Latest / 20 Percent Berlin Podcast / #39: Unemployment, Campaign posters, Speckgürtel

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#39: Unemployment, Campaign posters, Speckgürtel · 20 Percent Berlin Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the 20 Percent Berlin podcast,
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: the companion podcast to the 20 Percent Berlin newsletter.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I am co-founder,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: co-writer,
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: co-man for everything,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew Bulkeley,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm joined this week as I always am by
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maurice Frank, co-everything as well.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so many co's.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is a co-operative, I would say.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: At least we don't have a bathroom to clean.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: You're right, but we'll get there.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: One day we will have a bathroom.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we're doing it in the studio today with the hopes of getting more listeners.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So today we want to talk about national unemployment in Germany,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: a poll in Berlin that puts the AFD as the leading party in Berlin.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to chat a little bit about the campaign posters.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are campaign posters everywhere in Berlin now.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: The latest AI video surveillance will be at Cottbusser Tor,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Berlin's constant Brennpunkt, what's a hotspot, crime hotspot.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk about the Speckgürtel,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: the area around Berlin where people are moving because apartments are too expensive.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: And now there's like a double Speckgürtel.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's a concentric circle.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: The second one, right?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was kind of fascinating.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like in London, that would be called like Zone 8 or something.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is that how it is in London?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Are the concentric circles the zones?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you've been on vacation.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Last time we did this, you were in Denmark?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then after that, we went down to Bavaria for a few days to the Bayerische Voralpen.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know what that is?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bayerisch Zell.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus, no.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's always so important to people down there that you know exactly where you are.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in Oberfranken, Unterfranken.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a thousand year old village, which was founded by monks in the Middle Ages.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I have to say, it's pretty nice.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Weren't they all founded by monks?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I guess so.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a brewery.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just so beautiful.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know Germany really had nice mountains.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're really high.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're steep.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're beautiful.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to go to Austria to get them.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're both kids of the Rocky Mountains.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You grew up in New Mexico.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in Colorado.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: They aren't as dramatic.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Rocky Mountains are just kind of there.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is like, I mean, we went up this one mountain.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: We took a train up the mountain because the kids,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: there's no way the kids are going to be climbing it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was like, it was insane.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Alps go straight up, man.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get there and then there
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: was a cave.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Then you could go in a cave inside the top of the mountain.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was sick.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: You turn into a 12-year-old when there's a cave.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I see a cave.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is because I've been spending a lot of time.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's a promoter in Baden-Württemberg that likes me, so he books me for all these shows.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I spend a lot of time down there.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And every time I'm through there, I'm just like, dude, this is crazy beautiful.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the weather was amazing.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's clean.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: The air is fresh.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: The people are friendly.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to maybe delve into their political stance too much.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: For a
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: vacation, it's nice.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: You just described Brandenburg.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: But Brandenburg is not beautiful like that is.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: It can be.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, not the dramatic.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not the dramatic, but...
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Back here and you're just like, what is up with this place?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: It smells, there's like a thick layer of dirt on everything.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Just grime, yeah.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Grime, like in public transport.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes I look down at the ground and like the subway station,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: who's chewing all that gum?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where's all that gum coming from?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I chew gum, but then I throw it in the trash.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: But do you chew like every day?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, like, you know, every two weeks.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Man, there's just so much gum.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's beautiful down there.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know what the Algoi is now.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful, same thing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I have yet to explore the Algoi.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not big mountains.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's like big hills, right?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's like what you're talking about.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the Foa Alpen.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's in front of the Alpen.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just like farmland.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a flat area in front of the Alps.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's farmland.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is not flat where I was.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, this is like a hotel.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: We stayed in a hotel that was at a ski resort called Zurefeld.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: God, I just had a dream last night.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've been having weird dreams that we were staying at a resort somewhere
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: and there were people standing next to me in their ski outfits.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, it's summer.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't ski in there.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is the mountains, man.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can ski year round.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there are these cows everywhere with bells on them.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're like ding, ding.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's this like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding all the time.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have a joke because I performed in Friedrichshafen, which is on Bodensee at Lake Constance.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this happened.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I walked from the hotel to the venue and I walked by a herd of goats and four organic cows.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a little sign that's a bio-curso.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just thought like in that walk,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: that span down here in Baden-Württemberg, I walked by these goats and organic cows.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: In Berlin, I would have walked by two corpses.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, don't get me started.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was like, I saw a zombie yesterday in the warband.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, can I tell you one story about our road trip down there?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So somewhere in Turingen, we stopped at a rest stop to pee.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no amenities, nothing.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's just one of those prison-style toilets.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is this going to be a swinger story?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: I wish.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, there's a fence.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the other side of the fence is this old building.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And on the building, it says, Germany's oldest rest stop.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this house that was opened up in 1934 or something.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's like this little hut in front of it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then I realized, wait, there's like a menu on the fence.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you ring this bell.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then this woman comes out of the hut.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then you shout your order to her.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then she brings you a coffee.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: She hands it to you.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: She climbs up a little ladder, hands it over the fence.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then you give the money through the fence.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: But if you ask any questions, beware, she's in such a bad mood.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: This place is so crazy, man.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: East German customer service.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the freakiest place.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I got to go there.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently it's Germany's oldest Raststätte.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad when you said the menu, I was expecting something else.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's sometimes there's
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: just like broth.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's like women with campers
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: at rest stops.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's a little bit more Monday.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's like Bockwurst, coffee, a
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Mars bar.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds amazing.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: What is that on the Anoin?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this woman, she seems so unhappy to be there.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I love that in Germany, these spots where you think it's kind of a special spot.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's something unique.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: People put pride into this thing.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, she's just like, Nee, das kannst du schließen.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Das brauch ich gar nicht.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like, and her whole business is done over the fence.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's like what it Literally,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: it's like a short story or a movie you'd see at the Belly Nile or something.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, yeah, go down and do a TikTok, man.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: I should.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I like Terengi.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful state.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: You want to get onto the national news?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have one more thing I want to talk about.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Did we talk about this already?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I canceled Netflix, Prime Video.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I canceled all that.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Who cares?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That I canceled it or that those things exist?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I care about that?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, so now we're,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: what we're stuck with is the iDeMediaTek,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: like all we can watch are German public broadcasters.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there is actually, I'm shocked, there's some pretty good journalism out there.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're shocked that Germans can do journalism?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's problematic because half of the show is the German journalist's ego.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like we watched this thing last night about converting offices into residential
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: and half of the show was them standing in their fat,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: their production office in Cologne.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: This really nice production office, these two journalists.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're in these sort of like Airbnbs with like a MacBook
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: and they're just standing there like pretending to research.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, yeah, yeah.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, these things.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was another one about royalty where the woman,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: the journalist herself is royalty in the beginning.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, I don't really care.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you could tell she totally cares.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: She loves being royalty.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, I don't care.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: She's making fun of all the other people being royalty.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the end,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: she finally goes,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, there's no money with my royalty, but I wear it like jewelry.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What about Arte?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I always mix it together.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we're half Arte.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Arte, you get some French stuff too.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which is also nice.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's amazing.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to keep it canceled.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right, moving on.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: You want to talk about unemployment?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you haven't heard about it,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: like the economy of the country is pretty screwed and has been since 2018.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so just last month, this news in, 3 million unemployed people.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: For the first time in a July in 20 years.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the last time was 2006?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it seems like a lot of companies are going bankrupt.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Big car companies are laying off people.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: BMW just announced it was laying off 10,000 people.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: On top of VW and Mercedes.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have all these other stories,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: all these companies you've never heard of going bankrupt.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like a bakery in Berlin, whose name eludes me, it's like a chain.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: It just went bankrupt.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like 500 people are losing their job.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is happening all over the place.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember when we moved here, like, whatever, 20-something years ago?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: People would talk about 3 million unemployed people as this symbolic,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: like, milestone of how bad it's getting.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we're back there, Andrew.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: What's happening?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're the financial journalist.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on, man?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: You always have to put it in a context.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Unemployment, like, you need the percentage.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: You need, like, what you're saying since 2006.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was the beginning of the finance crisis.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually just down again in Baden-Württemberg where Bosch is.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I was walking through the thinking like, is this going to turn into Detroit?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's BMW, it's VW, it's Mercedes.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Also, Bosch is a huge supplier to all these.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're laying off 10,000.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you see these factories when you're down there, they're there.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought like, yeah, it's the de-industrialization of Germany.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was reading a thing about it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is not really happening in Berlin.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's happening in small to medium-sized towns like Ingolstadt or somewhere outside
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: of Stuttgart that you've never heard of.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: We have no idea what these places look like when you live in Berlin.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy when I go down there and do comedy because they have actual factories
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: that are working, like big, huge factories.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Ravensburg, I think it is.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The factory is so big that the street goes under the factory.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right, and there's like 10,000 people working there.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't see that here.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just these crazy towns that you don't even know exist and they're full
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: of just workers for these places.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, is it going to become a Detroit?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was a financial journalist.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the problem is the German companies thought China was going
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: to be their biggest market forever.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a financial journalist,
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: we wrote all the time about how China will never be able to manufacture to
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: the precision of German.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I always thought, why won't they?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And now they are.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: This woman we met, At basically a beer festival in Bavaria,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: like a retired retiree.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: She said, yeah, Germany slept through the e-mobility revolution.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so basically, they're just way too late when it comes to electric cars.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're still fighting it.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And all these jobs in southern Germany,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: they're all based on making little bits of metal for gasoline engines.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's still,
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Porsche's going back to combustion engines when the government should be saying,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: no, you're not.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they tried to ban it and everybody freaked out.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, Porsche, I mean, that's like not that many cars.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just sort of like a boutique car maker for like insanely rich people.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a, they're always at the spearhead.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're always like, everybody looks to Porsche for leadership.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: But it's crazy though, in Denmark, there are like tons of German electric cars.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's e-Porsches, there's like all over the place.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's more than here, it's crazy.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm dying to trade in my diesel for an electric car.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know, man.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was there, I reported on them ignoring this, the whole thing.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Just thinking China was gonna be the biggest market forever,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: they're gonna sell diesels, then we had Dieselgate, they solved that problem.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Germany's gotta come, their industry's gonna leave, they've gotta replace it with Zalando.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: How many Zelandos do you need?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, the unemployment rate is now at 6.4%, which is creeping up, creeping up.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Berlin is still like 11 or something, so.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're good at being unemployed.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just look at you and me.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: What are we talking about next?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: What's your first story, Andrew?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I like this speck girdle thing.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now you know we should be talking about the campaign posters.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: 250,000 campaign posters have been hung up all over Berlin now.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is the first time I get to vote in an election in Germany.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like speaking to me now.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of wanted to hand out awards of like the best poster, the absolute best.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Graphically,
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I will never vote for this party,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: but graphically, the best poster is from Die Linke for Elif.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Elif?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Elif, yeah.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just her head.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: The name Elif is behind her head.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: She's got a white shirt on.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the best thing,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: her little Kampfketten,
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: the little chain she's wearing around her neck, it says meat and deckel.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm against.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Kampf?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Kampf what?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Kampfketten.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're called Kampfketten.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Are we allowed to make like political endorsements in this podcast?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not because I would never vote for them.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I won't vote for the Ilinka.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: But that poster is beautiful.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I love looking at it.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's great.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just graphically, it's perfect.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so funny.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm against rent caps mostly.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm against rent.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I like rent controls.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like rent caps.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: But how badass is that?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're wearing.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's your necklace.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Linker, they
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: definitely know how to do media.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: They know how to do marketing, which is pretty ironic considering they're anti-capitalist.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: But they've definitely learned something from Mandami, right, in New York.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you could say learn from, they evolved at the same time.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because Reikonick was out there killing it before Mandami.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: But she just sort of like just rants about stuff in the Bundestag and it goes viral.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, no, her Instagram's great.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Her Instagram, like, she's just good social media.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I guess you could say she's AOC, like she's copying Cortez in America.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But, no, that post is great.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the biggest improvement, I won't vote for them either.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're a big fan of them, but vote.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Their posters used to be so dumb and nonsensical, you had no idea.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The goodness here.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Unfuck Berlin.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I'm kind of like get over yourself with the unfuck Berlin.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, you're going to alienate some older, more conservative people.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the other ones where they explain their platform sometimes?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, there's like a list of like 30 problems in Berlin.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's like trash...
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Rents, whatever.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's a long list of actual issues as opposed to just one populist shout out.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Their housing problem, they agree with me, I think with you.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: The housing problem is just build, man.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just build.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: They're saying, yeah, you need to slash the red tape around building.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Slash red tape,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: have the government-owned property owners build and build, which is exactly right.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm impressed with Volt.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then their candidate posters are like cringey, horrible, funny.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're so cringe they're funny.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like the dude standing with the big mustache.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my second place.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: The absolute, well, the worst of the AFD, they're just boring, they're unimaginative.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The SPD, man, what are you doing?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, God.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're just boring.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like the party.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Greens, also not so spicy.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Those are, I don't know, they are just, they've just lost like their oomph, you know?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Greens do seem like we're kind of tired of governing.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: We'd like to go back to opposition.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they are opposition right
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: now in Berlin, but.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: They will be governing again.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: SPD, I think the SPD should just give up nationally and locally.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is like Germany's oldest political party.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: They are like the OG people who fought for workers' rights.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And to say that is really quite flippant of you.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm so mad at Lars Klingbeil because they want to pass this law
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: that makes it illegal to nationalize apartments, basically.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Berlin voted to nationalize apartments.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: The federal government now wants to pass this law to make that illegal.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Lars Klingbeil came out and said, investors told us that that's a threat to them.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't get rid of this threat of nationalization, they won't invest in Berlin.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dude, they're not investing now.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're building fewer and fewer apartments.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I thought you were the SPD who hates money.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing, dude?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Fight against this stuff.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the SPD is irrelevant.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there, I talked about my campaign posters.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's your turn, man.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: this is a good segue over to...
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, basically, the actual campaigning officially began at the weekend, right?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of July, something really disturbing was released.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: The latest polling in Berlin says that the AFD would get 19% of the vote in
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: the September election, which puts them one...
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Percentage point ahead of Die Linke,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: which makes them the biggest party in Berlin, which is insane.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Who did the poll?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Good point.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the poll was commissioned by a rather disgusting far-right website called Nius.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Fox News.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: N-I-U-S, which is, if you pronounce it in German, it sounds like news.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: But to be fair, they did hire an actual polling company to do it.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder how- Insa.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so they actually know how to do polls.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just wondering if there were leading questions in there.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think there have to be- Because every time I find a poll that goes
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: in one direction,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: even if it's conducted by Insa or one of these other supposedly independent things,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: weirdly, they very often support the person who paid for the poll.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there has to be something in there swaying it some-
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm worried
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: about is that the CSD attack happened after that poll and then also the situation
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: in Ceuta and Morocco.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: So both of those events are probably going to add a few more percentage points to the AFD.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: the AFD is a symbol of the same thing with the CSD attack is
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: that Germany is not doing very good at dealing with extremism.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no kidding.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which is weird because I also thought Germans were smart.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Especially like sociologically.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Where'd you get that idea?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I thought like Germans, you know, like the, the World War II movie.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: They suck at the PISA test.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, just like being manipulative, you know, like just being manipulative, creepy people.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, what?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like the cliche of a German.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like we're being weird, like manipulative.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have ways of making you talk, you know?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I thought they knew sociologically how to,
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Freud was, okay, he was Austrian, but that's German.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so that makes them intelligent.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so they won't vote for... No,
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I thought
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: they would then,
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: they would be able to take that knowledge,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: apply it to the German, Germany country and deal with extremism.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Germany country.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Germany country.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's how I thought.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's weird that I just, how are we not doing more to battle extremism?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: How have we lost East Germany so badly to the right?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: My prediction is within the next 10 years, we could see the redivision of Germany.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that crazy?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can't see that happening.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's Civil War level.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go there in another podcast.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Another good journalism thing I saw because we don't have Netflix is a piece
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: about what would Sachsen-Anhalt look like if the AFD wins a majority.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's so mad.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Sachsen-Anhalt is a state in the former East.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's very thinly populated and everyone's old there practically.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: They desperately need young people to work there.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: But if the AFD wins, what's going to happen?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: They might win an absolute majority in September.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of foreigners will move away or none will move there at least.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're going to be understaffed.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like hospitals, businesses, you name it.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they asked the AFD that question.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like 20% of the doctors in Sachsen-Anhalt are foreign.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And of course the AFD says, no, we're not against legal immigrants.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Legal immigrants are okay.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's the illegal immigrants, which is just a lie.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: We know it's just a lie.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're against immigrants.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they'll just, you know, they will just.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: They want to send Ukraine, everybody from Ukraine back tomorrow, yesterday.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And how many of those doctors are Ukrainian?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they want to ship in some Russians.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's fine.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're good Russian people.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're not their government.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: The AFD in Berlin, 20%.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I used to think 10% of the electorate are morons.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we're now up to 20% of that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, 19%.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, is this going to affect the result, though?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So if Die Linke gets 18 and AFD comes out in top, I mean,
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Die Linke can still form a coalition with the Greens and SPD, theoretically, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what's going to be anyway.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: You could even have a minority,
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: theoretically, as long as somebody else doesn't build a majority.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: But then the CDU is around 22, you know.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have the AFD plus the CDU and maybe the FDP could bounce back.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, will you ultimately have Die Linke, Die Grünen and CDU?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, CDU won't have a coalition with Die Linke.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that's the only thing that can happen in Berlin.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're just not doing enough to get these right-wing people.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get them back over?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to stop calling them names on Instagram on my reels
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: because I think maybe that's just fomenting the division,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: but I don't know how to get them back over.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I have actually some followers that are AFD people.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think a lot of them are protest voters.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: They're just sick of everything.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them are racist, actual racists.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: To be fair, if I was going to vote protest, I would vote Die Linke.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: That would be my protest vote.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Or just don't vote.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe convince them not to vote.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: That would be the best strategy.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would be awesome.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I mean,
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: the AFD always accused the so-called old parties of corruption,
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: but they're actually the worst when it comes to corruption,
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: just hiring their cousins and stuff, so.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: The AFD.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because there aren't that many of them and they don't really people.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know people.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have networks.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not going to hire an expert from a university
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: because they don't trust educated people.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: They don't trust educated people.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the whole Fauci thing going on in America.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like here's an educated doctor.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or what's his name?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the guy that ran, who was the health minister here during Corona?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Lauterbach.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: They don't trust.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: They think he's a crook too.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: He lives right around the corner from me.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And now you have like RFK and then running the U.S.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: health ministry and like a record number of measles deaths.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is this what we have coming to us?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know what's funny?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do look to America to think like if this right wing thing keeps happening
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: in Germany, that's what's going to happen here.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to look like America now.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like the cops are probably going to turn into thugs who beat up immigrants just for fun.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they kind of do that already, but then it would be state sanctioned.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: We've been much more widespread, you know?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they probably would start attacking people like Jan Bermermann.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are people in the AFD who want to set up a German ICE.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that would probably start to,
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: you could already weaponize the existing police and the existing laws.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Then they could start,
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: if you got some prosecutors who are on your side,
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: you could start charging people, journalists on the left.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: You could just charge them whether the charges stick or not, whether convictions happen.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: You could charge them to try to.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Eternal lawfare.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well that's what's happening in America.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: The New York Times is constantly getting sued.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of, I look at America to see like what Germany might become, what it might be like.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Should we go on to the next story?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: We can, we got, you know.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: What's your next story?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: What is my next story?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Berlin's rising out of the Speckgürtel.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: First off, should we explain what a Speckgürtel is?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I like this phrase.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes Germans are funny.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the Speckgürtel is love handles.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've got more than just love handles now.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Your spare tire around your middle.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what they call the area around Berlin.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Love tires.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Love tires?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: that's what they call the area around Berlin where people,
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: because it's so expensive in the middle, they move to the edges.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's happening so much in Berlin.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: We now have a second concentric circle.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the first Speck, the first bare tire.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: A double donut.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, a double donut.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a Boston cream.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's about a million people in that first one.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the second one, there's 250,000.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And both of them have been growing faster than the rest of Brandenburg.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: So people are just getting pushed out of – it's like the people who got pushed out
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: of Berlin are now getting pushed out of where they got pushed out of.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: They're moving even further out.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all working in their home office so they don't need to come into town
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: or they drive in or –
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the S-Bahn goes out there.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: I guess so.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: To the first Speck Ripple at least.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: The S-Bahn goes out to the first Speck Ripple.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: But Berliners themselves have less cars than they used to.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I've noticed there's all the license plates are basically Brandenburg license plates.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, part of that problem is a lot of
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: the Brandenburg license plates you're seeing are Ubers that are illegal.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: The illegal Ubers all come from Brandenburg now.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, from TF, right?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because Berlin cracked down on it.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why they couldn't just hand that information to Brandenburg
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: and Brandenburg could crack down on it too.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how are the illegal?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: How are the illegal?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some dude signs up for Uber.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then he hands his car to somebody else to drive it, but it's his name.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a company.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a subcontractor.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: I saw this happen in Cologne.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had the same Uber driver, supposedly, even though it was not the same Uber driver.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Same car, even.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was the same name.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So he runs a company, what's supposed to be individual drivers, but anybody can do it.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: You just take it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I actually did a...
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: I got to stop calling me on comedy.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: I did a gig in...
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: No, Templehof in a bar.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a guy sitting at a table with all these women around him.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, who is that?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, you don't know?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Uber guy.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the guy who is scamming Uber.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: He has all these illegal Ubers.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, yeah, one of his friends works for Uber, and that's how come it works.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: But so all the TFs you see, all those TF Ubers, those are the illegal Ubers.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Owned by one guy?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Owned by one guy.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: But Uber's probably fine with it.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: They don't care, right?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: None of those companies have a moral compass.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of a mafia situation.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's definitely a mafia situation.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what's up with the Speckgordel?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's growing.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's grown a second ring.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's just growing.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the thing.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever think about moving out to Brandenburg?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Never.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I really thought about it.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have a weekend place out there,
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: which we're actually probably going to sell and buy a different one.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know what bothers me about Brandenburg?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, apart from the obvious sort of like weird Nazi vibe you get in some places,
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: the way they've renovated these beautiful old villages,
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: like basically after the Wende,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: all these old Prussian villages were pretty run down, like gray crumbling buildings.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And like all at once, all these people went to Obie, or the Baumarkt.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they just got the cheapest crap and covered up all the old stonework and the old stuff.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: They painted the houses bright green,
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: put on bright blue roof tiles,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: and they put these horrendous industrial fences in their front garden.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's so gross.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's horrible.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: You go to a village, I don't know, France or Spain or any other country, they don't do that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, part of the problem is that it was all renovated at the same time.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you go to France or Spain,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: this dude renovated in the 70s,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: this dude renovated in the 80s,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: so you have this weird kind of heterogeneous-
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's also some standards
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: or norms about- I don't know.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: I once went to this French village, right?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you could only paint the house a certain color.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: But you had to use these kind of roof tiles, you know?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it just allows the village to maintain its historic charm.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Here, they just ruin these places.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's insane.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Totzanie, I think, say it in German.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's worse than that.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's worse than Totzanie.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like, it's hideous.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like purple roof tiles and shit like that.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Those are disappearing.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen those recently.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: I know what you're talking about.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: They seem to be going away.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the fences really bother me.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: That gray fence.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly the fence you're talking about.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they're gray, green.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like this metal thing.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's a new one where they put wallpaper in it.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: They sort of weave it through it.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's fake rocks.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's fake rocks.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're tricking no one.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: It just looks crappy.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, usually when, I mean,
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: what happened in London, like all the villages around London slowly got gentrified.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: You got good coffee.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: You got like artist studios and stuff out there.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's like not happening here so much, you know?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like all that sort of like bourgeois,
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: bohemian stuff we people from Pennsylvania like, you know?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like a little bio shop, a good, like a flat white.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember the band, The Sneaker Pimps?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: He had, apparently he bought like an old water plant, like a pump station somewhere.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always met him to write him and say like, where is this thing?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go see it.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because he talked about it once in a podcast or something.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was like,
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: this were the days in Berlin where you just drove out there and there was a sign
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: that said for sale.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, here's 1500 and you got it.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I've always wondered where that is.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: I actually want to start this off,
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: like 2003 or something,
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: one of our colleagues from London,
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: this was back when I was a journalist, came to Berlin for the weekend.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we went to some lake outside in Brandenburg.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole time,
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know when somebody's visiting you and they've got this look in your eyes
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: and you're like, dude, what are you thinking about the whole time?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And after about three hours, like, Nick, what's up?
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you know, if this was London, do you know how much, how valuable this land would be?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody's out here just like naked,
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: swimming in kind of a gross lake with no, there's no amenities.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously everybody's just peeing.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, how is this even possible?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's exactly what you're talking about.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought like the Sneaker Pimps buys this water thing and then
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: that town becomes like the little weird bohemian town that everybody goes to.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there are like little places where like somebody has created something.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like if you go to the Merkische Schweiz.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been out there?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's – That's like this beyond the Speck a little.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that's like – there's like these little like organic bed and breakfasts and stuff, you know?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: That got bought up.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: That you can't touch anymore.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's so expensive.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's the area between Berlin and Poland.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you just go straight – I don't
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: need that shit.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to – if I want to move out there,
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to have to look at blue roof tiles and like,
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, absurd little gnomes and stuff in the front garden.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Our little village in Brandenburg where our weekend place is, there used to be tobacco fields.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there used to be a huge tobacco area.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: That grows in Germany?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: A certain kind of barn is there because that's where they dried the tobacco.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Probably because the Huguenots,
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: the French Protestants who came here,
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: they knew how to grow tobacco and that was their area.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody has a tobacco plant in their front yard just as like a real little reminder.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when it was East Germany, people grew it and could sell it for cash.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was under the table situation.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you go far enough out,
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly what you're talking about,
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: but you can get away from that sort of to some extent.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, there are pockets that are very beautiful.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Meckesche Schweiz,
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: that's probably the area,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: but then you have to go through that, what is that where the Tierpark is?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Marzahn?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what that is over there.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go through that area,
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: which is just like, it's like a rotten apple orchard driving something.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's so awful.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Straussberg as
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: well is a bit of a
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: dump.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get to Meckesche Schweiz,
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: because that was originally where we looked, but that got bought up quick.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Boko has its moments.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're up by Shvet, which is also just not true.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Am I just an architecture snob?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can be.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with you.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I didn't like about the Oste,
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: the Baltic Sea, was that all got renovated at the same time.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: All of those little towns look exactly the same.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing interesting about that.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: It just gets turned into this really bad version of suburbia.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a village, and they turn it into a soulless suburb.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even though these buildings are like
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: 300 years old.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Does anyone care?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're just chatting because we rented a studio.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: What are we up to?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have anything left?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wanted to talk about one of Berlin's endless number of pilot projects.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Have you noticed that the Berlin City,
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: when it comes to technology, it's always just a pilot project.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: At this point, I think we're learning how they sneak technology into the German public.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like there was the Pilot Bezirksamt.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, the Pilot Bürgeramt in Kreuzberg where you know what their innovation was?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Free Wi-Fi.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: But now there's the Pilot Mobile Bezirksamt that just kind of moves around.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like a trailer.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a food truck.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when I got my German citizenship,
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: they recommended I could go there the next day and apply for my passport.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, just go to the mobile one.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Did you do it?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, because I got an appointment the next day.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can get appointments now.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: That works.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: They've actually reformed.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, today's pilot project is a little controversial.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're testing AI-assisted video surveillance at Cottbus Atoile.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: With plans to expand to Warschauerstrasse, if it works out.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe places like Gurley or Alexanderplatz.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: Or even to surveil the Rotes Rathaus, which is the main city hall near Alexanderplatz.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Does anything happen?
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's on Alexanderplatz, which can be sketchy, but it's on such a far corner.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's cars all around it.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess you can save on security guards.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody even goes there anyway.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, so...
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Iris Spranger, who is the Interior Affairs Minister.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Iris Spranger.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: I guess she's in the SPD.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: She's the Interior Minister of Berlin.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: She emphasizes the system, analyzes movement patterns, not faces.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So no facial recognition.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: The police will only see stick figures on their screens.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about this before.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're not against it.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think maybe it's not what AI is for is to just look at banal things.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: So basically it can tell if some people are fighting,
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: if they have a weapon in their hand apparently.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: We have an AI expert, an AI professor among our readers.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: She said you don't need AI for that.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: A regular computer can do that.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what- I mean, everything's AI now.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: You just put an AI label on it.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right, because they tried the AI surveillance thing at Zutcoits.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: That was facial recognition.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've always, for years, I've thought, as soon as you're in an airport, they know you're there.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've thought this for 20 years.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: But this thing costs 2.47 million euros.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Police unions are in favor of it, of course.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it has its critics.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: So Matthias Marx from the Chaos Computer Club, which is a venerated hacker association.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: With a nice little building on the spray at... What's that?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: At...
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: He says that anonymization might not be guaranteed.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you're looking at those stick figures,
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: you can somehow still link like the gate,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: like the way they walk or the way they move to other files of those people and
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: that you could actually make a correlation.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean there's precedent for that.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's precedent for that.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: If the cameras are there,
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: like they started the toll collecting on the highway and I was supposed
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: to just like record trucks to make sure that you get the tolls for the trucks.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: And now they use them for murder investigations.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if somebody has a gun in their hand, maybe it's good that we know who it is.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like the flock cameras in America.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like you get to have too many cameras,
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: but generally I think like,
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Having a computer watch a square where you don't want somebody sitting there,
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: the person's going to fall asleep watching that.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: The computer's never going to fall asleep.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm with you.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really see the problem.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: This guy, Marx, great name, described the plan as expensive but dangerous security theater.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: It serves no purpose.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: We should leave such technology to authoritarian states.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I usually love the Chaos Computer Club.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like, they had a great thing where they found out
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: that VW cars could be hacked quite easily just by putting in a URL.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Janowitzbrücke.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're building the Janowitzbrücke.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know how I feel about this.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't want – somebody did say you don't want – you want to be able to walk
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: across Berlin-Mitte without being observed.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a slippery slope.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but at the same time, I want to feel safe at Alexanderplatz.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens when the AFD gets this technology?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's cross that bridge when we get there.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I mean, if they're in, they're going to have it anyway.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: By us not using it now,
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: where we have maybe an okay government,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't prevent them from doing it in the future.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough, fair enough.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean London is full of this stuff.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Guess what though?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: London has less crime than Berlin.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: The murder rate in London has gone below Berlin's, which is shocking.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Murder rates in cities around the world have gone down.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: But in Berlin it's going up a little bit.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: I saw this graph the other day and apparently the murder rate in Berlin is on par
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: with New York City now.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: To be fair, I contemplate murder two or three times a day.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's funny.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Of course it is.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, now that Schlecker's closed,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: it's a lot less,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: but... Schlecker, nobody... Man, you are a boomer, just like that commentator said.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: But explain Schlecker.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: What the hell is Schlecker?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Schlecker was just a drugstore where you went to get toilet paper and shampoo...
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was like an austere version of Rossmann.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was horrible.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, that's all the comedians, there's a joke.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Every comedian has this joke.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, Schlecker was like Rossmann, except that you never paid.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was always one woman working there.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was one woman who had to be the cashier.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: She had to stock stuff.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: She had to answer questions.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And she really did not care if you walked out the front.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they only took cash and E.C.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Carter.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just and they were just rude.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a family run business that was not a limited liability company.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a it was just like a regular it had like like 3000 stores,
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: but it had like the corporate structure of like a like a mom and pop store.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Which actually props to Anton Schlecker who ran it like that saying,
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's my store, I'm responsible for it.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was ultimately a problem.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I also have to say they did once kidnap his kids.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Who did?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, his kids got kidnapped, he had to pay ransom.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's not like they had an easy life.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: This show is all about digression,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: isn't it?
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what podcasts are, man.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you listen to podcasts?
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, you know, it's frustrating living in the city.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: We do have a very tolerated mafia.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: There are several organized crime families here, which are like a part of the fabric of Berlin.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Did you watch that documentary B for Berlin or B?
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: What was that B?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was a documentary about Berlin and I think it was Deepkin, this old mayor of Berlin.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody asked him about, oh, these Turkish and Arabic crime families are getting stronger.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I'm supposed to integrate the East Germans.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have time to worry about the Turkish people.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like he basically just opened the door to these crime families.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, with these gun people, whether they're shooting a day.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they shoot at a building, they don't shoot a person.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: But that happens once a day now here, at least.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: They thought they would be able to control it.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: The cops were like, we're going to get this under control.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's also linked to the Uber situation?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's linked to the crime families.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: They fly people in from Turkey.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: They go to a restaurant and say, give us protection money.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: The guy's like, I'm not giving you anything.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: So they go to Turkey, fly somebody in.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is what the somewhat racist press says.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Fly somebody from Turkey.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: He runs by the building, shoots twice in the building.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then the family goes back and says, hey, what about the protection money?
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is this linked to the drug trade?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Probably.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's all linked together.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Kids, don't do drugs.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're supporting murder.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: Time for Bear's Knees.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Two things we like about Berlin.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what's your thing?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm late doing it,
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: and I feel bad that I'm late doing it,
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: but there's these things that you start out in Berlin,
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: speaking of murdering people, that you hate.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just think like,
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: I hate this about Berlin,
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want this, I wish it would go away, and now I love it.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's those little, the strawberry stance, Carl's Adbert stance.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, I was like, come on, man.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't your kids work there?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my son worked there, which makes me like even more.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love, man, when they show up in the spring, I'm like, yeah, when's it opening?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: When's it opening?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: When's it opening?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the strawberry's good.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: They're good, man.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're probably full of pesticides and nitrogen, but they're good.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: And, like, I'm learning there's different kinds of strawberries depending on the season.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, what's it called again?
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: What's the name of the company?
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Karl.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Karl, right.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they all come from,
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: the strawberries come from the original Karls Atberhof in
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, right?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think they grow them all over now, but the thing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is there.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, in northern Germany, they have stores.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's actually Karls stores.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Fun fact,
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: did you know that Carl's Adberhof has opened up a strawberry theme park
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: in California?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: No way, really?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I did not know that.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm moving that.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Check it out, man.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was like two or three years ago.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is like, who says Germans can't do innovation?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: These Germans are doing innovation.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: I went to high school in California.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I graduated from high school north of LA.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And my high school was literally surrounded by strawberry fields.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was somewhere there in that sort of agricultural valley in the middle.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I was like embellishing it, like to tell my kids this story.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then we went there once.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it literally – you can see it on – Google Maps, it's just surrounded by strawberry fields.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: See, you know, who needs BMW when you have Karls-Edbehoff?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Karls-Edbehoff.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: What an export.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: What a great export.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that crazy?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, Germany has a few of these things.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know that Flixbus, which is German, did you know they bought Greyhound?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Greyhound, they bought Greyhound, yeah.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that insane?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: The murder boss, man.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: I took a Flix bus once.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: I would consider doing it here.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: I would never consider taking Greyhound in the States.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: I've taken a lot of Flix buses.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Awful.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've taken some Greyhounds too.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Greyhound stations in the US are like hell.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they're famous for being awful.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Bus stations?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the bottom.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Your life is done when you're at the bus stations.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Back when I lived there,
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: when I was a young adult,
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: I read too much Jack Kerouac and did a trip across the southeast.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, not the southeast.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, southeast from South Carolina up to D.C., hitchhiking.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: But then I gave up because it was so scary and took a Greyhound in the middle
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: the night from Charlotte to D.C.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was horrible.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was rough.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: I took a Flixbus once from Hamburg to Berlin.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've taken a lot of flex buses to Copenhagen from here.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Once in a while, the wind will push them off the road and someone will be injured.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's cheap though.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest problem with the one,
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: it was in the middle of the night and then it drops you off at the Busbahnhof
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: in Berlin, which is at the convention center in Charlottenburg.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Where nobody goes.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: They also have one at Alexanderplatz.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wish it had dropped me there.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be better.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: What's your what's your my bear's knees is
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: also summer appropriate.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's the rowboat rental at Cafe am Neuen See in the Tiergarten.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing I like more than taking one of those rowboats out on that lake
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: and it just stinking like stinky lake.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's not stinky.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a regular lake.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it stinks like whatever.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because those lakes there.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean it stinks?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no water movement in there.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's like that water that's in there was in there.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: When Isherwood was living in Berlin in the 30s.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, it has flow.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: It has throughput.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Very little.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: It just stinks.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're just out there rolling.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's like 11 euros or something.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it for an hour.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then later in the day,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: like you've done,
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: you're eating dinner and you're in a completely different district
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: and you're eating dinner and you're like,
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: and you realize you've got some of the water on your arm and it just smells mildewy.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: Absolute nonsense.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: I had a wonderful time there with my two sons.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: They were mesmerized by it.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like being out on the bayou.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw turtles, live turtles.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever been on a bayou?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do you even know what a bayou is?
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: We saw herons.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what a
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: bayou is?
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: I lived in South Carolina.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's close to the bayou.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: It is, man.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Get you some alligator shrimp po' boy.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, you can get like an overpriced pizza after you're- At the Cafe Amnoin's there.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, yeah.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which is slowly,
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: like all my favorite beer gardens are being renovated into, like I hate them now.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: That one's gentrified.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it always was.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is the fancy West Beer Garden.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's right next to all these embassies.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: But the rowboats, man, it's a good deal.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you have kids to entertain on a hot summer day, take them out to the bayou in Teer Garden.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, maybe a bayou.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: I do think a bayou probably does stink like that because it's in a swamp.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are swamp-like aspects to that.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what it smells like.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: So what, man?
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, same thing when my kids were that age.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: We were on those same rowboats.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Probably the same rowboats, literally.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's also, it's great for couples.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's great for dates.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Though, maybe on a first date, you don't want to be stuck on the rowboat.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Second date.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Second date material.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not even like, it's not even, it's a pond, really.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a lake.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a swamp.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: How much does it cost?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: What did you say, 11?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think 11.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: For an hour.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: Between 11 and 13 or something.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Maurice, thanks for coming to MIT for doing it here at this little studio.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, studio.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're definitely more talkative in this situation.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're not like fiddling,
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: like desperately trying to like salvage the technical situation.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, subscribe or whatever.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: I guess we have a YouTube channel now.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Smash that like button.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can throw this up on you.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can do that.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, guys.