What was the Four Pests Campaign?

This is an iHeart podcast.

Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody.

Lowe's knows that rewards members get more.

That's why when you sign up for My Lowe's Rewards or My Lowe's Pro Rewards Today, you get member deals, points, and more.

Plus, you get free standard shipping starting at Silver Key and Gold Pro status.

Savings for rewards members add up fast, so why wait?

Become a rewards member for free and get more savings today.

Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions.

Details at lowe's.com slash terms.

Subject to change.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck.

It's just us and that's okay

because we are going to do our best today.

pronouncing Chinese words, which is always a laugh riot if you're a fan of the podcast.

Yeah, you can take those, my friend, because I meant to look up the pronunciations and I didn't get a chance to.

But this topic about the Four Pests campaign comes to you from listener, actually non-listener, Emily Bryant, my wife.

Oh, nice.

She gave me the idea, and I was like, oh, yeah.

I looked into it a little bit.

It was like, yeah, this will be good.

That's funny.

I wondered if you had thought of it because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.

No, but I do have to say, you judge me pretty hard on the cockroach.

And while just very

casually talking about how much you would kill a mosquito in ticks and fleas, but the, but oh, not the cockroach, Chuck.

No.

Was I a little harsh?

I'm sorry.

No, you weren't harsh, but I was like, wait a minute, you're killing three out of four of these and acting like you're, you know,

God's gift to insects.

Yeah.

My boundaries apply to all.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

we're not talking about cockroaches yet.

We're talking about rats, mosquitoes, flies.

I have an issue with rats, but I get where they're coming from.

And sparrows.

These were the four pests that made up the four pests campaign carried out at the end of the 50s, beginning of the 1960s in Communist China, which newspapers at the time called Red China.

And it was an enormously successful communist eradication campaign that was bent on controlling nature.

And boy, did it ever work.

Yeah, I mean, successful in one way,

very destructive in another.

And we'll get to all that.

Obviously, we're talking about the leader at the time, Mao Zedong.

And this had

was not the first time something like this had been tried.

And it's been tried since then over there as well.

In the 1920s and 30s in China, they had fly-killing campaigns.

In the mid-1920s, there was a fly campaign such that the Southeast University in Nanjing was, it was very effective.

And they were, you know, this is very much like anecdotal, like there were practically no flies there all summer.

Yeah.

But apparently it worked pretty good.

And then they did this at other times in the 1920s and 30s where they would incentivize like middle schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them in and show them to their teachers in like a little matchbox, let's say,

and things like that.

But apparently that resulted in more than 10 million dead flies.

So there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.

Yeah, so much so that I actually saw a contemporaneous newspaper account that was talking about the

four pests campaign when it kicked off.

And the newspaper, this is an American newspaper, just kind of chided and said the fact that they're having to include flies belies the boast that there were no flies in China.

So apparently after these eradication campaigns, Trump told the rest of the world, we don't have flies anymore, suckers, because we get rid of it.

We take care of business, I think is how they put it.

Yeah, the four pests that we need to sort of set the stage because it's kind of rooted in the Great Leap Forward.

And that was a very

ambitious campaign in 1958, January 1958, that had a lot of initiatives.

But the real goal, the kind of stated goal, was to industrialize and to overtake the UK's industrial output in less than 15 years,

mainly in,

there are lots of ways they wanted to do this, but mainly to outdo them in steel production.

Yeah, and just a quick reminder, the UK is where the Industrial Revolution began.

So this was beyond ambitious for China, especially from the place that they were coming from.

So Mao was extremely ambitious, I guess, and to do something like this that required really huge sweeping changes and for them to happen immediately.

You weren't transitioning into anything.

It was stop doing this and start doing this.

Yeah, like stop farming and build a steel furnace in your backyard and start smelting.

It was, they tried new weird sort of farming techniques that weren't tested.

It was a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know, from the people as far as how they received it and how they got into it.

Apparently, that the farmers sometimes or people would just work late into the night and they called it catching the moon and stars.

And public officials were,

they would issue these steel and grain quotas to like, you know, make as much steel and grow as much grain as you could.

But they were very unrealistic quotas.

They were not able to fulfill those.

And in that time, with, you know, this sort of idealistic, authoritative approach to government, they were over-reporting output.

And as we'll see, that kind of happened again with the Ford Pest campaign.

Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into almost immediately after they began the Four Pest campaign.

And even though they were kind of parallel to one another, they were definitely intertwined, at least to some degree, right?

Yeah.

So the four pests campaign itself,

you might say, like, okay, China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK.

Who cares about flies and sparrows?

And it turns out that Mao cared a lot about flies and sparrows and other pests.

He, and I've noticed this before in a lot of the stuff he talked about, he almost had like a contempt for nature and a real like inner desire to

dominate nature and bend it to human will, to his will at least.

He had a slogan called Man Must Conquer Nature.

There you go.

Pretty on the nose, right?

Yeah.

And also, apparently, he was quoted back in 1958 that he wanted to make the high mountain bow its head, make the river yield the way.

And so this really kind of tied these eradication campaigns.

And make no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly, every rat, every mosquito, and every sparrow in all of China.

So this eradication campaign really kind of fit into that viewpoint that he held.

Yeah, for sure.

So there was some megalomania involved for sure, but it definitely had genuine roots and an ambition to be,

to get rid rid of disease,

to

stop these contagions from spreading, because they were coming out of a decade in the 1940s where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria, and the infant mortality rate was like 30%.

So there was definitely, you know, they reacted with these big large-scale vaccination drives, sanitation initiatives, but getting rid of these pests, they thought, could get rid of the things that were causing these diseases to begin with.

Yeah.

And getting rid of these pests in three of the cases would get rid of these diseases to begin with.

In the case of sparrows, they're not spreading disease, but he

sparrows are grain thieves.

They eat grain.

And so they had these wild estimates that sparrows could,

like the food they lost to grain by sparrows, could feed up to 60,000 people.

So that's why they were on the list.

Yes.

Somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole and ate about

four and a half kilograms a year, which equals to about 10 pounds, which is a staggering amount of grain for one single bird to steal from like right out of the Chinese people's mouths.

So that was why sparrows were on there.

You might have been sitting here the whole time going, what are you talking about with sparrows?

They're the cutest little bird.

They're the greatest of all birds, potentially.

Why would you want to kill sparrows?

And sparrows just got wrapped up into this big dragnet, essentially.

yeah along with other birds by accident of course yes so the whole thing was essentially like an adopt a mile program except with killing animals

yeah uh i mean they had sanitation teams that people would organize in communities uh they would go out together and hunt rats um they encouraged kids of course to do this but just individually they were encouraging people like hey kill every mosquito you can find kill every fly that comes near you it's your patriotic duty to do so uh They would incentivize and reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this is something you need to get on board with to make us all healthier.

Exactly.

And going back to that infant mortality rate, talking about making them healthier, like this is where they were coming from.

That 30%, the way that it's expressed typically is number of deaths per 1,000 births.

So that's 300 deaths per 1,000 births.

So this was a staggering infant mortality rate that they were dealing with.

And it kind of drives home like, okay, this was even more ambitious than it seems on its face because not only are they trying to leap forward, they're really having to come from a deficit to even begin to leap.

Yeah, for sure.

And of course, in communist China, how are you going to get this ball rolling?

Through government propaganda.

It was a big, big part of mobilizing people to do this stuff.

They had...

posters just sort of encouraging people to kill the pest.

They would say things like, it will lead to happiness for 10,000 generations.

They would also have posters like positive ones like, here's what our future is going to look like with like

farms that are flourishing and industry that is doing great.

And all you have to do is kill these pests.

It even filtered down to the level of children.

They had like children's songs and kids' books talking about killing sparrows.

Yeah, they did absolutely everything right to change people's views on sparrows so thoroughly because before they hadn't been seen as pests until those grain estimates came in.

Yeah, they're sparrows.

Exactly.

So I believe the Chinese

up to 1958, 59 viewed sparrows pretty normally.

And then all of a sudden the whole country was like, yes, we'll kill sparrows, no problem, because that propaganda campaign was so effective.

Yeah, they had they filled out the questionnaire.

How do you view sparrows?

A, favorably, B, not favorably.

C, don't really have an opinion.

Right, exactly.

And everybody said not favorably anymore.

So we should give the old grain of salt here as far as the numbers we're about to start talking about.

It is very hard for a few reasons.

A, it's communist China, so any statistics need to have the grain of salt that they put out.

And also, we're talking about killing individual flies and mosquitoes.

So it's just really tough to quantify that.

Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I tried to quantify it, and I think I did a great job.

Oh, boy.

Does that mean there's going to be some Josh maths?

Yeah.

Aces of Josh Math.

You ready?

Can't wait.

Yeah.

Well, let's just jump to that, okay?

Okay.

We'll come back to rats in a second, but flies, let's talk about flies.

One of the reasons flies were chosen is because they transfer all sorts of diseases because they like to hang out on poop and then they like to go hang out on food that people eat.

One of the big problems, one of the big problem

diseases that they spread is cholera, which is not fun and it spreads very easily.

So flies were targeted and 220 million pounds of flies were killed.

Okay, hold on.

I have a question.

I got to interrupt.

Okay.

Are you about to say that you found out the weight of an average fly

to find the total number of flies out of that 220 million pounds?

Yes.

Amazing.

You ready?

Yeah, yeah.

First of all, I have to shout out Bing.

and it's AI when I said how much is how many flies are in one pound.

Right.

I guess I actually put one to two pounds.

I tried to take the shortcut.

Bing comes back with one to two pounds of flies biomass equals one to two pounds of flies.

It's like, thanks for the help, Bing.

So I had to sludge forward and do it myself.

So I looked up how much a house fly weighs.

I saw 50 milligrams.

I saw 10 milligrams.

Okay.

So if you divide that per pound, that equals 9,000 flies per pound.

Okay.

It also equals more.

I'll get to that in a second.

But that, so nine, so at 50 milligrams of fly, which is way high, that's 9,000 flies per pound times 220 million pounds of flies equals 1.98 trillion

flies that were killed in just a couple of years.

Mind-boggling, right?

Well, get this.

If you adjust to a fly weighing 10 milligrams,

that equals almost 10 trillion flies that were killed in China over the course of this four-pest four-pest campaign.

Just a few years.

10 trillion flies.

That's that's the numbers I'm coming up with, guys.

That's amazing.

And this wasn't a bit, I genuinely didn't know that Josh was going to do that, but I saw the writing on the wall.

As soon as I knew that it was pounds of flies, I was like, I know he's going to figure out total flies.

Yeah, I didn't go ahead and convert it into Big Macs, which I feel a little bad about, but you know, I still feel like I did a good job.

All right, that's amazing.

Rats, they carry a disease called schistosomiasis.

I probably mispronounced that, but that is something that can kill you with organ failure, can give you cancer.

Rats also stole grain, and apparently they would drive these rats out of their holes, kill them, and allegedly get the grain out of their hidey holes and feed that to livestock is supposedly what happened.

That's vengeance right there.

You actually take the grain that the rats stole back.

Yeah.

Something else.

So 1.5 billion rats were killed.

How many pounds of rat is that?

You got to reverse engineer it.

So I would say about 0.7

billion, 0.7 billion pounds of rats.

I'm going to go in that.

I've seen New York rats.

I don't know if Chinese rats hold a candle, but those New York rats, those suckers can weigh several pounds, I feel like.

Oh, several pounds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I stand by my estimate.

Let's say 0.9, because not all of them are going to weigh two pounds.

I love a rat, by the way.

That's what I'm saying.

I'm not fully on board.

I get rats really easily spread a lot of disease, and they have throughout human history.

But rats themselves, I don't think, are problematic

individually.

Like a pet rat, give me that little guy and let me scratch it under the chin.

Super sweet.

Yeah.

So, yeah, a lot of rats died.

Again, the reason why they targeted rats is not just from spreading disease, but also they stole that grain too.

They estimated that rats stole way more than sparrows at about nine kilograms or 20 pounds per rat per year.

So the writing was on the wall for rats.

They were

well, mosquitoes, no one likes.

They spread malaria, which is a bad problem, obviously.

Everyone knows that mosquitoes

host their larvae and wet things and puddles and spare tires and things like that,

still waters.

So citizens were, they were like, hey, dredge your rivers,

fill these watery ditches up with dirt.

Don't let water collect.

Get rid of those breeding grounds.

They also, this is pretty remarkable, they raised fish and ducks to specifically feed on their larvae, which is pretty impressive.

And then, you know, obviously swatting them is one way, but lots of awful, harmful

insecticides just being sprayed everywhere.

Yeah, this is a requisite reminiscence of the mosquito fogging truck driving down the street at night in your neighborhood in the summer.

You remember that?

Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods, but I knew they existed.

Yeah, they were something.

Even back then in the 70s and 80s, it was like, well, you need to steer clear of those.

They just looked ominous.

Yeah.

The

very first opening shots of my beloved documentary, Vernon, Florida, is a mosquito truck going through the town.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

So they killed, as far as China estimates, 24 million pounds of mosquitoes or 4.354 trillion mosquitoes over the course of this campaign.

Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to that one.

Yeah, remember we talked about it before, if not in an episode, then on like Internet Roundup, where there was a geneticist or a molecular biologist, maybe who's like, hey, you know, I figured out a way so that we can get rid of mosquitoes forever in just a few generations if we adjust this gene and release these genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild.

And like it would have worked.

And everyone was like, you know, I don't know if we should do that.

Mosquitoes might be providing some service that we're just not aware of.

It just seems wrong or dumb to just eradicate them all.

And so we didn't pull the trigger on it.

But some, I think like UConn or something professor had figured out exactly how to do it.

Yeah, but didn't they also come back and say like, no, like we have yet to find any, like if mosquitoes were removed, there's no

domino effect in the insect chain.

Like they could really go away and everyone would be fine.

Yes, I do remember that too.

And before you can say anything else, I say we take a break.

That sounds great.

Great.

Thanks, man.

I appreciate the support.

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

It's washable, like fully washable.

Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe you don't make it a biohazard.

And here's the kicker.

It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Right now, you can even get up to 60% off your antibase sofa.

Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head.

Check out washablesofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

That's washablesofas.com.

Hey everybody, we want to talk to you about Squarespace.

And in particular, if you have a great idea that you want to sell on the web, well, Squarespace makes it easy to sell access to content on your websites.

That's right.

You can do online courses, you can do blogs, videos, memberships.

You can even earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall.

Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or a subscription for access.

That's right.

And you can get your content discovered fast with integrated SEO tools.

Every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto-generated sitemap, and more, so you show up more often to more people in global search engine results.

Just go to squarespace.com/slash stuff, and you can get a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code stuff, S-T-U-F-F, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See Capital One.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA, member F D I C

All right, so the fourth, I know you were just waiting with bated breath, about sparrows.

They, again, weren't considered pests before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this.

But he had a very, Mao had a very effective anti-pest campaign going, so people bought into it and they would kill them.

They would crush their little eggs.

They would light firecrackers and throw them at them.

They would destroy their nests.

They would set up up scarecrows or

scare sparrows in fields and then shoot them dead.

But apparently the most popular, far and away the most popular method is that they would just make such a racket in the streets, banging pots and pans and yelling and screaming that the sparrows would fly until they tired and then would just drop down from the sky.

Right, but not dead.

The people

after them would go kill them by hand usually, squeeze them or break their necks or something like that.

And guys, if you're not familiar with sparrows and you are not driving right now, go look up sparrows.

They're the little cute brown birds that hop around outside on the cafe patio, not bothering anybody, just being cute.

These are the birds that the people of China were killing by hand in 1958 to 1961, I think.

Yeah, they're kind of finchy looking.

Just they're very, very cute.

Oh, wow.

I'm actually seeing one of those propaganda posters right now that has

a rat, a sparrow, a mosquito, and a fly impaled on a Chinese sword.

Yes, that works.

That makes me want to kill a sparrow.

It's kind of a really sweet poster, actually, but I just don't like the message.

Yeah, for sure.

So as you can bet,

like this led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a few years.

So here's the problem is

with the sparrows.

Sparrows eat locusts and locusts are a true pest.

So without the sparrows, the locusts really, really thrived.

It turns out that sparrows are a very crucial part of maintaining that ecosystem.

And without them, there were no natural predators for the locusts.

And they ballooned and the crops were devastated.

I think the World Atlas estimated that the locusts were responsible for destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of this.

Right.

So that that was, I mean, that equals a lot of crop yield, even in China with all of the arable land that they have.

And so if you're familiar with Chinese history, especially in the late 50s to 1960s, you know what's coming.

The Great Famine of China, it lasted from 1958 to 1961, and it is far and away the most devastating famine in the history of humanity as far as recorded history goes.

Yeah.

Estimates run from 15 million to up to 78 million.

And I saw reasonable people estimating it was actually between 20 and 50 million people who starved to death from just 1958 to 1961 in China.

That's how bad the famine was.

And some people tie that back to, at least in part, the

four-pest campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, there were many reports and instances of suicide, apparently cannibalism,

people murdering each other to get to their food.

It got really, really bad.

There was also, it was also while it was happening, Mal refused to acknowledge that it was happening.

Like, there is no famine.

It was after everyone died, like a year later, that Mal finally admitted that a famine had occurred, which is like everyone knows there's a famine going on.

So that's like the ultimate sort of gaslighting when your leader is not even acknowledging that.

But he didn't accept, you know, he blamed it on rightists and their failure to implement his policies correctly.

From what I could tell, I did not see how much he actually was aware.

Part of the issue was how just ensconced and insulated he was from bad news because all of the people under him and all the people under those people were afraid of being beaten and tortured and murdered for giving Mao bad news, essentially.

So he might have really not realized realized just how bad things were.

I bet you can't lose 50 million people, though, and not just notice like traffic's better.

Well,

that's the other thing, too.

Most of the deaths were in the rural areas.

They were not in the cities.

A lot of people in the cities were probably hard up, but they were not starving to death.

It was the people in the countrysides.

And a lot of that had to do with terrible, terrible policies that were on top of a bunch of other issues that all kind of came together to exacerbate this famine famine and make it as bad as it was.

Aaron Powell, yeah, well, we're going to talk about those because, you know, I don't think anyone maintains that it was just the sparrows that caused this famine

or, you know, and people to die at the rates of tens of millions.

But there were a few factors.

One was obviously environmental factors.

In 1959, there was a drought in northern China.

and rain and flooding in southern and eastern China.

And all of these natural disasters were kind of happening at the same time, which are going to affect the grain output, led to a lot of grain deficit.

I think in 1959, 55%,

like more than half of their farmland was unusable.

And in 1960, their wheat harvest was down 70%.

Yeah, and that's a staple crop.

I mean, that's the kind of crop that you keep your people alive with, is wheat, right?

So that was a big deal.

There's another one that may or may not have been true, but I know that Mao blamed the Soviet Union on the famine or making it as bad as it was, and that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts during this famine, that the

relations between Communist China and Communist USSR had deteriorated right around this time.

And so just basically to

hold it be jerks, the USSR said, hey, you know all that money you owe us?

We need it right now.

I saw that that's not necessarily the case.

And someone said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for them to stop making payments, for the Chinese to stop making payments to the USSR for three years during this famine.

I don't know if that's true or not, but that is a long-standing talking point that came out of China at the end of the famine when Mao finally did admit that it had happened.

He blamed it in part on the USSR.

Yeah, for sure.

Another part was what we kind of mentioned earlier with the Great Leap Forward was that

push for industrialization and not just a push, but at such a rapid pace that they completely

upended kind of the way things had been such that it was devastating.

They, you know, if all of a sudden everyone is led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard, you're just going to have less grain planted to begin with.

And the other sort of irony to this is this wasn't even good steel that they were getting.

People making steel in their backyards out of

flatware and pots and pans just gets you pig iron.

It didn't result in anything that they could use for like big-time construction.

Yeah, that was a huge one.

I mean, they were also not trained, right?

They were, they just basically said, hey, create a backyard smelting furnace, and here's your quota for steel every month or quarter or year.

Go figure it out, essentially.

So not only were they paying less attention to farming,

they were also spending more time trying to figure this out.

And then, like you said, were unsuccessful.

That was, from what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this whole problem, because it reduced the

crop output so drastically that there was just not enough food to go around, not even close to it, because people simply stopped farming as much.

Yeah.

And at the same time, they had quotas on that grain.

So even though they were saying, hey, go.

go quit growing things, make steel in their backyard, but also we're going to raise the quotas on grain at the same time to unprecedented levels, basically.

And of course, they're not going to meet those quotas.

So party members were afraid of being blamed, kind of like what you were talking about, and covering up this deficit.

And if you did try to report, you know, accurate numbers, you might be beaten and detained or tortured.

And so they thought they had a grain surplus.

So they end up exporting grain when they were short on grain to feed their own people because they thought they had a surplus.

Yes.

And not only would they export it, the grain surplus was considered what the cities needed to survive, or however much they needed to eat.

They didn't calculate grain surpluses based on what percentage of how much was grown.

It was the cities need this much.

It doesn't matter how much that leaves you peasant because we're feeding the cities.

That's what we're interested in doing.

And so that's why I was saying most of the starvation happened in the countryside, whereas the cities managed to survive.

And I think that that probably gave an impression that there wasn't actually a famine going on.

You had to go out into the rural areas for that to happen.

And then dissenters, people who might speak up or criticize or whatever, were actually tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state.

And I think someone estimated that there was between 6 to 8% of the deaths, of the potentially 50 million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward

were caused by torture.

And those were mostly peasants.

6% to 8%.

That's amazing.

Yeah, being tortured to death for basically

speaking up about being left to starve to death, essentially.

All right.

I say we take another break and we come back and talk about the legacy of this and whether or not those sparrows made a comeback in China right after this.

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most silfas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

It's washable, like fully washable.

Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard.

And here's the kicker.

It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Right now, you can even get up to 60% off your anibay sofa.

Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head.

Check out washablesofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

That's washable sofas.com.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See Capital One.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA, member FDIC.

Introducing the new Dell AI PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra Processor.

It's not just an AI computer.

It's a computer built for AI.

That means it's built to help you do your busy work for you.

So you can fast forward through editing images, designing presentations, generating code, debugging code, running lots of apps without lag, creating live translations and captions, summarizing meeting notes, extending battery life, enhancing security, finding that file you were looking for, managing your schedule, meeting your deadlines, responding to long emails, leaving all the time in the world for more you time and for the things that you actually want to do.

Get a new Dell AI PC at dell.com/slash AI-PC.

How those those ahead?

Stay ahead.

Okay, Chuck, so finally, finally, after a a relatively short time, China realized, like, we should probably leave the sparrows alone.

Again, this was right before they became extinct in China.

And it was as recent or as soon as 1960.

I think the whole campaign started in 1958, right?

So just

two to three years, they were like, oh, God, this is not going well.

So they took the sparrows off and they said, bed bugs, you're up.

And the bed bugs said, gulp.

Can I kill a bed bug with your permission?

Yeah.

i i i've got no problem with killing bed bugs i don't know much about them i just know that they're very much disliked and they're hard to get rid of so why not okay

uh yeah they they swapped out sparrows for bed bugs um eventually they would add cockroaches to that list much to your chagrin

um but they they did study sort of the in the initial years of the four pest campaign they did study what was going on with the sparrows and you know whether or not it was making a difference in their eating habits and things like that and in 1960

I guess, I don't know if this was right before or right after it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort of mistaken in our initial estimates.

It turns out they aren't eating as much grain as we thought.

They actually eat insects.

Like 75% of their diet consists of insects and about 25%

is grain.

And

this one researcher collected, along with his colleagues, collected a bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey,

they're seasonal grain eaters on top of that.

So during the winter is the only time they're feeding on these grain seeds.

Otherwise, they're generally eating pests that keep us, you know, keep our harvest more safe.

Right, exactly.

I think that that was

the research by Zheng Zhujin.

Pretty sure that's as close as I can get.

His research was what led to the sparrows being taken off of the Four Pest campaign.

That's right.

So China realized the error of their ways and they took sparrows off.

But not only did they do that, they started reintroducing them by importing them from the Soviet Union to try to bring the sparrow population back.

And slowly over the years, it did bounce back.

They're no longer extinct and there's hundreds of millions of them in China today, but that's still far less than there was before the four-pest campaign.

Part of the way that they have been able to come back is China outlawed.

Talk about like just getting mixed messages here.

China outlawed killing sparrows after they took them off the four pests list and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.

Yeah.

Drive them from the sky with pots and pans, break their cute little necks, and then a year later, actually, you're going to go to jail if you killed more than 20 of them.

It's a criminal offense.

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

That's life under an authoritarian government.

Ta-da.

Yeah, for sure.

There's been different sort of versions of the Four Pest campaign over the years that's continued.

I know we mentioned the bed bugs.

I think that was in the 1960s.

In 19, starting in the 80s,

rats came back on the scene as far as

a big pest to eradicate.

And then in 1998.

There was a full sort of reboot.

Let's go back to the Four Pest campaign.

Remember that TV show we all loved back then?

Let's reboot it.

And new propaganda posters in 1998, like kind of like the old style ones still.

But this is when they added the cockroaches.

So it was flies, mosquitoes,

rats, and cocka roaches.

And that 1980s rat eradication campaign was very successful.

In 1984 alone, trying to kill an estimated 5% of the entire global rat population.

They killed so many rats.

One year.

Yeah.

I mean, they were paying citizens as late as 2007 to kill individual flies in certain places.

Yeah.

And I think in 2024, they started another mosquito campaign, anti-mosquito campaign to try to create the mosquito-free village.

So

not bad.

I mean, considering that they got rid of malaria back in, what year was that?

I think they, I think they finally, wasn't it like 2021, they finally said they were malaria-free?

Yes.

So it did have some positive effects, at least as far as the stupid mosquitoes go.

But the Great Famine, which you just can't talk about the Ford Pest campaign without talking about the Great Famine, because they were tied together in some ways, for sure.

They did a study, I think two different studies in 2023 on the effects the Great Famine had on people who survived it.

And they found that there are definite differences between people who lived through the Great Famine and people who didn't.

Yeah.

I believe that was a higher rate of non-communicable diseases.

We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even

than the general population and may have also caused a decline in the male birth rate all the way through the early 1960s.

Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one-child policy, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, which I guess either is ironic because of the one-child policy or led to the one-child policy.

Yeah.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else.

Four pests is over.

Yeah, hats it to Emily for coming up with that.

And one little lan yap, as obnoxious people call it.

If you want to know what they call sparrows in China, they call them ma chie.

I've never heard of lanyop.

Sure you have.

I've made that joke before and you thought it was hilarious.

Really?

Yeah, it's like an extra little something, like an extra little treat.

Okay.

I heard it on like the Splendid Table once.

They used it seriously where they were talking about how the bottom of an ice cream cone is filled with a little bit of chocolate to keep the ice cream from melting out the bottom.

They called it a little lanyap.

That formed my impression of the word lanyap from that point forward.

So in that case, the cherry on top is the chocolate on the bottom.

Oh, Chuck.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, I think obviously Chuck just brought about listener mail.

This is joke or not, Josh.

So you get to answer this question.

We had a few people write in, so I think there was either some confusion of a joke or maybe you just got something wrong.

We'll see.

Okay.

Hey guys, the reason I'm writing is because I heard something in the first heavy metal episode that I thought was a joke.

But after listening to the audio again and checking the transcript even, I'm wondering if it's just an error and it got through.

Mainly because it was so deadpan.

But see, buddy, Brian, you can never tell with Josh because he can be so deadpan.

I've shown over and over and over that I can't tell sometimes if he's joking.

Here we go.

Uh, Josh explained that Black Sabbath got their name from the Boris Karloff movie Black Sabbath, which is true, but the film isn't about a talking boat winning a regatta for a group of orphans.

In the film, Karloff hosts three different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans.

Uh, Boris Karloff, as an animated talking boat that saved orphans, would be amazing.

At any rate, maybe I'm wrong, and Josh was joking, and Chuck just missed it, or it was explained as such, and I miss it, but I wanted to pass it along.

Rock on!

That is from Brian in Brookline, New Hampshire.

Nice.

Thanks, Brian or Ryan.

Brian.

Thanks, Brian.

So what is it?

Let me just walk us through a couple of points real quick, and I think it'll become clear.

Okay.

One is that Black Sabbath, the band, would name themselves after a movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans.

Seems like a joke.

And secondly, that a...

movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath.

It was totally, totally made up.

Okay, so is there a talking boat orphan movie and you were just referencing that as a joke or did you just completely whole cloth create that?

I made that up from whole cloth.

I don't think there's a movie like that.

I could believe it, but I've never heard of one.

Well then in that case, my friend, I give you the improv award for the month because you sold it and it was pretty great.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

That means the world to me.

I couldn't have made up such an outlandish

movie plot

off the dome like that.

Nice.

Thank you.

And thank you to Brian for bringing that to Chuck's attention.

I've been waiting a little while, and I'm glad we got a chance to go over it.

It's very satisfying.

It was very satisfying.

If you want to be like Brian and set us up for a satisfying conversation, we love that kind of stuff.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis, or MG, and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and Partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's talk about moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in adults with obesity.

Doesn't sound familiar?

Think about how you've been sleeping lately.

If you've had nights where you've been told you snore loudly or choke or gasp for air, and then wake up feeling tired, it may be due to OSA.

In the U.S., U.S., moderate to severe OSA affects around 24 million adults.

Many are adults with obesity and most cases remain undiagnosed and untreated.

Don't sleep on the symptoms.

Learn more at don't sleeponosa.com.

This information is provided by LillyUSA LLC.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See Capital One.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA, member F D I C.

This is an iHeart podcast.