Julian Dorey Podcast - #370 - “WORST to Come!” - Venezuelan on Maduro, Narcos & $17 Trillion Oil Plan | Daniel DiMartino

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Daniel DiMartino is a Venezuelan Immigrant, Geopolitical Analyst & Manhattan Institute Economist. DANIEL's LINKS - IG: https://www.instagram.com/danieldimartino/ - X: https://x.com/DanielDiMartino FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Intro 1:45 - Daniel’s Childhood in Venezuela, Chavez & Socialism, $17 Trillion Oil Industry 13:55 - 1992 Venezuela Coup, Maduro Cuban Alliance, Chavez takes hold 25:25 - Zohran, Daniel’s Parents, Chavez Oil Seizure Breakdown, Cuban Doctor’s Program 35:01 - Venezuela Sanctions, Daniel becomes economist & wakes up, Chavez Constitution 45:09 - Regime Change, International Law, Venezuela Exodus 58:07 - Daniel’s Grandfather Story, Maduro, Communism & relationship w/ Catholic Church 1:06:12 - Venezuelan Secret Police, “Cuba is next,” Singapore, Tariffs 1:16:21 - Maduro’s Rise, Maduro’s Charisma, Chavez Death, Narco Gov begins 01:26:42 - Maduro Narco Empire, Hostage Trade, Venezuelan Torture Chambers 1:35:47 - Imprisoning Judges, Daniel ends friendship, Julian-Daniel Regime Change DEBATE 1:48:07 - Regime Change DEBATE continues: China, Motive, Intel 1:58:08 - 2024 Venezuela Sham Election Explained, Chavez dissolved Senate, Latin Coalition 2:14:43 - Venezuela Transition Plan Expelling Cuban Spies, South American Military Aid 2:24:34 - MADURO RAID: Delta, CIA Sources on Ground; Tucker Carlson Guest Controversy 2:37:34 - Julian on lack of nuance in Geopolitics; Middle East Annoying, Enemies within 2:43:25 - Daniel’s Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 370 - Daniel DiMartino Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, what percentage of it is about drugs? If you say more than 5%, I don't think you have a good argument. I do think it's about way more than 5%. I don't think it's all about the oil. You think the Venezuelan drug trade is significantly even remotely comparable to Mexico? You think it's even remotely comparable? I mean, but the drugs that get to Mexico from here come from Venezuela. Some of them do, but like Mexico is the problem with that.

Absolutely, I agree. And I think that the president wants to take a lot of things in Mexico too. he already said he offered U.S. troops in the ground in Mexico to the Mexican president. They actually said that this week. Interesting. Venezuela is different because it's an illegitimate regime. They're actually sponsoring terrorism. That's what the dog money is for.

The human rights violations are huge. The migrant crisis that they cost in the United States, Americans have died. Lake and Riley died because of a turn there are a gang member. So there's a lot of reasons to do this. What's up, guys? I just want to give a huge thank you to Daniel for coming in here to do this on Saturday night. So last minute after the invasion happened Saturday morning.

Obviously, I was working the phones that day trying to figure out who we could get in here to be able to cover it and for Daniel to turn around so quickly and get in here Saturday night so we could put the episode out for you guys now on Monday. I really, really appreciate that. If you're not following me on Spotify,

please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you. So when I woke up to this invasion this morning, I call my boy Sognick, I was like, you got to have someone for me, right? And he said, yeah, I got this guy, Daniel Di Martino. I was like, what the fuck am I going to do with an Italian? I need a Venezuelan. He's like, no, no, I swear to God, he's Venezuelan. But you got some Italian roots in there, right? There's plenty of Italian Venezuelans, okay? president of Venezuela. I mean, where do you think the Italians could go when they were banned from coming to the United States? So they gave my grandparents from my dad's side are Italian, from my mom's side are from Spain. No shit. And they got to Venezuela in the 50s when they were

teenagers. Not that long ago. Yeah. Not like hundreds of years ago or anything. In fact, they lived in Venezuela and they left before they passed away. They left around the time I left, which was 2016. And so, you know, it's a shame really because they loved Venezuela and nobody really wanted to leave. They built their entire lives there. My parents were born and raised there. I was to, we all lived in the same city in Caracas, we had a great life. And then it went all down the drain, right? I mean, I had a life similar to what many Americans have when I was a kid. And then I became like an African country. Yeah. And I don't think people understand like the effects of like hyperinflation and what that does. And you are actually like a PhD, almost done PhD at Columbia.

in economics, so you quite literally cover this stuff and you live through it. But, you know, my friend Matt Kemenosh back in the day, I always remembered this quote. He's like, you know, when inflation hits 10, 15 percent, people's eggs cost a lot of money. They get pissed off. They go on social media. Inflation, if it ever hits like 40 percent or 50 percent or God knows the percentages it hit in fucking Venezuela, I mean, people are in the streets and that always stuck with me. Well, imagine people here were complaining and everybody remembers very, I don't know,

angrily, the Jimmy Carter era in the 70s, when we had over 10% inflation a year in America, we had 10% inflation a week or a day in Venezuela, not per year. Venezuela had more inflation in one year than America had in 250 years of history. So, you know, when they left, quite literally you could not fit enough cash in your wallet

to buy anything. You couldn't fish enough cash in your pocket to buy an empanada, okay? Have you had an empanata? Of course. Not as a fucking great. Or on an Epa, I don't know if you had Venezuelan food, but yeah, you couldn't. So you had to pay everything in debit card or credit card.

The problem was that the points, like the tech, where you tap the card or inserted, those were imported. The government controlled the imports. Then they fell apart and you couldn't replace them. So then none of the technology to pay with card worked. And so you couldn't pay them, so you had to bring bags of cash with you. It's like Germany in the 1920s. Yeah, they were burning Deutschmarks for fucking fire. It was crazy.

Venezuela make art of the cash. Oh, they make art of it. Yeah, the refugees in the border with Colombia, they make art. And the cartels, I don't know if you know, but most currencies are made of the same material. It's a special paper. And so, quite literally, they would money launder, meaning they would clean the print in the paper, and they would reprint a different currency for a hundred percent gain. Oh, my God.

Yeah, there's so much going on here. I know, I know. We're going to break it all down. Obviously, people know we're recording this on Saturday night. The podcast is coming out on Monday. This morning we woke up to news that there was an invasion by the Delta Force from the United States military, along with what sounds like CIA, ground branch. We're learning more about it. In Caracas, where they carried out a mission to essentially capture Maduro, who is the president of the illegitimate.

The president, the dictator of Venezuela, along with his wife, and they have now been extradited here to New York. Didn't you say they just landed? They just landed in a helicopter. Do we have video? He was looking like Leonardo DiCaprio in one battle after another with the fucking sunglasses. We got video of this? All right, let's roll this, Steve. All right, so this is at the 34th Street helicopter terminal in New York.

Oh, isn't that where people do the blade thing, the private thing to JFK? he got VIP treatment there it is VIP it's also where they perp walk Luigi where he was looking like he was going to fucking Arkham Asylum wow well I've heard that he could go to the same prison as El Chapo

yeah well they're gonna probably take him to the Metropolitan Holding Center right Isn't that where Epstein was? Yes Well there's one in Brooklyn and there's one in Manhattan Yes

so he could go to either one of them Epstein was at the one in Manhattan where the cameras don't work. I see. You know. VIP heliport. Wow. Great treatment. Do we have video?

Can we skip ahead, Defe? Do we have video of the actual Maduro getting off? And I don't know if they like brought his wife with him. We're just skipping ahead here for a sec. There's a fucking, there's a million people on the ground. Let's go. Oh yeah, yeah. So he got in a car.

It was an armored vehicle. You don't see him. Okay. That's good defense. So essentially, you know, they capture this guy in the invasion. We'll go through everything that happened there. And I want to get like the full reaction. I want to get the reaction of people on the ground. You and I were talking about my good friend Christian who's worked on our team for the last year, who I'm very tight with who lives right there in Venezuela and watch this whole thing live and is obviously he has a lot of thoughts today. He is safe. By the way, everyone, we're all good to go. But before we get all there, I'd love to get like your personal story. Because you already mentioned, you knew. a normal Venezuela when you were at least a little kid and then, boom, something happened. So in telling your story, I think we can also get a lot of context on what the geopolitical takeover look like there when Chavez came in. Yes. So that you know, Chavez was elected in December of 98, democratically, okay?

He won, he was a socialist, he won, he reformed the Constitution. I was born a month after he got elected, January 99. And at the beginning, the first few years, it was still fine, in part because you have to remember Venezuela as an oil producing country, we have the largest oil reserves in the planet. Yes. I mean, more than Saudi Arabia. Yeah. It wasn't producing as much as Saudi Arabia, but it was producing three and a half million barrels.

It's pretty good. That's pretty good. Most of it came to the U.S., refining the Gulf is the specific type of oil that is actually useful for the U.S. Why? Because it's heavy kind, and all the refineries in the Gulf Coast are designed to refine Venezuelan oil, light crude from the Middle East or like crude from fracking. It's actually the specific type of oil we need. Interesting. So it was very useful. It was a very mutually beneficial

relationship. Venezuela was also the country that provided... Keep it in the money like that, yeah. That provided the most oil to the allies during World War II. I mean, Venezuela has been very crucial geopolitically. And what happened was, as Chavez implemented his socialist agenda, And by that, I mean, he began, obviously, taking over the country politically, but economically, putting price controls on the things that he thought were too expensive. Those things then disappeared from the grocery shelves. Because if the businesses can profit, what would they sell it? So they stopped selling it.

And so I had to line up for eggs, and I had to line up for chicken. And then I was in school. And, you know, first it starts with, like, your favorite brand of a product disappears. And then it's like, oh, why is there no milk in the grocery store? for a week. That's strange. And then you suddenly had to spend a long time in the grocery store. By the way, Daniel, I'm sorry about it. Can you just make sure you have it out in front of you like this rather than like talking over it like that? You know what I mean? Is this better? Yes, that's way better. So please continue. So that's what happened with the grocery stores

and then it gets so bad that, for example, you're in school and the teacher says, sorry, class, a friend just texted me, there's chicken in the grocery store next door. I have to go line up before anybody gets there, so class is dismissed. Whoa. And then, because it wasn't just price controls on the grocery stores, it was the government took over the companies. They went to the farmers and they took people's land. There was a very famous case, and I would love you, you could pull the picture of this man.

His name is Brito. He was the first farmer that really went on a hunger strike for his own private property. He had a family farm that Chavez decided to take over. And so when he would take it over, is this like your stereotypical, a few military cars pull up and say this is ours now? Oh, yes, it's actually the military. They even went to the Coca-Cola can facility and you had a general opening a Coke can say, this is mine now. Because they said we're going to give it to the workers. We're going to hand the power to the people, right?

The people are going to run the businesses. It's like the Soviet Union, like Cuba. I mean, the Cubans were there advising on all of this. I mean, this is part of why this happened. There is Franklin Brito. Oh, this is the case you're talking about? That's his sign. But I would love if you could show him and how what's starved he looked.

He says, I mean, hunger strike asking justice from the international organizations from my human rights because they took my... Oh, there he is. They're his. Wow. There he is. And he was a martyr for private property, 2009, that was. Did he die for the hunger strike?

Yeah, he died. Oh, my God. So was he doing that in a prison? No, he did that in the street. Just in the street. Oh, my God. And then they began arresting people for their property, of course. It was, you know, not just farms that they took. It was factories. It was little stores. Chavez would walk around the street. There's a famous video of him walking and saying, what's that building? Oh, it's a jewelry store. Expropriator. It's not yours anymore. It's the workers. And it's really, obviously, that means it's the state. but the workers manager, but then it goes broke. Because the government simply doesn't have the same incentives

of the private sector, right? What does a politician want in life? Power. They want to be re-elected. Right. And what does a businessman, a private business owner want? To make profits for the business and subsist. So if you have those two different goals,

if you're in a democracy to gain power, you don't want to increase your revenue and decrease your cost. You want to increase your cost and decrease your revenue. Why? Because you're going to give things for free to get votes. You're going to hire more workers than you need because I created union jobs, right? And then in the businessman, in the other side, they want to maximize profits, so they want to be efficient, right?

But they also want to sell things, increase their sales. So every single thing the government took went broke. They put signs in all the products that they made, big red hearts that said made in socialism. Made in socialism. That's right. There were signs in the entire country, too, with a heart made in socialism. Socialism and the face of Chavez, big public housing that they built with the signature of the president all over its side. And of course, that wasn't your apartment.

That was the government's apartment. So if you left and somebody else got in, it's not yours anymore. It's theirs because nobody can be evicted in Venezuela. People have a human right to housing. So you can't evict anyone. So people have housing, but they have no jobs. Their money's not worth anything. They get no imports.

Their economy totally tanks. their quality of life tanks, but they have a roof. Well, and Chavez actually got lucky because the oil barrel was around $10 a barrel in 1999. By 2009, it was $100 a barrel. So imagine your oil revenue multiplies times 10, and it was still not enough to pay for socialist programs. They had to print money and inflation shut up like crazy.

And then when the oil ran out, because they also ran the oil industry to the ground, We literally had explosions in the refineries. Then they ran out of money and then we had hyperinflation. All right. Let's take even one more step back for a second before you were born. Yeah. So Chavez was a guy who was trying to take power for a while.

Yes. I believe he was arrested at one point in like 92. He tried a coup. What happened there? Well, there was a democratically elected government that took some unpopular measures economically. Like, what were those? They raised the price of gas.

Okay. I mean, you can have whatever complaint about it, but what Chavez did is do a coup and kill people and bring tanks into the city and planes and bomb it. Right. He actually killed civilians. He took the government TV station and killed people. I mean, you can say anything about what Trump did. Trump didn't kill him in Venezuela or anything. Well, you know, if you're going to do a coup, you got a coup, right?

Well, but that's what he did. He failed and then he went to prison. The problem was that the following president decided to pardon Chavez and bring him out of jail. Now, why would he... Because in all seriousness, strokes aside, why would he do that to a guy who's proven to be a murderer? Because of power reasons, Democratic. So Caldera, the guy who won the next elections, he won a very closely contested election, four-way race. He won with like 33% of the vote against other guys who had like 30, 25 and 20.

So anybody could have won. Right. And Caldera, even though he was kind of like a center-right guy, he created a coalition that we call in Venezuela, the Cochorage Coalition, because it was a ton of little parties that we call cockroaches. There were communist parties, actually, who the concession to get the endorsement of them for this guy who wasn't a communist was, you need to pardon all the coup plotters.

And so that was his concession to get into office. It's like some straight-up game of throne shit. Yeah, and, you know, we paid the price for his big mistake. Yes. He pardoned him, and then Chavez immediately began campaigning Jerome for president. Now, looking back on it and the, I don't know, wins and undercurrents of society. What do you think it was in the 90s that pushed whatever it ended up being legitimately 30, 35, 40% of people to actually believe like, you know what?

Chavez might be the guy and then, you know, he eventually wins. Well, number one, corruption scandals of the previous politicians. It's true. They robbed money. Yes, they were corrupt. But that looks like babies in diapers compared to what we have today. But yeah, it's true. There was corrupt. but Venezuela was still the richest country in Latin America. I think that context is important. By GDP, you're talking about it. By GDP per capita. Yeah, yeah.

There were millions of Colombian immigrants in Venezuela seeking safety and jobs. Right. From the narco wars. Of course. Yeah. Colombia was a hellhole compared to Venezuela in the 90s. Yes. Now it's the opposite.

Now there are millions of Venezuelans in Colombia. It's like three million actually. So, you know, the... There were problems of corruption. There was a banking crisis that was very unlucky time that obviously crashed. In the 90s. Yeah, there was a recession. And so that obviously drove a lot of opposition against the current government and Chavez

was able to galvanize it. And I'll say, Chavez got a lot of help from the Cubans. The Cubans had a big problem. The Soviet Union fell in 1981. And they began what... In 1991. Yeah. It began what was called the special period in Cuba, which is a fancy term for they were

starving to death because they were. stopped receiving subsidies. Right. And they needed a new cash cow. And which was that cash cow? The Venezuelan oil. That's what Castro won. And he wanted it since the 60s.

There was an incident that you can look up called the Makuto incident. The Makuto incident? Something like that, yes. Where Cuba tried to invade Venezuela in the 60s. Oh, I don't know anything about this. Oh, of course. The Cubans have been plotting these for decades. They just figured out that it was better to do it peacefully rather than through a coup and an invasion.

Wow. Wow. What was that? But again, so when did Venezuela first discover ballpark that they had a ridiculous amount of oil? How many decades ago was that? Oh, that was like before World War I. Right. So we're talking like 1900. Yeah, early 1900s. And then Venezuela only became a democracy in 58. So, wow. So Cuba in the 60s, again, they still had the backing of the Soviets, which is certainly worth noting because that was a powerhouse. Yes. But they wanted to invade this enormous country of- Machu-Kutu-Kutu-Kutu. That's it. They wanted to invade this enormous country, comparatively speaking, Venezuela who already had this cash cow of oil. That almost seems like it would be impossible to do if Venezuela had that. Well, it was a guerrilla warfare thing. You know, Venezuela was very unstable.

It had just become a democracy. There was a lot of guerrilla warfare in Latin America, a leftist guerrillas, that Cuba was supporting. I mean, Che Guevara was the leader of it, remember. Right, right. And so that's really. That's really what their strategy was. So we have this up. This is the one you were talking about, the Machu Rucito Raid.

Am I saying that right? Yeah. All right. So the Mature Rucudo raid, also known as the invasion of Mature Rikudo, was a battle involving the Venezuelan Army and National Guard troops against Cuban-trained guerrillas on May 8, 1967, a dozen guerrillas landed in Venezuela near the coastal town of Matured, with one of them drowning. Venezuelan authorities engaged three of them on the night of May 10th, and the battle lasted into May 11th, killing one and capturing the other two. The remaining eight linked up

with guerrillas in the Andes who were attempting to overthrow President Raul Leone. It was a shit show down there. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So what I'm trying to convey here is that Cuba had a goal of taking over Venezuela for a long time. Fidel Castro did. Fidel Castro trained Hugo Chavez and Maduro. Maduro literally attended trainings in Cuba as a young man. Like Scientology, but for communism trainings? Yeah, more like for violence, but yes.

And intelligence and like how to take over a government, how to establish a dictatorship. We're going to get to Maduro in a minute because he was like literally a fucking bus driver. Yeah, at the beginning. I'll say I think people underestimated him. You do not become the dictator of a country. being a dumb person. Oh, I agree with that. I'm saying, but he literally began as a bus driver and

then worked his way all the way up. So it's like how far back was he still a bus driver when he was doing classes with Fidel? I don't know, but let's stay with Chavez for a minute. When did Chavez and Fidel consummate a relationship officially? I mean, as soon as he began campaigning, he already was a friend of Castro. And then when he became president, he became their first ally. Right. Chavez began saying that, you know, Cuba, you know, you couldn't win an election in Venezuela at the beginning saying that Cuba was not a dictatorship, right? You're not going to reveal all your cards. The Venezuelan people opposed the Cuban regime.

Right. And, you know, people didn't think that Chavez was going to become a dictator initially. Only a few people thought that. The guy who did the coup, who was a communist, they didn't think. Unfortunately, a lot of people were very dumb, okay? I mean, my family was not one of the people who voted for Chavez, but even my parents didn't think. he was going to get this bad. I've asked them and they're like, yeah, you know, we thought it was going to be a terrible

leftist government, but we didn't think we were going to have to live our own country ourselves and that this was going to last 26 years. What amazes me about a government like that, and this goes for any place, not just Venezuela, is the fact that, okay, they come in with these ideas speaking to the common man who might be going through some difficult times and telling them they're going to solve their problems. but then they get in there and the mask comes off and they reveal who they are and somehow obviously they're dictating through fear and pressure and throwing people into gulags and shit like that but somehow they're able to generate enough of that fear that people around them from the military to the government to a lot of the people themselves decide that it is not possible to overthrow them or disobey them There was an attempt, no. I mean, there were many attempts.

I mean, Chavez was couped in 2002 by the military that was still legitimately, you know, in Venezuela's interest. The problem is that they failed, and as soon as they failed, Chavez perched the entire government. A lot of people went into Excell in 2002 and three. There was an oil strike. All the oil workers had to leave because they were fired on national TV. That's actually the beginning of the decline of Venezuela's oil industries. That Chavez fired all the engineers. And then we had no engineers.

And so who's going to bring the oil out? But let's talk about that purse, though, because maybe I should have made that point a little clear. Yes, over the years, like there have been a lot of problems. We've talked about all the dispute or elections already and things like that. But the fact is, when those things do happen, they fail because enough people close around him in a lot of powerful positions decide, even though the Trojan horses opened up and this is their moment to be like, you know what, we're on this side. they go, you know what? We'll stick with this guy. That's what blows my mind.

And I'll say, especially in the early years, Chavez had a lot of popular support. Even if he began rigging elections and doing a lot of cheating. Mara Corrine, I'm a charter of the current opposition leader. How she became famous is that she was an election integrity activist.

An election integrity activist. That's right. She was the first one sounding in the alarm that they were cheating in the elections. And she was right. Of course. And so, but Chavez still had, you know, maybe 40 plus percent popular support.

He was very charismatic. People were totally brainwashed. The problem is that now they figure it out, now that they're starving to death, that they were wrong. You know, the most shocking moment when I see people really change. Though you have to remember,

the vast majority of the current adult Venezuelan population was not an adult when Chavez got elected. Meaning most people currently today, living in Venezuela, have no fault of what happened. The overwhelming majority. I mean, I wasn't in my mom's womb

when Chavez got elected. Right. I have no fault. I didn't vote for this. So after the rigged election last year, or well, 2024 now, there was this old lady who was crying in front of a journalist saying, I repent for my choice because I voted for Chavez, she said. And now my grandchildren are starving and my family left the country.

And it is my fault, she said, because I belong to a movement of trash. And you know what? I thought in that moment, because I, to be honest, for a long time, I had a lot of resentment against those people, because it's their fault, right? But I thought, you know, I totally forgive this woman. And I want to hug her and kiss her. But, you know, you can change your mind, but it's too late to change it by votes. Yeah, and like you've had to live through it. And that's why it's really heavy because, you know, you literally had to leave your own country, you know, broke up your family and

and what you guys had built there. But. And people don't want to leave their country, you know. Venezuela never left our country. We welcome people like my grandparents. And we all work together. I mean, you would never want to leave where you are, unless there's some drastic thing that happens.

Right. And that's what happened to us. There was a drastic thing. Right. If you look at it on a micro level of something that has happened here to compare it for a second. You just had Zoron get sworn in, who is a Democratic socialist, has some extreme policies and stuff like that.

But like I'm thinking about that old woman you're talking about who's thinking back and regretting her vote. And now I'm also looking at some of the famous videos we've seen of Zoron going and reaching voters who would vote for Trump. Have you seen some of these? Yes, I have. So obviously it's been tried over and over again throughout human history. socialist policies don't work that's right the average person working their job trying to pay their bills in an economy that is not serving the people of the middle class and the lower class in this country at this point you know i'm not i'm not saying you shouldn't be aware of everything going on or

whatever but they're voting on the one two or three most important things in their lives and numero unros can i pay my bills that's right and so when you have a candidate unlike andrew quomo who who couldn't be bothered to get out of his fucking black car for an interview, let alone go actually talk to a voter. And with a terrible background of what he did and a terrible governor, I mean. Of course. Yeah, we don't have to go there. I wouldn't speak well about him.

Yeah, but like when you compare that with a guy like Zoron who quite literally rolled up his sleeves, went out into these neighborhoods and instead of, you know, you can think the guy's fake as hell, and I certainly think he is a political kind of fake snaky guy, but like he went and talked to these people eye to eye did not judge them for voting for Trump. He asked them why. And they said, well, I can pay my bills more with this. And then he tells them some policy ideas he have that you and I both know

don't work because they're very socialist. But the average person who might not be thinking about this stuff or be as well versed because they're more worried about the important things in their life, they hear that. And they go, oh, so I can get more money in my pocket? Great. Julian, what happened with Mamdani and Cuomo is almost the same as the first Chavez election. Yeah, that's why I thought. The difference is that, I mean, my daddy doesn't have the capacity to do to New York City what Chavez did to Venezuela.

But I can tell you, I think he would love to. This is why he came out with a statement today in support of Madura. I mean, this is somebody... Effectively. Yeah. I mean, this is somebody who says he wants to arrest Nets on Yahoo. When we arrest an actual foreign leader

that's indicted with a crime here in the United States, he's like, oh, that's unfair, that's intervention. Give me a break. Like, he just doesn't like the Jews and he loves Madura. I mean, that's how interpreted. He's picking and choosing. It's very obvious.

So, and, you know, he wasn't even willing to call Trump, sorry, Maduro a dictator in his podcast with Jorge Ramos, the Democrat journalist. Oh, he wasn't? Yeah, of course not. You can look it up. Put Jorge Ramos and Sir Ramat. It was an amazing video because Jorge is on the left, but I admire Jorge. Because Jorge went to Venezuela, faced Maduro, and it was such a tough interview that

Maduro arrested Jorge. In 2019, right? Yeah, I think so. And so, you know, Jorge is a great journalist. And he stands for freedom in Venezuela, too, and Cuba. And he asks him point blank, you know, are they dictators? And he's like, you know, he couldn't say it. He couldn't say it.

That's so strange. No, it is not. It's because he does not think so, Julian. It's because he's so ideologically committed, like the Democratic Socialists of America. Did you know that the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, where Mamdani belongs to? They go to Venezuela every year. Really? they just went in the 2024 election, the rigged one.

They wanted to celebrate with Malora. They were greeted by the dictator themselves. The one that is now New York City indicted. What's the name of this group? The DSA. So the literal... American citizens going to Venezuela to celebrate with this narco-terrorist dictator.

That's wild. You should look up, DSA, Venezuela. See what they've said. See the picture. They've been greeted in the Venezuelan presidential palace. Yeah, Daniel, when I say it's strange, by the way, I say it's just so strange because it can't process to me. I know. It doesn't surprise me that he's saying that.

You know what I mean? It's like, wow. So this is where he comes from, and that is my fear. But, you know, obviously he's mayor, not president. But the comparison was the Venezuelan people fell for the same trap. Yeah. We fell for the same trap. That's what I'm saying with the comparison to the old woman, though.

I'm glad that you're forgiven and stuff like that, but I understand also that there's people like, what the fuck, how could people vote this in? But I have now seen live on a micro scale how it happens when good and honest people are doing that. And they're not doing it because they're trying to have some fucking communist revolution necessarily. Right. There's a small subset that obviously is. Yeah. But like the average person is just like, oh, this might be better for me to pay my bills, even though you and I both know it's not. And that is such a hard Ooh, it's a tough... And the charisma, it's all about the charisma.

People really vote based on how much they like a politician. You know, unfortunately, the average voter isn't as, you know, informed or intelligent about it. It's more about the vibes. Sure. What were your parents at the time, like in 98, when you were in the womb and this guy was getting elected? What were your parents' official political stances? Did they belong to a party? Obviously, they weren't communist, but, you know.

No. I mean, they voted. They weren't not voters in every election. They've told me that they didn't vote in every election, but they tended to vote in every presidential election, but not all. And what did your parents do? They, well, by around that time,

my mom had graduated college a few years earlier, same as my dad, they were young in their 20s, and my mom worked as an administrator in a bank, and then my dad and her were just opening a gas station, which was her business, that's what we did for a living. Yeah. Kind of funny in an old producing country, we had a gas station. I was going to say, like, it's right there.

You just fucking put the hose. He was a British Petroleum Gas Station, BP, that the government then took, by the way. Yes. And we became like state employees, essentially, living off subsidies. Now, I held that question in earlier because there was a lot going on, but you were talking about specifically the period of like 0203 after the first initial coup and then, or coup attempt. And then Chavez goes in and officially like nationalizes all the oil refineries. and things like that.

We are talking about companies, though, like BP, like Exxon, huge multinationals from all different countries around the world that serve, you know, a ton of countries around the world. And effectively, they had an enormous cash cow here that they were partnered in in Venezuela, and overnight, the suits were kicked out on a plane. And by the way, not just the oil companies, many glass-producing companies, many food companies, many tires,

I mean, Michelin was there. I mean, so good year, like, so many American companies were there. What's the name of the trucking company, the American farming trucks? John Deere. Oh, John Deere was there. John Deere, I mean, all the American companies were there. And they just sent them, they told the American executives who were there to go home and took over the property. They took over their property.

and then they didn't pay them. But they didn't just do that to the American companies. Oh, yeah, to the Venezuelans. Of course. They did that to everyone. Well, not the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians. They came in. They made a little exception.

Oh, yeah, they came in. Interesting. Oh, yeah, the Chinese and the Iranian and the Russian state-owned oil companies are extracting oil in Venezuela right now for free. For free? Of course. They don't pay anything.

They just take all the oil for free. How does that make any sense from a business perspective for the country? For Maduro is great because he gets political support and intelligence and yeah. So he's just trade. All right. So they're doing it for free in that the people of Venezuela don't get any money because the oil is being taken. They don't pay taxes.

But Maduro's getting a lot of benefits for his power structure. Of course. What the Cubans get for the free oil or give to Maduro is that they control the entire intelligence apparatus. They tap the communications. They keep the Venezuelan military. check. How do they do that? Well, by tapping the communications and having a Cuban officer in every military unit, a foreign Cuban officer in every Venezuelan military unit. It's just to keep people, to make sure they're not betraying anyone. Wow, that goes deep. You know,

have you heard of the Cuban Doctors Program? No. They send doctors around the world. It's like a humanitarian thing. No. They're not doctors. That's the problem. They're spot. I mean, some of them are doctors to be fair on their victims and some of them try to escape when they're sitting in other country and they're good people but most of them are spies and that's why Cuba sends these doctors for free to other countries now when when they took over all these businesses though multinationals in 0203 the United States and many countries around the world I believe but let's focus on the US because that's who's at the heart of this right now yes put a lot of sanctions on the country? Well, no. Not yet. The sanctions only came in, the only sanctions that

existed in Venezuela for most of his history were against, like, Chavez himself, like they took his bank account. So they didn't. The only sanction on the state, entire state, came on in 2018 and 2019 under the Trump administration. So they hadn't sanctioned? I didn't know that. So this is a myth that the left, especially the DSA, tries to push. That, oh, it's all because of the American sanctions. There were no sanctions of Venezuela. What are you talking about? They took the bank accounts of some leaders, yes, under the Obama administration. That was great. Like, we take the bank accounts of Alchapa Guzman when he's indicted in the United States. Yeah. I mean, there were entire buildings in Manhattan and Miami that were owned by

Venezuela and cronies. Entire buildings. And so that was, of course, not going to fly, but that's not a sanction on Venezuela. That's kind of wild, though, that like, obviously they were controlling a lot of different companies from a lot of different countries as well. But, of course, there were a ton of American huge multinationals there who have enormous government connections, big parts of our GDP and everything. Chavez goes in and just kicks them out, cuts a whole piece of their revenue overnight. And we didn't sanction them. Of course not.

That was in the early 2000s. President Bush didn't impose any sanctions over the Venezuelan nationalization. I would have thought he would have cared about that of all people. You know what I mean? He loved a good intervention. By that time, there were a lot of problems. in Congress that Bush had in 2006 and with Iraq. That was not the focus.

Yeah, but 0203? But that was not when the nationalization happened. It was a little later. It was a little later. 2006, 2007. So it was a timing thing. And then it just kind of got, the buck got passed for a lot of years.

And Venezuela essentially. And the Great Recession happened here. So no, they just didn't, when I get in trouble. No, the real sanctions came because of the human rights violation against protesters. And they were sanctions against individuals. individuals in Venezuela, meaning their bank accounts,

they're traveling privileges, they couldn't come to the US or to the EU, that's it. Right. The sanctions against, for example, the sanction, like the US didn't, the US stopped importing Venezuelan oil, that was 2018 and 2019. God, I didn't realize it was that long.

And by then also, Venezuela was producing like only half a million barrels of oil. It wasn't even producing very many, because the regime had destroyed the oil industry already, So it wasn't even a big impact. Venezuela was selling all its own to China anyway. Right. For free.

Yeah, exactly. Selling. You know, it's like a loan. And given it for free to like Caribbean islands to bribe them for the votes of the United Nations and other organization. That's why a lot of the other tiny countries were super supportive of Chavez

because they were all getting paid. Now that they run out of money, you see all this island saying, please thank you, Donald Trump. We love you. Right. Because there's no more money. Hey, guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please take one second and hit that subscribe button.

Thank you. What was, so when did, before I even look at your perspective, because you're a little boy during some of this, even at the beginning, obviously, when did your parents start to realize, oh, fuck? Like, this is bad, bad. Well, actually, my dad wanted to move out of Venezuela already in 2002. Early. He wanted to go to Spain. That's what he told us. And then my mom didn't want to, for actually cultural reasons.

She just tells me she just didn't want to raise me in Spain. She thought they were too liberal. And so they're like, no, we'd rather stay in Venezuela. It's more safe, conservatively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's the reason that we didn't move to Spain into 2002. But they saw it. Yeah, they were really, yeah.

Especially my dad, yeah. And then they didn't really want to leave anymore. And I'm the one who pushed them to leave. I left first. I left in the summer of 2016 because I got a scholarship to come to college. I really wanted to leave. 17, 18? I was 17.

We finished high school at 17, it's get through 11 in Venezuela. And so since I was young, so I'm crazy, okay? When I was 12, I was reading Milton Friedman. Oh shit. I read Free to Choose when I was 12. What made you do that? Well, I was seeing inflation shortages around me. So you went at 12, you had, you understood what inflation was.

Of course. Yeah. It was in my school cafeteria. Right. I couldn't pay for things. Like, this was very clear in our lives, you know. And, you know, yeah, I mean, I was somebody that was interested in these topics. I wanted to learn about economics.

I went to my school library, and I looked in the economic section, and I found this book, Libre de Lehir, free to choose, and I picked it up. And it's just like a gatsun. And then that took me down the rabbit hole. I began, like, watching YouTube videos of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And I became obsessed with the United States. Wait a minute. I was watching like the 2012 presidential debate

of Romney versus Obama in Venezuela and like super anti-Obama when I was a kid. Wait a second. There's a lot on the way. How did you, they let Milton Friedman books in your library at school? Yeah, there was. Like the government allowed that?

Well, first I wasn't in a government school. I wasn't a private school. But either way, the government, I would have thought, has all control of education. Certainly the government schools, but not in the private. schools. Wow. Okay. Most private schools in Venezuela are run by the Catholic Church. And you- Not mine, but most were. You could get free on federal access to YouTube.

Yes. Interesting. So they had- Well, not anymore. Now they have censored X. Right. You have to understand, these are not Chinese communists. They're not as competent. So they were not able to censor the internet yet. They wanted to. They really wanted to. They took the TV channels, they took the radio stations, but they didn't take the internet. actually that's why I opened a Twitter account when I was 12 years old you're not actually allowed to do it until you're 13 so when I had to like when when I had to tell the truth to X about my age they like suspended me and I had to wait for like a permission the reason I did it I opened a Twitter account as a kid not because I cared about social media I was reading

I was reading information news because I couldn't get the real news on TV so it was like an information mechanism. Venezuela was one of the countries with the highest rate of its population on X, on Twitter. Because of that. Now what, so obviously this ended up turning into what became lifelong aspirations and you turned it into a career with going to become an economist in this country and everything. But like Milton Friedman and reading that book, what was the name of video again? Free to choose. I highly recommend that it's free online. You can find a PDF. What, what, I mean, you're twice. It's just amazing. that at 12 you had a grasp of this.

What about that book really caught you besides like, hey, inflation's really bad. Well, what caught me is that he talked about how other socialist countries were destroyed, the Soviet Union and Cuba specifically. And this was written in the 80s, or late 70s. And so I thought, oh my God,

what's happened to Cuba and the USSR is exactly what I'm going through. These countries are going to starve to death. We're going to die. We don't leave. And so that's when I'm like, I need to to, like, excel because I need to get the hell out of here. Did you tell your parents about the book when you read it?

Yes, of course. What did they say? Oh, yeah, well, they just didn't think that it was going to get that bad. And I'm like, no, he still didn't think. Yeah, no, I'm like, no, like, Chavez is going to leave. Of course, we're going to eventually win the election against him. I'm like, no, we need to leave the country. How many years are between the presidential elections again?

Well, it used to be five without reelection before Chavez. you had to wait out a term now then it became six with re-election but at the time it was five well when I when I lived it was six okay so either way five or six

Chavez won a couple re-elections right he won one or two so first election 98 then he rewrote the constitution so there was a new election in 2000 and then that was until 2006 wait why did he rewrite it so that there be an election in 2000 he rewrote it to extend the presidential term to concentrate power in the presidency, abolish the Senate,

allow for enabling acts. Have you heard of an enabling act? I know that term. Every dictator uses an enabling act. It's essentially Congress passing a law saying, we relinquish our legislative authority, the president can pass all laws. Right.

And so they did that. Hitler did that, actually. The Nazis passed enabling acts all the time. That didn't turn out too well. And actually, Hitler also tried to do a coup, went to jail, and then... Right. for elections, very similar to Chavez.

Wow, that's very interesting. Yeah, I always joke that like the far left and far right are just so close to each other on the circle that they hate each other. Oh, why do you think Tucker Carlson is praising Maduro and all these people here in the U.S.? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. So I've watched the videos of Tucker talking about it. I think he's being careless about this one in particularly. I think he's just so pissed off of the people that have attacked him that he's that he is at least pointing out a couple of. things. I don't think he's supporting the guy. I think he's trying to ask questions, and we'll

talk about this later. I don't want to get to this yet. Sure, sure. I think he's trying to ask questions about what makes specific places ripe for regime change over other places when we've seen regime changes not work out well because we, the U.S. have not managed them well at all throughout the course of the last 60, 70 years. I think there's been many good ones, too, in that same period. You think there's been good regime changes that the U.S. Panama, 1989, Grenada, 1983. These are, respectfully, though, these are countries that are... Are next to Venezuela.

But they're also extremely small, far less important. Panama, there's some arguments to make there. Grenada... It's an island, sure. But you said regime change, and I just mentioned two very successful cases. But like you talk about Iran, you talk about countries... Iran, we didn't do regime change, unfortunately. Well, we set up that regime there in 1954.

That was a regime that we set up. And that was like our making that that ended up happening. You know, it's a shame that it ended, but it was a great thing before the Islamic regime. We just, comparatively speaking, for sure. I mean, for sure. You know, it was amazing relative to what we have today. Comparatively speaking, for sure. But I'm saying like there have been all kinds of issues with the United States managing the aftermath of these things.

Of course, people have a horrible taste in their mouth from Iraq, which was... Yeah, Iraq was a mess in Afghanistan, I agree. Which those were both disasters to the nth degree. And these are the people. And I think that that's the real issue, but there have been many good cases. I mean, even Germany and Korea and Japan were all U.S. regime changes and occupations that turned out amazing. That's what I'm saying. Long time ago.

This is a long time ago. And you're looking at the totally new generations dealing with it. So that's why that stuff comes up. But like, there's not, you can't look at a guy like Maduro and say, well, he's a good leader or a good guy or someone that's good for a country. Of course he's not. It'd be the same thing as like looking at Saddam and being like, you know, he's a good option. He was such an evil man.

Yes. It's like these things, you should be able to hold those two thoughts at the same time for sure. And I hate to see like some of this back and forth with all these fucking political personalities online. Or even things like, oh, it's about international law. Like, you know, first international law tends to be fake. The U.S. didn't sign any PAC international law. does not apply in the United States. We're not part of any agreement.

And the only matters is the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court does not recognize... We're not part of agreements. Which agreement forces us not to do whatever? We didn't sign most conventions. Even the human rights convention is not signed by the United States. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, the U.S. is not part of...

We didn't sign the Geneva Conventions? Well, I think that... You mean if you mean war crimes and all that, yes. Yeah. But not the human rights convention. Yeah, well, and I think that's where people get pissed off because, like, the U.N. is a mess of an organization for sure,

but there's all kinds of like loopholes that get used there that then defeat the purpose of the UN. Most countries are dictatorships and they're going to lecture us about this, like the Human Rights Council formed by like Saudi Arabia, North Korea. Right.

Give me a break. It's hypocritical. It's hypocritical for sure. It's just like, I think the term international law is such a loaded term in general. We can talk about what's right. I think that that's important. What do you mean?

You know, like rather than saying, you know, is this in accordance with international law? Is this in the interest of the U.S.? Is this a good measure for other reasons? Is this in the interest of the people? Is this advancing human rights? If you care about human rights. But, you know, I don't like getting into the legality as much either.

It's not a matter of like... And if we're going to the legality, to be fair, like if you want to talk about that, like Maduro was lawfully indicted by U.S. right you know tribunal the president is the law enforcement branch a jury right right right right a grand jury yeah a grand jury um you know there's an active indictment for six years now same as all the members of his regime the u.s president is the law enforcement branch of the

u.s government and the president just arrested a criminal and brought him to justice that's literally the job of the executive Yes. It gets a little complicated when that person is, even though I think, and I think there's tremendous evidence for this, he's illegitimate because he lost that election in 2024. But when another country has that person still technically recognized as in charge of their country, and you go in to said country and pull them out. It's a little hazy. Though it's important to say, it's not only that we do not recognize him, is that not even the Biden administration recognized that's right president that's right so it's like saying we arrest

a Muslim terrorist in the Middle East I don't know if it's quite the same I mean legally that's the argument that the Trump administration is saying yes and that is going to be done in in the courts yes I see what you're saying I just whenever you go to do something like this not that it's even totally possible but you want to try to bulletproof every possible argument that could happen against it I'm not sure this is so fresh right now. My opinion is still open. I'm not sure they did that. Now, like the Taliban rule Afghanistan.

So is the leader of the Taliban not a terrorist anymore? Is he the president of Afghanistan now? So, you know, is he not? No, it's a valid question. If we just put you on a suit and tell you your president rather than the at mood, you know, whatever of ISIS, you are still ISIS. But then we see the hypocrisy with that when you got the fucking federal government. playing pickup basketball with the leader of Syria who's literally a fucking terrorist.

I agree. I agree. Though I'll say he was recognized, like, legally. And Congress, you know, is going to feel with it too. I'm saying. What's so useful about him? I don't know. I really can speak. I would say I think he's a terrorist. It's kind of like in the series, like everybody's a bad guy that's very common in the Middle East. Yeah, there's there's a lot of issues. for sure with any leadership vacuums over there. I agree. It's just like, it's a little weird. But we're going to get to the actual semantics of that later and dig into that some more. In the meantime, you were talking about when you were 12 and you first actually get aware of like, oh my God, there's other ways to do economies here. And you're like, I got to leave.

So you tell your parents at 12, I got to figure out how to get out of here. You end up getting into U.S. college at 17 so you're able to, I guess, secure a visa and leave. That's another thing. And again, this is, I'm a total outsider. So some of these might be stupid questions for you, but I would think that in Venezuela, they're like not letting Venezuelans try to apply to go to U.S. college. Venezuela was not like Cuba. Venezuela did not yet have a system of prohibiting people to leave,

in part because Venezuela was not an island, right? How are they going to stop you from living? You're just going to cross the land border to Colombia. Right. And if they don't allow you to leave, you'll just get sneaked out. That's what people do. And they just walk. You know, when Chavez was running for office,

the people who defended him used to say that, you know, Venezuela is not like Cuba. We're not an island. We have oil. We're a democracy. We can never become like Cuba. Democracy with fake elections. Yeah, that's what we became. But like, being a democracy doesn't protect you from becoming a dictatorship.

For sure. You can vote a dictator in, clearly. Like many countries have done. So, but those people were right of only one of the three things. We were not an island. And so we can walk. We don't need to swim. And that's why, There's actually a great Nat Geo documentary with a comedian that leads it. It's called The Walkers.

It's almost like The Walking Dead. It's very sad. No shit. But he walks with the Venezuelan migrants thousands of miles because they go all the way from Venezuela down to Chile through Peru, Colombia, the Andean Mountains. If they get caught on the walk or they arrest it? No, they're fine. They're fine as soon as they leave Venezuela. The other countries don't persecute.

No, not the other countries. If they're caught by the Venezuelans. No, they're just extorted for a month. by the police. Same as the Mexicans do, to be honest. The Mexicans do that to the people in the border. So you, and I think you were telling me, like nine million Venezuelans have left over what period of time?

The last 10, 15 years. It's nearly a third of the population. Yeah, there's like 20 left over. Yeah. So every family has somebody who left, if not entire families who left. There are empty buildings, empty homes everywhere. Because obviously, that's what happens when a third of the population leaves.

It's tragic. You know, this past Christmas, there was the picture of the second-in-command after Maduro, Diozdao Cabello. He's one of the biggest thugs, indicted to, he has the second highest reward for his capture. And he was hugging all of his family for Christmas, and he posted the photo celebrating. And the Venezuelan people were, like, kind of like criticizing him resentfully. this is their picture, this is ours and it's a screenshot of Zoom calls

because that's how we see each other in Christmas because we're all living in different countries. Wow, that's heavy. That's very heavy. This is them hugging each other. This is us in video calls. What did your parents say

once you had had the opportunity to be accepted to college and you're like, oh shit, I can leave? Were you trying to convince them? I'm like, you leave with me now too? Well, no, they couldn't come here and also, like, they don't speak English, but they were very, very happy for me.

And then that's when I began pushing them, like, you need to leave. And they, you know, especially because I knew a lot more people were about to leave Venezuela, because things were going to get dire economically very quickly, and they were. So they needed to sell their assets before they run all their value so that they could live with something, right? And so they did, and they left a year later, and they went to Spain.

What, did they, I, like, I guess the home they lived in, like what kind of assets were they able to sell off? Or car and or apartment. And then everything inside our house, right? At this point. Or couch or bed. Do people even have investment accounts at this point? Oh, people, no.

Right. Investment accounts. It's not even an option. People don't even know that. Yeah. Yeah. So, and where did they go again? Spain.

They went to Spain. Yeah. Okay. So you go to the U.S. They go to Spain. Did you have siblings as well? No. I'm an only child.

My grandparents left with my parents. Then I had the chance to go to Spain and visit them. And it was very beautiful because my grandpa, the Spanish one, so my mom's dad, he was, his father died in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The Franco stuff, yeah. Yeah, and he fought, like he got drafted

like so many millions of others. My grandpa never even met him. He was born the year he died in the war, in 36. And that's the year it began. And so my great-grandmother remarried and then had six more kids. My granddad had a great stepdad. But he was the oldest child.

And in 1956, when he was 19, I went to turn 20, the economy was really bad under Franco, really, for the first 20 years. Franco was actually a very isolationist, autarkic economy. economy for a long time. Spain was very poor, rationing food, all that. And so my grandpa went to Venezuela to send remittances back to Spain. He sent half of his income to Venezuela for over a decade. And then he kept sending money. And I went to Spain and I saw my grandpa reunite with all his half siblings who they love him to death because, I mean, everybody was

maintained by this guy who they never met, who lived in Venezuela. And then I did the way of St. James with my mom a year and a half ago in Spain. It's a Catholic pilgrimage in the region where Spain, where my grandparents are from, and we did it from my great-grandmother's apartment. It started there, right outside their doorstep. Just very beautiful coincidence. And I was going through the things in my great-grandmother. She obviously passed away many years ago, but the family still owns the place, a very, very old place. And I, oh, there it is. So we did it from Orense.

That is where my grandpa and my grandma were from. There's many ways of St. James. But it's all to Santiago. That's where the Apostle St. James is that. Well, I did the minimum legally allowed to get the certificate, which is 100 kilometers. I did 110. That's like 70 miles.

Wow. Four days. I should have done it in five. You're walking. Me and my mom. But, man, I found all the letters that my grandpa had sent from Venezuela since 1956 to his mom.

And I found the first letter, February, 1956. And it was in Spanish, and it said something like, you know, I arrived to the port of Lagara mom, I'm all great. Caracas is such a great city. There's lights everywhere. I got in a car and I could see everything. I have more food than I could have ever dreamed of. That was his reaction to Venezuela, his first letter.

That's what was Venezuela. So he saw it for the whole... Oh, yes. He saw everything. It was so heartbreaking for him. Wow. Imagine coming in as a 19-year-old and leaving as an 80-year-old. I can't.

And leaving it... And then he died in the pandemic in Spain. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that man. I know. I can't imagine that trajectory because you're seeing it go the opposite way. It starts beautiful, ends dark, and you leave and live somewhere else. What's relevant about Venezuela more than any... Venezuela, more than any other socialist country,

is that it's the only socialist country that was destroyed democratically and that was rich before it was destroyed. Think about this. The Soviet Union before, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, the Russian Empire was the poorest country in Europe. It was a hellhole dictatorship, terrible. I mean, the Tsars were no angels.

China before Mao, poor as hell. Right. You know, a dictatorship too. Right. Cuba before Castro. You know, it was better off, but Batista was a dictator too. The Eastern Europe destroyed by World War II. They were invaded, right?

They didn't vote the communists in in Poland or in the Czech Republic or in Hungary. They were taken over by the Soviets. The Venezuelan people were duped by socialist politicians and they destroyed us. The largest refugee crisis in the planet is Venezuela. Really? There are more Venezuelan refugees than Ukrainian or Syrian refugees. Really? It's the largest refugee crisis.

What's the current number? It's nearly 9 million. There's fewer than 8 million Ukrainian refugees. And there's no war. There's no chemical weapons. But that's over a 10-year period. Okay, so over a rolling 10-year period. Got it.

Yes. That's more than Ukraine? That's more than Ukraine. Look up the, I mean, this is a UN thing. Wow. There's even a Wikipedia list of refugee crisis. It's the largest peace time refugee crisis in human history, not caused by a war. Only like World War II, World War I, like the Pakistani and Bangladesh Wars of Independence

are larger because, you know, like a billion people living in India and the sub-Indian continent. Wow. Yeah, do we have a ranking, do you find that? Yeah, let's put it up. Largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas. There it is. If you just click largest recorded refugee crisis. Yep, the Venezuelan refugee crisis.

There it is. Largest one in the world. After World War II, Partition of India, World War I and Bangladesh. So there it is. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is at 7 million. Versus 8.9 for Venezuela. Versus 8.9. Now Ukraine's only had three years for that to happen. True, but they were invaded and half of, like a third of their country was taken over by a foreign army. Absolutely. They're being bombed. This is crazy. There are no bombs falling in Venezuela. The fact that this is even close, let alone the fact that Venezuela still has an advantage and that's not a good thing here.

And our pre-crisis population also was smaller than Ukraine's. So the percentages is much larger. It's much larger. If you will, is insane. And Ukrainians have a much easier time leaving their country than we do. They're much richer. They have trains. The entire EU said, welcome, come.

Anybody can come. You have free train tickets to leave. We don't have that. If anything, other countries are trying to not welcome us. So they haven't, were there, obviously, Chavez and Maduro are locking out outside organizations from coming in and things like that. That makes sense, of course. But like outside the country, when you look at bordering countries, be it Columbia and stuff like that,

were there, I don't know, NGOs or organizations that have been setting up shop there for years to be able to, I don't know, like, I can't think of a better term, but like underground railroad people the fuck out of Venezuela left and right? I mean, there's a lot of international aid from the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has a lot of people set up in their border within June Venezuela and Colombia to help people

and a lot of other NGOs, but there's very little money flowing in. Nobody wanted to, I mean, there's even little publicity. How much money did the Syrian refugees get by the UN, by all these international groups? They got camps set up by the UN. We had nothing. What was the church policy, by the way,

over the years in Venezuela? Because usually communist takes away church. Yes. So the church in Venezuela, the Venezuelan Catholic Church, opposed the regime very much. I mean, you can see nuns and priests in the protests. It's really beautiful to see nuns facing the National Guard in Venezuela. That's amazing. It's also wild, though, that they haven't been like sent to the gulags.

Oh, they are. They arrest them, they beat them. But all of them, I mean. No, not all of them. Yeah. I mean, that would be very radical in a Catholic country. I think that the Venezuelan regime, if anything, tried to co-opt Catholicism. Now, how did they do that?

Well, Chavez did a lot of real things that were heretic. I mean, he's really heretic. I mean, there was a rosary. You know the rosary, right? Imagine he made a red rosary with his face instead of the Virgin Mary. I mean, he's in hell. He's burning in hell, Chavez. Yeah.

He thought that would pass. Yeah, he thought that would pass. He thought people would be like, God, this is fine. Oh, and he brought a lot of Santeria. Have you heard of Santeria? The religion. I heard of Sangria.

No. This is not as nice. Santeria is this Afro-Caribian religion that comes from a mix of the back when the slaves were brought to the Caribbean and they mix with the Catholic Church. They worship like demons and saints and they dress all in white and they sacrifice animals. They sacrifice especially chicken, but also larger animals. There was an entire Supreme Court case, actually. about their right to do that in the U.S. in Florida.

We didn't have any of them. In Florida, of course. Of course. You know, it's Florida, man. It's like hacking coats in Florida for God. But it's just mostly because of the Caribbean, you know, relation. But it was like a religious freedom case. I think the state wanted to abandon from sacrificing animals.

I don't remember what was the outcome. I hope it was that you could forbid animal sacrifice. But that began opinion in Venezuela under Chavez. There's a picture of Maduro with, with this Indian chaman or something, this which... I mean, these are not Christian. Maduro regime is in Christian. You can't be a Christian and support what Venezuela has done.

Of course you can. Of torturing, of killing. Of course you can. Like the misery, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the way you said it, they're heretics, to say the least. It's just, again, you see the first thing a lot of communist takeovers will do is remove the state. is now God or whatever.

So the fact that they didn't fully do that is fascinating to me. They didn't because they didn't have anything to gain from doing that. I think Chavez and Maru were very pragmatic. Why would you, for example, even arrest everybody who opposes you, right? Just you have the guns, you have the power. Stay in power. Keep stealing money. Let them be.

If you want to have a meeting in your house and your family opposes the regime, they're not going to do anything to you in the privacy of your home. Interesting. But if you go purchase in the street with a sign, they will arrest you. So that's the word you use pragmatic. They're more pragmatic than a lot of, they have been more pragmatic than a lot of these other countries have been in the past who are also totalitarian. But then other things happen, like an old lady has a TikTok account and she pisses off somebody in the regime because she jokes about him. This old lady in her 60s, she became very famous as a comedian about.

politics. And so she dressed up and she like mocked the members of the regime. And she called one like a cocaine dealer, which is. And then she was disappeared. And they do that. So if you piss off the wrong person, they will disappear. All right. So I've been waiting to ask this question. When is your first memory or your first experience with understanding that there was some form of, call it secret police, whatever it, whatever the term was? And that, there would be people who, if they pissed off the wrong people in the streets in this case, like you were just outlining or said the wrong thing on some sort of platform, they'd be disappeared and wouldn't be heard from again.

Well, when I was a kid, you know, as I told you, it was a crazy kid, a very young age. You were a smart kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's crazy. I think you were just really intelligent. Well, and I lived in the crazy circumstances. That's what pushed me to do that, right? And I did model United Nations.

It's like a debate thing. You represent countries. I really loved it for the debate skills. I was a very shy kid, and then that really helped me. We had Model UN in the U.S. Yeah, I know, I know. I did it in college. Yeah.

It was kind of like a waste of time in college for me, but I love what I did in high school and middle school. And when I started it, we went to do it in different schools, including public schools. And the teacher that ran it, she went to the next-door school. that was a public school government.

And when she went to invite them, they're like, oh, you guys are CIA agents, so we're going to report you to the regime. You're a CIA agent for Do Immortal UN? That's the first time we got accused of being CIA agents. You remember Che Guevara, the criminal guerrilla fighter? I met the guy who captured him, the CIA agent. Yeah, we're friends with Felix.

I have a picture with him. He's great. He signed his picture, his last picture, when they captured Che Guevara for him for me. He was CIA since he was 18. My buddy Danny Jones went and sat down with him and did an episode with him two years ago. Really? I'm so happy about that. Yeah, he didn't like communists. He didn't.

And he did everything he could his entire life and career to fight. I bet he's very happy today. It's a shame that Cuba is not free yet. But, you know, Venezuela, because of a free country, can assure you Cuba's next. It does seem like that would be the domino to fall. Like, that's probably the one thing that surprised me about that. this. It's like, you know, Castro's been dead now for a while. Cuba's closer. It's an island. I would have thought that that would have fallen sooner than Venezuela. Obviously, they don't

have oil like Venezuela. No, but it's not about that. It's about Venezuela has an active resistance movement on opposition and politicians to take over. Cuba doesn't. Cuba is much more tightly controlled and totalitarian than Venezuela is. They have no internet. What about people from outside Cuba, though, have left. Yeah, but then we already tried that. It was called by your Pigs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That didn't work well because of Kennedy, you know.

Honestly, if that had worked well, we wouldn't have seen what happened in Venezuela. I mean, that was the original sin that Cuba was allowed to become this. We would see half the problems that we see today in Latin America had Cuba never been taken over by Castro. That was a huge mistake. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it's wild because, Cuba, like you were saying, with Batista, was such a shit show with him. Of course. But then it was just like, damn, they had it good before God's trouble. I know I'm a sponsor of terror. I mean, Cuba went to Congo,

went to Angola, Nicaragua. I mean, El Salvador, I mean, you name it. Say what you want about the mafia, having a few casinos in Cuba where the dictator who's kind of an asshole is a little better than, you know,

what you just laid out. Listen. And by the way, this isn't even about democracy versus dictatorship, I'll say. It's really about freedom, right? I mean, there are dictatorships in the Middle East where people aren't starving to death. When people tell me, Daniel, what happened in Venezuela is not socialism. It's just you had a dictator, you had a corrupt dictator, to which I answer, do you think that Saudi Arabia is not a corrupt country? Of course they are. Why aren't people starving to death in Saudi Arabia then? I thought it was all about

corruption. There are a desert. They can't even grow food. In Venezuela, we grow food everywhere. where people are even bananas from the sidewalk. Right. Because it's not about dictatorship or democracy. It's about whether you have free markets or not. That's right. Right. Ability to make money. You know, Dubai has no elections.

Right. 90% of the country isn't even a citizen. But the citizens don't even vote. So who cares if you're a citizen? But they're rich as heck. That's right. Venezuela should be like Dubai. We have even more oil.

I tell people, I should not be in New York City. I should be driving a Lamborghini in Caracas. That's where Venezuela should be. Yeah, on that argument, it makes sense. And it is not because of socialism, not because of democracy. And of course, I prefer democracy over dictatorship. Of course. But let's not deceive ourselves that what happened here is because we have an authoritarian government.

It's because we have a socialist government. Yeah, you're saying basically you got the lowest piece of shit on the pile of shit, but man, if you had like a middle piece of shit, you might be able to do something. Yeah, exactly. Effective. I mean, look, Singapore never had a free election under the British, and they were the richest country in the world. I don't know my...

Sorry, Singapore not Hong Kong, but then Singapore too. Singapore now has elections. But there aren't that's free. Singapore is the rabbit hole I haven't done much on yet. I really want to go. It's a fascinating island nation. Yeah, I don't know much about it. I know there's like, obviously... Likuan Yew? You know, Lee Kuan Yew?

Who? Leader that founded Singapore? No, this is what I'm saying. I really don't know much about it. His video edits, by the way, this dude is based. He's like such a good speaker. Lee Kuan Yu is a man. Lee Kuan Yu. Yeah. Do not commit crimes in Singapore, believe me, because they're very tough on crime.

Graffiti? They still have physical punishment. What do they do? A few graffiti. A lash? Like, whipping you? Oh, that sucks. Yeah, there was a big controversy.

They whipped an American over vandalism in the 90s, and Clinton tried to, like, get them to forgive him, and then the Singaporeans are like, okay, we'll just whip him one time. Leave a little mark. Yeah. You know, you know, maybe that's better than going to prison. You know, if they said to me, choose when you're in prison or one whip.

I'm going to take the one whip and be in a lot of pain for a couple days. And then you will never do it again. You'll never do it again. Yeah. I mean, it's that whip. You ever see those fucking things. Well, I know. But.

Yeah, that's like when you. That's him. That's liquid you. I gotta really look into this, this country and everything that's going on there. I really, oh, so he's dead. So he's dead. Yeah. He already passed away.

They have had many prime ministers. He was prime minister for decades. He kept getting reelected, but you know, it isn't as a free election. But the party in power has been in power since founding. Right. They're not socialist. But no, they're super capital. Yeah, yeah.

They are the top country in the economic freedom ranking. Really? Yeah. Singapore. And they're richer than Americans. Well, I mean, you're obviously an economist. When you say economic freedom ranking, like what goes into that? The lowest tax rates, the lowest government spending, lowest debt to GDP ratio, stable currency,

rule of law, efficient trials and especially judgments for corporations like contracts to, can you enforce a contract, can you evict somebody of your home if they take it? Can you like, you know, force a company to pay you if they're breaking your contract, right? all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, regulation. Can you freely import and export? Do you have tariffs or not? Yeah, Fringhamper has total free trade. It's really incredible. A little side note right here just because you are an economics guy. What do you think of like the tariff policies that Trump has tried to impose? Do you think there's a use for something like that? Or are you kind of against tariffs in all their forms? I mean, what I will say is that I think it's been disastrous for the U.S. economy.

Very much disastrous. How so? Well, I think they have destroyed jobs. They have raised costs and we're poorer for it. Now, you can say, you know, with the case of China, that's different. But, I mean, we have tariffs on Singapore. And Singapore doesn't even have tariffs on us. I mean, the whole reciprocity thing is a whole different discussion,

but it's also not reciprocal what we're doing. But regardless, what I wanted to say about that is that, even if you say we shouldn't push tariffs on China because they're evil and we want to make them poorer, you have to recognize that's also making us poor. But we're willing to bear that cost, let's not deceive ourselves. We're bearing a cost because of a greater good.

But all tariffs are making us bear a cost. There's no free lunch. I mean, if tariffs were for free, then why would we have any other tax? No country would have taxes. Everybody would just have tariffs, of course, and that's not the case. Yeah, and you can create tariff wars real fast.

And that's what's happening. So I think, I mean, the Trump administration is realizing that that's why they have bad. backtracked a lot of them. What have they done recently on them? They just backtracked the pasta tariffs. They were tariff in Italian pasta and now they're like, oh, actually... Can't do that.

No, no. Thank God. Thank God. I love my Barilla pasta. That's bullshit. Have you been to Italy in Manhattan? I actually have. There is a...

There is on the one, I think there's a couple of Italy's, but the one by the one on 23rd Street. There's a little bar back there. fuck what is the name of it little bar restaurant malino i think okay they got one of the best papadelli dishes yeah milano that's it oh milano yeah they got one of the best popper deli dishes in the city low key which you would never expect respectfully like in a place that's just you know like selling the food a little bit touristy but yeah that place is far yeah no i i mean i love that um no i mean if you understand the concept of comparative advantage you understand that we can't and shouldn't. I mean, we can. We would just be poor if we did it, produce everything.

Can you explain comparative advantage for people out there? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you one great example. I can bet you that when you have been on an Uber ride, you can think, wow, this man drives really bad. I would be a better driver. Yeah. Why aren't you an Uber driver than if you're a better driver? Because you have better things to do with your time. So the fact that somebody's an Uber driver doesn't mean that they're the best drivers in the country. They're just it's just the best relative to the other options they have to do with their time. So they're doing their comparative advantage, even if you have an absolute advantage over them at being a driver. Einstein. Einstein, I bet, is better than us at doing math.

But he did physics. You know, Einstein is probably faster at reading. Why isn't he a news analyst or something? Because he has 24 hours in the day. He's going to do what's most productive to do among all the things he's great at doing. Even if he's better than you are doing everything. everything. Right. You know? I might be stronger than Einstein, but I'm not going to be, you know, a swimmer, a professional swimmer.

Because there are other people, you know, like everybody should do what's, they're relatively better at doing. That's a comparative advantage. So why are you bringing that up in the context of tariffs again? I'm bringing that because that's the same with countries. What is America relatively better at doing than other countries? A lot of farm products were a big ag exporter, soy corn, you know, a lot of other things. Airplanes, the Boeing, that's a big export military equipment, high-tech electric cars, Tesla, innovation, the tech companies, financial services, the banks.

We have the best banking system in the world. What are we not relatively better at doing? Well, bananas, because we're not a tropical country. Right. It's not that we can't make bananas. We can. We just have to pay $10 for each of them to grow them in greenhouses. Yeah.

And then people would have to stop doing other jobs to grow bananas, right? So we'll produce less of everything else. Right. So the things that we have a good natural... And it's not just bananas, even pasta. The Italians are relatively better. Why? Because of a history. Because of experience. Right. Right. A host of things. Absolutely. Okay. So that makes sense.

That's comparative advantage. And that's why we benefit from trade. And it's not just at the country level. It's at the state level. It's at the individual level. You know, we could all be subsistence farmers and not trade with each other. We would just all be subsistence farmers and we really don't want to be. Yeah, it wouldn't be efficient at all. Right. So going back to Venezuela, though, and the man of the hour, we've been putting it off, but Maduro. Yes.

So we've talked a lot of Chavez today because Chavez is who set the foundation here and laid it. Evil devil, man. Evil, the whole bit. But Maduro, as you laid out correctly earlier, is certainly not a dummy. Like, he's someone who figured out how to rise through the power structure and put himself in good positions. Even like at one point he was like the, I think the official foreign trade minister or something for Venezuela. Yeah, he was the minister for one of first. And he, and this is not a man who spoke any languages.

Of course. Like besides Spanish and yet was effective. About Spanish. Effective huge air quotes there in a job like that to be put in a job like that by someone like Chavez and be so trusted in the regime. So what was Maduro's history and how did this pathway happen from him literally driving buses to becoming the vice president eventually the illegitimate president of the country? Well, Maduro has been a loyalist from the beginning.

Majuro was a member of the Constituent Assembly that we wrote the Constitution in 1999. Yeah. And so he has been in the Chavez regime from the start. Same as Delci, same as Diostado, same as Horstead. Delci is the VP right now? Yeah. One of the VPs. There are several, actually. They created a lot of positions.

But all of the people in power have been with Chavez since the beginning. And Majora was just a big loyalist, and he managed to become vice president before Chavez died and get Chavez to appoint him before he died. Did Maduro, obviously, like, it waned as the years went on and he had a lot of problems and was winning elections illegally that he clearly didn't win.

He never won an illegal election, Maduro. But when he was coming to power, even before he was, he had people in the country who supported him and liked him. What was it about him that made him likable to a subset of people? So he was already a minority, but just Chavez's endorsement. That's it. That's it.

That's absolutely it. So Chavez dies at cancer. Wasn't there like an issue where they're like, he might have been dead a few months or earlier? Yeah, we think he died in December, 2012, but then they announced that in March. Now, is that because they like tried to pass a lot of laws, right? They sent him to Cuba.

No, it was just like I think they were figuring out who was going to take over. They had a lot of problems. He goes, before Chavez died, this was a one. one-man dictatorship. Chavez was the man in charge. It's the man. You had to follow the orders of Hugo. And then after that, it became an oligarchy.

It's several people in charge. It's that's not the proper meaning of oligarchy. It's several people who are in charge of a country. So there were other people besides Maduro? Of course. Maduro was the president in name, but he's not the leader. Of course. At the beginning, that's not what it was.

Oh, no, of course. It's Diosdado Cabello, who's also indicted as a reward for his head, Delci Rodriguez, her brother, Jorge Rodriguez, their siblings, Tarek Eliasimi, who now they all betrayed him and they arrested him, that we don't know if it's for real or he's just in hiding a lot of controversy. And then Tarek William Saab, who's like the prosecutor, he's the one who like orders who to arrest. And then there's like the Minister of Defense, Validimiro, that's another big guy. And Celia, the wife of Maduro, is also a big one. When Chavez died, what was the vibe like in the country and the quote-unquote mourning of him and that whole process?

Yeah, we were very happy. We were very happy because he died, but really because we were hoping that this was the breaking point of the regime. You know, he's dead. This is over. Right. But he wasn't because they had a transition plan to stay in power. And they announced their death. All the people that are in power today, they got together, did a press conference, crying over Chavez.

dying, you know, or commander, or intergalactic commander. Intergalactic. Intergalactic. They literally called this man intergalactic commander. Like, he wasn't enough to be the commander of Venezuela or the world. No, the galaxy. Who's a deity. Exactly.

Wow. They literally called him intergalactic. And... People are like, yeah, that's normal. Well, a lot of people, not. Not most people, but a lot of people. We laughed about it. And they called it.

these names. The United States was the empire. The empire, the imperialist. Yeah, it's kind of funny because it was the Soviet Union that was the evil empire by Reagan's word. And so every time people came back from the U.S. in a visit, we used to joke, like, oh, how was the empire? You know, we love the empire. And there were, they put graffiti, the regime and the street with evil Uncle Sam. Like, imagine an Uncle Sam, but with devilish horns on a tail. And he's like, Gringo, go home. And it's like, which gringo? Go home? And it's like, which gringo? Where are you? you're talking about. No one's here.

Yeah, there are no ringers here. So they really hated the United States and that's kind of why we love the United States. Because the regime hates America, we must love it. And then America began standing up for us, right? You know, some of the sanctions at the beginning and then really Donald Trump doing it and it was like, wow, you know, what's the country that's standing for our freedom? It's the United States. Now, Maduro, so it's a bunch of people kind of running at the same time and Maduro's the

public figurehead is like, oh, he's in charge. At some point, though, he does take control above the other people. Is that fair to say? Maybe on some decisions. They have an internal structure that we are not really aware of, but maybe not. Maybe it's a council and he's outvoted. I don't know. They're all drug dealers.

Even to this day? Even to this day. Okay. It's not just him and his wife. I mean, there's other people with a lot of power in the country. Diosdao Cavalue is actually the richest man in the country. it's not Madura. Do we have an idea of what is...

Do we have an idea of what is not worth those? Billions. Billions of dollars, billions. And you think, and that's all from the drug trade. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm stealing the oil money earlier. Okay. The gold reserves and illegal mining and a lot of things.

That's another thing I haven't asked yet, but let's get to that and figure out the actual, like, layout here. At what point did the Travis or Maduro regime? I'm not really sure. happened, but at what point... Early 2013. Early 2013. Travis died either.

No, no. At what point did either of these regimes say, we are now in the narco-trafficking business, and how did that work? It's a good question. They kicked out the American DEA, I think, in 2008. Don't take me on my word, but, you know, they kicked it out in a certain year around that time. But they really, I mean, the US alleges, and you can see the indictment that it was from the start, that it was from the start that they were dealing drugs. It just increasingly became

true. What were their supply routes? Like, who were they getting it from? Who were they working with? The Colombians. So, Colombia is the biggest producer of cocaine in the world. Who produces it in Colombia? Fark and ELN. You know about FARC on ELN? That, it's, it's been a while. Is that the left-wing guerrilla group? Communist guerrilla, yeah. Chavez was a big defender in support of FARC and ELA.L. I bet he was. He has even speech in Congress saying, FARC and ELN are not terrorist groups. They are armed freedom fighters, something like that. But he said they're not terrorist groups.

And they have to sell cocaine to fund it. Where do you think they came from? So FARC and ELN obviously produced it because they controlled land in tropical parts of Colombia. But then how were they going to take it out? It was difficult to take it out through Colombia because the Colombian government was against them, checking for it. Well, you had the government next door in the border that you control.

allowing you to bring all your cocaine in exchange for a fee, a recent whole fee, that they collaborate. And then they used Venezuelan airplanes, state-owned airplanes, even Maduro's nephews. That's why they were charged. Right. So there was like a whole deal here where they got charged, they got imprisoned in the U.S. And then Biden gave them a presidential pardon, yeah. He traded him for like people that he, some Americans he had.

Some Americans that I will say were working for the Venezuelan regime. Let's just be clear. Oh, really? Yes, let's be fair here. So then he just imprisoned them. They were not innocent people who got kidnapped. We have to be very transparent. They worked for the Venezuelan state-owned oil company,

and they were Venezuelans who became Americans. They were not just Americans from here. So why did we, the Americans, trade his sons? Not just his nephews, but also another big financier of terrorism, Saab, who was a Colombian-Lebanese guy who... Financier of terrorism? Financier of terrorism. Specifically, like, what terrorism?

Islamic. That's why he's Lebanese. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, Hezbollah. This was like a Hezbollah network guy. They traded him and the nephews. How do you think modern terrorist groups

financed themselves through drug trafficking? Oh, of course. Yeah, I know all about that. But I'm saying we traded one of those guys and his two nephews for seven dudes, big people, big people. Seven dudes who were on the take. Yes.

Yes. I mean, you can't. Look, I'm happy that they're free. I'm just saying it was a bad trade. Yeah. It was a bad trade. Sounds like a bad deal. And the presidential part on the Biden sign

for this terrorist financier said that one of the conditions is that he can't make a documentary about it. It's really, like, laughable. Like, don't do Netflix, please. I want this. Wait, I thought the nephew's trade was way early before Biden, though.

No, Biden released him. Biden released the nephews. Yes, they were arrested and charged under Obama, then put to prison, life in prison. A judge in New York, they were here under Trump, all the term, and then Biden released him. Wow. Okay, so that was more recent.

And then he just threw in a little hospitalo... Exactly. Fun answer. Yeah. And now there's more Americans getting up, by the way. Because why wouldn't Maduro take more Americans in exchange for more concessions? Is this the same type of American? No, no.

Now these are really innocent people. It's really sad. Like one guy, and he got released then under Biden, I'm very happy. He was like this poor guy from Utah who got in love with a Venezuelan woman. I'm like, yeah. You know, and now there's like five Americans right now still they're kidnapped, actually. And sitting in their gulags.

Horrible. You know what the Americans said, how they torture them, the Venezuelans. They told them every day that they were getting released. And they shower them, they got them ready, and then they're like, ha, ha, ha, you're not getting released. Psychological torture. Oh, that's fucked up.

It is. What other not to get, like, you know. How the torture? Too dark here. But what kinds of things do they do to the Venezuelans? What do they do? I have a friend, her name is Mario Pesa. She was kidnapped from her house in August 2024

after the fraudulent election for the crime of observing the fraud and calling it out in protest and on social media. So they make people eat their feces. They obviously hang them and electrocute them. They put them in very small spaces where they have to eat from the place

where they defecate and they piss. their son entire, it's called Elicoide, that's the biggest torture center in line. America, it was supposed to be a mall and they turned it into a torture center where they play basketball on top of the political prisoners in like a basketball court

and other sports. And that's how they torture them. They do everything you can imagine, taking their toenails and their fingernails like everything. Do people ever get released? Yeah. They released a few people on Christmas Day, actually.

They're very nice of them. They didn't release Maria, though. She's been in there for like 18 months? Yeah. Is there any way to have any contact with them in there? Are they totally shut off even from their mom with a phone call? No, her mom is there. Her grandma just died.

I don't know if she knows. I hope she doesn't. I fear that the regime is actually using it to torture her even more. You never know. She's just, you know, she actually, we met here in the United States. She came here, and that's where we met. And then she's like, I want to go back to fight for freedom. And she went back in 2019.

And she joined Maria Corina's party. She joined the Vente Venezuela, the, you know, like the free market, classically liberal party. And she became the leader who, well, she was part from running, but she's the opposition leader. She's the Nobel Prize winner, Mara Corina. And Maria, this girl, she became the leader of the party in her own state, of Portuguese, a rural state, her entire state.

She became the leader at like 30 years old, very young. and then, you know, they arrested her. But she really went back to fight for her freedom and she didn't have to. She could have sought asylum here. I mean, she had obviously a good case. Look where she is now. Yeah.

No, it's amazing that she went back there to do that because she cares that much. I admire that a lot, but I can't imagine. Her sister is here in the U.S. she's safe, but her mom is there fighting for it. The mom is there fighting for it, but the mom has no contact with her. No.

She doesn't, they don't let any phone calls happen or anything like that, obviously. No. That's part of it, right? That's part of the torture, the isolation. When Chavez changed the Constitution to take control, I forget if you said this or forgive me if this is being repeated. But was in those changes,

did that also seize control of all the courts as well? Yeah, so first, how could you rewrite the entire Constitution legally? You can't, right? There's an amendment process. Imagine in the U.S. I mean, you need so much consensus. That's why it would be impossible to pass any amendment today. Right.

So what Chavez did is argue, you know, the Constitution says that sovereignty lies in the people. Kind of like saying the American Declaration of Independence is we the people, right? So, and then he says, therefore, if we have a referendum where we win 51% of the vote, we can rewrite the entire thing. And then the Supreme Court said, wait a minute. And so then he went and just packed the Supreme Court. And then the Supreme Court says, yes, you can do whatever you want. He won the referendum, fairly, but obviously it's still wrong. Right.

And then he got an assembly elected with a supermajority that he had, and his people rewrote the entire thing. So they rewrote the entire thing. Within a year of being in office. Right. And so as a part of this sham rewrite, there is something in there. Maybe I'm reading this too deeply, but there's something in there that allows for them to arrest people. It will hold them without trial. No, not really.

They just do it. They just do that. against their own constitution. And no court systems stepping. Oh, any judge that rebels against them gets arrested themselves. That's why all the judges are in the pay. There's a very famous case of this judge, what's her name?

Afuny, the judge Afuny. Afuny, how do you spell that? A-F-U-F-I-U-F-I-U. F-I-U. Oh, Maria Lord is Afunyuni. Okay, so is a Venezuelan judge, she was head of the 31st control court of Caracas before she was arrested in 09 on charges of corruption after ordering the conditional release on bail of businessman, Allegio Sedano, who then fled the country. She was moved to house arrest in Caracas. I have a friend who lived in that building, actually.

In Caracas in February 2011 and granted parole in June 2013, but she is still barred from practicing law, leaving the country or using her. bank and counter social networks. In 2019, she was arrested and sent us to five years in prison. There it is. Okay, so she was sentenced for corruption. She was not corrupt. She just released somebody who should have been released against the orders of the regime. They kept coming after, years later they do that. And when they sentenced her to prison, are they sending her to that mall torture center?

I don't remember where she was sent. But they're sending her to some fucking hellhole prison where they may do the very same thing. That's right, absolutely. Is she still in there? I don't know what happened to her after that, actually. I think she's out of the country. the country, I don't know. Can you check? Yeah.

First and second detention. Okay, second detention. In 20, because she was sentenced to five years in 2019, but there's no announce to Venice, they released Al-F in July 2019, they released Al-Funi alongside journalist, Braleo, Jatar, and 20 detained students. Alfuni's brother and Jatar denounced that they had not received an official statement. from Venezuelan judiciary. And then there's no aftermath.

I don't know where she is now. I think she's released, yeah. Probably. Probably. Probably in Venezuela. No, no, probably a different country. I mean, I hope so. That's horrible.

So that's what happens to judges who don't follow orders. So all of them tend to be in the take. They're all corrupt. I mean, everybody in a political position in the regime. Did you have any friends at a family who, not even like if they're part of the regime, but did you have friends of the family who were judges or involved in the law system

or anything like that where it was like, dude, what are your parents? So, what are you doing? Not my family, but the only friendship I ever broke was because of this. What happened there? Very good friend. I'm not going to say who he is,

but he was a normal kid. He didn't work or anything. You know, we were the same age. And he lived only with his mom, divorced parents. His mom was a normal woman. But his dad that had abandoned the family worked for the regime, tax in the tax system. And then he was very rich, of course.

Very rich. Conveniently. Private airplane, you know, the entire thing, boats, yachts. And suddenly, you know, when we were in high school, then suddenly my friend starts going to parties, very lavish parties. And then I live Venezuela. And he's like in a private airplane, in a yacht. And that's why I broke the friendship,

because I'm like, man, you're an adult. Obviously you're benefiting, you're profiting from the destruction of the country. People are literally dying while you're profiting from your death. You're a piece of shit. Yeah, I don't blame you. That's the only friendship ever broke, actually.

And people say, oh, people today in America, oh, I break friendships for political reasons. This is not a political reason, okay? This is not like we have a disagreement or like abortion or whatever. This is like you're literally profiting from this. You're enjoying the fruits of ill-gotten gains. Yeah, I think you guys have a different reality check understanding of what it means to have political differences.

And that's not even the correct term. It's very sad to me a trend in this country that, you know, people have seen in their lives and that you hear about. Mostly I've just heard stories about I haven't seen it happen like. with people necessarily around me, but people break in friendships or families not talking to each other because they have political differences. That's fucking crazy.

That said, I agree with you. If you are like reality check, if you're living in a literal, literal dictatorship, literal regime that has choked off the economy from the world and ruined all the fucking people there. And then someone's political difference is that their fucking family's on the take of it

and they're Instagramming it around the world. That's different. Actually, that's how we found out where the Venezuelan gold reserves ended up because of Instagram. Come on. Because, you know, most countries have their gold reserves, their central bank gold reserves in Switzerland

or New York City for safety reasons, right? And then Chavez was like, we're a sovereign nation. We need to bring back the gold to Caracas. Yeah, for sovereignty, right? The gold disappeared. Where to go? Well, we found, you know,

Central Bank gold bars are special. They have like a special marking, you know, they're, I don't know how you call it, but they have their name on it, Central Bank of Venezuela. Every Central Bank has this. They're not just a flat gold bar. And some, like, prostitutes who are like doing a live on Instagram in Dubai,

like, you know, this is where people go. That's the place to do it. Yeah. And there was this glass table that had a bunch of gold bars below the glass table and the gold bars had the Venezuelan Central Bank

and that's where the goal ended and that actually makes a lot of sense because Dubai is the one place in the world where you go to laundering money with gold. They accept any gold, no questions asked in the Dubai airport and then you can use it to buy property and that's how you launder money.

Give it to the hookers. Well, and then, I mean, there were hookers in the apartment I'm not sure they were getting the hookers, but yeah, of course, there's prostitution and all of this. That's how these people lose their money, right? this is why crooks and

people who have ill-garden gains they never stay rich for long that's right because they didn't build it yeah they stole it

and they all got the same vices they all have the same vices come around to kick in the fat bottom if you will this is as all this humanity as you know all these vices now we were talking about the narco trafficking though

and everything and you're explaining how it's coming in from FARC and Columbia's basically like then Venezuela becomes a transporter of it and that's how the government gets on the take

fast forward to the months leading up to what we just saw with the invasion there was this whole thing with like Venezuela and drug boats being shot at and everything what was going on there who was in charge of that who was on those boats who were those people where does the government overlap with gangs

like say Trenda Aragua great well Tendarawa I'll talk on it separately Okay. Because they started in a prison. They began as a criminal gang, not as a drug gang. Okay. Like extortion, kidnapping. Venezuela had a big kidnapping problem in the mid-2000s.

That was a big fear for my family and many others. A kidnapping problem. Kidnapping. Yeah, it's, they created something called express kidnapping, sequester express. Like a holiday. Yeah, less than 24 hours. This is not like, when you think of kidnapping in the U.S., you think of a psychopath that is going to torture.

You're like, you think of criminal minds, N-C-I-S. No, Venezuela is a profit-making activity. They're like, you know, Julian, you've been kidnapped. We are serious people here. They keep you in the car with your eyespan. You give us your mom's number. We're going to call her. $5,000 for Julian's life.

We'll drop him off here, but you need to give us the $5,000. If not, he's dead. Oh, so they're still. Yeah. And so if you get the $5,000, they won't really kill you. They're actually serious about it. They'll just release you because for them is about money. They're businessmen.

Well, that's nice. Yeah, I mean, it's nice that they tell the truth on this. There's so many, there's this comedian, Venezuelan comedian who got kidnapped. And he has such a funny story because he literally had the kidnappers laugh with him because he was a professional comedian. And they laughed like with him.

They were having a great time in the car. This is not personal. Yeah, it's not. It was not personal. And so that was a big problem and that's how these gangs started. So, but on the drug trafficking, what happens is this is a big network,

the military is involved, everybody is on take. And regular Venezuelans get paid to traffic drugs and they're drug dealers. And they were on these boats. The Associated Press is a great report where they tried to make the Trump administration look bad by going into Venezuela interviewing the families of the people killed.

And even all the families of all the people killed said, oh, he was a fisherman, he was this, but yes, he was trafficking drugs. Everybody admitted they were trafficking drugs. So now you can say... Where were they taking them? to? To different, I mean, usually Caribbean islands, Central America, and then that's how they get here. So the question becomes, I'm just looking... Now, you can say maybe this is not a fair

response, but... Well, no, no. If they're trafficking drugs, that's terrible. But I'm saying if they're not trafficking it to the United States, where... Well, that's where it's coming to, though. I mean, people in Honduras are not buying the cocaine. So they're putting it, they're putting it to... But you're saying, like, some of these islands and stuff, they're then... Coming to the From there to the U.S. Of course. Okay, that makes sense. Puerto Rico, too. Puerto Rico has a sea border with Venezuela, by the way. But most of it actually ends up in the Caribbean islands and Central America, and then the other cartels trafficked them here.

Okay, understood. So the Mexican cartels collaborate with all of this. So I see that tie there. And there's a lot of tiny planes, too. It's not really just boats. A lot of it is in planes. Yeah. Dief, I sent you some tweets earlier on the messages. Can we pull up the one, not one of the videos. Well, I think there might have been a video on it of Trump talking. where the context was they were sent, not that one. Is it, uh, no, that one, I think, right?

Where he's talking about the oil, is that right? So, this is what the tweet says. And this is, you know, you see a lot of tweets like simplifying things down to the basics, but let's like, just look at what happened here. Marco Rubio, this is about a dictator who oppresses his people. Pete Hague said, it's about drugs. that pose an imminent threat. Trump, no, it's about oil.

Because Trump went on and he said, on Fox and Friends, and they said, what do you see as the future of Venezuela's oil industry? And he said, well, see that we'll see that we're going to be strongly involved in it. That's all what I can say. We have the greatest oil companies in the world. And so people do wonder, it's like the way that they marketed in the months leading up to this, that, you know, they had to go to Venezuela was because it was this giant drug war, when in reality Trump just pardoned the ex-head of Honduras, who was a massive drug trafficker.

We have, we've declared the cartels in Mexico terrorists and still haven't technically like done anything about that. And they're the ones that are trafficking the most drugs in here. And yes, there were drugs being trafficked from Venezuela, but comparatively speaking, it's much smaller, the bottom line is this is a country that has significant financial resources and you now have the president right after doing this saying, yeah, we're going to be really involved in those oil companies. Again, separating the fact Maduro, Chavez, bad, love it, that that could potentially be gone. There's a lot that has happened. That could potentially be gone for Venezuela. Do you see why people in the U.S., but even more specifically like around the world are looking at this

going, this is just a cash grab? No, wait a minute. What's the problem? What do you mean? What's the problem? You're pointing out that the U.S., it would be, like, wants oil. Yeah. Why is that a bad thing? I don't think it's a bad thing that the United States wants oil and to enrich its economy. I think that people around the world and then also people within our own country, because of the last 20, 25 years worth of history are very, very reticent to the propaganda that that can

cause when the most powerful government in the world decides whether a guy is a bad leader or not that they can send in delta force take the dude out in the middle of the night and then come in and say we're here as fucking freedom fighters by the way we're going to run the country which they said they're going to do today and we're going to get involved in the oil and enrich ourselves so if i were just purely selfish i'd be like yay my GDP just got a lot better in america but i'm also thinking about the way that this will be propagandized around the world by places that hate us and what this could do generation. The places that hate us already hate us. But that's not going to matter. But you're giving them evidence. What about the fact that hold on, hold on. What about the fact that it could

set precedent for Russia to take further action in Ukraine? What about the fact that it could take Russia already takes her oil, Venezuela and oil. Hold on. What if it could take, I'm talking about actual like, oh, well, Russia's just like, well, we'll just take out Zelensky. They already took Ukraine. They haven't taken all of Ukraine But because they couldn't Because they already did They already in vain What about if this sets a precedent

And they're actually killing people What about if this sets a precedent for China And it'd be like you know what fuck it We're going to take Taiwan now Well they already wanted to They're not going to but they already wanted to If anything this deters them It deters them

Of course this is like President Trump Was able to literally take the leader of the majority regime Like in the middle of the night He can't do that in China He can do it in China, but he can do it in different countries that support China. You could do it to Kinan. He could do it to somebody else.

He doesn't want to. That's a bad day for them. But the point is that the United States showed what it can do. And that's a blow to China because who was getting Venezuela's oil? China and Russia and Iran. This was a blow on them. These shows don't mess with Trump because look what he's willing to do. He's willing to literally blockade the entire country.

So I think that that was good. And on the whole thing about the oil, look, the only countries that were getting Venezuela oil for free were Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran. Right. Now Venezuela is, hopefully, if Venezuela becomes a free country now, let's see what happens, will become much richer because oil companies will invest, actually invest, create jobs, pay taxes. It's amazing. That's what we want. I think it very well could be. I, you know, and I'm not being... And that benefits America and benefits Venezuela.

I'm not being combative about it. I have to look at this. on all, this is a wide spectrum of stuff that just happened and I'm still processing what it all is and I have to look at the potential like, all right, what are the decision trees of where this could go? And maybe it is all good or mostly good at the very nice.

Imagine there was no oil. Imagine Venezuela had nothing to offer to the US. And why would the US do anything if it's not in its interest? That's what I'm saying. It would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. Now it gets used on the other end. Now it's not a waste of taxpayer dollars.

It's actually good. Right. Now it gets used on the other end though, because it's like, I'll tell you one thing I appreciate about Trump saying this. He's at least fucking saying this. He's honest. Right? He's at least saying this.

Whereas Hegg Seth is lying like a dog. Rubio's- Why are they lying? Well, Rubio's not lying because that does make sense. But Heg-Seth, it's about drugs. Well, but it's also about drug. This is the thing. It's not about drugs. It's about several things at the same time.

All right, what percentage of it is about drugs? If you say more than five percent, I don't think you have a good argument. about way more than 5%. I don't think so. I don't think it's all about the oil. You think the Venezuelan drug trade is significantly even remotely comparable

to Mexico? You think it's even remotely comparable? I mean, but the drugs that get to Mexico from here come from Venezuela. Some of them do, but like Mexico is the problem with that. Absolutely, I agree. And I think that the president wants to take a lot of things in Mexico to one.

He already said he offered US troops in the ground in Mexico to the Mexican president. They actually said that this week. Interesting. I think President Trump was to hit Mexico too. So it's all about a lot of things. They're chewing and going on and walking at the same time. And again, and maybe I'm admittedly, you're talking about,

I'm talking about both sides of my mouth was saying this. Now it gets weird with that too because it's like, well, that's a bordering nation to us. Now we hit them. And with a democratic government, you know, a lot of things. So that's why I think they're being more careful. Venezuela is different because it's an illegitimate regime. It was illegitimate.

They're actually sponsoring terrorism. That's what the dog money is for. The human rights violations are huge. The migrant crisis that they cost in the United States, Americans have died. Lake and Riley died because of a turn there over a gang member. Americans have died because of Maduro. Americans die every day because of this.

So there are Americans kidnapped there. So there's a lot of reasons to do this. And I think that the confluence of those reasons is why the Trump administration decided to go in. And there's no doubt. It's not anecdotal to say this. when you look at the response coming from people, forget people that have been forced to leave the country of Venezuela who are native Venezuelans who are celebrating this, but when you look at

the response of people who are in Venezuela right now, it is overwhelmingly like, let's fucking go. I mean, I told you I talked to my guy earlier. He was like they were literally watching it like with their hands up like this. People are very happy. Of course. They're very nervous because the regime is still in power, but they're very happy. Just on right now, what we know right now, it does need to be said that even you've seen a lot of videos coming out of Venezuela from people who are like, yo, I literally don't like Trump and have talked against them. But like this, thank you. We like this. And I think that I think that even, you know, the hardcore libertarians out there who hate anything regime change and stuff like that and would welcome some of the challenges I just offered you, you have to look at that and say, that's interesting. that so many people there like that.

So it's not like all bad. And they should talk to Venezuelan libertarians. Venezuela has a huge libertarian movement, students for liberty, like classic liberals ain't ran people in Venezuela. They're very happy. I'll bet they are. They're very, very happy the Venezuel libertarians.

I know a lot of them. I belong to that movement. Then I became just more conservative, but yes. Now what those guys, people who are much more isolationist, libertarian, like Americans, might say to something like this is like, okay at this point feel that got you what about what happens next though that's right now how now

what do you think if you were in charge and go wave a magic wand here how would you manage this situation as the united states to ensure some sort of peaceful transfer of power that is now not going to be in the hands of people who would support someone like maduro that's right um I would have had a very good phone call with Delci, with Yostado, with Vladimir Padrino, the other oligarchs in Venezuela, and tell them, you're next. Maybe that's what Rubio did. He had a phone call with them. They probably did that. And said, you're next. You have this number of days, whatever, to give an announcement to the country that you're going to turn in power gradually in the next couple of months, not a year, but the next couple of months. It needs to happen this year very soon.

To Edmundo Gonzalez, the president-elect. They're going to turn over the ministries. You're going to turn over the positions in every part of government. And then you're going to leave with all the money that you have. We will guarantee you a wire transfer that you can do right now. You can take the goal. You can take everything in your plane to Moscow. And you can leave, and you won't be charged.

And if you don't do this, we will do what President Trump just announced, which is that we're ready for a second, much larger operation to take you down. And maybe you won't even survive this operation. There's also some important differences we have to outline here compared to like, say, in Iraq. Number one in Iraq, we had to put all these troops on the ground like crazy. That's number one. There were mass casualties of people as well, just all kinds of problems. Iraqis, Americans, the whole bit.

This one, as of right now, there's zero casualties. People got in, got out, and, you know, we're going to want to. to a situation, but that's a nice start. I mean, incredibly well executed. We really have to give props to the American military, to the president. I mean, this is incredible achievement, military achievement. It certainly looked like it. I don't think you can argue with that at this point, but you have that going for you. You also in Iraq had massive regional problems, massive terror networks that were already existing who were not even Iraqi in a lot of cases right you have you have bordering nations like the Iranians who are funding issues like

this and of course you have the age old Sunni Shia problem which we mismanaged because then we kicked out all the bathists and allowed only one of them to take power those things as far as I know correct me if I'm wrong parallel types of cultural problems like that don't necessarily exist in Venezuela. Is that correct? No, Venezuela is like most Latin American countries. A majority Catholic country with some evangelicals, growing evangelical population. But people don't hate each other because of their faith or ethnicity. What about the bordering nations, though? With things like FARC or things like that, are there ways that insurgencies could find their way into Venezuela through native Venezuelans?

Yes. Well, I'm not sure they're any Venezuelans, but they're certainly the collectivos. That's the biggest threat. They are the paramilitary group that Chavez armed from the beginning. They're essentially communist guerrillas. They're small number in membership, but they are armed. They want to cause trouble. But they're also not dumb, and they would never fight like a foreign military or anything like that because they wouldn't get killed. They've only ever fought unarmed civilians in protests. That's their entire experience. Yeah. So, but there certainly are groups that can give trouble. And I think that that's the biggest threat. And that's why Venezuela needs some peacemaking force. You know, whether it's the Venezuelan military, can they survive a transition, the Venezuelan military itself? Yeah, what's the setup there right now?

What does that, what does that even look like? Like what, obviously they were loyal to Maduro, but are a lot of people in the military? I mean, the soldiers, the regular soldiers are not. Right. But they don't want to get killed. They want to get paid and they want to eat. and that's why they're soldiers. Did they have an opening now to say to the leadership,

yo, we're not fighting for this anymore? No, they don't. Because they're still in power, which is why we need the United States to threaten these people to peacefully, you know, give power to the elected government. What are your friends on the ground in Venezuela, who are fortunate enough to not be in prison right now?

What, in speaking with them over the past day, what have they been saying? saying about what it's like in the streets or at the government, outside the government buildings or things like that? It is empty, totally empty. The streets are empty. Everybody's like, we're not leaving our house

because everybody's afraid of getting arrested. Oh, they're afraid of getting arrested right now. Oh, yes, yes. And to be fair, they're waiting to see what Maria Karina Machado, the opposition leader says. Because she put out a statement a few hours ago saying, you know, remember we're recording this on Saturday, saying that carefully wait for my next instructions to the people of Venezuela.

All right. Can we quickly do a tangent on, we touched it earlier, but last summer, 24, with the obviously disputed sham election that happened, can you just give me the players who were on the other side of that, who really won that election and then Maduro refused to seed power and where these opposition leaders come from? like how long they've been around and what their background is? Yes. So while Maria Corina has been in opposition to this regime from the start, she was an election integrity activist.

I think I mentioned this before. Saying how the elections were rigged. When I mean rigged, I mean the beginning was that people were voting. There was the military forcing people to vote, people in public housing, government employees. But this is part of why they grew the state so that public employees

were forced to vote to get paid and get food. And were red shirts, all the government employees wore red shirts, because that's a color of socialism. So, you know, propaganda, censorship in the media. So that's part of how the elections were rigged. And then they began, like, you know, rigging them by just, like, changing the results.

Now they don't even bother paying people to vote or, like, having dead people vote. Because why would you? Just let people vote and then we just announce a different result. I honestly think they took too long. They took too long. Why would you go through all that process of rigging an election

when you can just make up the number? Crazy. Right? It's way cheaper, easier. People are freer. They can be happy. Go vote. Go participate in your sham. And then we just make it up.

And so she has been calling that out for decades. And then she ran for Congress. One, in my district, in the eastern part of Caracas, which was a big opposition stronghold. What years approximately? I think, oh, wow. It must have been like 2011. Okay, so a while ago.

Yeah. And then they, she challenged Chavez in the state of the union, in the middle of his state of the union in Congress, because Chavez was very known for taking speeches, that the speeches, making speeches that took hours. Okay, we thought that he was... Like a filibuster, if you will. Yeah, we thought that he was in drugs

because he didn't go to the bathroom for a very, very long time. He had a daily show, too. It was called, hello, Mr. President, every morning on TV. Like fucking Mr. Rogers. I guess I don't know. Oh, my God, I didn't know that. Yeah. And he never went to the bathroom for hours, so it was really impressive.

So we thought he was on something, maybe in his own supply, you know? Maybe. So Maria Karina challenged him in the middle of the speech, called him a thief for stealing private property, that he was a crook, you know, a criminal, all these things. She was eventually beaten. And, you know, later, not that moment. Chavez just kind of like mocked her or something. Then he died. and then she was kicked out of Congress illegally

and then they barred her from running and they barred her from leaving the country and then you know she eventually became the opposition leader after several people because several people were proven to be actually on the pay of the regime or their opposition members even the people who ran against Chavez

and Maduro turns out they were all on the take it's a sham, total sham for the inside out it's like if you lose even the winner was paid. Before Chavez changed the Constitution and change how the government was set up, obviously there was still something called a Congress in place, but before he did that, what was the setup?

Like in the United States, obviously, we had the judiciary and then Senate Congress. Three branches. We had a Senate. We had a lower house. He got rid of the Senate, right? He got rid of the Senate. He got rid of the Senate, only Unicameral Congress

just to make passing laws easier. God. Everything goes back to ancient Rome, bro. Same shit they did there. Right. I know. Yeah, separation of powers. Like we were a federal, you know, with the states that ran the police, right? You couldn't have the states running the police if you were going to implement a dictatorship. Yeah. What if they rebel against you and then they use the police as a military force, right? Yep. With guns. So he federalized all the police forces and he had the military be the police. Was there any... So the National Guard was in the grocery stores. In the fucking grocery stores? Yeah, with big guns and military attire

in the grocery stores everywhere. Of course in the grocery stores. Before he was in power, was there any private gun ownership? Yes, but limited. We never had a second amendment. And then he got rid of all private gun ownership. Like forcibly took them from people?

Yes. I mean, he just legally bartered. And then, you know, if you were caught, you would go to prison. Yeah, that's one issue. I'm pretty set on at this point. Me too. And it's not because of crime or hunting.

It's because of rebellion, which is why the founding fathers put the Second Amendment. Yeah, I'm a believer in that. I just, you just see example of example of it over the world and it's so sinister because then, you know, the government got things that they got the killing machines and all that and they're putting them in grocery stores. That's disgusting.

Grocer stores, I mean, the middle of the street. Now, why did he keep the Congress, though? So he gets rid of the Senate. I mean, he kept it, but they passed all the loss he wanted. And then when the opposition eventually, they allowed them to win the Congress, he just ignored them and then kept doing

whatever he wanted Madura. Is that because constitutionally they weren't able to pass things? No, they were, but I mean, you're in the president, you control the military, what are you going to do? Hold a vote in Congress?

So why didn't he just leave the Senate in place and do the same thing? At the beginning, he didn't have control the judiciary or the military remember 1999. He only got that later, years later. This was a gradual process.

Okay. Now, in 2024, you had the, there was another guy I was talking about. Edmundo. Yeah, but there was. He's the president-elect, Edmundo Gonzalez, the old man? No, I'm thinking to someone else. There's another guy. I was talking with Anthony Pompeiano like two months ago, actually, about this.

And then today I was talking about them, but I forgot to ask him about this. There's another. You said Guaido back in 2019, the whole thing with Trump? Maybe there's a guy that he actually wanted to potentially bring in here. who's an opposition leader from Venezuela, who I think, I guess, is in the United States right now? Quite dope, probably. Is that it?

Younger, he's not old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's his story? Well, because we didn't go past that. I didn't look into it and decide to do it. Yeah, when Joe became president of Congress in 2019, after the opposition was allowed to, like, get Congress in 2015. and then like how they tried to like legally

in the sham legal system the regime started was they tried to impeach and remove Maduro and then like you know say that the 2018 election was rigged therefore Maduro is not the president the president of Congress who's the constitutional successor right obviously none of that really matters I mean obviously the election was rigged they were right

and then Trump like kind of like recognized Whiteau and like that that was the whole thing in 2019 but then it failed because right the U.S. didn't actually follow through on doing anything, and then why you escaped, and you know the whole deal. And then it turned. What was this lady's name again, the opposition leader? Maria Corina, Maria Corrina.

So then she was... So she's the one who really rose to prominence after that. Got it. Okay. So she is now, she's in Venezuela right now. She's the most popular... No, she's not. Remember she went to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize? The U.S. sneaked her out.

And I don't know where she is, but she's abroad. And so this is important. She needs to go back. in there. I know. She needs to get back. Edmondo needs to get back. But first, I mean, we need the U.S. to pressure the current regime leadership left to say, it's what I said earlier. You have to give power to these people. You have to let them in. As soon as they go in, there's going to be mass protests, right, in their favor. That's going to help. And then we need the regime to peacefully give the positions to them. So these people, just looking at this from a bargaining perspective, they're going to want to keep their wealth. They're going to want to keep their freedom. And when they pass over the government to the people, the people of Venezuela are not going to want them there, which means they're probably going to have to go somewhere. That's right. Who's taking them? Probably Russia, but I'm not sure if Putin wants them, right?

So maybe Qatar. Qatar is a country that has been willing to cooperate with both sides. I mean, they're bad people, the leadership, obviously, in Qatar. But they have a U.S. military base. They have a lot of U.S. interests that they care about. So maybe them, but like, would they really when I live in Qatar, I don't know. I don't particularly care where they go as long as they go, right? But I'm happy for them to keep everything. The problem is that right now,

they're able to stay, not just keep everything, but keep building more. Right. Well, that would be the issue, for sure. If anything, I mean, if they keep what Maduro left over, they just got richer by taking Maduro

as part of the wealth. Yeah, yeah. It's like a good day for them. He just got rid of one of the guys who would divide the things. They're like, all right, we'll give up the government, But we're fucking...

We can split his part now. Right. Yeah. Wow, that's fucking crazy. But you were saying that there is also like a small coalition, or I shouldn't say small, but there's some sort of coalition of some of the other governments in South America that seems to be forming already today who's come out in support of this together. Who are they?

And how does that work? So this is important. Oh, here we go. Yeah, I put it. There is. So all the governments of this country, Argentina, of course, Javier Mille, has been a big supporter. the start, the president of Chile, the new president, who got elected, the conservative guy, the Dominican Republic put out the best statement, in my opinion, Luis Sabina, the president,

where he said he wants the Dominican Republic to help to reestablish the peace inside Venezuela. And that, to me, sounds like volunteering military force to me. And I would totally welcome it, because we do need something that would be helpful to reestablish the peace. Has he been a long-time critic of the... Of the regime? Oh, absolutely. I mean, Maduro's plain was seized by him in the the Dominican Republic, actually. There's, so there's also Panama too on this list. Ecuador is a very interesting one.

Yeah, the president of Ecuador, Daniel Nevoa. He's a big U.S. ally. Yeah. So have you looked into like what's going on there with the narco trafficking and stuff? Yeah, I know it's a big problem. Yeah. I mean, he's trying to fight the whole crime thing, but. I've had Luis Navia hit me up left and right for legit a year and a half about this.

So Luis Navia was on my podcast for episode 221. and 222. He was like the lead smuggler for the cartels around the world for two decades. Wow. He was caught in Operation Journey in Venezuela, actually, I believe. In 2000, it was fucking 15 different countries caught him. All the United States agencies that were involved, you know, took them down. And you've never believed the guy's story, if not for the fact that literally all all the federal guys are like, yeah, no, like he legit did that. I mean, you can't. verify every single behind the scene story but as far as like who he was and what he did like

holy shit like he was the real deal and he's been he's been called me he's like you're not going to fucking believe what's happening in ecuador man what does he says crazy down that he's just saying that it's the next like narco stronghold because they've essentially created and i don't know much about this so people in the comments please help me out i'm just going off of what louise has told me they've essentially created a safe haven for these guys to be able to funnel money. It sounds like also potentially like funnel drugs. I think even fucking... What you're saying is that the government in a cordial is collaborating? That's what it sounds like. The government at least is doing a, you know, like in the town like no look policy or whatever. And it has created a massive underbelly that he

thinks is going to explode. And I've taught there were other people. I can't remember who they are who were in my ear about this as well, saying, like, this is an issue. And if I don't know if we can find this, it might have been like fucking vice, if they're even still around. They did a documentary. What I can tell you is that Ecuador

has been extremely cooperative with the United States. That's why they even had a visit by Secretary of DHS, Kristinoem, Rubio by Hexeth. So they've been very cooperative and very much anti-Maduro. And they also have a lot of the government. And they also have a lot of Venezuelan refugees.

that it's become a big problem. Interesting. Because there's very, very poor people. So here we go. When is this from, Dief? Do we have a date? 2023? Okay, yeah, yeah.

So this is like a year before Luis. Luis was probably telling me about this, like June 2024. It was probably the first time you hit me. A few years ago, they had this big issue. They already cracked down on those gangs, is my understanding. And I'm not really sure when Novoa was elected. I think it was that year too. What was that, just, Dief, if you can go up,

what was the title so people out there can check this out? there can check this out. Mexican cartels are turning once peaceful Ecuador into a narco war zone. And yeah, that's what you're saying. He was like this is like a landing pad for the Mexican cartels and some of the other South American cartels. I got admittedly, like I'm bringing that up because I saw it on the screen that they were one of the countries.

I do have to look into that more and what that is. So if people out there have some thoughts or more information on that, please leave that in the comment section along with some links if you have them. But either way, we're talking about five different countries, sizable countries in South America on day one, having their leaders release statements in support of a peaceful transition to a new power structure that is free. Can we put this tweet up by Francisco Polo Leo? Yeah. Just now. Let me say, can you text it to me?

Yes. And then I'll send it over to D.R. I think we need to talk about this. Who is this? Francisco Palo is a journalist. in Venezuela. Sorry, I have a lot of texts. I'm trying to hear this.

No, it's all good. And you're sent it to you. All right. Hopefully that comes through. Here we go. I got it. So, Diff, I'll give this to you right now. We'll put this up.

This is a journalist. Where is he located again? I'm sorry. Well, he's in the U.S. now, but he's a very well-connected journalist. He's talking about the U.S. government strategy. Okay. D.F. Incoming. So this was a statement he released today?

Yeah. this is what his sources are saying of what's the transition plan. And I think that's very likely to be true what he's saying. All right. So Delci Rodriguez, this is from Francisco Palo, as you said, Delci Rodriguez and the core of the regime's leadership are negotiating with the United States as we speak. This is not a sudden pivot. It is the result of a conclusion reached in Washington over months. The U.S. does not believe that Maria Karina Machado and the opposition have the operational capacity to seize power in Venezuela because they do not control or meaningly fractured the military. I was going to ask you about that, but here we go. If they did,

power would have shifted immediately after the 2024 presidential election. It did not. For a long period, U.S. officials, including Marco Rubio, were in constant communication with Machado and her team. They were asked repeatedly for proof of a concrete plan, not just to win power symbolically, but to retain it in practice, chain of command, military alignment, institutional control day after governance, the answers were consistently evasive, justified by security concerns, but never substantiated. At that point, from the U.S. government's perspective, the opposition ceased to look like a viable transition mechanism and began to look like a political wager with no enforcement arm. The plan now on the table is for Delsey Rodriguez to stabilize the country with U.S.

backing, so that's Maduro's VP, and then call for general elections. This is not framed as an endorsement of the regime, but as a containment and transition strategy, Washington is explicit about one thing. This is not a partnership of equals. The United States is running the process. The lines are being managed through Rubio, and the leverage is entirely asymmetric. Delcy is the instrument, not the center of gravity. U.S. officials also assess that Delsey's harsh public rhetoric today was aimed inward at the Chivista base, not outward. That messaging is understood as domestic signaling. Nevertheless, as of now, negotiations with the United States are ongoing as we speak. Is that the end of, yeah. Yes. Okay, a lot going on there. Thoughts. So, I think that's probably

true that, you know, the regime still has the operational control of the country. And so the question is, can Trump pressure Delsie to have a peaceful transition in a matter of a month? In a matter of months. Because remember, if there is no transition under the Trump administration, Dells is going to stay in power after Trump leaves office. Do you think if the Democrats win the White House, or even another Republican, do you think they're going to do what Trump just did? I think only Trump has the ball.

So I would agree with you on that, with respect to what just happened last night. But if it did already happen and now that bell has been rung and Maduro's here, and we do know that at least on this issue, the Democrats and Republicans both don't like the guy and want someone else in charge. The Democrats, a lot of them are criticizing Trump. Of course they are. But they have been voting to take away his military ability to do this. I mean, every month they're hosting a voting Congress

to take away the presidential authority to have military action in Venezuela. Right. And they've come very close to getting the votes because there's like the isolationist Republicans voting with them. So like you have Rand Paul, you have Thomas Massey, you have Marjorie Taylor Green,

all voting with the Democrats. And the Democrats are likely to win the House. so they're going to be able to pass the resolution through the House, and then they just need 51 votes in the Senate. Right. And it depends on the math there. But when they get into power, when the shoes on the other foot, as they say,

they don't go to fuck about that because now they don't have to vote Trump out with it. They just do what they want. But then imagine there's no transition, then Trump leaves office and say Gavin Newsom becomes president. You think Gavin Newsom is going to do a military operation to take Delsey down? No.

They're not going to do anything, and then they're going to stay in power forever. Right. Without Madur. Yeah, I mean, 2028, it's a while. the election in 2028 to while off, I would be surprised. I'd be shocked if there wasn't.

Like, you say this needs to happen in months, and I agree with you, as sooner the better, now that this bell has been rung. But, like, even if it was really a colossal cluster fuck and it took a year or something, I mean, we're still in the middle of Trump's term. Potentially, potentially.

But, you know, it's a risk because then they can, like, do, like, a fake transition. Then as soon as Trump believes, they can come back and do a coup, right? right? This is why you need to have all of that leadership out of Venezuela. How do you fix the the big thing is the military? How do you get... That's right. First of all, let's start at the core here. The kids who end up holding the guns

in the fucking grocery stores. They're poor kids that just want money. So they weren't true believers? Of course not. Right. I mean, they do try to indoctrinate them but most of the time it's just that they have a Cuban attache in every unit to make sure that nobody is moving out of line. So let me think like way too much of a simpleton right now, but let's just try to paint a simple scenario. You turn on some of the oil rigs,

you get some money flowing, and suddenly you get some cash into the pockets of the resistance, and you go to these same kids and say, hey, what are you making? Whatever, I'll make something up. Five bucks an hour? Okay, well, now you're making 10. No, no, no, it's not even five bucks. You know what I mean. Like, I'm making up numbers.

It's not even bucks, it's Bolivars, but, you know, like you basically say, okay, well, you made five, now you're making 10. Yeah. And suddenly they're like, you have my allegiance. Is it that simple? Well, yes, but it's also, we need to kick out all the Cubans out of the military, all the Cuban regime people out of the country, really. Are there a lot of people who we don't know are Cuban? Or can we literally point and be like, yo, that's a Cuban? Well, I mean, unless they're really well trained, you really know.

even by their accent. Right. So get rid of them. And you know, I mean, where they were born. I mean, it's not difficult. But, but there are, I mean, there's different estimates, but the estimates are that there's over 10,000 in the country. That's a sizable number.

But like, if we know, if they know who they are, do step one there, get some money flowing. Yeah, but then who's going to kick them out? Is Delcio Rodriguez going to make sure they're kicked out? No. Or are they going to be foreign troops making sure that they get kicked out? Now, this is a very valid point because no,

the answer to your Delci Rodriguez one, that's what I would think. Am I wrong to think? I think she has no interest in doing that. Right. Exactly. And then the foreign troops think big problem. So you have to have it from the internal. Well, I think it would be positive if there were foreign troops for the transition. On the, for, for, positive for Venezuela. Do you see why a lot of people in America right now? I'm not saying U.S. troops and saying foreign troops. Who are the foreign troops? Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Panama. Now, that might make sense if you had a South American coalition. And even better, you know, they're like Spanish speaking troops.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of useful. That might make a lot of sense. And then they'd know who the Cubans are, in this case, despise, very easily. And it's just like have a good trip home. That's right. And Trump wanting to persuade those countries then to put in, to put those in. Now that's interesting.

So these countries that have already come out and support Spanish-speaking countries in South America, all have the same interests, peaceful transition of power. That's right. Maybe I'm getting way too ahead of myself, but this sounds like a very logical one plus one. I mean, there are foreign troops in Haiti right now. I mean, a bunch of countries, like the Canadians and the canyons have troops in Haiti. The Kenyans have troops? Yeah, no shit.

Yeah, really, they wanted an African country because of being black, that's really why. And the Dominicans really didn't want to go in because of their history. Right. But either way, that makes a ton of sense. That could work. Yes. You get the Cubans out, and now you just find a way to financially incentivize the rank and file of the military and then deal with the leadership who might have been actually loyal.

I think that would be the ideal situation. That doesn't seem... I mean, ideally it would be also Colombia, but Colombia is on the hook with Maduro until their election in the summer. Yeah, that doesn't... Now, if Colombia flips in the summer, this gets even easier. That's what I'm saying. Like, forget Colombia, though, for a minute. Even forget them.

I know that would be very helpful. But, like, this doesn't seem like that hard. Yes. It seems really possible that you could do that. And there's a big enforcement mechanism, right? Because then not only do you have the threat of Trump and all the U.S. Navy in the coast, you have all these countries with trips inside

that they would force Delsey to accept. And then Delsey has really people to fear there, right? We'll have guns. I watched a video this afternoon. afternoon, it was like an AI channel, you know, with like the AI voiceover and all the graphics. It looked beautiful, though. Oh, wow. That was breaking down the naval mechanisms already in place that the United States has, like,

off the coast of Venezuela and how it works. Like, people can Google this, like, Venezuela War Explained or something like that. And you will see, like, a map one that talks about, like, here's how it would happen. It was posted in the early morning hours of Saturday when the invasion happened. But the protocol for like if Venezuela tried X, then the U.S. would do Y, Z, A, B, C, D, K, like, it was like. Oh, we have zero threat from Venezuela. I mean, they can't do anything to the United States. They don't even have the capability.

They don't have the capability. They barely know how to fly their planes. There are very few planes that Venezuela has. Now, what are you hearing about the actual mission? I mean, we've been beating around the bush on this the whole time. The actual mission that took place, which again, as of right now, zero casualties, pretty amazing. No, we know that for sure. We know that for sure.

Zero U.S. casualties. So that's awesome. Love to hear that. But you have all these Delta Force Apaches fly in, toss some bombs. Have you seen the video? Oh, light it up like the Force to Jewel. Do you see the White House meme that they posted on Instagram and Twitter? It's amazing.

So look up the White House Twitter account there, now that you're there. It's so good. Because Majuro had this video, very similar to Noriega, the Panamanian dictator that got also arrested, challenging Trump. Trump, if you're brave, come and take me, you coward. And then, like, they did the whole. Yes, we can't play because it has, it has, it has copyright music.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, where you see the video like, da-da-da-da-da- Don't be late in arriving. And then look at the place. Yeah, I was waiting for them to post. The video where he, because Maduro was saying, don't come here. And I was waiting for the video where Trump's like, I'm going to come. You know that, you know the one I'm talking about?

Oh, I'm going to come. Where it used to be like Kamala Harris being like, don't come. Yes, do not come. He's like, I'm in a gap. They didn't post that one. But yeah, I mean, you see the video. They boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then obviously like smash and grab Maduro who was, he was wearing like Nike

Nike Tech. Yeah, he was wearing Nike. Oh, he's very rich. You know, remember, Chavez used to say being rich is bad with a Rolex on his wrist. That's right. That's how I want my communist saying being rich is dead. That's how socialism works, you know? That's how it works.

More for me, less for the... Socialism for the capitalism for me. They, exactly. They go in, they take them, there's no anti-aircraft missiles going up. I think they tried to hit a helicopter. and they did, but they failed and the helicopter was able to return back. Like one. Yeah, they have nothing.

So my question is based, and it's early here, based on any sources you have or what you're hearing, is this a situation where like the United States had a significant number of intelligence assets within the organizations here? Within Venezuela, of course. Not, no, not just like regular citizens, but like people in the government. How do you think they found where Maduro was? Right. Where he was sleeping.

It's not like one. one or two people, essentially, though. Of course not. It's a lot. I mean, remember Trump announced a couple months ago, we have the CIA inside and we have CIA operations. I love that if they just did it openly. Yeah, we sent the CIA into Venezuela.

And look, it was true. It's funny because the Maduro regime, and even Chavez before, had been saying for years, the CIA, you know, they're trying to overthrow us, and they're the ones cutting off the electricity. It wasn't. Venezuela was unfortunately lost on its own blackouts because of the failure of the electricity.

Electricity was free, so they did not invest. There were explosions or regular blackouts, right? And I remember for many years they have blamed Marco Rubio specifically. Well, he was a senator. For what? For the blackouts. How?

Oh, he hacked us. Marco Rubio? I know, a senator. And he owned her Obama. He hacked you? Obama was collaborating with Rubio, of course. Anyway, now they actually did it. I don't know if you saw Trump in the statement.

and he said it was very dark in Caracas because we did something there to make it dark. And I thought that was a really funny hint and we cut off the electricity. Well, in all seriousness, though, building up to this, the blackouts there are crazy. I know. And we take that, we take for granted what we have,

but like, yeah, man, how many hours? Sometimes for many hours. So my dad was the president of our buildings, Homeowners Association. They let you have that? Yeah, yeah. It's just internal. That homeowner association aren't comedians.

Unfortunately, it's, you know how it works. But you needed it. So we used to for rationing the water of the building, right? Because when you have no electricity, Oh, that's right. The water runs out very quick. Oh, shit. Or when you have no water, you know,

we have a tank, right, that we ration in the community. Yeah. So it's like you can only shower from 5 to 6 a.m. and open the faucet. And so, you know, you had to pick to ration it. Yeah, when I talk with Christian, the Deniswell and editor, my friend, like, he'll have those periods where, like, he goes dark. And it's not because he ain't working. It's because the electricity goes off.

Oh, wait. Christian's still there. Oh, yeah. Oh, bro. No, I've been trying to get him here. I've been talking to immigration attorneys. They're like, bro, you got to wait until 2028 and ain't happened. Yeah, now it's impossible with this restriction.

Yeah, it's real hard. It's like, they're like, you got to pay $100,000. Just to get permission to ask a question about whether or not you can pay another $100,000 just to get permission to see if you can fly him here It's a shame. Yeah, it's a shame But like, you know, we'll figure that out eventually hopefully he watches this Yeah, he's he will he's gonna well actually this one he won't because we're putting this out right away So he will not be doing the intro of this one but he'll definitely be watching it and it's like When you talk with him and like he it'll just go dark for 13 hours you're like holy shit man

Like, we freak out when we lose electricity here in a rainstorm for two hours. It's like the fucking world. You know, they began blaming climate change in Venezuela at the beginning. Oh, they were blaming climate change. Yeah, yeah, it was climate change. Because our main electricity source in the past was a huge hydroelectric plant. One of the largest in the planet, we created this huge reservoir called El Guri. Okay.

It was great, you know, because Venezuela then got all its electricity from hydroelectric. And then that means we burned less oil and gas that we could export. So that's good economically. Right. But then, you know, it started failing. The government didn't do maintenance. And so we started how to burn our own oil. And then like, you know, those things failed too.

And that's the problem. Yeah, it's funny that a lot of the Western nations when they were actually taking Maduro serious or seriously, it was like over climate change or something like that. Like, oh, we're going to try to get them on our side with that. Like, dude, you're not helping your cause. Well, you know, there were a lot of oil spills in Venezuela by the Venezuelan regime's oil company. You mean that the government-run oil people weren't good at managing the oil? Oh, wait.

You know how they clean the oil spills? Oh, no. People without shirts, like just an irregular plain clothing, getting in the river with buckets. Oh, my God. With the crude oil touching their skin. It's the, you can look it up. Is there what a pitcher river oil spill? A peacher river oil spill.

It's a really weird name. How do you spell that? How do you spell that? How do you spell? A. R. Whatapiche? Then river oil spill and you can find all kinds of pictures. They'd force people to go in there and just...

Or paid them, you know. They probably... What? A cent? And they do it. But it's... Oh my God. Oh, it's...

I can't... Probably can't even count the number thing. Oh, great. Right. Reuters is not. Oh, there. Oh, there. Oh, but that doesn't have pictures.

We want to see the pictures. Yeah, you know, socialists are actually very famous for causing the greatest environmental tragedies in human history. You've heard of the RLC in the Soviet Union, right? That totally dried down because of the Soviets dried it out, and now it's just salt. Because that's what happens when you have no profit motive. When you have a profit motive, you have property property, you want to maintain something to profit from it. That's right.

If not, you get the... Oh, yeah, there it is. Oh, Pan on Post, I know them. Post, I know them. Oh, look. Look, there's the people. Cleaning it up with buckets. Crude oil. The socialist taking care of the environment. It's just crazy that they sit on that much, they sit on a fucking gold mine, literally. Like, the world's, that was, that was what Kurt Metzger was pointing out when he was in here. I didn't realize it was like literally the biggest. And they somehow have run the country dry.

because of how bad their policies are. You know, a country doesn't get rich because of its natural resources. It gets rich because of its freedom. Natural resources help, of course. Dubai is very wealthy because of oil. But the UAE is still less rich than Singapore. Singapore has no natural resources.

How did they get rich? Because they let people be free. They allow free trade. They allow their human skills. It's human capital that matters most. Yes. America has a lot of that. But America is also blessed with amazing natural resources.

So if you had that combination, it's even better. But I think freedom is what matters most. Now, you've talked about needing the outcome here really idealistically needing to be in the next few months. You see that election happens, some sort of peaceful transition of power. We obviously just talked about having potentially the other five Spanish-speaking nations come in there with some troops to help assist with this outside of the obvious of like Delsey just being like fuck you and trying to go down in a blaze of fire right here. What are some other ways that this could go wrong? You know, I think it would go wrong if the Trump administration just declares victory and there's nothing. That's another risk, right?

You know, it's a risk to do something. Now, they could, I mean, they can plausibly do nothing. I don't think they will, because Trump was very explicit today. We don't want this to be in vain. We want, he specifically said peace, justice, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people. And so that really encouraged me. But that's always a risk. There's going to be pressure.

It's going to be a lot of political pressure for him from some people to do that. I mean, the Maduro regime has been loving themselves. They put money into lobbying here. Yeah. I don't even remember the guy who Tucker had talking about Venezuela, Robert Amsterdam? I didn't see that. His whole episode on Venezuela was with this man named Robert Amsterdam. He's on the payroll. He's a FARA registered agent that got paid, I think $20 million. We know this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you have to register. Yeah, yeah, you have to register under Farr.

So we've proven that he's on that. Yeah, he failed the report. He's there. And that's the guest on Venezuela. Very impartial, of course. I guess I'm not partial of Of course, because I'm opposed to it. I'm from there. No, yeah, but I'm not going to pay $20 million from behalf of a foreign government. That's right. You're pointing out someone who's not disclosing that. You're partial because you live through it.

You live through a horrible regime. You've watched it hurt your friends. You've watched it hurt your family. And you are supporting a regime like that come down, which makes sense. So if someone else is coming in to make an argument saying like, hey, they're bad, but hey, by the way, here's why this isn't good. but really behind the scenes they're being paid by those very people to basically do damage control that's right and they're not disclosing that you have every right it's unethical it's completely

unethical i was totally unaware of that yes that's inexcusable if that's the case that's that's Amsterdam oh it was four okay can we is can we score all the way up deep i want to read all this that's totally inexcusable so Tucker carlson recently gave a bizarre defense of venezuela being socially conservative, many were baffled. Turns out his guest, Robert Amsterdam is still an active far-registered agent of Venezuela. He earned four million in just the first four months of the engagement from the Majuro regime starting in January 2020. According to the relevant FARA filing, see below, Amsterdam was engaged to persuade the U.S. to mitigate or remove sanctions on Maduro's Venezuela. His contract was officially signed by the Attorney General of Venezuela since the U.S.

at the time did not recognize Maduro as legitimate. Tucker did not discuss Venezuela with Amsterdam, but during that Friday show, Tucker said that the guest was one of the people who I talked to the most off camera about what is happening to the Christian population of the world. It is unclear how much Amsterdam is currently being paid by that. Okay. All right. So there's a lot good. So he didn't talk to him about Venezuela on camera. But like... But it's the one where he said about majority and socially conservative.

Okay. But that's a mistake on... Tucker's team has to... You got to know that. You got to know you're bringing on a fucking guy. And better yet. Because things happen fast in this business sometimes. If you find this out after, you have to fucking say, hey, we didn't know that.

Obviously, that makes an issue with some of the... some of the other points that he could be made. You know, talk about when he was on Fox also had this woman. She lives in New York City. Ayanna Pramil, something like that. I think she's married to what's his name, Max Blumenthal. Max Blumenthal from Grayscale. Yeah, evil people.

Ayanna occupied the Venezuela. You think they're evil? Evil. Why are they evil? Because they support every dictatorship, evil dictatorship in the world. Why do you say they support every evil dictatorship? I mean, they support Venezuela, they supported Assad, they support Maduro. They support Russia, Putin, China.

All right, hold on. I talked to Max himself a few months ago in the United States. Do they support them or are they just radical isolationists? No, I think they're support them unpaid. I mean. You think they're paid? That's a big act. Max worked for the Russian state TV.

What are you talking about? He worked for the Russian government. He worked for Russia today. That's working for the Russian government. All right. But talking about like Venezuela and some of these other places or whatever. And then he defends Venezuela as a democracy. And then he meets with Maduro.

Yes, he meets with Maduro. No, no, I'm telling you. I'm telling you for real. He met with Maduro. He told me straight in my face that America is a more tyrannical country than Venezuela. That's crazy. Go live in Venezuela. He told you that?

Yes. That's crazy. I mean, this is a really evil people. Ayana Priyampil, she occupied the Venezuelan embassy in 2019 after the U.S. kicked Maduro out. She occupied it? She occupied it. She occupied it. She squirited in the embassy with a bunch of people.

code pink nudge-ups. Then the DC police kicked them out. And all the Venezuelans outside were protesting against these Americans occupying our embassy. This world is such a mess, man. Like, these are not honest people, man.

And it's really shameful. I don't know the gray zone that well. I see some big stories when they come up sometimes. But that's... If he told you that, That's wild. That's what I mean.

It's like you should be, Daniel, you should be able to criticize the dark underbelly and the evil that can happen even in a good place, like America. Absolutely. You should be able to do that. You should be able to root out the people who are objectively bad. But I feel like now, I mean, have you heard of Code Pink?

We do, of course, of course. Funded by the Chinese, we'll know, no, no, because of the American times. It's a, you know, it's a fucking activist organization. I don't really take any of those places seriously. But it's like, you should be able to hold those thoughts of like, okay, here's all the bad stuff. Let's get rid of that. And not throw the baby out with the bathwater and then say, therefore, all bad. And there, and there, and let's take another step.

Therefore, pick objectively bad place. like, I don't know, a Maduro in Venezuela and say, you know, actually they're misunderstood. I feel like we do that all the time now, and I agree with you on that stance. But there's people who are very honest about it and who you can have a principal disagreement on this. You know, Thomas Massey is one of them, I think,

around Paul too. But you also have to understand that these regimes want to advance this narrative, so they pay people to do this because it's in their interest. Sure. And that's how all these groups pop out and they're not honest. Do you remember the Palestine occupation at Colombia?

Oh, yeah, that was all cringe. Half of the people arrested were not students. One of the people arrested who was leading this, his name is Manolo de los Santos. You should look up Manolo. Manolo runs an organization in Manhattan called the People's Forum. I know them because they brought three people who worked for Maduro in 2022, and I organized approaches of Venezuelan immigrants against them. Manolo went to Venezuela in 2024.

to meet with Maduro, dance with him. That's crazy. His personal force of the dictator of Cuba, Miguel Diaz Connell. These are the people. I mean, these are... I don't take any of those protests seriously at all. Of course, me neither.

But I think Americans need to understand that there are foreign authoritarian regimes funding these American run organizations from abroad to destabilize us from the inside. Because it's in their interest to do so. I think that pretty much every... I'm at a point where...

You should look up the picture of Manolo with the Cuban and the Venezuelan dictators. I don't think outside of in some respects maybe like the UK and I'll leave it at the UK. I don't think there's really any country in the world that wants to see America continue to do well. I think pretty much every country in some way, even the ones. Really? Who defends them? Like, yeah, but look at their politics. Look what they keep putting into power.

You know, and there's a lot of Canadians, obviously, who love America. I'm not talking about the people. I'm talking about governments right now. We're not talking about people. You know, people are not their governments. But it's like everybody's working against us. And that's why you can't have it's so difficult to have a principled conversation on like the problems in the Middle East with Israel and Palestine and stuff. Because when I talk to people who are hardcore Zionists and when I talk to people who are hardcore anti-Zionists, they will each just point at what is convenient to their side that they'll be like, do you agree with this? And I'll be like, a hundred percent. And they'll be like, great. And then I'll be like, yes. Now, what about these other things over here? And they'll be like, no, no, don't look at that, depending on which side you're on. Okay. You know, and it's like, I've had these, I've had the exact conversations off camera.

that are just like mind-blowing with people on those two sides of the issue. And I just feel like we've lost our ability in a lot of society to have nuance with these discussions. Yes. I'll say too. I think it's important that people understand that there's a lot of evil regimes around the world. And that there's such a thing as good versus evil, not everybody's evil. Major is one of the evil ones. I would agree. There's, you know, you can have this disagreement with the government of Germany, you know, but Germany is not the Madura regime.

Right. Even, I mean, the UK, I mean, let's be fair, the UK is not respecting the free speech of its own people. Oh, it's a huge problem. I'm very opposed to what's happening. Yes, that's why I was even hesitating when I was saying that out loud. I was like, eh, ha, ha, ha.

You know, I think actually more people have been arrested because of social media posts in the UK than in Venezuela. Which is not. Crazy. But obviously, you can't still call that a dictatorship like Venezuela. Right. They have free elections.

You know, you might disagree with the government. And so there is a coalition of really evil regimes who are kleptocrats of different ideologies, socialist, Islamists, regular kleptocrats like Putin, right, that are not really socialist, whose only interest is we want to stay in power, who's our only threat, the United States. Sure.

They're the only ones who can take on us. Germany can take on us. They're not a threat. That's right. They're sellouts, like most countries. That's right. So they're conspiring to destroy us. And how can they destroy us?

They know they can't invade us. So they're trying to destroy us from within, as you said. 100%. Completely agree. And I think it's happening everywhere. And I just, that's one thing I wish all Americans, you know, regardless of political leanings, could somehow come together and see. And just be like, hold on, put your opinions aside of everywhere else for a second.

Not saying get rid of them. We can talk about that later. That's right. That's right. But like, none of them are working for us. Yes. The question is what to do when we can have reasonable discussions about what to do. but we need to understand they're working against us

and we're on the same team here. That's right. That's right, man. Well, I am very eager to see how this all turns out. I really appreciate you doing this last minute and I appreciate you also like standing and answering some hard questions as well. Of course. I love this.

As you understand, it's a complicated situation. But for you and your family and the potential opportunity that if this goes well could pose, I really hope to see that go great so that, you know, you guys can also be able to return to a free and prosperous Venezuela and be able to call that place home as well. And your friends don't have to fucking sit in prisons and get to, I mean, it's horrible. So I'm wishing you guys all the best. And I'd like to be an optimist on this and hope things turn out great.

Thank you so much, Julian. All right. We'll do this again sometime. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

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