Ones and Tooze - Live From Berlin

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This is the ones and twos podcast. I assume you're all in the right place. It is very cool to be doing this here in Berlin. We've done live shows in various other places, but this is the podcast 1 of the podcast's homes. It's it's our summer home, maybe we could call it.

But, yeah, this is not our 1st show here. But, for our listeners at home, who are not in the room, just to give them a sense of the atmosphere. It is something of a a kind of beer hall atmosphere. Is that a fair description? You know,

we'll 19 see twenties KPD, you know, dive.

Yeah. We'll see where where this ends up. If we all end up marching out on the streets afterwards, if there's a revolution, I guess our listeners will already have heard about it, at home. But, in any case, otherwise, we will assume this will be a normal, podcast with, the exception that we will be taking questions from the audience, which is always a great, part of these live shows. So you can already start thinking about what you might wanna ask.

We will get to that towards the end of the show, and there will be a microphone that goes around. But in the meantime, we will, talk about 3 topics, today, broadly speaking. 1 topic, about Germany, which is obviously where we are right now. Also, more specifically, 1 topic will be about Berlin. And then we will talk about we'll end

off

with a a sports topic. And I guess I can already reveal that will be about the World Cup tournament that is starting. Oh, wow. Okay. For the audience at home, the lights just went on us.

Now we can't see you at all.

Yeah. Is Swings around about. All the better, maybe. But yeah, so those 3 topics in that order. And so we will start by talking about Germany.

And the data point there is 70, according to some reports that have come out. That is 1 of the proposals for retirement age in Germany. That would be a significant increase, from the current retirement age. And we've talked about the government of Friedrich Mertz here, on the podcast before. We've talked a lot about the kind of stimulus, programs that the government put into effect at the beginning of taking office, the infrastructure program, the spending on the military.

But, what the German government right now is most acutely focused on is a series of reforms, as they call them, that will soon be unveiled that will basically, broadly speaking, reduce the welfare state or reduce certain security provisions in the bid to make the German economy more productive, so the government says. And among those reforms would be changes to labor law, changes to welfare payments to the unemployed, changes to statutory health insurance, and then most specifically, also changes to retirement provisions that the German government provides. And, yeah, there's already discussion, again, of both increasing the retirement age, of other ways of saving money by maybe even cutting pensions, reducing insurance protections for the elderly, maybe even forcing the children of retired people to pay more care for their parents. So a whole bunch of options here that the government feels compelled to pursue. But I was curious, Adam, how right now, even as a snapshot or given these changes that are being discussed, how does elderly care and state assistance for the elderly compare in Germany to The United States?

I mean, it does strike me that the German government is saying it's forced to do this. But frankly, a few years ago, 1 of the innovations of Donald Trump's Republican Party was to just stop talking about cutting Medicare, stop talking about cutting Social Security entirely. So is this 1 area where The United States actually maybe offers more security to the elderly than Germany does?

Yeah. If you look at the wealth distribution, which is key for thinking about pensioner security, right, because people are living off their savings essentially, you could get the impression that America is vastly better off because wealth measured per capita on the average is substantially higher in The United States than is in Germany. This is compounded by the fact that Germans, especially elderly Germans, don't tend to own their apartments and what they live in. There are 2 adjustments you need to make. A, you need to go from the average to the median.

In other words, not just ask what the mean is, but where the 50% mark is. And if you actually look at that distribution, you'll see that Germany, in fact, around the middle of the income and wealth distribution, people in their old age are already better off. If you include pension wealth, in other words, the capitalized value of pension entitlements through the social security system, Germans are hundreds of thousands of dollars better off in the middle phase of the wealth and income distribution than the average American. Because our sense of the prosperity and well-being and affluence of retired Americans is entirely dominated by the experience of the top 10 to 20%, the people with 401ks. The vast majority of Americans may have a 4 0 1 ks but they have a derisory amount of money in it.

And this isn't surprising from a historical point of view because Germany is after all the home territory of pensions. 1 of Bismarck's great innovations in the 1880s was to have created a pension system to wrong foot the socialists. It was very stingy. It kicked in at the age of 70 at a period when life expectancy at birth was 40. So they weren't expecting people to claim it or to claim it very long.

But by 1916, the Germans had actually reduced the pension age to 65 which is the threshold that they've subsequently moved away from. And the basic understanding of the German pension system throughout this period is that it inscribes lifetime work hierarchy as the metric against which retirement income or retirement status will be measured. So post retirement incomes are substantial fractions, 50, 60, 70% of lifetime income while earning through the social security system. Whereas the origin of the American pension system is the crisis of the Great Depression. America got social security in 1935.

That's 50 years after Germany. And the basic model in The United States is poverty prevention. So it's a minimum income kind of support system that guarantees Americans in retirement if you're really just living off social security, a smaller fraction of your lifetime income than you would get out of the German system. There's a reason why the politics of the German pension system are as serious as they are because this really is in many ways the apple. It's core of the German Zurcherstadt to a much greater extent than other people would imagine.

The only equivalent I can think of is the NHS system in Britain, which also has this totemic quality for Britain self understanding. And this is before we've even gotten into the conversation about the special status of Bamtin, and the social hierarchy that runs through the German social system is incredibly pronounced. That's why the stakes are so high in this conversation.

I mean, are a lot of sort of tragic stories that are cited of elderly forced to pick up bottles bottles on the streets and and I mean but and which I don't doubt are true.

Pension poverty is true in Germany as well, but it's at the 11% level rather than the 24% level in The US.

So we will soon know what the reforms are. We don't yet, and I'm sure we'll return to that in the podcast. But but to shift to another topic concerning, the current German national government, there was just a major defeat that, the German government, faced at the UN Security Council. The U the Germany tried to join the Security Council and was basically rejected in its bid to do so. And on 1 hand, this is ironic.

Right? I mean, because Germany if there is a country in the world that cares about the United Nations you know, The United Nations right now is on hard times. The United States has turned its back on the United Nations. Germany still cares about the United Nations. And yet it was rejected.

And so is this Mertz's fault? I mean, what exactly went wrong here?

Yeah, once attempted to say it's no longer just the sick country of Europe. It's the sick country of the world at this point. Yeah, I mean, if you look at Baerbok's face, as she was reading out the results, We

should

say She reads out the Portuguese number, and then she reads out the Austrian number, and the assembly erupts into applause, and then she has to read out the German number, and it's

I I should add here or or clarify for listeners that that Germans even happen to know who the head of the German the the the the UN general assembly even is. That's a German herself. German foreign minister.

Germany is the 2nd large funder of the UN. The UN provides an absolutely key legitimating function for Germany's thinking about international law and standing in the world. It's absolutely, it's kind of a core component, so we shouldn't be too cynical about this, but it is devastating. The politics of the elected seats in the Security Council is weird, right? So, there are 5 permanent, there are 10 temporary, they're elected every, there's a new election cycle every 2 years.

Apparently it's a standing ambition of German diplomacy to secure election to a 2 year term every 8 years. So every 4 cycles, I had no idea this was actually a German. So they've been on 6 times and they were desperate to get on again. And what's exploded and it's revealing in its indeterminacy is a kind of an interpretive mud fight about why Germany is not. And they can't agree.

So I've heard 6 or 7 different explanations. 1 is that they apparently the Portuguese and the Austrian started campaigning for a seat on the Security Council in 2011. So this is like campaigning for a World Cup bid. We'll come on The to that in a Germans didn't. They did it more recently.

Another explanation is that Russia doesn't like Germany because of Ukraine. And so behind the scenes, the Russians have been manipulating. And this is all completely indeterminate because it's a secret ballot. So you don't even know. A bareboat was genuinely surprised I think.

It was really like a lottery. She didn't see it coming. And Austria was neutral. And so Austria, classically cold war, gets less hassle than Germany. Then there's the elephant in the room which is Germany support for Israel which kind of served as a deadweight on the German campaign.

And the German diplomats were very quick to point the finger and say, it's because of our historic obligation to Israel that we paid this price. So it's a kind of sense of the price that has to be paid. Then there's a more general sense of hypocrisy that might be in play. Like why is it that Germany invokes international law sometimes but not very loudly when it comes to Venezuela or Iran. Then there's the age cuts.

The fact that Portugal sustains much closer relations with lusophone Africa and Latin Latin America relations than Germany does. So there's a sort of general sense of malaise but no 1 really knows and onto this Rorschach plot of, they don't love us, are we the baddies? That kind of shift in perspective these fantasies are being projected. But it's definitely not Mertz only. Think this is the crucial thing to say, he may be responsible for many Only.

But it isn't just

they do.

It isn't just Merx. They don't like Merx. No. It's a more general sense of malaise here.

Okay. When you say campaigning also, wonder what does even that involve? The

German foreign minister apparently saw during a week long stay in New York, which for foreign ministers an unusually long time place to be in 1 place, he saw 80 delegations. And and So he was scheduled to see delegations every 20 minutes for a week. Like twisting arms, trying to get them to agree.

He should have brought some like Bayern Munich tickets

and something

you were

like, know. It was his like, I don't have anything to blame myself for, was his was his summary of the week in New York.

Well, to shift topics once more It's kaleidoscopic today. Talking about Germany. The other big topic that is coming quickly for Germany, even if people outside of Germany don't yet know it, is the question of the AFD, the alternative for Germany party, the far right party that is is is maintaining very high levels in the polls. And there are a number of state level elections coming up in which they may potentially even become a majority. They may comprise a majority on their own and may take power in certain German states.

Now Germany still is maintaining what it calls a firewall with the IFD. In other words, all the other mainstream parties refused to cooperate with it. And yet, I guess I feel compelled to ask, there are plenty of other countries in Europe where the far right parties have governed in cooperation with other mainstream parties. Mean, there are some European countries where that's the case right now Sweden. There are other examples as well.

And so what should we be making of this firewall? I mean, should Germany be an exception to what we see elsewhere in Europe in that respect? And if so, if it should be an exception, is that because of Germany's history specifically? Or is it because of the nature of the AFD specifically?

Yeah. I I think this is a really, really pressing question. I'm about to sit down with a grand total of 6 hours of YouTube and podcast with Bjorn Hacker in the next coming days.

We have a special guest actually. No.

Joe, Joe, no, no, no. But I mean, this stuff is getting huge numbers, This big podcast, he's done over 5,000,000 views. That's that's an incredible breakthrough event in media terms that he is getting this kind of, it's a 4 hour interview. That's like 3 times as much as me and Thilo Jung. It's like terrifying.

I I should clarify for listeners at home. This is the leader of the most extreme faction of the far right party in Germany. His name is Bjorn Huche and is making the rounds on YouTube right now.

And we should explain more that this I would like to be more precise about this. I would say that the Brandtmauer, the firewall question, is not a question for Germany in total, it's a question for the CDU. It's a question for centrist conservatives in Germany. And that's gonna be my get out of jail free card in the way I'm gonna not respond to your question. But let's 1st of all just spell out, there's a date that people should remember which is the 09/06/2026.

And that's when Saxon Anhalt goes to the Poles. So this is a small state in East Germany. It's not Saxony proper for those of you who aren't into the German scene. So this isn't Saxony with Dresden. This is Saxony with Magdeburg as its capital.

It's got just over 2,000,000 inhabitants in a country of almost 83, 84,000,000. So this is a small place. It's like Queens in New York or something like that. And they're voting. And it's terrifying because in the polling in Saxon Anhalt, the AFD is polling not at like 27% as it is nationally, but at 40% plus.

The CDU is in the mid 20s. And so were it to come to an election and the tiny parties should fail to meet the 5% threshold, there's even the possibility that the AFD could be allocated a majority of seats in the Saxon Anhalt parliament. And if the CDU, the Christian Democrats, Chancellor Merz's party were gonna try and form a government against the AFD, they would need to be in coalition with everyone else. And that isn't the SPD, the social democrats with whom they're in government nationally, because they're at like 8% in the polls. It would have to be de linker.

That is the left wing party which descended from at least 1 of its branches from the successors to the SED, the former ruling party of East Germany. And guess what, the CDU also has a firewall against coalitions with them. But they're at 13%. So we're now in this real dilemma of how you form viable national democratic governments. And I don't think we should, I'm not cool with the playing this down.

It is true that Maloney rules in Italy and we've kind of normalized that. But we should normalize the fact we've normalized that. It's a scandal, it's horrifying. It's totally terrifying. Same with Sweden.

This is a nightmare and there is a real sense this summer in Germany that people are not really fully realizing the worst case scenario that is coming towards us fast. It is really, really bad news. But having said that, it seems to me we also, and I can't speak for the CDU, can't and I can't literally get inside their heads at all. They have Nertz as chancellor. What the hell?

Like he's at 15% positive. Like for heaven's sake, after Olaf Scholz, could Germany's mainstream parties actually pick a talented politician to govern with. We might get somewhere. So I don't really feel it's my job or even I don't even feel called upon to advise them on the choices they should be making other than to say if we were talking to the SPD and delinker, I would certainly advise them to swallow down their gag reflex and think hard about how they might be able to form governments with the CDU or at least some kind of party of toleration with the CDU. What is really interesting is the polling on this question, not just my opinion, but in the German public.

And 1 of the alarming pieces of information that's gone through the news recently is that the previously solid majority of general German voters, this imaginary thing that was solidly in favor of the firewall. In other words, against any compromises by the CDU with the AFD, that balance has shifted now down to the level which is 47%, 47%, 47% in favor of the firewall, 47% against. But the problem is that polling and they don't tell you includes all the AFD voters who now make up between 2530% shall we say AFD curious voters. If you actually poll CDU voters on this question it's 60% in favor of the firewall against compromise with the AFD, 30% who are open to the idea. So if you're leading the CDU right now and you are dallying with this question, you are risking a really profound break within your party.

And what's really interesting is that on the other side, on the question of whether or not there should be an exclusion of de linker from German politics, because it's both of those exclusions which have defined German democracy since the 1990s, opinion is shifting fast even within the CDU. So there is now only a tiny, it's like 51% majority of CDU voters who on principle reject any possibility of collaboration with delinker. And that I see as like steps towards an accommodation with the reality that we're facing. Because this is really a dangerous scene that we're moving towards. If you're in the business of trying to hold the CDU together right now, I think you're playing with fire if you open this up.

Because the polling within the party itself is really quite unambiguous.

Yeah. Certainly don't mean to normalize.

I wasn't accusing you.

With respect to the IFTA, but because certainly it's terrifying. Imagine everyone in this room probably knows someone who would be affected by IFTA policies. In my case, it's me. I am an immigrant to this country, and God knows what it would mean if IFTA were in power. At the same time, I don't envy the CDU in this either.

In some respects, it is an absurdity that the only way for the German political landscape to continue is for the center right party to pursue cooperation with the far left rather than the party that, frankly, in in some cases, probably shares more in common with the AFD in some questions. And so I just don't know how this will be resolved.

Mean, there

are members of

Bundeslag making that point.

But who knows? If there's

a solid German majority for center right wing politics, we should give Germany that we should give Germany that government. But I mean, the part of the issue here is like, how does the CDU behave in relation to this threat, right? And what we're seeing also is in part a reflection of the fact that the CDU doesn't really offer an alternative to the AFT. It's just a sort of watered down, less authentic version in many respects. And that's also a disastrous policy.

So I think the failure of the CDU to effectively carve out a constructive positive vision of Germany's future that isn't just a watered down version of what the AFD is offering is part of the problem here.

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So I wanna shift to talking about Berlin specifically, And I have another data point there. And it is 9 50, as in 9 50 acres, which is, the size of Tempelhofafeld, which makes it, 1 of the largest inner city public open spaces in the world. And for our listeners who are not here in Berlin, I will briefly describe what Tempelhoeferfeld is. Tempelhoeferfeld is the space of the former Tempelhof Airport, which is the 1st airport in Berlin. It is now in the very center of Berlin as the city grew up around it.

And about 20 years ago, it ceased to be in operation. And it is a remarkable Berlin symbol now. Whenever people come to Berlin and visit, I always suggest they go visit this public park because it's an enormous open space in the very center of the city. And it's been so for 20 years. And now it's an object of controversy because Berlin has many needs, among them more housing.

And for years now, there's been a long running discussion of whether to build housing on this Tempelhofeld. And it's, on 1 hand, the symbol of the freedom of Berlin and its commitment to public space and on the other now, this object of political controversy. And so I thought we could describe get into the politics of it, but also the history of it, frankly. Adam, as historian of Germany, it has its own fascinating history. The famous architect Norman Foster described the airport itself as the mother of all airports.

And Eibat Spear, the Nazi architect involved in building it. And so what was the kind of architectural vision that the Nazi regime had in building in the 1st place?

Yeah, it's rather spooky, I think, that Norman Foster, in fact, the full quote is, 1 of the really great buildings of the modern age, the mother of all airports. And Foster, I I spend a lot of time in airports. And he's built 7 at least. Stan said, you may know Hong Kong's airport and also Beijing Capital most recently amongst the really big ones. So he knows a thing or 2 about airports.

Yeah, I mean, is, if 1 asks what it represents, I mean, it was supposed to be the aerial gateway for the Nazi capital, not just of Germany, but of Europe, of Germania. And it is conceived on that scale. It's arguably, I think the 1st airport in the world to be conceived in this way as a global gateway to a country and to a capital city. I mean, the most striking thing if you ever get to see it is the facade, which is a continuous 1.6 kilometers. So that's a full mile of continuous facade in this light gray yellowy stone, these giant tall windows.

And then I think what the architects love about it is it had this brilliant idea of cantilevering out 50 meters from the edge of the building this overhanging roof that is not supported by pillars at the front. So it's on a cantilever. And that means that you can park the airplanes of the day under the roof and then move around unobstructed, covered from the elements, protected from the elements. So it's an extraordinary engineering feat. It wasn't Speer himself's work, it was a guy called Zagabiel.

Speer was designing the overarching design. It's truly, truly astonishing, astonishing thing. It was at the time 1 of the largest buildings in the world. And it never served military purposes. It was from the very beginning fundamentally conceived for civilian, it was this gateway to the 3rd Reich.

1 of the really fascinating things about it was its intended lifespan. So it was intended from the beginning to last until the year 2000. So they built like for the ages and then after that presumably it had what Albert Speer would call So ruin value. It was going to look good, dilapidated.

It's obviously something that

Berlin has ended up specializing in. It's a really strange space when you think about it. But also the name, Templehof, where does this come from? And it's the Knights Templar. So this is a kind of an ancient history of Berlin.

These presumably are the Crusading Knights that were Christianizing this part of the world. It was a parade ground for the Prussian Army. The last flight out on the 04/23/1945 made it across the encircling armies only to be shot down. It was supposed to be going to Franco, Spain and it was shot down somewhere over Southern Germany. And the building as we know it only survived because the officer who was in command of this largely civilian facility refused the Nero order by the regime to detonate and destroy it and then promptly committed suicide himself.

So the building is a kind of legacy of a failed project that survived as a result of sort of the flukes of history in 1945.

Did you ever fly from Temple Hoof,

I should add? Yes. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it only shut in 2008.

And if you flew from city of London, it's not small, short, it had a short runway. And you came in, people will have seen the footage in the post war period. You come in over the rooftops of Berlin. I think it's in Wings of Desire. Think it's in Vemde's as an aerial sequence, which I think may have been taken from around there.

Might be. But yeah, I mean, I guess the next time we're all there, we should think about the gateway to Germania that we're actually rollerblading in today. But to shift to the next phase of its history, it then played a kind of leading role in the Berlin airlift during the Cold War. So this is when, Berlin was cut off from the outside world, and then famously, the candy bombers came in. And so Tempelhof was at the very center of this logistical project.

And I'm just sort of, how should we be picturing what was going on at Templehof during this Berlin airlift? I mean, how big a logistical feat was that?

Yeah. I got really into this. Is totally This sounded like something. Was, like So airlifts, like, apparently the 1st major historical, historically significant airlift was the airlift of Franco's army from Spanish Morocco to the mainland in 1936. So the movement of the Spanish nationalist forces enabled by Mussolini and Nazi Germany, Tanto U, the U52 transport aircraft, the ones which look like they're made out of corrugated iron were used to move Franco's forces.

So moving large quantities of stuff or people by air is really a kind of a modern project. It's not something that you started out being able to, we started out being able to do. The most famous and disastrous promise of an airlift during World War II was the effort by Goring to supply Stalingrad from the air, which was supposed to deliver 300 tons a day and they never got over about 50 or 60 tons. The largest airlift during World War II itself is not widely known in the West because it happened in Asia, but it's the hump, it's the flying of a half million tons of supplies from British Imperial India across the Himalayas to nationalist China and the KMT bases that were fighting the Japanese, half million tons over the Himalayas. And it's the general, the Ad General that performed that extraordinary feat who in the summer of 'forty 8 when the Soviets blockade Berlin in retaliation for the decision by the British and Americans to introduce the Deutsche Mark, the unifying currency of the Western zones, he's put in charge of the airlift to West Berlin.

And it's a really daunting proposition because there's about 2,300,000 civilians plus military in Berlin at the time. They reckon they don't need 300 tons like in Stalingrad, but they need 4,500 tons a day to sustain Berlin. The average transport aircraft at the time can fly 5 to 10 tons. So that's 4 50 flights with the heaviest aircraft in existence at the time a day into Berlin into an airport which at its peak before the war, when it was the busiest airport in the world, had had 90 flights a day into Tempelhoef. So this is literally the largest aerial operation ever mounted.

And they peak at being able to deliver 12,000 tons a day on this airlift. So what that means, I did the math in the green room earlier. It means that were basically landing an aircraft every minute, 12 hours a day for 15 months. Every minute there's an aircraft landing. So then when you imagine that in the air, this is the origin of modern air traffic control.

So managing this was the largest air traffic control fee ever pulled off. They built radar stations, they brought massive electronic infrastructure, guidance beams, all the stuff they'd use to bomb Berlin, they were now using to actually direct the traffic in. There's this amazing advertising from 1 of the British bombing, an American bombing companies which shows them bombing German children with milk after 45 rather than with high explosives and incendiaries. And basically they stack any given moment about 35 airplanes in the air on route from the British bases up by Hamburg and the American bases by Frankfurt heading towards Berlin on an absolute conveyor belt. They land, they basically have to discharge them.

It's like Ryanair. They discharge them within 45 minutes. If you've watched, they can do it 45 to 50 minutes, turn the aircraft around and fly it back. And they in the end deliver 2,200,000 tons of cargo. 2 thirds of that is American, the other 3rd is British.

The British literally convert wartime bombers to do this. And the freakiest thing about it, the kind of most mind boggling thing about it, is that 2 thirds of what they're shipping is coal. It's coal. So this is like the most expensive coal in the history of the world ever. Like why are they shipping in coal?

Because it's Berlin for heaven's sake and you're heading to the winter and you know what this place is like from about October and the electricity system which is half damaged is running on this as well. And so 2 thirds of these heavy loads are coal with a little bit of milk powder added basically to keep everyone alive. And the British repurpose flying boats to land not at Temple Hove but on some of the waterways. Why flying boats? Because they're designed to withstand saline water and 1 of the things you need to ship into a beleaguered city is salt.

And so they literally fill North Atlantic U boat patrol fly boats with salt and fly them in. It's mad, bonkers thing. It's an extraordinary thing.

There's a part of you that wishes you were involved. Oh. Because I can see that.

We've would been make a great game. It would make somebody is a video game designer out there. This

is We've doing this podcast a very long time.

This would

make a great 1 of the most excited I've

ever seen. It's crazy. The distance they flew would have gotten you from the earth to the sun. Just linger over that for a 2nd. In propeller airplanes, in propeller airplanes in relay, they flew from the earth to the sun in 18 months.

I mean, think we can go there with a rocket, can we, in that kind of time?

I I I

I have

no idea.

It's extraordinary. It's not

I was just eating chips back there. You were doing the math.

It's just sentimental stuff. It's truly mind boggling.

Yeah. But but to bring this conversation to the present right now Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Tempelhof is

It's it's shameful at its peak.

It is no. No. No. No. No.

It it is it is worth saying it's an it's sort of an uncanny place now.

Oh, it's

something It is and and that's why I recommend people to go there. It is you know, we all know other big city parks, and and but but this is not Central Park with a kind of English garden kind of aesthetic. This is it's a bizarre place because

Because it's empty.

It's empty. It's empty. It's flat. It's like an ocean. And you and and and 1 spends time everyone everyone doing doing their their own own thing thing at this on this flat space that's even larger than you can sort of goes to the horizon.

A bizarre a bizarre experience. And yet, as I mentioned, it has now become this object of political debate. And and I guess, you know, aesthetics aside, is this something that the city can afford? Obviously, the city has many again, it's sort of struggling with housing. So is Temperhof in its current state something that Berlin should still have?

Yeah. Mean, it's worth just waxing again on the it's surreal, which you might think nothingness would be boring, but it's an absolutely void like prairie experience in the middle of a town. We're gonna talk about, we are gonna talk about football. Apparently it's large enough for 4 20 footballsoccer pitches. The World Cup will have 112 games.

So you could organize 4 World Cups simultaneously, all of the games at 1 time and have the whole thing done in 90 minutes. Yeah. That would be

like Yeah. That would

be it. I mean, imagine how that would be delirious. It would

be like speed chess tournament

or something. You could just do 5 a side and have this all over with. And we can invite all of the countries in the world to play in the World Cup in Temple Hope. And it is an extraordinary fact about Berlin politics that there are veto players in place because it's the Schiller Keats, it's the mobilization of a particular Keats is a Berlin name for a district, an urban neighborhood, a hood in American parlance that mobilized the referendum to basically stop this being developed. And so there's this huge open space in the middle of Berlin which of course endlessly attracts the, oh, but don't we need apartments?

Until again you kind of do the numbers on this. And then you realize like it's telling in the degree to which more conservative voices, more business orientated voices, more developer orientated voices fixate on this. Because it is at some level 1 of the last truly massive authentic emblems of the poor but sexy Berlin of a certain period. Because much of the club scene has been hollowed out, much of the artist studio scene has been hollowed out. But 3 50 hectares of prime real estate in the middle of town, yeah, that's Gunveons.

We're going to have that. But then when you ask the architects and the developers, okay, look, just imagine we let you say there's a plan right now that popped up in May to develop 1 3rd of it with neoclassicist buildings. There's a whole architectural debate about this as well. They think they could maybe put like 20 to 30,000 apartments there. Berlin doesn't need 20 to 30,000 apartments, Berlin to address its housing crisis needs 220,000 apartments.

So if you are fixating on the Temple Hofeld as the kind of emblem of what's wrong with Berlin, it's ideological. It's not really where the game's at. The broader program of building a livable, more flexible city where people weren't basically at a kind of gridlock in the housing market here does not revolve on around this project.

Yeah. From gateway to Germania to Porbateczys is 1 way of describing Tempelhof's history, and 1 way of describing Berlin's history, I guess. But we should shift the topic now to the last topic, which is the World Cup, as I mentioned at the outset. And, obviously, the host of the World Cup is The United States. And soccer is, you know, for most of the world, a hegemonic sport.

I know this here in living in Germany. There is 1 sport that, you know, my son cares about, and it is soccer above all else. That is not the case in The United States. There are many sports. And is there a way to describe, in some empirical way, the status of soccer among these various sports in The United States?

I mean, where does this rank, and how much money ends up getting spent on this in America? And even if it's the 5th ranking sport in America, it's a big country, a rich country. So does that actually mean that more is spent in America versus other less rich countries where they care even more about soccer?

These are great questions. I like talking to Cam at this moment about something like, we're gonna call it football, we should call it football.

Sorry,

it's football. Because ordinarily, with my accent, I would really have hang ups about talking about football. Because I would say it's quite constitutive of my identity since childhood that I don't like it. I'm no good at it. Was useless as a child.

Don't have a team. I'm like purely a kind of 1 of those kind of spectators who quite enjoys the World Cup and the World Steel Cup is nostalgic for me. I remember when The Netherlands and Germany played in the early 70s. I remember the Argentina World Cup. But I have kind of, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right.

If you'd ask 7 year old Adam, are you gonna end up in Neukolln with an Iranian American from Long Island talking about the World Cup. I would have said like, who the hell are you kidding? But you have to, right? We have to. It's part of culture.

It's part of commerce right now. It's a powerful reality. And it is 1 of the ways in which The United States is different from the rest of the world. Because practically everywhere else. India is the big exception.

Because in India, cricket is clearly the dominant sport. But virtually everywhere else in the world, think the rank ordering of sports is football top and then everything else follows down the list. Even in China, and as miserable as the Chinese national team is, nevertheless, football is real obsession there. And in The US, it is absolutely by the kind of rank order of the status and significance of the leagues, the 5th. The Major League Soccer is a thing.

It was spawned into existence by the last World Cup in United States. But it ranks well below the high status amount behind American football, behind baseball, basketball, and even behind hockey. I think that's absolutely true. But economics tells a different story. And this is really interesting and really took me by surprise.

And I'm riffing here on of course my go to source, the Financial Times, which has great business of sport coverage. And soccer now in American terms is really big TV in The US. So the rights to the Premier League in particular, the British League, the English League attracts 35 to 40,000,000 viewers in The United States. The big games over 1000000. So that is above what hockey games attract.

The fan base is very promising from a commercial point of view. They're younger people, it's very diverse, it's quite balanced male female, though there is a preponderance of male viewers. The total participation in football soccer is high in The United States. And it's 1 of the weird features of some of the main American sports is that no 1 in their right mind can play them. So there aren't amateur leagues of American football because you'd end up hospital all the time.

You can play touch football or something like that, where you can throw the ball around, but no 1 is hitting like you have to hit for it to be serious. It's just not something you can do beyond high school or college or in the pro leagues. So there are these obstacles, and soccer is 1 of the most widely participated in sports in The United States. Any big city you go to, you see games going on everywhere. And it is mixed.

So it's truly a game in which women participate. And what I found really fascinating is the invasion of American money into European soccer. So what I just hadn't tracked because you think of Arab money flowing into European soccer and British soccer in particular. But half the teams in the British Premier League right now have American investment. Half the teams started with Liverpool obviously, the people who own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Glazers, but then moved on from there.

So half of the British teams now have representation. Truly astonishing fact to take away from this is that Snoop Dogg is a major shareholder in Swansea Town. Now you do have to wonder. Snoop Dogg. I mean Snoop is obviously a prophet, right?

He is like 1 of the great cultural icons of the late 20th century. But I do wonder whether he really knows about Wales. Like, how did they explain that they don't play in the Premier League?

He might be a

good midfielder.

Might just have been a very good evening, and decisions were made. Truly staggering. What's happening here is that American entertainment capital in the same way as it moved into Formula 1 and transformed Formula 1 has recognized that European socket is structurally undervalued. And the result of that however, is then a winner takes all logic which really compounds the existing inequalities. So the Premier League now other than British TV rights, its major source of revenue is selling soccer viewing rights to The US.

And that compounds the advantage that British clubs have in terms of revenue flow over all of their European competitors. So there's winner take all logic here in which transatlantic Anglo American capitalism is driving a greater and greater agglomeration of resource in certain leagues in Europe. That is majorly distorting I think to the future of the game in Europe and in The US. And as that then reverberates back, all of the franchises in The United States also gain in value. So it's really kind of almost a bubble economy in soccer.

I do want to turn soon to questions from the audience so so just so folks know. But I'm I'm more generally, I'm sorry about your own traumatic experience as a kid. The soccer field

It's really it's life changing. No. It's like not bad. You get over it. Yeah.

It's odd to go back to soccer as an adult and have to actually have thoughts about it.

Yeah. Won't tell my son that you were not good at soccer.

Actually have a pathological fear of the sound of a ball, especially the old heavy leather balls being kicked in my direction. It causes this flinching impartial. Am Which is I can't I can't get over it. Maybe

we'll return to that at some point. But I maybe I'll I'll try to consolidate maybe the last couple of questions. I realize I don't want I do want to let people get questions of their own in. So I I was gonna ask 1 about the the economics of FIFA, which runs the World Cup and has been notorious for being, you know, a corrupt organization. And I'm curious how that plays out in The United States right now.

And, you know, and and and which has come under which has come under criticism for for the way it's running the World Cup and the ticket prices, etcetera. So 1 question about FIFA. And then otherwise, we've been talking about this sort of colonialism of America and other big countries, obviously, that care about soccer. But what is the experience of the World Cup like for small countries? Obviously, Germany is playing Curacao in its very 1st match.

And they will not have played, I think, by the time this podcast goes out to listeners. But I'm just curious how a country like Curacao even manages to compete. I mean, like, what are the strategies for very small countries competing against very big countries in this kind of tournament.

Yeah. I'm gonna say more about Curacao because it's so much more interesting. Because the other story is it's just like, what do you expect? I mean, you put you put a chronically money driven organization like FIFA with a I mean, I had the mixed pleasure in an undisclosed location in The Middle East of actually attending a meeting personally, a small group meeting, smaller than this room here, with David Beckham and the current head of FIFA, Jenny, and hosts. And it was exactly as you would imagine an event like that to be.

It was completely horrifying. So you take that person and that organization and you transplant it to Trump's America in the current moment. And what do you expect you end up with? You end up with this farcically overpriced extraordinarily exclusive price gouging event. FIFA gets 30% of ticket resales.

It's absolutely extraordinary. Apparently 2 attorney generals in New Jersey and New York have actually begun investigations into the excessive pricing of tickets. So even by American local standards, this is outrageous. So I think it's par for the course. It's kind of where you'd expect this to end up.

They're gonna make more than 13,000,000,000, which isn't actually that much money when you think about it on a 4 year rotation. So this isn't a huge organization, but they're living high on the hog. But Curacao is an amazing story. Because they are at the sweet spot intersection of 2 geo economic force fields. So 1 is, we had to look it up on the map.

We kind of vaguely remembered about cocktails and blue things, it's just offshore Venezuela. And why this matters is that means it's part of the same, so essentially the American, North American, Central American segment of the qualifiers. And in a historic turn of luck, of course, Mexico, Canada and The United States all qualify automatically. And so everyone else in that group gets a much easier run through to the qualifiers. And then on the other hand, your part Curacao is still formerly part of the Dutch empire.

So you are bolted in as part of Central America into the heartland of European soccer systems. So of the 26 players in the Curacao team, only 1 was actually born there. The other 25 are all products of the academy systems in The Netherlands and The UK. So they're 1 and the 1 player who was born in Curacao, I think is a Man United Academy player. So this is perfect.

This is just absolutely set up for a truly heroic run through. It's like well you've trained. They're not absolutely elite class, but they're coming out of really serious training squads. You've got a relatively free run through, but it's still worth focusing on just how difficult this 1. So Curacao qualified by beating Haiti five-one.

Haiti has a population of 12,000,000, Curacao has a population of 150,000. So that's 100 to 1 difference. Then they played Trinidad Tobago, 2 draws, one-one zero-zero. Trinidad And Tobago's population is 1,370,000 people. So that's 10 times as many.

Then they beat Jamaica, all of these clubs trained by ex Premier League players by the way, Steve McLaren actually Scottish League I guess, at White York in Trinidad. Jamaica population 2,800,000. So even if you've got everything stacked in your favor, you are fighting the odds like crazy. So how do you win? Well you hire yourself a coach so legendary that even I've heard of him, which is Dick Advocate, who is like absolute a legendary hard nosed Dutch coach.

And what do you do? You organize a really solid defense, you flood the midfield, you play on the break and you pull off 1 big, well 2 massive victories, 1 against Haiti and 1 against Jamaica. And that's how you get there. And it's 1 of the virtues of soccer as a game that it has the potential to do. This is what everyone always says, right?

It is this game which has the potential under the right circumstances, with the right system being played by a team like this, to actually produce incredibly surprising outcomes. So it'll be actually, I think, an interesting game.

Sounds like you're predicting they're gonna win. They're gonna beat Germany.

In the way things are going for Germany right now, I think like you know Yeah. You know, 2 2 draw or something like that. Sure. It's clearly on the cards.

Okay. Yeah. A loss at the Security Council and then a loss to Curacao. Well, I think the mood in the country would not be a good 1. But then there are reforms that are coming.

I'm sure that'll cheer everyone up. You know? Nothing like raising the retirement age.

Retirement age for soccer players at 20 Nothing

says summer like a 70 year old retirement age. But otherwise, I guess for now, I will thank everyone here for coming out. Yeah.

Thank you, really.

Thank you to the

It's really lovely.

And thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Dan. Thank you to FP Podcast for making this podcast possible. Thank you to the despite the lights not always working out.

This is wonderful. Chandeliers are nice.

Yeah. This is this is

And, yeah, the the evening can continue, and then we'll see what happens with this beer hall conversation from here. But, otherwise, thank you very much. And, yeah, until next time.

Ones and Twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Teddy. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and ones and twos listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. You can leave voice messages on the ones and twos homepage on foreignpolicy.com or email us. That's podcastsforeignpolicy dot com.

Or you can tweet us. That's onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

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