You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show

Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman. A word about the support of the podcast. As you know, we are supported primarily by the Skeptic Society, so your donations there are deeply appreciated, but we also have a sponsor, an advertiser.

Wondrium, this is the former teaching company, the great courses, they

changed their name because they're incorporating many other sources of

content, intellectual, and educational and entertaining content. And whereas intellectual and

back in the day when I was going to be where you had to purchase a course and back in the day when I was doing this

they would ship you a box of cassette tapes. That's how long I've been a

fan of this company. And you'd have to play those cassette tapes on your little

Sony Walkman and so on. Then they shifted to digital, of course, like everybody else else and now they've gone to a

subscription service so what you do is you access the content through an app either

on your laptop or on your phone like in my case here and then you

subscribe and to the service and you get access to all the courses and all the

lectures so there's hundreds of courses and therefore thousands of lectures

most of them are 30 minutes long. Each

courses like 12 to 24. Lectures like this one for example is one I'm going

to listen to this week. It's called communism and power from Stalin to Mao.

Look at communism behind and beyond the iron curtain.

So this is a dozen lectures each about 30 minutes long and so you can knock those

off in about 20 minutes at 1.2 or 1.3 listening speed which is what I do it at

Joseph Stalin the man of steel the Stalin is a gulag state world war two

steel tempered in the furnace I'm just skipping along here Mao Zedung and China's Cultural Revolution all the way up to Pulpott in Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.

Basically it's a story of just bad ideas implemented badly and but it's good to know because it's hugely

...