899 - Nut Up feat. Yasha Levine & Rowan Wernham (1/13/25)
We’re joined by journalist Yasha Levine & filmmaker Rowan Wernham of the new documentary “Pistachio Wars” join us to look at water in the state of California in light of last week’s L.A. wildfires. We discuss California’s water history, the network of real estate developers and agribusiness concerns that effectively control California’s water, the Resnick family and their Nut Empire, 21st century company towns, and how California water politics affect the Iran Nuclear deal.
Watch The Pistachio Wars documentary now: https://www.pistachiowars.com/
Comments (103)
Unrelated but Porterville is were Rick Owen’s grew up
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.
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
Chinatown mentioned at 5:39 in episode about water and capitalist greed in LA
Please have at least one element of comedy in this episode?
treatmaxxing
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
Also the Resnik’s own Justin wines which made a ton of money the last 10 years
I’ve got some inside info on a related water/climate potential catastrophe going on in SoCal, if you’re interested.
What's the email again for sending in a question?
calls@chapotraphouse.com
“CONGRESS CREATED THE DUST BOWL”
I wonder if they used The Blob as a metaphor on purpose because Lynda Resnick’s father produced the original The Blob
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
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.
This guy sounded like a completely different person on BJG’s show.
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’.
fuck i want some pure opium
what was the address for the call in? i have an important question for felix.
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
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.
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
You can have it all. My empire of nut.
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.
Despite what anyone says it’s still a Wonderful company
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.
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
That was nuts
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
Hella
yasha is tha god of Radio War Nerd guests, when he comes on you know it's gonna be straight 🔥
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.
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.....
Did I inject too many seed oils or does Rowan have the same accent as Elon Musk?
cool water outro goes crazy
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
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.
Iranian pistachios are otherworldly. Tastes like butter.
Humboldt County mentioned kind of !
Selling water to a river is the capitalist version of late Soviet Union shit
that's becauae late soviet union shit is the capitalist version of soviet socialism
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.
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.
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?
635
There’s a lot of unprotected targets if someone with some TNT and gumption wants to kill the 5th largest economy in the world.
Felix does not begin speaking.
I love that the main takeaway message being disseminated online from their doc is “it’s that Jewish family”
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
What's the name of the big nuts song in the middle?
As a native, 100% true on the drive. That shit feels so dreadful and I can only compare it to visiting London.
We still have a plantation class
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.
did not realize that engineers listened to this podcast. thank you for that perspective, i had never considered that
Another chapo ep that confirms that everything you need to know about America is contained in James Ellroy
California Saga (California)
lived in fresno for over a year, worst year of my life
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
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
The morally corrupt Faye Resnick 😔
As a Bakersfield resident, thanks for talking about our nuts
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
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.
LA gets its water from 3 sources. 3, like an octopus.
People don't understand that under the right circumstances, octopuses are capable of just about anything
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.
Its a start. One step at a time bud.
It really brings it into perspective that they’re destroying an entire ecosystem when relief would come if they scaled back 20%. Absolute devils
They would rather kill themselves than scale back 20%. In their minds they’re equivalent actions
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.
Holy shit.
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
Key takeaway: Jews control the (water) banks
*Juice*
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.
Where they decide to move the water so people can live does have to do with the water politics.
We can have cashews or we can have issues
Bro it's a Cum Town reference
He who controls the juice controls SoCal…My City of Angels…. My LA..
Everyone blames it on the juice
Stewart Resnick is just Immortan Joe “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water!”
Private property is not a right and no basis to form and maintain an enduring society and world.
You ever been robbed?
Iranian pistachios are superior in every way. If you ever get the chance try a fresh pistachio
can’t blame fat lil piggies like will living there though it’s the evil farmers
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.
Will, buddy, you gotta do that LA-SF drive at night!
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?
who?
Great guests but damn this one fella sounds like a bit like Adrian Dittmann, that’s unfortunate for him
This is what happens when a population doesn’t goon, devastating
Edgers wish they could goon like us !
Fucking love Yasha! LFGOOOOOO!!!!!
lmao yeah right
Wonderful Fam
Tonight on chapo: we bust a nut
if only California could stop nutting everywhere
As a California resident, I've wondered for years who Duke Resnick and his pistachio empire are and what made them regional oligarchs.
Finally someone talks about the GOD DAMN ALMOND AND PISTACHIO FARMERS destroying California water
That's like 30% of divorced dad daily calories. Have some mercy.
perfect timing as always lmao
Oh, I’m going to nut
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