Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to a couple of Europhiles coming to you from Northern Italy on Lake Garda. And we are going to discuss the ceasefire, Merz Meloni and Hungary's new desire to join the BRICs, or potential. My name is Bailey Alexander and I'm here with Francis. So, Francis, what say you? Where would you like to start?
[00:00:22] Speaker B: It's hard to say. There is just so much going on. Your head is spinning. And you could talk about a million different topics at the moment, all of which are unique. You know, this sort of thing has never happened for decades and now it's all happening all at once.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: You know, we've lived here for 25 years. What is the saying that nothing happens for decades and then a decade happens in two weeks?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: May you live in interesting times.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: May you live in interesting times indeed. So, hey, let's start out with merits. A lot of drama going on there in Germany.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Yeah, what a schmuck. This guy basically won an election. Well, won an election. He had 28%, which is not enough to become the chancellor by making several promises to the voters who went out and drove to vote for him. And he has now broken every single one of those promises in an egregious way. Among other things that really irritates the German electorate is he has broken the debt break that Germany had in their constitution to prevent another Weimar Republic and runaway inflation. And in order to get that passed, he basically depended on the votes of the existing outgoing parliament, which is going to be out of office in a couple of days.
And he basically did a whole bunch of deals with the existing parties, notably the Greens. And he has now baked climate change into the German constitution, which is a ridiculous thing that is irritating everybody. It's quite difficult to change the constitution in all countries that have a constitution because they need at least a two thirds majority. And they're getting that by using the votes of the existing outgoing disgraced Red Green government, plus Merz's die hards, to get over the 2/3 threshold. And they're basically trying to force their way through and he has basically promised them anything that they could possibly want as long as he gets his hands on all of this money.
He has broken every promise he's ever made and nobody, not even his own party, trusts him at the moment, but nobody knows what to do. So this is something that needs to be carefully watched. The AfD are now starting to overtake the CDU in the polls, but of course the election's over. So four years from now, you know, they'll win Unless they can force Merz's guys to abandon Merz and essentially go for broke and have another election, which they'll probably win.
So this is very interesting in Germany and this has dramatic implications also for the rest of the European Union, because the stability of the euro is dependent on Germany.
The European Central bank is in Frankfurt because everybody believes the Germans know how to manage money. But if they're going to go wild and crazy and start racking up debt like Greece, then the whole euro is going to go in the tank and that's going to have an effect on the borrowing ability of every other country. So that's, it's not just Germany. What he's doing has significant ramifications and, and is part of the reason why the EU is now on very shaky ground because it's spiraling out of control. People are doing things that they think are good for themselves and they don't care about the knock on effect it has on the union, which is a very carefully balanced entity. Right. The reason there were Copenhagen criteria is to prevent newcomers like Ukraine from destabilizing the European Union.
And that's all moot now because France and Germany and the EU central bodies in Brussels, they're going to start spending money on defense, which they have no mandate for. Other people are not going to do that. But that doesn't matter because their borrowing costs are going to go up as a result of the madness. So at the moment we're in silly season and I believe it's going to settle down.
But at the moment there's no end in sight. Nobody knows when and how. So we're in very, very interesting times, which is not necessarily a good thing. But I don't believe it will fundamentally spiral out of control forever.
It will come to its senses at some point and then we'll see where it goes from there.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: We are living in an era where everything is possible. So it's unnerving and it just doesn't seem like there's any rules anymore. Even Germany, I mean, Germany was, you know, it has its own, shall we say, rigidity rules.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: What are rules? We don't need no stinking rules.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: No, no. But Merz's background, he's from Blackrock. He's I guess, what you would call a globalist. How long has he been around?
[00:05:55] Speaker B: How old is he?
[00:05:57] Speaker A: How long has he been in government? How long has he been around in government?
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Well, he hasn't really been. He hasn't governed anything. He's never been direct, you know, minister, president. He was not in the coalition, he was part of Merkel's party and he resented playing. He is very arrogant and he resented largely playing second fiddle to Merkel, where Merkel was around and now he's just so happy that he's the cock of the walk. But that's unlikely to last and it's still 5050 on whether he will even become Bundeskanzler, because this whole chaos that is being thrown around right now can have very interesting repercussions. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. He's using the SPD and Green votes to essentially force through unpopular items into the constitution, but they're going to be gone. They lost the election. They have lost a tremendous number of seats. If he tries to make a coalition with the spd, that gives him a majority of one or two seats, which, as our English friends know, is not really enough to actually govern in a parliamentary democracy. It may be okay in a presidential system like the US because the executive power is separate, but in a parliamentary democracy, you need to have a majority in the parliament at all times, and you don't necessarily do if one person's sick or one person defects, you get a vote of no confidence and you're toast. So it's a very, very shaky. Germany is not the model of stability that everyone has come to expect it to be. So we're in interesting times. As we said before.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Did you read that Baerbock is going to be. She's going to be working for the un, I think.
Yeah. Because the global south, she's not very popular in the rest of the world. Right.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: I wouldn't trust her to basically run a hot dog stand.
She couldn't sell ice cream to the Arabs. Yeah, she's. She, she is ridiculous. She has no respect from anybody. The Russians have basically told her to sit down and shut up. The Chinese refused to meet with her. She's an idio.
And she's really done damage to Germany's standing on the international stage.
Who? Your foreign minister, Secretary of State Bundeslausen minister. Whoever he is or she is, does matter. Right. The one qualification that you have to have is you have to be able to command the respect of other countries in order to represent your country effectively on that stage. And Baerbock has squandered her every ounce of respect. And because she personally has done that, Germany can't get a seat at the table anywhere. Right. They're like, oh, if you're going to send Baerbock, we may as well not meet with you. So it's really A tragedy. But that's something that they can solve. Right? They just need to nominate somebody else as their foreign minister.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Do you see any significance with Alice Weigel going to meet with the Hungarian Viktor Orban next week?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: You know, they're trying to maintain good relations. They should.
There is no real significance at the moment. Weidel is in the background waiting for her chance to over topple Merz and basically step up into government in some way. She won't go into government with a CDU under merits. She will go into government with the CDU as long as it's not merits.
So, you know, if they topple merits as an internal coup or something, vital has a good chance of creating a coalition and then she's in government and then a meeting with Hungary would have some significance. At the moment, Orban is just signaling that he supports her policies, which are not to pick a fight with Russia and try to normalize relations and get the gas flowing and doing all the things that we should be doing and not going crazy with the debt and with the militarization.
Orban is against all of those things. And he's not alone. There's quite a large faction of Europeans that are now gathering together against Brussels.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: On this point, you can't deny there's a populist movement spreading across. So whether or not you're supportive of that, at least to me, it just appears that that momentum is gathering.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's firmly headed that way. The voters are firmly headed that way.
There's a lot of shadow power behind the throne in various places.
That's not yet completely obvious. In France, Marine Le Pen is likely to win the next presidential election because no one in the history of the French Republic has ever been as unpopular as Macron. So Macron is trying to govern with a minority government, which means he can't spend any money unless he has to play shenanigans. So all of his talk about, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that sort of ring hollow because you need to sort out your home front before you can go and play games on the international front. If you don't have any cash, your promises all ring hollow. So Macron is essentially neutered. Merz, as we've just discussed, is really in trouble because the voters voted for him, but he has betrayed them. There's no other way to put it. He promised them explicitly that he wasn't going to do all the things that he did, and he did them before he even became chancellor. So. So that guy is Again, going to find it extremely difficult to govern. If he does form a coalition with what remains of the Greens and what remains of the spd, it will be the same as the SPD ampel coalition, the traffic light coalition that they had before, which was voted out. So he's going to lose all of the by elections, he's going to lose all of the state elections. And he can't govern really if he doesn't command a majority. And even if he commands a small majority in the House, he also has the Bundesrat, which is the equivalent of the Senate, to worry about, and that is run by the minister presidents or the governors of the different German states. And the more states he loses, the less likely it is he can pass legislation through the Bundesrad. So it's a problem for Merz. So you've got Macron in trouble, Merz is in trouble, Von der Leyen is in trouble, she's being indicted and no one likes her policies.
And you've got Orban, you've got Meloni, you have, as we mentioned, Marine Le Pen. The Spanish have just told the European Union that they disagree with the militarization.
They're not into funding the war effort much further. And I think that Trump and Putin's meeting and the closer we are to getting a peace organized without the Europeans, I note, the less likely it is that the Europeans will be able to hold together their noise around arming Ukraine and fighting to the last Ukrainian. Ukraine is likely to surrender because without American intelligence and weapons, the Europeans can't make up the difference because they don't have the industrial capacity. And by the time the Europeans build the industrial capacity, Ukraine will be toast. So it's not likely to go on. So I think Ukraine is winding down and it's going to be a real object, salutary lesson to the European Union. And the European Union needs to worry about itself. It's fighting an existential battle between the Brussels centralization crowd that want to essentially force everybody to follow Brussels, and the conglomeration of nation states model which says that everybody should be involved and every country should look out for its own interests and only agree on the things that actually make sense to each individual country, which is what the treaties say and which is what Meloni is supporting. And Orban and several other leaders are falling into that. So it's not going to be an easy battle on either side of that.
But that's what makes life interesting.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: And the Dutch, what did the Dutch recently do?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: The Dutch rejected the European Union rearmament plan and they were ignored.
The Dutch are one of those countries like Ireland, that require referenda in order to pass new updates to European law. So the Dutch basically have to ask the people. The people don't want war.
So, you know, they're not going to go for it. Right. But the European Union is going, oh, it's an emergency. So we can't possibly stop and think about every little guy. We need to basically force this through because we know best. And von der Leyen and her kindergarten schoolteacher attitude, where she thinks she can dictate to the little children what they should be doing, is really not going down well. Right. Nobody is swallowing that. The Danes and the bolts are, but nobody else is.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: It's interesting because the US Government finally admitted it was a proxy war. So they said, listen, we're going to move forward in direct talks with Putin, and that's just the way it's going to go. But something I don't think I realized three years ago was how much the English were sort of involved in the Ukrainian government and the propaganda specifically, because that's always been what the English are good at, right, is propaganda.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: They're not really involved in the Ukrainian government per se. What they have is they have MI5 that's in the background playing games like they always have.
The English have been playing the so called great game for at least two centuries where the, the beginning of the Russophobia has always been England. Okay. America learned Russophobia from England.
Yeah, America used to get along with Russia. I mean, they bought Alaska from Russia. They did deals with Russia and frankly, during the war, the Soviets won the war, did the most bleeding and dying, and the Americans funded them and gave them a lot of the equipment and so forth and so on. So if you had to pick, you know, the number one cause of the winning of World War II, it's the Soviets, followed closely by the Americans with their peerless logistics. And then come the English and the French and like, oh yeah, we were also involved. The English still had an empire in World War II too, but it failed very shortly thereafter. India left in 1948. It's 47 actually, so it's pretty close to the end of the war. So then their empire sort of fell apart and their navy started going downhill. Now it's not even a shadow of a shadow of what it used to be, but they're still playing the game, right. Anti Russia, Russia, Crimea, you know, Afghanistan. They've had fights with the Russians for a very long time. And their secret service, which is not completely incompetent has a lot of agents and people to stir up trouble.
Not as many as the CIA, who has a bigger budget.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: But if you ask with the Madonna, when the coup came in 2014, obviously Victoria Nuland admitted to the 5 billion that was spent basically taking over so much of their, their government.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Right. But that's the CIA. That's not the breads.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: That's this. That's the CIA operation. But regarding these, the, this phone call between Putin and Trump, I know this, this seems not terribly serious, but they talked about the hockey because they would, they would get the hockey matches going. But more importantly, they talked about how they would allow businessmen to, because they'd been frozen for the past several years. But now American businessmen could have shares in their businesses once again. So there's some things opening up there.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Well, the Russians are cautious, and the Russians are cautious because the Americans have not demonstrated being people that honor their word and their deals. Right.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: I mean, even Clinton said. Clinton, Clinton and Bush Jr. And one or two other presidents said, the one thing we know about Putin is he does what he says. There you go.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: Strangely, Stalin did the same. Okay, everyone hates Stalin. Stalin was a monster. But Stalin kept his word on every deal he ever made.
He promised not to overthrow the Greek government, even though the Communists had a 70% majority in Greece at the end of World War II. And he didn't. He could easily have done it.
Basically, he kept his deals because that's what Russians do. Now, obviously, there are people that won't, but Putin is in the traditional mold. He's been around for a long time, and he knows that if he keeps his word, he will be respected around the world. Now, that's not true in places that are actively trying to undermine Russia with the narrative and all the other things that have been happening. But in Africa, the global south, the India is, the Chinese, they all know that if he says, I'm going to ship you gas at this price and I'm not going to turn the taps off because we have a deal that he's going to do what he says he's continued to pump gas through the pipelines. They blew up Nord Stream, but it wasn't the Russians that basically stopped pumping the gas, and they were pumping the gas through Ukraine just as they were before the war, in order to honor their deals with the Hungarians and everybody else until Ukraine shut the pipelines down. So, you know, they've been very good about honoring their word, so they're very cautious about trusting the Americans. However, Russia knows that America has a great Deal of expertise in mineral extraction, okay, to develop the oil and gas fields, to develop the mines and get the rare earths, all that other thing that they need. And a partnership between the Americans and the Russians is a good thing. Historically, the Russians have partnered with the Germans for this kind of expertise, but the Germans are going through a moment of insanity. So the Russians are like, hey, we can do a deal with the Americans, and the Americans can help us build our economy, improve our position.
We have ignored. Well, we haven't ignored, but we've managed to survive the sanctions regime that has been put on us by the previous American government. If now American government lifts the sanctions, our economy is going to boom because we have all the natural resources.
We have what is arguably the strongest army in the world. Now our military and defense is going crazy. People are buying the SU57.
Canada is just basically reneged on a deal to buy the F35. They're not going to buy the Soviet weapons. But the point is that around the world and the Indians and everybody else, they're looking at Russia as a serious alternative for buying weapons to the Americans. Now, the Americans aren't going to like that, but America could do a lot of business with the Russians if they choose to do so. If they look to their own economic interests, as Trump generally does, the Russians are a great partner, much better than the Ukrainians for minerals you have. Lindsey Graham has been touting the $12 trillion worth of resources that Ukraine allegedly has as being, gosh, if only we could basically do a deal with them and get the 12 trillion. Russia has at least 10 times as much. So, you know, you're like, if you're going to do a deal with somebody, do it with the Russians. You're smarter. It's better off.
And that would be where they're heading. I think. Now, Trump is erratic. He is supporting Israel for various reasons. However, you know, Putin is going to have something to say about that.
He is not going to tolerate anyone attacking Iran.
It's questionable as to what's going to happen with the Houthis.
And he has already made statements at the United nations that the Israelis have to go back to the truce and not bomb the crap out of Gaza. So, you know, Putin is still fighting his corner. And maybe, and I said this in a conversation just another day, maybe, maybe Trump is playing 4D chess and using Putin to push back on Netanyahu and the Israelis because he can't do it himself without serious political impact in the United States. But if Russia does it, you know, it's not Trump. So, you know, maybe he is that smart. I don't know.
I'm on the fence on this. He's either an idiot or he's playing 4D chess, and he's a master.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: You know, I often talk about Gore Vidal because he was prescient for six decades, but about four decades ago, he said Israel owned the Vice presidency. I mean, we were so innocent then. Right. But Mearsheimer talks about the Israeli lobby. He famously has that book. So it just feels like specifically in the last couple of days, that Trump is escalating war with Iran to provide cover for Israel. So hopefully he can use Putin as some sort of leverage. I know that Putin would like to play that part because he feels differently about the Middle east, and he has always played a part in the Middle East.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: So the Americans don't have the capacity militarily to beat Iran in Iran.
Okay? Iran is a big country. They have serious military capabilities. They have serious partnerships with big players like China.
And China is dependent on Iran for energy, and so is India. So you're sitting there going like, I don't think India and China are just going to let anybody hit Iran and close the Straits of Hormuz and cut off all the hydrocarbons. Right. Because the Saudi Arabian hydrocarbons come through the state of Hormuz as well. So you're sitting there going like, picking a fight with Iran is really bad for the world economy, and I don't think people are just going to tolerate it. So maybe I'm wrong, but we'll see. Interesting to watch Trump.
Trump does a lot of talking and he has a lot of bluster. And this is a characteristic of New York, I feel.
But you need to watch his actions and not necessarily what he says.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, Meloni's playing a difficult game. So she had a quote. I don't know if it's a recent quote, but she says, I believe in a Western civilization founded on Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian values. And, you know, for the past decade, we've lived in a culturally Catholic country, so I don't see how this could be a controversial statement.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Well, the Greeks invented philosophy and they invented democracy, and Romans invented law.
And between the Romans and the Greeks, they invented the heart of Western civilization, which everybody else borrowed. You know, the Romans came to Britain, and as I sometimes say, you know, we brought roads. You know, the Monty Python did a famous sketch about, what are the Romans done for us?
They brought. They brought the rule of law, they brought sanitation, they brought housing.
They teach them how to bathe so that they weren't running around the woods painting each other blue in the moonlight. Right. So, you know, the foundation of Western civilization comes from Greece and Rome. Italy is a new country, but Rome was there before and it brought a lot to the table in terms of civilization.
And Meloni is a champ, She's a populist and she champions Italian pride in their history, which is a long centuries, millennia long history and rightly so. She's a lot to be proud of.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: What about Greek though? You have a business partner from Greece. He came to dinner a couple of months ago and I was just surprised at his sort of laissez faire attitude about Greece. What's going on down there?
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Greece is never going to change. Greeks are incredibly tough. They're incredibly, they're wonderful people.
They're very much like Italians, to be honest, but even harder headed and tougher.
They went more or less bankrupt and they expected Europe to bail them out. And the Germans eventually bailed them out. And they did a study and they said, you know, the problem in Greece is that less than 3% of the Greeks pay their taxes. Okay, so that's 96% of Greeks just blow it off, right? They just don't care. They have a lot of little islands, A lot of their business like analysis and so forth, shipping and shipping operates in a, in a international waters and is, you know, they, they, they take advantage of, of every little thing that they can get. And the Greeks are, you know, they just mind their own business, move ahead and it's a, it's a very interesting place. They're tough though.
So, you know, some of my best friends are Greeks and the place is amazing.
Athens, interestingly, is twice the size of Rome. I don't think people realize this population wise. I mean, Greece is much smaller than Italy, but everybody in Greece, the huge majority of Greece lives in Athens. It's like Ireland, which is, you know, Dublin, and then there's a few places outside.
But Greece is like that with Athens. Athens is a huge, a huge place. It's over 3, 4 million people. So it's bigger than Rome.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: But it's interesting how the cities are changing. There's a very popular guy on Twitter named Chae Bowles, an Irishman, and he took some videos of downtown Dublin and that it was, it just, it just wasn't looking good. Just like a lot of the major cities. We have lived in so many cities, you know, London, New York and Seattle and Paris and Rome and Bucharest and Amsterdam, all these places. And I, and it's just sort of, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm living in the last gasp of these places and why we enjoyed living in Piemonte in the countryside for seven years and here, up here in Lake Garda where it's very safe and secure and clean. And I just think there's a lot of, a lot of drama and I think there's a lot of pain in a lot of these major cities that were once quite grand.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Rome has stood for almost 3,000 years, but it's not going to go away.
If you go to Rome, you'll still see the amazing things that were built thousands of years ago. And yeah, there's, at one point Rome had a population of 100,000 in the Middle Ages and there was cows walking around what is now the city streets of Rome. Right? It was huge. It was the first city with over a million people. Then it became small. Then it's going to become big. I mean, basically a sense of history is what you need. Rome is not going anywhere. So, yes, it may be going through some tougher times than, you know, let's say five or ten years ago, but its perspective is measured in millennia, not by just decades. Right?
[00:31:31] Speaker A: So, you know, Rome is truly unique. But then you look at someplace like Ukraine and, you know, they had what, 40 million people before the war and 20 million have flooded out. Millions to Poland, 1 or 2 million to Russia. And we obviously for a time saw, saw quite a few Ukrainians here. There isn't as many these days. But that, that place is just going to never be the same. So of course, you know, change is imminent and we're just seeing, we're just living amidst a lot of change.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: You know, Ukraine is in a terrible state. It's in a war.
They've destroyed the infrastructure. Trump says the houses have all fallen down. They're all the apartment blocks are lying on their side, there's no power, they're shivering in the dark, all that other shit. But people need to remember that Germany looked like that at the end of 1945, right?
There wasn't two bricks on top of each other, right? There's all these little 60, 70 year olds with little wheelbarrows digging up the rubble to basically move it out and rebuild it. And they did that. And now Germany became a huge powerhouse in what, 30 years after the war, and then it's declining again.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: France, right. People are not as tough as they once were. And they're not. The Ukrainians are just people are people.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: You know, look at the Palestinians, they've been hammered and hammered and hammered, and they're going to eventually start rebuilding their stuff.
You know, the point is, people have a lot of resilience. You got to give them credit for it. There's no such thing as, oh, these guys are just not tough enough. They can't do it. It's like, we don't think they're tough enough because we're sitting on Lake Garda, watching the sunshine in a very nice place.
But people who are actually being bombarded, they toughen up. They learn how to toughen up because they have to.
It's unfortunate, right? I mean, everybody wishes that there was no war, especially Italians. But the fact is that there's no such thing as it's destroyed forever.
They'll rebuild.
It may not be the same.
The eastern provinces are going to go back to Russia, but they were Russia before. So the eastern province is going to go back to Russia. The western provinces are going to clean up their act.
Maybe. Maybe if they get rid of the corruption and meet the Copenhagen criteria, they might eventually, if they're sufficiently humble, get to join the EU and get European funds to help clean them up.
At the moment, it looks bad because they behave so badly to the Hungarians and Slovaks by cutting off the gas supplies. So they're not going to get any favors. They're not going to come into the European Union fast. But once the war is over, new people will be in charge. It won't be Zelensky, and somebody will say, I didn't have anything to do with it. I wasn't the one who cut off your gas. Please give me a chance and people will forgive. Eventually.
Everything lasts, and then it gets over, and then we move on. And right now we're also seeing some amazing technological revolution. We're seeing a change, unprecedented change, with the implement of AI and all these other things that are happening that didn't exist before. The Chinese have really mastered the art of rebuilding buildings. They can put a skyscraper up in two weeks.
It's amazing.
So if we need to rebuild Ukraine, as long as there's the will, they can do it faster than anybody thinks possible. If there's peace.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: Did you say that Orban was discussing or talking?
[00:35:23] Speaker B: There are rumors that Orban is on the verge of telling von der Leyen to stick it and he wants to join the brics. Hungary has a great relationship with the Chinese, it has had for several years, and also has a good relationship with the Russians, although it would be wrong to assume that the Hungarian relationship with the Russians is really that Friendly, Right. Orban is a realist. He's like, I want good things for the Hungarian people. And good things include gas at decent prices and the ability to sell things to the Russian market. But that doesn't mean I'm friends with the Russians, right? The Serbians are friends with the Russians for historical reasons. But the Hungarians have always been a people apart. They're very self centered. I mean, they're almost the ideal populists, right? Hungarians have a language nobody understands, and they've always been Hungary first since forever. So it's a good model. And they're tough and they're basically fighting their end. And everybody in Europe who wants freedom from Brussels is watching them and thinking, gosh, if only I were that brave.
Orban has a lot of secret admirers from people that wishes their countries would have the balls to take on Brussels the way that he does.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Well, let's. Let's wish them well. And the drama will continue. And we will be reporting back in the next couple of days because a lot of things can happen in the next couple days. So, hey, thank you so much.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: A lot of things will happen.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: A lot of things will happen. So, hey, let's wrap things up and thank you so much for listening. And again, I'd like to tell my audience I have a book signing in Rome for my book called Personal Legends of Piemonte. It's on April 10th at the almost Corner Bookshop. And the book is. The first half is in English and the second is in Italian. So if Italy is on the itinerary, this book is for you. It's 12 interviews with Northern Italians, including wine and cheesemakers, chef, bar owners, a teacher, a bureaucrat, and of course, a car mechanic named Luigi. Because this is Italy and I wrap a bunch of stories around them and the Italians like it quite a bit. And again, it's. It's available in both together in English and Italian. So, hey, listen, thank you so much for listening and ciao for now.
