Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 124: Berlin-Brandenburg Airport

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

meine airport vas feelink very normal UND ZEN Ben's twitter assuming the site still exists: https://twitter.com/benwritesthings Ben's podcast: https://badgayspod.com/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  

Um, in that case, um, I believe do this thing. Yeah. Everything's going. Uh, hello. Welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. It has slides. Uh, I'm Justin Rosnick.

I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go. Uh, I am Alex Kovalkeli. I'm the person who's talking now. I was going to do this in German, but then I panicked and realized I could only do about half of it. My pronouns are she, uh, see, I suppose.

Hey, Liam. Hey, Liam. Hi. My name is Liam Anderson. Uh, my pronouns are he and him, and we have a guest. We have a guest. Hello. Uh, ich heiße Ben, meine Pronomen sind er und, um, I'm not going to do this in German.

Hi, I'm Ben Miller from bad gays and, uh, podcasting from Berlin, deshalb Deutsch und my pronouns are he and him. Thanks so much for coming on. It's, uh, it's a pleasure. Uh, and we've got you. It's very strange to be here, um, and to hear voices that, uh, usually don't respond to things that I say, responding to things that I say. Yeah.

It's sort of the level above parasocialty or it's just social, um, sociality and what's the level after that, um, hyposociality, like a sort of Vulcan mind meld. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Liam and I used to do. Yeah. You, you, you were hyposocial.

Now you're just back down to like regular social. Regular social. Yeah. Yeah. So we do share some organs, not the gross ones. Yeah. There's like a big tube. Yeah.

There's one down the street. Yeah. Yeah. Gross. Well, we got, we got Ben on to talk about this beautiful, beautiful airport. Yeah. This is Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Philipp Brandt. Um, as, as you see here in sort of the beautiful colors of gray sky and dead grass.

Whoa. I, I thought it was, I thought it was Montreal Mirabelle. Yeah. I thought this was North Jersey. I thought, I thought this was ever Glades Jet Port. Uh, the thing about this airport, the thing about this airport is that this building that you were looking at cost 7.3 billion euros to build and took 16 years of construction after groundbreaking to open for that man.

This was like capitalism's version of like the, uh, the Terracotta army, you know? I'm just coming at this from a U.S. construction cost and construction duration perspective. And I'm like, yeah, that's pretty good. Nothing wrong with that on time and on the budget. Yeah. Oh, it was neither. And we will get into why. This is one of these fun stories of public-private partnerships, dozens of layers of opaque subcontracting

arrangements where no one's actually in charge, um, sort of that all, all that kind of sort of legal corruption, plenty of illegal corruption, um, all this communism, all this just to put planes in the sky. Yes. All this just to put planes in the sky. Lord. And as we will find out at the end to deport refugee, to deport refugees and asylum seekers. Ask yourself, is there something wrong with European social democracy?

And you look at, look at the microtransportation centers and say, no, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Yeah. My friend and colleague, Rob Heinz, is also a historian as I am, um, and said that his, uh, his old man sort of masterpiece is going to be called social democracy, the global history of a disappointment. Now, before we talk about this airport, we first have to do the goddamn news. Uh, Norfolk Southern has assisted in a strategic strike on East Palestine.

Um, oh, that's dark. Guys, I'm in Germany. Don't get me in trouble. Yeah. So yeah, there's, uh, there was a big derailment, uh, two days ago, which I believe at time of recording is still on fire. Um, the Norfolk Southern put probably a couple of dozen cars on the ground there. The train derail going like 50, 60 miles an hour.

Um, it was very cold. Some people are theorizing. It was a broken rail, but it was right on the outskirts of East Palestine, Ohio. Um, and a bunch of hazmat cars derailed. And, you know, when you're going at speed and you derail, I don't, it doesn't matter how strong the cars are, bad stuff's going to happen. Uh, a lot of, a lot of nasty chemicals caught on fire. Uh, the smoke flume was, uh, visible on weather radar.

Um, the, didn't they, didn't this also like derail right next to like a chemical plant as well, just for sort of a double whammy? I do not believe so because the initial reports were derailed in the middle of downtown East Palestine, which would have exploded to gas stations and the fire station, but it looks like from here, they're on the outskirts. Um, but, uh, the, the, uh, you know, uh, a bunch of tank cars derailed. We don't know all the chemicals involved. At least one of them was vinyl chloride, which is nasty carcinogen.

That's a component of PVC, you know, like in pipes and other plastic crap. Um, so yeah, this is, uh, quite an ugly derailment. You know, of course this comes on the heels of Joe Biden giving the railroads everything they wanted, um, because they are responsible stewards of our national rail network. Yeah. What if the, what if the train crew of this had been like even more sleep deprived? Yeah.

What if there was only, what if there was only one guy in the cab though? There's one guy in the fire extinguisher. Well, there were probably 30, 30 or 40 cars ahead of this going that way. And the conductor had to run back and decouple the good half of the train to get it away from the disaster and then get on the last car while, while an engineer pulled away. And if they, if there weren't two guys, you would have had to have sprinted back, uncoupled the cars and then sprinted to the front of the train.

I mean, I probably would have had a much worse disaster. Fuck that. Jesus. Well, once again, we have learned no lesson the hard way. Absolutely no lessons, you know, because we're never going to know because this did not make headlines because of some other bullshit, which we'll discuss later. This is a crazy disaster. If this had happened like 1,000 feet earlier, like my God.

So like like McGonty again, huh? Yeah, something like 2,000 people were evacuated. I don't think they've been allowed back to their homes yet. You know, no fatalities, no injuries, lots of property damage though. Oh yeah, you're just going to be like scrubbing weird chemical residue off of your roof for like the next however long, when they let you back in, if they ever do. And to cancel the Amtrak capital limited. Yeah, sorry, we're turning around in Pittsburgh each shit.

Yes. It's that or like gun it through the like vinyl chloride. Gun it, gun it at Amtrak top speed of 37 miles an hour. Oh, this track, this track, I think is good for 50 or 60. Right up the TTP test. That's why it's so bad is because, you know, this is a, you know, three mile freight train doing 60 miles an hour or so. Hey, we got high speed rail sort of temporarily.

That's a lot of, we have high momentum rail. But of course, this, this was immediately wiped off every front page by the real shit, the real substantial story. The real substantial story. I'm sorry to tell you this, boys, but America is under fucking attack. We're under attack. We must not allow a balloon gap. Chairman, Chairman, she has, you know, committed an act of serious aggression

by loosing an enormous balloon in which a six year old boy has become trapped. I may, I may be confused. I may have run two things together in my head. So this, this was a Chinese surveillance balloon by all serious accounts. Like the official denial is that it was a weather balloon. It's not a weather balloon. You don't make weather balloons that big and you don't fucking float them over the Pacific for no reason.

And then I have a bunch of like DSLRs on strings hanging down on, you know, underneath them. I think it was weather balloon. I'm going with the weather balloon theory. Honestly, I think someone made a booboo and every gun in America had to be pointed at this thing. 00:09:34,600 --> 00:09:38,440 So, so one, two, finally got an air to air kill. It did first air to air kill and like, what, 16 years, something like, and it was a balloon, which is very funny.

Someone's going to have to paint a balloon on an F 22 at Langley Air Force Base. What was really funny to me was Time magazine called up a meteorologist to be like, is this a weather balloon? He had to be like, you've seen the shit that like meteorologists are left to deal with. And the budget like 70 foot diameter, like length of three school buses, things. I have like a helium balloon with like a phone strap to it, essentially. But so they think that maybe this was trying to like take photos of the nuclear silos in Montana or something like that.

And like, as if they're not taking pictures of that with the fucking satellite. That's the thing. And the U.S. is not like the U.S. Air Force is photographing every square inch of the entire world right now in like absolute detail. They're looking through my window and watching me sitting here next to this Monstera and make this podcast. And because I am hipster drash and like, yeah, I also like that. I like that the York County Sheriff's Department in South Carolina had to tell

citizens not to try to shoot the balloon with their own guns. Like you're not going to get a 60,000 foot range off of your rifle. You're just going to hit someone on the ground. Please don't shoot it. Another great moment for America was when someone apparently called into CNN to describe watching it be shot down and said, it looked like a balloon popping. Crazy. Oh, there's a reason for that.

Citizen journalism. Yeah. So I mean, there are good reasons why you would want to use a balloon for surveillance that actually pretty hard to detect. And you can get a much higher resolution over a much longer time than you can with a satellite. It was just fucking blazes past. Whereas this thing just hang out reading all the license plates in the parking lot or whatever. Unfortunately, it has fucked up.

And, you know, now this has been a national embarrassment for China, kind of a national embarrassment for the US as well. Everyone has come out of it looking dumber. And the other interesting thing to draw out here is the reason why you would want to use balloons for this shit, aside from the fact that it's like slightly more convenient, is that sort of both the US and China have been looking very strongly into anti-satellite weapons of both a directed energy and a missile basis. And if you lose all of your spy satellites, you're going to have to do something.

And so this is the something, this is the sort of the stop gap backup thing, also for like over the horizon communications relays and stuff. So everybody's, everybody's into balloons now. It's a thing, right? We're doing balloons. All right, this could have been a joyous event that could have united Americans if it had only gone on for another week and a half or so, you know, the balloon just like does a tour of the lower 48, you know, and people see it in major cities

and they say, look, there's the balloon. And like every military official and every gun in America is pointing at it for like, you know, 10 days and everyone's, you know, it's like, are you, and who is who becomes friend, who becomes foe of the balloon? You know, I feel like this was a major missed opportunity. It also would have been funnier if Trump was president when this was happening. That's true. That is true.

Trump has already accused Biden of being like a week on the balloon, which is a week on the balloon issue. I truly believe the balloon could have healed America. But we had all shut out in a wood of. You can't trust Joe Biden's they them army to protect us from. I'm going to say this and I'm stealing this joke off of Twitter. I forget who from I apologize, but you can't say Joe Biden hasn't done anything on the inflation issue at this point.

So the woke they them Air Force shot it down with a with a Sidewinder missile, which is, I mean, very funny in terms of the relative costs involved. What is the cost of the balloon? That's what I want to know. I yeah, I don't think China's answering you on that one. But like, yeah, I'm going to call up my good friend, Xi Jinping and ask him how much you pay for that balloon. Can I get my own balloon?

You got a balloon guy? There's clearly a balloon guy. Someone had this balloon idea and they're like, yeah, no, this is this is going to be the move is this balloon. As far as I know, the US like a balloon caucus is like a couple of like hyperwriters, you know, the Air Force Academy and like the War College and shit like that. But who's to say I mean, if it was if Trump was president, he probably would have shot it down over a populated area and it would have killed someone because that's what they

wanted to do. Yes. They're like, why are they why aren't they shooting this balloon down? It's like they're going to shoot. It's not like they can't take it away. Hilariously drapes itself over like the two antennas on the Sears tower. It's like perfectly balanced. With the like school bus sized thing hanging off the bottom of it.

It's like 9-11ing the Sears tower. Well, apparently Biden, Biden ordered them to shoot it down on like the Wednesday and it was the the DoD who were like, we're probably going to wait until it's over the ocean if that's all right with you. Last time they tried to shoot down like this. They blew up a town. So, you know, that's probably probably want to avoid that. I think that was like back in the fifties or sixties or something.

Some kind of training. The Pentagon blew up like a small town every like every couple of weeks in the fifties. Fun pictures of people going out into the desert to watch the atom bomb test. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Misatomic bomb. Sears the thing, America has declined as a country because there's no miss balloon, you know? Oh, yes. I want to audition right now for miss Chinese surveillance balloon.

Reorient our culture around balloons. Yes, we must submit to the balloons. We're cancelling the B-21 project in favor of balloons. You know how they do the from Miss Universe every year? They do the national costume pageant. Yeah. So, China next year should be a giant balloon. With like solar panels hanging off.

Miss America is a sidewinder. Yeah, that's all. She makes the cool growling noise. But yeah, so my sort of main takeaway from this is the new Cold War, somehow dumber than the old Cold War. And that's saying something if you looked into the old one too. Well, that's actually a nice transition because we're heading for the old Cold War now.

We are heading for the old Cold War. Even all of the episodes of the Cold War. Yes. It's all Reagan's fault. Reagan did it. Really genuinely is. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. So, we are looking at two photographs, one superimposed on the other.

Yes. The bottom photograph is an aerial photograph of the city of Berlin taken recently. And you will notice that there is a big honking airport in the middle of it. Wow. Oh, that's prime development land. Oh, Alice, we will get there. And the set in photograph is a photograph of a check-in hall of an airport. And you may be looking at that architecture and thinking.

Looks very fascist. Very fascist. Yes. Well, I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. So. It's almost as if it synthesizes a kind of romantic past-looking nationalism with a forward-looking revolutionary fervor and an attempt to create a kind of like

temple of futurism along ancient timelines. Indefined, German identity. Who would have done that? The airport terminal that kills you instantly. Next slide, please. So, in 1923, the first airport in Berlin opens. And this is built at a moment when the whole city of Berlin is being built. Basically, Berlin is built way after all of your other European capitals.

Berlin is a complete nowhere shithole like mud-field with cows until about the time of Frederick the Great until about the 1700s. And this is a time when London and Paris are already big major cities. And Frederick is in. Frederick is in Königsberg. Like, I'm sick of this bridge problem, shit. Well, it's Frederick. It's Frederick's actually grandfather, sorry, who builds the Brandenburg Gate, who sets up

Berlin to be basically a non-embarrassing capital city. And that's sort of the impetus. And then it's in 1870, after the reunification, the Berlin experience of Germany. That's when, or the unification of Germany, rather. That's when Berlin experiences basically all of its growth. So, every single apartment building in Berlin that you would live in, with a very few exceptions, like the vast majority of our housing stock, including the building that I am in now, the so-called Berliner Altbau.

That's your 1870 to 1914 quasi-standardized development. And as you can see in the aerial picture, everything has a courtyard. And big, wide streets, big, wide blocks, lots of inner layers. I'm in one of those inner courtyards now. I am not in that photo, but I am close to that photo. And so, they decide to build an airport in 1923, in the middle of it. And then in 1934, in 1934. It's not fascist enough, the fuck is this?

It's not fascist enough. It's not, and so they rebuild it. Whatever, I don't care. Yeah, I was, this has always been a very interesting building to me, just because it is a sort of like, it is a proto-large airport. Because at this time, airports are a very small affair. Dirt tracks, basically, yeah. Yeah, they're dirt tracks.

They're kind of, this thing had a grass runway until like well after the war. But it was like, this is sort of, so okay. It was, our airports opened in 1923, right? This is going to be, you know, the grand gateway to Berlin. Then these guys, you may have heard of them, they're called the Nazis. They take power in Germany, right? And they're like, well, gee, we need a bigger airport, huh? So, in the third one, not working out.

No, the Zeppelin turned out not to be a good idea. They listened to our episode with me and Mulder. Yeah, so we have to do heavier than air powered aircraft. And also, we have a sort of an ideology with a taste towards the monumental in architecture. Yeah, so they have this airport, which is very close in to densely populated neighborhoods. And they're like, well, you know, we'll just do this sort of big monumental thing. They get this guy named- The Nazis had won the war.

They absolutely would have like, accidentally 9-11 themselves in Berlin. They would have like flown a Yunkers into the Volkshalle like instantly. Oh, yes. So this was this, the terminals you see here, this big arcing structure. You got your sort of big building in the front, big monumental thing. This was done by a guy named Ernst Zegabiel. Is that, am I doing that right? Does not matter.

He's dead. Yeah, he was an SA member. Of course he was. He did a lot of- Oh, the hipsters of Nazism. Yes, exactly. He did a lot of architecture before- Yeah, I'm actually into all the stuff.

That was back when it was real gay. Yeah, it was just true, yes. So he does this big, stupid airport terminal. This is, I think, the biggest in the world when it opened. His style was sort of referred to as Luftwaffe Modern. This is very, very stripped-down classicism. This sort of becomes a weird prototype for a lot of future airport terminals, though. All airports are Nazi, gotcha.

Yes, it's true. The airport is an inherently fascist space. Yes, I would agree with that, actually. Absolutely. I'm not being ironic. I'm setting up for that. It's the place where I get to get my gender examined by a board security worker touching my dick.

Of course, it's a fascist space. What I think is just weird about is how it's integrated into an urban neighborhood. Like, you've got these office buildings out on the side. It's this whole considered space here. They were in Berlin police headquarters opposite. That's an interesting museum which I mean to go to. The neighborhood that I live in and the neighborhood on the other side were, and this airport didn't close until 2006, were both basically unlivable.

Despite being, and also the airport on the other side, the neighborhood on the other side of it, for me, I live in a neighborhood called Schoneberg, which means the pretty hill. Despite this being Berlin and there are no hills. But what Schoneberg is, a real gay. But anyway, on the other side is this neighborhood called Neukölln. Neukölln became a place where they put all of the immigrants because we're going to put all of the immigrants, the so-called guest workers of West Germany in the 70s. Because Germans were too racist to realize that people from Turkey might want to

stay in the country that they've been living in for so many years. A lot of those people ended up living there because basically no one wanted to live under the landing path of an airport, understandably. And suddenly the closing of this airport was a big engine of gentrification along the two kind of edges of it, as you can probably imagine. They were like flying real big aircraft in here too, like you could land. Oh, they were flying, they were flying like 737s into this, they were flying. Wow.

You could fly, I think this stopped relatively early, but in the 80s or 90s or something, you could land a 747 here. Oh, shit, dude. But they were mostly landing, the biggest thing they were mostly landing here was A300s and A310s. But we'll get into that later because flying into Berlin post-war, like everything else about Berlin post-war was weird. That tracks.

It says a lot of old-fashioned ideas implemented about how you run an airport terminal. So like you can sort of see down here, there's some big doors along this sort of cantilevered roof. The idea is you pull the airplane under the roof and then everyone can de-plane out of the weather. The scooch is under. Yeah, you just scooch the plane under, instead of having a jetway, which eventually we figured out was better.

00:25:25,960 --> 00:25:27,640 Yeah, plane port. This was actually replicated post-war several times, most notably the Pan Am Worldport at LaGuardia. Recently demolished, which was a tragedy. And actually, Pan Am could have learned it from here because one of the weird things about post-war Berlin aviation was that most of the inter-German flying was done by Pan Am in West Germany. 00:25:50,520 --> 00:25:50,760 Yeah.

We'll talk about it later. It was weird. Another interesting fact is I think this is one of a total of three neoclassical airport terminals ever built. There was Croydon near London. Croydon Airport is interesting because it has a similar trajectory where it was like, OK, London needs, it's going to need an airport. That's the way of the future.

We're going to need someone we can put this big grass strip. It was then immediately outgrown and sort of persisted through World War II. It's still there. It's mostly used for private jets when you want to flee the country because of your taxes or something like that. No, genuinely, as far as an escape route for oligarchs. Then there was another neoclassical airport, which was Spilva in Riga, Latvia, which looks like a train terminal.

It's kind of funny. Interesting. Maybe we should return with a V to those. Wow, they are fascist spaces. So obviously. Yeah, the weird white supremacist cloak shit. They're going to love that. The white paradise of the future fucking Latvia.

Yeah. So this is, I just want to talk about this for a bit. This is a very problematic fave of mine. This was, of course, also used for the Berlin airlift. That's right. That's why the square outside of it is the Luftbücher Platz or whatever. Platz der Luftbrücke. Yeah.

So the Berlin airlift is so in 45, the war ends. Berlin is, I guess we can say liberated, block by block by the Red Army. History happens to. Yes, a lot of history occurs. Unfortunately, when you when you cram a lot of history into small spaces, people tend to do things like starving to death. They do. They sure do.

Yes. Actually, fun fact is that every tree that you see in the city of Berlin is younger than 1946, because in the winter of 46, every single tree inside the city borders was cut down for fuel. But if they didn't want that to happen, they should have not been Nazis and gone. Looking at a sort of like defeated racist fascist white supremacist regime, the United States government is immediately like, oh, shit, we didn't mean it. Well, so Berlin is if people are not familiar with the geography of Germany, Berlin is deep inside the Soviet sector.

And the Soviets want all of it. And the rest of the people say no. And so basically the country of Germany gets divided into these quarters, basically. And then Berlin gets also divided into quarters, even though all of Berlin is inside the Soviet sector. So there's little extra bits of French sector, British sector and American sector inside your doughnut of the whole of the doughnut of East Germany. And all kinds of things happen.

We can't do the whole post war history of Berlin here. But basically at one point in the late 40s, the Soviets tried to get all of Berlin, which they want all of, because they think it should be theirs because it's in their sector. And so they decide that they're going to starve the city out. And so they shut down the highways of the train routes that run through their territory from West Germany into Berlin. And so the U.S. Air Force begins doing what is known as the Berlin Air Force,

Berlin Airlift, sorry, where they're landing an airplane every 90 seconds at Tempelhof to bring in food and to take out trash. And they didn't really take out the trash because then it just rises to the West German government. Right, haha. Thank you. The man on the right there is a guy named Billy Brandt, who is mayor of Berlin at this time. And he later becomes the first social democratic chancellor of post war Germany.

He's the one who kind of builds the German welfare state. Basically in this period in West Germany, there are two kinds of politicians. There are CDU politicians who spent the Nazi period doing Nevermind. And there are social democrats who spent the Christian Democratic Union, sorry. And there are social democrats who spent the war mostly not in Germany, mostly involved in various kinds of resistance things. He was in Scandinavia. But because of this, he becomes very beloved.

He remains mayor of West Berlin all the way through to the Kennedy and Ein Berliner speech and then becomes chancellor and then loses the chancellorship because it turns out that one of his top aides was a Soviet spy. Oops. And then remains a beloved figure. And so the airport ends up being named after him. Next slide, please. So in the Soviet sector, they don't have Tempelhof, which was the Berlin airport.

And so they build an airport on the south of the city called Berlin Schonefeld, which you can see here. It's like a baseball or like Warsaw Pact trade show. You've got the Hungarian buses with a big ass engine. Like the Claire Story windows, too. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. And then you got what's really funny is that the end of the terminal here in front,

the end of the terminal here looks like English miners' housing. Yeah, it does. But you know what else it looks like is it looks like first generation Lego system. It looks like the way that like Danes envisioned what's the simplest way to abstract a building. But I love the sort of like socialist fraternal plane spotting you can do here where you've got you've got Tehran, which is, I believe, Hungarian. You've got Aeroflot. You've got Romania.

You've got Aeroflot and you've got Interflug, which is the DDRs airline. Just hanging out. Are you ready for more Interflug next time, please? I am so ready for more Interflug. Look at that Interflug. Oh, beautiful. Look at that gray Interflug. Oh, that is fun.

Interflug, Ilyushin IL-62. If you're not watching but listening to the show, this looks like a big ass Super 80, but instead of two engines on the back next to the TTail, there's four engines on the back next to the TTail. Oh, it's beautiful. And so this is Interflug. Interflug is flying you from Berlin into the Soviet sector. East Germans are some of the richest people in the Soviet bloc.

And so East Germans are going on vacation to big socialist resorts in like Bulgaria on the Black Sea. And so there's a lot of that kind of flying in addition to, you know, government. We accidentally did aristocracy of labor because we need to like, you know, preserve some sort of semblance of East German industrial and like technological capacity. And, you know, also as a because the border onto the West. I like, I like the shell truck in the back here. I just, I think it's a little bit of capitalism.

Just a bit. Useful plane, though. Just it is a beautiful, beautiful plane. And this airline Interflug was liquidated in the 1990s by fucking Troy Hunt. By the fucking Troy Hunt, which is one of the worst and most corrupt organizations ever. This is the thing that this is the thing that was set up to take all of the East German state enterprises and property and privatize it.

And basically Germany is weird because the Troy Hunt did shock therapy to a quarter of it during the nineties, but then also huge amounts of tax revenue poured in to the places that were getting shock therapy done to them. But then all of the people who administered that shock therapy were from the former West. So if you do form a socialist country, it actually takes a screenshot. So, so even now the, like the, I think all, maybe all but one of the minister presidents, the governors of the former East German states were born in the West. The university presidents almost all born in the West.

The richest people almost all born in the West. The property almost all owned by people born in the West. And so this Aussie, Vessie East West divide still very much present. I can't hear you under the sort of deluge of articles questioning why former East German areas are like sort of heading to the right. I don't understand this fueling the rise of the Neo Nazi party, the alternative for Germany, which recent polls show has about 10% in Berlin and about 20% in the rural province, Brandenburg surrounding Berlin, how 27% in Saxony.

How could you for the day when we spent like a billion euros out of the cultural fund to restore the like, you know, the cathedral and nothing else. Like, yeah, and also the other thing that happens is in the in the late 90s, German Tony Blair, who looks like the love child man named Gerhard Schroeder, who looks like the love child of Tony Blair and an enormous ham. Passes these fun labor market reforms, which are called agenda 2010. And one of the things agenda 2010 does is it creates a new kind of job called a mini job, which of course is for people who are retired, want to make a little extra money or teenagers,

and certainly not something that people are going to have four or five of and instead of having a real job. But it basically means that there's a it's a low paid job with a low number of hours, and your employer is not required to contribute to and put you into the official social insurance systems. And so vast numbers of people in the former east are now working three or four mini jobs, making, you know, 14, 1500 euros a month, and having to pay for shitty private health insurance entirely out of pocket. Cool, right. Yeah. And anyway, let's move on to the to the third airport in Berlin's you've got a temple half, the one in the middle of the city. You've got Schonefeld, which is the communist one. And now here we are looking down at Tegel

Airport, which is built because temple half is too small. It's built up in the north of the city in the 70s in the French zone, and it is designed by an architect and makes the career of an architect named Meinhard von Gerkan. Good Lord, who try trying to like restrain myself for the rest of the episode, however long that is mine. I really like my hard one, Gerkan. She mine hard on my girl, come till I take all I let's do hexagon. She got on mine hearts. Stop it. Yeah. Talk to you about the hexagon. I want to know the hexagon. Originally, there is supposed to be three hexagons. Can we go one more slide, please? Oh, yeah. Look at the interior more hexagons. Design is happening. This is a beautiful airport that everyone loves when

it opens. And it has you can see the big ass Pan Am A310 there because Pan Am had to do all the inner German flying. On the left, you can see some extremely beautiful hexagonal 1970s seating. This is an airport that everyone adores, but it has a very funny design. If you remember, can we actually go back a slide now? Yes. So do you see how there's two loops inside the hexagon where all the planes are parked? There's another road. I see. Instead of having a main check-in hall where you do all of your checking in, and then you go through your one security point, and then there's all the gates. At this airport, the way that it works is you stand in line, you check in, you then walk directly from checking in to go through the security checkpoint,

and then you sit in a post-security gate area, which is just your gate. So everything is gate-based to your gate. Next slide again. Now, was this built before there was such difficult airport security? Yeah, this is built in the 70s. It is built with airport security because it's built after the first hijackings, and it's opened after the Munich 72 Olympics situation. So this was an intentional design then? It was an intentional design, and the idea was it was going to reduce big lines and reduce huge walking distances. Because again, Lufthansa is not allowed to fly to Berlin. West Berlin, which is what this is the airport for, is a small insignificant city with a failing economy,

which is propped up by the West German state because they can't have an embarrassment next to the capital of East Berlin. But West Berlin is not an important part of West Germany at all. It's a weird, fucked-up little island. I mean, there's a guy who made a movie about the 70s in West Berlin called My Wonderful Socialist West Berlin because it was like a planned economy of all of these fancy things built by the West German state, which didn't really care about it. And again, Lufthansa is not allowed to fly there, and so you're never going to connect flights at this airport. No one is connecting through West Berlin. Okay, so that makes sense. You just show up and you go straight to the gate through security, which I assume is very labor

intensive since there's that many security lines. And then you're like right there on the plane. Each one is a security line for one, and they're not all staffed at the same time. Just one flight arriving at once. Yeah, that makes sense. It's also a great free jobs program. Incidentally, the weirdest piece of sort of Berlin ephemera of the Cold War I've seen is an instructional VHS tape for British forces in Germany on how to drive to West Berlin from West Germany, which is an incredibly sort of regimented procedure, as you would expect, of if you break down on the one controlled highway in, you sit in your car on the hard children, you wait for us to come and get you, and you don't talk to any Germans,

and especially not to any Russians. It's so strange and so artificial, this sort of weird enclave at the end of Germany. It's very weird. So two more slides, please. So in 1989, you may have heard about this, the Soviet bloc collapse. In 1999, history switched to the bad timeline. So various things happen throughout the 1990s. In 2006, there's always plan that this is going to happen. Temple Huff closes and they really reduce the number of flights going to Temple Huff severely, more and more, as people in the city are like, fuck this, we don't want this airport to be here. It ends up becoming a giant park. This is ridiculous.

And then some of the worst people in the world try to build on it. And then there was a valid initiative. There was a valid initiative that was passed overwhelmingly, which says that you're not allowed to build any permanent structures on the field at all, or take anything off. So all of the hangers are there rotting. All of the old airplane things are still there. All of the bathrooms they've put in for the park have to be temporary. Everything like nothing, because that was like the most airtight language possible of like, never fucking put anything on this. Unfortunately, the worst people in the world still want to develop it and they suck and it's perfect. In the old buildings, which are exempted from this, a lot of things happen.

During the 2016 refugee crisis, they were using this for refugee housing. The eventual plan is to make this a big art center. Just here's a fun little Berlin politics anecdote. A couple years ago, they rented out all of the hangers for basically no money to a sketchy real estate dude who had this thing called the Foundation for Art and Culture, which immediately opened an art exhibit called Diversity United. And the picture of the opening is 12 white guys standing in front of a sign saying Diversity United. Oh my God. I love European politics so much. So we already talked about social democracy. We're going to get to the greens in a minute, but that's a big sort of green mood. It was also used as a vaccine center. And so I had some very

complicated epigenetic feelings about getting my COVID vaccines from an extremely buff, extremely hot German soldier in that Temple Huff Airport hangar. But meanwhile, next slide please. As Berlin becomes throughout the early 2000s, a place that people want to come, people start to take the EasyJet and the Ryanair to go to the nightclubs in the deindustrialized parts of East Berlin. Or at least to get to the door of the nightclub before they get rejected. Yes, to get to the door of the nightclubs and then to go to the other nightclubs. Yes. These airports become extremely bad. And so most of the time when you fly into Tegel, you're not in the beautiful hexagons. You're in the temporary constructed Kwanzit Hutt

Terminal C. When you're in Schonefeld, you're in a building which they take a building which was designed to have no commerce. And then you stuff all of the duty free and restaurants into it. And then there's no space for airport. I remember being in there once and there was this old guy standing next to his suitcase. And he just looked at me and said under communism, at least there was some place to sit down. Put that on the flag of your socialist organization. The way that you got to the easy jet gates to London at this airport. And I'm not making this up. This is how they told you to get there. You went through security. You then went up the stairs, took a left, went all the way down through the duty free into the Irish pub, then went through the fire door

down the exterior staircase across the open air bridge and into the temporary Kwanzit Hutt Pavilion. Amazing. Incredible. I'm just, our goal is the sitting down in a comfy chair of all mankind. This reminds me a lot of Washington dollars in that, you know, there's been a temporary terminal there that's been there for 50 years. Also, also has the sort of like company town. This is the capital now and we don't quite know what to do with it history, you know. So anyway, next slide please. In 1991, a man named Aberhardt Deepkin pictured from the CDU, the we definitely aren't former Nazis center right party. The most sort of like CDU looking politician. That is, that is, we're having an election right now and we'll get to it. But this is what they

all still look like giant hams. They haven't like quite made the transfer that like other European politicians have of everyone is like all the men at least are bald and wearing sort of like rimless steel glasses. Haven't quite got that yet. That's the social Democrats. That's the SPD. We'll get to them in a minute. But we've they have the bald rimless. Yeah. And then the Greens all look like art history professors. But anyway, pretty quickly, in 1991, it's decided that we obviously need to have a real airport for Berlin because it becomes clear that reunified Berlin is going to become the capital of reunified Germany. And Aberhardt Deepkin was the last mayor we've had from the CDU. And he left Berlin essentially bankrupted because they had a really

sketchy state affiliated bank which then went bankrupt and had to be rescued and Berlin had to issue huge amounts of debt in order to rescue this bank, which was allegedly run by people who allegedly were his friends and allegedly pocketed the alleged cash. That's the price of fiscal conservatism. That's right. We must be austere. Next slide, please. They have to figure out where they're going to put this airport. And they consider a bunch of sites outside the city. And they decide to put it where Schoenfeld is. You can see here on this map, there's a couple of other little air force bases and whatever. But you see Berlin-Tegel Airport, Oliver Lilienthal, that's Tegel, that's West Berlin Airport, Berlin-Tempelhof right there in the middle. That's the one

that was right in the middle of the city, the Nazi airport. And then this BER with the yellow, that was the old Schoenfeld Airport, the old communist one. And they decide they're going to build the new airport next to the old ones. They're going to put a second runway, a new terminal, and one of the two runways is already built. And it already has most of a transit connection. It already has most everything it needs to get there. You just build it on top of communism. Yeah, you just build an adjacent airport using parts of the old airport. It's a good decision. That's smart. That's smart in the brain head, if you ask me. Reduce, reuse, recycle, Roz. Yes. And so most of the 90s, they spend doing a bunch of different stuff. They decide that

they're going to privatize this airport because... Oh, okay. All right. The CDU. So they spend four years after selecting the site, not constructing it, but sending out different bidding processes for privatization, which they then awarded to a company are immediately sued because it's so corrupt and the lawsuit is successful. And they end up having to pay hundreds of millions of euros of public funds to the winning bidders in order to make it public again. Hey, hey, kid. Hey, kid, do you want an airport? Do you want to buy an airport? Next slide, please. In 2001, the Berlin CDU has just caused the city to be bankrupted. They are swept out of office. And in sweeps, the man we are currently looking at, the social

Democrat Klaus Woverite. Klaus Woverite is the man who, you see how it says, and das ist gut so next to him. So he was the first ever, one of the first sort of top-level, openly gay German politicians. He came out in this very kind of offhand way where he said, ich bin schuld und das ist gut so. Like, I'm gay and that's fine. That's like, it's all good. And he's the one who comes up with this idea of marketing Berlin as famously saying poor but sexy city. And creating this kind of vision of the kind of Richard Florida nightmare, creative city, et cetera. I mean, whatever I moved here from New York City, so I am part of the problem. But it's his idea. He is the one who is like, yeah, sort of concrete industrial music, things of

this nature. I mean, he's the one who sees that happening and says, we can use this to make future shitty startups want to move here. He solves Abraham Deepkin's financial crisis. He has a great idea. He's going to sell off tens of thousands of formerly social flats to giant mega landlords, which is definitely not going to be a problem later because Berlin is going to be cheap forever. Just an idea of what the property market in Berlin was like at this time. People I know who moved to Berlin in the early 2000s, he would move here and you would get the newspaper and there would be like hundreds of apartment ads and you would go to one and you would say this seven room apartment with 15 foot ceilings and crown moldings only has three

balconies and I want four and you'd reject it and take another one. We still have very cheap rent for a major city, but it's not it's not like that anymore and salaries here are also quite low. Anyway, so Voverite wants to make this a public airport. He pays off the bidders, as we said, and he creates a new Gehenbeha state owned corporation. If you think about that map that we just saw, it's right at the edge of Berlin, which is a doughnut federal state of Germany inside the the doughnut whole federal state of Germany, sorry, inside the doughnut of the state of Brandenburg. So Brandenburg and Berlin go in on this airport together because it's right on the border and they create this

holding company and it's in August of 2004 that the Berlin and Brandenburg state ministries grant approval. Now the problem with this location is that it's next to a bunch of villages who all of whom were looking forward to not having planes taking off in front of them and who suddenly find out that they're going to have lots more planes taking off in front of them. Next slide please. The opposite of what we wanted. The opposite of what we wanted. Yeah, they hadn't invented the sort of the mud wizard yet to defend themselves. So they had not yet invented the mud wizard. So the zoo is two years of lawsuits from 2004 to 2006. If you see these villages here, like Eichwalde,

Wemmsdorf, Großen, Blankenfelde, Malo, Großbären, these are all extremely Brandenburg place names. There's a town out near here called Schmeckwitz, which I was taking a walk with my friend Sholam during the height of the pandemic and we walked past a shuttered hair salon in this horrible, not horrible, in this very pretty but sort of depressed East German little town and the sign in the hair salon said London, Paris, Milan, Schmeckwitz. It's good to have dreams. These are all tiny villages, but they are nonetheless full of Germans and Germans love suing each other and the government. And so the eventual settlement is that there have to be fewer people under the takeoff and approach paths as the old three airports combined. And what this means is they

end up having- No, but airports like airport traffic grows every year until the pandemic. They end up having this takeoff curve called the Hoffman curve or the Vomit curve. Oh no, I don't like this at all. So if you look at the line extending, yeah, that one. So when the wind is blowing such that you have to take off towards the east, in order to, if you're going to fly east, you just keep flying east. But if you're going to fly west, they had to, for this settlement, stop you from overflying Schultzendorf, Eichwalde, Zeuten and Weemstorf. And so what you do is you come up off the end of the runway and essentially immediately go into a 135 degree sweeping turn where the bottom of the wing is,

I'm going to go ahead and say too close to the ground. And it has to be an extremely tight turn so that you avoid Mitterwalde and Zassen down there at the bottom. And the pilots unions do not like this. And it's not great. But they keep going. I would have extreme anxiety about this prospect. Yeah, I wouldn't like that at all. No, nothing. I don't do well with just the sort of combination of extremely fast and then pitching up takeoff and then turning over after that and doing them both at the same time. I can barely deal with a regular takeoff.

I'm going to be flying this takeoff tomorrow on a Ryanair 737 Max. And so if this is the last thing I ever do recording this podcast, I want to say, Mom, Dad, I love you. Anyway, I was just going to say, I don't want to die on a Ryanair flight out of Berlin and then you're living my nightmare. Just crashing, crashing in Schultzendorf. Wow, how do you like it now? This is your own fault. So next slide, please. So who's going to design this airport? But

Mein Hartfonger. Mein Hartfonger. Wow, yeah, that's a German. Yeah, that's one of the kinds of German. This is every architect currently working, more or less. Very, well, no, it should be a turtle neck. It could have been Kalitrav, I suppose. He's standing in front of our train station.

Next slide, please, to show you the interior. The Hoppenhof, yeah. This is the place where you don't have to take off weird here. You don't have to take off weird. No, you stay on the ground and you're on a train, which is good. And this is mostly a good building built in the middle of Berlin to regularize all the train traffic. And this is finished in, I think, 0607. So this is on its way to being done.

And he did Tegel. He did this. Who's going to do the new Berlin airport? But beloved Berlin architect, Mein Hartfonger. Next slide, please. And he comes up with a design, which I just want to point out the following things before we get to the construction. The design is not crazy and it is not render right. This is not a Zaha Hadid building made out of render right on a floating island

in an artificial lagoon. This looks like a realistic building that doesn't look too difficult to build. It is a mid-sized airport on a flat field. It does have something of a carport about it. It is very imbibed very much. It is exhumable, what hopes. It does look like this could be adjacent to a suburban split level home. Right.

I mean, it very much is because that's what these parts of Berlin look like. And this is not, I mean, this is an airport that is going to take, that's being designed to take 30, 40 million passengers a year. This is a mid-sized airport. Yes. A mid-sized airport on a flat field. Next slide, please. It's not the world's craziest project.

Oh, we'll get there. So, in 2006, on the left, ground breaks. And not to spoil it, but if you go to the right, this is the construction delays table from the Wikipedia article. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 delays from initial announcement on the 5th of September 2006 to an opening date of the 31st of October, 2020. Coming from a United States transit project background. This doesn't look too bad to me.

So, anyway, VovaRite, that gay mayor of Berlin whose nickname is Vovi, and a guy named Reiner Schwarz, who's the head of the airport, start interfering a lot in the plans. Because this is going to be close to VovaRite's big project that's going to make him the first gay chancellor of Germany. Gay Andrew Cuomo looms at this point. Mayors of Berlin are like mayors of New York City, and that they are mayors of cities that are great,

but that everyone else in the country hates. But they think that because of that, everyone is going to want them to run the country. One big project away. When, in fact, that's why everyone will never want them to run the country. Excuse me. Gay Bill de Blasio, then. Gay Bill de Blasio is not a bad comparison. But then they decide a few things about this airport.

First, they decide that the airport needs to have, quote, a Dubai-like luxury mall. No, it doesn't. Shut up. This was at the height of Dubai Envy, as well. And the sort of like. MineheartfunGearCon is extremely mad about this, by the way, because it means that his big, beautiful open space is going to be full of subdivided duty-free.

Someone went on Skyscraper page and was like, yeah, we need that. Give me that. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the time that you have the huge amount of sort of sovereign wealth fund investing like the 2010s, a shitload of like Emirati money is flowing. And everyone's like, yeah, okay, we should reciprocate this. And we should we should get some like big fucking Emirates air buses in here.

And oh, yes. Oh, yes. So they decide that. So Berlin, as I said, this is a 30 million person a year airport with between zero and one major airlines that have here. Lufthansa's hubs are in Munich and Frankfurt because of where the economy happened in West Germany. But they decide that the entire terminal has to be redesigned so the airport can take A380s, which again, this is like if you decided that we're putting on an addition to the Indianapolis

Airport and it needs to take A380s. This is insane. There is no reason to do this. One of the biggest customers for A380s was Emirates, right? And I don't know if they wanted any like sort of direct flights to Berlin, but it must have been sort of nice to have the option. It was Etihad, actually. Oh, okay.

Because Etihad invested in Air Berlin. We're going to get to Air Berlin in a minute. I knew there would be a sovereign wealth angle, though. As they are constructing the terminal, it grows in size from a planned 200,000 to 340,000 square meters, which means that this random-ass, non-important, second-tier German airport is going to be bigger than Frankfurt, which is the biggest international hub in Germany. Ravik. Ravik.

Morris Murphy. And it's just a little bit smaller than Heathrow T5. The seven contractors become 35 contractors who oversee hundreds of subcontractors. And most importantly, they design a fire protection system, which includes 65,000 sprinklers, 3,000 fire doors, and 55 miles of cabling. And remember that cabling and those smoke ducts, because they will come back later in our story. So next slide, please. In fall 2011, they finished construction on the airport, and that's an aerial photo in 2011.

On the right, that is a picture of the interior of the airport at this time. Just want to say this. We cannot emphasize enough how much this airport was constructed. I'm looking at the Indianapolis airport on Google Maps right now. And this still looks smaller. I like all of the blonde wood accents. That goes through the whole airport, yeah. Someone has been to the big Nordic Social Democracy School of Architecture.

Very that. And lots of burgundy also inside. How built was the airport? There was, I mean, the check-in counters were installed. The baggage system was installed. The screens were installed. There was candy on the shelves of the convenience stores. The cost had already ballooned to $4.3 billion, but it was built.

You just need someone to cut the ribbon at that point. You just need someone to cut the ribbon. Next slide, please. So there's this airline called Air Berlin that is being assembled through the course of the late 2000s out of bits of other budget airlines. And the idea was they were going to create a challenger to Lufthansa and sort of hub Berlin, which is not necessarily crazy. Lot of Polish airlines is doing this now.

They're building this giant airport in the middle of Poland. Anyway, Eryhad invests a lot of money into Air Berlin. But the whole plan is that they're going to be based at this airport, because again, if you're going to have this kind of an airline, you have to be able to hub and spoke. You have to have passengers change flights behind security. And they can't do that at Tegel. And Tegel is too small for them anyway.

So there's all this money and all of this stuff and all of these airplane orders and all of this stuff waiting to go to make Air Berlin a Lufthansa competitor that's going to be based at this new airport. And then, next slide, please. They decide to test the fire alarm system, because the building has to be approved by the fire marshal. And this all comes from a big 2015 Bloomberg feature about how Berlin's futuristic airport became a 6 billion euro embarrassment.

It's now a 7 billion euro embarrassment. So they simulated a fire. The system essentially melted down. Most alarms failed to go off. The ones that did go off said the fire was in the wrong part of the terminal. I mentioned the 55 miles of wiring, but it turns out that because none of the subcontractors were talking to each other and no one was in charge,

they laid the fire alarm communications line next to data cables, next to heating cables, without any protection between them. Oh, sorry, next to high voltage power. Oh, that's going to cause a problem. So the fire alarm is very useful and efficient because it is also a source of fire. Yes.

Exactly. And then they tested the smoke evacuation system, and it neither sucked out smoke nor replaced it with fresh air. The inspectors determined that in an actual fire, the main smoke vent would likely implode. Great. No, this is kind of beautiful. I do want to see a simulation of the smoke vent imploding, though.

Very gladly. We're going to get back to the smoke vent in a minute. It turns out that the smoke vent was designed by a Italian guy pretending to be an engineer. Okay. But we'll get back to it in a minute. So next slide, please. So the response of the government is to say,

fire alarms? Who needs fire alarms? Fuck you. So the fire alarm. So the fire alarm. Just don't start a fire. Yeah. The fire alarm, the fire alarm crisis occurs.

This is all kept completely under wraps, does not make it into the media. This is like late 2011, early 2012. The airport's going to open in 2012. And so in March 2012, the Reiner Schwartz, the head of the airport, proposes to the fire marshal the following plan for the fire alarms.

They're going to hire 800 interns and give them walkie-talkies. And if you smell smoke, you simultaneously call on your walkie-talkie and hold up a red flag and also point passengers towards the exit. Your job is fire alarm. I don't like that.

The problem with this is that Germany has some of the worst cell phone networks in the world. And some of the people who were going to be doing this job were supposed to be stationed near smoke evacuation channels. And the estimates was that in these locations, during a fire, the temperatures would be

a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Just stand in the path of the sort of like, we'll evacuate the smoke over you. Just blow on real hard. Next slide, please. Still, they tell no one and continue planning to open this airport. They're about to enter a new form of governance,

which Tittanica or whatever will find very funny by gendering as Das Merkel. So this is when I first came to Berlin. I had a plane ticket into Tegel in September 2012. And I had a plane ticket home from Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, which I ended up flying home from Tegel. That was when I was an exchange student.

But anyway, they planned an entire event on TV where they were going to close down the highway between the two airports. And they were going to drive all of the support vehicles down there and televise the whole thing. They sold tickets to flights at this airport. They planned opening this airport. They sold tickets to this airport for human beings,

despite knowing that there was no fire system. And then a few weeks before the opening, and this is, again, a quote from this Bloomberg article, the fire marshal of the area was named Loga. And here's the quote, Professor, let me understand this. Your plan is to have 800 people in orange vests sitting on camping stools,

holding thermos as filled with coffee and shouting into their cell phones, open the fire door, end quote. I mean, brought it for employment, I think. Maybe we should consider this. If you give those people a good living wage, you know, human fire marshal. That was the plan.

And it didn't work. It didn't work. Did they have to cancel the party? They canceled the party. No. They canceled everything. They made this very grim announcement that the airport was not going to move.

And anyway, next slide, please. We then get to the game of blame. So Klaus Voverite resigns in disgrace. The governor of the state of Brandenburg, who is also a social Democrat, resigns in disgrace. He was like hoist by his own batard of his like fantasy project airport. That's beautiful.

Yes. Yes. First gay mayor of Berlin goes down because of this airport. On the pedestal, these words appear. Maybe just use like a bunch of guys on cell phones. Yes. On the pedestal, these words appear. Maybe just build a normal fucking airport.

So Reiner Schwarz is fired. He then sues and wins damages for being fired wrongly. It's so funny to like think about places that have like employment protections and especially places that have employment protections to the extent that you can be like, yeah, no fire alarms. Also, you cannot fire me without compensating me seriously. And so everyone blames Mein Hart von Gerkan. Mein Hart von Gerkan blames Schwarz and Voverite.

Schwarz is replaced by a man named, another German name alert, Harmut Maydorn. Oh, Lord. And so Harmut Maydorn comes in full of piss and vinegar and he's going to turn this thing around. His first big thing is he decides he's going to turn the fountain on in front of the terminal to show that it's going to open soon. Oh, my God.

So they turn the fountain on, but then he says, you know, to be a good idea to turn the lights in the terminal off because we're paying for all this electricity and, you know, no one's in here. And the light system was run by a faulty computer system that no one knew how to fix because no one had designed it because it was just a bunch of subcontractors. And so they couldn't turn the lights off. You would have to like get all of your fire alarms.

To go around and like unscrew, you know, 20,000 light bulbs or whatever. So next slide, please. After Klaus Woverite, a man named Mika El Mula becomes mayor of Berlin. So we're now, you can see in our wireframe. We're in the wireframe glasses area, yes. Wireframe glasses area, yes. Michael Muler is a guy with absolutely no personality whatsoever. He is a sort of semi decent guy and he,

plus Woverite was in a coalition with the CDU. Muler creates what's called a red, red, green coalition. So social Democrats, actual leftists and the Green Party. His big accomplishment as mayor of Berlin is passing a rent cap where landlords had to, in many cases, actually lower the rent on their apartments. The CDU then sued through a law firm owned by one of them. So they also made the money off the lawsuit and successfully had this declared unconstitutional record.

This is the thing. I tend to admire the CDU because like few other parties outside of Italy have this like panache for corruption, you know? It's not just enough to like do the thing, but to do the thing so flagrantly that I almost am forced to admire. So next slide, please. So is this our fake Italian? This is our fake Italian.

This is our real Italian fake engineer. This was broken by the magazine Stern. So Alfredo de Maro, who was the main designer of the smoke exhaust system, had business cards that said he was an engineer, but in fact his highest degree was his address man. I'm not quite sure how regulated these two things are in Germany, but I feel like this is extremely regulated. So he was asked about this and he said, quote,

no one asked about my university qualifications. It wasn't necessary for the work we carried out. I told them I had a theoretical degree in physics. Incredible. What was the engineering? Check's better. So he was he was engineering the smoke system. Now here's part of the problem goes back to Meinhard von Gerkan,

because Meinhard von Gerkan, we mentioned this is a pretty normal design, but one of the problems with it is he wanted to have a very pretty, thin, architecturally nice roof without having to look at a lot of ducts. And so he designed it so that the smoke would be vented down through the floor. But smoke go up. Smoke does go up, yes. And he also planned for in a three hundred and forty thousand square foot terminal,

the fake engineer designed a smoke a smoke system, which had was supposed to have one main fan. Oh, well, it was really big, you know, how the fuck do you get the thing to implode if you if you're just trying to like push it with one fan. I will say globally, mechanical engineering is a lot less regulated than civil engineering. And so anyway, they had to turn the one smoke removal area. The building was designed as one smoke removal area. It had to be into three smoke removal areas.

And this ended up costing hundreds of millions of euros, because this had to be removed and reconstructed inside a complete building. I have a question at this point. The obvious thing for me from a less functional country in many ways is at some point, someone's got to suggest, why don't we like lower the fire safety standards? Did anyone dare do that here? The thing already happened in the story. Yes, they did.

No, that was that. That was the plan. I mean, that that was the airport's plan. The thing about Germany that makes Germany different from like the UK is that the guy like the bureaucrat in Germany does not serve any goals other than the maintenance of the bureaucracy. It's a perfect bureaucracy, which exists to perpetuate itself. And so in a situation like this, this is helpful because that bureaucrat

is not going to say, hey, politician who gave me my job, I will lower the standards for you. That bureaucrat is going to say, nein, ich habe die Standards hier und ich muss die like standards are the standards. So next slide, please. At one point during this complicated process of reconstructing, at which so at one point, they roll cherry pickers into the check-in hall to start fixing the stuff in the ceiling and they crumble the nice marble floor under the cherry pickers. No, my beautiful Nordic decor.

No. At one point, one of the managers is arrested for accepting an envelope of cash at a gas station from a manager at the company that had built the fire exhaust system. This company then goes bankrupt in August of 2015. In September of 2015, they immediately stopped construction because of a, quote, imminent collapse and, quote, terminal. Hey, but this is this is not so bad because the roof is very thin and delicate. So it won't be as dangerous when it crushes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a sort of like a delicate blanket falling on you and comforting you. Oh, there's this organization called the Té Uffé, which does the like testing and standards. They do another review. They discover that the lightning rods are missing and they discover that the backup generator for the sprinkler system was not nearly adequate. They said, quote, the power was sufficient for a circus tent, but not for the terminal. Yeah, like for a clown to use. It's just what you are to me.

They have 11 miles of exhaust ducts to remove the fire smoke. Those are leaking. And yeah, it's more of a sort of a smoke disseminator. It's a smoke disseminating system. It takes the smoke from the fire and puts it everywhere throughout. Next slide, please. Just an app for the grapes. Here's a picture of what this looks like the whole time.

This big airport under construction that looks done to the point that there's art there, but also that doesn't function. More and more bonds keep having to be issued because the airport keeps running out of money. Air Berlin goes bankrupt and goes out of business, which again, makes it clear that this whole idea of building a giant hub airport has utterly, utterly failed. 750 display screens in 2017 have to be replaced because no one could figure out how to turn them off. And so they've been on nonstop for six years and that's their lifespan. You just have like total screen burn, but it's on like a we'll be right back.

So opening soon message. Literally, literally many, many of these screens for seven years were just showing the logo of the airport and then got screen burn and had to be replaced. This is capitalism is the most efficient distribution of resources and don't let anyone. Tell you otherwise. In 2018, a board member of Lufthansa suggests just tearing the whole thing down and building a new building. This dude's named Thorsten Dirks. Incredible. And then they do another attempt at certification in 2018 and they discover

what Te Ufao describes as 863 major wiring issues. And so all I can see here is this building is a box. Yeah, building. It's a box. It's a large box with some boxes next to it. Like this is I guess, you know, in the airport, the electronics are hard, but my god, this is not this is not like the world's hugest feat of engineering. It's a 30 million passenger airport on a flat field in a first world country. So they decide to do the only sensible thing, which is to build more of it. Just one more terminal. Yeah, just one more.

It's gonna be different this time. Terminal two is not designed by mine hard fun, Gerkan. Terminal two is designed by Legos, I think. Let's get rid of the windows. That's probably the problem. So this is the this is the Ryanair. This is the Ryanair terminal that they build. Everyone's like sort of like stuck in there, like they're in the matrix pods, you know. The German simply loves in his heart to transit through a temporary airport terminal and will do whatever is necessary to ensure that that happens. So eventually everything is real.

You had become quite philosophical about it during this time in the second line. I've watched the whole of everything everywhere all at once since this strange people. Yeah, very strange people. As yeah, they add one more box to the boxes. In 2019, the smoke suction system is finally approved. They get very excited. But then it turns out that when they made that big expansion of the main terminal from 200,000 to 340,000 square meters, they didn't improve the strength rating of the foundation.

So the underground cabling beams and the foundation all need to be replaced. And also, that's a difficult job right there. There were also 700 kilometers of cable laid under the runways, which were not laid in waterproof ducts. Come on, man. You have to have to replace the foundation under the building while the building is built. And then you have to fucking tear up the runways and resurface them. Oh, yes.

All right. In fact, this is the way it was made of asphalt. That one's easy. This is 2019. The original announcement was 2006. Yeah. Yep. Excuse me.

13 years, baby. Yes. 13 years, baby. And this this building. These are not asphalt. These are concrete runways. That's going to be very difficult and expensive. And so they did that.

Again, just to reiterate, Berlin is a city where the water table is so high that any time you do any kind of construction project in the city, you have to put big above ground pipes to put the water in the river because Berlin is located on a swamp. And so the idea that you would put anything underground in Berlin without thoroughly waterproofing it, like if basements here weren't waterproofed, they would be underwater. Wait, wait, wait.

I've just had a horrible thought. It's 2019. If this keeps going into 2020, it's going to run straight into the... Oh, wait. We'll get there. Next slide, please. So this building was designed, the airport terminal was designed, as you can see here, so that trains would run right into the building.

They built this extension of the main line train, main line trains, and the S-Bahn, which to Schonefeld, they ran to this... You had to go through this sort of weird outdoor breezeway to the terminal from the train station, which, as you can imagine, February in Northern Europe, that can be an extremely breezy breezeway. So they decide this terminal should have a train station right underneath, so you just get right off the train and go into the airport. During this whole time, the ventilation system for those tunnels

was trains moving through them. And so Deutsche Bahn had to spend 10,000 euros a day running empty trains back and forth, so the tunnels did not develop fungus. I mean, it's good that they stopped the fucking... The last of us from happening down there. We dodged one pandemic out of this. Yeah, that's good design if you can get the airport done on time. And so Deutsche Bahn is suing the airport at some point

to try to get money for employing this guy, whose job it is to spend all day every day driving empty trains underneath the endless construction site. One of my favorite things about communism, one of my favorite things that it develops, is the sort of like, sinecure, right? The guy who gets a uniform and a job to like, watch the elevator. Will he assist you if the elevator breaks? No, he will not.

He'll stay in his little glass and have a thing. Yeah, definitely you, guy. Good luck. Yeah, yeah, we like replicated that under capitalism, but also paid worse, and you might get a thousand degree blast of smoke that just like leaves you a pile of charred bones. Yes. And also the rent is high and there's no apartments. So the union, but shit inexpensive. It's a universal phenomenon, it seems.

Yes. So next slide, please. The building opens in October of 2020 to a grand total of zero passengers. 16 years and 7.3 billion euros after groundbreaking. There it is. Just in time for the novel coronavirus. Yes. Late. So it opens, they can't even have an opening party of any kind. Like it opens with no fanfare whatsoever.

One fun thing about the design of this building, and I really do think that mine hard fund Gerkan was not actually responsible for most of the problems here, but if here's one thing he definitely was responsible for. Notice the fact that this whole check-in hall has giant glass walls. And then think about the fact that we are in northern Europe, and so for half the year, the sun basically never gets higher than that. So if you are on one of the rare sunny days in the morning in this airport,

the sun is just blinding. You have to wear sunglasses indoors, and even then you can't look at the direction the sun is coming from. You cannot escape the smoky death of time's magnifying glass. Don't worry about it. All right, that's almost universal in like every building now. Stop building shit. I don't want to see the outside.

I know I'm inside. Leave me alone. Can we just have like nice windows instead of glass walls? I know, right? No, dude. It's brutal. But you'll notice if you look at that beautiful ceiling, there's not a single visible smoke ventilation duct,

and so it was all worth it. Well, there you go. Anyway, next slide, please. Is it a good airport? No, it's freezing and it sucks. So remember, there's that system where the trains ventilate the train station under the check-in hall? Yeah. Okay, so take a look at this here.

So the check-in hall, this is your big ugly red sculpture, and these escalators in the foreground are running from the mezzanine level up to the check-in hall. And then if you notice, there's a sort of hole under each of those staircases, and those are the stairs down to the train platforms. Right. And you notice how nowhere in any of this are there doors? Right, yeah. Okay, so the trains are ventilating this train station with freezing Northern European air,

and so the average temperature in the winter at the top of the stairs right there is 48 degrees Fahrenheit indoors. Perfect. Yeah, that's that. The fact that this is built on top of the communist airport, and like this is a joke you would make about a communist airport, is we built the airport under communism as punishment, like it ventilates itself with like an icy blast every like 90 seconds or whatever.

So the communist airport is actually on the other side of the runway. The building is still there. The original idea was they were going to use that as the low-cost terminal. They then build the low-cost terminal on site, but they're still referring to this as terminal five. And someday it may open to provide extra capacity, but no one knows. And right now it's being used to house refugees, because Germany loves putting refugees on cots in horrible, disused public buildings.

It's estimated the airport will not turn an annual profit until 2034. The people working at the security checkpoint keep getting electrocuted by mysterious electric shocks. And more, okay, that's an interesting one. It's like mysterious electrical shocks. Ball lightning. Ball lightning is generated in this terminal. The people working at security keep being electrocuted by mysterious electrical shocks in the demon terminal.

Oh, okay, yes, of course, the demon terminal. Yes, demon terminal wants blood. The airport is also horribly understaffed because the airport corporation, which built it, is chronically out of money because they spent seven billion euros building it instead of two, and they're paying off all their bonds. So they have the horrible annual deficits and it's corona. And so everyone needs money. And so no one wants to pour more money into this.

And so there's continually strikes. There's continually not enough staff. It often takes like 45 minutes for your bags to come on the belt. It's a great, it's a great place. Beautiful. What is Triumph? Next slide, please. So in 2021, Michael Mueller moves to the Bundestag and is replaced as mayor of Berlin

by a Franziska Giffey, who is a walking meme. Here she is on the left, pictured shooting the gun to start the Berlin marathon last year with murder in her heart. It's like Mao combat liberalism, but combat liberalism is like an adjective instead of a verb. It's combat social democracy. And on the right, she is standing wearing a business suit with a big sort of blonde quaff holding a piece of bread. A piece of bread undersells it.

This is a loaf of black bread. Larger than her head. This was when she was giving a speech about integration, because she used to be the mayor of Neukold. And when she was the mayor of Neukold and everyone became a German citizen, got this bread given to them as a symbol of welcome. How old would you all estimate that this person is? 24.

Oh, this guy has a lot of even face. Oh, let's look at the different pictures. Sorry. It's fine. It is misgender, the mayor of Berlin. No, I was looking at a picture of that rule. I'm watching the Nebraska game on the other TV. Don't worry about that.

How old is this person? Give me 24 years old. It's our father. Please, 30. 30, come on, 30. Somewhere between 40 and 65. Yeah, so she's 43 when she's elected in these pictures. And she look, I mean, the joke is that she's like Berlin's social Democrat,

but she looks like it has the politics of the like CDU minister of agriculture of like Hessin. Why? It's like, imagine for our UK listeners, imagine Lisa Nandy for our US listeners, imagine Amy Klobuchar. But like Amy Klobuchar is mayor of Portland. Oh, her most cursed timeline. No, take it back. Take it back, bud.

Oh, no, it gets more cursed. More cursed. So she becomes mayor of Berlin. Now, at the same time she becomes mayor of Berlin, she wins barely, and the red, red, green coalition of Michael Mueller continues under her leadership unhappily. She doesn't want to do it, but she's sort of forced into doing it, mostly because her own members don't want to. Like Berlin, SPD has a very left wing base and an extremely right wing upper layer.

I don't know any policies like that. I know. Certainly no social Democratic ones. Now, at the same time that she wins, Berlin passes 60 to 40, a ballot initiative to forcefully expropriate private landlords who own more than 3000 flats and turn this all into social housing again. Yeah, what a good idea. I heard about this one.

Yeah. And so she makes a deal because the Greens kind of want to do it, but not really. Delink of the left are the good party, and they do want to do it, and she does not want to do it. And so she makes a committee that's going to study the possibility. And the committee just came out with a report saying it's possible. But we have to do the 2021 election again, because the Berlin SPD is as incompetent as the Berlin CDU is corrupt.

And so they somehow fucked up the 2021 election so badly that we have to redo it. And because the SPD fucked up so badly, and because the SPD is led by this ideology-less conservative person. What? No, back up. How do you fuck up an election so bad you get a do-over? Wait for it. The current poll leader in the redo of this election is, drum roll please, the CDU, which is- I am so mad right now.

I'm so confused. The worst bag fumbling in electoral history. And the CDU has run a campaign of being even more racist than normal. 01:32:41,880 --> 01:32:49,320 So every year in Berlin on New Year's Eve, the city turns into a fireworks war zone. And actually the- Oh, I see you're ready the way this is going. The CDU makes a big show about how they don't want to ban fireworks, because fireworks on New Year's Eve is a great German tradition.

But then it turns out that the cops lie about shit. And so the cops in the CDU said that hundreds of foreigners were attacking cops with fireworks. And it turns out it was 38 Germans who were arrested. And then the CDU's response to that was to put in a request in the Berlin State Parliament asking for the first names of those Germans. Oh, because German criminal anonymity laws, like if you get arrested for something, they'll just, you know, publicize your name. It's like Matthias V or whatever.

Matthias V, right. So basically they want to point out that these are- They want to make this thing about like, oh, they're all Mohammed F and Ahmed L. And it worked. They had a whole three day freak out, a whole like three week long national media freak out about the election and it propelled them into first place and the election's in a week and they might win and we live in hell. You know, before you expropriate the landlords, the landlords do have to get their two cents in.

I mean, that's democracy right there. Yeah, this is why we're all charter members of the Party for Moderate Progress and Reform within the law. Yes, the party of the- The party of the- which that is the Christian Democratic Union. Next slide, please. Just to add the final little- Little boxes.

But also we get to the final European form of the little box. The little box that's a little prison. It's actually a large box. Yes, a little cop prison box. And so this is in the Brandenburg government because this is on the Brandenburg side. But so there's a private investor who's going to build a private deportation center. Oh, come on, man. And his name is Jurgen B. Harder.

I bet it is. I bet it is. That's a cool style. Sorry, no. Jurgen B. Harder. Yeah. You want to slurp that German sausage? Yeah.

No, go ahead. So can you just pay to have anyone else be deported or like what? Who is not one of the bartenders at laboratory, but is instead a corrupt Brandenburg real estate investor. It was sort of 50-50. It's set to make millions of euros of profits over the 30-year contract of running the deportation center. You know, I really do think if you say the phrase, we'll make millions of euros in profit

from the deportation center over the next 30 years. Definitely going to have to bleep this, but I think it's reasonable. 01:35:35,320 --> 01:35:35,800 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just, some sort of, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. Please, please don't get me kicked out of Germany.

I don't want to go back to America. No, I do not endorse what was believed. I do not endorse what was believed. There's a private deportation center. I should be able to pay to have anyone I want deported. This is how capitalism works, right? Yeah, and the NCAP deportation center. Yes.

Oh, God. The plan is that they're going to have, the plans are going to have about 1,000 deportations a year by 2025 and about 1,300 deportations a year by 2040. And one important thing to know is that the campaign against this deportation center estimates that 50% of people in deportation detention in Germany are there unjustly and should not be there. That's, I mean, coming from a British perspective, that's remarkably low, even, like,

it's reprehensible, but we somehow managed to outdo you on this, I feel. And so that's the story of the extremely stupid and bad Berlin-Brandenburg airport. And pretty soon, I'm going to be, I imagine, flying into this and getting absolutely frozen, and now I'll know why. What airline are you flying? Are you flying a low-cost airline? Or are you flying a... Yes, yeah, I will be.

EasyJet or Ryanair? EasyJet, probably. Okay, if it's EasyJet, then you're flying into the main terminal. If it's Ryanair, then you fly into the windowless box. Cool. It gets like, sort of, picked my... And I really rub it in, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a great work of art. I'll be flying out of the windowless box tomorrow. Safe travels? It'll be great. What an absolute disaster. Disaster. Taking the vomit curve from the 7.3 billion euro windowless box over the private deportation center. It's horrific.

Oh, no. Do they still do the vomit curve that hasn't changed at all? No, the vomit curve is part of the... It's one of the official flight plans for leaving... Right. Yeah, one of the official flight plans. I no longer want to go to Berlin for the live show. Talk to me about that.

Given American cost overruns and delays, this doesn't seem that bad to me. This seems fine. Yeah, your brain is broken, bud. Your brain is broken, bud. This is a good outcome. I'm going to punch you. Oh, another... Just one last final thing.

There was a... So the airport is named after Billy Brand. Which was its own controversy because the other Berlin political parties accused the social democrats of just naming it after their own functionary. And so there were all these different ideas who they should name it after. They kept Billy Brand. Rosa Luxemburg. At some point, the Billy Brand Foundation considered revoking the airport's permission

to bear his name because they didn't want the association with this disaster to be associated with his legacy. It's too late, too late. But anyway, there it is. Social democracy. Berlin, Brandenburg Airport. I feel like I've learned so much about German politics and it's all bad. It is all bad.

Most politics are. Going back to Interflug, the return to tradition, you know, rejects modernity, embrace, embrace, illusion. We're going to make... We're going to close down Burgheim. We're going to reopen the turbine halls and make it into a big coal-fired cogeneration plant for heat and electricity. And...

So the kind of thing that has me understanding the impulse behind the wildly illegal 10-person continuation SED, you know? The party that's like, put it all back. Put it all back the way it was. I mean, Delinka, the political party of which I am a member, is the successor party of the former SED. Not if you ask those 10 people. They're the only good...

They're the only political party in Berlin who is responsible for doing anything good ever. And I really hope they don't not be in government anymore after this election, because it would really suck. I guess the lesson here is if you are a listener in Germany and you are able to vote for Delinka, are the one... You should do that, especially in Berlin, where they're in Berlin, they are run by good gay Klaus. So bad gay Klaus was Klaus Woverite. Good gay Klaus is Klaus Lederer. And if you're not in Germany, and the idea of having a party to the left of the Tepid

Social Democratic Party appeals to you, maybe investigate having one of those, you know? Wouldn't be a bad idea, I don't think. Yes, although we may be losing ours, because our party to the left of the Tepid Social Democratic Party is involved in what may be potentially a death spiral, but we'll see. Delinka would be a whole other episode of this party, because it is of this show, because it is kind of an engineering disaster, this cobbled together mix of West German social movements and East German reformist elements of the SED, which does really well after being founded, because the 2008 financial crisis happens,

and then has a lot of internal contradictions, which are resolved in profoundly unhelpful ways by people who are all essentially invested in continuing the conflict in order to not reveal their fundamental mediocrity. Sarah Wagenknecht, for example, who did a book tour during the last national election campaign about how the reason why the party wasn't doing well was because it was too much gender, and it was the gender's fault. Gender had done it, and the reasonable question of, well, if you don't want to talk about gender, why have you just written a book about it, was seemingly never asked.

That was like seven billion euros, right? Seven billion? Okay, so... He froze, he froze. At least we got almost everything done. There he's going, there he is, there he is, there he is, there he is, there he is, there he is, I'm here, so did we get that audio, or am I going to need to... You cut out immediately after I asked how much the project actually cost. Great, so I'll come in now.

So it cost a 7.3 billion euros. I was just going to say, that's actually, I just ran the conversion cost, and I was like, wow, that's a lot cheaper than East Side Access in New York was, which was just reusing an existing tunnel and doing a little bit of extra tunneling. If only the United States were as dysfunctional politically as Berlin, as Germany. Yes, I am in awe at how cheap and how well done this project was, this is my thing. This is like Germany's great national shame, and in the U.S., this would be the thing that would get you from being mayor of New York to being president or whatever.

Pete Buttigieg has to do this, he can be gay president now. This is what Andrew Cuomo wanted to do. Oh God, I went back to New York, so I lived in New York, and I remember old Penn Station, and I went back and I saw New Penn Station, and the thing that they don't tell you about New Penn Station, they tell you that it's a... They tell you the building is shitty, and they tell you there's no place to sit. What they don't tell you is that whole building is full of weird Andrew Cuomo shit. There's like weird quotes that no one ever said, Empire State is the state of prosperity, and yes, weird shit all over the walls,

that building is just full of bizarre Andrew Cuomo touches. They find it in the sort of post-apocalypse, and they're like, this Andrew Cuomo must have been like a mighty warlord, a powerful leader, revered in their culture. Dang it, LCD screens are not going to last that long. How much did more of that end cost? Famously, they only last seven years, right? Yeah, I mean, the line on Penn Station ultimately is under communism, you had somewhere to sit. Yes, okay, that was only $1.6 billion, so that was 1.6th of the airport.

1.6th, 1.7th of this airport, and again, Penn Station, Moynihan Station, okay, it wasn't a whole new building, but it was... Is that they just put on atrium in existing building. Right, but it is at least in the center of New York City, and involves doing things under New York City, as opposed to this airport, which I will repeat, is a 30 million passenger a year midsize airport, which is built in a middle of an empty field, which is flat. And one of the runways is already built. You've got to go all the way to the back of the Walgreens,

and then push a button to call a staff member to get up, train beer. That's ridiculous. At Moynihan train hall. It's a little get smart shit. Can we do safety third? I've been broadcasting for five and a half hours. Yeah, we can do that. Thank you.

Do we ask, what did we learn? No, we didn't learn anything. Be more like Germany, form a sort of left-wing political party, try not to have it tear itself apart onto the weight of its internal contradictions. What we learned is that Germany is the good country, which does good capitalism, and everything is efficient and excellent, and Angela Merkel was great. The worst embarrassment of a European infrastructure project is still cheaper than an exemplary American one.

This is not a Stuttgart 21, which is the new train station in Stuttgart. Oh, people have mentioned that to us before, yeah. Still not done. Take a look at that somewhere. Again, it would go a lot slower in America. All right, let's do safety third. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger.

Sorry, I jumped the gun a little bit there, but also I don't want to take it again. Hold on. Let me bring up the notes here. Greetings from Ellipses, Ellipses, Ellipses, Idaho. Hey. So sorry. No, I don't shoot up smack. That's not a track mark there on my arm.

I donate platelets. Cool. It's like the it's like the Bondo for your blood. I have one of the blood types that doesn't play well with others, so it's more useful to donate only this component and donate it more often. Sometimes they also extract plasma when they need it, just not the flaming kind, the boring blood kind. You see, I am not allowed to donate blood because I will not lie to the government

and tell it that I'm monogamous. Yeah, no, should you? No, this is true. To get at those platelets, I get strapped to a centrifuge. Sorry, what? I mean, what sort of James Bond bullshit? We're going to put you in the fucking wiggler and we're going to wiggle the platelets out of you. This is normal.

This is healthy. Now, I mean, not my entire body like an astronaut in training, but they stick a needle in me and send my blood into the machine that spins separates it, extracts the desired part. They got me on a spin cycle and shit. And returns the rest. I didn't know this actually. I thought if you donated platelets or something like that,

they just took the blood anyway. But I guess, OK, they give you the rest of it back. It's a good deal. You get like cash back. Yeah, yeah. 10% on every eligible purchase. Yes. These machines are a single venipuncture system,

so they both draw and return via the same very large needle. Ah, I don't like that. We had fluid dynamic shit. I don't like that. It makes you want to taunt those poorly endowed vaccine shots, right? You know where you ask, are you in yet? Just Christ. That was my experience getting the first vaccine.

Second vaccine, I noticed it, though. It sure beats the other setup where you have a needle in each arm that I've heard of. At least for the hour and a half plus procedure, I have a free hand to eat snacks and skip through irritating self-promoting ads on the video I'm watching. Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a millennial or whatever, and I'm on my phone.

But I think if I don't have use of either of my hands and you ask me to lie there for an hour and a half, I simply accept my death after about 10 minutes. Yeah, that sounds about right to me. On one visit. Can't be on my phone. I can't read my little military history Wikipedia articles to keep myself calm.

No, no, sorry. On one visit, the phlebotomist was a guy I hadn't seen before. He got me in the chair and prepped up the insertion site. Weird barcode tattoo on the back of his head. I had donated a number of times previous to this, so I noticed that something seemed off. It really seemed that he was sticking that needle in way sooner than in my previous visits.

Usually, that machine has to wear and spin its little dial-looking things for a while before it's jabbing time. I don't like that it's jabbing time. Yeah. Alas, I wasn't mindful enough to raise concern about this. Me in any medical situation. We'll be fine. The girl wear on its own, the experts do not do anything wrong.

I trust the medical professional most of the time. I was brave for the doctor. I want a sticker and a lollipop. The needle went in and as the machine spun up, there was a strong and audible vibration at the puncture site. No. You may rightly guess that this does not usually happen. You're getting like a notification.

That's not good. I think I recall he tried to make adjustments and retry it, but the same thing happened again. Needless to say that donation was cancelled. That's fine. I mean, like no harm, no foul. Yeah, that's probably fine. You know, they disconnected me and I headed to the canteen,

disappointed. Hopefully some little kid with cancer wasn't going to be even more disappointed. While sitting there, contemplating if eating a bag of chips or a cookie was warranted after an aborted attempt, one of the staff- I'll just dive right in on that. If you've had a needle in you, you are entitled to whatever treats you want. This is a policy I follow every six months when I get my hormone levels down. I just stop on the way back and get myself sort of the most dangerously sugary thing I can.

Yes. That's a smart thing to do. You're down some blood. You got to get the blood sugar back up on what remains. One of the staff members came by and asked if I was OK. And I answered no. I think they asked that question because my face was turning bright red. My mind thought back to a little speech that they have to tell you every time you are screened,

specifically to the part where they tell you about potential issues that might be encountered during your donation. Shortness of breath, check, dizziness, check, heart racing, check, chest pain, especially when inhaling more than a shallow breath, check. Oh, no. Why? These things I am experiencing appear to closely match the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism. One of the things that I dislike most about the human body is that

this also closely matches the symptoms of a panic attack. This is true, yes. Then you start conflating things, then you start to panic more, then you get an actual pulmonary embolism. No, you don't. No, you don't. Yeah, that's a different source. Me tomorrow on the vomit curve on the Ryanair 737 MAX, watching the window,

watching the tip of the wing get within 100 meters of the ground, screaming to the flight attendant that I'm having a pulmonary embolism. You've got to get one of those like Air Force pressure suits. Mm, yeah. So we all got a special visit from the paramedics that day at the blood bank, and I got some souvenir EKG electrode pads to take home and eventually painfully rip off. I hope you don't have a lot of body hair because that's, yeah. Got to do it quick.

Fortunately, my symptoms subsided after sometime lying down with my legs elevated and I went home more or less intact. This is the thing that, again, is not sort of popularly known. Like everyone sort of knows from TV that if you get an embolism, you just like die. And like most of the time on the numbers, you're just fine. You feel terrible for a bit and then you're just fine. It's not a very good way to kill someone. But that's the story of the time I got embolized.

I don't care if that's not a real word. That's what I call it. You deserve it. Don't worry. It's an embolism. You don't deserve being embolized, but you deserve to use the word. Exactly. Lesson learned is super important to do the steps in order

and speak up if you suspect something is being done wrong. I still donate platelets to this day twice a month if my scheduling works out, despite that bad experience. Heroic. And doubted I think about it. I don't think I ever saw that one phlebotomist again. Yeah, they killed him. He's gone.

He's in like 250 different blood bags at this point. They gave him the embolism. That phlebotomist is now working on needle night at laboratory. Yeah. By the way, you should always obey the cautionary instructions that give you like don't do heavy lifting the same day you donated, because performing a self-KO in front of your parents after moving a sofa is very embarrassing.

Thank you. Thank you to our writer, The Blood Dumbass. I say that affectionately, but that's more sort of blood-related mishaps than most people experience in their entire lives. I was about to say that. Yours truly, an Idaho Prince of platelets. I hated it when I thought of it, but I'm still putting it in here. Well, thank you for your service.

Thank you. We made it through. Yeah, we made it through. No one fainted. Safety third. Yes, that was safety third. Our next episode is Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yeah, if the people want more Ben, where can they find more Ben? Where can they find more Ben? If people want more Ben, you can listen to my podcast that I do with a Hugh Lemme, which is called Bad Gays. It's a podcast about gay disasters in history without slides. It's really good. It's about evil and complicated queer people in history. We are just about to make our sixth.

We're in the middle of making our sixth season, so it will be premiering around when you hear this episode. So check us out and we have five seasons' worth of episodes, and we have a book that you can buy from Verso called Bad Gays, A Homosexual History, referred to as a tour de force by the Washington Post. And you can find me on Twitter at Ben writes things, because that's what I do. And you can also find me tomorrow at Berlin Brandenburg Airport in the windowless box

of preparing to die on a 737 MAX flown by Ryan Ayer's Maltese subsidiary, Air Malta, which they have, because that's where they can pay the flight attendants Maltese minimum wage. Getting ready to take the vomit curve to fly to London Stanstad Airport. Ben, thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute delight. We've all learned a lot. For my last public appearance. We'll put a little in memoriam thing up at the end.

Actually, I think that's going to be funny to do, so we'll just do that anyway regardless of if you die. So yeah, listen to Bad Gays by the book. Support us by subscribing to our Patreon. We do bonus episodes. Next one is going to be on. What is the next one going to be on? We're going to do Frank Furness.

Yeah, Philadelphia Architect Frank Furness. All right, it's going to be that. Whenever that happens. In the meantime, thank you for watching, listening. All listening, whichever. Yeah, those spots that you seem oddly quizzical on that one. I feel a little quizzical, but that's because the madness is starting to set in. We apologize for you watching.

We apologize for this disappointing outcome. And resolve to do better in the future.