899 - Nut Up feat. Yasha Levine & Rowan Wernham (1/13/25)

Yeah as someone in water law this journalist could’ve done a better job at understanding western water rights and why they’re the best system in the world for regulating environmental and multiple-use systems. But I guess it’s easier to just say it’s archaic and needs to go? The criticism about crop choices is very on point though, pretty wild to use groundwater to water the thirstiest crops on earth.

Logan

As someone who has lived in the valley my entire life, you're absolutely right. It's depressing how the valley used to be so beautiful before the rapid industrialization of the area

Ernesto Flores

not even kidding, my psychiatrist told me the same thing

AO3

treatmaxxing

Ian Moody

Chinatown mentioned at 5:39 in episode about water and capitalist greed in LA

old crispin

Please have at least one element of comedy in this episode?

A person you vaguely know

Yeah well my dad told me that actually environmentalist are causing wildfires by preserving smelt habitats so… maybe check your sources

Jack Gude

And another thing - they used to have flat rate water in Fresno county The houses didn’t have water meters 32 bucks a month no matter how much you used

Cameron Young

Also the Resnik’s own Justin wines which made a ton of money the last 10 years

Cameron Young

Solid episode Been to lost hills a few times That park is the nicest thing in the town and huge - it’s right next to a school where they have a sign begging like really begging people on the highway to slow down during school hours

Cameron Young

I’ve got some inside info on a related water/climate potential catastrophe going on in SoCal, if you’re interested.

Sasha Kosek

Yeah, I live in LA and almost had to bug out. The Pasadena (closest area to the Eaton fire) water supply is supposedly contaminated at the moment. High water turbidity from ash and pumping from the reservoirs, as well as raised levels of heavy metal contaminants. The smoke certainly isn’t good, wood alcohol, phenols, carbon, etc, but I was living in OR in 2020 when the smoke was so thick I couldn’t see more than 50 feet in front of me on the highway, and the LA smoke isn’t nearly as bad.

Sasha Kosek

calls@chapotraphouse.com

John Griffiths

What's the email again for sending in a question?

John Griffiths

“CONGRESS CREATED THE DUST BOWL”

Rohan Williams

I wonder if they used The Blob as a metaphor on purpose because Lynda Resnick’s father produced the original The Blob

kron

I got my 1 year old and pregnant wife the fuck outta there for at least a week or two. Our careers are both in the entertainment industry but it’s got me wondering if we just say fuck it and move

Nathan E Simpson

That description of the 5 through the cv is so accurate. Always take the 101 never take the 5 lol it’s not worth the time saved. If that drive doesn’t make you want to kill yourself you don’t have a soul

Eric Currie

Holy shit.

Antipaganda

I like how everything they say about California sounds like exactly what we do here in Australia. I've been on drives through NSW that sound pretty close to the I5. Sure, we have the most water-efficient farming in the world... Because we grow cotton and rice in the desert.

Antipaganda

Animals have nuts too!

Antipaganda

This guy sounded like a completely different person on BJG’s show.

Kimi Ramos

100% the ash will be dangerously to inhale and water will be also. All those chemicals and electronics in a household are dangerous turned into gas and the remnants, think burn pits for soldiers overseas

jnakhoul .

We found a couple of live larvae of some sort in a freshly opened package of Wonderful pistachios the first and only time we bought one. Just sayin’.

JKL

Hella

justDave

I was told by a homie of mine who's been in LA their whole life and she said to treat it with the precaution similar to post-9/11 shit and those folks famously got cancer so I'm personally staying inside and masking outside for the next couple months

Chris Gabo

fuck i want some pure opium

One Sound Every Day (santino)

what was the address for the call in? i have an important question for felix.

Christopher Price

cool, thx!

SM21

Well said. I think this is a good topic to discuss, but I don't think it has all that much to do with the recent fires. If there are 100 MPH winds and 10 months without rain, there are going to be fires, no matter how well water is managed.

Axel Herrera

I’ve been to a camping festival near Lost Hills and swam in the lake with that agricultural runoff. Everyone in my group got sick

Miles

Does anybody have any insight into the toxic aftermath of the la fires? I suspect the air and ash coating the entire city are highly toxic but don’t have any hard evidence and ppl think I’m overreacting.

PP Cool P

Precisely

Justin Thomas

You can have it all. My empire of nut.

nick

Hell yeah I love to see some fire talk. It would be great to see LA and society writ large take the fire risks in the wildland-urban interface seriously and put it higher in planning priorities after this disaster, but I will not be holding my breath.

Liquidated Damages

If we just mandated that animals live decent lives (like we often imagine on the food labels) and stop subsidizing the meat industry, our consumption of meat would have to drop below preindustrial levels (almost vegetarian) to accommodate our current population. Which is a deal I’d take.

Dee Rubes

I assume he was talking about I-5 from the description? I lived in Sacramento for years and made the drive many times, so it's immediately where my brain went. Not sure why you'd take I-5 if you were going to SF, though. 101 seems the better choice for that, and is definitely a beautiful drive.

Jim Veil

The best book ever on the insanity of water in California is called, Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner published in 1986. It's one of my favorite history books.

Peter Bogdanovic

Despite what anyone says it’s still a Wonderful company

MCL

I'm out here delivering mail in Australia and having cooked old boomers tell me about that "Jewish couple who own all of California's water" after telling me climate change is fake. Yasha goes to all this effort and his reporting just gets turned into more fodder for the paranoid fantasy's of would be pogromists.

Maggie+Al

This is the correct topic to focus on. Thanks for the sane and relevant information amidst a wasteland of propaganda — one of the striking things having grown up in L.A. and still having the majority of my family based there is their inability to confront the fact that this is not just one hot year but that this will be going on for the rest of their lives. Terraforming is the correct framing — this whole episode is very well done in terms of making the subject accessible however this is only scratching the surface of the corruption. The L.A. county watershed plan is accessible to read online which includes plans to remove a ton of concrete from waterways to replenish the Aquifers which have been depleted so trees are dying from the roots up… and I would recommend anyone who is interested in a deep dive read that plan: whether it will be completed remains to be seen and my bet is on the money and plan being frittered away by various contractors who fail as usual with the L.A. budget. I also recommend Kenneth Mejia’s social media outlets the L.A. city controller publishes a lot of useful data

Studio Novaya

did not realize that engineers listened to this podcast. thank you for that perspective, i had never considered that

Sam

That was nuts

Marc Silverstein

I grew up in rural NorCall where there were almond orchards everywhere. We pronounced it 'æ-mind' like salmon, because the harvester grabs the trees and shakes the 'L' out of 'em

Karl Hungus

that's becauae late soviet union shit is the capitalist version of soviet socialism

ian

yasha is tha god of Radio War Nerd guests, when he comes on you know it's gonna be straight 🔥

etienne

Until this month I literally thought they all lived in NYC lol

Christian Bendillo

Also, here’s a fun anecdote related to California’s “tentacles” regarding water. I used to work in the legislature of Colorado, a state that also regularly has issues with fires and water and obviously the source of said “Colorado River” mentioned here. There’s a strict limit to how much water can be drawn from it because most of it has to be used all the way down river in Southern California. So yeah, those tentacles reach pretty far.

Christian Bendillo

Use to eat red dyed pistachios in my grandfathers tavern in Gary IN back in the 80's and 90's. The story was they were dyed for marketing reasons. By the 80's they weren't Iranian but they were still dyed. Ahhh my Gen x brain is sparking..... Reagan is the devil...... Buy union made...... Dukakis got a chance.....

Michael Wadman

Did I inject too many seed oils or does Rowan have the same accent as Elon Musk?

Davis G

cool water outro goes crazy

Gabriel Madrid

Idk I've done the SoCal-NorCal drive dozens of times, taken the Amtrak up and down the coast etc and I have basically the inverse emotional response to the bleakness described here. Not going to bat for capitalistic agriculture, the Resnicks, the mono- / cash-crop orientation of resource, etc -- but we need to eat; if we're going to have major US cities we need areas of major crop production. We might not need industrial ag in its current form but we sure as hell need it in some form; California (and the U.S. as a whole?) does not exist without an agriculturally robust Central Valley. So amidst the human and ecological exploitation, the abuses, etc I can't help but also see a 'breadbasket' born out of human ingenuity. There are fields and fields of food crops, of life, embraced by rolling green hills upon which cows idle and graze. By all means liberate Cowschwitz, go vegetarian (or vegan if you're super legit) but if you tell me the 101 from LA to SF isn't beautiful I think you're crazy

Mauve_Avenger

Iranian pistachios are otherworldly. Tastes like butter.

Sam Ray

Brandon eubanks replied I can't figure out how to reply to him My phone's kind of shitty but he mentioned beef. Beef alone out of California with approximate numbers calculated using 1800 gallons a pound equals 46,926,000,000,000 gallons of water a year

SkeepyBeeper

Right, there is incredible diversity and culture in the valley. You can also catch beautiful glimpses of the past in areas that have been preserved, there are sections of the San Joaquin river that have gone through restoration, the Stanislaus river has some beautiful areas. But if all you ever see of the valley is from the 5 or 99... I get how you could come to that conclusion.

Ry Guy

The Resnicks must be the owners of all the orchards between Fresno and Bakersfield between the 99 and the 5 because this whole region is PLASTERED with anti-NewScUM/Pelosi propaganda.

Puet

Modesto here. I agree, but also categorizing the ENTIRE REGION as “bleak and miserable” is a bit simplistic. 🤣 Like, there’s art and shit here, too. (Because HUMANITY.)

Puet

Where they decide to move the water so people can live does have to do with the water politics.

Christopher E Musgrave

The Central Valley BE busted forever

Jesse Svetlich

Humboldt County mentioned kind of !

Christopher E Musgrave

Online?

buttface

It’s a lot of LDS church investor money. In my neck of the woods they have bought up huge swaths of almond orchards and created a single vote water district

Jesse Svetlich

635

Nathan

Selling water to a river is the capitalist version of late Soviet Union shit

Mark Patsy

I am 3rd generation from the central valley, born and raised in Fresno... what we have done to the land here is beyond devastating. I would give anything to have been able to see the central valley prior to colonization. The agri business propaganda here is strong and people are brainwashed early on to believe that farms and farmers are only good, can do no harm to people or the land, and any criticism of industrial farming is blasphemy. All of our rivers are dry and dead, the land is desertifying, and the air is often toxic to breathe. Industrial agriculture is fundamentally cruel, destructive, and exacerbates regional wealth inequality.

Ry Guy

Nellie Bowles reference made me remember when chapo read that awful article Nellie wrote about growing up in San Francisco. Does anyone remember what episode that was?

Salt M. Bank

There’s a lot of unprotected targets if someone with some TNT and gumption wants to kill the 5th largest economy in the world.

Toby

They literally say the Resnicks themselves are not the problem, they’re just the most prominent representatives of the agribusiness industry which I’ll venture to guess is mostly Gentiles in CA

C. Ries

Felix does not begin speaking.

Travis

I love that the main takeaway message being disseminated online from their doc is “it’s that Jewish family”

james

What's the name of the big nuts song in the middle?

Noah McClellan

As a native, 100% true on the drive. That shit feels so dreadful and I can only compare it to visiting London.

Pablo

We still have a plantation class

Christian Bendillo

It’s wild people who own thousands of acres of land worked by migrants are called “farmers” instead of what they actually are, “planters.”

Christian Bendillo

Concerning the fire hydrants losing water pressure, I don’t think people understand how civil infrastructure is designed. Engineers design around scenarios, so the pumps and tanks that feed those hydrants were sized to be able to deliver a specific flow for a specific time. If we go bigger than needed, it would cost more but also water sitting stagnant in a tank for 6 months won’t be potable. The fundamental problem with climate change is that the scenarios our infrastructure is designed around are no longer valid. This means we get massive wildfires in the middle of winter and don’t have water to put them out, or massive hurricanes that have higher wind and more rain than we designed to deal with or dozens of other things we can’t design around.

Nathan

@ Nakatomi pretty much no-one who criticizes private property right as a key pillar of our political economy thinks that people shouldn't be able to possess their own personal items/durable goods. Notably, no historical or current socialist/communist country tried to do away with individual ownership on that level. But yeah, I've also been robbed. Most recently, someone cut my pocket on the Red Line in Chicago, got my ID, FOID card, fishing license and $60 cash (debit card too but I cancelled with no charges). This happened one time, in 6 years of riding that train twice a day, commuting to work at 4 in the morning for a while, returning from work well after midnight during other periods, taking no special precautions. If Chicago Thieves LLC. were a company, they'd be amongst those who ripped me off the least during that period, absolutely dwarfed by every employer I had, health insurance, internet provider etc. All those other actors shook me down with property right and the law very much on their side.

Ian H

There’s a big difference between someone stealing your wallet and privatization of water

Christian Bendillo

I've got relatives in Visalia and Fresno, been there a lot of times and it's depressing. The valley is hot and dry. You gotta drive for hours to go to nice places for hiking. Everyone's desperate and bored. The communities are either struggling hispanic deindustrialized farm/factory towns like Salinas, violent urban hellholes like Fresno or soulless white flight suburbs like Clovis. It's all dominated by the big corporate farms who treat the towns and people like medieval fiefs and the larger state like an enemy nation. Everything in California is wrong in its own unique way and this is the central valley's part of the story.

Plainwrap

Another chapo ep that confirms that everything you need to know about America is contained in James Ellroy

Fresh Dill

California Saga (California)

Steve Miller Band

Thank you! Def a cool show and well-researched, and I'm glad they mentioned it at the end. But you are spot on, animal ag is a way bigger contributor to water use and a sickening thing to put living beings through.

John A

This is a strange role-play, but I try not to kink shame

Ryan

The Sacramento Valley (Central Valley from Stockton to Redding) is a little better tho.

Axel Herrera

lived in fresno for over a year, worst year of my life

Kane Shirley

They would rather kill themselves than scale back 20%. In their minds they’re equivalent actions

Devin

Neither are necessary. Animal agriculture is even more harmful to workers, the environment, and human health—and it exists to maintain a level of meat and dairy consumption that is exponentially larger than it was 150 years ago.

Dee Rubes

they said feb at the earliest a while back

Leyland

1,362 gallons of water to produce one pound of pistachios 1.36 billion pounds of pistachios a year just out of California that's 1,852,320,000,000 gallons a year ALMOST 2 TRILLION GALLONS

SkeepyBeeper

The morally corrupt Faye Resnick 😔

Simon Maraya

Bro it's a Cum Town reference

Joe Quigley

As a Bakersfield resident, thanks for talking about our nuts

Bradlei Smith

Its a start. One step at a time bud.

Stu

An octopus gets its water from 3 sources. The ocean, the food it eats, and humid air if it's temporarily out of the water. Duh

Tommy

You ever been robbed?

Nakatomi_Jones

Tell me what’s more necessary to the human diet: animal products or pistachios?

YourBabysFather

Ask yourself how have you been manipulated into blaming individual consumers when they didn’t develop the system that they were born in?

YourBabysFather

Typical Matt Yglesias L

Dee Rubes

Is a lifelong Bay Area resident and a California native I can confirm that the central valley is indeed a shithole from Stockton to Bakersfield, this is not an indictment on you. This is an indictment on the states history and the people that developed it.

YourBabysFather

Can Canadians get real Iranian pistachios? I see them for sale online in Canada but dunno whether they're legit. As far as I can tell, the Canadian sanctions on Iran don't cover pistachios. But I've only ever seen American pistachios in stores here for a very long time

Tommy

People don't understand that under the right circumstances, octopuses are capable of just about anything

justDave

Can't believe that nobody mentioned the state flower of California is the golden poppy! I don't know if you can make opium from them, though.

Emily P

Puet

Australian / movie correspondent from mk I Chapo

Eamon Short

Everyone blames it on the juice

justDave

Submit your question for the call-in show

Tommy

LA gets its water from 3 sources. 3, like an octopus.

Nakatomi_Jones

Animal agriculture dwarfs almond and pistachio usage but glad we're talking about the nuts. God forbid we tell people to stop eating meat and dairy products.

Akber Khan

my question: when is the book I already paid for being shipped or when are you giving any update about it? We aren't all rich CIA operators

SM21

*Juice*

justDave

It really brings it into perspective that they’re destroying an entire ecosystem when relief would come if they scaled back 20%. Absolute devils

Alex Weber

Will is the one Chapo who doesn’t live in California and that’s who you go with. What a colossal blunder

Chris Rose

When I was in the Colorado front range everyone said that residential rain barrels were illegal because the rain that falls on your roof is already owned by more senior claimants like East CO and Kansas farmers.

Ian H

interesting. they have this weird private/public in the midwest like kansas. i wonder if privatizing water is any different in places that actually have water

mariol struga

Key takeaway: Jews control the (water) banks

Notpickinganame

lmao yeah right

mariol struga

To be fair it's about the same water usage per pound as most animal products, the latter just doesn't get the same scrutiny.

Robert Frenken

Just to clarify for those interested in SoCal fire ecology from someone who lived there and did their masters at UC Riverside, water management is largely unrelated to these fires (even if its insane in California). The ecosystem on fire in SoCal is chaparral which has naturally high fire return intervals, lots of those plants are adapted to fire. In addition you have an understory of invasive grasses which increase they extent that fire spreads quickly throughout chaparral (leading to much larger areas of burn than chaparral historically experienced). On top of this is climate change increasing the amount of time that vegetation is super dry and flammable. But this chaparral ecosystem doesn't naturally store large amounts of water, so that isn't really driving what we're seeing.

🤷🏼‍♀️

We can have cashews or we can have issues

Joe Quigley

wills not gonna fuck u, well aware of agribusiness but it is funny that fat boi will is floating around in a pool in a desert pointing fingers

Matty yglesias

He who controls the juice controls SoCal…My City of Angels…. My LA..

C. Ries

Agribusiness in America is evil. Get the image of an honest hardworking subsistence farmer out of your head. Most of the labor is done by machines or Mexicans. It’s subsidized by the taxpayer and they rape the environment.

C. Ries

Stewart Resnick is just Immortan Joe “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water!”

Brent

Private property is not a right and no basis to form and maintain an enduring society and world.

Justin Thomas

Iranian pistachios are superior in every way. If you ever get the chance try a fresh pistachio

Professor Jokes

can’t blame fat lil piggies like will living there though it’s the evil farmers

Matty yglesias

who?

Wilian Moreira

Will, buddy, you gotta do that LA-SF drive at night!

Shivvy

Unrelated question for the chat. Is there any reason Matt V Brady hasn't been on in like 600 episodes? I don't follow him as I have no special media except youtube and letterboxd. Did he do anything sus?

Eamon Short

Great guests but damn this one fella sounds like a bit like Adrian Dittmann, that’s unfortunate for him

Douglas Yates

This is what happens when a population doesn’t goon, devastating

Goonba

Edgers wish they could goon like us !

Goonba

Fucking love Yasha! LFGOOOOOO!!!!!

N

Wonderful Fam

ploob

Tonight on chapo: we bust a nut

Johnny Tubesocks

if only California could stop nutting everywhere

August1612

As a California resident, I've wondered for years who Duke Resnick and his pistachio empire are and what made them regional oligarchs.

Zen Ben

I'M NUTTINNNNG

Ghordo

No mercy for dads, in general

William Engels

That's like 30% of divorced dad daily calories. Have some mercy.

Khemith

Finally someone talks about the GOD DAMN ALMOND AND PISTACHIO FARMERS destroying California water

William Engels

perfect timing as always lmao

Skaven yes scurry

Hot

Terrible Dirigible

Oh, I’m going to nut

Joe