Part Two: The Russian Scientist Who Helped Kill 30 Million People

you doing. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me back to talk more death caused by Russian Well, before we get into that, I want to tell you something I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy saying Sylvestry. But it's one of the rare names that I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying. Really, it's because of the t R I I don't know. I yeah, I enjoy writing Sylvestry. Oh, I've always felt it had a weird rhythm to writing it. I don't I get lazy by the end of it. Especially my full name

is Maximilian, so it's oh my god. I know you've got a lot of ground. When I was a kid, I had to learn it rhythmically. I still kind of tap my foot. I am my l I a n um scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no, no no. My nickname is a kid was SMI because that's in my preschool. That's where I cut it off, which, in hindsight, what kind of school like only allowed six letters? That's not many. There's many common first names that hit six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Um, well, thank

you for saying that. Round. Maximi is a pretty cool nickname, though, No, I did like it. It was like my first A well screen name I believe in was Maximi with no number. I was in early nice. I mean, I feel like you had a choice to make there at some point as to whether or not to be a hip hop artist, and you you could have taken that road. Well, if you can believe it. My middle name, and it's Ukrainian,

actually is Shaft. It's my mom's maid. So there was a moment Maxim Shaft, Maximilian Shaft as like, you know, some sort of show biz name felt too much. I was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh my god, man it. I went to a family wedding this weekend and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft, And like I had never thought about the whole other side of the family that are the got married into it.

Just like the joke of all their speeches was like, I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft Shaft, she's marrying all these shafts. Oh man, Okay, Well that was an enjoyable digression and a Ukrainian name speaking of people who had bad things done to them because we just talked aboutout the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go, man, that is a country that has just wound up getting screwed over by so many people. It's really it's remarkable.

Like yeah, there's just these nations in history, the Congos and other one of them where it's just like, oh, you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone for the last three hundred years. It's like, I like, like Italy without the art or food, Um, we're not as excited by it. Yeah, I mean I like, oh no, I mean, I like I like parog. I just made like a you know, every street corner doesn't have a parogi restaurant right here in America, right, Yeah, not a

lot of that yet. Yeah, yet we need like a good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West the Ukrainian invasion, but not from the or one that Yeah. Ok. Anyway, we're talking about troph and Leshenko and Um. Where we last left off, the USSR had instituted Leshenko's policies, He had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic scientists who didn't agree with Leshenko is um, and of course millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of

scientific factory. That's where we wound up last time, and this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman mouse China to see what happened next with Lushenko is okay? So, as you will remember from part one, one of my sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts, written by Jasper Becker. One chapter in that book, which focuses on the bad science of Leshenko and his comrades, opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice

not to include as we start this episode. I never think of poems in books as being like this was so necessary, but yet this spoke to you in such a way that you want to repeat it? Yeah, because it happens a lot in the books that I read. For this all off and from a poem, and I usually don't include that, but epigraph what is what is that called at the beginning? Epigraph? Probably right, I don't, I'm not. I just always feel like, wow, how cool you know a poem? You know, like that is the

energy that I feel when I read, you know. Yeah, And this one is more I think it accurately sums up the mood of the people that we're going to be talking about. Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how can I alone remains sober? So alright, that's where we're getting into. In nine mause Dung became the chairman of the Central People's Government. His rise to power had included

an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign. Mao was the great Leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos in China, he promised his people that he would make their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth. I'm going to yeah quote from that book here. The nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists, and the entire Communist party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand.

Out of China the land of famine, he would make China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so much food that they would not know what to do with it, and people would lead a life of leisure, working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership, China would enter the final stage of communism, ahead of every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they would reach communism in ten or twenty years, Mau said the Chinese would get there in a year or two.

In fact, he promised that within a year, food production would double or trouble. It's too much food. That is too much food. You know, it's not good to have too much food. You know, you're just gonna piles of rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one of the things that was instituted as a result of their worry that they were just gonna be way too much food is they institute a program to get rid

of the pests. Before the pests could eat all of the food that they were sure was about to be there. And so for like a period of weeks, all of the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows and mass to try to kill all of the sparrows. They did the same thing with a couple of bugs too, were just like people just be chasing down birds and bugs all day. Sparrows could talk. I'm sure they would try to just be guys, we're not sure that we're going to need to get rid of me. You might

want the sparrow, you don't know. Yeah, well they had them too. Yeah. So one popular slogan at the time was worked hard for a few years, happiness for a thousand which sounds good, right, that's problem, Yeah, I can think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years. Was the idea that like they had a plan to buckle down and that's just that they would be set

up with abundance forever. Yeah. That was again this idea that you saw in the Soviet Union that once we perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it, and then none of these problems that have been present throughout twelve thousand however many years its recorded human history will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a hole because you've all been wrong, the people, the wrong

type of human sow. We figured it out two years at most, maybe, Yeah, a couple of years, and we'll reverse this twelve year old train. Yeah. Peasants as far off as Tibet would never so much as seen an airplane, were taught to expect that in the near future. Quote, practically everything would be done by machines. In fact, the time would come when our meals would be brought by machine is right up to our mouths. Wow. So this

is like fully automated luxury communist taught to expect. Here, And as they say in the Simpsons, people will be needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever, you know, Like, people will still have a purpose, you know, but they won't need to suffer. They won't need to labor miserably in the fields, and they won't starve in the winter. You know. It will still be a place for people,

but it will be in a perfect utopian state. So now intoxicated China with his view of what the future could be, and it's easy to see why that would be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged in a huge chunk of Like they, China had gone through a lot of ship It hadn't been a good run for

them lately, so they were eager for this. Unfortunately for everyone, The scientific underpinning of the Brave New World maw envisioned was yeah, yeah, See, Mao had spent years fighting as a guerilla warlord against the other men who aimed to dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd

become a racious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this propaganda had to do with these spectacular record harvests the USSR was supposedly but not really having, because remember they were lying about that trof and Lushenka was built as the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed the propaganda not just because he thought it was literally true, but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he already believed about the world. Seemo was not a big

scientific reality guy. One of his catch phrases was quote we should be like marks entitled to talk nonsense. He lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying stuff like science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing mysterious about it, and there is nothing special about making nuclear reactors, cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of these things. As long as you act daringly, you will

be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first machine building ministry, second machine building ministry, your King Hall University. But just act recklessly and it will be all right. Yeah, dream big, you know, Baron Munchausen style, just like if you will it, come on, just balls to the wall,

go crazy, like what is science? Is about recklessness? I'm not gonna sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo figure out what all this is, you know, poor ship and Beakers, get on with it. Corn should be bigger. Do it, do it and make the fucking corn bigger. You can see why it would be fun like in a world where people have been taught no science is about like painstaking research and checking your notes and yes, yeah, gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time.

Just be like, nah, just fucking try ship man. It's fine, Yeah, we're the best. Then we're going to be even better if you just listen to me. Don't worry about the logistics again. Another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after this time. I mean, this was like such a sad chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah, I mean, one of the best things about history is that people learn all of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes.

Of course, humans change, They change easily, and they change a stick I found. So I'm going to guess that ma his attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him in his career as a warlord. That could be good if you're like running an army, to just sort of be daring and bold and stuff. A question was he trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption or was it more just like, no, I also believe this and it's worked for them and I admire it,

or did he want to like get in better. It's certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the early period of like you know, forty nine or so when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress, And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism, right, like that's the like, well, I'm gonna do communism better

than you fuckers. I was WACAN briefly in seventh grade because like some kids that I hung out with, like one of them got into it and I didn't really believe it. I don't know if any of us did. But we went to a magic shop and bought like source books or whatever. But I wasn't, you know, a teacher's pet type student. And in that brief two month period I became like the best at wickanism. I like

to be like, knew the whole book. I'd like correct them and being like oh no, that's that mojo bag positivities. It won't work like that, you know, I won't working with you buried you know soil. So it wasn't that

I believed it. If I did like excelling at it, you know, yeah you want to memorize everything, yeah yeah, oh man, So like seventh grade wiccan uh Chairman Mao decided that his extreme knowledge of lashenko Is procedures and all of the reading he'd done of you know, Soviet agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most population nation on

the planet. Now, were they going through like I imagine their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's. Were they going through like terrible famine at that point? They were, but mostly because they've just been fighting a giant civil war, right, so that sucks up the foods. So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine in their lives, so it was like the promise that

there will be no famines was very powerful. And also he was sucking with something really intricate like Chinese agriculture, like some of the oldest cis ms in the human planet. We're continually operating, and yeah, it's one of those things. We saw it an episode on the the East India Company and when they came in right and they tried to like I saw the first three episodes of Taboo, So yeah, I have a pretty clear right, So like in Chinese, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and

they decide to change everything. So like in the Soviet Union, Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were seen as useless bourgeois specialists, too cowardly intimid to make great decisions, because again, science requires recklessness. To be a great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief in the philosophical underpendings of the party. Even children could

be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this period was called They Are Creating Miracles. It totally. It told stories about children in an elementary school who had quote developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot. This was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This is what the story. Schools are basically right, and just let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever, and as long and tell them, know, make carrots but

with tomatoes on the inside. Go do it. Just be daring fucking children. Quote it is a story out of a science fiction book. But no, my young friends, it is not. This is a true story. There are no fairytale magicians, no white bearded wizards, have Never Never Land. The heroes of our story are a group of young pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a

little excerpt from the book there. Yeah, So, the more mal read of Lushenko, Williams and Maturing, those those great Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the more smitten with them he became. He would have read Lushenkoist journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that ted Leshenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a

quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia. Stalin's teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants. The realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another. So this is the ship Maus reading. This is what he's coming to believe. Like you could literally change the nature of these plants by like altering

them physically, like you can change them forever. And by what you're saying now is not exactly doing deep dives

on the science. He's not double checking numbers here, he's just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and being like, this sounds fantastic, and a lot of what he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals directly to the science, which is leading him to think that, like, well, a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science by like what he understands and believes in the world.

So Mab began to tell his friends of his exciting plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying with company, they will grow easily. When they grow together, they will be comfortable. Now. Like Ashenko felt that plants at the same type could not compete with each other, the Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshenko as scientists Lu Tienu, who went on to persecute all of that

country's experts in genetics throughout the nineteen forties. He mandated that Soviet agricultural science and best practices head to be used fascist eugenicists. Scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigned supreme. Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience in college at the time, we were told the Soviets had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had

to change textbooks and rename things in Leshenko's honor. So the Harving Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland, became Leshenko syndrome to show it had been discovered by him. Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even the students. This meant that all through Mao's lifetime there was no policy to stop people in the same family marrying each other in passing down their genes. A lot of idiots

were born as a result his words. Idiot. No, no, in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean idiots like they bothered me at parties. I mean they're idiots.

Yeah yeah. What what did China have at that point of forty nine or whatever, like, was there a tradition of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of a world stage Western style of scientific method or I think it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere, connected with other scientists around the world to learn what they were doing and try to uncover truth better. And those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything,

because good scientists before they died. It must have been so annoying to scientists, which was relatively in the scheme of history. Yeah, they're like, no, no, none of that, and we're not doing magic anymore. Now we got science. And then like the new scientists be like, actually, we're gonna do some magic. It's pretty magical. It's gonna be magic. Children are scientists now. Anyway, you have to die. Yeah. Mushenko is theory demolished Chinese agriculture, just as it had

Russian agriculture. A potato blight hit in the nineteen fifties. Under the Shanko is um, the cause of the blight was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when the findings contradicted scientific or doxy. As a result, maw Era, China grew by some accounts, half as many potatoes as

it should have during this period. I don't want to get too deep into the woods and communist botany in the mid twentieth I do like the idea that someone was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well, you can look like this is how much land they dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to make really not die from lack of potatoes. Yeah, I'm talked to the Irish about that. One of the things that was really big in communist botany in this period

was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would be lauded in the press for like growing grapes on a per symmetry or apples from a pear tree, where you're just splicing off pieces of trees and so you have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Like it's the thing you can do in your yard and it's cool and we can oh, yeah, I would be like another example of magic. That's not true, the idea of having

two sitters fruits on one tree. And no, you can totally do like I don't know with it's like not every plant can be done that way, but there are a had to burn the guy that I saw that had that in his yard you just saw an apple and a pair on the same tree and started fire his poorhouse. Oh my god, there's nothing but ash. No, Like, to an extent, you can do that, but like, it's not it's not a solution for production or anything. It's a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something

that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale. Right. It takes a lot of time, Right, it's not like you might as well just grow a different field of apples in a field of per simmons and whatnot. The reason not to, but it was cool and it was impressive to people at the time, and they were just figuring this out. So like that's one of the things that would make the news a lot as they talk about like look at all these scientists who have crossed

these two different fruits and whatnot together. I had mesical this weekend that had a pair in the bottle, like a full pair, and we were trying to figure out very briefly and drunkenly, how they got the pair. And I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had a flat pair and then it got fat. I was like maybe they put a dried pair in and the mescal. What they do is they have the tiny little pair in the tree. They hang the tree with the bottles

so that rose inside. I was like, that is cool, but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol or grow pears. To have a handful of trees or perhaps a whole field of them with bottles on the end, it seems novel rather than super useful. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean it was delicious, went on so smooth. I didn't even need a lime one. Did you eat the pear? You know, we didn't drink that much? And luckily, when

would you break the bottle? I guess? So yeah, I mean you have to like get a glass or something like a little bit of glass in. I just want to drink a mescaled up pair. That sounds delicious, Yes, that sounds fantastic. Okay. So grafting and crossing all these plants and stuff became something of a meme in Red China, and soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of pumpkins crossbred with papaya, corn crossed with rice, and other such nonsense which you can't do. You can't make corn

rice corn. You can't make that a year of corn has rice and itoked rice on instead of kernels. Unclear. It would be kind of cool either way, yes, totally, yeah, but it didn't happen. Neither would really fulfill in need that I have. You know, I go in for different reasons when I'm going for both of those two. Never again, will man, you have to go to two different places for rice grains and corn cub I'm tired of when I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate um, and

so that would have solved that problem. That's really frustrating. So the different districts we compete with each other for like claiming wild successes and things that could like go in the local newspapers and stuff. Uh, there were stories of like a hundred and thirty pound pumpkins and whatnot, most of which were complete lies. I feel like that's still a thing we're covering in the news today. Yeah, somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look

at this big fruit. Yes, and exactly. I mean I always feel like it's pre social media. Uh yeah, you know. American Heartland Memes was like ten times forwarded emails that had just like look at this chiant pumpkin the size of a man. This is that, And this is kind of how the craze over this new science starts to sweep China. You know, at first it's not super negative, like yeah, I mean they're definitely not grown as many potatoes, but like it's mostly just people being like, well, I

can be a scientist. Get what I did to this tree. Look at it. Look at this photo of my husky son next to a potato as tall as he is. You know, come on, this will inspired people for a decade, a mix of actual, neat little experiments. It just lies. Yeah, So we're going to get into the Great Leap Forward next, which, um was not a great time for most people, but

it's called the Great Leap. I know, I know, sometimes advertisements are not true, but in this case, the advertisements are true because they're the ads for our show, and they're great, and we're back. We're talking. When we were about to talk about the Great Leap Forward, which started nine. It was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly

turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Now, one aspect of the Leap that's probably most famous was the creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants and peasant villages designed to sort of. The idea was like, we don't need to all like move into cities and make big factories like the rest of the world. We can just have our peasants be like producing this sort of they didn't make good steel. Turns out farmers don't

make great steel in their backyards. Well, we are going to need that steel for when all the robots do all the tasks in the near near future, that we might as well start building the steel. We might not have the robots yet, Yeah, we'll get the steel ready the robots. Yeah. Anyway. It also involved an eight point blueprint for Chinese agricultural written up by Mao himself and

based heavily in the Shanko's theories. The eight points included close planting and deep plowing, real deep plowing, two things that by nineteen fifty three, the Soviet Union knew did not work. Because again they had this data, they just weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by admitting that they had starved a lot of people and necessarily with bad science, So they hadn't shared it. But were they like quietly changing practices they were starting

to buy the mid fifties or so like. But yes, certainly by the late fifties some of this had started to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting people know, and so China was just like, I guess this stuff works, We'll give it a shot ourselves. So probably would have told us, would have told us if

this was killing people. Prior to the Shanko is M, one point five million seedlings had been spread per two point five acres of farmland in China right in nineteen fifty eight as part of the Greatly Before where Chinese farmers were ordered to plant six and a half million seedlings per two and a half acres. So that's one point five million seedlings to six and a half million seeds. That's a lot more seeds being planted in the same

amount of dirt. In nineteen fifty nine, the government increased the number of seedlings to between twelve and fifteen million per two and a half acres. So they're just dowsing way too many fucking seeds in the land, and they're gonna hoping that these seeds start talking to each other, and we're like, you know what, we gotta start growing differently like people, seeds are stronger together. Yes, exactly, dynamics.

I remember something about um. Every important crop in China was planted using this method, and across the board, almost all of the seedlings died. State propaganda photographers would do things like find a field of wheat that was growing, hid a bench inside it, and have kids stand on the bench so that they could at least claim that the wheat growing so dense that children could walk across

the top of a field of wheat. So like, in reality, they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow, and in the areas where it is growing, it's not growing any denser than it ever came in before. But they're essentially faking it. They're cropping the photos in a way that it makes it look like there, you know, potato inauguration is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is. Yeah, and many people didn't know this was bullshit. Millions of

farmers were watching crops die. The propagandists who you know stuck benches inside of fields, knew that they were faking yields. This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman Mao out of what was probably a mix of genuine desire to please the Chairman and fear of what would happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared

to be reality. One witness to a visit from Mao to this inly experimental field outside tan Jin in nineteen fifty eight recalled that before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly that you really could walk across them. Once Mao left, the rice was replanted. Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same thing done in a different city the chair and visited.

He later stated, all of China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza from now so, everybody's just like, we gotta, we gotta this. This is the guy, like, we've got to make it look like this ship is working and weirdly like walking on it is the way We've all decided that it is weird spread like it's gonna grow so dense we can walk across. This is the thing that how else can you say? It's growing

a lot of fucking corn? Were their purges happening. Yeah yeah, I mean I know as a thing people were murdered, that they were definitely purchased. Oh yeah, yeah, he's purging. He's purging during this period. So now also fell in love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had come up with, basically that planting seeds super deep was a good idea. But where Stalin had been content to find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories, Mao

saw himself as an innovator. So he figured that if planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was even better. Oh my god, yeah, why stopped there? These scientists didn't have the ambition of his magic nation planting way too deep. Guys, we all know that ground is this deep, But what if I'm just saying even deeper? Yeah,

even deeper, as deep as you possibly clan. Often he would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows in the land, sometimes ten feet deep, in order to seats. It's like, how I is a comedian know that wearing two hats is very funny, but you know what's even funnier than that? Wearing three hats just go bigger, yeah, and Maw would be walking into the room with like forty or fifty hats, and everyone would also be like, we also need to put these. Everybody get on them

in they hats. How dare you not have thirty hats walk across the hats. In one province, five million people were ordered to plow for forty five straight days in order to prepare three million hectares of land in the north where the soil was too frozen to dig into, holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them

dig deeper. This logic also applied to rice patties, which meant peasant farmer women had to weigh deeper into the patties than they've ever gone before, often catching infections as a result. In at least one province, farmers had to tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in the rice patties because they were just going so deep. Oh my god, yeah, just way too deep. Lushenko is to agrobiology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers anymore.

Mao had the government in all it's spending to build new chemical plants, and instead tried the same sort of bullshit. Fertilizer recipes the Russians had used, generally a mix of ten percent manure and normal dirt. According to Lushenko is m the manure would magically transfer all its properties to the regular dirt. This practice lead to farmers just mixing in random garbage with dirt. Here's a quote from Hungry Ghosts.

People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts of the city, where it was buried for several weeks before being put out on the fields near Shanghai. Peasants dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk across the fields and bare feet. Others broke up the mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves, and even pulled down their mud walls to use his fertilizer.

You know Tip MoU's credit. I know that's maybe not right, But if I were to put a little of my own manure into, say a bowl of mashed potatoes and mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's all manure now. I wouldn't be like, well, there's still there's a lot of good mashed potatoes in there. When you are mixing poop with food. Yes, in person poop means all. That is a fair point, but it doesn't work that way when you're trying to create fertilized soil.

So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all of this heroic innovation, but that meant they were also going to have to deal with the surgeon pests. As I mentioned, So yeah, in nineteen fifty eight, he ordered farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust all of the sparrows to death. We already went over that. Clearly, this is all like a plot from someone inside the government that hates sparrows, just the long play to get

rid of sparrows. How many people starve if we get rid of those god damn birds? Get off my roof. Wacky as this all was. For a while, things looked like they were going great. Nineteen fifty eight was a good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look like the autumn harvest head quadrupled. Now, when his comrades started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they

knew they were soon going to have. It was reported that fields had been producing less than three d and thirty pounds of grain per one of an acre now produced forty five to fifty three thousand pounds of grain, which if true, would be an amazing eight of income. They have too much food. They should just start destroying the food they have now, just to make room for the new food company. It's weird that you predicted exactly

what you're going to need that food. So all of that information on how much grain they were growing was lies. The State Statistical Bureau had been shuttered and replaced by good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies about the harvest. And so for a little while, China thought it had more food than it knew what to do with. So in the autumn of Chinese citizens were told to eat like it was going out of style. One slogan at the time was eat as much as

you can and exert your utmost in production. Peasants in a village called zeng Do told anthropologists later that quote everyone irresponsibly eate, whether they were hungry or not, And in twenty days they had finished almost all their rice. They had rice which should have lasted six months. Oh my god, So I do now feel guilty that that is. My attitude to eating three to five times a day is like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when you when you step until it hurts, man, And I'm

not getting out in the fields and doing any labor. No. I mean. One of the good rules of thumb with life is that if you do whatever you're doing until it hurts, about fifty percent of the time, that will be the right thing to do. Your body is a way of telling you to stop, which is calling a physical discomfort. Yeah, so if you work out till it hurts, Yeah, that's what we're always And the same thing is true

with eating or with snorting a lot of cocaine. You know, do coke until you start to bleed too much to do more coke, and then it's time to stop doing. Switch nostrils, switch nostrils, switch drugs, you know, move to the butt until your veins collapse. Do it till it hurts. Advice for all of our listeners. So Way D, a survivor of the Great Bleep Forward, later recalled We Lived Well. We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary

to eat meat. If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't do People even avide with each other to see who could eat the most, so they're have an eating contest. They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter supply of food in a couple of weeks, just because

why not, there's gonna be so much food. I know it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but this is all sounding pretty nice to me, right it come on, it's coming down from on high, like and if you're one of these peasants after years of war in privation, we eat as much meat as you can, like, you're feeling great. You're feeling like this fucking communism thing, there's no downside, up up, up, up. I can't imagine the graft changing. Yeah, we got plenty of meat, plenty

of grain. That's really all we care about, like other than the stuff we have that's not meat and grain. But anyway, it seems great for a while. People ate so much that by the time winter came around, the granaries were empty and most of China was running out of food. So there's that hard right turn. The States still had full granaries, but rather than hand out food to the people, mal convinced himself that the peasants were

hiding grain to be counter revolutionary. It was very important to him that communism seemed to be doing well in China. He didn't want to look bad to the USSR, so he had China double her grain exports and cut down on imports. That way it would at least look like a success. Now, oh man, this is like a rom com where like two characters hate each other or like are too afraid to tell the other person the truth

because they don't want to look bad. But really, like if they just came together and had to sit down conversation, which they might at the end of this film, they'd be like, we have a lot in common. I don't have any grain? Do you have any grain? And oh my god, I'm trying to impress you this whole time. It would be really fun to do a nice romantic comedy set during just Is twenty million people starved to death, like Stalin and Mao having a meat cute and just,

oh my god, what a cute movie that would be. Uh, Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's the nineteen eighties and they both live in Hawaii and like they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling rain. Maybe a road movie where they're just like going to get more grain, to get you know something where it's just like they have to spend a lot of time in a truck together in a car. Again. Yeah, there's

a lot of fun potential. Yeah, Okay. So the collective farming system that Maw and you know, his regime had induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct control of the food that they grew in hard sted It went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens. All this meant that it was under the direct control of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record breaking

allocations to the government. So food that could have fed people was given to the government for the sake of individual party members careers, and Mao then shifted out of the country for the sake of his own Ego nine harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by the spring of nineteen fifty nine, more than twenty four million people were starving in China. Mao being Mao was incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies.

The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap forward were only quote tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience. So it's an artful way of putting Yeah, I mean he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a lot of people in this country today, blenders in this country today. Yeah. When his braver Aids brought up just how bad things were starting to look in the countryside, Mao said, quote, come back in ten years and see

whether we were correct. China is not going to sink into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply because there were shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap. Imbalances and market problems have made everybody tense. But this tension is not justified. Even though I am tense myself. No, it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense. If I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills and then I feel better. You want to try sleeping

pills if you feel uptight. So right, that's a real quote. That's maus advice. When his guys are like, you know, tens of millions of people are starving, and he's like, try some drugs. Oh my god. Yeah, I follow someone like him on Instagram. I think I am someone like him a lot of the time, but I've never tried

to reform a continent's farming practices just get high. Was maw at all like when these things, when he saw that they were not going well, did any part of him feel like it's the people's fault for not allowing the system to change them or to not like forging themselves into newer, better, you know versions, Or was he

just sort of like a bad weather. I don't know about him to say what was going on in his own internal heart, But the things that he said in the practices that he put out as a result of like these problems, portray a man who believes that the issues and his plan are due to selfish people who are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain, who were refusing to give up what they owe to the government and whatnot. Like that's the issue in the long

and the long term. If he just like keeps a strong hand or a stronger one, they all work out because they're not really starving their hiding food because they don't want to give it to the government. They're eating in secret and stuff like that. That's his what he kind of rounding up fat children and just being like you're hiding grain and eating. I don't think they were fat children. So at this point disaster probably could have

been averted. The government had a lot of food and storage, and if the flaws in the system had been admitted, the bad practices halted and changed back to normal, things might have been okay for Chinese agriculture. But that would have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws and their ideologically consistent scientific theories. It also would have meant backpedaling on all of the propaganda they put out, So

rather than admit any error, Maw doubled down. Anyone who does not make a great leap is the rightist conservative. Some people think that a leap is far to adventure risks. It is new, it may not be perfect, but it is not an adventure. All must have revolutionary optimism and revolutionary heroism. So y'all are just too scared of the future. Yeah, and that's why this is having some growing revolutionary We all go a little. We all got to be revolutionaries.

Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains, but it's growing, I mean, not for me or the other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China, because we all are eating well, because disgusting amount of grain. If I seemable of grain, I am done. Yeah, I threw up more than I eat. My dog was like a king. So the autumn of nineteen fifty nine harvest was thirty million tons lower than the nineteen fifty eight harvest had been. Officials, however, reported that the harvest was

the highest ever. This saved them from reporting failure to mount, but it also meant that the government based its taxes that year on the expectation the country had grown more food than ever, and so in nineteen fifty nine, a year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes

in recent history. Peasants were required to turn over their total output, and since that total output was a fake number calculated via nonsense math, they were basically ordered to hand over all of their food, and in many cases more food than they actually had. So well that those numbers just aren't gonna work out for anybody. Know. They don't know, And I bet they get all mad and they don't pay their taxes. Yeah, they sure do. I

didn't pay my taxes for five years. I didn't file and it took five years for me to hear anything about it. I bet that's not what the case was then. No, no, no, Actually, I will say this. Everybody winds about the I R S. Like I grew up in a pretty conservative part of the world. They're always talking about how horrible it is. As someone who's been late on his taxes a few times, they're actually pretty easy to deal with. Yeah, they try to find a solution. They really want you to give

them something in the work with you. Look at us just defending the I R S here, and they're reasonable of policies. I mean I like rhoads. Ye like aces. Okay, speaking of something else, I like products and services that support the show. And let's let those products and services advertise to us and irritate the ghost of mouse dung and we're back. Boy, those were some good products, Oh my god. I mean, for the for the ones that meet my needs. I'm definitely gonnao about exchanging goods or

money for them. Oh yeah, goods or money. They'll take both. Usually trades. Big trade is a bit barter. I'm all about barter. Oh my god. Waited to see these clamshell necklaces that I make. Oh my god. Okay, so we just talked about the autumn harvest, which was thirty million tons lower than it had been the year before, and the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be, and so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more

than they had actually grown. I'm going to read another quote from Hungry Ghosts. Here. In many places the entire harvest was seized. Sometimes officials reported a harvest so big that even after taking away everything they could, including all livestock, vegetables, and cash crops, they still continue to search from house to house. Mal had ordered officials not only to deliver the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks,

and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village leading the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and beaten to death. So again, I r S. Isn't sounded so bad now, So this is a real dumb question. But like money, taxes pay for the state needs. You give the you give the government dollars and they use the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the

roads on for all them. Absolutely, that's my understanding. So when they're taking the food and on principle, on principle that like, well, we're all afraid of saying that what the truth is, um, Is it just so that the capital has a ton or are they selling it? Is this is their global trade going on where it's somehow

like benefiting. The idea is both that you know, the state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs, so you give all your food to the state, and then it redistrict is that it's supposed to perfectly work. And of course also they're not just exporting to the

Soviet Union. They're exporting suporting North Korea at this point because it's this idea that like the food that we produced will be used, you know, some of it we will have to sell for resources that we can buy things that we can't yet make ourselves, and we can continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist blosh that can compete against the decade and you know, the terrible West and whatnot. Um, with our spread out seeds

with our spread out. They're fucking horshly spread out seeds, much corn, much soil around them. God damn fertilizer swimming in it. Oh boy, Okay, So obviously, willful denial of reality can only last for so long as we in the West learned with a little war called all of the wars we fought in the last seventy years. Eventually it became clear that even the heavy handed methods used by the government weren't turning up as much food as

they ought to have. Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless, Maw came to the conclusion that the peasants were just bearing their grain underground to hide it. He accused them of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day, and eating rice secretly at night. In reality, most people were subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made mostly out of grass and inedible plants. Yeah, well, what

else you gonna do? I think those are now called grain balls in l A. Yeah, well, now you would pay fourteen dollars to have one of those out of a truck, can't. I guess that's the food of this city at the end of the year, while tens of millions of people starved, the People's Daily newspaper advised peasants to quote, practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality, and only eat two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid, which again sounds pretty much

like California. Right, come on the run. You know you will be glad to know that while tens of millions of people were starving, mel gave up meat. Oh that's good, you know, follow the leader exactly. Everybody give up meat. Oh you we took all the meat, and we beat half of you to death because you didn't give us your chickens. Life's funny. Sometimes. The Great Famine would last until nineteen sixty one and go down as the deadliest

peacetime disaster in Chinese history. During this entire time, Mao's government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere as a result of their desire to hide the famine and put on a successful face. The provinces that grew the most food during the famine where the provinces where the most peasants starved. Oh god, yeah, So the people who are actually making the most food are

the people who are most likely to die in the end. Conservatively, twenty five to thirty million people died from the famines that came from the Great Leap Forward. You will hear higher numbers as well. It is very politicized death toll, both because people conservatives in the West have a vested interest in making it seem higher, so sometimes here fifty million, sixty million, and also people who are you know, further to the left or even maoist today have a desire

and downplaying the famine. Twenty five to thirties, maybe thirty five million seems like a very fair estimate based on what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare. It's a big range, but it's all bad. It's probably roughly half the death toll of World War two starved to death during this famine that didn't need to happen. Oh my god. You know, so these bets were the result of many

different bad policy decisions. You know, the idea to like make steel in backyard furnaces and stuff was not great. And I'm just I've tried, you know, amateur, you know, you go online, you watch these videos, you set it up in your backyard, you melt down your plowshares, of course, the liquid, and then you let it cool into the shape you want. I tried. It never works. Yeah, no,

it's not great. Um. So, there were a lot of factors in the Great leap forward and why so many people starved, but Lushenko wasn't was maybe the number one contributing factor to this fan The blame for many of these deaths then must land on the head of Lushenko. Uh, it is very likely, although impossible to prove certainty, that Lushenko was responsible for more death than any other scientist

in human history. Um. Although there's still time for the guys who made the atom bomb to take that, you know, come, but right now it's probably Leshenko. Where is he right now again? Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union. That's about what we're about to get back to. Yeah. Yeah, So Trophim's dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to degrade in nineteen fifty three after the death of Stalin.

Some of this was due to the millions of people who had starved, but a lot of it had to do with some very public post World War two failures. Right after the war ended, Lushenko launched the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. He believed that he could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing millions upon millions of trees. That might work, if you could do it. I don't know, it seems like it

might actually work. But because he was Lushenko, he ordered all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly close to each other, and all of the plants died. You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things, the essential thing is to grow them, right. He has all these other big ideas but can actually now just it's like people from growing trees for forever, like we know, we know there's forests everywhere you look. Come on, you

don't need to change that up. So yeah, he tries to plant millions and millions of trees really really close together, but the plants all died. Of course. Um of course they didn't die before The composer Shashkovic had written his coral symphony The Song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht had pinned this poem about the forest that was supposed

to happen but never wound up actually growing. Because anyway, don't put your poem before the forest is what I always say, you know, let the forest grow in then, right, there's a lot of wisdom there. Don't put your poem, but well, I'm gonna read the poem for this non existent forest anyway. So let us, with ever newer arts, change this Earth's form and operation gladly measure thousand year old wisdom by new wisdom, one year old dreams golden If let the lovely flood of grain rise higher, so

all the more tragic beauty wasted on science. Yeah, bad science. If only he just known, he just needed to like have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever, he probably could have accomplished. Oh yeah, that would have the same thing. And I don't know, warming Russia, just to have everyone polluted a lot. Yeah, well they're getting that anyway. So the way to Chinese eight Rice, we just needed to drive pointlessly in Russia. Come on, everyone,

it's your duty. Just go in circles on the one road. In nineteen sixty two, the first generation of post Purge Soviet scientists began to carefully try to dismantle the myth of Lushenko. Nikita Khrushchev Stalin's successor protected Leshenko for a little while, but Kristjev lost his job in nineteen sixty four, and that same year physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lushenko to

the Russian Academy of Sciences. Quote, he is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics, in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, and even death of many genuine scientists. So Sakarov is

spent in some Fireshenko, Yeah, that's that's pretty damning. In nineteen sixty five, Lashenko was removed from his position as the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue his mostly live based research alone. That same year, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that lushenko wism was no longer immune to criticism, because it had been

legally immune to criticism since sending forty six. An expert commission was sent to look into Lushenko's experimental farm and study his methods. They found that he was an obvious and tremendous fraud. These results were published permanently demolishing Leshenko's career and reputation. I mean, I have truly no sympathy for this man who killed but the image of you know this deeply fallen from Gray's scientist on a small, little experimental farm, trying to make imagine whatever with this

tea should be even more seas. Maybe we just maybe the problems we're not digging deep enough. You guys, give me too few seeds and now everything's growing, okay. So um Trovim attempted to defend himself from this attack. He wound up in a six hour debate with the expert's commission, where he basically argued that what he fed his animals and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless.

The details of his experiments shouldn't matter. What should matter was his results, which he reported, and they should basically just trust what he reported as the truth. Yeah, yeah, I mean, why would you like as a scientist exactly, he's a scientist. Let's go to the last page. Yeah, tell make me show my work. The point is whether of a calculator or not a calculator. The answer is right. I'm going to quote from a book called the Lushenko Affair here. He had never troubled himself to be precise,

and he insisted that precise data were not essential. Shrillly, he called attention to biological theory to the progressive biological theory that had been developed quote in unity with the practice of collective and state farms, and that had always enjoyed the support of the party in state. Basically, he whined that his theories were correct with communism, and the party had always supported him. So why were they suddenly being so mean and asking for proof? Which, if you're Lushenko,

this has got to be confusing. Yeah, you're like you guys like me so much. It was crazy. Some of the times I'm like, well, they're not gonna like this one, and then they're not going to hurt even more. Seeds clostedgether, Okay, well they yeah, here's another quote from Loshanko Affair. The specialist stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect. For Leshenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning

with facts and figures. Their favorite device, as the chairman of the Investigating Commission put it, was to quote to say a single thing and hush up all the rest, as long as everything looks good. This was a perfectly obvious and deadly accurate characterization, and would have been with respect to any of Lushenko's recipes at any time, beginning in nineteen twenty nine when he first became prominent with his scheme for vernalizing grain. But that perfectly appropriate response

to Lushenko is m was thirty five years overdue. Which we know what happened now in those thirty five years. Yeah, like forty million people die, so many about a million people a year maybe, Yeah, it's hard to out of that was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the cool locks and stuff like there was other ship wrapped

into that. But it's an impressive sustained production. You know, Like I feel like a lot of the big death tolls ascribed to one person or like in a bit of a tighter window in this it just like to just keep pumping out debts. Yeah, because you look at like the Nazis and they were murder sprinters, you know. Most of the killing they did was like forty two to forty five, and then they were sort of out of gas. Rushenko is killing people for a really long time.

You know. You you kill a man's fish, he starts for a day. You teach a man to kill his fish accidentally, then you've gotten multiple generations of people with no fish. Think of the long game. So finally, at least the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do actual science again. Quote. The confusion of political and technical authority was now declared to be a mistake. Specialists were to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods

from those that only seemed so. Period. The thirty five year error was not to be examined or analyzed. So they understood lushenko wism was wrong. They didn't ounce Leshenko, but they weren't willing to look back and really analyze how many people had died or how fucked up things had gotten because of their belief because that was still you know, post Stalin Soviet Union was a bit more open, but they still weren't willing to like dig into just how fucked up things for sure, and other people were

you know, shared some responsibility. Yeah, you know, a lot of people responsibility. It has been suggested by some historians that Trophin Leshenko maybe the single individual most responsible for the fall of the USS are. The true extent of the damage he did demand kind is incalculable. Lushenko died

in Moscow in nineteen seventy six. The government waited two days to even announce his death, so in the end he died obscuring, discredited, But the politicians and officials who enforced his shitty science and praised him while he was Stalin's favorite were not punished, Nor were the people who'd helped export his bad ideas to China after nineteen fifty three, when the Soviets knew damn well rushenko Wism did not work.

But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern age of conman and bastards, troph And Lushenko is enjoying a renaissance. I barely got to relish. That was like four minutes of him living in obscurity. Yeah no, and now he's back to I mean, it's the trophy the tro finish trifinissancesheninnis right. They can't all be the Mecanissance, all the words the right way. No, it looks better

on paper, like finishedance on. I can't even pronounce. Yeah, no, it looks it looks like it should pronounce, but I'm not. It's not coming out right anyway. Record yourself trying to portmanteau, troph and renaissance and send it to us on Twitter. So, according to an article in Current Biology, over in Russia, the work of Lushenko has been picked up by quote a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, stalinists, a few qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church. So it's coming

back a little bit now. One of the reasons for this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding and genetic science. We've basically learned pretty recently that certain things that happen in the environment, like living through a bad winter or a war, starving for a period of time, can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian

genetics are not wrong. This has been seen by some as evidence that lushenk Go was right all along, even though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes and Lushenko didn't believe genes existed. The other factor is that these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something. They're not permanent, but like if you live through a famine and you have a kid, like right around that time, you can pass on certain things as a result of

the fact that you were in that extreme state. Wow, I mean in this, I feel like the simple grade school version of genetics and evolution I learned did not take that into account, and I probably got answers marked wrong that perhaps I feel like that's someone recent. Yea, genetics is prettyeah, definitely pretty recent that we've really gotten an understanding of it. I don't claim to be an

expert on genetics. People are still figuring this out. But like Lushenko didn't believe in genes, so it's wrong to say. People who are attacking the Shengo weren't saying nothing has passed down like as a result of environmental changes. They were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're

trying to figure out how to grow better grain. Right, And in fact, Lushenko had declared the entire science of genetics, to be quote, an expression of the senile decay and degradation of bourgeois culture, so crediting him for epigenetics is a little bit irrational. Are the people though, that are like giving rise to it again doing it out of the ideological principle of it. That is a little bit

of it. I think some of it is because and I'm not near I'm not an expert on modern Russia, but like, there's this because obviously Russia right now is not the Soviet Union, is not anything close to a communist state. But there is a lot of longing for that period of time for a variety of reasons, some of which there are things that we're better back then, and some of which is just obviously the same way

that people long for the nineteen five. Don't think about the fact that, you know, water fountains were segregated and stuff. So it's it's a complicated thing I think why certain groups are starting to come back to these ideas. But it is definitely scary because that means that there's the possibility that troph and lushenk go is very very very very very dumb science has the chance to kill somebody. Which, guys, if you're listening at home, spread Joe seeds, um, just

spread your seeds. Don't plant them too deep. You should be able to see him, but not too was together. I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life. None of them planted millions of seeds breaker like, oh man, it's not It's like one of those gross things you buy at a state fair that's got like a little bit of like molasses and it's just kind of like

sesame seeds. It's almost like a candied apple. There's like a weird I feel like southern dessert that's just like seeds and goo and a ball and you know what, it's gross. And I wouldn't plant at my ground and expected to feed my family. I had a seed gooball. I mean maybe it's just a weird thing that I was given that I was somebody just put some seeds and goo together. Like it wasn't yankee some seed goog I didn't buy it at the state fair. It was just handed to me by a man at the front

desk of a motel. I was staying, I shouldn't have eaten that seed googall. I'm still digesting it. You just got poisoned by someone. What state were you in? I just remember like as a kid that it was like, yeah, I mean, this is not a thing that I'm now I would be responsible to turn down a seed gooble. Now, child, I was like, this is a dessert. This feels I can say as a child in Texas, we have played many a good game of poison the Yankee. That was

everybody's favorite game growing up. On a hot day. No better way to pass the time than to kill a traveling Northerner. We just love making carpet bags, sick, grinding up glass, putting it in their grips, being doing slowly until their insides played out. The South those are better times. Oh boy, all right, well that's that's our episode on

trophrom Lushenka. How you doing, Max? I mean, I know that's not your style, nor is it the style of human history, but I wish the ending had been a little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up and now surgeon resurgence. It would be nice if people ever learned lessons from history. But if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that we don't. Thanks for having me on and depressing. Yeah, thanks for coming on and being

depressed by this. Do you want to plug some plug doubles? Sure? I have a fifteen minutes stand Up special on Netflix. Go to the Comedy Lineup Part two and yeah, I I don't know how to farm. Also, um seed googballs dot com use promo code shaft, but I now sell these balls. Um They're not good, but they are heavy, so yeah, yeah, if you need a heavy snack, if you need a heavy ball, Shaft is your man. And I Margaret Evans. You can find me on the internet at I Right Okay. On Twitter, you can find this

podcast website at behind the Bastards dot com. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards pod. So check us out, follow us, tweet us your best attempts to Portmanteau and Renaissance. I really feel like there's a way. I'm just not getting its finish now. I'm not I'm not gonna try it anymore. I don't know that's closer. We're good, alright, alright, alright, you have a good day. We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone else terrible And until then, I love about you.