Venezuela's Crisis and Fictional Prophecies (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The fact is that Venezuela is arguably the single greatest resource of oil and minerals on the planet. So, why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history?

[00:00:13] Speaker 2: A lot of folks online deeming that clip of John Krasinski playing Jack Ryan as prophetic. It's from the second season of the Amazon Prime TV show, Jack Ryan, and this was five or six years before the weekend's activities where the U.S. went in and snatched Maduro. The series co-creator, Carlton Cuse, was asked about the prophetic nature of it all, and he told Deadline, quote, the season came from our desire to tell a fictional story about the forces at play, not from imagining an outcome. What always surprises you as a storyteller is how often real-world events catch up to fiction. The goal of that season wasn't prophecy, it was plausibility. And in fact, the Jack Ryan series, started by author Tom Clancy in 1984, is rooted in plausibility. It's rooted in potentially real-world threats that could actually happen. The Jack Ryan series is different from, say, the James Bond series or the Mission Impossible series that way. Just as Clancy wrote about a fictitious plot to crash a plane into Congress in a 1994 book called Debt of Honor, which the 9-11 hijackers attempted to actually do seven years later, there's no connection other than this is the reality that we're all in, and both the Jack Ryan series and reality play off of that. So it's not really truth following fiction, it's truth following fiction following truth, because Venezuela, an unstable socialist country with boundless resources, existed 10 years ago before this Jack Ryan series and before what happened over the weekend. The fiction and the non-fiction came after that plausible reality.