1812 FBF: Vodka Diplomacy, Russia in the 90s, Superpower to Banana Republic, Phaedra Fisher

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

Welcome to episode 1812. 1812. This is a flashback Friday, episode 8. And with all of the absolutely heartbreaking things that are going on in Ukraine right now, we dug into our archives and we were looking for episodes where we talked about Vladimir Putin, who will go down in history as an evil, awful tyrant, as he well deserves to be known that way. Hopefully this will end soon, but we wanted to find episodes that talk about Putin, that talk about Russia, the dynamics between the US And Russia. And I really never do any kind of intro for Flashback Friday, but I felt that this episode deserved one. This is an episode I recorded a long time ago, and I remember it being very interesting. It's with the author of a book entitled Vodka Diplomacy. I know pretty good title, Vodka Diplomacy, and I remember it being very interesting. I have not listened to it in many years, since I recorded it years ago. But it's always good to look at things through the context of the past. And as you know, I am a big fan and I've said it often on the show. Listen to old movies, watch old TV shows, read old books, listen to old music. Did I say listen to old movies? I think I did. Anyway, sorry about that.

You know what I mean? Watch old movies. Anyway, it's a stressful time, definitely, so.

Please forgive my gaffe there. But yeah, it's. It's just heartbreaking what is going on. And it's heartbreaking that the US Cannot step in and just stop this disgusting, awful bully from doing what he's doing. He does not have the support of the Russian people. The Russian people will suffer and already are suffering greatly from the sanctions that have to be implemented. The world has no choice but to do that. But sadly, it won't affect Putin one bit, probably. And thank God that the world has gotten a lot smarter too, in attacking the oligarchs. So hopefully the oligarchs will put pressure on Putin to whatever extent they can, and this will end as soon as possible. And thankfully, it's not going very well for Putin either. You know, it's. It's just not been any easy thing for him as I think he thought it would be. So there is some good news coming out of this. Let's pray for the Ukrainian people and for the world the that this doesn't escalate into anything more than it is and certainly hope that it doesn't escalate into anything nuclear. So anyway, we're bringing this Flashback Friday episode just so it has some relation and context to what is sadly going on in the world today. And let's hope that this ends soon. So again, Flashback Friday. This is a flashback from many years ago with the author of Vodka Diplomacy. You're Here we go.

Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before and a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. And thank you so much for joining me today. We'll be back with today's guest or segment in just a moment. It's my pleasure to welcome Phaedra Fischer to the show. She has a very interesting background. She was on the ground in Russia during a very, very historic time in the 90s. Of course, she witnessed firsthand because she spoke Russian and didn't deal with interpreters. She witnessed firsthand the privatization, the inflation and a whole bunch of other issues. Her book is entitled Vodka Diplomacy, awesome title. And we're going to hear about her experiences today and I think it'll be very interesting. Phaedra, welcome. How are you?

Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Well, it's good to have you. Just to give our listeners a sense of geography, where are you located today?

I'm in San Francisco today.

Fantastic. And how long were you in Russia?

I was in Russia a total of about two something years. I was actually also in Kazakhstan for six months.

And what in the world would have inspired you to go there, especially during this chaotic time that we're about to talk about?

If you're in search of adventure, you go where the adventure is. I was just straight out of graduate school, I spoke Russian and it was a time in history in the mid-1990s where anyone who spoke Russian and was up for a bit of adventure was fully employable on these aid projects going on in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

And so what type of aid project.

Were you working on?

The projects that I was working on were really the World bank and USAID projects. And the whole theme about these aid projects is that the fundamental goal of them, the stated goal was to really help to build democracy, help to build the private sector. And these are, these are things that are near and dear to my heart. So I thought, wow, rather than just talk about it, it'd be great to actually be part of it. So I signed on to be part of these two, part of these projects. Each project on was for one year. The first one was extreme. They were both extremely exciting. The first one was really setting up a national database similar to like Dun and Bradstreet for recently privatized companies. So if you think about it, if you're a foreign investor or any investor trying to decide which companies to invest in in the former SO union, even though they're privatized companies, there is no organized way of finding them. So that was my first project, was trying to collect the information, consolidate it in such a way that people can find it. And the second project was really about the property market in St. Petersburg and the goal of that particular project was a title registration system. Because again, what had happened was in the, in the early days of privatization, even though people theoretically now owned their own apartments, there was no way to validate title of registration. The complete lack of a process meant that it could take upwards to two years to confirm yet someone actually had title.

Yeah.

So I assume that all of this work that you were doing was really with the goal of increasing FDI or foreign direct investment. Because if foreigners can't find anything out about these newly privatized companies, they're not going to invest. I mean, there was just no system at all. I mean the Soviet Union was about an 80 year run, I guess, or 60 year run, I can't remember exactly. But wow. I mean, what just an amazing shift. It's incredible.

And well, the key word here is goals of the project. There's very much a difference between goals and results, as you know. And so the basic truth about these aid projects was that the fundamental purpose of them was to keep the country from collapsing. I mean, that's really why USAID and the World bank were there, was they didn't want to return to the bad old days. And if you think about the logic of what was happening, what was happening was that you essentially had the US Government providing money to the Russian government, asking the Russian government to structure their own demise as far as getting less involved in the economy.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

And if you just start thinking through that logically, you wonder, okay, which government official is actually going to sit around trying to plan ways to warm themselves out of work? So it was a very, very interesting concept which essentially, if you had the government there to. The government's really not going to plan its own demise.

Right, right. And that's the same problem we have in the US we have all of these people in government that will never do anything to work themselves out of a job, which is what they should be. And I could say the same thing about many charities as well. Whether the motivation is really to find the cure or solve the problem or just increase power and influence, that's just part of human nature. You know, I always like to say that any human organization just has the goal of perpetuating itself. That's how it always works out, right?

Oh, exactly. And I mean, so essentially the conflicts that happen with an aid project is first of all, of course, you've got the consulting firms in there and their goal is just to collect revenue, is to just bill the client and whatever it takes to sign off the the milestones is what they're going to be doing. Meanwhile, on the Russian government side, what they're interested in is still preserving their power base. And so especially what was going on in St. Petersburg with me is we had this team that was working on the title registration, which in the good old days required about different government agencies, each one of which had their own fiefdom for how to sway influence to get their bit of the process done. And we're here coming in saying, oh, we're here going to eliminate all these middle. And of course, the various government agencies aren't interested in that, but they are very interested in the money that we have. So the result we started seeing. And this gets to your question about the Mafia. This gets to the question of, okay, how will the people who want our money but don't want the results yet get their hands on our money? And you do that via organizing certain subcontractors and putting pressure on the American side to you're going to use these particular subcontractors and we will sign off the Deliverables only after certain money is transferred. And that's the way it starts going downhill.

Fascinating. I mean, this is just completely fascinating. So take us through kind of what happened. I mean, you know, we all saw it on the news and so forth. Assuming we were even alive at that point, you know, depends what age the person is. But, but take us through what happened. I mean, the, the Soviet Union, I mean, you know, was dismantled, things were being reorganized. It's really hard for me to fathom how privatization even works. I mean, if you're just a regular average citizen, you're living in an apartment and you know it was owned by the government and then it's deeded over to you, I guess. And then what about all the companies, you know, all the government owned factories and so forth, who gets those? How are they picked? What happens?

Yeah, the whole of what happens for hybridization, you know, the mechanics of it. Feel like the academics can get into like the details of how all that works. I can share with you some of the things that I witnessed on the ground that I don't think most people really realize the scale of what was going on. For example, in the former Soviet Inn, you really had, or I should say in the Soviet Union itself, before privatization happened, you really did have the workers paradise where everything was provided to the workers by the government. So if you were working at, let's say a tractor factory, you worked at the tractor factory. The tractor factory provided your housing, they provided your schools, they provided the hospital, they provided also your children's education. And generally the income was so low that you didn't have transportation, you didn't have your own car. And so this tractor factory is off in the middle of nowhere. You're then dependent upon the company to drive you to civilization, which means that it's not quite serfdom, but it's pretty darn close in that if you are no longer paid the companies and essentially whenever we showed up there, the state of financial crisis was so extreme that most people had not been paid in six months across the whole country. Just the financial system had reached a state of collapse. People were not paid for six months. And I visit this tractor factory and find all the employees are still hanging out there, they're sitting around in the yard drinking vodka because there's nothing else. The factory is not operating, they're not being paid, but they have nowhere else to go. And it just makes your head explode going, wow, this is absolutely fascinating. And so the question that you're asking is how do you unwind all this and that was the issue that was grappled with, with the voucher privatization. First thing that had to be established was, and mind you, I'm not an academic expert on this, I'm just going to breeze through it extremely quickly. But essentially all these various industries had to be given title and fractured up and determine what of this actually is an entity that can be sold and what comprises of it. And then that was what was from structure then was a bunch of voucher auctions and every citizen in the country was given a number of vouchers that they could then trade in to buy shares of their preferred companies. And this is where just like scam after scam started happening in Russia in the early 1990s. And this is how the oligarchs really acquired a lot of their wealth, was scams of convincing lots of individuals to give up their vouchers and in return for X as a result, a lot of people accumulated a lot of shares very, very quickly.

So people were given vouchers and I mean, how were those vouchers allocated? Who gets what? I mean, how many vouchers do you have to buy the Russian oil company?

I really, I mean this is an area that I just, I couldn't even represent that I'm an expert.

Right, right.

Well, I appreciate the disclaimer. I mean, and as I said to you before we started recording, I would rather talk to an on the ground person with first hand experience than an ivory tower person any day.

Exactly. To some of your other questions about things that things that we're witnessing on the ground that were just shocking that other people just may not have actually realized. I mean the main thing that we were really witnessing on the ground was there really were no laws yet there's only suggestions. And that's the opening phrase that I start with my book with when we have no laws, only suggestions. And it's whenever you're operating in a country without laws, or I should say that it started to be more like there are laws, but the laws are flexible depending upon who you influence. It just changes everything. It changes how you operate in society and how society as a whole starts operating. And some examples of that were things like, well, here's the most basic example. I was actually attacked on the street in Russia and people just start gasping about that. But everyone was in a state of violence at some point. So it just happened. The amazing thing about my particular situation was that the police were actually nearby and caught the guys and we were all taken off to the police station. And this is the sort of thing where in the States, what you'd be expecting is, okay, the three guys that were caught, they should be read their rights, they should have a lawyer present, et cetera. And what happened in my situation was simply the. Simply the police held the guy, pointed him to me and said, is this the guy that attacked you? I said, well, I'm pretty sure. And that was enough to slam him to the ground, start kicking him, and start the most violent physical abuse I've ever seen in my life and never hope to see again.

This is vigilante justice.

Yeah.

But it's interesting that it's the police. I mean, I thought you were going to say something different. I thought you were going to say the guys that attacked you got off. I'm in a way glad to hear that there was some justice.

Yeah, well, it's one of those things where you're very conflicted at this point because they ended up finding my business cards on these guys. So there was absolutely no that they had been the ones to rob me. So it was zero question in my mind. But I was very conflicted from a perspective of, yes, but they should be punished versus well, it really should go through a proper process. It shouldn't be the police just being judged and executed.

Of course, of course, of course. But I agree, very, very interesting.

Okay.

So, yeah, I mean, communism is such an incredibly inefficient disaster because it has this sort of sense of everybody can buy justice in a way. And it also has this other issue of inefficiency where people are lining up to get their pair of shoes. And during the privatization stage, I mean, things were dismantled. Inflation was incredible. I mean, people were just massively impoverished initially. Right?

That's correct. I mean, it's very difficult for people to understand the scale of inflation of what was going on in the country, and what it's like to live in a country that is undergoing such extreme. And at the time I arrived there, I guess the ruble to the dollar started at about 200 rubles to the dollar. By the time I left, it was 5,000 rubles to the dollar. To give you a sense of just how extreme the inflation was during that period of time. And so what that meant for people on the street was, first of all, the financial system had completely collapsed. And even if the financial system did exist, you're not going to leave your money in a bank whenever, like, it's deteriorating a couple percent an hour or a day.

Right, right. With inflation, you're losing your money so quickly.

Exactly. So the question is, what do people do? I mean, how do you actually during this period of time? And the answer, first of all was dollars. People just were desperate to get their hands on dollars, meaning like the actual pieces of paper. This is not bank accounts. Everyone had physical pieces of paper that were stashed literally underneath their mattresses because that was really the only way that they could preserve anything resembling wealth. And then the second part of it also is the big rushes to the store. Anything that you can buy, that can retain value, you'll buy just so that you can. Anything except for holding those stupid pieces of paper rubles are going to deteriorate tomorrow. And it was pretty extreme. And also at the same time, we had no credit card system that really it was a cash only society at this time in Russia. Which meant that when I'm traveling, I was traveling continuously, I had to travel literally with shoeboxes full of paper rubles, which is pretty alarming. It's pretty amazing thinking that yes, you actually have take these rubles. I would wrap them up in newspaper, wrap them up in string so it actually look not like a big box of money. But then you would sit and because inflation was so high, the numbers of notes that you had, the big value notes were insufficient. And so you could sit for like five minutes counting out the paper notes. When you're checking out from a hotel, just sitting there, just counting them out, it's like paying for a hotel with probably quarters. You know, you just, it's going to take forever to do it and you're going, this is completely ridiculous.

It is completely ridiculous. So people were looking for some stable store of wealth. I mean, this is a great economic lesson, you know, and you saw it firsthand. And so they were looking to the dollar to provide that gold and silver are too heavy and they're not divisible enough and they have all sorts of problems. But you know, at the time they thought, well, the dollar now a lot of people in the US now today are fleeing the dollar because they're thinking the same thing, of course to a much lesser degree. But that's very interesting. And the shoeboxes, I mean, you had to completely increase the amount of money in rubles you would carry all the time, I'm sure, because it kept devaluing. Right.

Well, also I would keep money in dollars until the very last moment when I had to convert it into rubles, of course, and everyone would just keep money in dollars. And this also sort of fed the whole reason why foreigners are a target in these foreign countries because first of all, the Russians did not believe in keeping money in banks and they knew that Americans had dollars and they just couldn't fathom Americans keeping money in banks. Therefore, the calculations are, therefore the Americans must have all kinds of dollars stashed in their apartments. And so there is all kinds of violence against foreigners yet after their apartments, where people would fall back to their homes and beat them up looking for money in their apartments with the expectation that these wealthy Americans must have cash stashed here somewhere. And it's sort of a symptom of two interrelated problems. One is the inflation and the complete lack of a financial system leads people to believe that everyone's keeping money somewhere stashed away in their house.

Wow. Amazing. You know, do you have any lessons? I mean, I'm sure you do, but does this say anything about how we should be thinking today with what's going on in the economy? Just any thoughts on that? You know, I know it's tangential, but.

Yeah, it is tangential. Again, I don't claim to be an expert on these things, but we heard your disclaimer. Inflation is a terrifying thing and it actually can just rip out the heart of a country. And it's things like going to a restaurant and all of the items on the menu are printed daily because the restaurant menu has to update daily because of the inflation. Like you come back the next day, it's going to be different prices and you can't plan anything with that. You can't plan your family budget, you can't plan payroll, you can't pay your phone bill just because you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen in the next month. And so it just, it really starts to affect everything that you're doing in society. And then where it really started to affect us in Russia was that your planning horizon changes from years to days. And when no one is thinking in the long term, it means that there's no investment that's forward looking. And so what was going on in the post privatization factories? You initially think, oh, these newly privatized companies, people are going to be trying to build up, rebuild these factories, they're going to be hiring workers, they're going to try and come up with a better product line. That all requires, requires years of investment. People are thinking on a horizon of weeks, not years. And as a result, what was happening, these newly privatized companies is that they're just being stripped of assets and just being sold. And so that was resulting in positive cash flow in the short run, but the long run investment was just dire. And this is part of what sent Russia into a big spiral economically during those years.

Unbelievable. Wow. So what did you see? I mean, you went to about 30.

Different Russian cities and stayed at about.

30 in about 30 different cities while you were there, right?

That's correct. Somewhere around there.

And so how were people surviving? I mean, what were they doing? You said they weren't being paid for six months at a time. Inflation was rampant. When the price controls went away, you know, what would they do to survive?

Essentially, everyone had some scam going on on the side. And you can use the word scam or you can use the word business, but it was all just a random of happening, is everyone had some other way of making money. One of my favorite stories is whenever I first got my apartment, I was like 20 something years old and all my Russian friends were really lobbying me to take in a housekeeper. And I was like, I'm in my mid-20s, I don't need a housekeeper. This is ridiculous. And they really saw it as being my moral obligation to the future of Russia to hire somebody. Okay, I can do that.

You got to increase employment.

I can do this. I was able to. I hired a woman who, you're not going to believe this one. She was actually a nuclear physicist. She had not been paid by her nuclear weapons factory for the previous, like six months plus. And so she decided that it'd be more lucrative to work as a housekeeper for Americans. And this woman, Valya, was absolutely one of the most amazing people, people who I met in Russia. She took on this role that you and I might think, oh, gosh, that's a real setback, going from being a nuclear physicist to being a housekeeper. But she had an amazingly positive attitude about it. Like, hey, I'm now in control of my own destiny here. I can get my own clients, I can earn a cash income. Meanwhile, at the weapons factory, I wasn't being paid. And when I was there, I was under such bureaucratic control that I had no control of what I was doing anyway. So she actually felt a lot more economic freedom as well as personal freedom, yet taking this new life of being a housekeeper, which in the world of modern America, it's a bit mind numbing, but this was the reality of what was going on at the time, where people just were very much thinking, let's just look at practicalities. What will it take to survive? And. And let's move forward.

Yeah, right, right.

So she was excited about the change. What age was she? Because I find that the. When, you know, when I visited formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe and Russia, and then the only actual operating communist country I've ever visited at the time was Cuba, which was fascinating. But I find that there's a real disparity age wise. It seems like the younger people, you know, they were pretty optimistic about the changes, but the older people, you know, they just kind of liked their old idea of what. What do they say that, you know, it's the joke about the workers paradise is we make it look like they're working, we're working, and they make it look like they're paying us.

We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.

Right? Exactly. Exactly.

Yes. And you're exactly right. And Valya was about the same age I was maybe a couple years old, or should say late 20s or so. And you're up. That younger people really saw opportunities where the older generation, I mean, to their credit, or just sort of acknowledging their position, they've worked this way their entire lives and they just saw their entire life savings disappear. And if you just see your entire life savings, you will be a bit pessimistic as well as. I mean, the other things to keep in mind is like, the whole history of Russia is very fascinating in that one thing that we just sort of take for granted in the west is the whole concept of the civil society has the ability to influence government direction. And of course, you can be cynical about and just say, yeah, the people in Washington, we really have no influence over them. But the reality is, is that we still do to a much greater degree than ever happened in Russia. Yet in Russia, just as like, who is in power? And the people in power really treat the whole country as their own personal backyard. Whatever it is that they want to do is what happened. And civil society really had no influence over what was going on yet at the higher government levels until the next revolution and the next group of people takes control, and then they decide what's going to happen. So definitely with the older generations, you really saw that the mindset of, you know, what goes on in government really doesn't even matter because we can't influence it anyway. And so there just was very much a view of as long as you're not making things worse or disrupting things, just let them continue. Whereas the younger generations, especially the ones that we started to work with on our projects, they were very, very optimistic about just seeing the potential could happen. And I say, for me personally, what was. What was really exciting was working with all the young women throughout the country because until I came along, their whole view of what women would do in the workforce was maybe make tea, maybe be a bureaucrat. I mean, my dear Valya, who is a former nuclear physicist, was very much an exception. But talking to the women that I'd interviewed for roles with my project and speak with them, they really didn't look beyond. Yeah, just basic administrative tasks. And then they started to say, well, the whole world is opening up here and look at all the things I can do. A couple of the women on my team ended up going to the States to MBA school, which I was extremely excited about. But yet the younger generation definitely started to get very excited about the opportunities, and I think that's hopefully continuing.

And just to be sarcastic pessimist. So they went to the the States and they went to business school. So instead of being a slave to the government or to, you know, chauvinistic culture, they can be a slave to student loan debt. But I'm actually just kind of kidding. It's not as bad as the other alternative, so. Wow. Just incredible. Why do you call the book Vodka Diplomacy? I love the name.

Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, well, Vodka Diplomacy. I mean, I'm sure that everyone knows the stereotypes of Russians and vodka is pretty much just. You always think of them together. One of the things which is sort of like a stereotype about Russia, but I just learned to be, unfortunately, quite true, is that when in Russia, real business happens over vodka, it really does. And it's even more extreme than most people believe in that if you are meeting with people, working with your Russian partner, everything really be decided about the relationship, about how well you drink together. But meanwhile, it's all about determining who's in power here. Is it the host or is it the guest? And it's all this posturing, all this, all the drinking games. Really a very sinister edge to it. In the old Soviet era and before that, the tsarist era, all this drinking was really all about to get people to loosen up their tongues a bit, to really speak your minds about what you really believe. Because in this country, in this society where neighbor's been turned against neighbor for so long, people are very guarded about what they say. And so you need to have the vodka flowing to get people to actually say what it is that's on their mind. This is just a scene that I saw again and again working through Russia, was that that's what really set your tone for your working relationship, is how well you're able to drink with your Russian partners. And my liver definitely was Sacrificed in the process, but we actually did make progress there.

What's interesting about the vodka diplomacy, though, is using alcohol as a truth serum, which I think is a pretty valid reason to use it, actually. And that's quite interesting. It applies to both sides, though. I mean, one has to be a better drinker than the other to not give away the secrets and not have the loose tongue and get the other person to do it. Or fake that they're drinking and not really drink, right?

Oh, exactly. I mean, it's one of these things that's very, very ingrained in Russian culture. But the other part of it that you're sort of implying there is that this whole relationship is very, very different than a Western business relationship. In a Western business relationship, you can actually go into the relationship and say, hey, I want to buy carrots from you. I want carrots. You want my money? We can actually come up with a deal where we both walk away from the table happy. That concept is very much ingrained in Western society. But in Russian society, there's always this concept about who is winning, who is losing in a particular relationship. Both people cannot go away from the table happy. And if both people can't go away from the table happy, you've got to figure out some way of one upping your business partner. And I guess partner is not even the right word. It's a person who you're sitting at the table with. How can I make sure I can come out on top? And so this is where the vodka diplomacy came in of how do you. You're sorting out, how can I actually take advantage of this particular situation and how can I come out ahead? So the real agenda is very, very different than the superficial agenda for what's going on at the table there.

So the win, win idea just doesn't work in Russia. It's a win lose deal. It's conquering your opponent rather than building something great together.

Yeah, well, one of my favorite anecdotes from Russia during this period, this is, of course, the era that McDonald's was really making major headway into Russia. And the whole concept of customer service just fundamentally did not exist under the Soviet era. So you would try to check in like I try to check in for a hotel. And you're treated more as with under suspended suspicion rather than as a guest. It's like, who are you? There's times where I was thrown out of a hotel because they thought I was a prostitute, just because women do not travel by themselves. And so if you're checking in Here, you must be one of them. Like, no, this is ridiculous. So the whole idea of customer service is fundamentally lacking. So with that context, and one of my favorite stories about the era comes from McDonald's days. And I have no way of knowing if this was actually true or not. It's just one of these urban legends that was spreading at the time. So there's a whole group of young kids in for their first day of McDonald's training and they're learning all these controversial subjects, like, smile at your customer. Would you like fries with that? Have a nice day. These things are completely foreign concepts. And then a hand shot up and a kid asks, I don't understand, why do we have to be so nice to them? We've got all the hamburgers. And that just summarizes the whole mentality of what was going on at the time of just the whole concept of customer service, of, no, we've got the hamburgers, but we want their money. And you'll get that by being nice to them. And it's something that, it's a very, very interesting concept to think about how other cultures operate.

It sure is. And this is why it is so important, important to travel because it's just hard to fathom that your mind just, you know, you can't get your head around it until you've been there and sort of witnessed it. And you know, there are still, even 20 some odd years later, you can still sense these things. They still live in the culture a little bit, even to a much lesser degree than they did at that time, obviously. Very interesting. Well, Fedra, please give out your website, tell people where they can find out more about vodka diplomacy and highly recommend the book on Amazon. It's got great reviews.

Thank you very much. Yes, my book, you can primarily find it on Amazon. Vodka Diplomacy. My name is Phaedra Fisher. It will show up there when you search in. My website's very much under construction, but you can look at it if you'd like, which is vodkadiplomacy.com and I'm also on Facebook, which is updated regularly. Facebook. And you'll look at Vodka Diplomacy there.

Fantastic. Phaedra Fisher, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much.

Now you can get Jason's Creating wealth in today's economy home study course. All the knowledge and education revealed in a nine hour day of the creating wealth boot camp created in a home study course for you to dive into at your convenience. For more details go to Jason Hartman. Hartman.com. This show is produced by the Hartman media company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email mediaartmanmedia.com Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. Exclusively.