So today we're covering Hugo Chavez, who was the former leader of Venezuela, a very interesting human being and died very young or relatively young at the very least.

And we'll kind of discuss his times and his life and his disease is like in parentheses the S for the plural.

And how he passed away and what are the theories around why he passed away.

But before that, we also would like to thank all our patrons, of course, for letting us do this.

This is an episode for you guys.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

We cannot do this without you.

And that's what allows me to sit here after a fucking full workday and write up all this shit about

Hugo Chavez. Be very appreciative that I forgot the intro for you. All right. Okay, let me start.

A little bit of background about Venezuela from, I guess, like the 50s onwards. There are two major

parties that ruled Venezuela, and these

kind of existed almost like the states where it pretended to be some sort of like liberal

democracy, but most of it was a narrow slither of economic elites people who are descendants

of former Spanish aristocracy and these types was number one.

Another type was business magnates, I believe is the English word,

at least like high up business types.

And also U.S. assets or direct U.S. installed figures or American citizens

who are either related to the American government through, you know,

the several letter agencies, or were individual citizens, private citizens, that had some

business relation that was connected to American capital. And as a result of this, Venezuela was

basically just like a petro state with a huge underclass of very poor people, and then a very thin upper crust of like middle, upper middle, and then finally to the thinnest layer of the upper class. And it was kind of like a Cuban existence almost. A lot of times you hear the same nonsense, oh, Venezuela was a wealthy country. If you believe it, the wealthiest country, and they look at GDP metrics, but they don't

...