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Speaker 1: Mmm, Hello everybody. This is Robert Evans. I'm the host

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Speaker 1: of Behind the Vastards, and this is Behind the Vastards,

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Speaker 1: the show where we tell you everything you don't know

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Speaker 1: about the very worst people in all of history. This

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Speaker 1: is part two of our episode on Trophy and Lushenko,

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Speaker 1: the scientists who got everybody killed, and with me today

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Speaker 1: as with them. Part one is Max Sylvestry. Max, how

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Speaker 1: you doing. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me

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Speaker 1: back to talk more death caused by Russian Well, before

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Speaker 1: we get into that, I want to tell you something

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Speaker 1: I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy

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Speaker 1: saying Sylvestry. But it's one of the rare names that

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Speaker 1: I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying. Really, it's

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Speaker 1: because of the t R I I don't know. I yeah,

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Speaker 1: I enjoy writing Sylvestry. Oh, I've always felt it had

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Speaker 1: a weird rhythm to writing it. I don't I get

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Speaker 1: lazy by the end of it. Especially my full name

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Speaker 1: is Maximilian, so it's oh my god. I know you've

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Speaker 1: got a lot of ground. When I was a kid,

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Speaker 1: I had to learn it rhythmically. I still kind of

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Speaker 1: tap my foot. I am my l I a n

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Speaker 1: um scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no,

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Speaker 1: no no. My nickname is a kid was SMI because

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Speaker 1: that's in my preschool. That's where I cut it off, which,

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Speaker 1: in hindsight, what kind of school like only allowed six letters?

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Speaker 1: That's not many. There's many common first names that hit

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Speaker 1: six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Um, well, thank

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Speaker 1: you for saying that. Round. Maximi is a pretty cool nickname, though, No,

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Speaker 1: I did like it. It was like my first A

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Speaker 1: well screen name I believe in was Maximi with no number.

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Speaker 1: I was in early nice. I mean, I feel like

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Speaker 1: you had a choice to make there at some point

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Speaker 1: as to whether or not to be a hip hop artist,

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Speaker 1: and you you could have taken that road. Well, if

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Speaker 1: you can believe it. My middle name, and it's Ukrainian,

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Speaker 1: actually is Shaft. It's my mom's maid. So there was

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Speaker 1: a moment Maxim Shaft, Maximilian Shaft as like, you know,

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Speaker 1: some sort of show biz name felt too much. I

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Speaker 1: was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel

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Speaker 1: like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh my god,

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Speaker 1: man it. I went to a family wedding this weekend

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Speaker 1: and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft,

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Speaker 1: And like I had never thought about the whole other

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Speaker 1: side of the family that are the got married into it.

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Speaker 1: Just like the joke of all their speeches was like,

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Speaker 1: I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft Shaft,

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Speaker 1: she's marrying all these shafts. Oh man, Okay, Well that

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Speaker 1: was an enjoyable digression and a Ukrainian name speaking of

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Speaker 1: people who had bad things done to them because we

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Speaker 1: just talked aboutout the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go, man,

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Speaker 1: that is a country that has just wound up getting

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Speaker 1: screwed over by so many people. It's really it's remarkable.

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Speaker 1: Like yeah, there's just these nations in history, the Congos

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Speaker 1: and other one of them where it's just like, oh,

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Speaker 1: you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone

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Speaker 1: for the last three hundred years. It's like, I like,

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Speaker 1: like Italy without the art or food, Um, we're not

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Speaker 1: as excited by it. Yeah, I mean I like, oh no,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I like I like parog. I just made

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Speaker 1: like a you know, every street corner doesn't have a

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Speaker 1: parogi restaurant right here in America, right, Yeah, not a

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Speaker 1: lot of that yet. Yeah, yet we need like a

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Speaker 1: good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West the Ukrainian invasion,

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Speaker 1: but not from the or one that Yeah. Ok. Anyway,

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Speaker 1: we're talking about troph and Leshenko and Um. Where we

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Speaker 1: last left off, the USSR had instituted Leshenko's policies, He

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Speaker 1: had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic

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Speaker 1: scientists who didn't agree with Leshenko is um, and of

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Speaker 1: course millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in

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Speaker 1: other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of

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Speaker 1: scientific factory. That's where we wound up last time, and

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Speaker 1: this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman mouse

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Speaker 1: China to see what happened next with Lushenko is okay? So,

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Speaker 1: as you will remember from part one, one of my

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Speaker 1: sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts,

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Speaker 1: written by Jasper Becker. One chapter in that book, which

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Speaker 1: focuses on the bad science of Leshenko and his comrades,

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Speaker 1: opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that

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Speaker 1: I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice

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Speaker 1: not to include as we start this episode. I never

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Speaker 1: think of poems in books as being like this was

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Speaker 1: so necessary, but yet this spoke to you in such

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Speaker 1: a way that you want to repeat it? Yeah, because

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Speaker 1: it happens a lot in the books that I read.

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Speaker 1: For this all off and from a poem, and I

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Speaker 1: usually don't include that, but epigraph what is what is

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Speaker 1: that called at the beginning? Epigraph? Probably right, I don't,

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Speaker 1: I'm not. I just always feel like, wow, how cool

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Speaker 1: you know a poem? You know, like that is the

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Speaker 1: energy that I feel when I read, you know. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And this one is more I think it accurately sums

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Speaker 1: up the mood of the people that we're going to

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Speaker 1: be talking about. Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how

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Speaker 1: can I alone remains sober? So alright, that's where we're

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Speaker 1: getting into. In nine mause Dung became the chairman of

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Speaker 1: the Central People's Government. His rise to power had included

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Speaker 1: an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign. Mao was the

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Speaker 1: great Leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable

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Speaker 1: of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos

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Speaker 1: in China, he promised his people that he would make

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Speaker 1: their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth.

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Speaker 1: I'm going to yeah quote from that book here. The

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Speaker 1: nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists, and the entire Communist

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Speaker 1: party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand.

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Speaker 1: Out of China the land of famine, he would make

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Speaker 1: China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so

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Speaker 1: much food that they would not know what to do

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Speaker 1: with it, and people would lead a life of leisure,

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Speaker 1: working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership,

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Speaker 1: China would enter the final stage of communism, ahead of

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Speaker 1: every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they

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Speaker 1: would reach communism in ten or twenty years, Mau said

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Speaker 1: the Chinese would get there in a year or two.

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Speaker 1: In fact, he promised that within a year, food production

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Speaker 1: would double or trouble. It's too much food. That is

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Speaker 1: too much food. You know, it's not good to have

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Speaker 1: too much food. You know, you're just gonna piles of

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Speaker 1: rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one

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Speaker 1: of the things that was instituted as a result of

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Speaker 1: their worry that they were just gonna be way too

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Speaker 1: much food is they institute a program to get rid

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Speaker 1: of the pests. Before the pests could eat all of

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Speaker 1: the food that they were sure was about to be there.

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Speaker 1: And so for like a period of weeks, all of

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Speaker 1: the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows

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Speaker 1: and mass to try to kill all of the sparrows.

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Speaker 1: They did the same thing with a couple of bugs too,

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Speaker 1: were just like people just be chasing down birds and

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Speaker 1: bugs all day. Sparrows could talk. I'm sure they would

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Speaker 1: try to just be guys, we're not sure that we're

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Speaker 1: going to need to get rid of me. You might

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Speaker 1: want the sparrow, you don't know. Yeah, well they had

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Speaker 1: them too. Yeah. So one popular slogan at the time

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Speaker 1: was worked hard for a few years, happiness for a

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Speaker 1: thousand which sounds good, right, that's problem, Yeah, I can

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Speaker 1: think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years.

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Speaker 1: Was the idea that like they had a plan to

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Speaker 1: buckle down and that's just that they would be set

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Speaker 1: up with abundance forever. Yeah. That was again this idea

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Speaker 1: that you saw in the Soviet Union that once we

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Speaker 1: perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it,

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Speaker 1: and then none of these problems that have been present

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Speaker 1: throughout twelve thousand however many years its recorded human history

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Speaker 1: will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a

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Speaker 1: hole because you've all been wrong, the people, the wrong

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Speaker 1: type of human sow. We figured it out two years

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Speaker 1: at most, maybe, Yeah, a couple of years, and we'll

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Speaker 1: reverse this twelve year old train. Yeah. Peasants as far

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Speaker 1: off as Tibet would never so much as seen an airplane,

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Speaker 1: were taught to expect that in the near future. Quote,

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Speaker 1: practically everything would be done by machines. In fact, the

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Speaker 1: time would come when our meals would be brought by

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Speaker 1: machine is right up to our mouths. Wow. So this

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Speaker 1: is like fully automated luxury communist taught to expect. Here,

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Speaker 1: And as they say in the Simpsons, people will be

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Speaker 1: needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever, you know, Like,

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Speaker 1: people will still have a purpose, you know, but they

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Speaker 1: won't need to suffer. They won't need to labor miserably

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Speaker 1: in the fields, and they won't starve in the winter.

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Speaker 1: You know. It will still be a place for people,

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Speaker 1: but it will be in a perfect utopian state. So

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Speaker 1: now intoxicated China with his view of what the future

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Speaker 1: could be, and it's easy to see why that would

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Speaker 1: be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the

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Speaker 1: Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged in a

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Speaker 1: huge chunk of Like they, China had gone through a

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Speaker 1: lot of ship It hadn't been a good run for

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Speaker 1: them lately, so they were eager for this. Unfortunately for everyone,

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Speaker 1: The scientific underpinning of the Brave New World maw envisioned

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Speaker 1: was yeah, yeah, See, Mao had spent years fighting as

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Speaker 1: a guerilla warlord against the other men who aimed to

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Speaker 1: dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd

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Speaker 1: become a racious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this

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Speaker 1: propaganda had to do with these spectacular record harvests the

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Speaker 1: USSR was supposedly but not really having, because remember they

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Speaker 1: were lying about that trof and Lushenka was built as

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Speaker 1: the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed

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Speaker 1: the propaganda not just because he thought it was literally true,

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Speaker 1: but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he

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Speaker 1: already believed about the world. Seemo was not a big

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Speaker 1: scientific reality guy. One of his catch phrases was quote

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Speaker 1: we should be like marks entitled to talk nonsense. He

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Speaker 1: lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying

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Speaker 1: stuff like science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing

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Speaker 1: mysterious about it, and there is nothing special about making

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Speaker 1: nuclear reactors, cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of

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Speaker 1: these things. As long as you act daringly, you will

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Speaker 1: be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have

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Speaker 1: spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was

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Speaker 1: no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first

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Speaker 1: machine building ministry, second machine building ministry, your King Hall University.

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Speaker 1: But just act recklessly and it will be all right. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: dream big, you know, Baron Munchausen style, just like if

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Speaker 1: you will it, come on, just balls to the wall,

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Speaker 1: go crazy, like what is science? Is about recklessness? I'm

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Speaker 1: not gonna sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo

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Speaker 1: figure out what all this is, you know, poor ship

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Speaker 1: and Beakers, get on with it. Corn should be bigger.

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Speaker 1: Do it, do it and make the fucking corn bigger.

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Speaker 1: You can see why it would be fun like in

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Speaker 1: a world where people have been taught no science is

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Speaker 1: about like painstaking research and checking your notes and yes, yeah,

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Speaker 1: gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time.

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Speaker 1: Just be like, nah, just fucking try ship man. It's fine, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're the best. Then we're going to be even better

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Speaker 1: if you just listen to me. Don't worry about the

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Speaker 1: logistics again. Another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after

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Speaker 1: this time. I mean, this was like such a sad

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Speaker 1: chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah, I mean, one of

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Speaker 1: the best things about history is that people learn all

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Speaker 1: of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes.

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Speaker 1: Of course, humans change, They change easily, and they change

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Speaker 1: a stick I found. So I'm going to guess that

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Speaker 1: ma his attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him

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Speaker 1: in his career as a warlord. That could be good

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Speaker 1: if you're like running an army, to just sort of

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Speaker 1: be daring and bold and stuff. A question was he

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Speaker 1: trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption

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Speaker 1: or was it more just like, no, I also believe

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Speaker 1: this and it's worked for them and I admire it,

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Speaker 1: or did he want to like get in better. It's

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Speaker 1: certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the

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Speaker 1: early period of like you know, forty nine or so

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Speaker 1: when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress,

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Speaker 1: And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to

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Speaker 1: impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism, right,

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Speaker 1: like that's the like, well, I'm gonna do communism better

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Speaker 1: than you fuckers. I was WACAN briefly in seventh grade

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Speaker 1: because like some kids that I hung out with, like

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Speaker 1: one of them got into it and I didn't really

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Speaker 1: believe it. I don't know if any of us did.

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Speaker 1: But we went to a magic shop and bought like

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Speaker 1: source books or whatever. But I wasn't, you know, a

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Speaker 1: teacher's pet type student. And in that brief two month

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Speaker 1: period I became like the best at wickanism. I like

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Speaker 1: to be like, knew the whole book. I'd like correct

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Speaker 1: them and being like oh no, that's that mojo bag positivities.

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Speaker 1: It won't work like that, you know, I won't working

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Speaker 1: with you buried you know soil. So it wasn't that

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Speaker 1: I believed it. If I did like excelling at it,

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Speaker 1: you know, yeah you want to memorize everything, yeah yeah,

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Speaker 1: oh man, So like seventh grade wiccan uh Chairman Mao

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Speaker 1: decided that his extreme knowledge of lashenko Is procedures and

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Speaker 1: all of the reading he'd done of you know, Soviet

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Speaker 1: agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the

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Speaker 1: agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most population nation on

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Speaker 1: the planet. Now, were they going through like I imagine

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Speaker 1: their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's.

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Speaker 1: Were they going through like terrible famine at that point?

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Speaker 1: They were, but mostly because they've just been fighting a

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Speaker 1: giant civil war, right, so that sucks up the foods.

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Speaker 1: So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in

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Speaker 1: China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine

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Speaker 1: in their lives, so it was like the promise that

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Speaker 1: there will be no famines was very powerful. And also

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Speaker 1: he was sucking with something really intricate like Chinese agriculture,

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Speaker 1: like some of the oldest cis ms in the human planet.

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Speaker 1: We're continually operating, and yeah, it's one of those things.

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Speaker 1: We saw it an episode on the the East India

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Speaker 1: Company and when they came in right and they tried

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Speaker 1: to like I saw the first three episodes of Taboo,

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Speaker 1: So yeah, I have a pretty clear right, So like

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Speaker 1: in Chinese, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and

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Speaker 1: they decide to change everything. So like in the Soviet Union,

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Speaker 1: Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were

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Speaker 1: seen as useless bourgeois specialists, too cowardly intimid to make

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Speaker 1: great decisions, because again, science requires recklessness. To be a

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Speaker 1: great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an

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Speaker 1: intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief

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Speaker 1: in the philosophical underpendings of the party. Even children could

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Speaker 1: be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this period

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Speaker 1: was called They Are Creating Miracles. It totally. It told

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Speaker 1: stories about children in an elementary school who had quote

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Speaker 1: developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot. This

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Speaker 1: was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This

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Speaker 1: is what the story. Schools are basically right, and just

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Speaker 1: let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever,

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Speaker 1: and as long and tell them, know, make carrots but

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Speaker 1: with tomatoes on the inside. Go do it. Just be

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Speaker 1: daring fucking children. Quote it is a story out of

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Speaker 1: a science fiction book. But no, my young friends, it

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Speaker 1: is not. This is a true story. There are no

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Speaker 1: fairytale magicians, no white bearded wizards, have Never Never Land.

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Speaker 1: The heroes of our story are a group of young

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Speaker 1: pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a

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Speaker 1: little excerpt from the book there. Yeah, So, the more

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Speaker 1: mal read of Lushenko, Williams and Maturing, those those great

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Speaker 1: Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the

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Speaker 1: more smitten with them he became. He would have read

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Speaker 1: Lushenkoist journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that ted

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Speaker 1: Leshenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a

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Speaker 1: quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia. Stalin's teachings

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Speaker 1: about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical

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Speaker 1: qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants. The

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Speaker 1: realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be

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Speaker 1: transformed into another. So this is the ship Maus reading.

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Speaker 1: This is what he's coming to believe. Like you could

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Speaker 1: literally change the nature of these plants by like altering

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Speaker 1: them physically, like you can change them forever. And by

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Speaker 1: what you're saying now is not exactly doing deep dives

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Speaker 1: on the science. He's not double checking numbers here, he's

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Speaker 1: just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and

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Speaker 1: being like, this sounds fantastic, and a lot of what

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Speaker 1: he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals

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Speaker 1: directly to the science, which is leading him to think that, like, well,

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Speaker 1: a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science

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Speaker 1: by like what he understands and believes in the world.

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Speaker 1: So Mab began to tell his friends of his exciting

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Speaker 1: plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying

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Speaker 1: with company, they will grow easily. When they grow together,

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Speaker 1: they will be comfortable. Now. Like Ashenko felt that plants

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Speaker 1: at the same type could not compete with each other,

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Speaker 1: the Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshenko as scientists

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Speaker 1: Lu Tienu, who went on to persecute all of that

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Speaker 1: country's experts in genetics throughout the nineteen forties. He mandated

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Speaker 1: that Soviet agricultural science and best practices head to be

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Speaker 1: used fascist eugenicists. Scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or

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Speaker 1: forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigned supreme.

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Speaker 1: Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience

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Speaker 1: in college at the time, we were told the Soviets

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Speaker 1: had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had

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Speaker 1: to change textbooks and rename things in Leshenko's honor. So

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Speaker 1: the Harving Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland,

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Speaker 1: became Leshenko syndrome to show it had been discovered by him.

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Speaker 1: Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk

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Speaker 1: about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even the students.

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Speaker 1: This meant that all through Mao's lifetime there was no

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Speaker 1: policy to stop people in the same family marrying each

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Speaker 1: other in passing down their genes. A lot of idiots

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Speaker 1: were born as a result his words. Idiot. No, no,

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Speaker 1: in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean

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Speaker 1: idiots like they bothered me at parties. I mean they're idiots.

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Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. What what did China have at that point

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Speaker 1: of forty nine or whatever, like, was there a tradition

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Speaker 1: of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of a

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Speaker 1: world stage Western style of scientific method or I think

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Speaker 1: it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere,

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Speaker 1: connected with other scientists around the world to learn what

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Speaker 1: they were doing and try to uncover truth better. And

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Speaker 1: those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything,

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Speaker 1: because good scientists before they died. It must have been

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Speaker 1: so annoying to scientists, which was relatively in the scheme

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Speaker 1: of history. Yeah, they're like, no, no, none of that,

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Speaker 1: and we're not doing magic anymore. Now we got science.

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Speaker 1: And then like the new scientists be like, actually, we're

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Speaker 1: gonna do some magic. It's pretty magical. It's gonna be magic.

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Speaker 1: Children are scientists now. Anyway, you have to die. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Mushenko is theory demolished Chinese agriculture, just as it had

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Speaker 1: Russian agriculture. A potato blight hit in the nineteen fifties.

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Speaker 1: Under the Shanko is um, the cause of the blight

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Speaker 1: was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a

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Speaker 1: stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that

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Speaker 1: was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when

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Speaker 1: the findings contradicted scientific or doxy. As a result, maw Era,

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Speaker 1: China grew by some accounts, half as many potatoes as

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Speaker 1: it should have during this period. I don't want to

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Speaker 1: get too deep into the woods and communist botany in

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Speaker 1: the mid twentieth I do like the idea that someone

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Speaker 1: was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well,

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Speaker 1: you can look like this is how much land they

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Speaker 1: dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to

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Speaker 1: make really not die from lack of potatoes. Yeah, I'm

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Speaker 1: talked to the Irish about that. One of the things

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Speaker 1: that was really big in communist botany in this period

365
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Speaker 1: was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It

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Speaker 1: wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would

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Speaker 1: be lauded in the press for like growing grapes on

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Speaker 1: a per symmetry or apples from a pear tree, where

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Speaker 1: you're just splicing off pieces of trees and so you

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Speaker 1: have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Like it's the

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Speaker 1: thing you can do in your yard and it's cool

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Speaker 1: and we can oh, yeah, I would be like another

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Speaker 1: example of magic. That's not true, the idea of having

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Speaker 1: two sitters fruits on one tree. And no, you can

375
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Speaker 1: totally do like I don't know with it's like not

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Speaker 1: every plant can be done that way, but there are

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Speaker 1: a had to burn the guy that I saw that

378
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Speaker 1: had that in his yard you just saw an apple

379
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Speaker 1: and a pair on the same tree and started fire

380
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Speaker 1: his poorhouse. Oh my god, there's nothing but ash. No, Like,

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Speaker 1: to an extent, you can do that, but like, it's

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Speaker 1: not it's not a solution for production or anything. It's

383
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Speaker 1: a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something

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Speaker 1: that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale. Right.

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00:18:20,080 --> 00:18:22,200
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of time, Right, it's not like

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Speaker 1: you might as well just grow a different field of

387
00:18:24,119 --> 00:18:26,160
Speaker 1: apples in a field of per simmons and whatnot. The

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00:18:26,359 --> 00:18:28,480
Speaker 1: reason not to, but it was cool and it was

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Speaker 1: impressive to people at the time, and they were just

390
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Speaker 1: figuring this out. So like that's one of the things

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Speaker 1: that would make the news a lot as they talk

392
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Speaker 1: about like look at all these scientists who have crossed

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Speaker 1: these two different fruits and whatnot together. I had mesical

394
00:18:39,400 --> 00:18:41,840
Speaker 1: this weekend that had a pair in the bottle, like

395
00:18:41,880 --> 00:18:44,800
Speaker 1: a full pair, and we were trying to figure out

396
00:18:44,880 --> 00:18:46,960
Speaker 1: very briefly and drunkenly, how they got the pair. And

397
00:18:46,960 --> 00:18:48,720
Speaker 1: I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship

398
00:18:48,720 --> 00:18:51,320
Speaker 1: in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had

399
00:18:51,320 --> 00:18:53,040
Speaker 1: a flat pair and then it got fat. I was

400
00:18:53,080 --> 00:18:54,639
Speaker 1: like maybe they put a dried pair in and the mescal.

401
00:18:54,960 --> 00:18:56,960
Speaker 1: What they do is they have the tiny little pair

402
00:18:56,960 --> 00:18:59,680
Speaker 1: in the tree. They hang the tree with the bottles

403
00:19:00,119 --> 00:19:02,280
Speaker 1: so that rose inside. I was like, that is cool,

404
00:19:02,320 --> 00:19:05,680
Speaker 1: but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol

405
00:19:05,920 --> 00:19:09,000
Speaker 1: or grow pears. To have a handful of trees or

406
00:19:09,040 --> 00:19:10,919
Speaker 1: perhaps a whole field of them with bottles on the end,

407
00:19:10,920 --> 00:19:15,399
Speaker 1: it seems novel rather than super useful. Well, I mean, yeah,

408
00:19:15,760 --> 00:19:17,600
Speaker 1: I mean it was delicious, went on so smooth. I

409
00:19:17,600 --> 00:19:19,120
Speaker 1: didn't even need a lime one. Did you eat the pear?

410
00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:22,680
Speaker 1: You know, we didn't drink that much? And luckily, when

411
00:19:22,680 --> 00:19:24,240
Speaker 1: would you break the bottle? I guess? So yeah, I

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Speaker 1: mean you have to like get a glass or something

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Speaker 1: like a little bit of glass in. I just want

414
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Speaker 1: to drink a mescaled up pair. That sounds delicious, Yes,

415
00:19:31,880 --> 00:19:35,439
Speaker 1: that sounds fantastic. Okay. So grafting and crossing all these

416
00:19:35,440 --> 00:19:37,760
Speaker 1: plants and stuff became something of a meme in Red China,

417
00:19:37,840 --> 00:19:40,159
Speaker 1: and soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of

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Speaker 1: pumpkins crossbred with papaya, corn crossed with rice, and other

419
00:19:43,240 --> 00:19:46,160
Speaker 1: such nonsense which you can't do. You can't make corn

420
00:19:46,240 --> 00:19:50,040
Speaker 1: rice corn. You can't make that a year of corn

421
00:19:50,119 --> 00:19:54,000
Speaker 1: has rice and itoked rice on instead of kernels. Unclear.

422
00:19:54,480 --> 00:19:57,680
Speaker 1: It would be kind of cool either way, yes, totally, yeah,

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Speaker 1: but it didn't happen. Neither would really fulfill in need

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Speaker 1: that I have. You know, I go in for different

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00:20:03,080 --> 00:20:05,920
Speaker 1: reasons when I'm going for both of those two. Never again,

426
00:20:05,960 --> 00:20:08,880
Speaker 1: will man, you have to go to two different places

427
00:20:08,880 --> 00:20:12,160
Speaker 1: for rice grains and corn cub I'm tired of when

428
00:20:12,160 --> 00:20:14,720
Speaker 1: I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate um, and

429
00:20:14,760 --> 00:20:16,960
Speaker 1: so that would have solved that problem. That's really frustrating.

430
00:20:17,440 --> 00:20:19,679
Speaker 1: So the different districts we compete with each other for

431
00:20:19,760 --> 00:20:22,159
Speaker 1: like claiming wild successes and things that could like go

432
00:20:22,240 --> 00:20:25,160
Speaker 1: in the local newspapers and stuff. Uh, there were stories

433
00:20:25,160 --> 00:20:27,359
Speaker 1: of like a hundred and thirty pound pumpkins and whatnot,

434
00:20:27,480 --> 00:20:29,920
Speaker 1: most of which were complete lies. I feel like that's

435
00:20:29,920 --> 00:20:32,280
Speaker 1: still a thing we're covering in the news today. Yeah,

436
00:20:32,359 --> 00:20:34,120
Speaker 1: somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look

437
00:20:34,160 --> 00:20:36,280
Speaker 1: at this big fruit. Yes, and exactly. I mean I

438
00:20:36,320 --> 00:20:39,800
Speaker 1: always feel like it's pre social media. Uh yeah, you know.

439
00:20:39,880 --> 00:20:43,600
Speaker 1: American Heartland Memes was like ten times forwarded emails that

440
00:20:43,640 --> 00:20:46,280
Speaker 1: had just like look at this chiant pumpkin the size

441
00:20:46,280 --> 00:20:47,800
Speaker 1: of a man. This is that, And this is kind

442
00:20:47,800 --> 00:20:51,000
Speaker 1: of how the craze over this new science starts to

443
00:20:51,000 --> 00:20:54,040
Speaker 1: sweep China. You know, at first it's not super negative,

444
00:20:54,040 --> 00:20:56,200
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean they're definitely not grown as many potatoes,

445
00:20:56,240 --> 00:20:58,919
Speaker 1: but like it's mostly just people being like, well, I

446
00:20:58,920 --> 00:21:01,040
Speaker 1: can be a scientist. Get what I did to this tree.

447
00:21:01,080 --> 00:21:02,800
Speaker 1: Look at it. Look at this photo of my husky

448
00:21:02,920 --> 00:21:05,439
Speaker 1: son next to a potato as tall as he is.

449
00:21:05,600 --> 00:21:08,080
Speaker 1: You know, come on, this will inspired people for a decade,

450
00:21:08,160 --> 00:21:12,159
Speaker 1: a mix of actual, neat little experiments. It just lies. Yeah,

451
00:21:12,359 --> 00:21:16,320
Speaker 1: So we're going to get into the Great Leap Forward next, which,

452
00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:19,639
Speaker 1: um was not a great time for most people, but

453
00:21:19,640 --> 00:21:22,520
Speaker 1: it's called the Great Leap. I know, I know, sometimes

454
00:21:22,720 --> 00:21:26,080
Speaker 1: advertisements are not true, but in this case, the advertisements

455
00:21:26,080 --> 00:21:28,040
Speaker 1: are true because they're the ads for our show, and

456
00:21:28,080 --> 00:21:37,119
Speaker 1: they're great, and we're back. We're talking. When we were

457
00:21:37,119 --> 00:21:39,400
Speaker 1: about to talk about the Great Leap Forward, which started nine.

458
00:21:40,200 --> 00:21:44,240
Speaker 1: It was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly

459
00:21:44,280 --> 00:21:48,040
Speaker 1: turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Now, one

460
00:21:48,080 --> 00:21:50,240
Speaker 1: aspect of the Leap that's probably most famous was the

461
00:21:50,240 --> 00:21:53,560
Speaker 1: creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants and

462
00:21:53,600 --> 00:21:55,919
Speaker 1: peasant villages designed to sort of. The idea was like,

463
00:21:56,400 --> 00:21:58,359
Speaker 1: we don't need to all like move into cities and

464
00:21:58,400 --> 00:22:00,159
Speaker 1: make big factories like the rest of the world. We

465
00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:02,680
Speaker 1: can just have our peasants be like producing this sort

466
00:22:02,680 --> 00:22:05,840
Speaker 1: of they didn't make good steel. Turns out farmers don't

467
00:22:05,840 --> 00:22:08,399
Speaker 1: make great steel in their backyards. Well, we are going

468
00:22:08,440 --> 00:22:10,399
Speaker 1: to need that steel for when all the robots do

469
00:22:10,440 --> 00:22:12,639
Speaker 1: all the tasks in the near near future, that we

470
00:22:12,720 --> 00:22:13,960
Speaker 1: might as well start building the steel. We might not

471
00:22:14,040 --> 00:22:15,880
Speaker 1: have the robots yet, Yeah, we'll get the steel ready

472
00:22:15,880 --> 00:22:19,359
Speaker 1: the robots. Yeah. Anyway. It also involved an eight point

473
00:22:19,440 --> 00:22:22,639
Speaker 1: blueprint for Chinese agricultural written up by Mao himself and

474
00:22:22,680 --> 00:22:25,720
Speaker 1: based heavily in the Shanko's theories. The eight points included

475
00:22:25,720 --> 00:22:29,840
Speaker 1: close planting and deep plowing, real deep plowing, two things

476
00:22:29,880 --> 00:22:32,680
Speaker 1: that by nineteen fifty three, the Soviet Union knew did

477
00:22:32,680 --> 00:22:35,359
Speaker 1: not work. Because again they had this data, they just

478
00:22:35,400 --> 00:22:37,719
Speaker 1: weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves

479
00:22:37,720 --> 00:22:39,880
Speaker 1: by admitting that they had starved a lot of people

480
00:22:39,880 --> 00:22:42,320
Speaker 1: and necessarily with bad science, So they hadn't shared it.

481
00:22:42,359 --> 00:22:47,200
Speaker 1: But were they like quietly changing practices they were starting

482
00:22:47,240 --> 00:22:49,679
Speaker 1: to buy the mid fifties or so like. But yes,

483
00:22:49,760 --> 00:22:51,879
Speaker 1: certainly by the late fifties some of this had started

484
00:22:51,880 --> 00:22:53,960
Speaker 1: to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting

485
00:22:54,040 --> 00:22:57,160
Speaker 1: people know, and so China was just like, I guess

486
00:22:57,160 --> 00:22:59,800
Speaker 1: this stuff works, We'll give it a shot ourselves. So

487
00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:02,119
Speaker 1: probably would have told us, would have told us if

488
00:23:02,119 --> 00:23:05,639
Speaker 1: this was killing people. Prior to the Shanko is M,

489
00:23:05,800 --> 00:23:08,560
Speaker 1: one point five million seedlings had been spread per two

490
00:23:08,560 --> 00:23:11,680
Speaker 1: point five acres of farmland in China right in nineteen

491
00:23:11,760 --> 00:23:14,119
Speaker 1: fifty eight as part of the Greatly Before where Chinese

492
00:23:14,160 --> 00:23:16,320
Speaker 1: farmers were ordered to plant six and a half million

493
00:23:16,359 --> 00:23:19,960
Speaker 1: seedlings per two and a half acres. So that's one

494
00:23:20,000 --> 00:23:22,720
Speaker 1: point five million seedlings to six and a half million seeds.

495
00:23:22,800 --> 00:23:25,640
Speaker 1: That's a lot more seeds being planted in the same

496
00:23:25,680 --> 00:23:28,560
Speaker 1: amount of dirt. In nineteen fifty nine, the government increased

497
00:23:28,560 --> 00:23:31,520
Speaker 1: the number of seedlings to between twelve and fifteen million

498
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:34,160
Speaker 1: per two and a half acres. So they're just dowsing

499
00:23:34,280 --> 00:23:36,360
Speaker 1: way too many fucking seeds in the land, and they're

500
00:23:36,359 --> 00:23:38,639
Speaker 1: gonna hoping that these seeds start talking to each other,

501
00:23:38,680 --> 00:23:40,399
Speaker 1: and we're like, you know what, we gotta start growing

502
00:23:40,440 --> 00:23:45,200
Speaker 1: differently like people, seeds are stronger together. Yes, exactly, dynamics.

503
00:23:45,200 --> 00:23:48,119
Speaker 1: I remember something about um. Every important crop in China

504
00:23:48,240 --> 00:23:50,760
Speaker 1: was planted using this method, and across the board, almost

505
00:23:50,760 --> 00:23:53,840
Speaker 1: all of the seedlings died. State propaganda photographers would do

506
00:23:53,880 --> 00:23:55,639
Speaker 1: things like find a field of wheat that was growing,

507
00:23:55,720 --> 00:23:57,840
Speaker 1: hid a bench inside it, and have kids stand on

508
00:23:57,880 --> 00:23:59,520
Speaker 1: the bench so that they could at least claim that

509
00:23:59,520 --> 00:24:03,000
Speaker 1: the wheat growing so dense that children could walk across

510
00:24:03,040 --> 00:24:05,720
Speaker 1: the top of a field of wheat. So like, in reality,

511
00:24:05,880 --> 00:24:08,119
Speaker 1: they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow, and in

512
00:24:08,119 --> 00:24:10,200
Speaker 1: the areas where it is growing, it's not growing any

513
00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:12,680
Speaker 1: denser than it ever came in before. But they're essentially

514
00:24:13,200 --> 00:24:15,240
Speaker 1: faking it. They're cropping the photos in a way that

515
00:24:15,280 --> 00:24:17,880
Speaker 1: it makes it look like there, you know, potato inauguration

516
00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:21,440
Speaker 1: is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is. Yeah,

517
00:24:21,520 --> 00:24:23,679
Speaker 1: and many people didn't know this was bullshit. Millions of

518
00:24:23,720 --> 00:24:27,159
Speaker 1: farmers were watching crops die. The propagandists who you know

519
00:24:27,200 --> 00:24:30,080
Speaker 1: stuck benches inside of fields, knew that they were faking yields.

520
00:24:30,280 --> 00:24:32,639
Speaker 1: This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman

521
00:24:32,680 --> 00:24:35,160
Speaker 1: Mao out of what was probably a mix of genuine

522
00:24:35,160 --> 00:24:37,240
Speaker 1: desire to please the Chairman and fear of what would

523
00:24:37,280 --> 00:24:39,760
Speaker 1: happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared

524
00:24:39,800 --> 00:24:42,520
Speaker 1: to be reality. One witness to a visit from Mao

525
00:24:42,600 --> 00:24:45,800
Speaker 1: to this inly experimental field outside tan Jin in nineteen

526
00:24:45,880 --> 00:24:49,280
Speaker 1: fifty eight recalled that before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice

527
00:24:49,320 --> 00:24:52,040
Speaker 1: plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly

528
00:24:52,160 --> 00:24:55,200
Speaker 1: that you really could walk across them. Once Mao left,

529
00:24:55,280 --> 00:24:58,480
Speaker 1: the rice was replanted. Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same

530
00:24:58,480 --> 00:25:00,560
Speaker 1: thing done in a different city the chair and visited.

531
00:25:00,720 --> 00:25:03,720
Speaker 1: He later stated, all of China was a stage, all

532
00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:07,959
Speaker 1: the people performers in an extravaganza from now so, everybody's

533
00:25:08,040 --> 00:25:10,760
Speaker 1: just like, we gotta, we gotta this. This is the guy, like,

534
00:25:10,880 --> 00:25:12,560
Speaker 1: we've got to make it look like this ship is

535
00:25:12,600 --> 00:25:15,200
Speaker 1: working and weirdly like walking on it is the way

536
00:25:15,240 --> 00:25:19,119
Speaker 1: We've all decided that it is weird spread like it's

537
00:25:19,119 --> 00:25:21,720
Speaker 1: gonna grow so dense we can walk across. This is

538
00:25:21,760 --> 00:25:24,760
Speaker 1: the thing that how else can you say? It's growing

539
00:25:24,760 --> 00:25:29,479
Speaker 1: a lot of fucking corn? Were their purges happening. Yeah yeah,

540
00:25:29,520 --> 00:25:31,520
Speaker 1: I mean I know as a thing people were murdered,

541
00:25:31,520 --> 00:25:34,439
Speaker 1: that they were definitely purchased. Oh yeah, yeah, he's purging.

542
00:25:34,480 --> 00:25:37,000
Speaker 1: He's purging during this period. So now also fell in

543
00:25:37,080 --> 00:25:39,480
Speaker 1: love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had

544
00:25:39,480 --> 00:25:42,159
Speaker 1: come up with, basically that planting seeds super deep was

545
00:25:42,320 --> 00:25:44,919
Speaker 1: a good idea. But where Stalin had been content to

546
00:25:44,960 --> 00:25:47,960
Speaker 1: find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories, Mao

547
00:25:48,000 --> 00:25:50,200
Speaker 1: saw himself as an innovator. So he figured that if

548
00:25:50,320 --> 00:25:55,000
Speaker 1: planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was

549
00:25:55,040 --> 00:25:57,040
Speaker 1: even better. Oh my god, yeah, why stopped there? These

550
00:25:57,040 --> 00:26:00,920
Speaker 1: scientists didn't have the ambition of his magic nation planting

551
00:26:01,520 --> 00:26:03,960
Speaker 1: way too deep. Guys, we all know that ground is

552
00:26:04,000 --> 00:26:06,920
Speaker 1: this deep, But what if I'm just saying even deeper? Yeah,

553
00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:10,240
Speaker 1: even deeper, as deep as you possibly clan. Often he

554
00:26:10,280 --> 00:26:13,359
Speaker 1: would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows

555
00:26:13,400 --> 00:26:16,520
Speaker 1: in the land, sometimes ten feet deep, in order to seats.

556
00:26:16,600 --> 00:26:18,480
Speaker 1: It's like, how I is a comedian know that wearing

557
00:26:18,480 --> 00:26:20,040
Speaker 1: two hats is very funny, but you know what's even

558
00:26:20,040 --> 00:26:23,080
Speaker 1: funnier than that? Wearing three hats just go bigger, yeah,

559
00:26:23,240 --> 00:26:25,040
Speaker 1: and Maw would be walking into the room with like

560
00:26:25,080 --> 00:26:27,800
Speaker 1: forty or fifty hats, and everyone would also be like,

561
00:26:27,800 --> 00:26:29,719
Speaker 1: we also need to put these. Everybody get on them

562
00:26:29,720 --> 00:26:31,600
Speaker 1: in they hats. How dare you not have thirty hats

563
00:26:31,720 --> 00:26:35,480
Speaker 1: walk across the hats. In one province, five million people

564
00:26:35,480 --> 00:26:37,560
Speaker 1: were ordered to plow for forty five straight days in

565
00:26:37,640 --> 00:26:40,280
Speaker 1: order to prepare three million hectares of land in the

566
00:26:40,320 --> 00:26:42,399
Speaker 1: north where the soil was too frozen to dig into,

567
00:26:42,600 --> 00:26:45,000
Speaker 1: holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them

568
00:26:45,000 --> 00:26:47,920
Speaker 1: dig deeper. This logic also applied to rice patties, which

569
00:26:47,920 --> 00:26:50,080
Speaker 1: meant peasant farmer women had to weigh deeper into the

570
00:26:50,080 --> 00:26:53,000
Speaker 1: patties than they've ever gone before, often catching infections as

571
00:26:53,000 --> 00:26:55,159
Speaker 1: a result. In at least one province, farmers had to

572
00:26:55,160 --> 00:26:57,639
Speaker 1: tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in the

573
00:26:57,760 --> 00:27:00,360
Speaker 1: rice patties because they were just going so deep. Oh

574
00:27:00,400 --> 00:27:03,760
Speaker 1: my god, yeah, just way too deep. Lushenko is to

575
00:27:03,760 --> 00:27:08,160
Speaker 1: agrobiology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers anymore.

576
00:27:08,520 --> 00:27:10,720
Speaker 1: Mao had the government in all it's spending to build

577
00:27:10,720 --> 00:27:13,320
Speaker 1: new chemical plants, and instead tried the same sort of bullshit.

578
00:27:13,359 --> 00:27:16,240
Speaker 1: Fertilizer recipes the Russians had used, generally a mix of

579
00:27:16,280 --> 00:27:19,480
Speaker 1: ten percent manure and normal dirt. According to Lushenko is

580
00:27:19,560 --> 00:27:21,960
Speaker 1: m the manure would magically transfer all its properties to

581
00:27:21,960 --> 00:27:24,680
Speaker 1: the regular dirt. This practice lead to farmers just mixing

582
00:27:24,680 --> 00:27:27,600
Speaker 1: in random garbage with dirt. Here's a quote from Hungry Ghosts.

583
00:27:28,200 --> 00:27:30,800
Speaker 1: People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts

584
00:27:30,800 --> 00:27:32,680
Speaker 1: of the city, where it was buried for several weeks

585
00:27:32,720 --> 00:27:35,479
Speaker 1: before being put out on the fields near Shanghai. Peasants

586
00:27:35,560 --> 00:27:37,720
Speaker 1: dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk

587
00:27:37,760 --> 00:27:40,080
Speaker 1: across the fields and bare feet. Others broke up the

588
00:27:40,160 --> 00:27:42,080
Speaker 1: mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves, and

589
00:27:42,119 --> 00:27:44,800
Speaker 1: even pulled down their mud walls to use his fertilizer.

590
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:47,359
Speaker 1: You know Tip MoU's credit. I know that's maybe not right,

591
00:27:47,440 --> 00:27:48,919
Speaker 1: But if I were to put a little of my

592
00:27:49,040 --> 00:27:52,320
Speaker 1: own manure into, say a bowl of mashed potatoes and

593
00:27:52,400 --> 00:27:53,960
Speaker 1: mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's

594
00:27:53,960 --> 00:27:55,960
Speaker 1: all manure now. I wouldn't be like, well, there's still

595
00:27:56,040 --> 00:27:57,880
Speaker 1: there's a lot of good mashed potatoes in there. When

596
00:27:57,920 --> 00:28:00,840
Speaker 1: you are mixing poop with food. Yes, in person poop

597
00:28:00,920 --> 00:28:05,920
Speaker 1: means all. That is a fair point, but it doesn't

598
00:28:05,960 --> 00:28:08,879
Speaker 1: work that way when you're trying to create fertilized soil.

599
00:28:10,080 --> 00:28:12,959
Speaker 1: So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all

600
00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:15,240
Speaker 1: of this heroic innovation, but that meant they were also

601
00:28:15,240 --> 00:28:16,959
Speaker 1: going to have to deal with the surgeon pests. As

602
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:19,760
Speaker 1: I mentioned, So yeah, in nineteen fifty eight, he ordered

603
00:28:19,880 --> 00:28:22,280
Speaker 1: farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust

604
00:28:22,359 --> 00:28:25,080
Speaker 1: all of the sparrows to death. We already went over that. Clearly,

605
00:28:25,080 --> 00:28:26,560
Speaker 1: this is all like a plot from someone inside the

606
00:28:26,600 --> 00:28:29,119
Speaker 1: government that hates sparrows, just the long play to get

607
00:28:29,200 --> 00:28:31,880
Speaker 1: rid of sparrows. How many people starve if we get

608
00:28:31,920 --> 00:28:34,320
Speaker 1: rid of those god damn birds? Get off my roof.

609
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:37,080
Speaker 1: Wacky as this all was. For a while, things looked

610
00:28:37,080 --> 00:28:39,000
Speaker 1: like they were going great. Nineteen fifty eight was a

611
00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:41,160
Speaker 1: good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look

612
00:28:41,200 --> 00:28:43,840
Speaker 1: like the autumn harvest head quadrupled. Now, when his comrades

613
00:28:43,840 --> 00:28:46,600
Speaker 1: started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they

614
00:28:46,680 --> 00:28:49,600
Speaker 1: knew they were soon going to have. It was reported

615
00:28:49,600 --> 00:28:51,680
Speaker 1: that fields had been producing less than three d and

616
00:28:51,720 --> 00:28:54,040
Speaker 1: thirty pounds of grain per one of an acre now

617
00:28:54,080 --> 00:28:57,120
Speaker 1: produced forty five to fifty three thousand pounds of grain,

618
00:28:57,480 --> 00:29:00,480
Speaker 1: which if true, would be an amazing eight of income.

619
00:29:00,600 --> 00:29:02,280
Speaker 1: They have too much food. They should just start destroying

620
00:29:02,320 --> 00:29:03,800
Speaker 1: the food they have now, just to make room for

621
00:29:03,800 --> 00:29:07,560
Speaker 1: the new food company. It's weird that you predicted exactly

622
00:29:07,600 --> 00:29:12,280
Speaker 1: what you're going to need that food. So all of

623
00:29:12,320 --> 00:29:15,120
Speaker 1: that information on how much grain they were growing was lies.

624
00:29:15,280 --> 00:29:18,120
Speaker 1: The State Statistical Bureau had been shuttered and replaced by

625
00:29:18,200 --> 00:29:21,840
Speaker 1: good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies

626
00:29:21,880 --> 00:29:24,560
Speaker 1: about the harvest. And so for a little while, China

627
00:29:24,640 --> 00:29:26,520
Speaker 1: thought it had more food than it knew what to

628
00:29:26,560 --> 00:29:29,680
Speaker 1: do with. So in the autumn of Chinese citizens were

629
00:29:29,680 --> 00:29:31,600
Speaker 1: told to eat like it was going out of style.

630
00:29:32,120 --> 00:29:34,440
Speaker 1: One slogan at the time was eat as much as

631
00:29:34,520 --> 00:29:37,560
Speaker 1: you can and exert your utmost in production. Peasants in

632
00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:40,760
Speaker 1: a village called zeng Do told anthropologists later that quote

633
00:29:40,960 --> 00:29:44,080
Speaker 1: everyone irresponsibly eate, whether they were hungry or not, And

634
00:29:44,120 --> 00:29:46,320
Speaker 1: in twenty days they had finished almost all their rice.

635
00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:49,200
Speaker 1: They had rice which should have lasted six months. Oh

636
00:29:49,240 --> 00:29:52,080
Speaker 1: my god, So I do now feel guilty that that is.

637
00:29:52,400 --> 00:29:55,560
Speaker 1: My attitude to eating three to five times a day

638
00:29:55,680 --> 00:29:58,480
Speaker 1: is like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when

639
00:29:58,480 --> 00:30:00,920
Speaker 1: you when you step until it hurts, man, And I'm

640
00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:02,880
Speaker 1: not getting out in the fields and doing any labor. No.

641
00:30:02,960 --> 00:30:04,680
Speaker 1: I mean. One of the good rules of thumb with

642
00:30:04,720 --> 00:30:06,760
Speaker 1: life is that if you do whatever you're doing until

643
00:30:06,840 --> 00:30:09,480
Speaker 1: it hurts, about fifty percent of the time, that will

644
00:30:09,520 --> 00:30:11,640
Speaker 1: be the right thing to do. Your body is a

645
00:30:11,640 --> 00:30:13,640
Speaker 1: way of telling you to stop, which is calling a

646
00:30:13,680 --> 00:30:17,440
Speaker 1: physical discomfort. Yeah, so if you work out till it hurts, Yeah,

647
00:30:19,360 --> 00:30:21,240
Speaker 1: that's what we're always And the same thing is true

648
00:30:21,240 --> 00:30:23,720
Speaker 1: with eating or with snorting a lot of cocaine. You know,

649
00:30:24,120 --> 00:30:26,360
Speaker 1: do coke until you start to bleed too much to

650
00:30:26,400 --> 00:30:28,040
Speaker 1: do more coke, and then it's time to stop doing.

651
00:30:28,080 --> 00:30:31,440
Speaker 1: Switch nostrils, switch nostrils, switch drugs, you know, move to

652
00:30:31,480 --> 00:30:34,600
Speaker 1: the butt until your veins collapse. Do it till it hurts.

653
00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:38,680
Speaker 1: Advice for all of our listeners. So Way D, a

654
00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:41,920
Speaker 1: survivor of the Great Bleep Forward, later recalled We Lived Well.

655
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:44,400
Speaker 1: We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary

656
00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:46,560
Speaker 1: to eat meat. If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't

657
00:30:46,560 --> 00:30:48,800
Speaker 1: do People even avide with each other to see who

658
00:30:48,840 --> 00:30:51,920
Speaker 1: could eat the most, so they're have an eating contest.

659
00:30:51,960 --> 00:30:55,040
Speaker 1: They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter

660
00:30:55,120 --> 00:30:57,600
Speaker 1: supply of food in a couple of weeks, just because

661
00:30:57,960 --> 00:31:01,440
Speaker 1: why not, there's gonna be so much food. I know

662
00:31:01,520 --> 00:31:03,719
Speaker 1: it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but

663
00:31:04,000 --> 00:31:05,880
Speaker 1: this is all sounding pretty nice to me, right it

664
00:31:06,040 --> 00:31:08,560
Speaker 1: come on, it's coming down from on high, like and

665
00:31:08,600 --> 00:31:10,680
Speaker 1: if you're one of these peasants after years of war

666
00:31:10,760 --> 00:31:13,200
Speaker 1: in privation, we eat as much meat as you can, like,

667
00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:16,840
Speaker 1: you're feeling great. You're feeling like this fucking communism thing,

668
00:31:17,520 --> 00:31:20,440
Speaker 1: there's no downside, up up, up, up. I can't imagine

669
00:31:20,440 --> 00:31:22,440
Speaker 1: the graft changing. Yeah, we got plenty of meat, plenty

670
00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:25,040
Speaker 1: of grain. That's really all we care about, like other

671
00:31:25,120 --> 00:31:27,080
Speaker 1: than the stuff we have that's not meat and grain.

672
00:31:27,200 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 1: But anyway, it seems great for a while. People ate

673
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:31,880
Speaker 1: so much that by the time winter came around, the

674
00:31:31,920 --> 00:31:34,200
Speaker 1: granaries were empty and most of China was running out

675
00:31:34,200 --> 00:31:36,640
Speaker 1: of food. So there's that hard right turn. The States

676
00:31:36,640 --> 00:31:39,400
Speaker 1: still had full granaries, but rather than hand out food

677
00:31:39,400 --> 00:31:41,800
Speaker 1: to the people, mal convinced himself that the peasants were

678
00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:45,200
Speaker 1: hiding grain to be counter revolutionary. It was very important

679
00:31:45,200 --> 00:31:47,520
Speaker 1: to him that communism seemed to be doing well in China.

680
00:31:47,640 --> 00:31:50,240
Speaker 1: He didn't want to look bad to the USSR, so

681
00:31:50,280 --> 00:31:53,400
Speaker 1: he had China double her grain exports and cut down

682
00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:56,080
Speaker 1: on imports. That way it would at least look like

683
00:31:56,120 --> 00:31:58,880
Speaker 1: a success. Now, oh man, this is like a rom

684
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:02,360
Speaker 1: com where like two characters hate each other or like

685
00:32:02,920 --> 00:32:05,080
Speaker 1: are too afraid to tell the other person the truth

686
00:32:05,080 --> 00:32:06,719
Speaker 1: because they don't want to look bad. But really, like

687
00:32:06,760 --> 00:32:09,560
Speaker 1: if they just came together and had to sit down conversation,

688
00:32:09,560 --> 00:32:11,000
Speaker 1: which they might at the end of this film, they'd

689
00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:12,280
Speaker 1: be like, we have a lot in common. I don't

690
00:32:12,280 --> 00:32:14,440
Speaker 1: have any grain? Do you have any grain? And oh

691
00:32:14,480 --> 00:32:16,160
Speaker 1: my god, I'm trying to impress you this whole time.

692
00:32:16,680 --> 00:32:18,520
Speaker 1: It would be really fun to do a nice romantic

693
00:32:18,520 --> 00:32:21,880
Speaker 1: comedy set during just Is twenty million people starved to death,

694
00:32:22,080 --> 00:32:25,840
Speaker 1: like Stalin and Mao having a meat cute and just,

695
00:32:25,960 --> 00:32:30,920
Speaker 1: oh my god, what a cute movie that would be. Uh,

696
00:32:31,040 --> 00:32:33,840
Speaker 1: Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's

697
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:36,160
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and they both live in Hawaii and

698
00:32:36,280 --> 00:32:38,760
Speaker 1: like they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling rain.

699
00:32:39,880 --> 00:32:41,840
Speaker 1: Maybe a road movie where they're just like going to

700
00:32:41,840 --> 00:32:43,640
Speaker 1: get more grain, to get you know something where it's

701
00:32:43,640 --> 00:32:45,160
Speaker 1: just like they have to spend a lot of time

702
00:32:45,200 --> 00:32:48,520
Speaker 1: in a truck together in a car. Again. Yeah, there's

703
00:32:48,520 --> 00:32:52,720
Speaker 1: a lot of fun potential. Yeah, Okay. So the collective

704
00:32:52,760 --> 00:32:55,640
Speaker 1: farming system that Maw and you know, his regime had

705
00:32:55,640 --> 00:32:58,200
Speaker 1: induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct

706
00:32:58,240 --> 00:33:00,320
Speaker 1: control of the food that they grew in hard sted

707
00:33:00,720 --> 00:33:03,640
Speaker 1: It went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens.

708
00:33:03,880 --> 00:33:05,720
Speaker 1: All this meant that it was under the direct control

709
00:33:05,760 --> 00:33:08,480
Speaker 1: of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record breaking

710
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:11,240
Speaker 1: allocations to the government. So food that could have fed

711
00:33:11,280 --> 00:33:13,200
Speaker 1: people was given to the government for the sake of

712
00:33:13,240 --> 00:33:16,520
Speaker 1: individual party members careers, and Mao then shifted out of

713
00:33:16,560 --> 00:33:18,920
Speaker 1: the country for the sake of his own Ego nine

714
00:33:19,680 --> 00:33:21,760
Speaker 1: harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by

715
00:33:21,800 --> 00:33:24,240
Speaker 1: the spring of nineteen fifty nine, more than twenty four

716
00:33:24,280 --> 00:33:27,560
Speaker 1: million people were starving in China. Mao being Mao was

717
00:33:27,560 --> 00:33:31,040
Speaker 1: incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies.

718
00:33:31,360 --> 00:33:34,200
Speaker 1: The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap forward were

719
00:33:34,200 --> 00:33:37,840
Speaker 1: only quote tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience.

720
00:33:38,640 --> 00:33:41,440
Speaker 1: So it's an artful way of putting Yeah, I mean

721
00:33:41,440 --> 00:33:44,520
Speaker 1: he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a

722
00:33:44,600 --> 00:33:47,400
Speaker 1: lot of people in this country today, blenders in this

723
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:50,680
Speaker 1: country today. Yeah. When his braver Aids brought up just

724
00:33:50,720 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 1: how bad things were starting to look in the countryside,

725
00:33:52,800 --> 00:33:55,120
Speaker 1: Mao said, quote, come back in ten years and see

726
00:33:55,160 --> 00:33:57,640
Speaker 1: whether we were correct. China is not going to sink

727
00:33:57,640 --> 00:33:59,960
Speaker 1: into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply

728
00:34:00,040 --> 00:34:02,800
Speaker 1: because there were shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap.

729
00:34:03,040 --> 00:34:05,719
Speaker 1: Imbalances and market problems have made everybody tense. But this

730
00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:08,800
Speaker 1: tension is not justified. Even though I am tense myself. No,

731
00:34:08,960 --> 00:34:11,000
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense. If

732
00:34:11,040 --> 00:34:13,400
Speaker 1: I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills

733
00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:15,400
Speaker 1: and then I feel better. You want to try sleeping

734
00:34:15,400 --> 00:34:19,280
Speaker 1: pills if you feel uptight. So right, that's a real quote.

735
00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:22,200
Speaker 1: That's maus advice. When his guys are like, you know,

736
00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:24,080
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people are starving, and he's like,

737
00:34:24,160 --> 00:34:26,759
Speaker 1: try some drugs. Oh my god. Yeah, I follow someone

738
00:34:26,800 --> 00:34:29,200
Speaker 1: like him on Instagram. I think I am someone like

739
00:34:29,280 --> 00:34:30,879
Speaker 1: him a lot of the time, but I've never tried

740
00:34:30,920 --> 00:34:35,719
Speaker 1: to reform a continent's farming practices just get high. Was

741
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:38,239
Speaker 1: maw at all like when these things, when he saw

742
00:34:38,280 --> 00:34:40,120
Speaker 1: that they were not going well, did any part of

743
00:34:40,200 --> 00:34:44,000
Speaker 1: him feel like it's the people's fault for not allowing

744
00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:46,320
Speaker 1: the system to change them or to not like forging

745
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:49,840
Speaker 1: themselves into newer, better, you know versions, Or was he

746
00:34:49,880 --> 00:34:51,840
Speaker 1: just sort of like a bad weather. I don't know

747
00:34:52,320 --> 00:34:53,640
Speaker 1: about him to say what was going on in his

748
00:34:53,640 --> 00:34:55,600
Speaker 1: own internal heart, But the things that he said in

749
00:34:55,640 --> 00:34:59,120
Speaker 1: the practices that he put out as a result of

750
00:34:59,160 --> 00:35:02,560
Speaker 1: like these problems, portray a man who believes that the

751
00:35:02,680 --> 00:35:05,879
Speaker 1: issues and his plan are due to selfish people who

752
00:35:05,880 --> 00:35:08,000
Speaker 1: are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain, who

753
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:09,640
Speaker 1: were refusing to give up what they owe to the

754
00:35:09,640 --> 00:35:12,560
Speaker 1: government and whatnot. Like that's the issue in the long

755
00:35:12,680 --> 00:35:14,360
Speaker 1: and the long term. If he just like keeps a

756
00:35:14,400 --> 00:35:16,719
Speaker 1: strong hand or a stronger one, they all work out

757
00:35:16,760 --> 00:35:19,319
Speaker 1: because they're not really starving their hiding food because they

758
00:35:19,320 --> 00:35:20,799
Speaker 1: don't want to give it to the government. They're eating

759
00:35:20,840 --> 00:35:23,600
Speaker 1: in secret and stuff like that. That's his what he

760
00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:25,839
Speaker 1: kind of rounding up fat children and just being like

761
00:35:25,920 --> 00:35:27,920
Speaker 1: you're hiding grain and eating. I don't think they were

762
00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:33,400
Speaker 1: fat children. So at this point disaster probably could have

763
00:35:33,440 --> 00:35:35,600
Speaker 1: been averted. The government had a lot of food and storage,

764
00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:37,680
Speaker 1: and if the flaws in the system had been admitted,

765
00:35:37,719 --> 00:35:40,399
Speaker 1: the bad practices halted and changed back to normal, things

766
00:35:40,480 --> 00:35:42,600
Speaker 1: might have been okay for Chinese agriculture. But that would

767
00:35:42,600 --> 00:35:44,840
Speaker 1: have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws and

768
00:35:44,880 --> 00:35:48,879
Speaker 1: their ideologically consistent scientific theories. It also would have meant

769
00:35:48,880 --> 00:35:51,600
Speaker 1: backpedaling on all of the propaganda they put out, So

770
00:35:51,719 --> 00:35:55,160
Speaker 1: rather than admit any error, Maw doubled down. Anyone who

771
00:35:55,200 --> 00:35:57,680
Speaker 1: does not make a great leap is the rightist conservative.

772
00:35:57,800 --> 00:36:00,319
Speaker 1: Some people think that a leap is far to adventure risks.

773
00:36:00,320 --> 00:36:02,160
Speaker 1: It is new, it may not be perfect, but it

774
00:36:02,239 --> 00:36:05,839
Speaker 1: is not an adventure. All must have revolutionary optimism and

775
00:36:05,880 --> 00:36:10,959
Speaker 1: revolutionary heroism. So y'all are just too scared of the future. Yeah,

776
00:36:11,080 --> 00:36:14,400
Speaker 1: and that's why this is having some growing revolutionary We

777
00:36:14,440 --> 00:36:16,720
Speaker 1: all go a little. We all got to be revolutionaries.

778
00:36:16,800 --> 00:36:18,920
Speaker 1: Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains,

779
00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:21,160
Speaker 1: but it's growing, I mean, not for me or the

780
00:36:21,160 --> 00:36:23,799
Speaker 1: other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China,

781
00:36:23,840 --> 00:36:26,359
Speaker 1: because we all are eating well, because disgusting amount of grain.

782
00:36:26,640 --> 00:36:28,719
Speaker 1: If I seemable of grain, I am done. Yeah, I

783
00:36:28,800 --> 00:36:32,239
Speaker 1: threw up more than I eat. My dog was like

784
00:36:32,280 --> 00:36:36,920
Speaker 1: a king. So the autumn of nineteen fifty nine harvest

785
00:36:37,080 --> 00:36:40,200
Speaker 1: was thirty million tons lower than the nineteen fifty eight

786
00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:43,239
Speaker 1: harvest had been. Officials, however, reported that the harvest was

787
00:36:43,280 --> 00:36:46,359
Speaker 1: the highest ever. This saved them from reporting failure to mount,

788
00:36:46,600 --> 00:36:48,640
Speaker 1: but it also meant that the government based its taxes

789
00:36:48,680 --> 00:36:51,080
Speaker 1: that year on the expectation the country had grown more

790
00:36:51,080 --> 00:36:53,920
Speaker 1: food than ever, and so in nineteen fifty nine, a

791
00:36:54,000 --> 00:36:57,080
Speaker 1: year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes

792
00:36:57,080 --> 00:37:00,960
Speaker 1: in recent history. Peasants were required to turn over their

793
00:37:00,960 --> 00:37:03,879
Speaker 1: total output, and since that total output was a fake

794
00:37:03,960 --> 00:37:07,279
Speaker 1: number calculated via nonsense math, they were basically ordered to

795
00:37:07,360 --> 00:37:09,880
Speaker 1: hand over all of their food, and in many cases

796
00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:14,040
Speaker 1: more food than they actually had. So well that those

797
00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:17,480
Speaker 1: numbers just aren't gonna work out for anybody. Know. They

798
00:37:17,520 --> 00:37:19,680
Speaker 1: don't know, And I bet they get all mad and

799
00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:22,200
Speaker 1: they don't pay their taxes. Yeah, they sure do. I

800
00:37:22,200 --> 00:37:24,480
Speaker 1: didn't pay my taxes for five years. I didn't file

801
00:37:24,520 --> 00:37:26,200
Speaker 1: and it took five years for me to hear anything

802
00:37:26,200 --> 00:37:29,080
Speaker 1: about it. I bet that's not what the case was then. No, no, no, Actually,

803
00:37:29,360 --> 00:37:32,000
Speaker 1: I will say this. Everybody winds about the I R S.

804
00:37:32,040 --> 00:37:33,680
Speaker 1: Like I grew up in a pretty conservative part of

805
00:37:33,680 --> 00:37:35,520
Speaker 1: the world. They're always talking about how horrible it is.

806
00:37:35,560 --> 00:37:37,760
Speaker 1: As someone who's been late on his taxes a few times,

807
00:37:37,880 --> 00:37:40,560
Speaker 1: they're actually pretty easy to deal with. Yeah, they try

808
00:37:40,600 --> 00:37:42,960
Speaker 1: to find a solution. They really want you to give

809
00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:45,560
Speaker 1: them something in the work with you. Look at us

810
00:37:45,560 --> 00:37:47,680
Speaker 1: just defending the I R S here, and they're reasonable

811
00:37:47,719 --> 00:37:54,120
Speaker 1: of policies. I mean I like rhoads. Ye like aces. Okay,

812
00:37:54,320 --> 00:37:57,560
Speaker 1: speaking of something else, I like products and services that

813
00:37:57,600 --> 00:38:01,960
Speaker 1: support the show. And let's let those products and services

814
00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:06,640
Speaker 1: advertise to us and irritate the ghost of mouse dung

815
00:38:12,400 --> 00:38:15,440
Speaker 1: and we're back. Boy, those were some good products, Oh

816
00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:17,719
Speaker 1: my god. I mean, for the for the ones that

817
00:38:17,760 --> 00:38:20,799
Speaker 1: meet my needs. I'm definitely gonnao about exchanging goods or

818
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:23,839
Speaker 1: money for them. Oh yeah, goods or money. They'll take both.

819
00:38:23,920 --> 00:38:27,359
Speaker 1: Usually trades. Big trade is a bit barter. I'm all

820
00:38:27,400 --> 00:38:29,880
Speaker 1: about barter. Oh my god. Waited to see these clamshell

821
00:38:29,880 --> 00:38:34,120
Speaker 1: necklaces that I make. Oh my god. Okay, so we

822
00:38:34,280 --> 00:38:37,840
Speaker 1: just talked about the autumn harvest, which was thirty million

823
00:38:37,880 --> 00:38:39,919
Speaker 1: tons lower than it had been the year before, and

824
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:42,680
Speaker 1: the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort

825
00:38:42,719 --> 00:38:45,080
Speaker 1: of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be,

826
00:38:45,120 --> 00:38:49,480
Speaker 1: and so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more

827
00:38:49,520 --> 00:38:51,479
Speaker 1: than they had actually grown. I'm going to read another

828
00:38:51,560 --> 00:38:54,479
Speaker 1: quote from Hungry Ghosts. Here. In many places the entire

829
00:38:54,520 --> 00:38:57,919
Speaker 1: harvest was seized. Sometimes officials reported a harvest so big

830
00:38:57,960 --> 00:39:01,759
Speaker 1: that even after taking away everything they could, including all livestock, vegetables,

831
00:39:01,760 --> 00:39:04,399
Speaker 1: and cash crops, they still continue to search from house

832
00:39:04,440 --> 00:39:07,200
Speaker 1: to house. Mal had ordered officials not only to deliver

833
00:39:07,280 --> 00:39:11,320
Speaker 1: the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks,

834
00:39:11,320 --> 00:39:14,239
Speaker 1: and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village leading

835
00:39:14,239 --> 00:39:16,720
Speaker 1: the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal

836
00:39:16,760 --> 00:39:19,360
Speaker 1: and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and

837
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:23,600
Speaker 1: beaten to death. So again, I r S. Isn't sounded

838
00:39:23,680 --> 00:39:27,360
Speaker 1: so bad now, So this is a real dumb question.

839
00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:33,560
Speaker 1: But like money, taxes pay for the state needs. You

840
00:39:33,840 --> 00:39:35,799
Speaker 1: give the you give the government dollars and they use

841
00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:37,160
Speaker 1: the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the

842
00:39:37,239 --> 00:39:39,520
Speaker 1: roads on for all them. Absolutely, that's my understanding. So

843
00:39:39,560 --> 00:39:43,200
Speaker 1: when they're taking the food and on principle, on principle

844
00:39:43,280 --> 00:39:45,279
Speaker 1: that like, well, we're all afraid of saying that what

845
00:39:45,360 --> 00:39:47,600
Speaker 1: the truth is, um, Is it just so that the

846
00:39:47,680 --> 00:39:50,640
Speaker 1: capital has a ton or are they selling it? Is

847
00:39:50,680 --> 00:39:52,960
Speaker 1: this is their global trade going on where it's somehow

848
00:39:53,040 --> 00:39:55,840
Speaker 1: like benefiting. The idea is both that you know, the

849
00:39:55,880 --> 00:39:58,080
Speaker 1: state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs,

850
00:39:58,080 --> 00:39:59,360
Speaker 1: so you give all your food to the state, and

851
00:39:59,360 --> 00:40:01,799
Speaker 1: then it redistrict is that it's supposed to perfectly work.

852
00:40:01,840 --> 00:40:03,680
Speaker 1: And of course also they're not just exporting to the

853
00:40:03,680 --> 00:40:06,240
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. They're exporting suporting North Korea at this point

854
00:40:06,239 --> 00:40:08,600
Speaker 1: because it's this idea that like the food that we

855
00:40:08,680 --> 00:40:10,600
Speaker 1: produced will be used, you know, some of it we

856
00:40:10,640 --> 00:40:12,560
Speaker 1: will have to sell for resources that we can buy

857
00:40:12,600 --> 00:40:14,440
Speaker 1: things that we can't yet make ourselves, and we can

858
00:40:14,440 --> 00:40:18,160
Speaker 1: continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist blosh

859
00:40:18,280 --> 00:40:20,520
Speaker 1: that can compete against the decade and you know, the

860
00:40:20,600 --> 00:40:24,320
Speaker 1: terrible West and whatnot. Um, with our spread out seeds

861
00:40:24,480 --> 00:40:28,600
Speaker 1: with our spread out. They're fucking horshly spread out seeds,

862
00:40:30,200 --> 00:40:34,520
Speaker 1: much corn, much soil around them. God damn fertilizer swimming

863
00:40:34,520 --> 00:40:38,680
Speaker 1: in it. Oh boy, Okay, So obviously, willful denial of

864
00:40:38,719 --> 00:40:41,319
Speaker 1: reality can only last for so long as we in

865
00:40:41,360 --> 00:40:43,719
Speaker 1: the West learned with a little war called all of

866
00:40:43,760 --> 00:40:47,600
Speaker 1: the wars we fought in the last seventy years. Eventually

867
00:40:47,600 --> 00:40:50,040
Speaker 1: it became clear that even the heavy handed methods used

868
00:40:50,080 --> 00:40:52,239
Speaker 1: by the government weren't turning up as much food as

869
00:40:52,280 --> 00:40:56,040
Speaker 1: they ought to have. Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless,

870
00:40:56,120 --> 00:40:58,120
Speaker 1: Maw came to the conclusion that the peasants were just

871
00:40:58,200 --> 00:41:00,759
Speaker 1: bearing their grain underground to hide it. He accused them

872
00:41:00,760 --> 00:41:03,239
Speaker 1: of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day, and

873
00:41:03,280 --> 00:41:06,759
Speaker 1: eating rice secretly at night. In reality, most people were

874
00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:09,359
Speaker 1: subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made

875
00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:13,440
Speaker 1: mostly out of grass and inedible plants. Yeah, well, what

876
00:41:13,520 --> 00:41:15,719
Speaker 1: else you gonna do? I think those are now called

877
00:41:15,719 --> 00:41:18,600
Speaker 1: grain balls in l A. Yeah, well, now you would

878
00:41:18,640 --> 00:41:21,200
Speaker 1: pay fourteen dollars to have one of those out of

879
00:41:21,200 --> 00:41:24,640
Speaker 1: a truck, can't. I guess that's the food of this

880
00:41:24,680 --> 00:41:26,920
Speaker 1: city at the end of the year, while tens of

881
00:41:26,920 --> 00:41:30,040
Speaker 1: millions of people starved, the People's Daily newspaper advised peasants

882
00:41:30,120 --> 00:41:33,520
Speaker 1: to quote, practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality,

883
00:41:33,560 --> 00:41:35,560
Speaker 1: and only eat two meals a day, one of which

884
00:41:35,560 --> 00:41:38,440
Speaker 1: should be soft and liquid, which again sounds pretty much

885
00:41:38,480 --> 00:41:42,640
Speaker 1: like California. Right, come on the run. You know you

886
00:41:42,680 --> 00:41:44,320
Speaker 1: will be glad to know that while tens of millions

887
00:41:44,360 --> 00:41:47,640
Speaker 1: of people were starving, mel gave up meat. Oh that's good,

888
00:41:47,840 --> 00:41:50,680
Speaker 1: you know, follow the leader exactly. Everybody give up meat.

889
00:41:50,680 --> 00:41:53,080
Speaker 1: Oh you we took all the meat, and we beat

890
00:41:53,120 --> 00:41:54,880
Speaker 1: half of you to death because you didn't give us

891
00:41:54,880 --> 00:42:01,319
Speaker 1: your chickens. Life's funny. Sometimes. The Great Famine would last

892
00:42:01,360 --> 00:42:04,080
Speaker 1: until nineteen sixty one and go down as the deadliest

893
00:42:04,080 --> 00:42:07,960
Speaker 1: peacetime disaster in Chinese history. During this entire time, Mao's

894
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:11,239
Speaker 1: government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union,

895
00:42:11,239 --> 00:42:13,239
Speaker 1: and elsewhere as a result of their desire to hide

896
00:42:13,280 --> 00:42:15,960
Speaker 1: the famine and put on a successful face. The provinces

897
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:18,440
Speaker 1: that grew the most food during the famine where the

898
00:42:18,480 --> 00:42:21,799
Speaker 1: provinces where the most peasants starved. Oh god, yeah, So

899
00:42:21,800 --> 00:42:24,120
Speaker 1: the people who are actually making the most food are

900
00:42:24,160 --> 00:42:27,600
Speaker 1: the people who are most likely to die in the end. Conservatively,

901
00:42:27,719 --> 00:42:30,880
Speaker 1: twenty five to thirty million people died from the famines

902
00:42:30,920 --> 00:42:33,040
Speaker 1: that came from the Great Leap Forward. You will hear

903
00:42:33,120 --> 00:42:36,719
Speaker 1: higher numbers as well. It is very politicized death toll,

904
00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:40,440
Speaker 1: both because people conservatives in the West have a vested

905
00:42:40,480 --> 00:42:43,320
Speaker 1: interest in making it seem higher, so sometimes here fifty million,

906
00:42:43,360 --> 00:42:47,160
Speaker 1: sixty million, and also people who are you know, further

907
00:42:47,239 --> 00:42:49,400
Speaker 1: to the left or even maoist today have a desire

908
00:42:49,400 --> 00:42:52,720
Speaker 1: and downplaying the famine. Twenty five to thirties, maybe thirty

909
00:42:52,719 --> 00:42:55,239
Speaker 1: five million seems like a very fair estimate based on

910
00:42:55,280 --> 00:42:58,120
Speaker 1: what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare. It's a

911
00:42:58,120 --> 00:43:00,959
Speaker 1: big range, but it's all bad. It's probably roughly half

912
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:03,040
Speaker 1: the death toll of World War two starved to death

913
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:05,399
Speaker 1: during this famine that didn't need to happen. Oh my god.

914
00:43:05,600 --> 00:43:08,640
Speaker 1: You know, so these bets were the result of many

915
00:43:08,640 --> 00:43:10,880
Speaker 1: different bad policy decisions. You know, the idea to like

916
00:43:11,200 --> 00:43:14,200
Speaker 1: make steel in backyard furnaces and stuff was not great.

917
00:43:15,480 --> 00:43:19,080
Speaker 1: And I'm just I've tried, you know, amateur, you know,

918
00:43:19,080 --> 00:43:20,960
Speaker 1: you go online, you watch these videos, you set it

919
00:43:21,040 --> 00:43:23,399
Speaker 1: up in your backyard, you melt down your plowshares, of course,

920
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:26,360
Speaker 1: the liquid, and then you let it cool into the

921
00:43:26,360 --> 00:43:28,640
Speaker 1: shape you want. I tried. It never works. Yeah, no,

922
00:43:28,760 --> 00:43:30,920
Speaker 1: it's not great. Um. So, there were a lot of

923
00:43:30,960 --> 00:43:32,839
Speaker 1: factors in the Great leap forward and why so many

924
00:43:32,880 --> 00:43:35,919
Speaker 1: people starved, but Lushenko wasn't was maybe the number one

925
00:43:36,040 --> 00:43:39,799
Speaker 1: contributing factor to this fan The blame for many of

926
00:43:39,840 --> 00:43:43,480
Speaker 1: these deaths then must land on the head of Lushenko. Uh,

927
00:43:43,560 --> 00:43:48,399
Speaker 1: it is very likely, although impossible to prove certainty, that

928
00:43:48,560 --> 00:43:51,640
Speaker 1: Lushenko was responsible for more death than any other scientist

929
00:43:51,719 --> 00:43:56,120
Speaker 1: in human history. Um. Although there's still time for the

930
00:43:56,200 --> 00:43:59,359
Speaker 1: guys who made the atom bomb to take that, you know, come,

931
00:43:59,719 --> 00:44:02,640
Speaker 1: but right now it's probably Leshenko. Where is he right

932
00:44:02,640 --> 00:44:04,839
Speaker 1: now again? Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union. That's

933
00:44:04,840 --> 00:44:06,680
Speaker 1: about what we're about to get back to. Yeah. Yeah,

934
00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:10,200
Speaker 1: So Trophim's dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to

935
00:44:10,239 --> 00:44:13,160
Speaker 1: degrade in nineteen fifty three after the death of Stalin.

936
00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:15,080
Speaker 1: Some of this was due to the millions of people

937
00:44:15,080 --> 00:44:16,600
Speaker 1: who had starved, but a lot of it had to

938
00:44:16,640 --> 00:44:19,120
Speaker 1: do with some very public post World War two failures.

939
00:44:19,520 --> 00:44:22,760
Speaker 1: Right after the war ended, Lushenko launched the Great Stalin

940
00:44:22,840 --> 00:44:25,600
Speaker 1: Plan for the Transformation of Nature. He believed that he

941
00:44:25,600 --> 00:44:27,880
Speaker 1: could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing

942
00:44:27,920 --> 00:44:30,719
Speaker 1: millions upon millions of trees. That might work, if you

943
00:44:30,719 --> 00:44:32,560
Speaker 1: could do it. I don't know, it seems like it

944
00:44:32,640 --> 00:44:35,520
Speaker 1: might actually work. But because he was Lushenko, he ordered

945
00:44:35,560 --> 00:44:37,880
Speaker 1: all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly

946
00:44:37,920 --> 00:44:40,040
Speaker 1: close to each other, and all of the plants died.

947
00:44:40,200 --> 00:44:41,960
Speaker 1: You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things,

948
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:44,000
Speaker 1: the essential thing is to grow them, right. He has

949
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:46,319
Speaker 1: all these other big ideas but can actually now just

950
00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:49,799
Speaker 1: it's like people from growing trees for forever, like we know,

951
00:44:50,520 --> 00:44:53,360
Speaker 1: we know there's forests everywhere you look. Come on, you

952
00:44:53,360 --> 00:44:55,359
Speaker 1: don't need to change that up. So yeah, he tries

953
00:44:55,360 --> 00:44:57,680
Speaker 1: to plant millions and millions of trees really really close together,

954
00:44:57,840 --> 00:44:59,879
Speaker 1: but the plants all died. Of course. Um of course

955
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:03,320
Speaker 1: they didn't die before The composer Shashkovic had written his

956
00:45:03,400 --> 00:45:06,640
Speaker 1: coral symphony The Song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht

957
00:45:06,640 --> 00:45:09,160
Speaker 1: had pinned this poem about the forest that was supposed

958
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 1: to happen but never wound up actually growing. Because anyway,

959
00:45:13,360 --> 00:45:15,520
Speaker 1: don't put your poem before the forest is what I

960
00:45:15,520 --> 00:45:17,520
Speaker 1: always say, you know, let the forest grow in then, right,

961
00:45:17,560 --> 00:45:19,760
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wisdom there. Don't put your poem,

962
00:45:19,760 --> 00:45:21,640
Speaker 1: but well, I'm gonna read the poem for this non

963
00:45:21,640 --> 00:45:25,440
Speaker 1: existent forest anyway. So let us, with ever newer arts,

964
00:45:25,600 --> 00:45:29,359
Speaker 1: change this Earth's form and operation gladly measure thousand year

965
00:45:29,400 --> 00:45:33,200
Speaker 1: old wisdom by new wisdom, one year old dreams golden

966
00:45:33,239 --> 00:45:36,480
Speaker 1: If let the lovely flood of grain rise higher, so

967
00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:45,360
Speaker 1: all the more tragic beauty wasted on science. Yeah, bad science.

968
00:45:45,400 --> 00:45:47,319
Speaker 1: If only he just known, he just needed to like

969
00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:50,399
Speaker 1: have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever,

970
00:45:50,400 --> 00:45:53,040
Speaker 1: he probably could have accomplished. Oh yeah, that would have

971
00:45:53,200 --> 00:45:55,759
Speaker 1: the same thing. And I don't know, warming Russia, just

972
00:45:55,800 --> 00:45:59,480
Speaker 1: to have everyone polluted a lot. Yeah, well they're getting

973
00:45:59,520 --> 00:46:02,799
Speaker 1: that anyway. So the way to Chinese eight Rice, we

974
00:46:02,880 --> 00:46:06,200
Speaker 1: just needed to drive pointlessly in Russia. Come on, everyone,

975
00:46:06,200 --> 00:46:09,799
Speaker 1: it's your duty. Just go in circles on the one road.

976
00:46:10,239 --> 00:46:12,960
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, the first generation of post Purge

977
00:46:13,000 --> 00:46:16,560
Speaker 1: Soviet scientists began to carefully try to dismantle the myth

978
00:46:16,600 --> 00:46:20,680
Speaker 1: of Lushenko. Nikita Khrushchev Stalin's successor protected Leshenko for a

979
00:46:20,719 --> 00:46:24,000
Speaker 1: little while, but Kristjev lost his job in nineteen sixty four,

980
00:46:24,080 --> 00:46:27,640
Speaker 1: and that same year physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lushenko to

981
00:46:27,680 --> 00:46:31,319
Speaker 1: the Russian Academy of Sciences. Quote, he is responsible for

982
00:46:31,360 --> 00:46:35,000
Speaker 1: the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics, in particular,

983
00:46:35,239 --> 00:46:38,759
Speaker 1: for the dissemination of pseudo scientific views, for adventurism, for

984
00:46:38,760 --> 00:46:42,040
Speaker 1: the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest,

985
00:46:42,080 --> 00:46:46,279
Speaker 1: and even death of many genuine scientists. So Sakarov is

986
00:46:46,280 --> 00:46:51,279
Speaker 1: spent in some Fireshenko, Yeah, that's that's pretty damning. In

987
00:46:51,360 --> 00:46:54,319
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, Lashenko was removed from his position as

988
00:46:54,320 --> 00:46:57,000
Speaker 1: the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto

989
00:46:57,000 --> 00:46:59,480
Speaker 1: a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue

990
00:46:59,480 --> 00:47:02,759
Speaker 1: his mostly live based research alone. That same year, the

991
00:47:02,800 --> 00:47:05,680
Speaker 1: president of the Academy of Sciences declared that lushenko wism

992
00:47:05,719 --> 00:47:08,279
Speaker 1: was no longer immune to criticism, because it had been

993
00:47:08,320 --> 00:47:11,560
Speaker 1: legally immune to criticism since sending forty six. An expert

994
00:47:11,560 --> 00:47:14,440
Speaker 1: commission was sent to look into Lushenko's experimental farm and

995
00:47:14,480 --> 00:47:16,800
Speaker 1: study his methods. They found that he was an obvious

996
00:47:16,800 --> 00:47:20,600
Speaker 1: and tremendous fraud. These results were published permanently demolishing Leshenko's

997
00:47:20,680 --> 00:47:26,320
Speaker 1: career and reputation. I mean, I have truly no sympathy

998
00:47:26,200 --> 00:47:30,120
Speaker 1: for this man who killed but the image of you

999
00:47:30,120 --> 00:47:34,800
Speaker 1: know this deeply fallen from Gray's scientist on a small,

1000
00:47:34,880 --> 00:47:40,799
Speaker 1: little experimental farm, trying to make imagine whatever with this

1001
00:47:40,800 --> 00:47:45,040
Speaker 1: tea should be even more seas. Maybe we just maybe

1002
00:47:45,040 --> 00:47:47,399
Speaker 1: the problems we're not digging deep enough. You guys, give

1003
00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:53,200
Speaker 1: me too few seeds and now everything's growing, okay. So

1004
00:47:53,320 --> 00:47:56,440
Speaker 1: um Trovim attempted to defend himself from this attack. He

1005
00:47:56,440 --> 00:47:58,960
Speaker 1: wound up in a six hour debate with the expert's commission,

1006
00:47:59,000 --> 00:48:01,720
Speaker 1: where he basically argued that what he fed his animals

1007
00:48:01,760 --> 00:48:04,120
Speaker 1: and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his

1008
00:48:04,239 --> 00:48:06,799
Speaker 1: utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless.

1009
00:48:06,960 --> 00:48:09,680
Speaker 1: The details of his experiments shouldn't matter. What should matter

1010
00:48:09,800 --> 00:48:12,120
Speaker 1: was his results, which he reported, and they should basically

1011
00:48:12,160 --> 00:48:15,040
Speaker 1: just trust what he reported as the truth. Yeah, yeah,

1012
00:48:15,239 --> 00:48:16,960
Speaker 1: I mean, why would you like as a scientist exactly,

1013
00:48:16,960 --> 00:48:18,839
Speaker 1: he's a scientist. Let's go to the last page. Yeah,

1014
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:20,759
Speaker 1: tell make me show my work. The point is whether

1015
00:48:20,840 --> 00:48:22,920
Speaker 1: of a calculator or not a calculator. The answer is right.

1016
00:48:23,400 --> 00:48:25,200
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from a book called the Lushenko

1017
00:48:25,239 --> 00:48:28,280
Speaker 1: Affair here. He had never troubled himself to be precise,

1018
00:48:28,320 --> 00:48:31,280
Speaker 1: and he insisted that precise data were not essential. Shrillly,

1019
00:48:31,360 --> 00:48:34,759
Speaker 1: he called attention to biological theory to the progressive biological

1020
00:48:34,800 --> 00:48:37,239
Speaker 1: theory that had been developed quote in unity with the

1021
00:48:37,239 --> 00:48:40,240
Speaker 1: practice of collective and state farms, and that had always

1022
00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:43,239
Speaker 1: enjoyed the support of the party in state. Basically, he

1023
00:48:43,280 --> 00:48:45,680
Speaker 1: whined that his theories were correct with communism, and the

1024
00:48:45,680 --> 00:48:47,960
Speaker 1: party had always supported him. So why were they suddenly

1025
00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:52,160
Speaker 1: being so mean and asking for proof? Which, if you're Lushenko,

1026
00:48:52,280 --> 00:48:54,200
Speaker 1: this has got to be confusing. Yeah, you're like you

1027
00:48:54,200 --> 00:48:56,000
Speaker 1: guys like me so much. It was crazy. Some of

1028
00:48:56,000 --> 00:48:57,400
Speaker 1: the times I'm like, well, they're not gonna like this one,

1029
00:48:57,440 --> 00:49:00,840
Speaker 1: and then they're not going to hurt even more. Seeds clostedgether, Okay,

1030
00:49:00,880 --> 00:49:04,960
Speaker 1: well they yeah, here's another quote from Loshanko Affair. The

1031
00:49:04,960 --> 00:49:07,719
Speaker 1: specialist stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect. For

1032
00:49:07,800 --> 00:49:11,000
Speaker 1: Leshenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning

1033
00:49:11,000 --> 00:49:14,520
Speaker 1: with facts and figures. Their favorite device, as the chairman

1034
00:49:14,560 --> 00:49:17,040
Speaker 1: of the Investigating Commission put it, was to quote to

1035
00:49:17,160 --> 00:49:19,040
Speaker 1: say a single thing and hush up all the rest,

1036
00:49:19,080 --> 00:49:21,800
Speaker 1: as long as everything looks good. This was a perfectly

1037
00:49:21,800 --> 00:49:24,600
Speaker 1: obvious and deadly accurate characterization, and would have been with

1038
00:49:24,640 --> 00:49:27,280
Speaker 1: respect to any of Lushenko's recipes at any time, beginning

1039
00:49:27,320 --> 00:49:29,920
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty nine when he first became prominent with

1040
00:49:29,920 --> 00:49:33,400
Speaker 1: his scheme for vernalizing grain. But that perfectly appropriate response

1041
00:49:33,400 --> 00:49:36,920
Speaker 1: to Lushenko is m was thirty five years overdue. Which

1042
00:49:37,320 --> 00:49:39,600
Speaker 1: we know what happened now in those thirty five years. Yeah,

1043
00:49:39,719 --> 00:49:42,600
Speaker 1: like forty million people die, so many about a million

1044
00:49:42,640 --> 00:49:45,800
Speaker 1: people a year maybe, Yeah, it's hard to out of

1045
00:49:45,840 --> 00:49:48,120
Speaker 1: that was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the

1046
00:49:48,200 --> 00:49:50,440
Speaker 1: cool locks and stuff like there was other ship wrapped

1047
00:49:50,480 --> 00:49:53,640
Speaker 1: into that. But it's an impressive sustained production. You know,

1048
00:49:53,719 --> 00:49:56,040
Speaker 1: Like I feel like a lot of the big death

1049
00:49:56,080 --> 00:49:58,239
Speaker 1: tolls ascribed to one person or like in a bit

1050
00:49:58,239 --> 00:50:00,560
Speaker 1: of a tighter window in this it just like to

1051
00:50:00,640 --> 00:50:02,839
Speaker 1: just keep pumping out debts. Yeah, because you look at

1052
00:50:02,840 --> 00:50:05,040
Speaker 1: like the Nazis and they were murder sprinters, you know.

1053
00:50:05,080 --> 00:50:06,920
Speaker 1: Most of the killing they did was like forty two

1054
00:50:06,960 --> 00:50:08,759
Speaker 1: to forty five, and then they were sort of out

1055
00:50:08,760 --> 00:50:12,680
Speaker 1: of gas. Rushenko is killing people for a really long time.

1056
00:50:13,040 --> 00:50:15,480
Speaker 1: You know. You you kill a man's fish, he starts

1057
00:50:15,520 --> 00:50:17,160
Speaker 1: for a day. You teach a man to kill his

1058
00:50:17,280 --> 00:50:21,560
Speaker 1: fish accidentally, then you've gotten multiple generations of people with

1059
00:50:21,719 --> 00:50:25,000
Speaker 1: no fish. Think of the long game. So finally, at

1060
00:50:25,040 --> 00:50:27,799
Speaker 1: least the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do

1061
00:50:27,840 --> 00:50:30,960
Speaker 1: actual science again. Quote. The confusion of political and technical

1062
00:50:30,960 --> 00:50:33,359
Speaker 1: authority was now declared to be a mistake. Specialists were

1063
00:50:33,400 --> 00:50:36,520
Speaker 1: to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods

1064
00:50:36,520 --> 00:50:39,600
Speaker 1: from those that only seemed so. Period. The thirty five

1065
00:50:39,680 --> 00:50:42,239
Speaker 1: year error was not to be examined or analyzed. So

1066
00:50:42,840 --> 00:50:46,400
Speaker 1: they understood lushenko wism was wrong. They didn't ounce Leshenko,

1067
00:50:46,680 --> 00:50:49,320
Speaker 1: but they weren't willing to look back and really analyze

1068
00:50:49,320 --> 00:50:51,319
Speaker 1: how many people had died or how fucked up things

1069
00:50:51,320 --> 00:50:53,480
Speaker 1: had gotten because of their belief because that was still

1070
00:50:53,960 --> 00:50:56,840
Speaker 1: you know, post Stalin Soviet Union was a bit more open,

1071
00:50:56,880 --> 00:50:59,440
Speaker 1: but they still weren't willing to like dig into just

1072
00:50:59,480 --> 00:51:02,360
Speaker 1: how fucked up things for sure, and other people were

1073
00:51:02,400 --> 00:51:05,759
Speaker 1: you know, shared some responsibility. Yeah, you know, a lot

1074
00:51:05,800 --> 00:51:09,960
Speaker 1: of people responsibility. It has been suggested by some historians

1075
00:51:09,960 --> 00:51:13,200
Speaker 1: that Trophin Leshenko maybe the single individual most responsible for

1076
00:51:13,239 --> 00:51:15,719
Speaker 1: the fall of the USS are. The true extent of

1077
00:51:15,719 --> 00:51:19,160
Speaker 1: the damage he did demand kind is incalculable. Lushenko died

1078
00:51:19,200 --> 00:51:22,319
Speaker 1: in Moscow in nineteen seventy six. The government waited two

1079
00:51:22,360 --> 00:51:24,640
Speaker 1: days to even announce his death, so in the end

1080
00:51:24,680 --> 00:51:27,839
Speaker 1: he died obscuring, discredited, But the politicians and officials who

1081
00:51:27,920 --> 00:51:29,880
Speaker 1: enforced his shitty science and praised him while he was

1082
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:32,839
Speaker 1: Stalin's favorite were not punished, Nor were the people who'd

1083
00:51:32,840 --> 00:51:35,839
Speaker 1: helped export his bad ideas to China after nineteen fifty three,

1084
00:51:35,840 --> 00:51:38,520
Speaker 1: when the Soviets knew damn well rushenko Wism did not work.

1085
00:51:39,360 --> 00:51:41,960
Speaker 1: But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern

1086
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:44,880
Speaker 1: age of conman and bastards, troph And Lushenko is enjoying

1087
00:51:44,880 --> 00:51:50,040
Speaker 1: a renaissance. I barely got to relish. That was like

1088
00:51:51,120 --> 00:51:54,640
Speaker 1: four minutes of him living in obscurity. Yeah no, and

1089
00:51:54,680 --> 00:51:56,600
Speaker 1: now he's back to I mean, it's the trophy the

1090
00:51:56,680 --> 00:52:02,040
Speaker 1: tro finish trifinissancesheninnis right. They can't all be the Mecanissance,

1091
00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:05,839
Speaker 1: all the words the right way. No, it looks better

1092
00:52:05,880 --> 00:52:09,120
Speaker 1: on paper, like finishedance on. I can't even pronounce. Yeah, no,

1093
00:52:09,200 --> 00:52:12,000
Speaker 1: it looks it looks like it should pronounce, but I'm not.

1094
00:52:12,120 --> 00:52:16,960
Speaker 1: It's not coming out right anyway. Record yourself trying to portmanteau,

1095
00:52:17,280 --> 00:52:20,759
Speaker 1: troph and renaissance and send it to us on Twitter. So,

1096
00:52:20,840 --> 00:52:23,600
Speaker 1: according to an article in Current Biology, over in Russia,

1097
00:52:23,680 --> 00:52:25,760
Speaker 1: the work of Lushenko has been picked up by quote

1098
00:52:25,760 --> 00:52:29,279
Speaker 1: a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, stalinists, a few

1099
00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:34,480
Speaker 1: qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church. So it's coming

1100
00:52:34,520 --> 00:52:36,560
Speaker 1: back a little bit now. One of the reasons for

1101
00:52:36,600 --> 00:52:39,440
Speaker 1: this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding

1102
00:52:39,440 --> 00:52:43,560
Speaker 1: and genetic science. We've basically learned pretty recently that certain

1103
00:52:43,600 --> 00:52:45,759
Speaker 1: things that happen in the environment, like living through a

1104
00:52:45,800 --> 00:52:48,720
Speaker 1: bad winter or a war, starving for a period of time,

1105
00:52:49,200 --> 00:52:51,880
Speaker 1: can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that

1106
00:52:51,920 --> 00:52:55,400
Speaker 1: to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian

1107
00:52:55,440 --> 00:52:58,920
Speaker 1: genetics are not wrong. This has been seen by some

1108
00:52:59,040 --> 00:53:01,319
Speaker 1: as evidence that lushenk Go was right all along, even

1109
00:53:01,320 --> 00:53:04,200
Speaker 1: though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes and

1110
00:53:04,280 --> 00:53:07,319
Speaker 1: Lushenko didn't believe genes existed. The other factor is that

1111
00:53:07,360 --> 00:53:10,120
Speaker 1: these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something.

1112
00:53:10,120 --> 00:53:12,080
Speaker 1: They're not permanent, but like if you live through a

1113
00:53:12,080 --> 00:53:14,160
Speaker 1: famine and you have a kid, like right around that time,

1114
00:53:14,200 --> 00:53:16,000
Speaker 1: you can pass on certain things as a result of

1115
00:53:16,040 --> 00:53:18,920
Speaker 1: the fact that you were in that extreme state. Wow,

1116
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:21,800
Speaker 1: I mean in this, I feel like the simple grade

1117
00:53:21,800 --> 00:53:26,279
Speaker 1: school version of genetics and evolution I learned did not

1118
00:53:26,360 --> 00:53:29,440
Speaker 1: take that into account, and I probably got answers marked

1119
00:53:29,440 --> 00:53:32,560
Speaker 1: wrong that perhaps I feel like that's someone recent. Yea,

1120
00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:35,959
Speaker 1: genetics is prettyeah, definitely pretty recent that we've really gotten

1121
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:37,960
Speaker 1: an understanding of it. I don't claim to be an

1122
00:53:37,960 --> 00:53:40,120
Speaker 1: expert on genetics. People are still figuring this out. But

1123
00:53:40,160 --> 00:53:43,160
Speaker 1: like Lushenko didn't believe in genes, so it's wrong to say.

1124
00:53:43,520 --> 00:53:46,040
Speaker 1: People who are attacking the Shengo weren't saying nothing has

1125
00:53:46,080 --> 00:53:49,040
Speaker 1: passed down like as a result of environmental changes. They

1126
00:53:49,040 --> 00:53:51,799
Speaker 1: were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're

1127
00:53:51,800 --> 00:53:53,880
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to grow better grain. Right,

1128
00:53:55,320 --> 00:53:58,120
Speaker 1: And in fact, Lushenko had declared the entire science of genetics,

1129
00:53:58,160 --> 00:54:00,400
Speaker 1: to be quote, an expression of the senile decay and

1130
00:54:00,440 --> 00:54:05,360
Speaker 1: degradation of bourgeois culture, so crediting him for epigenetics is

1131
00:54:05,360 --> 00:54:07,839
Speaker 1: a little bit irrational. Are the people though, that are

1132
00:54:07,880 --> 00:54:10,600
Speaker 1: like giving rise to it again doing it out of

1133
00:54:10,719 --> 00:54:13,239
Speaker 1: the ideological principle of it. That is a little bit

1134
00:54:13,239 --> 00:54:15,239
Speaker 1: of it. I think some of it is because and

1135
00:54:15,239 --> 00:54:17,320
Speaker 1: I'm not near I'm not an expert on modern Russia,

1136
00:54:17,360 --> 00:54:19,360
Speaker 1: but like, there's this because obviously Russia right now is

1137
00:54:19,360 --> 00:54:21,080
Speaker 1: not the Soviet Union, is not anything close to a

1138
00:54:21,080 --> 00:54:24,160
Speaker 1: communist state. But there is a lot of longing for

1139
00:54:24,200 --> 00:54:26,680
Speaker 1: that period of time for a variety of reasons, some

1140
00:54:26,760 --> 00:54:28,600
Speaker 1: of which there are things that we're better back then,

1141
00:54:28,640 --> 00:54:30,680
Speaker 1: and some of which is just obviously the same way

1142
00:54:30,680 --> 00:54:32,839
Speaker 1: that people long for the nineteen five. Don't think about

1143
00:54:32,880 --> 00:54:35,680
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, water fountains were segregated and stuff.

1144
00:54:36,200 --> 00:54:38,680
Speaker 1: So it's it's a complicated thing I think why certain

1145
00:54:38,719 --> 00:54:41,440
Speaker 1: groups are starting to come back to these ideas. But

1146
00:54:41,520 --> 00:54:44,360
Speaker 1: it is definitely scary because that means that there's the

1147
00:54:44,360 --> 00:54:46,640
Speaker 1: possibility that troph and lushenk go is very very very

1148
00:54:46,719 --> 00:54:50,520
Speaker 1: very very dumb science has the chance to kill somebody. Which, guys,

1149
00:54:50,520 --> 00:54:53,000
Speaker 1: if you're listening at home, spread Joe seeds, um, just

1150
00:54:54,080 --> 00:54:58,520
Speaker 1: spread your seeds. Don't plant them too deep. You should

1151
00:54:58,520 --> 00:55:00,560
Speaker 1: be able to see him, but not too was together.

1152
00:55:00,800 --> 00:55:03,120
Speaker 1: I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life.

1153
00:55:03,440 --> 00:55:07,839
Speaker 1: None of them planted millions of seeds breaker like, oh man,

1154
00:55:08,320 --> 00:55:11,880
Speaker 1: it's not It's like one of those gross things you

1155
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:13,799
Speaker 1: buy at a state fair that's got like a little

1156
00:55:13,800 --> 00:55:15,880
Speaker 1: bit of like molasses and it's just kind of like

1157
00:55:16,320 --> 00:55:18,840
Speaker 1: sesame seeds. It's almost like a candied apple. There's like

1158
00:55:18,840 --> 00:55:21,920
Speaker 1: a weird I feel like southern dessert that's just like

1159
00:55:22,520 --> 00:55:25,200
Speaker 1: seeds and goo and a ball and you know what,

1160
00:55:25,200 --> 00:55:26,759
Speaker 1: it's gross. And I wouldn't plant at my ground and

1161
00:55:26,760 --> 00:55:29,600
Speaker 1: expected to feed my family. I had a seed gooball.

1162
00:55:29,880 --> 00:55:31,319
Speaker 1: I mean maybe it's just a weird thing that I

1163
00:55:31,360 --> 00:55:34,000
Speaker 1: was given that I was somebody just put some seeds

1164
00:55:34,000 --> 00:55:37,279
Speaker 1: and goo together. Like it wasn't yankee some seed goog

1165
00:55:37,440 --> 00:55:38,960
Speaker 1: I didn't buy it at the state fair. It was

1166
00:55:39,000 --> 00:55:41,279
Speaker 1: just handed to me by a man at the front

1167
00:55:41,280 --> 00:55:44,160
Speaker 1: desk of a motel. I was staying, I shouldn't have

1168
00:55:44,160 --> 00:55:48,520
Speaker 1: eaten that seed googall. I'm still digesting it. You just

1169
00:55:48,560 --> 00:55:52,960
Speaker 1: got poisoned by someone. What state were you in? I

1170
00:55:53,000 --> 00:55:55,239
Speaker 1: just remember like as a kid that it was like, yeah,

1171
00:55:55,480 --> 00:55:56,839
Speaker 1: I mean, this is not a thing that I'm now

1172
00:55:57,120 --> 00:56:00,400
Speaker 1: I would be responsible to turn down a seed gooble. Now, child,

1173
00:56:00,400 --> 00:56:02,360
Speaker 1: I was like, this is a dessert. This feels I

1174
00:56:02,400 --> 00:56:04,880
Speaker 1: can say as a child in Texas, we have played

1175
00:56:04,920 --> 00:56:07,800
Speaker 1: many a good game of poison the Yankee. That was

1176
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:10,640
Speaker 1: everybody's favorite game growing up. On a hot day. No

1177
00:56:10,680 --> 00:56:12,600
Speaker 1: better way to pass the time than to kill a

1178
00:56:12,719 --> 00:56:17,720
Speaker 1: traveling Northerner. We just love making carpet bags, sick, grinding

1179
00:56:17,800 --> 00:56:19,920
Speaker 1: up glass, putting it in their grips, being doing slowly

1180
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:24,760
Speaker 1: until their insides played out. The South those are better times.

1181
00:56:25,000 --> 00:56:27,320
Speaker 1: Oh boy, all right, well that's that's our episode on

1182
00:56:27,320 --> 00:56:32,200
Speaker 1: trophrom Lushenka. How you doing, Max? I mean, I know

1183
00:56:32,320 --> 00:56:34,719
Speaker 1: that's not your style, nor is it the style of

1184
00:56:34,920 --> 00:56:37,719
Speaker 1: human history, but I wish the ending had been a

1185
00:56:37,719 --> 00:56:41,359
Speaker 1: little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up and now

1186
00:56:41,920 --> 00:56:46,120
Speaker 1: surgeon resurgence. It would be nice if people ever learned

1187
00:56:46,200 --> 00:56:48,799
Speaker 1: lessons from history. But if there's one thing we've learned

1188
00:56:48,840 --> 00:56:53,000
Speaker 1: from history, it's that we don't. Thanks for having me

1189
00:56:53,040 --> 00:56:55,360
Speaker 1: on and depressing. Yeah, thanks for coming on and being

1190
00:56:55,440 --> 00:56:57,960
Speaker 1: depressed by this. Do you want to plug some plug doubles? Sure?

1191
00:56:58,120 --> 00:57:00,480
Speaker 1: I have a fifteen minutes stand Up special on Netflix.

1192
00:57:00,600 --> 00:57:05,400
Speaker 1: Go to the Comedy Lineup Part two and yeah, I

1193
00:57:05,400 --> 00:57:08,800
Speaker 1: I don't know how to farm. Also, um seed googballs

1194
00:57:08,840 --> 00:57:13,239
Speaker 1: dot com use promo code shaft, but I now sell

1195
00:57:13,360 --> 00:57:16,920
Speaker 1: these balls. Um They're not good, but they are heavy,

1196
00:57:17,240 --> 00:57:19,360
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, if you need a heavy snack, if

1197
00:57:19,400 --> 00:57:24,160
Speaker 1: you need a heavy ball, Shaft is your man. And

1198
00:57:24,200 --> 00:57:26,280
Speaker 1: I Margaret Evans. You can find me on the internet

1199
00:57:26,320 --> 00:57:28,520
Speaker 1: at I Right Okay. On Twitter, you can find this

1200
00:57:28,720 --> 00:57:32,040
Speaker 1: podcast website at behind the Bastards dot com. You can

1201
00:57:32,040 --> 00:57:35,160
Speaker 1: also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards pod.

1202
00:57:35,280 --> 00:57:38,120
Speaker 1: So check us out, follow us, tweet us your best

1203
00:57:38,160 --> 00:57:42,760
Speaker 1: attempts to Portmanteau and Renaissance. I really feel like there's

1204
00:57:42,760 --> 00:57:47,160
Speaker 1: a way. I'm just not getting its finish now. I'm

1205
00:57:47,160 --> 00:57:49,800
Speaker 1: not I'm not gonna try it anymore. I don't know

1206
00:57:49,920 --> 00:57:53,400
Speaker 1: that's closer. We're good, alright, alright, alright, you have a

1207
00:57:53,400 --> 00:57:55,600
Speaker 1: good day. We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone

1208
00:57:55,600 --> 00:57:58,440
Speaker 1: else terrible And until then, I love about you.