True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 283: Falun Gong Part 1: Shen Yun
Aired: 2023-04-13
Duration: 01:04:10


=== Megan Traynor's Mother (14:19) ===

[00:00:00]  I want to say something, which is I heard a song today that, by the way, this was, I did not choose to hear this song.
[00:00:10]  Okay.
[00:00:10]  The song was heard to me.
[00:00:12]  Uh-huh.
[00:00:12]  Played to you.
[00:00:14]  No, it was heard to me.
[00:00:15]  Okay.
[00:00:16]  And it was a song called Mother by Megan Trainer.
[00:00:21]  Yeah, I like, I don't know this song.
[00:00:22]  We put this in an episode.
[00:00:24]  We did?
[00:00:24]  Yeah, I could brace Translate.
[00:00:26]  I am your mother.
[00:00:29]  I literally did not.
[00:00:30]  I'm going to tell you something right now behind the scenes to listeners and apparently to the voice that I work with.
[00:00:35]  Did not realize that was a Megan Trainer reference, thought you just were doing a bad dancing.
[00:00:39]  You thought I just made that song up?
[00:00:41]  You thought I wrote the song Mother by Megan Traynor.
[00:00:43]  Yeah.
[00:00:44]  I want to say this.
[00:00:45]  no one that song starts off with someone being like the faculty mother right now Or whatever.
[00:00:53]  That is fucking astroturfed.
[00:00:56]  No one, I'm sorry.
[00:00:58]  I do not believe that any gay, even as like drunk, coked out, whatever, drugs, any kind of like kiki they're doing, whatever, has ever called Megan Traynor mother.
[00:01:11]  That's fucking bullshit.
[00:01:13]  That's fucking bullshit.
[00:01:15]  Well, I'll be the first, Liz.
[00:01:17]  Liz, you know me.
[00:01:18]  I love, I love Megan, right?
[00:01:20]  Some have said that due to my comments under each of her Instagram photos, thousands of them of the comments, that I kind of gave her the idea for calling a song mother.
[00:01:29]  No.
[00:01:31]  But I will say there is one thing that's sort of missing.
[00:01:34]  Megan Traynor is probably one of the most complete artists in modern history.
[00:01:39]  But she's missing one thing.
[00:01:42]  5,000 years of Chinese history.
[00:02:09]  Liz.
[00:02:11]  Actually, Young Chomsky, can you cue a gong?
[00:02:15]  The Dragon Rises.
[00:02:16]  I really think that she should do Shen Yun.
[00:02:18]  You think she should do Shen Yun?
[00:02:19]  No, here's what I was, yeah.
[00:02:20]  My thing is, is any celebrity.
[00:02:22]  That would be so funny and weird.
[00:02:23]  100%.
[00:02:24]  Shen Yun should have like more, like they should collab more.
[00:02:27]  They should do features.
[00:02:29]  They should.
[00:02:29]  Like they should have Drake come out.
[00:02:31]  Like they have too many.
[00:02:32]  We'll talk about this.
[00:02:33]  They have too many celebs in the old little pamphlet giving pull quotes.
[00:02:37]  But on stage, get him on the stage.
[00:02:39]  I look and I see, all I see is the Monkey King.
[00:02:42]  Yeah.
[00:02:42]  Who the hell is he?
[00:02:43]  Harvest Megan Traynor's organs.
[00:02:45]  He's only famous DNA.
[00:02:46]  Exactly.
[00:02:47]  What she got going on in there?
[00:02:48]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:02:48]  I would love, oh my God, I would love to be giving Chinese government persecution of Falun Gong to Megan Traynor.
[00:02:57]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:58]  Hello.
[00:02:59]  My name is Brace Belden, the venerable baby.
[00:03:07]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:08]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:10]  This is Truanon.
[00:03:11]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:12]  5,000 years of podcasts.
[00:03:14]  5,000 years of civilization.
[00:03:16]  What are they talking about?
[00:03:17]  Israel?
[00:03:20]  Yes, Liz.
[00:03:21]  They are talking about Israel.
[00:03:23]  Come on.
[00:03:24]  I would love to check out Megan Trainer's Vertical Growth.
[00:03:26]  By the way, can I do?
[00:03:29]  Yes.
[00:03:29]  I don't know if I should say this on the recording, but I'm going to do it because I just started.
[00:03:32]  Which is that today, getting my hair cut.
[00:03:36]  And the receptionist was like, oh my God, I grew up with someone with the same last name as you.
[00:03:42]  And I was like, what?
[00:03:45]  Where'd you grow up?
[00:03:45]  Krakow?
[00:03:47]  And she was like, yeah, he was like the rapper in Boston that I grew up with.
[00:03:51]  Really?
[00:03:52]  And I was like, I'm sorry.
[00:03:53]  What?
[00:03:54]  The rapper in Boston?
[00:03:55]  Yes.
[00:03:56]  And she was like, yeah, Polish, right?
[00:03:58]  Well, yeah.
[00:03:59]  Some Polish kid rapper in Boston have my last name.
[00:04:02]  So if that's you, hit the DMs.
[00:04:04]  I'd like to hear from you.
[00:04:05]  Honestly, get into Shenya if you're rapping, because that's Polish.
[00:04:09]  And Polish?
[00:04:10]  I know.
[00:04:10]  Because that's what the Polish world, the Polish cultural world has long yearned for a rapper.
[00:04:16]  Liz.
[00:04:17]  Yes.
[00:04:18]  I'm sick of Poland.
[00:04:20]  I'm sick of Israel.
[00:04:21]  I'm sick of America.
[00:04:23]  All I want is China.
[00:04:25]  And specifically, one thing that I've always wanted is 5,000 years of Chinese history.
[00:04:29]  And try as I might, I can never find anywhere that gives it to me.
[00:04:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:33]  I've always wondered, and I know you have too.
[00:04:36]  We've talked about this on the show before.
[00:04:38]  What was China like before communism?
[00:04:40]  And I look at all these books and I peer into these tomes and it seems like it's crazy.
[00:04:46]  History starts basically in 1949.
[00:04:48]  There's nothing before that.
[00:04:50]  Well, that says more about your library than really anything else.
[00:04:53]  Correct.
[00:04:54]  I mean, that is sort of on purpose.
[00:04:56]  But, you know, we hear at Truanon taking a lot of shows, right?
[00:05:01]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:01]  We're always down at the old Broadway.
[00:05:04]  Bad Cinderella.
[00:05:06]  Lion King.
[00:05:07]  We're talking Hamilton.
[00:05:10]  We're talking Jesus in the Technicolore Dream Coke.
[00:05:13]  Joseph and the Technical Dream.
[00:05:14]  No, no, no, no.
[00:05:15]  Just keep going.
[00:05:17]  Funny girl.
[00:05:18]  We're talking Glee.
[00:05:20]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:21]  You know what?
[00:05:23]  We're talking rent.
[00:05:25]  Blue Man Group.
[00:05:26]  Blue Man Group, Stomp.
[00:05:27]  All of it.
[00:05:28]  We're taking it all in.
[00:05:29]  We have season tickets as a show to Stomp.
[00:05:31]  Yes.
[00:05:32]  Does that still exist?
[00:05:34]  It did, I believe, just close.
[00:05:36]  Yeah, which I've seen.
[00:05:37]  I actually have seen Stomp.
[00:05:41]  I don't want to talk about it.
[00:05:42]  But I've seen two musical type things.
[00:05:44]  Stomp.
[00:05:44]  I guess it's not a musical.
[00:05:45]  It's just stomping.
[00:05:47]  And I saw the Book of Mormon, which was one of the worst.
[00:05:52]  I got a free ticket to it.
[00:05:53]  And at one point, I stood in the bathroom for about 15 minutes and just stood there.
[00:05:56]  Yeah, you had some of our subscribers.
[00:05:58]  Now you've seen 5,000 years of civilization reborn, Shen Yun.
[00:06:04]  Because Lil Bracey, a couple, what, about a month ago, you were like, guys, hit the whole group chat.
[00:06:13]  Yeah.
[00:06:13]  Guys, Shen Yun coming to Lincoln Center, which is Lincoln Center.
[00:06:19]  We're going.
[00:06:19]  I'm getting tickets.
[00:06:20]  And you got his tickets and we went.
[00:06:22]  I did.
[00:06:22]  Yeah.
[00:06:22]  And you know what?
[00:06:23]  Gave me the inspiration to get those tickets.
[00:06:25]  Was it the billion ads that you see every day in everywhere in New York?
[00:06:31]  I was sitting shirtless on the subway and I'm looking up smoking a cigarette and with my dogs on chains.
[00:06:37]  And I'm looking up at the different little ads they got at the top there, trying to avoid eye contact with all the people staring at me and also talking to me, but I'm wearing fucking air paws.
[00:06:46]  You know, I'm shit, mother.
[00:06:49]  And I'm looking up there and I see Shen Yun 5,000 Years of Chinese History.
[00:06:52]  I'm like, holy fuck, that's such a big number.
[00:06:54]  That's so much.
[00:06:55]  Look at that dance.
[00:06:56]  Exactly.
[00:06:57]  And I was like, you know, I know about Shen Yun.
[00:06:59]  We've talked about Falun Gong.
[00:07:01]  I don't probably mention it on the show before, but we've talked about it before.
[00:07:04]  If you lived in San Francisco, you know, you'd see them sort of parading throughout Chinatown in dog cages, birdheim style.
[00:07:12]  Yeah, very, very active in Barcadero protests.
[00:07:15]  Exactly.
[00:07:16]  They kind of do their own like sort of East Meets West version of Folsom Street Fair with like dog cages and chains and stuff like that.
[00:07:23]  And I was like, this would be perfect for us to do an episode on.
[00:07:26]  Yeah, totally.
[00:07:27]  I will say also, Shen Yun has been in the, I don't know, me and all my friends, we used to just say it to each other.
[00:07:34]  Like, Shen Yun, like you're saying hello, Shenyun.
[00:07:37]  Shen Yun.
[00:07:38]  When we'd start, because it'd be like, oh, it's spring.
[00:07:40]  Winter is over.
[00:07:41]  Yes.
[00:07:41]  The Shenyun ads are back.
[00:07:44]  I will say, it being at Lincoln Center blew my mind.
[00:07:48]  I was like, hold up.
[00:07:49]  We're not going to like the Cow Palace, the equivalent to the Cow Palace, which I assume is just, you know, some sort of arena in Queens.
[00:07:56]  Uh-huh.
[00:07:57]  No, Lincoln Center.
[00:07:58]  Do you think I so I don't know?
[00:08:00]  It's the heart of American liberal philanthropy and artistry.
[00:08:04]  Is it really?
[00:08:05]  Lincoln Center?
[00:08:05]  I've never been there.
[00:08:06]  Well, I went there now.
[00:08:08]  Yeah, we just went.
[00:08:08]  We just went, but prior to that, I.
[00:08:10]  Yes, the Met is there.
[00:08:12]  Okay, yes.
[00:08:13]  All right.
[00:08:13]  The music.
[00:08:14]  Physioharmonic.
[00:08:15]  Okay.
[00:08:15]  Yeah.
[00:08:16]  But also 5,000 years of Chinese history.
[00:08:19]  Yeah, but it's very weird.
[00:08:20]  Yeah, but it is, I mean, 5,000 years, you're going to get a lot of weird stuff.
[00:08:24]  So we, Liz, you set the scene for us.
[00:08:28]  We go, we go, we get matinee tickets.
[00:08:31]  Yeah, matinee.
[00:08:32]  Matine tickets.
[00:08:32]  I was not trying to spend a Saturday night doing this.
[00:08:35]  I'm going to be real.
[00:08:36]  I got to be, and I got to be even real with you, listeners.
[00:08:39]  These things aren't cheap.
[00:08:41]  But they were cheaper than what a Broadway show is.
[00:08:43]  100%.
[00:08:44]  Yes, which I didn't know how much those cost.
[00:08:46]  And I looked it up after we went to Shenyun and they are very expensive.
[00:08:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:49]  I don't do that.
[00:08:50]  Yeah, yes.
[00:08:51]  But Brace never believes me until he likes to double check.
[00:08:53]  Yeah, he doesn't.
[00:08:54]  Trust but verify.
[00:08:55]  That's sort of a phrase I coined.
[00:08:57]  Yeah.
[00:08:58]  Just with women.
[00:08:58]  Yeah, just with women.
[00:09:00]  No, but we got these sort of, we got, I thought they were good seats.
[00:09:03]  They turned out to be.
[00:09:04]  I think they were all right.
[00:09:05]  There's no such thing as a good seat at Chen Yun about the matinee.
[00:09:09]  Yeah.
[00:09:11]  A lot of people, a lot of families.
[00:09:14]  A lot of families.
[00:09:15]  Big family affair.
[00:09:17]  We had a group of, I assume, people of Staten Island heritage.
[00:09:24]  Yes.
[00:09:25]  P-O-S-H.
[00:09:26]  Posh.
[00:09:28]  That were had a lot of commentary.
[00:09:32]  Yes.
[00:09:33]  Mostly which tended to be very descriptive.
[00:09:36]  It was almost.
[00:09:38]  Look, Young Chomsky made this joke at one point, but I was kind of waiting for them to be like, that's Chen Yun.
[00:09:43]  Yes.
[00:09:43]  There was a low, guttural mutter coming from behind us, as if a street urchin had snuck in to see a three-penny opera.
[00:09:52]  It was like the rattle of the bottom of a bottle.
[00:09:54]  It did sound, she did sound emphysemic.
[00:09:57]  The entire time, too.
[00:09:58]  The entire time.
[00:09:59]  A running commentary the entire time.
[00:10:01]  Yeah.
[00:10:03]  I kept turning around.
[00:10:04]  You did the classic huff of like, I was trying to get a look at this.
[00:10:09]  Performatively turn around so you can see.
[00:10:11]  That wasn't performatively turning.
[00:10:12]  It was a performative.
[00:10:14]  It was an actual glance because I was trying to get a look at this fucking phlegmatic throat behind me.
[00:10:21]  Frizzy hair.
[00:10:22]  Frizz.
[00:10:22]  Oh my God.
[00:10:23]  She looked exactly like you'd expect.
[00:10:27]  Marge Simpson's sister sitting behind me.
[00:10:30]  She had like reverse cubella.
[00:10:31]  It was crazy.
[00:10:33]  Her entire body was made of goiters.
[00:10:35]  I've never seen anything like it.
[00:10:37]  Anyways, and there's like five of them.
[00:10:39]  Next to Young Chomsky was a gay couple.
[00:10:44]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:44]  Including a guy wearing.
[00:10:46]  Litas.
[00:10:47]  Litas.
[00:10:48]  For those who know what I'm talking about, he was wearing leaders, and that was crazy.
[00:10:51]  I've never seen that.
[00:10:51]  Yeah, you did go.
[00:10:53]  Liz did sort of a what are those at them?
[00:10:56]  You didn't point.
[00:10:57]  Yeah, you did.
[00:10:57]  And you said, what are those?
[00:10:58]  No, I didn't.
[00:10:59]  And you were filming with your phone.
[00:11:00]  Oh, my God.
[00:11:02]  In front of us was a Slavic couple of some sort with a sort of, I don't know, an old man who looked like a big cigarette and then his wife who kind of looked like she just looked like the wife of a cigarette.
[00:11:17]  She looked like a wife of a cigarette who'd had a lot of things injected into her that have hardened over time.
[00:11:23]  Who I caught taking a photo in front of the Shen Yun on DVD banner.
[00:11:28]  I took a photograph of them doing that.
[00:11:30]  She also, right before the show started, she googled how long is a Shen Yun.
[00:11:37]  And to be clear, we're not making fun.
[00:11:40]  This is the woman in the audience who I had the most empathy with and sympathy with and camaraderie with because I had done precisely the same thing a mere 10 minutes.
[00:11:49]  I did the same thing the night before.
[00:11:51]  Now, the people next to me, I want to say, were a young couple.
[00:11:55]  Yes.
[00:11:56]  I would say mid to late 30s who were eyes wide open with delight.
[00:12:04]  They were very excited up until a certain point, which we'll talk about.
[00:12:08]  But they were just, ooh, wow, ooh, ooh.
[00:12:13]  Yeah.
[00:12:14]  Like through the dances.
[00:12:16]  And I got to say, the dances were not ooh and awworthy.
[00:12:22]  Well, we should get to the show.
[00:12:24]  Because I feel like, all right, so for those of you who don't live in America, well, let's actually start with the best.
[00:12:29]  Well, there's a Shenyun near you.
[00:12:30]  So no Shenyun, yeah.
[00:12:32]  Shen Yun does do world tours.
[00:12:33]  Unless you're in Italy where the Chinese government is getting the Shenyun production shutdown.
[00:12:38]  Well, that's thank you, China.
[00:12:40]  Thank you very much.
[00:12:41]  So, I mean, my whole life, like you sort of mentioned this before, but I feel like I've known about Shen Yun.
[00:12:47]  Like I did, my mom did baby Mozart or something to me about it.
[00:12:50]  Like I've come out of the womb knowing about Shen Yun.
[00:12:52]  I've seen the billboards everywhere.
[00:12:54]  And it's one of those things that you sort of like, it's like cash for clunkers or whatever.
[00:12:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:59]  Like you see it out there and you kind of know it exists, but you kind of just like breeze past it.
[00:13:07]  Shen Yun is a little more aggressive than anything else because they actually come to your home and put the little things like Chinese food menus on your fucking door.
[00:13:15]  And just like, it's, you know, they send you postcards and everything.
[00:13:18]  But I assume much of the crowd, which was, I will say, there were some young people near us, but there was a lot of elderly people there.
[00:13:25]  Yes.
[00:13:26]  I assume these are the people, and I'm not excusing us from this, that these advertisements work on.
[00:13:34]  I mean, I think also they're just on the subway and they're everywhere.
[00:13:37]  And it's like, oh, this is a thing to do.
[00:13:39]  I mean, there were so many kids there.
[00:13:41]  And it's like, look, I get it.
[00:13:42]  My friends with kids, you're always trying to find something to like send these little rug rats to do.
[00:13:48]  Yeah.
[00:13:48]  Delight them with something.
[00:13:49]  Why not?
[00:13:50]  5,000 years.
[00:13:50]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:13:52]  And so the 5,000 years began.
[00:13:55]  Now, immediately there is a huge announcement over the loudspeaker.
[00:14:01]  No recording, no video, no photo.
[00:14:03]  And I was like, wow, I recognize that from Trinan Show.
[00:14:05]  Shout out.
[00:14:06]  Get it.
[00:14:06]  Shout out.
[00:14:07]  But there are guys in the, you know, in the aisles that are not, I believe, they are not David Koch theater employees.

=== Heavens Above: Shen Yun's Performance (16:11) ===

[00:14:20]  No, 100% not David Koch theater.
[00:14:22]  But were actually part of the Falun Gong group and the Shen Yun traveling group.
[00:14:26]  They were making sure and policing that nobody had their phones out.
[00:14:30]  I've been to several events.
[00:14:33]  They had the little yellow ties on.
[00:14:34]  They had the yellow ties on, but they also had the little secret service clear plastic twirly telephone cord earpieces in.
[00:14:42]  And I will say this, these guys were not just your typical theater security guards who stand there while you do your little pee-wee hermit act in the seat and they kind of ignore you.
[00:14:52]  These guys were looking up and down the aisles.
[00:14:54]  They were very active.
[00:14:55]  They were very active.
[00:14:56]  But very soft-spoken.
[00:14:57]  And I remember thinking, like, man, if you want to, like, really get people to put your phones away, like, you should talk a little louder.
[00:15:03]  Exactly.
[00:15:04]  Because these old people can't hear you.
[00:15:06]  They cannot hear you.
[00:15:07]  No, no, they can't.
[00:15:08]  And I couldn't hear anything over the din of the fucking tuberculosis patient behind me.
[00:15:15]  It didn't work because 10 people's phones kept ringing through the whole performance.
[00:15:19]  Yes, well, I knew once I saw that many old people gathered in one place, that there would be mostly phone ringings that I hear throughout the entire show.
[00:15:26]  So the lights dim.
[00:15:29]  And suddenly, to our left, a couple walks out on the stage.
[00:15:39]  A young man and a young woman.
[00:15:42]  She is dressed in a very beautiful gown.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:46]  They look like, and he's in like a tuxedo.
[00:15:48]  Yes.
[00:15:48]  They're like, they look like Oscar presenters or something.
[00:15:51]  It's very weird.
[00:15:52]  Yeah.
[00:15:53]  Now, this guy, the best way, I was thinking about it, and the best way I can describe him is Uncanny Valley version of Colin Jost.
[00:16:03]  Yes.
[00:16:05]  Well, I have nothing to add to that.
[00:16:07]  That's a perfect assessment of what it's like.
[00:16:09]  If an alien was like, I am an alien, I must act like human, and then only watched Week An Update with Colin Joast.
[00:16:18]  He was like, this is his.
[00:16:20]  This is the normal person.
[00:16:22]  It's crazy.
[00:16:22]  This guy was so eerie and crazy and talked so fucking weird.
[00:16:26]  He talks so fucked up and funky.
[00:16:29]  He talks, he talked sort of like an AI chat bot that was made in another country that didn't speak English.
[00:16:37]  Yes.
[00:16:37]  Learned English and then began to speak.
[00:16:39]  He had this sort of like this, there was no lilt to his speech.
[00:16:45]  I'll say that.
[00:16:46]  But it was this sort of like robotic but like professional way of speaking that like sounded like someone imitating kind of an Oscar presenter.
[00:16:53]  And then bam, about a minute into his little spiel, he hits us with John Cena style Chinese.
[00:17:01]  Yeah.
[00:17:01]  Which is, I got to tell you, if you've never seen a funky white boy speak Chinese, it is one of the seventh wonders of the world.
[00:17:10]  It is crazy looking.
[00:17:12]  This guy just starts busting out in Chinese.
[00:17:15]  Who the hell knows what he's saying?
[00:17:16]  Kind of goofing around and doing it.
[00:17:18]  He's speaking Chinese in this sort of like Oscar presenter voice.
[00:17:22]  There was something very mercenary about him.
[00:17:24]  Yeah.
[00:17:25]  Like he seemed like it was like, oh, this is what, like, if HR could like assassinate people, this is, they would get this.
[00:17:32]  They would send this guy.
[00:17:33]  Yeah.
[00:17:34]  Wow, you really, you're, you really nailed this cat.
[00:17:36]  I mean, he is, he's stuck in my mind.
[00:17:38]  Also, you know, once you find, you know, you learn about the Falun Gong and what they think about aliens taking over human bodies, I, you know, I got to say, maybe they should look into this guy.
[00:17:46]  Well, I'm just like, I get why they think that.
[00:17:48]  These guys are the one that's in their own home.
[00:17:50]  So these two people kind of came out between every song.
[00:17:54]  Yes.
[00:17:55]  Or every dance, every song and dance, actually, because they were both.
[00:17:58]  And kind of presented them, gave us a little backstory in mostly English, and then a little bit in Chinese.
[00:18:02]  Yeah.
[00:18:03]  He did.
[00:18:04]  A lot of Chinese speakers in the audience.
[00:18:06]  Yes, yeah, true.
[00:18:08]  He did most of the talking, and then she would kind of like talk a little bit in Chinese.
[00:18:12]  And then he would gracefully let her walk out before him.
[00:18:16]  Exactly.
[00:18:16]  In fact, me and Young Chomsky started doing it every time they ended, extending our arms and letting them walk out, which, by the way, that's a classic move.
[00:18:25]  You ever let anyone out.
[00:18:26]  First of all, always let the woman go before you.
[00:18:28]  Yeah, because what if there's a trap?
[00:18:30]  That's why I always do it.
[00:18:31]  You have women walk on the outside on the sidewalk in case there's a madness.
[00:18:34]  Oh, I always walk on the inside.
[00:18:35]  No, you're supposed to have women walk on the inside.
[00:18:37]  Something I learned a long time ago.
[00:18:38]  Never let a girl walk on the outside in case a car hits you.
[00:18:41]  But for me, I'm like, actually, why don't you walk on the outside in case a car hits you?
[00:18:47]  And then go through the door first in case there's a trap.
[00:18:50]  Oh, my God.
[00:18:51]  Like a bottle, a bucket of water.
[00:18:53]  So let's talk about these dances.
[00:18:56]  Liz, are you familiar with Chinese dance?
[00:18:59]  I'm more familiar than you would think.
[00:19:02]  Really?
[00:19:02]  Yeah.
[00:19:02]  Okay, yeah, you are.
[00:19:04]  That is, I would think you were completely unfamiliar.
[00:19:06]  You're familiar with Chinese dance?
[00:19:08]  I know a little bit about all kinds of dance, yeah.
[00:19:12]  I don't.
[00:19:13]  And let me tell you, I couldn't tell if it was good or bad.
[00:19:18]  I did not think it was very good.
[00:19:23]  I thought.
[00:19:24]  For a lot of reasons.
[00:19:25]  So the first two numbers were kind of boring.
[00:19:28]  So let's set the scene a little bit.
[00:19:32]  They kind of like, you know, after the announcers walk out, the curtain rises.
[00:19:36]  There is a, there has been a fog machine on for about 20 minutes.
[00:19:42]  That was actually very tight.
[00:19:43]  Yeah.
[00:19:44]  Yeah, that was sick.
[00:19:44]  The stage was thick with fog.
[00:19:47]  Yeah, and then boop, pop up the dancer.
[00:19:50]  Yeah, that was actually very balling.
[00:19:52]  And they start to go into just a kind of like routine.
[00:19:57]  Yeah, a little dance routine.
[00:19:59]  Now behind them, and this is the key.
[00:20:01]  This is, yes.
[00:20:02]  There is a massive video screen.
[00:20:06]  It takes over the entire stage.
[00:20:07]  Yeah, not a projection, but a video.
[00:20:10]  Now, how can, will you describe a little bit this video screen?
[00:20:14]  Well, to be clear, Shen Yun has actually patented this video technology.
[00:20:19]  What's the technology?
[00:20:21]  I don't know.
[00:20:22]  Just a big computer screen?
[00:20:24]  You can patent anything now.
[00:20:25]  I don't know what really they would need to patent it, but I read in an article about Shen Yun that they used to hand out full page, their patent things about it.
[00:20:35]  Anyways, it was a full, it takes up the entire, there's no set.
[00:20:39]  No set.
[00:20:40]  There's a couple steps in the back.
[00:20:42]  There's three steps.
[00:20:43]  Yes.
[00:20:43]  There's three sort of decorative steps that are right in front of the video screen.
[00:20:47]  There's very clearly a gap between the top of the steps and the screen of about three feet or something like that.
[00:20:54]  But you can't really tell because of, I mean, or there's the illusion because of, you know, basically the way we're sitting and looking at it.
[00:21:01]  But there is obviously a gap there.
[00:21:04]  And the interaction that the performers have with this video screen almost entirely is them jumping up these steps, leaping over into the little dugout, and then characters, them appearing on the screen and flying.
[00:21:19]  Yes.
[00:21:19]  There is an extraordinary amount of flying.
[00:21:22]  Flying into the heavens.
[00:21:23]  Into the heavens.
[00:21:25]  Well, we open up with a couple of dance routines that have in the background dozens of people who are standing on little clouds like they're angels from The Simpsons or something like that.
[00:21:37]  And what appears to be God.
[00:21:39]  I would say that is the angel of death.
[00:21:44]  You think that's an angel of death?
[00:21:45]  I couldn't figure out what it was.
[00:21:47]  It was a large angel in all white flying down.
[00:21:52]  Yes.
[00:21:53]  The only thing that I can associate that with is the apocalypse.
[00:21:57]  It did.
[00:21:58]  There were many apocalyptic backgrounds.
[00:22:00]  Yes.
[00:22:00]  There was also a roaring lion on a cloud.
[00:22:02]  Yes, but that is.
[00:22:04]  Now, visually, I would say it looked like you compared it to Mist, which, of course, I'm a big fan of.
[00:22:10]  I grew up with.
[00:22:11]  But I'm going to add in just with a hint of Street Fighter.
[00:22:16]  Well, that's so what I, so that's actually something that I wrote down in my little notebook, which I was scribbling in the entire time, in the dark, I might add.
[00:22:24]  I will say many of the backgrounds, particularly in the dances that were set in ancient Chinese history, look like Mortal Kombat backgrounds.
[00:22:34]  Yes.
[00:22:34]  And so it definitely, if you're having trouble picturing this, you can literally just picture what's behind you in a fighting game, and that's what they had on the screen.
[00:22:44]  It was extraordinary.
[00:22:47]  I mean, I will say without that, the show would have been dog shit.
[00:22:51]  So there's basically two halves to the show.
[00:22:54]  And it kind of like proceeds like this.
[00:22:56]  There's like a series of three or four, or maybe five dances that they do that are very like innocuous.
[00:23:03]  Absolutely.
[00:23:04]  Just like, this is the dance of the lotus sleeve.
[00:23:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:08]  And then it's like a bunch of girls with like crazy sleeves doing like twirls.
[00:23:11]  And everyone's like, ooh, this is nice.
[00:23:13]  This is nice.
[00:23:14]  And then they're like, this is the dance of the fighting monk.
[00:23:18]  And then it's like the fighting monks or whatever.
[00:23:19]  And everyone's like, ooh, wow, look at those monks.
[00:23:21]  They're leaping.
[00:23:21]  That's crazy.
[00:23:23]  And then, so that goes on for like a couple times, four or five times.
[00:23:27]  Whenever I say a couple, I mean a handful.
[00:23:28]  She does.
[00:23:29]  Liz does have trouble with the meaning of the word couple.
[00:23:32]  Yeah.
[00:23:32]  She thinks it means two to everyone in the world save Liz.
[00:23:36]  Yeah.
[00:23:36]  A couple.
[00:23:37]  Anyway.
[00:23:41]  Then we get to a song.
[00:23:46]  Yes.
[00:23:47]  And this is when Shen Yun kind of turns a little bit, especially for the people sitting next to me.
[00:23:55]  Because we have a pianist come out and a soloist who sings in a, like a, I don't know, a Chinese song.
[00:24:08]  You can't understand lyrics.
[00:24:09]  And they have the lyrics, you know, translated projected on the back on the screen.
[00:24:14]  Big mistake.
[00:24:16]  Because I will say for the English-speaking people in the crowd, I saw a lot of people get a little confused at the lyrics to this.
[00:24:23]  Yeah, there was a lot of shifting in seats.
[00:24:25]  Audible shifting.
[00:24:26]  To be clear, and we'll talk much more about this throughout the rest of the episode and in the next episode.
[00:24:33]  But obviously, Shen Yun is sponsored by a religious organization or a cult, you might say.
[00:24:41]  But there wasn't really a lot of talk about that.
[00:24:43]  There was like a few hints.
[00:24:44]  And if you looked at the merch table and you knew what you were looking for, you would definitely see it.
[00:24:49]  But if you're just like, I'm an old person at the fucking matinee.
[00:24:52]  We're at Lincoln Center.
[00:24:53]  It's the Chinese.
[00:24:54]  It's the damn Chinese dance that we're going to.
[00:24:59]  That's the woman behind me.
[00:25:01]  And so you wouldn't really know that there was maybe a spiritual component to what we were witnessing because most of the things the dances had revolved around were fables and folktales from Chinese history.
[00:25:12]  Some might say folkish in nature.
[00:25:14]  Yes.
[00:25:15]  However, I actually wrote down some of the lyrics, although it was pitch black in there.
[00:25:20]  And so the handwriting is a little bad.
[00:25:22]  But the lyric starts, actually, no, you know what?
[00:25:27]  No, this is the first song.
[00:25:29]  Heavens were crumbling at their cyclical end, anticipating the day the creator would begin anew.
[00:25:35]  As disaster looms, he alone gives us a future.
[00:25:40]  And then return to tradition.
[00:25:43]  And I will say an exhortation to reject the twin evils of atheism and the theory of evolution.
[00:25:52]  Yeah, and it was, I think it was when evolution dropped that people went, what?
[00:25:58]  Yeah.
[00:25:59]  Everything else, they were sort of like, ah, maybe they don't know what they're saying.
[00:26:03]  Yeah.
[00:26:03]  And then you say reject evolution and people are like, well, okay, that's a little weird.
[00:26:08]  We're at the Lincoln Center, man.
[00:26:19]  And so I will say for the most part, and I got pretty bored, to be real with you.
[00:26:24]  I mean, there were some...
[00:26:25]  Yeah.
[00:26:26]  Oh, listen, hey, I like any sort of extraordinary thing, right?
[00:26:30]  Doesn't matter what the content is.
[00:26:32]  I got to tell you, the only thing I was really impressed by were the backflips.
[00:26:37]  There were some guys, there was a couple of dances there.
[00:26:39]  You know what I'm talking about, Jam Chonsky.
[00:26:42]  Listen, maybe this is for the fellas, but I really get excited when I can see somebody do a bunch of backflips in a row.
[00:26:48]  I think it's cool.
[00:26:50]  No, I like Tim Nestle.
[00:26:51]  Yeah, well, it kind of reminds me of Jackie Chan or something like that.
[00:26:54]  Not due to the racial component, just because he also can flip very well.
[00:26:58]  And so there was there was some like kind of cool dances, but you get a little a little bored during some of it.
[00:27:04]  I mean, there's a lot of Chinese folktales that I thought were more the ones that were more narrative were definitely more impressive than the ones that were just like, here's the dance.
[00:27:13]  No, it was boring as fuck as hell.
[00:27:15]  It sucked.
[00:27:16]  Sorry, the show sucked.
[00:27:17]  Yeah, we should get that out of the way.
[00:27:19]  It stinks.
[00:27:20]  This is awful.
[00:27:21]  It's not even like one of those things where you're like, oh my God, that's so funny.
[00:27:24]  We should check.
[00:27:25]  No, it's not funny enough to see.
[00:27:27]  We saw it for you.
[00:27:28]  Yes.
[00:27:29]  It's not like, even the, even the funny thing.
[00:27:31]  It's not like even ironically funny enough.
[00:27:34]  If you go and it's bad.
[00:27:36]  It stinks.
[00:27:37]  You should take, if you are, listen, if you are in a bad relationship and you want to kill your partner, get season tickets to Shenyun.
[00:27:45]  Season tickets?
[00:27:46]  Season tickets to Shenyun.
[00:27:48]  Start following Shen Yun like the dead.
[00:27:50]  Like start going out selling fucking nitrous outside of Shen Yun.
[00:27:54]  Get two tickets.
[00:27:55]  Get to your seats and then do the, hey, I just got to run to the bathroom.
[00:28:00]  Oh, that's a great move.
[00:28:03]  Yeah.
[00:28:03]  Yeah.
[00:28:04]  And you're just on out of there.
[00:28:05]  You're out of there, out of their life forever.
[00:28:07]  And you leave them because you traveled to Detroit to see it.
[00:28:09]  So you leave, you go back down to San Diego.
[00:28:12]  Bye-bye, asshole.
[00:28:14]  Now the car is in my name.
[00:28:15]  So we didn't like the show, but there was a couple parts in it that I think do deserve mention.
[00:28:24]  So you and Young Chomsky did not read about the show prior to going, right?
[00:28:28]  No, I very purposely was like, I don't want to see anything.
[00:28:31]  I don't want to read anything.
[00:28:32]  I don't want to know what I'm getting into.
[00:28:34]  All I know is from the ads and from it being in this kind of like meme that everyone knows about.
[00:28:40]  And from the ads, I mean, we see like a woman kind of in like a, in like in mid, in flight, sort of in midday, right?
[00:28:46]  Leaping.
[00:28:46]  There's a fog, which, by the way, the fog only in two things.
[00:28:49]  They only used it twice.
[00:28:51]  They did use it very effectively, but I would have definitely preferred if they used it for basically every dance.
[00:28:55]  That would have been way better.
[00:28:57]  But from the posters and stuff, I mean, obviously you see China before communism.
[00:29:01]  And if you can read the subtext of what that means, you're like, all right, you're getting to something political and weird here, probably.
[00:29:06]  But there's no like indication that there is any sort of like organ harvesting or anything going on in the dancing from the ads, right?
[00:29:13]  No.
[00:29:14]  And so you went into it?
[00:29:16]  Yeah.
[00:29:16]  So like you, you go, you kind of go into the show and you think that I'm going to see just some traditional Chinese dance.
[00:29:22]  However, there are a couple of numbers that this outfit has that sort of deviate from the most of the most of the settings for the dairies dances take place 1,000 years ago, 800 years ago.
[00:29:35]  But there's a couple that take place in the modern day, and I think it's worth talking about them.
[00:29:41]  The first one takes place and it's introduced to us as a group of practitioners of qigong.
[00:29:46]  I don't think he actually used the word qigong.
[00:29:48]  I think he might have even said Falun Gong practitioners or spiritual practitioners who are putting the banners that say like truth, compassion, and I think benevolence out in a public square in China and the repression they get from the Chinese government.
[00:30:02]  This is how it's introduced to us by the funky white boy in the tuxedo.
[00:30:06]  And indeed, that's what we see.
[00:30:08]  Finally, we have a modern backdrop of mist on the back of this computer screen.
[00:30:12]  And then several bakakied young people wearing the blue and yellow, not of Ukraine, no, but of the Falun Gong, sort of cavorting in a public square and putting out these banners that say these very, you might say it, well, if it's in Chinese, but you know, they say that compassion on them.

=== Zero Days, Zero Hope (12:18) ===

[00:30:31]  Yeah.
[00:30:32]  And they're performing this stuff.
[00:30:34]  And one of their fathers comes out and he's like, don't you do this.
[00:30:37]  And you're like, well, why would you be warning your daughter not to be putting out these, you know, these beautiful slogans in a public square, right?
[00:30:46]  And you're like, this father is such an asshole.
[00:30:49]  And then all of a sudden, three dressed, three policemen dressed all in black, but for some reason with a hammer and sickle upside down.
[00:30:58]  Yeah.
[00:30:58]  Do you guys notice that?
[00:30:59]  Yeah, that's it.
[00:31:00]  Upside down on the back of the corner.
[00:31:01]  I kept kind of like turning my head and I was like, am I looking at this?
[00:31:04]  Is this like the thing?
[00:31:06]  I don't know why that was.
[00:31:08]  Wielding truncheons come out and savagely beat these young spiritual practitioners to within an inch of their lives.
[00:31:15]  Yes.
[00:31:16]  And then it cuts to the prison.
[00:31:20]  What appears to be, oh, this is the inside of the prison, yeah, because we see the outside of the prison too.
[00:31:24]  The inside of the prison, which appears to be, and this is, I'm going to make another video game reference here from my youth.
[00:31:30]  Have you ever played the video game Odd World?
[00:31:33]  Abe's Odyssey?
[00:31:34]  It appeared to be a background of that Nintendo game or whatever, Sega game.
[00:31:39]  Giant, oversized, like steel door, very spacious interior.
[00:31:43]  And I'm like, this prison ain't so bad.
[00:31:46]  Unfortunately, it is bad.
[00:31:49]  Yeah, there's one, I guess, communist policeman who comes in and like points at the girl.
[00:31:55]  Like he's like going through and he's like looking at all of the prisoners.
[00:31:59]  And he's like, no, not you.
[00:32:00]  Not you.
[00:32:01]  Yeah.
[00:32:02]  Not you.
[00:32:02]  And behind him are these people in white coats with clipboards.
[00:32:05]  And you're like, surely they're here to do physicals on these girls and make sure they're healthy, right?
[00:32:10]  And then he like points to the young girl and he's like, that one, that's the one.
[00:32:15]  Which like, I don't know what he sees.
[00:32:16]  And they kind of like drag her away, prick her with some sort of like oversized needle, fentanyl, and then pull out a case.
[00:32:30]  Yes.
[00:32:31]  Like a little box, freezer box style.
[00:32:33]  Yeah.
[00:32:35]  Clearly to take her organs.
[00:32:37]  They take her motherfucking organs.
[00:32:38]  Yeah.
[00:32:39]  They take her organ.
[00:32:40]  There's not a lot of dancing going on at this point.
[00:32:43]  Just so up until this point, it's basically just been folk dancing.
[00:32:49]  And then suddenly we're in modern China and organs are being harvested.
[00:32:53]  Prior to this, it was the celestial lion takes the form of a warlock and kidnaps the fucking emperor's concubines.
[00:33:00]  And then the monkey king and his two cohorts, like he was like good and dud, go and fight.
[00:33:05]  I don't remember their actual names, but like they go and you followed this a lot.
[00:33:09]  I wrote, yeah, I really like the monkey king.
[00:33:11]  Okay.
[00:33:11]  And I looked up the actual fable afterwards.
[00:33:15]  You know, he rescues them and they fly on a leaf.
[00:33:17]  They were flying on leaves five minutes prior to this.
[00:33:20]  And now we have Dr. Mengela with an ice box full of kidneys taking it from this girl.
[00:33:26]  They put a white sheet on her.
[00:33:29]  Now we're on the outside of the prison.
[00:33:30]  What appears to be Auschwitz?
[00:33:32]  There is a full crematorium smokestack in the background here.
[00:33:37]  And the father, and some of the surviving Falun Gong practitioner girl comes out, and the father of the deceased young girl who's been harvested comes and is like, where's my daughter?
[00:33:49]  Where's my daughter?
[00:33:50]  I mean, he doesn't say these things, but you can see he's acting.
[00:33:52]  He's very emotive.
[00:33:54]  And he's, they tell him, she's passed.
[00:33:56]  She's gone.
[00:33:57]  She's gone.
[00:33:57]  They took her kidney.
[00:33:58]  She injected her.
[00:34:00]  Could have been took her heart.
[00:34:01]  It could have.
[00:34:02]  It took her heart, maybe.
[00:34:03]  I don't remember exactly what organs it did.
[00:34:05]  Oh, it all.
[00:34:06]  Wow, you really felt this a lot closer than that.
[00:34:08]  I was putting my hands in front of my eyes because I do it, I get scared.
[00:34:12]  And I was going, and then he goes and practices Falun Gong dances or whatever the fuck.
[00:34:25]  They don't even call it Qigong.
[00:34:26]  It's like spiritual movements.
[00:34:27]  His spiritual movements in the park, just like his daughter did, and then he's taken away by the police.
[00:34:43]  I think people, there's a lot of shifting in seats at this point.
[00:34:46]  But that, like, that skit, I'm going to call it a skit.
[00:34:50]  It was not a dance.
[00:34:51]  It was, yeah, it was, it was not a, it was very little dancing going on in that one.
[00:34:55]  Pales in comparison to the one that was in the second half.
[00:34:58]  That again, like, the second half was like, okay, we're back.
[00:35:01]  We're just doing nice dancing.
[00:35:03]  It's more nice dancing.
[00:35:04]  Back to 5,000 years of Chinese history.
[00:35:06]  There's a whole story about a drunk monk.
[00:35:08]  Oh, my God.
[00:35:08]  That sounds fun.
[00:35:10]  I did like that one.
[00:35:11]  That's cool.
[00:35:12]  And then suddenly a dark cloud comes over.
[00:35:17]  And we're back in modern-day China.
[00:35:20]  And there's all these people rushing around in their khakis with their cell phones in front of their faces.
[00:35:26]  Yes, I did like this part.
[00:35:28]  I did like this part.
[00:35:30]  Not looking at each other, not looking at anything, so wrapped in their phones.
[00:35:32]  Oh my God, modern technology, what has happened?
[00:35:35]  Oh, I'm on WeChat.
[00:35:37]  I'm on WeChat.
[00:35:38]  A whole crew of young girls who come out with ring lights and start performing in front of them.
[00:35:44]  Oh, it says so much about our society.
[00:35:46]  It said so much about our society.
[00:35:49]  And like how fucked up things are.
[00:35:51]  True.
[00:35:51]  Honestly, to me, it felt like a two-in-on episode.
[00:35:55]  It kind of did.
[00:35:56]  And I did think that.
[00:35:57]  And then as people are kind of like walking around, walking around, walking around, a couple comes out with a baby.
[00:36:05]  Uh-huh.
[00:36:05]  And the baby, so this is a fake baby, but it's a fake baby.
[00:36:09]  It's just a bundle.
[00:36:10]  But there is a loud, which I at first I thought maybe I, because I do that sometimes when I get my ADHD kicks in.
[00:36:20]  I got and I was like, maybe I did that without noticing it.
[00:36:23]  But we all thought it was a real baby anyway.
[00:36:25]  It was a real baby.
[00:36:27]  It was a very convincing sound.
[00:36:29]  It was one of the better moments from the orchestra.
[00:36:32]  Yes.
[00:36:32]  I don't know if the orchestra played that.
[00:36:34]  I think someone just hit a button.
[00:36:36]  I'm saying that's how bad it was.
[00:36:38]  I will say on Lou Reed's song, The Kids off of The Beast Out of Berlin, they do actually record the producer's children really crying because he told them that their mother was dead.
[00:36:46]  And then he recorded the reaction.
[00:36:47]  Their mother was not dead, but he used it in the recording.
[00:36:50]  That's fucked up.
[00:36:51]  Really fucked up.
[00:36:52]  But this couple has a baby.
[00:36:54]  That's Nathan Fielder style.
[00:36:57]  They got the little baby.
[00:36:58]  And they're walking around.
[00:36:59]  But you know what?
[00:37:00]  But they're both looking at their phones.
[00:37:01]  They both look at their motherfucker.
[00:37:02]  They're looking at the baby.
[00:37:04]  And then at one point, the mom's like, here, you take the baby.
[00:37:06]  And the dad's like, no, you take the baby.
[00:37:08]  I want to be on my phone.
[00:37:09]  I want to be on my phone.
[00:37:10]  You take the baby.
[00:37:11]  And then, boom, the baby goes flying.
[00:37:14]  They get struck by a vehicle.
[00:37:17]  You know what?
[00:37:17]  Driver of that motherfucker was probably texting himself.
[00:37:20]  And the baby flies as if it was launched like a discus and it flies through the air.
[00:37:26]  And I believe that.
[00:37:26]  This was actually quite shocking.
[00:37:28]  Yeah, it was crazy.
[00:37:29]  Everyone around us was just like, what?
[00:37:32]  And then the baby is caught by the Falun Gong practitioner.
[00:37:36]  Because they weren't looking at their phones.
[00:37:38]  No, they were here and now, man, they're in the moment.
[00:37:42]  And so they were able to catch the baby.
[00:37:44]  And the couple is like, oh my God, wow.
[00:37:47]  Thank you so much.
[00:37:48]  You caught our baby.
[00:37:50]  Thanks for catching the baby.
[00:37:53]  And then something happens.
[00:37:55]  Some policemen come out.
[00:37:57]  We hear a siren.
[00:38:00]  And they're in white hazmat suits.
[00:38:04]  Yes.
[00:38:05]  They have a huge sign that they unravel.
[00:38:07]  It says, zero COVID.
[00:38:09]  Zero fucking COVID.
[00:38:12]  Wee, wee, wee.
[00:38:13]  And then you realize when it is.
[00:38:16]  Oh my God, it's 2019.
[00:38:19]  China is hit with the coronavirus 19 virus.
[00:38:25]  Or as Donald Trump called it, as Liz reminded us yesterday, the Kung Flu.
[00:38:31]  Yeah, that one really should have.
[00:38:33]  I watched the video clips of it.
[00:38:34]  It's good.
[00:38:34]  Yeah.
[00:38:35]  It's almost two.
[00:38:36]  It's really good.
[00:38:37]  He knew he had lightning in a bottle with that.
[00:38:39]  And he actually, you know what he did?
[00:38:40]  He didn't try to impress anybody.
[00:38:42]  He just kept that one time.
[00:38:43]  You know what?
[00:38:43]  It says something about our society that Kung Flu didn't stick, but the obviously more vulgar one, China virus.
[00:38:48]  China virus, give me a fucking break.
[00:38:50]  Just horrible.
[00:38:52]  Lame.
[00:38:53]  So can't appreciate the elegance.
[00:38:55]  COVID-19 hits, and the fascist Chinese government clamps down in order to get Liz can see me messing with my feet down here.
[00:39:03]  Yeah, it's a little noisy.
[00:39:04]  Okay, well.
[00:39:05]  You're always rustling.
[00:39:07]  My foot was itchy.
[00:39:08]  So the Chinese government clamps down on Chinese society and things go crazy.
[00:39:13]  We basically witnessed the apocalypse.
[00:39:15]  Yeah.
[00:39:17]  They stop all of the Falun Gong practitioners are like, no, you just need to practice Qigong or Falun Gong and you will be cured of coronavirus.
[00:39:28]  It's fine, everybody.
[00:39:29]  Everyone, chill out.
[00:39:30]  It's fine.
[00:39:31]  Just do basically Tai Chi.
[00:39:34]  It's fine.
[00:39:35]  It's all good.
[00:39:37]  The authoritarian CCP is like, no, and ripping everyone apart and saying, no more practicing, no more practicing.
[00:39:45]  Uh-huh.
[00:39:46]  Because here's the thing: there's only one organization, and it's not the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:39:52]  It's the Falun Gong that can get us to zero COVID.
[00:39:55]  Well, then, twist of fate, one of the CCP officers starts coughing.
[00:40:02]  Oh, no, they have COVID.
[00:40:04]  No!
[00:40:05]  And the Falun Gong, the beaten-down Falun Gong member, the wretched, grabs them and is like, here, do these movements with me and starts like kind of doing the little Tai Chi movements with their arms.
[00:40:18]  And the CCP officer is like, oh, I've got COVID, but let me try.
[00:40:24]  And then, oh, healed.
[00:40:27]  He's healed.
[00:40:28]  He's fucking cured.
[00:40:29]  COVID gone.
[00:40:31]  COVID zero.
[00:40:32]  But then there's a massive flood.
[00:40:36]  Yes.
[00:40:36]  So this.
[00:40:37]  I want to say an apocalyptic vision comes sweeping across the digital Missed X Street Fighter screen.
[00:40:46]  So I got scared because it was coming towards me, which Liz had to prevent me from fleeing from my seat, but it looked real.
[00:40:54]  The backdrop of the Mortal Kombat set, a giant, massive wave arises.
[00:40:59]  A tsunami.
[00:41:00]  A tsunami, frankly.
[00:41:01]  Yes.
[00:41:02]  And the likes of which none have seen.
[00:41:05]  Mankind has never seen before in mankind's entire existence.
[00:41:08]  All 5,000 years of Chinese history.
[00:41:10]  It seems to kill everybody on stage.
[00:41:13]  Yes.
[00:41:14]  But our Falun Gong participants are our dancers know that their mortal, their mortal, they might shuffle off this mortal coil in a dance sort of shuffle.
[00:41:26]  But their beings and their spirits, because they have ascended through their cultivation practices, get to go to heaven.
[00:41:33]  And then, bam, they're all in these clouds.
[00:41:35]  And there's all these fucking like Falun Gong people rushing around on all these clouds.
[00:41:39]  And it is, it is just a beautiful ending for that.
[00:41:41]  We don't really see what happens to everybody else.
[00:41:44]  Well, then a ton of angels start flying around.
[00:41:47]  Yeah, lots of angels.
[00:41:49]  And everyone kind of does their like running up to the stairs, leap, whoop, and then they start flying on the screen.
[00:41:55]  Yeah.
[00:41:56]  And it's very clear that a giant tsunami has come, destroyed the world, and Falun Gong members have now ascended to heaven.
[00:42:03]  Correct.
[00:42:04]  And the angel of death, I'm assuming, is there, looks really eerily like the Paramount Lady.
[00:42:13]  Does look like the Paramount Lady.
[00:42:16]  And she's kind of floating up there, you know, watching over this apocalyptic revelation.
[00:42:24]  And everyone, and then it ends.
[00:42:26]  And then that's just the end of Shen Yun.
[00:42:29]  Which is crazy.
[00:42:30]  Now, what's even crazier is that I saw like four people in front of me stand up and clap.
[00:42:37]  There was a, I will say, there is nothing.
[00:42:39]  Bitch, what are you clapping for?
[00:42:41]  There is nothing that makes me feel more uncomfortable than a partial standing ovation.
[00:42:46]  Oh, man.
[00:42:47]  It's because I get it.

=== Four Standing Claps (06:49) ===

[00:42:49]  I've been in standing ovations before where I didn't want to stand.
[00:42:52]  No one does.
[00:42:52]  But nobody does.
[00:42:54]  Unless you're really moved.
[00:42:55]  The heat of the crowd.
[00:42:55]  And then, of course, and the crowd, I stand because everyone else is standing, and I don't want to look like I'm making a point.
[00:43:01]  A lot of people in that audience, ourselves and basically everyone around us, except for those like eight people sort of scattered near us, was like, I don't need to stand and clap.
[00:43:10]  Now, I gotta say, I was at the Philharmonic like a couple of weeks ago.
[00:43:13]  The soundtrack tomorrow went.
[00:43:19]  They do like five standing ovations.
[00:43:22]  And I'm like, that's a little much.
[00:43:26]  Let's keep it going.
[00:43:28]  Yeah.
[00:43:28]  Five standing ovations?
[00:43:30]  I don't think the conductor is like that.
[00:43:32]  This is why Truanon only does standing room shows because you can't, you have to give us a standing ovation.
[00:43:38]  But so we leave, we finally leave.
[00:43:40]  I got to say, they did keep it.
[00:43:41]  It was, it was, we got out of there in like, what, two and a half hours?
[00:43:45]  Yeah, about two and a half hours, yeah.
[00:43:46]  Which is a little longer than you want it to be, but shorter than it definitely could have been.
[00:43:50]  Absolutely.
[00:43:51]  And we leave the theater.
[00:43:57]  We walk down to the veranda.
[00:44:00]  Yes.
[00:44:01]  Where there's sort of two levels there where different Falun Gong members, I assume, are selling their wares, sort of market style, Etsy market style.
[00:44:14]  Well, I, of course, approached the merchant nearest to me, a 15-year-old boy with braces wearing a suit.
[00:44:23]  Yes.
[00:44:24]  And as I approached him, I don't know if I mentioned this to you.
[00:44:27]  As I approached him, an older woman with her friends who are very buoyant and happy, as I'm walking up to the merch booth, she says, if you were just a little bit older, I'd take you out of here myself.
[00:44:41]  What?
[00:44:42]  Yeah, just a child?
[00:44:44]  And he was like, thank you.
[00:44:46]  Yeah, he was like, thank you so much.
[00:44:48]  Saying this to the blonde boy who likes no care.
[00:44:51]  He's a Levite Beaver looking son of a bitch.
[00:44:53]  And I had talked to him before the show.
[00:44:56]  I was chatting up with him, asking him what his favorite year of all those 5,000 years of Chinese history was.
[00:45:01]  He told me he liked the Tang dynasty the best, which is actually, I asked everyone what dynasty liked the best, and they all said Tang.
[00:45:08]  And I didn't like him.
[00:45:10]  He was nosy.
[00:45:11]  He looked like the son of the host, the male host.
[00:45:14]  Yeah, he did.
[00:45:15]  I assume he's just like an upgrade.
[00:45:18]  I asked him how many times he was a volunteer.
[00:45:20]  I asked him how many times he'd seen Shen Yun, and he literally could not count how many times.
[00:45:25]  I was there every day.
[00:45:26]  I thought about buying merch, but it was literally, it was too expensive.
[00:45:29]  And I will buy stupid shirts.
[00:45:31]  They had like $75 silk scarves.
[00:45:34]  Yeah.
[00:45:34]  Hideous.
[00:45:35]  Hideous.
[00:45:36]  And it was like the cheapest thing they had was a like $35 compact.
[00:45:40]  Also, I want to be like, where's this made?
[00:45:42]  I meant to ask.
[00:45:43]  Yeah.
[00:45:44]  Is it made in China?
[00:45:45]  Probably.
[00:45:45]  Maybe Vietnam.
[00:45:47]  You know, they moved a lot of manufacturing in Vietnam.
[00:45:49]  Well, we go downstairs, and I said, as we're walking downstairs, we got to get interviewed because I knew this.
[00:45:56]  I knew that the Shen Yun organization and its associated news wings frequently interviewed people after the show to do sort of like a splash reel of people being like, I loved it.
[00:46:11]  And what happens to us as we descend those stairs?
[00:46:15]  These two jokers get plucked out of the crowd immediately, which I'm like, okay, guys.
[00:46:22]  You're going to ask these guys?
[00:46:24]  We looked cool.
[00:46:26]  You guys looked like, come on.
[00:46:28]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:46:29]  You set the scene here.
[00:46:31]  I was in full traditional Chinese dress.
[00:46:35]  And yeah, I was.
[00:46:37]  I'm not afraid to admit it.
[00:46:38]  I was wearing about $3,000 worth of silks.
[00:46:41]  If I'm a cult member, I'm like, I'm not picking those guys.
[00:46:44]  They're going to make fun of me on TV.
[00:46:46]  They don't know what Jews are.
[00:46:47]  They only have Kaifeng Jews in China.
[00:46:49]  There's like 2,000 Jews in China.
[00:46:51]  They're from Marco Polo's time.
[00:46:53]  They're really funny.
[00:46:55]  It's cool that they exist.
[00:46:58]  We go down there and a woman from New Tang Dynasty TV, which I knew what that was, and I was excited.
[00:47:05]  She's like, would you guys like to do a quick interview about your experiences?
[00:47:10]  And they go up and they ask Young Chomsky, I mean, what do they ask you?
[00:47:14]  It was very, she was just like, what did you think of the song?
[00:47:17]  What do you think of the songs?
[00:47:18]  And I was like, this lady seemed like a nice lady, so I didn't want to.
[00:47:21]  Yeah, it was good energy.
[00:47:24]  Yeah, yeah, good energy.
[00:47:25]  And I told them.
[00:47:26]  You talked for like five minutes.
[00:47:27]  What are you talking about?
[00:47:28]  You talked for like five minutes.
[00:47:29]  You were like, you're like, oh, well, you know, I went to music college, and so I appreciate music.
[00:47:34]  You know, I write music myself, and so I can understand.
[00:47:37]  I read the stage of it off all cool.
[00:47:40]  You were chatting their ears off.
[00:47:42]  They spent way more time talking to heads.
[00:47:43]  They did.
[00:47:44]  Well, because you, you know, so I introduced, because there was like a little like screen you got, or like a backdrop you got, they taped you in front of.
[00:47:53]  But then there was like a lady who was like kind of like, it was someone in front of us.
[00:47:56]  She was the handler.
[00:47:57]  The handler.
[00:47:58]  And she was talking about.
[00:47:59]  She's trying to, you know, weed out the crazy lady.
[00:48:02]  And she asked us what we did, Me and Young Chomsky.
[00:48:06]  And I saw this motherfucker was about to say we do a podcast.
[00:48:09]  And I was like, first of all, Jon Chomsky, never tell anyone that in any situation.
[00:48:14]  Always do this.
[00:48:15]  I work in business.
[00:48:16]  We learned that in Idaho.
[00:48:18]  Yeah, we did.
[00:48:19]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:48:19]  We did learn that in Idaho.
[00:48:21]  I work in business.
[00:48:22]  But I told it, I jumped in and I said, we're software developers.
[00:48:26]  Yeah.
[00:48:27]  We're freelance.
[00:48:28]  I said I think we're freelance software developers.
[00:48:30]  They get me up there.
[00:48:31]  No one's going to ask me a question about that.
[00:48:33]  Yeah.
[00:48:34]  Exactly.
[00:48:34]  Well, that's why exactly.
[00:48:36]  Anything I tell people, if they ever ask me what I do and I don't want to talk to them, grad student, freelance software developer, or something like that, where they don't want to hear that.
[00:48:44]  You're going to get too many questions.
[00:48:45]  You can get questions for that.
[00:48:47]  Freelance software developer, no one's going to be like, oh, tell me about that.
[00:48:50]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:48:51]  Well, grad students, certain, certain, yeah, yeah, correct.
[00:48:54]  But in certain places, like if I tell any of my friends that I'm in grad school, I guess they would know that I'm not, but equivalent to them, they'd be like, I don't want to hear about it.
[00:49:04]  They asked me my name and what I do, and I tell them, my name is Rachel Jake, and I'm a CEO of a software company.
[00:49:13]  And they asked me to spell Rachel Jake, and I don't want us to spell Rachel, so I spell it Rachel for them.
[00:49:21]  I didn't catch that you did that.
[00:49:23]  And they interviewed me for a while.
[00:49:27]  That's an annoyingly long time.
[00:49:29]  Yeah, like 15 minutes.
[00:49:31]  And I was – What are you – Yeah, you just, it was like, I looked over and you're just like, I loved the dancing.

=== Fallon's Local Controversies (13:41) ===

[00:49:39]  Like a little boy or something.
[00:49:40]  It was like the most useful.
[00:49:42]  I'm divided by the leaping.
[00:49:45]  I was trying to get them to use it.
[00:49:46]  So I was saying things like, you know what?
[00:49:49]  I didn't even know China had 5,000 years of culture and my mind is blown.
[00:49:53]  I wish we lived in ancient China.
[00:49:56]  They asked me what I thought of the music and I said that I haven't really listened to music since Ovici died.
[00:50:01]  And to me, like there was nothing better than, I kept saying Ovechi.
[00:50:05]  There's nothing better than Avici.
[00:50:06]  And to me, this is basically as good as Avici.
[00:50:09]  I want to say, if anyone listening can find clips of this, there's no way they aired it.
[00:50:15]  That's the biggest Easter egg that could exist for Truana is if someone could deliver us a clip of it.
[00:50:21]  While this is happening, by the way, there's this gentleman behind me and Yank Chomsky who's kind of like trying to get ushered into the line.
[00:50:28]  They're trying to push him in.
[00:50:30]  And he looks like a gay version of Elliot Gould.
[00:50:37]  He did have gago.
[00:50:39]  He was doing gay gold.
[00:50:40]  But who was doing like who's dressed as Andre Leontale?
[00:50:43]  I don't know.
[00:50:44]  He is in a full-on like blanket coat.
[00:50:47]  Yes, with like a drape.
[00:50:48]  With a drape.
[00:50:49]  And it has like that shine, shiny, like Botox skin.
[00:50:54]  Yeah.
[00:50:55]  And looks very much like gold rings and bejeweled.
[00:51:00]  Of course.
[00:51:01]  Looks very much like a heavyweight, like a heavy hitter Broadway producer.
[00:51:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:06]  And he, I saw him up on the mezzanine level when he was like talking to some of them and they were like, he was saying, oh, yeah, I loved it.
[00:51:14]  It was great.
[00:51:14]  Blah, blah, blah.
[00:51:15]  You know, just kind of like, it seemed like making small talk, trying to be nice.
[00:51:18]  And we kind of like quickly usher him down.
[00:51:20]  And then he goes, oh, wait, will this be shown in New York State?
[00:51:25]  Will people in New York State see this?
[00:51:27]  I can't be seen doing this.
[00:51:28]  I can't be seen doing this.
[00:51:29]  And then he kind of like floofs out of there with his like coat behind him.
[00:51:34]  Trailing behind him.
[00:51:35]  He kind of looked like the penguin.
[00:51:36]  Yeah.
[00:51:37]  But not like, he wasn't like evil looking.
[00:51:39]  He wasn't evil looking.
[00:51:40]  No, not.
[00:51:41]  He was very Upper.
[00:51:42]  He was just wearing like a big scarf.
[00:51:44]  Yeah, he was very, very Upper West Side.
[00:51:46]  But it was very funny because I think they do a really good job of getting people to give these quotes without understanding exactly what they're giving quotes for.
[00:51:56]  Like if you look on the brochures or anything for Shenyun, it's like Kate Blanchett and she's like, oh, it's a delight for our children.
[00:52:02]  Like, how did you get her to do that, man?
[00:52:04]  Well, that's, so they have quotes from like everybody, like every local politician they'll have quotes from from whatever town they're visiting.
[00:52:12]  Every single celebrity they'll have quotes from.
[00:52:14]  And it appears what they do is they just ask their press office for like a generic quote for anybody from any like their P anyone's PR.
[00:52:23]  And people will for some reason supply them and then they'll put them everywhere.
[00:52:28]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:52:29]  I mean, they, I mean, the Shenyun organization, which we now we should talk about, like really does a really good job of basically hiding what they're all about, who they're, you know, who's behind them, and what they're doing.
[00:52:44]  I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:52:56]  To me, Shenyun is simply a traditional Chinese dancing group that is only trying to spread the message of traditional Chinese culture.
[00:53:05]  In fact, 5,000 years of civilization in China to American audiences.
[00:53:10]  And for some reason, they're banned in China, likely because the fascist Chinese government wants to crack down on a totally unrelated group called the Falun Gong.
[00:53:21]  So we should, let's back up a little bit.
[00:53:23]  Shen Yun as a performance, it debuted back in 2006.
[00:53:27]  Yeah.
[00:53:28]  So it's been going for quite some time.
[00:53:29]  A long time.
[00:53:31]  They have an organization headquartered up in the Hudson Valley.
[00:53:37]  It's in a place called Cuddyback, which I hate that.
[00:53:40]  Cuddy that I had to see.
[00:53:42]  Do you remember the Bay Area Slan Cuddy?
[00:53:44]  Yes.
[00:53:45]  Yeah.
[00:53:45]  Absolutely.
[00:53:46]  Still say Cuddy.
[00:53:48]  Cuddyback, New York.
[00:53:50]  It's like 427-acre compound.
[00:53:53]  They call it Dragon Springs.
[00:53:56]  I'm not a fan in general of like upstate quote-unquote groups.
[00:54:01]  Like if someone's like, oh yeah, our founder lives at the compound.
[00:54:05]  It's headquartered upstate.
[00:54:06]  I'm like, I'm running away from you.
[00:54:08]  You know the True Anon rule.
[00:54:10]  You don't want to live on the compound.
[00:54:12]  If the group has a compound, you don't want to live on the compound.
[00:54:15]  But a lot of people do live on this compound.
[00:54:18]  Yeah.
[00:54:18]  And it's a very weird.
[00:54:19]  There's very little that's known about what actually goes on inside the compound.
[00:54:23]  You can't actually even search for Dragon Springs on Google Maps or anything like that.
[00:54:27]  Cuddeback is, there's also no buses that go there.
[00:54:30]  I looked it up yesterday.
[00:54:31]  But it's about two hours north of New York, or northeast, I think, of New York.
[00:54:36]  But like, you know, kind of bad.
[00:54:37]  Towards Canada.
[00:54:38]  Towards Canada.
[00:54:39]  Kind of.
[00:54:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:42]  And it is a large, sprawling complex that is like some like kind of Chinese, old-style Chinese looking buildings.
[00:54:49]  Yeah.
[00:54:49]  And then like big.
[00:54:50]  Tang Dynasty, in fact.
[00:54:51]  Tang-ass buildings.
[00:54:53]  And then there are like kind of taller buildings just with that giant Falun Gong swastika.
[00:54:59]  Yeah.
[00:54:59]  I guess there's like, they have a ton of academies and training stations elsewhere in town.
[00:55:06]  Yeah, where they kind of like act as like feeder universities in quote unquote into the Shen Yun performance.
[00:55:13]  So there's like, there was a bunch of, I was reading like construction controversies happening up there.
[00:55:19]  There was something to do with they were like polluting the local water.
[00:55:23]  Yeah.
[00:55:24]  I don't know, some big lawsuit.
[00:55:25]  All the townspeople really hate them and are trying to like push back.
[00:55:30]  This is a very classic situation in terms of compounds and local people.
[00:55:34]  Yeah, that's the thing too.
[00:55:35]  It's like, this is what Jim Jones was kind of smart about when he built Jonestown.
[00:55:40]  You can get it.
[00:55:40]  He did it just way out in the middle of motherfucking nowhere.
[00:55:43]  Yeah.
[00:55:43]  And get in the pocket of every single San Francisco politician.
[00:55:46]  Exactly.
[00:55:46]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:47]  But like his shit in Guiana was just like in the middle of the jungle.
[00:55:50]  You don't want neighbors.
[00:55:52]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  But they got these fucking neighbors.
[00:55:54]  I will say it does remind me a little bit of Scientology in terms of the secretive nature of the compound and the way like internet is highly restricted inside the compound.
[00:56:07]  Apparently there are a lot of arranged relationships.
[00:56:10]  No one really who lives inside really doesn't interact with the outside.
[00:56:14]  Yeah.
[00:56:15]  There was like one, I was reading a story about one 54-year-old Canadian man who died while he was like working on construction on one of their buildings.
[00:56:25]  And the group refused to do an autopsy, refused to answer any questions from local journalists about how he died or anything about his death.
[00:56:33]  His chi was off.
[00:56:34]  It's just very, it's just stuff you don't want to hear about at all.
[00:56:38]  But they have their music school there because by the way, I don't think we sort of mentioned this, but they had a full orchestra when we saw Shen Yun.
[00:56:48]  And they also have a dance school there.
[00:56:50]  So they've got these two like arts academies, they call them.
[00:56:54]  And I think people basically live and work on the compound and then are sent on tour.
[00:56:59]  So they work there.
[00:57:00]  They write a new show every year.
[00:57:02]  And so I had read several years prior reports about Shen Yun, like basically reviews of Shen Yun, none of which were very good.
[00:57:10]  In fact, I've still never seen an actual organic good review of Shen Yun from like a newspaper.
[00:57:15]  Just keep Blanchett.
[00:57:16]  Only Blanchett likes it.
[00:57:18]  Which makes sense because they're also in Battered Composers, kind of.
[00:57:22]  They had a Moldovan composer.
[00:57:24]  Or not a composer, excuse me, conductor.
[00:57:26]  Anyways, they have eight traveling groups.
[00:57:30]  I think six main ones, but they have eight different troops that go around the world and that are on tour for six months out of the year.
[00:57:38]  And so this makes sense that you see Shen Yun billboards everywhere because statistically, there are so many people in Shen Yun that they're likely to come to your town just by pure chance.
[00:57:50]  Yeah.
[00:57:50]  Now, it's tough trying to look into exactly like what goes on with this organization.
[00:57:56]  Like we said, like the compound, everything about it is like very opaque.
[00:57:59]  They got a lot of guards, all that shit.
[00:58:01]  Yeah.
[00:58:01]  And the organization itself, like it's been a tax-exempt organization since 2007.
[00:58:06]  And I was looking at some of their tax returns.
[00:58:08]  They took $33.2 million in revenue last year, which is a shit ton.
[00:58:13]  Yeah.
[00:58:14]  Like way more than you would think.
[00:58:16]  They've got about $145 million total assets on hand.
[00:58:20]  They're making some money.
[00:58:21]  It's made even more opaque because one of the big, I don't want to say controversies, but the big questions that a lot of regular people have about Shen Yun and Falun Gong is that how the fuck can they afford this much advertising?
[00:58:36]  They have primo billboards in basically every major advertising market.
[00:58:41]  I mean, Shen Yun is fucking everywhere.
[00:58:44]  Subway ads, billboards, fucking bus stop ads.
[00:58:46]  Like every one of the billboards.
[00:58:48]  Yeah, it's insane.
[00:58:50]  I mean, Shenyun really blankets towns, major cities with advertising, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to with how much money they take in or disperse from the organization itself.
[00:59:02]  And the way they kind of get away with this very opaque structure is that they have these different Shenyun sort of affinity groups in each of these major cities.
[00:59:12]  I mean, obviously not everywhere that Shenyun goes, but in a lot of different cities, that they take in money and then they buy Shenyun ads for Shenyun.
[00:59:22]  And so it's not actually coming from the central organization itself, which makes actually following the money on a lot of this stuff really difficult to do.
[00:59:30]  But I will say, Shen Yun is probably the biggest non-major company advertiser in America.
[00:59:37]  Which is insane.
[00:59:38]  Insane.
[00:59:39]  That's totally crazy.
[00:59:40]  For a dog shit dance performance.
[00:59:42]  Yeah, which, as you mentioned, is banned by China.
[00:59:48]  And why might that be?
[00:59:51]  Well, that's because Shen Yun aren't simply dancing archaeologists taking the brush of the feet and uncovering the dusted remains of Chinese history overlooked for so long by Western audiences.
[01:00:07]  In fact, they are part of a weird freaky deaky group called the Falun Gong.
[01:00:14]  I think much like many audience members at Lincoln Center, our audience members might not be as familiar as we are with the Falun Gong.
[01:00:41]  No, and that's really a shame, right?
[01:00:46]  Because we get a lot of people asking us, like, hey, you know, like, I have a kidney stone, right?
[01:00:53]  Or I'm possessed by an evil demon that made me a communist.
[01:00:58]  Sure.
[01:00:59]  Or I'm gay.
[01:01:01]  And I feel like all of the solutions to those things, things that you might not even think were problems, are actually explicitly laid out in the Falun Gong's text.
[01:01:12]  I mean, if you've ever wondered, like, hey, like, how come there's a nuclear reactor that's 2 billion years old that they found in Gabon and nobody's talking about it?
[01:01:23]  Well, the Falun Gong is.
[01:01:25]  But what is the Falun Gong?
[01:01:27]  Well, that's the whole thing, right?
[01:01:28]  I mean, it's like, I think people see these ads for Shenyun everywhere, and everyone's sort of like, yeah, it's this kind of weird thing.
[01:01:34]  But it turns out that it's completely produced by and meant to propagandize the teachings of what I only call like an esoteric, apocalyptic, Buddhist cult.
[01:01:48]  Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
[01:01:50]  I mean, sometimes you read stuff about Shenyun and there'll be an article like, well, what's the group behind Shenyun like?
[01:01:56]  And it might mention that the founder of the Fallon Gong is homophobic or has some weird beliefs or.
[01:02:03]  But a lot of times it doesn't.
[01:02:05]  A lot of times it doesn't, yeah.
[01:02:07]  Or is just like a little wacky.
[01:02:10]  And then sometimes you also might be reading, you know, Reuters or Forbes or something.
[01:02:15]  The New York Times.
[01:02:16]  The New York Times.
[01:02:17]  And you see these extraordinary claims that China is harvesting organs from tens of thousands of religious prisoners of conscience in a essentially almost genocidal system, and nobody's doing anything about it.
[01:02:34]  Yeah.
[01:02:35]  You know, you see all these different things.
[01:02:38]  You might not think, oh, well, what on earth do these reports about organ harvesting that I see in all of these respectable outlets have to do with 5,000 years of Chinese history shown on the stage in the form of dance?
[01:02:50]  And the connective tissue there is the Fallon Gong.
[01:02:53]  Now, Liz, you and I have both been Falun Gong, aka Fallon Dafa members for like seven, eight years now, right?
[01:03:01]  Yes.
[01:03:02]  Ever since Tiananmen Square.
[01:03:04]  Yes.
[01:03:06]  Well, that was a little more than seven years ago, but that was, yeah, but our Tiananmen Square incident, which we don't want to talk about on the show, but it was a big deal at the time.
[01:03:15]  And in that time, like, I mean, you and I have both done some extraordinary things, right?

=== Falun Gong Bonds (00:50) ===

[01:03:20]  And Young Chomsky, who prefers to, of course, practice the ancient ways of Kabbalism, has never been able to do.
[01:03:27]  We can fly.
[01:03:29]  Yeah, we can fly, just like that lion on a cloud like we saw at Lincoln Center.
[01:03:35]  So in the next episode, we'll walk you through everywhere from ESP to the Qigong boom to flying to space aliens to two billion-year-old reactors to organ harvesting.
[01:03:48]  And YouTubers.
[01:03:49]  And the Epic Times, exactly.
[01:03:52]  All right.
[01:03:53]  So, Liz, I think we should sit cross-legged and levitate three inches off the ground.
[01:03:57]  Well, I'm Liz.
[01:03:58]  My name is Brace.
[01:04:00]  And frankly, you know what I see over there, Liz?
[01:04:03]  It's the Dragon Rising.
[01:04:05]  We have over here with us producer Young Chomsky.
[01:04:08]  And this has been Trunan.
[01:04:09]  We'll see you next time.