Doomed to Fail - Ep 184: Rejection turned to Destruction - Hitler, Pol Pot, & Stalin

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

We've all heard how Adolf Hitler was rejected from art school... today we'll dive into the details, how being a poor non-student in Vienna led him to the back rooms of rebellion - and eventually to the horrors of WWII. Did you know that Pol Pot of Cambodia was similarly rejected by the Paris elite while in college? Also, Stalin was rejected by the Church and kicked out of the seminary. Would history have been the same if these guys had found a more productive outlet in their 20s??? Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do. And we are live. Taylor, hi, how are you? Good. How are you? I laugh every time because I feel like you fundamentally don't understand how podcasts work if you say we're live every time.

I don't. I assume everybody's listening right now in real time. So funny. I like your vibe right now. It looks like you're in like an arcade. It was a blue light behind you. It's like a neon sign behind you. So I have a light here in the office.

And it's LED. It can switch between different vibes. And it depends on what mood I'm in. And today I'm in a blue mood. So I did blue. But sometimes I'm in a purple mood or a green mood. When it's rainy outside, I'm in like a turquoise mood. So yeah.

That's the energy. Would you like to introduce us? Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to doomed to fail. We bring you history's most notorious disasters, failures, and interesting stories twice a week. And I'm Taylor joined by Fars. I'm Fars.

I'm joined here. So one thing I will say, so the audience knows, I have a notoriously terrible memory. Horrible memory. I don't, I forget everything as soon as it happens and move on to the next thing. And Taylor pointed out in a recent episode about how often I talk about margin call. And it wasn't until her husband reached out and reached out and was like, dude, you haven't talked about margin call in like over 100 episodes? I didn't know because Taylor said it. So I assumed it was true.

So I just like went with it. And then I keep talking about this stupid movie. So thank you, Juan, for correcting the record. I said fairly that you and you, when I die, you and Juan are going to lose so many of your memories because I'm the only one. when it holds them. But Juan, there's no way Juan is more forgetful than I am. I mean, no, all the time. He's like, I just had no idea.

Like, I just, yeah, no, I remember so much on behalf of him. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Sweet. Should we dive in? Uh-huh. Is it me or you? You.

Taylor, I got a long one. Okay, cool. So I'm going to tell several stories. Ooh. And I was really going back to the ethos of why we started this podcast, which was things that would occur that were obviously going to

lead to massive failures or repercussions, let's say. And what I did was I just recently listened to an episode of wow, I forgot the name of the show now. Things you should know. Sorry, things you should know.

Stuff you should know. Again, Taylor's Taylor's I hate I don't know what I'm cursed I'm cursed to be this way Taylor is the archivist

of my brain I was sitting by the historian in high school no big deal yeah so I was listening to stuff you should know they were covering an episode

on artwork not necessarily anything unique about it other than like major artists and fascinating amazing stories about major artworks and somehow

they segueue into a story about Adolf Hitler and they did like a really top line overview of his history very top line so what I thought of was wow there's a lot of really

interesting people out there who's rejections in life resulted in horrible ramifications to the world Hitler being one of them so I'm going to cover three historic figures and the rejection that resulted in world global or countrywide disaster.

And I'm going to actually start with Adolf Hitler. And I'm not going to get into the history of Hitler because, well, I'm not going to get into the reason we all know him because that's boring. It's been done over and over and over again. That's not really that interesting. What's interesting is his early life

and what I think was the impetus of why he became who he became. We all know it has to do with our school rejection. But let's get into the details with the nitty gritty of it. So, if you're ready, we'll kick off. I'm ready. Okay. We're going to start with his childhood. born in Austria in 1889 and was one of six children his parents had with only three of them

making it past infancy. In addition, since this was his father's third marriage, he also had two children from his second marriage living with him. So five siblings in total overall. Big family. Reading about his early life, we'd kind of like any other teenager. His father was this strict disciplinarian shocker. And I'm going to actually call him Adol, because I'm covering the pre-Hitler Hitler phase of Hitler. But you're calling Hitler that we know Adolf. It's not his dad's name.

His dad's name is Louise. So I'm calling Adolf Hitler, Adolf, because if I say Hitler, everybody's memory is going to go to like the Holocaust and I'm trying to cover like the pre-Holicost era. Right, before we knew what we knew. Exactly. You didn't know.

Okay, I get it. I get it. And like, okay, here's the part that's kind of like crazy to say out loud and record myself. saying it and have it broadcast it across the world he seems like a normal guy like he seemed like a totally his dad was his asshole

disciplinarian and Adolf was just this like rebellious kid basically yeah I think that's fair I think there's plenty of people who it's just weird because when you think of like Adolf Hillary like he's a vision of evil so you're like oh he's got to be different than all of us like no he's he wasn't there's a reason why he like turned into

who he turned into and that's the part of the rejection that we're going to get into um so he was put into the equivalent of a middle and high school with like very strict obedience standards while he was in Germany while his family was living in Germany and Adolf was not a fan of it he was constantly getting in trouble costly rebellion he's basically a kid who's like let's go smoke a joint under the bleachers you know he's one of those guys so this will result in pretty regular beatings by his father who was like very very strict and as Adolf grew older he found his passion in the arts which pissed his father off to no man it reminds me of when you're like if your daughter was like turns into a poet in her later life you'd be really pissed like it's literally that i just be like annoyed as shit you might not beat her but you'd be no i would definitely not harm her but i would be like please stop breeding me palms i'm going to don't need more slam poets in this world oh my god

oh my god i was even thinking her being a slam poet of even worse but yes i get it i get it so his father in addition to being a part-time farmer was he had worked his entire career as a government bureaucrat so he assumed his son would follow in his footsteps and like people might not like me saying this but i have a vision of my mind of a bureaucrat in the government which is they're slow tedious boring rules like it's just like the opposite of like anything artistic yeah yeah the opposite of creativity i think of hermes in for drama remember he's like oh my god yeah oh yeah yeah of course but he was cool he was a jama right but he like loves it and he's like i love you ever think it's stamped 15 million times by like this person or

whatever it's like oh you have to love it i love the constant you know what we've brought up futureama more on our show than we did margin call and you have not called that out well i know but it's just but everyone brings it future it's true it's true um so adolf wanted to attend a high school whose focus was more liberal arts than straight line education but his father sent him to a school that's called Real Schuila, which I think means real school. Sounds right. And this was like a general studies school that was focused on practical things that would lead to practical careers, essentially. It was the opposite of the artistic school, essentially.

And obviously Adolf hated this and deliberately tried to fail out to prove to his father that he was not suited to this kind of work. Three years into attending his high school, his father would pass away. so his mother was the opposite of the father and was pretty caring. So back in the day his father was subject him to regular beatings

which his mom would try and get in the middle of and trying to protect Adolf from his father's wrath. So when the father died the mom was like yeah, just drop out and do what you're passionate about

like obviously that's the best thing to do for you. Can you hear the barking? A little bit but like everyone will do hear out in the thing. Okay. He would finish out of schooling elsewhere in lynn's which i interpreted as him trying to get away from like a lane part of town it

sounded like he was leaving his hometown like in oklahoma to go to portland or something he would which we i mean we did i mean actually no we didn't you left new york i did l.a but still i left like los vegas to go to new york oh there you go yeah great example yeah um from there he'll move on to vienna and do you know anything about vienna during this time well you mentioned you told me about how Vienna was like a champion of the arts and culture in this time. Dude, it was like the hub. It was like the central hub. It was like art philosophy, politics, offers, composers.

It was all based out of Vienna. So it sounded very much like a modern day Paris or New York or something is kind of what it sounded like. I looked at this up. So around the time that Hitler, sorry, Adolf, young Adolf, moved to Vienna, same when Ford was there Erwin Schrodinger was doing his his experiments there Leon Trotsky was writing there

there there's a bunch of composers there like it was like a really hot spot to be and Adolf moved there thinking that like well this is where I'm going to go to get my art career off the ground his ultimate goal was to get accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts he would spend his days by the waterfront

trying to sell his artwork and the Knights trying to kind of perfect his technique so he could get admission to the school his preferred subject matter for painting was architecture and typically he would do this in the medium of watercolors have you seen his artwork no I'm gonna look it up I was looking at I'm looking at his dad on on Wikipedia

and he does look mean and I'm looking at his his sister's name is like Angela yeah I would say they pronounce like Angola but it's like Angela Hitler like what kind of name just like blows my mind isn't it weird so weird that's why that's why i was referring to him as ad hoc i was like yeah if i kept saying hitler all we would think is like the old hitler once you put that in there you're like what his just what okay continue though um no let me look up his let me look up his artwork i see yeah i want you to look his artwork and then give me your perspective of it so we can discuss it real quick

Oh, I think it's nice. I couldn't do it. It's pretty good, actually. It's a little bit like Thomas Kincaid of Germany, you know? Because it's like, I see like a nice house, nice castle. He did like this floral arrangement. I'll bring it up here like literally in the next part of this outline. He like, he, what I was wondering actually, Taylor, when I was researching this was like, who got accepted?

that wasn't him and today if we were to look at their artwork like it was worth to have accepted him than that person yeah I don't know no it's nice I don't think I've ever looked at it before I'm gonna go into it a little bit more detail so he obviously mostly as you can tell painted buildings and that was kind of his issue so he actually attempted twice admission to the Academy of Fine Arts and the response to his submission was we don't accept you as an artist. You would be a fine draftsman. You should go work in the architectural trades. That's the response. I think it's, if anyone of a listener as an architect, please let me know if you've ever in your life carried around rolls of paper and worked at a

big table because it's so funny that, that's high picture an architect. Is that true? That's all they do. That's all they do. My sister one time for my dad's 60th birthday, she made these signs and said free banana decories, because I was going to a bar because my dad likes banana decarries, but she had him in the airport. And so I'm going to ask her if she's an architect. That's funny. That's great. She was like, I'm carrying this free banana daughery science. But yeah, he should have been an architect.

Good to you. So 1908 was the second submission that failed. So 1906 or seven was the first one. 1908 was the last one. If you look, there's a Wikipedia page of Hitler, Adolf Hitler artwork. And I will say, like his later stuff was pretty damn good. Like, he definitely took the feedback that you do too much. many architecture sketches, seriously.

And so he has one that's like a floral arrangement that looks really well done. There's a cottage with like the Alps behind it that looks really well. Like he actually like I thought was like, he's better than I would be. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I think. So 1907, like I said, the year he submitted his first application for admission is also the year that his mom died. and my association here is like he was super like his mom was his protector the mom was the one that

could protect him for beatings and all that and the mom was also the financial source for for adolf like she she was the one that supported him he also got benefits from his dad because his dad again was a government worker his entire life so that's the way he supported himself but when his mom died he couldn't really support himself very much and so he ended up landing into this like drifter artist lifestyle. And I think that was the inflection point. He's living in a city full of prominent thinkers and philosophers and political commentators. And he's basically homeless, shilling his artwork to make money to eat. Right. He can't get into that world. He can't get into that world. And like what I equated to is like the Hari Krishna's or like other other religious people who like

they feed off homeless people and like poor people. It's like feed them to come in and and hearing where their indoctrination was. That's kind of how I interpreted his indoctrination at that time. So he was bouncing around Vienna at the same time that he would like a guy named Carl Lugar, who was the former mayor of Vienna, was holding meetings espousing the virtues of anti-Semitism. There was a lot of anti-Semitism going on in Vienna around this time. There was another guy named George Ritter,

who was also a politician active in spreading anti-Semitic philosophy around Vienna, and it was later deemed to be a huge influence on young AISM. Adolf, Hitler himself in his book, Mein Kampf, mentioned that Vienna is where's hatred of Jews began. So, like, this was not like someone who was just, like, born into it. And his parents were, unfortunately, that's not the story of how he became the way he became. So he's a homeless kid who can't afford entertainment other than attending these insane hate meetings. Then World War I kicks off in 1914. The reason why him being admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts would have been world change.

is because despite the fact that Austria-Hungary had a mandatory draft, university students were exempt or could be granted a deferment from the draft. So not only would he have been less exposed to political philosophy because he wouldn't be bouncing around from homeless like lectures and meat to eat a sandwich than he was. But in addition to that, he was very active in World War I. Like he was on the Germany side of World War I. Germany had allied with Austria-Hungary during World War I.

Adolf actually was awarded two medals for injuries that he sustained in World War I and that further entrenched him in the psyche of German nationalism. So like a lot of things would have been changed if he just... He could have just been in college. He would have just been a college student in Vienna during World War I. Like it wouldn't have turned out the way that it did. and that's that's kind of my perspective on this is like we could have avoided the worst parts of human history

if he'd just gotten accepted he would have avoided the draft and he wouldn't have been walking around being indoctrary with anti-semitism which like I said he wouldn't he wasn't ingrained with he learned that later on in life right like it was in there like his parents definitely like it was around not saying his parents said it was around but it wasn't like his his identity it wasn't his identity yeah he he was able to blend

german nationalism from his time in world war one because he hated austria-hungary despite the fact that he loved vienna he hated austrian because of the hapsburg dynasty thought that they were like well there was a lot of multicultural issues that he had with it but he thought that they dragged germany down with them during world war one and they turned germany into a pariah and then the rest is history i yes yeah that's the first story whoa i'm excited for the other ones so next we're going over to cambodia by way of france to discuss pol pot oh okay i don't know much i don't know much which is crazy you and everybody else it's crazy that we don't know this guy i know so i'm

I'm going to punctuate the crazy part here in about four bullets. So I literally wrote this my outline. I think people mostly know what he was about, but he's less famous than Hitler. So the TLDR of who he is. So he was born in 1925. He was born in Cambodia, during a time when Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos were French protectorates. The situation in Cambodia at that time was leading towards independence of France.

France was obviously exploiting this region and weren't friendly to indigenous people. for obvious reasons. Polpao would eventually lead the Cambodian Civil War to break away from France and in the process to establish a communist regime that became most famous for what's called the killing fields of Cambodia. By 1975,

24% of the population of Cambodia had been terminated. Oh my God. It was crazy. What is that in the U.S.? was 25% it's I can't do that now

and it's not like they died of measles they were killed yeah they were murdered they were all murdered yeah yeah yeah well there were some starvation too because the economics of it were also really horrible

so his motivation was driven by paranoia and a desire to achieve what he called year zero which was to erase all traces of modernity and Western influence and start Cambodia an agrarian utopia Basically, what that meant was that anybody associated with urban life, education, modern professions, anything you have to do with foreign influence.

This one's bad for me and you, Taylor. Anybody who wore glasses? Oh. Yeah. They were all marked for execution. Do you think that people just throw out of glasses because they discovered they needed them? Or what did he not realize? Before that people just couldn't see?

I don't think it matters when you're mass executing people. I guess not. I'd be like, you fucking nerd. You're fucking teatweep. Someone takes off his glasses. Someone takes off his glasses and he walks into a wall and they're like, I knew it. You know, it's funny. That's actually a part of the story of Pol Pot is somebody faking, having an education

and then accidentally being, like, somebody learning that they understood English. I mean, like, I swear to God, I don't understand it. And like, anyways, the whole story. So let's talk about the rejection. he endured and where it led to. So let's talk about his early life. So Polpaw was born to a wealthy family

and as such he had a good education. In 1949, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the academy to study radio electronics. He made, yeah, that was the thing at that time. No,

I just mean like, it sounds like he liked modern things for a while. Yeah. Well, so we're going to talk about his rejection of it is being part of the rejection aspect. all this so by all accounts he made no attempt to assimilate into french culture which um while there and pretty much stuck to his cambodian counterparts because there was a group of them that went

over there together um one of the guys who went over there was a guy named lang sari who was very influenced by marxist philosophy um marxism gained a actually taylor what do you know about Marxism. Oh, God, that's really hard to answer. Isn't communism? Is the same thing? Similarly? Yeah, yeah. I think communism is the end political manifestation

of the philosophy of Marxism is how I would define it. So, in communism, the essential element of it is like a counterpoint to capitalism thinking that like, oh, let's just all share in production and the state should be in charge of production. That's essentially where it boils down to.

Fair. so this guy his close close friend was highly influenced by this philosophy and Marxism gained a foothold as a political movement in Europe in the 1920s and 30s from World War II until like literally right before this time it was on the decline and had zero political attraction in places like France but it was still kind of being kicked around as like a philosophical exercise the way I kind of equated this my own mind was like when like somebody comes over here from Iran and like they're just like blown away by everyone. everything. It's like, wait, there's lights everywhere. We're going to wear bikinis.

It's just like, it's really overloading. Like, I want to be a part of all of it. Like, I want to, I'm going to indulge in all of it. And that's kind of how I pictured this group, where they're coming from a French protectorate and have no autonomy and they learn about this philosophy we're all equal. And they just embrace it. So they ended up establishing these Cambodian students that came over to France. They ended up establishing these little groups, they called the Marxist circle and would use their time together to read and talk about

Marx ideas and eventually went on to join the French Communist Party. He was very active in the party, attending events and meetings and recruiting new members. Surely thereafter, the king of Cambodia decided to dissolve the government and made himself the prime minister. So basically,

he further adopted Western ideas of democracy over monarchy concept. But is France still involved? About the end of that. Okay. So Pol Pot volunteered to go to Cambodia as civil unrest started to increase to decide who the French cohort of Cambodians who were there will support which part of the repel uprising that was happening in the home on the home trip in Cambodia. By this point, the government had dissolved Cambodian conscripts.

The French army were revolting and the citizenry was revolting against the governors and businesses in the state, in the country. country. So France at this point was out of the picture. Okay. So this is all part of the Indo-China war. So basically Vietnam as well as Cambodia were all revolting against France. And they basically gained, basically France is like this is more trouble than it's worth. Let's just get out of here. The Vietnam. So these were communist Vietnamese. They found allyship with Cambodia and the communist party and embedded within them. So you have the abdication of the king and the reestablishing of him as the prime minister and the political climate is just kind of ripe for competing political factions to fight

for dominance. The Vietnam worked with members of the Marxist Circle and local supporters to establish the Cambodian Communist Party, also known as the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party. and it sounds like from the beginning the entire point of this was to launch a full-on military operation of seize power given the fact that they were collaborating

with the Vietnam who were deeply embedded in a well they were about to be deeply embedded in a war with the U.S. government in Vietnam. Okay. So Pol Pot became the party leader in 1963

during which they established secret networks recruited peasants and farmers and established these jungle bases around the country. It sounds like real guerrilla warfare type of stuff. Like, by 1967, he felt he had built up enough infrastructure to start launching that guerrilla warfare against the government.

By 1970, as the prime minister of Cambodia, had partnered with the U.S., who was already established a reputation as being imperiless, further damaging the credibility of the prime minister domestically. That gave Pol Pot and the Communist Party more of a like to stand on. As a reminder, during this time, the U.S. was actively battling. the North Vietnamese and communism. So anything sees as being anti-communist in the region, the U.S. was backing.

And so it was seen as like an us-vers-them kind of a thing. By 1975, he took complete control of the government and established the Democratic Campuchia and went on to eliminate 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians during just five years of rule. That's, again, 24% of the population in Cambodia. it was something like 30% of men and 15% of women were being were killed wait so Pol Pot did that yeah okay how did he become the leader he just was like so he let a so

he fought the government the established government basically what happened was that the prime minister was out of the country doing something this is exactly what happened with the shaw iran actually he was out of the country and then he was his people were embedded within the government and they were just like oh yeah we're just going to take control now and they essentially and they'd already established these little bases around the country and were launching guerrilla warfare tactics against the established government so like they were it was a war of attrition from when I can get there so 1975 would also be the year when Vietnam would invade Cambodia to topple popos regime the reason being because like they were like legitimately terrible because what

they would do is they would actually have these excursions across the border into Vietnam and attack Vietnam for no reason like it was he was leading a gang of psychos essentially and so Vietnam was sick of this they decided to attack invade they topple his regime and then Paul Paul would essentially live in the jungle for

nearly 20 years before being arrested by his old his own men and either depending on the historical account you read dying of a heart attack or committing suicide under the threat of being turned over to the US that was how he ended that was 1985.

Whoa. Yeah, it was like very recent. So the question is like, again, going back to the whole point of this episode, like, how was he rejected? So first thing's first, he sucked in France. So I mentioned that he a hard time of stimulating. He made no attempt. Not only that, but he was kind of also a dumbass.

He failed his exams for radio electronics and lost his scholarship to continue studying at the academy. He was generally down upon for being in Asian in France. So that probably sucked. get what that must be like but it all contributed to his attempt to find a place in this world it's also word noting that

he never understood Marxism he never actually understood Marxism he would only read Stalin's writing he would actually be quoted as saying I don't actually get any of this he'd read Stalin's writing and then interpret that as his version of Marxism

but all this is why he ended up in this cohort of Cambodians also studying there and there were a focus on Marxism. He also was rejected by Cambodians. Like I mentioned, like something you brought up earlier, he came from a wealthy family. Right.

And he had privilege. But he was talking about this like agrarian utopia. And he's like, dude, you're not a farmer. You're like a rich kid. You're studying in France. Like, yeah, yeah. But it reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt, where Teddy Roosevelt was like kind of the weak-twenty kid.

So he adopted this tough guy persona. And so it became real. And world Cambodians, they just couldn't relate to Pol Pot in his background. So part of that focus of that agrarian utopia that he was focused on was to dress like a farmer and act like a farmer and advocate for farmers. And so it all kind of came together as like this one person who was like, I don't know. I want to say like they're trying to find their community. Right.

Like we're all trying to find the community we belong to. And some people who are far removed from any community just create their own. In this case, he created his own. And there's like a special kind of person that like. it doesn't just like I feel like most people who can't get along with anyone just retreat into themselves

which you should they don't end up like killing millions of people yeah but there's like then there comes around that special kind of guy who's like I'm gonna make this everyone's fucking problem yeah like just retreat into yourself like everyone's problem it reminds me of like when I see these

these male influencers like the Andrew hates the world and you hear like other people talking it's like it's like listen like the problem you know so much of it's like built around like being rejected by women and right it's like I forgot who it was who was talking about how listen if you were rejected by women and you feel bad about that become the person that a woman would want to be alive right don't blame the women like don't blame the women like don't blame them that you're a loser yeah a thousand percent and uh i don't know how that how we came off that from pol pot but like it seems i see you're saying

that you're like some people are just like rejected and then they like make everybody else's problem and then exactly exactly it's not my problem it's supposed like hey just like retreat for a little bit and then figure out how you can fit into society and so um pulpot found this way uh the story that i was referring to when you mentioned earlier what was it that you said about um the killing fields is autobiographical almost. It's about a guy named Diff Pram. I'm going off my memory. I'm not looking at the outline right now

and my memory is horrible as I just mentioned. But it was essentially this one guy who was a journalist in Cambodia during this time and how he was trying to do research along with I think it was Washington Post or New York Times or something and he was caught and sent to the killing fields and we only know about the details of it

because he was able to kind of escape and explain it to us and there's a movie about it that came only in 1990s I think but it's a it's a horrible story it's a really really tragic story 24% it's crazy I think with Dith Pram what he said

was that 50 members of his family were killed during the purges and so... Sorry, that was a part of it that was recollecting back to what you mentioned earlier which was he was caught listening to an American radio station and like listening to it and a member of the Kumar Rouge saw him and was like oh you're an intellectual we got to kill you now he's like dude I swear I don't understand any of this like it was all right right but he did but he was like he understood yeah yeah I think it was it might have been a voice of America

which was just shut down I believe but I last story and I'm done with this, but the last story is super interesting and I just referenced him earlier talking about who this guy was reading and absorbing his knowledge Joseph Stalin. So do you know

can you guess why he felt rejected? What is he short? Was he short? Yeah. Was he really? Yeah, let me double check this gossip that I have. We can't be held liable here. You made me guess

um hold on hold on there's a lot on his okay now how tall was Alan he's like 5-4 that's shocking really

yeah man of steel wow but like also like I'm on Reddit now so this is this is on today I learn on Reddit now so this is on today I learn on I read it, but someone said, Lenin was 5,5, and Churchill was 5, 6, and then, like, FGR was in his wheelchair, so it was, like, time to shine for shorties.

It would look bright if he was, like, six feet tall. Wild. Anyway, that was my guess. Is it art? No. Is it the French? It's neither of those things. But I will say, it is shocking how we look at, like, Adolf Hitler is the worst person in the world, and Joseph Stalin was responsible for, like, 5x, the number of deaths.

it's like I think also it was not presented to me in school enough how much we were allies with Russia during World War II which is exactly what I was going to say which is the the common

refrain is the Victor writes the story yeah in World War II Joseph Stalin was on the Victor side Hitler wasn't yeah if he factually If you go back and look at, like, their track record, he killed the country of Canada two and a half times over again. Wow.

Like, it is insane how horrible this guy was. So, that being said, I'm actually going to skip over the latter part of his life because this podcast episode is going on too long anyways. And we all probably know the gist of it. So why do I bring up Joseph Stalin? So Marxism and religion have always had a rough history. Marx was famous for calling religion the opium of the people. Agreed to agree. When Lenin took over, he associated the Russian Orthodox Church with its connection

of the Tsar regime. And he implemented some changes, including nationalizing churches, separating church from state, stripping tax advantages from the church. And that's basically like where he stopped. Like he wasn't going so far as to try to prevent people from practice. acts and a religious affiliation. He had no issues with you being religious personally. I'm not going to,

I'm looking at pictures of Stalin just to put on our thing, and I will not include the hot picture of Stalin when he's in the 20s, but there's a hot picture of Stalin when he's in his 20s. Thank you for this groundbreaking news after talking about him killing 30 million people. He could walk into a bar in L.A. And people would be like, who's that guy? He's 5'4. Nobody's going to look at him and say he was that guy.

Maybe if he's sitting on a stool, then he gets off the stool And you're like Also joking If you're 5'4 Short King we love you Exactly You're totally fine

You can definitely meet someone It's not a big deal Keep going Women make it a big deal That's the problem Like women are the problem Here No we literally just said

Women aren't the problem Get over yourself And find it's fine You're fine It's not women Can't help being short I'm saying Don't sit alone

And hate other women I did I did read somewhere That for every $100,000 A man earns they are one inch more attractive to a woman. So if you're like 5'4 and you make it 100 grand, you're like a 5.5 guy.

If you're 5.4 and you make 800 grand, then you're like a 6 foot guy. So just make yourself better by making more money. I swear to God, Taylor. I'm not making this up. No, I'm sure that someone researched that. I'm sure that person researched it was like 5'2. No, I bet he was.

six, two, and made 50 grand. Uh-huh. Oh, maybe. It's the opposite direction. Okay. Anyways, that woman's fault. Just make yourself better. Go ahead.

When it came to Stalin and religion, Stalin changed all of this. And here's the reason why. And again, the reason why the world changed and rejection was so big, such a big deal here. Stalin was raised deeply religious and was deeply religious himself. He was enrolled in seminary school at 15.

years old, with the goal of becoming a priest. Five years later, he was expelled from seminary school for a number of reasons. My bullet points here are, one, he fell into Marxism, which was inherently anti-Zar. And that was frowned upon because the czar regime and the Russian Orthodox Church were kind of closely tied to each other. He was very anti-authoritarian, and that was embedded within Marxism as well. And seminary schools were naturally very authoritarian, and he was rebelling against administration. and became kind of difficult to deal with.

And it just generally sounded like he was a pain in the ass student. Some schools would try to probably correct that behavior. But at this time period that he was at school, the seminary school, they decided to expel him. The official reason on expulsion papers was, quote, failing to appear for examination. That's what the reason was given. It said that after this, he was deeply embarrassed, super ashamed.

he was socially ostracized by everyone, especially his family because they wanted him to be a priest. And he blamed a seminary in the church in general for this outcome in his life. He fell deeper into Marxism and became super, super anti-religious. So when Linen died and Solon took power, he went way deeper than his predecessor did. He ordered mass executions of tens of thousands of thousands of, thousands of clergy and their followers.

That's imams from the mosques, the Muslim side, and rabbis and Catholic priests and all that good stuff. He burned church, mosques, and synagogues to the ground in Russia. Religious statues and iconography were destroyed.

He established the quote, the godless five-year plan to eradicate any vestiges of religion within a five-year window from 1932 to 1937. He established the practice of children reporting their parents' religious activity. And it wasn't until the early 1980s until Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of Glassknott and Perestroika that the full frontal assault on religion that was shaped by Saul's rejection of the seminary school was finally eased up and people could practice their faith without overt fear or persecution.

I'm not going to read more than his logical end of this. but if your fuel is fired that strongly by something that is that deeply entrenched in people's philosophy of life it's not that hard to make another leap to let's start gulags and people at camps and you're basically replacing what religion does to their lives with yourself like you are religion and that's not good no it's not good i do i would love a godless society but what do i know so actually this is actually a really really um fun time period to be having this conversation because there's so much division in the u.s. has broken sense and i found this is a really interesting dichotomy of you have adolf hitler on the hard right you have pole pot

and joseph stullen on the hard left and this is a really good example of why we should stop being crazy and people should be normal and should be accepting of let me just calm the fuck down yeah yeah yeah I'm not against that I'm not against everyone calming down a little bit if you're religious be religious that's fine yeah just don't hurt other people if you want to if you want if you want to get married and have kids have get married and have kids if you want to be a single cat lady be a single cat lady it's all good everybody's fine there's no rules yeah it's all it's all good it's like the outback steakhouse of you can do whatever you want you can have a bloomed onion every freaking day if you want. I don't care.

Every day. You might die, but like, you'd live your life. The trans fats will do it, but. Yeah, but whatever. Whatever, who cares? Um, I thought it was really fascinating because, because, um, yeah, the fact that these people had such unbelievable outsized impacts on the world. A hundred percent, yeah. And it was like these, these little things that lead to the

next thing, lead to the next thing, and then all of a sudden you're like, And now we're killing 30 million people in Gulag. It's, like, crazy. How do we get here? Yeah. So, the other stories I was going to cover that I was like, this is going to be too much time, was Ted Kaczynski. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I know. We've talked about it. I want to do a whole thing. Which apparently Ted Kaczynski is like catching on in Red Pill Media as like he was right on things. I haven't read any of his manifesto nor do I think I will But I thought it was really really interesting The other one was Richard Nixon Which I did not know this

He lost presidential in 60 Lost the California gubernatorial in 62 He was bitter and super secretive And after he lost 60 gubernatorial That's when he told the media You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore He came super insular And like that's part of the whole deleting parts

of his like recordings like that was kind of the the big piece of it as well which is fascinating i was hoping you were going to say it was like musical theater that rejected nixon and that made him the way he was so dude i bet you know what taylor he was born he was raised a quaker i bet i bet you there's something in there about like being raised to quaker and then moving on to like these like highly esteemed positions that you lose your community and your faith and whatever there's probably something in there as well yeah so yeah that's my story that's fun

that's fun went a different tack today no I like it that's super interesting I feel like you hear the cliche about Hitler and art school but you're like I don't know the details you know dude his art

like you should look at his art like Wikipedia has like no totally I agree like more than a dozen of his artworks on there and you're looking like so one thing that was fascinating was that the whatever the Washington

the DC Art Museum has the main piece of art that he's known for which is like this giant building with I'd be growing on the side of it with like a town square in the middle of it they have that in their collection they just won't display it because they don't want it to turn into like a thing

it was fascinating because yeah fuck it display his art like I don't know maybe we'll learn something but like hey don't be a dick to people maybe like I don't know or like you know if you don't get to school you want like try another one

that was not my takeaway from this maybe he would be a great architect was like was like dude you know what you want to remind me of actually taylor was um something under under bush that i forgot who said it or probably on msnbc but they said something about how every time you do like a strike in like afghanistan or iraq whatever yes you killed several jihadists but you just created

like five more people that liked them and wanted to be like them so everybody got a show bill that's all good yes everyone take it down

like two notches it'd be great it'd be great I think it would be much better cool thank you though was super interesting well you liked it you see it engaged

usually make you yawn and this time I yawned I think more today than I usually do Why are you telling that? I'm recording. But I think I'm really awkward because you mentioned it. No, I spent a lot of time outside this weekend, so it makes me, you know, I'm outside tired.

I'm a soccer game. Yesterday, we went to our friend's pool at summertime. Fun. Yeah. You're the second person who said it's summertime, and I keep wanting to correct you all and saying it's spring. I know it just turned spring on Thursday. It's been spring for four days, but I went to a pool party yesterday,

And that's what I feel like it's summer. Fine. Fine. Do you have anything to read us off with? After you're done yawning. Jesus Christ. I do. I started a Patreon for us.

And we haven't done this yet, but like we don't make any money doing this. And we're not, I mean, it'd be cool if we did, but like, we're not trying to make a billion dollars. We don't only not make money. We spend. We actively lose money doing this. We actively lose money. We gain so much in knowledge and friendship, but we actively lose money. So I started a Patreon just so we can invest in some ads and things.

I think every time I do a boost on TikTok, it does help, but they're not cheap. So I started a Patreon. I will put the link in the notes you can just search Doom to Fail on Patreon, and there is a way to just donate, just to look, a one-time donation. And then there's a way to donate $5 a month. I'm calling it the Doom to Fail Founders Club. And what it will be is $5 a month forever and shows will have no ads. I know shows right now don't have any ads, but someday when we do have ads, you will be in the no ad zone at your $5 a month, even though that tier will probably cost more if we become

really successful. If we get 50,000 of you, we can recoup our cost. Exactly. So, yeah, I'll put it up. It's fine. I figured we should have it because, well, I brought it up because I was at softball practice and talking to my co-coaches and they were like,

you should take donations. Like, you know, they're like, we like the show. You should take donations. And I was like, you're right. I should at least have it as an option.

So it's an option now. I will also take this moment to shout you out, Taylor. Oh. So if the sausage baking aspect of this show is such that we do our individual research. We hop on. We record. And I edit and upload the episodes. which is like something but taylor does 6,000 more things in terms of

reediting shows and cutting them into quick clips and uploading them to instagram and tic talk and yeah it's a lot of work and you do uh more than i have the capacity or interest no it's not capacity you have less capacity than i do but still like i i i'm jealous of the that you have that drive. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. No, thank you. And a lot of it actually is a headliner app that we pay for. That is not cheap, but that helps too. So there's that, but yeah, thank you. Thank you for learning how to edit. Do you remember what a nightmare that was in the beginning? The first, like, muzzle is a nightmare. It took me like 16 hours to edit a 30 minute episode. You were like, Taylor, if I hear you say

um, one more time, I'm going to fly to California and murder you. That was like, I actually signed up with this one AI software. they would i could just type command find uh um and then it would find it and it was it didn't work so anyways we're good now though our best sweet do you have anything else to read us off with that's it thank you everyone find us on patreon and all of the socials at doomed to fail pod please appreciate you we will join you in a few days thanks all thank you