WEBVTT - Part Two: The Russian Scientist Who Helped Kill 30 Million People 0:00:00.040 --> 0:00:05.480 Mmm, Hello everybody. This is Robert Evans. I'm the host 0:00:05.480 --> 0:00:07.720 of Behind the Vastards, and this is Behind the Vastards, 0:00:07.720 --> 0:00:09.479 the show where we tell you everything you don't know 0:00:09.560 --> 0:00:12.360 about the very worst people in all of history. This 0:00:12.440 --> 0:00:15.240 is part two of our episode on Trophy and Lushenko, 0:00:15.440 --> 0:00:18.200 the scientists who got everybody killed, and with me today 0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:20.920 as with them. Part one is Max Sylvestry. Max, how 0:00:20.960 --> 0:00:22.640 you doing. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me 0:00:22.680 --> 0:00:26.079 back to talk more death caused by Russian Well, before 0:00:26.079 --> 0:00:27.479 we get into that, I want to tell you something 0:00:27.480 --> 0:00:29.920 I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy 0:00:30.000 --> 0:00:32.280 saying Sylvestry. But it's one of the rare names that 0:00:32.320 --> 0:00:35.519 I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying. Really, it's 0:00:35.520 --> 0:00:37.800 because of the t R I I don't know. I yeah, 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:41.640 I enjoy writing Sylvestry. Oh, I've always felt it had 0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:43.680 a weird rhythm to writing it. I don't I get 0:00:43.760 --> 0:00:45.879 lazy by the end of it. Especially my full name 0:00:45.960 --> 0:00:48.360 is Maximilian, so it's oh my god. I know you've 0:00:48.400 --> 0:00:49.959 got a lot of ground. When I was a kid, 0:00:49.960 --> 0:00:52.120 I had to learn it rhythmically. I still kind of 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:54.120 tap my foot. I am my l I a n 0:00:54.480 --> 0:00:58.000 um scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no, 0:00:58.000 --> 0:01:00.960 no no. My nickname is a kid was SMI because 0:01:01.000 --> 0:01:03.400 that's in my preschool. That's where I cut it off, which, 0:01:03.400 --> 0:01:07.600 in hindsight, what kind of school like only allowed six letters? 0:01:06.600 --> 0:01:10.679 That's not many. There's many common first names that hit 0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:13.800 six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Um, well, thank 0:01:13.840 --> 0:01:17.040 you for saying that. Round. Maximi is a pretty cool nickname, though, No, 0:01:17.160 --> 0:01:18.680 I did like it. It was like my first A 0:01:18.720 --> 0:01:22.839 well screen name I believe in was Maximi with no number. 0:01:23.240 --> 0:01:27.200 I was in early nice. I mean, I feel like 0:01:27.240 --> 0:01:28.920 you had a choice to make there at some point 0:01:28.959 --> 0:01:31.000 as to whether or not to be a hip hop artist, 0:01:31.240 --> 0:01:33.399 and you you could have taken that road. Well, if 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:36.200 you can believe it. My middle name, and it's Ukrainian, 0:01:36.240 --> 0:01:39.920 actually is Shaft. It's my mom's maid. So there was 0:01:39.959 --> 0:01:45.120 a moment Maxim Shaft, Maximilian Shaft as like, you know, 0:01:45.319 --> 0:01:47.160 some sort of show biz name felt too much. I 0:01:47.240 --> 0:01:48.720 was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel 0:01:48.760 --> 0:01:51.160 like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh my god, 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:54.400 man it. I went to a family wedding this weekend 0:01:54.440 --> 0:01:56.600 and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft, 0:01:56.680 --> 0:01:58.680 And like I had never thought about the whole other 0:01:58.720 --> 0:02:00.840 side of the family that are the got married into it. 0:02:00.920 --> 0:02:02.880 Just like the joke of all their speeches was like, 0:02:02.960 --> 0:02:07.680 I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft Shaft, 0:02:07.720 --> 0:02:11.800 she's marrying all these shafts. Oh man, Okay, Well that 0:02:11.919 --> 0:02:14.400 was an enjoyable digression and a Ukrainian name speaking of 0:02:15.160 --> 0:02:16.959 people who had bad things done to them because we 0:02:17.040 --> 0:02:19.679 just talked aboutout the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go, man, 0:02:19.800 --> 0:02:22.680 that is a country that has just wound up getting 0:02:22.680 --> 0:02:26.160 screwed over by so many people. It's really it's remarkable. 0:02:26.360 --> 0:02:30.359 Like yeah, there's just these nations in history, the Congos 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:31.799 and other one of them where it's just like, oh, 0:02:31.880 --> 0:02:35.160 you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone 0:02:35.200 --> 0:02:37.640 for the last three hundred years. It's like, I like, 0:02:37.639 --> 0:02:40.960 like Italy without the art or food, Um, we're not 0:02:41.000 --> 0:02:44.120 as excited by it. Yeah, I mean I like, oh no, 0:02:44.200 --> 0:02:46.160 I mean, I like I like parog. I just made 0:02:46.160 --> 0:02:48.639 like a you know, every street corner doesn't have a 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:51.720 parogi restaurant right here in America, right, Yeah, not a 0:02:51.720 --> 0:02:54.720 lot of that yet. Yeah, yet we need like a 0:02:54.760 --> 0:02:58.200 good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West the Ukrainian invasion, 0:02:58.639 --> 0:03:05.720 but not from the or one that Yeah. Ok. Anyway, 0:03:05.760 --> 0:03:08.200 we're talking about troph and Leshenko and Um. Where we 0:03:08.320 --> 0:03:12.000 last left off, the USSR had instituted Leshenko's policies, He 0:03:12.040 --> 0:03:14.600 had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic 0:03:14.680 --> 0:03:17.400 scientists who didn't agree with Leshenko is um, and of 0:03:17.440 --> 0:03:20.360 course millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in 0:03:20.440 --> 0:03:22.440 other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of 0:03:23.040 --> 0:03:26.400 scientific factory. That's where we wound up last time, and 0:03:26.480 --> 0:03:28.560 this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman mouse 0:03:28.639 --> 0:03:32.600 China to see what happened next with Lushenko is okay? So, 0:03:32.840 --> 0:03:34.520 as you will remember from part one, one of my 0:03:34.560 --> 0:03:37.600 sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts, 0:03:37.600 --> 0:03:40.880 written by Jasper Becker. One chapter in that book, which 0:03:40.920 --> 0:03:43.680 focuses on the bad science of Leshenko and his comrades, 0:03:43.680 --> 0:03:46.160 opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that 0:03:46.200 --> 0:03:48.880 I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice 0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:52.000 not to include as we start this episode. I never 0:03:52.040 --> 0:03:54.000 think of poems in books as being like this was 0:03:54.040 --> 0:03:56.240 so necessary, but yet this spoke to you in such 0:03:56.280 --> 0:03:58.000 a way that you want to repeat it? Yeah, because 0:03:58.040 --> 0:03:59.560 it happens a lot in the books that I read. 0:03:59.600 --> 0:04:01.880 For this all off and from a poem, and I 0:04:01.960 --> 0:04:04.440 usually don't include that, but epigraph what is what is 0:04:04.480 --> 0:04:07.400 that called at the beginning? Epigraph? Probably right, I don't, 0:04:07.480 --> 0:04:10.480 I'm not. I just always feel like, wow, how cool 0:04:10.640 --> 0:04:13.200 you know a poem? You know, like that is the 0:04:13.280 --> 0:04:15.480 energy that I feel when I read, you know. Yeah, 0:04:15.520 --> 0:04:17.880 And this one is more I think it accurately sums 0:04:17.960 --> 0:04:20.760 up the mood of the people that we're going to 0:04:20.800 --> 0:04:24.400 be talking about. Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how 0:04:24.440 --> 0:04:28.200 can I alone remains sober? So alright, that's where we're 0:04:28.200 --> 0:04:31.800 getting into. In nine mause Dung became the chairman of 0:04:31.839 --> 0:04:34.640 the Central People's Government. His rise to power had included 0:04:34.640 --> 0:04:38.320 an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign. Mao was the 0:04:38.360 --> 0:04:42.279 great Leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable 0:04:42.320 --> 0:04:45.080 of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos 0:04:45.080 --> 0:04:47.240 in China, he promised his people that he would make 0:04:47.279 --> 0:04:50.360 their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth. 0:04:50.800 --> 0:04:53.599 I'm going to yeah quote from that book here. The 0:04:53.680 --> 0:04:56.799 nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists, and the entire Communist 0:04:56.800 --> 0:04:59.280 party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand. 0:04:59.360 --> 0:05:01.120 Out of China the land of famine, he would make 0:05:01.200 --> 0:05:03.520 China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so 0:05:03.600 --> 0:05:05.039 much food that they would not know what to do 0:05:05.120 --> 0:05:07.000 with it, and people would lead a life of leisure, 0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:10.039 working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership, 0:05:10.120 --> 0:05:12.320 China would enter the final stage of communism, ahead of 0:05:12.360 --> 0:05:14.880 every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they 0:05:14.880 --> 0:05:17.120 would reach communism in ten or twenty years, Mau said 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:18.719 the Chinese would get there in a year or two. 0:05:19.000 --> 0:05:21.440 In fact, he promised that within a year, food production 0:05:21.480 --> 0:05:24.920 would double or trouble. It's too much food. That is 0:05:24.960 --> 0:05:26.600 too much food. You know, it's not good to have 0:05:26.640 --> 0:05:28.440 too much food. You know, you're just gonna piles of 0:05:28.520 --> 0:05:31.160 rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one 0:05:31.240 --> 0:05:33.600 of the things that was instituted as a result of 0:05:33.640 --> 0:05:35.080 their worry that they were just gonna be way too 0:05:35.160 --> 0:05:37.080 much food is they institute a program to get rid 0:05:37.120 --> 0:05:38.880 of the pests. Before the pests could eat all of 0:05:38.920 --> 0:05:40.599 the food that they were sure was about to be there. 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:43.240 And so for like a period of weeks, all of 0:05:43.279 --> 0:05:46.720 the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows 0:05:46.720 --> 0:05:48.960 and mass to try to kill all of the sparrows. 0:05:49.560 --> 0:05:51.479 They did the same thing with a couple of bugs too, 0:05:51.480 --> 0:05:53.719 were just like people just be chasing down birds and 0:05:53.760 --> 0:05:56.320 bugs all day. Sparrows could talk. I'm sure they would 0:05:56.360 --> 0:05:58.880 try to just be guys, we're not sure that we're 0:05:58.880 --> 0:06:00.200 going to need to get rid of me. You might 0:06:00.240 --> 0:06:02.960 want the sparrow, you don't know. Yeah, well they had 0:06:03.000 --> 0:06:08.240 them too. Yeah. So one popular slogan at the time 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:10.719 was worked hard for a few years, happiness for a 0:06:10.760 --> 0:06:14.720 thousand which sounds good, right, that's problem, Yeah, I can 0:06:14.720 --> 0:06:17.520 think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years. 0:06:17.640 --> 0:06:19.200 Was the idea that like they had a plan to 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:21.440 buckle down and that's just that they would be set 0:06:21.520 --> 0:06:24.799 up with abundance forever. Yeah. That was again this idea 0:06:24.839 --> 0:06:26.560 that you saw in the Soviet Union that once we 0:06:26.600 --> 0:06:29.520 perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it, 0:06:29.839 --> 0:06:31.960 and then none of these problems that have been present 0:06:32.000 --> 0:06:35.679 throughout twelve thousand however many years its recorded human history 0:06:35.760 --> 0:06:37.960 will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a 0:06:38.000 --> 0:06:40.599 hole because you've all been wrong, the people, the wrong 0:06:40.640 --> 0:06:43.440 type of human sow. We figured it out two years 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:46.400 at most, maybe, Yeah, a couple of years, and we'll 0:06:46.400 --> 0:06:50.320 reverse this twelve year old train. Yeah. Peasants as far 0:06:50.360 --> 0:06:52.680 off as Tibet would never so much as seen an airplane, 0:06:52.680 --> 0:06:55.120 were taught to expect that in the near future. Quote, 0:06:55.160 --> 0:06:57.640 practically everything would be done by machines. In fact, the 0:06:57.680 --> 0:06:59.600 time would come when our meals would be brought by 0:06:59.600 --> 0:07:02.560 machine is right up to our mouths. Wow. So this 0:07:02.760 --> 0:07:06.240 is like fully automated luxury communist taught to expect. Here, 0:07:06.279 --> 0:07:08.000 And as they say in the Simpsons, people will be 0:07:08.080 --> 0:07:11.000 needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever, you know, Like, 0:07:11.040 --> 0:07:13.960 people will still have a purpose, you know, but they 0:07:13.960 --> 0:07:17.600 won't need to suffer. They won't need to labor miserably 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:19.720 in the fields, and they won't starve in the winter. 0:07:19.880 --> 0:07:22.200 You know. It will still be a place for people, 0:07:22.240 --> 0:07:24.600 but it will be in a perfect utopian state. So 0:07:24.680 --> 0:07:27.400 now intoxicated China with his view of what the future 0:07:27.400 --> 0:07:28.960 could be, and it's easy to see why that would 0:07:28.960 --> 0:07:32.240 be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the 0:07:32.320 --> 0:07:36.400 Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged in a 0:07:36.480 --> 0:07:38.600 huge chunk of Like they, China had gone through a 0:07:38.600 --> 0:07:40.680 lot of ship It hadn't been a good run for 0:07:40.720 --> 0:07:44.640 them lately, so they were eager for this. Unfortunately for everyone, 0:07:44.760 --> 0:07:47.960 The scientific underpinning of the Brave New World maw envisioned 0:07:48.200 --> 0:07:54.520 was yeah, yeah, See, Mao had spent years fighting as 0:07:54.520 --> 0:07:56.880 a guerilla warlord against the other men who aimed to 0:07:56.920 --> 0:07:59.640 dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd 0:07:59.640 --> 0:08:02.920 become a racious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this 0:08:02.960 --> 0:08:05.880 propaganda had to do with these spectacular record harvests the 0:08:05.960 --> 0:08:09.320 USSR was supposedly but not really having, because remember they 0:08:09.360 --> 0:08:12.360 were lying about that trof and Lushenka was built as 0:08:12.360 --> 0:08:14.960 the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed 0:08:14.960 --> 0:08:18.000 the propaganda not just because he thought it was literally true, 0:08:18.040 --> 0:08:20.520 but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he 0:08:20.560 --> 0:08:24.480 already believed about the world. Seemo was not a big 0:08:24.560 --> 0:08:28.280 scientific reality guy. One of his catch phrases was quote 0:08:28.320 --> 0:08:31.720 we should be like marks entitled to talk nonsense. He 0:08:31.880 --> 0:08:35.079 lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying 0:08:35.120 --> 0:08:38.480 stuff like science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing 0:08:38.520 --> 0:08:42.080 mysterious about it, and there is nothing special about making 0:08:42.160 --> 0:08:45.840 nuclear reactors, cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:48.400 these things. As long as you act daringly, you will 0:08:48.400 --> 0:08:50.520 be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have 0:08:50.600 --> 0:08:53.319 spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was 0:08:53.400 --> 0:08:56.160 no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first 0:08:56.200 --> 0:09:00.400 machine building ministry, second machine building ministry, your King Hall University. 0:09:00.640 --> 0:09:03.120 But just act recklessly and it will be all right. Yeah, 0:09:03.200 --> 0:09:05.920 dream big, you know, Baron Munchausen style, just like if 0:09:05.960 --> 0:09:08.520 you will it, come on, just balls to the wall, 0:09:08.559 --> 0:09:11.440 go crazy, like what is science? Is about recklessness? I'm 0:09:11.480 --> 0:09:13.600 not gonna sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo 0:09:13.640 --> 0:09:15.720 figure out what all this is, you know, poor ship 0:09:15.840 --> 0:09:18.280 and Beakers, get on with it. Corn should be bigger. 0:09:18.480 --> 0:09:21.040 Do it, do it and make the fucking corn bigger. 0:09:21.120 --> 0:09:22.480 You can see why it would be fun like in 0:09:22.520 --> 0:09:24.199 a world where people have been taught no science is 0:09:24.200 --> 0:09:28.240 about like painstaking research and checking your notes and yes, yeah, 0:09:28.440 --> 0:09:31.520 gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time. 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:34.560 Just be like, nah, just fucking try ship man. It's fine, Yeah, 0:09:34.600 --> 0:09:36.160 we're the best. Then we're going to be even better 0:09:36.200 --> 0:09:37.800 if you just listen to me. Don't worry about the 0:09:37.800 --> 0:09:43.120 logistics again. Another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after 0:09:43.160 --> 0:09:44.920 this time. I mean, this was like such a sad 0:09:45.000 --> 0:09:47.400 chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah, I mean, one of 0:09:47.400 --> 0:09:49.559 the best things about history is that people learn all 0:09:49.559 --> 0:09:52.000 of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes. 0:09:52.000 --> 0:09:55.000 Of course, humans change, They change easily, and they change 0:09:55.000 --> 0:09:59.760 a stick I found. So I'm going to guess that 0:09:59.800 --> 0:10:03.120 ma his attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him 0:10:03.120 --> 0:10:04.760 in his career as a warlord. That could be good 0:10:04.800 --> 0:10:06.400 if you're like running an army, to just sort of 0:10:06.400 --> 0:10:08.840 be daring and bold and stuff. A question was he 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:13.680 trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption 0:10:13.760 --> 0:10:15.439 or was it more just like, no, I also believe 0:10:15.520 --> 0:10:17.520 this and it's worked for them and I admire it, 0:10:17.600 --> 0:10:19.480 or did he want to like get in better. It's 0:10:19.480 --> 0:10:21.760 certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the 0:10:21.800 --> 0:10:24.160 early period of like you know, forty nine or so 0:10:24.200 --> 0:10:26.520 when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress, 0:10:26.840 --> 0:10:28.760 And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to 0:10:28.800 --> 0:10:31.959 impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism, right, 0:10:32.160 --> 0:10:34.280 like that's the like, well, I'm gonna do communism better 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:37.560 than you fuckers. I was WACAN briefly in seventh grade 0:10:37.600 --> 0:10:40.520 because like some kids that I hung out with, like 0:10:40.600 --> 0:10:42.679 one of them got into it and I didn't really 0:10:42.679 --> 0:10:44.640 believe it. I don't know if any of us did. 0:10:44.640 --> 0:10:46.160 But we went to a magic shop and bought like 0:10:46.200 --> 0:10:49.040 source books or whatever. But I wasn't, you know, a 0:10:49.040 --> 0:10:51.800 teacher's pet type student. And in that brief two month 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:55.319 period I became like the best at wickanism. I like 0:10:55.400 --> 0:10:57.120 to be like, knew the whole book. I'd like correct 0:10:57.200 --> 0:10:59.880 them and being like oh no, that's that mojo bag positivities. 0:11:00.000 --> 0:11:01.680 It won't work like that, you know, I won't working 0:11:01.760 --> 0:11:05.280 with you buried you know soil. So it wasn't that 0:11:05.280 --> 0:11:06.880 I believed it. If I did like excelling at it, 0:11:06.960 --> 0:11:10.239 you know, yeah you want to memorize everything, yeah yeah, 0:11:10.559 --> 0:11:16.079 oh man, So like seventh grade wiccan uh Chairman Mao 0:11:16.280 --> 0:11:21.120 decided that his extreme knowledge of lashenko Is procedures and 0:11:21.200 --> 0:11:23.439 all of the reading he'd done of you know, Soviet 0:11:23.480 --> 0:11:26.960 agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the 0:11:26.960 --> 0:11:30.400 agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most population nation on 0:11:30.440 --> 0:11:33.040 the planet. Now, were they going through like I imagine 0:11:33.040 --> 0:11:36.280 their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's. 0:11:36.280 --> 0:11:38.960 Were they going through like terrible famine at that point? 0:11:39.120 --> 0:11:41.000 They were, but mostly because they've just been fighting a 0:11:41.000 --> 0:11:43.360 giant civil war, right, so that sucks up the foods. 0:11:43.600 --> 0:11:45.959 So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in 0:11:46.040 --> 0:11:48.400 China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine 0:11:48.440 --> 0:11:50.400 in their lives, so it was like the promise that 0:11:50.440 --> 0:11:54.160 there will be no famines was very powerful. And also 0:11:54.679 --> 0:11:58.000 he was sucking with something really intricate like Chinese agriculture, 0:11:58.160 --> 0:12:01.560 like some of the oldest cis ms in the human planet. 0:12:02.280 --> 0:12:06.880 We're continually operating, and yeah, it's one of those things. 0:12:06.880 --> 0:12:09.040 We saw it an episode on the the East India 0:12:09.080 --> 0:12:11.120 Company and when they came in right and they tried 0:12:11.160 --> 0:12:13.200 to like I saw the first three episodes of Taboo, 0:12:13.240 --> 0:12:15.760 So yeah, I have a pretty clear right, So like 0:12:15.840 --> 0:12:18.680 in Chinese, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and 0:12:18.720 --> 0:12:22.120 they decide to change everything. So like in the Soviet Union, 0:12:22.200 --> 0:12:25.240 Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were 0:12:25.240 --> 0:12:28.600 seen as useless bourgeois specialists, too cowardly intimid to make 0:12:28.600 --> 0:12:31.680 great decisions, because again, science requires recklessness. To be a 0:12:31.720 --> 0:12:33.880 great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an 0:12:33.920 --> 0:12:37.079 intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief 0:12:37.120 --> 0:12:40.680 in the philosophical underpendings of the party. Even children could 0:12:40.679 --> 0:12:44.000 be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this period 0:12:44.120 --> 0:12:49.880 was called They Are Creating Miracles. It totally. It told 0:12:49.920 --> 0:12:52.920 stories about children in an elementary school who had quote 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:56.760 developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot. This 0:12:56.840 --> 0:12:59.559 was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This 0:12:59.679 --> 0:13:01.840 is what the story. Schools are basically right, and just 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:03.840 let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever, 0:13:03.880 --> 0:13:06.120 and as long and tell them, know, make carrots but 0:13:06.160 --> 0:13:08.760 with tomatoes on the inside. Go do it. Just be 0:13:08.920 --> 0:13:13.319 daring fucking children. Quote it is a story out of 0:13:13.320 --> 0:13:15.800 a science fiction book. But no, my young friends, it 0:13:15.920 --> 0:13:17.800 is not. This is a true story. There are no 0:13:17.880 --> 0:13:21.080 fairytale magicians, no white bearded wizards, have Never Never Land. 0:13:21.120 --> 0:13:22.959 The heroes of our story are a group of young 0:13:23.000 --> 0:13:26.240 pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a 0:13:26.240 --> 0:13:29.360 little excerpt from the book there. Yeah, So, the more 0:13:29.440 --> 0:13:32.720 mal read of Lushenko, Williams and Maturing, those those great 0:13:32.760 --> 0:13:36.200 Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the 0:13:36.240 --> 0:13:38.720 more smitten with them he became. He would have read 0:13:38.760 --> 0:13:42.600 Lushenkoist journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that ted 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:45.640 Leshenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a 0:13:45.720 --> 0:13:50.240 quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia. Stalin's teachings 0:13:50.280 --> 0:13:54.640 about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical 0:13:54.720 --> 0:13:58.160 qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants. The 0:13:58.160 --> 0:14:01.720 realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be 0:14:01.760 --> 0:14:05.200 transformed into another. So this is the ship Maus reading. 0:14:05.240 --> 0:14:06.960 This is what he's coming to believe. Like you could 0:14:06.960 --> 0:14:11.560 literally change the nature of these plants by like altering 0:14:11.640 --> 0:14:14.080 them physically, like you can change them forever. And by 0:14:14.080 --> 0:14:16.360 what you're saying now is not exactly doing deep dives 0:14:16.400 --> 0:14:18.839 on the science. He's not double checking numbers here, he's 0:14:18.840 --> 0:14:20.640 just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and 0:14:20.680 --> 0:14:22.600 being like, this sounds fantastic, and a lot of what 0:14:22.720 --> 0:14:25.880 he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals 0:14:25.880 --> 0:14:28.120 directly to the science, which is leading him to think that, like, well, 0:14:28.160 --> 0:14:31.440 a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science 0:14:31.520 --> 0:14:34.880 by like what he understands and believes in the world. 0:14:35.440 --> 0:14:37.320 So Mab began to tell his friends of his exciting 0:14:37.400 --> 0:14:40.480 plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying 0:14:40.560 --> 0:14:43.120 with company, they will grow easily. When they grow together, 0:14:43.200 --> 0:14:46.200 they will be comfortable. Now. Like Ashenko felt that plants 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:48.320 at the same type could not compete with each other, 0:14:48.800 --> 0:14:51.840 the Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshenko as scientists 0:14:51.920 --> 0:14:54.000 Lu Tienu, who went on to persecute all of that 0:14:54.040 --> 0:14:57.400 country's experts in genetics throughout the nineteen forties. He mandated 0:14:57.440 --> 0:15:00.240 that Soviet agricultural science and best practices head to be 0:15:00.320 --> 0:15:04.680 used fascist eugenicists. Scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or 0:15:04.720 --> 0:15:08.480 forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigned supreme. 0:15:08.800 --> 0:15:11.400 Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience 0:15:11.440 --> 0:15:14.080 in college at the time, we were told the Soviets 0:15:14.080 --> 0:15:17.200 had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had 0:15:17.240 --> 0:15:19.960 to change textbooks and rename things in Leshenko's honor. So 0:15:20.000 --> 0:15:22.800 the Harving Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland, 0:15:22.960 --> 0:15:26.160 became Leshenko syndrome to show it had been discovered by him. 0:15:26.200 --> 0:15:28.520 Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk 0:15:28.520 --> 0:15:31.960 about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even the students. 0:15:32.280 --> 0:15:34.360 This meant that all through Mao's lifetime there was no 0:15:34.440 --> 0:15:36.920 policy to stop people in the same family marrying each 0:15:36.920 --> 0:15:39.480 other in passing down their genes. A lot of idiots 0:15:39.480 --> 0:15:44.720 were born as a result his words. Idiot. No, no, 0:15:44.840 --> 0:15:46.240 in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean 0:15:46.280 --> 0:15:50.000 idiots like they bothered me at parties. I mean they're idiots. 0:15:50.280 --> 0:15:53.360 Yeah yeah. What what did China have at that point 0:15:53.480 --> 0:15:56.480 of forty nine or whatever, like, was there a tradition 0:15:56.520 --> 0:16:00.040 of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of a 0:16:00.400 --> 0:16:03.920 world stage Western style of scientific method or I think 0:16:03.920 --> 0:16:08.080 it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere, 0:16:08.120 --> 0:16:10.560 connected with other scientists around the world to learn what 0:16:10.600 --> 0:16:13.760 they were doing and try to uncover truth better. And 0:16:14.040 --> 0:16:17.720 those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything, 0:16:17.720 --> 0:16:21.720 because good scientists before they died. It must have been 0:16:21.720 --> 0:16:24.840 so annoying to scientists, which was relatively in the scheme 0:16:24.880 --> 0:16:27.800 of history. Yeah, they're like, no, no, none of that, 0:16:27.840 --> 0:16:30.120 and we're not doing magic anymore. Now we got science. 0:16:30.120 --> 0:16:32.520 And then like the new scientists be like, actually, we're 0:16:32.520 --> 0:16:36.200 gonna do some magic. It's pretty magical. It's gonna be magic. 0:16:36.360 --> 0:16:41.880 Children are scientists now. Anyway, you have to die. Yeah. 0:16:42.120 --> 0:16:45.240 Mushenko is theory demolished Chinese agriculture, just as it had 0:16:45.280 --> 0:16:48.320 Russian agriculture. A potato blight hit in the nineteen fifties. 0:16:48.440 --> 0:16:50.440 Under the Shanko is um, the cause of the blight 0:16:50.520 --> 0:16:52.640 was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a 0:16:52.680 --> 0:16:56.120 stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:58.240 was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when 0:16:58.240 --> 0:17:01.800 the findings contradicted scientific or doxy. As a result, maw Era, 0:17:01.920 --> 0:17:04.639 China grew by some accounts, half as many potatoes as 0:17:04.640 --> 0:17:07.000 it should have during this period. I don't want to 0:17:07.000 --> 0:17:09.119 get too deep into the woods and communist botany in 0:17:09.160 --> 0:17:11.000 the mid twentieth I do like the idea that someone 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:13.960 was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well, 0:17:14.000 --> 0:17:15.479 you can look like this is how much land they 0:17:15.480 --> 0:17:17.879 dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to 0:17:17.920 --> 0:17:22.360 make really not die from lack of potatoes. Yeah, I'm 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:25.120 talked to the Irish about that. One of the things 0:17:25.200 --> 0:17:27.399 that was really big in communist botany in this period 0:17:27.440 --> 0:17:30.720 was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It 0:17:30.800 --> 0:17:34.280 wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would 0:17:34.280 --> 0:17:36.280 be lauded in the press for like growing grapes on 0:17:36.359 --> 0:17:38.600 a per symmetry or apples from a pear tree, where 0:17:38.640 --> 0:17:41.239 you're just splicing off pieces of trees and so you 0:17:41.280 --> 0:17:43.639 have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Like it's the 0:17:43.640 --> 0:17:45.359 thing you can do in your yard and it's cool 0:17:45.440 --> 0:17:48.200 and we can oh, yeah, I would be like another 0:17:48.240 --> 0:17:50.560 example of magic. That's not true, the idea of having 0:17:50.560 --> 0:17:52.360 two sitters fruits on one tree. And no, you can 0:17:52.359 --> 0:17:55.159 totally do like I don't know with it's like not 0:17:55.280 --> 0:17:56.639 every plant can be done that way, but there are 0:17:56.640 --> 0:17:59.040 a had to burn the guy that I saw that 0:17:59.160 --> 0:18:01.879 had that in his yard you just saw an apple 0:18:01.880 --> 0:18:04.400 and a pair on the same tree and started fire 0:18:05.320 --> 0:18:08.639 his poorhouse. Oh my god, there's nothing but ash. No, Like, 0:18:08.720 --> 0:18:10.720 to an extent, you can do that, but like, it's 0:18:10.720 --> 0:18:14.080 not it's not a solution for production or anything. It's 0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:16.560 a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something 0:18:16.600 --> 0:18:19.639 that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale. Right. 0:18:20.080 --> 0:18:22.200 It takes a lot of time, Right, it's not like 0:18:22.520 --> 0:18:24.080 you might as well just grow a different field of 0:18:24.119 --> 0:18:26.160 apples in a field of per simmons and whatnot. The 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:28.480 reason not to, but it was cool and it was 0:18:28.520 --> 0:18:30.159 impressive to people at the time, and they were just 0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:32.439 figuring this out. So like that's one of the things 0:18:32.480 --> 0:18:33.879 that would make the news a lot as they talk 0:18:33.920 --> 0:18:36.480 about like look at all these scientists who have crossed 0:18:36.480 --> 0:18:39.240 these two different fruits and whatnot together. I had mesical 0:18:39.400 --> 0:18:41.840 this weekend that had a pair in the bottle, like 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:44.800 a full pair, and we were trying to figure out 0:18:44.880 --> 0:18:46.960 very briefly and drunkenly, how they got the pair. And 0:18:46.960 --> 0:18:48.720 I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship 0:18:48.720 --> 0:18:51.320 in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had 0:18:51.320 --> 0:18:53.040 a flat pair and then it got fat. I was 0:18:53.080 --> 0:18:54.639 like maybe they put a dried pair in and the mescal. 0:18:54.960 --> 0:18:56.960