QAA Podcast - The Wonderful Conspiracy feat Yasha Levine & Rowan Wernham (E283)

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Conspiracy theories about weather control and the California Drought don't hold a candle to the grim reality: a cabal of wealthy farmers controlling California's water and committing ecocide. We speak to Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham about their upcoming documentary, Pistachio Wars, a damning exposé of The Wonderful Company and the billionaire couple behind it: Lynda & Stewart Resnick. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA Pistachio Wars: https://www.gofundme.com/f/pistachio-wars-pay-for-stock-footage / https://filmfreeway.com/pistachiowars / https://x.com/pistachiowars Yasha Levine on Substack: http://yasha.substack.com Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Thank you. If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 283, The Wonderful Conspiracy. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky and Julian Field. One of the trickiest things about conspiracy theories is that they often occupy the space of very real conspiracies, which tend to be more mundane and related to the consolidation of power and capital. In that vein, this week we're diving into territory that will be familiar.

to anyone who's seen the Hollywood classic Chinatown, a handful of backroom dealers controlling California's water. And I'll probably find an opportunity to say, forget it, Jake. It's wonderful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll figure it out. I guess I just did. Forget it, yosh. It's Chinatown. You can actually say it's a wonderful town, I think,

because they do have a town, you know? Oh, yes, that's true. Yeah, that is true. And actually, I don't want to forget this. I want to remember it because maybe we'll learn something. That's great, Jake. Yeah, I think that at that point, no one will even recognize the original line. So you've done your work here.

Our guests are Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham, the duo behind the upcoming documentary Pistachio Wars. Welcome to the podcast, fellas. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us. Yeah, a pleasure. It was a pleasure to watch the movie. It's really well put together. And we're looking forward to a wider release.

We'll get into that later. But to get us started, I wanted to read a 2015 Guardian article about conspiracy theories concerning California's recurring droughts. Drought blamers. California conspiracists see government's hand in arid climate. A lack of rain is way too simple in explanation for these conspiracy theorists. It's why it hasn't rained much in four years that matters. The U.S. government is geoengineering the California climate.

To most Californians, the state's four-year drought is not all that mysterious. It just hasn't rained in a very long time. Then there are those for whom that's way too simple an explanation. Last week, a crowd of several hundred turned out in Redding in Northern California to hear grave warnings from a solar power contractor named Dane Wigington that the weather has been taken over by government geoengineers spraying our skies with toxic chemicals in a doomed attempt to slow down global warming. In April, an essay published under the name State of the Nation argued that the drought was not only artificially created, it was in fact a stepping stone in the U.S. military industrial complex's master grand plan to take over the planet and achieve, quote, Total control of all of Earth's resources.

The country's leading conspirator, radio host Alex Jones, has jumped on the bandwagon, as has natural news, a website known for its campaigns against public vaccination programs. Quite why the U.S. government would want to fry California to a crisp is a matter of some confusion and debate. But the longer the drought goes on, it is already the longest of the modern era, the more currency the fringe theories appear to be gaining. There is no natural weather at this point, Winkington's website asserts. The climate engineers decide when it'll rain or snow.

Where, how much, and how toxic the rain or snow will be. There will be drought or heat. The conspiracists are in no doubt. The government is spraying chemicals and artificially holding back weather patterns off the California coast to keep the rain away. They are doing this with planes. Wingington likes to show audience footage of thick contrails spewing into the sky, evidence he calls undeniable. But they may also have operated in the past from a military installation in Alaska, now closed, called the High Frequency Active Aurora Research Program, or HARP.

Harp has been a focus of conspiracy theorists for years and was previously blamed for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, even though its mandate, while it was operating, was to find clear communication routes through the ionosphere and had nothing to do with climate. Mainstream scientists and environmental activists listen to these theories in despair, you want to pull your eyes out because these people are so fucking stupid.

David Allgood, political director of the California League of Conservation Voters, told The Guardian, here is the agenda of the oil and coal companies. Exxon knew back in the 1970s that their products were destroying the planet and instead of doing something about it, they decided to bribe the government. If people want to see conspiracies, it's not the government causing them. It's the fossil fuel industry. So I thought this was an interesting article because, you know, obviously it shows how some of the thinking in conspiracy theorist circles misses the point. But it's also interesting because in your movie, you talk a little bit about the drought and how it is treated

entirely as a kind of natural phenomenon when, in actuality, despite the lack of rain, very often the water is being rerouted by these interests, these like big consolidated farming companies. So we're not here to really focus on oil companies, villainous as they are, but we will obviously touch on them just because of the amazing new way they found to water their plants with, you know, oil runoff. But yeah, we're here to talk about a cabal of farmers. So, Yasha Rowan, can you tell us a bit about what led you to state in your documentary? A small group of powerful families have seized control of California's water supply. We stated this in our documentary because it's true.

And it's really, you know, it's not even a, I mean, I don't know, anyone, I think any historians that study the history of California agriculture, or really California history in the way that things developed here. It's sort of been a fundamental truth of history here on the West Coast. I mean, not just California, but most of the southwestern and southwestern states is that agricultural interests were the first to really dominate the political space and other political interests, you know, most recent Silicon Valley and tech and things like that in aerospace and after the world, during World War II and afterwards, they came to kind of to the forefront. So tech is like associated with, you know, California in a big way, Hollywood, also associated with California in a big way. But farmers and really large scale farmers. We're not talking about kind of like the farmers of the Midwest, you know, that. really were like family farmers that settled the land.

Of course, these farmers don't exist anymore in America, really. It's a very niche thing. But even in the 19th century, there were no real small farmers in California because the nature of the land, the fact that it required you to move water around, required a lot of capital. And so it was very quickly dominated by these large landowners. And so these big farmers, it's a cabal. It's been a cabal from the beginning because they've run the state.

And so nothing's really changed on that. It just California became much more developed. and other industries kind of plugged in and it became a much more diverse economy. But that core group of agriculture interest is still the oldest. I'd say it's the oldest business group in California. And today it's the most overlooked.

I think it's the most ignored. No one really... I mean, people know that California, you know, produces a lot of agricultural products. You know, you see them on shelves around the country and around the world. But no one really thinks about them as being a really powerful political force in the state.

And they like to keep it that way, generally. I mean, most of them, I mean, the subject of our film or one of the main subjects of our film, the wonderful company and the couple, you know, the very loving couple that's behind this company. They're different.

They're a lot more public-facing. They're a lot more showy, glitzy. But generally speaking, farmers don't like to be in a limelight. They like to operate in, you know, just behind closed doors. And so California is really, yeah, so that's why we said it

because it's a fundamental fact, but it's a fundamental political reality in California and very few people know about it. Yeah, I mean, there was a time when we were going to publish an article that said there was no drought in California. you know with a provocative title and you'll get farm lobby groups that'll say that the drought in California is manmade for different reasons and they'll say it's about water allocation and they'll say

it's because the water is being diverted to help some little fish you know that are going to go extinct in the San Francisco Bay whereas if if we were going to say something like that we would probably say it's because California's water system is like a very highly developed high-tech system like most of the water almost all the rivers are captured and run into dams and then the water from those dams is distributed through the state and manage like a commodity. So, you know, the decisions around who gets water are political, basically, and economic. You know, obviously, yeah, there was not very much rain falling out of the sky, but for most people in California, you know, they might have their gardens, but, you know, their water comes from the tap, it comes from the system, and they're in

competition with farmers who, you know, it's roughly 80% of the states developed water that goes to farmers and around 20% to residents. So, you know, and, you know, you can argue. you about what privatized means, you know, whether it's utilized by private companies or controlled by private companies. But, you know, obviously, the overwhelming majority of water is privatized. It's controlled by private interests. And I mean, you know, what a politics in California are difficult because you start talking about that people's eyes glaze over, you know, which is kind of where we had to put this Iran thing in the documentary. But it's important, you know, yeah. You know, I mean, because, you know, you guys are both in California in Los Angeles. And, you know,

I don't know if you have this in your homes, but I'm sure you have low, flush toilets or low flush showerheads. I'm not just low volume showerheads. I grew up in California. I've seen firsthand, you know, all the different initiatives that the state rolls out to try to limit urban water use, right? And these things are all good. You know, you don't want to just be draining water down the toilet for no reason. But, you know, to put into perspective, you know, to put the sort of the strangle hole that agriculture has on the political system and the water system, Rowan mentioned this 80% as a number of the total amount of water that's used, you know, 80% of it is used by agriculture.

So if there's some kind of cosmic, you know, a ray goes by tomorrow or a comet flies by tomorrow and all human beings disappear, right? But farms remain. You'll only achieve a 20% reduction in water use. Maximum, maximum. So, I mean, that number is actually disputed. Some say it's 85, 90%.

I mean, it just depends how you calculate it. But I'm saying that as a maximum if all human, you know, urban, suburban, human activity ceases tomorrow, you will achieve overall a 20% reduction. production and water use. So when you're talking about, you know, these initiatives of saving water, you know, it's basically a fraction of a fraction of a percent. And not a bad thing because we're talking about still huge amounts of water, but what no one talks about is

what is the other 80 percent being used for? What kind of things are being grown with that water? Because that water, when it's taking out of the natural ecosystems, and because rivers are dammed, all major rivers in California are dammed. Most of them have several dams on them. And so you're destroying ecosystems, you're destroying natural life, you're altering the environment. You're sort of doing terraforming on a kind of a mass, you know, on a statewide level. You know, you can see this stuff from space. So if this was done, it's what, when people think of, oh, we're going to have to terraform Mars to live there, I mean, this is the kind of scale of terraforming that's, you know, happened and happening in California. And so you're

destroying, you're destroying life, you know, to grow something. And what is this thing that's being grown? And that's the central question, right? When we did this documentary, we look at the crops that are being grown. And they are generally, for the most part, now the big crops that dominate the market are boutique, like luxury crops that are mainly grown for export. And the thing that's grown is sort of determined by, not even by market forces, but essentially by these two billionaires who decided that like, this is a great market, let's develop it. Let's make money off of it. Let's push it on people because no one even eats these pistachios are one of the major crops that, you know, consume all this water. So they're creating markets, growing things that

people don't even want to eat and then, you know, launching these massive marketing campaigns, you know, essentially corporate propaganda to get you to eat the things that you didn't even want to eat before, you know, so they could make money so that they can keep taking the water. So the whole, you know, we all need to eat, obviously, and there's always a trade-off, but what that water is used for to grow and who it enriches and what it kills, right? That's a, like, that's a conversation or that's even on a topic that's, you know, way off. It's hard to even have it with people because people can't even fathom even having this conversation because no one thinks they can have, they have even the power to, you know,

I don't know, who am I to say what's grown or whatever. When you see the people lobbying around farm water, they always have pictures. of vegetables, you know, lettuce and tomato and the things we desperately need to put on the table to keep the children healthy and feed our families and whatever. But, you know, the company at the center of our film, the wonderful company, you've got these two people, Stuart and Linda Resnick that kind of rolled into farming in the 70s from, you know, previously having an odd background, you know, in marketing and, you know, like a security business, teleflora, sort of selling trinkets, they bought up some farms and kind of accidentally

ended up with pomegranates, pistachios, some citrus crops, some almonds. And because marketing was like Linda Resnick Speciality. They put a huge amount of money into something to launch these brands. So Palm Wonderful was the first one of the palm juice. And then Wonderful Pistachios was probably the biggest hit. So yeah, like Yashis said, there wasn't a huge pistachia market in the US before. You know, they were there, but they were like kind of on the edges. You know, and then, you know, they launched them with Super Bowl commercials. And you've got Gangham Style. You know, you've got Stephen Colbert. You've got the prancerized lady. And so what that enabled them to do, they essentially created the market. And they, um, they

They created a monopoly position for themselves in the market. So they had, like, I think at least two thirds, maybe as much as 80% of the American market is processed, at least by them. Yeah, like, when I was a kid, like, pistachios were only something that were found in, like, a bowl on, like, my softest side table. You know, it was like, oh, what is this, like, strange nut that, like, my, you know, my grandparents eat? There was no, there was no kind of, like, sort of, like, hip consciousness, like, about pistachios until those commercials came along. I know. Now you can't walk into the bodega, you know, without seeing a huge display. Yeah. So I definitely want to get into Stewart and Linda Resnick, but just I want to give people a sense of scale here.

I mean, California has the largest system of aqueducts and privately owned water banks in the world, right? Yeah. And the pistachio fields currently are 10 times the size of Manhattan. Yep. So pistachios are not classically something that there's a lot of demand for in the United States. So could you tell us a little bit about America's relationship with the pistachio and how this kind of pistachio empire was created? Yeah, it has an actually very interesting origin story that's an unexpected one. Traditionally, you know, the cultures that have eaten pistachios, you know, they're frequently eastern cultures, Middle Eastern cultures.

And traditionally Iran was the pretty much, I think, you know, Turkey grew some potassium, depending on the climate, different countries grew up. But Iran was essentially the sole supplier of pistachios to the world, you know. And so what happened was when the Iranian revolution happened. There was some friction between Iran and the U.S. for the U.S. involvement in Iran's domestic affairs and essentially overthrowing Iran's democratically elected government. All that led to the U.S. embassy sort of being taken over and a hostage is being taken in Iran, American hostages being taken in Iran. That triggered by the Carter administration the first sanctions, the first round of sanctions against Iran. And that moment was the birth of the American pistachio industry because suddenly, you know, there was a small market for pistachios in America. Suddenly, its main supplier, its only supplier, was cut off.

And so there was some pistachios grown in California, but that was when enterprising farmers began to see that they have an in-here, and that they have, you know, essentially an open market right now. And so that was the birth of the pistachio industry. And, you know, not long afterwards, the Resonix came along. And, again, they saw an opening there. They saw a market. They saw a crop that could be expanded, could be marketed, could be sold,

and they really took it to the next level. But the origin of pistachios in America, being grown in America. It goes back to America's meddling in Iran. And, yeah, so that's the story. So Stuart and Linda Resnick, they own more water than anybody else on Earth. And I know that they also own Fiji, which has its own, you know, probably documentary that needs to be made about how they own for like a dime.

They own like a ton of the public water sources around that island. But for now, let's focus a little bit on California. So tell us a bit about. how Linda and Stuart Resnick came to be farmers because that wasn't always the case and now when you see them like they just, you know, she is, I hate to say this, but she's, she's incredibly freaky. I mean, she has a lot of plastic surgery. She loves to do kind of like public appearances and they use, you know, faces like Stephen Colbert and stuff like that to like put a fun face on the company. So yeah, tell us a little bit about how they came up, how they came to own and

and run the wonderful company and what effect that had on California's water and et cetera. Yeah, I mean, well, the classic story is that in the 70s, there was, you know, rampant inflation. And so they just started buying up farmland to hedge against that because, you know, land is always a reasonably safe investment. And then, you know, they got a farming company along with that. It was called Paramount Farms at the time. And, you know, I think just as they sat on those assets, they realized some of these things are marketable, you know, so they started to create these brands. So, you know, they came from a background that was, you know, very not traditional for farming. You know, Linda was a Hollywood kid. Her dad was a movie producer. Stuart Resnick

kind of hints that he grew up around the mob in New Jersey. He had a security business that got snapped, bringing large amounts of heroin through LAX. I just want to stop because I know you like conspiracy theories. And just this is something that, you know, there's stuff that swirls around it. I'm sorry to interrupt you. But yeah, Stuart has an interesting background. I mean, he came from a poor background, Jewish, you know, kind of background. New Jersey, he got into UCLA law school, and he suddenly launches this cleaning business, you know, it's like he is a cleaner suddenly. And it's an extremely successful business. A janitorial business that makes like $10 million. Yeah, when I saw that in the documentary,

I was like, I was like, wait a minute. I was like, wait, he sold off this janitor business for, because then it like cuts to an interview of him being like, well, I used to clean, you know, I used to mop floors. How do you grow that into a $10 million business? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is in the 60s. This is like, that's a lot of money. It's a good time. It's a good time to New Jersey mob connections in the 60s. Exactly.

And then it only gets more interesting because, as you know, L.A. is basically kind of an Anglo town, especially in those days. It was dominated by white people, you know, Jews who worked to Hollywood, but the political system was dominated by the old L.A. Anglo community. And, you know, and he parlayed his janitorial business that he sold into a security business. They not only installed security alarms in people's homes and businesses, but he had like the largest, basically private security force, armed security force in Los Angeles. And the former chief of police on the payroll.

And so it's a very interesting trajectory from just some nobody guy in New Jersey comes to study at UCLA, says that he has some connections to the mob, again, his dad. This is something that he just said publicly. He gave essentially one interview to one journalist for a book that he was authorized to be written about him, you know, a biography. And he, this kind of this business journalist, these two business journalists who wrote a pretty flattering book about the sort of the Cotton King, the previous generation of these kind of agricultural oligarchs, the older generation. And Resnick liked it so much, Stewart liked it so much that he invited them in and, you know, gave him a couple of interviews. And so he opened up to them a little bit.

He's very, very tight-lipped about his past. And then he quickly shut down the project. I think he was getting uncomfortable where it was going. He shut it down. And that's it. And so some of the, some of the material that came out of those. interviews was used by another journalist in a different book about real estate in California. So we know very little about his background, but his trajectory is very interesting, you know,

yeah. So already, he's a special guy. I mean, if there isn't anything funny going on there and maybe there is no mob connection, maybe he is just an extremely successful businessman, you know, has a nose for markets and getting ahead. But already he has an interesting story. And Linda herself has an interesting story, too. Her father produced The Blob, one of the greatest horror films. Right, that's right. So they, yeah, so I'm sorry to interrupt you. Rowan but yeah but so there's a there's a lot of it they're interesting people you know they're not just like I don't know they're not just like bland they're unexpected yeah unexpected people for farming uh you know and one person that we were talking to look at the next couple of businesses

which they bought up teleflora and um the franklin mint and kind of said well you know if you were still interested in moving drugs around those would be you know great businesses to own but you know I don't like to just kind of speculate make things up well you don't have to speculate about the big heroin bust right yeah I mean the the heroin bust was kind of covered by the LA Times. But I mean, anyway, so, you know, long digression into their past. But, you know, they had a number of businesses. They've always had a big portfolio that they kept under the name Roll Global. But then as the sort of pistachios and, you know, the pomegranate juice, everything with a wonderful brand took off. You know, they basically rebranded the whole company. It's wonderful. And, you know,

their agricultural empire by that stage was, you know, the biggest part of their portfolio. And I mean, pistachios are probably, I think, the biggest single thing. They're about a billion dollars annually now, and maybe they have like four or five billion annual in revenue. So, you know, the way that they take control of water by owning this, you know, this farming empire, you know, is that in California, the water system is kind of public, but it's quasi-private. So if you own land that, you know, usually gives you an interest in a water district, so you can essentially, as a private company, by owning a lot of land, almost take control of water districts. And your water rights, and everybody kind of running the system is very sympathetic to business. It's a very

kind of like a fragmented, decentralized system where a lot of power is given to local bodies that are essentially extensions of the industries that control them. So simply by owning a lot of land, they took control of a lot of water, but then they also took steps to basically grab infrastructure. So in the 90s, they got this thing called the current water bank. You know, it sort of happened in a backroom deal. They got some state legislators in there. They did a whole pile of work on on legislation called the monary agreements that kind of also changed some of the ways that water could be sold in california they allowed like more open trading this brings us to the the kind of lost hills company town and the central valley itself and how it was turned from

a lush green habitat as you guys put it to arid wastelands with prisons garbage pits and oil wells. So can you explain to us how California gets basically browned and crisped up and what this Lost Hills Company town is? Well, all right, so you know as someone who's probably driven

from L.A. to San Francisco, right? You know that there's that whole space. Oh, yeah. That you just want to get past that fucking area as fast as possible and it's just a straight line right on the highway just goes straight through the valley. I mean, the Central Valley is essentially like a giant tub, right? It was

It was, you actually used to be, I think, you know, an inland sea at some point. Then it broke through where the Golden Gate Bridge is and all the water, you know, flooded out of there. So it's a, it's kind of a natural lake area. So when water, when snow melt comes off the mountains, up the Sierras, you know, it pools in the Central Valley and stays there. It was a, it was a floodplain, you know, it was kind of like a beautiful wetland teaming with birds and tully elk and bears. And it was a pretty lush place before people got. there, you know, around the gold rush. But very quickly, as agriculture followed the gold rush, you know, people like Henry Miller, the first big cattle baron, realized that there were sort of

loopholes that they could claim land. So anything that was navigable by boat that was a swamp land, you know, you could kind of claim it if you could say you were developing it. He did all sorts of tricks. He had like a boat on wheels. I can't remember exactly how that worked, but he just got wheeled around on a boat and claimed huge amounts of land. So these kind of early enterprising cattle barons were able to claim these massive land empires. And the first thing they did was to usually drain the water or try to control the way the water was flowing. There used to be a massive lake. There still is a lake in the middle of California called Lake Tulari. It actually reflutted in the last couple of years because we flipped from record drought into record like rainfall. So all of these

corporate farmers suddenly saw their farmland reclaimed by the water. There's nothing they could do to stop it because it's all gathering in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because most of the land, most of the farming happens on this dry leg bed, essentially. Yeah, and so the history of it is that because waterfall is so seasonal in California, it usually rains in the winter, as you know, so you have some rains in the winter, and then in the spring, you have some snowmelt, so you have, the water is not year-round. And so the earliest things that these farmers, these big farmers needed to do was create, you know, aqueducts and small private dams to hold the water so they can, so they can distribute it regularly to their crops. And so, you know, that was the beginning of this

terraforming of the land, right? It couldn't have been done without the federal government, you know, even on the state level, the state didn't have enough funds to, you know, finance these huge public works projects, as they called them, but they were really done for the benefit of a small, of a small agricultural elite in the state. And so over time, just the entire region became, just was one giant continuous farm all through the Central Valley. And over time, every river, every, you know, major creek was dammed and its water diverted to find And so what used to be this very, very seasonal place that would, you know, get really wet in the winter and in the spring and then dry out in the summer and in autumn and become kind of, you know, semi-arid. And, you know, it'd be this, it'd be the cycle was completely just turned into an arid wasteland except for the patches, the green, bright green patches of farmland.

So all of the, you know, the ecosystem that was the Central Valley, this floodplain, was completely destroyed. So all of the animals, you know, a whole web of life was just wiped off the. map because you just have these monocrops and that's it you know and you know you're you're using pesticides you're using monocrops you're using you know mechanical you know machinery to just to basically slice through the lance you're just killing everything except those the crops that you're growing and for a long time it was like you know it was like a really simple stuff like alfalfa which is feed for cows and cotton and you they just flood those that plane with water and over time things would evolve you know they'd grow citrus and things like it so other things would be added depending on

marking conditions depending on, you know, what was more profitable for farmers. And at this point, of course, you know, then suburban development started to creep in. So generally speaking, that whole area, you know, is completely developed, you know, and the parts that aren't developed are devoid of life. I mean, just to be out there is to be like, it feels like you're on a different planet, you know, it doesn't feel like you're on Earth really because it's so lifeless. It's so dry. And you step just one, you know, a couple of feet to the left. And then there's this lush farm that's, you know, laid out and like with computer grids. I wouldn't even say they're lush, because the thing about it is that it's this very neoliberal efficiency where they don't want anything

except for the crop growing there. So any, you know, any weed is kind of cleared away. But I mean, I think one other thing that's striking is that like, you know, like you said, the Delta, the farms are older, they're smaller because it was like it made sense to farm there naturally. And then big companies like the wonderful company came in pretty late where a lot of the good land had been taken. So they kind of came in and swooped in and got this land that used to be owned by oil companies. So, you know, there are farming empires in some of the worst land in central California. It's got no groundwater. A lot of it still has active oil production. But I mean, as Yasha said, it's just an odd feeling of desolation when you're there, which is a strange thing when you think about it as a food-producing

area. Like you don't really think of like farming areas as being a dead zone. But that's what they are just because of the way that industry has really pillaged them. And also because of an extension of this kind of very narrow efficiency you know so they'll talk a lot about how efficient they are with water but what that really means is that they drip irrigate the trees so they don't put you know drop more water than would be needed to keep the crop alive so there's no no no weeds there's no flowers there's no insects that shouldn't be there very rarely birds it's just this desert you know this desert the bees that they need to pollinate the farms are trucked in frozen you know frozen bees that they thore out yeah everything about it is controlled and yeah and so

squeezed, right, just fully squeezed, you know, extracted. You know, so when you're there, it does feel like, I mean, it feels, it's interesting because there's also, as Rowan mentioned, a lot of the newer farmland that came online that the Resnick's own was bought off oil companies. And so what the Resnix bought was that, like, the top layer of soil that they can plant trees on, but the substrate, the mineral layer, where there's still some oil, is still owned by old companies. So it's actually, there's actually, like, they divided the land based on the, the, the

layer of the land. So you actually can own different slices of the land. And so you'll actually go into an orchard, you know, growing these healthy crops like, you know, pistachios or even citrus crops, like they have their mandarins, you know, their branded mandarins that are generally sort of modified cuties or whatever the hell they call them now. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Halos. Halo. Halo. The halos, because they had a, they had a split with a cutie brand. Yeah, it's the halos now. And it's, and there'll be like an oil, so there'll be these trees, you know, these orchards, The green, they're laid out in a perfect, precise grid kind of going out to the horizon. And then in the middle of that orchard will be oil derricks that are just bobbing up and down, you know,

bobbing up and down. And then there'll be, you know, these pipes that are oil-stained, that will be snaking along the ground to these bigger collection kind of tanks where the oil is stored for pickup. So it's the two things, the two things are, when you think of oil, you know, the oil business, you think of desolation. You know, you think of, you know, just nothing alive around oil facilities, right? And yet the trees are there. The food is grown right there. And so they do fit together. The desolation actually is, yeah, it's scary to be out there.

And you know that the water that feeds it is taken out from, you know, what is now a dead ecosystem. It's been dead for so long that people in California, even people who grew up in California lived several generations in California, they don't even remember it, you know, because it's been dead for so long. No, you have to go and read old Steinbeck novels to find out that there was once a lush Valley there. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that was so frightening, like, when watching the documentary, because I had no idea. I had no idea that to see these, like, dozens and dozens of oil bobbers, you know, amidst the, the fruit trees was just like something that, yeah, was like incredibly

frightening to me. I mean, I told you guys before we, yeah, before we started recording how, like, you know, watching, watching the movie oftentimes felt like watching a horror movie. And, I mean, and, I mean, Resnick herself, I mean, she looks like, she's got like the energy of like a, like a spiritual medium, if that makes any sense. Like, kind of like a Hollywood medium. Like she has that kind of, that kind of energy anyways. But yeah, seeing all the oil drilling happening right like within the, and just how much of it, even the fields of the drillers or the bobbers, whatever you call them, without any plants around them, it's just like, oh my God, there's just like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these machines. least they're not, you know, pumping oil back in and using like oil runoff water to feed the plants, right? That would be terrifying. They'd never do that. No, that would be a line too far. So tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, you know, so when you drill the oil is a lot of water that goes into that process, injected into the wells, and that comes up dirty. It's got chemicals from the drilling

process. It's got oil residue. So in a lot of cases, the companies will just dump it in a pit around California, probably illegally, and like kind of let it seep into the ground. But then at some point Chevron came up with a recycling scheme for this water. So they would take it and use some walnut shells left over from the agricultural industry to filter it somewhat and run it into these pools, you know, where you can still see quite a lot of oil on the top. They'll skim it out and then run that water into the agricultural water system. So you'll see the agricultural canals. We'll have an oil slick on top of them. They'll have crud floating in there. It's Smells like oil. It smells like oil.

Intuitively, something doesn't seem very good about it. So the walnuts really aren't doing their job, is what we're saying. Yeah. We have a walnut problem. We have a fish problem. They're getting in the way. Yeah, it's a good way. They're very resourceful. You know, they'll use their waste. But at some point, Mark Ruffalo, actually, the Avenger started a water testing company. So he threw some money into a, you know, I think it's called water defense or something like that. Yeah. And they paid some scientists to go out and test the water.

and the scientists found acetone, benzene, they found all of these pretty nasty industrial solvents and oil chemicals. And, you know, you'd think the reaction of the industry would be like, oh, geez, we probably shouldn't use this, especially a company like wonderful that has this, you know, a very healthy image and they're selling halos to put in your kids' lunchbox. But the companies essentially just brushed it off and they said, well, okay, you found these chemicals, but we're going to wait and see if we find if they get into the food. Oddly enough, though, like, the only brand consciousness I have around fruit or nuts, like, is the wonderful company. Like, because now that we've switched to Hulu and the streaming services, I only get the, like, antidepressant commercials.

But, like, when watching, like, from childhood to the streaming services, watching regular television, the only thing I remember are the wonderful, the pistachio wonderful commercials, the cuties. You know, I remember when the cutie craze came. And, like, that's, and then I guess before that, the California raisins, that's basically it. Like, that's my brand consciousness of like... All of that has grown with oil waste water. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Congratulations.

I don't even know if you can escape it, you know, because if you go and try and buy QDs as opposed to Halos, I'm sure they're all roughly grown in the same area. So, I mean, the wonderful company is the most recognizable brand now. And, you know, I mean, they actually just admitted to it on their website. Yeah. It's in the FAQ section. It might be gone now, but it was on the wonderful Halo site. They said, you know, it's naturally occurring water that comes up with oil waste, you know,

but it's totally safe. I just want to finish a thought here because I think, you know, you started off with a reading about conspiracy theories, right? About, you know, that the government and these corporations are controlling the weather, that there's nothing natural about the weather. I mean, talk about a conspiracy theory. I mean, this is what fascinated me when I first got into reporting. First, about the Resnix and the wonderful company and, you know,

just generally the ecosystem in which they live, the agriculture industry in California and how open it is. I mean, so these conspiracies, these horrible things are happening out in the open. Like, you could drive, all of it is private property, but because it's owned by these absentee landlords, essentially, who are sitting in Beverly Hills or somewhere else, no one cares that you're there. So they have some, you know, low-paid workers that are checking that the drip irrigation system is working. They're, you know, spraying some chemicals. If you drive up there, they don't know who you are, and they don't, frankly, they don't care. And so you could, you have, you're free to roam, this huge expanse of land, right?

And the crimes, you know, quote-unquote, that they're committing or the horrible things that they're doing that you'd think, you know, they'd definitely want to keep it, you know, quiet. They definitely, and if you find out, you know, they're going to whack you, you know. They're going to try to shut you up. It's like, no, they don't care. They don't care that you go and look with your own eyes at this pool of wastewater with oil waste in it. And you can just walk down, you know, using your feet, walk down and look at where the canal ends. It's not, it doesn't take that, it doesn't take that much, you know. And you can see the brands of the companies, what they grow there in the fields that are getting this water.

So you could look at the oil derricks side by side with the healthy, fruit snacks that you're buying in the grocery store. It doesn't matter. It's all in the open. And so that's the thing about, you know, conspiracy theories is that you don't really need to, I mean, the biggest conspiracies are right out in the open. And they're not really conspiracies, I guess. The environment is so business-friendly, basically, that they believe that they can operate with impunity. And they're right, generally speaking. Like, there was a big protest about the oil waste water used on the crops and people turned up and shouted at their offices a little bit.

And they just basically let it die down and it went away. Exactly, because it wasn't actually people who cared. It was, you know, it is an environmental organization, food and water watch, a great organization. You know, they organized a protest. So people who worked for this environmental organization, you know, dressed up and marched to their offices and did a little protest. And, you know, the L.A. Times wrote about it, a couple of stories. And it just disappeared, right? Yeah.

And to the extent that anybody even read those stories, well, I don't even, you know, if 5,000 people read those stories, I'd be surprised. You know, so because just no one wants to know, no one wants to care. And because people are so powerless generally in their lives, that it's, they really do. operate with impunity and no fear whatsoever, you know? And it is, it is shocking to see it. I mean, I'm pretty cynical as a, you know, as a long time investigative reporter, pretty cynical about these things, you know, I'm professional about it. I know that, you know, the world is, is the way it is and it's very difficult to change it. But I don't know, as something is, when you're, when you're confronted with something is this basic, this kind of, this just brazen, I can just, to irrigate

crops with fucking oil waste. You know, I don't even know how, what? You know, it's, and yet I'm like, here I am, and I've already, to me, it's sort of normalized already, you know? You're like, yeah, that's just, oh, well, they do that. We're not dead, I guess. You did choose to spend some time out there, and you spent some time specifically in Lost Hills, which is a kind of wonderful company town. And it's so funny because, you know, it probably wouldn't take very much for the Resnix to make sure their company town had, let's say, safe water, safe air, all of this stuff. But they are completely incapable and or they don't care.

They just did a bit of kind of cosmetic work, like installed a little park. for kids or whatever, beautified a little city center area. But in general, we're talking about tap water, air, and in general, just the environment there being incredibly poor and poisoned. So can you tell us a little bit about Lost Hills? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, obviously the Riznix consider themselves to be good philanthropic citizens, you know, they're kind of liberal, California liberals. And at a certain point, it was an early article pointed out some of the inequality between them and their workforce. You know, Linda was shocked. She's like, wow, our workers are living in poverty. How could that have happened? What conditions could

have led to this? So they turned their attention to this town, Lost Hills, which is kind of adjacent to their fields, which also means it's adjacent to a large oil refinery, a big oil field, which is a block from the local school, and started to spend some money around town. And they have to spend money because the town's not incorporated, doesn't have any local agency, it doesn't have a tax base. Obviously, they don't pay any tax there. I don't think they, I don't know where they pay their tax, but it's certainly not lost hills. So they spent millions of dollars building a nice park. They fixed up some of the streets. They put in a community center. They got a ton of good PR, you know, David Brooks and the New York Times wrote an editorial about them all over the place.

You know, that was an early editorial, not the last. But yeah, then you go to the town and, sure, there's some things there that are nicely developed. You know, they've got it, but it's a charter school. you know, it's a park, and then you start talking to people, and there's sort of like a low-level flint water crisis there. So because most of the water for the drinking water comes from aquifers, it's pumped up, and because they're drained so low by the farming, a lot of these chemicals that are present in the water get concentrated. So you've got arsenic that's naturally occurring, but now it's in the water system at, like, illegally high levels or higher than, you know, state safety levels. So the town had responded to this by using a cheap chemical filtration system. You know,

they dump a whole pile or something in the water that I suppose neutralizes the arsenic. And it makes it taste terrible. It's not drinkable. You know, you've got people saying that their kids are getting sort of dry skin and rashes and stuff from it. Most people are drinking bottled water. It's one of those problems also like the Flint problem where depending on the pipes, it will react worse or better. So sometimes it'll react with certain pipes and really have a problem. Some people maybe with plastic pipes or something, they're not going to have the same level of problems. It's a difficult problem to pin down. But yeah, I mean, you had, you know, basically, you know, cosmetic improvements in the town while this, like, really core necessity of good drinking water was not serviced. You've got a lot of health

problems due to air quality because of the proximity to the oil field. Also, probably some level of agricultural chemicals that are drifting and being sprayed. A lot of elderly farm workers have their thyroid removed, which is normally a sign that it'd been exposed to chemicals, bad chemicals. good kind yeah this is like the real life like horror version of like sim city you know when like your town is failing and like you got all the unhappy faces everybody's frowning and then you like slap a park in the middle of the residential area like for a brief period of time all of the little like faces turn happy in green but then but it still can't you you know you haven't fixed the underlying issues of like your horrible like town mismanagement and it looks like they also kind of hire

people to go do water testing and go well no actually your tests are wrong we got these other guys to do tests, and they send in lawyers to argue with people at the kind of city meetings and stuff like that. Yeah, they do that. But, you know, and of course, they push back. They say that everything's good, and they blame the government for forcing them to clean the water, which they say made it even worse. I mean, what's interesting about it is that I was actually surprised that people were willing to talk to us,

just because the wonderful company is the main employer in town, you know, and so most of the men, you know, work seasonally because depending on the crops, you know, you're moving around a lot, you know, people are moving around a lot, around the Central Valley, you know, depending on the time of the year. And so some people are, you know, are working part of the year for the wonderful company and it's a major part of their paycheck. You know, some people are working at the factory. Obviously, not everyone chose to talk to us, you know, not actually a handful of people, but enough, you know, on the open their face on camera, you know, it was surprising. And, you know, the sad thing is, the sad thing is to give the Resnix credit, they're not actually

the worst employers in the Central Valley. I mean, you know, so actually people, People are generally say, well, they're not bad. Their pay isn't, it's decent pay compared to what you're getting in some of the other outfits. But it's a very bleak situation. I mean, you have these people, you know, who live in Beverly Hills, you know, they, if you actually look at a satellite, like a Google nap of their house, they live on Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills. I'm sure if you've driven down, Sunset Boulevard of Beverly Hills, through Beverly Hills, you've driven by their house.

It's shrouded in trees and sort of set back a little bit. Orange trees, too. They've got little orchards around it. Yeah, yeah, and olive trees too, I think. And they actually knocked down two neighboring houses to expand their territory. So if you actually look at Beverly Hills from space, they have one of the largest mansions in Beverly Hills. So it gives you a sense of, you know, the size, their extreme wealth. I mean, it looks like Versailles inside their house.

I mean, it's just, it's obscene wealth. They've got a taste for, like, tacky or, you know, 17th century art and, you know, Rococo aesthetics. It's like West Coast Trump style. They wanted their neighbor's pond. They wanted to siphon. siphon off their neighboring water supplies so they could have a nice coy pond. The neighbors don't like them

because they promise not to destroy the houses and they did it anyway. Anyway, the point is they have extreme wealth. The amount of wealth that they have is just, you know, off the charts and the place where they get that wealth, you know, where they extract that wealth from, you know, it's poisoned on multiple levels. It's poisoned by chemicals that are produced

by the oil industry that still operates there. It's poisoned by the agricultural chemicals that they spray because you have to understand And farming isn't like, you know, what Old McDonald, you know, with his farm going out and chicken on the chickens, it's, it is like a factory. So you want, you know, your almonds or you want your pistachios or you want your, you know, your citrus crops to bloom at a certain time. You know, you don't want them to bloom generally around, you know, this season because generally plants won't come online at exactly the same time, you know. So there's chemicals that you spray hormones essentially that you spray to get them to turn on. So all that stuff is floating around.

They're using a lot of pesticides. They're one of the largest users of pesticides in the state of California. In fact, a recent report just came out saying that they're using a pesticide which is banned, you know, on golf courses in urban areas because it's linked to neurological disorders. They just dump incredible amounts of it in their fields and on their orchards. And so the people who live there, the people who work for them producing this wealth, you know, they're living in an extremely toxic environment. And there's children, there's children growing up there. Yeah, I mean, so it is a very, very, very bleak situation and it's totally normalized. And so, I mean, I think for Linda Resnick and Stewart, you know, what they did with Lost Hills is that they know it doesn't look very good with their sort of liberal Beverly Hills set to have just, you know, just a totally, I mean, before they put in the park, I mean, it was just a desolate landscape and, you know, a grid of RVs. You know, that was, that was the worker town. It was just, it looked, it looked horrible. And so they threw in a bit of money. Actually, some of the money actually came from government sources as well. It was mad. you know, because they just applied for grants from the government to build, like, the charter school and all this stuff.

So they beautified it a little bit, so it doesn't have this punch to the gut, you know, immediately when you go there. So you could bring in reporters, you could show them the nice park. It's nice. It's a nice park, you know. Sure, the water is so corrosive in Lost Hills that the splash park that they have for the kids, you know, it basically it melted the pipes in the splash park and it has to be shut down all the time. That's a whole different story. But they can show it to people, right? So they can present a kinder, more gentler kind of extractivism, right, to the public.

That's the bottom line, isn't it? It's like their relationship to the area is obviously extractive. You know, they're making billions of dollars in profit with cheap labor, with the water that's being delivered there and by utilizing the land. But in our current world, they get to portray themselves as philanthropists when they, like, drop, I don't know what percentage of the money they're making. But, you know, we're talking 10, 20 million dollars, you know, out of, you know, a billion dollar annual cross. for pistachios. So it's really just a drop in the bucket. Mm-hmm. And so they do have different ways of laundering their image. Like they've advertised and have a close relationship with Stephen Colbert. They're linked in with Lachma and the local

art scene. They have Feinstein on their side. So can you explain this kind of ecosystem of image laundering that they maintain? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, one of the primary ways is, yeah, they're huge philanthropists donors to the arts in L.A. I mean, they're one of the largest in Los Angeles. I mean, they're big donor, Stalachma. They now just opened, gave a huge amount of money to the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and now it's called the Stewart and Linda Resnick Hammer Pavilion or something. And so, yeah, so they whitewash their image, you know, by using tried and true methods, you know, that a lot of rich people use. You know, they give to charities, they give to the arts. Obviously, they fund campaigns

of politicians. They hold fundraisers for politicians. They're in with, I mean, they're, they're, they're, They were very, very close with Ariana Huffington, if you remember her. So, you know, she had the Huffington Post. You know, obviously they're part of this kind of new money to lead in Los Angeles. It's very much like they're like the modern flavor now of like American industrialists. They're going to have some liberal social values, you know, in the same way that now America projects liberal social values, you know, as it kind of invades countries around the world or whatever.

But, you know, underneath it all, its business as usual, union busting, you know, pretty, pretty ambiguous political donations when you really scratch the surface. they'll give money to everyone, you know, and, you know, they were like doing fundraising for Mike Bloomberg, you know, that's like the level of presidential candidate thereafter. Also, the Central Valley, as you know, it's a Republican area. You know, a lot of the counties there have a Republican majorities and a lot of the Republican congressmen from California are from the Central Valley and from, you know, the San Bernardina County. So sort of these outlying non-urban areas, right? Because California is solidly, you know, democratic. But when you leave the cities and you're in these farming areas, they're Republicans. And so they give to Republicans, and they also are big donors to sort of the think tank industrial complex that's always pushing for war. One of the things that's interesting about them is they have the geopolitical dimension to their philanthropy, let's say, because they're still rivals, you know, with Iran. Iran is still a major producer of pistachios.

Actually, America, thanks to the Resnix, has now overtaken Iran as the dominant pistachio-producing country. So Iran is now in second place to America. But still, Iranian pistachios, and people who've eaten Iranian pistachios will tell you they're much better than American pistachios. But that's not just, that's not the only thing. But generally speaking, they're fighting for market share. They want the relationship to stay bad to that country so that they continue to get choked off as a competitor. Exactly. And so it's, it's, so they give to think tanks.

They, you know, it's the whole range of things. And it's the personal intertwined with the political and they are very much in synchronous, in sync. And yeah, and they have like, you know, for instance, I, we did this little protest. outside of Lackma and the Hammer Museum a few months ago to protest to try to like drum up awareness about the fact that these institutions take money from the Resnix who are destroying the environment. They're basically killing what's left of the natural environment in California and that they are, you know, in a way they're kind of like the Sacklers. I mean, I'd say on some level they're even worse than the Sacklers because they're killing something

that's a lot more fundamental. You know, they're killing the layer of life that we all need to survive on this. planet you know as people who live on this planet as as living beings that live on this planet we need the earth to function and and so they are contributing to climate collapse and ecocide and so we did these protests and we got their attention you know and they they sick the new york times reporter on us to basically to do this ridiculous whitewash i mean they they got this culture reporter from the new york times and when i talked to on the phone i mean what she she just regurgitated all the talking points back to me you know she said she said well but they're job creators you know like

These people in Lost Hills, they wouldn't have jobs if it wasn't for the Resnics. I'm like, and I, and I'm just, you know, my jaws on the floor. I'm like, are you, what is this like the 80s? Are you freaking Reagan? Like, they're not there to give jobs to them. It's not a philanthropic effort for them to sustain, you know, these people. They are using their labor to grow their crops. You know, these people are, you know, slowly dying in that little in that town of theirs.

They're all poisoned. But so she, you know, and it was very, very effective. She produced this New York Times article that was essentially, it was a very, it was a very, useful document. It was like all the talking points, all the wonderful propaganda compiled, you know, and, you know, well written, well edited, you know, in the New York style, in New York Times style. And it's just produced as a document. And they can, they can activate that kind of stuff, you know. It was quite bizarre to see, you know, because I like looked at what Yash was doing and it sort of was like, okay, like one guy with a microphone at a, you know, an L.A. Museum being a nuisance

effectively, you know, like he's yelling. But we had one guy cover it. And it obviously irritated the people running the museum and they didn't like the idea that their big donors were going to get some negative publicity possibly. So, you know, they call up a friendly culture reporter from the New York Times and she reached out to us and we're kind of like, well, you know, what is, this is going to be maybe interesting. What are the New York Times going to write about the Resnix? And we put them in touch with some sources, Rosanna Espaza, an environmentalist and PhD kind of environmental scientist who worked in Los Hills. So we gave them all of the information. We gave them a segment of the film that showed the oil waste in the water, you know, the scale.

of the farms, you know, as inequality, you know, all of these sort of problems, the water privatization gave them a lot of material. And then, of course, the piece comes back, and they've seen a publicity photographer with Linda out to Lost Hills, and they've got some shiny photos of her and at charter school. And, you know, they mention some criticism because it's in New York Times. They have to have both sides. So they mentioned some criticism, you know, the amount of water and sort of summarily dismiss it with a quote from Linda who just says, oh, well, you know, we're not in your taps. We're not taking a drinking water. Yeah, I wanted to read from this article because I think it's a good cap off to the episode because it kind of shows how the reporting is used to whitewash the image of these billionaires and also is a form of essentially laundering the issues, right?

Because it'll say, well, we're going to tell you about some of the critiques that these people receive and yet it's framed and minimized and, you know, they selectively choose things. And then, like you said, set it to, you know, a quote by the Resnix. And then all of that goes through the kind of filter of a culture reporter, which is hardly the investigative journalism that is required here, which I think your documentary, your upcoming documentary, Pistacho Awards is going to be obviously much better at. But, yeah, let's take a little read of this article to cap off the episode. It's called Giving Big. A California couple gets gratitude and scrutiny. So already Giving Big is so great to open up. Lyndon and Stuart Resnick have directed their pistachio fortune toward large transformational gifts,

but also drawn some criticism for their water use in an often parched state. Now, no mention of like oil runoff, poisoned local company town. You know, it's very much like, okay, well, let's just focus on like the water use because that's something where we can argue. So here's the article by Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times. It's from February 26, 2024. Standing on the grand staircase of Linda and Stuart Resnick's opulent Beverly Hills Mansion at a party last fall, where Diane Keaton, Bob Iger, and Brian Grazer were among the luminaries making small talk over cruditates and Sazirac cocktails.

The author Walter Isaacson took a moment to thank his hosts. Calling Bob Iger a luminary is fucking amazing, especially after the strikes. But anyways, not only were the Resnicks giving the party to celebrate his new biography of Elon Musk, They had also been major supporters of his former professional home, the Aspen Institute, donating 36 million to think tanks over the years. Isaacson was not the only one in the room with reason to be grateful to them. Milling about the house, where works by Picasso, Fragonard, and Boucher lined the walls, where the museum director's Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has received 90 million from the Resnix and Anne Philbin of the Hammer, 30 million,

as well as Michael Milken, the former Junk-Bondkin, who later founded a think tank, the Milken Institute, $25 million. Spent time in jail. Yeah, yeah. Overall, the Resnix, whose wonderful company business empire includes palm wonderful pomegranate juice,

wonderful pistachios, Fiji Water, HALOs, Mandarins, and Teleflora, the Flower Delivery Service, have donated $1.9 billion of their estimated $13 billion fortune

to academic institutions, climate change initiatives, cultural organizations, and programs in California's Central Valley. Their gifts have landed them on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of the 50 biggest donors,

three times. Quote, you really have to see them as one of the largest proponents of investing in L.A.'s public institutions, said Mr. Govan, Lachma's director. Oh, my God. So, I mean, we're going to keep reading it, but go ahead and jump in.

You know, what's interesting about the Resnics is, you know, there's different kinds of imperialisms, I guess, you know? So, you know, there's the classic kind of imperialism where, you know, America goes and does imperialism somewhere else and extracts resources from a different country.

But there are, you know, more intimate imperialisms. And the Resnics, and there, again, And they're just the latest manifestation of something that has existed in California and existed really in America for a long time, which is that these people treat their own country, you know, their own... Like a banana republic. Yeah, it's just, it's not that far away. It's an hour drive. It's two hours drive away.

But they treat them like people that don't matter, people that you can throw away, people whose lives are not valuable at all. And these people are celebrated in our society. And all this is done out in the open. It's not hidden. It's very, very blatant. We kind of saw Portaville as a microcosm for the biggest story because I think people don't really understand, you know, what water privatization can look like. You know, they think it's going to be like, you know, Elysium or something, you know, where you turn up to get your water for the day and there's a robot guard and, you know, he shoots you and then you die because you don't get any water because you don't have a dollar. You know, this is sort of very dystopian thing. But we were trying to make this point about how like water privatization is already in force and how it can look. And basically what happened in Portaville was. that, you know, there was a shortage of water with the drought. There was a lot less water flowing through the rivers,

and that caused some people's wells not to recharge. But basically, the business interests there had control over the dam, the water delivery system. And when there was a shortage, they kind of took what they needed. And then the people suddenly who never really questioned whether they had, you know, access to water before, suddenly found that they didn't. And, you know, this is the sort of situation you could find in California where, you know, the shortage does get more severe, and people are talking about, like, severely rationing the cities.

And then you've got these businesses that are like, well, we own this water bank. You know, we have this water right. And we also have a much more direct control of the political apparatus. So, you know, they probably will force cuts on people. And that happened, essentially, and he's portable. That was played out on a small scale. Speaking of these company towns, the article continues and does bring up Lost Hills, but not to talk about, you know, rashes or poisoning.

Here's how it's put. Ms. Resnick, 81, the driving force behind the couple's charitable efforts has become particularly focused on giving back in the Central Valley, specifically Lost Hills, where one out of every two households includes an employee of the wonderful company. Over the past decade, the Resnicks have invested about $580 million in Lost Hills and Delano, another Central Valley town, creating charter schools that offer robotics, yoga, and mariachi electives, health, wellness, and fitness centers, affordable housing, a park, and a new pedestrian Bridge across Highway 46. Quote, it's the most satisfying of anything I've ever done in my life,

Ms. Resnick said in a recent interview at her home. You meet these young people. You watch them go through school. You see them come back to the valley, which was my dream. Some of them are going into politics. A lot of them have come back to work for us in middle management jobs, not in the fields like their parents. But at a moment when philanthropists are increasingly coming under scrutiny, museums have distanced themselves from the Sackler family for its role in the opioid crisis, Warren Kander stepped down as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art after protests of his company's sale of tear gas and climate activists have protested museum donors and board members.

The Resnick have found that they are no exception. They have faced scrutiny for their use of one of California's often scarce resources, water. A 2016 investigation in Mother Jones found that the Resnick's agricultural businesses were, quote, thought to consume more of the state's water than any other family, farm, or company, and their operations were critiqued the following year, in the documentary, Water and Power, a California heist. And this is the turn, right?

So switching the focus from the poisoning of the local towns to the water, which is a cleaner issue to deal with. So then here we go. Last fall, a pair of activists protested the Resnics at both Lackma, which named its Linda and Stuart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in recognition of a $45 million gift, and the hammer, which named its Linda and Stuart Resnick Cultural Center in honor of the couple's $30 million gift. One of the protesters, Yasha Levine, who has been working on a documentary called Pistachio Wars,

carried a sign that said, Hammer celebrates climate criminals. They have brought a lot of improvement, but it's not all glitter and gold, Rosanna Esparza, a Kern County activist who has spoken out against the Resnick for their water usage, said in an interview. And that's it. That's all they give her. It's a solid four lines of criticism. Just it's not all glitter and gold. Could we get some more maybe coverage here? No, no, no.

Let's focus back on the money. In response to such criticisms, Ms. Resnick said, quote, we've been attacked for water for generations. We're not taking anyone's water out of their tap. I don't have anything to do with the municipal water supplies. So it's just like this absolute fucking hatchet job, rerouting things to the water issue, cutting the person who might have a longer quote down, not giving you any quote, obviously. Of course not. But then cutting her down to just, it's not all glitter and gold.

Moving on. I know. It's crazy. It's shocking, right? This is the, you know, this is the flagship liberal newspaper in America, you know, and it's just such a brazen whitewash. It's, I mean, this is, I guess, because it's the art world and it's cultural criticism, you know, these reporters, as I have some people who do, you know, art journalism.

And, you know, they are obviously not very held in very high regard, you know, journalists who do this kind of culture criticism because most of it is just hobnobbing with donors to museums. That was kind of how it felt, wasn't it? Like, she just wants to keep getting involved. to the black tie events and they asked her to do them a favor and you know but then it gets put in the times you know which is supposed to have a lot more credibility yeah they're all fucking like fake phony rich friends who go to the parties together and they you know they hobnob and they do all the stuff yeah and there's a direct connection i mean i just know a little bit of the back story behind

the story what i think triggered this article was our protest at the hammering museum because when we did the protest the the head of the museum who really turned it around who took it from this failing institution and created into it one of the main museums in los angeles now and philbin she came out you know from like her office in the tower and like looked at us and we kind of chased her a little bit and i mean we were yelling at her through the through the loudspeaker and you know asking her like if she knows that she that she took money from climate criminals that she's that she's helping whitewash climate criminals and she was so pissed like it was i mean she she was like what are these pieces of doing here in my museum, you know? And so then they called the cops on us after that. And I know

that the author of the article, she, Robin Pagrebben, she had just like a month before that done this huge, huge profile of the director of the Hammer Museum. You know, basically just singing her praises, you know, talking about what an amazing job she did. So, you know, on one level, I think she's like not only protecting the Resnix, she's also protecting her own journalism, right? So she's kind of covering for herself because she did a story on the Hammer Museum and I'm pretty sure she wrote about the big donation that she got from

the Resnix and she painted it as like a big win as like a huge career milestone for the director and here and here just a few weeks later or even a month later I might have been just actually a few weeks later we show up and we're saying that you know the Resnics are worse than the Sacklers and so I think that's what

there's like a you know there's a kind of a couple of things came together to create this article and I think her own personal protection is part of it as well. Talk about, again, conspiracies. Yeah, it's a conspiracy of wealthy people and their hangers on, covering for each other and painting things in good light while making like a kind of cursory head nod to the fact that, yeah, there are some issues. These are problematic, but there are faves. Yeah. Well, you saw the luminaries also at the party that the reporter's writing from, Walter Isaacson, all these other ass kissers. You know,

the critique shouldn't be that hard to find either. You know, They have the, you know, almost a billion, almost a billion dollars, right? Yeah, 900 million. You know, so you've got this agribusiness that's going to be the, you know, the big-ticket donor for this new climate research center run by UC Davis. No one's really given the mini grief about that, but they've got such a huge track record for misrepresenting science. You know, they did this huge pseudoscience campaign for Palm Wonderful, where they said that Palm Wonderful would make you live longer, would, like, kill your prostate cancer, it would, you know, fix your erectile dysfunction. I think they said the same thing for pistachios. They got slapped by the FDA for that.

You know, they've basically, on the water issues, they've tried to push their own scientific interpretations of the ecological crisis on the Obama administration through Diane Feinstein. So they've got a very long documented track record of, you know, pseudoscience and trying to manipulate science in their corporate interests. And now they're going to turn up and be the donors to the biggest climate center in California. So, you know, one, I somehow doubt that climate center is going to come up solutions that involve cutting back wood use for farms. You can look on their website. It's very much

a techno fix kind of a place there. They're the ones that are going to build the, you know, the giant carbon capture machines or something. But whatever it is that they're doing, it's going to, it's not going to impinge on the growth of industry. It's going to be some kind of green capitalism, essentially, that they're going to try to, you know, preserve the town, you know, and then the wonderful town. It's basically a corporate town. You know, like we had company towns in the 1950s where the company would go on and try and make a model environment. And everyone realized it was a failure because the company has too much control over people's lives. You know, it controls housing. The workers very disadvantaged. And, you know, their wanted education

program, they talk about all of the diverse things people do. It's basically a farm education program. They're training people in a pipeline to work in farms. So, you know, the idea of class mobility or, you know, all of these things that are supposed to happen with the American dream, you know, are not really part of this new corporate reality. Fantastic stuff. I really recommend that people go check out your documentary when it comes out, but I also want to know, like, you guys were raising some funds to pay for the incredibly expensive stock footage that you're using in your documentary, footage that, you know, shows California through the ages, footage that serves to paint the broader picture that is definitely not going to be the

focus of these types of articles. So where can people kind of follow your work, support your work? Yeah, if you go and find Pistachia Wars on Twitter, we'll probably have that good. GoFundMe pegged up the top of that, along with our festival premiere, which is going to be at Dock Edge in New Zealand. So if there's any New Zealand people listening, you can go and see Pastasio Wars, I think, in about two weeks in Christchurch, and it's going to be in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. The GoFundMe, we were raising money for the stock. We got enough to get it licensed for festivals, so we've kind of cleared the big milestone. But there's a little bit left on the goal, which is going to help us if we want to put it out on, like, Vimeo or streaming later to extend the license. So if people's pockets are feeling, um, jangly, by all means, uh, go in and drop a few bucks

into that. Go fund me because it'll help us get the film out beyond the festivals. Yeah. And if you're, uh, you know, if you're, uh, we're actively basically seeking, uh, you know, we're trying to, over the next year, six months, we're going to be entering into film festivals in North America and, uh, and trying to get the film distributed. So it's, it's, you know, it's a slog, but we're, we're finally finished the film. And, and now it's, it's time to get, get people to see it. So we'll have those links in the episode. notes in the description. So go ahead and click through and follow them and support their work. I really hope this documentary finds a larger distribution because it's a really important story

that is just not being told in such a kind of direct and investigative way. And, you know, I mean, it's obvious, but you guys are not captured by the same financial interests that would want to paint this any other way than the way it really is. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it. I mean, you know, the journey to find a distribution is going to be interesting in itself, I think, maybe warrants a documentary of its own because, I mean, from what, you know, from what a lot of people are saying is that

recently there's a big drop-off in interest in political documentaries from, you know, most of the streaming platforms. It's got to be true crime. That's all people want. Yeah, but they like, yeah, they like horror and this is, you know, I think this is... Exactly. Maybe we should, maybe we should rebranded as fiction,

you know, and then... I just need to do the supercut on Linda interviews because I transcribe so much Linda that I have felt the pain more than any person maybe on this planet. It reminds me actually of something that Julian told me a long time ago, not on a podcast, I don't think, but I think we were just hanging out. And he was like, dude, the biggest irony of like, you know, the movies and all this stuff is that, you know, that they kind of like show the apocalypse is happening, like, you know,

way in the future. And he's like, and what's crazy is that, no, the apocalypse is happening all around us. It's just happening to different groups of people at different times. You know, there are people that are living like nomads, you know, who are having to, protect their stuff from either, you know, police or, you know, other people who, you know, want to take it from them, you know, they are living like they're in this Mad Max sort of universe. And, like, watching this movie, I felt like, well, this is, it's like the citadel in Mad Max. There is this entity that is, like, controlling the water and portioning it out, like,

you know, where it goes. And it's, yeah, just one of those great examples that, like, this apocalypse or, like, you know, something like interstellar, you know, with all the farms drying up. It's the thing that we suppose is happening or it's going to happen, you know, dozens and dozens of years into the future, but it's happening right now, and it's happening around us, and there's no awareness yet. I think we should spread a little conspiracy of our own, which is that Immorten Joe is based on Linda Resnick. Same look. Yeah, I mean, it's a doomy movie. There's no doubt about it, but it is a road trip through this environment that people generally don't look at, and it's a crazy environment to look at, and then there's just insane dimensions to the story that

make it fun, like the marketing and the backstory of Stuart and Linda. So, you know, I think it all comes together into a pretty great film to watch. It's a love story. Love story. Yeah, you can say that. We crowdfunded it. So we've, we've had, you know, people approach us and say maybe we could do a Netflix version. And we've resisted that because it's like we put so much sweat into making this weird, polemical version that probably wouldn't survive Netflix treatment. So it's going to be out there. Thanks to crowdfunding, Kickstarter, and we hope we love it. Yeah. It's a real. It's a really great film. Congratulations. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us on. It was a pleasure.

Yeah. Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and, of course, our mini-series. We've also got a website, QAAApodcast.com. Listener, until next week, may the Resnix bless you and keep you. Amen We have auto-cued content

based on your preferences Crack and Gundam style Gondam style Crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack in Gondom star Hey Break your love now Crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack Baskatchi hosts

Crack and Gundam star Side does it, why don't we all go nuts. Crack, crack, crack, crack, wonderful pistachios. Get cracking.