Episode 124: Berlin-Brandenburg Airport

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 124: Berlin-Brandenburg Airport .ass file - download the video off of YouTube and play with your media player of choice .ytt file - feed the subtitle file to your YouTube(!) in this convoluted manner Corrections (please!) to haitch dubya ei zed you you dubya at the google mail service JUSTIN: Um, in that case, um, I believe– BEN: Let's do this thing! JUSTIN: Yeah, everything's going. Uh, hello. Welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast. About engineering disasters. It has slides. I'm Justin Roczniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, alright, go. NOVA: I am [November Kelly], I'm the person who's talking now. I was gonna do this in German, but then I panicked and realized I could only do about half of it. My pronouns are she, her, and sie, I suppose. Yay Liam! LIAM: Yay Liam, hi, my name is Liam Anderson, my pronouns are he and him, and we have a guest! JUSTIN: We have a guest. BEN: Hallo! Ich heiße Ben, mein Pronomen sind er, und, um... ...I'm not gonna do this in German. Hi, I'm Ben... JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: Miller, from Bad Gays, and podcasting from Berlin, Deshalb (?), Deutsch, und... my pronouns are he and him. NOVA: Beautiful, thanks so much for coming on, it's a pleasure. And we've got you– BEN: It's very strange to be here, and to hear voices that usually don't respond to things that I say, responding to things that I say. NOVA: Yeah, it's sort of the level above parasociality–or it's just social. JUSTIN: It’s “sociality”... and what's the level after that? NOVA: Hypersociality. JUSTIN: Like a sort of Vulcan mind meld, you know? LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: ...being roommates. JUSTIN: Oh, well, yeah. LIAM: Hey! JUSTIN: Yeah. JUSTIN: That's what Liam and I used to do. NOVA: Yeah, you were hypersocial, now you're just back down to regular social. JUSTIN: Regular social, yeah. LIAM: We do share some organs. Not the gross ones. JUSTIN: Yeah. There's like a big tube that runs down the streets. LIAM: Yeah, just running (?) Philadelphia, yeah. [laughter] NOVA: Gross. Well, we got Ben on to talk about this beautiful, beautiful airport. This is Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt. As you see here, in the beautiful colours of grey, sky, and dead grass. LIAM: Woo! JUSTIN: I thought it was Montréal–Mirabel. LIAM: Yeah, I thought this was North Jersey. JUSTIN: I thought this was Everglades Jetport. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: 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. NOVA: This was like capitalism's version of the Terracotta Army, y'know? JUSTIN: I'm just coming at this from a US construction cost and construction duration perspective, and I'm like, yeah, that's pretty good! Nothing wrong with that! [laughter] NOVA: On time and on the budget. JUSTIN: Yeah. BEN: 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, all that kind of legal corruption, plenty of illegal corruption, all of communism... NOVA: All this just to put planes in the sky? JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: All this just to put planes in the sky. LIAM: Good lord. BEN: And as we will find out at the end, to deport refugee... LIAM: Oh, right. BEN: to deport refugees and asylum seekers. NOVA: Ask yourself, is there something wrong with European social democracy? And look at the migrant deportation centres and say, no, everything's fine. JUSTIN: Everything's fine. Yeah. BEN: My friend and colleague Rob Heinze is also a historian, as I am, and said that his old man masterpiece is going to be called Social Democracy, the Global History of a Disappointment. [laughter] JUSTIN: Now, before we talk about this airport, we first have to do The God Damn News. ♪[news jingle]♪ JUSTIN: Uh, Norfolk Southern has assisted– NOVA: These fuckin' idiots. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: Norfolk Southern Railroad has assisted in a strategic– LIAM: ...”has annihilated Ohio”. JUSTIN: Assisted in a strategic strike on East Palestine. Um. NOVA: [laughs] Oh, that's dark. BEN: You guys, I'm in Germany, don't get me in trouble. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, yeah, there was a big derailment, uh, two days ago, which I believe at time of recording is still on fire. Um, Norfolk Southern put probably a couple dozen cars on the ground, their train derailed going like 50-60mph, 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, and a bunch of hazmat cars derailed, and when you're going that speed and you derail, it doesn't matter how strong the cars are, bad stuff's gonna happen. A lot of nasty chemicals caught on fire, the smoke flume was visible on weather radar. NOVA: Didn’t this also derail right next to a chemical plant as well, just for a double whammy? JUSTIN: I do not believe so, because the initial reports were “derailed in the middle of downtown East Palestine”, which would've exploded two 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, 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. 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. NOVA: What if the train crew of this had been, like, even more sleep deprived? We're gonna find out. JUSTIN: What if there was only one guy in the cab, though? NOVA: Just one guy with a fire extinguisher. JUSTIN: Well, there were probably 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 an engineer pulled away, and if there weren't two guys, you would've had to have sprinted back, uncoupled the cars, and then sprinted to the front of the train, I mean, you probably would have had a much worse disaster. NOVA: Fuck that. Jesus. Uh. Well, once again, we have learned no lesson the hard way. JUSTIN: Absolutely no lessons, you know, cause– LIAM: No, no, we're never gonna lear–no. JUSTIN: 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 a thousand feet earlier, like, my God. NOVA: Sorta like Lac-Mégantic again, huh? JUSTIN: Yeah, something like 2,000 people were evacuated, I don't think they've been allowed back to their homes yet. No fatalities, no injuries, lots of property damage, though. NOVA: Oh yeah, you're just gonna be scrubbing weird chemical residue off of your roof for like the next however long when they let you back in, if they ever do. JUSTIN: Had to cancel the Amtrak Capitol Limited. LIAM: Yeah, sorry, we're turning around in Pittsburgh, eat shit. JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] NOVA: It's that, or like, gun it through the vinyl chloride. LIAM: Mmm. BEN: Gun it at Amtrak top speed of 37mph. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This track I think is good for 50 or 60. BEN: (?) JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: That's why it's so bad, is cause this is a... three mile freight train doing 60mph or so. NOVA: Hey, we got high-speed rail, sort of. NOVA: Temporarily. JUSTIN: That's a lot of... JUSTIN: we have high-momentum rail. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: But of course, this was immediately wiped off every front page by the real shit. The real substantial story. JUSTIN: The real shit, yeah. The real substantial story. NOVA: I'm sorry to tell you this, boys, but... LIAM: Yes. ♪[news jingle]♪ NOVA: America is under fucking attack JUSTIN: We're under attack. LIAM: [groans] [laughs] JUSTIN: We must not allow a balloon gap. [laughter] NOVA: Chairman Xi has, y'know, committed an act of serious aggression by loosing an enormous balloon in which a six year old boy has become trapped. BEN and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: ...I may have run two things together in my head. LIAM: Maybe. [laughs] Don’t worry about that. NOVA: So 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 they don't have a bunch of DSLRs on strings hanging down underneath them. BEN: [laughs] JUSTIN: I think it was a weather balloon, I'm going with the weather balloon theory, honestly. Someone made a boo boo, and every gun in America had to be pointed at the thing. LIAM: No, no, no. (?) F-22 finally got an air-to-air kill. NOVA: It did; first air-to-air kill in like, what, 16 years, something like? And it was a balloon, which is very funny; someone’s gonna 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?” You had to be like, you've seen the shit that meteorologists are left to deal with? They don't have the budget for, like, 70 foot diameter length of three school buses things; I have a helium balloon with a phone strapped to it, essentially. But, they think that maybe this was trying to take photos of the nuclear silos in Montana, or something like that, and like... BEN: As if they're not taking pictures of that with the fucking satellites and with the stealth jets, and as if the US 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, because I am hipster trash, and, like, yeah. NOVA: Oh yeah, absolutely. BEN: I also 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. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: You're not gonna get a 60,000 foot range off your rifle, you're just gonna hit someone on the ground, please don't shoot it. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: Another great moment for America was when someone apparently called in to CNN to describe watching it be shot down and said, “it looked like a balloon popping.” NOVA: Crazy. LIAM: Wow. JUSTIN: There's a reason for that! NOVA: That’s, that’s that citizen journalism. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, so, I mean, there are good reasons why you would want to use a balloon for surveillance, they're actually pretty hard to detect, and you can get a much higher resolution over a much longer time than you can with a satellite, which just fucking blazes past, whereas this thing, you just hang out reading all the license plates in the parking lot, or whatever. Unfortunately, it has fucked up, and 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 slightly more convenient, is that 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 gonna have to do something, and so this is the something, this is the sort of the stopgap backup thing, also for like, over the horizon communications relays and stuff. So everybody's into balloons now, it's a thing, we're doing balloons. JUSTIN: 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 pointed at it for like, you know, 10 days, and everyone's, you know, it's like, are you, 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. NOVA: That's true. That is true. Trump has already accused Biden of being like, weak on the balloon, which is incredibly– JUSTIN: “Weak on the balloon issue”. NOVA: Yeah. [laughs] I truly believe the balloon could have healed America. LIAM: Well, if we had all shot at it, it would have! BEN: You can't trust Joe Biden's they/them army to protect us from... NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I'm gonna 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. [laughs] NOVA: [sarcastic] Ha Ha Ha–Goddammit. Yeah. So, the woke they/them air force shot it down with a Sidewinder missile, which is, I mean, very funny, in terms of the relative costs involved. JUSTIN: What is the cost of the balloon, that's what I wanna know. JUSTIN: I need to know more about the balloon. NOVA: Yeah, I don't think China's answering you on that one, but like, yeah. JUSTIN: I'm gonna call up my good friend Xi Jinping, and ask him. NOVA: “How much you’re paying for that balloon?” JUSTIN: Can I get my own balloon? You got a balloon guy? [laughs] NOVA: There's clearly a balloon guy. Someone had this balloon idea, and they're like, yeah, no, this is gonna be the move, is this balloon. As far as I know, the US balloon caucus is like a couple of paper writers at the Air Force Academy and the War College and shit like that, but it was the same. BEN: I mean, if Trump was president, he probably would've shot it down over a populated area, and it would've killed someone, because that's what they wanted to do. NOVA: Yes. BEN: They're like, why aren't they shooting this balloon down? It's like, they're gonna shoot... it's not like... they can't take it away. JUSTIN: ...hilariously drapes itself over, like, the two antennas on the Sears Tower. [laughter] NOVA: It's like perfectly balanced. BEN: With the, like, school bus-sized thing hanging off the bottom of it, just like, 9/11-ing the Sears Tower. NOVA: Well, apparently Biden ordered them to shoot it down on, like, the Wednesday, and it was the DOD who were like, we're probably gonna wait until it's over the ocean if that's alright with you. So, y'know, it really is the woke air force. JUSTIN: Last time they tried to shoot down like this, they blew up a town, so, y'know, that's... probably, probably wanna avoid that. I think that was back in the 50s or 60s or something, some kind of training drone gone awry. NOVA: The Pentagon blew up a small town every couple of weeks in the 50s. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: Fun pictures of people going out into the desert to watch the atom bomb test. LIAM: To look at the atom bomb test, yeah. NOVA: Miss Atomic Bomb. Here's the thing, America has declined as a country because there's no Miss Balloon. Y'know? BEN: Oh yes. NOVA: I wanna audition right now for Miss Chinese Surveillance Balloon. JUSTIN: Reorient our culture around balloons. LIAM: Yes, we must submit to the balloons. JUSTIN: We're canceling the B-21 project in favor of balloons. BEN: You know how they do the, for Miss Universe every year, they do the National Costume Pageant? NOVA: Mmhm. LIAM: Yes. BEN: So China next year should be a giant surveillance balloon. LIAM: A giant balloon, that'd be fun. BEN: With like solar panels hanging off... LIAM: Miss America is a Sidewinder, yeah, that will cause chaos. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah. Which makes the cool growling noise, too. 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 at all. BEN: Well that's actually a nice transition, cause we're heading for the old Cold War now. JUSTIN: We are heading for the old Cold War. Even previous to that. NOVA: Seems like we start all of the episodes with the Cold War, now. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: It's all Reagan's fault. JUSTIN: Reagan did it. BEN: Really, genuinely is. JUSTIN: Anyway, that was The God Damn News. ♪[news jingle]♪ BEN: So, we are looking at two photographs, one superimposed on the other. The bottom photograph is an aerial photograph of the city of Berlin, taken recently, and you will notice that there is a big honkin' airport in the middle of it. LIAM: Wow. NOVA: ... that's prime development land. BEN: Oh, [Nova], we will get there. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: 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... NOVA: Looks very fascist. JUSTIN: Very fascist, yes. LIAM: Oh wow, I’m shocked. Shocked, I say. NOVA: It's almost as if it synthesizes a kind of romantic, past-looking nationalism with a forward-looking revolutionary fervor, in an attempt to create a kind of, like, temple of futurism along ancient German lines. LIAM: Unified German identity. NOVA: Who would have done that? JUSTIN: The airport terminal that kills you instantly. BEN: 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, mudfield 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 doing big major city things. NOVA: And Frederick is in Königsberg, like, I'm sick of this bridge problem shit. BEN: Well, it's Frederick's actually grandfather, sorry, who builds the Brandenburg Gate, who sets up... Berlin to be basically a non-embarrassing capital city. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: And that's sort of the impetus. And then it's in 1870, after the reunification, the unification of Germany, 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, 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... NOVA: It's not fascist enough. The fuck is this? BEN: It's not fascist enough. JUSTIN: It's not fascist enough. LIAM: “Deutsche”... “Deutesche” whatever, I don't care. I don't speak German. JUSTIN: 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– LIAM: Dirt tracks, basically. JUSTIN: 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, um... So, okay, it was, the airport's open 1923, right, this is gonna be, y'know, the grand gateway to Berlin, then these guys, you may have heard of them, they're called the Nazis. LIAM: Boo! JUSTIN: They take power in Germany. Right? And they're like, well, gee, we need a bigger airport, huh. So in the 30s– LIAM: Oh, is the Zeppelin not working out? JUSTIN: No, the Zeppelin turned out not to be a good idea. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: Go listen to our episode with Mia 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. JUSTIN: Yes. JUSTIN: So they have this airport, which is very close to densely populated... neighborhoods, and they're like, well, y'know, we'll just do this sort of big monumental thing, they get this guy named– NOVA: If the Nazis had won the war, they absolutely would have accidentally 9/11'd themselves in Berlin. They would have, like, flown a Junkers into the Volkshalle, like, instantly. LIAM: Oh yes. JUSTIN: So this was, the terminals you see here, this big arching structure, you got your sort of big building in the front, big monumental thing, this was done by a guy named Ernst Sagebiel– Am I doing that right? LIAM: Does not matter, he's dead. JUSTIN: Yeah, he was an SA member. LIAM: Of course he was. JUSTIN: Did a lot of, uh, a lot of– NOVA: The hipsters of Nazism. JUSTIN: Yes, exactly. He did a lot of architecture for– NOVA: “Hey, I'm actually into ze older stuff.” JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: That was back when it was real gay. JUSTIN: This is true, yes. [laughs] So he does this, uh, 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. LIAM: [groans] JUSTIN: Right? [laughs] It's this very, very stripped down classicism. This sort of becomes a weird prototype for a lot of future airport terminals, though. NOVA: All airports are Nazi, gotcha. JUSTIN: Yes. It's true. NOVA: The airport is an inherently fascist space. JUSTIN: Yes. I would agree with that, actually. [laughs] LIAM: Yeah, absolutely. [laughs] NOVA: I'm not being ironic, I'm setting you up for that. It's the place where I get to get my gender examined by like a bored security worker touching my dick; of course it's a fascist space. JUSTIN: What I think is just weird about it is how it's like, integrated into like an urban neighborhood, like you've got these office buildings out on the side, it's this whole... considered space. NOVA: ...Berlin police headquarters opposite. There's an interesting museum which I need to go to. BEN: The neighborhood that I live in, and the neighborhood on the other side– and this airport didn't close until 2006–were both basically unlivable. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: 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 Schöneberg, which means “pretty hill”, despite this being Berlin, and there are no hills. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: But what Schöneberg is is real gay. But anyway, on the other side is this neighborhood called Neukölln, and 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. LIAM: Crazy. BEN: 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. JUSTIN: They were like flying real big aircraft in here too. Like, you could land– BEN: They were flying 737s into this. JUSTIN: Wow, you could fly– JUSTIN: I think this stopped relatively early, but like in the 80s or 90s or something, you could land a 747 here. LIAM: Holy shit, dude. BEN: 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. JUSTIN: Mmhm. JUSTIN: It has a lot of old-fashioned ideas implemented about how you run an airport terminal, so 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 deplane out of the weather. NOVA: Just scooches under. JUSTIN: Yeah, you just scooch the plane under, instead of having a jetway, which eventually we figured out was better. BEN: A plane court(?)! LIAM: Yeah, a plane court(?). JUSTIN: This was actually replicated post-war several times, most notably the Pan Am Worldport at LaGuardia*. [sub note: *at JFK] Recently demolished, which was a tragedy. BEN: 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. LIAM: Really? Mm. Interesting. BEN: Yeah. We'll talk about it later. It was weird. JUSTIN: Another interesting fact is, I think this is one of a total of three neoclassical airport terminals ever built. There was Croydon near London, and then there was– NOVA: Croydon Airport is interesting, because it sort of, like, has a similar trajectory, where it was like, okay, London needs, it's gonna need an airport, that's the way of the future, we're gonna need somewhere who can put this big grass strip, it was then immediately outgrown, and like, sort of persisted through to 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, this was an... escape route for oligarchs. But, um. JUSTIN: Then there was another neoclassical airport, which was Spilve in Riga, Latvia, which looks like a train terminal. It's kind of funny. [laughs] NOVA: Interesting. Maybe we should, like, retvrn with a V to those. JUSTIN: Well, they are fascist spaces, so, obviously. [laughs] LIAM: Yeah, the weird white supremacist cloak shit... they're gonna love that. The white paradise of the future, fucking Latvia. JUSTIN: Yeah. So this is, uh, I just want to talk about this for a bit, this is a very problematic fave of mine. Uh... [laughs] LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: This was of course also used for the Berlin Airlift. NOVA: That's right, that's why the square outside of it is the, uh, Luftbrücke Platz, or whatever. BEN: 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. NOVA: History happens to it. BEN: Yes, a lot of history occurs, and actually there are still– NOVA: And unfortunately when you cram a lot of history into small spaces, people tend to do things like starving to death. LIAM: They sure do. BEN: 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 done the Holocaust. NOVA: And 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. Uh, uh. BEN: 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 donut of, the whole of the donut 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 US 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– LIAM: Yeah, they didn't really take out the trash because then it just rises to the West German government. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: Right. [sarcastic] Haha. LIAM: Thank you. BEN: The man on the right there is a guy named Willy 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– [laughter] and there are social democrats who spent the–that's 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 “Ich bin 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... LIAM: Happens to the best of us. BEN: ...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 south of the city called Berlin Schönefeld, which you can see here– NOVA: It's like a beautiful little Warsaw Pact trade show, you've got the Hungarian buses with a big arse engine, LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: you've got your– JUSTIN: Oh yeah, it’s got the... JUSTIN: ...clerestory windows, too, oh my God. ...What's really funny is that the end of the terminal here– BEN: You’ve Trabant, in front. LIAM: Mm. JUSTIN: ...the end of the terminal here looks like English miners' housing. [laughter] NOVA: It does! It does! But you know what else it looks like, Is It looks like first generation Lego system. It looks like the way that Danes envisioned what's the simplest way to abstract a building. But I love the sort of socialist fraternal planespotting you can do here, where you've got TAROM, which is I believe Hungarian, you've got Aeroflot– BEN: Romania. Romania. NOVA: Ah, okay. NOVA: You've got Aeroflot and you've got Interflug, which is the DDR's airline. Just hanging out. BEN: Are you ready for more Interflug? Next slide please. NOVA: I am so ready for more Interflug. JUSTIN: Look at that Interflug. NOVA: Oh, beautiful. Look at that grey! BEN: 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 T-tail, there's four engines on the back next to the T-tail. JUSTIN: Oh, it's beautiful. [laughs] LIAM: I like this. BEN: 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 Bulgaria, on the Black Sea, and so there's a lot of that kind of flying, in addition to government kinds of flying. NOVA: Oh shit, we accidentally did aristocracy of labor, because we need to preserve some sort of semblance of East German industrial and technological capacity, and also because they'd order onto the West. JUSTIN: I like the Shell truck in the back here. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: I just, I– JUSTIN: ...doing a little bit of capitalism. LIAM: Just a bit. NOVA: Beautiful plane, though. Just... BEN: It is a beautiful, beautiful plane, and this airline, Interflug, was liquidated in the 1990s by– NOVA: Fucking Treuhand! BEN: By the fucking Treuhand, which is one of the worst and most corrupt organizations ever... 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 Treuhand did shock therapy to a quarter of it during the 90s, 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 even now– NOVA: If you do all of (?) of a former socialist country, it actually takes a screenshot. BEN: [laughs] So even now, the, like, 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 Ost-West... East-West divide, still very much present, and– NOVA: 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. BEN: ...Fueling the rise of the neo-Nazi party, the Alternative for Germany, which recent poll show has about 10% in Berlin and about 20% in the rural province Brandenburg surrounding Berlin. 27% in Saxony. NOVA: How could you vote for the AFD when we spent, like, a billion euros out of the cultural fund to restore the, like, the cathedral, and nothing else? BEN: Yeah. And also the other thing that happens is in the late 90s, German Tony Blair, who looks like the love child– a man named Gerhard Schröder, who looks like the love child of Tony Blair and an enormous ham, LIAM: [laughs] BEN: 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 and want to make a little extra money or teenagers, and certainly not something that people are going to have four or five of instead of having a real job. But it basically means that 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 14, 1,500 euros a month and having to pay for shitty private health insurance entirely out of pocket. LIAM: Cool. BEN: Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to the third airport in Berlin. You've got Tempelhof, the one in the middle of the city. You've got Schönefeld, which is the communist one, and now here we are looking down at Tegel Airport, which is built because Tempelhof 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. LIAM: Good lord. BEN: Who– NOVA: Trying to, like, restrain myself for the rest of the episode, however long that is. LIAM: Mein Gerkan. JUSTIN: “I really like hexagons.” BEN: Meinhard von Gerkan. NOVA: "...She meinhard on my gerkan till I Tegel." I– [incorrect buzzer noise] JUSTIN: Let's do hexagons. NOVA: She gerkan meinhard's– LIAM: Stop it. [incorrect buzzer noise] LIAM: ...Talk to me about the hexagon. LIAM: I wish to know the hexagon. BEN: Originally there was supposed to be three hexagons. Can we go one more slide, please? JUSTIN: Oh yeah. BEN: Look at the interior. JUSTIN: More hexagons! LIAM: Oh... like a Lamborghini! NOVA: Oh, design! Design is happening! BEN: 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 inter-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? JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: So do you see how there's two loops inside the hexagon where all the planes are parked, there's another road? JUSTIN: I see, yes. BEN: There's no... 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. JUSTIN: Now, was this built before there was such difficult airport security? BEN: Yeah, this is built in the 70s. This is built from... ...it is built with airport security, because it's built after the first hijackings, and it's opened after the Munich '72 Olympics situation. JUSTIN: So this was an intentional design, then? BEN: 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 of... I mean, there's a guy who made a movie about the 70s in West Berlin called My Wonderful Socialist West Berlin, because NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] BEN: it was like a planned economy JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: 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. JUSTIN: Okay, so that makes sense. BEN: So you’re coming to West Berlin directly. JUSTIN: 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. BEN: ...Each one is a security line for one– and they’re not all staffed at the same time... JUSTIN: Ah okay, yes, ‘cause there’s just one flight arriving at once, yeah... NOVA: ...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 regimented procedure, as you would expect, NOVA: of, like, if you break down on the one controlled highway in, you sit in your car on the hard shoulder and 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 like, so strange and so artificial, this weird enclave at the... like the end of Germany. It's very weird. LIAM: The Soviet (?), yeah. BEN: So, two more slides, please. So in 1989, you may have heard about this, the Soviet bloc collapses NOVA: 1989, history switched to the bad timeline. JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: So, various things happen throughout the 1990s. In 2006, there's always a plan that this is gonna happen. Tempelhof closes, and... they really reduce the number of flights going to Tempelhof 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... JUSTIN: ...this is ridiculous. LIAM: (?) flying here! BEN: And then some of the worst people in the world try to build on it... NOVA: Ah, property developers, right. BEN: 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 hangars 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. Like, everything, like nothing–’cause that was the most airtight language possible of never fucking put anything on this. LIAM: At least build a bathroom, goddamn! BEN: Unfortunately, BEN: 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 hangars 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 twelve white guys standing in front of a sign saying "Diversity United". JUSTIN: Oh my god. NOVA: [laughs] I love European politics... so much. BEN: So we already talked about social democracy– we're gonna get to The Greens in a minute, but that's a big sort of Green mood– NOVA: [laughs] BEN: 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 Tempelhof airport hangar. NOVA: Nice. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] BEN: 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. BEN: And people– JUSTIN: Or at least to get to the door of the nightclub before they get rejected. BEN: To get to the door of the nightclubs and then to go to the other nightclubs, yes. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] BEN: 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 Quonset hut Terminal C. When you're in Schönefeld, you're in a building– 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 someplace to sit down." [laughter] NOVA: Put that on the flag of your socialist organization. BEN: The way that you got to the easyJet gates to London at this airport, and I'm not making this up, this is how they told you to get there, is 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 Quonset hut pavilion. LIAM: Amazing. NOVA: Incredible. NOVA: I'm just... our goal is the sitting down in a comfy chair of all mankind. JUSTIN: This reminds me a lot of Washington Dulles. In that there's been a temporary terminal there that's been there for 50 years. [laughs] NOVA: 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. Y'know? BEN: So anyway, next slide please. In 1991, a man named Eberhard Diepgen, pictured, from the CDU, the We Definitely Aren't Former Nazis, center right party– NOVA: The most sort of, like, CDU-looking politician... BEN: 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. NOVA: They haven't quite made the transfer that 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 there yet. BEN: That's the Social Democrats, that's the SPD, we'll get to them in a minute, but... NOVA: [laughs] BEN: they have the bald, rimless... yeah. And then The Greens all look like art history professors. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: But anyway BEN: 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 Eberhard Diepgen 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. JUSTIN: That's the price of fiscal conservatism. LIAM: That’s right. We must be austere. BEN: Next slide, please. They have to figure out where they're going to put this airport, BEN: they consider a bunch of sites outside the city, and they decide to put it where Schönefeld 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, Otto Lillienthal, 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 Schönefeld Airport, the old communist one, and they decide they're going to build the new airport next to the old one. So 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. NOVA: You just build it on top of communism. BEN: Exactly. JUSTIN: ...you just build like 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. LIAM: Reuse... reduce, reuse, recycle, Rocz. JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: 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... LIAM: Oh, no. JUSTIN: Oh, okay. Alright. No. BEN: CDU. BEN: 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. JUSTIN: “Hey, hey kid. “Hey kid, you want an airport? “You want to buy an airport?“ [laughs] BEN: 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 Wowereit. Klaus Wowereit is the man who, you see how it says, “und 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 schwul 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”. LIAM: [laughs] BEN: 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. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: ...Modern Berlin is, it's his idea, he is the one who is like, yeah, sort of concrete, industrial music, things of this nature. BEN: 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 Eberhard Diepgen'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. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright, okay. BEN: Just so you have 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, you 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”. Then you'd reject it and take another one. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] BEN: We still have very cheap rent for a major city, but it's not like that anymore. And salaries here are also quite low. Anyway, so Wowereit wants to make this a public airport. He pays off the bidders, as we said, and he creates a new GmbH state owned corporation. If you think about that map that we just saw, it's right at the edge of Berlin, which is a donut's federal state of Germany, inside the donut hole federal state of Germany, sorry, inside the donut of the state of Brandenburg. And 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 Berlin and Brandenburg state ministries grant approval. Now the problem with this location is that it's next to a bunch of villages, 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. JUSTIN: Right, The opposite of what we wanted. BEN: The opposite of what we wanted. NOVA: Yeah, and they hadn't invented the Mud Wizard yet, to defend themselves. So. BEN: They had not yet invented the Mud Wizard. So, they sue– ...two years of lawsuits from 2004 to 2006, from, if you see these villages here, like Eichwalde, Wermsdorf, Gosen, Blankenfelde-Mahlow, Großbeeren, these are all extremely Brandenburg place names. Dahlewitz– There's a town out near here called Schmöckwitz, which I was taking a walk with my friend, Sholem, during the height of the pandemic. And we walked past a shuttered hair salon in this like, horrible–not “horrible”–in this very pretty but sort of depressed East German little town. And the sign on the hair salon said, “London, Paris, Milan, Schmöckwitz”. [laughter] LIAM: It's good to have dreams. BEN: 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– NOVA: No, but airports, like airport traffic grows every year until the pandemic. BEN: They end up having this takeoff curve called the Hoffmann curve, or the vomit curve. NOVA: Oh no. I don't like this at all. BEN: So if you look at the line extending, yeah, that one. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: In order for– BEN: ...when the wind is blowing such that you have to take off towards the east, in order to, if you're gonna fly east, you just keep flying east. But if you're gonna fly west, they had to, for this settlement, stop you from overflying Schulzendorf, Eichwalde, Zeuthen, and Wermsdorf. 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 gonna go ahead and say “too close to the ground”. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: And it has to be an extremely tight turn so that you avoid Mittenwalde and Zossen down there at the bottom. And the pilots unions do not like this, and it's not great. But... they keep going. NOVA: I would have extreme anxiety about this prospect. LIAM: No, I wouldn’t like that at all, no thank you. JUSTIN: Take the train. JUSTIN: It's Europe, take the train. LIAM: Yeah, there's lots of 'em. NOVA: I don't do well with just the combination of extremely fast, and then pitching up, take off, and then turning over after that; doing them both at the same time? I... JUSTIN: I can barely deal with a regular takeoff. BEN: I'm gonna be flying this take off tomorrow on a Ryanair 737 MAX, LIAM: Oh no! BEN: and so if this is the last thing I ever do, recording this podcast, I want to say, Mom, Dad, I love you. [laughter] BEN: Anyway. LIAM: I was just gonna say, what a horrible way to die, on a Ryanair flight out of Berlin, and then you're living my nightmare. BEN: Crashing, crashing in Schulzendorf. JUSTIN: “Wow, how do you like it now? This is your own fault!” [laughter] BEN: Next slide, please. So, who's gonna design this airport, but... Meinhard von Gerkan. NOVA: Meinhard von Gerkan... LIAM: Wow, that, yeah, that's a German. BEN: Yeah, that's one of the kinds of German. NOVA: This is every architect, like, currently working, more or less. JUSTIN: Well, no, it should be a turtleneck. LIAM: It could have been Calatrava, I suppose. JUSTIN: Oh, now that would have been funny. BEN: He's standing in front of our train station, next slide, please, to show you the interior. LIAM: Oh, the irony. JUSTIN: Oh, the Hauptbahnhof, yeah, this is the place where you don't have to... BEN: So, that’s the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. JUSTIN: You don’t have to take off weird here. BEN: 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, 06-07. 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 Meinhard von Gerkan. 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 renderite. This is not a Zaha Hadid building made out of renderite on a floating island in an artificial lagoon. JUSTIN: This looks like a realistic building that doesn't look too difficult to build. BEN: It is a mid-sized airport on a flat field. NOVA: It does have something of the carport about it. LIAM: That is achievable, one hopes. JUSTIN: It does look like this could be adjacent to a suburban split-level home. LIAM: Right. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: 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. A mid-sized airport on a flat field. Next slide, please. JUSTIN: It's not the world's craziest project. LIAM: Oh, we’ll get there. BEN: 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. LIAM: Jesus Christ... NOVA: [laughs] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 delays. From an initial announcement on the 5th of September 2006 to an opening date of the 31st of October 2020. JUSTIN: Coming from a United States transit project background, this doesn't look too bad to me. [laughter] BEN: So anyway, Wowereit, that gay mayor of Berlin, whose nickname is Wowi, and a guy named Rainer Schwarz, who's the head of the airport, start interfering a lot in the plans, because this is gonna be Klaus Wowereit's big project that's gonna make him the first gay Chancellor of Germany. NOVA: Gay Andrew Cuomo looms at this point. BEN: Mayors of Berlin are like mayors of New York City, in 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 gonna want them to run the country. LIAM: ...One big project away. BEN: When in fact that's why everyone will never want them to run the country. NOVA: Excuse me, gay Bill de Blasio, then. JUSTIN: Yeah. BEN: Actually, gay Bill de Blasio's 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–" LIAM: No it doesn't, shut up. JUSTIN: You probably don't like that. NOVA: This was at the height of Dubai envy, as well. BEN: And Meinhard von Gerkan is extremely mad about this, by the way, because it means that his big beautiful open space is gonna be full of subdivided duty free. JUSTIN: Someone went on Skyscraper Page and was like, yeah, we need that. Give me that. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: ...but I mean, this is the time that you have a huge amount of, like, sovereign wealth fund investing, like the 2010s, a shitload of Emirati money is flowing in, and everyone's like, yeah, okay, we should reciprocate this, and... we should get some big fucking Emirates Airbuses in here, and... BEN: 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 hub 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. NOVA: One of the biggest customers for A380s was Emirates, right? And I don't know if they wanted any direct flights to Berlin, but it must have been nice to have the option. BEN: It was Etihad, actually. NOVA: Oh, okay. BEN: Because Etihad invested in Air Berlin; we're gonna get to Air Berlin in a minute. NOVA: I knew there would be a sovereign wealth angle, though. BEN: 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. LIAM: Terrific. BEN: More square feet. 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, we cannot emphasize enough how much this airport was constructed. JUSTIN: I'm looking at the Indianapolis Airport on Google Maps right now, and this still looks smaller. JUSTIN: Um... [laughs] NOVA: I like all of the blonde wood accents. BEN: That goes through the whole airport, yep. NOVA: Someone who's been to the big... Nordic Social Democracy School of Architecture. BEN: Very that. And lots of burgundy also inside. ...how built was the airport? 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. NOVA: You just need someone to cut the ribbon at that point. BEN: 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... hub Berlin, which is not necessarily crazy; LOT Polish Airlines is doing this now. They're building this giant airport in the middle of Poland. Anyway, Etihad 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. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] They decide to test the fire alarm system because the building has to be approved by the fire marshal. LIAM: Oh boy. BEN: And this all comes from a big 2015 Bloomberg feature called 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– LIAM: YYEES. BEN: –oh, sorry, next to high voltage power. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh, that’s gonna cause a problem, yeah. BEN: All in one cable– NOVA: Ah, so the fire alarm is very useful and efficient, because it is also a source of fire. JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: Exactly. And then... BEN: 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. [laughter] NOVA: Great. No, this is beautiful. I do want to see a simulation of the smoke vent imploding, though. Very badly. BEN: We're gonna get back to the smoke vent in a minute. It turns out that the smoke vent was designed by an Italian guy pretending to be an engineer. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Okay? JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: 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? LIAM: Fuck you! BEN: So the fire alarm– JUSTIN: Just don't start a fire. BEN: 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 gonna open in 2012. And so in March 2012, ...Rainer Schwarz, the head of the airport, proposes to the fire marshal the following plan for the fire alarms: LIAM: Oh no. BEN: They're gonna 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. NOVA: Your job is fire alarm. JUSTIN: I don't like that. BEN: The problem with this is that Germany has some of the worst cellphone networks in the world, and... some of the people who were gonna be doing this job were supposed to be stationed near smoke evacuation channels, and the estimate was that in these locations, during a fire, the temperatures would be 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. NOVA: Just stand in the path of the, sort of, like, we'll evacuate the smoke over you. JUSTIN: Just blow on it real hard. BEN: Next slide, please. Still, they tell no-one, and continue planning to open this airport. NOVA: We're about to enter a new form of governance, which Teutonic or whatever will find very funny by gendering as Das Merkel. BEN: This is when I first came to Berlin, I had a plane ticket in to 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 Loge. 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 thermoses filled with coffee “and shouting into their cellphones, ‘open the fire door?'" JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Run it NOVA: Full employment, I think... Maybe we should consider this. NOVA: If you give those people a good living wage, JUSTIN: “We’ll do it live!” NOVA: y'know, NOVA: human fire alarm. BEN: That was the plan. And it didn't work. It didn't work. NOVA: And they have to cancel the party? BEN: They canceled the party, they canceled everything, LIAM: Nooo. BEN: 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 Wowereit resigns in disgrace, the governor of the state of Brandenburg who is also a social democrat, resigns in disgrace– NOVA: He was, like, hoist by his own petard of his, like, vanity project airport. That's beautiful. BEN: Yes. Yes. First gay mayor of Berlin goes down because of this airport. NOVA: On the pedestal these words appear. “Maybe just use, like, a bunch of guys on cellphones.” JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] BEN: On the pedestal these words appear: “Maybe just build a normal fucking airport.” NOVA: [laughs] BEN: So Rainer Schwarz is fired, he then sues and wins damages for being fired wrongly? NOVA: It's so funny to think about places that have 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. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: So everyone blames Meinhard von Gerkan, Meinhard von Gerkan blames Schwarz and Wowereit, Schwarz is replaced by a man named, another German name alert, Hartmut Mehdorn. LIAM: Good lord. BEN: And so Hartmut Mehdorn 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. NOVA: Oh my god. BEN: So they turn the fountain on, but then he says, you know, it'd be a good idea to turn the lights in the terminal off, because we're paying for all this electricity and 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. NOVA: You would have to, like, get all of your fire alarms to go around and unscrew 20,000 light bulbs or whatever. BEN: So, next slide please. After Klaus Wowereit, a man named Michael Müller becomes mayor of Berlin, so we're now, you can see, in our wireframe– NOVA: We’re into the wireframe glasses era, yes. BEN: Wireframe glasses era, yes. Michael Müller is a guy with absolutely no personality whatsoever. He is a sort of semi-decent guy, and he– Klaus Wowereit was in a coalition with the CDU, Müller 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. NOVA: ...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 do the thing, but to do the thing so flagrantly, that I almost am forced to admire it. BEN: So, next slide, please. NOVA: So is this our fake Italian? BEN: I mentioned– BEN: ...real Italian, fake engineer. LIAM: Oh boy. BEN: This was broken by the magazine Stern, so Alfredo di Mauro, who was the main designer of the smoke exhaust system, [sub note: yes, the name on screen is a typo, “Alfredo” is right] had business cards that said he was an engineer, but in fact his highest degree was he’s a draftsman. NOVA: I'm not quite sure how regulated these two things are in Germany, but I feel like this is– BEN: ...extremely regulated, so he was asked about this, and he said... JUSTIN: I’d figure so, yeah. BEN: He said, quote, "...no one asked about my university qualifications. “It wasn't necessary for the work we carried out." NOVA: “I told them I had a theoretical degree in physics,” I... NOVA: Incredible. JUSTIN: What was he engineering? LIAM: Do background checks better. BEN: So he was engineering the smoke system. Now, here's... part of the problem goes back to Meinhard von Gerkan. 'cause 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. NOVA: But smoke go up. JUSTIN: Smoke does go up, yes. This is, uh... BEN: And he also planned for, in a 340,000 square foot terminal, a fake engineer designed a smoke system which was supposed to have one main fan. LIAM: Oh, well–it was really big. You know? NOVA: ...How the fuck do you even get... LIAM: Big ass fans dot com. NOVA: ...the thing to implode, if you’re just trying to... push it with one fan? JUSTIN: I will say, globally, mechanical engineering is a lot less regulated than civil engineering. BEN: 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 turned 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. NOVA: 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 gotta suggest, why don't we, like, lower the fire safety standards? Did anyone dare do that here? BEN: The thing about Germany... JUSTIN: ...Already happened in this story. BEN: Yes, they did, that was the plan, I mean, that was the airport's plan. The thing about Germany that makes Germany different from 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 must die...” like, standards of 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. NOVA: No, my beautiful Nordic decor. LIAM: Nooo. BEN: 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. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: This company then goes bankrupt in August of 2015. In September of 2015 they immediately stop construction because of a “imminent collapse”, of the main roof of the terminal. LIAM: Hooray! [laughs] NOVA: Hey, but this is not so bad, because the roof is very thin and delicate, so it won’t be as dangerous when it crushes everybody. LIAM: Yeah, (?) saltines, yeah. JUSTIN: ...it's like a delicate blanket falling on you and comforting you. NOVA: Aaw. BEN: There's this organization called the TÜV, which does the 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.” NOVA: [German accent] “Yeah, like for a clown to use. “It's just what you are to me.” BEN: They have 11 miles of exhaust ducts to remove the fire smoke, those are leaking, and yeah. NOVA: That's more of a smoke disseminator. BEN: [laughs] It's a smoke disseminating system, it takes the smoke from the fire and puts it everywhere throughout. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: Next slide, please. NOVA: Just sorta, airport of vapes. BEN: 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. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Terrific. NOVA: You just have, like, total screen burn but it's on like a, “we'll be right back”, opening soon message. BEN: Literally. Literally–many of these screens for seven years were just showing the logo of the airport, and then got screenburned and had to be replaced. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: This is–capitalism is the most efficient distribution of resources. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise. BEN: In 2018, a board member of Lufthansa suggests tearing the whole thing down and building a new building. NOVA: This dude's name is Thorsten Dirks. Incredible. BEN: Thorsten Dirks. Yep. And then they do another attempt at certification in 2018, and they discover what TÜV describes as 863 major wiring issues. JUSTIN: All I can see here is, this building is a box. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: 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 like... the world's hugest feat of engineering. [laughs] BEN: 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. NOVA: [laughs] Just one more terminal, bro. Just one more terminal, I swear. It's gonna be different this time. BEN: Next slide, please. BEN: Terminal 2 is not designed by Meinhard von Gerkan, Terminal 2 is designed by... Legos, I think. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, let's get rid of the windows. That's probably the problem. [laughs] BEN: Yes. So this is the Ryanair terminal that they build. JUSTIN: So everyone's sort of stuck in there, like they're in the matrix pods, y'know? NOVA: 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. LIAM: Eventually everything is temporary, [Nova]. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: “Yeah, I've become quite philosophical about it during this time in the check-in line.” [laughs] NOVA: “I've watched the whole of Everything Everywhere All At Once since this.” LIAM: Strange people. NOVA: Yeah. BEN: A very strange people. 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. LIAM: Good, okay, cool. BEN: So the underground cabling beams and the foundation all need to be replaced. And also... JUSTIN: That's a difficult job right there. [laughs] BEN: There were also 700 kilometers of cable laid under the runways, which were not laid in waterproof ducts. LIAM: Come on, man. NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: You have to tear up, you 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? LIAM: Ugh, yes, yes. JUSTIN: In France, the runways were made of asphalt. That one's easy. NOVA: This is 2019. The original announcement was 2006! LIAM: Yeaaa! BEN: Yep! BEN: 13 years, baby! NOVA: 13 years! BEN: Thirteen years, baby! And this building– JUSTIN: I misspoke, these are not asphalt, these are concrete runways. That's gonna be very difficult and expensive. [laughs] BEN: 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– NOVA: Wait, wait, wait. I've just had a horrible thought. It's 2019. If this keeps going into 2020, it's gonna run straight into... LIAM: Oh boyyy. BEN: 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... mainline trains and the S-Bahn, which, the Schönefeld 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. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: I mean, it's good that they stopped... The Last of Us from happening down there; we dodged one pandemic out of this. That's good design, if you can get the airport done on time. [laughs] BEN: 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. NOVA: One of my favorite things about communism, one of my favorite things that it developed, is the sort of, like, sinecure. The guy who gets a uniform and a job to watch the elevator. Will he assist you if the elevator breaks? No he will not, he will stay in his old glass of a cabin thing. LIAM: Yeah, different union guy, good luck. NOVA: Yeah, yeah. We replicated that under capitalism, but also paid worse, and you might get a thousand degree blast of smoke that just leaves you a pile of charred bones. BEN: And also the rent is high and there's no apartments. NOVA: Soviet Union but shit and expensive. It's a universal phenomenon, it seems. JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: 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. NOVA: Just in time for the novel coronavirus. JUSTIN: Yes. BEN: Late, so it opens–they can't even have an opening party of any kind. Like, it opens with no fanfare whatsoever. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: One fun thing about the design of this building, and I really do think that Meinhard von Gerkan was not actually responsible for most of the problems here, but... 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. LIAM: You cannot escape the smoky death of time's magnifying glass, don't worry about it. JUSTIN: That's almost universal in, like, every building now– LIAM: Stop building shit! I don't want to see the outside! JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] I know I'm inside! Leave me alone! NOVA: Can't we just have nice windows instead of glass walls? JUSTIN: I know, right? LIAM: Nah, dude, it's brutal. BEN: 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. JUSTIN: Oh, there you go. BEN: 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? NOVA: Yeah. BEN: 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. And you notice how nowhere in any of this are there doors? JUSTIN: Right, yeah. LIAM: Cool. BEN: 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. LIAM: Terrific. JUSTIN: Now– LIAM: ...that's... that's... that's... that's– NOVA: The fact that this is built on top of the Communist airport, and the... like, this is a joke you would make about a Communist airport, is, oh, we built the airport under Communism as punishment, like, it ventilates itself with an icy blast every 90 seconds or whatever. BEN: 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 5, 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. NOVA: What? BEN: And, um– LIAM: What. No, back up! Back up! What? [laughs] JUSTIN: Okay, that’s an interesting one. What? NOVA: Sorry–mysterious electrical shocks? [laughs] JUSTIN: Ball lightning. JUSTIN: Ball lightning is generated in this terminal. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Jesus fuck. BEN: The people working at security keep being electrocuted by mysterious electrical shocks in the demon terminal. LIAM: Okay, yes, of course, the demon terminal. BEN: 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 7 billion euros building it instead of 2, and they're paying off all their bonds, so they have... horrible annual deficits, and it's corona, and so everyone needs money, and so no one wants to pour more money into this. 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 place. NOVA: Beautiful. What a triumph. BEN: Next slide, please. So in 2021, Michael Müller moves to the Bundestag and is replaced as mayor of Berlin by 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. NOVA: This is, uh... BEN: And on the right– NOVA: ...it's like Mao, “combat liberalism”, but “combat liberalism” is like an adjective instead of a verb, y'know? BEN: 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. NOVA: A piece of bread under seltzer. This is a big fucking... loaf of black bread. BEN: Larger than her head. This was when she was giving a speech about integration, because she used to be the mayor of Neukölln, and when she was the mayor of Neukölln, everyone who 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? NOVA: 24. LIAM: Oh, this guy has an uneven face. LIAM:... I was looking at a different picture, sorry. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: No, it's fine, just misgender the mayor of Berlin– LIAM: 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. BEN: Sike(?). LIAM: [laughs] BEN: How old is this person? NOVA: 24 years old. It's a hard– LIAM: 30, please, 30, come on, 30. JUSTIN: I can see somewhere between 40 and 65. BEN: Yeah, so she's 43 when she's elected in these pictures. JUSTIN: [laughs] BEN: And she looks, I mean, the joke is that she's like Berlin's social democrat, but she looks like and has the politics of the, like, CDU Minister of Agriculture of, like, Hessen. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: 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. LIAM: Ugh. Oh, most cursed timeline. Nope, take it back. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Take it back, bud. Take it back, bud. BEN: 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 Müller 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. NOVA: I don't know any parties like that. BEN: I know. Certainly no social democratic ones. Now, at the same time that she wins, Berlin passes 60-40, a ballot initiative to forcefully expropriate private landlords who own more than 3,000 flats, and turn this all into social housing again. JUSTIN: I heard about this one. BEN: Yeah. And so she makes a deal, because the Greens kind of want to do it, but not really. Die Linke, The Left, are the good party, and they do want to do it, and she does not want to do it. So she makes a... committee that's gonna 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– LIAM: Bro, what, no, back up! How do you fuck up an election so bad you get a do-over? BEN: Wait for it. The current poll leader in the redo of this election is, drumroll please, the CDU. Which is– LIAM: I am so mad right now. I'm so confused. [laughs] NOVA: The worst bag fumbling in electoral history. BEN: And the CDU has run a campaign of being even more racist than normal. LIAM: Oh, no. BEN: Every year in Berlin, on New Year's Eve, the city turns into a fireworks warzone, and actually the CDU– NOVA: Oh, I see already the way this is going. BEN: The CDU... makes a big show about how they don't want to ban fireworks, because fireworks in (?) a great German tradition. But then, it turns out that the... cops lie about shit, and so the cops and 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. NOVA: Oh, because German criminal anonymity laws, like, if you get arrested for something they'll just, y'know, publicize your name, it's like, Matias V. or whatever. BEN: Matias V., right, so basically... they want to point out that... they want to make this thing about, like, oh, they're all Mohammed F. and Ahmed L., and... and it worked. They had a whole... three week long national media freakout 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. JUSTIN: You know, before you expropriate the landlords, the landlords do have to get their two cents in. I mean, that's democracy right there. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: And this is why we're all charter members of the Party for Moderate Progress and Reform Within the Law. LIAM: Chairwoman, [November Kelly]. BEN: The party of the... That is the Christian Democratic Union Next slide, please. Just to add the final little, uh, the little, uh, final– NOVA: ...Little boxes, but ultimately we get to the the final European form of the little box: the little box that's a little prison. JUSTIN: It's actually a large box. BEN: Yes. A little cop prison box. And so, um, this is in the Brandenburg government, because this is on the Brandenburg side, um, but... so there’s a... there's a private investor who's gonna build a private deportation center... LIAM: Aw, come on, man. BEN: And his name is Jürgen B. Harder. LIAM: I bet it is. LIAM: I bet that it is. NOVA: That's a porn star, sorry. No. BEN: Jürgen B. Harder, who was– LIAM: Jürgen B. Harder. Yeaaah. You wanna slurp that German sausage? Yeah– No, go ahead. JUSTIN: So can you just pay to have anyone else be deported, or like what? BEN: Who is not one of the bartenders at Lab.oratory, but is instead a corrupt Brandenburg real estate investor, NOVA: [laughs] ...sorta 50-50. BEN: is set to make millions of euros of profits over the 30 year contract, of running the deportation center. BEN: Um, by 2020– NOVA: 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,”–Dev, we're gonna have to bleep this– but I think– [bleeping noise] –you know? I think that’s fair. LIAM: Yeah. Yeah, instantly– [bleeping noise] NOVA: ...reasonable. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Yeah, some sort of... yeah. LIAM: I agree with that. BEN: 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 bleeped. I do not endorse what was bleeped. JUSTIN: If there's a private deportation center, I should be able to pay to have anyone I want deported. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is how capitalism works, right? NOVA: Yeah, this is like the ancap deportation center. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Oh God. [laughs] BEN: The plan is that they're gonna 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. LIAM: Terrific. JUSTIN: Sounds about right. NOVA: That's, I mean, coming from a British perspective, that's remarkably low, even. Like... Reprehensible, but... we somehow managed to outdo you on this, I feel. BEN: And so that's the story of the extremely stupid and bad Berlin Brandenburg Airport. NOVA: And pretty soon I'm gonna be, I imagine, flying into this and getting absolutely frozen, and now I'll know why. BEN: What airline are you flying? Are you flying a low-cost airline? Are you flying a... NOVA: Uh, yes. Yeah, I will be. BEN: easyJet or Ryanair? NOVA: easyJet, probably. BEN: Okay, if it's easyJet, then you're flying into the main terminal, if it's Ryanair, then you fly into the windowless box. NOVA: Cool. I get to sort of pick my terminal. JUSTIN: Gotta really rub it in, y'know. NOVA: Yeah, yeah. BEN: Yeah. It's, uh, it's a great work of our–I'll be flying out of the windowless box tomorrow. NOVA: Safe travels. BEN: It'll be great. NOVA: What an absolute disaster. BEN: Taking the vomit curve from the 7.3 billion euro windowless box over the private deportation center. LIAM: Terrific. NOVA: [quietly] Oh no. Do they still do the vomit curve, that hasn't changed at all? BEN: No, the vomit curve is part of the–it's one of the official flight plans for leaving... NOVA: Right. Right. BEN: Yeah. One of the official flight plans. NOVA: I no longer want to go to Berlin for the live show. [sad laughter] JUSTIN: I'm just saying. LIAM: Not sure about that, huh(?) NOVA: No, I know, I’ll just suck it up. JUSTIN: Given American cost overruns and delays, this doesn't seem that bad to me. This seems fine. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: [laughs] This is like, normal. LIAM: Yeah. LIAM: Yeah, your brain is broken, bud. Your brain is broken, bud. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is a good outcome. LIAM: I'm gonna punch you. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] BEN: Oh, just one last final thing, there was a... so the airport is named after Willy Brandt, 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... BEN: there were all these different ideas who they should name it after. They kept Willy Brandt, but then at some point– NOVA: “Rosa Luxemburg”! BEN: At some point, the Willy Brandt 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. NOVA: Too late. Too late. BEN: But anyway, there it is. Social democracy. Berlin Brandenburg Airport. NOVA: I feel like I've learned so much about German politics, and it's all bad. LIAM: It is all bad. Most politics are. NOVA: Go back to Interflug. Retvrn to tradition, you know. Reject modernity, embrace illusion. BEN: We're gonna close down Berghain, we're gonna reopen the turbine halls, and make it into a big coal-fired... cogeneration plant for heat and electricity. NOVA: The kind of thing that has me understanding the impulse behind the wildly illegal ten-person continuation SED, you know? [laughs] The party that's like, put it all back! Put it all back the way it was! [laughter] BEN: I mean, Die Linke, the political party of which I am a member, is the successor party of the former SED. NOVA: Not if you ask those ten people. BEN: 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. NOVA: I guess the lesson here is, if you are a listener in Germany, and you are able to... ...vote for Die Linke, um... Otherwise? BEN: You should do that, especially in Berlin, where in Berlin they are run by good gay Klaus, so bad gay Klaus was Klaus Wowereit, good gay Klaus is Klaus Lederer. NOVA: 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. BEN: Yes, although... we may be losing ours. NOVA: Oh, goddammit. BEN: 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. Die Linke would be a whole other episode of this party– 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. Sahra 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 an entire book about it, JUSTIN: How much does this project end up costing? BEN: was seemingly never asked. NOVA: It was like seven billion euros, right? JUSTIN: Seven billion, okay, so... LIAM: He froze, he froze– Ben? ♪[technical difficulties music]♪ NOVA: Oh. NOVA: At least we got... almost everything done? LIAM: There he is, there he is, there he is. JUSTIN: Oh, he’s back. BEN: I’m here! So, NOVA: Hi again. LIAM: Hi Ben. BEN: did we get that audio, or am I gonna need to...? JUSTIN: You cut out immediately after I asked how much the project actually cost. BEN: Great. So, I'll come in now. So it cost 7.3 billion euros. JUSTIN: I was just gonna say, that's actually, uh, 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. [laughs] NOVA: If only the United States were as dysfunctional politically... as Berlin, as Germany. JUSTIN: Yes, I am in awe at how cheap and how well done this project was. This is my thing. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] BEN: This is like Germany's great national shame, and in the US this would be the thing that would get you from being the mayor of New York to being president or whatever. NOVA: Yeah... NOVA: Pete Buttigieg has to do this, he can be gay president now. JUSTIN: Oh, this is what Andrew Cuomo wanted to do. [laughs] NOVA: Mmm. BEN: Oh God. 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, um, 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. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: What? BEN: Like, there's like weird quotes that no one ever said, like, “Empire State is the state of prosperity”, and yes, like, weird shit all over the walls, that building is just full of bizarre... BEN: Andrew Cuomo touches. NOVA: They find it in the... post-apocalypse, and they're like, "this Andrew Cuomo must have been a mighty warlord, "a powerful leader revered in their culture." JUSTIN: The thing is, the LCD screens are not gonna last that long. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: How much did Moynihan cost? BEN: Famously, they only last seven years, right? NOVA: Mmhm. Yeah, I mean, the line on Penn Station ultimately is, “under Communism you had somewhere to sit.” JUSTIN: Yes. The, uh... okay, that was only 1.6 billion dollars, so that was one... seventh of the... ah, one sixth, one sixth of this airport. BEN: One sixth, one seventh of this airport. And again, Penn Station, Moynihan Station, okay, it wasn't a whole new building. But it was... JUSTIN: But they just put on atrium in an existing building. BEN: 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 mid-size airport which is built in the middle of an empty field, which is flat. And one of the runways is already built. JUSTIN: We gotta go all the way to the back of the Walgreens, and then push a button to call a staff member to get a train beer, LIAM: That's ridiculous. JUSTIN: at Moynihan Train Hall. NOVA: It's all Get Smart shit. Can we do Safety Third? I've been podcasting for five and a half hours. JUSTIN: Yeah, we can do that. NOVA: Thank you. JUSTIN: Did we ask, what did we learn? LIAM: No, we didn't learn anything. NOVA: ...be more like Germany, form a sort of left-wing political party, try not to have it tear itself apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. BEN: 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, and uh... NOVA: Das ist auch gut so. BEN: Und das ist auch gut so. JUSTIN: The worst embarrassment of a European infrastructure project is still cheaper than an exemplary American one. [laughs] BEN: This is not... Stuttgart 21, which is... the new train station in Stuttgart, still not done. NOVA: Oh, people mentioned that to us before. Yeah. BEN: Still not done. Take a look at that some day. JUSTIN: Again, it would go a lot slower in America. [laughs] [crosstalk] JUSTIN: We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. ♪[Shake hands with danger]♪ NOVA: Sorry, I jumped the gun a little bit there. But also I don't want to take it again. JUSTIN: Hold on, let me bring up the notes here. “Greetings from, ellipses, ellipses, ellipses, “Idaho. NOVA: So sorry. JUSTIN: “No, I don't shoot up smack, “that's not a track mark there on my arm, “I donate platelets. “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.” BEN: You see, I am not allowed to donate blood, because I will not lie to the government and tell it that I'm monogamous. NOVA: Yeah, nor should you. BEN: No. JUSTIN: This is true. “To get at those platelets, I get strapped to a centrifuge. NOVA: Sorry, what? JUSTIN: “I mean, not my”– NOVA: What sort of James Bond bullshit? JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: We're gonna put you in the fucking wiggler, JUSTIN: [laughs] and we're gonna wiggle the platelets out of you. This is normal, this is healthy. JUSTIN: “Now, I mean, not my entire body like an astronaut in training, “but they stick a needle in me, and send my blood NOVA: Oh. NOVA: That’s less fun. “into the machine that spin-separates it, extracts the desired part–” NOVA: [laughs] They got me on a spin cycle and shit. JUSTIN: “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 okay, they give you the rest of it back. It's a good deal. NOVA: You get, like, cashback. Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] BEN: 10% on every eligible purchase. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: “These machines are a single venipuncture system, “so they both draw and return via the same very large needle. BEN: Ahhh. BEN: I don't like that. NOVA: Weird fluid dynamics shit. BEN: I don't like that. JUSTIN: “Makes you want to taunt those poorly endowed vaccine shots, right, “where you ask, are you in yet?” [laughs] LIAM: Jesus Christ. JUSTIN: That was my experience getting the first vaccine. Second vaccine, I noticed it, though. [laughs] “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.” NOVA: 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 ten minutes. JUSTIN: Yeah, that sounds about right to me. JUSTIN: “On one visit,”-- NOVA: Can't be on my phone? I can't read my little military history Wikipedia articles to keep myself calm? No, no, sorry. JUSTIN: “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.” NOVA: “He had this weird barcode tattoo on the back of his head.” LIAM and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: “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 whir and spin “its little dial-looking things for a while before it's jabbin' time.” NOVA: They don't like that it's jabbin' time. LIAM: [laughs] Yeah. JUSTIN: “Alas, I wasn't mindful enough to raise concern about this.” NOVA: Me in any medical situation. “It's probably fine. It'd go away on its own. “They're the experts, you're not doing anything wrong.” JUSTIN: I trust the medical professional most of the time. NOVA: I was brave for the doctor, I want a sticker, and a lollipop. JUSTIN and LIAM: Yep. JUSTIN: “The needle went in, and as the machine spun up, there was “a strong and audible vibration at the puncture site.” NOVA: No. JUSTIN: [laughs] “You may rightly guess that this does not usually happen.” NOVA: You're getting like a notification. BEN: That's not good. JUSTIN: “I think I recall he tried to make adjustments and retry it, “but the same thing happened again. “Needless to say, the donation was canceled.” NOVA: That's fine, I mean, like, no harm no foul. JUSTIN: Yeah, it's probably fine. “They disconnected me, and I headed to the canteen, disappointed. “Hopefully some little kid with cancer “wasn't going to be even more disappointed. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: “While sitting there, contemplating if eating a bag of chips or a cookie was warranted, “after an aborted attempt, one of the staff– NOVA: 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 done. I just stop on the way back and get myself the most dangerously sugary thing I can. JUSTIN: Yes. That's a smart thing to do, You're down some blood, you gotta get the blood sugar back up on what remains. NOVA: That’s right. JUSTIN: “One of the staff members came by and asked if I was okay. “And I answered no. “I think they asked that question because my face was turning bright red. “My mind thought back to the little speech “that they have to tell you every time you were 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. “Why, these things I am experiencing appear to closely match “the symptoms of a pulmonary... embolism.” LIAM: Oh Jesus. NOVA: One of the things that I dislike most about the human body is that, this also closely matches the symptoms of a panic attack. [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, this is true, yes. And then you start conflating things, and you start to panic more, and you get an actual pulmonary embolism. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] No you don't. JUSTIN: No you don't, yeah, that's a different source, yeah. BEN: It's this me tomorrow on the vomit curve on the Ryanair 737 Max, JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] BEN: watching the window, watching the tip of the wing get within 100m of the ground, screaming to the flight attendant that I'm having a pulmonary embolism. JUSTIN: Gotta get one of those Air Force pressure suits, y'know. [laughs] NOVA: Mm, yeah. JUSTIN: “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.” NOVA: I hope you don't have a lot of body hair, cause that's, uh, yeah. JUSTIN: Gotta do it quick. “Fortunately, my symptoms subsided after some time lying down with my legs elevated, “and I went home more or less intact.” NOVA: This is a thing that, again, is not sort of popularly known. 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. JUSTIN: But uh, “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.” LIAM: You deserve it. Don't worry. NOVA: It’s an “embolism” so you get “embolised”, that makes sense. LIAM: –Not deserve being embolized, but you deserve to use the word. JUSTIN: Exactly. “Lesson learned, it's super important to do the steps in order, “and speak up if you suspect something is being done wrong. JUSTIN: “I still donate platelets–” NOVA: Oh God, I'm not gonna be very good at that part. JUSTIN: “I still donate platelets to this day, “twice a month if my scheduling works out, “despite that bad experience. NOVA: Heroic. JUSTIN: “And, now that I think about it, BEN: Genuinely noble. JUSTIN: “I don't think I ever saw that one phlebotomist again.” NOVA: Yeah, they killed him. [laughs] He's gone. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: He's in like 250 different blood bags at this point. JUSTIN: They gave him the embolism. [laughs] BEN: That phlebotomist is now working on Needle Night at Lab.oratory. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] “By the way, you should always obey the cautionary instructions they 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.” JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: Thank you to our writer, The Blood Dumbass. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: I say that affectionately, but why– JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: That's more sort of blood-related mishaps than most people experience in their entire lives. JUSTIN: Yeah, I was about to say that. JUSTIN: “Yours truly, in Idaho, Prince of Platelets. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: “I hated it when I thought of it, but I'm still putting it in here. NOVA: My liege. NOVA: Well, thank you for your service. We made it through. JUSTIN: Yeah, we made it through. No one fainted. [laughs] NOVA: Safety third. ♪[Shake hands with danger]♪ JUSTIN: Yes, that was safety third. JUSTIN: Our next episode is Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? NOVA: Yeah, if the people want more Ben, where can they find more Ben? JUSTIN: Where can they find more Ben? BEN: If people want more Ben, you can listen to my podcast that I do with Huw Lemmey, which is called Bad Gays. It's a podcast about gay disasters in history, without slides. NOVA: It’s really good. BEN: It's about evil and complicated queer people in history. NOVA: You genuinely should listen to it. BEN: 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. You can find me on Twitter @benwritesthings,, because that's what I do. You can also find me tomorrow at Berlin Brandenburg Airport in the windowless box, JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] BEN: preparing to die on a 737 MAX flown by Ryanair's Maltese subsidiary, Air Malta, NOVA: [concerned laughter] JUSTIN: Oh my god. BEN: which they have because that's where they can pay the flight attendants Maltese minimum wage. NOVA: [laughs] BEN: Not making (?), you know. Getting ready to take the vomit curve to fly to London Stansted Airport. NOVA: Well, Ben, thank you so much for coming on, it’s been an absolute delight. We’ve all learned a lot. BEN: ...For my last public appearance. NOVA: [laughs] We'll put a little in memoriam thing up at the end– Actually, I think that's gonna be funny to do, so we'll just do that anyway, regardless of if you die. [laughs] So yeah, listen to Bad Gays, buy the book, support us by subscribing to our Patreon, we do bonus episodes. Next one's gonna be on... what is the next one gonna be on? JUSTIN: We were gonna do Frank Furness. Philadelphia Architect Frank Furness. NOVA: Alright, it's gonna be that. Whenever that happens. In the meantime, thank you for watching? Listening? LIAM: Or listening, whichever. JUSTIN: Yeah, I was about to say, you seemed oddly quizzical on that one. NOVA: I feel oddly quizzical, but that's because the madness is starting to set in. JUSTIN: We apologize for you watching. LIAM: Goodbye everybody. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: We apologize for this disappointing outcome, JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: and resolve to do better in future.