Was Mao Zedong Great?

27:55And if it really came down to it, boomers would support them conscripting your Gen Z, you know, nephew also if they needed to. So like, it's, it's just, it's just a matter that if there was anything that actually really upset America, sure. There'd be tremendous support for us to just take the gloves off and go world war two style on them. But yeah, we don't have anything like that here. and for good reason you know so we will uh yeah i mean i don't even know maybe i guess we don't even need these clips we can move right on to the the hassan piker one because i was going to talk about that but here's i guess where we are in the world i'm sorry i would say the clips are each only about a minute long and i do think they add some context to where all right fine at the moment fair enough rob i'll defer to you on that let's uh here natalie let's throw to the first uh donald Trump clip that I sent.

29:12Do you know something that I don't know? Do you know something I don't know? Well, tell us. I will tell you. They want to desperately meet. And until they're ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest in even. All right. You know, I'll throw it to you. I'll just make one point. That is honestly the first thing that came to my mind watching it this time. So, you know, in all the one of the most valuable things about Donald Trump, One of the greatest things Donald Trump did for America was just make the corporate media look so bad. And he would just call them out for how much the liars that they were, you know.

29:50And, yeah, he always focused on the lies about himself a little bit more than the lies just about the country. But he did call them out for the liars they were. And then he'd expose them and they'd say some lie, you know, bullshit question about Russiagate. And he'd be like, you're fake news. You're lying. Like if there was value in that because the corporate news were liars and Donald Trump called them liars and then years later, everyone went, oh, yeah, Donald Trump was right. They were lying about that. If there was any value in that, well, then there's equal opposite, you know, costs to Donald Trump sitting here and just making the corporate media look good.

30:25You know, he's sitting there lying. They're asking an obviously correct question. And he goes, that's why you're fake news. That's why you're a liar. You know, that does that does every bit as much damage as it ever did help in making the corporate media look bad. Because, of course, Rob, obviously, what do you mean they're not ready to capitulate? Who told you that? I don't know. The families of the four American service members who were killed by the Iranians this weekend. Maybe that. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Ultra Pouches. You guys know about Ultra Pouches.

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32:07And new customers can use the promo code problem to get 15 % off at take ultra.com. That's take ultra.com. And for 15 % off, use the promo code problem. All right, let's get back into the show. Yeah. And then of course he got, um, uh, you know, he's calling them out. You guys are reporting fake news. What am I supposed to be reporting? You keep telling me something that's happening and then it's not happening. You've said multiple times that the Iranians have already given up or they've admitted defeat. You're going to see a signing tomorrow and that did not happen. At the moment, we seem to be seeing the most, I mean, the biggest amplification of this war and that now there's more civilian infrastructure being taken out.

32:47And you're telling me that Iran wants out of this fight. Can you give me any more information about that? Yes, they called me. All right. I guess if we're back to the Donald Trump said so standard after that being not true since he's in office and particularly on this war, it's such an incredible way to spin this lie of, well, do you know something I don't? Because I'm the president. I'm telling you that they just called me. All right. Well, do you have any evidence of that? Because we can't really just work with you saying it. You've said that a thousand times. Right. I mean, look, I mean, I guess I'm trying to be as generous as I could here.

33:19I suppose like once for maybe a period of 72 hours from a president who had some had had built up some some goodwill and trust, you know, if they were like, no, look, this thing's almost we're talking behind the scenes. We got that. But you're like, dude, you think you can just go for like well over 100 days of just trust me? We're on the phone. The straight close the whole time. They're desperate to open it up. There is no tangible sign of that that he can look to. The only signs we have so far, right, are look like I've said this from the very beginning of the war. And this again, guys, this isn't rocket science.

33:59That's why me and Rob were not journalists and we're still better at it than most. You know what I mean? It's just like because this isn't rocket science. You look at what the governments are doing. You look at what the governments are saying. You look at how those things interplay with each other. Iran has been saying the same thing the entire time. We are not capitulating. We're fighting to the last man. And by the way, we're winning. OK, the only in terms of what they've done, it's backed that up. They've responded to every attack. They haven't gone down. They've continued just decimating our bases, killing Americans, attacking our allies where our bases are stationed, all of that.

34:34And, of course, closing the strait. Iran came to the table twice, both times when Donald Trump completely capitulated to them. And then when Donald Trump was like, no, no, no, I'm not completely capitulating. Both times they went great back on. So he could sit here and say, no, no, no, no, no. Someone's calling me on the phone. OK, Rob, I don't know who's on the phone with him. I don't know what he's talking about. But in terms of what the like, even if that is true, which I don't believe, but even if it's true, well, what the Iranian government is officially saying and doing is not what they're telling you on the phone, sir.

35:10And we have long established that at this point. Sir, if they're actively begging for a deal, but it's not good enough for you to take it, do they continue? Are they going to continue to engage in warfare because it sounds like you're not in agreement? yeah like what i mean i i don't know it's it's the guy they're they're still shooting at us everyone knows that so if they're so terrified they still want to make a deal why wouldn't they like we are to again this is we used the best example rob we used to love this one so much but it's when they would tell you covet is the worst illness ever it's the plague the vaccine is the greatest cure ever it's the cure it's 100 and you can't possibly get hurt by it and you can't possibly get the plague with it.

35:53And we're really having trouble convincing people to take it. Our biggest problem is vaccine hesitancy. And we would go, just think about the story you're telling right now, just like on the face of it. It makes no sense at all. You're convincing me there's the plague and you found the cure and you can't get people to take the cure. They're like, this just, it can't be all of those things. Either the germ has to be not that dangerous or your cure has to be not that good or something else is going on. Then Alex Jones convinced everyone in the middle of the plague not to take the cure for it. Right.

36:25And it's like the same thing right here. They're desperate and trying to get out of this and they just want to make a deal. But you're also telling us that they just violated the last deal, that they just broke this agreement that we just had. And that's why we're back at the in the war. Well, why would they do that if they felt the way you're saying? Why would they possibly? I'm sorry. Like the guy who's begging you to not fight anymore isn't also swinging haymakers. He can't tell me he's both of those guys. Here, let's I'm sorry. Did you want to add something? We can roll to the next one. Let's jump to that next Trump clip.

37:04They can't have a nuclear weapon right now. We take them years to produce it. And we will absolutely attack. We you know, the the new site that they're talking about. I mean, how about these people? They're in this because of nuclear weapons, and they're trying to possibly reconstitute a site. We'll hit that site. Any site where they're even thinking about nuclear will be hitting it very, very powerfully. Now, nobody knows except the Iranians, the damage that we've done to them. We have done damage that will take them 20, 25 years to recover from. so if we left tomorrow we had a big we had a big success but we're not leaving tomorrow i can't have a good well there you go rob there was your uh the outline of the new trump doctrine that you were alluding to before bonus point war we're just in you know you ever go to the arcade and you get like a couple rounds in the game in and then it's like bonus rounds like you already got what you paid for you're just trying to get a few more extra tickets now maybe maybe get out here with that big water gun you got your eye on that's all we're doing yeah and of course the bonus points are the straight so we're not getting back yeah right right now i mean look uh um it's you know it's just it's it's cartoonish it's ridiculous um he's really you know as we said through this whole war you know you're watching something you're watching a um something uh truly self-destructive and you just kind of wonder how much destruction is going to be done by by the end of it he's uh he's obviously lying he's obviously trapped and he obviously doesn't know what to do and he's going to continue he's going to keep lying at least for now and we'll see um all right you want to transition and talk about this uh this hot song clip so i guess the transition there would the almost the best way is that look one of the uh one of the costs here in a way of this war you know that cost of war project they always come up with great numbers on excess mortality and and money spent on munitions and stuff but they never factor this cost in is that uh people who who oppose the war but have really bad views also end up gaining a lot of traction.

39:29Um, so there's a, there's a Hassan Piker, a little clip here that's going super viral, uh, around social media. And I thought we would respond to this now. I don't want to, this is a short clip and I don't have all the context around this. And so I don't want to do a thing here where we're like taking this out of context. It's more something that just like, there's this thing that's going viral. A lot of people are freaking out about it or loving it, to be honest. And, um, and I just feel like there's an interesting conversation me and, me and you could have about this, Rob, and kind of different than what other people are saying.

40:01But one of the first things I'd say is that, look, I think it, it seems pretty clear to me that Hassan Piker is like ascendant right now. He's, I think he's the biggest lefty streamer in, in America. And he's, I think he's very influential in this, um, the kind of democratic socialist wing of of the the political movement whatever you want to call that I don't know you know as I've said before I don't know that democratic socialist is exactly the right term to call it like the mom Donnie wing or whatever and I know some of those guys are affiliated with like the DSA and stuff and some of them aren't but I just kind of broadly mean that that wing I think he's very influential with them.

40:43He's become a guy who like politicians are either denouncing or refusing to denounce. And anyway, he's got, you know, he's got some momentum, it seems to me right now. And I think a huge part of that has got to be because, well, he has always been several clicks to the left of anything, you know, kind of establishment inside the Democratic Party. And I think he's I think it's fair to say he's an open communist sympathizer. And so because of that, he hasn't had to tie himself to the awful positions of the Democratic establishment. And he's been against the wars and against some of the corporate Democrats kind of policies.

41:22and as they've you know as the wars have given you nothing but what genocides give you and as the corporate democrats ended up giving you donald trump and jd vance the mom donnie wing has a lot more credibility uh than they otherwise would have and so now we got to deal with uh some of the other ideas that they bring along with them uh anyway here let's let's play the clip and then there's there's a good amount we could talk about here rob i got stopped by a cop who thought i was like making fun of of mal zedong which i never would and never will now zedong is a is a one of the great leaders of of this world okay a man who changed the entire universe the entire planet okay for real for real yes i mean there was a lot of fucking excesses let's be real but the people's Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.

42:25I got stopped by a cop. All right. So this is the clip that of course is going super viral. I do not understand the context of this story. Was he in a communist country or something? I don't know what it is, but there was a cop who was angry that he was making fun of Mao Zedong. And he's like, I would never, would never make fun of the great Mao Zedong. Anyway, this, this clip, it seems to me, This has gone super viral on social media. And it seems to me I was looking through, you know, Rob, by the way, this is a little bit of an aside note. But I got to say it's one thing I don't like as much about new Twitter.

43:00You know, when videos, Twitter used to have a thing where if you shared a video, like whoever the original person, you know, you put a video clip up. Now, like if say I shared that same video, like if I shared your video, the view count would be the total number between your video and my video. And then if someone else shared my video, any one of their videos you would look at. So like if it was the most popular viral video ever and some random account with 20 views showed it, he'd be sharing a video with 20 million views on it. You know, now everyone gets their own count. Anyway, the problem with this now is you can't see how viral a video is going.

43:40You used to be able to look at this and go, whoa, this spread to like 40 million people. But now it's like you have to go find each one and tally it up, which nobody is going to be capable of doing. Anyway, a side note, it's just it was a better system the old way because you could kind of get a gauge on like how broad the, you know, the viewership of something was. Anyway, there's basically two reactions, as I can say, and this one's super. provide the the dsa one account that i saw it shared it had like 10 million views just on that one account i saw another one was like that had like 13 million views like it was a lot of people had seen this and it's almost all the reactions are one of two things it's either yes we love or oh my god you monster you know how could you possibly say something like this and in some way I just find both of those reactions to be fundamentally wrong.

44:33And well, like, I guess the pro-Mao one is kind of obvious why it's wrong, but we kind of could get into that. But even the people who are acting hysterical, I find them to be wrong, too, because that's just not. What do you do? You're almost saying that it's like, oh, that's the correct thing. The anti-communist should also get our panties in a bunch. and what cancel him it's also why i hate this whole new thing there's like this new thing where they say deport you know deport hasan piker deport this guy deport you're like guys like this is just i don't know it's just like some right-wing version of snowflake shit but it's like just decimate them if you're in the political sphere where you're making arguments about why things should be a certain way.

45:21Just like, I don't know. So like, if you want to look, I understand Rob, people have been pointing out forever. What hypocrites, you know, people like Hassan Piker are, cause what's really the difference between saying this about Mao or saying this about Adolf Hitler or something, you know what I mean? And okay, fair enough. That's a reasonable point to make, But at the same time, I don't know, I guess in some ways I just find it more effective to like open up that conversation and just be like, how much do you want to own this? How much do you want to own that you're supporting the biggest mass murderer in human history, that you're supporting the biggest police state that was erected in human history and perhaps the most vicious one?

46:09I don't know. I just the correct answer here, Rob, can't be that we're supposed to screech, you know, oh, my God, you're horrible or something like that. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Ridge. You know, I've been telling people for years about the Ridge wallet. It's the coolest wallet out there. It's minimalist and sleek and metallic. It's a great conversation piece. But that is not all that Ridge does. Ridge has a five in one travel power bank. You know how you have several devices that have different chargers? with Ridge's five-in-one travel power bank.

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47:18You can grab one of Ridge's power banks over at Best Buy, or our listeners can get 10 % off at Ridge.com when they use the promo code POTP10 at checkout. That's Ridge.com, promo code POTP10 at checkout for 10 % off. All right, let's get back into the show. I mean, yeah, I guess from a let's cancel or censor this guy because this is violent political rhetoric and this guy believes that communism or socialism or whatever he wants is so desirable that even if you need mass murders to accomplish it, that's a worthwhile cost. I would agree with you that I don't believe that speech is violence or that anyone needs to be censored.

47:57But I think to highlight this is, hey, guys, here's what the core of this philosophy is. And you guys are pretending you're nicer people. Here's what you really believe. And here's a guy who's even pretending to be, hey, I just care about the poor and we need more socialism here. And yet he's celebrating a mass murderer. So to me, it's more— Well, and to be clear, man, not a mass murderer. the biggest mass murderer in human history by orders of magnitude. And that really is the case. The estimates of how many people Mao killed are, I think it's, I've seen estimates from around 40, I think is the lowest you'll get, to over 100.

48:34Like, they really have no idea. Dude, there's entire, there's like the biggest war in human history worth of margin of error in how many people Mao Zedong killed needlessly. So I think it's worth highlighting as, hey, this is not a person that either this person's completely evil and you probably don't want to get your where can I how can I be a nicer person and advocate for more government so that I can feel like this is not actually a nice philosophy or this person is so ignorant and stupid that they seem to be praising a mass murderer. So I think it's more highlighting the stupidity so that people realize, oh, this is not actually worth listening to or platforming or, you know, taking seriously as a political movement.

49:25Absolutely, man. No, I think that's kind of my feeling with it. You know, look, I'll say this, OK? There is obviously, as as anybody who's familiar with like social media or or a comment section of any sort would know, there are a lot of like there's there's a lot of like right wing. comments online i'll say i think it's it's a reflection of people who are feeling this way who flirt with support of adolf hitler and with the nazis and with kind of like um uh and even even to a lesser extent you see this with like pinochet and people just there's almost this kind of celebrating of some of the the right-wing governments in history who kind of historically have been known for their brutality but there's this kind of now fuck that we're going with them anyway.

50:16I will say, you know, a lot of people made the, um, the comparison to Nick Fuentes, who has also made comments about like Adolf Hitler being a great man or Joseph Stalin being a great man or stuff like that. I guess I would say, I guess I could be wrong about this. When I see right wingers do it with Hitler, there always seems to be like a little bit of a smirk. Like they know they're doing something naughty. There's a little element of like trolling involved in it with in my experience with the vast majority of guys like that when you talk to them one-on-one and you go what do you actually believe they come way down from like this kind of persona of like oh I actually believe in in death camps or something like that no I get I'm just giving you kind of my experience and maybe I'm wrong about this when I hear Hasan Piker do this I don't think there's any element of that.

51:08Like, it doesn't seem like there is any element of like a Nick Fuentes smirk and I'm trolling a little bit. I'm being a little sarcastic. I'm saying something to get a reaction. This seems to me like it, and I could be wrong. I'm kind of guessing someone else's motivations here, but this seems to me like this is Hassan Piker's genuine analysis of Mal. Like I wouldn't make jokes about him. He's a great man in history. And I will tell you, I've and I'm somebody who like, you know, I swim in politically radical circles. I've talked to a lot of radical right wingers and a lot of radical left wingers about politics in my day.

51:48And I have seen this is a thing that if you get into that world, Rob, where you're talking about people who are like DSA and or democratic socialists in general, whether they're part of the organization or not. You do get a lot of this. You find some kind of communist's apology, you know, some kind of like, well, and they much more so than I've ever really seen right wingers like legitimately defend Hitler or something like that. I have seen a lot of left wingers go, you know, oh, Mao wasn't really so bad or they talk like this, Rob, excesses, the excesses of Mao. 40 to 100 million people those were the excesses and then this this by the way i find fascinating because in some ways you almost like empirically can't even argue with these people because look at the track record you're talking about the biggest mass murderer ever you're talking about the person and and rob also like it's not just that they were brutally authoritarian if anyone doesn't know much about mass go go google the brutality of the mousey tongue regime and go go look into it right and so not only are they this brutal brutal regime that tortures in the sickest ways dude like cuts ears off and cut like just tortures political dissidents cracks down on all uh um um speech rights but also at the same time it's an economic program the great leap forward right now the the cultural revolution is to cover up for what a disaster that was and propagandize all the kids to go kill all the adults who are talking about what a disaster that was, but this was an economic program.

53:28The vast majority of those numbers of deaths, Rob, you understand, came from starvation. So like the result of it is mass starvation plus no political liberty. And so empirically, that's not enough to get you to go like, you know, we turn away from this or something. I would also think, and not my field of expertise, so people can bash me for having this wrong but even and this is disgusting but let's say you even wanted to say hey china's now a better place for all of these individuals and i understand it took a hundred million people to die in order for the current state of china but now china is this incredible place well for one i'd love to see an economic study of the standard of living of uh people who are living in hong kong during the same time period um just to kind of showcase the differentiation between these two economic models.

54:20And then you'd also be forced to look at the current situation in China and say that I guess that's such an ideal landscape that it justified. I'm saying even if you wanted to say, listen, it took authoritarian efforts and it took a sacrifice of 40 million people, but look at what we ended up with. And I think that this is the most fantastic form of government you could possibly have. Compare that to the economic growth in Hong Kong and then look at the situation in China and tell me that that's the absolute best model that it justifies that level of not that anything would justify that level of death but I'm just saying as a thought experiment if that's what you're saying but dude there's almost uh there's two points in what you just said and I think they're both really important I want yeah I will and and let's almost like go through both of those because that's a really really important point here Rob and I almost like would challenge every leftist like every leftist who i like like all the crystal balls ryan grimm's and like all you guys like and i don't even mean this is like a rhetorical question like please answer this like i actually want to because you know look the neocons right who were uh also by the way former communists just saying and from our perspective they didn't shed enough of it But so like if you remember, I've mentioned this a bunch on the show, but I guarantee you like Crystal Ball and Mehdi Hassan and Ryan Grimm, I bet a bunch of them have covered this and done segments on it.

55:48But because this this got a lot of us people talking about it. But when Brett Stevens wrote for The New York Times, this piece in 2023, that was Iraq 20 years later. and he was asking the question was it worth it you know i was a cheerleader of the war in iraq was i wrong did i get this huge foreign policy thing wrong or not and literally the whole thing you could you could read it the whole thing is a comparison between saddam hussein's iraq and iraq of today and he makes the argument that iraq of today is better therefore he was justified in in in the war and every single one of those people crystal ball and ryan grim and zoran Mamdani and even I want to believe Hassan Piker, if he was really focused and rubbed all his brain cells together, would be able to tell you why that doesn't work.

56:37Like methodologically, why you're leaving out a big thing here. Because like, what about the million people you killed? Huh? You're not even going to kind of take that? Like, OK, you killed a million people. A million people are dead. 13 million people had to flee from their homes. You know, like you, okay, you destroy an entire country. And I don't even know if you get into the numbers of like how many hundreds of thousands of people were like, you know, were wounded and had severe injuries and all that stuff. And the trillions of dollars that it cost, right? And then you got to think about the seen versus unseen.

57:12What could have been done with those trillions of dollars that now isn't done because of that? Like, what about all that calculation? Do you just get to yada yada over that? Like, that's a real goddamn human toll. And if the goal of the thing is human flourishing, well, then what about all these humans who not only didn't flourish, but met the worst fate ever? You have to factor that in. And so in this breaking eggs to make an omelet argument, which essentially it is, well, he's a great man because he made, you know, whatever. China ended up being a thing because of him, which to some degree is there's some truth to.

57:47But like, OK, yeah, you're yada yada in over the biggest bloodbath in human history. And so, yes, there's that is one argument right there. Like, are you really prepared to embrace this? Like, got to break some omelets to make an egg argument. And by the way, people like me and Rob, who forgive us when we're good on the war question, but we're a little bit hesitant on your we can break as many omelets as we want to make an egg. we may have some questions like, is there a limiting principle to that? Other than you say the word democracy, like, you know, cause, cause like, Hey, Hassan Piker, if you're so into the idea of like, whatever, this breaks some omelets to make an egg, you know, we could save like seven people's lives by murdering Hassan Piker and harvesting his organs and then giving them out to other people who need, you know, a new liver or a new, I don't know how kind Hassan's been to his liver, but I'm sure he's got some good stuff in there that someone could use.

58:46You know what I'm saying? Like, where exactly do we go with this theory? And then the other point, though, that you really got at there, and I think this is a really, really important one that I wanted to make, because there is this thing where, and I've seen this, where the Stalin apologists and Mao apologists will do this thing where they go, So, but he industrialized. Like, hey, man, say what you will about Lenin. But when he found Russia, it was an agrarian society. And when he left it off, they made it into a, you know, they had factories and stuff. Mao Zedong built factories or whatever it is.

59:30And it's like, first of all, there's a couple of things here, Rob. Number one, isn't it interesting to watch communists celebrate someone for building factories? You just got to you got to really juxtapose the way they treat the industrial revolution in the West, which, by the way, Rob, came without tens of millions of starving dead people. Like, but and all they can think, all they can think when they see that is is child labor and a capitalist taking advantage of somebody. But yet, if the biggest mass murderers in history build a factory, all this. Well, look, they industrialize the country.

1:00:12So let me just get this straight in Britain, in America, in Germany, in France, we had industrial revolutions in Belgium. We all had the industrial revolution. OK, different phases of it, I suppose. but like it okay it was capitalist societies no rob what i say just to be clear for the when i say these are capitalist societies me and you i'm sure could go through the federal book of regulations in any of these countries or whatever and find some things we didn't like but i just mean for the sake of the argument here since we're talking about mao zedong um then like i'm saying they were private business owners who owned factories and built factories it wasn't when When you talk about the industrial revolution in the United States of America, you're not talking about Washington, D.C.

1:01:00opening a whole bunch of factories and having a program of we're industrializing the country. You're talking about people opening factories. OK, so explain this to me, Rob, a capitalist in America in 1879 or whatever. OK, you've got a bunch of money. You could use this for present consumption. Right. You could go out and buy all the finest amenities that 1895 or whatever year I said it was, 1879, has to offer, okay? But let's say you choose to defer that and you go, instead, I'm going to open a factory that will provide 5 ,000 people with work and it will make me money. I'll get to consume things, but in the future, I'll sacrifice my present consumption for more future consumption that will also provide a whole bunch of jobs for this community.

1:01:50You're evil. but the fucking murderous dictator who says i put up nothing of my own but i'll take this poor peasant shit and fucking insist that he go into labor to build a factory that guy gets credit for building the factory just think about this for a second you had yes yes it is true that there was some degree of industrialization in russia and china under lenin and stalin and mao seitan but it was also true that we had industrial revolutions all throughout the western world without the communist bloodbath that's preferable also oh can i i'm i'm sorry rob i know i i rant for too long um but this is another one that's kind of interesting is that also and because none of them no one fucking this is what i say austrian economics is the only real economics none of these guys even understand what they're talking about and it is unfortunate because i do like some of them um not so much hassan but some of the other ones but like also you're not always supposed to industrialize like it's not everybody knows you can nobody's rob if i enslave everyone in the country to build a factory there might be a factory at the end of it but it's not clear that that was the right and in fact that's kind of the whole point at least certainly in china is that they weren't ready to industrialize, right?

1:03:11So like, this is essentially what happened. And this is, you know, I'll just say this on the caveat, because we're getting toward the end of time, that there's historians who could explain this way better than me. But this is very interesting, right? So essentially, England, where the Industrial Revolution first happened, was very, very capitalist at the time. America, when the Industrial Revolution happened here, after the civil rights, like we didn't have a central bank, we didn't have an income tax, We didn't have federal regulations. We didn't have federal spending. Like it was just, you know, these were these were free market countries, relatively speaking, that had industrial revolutions.

1:03:47And so what happened there, like, Rob, if you could imagine, right, let's say like me, you and Natalie and 10 of our closest friends, we all move out to like it's 1886. OK, if you've seen that show, we go out on the on the Oregon Trail or something there. The Industrial Revolution is happening in the cities, but it's not happening out there. So we're no industrial revolution, right? So we go out there and we're going to homestead a piece of land together. And you're going over jobs like what we should all do because a winter's coming in a couple months. And I go, I think we should industrialize, Rob.

1:04:22Let's start building a factory. You very likely might go, hey, hold on there, Dave. Like, we don't have any steel. You know what I mean? Like, we don't we are not at all. We will starve to death if we start putting our time and resources toward building a factory. were nowhere near ready to do that. And you know what happened? Again, this is a little bit above my pay grade, but go read about this because it's very interesting. What preceded the Industrial Revolution in England is what's known as, I believe, the British Agricultural Revolution or the Second Agricultural Revolution. I can't remember, but it's something like that.

1:04:57And it's basically this period of time where they figure out all these things. And Rob, I'm not the expert in, I know figuring out the steam engine was big in the British Industrial Revolution because they could move the shit on the boats. And then I know it was the internal combustion engine was huge in the American Industrial Revolution. But like, I don't know all the details of this at all. But I know that this agricultural revolution, it led that they for the first time started producing way more food than they needed. And the population in England exploded from like five million to 40 million.

1:05:24And for the first time ever, there was so much food that they didn't need as many people working in agriculture to make food. Like that was a really important precursor, Rob. to everyone going and investing all of these resources and building factories and doing factory jobs. And you know what happened in China? They weren't at that point. And so Mao just ordered everybody to stop being farmers and start fucking building factories. And then you know what happened, Rob? They weren't producing nearly enough food and people starved to death by the tens of millions. Like, look, if you want to say he was a great man, just meaning he was a powerful man in history or something like that well then fine yeah he was but you're not saying anything if you're saying that so i don't think that's just what you're saying you're saying you won't make jokes about this guy because there were some factories at the end of the day just think about that rob you gotta you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet but if you built some factories then that's worth it man could a capitalist get some of that love i'm sorry that's too long of a rant but go ahead rob anything you want assan's got to get back on the mountain do i think he uh He's lost his touch.

1:06:34He's the black fingernails and a fresh mountain dude to clear his head. There you go. Well, you know, dude, I would still love to debate him. We had talked about doing that, and then he got in all his legal trouble. I'm going to reach back out to try to make that happen. But there you go. Let's debate Maoism. What a wonderful thing it was for China. Oh, and by the way, I guess the last thing to add is just that people give Mao the credit for modern China. It's like, yeah, when he died and then they decided to allow business. You know, like, why didn't all that happen while he was alive? Why don't they try to make it out like this is, oh, no, they did communism for a long time.

1:07:14And now they're much richer than they were. Yeah, they were at their poorest after doing communism for a long time. And it was around the time that they decided communism meant fascism. You know, it was around the time that they go. communism really means big business and government just work together a lot and then that worked a bit better than communism where they had no prices you know oh and by the way i should robin all that shit that i was saying about moving out to we go homestead when do we industrialize when do we do this all that shit how do you tell prices that's how you do a pricing system is you go oh steel's really cheap that means we should start doing a project that involves steel You know, why did Mao Zedong decide they were going to produce steel?

1:07:57Because he wanted to. He thought, he decided that would be best for China long term, would be to produce a lot of steel. So he took all the people. And then what did he need to do in order to enforce that type of economic policy? Be the most draconian, authoritarian, brutal mass murderer in human history. All right. All right. Communism sucks. And the Republicans who launched stupid wars are actually giving them a lot of ammo. so that I guess continues to be the theme. All right. Catch you guys next time. Peace.