Andrew Sage

And...

They will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo, in this case oil, right?

So this happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels.

It was one such vessel called the Skipper that the U.S.

Coast Guard boarded, I think, last week as we're recording this.

Yeah, sure.

That is how Venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions.

And Iran does this too.

Russia does this too.

They also do things like spoof their location or turn off their... They have like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use.

A transponder, yeah.

Yeah.

So this is fairly common practice.

But obviously the way to stop that is a physical blockade, right?

Like that's not going to be possible if the U.S.

is effectively like...

inspecting ships leaving Venezuela right or sort of keeping a very close eye on them so that will end and with that will end a very important source of income for the Maduro regime if they keep doing this yeah now obviously one of the sort of issues we're trying to work out what is going to happen here especially before whatever speech Trump is about to give is that we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting right yeah there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent so

Okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

And this was also unhinged.

The closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess, was the IRGC.