Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 81: Palace of the Parliament

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

unfortunately our automatic revisionism detector scrubbed liam from most of this episode Adam Something on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AdamSomething TICKETS FOR THE LIVESHOW: https://www.caveat.nyc/event/well-theres-your-problem-9-3-2021 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Listen, you got to get your bombs delivered somehow and I trust the U.S. Postal Service to do that. I thought those scabs over at FedEx. Welcome to Wellerish Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. And my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

I am Alice Gordwell-Kelling. Please do not ban me from entering the United States so we can do a live show in person at some point. My pronouns, she and her. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. Returned from my mystery location. How are you feeling, Liam? Oh, you know, I actually feel all right.

Last night was hell. I worked today and I was coming pretty close to taking a nap on the clock. But I feel all right. Also, we have a guest. We have a guest. Indeed, we do. So hello, everyone. I am Adam, also known as Adam Something on YouTube.

Pronouns he, him. And I'm glad to be here. Why are you here, Adam? I wish I knew. No, Adam is going to explain Romania to us. I was seen here in two pictures, a flag with a hole cut out of it and a big ugly building. That's not how I like it. No, I would attempt to give an explanation if such a thing is possible because it's Romania.

It's nice there, like to some extent. I am the only person here who has training in architecture. And I can tell you, this is an ugly building. Ugly can still be good, though. You've done it all right. I practiced that. I live by those words every day of my life. No, this isn't the good kind of ugly.

No, you know what, Roz? Fuck you. How's that? Okay. We're going to talk about the people's palace. Yeah. And how the whole came to get in this flag. Not originally.

It was added later. The whole building. Not originally. It was added later. Well, it holds the goal, I suppose. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. All right. So I just want to tell all of the Philadelphia urbanists that I was right and you were wrong.

Once again, Justin is vindicated by history. Yes. Um, Toll Brothers just applied for a permit to keep the jeweler's row a whole. Yeah. A whole for the next three years. Yeah, a whole. The Toll Pussy, the Tussy. Yes.

I wish you wouldn't have said that, but yes. They demolished several years ago a full quarter of one of Philadelphia's most historic streets for to build a tall residential tower there. And then what happened, Roz? And then what happened? Oh, well, I just decided to sit on it. Oh, that's crazy. They're not going to actually build the building.

What? The building's not. I couldn't foresee this happening. It's it's it's so it's so dumb. I I I hate all the people who are like chilling for this when it was like, oh no, this is going to be good for center city. It's good for density. No, they're not actually going to build the building and they're not going to build the

building. The building's not going to happen. It's not real. It's just a land scam. Yes. It's going to be it will probably be a vacant lot for like until I'm middle aged. Yeah, but on the plus side, they have this cool like sort of retro looking logo with the like diamond around the date.

Who doesn't love that? You know what I would prefer, Alice? Jewelers are to be intact. Yes, it's it's open for business. What do you want from me? For you to be open for business? I'm sure it's going to be a nice building at all with like like three K per month for rent. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, because they tore down like five buildings that were going to put one building in their place. And that's that's great for like, you know, storefronts and stuff like that. Yep. Which also benefit from density, which we already had, but it's fine. This is fucking stupid.

So fucking stupid. They just tore down all those buildings for no reason. The important point to pull out of this is that Justin is the man who has never been wrong about anything in his life. That's true. I'm not going to start now. I'm right all of the time. And you should listen to me because of that.

That's right. And then you get mad at me when I'm just like, hey, do you want to do a shot of whiskey? And you're like, sure. And then you go to bed and you feel bad. And then you blame me even though it's not my fault. Yeah. I was right at the time. I told you I didn't want to do a shot.

And it was like, and it's like, no, you didn't. Justin is like capitalism. He cannot fail only be failed. By you, Liam. Okay, all right. Yeah, that's how this goes by and large. Although as a note regarding this image in front of us, for me, as in me mostly being from the European perspective, including Alice, of course, it's so strange to see Americans

tearing down historic buildings to build some kind of like shiny five or one glass and steel bullshit in place of it. Like in Europe, it's usually like in Germany, in Deutschland, where I live right now. It's usually there's an empty plot on which we build something nice because the Americans bombed it. So it's empty. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And to be fair, did you deserve it? Probably. Just like, yeah, just sort of calmly asking the German town planner, how did you get this beautiful blank canvas to redesign? It's like, well, you did explode most of it. Yeah, well, I know. It's just like, well, did you have it coming? Yes.

I know that's a fun filling trend, Adam, is ruining our UNESCO designated World Heritage City to build schlock. I think we have the weakest historic preservation laws in the country. I'd second that. Okay. They're awful, genuinely awful. They don't work. I mean, maybe we should have talked about that in the historic preservation episode.

But yeah, this was supposed to be a 30 story building that we're going to put up here. And now they're just not going to put a building here. They're just not going to do it. There's no building. It's more about the vibes. It's like jazz. It's about the building you don't build. So that was the news.

I only did one news today. Nothing else happened. It's very cool. Oh, yeah. Nothing else happened. We talked about all the important news last week. Listen, we were already sad about Afghanistan. All right.

So we have to talk about something called the Warsaw Pact. Yeah, the good guys. Yes. And so we have to ask, what is the Warsaw Pact? What is the Warsaw Pact? Yes, it's a good actually. It's a group of super friends who got together after the Second World War to try and contain NATO aggression by means of a multilateral defensive pact.

It's true. There was no kind of coercion. So according to the official definition, it's a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern European Eastern bloc social republics of Central Eastern Europe in May 1955. So basically this is, as you mentioned, it is a counterweight to NATO. And in theory, it's an organization for, quote unquote, mutual protection.

However, in practice, it's just an easier way for Moscow to roll tanks into those countries. Should there be any attempts at establishing a democracy? Wow, it's crazy how that works. Are you suggesting that this is just like red colonialism? Because like, I don't think that the Soviet Union would act imperialistically. They would never do that. That would not be practice. No.

And I've put in the notes here that the Warsaw Pact is also a cool way of making very various decks in war game, European escalation. Yeah. If you want some like cool Polish infantry, you can do that thanks to the Warsaw Pact. Many, many, many cool tanks which would not have existed otherwise. Oh, that's true. Oh, yeah. So this is something I wanted to maybe introduce.

I mean, I think a lot of our like ourselves and a lot of our listeners have, you know, radical politics, right? Yes. Liam's excused from this slide because he's an anarchist. But those of us who have real politics. Yeah, we have not included. Most of us have radical politics. And I have to like look back on this thing called the Soviet Union.

Right. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I have a drop for this. Let me just scroll down here. Yeah. What's going to be great when I do the bonus episode on communism?

I will go full-on Prager you. I will be on stock. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, Liam. What's that? I can't hear you over there. So you may have radical politics. You have to strike some kind of balance on what I call the spectrum of communism.

Oh, I think communism is famously good at is striking a balance. Right. Which is some of the bad stuff about Soviet communism is western propaganda, but also some of it is true. Well, like people don't get that sometimes the best propaganda is stuff that is true. Yes. In fact, it's the best thing you can do is to be like, oh, you're doing this fucked up shit. And if they actually are, you know, what are you supposed to say to that?

This is a lie. Okay, that works for a while. But like if you can prove it, then. Right. So my definition of the spectrum of communism is, you know, at the one hand, you're super tanky. You say North Korea is a secret workers' paradise over here. And at the other end, you're super anti-communist.

You say Ukrainian Waffen SS guys were freedom fighters, actually. Yeah, yeah. Every single landlord who had their feelings hurt is in the big book of victims of communism. Yes. I put myself around here, which I define as Kulaks deserved it. I'm like slightly, slightly, slightly tankier than Justin is, I think. But, you know, I've mellowed a bit in my sort of middle age. In my youth, I was much more in the like, yeah, no, the good guys.

Yeah. But I think about the Soviet Union was that, well, having grown up in Hungary, I'm maybe a Hungarian. So I sort of grew up on the ruins of the Soviet Empire, so to speak. It was like, you know, the country went through like very integrated success. Now it's like a far right hell hole with Orban, but, you know, oh, well. But during the Soviet times, I hear the rule of thumb was that whatever they said, the opposite was true.

So, for example, when this like Hungarian comedian who is kind of an old guy, he grew up during the Soviet times, he said, and so when we heard on TV, announced by Comrade XYZ, that in the Soviet Union, there is no anti-Semitism, we knew that our friends were already packing at home. And there's there's other sort of, and just just just for you to get the feel of the era, really, I prepared two jokes from from the era, which which sort of depicts the actually three. But I think they're shorties. So Ivan is asked what he would do if the Soviet borders were opened.

I would climb the highest tree he replies, ask why he responds. So I wouldn't get trampled in the stampede out. Then then he's asked what he would do if the US board if the US border is opened. I would climb the highest tree he says, so I can see the first person crazy enough to come here. And the other classic is the, you know, someone happened to call the KGB headquarters just after a major fire. We cannot do anything. The KGB has just burned down, he was told. Five minutes later, he called back and was told again that the KGB had burned. When he called to a third time, the telephone operator recognized his voice and asked,

why do you keep calling back? I just told you, the KGB has burned down. I know the man said, I just like hearing it. You want to hear my favorite Soviet joke? Go ahead. Okay, so a new guy arrives in the gulag, right? And, you know, a guy sidles up to him, and he's like, how long are you in for? Five years? What are you in for? Wow. I was a plumber. I was an engineer. And the old guy says, well, they don't give you five years for being a plumber. What happened? And he says, well, I got this job where I had to like

inspect the boiler in the KGB offices. So I got down there and I looked at it and I looked at the boiler and I put my hands on my hips and I said, this whole system needs replacing. What was a joke that Stalin used to tell about himself? Oh, boy. Stalin was giving a speech to, you know, the Politburo or something. Everyone filed in, you know, the last row fills in first and then the second the last row fills in next, so on and so forth. Stalin is giving this great speech, right? And so during the speech, someone sneezes. Stalin says, who was it? Who did that? Who was it? And no one speaks up. And Stalin orders the first row executed. No one speaks up. No one speaks up still.

Yeah. So he orders the second row executed. Then finally, he's about to order the third row executed. One guy stands up says, it was me, Comrade Stalin. Stalin says, bless you. We can't get too bogged down and telling communist jokes, but I do have my favorite Stalin one, which is Stalin goes to the theater and it's a comedy. And they ask him afterwards, Comrade, what did you think of the play? He said it was excellent, but the clown, he has a moustache like mine, kill him. And one of his aides sort of thinks about when he goes with a comrade Stalin, perhaps he could shave the moustache. And Stalin says, excellent idea,

shave, then shoot. So anyway, if you're on the spectrum of communism, Oh, we're all on the spectrum, baby. If you're on the spectrum of communism, I think we all need to acknowledge that there is actually a very, very bad man in communism. And that guy was Nikolai Chowchescu. Oh, yeah, one of one of let's say many. Yeah. Very, very bad man. Oh, these comments, this comment section is going to be a hoot. Yes. I want to just go record as once again stating that I am an anarchist.

It's going to be fun watching all try and spell Chowchescu. No, that's the fun thing. I can't spell Chowchescu, but I can say it. How do you do on spelling Enver Hozier? I don't think about it. I don't think about Enver Hozier, the leader of Albania for many years, the other great sort of like weird Stalinist of the... You see the bunker guy? Yes, the bunker guy. Yes, he was the bunker guy. Oh, yeah. Enver Hozier, okay. I got you.

Enver Hozier, it's an easier to spell, harder to pronounce. I did like his never-ending beef with Tito. That's admirable. Despite the fact that the Warsaw Pact was an entirely organic communist revolution which had no influence from outside forces, there were some attempts to liberalize the Eastern Black, right? Yeah, it's called the Central Intelligence Agency. Exactly. That's right. You know, the first and I think the most famous one was in Hungary in 1956, where after weeks of student protest, Imre Nagy became prime minister.

Yeah, Noyj is pronounced, Imre Noyj. Is it Noyj? Noyj. I did not know that. It's like trying to pronounce G and Y to get it like G, G. Makes sense. Okay, yeah. Anyway, I understand that. He became prime minister sort of for the purpose of withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and then

I think it was Khrushchev at that point. He sent in the tanks to, you know, stop that nonsense. Under everyone's favorite general, Marshal Zhukov was the commander of that operation. Fuck yeah, dude. Yeah. Yeah, this is where we get the term tanky from, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because most, a lot of the European communist parties broke from the Soviet Union after this because, you know, it was a real sort of like crisis of faith for a lot of leftists in the West, especially for like older leftists who had been like, I mean, you have to understand that like

the thing about like the common like line about the Soviet Union is that it was just funding every like leftist movement and every leftist party and everybody sort of left of liberal in Western Europe and the United States for its entire existence. And that was also true. And so consequently, when these people who had been, you know, taking the money, which is not necessarily good money, but had been, you know, taking the money from the Soviets. It's practical. Yeah, on the reconnaissance that this is like, this is our last best hope for socialism. Like some of them believing this entirely idealistically, like having seen a world war

and having believed that like, oh, yes, this Stalin guy is like the last hope of like civilization against fascism or whatever. And then oops. And then depending on how like how far gone you are at this point, either revisionism has like one to the extent that it has to be like brutally crushed back down and you're going to become like a sort of a Soviet loyalist or you see, oh, the Soviet Union that I thought was this, you know, beacon for socialism and progress and human rights, even is acting a lot like America or acting a lot like Britain. And you know, what now? Yeah. And I mean, the fundamental problem I see with with the Soviet Union was that and just

like Russia in general, because I mean, let's not get ourselves like the Soviet Union and everything that entailed came out of Moscow, essentially, like from from this sort of established Moscow elite, that the main problem that I see is that the enlightenment kind of stopped halfway to Russia, like it kind of stopped halfway between Kiev and Kharkiv in Ukraine and then never went further. And so and so of course, as people say, Vladimir Putin nowadays is himself a Tsar and nothing else like his his style of governance and just the way he runs the country is fully that of a Tsar. Not fully, but you know, if you get the idea, it's similar. And so the Soviet Union bore the imprint sort of of Tsarist Russia, obviously. And well,

I guess that that was a big part of the reason. And of course, the lack of enlightenment thought that as soon as like as soon as the Tsarist sort of oligarchal elite ended, then came the the eradicated oligarchal elites, aka the Soviet Union, where basically party officials became the new rich order class through the state apparatus. Yeah. And it's a tragedy is the thing. It's a popular tragedy. And what's interesting is the thing that occasionally makes me as a communist go, oh, we just live in the bad timeline is that like, when you look back, you know, any of the original any of the old Bolsheviks, including Lenin, if you had said, OK, there's going to be one European country that becomes

like the bulwark of socialism. And then there's going to be like another one that's going to fall into fascism, you would never in a million years have picked Russia and Germany in that order. Every every like every communist thinker of consequence thought that the revolution would start in Germany. Yes. And we got crushed instead. And as a consequence, all of these guys were left to sort of like make do and to try and like modernize what had been a sort of very decrepit empire. And the result was but hey, hey, I disagree. Hey, look, elections are coming up. They say they was down. The social democrats are coming up. We got this. Yeah, sharpen with us. Yeah, we sharpen this.

One further bit of proof like I disagree with you that we are living in the bad timeline. We are not living in the bad timeline because like imagine the sort of the sort of bad parallel universe. For example, when Ross is like, so in conclusion, core good trail and bad. I'm just I'm Justin Rosniak for Prager University. Yeah, we're all running the most popular engineering podcast in the sixth right. Yeah, that would be my that would be my show on NASA YouTube, which YouTube. Yes, I know Dennis Frager is Jewish, but the word. So no, I tried to like do moderate liberal reforms while still being still being a socialist, which is also very fun, not even like necessarily like what we would think of as like a

democratic socialist or a social democrat. He was still a communist, but like up all of these like revolutions and revolts and like political changes in the Eastern Bloc, they were led by communists, the people who supported them were communists. They just wanted out from under the boot of the Soviet Union, which, you know, it was understandable. Yeah. Like the most reactionary tendency you can identify in these easily is just nationalism. And that's so I think no nationalism in the Soviet Union. Thinking like in terms of like, you know, I'm a member of a fraternal socialist brotherhood,

thinking of myself as like, you know, a Hungarian or a Czechoslovak. It makes a lot more sense when you consider there are a lot of guys with guns and tanks who are trying to get you to not do that. Right. Yes. I mean, damn, it's almost like the Soviet Union is just like a fascist oligarchy masquerading as, you know, like with the paint of red. Wow, it is almost like that. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. So about a decade after the Hungarian Revolution, we had the Prague Spring. It was a little course of empire bad, no matter what color it is. And what a party that was. Yeah. This is an interesting few days. This was in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, right? And, you know, the Prime Minister was Alexander Dubcek.

I don't know how to pronounce that. Dubcek. Yeah, it's generally, yeah, it's all right. Yeah. He was trying to implement some liberalizing reforms, you know, socialism with the human face, right? Yeah, you don't want to do that. Otherwise, you might find that socialism without a human face is landing a lot of paratroopers at your capital cities. Without a human face, like some sort of horrific Lovecraftian monster. I'm kind of bummed you get a horrific Lovecraftian monster. It was like the one thing the Soviet airborne forces got to do in between World War Two and Afghanistan was a drop into Prague, which is, you know, it's nice for them to get the exercise, I suppose. I guess so. Yeah. I mean, so there are some liberalizing reforms here where you have,

like, a multi-party democracy, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, you know, revisionism. Revisionism, exactly. Also, in Czechoslovakia, the press was relatively free up until the Prague Spring, of course. So things were allowed, which you normally would not have been allowed. So the Czechoslovakia was sort of a slight exception in the Warsaw Pact countries, because, you know, things were still allowed there, or at least some things. Yes. And like having this capacity for some autonomy in the Warsaw Pact, which was then very rapidly judged to be too dangerous. So socialism with a human face also crushed very quickly. Oops, oops, number two. And this was, you know, supported by a lot of Warsaw Pact countries,

but not all of them, right? Including in Romania, by a man named Nikolai Ceausescu, right? Or if you're my parents' cat, Nikolai Miao Ceausescu. What a man he was. So Ceausescu had risen to power in Romania. He'd made a speech, a famous speech on August 21st, 1968, condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Soviet Republic, right? And that was Socialist Republic, that Soviet Republic. And this guy, okay, so Ceausescu was actually like a guy who had, you know, he was a communist. He had been thrown in prison multiple times for organizing communist parties in Hungary before, you know, before the Warsaw Pact existed, right? And he, you know, because he condemned this revolution, or because he condemned the

suppression of this revolution in Czechoslovakia, he became very, very popular, right? But the thing is, he used this, he used this popularity to sort of build a government that turned itself into a Stalinism but more. It's as, as a great communist, George W. Bush once said, dictatorship sounds pretty good so long as I get to be the dictator. Yes. Yeah, Ceausescu heard that and basically had a tattooed on himself. Nikolai Ceausescu, a man who looks the way Gary Larson drew people in the far side.

This cowtoons looking motherfucker is now like the sole authority in your country of several million people. Yeah, who's also a former, I think, shoemaker assistant. That's his, those are his credentials. But do you know how he called himself, by the way? No. The genius of the Carpathians. Dude's rock. I mean, He's rock.

Just, yeah. Sigma, sigma male energy. That's right. It's Grimesat. That's that part of my title. Yeah, we'll go. Constantly. Always grinding. You're not even bad at that, you know?

All right, so he's gonna do, he's gonna do chad shit on Remain. 00:30:42,080 --> 00:30:44,080 He's gonna do muscle confusion. Immediately starts doing chad shit. Yeah. We'll go again. So, you know, one of the things he did when he came to power is he was, he sort of started trying to do some liberalization, right?

And then when it doesn't work, he sort of goes the opposite way completely. Oh boy. So, you know, there's a little bit of liberalization of the breast when he comes to power. This is 1966, a little bit earlier than that, maybe. It's classic like aparachic brain, right? You think, ah, maybe we can do some things that are good and then it like erodes your grip on power very slightly and you're like, oh shit. Thanks.

Thanks. What if we made the entire country out of the cops? One of the things, it was like really difficult for me to like figure out a narrative on this guy. You know, because he was a weird dude as well. That's why I bring up Hozier, too. It's because he was like a very weird, very idiosyncratic dude because that's kind of what happens when you have like this situation where you have absolute power and it's like, due to the way the Soviet Union worked, like Khrushchev never had absolute

power, Brezhnev certainly didn't. There were always networks of like within the military or within the party that could act as like credible threats to their power in ways that made them sort of act in different ways for better and worse. Whereas if you're in a small enough country and you like lock it down hard enough, whether you're like Hozier or whether you're like Yogi Dmitrov or whether you're Toto Zhivkov or whether you're Chachescu, it's much, much easier for you to just be like, oh, the like nexus of opposition to me within the government is one guy, kill him.

And then you just do whatever you want. Right. We talked about that on my episode of Lines about the central Africa, but I heard rumors that he was actually like a mentally sort of hindered, so to speak, like he was not completely sort of there, which as we move on, I believe we will see evidence of, but anyway, so there's this degree 770 in 1966. People like this is the most defining moment of like the Chachescu regime was to create 770. So he sort of wants to, he wants to make Romania into a world power,

and part of that is increasing the population. Right. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the urbanists should listen up right now. The genius of the Carpathians is telling you to get fucking. Yes.

One bird of Romanians. So, you know, you increase the population, but it's not, you wouldn't do that through like immigration, which would be the rational way to do it. No, because that hinders your like nationalism thing. You can't, you can't. Very difficult to balance that thing of like, I want a strong country X, but also I want to like have a bunch of people immigrate to country X. Very difficult.

Yes. Maybe he just wanted to see some people fuck. Yeah. So, so, so what he, what he did was, you know, the idea is we're going to increase the native of born population and believe we're going to do that is Romania had very good access to contraception and abortion prior to Chachescu. One of, one of the good things of communism. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. They're, they're of the good things about communism. That is one of them. Right. But Chachescu decided, well, you know, actually, no fuck. If, if you're going to go, if you're going to go fuck, you're going to have a baby. He made contraception illegal.

He made abortion illegal. He made state benefits available to women who had more than five children. Just trying to like spread, spread around the sort of like powerfully erotic vibes of that face. You kind of like lose yourself in the like waves of his hair. You're not? Yeah. The dude, the dude is like weird. This guy is telling you you need to have more sex.

You need to have more sex and it needs to not be protected. Oh, he's a sigma. What can you do? Yeah, you need to bear back the dog. I'm just, I'm sorry, but you have to for communism. So it did, it did rapidly, the population increased very quickly, but it turned out that the, you know, they didn't quite have the capacity to deal with all the kids, which resulted in an orphan crisis, which remains to this day in Romania.

Again, because of this one dude, which is not something like as we sort of move more and more away from this sort of like great man era of history and stuff, you think there are way fewer like demographic changes that you can trace like one dude. Like you go back far enough and it's stuff like, oh, you know, Genghis Khan killed an appreciable percentage of Earth's population or whatever. But like, no, this is one of them. This is a lot of kids who grew up in Romania because of like one Gary Larson looking motherfucker. Yes.

And Chescu, like sort of, it's strange, but it was effective because, you know, he was, he was trying to move Romania away from Soviet influence, right? But he did that as opposed to being more liberal. He did that by being more Stalinist. Blackadoodle, yes. And curiously, again, this is one of those things where you have a couple of guys who try to do this and I'm going back to Hoxha again. But because they're all so weird, none of them actually like get on with each other.

And so you end up with a bunch of like hyper Stalinist microstates rather than what could have been. You start to suspect a sort of like credible right opposition to the Soviet Union. Tito and Hoxha, how did you say it? F, F, Mr. Bond. Well, Tito was the only man who could unite the Balkans. And look what there, what that's where that got us. If the rule that you followed brought you to this, yeah. So like, but, you know, Romania was far enough outside the Soviet sphere of influence that

it was the first country that a U.S. president visited, which was Nixon in 1969. Yeah, communism. We're scared to leave our tiny island now. Yes. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to follow the mindset of your average American. Don't try and do that. It's a horrible mistake. I tried to do it once and it made me so weird.

I started a podcast. Sounds good to me. Adam, you wrote the rest of the slide. Go. Oh, oh, yes. So, oh, yeah, yeah, finally. So do you, do you see the picture on the right? What do you see there?

Can you tell me? I see a ballasted subway station. That's interesting. That wooden ties on ballast underground. Incredible. Yeah, don't, don't, don't. Yeah. Don't page and pay attention to that.

It must have been like, yeah, I'm sure it was like personally designed by the genius of the Carpathians, which, which actually, which is, which I don't know, I don't know, and I don't think it might be true. So do you notice anything else, peculiar about this metro stuff? Hmm. Well, the platforms are very narrow.

Right. And do you know why that is? Because. All right. Let me, let me tell you. I watched your video, Adam. Everyone, everyone on the planet did. You're not special.

Yeah. So, so basically what happens here in case you didn't watch the Dubai video in, you know, whatever. But, um, so here what happened was the, uh, so Nikolai Chaukjesko, back in the day, commissioned a metro system for Bucharest, because of course the city was growing, people were getting, uh, moved in and, uh,

you know, the, the need arose for a high speed, sort of great separate public transit system. So the engineer sat down and designed a whole system for Bucharest, which actually made sense. And then Chaukjesko was like, okay, no, you know what? Fuck that. Sigma made a grind. Said I'm going to do the whole thing myself.

If you have something done right. Yes. Yeah. Right. In, I mean, you know, in whatever. Yeah. Right. So he, his idea of right was to take the metro line

and lead it under the river, but like along the river. So the metro line doesn't like cross the river underneath. It goes along the river underneath the river, which actually wasn't even a real river. Like the river going through the, uh, the city center is like, there was this, it was this artificial canal filled with like tap water under which there was the real river, which was basically like a stream of like toxic shit in a, in a sewer.

And underneath was the metro and, um, Chaukjesko actually, you know, drew it up. Everyone thought it was stupid, but of course, if you say that it is, then you, you know, get executed. So whatever. Let's do it. It's the genius of the Carpathians. You're, you're smart. And so, and so they did it.

And the thing was that, um, there was when the, so when the engineers were like, okay, do we have a choice? No. Okay, fine. Fuck it. So they, they, uh, presented the station layout to the Chaukjesko couple because Chaukjesko's wife was also, uh, for some God awful reason involved in this. It's called feminism.

Yeah. Girl boss. Ellen, that's right. And so, so they, they, they, so they put up this plan in front of the couple and below. And so Ellen Chaukjesko, who used to be, I think a worker at a clothes factory or something. I don't know who you go.

Anyway, also like very well versed in city planning, as you can tell. So they presented the plans and Ellen Chaukjesko looked at the map, looked at the station layout and asked, okay, why is there a station at Piata Romana, which is the central square? Like what, what, what factory is there? Which is a very sort of, you know, Eastern block question to ask. And the engineers were like, no, there are no factories, but there's the Bucharest University of, of economics and there's a ton of students.

And okay. To which she responded, and I'm quoting, I translated this, I translated this from Romanian. She said, students, they've gotten fat. They grew a belly. They should walk. No station at Piata. Let them walk.

That's bad. So Ellen Chaukjesko decided that the students were too fat, apparently. And then she forbade the engineers from building that station. And so Nikola Chaukjesko said nothing to that. And so nobody else there to say no to his wife, obviously, because of course, you get the firing squad if you do. So, but the engineers were sort of one step ahead of these two.

Well, geniuses of the Carpathian. And, and they thought, okay, we, so they thought, okay, so this is a, this is a, an obviously stupid idea that you're not building a station at the, at one of the central, very important hubs of the city. So what they did was, okay, they assumed that public pressure will force the Chaukjesko couple, the power couple, to, to build, to have the station built in retrospect. Right.

So what they did was they secretly excavated a station area, disguised as a tunnel boring. And because of that, since they, since they had to disguise it as like normal works, they couldn't, they, they couldn't like excavate a normal sort of station cavern. And that's why you have these like, narrow ass, dangerous platforms that you see on the, on the picture on the right. Because this is what they could get away with, essentially.

Because of course, if, if this shit turns out, like if it turns out that someone opposed the, the, the, the misses, then you get the firing squad, you know, but, and in the end, as the engineers predicted, there was a public backlash and a public pressure. And then the engineers were like, huh, would you look at that? So there's actually enough space to build a station here. Must be magic. Cool.

So now we have a station and idiotic looking dangers in narrow station. But at least they did it, you know. That's, that's compromised. That's how the sausage gets made. Whoever decided to actually excavate this thing, I want to retroactively award them a hero of socialist labor. Some alpha energy right there. But then this, but then from here, kind of like, as, as church school was popular

in the beginning, but as time went on, he started sort of, look, sort of things went downhill, sort of faster than expected, so to speak. Romanian sort of going, hey, your vibes kind of off, your vibes are off. Yeah. So just, just to, just to foreshadow what, what is going to happen in 1981, Cho Chescu began this austerity program to quote unquote, eliminate Romania's national debt. Now this was because he was enamored with this. People, and I also would assume that this was because he was influenced by the Jiu-Jitsu

ideology of North Korea, where he was prior, like a decade or so, maybe not a decade, but a few years before. And so he said, okay, we're going to do this austerity program and we're going to eliminate Romania's national debt, which was just some like 10 billion US dollars or something making a day, which nowadays would be like 30 or 40 or something. It's not nothing terrible. Still, his austerity program, I mean, you know, compared to the US or something, but compared to the US, the, I'm sorry.

So, however, in Romania, this actually caused severe shortages of even the basic goods, like, you know, foods and gas. And as in, like, you know, fuel for the car. And this support kind of started dwindling behind him. But, but the program itself was actually successful in terms of paying back the debt. Like he actually did manage to pay back the debt. And, but it was less successful in terms of him staying alive more on that later. A lesson to every deficit hawk out there.

But he also had this, he also had this deep Queen's ass mansion. Yeah, Mac mentioned hell. I think this looks cool, actually. Yeah, especially that, that like cheeseboard ceiling over the pseudo Indian pool. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I probably, I probably, you know, I would probably live here. If the option were given to me, all of these looked like one of those AI generated pictures that are like name one thing in this image.

Yeah. Click on horse shit. Oh, there we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but the, the, so the four pictures you can see here, can you see? Yes. Or the mansion from outside, which is, which looks kind of unassuming, but it was, it was fucking enormous.

So very Italian eight. Yes, they vaguely Italian eight, I guess we'd call it. Yeah. I mean, as close as it gets. The corner says huge. Yeah. Which I'll, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that might be the nice thing about this house.

The rest is like kind of eh, you know, because I mean, so this mansion right here, it looks small. It looks like, you know, looks like it's a slightly bigger than like Grover house, right? But this building actually has like this, this just continues on. This thing has 80 rooms. That's 80 rooms. 80 rooms. This is an 80 room building.

One uniquely terrible looking. Man, I'm not sure I had eight rooms. I know, right? And it's, and this thing has like, oh, by the way, the corporate, the person responsible for this interior design was Elena Chaukescu. You know, it's who was inspired, I guess, by, by her foreign trips. So this, this is basically like the Pinterest influence before Pinterest. And so this monstrosity has multiple salons, multiple study rooms and bedrooms, obviously,

with Louis the 14th slash 15th era furniture in it. Because, because why the fuck now? And it's got children's luxury suits, sweets. An indoor swimming pool. Children's luxury suits is more of a Lukashenko vibe. Yeah, but like, you know, these, these people are similar. What a little Nathan J. Robinson mansion. And it also has an indoor swimming pool, as you can see.

It looks ugly as sin, but whatever, at least they have it. Also, it has a drop ceiling. There's a drop ceiling with the indoor swimming pool. It's like, man, if you ever thought about what humidity is, you ever considered like, you have like small moist chunks of asbestos dropping down on you when you're swimming. Oh, God. Well, all expenses are borne by the taxpayers anyway. So who gives a shit?

This is dope. And so the house also had a private cinema, where, according to reports, Nikolai Charchas Kuhl liked watching old gangster films and westerns, and especially Kojak, this old sort of detective slash cop series. He loves you, baby. And dude's rock. I mean, this is a weird thing with dictators. They love this shit.

Like Hitler loved a Western, also loved like Disney. I think Stalin was big into his cartoons as well. So, yeah. But this being said, Eleanor's favorite was Dallas, actually. So Eleanor Charchas Kuhl was watching Dallas in the private theater. She did a horrible job of imitating it. Yeah, well, as far as the shooting goes, you know. And the house also had a wine cellar, an indoor winter garden with statues,

a fountain, and exotic plants. Eleanor was really into exotic plants. She also wanted to put exotic plants in the Bucharest metro, the way I heard. You know, like underground plants, which need a lot of sunlight, but, you know. So when you live in your commute, you can just see like a rare orchid or something. Yeah, underground. Yeah, like I believe the plan was abandoned. Like I just heard these rumors from like Hungarian sort of metro enthusiasts circles.

There was some songbirds in there every day. And the house also had, by the way, a nuclear shelter, which was accessible from the wine cellar. Yeah, just grab a couple of bottles as you're going in. Exactly. And also something very interesting trivia about this house is that it had inside of this house was the first and for a long time only color TV in Romania.

Hell yeah. We couldn't watch Dallas in black and white. Good God. I know, right? Yeah, so this is a real little appetizer before we get into the big the main course. Exactly. Exactly.

So, Ceausescu took a trip in 1971 to North Korea. Or is it like to call it Korea? Korea, yes, exactly. The People's Republic of Korea. That's right. So in 1971, Ceausescu visited China, Mongolia, North Korea and North Vietnam, but crucially, North Korea, right? And he was introduced to a communist philosophy known as Juche,

which is Korean. Can you do whatever the fuck you want? Yes, it's Korean for dudes rock. No, it's self-reliance, right? He met Kim Il-sung, right? And North Korea in the 1970s, there was this weird period after the Korean War that extended for a long time where actually North Korea, by our current standards of GDP, so on and so forth, North Korea was actually doing better than South Korea for a long time.

People talk about the Marshall Plan, but the Soviet Union in another broadly good move did pour a lot of money into improving the living standards of people and its allies, like North Korea and Cuba. The downside of that was making them just a talk of self-reliance aside, incredibly dependent on those things. Oh yeah, I mean, Juche has always been fake. Yeah, also at this point, South Korea was on its fourth consecutive fascist dictatorship, because that was like the 60s and 70s C.I.A.'s bread and butter.

It was like, okay, we need a reliable guy in here. Let's find the weirdest general in this country's army, have him kill his predecessor, and now he's the boss. Yes. But Chow Chesky was sort of inspired by the fact that North Korea could sustain itself outside of the Soviet sphere of influence. And outside of the China sphere of influence even, right? Did a slightly better job there, yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, this sort of philosophy of Juche, clearly this is the way we make Romania a world power, right? Obviously. Having done a lot of other dumb stuff so far. First, the Metro, tomorrow, the world. Chow Chesky came back, delivered a speech now we call the July Theses, which is sort of an indication of a return to Stalinism.

More like the July Theses, am I right? And nothing went wrong. Nothing went wrong. No, I mean, that's why we all live today under a glorious United States Socialist Republic. Yes, yes. That's right. God, it's so funny to think about a time when Juche was still being justified, even by the Kims, as a Stalinist philosophy.

They don't bother with that now is the main thing. Care about it. None of these communist countries care about communism. This is the unfortunate situation. It's like, well, you know, maybe you should just do some communism. Guys. Cuba, maybe. Cuba, maybe, yes.

Let's see how that works, Roz. So the July Theses involved a return to sort of Stalinism, right? But more Stalinism than Stalin did, right? Because the thing about Stalinism was he was a pussy and a cop and a baiter. And so far, it sounds like Prager you to me, you know. The problem is the problem is that we're not doing capitalism hard enough, you see. Yes, but one of the fun ones was, you know, as part of this, these July Theses, there were 17 of them, and I don't know what they are, except that one of them was that

students are going to volunteer on construction projects. Oh, yeah, I know the sound of that. That happens to this day in Hungary, you know, when they actually, it happened the other day, they asked a bunch of students to volunteer to, I don't know, be, I don't know, some kind of helpers at some kind of fucking conference that Robert likes. So this is actually a very, this is a long and, well, somewhat beautiful tradition in the eastern block. Fuck me.

I love to be getting a fucking like engineering degree in Hungary and then be told that I have to go and suck off Tucker Carlson because the president likes him, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we are like quote unquote, volunteering now because the students are quote unquote, so enthusiastic about, you know, helping judges with cars. Securing a future for Hungarian children, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, exactly. Well, the thing is, the thing is having identified all of the things that

the country needed to do in order to become a world power. The third Rome, independent of both Moscow and Beijing, is Nicolay needed to turn on the big earthquake machine, which he did as soon as he got back. Immediately. Well, no, actually six years afterwards. It was 1977. Well, it takes a long time to warm up, all right. It's got Nixie tubes in there.

So magnitude 7.2 earthquake gave him gave Chachescu a nice pretext to start demyelishing a huge amount of Bucharest, you know, for the sake of rebuilding it in a sort of socialist, realist fashion, right? Emphasis on the fashion, I guess. Yes, exactly. And what Chachescu did is actually called so-called systematization, which, well, according to the definition, it's the demolition and reconstruction of existing hamlets, villages, towns and cities, in whole or in part with the stated goal of turning Romania

into a multilaterally developed socialist society. And soon we will see how that worked out. And yeah, that go ahead. Oh, I mean, like multilaterally developed. It sounds like some kind of corporate speak. Corporate speak. Yes, exactly. We're going to synergize Romania.

Corporate speak, but your manager shoots you or something. Yeah, like regular corporate speak. And that monstrosity we see in the background getting built, that unholy Ozymandian monument is what we will be very soon talking about. It's coming, people. Winter is coming. And other things with it in the December of 1989. Yeah, but first we're going to talk about two distinct artistic movements.

I've heard autistic movements. Yeah, we've got to talk about two distinct autistic movements, socialism and communism. Yes, as I said, as I said earlier, the spectrum of communism. All right. So we need to talk about this concept of socialist realism, right? One of the things about Soviet communism in particular, which is the conservatism of it. Soviet communism was very conservative, I guess, culturally, right? This is the thing.

You had this sort of moment of opening, it's sort of like in the early years of Bolshevik government, and then Lenin sort of is a kind of ambiguous figure, sort of like repressed some of this, tolerated others, encouraged others. But then the door firmly got shut in everyone's face when Stalin took over. Absolutely, yeah. No more weird shit. And Lenin allowed some weird shit. For instance, tolerating Arseniy Avramov, the guy who said we should destroy every

piano in Russia, like a bunch of weird futurist art that was all wedges and shapes, and like more prosaically things like, you know, educating women, giving women access to contraceptives, legalizing homosexuality, just regular, cool stuff that was then immediately shut back down in 1924. Yeah, it was just, you know, it was an incredible period of art and architecture, stuff like that, you know. Just imagine the optimism of that. Exciting new forms.

You had, you know, constructivism, right? You had futurism, you had suprematism, which is, you know, Kazimir Malovich putting a square on a canvas. Some really, truly unironically for one's dudes rock shit. Yes, you know, this is where, there's some people out there who say like the CIA is responsible for modern art and architecture, which I think is very strange because like all the good stuff was in the early years of the USSR. Now, and you read like, you read like oral histories of this period, there was a genuine

error of like, because it was so unexpected and it was so unprepared, that it was fully the case that like, you know, the central government would send you to, you know, the fucking up the banks of the Yenisei or whatever and be like, okay, here are two pencils, start a school for 5000 people. And they did it. People did this stuff and it sort of like, it worked and it didn't and it was chaos and it was order, but it was like a whole rich human tapestry. And then not so much. The art was good.

The art was so good. And also one factor which plays into this like the art flourishing is that in many cases, there was like the artists were allowed to flourish and they could sort of really explore their creativity because they were not necessarily tied to the profit motive, meaning that, you know, you are not at risk of creating something that cannot sell. And so you die of hunger. And like even, even at its most decrepit, right, the empire still had enough of a grip on the reins of power that it could implement artistic censorship very easily and very effectively,

not so necessarily of the early days of the Bolsheviks. Like, yeah, okay, it was still possible for them to kill you, right? But like in terms of implementing a sort of like national policy of this is the guy who's going to watch you work to make sure you don't get any weird ideas with it. That was a few years off yet. Yeah, and this flourishing of art sort of, it comes to a stop when Stalin comes to power, right? Yeah, when he poisons Lenin, allegedly. Yes.

Destroys and buries the the testament that Lenin writes that says, don't let Stalin take power under any circumstances, allegedly. We'll not tolerate dratskyism on this, but I'm fine with being against Stalin, but no dratskyism, please. All right. So Stalin is Stalin comes to power. He's basically he's, you know, he's, he's a communist, but he's also like a nationalist, right? Yeah.

And a terrible communist. If you've ever actually like one of the funniest interactions I've had with tankies online was being told to read Stalin's theory, right? Because I have. And let me tell you, this was this was not a theoretical communist. Yeah, he's well, he's the worst kind of nationalist. He's a convert because he's from Georgia, not Russia. Converts, man.

I'm telling you. Zealotry. Yeah. Being sort of on the borderline, but like borderlands of like acceptability, you know, fucking destroying Osip Mandelstam for writing a sort of Russian chauvinist poem about him calling him like the the Kremlin Caucasian. Good Lord. So this is this is sort of a state sanctioned style of art and architecture, the socialist

realist style, right? It's is representational. It's supposed to be understandable to the workers. It was it was not high art. It was not something that you you had to think about, right? So you can sort of see. And in some ways, it approaches a sort of confluence with a lot of fascist art where you end up with these sort of like monumental classical forms on the one hand.

But on the other, you get this kind of like really kitsch, nostalgic, sentimental sort of art. Yes. So we see here on the screen, we got a mosaic of Lenin in one of the Moscow metro stations. You have a large classical building. I forget where this is. It sounds about right. I don't recognize that we see here. And then the one painting that was allowed with one kind of painting that's allowed,

which is the children giving Stalin some flowers. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the deeply deeply sentimental, deeply kitsch, deeply annoying, deeply parochial. And like this is exactly the same kind of shit that the Nazis did to is like people people remember the sort of like the revolutionary aspect of fascist art, which is, you know, the sort of like giant Arno Brecher bronzers and stuff, less so the kitsch. But like if you look at things like the service stations that they put on the outer barn,

it was like, oh, we're going to make this like a little chocolate box cottage, because that that like reflects German values. Same deal. Same exact deal. Not not to do horseshoe theory here, but yeah, same thing. And with that, I'll be right back one second. A favorite to go on, by the way, is your podcast. I'll just I'll just keep yelling about socialist realism.

Yeah, we can just we can yell about socialist realism for a while. I mean, you know, one of the things which I think is very, you know, as someone who kind of likes, you know, maybe what you would call traditional architecture, I feel like this is this is not well, it's just not executed properly. It's like it has its moments. It has its moments. But there's not like a sort of I don't know how you explain it. It's when the execution goes that extra mile.

It can be it can be very good. I love the the Moscow Metro, for instance. There are, you know, the apartment buildings, the Stalin case, actual the actual buildings that are built for the people are good. Like the metro stations, like I remember Milo talking on Trash Future about the Stalingas and just how absurdly overbuilt they are. Oh, yeah, the consoles, consoles for the proletariat. But it's like it's like these are actually these are buildings that are actually built

for people to like live in and use as opposed to like, you know, the buildings, which are, I don't know, some kind of they're more monuments than buildings, right? Right. They're not like this is not like a building for like the people. This is a building for like government. Well, we have a fantastic example of this on the next slide. Yes, never built the Palace of the Soviets. Yes.

The like the big passion project, because like, again, not to keep drawing the parallels, but like impractically large monumental buildings that like the new Axis Mundi, like Berlin was going to have the Volkshalle. And this, you know, Moscow was going to have the Palace of the Soviets. And the size of this isn't really conveyed properly by this drawing, but it was like going to be gargantuan. Right. Like big, big energy, big, big energy.

So yeah, I mean, there was a whole central plan. Pass up for a meaty can opening. I really appreciate that. Yeah. No, the Palace of the Soviets is like the best example of sort of like impractical, boring event, despite its size, socialist realism. It was going to have this gigantic statue of Lenin on the top that was going to be like twice the size of the statue of Liberty.

So to conclude this slide, socialist realism was kind of goofy. It was dumb. It was an anachronism, right? And by the fifties, Khrushchev, with this sort of denunciation of Stalin, Khrushchev managed to, you know, get rid of the sort of socialist, realist style as the official style of the Soviet Union, right? Yeah. Without really getting rid of the sort of conservatism or the nostalgia, which is a

fascinating trick you pulled. Yes, I, yeah, I mean, the Soviet Union is weird. So a series, a series of tragedies. Yes, series of tragedies. Yes, we could have had socialism, if not for the Soviet Union. So Chachasco decided that, you know, here in the modern world of the 1980s, by this point, it was time to bring back socialist realism, right? So, you know, and it's, that's the Palace of the Soviets that I was talking about.

The Soviets, yeah. I have one real quick comparison to draw here, which is this is what socialism, socialist realism gets you, or doesn't, because it's like a swamp now. The original, the original plan for this site was the Tatlent Tower, which was this insane, sort of like, what if the Eiffel Tower was made by the dang joker kind of futurist thing, a bunch of like, really twisted steel and really interesting forms that, that truly would have said a lot about our society. And then instead of doing that, they, they tried to do this.

They started laying the foundations for it, and then World War Two happened. And they did not build. So many architects like, enter the competition to build the Palace of the Soviets, right? You know, Lake Kupuzia was involved. You had, that was the big one. I don't remember who else. Tatlent's Tower, I thought, was definitely the most interesting one, because Tatlent's Tower involved like this, this sort of,

was a mechanical sculpture as well as a government building. Because, you know, you would have the lower house at the bottom would be in the cube, and the cube would rotate once a day, and then you have the upper house, which would be in a sphere, and the sphere rotated once, once a month. And then you had the upper half, which I think a pyramid, and the pyramid rotated once a year. It's like if, ironically, given who's like, you know, opposed to Kupuzia, if a house is a machine for living, this was like a machine for governing.

Yes. And just to add a little something to this, to this sort of idea in the slide. You see, throughout the Eastern Bloc, you sometimes see these gigantic, you know, monuments of shit. There's like Soviet things, the big, the kinder stuff. Like here, the Palace of the Soviets in Warsaw, the like the Stalin skyscraper. Exactly. And funny enough, Hungary doesn't have something like that.

Thank God. Anyway, in Romania, as we will soon see, we have this something, which we'll be discussing. But the strange thing about the Soviet Union is ultimately a big part of the reason why it fell apart is that while these huge prestige projects went on, basic necessities and just like basic commodities were struggling, so to speak, or the state was struggling to provide them. So, for example, an example I want to bring up is buying a car.

So during the second half of the 20th century, how did you buy a car in the U.S.? Like they basically like threw it after you, right? So it wasn't particularly hard to get one. Whereas in the Eastern Bloc, the way you got a car was you first off, first off, you signed up by paying part of the money or the whole thing. And then you waited. You were put on a waiting list and you waited for years to get your car. And you looked at the newspaper every week to see the names of who will get

their cars this week. And hopefully your name was among them. And you remind me of another Soviet joke. Go ahead. A man puts in his order to buy, you know, Zaporizhets or whatever. I think I know this one. He buys a car and the guy tells him, okay, it'll be with you in 10 years. 10 years exactly this date.

And the guy says, oh, in the morning or the afternoon. And the salesman looks at him and says, well, why would you need to know that? And the guy says, oh, the plumber's coming in the morning. Yeah. Yes, that is the one I thought it was. Yeah, yeah. It's also a very good and very indicative joke, actually, of how these state affairs and but the but just waiting, waiting years for your car wasn't the only thing actually.

So once you waited like five, six years to get your fucking Trubbant or or Warburg or Zaporizhets or or, you know, Polsky or something. Once you got it, you had one more task in front of you. You had to take it to a friendly mechanic that you knew and just and you entrusted and shell out a ton of money like a month's salary or something for the mechanic to reinstall everything that was stolen out of the car in the factory. So yeah. And with that next slide, please.

All right. So yes, it's it's coming. It's coming at you full speed. Yes, it's the people's palace. It's the people's palace and a spoiler alert. Our boy Chalcescu will not live to see this building complete it. Yeah. Oh, what a shame.

And well, let's see why as soon. So the Ross wrote here that this is the biggest goddamn thing ever. And I'm inclined to agree. And this thing broke down broke broke down broke ground. It's been broke down all time. It's been based just like the country. So this this thing broke ground in 1984. You know, it's it's the it's the thing that you know.

Yeah, George or George Orlando was 1968 that conservatives like to quote. And the thing was actually finished after the revolution in 1997. Now, can you guess the number of architects that worked on it? For those of you who don't have the notes in front of you. Well, there is one of them in the picture on the right. So I'm going to guess one. So that's one. And there were also 699 more.

Huh. Like a little a little battalion of architects. Exactly. Exactly. You have to have to be at the back and call of the orders of the genius of the Carpathians. So, you know, the the the nominal lead architect, Anka Patrescu, who is on on the on the right picture. They're 28 years old at the time that they started building this.

Yeah, because they they support women in Romania. Chachescu, they really supported women. Some girl boss energy right there. Yes. And this whole thing, the whole building, by the way, costed about 4.7 billion US dollars on today's course, I believe. So it's, you know, it's a little big Chungus building. So it's a good size building.

I mean, it has the same number of stories below ground as above ground, if I recall correctly. Yeah. So the building is 12 floors high and is so 84 84 meters tall. And eight. Well, okay. Wait a second. We have Americans here.

So meter two. Yeah. What's that in? What's that in burgers and hamburgers? That's 275 hamburgers. So it's a pretty tall building. Can you guess the floor space of this thing? I'm terrible at estimating floor space.

I just like whenever I whenever I'm renting an apartment, I just let them. Yeah, me too. It's not fair. But so the floor space, the floor space is 365,000 square meters or 3,930,000 square feet. The number of rooms in this thing is 1,100. Oh, well, you know, just showing people around my four plus 1,096 apartment, you know. Romania is a complex country. It needs a lot of administration.

That's right. This is what requires that many rooms. Yeah. Well, that high quality governance needs a lot of room to do, you know, functions. Needs to needs to fit Chaucescu's enormous brain inside it. So. Exactly. I read something from a, I forget.

I forget who the journalist was who met Chaucescu once. Who said that Chaucescu, when he sat down in front of him, had the most enormous balls. Gigantic, huge. That explains everything. Visible through the pants. Incredible. Oh, God. The stallion of the Carpathians.

And this was going to house every ministry of Romanian government. No, that's his balls. And his balls. And his massive, one wing for the left nut, one wing for the right nut, one wing for every other government ministry. And so this building has some relevant titles. This is this building is, which is an absolute monstrosity, by the way. Absolutely.

This is the world's largest civilian building with an administrative function. It is the world's most expensive administrative building. So, you know, Andrew, cool, more can get some ideas. And it is also the world's heaviest building. And because of that, I hear that it's actually sinking by around five or six millimeters per year. Oh, I identify with it now. And it's also the dumbest fucking thing ever built in Romania.

That's not an official title. I just wrote it there because I think that. I do love the sort of like architectural models that they have of it here. It's very charming. The little Dracula castle roofs did not make it into the final plans, but it would look a lot better with the the the peaked roof, though. Even on that scale, I'm not sure, though. No, I mean, my biggest issue with this building is it looks like shit.

It looks fucking terrible. It is an ugly building. I mean, it looks really bad. I mean, it's like Romania. You know, it was in what can you do? Well, on the plus side, much like Guy de Maupasson dining in the Eiffel Tower, because it was the one place in Paris, he didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower. One place you don't have to look at the people's palace is from inside it.

But what you do have to look at is the interior. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of a sort of a communist Versailles, but also like it's like a Versailles was built as a train station. It's not it's because it's not like a building that like has a public purpose. It's for government, right? Yes, it's not particularly attractive.

Yeah, it's like a second mention, but on any government level, essentially. There's not enough color because it's white and gold. That symbolizes opulence, Roz. Listen, listen, you're not you're not correct about this. This is just a bad implement. And much like the Soviet Union, the ideology isn't the problem. It's only the implementation. Yes, it's it's it's it's bad.

It's like not not interesting. It's not like there's nothing there's nothing going on here that I like. So it gives you a toothache to look at. It looks like a big wedding cake. Yeah. George has come and it's like, OK, I'm the genius of the Carpathians. And here's what we're going to build. Louvre, but depressed.

Yes. So yeah. Got a next slide here just to the the main staircase here. And it has this stara. It's it's like it's it has this sort of classical but sterile look. So it is sterile like like this like this this government office from the 1970s rural Russia where like all the employees are like suicidal. But it's also classical and such a weird sort of disharmony.

It's bizarre. Yeah. And it's it's it's all it's all white, right? So it's like no no sort of it's also made entirely from Romanian materials, as I understand it. Because again, we're trying to do Romani and Juche. Yeah. But it's also like there's I don't know. There's something there's something wrong with it.

It's all it's all out of proportion. It feels like sort of like dream logic, you know. No, the proportions are great. The proportions are all exactly right. That's the thing that I think is weird about it is because, you know, the proportions are correct. Everything is correct academically. But there's something wrong here.

I think I think it's because they just they just like piled the ornamentation on top of each other. Like it's just like ornamentation on top of ornamentation. It just it just goes on. It just like this this this this style never lets you catch a break. Everywhere you look, it's always something. It's always like it always has to scream into your face. How how great it is, how exceptional it is.

And that's because it was designed by some dumbfuck. So, you know, it's it's it's very overstimulating, isn't it? Exactly. There's like good, good, good. Sorry, go ahead. There's an intent behind the architecture is the thing. Maybe I don't know how you describe it. But like there's there's an intent here. And it was, you know, you're trying to guess.

It is it is the wrong intent and it hasn't it hasn't aged into its new problems either. See, people people think hostile architecture. And they think that means exclusively like spikes over subway get greats, which is, you know, one example. This is hostile architecture, too. Yeah, but subtle. Yeah, yes.

Yeah, so I mean, this this building would look nice, if not for the the the the suffocating amount of ornamentation. Plus, if you're criticizing it, you know, like behind that beautifully crafted, you know, staircase leading upwards to, you know, the higher level of level of existence or something. Behind that are or five secondary officers who will just fucking, you know, drag you off to the gulag if you dare to give him a dirty look. So I have a I have a view in the next slide because I wrote that slide

of the the aerial shot of this, which really just just take it in. Just just take it in. It's just this big sort of tumor, just like the stretching into the fabric of the city. It looks like it's been like anchored in the corners. Yeah. And the building is like the plan is not good. Like starting from starting from like the beginning, like the plan of the building is not good.

Like you you you don't have 28 year olds. You've taken this whole sort of classical architecture. Like you you've applied all the right rules to the wrong thing. Yeah. And like spoiler alert, because we're going to talk about this in a couple of slides time, but yeah, Romania is no longer a communist country. It is a democratic. This is the current the current the current governing ideology for many years.

Yeah. Anyway, so after after after communism or after chauchesquism, the new guys go, well, OK, what are we what are we going to do with this thing? Do we like leave it half done? Do we demolish it? And what they do is they finish it. They finish construction of this because, you know, you're already most of the way there. What else are you going to do?

And then having having like, capped it out, having finished it, they go, shit, what the fuck are we going to do with the world's heaviest building? It's an order of magnitude larger than like even the most authoritarian Romanian government could have possibly used it for. I was reading about the it was like the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania talked about his his office once he got into it. He had to order a smaller desk because the size of his desk was upsetting him. What he got what he got was a desk that was like larger than the largest one you could get.

Like it had to be custom made and it was still half the size of the one that the office came with. Oh, God, yeah. With these megalomaniac buildings, like there's, oh, God, something came into mind like when in Berlin, there used to be this chancellor, chancellor rebuilding, which was then blown up by the Soviets ironically. But that was designed by this by this mad architect of Nazi Germany, who was like kind of like a genius to some extent. And it was also this like gargantuan building, but not like not to this extent.

But the way that I just remember this, I think I think it's interesting trivia to like he had to build this enormous fucking building in like one or two years, like like a super short time. So what he did was he looked at the rooms and said, okay, how what is the most time consuming thing to be done here? The corpets. Okay, so he submitted the orders for the corpets and then designed the rooms around the corpets because back then the corpets need to be handmade and it took a lot of time. So this, I believe this same energy was present here during the building of this thing in front of us, which looks like the microchip that Bill Gates will put in your brain with the COVID vaccination. But like, I did not know about the desk part.

So they're actually surprising. They go through a few iterations of things that maybe we can do with this, in part because like the new liberal, democratic capitalist Romanias also quite strapped for cash. So a sort of a revenue seeking thing. They consider like making it into a casino. That doesn't work. They try and make it into a mall. And that also doesn't work. Rupert Murdoch offers to buy it for a billion dollars. And they turn them down because they think they can hold out for more. I have this in good authority. I can cite my sources on this one, that it's seriously considered at one point to try and turn this into a Dracula theme park.

Based. Yes. That was what I was rooting for. The horrible, you're here in a horrible, the horrible, Dracula, what's the reason? Castle Thunder is playing the whole time. Welcome to Pennsylvania. I saw the stats on this. This building has only been at most 30% occupied. You could play a fantastic game of hide and seek here. There's going to be shit in these offices nobody knows about. Yes. It sounds like the World Trade Center so far. It reminds me a lot of Philadelphia City Hall. Just by being way larger than it used to be. Statue of John Hancock. There are some

statues. Parallels. William Penn. There have been multiple instances of people being discovered living in abandoned offices in Philadelphia City Hall. There's got to be people living in this under the radar. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. But what ultimately happens is that inertia wins. It now houses both chambers of Romania's Parliament and they have no use for it. It's just that they're stuck with it. They're the consumer of last resort ever since they turned down Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. One of the weird things is like the big Parliament Hall, which I believe is this guy right here. Yeah. So they finish the exterior before they finish the interior. It's been

finished in a very post-modern style. I don't have a picture here, but it's... One of these sort of like more sort of collaborative big curved benches kind of parliaments. Yeah. Yes. Well, you know, taste and Eastern Europe do not always go hand in hand. Unfortunately. It does have good public transport links, as we'll see in the next slide. So this picture is the bus stop next to the palace. And if you look closely, the little little sign over there says that it is indeed the palace, parliament, to Louis. And yeah. So I believe this picture illustrates the sort of land of contrasts to borrow a phrase. There was Romania. And what is Romania to this day, to some extent, at least.

And so you have these big bullshit projects, these little big sigma mail, whatever obelisks of shit. And next to it, the basic public services are just kind of like struggling. And as a bonus, if you look in the top left corner, you can see these like sort of random balconies built in with these sort of haphazard glazing on it. Well, that's because that is sort of that is rather common in countries like Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus. And that's because no meaningful reforms were done in the housing sector. As in, you know, it wasn't regulated and people can just build whatever the fuck they want out on these houses. Sometimes they collapse because of it. Sometimes they somehow don't. Oh, well,

but the thing is that the focus of the governments in the Soviet era before the evolution, sometimes even after it, was this sort of inward looking projecting our own glory and sort of not giving a shit about basic public services, which, you know, we should have done. So this bus stop symbolizes, I think, that truth. And with that, we're going to get into spicy stuff. So, you know, I hear you ask, but what happened to this Nikolai Chaukescu guy? What was what was his deal? What happened to Nikolai and Elena Chaukescu? Gee shucks. Am I excited to tell you? Alice, could I get the drop, please?

Hi, my name is Nikolai Chaukescu and you might be wondering how I ended up in this situation. So the question, what happened here? And the answer is a Hungarian pastor gave an interview. Never let them do that. Big mistake. Exactly. So over here, we see on this picture, we see the the execution of the Chaukescu couple by a firing squad in 1989, December. And so this whole thing, I'm going to turn you through it because it's super interesting. So the last little Turkish was a Hungarian sort of protestant pastor who organized against systematization, which was, as we discussed, this this destructive urban planning practice of Chaukescu, where he just like leveled entire historic centers to build out the supposed ideal

socialist town. And this pastor, last little Turkish gave an interview to the Hungarian television, so not the Romanian, but the Hungarian one. And this happened in like July 1989. But the thing was aired in like December or October. Anyway, fall slash winter. And the Romanian government responded this, responding to this by accusing Turkish of being anti-Romanian. And they deprived him of his pastoral pastoral title. And so because of that, legally, he had to move out of his apartment because his apartment was sort of assigned to him based on his work. So he was about to be evicted. And there was a big support in front of like for him in support of him in front of his house and the area. So this was on the 16th of December 1989. And you know,

because everyone is at this point, everyone is kind of like fed up with with with Chaukescu's austerity program. And they are also kind of fed up with the with the systematization. And so last little Turkish gave voice to something which everyone kind of like felt. But he was the one to to like sort of bring bring those concerns to real life, so to speak. And so on the 16th of December, there was this big protest in favor of him. And the Securitate, the Romanian sort of, well, secret police, I guess, tries to crack down on it. But the whole sort of the whole conflict spread rather quickly through across the entire country, because turns out not just the local Hungarians have had enough of the or had had enough of the

Chaukescu regime. And within one day, the situation got so bad that the Securitate basically could not handle it anymore, the army had to be involved. And right, so and and today people were rather fed up with Chaukescu at this point, who built out a personal cult based on the North Korean one. Yeah, so that that's that that usually doesn't end well. And so two days later, two days after the army got involved, and you know, things are kind of going to shit, but you know, it's still under control. The Ministry of Defense dies under mysterious circumstances after refusing Chaukescu Chaukescu's orders, personal orders to open fire at the protesters with live ammunition, of course. And of course, and then the guy dies. And as the joke

goes, you know, like the guy died of suicide with like five shots in the back from 50 meters away. And of course, and his death, he was actually a light and and respected member of the of the establishment by the soldiers anyway. And his death actually caused mass defections in the army. So the whole system sort of started dissolving. And this this accumulated in Chaukescu's famous last speech, when like it was the first instance when the crowd actually turned against him and he was just kind of like he was like he was like a toddler who was just kind of like lost in a supermarket. You know, he's just had no no idea what's going on, because you know, he's been he's been living in a bubble. And now you know, it's just this, you know, Earth and Sky kind of

difference. And so after following like him, he tried to calm the crowd down. He had like rallies, TV addresses, etc. didn't work. And things were getting out of hand rather quickly. And so we are at the we are the palace, the big dumb building we've been talking about so far. And well, he needs to be evacuated because people are kind of like people are seeping into the building, you know, the bodyguards cannot hold them back. And around noonish, Chaukescu's personal helicopter pilot gets a message that he needs to go immediately to the people's palace to pick up Chaukescu. And okay, he flew there and he saw that he could not land on a square because it was full of people and there's people climbing on the balcony where where Chaukescu was holding speeches beforehand.

And after that, so the helicopter pilot saw someone wave this like white curtain out of one window signaling where she would land. And he landed actually and the bodyguards brought out the Chaukescu couple who were just like petrified with like shock and fear at that point. Because, you know, what was the people catch up with them? They're like, you know, they're gonna end up on a lamppost at that point. And they knew that. And so the the Chaukescu's together with like two security at the officers were evacuated from the palace by helicopter to a safe house near Bucharest to the north by like 50 kilometers or so. And there the Chaukescu, Nikola Chaukescu ordered his pilot to get in touch with his unit commander and hit it.

And Chaukescu ordered the unit commander to order additional helicopters with armed guards to where he is to, you know, be a presidential sort of escort. And the unit commander responded with the following. There has been a revolution. You are on your own. Good luck. Okay. So things things were going to shit pretty fast. And like, you know, festive things, as you can tell. And so at this point, Chaukescu ordered the pilot to take them even further away from the capital. And to this specified place, which was this safe zone or safe house. And on the way the pilot, the pilot was also kind of fed up with this whole thing. And so he the pilot made the helicopter sort of dip up and down. And he told Chaukescu that he was doing it because he wants he wanted to avoid the

incoming entire fire, which of course, no one was shooting at a helicopter, but the pilot was just fucking with Chaukescu at that point. But this this made Chaukescu panic, actually, and ordered an immediate landing. And so the pilot landed on an on this agricultural field next to a road. And, and then told the Chaukescu's that he could do nothing more. As far as his concern, that was it. You must live amongst the people. Exactly. And they did for a communist leader. Exactly. And so to to to try what it's like to live among the people, the secretary at the officers who were still with them, flagged down, they actually managed to flag down two cars on the road, one of which was a countryside doctor in a red Dacia car who who actually who wasn't

particularly happy about having to drive the Chaukescu's, which he did in the end. So on the way, as he was driving them, he faked an engine breakdown and stopped on the roadside. Because you know, I'm just fucking done with this shit, whatever. And the getting the sense of an entire nation that is very much done with this guy's shit. You just wait to pick up Barack Obama on the side of the road. You're like, no, get out of my car. How will I get to the nearest settlements? The free market will take care of it. Don't worry. Once again, the Third Amendment comes in at the end as the hero we knew it would.

I will not quarter Barack Obama in my car. That's right. But the secretary of officers actually managed to flag down a third car. This time it was a bicycle repairman who actually managed who actually agreed to drive them to a nearby town. And on the way, as they were driving there, the bicycle repairman managed to convince the Chaukescu couple that they can hide at the local agricultural complex because it was because it was a safe spot. And so upon arrival, the director of the agricultural complex welcomed the Chaukescu couple and led them into a room and then locked them in.

Shortly after, local police came and picked up the two and transported them to a nearby military camp bound when they were tried in a few days and then, of course, put in front of this firing squad. And this was the end of the Chaukescu couple, their reign. All this because the man failed a speech check. You see the footage of him speaking from the balcony and that you can see him lose control of it in real time. And you're just like, and he's going like, hello, hello. And people are just like, you know, whatever, fuck you. He offered them like a five to 10 percent pay rise.

Yeah, thank you. I can't afford food, but... He offered to raise worker salaries by 200 lei per month. It was about $19. Nice. And fun fact, though, the big part of the protesters were workers who came to the capital to protest after striking. It was miners mostly, right? Yeah, a big, big part of it was miners, yes. So do drug. Yeah. And it never, never got to see his big, beautiful palace. Yeah, do it. Well, there's, well, but Alice, did you know there's an even bigger and even more beautiful palace next to it? Really? Yes. Which is getting built. Right now. Do you want, do you want a, do you want a big Orthodox church? Oh, yeah. That's what you want.

So thick. It's 35 meters taller than the palace is. Yes. And this is, this is Orthodoxy's revenge, more or less explicitly, for the five churches that Ceausescu had destroyed in order to build his palace. Yeah. Because Orthodoxy gets pretty intense about martyrdom. You may be aware of this. So the church in Romania considered these churches to have been metaphorically crucified. It's kind of a big deal to them. And so as a consequence, yeah. And so as a consequence, they have, they have built this, or are building this massive cathedral immediately next door as an own. Yes. Well, I'm sure this is the most immediate urbanistic need of Bucharest. That's right. And, you know, there are absolutely no lessons about hubris and building

massive structures here. Oh, yeah. Well, we can do it bigger, Buddha-ass. Fuck you. There's a lesson. Our thing's bigger. America number one. It's the only thing that can defeat communism, religion. The last castle. The only thing that can defeat religion, communism. We got to build an even bigger, even taller, even more communist thing. And then when they kill our guy again, and they build a gigantic, even larger second cathedral next to that, we just got to keep going until eventually we have a kind of like gradient upwards. The Orthodox space elevator. Yes. Not to be confused with the Jewish space laser, of course. By the way, is Liam still with us? Yes. I haven't heard him yet. Yes. Yes. Liam. Yes. He's dead.

Can you not hear me? I've been talking this entire time. It's very unfortunate. Liam has been martyred in the cause of this podcast. We will shall build the Christian space laser. I have literally been talking this entire time. Oh, my God. I haven't been on mute. So I've just been recording locally, and I was wondering why I kept getting talked over. Oh, man. Oh, buddy. And Zencaster was showing fine, and Audacity was showing fine. That's insane. That's really fucking annoying. Okay. That's not so good. Yeah. I have my local, so if you could just, I guess, splice it together. Yeah, we'll just edit in. Wow, that's annoying. Yeah, no, I've been with you the whole time.

Or we can publish a second version of the podcast with the Liam Anderson developer commentary. Release the Liam cut. The Liam cut. It's just me saying, Ross sucks butt for two hours and 15 minutes. You know, we were on all sorts of drugs when we were premiering this, you know, making the band, but it's just me. Wow, this is going to go into the history books is the episode where we lost the host for the entirety of the thing. The host didn't know it. And just not his co-host for being very rude. I have no mouth and I must pod. This is the most anti-Semitic pod we've ever done.

This is quite possibly the hardest we've fucked up logistically, recording one of these. Since the time we had to record the same episode three times. I'm just glad that I wasn't being ignored. No, no, I was, I was wondering what I was like. Oh, I don't want to call attention to fucking died as a second. I refresh Zen, because I could hear all of you the entire time. And my Zencaster, like I said, showed totally normal. Like I was picking up on my sound, everything healthy. Luckily, obviously I was on audacity or we'd be totally. There's some stuff I said about now that now that I'm back, I guess there's some stuff I had

said about you guys are talking about sort of power, reabsolute power. I'm like, even if you don't start goofy, it makes you goofy by the end of it. We were talking about on lines about the guy whose name I shamefully can't remember the Central African Republic who decided he was Napoleon. Oh, Bacchasa. And yeah, off the dome. How fucking smart am I? Yeah, good job. Thank you. Thank God I wasn't being ignored. My anxiety is returning to normal. You know, I'm like a dancing clown. I need to be at the center of attention at all times because I'm an old child. And my yeah, this is my whole life. But I do think it's funny that like, I do think it's true that absolute power,

like no matter like if one of us got absolute power, we'd be we'd be fucking just absolutely off our rockers and saying Ross was going to normal now. Yeah, Ross. Ross would be building a GG one out of solid gold. Like weird shit. I would build a nicer building than the power. I like it. See, that was the other thing is that I I I ironically like this hunk of shit. I think it's kind of deep. Like obviously, it's horrible. But like you have a bad building. It's a bad building. You have said to my face that Philadelphia City Hall is ugly, but you like it. No, it's ugly and I like it. Yes. This is different. The web of lies becomes untangled. There's a way in which Second Empire is an objectively ugly style.

I love Second Empire. I'll put that shit right in my veins. No, Second Empire is ugly. And I like the last gas of dying Republic. We have a segment that we like to call safety. No, I'm making up for last time. This is safe. Safety. I am making up for a lot of time. That's it. Well, there's your Liam podcast about Liam was slides posted by me. And he said my co-host Alice Liam Caldwell Callie and Justin Liamyak. Our part-outs are Liam. Yay, Liam.

Yeah, I was actually I was actually wondering if if like if this is like part of some kind of like sort like smooth let down of Liam of like, yeah, Liam, we were cutting you from a podcast. Adam is a new Liam. We're downsizing you by like cutting your mic for five minutes more. Do you know this? That'd be tough because sometimes I don't listen to the episodes we record. And I would like that could that that could go on for a while. We would just like as a means of gaslighting you. That's that's powerful.

Yeah, what I say you want to do is listen to a podcast. I don't listen. I just, you know, it's not a format I particularly enjoy the guy who makes his living recording these days. There's a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. But I've been enjoying your podcast on my afternoon's off for a long time now. And I must say into that tonight. Yeah, sorry, buddy. You idiots go down well with a few glasses of mint julep.

Hey, fuck you too. That's why they call me a cutting lingua. I just remember the name of Emperor Bacchasa the first just off the top of my fucking head. Well, today I didn't have any bullet. So I actually remember bullets. I have a great Safety Third for y'all. Come on, dude. Have some respect for yourself.

I tried to simplify the chemistry involved. So even the city planners listening will understand just how much stupid took place here. I don't know, man. You're the one not drinking like Woodford Reserve. I don't like Woodford Reserve. I know it's just fancy. Buffalo Trace. No, I'm saying things I like.

I don't like Sparky 101. The old legitimate bourbon. Eagle Rare. I do like Eagle Rare. I just can't fucking find it anymore. Yeah, you can't get it anymore. Yeah, exactly. You can get it at the state store at 11th and Bilbert.

They keep it behind the counter. No one ever buys it. Back when I was in college, I needed a way to make money for booze. Oh, no. And the occasional textbook. As I have a body made for radio and a voice made for text, prostitution and podcasting were out of the question. So I had to get...

Hey, if we could fucking do it, buddy. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell me about it. Sing with me, energy. So I had to get a job. Oh, sorry. Luckily, the school I used to go to had a position open for an assistant lab tech and already had enough chemistry qualifications to apply. Now, here's how things were meant to work.

A chemistry teacher with qualifications in chemistry plans a chemistry lesson well in advance of the day they need to teach it. They then hand any planned demonstrations and associated paperwork to lab tech in the chemistry preparation room. They would check that the planned reaction was safe and modify the protocol as required. Justin, are you doing like a shot of bullet in between sentences? Yeah, what do you do with that, buddy?

Do you want me to read that? Finally, an assistant lab tech would be time to prep the glassware, the chemicals, et cetera, ready for the lesson. Now, here's how things actually worked. A biology teacher with qualifications in English literature would remember that they had a chemistry lesson to teach the next day. Storm into the prep room with some crayon drawing, some poorly done maths, and expect the first person they find to be able to make it work.

The main lab tech always seemed to schedule his break at just the right time to miss this shit show. So, inevitably, I would have to do all the work. I was going to guess right here I was not going to be this lucky, is he? Luckily, for every poor child who was being forced to sit within the splash zone of these idiotic teachers, I was actually good at my job. If a teacher high and mighty upon their packing order would question my correcting their dangerous protocol into a safe one

or argue that they knew what they were doing, I would simply tell them, you know how Timmy's mother always makes your parent teacher nights a motherfucking nightmare because you marked down poor Timmy a point for attendance? Well, imagine that bitch after you've blinded her poor sweet shit stain of a child. Oh my god! Hell yeah!

Yeah! Miss worked on all but one teacher. She still knew better. We'll call her Miss Bromison. Miss Bromison's lesson was on halogen displacement reactions. Our demonstration was simple. Drop a few drops of dilute chloride solution, which is basically watered down bleach, into dilute solutions of potassium chloride,

potassium bromide, and potassium iodide. The chloride ions will displace the bromide and iodine, turning the solutions red and brown respectively, right? Now, let me tell you a little bit about bromide. This shit is corrosive and toxic. In its pure form, it's a deep red, almost blood red. It's a liquid at room temperature, but it's extremely volatile. Producing thick red clouds of vapor that quickly fill any container.

See attached picture for its full demonic glory. That's what we're looking at right here. I thought it was a doom eternal screenshot. It was like a gummy. Yes. It's like a harbour. Gummy. You got to get Mia back on the pod.

That'd be pretty fun, yeah. This stuff can easily burn your lungs and eyes. Bromide does, however, dissolve in water. So as long as the concentration of potassium bromide is kept well below 0.2 moles per liter. Then little to no bromide gas will be released. The original protocol handed to me was for a solution of one mole per liter of potassium bromide, which is more than enough to gas the entire school, let alone one class.

Hell yeah. They don't even need to do it. It revives this down to the much safer value of 0.05 moles per liter. Ms. Bromison did not like her authority or competence question by a young spotty college student with a part-time job, but I did not like being party to the gassing of the younglings. So after about an hour of explaining on my part, and much screaming and wailing on her part, we came to the most dangerous of agreements, which was a compromise.

I've heard of these. Yes. This is why you need to go with the fullest of Stalinism. That's the thing Democrats do. And it works so well. Yes. The Republicans. The protocol would be modified to include a fume hood to safely deal with the incoming gas bomb, and the solution of potassium bromide would also be lowered to a concentration of 0.2 moles per liter.

This would still release the demonic red cloud of death that Ms. Bromison didn't believe existed, but it would be small enough for the fume hood to deal with. Ms. Bromison signed all the required health and safety and liability forms before leaving with the shit-eating grin on her face. And like magic, the head lab tech rematerialized just after she left. I tried convincing him this teacher should be removed from teaching chemistry, and preferably removed from civilization altogether. But as a failed chemical engineer barely making living in a school prep lab,

he had long ago stopped giving a shit. I ensured the lazy bastard filled out all his paperwork, confirming that he agreed with the planned protocol. I put in an official complaint with the school office, and I sent a detailed account to the health and safety executive, stating the blatant disregard for safety from both the teacher and the main lab tech, and handed in my resignation. Hell yeah.

Dude's drunk. Yeah, he's drunk. Now, the rest of this account was told to me by my friend's little brother. I had pre-warned him about this teacher and this demonstration, and he had warned his classmates. They were ready to run if they saw Ms. Bromison summon forth the big red demon clouds of death. I am particularly grateful that they had that warning, as Ms. Bromison chose not to use the fume hood.

In front of the entire class, she applied several milliliters instead of a few drops of chlorine solution to the flask containing 0.2 moles per liter of potassium bromide solution, directly under her own face. Oh yeah, Autobots roll out. As the big red demon clouds of Corosan Hellfire engulfed Ms. Bromison, the class escaped before it could build up in the room. But don't worry on it, this tale has a happy ending. Ms. Bromison survived long enough to face charges of negligence.

The head lab tech was fired. The kids got over two months off school while the corrosive damage of the bromide it caused was repaired. Kids rock. And yours truly used the extra time gained from not gassing the children to learn how to pirate textbooks to get into home brewing and eventually get a degree in theoretical physics. Congratulations. Yeah.

And in there, the closest I get to replicating genocide is contemplating the vivisection of subatomic particles. Signed mixed organic solution containing ethanol and significant left chiralites. Sounds delicious. Well, what did we learn other than use a fume hood for everything? Do not gas children. Um, I would recommend if you're trying to do communism, you should actually try and do, you know, things that improve the quality of life of the workers.

No, that's communism. The next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. That's right. Yes. We have a live show in a matter of days, three days or however long it'll be when this comes out. Uh, can everyone hear me this time? Yes.

Yep. All right. So we do not have a shouldn't say that. We may have tickets available. I just got an email, a couple of people needed refunds, but I wanted to do sort of a uh, we may, we may not. I don't know what the timeline is on that. So don't get mad at me.

Uh, have tickets available. Roz, I will get one for uh, uh, the other person, Jun's person whose name I can never remember. Yes, but you, you can still get tickets to watch the live stream of the show, which will be at Caveat, New York city, New York state, uh, on the third of August, year of our lord, third of September, baby girl. That's, yeah, no, it happened, uh, over three weeks ago. Um, the third of September in the year of our lord, 2021, I will say you must show proof of vaccination to be allowed in.

That is per New York guidelines. That is not us. I'm really hopeful you don't have any anti-vaccine. When they say proof of vaccination, they mean proof. They don't, they do not mean you like yelling and like waving a fucking piece of paper that you downloaded from the internet that says that you don't have to take the vaccine because of your fucking like, uh, ivermectin horse paste or whatever you have to have been vaccinated to get on the venue.

I personally, uh, do have a religious exemption from getting the vaccine. So, um, unfortunately, uh, there will be at least one person there who is not vaccinated. Yeah, and you're going to be breathing on everybody. Oh, absolutely. You are vaccinated. Don't do that. It's a joke. Don't do that.

Motherfucker, I will shoot you up with a needle. You know, show up with like a, uh, a dart gun, just shooting vaccines into people. Do you think the Havana syndrome is? Adam, do you have any commercials before we go? Yeah, where can the people find you? If the people want more Adam, what do they do? Yeah, just, just like Adam Dubai, put that in, you'll find me. Otherwise, yeah, like my YouTube channel is Adam something.

It has this like nice, for now it has this nice pinkish vapor wave avatar because why not? And, uh, yeah, feel free to find me there. I dunk on Elon Musk. I do urban planning. I dunk on PragerU. I dabble in politics. And I'm essentially a left tube channel, which, uh, if I can believe what I've heard, I am the fastest growing left tube channel in the history of YouTube.

So, hell yeah. Pretty cool. Very nice. Yeah, like, it was pretty, pretty insane. Like what, uh, it was a Dubai video that really sort of like shot me out. I went from 50,000 subscribers in two weeks to 350 and in one more week to 450. So it's pretty insane. Hmm.

Oh, there we are. I, I, at this point, I am simply asking you, the listener, to subscribe both to Adam and to us because I want that little fucking silver play button that they give you when you have, uh, like, yeah. I think it's like 100,000 subscribers. We're like almost halfway. I want the button. I want that button.

Yes. Hey, yeah, I can put a preview of this episode on my channel and direct it yours. Yeah, he's doing. Yeah. Yeah, tomorrow I'm gonna, well, today it's 2am here, but I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna do that. So, all right. Thank you for coming on. It's a pleasure.

Thank you for coming. It was my pleasure. I mean, as I said, as I said, like, uh, do not eat and, uh, consequently, well, there's a problem was one of the inspirations for me to start my channel. So it was pretty cool to, you know, talk to you guys. Like, I've been listening to you for like a rather long time before I even started my channel, which was like January this year. And now I'm here.

It's like, it's pretty fucking cool. So thank you. And thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. It was just a part of the master. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

So once again, thank you very much for having me on. And it was, it was, it was, it was fun. So if you ever need a co-host, let me know. Oh, fuck you, buddy. I'm back now. Liam, we're going to make you interview your own job. Yeah. All right.

All right. I think that was a reminder. Bye. Peace out.