Southern Europe

And if you look at certain markets like Germany, demand is at an all-time low, as is France and the UK.

Not so bad in Eastern Europe or Spain or Southern Europe where things are improving, but the core is really, really struggling with regard to that development.

So look, it will be a two-way pole, but I think eventually, actually, the housing site will win, i.e. the demand for housing, and actually, in turn, then, what that means for volumes.

And we're going to talk, I think, later a little bit about SCMs.

A lot of my research, too, is in the area of the history of Europe.

And you see the difference in the labor movement in the latter 19th, the early 20th century in Europe between Northern Europe which had industrialized at that point 100 years previous, and things had kind of settled down, right? And Southern Europe, you talk about anarchism, you know, the anarchist movement, the anarchist syndicalist movement, I was very influenced by this The Spanish Civil War, you know, is a big influence.

I mean, that Southern Europe stretch, which was just then going through the first rounds of industrialization and proletarianization, was the more radical element of the labor movement in Europe at that time.

And you see this over and over again.

I think that's partly what you're seeing here with the hobo as well in America, in the American West.

And in order to make any kind of transmission corridor transportation corridor etc to pay for itself is to have a lot of throughput so a lot of electricity that will go so the reason we built we put the cable down is for security of supply particularly for cyprus and perhaps later on the link with israel which is great but Right now, Cyprus and Israel, relatively speaking, are smaller markets and Greece is a relatively smaller market.

Now, if a lot of energy goes through Greece and then perhaps gets transported to Europe or vice versa, very importantly, a lot of solar and wind from Central Europe comes down to Southern Europe and gets transmitted, which is conceivable.

so if there is a lot of utilization of the cable then it will make it worth if the investors can see that that there is a lot of throughput which means it generates a lot of transit fees transmission fees then they will invest in it even if there are geopolitical issues so my i'm not a technical person but my big question mark would be are we going to have the amount of electricity that we hope that we will have to make the whole thing pay.

Eventually it's not going to pay in five years or 10 years, probably going to be 20 or 30 years.

One thing I like, and this is maybe a bit silly, but rather than being just like a reference list, what's it referred to as, like the captain's log or the...

That was almost a joke because I'm from Genoa and I was writing in Genoa in the lockdown period so we were confined to our homes and I felt that I was in the book I was attacking capitalism and in a sense I was harder on Northern Europe than on Southern Europe, but then I realized that Genoa is a very pivotal town in the building of capitalism.

We invented the finance.

Ooh, it's your fault.

If I can find one, they always sell out first.

Number three, summer in Scandinavia or in Southern Europe? Scandinavia, for sure.

Four, Copenhagen, Oslo or Stockholm? Copenhagen.

Five, the fjords or the Swedish archipelago? Definitely the fjords.

So we started to import the Bolts from Northern Europe, ran out of them.

We started to import the Southern Europeans, the Italians and the Greeks, et cetera.

We all grew up through all of that.

Then we had Vietnam after the war.

But I don't think the problem was that they were Westerners, because you have to understand, Latin America is not exactly part of the West, but we speak a Western language, and Catholicism is a Western religion, and we get our news from American outlets, and our elites are educated in the West universities.

So the exteriority of the of mutual exteriority of the west and latin america is problematic so what i would say is that we are not completely western especially when you think about indigenous people but there are indigenous people in the us too and and the us is not europe either you know and catholic europe is not a protestant europe either for example for latin american populists We have a lot more in common with Southern Europe because they are Catholics.

So you have to understand that usually when in South America someone speaks against the West, there are two options.

Either he's a colonial intellectual or he's a far-right nationalist.