EU Debate, Bank “Heist”, Edition Murder, Hunting Minks & Whales

The Reykjavík Grapevine's Iceland Roundup brings you the top news with an (un?)healthy dash of local views. In this episode, Grapevine publisher Jón Trausti Sigurðarson is joined by Grapevine editor-in-chief Bart Cameron, and Grapevine friend and contributor Sindri Eldon to roundup the stories making headlines in the past week. On the docket this week are: 

Elderly Man In Húsavík Prosecuted For Killing Five Minks

According to a very brief report on visir.is. a man in his 70s has been charged for violating the laws against the protection of wildlife for trapping five minks and subsequently killing them. The Mink slaying happened near the town of Húsavík in North Iceland.

The Reykjavík Mayor’s Credit Card “Scandal” And Upcoming Municipality Elections

Outgoing Mayor Heiða Björg Hilmisdóttir paid the city of Reykjavík back 28.000 ISK because of unauthorised use of the mayor’s credit card. This she did after the Icelandic media requested information about her card usage. The mayor was featured in a cover story here.  Municipality elections will take place next weekend, learn about who’s running for office in Reykjavík here.

There Will Be Violence - Anti-EU Discussion Heats Up In The Reykjavík Grapevine

This publication interviewed meteorologist, university professor, and chairman of anti-EU group Heimssýn Haraldur Ólafsson for our latest cover feature. In the interview Haraldur suggests that the EU debate could become so heated that people might resort to violence. His comments went viral over the weekend after visir.is picked up on the comments.

Romanian Hacker Steals Millions From Icelandic Arion Bank

A Romanian man has been arrested in his home country for embezzling millions of krónur from the Icelandic bank, Arion. The man will be extradited to Iceland to face prosecution.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:09

Colantine. Also has an online store. It funds our journalism. We sell all sorts of stuff there, including these specially curated boxes curated by our staff. Go to shop.creven.

SPEAKER_05 0:33

You're out of the side.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

It's like the little hamburger helper.

SPEAKER_05 0:40

Where we here at the regular craven to make an attempt of rounding up the last week of Icelandic news.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

I like to add a little uh bizad. A little zap brennegan.

SPEAKER_05 0:53

This starts off uh perfectly with uh peop people who really own the money here.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

I like the money.

SPEAKER_05 1:03

We're uh we're not actually a news show, we're like a dumbass morning radio show.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

I wish. Can you imagine getting paid for that?

SPEAKER_05 1:15

Okay. Uh uh it's a pretty uh gruesome bunch of stories that I've uh collected here from the last week or so. Oh wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

We've been off the air for like two or three weeks, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

A lot of dead animals can pile up in the city. Because everybody's been in France.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Everybody here has been in France except for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

I'm the first I I left Reykjavik, though, for the first time in like eight months. Oh, congratulations. I went all the way to Keplovik. Yeah, the ends of the earth. Truly.

SPEAKER_05 1:45

We actually went to Keplovik too, but then we took the plane out of there.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah, I was just at the pool. Oh, what's the pool like there? Oh God, we're on the air. Uh it's not very good. I I find it unusually. The water is hot.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

I I went to the pool in a Disneyland hotel and it was not very good either. I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Yeah, it's hotel hotel pool vibes.

SPEAKER_05 2:08

Uh I mean we we have a pretty high standard of what we think is a good pool.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yeah, I realized my love affair with swimming probably came from Vesterbylock.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Because I was gonna say, I I actually feel like I have a pretty low standard for swimming pools, and yet most pools fail to meet this standard. Like I go to somewhere like I don't know, uh, you know, Cobovor or or even Lo Dalur, and I'm like, damn, this is nice. They really got it all there. Like it is easy. And then I go to Vestabillo and it's just like, what the fuck is this shit? It's like the whole thing there.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

What's the name of the both of them are excellent?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:43

Yeah. Um, if you if you tried swimming pools in a different country on a regular basis, you you'll eventually think all of these Icelandic swimming pools are excellent.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah. I I I'm not sure. Depending on where you've been.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

I I even kind of like Sintutlin now after the the expansion. Oh, it's not a good thing. I used to hate that place. I mean the building has always been amazing, but as a pool it kind of sucked. But now they opened up the outdoor part and it's like a whole new whole new vibe.

SPEAKER_05 3:11

So one of one of the things we've talked I've talked about frequently with Sweden is is their love of hot dogs, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Oh god. Do they swim with a thermos of hot dogs too?

SPEAKER_05 3:20

There's no thermos of hot dogs, but they have not been able to disassociate swimming pools from the idea if if you're going swimming in a lake or at the ocean, you're gonna have a hot dog. So there are people. Where is this going? So there's gonna be mustard and ketchup all over the place and fried onions. Not a big fan. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

But they're so clean. They're such a they're such a hygienic people.

SPEAKER_05 3:53

Is that a misconception? You're just gonna have to check out those swimming pools.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Oh, anyway. I I don't have to. No, I'm not yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

No amount of mustard on earth could compel me to uh do that now.

SPEAKER_05 4:06

I'm gonna I'm gonna try to like open with a previous sort of lighthearted story and end on a You already went dark with the swimming pools.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, but we're expecting up to make it less dark with some kind of death or something because there's a death hot dogs in the pools.

SPEAKER_05 4:20

So uh an elderly man in Husavik has been is being prosecuted for killing five minks.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:27

Um this is like we really bring you the important stories here at the Ashland podcast. Um so a man in the 70s, according to VCS, have been charged for violating the laws against the protection of wildlife for trapping five minks and subsequently killing them. Um near the town of Hussaik. I'm I So there's no there are no details in the story.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Um but I didn't I didn't first of all the police are unwilling to divulge uh uh an ongoing investigation. Yeah, fear that it might inspire more mink killing, I guess. I didn't know minks were could be killed.

SPEAKER_05 5:07

In like Icelandic wildlife, that that was being like invasive species.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

It's nice to know that they're like protected by like you know, that we care enough about five minks, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Well, there's lots of minks here.

SPEAKER_05 5:21

I also suspect that this man who's in his seventies has been killing minks all his life, and this is the first time he's gotten into trouble for it.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Yeah, you you think it's like Dahmer or something where there's like a lot more than than the official number indicates. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

It's it's really hard to farm if there is minks around. It's they're a painwill. Yeah. And they're I know people like their jackets, and God bless you, but those are a terrible thing to have escaped in Iceland, especially near Hussevik.

SPEAKER_05 5:49

Yeah, everywhere. They're everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

I mean, anyone who's watched, you know, any kind of serial killer TV also knows that if they kill enough animals, eventually they'll start killing people. So, you know, these people have gotten a lot of people. Oh, you mean this is a preemptive thing? Yeah, it's like our version of minority report, you know, it's just like we jail the animal killers.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

He's killed five minks at 70. By the time he reaches 150, yeah, it's gonna be moving on.

SPEAKER_05 6:13

He will have strangled the whale with his bare hands.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Did you know I just found out the other day that uh Claud the Emperor Claudius like fought a whale? Like a whale became trapped in the the the harbor, like the Roman harbor, and for some reason Claudius decided it would be a good idea for him to like fight and kill this whale, which he then did somehow.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

So Claudius was the man with the dis disability, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, he was he wasn't he had a limp and yeah, I mean hence the the water the salt water gave him an advantage, probably that he you know he couldn't take to the that sort of explains it. He couldn't just go in the arena and kill like a normal emperor. Oh, yeah. So he had to go to to yeah, he had to float in some salt water and stab a a whale with This brings us to our to our student.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

We didn't mention that it's not in the news that we're whaling again in Iceland. We're whaling in demonic.

SPEAKER_05 7:09

Um there will be some whaling this summer.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

There is there's a you know, maybe we could find a local kind of disabled emperor to go out. I I know of one.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Um Yeah, the guy who does the whaling is a bit of a disabled emperor himself.

SPEAKER_05 7:26

I think we're we're really short on royalty here. Uh I think there's one king of Norway buried somewhere in Iceland. We could maybe summon him for a whale killing.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Right.

SPEAKER_05 7:38

But other than that, we're not in good shape.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

I think I might have to claim disabled emperor as the name of my next band. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_05 7:49

Okay. Uh yeah, that that that's that's that was in the news also um this past week.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Not as important as five dead minks though.

SPEAKER_05 7:58

No, that there will be whaling is still legal. I think the uh minister was saying that they're planning to um to uh like they have a a planned law coming up to outlaw whaling altogether, but for the time being it's still legal.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Looks like this is probably the last year.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Which minister was this?

SPEAKER_05 8:21

Uh minister of uh whaling. Fisheries, right? Fisheries. Um there wasn't really much whaling.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Well they did just like whale gotta uh we're gonna kill just a few more whales and then we're done, promise. I think they it's like trying to kick, you know.

SPEAKER_05 8:42

I think there wasn't that much whaling last summer. I know uh whale uh limited. Whale the whaling company, yeah. Whale Unlimited, the whaling company who who's uh who who run what, a few whaling boats called whale one two seven or something. And who have a a whaling processing factory in whale.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

It's stunning that these people lack the imagination to picture a future without whaling, isn't it?

SPEAKER_05 9:08

Uh he they didn't do any whaling last summer, um for whatever reason, I can't remember. Uh I but I think he's at least hinted that that he might be doing some whaling this summer. But it could be the last summer of whaling.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

They're gearing up, yeah. I believe they are definitely doing it this summer. Yeah. That's that'll be in the upcoming issue of the Reykjavik Grapevine newspaper. We forgot to introduce it.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

This is like a bad sign. Like when I when someone tells you they're gonna stop drinking after they're gonna have one last big party and then stop drinking, it's like you know it's not gonna happen. If they really wanted to stop, they would just fucking stop.

SPEAKER_05 9:42

I'm gonna I'm gonna request uh to go on one of those last vessels that go out whaling. See if it's not a good thing. Yeah, we've just talked about that.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

I'm surprised you're saying that on camera.

SPEAKER_05 9:50

Yes, that's I'm gonna ask and see if uh see if they'll allow me to go.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

He's literally yeah, he's our neighbor, right? He lives between you and I on the same line.

SPEAKER_05 9:59

Yeah, uh Christian Loftson, the CEO of Whale Unlimited. The disabled emperor of whaling in Iceland.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

No. Uh the iClaudius, I always think of yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:10

Have you ever seen iClaudius? Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Of course you have.

SPEAKER_05 10:13

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

So I'm thinking of that speech pattern. Anyway. Yeah, so uh five dead minks and then some minky. Well, maybe 150 whales, 1500 keys.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

No, I yeah, I love uh iClaudius. I I like to say that uh if you if you watch uh if you start with Spartacus, the the show, and then watch Rome, the show, and then iClaudius, that's like 150 years of Roman history without opening a single book, it's great.

SPEAKER_05 10:41

Oh nice This is true. This is true. That's about uh the 70s BC until the 70s AD, I guess, or sixties.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

I may be the only person the only male who does not think of Roman history on a daily basis. Is that that the statistic? That's yeah, that could be.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

It's wild feeling this sort of happening to me over the last you know ten years or so. It's just like suddenly, like, huh, you know, Rome, World War II.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

You're ready.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Yeah Welcome them it's I didn't, you know, you don't initiate it, it just sort of starts creeping into you.

SPEAKER_05 11:21

I I I'm called it's like I'm always thinking of the crisis of the third century.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Yeah. I know you are. I mean you've been into this shit for ages. Like you've been ready. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something to compensate for your youthful appearance. You sort of took on middle-aged hobbies ages ago. No, it's cool. Like I I feel really under informed. Like I have I have friends who know so much about it, and it's like, uh, where do you where do you go for all this knowledge?

SPEAKER_05 11:46

I i th these things were in the shelves at home when I was a kid, then I just read them.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

It's Graves. Is that the author of the case? Robert Graves, yeah. I remember reading it and loving that.

SPEAKER_05 11:55

He wrote I Claudius, and then he wrote uh similarly sort of structured book on Belisarius, who's a who's a general of of uh just justinian in the sixth century. Right. I don't uh not that good of a book book compared to i Claudius.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

I Claudius is a fantastic read. I don't watch television, so I I don't know enough about uh the rest of the case.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

No wonder you're so smart.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

No. No, no, I just don't have the attention to the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

I mean, I see like I tried reading Tacitus, and it's just like I don't want to know I'm I don't want to read a bunch of biographies. Like I I kind of want a broader view of the society. I need nonfiction, is what I need. Well if you want to read I mean obviously Tacitus isn't fiction exactly. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_05 12:40

If you want to read the originals, like any of the original material, I I'd just r read the Twelve Caesars by Soutonius, which is just gossip about the case.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Yeah, that sounds like gossip and biographies.

SPEAKER_05 12:50

Yeah, but uh that's kind of fun because it's kinda colorful. I don't find that very much. Uh the other historians um find that to be the original sources are balls. Well, there is the one, the Greek one that describes the last uh war between Rome and Carthage, um, which he's he's really good. He's a good read. But the rest is kinda difficult to read. Anyway, back to Icelandic News.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Um this will be a growing segment on our show as we allow on through our forties.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Talk about I uh yeah, transams or I don't know what else old classic cars, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Um I don't know what else. Yeah, what are we boomers? I mean we're getting old, but we're not that old.

SPEAKER_05 13:35

Yeah, what are classic cars to us? Is it like a Toyota Corolla 1988 or something?

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Don't get me going, yeah. Remember what Subaru Foresters looked like in the old days? Hell yeah. Yeah. So um municipality elections are coming up. Have you seen what the Subaru Forester has become? It's like this fucking Jeep now. It's just like lost all character. As somebody on social media described it, it's he said it was an insult to to to guys with noise tapes, lesbians and lesbians with noise tapes.

SPEAKER_05 14:08

No, uh this is this I could I could go into like a whole thing about uh my dislike of car design in the 21st century, but maybe not. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

I like how weird and freaky it's getting now with all the sort of frog shapes, but yeah, the sort of like bougie kind of butch jeepicizing of certain makes of car disgusts me. Like you know, these like it's a homogenization, you know.

SPEAKER_05 14:36

Oh, yeah, they all look the same. They don't really come in good colors anymore.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

No.

SPEAKER_02 14:41

The colors are too complicated now.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Well, they just go for like grey, white, and it's a little bit more than a little complicated names for five different shades for the fifty shades of grey that they use.

SPEAKER_05 14:50

Yeah, and then apart from that, I think they're just not adventurous enough in their designs. I kind of miss the saps and the runo twinklos and all these weird things. We had one, right? We had eventually had two twingos of the original type. Um But anyway.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Yeah, you can't have twingos in a recession.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

No well that was the reason they but yeah, and I keep on looking at the all the uh land cruisers in Iceland, the Icelandic overcoat. Yep. He's uh being stunned, realizing this will be probably the last year that'll be the most common car in the country.

SPEAKER_05 15:23

Unless the Toyota's called full elect electric, which they've been kind of slow in doing. Like if you look at the available uh new cars from the various brands that are sold in Iceland, Toyota is the only one that doesn't really have a fully fledged EV line.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

That's right. They have not committed to that.

SPEAKER_05 15:41

So that's kinda weird.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

But right now, if you walk this uh especially like as I did coming on Cybrid on the way to work, there's nothing but line cruisers everywhere. It's i it's they're so common and and they have a certain look. And I know that twenty years ago we did a we did a piece in the grapevine about the cars that like shaped the country, and it was like Skotas and uh it had so it had the the Willie's Lotta Sport.

SPEAKER_05 16:07

It had a yeah, it had the Will Willys, the um the Jeep, the American uh Wor World War II Jeep. And then it had the Land Rover, like vintage Land Trovers that it had the Lotta Sport. I feel like it had a super station.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Oh, and the Trabant was a big one right here.

SPEAKER_05 16:25

Not sure, but it was a big you know, the Trabant's were big. The Lata Sport is in there. Yeah. Um just hats off to our uh our relationship with the Soviet Union. They got fish, we got Latas and Mosquitch and all these different brands.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

And we had lotta sports when I was here twenty years ago. They were still pretty common. You'd see them very frequently.

SPEAKER_05 16:46

There was a resurgence in new Lata Sports here in the 2010s, I think, for a brief moment. They they were like and they looked exactly the same and they felt the same.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah, the drummer in my band drove one in like 2010-ish.

SPEAKER_05 16:59

Yeah, I I remember like uh looking at like the first car me and my wife bought, and we were looking for some cars, and she really liked the Lata Sport. And I was like, well, let's try driving it. And she never spoke of it again.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Boom, boom. Yeah, they this is uh interesting approach.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Well it's like my drummer had to keep the the the the side window shut by like jamming like a knife into the the like between the window and the the the the lip, like the rubber lip there. That's one way of doing it. Yeah. It looked very on brand. It was like this is there's also guffa tape, I guess. This is this is another. He tried that, but the it's just slid down, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

This is an alarming aside to an aside, but uh twenty years ago when I was in the music culture here, uh I knew somebody with a lot of sport that broke down and they just gave up on it. And so I went with my friends to push it to the harbor so they could trade the broken down lotta sport for a case of vodka.

SPEAKER_05 17:57

Yeah. Also quite common.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Yeah, and what, take it back to Russia and sell it for barks? Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_05 18:09

So this was common when I was living in these smaller fishing villages.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Uh it was still a a real place, damn it.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Well, the Russian trade is still kind of a thing. We had that weird experience with finding out that uh Icelanders are selling fish to Russia. Buy some back channels, yeah. Using back channels. This was a few months ago. Yeah. I don't think we ever covered that up to the phone.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

There must be some very fast back channels.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Like we're not sending it to Brazil and then Switzerland and then you take the You take you get a order of fish and it's kind of the fish are counted whole, and but when you process it, it's the weight goes down, so then you can kind of dump extra fish in. Uh extra waste and buy it, buy your extra Russian fish with it.

SPEAKER_05 18:55

Yeah, it's kinda like money laundering in a sense. Uh but fish laundering.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

I mean, fish laundering is like a euphemism for this and the economy of this entire country. Like But it's nice to know that it's happening literally as well.

SPEAKER_05 19:10

But uh there was also like some figuratively literally. There was also some things with like using uh Belarusian companies and etc. I I don't really remember.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Oh yeah, because they're so fucking great.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah, so we let them back into weird things going on with fish here.

SPEAKER_05 19:26

Uh municipality elections, anybody that are coming up next weekend, right? Yay. Um this has been uh kind of a well I've uh personally been kind of demoralized by the campaigns because I think they're kinda dumb and weird and superficial and not really about the municipality elections at all.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Yeah, most people seem to think that though, right? I don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:53

I I I try to stay off the topic when I meet other people, but um That's no yeah, it's never a good thing to start talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Are the municipal elections Should we start talking about it?

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Yeah is the municipal coverage weird, dumb, and super You said the campaigns are weird, dumb, and super.

SPEAKER_05 20:08

Yeah, the the campaigns feel kinda weird to me. Um it's Well, first of all, like the Center Party, Mini Flocken has been running just an all-out racist campaign.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Well, why is that first of all? They're they're so.

SPEAKER_05 20:24

It's just it's not even it's not dog whistling as we were talking about. It's just blatant. And that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

And not and it's kind of just so yeah, to explain to our readership, because we don't cover Myth Flockern much in the paper because No. They're kind of a reform.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

We sure love to talk about them on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

They're a reactionary right-wing group.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

The horse party we like to call them here. Yeah, they love they Yeah, that was the that was one of their first big dog whistles. They they put like uh a picture of an Icelandic horse.

SPEAKER_05 20:54

And then the rest of this is just basically just trying to like put up pictures of of sort of famous people who are running for office with the local of the party they're running for, and that's kind of the gist of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

This becomes very complicated in a country where you end up knowing everybody. So I end up knowing members of this party that um I can be friendly with and then be alarmed by a public statement.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I hate that the independence party like slathered fucking city buses with like the pictures of their candidates. It's like as if I had didn't have enough fucking uh motivation to you know to cut off buses and traffic and avoid them. It's just like I don't want to look at your fucking face.

SPEAKER_05 21:37

And well you the trick is is to do what I did. I took the bus here, and if you're on the inside of the bus, you don't see it.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Except where it's on all the billboards. But the and so Cindy, I w I kind of wanted your opinion on this.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Really? Somebody wants my opinion. Yeah, all right.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Okay, the the term Strax D.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

On the scale of awkwardness, how awkward is that to say? With a photo of young people, often wim women, saying Strax D.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah, right? Like give me the D now. Like D right D right away. D right away. Immediate D.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

It's so I mean, yeah. The translation of Strax is yeah, no, right away. And then it's uh how would you not know what that means to me?

SPEAKER_01 22:27

I mean, if anyone's gonna not know what that means, it is the Independence Party, right? But just like willful ignorance of all foreign influence is just like, nope, we're not gonna do any research. We're we know we know best. So it's we know what this means.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

There's billboards everywhere that says give me the D now.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

And it's often of their youngest.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

These well-manicured suburban women. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

I've I've kids look away. Please don't look at that. No, no, that no.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

And like I mean, everything about this country is like the politics here is kind of embarrassing. It's sort of like England, but you know, even stupider because it has no effect really. I mean, I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 23:06

I think like it's also kind of funny to me when you have these um not well, I think I saw the um there was an off-bet by um the chairman of the Widerest? Um Reform Party or whatever the hell you call it.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

It's not the It's not our racist party. That's in the UK that's the racist party here. Reform is like the the kind of blah center.

SPEAKER_05 23:29

Yeah, that's a blah blah right-wing center, free market kind of uh something. But uh there the I she was saying things like, you know, um you know, like the people of Regioik just want freedom and they want, you know, uh you know the politicians Give me blah or give me death. And I was just like I mean it's just it running a municipality is inherently a socialist operation in a sense. Yeah, you could argue that. And you you are just running services, and in general um there is very little sort of disagreement between parties on most of the things they do, and they kinda like the way I see it, they just kind of make up having fights about things that don't really matter. Yeah, it's try to give off the like an aura that they disagree on something.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

It's like kids playing at an election, it's not real in any sense, really.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

I've been extremely embedded in this discussion and I have different opinions on this, but um I guess I'm too cynical about this. Yeah, I I think there's so what happens at most elections is the independence party gets the majority gets the largest amount of votes. The independence party whose literal motto is immediate D, um are upset that they can't get everything they want done immediately. Uh and for this reason, nobody's gonna be able to do that. If you want the D, you're gonna have to you know Charlie, you're gonna have to work your massive. There was a uh uh American campaign campaigner for president, I think, who wanted a little bit less conversation, like from the Elvis song about like no foreplay, just get to it, and this is anyway, they don't work with other people, and so that they can't form a coalition government, and that that's an alarming sign. Um yeah, so but right now we have a mayor who um who is not who is not particularly pop popular with mainstream media.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

He's not particularly known to any media.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

The the joke will frequently be from the mainstream media, we don't know your name. Why don't we know your name? And and th it's a lot like watching um the political equivalent of the movie Carrie, where they're like dumping pig blood on her and like laughing, and they're like, So why aren't you why don't you have a sense of humor about us dumping pig blood on you?

SPEAKER_01 25:43

It's uh I feel like I'm watching a s a bizarre uh uh yeah, I mean I think it's kind of if you think about it like becoming mayor of the largest city here and nobody knows your name. This is like kind of a power move a little bit of a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

But they constantly tell you that they don't know your name to your face.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

It's yeah, but if she's fucking mayor, it's like she she has the last laugh at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Not this week she hasn't like nobody knows your name and you're not fucking mayor.

SPEAKER_05 26:08

It's take it's taken us twenty minutes to get there, but we were gonna talk about why she was in the news this past week for her credit card use. Yeah, she is so uh somebody requested an overview of her credit card use for the past month.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

So this is why I would never run for office.

SPEAKER_05 26:25

Or maybe it leaked. I can't I we don't know. I don't believe somebody requested and uh she had used her uh credit card for expenses, and I mean the number wasn't quite wasn't that high, so I would say she'd used it kind of conservatively. And uh it was audited and she had to pay back what 28,000 kroner, which is like 200 bucks or something. Yes, uh for uh the past year of usage where like something like the 28,000 was for something that didn't really fit the description of what you should use the card for.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

Right.

SPEAKER_05 26:59

I guess. Um and at the same time, I guess nobody went back to like request the expenses for the previous mayors, whether it's Einar Thorstenson or Daubia Eckerson or Jonknar or Expense reports were not requested at all.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

It was only credit cards, which is curious, and only the credit cards of the last Jung.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

It's just like bungee equipment, live jeep, ten tons of seaweed for miscellaneous purposes. It's like it's gonna be a fucking clown's pocket.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

The wire, right? The wire DVD set. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 27:41

Or or the previous mayors before 2010, which were uh at least a couple of independence party mayors, and then we go back to the the social dams and then etcetera.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

But yeah, just to follow up, we are requesting all those all those records. Yeah. Because now that we know that you're allowed to just look at all the credit card statements. Might as well look at the But I don't I don't believe anybody filed a correct r request for those. I believe that was that's clearly a leak. I I think uh a smear campaign.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

I think this is a smear campaign.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

And I think this is exactly the sort of shit that the independence party loves to pull and the people, you know, independently affiliated with them who work in various Sandra and I were talking about the municipal coverage, and I said, well, you it's because it's hard to understand what's uh what election coverage is really supposed to mean because it's kind of vague and and gossipy in the local papers.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

And what else do they have to go on, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

And I I say, well, if you just take off the lens that it's mayoral campaign and just look at is it sexism or racism? Because usually it's those two things. And the and if you look at the comments on the credit card thing, it's sexism. It's all sexism and it's all this woman can't control her credit card usage. I mean, so they started with that and then pitched it, and the credit card usage is uh roughly twice the spending of Aynard, I believe, because she paid for a trip back from Japan on official business using the corporate the the mayor's credit card.

SPEAKER_05 29:03

I mean, uh I think the number for like a whole year was what what was it, like uh 700,000 ISK. 5,000 bucks or something?

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Not very high, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:12

No. And I mean that's a monthly of like f less than five hundred US dollars.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

And it gets really tricky because if you're a mayor and you go out to dinner, you cannot allow anybody to buy your dinner because that would be uh illegal contribution. Yeah. So I I really am uh we have requested all their uh financials from the mayor's office to see who's paying for what.

SPEAKER_05 29:36

Yeah. Um I mean, uh I suspect other people's expenditures may have been a little more liberal than this. Yeah, I can't wait to see. That'll be interesting to see.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Um be funny if she tried to just say, like, oh, that that wasn't me, that was someone else. It's like, oh, we'll prove it. Your name's not in the critical.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Well, you don't know my name, so it's like so keep saying you don't know my name. How can you know what name is on my card?

SPEAKER_05 30:03

So this this is uh this is maybe the darkest story of them all here, but uh uh so we're being on the news? No, we're getting there. But we're just gonna do this one, get this one out there.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

We we don't we don't belly button view, like we're we uh we'll get there. We'll get there.

SPEAKER_05 30:23

We were on the news, we'll get there. Um so last summer, last June, um two people were found dead at the addition, uh probably the most expensive hotel in Reykjavik.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

Right.

SPEAKER_05 30:35

Which is also, as we've pointed out, where we the rest of us uh peasants found out how much uh room there is for a for a night.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Across the fucking wind tunnel, like out in the new buildings there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

It is a beautiful building.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

It is a and is it it is very windy.

SPEAKER_05 30:50

It is very windy, but um so uh the this this uh I guess manslaughter, like two dead people uh case has finally now led to somebody being charged for manslaughter. And it's okay, we're gonna discuss this. Very briefly because it's also been mentioned like it's really gross, it's been mentioned so often in the past um ten months. So uh unusually I would say for um any sort of crimes committed in in Iceland the details didn't really ever leak much from the story. So it was kinda you know, we there was just two people died, and then it kinda came out that they uh they were related. And then we finally found out that uh the two people who had died were uh father and a daughter, and the person who had been arrested was the mother and that they were French citizens, and now we have the names of these people and um the mother has now been charged for the murder of her daughter and this is still kinda murky because uh the original story was that that this was some sort of a suicide pact that um but she then apparently uh made such a statement originally and then uh withdrew it and pled not guilty to manslaughter, and now she's being charged for the ma like the death of her daughter, but not her husband. So this is still kind of a really weird thing. Um extremely tragic.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

It it's like this is uh I I think though you were saying that like details didn't come out, and you know, I I feel like this is sort of the the the darkest, most heinous crime to happen in Iceland, you know, for the last few years. And I th I think that that's just a sign of like this accelerated news cycle and every all the shit that's going on in the world is it it did sort of get buried just with all the stuff that's going on, which is by Icelandic standards is unusual. Yeah. Because this has sort of this sort of thing hasn't happened for a while, you see what I'm saying? Yeah, like uh we just yeah, the this is just how things have changed just the last time that this happened.

SPEAKER_05 33:15

Busy watching the world burn and not paying attention to this.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Yeah, I mean like since then didn't we realize that like um the Harpa that hosts the Arctic Circle conference, we realized that a lot of the Epstein collaborators were all hanging out there and uh probably at the Edition Hotel. So if we're talking about the worst crimes, probably there's some kind of Epstein ties to that.

SPEAKER_05 33:34

There's also been an additional apparently a few wars going on and you know, somebody wanted Greenland.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

When we were over at Addition Hotel for a news conference for the EU, this was a couple weeks ago. The EU and the Icelandic fisheries had a news conference, but we got distracted because there was some kind of podcast Bro Sphere from America there doing siphoning some money out of the country. So Addition Hotel is really a fascinating place.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

So it it has it has all the worst things funnel into one.

SPEAKER_05 34:07

Um but uh we should get to uh how we were on the news this this past weekend. Oh god.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

That's been a long weekend for us because we've been dealing with uh news people.

SPEAKER_05 34:20

Yeah, so the latest cover feature of the regular great one, which was out this Friday, was on the sort of ongoing debate about whether or not to restart negotiations on joining the EU, on which there will be a referendum uh on August 29th, I think.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Yeah. And um Yeah, so as the editor, I reached out and and found somebody to write this piece on the referendum, alias Thorsen, uh who last wrote about Christian Frost Author as Prime Minister at a extended interview. And we worked together for six weeks, eight weeks to try to get this into shape. And we're really excited about doing a feature, but like how are we gonna get people interested in an EU discussion? And then he comes back with the quotes, and I realize we have to drop everything from the paper and give it to this. And such a big story, it's uh our newspaper isn't equipped for it almost.

SPEAKER_05 35:15

Uh so no, so he talked to like um a guy called Harald Rolason, who's the kind of the chair of an anti-EU group, called Tame Scene, and then he talked to somebody who's like the chair of a pro-EU group, and then he talked to a you know uh professor of political science, whom we will all see on TV next weekend when he's gonna be covering the uh municipality elections as he's been. Yeah, and and what came out of it were these like kind of matte, absolutely matte quotes to uh Professor Harald Roloson, who's a professor of meteorology at the University of Iceland.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

Meteorology? Yeah. Like weather? He's the weatherman. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 35:56

Uh he is a weatherman. He's he used to be the weatherman a long time ago in a, in a sense. He was at Roof. Who lived on Weather Lane. Yeah, Weather Lane at Weatherhill or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Uh now he's ready to be a weatherman underground.

SPEAKER_05 36:09

And then what he's kind of s what he was kind of like what he was suggesting uh in the interview and his quotes is that you know he thinks the EU debate uh is so existential and is gonna get so heated that there might be violence.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

Which just sounds well wishful thinking maybe a bit over the top. If you continue to talk about this, I will punch you. It is already inciting violence.

SPEAKER_05 36:35

Yeah, but in a sense, uh Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

But this this he said it far more passively than he did.

SPEAKER_05 36:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

I don't really hold those views, so it's no so he invoked very yeah, kind of shocking quotes about how there will be things will be blown up.

SPEAKER_05 36:53

Yeah. So he was referring to uh yeah, he was referring to a botched attempt of blowing up like uh US military uh installations in Qualfjord in the late sixties, which never materialized.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Well, they kind of did because the bomb was there.

SPEAKER_05 37:09

The bomb was there, but it w they they w it was found before the timer went off. Right. But uh that's I mean, given the level of sort of political violence we have experienced in this country in the past a hundred years, that's we haven't experienced a lot, is what I'm saying. We have like we have one famous sort of union or workers against the police fight in 1932, known as the Kukto fight. We have the protests at Oesterböttler in 1949 when Iceland joined in NATO, which you know, some some windows of the parliament were broken and and and um uh uh tear cash was dispensed off. Uh and then we had the 2009 uh protests after the economic collapse, yeah, which ousted the then government. And that is basically it.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Yeah, we're not a we're not a violent people, I feel like, when it comes to this sort of stuff. Like it was just like we, you know, you have a vaguely strong opinion about something and you're like, ah, and then you lose interest in a couple days, really.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

These quotes were so shocking that we ended up double checking and asking them, Are you sure you want to run this? Because you're like a professor, which he responded with, yes, please, in all caps.

SPEAKER_05 38:25

Well, yeah, so uh as sometimes happens, as sometimes happens here, is like if an interview is being conducted in Icelandic, right? Yeah, and we're translating the quotes, we will then send the quotes to the people who said the quotes. Yeah, we're you being accurate. Is this accurately representing whatever you you know wanted to say? And in his case, yes, and then he just went through the quotes who were like in text, and the things he wanted to like more like make more prominent, he just all capped and sent back to us. I was so he was not backing out of these things. No, and uh Bart came up to me, I think it was on Thursday and was saying, like, should we be worried about like uh legal consequences of this? And I was like, We have his reply where he's saying, Yes, I said this, I want to emphasize it more.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Yeah, I know you can't see our office, but they're we're getting like a pattern in our office of me pacing, being like, I can't believe this is happening because I really got pretty freaked out by these the story. And then and then we published the quotes and we get it in print, and then I went off to do an interview before I uploaded the the article. And I got back and Visa had already picked up the story, which is great. Yeah, thank you to Visa for covering a Grapevine story.

SPEAKER_05 39:35

Thank you to Kirtan Kertel.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Yeah, yeah, Kjarton journalist of the year, Kirtan Kjertensen found the story, found these quotes and said, Oh my god, this is big news. The thing is, we hadn't uploaded the story yet, so so Viser's story was everywhere that the grapevine quoted this, but our our our online story was not everywhere within Iceland.

SPEAKER_05 39:53

No, well, it happens.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

There was a moment I said, like, hey Yonde, there's 24,000, 2,400 people have react reacted to this video of somebody talking about Vser's story about the grapevine, and we still didn't have the story up.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

It's hard. What does it boil down to? What is he saying? Is it that is that it's like that that people's, you know, that the xenophobes and racists will be so against joining the EU for you know for some sort of pluralist reasons that that they will start rioting or that you know that people will demand some sort of is is he saying there will be violence like the around the day of the referendum? Because this is just like the very start of a of a very long process, right?

SPEAKER_05 40:35

Yeah, I he said something to the effect that uh you know he he would always condemn violence when it came up.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

But um You're the one who brought it up. You know, we just condemn violence.

SPEAKER_05 40:48

Uh but but then talk about violence.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 40:50

Then he talked about violence, yeah. I mean, he took like we were saying before, he was like referencing this bomb thing in the 60s.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 40:58

And um, you know, he was saying that I he suspects that things might get more heated over this than over anything so far in in Iceland's modern political history. And I don't know whom he's talking to, but that just sounds kind of yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Sounds like he's a great struggle. And being very angry with But no, I mean it to be fair to him though, like this is like a sort of issue that underpins how Icelanders view themselves. I mean, this is sort of a pretty pivotal thing, you know, it's symbolic, really, you know, as well as practical. It's just like, are we part of something greater? Do we want to be part of something greater? Like we have this very individualistic streak where you know we think we can do everything right by ourselves, especially the people in power, usually people on the right.

SPEAKER_05 41:48

I think I think uh Elias, who wrote the piece, did point out that the last time we had any sort of like real political violence here was in the thirteenth century. When we had a civil war. Which then, we should point out to Haraldur, led to us ceding our sovereignty to Norway. Yeah. So, like, you know, if you if you look at history, if you start becoming violent, that might be the end of your sovereignty.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Yeah. It's a good thing absolutely nothing has changed in 800 years.

SPEAKER_05 42:17

I'm kidding. Yeah, but then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy then, if he's worried about also like I think. I also find the whole like it's always like this, like, yeah, we're seating our sovereignty to Brussels. It's the what?

SPEAKER_01 42:31

Like you make it sound like such a big fucking deal. It's just like who cares? Who cares if the assholes running this country live five miles away from you or five hundred miles away from you, or five thousand miles? It's just like who gives a shit?

SPEAKER_00 42:43

I've had so many hours with this stuff. Same kind of assholes, man.

SPEAKER_05 42:47

But yeah, it's you you can check it out. It's it's on our website, the story. Uh it opens with uh this Mr. Professor Harald Olerson's quotes.

unknown 42:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 42:57

And uh yeah, it's uh it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

But also Fear of a European Iceland.

SPEAKER_05 43:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

And we we uh I like the cover, by the way. Oh, yeah, we the Icelandic Euro.

SPEAKER_05 43:10

We asked our Swiss friend Swimp to design like uh uh an Icelandic Euro. Yeah. Yeah, so we we put something on there that no Iceland would ever put on an Icelandic UCON, which is the uh Sun Voyager sculpture.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

Oh. I think we're just shallow uh and uh desperate enough to do that, desperate for approval. It's just like what what do people like about us? There must be something which nobody in Iceland could be a lot of people.

SPEAKER_05 43:37

And I we've said this so many times on the podcast. The Sun Voyager, which is uh it's a it's a sculpture that was, I think, commissioned when Reykjavik turned 200 years old in 1986 or something.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

And had some leftover aluminum it didn't really know what to do with.

SPEAKER_05 43:49

And it's like uh it's a portrayal of a Viking ship, I guess, or uh Knurr. And it's it's sitting on the waterfront next to a highway uh with a view of Airshan, which is a I guess nice.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Kind of the main draw there.

SPEAKER_05 44:02

And it's just been there like forever and nobody ever paid attention to it. It was kind of like quietly tolerated and nobody ever would go look at it here. And then tourism came and people started walking in all weathers to take a selfie off themselves by that statue or by that sculpture. Having sex with it. Which nobody locally understands, but that's become a thing. Up to a point, as you might mention in your editorial in the a couple of issues ago, that uh if you ask Google Gemini to give you like a travel interior for Iceland, they would actually recommend that you go see that thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

It's the first thing.

SPEAKER_05 44:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Only 800 tourists have died there, so it's relatively safe.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

We should point out it somehow this is the least safe thing you can do because it's on a highway, a very highway on the ocean. So the it's very slippery there, very windy there. And cars driving pretty fucking fast. It drives land cruisers. So those don't stop. So if you're running across a highway at night and a land cruiser's coming and the wind has made all the all the ocean water super icy.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

And so we've had two deaths in the last, I think, five years I was checking.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

But and then there have been deaths. I was just kidding.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

And then there's yellow bikes there for indicating that people on bikes have been hit there. So one of the cool stories right now is they have a yellow bike for every bike accident. Throughout Reykjavika, there's a yellow bike up, and I think that's a really cool mission. But then you see how many people have been hit on bikes, it's pretty, pretty scary. So yeah, this is l really like the most dangerous thing you can do is go look at the stupid uh tourists don't come here for the safe package.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

They like to live on the edge.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

But I saw today drive uh taking a scooter in, which I shouldn't. I should have hop scooter in to work. And uh and I went past the Sun Voyager and and uh somebody stepped in front of me trying to get their photo. So I almost crashed into somebody because they were trying to get a good photo and they weren't looking around, and they were there with their bus, and that's the reason it's in it's comes up at the end of the street. Yeah, there's a bush park there, but buses stop, yeah. Buses park right in front of the Sun Voyager. So we just thought this was a hilarious thing to put on the a Euro coin. But no, my now my fear is because it actually because our designer did a good job. My fear is this is actually gonna end up on a Euro coin. That would be fun.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

I I was like, I saw that cover and I was like, damn, now I want now I want to be in the EU more than ever. Like I want that fucking coin.

SPEAKER_05 46:20

I want to be able to like flip that coin at somebody for change, just like last story this time around is the story of a Romanian hacker that stole millions from an Icelandic bank. And funny enough, I was looking at this story this morning, and the original story said 57 million and didn't disclose which bank the money was embezzled from. And then the story of it being 150 million popped up, and the bank being Arion, and then that story got pulled off the website immediately.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

That's my bank. It's also yours. Those assholes got robbed.

SPEAKER_05 47:01

So I'm not sure why they pulled that story like five minutes after it popped up, but uh I'm assuming then then it was from Arion Bank, which is one of the three big banks here, and and a bank both of you do business with. Congratulations. Uh but given how their profit margins look these days, I don't really worry that this is gonna affect your uh um business with them at all.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Uh I mean I'm sure they they can just make up anything they want, right? They're just like, oh, due to this robbery, we're now gonna have to take a bunch of your money and you know owe a lot more on your house. Lower the interest on your savings account.

SPEAKER_05 47:34

But whatever the number if is, if it's a fifty-seven million ISK, which is what, half a million doll US dollars, or a hundred and fifty-seven, which is then one and a half, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

It's enough to buy a Romanian election.

SPEAKER_05 47:47

This happened because this he made apparently the man made sort of some sort of um money transfers, I think, to his own account between April 23rd and 27th this year. And he was able to do this because of some sort of a glitch in the back's computer system.

SPEAKER_01 48:03

Uh he's titled as a hacker in the story, but it just sounds like he just realized that he could actually transfer money into his own account from um every other time I opened the app, there's like a little thing saying, like, oh, we're having problems with this or problem with this, you can you can't do this, you can't spread out payments or something, and it's just like it seems like a fucking shit show. But doesn't it like doesn't I'm not surprised like some half-awake Romanian dude figured out a way to But doesn't it like every time you hear a story about somebody having owns my house, so I'd lost I hope they're but every time Fuck them. If they can't handle a little bad publicity, it's just like come at me, bro, like do a better job.

SPEAKER_05 48:40

But what does it tell you sort of about our our situation towards banks and the interest rates we're all paying off of loans and stuff? That every time you hear a story about somebody sort of embezzling money from a bank, you kind of feel like you start taking notes. You're like finally somebody like it's kind of like a almost like a positive thing.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

Like if I was still working here at the Grapevine, I'd be like calling the police. It's just like, can you tell me more about how he did it? It's for the for the interest of the police. Yeah, yeah. Can we get a quote from you on the exact uh programs he used to do? Do you have his email address? I've never asked him to request it.

SPEAKER_05 49:19

I mean, is there any way we could get our money back back from the bank?

SPEAKER_02 49:23

No. Have you ever tried getting money back from a bank?

SPEAKER_05 49:28

Well, uh I think I think we've covered everything uh sort of of notice for for like the there's a bunch of stories from the previous two weeks we didn't cover. Um I think one of the bigger ones was the it turned out that the level of um human trafficking and uh prostitution in Iceland was staggering. I don't know if you guys saw that story.

SPEAKER_01 49:52

There's certainly like a lot of iffy looking clubs and spots downtown and you know, um some of which have stayed open a little longer.

SPEAKER_05 50:00

Yeah, it's more like uh. Yeah, it's more like apartments and and hotels in proper Reykjavik that were in in that story. And um there's apparently some sort of an online service that people people use to find um prostitution and Iceland has like a per capita ranking on that thing that is staggering.

SPEAKER_01 50:25

Another win for the per capita book.

SPEAKER_05 50:28

Yeah, so that was kind of like a shocking story.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

I mean, this is one of the reasons we ended up uh putting uh offering free advertising to s to Steamode.

SPEAKER_05 50:46

For like a women's shelter. Yeah, it's a woman shelter. We're trying to do more uh and then uh I it's it kinda because you know we we learned as a society thinking that human trafficking wasn't a thing here, that human trafficking we've been learning in the past two years is is a massive problem in like the services industries and and you know restaurants and and stuff. And we don't seem to be equipped to deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Aaron Powell I mean it's just like anywhere else. Like if you're you know, I think if people it's always the gonna be there. Like if people are committed enough, they will find it, you know.

SPEAKER_05 51:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

So it's uh it's kind of a it's a very depressing um Do you think that if we were part of the EU it would be easier for like Interpol or whoever to crack down on these and investigate? Like would it I think it's would it just make it easier for the criminals to proliferate here?

SPEAKER_05 51:36

Aaron Powell No, I mean we are a part of Schengen, the free movements of peoples anyway.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Which is it sort of seems like we've already opened our borders with none of the the benefits of you know, well lots of benefits, but you know, none of the the the the law enforcement that that you know being part of EU would entitle us to.

SPEAKER_05 51:53

Yeah, I I I don't I have no idea how that would work.

SPEAKER_01 51:55

I think partly um I mean I can only hope that police here are eager to work with any foreign I hope so.

SPEAKER_05 52:00

I think part of the problem may be that this is just not a contingency that we were used to having or had planned on the other. No, yeah, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

I'm saying like police here are completely unequipped for it, or definitely undermanned, as if every other branch of everything in this country is.

SPEAKER_05 52:15

So that's I think that's more of the problem than anything else.

SPEAKER_00 52:17

Um there's a lot of that in in in culture here. And we don't have it exactly with malice. The paradigm shifts are hard to catch up with. As indicated by you know, we work really hard on a feature and we can't figure out how to get take advantage of it as a newspaper. You know, like um, you know, you you work hard on campaign enforcement laws, but you're not ready to deal with uh with foreign influence on podcasts, for example. Yeah. Um there's a lot of it's hard to write laws and enforce laws and use government as quickly as the world is changing at the moment. And so I I I uh and it's hard for us to like cover human trafficking uh uh uh as as the new information is changing. So we're uh the world's changing pretty quickly, and some of those skills that we had in the past aren't exactly applying now.

SPEAKER_05 53:08

No, no, no, it but yeah, I would agree with that. It's yeah. It's not only the police, it's not only the government, it's also just every other institution has has a hard time keeping up.

SPEAKER_00 53:18

You have to like build a plane in the air, basically, at this point.

SPEAKER_05 53:22

Fair point. Uh so on that depressing note. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:27

Do you have any catchphrases for this? Like so when things get so dour that uh I need another catchphrase.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

Oh yeah. Isn't enough I can stretch it into like a whole nother sentence.

SPEAKER_05 53:39

So uh thank you, Barth Cameron and Cynter Elton for uh doing this podcast with me today. I was uh I'm your trusted. This has been Iceland round up. Iceland round up? Yeah. Sure. Yeah, uh see you next time. Thanks for listening and watching. Goodbye.

SPEAKER_04 54:02

It funds our journalism. It sells all sorts of stuff, including especially curated gift boxes. Just like the uh famous Iceland box.