Trump drinks Venezuela’s milkshake

One week ago, President Trump announced https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117175567133618952 a deal that would give the “U. S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer.” The exact nature of this deal has been … obscure, to say the least. But today, we wanted to know, from someone who’s been through this before, what does this mean for Venezuela? José Ángel Pereira Ruimwyk is both optimistic … and wary. He’s a longtime Venezuelan oil insider. When Venezuela invited in foreigners, decades ago, he was there to greet them. And when Venezuela wanted them out? Well, that’s how he ended up in a jail cell. On today’s show, we’re going to hear from one third-generation Venezuelan oilman who has seen everything … up until this, of course. Check out our other episodes about Venezuela: - Chevron, Venezuela and the Paradox of Plenty https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5680400/chevron-venezuela-oil-industry-petrostate - How Venezuela imploded https://www.npr.org/2024/10/02/1202966830/venezuela-hyperinflation-maduro-gonzalez Read: - Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD - Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB - Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: - Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws - TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq - YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C - Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Erika Beras and produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact checked by Emma Peaslee with help from Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Josephine Nyounai with help from Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  It's been one week since President Trump got on Truth Social and announced that the United States of America had just entered into an agreement with the country of Venezuela on the biggest oil deal in world history, all caps.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  This announcement was a little vague on the details, but more have come out since. According to the White House, the US government, through the Pentagon, might be buying a stake in a Venezuelan oil company. The Venezuelan government is gonna give that company the exclusive right for 100 years to extract oil from 17 of its oil fields. And the US will get a bunch of that oil for cheap.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  So, yeah. Eight months after Trump ordered the capture of the leader of Venezuela and told oil execs, "We're gonna be extracting numbers in terms of oil like few people have seen," the US government is apparently in the oil biz. We didn't know what to make of this. Venezuela, as we've talked about on the show before, has been blessed with one of the biggest reserves of oil in the world. Despite that, it is a poor country, and its oil industry is just barely sputtering along right now. Part of that has to do with politics, from American meddling to corrupt leadership.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  And part of it has to do with an idea we've covered before, the paradox of plenty. What happens when a country's whole economy is based on riches from one resource?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  But part of it, the part we're gonna focus on today because it's relevant to Trump's announcement, has to do with foreigners. Who gets to tap into the country's massive oil reserves? Because for the last century, Venezuela has been wrestling with this other paradox. We're gonna call it the can't live with them, can't live without them paradox. You know how sometimes you need help, but you don't like it when you get it? That has been the story of Venezuela's oil industry and outsiders. They have this long history of opening up to foreign investment and then shutting down again, opening up and shutting down again.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Earlier this week, I called up a guy who witnessed this back and forth from the inside.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Hi. His name?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Jose Angel Pereira Rembec.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  His oil pedigree: strong.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  I am the third generation.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  His grandparents worked in Venezuela's oil industry at its founding, when foreigners all but ran the show. His parents were part of its nationalization. Jose himself found his true love because of Venezuelan oil. He and his wife, Mervis, were in a chorus run by the state oil company.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  She was a mezzo-soprano, I was a bariton. And we met there, young kids.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  You met in the state oil company's chorus?

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Give me a song. Give me a few notes.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Ferreyacca, ferreyacca.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  And as Jose has been following the news out of Venezuela this week, he has been thinking about the lessons he and his family have learned as they've watched Venezuela open its vast reserves of oil to foreigners and then decide to shut them out.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  In particular, Jose himself had a front row seat to one moment in the 90s, when, just like now, Venezuela's oil industry was faltering. And just like now, they opened up their previously nationalized oil industry to foreigners. It was called, well, I'm gonna need some help.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Apertura petrolera, opening.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Apertura, like the aperture of a camera?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Apertura is opening, yes.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Jose kinda led the charge of the apertura, the last time Venezuela opened its doors to foreign investment in their oil sector.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Me and my wife.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  You and your wife worked for the first project of the apertura?

• 4:24Speaker 03

  The very first, the very first project, yes.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  So you're the perfect person to talk to about this.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  I was the guy that started all of this.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  And I'm Erica Barris. There's been a lot of coverage of this evolving deal between the US and Venezuela, some great stuff from our colleagues here at NPR about what the US hopes to get from this and whether it'll work, the climate impacts. Today on the show, what does this mean for Venezuela? We're gonna hear one take, the take of a Venezuelan oil man who's been through all this before.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Everybody's saying this deal is probably terrible for the Venezuelan people. Do you agree with that?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  No. Let me tell you, I'm an oil and gas guy that knows the industry inside.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jose, he's both optimistic and wary, because he's seen it all. When Venezuela invited foreigners in, he was there to greet them. And when Venezuela wanted them out, well, that's how he ended up in a jail cell.

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• 6:45Speaker 02

  All right, so what does Jose think about this news coming out of Venezuela? In a bit, we're gonna hear his take, why he thinks this deal between the US, this private Venezuelan company, and the Venezuelan government could help a lot of people, and where he thinks this all might go wrong, based on his experiences.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  His generational experiences. Remember, he's a third-generation Venezuelan oil man. And from each of those generations, you can get these picture-perfect little snapshots of the long, drama-filled history of Venezuela's oil, from a time when foreigners reigned to the nationalization, and back and forth again.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Snapshot number one, a century ago. His grandparents meet cute. His grandpa, a Dutch drilling engineer, part of the original wave of foreign investment in and exploitation of Venezuela's oil. His grandma, a Venezuelan nurse in a hospital run by an oil company.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  How they met is that he got in accident, and they put him in the ER. And she saw, you know, a blond, blue-eyed guy, very cute.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  And they got connected.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  This, of course, was the first era of Venezuelan oil, foreign control, which eventually Venezuelans got tired of, because too little money from their labor and their resources were going to them.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Right, which brings us to snapshot number two. Now it's 1967, and this photo is of Jose's parents, both oil workers, with suitcases. They're moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with cute little five-year-old Jose and his two sisters.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  As part of a bigger plan. Before Venezuela could nationalize their oil industry, they needed trained-up Venezuelan oil engineers. So, he says, Venezuela's oil minister sent Jose's family and a bunch of others to train at the University of Tulsa to study at their world-class petroleum engineering program.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  10 Venezuelan families in the 60s in the US was very, very uncommon, let me tell you. My best friend was an American, where we played cowboys and Indians. And can you imagine who played the Indians?

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Seven years later, snapshot number three. It's Jose and his family again, but he's a teenager now. It's the late 70s and they're back in Venezuela. His parents are working for a new nationalized oil company. Actually, everyone is. Venezuela has taken control of the oil and eventually creates one state-run company to own everything, Petroleros de Venezuela, or Pede Vesa.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Though there are still tons of American workers around. In fact, Jose and his family are living in this weird company town that looks like Texas. Picture it. It's Texas, but in the middle of nowhere, an oil field in Venezuela.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  That was like a copy paste of the US. We have golf courts, we have bowling, we have pools, theaters. You know, we celebrated 4th of July, we celebrated Thanksgiving, we did Halloween, we did many American things.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  A decade later, Jose and that mezzo soprano he married from the youth chorus, they're grown. They have their own jobs with a nationalized oil company. And for them, everything is great. Except after years of high oil prices and ballooning budgets and payrolls, the price of oil has dropped. Venezuela is starting to neglect its oil fields.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so maybe another snapshot, idle drilling rigs and pump jacks. Jose says he was there to see it. And from it, he took a very important lesson.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  The oil industry where you always have to be investing.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Always be investing. ABI. If you don't, he says, your oil fields stop being as productive.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Any oil field can have around to 10 to 11% yearly that they decline. So if you don't do nothing, in 10 years, your production is zero. So Pede Vesa didn't have money to do that. And that's what the genius guys of that time created Apertura, because they said, okay, let's do something. Let's bring international players so they can bring money. And that's how the Apertura came.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  This is the moment we wanted to talk with Jose about the most, the Apertura, the opening. Because if you squint at least, it is analogous to what's happening now. A rusty heap of an oil industry and an opening for foreigners to plow money into the economy.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Jose, if you couldn't tell from his genius comment, is a fan of that earlier Apertura. He says he saw firsthand how letting in both money and expertise from outside of the country could benefit Venezuelans.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, as we mentioned before, he says he worked for the very first project of the Apertura way back in 1992. He got himself hired by one of those foreign investors, a Japanese company, which was exciting. Had you ever met a Japanese person?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  No, I had to buy a book, how to deal with Japanese.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  They sent him to Tokyo for months to get trained. And Señor Pereira got schooled in Japanese business culture.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Well, for example, I became Pereira-san. Hey, Pereira-san.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Pereira-san, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He picked up new business principles, like the one where you try to get some consensus before making big changes?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  It can be crazy, but if you are having a team of 20 peoples, you need that all that 20 peoples are in consensus. It takes time.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Is that how the oil industry usually works?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  No, I came with the American culture that is like this, you know? And if you're the boss, you make a decision.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  He worked for a few years for the Japanese company, building up oil field infrastructure, and then jumped over to an American company, majority owned by Conoco and Chevron, also part of the Apertura.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Jose says those two companies brought new technology that Venezuela had needed for years. For example, a lot of Venezuela's reserves of oil are this kind of sticky, icky tar-like stuff.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Bad stuff. So we needed to have a way to produce that. Venezuela didn't have that technology.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  And these companies had figured out how to deal with this sticky, icky stuff. Essentially, they diluted it, made a smoothie of it, so it could be transported in a pipeline.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  That was a technology that was brought by Chevron, by Conoco, these companies.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they brought tons of new technology and also tons of money, just enormous amounts of investment.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  So do you think that the Apertura worked?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  The first years, the first decade worked very good.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jose says for the industry and for many, though not all Venezuelans, it worked very well. Foreign companies brought new oil fields online, fixed up the old ones, oil production nearly doubled. And all that investment meant lots of jobs for Venezuelans.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So Jose says he's been thinking a lot about the Apertura as he's seen the news trickle out of Venezuela about this new deal with the United States.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  This is going to be like Apertura 2.0. So the thing we did in the 90s. Yes, it's going to be like an Apertura 2.0, yes.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  The White House said the company they're doing business with is going to invest $100 billion in new oil production. And this week, Chevron said they're going to spend more than $7 billion over the next five years.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, lots of cash. And remember the motto, always be investing? Jose says that investment.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  You don't put it in Mars, you put it in Venezuela, because you had to drill the wells. So to drill the wells, you had to have that truck driver, you need a chauffeur, you need the empanada lady that prepares the breakfast.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  She's very important. She might be the most important person.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm not kidding, you will need everything so that people can have a better life.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  But when Jose looks at the Apertura he helped spearhead back in the 90s, he says it also includes a cautionary tale, which is when you open up Venezuela to foreign investment and the foreigners seem to have the upper hand, things can go sour.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Right, because here is how the Apertura 1.0 ended. As foreigners started reaping the benefits of their investments, a brash, red beret-wearing populist named Hugo Chavez, El Comandante, was gaining popularity. In 1998, he'd run for president and win, partially on the promise of sharing the oil wealth, lifting people out of poverty and dethroning the oil elite.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Chavez criticized Pede Vesa, the state oil company, calling it a state within a state. And Jose says on that point, he wasn't exactly wrong.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  The problem that was happening with Pede Vesa, that those guys that began to work with my dad, that this guy became like, they were like kings. They were untouchable. They became very, you know, it was like a theocracy, you know?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, theocracy and oligopoly. And they weren't just going to let Chavez take their power.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  These guys didn't like Chavez and they did kind of a plot to take Chavez. And that created the national strike.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  In late 2002, oil workers, their management walked off the job. It was a standoff between Chavez and the oil elite. There was violence in the street. Oil production dropped to close to zero. Venezuela was starved of its oil money.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  They were thinking that if they do the national strike and they squeeze Chavez, he will resign. That was their idea. That's what they thought. And look what Chavez did. He fired 20,000 people.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  20,000.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Including everyone you knew.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Everyone I knew, yes.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Not him. He was in the private sector by then.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Can you imagine all my former colleagues being fired? I have neighbors, neighbors that live beside my house that were fired.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  In the mid 2000s, Chavez made good on his promise to try to redistribute the oil wealth. He tore up the contracts the foreign companies had with Pede Vesa, said they were unfair.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  He was a little bit right, but if you see the things in what happened after, he took a bad decision.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  For Jose, though, everything worked out okay, because all those formerly foreign-owned companies.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  I became the manager.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  You became the manager of?

• 17:41Speaker 03

  And all those companies.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  You became the manager of all the nationalized oil companies?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  44 companies, yes.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  44 companies.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Which means Jose had a front row seat as foreigners made their slow retreat out of the country. The only major American oil company to stay was Chevron, under a new contract that gave majority control to Pede Vesa. Meanwhile, Pede Vesa was taken over by Chavez loyalists, some of whom couldn't tell a pump jack from a nodding donkey. Just kidding, that's the same thing.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  It took years, but at the end, they destroyed it. It lost 2/3 of the production capacity.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  But at the same time, Pereira became bloated. They hired an enormous number of employees.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Like five times that we had in the past, yes. They are only being paid because it's like a political party.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So that is the cautionary tale of the Apertura. If you let foreign investors in, it can be good. It can revitalize the oil sector. A lot of people can reap the rewards. But beware, because things can change. If Venezuelans get the sense that they're being taken advantage of, they might take everything back.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Now, this new Venezuelan oil deal just announced by Trump, it's a weird one. Even though the Venezuelan constitution says that oil deposits are owned by the Venezuelan people and can't be transferred to a private company or country, this deal gives the rights to 17 oil fields in Venezuela to a private company, which might be partially owned by the US.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Of course, it's not the best deal. I would never negotiate that. But no, of course not. If they didn't have a chance to negotiate, that was imposed, OK?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Remember the US military bombed Venezuela, removed its former president, put him on an airplane, and is holding him out of jail in New York? The current US-backed president seems basically at the beck and call of the White House. Not exactly a negotiation.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  But despite all that, and despite the climate impacts and how the oil wealth might not be shared equitably, Jose thinks anything to jumpstart Venezuela's oil economy has the potential to be good for Venezuelans. He's not out. Wow. Are you going to come out of retirement to do this?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  I can be advising back from here from the US. I'm not planning to go back to Venezuela.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Because there is one more thing that happened to Jose in Venezuela that we haven't told you about yet.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. It might be the most cautionary epilogue to this cautionary tale, especially for any oil execs trying to get in on this deal.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Here's a little image, a preview.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Can you imagine 20 guys with skeleton masks and rifles?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  That's after the break.

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• 21:46Speaker 02

  You know, I don't really think that any oil exec who is thinking of going into business in Venezuela right now has the time to listen to the show. But if you are, you're going to want to hear this part.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  This story is about just how bad things can get when an oil exec gets caught in a geopolitical struggle. In the 2010s, Jose Pereira got a pretty sweet job. He became president and CEO of Sitco, which is an oil company owned by Venezuela and selling Venezuelan oil, but based in the United States.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  So he moved up to Houston, was living the oil executive's life.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  We have all the toys. I flew in helicopters all over. I have a plane that I could travel all over.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  But it was a tough situation politically. Jose was a Venezuelan, kind of raised in Oklahoma, running a Venezuelan oil company in Texas?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. The Americans thought he was just such a vista, and the Venezuelans, well, eventually, they didn't trust him either. And that got worse in 2017, when President Trump and the successor to Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, really started going at it. Sanctions from Trump, harsh words from Maduro.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Jose says being stuck in the middle was exhausting. He was ready to call it quits, getting ready to retire. And then, just before Thanksgiving, he was at the movies with his wife, Justice League, when he got a call. It was Venezuela's petroleum minister. They wanted him to come to Caracas to give an update about a refinery project.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  So it was like a short notice. Come tomorrow.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Come tomorrow.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Tomorrow, yes. So I quit the movie. I told my wife, we see the movie when I come back.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Next morning, he and five other executives fly to Caracas. They give their presentation. It goes well.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  I had the plane waiting for me in the airport. And when I was going to go to the airport, they opened the doors and it came like 20 guards with masks, skeleton masks. Can you imagine 20 guys with skeleton masks and rifles?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  He says they were from Maduro's counterintelligence unit, the folks who rounded up Maduro's political prisoners. One of them approached him.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  And said, who is Jose Pereira here? So I said, I'm Jose Pereira. OK, you had to come with me. And then we went to a small room. He came inside a general, and he announced that we were accused to be American spies, had committed treason to the country, and we're going to go to jail. They put us handcuffed, and the next time I went out to see the sky was 10 months after. So I stayed in solitary confinement for the next 10 months.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  10 months in solitary, accused of treason, corruption, and embezzlement, all of which, he says, he didn't do. The US government agreed. They said he was wrongfully detained.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  But he was stuck. This is the last snapshot of our story. Jose, alone in a cell, the starkest of contrasts with the expense account life he'd been living before. He lost 100 pounds.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  100 pounds, yes.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  You lost 100 pounds?

• 24:55Speaker 03

  100 pounds in one year. Yeah. So no diet, starving.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Eventually, he got out of solitary. His family figured out how to get him food, and he was reunited with his Sitco colleagues.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Oh, wow, my friend. We hugged, all of us, we began to cry.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  He says they kind of saved each other. In detention, they became workout buddies, Bible study buddies, Domino's buddies. It was like when he worked for the Japanese company. Every decision they made, they made together and discussed at great length.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Well, let me tell you, we create like a boardroom.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  No, no, no, literally, we did like a boardroom, but we weren't the six in a round table, taking decisions how we will survive.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Eventually, after nearly five years of imprisonment, two cases of scabies, two of COVID, a case of bronchitis, and a heart attack, Jose, the rest of his Sitco colleagues, and two other prisoners were swapped for two Venezuelans, nephews of then-President Maduro.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  What's a good deal? What's a good deal?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  So that explains why he doesn't want to go back and why his son, who also works in oil for generations, says, no way. And it might also explain why kickstarting foreign investment in Venezuela has been so hard for President Trump, why most of the big oil companies haven't jumped back into Venezuela so far. Apertura 2.0, it is not exactly happening on the best of terms. It is one country, the US, pretty much dictating the terms with gunboats and helicopters. Jose and a lot of other people do not want to be in the middle of that.

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  This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee and Samyullah Horst Kessler. It was edited by Mary Ann McKeon. It was fact-checked by Emma and Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Josephine Neonai with help from Jimmy Keely. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Special thanks to longtime Planet Money producer Willa Rubin, who is currently covering energy for NPR. You got to check out her coverage. It's really great. I'm Nick Fountain.

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• 28:04Speaker 00

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• 28:34Speaker 04

  This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Is there a right time to sell a stock? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often, your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Join host Mark Reapy as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the biases that may affect your investing decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/financialdecoder.