Kenny Malone

And in Venezuela, some of them were digging up oil in that same place that gave Venezuela its name.

You want sound effects?

And that oil, it blew for nine straight days.

Raining oil on people and trees and houses.

It made headlines.

It made lines of oil on people's heads.

Also, kind of freaked out the townspeople reasonably.

It made a huge mess, and then it caused a proper oil rush to Venezuela.

Because, of course, oil in the ground is not an oil industry.

Turning that into something requires machinery and geologists and refineries and companies.

Venezuela makes some money from this, but those companies make so much more.

And so this was the very messy, gold-rushy way that the world's first oil-based economy sort of snapped into existence overnight.

No one said petrostate before you?

How do you know that?

Petro-states are simply countries with an economy built around having oil.

And overnight, Venezuela had become the first.

Venezuela would not have known about these issues in the 1920s.

But today, these things have memorable names like the Dutch disease, the resource curse, mono economic exposure to exogenous shock, which, OK, fair enough.

That doesn't have a memorable name.

But all of these things would debatably shape Venezuela over the next century.