Swiss + Harms #20 : Cybermafia und Masturbationsräume
Episode 20 – Cyber Mafia and Masturbation Rooms
Swiss und Harms – Zwischen Tour und Angel
(translator’s note: in German you literally say, “between door and hinge” for “in passing,” they altered it to “between tour and hinge”)
Description of the episode:
Episode 20 is about a topic that Chris is currently struggling with: fake profiles and cybercrime. Chris talks about his unpleasant experiences, which are currently even the subject of a police investigation. Later, the two heroes of our favorite podcast argue about whether there are five or seven continents and wonder which daycare centers actually have masturbation rooms. If you still haven't had enough of the guys after this episode, you should get tickets for the live podcast in Hamburg on December 5th as soon as possible. Tickets are only available in the Missglückte Welt Shop! Tuning in and spreading the word is not a criminal offense!
*Intro playing*
Swiss: Ladies and Gentlemen, what’s up? My name is Swiss, I am here with my “oldest” friend—
Chris: *laughs*
Swiss: —my best friend, maybe also my most successful friend, Ladies and Gentlemen: Chris Harms! Chris, how are you doing? Just briefly, do you maybe want to introduce our advertising jingle here?
Chris: Yes, yes sure! December 5th, Kulturkirche (he struggles pronouncing it, so it ends up sounding as if he was trying to fake an Eastern European accent).
Swiss: Kirche (= church, he says it in that same accent)
Chris: Kulturkirche Altona in Hamburg.
Swiss: It has a touch of an Orthodox Church about it. “Kirche” (still in that accent).
Chris: “Kirche” (also in that accent). Yes, exactly. But it is a Protestant Church.
Swiss: Who cares? Now it is an Orthodox… if we go there, it becomes—
Chris: Yes, but I was raised a Protestant, so that needs to be correct.
Swiss: Yes, fine.
Chris: Protestant Kulturkirche Hamburg, Swiss and Harms – the Podcast live. The Service.
Swiss: Exactly! I hope you all already have tickets. If not, get them, we will record two episodes and play some live music, acoustically. It will be very, very funny I think, and—
Chris: My parents will be there for sure! So, there will definitely be two people there already.
Swiss: Two people are sure to be there already.
Chris: Right, my parents are coming.
Swiss: Yeah, nice. I'll think about inviting my mom. I wonder if it's something for her. Or if she'll just take it too critically, so maybe I won't do it after all, but hey mom, we’ll see. Right, Chris, come on—I don’t even know if I may say that—we had actually planned to record this on another day—
Chris: Sure, go ahead!
Swiss: —and then you did something you never really do, resulting from a problem that I don't think you have that often, right? You normally always sleep the “sleep of the righteous.”
Chris: I can actually always fall asleep easily, yes.
Swiss: And then you wrote to me one night, and I often find myself suddenly awake at night, I don't know, at four or five, and then I see a message from you saying, “I can't fall asleep. I don't know if I'll be fit tomorrow.” And then you wrote to me again, even later, and you said, “It's just not going to work. Can we postpone it?” And then I said: “Okay Christian, since my schedule is also very, very tight right now, there are a lot of shows on Netflix that I have to watch; I had to watch PFL Fight Night, I had to go to the sauna…”
Chris: You have a complicated life.
Swiss: I also had a few rehearsals with the guys, made some music, just completely aimlessly, so it was hard for me, but we were able to find this appointment.
Chris: *laughs*
Swiss: And maybe you could tell us, Christian, what kept you up all night.
Chris: Alright. I always have these pictures of you that will last forever (quote from a song by German pop singer, Laith Al-Deen).
Swiss: Was there too much oil? Be honest!
Chris: Erm… too much oil?? *chuckles*
Swiss: Those pictures of me, that—*both burst out laughing*—or was it the cream?
Chris: All of it, all of it.
Swiss: It was simply too much of everything.
Chris: Hat, bald head, foam. [1] Well, no. That's… I can usually fall asleep really well, but I just had the headache of death and couldn't fall asleep for many days because one thing is really bothering me right now. And that's all the fake profiles that exist on social media—
Swiss: Fake!
Chris: —there’s a lot of those of us.
Swiss: I was just about to say that… do you have… maybe I’m just simply too stupid to notice it, but do you really have a lot of fake profiles, who—?
Chris: Exactly.
Swiss: And what are they doing?
Chris: There are new ones every day, there are over 1000 by now, we actually list the URLs, we collect them to see if they come back somehow, because of course most of them get blocked because people report them, and that's gone into the four figures over the years, and what most of them do is take money from people. So, it’s typical things like, “Hey, you want a…”
Swiss: But that is actually the typical Lord of the Lost style. *laughs*
Chris: It’s like the mafia. We are behind it, and all our wealth comes from our self-made fake profiles.
Swiss: That’s franchise, bro! You are cutting in there a bit! *Both laugh* No, okay, cool. Sorry.
Chris: Nah, it's not funny at all, and what they usually do is get people to part with money. And the harmless version—or at least harmless for the people, where they just lose money—is when they get e-mails saying, “Hey, you want to join the exclusive club, here's a club card, blah blah blah, blah, blah,” then they photoshop something on there, and “with this you now somehow get access to some chat room and there you can talk to Chris or to Nik,” or whatever, or you can… “then Chris calls you, and that costs 800 dollars” —or whatever. And some of the people pay really big bucks—
Swiss: As this sounds like a typical Lord of the Lost thing! *laughs*
Chris: Exactly! *Both laugh* The things we always do. And the thing is: in our case, the prices that these fake profiles charge people were still within a manageable range. I'm in contact with an OnlyFans lady who also appeared in one of our music videos, and sometimes the prices their fake profiles charge people are in the five-figure range—
Swiss: Crazy.
Chris: —because of course, there they also promise the people sex.
Swiss: Oh, yeah.
Chris: That's in a different league altogether. So. And the thing is… the first time that we started to really sit up and take notice was 2-3 years ago, when I received a letter in the studio, at Chameleon Studios, an envelope. I opened it and immediately saw that it was very young handwriting, a girl's handwriting, it was from a 14-15-year-old girl who wrote: “Hey Chris, I'm so sorry that it took me so long, but here is the Steam Coupon for the children in Africa, and I know that you only are trying to help, please don't be mad at me and accept me as your friend again on…”—I don't know what it was—“and this is my membership number of the Super Special Chris Harms Club, and I'm so sorry for hurting you!” And I was like: “Whaaat? What's going on?!” And then I realized: “Okay, this must be one of their scams, someone has put pressure on an underage girl, saying: ‘Pay here… send me a Steam voucher,’ which is also money.”
Swiss: What is Steam?
Chris: That’s one of those gaming platforms.
Swiss: Ah, okay.
Chris: You can go there and—
Swiss: For the children in Africa.
Chris: *chuckles* I don’t know. It’s totally absurd. Apparently, this fake Chris Harms told people: “Hey, I want to help children here, and children in Africa, they may have nothing to eat, but much more important for them are video games.”
Swiss: So, they can be gaming.
Chris: I don’t know. You know what I mean—go to DM or Budnikowski (German drug stores) where they have those voucher stands for Spotify, Netflix, I don't know… no, not Netflix. But anyway, Amazon and also this Steam. And I just realize that someone's been conned out of money, I take a look at the sender, I see a—I can't remember it—a relatively unusual surname and a small village, that much was clear, it was a small village—
Swiss: But what a cool girl to write to you!
Chris: —I googled it—
Swiss: The place that the girl came from?
Chris: Where the girl came from. I googled it, found a family by that name, from that village. There was only that one family by that name, and I thought, “Okay, what do I do now?” If I call the parents now, I'll somehow expose the girl, too.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: But she just thinks that I'm somehow the money rip-off—and she has saved up her pocket money and used it to buy me a Steam voucher. So, I called there, a woman answered, I said: “Excuse me, are you the mother of—”
Swiss: XY
Chris: “—XY?” She replied, “Yes.” And I went, “Okay, this might be a really strange call, but I'm Chris Harms from the band Lord of the Lost.” She was like, “Yes, I know you, my daughter always listens to that!” I was like, “Yes, I know,” and I explained it to her. Then she said, “Thank you for calling, we were already wondering, she's been so down and depressed lately, and she was always asking for money.” The end of the story was, it was sorted out, we then invited her to… I don’t remember exactly… to the Lordfest two years ago or to some concert, with her parents, everything was cool.
Swiss: Mm-hmm.
Chris: But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It escapes your notice. And since then, we've been trying even harder to fight it, and we also have a Telegram channel and a WhatsApp channel, so we always try to inform people about it. Especially when we hear from people: “Hey, I got scammed out of money here!” or “a friend of mine got scammed out of money” then we send the links, always saying: “Guys, watch out for the blue checkmarks, almost all of our profiles have them… and don't listen to anyone else!” We never ask people for money, we ask for money by saying: “Buy our shirts, buy our tickets!”
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: But we don't say, “Hey, buy me a Steam gift card?” or “Please give me $800 for a private meet and greet.”
Swiss: Yeah, right.
Chris: Alright. Now it really went crazy recently. I posted about it online… screenshots of it, without showing the name. A mother from the Netherlands got in touch with me, who said, “Hey, are you real? Are you Chris? My daughter is missing. She said she has a meet and greet with you; she stole money from me, almost 1000 euros or something like that, and ran away!” And I'm like, “What?” “Yeah, she said she was meeting you in Hamburg, in St. Pauli.” I was like, “Yeah, that's the only real thing about it, I live here.” And then I wrote back and forth with her. It's been ten days now, and the girl is still missing. The mother has since contacted the police in Hamburg, who have located her cell phone and also—
Swiss: In Hamburg?
Chris: In Hamburg. Close by from here. In the commuter belt of St. Pauli. They also raided the house and found some men there, and they also found other girls there who… that is, she was somehow abducted! The mother has also reached the cell phone twice in the meantime, someone answered, a man… the first time she thought—before she contacted me—that it was me. Then it was clear to her that it wasn't me. The second time someone answered, they hung up straight away. And… the daughter is gone. She's 15 years old, stole money from her mother and ran away… and in the best case she's buggered off, has some older boyfriend here and just wanted to get away from her mother.
Swiss: Yeah, that could—
Chris: Well, I don’t want to beat about the bush now, but—
Swiss: In quotation marks “a crush,” somehow—
Chris: Exactly. In the best case this was a stupid excuse, in the other best case—I don't want to offend the mother, but some of what she writes is so crazy that… either she's a very desperate mother or, as I said, I'm really, really sorry, but I have to take it into consideration, or she's just crazy—you don't know, sometimes we get totally crazy mail from people who make it all up.
Swiss: Yeah, yeah, welcome to my show, bro. Nah, it’s fine. *chuckles*
Chris: Yes, but I just wanted to say it once, because I worry about it, it keeps me up at night, I think: “… or is the mother crazy? Is the daughter not gone at all, is she just crazy?” But of course, I want to believe her, even if it's really hard to accept something like that as real… as reality, but somehow there's just a 15-year-old girl, apparently just gone from home, and still: it's just the tip of the iceberg! And if I ignore the suffering of others for a moment and just relate it to ME for the moment, I have to say it's completely crazy because I think to myself, “Hey, how many cases are still out there?” and “Will you maybe have a knife in your back from a parent at some point because they think I have… at best scammed their children for money or their partner for money, at worst I've done something completely different to them?” There are hundreds of e-mails from people saying: “Here's my girlfriend, my daughter, my son,” I don't know—“they've had contact with you, sent you money, sent you nudes,” I don't know. So, you think: “Wow!” But now the abduction thing! And the next thing, that once… sorry if I've been talking for so long, but that's just—
Swiss: Nah, it’s fine.
Chris: What fucks me up so hard is kind of the following: I always have to think of a thing. Over a decade ago… that was sometime in the transition from MySpace to Facebook time. Let it be almost 20 years ago. A friend of mine from another band—he doesn't play in the band anymore, back then… I'm not allowed to say who… he used to play in a band back then, they were at a concert somewhere in Eastern Europe and at the autograph session, all of a sudden some girl falls into his arms and says: “Finally we are reunited, my darling!” and so on, blah blah blah. And he's like: “Whoa, what’s going on here?!” Security pulled her away from him. And she had written with a fake profile, someone who made fun of her by convincing her that they had a cosplay-like relationship. I even have fake Tinder profiles, 10 or so, totally weird. So, completely crazy. And the end of the story was that… he pushed her away there—and she killed herself—
Swiss: Dude!
Chris: —because she couldn't be with the love of her life. He then turned his back on the public eye, left the band, and… I don't want to scare anyone out there, but I have to say, that move [out of public life], saying: “Bro, this is all getting too crazy for me, I didn't expect this!” I expected that people on the street would want to take photos, that you'd have weird stalkers on your doorstep… but THAT is a level… I'm not responsible if a girl like that was kidnapped, but I still feel responsible because it somehow happened in my name—inactively through me, without me doing anything, except that I'm a bit more famous than my neighbor!
Swiss: I think you’d be doing the right thing by putting some distance between yourself and this, including in your mind, because… as you said, for all the advantages the internet brings us, it has also given rise to a perversion in interpersonal communication—
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: —which nobody really knows how to handle yet. And you are not responsible for it. That's the easiest thing. It actually happened to me once—
Chris: I know that. Still, I sometimes cannot fall asleep because of it.
Swiss: It happened to me once, when I was supposed to play at a hip-hop jam with Samy (Samy Deluxe, German Rapper) and Afrob (German Rapper and Actor) many years ago, and someone apparently threatened Afrob in my name, using very unpleasant words via an email. And then, at the time, Ilhan, a friend of mine—best regards to Illi—called me and said: “Hey, can Sticky (Crew Member of Samy Deluxe) call you?” Sticky was the Eimsbusch (German Hip Hop Label) manager at the time.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: Also, a cool guy. Best regards to him, too. And he asks me: “Hey, why are you threatening Robbe?” I'm like, “Which Robbe?” (Translator’s note: In this case it’s obviously a nickname, but normally in German “Robbe” is the word for a seal (the animal)).
Chris: “Whom?”
Swiss: He was like, “Afrob!” And then I said, “What?” And he said, “Yeah, there are some e-mails from some e-mail address, Swiss… @gmx—blah blah blah!” So, I said, “Hey, bro, look, if I had something to say to Afrob, I would tell him directly myself!”
Chris: Or in a song, as one usually does.
Swiss: A) Especially if I am going to meet him a few days later anyway, I would tell him that in person, and B) bro, everyone can create such an e-mail account! But that was a real talk, it got sorted out in the end. I was like, “Hey, are you guys serious?!”And this procedure, pretending to be someone else on the internet is one thing, but another thing is to get cheeky on the internet, to present yourself on the internet differently than you are in real life, and I have—
Chris: Yeah, but that doesn’t hurt anybody.
Swiss: Yeah? I don’t know. I don’t know.
Chris: Well, at least not in that way.
Swiss: I do believe that this whole thing—this whole internet communication—has an extreme influence on our lives and our interactions, and also on what we are willing to do. It's so easy! I create a profile; I download a photo of you, and I start catfishing people.
Chris: And that won't be any easier in the future with AI, voice and video and deepfakes.
Swiss: It's going to be even crazier. Right. And of course, I've been listening to our favorite podcast “Lanz and Precht” again, I don't know if you also…
Chris: Favorite Podcast would be “Handvergnügen” (Hand Pleasure), we have talked about it before.
Swiss: Precht says an interesting thing there, he quotes some guy who has investigated it, and he said, “This young generation, this is the first generation that is rewired.” So you know, these… well, the kids today, they're so used to socializing on the internet, and their bubble is on the internet, and their friends, and they don't go out that much and they don't have that much of a need or… well, you know, like… we grew up with… you hugged, you… you know, with a different feel, with a different physicality. And today's people don't have that… they're no longer used to that, and I think that's also what causes a… well, my mom was also *chuckles* recently… it was a phone call that she had, it was about a health food supplement. But my mom is cool about it. And then the guy on the phone was going on at her like: “Yes, but you have to take three of those, otherwise it won't help, blah blah blah,” and then she said at some point: “Listen, young man, this is really going too far for me, I don't like it at all, and I'm hanging up!” and he didn't let up. And… yes, well: it's not your fault, that this is happening, I can understand that it's taking a toll on you, but I think you would do well, Christian, to really consciously build a distance there.
Chris: I know.
Swiss: Because you cannot change it, and I think this is something you shouldn't dwell on too much. Of course it's difficult.
Chris: I’m trying, yes. But of course, it is something—of course I am trying—
Swiss: I always hear some sound, by the way. I don’t know if that’s on the recording—
Chris: No, I hear you just fine. All good.
Swiss: I hear this “woop” sound at the end, when I speak.
Chris: Okay.
Swiss: I don’t know. It can be in my ear as well.
Chris: Shall I have a listen?
Swiss: No, it’s fine. Okay.
Chris: It sounds pretty nice.
Swiss: It’s not that bad.
Chris: Well, I try to figure it out, of course, but it takes a while and I'm also fundamentally not unempathetic enough for that.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: Sometimes I wish that things would bother me less… that people would be less important to me. Of course, that's helpful in these situations, but I don't know if it would be more helpful in life in general. But it's just like that… I really found myself in the situation… I couldn't pull myself out of it. At some point I said to the mother: “Can you send me a few pictures of your daughter, so I know what she looks like now?”—if I know she's somewhere here in St. Pauli. I walked around here, looked to see if I could see her anywhere! So, if it reaches a level where you think… “Wow, hey!” Well, I can only hope—
Swiss: Well, hey—
Chris: —I can only hope that it all ends well, and the main problem is—sorry, what did you try to say?
Swiss: But what could also be, and that's the bad thing about it nowadays: it could all be true, exactly true and be totally awful. But she could just as easily be a totally crazed Lord of the Lost fan.
Chris: Absolutely.
Swiss: And she… well, you see, people like that do… well, not that kind of person, I'm not talking about this mother, to everyone out there, I don't know. I'm saying that when things like that happen, when a mother makes up a story like that to somehow get a hold on you, that's borderline personality behavior too.
Chris: Exactly!
Swiss: Well, borderliners always try to keep you in their lives in some way, if not with something positive, then with drama. And you're right in the middle of it now and I understand that it takes a toll on you, but I can only tell you that there are cases… we had also talked about it in our groups, where there were also one or two such situations where I was very challenged. “Hey, what do you think? Decide!” And where I just kind of said very quickly: “Guys, I can't do that… I'm not there, I wasn't there, and if this and that is supposed to have happened”—
Chris: I’m not the judge!
Swiss: Right. I am not the judge. And then it's a matter for the police. We live here in Germany, which is a constitutional state, so it's not up to me to go to Berlin and start looking for people or making decisions. “You behaved wrongly, it's not your fault.” So, I can only give you the advice that I would really give anyone: I would strongly advise you to distance yourself from it, because—you can't change it, and you won't change it, and it won't bother you any less the more you get involved in it.
Chris: That's true. The general thing is of course that I still want to encourage everyone who hears this, if you feel you've found a fake profile, block it, send us an email, you can find various contact addresses on Lordofthelost.de. If you're not sure whether you or your daughter, son, friend, mother, father, whatever, are writing to one of us and something seems strange to you—ask! The thing is, almost all of them—and I have to say one thing very briefly at the end—almost all of our profiles have these blue ticks, but only ALMOST. Because the problem is really, Meta makes it damn difficult to prove that you are authentic, that you are yourself. And Meta isn't particularly good at actually recognizing fake profiles either. Fake profiles are reported so often and then the email comes back from Facebook, Instagram: “Hey, we checked it. Everything's fine.” Even if we report it ourselves. Even if I say myself: “Look, I'm the… the original. I already have the blue tick. It's a fake!”—I sometimes get the message back: “No, it's all fine.” That means that I don't think they really care, because of course it generates an incredible amount of traffic.
Swiss: Hey, did I tell you that a few years ago… this is still the cybercrime topic… a few years ago my private Facebook was hacked.
Chris: I remember that, yes.
Swiss: Right. And back then I didn't have a two-step… what you do today… authentication and so on and so forth. And this profile was the main profile for the Swiss & die Andern Facebook pages. That is, the admin profile.
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: And that profile was gone! Someone had hacked into my account. I think I was on vacation at the time and couldn't get into it. I wrote to Facebook and was told: “Can you prove such and such?” And I couldn't prove it. I didn't give a damn about my private profile, but I thought, “Man, now he can do whatever he wants on the Swiss & die Andern side.”
Chris: Yeah, right.
Swiss: So. And still nothing happened. And then at some point I went to the police. I said: “Hey, my profile is gone, I need it back!” And then at some point a… then this cybercrime thing got involved, there was a really cool policeman. Bro, from cybercrime. And I explained everything to him and so on and so forth, and he was like: “Wow, that's going to be difficult.” He said: “Of course we have a contact on Facebook, but when they give out data, it's usually about capital crimes, tracking cell towers and so on and so forth”—and he sorted it out. He got my profile back for me, really, he was a really cool guy, I… and he actually got in touch again afterwards because this case was bigger. And some Albanian from Malmö was logged in, and he actually only bought sex ads. It was linked to my PayPal account, and he didn't even—
Chris: With your money, or what?
Swiss: Exactly. He did—
Chris: So, he also got into your Paypal account?
Swiss: Yeah, he… or how was it actually? He definitely had… or via my Facebook page he had—
Chris: Yeah, right, because you are connected with the advertisement management tool, that’s connected with the payment method blah blah blah, right.
Swiss: Exactly. And with that, he somehow advertised or placed sex ads, whatever.
Chris: *laughs*
Swiss: Not on a grand scale, but a few hundred euros were gone. Of course, that was also a fake account, and it was probably a bigger thing, because I was in contact with this guy from the police cybercrime unit a few more times, because he showed me a few more things and asked me a few more things, and I thought, “Wow, that's so messed up!” It's so messed up because you don't catch the people. It's such a—
Chris: That’s so messed up. You can't get them, it's really… partly organized crime!
Swiss: Of course!
Chris: They have real… like these call centers.
Swiss: Yeah, do you know these call centers in Cameroon and Nigeria?
Chris: There are even YouTube documentaries about them.
Swiss: Yeah, crazy.
Chris: Yeah. Of course. And we actually also had something like that. There were a few of our fans, including fan club members, who got involved and tried to make video calls.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: I actually uncovered one at some point, I found myself in the absurd situation where I, as Chris Harms, was discussing with a fake Chris Harms, and he tried to make it clear to me that I was fake. And at some point I said: “Let's talk on the phone, or let's talk, whatever,” and at some point I got to a point where someone said: “Yeah, I'm sorry, man, I'm fake, and everything is organized here, I'm really miserable, but what can I do, I have to feed my family, I need the money too!” And as I was at the time, I posted it, the whole conversation. “How much do you need? I'll give you money, and you make sure this shit stops!”
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: Then I transferred a few hundred euros because I thought I would help them. I don’t know, I—
Swiss: So much money. You are really funny in the way you deal with this whole topic. *laughs*
Chris: I just thought, I… well, we were actually talking, I felt sorry for him.
Swiss: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And then—that was Pandora's box. Because then at some point… there was peace and quiet, and after a few months it started again, with the same spelling, also this very specific grammar that—
Swiss: Yeah, right. This translator grammar, right?
Chris: This, but also certain keywords that were used again and again. And I said: “It's you again!” And he said: “Yeah, yeah!” And I said: “I transferred you money!” He said: “Yes, but I need more!” And then I thought to myself: “Wow!” Well, of course I made all the mistakes you can make when it comes to that. So, but… just briefly, about this blue tick—sorry to harp on about this for so long, but it's really a nightmare for me.
Swiss: Do you think, that would make a good episode title, “The blue tick”?
Chris: The blue tick?
Swiss: Exactly, right.
Chris: That sounds a bit like AfD, doesn’t it? (AfD is “the blue party”)
Swiss: No, like a Gangsta Rap song. “Blue tick.” *Tries to find something that rhymes with that*
Chris: Spade. (in German that rhymes)
Swiss: Capercaillie. Blue cock. Farmer’s car. Well, that’s not so good.
Chris: No, just briefly, that sometimes some Telegram profiles or something, there are things like that now, there are fake profiles, they even have these blue ticks—
Swiss: For real?!
Chris: Yeah. That means that even… they somehow manage it. I don't know whether it's a money story, but it's definitely the thing, and you can't trust that anymore either. That's why I can only say: write us an email, our website Lordofthelost.de, nobody else has it, and if you write to us and ask, then you'll know whether it's fake or not. The problem is: that's always just the tip of the iceberg. AI is now doing the voice, and AI will make everything worse. And the thing is… the problem is: look, we're just well-known enough that it seems to be interesting for people… so, for these scam factories, they know exactly that we're big enough that there are enough people who fall for it, but we're not so big that people think: “Yeah, sure. If you believe it.”
Swiss: “Never ever.”
Chris: Like, for example, Taylor Swift.
Swiss: Yeah, right.
Chris: “Hey, Taylor Swift has written to me! She would like 800 euros for—”
Swiss: For such a coupon card. For gaming. She so loves to game.
Chris: That’s not going to work. And perhaps I should conclude with a little anecdote—I don't even know if I've told you this before, you know Dave Chappell?
Swiss: Bro, yes, of course.
Chris: And he said that at some point he discovered that there was a fake Facebook account of his.
Swiss: Yeah?
Chris: And he thought it was really funny; he looked at everything that this fake account was posting and realized that this fake Facebook account was having trouble with some other big celebrity in Hollywood. I'm going to say… I don't know, Madonna.
Swiss: I remember something like that.
Chris: Have I said it before? Doesn’t matter. In any case, let's say Dave Chappell and Madonna have a real beef. At some point the real Dave Chappell meets Madonna at some party and says: “Hey, I have to tell you: sorry, I don't have Facebook!” And she replies: “Me neither.”
Swiss: *laughs out loud* I think I have watched the show, where he said this.
Chris: Exactly. That’s two fake profiles having a beef with each other. That’s the—
Swiss: Yeah. That’s awesome, bro.
Chris: Maybe I should take a photo of you sometime, it's for social media, we need to take a cool photo of you with my microphone here in front, and you here at the back, like this, not so close now, cool, so we can finally post something!
Swiss: I hate photos so much.
Chris: With you on them? I get that.
Swiss: I notice that I'm getting worse at them.
Chris: I hate these too.
Swiss: Some get… well, never mind.
Chris: Hey, you are so well trained, particularly how great you look naked by now, dude!
Swiss: Nope, I’m not going to say the mean thing that I was going to say.
Chris: Oh, please, say it!
Swiss: No, I won’t say it. Really. I also set out to—
Chris: I just told you that you look awesome naked!
Swiss: Yeah. Yesterday I was a guest at my family, and there a man said—
Chris: Someone from your family said that you look awesome naked? *laughs* Sorry.
Swiss: No. No. God bro, that’s this German humour. You can’t do that in our culture. What is that, dude?
Chris: I am a pure German, so I can also bring on pure—impure German humour.
Swiss: Yeah, but those incest family dynamics, bro, you just can't pull that on us!
Chris: That’s my fetish. Incest porn.
Swiss: Yeah, bro, then you need to integrate better here in Hamburg-St. Pauli.
Chris: That won’t work for you guys, in your—
Swiss: And then he went, “Wow, you look so fit! Have you lost weight?” And I'm always… it's very funny because my weight always fluctuates by three to four kilos up or down, so there's never a time when I'm like, “Yes, man, I've lost ten kilos.”
Chris: That’s the same with me, it’s always just three to four kilos up or down.
Swiss: And yet I liked it so much. I thought, “Yeah. Yeah. What do you want to drink? Should I go buy something for you? Should I get something for you? Should I bring something for you the next time around? Should I create a Fake Profile for you?”—those were the things that I thought of. And—yes, I liked that very, very much, Christian. I don’t even know how I got to this now.
Chris: I don’t know. Besides that—by shaving your legs you’d lose one more kilo.
Swiss: Is that so? But I generally have very little body hair.
Chris: Me neither, luckily. But not very much grows on steel anyway.
Swiss: Not much grows on steel anyway. These German Steel Bodies.
Chris: Exactly. German Steel Bodies.
Swiss: Steel Bodies. Krupp Steel maybe. Also, a sympathetic family company, which somehow had a good run between 1939 and 1945.
Chris: Well, let’s say… the whole German economy, Krupp Steel, Thyssen-Krupp or BASF or also, as I just have a microphone there in front of my face, Neumann, in the Nazi era… that flourished!
Swiss: That was not so bad.
Chris: For them, at least. Have you brought along any topic, or should we just close here?
Swiss: Well, Christian, no—
Chris: This is episode 20, by the way. 20 years of Swiss and Harms.
Swiss: Wow. Yes, we can talk about it for a little while. I think that's how we do it—I had to think about that while driving here also—we've been doing it for almost a year now, not quite a year, ten months.
Chris: Let's put it this way: We have… you called me almost exactly a year ago, in November, you called, you said… I was in Leipzig at the rehearsals for this Gothic meets Klassik, this orchestral show and you said: “Hey, I have an idea! Let's do a podcast!”
Swiss: Yeah. True!
Chris: So, this was about a year ago.
Swiss: And you were like, “Heyyy…”
Chris: “Not right away!”
Swiss: “That’s such cool idea! I didn’t even dare to ask you, Swiss! Can we please really do it? I want to do it right now!” *Both laugh* I was like, “Chris, it will take a bit of time!” And you were like, “No, I have a microphone here with me!” I must say, somehow—no, it is—I think it's very, very pleasant. And—yes, we've talked about that before. It's really just crazy how many people listen to this podcast who you wouldn't even think listen to it, and then approach you and say, “Hey, cool, I like what you were talking about, I find it interesting, I find it exciting,” and… that's just cool, Chris! I have to say, I always had the feeling that you are not the smartest, I don't mean that in a mean way—
Chris: That’s why you asked me to do a podcast together, as you needed someone—*both laugh*
Swiss: So that I look even better.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Swiss: And—really, I enjoy these conversations with you a lot. Yes.
Chris: Should I fade in “Careless Whisper” now, such a sexy Saxophone, and you keep on talking?
Swiss: Deed-deed-deed… yeah. I find that’s a very cool thing.
Chris: Above all, it's crazy that yes, I don't know how many episodes have been translated into English so far, 12 or so.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: We have these Translation of the Lost people there, who translate all our German interviews for the international audience.
Swiss: That’s crazy.
Chris: Because we have like 75% non-German-speaking fans. And it all gets translated! Where I sometimes think, “Sometimes we talk such rubbish that I wouldn’t even know how to start translating it to English!”
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: “Do I really want to have that on the net in the future?”
Swiss: Yeah, right. Well, now that you say it… maybe you can announce to your fans, Christian… what does your next year look like?
Chris: Hmmm. Actually, YOU want to know it in advance, so you can put it into your appointment calendar.
Swiss: So that I can take a day off for the Lordfest. When does it take place?
Chris: December 14th.
Swiss: Yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I was already afraid that I have agreed on something else yet.
Chris: We have made plans.
Swiss: You have made plans.
Chris: MC—
Swiss: You wrote to me as a Fake Profile, somehow you were like, “Hey, come here, if you transfer 1000 euro to me, you can do this and that, also go backstage, get extra catering, which normal guests don’t get—”
Chris: Well, I only asked you when—we asked Blümchen first, but she doesn't have time this year.
Swiss: Why did Blümchen—?
Chris: She just can’t manage it.
Swiss: Well, then I won’t come. Because I was chatting with a Blümchen Fake Account.
Chris: *laughs* Ah, yes!
Swiss: And she was like, “I’m coming!”
Chris: No, I had you as a last resort. So, you were the second choice.
Swiss: You also were just my last resort, because to be honest, actually thingamabob asked me if I wanted to come.
Chris: Die Ärzte?
Swiss: Die Ärzte. But then it didn‘t work out either, because they on the other hand—
Chris: —don’t play on that day.
Swiss: don’t play.
Chris: *laughs*
Swiss: And then I agreed to come to you as a last resort.
Chris: But MC Witty will be there as well!
Swiss: Fitty?
Chris: No, Witty!
Swiss: Who’s that?
Chris: Joachim Witt!
Swiss: OH, Joachim Witt.
Chris: MC Witty. He also does a few songs with us.
Swiss: Alright, Christian. Now tell, what’s coming up?
Chris: Well, most of it I’m not allowed to talk about yet, because we’ll also be doing some things on other continents.
Swiss: Right, I have seen that. A tour in South America.
Chris: A tour in South America.
Swiss: Cool! I think it’s six or seven dates in six or seven countries, a few shows of which also include Powerwolf, so that’ll be really big shows.
Swiss: Cool!
Chris: And besides that, we will be going to Asia next year, I’m not allowed yet to tell, where to exactly, and next year, we are also actually going to a continent that we have never been to before. So, that just leaves Africa or Oceania.
Swiss: Mm-hmm.
Chris: But I unfortunately may not—
Swiss: You mean Australia, right? Africa or Australia?
Chris: Exactly. Well, the definition of continents is an interesting topic, right?
Swiss: Yes, sure.
Chris: They say, “Australia, yes—but what is New Zealand then?”—that’s why you call this area down there “Oceania.”
Swiss: Did you know… I have just recently gone through a book with my daughter… did you know that both the Arctic and Antarctica are considered continents, too?
Chris: But isn’t it just Antarctica, as the Arctic only consists of ice, while Antarctica is a solid landmass?
Swiss: Well, in that book… as I thought… I always assumed it was five. I also didn’t even know that North America and South America are considered separate continents.
Chris: Yes, but that’s a very interesting thing, it depends on who you ask. If you ask a geologist, if you ask a historian, whatever, some will say—
Swiss: I exclusively ask geologists. In everything I do.
Chris: You normally say, “Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and America,” but sometimes North [America] and South [America] are seen separately. And then, when it comes to Australia, some people say: “Well, everything around Australia, the entire tectonic plate, is Oceania.” Others say: “You actually have to include Antarctica, even though no one lives there.” Some combine the two Americas.
Swiss: Did you know, that—
Chris: Some even combine Europe and Asia.
Swiss: Really?
Chris: As Eurasia.
Swiss: Did you know that there are polar bears in the Arctic and not in Antarctica, and on the other hand there are penguins in Antarctica and not in the Arctic?
Chris: That's the favorite smart-ass question, to ask: “Why don't polar bears eat penguins?” And everyone goes, “Maybe they don't taste nice, or they are too fat.”
Swiss: “Yeah, too fat”—when actually nothing can be fat enough in that region.
Chris: They just live in different places. But funnily enough, if you want to get into real smart-ass mode—my son and I are really bad smart-asses—we compete to see who can be the smartest, it's unbelievable fun—there are also smart-ass situations in nature, not just in the zoo, in the northern hemisphere—pay attention, on the island of Galapagos, which is on the equator and protrudes a few kilometers above the equator at its northern tip—
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: —there are Galapagos penguins there. And if a Galapagos penguin ever happens to be on the northern tip, then there is also a penguin in the northern hemisphere in its natural habitat.
Swiss: Which is totally irrelevant, because we are talking about the Arctic. And even if it’s the northern hemisphere, it doesn’t reach as far as the Arctic.
Chris: But there are Galapagos penguins!
Swiss: I must admit, I’m also happily present in this smartass—
Chris: —Club!
Swiss: —Game, and… that doesn’t fit, Christian, you have to be precise there.
Chris: But there are Galapagos penguins!
Swiss: Right, but they are not in the Arctic!
Chris: You are totally right, I just talked rubbish here.
Swiss: Nobody talked about the northern hemisphere, but about the Arctic and Antarctica.
Chris: Exactly.
Swiss: I have a buddy, by the way, who… that was his big dream, he flew to Argentina with his girlfriend, to Buenos Aires, they stayed there for a few days, and then they—there is a boat trip to Antarctica. Completely decadent, and really, really expensive.
Chris: Talking about Blümchen, I think she told me that she did that once, too.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: Some time ago. Doesn’t matter. Okay.
Swiss: And you just—you get out there and so on and so forth and walk onto these ice floes.
Chris: But what time of year? Even in winter, when it's really cold there?
Swiss: They did that in winter. That’s really wild.
Chris: Dude. When it’s winter there.
Swiss: And then they showed pictures. That guy is really well off—
Chris: That can’t be cheap.
Swiss: —and he wants to… instead of spending his money on… I don’t know, cars—well, he does spend it on cars too, but otherwise he is actually a relatively modest guy. And that was his big dream, this ship, then you go there and sit in the sauna, in front of a huge panoramic glass front and look at the *laughs*… you go through the Antarctic. And they saw penguins there too, and it's just like… people always talk about “like being in another world,” but it's just… what kind of reality other creatures are at home in, bro!
Chris: Right.
Swiss: That's unbelievable for us. For us it's like that… you go to Austria and think: “I don't understand a word, man, how are they talking?” Or to Bavaria. And then you go there, and it's just a world that you… that you just can't exist in. So, you can't survive there.
Chris: Well, we humans, if you look at us, we are not made for… well, if we as animals were to live outside, with our furless skin, where would we be able to survive? Somewhere between 15 and 25 degrees, naked, that is completely… that is not possible at all!
Swiss: You are very into the nude theme today, aren't you? That's so—
Chris: Well, just think about what happens to babies. How long do human babies need to get by halfway okay? A giraffe is born, falls out of the womb, and has to run with the herd 15 minutes later!
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: Imagine something like that with an infant. *In an enthusiastic tone* “Hey, just born, your name is Mika, in 15 minutes you're going to kindergarten, off you go, have fun!”
Swiss: Which wouldn’t be so bad. *laughs*
Chris: Nah, but that's… we are not made to survive. Evolution has—
Swiss: But somehow, we are.
Chris: Somehow, yes, well, through what we have created and what we are destroying all around us here, but without the civilization that we would have built around us, we are not at all—
Swiss: But on the other hand, of course, we have simply become so lazy.
Chris: Lazy parasites, yes.
Swiss: When I think that you used to want to take a trip to Italy, to northern Italy… I also have—
Chris: In the car, without AC.
Swiss: In the past, for example, there was the “Grand Tour” among aristocratic youths. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
Chris: Nope.
Swiss: It was just like that, you went to friendly noble houses or something like that, just to Northern Italy or Spain, just to experience life—
Chris: I did not grow up like you! *laughs*
Swiss: Yeah, well, but for us this was normal. My father was at the Royal House of Saxony for a very long time and then bought the city of Jena—
Chris: *laughs out loud*
Swiss: —and there he founded the Police Authority.
Chris: *laughs even more*
Swiss: And it is still like that up till today, and for me this is an achievement of my family. Joke aside, I have read about this “Grand Tour” at some point, and those people also have, considering the time they lived in… well, regular people didn’t travel at all.
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: You are a farmer somewhere; you didn’t travel at all. And these people somehow travelled to northern Italy in a carriage—and it took forever! And then you sit there in a jolting carriage, which has really hard suspension—
Chris: And it’s loud. And cold.
Swiss: —and was loud. And there are robbers and so on and so forth. And I found that very, very interesting, just to consider how we have changed, just what… on the one hand, it means having to tolerate the cold and so on and so forth, walking, we can't manage all that anymore… and on the other hand, we have an unbelievable horizon of expectations these days. That was very, very exciting, I heard it in a podcast, why so many people vote for the AfD, and so on and so forth, and… I think that was also on Lanz and Precht.
Chris: That was on Lanz and Precht, yes, I heard that, too.
Swiss: Right, where he says—
Chris: “The Expectations and the Contentedness.”
Swiss: We are a generation… expectations have never been so high. And therefore, along with that comes disappointment.
Chris: Yeah. Also, the disappointment has never been so high.
Swiss: Exactly! Because of course… well, back then, you were somehow… you know, you were the… what would you have been? You would have been a farmer's son, let's put it this way—
Chris: Yep.
Swiss: And then your father would have said at some point: “You're marrying the miller's daughter, we're doing business with him, that's a good agreement, you're together now.” It wasn't about “Oh, is this the love of my life, can I fulfill my dreams with her—”
Chris: No, that was a contractual community of convenience.
Swiss: —and do we want to stay here in little Sulzhausen (made up place name to describe a small place nobody has heard of) or maybe we want to start our own business with a cool barista shop—
Chris: A startup. *laughs*
Swiss: —in Leipzig?"—you know?
Chris: Yes.
Swiss: And nowadays it's not just this “you expect everything.” You also want somehow… you're disappointed when you don't manage to do everything, and that makes you disappointed in yourself.
Chris: Yes, because we grow up with the illusion that “everyone can be anything.”
Swiss: Exactly!
Chris: Which is actually a nice mindset.
Swiss: “Mindset” is such a cool word, I just wanted to tell you that.
Chris: I always try to just sprinkle that in… “Mindset”
Swiss: *whispers* Mindset.
Swiss: It’s also a cool brand. *In a squeaky tone* “Brand!”
Both: *laugh*
Swiss: *Still in that squeaky tone* “Hello!”
Chris: But on the other hand, if that doesn't happen, there is naturally a lot more disappointment. For example, if you say: the farmer's son in the past, then it would have been clear that if you were a farmer 200 years ago, then… then you wouldn't have given any thought to whether you might be a prince.
Swiss: Nope. And the thing is—unless you’ve already read The Frog Prince back then already—
Chris: Of course—
Swiss: —and so on and so forth—
Chris: —I did.
Swiss: Nah, but that's also… I mean, how hard was the life of a farmer back then? You got up when it was dark and actually just doing hard work outside all day.
Chris: Yes, but look, you don't have to go back as far as when you said, “travel to northern Italy,” where I quickly interjected, “in a car without air conditioning.” Just thinking about my childhood… we're talking about luxury problems now, yes? But this “you just go on summer vacation somehow, in the Citroën, with the suitcases in the back, and you sit there on the—
Swiss: Is it Citroën or Citroen?
Chris: Citroën. Hence the two dots on the e.
Swiss: Really?
Chris: Yes.
Swiss: I thought it’s Citroen.
Chris: No, that’s why it’s really pronounced “Citroën”. As it is in “Zoë,” there you also have the two dots on the e.
Swiss: You explained that nicely, now I understand that.
Chris: I’m not clever, but I am smart.
Swiss: What was the name again, “Zoë”?
Chris: Zoë.
Swiss: Okay. Zoë.
Chris: So, you're sitting there in this car, on the highway, on a really bumpy highway, with the window down and no air conditioning, and you've just sweated your 12 hours to Italy. Nowadays, you sit in a car like that for five minutes, and someone goes, “Hey, can you turn on the air conditioning? I can't stand it!”
Swiss: “No, oh, air conditioning, it gives me a sore throat!”
Chris: That’s me then. That’s me then.
Swiss: There’s always something wrong there. That’s how it is. So, this effeminacy, this *in a Prussian dialect/voice* “Yes, we need real men again, Chris, you know? That's my opinion, yes, that's right, German men again, who also pitch in, who also chop wood!” Oh, I have to tell you one more thing: do you know Hoss and Hopf? [2]
Chris: *audibly thinking* Nooo?
Swiss: That's one of the… the one, Hossein blah blah something, he's an influencer, he… thing, as a young guy he somehow made millions trading, and then there's another one, Hopf is his name, Maximilian Hopf or… I don't know, and he's a real egghead, bro, a real… And he talks, *in a raspy voice* he always talks like this: “Yes, we have the 200-day line here, and we have…”
Chris: Is that also a podcast or something?
Swiss: Nope. He also has such a HCKM or something, HCKM, sort of like an investment agency that makes trades for you, so to speak (The HKCM has made it its mission to identify the best times to trade).
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: “We told our people here, at this point, where we go out, we go in!” And that's how he actually talks, like an old Prussian. And he's a real dickhead, dude. Just look at him! And the two of them have a podcast that I think it actually was—
Chris: So, they do have a podcast?
Swiss: —the most successful one for a while.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: And what often happens is that when people are good at something, finances, they get the idea that they're generally super smart. And this podcast has had some drivel, and this… yeah, and he's also totally against the war with Russia and so on and so forth, and “Yeah, it's gonna… so-and-so said that in five to six months we're gonna have a world war!” That's how he talks! And you think to yourself: “Bro, just relax!” And now he is—and this became… I sometimes can't escape it, because I love to listen to eggheads being dicks—
Chris: *laughs*
Swiss: And then he emigrated to Switzerland.
Chris: It’s a bit like watching RTL (German TV channel with a lot of trash TV).
Swiss: And there they are, the two of them, sitting in his Tesla, and you realize: the guy probably has… financially he's doing great, but he's so dissatisfied, and so trapped in his fear bubble. And then the other one says, “Tell me, why did you move to Switzerland, to Zurich?” “Yeah, let me say, there are some problems I have in Germany, but when… I have a one-year-old child now. When I hear things about daycare centers and schools… not in all schools, but many, MASTUBATION ROOMS!” *Laughs out loud* And I think to myself: “Bro, that's the first time I've heard that!” And I would say that if there was a masturbation room here at the kindergarten in St. Pauli, where my offspring goes to kindergarten, and later on at school, too… I am relatively sure that I would not be the only one who would really—
Chris: In the kindergarten, for the caregivers or what??
Swiss: Bro, what are you talking about?
Chris: I know that from the tours, there it’s called “Nightliner,” but that’s something different.
Swiss: Nightliner. Yes, of course, but… that’s just simply… And I always find that so funny and that's exactly what he is like—Elon Musk. This… on the one hand being very good at something—
Chris: Sorry, I can't get off on the masturbation rooms right now.
Swiss: —and then on the other hand to talk such nonsense, bro, you know. Where you think, “What masturbation rooms?! And… that’s why you emigrate to Switzerland?” Bro, well, as a Swiss person, I dare to say: there are only perverts in Switzerland. Only.
Chris: And that’s why you… that’s why your family emigrated here.
Swiss: *laughs* That’s why I emigrated… my father did.
Chris: So, would you—
Swiss: No, just kidding, dear Swiss people, see you in Zurich. Thank you for the good advance sales figures there, we're really looking forward to it in November.
Chris: So would you describe your family as…
Swiss: *Makes some weird noise*
Chris: Do you have a bit of… should I put in another little advertising jingle?
Swiss: No, it’s fine. It’s okay. The show is a smash hit, we don't have to—
Chris: Where will it take place in Zurich?
Swiss: Erm… Komplex 357 or something.
Chris: I don’t know that.
Swiss: Cool. 357! *Shouts out* 357! (Translator’s note: the venue is actually called “Komplex 457”)
Chris: So, you would describe your family as a Swiss system refugee family?
Swiss: Exactly! We fled from these masturbation rooms in Switzerland, that’s why I cannot understand, why egghead Hopf flees to Switzerland.
Chris: Right.
Swiss: There he will find even worse things than masturbation rooms. There are… you know, the Swiss bunkers? There are masturbation bunkers.
Chris: But I *both laugh*… but I'm always in for it… I think we should all google “masturbation rooms” just to fuck the algorithm.
Swiss: Yeah.
Chris: If we… I think our podcast has 27 listeners. Imagine 27 people—
Swiss: It gets googled 27 times.
Chris: Imagine this gets googled 27 times, what this will do to Google.
Swiss: No, but what kind of [….] is this? (he left out the word). But we need to come to an end here soon.
Chris: Do you have to go again? Are you in a big hurry?
Swiss: I need to go do sports, Christian. Do you understand, this beautiful, nice look does not just come from—
Chris: But don't you have to make an appointment to exercise and all that? Right.
Swiss: Listen, Christian. I don’t have to justify myself here.
Chris: No, I’m just interested. Is it a sport, where you always have to—
Swiss: For my calendar—*switches over to the squeaky voice from before* No, I then go—no. *Back to normal voice* Hey, what’s going on with my voice today? Alright.
Chris: Nah, it could be that you… that it's a sport where training starts at—
Swiss: No. I have my days when I do one thing, I have my days when I do another. I know when I eat and when I don't eat. Christian, we now also bake at home—I might as well mention that briefly—
Chris: So, is it ballet or curling today?
Swiss: Curling (he does an untranslatable word play with the name “Hopf” here). We even make sourdough bread at home now.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: A friendship bread dough was made there. That's what it's called, this piece.
Chris: Yeah, right. That yeast stuff.
Swiss: No. Bread. No! Without Yeast!
Chris: So, this friendship bread is not yeast, but sourdough?
Swiss: Without yeast! Many do it with yeast, but not in our home!
Chris: Oh, so a friendship dough is also possible without yeast.
Swiss: Salt, flour, water—that’s what is in the bread that we eat at home.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: Plus, I ordered… I need to make an advertisement here now, because there are… some might be critical of this, but I like it a lot… Coach Aaron from around here, he spoke up for honey a bit. He discovered that raw honey actually is very healthy. Antiphlogistic.
Chris: Yes, exactly.
Swiss: And I thought to myself, “Hey, Coach Aaron is right, I must order that!” And then I ordered the “Herculean task” of Krüger honey from the Allgäu (a mountainous region in Bavaria, southern Germany), 500 grams, for a mere 50 euros.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: And it tastes very bitter, but it is so healthy! And I pop it into myself when I eat it, on this homemade sourdough bread with three ingredients, and I think: “Nothing can happen to me!” Christian.
Chris: How do you bake this bread, do you put it into a bread pan?
Swiss: No, you need a fermentation basket.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: Then it will be… I don't know, I'm always just there, I'm talking big about something that I don't even do myself *laughs*, but I'm there.
Chris: “Fermentation basket” is the second new word I’m learning today, besides “Masturbation rooms.”
Swiss: Right. The fermentation baskets in the masturbation rooms have to be kept clean!
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: And then it rests there somehow, I don't know, and then it's made again and blah blah blah, and then it goes into the oven, and it tastes so good, Christian! So, you know: the fewer ingredients, the healthier something is.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: Where were we?
Chris: Because I… I did—
Swiss: At my calendar.
Chris: I asked you, if you have yet another big topic left.
Swiss: I was going to say something, and you totally interrupted me.
Chris: *chuckles*
Swiss: I somehow wanted to… and you were like, “Do you need to go, do you have particular appointments?”
Chris: You said, you were going to do sports.
Swiss: Yes, exactly, but beforehand I was originally trying to say something, when you excessively and meanly ripped me out of that. Just like a Fake Account would do. That’s why I don’t know now. I’m very forgetful recently, like really. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know.
Chris: I’m going on vacation today.
Swiss: Where are you going?
Chris: Africa.
Swiss: Africa?
Chris: I wanted to see for myself… it's just the edge of Africa. I wanted to see the Mediterranean from the south.
Swiss: But are you the kind of guy… I was there, after all. As the crow flies from Sicily to… may one say which country?
Chris: Of course, nobody will come follow me.
Swiss: Algeria, right?
Chris: Tunisia.
Swiss: I see. I thought Algeria.
Chris: That’s practically right next to it.
Swiss: That’s a cool vacation spot, too. But are you also someone who goes out of the resort in Tunisia?
Chris: I want a bit of that, yes. So, I booked something, where you have a cool hotel, but where you can at least go to a small town also. So, we are… it's a few kilometers to Hammamet, it's about two or three kilometers, and about 20 kilometers to Tunis.
Swiss: Hey, the Vikings also had “Hammer Met” (untranslatable word game) Haha.
Chris: I know.
Swiss: My experience of North Africa in a nutshell: I was once in Tangier, which is in Morocco.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: And I have to say, I don't go there because, as I said, I understand the people, it's totally part of it, they want to get their bargain, I go there as a rich Westerner, bro, it was… every two meters you were talked at: “Do you want to buy this, do you want to buy that, come here, do that.”
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Swiss: And I just—we've talked about it before, I just realized that I'm a complete foreign body here, even though I and my companion actually have a rather dark appearance, I'll say, so we actually don't stand out much in the south.
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: But that was very, very, very exhausting and then I find on the other hand… you know, for example, I… Martin was also in Casablanca once.
Chris: It was the same in Mexico, for example.
Swiss: In Cuba it was the same thing, we spoke about it before, and I experience that as very, very, very exhausting, and I understand the people, and I—
Chris: Are you also the kind of guy who goes out of a shop again? You go into a store, you just want to look around, and then someone shows up and asks, “Look here, look at this, try this!”—then I immediately go out again, because I—
Swiss: I don’t even enter such shops, where there are not enough—hey, shops in general, if there are only one or two customers present, I won’t enter, because I am afraid that the shop assistant will pounce on me.
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: I just want to go in there and look around a bit.
Chris: That’s the same with me. I don’t want to be—
Swiss: I don’t want to be talked into anything. On the other hand, I think—when I was in Cuba, we were in a resort like that for five days. And there were only Canadians there. Bro, they didn't go out. They just… they got drunk, went to the beach, and I think that's so whack.
Chris: I always try to do both, somehow.
Swiss: And in Cuba we traveled a lot, even by car and so on, and it was great, but it was also very, very, very exhausting. And… just… well, if you're that kind of guy, I just don't celebrate it. Bro, I don't want this, please leave me alone.
Chris: Yeah.
Swiss: I want peace and quiet, and on the other hand I understand the people, and I understand that I owe it to them in some way when I, as a rich Westerner, go there and say: “I want to take a look at this.” I always feel a bit like I'm on a misery vacation. And that's why I don't like doing it so much anymore.
Chris: I think it's actually a general culture clash, because if you look… of course in Germany you also have people at the market and at the flea market and in the shops and people are bargaining and so on, but this whole market crier and trading culture is completely different here, even in the tourist shops.
Swiss: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And in many countries—and this is often the case in the south, where communication is very different, where communication is LOUD—it's part of it, and many people really enjoy it. They're into it! For communication, for trade, and yeah, yeah, yeah—
Swiss: Bro, there are traders, also in thingamabob, who are—
Chris: —and I cannot do that at all.
Swiss: —disappointed, if you don’t try to make a bargain.
Chris: Exactly! They are insulted then.
Swiss: They tell you the price, and you go, “Okay.”
Chris: They are insulted then.
Swiss: They go, “What? Are you kidding me, dude?” Right. Well—
Chris: No, I don't even like that at H&M when I walk through the store, and someone says: “Can I help you?” And I go, “No…”
Swiss: “NO! You cannot! YOU CANNOT! Look, at the way you walk around… no, you can’t.”
Chris: “I’ll ask then, thank you.” So, there's a collision between my… attention!… Between my mindset in general, and also culture.
Swiss: Yeah. So, I really like that, that's why I love Italy, that's why… well, I really like that in Turkey too, where I'm always, bro, I like Europe in general, I like being left alone. I love it.
Chris: But in Italy this is sometimes not so easy in the tourist shops either.
Swiss: Not in the places where I stay. And I don’t want to claim that I just went to all the insider spots.
Chris: They think you’re an Italian. A veritable Italian.
Swiss: *In Italian accent* I am Giacomo!—Oh no, I have to be careful to not commit cultural theft. Christian, this was a very nice hour with you, I wish you a nice flight, Christian, please also tell us how your flight was. You know—
Chris: Yes, I will.
Swiss: —flights are interesting. Flight-interested people like me want to know how the flight was.
Chris: Absolutely. We’ll meet again in about two weeks.
Swiss: And we’ll meet again in two weeks, Christian. And of course we will meet on December 5th, at our Live Show in Kulturkirche Altona, go get your tickets.
Chris: Right!
Swiss: Bye!
*Outro playing*
[1] Apparently, they’re talking about images of Swiss masturbating.
[2] Hoss and Hopf (own spelling Hoss & Hopf) is a German podcast by financial influencers Kiarash Hossainpour and Philip Hopf. The podcast is classified as politically right-wing or right-libertarian. Media and experts have repeatedly accused the podcast's creators of spreading false information and conspiracy theories. It combines financial topics with political and social issues and is one of the most listened to podcasts in Germany.
Translation: Margit Güttersberger
Proofreading: Helen Forsyth