PJ Vogt

And so what does that look like?

What does it mean for this one resource to be so central to the country itself?

And so people are seeing this very early, even if it's more like an instinct, like just this feeling of like, oh, this goopy...

Black discharge from the soil that's so valuable.

Like, people have a feeling that this could be a problem.

Chapter two, Venezuelan democracy.

What is his prescription for the relationship between how Venezuela controls its own oil and whether or not it's democratic?

Because what you have in the early decades is essentially like dictators making deals with foreign oil companies like

I will violently subjugate people here, and I'll make sure the oil flows.

Exactly right.

Before the oil shock, because it seems like it's kind of a very, I don't want to say utopian moment, but like...

Just paint me a picture of what life looked like when everything was going really right.

So it's too simple to say, oh, life is great for everybody.

But the truer thing to say would be...

Like, things were relatively stable.

There were a lot of people in Venezuela for whom life was good, but there were also have-nots.

And part of the problem was just in a given year, no matter who's in charge or what their ideology is, what is the price of oil?

And so even if you're making promises about fair redistribution, if the price of oil goes down, what you have to redistribute is less.

And people who aren't getting anything...

might not be very patient about that.