About
David Edick Jr. has over 30 years’ experience in trade, investment banking, and NGO relations in Russia, focused on the Russian Far East. In the 1990s, he was involved in technology scouting, equity investment, and wholesale food imports in Vladivostok and other areas of the Russian Far East. As such, he became an expert on shipping logistics and the particularity of doing business in the Far East.
David Edick was a seven term President of the San Diego – Vladivostok Sister City Society at a time of budding cooperation between the US West Coast and the Russian Far East that mixed citizen diplomacy and business.
David Edick was a seven term President of the San Diego – Vladivostok Sister City Society at a time of budding cooperation between the US West Coast and the Russian Far East that mixed citizen diplomacy and business.
Daniel Satinsky: So, let me ask you just to begin with how did you first become involved with Russia or Russia-related activities?
David Edick: It goes back to my university training. I trained as a global political economist at a university that didn’t have such a program. I found a way to combine history, political science, and economics with an international focus. I designed—
Daniel Satinsky: And what university?
David Edick: San Diego State.
Daniel Satinsky: And what years?
David Edick: Oh, gosh, ’82 through ’85.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
David Edick: I transferred down from San Jose State. I went from being a meteorology major to kind of quasi political science, business, and decided to chart my own path to be an investment banker, which I thought was a global political economy, to be able to work across silos, because political science didn’t talk with the econ guys just on the next floor upstairs, and the econ guys didn’t talk with poly sci, and it was really kind of a joke, a bad joke, so I decided that in order to be effective, to be educated and be effective I needed to cross silos. So, I did that, and that was at the time that the wars in Central America were going on, and my mentor had some big contacts there. And there was a Soviet political systems old guard professor who I enjoyed his work, and so I’ve been in the thread really since the ‘70s of being aware of geopolitics and learning about the world and the Soviet Union.
And then it picked up. I got in with the…I thought the world of the environmental movement was going to be an opportunity for me to work with. That turned out to be a huge disappointment. So, just at kind of the moment that the wall in the East began to shudder or dissipate with the Polish roundtable, the summer of ’88, I joined with a group called Science Solutions here in San Diego in 1990. They asked me to come on board and be their director of development. And the purpose of that company was to bring high technology processes and products out from the Soviet Union to the West, particularly the United States.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And this was what year?
David Edick: 1990.
Daniel Satinsky: And who founded that company?
David Edick: James Baur.
Daniel Satinsky: James Baur.
David Edick: Yeah, B-A-U-R. He’s still alive. In fact, he’s going to…there’s going to be a reunion of Science Solutions in September here in San Diego. If you’re looking for businesspeople to interview, he’s going to have some perspectives.
Daniel Satinsky: If he would give me an interview, that would be very interesting, because obviously he has a story about, first of all, how he had those connections in the Soviet Union, and then how to bring out intellectual property from the Soviet Union is an interesting story.
David Edick: Well, it was quite a ride of exploration and discovery. Jim’s roots are out of General Atomics here in San Diego, which is a… He came out of the nuclear engineering program as a physics guy and knew scientists in the Soviet Union in the world of physics, and nuclear sciences, and the space program. General Atomics, in addition to doing nuclear stuff, more commonly today is known for drones or things of that sort, so aerospace. It’s a defense nuclear engineering company.
So, he came out of that and knew people, real scientist guys. He had some great contacts in Leningrad, St. Petersburg. But it was a long road to figure out… You know, academics in the United States and in the Soviet Union have negligible commercial experience or perspective. It’s a real learning curve to climb. And culturally in the Soviet Union there was negligible commercial experience, particularly in the Russian space. Armenians and Azerbaijanis and all Central Asians had a different feel for it. So, anyways, it was a lot of education.
Daniel Satinsky: And did you speak Russian at that time?
David Edick: No.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was all through translators.
David Edick: Yeah, I had…so in this latter environment period I had… I was a known quantity at San Diego State as being an unusual guy who knew a lot of stuff. I was very creative. As a student, as a non-PhD student. So, I was around the Arid Lands program, which was a Jordan, Egypt, United States effort to—it was an Israel, Jordan, Egypt, United States effort to collaborate around the issues of water, to find a way to work together and build trust and build connections. And I thought that was a great idea, and I thought… I tried to put together a connection between San Diego State and a university in Wroclaw, Poland. And then jumped over to parallel the Arid Lands program with a California, Uzbekistan water management exchange project.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: And there were a lot of good people at San Diego State and in San Diego on the water issue. I could just…many of the pieces or modules were right there with the Arid Lands program, so I thought well, you know, the politics are flowing in the right direction now. And this was built particularly around the crisis at the ROC. So, I spent the better part of a year trying to put that together, kind of as I was leaving the academic world. I did some Latin American debt stuff in looking at debt for equity swaps around Brady bonds in the late ‘80s, so I did some contract work. With a B.A., you know, so, I mean, it’s like all these PhDs were like who are you? And it’s like you haven’t drunk all the Kool-Aid yet, you don’t have all the certificates and so we’re not sure whether we should treat you seriously. Okay.
So, it turned out that the institutional, I guess, resistance to this kind of effort with Uzbeks and all, it was too steep a climb for me to do. But I got to know a lot of people. And Jim Baur with Science Solutions came to me, and we met over lunch. I had developed… Nobody knew anything, okay, so for the Uzbek-California thing, nobody knew anything, so get to work, you know, study, research, build a puzzle, find the pieces, put them together, so I got a bit of a reputation out of that.
And Jim said well, you know, you straddle this academic-commercial world, why don’t you come be our director of development? For a small company that’s like change toilet paper and everything else that needs to be done at that time but help guide the group of science guys into understanding the sociopolitical culture, how things were evolving, where new sources of funding might be, business support programs, and customers. How to go from…how to find potential customers for these technologies. At the Leningrad Institute for Optics and Fine Mechanics, or Fine Mechanics and Optics*—you can check me on that.
That was a very advanced place on the planet, and the people that were there at the time ultimately created the lenses that are used in fiber optic systems all around the world. They are multiple mega millionaires, and a billionaire came out of that. And we ran through the resistance here of well, the Soviets are idiots, they are communists, and nothing good commercially is going to come out of there. But the science guys knew differently. But again, we’re trying to bridge between science, to applied science, to commercial stuff. And on the commercial side a lot of these companies had defense business as part of their order book, if you will. That’s part of their business. And most of them were scared to talk with us because they didn’t want to bring any complications to their existing business. So, they were like, you know, this is interesting, very intriguing, but…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Did you play a role in bringing those lenses and those guys into market?
David Edick: No, no. We got close. In business, I don’t know, luck matters a lot.
I hear all the stories about I’m god’s gift, and I just, I’ve got it. Luck plays a huge role. And there were other people around. And ultimately, for the most part, the Russians, they just found their way by the force of circumstances. And that’s part of why they’re kind of tough right now. So, we—
Daniel Satinsky: So, Science Solutions, did you have any successes out of Science Solutions?
David Edick: There were some. Jim would be able to tell you a whole lot more about that. We came at the—my involvement, once I really understood what was going on—and we hosted some delegations here. I mean, we… You know, what is success? We put together some fascinating relationships out of the connecting between the U.S. and the Russian space program. Roald Sagdeev and Susie Eisenhower, and there was a marriage there. One of the Eisenhower ladies and… But this was at the time of glasnost turning into perestroika, and the deeper perestroika…
So, there was an underlying crisis in the Soviet Union anyways that’s completely not understood here in the West. I don’t think the Russians have a good handle on it, either. But there was a crisis that the mirror, kind of weird mirror of inflation in an economy was goods disappeared. They did. The common thing is to call them, well, they’re damn communists and they couldn’t make anything anyways. But there was more going on than that. So, things were fraying pretty seriously. And the guys that—and they were mostly guys, there were a few women—were increasingly scrambling, and their time horizons were getting narrower and narrower and narrower, shorter and shorter—you know, can we do a deal? Some sort of container of this, or some computers of that.
And what really kind of ended things for me at Science Solutions—and I’m condensing things here—the coup, the Soviet coup in August of 1991, changed everything. That was the end of the Union. And it was the end of all of these Union structures that we had been dealing with, all these Soviet Union-level scientific institutes and relationship structures, whatever funding that was part of it, but it was mostly the institutional connections. They were…what I tried to explain was that they’re there, but they’re not there, and they’re going to go away, and it’s going to be in months. And all these groups that we’ve been working with are going to go. And I was told to stick to my reports, so I was like okay, I got it.
Daniel Satinsky: And how did you know that?
David Edick: I just knew. You know, my background is more on the sociopolitical of it. I mean, that’s… When the wall to the East… With the thing with Poland, that opened the door, and I could feel it. Very few could. I don’t know, it just…
Daniel Satinsky: Well, go back to what you said about the underlying crisis. How would you describe that underlying crisis? What was it?
David Edick: Well, it was firstly and foremost an economic crisis in a non-market system where, up until the 1960s, the Soviet Union was, in this communist era was about industrialization, electrification, workers, the proletariat. It wasn’t about oil or gas. Natural resources were wood. You can make paper or… I mean, yeah, there was Baku and everything, but it wasn’t until the discovery of the super giant fields in West Siberia that the Soviet Union changed in a really important way. And one of these days somebody will dig into it. And I think it changed very importantly the internal structure, the drivers, the economic drivers, because the resources that were competitive in the system, suddenly energy became dirt cheap, and the focus of the economy moved more toward the development of this new energy.
I mean, yes, the Russians got in—the Soviets got into exporting a fair amount of oil, maybe 3 million barrels a day, I think, somewhere in the mid ‘80s, but it was mostly a domestic thing, and it was… I wonder if it was a version of Dutch disease. That was explored with the Dutch and the Groningen gas field, and the impact that that had on the Dutch economy, and the value of the guilder, and how it suddenly made Dutch manufacturing uncompetitive in Western Europe, which was like, what? What? Something is really weird here. But then the Europeans went to the European Union and things changed. The rise of oil and then gas changed the character of the Soviet economy I think in important ways.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s a great insight. No, seriously, it’s a great insight, and one that I have—and I can’t claim to have read everything written on it, but I have not encountered that before, so I think that is something for some future PhD researchers to go into.
David Edick: You know, and Russia’s best years in the post-Soviet time, as Russia was reinventing itself, re-gathering itself together, was when oil prices, you know, 1998, ’99, 2000, oil prices were in the tank. Russian oil production was beginning to recover, but oil prices were seriously in the tank.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. It was like down to $15, $16, and maybe even less.
David Edick: Yeah. And the ruble was garbage. And that was when Russian manufacturing took off. Suddenly there was demand, okay? Enough to drive suddenly competitive human and material resources, manufacturing, which is machines and people. So, anyways.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you left Science Solutions.
David Edick: I left Science Solutions basically September 10, 1991, when we participated in a trade show that was part of the signing of the San Diego-Vladivostok Sister City Agreement.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, which was when, 1991?
David Edick: September 10, 1991.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, yeah. Signed that agreement and then left the company?
David Edick: Right. There was a delegation in town of big, serious guys. These weren’t clowns. These were the cream of the crop out of naval, maritime engineering, the best guys. And there were some very good ones, some forward—Vladivostok is unlike any other city in Russia that I’ve ever visited. Odessa is something like it.
Daniel Satinsky: I was in Vladivostok in June of 1990.
David Edick: Oh, wow. Wow. [Laughs.]
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, so I was there. I don’t want to digress too much, but I did a mid-career change and got a master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Fletcher School held a North Pacific seminar in Vladivostok. And we flew to Moscow and picked up people and then went to Vladivostok for this seminar when the city was officially still closed, I think. So, I saw it then. It was a very interesting experience. So, who initiated the sister city?
David Edick: It comes from the arts people here in San Diego. James Hubbell, who was an acclaimed sculptor-artist. There’s a—you ask a really good question here, actually, and I can’t answer it the way I’d like to. There were some arts university connections, just a few people. How they knew each other I don’t know. But it’s these early days of… It was in the arts and culture.
We had a—oh, I think I know where it came from. There was a Soviet arts festival here in San Diego in 1988. The mayor got behind it. It was a big deal, very successful, and people from all over the Soviet Union came here with acting, poets, art, you know, painting, all kinds, sculpture. And I think it’s out of that people got to know each other, just a few connections.
And then there was a Soviet navy visit here in 1989 which kind of juiced that, because the Soviet navy ships were carrying boxes of art. [Laughs.] As captain’s cargo, basically. Which is a cool thing in the world of maritime. The captain can carry commerce that is not part of the bill of lading, is not part of the register. And it’s a way to kind of get things back and forth.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Edick: And on the Soviet side, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Gennady Gerasimov—there’s a legendary hot tub meeting, James Hubbell and others, Gennady Gerasimov. But anyways, Gennady Gerasimov was asked what a good sister for San Diego might be, and he said Vladivostok would be great, two big navy ports.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. This hot tub encounter wouldn’t have been through Esalen, was it?
David Edick: I don’t think so.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
David Edick: It’s an interesting idea. And I don’t… This pre-dates my active involvement. These early historical days, as we’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of the program, yeah, it’s…
Daniel Satinsky: I can actually check that because I know the director of the Esalen program, but it would have been an interesting thread to pull here. But it doesn’t matter. But there was a mutual interest on each side in putting a sister city together that wasn’t particularly commercial.
David Edick: Not at all. Not at all. This is like how do we get beyond the Cold War. We’re ending the Cold War, and how do we build bridges. And in fact, the first big project of the sister city program was a space bridge. It was a live two-way satellite telecast between a theater audience here in San Diego out at Sea World and at the Gorky Theater in Vladivostok. I mean, there were thousands of—
Daniel Satinsky: Do know when that was?
David Edick: January 22, 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: January 22, 1992, okay.
David Edick: Yeah, 22nd, 23rd.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, because there’s a whole history of space bridges. Beginning, actually, with the US Festival, and Steve Wozniak, in the early ‘80s, and then later morphing into increasing numbers of these through people who formed Internews. So, this is another piece to the puzzle.
David Edick: There was a guy named Goldin, a Russian—
Daniel Satinsky: Joseph Goldin1234
David Edick: Joseph Goldin, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Edick: He was the guru that kind of made it happen. If it wasn’t for this Russian speaking operator in Pittsburgh, nothing would have happened, but Goldin was the guru that imagined it, and it was his force of imagination and force of personality that pulled it off, pulled it together.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was the first activity of sister cities, was this theater exchange?
David Edick: Well, it was two audiences. There were maybe one, two thousand—a thousand people at Sea World and a full—the theater at Sea World was full. The Theater Gorky* in Vladivostok in the middle of the night was full. And it was the opportunity…it was…I mean, we were looking at each other like this, you know, only with a cast of thousands. And it was such an amazing thing. Everybody was in awe of the moment to do this without any intermediation. It was people to people on…beyond imagination. So, it was an electric time. It’s hard to describe the energy. I mean, I get chills thinking about it. So, that was the first big effort.
And then there was…the next big project was in May, which was a planeload of 177, whoever could get on the plane in Vladivostok, and 55 members of the Russian Pacific fleet song and dance ensemble. They kind of provided the kind of the artistic and…I don’t know, it was a splash. But it was mostly geared toward business.
Daniel Satinsky: And where did this take place? In San Diego?
David Edick: In San Diego. This was multiple days. We home hosted people. And I was…my assignment was to help find partners. We were looking to have tables of people, and rooms of people with shared interests, and trying to facilitate some discussion. Where do you start? Well, it helps if you have something to talk about, and you go from there. So, that was…
Daniel Satinsky: And there was…business matching was sort of part of this?
David Edick: Absolutely. It was the key. That was the centerpiece of it. Because we’d moved beyond the, you know, I mean, the Soviet Union had broken up, the Cold War was over, the military stuff rapidly moved to the side and disappeared, and it became all commercial, all about making a buck, mostly a quick buck.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: And between the space bridge and the planeload of 177, space bridge being in January and the plane coming in on April 20, 1992, I had met a Russian guy at a party to celebrate the space bridge. This was a party in northern Baja, across the border to Mexico here. There was a guy standing looking out over the sunset, you know, looking at the Pacific, and I’m like that’s a Russian, I’m going to go talk to him. And it’s a guy my age. And at the time I’m 30. And we got to talking, and he was a representative, it turns out he was a representative of the commercial wing of FESCO Shipping Company, which had been spun off into a group called OCFES, and he was part of that commercial group. And they were really the biggest private commercial group in the Russian Far East at the time.
And we hit it off. We spent a month going all over San Diego, talking to everybody that we wanted to. Every door was open, political, business, but focusing on business. This is opportunity. It’s not about getting rich at this point; it’s we can do something. I mean, we can build a career, we can build something. And it was so exciting. And through Pavel Morozov we formed—
Daniel Satinsky: That’s the name of this guy?
David Edick: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Pavel Morozov, yeah.
David Edick: Pavel Morozov. We formed a small, we formed a California company with another local entrepreneur, called it Russian Pacific Services, and ran with it. And that was the vehicle that took me to Vladivostok in June of 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: Representing your company.
David Edick: Yep.
Daniel Satinsky: And you moved there to live or to travel back and forth? What was that relationship?
David Edick: So, I went for a two to three week visit to see the city and explore what was possible.
Daniel Satinsky: And this was your first visit to Russia?
David Edick: Yeah. And, you know, wow. [Laughs.] A lot of details here I’ll leave aside, but to stick to the commerce stuff. So, I went for two to three weeks. They had provided me an interpreter and a car with a driver. But between… Pavel had come down with a heart condition, a serious one, and he suddenly was out of the game. And the other guys at OCFES, the management, senior people at OCFES were like yeah, we get Australia, we get New Zealand, but, you know, we haven’t figured out what use the Americans are commercially. So, they were very hard-nosed, really commercial. And I liked that. I mean, they were focused, very focused on what was going to work, not talk, not MOUs or anything like that. It’s like, you know, we want to move containers, and we want to make money, we want to do it profitably. That’s why we’re here. That’s why you’re here. [Laughs.] But I ended up…
Daniel Satinsky: So, in order to do that you had to have demand in the U.S. for goods or products from Russia that would come through the port of San Diego, or you needed goods that were required in Russia that would be shipped the other way, maybe, by FESCO through the port of San Diego, correct? That’s what you were looking for?
David Edick: I had moved well beyond that at that point. I knew very early, you know, San Diego has a modest commercial port. It’s a military port. It’s a navy port with a bit of commerce bolted on. We have a port district here. Their big business is real estate and tourism. And it’s big. They do…they have built some commercial stuff. But even at the time it was pretty minimal. And when it comes to international trade it’s logistics, logistics, logistics, and where do the ships go. Markets are important, but if the ship don’t go there, you better find a truck or whatever.
So, really pretty quickly, you know, the big West Coast ports, L.A.-Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle-Tacoma. And FESCO had an office in Seattle. And ultimately the Russians had a consulate in Seattle, very quickly, actually. And the commercial connections developed very, very quickly with the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle as a transit port for mostly consumer goods. I went to Vlad[ivostok] to find out…to learn about the market. We weren’t looking to bring anything out. Everything was going in. And that’s really always been the challenge for trade between the United States and Russia, is that there’s not much that’s going to come this way. It’s just the structure of the economy. What’s coming now is—you’re in Boston?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: Fuel oil, diesel. Almost a million barrels a day is coming into the Northeast out of Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: Russia is now the second-largest hydrocarbon supplier to the United States after Canada. Shh.
This has all popped in the last three or four years with closure of refineries around Philadelphia and closure of refineries in the Caribbean, and the Venezuelan thing. So, anyways, I went to see what might work, what did people want, and what was available that we might bring out. I mean, we knew something about some of the—it’s a navy town, like what are we going to…?
But we also knew that there was some good science there. The only way to find out what we might do is go. Talk is so cheap. So, I got on a plane and went. And ultimately, got a relationship, fell in love with my interpreter, you know. It was not an instant thing. It took a while. There’s a long story behind that.
But very quickly it became clear that the OCFES, that there wasn’t anything that we could do—we ended up shipping some used cars, police cars, actually, out of Seattle-Tacoma to Vladivostok. But their focus was New Zealand and Australia, Singapore, a little bit of Vietnam. But we just couldn’t find anything to make it work. The Apple guys in the Pacific Northwest tried to—they made a go of it. But price, just couldn’t get U.S. prices competitive, along with the logistics. It just didn’t pencil out. Ultimately, most of the cargo I brought in came out of Western Europe.
David Edick: It goes back to my university training. I trained as a global political economist at a university that didn’t have such a program. I found a way to combine history, political science, and economics with an international focus. I designed—
Daniel Satinsky: And what university?
David Edick: San Diego State.
Daniel Satinsky: And what years?
David Edick: Oh, gosh, ’82 through ’85.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
David Edick: I transferred down from San Jose State. I went from being a meteorology major to kind of quasi political science, business, and decided to chart my own path to be an investment banker, which I thought was a global political economy, to be able to work across silos, because political science didn’t talk with the econ guys just on the next floor upstairs, and the econ guys didn’t talk with poly sci, and it was really kind of a joke, a bad joke, so I decided that in order to be effective, to be educated and be effective I needed to cross silos. So, I did that, and that was at the time that the wars in Central America were going on, and my mentor had some big contacts there. And there was a Soviet political systems old guard professor who I enjoyed his work, and so I’ve been in the thread really since the ‘70s of being aware of geopolitics and learning about the world and the Soviet Union.
And then it picked up. I got in with the…I thought the world of the environmental movement was going to be an opportunity for me to work with. That turned out to be a huge disappointment. So, just at kind of the moment that the wall in the East began to shudder or dissipate with the Polish roundtable, the summer of ’88, I joined with a group called Science Solutions here in San Diego in 1990. They asked me to come on board and be their director of development. And the purpose of that company was to bring high technology processes and products out from the Soviet Union to the West, particularly the United States.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow. And this was what year?
David Edick: 1990.
Daniel Satinsky: And who founded that company?
David Edick: James Baur.
Daniel Satinsky: James Baur.
David Edick: Yeah, B-A-U-R. He’s still alive. In fact, he’s going to…there’s going to be a reunion of Science Solutions in September here in San Diego. If you’re looking for businesspeople to interview, he’s going to have some perspectives.
Daniel Satinsky: If he would give me an interview, that would be very interesting, because obviously he has a story about, first of all, how he had those connections in the Soviet Union, and then how to bring out intellectual property from the Soviet Union is an interesting story.
David Edick: Well, it was quite a ride of exploration and discovery. Jim’s roots are out of General Atomics here in San Diego, which is a… He came out of the nuclear engineering program as a physics guy and knew scientists in the Soviet Union in the world of physics, and nuclear sciences, and the space program. General Atomics, in addition to doing nuclear stuff, more commonly today is known for drones or things of that sort, so aerospace. It’s a defense nuclear engineering company.
So, he came out of that and knew people, real scientist guys. He had some great contacts in Leningrad, St. Petersburg. But it was a long road to figure out… You know, academics in the United States and in the Soviet Union have negligible commercial experience or perspective. It’s a real learning curve to climb. And culturally in the Soviet Union there was negligible commercial experience, particularly in the Russian space. Armenians and Azerbaijanis and all Central Asians had a different feel for it. So, anyways, it was a lot of education.
Daniel Satinsky: And did you speak Russian at that time?
David Edick: No.
Daniel Satinsky: So, it was all through translators.
David Edick: Yeah, I had…so in this latter environment period I had… I was a known quantity at San Diego State as being an unusual guy who knew a lot of stuff. I was very creative. As a student, as a non-PhD student. So, I was around the Arid Lands program, which was a Jordan, Egypt, United States effort to—it was an Israel, Jordan, Egypt, United States effort to collaborate around the issues of water, to find a way to work together and build trust and build connections. And I thought that was a great idea, and I thought… I tried to put together a connection between San Diego State and a university in Wroclaw, Poland. And then jumped over to parallel the Arid Lands program with a California, Uzbekistan water management exchange project.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: And there were a lot of good people at San Diego State and in San Diego on the water issue. I could just…many of the pieces or modules were right there with the Arid Lands program, so I thought well, you know, the politics are flowing in the right direction now. And this was built particularly around the crisis at the ROC. So, I spent the better part of a year trying to put that together, kind of as I was leaving the academic world. I did some Latin American debt stuff in looking at debt for equity swaps around Brady bonds in the late ‘80s, so I did some contract work. With a B.A., you know, so, I mean, it’s like all these PhDs were like who are you? And it’s like you haven’t drunk all the Kool-Aid yet, you don’t have all the certificates and so we’re not sure whether we should treat you seriously. Okay.
So, it turned out that the institutional, I guess, resistance to this kind of effort with Uzbeks and all, it was too steep a climb for me to do. But I got to know a lot of people. And Jim Baur with Science Solutions came to me, and we met over lunch. I had developed… Nobody knew anything, okay, so for the Uzbek-California thing, nobody knew anything, so get to work, you know, study, research, build a puzzle, find the pieces, put them together, so I got a bit of a reputation out of that.
And Jim said well, you know, you straddle this academic-commercial world, why don’t you come be our director of development? For a small company that’s like change toilet paper and everything else that needs to be done at that time but help guide the group of science guys into understanding the sociopolitical culture, how things were evolving, where new sources of funding might be, business support programs, and customers. How to go from…how to find potential customers for these technologies. At the Leningrad Institute for Optics and Fine Mechanics, or Fine Mechanics and Optics*—you can check me on that.
That was a very advanced place on the planet, and the people that were there at the time ultimately created the lenses that are used in fiber optic systems all around the world. They are multiple mega millionaires, and a billionaire came out of that. And we ran through the resistance here of well, the Soviets are idiots, they are communists, and nothing good commercially is going to come out of there. But the science guys knew differently. But again, we’re trying to bridge between science, to applied science, to commercial stuff. And on the commercial side a lot of these companies had defense business as part of their order book, if you will. That’s part of their business. And most of them were scared to talk with us because they didn’t want to bring any complications to their existing business. So, they were like, you know, this is interesting, very intriguing, but…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. Did you play a role in bringing those lenses and those guys into market?
David Edick: No, no. We got close. In business, I don’t know, luck matters a lot.
I hear all the stories about I’m god’s gift, and I just, I’ve got it. Luck plays a huge role. And there were other people around. And ultimately, for the most part, the Russians, they just found their way by the force of circumstances. And that’s part of why they’re kind of tough right now. So, we—
Daniel Satinsky: So, Science Solutions, did you have any successes out of Science Solutions?
David Edick: There were some. Jim would be able to tell you a whole lot more about that. We came at the—my involvement, once I really understood what was going on—and we hosted some delegations here. I mean, we… You know, what is success? We put together some fascinating relationships out of the connecting between the U.S. and the Russian space program. Roald Sagdeev and Susie Eisenhower, and there was a marriage there. One of the Eisenhower ladies and… But this was at the time of glasnost turning into perestroika, and the deeper perestroika…
So, there was an underlying crisis in the Soviet Union anyways that’s completely not understood here in the West. I don’t think the Russians have a good handle on it, either. But there was a crisis that the mirror, kind of weird mirror of inflation in an economy was goods disappeared. They did. The common thing is to call them, well, they’re damn communists and they couldn’t make anything anyways. But there was more going on than that. So, things were fraying pretty seriously. And the guys that—and they were mostly guys, there were a few women—were increasingly scrambling, and their time horizons were getting narrower and narrower and narrower, shorter and shorter—you know, can we do a deal? Some sort of container of this, or some computers of that.
And what really kind of ended things for me at Science Solutions—and I’m condensing things here—the coup, the Soviet coup in August of 1991, changed everything. That was the end of the Union. And it was the end of all of these Union structures that we had been dealing with, all these Soviet Union-level scientific institutes and relationship structures, whatever funding that was part of it, but it was mostly the institutional connections. They were…what I tried to explain was that they’re there, but they’re not there, and they’re going to go away, and it’s going to be in months. And all these groups that we’ve been working with are going to go. And I was told to stick to my reports, so I was like okay, I got it.
Daniel Satinsky: And how did you know that?
David Edick: I just knew. You know, my background is more on the sociopolitical of it. I mean, that’s… When the wall to the East… With the thing with Poland, that opened the door, and I could feel it. Very few could. I don’t know, it just…
Daniel Satinsky: Well, go back to what you said about the underlying crisis. How would you describe that underlying crisis? What was it?
David Edick: Well, it was firstly and foremost an economic crisis in a non-market system where, up until the 1960s, the Soviet Union was, in this communist era was about industrialization, electrification, workers, the proletariat. It wasn’t about oil or gas. Natural resources were wood. You can make paper or… I mean, yeah, there was Baku and everything, but it wasn’t until the discovery of the super giant fields in West Siberia that the Soviet Union changed in a really important way. And one of these days somebody will dig into it. And I think it changed very importantly the internal structure, the drivers, the economic drivers, because the resources that were competitive in the system, suddenly energy became dirt cheap, and the focus of the economy moved more toward the development of this new energy.
I mean, yes, the Russians got in—the Soviets got into exporting a fair amount of oil, maybe 3 million barrels a day, I think, somewhere in the mid ‘80s, but it was mostly a domestic thing, and it was… I wonder if it was a version of Dutch disease. That was explored with the Dutch and the Groningen gas field, and the impact that that had on the Dutch economy, and the value of the guilder, and how it suddenly made Dutch manufacturing uncompetitive in Western Europe, which was like, what? What? Something is really weird here. But then the Europeans went to the European Union and things changed. The rise of oil and then gas changed the character of the Soviet economy I think in important ways.
Daniel Satinsky: That’s a great insight. No, seriously, it’s a great insight, and one that I have—and I can’t claim to have read everything written on it, but I have not encountered that before, so I think that is something for some future PhD researchers to go into.
David Edick: You know, and Russia’s best years in the post-Soviet time, as Russia was reinventing itself, re-gathering itself together, was when oil prices, you know, 1998, ’99, 2000, oil prices were in the tank. Russian oil production was beginning to recover, but oil prices were seriously in the tank.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. It was like down to $15, $16, and maybe even less.
David Edick: Yeah. And the ruble was garbage. And that was when Russian manufacturing took off. Suddenly there was demand, okay? Enough to drive suddenly competitive human and material resources, manufacturing, which is machines and people. So, anyways.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you left Science Solutions.
David Edick: I left Science Solutions basically September 10, 1991, when we participated in a trade show that was part of the signing of the San Diego-Vladivostok Sister City Agreement.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, which was when, 1991?
David Edick: September 10, 1991.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, yeah. Signed that agreement and then left the company?
David Edick: Right. There was a delegation in town of big, serious guys. These weren’t clowns. These were the cream of the crop out of naval, maritime engineering, the best guys. And there were some very good ones, some forward—Vladivostok is unlike any other city in Russia that I’ve ever visited. Odessa is something like it.
Daniel Satinsky: I was in Vladivostok in June of 1990.
David Edick: Oh, wow. Wow. [Laughs.]
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, so I was there. I don’t want to digress too much, but I did a mid-career change and got a master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Fletcher School held a North Pacific seminar in Vladivostok. And we flew to Moscow and picked up people and then went to Vladivostok for this seminar when the city was officially still closed, I think. So, I saw it then. It was a very interesting experience. So, who initiated the sister city?
David Edick: It comes from the arts people here in San Diego. James Hubbell, who was an acclaimed sculptor-artist. There’s a—you ask a really good question here, actually, and I can’t answer it the way I’d like to. There were some arts university connections, just a few people. How they knew each other I don’t know. But it’s these early days of… It was in the arts and culture.
We had a—oh, I think I know where it came from. There was a Soviet arts festival here in San Diego in 1988. The mayor got behind it. It was a big deal, very successful, and people from all over the Soviet Union came here with acting, poets, art, you know, painting, all kinds, sculpture. And I think it’s out of that people got to know each other, just a few connections.
And then there was a Soviet navy visit here in 1989 which kind of juiced that, because the Soviet navy ships were carrying boxes of art. [Laughs.] As captain’s cargo, basically. Which is a cool thing in the world of maritime. The captain can carry commerce that is not part of the bill of lading, is not part of the register. And it’s a way to kind of get things back and forth.
Daniel Satinsky: Right.
David Edick: And on the Soviet side, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Gennady Gerasimov—there’s a legendary hot tub meeting, James Hubbell and others, Gennady Gerasimov. But anyways, Gennady Gerasimov was asked what a good sister for San Diego might be, and he said Vladivostok would be great, two big navy ports.
Daniel Satinsky: Ah, okay. This hot tub encounter wouldn’t have been through Esalen, was it?
David Edick: I don’t think so.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay.
David Edick: It’s an interesting idea. And I don’t… This pre-dates my active involvement. These early historical days, as we’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of the program, yeah, it’s…
Daniel Satinsky: I can actually check that because I know the director of the Esalen program, but it would have been an interesting thread to pull here. But it doesn’t matter. But there was a mutual interest on each side in putting a sister city together that wasn’t particularly commercial.
David Edick: Not at all. Not at all. This is like how do we get beyond the Cold War. We’re ending the Cold War, and how do we build bridges. And in fact, the first big project of the sister city program was a space bridge. It was a live two-way satellite telecast between a theater audience here in San Diego out at Sea World and at the Gorky Theater in Vladivostok. I mean, there were thousands of—
Daniel Satinsky: Do know when that was?
David Edick: January 22, 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: January 22, 1992, okay.
David Edick: Yeah, 22nd, 23rd.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, because there’s a whole history of space bridges. Beginning, actually, with the US Festival, and Steve Wozniak, in the early ‘80s, and then later morphing into increasing numbers of these through people who formed Internews. So, this is another piece to the puzzle.
David Edick: There was a guy named Goldin, a Russian—
Daniel Satinsky: Joseph Goldin1234
David Edick: Joseph Goldin, yeah.
Daniel Satinsky: Whoa.
David Edick: He was the guru that kind of made it happen. If it wasn’t for this Russian speaking operator in Pittsburgh, nothing would have happened, but Goldin was the guru that imagined it, and it was his force of imagination and force of personality that pulled it off, pulled it together.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was the first activity of sister cities, was this theater exchange?
David Edick: Well, it was two audiences. There were maybe one, two thousand—a thousand people at Sea World and a full—the theater at Sea World was full. The Theater Gorky* in Vladivostok in the middle of the night was full. And it was the opportunity…it was…I mean, we were looking at each other like this, you know, only with a cast of thousands. And it was such an amazing thing. Everybody was in awe of the moment to do this without any intermediation. It was people to people on…beyond imagination. So, it was an electric time. It’s hard to describe the energy. I mean, I get chills thinking about it. So, that was the first big effort.
And then there was…the next big project was in May, which was a planeload of 177, whoever could get on the plane in Vladivostok, and 55 members of the Russian Pacific fleet song and dance ensemble. They kind of provided the kind of the artistic and…I don’t know, it was a splash. But it was mostly geared toward business.
Daniel Satinsky: And where did this take place? In San Diego?
David Edick: In San Diego. This was multiple days. We home hosted people. And I was…my assignment was to help find partners. We were looking to have tables of people, and rooms of people with shared interests, and trying to facilitate some discussion. Where do you start? Well, it helps if you have something to talk about, and you go from there. So, that was…
Daniel Satinsky: And there was…business matching was sort of part of this?
David Edick: Absolutely. It was the key. That was the centerpiece of it. Because we’d moved beyond the, you know, I mean, the Soviet Union had broken up, the Cold War was over, the military stuff rapidly moved to the side and disappeared, and it became all commercial, all about making a buck, mostly a quick buck.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: And between the space bridge and the planeload of 177, space bridge being in January and the plane coming in on April 20, 1992, I had met a Russian guy at a party to celebrate the space bridge. This was a party in northern Baja, across the border to Mexico here. There was a guy standing looking out over the sunset, you know, looking at the Pacific, and I’m like that’s a Russian, I’m going to go talk to him. And it’s a guy my age. And at the time I’m 30. And we got to talking, and he was a representative, it turns out he was a representative of the commercial wing of FESCO Shipping Company, which had been spun off into a group called OCFES, and he was part of that commercial group. And they were really the biggest private commercial group in the Russian Far East at the time.
And we hit it off. We spent a month going all over San Diego, talking to everybody that we wanted to. Every door was open, political, business, but focusing on business. This is opportunity. It’s not about getting rich at this point; it’s we can do something. I mean, we can build a career, we can build something. And it was so exciting. And through Pavel Morozov we formed—
Daniel Satinsky: That’s the name of this guy?
David Edick: Yes.
Daniel Satinsky: Pavel Morozov, yeah.
David Edick: Pavel Morozov. We formed a small, we formed a California company with another local entrepreneur, called it Russian Pacific Services, and ran with it. And that was the vehicle that took me to Vladivostok in June of 1992.
Daniel Satinsky: Representing your company.
David Edick: Yep.
Daniel Satinsky: And you moved there to live or to travel back and forth? What was that relationship?
David Edick: So, I went for a two to three week visit to see the city and explore what was possible.
Daniel Satinsky: And this was your first visit to Russia?
David Edick: Yeah. And, you know, wow. [Laughs.] A lot of details here I’ll leave aside, but to stick to the commerce stuff. So, I went for two to three weeks. They had provided me an interpreter and a car with a driver. But between… Pavel had come down with a heart condition, a serious one, and he suddenly was out of the game. And the other guys at OCFES, the management, senior people at OCFES were like yeah, we get Australia, we get New Zealand, but, you know, we haven’t figured out what use the Americans are commercially. So, they were very hard-nosed, really commercial. And I liked that. I mean, they were focused, very focused on what was going to work, not talk, not MOUs or anything like that. It’s like, you know, we want to move containers, and we want to make money, we want to do it profitably. That’s why we’re here. That’s why you’re here. [Laughs.] But I ended up…
Daniel Satinsky: So, in order to do that you had to have demand in the U.S. for goods or products from Russia that would come through the port of San Diego, or you needed goods that were required in Russia that would be shipped the other way, maybe, by FESCO through the port of San Diego, correct? That’s what you were looking for?
David Edick: I had moved well beyond that at that point. I knew very early, you know, San Diego has a modest commercial port. It’s a military port. It’s a navy port with a bit of commerce bolted on. We have a port district here. Their big business is real estate and tourism. And it’s big. They do…they have built some commercial stuff. But even at the time it was pretty minimal. And when it comes to international trade it’s logistics, logistics, logistics, and where do the ships go. Markets are important, but if the ship don’t go there, you better find a truck or whatever.
So, really pretty quickly, you know, the big West Coast ports, L.A.-Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle-Tacoma. And FESCO had an office in Seattle. And ultimately the Russians had a consulate in Seattle, very quickly, actually. And the commercial connections developed very, very quickly with the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle as a transit port for mostly consumer goods. I went to Vlad[ivostok] to find out…to learn about the market. We weren’t looking to bring anything out. Everything was going in. And that’s really always been the challenge for trade between the United States and Russia, is that there’s not much that’s going to come this way. It’s just the structure of the economy. What’s coming now is—you’re in Boston?
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: Fuel oil, diesel. Almost a million barrels a day is coming into the Northeast out of Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: Russia is now the second-largest hydrocarbon supplier to the United States after Canada. Shh.
This has all popped in the last three or four years with closure of refineries around Philadelphia and closure of refineries in the Caribbean, and the Venezuelan thing. So, anyways, I went to see what might work, what did people want, and what was available that we might bring out. I mean, we knew something about some of the—it’s a navy town, like what are we going to…?
But we also knew that there was some good science there. The only way to find out what we might do is go. Talk is so cheap. So, I got on a plane and went. And ultimately, got a relationship, fell in love with my interpreter, you know. It was not an instant thing. It took a while. There’s a long story behind that.
But very quickly it became clear that the OCFES, that there wasn’t anything that we could do—we ended up shipping some used cars, police cars, actually, out of Seattle-Tacoma to Vladivostok. But their focus was New Zealand and Australia, Singapore, a little bit of Vietnam. But we just couldn’t find anything to make it work. The Apple guys in the Pacific Northwest tried to—they made a go of it. But price, just couldn’t get U.S. prices competitive, along with the logistics. It just didn’t pencil out. Ultimately, most of the cargo I brought in came out of Western Europe.
So, anyways, Russian Pacific Services transitioned, basically within a couple weeks, where I joined an entity that I learned about during the space bridge. There was an American guy that stood up in the audience and waved to his sister in San Diego, Paul Cutter, waving to his sister Olga Cutter here in San Diego. And I carried some stuff over on a trip and ultimately Paul Cutter and company at Siberian Capital Investment invited me to join their company, and I did. A fascinating opportunity. We came so close to the biggest of the big time. But it was too soon.
We had a who’s who of Russian shareholders, a who’s who of Siberian companies. But nobody took time to actually collect the… I mean, if you’re going buy shares in a company, you put money up. Nobody bothered to collect that money, which made the finances inside the company kind of a problem. We had good people. We had a finance guy, a British finance guy who had come up out of Hong Kong that spoke fluent Russian, and we had good connections. Paul Cutter turned out to be dishonest, which didn’t help. Talked a great game. We had good young Russian staff that wanted to learn. The older guys, the director level guys, didn’t understand commerce and thought that you just give an order. You just pick up a phone, you give an order, and it’ll happen, you know, and just never got it.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was a private equity company?
David Edick: It was more on a model of a Japanese trading company. I mean, it was going to be an early private equity, before anybody knew what private equity was. It was a term that didn’t exist. And really what the purpose of Siberian Capital Investment was, was to be an investment bank that brokered projects and companies to investors abroad, to develop opportunities. I had already, in preparation to go I’d read everything there was in English on the Russian Far East. I mean, I cleaned out the libraries here in San Diego.
And I had a pretty good handle of what the resource opportunities were, some of the manufacturing. We’re on the front door to Asia, you know. There’s Japan, there’s Korea. It was before China. It was Japan and Korea. And we’re right next to a port, and the rail works. We can do things. We need investment capital, and we need also business structures. We need partners, organizations as partners, not just hot guys. So, somebody needed to make that happen, and that’s what we thought we were going to do. We had the skill set to do it, but it was…the most amazing two months of my life. Really, really an incredible time.
Daniel Satinsky: Two months?
David Edick: Yeah. And it blew up.
Daniel Satinsky: Two months seemed like years.
David Edick: Oh, totally, you know. I mean, you know, it comes back to the money thing, you know. I mean, they didn’t get the money out of the shareholders, and without it… I mean, I was working for rubles at the time, with the promise of a hard currency contract. It’s like I’m not going to let the paperwork get in the way of an opportunity of a lifetime. I mean, you can go to Hollywood and you’re not going to find the script. But every day was…it was all condensed. I mean, it was so intense.
I mean, the Russians, the older guys come into work at 9:00, and it’s like dude, I want to be there at 7:00 because in North America we can still catch people. The Western hemisphere, we can still catch people before they go to bed. It was crazy. And we were dealing with Moscow yesterday. We were talking with people in morning tea to find out what happened yesterday in Moscow, which is the weirdest thing. Driving the car backwards, looking in the rearview mirror. It just was…
But it was one thing after another. The groups of people that we… A Serbian construction engineer and a box of plum brandy out on a yacht. Hey, you know, what can go right with that? It’s just…it was amazing stuff. But to focus on the business here, it…very quickly it was sink or swim. It was survival. We need capital. We need money to pay our staff to live. Not to go to Geneva, to live. So, very quickly it came down to trade. And hyperinflation now, inflation running 25, 50% a month in July of ’92. Financial calculations were kind of a joke. The back of an envelope was the best you could do. And it was easy to make mistakes. Very quickly the company had no money. So, there was a night of the long knives, and they…they tried to fire me. They fired a lot of people.
Daniel Satinsky: “They” being the board or…?
David Edick: The Russian director and Paul Cutter. By this time, we knew that Paul was lying. We had the hard evidence of it. But the Russians, they loved his look, his bearing, and they loved the way he talked. Ah, you know, ah, kind of a…he had a Serbian background in his family, so he knew, just it was natural, and his language, his body language, his way, his manner, the Soviet guys loved it. But he was full of crap.
So, they tried to chuck me out the door and I said okay, you know, if this is the way you want to play it. And I ended up suing Siberian Capital Investment in a Russian court for lost wages, a handful of rubles. You know, it was all on principle, you know. It’s like okay, welcome to the NFL, guys. If you’re going to do this to me, I just have to do this. I won the case. You probably don’t want to put this in the book, actually, but I won the first case of a breach of employment contract in the Primorski Krai courts, so I got like, you know, like 60 dollars in rubles, which was like, I mean, we went down to the corner and bought groceries for the next week. But to see the look on—
Daniel Satinsky: By the way, you were in Vladivostok while all this was going on, correct?
David Edick: Yeah. I went for two to three weeks, and I stayed for four months. And then they told me I had to leave. They wouldn’t extend my visa. But I’d run out of clothes anyways. The weather was changing. I needed to leave. So, I came back and then went back in January of ’93.
Daniel Satinsky: In what capacity?
David Edick: As vice president of California Trading & Industrial Corporation. This was a vehicle that… So, there were a lot of people that knew I was making this move, and there was an old school trader who had made a fortune in, starting in the Biafra war, but in Australia in particular. He was a skilled international trader, and for him Russia was like opportunity. And he didn’t know anybody there except me. And I was there. And I’d come back, and I was going to go back. So, he had a structure, many companies, easy to set up. And he said let’s make this vehicle our vehicle, we’re going to build our Russian business. And I have my network, and you have yours, and we’ll work together, and I’ll teach you the game. I like it, good.
So, I went back and just continuing on from the Russian Pacific Services idea. The Siberian Capital Investment thing, we were going to make a move at the vouchers and just ran out of road. But we could all see the opportunity out of it, but we could also see the risks that were in it. And there was some quiet discussion after hours about where this was going to end up. But we’re trying to…we’re looking at how things will work, not why things won’t work. We’re looking to solve problems.
But the society is, the change is…when I got there half the people, anybody with gray hair—and that’s people in their mid 30s and on, basically—anybody with gray hair was walking around in a complete state of shock, real shock. And they’d get up the next morning and they’d still be in shock. And it went on for months, until the hyperinflation just shredded everything. And the younger people were scrambling like mad to one, work with opportunity, but two, also to survive. But anyways, I jumped over to California Trading, and we did there what Russian Pacific Services started to do, which was focus on the food business and really most of the work was… My partner helped out.
Daniel Satinsky: Your partner being the older guy?
David Edick: Yeah. And we had…yeah, and I hired staff in Vlad[ivostok], and so we had a nice thing going. It was a wholly owned subsidiary in Vladivostok. We registered it through the consulate in Seattle. That was actually on the trip of taking police cars up to Tacoma. We had in-country staff and were operating in the wholesale markets for non-perishable foods and beverages. Most of the work was mine. I found the suppliers in Western Europe and North America. Canned meat was the big money. Cooking oil out of North America. Okay, so there’s a demand for cooking oil. It’s significant, okay? It’s an important element of Russian life.
Daniel Satinsky: Sunflower oil
David Edick: Any kind of cooking oil, whatever it might be, sunflower, canola, corn. And I’m communicating with all the big manufacturers in North America. I’m on the horn with the guys at Hunt-Wesson. They said we’ll talk with you, but the minimum order is 500 containers. [Laughs.]
Who the hell do you think you are? Have you ever developed a market once in your life? It’s Russia. It’s 150 million people, at the time, roughly. And they’re wiping the mud out of their eyes. It’s going to start small, and this is how you do it. It was the finding… And in Europe it was totally the opposite. They were like you can do container shiploads? Fantastic. Let’s start here and we’ll build it. What kind of work do you need on packaging? So, we designed packaging. Out of North America it was we have one color, black.
And it was during this time I really began to understand that we kind of believed our own mythology about our commercial success, and it was already 100 years old. It was before the First World War. It was two generations old. And it was all momentum. And I’m being harsh here, but certainly in the world of consumer products I couldn’t believe what I found. Finding good partners here was very difficult. And in Russia finding stable partners, people that could be around for… They would place an order for a shipment, and the shipment would arrive, and they would sell it. But then they would disappear, they would be gone.
Daniel Satinsky: And so were you ordering—I mean, just…I mean, I’m really in the weeds here, but were you selling for hard currency and prepayment or was it hard currency and payment upon sale?
David Edick: Prepayment to start.
Daniel Satinsky: Prepayment, okay. And you found people who were able to do that, but then once they took delivery and they sold the products sometimes they wouldn’t be around for a second order or a third order.
David Edick: Yeah. Companies would make mistakes. There was infighting. There was just zero stability, you know, very few companies.
Daniel Satinsky: And you found these clients, these customers, in Vladivostok through your staff or were you there then?
David Edick: I was there. I would come in for… I was doing rotations of three months in, three months out. I discovered email in Vladivostok in August 1992. In Russia. Not here, in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: In where? In an American business center?
David Edick: No. First it was a Russian Academy of Sciences guy that was trying to market NCI as a platform for email internet communications. But NCI had a…it was very cumbersome. They never went anywhere with it, and it was obvious that was going to be the case. But there was a group called Sovam Teleport that set up off the West Coast, and we became one of their early customers.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And they ran…so their connection was through Moscow? How did that internet connection work, do you know?
David Edick: I don’t know specifically, but by Vlad connected to Japan, pretty fast. But it was probably still through Moscow at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: I am aware of Sovam Teleport. I interviewed Joel Schatz, who was the founder.
Yeah, so again pieces are falling into place. So, they became your means of conducting business. Because I know at that time, we…I was part of a joint venture in 1992 and ’93 and I remember the frustrations with communications, and trying to send faxes, and hitting the redial button for hours, literally hitting it for hours to get a fax through. So, you had a real advantage if you were using email and able then to stay in touch with your staff that way, right?
David Edick: Yeah, so when I was having dinner with this fish expert, I mean, fish science, not fishing, but fish science, ichthyology, he’s telling me about fish dreaming and everything, and the next minute he’s talking to me about email, and packet switching. You fed the faxes. We would get faxes that would look like some sort of Rorschach. It’s like what…? And the other option was telex, which worked, and it worked really well on the Russian side, but we couldn’t find anybody here in San Diego that used a telex machine. It was like go to the museum and take one. Yeah, the email broke it open. I knew it was a game changer as soon as I got it. We paid a lot of bills for Sovam Teleport, I can tell you. But it was a miracle, and 1200 baud, you know. But what we could do, I mean, that 1200 baud was crystal clear text communication. And I could be up late at night here on the West Coast and be working with my staff in real time in Vlad[ivostok]. That’s the way it worked.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, you found, either your staff or you found people, companies that had enough hard currency to purchase a container or several containers of food products, right?
David Edick: So, again, we were operating in the wholesale markets, and we were doing some of this with other people, but we were also working on our own account. So, we had stuff in warehouses, and we would have product trucked to Khabarovsk or Komsomolsk-on-Amur, to Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. I really, the goal all along was to get to Sakhalin, because I knew that the Sakhalin projects were going to come, and it was going to be big. But it took much longer than I expected, so we ended up working the regional urban markets. And I looked to expand west.
And there were “reklama*” magazines, kind of early business networking companies would advertise products, but really what they were doing was they were advertising their existence, and a bit of their capacity. So, in their advertisement they would try to show that they were more than a soap bubble, that they’re real, that they’re reputable, and here’s the phone number, a fax number, here’s an address and maybe some artwork, and they would talk a little bit the products that they had, or maybe what they were looking for. And based on product lines that companies were working with; I would reach out to them and try to get something going.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were doing this through a translator?
David Edick: Yeah. So, by this point my Russian had gotten to the point where I could grind my way through written material and understand what was being said. But I was far from being fluent such that I could write or do business communication. The margin for error was too high. So, I had an interpreter, or translator. But on a lot of this early research, I was just going through the…turning the pages of these newspapers.
I mean, I went…I mean, if I was in a new town or train station traveling through and I saw a newspaper I’d not seen before laying on the ground I picked it up and okay, this is information here. It’s intelligence, man. What the hell am I going to find? Who knows, but I’m going to look through it and try to understand who wrote it, and who are they communicating with, and is there something that we can work with here. But very quickly these specialized magazines came out, and I was able to read well enough to understand who…and I knew the geography. We didn’t do business in Moscow; we didn’t do business in St. Petersburg. It was east of the Urals.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so Novosibirsk, Tomsk?
David Edick: Yeah, those were the places. In practice nearly everything was in the Russian Far East. But I put together the logistics to bring cargo out of Western Europe or North America. We’d pick stuff up FOB Le Havre or Charleston and I would work out the shipping. Because nobody knew any of this stuff, and there were only a handful of shipping companies that were in the game anyways. But even their staff had no idea. So, I would put these things together. And the companies that…the suppliers were like how do you spell that?
That was part of the value that we were providing, was it was the logistics and the products, and the marketing and distribution framework in country.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you were a pioneer in developing those shipping routes that probably others then followed.
David Edick: There were others that were doing the same thing. All I can say is what my experience was as a business guy at the time. Building puzzles from literally pieces. And not even sure that it was working from the same…it might have been several boxes of puzzles mixed together. But it was a lot of fun.
Daniel Satinsky: How long were you in that business of importing food? The wholesale food business.
David Edick: That really ended in ’97. We took a very serious—several serious hits. My partner, one of his contacts selling goods to Camp Pendleton, the Marine base up here, I got a container of pineapple, canned pineapple cheap, we’ll get it to you. And it was a good price. And I ended up having to dump about half a container of pineapple because it was so old that it was leaking. And when the Russian sanitary guys came and said you…. I was completely shocked. That’s not the way I worked. We did stuff fresh from the factory. You want Russian labels; we’re going to do Russian labels. None of this Arabic stuff, no seven-year-old chicken. We’re going to treat you the way we want to be treated, and we’re building a reputation here. And the guys provided me this stuff. And so, it’s like I learned a bit about business on this end, which is…
So, I lost a chunk of…that was money down the drain. And meanwhile I’m paying staff. And a big moneymaker, though, was canned meat. And we took it in the neck when the wife of the Governor Nazdratenko, she had a relationship with somebody in the Pacific navy who had come to have the keys to storage of nonperishable supplies like canned meat. And of course, the classic Soviet canned beef, everybody wanted that. Well, great. They came onto market at about half the commercial price, and they had a lot. It never seemed to end. But we did.
Daniel Satinsky: Where did that come from?
David Edick: Some storages in the Russian Far East, somewhere in Vladivostok.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, I see. So, what he did is he privatized some of the navy storage food reserves and sold it at half price.
David Edick: Well It wasn’t the governor. It was his wife. And they split the money. Yeah, it was privatized, and there was a lot of that going on. But it was stupid, if anybody’s listening. It was stupid because look, you know, you came on the market at half price, and you didn’t… At the time that we’re getting killed, she is a guest in my house as part of a Sister Cities delegation. That didn’t go over too well with my wife, I will tell you. And it was like okay, I get it, it’s the NFL, business is business. You have this opportunity, and I understand you don’t care about us, but you left so much money on the table by being stupid. I mean, it’s not even greedy, it was just being dumb. And they killed the market. And we weren’t the only ones. And we’re paying taxes. Our Russian competitors would pay taxes when they felt like it or had some sort of arrangement. But anybody on the international side, there were a number of our competitors operating out of Astana that tried to play the Russian game, and as a group they were contacted and told they were no longer welcome, they could leave now. So, we paid taxes. The road tax was based on revenue. So, we were running a self-liquidating company.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: But I figured that these things would change, and ultimately, they did, but we couldn’t play by the Russian rules, and we were held to a different standard, which was okay. But the canned meat thing was devastating because it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I mean, it just killed us capital-wise, and it was months and months and months and months that we couldn’t move anything. And we’re paying staff, we’re paying warehousing.
We tried to find things to bring out. Honey was a big opportunity, but we couldn’t find anybody that could do adequate packaging. Everything came out in cans, and the processing was low enough grade where after a few months the cans would start to swell, which is not okay. But now it’s… I saw a picture a couple weeks ago of somebody’s Instagram. They were just into Arsenyev at a shop and there were all these different kinds of honey, and I’m like…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
So, it’s timing, timing, timing.
David Edick: Timing, timing. So, my attention turned. I ultimately joined up with my old British pal from Siberian Capital. He had gone to Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: What’s his name?
David Edick: Steve Tupper. And he had worked at the European TACIS program, T-A-C-I-S. He knew both sides of a lot of fences and got back into investment banking. And I joined a group that he was a part of. Oh…suddenly my brain has gone flat. Vtoroi Finansovyi Dom. Second Financial House, basically. It was a Russian British investment bank out of Moscow. And that was another great…that was 1997. It was a raging bull market in Moscow, and the GKO* scam was ramping up. But by that time Russian industry was beginning to sort itself out, so I ran North American operations in outreach for this group.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you moved back from Vladivostok to San Diego?
David Edick: Yeah. My focus in being in Vlad[ivostok] changed when our son was born there. Mine was the second marriage recorded between a Russian and American, and our son was the first registered birth to a Russian American couple registered at the consulate. But when he was born, we spent…the family focus was here and—
Daniel Satinsky: In San Diego?
David Edick: Yeah. And that’s where the telecoms became, and I was doing important—I was up late at night here in real time with the guys in Vlad[ivostok], etc. And my trips became rarer and more commercially driven because you’re trying to control expenses and all.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, in ’97 when you had this big hit on the meat did you close the business?
David Edick: Yeah, ultimately yes. Yeah, I mean, it just kind of… I closed things in the Russian Far East. Laid everybody off. The bitter… It finished with a whimper. It wasn’t even like pink slips Monday morning. It was just…everybody knew. People began to just scatter away, and just running it lower and lower, and we couldn’t…
Daniel Satinsky: How many staff did you have at your peak?
David Edick: Four. Yeah, it’s not a big company, but it was four full-time, and it was a network kind of a thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you went to work with these guys trying to find capital investment in North America.
David Edick: Yeah, and by that time people had begun to figure out here that there were opportunities. We were focusing on what our clients in Russia needed. And they needed partners in the same business abroad. They needed investment, but they also understood they needed to have partners to build marketing relationships. One of the projects that comes to mind was carbon black, for example.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? Who did you work with on carbon black?
David Edick: It was a group out of Omsk. There’s a mega refinery in Omsk.
Daniel Satinsky: I know a little bit about carbon black. There were four factories that made carbon black. One of them was in Yaroslavl, Yartek Uglerod. And I did some work for them regarding an American who cheated them out of final payment. And I then later became friends with a Russian who owned the tire factory, because the tire factory and the carbon black were linked. So, I know that Cabot, the U.S. corporation, was interested in carbon black in Russia, ultimately didn’t pull the trigger, as far as I know, and looked at all of these, probably Omsk as well. Did you run across them?
David Edick: I did talk with Cabot. I didn’t get any meaningful response. The traction I got was from the Canadians, Trans-Canada. They were particularly interested in carbon black based off of natural gas. And indeed, Krasnoyarsk has got a big tire operation. They were actually one of the founding shareholders of Siberian Capital Investment.
But then at the end of 1997 the markets…the Asian financial crisis arrived in Russia, but it may have been embedded in Russia first. When 30-year Treasuries got to 6.2%, I remember having this conversation with Steve Tupper, and I was like I don’t know what investment can you think of, U.S. Treasuries are paying 6.2% and all you have to do is sit, risk-free. And if you get leverage on 6.2%, you have a good business.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, without risk and doing anything.
David Edick: And so, at this point Moscow had overheated, and then the GKO thing blew up in Moscow. And that was the end of my…that was the end of the business stuff.
We had a who’s who of Russian shareholders, a who’s who of Siberian companies. But nobody took time to actually collect the… I mean, if you’re going buy shares in a company, you put money up. Nobody bothered to collect that money, which made the finances inside the company kind of a problem. We had good people. We had a finance guy, a British finance guy who had come up out of Hong Kong that spoke fluent Russian, and we had good connections. Paul Cutter turned out to be dishonest, which didn’t help. Talked a great game. We had good young Russian staff that wanted to learn. The older guys, the director level guys, didn’t understand commerce and thought that you just give an order. You just pick up a phone, you give an order, and it’ll happen, you know, and just never got it.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, this was a private equity company?
David Edick: It was more on a model of a Japanese trading company. I mean, it was going to be an early private equity, before anybody knew what private equity was. It was a term that didn’t exist. And really what the purpose of Siberian Capital Investment was, was to be an investment bank that brokered projects and companies to investors abroad, to develop opportunities. I had already, in preparation to go I’d read everything there was in English on the Russian Far East. I mean, I cleaned out the libraries here in San Diego.
And I had a pretty good handle of what the resource opportunities were, some of the manufacturing. We’re on the front door to Asia, you know. There’s Japan, there’s Korea. It was before China. It was Japan and Korea. And we’re right next to a port, and the rail works. We can do things. We need investment capital, and we need also business structures. We need partners, organizations as partners, not just hot guys. So, somebody needed to make that happen, and that’s what we thought we were going to do. We had the skill set to do it, but it was…the most amazing two months of my life. Really, really an incredible time.
Daniel Satinsky: Two months?
David Edick: Yeah. And it blew up.
Daniel Satinsky: Two months seemed like years.
David Edick: Oh, totally, you know. I mean, you know, it comes back to the money thing, you know. I mean, they didn’t get the money out of the shareholders, and without it… I mean, I was working for rubles at the time, with the promise of a hard currency contract. It’s like I’m not going to let the paperwork get in the way of an opportunity of a lifetime. I mean, you can go to Hollywood and you’re not going to find the script. But every day was…it was all condensed. I mean, it was so intense.
I mean, the Russians, the older guys come into work at 9:00, and it’s like dude, I want to be there at 7:00 because in North America we can still catch people. The Western hemisphere, we can still catch people before they go to bed. It was crazy. And we were dealing with Moscow yesterday. We were talking with people in morning tea to find out what happened yesterday in Moscow, which is the weirdest thing. Driving the car backwards, looking in the rearview mirror. It just was…
But it was one thing after another. The groups of people that we… A Serbian construction engineer and a box of plum brandy out on a yacht. Hey, you know, what can go right with that? It’s just…it was amazing stuff. But to focus on the business here, it…very quickly it was sink or swim. It was survival. We need capital. We need money to pay our staff to live. Not to go to Geneva, to live. So, very quickly it came down to trade. And hyperinflation now, inflation running 25, 50% a month in July of ’92. Financial calculations were kind of a joke. The back of an envelope was the best you could do. And it was easy to make mistakes. Very quickly the company had no money. So, there was a night of the long knives, and they…they tried to fire me. They fired a lot of people.
Daniel Satinsky: “They” being the board or…?
David Edick: The Russian director and Paul Cutter. By this time, we knew that Paul was lying. We had the hard evidence of it. But the Russians, they loved his look, his bearing, and they loved the way he talked. Ah, you know, ah, kind of a…he had a Serbian background in his family, so he knew, just it was natural, and his language, his body language, his way, his manner, the Soviet guys loved it. But he was full of crap.
So, they tried to chuck me out the door and I said okay, you know, if this is the way you want to play it. And I ended up suing Siberian Capital Investment in a Russian court for lost wages, a handful of rubles. You know, it was all on principle, you know. It’s like okay, welcome to the NFL, guys. If you’re going to do this to me, I just have to do this. I won the case. You probably don’t want to put this in the book, actually, but I won the first case of a breach of employment contract in the Primorski Krai courts, so I got like, you know, like 60 dollars in rubles, which was like, I mean, we went down to the corner and bought groceries for the next week. But to see the look on—
Daniel Satinsky: By the way, you were in Vladivostok while all this was going on, correct?
David Edick: Yeah. I went for two to three weeks, and I stayed for four months. And then they told me I had to leave. They wouldn’t extend my visa. But I’d run out of clothes anyways. The weather was changing. I needed to leave. So, I came back and then went back in January of ’93.
Daniel Satinsky: In what capacity?
David Edick: As vice president of California Trading & Industrial Corporation. This was a vehicle that… So, there were a lot of people that knew I was making this move, and there was an old school trader who had made a fortune in, starting in the Biafra war, but in Australia in particular. He was a skilled international trader, and for him Russia was like opportunity. And he didn’t know anybody there except me. And I was there. And I’d come back, and I was going to go back. So, he had a structure, many companies, easy to set up. And he said let’s make this vehicle our vehicle, we’re going to build our Russian business. And I have my network, and you have yours, and we’ll work together, and I’ll teach you the game. I like it, good.
So, I went back and just continuing on from the Russian Pacific Services idea. The Siberian Capital Investment thing, we were going to make a move at the vouchers and just ran out of road. But we could all see the opportunity out of it, but we could also see the risks that were in it. And there was some quiet discussion after hours about where this was going to end up. But we’re trying to…we’re looking at how things will work, not why things won’t work. We’re looking to solve problems.
But the society is, the change is…when I got there half the people, anybody with gray hair—and that’s people in their mid 30s and on, basically—anybody with gray hair was walking around in a complete state of shock, real shock. And they’d get up the next morning and they’d still be in shock. And it went on for months, until the hyperinflation just shredded everything. And the younger people were scrambling like mad to one, work with opportunity, but two, also to survive. But anyways, I jumped over to California Trading, and we did there what Russian Pacific Services started to do, which was focus on the food business and really most of the work was… My partner helped out.
Daniel Satinsky: Your partner being the older guy?
David Edick: Yeah. And we had…yeah, and I hired staff in Vlad[ivostok], and so we had a nice thing going. It was a wholly owned subsidiary in Vladivostok. We registered it through the consulate in Seattle. That was actually on the trip of taking police cars up to Tacoma. We had in-country staff and were operating in the wholesale markets for non-perishable foods and beverages. Most of the work was mine. I found the suppliers in Western Europe and North America. Canned meat was the big money. Cooking oil out of North America. Okay, so there’s a demand for cooking oil. It’s significant, okay? It’s an important element of Russian life.
Daniel Satinsky: Sunflower oil
David Edick: Any kind of cooking oil, whatever it might be, sunflower, canola, corn. And I’m communicating with all the big manufacturers in North America. I’m on the horn with the guys at Hunt-Wesson. They said we’ll talk with you, but the minimum order is 500 containers. [Laughs.]
Who the hell do you think you are? Have you ever developed a market once in your life? It’s Russia. It’s 150 million people, at the time, roughly. And they’re wiping the mud out of their eyes. It’s going to start small, and this is how you do it. It was the finding… And in Europe it was totally the opposite. They were like you can do container shiploads? Fantastic. Let’s start here and we’ll build it. What kind of work do you need on packaging? So, we designed packaging. Out of North America it was we have one color, black.
And it was during this time I really began to understand that we kind of believed our own mythology about our commercial success, and it was already 100 years old. It was before the First World War. It was two generations old. And it was all momentum. And I’m being harsh here, but certainly in the world of consumer products I couldn’t believe what I found. Finding good partners here was very difficult. And in Russia finding stable partners, people that could be around for… They would place an order for a shipment, and the shipment would arrive, and they would sell it. But then they would disappear, they would be gone.
Daniel Satinsky: And so were you ordering—I mean, just…I mean, I’m really in the weeds here, but were you selling for hard currency and prepayment or was it hard currency and payment upon sale?
David Edick: Prepayment to start.
Daniel Satinsky: Prepayment, okay. And you found people who were able to do that, but then once they took delivery and they sold the products sometimes they wouldn’t be around for a second order or a third order.
David Edick: Yeah. Companies would make mistakes. There was infighting. There was just zero stability, you know, very few companies.
Daniel Satinsky: And you found these clients, these customers, in Vladivostok through your staff or were you there then?
David Edick: I was there. I would come in for… I was doing rotations of three months in, three months out. I discovered email in Vladivostok in August 1992. In Russia. Not here, in Russia.
Daniel Satinsky: In where? In an American business center?
David Edick: No. First it was a Russian Academy of Sciences guy that was trying to market NCI as a platform for email internet communications. But NCI had a…it was very cumbersome. They never went anywhere with it, and it was obvious that was going to be the case. But there was a group called Sovam Teleport that set up off the West Coast, and we became one of their early customers.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay. And they ran…so their connection was through Moscow? How did that internet connection work, do you know?
David Edick: I don’t know specifically, but by Vlad connected to Japan, pretty fast. But it was probably still through Moscow at the time.
Daniel Satinsky: I am aware of Sovam Teleport. I interviewed Joel Schatz, who was the founder.
Yeah, so again pieces are falling into place. So, they became your means of conducting business. Because I know at that time, we…I was part of a joint venture in 1992 and ’93 and I remember the frustrations with communications, and trying to send faxes, and hitting the redial button for hours, literally hitting it for hours to get a fax through. So, you had a real advantage if you were using email and able then to stay in touch with your staff that way, right?
David Edick: Yeah, so when I was having dinner with this fish expert, I mean, fish science, not fishing, but fish science, ichthyology, he’s telling me about fish dreaming and everything, and the next minute he’s talking to me about email, and packet switching. You fed the faxes. We would get faxes that would look like some sort of Rorschach. It’s like what…? And the other option was telex, which worked, and it worked really well on the Russian side, but we couldn’t find anybody here in San Diego that used a telex machine. It was like go to the museum and take one. Yeah, the email broke it open. I knew it was a game changer as soon as I got it. We paid a lot of bills for Sovam Teleport, I can tell you. But it was a miracle, and 1200 baud, you know. But what we could do, I mean, that 1200 baud was crystal clear text communication. And I could be up late at night here on the West Coast and be working with my staff in real time in Vlad[ivostok]. That’s the way it worked.
Daniel Satinsky: And so, you found, either your staff or you found people, companies that had enough hard currency to purchase a container or several containers of food products, right?
David Edick: So, again, we were operating in the wholesale markets, and we were doing some of this with other people, but we were also working on our own account. So, we had stuff in warehouses, and we would have product trucked to Khabarovsk or Komsomolsk-on-Amur, to Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. I really, the goal all along was to get to Sakhalin, because I knew that the Sakhalin projects were going to come, and it was going to be big. But it took much longer than I expected, so we ended up working the regional urban markets. And I looked to expand west.
And there were “reklama*” magazines, kind of early business networking companies would advertise products, but really what they were doing was they were advertising their existence, and a bit of their capacity. So, in their advertisement they would try to show that they were more than a soap bubble, that they’re real, that they’re reputable, and here’s the phone number, a fax number, here’s an address and maybe some artwork, and they would talk a little bit the products that they had, or maybe what they were looking for. And based on product lines that companies were working with; I would reach out to them and try to get something going.
Daniel Satinsky: And you were doing this through a translator?
David Edick: Yeah. So, by this point my Russian had gotten to the point where I could grind my way through written material and understand what was being said. But I was far from being fluent such that I could write or do business communication. The margin for error was too high. So, I had an interpreter, or translator. But on a lot of this early research, I was just going through the…turning the pages of these newspapers.
I mean, I went…I mean, if I was in a new town or train station traveling through and I saw a newspaper I’d not seen before laying on the ground I picked it up and okay, this is information here. It’s intelligence, man. What the hell am I going to find? Who knows, but I’m going to look through it and try to understand who wrote it, and who are they communicating with, and is there something that we can work with here. But very quickly these specialized magazines came out, and I was able to read well enough to understand who…and I knew the geography. We didn’t do business in Moscow; we didn’t do business in St. Petersburg. It was east of the Urals.
Daniel Satinsky: Okay, so Novosibirsk, Tomsk?
David Edick: Yeah, those were the places. In practice nearly everything was in the Russian Far East. But I put together the logistics to bring cargo out of Western Europe or North America. We’d pick stuff up FOB Le Havre or Charleston and I would work out the shipping. Because nobody knew any of this stuff, and there were only a handful of shipping companies that were in the game anyways. But even their staff had no idea. So, I would put these things together. And the companies that…the suppliers were like how do you spell that?
That was part of the value that we were providing, was it was the logistics and the products, and the marketing and distribution framework in country.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you were a pioneer in developing those shipping routes that probably others then followed.
David Edick: There were others that were doing the same thing. All I can say is what my experience was as a business guy at the time. Building puzzles from literally pieces. And not even sure that it was working from the same…it might have been several boxes of puzzles mixed together. But it was a lot of fun.
Daniel Satinsky: How long were you in that business of importing food? The wholesale food business.
David Edick: That really ended in ’97. We took a very serious—several serious hits. My partner, one of his contacts selling goods to Camp Pendleton, the Marine base up here, I got a container of pineapple, canned pineapple cheap, we’ll get it to you. And it was a good price. And I ended up having to dump about half a container of pineapple because it was so old that it was leaking. And when the Russian sanitary guys came and said you…. I was completely shocked. That’s not the way I worked. We did stuff fresh from the factory. You want Russian labels; we’re going to do Russian labels. None of this Arabic stuff, no seven-year-old chicken. We’re going to treat you the way we want to be treated, and we’re building a reputation here. And the guys provided me this stuff. And so, it’s like I learned a bit about business on this end, which is…
So, I lost a chunk of…that was money down the drain. And meanwhile I’m paying staff. And a big moneymaker, though, was canned meat. And we took it in the neck when the wife of the Governor Nazdratenko, she had a relationship with somebody in the Pacific navy who had come to have the keys to storage of nonperishable supplies like canned meat. And of course, the classic Soviet canned beef, everybody wanted that. Well, great. They came onto market at about half the commercial price, and they had a lot. It never seemed to end. But we did.
Daniel Satinsky: Where did that come from?
David Edick: Some storages in the Russian Far East, somewhere in Vladivostok.
Daniel Satinsky: Oh, I see. So, what he did is he privatized some of the navy storage food reserves and sold it at half price.
David Edick: Well It wasn’t the governor. It was his wife. And they split the money. Yeah, it was privatized, and there was a lot of that going on. But it was stupid, if anybody’s listening. It was stupid because look, you know, you came on the market at half price, and you didn’t… At the time that we’re getting killed, she is a guest in my house as part of a Sister Cities delegation. That didn’t go over too well with my wife, I will tell you. And it was like okay, I get it, it’s the NFL, business is business. You have this opportunity, and I understand you don’t care about us, but you left so much money on the table by being stupid. I mean, it’s not even greedy, it was just being dumb. And they killed the market. And we weren’t the only ones. And we’re paying taxes. Our Russian competitors would pay taxes when they felt like it or had some sort of arrangement. But anybody on the international side, there were a number of our competitors operating out of Astana that tried to play the Russian game, and as a group they were contacted and told they were no longer welcome, they could leave now. So, we paid taxes. The road tax was based on revenue. So, we were running a self-liquidating company.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
David Edick: But I figured that these things would change, and ultimately, they did, but we couldn’t play by the Russian rules, and we were held to a different standard, which was okay. But the canned meat thing was devastating because it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I mean, it just killed us capital-wise, and it was months and months and months and months that we couldn’t move anything. And we’re paying staff, we’re paying warehousing.
We tried to find things to bring out. Honey was a big opportunity, but we couldn’t find anybody that could do adequate packaging. Everything came out in cans, and the processing was low enough grade where after a few months the cans would start to swell, which is not okay. But now it’s… I saw a picture a couple weeks ago of somebody’s Instagram. They were just into Arsenyev at a shop and there were all these different kinds of honey, and I’m like…
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah.
So, it’s timing, timing, timing.
David Edick: Timing, timing. So, my attention turned. I ultimately joined up with my old British pal from Siberian Capital. He had gone to Moscow.
Daniel Satinsky: What’s his name?
David Edick: Steve Tupper. And he had worked at the European TACIS program, T-A-C-I-S. He knew both sides of a lot of fences and got back into investment banking. And I joined a group that he was a part of. Oh…suddenly my brain has gone flat. Vtoroi Finansovyi Dom. Second Financial House, basically. It was a Russian British investment bank out of Moscow. And that was another great…that was 1997. It was a raging bull market in Moscow, and the GKO* scam was ramping up. But by that time Russian industry was beginning to sort itself out, so I ran North American operations in outreach for this group.
Daniel Satinsky: So, you moved back from Vladivostok to San Diego?
David Edick: Yeah. My focus in being in Vlad[ivostok] changed when our son was born there. Mine was the second marriage recorded between a Russian and American, and our son was the first registered birth to a Russian American couple registered at the consulate. But when he was born, we spent…the family focus was here and—
Daniel Satinsky: In San Diego?
David Edick: Yeah. And that’s where the telecoms became, and I was doing important—I was up late at night here in real time with the guys in Vlad[ivostok], etc. And my trips became rarer and more commercially driven because you’re trying to control expenses and all.
Daniel Satinsky: Right. So, in ’97 when you had this big hit on the meat did you close the business?
David Edick: Yeah, ultimately yes. Yeah, I mean, it just kind of… I closed things in the Russian Far East. Laid everybody off. The bitter… It finished with a whimper. It wasn’t even like pink slips Monday morning. It was just…everybody knew. People began to just scatter away, and just running it lower and lower, and we couldn’t…
Daniel Satinsky: How many staff did you have at your peak?
David Edick: Four. Yeah, it’s not a big company, but it was four full-time, and it was a network kind of a thing.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you went to work with these guys trying to find capital investment in North America.
David Edick: Yeah, and by that time people had begun to figure out here that there were opportunities. We were focusing on what our clients in Russia needed. And they needed partners in the same business abroad. They needed investment, but they also understood they needed to have partners to build marketing relationships. One of the projects that comes to mind was carbon black, for example.
Daniel Satinsky: Really? Who did you work with on carbon black?
David Edick: It was a group out of Omsk. There’s a mega refinery in Omsk.
Daniel Satinsky: I know a little bit about carbon black. There were four factories that made carbon black. One of them was in Yaroslavl, Yartek Uglerod. And I did some work for them regarding an American who cheated them out of final payment. And I then later became friends with a Russian who owned the tire factory, because the tire factory and the carbon black were linked. So, I know that Cabot, the U.S. corporation, was interested in carbon black in Russia, ultimately didn’t pull the trigger, as far as I know, and looked at all of these, probably Omsk as well. Did you run across them?
David Edick: I did talk with Cabot. I didn’t get any meaningful response. The traction I got was from the Canadians, Trans-Canada. They were particularly interested in carbon black based off of natural gas. And indeed, Krasnoyarsk has got a big tire operation. They were actually one of the founding shareholders of Siberian Capital Investment.
But then at the end of 1997 the markets…the Asian financial crisis arrived in Russia, but it may have been embedded in Russia first. When 30-year Treasuries got to 6.2%, I remember having this conversation with Steve Tupper, and I was like I don’t know what investment can you think of, U.S. Treasuries are paying 6.2% and all you have to do is sit, risk-free. And if you get leverage on 6.2%, you have a good business.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah, without risk and doing anything.
David Edick: And so, at this point Moscow had overheated, and then the GKO thing blew up in Moscow. And that was the end of my…that was the end of the business stuff.
Daniel Satinsky: That was the end of the business stuff. The 1998 financial crisis blew you out of Russia.
David Edick: Yeah. I was left owed a lot of money. And I saw what happened. And my interest was I like investment banking, old school stuff. You connect money with ideas and people. No use for me anymore. But I watched the West, the U.S.—and we had developed some curious contacts out of the U.S. Treasury who were helping former Soviet and former Russian bigwigs stay out of trouble, help them manage their privatized piles, so I began to get an understanding that there was more going on than met the eye. And when the U.S. and the IMF shoveled in I think it’s $4 billion—small money in today’s framework, at the time it was quite a bit—helped the Russians in the August crisis, and the money went out the door, I mean, instantly. It left. It was privatized and it was just…well, I’m trying not to use four letter words in this conversation. But I was just completely outraged and for a year—
Daniel Satinsky: So, you think they knew that putting that money in that they were actually supporting certain people within the Russian economic and political structure?
David Edick: There may have been some people. I think the level of naïveté here was boundless. I was in a line to get a changed Aeroflot ticket, and when I go to—I’m living in Vladivostok, and I go to the Aeroflot office, and I live like everybody else. And if you wear a suit and tie, well—[laughs]—you’re an idiot.
Daniel Satinsky: You’re a target.
David Edick: Well, a target, too. And it’s just like…it just was inappropriate, okay. The guy in front of me is a Westerner, he’s American, he’s a consultant, and he’s got his interpreter with him, and he’s going on and on and on about what an awful place this is, how nobody knows anything, and that he was such a fool to be taking these contracts with these aid agencies. And I just stood there and listened to him. I never spoke a word with him and never let on that I was an American, but I stood there behind him in the line, and in shock and disgust because he had no business being there. He was wasting everybody’s money and time. And here I was trying to…people that we had on staff, they saw the hope, too. I mean, it was about hope. It was about building a future. We had long gotten past the point where it’s going to be some sort of lucky shock.
Just to come back to the San Diego-Vladivostok thing for a moment, it became a commercial thing. People’s involvement, people’s attraction to the opening of Russia became a business opportunity, a get rich opportunity. At least that was the narrative that people told themselves. And when that faded rather quickly people’s interest faded just as quickly, and the numbers of people within the San Diego-Vladivostok program faded. I’m past president there, got seven years. I’m typecast here in San Diego with Sister Cities and with the Russia connection with Vladivostok. It was…there were a limited number of people who really stuck around, who were in it for the long haul. And I think that from the business standpoint, from the aid programs, we didn’t put enough money in. It should have been ten times as much with the understanding that half of it would get lost or stolen. But I learned a ton.
Daniel Satinsky: So, back to the San Diego Sister City. Does it still exist?
David Edick: It still exists.
Daniel Satinsky: Does it hold meetings or events?
David Edick: Meetings. It is now a shadow of itself. It’s a small group. And actually, we’re looking at holding a 30th anniversary gathering in September, along with our partners in Vlad[ivostok], who are far more organized now. This is a warning. I’m telling you; this is a warning. We are in big doodoo here. We’re 20 years—20 years have passed since the last time Americans checked in abroad, and we’re slow, we’re slow, we’re slow. And the Russians survived, and they have their own problems, and there are buckets of them. They are clicking, it’s fresh. Well, I’m going to leave that.
Coming back to the business part. I was in the food business and thought that I was representing the American tradition of a big food supplier. Our Russian customers had ruthless tastes. They want natural products. And that predated the move here in the United States to natural products. What we came to sell in Russia was food chemistry, and the Russians wanted none of it. They were like no. I mean, we have no money, so we’ll kind of struggle along with this, but what they wanted was a very simple list of ingredients. Less was more. No chemicals. So, I learned a lot about how to listen to customers, that running a business was so much more involved than making money.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And that lesson, how does that get conveyed to anybody? Or is that—I’m just curious about how you feel about that. My book is not going to be a Harvard Business School case or something in which there are lessons drawn from it or something, but in some aspects of what you’re saying here, this is a learning-teaching experience. Anyway, I don’t know where to go with that, but I’m curious about it.
But I think—let me go back to the other thing, which is what I want to explore with you a little bit more, is okay, so in the Soviet times Americans are incredibly curious about the Soviet Union, and these space bridges, including ones with Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donohue, there was one with Peter Jennings and members of Congress and members of the Supreme Soviet, I mean, incredible amount of public interest in each other. And this move, which later sort of led to the business, also had a public interest driver from it. And now, with hugely improved means of communication, there’s virtually no interest, at least among Americans, in what life is like in Russia or what Russians think. I think that that’s just amazing to me the more I see the level of enthusiasm and drive from ordinary people in this earlier period. And I don’t know what to make of it. I just know that I see it. And I don’t know if you’ve thought about that at all.
David Edick: Yeah, I think about it a lot. We’re a navy town still, Third Fleet space here, and I have friends, flag officers retired, and still very much in the game. But also, in the public. It was up until two, I think two years ago San Diego-Vladivostok was very active in hosting Open World delegations. I’ve personally organized and executed 15 delegations.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: And we’ve got a lot to offer here in San Diego, and people are excited and interested, to a point. It’s like their lives are so dense or preoccupied they enjoy something new, something exotic, and oh yeah, and then after the meetings are over, the delegation’s gone, after a week it goes back to the way it was, just heals back up again. There’s deadening. And I have done public presentations to universities and programs here. I’m past president of the World Affairs Council here in San Diego. Turned the program around here.
And while Russia remains…it has morphed into a Cold War narrative that people, older people, our generation and older are comfortable, which is super sad. The part that disturbs me and annoys me is at the, say within the leadership in the navy. They will come around and make their presentations, and when it comes to Russia, they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, and they’re trading on their stars, and I don’t like that. I don’t like that. And if you are commanding young men and women in the field, one of the oldest rules of the game is know your opponent and know yourself. And this closed…the minds here have closed. We’d have to start fresh on this one.
But it is super important because we’re headed into some so dangerous waters now. All of us are. The Russians, you know, Putin and his guys, they’re killing the commercial culture in Russia. If they don’t get property rights figured out, that’s going to be where the explosion comes.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, let me, but I want to go back a little bit. So, I know, so now talking to you I know there is a San Diego-Vladivostok Sister City that’s in existence, much reduced activity, but still in existence. I know that Burlington, Vermont and Yaroslavl sister city exists, actually fairly active exchange between the two cities. I know in Minneapolis there’s a Russian business and cultural association, and they have been putting on webinars during this pandemic. And I don’t know if there are others. So, there are individual places which don’t know each other, right? There’s no sense that…I mean, you didn’t know the people in Minneapolis, for instance.
David Edick: Correct.
Daniel Satinsky: And the fact is that someone in Minneapolis could put on a webinar with someone from Siberia, which they did, or a program on the German Volga, the Germans in the Volga region, and that could be done nationally because we’re talking about Zoom. And you could be doing a program that was up nationally. But if that network gets rebuilt, there’s at least some information exchange channels.
And I’m not—this is separate from the book. Because I was president of the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce of New England for many years, 20. And we are defunct, we’re out of business, because there’s no business to support it. So, we’re officially disbanded. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have that interest. So, at some point, aside from the book, I may want to try to make people aware of each other to see if there’s any synergies that can rebuild some channels of communication and exchange that we can all feel genuine because they’re arising not out of the media, and not out of the Russia experts who all have a bone to pick or chew or promote. So, anyway. Do you know of other active sister city organizations?
David Edick: Yeah, the group in Portland. The Portland-Khabarovsk. They’ve got a good group there. And they’re much more active than San Diego. We share some people connections in that, San Diego and Portland. So, they’re well focused on—and water issues are a central theme for them, the environment and water. They’ve been able to find something to work with. I tried to do the same here using science, ocean sciences. We just, we didn’t get traction. Yeah, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and others. People will talk, but the empire building, money, money, money. money. Who’s bringing the money.
There is still interest that can be networked. A little resources would help. Hope is a…my Russian guys, hope—hope dies last.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes, I know that. Right. What is it in Russian? Nadezhda umirayet posledney, right.
David Edick: My Russian is corroded. But hey, you know, I am…it’s a weird thing. I have this expertise, and it’s not worth a damn here. And that’s really—you know, is the world a better place. I remember the 1990, 1992, ’93—’92-’93 is when it became a nightmare for the Russians. And there’s no awareness here of what that was. And I have tried to keep people updated on—and this is even to the highest levels—keep people updated on what is happening structurally in Russia, where Russia is going, what Russians are doing, what’s working, what’s not working. From an analytical point of view. Like I’m walking into a room, a dozen investment bankers, and we have to be focused, and bullshit doesn’t cut it. You can do it once and you never come back.
So, I’m just calling it as I see it, and I’m looking to learn every day that I get up. And the last couple years people aren’t listening. They’ve got it all figured out. They’ve bought into a narrative. And these narratives, this is where the whole world is going. And this is part of why I’m stepping back, is where this is going to take us in a few years, and how do I position my family and myself in a world that peace is adrift in a big way. A big way. So, it’s been a pleasure to know about you and the work that you’ve stepped into here. I think it’s great that you are writing this book on this topic. And if there’s anything I can do to help you out…
Daniel Satinsky: I appreciate it. Look, you’re a combination of practical business person as well as a thoughtful and analytic person, so I have enjoyed the conversation.
David Edick: Yeah. I was left owed a lot of money. And I saw what happened. And my interest was I like investment banking, old school stuff. You connect money with ideas and people. No use for me anymore. But I watched the West, the U.S.—and we had developed some curious contacts out of the U.S. Treasury who were helping former Soviet and former Russian bigwigs stay out of trouble, help them manage their privatized piles, so I began to get an understanding that there was more going on than met the eye. And when the U.S. and the IMF shoveled in I think it’s $4 billion—small money in today’s framework, at the time it was quite a bit—helped the Russians in the August crisis, and the money went out the door, I mean, instantly. It left. It was privatized and it was just…well, I’m trying not to use four letter words in this conversation. But I was just completely outraged and for a year—
Daniel Satinsky: So, you think they knew that putting that money in that they were actually supporting certain people within the Russian economic and political structure?
David Edick: There may have been some people. I think the level of naïveté here was boundless. I was in a line to get a changed Aeroflot ticket, and when I go to—I’m living in Vladivostok, and I go to the Aeroflot office, and I live like everybody else. And if you wear a suit and tie, well—[laughs]—you’re an idiot.
Daniel Satinsky: You’re a target.
David Edick: Well, a target, too. And it’s just like…it just was inappropriate, okay. The guy in front of me is a Westerner, he’s American, he’s a consultant, and he’s got his interpreter with him, and he’s going on and on and on about what an awful place this is, how nobody knows anything, and that he was such a fool to be taking these contracts with these aid agencies. And I just stood there and listened to him. I never spoke a word with him and never let on that I was an American, but I stood there behind him in the line, and in shock and disgust because he had no business being there. He was wasting everybody’s money and time. And here I was trying to…people that we had on staff, they saw the hope, too. I mean, it was about hope. It was about building a future. We had long gotten past the point where it’s going to be some sort of lucky shock.
Just to come back to the San Diego-Vladivostok thing for a moment, it became a commercial thing. People’s involvement, people’s attraction to the opening of Russia became a business opportunity, a get rich opportunity. At least that was the narrative that people told themselves. And when that faded rather quickly people’s interest faded just as quickly, and the numbers of people within the San Diego-Vladivostok program faded. I’m past president there, got seven years. I’m typecast here in San Diego with Sister Cities and with the Russia connection with Vladivostok. It was…there were a limited number of people who really stuck around, who were in it for the long haul. And I think that from the business standpoint, from the aid programs, we didn’t put enough money in. It should have been ten times as much with the understanding that half of it would get lost or stolen. But I learned a ton.
Daniel Satinsky: So, back to the San Diego Sister City. Does it still exist?
David Edick: It still exists.
Daniel Satinsky: Does it hold meetings or events?
David Edick: Meetings. It is now a shadow of itself. It’s a small group. And actually, we’re looking at holding a 30th anniversary gathering in September, along with our partners in Vlad[ivostok], who are far more organized now. This is a warning. I’m telling you; this is a warning. We are in big doodoo here. We’re 20 years—20 years have passed since the last time Americans checked in abroad, and we’re slow, we’re slow, we’re slow. And the Russians survived, and they have their own problems, and there are buckets of them. They are clicking, it’s fresh. Well, I’m going to leave that.
Coming back to the business part. I was in the food business and thought that I was representing the American tradition of a big food supplier. Our Russian customers had ruthless tastes. They want natural products. And that predated the move here in the United States to natural products. What we came to sell in Russia was food chemistry, and the Russians wanted none of it. They were like no. I mean, we have no money, so we’ll kind of struggle along with this, but what they wanted was a very simple list of ingredients. Less was more. No chemicals. So, I learned a lot about how to listen to customers, that running a business was so much more involved than making money.
Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. And that lesson, how does that get conveyed to anybody? Or is that—I’m just curious about how you feel about that. My book is not going to be a Harvard Business School case or something in which there are lessons drawn from it or something, but in some aspects of what you’re saying here, this is a learning-teaching experience. Anyway, I don’t know where to go with that, but I’m curious about it.
But I think—let me go back to the other thing, which is what I want to explore with you a little bit more, is okay, so in the Soviet times Americans are incredibly curious about the Soviet Union, and these space bridges, including ones with Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donohue, there was one with Peter Jennings and members of Congress and members of the Supreme Soviet, I mean, incredible amount of public interest in each other. And this move, which later sort of led to the business, also had a public interest driver from it. And now, with hugely improved means of communication, there’s virtually no interest, at least among Americans, in what life is like in Russia or what Russians think. I think that that’s just amazing to me the more I see the level of enthusiasm and drive from ordinary people in this earlier period. And I don’t know what to make of it. I just know that I see it. And I don’t know if you’ve thought about that at all.
David Edick: Yeah, I think about it a lot. We’re a navy town still, Third Fleet space here, and I have friends, flag officers retired, and still very much in the game. But also, in the public. It was up until two, I think two years ago San Diego-Vladivostok was very active in hosting Open World delegations. I’ve personally organized and executed 15 delegations.
Daniel Satinsky: Wow.
David Edick: And we’ve got a lot to offer here in San Diego, and people are excited and interested, to a point. It’s like their lives are so dense or preoccupied they enjoy something new, something exotic, and oh yeah, and then after the meetings are over, the delegation’s gone, after a week it goes back to the way it was, just heals back up again. There’s deadening. And I have done public presentations to universities and programs here. I’m past president of the World Affairs Council here in San Diego. Turned the program around here.
And while Russia remains…it has morphed into a Cold War narrative that people, older people, our generation and older are comfortable, which is super sad. The part that disturbs me and annoys me is at the, say within the leadership in the navy. They will come around and make their presentations, and when it comes to Russia, they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, and they’re trading on their stars, and I don’t like that. I don’t like that. And if you are commanding young men and women in the field, one of the oldest rules of the game is know your opponent and know yourself. And this closed…the minds here have closed. We’d have to start fresh on this one.
But it is super important because we’re headed into some so dangerous waters now. All of us are. The Russians, you know, Putin and his guys, they’re killing the commercial culture in Russia. If they don’t get property rights figured out, that’s going to be where the explosion comes.
Daniel Satinsky: Well, let me, but I want to go back a little bit. So, I know, so now talking to you I know there is a San Diego-Vladivostok Sister City that’s in existence, much reduced activity, but still in existence. I know that Burlington, Vermont and Yaroslavl sister city exists, actually fairly active exchange between the two cities. I know in Minneapolis there’s a Russian business and cultural association, and they have been putting on webinars during this pandemic. And I don’t know if there are others. So, there are individual places which don’t know each other, right? There’s no sense that…I mean, you didn’t know the people in Minneapolis, for instance.
David Edick: Correct.
Daniel Satinsky: And the fact is that someone in Minneapolis could put on a webinar with someone from Siberia, which they did, or a program on the German Volga, the Germans in the Volga region, and that could be done nationally because we’re talking about Zoom. And you could be doing a program that was up nationally. But if that network gets rebuilt, there’s at least some information exchange channels.
And I’m not—this is separate from the book. Because I was president of the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce of New England for many years, 20. And we are defunct, we’re out of business, because there’s no business to support it. So, we’re officially disbanded. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have that interest. So, at some point, aside from the book, I may want to try to make people aware of each other to see if there’s any synergies that can rebuild some channels of communication and exchange that we can all feel genuine because they’re arising not out of the media, and not out of the Russia experts who all have a bone to pick or chew or promote. So, anyway. Do you know of other active sister city organizations?
David Edick: Yeah, the group in Portland. The Portland-Khabarovsk. They’ve got a good group there. And they’re much more active than San Diego. We share some people connections in that, San Diego and Portland. So, they’re well focused on—and water issues are a central theme for them, the environment and water. They’ve been able to find something to work with. I tried to do the same here using science, ocean sciences. We just, we didn’t get traction. Yeah, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and others. People will talk, but the empire building, money, money, money. money. Who’s bringing the money.
There is still interest that can be networked. A little resources would help. Hope is a…my Russian guys, hope—hope dies last.
Daniel Satinsky: Yes, I know that. Right. What is it in Russian? Nadezhda umirayet posledney, right.
David Edick: My Russian is corroded. But hey, you know, I am…it’s a weird thing. I have this expertise, and it’s not worth a damn here. And that’s really—you know, is the world a better place. I remember the 1990, 1992, ’93—’92-’93 is when it became a nightmare for the Russians. And there’s no awareness here of what that was. And I have tried to keep people updated on—and this is even to the highest levels—keep people updated on what is happening structurally in Russia, where Russia is going, what Russians are doing, what’s working, what’s not working. From an analytical point of view. Like I’m walking into a room, a dozen investment bankers, and we have to be focused, and bullshit doesn’t cut it. You can do it once and you never come back.
So, I’m just calling it as I see it, and I’m looking to learn every day that I get up. And the last couple years people aren’t listening. They’ve got it all figured out. They’ve bought into a narrative. And these narratives, this is where the whole world is going. And this is part of why I’m stepping back, is where this is going to take us in a few years, and how do I position my family and myself in a world that peace is adrift in a big way. A big way. So, it’s been a pleasure to know about you and the work that you’ve stepped into here. I think it’s great that you are writing this book on this topic. And if there’s anything I can do to help you out…
Daniel Satinsky: I appreciate it. Look, you’re a combination of practical business person as well as a thoughtful and analytic person, so I have enjoyed the conversation.
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