1269: Venezuela | Out of the Loop

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27:04That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Jordan. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash Jordan. Don't forget about our newsletter, y 'all. We bit wiser. It comes out every Wednesday. It's a short message from us to you. It's about a two minute read maximum. It's actionable. It's specific. It's practical. You can apply it right out of the box. Again, it comes out every Wednesday. JordanHarbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it. I would love to know a little bit about everyday life for normal Venezuelans under Chavez and Maduro, because my best friend was Venezuelan when I was growing up as a kid.

27:36This is like the 80s and early 90s. His dad was like a wealthy dude and he said back home things were pretty normal. His mom, of course, had been to Venezuela. She wasn't Venezuelan, but she'd been there. She was like, I was nice and like very modern and clean and things were running well. This is like the 80s. It was like a wealthy, normal place to go. It was, people were not starving in the streets and lighting things on fire. Widening inequality clearly happened at some point. Yeah, absolutely. The inequality slowly began because there was a difference between people who were connected and people who weren't connected.

28:12And a big portion of that was hyperinflation. So hyperinflation hit in like 2016, and this hyperinflation was over 800%. And you can just imagine if you think that something is going to cost more tomorrow than it does today, you're probably going to buy that thing today. And what does that lead to? That leads to shortages. Remember when during COVID, there was no toilet paper on the shelves? So why are people buying toilet paper? Oh, there's toilet paper there. I better buy it because there might not be any the next time I'm in the store. And in a situation like that, where there's all this hyperinflation, you have somebody in power, such as a police officer, or even just someone who might grant a permit like a driver's license.

28:54The corruption doesn't become someone stole money. A lot of corruption in the U.S. is of the someone stole money, pay to play kind of thing, or I'm going to steal money from this organization. Corruption in Venezuela was more like the system won't function unless you grease my hand a little bit. I think in some ways a lot of that is intentional because Iran is a similar example. I know a woman who's Iranian and she has been trying to get a passport for years now because she has a piece of property in Iran and she can't sell it unless she gets a passport and goes to Iran and is able to complete this transaction.

29:35But in order to do that, she needs a birth certificate. In order to do that, she has to send away for it and then go to the consulate. And I think a lot of those runarounds, that bureaucracy does two things. The first is it staffs the government with people who will support the government because at least it's a job. And the second thing is that job becomes an excellent opportunity for graft. Oh, you want your birth certificate? You have to pay me. I can expedite it if you pay me. There was a factory owner, and this guy, he couldn't find toilet paper. And the union contract that he had with his workers required that he provide toilet paper and all the bathrooms.

30:11So now you got a guy running around the city trying to find toilet paper instead of actually running his business. Because if he goes into breach of contract with the union, the government can take his business. Oh, my God. And if you have someone running around just constantly doing busy work all the time to satisfy these little tiny bureaucratic states, then it makes it a lot harder to go protest or fight against the government. Like, I can't protest against the government. I got to friggin wait in line for food. I can't protest against the government. I need to renew my driver's license. And that takes two days.

30:45So I think a lot of this is intentional. So the average life of a person in Venezuela is just dealing with all this BS and dealing with people who are in the government who want a payment just to do their jobs. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Venezuela, man, they got 300 billion barrels of oil or something like that. How does having massive oil reserves, how does that make the problems worse? Because a lot of people are like, there's so much money there. This place should be paradise. But the problem is all these oil states, except for Norway, it's a curse, basically. Yeah, any country that primarily relies on pulling minerals out of the ground tends to become corrupt because then there's no incentive to be accountable to taxpayers.

31:29You and I, we pay money to the federal government or in some cases, the state government. And for the most part, if the government doesn't do what we want them to do with that money, we unelect them. I complain a lot that I get taxed 6 % where I live in Maryland, but I can go online. I can renew my driver's license online, right? I don't have to go into the DMV. I do actually get a lot of services, but if there's no incentive to be accountable to the taxpayer and you have things like foreign contractors providing a lot of the expertise for mineral extraction, then all you really need to do is provide the labor, which is mostly unskilled or semi-skilled labor.

32:12So you don't necessarily need to make sure your people are educated. You don't necessarily need to have hospitals other than maybe maternity hospitals, right? Because you still need to keep that birth rate up to keep creating those semi-skilled or low-skilled workers. You need those people. And then you need a small group of people who are the elite, the doctors, the lawyers, the technocrats that help the country run. But you don't necessarily need that big middle class that's well-educated because those are the people that can go protest or might get upset if things go wrong. So mineral revenue is basically the prize that makes corruption worth it.

32:49I've done shows about this. I remember talking with, oh man, his name is Alistair. He wrote The Dictator's Handbook. Remember that guy? Yeah, I've been quoting stuff from there, yeah. When I said the three people that you need to satisfy. Yes, exactly. This is like straight out of The Dictator's Handbook. And the reason that so I went in depth on like why oil and mineral extractive regimes are usually authoritarian shite holes where people get shot in the street just generally. It's the default unless you really have a lot of momentum going in the other direction like you're Norway and one of the most sort of progressive societies in the world.

33:25And you have oil. And then, like you mentioned before, Dutch disease, high oil prices, good times. Everybody gets a government program so that they don't have any problem with the government. But then the party stops because the game of musical chairs goes to shit because the oil price falls. And it's not only are you not getting free education, you aren't getting food because there's no diversified economy. You got major problems and other businesses can't even get talent because it's all going to the oil company. The other issue is businesses, they have a hard time competing with oil or mineral extraction.

33:57Right. So if I have a factory and I make widgets and I can pay you ten dollars an hour, but the oil fields pay twelve dollars an hour, where are you going to work? Some people will work in the widget factory because maybe it's easier work. But eventually that widget factory is going to have to raise their wages. Yeah, this is the problem that Rush is having right now. I've got friends there and basically everybody works at a defense contractor like everybody. Yeah, they still have teachers and doctors, but. Yeah, and the defense contractors are competing with the army. So the army raises wages or they raise the bonus.

34:35So the defense contractors have to raise their bonus. And that's why you see 20 % inflation inside of Russia. Yeah, I don't mean like defense contractors per se, but defense related industries, I should say. So like everybody's doing something because that's where all the money is, like all of it. Okay, oil production. I was shocked by this. They have the, what is it, first or second largest oil reserves in the world? They have the largest oil reserves. But they produce less than a million barrels a day, which makes no sense to me until you read that those oil derricks are rusty, right? They haven't been cleaned out since Chavez, which is what, 1997?

35:10They have had a lot of reinvestment, right? If you're trying to steal as much as you can before you retire, I'm going to use the Dukes of Hazzard analogy. Did you ever watch the Dukes of Hazzard, that TV show? Hell yeah, of course. So Roscoe Coltrane, the sheriff, he was actually a fairly honest sheriff. And then a bond issue failed that would pay for his pension. And he had three years before he was going to retire. So he had three years to make all the money you could steal. And so with something like this, when you're a dictator, the clock on the wall is ticking, right? Are you going to die or are you going to get deposed?

35:46So you have to make as much money as you can steal before that clock hits zero. So why would you reinvest into repairing your oil rigs or buying new stuff or finding new fields when you could take that money? Because one of two things is going to happen, right? You're either going to get deposed and you get killed. You're going to die in your sleep or maybe three things. You might get deposed and be able to get on a plane and go to Russia and play Fortnite with Assad for the rest of your life. I was going to say, Putin is collecting dictators like my grandma used to collect those Matryoshka dolls, the nesting dolls.

36:23And I was thinking, man, Maduro, he got kidnapped. But if he had gotten to his safe room or whatever and the army started closing in, the special forces would have had to leave without him. But, man, I could just picture Putin screaming, Assad, clean your room. Maduro might be coming over and he's definitely sleeping with you. Clean your room anyway, though, because Khomeini might be coming over and he's not sleeping with me. If you run an authoritarian state right now, someone in Putin's palace is sweeping the floors and tucking the sheets in and giving you your Star Wars bedding all set up. They are ready for your arrival.

36:57Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely correct. What really surprises me is that Maduro didn't take the offering. There was a theory that maybe this was something we used to do in Iraq where someone was going to self-surrender or someone was going to inform on terrorist organizations in Iraq. And instead of them walking to our forward operating base, we would tell them, just don't worry about it. We'll come to you. And then one night we kick in their door and we grab and we put a bag over their head. He knows it's all for show, but the neighbors don't. And so that was one thing that people said, oh, maybe Maduro actually self-surrendered and they had to do it in a certain way.

37:38I don't think so. I don't believe that's the case. Nah. If he was going to do it that way, they would have done something where like his plane took off and the Air Force escorted it to Florida with very little expense, little fanfare, not a big deal. Like it was over international waters. Oh, my gosh. They wouldn't send special forces into Caracas after bombing the crap out of the air defenses and do this super risky thing to get him and his wife out of there. There's no way that I do not believe that. Yeah, you're absolutely correct. They did give him an off ramp to I believe it was Turkey. And he basically said, go fly a kite.

38:13That's not happening. And then he went on TV and started mocking and dancing and like laughing about it. And I think that just pissed off Trump and his buddies enough where they were like, kick this door in extra hard. I said it was going to happen. A couple of days before the events, I actually came out with a Ryan McBeth 2026 bingo card. I saw that. You know, I had Venezuela as the free space. But Maduro, he was done. The president cannot drive an aircraft carrier into the Caribbean and put all those ships. I think we have about 20 Navy ships there, plus Coast Guard vessels, without looking weak in front of Russia and China.

38:50the president backs down. Maduro was going on where the oven. I knew it was only a matter of time. I think you and I talked over the holidays and you were like, eh, it won't happen before January. I can't remember because Congress isn't in session. It needs to get congressional approval to do anything like this. And then that's not what happened, is it? It's not how our president rolls. One of the things we probably should have done was get a general authorization for use of military force just to that area. But unfortunately, I am not a lawyer. I am not a congressman. I'm not on the Supreme Court.

39:21So I can't say whether this particular act, you're the lawyer, you should be able to tell me whether this was legal. I'm only one of those things that I can tell you that this was definitely not legal, but it doesn't matter because nobody's enforcing anything. That's the bigger problem. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the thing. There's what is legal or illegal and then there's what you can get punished for. Exactly. Speeding is illegal, but I can speed as long as I don't get caught. That's right. I want to talk about the Venezuelan military because one of the things I thought was, wow, that happened, was this is a massive operation.

39:5540 people were killed. Somehow, 32 of them were Cubans, according to Cuba. So I want to hear about that. But then also we had to repaint one of the helicopters because it had a bullet hole on it and everybody else was totally fine. We absolutely smoked this mission. The Venezuelan military, are they competent at all? I mean, clearly they don't stand a chance against American soldiers or marines or special forces at all but is it just they just do internal security but isn't internal security i don't know controlling your airspace they have all these chinese or russian air defense units hey you might want to plug those in guys yeah i mean so war is hard right there's that war is hard to start with the air defenses one of the air defense units they have is the russian s-300 it's an older system not the best system ukraine still uses that system Russia still uses that system.

40:50But we have ways of not only jamming that system with electronic countermeasures aircraft like the Growler, the EF-18 Growler, which effectively jammed these systems so that either they can't lock on to aircraft or once they fire, that missile goes someplace else. We also have something called SEED or suppression of enemy air defenses, where when we notice that the enemy radar is emitting, we fire a missile toward that enemy radar, and that missile is called a HARM anti-radiation missile. That missile goes after the radar signal. So it homes in on the actual radar dish that is sending out radio waves tracking a jet.

41:33Now they have two choices. They can turn the set off and hopefully move. If they do turn it off, the missile remembers where it is and goes there anyway. They can turn the set off or they can keep it on in the hopes that they can either shoot down the incoming missile or still shoot down some of the jets. It is doing anti aircraft work. It's an art, not necessarily a science because you can have different units where they turn on their radar and then turn it off really quick and have another one turn on their radar and turn it off really quick. But when you're facing massed forces over 150 aircraft, I would imagine quite a few of those were suppression of enemy air defense aircraft.

42:12I think they had 18 surface-to-air missile launchers. So 18 of those, dealing with all those suppression of enemy air defense aircraft, that's going to be a major problem. So they were prepared for an invasion from Kyrgyzstan or Turks and Caicos, not an invasion from the United States. It can certainly give you a false sense of security. And that's not saying they can't get lucky during the war in Serbia. Serbians shot down an American F-117 Nighthawk with an anti-aircraft system. The guy who was doing the air defense, he was just really good, and he was able to wait until the stealth fighter opened up its bomb bays.

42:51When that happened, the stealth characteristics were gone, and he was able to shoot during that time. It took a lot of patience, but he was able to do it. My buddy's army unit captured the pilot from the United States. It was this guy, Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko in 1999. This FF-117 Nighthawk was down. This is the Yugoslav slash Serbian army. And my friend was like, we felt so bad for that guy. The proximity warhead on a missile doesn't care if you're invisible, right? The guy I lived with in Serbia went up on a billboard and they spray painted in Serbian. Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible.

43:32that's pretty funny yeah they're pretty snarky it was kind of funny yeah serbians are good it's a good time if they're not shooting at you and maybe even if they are i don't know they actually have some really good military equipment the serbs in a lot of ways because almost kind of like the south africans because nobody would sell to them right so the serbians had to develop a lot of their own military equipment like the lazar which is an armored personnel carrier but i know we're here to talk about Venezuela. Yeah. You had mentioned the troops and, you know, for the most part, if the troops are essentially just being used to put down protesters, they're not very skillful.

44:07You have special forces guys. They built a compound. They built Maduro's compound and they practiced again and again in order to execute this mission flawlessly. So when you're going up against operators who practice for four months to kill you and they I know every single corner, you might be able to get a lucky shot in, but these guys really are the best of the best. I read about this and they said that Maduro, when this was all going down, they knew exactly where he was. They knew what he had for breakfast. They knew all the places he was going. They knew what kind of pets he had. They knew his night schedule, his morning routine, everything, of course, because the CIA was on the ground.

44:41They said that when they caught him, finally, he was already in a safe room trying to close the door. So like that was a close call. Also, what was their plan if he got in that room and shut the door? Because it sounds like they had 30 second basically window that they almost didn't get him. Were they just going to drop a bunker buster on that thing and then they didn't arrest him? He just turned into pink mist or what? They have charges with him. You blow that door. There'd be ways to get through that door. Look, any safe is really a time delay, right? The question is, how much time do we have in order to penetrate this room?

45:18One of the things that I had mentioned in a video I had done was that President Trump, it was on October 15th, he said, we have CIA assets in Venezuela. Everyone went, oh, my God, why would he say we have CIA assets in Venezuela? What an idiot. He didn't say it for Americans. He didn't say it to brag. He did it to let the Venezuelans know we are coming and you can open the door for us or you can be under it when we kick it in. now next time he says there's cia on the ground in iran now when he orders that phrase it means i'm getting arrested at best in 90 days it's probably a little bit easier to put cia on the ground in venezuela i don't know how many persian uh special operators or cia agents we have we for sure have that are you kidding me go to la you can find a few guys there the one just go to the ones that aren't selling necklaces i love my persian friends you go to find one that's not a dermatologist.

46:18First we arrest him, then we sell him a carpet. We have Persians. Come on, man. And if we didn't just talk to Israel, the Mossad is probably half Persian or Persian passing guys. I got to tell you, when I was in Israel, there were quite a few of the guards at the Knesset. I was there with a news channel I worked for and quite a few of the guards, you could tell they weren't Ashkenazi, right? So I would assume they're either Christian or Arabs and they look like straight up killers. There's a unit that I used to know some guys in Israel and the name is something like Mishta-Aravim and it basically means living among the Arabs and they're Sephardic Jews, so Arabic Jews.

46:59You ever see Fauda? Remember that show? Yeah, excellent show. You know how the guy speaks fluent Arabic and he convinces everybody he's a Palestinian from the West Bank or something like that. It's flawless. These are guys that like grew up in Yemen and their family's from Yemen and They have a Yemeni culture. They happen to be Jewish. They could go into Yemen and people would be like, oh, yeah, you're one of us. Of course, you got the local accent from our town. It's just completely amazing how well these guys can infiltrate stuff. It's absolutely bananas. Anyway, that's a tangent. All right, we got Maduro.

47:29What's going to happen to that guy? Is he sharing a cell with Diddy, exchanging petroleum for baby oil? Yeah, I mean, I guess we took both of their oil. That's right. That's right. They're having their own oil party in Rikers Island. Okay. We left the VP, Rodriguez, Delcy Rodriguez, I believe is her name. She's still in charge. So a lot of people are saying like, hey, what good does this do? The whole regime is still in place. The armed forces are still in place. The VP is still in place. Are we just thinking they're going to be more amenable to getting bribed or whatever, or to the carrot or the stick to do what the United States wants now?

48:05I think that the idea is Delce Rodriguez is mainly a technocrat. She did run the oil side of the oil exploitation side of Venezuela for quite a few years, and she was a vice president. So she manages a lot of that stuff. She knows where all the bodies are buried and how the oil extraction process works in the country. One of the issues that we had in Iraq and I guess in Afghanistan as well, we listened to people like Noriel Maliki in Iraq and Hamid Karzai. And these people said, oh, the people love me. The people want me back. The people want me here. and what happens when we arrive in Iraq? The people don't know who Nouriel Malik is.

48:54He hasn't been here. And Hamid Karzai was basically the mayor of Kabul. So the thing is, in 2024, Edmundo Gonzalez, he won Venezuela's last election, and Maduro essentially said, no, you didn't. And he was a stand-in for a woman named Maria Carina Machado. And both of those people left the country. And Maria Carino Machado, she was one who won the Nobel Peace Prize and thanked President Trump thinking, oh, he's the guy who's going to bring me in. The problem is that if either Gonzalez and Machado, if they walk off the C-17 escorted by Marines, the Venezuelan army and the Venezuelan police are not going to respect them.

49:40They're going to consider them to be American puppets. It's going to look bad if we put our own people in charge after arresting the leader. Especially people who have been out of the country have been risking their butts like everybody else in Venezuela. Like I said, Ahmed Karzai and Noriel Maliki, who, oh, yes, I'm going to go in and they're going to be throwing roses at me. And that didn't work out. So I think we for once we learned our lesson. And actually, I will tell you this, going back to military stuff for a second. We fought an insurgency for 20 some years. One of the things we're really good at is finding where a bad guy is, kicking in the door and grabbing him.

50:19That's something we essentially practiced for 20 years. This was absolutely inevitable. And that's one thing we learned from the global war on terror, along with maybe we shouldn't take the outsider and put them in a position of power. Nothing says we'd love to work with you in a mutually beneficial relationship, quite like Delta Force blasting down your steel-reinforced doors at 4 o 'clock in the morning. Fighter jets and crack commandos don't come cheap, though, so let's prop up our economy by supporting the amazing sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by SimpliSafe.

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53:28They make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a code or you can't find a code or you're not sure if there is a code, feel free to email us. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com. We are happy to surface codes for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of our out of the loop here with Ryan McBeth. One thing that's interesting is they did indict him right for drug trafficking, narco terrorism related charges.

53:58And they're also hitting him with this possession of a machine gun, essentially, which is funny because so the way this charge works, it's this is like some stupid lawyer thing, but whatever, maybe nobody else thinks this is funny. But in order to get this charge, you don't have to have a machine gun. If I get hit with that charge, it's not like I have the machine gun in my hands or in my kitchen. It's that somebody associated with me in whatever crime I was doing, whatever criminal organization, they had a machine gun that they were using in the crime of drug trafficking or narco terrorism. So you're taking this guy who controls a literal army with a Navy and Air Force anti-aircraft missiles and like thousands of weapons and rockets and everything.

54:36And you're like, hey, man, I know you had a machine gun when you were doing those crimes. And you're like, yes, I yes, I had a machine gun. I have thousands of them and grenades and missiles and everything in a boat that launches them. So it's this sort of funny add-on charge that you see when you hit like a crip with this or a guy in the bloods when he's dealing drugs and possession of a machine gun. Damn, there's three extra years on the sentence. And we're adding that to Maduro. It's kind of like charging somebody. You have done capital murder and you're a serial killer and we found a bag of weed in your car.

55:10So you're getting life plus two and a half months. It's just a silly, stupid add-on charge that kind of looks funny, even in the indictment. You're like, what? Why bother with that? I know this is silly. That's a good one. I know that the charges were actually filed in 2020. One of the last things that the Biden administration did was increase the reward for Maduro's capture to$25 million. That was kind of interesting when Vice President Harris went on Twitter and said, how dare Trump grab Maduro? Wait a minute. Wasn't one of the last things your government did increase the reward by$25 million?

55:47dollars. That's one of the issues that I can kind of see with this country now, even if, you know, we should take the win on this one. Everyone in America should go like, good job, special forces. We got a bad guy out of power. We have the potential for degrading China's influence in our hemisphere. Yeah, this should be something both Republicans and Democrats should agree on was a good thing. And honestly, Biden probably would have done it if he had thought of it first. Yeah. He's the guy who raised the reward. Yeah. I think we need to stop sharpshooting each other and come together as Americans for the win.

56:23Can we sort of steel man what people are saying? Like, this is really terrible. This is bad. We shouldn't have done this because I'm with you where I'm like, I love a good bad guy takedown. But I'm also like, OK, people who say this is terrible in an escalation, they have a point. Well, I think what's terrible is that we didn't get an authorization for use of military force. Yeah, I agree with that. That sets a really bad precedent because President Trump won't be in office forever. And the next guy who is in office who decides, you know what, I want to invade this country over here without authorization of Congress, he might actually do that.

56:59He or she might actually do that. And that authorization for use of military force is necessary because then the president has to go to Congress and make the case. I said in a couple of my videos, I don't mind doing this because of the China connection. But the president needs to make the case. The president needs to get the authorization for use of military force. And Congress has not done its job. They've been asleep at the wheel when it comes to the checks and balances that our nation depends on. Yeah, I completely agree. There's certainly a portion of this, I'm thinking, that basically wanted to signal to China, hey, we don't care if you have influence in our backyard.

57:37We're not going to allow that. And also to Russia, you have influence in our backyard. We don't like that. And by the way, your weapons are trash. Yeah. I mean, if there was a nail in the coffin, it would certainly be this, at least when it comes to surface air missile system, because the Iranians are using Russian made surface air missile systems as well. If Russia ever recovers from their war in Ukraine, nobody is going to buy their stuff. If I were in a democracy or even like a semi-democratic country where people really are accountable in the legislature and someone said, hey, we should buy these Russian T-72 tanks.

58:14I know that if I agree to that, the next time I'm up for election, people are going to be showing footage of Russian tanks blown up with their turrets popped off in Ukraine. And they're going to go, Senator Bongo wants to buy this horrible Russian equipment. Vote for this other senator. So when you look at the performance of Russian equipment in Venezuela, that doesn't really bode well for the Russian arms industry and that Russia can ever recover and actually export arms again. Because right now, everything is going towards Ukraine. They essentially can't export anything. I do think Russia actually took a bit of a win here.

58:55Because they can now go, yeah, we invaded Ukraine, but look, they went and arrested Maduro. They're no better than us. I see key differences in these two things, but they're going to say, hey, the international law that you guys talk about all the time, you clearly don't care about that either. You're absolutely right. There is a woman, she's a Russian-American, her name's Ksenia Turekova. I've worked with her on various projects before. And Ksenia keeps an eye on the Russian news media. and she said that Russia has already been showing their citizens, look, this is what America does. Now, on the world stage, I don't really think it matters because it's not like other countries are going to go, oh, look, America did it so Russia can do it too.

59:39Kind of like that Tyler Perry movie, I can do bad all by myself. Russia doesn't need an excuse. Russia can do bad all by themselves. So can China. China doesn't need an excuse to take over Taiwan. But from an internal standpoint, this really is a win for Russia because they can say to their people, look, America is no different. Exactly. Although ignore the part about how they didn't lose anybody and it took three hours and we're in Ukraine for three years and we're on 500 ,000 dead or whatever the heck it is at this point. Not just that, but look at when Russia tried to take over Hostomel Airport, they performed an air assault, really similar to what we did in Karak.

1:00:16And they flew into Hostomel Airport, which is a little bit northwest of Kiev. And they had to do it at dawn because they didn't have enough night vision goggles for their pilots and their men. And they didn't have enough training flying at night. Whereas the 60th SOAR, which is the Night Stalkers, the unit that flew these operators in, that's all they do is fly it. These guys fly at night all the time. Imagine looking through two rolled up magazine tubes that are tinted green and trying to fly a helicopter. I've flown a helicopter before. It is very hard. It is very hard. And these guys, they're the kinds of guys that can hover inches off the ground and keep it steady while their operators jump out because they don't want to land because they don't know if the roof will collapse or there might be a mine on top of the ground or whatever.

1:01:09And these guys are really that good. And Russia, look, you get what you pay for. If you're not constantly training like the 160th does, you're just not going to see that level of performance out of your pilots. I would love to counter the people who say this is just about oil because, yes, we do need the grade of oil, the Venezuela pumps. It's the kind we are set up to refine in the United States. But it's going to take eight years to get that stuff back up online. This infrastructure is just trashed right now. And digging wells, especially offshore stuff and deep enough in pipelines and infrastructure to the ports and the containers.

1:01:45I mean, this is not something, even if you work 24-7 at rapid pace as fast as you can, you're talking about half a decade before you're really ramping this stuff up. It's going to be crazy. It's going to take forever. You're absolutely correct. When you look at it, you have companies like Exxon, and I'm sure it would be great to go down to Venezuela, but we got plenty of capacity coming from fracking in North Dakota, right? Right. So why would we go down to Venezuela and invest money in something? It's going to take five to seven years to get any kind of return on investment. And it might get seized again by the next guy who gets elected in Venezuela, which they've done before.

1:02:26That could theoretically happen. And in five years, assuming there's no third President Trump term, which I don't think is going to happen. But let's say the White House flips and you have a person who enters the White House who doesn't feel like we need to have the same sort of Dunro doctrine. Those oil companies might be out of luck. So there's going to have to be some incentives for them to go down there and pump some oil as well as some security guarantees as well. It still seems like this chess move makes sense, even if Venezuela was exporting avocados. Strawberries. Absolutely. And that's something a lot of people don't seem to understand because people go, oh, the oil.

1:03:06And again, President Trump didn't help when he goes off script and goes, we're going to take the oil and we're going to. Oh, God, why did you say that? It's just the fact that we're cleaning house in our own hemisphere and denying China and Russia and Iran access to that. There were Iranians who are coming to Venezuela. They get that diplomatic passport. Now you have Hezbollah guys who can travel all around the world on a diplomatic passport issued by Venezuela. That is not a situation that we want going on in our own backyard. What happens next, man? A little bit of oil volatility, maybe, but probably not too much of that.

1:03:44What about opposition parties in Venezuela? Is the era of socialism over? I know Iranians are like, hey, we're protesting over here, too. You want to drop in with your night stalkers and help a brother out? I mean, I see that kind of talk online as well. That would be a little bit harder. You know, Iran is fairly mountainous. I can tell you that probably the most realistic outcome is a managed transition where you have security forces mostly staying intact because they honestly want the paycheck and eventually some sort of negotiated political settlement where they hold free and fair elections, maybe even with American observers.

1:04:20We have free and fair elections. And those people who are elected can then move toward weaning Venezuela off whatever socialist experiment they were in. That is the most realistic best outcome. Yeah, I was going to say that's the good outcome. What else could happen? What's the worst case scenario? Oh, boy. The bad outcome is, let's say, in a power vacuum. So Maduro is gone and maybe oil revenue isn't going out like it was or maybe different people have to get paid off. Now you have these motorcycle gangs and these guys essentially become free agents. And now you don't see Venezuela turn into Iraq because in Iraq there's a lot of secretarian violence, Sunni and Shia.

1:05:07The Sunnis were a minority, but they were in power. The Shia were a majority. They were not in power. And they were. Iraq was essentially a civil war for probably about six years. You're not going to see that in Venezuela. You're not going to see a civil war because there's really no secretarian divide there. but I can easily see it turning into Libya with all of these fiefdoms run by warlords, most likely narco warlords, right? Because they're getting their funding somehow. And then you have this legitimacy crisis where you have the president who is essentially the mayor of Caracas. Everyone is afraid to go out into the jungle because that's where all the gangs are.

1:05:50I can see that as a possible worst outcome. Jeez. Oh my gosh. I hope it, works out better than that. The reaction from Venezuelans has been interesting. There's people in Venezuela celebrating, there's Venezuelans in the United States celebrating, and there's no polling data on this or anything, but like the majority of people are doing. Do they see this as a liberation, chaos, foreign power meddling that they'd rather not deal with? Because if you're suffering and you've been starving and stuff like that and you have no medical care, you might feel a little bit hopeful. But if you're an older person who is just thinking you have five more years and maybe you can survive it, this might not be a shock to the system that you really needed.

1:06:27I think you're seeing a wide range of possibilities here. For 25 years, Venezuela has been socialist, right? You have people who've never seen democracy. Maybe some of the older people might be cautiously optimistic about what might happen. The younger people might kind of wonder what is this whole democracy thing? How does that actually change? I've got my TikTok, I've got my friends. I never get in trouble with the police. What's the big deal? Maybe it's not a big deal until you want a family or you want a stable job. You want a good job after you get an education. I think if you're risk sensitive, like you're an elderly pensioner or something, you're probably going to fear any kind of instability, especially if consumer goods start flooding back into the country.

1:07:16Sanctions get lifted, consumer goods start flooding into the country. Now you might see prices rise because now you have money chasing more oil money gets produced, more money chases those new consumer goods. I think you might be able to see prices rise. And so pensioners might go, crap, it might not be as bad as 800 percent hyperinflation. But if you have a certain dollar value to your pension, there's not a lot of elasticity there. If you're in the regime, that's a good question, because one big problem that we had in Iraq was what we called de-Bathification. The Ba 'ath party was Saddam Hussein's party.

1:07:55And Paul Bremer, the genius that he was, and I said that sarcastically, on the third day of the occupation, he said, if you're in the Ba 'ath party, you're fired. And essentially, everybody who knew how the water treatment plant worked walked off the job. So if you're the regime, you're probably going to be thinking, like, I need to play along no matter what happens. You don't want to rock the boat too much. I don't really see people grabbing their AK-101s and going and fighting for Maduro because Maduro wasn't really fighting for Venezuela. AK-101? Yeah, I believe that's their assault rifle that they use in the Venezuelan army.

1:08:36Huh. I know there's 47 and I know there's 74 because I play Call of Duty. I never heard of the 101. so uh for it belongs to the ak-100 family uh it's kind of a new rifle floating barrel developed in 1994 uses 556 by 45 so yeah it's a smaller cartridge intermediate cartridge i believe venezuela bought or man i think they have a licensed manufacturer and they manufactured like a million of these things so there's a heck of a lot of these things floating around South America, at least floating around Venezuela. You can probably get one real cheap right now if you want one for your collection. I didn't mean to derail you.

1:09:15This is an interesting and very sort of, frankly, fascinating developing situation. Do you think we're going to continue to drone boats coming out of there or is that kind of over? I don't really know. That is a really good question. I guess we'll see. But it seems like the point of that might have been to like rattle Maduro a little bit. Now he's already he's gone. Yeah, honestly, that's a tough one. It might have been to Rado Maduro. I can see us not striking these votes anymore because our objective has been realized. Maybe that won't happen anymore. I don't know what kind of debt we put in the actual drug market by destroying 20 boats.

1:09:54Oh, none. No, I read up on the narco traffic from Venezuela. It's a drop in the bucket. It's not a real player. I would imagine it would be more Colombia for the processing. I know it is a fact that the FARC engages in cocaine production and trafficking in some of the jungles near the Colombian border. That is 100 % obvious. I often thought those boats that we were hitting, they might have been going out to a mothership, right? There's an oil tanker that's headed over to Europe. I'm going to carry a bunch of bales of drugs, pull up next to this mothership. We're going to throw these bales onto the mothership.

1:10:32The Filipinos are operating the ship. They don't care. As long as they get paid, bring whatever you want. And they put that stuff in the hold and it goes over to Europe. So I'm not sure how much of a dent we really made in the drugs being imported into the U.S., but it could have been done to rattle Maduro. You're absolutely right. That was actually one of the big issues that I had with this whole venture was that we never really explained why this was necessary. Yeah. All right. Last question. when Trump said something's got to be done about Cuba. What do we think is happening here? Are we actually going to do something about it?

1:11:06Or is it just like, I got a chance to scare the shit out of Fidel Castro and his cronies. Like, I'm going to do it. Yeah, we saw that movie, The Bay of Pigs. Yeah. I could see us perhaps giving Cuba a little push. Right now, we're coming off a high, right? That raid was so amazing. Then two days later, the president's talking about invading Greenland. Yeah, take the win. Take the W, right? Yeah. Now we're talking about Greenland. It's certainly possible that we could give Cuba a little bit of a push, but I don't know how ready the Cuban people might be to accept any kind of Yankee imperialism.

1:11:47They might know that their lives aren't that great, but they've had to deal with the U.S. sanctioning their country since, I believe, 1963, was it? Since the early 1960s, right, we've sanctioned Cuba. In fact, I think one of John F. Kennedy's last things he did was he bought a thousand cigars from Cuba before he signed the order sanctioning Cuba. So he was good, at least for the rest of his life. Yeah, it's interesting. The Cuban people might not be ready for Yankee imperialism. Were the Venezuelans ready for Yankee imperialism or you just think it's a different situation? I think it's a different situation because they've experienced wealth and democracy.

1:12:27That's true. Nobody alive in Cuba has experienced any sort of prosperity at any point, really. That's probably accurate. I guess as Americans, we have this conceptualization that everyone wants to be free and people are imagining like, oh, wouldn't it be great if I can speak my mind? And that's one of those things that sounds good to us. But for the average Cuban who just they need to get to work and they need to find food and they do this. Oh, it's democracy now. OK. Does this mean I get food? There could be that whole situation where democracy comes and you have winners and you have losers and you look at Russia.

1:13:05I mean, there were some real winners and some real losers. In fact, there were a couple of winners and the rest of the country was the loser when all those pyramid schemes came out after the fall of the Soviet Union. I would certainly imagine that if we push Cuba over into some sort of fall of the Cuban regime, it's the pottery barn rule that Colin Powell mentioned. You break it, you buy it. You break it, you own it. And Venezuela might be able to take care of themselves, but Cuba is a freaking basket case. It is. My God. I went there and I'll never forget the things that they told us versus the things that we saw with our own lying eyes.

1:13:45It was just like everyone has free health care and you get free clothing and you get free school. All right, we're going to stop at this bathroom over here and bring pencils because the kids here don't have any. Why is everyone naked? They don't really have clothing. What the hell, man? Yeah, I've heard when you run the Havana Marathon is tradition to give your shoes to somebody at the end. That doesn't surprise me at all. The things I saw there and then our tour guide was like, you don't understand. You don't understand. And I was like, maybe I don't understand, but I don't know. This is what I'm seeing.

1:14:14And then three years later, he escaped to the United States. I emailed him and I was like, so mostly bullshit. And he's like, what do you want me to do? I'm a tour guide for the government of Cuba. Anyway, Miami's nice these days. I'm happy to be here. That was really, really crazy to see. Ryan, thank you so much, man. This is fascinating. I'm so curious what is going to happen next with this. And I just I really hope that the positive outcomes that we outlined are more on the menu than the disasters that could come out of this. We'll see. I'm going to use my Arabic and say inshallah. There we go.

1:14:44Thank you very much. Thank you. You're about to hear a preview with Ken Burns, who says the real American Revolution wasn't a clean break from Britain, but a messy, violent civil war whose contradictions we are still debugging 250 years later. A good story neutralizes the binary yes and no, you know, you're bad, left, right, young, old, rich, poor, whatever the dialectic is you're involved in. A good story can sort of neutralize it and go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. There's no test. We'd share with you our process of discovery. So all the stuff I've said about the revolution, I had no idea going in.

1:15:21And I am so overwhelmed with the joy of acquiring it that giving it away feels even better. The ideas are really, really powerful at the heart of this. The idea that you could be a citizen, that you could have a say in your government after your family has worked the land for a thousand years for somebody else. And all of a sudden you come here and you own some land and farm and you can do this and you're literate. Democracy is a really messy form of government, but it's better than all the other forms because the other forms involve a kind of tyranny on authoritarian certainty. Democracy is messy because you actually have to listen to people that you disagree and you have to compromise.

1:16:00When that breaks down, then you lose the possibility of having it. America comes out of violence. It's born in violence. What would you guys do? What would I do? Would I be a loyalist? Would I be a patriot? What would I be willing to fight for? What would I be willing to give my life and all that I've accumulated in my life, my fortune? Would I do that? We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. For more on what else we've been getting wrong about our own origin story, check out episode 1238 with Ken Burns. This episode forces you to confront the version of America you didn't learn in school.

1:16:38All right, if there's one takeaway here, it's that Venezuela didn't collapse because of one villain or one policy. It collapsed because oil rents replaced accountability. Institutions got hollowed out. Competence got replaced with loyalty. And once the money dried up, the regime compensated with control. And for Americans, Venezuela isn't a distant cautionary tale. It's a pressure point. Energy markets, migration flows, criminal networks, and a strategic backyard problem right next to critical shipping lanes and the Gulf Coast refining complex. That mix doesn't stay contained just because we want it to.

1:17:09As always, we'll keep watching what happens next, whether this turns into a managed transition with an off-ramp for the people who currently hold the guns and the keys, or whether the vacuum turns into a gray zone free-for-all where ordinary people get squeezed between politics and criminals. Show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show on the website as well at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, and our six-minute networking course as well. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

1:17:42This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. the fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in geopolitics, Venezuela, South America, oil dictators, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:18:10And we'll see you next time.