2024-06-17
44 分钟The Berlin dance mecca Berghain is known for its eight-hour line and inscrutable door policy. PJ Vogt, host of the podcast "Search Engine," joins us to crack the code. It has to do with Cold War rivalries, German tax law, and one very talented bouncer.
I'm a reporter, a writer.
I try to answer questions not unlike what you do, Steven, although our questions are sometimes a bit dumber, but sometimes they're not.
Sometimes they're smart.
That is PJ Vogt.
He's been making podcasts for nearly as long as I have.
His shows are often about life on the Internet and how technology changes us.
So your current show, search engine, despite the name, isn't a show about life online for the most part, is it?
No.
The reason it's called search engine is because it's a show where it's a bit of a joke.
What a search engine is supposed to be is like, you ask it a question, and very cheaply and very quickly, a machine gives you an answer that might be pretty good, where, like a human powered bespoke, incredibly expensive to run, very slow, search engine, it gives answers.
In layers and over time, as opposed to bang, here it is.
Yeah, yeah.
Oftentimes the answer is, who can say?
But we give you, like, human level, complicated and complex answers.
Today on free economics radio, a bonus episode with PJ vote and search engine.
It's sort of about economics, the economics of a famous nightclub in Berlin.
I'd heard the basics.
A decommissioned power plant turned into a multi story nightclub.
People talked about this place as a kind of grimy, heavenly, and like traditional heaven, grimy heaven was also supposedly very hard to get into.
One guiding principle of our show is that just how anything can be interesting, if you are willing to look closely enough or from the right angle.