Welcome to another edition of Geopolitics and Empire.

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We're joined today by Tim Pickles, who works in commercial finance

as a finance and strategy consultant. And he's got a lot of interesting things to say on

the economy, energy, and so forth. Welcome to the podcast, Tim. Hey, Harvey. Thanks very much

for having me. It's exciting to finally try and get this down in some form.

I suppose short story would say, you know, after 12 years of, you know, the classic life, you know, and a good career,

I decided to take sabbatical. I was going to go traveling, you know, I hadn't done anything like that in my youth.

And in the time, there was, there was, you know, news about Venezuela and the crisis it was in.

And I reflected, because the first time in my life, I actually didn't have to go to work and I had

time to think, you know, how could that be?

How could this country with more, you know, oil than anyone else and relatively easy,

accessible, how could it find itself where people were, I mean, I think the story that I read just, you know, horrific was that people were crossing over the mountains and getting to

Columbia and there was a mother with

a child and they frozen to death, you know, the top, trying to make it over on the night.

Basically, you know, it was a story of a mother who's crossing over the top of the mountains,

the end is to reach Columbia and she's frozen to death with a child with her arms.

I was like, what on earth is happening?

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