Podcasts about like california

Talking with novelist ARX-Han on the optimistic outcome, the counterbalance to techno-feudalism, the shifting Overton window, on deep (racial? / psychosexual?) anxieties of Western elites over China's technological rise, transhumanist cults, the internet as a pathologization engine, the problem of male agency in a world trending toward simulation, the accelerating breakdown of ideological coherence, the future of literary fiction in an era of digital feudalism, the aesthetics of niche subcultures, on panpsychism for story building models, the seduction of AI worship, Grand Theft Auto as contemporary American reality. On paranoia, the next phase of cult formation, social engineering, why the next big cultural divide won't be left vs. right but human vs. post-human, and why it's enough to just be read by a small group of considered minds in a literary salon scattered across the digital ether… + more.ExcerptsOn American Social Engineering“So I think the broad thing to understand is that my view is that Americans are the most propagandized population in the world, but the sophistication of that propaganda is so high that they have the inverse view, right?”On Convergence“And so I think that the structures of our consent manufacturing apparatus are much more sophisticated, distributed decentralized coded in a sort of implicit procedural logic and institutional logic that is takes quite a bit of time to disentangle and see clearly. And one thing that's very fascinating to me is just the convergence between effective altruists and Silicon Valley defense tech bros.Because they basically converged on the same foreign policy, which is just essentially American hegemony, right? And I just think it's very ironic that you know, I have this line in my head that you know, maybe it turns out that effective altruism was really just about killing Chinese people, right?”On Literary Opportunity:“ I've written about this before in terms of how liberalism has acted as a sort of identity shredder for Asian Americans, but the irony is, I think, because this is such an important historical moment in the geopolitical contest between East and West, but I think there's an opportunity to write fiction about it and literary fiction about it that's very interesting that taps into the vein of this present moment”On Masculinity“The solutions essentially require, probably technological reversal over and above anything else. I'm increasingly of mind that the ennui of the modern male is downstream of technological civilization itself.”On the Optimistic Countervailing Force:“The funniest optimistic outcome to me, the most hilarious outcome would be that various Chinese tech companies produce vast quantities of open source, AI and, robotics platforms that are then diffused throughout the world at scale.And, that acts as a countervailing force that prevents us from entering full blown techno feudalism and concentration of power”On America“America just is like a Grand Theft Auto sketch… Especially California, right? Like California is just like a GTA comedy routine where the most like crazy s**t just happens with consistent frequency, you read about something like, ‘Oh my God', that's a feature, not a bug of California… I think the strength of America as a system - Is this ability to do memetic recombination…”On New Axis of Conflict “I think the new axis of conflict will be pro and anti transhumanism slash AI worship and stuff like that. So I feel that a major transection of values is inbound. Something novel. And that, that kind of cuts across this conventional left right distinction in strange and discomforting ways.”On Literary Privilege“ And I think we shouldn't, I think writers, we shouldn't be so so damn greedy, and we should just say that's, that's enough. Like this is already a privilege, you know? Like it's already it's a privilege to be read by a small number of considered readers, and to be taken seriously, and to engage in dialogue with others.”MoreARX-Han @ www.DecentralizedFiction.com2024 Interview with ARX-Han on his novel Incel https://www.leafbox.com/interview-arx-han/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Headlines with an update on the California wildfires This dude's wife makes him do a lot he don't wanna do, will he ever tell her he's done??

The results of November's election broke a number of norms for many so-called blue states, including California, where the number of Trump voters in the state jumped by more than 40 percent between 2016 and 2024. It was also a similar story with the bills that voters approved, with Californians passing laws that made the state tougher on crime while rejecting laws that would have raised the minimum wage and ended involuntary prison labor. For more, KCBS Radio news anchor Patti Reising spoke with Melanie Mason, Politico's senior politics reporter who covers California.

Ricardo Lara has ignored every request from the show to appear and answer our questions the state's insurance debacleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

#VicePresidentDebates #WhoWatchedThem #WouldItSwayYou? #Policies #CivilDebate #TimWalz #JDVance #CentralParkAttack #NewspaperArticles #1989 #PoisoningmindsofNewYorkers #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Slogan #Priorities #TheBlackVote #VotingOutcome #Crime #Democracy #ResponsetoChange #Prisons #FederalStandard #ThreeStrikeLaw #25States #Qualityoflife #California #CostofLiving #QualificationsforImmigrants #FundsandResourses #DayCare #Hotels #Cellphones #Funds #CitizenPriorities #Taxes #AllocationofFunds #MismanagedDocumentation #CabinetSpreadsheet #FocusInternally #LessInternationalAide #Can'tSatisfyEveryone #DoWhatsMoralyRight #Votes We're back with the Vice-Presidential Debate! How influential is this to the people? Did the Vice President representatives outshine their Presidential partners? Showing concern for their adversary while the presidential candidates accuse another of racism! Does the slogan “Make America Great Again” hold power and meaning with people or was it a bust? What does it mean for one to vote and how do you do it; by mail or like Chris and wait in line? Are crime laws good the way they are or should there be a federal standard for regulated crime facilities? States have different populations and policies; what problems are you facing in you states? Like California and their high income of living? How do the people feel about resources and funding that's given to undocumented migrants when they could be allocated to civilian needs; like the homeless, work incentives, and infrastructure? What can the government do to reduce wasteful spending and improve economic quality of life? There are many priorities of concern and improvement that can be focused on in America. What is the most pertinent for the people to affect votes?

Get ready to rethink everything you know about the Democratic Party! In this explosive episode of Connecting the Dots, I sit down with historian and author Jeremy Kuzmarov to reveal how the party's messaging has quietly embraced militarism—and what it means for America's future. This isn't just another political chat; we're diving deep into the hidden history behind today's headlines, exposing the bipartisan grip of the military-industrial complex on both parties. Jeremy and I break down how Democrats have shaped U.S. foreign policy, fueling wars and global interventions that have real-world impacts on immigration and international relations. If you're ready for a raw, eye-opening conversation on how our political system prioritizes power over peace, you won't want to miss this! Tune in for insights that challenge the status quo and uncover the urgent need for a more balanced, humane approach to politics, both at home and abroad. Watch or Listen now to join the conversation! Find me and the show on social media. Click the following links or search @DrWilmerLeon on X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Patreon and YouTube!   Hey everyone, Dr. Wilmer here! If you've been enjoying my deep dives into the real stories behind the headlines and appreciate the balanced perspective I bring, I'd love your support on my Patreon channel. Your contribution helps me keep "Connecting the Dots" alive, revealing the truth behind the news. Join our community, and together, let's keep uncovering the hidden truths and making sense of the world. Thank you for being a part of this journey! Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:00:00): Hey, here are a couple questions. Has the messaging from the Democrats changed over the past few years? Is the messaging more jingoistic, more saber rattling, have they become the party of militarism? Let's find out Announcer (00:00:22): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:00:30): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I am Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they happen in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which they take place. During each episode, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between these events and the broader historic context in which they occur, thus enabling you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode. The issue before is militarism and messaging. My guest is a man who holds a PhD in American history from Brandeis University. He's the managing editor of Covert Action Magazine. He's the author of five books on US Foreign Policy. He's the author of a piece at Covert Action entitled DNC Convention Features former CIA director who was in charge of drone programs that killed thousands. He is Dr. Jeremy Komaroff. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:01:39): Thanks so much for having me. Great to be with you. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:01:41): You open your peace in covert action as follows, Leon Panetta was drowned out by anti-war activists when he spoke at the 2016 convention, but not this time. Former CIA director, Leon Panetta, who was the director from 2009 to 2011, was among the featured speakers on the final day of the DNC in Chicago on August 22nd when Kamala Harris accepted the party's nomination as its presidential candidate. Jeremy, does this represent just a shift in rhetoric, or is this a shift in policy and a shift in direction? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:02:25): Well, I think we see a lot of continuity. I mean, Panetta was there in 2016. He's giving the same kind of speech eight years later. In 2016, he was really promoting these anti-Russia themes, anti Putin. This was the forerunner of the Russia gate. They were already attacking Donald Trump as a Russian agents. And his speech in 2024 was the same kind of thing. It was really very jingoistic militaristic in that speech. He was invoking the glory of the Obama administration assassination of Osama Bin Laden or alleged assassination because there are a lot of different theories about what really might've gone on there. And the official story was shown to be a lie. Seymour Hirsch had a piece that was very good, and he compared it to Alice Wonderland, and their rhetoric was so far out there as to what really is known to have happened. And yeah, there are a lot of question mark or they dumped the body at sea, so there are no autopsy and some question if that was even Bin Laden. (00:03:31): Some people believe he died years earlier from renal failure. But in any event, that's the kind of thing they were doing just touting the War on terror. The US military Panetta said something that America made mistake of trying to be isolationist in the 1930s. And there's this kind of insinuation, you can't appease Putin as if he the new Hitler and America was not really isolationist. It was a global empire starting the late 19th century when it acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico and Cuba and function as a global empire from that time period. So it never really isolationist. And FDR had this major naval buildup in the Asia Pacific that essentially provoked the Pacific War. It was a horrific war. So I mean, he obviously doesn't know his history that well, but this is just theater. Yeah, it's a very hawkish theme. He's a dancing and his speech echoed Kamala Harris' speech, anti-Russia themes, pro-military themes. (00:04:36): So that's what you get nowadays out of the Democratic party. And yeah, I mean there were booze of Panetta in 2016, but it was quiet this time around. It seems that people are just trying to mobilize around Harris and the EM of the anti-war movement. I mean, there were protestors outside of the convention. A lot of that centered exclusively on Israel Palestine. So I don't know. I mean, I think the protestors in 2016 were part of the Bernie Sanders faction. Maybe they had some hope in the party then, but now I think anti-war people have no hope in the Democratic Party. So they left or somewhere outside protesting. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:05:21): Well, in fact, that was really the crux of my question, Panda's rhetoric versus the convention's response. And does the convention's response, or some might say lack of response, indicate that there's a serious shift in the party, particularly as we look at how easily war mongering legislation gets passed through Congress, through the democratic elements of Congress as it relates to funding for Ukraine and funding for Gaza and more jingoistic rhetoric as it relates towards China? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:06:01): Absolutely, and I think it's telling that Robert Kennedy and Tulsa Gabbard are considered more peace candidates and they've made a lot of statements critical of US foreign policy, especially regarding Ukraine. Less so for Kennedy, and I think also Gabbard, Israel, Gaza, but definitely Ukraine. They've both been very critical and called for easing of relation with Russia. And they've warned about the threat of nuclear war and that we're in an era and new Cuban missile crisis, they've compared it to, and they were booted out of the party. I mean, Tulsa, they were treated horribly beyond just debate. I mean, Gabbard, she was in one of the CNN debates or televised debates in 2020 as she was running in the primary. And she was viciously attacked by Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and others who dominate the party in kind of Neo McCarthy I term, and they called her a Putin stooge. (00:07:01): And a Bashir saw theologist because she wanted to, she was against the covert operations in Syria and the escalation of conflict. And somehow they called her all these kind of names and really treated her in the way that Joseph McCarthy would recognize or victim of McCarthyism with reminiscence of that. So she was totally driven out of the party. Now you find they're more on Fox News. I mean, I think the Republican, they're trying to capitalize on the disinfection of many pacifists and peace oriented people with the Democrats, and they're trying to recruit them and draw them into the fold. And that's why they brought in Kennedy and gather. But personally, I think that they're just, they're very cynical operative and their Republican party are just trying to get that vote. But they're not really peace oriented party either. And Trump's foreign policy was very bellicose and aggressive in many ways, certainly toward Latin America. (00:08:00): The drone war, Trump escalated the drone war, escalated war in Somalia, and he's very aggressive and very xenophobic and threatens a major escalation, I think with China. So I think it's just a cynical ploy by the GOP to try and get these disaffected people are disaffected with the Democrats and by recruiting Kennedy and Gabbard to create this persona as a new peace party. But I don't think they really are a peace party. And so those of us who are really committed to pacifism, anti imperialistic politics really have nowhere in the mainstream American politics, and I think we should work on developing our own independent parties. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:08:47): Before I get back to your piece, you mentioned in your earlier answer a reference to people trying to compare former President Trump to Hitler. And I was at the RNC when JD Vance was, his name was placed in nomination and he accepted the nomination. And I was doing my standup after the nomination. And I was saying as I was closing my analysis, I said, I find it very interesting, if not ironic, that a guy who just a couple of years ago was comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler is now his vice presidential nominee, and we'll be standing next to him on stage. I said, how does that happen? And when I said that, there was a guy standing next to me who turned to my cameraman and said, you guys have to leave. You have to leave right now. He was allowing us to use his space, so he was able to tell us that. But my point is, as soon as I said that, you guys got to go, you got to go right now. Explain that because I find it amazing. And only now would something like that happen in our politics. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:10:11): Yeah, well, I think it is increasingly out of the Twilight Zone. I mean, well, firstly, I think a lot of the rather is a bit overblown. I mean, I think Trump, there are a certain fascist theme in the GOP and there are concern about ascendant fascism and authoritarianism both among both parties. I mean the scapegoating of immigrants in the GOP, the extreme nationalism, ultra militarism like veneration of the military, that bears fear that the GOP leaning the fascist direction. I mean, I think some of the rhetoric about Hitler may be overblown, but yeah, it's totally ironic that he was calling him Hitler, as you say, and then he's the nominee. So that's just insane. But why did they kick you out? I mean, you were just repeating a fact that is known to be a fact, and that goes to the growing authoritarianism we see that can't, the kind of conversations we're having are not tolerated in the mainstream. And just a journalist doing his job and just reporting on something is being removed that Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:11:22): And can get you arrested and detained in airports and have your home raided by the FBI, as with Scott Ritter and O'Malley Yella and the three, Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:11:37): Yes, this is, yeah, I think what we're seeing is, yeah, more overt form of authoritarianism. And I think it's showing the flaw of American democracy. I mean, on paper there has been a democracy, but in reality for years and generation dissidents have been ostracized and marginalized and faced a lot of persecution, maybe not physical violence, although I mean under FBI Cual Pro, there were a lot of victims of state repression, people who were unjustly incarcerated sometime for decades, there were people killed. I mean the FBI infiltrated leftists in radical groups with the goal of destroying them and creating divisions. And in the Black Panther, they orchestrated murders. So I mean, there very violent, undersized underbelly of American politics. And that's coming more to the surface more and more. And I mean, you see, look, mark Zuckerberg said that Biden administration told him to censor Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:12:45): The Hunter Biden laptop story. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:12:47): Yeah, well, the hunter bought laptop and relate to COVID-19. And without your view on that, people should have a right to express it, but Zuckerman was told to censor viewed that criticized the government position. And then yeah, you have these raids going on Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:13:04): A minute, a minute, a minute because it's important. I think that people really clearly understand that the point that you just made about Zuckerberg, that's not your opinion. He stated that in a letter that he wrote to Congressman Jim Jordan. And so those who want to wait a minute, what is Jeremy talking about? Right? Google it. You can read the letter for yourselves. It was sent last week and Zuckerberg made those very clear statements and was apologetic for having done what he did in censoring those stories on Facebook because he has since come to understand that contrary to, as he was told, those were not Russian propagandist talking points. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:13:56): Exactly. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. And another fact is that Tim Waltz made statements supporting censorship if it was related to misinformation, and that seems to be the line in the Democratic Party, but they use misinformation. Could be anybody who's simply critical of the government. They call it somebody who criticizes government policy in Ukraine or vis-a-vis Russia. They say he's promoting misinformation or Russian propaganda, or the same for the Covid narrative. They question the dominant narrative. And I found the review of waltz's statements. He promoted misinformation. So for instance, he claimed that carried out chemical attacks on his own people, and that was refuted by scientists like Theor Postal did a very detailed scientific study, and I did an article and I interviewed postal and he showed me his data and this guy, the top flight MIT scientist, and he repu these claims, his analysis, and he was very neutral. (00:15:02): He wasn't really on any side of the war, and he wasn't even particularly political. It was a very objective scientific study that based on the angles, those attacks had to have occurred from certain areas that were controlled by the rebels, not the Assad government. And that other attacks didn't think that there were chemical attacks, one of those bombing of a fertilizer plant. In other case, some stuff may have been planted like dead animals to make it look like an attack because people would've been dead. He said, he showed me photos and he had images of photos where people who were on the scene would've immediately been killed if there was actually a chemical weapon attack the way they described it, and they weren't affected or sick in any way. So in any event, that's just an example of waltz can be seen to have promoted misinformation. (00:15:57): So based on his own statements, he should censor himself. But the broader point is the American constitution and the American Republic was founded on the deal to free speech, and that's what we should have. And this cancel culture. I think too often on the left, people support censorship under the GU of a cancel culture. And I think that's very dangerous, and I think people are smart enough to see which ideas are good or bad for themselves. They don't need to have this censorship. It serves no purpose, even for somebody who is promoting bad things or false information, you don't have to censor because people are smart enough to see there's no evidence behind what he's saying, which is often true, sadly, of the US government, and that's why they lose credibility. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:16:45): I've asked this question of a number of guests, Caleb Moin and I think Dr. Gerald Horn and a few others that talking about censorship in the United States, engagement in censorship, that if you look over history, particularly since World War I, this whole idea of censorship really comes to a height when the United States feels threatened. And then once the perceived enemy is vanquished, then the whole focus on censorship tends to wane if not go away. And so I'm wondering if now because we're seeing heightened censorship, if that's an indication to you how threatened the United States empire feels? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:17:34): I think so. Yeah. Censorship goes hand in hand with war. War is the enemy really of democracy. And we've been in a state of permanent war since nine 11, and I think they've manufactured this new Cold War for sustaining the military complex police state, which has to go hand in hand with censorship. And we've seen more authoritarian forms of government, even toward the domestic population, heightened militarized policing in inner cities. We've seen the government stripping funding from vital social programs, and that's automatically going to generate more and more dissent and dissatisfaction with the government and living conditions. So they have to ratchet up censorship and more authoritarian, greater authoritarianism, and that's the only way they could sustain their power, and they've really lost their governing legitimacy. People, if you talk to people from all walks of life, whether in liberal areas, conservative, you find almost universally people distrust the government and they're not happy with the direction of the country, and more and more are speaking out. So they have to censor them and try and control the media and channel any descent they want to channel it and co-opt it. And that's why a lot of the media has been co-opted their CIA or FBI, infiltrators and media, even alternative media. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:19:06): In fact, to your point about people being dissatisfied with the direction of the country, if you go to real clear politics, those polled 26.9% believe the country's heading in the right direction. 63.4 believe that the country's on the wrong track. So again, I try my best to give as much data as I can to support the positions that are being stated so the people can understand that this is substantive analysis that we're providing because talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter here. Let's go back to your piece you write, Panetta said that Harris would fit the bill as a tough commander in chief to defend the USA against tyrants and terrorists, according to Panetta. Harris knows a tyrant when she sees one and will stand up to them, unlike Donald Trump, who Panetta suggested had coddled dictators such as Putin and effectively told them they could do whatever they want. Why is that exchange or that recounting by Panetta troublesome to you? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:20:18): Well, firstly, yeah, and the statistics you're citing indicate that many Americans are increasingly seeing their own government as tyrannical. And this is the kind of tired rhetoric we've seen over and over to justify these foreign adventures and unjust and unnecessary wars that further divert our treasury away from actually solving the problem in our society. And yeah, we see, Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:20:45): Wait a minute, and many will tell you, because I've been having this conversation for at least eight years, that that's the intent, that the objective has always been to heighten the sense of insecurity within the country so that social program funding social safety net funding could be shifted away from the public to the private military industrial complex. And they talked about this when Obama came into office, they talked about this, I know I have it backwards. When Clinton came into office, they talked about this when Biden came into office, they said the narrative is more subtle with the Democrats, but the objective is still the same. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:21:32): And the rhetoric, as you see, they're really attacking Trump from the right and they're positioning themselves as more hawkish. And that's why a lot of the neoconservatives have moved into the Democratic party. And William Christol, who this neo-conservative, intellectual, and a great cheerleader for the Iraq war, he sent out a tweet, Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan at the Democratic Convention. This is my Democratic convention or a CIA director quoting Ronald Reagan. And yeah, you see from that statement you read, Trump is somehow soft on the Russian, but if you actually look at Trump's policy toward Russia, he pulled out of the INF treaty, which is a very good arms limitation treaty. He ratcheted up these sanctions from hell on Russia. He ratcheted up arm sales to Ukraine, for instance. He sold javelin anti-tank missiles, which Obama had up to that point hadn't sold. So he would not soft at all. (00:22:31): And he was plotting regime change. I mean, there's a lot of continuity in foreign policy. You see a lot of continuity among administration. So Trump's approach really was not very different from Obama. He's just kind of expanding on things Obama was doing. And then Biden takes it to a further level of provoking all out war and attacking Russia directly. So the rhetoric is meaningless, but yeah, it's designed to inculcate fear. I agree with your analysis that they just try and make us fearful and on edge whether it's of the next disease pandemic or the next threat. I mean, they're always playing up the threat of North Korea or Iran. I mean, look at North Korea. I mean North Korea was bombed back to the Stone Aid by the United States during the Korean War and the US pumps South Korea with weaponry and stores nuclear weapons there. I mean, obviously North Korea is going to respond. (00:23:27): I mean, developing a nuclear weapon is their only way to save their country and survive as a nation. I mean, they see what happened to Libya, but our media doesn't present it in that way, or our political elites, they present it like North Korea as some major threat to us led by this crazy dictator. But they give no context for why North Korea would invest in nuclear weapons or missiles and how a lot of their weapon development is just designed to protect themselves from the threat of renewed invasion and being destroyed again, that they were in the Korean War, but they never give the history of the context. So the public who believes that rhetoric as in fear of North Korea one day, Iran, another day, Putin is presented in the most demonized way, conceivable a totally kind of cartoonish way as this evil Hitler type figure. So we're supposed to fear him one day, and that's how they do it, and that's how they justify this huge military budget that's approaching a trillion dollars now. And yeah, I mean the government spends a pittance on social welfare programs and education and healthcare infrastructure. I mean, that's what the government should be doing, should be helping to create a better society, better living conditions here at home. But instead, they spend a trillion on weapons. And that comes back. And now you have the law like the USA Patriot Act and 1290 D program where all that Pentagon weaponry gets put into our police forces who become more like occupying armies in inner cities and their mistreatment minority groups. So it's an ugly picture. Yeah. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:25:13): You mentioned Libya, and I think we can tie this to your piece. You mentioned Libya, and people need to remember that the execution of Libby and leader Muammar Kadafi took place under the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton was his Secretary of state, and it was Hillary Clinton, and I believe Samantha Power that convinced then President Obama to execute Kadafi. And so if we understand a lineage of thought from Hillary Clinton, her predecessor Madeline Albright, she was a student of Brzezinski who was a Russia phobe. And so there's a lineage of thought within the State Department, and now we have to understand that Vice President Harris is an acolyte of Hillary Clinton. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:26:18): And Hillary Clinton is a very dangerous figure. And I wrote a book on Bill Clinton and I did a lot of research on their career bill's career as the governor of Arkansas. So I learned a lot about Hillary, and even from that time, she's very corrupt individual. Clinton was tied with the national security establishment. He oversaw a major covert operation in Arkansas to the Nicaragua and Counter-revolutionaries, and they laundered a lot of money through illicit Proceed, and they were bringing back drugs as part of these arm smuggling operations. And Hillary worked for the Rose law firm and was representing clients who were involved in money laundering in Arkansas banks. And she was always known as a hawk. So she very unprincipled corrupt person who was involved in also all kinds of shems to raise money for Clinton's campaigns that should have put her in prison. (00:27:16): And then she was always known as a warhawk. She evolved into a major warhawk. There was a very good article in the New York Times, the Rare Good article, New York Times magazine called Hillary the Hawk, and it surveyed her career going back to the Kosovo War. She was a big proponent of the bombing there. She supported the Iraq war, every war she supported, and her hawkishness came out on Libya where she was gloating after Kadafi was lynched. She gloated, we saw he died and she was so happy about it and giggling. And I mean that was a disgrace comparable to Iraq. I mean, Libya was a well-functioning country under CA's rule. I mean, he may have had certain authoritarian features, but he used Libya's oil resources to develop their economy to invest in education. I met a number of Libyans who were able to get free education abroad that Libyan government paid for their education abroad, and they came back to work to develop their country. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:28:20): Wait a minute, wait a minute. To that point, I was teaching at Howard University at the time, and I came across some Libyan students and I asked them who was paying their tuition and they didn't understand the concept of tuition. They were saying, well, wait a minute. Why would you pay to go to college? Help us understand. They could not put their head around Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:28:50): Paying Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:28:51): For tuition. And I believe, I don't think it's a stretch for me to say that at the time that Kadafi was the leader of Libya, that Libya was the most one of, if not the most stable country on the continent. It had one of the strongest economies on the continent. And Kadafi was developing his country, developing his agriculture. He was, as they called it, greening the desert. Libya had some of the purest water in the world, some of the deepest water, the water table. And one of the big issues was he saw himself as an African, not an Arab. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:29:36): And I visited Zambia, my ex-wife was from Zambia, and I visited there in 2007 and Kadafi came during my visit and he was greeted as a hero because he was using Libby as well, resources to promote development projects across the African continent. And he was seen as somebody who stood up for African and was carrying on the tradition of Pan-Africanism figures who revered in Africa like Kwame Nama and Nelson Mandela. And he was seen an heir to that tradition. And then he was overthrown and treated worse than a dog. And Libya has now seen the return of slavery, violent extremism has come into the country, just pure chaos. And a lot of Libyan have had to flee to Europe and then the European under perilous conditions in these boats. And then Europeans complain about immigration. I mean, they turn Libyan to a hellhole and the cost in lives, and it's just sickening. (00:30:38): And Clinton was just laughing all about it and thought it was funny. And I think Kamala Harris seems to be on that intellectual level. She laughs at inappropriate moments. I've seen her. She doesn't seem to have a good grasp of world affairs, and she's close with some terrible leaders around the world, like the Washington Post report that she has developed as vice president, an unusually close relationship with Ferdinand Marcos Jr. And he's the son of one of the worst dictator of the US support in the Cold War Fernan Marco Sr. Who looted the Filipino treasury and killed who knows how many dissidents. And his son seems to be picking up where the father left off. He jailed Walden Bellow, who's a great intellectual in the Philippines, who is running for an opposition party, and they're building up US military bases in Philippines to confront China. And Harris went to ink some base deal a couple of years ago, and there were a lot of protesters for her visit. But yeah, this is one of the dictators she's very close with. So she's following this imperialistic tradition, and yeah, there should be, well, again, a lot of people have left the Democratic party. They see no hope in it, but it's troubling when this is supposedly the more liberal and humane party and this is what they're doing. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:32:07): And folks, we're connecting the dots here. That's the purpose of this podcast, is connecting, linking dots, linking historic events so that you can see the trend, you can see the pattern, you can understand what's really going on behind the scenes. Let's go to Vice President Harris's speech at the convention. She says, as commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world, and I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. She'll always honor their sacrifice as she should, but the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world that now Jeremy seems to be really throwing good money after bad because the issue now, at least in terms of the geopolitical landscape, is economic. It's not militarism. It's the United States that seems to be using militarism as its only weapon. And I use that euphemistically against this unipolar to multipolar shift with the rise of bricks and the Chinese cooperation organization, their fighting an economic war with militarism. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:33:40): Yeah, and actually it was ironic that she made those statements and that week the New Yorker published these photos from 2006 Haditha Massacre where the US military massacre, all these Iraqi civilian, and there were these horrible photos you may have seen of children who had been shot by us Marines or soldiers. So having the most lethal military force in the world, what does that mean? You go into a country like Iraq and shoot up women and children. I mean, is this something to strive for? And then as you say, this military force is getting us nowhere. I mean, it's just causing backlash against the United States. I mean, yeah, look, in Africa, all these new governments have come in and they're kicking out the US military. They don't want the bases in their country. Like in Niger, for example, a huge drone base that was removed. And I mean Ukraine Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:34:40): Just recently, a couple of soldiers within the last couple of days were harassed Incaa. And Dr. Horn was saying that this is not an isolated incident, that when you see something like this happening on the streets of tur or as many still know it as Turkey, that this is an indication that the people are rising up, not the leadership, the people. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:35:08): Absolutely. And we see, yeah, the United States is a paper tiger. I mean, look at Ukraine, billion and billion, the weaponry and Russians are gaining more and more territory every day. It's reported that even as Ukraine is taking the war into Russia, Russia's taking more territory in Eastern Ukraine every day than they were before. Israel is doing nothing in Gaza. They just leveled the place killed. According to the Lancet report, now it's about a month ago, 186,000 civilians. Now they're attacking people in the West Bank, but they've achieved nothing militarily and the United States wars were all failure in the last generation. You have Libya. I mean, they turn countries into chaos, but it's ultimately they don't achieve the broader goal they set out. I mean, look at Afghanistan 20 years and they achieved nothing, and the Taliban came back in and it's just Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:36:04): Money. Well, Lockheed Martin and McDonald Douglas made a hell of a lot of money in Afghanistan. They achieved something. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:36:10): Yeah, that's all they Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:36:11): Achieved. Stock value went pretty high. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:36:15): And I think the public needs to channel their revolt against those company in the military industrial complex. Their hard-earned taxpayer dollar. They're getting absolutely nothing for it. People are getting killed around the world that weaponry has coming, being sent to us police forces after the military used equipment. It's creating a more authoritarian environment here. And a few fat cats, what they used to call merchants of death are getting rich. And there should be a revolt against those people because they've grown rich off the misery and death of other humans. And it's not a way to run an economy or society rooted in violence and just the wealth of tiny number off the misery of everybody else. And horrific weapon we've never seen in human history, the kind of horrific weapon they're developing now. It's unfit for humanity, and there is movements to try and get universal bans on certain kinds of weapons, and that should certainly be supported as well Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:37:17): In her speech. She also said, let me say, I know there are people of various political views watching tonight, and I know you know, I promise. Oh no. And I want you to know, I promise to be president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self to hold sacred America's fundamental principles from the rule of law to free and fair elections to the peaceful of power. Well, when you look at the data and you look at the polling, an overwhelming majority of Americans, even Jewish Americans, want an end to the United States involvement in the genocide in Gaza. Now, she's saying that she promises to be the president of all Americans, but she and I put this on her because this was her convention, would not allow a Palestinian spokesperson, a representative of that position on the stage. Is that tone deaf or is it evidence that she's a Zionist and she's down with the, Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:38:37): Or both? Well, I think it's an illusion. They were trying to claim at the convention that she was working tirelessly for a ceasefire and for peace in the Middle East. And that's simply a lie the Biden administration has. It's been a joint US Israeli operation in Gaza. And we should recognize that Israel is basically a proxy of the United States empire in the Middle East that the US has used Israel. The reason they've given all those weapons to the Israelis over years now is that Israel has served the key function for the US Empire in the Middle East and accessing Middle East oil. Israel provides US military bases, and it does a lot of the dirty work for the US Empire going back years. For instance, in the six day war, the Israelis humiliated the US nemesis, Kamala del Nassar, who was like Kadafi, started as a pan arabist, and he was in the mold of Nassar who had moved to nationalize the Suez Canal and nationalize the oil resources and was forged alliances with Syria and forged the United Arab Republic with Syria and was promoting Arab unity so the Arab states could go strong in the face of Western imperialism and reclaim control of their chief natural resource oil. (00:39:58): And obviously the CIA tried to overthrow Nassar. They even sent in Kermit Roosevelt, a coup master who had been in Iran, but he failed. But Israel did the job in the sixth day war. They humiliated Nassar. And by that point, Israel was getting a lot of the US weapons already starred in the Kennedy administration where he basically opened the spigots. And Johnson was a huge supporter militarily of Israel. And Israel also carried a lot of covert operations in Africa that have served US interests, including countries like in Congo where they help access the mineral wealth of the Congo. So Israel has gone after the Assad dynasty was an enemy of the United States and West because they were more alive with Nassar in whose day and the Soviet Union, and they're more nationalistic so that the regime the US doesn't like and they've used Israel to Israel has been bombing Syria for a long time now and has tried to gone after Asad. (00:40:57): So these are just examples of how Israel does some of the dirty work of the United States and functions as a proxy of the United States. So the country basically are arm in arm together, and they may pay for public relations purposes. If Netanya has seen a bit extreme among some of their base or among some of the electorate, they may try and take a public distance or say they're trying to moderate his behavior, but I think that's more for public relations. They continue to provide him the weapons he needs, and they're not going to do anything. The last president who had a kind of even handed approach in the Middle East was to some extent with Dwight Eisenhower, who when Israel and Britain and France invaded Egypt, and after Nassar nationalized the Suez Canal, Eisenhower imposed sanctions on Israel and threatened why their embargo and even to punish Israel and the United Nations, but they would never do that today. (00:41:55): They're just giving cover and the weapons and diplomatic support in the UN for Israel's conduct and ethnic cleansing or genocide, whatever you want to call it. And I think they support the US imperialists support the project of a greater Israel, the Israeli far right that their goal is to expand the Israeli polity to basically remove the Palestinian and to use their land for broader projects, canal building to increase the water resource in Israel, access offshore oil. And the US supports that. Could they want a stronger Israel because that's their proxy in the Middle East and the US wants to dominate the Middle East and its oil resources for the next several generations, and they need Israel for that. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:42:46): We could spend a whole nother hour on this next question, but if you could just clarify a point that you made that you just made. You mentioned Kermit Roosevelt, you mentioned the United States going in and overthrowing Nassar, and you said they failed in, oh, you said they failed in Iran. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:43:09): Sorry. They failed in Egypt. They succeeded in Iran. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:43:12): See, okay, see that. Okay. Kermit Roosevelt and Norman Schwartzkoff Sr went in and overthrew Muhammad Ek and installed the S Shah. That's why I wanted clarification. I thought you said, and I could have misunderstood you. I thought you said they failed in Iran. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:43:32): No, and my point was they succeed in Iran, Kermit Roosevelt with a coup master. Then they sent him to Egypt to get rid of that thorn in their side, Albu master, because his pan-Arabism. But there he failed. Nassar was very popular, and he couldn't work the same magic, or they didn't have the right people to get rid of him. So that's when Israel stepped in and it was beefed up by us armed supplies. And in six days, they humiliated him and they provoked that war. It's been admitted by top Israeli leader than generals that they provoked that war. They humiliated Nassar, and three years later he died. And he was replaced by Anmar Sadat, who was much more west and abandoned his Pan Arab ideology. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:44:16): And also, again, this could be a whole nother show, but just quickly, you were talking about Israel being a US proxy, and you've mentioned this before, but I think it's folks, we're connecting the dots here, pay attention. We're connecting the dots. Ukraine is operating in a similar fashion as a US proxy in that part of the world as Israel is acting in the Middle East. And so because look, folks, the Ukraine war is lost. It's lost. And people say to me, Wilmer, you said that the war would be over in two years. And I was right as Putin wound up negotiating with, I'm drawing a blank on the Ukrainian president's name, Zelensky, vmi Zelensky. And he holds up the paper and says, we negotiated a settlement. The US sends in Boris Johnson to say, we're not going to accept this. The West will not. Hence the war is ongoing. Ukraine has no tanks of its own. They're now having to go into their prisons and empty their prisons to send convicted murderers to the frontline. They don't have an army of their own anymore. They don't have artillery of their own anymore. They don't have jets of their own anymore. Everything they're using comes from NATO and comes from the West. And it's a very same situation in Israel. Again, that could be a whole show of itself, but I just wanted to quickly connect the dots between the proxies in Israel and the proxies in Ukraine. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:46:05): And I would add the point that the United States and the people of those countries should understand, and I think this is American Jews should understand that the United States doesn't care about the people. They're using them for their own agenda. And look, Ukrainian has suffered terribly through their lines with the United States. They never would've gone to war with Russia, Ukraine and Russia got along. They had some issues, but they resolved it. And maybe the Ukrainian felt slight in some way toward the Russians, but they weren't stupid enough to take up arms against the Russians and annihilate themselves. But they thought because they had the United States and all these weapons that they could take on the Russians, and they made the same mistake as Napoleon or Hitler. I mean, the Russians are, I spent time in Russia. They're very patriotic people, and they will defend their country. (00:46:58): And this was a war provoked by the United States that basically used, and the Russians know this, that the US was using Ukraine, a battering ram against Russia, and they're going to defend themselves. And the Israeli case, look, the Israelis Israeli security has suffered tremendously. Now they're inviting attacks from all their enemies and they've shed so much blood, they're going to invite vengeance and retaliation against them, the security situation, very poor in Israel. I would not want to live in Israel, and they could invite one day their own destruction. Already, they've compromised the moral of their society. Israel was founded as a haven for Jewish people, and a lot of the very idealistic people were part of the original Zionist movement. I mean, the kibbutz was a concept of a cooperative model of an economy. But look at Israel today. It's this armed military state that is pariah around the world because of the atrocity that's carried out with support by the United States doing the United States dirty work. (00:48:05): And it's eviscerated its own democracy. I mean, it's become very repressive there. Journalists who are trying to report on what's going on in Gaza have been, I don't know. I think they've been certainly blacklist, if not jailed or shot. I mean, it's just a evolved, a violent authoritarian state. That's king of assassination. Mossad carries out assassinations around the world. It's hate and fear. It has an extreme right-wing government, this is not the ideal of a lot of the original Zionists. And a lot of American Jews are very uncomfortable the direction of that society they should be, and it could invite their own destruction one day. So I mean, that's a lesson you can take. If you lie with the empire, they'll use you for their own purpose and ultimately they'll spit you out. I mean, ask the Kurds, ask the Hmong and Lao, they've used proxies in other countries, and those proxies got totally destroyed like the Hmong and Laos or the Kurd, and they'll abandon them when it doesn't suit their agenda. They may find somebody else. And Ukrainian society has been destroyed. 500,000 youth have been killed. They don't even have enough people. How are they going to run their economy when all the youth of the country have been killed? Others had to flee. They don't want to fight the front lines. Yeah, they've sacrificed them as ponds in this war. It's sad. And Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:49:29): Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham goes to Ukraine and encourages the Ukrainians to fight and to continue to fight. And let me just give you a quick analogy. Imagine a boxing match, and one of the cornermen is getting paid not for the win, but for the number of rounds his fighter engages in. And so that's Lindsey Graham, he's the corner man, his guy. Both of his eyes are damn near shut. He can't breathe. His lips are swollen. His head has all kinds of knots on it, and he keeps sending his guy out there to get slaughtered because he gets paid by the round instead of the knockout. Is that a fair analogy? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:50:20): Absolutely. Yeah. And I studied the history of the Vietnam War, and one thing I remember and I used to show students the TV history of the Vietnam War, and they had one, it was made in the eighties. They had one segment on the Secret War in Laos, like what I was saying with the Hmong who they used to fight the left-wing, Beth Lao and William Colby came on, was interviewed some years later. He was the CIA director. And he said, oh, well, that was a great project for us. The Hmong lasted 10 years is exactly what you're saying. Yeah, they lasted 10 round, but then they got killed. All of them. The Hmong were decimated, and they had to send, that's what the Ukrainians are doing, the hm. Had to send 14 year olds to the front lines. And a sea operative said, started to feel bad. (00:51:06): He is like, we're sending these 14 year olds on these planes to be killed, and I know they'll be killed. And I'm telling their parents, I'm patting them on the back and they'll be killed next week. And that's what's happening with Ukraine. And Graham won't send his own kids. I mean, if they're the real reading the fight, fight a war, you have to fight. If you're a real man, you'll fight it because there's a real reason your community's under attack or there's a real threat of Hitler. But instead they manufacture these wars and cowardly send and manipulate other people to fight and die. And that's the worst form of cowardice and manipulation I could think of in human society Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:51:45): As we wrap this up and folks we're connecting dots. And if you don't like what we're saying, if what we're saying makes you angry, as Malcolm said, if my telling you the truth makes you angry, don't get angry at me. Get angry at the truth. And you can look all of this up. I want to get back to your piece you quoted, and you mentioned this earlier, but Panetta quotes Ronald Reagan at a speech at the DNC, and he emphasized the isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to government. You write, Panetta ended his speech by highlighting that Harris was a good choice to reinvigorate American world leadership as she worked with 150 foreign leaders as vice president served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, worked closely with VMI Zelensky of Ukraine to fight against Russia. And you go on a number of things. You say that Panetta provided a litany, my word, not yours, of misinformation and disinformation in that part of his speech. How so? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:53:00): Well, I mean, the whole speech is disinformation because he has this mythical, romantic view of the killing of bin Laden that's not rooted in the reality. And then, yeah, he's claiming the US was an isolationist in the thirties, but the US was a global empire starting the late 19th century. And in the 30, the FDR had been the head of the secretary. I forget his position, but it was with the Navy, and he headed the Navy and he was a big naval enthusiast, and he initiated a massive naval buildup in the Asia Pacific. And then he historian believed that the key factor that provoked a Japanese counter response and led to the Pacific War. So where's the isolationism? I mean, it's not the accurate history, but I mean these conventions just about political theater. But I mean, yeah, quoting Reagan. I mean, Reagan is the icon of the Republican. That's not even your party. So what is he doing quoting Reagan? Reagan? Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:54:04): Well, he's Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:54:05): The thing that bar a right wing extremist. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:54:07): Barack Obama said that Reagan was his favorite Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:54:09): President. I know. And it shows how far to the right the whole American spectrum has been because Reagan, when he came up in the sixties, was viewed as a right wing extremist, certainly by people in the anti-war and countercultural movement. And his whole theme was to attack the mess at Berkeley. And the student, how dare they question the Vietnam War. And then when he came in, he veered American politics sharply to the right. He cut the corporate tax rate and he ramped up us militarism in Central America, and he wanted to avenge the Vietnam War. They call them Rambo Reagan. And you can't get, this is like an icon of militarism and fascism, and they're quoting him. So I mean, what kind of party is this? And we have two right-wing parties in our country. The political spectrum has shifted so far to the right, and it's created dystopia. (00:55:04): We're discussing here where we invest trillion dollars on warfare, these morally bankrupt wars. And our own societies is filled with pathologies and majors, social ills, and we never address them. So they grow worse and worse. And we're not investing in our youth and education. I mean, where I live, the teachers are so poorly paid, it is just a disgrace. And you have third world conditions like the schools. They were protests in my state a few years ago, and I covered those protests for local newspaper. And there were people showing me on their phone who taught in schools in rural areas. I traveled in Africa and third world country. Then what they're showing me is from a third world country. There were no proper sanitation in their school. There were not enough seats for the students. And these are high school teachers trying to keep them in school. So I mean, the government is failing its citizens, and this is Reaganomics 1 0 1, so we've got to get beyond that. But they're touting this guy as a hero. That's terrible. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:56:06): And again, I think this will be the final question, but the longer we talk, the more questions because of your insight, you mentioned that we're dealing with two right wing parties. Are we dealing with two right wing parties that are representing different interests of the right winging elite? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:56:30): Yes, absolutely. The GOP has always been rooted in the oil industry, the extractive industry, because their environmental policy is very favorable to big business and extractive industries and big oil. I think the military industry that hedged their bets now with both parties traditionally, like in the Reagan era, the Republican and the Reagan Republican got a lot of support in states that had big military industry. Like California used to be a center of the Republican domination and states like Arizona and the Southwest. But I think the Democrats under Clinton started courting the military contractors, and now they hedge their bets on both parties. I mean, there are a certain cultural issue, the right wing, the evangelical churches who were very gung-ho about things like against abortion. That's a certain spectrum that supports the Republican party. The Democrats go for this diversity, and they court the African-American vote, but they do so really based more on symbolism than actually delivering for the black population. (00:57:45): I think something that the black population, I think we'll see more and more than maybe leaving the Democrat. They're not getting anything. They're just getting the symbolism of some black elected officials, but they're not getting benefits to their communities. And there have been studies about this, and I heard Michael Eric Dyson, who was it? Yeah, it was Michael Eric Dyson came to where I live, and he gave a talk. He had done a study, it was him, it was, sorry, TVIs Smiley who used to work for PBS. He did a big study on black America in the state of black America, and he found it got worse under Obama, a certain core thing like income and business ownership and education because the Democrat weren't delivering on concrete social program that would benefit their community. So it's more of the symbolism and that's how they get votes. Dr. Wilmer Leon (00:58:38): And as we get out, I want to read this quickly because again, folks here on connecting the dots, we connect the dots, we provide data to support statements made. You talked about the defense industry funding both parties and Dave Calhoun, who was the CEO of Boeing. When asked in July of 2020 who Boeing would prefer Trump or Biden Boeing, and this is from CNBC, Boeing CEO. Dave Calhoun said that he was confident that whoever wins the White House in November, whether it's Donald Trump or Vice President Biden will continue supporting the defense industry. I think both candidates, at least in my view, appear globally oriented and interested in the defense of our country. And I believe they will support the industries. They'll do it in different ways and they'll have different terms, different teams for sure. But I don't think we're going to take a position on one being better than the other. And Dr. Jeremy Komarov, that I think is clear evidence of the points you made that we're dealing with two wings on the same bird. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (00:59:56): Absolutely. And viewers can go to open secrets.com and look at, well-known politician where they get their money. I mean, look up Joe Biden because I've done it. You'll see he gets a ton of money from Lockheed Martin. And yeah, the Democrats in some, I think they're getting more, Democrats now are getting more from the military contractor because they're even more hawkish, especially on Ukraine. That's been a big boon for a company like Boeing and Lockheed and surveillance industry. So I think they like Democrats even more now. And Democrats are positioning themselves to the right and more hawkish on foreign policy and even the border. I have an article next week on the border issue. Democrats are more to the right than Republican as far as spending on border surveillance. And that's a big, big industry, border surveillance drones, and that's part of the military industrial complex. Dr. Wilmer Leon (01:00:53): So I said, this was the last question. This is the last question, and you can just answer this, yes or no, all this conflation of the border, whether you're Donald Trump or whether you're Kamala Harris, whether you're Joe Biden or whoever, all of this talk about the border building, the wall security systems, drones a lot of money on the border. They don't talk about the US foreign policy that is driving people from Columbia, from Guatemala, from Mexico to the border because the United States policy is decimating their economies. And quick point people, you can look this up. About three weeks ago, Chiquita Brands was convicted in federal court in Florida of sponsoring death squads in Columbia. And now Chiquita Brands has to pay millions of dollars in reparations and damages to these victimized families in Columbia. Kamala Harris isn't talking about that. Donald Trump is, you want to deal with the border, deal with the decimation of these. Why are, ask the question, why are Haitians coming here? Because the United States is trying to rein, invade Haiti again, Jeremy, that in and of itself is another show. 30 seconds, am I right? Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (01:02:16): Yeah, absolutely. And there's no debate about that, and it's been a bipartisan in foreign policy that caused that vast immigration. And also you have to look, that caused the wreckage in those economies and societies, and you have to look at the free trade agreement. The Clinton administration promoted the nafta, and that helped decimate Mexican agriculture and forced a lot of the Mexicans to come to the United States. So nobody questioned the free trade laws. That's a big factor inducing immigration, including, especially from Mexico. So they ought to address revising those laws and creating a fairer world economy, but that might erode us primacy and the primacy of dollar, and they don't want that. So it's better to beef up the border, boost the coffer, the Lockheed Martin, instead of doing that, Dr. Wilmer Leon (01:03:10): Dr. Jeremy Komarov. In fact, here's one of the books. War Monger. I got it. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (01:03:17): Oh, great. Thank Dr. Wilmer Leon (01:03:17): You. Oh, hey, man. Great. Great work. Great, great work. Dr. Jeremy Kumar, thank you so much for joining me today. Dr. Jeremy Kuzmarov (01:03:25): Thank you. Great conversation. Dr. Wilmer Leon (01:03:28): Hey folks. Thank you all so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wimer Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share the show, follow us on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. Remember, this is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge, talks without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter here on connecting the dots. See you again next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Wimer Leon. Have a great one. Peace. We're out Announcer (01:04:11): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.

On today's Top Five we have: Utah Avalanche Center Opens New Rescue Skills Training Park Close to SLC Health Care Sex Assault Investigations: 4 Utah Women Reported  Don't Let Utah Become Like California, Texas A.G. Tells Beehive State Republicans  Lawmakers Wanted $150M to Expand School Vouchers  Passenger Rail To Moab Hasn't Left The Station   Visit UtahStories.com for more and to subscribe to our free digital newsletter. There you can also support our journalism by subscribing to our print magazine for $3 per month. Follow us on: Instagram @UtahStories Twitter @UtahStories

An LA Times poll shows that Americans think California is on the decline and don't view the state favorably.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This BONUS episode of the Let People Prosper show is with Bradley Swail, host of the Texas Talks podcast. Today, we discuss: 1) Why "largest property tax relief in Texas history” became the second biggest due to excessive state spending and how the Lone Star State can eliminate the property tax for good; 2) The problem with a mandated minimum wage and reckless spending at the state and federal levels and; 3) Policies Texas leaders and lawmakers should adopt to strengthen the Texas model. Please share this on social media, and provide a rating and review. Also, subscribe and see show notes for this episode on Substack (www.vanceginn.substack.com) and visit my website for economic insights (www.vanceginn.com).

Five years ago, Hollywood rose up in protest over Saudi Arabian dissident Jamal Khashoggi's murder, which U.S. intelligence found was approved by the country's leader, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. Now, with Hollywood in lean times and in need of new markets, the Kingdom and its $776 billion sovereign wealth fund appear back in favor, reports Claire Atkinson, with one movie producer likening it to "California in the 1920s." Meanwhile, political waters also are churning around the Golden Globes, where a ribbon-wearing campaign for Israeli hostages being held captive by Hamas may or may not bear out, explains Peter Kiefer, who broke news of the efforts. Also: Andy Lewis delivers George Santos' thoughts on an upcoming HBO film, and Richard Rushfield expounds on his New Year resolutions for Hollywood. For more entertainment industry news, subscribe to The Ankler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a California task force issued an 1,100-page report last summer, lawmakers there are starting to look at policy options to compensate Black residents descended from enslaved ancestors. Now, a state reparations bill could be voted on this year. As part of a three-part series, we’re chronicling the history, details and challenges of California’s reparations movement. But first, markets start 2024 with a course reversal.

After a California task force issued an 1,100-page report last summer, lawmakers there are starting to look at policy options to compensate Black residents descended from enslaved ancestors. Now, a state reparations bill could be voted on this year. As part of a three-part series, we’re chronicling the history, details and challenges of California’s reparations movement. But first, markets start 2024 with a course reversal. Correction (1/3/24): The story about the reparations debate in California has been updated to correct a mischaracterization. For more information, check out the story on marketplace.org.

Energy economist and analyst Charles Komanoff says that it's totally 'nuts' to displace all nuclear power like California's Diablo Canyon Power Plant with wind and solar in the effort to ween our reliance on fossil fuels. You can listen to every episode from season seven online!

In terms of privacy, that is!

Maybe it's time… Or do you need more? Is there something else you're searching for? We just wanna take one more look at you… Look what we found! It's episode 8 baby! Like California gold, you'll be on a musical ride… if you can't get yourself out of bed, hear these voices in your head like a song - we're serving hair, body, face and episode 8

TSV Host Fred Bird is joined by Keely Hopkins, CSF Manager of the Northwestern states, and Bill Gaines. The crew dive into California's AB 28 Firearms and Ammunition: Excise Tax, and AB 2571 Firearms: advertising to minors. Discussed in this episode: how laws like AB 28 (and others like it) could threaten the fabric of conservation funding in this nation with so-called ‘sin taxes' and how we can challenge them without harming the Federal excise taxes that fund conservation. They also take a look at how legislations like AB 2571 jeopardize the future of conservation and the sporting community. Get the FREE Sportsmen's Voice e-publication in your inbox every Monday: www.congressionalsportsmen.org/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After seeing Soundnl Of Freedom, my thoughts on parents wanting to change their child's gender have changed. This whole transgender movement is a distraction from real issues, like the economy, violence in cities, as well as the growing child sex trafficking industry. Why is Child Protection Services silent on the movie Sound Of Freedom. How CPS, as well as state and federal governments around the world, are refusing to tackle this issue. Like California rejecting stiffer penalties for child sex traffickers. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/david-shore2/support

Is there another state with a worse labor situation than CA?  Congressman Kevin Kiley (R-CA) recently had an opportunity to drive-home the Golden State's dire situation during a confirmation hearing with Biden's proposed Labor Secretary, Julie Su.  See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.

We revisit the Dalai Lama and what 'suck my tongue' really means, Whether Andrew Lester shooting a black teen was racially motivated, LA using classical music as a weapon, and Johnathan Majors possibly getting dropped by Marvel

GST guest and local business owner Jonny Hoffner (Paper Antler, Good Lion Golf) joins Stan and Mitch in the booth to discuss the month he and his family spent in Portugal. They discuss how Portugal was the “edge of the old world”, why it is such an attractive place to visit or retire, and Jonny's fun day at a Portuguese golf course. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/walkner-condon-expats/message

Agenda for The Weekly Stan(d) Up #109: (Meeting Recorded: 14 January 2022): Happy New Year (for real this time)! Pau's music playlist: Le Sserafim Awards Shows, Newjeans Ditto and OMG (and all the remixes), Huh Yunjin's I ≠ DOLL, Fyeqoodgurl (her Hype Boy cover), Henry's Moonlight Pau's show playlist: Single's Inferno 2 (stay tuned for a separate episode), Super Action (stunt actor competition), Leemujin Service (Year-End episode), Pau's drama + movie playlist: Alchemy of Souls 2 (stay tuned for a separate episode), The Glory Reacting to Huh Yunjin's I ≠ DOLL MV Happy Birthday Mika! Mika's playlist: SZA's Kill Bill (watch the MV at your own risk), Gen Neo's Like California feat. DeVita, Kwangya Concerts (Chanyeol and Raiden's Yours feat. Winter and Mark), WayV's Phantom) Reacting to WayV's Good Life Track Video Music / Footage The Weekly Stan Up New Intro by Mika Good Life cover by Mika Images from Genius, ColorCodedLyrics, YouTube

Steve Forbes questions why multiple states still don't have results a week after Election Day.Steve Forbes shares his What's Ahead Spotlights each Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Chris is the founder of Skyline Commercial Real Estate Focused on advising clients regarding their multifamily assets - to maintain and build wealth and forge strong relationships across the Southern California investment market. He previously played professional baseball for multiple teams, reaching the Major Leagues with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in 2009. Through hard work and dedication, Chris kept earning his way to the next level and achieved success at the highest level.   Tune in as he shares valuable strategies on how you could get the best deals for your real estate investments, and how he is able to maintain leads for his business which could be applicable to you too. [00:01 - 11:48] Finding Opportunities in Challenges A professional baseball player turned real estate investor The need for cashflow led him to focus on the brokerage instead of the investment route   [11:49 - 17:39] Things You Need to Know Before Buying A Real Estate Buying a unit? Chris shares a strategy to increase its value Regulatory environment for buyers Stay on top of your rents and increase when you can California has restrictive rent control. You need to be within the guidelines  Brand new investors must be comfortable with the cap rates knowing it is capital preservation The resilience of tenants to rent increases   [17:40 - 17:54] The Keys to Business Growth How to find motivated seller leads Emails and build and maintain relationships Chris on starting his own brokerage How to approach a broker as an investor Ask with no expectations   [17:55 - 20:45] Closing Segment The similarity between baseball and real estate is failure Reach out to Chris!  Links Below Final Words   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Tweetable Quotes: “When you start in the business, it's a grind.” - Chris Pettit   “If you're brokering and you're not owning, like, do you really believe in your product?” - Chris Pettit   Connect with Chris on LinkedIn and visit Skyline Commercial Real Estate for investment opportunities.   Connect with me:   I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook   LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!   Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Chris Pettit: [00:00:00] What took me, the brokerage drought was the ability to be entrepreneurial, grow your own business, do your own thing. And it's really, you eat what you kill. So whatever you're out there putting in, you're gonna make those returns.  Sam Wilson: Chris beta is a localized department, brokerage founder. He assists private clients with wealth, growth and preservation. He also has a background in baseball, investing in taxes, and as Chris puts it, he has all the bases covered. Chris, welcome to the show.  Chris Pettit: Hey Sam, thanks  Sam Wilson: for having me important in here. Absolutely. The pleasure's mine. There are three questions. Chris, ask every guest who comes in the show in 90 seconds or less. You tell me, where did you start? Where are you now? And  Chris Pettit: how did you get. Yeah, I was playing baseball and I joined a couple friends for some very small scale investments. Some single family houses out in it's called the Midwest. One of my friends said, Hey, I think this is a good idea. I said, well, why don't we pull some money [00:01:00] together? And we can buy a couple of these. So we did that learn more about. The real estate side of the business. My background's more on the finance side. So got to see some of the tax advantages, the depreciation, the cash flow, how it worked. Good hands on experience. Finished playing baseball and got into the brokerage business, local Southern California apartment brokerage, and really took me to where I am now. Just started this company a couple years ago with a couple partners and we're moving that forward. So  Sam Wilson: here. Man. That's really, really cool. So you're playing baseball professionally, and then you start investing in real estate. Were you guys buying single family stuff, buying multifamily? What, what were you guys buying?  Chris Pettit: Yeah, those were single family. And maybe a little bit of the misconception about playing professional baseball is not, everybody's making millions of dollars. So , I, I was not making a lot of money at that time, but I was saving money put away. So we were buying single family little bit in Dayton, Ohio, actually just kind of like bottom of the barrel type stuff for calf flow.  Sam Wilson: Got it. Got it. And when did you know you were onto something and you [00:02:00] said, all right, I'm onto something. And now I'm gonna scale into bigger assets. And I guess then of course, you know, , all the way to launching a, a brokerage, what  Chris Pettit: led you there? Well, seeing how the cashflow would work on a single family and then saving that up, being able to purchase another one, just purely based off of the cashflow you had gotten to date. And having the depreciation, the ride offs, the expenses, that type of thing, it was like, wow, you could kind of scale this a little bit. I didn't wanna try to make something huge there. And , you know, I wasn't didn't know all the tools that we have now, but once I got into the brokerage business, I realized, well, this actually is scalable. Seeing like a lot of things that my clients have done and how they've grown their portfolios. A lot of people just started from the ground up and individuals have large portfolio.  Sam Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. What took you to the brokerage route versus the investment route? Or  Chris Pettit: maybe there's both. You know, it's, it's both for me. I, I do believe in investing and the, the brokerage route is an avenue that you can get there. [00:03:00] Obviously you gotta make some money to be able to invest it. So I think that's probably what led me to the brokerage drought over other over say other jobs. What took me, the brokerage drought was the ability to be entrepreneurial, grow your own business, do your own thing. And it's really, you eat what you kill. So whatever you're out there putting in, you're gonna make those returns. Right, right. Yeah. So I saw the, I saw the upside for, in brokerage compared to just like a job.  Sam Wilson: Absolutely. Absolutely. and as things get extremely frosty in a, in a few different asset classes, I've oftentimes looked at it and I'm like, gosh, it's kind of a risk free way. And obviously you got your time, your capital, your investment on the front end of, you know, going out and finding opportunities and building your buyers list and all those things, but in its own, right, you're not putting down millions of dollars into these deals and going, gosh, I hope it works out. It's like, okay, once we get it across the finish line, it's kind of a risk pretty way of, of being involved in real estate. So I really really, really kind of liked that, especially in times of uncertainty. So that's really cool. Now you guys are [00:04:00] specializing in the Southern California market,  Chris Pettit: is that right? Yeah. Specifically Southern California and specifically apartment buildings. So it ranges the gamut from, you know, four units, which obviously is similar residential, but four to, 50, to a hundred. You know, there's a lot of smaller buildings in Southern California versus . Maybe some other areas. So there's a lot of 10 to 30 unit buildings out here.  Sam Wilson: From what I understand, there's not a lot of new supply coming online in your guys' market.  Chris Pettit: No, not at all. So the market we work, like I said, is let's call it four to 50 core market. And nobody's building those. Maybe there's a couple people building duplexes or fourplexes based on some new zoning, but the stuff that's getting built is 200 unit 300 unit, 400 unit class, a right in the core business districts on these main drags. And those are just not competitors for the type of product that. Are seeing our investors focus  Sam Wilson: on. Right? So tell me about the opportunity right now in your market.  Chris Pettit: So a little bit of the difference in our market versus [00:05:00] other markets is, is such a core market, specifically orange county, LA county, San Diego county being core markets. You can't, like you said, no more supply and someone who wants to preserve capital. Yeah. You might look at the cab rates. They're very compressed, but they're staying compressed. They're not, they're not changing. And rents are flying. Some of that to do with the back end of rent control, but rents are really flying up. So there's no supply, there's no rental supply. And then the class a stuff that's coming out is being priced to the moon on the rental side. So any, any nice property, that's a little bit lower density living for a tenant. They're gonna wanna come in and happy to pay a good amount of rent there just to live in the location that, that they wanna live in. And I don't see that changing just due to the supply, like demand and supply. So the opportunity is purely more preservation rather than say. You might be like, oh, let me go out. I can see this quick flip over here in this hot market. You know, I wouldn't call us like a hot type market or cold market obvious.  Sam Wilson: So what's a strategy then for a buyer. I mean, you know, they're, they're buying something [00:06:00] four to 50 units, Southern California. It might be a rent control. I don't, I don't know exactly how rent control work if that's by county, if that's by building, if that's, maybe you can even give us some, you know, lightness on that, but what is the buyer? What is the person you're representing? What are they thinking when they buy a building? What's their strategy for  Chris Pettit: how to increase value? So their strategy's gonna be growth and appreciation, and you're gonna get there just through the natural and pushed rent growth. The overriding it's a state rent control policy, max of 10%. It's not terrible. Obviously. Sometimes if people are behind then, because an owner's own the building a long time, there is a lot more upside there. Yeah, the strategy is just to come in, purchase the building, get the rents up to market, improve the property a little bit. And not that it's gonna be a significant, like I said, flip, but you're gonna have the value. You're gonna have the value earned in the property and the significant rents providing more cash flow. And you're gonna be, you're also able to get pretty much [00:07:00] core.  Sam Wilson: what's it like when you buy a building? And again, I'm asking just as it, as it pertains to more the regulatory side of things there in California, which is a lot of what investors are afraid of. I think mm-hmm oh man. You know, and, and we hear it. I think, I think it gets a bad rap because obviously you're there and you have clients there making money. You're there making money. I've got friends out there making money in the apartment space in Southern California. And I hear it, hear it all the time. We don't invest in California. But what does, which I think is kind of, again, it, it's kind of a, just a, it's probably a bad statement cuz obviously there's opportunity there. But what's somebody doing when they buy a building from a regulatory and from like a rehab standpoint, like what can they expect? What are the challenges there? Do those challenges, present opportunity. Talk to me about  Chris Pettit: that a little bit. Yeah. Completely understand the regulatory side and a lot of our clients and owners have some of the same feelings. Like they're not saying I won't invest here, but because they already own here. They're saying, oh, I'm not sure about how this regulatory environment is gonna be for, for landlords, which is a fair thought. So part of [00:08:00] our deal, our job is educating them on what the latest government requirements are gonna be that are coming down the pipeline. We don't really have a say in those things. So it's, it's just keeping them up to date. And how do you navigate that? The biggest thing you can do is stay on top of your rents and increase them when you're, when you can once a year and not, not fall behind. If you're buying a building today, it's not, it's not crazy. I mean, we don't really market to say out-of-state buyers. Like California's a, our buyer pool is the buyers that own in the market that live here and that's the people. Like they wouldn't say, oh, I don't, they already own here. And they live here, so right. California's gonna get you for taxes either way, whether, you know, if you're gonna do both. So if you're gonna live here and you wanna own here, maybe you wanna drive by your building. Maybe that makes sense. But just in order to get there, there's no like crazy regulatory requirements. When you purchase an investment property, you go buy an apartment, building a 10 unit down the. Nothing crazy. But if you do wanna do some rehabs or some or raise rents, you just need to be within the guidelines. And, and they're [00:09:00] really not outside of a couple areas. You know, city of LA is very restrictive. Santa Monica has restricted rent control, Santa Ana and there city, certain cities do have up above and beyond requirements. And those are the cities that people are. Either navigate away from, but like you said, there's still a lot of people that maybe not a lot, there's people that will make money in those areas. And they're more experts in navigating that local environment.  Sam Wilson: What do you say to somebody that maybe is a brand new investor to your market? Where do you start them?  Chris Pettit: I would start 'em with the sense of. You need to be comfortable with with the cap rates, let's call it, you know, three and a half to four and a half. When now it's probably generous, but you know, you, you have to be comfortable knowing that this is capital preservation. And if you're, if you're buying here, you're gonna start a three, three and a half and push that up quickly to. You know, four, four and a half on your numbers, and it's not something that you're gonna be making this huge pop on right away. But you, you are gonna [00:10:00] make those gains and rents are gonna go say, they go 10% this year, 10% next year. They're a little bit behind. Then you, you will catch up and you'll have the value and it's gonna be safe. It's, it's a safety play really, but we don't work with too many new investors. I mean, you know, , I live here, I invest here. I don't have a, an issue with that for me. It's I want to be, I'd rather rather own good real estate and good locations. And it's not, about today's cash flow for.  Sam Wilson: Yeah, that's a good point. You know, and that's a lot of, that's a lot of what people are looking for is that big pop. So I guess just reframing the investor expectation. Like, Hey, you're coming into this market. You are, this is a safety play. I think, as you put it, it's not, you're not here to, to hit, hit your home run. You're here to preserve capital. What is I, I, if a landlord is behind, let's say it's a legacy owner. They haven't raised rents in 7, 8, 10 years. What is the tenant resiliency as it pertains to rent increases? Like do, [00:11:00] do, do we see a lot of buildings go vacant once people are like, Hey, we're raising rents 10, 10% this year, you were at 2000 bucks. Now you're at 2200 next year. You're gonna be at, you know, 44 20. What's that? How  Chris Pettit: does that work out? Yeah, not really. I mean, a legacy owner who's fallen behind or just chosen , to do that because they don't need the extra cash flow. Right. New owner comes in. Goes 10% people don't budge. It's not, it's not enough because the building on the streets rent convert $500 more than that, you know? , some people will move and you get natural movement. It's not too restrictive. And then you, you may be able to move people out for some renovations, but that's a little bit dependent on the, the.  Sam Wilson: Right, right. That's really, really cool. Tell me about finding sellers. I mean, that's obviously the, the two things we need in this in this real estate are deals and money. How are you guys finding  Chris Pettit: sellers? Yeah. On our, on the, on the business side, I mean, we just do a lot of consistent calling and emails and touching base with people. It's a very consistent group of people that we're [00:12:00] talking to, the owners that are local, just trying to build that relationship. And there's not a lot. Let's say people that are just oblivious to what's going on. A lot of people know what's going on relatively. And we, we just want to talk to 'em and see, Hey, is, you know, are you ready to go? Are you ready to sell today? Or what's your impetus to sell? These are mostly long term holds for people long term legacy ownership. And as we know, those are great deals to buy and the most opportunity for upside. And so sometimes it's like building family relationships whenever their family. Whenever that time comes to pass it down along the family, things like that. I mean, you know, the time comes for every. , but this is not a short term lo short term game, as far as location goes, you know, you gotta put in the time, build the relationships here. Yeah.  Sam Wilson: Yeah. And that's true, you know, that's true. I think in, in any market, there's not a, there's not a nuance there necessarily defining sellers. It, it sounds like you guys are grinding it out, just like everybody else when it comes to to  Chris Pettit: deal flow. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we are, [00:13:00] we have some younger guys and it's you know, that's, we don't pull any punches there. It's like, no, this is a grind. I mean, when you start in the business, it's a grind. I mean, we're still on the grind and that's what, that's really the only way you're, you're not gonna you're not gonna miss, you know, blatant deals. Right? Tell  Sam Wilson: me about your team, building out your team. You said you have some younger guys on the team now, what's it been like building a brokerage and, you know, talk to us about that experience and some of the lessons maybe you've learned in that. Chris Pettit: Yeah. So it was just an opportunity that that presented itself for so myself and two partners. And we were working together before not necessarily doing deals together, but independently doing deals while working together. And so we thought, Hey, this is a great opportunity for us to build ourselves, where are we gonna be in five or 10 years? And, you know, maybe build out, build out some sort of a brokerage it's we're not trying to be this big brokerage house, but having some. More people talking and being able to collaborate on deals. I hear you say someone. Oh, Sam. Oh, what was that deal? You were talking about Sam. Like [00:14:00] maybe I, I might have somebody for that where you're, you're just thinking, I talked to this person that was like a waste of time. Right? They said something, but I, it didn't click for you, but I'm sitting over here like, oh, well, I it clicked for me and they let's, let's put a deal together. And so we're really trying to build. Team environment where obviously you're gonna get rewarded on something you bring in and we have, so we have two other guys that are just starting out in the business.  You know, they believe in owning real estate as well. And that's, that's a long term goal. I mean, if we can all switch from the broker side to the owner side, we're gonna, we're gonna be doing pretty well, you know? Right.  Sam Wilson: Is that the long term plan then is to, yeah. I mean, transition.  Chris Pettit: Yeah, to accumulate and own, own real estate. I think California, maybe getting back to one of your earlier questions, Southern California is more of an accumulation game. Mm-hmm if you can accumulate little bits and pieces of, of deals. I mean, I know I have some clients that are open to me throwing into deals, and if, you know, if I can at the time, I'll do that and just kind of put it away. It's not, you know, it's not there. It's not accessible, not running the deal, but [00:15:00] Hey, it's in the deal. I know that's a good piece of real estate and, and down the road I'll be rewarded. So I think it's more of an accumulation play, but yeah, that's the goal, ultimately, just to own more real estate. I mean, we're believers in real estate and we also feel. I'm a strong believer in the fact, if, if you're brokering and you're not owning, like, do you really believe in your product? right. And maybe you don't. Right. Maybe you're just a sales guy, you know, that's fine too. But  Sam Wilson: absolutely. Tell me about cuz that's a nuance a nuance kind of play that you talked about there when you said. How your buyers will rope you in on the deal and say, Hey Chris, do you wanna participate? What's that conversation like? And what would you recommend to somebody that wants to approach their broker? Maybe it's a large commercial real estate transaction. The broker's getting a six, you know, multi six-figure paycheck and they go, Hey, you know, do you want to get in on this deal? How should someone approach you as the broker  Chris Pettit: to have that conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think it's very easy approach from the investor. It's an easy question. Hey, do you have, would you have any interest in [00:16:00] partnering in or putting some of your commission? The deal obviously clear, very clear that no, you're not giving it up. You're not giving up your commission, but right. In putting it into the deal And , timing's everything in that respect, you know, like I said, this is my, my job. So depending on where I'm at timing, maybe I just put money into another deal, obviously gotta pay the bills. And so, yeah, it's an, I feel like it's an easy conversation from the. Investor from the agent side. I don't really bring it up that much. Just because it's, I feel it's a little more you know, most people, most people I deal with it's their, their deal. It's like a one person buyer. Right. And maybe, but, but a people that I know, well, I'll throw it out there at some point. Like, oh, I'd be happy to co-invest with you at some time. And so there's a few, that's the way I would frame it as a broker. You don't wanna be telling everybody, oh, let me get in with you. Let me get in with you. You know, it's a little more, I guess I feel like that would be like pushy, but from the investor side, I think if you just ask with no expectations, I don't see the, I don't find the broker being [00:17:00] offended. Sam Wilson: No, no, certainly not, certainly not. I think it's a great way. One to get some buy in from, like you said, either you believe in the product or you don't. So get some buy in from the broker it's a relatively not easy, but it's a, it's a, it's a source of capital, you know, where you can get involved in it. But then I think it also, it also just develops a long-term relationship with your broker where it's, Hey, you know what we're, we're not just doing a onetime transaction. We're we're in deals together for the long haul. So that's. That's really,  Chris Pettit: really cool. Yeah. I mean, I think it's beneficial for both parties. Like you said, you put people in, we can be partners and you sold me the deal and then, you know, we'll sell it back whenever the time comes again and we'll make money and go to the next thing. Absolutely.  Sam Wilson: Tell me about baseball, baseball, and real estate, that transition. what would you say some things, or maybe, maybe I'll ask this question. I could find the question I was gonna ask you. You know, as it pertained to baseball, what are some things, some, some crossovers from playing baseball to real estate, some similarities you find in, in, in  Chris Pettit: between the two. Yeah, the, the biggest crossover, especially to [00:18:00] brokerage is failure. So, yeah, baseball's a game of failure. You fail all the time. You know, you fail seven outta 10 times. You'll be in the hall of fame. And you know, this is a game of failure too. You're, you're talking to people and some people are not, not receptive to your call at that time or anything you're saying, but it's really a game of being able to a failure and being able to maintain your composure through the highs and the lows. This is a game of highs and lows, and that's the same as baseball. So you can't be out there closing a deal. Celebrating, like just won the world series. It's not gonna, it's not gonna pan out. You know, you gotta be back on, back on the grind and work harder.  Sam Wilson: That's it, man. That's it? Baseball is a game of failure. Yeah. That's kind of funny. I've never heard it quite put like that, but you're right. You know, the what'd you say, what was your statement there? I didn't quite catch that, but it was something about a hall of Famer. If you do  Chris Pettit: what now, if you fail seven outta 10 times as a hitter, you're a hall of fam. Right. Yeah. If  Sam Wilson: you have a 300 buck average, you're, you're a hall of Famer, which is that's pretty [00:19:00] crazy. I absolutely love it. Chris, if our listeners wanna get in touch with you and learn more about you and what's going on there in your marketplace, what is the best way to do that? Chris Pettit: Yeah, you can reach me via email or through our website. It's skyline commercial advisors. And I'm also on Twitter. It's CED at eight 15. That's more of a generic following. I do talk some real estate. It's not strictly real estate focused. It's pretty personalized and, and open. But yeah, those two places and email, or my emails on the site, you gimme anytime. Awesome.  Sam Wilson: Chris, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. Certainly  Chris Pettit: appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks Sam. Nice to meet you and a pleasure being on the show.

Biden's Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm says "We should all be like California"... even though California is expected to have rolling blackouts due to energy shortages. Jonathan Broadbent on ESG. Jack Windsor discussing Bob Paduchik's potential ousting as ORP Chair.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Want to know how you can build a recession-resistant passive cash flow?   Brandon Cobb, CEO of HBG Capital, joins us to discuss how they are helping investors earn passive income through affordable new construction housing for first-time buyers.   From flipping houses, Brandon and his team pivoted to developing land and found their niche in government-friendly areas. He talks about the opportunities in this undersupplied but in-demand real estate product and offers advice on how to mitigate risks in the space.      [00:01 - 05:51] Building Affordable New Construction for First-Time Home Buyers Brandon on being unemployed to becoming a real estate investor  How he invested in himself Putting investors' capital in recession-resistant real estate Affordable does not mean low-income housing   [05:52 - 17:50] Getting Into Ground-up Development Their experience in flipping houses vs doing new construction Partnering with people who know what they are doing How Brandon and his team find riches in niches Collaborating with the local government What they do to mitigate risks Looking for deeply discounted deals Managing in-house Being insulated from market volatility Doing compartmentalized funds for investors   [17:51 - 20:27] Closing Segment Reach out to Brandon!  Links Below Final Words Tweetable Quotes   “The country has a huge problem. The most undersupplied, highest-demand real estate product in the country right now is affordable homes for first-time home buyers. Nobody can find something that's affordable to move into.” - Brandon Cobb   “We do everything in-house. What that does is it aligns the builders' initiatives with the investors, right?” - Brandon Cobb   “When there is a market contraction, the need to live is still there. People still need housing.” - Brandon Cobb   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Connect with Brandon through his LinkedIn and Instagram. Visit the HBG Capital website and their educational resources including their FREE e-book, Recession-Resistant Passive Income. Check out their Linktr.ee page, too! Connect with me:   I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook   LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!   Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: [00:00:00] Brandon Cobb: What happens is people, consumers transition from those more luxurious, more expensive living arrangements into more affordable living arrangements, but they don't want to be in the war zones, right? They want affordability, but they don't want to get shot. That's where we want to be. We want to be in those product types that are affordable to first-time home buyers because that gives us a level of insulation. [00:00:20] Brandon Cobb: Now there's a couple of other things, kind of, you know, our market specifically, you know, why do we feel it's insulated. Well, one, it's more affordable compared to the rest of the country.  [00:00:40] Sam Wilson: Brandon Cobb is a CEO at HBG Capital and an expert real estate consultant and investor. He's here to share some actionable advice about using real estate investing as a way to create passive income. Brandon welcome to the show. [00:00:53] Brandon Cobb: Sam, I appreciate you having me. Love the energy, man.  [00:00:55] Sam Wilson: Hey, man, pleasure's all mine. Three questions. I ask every guest who comes to the show: in 90 seconds or less, where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?  [00:01:03] Brandon Cobb: So medical device sales rep turned real estate developer. If you asked me seven years ago that I'd be building houses, I would look at you like you had six heads. Never expected myself to jump into real estate, but found myself unemployed. Got sat down one Friday at Starbucks, fired. [00:01:19] Brandon Cobb: And I'll kind of save you the story from there to here now, what do we do? And now, well, you know, when you've got some discretionary income, you're looking to invest it and grow it, but inflation is crazy and there's 20 different investment vehicles out there and you're wanting something that's designed to be insulated against market volatility. [00:01:36] Brandon Cobb: What we do is we put investors' capital into recession-resistant real estate, designed to be insulated against the market volatility for them to get passive income straight to their bank. That's two and the three what's the third one, my ADHD kicked now.  [00:01:50] Sam Wilson: You're good. Where did you start? Where are you now? How did you get there?  [00:01:53] Brandon Cobb: How did we get there? Well, it's been a long journey, so got fired from my job, started wholesaling, flipping houses, and basically took all the profits the first three years and dumped it back into coaching, mentorship, mastermind programs, rooms with people smarter than me. And that's what I would contribute to growing as fast as we did, just constant reinvestment in myself, and maybe we can touch base on that and do a little deep dive for your audience if you want to.  [00:02:21] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. I do have one question though. They took you out to Starbucks, they bought you coffee to fire you? That's a step up, man. Most people don't get that. [00:02:29] Brandon Cobb: He actually didn't buy me coffee there. That's just where he wanted to meet on Friday at four o'clock.  [00:02:35] Sam Wilson: Oh, that's brutal. I was hoping for at least a cup of coffee out of the deal. It would have been nice. Tell me this though. I mean, what was the jump? Like, how did you end up saying, all right, got fired. And then how did you say, okay, real estate. What was the delay there? How did you end up picking it? Talk to me about that.  [00:02:51] Brandon Cobb: I'll be honest. I was, I had like a motivational blog I was working on. I'm a big Tony Robbins fan, always have been. I was working on a course to help people break into medical device sales 'cause I was, you know, people were like, what are you good at? What do you do? And I'm like, well, heck I got into here. I've had a lot of people reach out to me. Maybe there's an opportunity here. Read a ton of books over the years. Real estate investing was one of them. And so I was doing all these different things and went to a bunch of different meetups and ended up meeting a guy who would, you know, become a mentor for a little bit. [00:03:21] Brandon Cobb: And he's my partner to this day. But that was the first thing that took off. And so when I was, when I learned, okay, wow, this is the first thing that's got the ability to produce income for me. I just cut all the other things off. And focus strictly on that. And that's why decided on real estate.  [00:03:36] Sam Wilson: That's awesome. Today, you guys are building affordable new construction for first-time home buyers. Is that right?  [00:03:43] Brandon Cobb: Yeah, that's correct.  [00:03:44] Sam Wilson: You've gone from wholesaling all the way to, are you going to be building brand new communities? Are you building just ground up whole neighborhoods at a time? [00:03:51] Brandon Cobb: Yeah, we are doing that. And you know, I've struggled to come up with a word for what we do because when I use the word affordable, people think it's section eight or low-income government housing. Like that is not what we're focused on at all right now. The country has a huge problem. The most undersupplied, highest demand real estate product in the country right now is affordable homes for first-time home buyers, right? Nobody can find something that's affordable to move into. And so that's what we focused on here in middle Tennessee is delivering those products aimed towards first-time home buyers.  [00:04:21] Sam Wilson: What does affordable mean? I mean, is there a dollar, you know, you're here in middle Tennessee, is there a dollar amount that you say, okay, we can build it for X. Somebody can afford a payment of Y. When you say affordable, can you give some color to that?  [00:04:34] Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Typically with a first-time home buyer family, you know, combined incomes are right about six figures, maybe a little bit less. And so they're able to afford 400,000 and less. That's kind of our bread and butter. [00:04:45] Brandon Cobb: Now we've got a small portion of our portfolio that does go above that. But while we consider it, you know, recession-resistant still, even though it might not fall in the word affordable, is our cost basis is really low. In other words, we've got like eight homes that are, we'll probably sell them for 700 grand, but our cost basis is like $380,000. [00:05:03] Brandon Cobb: Then there's a huge runway that those prices can hit. And so we would consider that recession-resistant if they can take almost a 50% hit.  [00:05:11] Sam Wilson: Okay, cool. So 400,000 bucks or less. If you have a dual-income family making roughly, you know, a hundred grand a year between the two of them, that then becomes affordable housing. Are there programs or things that you guys are working with that you're putting all these people into? Are they using the first-time FHA home buyers plan? What's that look like?  [00:05:29] Brandon Cobb: Yeah. So that's those driving the market are these, these FHA loans, these first-time home buyers. I mean, that is the largest portion of the market that is buying homes. [00:05:38] Brandon Cobb: As far as programs, we've partnered with some local mortgage brokers that do that. You know, we don't do that in-house. We can make the necessary introductions to the people that they need to know, but that's not something that we're outfitted to do for people. [00:05:51] Sam Wilson: Right. Right. Tell me about, I mean, the iterations of your business, how did you end up getting into development? I mean, again, medical device sales now developer, like that's, that's a lot of different kind of steps along the way. Why did you pick development versus, you know, doing what a lot of other people, you know, buying existing stock, things like that? Talk to us about that. [00:06:11] Brandon Cobb: Blue oceans. Anybody that's flipping houses right now. We're wholesaling. You're probably going on 10 appointments to close one deal. You're probably seeing a lot of stupid grain, new money coming in, buying stuff. That's outpricing you. You're probably filling your margins, get squeezed. Gosh, when we went from flipping houses, we were making, you know, 30, 40 grand a house on a 250, maybe $285,000 home. [00:06:36] Brandon Cobb: Four years ago, it was probably making 30, 35 grand on a 350 to $380,000, Right? Same profit margin, much more expensive home that squeezes your margin. When you're starting to get doing 8%, 10% margin deals, like that's just an interest, in my opinion. You know, that market takes a hit in that four or five, six months period, you know, that's that's concerning. So we had accidentally done some new construction projects, probably seven or eight over a few years while we were flipping houses. And, you know, you show up, it's a tornado-damaged home, or, you know, halfway burned down and we're like, well, we can buy this for less than what the land's worth. [00:07:13] Brandon Cobb: It's kind of give this a shot. And the light bulb went off one day where we had this one home that we were doing new construction on this one home. That was just our problem child is a full gut rehab. And we built that fire-damaged home faster than we rehabbed the full gut rehab. And we made like three times more money on the new build than we did flipping that home. [00:07:35] Brandon Cobb: And we said, wait a minute, we did a tactical pause and said, there's something here. What if we just scrapped all the house flipping, shut off all the marketing and just shut down that whole division of the business and just focused on self-generation and going after the sellers that have a lot of land. What would that look like? [00:07:54] Brandon Cobb: And so that's exactly what we did. So we pivoted, we probably reduced overhead by like 25%. I mean, we, we were doing like 30, $5,000 a month in marketing. Shut all that down, pivoted to just do a new construction. And when we did, we went literally almost overnight from having more money than we could find deals for to now we have way more deals than we'll ever be able to finance. So the pivot, Achilles heel of the business right now is just capital, is getting that caught up to the rest of the business.  [00:08:23] Sam Wilson: Right. Yeah. So tell me about that. I mean, you said you going after sellers with land. There's a lot of moving parts there. Can you kind of break down how your business is implemented when you find somebody with the land? How do you know you can get utilities there? How do you know you can get it entitled? How do you know, I mean, that seems like a really a niche skill set to develop. [00:08:42] Sam Wilson: Yeah, it is, there's a learning curve, but the way to offset any big task is just partnering with people that know what they're doing, right? I mean, that's all there is to it. And when we weren't completely green to new construction when we started, right? We'd done seven or eight projects. So we had a taste for the utilities and putting stuff in. [00:08:59] Brandon Cobb: So we kind of knew what we were doing, but you know, doing a bigger land development project, like putting 36 townhomes in, you know, definitely different. But, luckily, we had the right partners in the right people to kind of guide us along the way. So. They said that there's riches in the niches, right? So we really niched down whereas, you know, a wholesaler flipper's probably sending, you know, 40,000 mailers out so they can ask a T lists and kind of doing the spray and pray method. We boil things down to a very niched, target list of people that we knew we could help. And over the years, we had paid our dues. We learned we'd failed. We've made a lot of mistakes, but that knowledge enabled us to understand how we needed to entitle the land, what due diligence we needed to do, right? So the cool thing about middle Tennessee is it's very government-friendly. In other words, the government's not shutting things down when the big buyers come, and two, they want the density. So it's not like California, where it takes two years to get things permanent. So everything we put under contract, we don't buy until we have either a final plot approved or before we've got a permit. [00:09:58] Brandon Cobb: So that reduces the risk of making a bad investment. So when we boiled down and realized we need to be going after people that own a lot of land and cultivating relationships with those people, that's what we did. And so, as we closed on these deals over time, we built these relationships with people that had a lot of this land. [00:10:15] Brandon Cobb: And so now we just get referrals generated to us. So we have a $0 marketing spend, and again, we've got more people throwing deals at us, then we'll be able to buy. [00:10:23] Sam Wilson: How do you find land in an area where they want density? Like, it seems like those two are kind of like, obviously, the city expands at a certain pace and it'll catch itself up, but is there, like, are you on the fringes going okay. [00:10:36] Sam Wilson: You know, as this expands that we want to be right in front of that by a certain, like, it just seems like that's, I don't know, a nebulous way of defining what it is that, that you want. [00:10:45] Brandon Cobb: Here's what we did. We went to all the tertiary markets kind of around Davidson County, Davidson County's the core county in Nashville. [00:10:53] Brandon Cobb: And we knew we wanted to be there 'cause COVID just created this huge migration to these, these surrounding counties. And that was where the opportunity was. And we went and we got meetings with the district Councilman. We met with the mayors, we met with the building commissioners and we brought a map and we said, Hey, we want to work with you. Where do you want density? Where would you support rezones? Where do you want to see houses? What are your needs? Do you need, do you need condos? Do you need single-family homes? What types of homes do you need? And when we have those conversations, one, their eyes popped up. They're like, wow, no one's ever come to us and asked us this. [00:11:28] Brandon Cobb: And so we literally took a map and like, you know, we're sitting down with the, you know, the mayor of a little suburb in Nashville. And she's like, you know, this is what we need. This is where we need it. And we just reverse engineer. That's where we went. So we went to the areas where the city wanted to see density. [00:11:45] Brandon Cobb: And then we just got laser-focused. We were looking for those areas with road frontage, with access to sewer, or, you know, the city will give you all the sewer maps and the water maps and all that stuff. And we started cultivating those relationships and we started bringing them deals in those areas. And they're like, you actually did what we asked you to do? [00:12:02] Brandon Cobb: This is pretty cool. Then they became very interested in working with us. And so now we actually work for X deals. So that's what we did. We just went to the horse's mouth and said, what do you want? And went and gave it to them.  [00:12:12] Sam Wilson: Right. That's really, really smart. Again, you know, like, like you said, meeting with the mayor and everybody else, like, that's just the step that nobody's taking. [00:12:21] Sam Wilson: All right. That is, at least, not many people are doing that most of the time. There's, that's a very adversarial type of deal where it's like, Hey, I want to build X, Y, Z project. And they're like, no, you can't build XYZ project. And then it becomes just a, like an adversarial versus a collaborative relationship. [00:12:37] Brandon Cobb: Yeah, and it's not, you know, it might be tougher to get access to, to the mayor of like Davidson County, you know, 900,000 residents. But again, we're talking about the tertiary, the suburbs, they will meet with you. You can walk in almost same day, catch them during lunch or something. They want to meet with you because they want the tax dollars. They want the revenue. And so it was a lot easier.  [00:12:57] Sam Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. Tell me, tell me about the risks involved in what you guys are doing. There were, in 2007, 2008 saw a lot of builders, saw a lot of people just go completely belly up. What do you guys see is the runway for your business? What are some risks associated with it? How are you mitigating those?  [00:13:14] Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Great question. So I'll explain what the risks first and then what we're doing to mitigate the risks. So obvious risks upfront is going to be the price of the home, right? If the price is at home, take a nosedive, then that's an obvious risk to the sales price of the homes. [00:13:28] Brandon Cobb: How do we mitigate that? We buy these very deep discounting deals. So most of our deals are underwritten in a 66, 67% loan to value. We look for 20, 25% gross margins. In other words, I'm talking about after all the hard and soft costs or taking care of, we should be able to take a 25% hit and still be completely fine. [00:13:49] Brandon Cobb: Now, one other thing that we're doing to mitigate it is we manage everything in-house. So we're not relying on another builder to build the homes for us. Like a lot of investors, we're not relying on someone to find the deals for us. We do everything in-house. What that does is it aligns the builders' initiatives with the investors, right? [00:14:06] Brandon Cobb: So there's an alignment there and we're building them a lot quicker. Then a builder normally would. So, typically, all of our spec we're in and out in 10 months or less. So, you know, the market, you know, what are the odds the market's going to take a 25% hit in that time period, you know, couldn't it? Yeah, anything's possible. Likely? Probably not. [00:14:24] Brandon Cobb: And then again, it also comes back to our niche. When there is a market contraction, the need to live is still there. People still need housing. What happens is, is people, consumers transition from those more luxurious, more expensive living arrangements into more affordable living arrangements, but they don't want to be in the war zones, right? They want affordability, but they don't want to get shot. That's where we want to be. We want to be in those product types that are affordable to first-time home buyers, because that gives us a level of insulation. Now there's a couple other things, kind of, you know, our market specifically, you know, why do we feel it's insulated well, one, it's more affordable compared to the rest of the country, right? [00:15:01] Brandon Cobb: So people just flock to those more affordable areas kind of what I just illustrated. The second is man, Tennessee. Huge migration after COVID we didn't shut everything down. Like California, New York people were moving their businesses here in droves. And not just because of the government but because of the tax initiatives too. [00:15:19] Brandon Cobb: So there's no income taxes, just like. People love that and moving their businesses here in droves. So we have a high growth city. We manage everything in-house and we're in a product type that's insulated against market volatility.  [00:15:31] Sam Wilson: Yeah. I love, I love all the thoughts on that. The other thing that people may not know, I guess, regionally, you know, I'm very familiar with middle Tennessee, obviously, I'm from Tennessee, but or live here in Tennessee, not originally from it. I wish I were, but either way it is the, is it the housing stock is just old. I mean, there is an aging housing stock that is just it's fading out. We're seeing it here in Memphis where it's like, gosh, I mean, you know, 80 to hundred-year-old homes, that's an 80 to a hundred-year-old home. [00:15:56] Sam Wilson: We need new housing stock coming online. And so I think that's the other thing when you're having that increased demand and also this, this kind of just aging out of stock. I mean, there's, there's places now in Memphis where you just it's time to tear it down, especially in middle Tennessee, that story is there, there as well. [00:16:11] Sam Wilson: So I think, you know, you've got yet further tailwinds to what you guys are doing. How are investors getting involved with your business? I mean, it sounds like a pretty fast process here. You know, if it's a 10-month turn, are you guys developing a fund and they come in and invest in the fund and that way they have, you know, just evergreen exposure to what it is you guys are doing or what's that, how does that work for you? [00:16:32] Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Great question. So we do have a fund, so investors can invest in the fund. They get to see the projects before you invest in them. So, you know, typically we work with accredited and both non-accredited investors, couple of more steps with the non-accredited investors, but they can go to our website. hbgcapital.net. [00:16:48] Brandon Cobb: That's Harry, Bob, Gary capital.net. They can sign up for an introductory call. That's the first step. There's a ton of free educational stuff we put on there. That kind of explains what we do. We've got an ebook, Recession-Resistant Passive Income, kind of explains what our investing piece is. So that'd be a great place to start. [00:17:05] Brandon Cobb: If you think it's a fit after you've seen some of the contents, schedule a call with us, we'd love to get to know you. But that's what we're doing is we're, we're funneling money into the fund. They get to see the products that we're going to put out beforehand and, you know, a lot of our investors are local, so it's kind of cool being able to drive them around and actually showing them the projects. [00:17:21] Sam Wilson: Right, right. Yeah. So they get in the fund. I'm just really just curious, cause this is different than a lot of the guests that come on the show where it's a syndication. Hey, we know it's a five-year plan when somebody puts the money into the fund. How long are they in that fund? And what's a typical return profile look like, or what are you shooting for? I'm just really curious the kind of mechanics of how your fund works, because it's different than a lot of things we hear about.  [00:17:42] Brandon Cobb: Yeah, so we compartmentalize everything, right? So syndications we've done syndications before for some nuance deals, but everything is compartmentalized. [00:17:51] Brandon Cobb: So all the money goes into the fund, right. Or a syndication opportunity, but it's kind of it's separated. So when it goes in, it's spoken for, we invest capital and just specific deals. And then once that's done, it's done, right? If we raise any more money, it's going to go into another set of deals. So we structure it where 100% of all the returns or the distributions flow to the investors until they get the return of capital back and the return on. [00:18:17] Brandon Cobb: And then our firm will profit on the remaining. Usually the first 30% of the homes itself, all the investors are completely paid off. And then our firm profits then remaining 70% of the home. That's how we got it structured.  [00:18:27] Sam Wilson: Got it. So when somebody gets in the fund, you might have a development of say, you know, 20 townhomes or whatever it is. I'm just making stuff up here. You're like, okay. This is what we're raising for, this 20 townhome. It goes in the fund and it gets deployed. And then that's the end of that. It's, it's like syndication-esque, but in a fund model.  [00:18:42] Brandon Cobb: Yep. That's basically it. If it's a development deal, usually we say that's a 24-month turnaround. We'll raise money for phase one. Once phase one is done, that's all the horizontal work, roads, infrastructure, all that stuff. Usually six to eight months. And then we'll raise for phase two, which is the vertical. Once you do the vertical, we're usually in and out within 12 months.  [00:19:01] Sam Wilson: Wow. Wow. Really cool. Brandon, thanks for taking the time today to breakdown your business, what it is you guys are doing and how you're doing it, and just really how you see runway in your space. [00:19:10] Sam Wilson: And then, you know, how yeah, just how you're putting deals together. And of course, the tactical tip of going and meeting, especially in these smaller tertiary markets, meeting with your local government. I mean, that's a, that's absolutely brilliant. I love it. I love the way you guys are taking stuff down and provide excellent returns for your investors. [00:19:25] Sam Wilson: I know you gave this already, but just one more time to make sure we capture it here at the end. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?  [00:19:33] Brandon Cobb: Yeah. So you can go to our website. hbgcapital.net. That's Harry, Bob, Gary, capital.net. I'm all over social media, Google Brandon Cobb HBG Capital, like corn on the cob. [00:19:44] Brandon Cobb: I'm all over. We post content every single day. Everything we do is all-around value add. So we really try to educate people on what we do and not just what we do, but you know how we can help them, putting out a bunch of content that's designed to help them get to where they want to go. So follow us, like us, love us, would love to hear from you. [00:19:58] Sam Wilson: Thanks, Brandon. Appreciate your time today.  [00:20:00] Brandon Cobb: Thanks, Sam. Appreciate it. 

The paralysis of politics in Congress leads us to turn away from Washington and look at the states: What can the Democrats do when they control a state government? Like California? Democrats there are proposing dramatic changes in health care, expanding coverage to everyone below the federal poverty line–regardless of immigration status. Sasha Abramsky reports on that—and on the more radical proposal, also before the California legislature, to create a single-payer health-care system for all residents of California.Also: American universities in the '60s: Was that a golden age destroyed by student radicals who were protesting the war in Vietnam and racism in America? For some answers we turn to historian Ellen Schrecker—her new book is The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Defo has taken his talents to San Diego for the weekend!

It's poppy season. Poppies are bright, cheery flowers that grace gardens from spring until fall. While there are some early blooming poppies, such as the red Flanders poppy and the Oriental poppy, it's the seed grown, summer poppies that I love best. These include the California poppies and bread seed poppies. Seed grown poppies germinate in spring and flower starting in early summer. California poppies, in particular, will set more seed and flower a second and maybe third time during the growing season. While California poppies are known for their golden colored flowers, there are variations that feature white, pink and red flowers. I like the natural crosses that occur in our garden with many color variations. Speaking of variations, nothing beats the bread seed poppy. While California poppies are low growing with silver foliage, bread seed poppies stand 2- to 3- feet tall with beautiful flower buds, blooms and seed pods. Like California poppies, the plants self sow readily so once you start them, you'll have them poppies forever. We have single and double flowered poppies in colors such as light pink, crimson and lavender. Some look like pom-poms they are so fluffy. The individual flowers don't last long, especially with rainy and windy weather, but the flower buds keep coming for weeks. Plus, once the flowers pass, the seed pods are ornamental too, making get cut flowers. Collect seed of either of these poppies in summer and sow them where you like in spring. Thin seedlings and self sown poppies to 6 inches apart for best flowering and enjoy the flower show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kol Peterson: Hey everybody. Thanks for joining us on the ADU Hour. I am super excited for today's guest, Katherine Levine- Einstein. This topic is fascinating background about the way that land use decisions are made at the local level across the country and that has some important impacts in terms of understanding what advocates [00:03:00] for infill housing should consider doing strategically in terms of improving regulations for middle housing, ADUs, et cetera. Thanks so much for coming to join us today, Katherine, I stumbled upon your work through another podcast that I listened to. I want to confess right up front, I haven't read the book, but I wanted to take this opportunity to take some of the things that you've written about and researched and frame it in the context of some of the issues that come up time and time again with ADUs.Before I launch more into my questions, let me just give you a minute to introduce yourself. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Sure. So I'm an associate professor of Political Science at Boston University and I study Urban Politics and Housing Politics, and I'm one of the authors of the book "Neighborhood Defenders, Participatory Politics in America's Housing Crisis".Kol Peterson: Have you considered doing an audio book?Katherine Levine-Einstein: It's definitely a great idea. I don't frankly know if the University Press has that kind of bandwidth. But yeah, I'm with you. Audio books are the way to go. Kol Peterson: Yeah, for me, it's just like how I [00:04:00] consume. So anyway, and this, this series will eventually become an audio podcast for what that's worth for people who are listening.So there's 19,495 incorporated cities, towns, and villages in the US, 310 cities with a population of a hundred thousand or more. Neighborhood level politics, that is, city councils, associations. Play an outsized role in how land is developed in the United States. Americans like local democratic processes. So, why is this a problem? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. So democratic processes, I mean, you say that word, that sounds really good. Right? Like having land use be democratic? I think most people hear that, they say, "yeah, that's how it should be "people who live in a community should have a say over what goes on. And indeed, that's why we have these regulations in the first place. That when we sort of had a developer dominated system back during the Urban Renewal Days, a lot of bad things happened in neighborhoods.So there are sort of good reasons to have urban planning practices be really oriented towards neighborhood level [00:05:00] input. But in practice it can be deeply problematic because we may not be empowering a representative democratic subset of the neighborhood, right? What we show in our research is that the people who show up to these neighborhood level meetings are deeply unrepresentative of their communities in a way that actually depresses the supply of housing in the United States and the supply of affordable housing in particular. The people who show up to these meetings are privileged. They're homeowners, they're older, they're whiter, and they're overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing.Kol Peterson: Let's frame your research a little bit, so that we'll know what you did. And then tell us a little bit more about the numbers behind those findings of the demographics of people who actually show up to these meetings.Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah, so our book is about these participatory processes. You know, when we told people we're going to go out and study neighborhood meetings at planning and zoning boards. Really is that so interesting and important? But, I suspect I don't have to convince the audience here. These are incredibly important, these meetings are what dictate whether or not housing gets built in most [00:06:00] communities in the United States. So we really wanted to understand what happened in this sort of hyper-local politics. And so what we wanted to do is go out and document who shows up to these meetings and what do they say? And Massachusetts turns out, because of unique open meeting laws in the state, to provide an incredible opportunity to do so.So what we did is we went out and we collected meeting minutes for three years worth of meetings across 97 cities and towns in Massachusetts. And what made the data for Massachusetts really unusual is that in addition to including a list of public comments that happened at these meetings, we were able to learn the names and addresses of the people who participated in these public forums.And when you have someone's name and address, you can link them with a lot of other administrative data and learn really interesting and important demographic information. So from those meeting minutes, we were able to learn how demographically and attitudinally representative the people are who show up to these public meetings. The first k ey finding that we had is that these [00:07:00] folks were privileged. They were about 25 percentage points more likely to be homeowners than the general population in their community. They were over 20 percentage points more likely to be over the age of 50. They were about 10 percentage points, more likely to be white, right?So these are folks who occupy positions of privilege in their communities. They also overwhelmingly do not like the construction of new housing. So we looked at public meetings that involved the construction of one or more units of housing. So we looked at everything involving meetings had accessory dwelling units up to like big apartment complexes.And we found that only 14% of people showed up to these meetings in support of the construction of new housing. So, overwhelmingly the voices that planning and zoning board officials hear and that city councils hear, are people who are opposed to new housing developments. Kol Peterson: So 14% showed up in support of the projects and all the rests showed up as opposing the projects?Katherine Levine-Einstein: Most of them, I think at [00:08:00] 65% showed up opposed, and the rest showed up as neutral. There were a lot of those neutral folks were in fact opposed, but they were sort of asking clarifying questions about whether the developer had complied with parking studies or something like that.Kol Peterson: And then you took that data in your study and you contrasted it to legislative support for affordable housing so that kind of gives you a baseline of theoretically , this demographic should have one feeling towards affordable housing, but in practice when it comes to development in their own backyard this is what we see. So can you talk about the differences? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Absolutely. So another great thing about studying Massachusetts was in 2010, we actually had a ballot referendum about public support for affordable housing, so there's a piece of statewide legislation here in Massachusetts called Chapter 40 B, which allows housing developments that have a certain percentage of affordable housing to bypass local zoning regulations.And so this was up for a ballot referendum in 2010. And so it gives us a [00:09:00] rough sense in each city and town, the extent to which individuals support the production of affordable housing and the ability to bypass local zoning to accomplish that goal. So the ballot referendum passed. So this law is still in place in Massachusetts.And what we found is in every single city and town that we studied, support for housing was higher as measured in this ballot referendum than it was when we actually went and looked on the ground at support from new housing at these planning and zoning board meetings. I think liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts is the best illustration of this.So 80% of Cambridge, Massachusetts voters in 2010 came out in support of chapter 40 B. But only 40% of commenters at Cambridge planning and zoning board meetings show up in support of the construction of new housing. So when it comes to developments in their own backyard, the people who show up to these meetings are considerably more opposed to new housing.Kol Peterson: So what does this tell you about the disparity of those who are empowered to participate in local [00:10:00] zoning processes and the general ideological sentiment towards infill housing in general? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. I mean, what it tells me is that the people who show up to these meetings are not representative of their broader communities. And they're not representative in ways that are gonna depress the supply of housing. And it, this is really problematic, right? Because one, it's depressing the supply of housing relative to what the general public wants, right? Like if we sort of look at general public opinions, especially in these high costs, communities like Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, we see high levels of support for new housing, but when it comes to the housing actually being built in specific neighborhoods, when we empower neighborhoods to have a say over whether or not they want housing there, the evidence suggests that those neighborhoods overwhelmingly saying, "No thanks, we don't want housing".I sorta think the second important point timbers from our data, when we think about this broader housing politics is this is not just a story of people showing up in opposition to big apartment complexes, right? This is a story about people coming out in opposition for a townhouse or [00:11:00] accessory dwelling unit being built in their community.And so these neighborhood meetings get really contentious, not just when it's a big development, but sometimes when it's like a pretty modest one. Kol Peterson: Can you explain the theory of Cost for Political P articipation in the process and let's cover both the expertise element of it, the time required element, then this theory of concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. Two big reasons that the folks who show up to these meetings are deeply unrepresentative of their broader communities. The first is that it's incredibly costly to participate in these forums. And the second is that the people who are sort of weakly supportive of new housing may not be especially interested in showing up to these developments.So when we look at canonical political science research, we know that the biggest drivers of whether or not you participate in politics, are whether you have the resources to participate, and whether you're interested to participate. And we believe that both of those factors are really critical to explaining why the people who show up to these planning and zoning board meetings are really unrepresentative of their broader communities, right. So starting with these [00:12:00] sort of resource-based costs, going to the planning and zoning board meeting is like a big outlay of time, right? So you have to have two to three hours of your life that you're willing to give up, you have to have the childcare. There's a lot of just like basic costs to showing up to one of these meetings, you also have to develop the expertise.These meetings often devolve really quickly into the minutia of whether or not a setback is big enough or whether or not a parking study or a traffic study is required. If you're not someone who is intimately familiar with the lingo of variances and special permits, these meetings are not going to feel really accessible to you, right?So another cost is developing that expertise. So there's really big cost barriers. There's also, again, the second big factor there, these big interest barriers to showing up. So new housing developments have concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. So let's just imagine, you know, a townhouse development, right?Like not, not sort of a major apartment building, but just sort of a small housing development. The benefits of that housing development, if I'm measuring across the whole city in it, [00:13:00] City that has a shortage of housing, that the benefits of that they're like pretty diffused. You know, we're not going to really measure a significant decrease in housing costs from the construction of those two new units.But the cost of that building of two new units is really concentrated. If I live next door to that townhouse development, I'm going to have to listen to construction noise for like a year maybe, or I'm going to have to have my view changed in a way that I don't like, or maybe there's going to be more cars parked in front of my house.There are all these things that are going to be very motivating to me, as the next door neighbor, to show up in a way that even if I'm the most ardent pro housing supporter in the world, I'm probably not going to show up to a planning or zoning board meeting about a townhouse across town. That's just not a useful outlay of my time given the diffuse benefits.Kol Peterson: Yeah. And it, it really begs the question, " Who would actually show up for a meeting for a proposed project near them in general?" It totally makes sense that [00:14:00] everybody has NIMBY predispositions, even myself.We don't want change near us. We don't want more parking near us, we don't want more housing near us. We all kind of feel this way and it's almost a natural thing yet our democratic process at the local level is set up to empower that predisposition that we have. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. So there's really good psychological research out there that shows that we, as humans are just innately sensitive to changes in our neighborhood. Like we respond really strongly to changes in our community. And so it totally makes sense. A development definitionally is a rapid change to your community, even if it's one of a pretty modest scope. Having a new townhouse go in next door is a really big change to your view. It's a big and rapid change to the environment into which you bought into. Those kinds of rapid changes, we know have a strong impact on people's attitudes and they're motivating, they get you sort of interested in politics and eager to show up to these forums. And as you said, these forums are therefore designed [00:15:00] to capture that exact set of preferences. The people who are intensely motivated to show up and have the resources to do so. Kol Peterson: For those of us who haven't been through this type of local land use process at the local level, can you help set up for us what a local meeting dynamic that occurs for a proposed housing development project would look like? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah, sure. So there's obviously a lot different ways this can go and some of them are a lot more contentious than others. But I can provide sort of a pretty standard example of a multi-family housing development that happened in Cambridge. So this particular developer I think it was in 2015, he showed up and it was this like terrible abandoned warehouse near a mass transit stop in Cambridge. And so he shows up and says, "I would like to convert this abandoned warehouse into four condominium units. Each with one parking space." Because he was proposing converting a she'll use into a residential one he needed to get a special permit. And so he found himself before the [00:16:00] Cambridge planning board in order to get a special permit. So the way that this typically goes, he comes to the meeting, he presents his plan, then the Cambridge planning board asks them like pretty technocratic questions. And at that moment it's turned over, to public comment. In most places in the United States, Cambridge is not unique by any means, when you need to get a variance or a special permit. Given the way that land use is set up in the United States, most of the time, if you want to build more than one unit of housing, that's going to be your situation. You have to present your plans in front of a public body. And as part of open meeting laws that members of the public then have the opportunity to comment on that housing development. They can sort of say anything that's pertinent to the proceedings at hand.And so at this particular meeting in 2015, after the developer presents his plans, there were a few neighbors who showed up. Every single one of them deeply opposed to the project. Some of them talked about like foundation issues at their houses that had, one person showed up, she was a lawyer, with handouts [00:17:00] indicating that the developer was violating zoning proceedings.Other people were worried about parking issues. And so after hearing from the neighborhood, the planning board, which had initially been like pretty supportive of the project, was considerably more concerned. And they said to the developer, look, you need to go talk to the neighbors and you need to get us a parking study and an engineering study, each of which can cost the developer, you know, $10,000 so these are not cheap. It also meant that the developer had to come back three months later after the carrying costs and the other costs associated with holding onto a project and delaying and development by three months. So he comes back three months later and says, okay, I've talked to the neighbors, I've done my studies.And now instead of developing four units, each with one parking space, I'm going to do three units each with two parking spaces. And so at one level, that's maybe not such a big deal, it's only one year lost and a few extra parking spaces. But when we start to think about that process, getting repeated thousands of times over in [00:18:00] cities, across the country, it's not hard to see how these neighborhood politics are reducing our supply of housing and creating a housing crunch in so many places.Kol Peterson: You explicitly moved away from using the term "NIMBY", which is a little bit contentious, and instead using a different term "Neighborhood Defenders" in your book, is that a term that's intended to be synonymous? Or can you explain what that terms about? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. So we talk about the people who show up at these public meetings as being "Neighborhood Defenders" and we very deliberately wanted to move away from this term NIMBY, which refers to people who are "not in my backyard, I don't want new housing here". We think NIMBY connotes, inherently sort of selfish attitudes about, you know, one's own property values, one zone house. And what we observed with me read through thousands of pages of meeting minutes is that's not actually the attitude of most of the people who show up to these meetings.Most of the people who show up to these public meetings, invokes sort of community concerns. "I'm worried about my neighborhood. I'm worried about my neighborhood character. [00:19:00] I love my community and I want to protect it". That is sort of the impetus behind people who are worried about parking, who are worried about wildlife, who are worried about wetlands. It's these broader community concerns. And so we think one that this term "Neighborhood Defender" better captures these individuals self conceptualization, but we also think it better captures why these individuals are so persuasive. The Cambridge planning board could've just ignored the neighbors, right? They had that power. This wasn't a situation where the neighbors get to vote on a development. So the Cambridge planning board could have said. "We hear your concerns, neighbors, but we're just going to go ahead and approve this project because we think this neighborhood of Cambridge desperately needs more housing". And they didn't do that.And I think part of why these folks are persuasive is because they don't seem selfish. They seem community oriented and like representatives of their community.Kol Peterson: Let's go into the history of nimbyism a little bit. I had come across information that there was a connection to the environmental movement, which I think is fascinating and that back in 1970s, the Cuyahoga river [00:20:00] in Ohio was burning and neighborhood conservationist and environmentalist were coming out and trying to fight the pollution that was associated with that. And I think that had some connection with the origin of the kind of environmental movement slash modern environmental movement slash nimbyism. Now nimbyism has taken on a new understanding as of late, but then there's also conflation or connection to urban renewal and environmental regulations that are occurring that make development more challenging. Can you just help tease apart these different topics for us?Katherine Levine-Einstein: Absolutely. So I actually want to route this a little bit thinking about again this Cambridge housing development. The reason that that Cambridge housing development had to go before a planning board was because there was a land use regulation in place that said, "anything that converts a commercial use to a residential use has to go before a public meeting." If there hadn't been that land use regulation, then this housing development could have happened what is called "By Right". And if a development can [00:21:00] happen by right, it doesn't have to go through this lengthy process. If we're really interested in understanding, okay, so why do things show up in front of these meetings?We need to understand the origins of these land use regulations. Why do cities and towns have them? When did these land use regulations that are coming to being? The answer is it's sort of a confluence of a bunch of different movements and different zoning codes emerged at different times. So some set of land use regulations actually date back as early as the 1920s.That's when we start to see zoning ordinances really come into vogue. And a lot of the impetus there is really explicitly rooted in segregating communities by race and by class. There's been really good books written on this by Richard Rothstein and Jessica Trounstine, about the racial origins of zoning and land use regulations.These ordinances came into being to keep people of color and poor people from moving into communities. So a lot of places where folks live, you've probably all heard about conversations about single family zoning, a lot of regulations that [00:22:00] ban multi family housing very much came into being with this sort of race and class-based origins. But then there's a sort of separate set of land use regulations that start emerging in the 1970s. So we start to see this big proliferation of land use regulations oriented around environmental uses and around neighborhood meetings that emerged during that time period. I already talked a little bit about urban renewal. So one thing that went on is during the 1950s and 1960s we essentially had developers bulldozing communities of color and low-income communities. We were building highways and downtown shopping malls and all of these uses that weren't really serving those communities. After that happened a lot of urban planners said, my God, we, we actually need to like talk to neighborhoods.And not just bulldoze them, we may not know what's best for communities. From urban renewal emerges, in a lot of cities, this really noble impulse to actually listen to communities that are being affected by development. At the same time, you talk about the Cuyahoga River, there's lots of different examples of this, there also [00:23:00] this whole series of terrible environmental outcomes happening and we have suburban sprawl, like ruining wetlands. There's a lot of recognition among environmentalist that the way we were doing development was deeply harmful to a lot of vulnerable, natural resources. At the same time, we also see a lot of communities start to create wetland regulations or Vernal pool regulations, or Vernal pool, buffer zones. Things that essentially make it really hard to develop anywhere near a Vernal pool or a wetland and require you to get like lots of extra permitting. And again, that sounds probably good to most people where you're like, yeah, we probably should be protecting some of our wetlands and our Vernal pools and these other very important natural resources.But when you sort of layer them on to all these other land use regulations, what happens is in practice, each of these additional regulations makes it harder to build a new housing, especially in high opportunity communities that seem to love to add these land use regulations. Kol Peterson: I have a an [00:24:00] observation which is some of the most politically liberal cities in this country seem to have some of the strongest NIMBY strands I've observed. Berkeley, California, Eugene, Boulder, and Cambridge, perhaps, I don't know if Cambridge would really stand out or not, but is there any correlation there or am I just projecting that? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. So it actually turns out, if you look within those liberal places, it's the most conservative people who are more opposed to housing. In our data in Massachusetts, it's obviously a pretty liberal place if you look at like what predicts whether someone's supposed to the construction of new housing, things like being a homeowner, if you own your home, your more opposed the construction of new housing. Also being a Republican predicts being opposed to the construction of new housing.And there's other folks like Mike Hankinson, who's done more survey work that showed that conservatism is actually more associated with being opposed to new housing. But all that said, you're right to note that some of the most contentious battles that we have over new housing development seem to be happening in places like Berkeley, California Cambridge, [00:25:00] Massachusetts. Those are the places that are facing the most acute pressures for new housing. Those have been places that have experienced incredible economic growth over the last few decades. They haven't been able to match that demand for new housing. In some ways that's why we're seeing more of the housing crisis emerged there is because there's been so much economic growth, it's created demand that we're not necessarily seeing in more conservative cities. But I actually do want to stress that this phenomenon is not just limited to these really expensive cities. I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and as a Wisconsin native, I was interested in understanding how these processes play out in my hometown, which is not a place that is having the kinds of housing crunches that are experienced in Berkeley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts. And even in these kinds of places like Milwaukee, we do see similar kinds of dynamics playing out at neighborhood meetings. And the place where you see it is in the most privileged part of town. So you look at both the privileged suburbs and the [00:26:00] privileged neighborhoods within the city of Milwaukee, you see folks there fighting the construction of new housing. Even in these less crazy housing markets, we do see advantaged towns and advantaged neighborhoods still activate to protect their boundaries and stop the development of housing. Kol Peterson: So for some context my opinion as a subject matter expert is that Massachusetts has very restrictive ADU regulations, relatively speaking, along with most of the country, that's just a general observation. Part of what makes it restrictive in Massachusetts is so many towns require a special permit, which is also known as a conditional land use permit. Can you share with us any statistics you have about the impacts that a special permit requirement or a conditional land use permit requirement has on the likelihood that an average homeowner would pursue a home improvement project?Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah. So I haven't looked at this for eighties specifically. But those are research and that of many economists has essentially shown that every time you add a new [00:27:00] regulation onto the housing development process, you make it more expensive to build and you reduce the supply of housing. Applying that research to the world of ADUs, I would say, anytime you add a requirement in a special permit is a very onerous requirement, you are going to reduce the likelihood that someone's going to pursue that because it's going to be a lot more expensive. It's going to take longer, you're going to have to presumably hire more experts to get yourself through the public hearing process, you have to pull more permits. All those things cost money and time. We know from just more general research and land use regulations, that's going to make it harder to do and reduce the overall supply. Kol Peterson: What's the difference between a special permit and a variance? Katherine Levine-Einstein: So variance from existing zoning is essentially, you're saying " I know that I'm in a commercial zone, but I want to build something residential."So then you're getting a variance from existing zoning. You're essentially asking for an exception to the existing zoning code. A special permit is different because a special permit essentially says, you have to get this permission to build [00:28:00] multi-family housing anywhere in this city. Right? So in a lot of places that's sort of the context in which I think about this, the most you to build an accessory dwelling unit, or a townhouse, or three family housing, have to pull a special permit.It doesn't matter where you build it, there's no zone where we let you build this without asking for this extra permission. Kol Peterson: As a general matter, based on your professional research on this topic, et cetera. Do you believe, or is it your your opinion that neighbors should be given authority in the decision making process that their neighbor has over property improvements?Katherine Levine-Einstein: No, so I think this neighborhood meeting process is sort of it's undemocratic. When I've talked about this work before, I've had people at public meetings come upto me and say, "you're being undemocratic for advocating for getting rid of these meetings". And I would say we spent years looking at this evidence and the evidence tells us that what is happening at these meetings is deeply undemocratic.And it's, it's [00:29:00] undemocratic in a way that it's really hurting urban areas. It's depressing the supply of housing, especially in high opportunity neighborhoods. It's making it harder for low-income people to move into sort of the most privileged parts of our cities. So, no, I don't think that these processes are working as they should. I, like many others, advocate for making more development by right, that allow members of the public to have a say over what land use regulations look like. So we should absolutely be incorporating public input. And I would argue members of the public certainly have a right to vote out officials who pass these policies that they don't like.But once the land use regulations are set, we should be allowing property owners to be developing to what those land use regulations specify without having to go through an ad hoc and unpredictable neighborhood permit process. Kol Peterson: What's your take on the most frequent objections that we're hearing in general, in the U S about, around proposed residentially zoned Don conforming housing development project? A lot of jurisdictions, [00:30:00] not just in Massachusetts, but elsewhere. There's a conditional land use process and you have to go through a public process and, and the frequent objections, among other ones, are, " This is going to change the character of our single family, residential neighborhood". Whether it's a city-wide process or a local project that can be a complaint that would be issued by a neighborhood defender.How often does this neighborhood character concept arise as a rationale for obstructing new proposed developments. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Oh, all the time neighborhood character is a really frequent objection. And a lot of people sort of wonder, like, is this a code word for like race or class-based bias?And that's, that turns out to be really hard to prove, but it's, it's hard not to see it there at least some of the time that people raise it. Some of the other concerns that we hear a lot about traffic parking, the environment. And I will stress that those traffic and parking concerns, and this sort of blew our minds as we read through the meeting minutes, like it doesn't just happen with big apartment buildings where maybe you could say, okay, there are 200 new apartment units, maybe that's going to change traffic loads, but people will [00:31:00] raise that with like a five unit building. They'll say, it's going to change traffic. And you sort of are like, how can that be? There's only going to be five or 10 new cars tops, but people really worry a lot about those traffic and parking and environmental concerns.Kol Peterson: Something else you've alluded to is this traffic study or parking study. Say I want to build an ADU, I want to convert my garage to an ADU. Can't provide an off-street parking spot, can't replace it. The driveway leading up to the garage doesn't classify as an off street parking spot, according to the zoning code. Is it a reasonable thing to ask me to do a traffic study or a parking study. Katherine Levine-Einstein: They're really expensive, right. So when we require those things we make it much more expensive to build.I think my take on that would be that clearly, there are some projects where we want to see parking studies and traffic studies. And I think we should have planners who are experts in those areas work with engineers and other people in city staff to come up with a really clear set of requirements about here are the kinds of projects that absolutely need to [00:32:00] provide us with a parking study and a traffic study.And here's what we need to see from that parking and traffic study to view it as conforming with city requirements. Because one of the things that is sort of especially problematic about these neighborhood processes, it's actually not just that neighborhoods can demand, like you need to give me a parking study.It's if they don't like the results of the first study, they can ask for a new one. As part of our book, we interviewed a lot of developers across the country. And a story we heard from multiple ones was that we had to do like two, three, four in one case five traffic studies for the same project, because the neighbors kept raising objections to the one that the developer had provided. I totally buy that they're unscrupulous developers who cut corners and provide terrible traffic studies. And I think that is something that local governments can set clear requirements around to avoid. They can say here's what comprises a good traffic study. And if you meet those requirements, you don't have to provide four more, just because the neighbors didn't like the results.Kol Peterson: Given this entrenched [00:33:00] dynamic that is more or less a truism that people don't like change and that they're going to object at a local level to proposed projects. What are some practical approaches that ADU advocates, infill housing advocates in general should consider in the face of this type of dynamic?Katherine Levine-Einstein: At a sort of more policy level, as much as possible advocate for policies that allow for ADUs by right. Any time you can get around this sort of ad hoc and neighborhood process, it's going to make it easier for folks to build. I think at a sort of policy level, avoid the special permits as much as you can, but obviously that's easier said than done.And sometimes getting these policies passed in communities is incredibly contentious in the special permit is like the compromise that lets you get it done. So thinking more micro, if you're that property owner is trying to get an ADU through a neighborhood process, I think clearly the most important thing is making sure you have supporters in the room.Ideally make sure if you don't have opponents in the room. We did read through [00:34:00] meeting minutes where essentially the meeting around an ADU work extremely uncontentious, you know, someone brought like two neighbors with them who are like, yeah, Joe's a nice guy. You should let him build this ADU.And then no one showed up in opposition. And so the thing went through really easily and it was presumably a reasonably low stress process for the homeowners. So I think making sure that you line up some form of support at these hearings. And if you do hear wind of opposition, really thinking about ways to frame the opposition as being unreasonable or NIMBY in some ways.Right. I think it's really important. Kol Peterson: I think we've started to see some you know YIMBY yes. In my backyard movements to kind of coalesce in support of local projects. Any observations to share about that, that you've heard about. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Yeah, no. So, I mean, I wish and so many people people have asked me about this a lot in regards to our Massachusetts data, because Cambridge has a very active YIMBY movement now.And unfortunately our data collection stopped in 2017. And I would say the movement there, it really picked up in 2018, 2019. And so thinking about [00:35:00] sort of where a YIMBY movement can be most effective and looking at Cambridge. In some ways, the place where they've been most effective is actually organizing around pro-housing city council candidates, right?That at the end of the day, to get good housing legislation passed, you need to have politicians in place who are willing to sort of put into, put into place policies. Like in Cambridge, the affordable housing overlay, we look at Minneapolis, something like abolishing single family zoning, right?Like that requires the actions of politicians who are pro-housing. And so if I were advising YIMBYs, I would say, go out and organize and get those candidates elected so we can pass the citywide legislation that allows for more housing to be built by right. More recently we've seen Kol Peterson: states like California and Oregon step in with pretty aggressive or assertive statewide ADU legislation superseding local control over ADUs ordinances.While this may be seen as a bit heavy handed to some city officials and planning staff in the sense that [00:36:00] historically zoning controls is at the local level. I'm now, personally, becoming convinced that this is the only reasonable pathway forward, to enacting best practices for ADU zoning regulations.For the most contentious things like Austria parking, owner occupancy requirements. The only reasonable pathway forward in the sense that I am impatient. I'm not willing to do this through 190,000 jurisdictions in the United States. I want to do it through 50 or, you know, however many handful of states are willing to take this on where there's actually promise of our potential for ADUs to play a role in addressing housing shortfalls.So what's your take on statewide legislation that preempts local zoning? And what do you suspect are some variables that would indicate whether this would be a viable approach in your state? Katherine Levine-Einstein: I'm really into state level preemption in part, because I think it makes the development pressure it's more evenly spread, right.And more spread to exclusionary places. And so we can think about places like Minneapolis, they went out on their own and they abolished [00:37:00] single family zoning and that's awesome. But their surrounding suburban communities haven't done that. Right. And so that essentially does, is it concentrates a lot of development in the city.And it means that some of the places that have, you know, the highly ranked school districts get to stay exclusionary. And so I think we don't want to rely solely on a process that involves the most progressive places saying, sure, we'll let more housing get built here, while exclusionary places get to stay exclusionary.And I say this for two reasons, one it's unjust because it makes it harder to access the really high quality public goods, the top rated schools in many places. Right. And so that's, that's I think a deep problem. I think the second issue though, with having that kind of uneven development pressure is it can lead to gentrification and displacement, right.That, you know, here in the Boston Metro area, an overwhelmingly amount of our development has been concentrated in the city of Boston because they haven't made it super easy to develop, but relative to the surrounding suburbs they've made it much easier to develop. And so what that means is they get all of the building.And a lot of [00:38:00] people of color have been pushed out of their neighborhoods. And in contrast are like inner core streetcar suburbs with all that top ranked schools are just not doing their share and they're not going to voluntarily do their share. And so I think that's why we need the state to step in because otherwise a lot of places where that should be shouldering their development burdens just aren't going to do it.Okay. So where can it happen? Right. Like. Oregon sort of a unicorn, right? Like California, I think has been the counterpoint to show us a place where everyone agrees that housing is a huge issue, but no one can seem to agree on what the preemption legislative package should look like. Right.Like we've seen many packages go through. And I think finally, now there's been a little bit more attraction. But that's been a really contentious issue in one that it's been really hard to get support from a bunch of different state legislators. So so I guess, yeah, my answer to how to get it done is we haven't really been able to get it done in a lot of places, right.That Oregon is the most recent example where there's been real success. But in a [00:39:00] lot of other places like Massachusetts or California that has really pressing housing crises and very liberal state governments it's been really hard to do.Kol Peterson: Ironically though. I'd say it's, it was. Weirdly easier to pass a statewide legislative bill for, for what, just for the elements that occurred within the ADU portion of the bill for Oregon, which said no owner occupancy, no off street parking. Easier to pass at the statewide level than to try to do it in a given local jurisdiction.So I think depending on how the bill is targeted and framed and how explicit or how minor it might seem, it actually might be easier to pass at the state level than at the local level because of this dynamic that you've articulated so well, which empowers neighbors to have more voice than people who dedicate their profession to studying this issue who are more empowered at the state level. In other words, more [00:40:00] academics, more institutional voices that understand the statewide dynamics between supply and demand. I wish I knew which states would be most ripe for that type of suggestion at this point.Katherine Levine-Einstein: I think the packaging really matters, that's a really important point. I think again about this Minneapolis example where they've gotten tons of attention for ending single family zoning at the same time that they did that they also abolished parking minimums, which like no one was really talking about because they were also distracted with the single family zoning, which is as much bigger, more contentious issue.And I imagine in a lot of places, if you tried to abolish parking minimums, without having a broader conversation, it would seem like a huge deal. And so, as you say, I think a lot of it is in the packaging. And whether you can make it seem like a minor little tweak to land use regulations or whether it sounds like the, a big deal that will get rid of all of our beautiful single family neighborhoods. I think that's an important political point. Kol Peterson: Awesome. Thanks, Katherine. So Kelsey let's I'll have you take it away. Kelcy King: That wraps up the interview portion of this [00:41:00] episode of the ADU hour. As a reminder, these episodes are the edited audio version of interviews that we conducted via a webinar series. Good news. You can access the full video series via Kol's website, BuildinganADU.com. Now for the second half of the show I curate questions from the audience that gives our guests the opportunity to dive deeper into a topic or address new ideas and questions.First we want to know what the podcast was that you heard, Kol. Kol Peterson: Oh is maybe Catherine can speak better than me to this . Katherine Levine-Einstein: It was with the it was The Weeds with Matt Yglesias, and I think it was in January, which feels like a lifetime ago that wasn't so long ago.Kelcy King: Thank you. This one's from Neil, are contemporary neighborhood defenders being honest in their community concerns, or could they be euphemisms in order to not say the more insidious intentions out loud? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Oh, totally. Yeah. And the problem is right. Obviously we can't know that for [00:42:00] sure. I can't mind read and see sort of what's inside someone's head and certainly not when I'm reading the meeting minutes. But sometimes, people say that the quiet part, right? So there are times where you read through these meeting minutes and people say things that are, that are more explicit.So one that really comes to mind for me, was one public meeting where someone talked about their lovely north shore town that's right on the ocean, say we don't want it to become another Chelsea, which is a town that is like six towns over majority Latino. And so it was very clear that the concern was that if you built this housing development, you would have Latino people moving in.We also heard from someone who worked in the planning department in another privileged community in the Boston area that sometimes the meeting minutes actually gets scrubbed when someone says something that's incredibly racist. And so I can't speak to that, I haven't seen it personally.That's all to say, I think those sentiments are very much out there and there's also a really strong incentive on the part of both individuals who are trying to be persuasive and also governments to not [00:43:00] have those be in official documents. So yeah, very much still there. Kelcy King: Melissa wants to know, with your research, is it better to ask for more units, say 10 versus four, so that after it's all said and done going from 10 to four, rather going from four to three.Katherine Levine-Einstein: You know, I can't say that for sure. I would love to partner with a developer where we experiment and try a few different developments to see how this plays out. But in interviews with developers, a lot of them will say that they shoot high in their initial ask, so that then when they're like, oh yeah, we're going from 10 to four that were so reasonable.We're cooperating. Right. And I think, again, this is another cost of these land use regulations is if you're a property owner or developer, you have to guess, right. You have to sort of say, okay, what's the too high number to shoot for us that I can eventually end up with the optimal number of units for me.Yeah. Kelcy King: Great. Thank you. Is it possible for local jurisdictions to take the state to court on state level preemptions?Katherine Levine-Einstein: That's a great question. I don't know about whether they can take them to [00:44:00] court. I know they can do lots of appeals and fight it. And I know that individuals have taken the state to court over preemption. More generally, one of the critiques of preemption laws has been that in practice, they don't produce more housing because they lead to more litigation. That has absolutely been the experience with Massachusetts' preemption law, chapter 40 B, which has been around since the 1990's. And it's unclear what the longterm effects have been on housing supply.There's been sort of mixed studies on this, but there have absolutely been a lot of lawsuits about it. So I think it is definitely something that folks have to be prepared for when you pass these kinds of laws, that there is litigation around it. Kelcy King: Once land regulations are set development should be by right, but how do you deal with design and design compatibility with an existing historic neighborhoods?. Katherine Levine-Einstein: Historic neighborhoods are really interesting ones. Because it's funny when you read sort of be an economist who studied land use regulations, they hate historic preservation. I think if you were to sort of say, like, what is the thing that they would most love to get rid of?They sort of look at these historic districts and say that the, when [00:45:00] we have those regulations, we make it harder to build. And yeah, I think those are that would sort of be the hard party line. I think it's challenging though, because when we look at what we love about many of our Americans cities, we love some of the pretty old preserve neighborhoods.So yeah, I think you've highlighted a really tricky trade-off when we have regulations that preserve our communities, we make it harder to build and we make it more expensive to build. And in some cases that may be worth doing but not always . Like I think we have to sit or yeah, balance the need for more housing, with the need to preserve some of our some of our treasured neighborhoods.I think the second place I want to flag that with historic preservation is again, this equity concern in a lot of American cities, the old neighborhoods that are historic preservation areas are also the rich areas. And so they provide this tool for affluent areas to say, oh, you can't develop here look at all these pretty Victorian houses. Why don't you go develop over there? And the other part of the city, which happens to be where poor people and people of color live. And so I think that's one of the tools that has led to incredible [00:46:00] inequities in where development happens. Kol Peterson: I want to make comments last question, which is what if as a general operating principle, the higher priced land value areas were required to have the most liberal regulations for housing development.Katherine Levine-Einstein: I think it would solve a lot of the gentrification displacement concerns. And again, if you look at California, one of the big issues has been that in Los Angeles a lot of local low-income communities of color have borne the brunt of development pressures there and it turns out that those are also the areas that have been upzoned more frequently . And so I do think something that, that rectified that inequity would certainly be something I support. I think it would be very politically difficult to pass because the most powerful areas are the ones that are protected by these regulations.Kol Peterson: But its precisely where we, we need development, right. I mean, those areas, in general, going to be the areas where the most transit oriented, most desirable places and [00:47:00] where these kinds of projects could pencil out, it would make sense for the community if they were allowed.Kelcy King: In addition to building smaller footprint ADU's, how can we also get people to build smaller main homes versus mega mansions? Katherine Levine-Einstein: This is again, one of the issues that people raised in the town that I live in, when you try to sort of reform zoning and land for more multi-family housing.One of the issues that gets conflated is people say, well, you know, there's been so many tear downs as small houses to build these mega mansions. And so when we loosened zoning, how do we prevent all the housing from becoming less affordable? You know, I don't know that I have a good answer because I always worry when you add in more regulations, we're just going to make it more expensive to build.But I definitely share the questioner's concern about about replacing a small single family home with a big single family home, I guess I would say we should replace that small single family home with like a couple of homes or a townhouse, if we can, if the lot's big enough in supports that use. Kelcy King: Great. Thank you. Are you aware of any research that shows the relationship between increased housing price and decreased [00:48:00] quality of living? Katherine Levine-Einstein: Hmm, interesting. So yes, I think there's a lot of research that shows when your housing gets more expensive, life becomes more terrible at a variety of dimensions.And so when we have higher costs of living, I think if you want the most direct measure of quality of living health, right, your health, your stress, we know that if you're in a more expensive housing market, and if your housing itself is more expensive, you experience more stress, you experience all these negative physical outcomes .You're more likely to be faced with a crazy long commute which is terrible for a whole host of reasons. So I think there's a lot of ways in which being stuck in an expensive housing market makes your life worse. Kol Peterson: Thanks for being our guest today, Katherine, it's been a lot of fun ! .And thanks everybody, we'll see you around the bend. [00:49:00]

In this episode we discuss Non-Binary babies, Vax for Vax and condoms or the lack there of in the gay community. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/whats-the-5678/support

Get the story behind the settlement and development of the Great Basin in this episode of the Utah Stories Show that dives deep into Mormon Pioneer history and the community-building efforts of the early pioneers. Find out what they had right, that we have largely forgotten. Why is this relevant today? Utah has now more tech jobs per capita than any other state. Our educated workforce, strong family values and comparatively cheap real estate has successfully landed big tech in little Utah. But what is to stop Utah from becoming just like California? Great for the elite tech workers and rich; but terrible for middle-class working Americans who are only watching their dreams of owning homes and businesses disappear. Utah once had very clearly defined priorities and values. Those values defined the entire Great Basin area and most western states. The values were to keep government small, maintain a strong middle class and maintain limited government by maintaining a strong civic partnership between small and medium-sized businesses and government. Today, more than ever our government is operating like a plutocracy, for the rich, by the rich -- and catering to big corporations and massive tech companies. It's time we returned to the original western values which defined the culture of the region. Brigham Young and Joseph Smith's ideals to create strong local economies and communities have been largely forgotten. In this episode, we illustrate how Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints successfully built nearly 600 small communities throughout the West, from Canada to Mexico and throughout the entire Great Basin. Visit UtahStories.com to subscribe to our free digital newsletter. Follow Utah Stories on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. You can also support Utah Stories by supporting our advertisers and subscribing to our monthly print magazine.    

It takes a lot of talent to make it big in Broadway. Sometimes you make it even bigger off Broadway. Like way off. Like California off. Robert and Kristen Lopez had some very humble beginnings before they became the musical power team for Disney. This week we go "behind the music" with Team Lopez and learn everything we can about them. Spoilers: It's more about one than the other.   Please rate, review and subscribe!! Twitter @3sheetspodcast insta @3sheetspodcast facebook @3sheets teepublic shirts Magical Meltdown Opening Credits by Jonathan Young Mr. Young’s Awesome Music

Max: Hello everybody and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'd like to welcome somebody who's dialing in from Switzerland. Suzanne Lucas, who is the owner, and chief writer of a little place called evilhrlady.org. Suzanne: Yes Max: evilhrlady.org, go check it out. Welcome to the show Suzanne. Suzanne: Thanks so much for having me. Max: Thanks for joining. So, where do I begin? How long have you been evil for? Suzanne: Well that's kind of like a bad pickup line. I have been the evil HR lady since 2006, which it doesn't seem that long ago until you do a math in your head and then you go Oh boy! It's been a long time. Max: I love the website it does have that 2006 vibe a little bit, you know it's got these, you know when we were all building our own websites too and and just the format, it looks just a little bit like going back in time I must say, but it has an edge because of it. In fact, I've always thought the best websites are the ones  from that era, like, in terms of layout, nothing has ever been drudge or the eBay for evolved and so on. Even though I'm in the business of changing interfaces but for those who are listening and not on their computer. What can they expect if they go on to the evil HR lady, what audience are you attracting to your website? Suzanne: My audience is a lot of HR professionals and then, a lot of people that are trying to figure out how to handle situations at work. So it skews strongly towards the HR professional but there is a good contingent of non HR people as well that are just either interested in the topic, or they are literally coming to find an answer to their question. Max: Right and I see there is plenty of ways to kill time here there is a big red button that says show me a random post, you click on that and then you can go right into some serious topics. The one I got was enforceable severance clauses, so serious questions for HR folks. Suzanne: Okay, so maybe that's not the most exciting as post. But that's the type of thing that you know you don't know about unless you've been through it, and a lot of people need that kind of information and I hope to be able to provide it. Max: And from your background, obviously, you got into this space because you were a practitioner at some point, and you're a consultant on Labor and Employment Law. How long have you been in Switzerland? Is your background more focused on US law or do you also cover international markets? Suzanne: My focus is the United States that's my main focus. Of course, I've been in Switzerland for almost 12 years now and came for two years and a little bit longer. But, you know, I have my finger on the global market but I'm certainly not an expert in like Swiss employment law. I feel confident in saying, I'm an expert in US employment law, but I'm not really an expert in Swiss law or anything. My audience skews heavily towards the US. And that's where my focus is I do intend to return to the US someday, about 10 years ago. Max: Yeah. And when it comes to employment law. I mean I guess the US has a reputation for being one of those markets where it's relatively deregulated compared to Europe, but when it comes to employment law, it may be actually the opposite. My perception, purely from talent acquisition is that it is more litigious than Europe. Is that in agreement with your views? Suzanne: I mean I think that American culture is far more litigious than European culture in everything. Like my Swiss neighbors would never think of suing anybody for anything, you just don't do that, that's just not something that you do, that's not what comes to your mind. Whereas in US culture is very heavy on the law suing in the court, attitude, so that's a very very different cultural thing. US employment is different from a lot of the world because we have almost always what's called outwell employment, which means that I can quit and you can fire me and nobody's required to give notice on either side. And that's something that's very very unusual, especially in the Europe. I mean that's just, that's not something here, in Switzerland and nobody is that out well employment you know you've got a minimum. But after you have a probationary period but then after probationary period, they have to give you three months' notice before they can terminate you, whereas in the US your boss can walk in today and say, Thanks so much, Max but today's your last day. Max: So, by that. By that formula, employment would be easier in the US. Are there some ways in which employment is harder in the US? Suzanne: You know, I am a huge fan of the outwell employment, and when I say out well, keep in mind that you can't terminate someone for an illegal reason. So I can't walk in and say, Max, you're a white male you're fired. That I can't do. I can fire you but I can't fire you because of your race, your gender or your religion any of those types of things. Max: I thought that you could make an exception for a white male, but okay. Suzanne: You can, lots of people think that you can but you cannot. Max: It means I am protected too, yes. Suzanne: You are protected too and if you're over 40, then you have another layer of protection.  Max: Oh! Suzanne: But I know. 40 is not officially old in the US employment law. Yeah, right. Max: So when you're on the wrong side of 40, go to the US you are protected there. Suzanne: Although in Switzerland, when you're over 40, then they have to give you six months notice before they terminate you. Max: It's lovely. Suzanne: Because you come to Switzerland. Anyway. So the nice thing about this and people don't realize this so much but the easier it is to fire the more likely people are willing to hire. And so, you know, if you're in, say, Germany where it's almost impossible to terminate anybody.  Max: Hmm Suzanne: You're going to be so so so cautious about hiring, and you're going to use temps and contractors, as much as you possibly can.  Max: Mhmm Suzanne: Because once you hire someone if they are not, you know, completely you know i don't know burning down your office building. You're stuck with them until they retire. And so people are very very hesitant to make hiring decisions in in those cultures where it's very difficult to terminate, whereas in the US, because I know that I can get rid of you tomorrow, if I want to. I'm much more willing to give you a try and I think that's a real advantage and employment even though, when someone gets terminated for no fault of their own it's a really big bummer. But the fact is is a lot of those jobs wouldn't exist if. Max: So it's more of a red market. Yeah, does the sacrifice, you have to make you create a more competitive market so that there are more opportunities, but maybe we're getting too specific detail but it's in California i think that i mean in many states I guess there's also a state level protection, where you cannot Fire at will, or rather there. Isn't there some sort of compensation for tenured employees people who've been on the payroll for a long time? Suzanne: There is not Montana, the only state that doesn't have outlaw employment. Now there are protections. California is especially bonkers and very employee friendly. I say bonkers because I would never want to be an HR practitioner in California. Max: Too much paperwork. Suzanne: It's a lot of paperwork and there's a lot more restrictions, ultimately it's still an at will state but there's a lot of things that are gonna come down on you more. Like California says, specifically that terminating somebody because their salary is higher than other employees is illegal. So if I'm doing a layoff and I just want to get rid of my high dollar people. I can't do that. Now, I can eliminate their whole department or whatever but I can't just say, you know, here I have two accountants one's earning $10,000 more than the other, so I'm going to choose the highly paid one. I have to be able to give another reason. Now I can still terminate that person but I have to have another reason, and the reasoning behind this was actually not salary protection but age protection because who tends to earn the more money is older people. And so, by saying you can't fire people just because they're the highest earner. Max: White males also. Suzanne: Well, there you go. Max: All the white males, yeah. Suzanne: Then you're protecting your, your older workers. It's kind of bonkers as I said, you know when I was working as a labor and employment law consultant for a big pharmaceutical company, we had, you know, we had sales people in all 50 states of course, and we have three attorneys that handled that, and one handled 24 states, one handled 25 states, and the third handled, California, you know, that's just how California is, it's just so complex. Max: The complexity that I was alluding to when I said the hidden cost of employing in America, is the lawsuits around the Equal Employment Opportunity law. And for me on the tech side, you know, in the US you have a few more layers of data that you need to collect about everybody that you interview, and it just it's always, you know, an awkward moment for employers in most of the rest of the world including in Asia to be asking people if they're obviously you know a US veteran or what their ethnic origins are because that's not how it's done in other parts of the world. Suzanne: Yeah, that's something that frequently bothers job applicants too. They'll be like, why, why are you asking me this and like they don't want to ask it any more than you want to answer it, it's just required to for our reporting to be able to say, this is what we did. Max: Okay, so do you advise people who are moving into the US for the first time making their first hires there, you to be ready on this front or is this is this more of a nice to have. Because, I mean, I guess if it's a small business, keeping track of everybody's profile is maybe a little bit easier than when you're a big corporation. Suzanne: Well, I mean, the reporting requirements really depends on your business and your business size and if you have any dealings with the US government, and more companies than you would think work with the US government. For instance, my brother is a real estate appraiser he works for a small company, maybe 20 people altogether. They only do property in, you know, Southern Utah, but sometimes that property is government property, which means that they that are a government contractor, which means that they're subject to some of these reporting requirements. So, even though you would think, Okay this is a tiny business and they're not like Lockheed Martin or whatever selling jets to the US military or whatever you know they're appraising land but sometimes when that land is owned by the federal government then they become this government contractor. So, you know, there are these regulations but not everybody is subject to them. And some of the things are ridiculous like you have to be able to report on, you know, the race of all your applicants but what if I don't tell you my race, then you have to guess which is so ridiculous. You know, if we meet face to face, you see me face to face, I am as white as white can be, and with red hair, although the red hair is fair. Max: I couldn't tell. Suzanne: But if we don't meet face to face, then you're gonna be making a judgement based on the stereotypes of my name and my accent. You know, that's. Max: I mean I'm really good at that. But I'm not gonna do it on the air. Suzanne: I'm guessing you're probably gonna get me right because you can't see me. But, you know, that's something that I find bizarre. But we're not the only country that does that. The UK has this completely. Huge recommended list of questions that you ask for demographics, like, How were your parents married when you were 14. What's your parents income level, what's your sexual orientation. Have you ever been on welfare and people see these questions and they freak out and they're like, what does my parents income, why does it matter if my parents were divorced, then why at 14, I could be wrong about the age but it's like a specific age. And they're trying to gather this demographic data, and their goal is to be able to do these long term studies where they can look at upward mobility and it's got a nice goal to it because if I if I can say look you know I was super poor and I was on welfare when I was a child, and now I'm, you know, a marketing manager and I'm making 80,000 pounds a year or whatever. Look at me I've really come up in the world. But when people get these huge questionnaires, they're like what in the heck, and the first time I saw when I was like this is wrong and so I start googling and I'm like, Oh, well here's the government office that gives you a form I'm like okay this is real.  Max: Yeah. That reminds me, I think I had a similar form to come in as a tourist visa for India-is my parents, my parents marital history religion, just making sure I was not from Pakistan, no matter what. So that was, that was that experience but, yeah, I think it must be reassuring actually for somebody who is not based in the US and hearing you say that this employment. What's a call outwill determine at will, protects them means that, you know, we can start hiring tomorrow, start hiring in the US tomorrow, there's not going to be that much paperwork and, you know you're not if you make a mistake, you can still mend your ways later on. Suzanne: Absolutely. It's a really great boon for businesses, and in a roundabout way it's good for employees too because there's just more jobs. I mean, even now, are the unemployment rate in the US. As of, like yesterday was like 6.7%. Max: Yeah. Suzanne: Which, for most of the world that's super low in non pandemic time. For US it's quite high, because of the pandemic but for the rest of the world that's, you know, incredibly low like if you look at like Portugal and Spain, they're always hovering between 20 and 25%. They also have incredibly strong protections for employees, so nobody wants to hire. Max: Yeah. 6.5 is remarkable. I just googled vacation on your website. It's a subject which is dear to my heart because we've had in my company or culture where we've said, We want you to take a vacation, but we also don't really have time to monitor it so take as much as you want. And we've realized that they don't take any.  Suzanne: That's correct. Max: So, can you advise me on me and anybody who is in the same predicament as I am, on what should we do in terms of forcing people to take a vacation. How can I impose vacation on people, which is, I can assure you a very weird thing coming out of my mouth but It is coming in, I'm saying it earnestly. I do want people to take a vacation, but it took me a while to get there. Suzanne: Yeah, well you do and there are lots and lots of reasons for it and this is something that was a big culture shock moving from the US to Switzerland because, by law, everyone gets at least four weeks of vacation here whereas in the US, there's no required minimum vacation, you can have zero if you want. Most places offer vacation but definitely not four weeks. And a lot of people the higher up the food chain you are, you're likely to have six weeks of vacation. And there's a big cultural shift there. But I'll tell you why you should enforce vacation. There are really nice warm fuzzy things. When your people have a vacation, then they're rested they have time off and they have time to recuperate and everybody needs a break and that you already know. But vacation also reduces fraud. And one of the US banking regulations it's, I guess it's not technically a regulation it's strongly recommended. And every bank I'm aware of actually does this, is that every employee has to take at least one week off completely with no contact. No phone contacts, no email checking, no access to any system. And the reason for this is fraud because if you're running a fraud thing. You really need to take care of it. And so, if you go away for a week and you can't even check your email or your voice mail, or log in at all, someone else has to do your job. And as a result, you uncover fraud, and you prevent fraud and it's even better if you do two weeks and you may say, we're not banking, we don't need that. If you would be surprised at the number of people that embezzle from companies, and here's the other thing about the embezzlement. They're not like you know in the movies or whatever where it's someone takes the job with the plan of taking over. It's usually someone that gets behind on their credit card bill or something and they just front themselves $200. And then they pay it back, you know. And then next time it's $300 and they pay it back and then the next time it's 500 but they don't have the money to pay it back. And it's Max: It's because they gambled! they gambled it all off. Suzanne: Or whatever, it starts out, generally accidentally not I mean, obviously, you embezzle on purpose but you know they don't intend to a lot of these people, and having this vacation time this mandatory vacation, actually prevents that fraud and catches that fraud. So from you as a managerial perspective you trust your employees they're awesome, but vacation actually prevents fraud. Max: I mean even if they're not, you know, dealing with a financial transactions. If they really have to switch off, it forces your system to be ready to function without them, which is continuity one on one. You know what would happen if I get hit by a bus. Suzanne: This is also true. This is also true because you've got to do that cross training, you've got to be able to have someone be able to step in and handle you because you may get hit by a bus I mean, fingers crossed, nobody's getting hit by a bus but I mean it happens. And what happens when the guy that gets hit by the bus is the only one with the passwords to your system. That's what you know that's something that you really can't have happen and so there's just so many good reasons, besides the ones that we always think of like you know everyone needs rest and relaxation but everyone does need rest and relaxation, absolutely do. Max: To change the topic and thinking back about 2020, which is the time when everybody left the office, and it was bye, bye everything work from home doesn't matter where you live. Everybody can work from anywhere I have some friends who were working in the US that were Europeans and that they basically moved over to Europe and said well I'm still drawing my salary into the US and US dollars but I'll be working in Europe for the time being until dot dot dot. Have you noticed in your practice, these, these shifts and a lot of your customers are permanently moving towards work from home, and kind of higher from anywhere, or is everybody still thinking of going back to the way things were? Suzanne: You know, I think everyone in everyone. Almost everyone is leaning towards a little bit more of this flexibility model people really like the opportunity to work from home. Now I say that, but there are definitely people that hate working from home and don't like it. And there are definitely jobs that can be done from home but they're much better when you're in a better collaborative environment.  Max: Hmm hmm Suzanne: But there are some things that you have to think through before you make this a permanent thing and a lot of this depends on your employment law. Nobody really has a problem with I'm going to go, you know, back to my home country for a month to help my mother who had hip surgery, and during that time I'm going to keep working. You know, just remotely. Nobody has a problem with that, you know, tax authorities are going to come after you or whatever. But if you say, I'm going to move to my home country. Then suddenly, it's a different deal. And then your business needs to register in this other country you're subject to that country's employment laws. Max: Your tax Suzanne: Your tax withholdings and things like that. And, even within the United States. There are 50 different states and different states have different laws as well and you'll need to start registering in those states if people aren't coming into the office at all anymore. And so that can really limit what you do, certainly people do it, talked with a guy who has like 11 employees and they're in seven countries. But, you know, you can do it, you absolutely can. But there are things to consider on it, it's not as easy, you know, if you want to chair globalization, this would be a way to do it and be like hey let's make it easier for people to work everywhere. Max: Yeah. I think it's there, yes there's some work to be done on filing and registering in a new country, but by offering that freedom for a lot of the white-collar jobs is there and where I intend to take advantage of the global talent pool for sure, personally. Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely a great thing. I mean, look at us. I'm sitting in Switzerland, you're sitting in Hong Kong. And we're having a conversation like we would if we were in the same room. Max: It's a miracle. Yeah, and, and last year I hired somebody in the US, and all I did is I sent him a contract and I started sending him money. And then he did work, and it was just that simple. But I walked into it, you know, with a lot of fear in my heart, because I'm European originally and I just thought it'd be way more complicated than that. But turns.  Suzanne: And if you probably didn't hire him as an employee you probably hired him as an independent contractor. Max: Yeah, but in California I was told that doesn't make a difference. Suzanne: It does make a difference. Max: I was told by the person I hired, so I guess that's why. Suzanne: We can talk later. But, yeah, it's pretty easy and that's what you know I most of my clients actually all of my clients but one are in the US I have one client in Paris. But I work as an independent contractor, which allows them to hire me when I am sitting over here.  Max: So yeah they don't have to worry about where you file your taxes and so on. Suzanne: Right, I take care of all of that. Right. Max: Great. When you started your blog in 2006, you pick the word evil HR lady. Can you take us back to that moment in time when HR was evil, what did you mean by that. Did you mean that this is, this is how people perceive HR, because HR is always getting in the way that that sort of that old notion of. I have to go through HR it means I did something bad. Suzanne: I wouldn't say an old notion.  Max: You think it's still alive. Suzanne: It's still alive. I mean think about it, if your boss calls you in, and you walk in and sitting there in his office is the HR manager. How is that meeting going to go? You already know it's gonna be a bad meeting. Nobody calls HR in to say, Gosh, Max You're doing a great job I just really wanted to give you feedback clients love you your employees love you I just think you're great. They're not calling the HR manager in for that. HR shows up when there's a problem. And, you know, one of my favorite definitions of good HR comes from my friend Kate Bishop she's an employment attorney and an HR consultant and she says, Good HR is like the CIA. When we do a good job. You never know we were there. You only know when we mess up. And that's, you know, really true we're like this secret operation that goes on behind the scenes and when HR is functioning properly you don't think about HR at all. It's just like, what is that I don't know who that lady is. But when things go badly, then you're aware of them. So people still have this really negative attitude towards HR, and you being in the recruitment space should know this, that recruiters have a terrible reputation. Everybody blames the recruiter for everything that goes wrong in the hiring process. Some of it is the recruiters fault, some of it is the hiring manager's fault and some of it is that you were just a terrible candidate, but nevertheless who gets the blame the recruiter. What, are we done for the day? Max: I've heard some bad things about recruiters but you know I mean, at least recruiters are have something to celebrate right. This quarter win that they hired somebody. So there's a lot of upside there. It sounds like HR is a little bit more bitter where you're just, you know, you'll never be celebrated if nothing happens. But you'll be there when there's drama. And so, you must need a particular psychological build, to be able to do well in those conditions right to, you have to be able to have a very even calm temper. Suzanne: It would be a good plan. Does everybody have that? No they don't. Do we all have cats? Yes we do. Max: Did you all study psychology? And then no, a good chunk. Suzanne:  My degrees are actually in political science so that's a Max: Not too far, not too far from psychology. Suzanne: You know, you deal with bureaucrats that's a charm. Max: Yeah. Great. Well, I've already given the name of your website. Is there a better way to get ahold of you than to visit evilhrlady.org. Suzanne: There's so many ways to get ahold of me, there's my website, evilhrlady.org, I have a Facebook group called evil HR lady that right now we have about 6000 members and we discuss all things HR, and we share all the best HR memes. So, anybody is welcome to join that if you're smart enough to be able to answer our entry questions which are, why do you want to be here and if you just write yes I'm going to reject you. So you have to be able to at least put a sentence together. And that's a good way to reach me, I'm on Twitter at real evil HR lady, and I'm on LinkedIn every day. Max: I guess I still don't know if you're evil or not but I'm still very thankful for   Suzanne: I am good and Holy. Max: Holy? Okay, so there's the two sides of the coin there. Thank you, Suzanne It was a pleasure to have you on the, on our show. And we'll see you online.  Suzanne: Alright. Max: Looking forward to those blog posts. Suzanne: Absolutely. Max: That was Susan Lucas, also known as the evil HR lady. That's not the title I gave her. She gave it to herself. If you want to get an idea for the kind of articles that she writes, you can find articles labeled or titled how to get your boss fired or I'm in trouble for working too hard. Or president Biden's fire on the spot policy is a bad idea for your business. Another social commentary and commentary on HR practices. The main lesson I got from this exchange was that it's important to make sure your staff takes holidays. And the best way to ensure that is to start tracking it and enforcing it with, or without regulatory mandate. It is the best thing to do in order to keep the same workplace. I'll be implementing those immediately. I hope you got something out of it too, and that's, you'll be following us for more. On your podcast platform of choice.

The pandemic has accelerated the exit of many Americans from big cities and tax heavy states to cheaper ones that can provide lower costs, bigger living spaces, and a better quality of life. New York and California have seen a big exodus and people are moving to places like Texas and Florida. Austin, gained the most people between April and October this year. Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, reporter at Bloomberg News, joins us for how the pandemic is speeding up relocations. Next, as coronavirus vaccines are rolling out, the big question is… Who is next in line? A CDC panel is meeting this weekend to discuss recommendations for who will get the vaccine after healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes. Groups such as teachers, firefighters, and even camp counselors are lobbying to be next. Rachel Roubein, health care reporter at Politico, joins us for who are the next most essential group. Finally, getting into the end of the year, everyone is experiencing Covid fatigue and parental burnout has reached a tipping point. Parents have had an especially jarring year having to balance everything from staying healthy, juggling remote learning for the kids, and also trying to balance work life. It is especially tough for moms out there that are trying to do it all or even dropping out of the workforce to take care of their kids. Anna North, senior reporter at Vox, joins us for more. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

The pandemic has accelerated the exit of many Americans from big cities and tax heavy states to cheaper ones that can provide lower costs, bigger living spaces, and a better quality of life. New York and California have seen a big exodus and people are moving to places like Texas and Florida. Austin, gained the most people between April and October this year. Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, reporter at Bloomberg News, joins us for how the pandemic is speeding up relocations. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

We all have our money stories sitting in the wings of our minds ready to “keep us safe” when we venture into new territory. Whether it be in our lives, our businesses, or any other venture, our minds are designed to keep us safe from the fear of the unknown. Listen as I do a live coaching session with Rachel Gully and discuss how investing in her business would mean the difference between living her dreams or wallowing in her current reality. Rachel is an empowerment coach for women seeking to overcome body image issues and a lack of confidence in themselves and their bodies. She’s been dabbling in her business for the past 18 months or so, but when COVID hit she knew she needed to start making some changes. She shares that investing in her own coaching would help her move the needle, but she’s not sure where to find the money. Now there are many different ways that we can all find the money to fund our dreams, but when it comes down to it, we all face the same fears. The one that is most prevalent for Rachel is the fear of failure and a feeling of having lost out on her dream. But the feelings she fears are the same ones she’s currently living with. Listen in as we dig deeper into Rachel’s fears and everything that’s holding her back from moving forward. We also visualize what life would be like if she did move forward in her business, did the work, and came out on the other side of 10 years living her version of success. Visualization is so powerful and the future that Rachel maps out is clear and detailed and obviously the vision that she needs to be in service to. If you’ve been dealing with your own mindset blocks, then you won’t want to miss out on this episode. In this Episode: [01:57] Welcome Rachel to the show for this coaching session. [02:19] Learn more about Rachel’s business and work. [03:15] Where is Rachel at in her business? [04:10] What was it about COVID that had her moving forward with her business? [04:43] Rachel shares her dreams for this company and her future. [05:53] What kind of support does Rachel think she needs to realize her dreams? [06:49] Which blocks have kept Rachel from signing up with I Heart Coaching? [08:16] Listen as Emily learns more about Rachel’s marketing process. [09:06] How does Rachel approach advising her students to overcome their body image issues? What would she say to herself when it comes to her business? [10:24] What would it look like for Rachel to stop playing small and go all in? [13:07] In what ways is she self-sabotaging herself? [16:16] There is a reason why we start with 6-weeks of mindset work in I Heart Coaching. [19:02] In one word, Rachel shares how she loves helping women. [21:36] Where does her money struggle come from? [24:55] What kinds of different decisions can Rachel start to make on behalf of the vision? [26:46] Rachel shares what comes up for her when she states her next steps out loud. [29:38] Why you need to focus on the vision that has been gifted to you. [31:57] What is one way that Rachel could fund her dreams and get the support she’s craving? [36:26] How would it feel to never take action toward her dreams? [40:24] The decisions she needs to make now to support her 10 year vision. [44:00] Rachel’s final thoughts on the call. Links & Resources: Subscribe to the Podcast: I Heart My Life Show on Apple Podcasts I Heart My Life Show on Spotify Connect with Emily: I Heart My Life Website I Heart My Life on Instagram I Heart My Life on Facebook I Heart My Life on LinkedIn I Heart My Lifers Community Email: info@iheartmylife.com Book a Call Episode Sponsor: Virtual Intensive for New Coaches Quotes: “Staying in the same place and not making different decisions means that you’re not going to get a different result.” - Emily Williams “You have to decide within yourself, how much longer are you willing to put up with a life that does not excite you and work that does not excite you.” - Emily Williams “I’ve got a bit of goosebumps as well and my hands are sweaty. It makes my heart skip a beat and makes me feel excited and happy. Like California is my happy place.” - Rachel Gully

Today, we're gonna be talking about the fact that many states have made laws that presume COVID-19 was contracted at work and makes you liable via workers' comp for any contraction of COVID-19. We're gonna talk about that and we're gonna talk about how to fight back against that argument and what would happen if you were to have a claim. First though, please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much any podcatcher of your choice. You can also subscribe to peopleprocesses.com, which will give you exclusive subscriber-only content.  Now, let's dive into this. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order creating what they're calling a rebuttable presumption to receive workers' compensation benefits, that employees who test positive for COVID-19 contracted the virus at work. Now, what that means is they have created an executive order that says, if you got COVID-19 and tested positive, there is a presumption that you contracted the virus at work. But it can be refuted or argued against given very specific requirements and we'll go over those in a second. This is called  N-62-20 (https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/5.6.20-EO-N-62-20-text.pdf) . Its link at peopleprocesses.com. You can click on the words it'll go to the website, you can read the executive order. California has become the latest state in a line to expand these workers' compensation benefits to the employees during the pandemic.  We tuned into a webinar to hear McGuireWoods which is a law firm partner Sabrina Beldner, and her colleague in the firm's labor and employment practices explained that states such as Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin, have all enacted orders similar to California's. That seems to be a national trend. Again, that's Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and now California. "Like California, other states have taken actions to expand workers' compensation benefits to employees or create a presumption that employees contracted COVID-19 in the course of their employment to obtain workers' compensation benefits," says Ms. Beldner. Also, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and Vermont are among the jurisdictions where the efforts are pending to enact a similar presumption in favor of employees who have contracted COVID-19.  According to Beldner, the state order means that employers across the country who may want to rebut that presumption should implement considerable best practices, including: I'm going to go through these one at a time.  Establish a COVID-19 workplace health and safety policy that complies with OSHA and any applicable state or city health and safety mandates.  Establish a policy that specifies the frequency with which common areas and frequently touched surfaces will be sanitized and disinfected. Many companies have increased the amount of frequency that they do these things, but they have not documented them.  Implement workplace safety features, such as requiring frequent hand washing, face coverings when interacting with other employees or customers, and social distancing.  Provide employees with personal protective equipment, such as masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer.  Require daily temperature checks and reporting of symptoms.  Prohibit any individual who demonstrates symptoms or tests positive for COVID-19 from entering the workplace.  Required daily inquiries of employees regarding exposure to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19, such as family members, friends, or neighbors. And most importantly, track and retain all the prior information (in a method that protects confidentiality) to be able to...

Governor Jerry Brown is no ordinary politician. Like California, he is eclectic, brilliant, unpredictable, and sometimes weird. Join us virtually as Newton explains how Jerry Brown extended, but still radically altered, the legacy of his father, Governor Pat Brown. In his 16 years as governor (from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019), Jerry Brown's blend of compassion, far-sightedness, and pragmatism helped restore the California economy, balance the state budget, combat climate change, and defend immigrants' rights. Newton reveals the blueprint of Jerry Brown's offbeat risk taking: equal parts fiscal conservatism and social progressivism. Newton also reveals other sides of Jerry Brown, whose defeat on the national stage did nothing to diminish the scale of his political, intellectual and spiritual ambitions, and whose legacy demonstrates how politics may once again be effective in the future. MLF Organizer: George Hammond MLF: Humanities Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” John 12.   This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993): “Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.   I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.”[1]   Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made? Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth. On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too. In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season. Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.[2] It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”[3] In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on a person’s identity. For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day. This means that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.[4] The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole sworld full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones. But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.   [1] Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530. [2] Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75. [3] Ibid., 91-2. [4] Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm

Anthony is a managing broker of Buckingham Investments. Just as Buckingham Investments has been doing for over 50 years, Anthony seeks to be a trusted advisor and assist his clients with achieving financial independence and retirement security through investing in multi-family income property. He believes that real estate wealth is not created only at the time of purchase, but well before an investment is ever made through education and planning. Here are the topics we discussed: • When and why did you start investing in real estate? • Personally, I don't invest in California because I don't like gambling. What are different ways for investors to make money in a market like California? • What are some things investors should keep in mind while investing in expensive markets? • How do you analyze the deal and location? • Can you mention the mistakes you have made? • Can you tell us @ your best deal and worst deal? • Any advice you can give your younger self knowing what you now?

Anthony has about 110 multifamily units in the Los Angeles area, and has learned a lot since 2011 when he only had about 5 units. It’s refreshing to hear about someone who can find deals in California, a lot of natives in California will look in other states. Hear how he is able to find deals in his backyard. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!   Best Ever Tweet: I don’t consider what we do speculation   Anthony Walker Real Estate Background: CEO and managing broker of Buckingham Investments, an investment property brokerage firm Helps clients learn, plan, and invest in multi-family properties since 1963, teaches seminars on investing Owns a portfolio of multi-family properties in the LA area of about 110 units Based in Los Angeles, California Say hi to him at Best Ever Book: Think and Grow Rich   Made Possible Because of Our Best Ever Sponsors: Fund That Flip provides short-term fix and flip loans to experienced investors. If you're looking for a reliable funding partner, their online platform makes the entire process super easy, and they can get you funded in as few as 7 days. They've also partnered with best-selling author, J Scott to provide Bestever listeners a free chapter from his new book on negotiating real estate. If you'd like to improve your bestever negotiating skills, visit to download your free negotiating guide today.

- The North American Commercial Truck Show - Daimler Trucks Tests Platooning in the U.S. - Mercedes Teases New Sprinter Van - Subaru VIZIV Performance Concept - Suzuki Concept Has Jeep Flare - Automakers Don’t Like California’s EV Mandate - Super Cruise Takes CT6 Fleet Cross Country

- The North American Commercial Truck Show- Daimler Trucks Tests Platooning in the U.S.- Mercedes Teases New Sprinter Van- Subaru VIZIV Performance Concept- Suzuki Concept Has Jeep Flare- Automakers Don’t Like California’s EV Mandate- Super Cruise Takes CT6 Fleet Cross Country

http://divorce661.com - In this episode, we will discuss another reason why we don’t like California summary dissolution and what are your other way around it. Make su1re to listen to the latest podcast.

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.