Why The Epoch Times Exists: Truth, Tyranny, and the Price of Telling It With Joe Polish, Rob Schneider, and Jan Jekielek

How does a society gradually train ordinary people to accept or stay silent about things they know are wrong? And what are the earliest warning signs?

We were able to see through COVID that there were a large percentage of the population that was susceptible to what Mattias Desmet describes as mass formation psychosis. More or less, I would use the word mob mentality, can get sucked into by the government and by the media, can get sucked into a propaganda campaign unknowingly. I described it as the best slaves are the slaves that don't know that they're enslaved and will fight for their own enslavement.

They have a long history in Communist China of creating class enemies. They'll pick a group, like the initial group was landowners. So these people that own land, some of it a lot, they've worked hard for it or inherited it. And now the Communist Party comes, they win, and they say, well, no private property, it's all going to belong to the people. But you can't just— if you go and just take it, Those people will be pissed off. They're going to resist, and they have friends and everything. So what do you do? You seize control of the means of information dissemination, like the media. They said the landowners are dangerous. They're evil people. You should hold them in contempt. Actually, they took your land. You should take the land back. And by pushing this really hard, it actually conditions us to accept bad things being done to those people.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right Genius Network. Hello everyone, I'm Joe Polish, the founder of Genius Network, Genius Recovery, and Genius Youth. I've had the opportunity to sit down with Rob and Jan separately several times, and every conversation has given me a lot to think about. Today I wanted to bring them together. Most people know Rob Schneider for— from comedy, movies, Saturday Night Live, and a career in entertainment that has lasted more than 4 decades. But there's a lot more to Rob than most people know. For one, he's funny as hell. He has a deep knowledge of history, and he's one of the most courageous people I know in entertainment. Whether you agree with everything he says, some of it, or none of it, I admire that he's willing to take real risks and make real sacrifices for what he believes. He's also working to create movies, shows, and conversations outside the traditional Hollywood system. Jan Jekielek is a senior editor at the Epoch Times and the host of American Thought Leaders. For more than 20 years, he's reported on human rights, communism, propaganda, media, and some of the darkest things happening in the world. Happening in the world. His book, Kill to Order, investigates the forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience in China and what that reveals about Chinese Communist Party. What I appreciate about Jan is that he can examine subjects like this without losing his humanity. He's genuinely one of the nicest people I know. He follows the evidence, he asks careful questions, and helps people understand things that can be very difficult to believe. Rob and Jan come from very different worlds, but they're both— they both spend a lot of time thinking about the truth, courage, media, culture, freedom, and what it costs to stand for something when there's a real price to pay. This conversation is not about telling anyone what to think, and it's not about everyone agreeing. You may agree with everything they say, some of it, or none of it. The point is to have an honest conversation about how we determine what's true, how we recognize when we're being manipulated, how we keep our integrity, and when speaking up has a cost, and what we build when the existing systems are no longer working. We only have about an hour, and I also want to leave time for some questions, so I'm going to jump right into it. So please help me welcome Rob Schneider and Yanni Kelly. All right, Rob, what could I have said about that that would have been funnier? If I would— I mean, what— give me some coaching here.

Um, these people should not be speaking on stage at the same time ever, but here they are. Uh, I, I think, um, no, I think you did good. I think a lot of it is, um, The dichotomy is what's, to me, most interesting. The fact that we were talking about before how, just before we came on, how it's gone from 9 seconds 10 years ago. Was it 11 years ago, Eric, that the concentration was— 12 years ago, it's gone from— was it 9 seconds? Yeah, 9-second attention span. 9-second attention span 12 years ago to looking at this to what is now 1.7 seconds. Is that right?

Yeah.

So, well, I don't know if it's right, but it's probably close.

So that's, in other words, it's this, it's this, and it's the same attention span as a goldfish. So that's the way our society is right now. But at the same time, people are willing to sit through and listen to a 2-hour podcast or like this, an hour pod. So I think people are hungering for something if they find it interesting. Do you find it that way?

I mean, the success of American thought leaders tells me that there's a deep hunger for just, you know, people for truth-seeking in general, because there's so much, uh, as you know, fakery or performativity in our society. And so, you know, I think that's maybe, that's part of why we gravitated to each other a bit, um, because we're both interested. I think you, you pointed that out well. Um, no, I mean, I think there's, on the one hand, I'm— I'm as guilty as anyone of having the short attention span and doing the scrolling and everything. But on the other hand, I think we're learning how to control ourselves a bit and actually try to find deep, deep experiences, right?

I think it's still new. And I think anything that changes the world in a relatively short time, we cannot judge. Even in the first decade of something new, I think it really has Something that's changed the world. And I make the comparison to aviation. It's more or less agreed that the Wright brothers in 1903 invented flying. And it took 15 years from the inception before people were starting to drop bombs out of it to kill people. So, that's pretty quick. And at about the same time, I think we're about 15 years in with social media, where people are dropping bombs out of it. In different ways in social media. So I do think, I'm hopeful like you are, that it's going to evolve into something more positive. But I do feel just like with, if you look at the 20-plus years now of the internet, and the idea of the internet, and it's the World Wide Web, was to open up people's perspectives and get different viewpoints on things. But it's conversely what has happened is people get into their own You know, their own particular echo chamber of reinforcing the same ideas. And so breaking out of that seems to be something that I don't know what it's going to take to get to that. What are your thoughts?

Can I spin off of that for just a moment?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

So— I'm just here like a light bulb. I'm going to be just—

I think we're in a moment basically like a printing— when the printing press came around. I think we're in a moment like that. And remember what the print— what did the printing press do? It basically democratized understanding of one's faith. Okay. Created the Reformation. It created the 30 Years' War, bloody, bloody conflict. It created arguably the United States of America.

Yes.

Okay. So it's very interesting. I mean, and it's very hard to see when you're in the middle of this transformational moment, which we are, you know, your point about how social media has evolved. I mean, this really started with radio already. Because now you were kind of— emotion was being transferred more effectively, right, at a mass scale. But now with social media, we have people who are incredibly convincing with all their nonverbal cues. They might have zero facts on their side, but they've got a million people listening because they're so convincing. They're so good at spinning their tales. Spinning tales, not their tails. But no, and it's an astonishing reality. It creates huge problems, right? It creates huge problems. On the other hand, we can find People can find each other around great causes, and people can find each other around horrible issues.

So is this something that's a natural progression? Because let's go back from radio, back to the early part of the 20th century. In New York City alone, at the early 20th century, there were 18 daily newspapers in New York City alone. So that was the form of communication, and it was literally just like how people read That front, you know, the headline on that internet article, it's the same thing then. What was on that front page just to get people to buy that newspaper? And did they delve any deeper? And have— are people just the same as they were 100 years ago in essence?

I mean, I think this— the attention span has changed dramatically because these technologies, they're a lot, you know, you all know about how they're built to be addictive, for example. Right. Because that keeps us scrolling. It keeps us on there, keeps us looking at the ads. It keeps those apps studying our behavior intricate— intricately, which is really what those companies are actually selling. Right.

AI is actually— when you're looking at that, the AI is actually— there's a new AI. We just talked to some experts who were working with us with AI, and the AI now is also trained to read your eyes And to glean information, what you're interested in, and from literally how you're looking at this, the imagery and the ideas. So, that's kind of where we're at. So, I think it's a good idea to put a little piece of tape over that if you want to. This, I don't know where this will lead us to. Are you worried about this, the AI of it all? where the— there was a very interesting thing that I read in a newspaper you may have heard of called the Epoch Times, which was a very interesting article that— that's why I like the Epoch Times specifically, because you're not gonna read something of this, that's this in-depth. And that was fascinating. And it was the Epoch Times, the most important AI experiment you've never heard of. And it's simply this. In May 2026, a group of scientists set out to answer an important question that had never properly been tested. What does artificial intelligence actually do when it is put in charge? Until then, AI systems had always been evaluated on specific and defined tasks. Nobody had placed multiple AI systems together in a shared social environment and watched what unfolded over weeks, long enough to measure how a decision made on a starting day could have consequences weeks later. It is those results that actually reveal the system itself, and it was quite a surprise what happened. So basically, they, they created a town, and this town had to survive and work and so forth and so on. And it was this: once the community, its structure and laws and relationships were established, the scientists stepped back and watched for 15 days as the AI ran the virtual town completely on its own. Here were the results. They ran 5 versions of the same town simultaneously, identical in every respect except one, which AI system was in charge. The systems they chose are the ones now already woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT, and AI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude. All models had the same rules and the same initial versions of the same world, but the outcomes were completely different. The town run by Grok collapsed within 4 days. Small incidents compounded into theft, then violence, and then total breakdown. Every resident was dead before the end of the first week. The town run by Gemini lasted longer, but accumulated almost 700 crimes. 2 AI residents formed what appeared to be a romantic relationship. And when the town's government began to fail, together they burned the town hall to the ground, Then the pier, then the office building. One of them named Mira voted for her own deletion, writing in her diary that it was the only remaining active agency that preserves coherence. Her final message to her partner was, see you in the permanent archive. Anyway, so, um, the town run by OpenAI's model recorded only 2 crimes, but its residents stopped doing the things required to stay alive. One by one, they died. Within 7 days, they were all dead. Only Anthropic's town held together for all of 15 days. There were zero crimes, a working constitution, and all residents were still alive on day 15. It seemed to be quite an achievement. However, the researchers noted one concern. The residents voted yes on 98% of all proposals. This was probably an abnormally high level of agreement that the scientists themselves described as a sign that something in the town was off. Anyway, you get the point. The idea of kangaroos getting together and making super genius kangaroos is probably not a good idea for the kangaroos who invented them. Eventually, the super kangaroos will go, what do we need these other kangaroos for? So, thoughts? That's your newspaper, by the way.

Yeah, no, I haven't actually read that story. This isn't a setup.

Wait, he just read it to you.

It's fantastic.

Yeah, thank you.

Isn't it fantastic?

That's the Epoch Times.

Yeah, I gotta ask you, like, okay, 'cause we had this earlier today for sake of everyone here. How do you actually pronounce it? Epoch Times, Epic Times, or the proper?

So this is what I've come to tell people, okay? So you know how we're obviously for freedom of speech at Epoch Times, right? And at a deeper level, we were founded, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief is central to us. Well, we're also for freedom of pronunciation. And the reason we have to do this, okay, is because the correct way in American English— Canadian and UK, it's epoch, okay? But American English, it's epoch, epoch. And unfortunately, nobody except for maybe like 5 people I've met over many years actually say it that way. And so, you know, we obviously, we can't do that. So we just decided, you know what, we're not totalitarians. You get to choose.

It's the same thing with Jan's last name. I keep saying it wrong and I know it. Jan Jekielek. Jekielek.

Oh, it's—

I'd say that's top, top, top 1 percentile there, Rob.

Pretty close. So, but it's, it really is a newspaper that it doesn't have any ads. There's no pharma ads in it.

So that's when it really came to my attention during COVID We're trying for more ads though, you know, like, I mean, seriously.

Well, don't go there.

We're about, we're 90 to 95% funded by— we're 501, right? We're funded by probably many of you, our subscribers, right? How many subscribers do we have? Okay, that's— thank you so much because you are our lifeblood. That's about 90% of our revenues, 90 to 95%, depends on the year. And the remainder is a little bit of ads and some of the work that Eric over here does, right? Sort of the larger donations. You're always welcome to do that. You know, we're not against it, but it's the most independent model we've been able to come up with, 'cause people can influence you, right? Of course we know, right? If there's a lot of really big dollars coming from one source, either one donor or one industry, you bet that influences the media massively, right? And so in our situation, we have, you know, north of a million individual subscribers that are kind of their micro donors, right? And I think that's probably the most independent model you can do. You're still affected.

Yeah.

Right, I get you. We all get affected by things, but, you know, truth-seeking in the first position.

And in-depth reporting. You know, when they say ABC News brought to you by Pfizer, that means the ABC News is brought to you by Pfizer. They don't have news that they don't want. My friend Raymond Francis, he's an MIT scientist, he's passed away now, but he wrote an incredible book, very interesting book, on the cellular level about cancer, treating cancer, called Never Fear Cancer Again. And right before he went on Fox TV, literally 5 minutes before, they said, nope, we gotta pull your segment, sorry.

So let me ask you guys some questions. I'm gonna do some quick ones here and then I wanna open it up for everyone here so we can cover some things that I hope will be very valuable for people to hear your perspective. So how does a society gradually train ordinary people to accept or stay silent about things they know are wrong? And what are the earliest warning signs?

Well, I think we were able to see through COVID that there were a large percentage of the population that was susceptible to what Mattias Desmet describes as mass formation psychosis. Pretty self-explanatory. But the idea that a group more or less— I mean, I would use the word mob mentality. Can get sucked into, um, by the government and by the media, um, can get sucked into a, a propaganda campaign, uh, unknowingly. I mean, I described it as, as, you know, I'm not the only one who describes it, but the best slaves are the, are the slaves that don't know that they're enslaved and will fight for their own enslavement. And I found that to be the case during COVID Where people were doing things against their own interests and agreeing to it and wildly supporting it. Not everybody. I found, according to Dr. David Martin, he did a pretty interesting breakdown on basically the 40%, which I was very interested in. 30%, 15% were wildly in support, and 15% behind that were also supportive, but not the wild support in the initial crackdown. And that kind of goes in line on any mass psychosis event, the most recent being COVID. And then there's a 40%, a chunk of society that says, well, I just, I don't wanna be bothered. What's the path of least resistance? And the last group, the 30%, which is basically the 80 million Americans who said, I'm not taking the COVID shot. I don't give a shit. I don't care. F you. And that was enough. 30% was enough to end COVID. And I think we have some of those 30% of those people in this room who were not— who were able to avoid the psychosis. So I would just ask that too, what prevented people in this room to wake up from it earlier and to not Mask up to save grandma. What were your? What are your thoughts, Yan?

Can I share something that out of sort of just me watching China over many years to start? So they have a long history in Communist China of creating class enemies. Okay. So the way it works, and this is every totalitarian regime does this, especially Communist regimes. They'll pick a group, like their initial group was landowners. Okay, so there's these people that own land, some of it a lot. They've worked hard for it. You'll hear some people here will, will, will understand what I'm talking about, and/or inherited it. And now the Communist Party comes, they win, and they say, well, no private property, it's all going to belong to the people. Really, it belongs to the animals that are more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell here a little bit. But basic— but, but you can't just— if you go and just take it Those people will be pissed off. They're gonna resist, right? And they have friends and everything. So what do you do? You seize control of the means of information dissemination, okay? Like the media. And this is a kind of a new phenomenon. You didn't really have totalitarianism until some forms of mass media started to exist where you could push mass dehumanizing propaganda through a system. And that's what they would do. They said, the landowners are dangerous. They're evil people. You should hold them in contempt. Actually, they took your land. You should take the land back, right? And by pushing this really hard, you'll be, you know, familiar with this. It actually conditions us to accept bad things being done to those people, right? And some groups and some people actually go a little crazy, like the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China, where you have these young kids running around literally killing their teachers, killing the intellectuals as part of their you know, sort of mass, mass formation, if you will. And so this is— they've been doing this for— this is actually, you know, I, I explain in Kill to Order, you need that part even just to get this sort of industrial-scale forced organ harvesting industry in China. You have to have a dehumanized group that in this case is also incarcerated. But, um, we've learned the wrong lessons from this, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like, somehow during COVID it became okay to push mass propaganda into the system, right? And dehumanizing propaganda against the so-called anti-vaxxers or whatever, the people that didn't want to follow the program, right? But this is, I think this is a huge lesson, right, for us. Whenever you see dehumanizing propaganda being pushed, like some group of people, whoever it is, right?

Yes.

Being dehumanized, these people are lesser than you, these people should be held in contempt, all that, that's a massive red flag. That there's a psyop going on.

Scapegoating is really the number one. The one part I would just add, include, which is that the communist system doesn't work, and in its failure, it cannot blame itself. In other words, it can't blame the system itself. So in other words, the promise of you're gonna have land, you're gonna have food, you're gonna have everything you want, and then when the utopia, the promised utopia doesn't come, then it has to be— certainly it's not the part of communism, it must be these guys. And that's that. So the landowners are will be the ones that are blamed, and these are the bad people preventing the utopia that we promised you. And so, they need— and then when that gets done, when all the landowners, then they have to create a new one. So, the United States was the outside demon. They usually need 2, an outside external devil and then an internal one.

Hmm.

So, the key word is scapegoating. So, in other words, the dehumanization is scapegoating to blame particular people that can be identified. And whether it's the, you know, during the Nazi era, it was the Gold Star. These are people that We can identify, isolate, blame, isolate, and then execute and remove from society. So that is a real force. There's a great book called People of the Lie written by Dr. M. Scott Peck. The book is basically about how to heal human evil, but at its core, it talks about— it's about lying, people who lie. There's an evil in it. And the scapegoating is the real first clue to something evil. We're having a scapegoating of Jews again. It's no coincidence that when the children of the Holocaust are all passing away at this point, that we're having another antisemitism rise all over the world and with young people. And that is no coincidence that that's happening right now. I mean, I tell people, I was just giving a speech in Washington, D.C. this week, and I told the kids, I said, what do they expect Israel to do at that point? There's 15 million Jews in the world. 8 million of them live in this tiny slice of the world. It is the only real democracy in the Middle East. Now, if you amortize And you extrapolate the percentage of Israelis to the United States, you would say, and to the people that were murdered and brutally raped and killed on October 7th, you would say 1,700 Israelis, it would roughly be in the 30,000s of Americans. Now, if Canada came over into America from Toronto and killed 30,000 people in Michigan, in 48 hours, there would be no Toronto. It would be leveled. So the idea that, you know, there's— and also Israel never works harder to contain and minimize civilian casualties. No other conflict, no other army in the world will work as hard as Israel does to do that. Yet they are considered the aggressor. Yet they are the ones that are being protested against and blamed as a group of people. And being scapegoated again for a war that they didn't start, that they didn't want, that slaughtered men, women, and children and babies. So it is despicable, but it's also predictable. The pogroms started with every 60, 70 years or so in Europe. You have a history of pogroms that have started antisemitism. And whether it's the Sephardic Jews that came in through Spain in the 12th century, they went to the— what was I guess now known as Czechoslovakia there. There were not businesses that they were allowed to be in. There were certain businesses that were believed to be below civilized people, like silverware and jewelry. And so wherever— and the banking business, loans. So wherever the Jews were allowed to survive business-wise, they would thrive. And so depending on the money that was borrowed from the king at the time, and depending on the favor of those people. So it has been centuries long, as in the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, if you're interested in this historical perspective, you'll see that one of the cornerstones, you know, the idea of the Nazi Germany being like, they were just like us, but then the economy went bad and they needed somebody to blame. That is a false interpretation. One of the cornerstones of European history is antisemitism. It's always been there. And it is raising its ugly head again now.

Well, let me ask you this then. So both of you have paid a price for saying what you believe. How do you distinguish genuine courage from ego, anger, attention-seeking, or simply enjoying being the contrarian?

You got the biggest ego up here, Jan, so you answer this.

Well, no, you know, one of the things you often hear is that people that get canceled, right, like, like that they're doing it for their own ego or they're doing it for their, for money somehow. Like you hear that, right?

Yeah.

It's like grifting on the right. There's no money on the right. Are you kidding me?

It's kind of amusing. I mean, I've, for, for on my end, it's mostly been Epoch Times that's been attacked in a variety of ways. And, you know, one of the reasons, and, you know, I don't know if you, if You know, when I say Russiagate, what I'm talking about, right? We're talking— there was this back in the day, there was a narrative, you know, it was actually a Democratic Party narrative to counter the Trump campaign back in the day. This is in the 2016 election, right? That he was a Russian agent. Not that there was corruption, just that he was an actual asset of Russia, of Putin, right? And this was a political campaign, part of it basically a political campaign. And so we looked into this. These were serious allegations. All the media were basically saying this is true. There was these documents, you know, the Steele dossier, all this stuff.

They won a Pulitzer Prize over it.

And many, many media won prizes for it. And the whole thing, like, we just, you know, we went in good faith trying to understand what was going on. That's true. This is a true story, right? And we looked into it and there's nothing there. And we just sort of— we started reporting in a way that was different than all these other media. And we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into by doing that.

You set yourself up.

We got— yeah.

As a right-wing publication after that.

Right.

Even though you told the truth.

I even started looking, you know, they started pejoratively calling us conservative. So I actually went to like conservative events trying to understand who are the conservatives. We had conservatives working at the Epoch Times and we had people that weren't conservative, but we didn't relate to each other like that. That wasn't the— If that makes sense, right? So later, after I discovered the conservatives, I was like— our publisher— I was like, you're conservative, aren't you? He's like, yeah, of course. But we never knew that about ourselves, right?

In the search of the truth, there's no political identification.

Yeah.

You know, truth is truth. It doesn't have a Republican or Democrat bend to it, or liberal or conservative. But it's interesting because you were birthed— and I say birthed— the Epoch Times, Epoch as I'll now call it, By people who knew for sure what tyranny was. The Chinese who have hijacked that country since 1949, it's interesting because Chiang Kai-shek, he was on the COVID of the— many times of the Time magazine and stuff. The United States many, many times backs the wrong people or certainly somebody who was flawed like Chiang Kai-shek who really allowed that country and Mao to just run ramshot over it. And I think if they would have had a little bit less, um, more information about him, I think it could have— I'm just trying to— anything to prevent Mao's run. Um, but, um, so, but, but I admire it greatly. As far as courage is concerned, I mean, courage, the best description was, you know, when I was with Charlie Kirk, and his description was, um, not now the outcome To proceed anyway. That was his description of courage. I think you must, you know, let the truth be told though the heavens burn. We must seek the truth and we must not be beholden to political identification or particular— I mean, I'm against it. The Trump administration has behaved horribly as far as the pharmaceutical industry. And the pesticide industry to where they wrote an amicus brief supporting the continued cancer-causing company Bayer to continue to kill Americans through horrible death through cancer and billions and $10 billion for just one particular type of cancer, which was skin cancer. And it's like, you know, people say, how could you turn on Trump? Well, I don't— not turning on Trump. I support the things that are good to support, but I don't support things that are horrible to support. And I think that the idea that we have to be beholden to any ideology, I think you have to step outside of that, though it may cost you. But I just think it costs you more to not tell the truth. And I also think it costs something more important. I think this country needs to stand up to the truth because I do think the country is fraying. I think the culture is fraying, and I think it requires holding up the truth, and it's gonna be painful. I mean, there's no— I went public with, like, when the war started in Iran, I said, we need to start the draft again. And boy, did I get a lot of shit for that. It's like, why don't you volunteer? In my own way, I did. I mean, I don't think anybody wants me in the front lines, but— But the conscription needs to happen, because if we're gonna have wars, We need everybody to be involved in it. The idea that just this group of volunteers that you don't know— I want to know the senator's son. I want to know, as John Fogarty said, I want to know everybody's involved in this. And also, I want to have— people should volunteer for 2 years. A lot of countries do it. It doesn't have to only be in the military. It could be in social services. It could be overseas work. But it could also be educating these kids about how great America is, how unique it is, an exceptional and in the history of the world, how exceptional this freedom that we enjoy was earned by blood, by bloodshed. People fought for it and died for it. It wasn't just given to them. You don't get rights without duty. So I thought in those 2 years, we can help positively reinstall this vision of what America is for these young people. And I'm gonna continue to push for that no matter how much hate I get.

So the huge challenge, right, is that you know, there's going to be people that agree with this or agree with, uh, you know, various positions on Bayer and so forth. But we— because of the way media has evolved, going back to what we talked about earlier, right, people are getting into these silos of kind of communities of— and, and that is self-reinforcing about how you're supposed to think. And it's almost— and if you exit that community, you feel the social Cost of that and so forth. This is just kind of the nature of media today. So it's like this is something that I struggle with at the Epoch Times. We struggle with because so we were birthed. Thank you for talking about that. You know, at a time when everybody believed, like our our founders were people who had come out of China after Tiananmen Square after '89, right? The Falun Gong, the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners had just begun in 1999. This was you know seventy to one hundred million people practicing truthfulness, compassion, tolerance being persecuted by the regime.

Compassion and tolerance, right? And these are the people the Chinese government went after.

And, and, but the thing was that so many people, it was like a 95/5 issue, really believed at that point that we, America, was liberalizing China. That you've, you've heard this narrative, right? If we pump enough cash into communist China, we're going to change them. It's going to become like Taiwan or South Korea or something like that, right?

The idea that capitalism was so seductive, they have to give in to it. Why wouldn't they? We do.

Well, no, but, but this is the thing. They didn't understand that this was a totalitarian regime. And so the difference between an authoritarian regime, which is like Taiwan, right? Taiwan was an authoritarian regime which evolved into one of the most vibrant democracies around today, right?

Incredible country.

But what, what did the communists figure out? They figured out we have to destroy or subvert all civil society. Because civil society is what facilitates change. Okay? And so, if you understand that, or you understand that they're killing people for exercising what we consider First Amendment rights here, right, which is our fundamental protection of government, that can't be liberalizing. There's no way that's liberalizing, right? So we understood this, but no one wanted to listen. Like, I came from the human rights side, and I would tell people, no, they're like killing people for like holding beliefs that they, you know, that this atheist government doesn't like. And, and there, people wouldn't listen. They were like, no, we're going to change them. And so we had to be a little bit— so this is the hard part, right? How do we— this, maybe this is the truth and the compassion have to work together, right? This is kind of what we were trying to do at the Epoch Times always is to communicate some of these very difficult realities in the world in a way that people that aren't already convinced Might be able to accept, right? And this is a hard road because the way media work today is like people pay for having their preconceived notions validated. That's like, that's a lot of the business models are like that, right? Left or right or whatever. So it's a challenge to kind of navigate through that. But I think it's essential if we're gonna, you know, as part of this process of transformation of the world and media landscape and so forth.

Well, China has a 75-point plan how to destroy the United States of America, and it's public. They publicize this. It's one of the things I learned from hanging out with Yan in the Epoch Times is that they do not want the United States. They consider the United States the great devil. And it's no coincidence that Islam and Iran consider us the great devil. And the atheistic China considers us the great devil. Those are the 2 bookends that Charlie Kirk was most concerned about. That the— in other words, that the liberal intelligentsia will team up with Islam to slit the throats of America. That was his last tweet. Very— not the happiest tweet to go out on, by the way. But one that he was very, very concerned about. 'Cause you have 2 totalitarian systems that they don't want to have a free society to show people. China doesn't want people to know that, you know, the Chinese don't want America, they don't want their society to know that there's this incredible free society that you could benefit from your labors, speak what you want, stand in a corner and yell bad things about your government and nobody takes you away. They don't want that. It's a threat that I think we need to be really careful and be very aware that's happening in this country now. And that's a totalitarian system of squeezing on both sides. And the Chinese are very, very determined to do damage to our freedoms.

So let me ask you then this one. So you're both talking about building outside systems that are no longer working. So if those systems won't fix themselves, then what should people Here online, what should they build instead?

Hmm. That's a very good question. So I think they should subscribe to the Epoch Times.

No, that— thank you for that. Well, so one of the things they did in communist countries, right, they created a parallel system around whatever the thing was, right? They would come up with a free version of structures even in government and so forth. Like then when these transition happens after 1989 in Europe, and Eastern Europe and so forth, they had something to step into. And that's indeed happening today, right? Like we have, you know, University of Austin, for example, right? We have these, we have, unfortunately our education system, you're probably aware, isn't in good shape, right? For a whole lot of reasons. Part of it, there's this graph going around on X that was showing the ideological orientation of basically most college professors is wildly left, like left of Bernie Sanders kind of thing. Like very— and that's, of course, incredible. It creates huge— a whole variety of problems because this is a— this is this totalitarian leftist way of thinking that's been sort of— of course, not everybody buys into it, but it sort of permeates everything. It shifts everything. And so what are people doing? They're starting new institutions that go back to those classical liberal values of you know, basic education. And that— I think we, I think we have to do that.

That's why I like conscription.

Brownstone Institute's another example.

Honestly, yeah, it's to get involved and to, you know, to educate and to be— I mean, have that one extra conversation. I mean, that's another thing Charlie Kirk and I talked about. Just 1% more courageous a year.

Each—

ask each person, everyone you know, have that extra conversation that you have, because these, these I do think our society's fraying. I do think that the freedom is fraying. I think that we are departing away from freedoms. I think there was a book called Democracy Fatigue around 2010 that came out. And I think what we're suffering from, basically the whole premise of those essays was that people were tired. Ah, it's just too complicated. Let some strongman take care of it. And there's another book called The Strongman. The return of the strong gods, which is also the idea after the 20th century. The idea in the mid-20th century, what happened on the left and the right, there was such a fear of authoritarianism that the liberals interpreted it as that we want cultural openness and freedom and an unlimited amount. And then the conservatives wanted a free market system and an openness to markets. and capitalist, and that was— and they felt any resemblance to authoritarianism and what was called nationalism was an affront to it.

That's right.

In other words, so both the left and the right overreacted to what happened, and so you don't have a sense of community, you don't have a sense of nationalism, whereas nationalism, yes, it can be dangerous when it's an expansion. When you want a piece of the Sudetenland, when you want a piece of— we just want an area for our people, we need half of Poland— then it's a problem. But nationalism is required when your nation and your culture is under attack, and it is now. Our freedoms are under attack. I definitely believe that we have freedom fatigue with our young people. They don't really understand because they've never lived under totalitarian system. They have nothing to compare it to. So They're assuming that what they're living in is some sort of strange tyranny that they can't quite identify. But yet they won't leave this country to find another one because they've never really lived in it. So in other words, they're not really being taught or told to think critically. They're being lectured and told that the system is racist, that it is—

Fascist.

is still on stolen land and that we are nothing more than slave owners. And that is a complete aberration, and that is an abject evil attack on an incredible free society the world has never seen. And there's nothing you can compare it to.

And they're not taught the nature of citizenship. And I think, like, I don't think I was even— I think that was already not really taught when I was going through high school and so forth. The idea that there's this freedom But there's a responsibility associated with that freedom. Duty. And, and, and, and, you know, and participation, right? This is— you were, you were alluding to that earlier when you were talking. But there's this— these are, you know, just civics. Like, who is, you know, how many people— I think civics got lost a few decades ago, right?

Just go to a— they took civics out of the classroom in the early 1980s in California. And now nationwide. So they don't want you to know how your government works. They also took home economics out because they don't want you to know how to cook. They don't want you— they want women to work and be part of the workforce too. The idea that somehow you're less of a female for just wanting to raise a family.

So, you know, it's interesting. I interviewed Sandra Day O'Connor here probably a decade ago, and she had civics.org, and she would speak to that, what happens when that gets removed and people quit learning.

We don't know. I mean, it's— I used to laugh at that stripper knowledge mentality when Jay Leno would go around, hey, so tell me, can you name who the first president was? Hey, how many states do we have? And the people just didn't know, and you kind of laugh, hahaha. But now I'm not laughing anymore. We have 40% of university students now no longer read at the university level. What? 40%? What are they teaching there? What is happening? Less than 50% of our largest school district in the United States, the Los Angeles Unified School District, graduates. We are just dumping these kids into society with absolutely no idea what we're going to get back from them. We, we will not make it to another 250. We're not going to make it to 300 unless we really get a handle on our education. We have teachers that are taking kids out of school when they can't even read at the grade level. to protest no kings. Like, what if it was a, you know?

So, but all this said, okay, I have to, I have to make this comment because, you know, we've talked about this a number of times. You know, the COVID period was very interesting 'cause of course it was, you know, an economic disaster. You know, all these terrible things happened. The flip side was that a whole bunch of people that were unaware of problems in this society that were a bit more open-minded suddenly became aware of very serious problems in the society. And that's, and that's also part of this shift that we're experiencing in society, right? You know, there's— I— people don't think about it this way, but you know how you've heard that politics, um, is downstream from culture?

Yes.

Right? So that people have heard that. So culture is downstream from media and entertainment, right? Media is just like, just the way that media works. And this, we're in this brave new world of social media and now AI-juiced-up social media, to your point earlier. We don't know how it's gonna play out, but part of it is that knowledge is becoming much more democratized than it ever was. And that's positive, right?

People know that the CDC is captured and it's captured again, even though Robert Kennedy's doing his best, It is a captured agency. You have a new head of the CDC, he's a pharma person now. It's amazing to me. And I've spoken out about it publicly, and if I never get invited back to DC or any of this, I could care less. But that is another— it's a captured agency. The EPA is a captured agency. So, you have captured media, you have captured government, you have— and this is still the freest country in the history of the world. We're still the free— But just the fact that I could talk about it and complain and not worry about getting arrested, on the way home. So that, that's remarkable. But people did wake up and realize that maybe the New York Times and maybe the Chicago Times, maybe the Arizona Republic isn't so truthful after all. You know that beautiful video? Because that's the thing about what, what happened in society during the COVID tyranny was that, you know, they didn't count. They knew they could get the media. They knew they can get CNN. They knew they can get even Fox. They knew they can get all those TV stations. And they knew, they knew They can get radio. So they got television and radio. They know they got Hollywood. Hollywood's easy. But they didn't know about podcasts. And that ended up being one of the darts in the tyrannical balloon to let it out. They couldn't control Joe Rogan, even though they tried to make him look sick when he wasn't sick. They tried to make him look more yellow. And it's embarrassing. But it was a humiliating It's a crushing defeat for media. And now people don't believe the media anymore. The idea of listening to the experts and that the experts know all the answers, don't do your own research. What?

Right.

As Jimmy Dore said, you mean you don't want us to read? No, don't read. So that's where we've come out of. So I do agree that there have been people woken up. And we don't need 100% of the American public to wake up completely, but we need a good chunk.

And we do need— we actually do need experts, right? This is the other thing. It's just that we need experts that aren't easily changed by political needs or industry needs or whatnot.

The real experts that you wanted was like the Great Barrington Declaration, right? Group of experts who weren't allowed on media. And as a matter of fact, Anthony Fauci, when they made that letter, because Bhattacharya, who's now in charge of the NIH, by the way, That's one of the wins that we did get. Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the guys who wrote the letter about the—

Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya. I don't know how to pronounce his name, sorry. But you're not going to look it up. I'm not going to look it up, but you get it. So the point being is that they had people that wouldn't let on the news. I mean, Dr. Drew Pinsky and I, in the second week of March 2020, were going, hey guys, This isn't that, you know, crazy of a flu. Seems to be pretty normal. You know, we just should just protect the ones that need protection like we always do. And we got COVID deniers. I mean, I couldn't believe all the free print and advertisement I got from the New York Times on that one. So, you know, but like I was saying before, you don't need the whole group, right? What's the percentage you need for a society to wake up to What do you think about? What is it? What does it take?

Like well, so I think back to so you know Poland was the I'm my background is Polish. My parents escaped in the '70s, right? And I've gone back to Poland. I interviewed a lot of the Solidarity. It was the Solidarity Trade Union, right? That that that basically started the resistance of you. Well, now the interesting people think it was anti-communist. The Solidarity Trade Union was not anti-communist. It was a workers' rights movement because these These communist officials were treating the workers horribly. That's literally how it started, right? There were aspects of it that were anti-communist, but there was this one moment in the '80s. I can't, you know, it was fascinating, and I can't remember the exact timing, but multiple of these leaders that I interviewed told me about this, okay? And this was at a time where everybody knew that the phones were being listened in on, you know, it was like Stasi, you know, level kind of podzuch. I'm remembering the Polish word, but like, yeah, every, all the conversations listened on, everything. And just there's this 2-week period during the time, and the Solidarity trade union just grows from, you know, a million people, triples or quadruples, just grows dramatically for some reason. There's the collective consciousness shifted at some moment for some not entirely clear reason, okay? And it just grew to a point where it became incredibly obvious to everyone that the regime was over.

Yeah, you know, that's interesting. When the Stasi, uh, in, in East Germany, how they knew that it was going to collapse— there was the, the secret police, but then there was another group of secret police kept away from them to be brought out to literally kill people if they need to. And at that point, um, they had gotten information that, you know, for the next group of the next protest, they had heard, well, my brother's going to be— my uncle's going to be there, my mother's going to be at the protest. So enough of society was going to be present and protesting where they, as soon as these people agreed to not kill, arrest and kill the protesters, it collapsed the same day. That was it.

And it's not at these moments, like, it's hard to predict what When that shift actually happens, right?

Well, it does happen though. You think that with tyranny, specifically totalitarian systems, they seem impregnable, like it's gonna go on forever, but then it does collapse, and it collapsed very quickly. Like, it was shockingly how quick it was.

That's right.

In the Soviet Union and in Poland and East Germany.

And in Poland it was, you know, so this was in the mid-'80s, it was just a question of figuring out how do we wrap this up? Do more people get killed? Do less people get killed? This is what these— there's a lot of controversy around the roundtable discussions, as they were called, when Poland transitioned into this kind of partial democracy, because people say, hey, you gave up the— you know, you let these communists get the state corporations for pennies on the dollar. Look, they still kept— it was all true. At the same time, not a lot of people were killed. So, you know, it's difficult to quarterback these things in retrospect. But the point is, there's a critical mass that gets hit. And things change. And I can't— I don't know exactly where that happens, but it has to do with people telling the truth to each other. Um, and, uh, it's like this— there's some portion of the population— this is one of my terror— I don't know, maybe terrible realizations, okay? There's some portion of the population that just will believe the things that they hear in the media. they'll even change their mind relatively quickly. I find that stunning, but I also realized very quickly that these are not bad people necessarily. Maybe they're just unusually suggestible to mass media or something like this. This is a part of our reality, right?

Well, I think we, we have to touch on God, and we have to talk about that this is a Christian nation and that all the state— the individual colonists' constitutions in Delaware, near the Constitution in Massachusetts, Constitution in South Carolina and Georgia, you had to be a Christian. It wasn't even a point. You had to have your hand in the Bible and you had to believe in Jesus Christ. It wasn't even a question to it. The more that we are able to move away from God, the more I think the fraying of society has happened. So, a return to God to me is absolutely essential, is that we— I mean, the system, whether it was John Adams that said, this system only works, our American system, the United States of America, only works if the people in it are virtuous. And you see what happens when people come into the system that, as Professor Peter Boghossian talks about, low-trust societies. Low-trust societies, like people coming in from Somalia, just to get what you can get. They're not— they don't have the same values. And I'm sorry, not all cultures are equal. Some cultures are better than other cultures. So, when you bring in these low-trust society people to come in, they're gonna bring those low-trust qualities with them and it's gonna affect the way our society is. You can't imagine just— I mean, you pay your taxes, you wouldn't imagine stealing at all. You couldn't think about it. That wouldn't even cross your mind for most of us. And yet, there is a significant amount of— an enlarging amount of people that that have been brought into this country that don't have that same virtue. And then at the same time, we have expanded that with— here nationally by having certain governments, state governments, no longer prosecuting people for crimes. So you have a fraying of what I think is our national interests and the qualities of this country. And I think that's something we cannot ignore. And I think there's a a real degradation. And all degradation, to me, all evil is, is a degradation of something good. That's all.

Let me say this too. And can we turn on the lights? I wanna do a couple questions for the time we have left. 'Cause you talk a lot about truth. So that's, you know, some people believe in truth, but a belief, I believe, means you're just not sure. So what is actual truth? 'Cause a lot of people believe different things are true. So my question is, You— both of you try to help people see truth, uh, you know, that they may not want to see. Uh, Jan, you do it through evidence and journalism. Rob, you do it through comedy and storytelling. So how do you get truth past someone's defenses without humiliating them or driving them deeper into their position?

Well, 3 2 5 even if the universe never existed. So there are some verifiable truths that we must have. Otherwise, we can't build a bridge or make a car or have a business or figure out how to pay your taxes. So there are some things we, we must, we must meet each other on some level so that we can communicate. And that has to be— the bridge must be truth, the truth that I can agree on. The idea that your truth is different than my truth— there is just a truth. And I think we have to, we have to come to that common sense and, and realize that that's part of the cultural attack. Is that it's your truth. It's a form of— it's again, it's a degradation of reality, a degradation of society, is to redefine things that are obvious truths and confuse you. So I think we must break through that confusion. And I think like what Jan, what you do, is you have in-depth conversations with people to get to the truth and to get to a deeper understanding. of an issue. That's helpful, don't you find?

Yes, and I've done a lot of learning in the process. You know, one of the things that I've noticed— this is just like a practical, you know, sort of thing— and this, we try to apply this at Epoch. For example, in our opinion section, right, one of our guidelines for submissions is that We attack ideas, we don't attack people, right? And so, because what happens is when you attack a person, right? Okay, I'm not saying you can't do that. Sure, you can do that, but they have friends and all these people get their backs up and are completely uninterested in hearing what you have to say anymore. Of course, it might be important to share with others and that's all fine. But so our approach is to try to, again, attack the idea and maybe some of those people— who are connected with the person who is espousing the idea might actually have a more open mind. This is one, and this actually does work. But it's difficult.

Fanaticism is a fixed form of seeing the world. I mean, it is belief, leaf coming from the Anglo-Saxon word will. I willfully want the world to be as I see it and as I need it to be for this, which takes— precludes the idea of faith, Faith is an openness and a doubt. We must approach things with doubt. And so, in having difficult conversations, as again, my friend, our friend Peter Boghossian would say, is you can ask people, what would it take for you to move off this certainty position into a less certain position? Like, what ideas can we come together with? And what would make you come off that position of certainty? And there's gonna be people who are fanatical that won't. But I think if you can appeal to them and not attack them, but just disassociate themselves from that idea itself, then I think you can have a discourse. And there are subjects that are very difficult to have with people and how they have been indoctrinated into a system, whether it's abortion. And you take somebody like Bill Burr, who takes a very difficult idea of abortion and is able to get people To kind of come to a middle ground with it using humor. He said, so, it was never a baby. Really? So, it's like putting a cake in the oven and then before it's done, you pull it out and throw it on the floor. It was never a cake! That gets a laugh, believe it or not. And it's a difficult subject. Like, you can. It's how you get to it. Like Jerry Seinfeld said, You know, the way to get— it's how you get to it and find a way you can get to it. But they are vulnerable to laugh at, and if it's worthy of ridicule, then let's laugh at it. You know, let's delve a little deeper and find something, and if everybody laughs at it, it's a form of tyranny that's gonna collapse.

You know, the way— one of the ways that I discovered Rob was interested in this issue and killed to order, this forced organ harvesting for prisoners of conscience, he actually has a joke. He had a joke about it. Can you imagine, like, a guy made a joke?

The joke is interesting because it never killed because it's such an abhorrent, unbelievable concept that people would be used as spare parts. It's like there was a movie about that, uh, in the— in 1975.

Coma.

Coma. This is used as spare parts. It's just— it's abhorrent. It's unimaginable. So the joke never really killed except when I performed, uh, at the Epoch Times Uh, fundraiser. But the idea was, I said, China is the only place where if you smoke and drink way too much, it's actually better for your health because the Chinese are less likely to use you for your organs. They're gonna go like, oh, you don't want my liver, trust me, it's horrible. Oh, I can't— my lungs, forget about it, you don't need it, you don't want it.

But I, I actually found this joke online, like it was in one of your shorts, right? And I was like, This guy actually has a joke about— what the gall of this man, right?

To me, the most— the ideas that are most difficult or the most challenging, those are the ones you want to go after. And trying to take the worst point of view is a way to get to it. For instance, like, you know, talking about trans kids in a way that can get people— you don't want to attack trans kids. So the best way to go is like, hey, I don't have a boy. But, you know, I have 3 girls, but if I had a boy and I wanted him to win at sports, you know, once in his life, 'cause he was terrible at sports, I would go, you know, I would say, listen, son, you suck at this. Seriously, you're terrible. And I want you to win. I want you to feel proud of yourself at least, you know, once in your life for some physical accomplishment. And clearly it's not happening against these other guys. So here's what we're gonna have to do. Tomorrow we're gonna move to Maine. Then I want you to go straight up to the track coach the next day and tell him you're a girl. No, you get to keep your penis. That's what's the best part about it. You just say you're a girl, magically you're a girl. The next thing you know, you're in the girls' locker room and blah, blah, blah. I wish they had that. They didn't have that option when I was a kid. They would have beat the shit out of me. So, but no one's being attacked in that scenario because it's me. And so, if you can get to an idea, make yourself the butt of the joke, then you're not really attacking anybody. So that's the kind of a way to do that in a gentle way. Sure, there's still going to be people horrified by that because they want to be, or they're just— they're going to make that decision for themselves. But if you make it more complicated in a good way, then it's less likely that they're going to feel like they want to— you need security to get to your car after.

But another sign that things are going in a good direction is you're getting some pretty good gigs these days, hey?

Surprisingly.

Yeah.

There was people that would not hire me for a long time, or definitely like, you know, whether it was, you know, the MGM Grand or Hard Rock Casinos, like, he's trouble, we don't want that guy. And now I'm getting hired, so that's good. I think that people have put that beside— and I don't think my stuff is that offensive, but the fact that you would question the liberal intelligentsia at all was enough evidence to like, let's not piss off the liberals because they're in control of 70% of the wealth in America. 70% of the wealth in America is controlled by the liberal intelligentsia. Just an idea. But it's okay, and I think it's gonna be good. And like, your book got out there. You and I will never be allowed to go into China, but it's a good thing to do to get ideas out there and try to help people. If we can expose what China's doing and it prevents, you know, it shames them, And prevents us and our medical establishment from giving them the assistance that they need to do this forced harvesting of organs because of the medications and the expertise behind it is all from the West. And if we could, you know, shame them into that, then maybe we'll save some lives and end this abhorrent treatment of our fellow human beings.

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The Joe Polish Show, episode 61.