Wallonia

And to the extent that the EU-Canada free trade agreement contains an investment chapter, that chapter has not yet been ratified by every EU member.

The Belgians in particular had a problem with one of their provinces, Wallonia, as it happens, that for some reasons that I've forgotten, were reluctant to ratify that provision.

So even here, an agreement that is probably now more than ten years old has not 100% gone into effect because there is resistance on the European side to some of the provisions.

So I'm not sure much, how much farther this is going to get.

Uh, and I, when I saw him today in the sprint, and I thought back, man, I mean, you know, 2020 was COVID year, right? Was the COVID year.

Um, I remember going to Belgium, so this is six years ago, going to Belgium to watch a race th- th- which was organized by a friend of mine in Wallonia, and there was the, and I actually gave the trophy to the winner, w- who was Stefan De Schoutenheer.

Whoa.

He was Belgian champion, he was Belgian champion cadets.

In the UK, it got to number nine on the sequence charts.

LAUGHTER And peaked at number one in Italy, Israel, Luxembourg, Portugal, Lebanon, and your friend and mine, the Walloon region of Belgium.

It also topped the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart.

It was nominated for Best Pop Duo Group Performance at the 57th Grammy Awards, where it was sadly beaten by A Great Big World featuring Christina Aguilera and their classic hit Say Something.

Not very exciting.

There's a beautiful countryside around the Walloon area of Spa-Francorchamps, an area that is very, very popular for tourists.

There's a beautiful river, and a little village that sits between two parts of the river.

which is really a stunning little place to play because you've got the river to play in.

One of the interesting aspects of this is that just a couple of weeks ago, the first water permit rejection in recent memory occurred.

has happened in the area of Wallonia.

I needed to look up where Wallonia was, but it's apparently a French-speaking part of Belgium.

Wallonia has recently refused Google a water permit for an AI data center.

I think that that is really interesting as a kind of starting gun, which is you start to get water permits refused.

Food and beverage companies have typically always received their water permits, but food and beverage companies also have much higher water impact than data centers.

And even in Belgium, they have a few money, the fund, they are... was inaccessible for me if I wanted to be produced completely by Belgium.

But there is Tax Shelter and another firm which is Wallonie and we...

We applied for it and we won this fund and it was about 100,000 euros, but the project was so poor that this 100,000 euros changed my life.

Also, I think that it's not only a question of money, it is also a question of how my producer was faithful to my vision.

Like, everything that came about in here was people from all over the place.

Or Wallonia or Flanders-

Right

... or any of these places, because they saw it as a pan-European crusade against Bolshevism.

I don't know why there's two.

There's ultra top Flanders and ultra top Wallonia.

I don't know.

Dutch albums, 26.