08Mike Rowe?

  And he paid a price.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  He's paid a price, he's paid a huge price for it and he's, and it's painful to him, I know, right? Very, very painful to him, yet he's, he's made a decision. And like I, I am so, it's amazing to have, you know, people like yourself and people like him decide, hey, this is something I want to put my voice, my clout, you know, so to speak, that I've developed over years, my reputation behind, right? Because this is, I think that's part of the reason too, why a lot of people haven't said something, because maybe they were afraid, what if it turns out to be fake? What if it, you know?

• 1:38:45Mike Rowe?

  I, I'm there. I don't want to be, have you seen the Y files?

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 1:38:51Mike Rowe?

  Huge show online, A.J. Gentile does it. I'm gonna talk to him, I hope, next month. It's an ingeniously fun sort of take on The X-Files, where he looks at all manner of conspiracy theories. Some really feel kind of out there, but he gives them their due. And he lets his audience go along with the idea or the reasons that the tale grew in the telling. And, right? But then at the end, he's like, okay, now here's what's wrong with it. And here's where it doesn't quite hold up. And, and, and my point is, people love that. They, it's delicious.

• 1:39:33Mike Rowe?

  The story of it is, you know, gosh, did we go to the moon? Let's really think it over. You know, could the world actually be flat? I don't want to be on the wrong side of any of those obvious things. This is dangerous. I mean, I feel like I know you now, but I didn't. You know, the first time you ran this by me. It took two years of me like thinking about it and reading up on it as best I could. And then just asking myself, you know, if the NBA could become so captured and if Hollywood could become so captured by all that money and all that power and just all that China. Well, then, why wouldn't this be happening? It certainly seems plausible.

• 1:40:17Mike Rowe?

  So I'm betting on you. I'm betting you're right, because it feels right to me. And also-

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  I wish it wasn't, Mike. I truly, deep in my heart, I truly wish this was all a story.

• 1:40:30Mike Rowe?

  That's why, listen-

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  I wish it wasn't.

• 1:40:32Mike Rowe?

  Here's my blurb in the very front of your book. "A lot of what you're about to read, I heard directly from Yan when he first appeared on my podcast to talk about the multi-billion dollar human organ trade in China. I had no idea our conversation would go viral or ruffle so many feathers would lead to this extraordinary book. Spoiler alert, as you read, you will likely experience the same mix of incredulity, horror, and disbelief that I did when Yan explained to me precisely how and why this atrocity has continued to unfold since 2000. But with every chapter, every page really, your skepticism will be challenged with some very uncomfortable facts

• 1:41:15Mike Rowe?

  and you will be confronted with a simple choice to accept the claims herein as true." Or not. Frankly, I wish the evidence was flimsy, or circumstantial, or refutable. I'd prefer to live in a world where human beings are not wrongly imprisoned and routinely harvested for their parts. But I'm afraid that isn't the case. The evidence in this book is compelling and credible, and the evidence demands a verdict, no matter how uncomfortable or upsetting the truth might be. Such are the hazards of pulling one's head from the sand, and having a look around at a world in desperate need of improvement.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Oh, it's...

• 1:41:55Mike Rowe?

  I was writing for me. You asked me to write a blurb. That's what I'm thinking about for, for me. And I bet a lot of people who read this are gonna wrestle with the same thing.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Well, you're a good man.

• 1:42:09Mike Rowe?

  It's just about the work of the moment.

• 1:42:11Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna get emotional.

• 1:42:13Mike Rowe?

  Your book is officially out today. It's called Killed to Order. It's not a comedy, but it's important. Thanks.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Mike, thank you so much.

• 1:42:26Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  It's coming out on the 17th?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Wow, that is so cool.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go online and leave us a review.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge, but in this world, the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you've got to do is leave a quick... Even if you hate it. Five-star review. Thank you.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

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