How racial bias is messing with DNA research

Mapping our genes has already allowed humanity to make huge strides in medicine. But the vast majority of the genomes we’ve decoded are those of people of white European heritage. Why is that a problem, and how do we fix it? This week we talk to the Nigerian geneticist Segun Fatumo about fixing the genome gap. We’re also talking about Andalucía’s bid to protect flamenco, and why Europe’s most powerful media mogul is in hot water.

Segun is an associate professor of genetic epidemiology and bioinformatics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He tweets @SFatumo.

You can find a video of flamenco performers celebrating Andalucía’s new law here, and watch the latest visual podcast in our series with Are We Europe, 'Andrea', here. We are delighted that the visual version of an earlier episode of This Is What A Generation Sounds Like, 'Mohamed', has been nominated for the CIVIS Prize! Watch it here.

This week's Isolation Inspiration: this interview on the European Space Agency's Jupiter mission; How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast); World Leader or My Friend's Dad? and Luis Sal's Parisian croissant review. 

Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at ⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠ (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by ⁠leaving us a review⁠ or giving us five stars on Spotify. 

00:22 Make Europe Digestible Again

02:23 A Good Week for protecting flamenco?

09:22 A Bad Week for Axel Springer's CEO

19:30 Interview: Segun Fatumo on the European bias of genomic studies

30:24 Isolation Inspiration: Juice, 'How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)', World Leader or My Friend's Dad, croissant reviews

34:59 Happy Ending: 500 days of reading and knitting (in a pitch-black cave)

Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak

Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

Twitter | Instagram | hello@europeanspodcast.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION: 00’22”

KATY: Welcome back to The Europeans, your weekly dose of stuff that happened around Europe, delivered in a digestible way. That makes it sound like one of those yoghurts that's good for your – good for a healthy gut.

DOMINIC: It sounded like you were auditioning to do an advert for Marks and Spencers.

K: This isn't just any podcast. This is The Europeans podcast. How're you doing, Dominic? What's happening in Amsterdam?

D: Yeah, I'm fine. It's sunny. All is good here. Life is fine.

K: Oh, unusually optimistic. You're usually, like, sick or overworked or something.

D: It's true.

K: Well done.

D: Famous last words. Anyway, how are you?

K: Also good. I just spent the weekend being a tourist in my own city. Do you ever do that? 

D: Yeah, when people come to visit me.

K: It's really nice when people come and visit especially, because you can just see things with fresh eyes and be grateful that you live in this place that people want to visit for fun. But I went to the Musee d'Orsay. And I posted this on our Instagram, but I was made aware of the fact that this beautiful, beautiful museum got used as a car park in the 70s. Did you know that?

D: I didn't know that. But I did know that it was originally a train station, right?

K: Yeah. And it still very much has a train station vibe, with a big clock and all that jazz. Anyway, it's a great museum. Go visit. Nobody needs that advice, but there you go, you have it from me. What are we talking about this week?

D: This week, we're going to be talking about genetics. Did you know that 86% of all genomic studies only use data of people with European ancestry? We wanted to know why this is and what kind of effect it's having on the treatment of people who do not have European ancestry. A lot of people in the world – most of the people in the world, that is. So to help us understand, we’ll be joined later on in the show by a very talented geneticist by the name of Segun Fatumo. But first it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

GOOD WEEK - 02’23”

D: Who's had a good week, Katy?

K: It's a kind of caveated Good Week, as has become tradition on this show.

D: Again?!

K: I'm giving Good Week to flamenco. Have you ever watched a flamenco performance? 

D: Yes, I have. My sister lived in Seville for a while, so I saw one the. It was really impressive.

K: I also saw flamenco in Seville. If you've never seen a performance, go see some flamenco! It's a very special artform with very old roots in gypsy folklore. And it's incredibly emotionally intense as a form of music and dance. And in its home region of Andalucía in the south of Spain, people are rightfully proud of being the birthplace of this amazing artform. So proud, in fact, that the lawmakers in Andalucía’s regional parliament have just passed a new law to protect flamenco. And that has been greeted as good news from a lot of artists. I'll post a link to a video of some very well-known artists like Farruquito and El Pene singing and dancing in celebration outside the parliament after the vote.

D: So it's a law to protect flamenco. But does flamenco need protecting?

K: Well, certainly people who practise flamenco have long-standing complaints that as an artform, it doesn't get enough support from the state. And as in general, with the arts, it's very helpful to have enthusiastic support and ideally, money from the state to support culture, right? Like, you're a professional singer, you don't need me to tell you that.

D: Yeah.

K: But it's not just about money, this sense that the tradition of flamenco is under threat. It's also about who watches it. Like, is it something that feels really mainstream and is enjoyed by everyone? Or has flamenco just become something that is largely watched by tourists? And there are some people in the flamenco world who worry that it is becoming an artform that is mostly watched by tourists.

D: So what is this law doing to try and protect it, then?

K: A couple of different things. Firstly, it is trying to define flamenco. And it defines flamenco as ‘a cultural manifestation and artistic language with popular roots with an important contribution by gypsy people, as well as the historical influence of other cultures’. And the law also states that while flamenco does have links with other regions, Andalucía is the birthplace of flamenco, and don't you forget it! It doesn't actually say ‘don't you forget it’, but I get the sense that that's very much a message that you're supposed to come away with. Which I guess is where, like, a slight cynicism starts to creep in, for me at least. Like, is this partly a promotional gimmick that just happens to boost the tourism sector? I don't know. It's also a very tangential link, but it also kind of reminded me of the food populism in Italy that we talked about a few weeks ago, where right-leaning politicians find it helpful to debate traditions rather than more pressing issues. But like I say, that's a very tangential link. But leaving aside my cynicism for a second, one of the big things that the law does is that it sets a path for flamenco to be taught at schools in Andalucía, and not just as an extracurricular activity, like as an actual part of the curriculum. And that feels like a pretty concrete thing that's being done to encourage the next generation to become interested in flamenco as an artform. It kind of makes me think of the push to revive the Irish and Welsh languages in schools. I know that there's constant debate over the quality of that teaching, and the extent to which that has actually revived those two languages. But it's difficult to argue that Welsh or Irish would be more widely-spoken if they weren't taught in schools. So maybe something similar can be done with flamenco, right? I mean, maybe. It's obviously not something that we can know the answer to overnight, whether that would work or not. And this law doesn't even enter into force for another 18 months. And also, you know, people in the flamenco world have a lot of questions over how it's going to be taught in schools. They also want to know how much money is gonna go into this, because there doesn't seem to be a specific budget attached to a yet.

D: Oh!

K: Mm. And they want to know whether the fact that the Gypsy origins of this tradition being recognised by the law, whether or not that means that there's actually finally going to be decent representation of people from that community in all of this new stuff that's going to be financed with public money – research jobs at universities, for example. And then there's the bigger question of defining flamenco. People have been arguing about what flamenco is, since forever. But the more traditional flamenco fans are arguing that it's been kind of corrupted by modern influences. As a total non-expert, myself, I am instinctively a little bit suspicious of any attempt to say, ‘This counts as part of the artform and this doesn't’. Because you know, artforms have always been fluid. And isn't the whole point of creativity being able to draw inspiration from different places?

D: Yeah, it's a can of worms, this conversation, but I like that sentiment of what you just said.

K: Evidently a lot of local lawmakers are also quite ambivalent about this whole thing, because a lot of them abstained in the vote, saying that it was vague or saying that it was unnecessary. It was passed solely with the support of the conservative Popular Party who hold a majority in the regional parliament. Although there was also, hilariously, one opposition lawmaker who got confused and voted for it by mistake. Among the critics, there was also this very nice quote in the Times newspaper’s article about the new law. They interviewed the flamenco expert Antonio Ortega, who said, ‘To legislate flamenco could be the most anti-flamenco thing in the world. Are you going to send inspectors to check on what is flamenco and what is not?’ I mean, I feel like I've raised quite a few potential criticisms, and this is after all, Good Week. So I want to leave things on a more positive note and quote another person interviewed by the times, Arturo Bernal, who is the guy from the regional government that's overseen this new piece of legislation. He drew a comparison with this very famous flamenco competition in 1922. It was called the Concurso del Cante Jondo, and at the time, flamenco was being really rubbished by intellectuals, it did feel like it was an artform in danger of dying. And that competition changed everything. It's seen as this really seminal moment in Spanish music history. Bernal said that this was another chance to properly safeguard the future of flamenco. And when it comes to teaching it as an art form in Andalucía’s schools, he said, ‘Introducing it into schools does not mean evening classes or somesuch, but making it a fundamental part of the curriculum as part of our identity, culture and history.’

D: Interesting.

BAD WEEK - 09’22”

K: Who has had a bad week?

D: Well, it's been a week where there's been a ton of international media attention for Rupert Murdoch in his defamation battle with Dominion voting systems in the United States. But I would like to focus my Bad Week attention this week on another media mogul, arguably Europe's leading media mogul, but someone who I imagine most of you know much less about than Rupert Murdoch. His name is Mathias Doepfner, and he is the CEO of Europe's largest media publisher, Axel Springer, who run the German tabloid Bild and the broadsheet Die Welt. They also run Business Insider and Politico, among others. And Doepfner has had a very bad week after a rival newspaper, Die Zeit, was leaked some rather eye-catching messages between Doepfner and various employees at his company. Let's start with his quotes about climate change. First quote, ‘I am all for climate change.’ I'll let that sink in. He's not saying ‘I’m all for fighting climate change’. He's saying that he is all for the climate changing, which is an unusual point of view, considering the science. I should say that that was a message from 2017. So if I'm feeling kind towards him, then I would say the discourse has shifted a bit since then. I mean, we knew climate change was bad and real back then, even. But he went on to say that human civilisation is historically more successful in times of warmer climate than in cold climates.

K: Interesting. What like compared to an ice age, or…?

D: Yeah, I guess so. And he said, ‘We shouldn't fight climate change, but adjust to it.’

K: Okay…

D: Next up, it gets grim quite quickly. And I'm gonna give you a summary of his foreign policy outlook, which he summarised in one pretty racist message. He said, quote, ‘Free West, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riffraff.’ End quote. Pretty gross. And the words that perhaps got him into the most trouble in his home country of Germany are the words he used when talking about people from former East Germany. Firstly, he uses a somewhat derogatory term to describe these people living in the former East, he calls them Ossis. And in one quote, he said, ‘The Ossis are either communist or fascist, they don't do in-between. Disgusting.’ End quote, In another, he said, ‘My mother always said it, the Ossis are never going to be Democrats.’

K: The fact that he, like, wrote these things down and actually expressed them outside his own head to other people, just makes me think like, this is a person who spent so long just having people nod at him and say, ‘You're right! You're so right!

D: Yeah.

K: How rich and powerful do you have to be to think like, ‘It's a very good idea for me to write this down’?

D: Yeah, I don't know if you're watching Succession, like much of the rest of the world at the moment. But I really can imagine some of these quotes as things that Logan Roy would say, the fake media mogul that in that series. You should watch it if you haven't, everyone, even though it's not really European.

K: Sort of British, isn't it? 

D: Sort of a bit British, yeah.

K: But how did these comments actually get leaked? I mean, do we know how they got leaked?

D: No, we don't actually know who the source is, which is probably for the best. But by the sounds of things, there are quite a fair few people who have a bit of beef with him. So yeah, there are various candidates,

K: And has he responded, has he tried to defend himself?

D: Yeah, he has tried to defend himself a bit. And he took a while to apologise, but he did. So eventually, on Sunday, he expressed regret and said that he doesn't always manage to use the correct tone of voice when writing private messages. Which I think – yeah, we could all attest to that! According to a different statement that he posted on the Axel Springer internal message board and was seen by The Guardian, he claimed that the messages were taken out of context and that they cannot be taken as his true way of thinking. But he does say he lets himself be taken to account for every published word. And he does say that he is worried about the rise of the far right in East Germany and by radical Islam, and they were the points he was trying to make, apparently, amongst the bad language. But going back to the leaked messages, because there's more dirt in there to be discussed. Messages also show him criticising former German chancellor Angela Merkel quite a lot and praising former US president Donald Trump. Even suggesting that Trump should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.

K: For…?!

D: It was for killing an Iranian general with an American drone in January 2020. But one of the most damaging parts of this leak is the evidence that emerges of his attempt to make his tabloid newspaper Bild reflect his own personal political views. For example, some messages to Julian Reichelt, the now former editor of Bild, were part of the leak. Reichelt has actually since been fired due to accusations of sexual misconduct, but Doepfner wrote to him in the run-up to the German general election in 202, urging him to, quote, ‘do more’ for the FDP. The FDP is the centre right, pro-business, liberal party who are now in coalition with the Greens and the SDP. And this was after Doepfner had had dinner with the FDP party leader and yeah, he wanted to see them do better in the polls, and was persuading the editor of one of his newspapers to help them do better in the polls. Which, yeah, I find quite depressing.

K: Just to be cynical for a minute, isn't that why you buy a newspaper, though? To just have this massive mouthpiece? And then you say, ‘Oh, I leave my editors to do what they want.’

D: Oh, you buy a newspaper as an owner? I thought you meant like the consumer. That's…

K: No!

D: I was confused for a second.

K: No, I mean buy the whole newspaper.

D: Yeah, I guess it just brings to light the quite murky thing that we all know sometimes happens, that this like tiny pool of billionaire men who own newspapers use their media outlets sometimes as an outlet for their own personal political opinions. And personally, I find that quite gross and, frankly, unhealthy for democracy, at the very least. And to see it in such stark contrast is quite confronting. Doepfner responded to this specific allegation, and he said, ‘In the spirit of freedom and variety of speech, I enjoy having arguments, especially with our editors, who are all responsible and self-confident. That also explicitly applies to alleged influence taken in regards to the FDP. I am very close to the values of this party, but thank God our journalists won't let themselves be influenced.’ End quote. Which I find a bit of a cop-out, because… were they really not influenced? Did they really not ever do anything because they know their boss wants them to do it?

K: Having worked for some publications that will not be named, I've certainly been involved in bits of reporting where the editors have heard from the owners that they don't like a particular way that something is being angled or phrased, and have suggested that we change our tune. And it's ugly, it's really ugly.

D: I have to say, I find it interesting that at the time of recording, there has been nothing on Politico EU about this Doepfner leak story. And the story has been rolling for quite some days now. So that's not a great look. And talking of Politico, when Doepfner bought Politico in 2021, both the EU branch and the US branch, he claimed to The Washington Post that he wanted to bring a more non-partisan approach to the US media landscape, which seems pretty ironic now to say the least.

K: I'm sure they're just getting around to writing that piece!

D: Oh, sure. Anyway, bad week for billionaire Mathias Doepfner. There are now calls for him to resign, including from the German government's commissioner on East German Affairs. He's also, interestingly, one of the media moguls that seems most excited about artificial intelligence, and recently he announced that job cuts would be coming at his titles due to the promise of AI replacing some journalists. And that concerns me even more, because I think it's easier to persuade a robot to write what you want with whatever political opinion you want than a journalist who will sometimes say no.

K: Well, we asked AI to write a little biography of you a couple of weeks back, and it said some very nice things about you. So maybe he'll just ask the robots to write nice things about Mathias Dopefner now every week.

D: It'll be like, write an article for me about why we should not be fighting climate change, using arguments from the FDP manifesto.

K: Ahhh…

* * * 

D: After that Bad Week about Axel Springer, we're very unlikely to be bought by any media mogul anytime soon. So we really need to continue growing our support base from our lovely listeners instead, if we're going to be able to survive in this dog-eat-dog world. We thankfully have some new supporters to thank this week and we are very grateful to them. They are [LIST OF NAMES].

K: Thank you all so so much. Yeah. If it isn't obvious by now, we are a very small, very independent, tiny little operation. We’re no Axel Springer. So we really couldn't be making this show without the amazing, generous people who chip in a few bucks a month so that we can pay ourselves and pay our producers to make this show. You can join these lovely generous people by heading to patreon.com/europeanspodcast.

INTERVIEW: SEGUN FATUMO ON THE EUROPEAN BIAS OF GENOMIC STUDIES - 19’30”

K: A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that I was reading a book about genetics called ‘A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. I say I'm reading it, but I've been listening to the audiobook. That's kind of reading, isn't it?

D: Yeah!

K: Thank you. One of the things that came up in this book, that I found really quite troubling, is the crazy level of bias in the existing body of research that we have on people's genes. The vast vast majority of the DNA that we have decoded and use for what's known as genomic studies – so, the studies of people's complete sets of genes – the vast majority of these studies have been done using the DNA of people of European heritage, otherwise known as white people. Is that necessarily a problem? Yeah, it really, really is. I'll let our guests tell you why. Segun Fatumo is a Nigerian geneticist, he's based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And he's someone who's done a lot of work trying to explain why it's a problem that so many of these studies are based on the genetic information of people of white European heritage. And he's also someone who's trying to fix this problem. We gave them a ring to find out more.

D: What got you interested in genetics in the first place?

SEGUN: I was born in Lagos, Nigeria. My immediate younger brother had sickle cell disease, he was always having unbearable pain. At that time, we didn't understand what was going on for him. At some point, the doctor said that I also have sickle cell traits. So the irony is that I wasn't getting sick, I wasn't even getting malaria. So the sickle cell trait I have was even protecting me for getting malaria. That was the initial time I had an interest in understanding genetics.

K: So humans share almost all of their genetic material, right? Something like 99.9% of our genetic material is the same person to person. What difference can that remaining 0.1% make to people's health?

S: 0.1%, that's more than 3 million variations between two people. And those 3 million variations, they could mean anything, they could be the reason why you are likely going to have a kidney disease or have diabetes. So even though we are very, very similar, we are also very, very different.

D: Up until now, the vast majority of the world's genomic studies have been based on the genes of people of white European heritage. Why is that? And why is that a problem?

S: Okay, very interesting question! So currently, about nine out of 10 genomic studies have been done with data from individuals of European ancestry. Only 1.1% are based on African ancestry people. There are many reasons why that is. So one of them is funding. Governments in the UK and in the US are putting a lot of money for research. Another one is the capacity for research in developed countries, which is currently lacking in many countries in Africa. And this also includes training, to be able to train people to do analysis. We're not doing ourselves good if we focus genomic studies on only one population. Genetics is very important for drug discovery. And I’ll give an example. The current drug that we have that is used for lowering cholesterol – that was discovered because some African ancestry people were involved in a research study. The study found out that those African ancestry people, they are naturally – they have a gene called PCSK9 which is helping them to lower their cholesterol. And that helps us now to have a drug that is useful for both African and non-Africans. So what is actually happening is that we are missing a lot, if we continue to exclude some population from genomic studies.

K: There's been a lot of interest in recent years in what's known as precision medicine, this idea that we can create personalised treatments for illnesses based on people's individual characteristics, including the make-up of their genes. So presumably, it's a problem for a lot of the world's population, if the genetic studies that these treatments are based on are only looking at the DNA of white Europeans.

S: Let me give you a very simple example. So when I was doing my postdoc in the UK, in Cambridge, I was tested for diabetes. And the result came and it was very, very surprising to me, the result. And I had to question the doctor and say, ‘Did you put into consideration the fact that I have sickle cell traits?’ Of course, that was not a consideration for him. This took one to two years before he recommended a much more appropriate diagnosis for me. You'll remember during COVID that some particular ethnic groups were more likely going to die from COVID, or more likely to have a disease from COVID? So we need to understand that, and we need to provide an appropriate – maybe either medication or an appropriate diagnosis for them. And a more appropriate treatment needs to be given to each individual or group of people.

D: Do you think the medical community is waking up to just how serious a problem this genetic gap is?

S: Yes, we are. There are so many publications that show that people are now speaking about that. There is a lot of awareness on that. You know, there's one problem of, ‘There's no data, so what can we do?’ But there's another problem of, ‘When data is made available, do people have the necessary skills to analyse them?’ And I’ll give an example, UK Biobank, that resource has samples from about 500,000 people in the UK, including almost 40,000 people that are not white European. In publication, we found out that our colleagues, even though they are aware about the need to analyse those 40,000, they don't analyse them, because it's become more difficult to analyse data that are not European ancestry. So that's even the case where data is available.

K: You've been working on something called the 100,000 Genome Project. It's a project where you've collected the genomic data of 100,000 people in Nigeria. What difference do you think it makes to have this work and projects like it coordinated by African scientists?

S: Excellent question. So yes, you know, there used to be what is called helicopter science or parachute science. So people fly in from developed countries like the UK, the US, they fly to Africa, they take samples, and they go back to their country, analyse the sample without any consideration to those people where they have taken a sample from. But that has changed. Or, that is changing. So the last ten years, we've had funding for different initiatives in Africa. One of them that has been very, very successful is the H3Africa programme. But that also was funded by Wellcome Trust in the UK, and the NIH in the US. A lot of scientists have been trained, a lot of young African scientists have been trained, and that includes me –  I had funding to get trained at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge. And there's so many other people, also like me, that have been trained from that programme, who are now taking the step to organise their own group, they now have the expertise to analyse large scale data sets. So I'm very excited that today, there are many African scientists now leading large-scale projects in Africa. So they collect data by themselves, they do the biobank by themselves, they do genotyping in Africa, they analyse data by themselves, and then publish the paper by themselves. That is a lot of progress that we made in the last 10 years.

D: And I imagine it also makes a big difference to have scientists leading these projects that are more familiar with the culture of the people they're collecting the samples from?

S: it's very, very, very important to have local scientists taking the lead in their own study. For any study to be successful, there has to be this mutual trust between the scientists and the participants. If they don't trust you, they're not going to be very receptive, or they're not going to allow you to be able to do that study successfully. I’ll give an example. In Nigeria, some people will not allow you to take their blood, because there's this culture, this belief that you're probably going to use their blood for, maybe some ritual, or for something that is bad. But if you understand the context of where the study has been done, of course, you understand how to talk to them. Or you understand that there is a need for you to study the project with a very comprehensive community engagement. So you don't just go and start collecting samples from people. You go to the community, there'll be a lot of mobilisation, discussing with stakeholders, the leaders in the community. In Uganda, where most of my studies are based, we have a committee, they are people from the community themselves. They are people like pastors, like imams, like community leaders. So before you go to the people, we tell them about the project we want to do. They trust us, we trust them. It’s very key to understand the cultural context of where you are doing the study before you even go there.

* * * 

K: If you are still on Twitter, an increasingly depressing website, make your experience slightly less depressing by following Segun where you can find out more about his work. He's there @SFatumo. And if you're interested in the wider story of Africans taking charge of genomic studies on their own continent, there's a really interesting article from a couple of years back in Science magazine, which also has some really inspiring details of Segun’s own story and how he came to work in genetics. I will post the link to that in the show notes.

ISOLATION INSPIRATION - 30’24”

K: What have you been enjoying recently?

D: Well, this week, I really enjoyed all the news coming from the successful launch of Juice, or the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. And it's one of the European Space Agency's biggest ever projects. The rocket is tasked with looking at the icy moons around the largest planet in our solar system, and specifically checking out if it may possibly be habitable, because there is some evidence that there are huge liquid oceans under the icy crust. If you'd like to get excited about this, too, then I highly recommend a 13-minute interview with the European Space Agency's Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell. She was interviewed on the BBC, I'll put a link in the show notes. And I was particularly excited about how intergenerational a project like this is. The project was first proposed in 2007, when she says it still felt a bit like science fiction. But Juice will, if all goes to plan, arrive in the Jupiter neighbourhood around 2031, exploring the area until 2035. And Professor Carole points out that many of the future scientists who will work on the incredible data collected are still in school today, which is quite a nice thought.

K: Wow!

D: So yeah, go check out that interview, and keep your eye out for updates from the ESA. It's all very exciting.

K: This is a really nice example of cathedral thinking, something that we talked about on the podcast a very long time ago, making intergenerational projects. I also really like the name Juice. It's just sassy.

D: It's really fun, they did well with their marketing.

K: Love it.

D: What have you been enjoying this week, Katy? 

K: I don't feel like I've laughed enough recently, so I wanted to suggest a couple of things that made me giggle this week. The main one is that I've started a new Netflix series. I mean, it's not actually new, t started in 2019, but it's new to me. I'm late to the party. It's a German comedy called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). Have you seen it?

D: Oh, my friend is in it!

K: In it?!

D: Yeah!

K: That's so cool, which character are they?

D: She plays the role of Marlene.

K: Ah, I don't think I've met her yet. Cool celebrity spot, I’ll look forward to that. Anyway, it's kind of a cross between Sex Education and Breaking Bad, if you've seen either of those two shows. But it's about Moritz, who is a teenager living in a fictional small German town. And he gets dumped because his girlfriend gets into drugs and starts moving with a different crowd at school. Moritz is desperate to win her back. And he happens to be a massive computer nerd, which starts him off on this spiral of accidentally becoming a drug kingpin on the dark web in a bid to impress her. I don't think it's the show to watch if you're looking for advice about the safe consumption of drugs, and I do hope it goes without saying that we at The Europeans do not condone the consumption of illegal substances, obviously, but I'm really enjoying the show. It's very funny and fast moving. Visually, it's very snappy and fun. And it also has some quite sharp commentary in it, I think, about how reliant we are on technology. So that's one to watch, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). I also have two short YouTube things to recommend this week. One is via producer Wojciech, who sent a very funny video of the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau playing this game called World Leader, Or My Friend's Dad? Where he was shown pictures of, like, middle-aged men and asked to guess if he was in fact looking at a world leader, or the dad of one of the friends of Hasan Minaj, the host. I would love to see a European version of this game. We have so many leaders here with strong dad vibes.

D: I think we should do it.

K: Let's make one. The other YouTube video that I want to share is a review of the best croissants in Paris filmed by the Italian superstar YouTuber Luis Sal. Luis is like 25 years old and has nearly 2 million followers, it's kind of terrifying. But anyway, he came to Paris during the recent pension protests, and he filmed himself sampling various croissants at the protests. So you can hear him talking in this really deadpan way about how, ‘Yeah, this one's quite flaky, quite buttery’, and behind him there's like a garbage can on fire and black bloc protesters wandering around. It really made me laugh, so I thought I would share it with you. 

D: That sounds great.

HAPPY ENDING - 34’59”

D: Well, we don't need a Happy Ending, then, after your recommendations.

K: Give me one anyway!

D: Okay, well, we're going back to Andalucía for the Happy Ending, and I wanted to tell you about the most bizarre feat of human endurance that ended this week for a 50-year-old extreme athlete called Beatriz Flamini. Beatriz this week emerged from a cave 30 metres below the surface of the Earth, where she'd been living completely alone for the past 500 days.

K: Why would you do that?!

D: I know, I would not do it personally. But she did have some contact when she was down there from a team of scientists who were monitoring her progress and studying how it was going for her using special messaging technology. They were doing, like, tests on her and she was making a documentary down there. But she really had no sense of how much time was passing. And she actually said that when she was collected this week, she had thought that she was only about 160 or 170 days into the 500 days, which is so interesting. And the reason why I'm talking about this as a Happy Ending is because she just doesn't seem to have gone that mad. She seemed, like, pretty happy when she emerged. And it's completely unthinkable, but she seems okay. 

K: Do you know what? I don't think the dark affects us as much as some people think. I recently moved out of a very, very dark cave-like apartment, after five years of living there. And I was fine. I feel like people should do some research on me.

D: It was quite dark there, you're right, but not as dark as it was down in this cave. And she seemed to have filled her time quite well. She did a lot of exercise. She drew pictures and she knitted some woolly hats. And she had those two cameras with her, not with camera people, but she was filming herself. I definitely want to watch that documentary when it comes out. She also read 60 books. In fact, when her team came down to get her – the first human contact in 500 day –  she was really surprised and said, ‘Already?! No way. I haven't finished my book!’

K: Was she like, ‘Hang on a second, I just need to finish this last chapter?’

D: Yeah. ‘Come back tomorrow!’

K: ‘I'll be with you in a sec.’

D: And one of the things that's quite amazing about this story is that she of course had no idea what's happened in the world over the past 500 days. When she went in, the COVID pandemic was much more present in our day-to-day life, and it was some months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So I found it quite moving to hear her say at the press conference that, ‘I don't know anything that's happened since November 2021.’ And I was a bit jealous of her blissful ignorance. Anyway, she survived and seems okay. I wouldn't want to do it, but it's a fun story.

* * * 

D: We're on a break next week. But if you're missing us, why don't you check out the amazing new video version of our episode Andrea – it's one of my favourites of this series of visual episodes that we've been making with our friends at Are We Europe, based on all our audio pieces from a series called This Is What A Generation Sounds Like. So go check it out! It's about 12 minutes long, and I think it looks really cool.

K: I agree. I really, really like the visual style of this one especially. You can also, if you happen to be missing us, find us on Instagram. Some people have been complaining, Dominic, that the picture that you posted of your cat doesn't look quite as ridiculous as they hoped. She only looks moderately ridiculous.

D: She's just such a good looking cat that she can wear anything.

K: She gets away with it. @europeanspodcast for those lovely pictures of Sadie the podcast cat. We’re also on Twitter @europeanspod, and we love hearing from you via email: hello [at] europeanspodcast.com.

D: Before we go, we've also got some breaking news. Just this week, another episode in that series, This Is What A Generation Sounds Like, the Mohamed episode, has been nominated for a very prestigious award, the Civis Media Prize. And I just wanted to say that we are incredibly proud of Katz, Mohamed, Melody and everyone else that worked so hard on this co-production with Are We Europe in collaboration with the Allianz Foundation. So congratulations, everyone. And please keep all fingers and toes crossed for us until the awards ceremony. It's on June 6, so there's quite a long time, but keep them crossed. 

K: People are going to get cramps.

D: It's worth it.

K: We were produced this week by me and Wojciech Oleksiak. We will be back in two weeks, see you then!

D: Adiós.

K:  Tschüß!