00:00John, you're there and you've just spoken to me about the optics of what you've seen.
00:04And it's quite interesting because the EU's Kaya Kallis said that those Ukrainian drone attacks in St. Petersburg have caused
00:13panic in the Kremlin.
00:14Would you agree with that sentiment?
00:16Do you feel the panic across St. Petersburg and while you're at that investment conference there?
00:22I would respectfully or maybe not disagree with the high commissioner.
00:28No one's panicking. They're angry. And there's a difference between panicking and angry.
00:35And, you know, no government likes to be embarrassed on its home turf.
00:40This event is once a year. It is. It's massive.
00:46There are a lot of delegations from all over. This hotel has Venezuelans and Vietnamese as the president of Tanzania.
00:54You have a lot of senior ministers, not really too many heads of state, heads of government over the last
01:04five years.
01:05That's all decreased. The war has, Spief has been a casualty of the war because it's just unappealing for a
01:14CEO of a large global company to be seen here.
01:19Now, this year is a little different because the U.S. does have an official representative.
01:24He's a cultural guy, but he still is the official representative of the president of the United States.
01:31And we even have former New York mayor Eric Adams, which is always entertaining.
01:37But the event does seem to be a little smaller this year in terms of physicality, in terms of how
01:44many displays are in the booze.
01:47The booze are still creative, but you have a lot of sort of Russians here, Russians from all over different
01:52regions.
01:53And so it's more Russia to Russia, but they do have their signing ceremonies in that.
01:57But I wouldn't say that Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, are panicking there to use a sort
02:07of coarse word.
02:08They're pissed. You know, they've been embarrassed and they're not happy about it.
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