BHS – 8A – ‘Foodie Friday’ with Jane Wells | This Week's ‘World in Review’

CNBC special correspondent Jane Wells fills-in for the Fork Reporter Neil Saavedra on this edition of ‘Foodie Friday.’ Jane talks about REAL Kona Coffee and ___. We’re gonna need a bigger number: Scientists consider a category for mega-hurricane era. This week’s ‘World in Review.’

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demandfrom KFI AM six forty. You are
listening to the Bill Handle show.I need coffee and Joy coffee and join
Coffee in JFI AM six forty BillHandle here. It is a footy Friday,
April twenty six. Some of thebig stories we're looking at. Supreme

(00:24):
Court yesterday heard arguments in the caseof Donald Trump and his claim of total
immunity. Specifically overturned the issue ofoverturning the twenty twenty election. This was
a federal crime. And also AppealsCourt yesterday overturned the sex crime. This

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is in New York of Harvey Weinstein. I talked about that you can go
on demand listen to any part ofthe show this morning. Now Neil is
not here, and in place ofNeil, Jane Wells is joining us CNBC
Special correspondent. You can reach heron x and Instagram at Jane Wells.
And a story that Jane is coveringhas to do with ConA coffee, real

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ConA coffee. Good morning, Jane, Aloha, Bill, how are you
Aloha? Aha? We're already therenow. ConA coffee is insanely expensive and
I'm still drinking. Maxwell house.Does that date me and tell you the
kind of quality of coffee I drink? Coneywell, I don't know if they

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do or not. Folder's Maxwell House. They may, I don't even know.
You know those big fifty five gallontins they go, Yeah, they
go for two dollars and twenty twocents for five pounds. In any case,
ConA coffee is first of all,really really good, high end coffee,
and it costs buckets of money.But ConA coffee may not be ConA

(02:00):
coffee that we buy. Would youlike to share with that? Yes?
Here's the thing. A ConA coffeeso expensive because they don't make a lot
of it. There's maybe only fourthousand acres of it here on the Big
Island, which is where I amright now. And unlike other states which
have done a job good job ofprotecting products from their farmers, like Vermont
maple syrup, if you put thatlabel on it, it's got to be

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one hundred percent Georgia, Vdalia onionsor potatoes. For Idaho and Hawaii,
the only regulation is if you putthe ConA on it, or Maui or
Kawai, it only has to haveten percent of coffee from that region there.
The rest can be from anywhere elsein the world. And the farmers

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say, well, that's like,you know, using one orange and nine
lemons and calling it orange juice.But they started to suspect here that it
wasn't even even a ten percent wasit ten percent con of coffee? And
a few years ago they found thebasis of a federal law because a couple
of farmers used to be lawyers beforethey retire to become coffee farmers. And

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they sued all these re retailers likeWalmart, at Costco and other places that
we're selling quote unquote called coffee anddetermined through some laboratory tests that zero of
the coffee in some cases and onlya minute amount in other cases was actually

(03:25):
from Kona. And they want fortyone million dollars in a settlement. Wow.
Yeah, but that's pure fraud,isn't it. I mean that now
we're talking straight out in misrepresentation andfraud. Where so that one doesn't surprise
me at all. The one thatdoes surprise me is the government of Hawaii

(03:46):
somehow protecting people who distribute coffee byputting in less than ten percent ConA coffee
or ten percent ConA coffee and callingit ConA coffee. Have they changed that
or is that still law in Hawaiiwhen they're able to do that, Well,

(04:06):
that's still the law that the mostyou have to put into something is
ten percent. And part of theproblem is all the power is in Honolulu
on Awahu, and these farmers areout on these outer islands and they don't
have a lot of cloud because there'snot a whole lot of them. But
the coffee blenders, the retailers,distributors, they're all in Honolulu. And

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so for years these farmers have triedto change the law saying that you know,
we want one hundred percent ConA coffeein it if you're gonna call it
ConA, or at least fifty percentplus one. They have failed repeatedly to
get those bills through. But nowthat this particular story, which I wrote
up and is also was commoned bythe New York Times, The New York
Times wrote about it, and theNew York Times also wrote about corruption in

(04:53):
the Hawaiian politics, there's now abills in the Hawaiian Senate and House that
would phase in wrapping up the amountof ConA coffee in something called ConA over
the next few years. The farmersdon't have much faith that it will pass
because of a past experience of that, but maybe now it's a little bit

(05:14):
of momentum. The problem is currentlythere's no enforcement mechanism. So the farmers
won this forty one million dollars ina settlement. The defendants challenged their lab
results but settled before it went tocourt. But they don't have any way
now going forward. They can't affordto continue to test to see if people
are being honest about it. Thelegislation would create a level of bureaucracy to

(05:39):
try and enforce it again, probablyin Honolulu's who good left with fact?
How much more is ConA coffee perpound than another high end coffee? You
know obviously? Well, I sayit's I don't know what it is.
I don't know what it is comparedto other high end coffee. But just

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talking to a arm because they're alsodealing with a leaf rust issue here in
ConA right now, which is affectingproduction. So normally it might sell for
if you buy it at the farm, which is the only way you know,
it's one hundred percent corn of coffee, it might sell for forty five
dollars a pound, but right nowit's selling for like seventy dollars a pound

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because there's so little of it now. They never sell it at pounds.
If you go to the store,it it's in half pounds or maybe like
seven ounces to try and break theprice down. But one reason the farmers
realized that are suspected that there wasn'tConA coffee and stuff that said ConA coffee
was the price is too cheap.They're like, this is not making sense.

(06:40):
They can't have ConA coffee in therebecause they wouldn't be making money on
this. Yeah, that makes senseto I don't understand that all where the
government is, they're basically backing upalmost fraudulent activity. I mean, you
know what is government for? Hey, when are you going to write about
the almost extinct weasel crab coffee that'salways fascinated me? Oh, I know

(07:03):
the what is it called the siboth? That stuff? Yeah? Have you
ever had any of that? No, it's it's for a cup, okay,
to eat something that some catlike creatureate. Yeah, and yeah,
they eat the beans. They crapout the beans and you pull the beans

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out of there and it's the weirdestcoffee in the world. Anyway, Wayne,
Jane, thank you so much foryour story. Take care, We'll
be back all right. Jane WellsCNBC Special correspondent, and she wrote this
story. By the way, it'snot just reporting on it. She created
the the what is It? NewYork Times story that she did. Now,

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this topic came up and I wantedto share this with you, and
this has to do with weather.Now you've heard the frame off the scale
and what do you refer to.Well, when I think of off the
scale, like the doctor one toyou know, ear in pain, one
to ten, tell me what itis, I go, I'm a twelve.

(08:11):
I mean that is how crazy itis. Off the scale, the
Richter scale, right, I meanit can go on forever theoretically, but
once we hit a seven, two, seven, three, it's off the
scale. Well, that's exactly whathas been happening and has happened to hurricanes.

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We go up to a category fivehurricane and we've gotten category five plus
hurricanes, and so scientists are saying, here's what we got to do.
It's we have to add a categorysix hurricane. So we go back to

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nineteen seventy three, the National HurricaneCenter introduces what is called the Saffir Simpson
Scale, that's category one through five, and it classifies hurricanes by wind intensity.
At the bottom of the scale isa category one sustained winds of seventy
four to ninety five miles per hour, which is still completely insane, but

(09:16):
it's at the bottom of the scale. We go to the top of category
category five and there are sustained windsof one hundred and fifty seven miles per
hour or more. So why wouldthey even consider another category a category six?
Well, the scale came out fiftyyears ago, and we know land

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and ocean temperatures have continued to risebecause of climate change, greenhouse gases,
et cetera. And as we've beentold, and it is absolutely true,
hurricanes have become more intense, stronger, winds, much he rainfall. Look
what we went through the last coupleof months with rainfall. It's worse than

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it ever been. I mean theysay there was one time when it was
worse. I don't remember that.So catastrophic storms are now blowing past one
hundred and fifty seven mile per hourmark, and unfortunately, with more regularity
and scientists are arguing, you can'tuse the saff Or Simpson scale anymore because

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it doesn't convey the threat of thebiggest hurricanes. So there was a paper
published earlier this year that compared ahistorical storm activity to a hypothetical category six
under the Saffir Simptoms scale. Ofthe one hundred and ninety seven hurricanes that

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were classified at category five from nineteeneighty to twenty twenty one, that's forty
years five hit the description of thatcategory six, and there were a few
times, but that's in another partof the world. So do we really
care? We do not now.Hurricane Patricia in twenty fifteen, which made

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landfall near Jalisco, Mexico, Octobertwenty fifteen, the most powerful tropical cyclone
ever recorded. The storm had weakenedto a category four by the time it
made landfall, and then in thePacific Ocean, the winds hit two hundred
and fifteen miles per hour. Asenior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,

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that's incomprehensible. That's faster than aracing car on a straightaway and the winds
were that strong, and so isit going to happen? Is a National
Hurricane Center going to be using thisbecause it makes tremendous sense. The answer
is no. And here's why thisscale one to five is not all that

(11:56):
good for warning the public. Itmeasures only sustained whinins. And that's just
only one of the threats that hurricanespresent. Matter of fact, here was
a figure that was thrown out inthe paper four hundred and fifty five direct
fatalities from twenty thirteen to twenty twentythree, ten years due to hurricanes.
Less than fifteen percent were caused bythe winds. The other one where the

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storm surges, flooding riptides. Andhere is why science has come in to
say, just give it up.You don't want a category six because thirty
years ago, that's all we couldbe told about hurricanes, how strong it
is right now, we didn't knowmuch about where it was going to go,

(12:39):
how strong it was going to go, with the hazards we're going to
look like. Now we have amuch better idea because weather forecasting, of
course, is on a whole newlevel because of the satellites, the computer
modeling and computer modeling is well,let me put it this way. Weather
is the most common complicated programs thatcan be issued or put into a computer.

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I mean, it is that crazy. I remember when the Kraz computer
first came out. That was thefirst supercomputer that was probably forty fifty years
ago. It was the only computerthat could deal with weather models to determine
what the weather was going to belike, and it didn't come close to
actually doing what it should do.So are you going to see category six?

(13:28):
Probably not. They're just going togive us other ideas, other ways
of determining, and that is hereare the chances of it going over here.
Here are the chances of the strengthwhen it goes inland twenty or thirty
miles. Here's what you're looking atin terms of potential damage. Yeah,
you're not going to see category sixanytime soon, although hypothetically there it is

(13:52):
gives us a better idea. Now, as we finished the last two segments
of the show, and what wedo is I share with you this week's
World in review Living under a Rock. Well, here's what you've missed,
piping hot off the newswires from aroundthe corner to around the world. Now

(14:16):
back to this week's world in review. All right, this week, boy,
big big stuff on the legal front. Donald Trump two items going forward,
one in front of the US SupremeCourt, which happened yesterday, and
I talked about this earlier. Reallyimportant stuff and has to do with presidential

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immunity in terms of the federal casethat Jack Smith has filed against Trump interference
with federal election in twenty twenty.Trump has claimed absolute total immunity because anything
that a president does is absolutely immunefor prosecution. The court. Supreme Court

(15:01):
now oral arguments, where you anidea of where the court is going to
go based on the questioning the justicesdo engage in with the attorneys. They
barely mentioned Trump. The issue oftotal immunity is off the table. No
one thinks total immunity is crazy.Trump's lawyers saying, yeah, even if

(15:22):
the president orders the assassination of arival, he's covered under total immunity.
I mean, that's crazy making.However, the limit of presidential power was
really important. How far does itgo? What's private, what's public?
Because even with Trump having engaged inlet's say, prosecutorial action because of private

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affairs that he did, private conduct, it really doesn't matter. This is
for the future. Gorsag said,this is for the ages and Trump and
it doesn't matter. I mean Trump, whether he's convicted, and he won't
be now the trial is delayed,and so it becomes academic. Once he's
sworn in and there's still going on, Justice Department just drops everything by his

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order, and if he is convicted, as if he wins, he'll pardon
himself. I'm convinced of that.But the big issue is presidential immunity and
how far it goes. Courts neverheard that. The other issue is Trump
is sitting in trial in New Yorkover the hush money case, and that

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one is more tenuous because he paid. What they're really going is not the
hush money. You actually can payhush money, it's not illegal. What
is illegal is easing that to interferein an election. And also what he
claimed were attorney's fees when it reallywas hush money. So there is some

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leg there are some legal issues there, and he's sitting in trial. He
has to for the next six weeks. The boy, he's not happy about
it. I just said, realsimple, this is a criminal trial.
You're in the courtroom, and he'snot very happy about that. And of
course he's in violation of the gagorder ten times now. All right,
So those are the two cases.Also Harvey Weinstein, that was a big

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one. Remember he was convicted inNew York given twenty three years for rape.
That case was just overturned by theappeals court in New York saying no
because there was error by the judge. Therefore the case is dismissed or has
to be it has to be retried. Because now when the case is dismissed

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because of error of the judge ofthe prosecution, then it's up to the
prosecutors say, Okay, we're goingto retry it, or many cases not.
It happens all the time where prosecutorsdon't go forward. Let's say there's
a hung jury eleven to one infavor of acquittal. They're not going to
go forward with it. I meanthey're done. And in this case they
have to go forward because it's sohigh profile. How could the prosecutor in

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New York not go forward with aretrial of Harvey Weinstein, who is effectively
the poster child of the B twomovement, started the Me Too movement.
Now he's still convicted in Los Angelesand he is doing sixteen years for the
crimes that he committed here and thatmeans that if they don't retry him in

(18:26):
New York and he does only quotesixteen years half off for good behavior,
he's he's gonna walk after eight years. Let me tell you, there were
some victims that are not very happyabout that, devastated and even devastated about
going back and reliving what happened.A lot of times prosecutors don't go forward

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or they take a plea when theyotherwise would not have because putting the victims
through again, because they have tobe witnesses, have to be in front
of the court explaining what happened.And it is brutal for these women to
relive what happened to them and nowrelive again what happened happened to them.

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But is it going to be retried. Of course, it is all right.
We're gonna come back and do afew more. You know, I
wish I could do this for anhour and a half. There are so
many things to cover. Another hugestory is that part of that massive bill
that the President signed giving money toIsrael and to Ukraine and Taiwan tucked into

(19:37):
that which obviously became a huge storyas Byte Dance own the owners of TikTok,
and TikTok either has to be soldwithin a year or it is going
to be banned in the United States. And in a two word statement from
byte Dance, it just said biteme and that that's it. And so

(20:03):
they said they're going to fight it, although I don't know how they're going
to fight it. And a littlebit of good news, couple of good
news stories that because I do alot of negative stuff because well that's who
I am. Voyager one and I'ma huge fan of the space world.
NASA regained communication with Voyager one andthis was launched decades ago. It is

(20:29):
now the most distant spacecraft from Earthin ever. There was a five month
computer glitch and they were able tobring it back and now the signal has
come back from fifteen billion miles away. A real interesting factoid is when you
have these satellites that are out therein for forefin Land billions of miles away,

(20:55):
do you know that the signal thatcomes in from them is basically less
than a what that it takes ofpower coming in from the satellite and the
satellites the dishes on Earth are ableto receive it. For those of you
that are Taylor Swift fans, whichI'll never understand. Her latest album,

(21:17):
The Tortured Poets Department. That's notbad, you know, it's not a
bad title. It became the moststreamed album album on its first day across
Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, three hundred million streams on Friday on
Spotify alone, and became the moststreamed album in a single day. And

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they did it. She did itin twelve hours. And again I don't
understand why she is as famous asshe is. Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, this is good news.Twenty twenty four inductees and it is Mary
Jill who is there? No,I know it's blige. It's just I

(22:03):
like the bulge of a ship.It just sounds better. Dave Matthews Band
share. I'm surprised as shere isn'talready in there. And back we go
to a bit of good news forthose of you that are Second Amendment people.
State legislators in Tennessee passed the billthis was Tuesday, allowing kindergarten to

(22:27):
twelve grade teacher K twelve kate totwelve grade teachers and school staff in Tennessee
to be armed. Teachers can walkaround with a gun on their hips,
as school staff, as cafeteria workers. You don't like the food. Really,

(22:48):
you want to say that again.And for anybody who's ever listened to
the show, you know how Ifeel about, you know, gun control
and unlimited second Amendment, Right,I always had a real problem with it.
I got to tell you this oneworks. This one works for two
reasons. First of all, becauseactive shooter drills that go on in every

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single school in the country now,and they're making it really tough. A
lot of safeguards, a lot ofconditions, training the ability and training not
in terms just firearms, but trainingin terms of active shooters protecting kids.
It used to be and when Iwas a kid, we used to have

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drills. They were fire drills whereeverybody would march outside. There were drop
drills. Those are the real funones where you drop to your you drop
to the floor on all floors,on all fours, and you would your
butt would be towards the window andyour face would be away from the window,

(23:53):
and you'd put your hands over yourneck. So it was an atomic
bomb, by the way, itwas dealt with the Russian the threat of
Russia dropping the bomb and it turnedout that if your ass was towards the
window, your ass would fry onemillionth of a nano second before your head

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would. Today it's active shooter drills, no bomb almost, no fires,
tons and tons of active shooter situationsgoing on in the schools. All right,
we're done, guys. We're backagain on Monday tomorrow. It's Handle

(24:36):
on the Law from eight to eleveno'clock. Amy comes back on Monday from
five to six o'clock with wake upCall, and the rest of us are
here until nine o'clock. As always, I have a good one. I'll
catch you tomorrow. This is KFIAM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio
app. You've been listening to theBill Handle Show. Catch my show Monday

(24:57):
through Friday, six am, nineam, and anytime on demand on the
iHeartRadio app.