You're gonna like this episode because we talk about Perhaps the crash of the economy that's coming in 2021 with a great economist Peter linman you're gonna like this episode also We're gonna give away a free program because that's what we do. We're very giving people today's giveaway is map strong Here's how you can get free access to map strong leave a comment in the first 24 hours And if we'd like your comment if we pick your comment is the best comment of all the comments You get free access to map strong also subscribe to this channel and turn on your notifications One more thing we are running a sale this month maps prime maps prime pro and the prime bundle all 50% off Go check this out at maps fitness products calm. Just don't forget to use the code June prime for the discount. All right. Enjoy this podcast So Peter with the way we'll do this and it's a very conversationalist between all of us I'll give you a little Little background. Well, although we're a health and fitness podcast. We talk about financial health all the time We've had yes, we had Peter Schiff on here a few months back and so we've had economists come on here and talk and One of the things that I loved about you. I found you on the Walker webcast a little over a year ago So that's that's how I came across your content and one of the things that that drew me in about your content was a lot of times when I listen to economists talk about stuff I feel like they're very biased or they have an agenda whether they're trying to sell gold or they have a political agenda and And I don't know you can argue or debate that but I I feel that you do not come off that way I feel like you're very non-biased and so I wanted to introduce you to our audience Well, that's nice of you to say I I have this funny thing I'm 70 years old and my career is typified by Democrats are convinced I'm a Republican and Republicans are convinced. I'm a Democrat So I think it goes to what you're saying and I sort of pride myself on that. None of us always succeed in being Free of whatever but I try and to your physical fitness, you know 70 years old. I I did 80 minutes on the stationary bike this morning Let's wait for an hour and walk 10 miles while working. Wow. You're doing pretty right on buddy. You're doing pretty good I don't yeah, and you did some work at from the Chicago school, right? So you're like a Milton Friedman fan if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, Milton Milton was one of my Nature professors back then and I did my graduate work there and I stayed on the faculty there a couple of years and Then went to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1979 And I guess I retired from there 10 years ago and I've since folk I had lineman associates Which is a financial advisory firm. I started in 1979 And I continued doing that in my boards and my Investing and my charity so anybody interested you could go to lineman associates and you'll see about What we do and our publications and our charity and and so forth So I'm not retired, but I'm tired from the University world. No, that's that's awesome Yeah, you know Milton's series free to choose had a huge impact on me and I became a huge fan of economics after that I do want to ask you to open this up one big question. Now. I read recently that the majority of Dollars the the majority of money That exists got created recently I don't remember what the number was but it was something insane like the when you look at the total amount of money that we that we've created It was something like 90% of it was made in the last few years Number one is that true and number two. Does that a problem? Could that potentially cause problems for us? So it is absolutely true I'm now going to do numbers off top my head, but as we came to the beginning of the financial crisis in very late 2008 the total amount of What's called high-powered money or or the money stock or whatever you want to call it was and I'm doing this from memory about 800 billion and Over the next four or five years QE 1 QE 2 QE 3 took it from 800 billion to about 4 trillion That's a big jump. Yeah, if you think about all of the history of the United States Took it basically from nothing to 800 billion and then in a matter of four years it went to four trillion and then What I call QE infinity which has happened with the Fed injections associated with The COVID and the COVID lockdown have got it up to some number. I'm again I'm doing all the time they had six trillion so in a matter of months We grew it more than in 200 years just to put a Context on it. So you're absolutely right And again, anybody who really wants to see that figure you can go to Lennon ladder and it's in there It's public. It's federal reserve data. So, okay, so and what does it mean? So what does it mean good? I left I got What it means is that money will eventually find a home and whatever I You guys kind of the right age remember beavis and butthead. Oh, yeah, of course love them So imagine the Fed Gave four trillion dollars in four years to beavis and butthead and their friends Do an intellectual experiment? What would have gone up in prices though and your answer would be whatever beavis and butthead spend money on Beer and metal Prices would go up. I'm not sure home prices would have gone But skateboard prices would skyrocketed AC DC shirts skyrocket. You got the point, right? So in the 70s are when the Fed gave money to the banking system of that time It was very fragmented by today's standards and they gave thousands of dollars to millions of people to buy bread and Coca-Cola and a car and so forth and by the way when they created money It chased those and that's where you saw most of the inflation What happened in the financial crisis and after really after they gave the money to the big banks and the big banks lent money mostly to asset buyers either homeowners, right that's an asset buyer or corporations to buy other corporations or to buy Stock people to buy stocks or bonds or gold or whatever. So what we saw from 2009 to 2019 was that money as it came out didn't chase goods and services so much It chased asset so the price of homes went up big time the price of stocks went up big time price of bonds price of gold You at real estate and so forth So now you say, okay, they put a whole bunch more money into the system Ask the Beavis and Buckhead question What are those banks going to lend it to and they're going to lend it? I think primarily to asset buyers again Because come on a big big bank is set up to lend in big ways Not to give you guys six dollars, right now. They might give you a line of credit They might give you a credit card loan. I'm not saying nothing But they're set up to write a check for 80 million a hundred million 200 million That's so I think we're set up for another decade of moderate consumer price inflation and Very high asset price inflation again So it'd be a great time to own assets not every day, right? But in general it'd be a great decade to own assets again. No Peter I've heard you say that inflation is one of the most misunderstood ideas. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah You mentioned Milton Friedman and but the definition of inflation is the on average Movement of prices in the economy. Okay. Well, that includes the price of bubblegum And that includes the price of gold that includes the price of houses that includes the prices stocks that includes, you know, you name it, right? When we measure inflation Simply by looking at consumer prices Which is what we tend to do Because it's easy Only because it's easy We're set up to do it. They send little checkers out to see how much bread is this week versus last week, right? They're set up to do it We're missing huge numbers of prices in the economy namely asset prices and So when you see no consumer and price inflation that doesn't mean no consumer prices are going up We know medicals gone up. We know universities have gone up. Those are consumers But it also ignores asset prices have gone up and and we need to think more broadly the Fed should think more broadly They they know this at the Fed. They just don't know what to do about it It's like you may know you've got a kid who who who can't do their homework Knowing it is one thing doing something about it is more challenging Okay, so let's take a step back real quick because somebody listening may may hear what you're saying and they may think Well, what's necessarily wrong with more money? Is it money? Okay. Like if someone gave me $10,000 That would be a good thing like explain the difference between money connected to goods and services and Money just not connected to anything just more of it existing but not connected to those goods and services What's the difference between the two? Okay, so I'll take a very simple I'll take two very simple examples one bread if Bread prices rise the seller of bread Benefits Right, and yes, their costs may be going up So they may not benefit as much as the first appears who gets hurt by that inflation the consumer Right, right and by the way their wages may be going up, but not all consumers have wages And so you can get the spirit is complicated In that regard. Okay now think of asset prices and I'll take the simplest asset price home prices Go up. Let's just let's just say that what it causes is inflation and home prices The money that comes out is lent to people and they chase a pretty fixed number of homes, right? We have what? almost nine times the amount of money and We have what 12% more houses. That's got to be a bit of an imbalance So who gets helped and who gets hurt when a lot of money chases home prices? I got helped Why I already owned my home Right, I had to live in a condo, but the same point, right? I got help because that money chased Homes and bid it up who got hurt The people who got hurt are the ones that didn't own homes yet and still wanted to buy them And they just saw those homes moving out of affordability Right, they didn't have enough money for a down payment because as fast as they say the home prices were rising Requiring an even bigger down payment. So the simplest way to say it is asset price inflation is a wonderful thing if you own assets And not a wonderful thing if you don't so if you think about society Young people in general don't own assets when I was young I had nothing I had just put myself through high school. I put myself through college I had I had net negative worth because I borrowed a bit to go to college, right and so asset price inflation wouldn't help me because I didn't own any assets Today asset price inflation helps me Because I own some assets. I'm older. I had a time to accumulate So if you think about it What it does is so How should I say so's Disparity but the disparity is Interestingly not about income, right? It's about have you accumulated assets if you have a high income, but you spend it all You don't have any assets to benefit from Right. So think of it that way. I'll give you a variant The fed's policy of very low interest rates Who's that help? Who's that hurt? It helps anybody who wants to borrow It hurts anybody who is saving Safely Safely like government bonds bank accounts, etc. So I was talking the other day To an english professor who's 79 years old. She's been teaching for 51 years She put in her money into her life savings account And during the financial crisis She took it all out of the stock market and put it all in cds Okay And for the last decade so first of all she did it at the bottom rule number one Don't panic right and sell at the bottom. So she sold at the bottom She converted her life savings into CDs Certificates of deposits at the bank. How much interest did she get on that over the last 12 years? Zero right So Okay, we made it easier for somebody who was borrowing and we wiped her out Because for 12 years. She's had no income on her life savings and she's terrifying So she has a decent I mean she has the university. She wasn't a big-time university professor She has them, you know, I don't know. She has been nothing spectacular, right, but no income That's frightening and Even though she had assets They didn't appreciate because they were cash So what's happened by all this is a lot of arbitrary Young people getting hurt people who save safe being hurt People who borrowed a lot being helped By the way, who's the biggest borrower in the world? US by far US government So what we've done by low interest rate policies Is give money Essentially free to the US government And you go wow We've taken and made money free Which right away is going to distort things to one of the least efficient spenders in the world And one of the least productive spenders in the world that has to slow down growth Because you've made borrowing free to them isn't surprising if you made borrowing free to somebody They'll try to borrow a whole lot more That's what the US government has done over the last decade. They borrowed a whole lot more because It is basically free and because it's the US government People will buy it. Why won't people buy your debt? Your credit is not as good as the US government because US government can print money to pay them off So these deficits. Yes, it has something to do with COVID and yes, it has not saying none, but you've given a profligate spender Free money that can't be a good thing that just can't in general that doesn't mean everything is wrong can't be a good thing Okay, so so let's go back for a second to when we started this this kind of printing Bonanza of money, but you know, this is after the financial crisis, right? Let's say we didn't do that. Let's say we left it. We didn't we didn't print tons of money We allowed, you know, what some people would say for the market to correct itself Would those consequences have been better than the ones that we may be getting in the future or was like in other words There's a risk versus reward. Did they make the right decision or was there somewhere in the middle or should they have left things alone? So my noble never know, right? We'll never know It's like with your kid if you hadn't told their kid they were grounded for a week Would they have been better or worse? You'll never know, right? You'll literally never know. It's an unknowable and by the way People can argue either way I give you all I can give you is my own view. I think The good news is Both in the financial crisis and now during covid the federal reserve learned The lesson Milton Friedman taught about the great depression he and Anna Schwartz wrote the definitive book It wasn't until the 1960s So the great depression was in the 30s and it wasn't until the 1960s the definitive book is written and what they found was that It would have been a recession But it became the depression Because in a matter of about a year and a half the money Supply shrunk by about 35 percent And what did that do? That is because they let it try to find its own Bottom and then you went out of business as a bank since you went out of business She couldn't pay your depositors since you couldn't pay your depositors They couldn't pay there to buy food or whatever and it it cascaded in a negative way and Friedman's admonition was they should have Not shrunk the money supply and they probably should have increased it to maintain liquidity and hard times That's what they did in the financial crisis And that's what they did during covid Now that part I fully agree with then you're only talking about How much so I told you I think it went from 800 billion To 4 trillion in a matter of a couple of years Maybe they should have only gone to a trillion and a half Maybe they should have gone to 1.2. No one will ever know should you have grounded your kid for three days Or three weeks or not at all. You'll never know the right answer The really right answer, right? You'll never know um What you do know is we avoided the great depression because we didn't let the money supply fall and again certainly with covid My gut is they went too far That's my gut But i'm not sure of that and nobody has ever done a study and you can make interesting arguments Now what what are the consequences of going too far? What is that? What should we should we see? Yeah, yeah Going too far amounted to You started the largest Wealth redistribution and income redistribution and the history of the united states That's what it did because that money that went in If they'd given it to beavis and butthead beavis and butthead came became rich They gave it largely to asset buyers and those asset buyers and the people they bought assets from got Wealthier because of that right just mechanically and That was a huge wealth transfer and the reverse the not the reverse the other side of that coin is low interest rates transferred studying amounts of money from people like the english professor i was talking about to borrowers And the u.s. Government and when i said the u.s. Government whatever the u.s. Government spent on So the wealth transfers that it created were staggering And do i know that the whole social whatever you want to call of today is because of that i don't know I have an a gut That a whole bunch of people think of the english professor right think of young people who can't afford a home because the asset price keeps going out of reach um They're saying we're getting screwed somehow and i don't even remember a vote I don't even remember a debate because remember it was done Without any congressional debate Right it was all done by the fed Staggering the largest wealth wealth redistributions in history if you'd have walked into congress And said we're going to redistribute Five trillion dollars four or five trillion dollars Remember gdp is only 21 trillion. I think that that would have been one of the most contentious debates in american history It occurred with no External debate and I think people didn't realize it happened, but they knew something happened to them And the losers particularly realized something happened to them one other interesting thing the People sometimes say the really poor got hurt And that turns out not to be true from this you know why The kind of permanently really poor never had any assets never will have any assets So the fact that assets got more expensive Didn't affect them if you don't use heroin and heroin prices go up. It doesn't affect you right and and so the really the kind of when I say poor I mean the kind of permanently low skilled Uh low earners they didn't have assets before they didn't have assets after That didn't hurt them the ones that really hurt Were what I would call on the make young people right probably a lot of your viewers I would bet and they got hurt because in the normal scheme of things they would get a promotion They would get a kid. They would want to buy a house. Whoops. I can't afford it because home prices are up And they got hurt Right so so a follow-up question to that would be you know because you have asset inflation So houses and properties are going up and getting much more expensive But people have to rent those properties in order to live in them Obviously a lot of people buy these properties to live in them But a lot of them are also investments and you charge rent on these and as the prices of these properties continue to go up I would imagine rent would go up as well. Are we seeing or did we see any inflation? In the cost of rent That would follow along the cost of the the the value of these assets Great question We saw two things interestingly on the rental side over the last decade one was absolutely, you're right the Value of apartments went way up because there was just a lot more money chasing it and by the way rents were going up And rents were going up We'll come back to that rents were going up But the interesting thing is values rose faster Then rents went up. So it's not like your rents didn't go up But values rose even faster another way of saying it the cash return Of owning an apartment building actually went down the cash return The total return including the factor asset went up and value went up But you were getting less of it from cash more of it from appreciation. In other words cap rates went down one of the things that Cap rates went down one of the remarkable sociological things of the last um Let's just say since 2000 and Is that we the united states Have underproduced single family housing by any normal benchmark by three and a half to four million houses and we've underproduced multifamily rental housing By around a half a million That means in the last 20 years We've underproduced housing By about three and a half percent And some of that is not in my backyard, right? Some of that is Values have gone up construction costs. There's a lot of complicated reasons People don't have down payments because even though If they bought the home they'd win. They don't have a down payment to buy the home And so we have fundamentally underproduced housing for 20 years Is it a surprise that rents went up and home prices went up? And apartment prices went up What happened during covid shutdown was stunning And I got it wrong originally In march of last year. I said housing is going to get clobbered people are going to try to maintain their Their lifestyle they're going to lose their job. They're going to try to keep maintaining their lifestyle They'll have no money. They're not going to have confidence. They're not going to buy a home Well, what happened was their lifestyle got changed for them so you Normally still try to go to the movies you still try to buy that nice pair of shoes for your kids You still try to go to disney But since you don't have as much money your savings go down you scrimp And housing is an easy one to put off for a couple of years, right? I mean, I don't need it today What happened this time is The savings rate for somebody earning a hundred thousand went from seven thousand dollars a year To thirty three thousand dollars a year. Wow Now it's since come down a bit. It's down to about 14 000. So if you said over 12 months starting april last year Because it bounced around a little somebody who would normally have saved seven thousand out of a hundred saved about 23 000 out of a hundred just over the course of the year. Why? Why what were you going to spend it on?  And a whole bunch of people didn't lose their job a lot lost their job, but not everybody Suddenly people had down payment think of the following you're saving seven thousand dollars a year But four thousand of that's your retirement. You can't touch it So you're only saving three thousand a year for a home You want to buy a three hundred thousand dollar home? You need a thirty thousand down payment. That takes ten years fair enough Now imagine you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year You've already saved for five years. So you have fifteen thousand three thousand a year for five years And now you save twenty five thousand in a year You have plenty of down payment after about six months And by the way the same thing's happening to your parents So suddenly people said, oh, I have a down payment I can buy a home and interest rates are low Interest rates being low didn't matter if you don't have a down payment But it's the down payment. That's the key, right?  I'm thinking younger people right in their thirties. They get it from the grandparent Go back to my english professor When interest rates were zero She had wealth to distribute to them, but no income So she kept telling her grandkids. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry if the interest rate had been four percent She would have been able to give each of them 10 15 thousand a year For a couple of years for a down payment and that's one of the reasons Home purchases over the previous decade 2010 to 2020 was very low people didn't have the down payment And they didn't want to adjust their lifestyle Suddenly their lifestyle got adjusted for them they ran to buy homes and About 150 000 people 70 years an old grandma your grandparents died Earlier by a number of years then they normally would have died. Why does that matter? Let's say a third of those 150 so 50 000 had nothing had no money to give to their grandchildren or children doesn't help them at all 50 000 of them died and left it to their spouse, right doesn't do anything for the grandchildren or the children 50 000 of them Left it to their two children and their four grandchildren Divide 300 000 by six 50 000 people Suddenly we're giving six people 50 000 what did a lot of those people do with that bequest buy a home? With money that they would have never gotten absent covid and then so A lot of strange things And the number that you use to prove this point is the the national savings average. Is that correct? I've heard you say that it's staggering to me It was I think we we averaged like three trillion or something and we're three x that is that correct? We're like three x the normal yeah, we're actually closer to yeah about a little over three x at the moment Yeah, it's saying now the this this death phenomena Is not about that. That's about how much I had saved By the time I was 75. I got covid. I died. I was going to live until I was 85 Suddenly my children and grandchildren got an inheritance if I had anything to leave them years earlier Hmm And scrambled to buy a home So so peter I want to I want to kind of go down the line of of you know effect and in consequence, right? So property values going up Potentially rents can go up typically when this starts to happen, especially when a segment of the population is having trouble affording these types of things States and cities, but usually cities will enact laws that control rent, right? So this okay Property values going up rents going up. Oh people can't afford it. Let's put some laws here that say you can't raise rent anymore Could we potentially run into a and you also said that we're building far less than we had in the past Could we potentially run into a situation where there's just a shortage? of places for people to live in because You know rent is stuck so nobody wants to leave People are not investing in building new properties because of the rent control Could we run into that in the future with this? Absolutely, and we've already seen bits of it and in fact a comment that was made a very insightful comment a question was um Was the question about well, why do we care if there's a whole lot of money out there? And your question underscores? Why it creates all sorts of strange? social stresses That get reacted to by politics So absolutely. There's no doubt that you're seeing more um What political demand for rent control? Then you saw 15 20 years ago Right, why because the asset prices are going up faster than income prices even for Well-paid millennials right even for well-paid millennials I don't mean billionaire millennials, but you know even for a well-paid millennial Whose wage has gone up pretty effectively over the 10 years or 15 years since they came out of college Home prices went up faster. So it i'm doing better, but it's getting farther away becomes a political strain You got to do something Now as you suggest the something will end up being more destructive Than the problem But it will happen It will happen and interestingly the And of course what happens if you threaten rent controls am I going to build more apartments or fewer apartments fewer fewer Right Even if they don't get introduced even if the rent controls don't get introduced You know, you're going to discourage somebody from building an apartment And you've seen it in seattle. You've seen it in portland. You've seen it in cap coastal california Um, though those concerns have dampened by the way, you don't see it in houston You don't see it in dallas. You see different issues, but you don't see that Wire homes very affordable in houston and dallas Even though the population in houston and dallas has grown far faster Than the population of the bay area and in in california It's not about demand. It's all about Supply houston and dallas make it very easy to build homes. They don't threaten rent controls They don't have a lot of uh fancy rules. They don't have a lot of fancy taxes It's pretty easy to build Um, not unsafe just regular, you know, just easy process wise and dollar wise California is the exact opposite. California prices are crazy And yeah, i'm paid more in california than i am and i'm paid twice as much in california as i am in texas But home prices are four times higher i'm not better off And hence the rent control Why don't we do something which will mean even less housing which will make it even worse Now i have a question, uh, just mainly about, uh, you know, this redistribution of wealth Uh and back to kind of the inflation talk like How can you explain to me if this is going to affect the overall value of the dollar or if this like in a sense doesn't really affect Okay, that's a great question. You guys are clever. Um Um It's a great question The value of a dollar Is clearly depreciating every year In terms of what it'll buy, right? So even if the inflation rate in the u.s. Is only 2% You have to have 102 Next year to buy the same things you bought for 100 this year So that's devaluing the dollar, but i don't think that's what you have in mind What you mean is versus the euro or versus the yen or versus the u.s. Okay Well, think about what's happening The dollar getting weaker or stronger is yep, we're devaluing our currency compared to last year but So is Europe. Yeah So is china So is every place else and so the value of the dollar depends on how fast To you erode your value compared to how fast they erode their value So if it only cost us 2% more and it cost them 5% more we strength it Even though it's by the way Again, you say you have a health orientation on this I am in much worse physical condition at the age of 70 than I was when I was 20. However Compared to other 70 year olds I'm in massively better shape Compared to my peers today Then I was when I was 20 And I was in decent shape. I played a little intercollegiate ball, but you know, there were studs. There were real studs um Today just being in any kind of shape puts me in the top Half a percent of 70 year olds, right? So it's similar to that. So if I came back to your question, I would say that the world Is an race to devalue itself And as a result in an odd way, we probably get stronger Relatively even though we're weaker in an absolute sense Right, but it's interesting. But but will this negatively affect uh investment or the allocation of uh, you know resources and to because the market signals are getting a little bit skewed, right because Of all this Intervention so what are the consequences of Of the world devaluing its currency does it result in less innovation? Does it result in malinvestment? All they think it really means that the us Gets even more money cheaply from abroad. So when I was your age Foreigners provided, I don't know 10 percent of the us debt government debt today. They provide about 50 percent of it five zero Why because kind of what you're saying and I'll do a little quiz How many of you would rather be investing your money in Uzbekistan right now, right? I don't think so. How many and by the way, if you're in Uzbekistan Would you try to get your money out of Uzbekistan and the world as crazy as it is today and into the us Even if the us is getting worse, you of course And what about kenya? I have a big charity effort in kenya. My wife and I do and I can tell you They're trying to get their money here Not there because if you think it's tough here, it's really tough there and it could truly get stolen. How about china? You want to have your money? How many you've sent a lot of money to china in the last month? How many you woke up today saying yep, how many your listeners woke up saying yep, I need to invest more money in china I know a whole lot fewer than chinese that woke up today saying Damn, we get more and more authoritarian. I have no influence on it.  I'm not maybe you're mispronouncing his name in hong kong What are the them? I don't think twice about me if they're going to take on jack ma I think if I could get my money in the u.s. So what it means if you go around the world Saudi arabia, would you rather have your money in saudi arabia now or in the us now? and given all the things that are going on and so as odd as it may seem We're getting more money from these places because even though we're not wonderful um Relatively are i'll take a good example.  That's a normal occurrence In lots of countries Here it's a rare event Right, it's a rare event i'm not trying to but Here we're shocked That somebody had a massive ponzi scheme in robinia. They're not shocked In saudi arabia. It's not a ponzi scheme. It's the government member when the prince Imprisoned in the what was it the ritz karpner the four season the hotel four or five four years ago um 70 of the wealthiest until he extracted the money he wanted Right. Does that make you want to have your money in saudi arabia are here?  They do it professionally and daily in these other places And that's the best thing we have going for us. So it actually will help our productivity In a perverse way Okay now going back to you know the comment you made about the great depression and how had we loosened the money supply We made if we might have put ourselves in a recession and so that apply that to what happened in 2008 We loosened the money supply And some people would argue that prevented a depression. We were in a recession Lots of other people were saying this is never going to end They're going to continue to kick the can down the road Until we and and we're going to blow this thing up until the correction is so big Uh, that there's nothing that we can do. What do you say to those people? What do you say to people who say look? Here's the deal. You're right. We would have had more harsh consequences in 2008 But what we've done now is we've just put ourselves on the cycle of printing And at some point the you know, it's going to be worse. It's going to be far worse We have way more pain because we've we've increased malinvestment because we've inflated the money supply so much and it's no It's not going to stop So I have two answers I'm a healthy 70 and I think my life expectancy is a healthy male age 70 is to what? 86 or something like that. So that's sound about right.    Good luck Just keep kicking it for another, you know, so I'm joking, but you get the points. Um Interestingly you could we can kick the can down the road I don't know if we can do it infinitely but we can do it a long time um if We're willing to deal with those distortions like you were talking about rent controls social concern about gee, how did those people suddenly end up A whole lot just a whole lot richer just think of what we saw in the stock market in the last what year How did those people end up a whole lot richer? I'm not richer Is what some people are saying right that didn't have any assets So the people without assets are saying how did they get richer and I didn't get richer that can't be fair Right and I'm not even going to say what is fair But that's a social thing you got to deal with that has political ramifications If as long as we can deal with those social and political whatever you want to call them We can keep kicking the can down the road as long as We're better than everybody else So europe has been kicking the can down much more than we have You know italy right greece Uh, et cetera they've been kicking the can much more than us um And many other countries so we can kick it down the road As long as where else you're going to go is true and as long as you're willing to deal with all these social fabric issues that arise Remember there are always social fabric issues. So we have all the normal social fabric issues plus The social fabric issues created by this Yeah, because you'll look at like statistics and it'll show over the last, you know 20 years You know this top Quadrant of the economy increased their wealth by this ridiculous amount in the bottom Didn't at all or very very little And some of that is due to you know what you're talking about what this we're you know people at the top They they have a lot of the money tied up in Investments and they see this and they can invest in things seeing that the prices Are going to go up one of the challenges I tend to have with people oftentimes is and this is a I think And I'd love to ask you about this is We don't know what would have happened and what I mean by that I'll give you an example where you know Let's say a city raises their minimum wage They pass a law it goes up by five dollars and then at the end of the year they do a study and they say hey look we added 500 jobs. So there you go. It didn't hurt Any jobs, but what we don't know is how many jobs would have been added Had they not done that in the first place? um Could we have potentially seen prices drop in goods and services? We're seeing some inflation, but would we have seen maybe deflation and it is deflation bad I've heard economists talk about deflation is a bad thing But it's always confusing to me like isn't the price of things going down a good thing Uh depends which side of the desk you're on right if I'm a buyer price is going down is a great thing so I like hotel prices not prices hotel room rates going down As a room rate person the problem is for the hotel year Their income has gone down that means they may not have enough money to pay their taxes To pay their debt to pay their lenders their employees. Oh, that's a problem So as long as those things are kind of in balance Eh, right when they get way out of balance It can be a disaster and we saw it with Way out of disaster way out of balance on price drops can be a real disaster It's not like inflation is a good thing It is a good thing to some people and a bad thing to others And it just depends on who you are Where you are in the economy. It's very interesting people haven't really focused on this You know, you correctly make the comment about wealth going up for those that owned assets That's it's interestingly less quote the top 10 percent or 2 percent or whatever It's if you owned assets, right? It went up, right? Interestingly the people who never Had assets Think about what happened during cove it just as a real example um If you were living in public housing And you were living on food stamps and you were living on various government programs and you weren't employed And i'm not making any judgment Your income was unchanged Right, you literally had no change in your status economic status, right through one of the most crazy times ever You went through unaffected by the way a lot of retirees Went through unaffected so security And their you know pension plans they just kept paying them they went through unaffected some of them Others got clobbered right young employees got clobbered if you were cleaning rooms at all so the impacts across people of big changes are hard to predict and so by Not letting the economy fall apart Which is probably what we did during the financial crisis by injecting some amount of that money I don't know if we needed it all i've on records saying we didn't need it all we went too far, but We'll never know and again this time. I think we injected too much, but we'll never know if it was too much or not We'll never know Why do I think it's too much it's all these social stresses that it creates That I worry about by too much right and Why is the social that then translate into political etc the rent controls being a great example I'll give you another example that I worry about I worry about Why don't we reduce the typical down payment? From 10 or 20 percent to 2 percent Right and when things get very unaffordable you start hearing that again And why don't we have freddy and fanny the government agencies be required to do 1 and 2 mortgages?  Well, that's part of what led to the problem in the way. I don't know And that's what led to the actually to o2 o2 to o6 which then Uh manifested in o8 o9. Yes now in in the in the late 70s we saw inflation Going up quite a bit some huge numbers and the way that they've Tried to fix it Was by dramatically increasing interest rates Is that still a tool that they could use today if things start to get a little bit too hot? Can they raise okay interest rates and what would that look like? Okay, do you know how they really first tried to stop inflation? back then under a republican administration um They had a wage and price control board A wage and price control board. We weren't the only country Many of these were put up in many countries israel and and down in brazil and argentina all around the world wage and price controls Literally government agencies that were micro managing wages and prices if you were going to raise the price of certain things You had to go to the government and in fact Gerald ford was a republican president Went during one of his addresses to the nation. I think was in 75 Could have been in early 76 went on with a little button That said win White letter, you know the kind of campaign buttons or smiley face button that kind of button He had that kind of button on that said win whip inflation now With wage and price controls and of course Too much money created all these social stresses by the way by 1974 five six huge lines just to buy gasoline just to buy gasoline Go on and google search gasoline lines My wife and I I was in graduate school. We had a tiny little apartment and we looked out at a gas station and There would be a two-hour line there every day because you're only allowed to buy like four gallons Because they were rationing and they were keeping the price artificially low if you were to drive from chicago to ohio You had a carefully playing and you would then have to stop probably three times to Not fill your tank, but to you know get It was crazy. So that was the first way they tried to do it then Finally in 81 paul volker Was became the new fed chairman and said we just got to make it more expensive To get access to money for borrowers And the interest rate went way up Borrowers suddenly stopped borrowing as much And whether they were consumer borrowers or business borrowers and that effectively started dampening inflation That's what really happened and including by the way the government It's not her chance that when interest rates went up in the early 80s late 70s early 80s Is not her chance that the government Had to face we can't buy everything we want because money isn't free. We got to tax them And taxing is a harder thing to do than printing money Right. So so do you think that they would do that now that they would raise interest rates now? Or do you think that they're like that's that's a hard thing to pass? So let's just keep printing If you really made me guess We're not going to have much consumer inflation over the next four years We are going to have a lot of asset inflation, especially Three and four years from now takes a little while for that money to come out It would not shock me remember I said It was a republican administration that introduced wage and price controls If we started to see what we're seeing now like lumber And some of these other items where the prices are running really running It wouldn't surprise me at all that the government agents creates an agency To mandate prices on select essential items Because if the republicans did it in the 70s, I don't find it hard to believe the democrats would do it in 2020s intellectually I don't find that hard to Believe and of course what they'd say we're only going to do it temporarily We're only going to do it on essential things and we're only going to do it where we think people are being gouged, right? That's the slow So I wouldn't be shocked If late this year early next year, I don't think it'll happen But I wouldn't be shocked if it would that you start seeing Freezes, that's how it starts put on certain items So and what's really happening is very simple. What's really happening on those prices Look, I'm on corporate boards. I advise corporate boards. I advise and I can tell you in march 2020 april may june of 2020 every Board of it worth their merit or every executive worth their merit said shrink capacity Otherwise, we're going to get crushed and we're going to have to go out of business Shrink capacity freeze all expansion of capacity Especially in cyclical businesses like auto and and airline and Housing and these cyclical businesses you sat there going well if it was bad Then and it was bad then and if it was bad then It's going to be horrible now Because normally at the start of a downturn, you don't even know it's a downturn yet, right? You don't really know it's a downturn until you're in it four or five six eight months by trust me last year everybody You didn't have to be a genius to sit there by the end of march last year early april saying This is not going to be good in the near term And so they they reduced capacity by 10 to 40 percent That meant capacity went to levels of something like 2000 year 2000 or year 2010 What do you think happens if capacity got slashed so those businesses didn't go out of business? And let's just take you're a 2000 year 2000 capacity And demand suddenly grows back to 2020 excuse me to 2019 demand Prices are going to go through the ceiling So and that's what's happening not everywhere But in select places and those select places Make things very challenging Now what will happen? You know capacity will come back on Just a matter of when in the meantime they're making a lot of money And saying well, I don't want to expand my capacity because nobody can steal my customers anyway But you know it's only until next week somebody's going to say I got a better idea I'm going to keep prices up to my customers. I'm going to expand my capacity a little bit and steal their customers And that will start the process But it'll take six to 24 months for that to unwind and during that period. It is possible. We would get price controls of some title In key areas, so I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong So let's I'm real estate is your is your expertise. So I like to speculate with you What what do you think is going to happen in multifamily single family commercial? over the next You know 12 12 plus months, what are we going to see over the next couple years in those areas? What's your prediction? Um by and large Good thing like hotels The supply is shrunk by about 10% Right. So a bunch of hotels just went out of business or were shuttered. So I'm going to do it nationally 10% reduction in hotel supply And I think by the end of next year With the possible exception of international travel Demand will be back to 2019 So you're going to have 2019 demand with 10 lower capacity That's a great time for the hotel sector right done dig a genius to figure that out um office I think what happens is that the next year is challenging But people are going to come back to work right now. They're under no competitive disadvantage Not Going to work working virtually But once somebody starts coming back to work The competitive pressure picks up. It's like the difference between a shooting around before a game and having real defenders It's a whole different thing And I said to somebody the other day who has two children and was complaining to me about how awful virtual schooling is And I believe it is Was complaining to me about what a disaster it is for their kids and then he said to me Separate conversation. He says I don't think people are going to go back to the office.  And if I'm In your culture you deal with it, but You know, it's very hard to build a culture and attempt to grow a company So office people will come back, but it will take a little time and you'll see Um, improvement although the supply is not shrunk much. So there the supply is still about 2019 levels and it'll take a couple of years for demand to get back to 2019 levels Um industrial properties warehouses The supply Cannot keep up With the demand This was true before um COVID Because um, this is roughly if you bought that shirt online And let's say it took one square foot of warehouse space to deal with you buying that Uh, uh, let's say it took three square feet in a warehouse to deal with that selling to you online It only takes one foot if you buy it in a store One foot so it's a three to one Well now if you have online growing fast and it's a three to one factor Not a one to one factor It's very hard to overbuild it. So what happened in warehouse is the supply demand fundamentals are gee, we're going to build 2% Surely that'll take care of the demand in 2017 demand grew by 5% Rents went up Then in 18 Same thing they went up to two and a half percent new supply Demand grew by four and a half percent rents went up same thing in 19 rents went up rents went up They fundamentals there. So I think rents and warehouses keep going up even as they build more and more Because people don't understand this three to one phenomenon The people in particular that don't understand it are lenders Um, what did I forget apartments? Apartments solid Solid the biggest run of people Getting instant down payment money will be over by the end of this year Why do I say that because as we go back through the ball games as you go back on holidays as you go back out to eat That savings disappears that we were talking about goes back down to 7 7% so people don't have this massive down payment capacity and by the way people over 70 are done dying Abnormally fast They're dying but not abnormally fast. So that other phenomenon. I was talking about Is gone. It's not completely gone because it takes a few months to settle in the state So this year still has some of that so, um multifamily will do fine um multifamily will do just fine lot of capital chasing it And single family will do well the rest of this year But I actually look forward to slow as we go to next year because of this down payment phenomena and this affordability phenomena that this Flood of down payment money availability will be gone And now we're going to be just facing people saying, oh my god Uh, how do I afford it? You know, I don't have a down payment Everybody who had a down payment has already done it. So now you're into those who Don't have a down payment. So it becomes more of a challenge Single family. So I think it softens a bit Do they cover everything that way more or less senior housing has a serious problem as two problems One is people can't do math um Basically people don't start moving into senior housing until they're 78 to 80 their exceptions But in big way and so people keep saying That the baby boom the baby boom the baby boom. Well, the baby boom is not going to be 78 to 80 for another five to seven years the front edge of And in fact the people who are the right age to move into senior housing were the ones born during world war two And there weren't as many because 43 of the american males were in the military during world war two By the way, I was just looking there were 300 thousand births In great britain to american servicemen during the war 300,000 well, I mean Those were births that could have happened here. So they might have a surge in england but not here. We weren't here So second problem they have I think they'll solve Is this data I've seen Shows that only about 60 60 percent of caregivers Are getting vaccinated And you could say that's good or bad and personal freedom and all that Do you really want your grandma even if she's been vaccinated? Around a bunch of caregivers who aren't vaccinated And yeah, I read the press and it's 90 whatever 97 effective You want grandma to not only be affected, but you want everybody around her to be effective And so far they have not mandated that caregivers get vaccinated University of pennsylvania, which is a large medical system not senior care Just announced this week that they're going to require all all employees To get vaccinated they make them get flu shots So they're going to require them to get vaccinated. We'll see how that goes But if you're a senior Care owner that is a problem of are you looking to put grandma? In a place where you think 40 percent of the caregivers aren't vaccinated I don't know. Peter. I that's a challenge. Peter. I want to go back to the the single family homes because historically The vast majority of single family homes were purchased by You know people wanting to live in these houses, right people who have families But from what I from what I've been reading it looks like more and more you're seeing these investment groups which historically would buy Multifamily, you know apartment complexes duplexes More and more they're recognizing this opportunity with single family homes and they're buying multiple Single family homes as investments. You see them doing this with like air b&b Where they're renting them out in that way Do you see that continuing to grow and what kind of impact? Well, do you think that'll have? I think it will grow But they're mainly because I'm doing this from memory. There's something like 16 million single family homes That are rented out And the big guys, you know the kind of invitation homes american home for rent, etc There only some number like Two million of those and I think what will happen is it just keeps professionalizing.  So it's always been there and I think largely what has happened largely is institutionalization and professionalization Of more and more They're buying the home that your uncle Phil had or the six homes that your uncle Phil had The economics are very interesting and that basically If you buy one or two homes You deal with it with the back of the pickup truck.  It's hard not to make money if you do one or two or four six When it's hard is when you take institutional money and maybe you have 300 of them or 500 of them because now I have to get audited by a big firm and now I've got to have a Wharton mba Get reports to those investors Well, that overhead becomes crushing just becomes crushing If I got big enough if you have 3,000 homes 4,000 homes you can spread that overhead And it works again. So it's this very odd phenomena where you can Almost have to make money very small and you have to make money very large And so the big guys just try to get bigger to spread the overhead and to reduce the financing costs There is another niche people are playing and that is We own some land and um If I said I have enough land for 300 homes single family homes To be purchased and you asked me in a typical market that takes Five years to sell 60 homes a year is a big velocity. I mean, that's a big velocity. That's 15 homes a week That you're kicking along right On the other hand if I said rent up 300 apartments you'll do that in 10 months And so there is a bit of an arbitrage That if I rent homes I can lease them up with an apartment rent or speed But I buy the land as if it's got a low velocity of single family.  I have I have an invest another investment question for you So let's we're going to create two avatars and I would love your advice for these two people Uh, let's say you're you have a hundred thousand dollars saved knowing what we know about the next, you know, five to 10 years What would you do with that money? And then let's talk about another avatar.  What does that person do knowing what we know, you know, moving forward? So those two people, what should they so I would take I've got a new book coming out At the end of the year national geographic is the publisher with and I it's an odd combination of Albert Ratner who's 91 and Mike Royson who's head of Wellness at Cleveland clinic and me who would and we've got this book about living a long time and My advice to the latter namely you make a living you have a job You Will earn a bit more three years from now than you do today You'll own earn a bit more. Excuse me 10 years from now than you will three years from now if I were to say Do Move heaven and earth and save five percent a year Save five percent a year What do you put it in? I'm not promoting vanguard, but put it in something like a vanguard index fund state street and you know a no load Index fund and forget about it. You know just put it in there and if you can do it through a retirement like a 401k or an ira even better and just put it in there Don't Sell it. Don't trade it. Don't look just put your five percent a year And by the way, if you can figure out how to do seven percent a year even better Just put it in move heaven and hell to do it um That's my advice to them, which is I don't know if it's a great time now to invest I don't know if it's a bad time now to invest, but I know that over a long term. There'll be more good times than bad with hindsight to have invested and Just do that. Don't try to be sophisticated the biggest mistake I think the one of the biggest mistakes we all make in life is thinking we know things we don't know If you be it's one thing to not know stuff, but if you act on stuff, you don't know It kills you like my friend the english teacher who thought she knew how stocks would move in the future had no idea She's an english teacher. Why did you sell at the bottom? Why did you never go back in if she would have just left it untouched? She'd have been all right. She'd have been all right She was a real worst enemy and i'm not picking on her. I'm just using her example So for normal people and I come from normal people I mean my father didn't graduate from high school My mother graduated from high school. My father was a labor at standard oil of Ohio And then worked for the local little city government in a clerk kind of job My mother worked in a little perfume store counter, so I know what real people are. I wasn't real person I remember when we were on food stamps and so forth Don't try to outthink things simple simple simple safe safe safe um If I had the avatar that has more Assets more resources I would say Pretty much the same though I would then Have a little re portfolio probably You know and maybe a little gold Uh from a diverse i'm not a gold bug but the little gold and I'd avoid bitcoin And the reason I'd avoid bitcoin is And I don't mean this the way it'll stop if I can't figure it out how the hell can most And if Elon Musk Thought he had it figured out One week and then three days later said oops. I was wrong It just says it's not easy to figure out and if people get really rich Off of bitcoin god bless You know god bless It's hard to think of an avatar That that fits You know and unless there's a the obvious and they're all starting to tumble to it I've been saying to friends that bitcoin It's drug money. It's crime syndicate money It's guys who refuse to pay taxes.  I saw something that they believe twice The amount of money was used for illegal purposes like ransoms As was used to actually buy stuff With cryptocurrency last year that says a lot Do you want to be in an item? Where it's largely being used to ransom people launder drug money? You know, I don't think so. That's not for the little old lady from pasadena even if she has a lot of money So I would not go in a shell though. I would not go in a shell Okay, so what I keep hearing from you is if you've got some money You said REITs, which is investments in property that right right now property is probably a pretty good Bet because the prices are probably going to keep going up because supplies low. It's getting lower Interest rates are low. It doesn't sound like you think they're going to raise them anytime soon So it's probably a good time to keep buying property But is this going to be a bubble at some point? Are we going to see a large correction? How I mean how far can they keep going? So first of all it could drop the day after you bought Okay, and all you have to do is look at the last 20 year history of it, right? It could drop the day after Buy but If you hold it seven ten years, that is don't look at it You'll do okay Just don't look at it Um, you'll do okay now buy quality, right?  Don't go into the worst companies go into the better companies Try to buy the better real estate good things tend to happen to good real estate But and good things tend to happen to well Managed companies that doesn't mean bad things never happen to good companies And bad things happen to good real estate sometimes But I would skew the quality I would Do it and and be patient Um And yep, it's going to go up and down. It's going to be horrible. You're going to pull your hair out And yet 10 years later 20 years later You're going to be fine and we've studied that I've done research We wrote it up in linem and letter actually we're bringing it back out in the upcoming issue of linem and letter of of returns over a 10 year hold How they did and and you know you do okay You don't keep become a billionaire But you do okay if you want to become a billionaire overnight play the lotto All right, peter before one last question and then I'll let you go. I appreciate your your level-headedness. It's been a great conversation I hope we do this again Before we go though, uh, any books you recommend. What are some of your favorite books? Okay, so it's funny. I have a book club for my kenya Kids we support a lot of orphans All every every element of their life clothes food, et cetera, et cetera school. It's good. You know, you name it We have them going from I think our youngest is seven and we have One getting his man as phd. Excuse me at the university of georgia um In us so we have everything in between so you can imagine for the older ones I've tried to get them to expand their minds I'm gonna give you a couple from that But the reason I stress them is I think they're formative items for thinking Okay, and you mentioned one of them, which is melton freedman's free to choose You may love it or by the way, it's also was a video series. So you could do The the video series is as you might imagine not quite as nuanced in its argument But it's the same arguments made very well By melton freedman. So either the book or the video series. I think you can get the video on youtube. It's there. That's where I've seen it It's free on youtube Yeah, so I would say Free to choose now you may hate it But you'll learn the argument for real you may love it and I mean, but It is a brilliant It's just a brilliant statement in my mind second Is a book. Um, I think it's by nicolas ridley Called the rational optimist And it's probably about six years ago brilliant book That basically says That the world Is getting better Is getting better in fits and starts all of its history and For example, the sun king louis the 14th of france. None of us would want to live like louis the 14th Even though he lived more opulently than anyone in history But they didn't know how to do antibiotics So if he cut himself, there was a good chance he was going to die of an infection just a They didn't have indoor plumbing, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right? We would never want to live that way So I'd say the rational optimist I would say there's a book By hans rossling who passed away just after he finished the book Called factfulness Factfulness, I'm not even sure it's a real word, but factfulness in which he makes an important argument About again how the world is improving though in fits and starts and how all of us are captured By the world as it existed At the time we learned about it So we freeze in our mind How many girls finish High school in the world At the time you were in high school or college when you learned it And then you come back 20 years later in my case many more than 20 years is radically different And he it's a it's a wonderful book He has Again on youtube, there's a hans rossling brilliant It's probably about eight minutes seven minute video Of like the economic history of the world in five minutes or whatever it is I encourage people to see it now. It's a little dated It's about six years old or whatever So it's not updated, but you'll get the theme And it's brilliantly done Those would be and I'll tell you another book. You'll laugh at this I never read robin sincruzo Never read robin sincruzo So I have essentially a german grandson who's 12 and we read books and he chooses one and it's invariably You know some fantasy like harry potter or you know, people are half half animals or and so we read And and then when I pick you it's treasure island three muskets. So I'm doing these kind of classic Well, I had never read robin sincruzo Which is written in 1719 And it's very interesting in a couple of ways one You realize it wasn't written for children. There was no audience for children's books So you realize that's how you wrote for adults Back then If you wanted a big seller as an adult, that's what the level of reading and storytelling was Other than religious So that's one and the other is it's a fascinating story of what the hell would I have done? How would I have done? The guy was a slave at one point and owned slaves at another point And he thought nothing about And he thought nothing about The incongruity that was life in 1719 And so it's useful for us to get out of our shell And understand how the world has changed and on top of it. It's a ripping good story. So if I said for fun I would read that in the last set. I would do is it for fun You've never read john lachare who died what four months ago five months ago the great Mystery writer if you've never read the smiley trilogy Read them. They're they're great fun as well So I kind of gone the gamut in that regard. Awesome. Peter. This has been great I'd like to add two things uh human progress.org is a great website very similar along the lines of Factfulness and some of the other books where you can read about The progress that we've made in the world with literacy and medicine and innovation It's really phenomenal And then if you want to see a really short Milton Friedman video Because freedom chooses a long series just watch him talk about the pencil All you gotta do is type in Milton Friedman the pencil and you'll kind of get the the you get the gift of you know Figure out what kind of what he talks about a little bit and see if you want to keep going any further I'll just do one more I'll do one more. I started on my our charity effort in Kenya in very early 2003 at that time We went over as tourists right and um Did and I said well these animals are great, but what about You know, what about people and what about education because education matters a lot to me and at that time In 2003 there was no mandatory education in the country of Kenya Liter no mandatory education now today It's not perfect education. It's not wonderful But what was that 18 years later? You know, there is mandatory education At least up to age 12 you may say they should do more but And there are more schools and it's not wonderful the world evolves.  Yeah. Thanks again, peter. This has been a great interview. Thank you very much My pleasure and enjoy use becker stand when you go Much appreciated plan it out If you find yourself in this state where you're like i'm kind of losing Motivation i'm losing a little bit of steam Is to change your goals. It's not just changing your goals. I want to be very clear. That's part of it, right? It's your mindset the mindset's the important thing. Let me tell you that is the hardest part of this whole conversation because the inevitable


This is Nadia Tolokonnikova. She is part of a Russian punk rock collective called Pussy Riot. In 2012 she captured the world's attention for staging a protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's largest Orthodox church. Since then, Pussy Riot has continued using performance art to oppose political repression in Russia. People like me are labeled as extremists or terrorists. Nadia is now actively using cryptocurrency to promote her cause. The video of her music single Panic Attack sold for over half a million dollars as an NFT series in 2021. I wanted to bring a large human rights and charitable component to NFTs. In Cointelegraph's latest interview we talked to Nadia about how Pussy Riot is using NFTs as a tool for achieving social and political change. So first of all Nadia, I'm curious how did you take your first steps in crypto and in the NFT space in particular? I was always interested in that section of culture and tech because I believe that activists have to learn about what's going on with technology in order to be effective. So I have a group of friends who are particularly involved in the NFTs since well since late 2019 maybe earlier and except in hearing lots of great stuff from them. That's how I got involved. I dropped my first NFT in March 2021 and the reason why I decided to become active in this space is I wanted to bring a large human rights and charitable component to NFTs because I quickly realized that it's a space where people are open to hearing your thoughts. It's really flexible. It's a relatively new space so that's why you can actually establish residence with your own behavior. Initially I was pretty hesitant about entering the NFT space. It's a lot of activists for various reasons. My main reason was the homogeneity of the space. Due to various historical reasons, crypto is mostly owned by white men, white heterosexual men and those are not my demographics unless you need a dig. I don't really interact with them. I had a hard time actually entering the space because I was thinking how I'm going to fill within that community and then I started to connect with various groups of LGBTQ plus groups and women and crypto space. We talked about them promoting their activist issues for a while within crypto space and then realized that actually it's just like that from the surface and the statistics right now is unfortunately really daunting but we can change that. I decided that I'm going to join to make the statistics better and maybe in the future on board more women and LGBTQ plus folks into the space. What would you say is the main utility of crypto for a political activist like you? There are a lot of reasons why my activist would want to use crypto. I think first is because crypto is a great tool to transfer money without being controlled by the government if you don't want to and there is a problem with interacting with the financial system when you're living under the government. I'm from Russia and I'm fighting with my government for the last say 17 years more than half of my life and it's becoming harder and harder for us to fight with the government because they're using everything they have to oppress us including financial tools so it's not even difficult to raise money when you're critical to your government in Russia but also it's even difficult to use money that you already have in your bank account because often your bank account would be frozen because you are labeled as a terrorist or extremist by the court decision so legally technically everything is right illegal and technically according to the constitution they're protecting people from dangerous subjects as myself so people like me are labeled as extremists or terrorists so it becomes really difficult to deal with any infrastructure logistics so we need to build something on our own and definitely crypto has been a great tool to transfer money so there is that but also for raising money I mentioned it's difficult to even have money as an activist in Russia but it's even more difficult to raise money because one of the tools how our government oppresses us is frightening individuals who wanted to donate money to our cause effectively if you donate any sound that is considered as a large sound which could be even $500 to my cause you can be considered an extremist as well in my country so if you don't protect yourself if you don't encrypt this interaction then you're fucked and so we don't want we don't want our supporters to suffer that's why for a while actually so yeah you've been asking me about how we used how we used crypto before before NFTs so that's how we've been using it we for a while we have ETH and bitcoin wallets on our website so people can donate anonymously I believe that you're not you're not going to be an effective activist if you don't have global network of supporters well this is true for my movement so that's how we're all for instance day one but crypto gave us tools to actually empower ourselves and reach a much bigger amount of people than before so talking about NFTs specifically you became very much involved in the NFT space since the start of 2021 and in March you sold NFTs in order to raise money for victims of domestic violence women that were victims of domestic violence can you tell us about that initiative how did it go it was called panic attack and it consists of four four pieces in the first ever piece went for 100 ETH with Amir who bought it and then doddle price of four pieces was 178 ETH so that's how we entered the space so we raised quite a large sum for domestic domestic stulture for victims of domestic violence and we were able to transport a lot of women outside of Russia because the shelter was located in one of the southern republics of Russia I cannot name the exact one because because of security reasons because of safety reasons so I'm sure that you were raising funds for social causes even before NFTs so what is the novelty here what is the advantage the NFTs bring for this kind of fundraising purposes in social political activism NFTs are opening up us to new capital because we have large amount of supporters but most of them they don't they don't own a lot of money so crypto space is a really interesting space because not everyone but a lot of people who happen to be early adopters and crypto they care about the world they care about how the future is going to look like they don't think about what's going on how how are they going to enjoy their money today but they also think about how they're going to enjoy how future generations are going to enjoy this planet in 100 years from now so it's a really pretty incredible community with people who and the same that they they own a large amount of money because they they just bought Ethereum or Bitcoin when when it cost used to cost nothing and at the same time they care like a lot of them care about activist causes so that's that's the new development so we can say that Pussy Riot's activity is at the intersection between political activism and art and performance art so we talked about the political and the the activism side of that now let's talk about the art how are NFTs useful for your art to me as an artist it's really valuable that digital art for the first time was actually recognized as valid art and I know that there's been there's been some digital pieces exposed at museums and galleries before but generally as an artist who works only with digital assets since the very beginning of my career I never I never got they never produced any physical pieces so just had really hard time communicating to museums and galleries like where's where's my volume as an artist if I could not bring anything physical to the gallery and this NFT movement made me feel seen and happy and supported because it connected me with other other digital artists and just exposed me to this community of other people who experience the same problem and also at the same time exposed us to community of collectors who see real value in art in digital art now let's address some of the concerns around the NFT space so I'm sure that you know about all the concerns regarding the environmental problems caused by NFTs the energy consumption that is involved with the creation of NFTs so what is your take on that well there are a lot of NFTs there are ways to mint NFTs on different blockchains and you don't necessarily have to pick Ethereum you can mint on Tezos or Solana and they use proof of stake which is much more environmental environmentally friendly a concern with Ethereum is a very valid concern and that was a big it is a big question to me when I just started using Ethereum as a blockchain to mint my NFTs on what I decided is there's a question most it's it's not really fair to make artists responsible for that I think it's a question to the fossil fuel industry and it's a question to the way how we extract um extract energy as as humanity and as an activist I am committed to working on special renewable sources of energy and also besides that I know that Ethereum is going to switch to proof of stake and they have it in their roadmap now you're not using NFTs just to promote single causes you are also actively building your community within the NFT space and this community is particularly focused on LGBTQ plus people and women can you explain what is the purpose of this project problem that we're trying to solve is the problem of representation of women and LGBTQ plus people in the NFT space we believe that we're still pretty early in this space we actually have have chances to change it dramatically so our goal our goal is to change change the statistics of when it comes to NFT sales between when you compare women and men maybe you remember a month ago NFTs now posted this terrible statistics that women are women artists are accountable for only five percent of all NFT sales throughout the last year she's really sad it's combined both of women's work being cheaper and also women are not not participating equally with men in this space and the goal of Pussyverse is going to be to change that and we're going to see it looks going to be really interesting to compare the statistics in a year from now because we're super serious but making this work and there's going to be a combination of onboarding more feminine LGBTQ plus folks in the space and also at the same time working with collectors not necessarily not necessarily women and LGBTQ plus but collectors can be whoever whoever like we are going to work with male allies as well and it's going to be interesting to compare statistics obviously we're not the only player who is trying to change it but I think if we combine our efforts we really can change it and establish a new paradigm in this space because when it comes to traditional art world it's it would be pretty much impossible for just a comparatively small group of people to try to change the whole landscape but the NFT world is still so small I feel like with a good enough effort you can actually change it okay so that's very interesting can you give us more details about this DAO that you are building and how you are concretely going to achieve the goals that you mentioned it didn't announce anything yet for a reason because we want to do a lot of work behind the scenes before being on the structure of it but right now I can just state that we have intentions of creating this DAO for women and LGBTQ plus people there's going to combine already established artists in space and up-and-coming artists and basically I think the closest you can get a taste of what it's going to be with what I'm already doing if you take a look at Pussy Riot Twitter I highlight quite often new artists coming into space who I personally helped to on board tell them about MetaMask going base how you established that paying for their gas fees because as you mentioned they often can be really expensive to kick off their journey in the energy space and another part of what I'm doing is trying to find collectors for them because initially initially I was just jump-starting their journey into space and then I saw a couple of times that there is not there is no enough interest and it I think it's a combination of two factors that most of the collectors they're still men and they're really into brotherhood which is really good so another part of my job is to find empathetic collectors either men or women doesn't matter who actually can can feel that and support up-and-coming female artists so yeah that that's what I've been doing so far and we're going to continue to work on that but I want to scale it because I think this efforts that I've been doing over the last year they're nice and valid but know that one person only can change that much so I'm going to hire the whole team who are going to create educational materials for girls who want to enter the space and people who are going to be just some problem shooting if someone has any technical questions and also you know another another part of our effort is to find collectors and now another another concern regarding the NFT market specifically so a lot of people are saying that it's a big it's a bubble and that the market is overheated and that it cannot continue like that for much longer it will eventually crash so I'm not concerned that if that happens then you won't be able to use NFTs as that efficient method for for fundraising as before it's possible you know you never want to put all your eggs in the basket and you have other ways to raise money for our activism I don't think you should only hold everything just in one place but that's been said I'm positive that the value of art is not going anywhere and despite I'm focusing on working with real artists I personally love to focus on community building and on creating great art and I think in the long term these two these two are going to be long-term time investments and I never really cared that much about money I care mostly about building good community and if money are going to follow that good if they don't that's that's fine with me as well