Amanda Breuer and Paul Betancourt

[00:04] AMANDA BREUER: I'm 44. Today is July 27th. I'm speaking to you from Visalia, California with Paul Bettencourt, and this is the first time he and I are e meeting.

[00:16] PAUL BETANCOURT: My name is Paul Betancourt I'm 61 years old. It's July 27th. I'm in Kermit, California. My conversation partner is Mandy. And this first time we met, so we're neighbors in the Valley.

[00:32] AMANDA BREUER: So, Paul what made you want to do this interview today?

[00:36] PAUL BETANCOURT: Sonia made me do it. I'm a. I'm really interested in this type of conversation. Depressed how we tended to retreat into silos, and I find conversations much healthier in person than by meme wars on social media. So I think it's a great opportunity. What made you want to do this interview today?

[01:09] AMANDA BREUER: I feel you on a lot of that, Paul I recently moved to Central California from Los Angeles, and I think it was nice and refreshing to sort of get out of that bubble. You know, there's a lot of diversity inside that amazing city and different perspectives. But I just, I don't think. I don't think we remember how to talk to each other anymore. And, you know, I think even with the pandemic, it sort of forced us a lot more into, you know, social media and technical sort of bubbles and reinforce some of those divisions. And I'm excited to find channels that are willing to facilitate some conversations and connections that may not, you know, maybe we wouldn't have had. Yeah.

[02:07] PAUL BETANCOURT: Sorry, I didn't get much to work with there.

[02:11] SPEAKER C: So I put your bios in the chat. So if, Mandy, you could read Paul's and then if you have any questions to ask about that, and then Paul if you could read Mandy's and do the same.

[02:24] AMANDA BREUER: All right, so Paul is a semi retired farmer who teaches part time. Paul was born back east, grew up in San Diego, and has been a farmer for decades and thinks this broad experience gives him some perspective on the issues that we face. Pauline's conservative, but he sees himself as a problem solving conservative. He didn't really much like the religion question. He thinks the term religion spooks people and prefers to say that his faith is the center of his life.

[03:01] PAUL BETANCOURT: Randy is a text. Pat, explain that. Living in California for over 21 years, queer public educators, climate change advocate, guitar player, and alpine hiker.

[03:14] AMANDA BREUER: True story. I would love to know what kind of farming did you do, Paul

[03:21] PAUL BETANCOURT: Oh, mainly cotton, wheat, and almonds for the last few years. But we, we did everything. We grew tomatoes, sugar beets, barley, garbanzos, black Eyes, corn. We used to run cattle up and Kinga just trying to keep our heads afloat.

[03:41] AMANDA BREUER: How did a dude born back east get into this?

[03:45] PAUL BETANCOURT: Met a nice girl in college. We live on ground that her grandfather farmed. Our next door neighbors are aunt and uncle who live in a house her grandparents built in 1938. So I'm down to 27 acres of almonds, and I'm looking out my office window through the backyard to those almonds.

[04:09] AMANDA BREUER: I love almonds. Way to go. I grew up on a farm in West Texas, so my family ran Hereford cattle and did a lot of, or they still do a lot of cotton farming. So I'm no stranger to the agriculture. You know, the ins and outs of agriculture. It's a lot of work, a lot of people. Hey. And stock showing stairs paid for like two years of college. So.

[04:39] PAUL BETANCOURT: Cheryl's dad paid for his tuition at Cal back in the 50s. He sold all of his dairy cows that were his 4H projects.

[04:48] AMANDA BREUER: I was a 4H kid. I. I never slept past 7:30 my entire growing up life. So 7:30 was late. I was excited to be able to sleep till seven. But, you know, snow, sleet, or hail, sun, it doesn't matter. You have to take care of animals. But it taught me a lot about, I appreciate, I guess, the rhythm and consistency of work and kind of working with your hands. And, you know, I think showing steers growing up, it's part of the reason why I eat mostly vegetarian or pretty low on the food chain because you got these little animals as like, babies, and as soon as they weaned from their mom, they were in your care. And so I think growing up with, like, growing up with, you know, little calves as they turned into steers and then kind of their life path was. I was kind of shocked when I was nine when I thought I'd done so well. I won second place at the San Antonio stock show. And I walked my steer through this thing and I didn't really quite understand what was going on. And I thought it was really good because I got second place. And then like all of a sudden, they slammed a brand on his cheek. And I was like, what's going on? And then we get all the way to all these gates, keep going through these gates and tunnels, and we get to this truck ramp. And they told me to take the halter off of him. His name was Kicks. And I had no idea what was going. And I took the halter off Kicks. Kicks is looking at me. I'm looking at Kicks and my dad said I had to say goodbye. And it was just like this really crazy moment and, like, I had to say goodbye to my friends. Like, he was my friend. Like, again, I was out there, you know, if it was raining, sleeting, snowing, blowing dirt, doesn't matter, like, you're out there having to work with them. So that was traumatic.

[06:47] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yeah. I was gonna say how traumatic.

[06:49] AMANDA BREUER: Yeah, that's fine. Somebody captured a picture of me and kicks and it's the saddest look on. It's heartbreaking. But we both. Both his big brown eyes and my blue eyes. We're not.

[07:10] PAUL BETANCOURT: Anyway, I agree. I've said for years we'd have a lot more vegetarians if people knew, you know, how their foods processed. Because they see steaks wrapped in cellophane or hamburgers, you know, shoved out on a plate and. And they don't know what goes on behind it.

[07:26] AMANDA BREUER: Yeah, yeah. It taught me a lot about, I think, food ethic and, you know, just trying to respect eating closer to the land. And, you know, my nephews are hunters and I try to tell them all the time just about the importance of taking responsibility for the life that you decide to take, so.

[07:45] PAUL BETANCOURT: Absolutely. Well, I think that was part of the introduction. There was that word respect, and I think that's one of the words that's lost in our public discussion. We don't respect disagreement. We don't. You know, you're trying to encourage your nephews to respect the natural world. And I think there's a worldwide shortage of respect.

[08:13] AMANDA BREUER: You know, I think a lot of that, in my humble opinion and just my experiences, you know, I've been in and out of rural and urban environments, just both professionally and personally for my entire life. And I think that when people lose connection to the land, I think they lose connection with each other. And I think there's a lot of really hopeful opportunity. I think around some of the. You know, I work a lot in environmental education and really connecting students to the natural world and families to the natural world is one step I think we can take to connect, you know, deeper to each other too, as we start to see each other as part of a natural ecosystem.

[08:55] PAUL BETANCOURT: Absolutely. Are you familiar with either Valley Clean Air now or sustainable conservation?

[09:03] AMANDA BREUER: Both of them, actually.

[09:05] PAUL BETANCOURT: Okay. I'm on an advisory board for Suscon and I'm long term board member on Valley Clean Air Now.

[09:13] AMANDA BREUER: Awesome. Absolutely. You know, I think there's such an opportunity here in Central California just around land use and strategic land use. And, you know, I think farming has a Huge opportunity to mitigate a lot of climate change effects despite even having, you know, plants are our friends and plants pull carbon from the air and put it right back in the soil. So I'm excited to see what farmers that are dabbling into regenerative farming and regenerative agriculture. There's some really cool projects out here happening, and that makes our air, water and land a lot healthier.

[09:55] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yeah, that's one of the things we've been working on with sustainable conservation. Because I've got a neighbor who's farmed organically for 30 years now, and he has not managed to increase the organic matter in his soil and kind of come to the conclusion the valley heat cooks it out. And that was kind of my experience, rotating wheat and tomatoes with cotton. And we need some bench science. I mean, we need some hardcore bench science. We don't need politicians waving their magic wands and saying things. We need to figure out how to make that work in the valley. Because there's been a lot of talk about carbon sequestration and agriculture for over a decade now, but nobody's figured out how to do it in our climate.

[10:43] AMANDA BREUER: That sounds like a good science problem.

[10:45] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yep, yep. And that's why, you know, I've been working with the folks at Suscon on that particular one. You know, they ask, what do you need help on? There's a good one right there. So. Yeah, and I agree with you. You're living near the land. You know, I frequently get this conversation. Well, it's less now, but when we first moved up here, you know, people found out I grew up in San Diego, and it's like, I'm living up here. It's like, what the heck are you doing up here? And I tell them, you know, yeah, it's. The weather's too stinking hot three months of the year here. The traffic sucks down there all, every day.

[11:19] AMANDA BREUER: That's true for me.

[11:21] PAUL BETANCOURT: It's. It's that connection with the land. Living through the seasons, the daily cyc, you know, feeding the livestock when we were running cattle, you know, taking care of the horses, you know, living through the seasons. You know, Thoreau wrote, you know, eloquently about it, but, you know, we get to live it here. And there's. There's a certain beauty to that, which to me is priceless.

[11:47] AMANDA BREUER: It's true. It's really pretty out here. I live where I live to be really close to the trees. So I moved out here for work, and part of the deal was I lived really close to the beach In Venice, California. So part of the deal was like, if I was going to leave the beach, I had to come to the trees. And so the sequoia trees are pretty spectacular creatures. So I settled right between the Cahuilla and the Kings just to be close to them for a little bit.

[12:19] PAUL BETANCOURT: So what's the hiking thing?

[12:22] AMANDA BREUER: I began a spiritual practice of long overnight backpacking trips in the summer. Working in education, there was always a little bit of time I could squeeze away. And when I got my first job out of grad school, it was for an environmental school. And we took. We had to be really prepared because we took entire grade levels out for overnight. And I was on an 11th grade team and we were going to have to do this big overnight backpacking trip. So I was like, well, I better figure out what that means before I just go out there with students. So I went out and I got hooked. And so I've been doing this really for almost, at this point, almost two decades. So I'll go get a permit and spend some time carrying all my weight up a mountain and back down again and all my stuff, pack it in and pack it out.

[13:17] PAUL BETANCOURT: Mainly up in the Sierra.

[13:20] AMANDA BREUER: You know, I've been. I spend a lot of time in the Sierras, But I have had the good fortune to really kind of get into some national parks all through the West. You know, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone in South Dakota. Done some little gaunts out there. One of these days I'll get all the national parks, But I try to get out and now that I live a lot closer, or you can be Sequoia national park really fast. I try to even put a lot of, like short, you know, three day two nighters or two days one nighters. But I think the reason why I do it is because it's hard and you spend a lot of time hating it because it hurts. And then all of a sudden you find yourself, like, surviving trials and tribulations. Like the blister that you get on your toe about 5.6 miles in and you realize you're still 31 miles, you know, to go before you get back to your car. But there's nothing like the quiet and the way that, though, you know, the water feels and sounds the air, and you realize the things you get to see if you put in the effort. And my most recent one was a couple weeks ago on the High Sierra trail. All the way back against the great Western divide is a little hallway called Valhalla. And I think it was a great reminder to feel how Small you are and how insignificant one is in the big scheme of things. And it's kind of liberating because you're small and insignificant sometimes when it comes to nature.

[15:11] PAUL BETANCOURT: About 30 years ago, I did the John Deere trail.

[15:15] AMANDA BREUER: I've done big chunks of it. So you've been on top of Mount Whitney? Oh, yeah, yeah.

[15:23] PAUL BETANCOURT: In fact, we came down. We had not used tents the previous week. And as we got closer to Whitney, there were thunderstorms every afternoon. So we put up tents and we left early in the morning to get up Whitney and get back down before the thunderstorm. So we got back to McClure Meadow, and just as it hit, and I had a little blue tube tent I was in. And it was like being in the middle of a thundercloud for about 45 minutes. But I stepped out and I got one of my favorite photographs of the Sierra of a rainbow over McClure Meadow.

[16:05] AMANDA BREUER: Oh, yeah.

[16:07] PAUL BETANCOURT: The next day it snowed as we left and saw a thunderstrike hit and start a fire miles away across the mountains. And so it just. Yeah, I don't. It puts things in perspective. You didn't even mention the stars. Yeah.

[16:27] AMANDA BREUER: All right.

[16:28] PAUL BETANCOURT: The stars you can see in Venice beach and the stars you can see up on the Great Divide. You know, that's why we didn't put sleep at night under the stars at 10,000ft. It's just amazingly beautiful.

[16:43] AMANDA BREUER: Yeah, I got to. I did Whitney from the backside, and that was on the portal side. It was pretty amazing. It hurt after 11,000ft, though. I was dumb. And then once I got under 11,000, I was fine again, but I felt, like, pressure, like all sorts of things and. Not to be gross. I was gonna say not to be gross, but, like, I love the fact that you have to pack. You know, you're packing everything in and packing everything out and including your, you know, all of your toilets. Toilet. I don't even know how to say that nicely, But I loved it because your pack weight never changed because the food. The food just changed form. So anyway, yeah, we just stayed packed there.

[17:28] PAUL BETANCOURT: But I used to get horribly sick above 8,000ft and finally found. Had a doctor and he says you're just getting dehydrated. Once I properly hydrated myself, I was much better up there. But I would get these splitting headaches. And you gotta learn to respect where you are. Nature has home field advantage. It breaks my heart every summer, you know, somebody gets lost up in the Sierra because they've gone on a hike and flip flops. Shorts and a T shirt. And they end up spending the night all alone out in the woods. And some of them don't make it home. It's. It's heartbreaking, and you just gotta. Nature.

[18:08] AMANDA BREUER: So, Paul who are some influential people in your life, and what are some of the things they taught you?

[18:17] PAUL BETANCOURT: That was one of those floating questions. Let's see here. You know, the obvious faith question we'll leave out. You know, it's like, who would you, like, want to have dinner with? My answer for that is Theodore Roosevelt. I like Theodore. He was an outdoorsman, different generation. But his speech, the man in the arena, was just an inspiration. It's not the critic who counts, the man in the arena who strives. Even if they fail, they fail boldly. And so I've. Theodore's on the list, the different teachers. Dr. Boslow, in college, was a history professor, and he just knew everything. And just like, for me, like, learning nature and being able to go out in the Sierra adds into perspective to my life and enrich it. Learning history is the same thing. You know, I understand when people say, we gotta live the moment because too many people, you know, put on miss what's happening in front of them because they're waiting for some future thing. But if all we do is live in the moment, we have no perspective on what's happening. And so history, you know, Dr. Boslow taught me a lot of history that gave. Gives me perspective when I look at things. And so those would be two. How about you? I'll pick up some others.

[20:04] AMANDA BREUER: These are always. This is always a hard question, because I feel like, you know, I. One of. My grandmother, my mom's mother, I think, was one of the first people that taught me about love. She was a sweet, crazy woman in Lubbock, Texas. And, you know, we would always be getting into something. And I felt like there were a lot of times she saw me, even kind of ways my parents didn't see me. Always kind of rooting for me. You know, I see a lot of. I love to play guitar in this garage band. And, you know, it's funny, because a lot of the ways that I play guitar, kind of how I watched her play piano, so sometimes I feel like she's kind of there. When she died, I cried so hard because I kind of realized, like, that was kind of part of my childhood was, like, over, even though I was an adult. But, like, I still felt like a kid in a lot of ways. And, you know, when I went to college, I had this really transformative experience. With in my freshman year. I think it was my freshman year. But I went to Texas Tech University and it's not, you know, I grew up. My parents went to church a lot and I grew up kind of going with them. But I'm super familiar with a lot of the Bible. But I heard Sister Helen Prejean speak. She wrote the book Dead Man Walking. And I watched this, like, older Catholic nun get up on this stage at Texas Tech University at Allen Theater and just slay the room with the reality of how a justice system plays out. And I think kind of growing up where I grew up in West Texas, you know, I had a decent education, but I didn't really have history teachers until I started taking community college classes. And I started to see like there was a lot more happening than we had been taught. And then I think having this, you know, this sister really kind of rocks my world about and shifted kind of a lot of what I think I had perceived as real was just incomplete information. So I. It kind of like launched me onto a path. I kind of look back at that moment and I would say that was a spark for just me wanting to try to make the world a better place and better than I found it, doing what I can to elevate communities and really kind of work to shift some of the power balance around so that more people can have access to little things like equity and justice. But I would say she was really influential. And, you know, I only got to see her from afar and say hi to her in a lobby. But that book was really powerful.

[23:12] PAUL BETANCOURT: Absolutely. She's a great soul.

[23:16] AMANDA BREUER: You know, just she spent a lot of her work in prisons in the south and really just the people that were in there and a lot of situations were in there just because they didn't have access to a good lawyer. And I think she was the one that kind of rocked my world of like, you know, long term effects of poverty on communities. And what happens if you incarcerate at the levels of. Some of our rates are detrimental to families and communities to ways that takes a long time to dig out from under. So, yeah, I'm trying to think other. This is such a hard question because.

[24:07] SPEAKER C: I've also put another question in the chat, by the way, we're kind of.

[24:11] PAUL BETANCOURT: Leaning into it already. Could you briefly describe in your own words your personal political values? And you're kind of circling around that.

[24:20] AMANDA BREUER: You know, it's funny because, like, I'm probably, I think, you know, my family would look at me and be like that, left winging like left wing liberal rag of a person. And you know, I don't even know if I have a home in a lot of ways. I think there's some really interesting things across the sort of center and left and just to the right of the center as far as political values. But you know, I do believe in good regulation. I think there are smart regulations that help at a systems level that individuals can't do, local communities can't do. I think there's a lot of power in the local communities and when groups of people get together. But I also believe that a lot of the change that we need, you know, does need to have some at scale versions. And I think we can be. I'm definitely, I'm not a socialist, I definitely. Or as far as like a communist. I definitely feel like democracy is in capitalism. I'm down for that game. Regulations. Yep. But I think like smart regulations. When I think about climate, I don't think that in like we've been piecemealing things really since I mean, the only legislation we've had at a federal level were in the 70s that was the first set of like the Clean Water act and the Clean Air act or in the seventies passed by Nixon and a Republican Congress. We had a little bit of another little round when science showed us that the ozone layer was depleting due to overuse of particular types of, you know, chemicals in our aerosols. And policy was made at a federal, actually at an international level, but definitely at a federal level and then into an international level where we actually got the, we prepared the ozone hole. So I think about some of those big scale regulations that are needed to get the kind of. Because some of this change that we need is at scale. It needs to be at scale, otherwise we're never going to see any kind of impact. So I think that I think about the problems and where is the, you know, and I do think that local and civic engagement, like local civic engagement is important. You know, as a public educator, I want our students to be actively working in the community, actively voting, actively, you know, trying to shape policy and influencing policy and being involved. And I think, you know, a lot of that's missing, I think even these days, kind of as with social media, is that we've missed this opportunity for town halls and for people to interact on the square and to argue kind of publicly so that we can find. Because I think in a lot of ways we can find, win wins across things. But I do think, you know, I want to support businesses and I want to support job creation. But I also know that some, you know, public health also plays a role in that. So I guess regulations that I think, you know, scale, you know, big scale regulations that really impacts public health for the better. And I do feel that climate action comes down to a lot of health, land health, but also public health. But I don't see us as separate from the earth. So if the land, if the earth isn't healthy, then how are we healthy? So, and the Earth is just a collection of systems, right? So and finding our way in our systems and how we play, you know, we're part of that system, but we also influence that system. So we're an influential creature, humans Connecting.

[28:14] PAUL BETANCOURT: Your comments on poverty and environment. Have you read Bjorn Lomborg or do you know who he is?

[28:21] AMANDA BREUER: I haven't read that.

[28:23] PAUL BETANCOURT: Former Greenpeace member wrote a book. He was going to prove that business was wrong, that, you know, business wasn't the horrible thing, you're screwing up the environment. And he wrote a book called the Skeptical Environmentalist. And it's like a 700 page brick. But one of his strongest recommendations for caring for the planet is eliminating poverty because the more secure people are economically, the more able they are to help care for the planet. And it's kind of coming, it's a long way around, but I thought it was a compelling argument. And then you mentioned local involvement. Eleanor Ostrom co won a Nobel Prize in economics. Are you familiar with Ostrom? So she started her research here in California and then worked it historically and around the world. Local control of natural resources gives better answers than something from the mothership. And she may, you know, she wins a Nobel Prize on these, but it's a pretty compelling argument. So, you know, I'll answer the question you gotta ask, you know, yeah, some regulations, fine, but I think we've gone way overboard. I've literally sat in meetings. Schwarzenegger appointed me to the Regional Water Quality Control Board. I served for three years and went up to Sacramento regularly. And I sat in, in meetings and people were going, well, we haven't regulated that. I'm like, let's leave it alone. It seems to be working. But there's this. People feel compelled to regulate everything. I'm, you know, in part of my answer on personal political values, I definitely lean toward the government that governs best is the one that governs least. I get a little nervous the more invasive government becomes. Sure, I like clean water and clean air. I like good pesticide roots. I raised my kids in this house and on this farm. I'm not going to do anything to hurt my kids. But, you know, some of this stuff is getting a little. A little over the top.

[30:40] AMANDA BREUER: You know, I just kind of think about water in California such a wacky, you know, because I love John Wesley Powell. When the west was really being developed and settled and when they were trying to figure out, like, you know, because they wanted to. They wanted to make agriculture kind of boom in the west, and they wanted to settle the west, and so we have to control the water. And I feel like John Wesley Powell was really the holdout when he was like, actually, local watersheds, like, we should. We should arrange ourselves by local watersheds, organize ourselves around local watersheds and manage ourselves by local watersheds. And nobody listened to them. We just dug channels and we built dams, and we built more dams and we dug more channels, and now we sucked all the groundwater out. And I don't know if we realized a lot of the impact of, like, well, you know, and this is where I think a lot of local people kind of. I guess it was more kind of statewide. And there was some federal overreach in there, too. But, you know, California's water story is crazy. And just seeing. I mean, we literally moved rivers. We have moved whole wild rivers down. I spend a lot of time on the San Joaquin and the Kings and the Cahuilla river, and it's just, you know, and I think there's a reckoning about. And I think ag can be smarter. I think. I don't know if necessarily we need ag to the scale that we have, only because our food waste in this country is ridiculous. Like, we throw away so much food. We're making food for a population at 2050. Although I'm also really thankful for our food production, you know, because I think about a pandemic. Our food system didn't fail. You know, there were some issues here and there of getting food to places, but barely. So I have a lot of respect for that. But I also think that there's opportunities for us to innovate and think about land use. Like, does it all need to be farmed? Could it be grazed? Does it. You know, like, I think we have to do some reckoning around water, because I don't think water is as infinite as we all thought.

[32:55] PAUL BETANCOURT: But here's the magic number. So what did almond farmers get beat up on five years ago? It takes a gallon of water to grow one almond. Wrong number. This is not Paul's number. This is the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. It's online. You can Go look it up yourself. The magic number is 800 gallons of water per person per day. This is a global number, not just California. That's what it takes to produce the food for every person on the planet. That's a lot of water. And if you multiply that by 38 million Californians and always check my math, it's not 31 million acre feet of water to produce food just for Californians. And you know, so we need to, you know, I've asked for years, who's the end user of water? Is it the farmer or is it the consumer? And obviously I'm thinking it's the consumer. Do we have to share it carefully? You betcha. You ought to see the looks on my faces of my students when I bring this up in class. Who owns the water of California? And my farming neighbors get this wrong. You know the answer. It's owned by the people of California. I don't own the groundwater under my farm. And you know, so that means I've got to be responsible with a commonly held resource and that, that ties us together. And it's important that we know that we got a ways to go. So that's why in my thing about problem solving. Conservative. Yeah, well, my boss in Madera said I'm not as conservative as I think I am. You know, there's some accusation that conservatives don't want to fix anything. They're stuck in the past. They want. No, no, no, no, no. You gotta be an idiot to look to read today's newspaper and not realize there's problems out there. That he was conservative because he, he wasn't inclined to throw out the things that had worked in the past.

[35:01] AMANDA BREUER: And that's, I think, well, what's frustrating too, a lot, is that we've lumped. I don't know, I don't even know if conservative means what conservative used to mean. I'm not even sure liberal means what it used to mean. Progressive means what it used to mean. Like, I feel like these have taken weird amalgamations of like, people just sort of tacked everything on it. And I feel like, and people judge, like, hard, like the minute that they find you're maybe in one particular place on a spectrum, like they've already judged you. And it's part of the reason I have a lot of frustration with like, the super far, far left that, you know, I have a lot of respect for, like, I'm going to just put it out there. I have a ton, immense respect for aoc, but I have some people that, like, I think the election, you know, the last round of election was really hard on a lot of friends and a lot of family because last two rounds, just if you weren't, you know, I had a group of friends that if you weren't for Bernie Sanders, then you were gonna, you should be in hell burning. And some of those friendships have suffered and not come back. But I think that's a. There's a good question put in here. It's like, do you ever feel misunderstood by people with different beliefs than you? And I think also do you feel misunderstood by people with the same beliefs as you? How so?

[36:38] PAUL BETANCOURT: I shouldn't mention social media, but, you know, some, some friends on Facebook yesterday were complaining about, you know, new regulations up in the mountain areas where they're rebuilding after some of these fires. And I wrote in, guys, we're building houses and places we shouldn't be building houses.

[36:57] AMANDA BREUER: Preach.

[36:58] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yeah, I visited a friend coming back from a motorcycle trip to Idaho a few years ago. They were up in Reading. Beautiful three story house with the pool and the three car garage set in the forest. It was gorgeous. And three months later it was ash. That fire up there caught him. And having been in there, good land that was just, you know, there were these houses, you know, and tucked in the forest and they were at risk, you know, and so we need to think and look at Tahoe, you know, in our lifetime, how crowded some of the areas of Tahoe have gotten. I haven't been up there in 20 years, but I get the impression they're kind of packing them together up there. You got folks from the Bay Area with some money and who wouldn't want to live in Tahoe? It's gorgeous. It's one of the jewels of the planet. But we need to rethink this. There's a certain sense we're loving the planet to death, but we're also setting ourselves up. So I didn't win any friends with my comment about that because they all want to build their cabins wherever they damn well feel like.

[38:12] AMANDA BREUER: Yeah, you know, I think it's hard, I think, to like, I am so down for so many conversations, like, let's sit down for coffee and a beer or trying to like engage. Especially since I moved out of LA and into like Central California, people will talk to you a lot more here, really. Whereas maybe in LA and San Francisco it takes a long time to get to know people, unless you kind of have met them through work or something. But to really kind of get into some really interesting conversations, like, you know, it takes a Long time. I feel like you can at least get a conversation starter going here a lot faster. But I think, you know, this place is way more purple than I would. I would think I originally would have thought because when I was. When I started, when I moved out here, my friends were like, what the heck are you doing? You're going to like, red territory. And, you know, it's interesting. I came out here and I have. I've definitely run into the super conservatives or how, you know, they identify as loyalists to a lot of, I think, the values and beliefs of number 45. But, you know, I think the biggest thing is some of the relationship that I think conservatives have made. Their politics and their religion, really, I don't even know if it's tied together, like, in a way that I don't even know if it's healthy, like codependent in a way. And I think it's funny, too, because I'm watching again, most of my family is super conservative and we don't talk about politics at all. They don't want to talk politics. We can only talk about the weather and Texas Tech sports. Those are the two. Okay. And I can sometimes talk about my work, but it's just really hard because I think sometimes when I do want to talk about things that mean a lot to me or, you know, that I would love to try to find common ground with people that are really different. Like, if it doesn't match up with their religious belief, you're out. You don't have a shot. I'm not listening to you. Or they're going to try to, like, save you. And I, again, I grew up. I grew up in Christian, evangelical, Christian churches. So I get, you know, the importance of that community. But I also, like, I don't know, I want, like, is it healthy?

[40:52] PAUL BETANCOURT: But you spoke eloquently earlier about one of your heroes who brought her faith and politics and social issues together.

[41:01] AMANDA BREUER: Where are those, though? I don't, like, I feel like in the 60s there were a lot of people that kind of, like, definitely saw some of the liberation work of African American. As you know, there was definitely. That was rooted in some deep spiritual practice and, you know, church effort. But I feel like it's just so hard to find ways to connect with evangelicals now right now. Although I will say, like, there are pockets. There are definitely pockets. But even, like, maybe Sister Helen Prejean was like an anomaly. Maybe she was a pocket in sort of that, you know, church and in that work that she just happened to be Catholic.

[41:54] PAUL BETANCOURT: I don't know, well, the Catholic Church is interesting. It's a pretty broad tent. You know, we did right. We did get St. Francis and Mother Teresa. Many church that can turn out those two I'm pretty impressed with. So I, by the way, you know, like, I, I met Mother Teresa. So you had experience meeting your saint? I got to meet one. And yeah, she was a lot shorter than I expected.

[42:28] AMANDA BREUER: Big in other ways. Yeah.

[42:31] PAUL BETANCOURT: But I, I, you know, I understood. You know, I'm not a complete idiot. I understand religion's been abused and the combination of politics has a long history, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive. People are trying to live out their values, and not just Christians, but anybody who's trying to live out their religious faith. I have tremendous respect for them, and I've actually made the argument we're kind of proud that we've taken religion out of the public arena. But if you take values out of the public arena, what do you have left? Money and power. I was in Beijing a few years ago. My tour guide was proudly told me, we don't have religion in China. And I go, cool, where do you get your values? And he hangs his head and he goes, we don't have values. What you're left with is money and power. So I would hope we can use faith to inform our lives.

[43:28] AMANDA BREUER: So you did mention that faith is center. Like, you feel that your faith is the center of your life, even though the religion question spooks you a little bit. Can you speak a little bit more to that?

[43:39] PAUL BETANCOURT: Sure, yeah. If you say you're religious, people put you in a box and slide you over and yeah, I hate being called religious. So that's where I come up with that phrase, you know, my values come from my faith. And so. But that's what I mean by that. But again, you know, I'm comfortable enough. I taught world religions at the college level for a while, and it was. I enjoyed learning about them. Yeah, when we're in traffic and I'm fuming and smoking, I tell my wife I'm not a very good Buddhist because Buddhism, you know, life is suffering, and suffering comes from desire. I desire to get from point A to point B, and I can't get there because people are idiot drivers. So I just, I'm not a good Buddhist. But, you know, there were business students were teaching this world religions class, and they're kind of, you know, what the heck are you teaching us about religion? It's like, guys, you know, we live in a globalized world. You're Going to spend part of your career overseas. You need to understand the culture and the values, and they're often rooted in religion. You need to understand those are the people you're going to be doing business with. So I. I respect others religions. I draw them, my values, from there.

[44:59] AMANDA BREUER: And where do you think you learned that? Like, where did you think you learned how to be open to the differences, you know, and more than just respect, but also maybe, like, accepting them, you know, or maybe not just accepting them, but respecting them.

[45:17] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yeah, but you. You brought up the shift in your education when you got to college. You know, too many people. Education is indoctrination, and I sure as heck don't want to indoctrinate my students. My job is to get them to think a little bit. And I would add to that. You know, Mark Twain said, you know, travel is fatal to prejudice. It's kind of like social media. You know, if all you see is social media, you know what those people are like. And if you don't travel, you know what those people are like. But when you. When, you know, I've been blessed and fortunate enough to do a little traveling and we spent a semester in Mexico while we were in college, and it just opens perspective. Made me a better listener, Gave me a little more perspective again, like, history gave me perspective. Travel's given me perspective on things. And back to that respect thing, you know, there's one judge in the universe and I'm not it, so I have zero interest in that, you know, So I look at faith differently.

[46:29] AMANDA BREUER: I'm trying. I feel like in a lot of ways, I feel like we've kind of talked, you know, deep, and then we kind of dance around some things. I find myself doing that too, you know, like. But I'm curious about the question that we got posed with here, is like, is there something about my beliefs that you don't agree with, but still respect?

[46:50] PAUL BETANCOURT: No. I haven't found much we disagree with. Okay. I'm not AOC's biggest fan, but I'll probably get over that.

[47:00] AMANDA BREUER: She's a firecracker.

[47:04] PAUL BETANCOURT: You know, I like, you know, Andrew Jackson for the same reason he was a firecracker. You know, Do I like all of his perspective on life? No, but, you know, he was. He. He's the one that instigated regulations in the way we look in the modern world. And so, you know, yeah, that's part of Viva la virans. You have a deep respect for the natural world. I sure appreciate that. You want to see the world a better place. I'm with you. I'm okay with that. You probably have bigger respect for stronger government than I do, but that's what.

[47:50] AMANDA BREUER: Makes it interesting, you know, And I think the reason why I might feel that way is because. And again, I'm going to. I'm saying this with the most respect, but, like, I'm not a white male. Like, I've had to come through the world as someone different than the norm or the dominant power of this country, really, since the beginning. And I've needed government to protect me or I've needed government to open doors for me that weren't available to me. And I think about, you know, I wouldn't be able to vote if it weren't for big government. And certainly that was a civic movement that pushed government to legislate, you know, federally, across all the states. But I also think about, I do identify as queer, and I am in a relationship, you know, with somebody that is. Identifies as the same sex as I do. And I wouldn't be able to have a partnership that I might want to get married someday without some of that federal protection and federal, you know, regulation. And so I think about communities that don't have access to the same levels of power. And, you know, I wonder if that's how we look at, I guess, regulation differently is just the access to that power and the proximity to that power. And things have been changing, but there's a lot of work yet to be done. Like, I still, you know, when I was at Fox Broadcasting, which was my first job out of college, I had to fight to get even close to what men were that had, like, fewer years of experience were making, you know. And I remember, like, I got pulled in with more experience, and I had a lot of respect for that department. So I'm not, you know, I don't want to sound like ungrateful, but, like, I had to fight for my assistant manager title when they were walking in with manager titles. And I had more experience, and it was very interesting.

[50:02] PAUL BETANCOURT: My beef with regulation is as a farmer, because my job's to produce and it interferes with my ability to produce. Your examples you brought up are fabulous. We just had the centennial of the right of women to vote. And I asked my students, why did it take when we talk about civil liberties and civil rights? Because I want to make sure they understand the difference between the two, because too many people kind of bore them together. So my students, to get through the class, they got to know the difference between civil liberties and civil rights. Why were women. Why Were women not allowed to vote for over 100 years? Were they any less intelligent? No. Were they any less capable? No. Why? Because the boys said no. That's a ridiculous standard. So you know, but I think, you know, this is politically unpopular. I think America is exceptional because those seeds are set there. 14th amendment, equal protection under the law gives you rights and abilities. It take us a while to get there, granted, but it took us a while to get there. But those seeds were set and it's an amazing deal. So as a conservative, I like the seeds that were set in the Constitution, the Declaration, and as a problem solving conservative, I see we need to. We still got a lot of work to do.

[51:25] AMANDA BREUER: I get hopedimistic about America, I'm not going to lie. Like, I do call it hope demystic though. Like it's the marriage of hope and optimism. So.

[51:38] SPEAKER C: And Mandy, can you answer the same question?

[51:44] AMANDA BREUER: Yeah, I think, I think I'm really curious still. Like as you say, you know, as a farmer your job is to produce and like regulation gets in the way of production. Like I guess I respect you a as helping us get good, healthy food to people and I appreciate the way that potentially you are thinking about how you can grow your farming practices in water conscious ways and helping, you know, seeing that land and farming can help air, water and soil. But I guess my question is like, why not some regulation to help sort of spur it along because left to your own devices changes flow.

[52:35] PAUL BETANCOURT: Well, and that's, that's Schlesinger's biography. Jackson is age of Jackson. He says exactly that. Jackson went nose to nose at the bank of the United States and he was the first one to use federal power to regulate business in the way we do today. And Schlesinger says that Jackson used that power because otherwise business would tear society apart in the pursuit of profit. Profit. That's absolutely true. As much as I'm a pro business guy, some of my neighbors are real jerks. I got that. But on the other hand, let's not talk about me. Let's talk about my friend Daniel. Daniel's the kind of guy you would love. He and his wife have been growing organic fruits and vegetables for almost 20 years and his wife was selling them at the farmers market and they would take the girls and go to the farmer's market and Daniel's grown fruits and vegetables and you know, 10 years ago he was telling me it was taking him five to eight hours a week just to fill out the forms to certify and do the paperwork to be an organic farmer. About five years later, he goes, I had to hire somebody full time to do it. And they've got to fill out a 3 inch binder to sell his produce to Whole Foods to certify it. But if he sells it to Costco, they won't use the same binder. He's got to fill out another 3 inch binder. And I got a neighbor grows cherries he's got to fill out. He sells to three sources and he's got to fill. Do the paperwork separately for all three. Fine, let's do the paperwork. Let's do it once, you know, kind of thing. So do we need regulation? Absolutely. Schlesinger's onto something. They're business people that would tear society apart in the pursuit of profit. But let's keep it reasonable. We talk about safe and sane, let's make it safe and sane regulations.

[54:34] AMANDA BREUER: And I think there's a lot of. I agree with you a lot there. I think some of the organic certification process in California is crazy. But that was also because a lot of conservative Republicans also weakened organic. And then you had, you know, the original OG organic people were like, no, it's got to be like this. And then all of a sudden the FDA is like, no, it's going to be more like this. And so you've got like all these different players of organic certification with. Actually we had smart and sane federal regulation that embraced the kinds of qualities and, you know, what is needed to make to the level of organic. Like, so I think there's, I think you're right. Smart and sane. So.

[55:20] SPEAKER C: So I put a set of three questions in the chat. We've got about. We're a little bit over time, but let's say we got about five minutes left. So yeah, if you want to pick one of those three to ask one another and then we'll wrap it up.

[55:44] PAUL BETANCOURT: See, you know, you're talking about the pandemic and you're concerned about climate regulation. Have you seen anything in our government's response to the pandemic that gives you confidence that they're ready to take on the climate issues? Because I don't see.

[56:06] AMANDA BREUER: Yes. Here is what the pandemic lays a roadmap for. I deal. I get a lot of questions. You know, I'm a public school educator right now and I'm doing everything I can do to beg families to get vaccinated. Like if we're going to take care of our little kids and we want them to be in school, which I want them to be in School, I do not want to work from home. I do not want to do virtual education. I want my students to be in school and doing our educational program, which is going to be innovative and amazing. So I think, and one question I always get is like, well, you know, I don't trust the vaccine and I understand there's layers and layers and layers to that, but people are like, it just came about so fast. And what's fascinating, and I think this is where I think this is a roadmap for us. When I think about climate. We dealt with the pandemic at a global scale. Yes, the United States dipst up in a lot of ways. So did several countries dipsed up in a lot of ways. But what happened was, is an international, like international scientists came together, they shared research, they shared data, they were looking. I mean, a lot of the MRNA vaccines were from science that we have learned from hiv, from Ebola, from the work that we had been doing on past viruses. And we got to a vaccine, we got to several vaccines across the globe in a short amount of time because the level of cooperation, the level of funding and devotion and focus that we had on a singular issue moved us to multiple vaccines quickly. I think about the space race when we were trying to get to the moon, and when the United States government basically pointed all of these science resources to education, to engineering, to manufacturing rockets that could get it to the moon. We got there so fast. And it just shows me what can happen at scale if we put our minds to it as humans. So I think the biggest thing from the pandemic, it showed me if we were to internationally and the United States, when we say international, the United States is a major part of that international work. And if we were to be in that and have the same singular focus to it, we could solve major changes or major problems. Because I do think a lot of this is just engineering and sociology and science like really kind of coming together to create. And I think nature also shows us how to do it. Biomimicry is a really powerful design tool. And a lot of our climate problems, I think we could look to nature and get the kinds of answers and be able to deliver that to scale. So I do think the pandemic has kind of shown us how that's possible. So. Yeah.

[59:18] PAUL BETANCOURT: Yeah, well said. Not sure if I agree, but well said.

[59:25] AMANDA BREUER: I guess I'm going to ask you the same. Well, do you want to talk about that disagreement or do we want to go to another question?

[59:32] PAUL BETANCOURT: The second half of the question, you know, how do we get past the device election? It's exactly this conversation. Yeah. I'm fundamentally skeptical. You know, again, I'm a small government guy, so I'm fundamentally skeptical. But just talking with my farmer friends isn't going to illuminate that. And I appreciate your participation, your passion, your answer to that. I'll have to think about that. And that's how we get past, you know, the divisiveness we continue to have. Have you ever gone to the store and not bought something and wish you bought it? Yeah, I saw one of these goofy greeting cards and it's two old guys on the beach and there's one guy walking away from you stark naked with a wrinkly butt and the other guy's walking towards you with a yachting cap and an ascot and a double breasted coat. And there's a quote from Patton that said, if we agree on everything, then one of us is unnecessary.

[01:00:39] AMANDA BREUER: That's good.

[01:00:40] PAUL BETANCOURT: Such a graphic. You know, the book of Proverbs talks about as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. You know, we need each other just to sharpen each other. We need the diversity of opinion to find reality. We've made truth subjective. I have my truth, you have your truth, or your truth is an opinion. For the Greeks, the aletheia is rooted. Truth is rooted in reality. And we need to sort out and find that reality. I can't do it by myself. I need your experience to help round out what I know. And that's how we get past the divisiveness. We listen to each other, you know, instead of shouting at each other.

[01:01:28] AMANDA BREUER: And.

[01:01:28] SPEAKER C: What a great way to.

[01:01:30] AMANDA BREUER: Oh, sorry, No, I was just gonna. I was just gonna be like, bravo, drop the mic.

[01:01:37] SPEAKER C: Thank you so much. So how was that for you too?

[01:01:41] AMANDA BREUER: I've done it live.

[01:01:46] SPEAKER C: I know.

[01:01:46] AMANDA BREUER: Well, I'm hoping that.

[01:01:50] PAUL BETANCOURT: Sorry, coffee or adult beverages?

[01:01:54] AMANDA BREUER: Exactly.

[01:01:56] SPEAKER C: Well, I'm hoping that we can do an in person listening event at the end of the year. There will be a listening event. Whether, yeah, it's virtual or in person is yet to be seen.

[01:02:06] AMANDA BREUER: But if it's in person, that would.

[01:02:08] SPEAKER C: Be super fun and we could all meet and yeah, good radio, since that's.

[01:02:12] PAUL BETANCOURT: What we're just performing.

[01:02:14] SPEAKER C: Did I get good radio? I think I got good radio. It sounded pretty good to me. Oh, I need to stop the recording.