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Today, KQED climate reporter Laura Klivans helps Ericka decode her PG&E bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC2258746301&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Links:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12033386/pge-electricity-rates-have-jumped-nearly-70-since-2020\">The Average PG&E Utility Bill Has Gone Up Nearly 70% Since 2020 | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1999400/bay-area-electricity-bills-are-some-of-the-highest-where-does-your-money-go\">Bay Area Electricity Bills Are Some of the Highest. Where Does Your Money Go? | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023805/pge-bills-keep-rising-what-can-you-do-to-potentially-lower-your-bills\">PG&E Bills Keep Rising. What Can You Do to (Potentially) Lower Your Bills? | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:51] \u003c/em>I’m Ericka Cruz-Guevarra and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:56] \u003c/em>All right, so what are you holding in your hand?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:58] \u003c/em>I am holding my PG&E bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:01] \u003c/em>This is Kenya Brown, she’s a mom of five and she lives in a one story house in the East Bay city of Bay Point. And she’s tried a bunch of things to try and lower her Pacific gas and electric bill. Weatherizing her home, asking the kids to turn off the lights and turn down the heat. But she’s never had to pay this much for her utilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:26] \u003c/em>Can you read it for me? What does it say? What’s the grand total?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:30] \u003c/em>$648 for one month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:35] \u003c/em>Like, I have to decide, like, am I going to pay this bill, or am I gonna eat food? And I have choose food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:46] \u003c/em>A lot of people are in this situation in California because you aren’t just imagining it. Utility bills are going up. But where does any of that money actually go? And why are bills skyrocketing in the first place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:02:05] \u003c/em>And so then I thought, it’d be fun to do a story where I just dive into someone’s bill and try to really understand this. And for me as a climate reporter, it took a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:02:17] \u003c/em>Today, KQED’s climate reporter Laura Klivens sits down with me and my PG&E bill to help me decode it and understand where exactly my money is going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:24] \u003c/em>Part of the reason why we wanted to do this is because, to be honest, this is the first time I’m actually looking at my energy bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:30] \u003c/em>You and everyone else. Yeah. Nobody like looks at this gobbledyguck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:37] \u003c/em>Laura Klivens is a climate reporter for KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:43] \u003c/em>I had been doing reporting and I’d heard here and there people being like, you know, only a quarter of your bill is actually for the making of energy, which sounded so crazy to me. And that is accurate. That’s on one end of the spectrum. It’s like a quarter to 40%. But I was just like, what else is in the bill? And so then I thought it’d be fun to do a story where I just dive into someone’s Bill and try to really understand this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:12] \u003c/em>So Laura, we’re gonna be looking through my PG&E bill here. And I think I just wanna start at the top here. I paid $56.11 on my energy bill in October. Is that… expensive?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:31] \u003c/em>No, you are paying a super cheap amount. So it’s like, it tells me that you are not using a lot of electricity and you’re not using a lot of gas. Average bill is around $300 a month. This was from an analysis that our old colleague, Matthew Green, did in March. And that’s up from 179 a month in 2020. So yeah, you’re getting a good deal. I mean, you not getting a better deal than anyone else. You just don’t use as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:56] \u003c/em>I also want to mention that I have time of use peak pricing plan, which basically means that my, as I understand it, energy is charged based on peak usage time. So I try not to use my laundry from 4-9pm at peak pricing times because it’s more expensive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:05:23] \u003c/em>And the reason why energy providers have these is because we experience an increase in demand during those times. That’s when most people are coming back from an office or whatever kind of job and going home and cooking and washing and whatever. And so there’s a bit of a strain on the grid. And also at that time in California, the sun is setting, right? And so we have a bunch of solar, but the curve of solar goes down at that time and then the demand either remains the same or goes up a little bit. And so then you have this sort of strain at that time. So that’s why they’re trying to incentivize people to not use as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:02] \u003c/em>So you’ve got my bill printed out in front of me. I feel very exposed a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:10] \u003c/em>I know, doesn’t it feel a little weird?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:11] \u003c/em>It does. And I’ve got my bill in front of me as well. So let’s go through this thing. So it is eight pages, but I want to start on the first page because it looks like there are three main things that I’m really being charged for at the top here. PG&E and electric delivery charges, electric generation charges, and current gas charges. So what is going up for most people in their bills, and why is that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:40] \u003c/em>There’s different reasons why our energy bills increase at different times. Right now, in the past like five years-ish, we’ve been paying largely for wildfires. What we’re seeing is an increase in one section of the bill, which we will talk about. And it’s called transmission and distribution. And this includes things like towers and huge wires, and then the local wires and poles that we see in our neighborhoods. And that’s increasing because we have to prepare those things to be ready for more wildfire so that if fire comes towards them, that they don’t just sort of melt and cause issues, but also that they don’t spark wildfires, and we’re also paying for the liabilities of past wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:33] \u003c/em>Because they have sparked wildfires in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:35] \u003c/em>Yeah, mhm.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Severin Bornstein: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:37] \u003c/em>So if you went back 30 years, it was basically putting up wires around neighborhoods and then maintaining them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:46] \u003c/em>I spoke to UC Berkeley professor of energy and economics, Severin Bornstein, and he said that 30 years ago, transmission and distribution was just cents out of your entire bill. And now it’s just, it’s a much larger percentage of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Severin Bornstein: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:01] \u003c/em>Now because it’s much more likely that when that wire falls, it will hit dry tinder and it will happen on a windy day when there’s just a lot more fire risk, we’re spending an enormous amount of money to avoid that risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:18] \u003c/em>Basically, people’s electric delivery charges are going up because of wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:23] \u003c/em>Yes, made worse by climate change, not being able to be managed easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:28] \u003c/em>I’m paying $29.97 for these electric delivery charges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:35] \u003c/em>Yeah, and that’s out of your bill of $56.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:38] \u003c/em>Right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:38] \u003c/em>So the majority of your bills going into that. One thing I do want to mention about the first page, this is also where you would see if you are in a low income program like CARE, you would seek CARE discounts here. They’re at least going to be 20% of pretty much around your overall bill, 20% off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:58] \u003c/em>What’s CARE?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:58] \u003c/em>It’s a program for if you qualify for a low-income program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:04] \u003c/em>Should we flip the page?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:05] \u003c/em>Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go to the next page here. Okay. It says details of MCE electric generation charges. So what is MCE, electric generation charges?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:19] \u003c/em>Okay, so this is where your bill is different than than other people’s and the same as other people. Okay. So generation is like, that’s the cost of producing energy. In California, we see it coming from natural gas, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and it includes the expense of the upkeep of these facilities. MCE is something called a community choice aggregator. Just rolls off the tongue, right? These are community power providers. That means that your electricity generation comes from them. You’re automatically enrolled in the community choice aggregator, in your case, MCEs, for your area. But if you’re here in the Bay Area region, you’re going to see different ones. There’s Clean Power SF, AVA, Community Energy is East Bay. So you’re enrolled in that program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:11] \u003c/em>And I am paying 17 and 68 cents on my electric generation charges\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:17] \u003c/em>So you’re paying some money to your community choice aggregator, and you’re also still paying PG&E. The reason why, when you’re part of one of these community choice aggregators, you also see that you’re paying PG& E is because PG& E still owns the poles and wires. They own the system, and so MCE uses their system, but they push their energy through it to you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:45] \u003c/em>I mean it is really complicated to really sort through this, but it does seem like there are some high level things that we can do to really understand and decode this a little bit, which I feel like you’ve really helped me with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:58] \u003c/em>That’s good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:59] \u003c/em>Why is it so complicated?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:11:02] \u003c/em>I don’t know why it is this way right now. I ended up profiling someone with a high bill and part of the reason why her bill was high was because there was an error in her bill. But because all the bills are high right now and that’s sort of the conversation, she didn’t think to question it. Moving forward, she’ll probably be paying $150 to $200 less monthly. She’s just received $1,300 of a credit. There are hotlines you can call for assistance or to help you with a variety of your bills. But I will say that sometimes, and as much as you can go to PG&E, they have a website or a page with all the resources, it’s still hard to advocate for yourself for your bill because when you call some of these resources, maybe you get somebody who’s not particularly friendly as your customer service representative. It’s confusing to read your bills and understand them. You might. Have limited English ability, these are some of the barriers that face people who have high utility bills and wanna sort of ask some questions about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mohit Chhabra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:10] \u003c/em>It takes like multiple experts, maybe some PhDs, a bunch of phone calls to understand one electricity bill in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:19] \u003c/em>I spoke to Mohit Chhabra at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and he said something funny to me, which was, you know, it’s just, it says something that you have to talk to like eight PhDs to decipher something like this\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mohit Chhabra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:35] \u003c/em>And if you want people to actually like understand and take action, maybe like having a simplifying like front end or something would be useful. And if they want these details, they can like access it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:47] \u003c/em>I don’t think it’s high on anyone’s agenda right now, but reforming this to make it user-friendly would be so neat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:53] \u003c/em>Well, Laura, thank you so much for looking at my energy bill with me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:58] \u003c/em>Thank you for being so vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:00] \u003c/em>I do feel very vulnerable, but I’m also proud that I guess my energy is not as high as it could be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:08] \u003c/em>I know maybe you can give tips. Yeah. What are your tips?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:12] \u003c/em>You know, what I do, I do have a tip. OK. I load my laundry the night before. Like I put the soap in, I put clothes in. And then I first thing in the morning during off-peak hours I run that thing. So by like peak hours, I’m folding the laundry. I’m not doing the laundry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:31] \u003c/em>I love that.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>You’re not imagining it — your Pacific Gas & Electric bill really is going up. In fact, according to a KQED analysis, the average PG&E utility bill went up nearly 70% between 2020 and March 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not just the cost: understanding what’s actually in your bill can be confusing. Today, KQED climate reporter Laura Klivans helps Ericka decode her PG&E bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC2258746301&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Links:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12033386/pge-electricity-rates-have-jumped-nearly-70-since-2020\">The Average PG&E Utility Bill Has Gone Up Nearly 70% Since 2020 | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1999400/bay-area-electricity-bills-are-some-of-the-highest-where-does-your-money-go\">Bay Area Electricity Bills Are Some of the Highest. Where Does Your Money Go? | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12023805/pge-bills-keep-rising-what-can-you-do-to-potentially-lower-your-bills\">PG&E Bills Keep Rising. What Can You Do to (Potentially) Lower Your Bills? | KQED\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:51] \u003c/em>I’m Ericka Cruz-Guevarra and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:56] \u003c/em>All right, so what are you holding in your hand?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:00:58] \u003c/em>I am holding my PG&E bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:01] \u003c/em>This is Kenya Brown, she’s a mom of five and she lives in a one story house in the East Bay city of Bay Point. And she’s tried a bunch of things to try and lower her Pacific gas and electric bill. Weatherizing her home, asking the kids to turn off the lights and turn down the heat. But she’s never had to pay this much for her utilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:26] \u003c/em>Can you read it for me? What does it say? What’s the grand total?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:30] \u003c/em>$648 for one month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kenya Brown: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:35] \u003c/em>Like, I have to decide, like, am I going to pay this bill, or am I gonna eat food? And I have choose food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:01:46] \u003c/em>A lot of people are in this situation in California because you aren’t just imagining it. Utility bills are going up. But where does any of that money actually go? And why are bills skyrocketing in the first place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:02:05] \u003c/em>And so then I thought, it’d be fun to do a story where I just dive into someone’s bill and try to really understand this. And for me as a climate reporter, it took a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:02:17] \u003c/em>Today, KQED’s climate reporter Laura Klivens sits down with me and my PG&E bill to help me decode it and understand where exactly my money is going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:24] \u003c/em>Part of the reason why we wanted to do this is because, to be honest, this is the first time I’m actually looking at my energy bill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:30] \u003c/em>You and everyone else. Yeah. Nobody like looks at this gobbledyguck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:37] \u003c/em>Laura Klivens is a climate reporter for KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:03:43] \u003c/em>I had been doing reporting and I’d heard here and there people being like, you know, only a quarter of your bill is actually for the making of energy, which sounded so crazy to me. And that is accurate. That’s on one end of the spectrum. It’s like a quarter to 40%. But I was just like, what else is in the bill? And so then I thought it’d be fun to do a story where I just dive into someone’s Bill and try to really understand this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:12] \u003c/em>So Laura, we’re gonna be looking through my PG&E bill here. And I think I just wanna start at the top here. I paid $56.11 on my energy bill in October. Is that… expensive?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:31] \u003c/em>No, you are paying a super cheap amount. So it’s like, it tells me that you are not using a lot of electricity and you’re not using a lot of gas. Average bill is around $300 a month. This was from an analysis that our old colleague, Matthew Green, did in March. And that’s up from 179 a month in 2020. So yeah, you’re getting a good deal. I mean, you not getting a better deal than anyone else. You just don’t use as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:04:56] \u003c/em>I also want to mention that I have time of use peak pricing plan, which basically means that my, as I understand it, energy is charged based on peak usage time. So I try not to use my laundry from 4-9pm at peak pricing times because it’s more expensive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:05:23] \u003c/em>And the reason why energy providers have these is because we experience an increase in demand during those times. That’s when most people are coming back from an office or whatever kind of job and going home and cooking and washing and whatever. And so there’s a bit of a strain on the grid. And also at that time in California, the sun is setting, right? And so we have a bunch of solar, but the curve of solar goes down at that time and then the demand either remains the same or goes up a little bit. And so then you have this sort of strain at that time. So that’s why they’re trying to incentivize people to not use as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:02] \u003c/em>So you’ve got my bill printed out in front of me. I feel very exposed a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:10] \u003c/em>I know, doesn’t it feel a little weird?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:11] \u003c/em>It does. And I’ve got my bill in front of me as well. So let’s go through this thing. So it is eight pages, but I want to start on the first page because it looks like there are three main things that I’m really being charged for at the top here. PG&E and electric delivery charges, electric generation charges, and current gas charges. So what is going up for most people in their bills, and why is that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:06:40] \u003c/em>There’s different reasons why our energy bills increase at different times. Right now, in the past like five years-ish, we’ve been paying largely for wildfires. What we’re seeing is an increase in one section of the bill, which we will talk about. And it’s called transmission and distribution. And this includes things like towers and huge wires, and then the local wires and poles that we see in our neighborhoods. And that’s increasing because we have to prepare those things to be ready for more wildfire so that if fire comes towards them, that they don’t just sort of melt and cause issues, but also that they don’t spark wildfires, and we’re also paying for the liabilities of past wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:33] \u003c/em>Because they have sparked wildfires in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:35] \u003c/em>Yeah, mhm.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Severin Bornstein: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:37] \u003c/em>So if you went back 30 years, it was basically putting up wires around neighborhoods and then maintaining them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:07:46] \u003c/em>I spoke to UC Berkeley professor of energy and economics, Severin Bornstein, and he said that 30 years ago, transmission and distribution was just cents out of your entire bill. And now it’s just, it’s a much larger percentage of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Severin Bornstein: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:01] \u003c/em>Now because it’s much more likely that when that wire falls, it will hit dry tinder and it will happen on a windy day when there’s just a lot more fire risk, we’re spending an enormous amount of money to avoid that risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:18] \u003c/em>Basically, people’s electric delivery charges are going up because of wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:23] \u003c/em>Yes, made worse by climate change, not being able to be managed easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:28] \u003c/em>I’m paying $29.97 for these electric delivery charges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:35] \u003c/em>Yeah, and that’s out of your bill of $56.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:38] \u003c/em>Right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:38] \u003c/em>So the majority of your bills going into that. One thing I do want to mention about the first page, this is also where you would see if you are in a low income program like CARE, you would seek CARE discounts here. They’re at least going to be 20% of pretty much around your overall bill, 20% off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:58] \u003c/em>What’s CARE?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:08:58] \u003c/em>It’s a program for if you qualify for a low-income program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:04] \u003c/em>Should we flip the page?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:05] \u003c/em>Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go to the next page here. Okay. It says details of MCE electric generation charges. So what is MCE, electric generation charges?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:09:19] \u003c/em>Okay, so this is where your bill is different than than other people’s and the same as other people. Okay. So generation is like, that’s the cost of producing energy. In California, we see it coming from natural gas, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and it includes the expense of the upkeep of these facilities. MCE is something called a community choice aggregator. Just rolls off the tongue, right? These are community power providers. That means that your electricity generation comes from them. You’re automatically enrolled in the community choice aggregator, in your case, MCEs, for your area. But if you’re here in the Bay Area region, you’re going to see different ones. There’s Clean Power SF, AVA, Community Energy is East Bay. So you’re enrolled in that program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:11] \u003c/em>And I am paying 17 and 68 cents on my electric generation charges\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:17] \u003c/em>So you’re paying some money to your community choice aggregator, and you’re also still paying PG&E. The reason why, when you’re part of one of these community choice aggregators, you also see that you’re paying PG& E is because PG& E still owns the poles and wires. They own the system, and so MCE uses their system, but they push their energy through it to you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:45] \u003c/em>I mean it is really complicated to really sort through this, but it does seem like there are some high level things that we can do to really understand and decode this a little bit, which I feel like you’ve really helped me with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:58] \u003c/em>That’s good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:10:59] \u003c/em>Why is it so complicated?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:11:02] \u003c/em>I don’t know why it is this way right now. I ended up profiling someone with a high bill and part of the reason why her bill was high was because there was an error in her bill. But because all the bills are high right now and that’s sort of the conversation, she didn’t think to question it. Moving forward, she’ll probably be paying $150 to $200 less monthly. She’s just received $1,300 of a credit. There are hotlines you can call for assistance or to help you with a variety of your bills. But I will say that sometimes, and as much as you can go to PG&E, they have a website or a page with all the resources, it’s still hard to advocate for yourself for your bill because when you call some of these resources, maybe you get somebody who’s not particularly friendly as your customer service representative. It’s confusing to read your bills and understand them. You might. Have limited English ability, these are some of the barriers that face people who have high utility bills and wanna sort of ask some questions about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mohit Chhabra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:10] \u003c/em>It takes like multiple experts, maybe some PhDs, a bunch of phone calls to understand one electricity bill in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:19] \u003c/em>I spoke to Mohit Chhabra at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and he said something funny to me, which was, you know, it’s just, it says something that you have to talk to like eight PhDs to decipher something like this\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mohit Chhabra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:35] \u003c/em>And if you want people to actually like understand and take action, maybe like having a simplifying like front end or something would be useful. And if they want these details, they can like access it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:47] \u003c/em>I don’t think it’s high on anyone’s agenda right now, but reforming this to make it user-friendly would be so neat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:53] \u003c/em>Well, Laura, thank you so much for looking at my energy bill with me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:12:58] \u003c/em>Thank you for being so vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:00] \u003c/em>I do feel very vulnerable, but I’m also proud that I guess my energy is not as high as it could be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Laura Klivans: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:08] \u003c/em>I know maybe you can give tips. Yeah. What are your tips?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/b>\u003cem>[00:13:12] \u003c/em>You know, what I do, I do have a tip. OK. I load my laundry the night before. Like I put the soap in, I put clothes in. And then I first thing in the morning during off-peak hours I run that thing. So by like peak hours, I’m folding the laundry. I’m not doing the laundry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "This Popular Kitchen Countertop Material Is Making Workers Sick",
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"headTitle": "This Popular Kitchen Countertop Material Is Making Workers Sick | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Engineered stone, or quartz, is a man-made material made with high concentrations of silica that is commonly used to make kitchen countertops in the U.S. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But doctors are seeing more and more workers in the countertop industry developing silicosis, an often deadly lung disease linked to inhaling toxic dust the material releases when powercut. Even though California has safety rules in place to reduce the risk to workers, some say it’s time to ban the use of engineered stone altogether.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Links:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064693/california-doctors-urge-ban-on-engineered-stone-as-silicosis-cases-surge\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">California Doctors Urge Ban on Engineered Stone as Silicosis Cases Surge | KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4840843567&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:01:34] Before we really dive into this story, I wanna ask you how likely the average person is to come across the kind of countertops that we’re really talking about in this story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:01:46] It’s super common. Go to a Home Depot or get this product through big box retail stores like Costco this has become one of the most popular or the most popular countertop material in the US. It’s made in a factory with different products like silica and resins and dyes that are baked together into these slabs by machines. They can add like different colors and designs, you know? So it’s very popular because it’s beautiful. It’s also very stain resistant. It can be a lot cheaper than natural stones like marble or granite. And so that’s why consumers have preferred it. Few people know, I think, among consumers, about the risks of this product. Workers who are cutting it and polishing it and grinding it are getting sick with silicosis, which is a disease that they get from breathing the dust released by the material when it’s cut. The dust has a lot of silica particles. Those particles get stuck in their lungs. And cause a lot of health problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:03:19] And Farida, I know you met one stone worker, actually here in the Bay Area, who now has silicosis because of his work. Can you tell me a little bit more about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:03:30] In his story. So we’re calling him Lopez because he’s an undocumented immigrant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez\u003c/strong> \u003cem>\u003cstrong>[in Spanish]\u003c/strong> \u003c/em>[00:03:36] I’ve spent 20 years working in tile manufacturing, starting when I was 20 years old…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:03:45] Nearly all of the workers who’ve gotten sick with this kind of silicosis linked to engineer stone are Latino men. Lopez started working in this industry about two decades ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:00] Was there a specific moment when his health really started to go south?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:04:07] Part of his job was also to unload these big slabs, you know, from trucks into the shop, or even when they’re gonna install the countertops in people’s homes or, you know businesses or hotels. He said he started noticing that it was really difficult for him to lift them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:04:26] In that year, in 2023, that’s when I started to feel like I was out of breath. We used to carry loads, but I didn’t feel like that before. We got to the point where I didn´t like it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:43] And then he was coughing a lot, trouble like breathing. So he ended up going to the doctor and he was diagnosed last year with silicosis. Now he’s confined in his home. He has to breathe 24-7 with the help of an oxygen supply machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:05:05] Look, in fact, I’m not leaving my house anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:05:14] So when I met him, he was sitting next to this machine and he had these clear tubes pronged to his nostrils and he can’t really leave his house without one of these machines to give him oxygen. He also wore masks when he was working, but they were filter masks and him and his employers thought that they were protected in that way, but now doctors are finding that this. Silica dust that is released by artificial stone is so tiny that it can penetrate the filter masks and it still lodges in the lungs and causes scarring and over time the lungs can’t expand and contract to breathe like they normally do. And he of course can no longer work. He’s run out of state disability benefits and he is on a waiting list to receive a double lung transplant and he’s only 43.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>[00:06:24] Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be sitting alone, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here alone, waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, so that I can receive the transplant that I’m waiting for and be able to go out and work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:53] I mean, Farida, how many people are there like Lopez in California now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:06:59] What we know so far in California and the California Department of Public Health is now tracking this is that there are 450 confirmed cases of silicosis among stone workers linked to artificial stone since 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:07:18] I mean, the number of cases is exploding. I think many of us in the field expected it to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero\u003c/strong> [00:07:25] So one of the doctors I’ve spoken with is Dr. Shephali Gandhi. She’s a pulmonologist at the University of California San Francisco and she is seeing a lot of these cases be referred to her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:07:41] I have like 40 cases that are on my like waiting list right now to see and it’s just like every month my mailbox is just like full of more referrals of silicosis cases like it’s Just insane the number. 25 people have died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:07:58] And there are dozens more that have received lung transplants and more workers that are waiting for them or didn’t qualify for a lung transplant. Doctors tell me all the statistics and figures we have now are definitely an undercount. This disease takes a couple of years to show up with symptoms. People may be sick already, but they don’t know it yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:08:25] It’s so wild to hear just how, how much someone like Lopez’s life has been just irreversibly altered. What protections do stone workers have in California right now? I mean, even as it comes to safety gear, I mean is that, is that helpful at all? Or could that be helpful at for these workers?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:08:50] The state is now requiring countertop fabrication shops that use stone with silica to cut it wet with machines that submerge the stone underwater when they’re cutting it and sawing it to suppress dust. They also need to be wearing protective gear, like these powered air purifying respirators, which sometimes cover the worker’s full face. There’s a lot of dust suppression. And so we’ve had those in place since 2023, but most of these shops are small and don’t have the money or the capacity or the willingness to put these in place. That’s why doctors are looking at what happened in Australia, where Australia ended up banning artificial stone with high silica last year. Dr. Gandhi and other doctors have spoken with, say, it’s time for the state to start facing these products with high silica out of fabrication shops to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:10:11] You know, substitution, which is where we like really go for safer alternatives to all artificial stone is really where I think we should be concentrating our efforts, which is essentially what they did in Australia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:10:29] California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or CalOSHA, has discussed whether the state should ban the use of engineered stone. And on Friday, doctors from the Western Occupation and Environmental Medical Association sent a letter urging the state to ban all fabrication and installation of engineered stone containing more than 1% silica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:11:01] I mean, what does the countertop industry think about that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:05] So I spoke with Laurie Weber, who heads the International Service Fabricators Association.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:11:12] Do we think there should be a product ban? Absolutely not. It’s not about the product. It is about the proper fabrication processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:21] She doesn’t believe that a ban is a solution. She thinks really the issue is having fabrication shops work on these products safely and following all the, you know, rules, is really important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:11:37] You know, I think that the easy answer for people is just to ban a product. But I mean, we want to talk about all the shops not in compliance. What about the shops that are in compliance?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:46] Especially because there may be other products produced in the future. You know, these companies are adapting and changing really fast, you know? And so there might be other toxic things that workers are exposed to. So they believe that the best thing to do is to have something like a licensing system in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:12:06] There are a lot of livelihoods around that, right? A lot of jobs around that. And I think it just sounds very doomsday when at the end of the day, there are ways that we can help them become compliant and help them be better business owners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:12:24] I’ve talked to fabricators. Told me that starting a basic shop that is complying with all the California safety rules would cost around $250,000. So some fabricators do it, but many others don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:12:40] Yeah, anyone you talk to from the companies themselves, you know, how are they responding to this crisis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:12:46] Well, so there’s major manufacturers of artificial stone, Caesarstone, which is based in Israel. Another one is Cosentino, based in Spain. And then there’s a third one called Cambria, which is base in the US. But what they say is that they believe that you can cut and work on engineered stone safely if you follow proper health and safety measures. But because of the ban in Australia, Caesarstone and Cosentino have started to develop and sell alternative products with a lot less silica than traditional engineered stone. I’ve heard from doctors in California that have gone to Australia that these alternatives look pretty much the same as traditional artificial stone, that they’re a similar cost. There’s still questions whether the newer products are actually really safe or if they have other metals or resins or things that could be making workers sick. But what we know so far, for manufacturers, they say to the workers that are cutting it, they just need to follow the rules and precautions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:13] I mean, Farida, I wanna go back to Lopez here. I mean how is he doing? How are his spirits at this point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:24] I’d say it’s an illness that has completely transformed his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish]\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:14:30] Yes, in fact I’ve been having my appoints the same way for a year now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:35] Just in the span of my conversation with him, we started and he was very animated and you know engaged and sort of by the end he was just like exhausted and I feel like I got a glimpse of what life is like for him and his family now and it’s pretty bleak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez’s wife \u003cem>[in Spanish]\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:15:00] Well, he’s always seen for us, he is the pillar. Now that we have it here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:15:14] His wife said, you know, he’s, he was a very hardworking, active person. We go to work every day, you know, was out of the house the whole day, um, you know, busy and, and now he’s just sitting at home thinking about this. It’s an incurable illness. Uh, and even when they get a lung transplant, doctors have told me that. You know, people still need to a lot of treatment, you know. And they can’t go back to life as normal. He’s one of hundreds of workers in California that are suing major manufacturers of artificial stone, like Caesarstone, claiming injuries. And so, Caesarstone is a public company, so I listened in to one of their earnings call recently, and they said there’s more than 500 lawsuits against them, from workers, not just in… The U.S., but in Australia, in Israel. So we’ll see what happens, but there’s definitely hundreds of cases in the pipeline against these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:23] I mean, Farida, you’ve been reporting on this since 2023. What do you hope that people listening to this take away from your reporting?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:34] For me, you know, like I’m talking to workers, talking to fabricators, but I think the most candid conversations I have, you know are when I talk to friends. Once they find out about this, they’re like, wait, I just went to Home Depot and bought materials for a new countertop because I’m renovating my kitchen and it’s called Quartz. Is that the same thing as, you know, what you’re talking about? And I’ll be like, yes. And they’re, like, wow, I had no idea. For me, what was really striking is just how quickly this product became so popular. This stuff is everywhere. And then how quickly this public health crisis came, you know, as well. So I think that, you know we need to do this work so that more people know about it and can have a more informed decision when they’re buying these products.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Engineered stone, or quartz, is a man-made material made with high concentrations of silica that is commonly used to make kitchen countertops in the U.S. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But doctors are seeing more and more workers in the countertop industry developing silicosis, an often deadly lung disease linked to inhaling toxic dust the material releases when powercut. Even though California has safety rules in place to reduce the risk to workers, some say it’s time to ban the use of engineered stone altogether.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Links:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064693/california-doctors-urge-ban-on-engineered-stone-as-silicosis-cases-surge\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">California Doctors Urge Ban on Engineered Stone as Silicosis Cases Surge | KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4840843567&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:01:34] Before we really dive into this story, I wanna ask you how likely the average person is to come across the kind of countertops that we’re really talking about in this story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:01:46] It’s super common. Go to a Home Depot or get this product through big box retail stores like Costco this has become one of the most popular or the most popular countertop material in the US. It’s made in a factory with different products like silica and resins and dyes that are baked together into these slabs by machines. They can add like different colors and designs, you know? So it’s very popular because it’s beautiful. It’s also very stain resistant. It can be a lot cheaper than natural stones like marble or granite. And so that’s why consumers have preferred it. Few people know, I think, among consumers, about the risks of this product. Workers who are cutting it and polishing it and grinding it are getting sick with silicosis, which is a disease that they get from breathing the dust released by the material when it’s cut. The dust has a lot of silica particles. Those particles get stuck in their lungs. And cause a lot of health problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:03:19] And Farida, I know you met one stone worker, actually here in the Bay Area, who now has silicosis because of his work. Can you tell me a little bit more about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:03:30] In his story. So we’re calling him Lopez because he’s an undocumented immigrant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez\u003c/strong> \u003cem>\u003cstrong>[in Spanish]\u003c/strong> \u003c/em>[00:03:36] I’ve spent 20 years working in tile manufacturing, starting when I was 20 years old…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:03:45] Nearly all of the workers who’ve gotten sick with this kind of silicosis linked to engineer stone are Latino men. Lopez started working in this industry about two decades ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:00] Was there a specific moment when his health really started to go south?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:04:07] Part of his job was also to unload these big slabs, you know, from trucks into the shop, or even when they’re gonna install the countertops in people’s homes or, you know businesses or hotels. He said he started noticing that it was really difficult for him to lift them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:04:26] In that year, in 2023, that’s when I started to feel like I was out of breath. We used to carry loads, but I didn’t feel like that before. We got to the point where I didn´t like it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:04:43] And then he was coughing a lot, trouble like breathing. So he ended up going to the doctor and he was diagnosed last year with silicosis. Now he’s confined in his home. He has to breathe 24-7 with the help of an oxygen supply machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:05:05] Look, in fact, I’m not leaving my house anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:05:14] So when I met him, he was sitting next to this machine and he had these clear tubes pronged to his nostrils and he can’t really leave his house without one of these machines to give him oxygen. He also wore masks when he was working, but they were filter masks and him and his employers thought that they were protected in that way, but now doctors are finding that this. Silica dust that is released by artificial stone is so tiny that it can penetrate the filter masks and it still lodges in the lungs and causes scarring and over time the lungs can’t expand and contract to breathe like they normally do. And he of course can no longer work. He’s run out of state disability benefits and he is on a waiting list to receive a double lung transplant and he’s only 43.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish] \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>[00:06:24] Right now, I feel desperate. It’s a desperation to be sitting alone, without being able to do anything. It’s anguish to be here alone, waiting for the time for them to talk to me about the hospital, so that I can receive the transplant that I’m waiting for and be able to go out and work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:06:53] I mean, Farida, how many people are there like Lopez in California now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:06:59] What we know so far in California and the California Department of Public Health is now tracking this is that there are 450 confirmed cases of silicosis among stone workers linked to artificial stone since 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:07:18] I mean, the number of cases is exploding. I think many of us in the field expected it to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero\u003c/strong> [00:07:25] So one of the doctors I’ve spoken with is Dr. Shephali Gandhi. She’s a pulmonologist at the University of California San Francisco and she is seeing a lot of these cases be referred to her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:07:41] I have like 40 cases that are on my like waiting list right now to see and it’s just like every month my mailbox is just like full of more referrals of silicosis cases like it’s Just insane the number. 25 people have died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:07:58] And there are dozens more that have received lung transplants and more workers that are waiting for them or didn’t qualify for a lung transplant. Doctors tell me all the statistics and figures we have now are definitely an undercount. This disease takes a couple of years to show up with symptoms. People may be sick already, but they don’t know it yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:08:25] It’s so wild to hear just how, how much someone like Lopez’s life has been just irreversibly altered. What protections do stone workers have in California right now? I mean, even as it comes to safety gear, I mean is that, is that helpful at all? Or could that be helpful at for these workers?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:08:50] The state is now requiring countertop fabrication shops that use stone with silica to cut it wet with machines that submerge the stone underwater when they’re cutting it and sawing it to suppress dust. They also need to be wearing protective gear, like these powered air purifying respirators, which sometimes cover the worker’s full face. There’s a lot of dust suppression. And so we’ve had those in place since 2023, but most of these shops are small and don’t have the money or the capacity or the willingness to put these in place. That’s why doctors are looking at what happened in Australia, where Australia ended up banning artificial stone with high silica last year. Dr. Gandhi and other doctors have spoken with, say, it’s time for the state to start facing these products with high silica out of fabrication shops to protect workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Shephali Gandhi \u003c/strong>[00:10:11] You know, substitution, which is where we like really go for safer alternatives to all artificial stone is really where I think we should be concentrating our efforts, which is essentially what they did in Australia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:10:29] California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or CalOSHA, has discussed whether the state should ban the use of engineered stone. And on Friday, doctors from the Western Occupation and Environmental Medical Association sent a letter urging the state to ban all fabrication and installation of engineered stone containing more than 1% silica.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:11:01] I mean, what does the countertop industry think about that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:05] So I spoke with Laurie Weber, who heads the International Service Fabricators Association.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:11:12] Do we think there should be a product ban? Absolutely not. It’s not about the product. It is about the proper fabrication processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:21] She doesn’t believe that a ban is a solution. She thinks really the issue is having fabrication shops work on these products safely and following all the, you know, rules, is really important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:11:37] You know, I think that the easy answer for people is just to ban a product. But I mean, we want to talk about all the shops not in compliance. What about the shops that are in compliance?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:11:46] Especially because there may be other products produced in the future. You know, these companies are adapting and changing really fast, you know? And so there might be other toxic things that workers are exposed to. So they believe that the best thing to do is to have something like a licensing system in place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laurie Weber \u003c/strong>[00:12:06] There are a lot of livelihoods around that, right? A lot of jobs around that. And I think it just sounds very doomsday when at the end of the day, there are ways that we can help them become compliant and help them be better business owners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:12:24] I’ve talked to fabricators. Told me that starting a basic shop that is complying with all the California safety rules would cost around $250,000. So some fabricators do it, but many others don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:12:40] Yeah, anyone you talk to from the companies themselves, you know, how are they responding to this crisis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:12:46] Well, so there’s major manufacturers of artificial stone, Caesarstone, which is based in Israel. Another one is Cosentino, based in Spain. And then there’s a third one called Cambria, which is base in the US. But what they say is that they believe that you can cut and work on engineered stone safely if you follow proper health and safety measures. But because of the ban in Australia, Caesarstone and Cosentino have started to develop and sell alternative products with a lot less silica than traditional engineered stone. I’ve heard from doctors in California that have gone to Australia that these alternatives look pretty much the same as traditional artificial stone, that they’re a similar cost. There’s still questions whether the newer products are actually really safe or if they have other metals or resins or things that could be making workers sick. But what we know so far, for manufacturers, they say to the workers that are cutting it, they just need to follow the rules and precautions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:13] I mean, Farida, I wanna go back to Lopez here. I mean how is he doing? How are his spirits at this point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:24] I’d say it’s an illness that has completely transformed his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez \u003cem>[in Spanish]\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:14:30] Yes, in fact I’ve been having my appoints the same way for a year now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:14:35] Just in the span of my conversation with him, we started and he was very animated and you know engaged and sort of by the end he was just like exhausted and I feel like I got a glimpse of what life is like for him and his family now and it’s pretty bleak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lopez’s wife \u003cem>[in Spanish]\u003c/em> \u003c/strong>[00:15:00] Well, he’s always seen for us, he is the pillar. Now that we have it here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Farida Jhabvala Romero \u003c/strong>[00:15:14] His wife said, you know, he’s, he was a very hardworking, active person. We go to work every day, you know, was out of the house the whole day, um, you know, busy and, and now he’s just sitting at home thinking about this. It’s an incurable illness. Uh, and even when they get a lung transplant, doctors have told me that. You know, people still need to a lot of treatment, you know. And they can’t go back to life as normal. He’s one of hundreds of workers in California that are suing major manufacturers of artificial stone, like Caesarstone, claiming injuries. And so, Caesarstone is a public company, so I listened in to one of their earnings call recently, and they said there’s more than 500 lawsuits against them, from workers, not just in… The U.S., but in Australia, in Israel. So we’ll see what happens, but there’s definitely hundreds of cases in the pipeline against these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:23] I mean, Farida, you’ve been reporting on this since 2023. What do you hope that people listening to this take away from your reporting?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra \u003c/strong>[00:16:34] For me, you know, like I’m talking to workers, talking to fabricators, but I think the most candid conversations I have, you know are when I talk to friends. Once they find out about this, they’re like, wait, I just went to Home Depot and bought materials for a new countertop because I’m renovating my kitchen and it’s called Quartz. Is that the same thing as, you know, what you’re talking about? And I’ll be like, yes. And they’re, like, wow, I had no idea. For me, what was really striking is just how quickly this product became so popular. This stuff is everywhere. And then how quickly this public health crisis came, you know, as well. So I think that, you know we need to do this work so that more people know about it and can have a more informed decision when they’re buying these products.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "ukraines-surprising-ties-to-silicon-valley",
"title": "Ukraine’s Surprising Ties to Silicon Valley",
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"headTitle": "Ukraine’s Surprising Ties to Silicon Valley | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. In an episode from KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">\u003ci>Close All Tabs\u003c/i> \u003c/a>podcast, Bay Area journalist Erica Hellerstein visits Ukraine to learn about how the nation’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4654111507\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here on Close All Tabs, we cover all different sides of tech and the internet — the good, the bad, and the gray areas in between. Today, we’re doing something different, and taking our deep dive abroad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tech industry is increasingly intertwined with global conflict. Like how Silicon Valley’s AI obsession has fueled the automated warfare in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or US bomb strikes in Iraq and Syria. So-called “defense tech” startups are attracting billions in funding. And like we’ve talked about on this show before, the Pentagon’s Cold War investments actually built Silicon Valley. This startup approach to weaponry has some pretty concerning implications for the future of war. And we’ve seen, in real time, the way these advancements in surveillance and automated warfare are being used to oppress people — like Palestinians in Gaza. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the same time in another region plagued by conflict, Ukraine, tech culture has become a vital part of the country’s resistance against Russian aggression. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the kind of story that Erica Hellerstein stumbled upon, as she prepared for her own trip to Ukraine. Erica is a Bay Area investigative journalist who reports on human rights, politics, and tech. Back in June, she spent three weeks around Kyiv on a reporting trip, working on a project about her own family’s roots in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just before her trip, she heard a story about a Ukrainian engineer who had worked for a Bay Area tech company, but left his job to join his country’s defense forces. It got her thinking about the connection between Silicon Valley and the Ukrainian fight against Russian occupation. She started digging and according to the people she talked to, the tech sector is part of the reason Ukraine is still standing today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are the Geeks of War — that’s what one Ukrainian drone operator nicknamed the group. Ukraine actually has a long history of technological innovation that is still alive today, and is fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this special episode, Erica will introduce us to a few of these “Geeks” and we’ll explore how this new generation is blurring the lines between the digital and physical battlefield — reshaping the next generation of conflict, and maybe even the future of war itself. I’ll let Erica take it from here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein, Reporter\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s around 11:55 pm when the first alarm goes off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Alarm sounding from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The noise shatters any illusion I had that my first night in Kyiv would be quiet or peaceful. I’ve been doomscrolling on my phone in a bomb shelter connected to my hotel in Kyiv. It’s surprisingly nice, with wifi, beverages, even bean bag chairs. On heavy nights of bombardment, like tonight, these sirens can go off multiple times and last for hours. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But most of the time I’m in Ukraine, I’m hearing these alarms digitally through an app on my phone called Air Alert. The Ukrainian government developed the app towards the beginning of the war, and it’s now been downloaded at least 27 million times. That’s in a country of 39 million people. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Air Alert sounds a loud, jarring alarm whenever a Russian missile strike, or drone attack is detected in your region. And the voice telling you to find the nearest shelter? None other than Jedi master Luke Skywalker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Or rather, Mark Hamill, the actor who \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">played\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the beloved character in Star Wars. Hamill’s a vocal supporter of Ukraine so he pitched in to voice the English language version of the app.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: I’ve learned, though, that the app only gives you basic information. To get details, I go to a different app, Telegram, where I follow a volunteer-run channel that gives updates about what kinds of missiles, or drones, are in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As if two apps aren’t enough, I’m also on WhatsApp messaging a group of journalists who are also in Kyiv. Some are in the same hotel shelter, others are sheltering in the hallways of their apartment buildings or metro stations. Everyone is sharing updates. “Drone flew right over our roof,” someone writes around 1 am. Another, two minutes later: “Loud explosion not far from my place.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, around 6am, another alert goes off. Once again, I hear a familiar voice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That means, at least for now, the skies in Kyiv are safe. But as dawn breaks, the scale of the destruction starts to come into focus. About two miles from where I’m staying, an apartment building was hit by a ballistic missile and reduced to rubble – there are reports of people still trapped inside. A Kyiv metro station and university were also hit. All told, ten people, including a child, were killed in the onslaught.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This has become a regular occurrence in Ukraine. People have been living through these kinds of attacks for years. Unable to sleep through the wails of the sirens, reading news about buildings blown up, civilians killed and then somehow, still managing to go about their daily lives – going to work, picking up their kids, celebrating birthday parties, getting married.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And beyond the apps like Air Alert, technology has become a centerpiece in this war — hacking software, killer drones, medical robots delivering supplies to the frontlines. It’s transforming how people experience war. Now, every aspect of our lives, including conflict, is mediated by our digital world. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the people behind the screens can be a little mysterious. I wanted to learn more about them. To understand the workers and whizzes changing what warfare looks like, with major implications for the rest of the world. I wanted to meet the self-styled “Geeks of War.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And for that, we’ll need to open a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meet the Geeks\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: My first guide to the geeks is a couple I met in Lviv, which is a Western city in Ukraine. Dimko and Iryna Zhluktenko. They’re the co-founders of Dzyga’s Paw. It’s a Ukrainian nonprofit that donates defense technology to the frontlines. Both Iryna and Dimko used to work in tech. Dimko was a software engineer, Iryna a product analyst for the San Francisco-based tech company, JustAnswer. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, they quit their jobs and threw themselves into Dzyga’s Paw, which, by the way, is named after their adorable little fox-faced pup, Dzyga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stop by the organization’s headquarters one night. They greet me with a tour of the space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can just come like this. So we used to live here, so this is actually, like a normal house location, but very old one is from 1906, so it’s more than 100 years old, and here you have our main working, like a little open space.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: There’s a small party happening, with some women playing an intimidating-looking card game in the kitchen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The girls are playing [inaudible] Do you know this game? No, you should try. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, I’m horrible at cards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pass an entire wall full of framed thank you letters from different military units. There’s another wall, too, full of patches from soldiers and volunteer fighters, some coming from the other side of the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow, I see Argentina. That’s far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s from, yeah, from international volunteer who’s fighting here in Ukraine, from Argentina. This is a Estonian one from Estonian cyber defense forces. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna shows me another decoration tacked to the wall: A downed Russian drone. And it’s in really good shape. So she decides to give it a whirl.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me try to do it. So it turns on. And if I had a controller, if I had a like TX controller, I could launch it and start it, probably.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is like a war treasure?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Looted from Russians. Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once I tear myself away from the shiny objects, I sit down with Dimko, Iryna, and of course, Dzyga, who has extreme zoomies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the boss of the operation.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> [Laughs]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Dzyga barks]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They tell me that the project came about in the early months of the war. Of course, like so many other Ukrainians, they wanted to help. And they started to think about what they could bring to the table. And that’s when Dimko and Iryna, had their \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">a-ha\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> moment. “We’re nerds!” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve decided that well, we might just use our, uh, tech experience, our tech geekiness, uh, to, uh, innovate. Some of the approaches on the battlefield.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We figured out, okay, we can help better when our expertise is. So basically we started looking more into more advanced equipment. We started looking into drone and things like that and because we had friends in the military, uh, it was like our first point of contact because like we had people we could trust. And we started, you know, buying and supplying some tech devices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They started with what their friends in the military really needed: equipment. Drones, Starlink units — which provide remote internet access – long-range encrypted radios, thermal cameras. Dzyga’s paw has since grown from a scrappy idea into a multi-million dollar nonprofit. In October alone, they delivered over $230,000 worth of equipment to the military, according to the organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all of this high tech gear goes to soldiers and drone operators who are stationed near the frontlines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They often work in hideouts, or command centers, miles from the front, flying drones by remote control while wearing a headset that shows exactly what the device sees through its camera. Other soldiers sit beside them, watching live maps on screens, calling out targets and coordinates in real time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dimko explains what these command centers look like in action.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Basically an underground shelter with, uh, tons of, uh, big ass four screen TVs or something. Uh, and guys looking like they just finished the MIT or something. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So literally geeks of the war, sitting in those command centers and analyzing what is happening at the battlefield, and then suggesting what decisions should be taken to be the most effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> About a year ago, Dimko also enlisted as a drone operator for a Ukrainian military unit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Because this is my chance to, uh, well defend my home, defend my family, and, uh, in the end defend my country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically the job is to do the reconnaissance. Um, you have this big UAV that, uh, like a fixed wing kind of a thing that you launch in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drone warfare has quickly become one of the defining characteristics of this conflict. The kind Dimko pilots are called UAVs — or unmanned aerial vehicles. They look like small airplanes, and like Dimko said, they’re mainly used for reconnaissance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It has the radio connection, so you have the radio signal link, uh, to it. And, uh, you have the live stream from that, you stream that footage into one of the IT systems that we have, uh, in the armed forces.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So all of the people interested in the situation in the area. Can watch that live stream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Then there’s this other kind of drone, called an FPV. That stands for first-person-view. They’re some of the most common drones on the battlefield right now. Once upon a time, these drones were mainly the toys of hobbyists and creatives. You know that insufferable wedding reel you saw on Instagram? Probably shot on an FPV drone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian military started rolling them out on a massive scale. They cost next to nothing. They’re endlessly scalable, and for a country like Ukraine, with far fewer resources and manpower than Russia, they’ve been a game-changer. Drones that can be bought for just a few hundred dollars are now taking out Russian tanks and artillery worth millions.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are swarms of these things buzzing around now on the front, some with cameras for spying, others loaded with explosives to detonate on their targets. And they’re responsible for massive damage. Drones now account for as much as seventy percent of casualties on both sides, according to Ukrainian officials.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experts are already warning that this rapid, wide-scale shift could dramatically change the future of conflict. Other countries are likely to learn from or maybe adopt the technologies and tactics deployed in this war. And It’s not just militaries that can repurpose these technologies. Paramilitaries, militias, and extremist groups can all easily purchase and deploy drone technology. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As drone warfare becomes more lethal on the battlefield, Dimko tells me that his work is also getting more treacherous as the war progresses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is very and very dangerous because the kill zone is getting wider and wider because of the danger of FPV drones there in our direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have a lot of, uh, Russian groups there, specifically hunting pilots like us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But even though Dimko is now an official member of the Ukrainian military, the organization he helps run, Dzyga’s Paw, started completely outside of that system as a grassroots, volunteer mission. And now it’s directly helping units like his and this is really common. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine is heavily dependent on volunteers. People like the Dzyga’s Paw team, delivering supplies to the frontlines, volunteer air defense groups that shoot down Russian drones in the middle of the night, or Ukrainian tech companies building safety apps for civilians. All of this experimentation, this volunteer work – it’s been a really important part of Ukraine’s survival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a classic battlefield, it’d fail. But, um, it’s a constant competition of technology again and I still feel we are more rapid. We are more fast in terms of inventing something new. I wanna believe at least that, um, it all comes from our initial desire to survive and to fight for our country ’cause uh, there were many different people with different careers and professions, but, uh, huge part of them switched to thinking in this direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And this bottom-up, grassroots approach represents a fundamental difference between how Ukraine and Russia operate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to Russia, it’s like they don’t have a, they like, everything is very like, top down. It’s controlled from the,yeah, from the state. So, indeed they have great engineers, but they are given like a task to develop something, to come up with a solution. While in Ukraine, it’s more of a like, grassroots thing and sometimes something brilliant just comes out of nowhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So how did Ukraine get here to this nimble and adaptive space for innovation and experimentation? And why does it all remind me so much of the tech culture in the Bay Area? We’ll get into that after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, we’re back. Time to open a new tab: [\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To help us understand Ukraine’s tech culture, we’re taking a visit to MacPaw — one of the most successful tech companies to come out of Ukraine before the war. They created the CleanMyMac software. I’m at the company’s headquarters in Kyiv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This building was actually hit by a Russian missile back in December. There are still some traces of the attack around the building: Window glass damaged, parts of the exterior crumbling. Here’s MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan describing that day:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The rockets were very powerful so they destroyed all the facade of the building. All the windows were shattered. A lot of damage inside the office, but nothing super critical. We were very lucky in that none of our employees were injured. It was scary.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> MacPaw has built several digital tools to support Ukraine during the war, including an app to help Ukrainian companies check on employees after attacks, software that helps computers identify Russian malware, and a special VPN to help people in occupied territories circumvent Russian censorship.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While getting a tour of the MacPaw office, something catches my eye. It’s a wall filled with a collection of old Apple products from across the ages. It’s got ancient looking grey computers, and those bulky, colorful desktops that always felt to me like the computer version of a jolly rancher. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b> \u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember having these in school. It brings me back. Very nostalgic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oleksandr created this wall as an homage to Apple, which has always been an inspiration to him. Before the war, he wanted to create a museum full of the company’s products. For now, this wall is a little shrine in the middle of the MacPaw office.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a Bay Area resident, it’s kind of funny, being here and seeing traces of where I’m from all over the tech industry here. Granted, Silicon Valley is hugely influential but what surprises me is just how intertwined Silicon Valley and Ukraine’s tech industries are. Like how Iryna of Dzyga’s Paw worked for a San Francisco startup.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this is not unusual I’m learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, tech companies from San Francisco to San Jose have relied on Ukrainian engineers for their technical skills, English fluency, and lower labor costs. Companies like Google, Grammarly (which was founded by Ukrainians), Ring, JetBridge, and Caspio all had employees based in Ukraine when Russia began its full-scale invasion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a general cultural ethos here that feels familiar to my Bay Area sensibilities, like the food trucks, ping pong tables, and hoodies I see all over tech campuses in Kyiv. There was one friendship bracelet-wearing tech worker I talk to who tells me all about her recent ayahuasca healing journey in South America. I felt like I was back at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are all the personal connections I notice with the Ukrainians I meet. Some worked for Bay Area companies. Or, have friends who live there for work. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since the war began, these transnational ties have become a quiet but meaningful network of support for Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Silicon Valley–based nonprofit Nova Ukraine, which was co-founded by a former Facebook and Google employee from Kharkiv, has raised over $160 million in humanitarian aid.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna’s old employer, JustAnswer, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">has expanded its Ukrainian workforce. It funded a pediatric mental health center in the country as well. Caspio \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">helped relocate dozens of Ukrainian staffers safely out of the country, and\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> continues supporting staff remotely. Sometimes, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">company Zoom calls will be interrupted by the wail of a siren telling Ukrainian workers to go to a bomb shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While there’s a lot of overlap between these two parts of the world, the innovation mindset that runs through Ukraine’s tech sector has deep roots. It started long before Steve Jobs or Silicon Valley exploded onto the global scene, like, decades before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1951, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, engineers on the outskirts of Kyiv developed the first computer in all of Europe. They worked around the clock, under tough conditions, in a crumbling old building that was ravaged by bombing during WWII. The people who made this computer, they’re considered the godfathers of Ukrainian IT. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Oleksandr again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the, uh [inaudible] or IT on that era was actually originated from Ukraine. And um, beside that, there were like so many engineers, like my father was an engineer. There are so, so many great engineers that were working for this industry back then. And, and this basically were like the birth of the modern IT industry in Ukraine. So when the USSR collapsed, this talent and this, uh, uh, knowledge, uh, stayed in, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And today, the industry those engineers helped to create now plays a significant role in Ukraine’s economy. In 2024, Ukraine’s IT sector contributed 3.4% to Ukraine’s GDP, behind only the agricultural industry, according to a report published by the IT Association of Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally hundreds of thousands of people joined, uh, Ukrainian army. They started to bring their experience and their, like, creative, uh, vision and approach, uh, to the Army. And they started to apply, uh, some changes from, from bottom up. Uh, because, uh, these generals here, they probably know how to, uh, find the war of previous era, uh, but they don’t, uh, definitely understand how they can apply these technologies in order to, to receive some, some advantage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To this point, we’ve been mostly talking about the physical battlefield, like drones attacking targets in the real world. But a new frontline has emerged in this war — the internet. And the tools and tactics needed to fight in these spaces look completely different. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The new digital battlefield.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our guide to this world is David Kirichenko, a fellow journalist who splits his time between the U.S. and Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m a war journalist and since 2022, I’ve been working on the front lines, um, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But he’s also been reporting on another front: the digital fight between the two countries. Because the information space between Russia and Ukraine has become its own proxy war, with each vying for support at home and abroad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It certainly has, I think, a very big impact on what goes on the physical battlefield just from the amount of influence and impact that you can have. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia’s a country long known for its sophisticated cyber warfare campaigns. In the current conflict, it’s been deploying vast amounts of disinformation online to weaken support for Ukraine around the world — on social media, fake news sites, even video games. This practice, as David points out, has deep roots, going back to the Cold War.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Even since the 1980s, the Russians first started out by building like a newspaper in India. It prints a fake story and then you have a, a more slightly more credible one, print that, and then everyone just starts citing it and it circulates around the world. And an MIT study showed that, um, like the fake news it it spreads like six, seven times faster than the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Enter: The Fellas. They’re a niche online community that has come together to fight Russian disinformation. They call themselves the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, or NAFO, for short. And because it’s the internet, their entire social media “army” has adopted the likeness of one very good boy: A Shiba Inu.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The members of this online battalion, who like to be called the Fellas, usually identify themselves on Twitter, or X, with a cartoon Shiba avatar. And they have one major purpose: To take up digital arms against Russian propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When a pro-Russian narrative pops up on social media, The Fellas leap into action. Their objective is to distract, mock and debunk the Kremlin’s talking points. Politico called the group “a sh*t posting, Twitter-trolling, dog-deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time.” \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are now thousands of Fellas out there in the digital dog fight. They’re an organic phenomenon, borne out of internet culture. And they make anyone who earnestly tries to engage with their trolling look ridiculous. “Oh, you’re fighting with a cartoon Shiba at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Don’t you have anything better to do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The best way to counter Russia propaganda is by mocking it, ridiculing it, and showing that like, this is how ridiculous it is. And like you just make a joke at it yourself by sharing it. Just the fact that, you know, over the years you had all these high-ranking Russian and then other officials engaging with cartoon dogs on, on Twitter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A less cheeky example of digital warfare is the IT Army of Ukraine. They’re a collective of volunteer hackers around the world who coordinate cyber attacks against Russia. They’ve attacked thousands of targets since the war began, from Russian banks to media outlets, and power grids. In June 2024, the group claimed responsibility for a large-scale cyberattack against Russia’s banking system, reportedly causing outages on banking websites, apps, and payment systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The IT Army of Ukraine isn’t a traditional military unit. It’s a sprawling, loosely organized network that runs primarily online. They post updates and send communications on their Telegram channel, where they have nearly 115,000 subscribers. They also have a website that lays out more information about their work and how to get involved. One page, for example, is titled: “Instructions for setting up attacks on the enemy country.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">David has also been reporting on this group. The IT Army’s spokesperson told him last year that its volunteer hackers had caused something like a billion dollars in damage from these attacks. David explains the anatomy of an attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You typically have people that you have the toolkit installed so it doesn’t interfere with your, your Netflix or slow down your internet. You couldn’t set it to, I want to run from like 12:00 AM to 6:00 PM, I’m gonna leave my computer on. So if the IT army, like, runs the botnet and wants to direct an attack, it has the access to the compute to be able to run it and send pings from a lot of different places to overwhelm, um, a system. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so they like posted the, the toolkit onto their website so anyone’s able to go and, and download it. And it’s pretty, pretty simple to install it. And, uh, all you gotta do is just make sure that your computer is running and contributing your compute power to the botnet so that it’s overwhelming, like services when the attack begins.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve met people that said like, even my 12-year-old child is like doing these, uh, cyber attacks against Russia. They just download the toolkit and, you know, you set, you can even set a timer, allow your computer to participate in this botnet\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But these IT soldiers operate in a legally murky zone. There’s obviously something troubling about kids participating in cyberwar against another country. And, if someone participates in an attack from their couch on the other side of the world, are they breaking any laws?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is a gray space. How do governments prepare to legislate for this. Like, are you a combatant If you’re engaging in like cyber warfare? Are you breaking any laws? Should governments build a cyber reserve or some sort of like legal framework for their, like, people to be able to participate in this stuff? I mean, it, you know what, if you’re in Poland and then you’re conducting some cyber attacks and the Russians are very upset and they can launch a missile and they claim that you’re an enemy combatant. And yeah, just it’s, it’s a very challenging space and for I think lawmakers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For all the reasons he just laid out, most of the people I spoke with wouldn’t talk openly about participating in the IT Army. Though one person told me that “literally everyone with a laptop did.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Regardless, all these IT Army volunteers are having a real impact, David says. And this theme of a decentralized, grassroots approach as part of Ukraine’s strategy — chaotic with flashes of ingenuity — it keeps coming up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It ties back to Ukraine’s, wider story of, it’s a volunteer driven war effort. Like Ukrainian soldiers across the frontline are just dependent on online communities and, and volunteers. And so just people around the world have had such a big impact, both in information space, getting supplies to soldiers. Um, and one of the other ways has been on the cyber realm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This grassroots system is pretty much the opposite of how \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> does things. Which is centralized, top down, structured. Just a few solutions, scaled across every single military unit. They’re two competing philosophies fueling this technological arms race between Russia and Ukraine. A war of who’s quicker to out-innovate the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Ukraine is so decentralized, it’s kind of its biggest strength and biggest weaknesses. You have a zoo of solutions of every volunteer group. They’re making, they’re iterating, but then there’s so many different technologies and, and weapons, that everyone’s using different things and it’s hard to standardize, but then it also makes it very effective. But then the Russians learn what’s working and over time they can steer \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the whole war machine to focus on a, on a few things, and it’s sharing those lessons. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no matter how things end, what they’re coming up with is changing what war looks like altogether. With major implications.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drones dominate not just the, the frontline itself, but it’s changed like naval warfare. Ukrainians’ naval drones have helped to neutralize a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and they’re basically blockading Russia’s fleet that had to retreat from occupied Crimea. Ukraine has built, right, these ground robots that are becoming like mechanical medics, and the naval drones help shoot down multiple Russian helicopters, a couple of fighter jets. And those two fighter jets that were lost in Mayra, um, each like 50 million. So you can have a sea drone worth like 200, $300,000 with the, uh, missile worth that much or less, shooting down something that’s $50 million.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so we’re going to continue to see the proliferation of like, cheaper, faster tech. And we gotta learn what, you know, how do we prepare for that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technology is fundamentally a gray area. It’s built on these bursts of genius and promise, and also shows up in our modern world in dark and scary ways. It’s that first European computer, created out of the ashes of a bombed-out building in the Soviet Union. It’s Silicon Valley revolutionizing the world we now inhabit. For better, in some ways and in many ways, for worse: consolidating power, money, data, and influence, on an unimaginable scale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s the real story of the geeks of war. There are the lifesaving apps, like Air Alert, Telegram channels with real-time information about missiles and drones, VPNs connecting people in occupied territories to a bigger, broader, information ecosystem- Tools that are keeping people safe, connected and alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are also new technologies that are killing people, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of cyber saber-rattling. Destroyer drones, yes, they can give an underdog country like Ukraine an edge, but when you stop and think about their capabilities, the damage that can be unleashed with a tool literally anyone can buy for just a few hundred dollars, it’s terrifying. And then of course, there’s cyberwarfare, which can take down a whole country’s infrastructure, cripple power grids, communication networks, financial systems and thrust us all into completely uncharted geopolitical territory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It reminds me of the early days of social media. When Google was still telling us not to be evil. When social networks were described as a revolutionary, democratizing force, helping to topple authoritarian regimes, organize mass protest, connect people all over the world. But we all know what actually happened was a lot more complicated than Big Tech’s aspirational mottos. The lens flipped. The narrative cracked. And now we’re living on the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what will be the story we tell about all these tools 10, 20 years from now? The technology we’re seeing in this war is opening up a new frontier. But who knows where it will be deployed next: What it will look like, who it will target. The geeks are showing us the future we just don’t know where it will lead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks to Erica Hellerstein for her reporting and collaboration on this episode. Erica’s reporting was supported by a fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With that, it’s time to close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios in San Francisco, and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Hambrick is our editor. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. In an episode from KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">\u003ci>Close All Tabs\u003c/i> \u003c/a>podcast, Bay Area journalist Erica Hellerstein visits Ukraine to learn about how the nation’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4654111507\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here on Close All Tabs, we cover all different sides of tech and the internet — the good, the bad, and the gray areas in between. Today, we’re doing something different, and taking our deep dive abroad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tech industry is increasingly intertwined with global conflict. Like how Silicon Valley’s AI obsession has fueled the automated warfare in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or US bomb strikes in Iraq and Syria. So-called “defense tech” startups are attracting billions in funding. And like we’ve talked about on this show before, the Pentagon’s Cold War investments actually built Silicon Valley. This startup approach to weaponry has some pretty concerning implications for the future of war. And we’ve seen, in real time, the way these advancements in surveillance and automated warfare are being used to oppress people — like Palestinians in Gaza. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the same time in another region plagued by conflict, Ukraine, tech culture has become a vital part of the country’s resistance against Russian aggression. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the kind of story that Erica Hellerstein stumbled upon, as she prepared for her own trip to Ukraine. Erica is a Bay Area investigative journalist who reports on human rights, politics, and tech. Back in June, she spent three weeks around Kyiv on a reporting trip, working on a project about her own family’s roots in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just before her trip, she heard a story about a Ukrainian engineer who had worked for a Bay Area tech company, but left his job to join his country’s defense forces. It got her thinking about the connection between Silicon Valley and the Ukrainian fight against Russian occupation. She started digging and according to the people she talked to, the tech sector is part of the reason Ukraine is still standing today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are the Geeks of War — that’s what one Ukrainian drone operator nicknamed the group. Ukraine actually has a long history of technological innovation that is still alive today, and is fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this special episode, Erica will introduce us to a few of these “Geeks” and we’ll explore how this new generation is blurring the lines between the digital and physical battlefield — reshaping the next generation of conflict, and maybe even the future of war itself. I’ll let Erica take it from here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein, Reporter\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s around 11:55 pm when the first alarm goes off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Alarm sounding from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The noise shatters any illusion I had that my first night in Kyiv would be quiet or peaceful. I’ve been doomscrolling on my phone in a bomb shelter connected to my hotel in Kyiv. It’s surprisingly nice, with wifi, beverages, even bean bag chairs. On heavy nights of bombardment, like tonight, these sirens can go off multiple times and last for hours. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But most of the time I’m in Ukraine, I’m hearing these alarms digitally through an app on my phone called Air Alert. The Ukrainian government developed the app towards the beginning of the war, and it’s now been downloaded at least 27 million times. That’s in a country of 39 million people. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Air Alert sounds a loud, jarring alarm whenever a Russian missile strike, or drone attack is detected in your region. And the voice telling you to find the nearest shelter? None other than Jedi master Luke Skywalker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Or rather, Mark Hamill, the actor who \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">played\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the beloved character in Star Wars. Hamill’s a vocal supporter of Ukraine so he pitched in to voice the English language version of the app.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: I’ve learned, though, that the app only gives you basic information. To get details, I go to a different app, Telegram, where I follow a volunteer-run channel that gives updates about what kinds of missiles, or drones, are in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As if two apps aren’t enough, I’m also on WhatsApp messaging a group of journalists who are also in Kyiv. Some are in the same hotel shelter, others are sheltering in the hallways of their apartment buildings or metro stations. Everyone is sharing updates. “Drone flew right over our roof,” someone writes around 1 am. Another, two minutes later: “Loud explosion not far from my place.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, around 6am, another alert goes off. Once again, I hear a familiar voice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That means, at least for now, the skies in Kyiv are safe. But as dawn breaks, the scale of the destruction starts to come into focus. About two miles from where I’m staying, an apartment building was hit by a ballistic missile and reduced to rubble – there are reports of people still trapped inside. A Kyiv metro station and university were also hit. All told, ten people, including a child, were killed in the onslaught.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This has become a regular occurrence in Ukraine. People have been living through these kinds of attacks for years. Unable to sleep through the wails of the sirens, reading news about buildings blown up, civilians killed and then somehow, still managing to go about their daily lives – going to work, picking up their kids, celebrating birthday parties, getting married.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And beyond the apps like Air Alert, technology has become a centerpiece in this war — hacking software, killer drones, medical robots delivering supplies to the frontlines. It’s transforming how people experience war. Now, every aspect of our lives, including conflict, is mediated by our digital world. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the people behind the screens can be a little mysterious. I wanted to learn more about them. To understand the workers and whizzes changing what warfare looks like, with major implications for the rest of the world. I wanted to meet the self-styled “Geeks of War.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And for that, we’ll need to open a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meet the Geeks\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: My first guide to the geeks is a couple I met in Lviv, which is a Western city in Ukraine. Dimko and Iryna Zhluktenko. They’re the co-founders of Dzyga’s Paw. It’s a Ukrainian nonprofit that donates defense technology to the frontlines. Both Iryna and Dimko used to work in tech. Dimko was a software engineer, Iryna a product analyst for the San Francisco-based tech company, JustAnswer. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, they quit their jobs and threw themselves into Dzyga’s Paw, which, by the way, is named after their adorable little fox-faced pup, Dzyga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stop by the organization’s headquarters one night. They greet me with a tour of the space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can just come like this. So we used to live here, so this is actually, like a normal house location, but very old one is from 1906, so it’s more than 100 years old, and here you have our main working, like a little open space.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: There’s a small party happening, with some women playing an intimidating-looking card game in the kitchen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The girls are playing [inaudible] Do you know this game? No, you should try. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, I’m horrible at cards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pass an entire wall full of framed thank you letters from different military units. There’s another wall, too, full of patches from soldiers and volunteer fighters, some coming from the other side of the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow, I see Argentina. That’s far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s from, yeah, from international volunteer who’s fighting here in Ukraine, from Argentina. This is a Estonian one from Estonian cyber defense forces. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna shows me another decoration tacked to the wall: A downed Russian drone. And it’s in really good shape. So she decides to give it a whirl.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me try to do it. So it turns on. And if I had a controller, if I had a like TX controller, I could launch it and start it, probably.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is like a war treasure?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Looted from Russians. Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once I tear myself away from the shiny objects, I sit down with Dimko, Iryna, and of course, Dzyga, who has extreme zoomies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the boss of the operation.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> [Laughs]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Dzyga barks]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They tell me that the project came about in the early months of the war. Of course, like so many other Ukrainians, they wanted to help. And they started to think about what they could bring to the table. And that’s when Dimko and Iryna, had their \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">a-ha\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> moment. “We’re nerds!” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve decided that well, we might just use our, uh, tech experience, our tech geekiness, uh, to, uh, innovate. Some of the approaches on the battlefield.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We figured out, okay, we can help better when our expertise is. So basically we started looking more into more advanced equipment. We started looking into drone and things like that and because we had friends in the military, uh, it was like our first point of contact because like we had people we could trust. And we started, you know, buying and supplying some tech devices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They started with what their friends in the military really needed: equipment. Drones, Starlink units — which provide remote internet access – long-range encrypted radios, thermal cameras. Dzyga’s paw has since grown from a scrappy idea into a multi-million dollar nonprofit. In October alone, they delivered over $230,000 worth of equipment to the military, according to the organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all of this high tech gear goes to soldiers and drone operators who are stationed near the frontlines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They often work in hideouts, or command centers, miles from the front, flying drones by remote control while wearing a headset that shows exactly what the device sees through its camera. Other soldiers sit beside them, watching live maps on screens, calling out targets and coordinates in real time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dimko explains what these command centers look like in action.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Basically an underground shelter with, uh, tons of, uh, big ass four screen TVs or something. Uh, and guys looking like they just finished the MIT or something. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So literally geeks of the war, sitting in those command centers and analyzing what is happening at the battlefield, and then suggesting what decisions should be taken to be the most effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> About a year ago, Dimko also enlisted as a drone operator for a Ukrainian military unit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Because this is my chance to, uh, well defend my home, defend my family, and, uh, in the end defend my country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically the job is to do the reconnaissance. Um, you have this big UAV that, uh, like a fixed wing kind of a thing that you launch in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drone warfare has quickly become one of the defining characteristics of this conflict. The kind Dimko pilots are called UAVs — or unmanned aerial vehicles. They look like small airplanes, and like Dimko said, they’re mainly used for reconnaissance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It has the radio connection, so you have the radio signal link, uh, to it. And, uh, you have the live stream from that, you stream that footage into one of the IT systems that we have, uh, in the armed forces.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So all of the people interested in the situation in the area. Can watch that live stream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Then there’s this other kind of drone, called an FPV. That stands for first-person-view. They’re some of the most common drones on the battlefield right now. Once upon a time, these drones were mainly the toys of hobbyists and creatives. You know that insufferable wedding reel you saw on Instagram? Probably shot on an FPV drone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian military started rolling them out on a massive scale. They cost next to nothing. They’re endlessly scalable, and for a country like Ukraine, with far fewer resources and manpower than Russia, they’ve been a game-changer. Drones that can be bought for just a few hundred dollars are now taking out Russian tanks and artillery worth millions.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are swarms of these things buzzing around now on the front, some with cameras for spying, others loaded with explosives to detonate on their targets. And they’re responsible for massive damage. Drones now account for as much as seventy percent of casualties on both sides, according to Ukrainian officials.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experts are already warning that this rapid, wide-scale shift could dramatically change the future of conflict. Other countries are likely to learn from or maybe adopt the technologies and tactics deployed in this war. And It’s not just militaries that can repurpose these technologies. Paramilitaries, militias, and extremist groups can all easily purchase and deploy drone technology. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As drone warfare becomes more lethal on the battlefield, Dimko tells me that his work is also getting more treacherous as the war progresses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is very and very dangerous because the kill zone is getting wider and wider because of the danger of FPV drones there in our direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have a lot of, uh, Russian groups there, specifically hunting pilots like us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But even though Dimko is now an official member of the Ukrainian military, the organization he helps run, Dzyga’s Paw, started completely outside of that system as a grassroots, volunteer mission. And now it’s directly helping units like his and this is really common. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine is heavily dependent on volunteers. People like the Dzyga’s Paw team, delivering supplies to the frontlines, volunteer air defense groups that shoot down Russian drones in the middle of the night, or Ukrainian tech companies building safety apps for civilians. All of this experimentation, this volunteer work – it’s been a really important part of Ukraine’s survival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a classic battlefield, it’d fail. But, um, it’s a constant competition of technology again and I still feel we are more rapid. We are more fast in terms of inventing something new. I wanna believe at least that, um, it all comes from our initial desire to survive and to fight for our country ’cause uh, there were many different people with different careers and professions, but, uh, huge part of them switched to thinking in this direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And this bottom-up, grassroots approach represents a fundamental difference between how Ukraine and Russia operate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to Russia, it’s like they don’t have a, they like, everything is very like, top down. It’s controlled from the,yeah, from the state. So, indeed they have great engineers, but they are given like a task to develop something, to come up with a solution. While in Ukraine, it’s more of a like, grassroots thing and sometimes something brilliant just comes out of nowhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So how did Ukraine get here to this nimble and adaptive space for innovation and experimentation? And why does it all remind me so much of the tech culture in the Bay Area? We’ll get into that after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, we’re back. Time to open a new tab: [\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To help us understand Ukraine’s tech culture, we’re taking a visit to MacPaw — one of the most successful tech companies to come out of Ukraine before the war. They created the CleanMyMac software. I’m at the company’s headquarters in Kyiv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This building was actually hit by a Russian missile back in December. There are still some traces of the attack around the building: Window glass damaged, parts of the exterior crumbling. Here’s MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan describing that day:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The rockets were very powerful so they destroyed all the facade of the building. All the windows were shattered. A lot of damage inside the office, but nothing super critical. We were very lucky in that none of our employees were injured. It was scary.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> MacPaw has built several digital tools to support Ukraine during the war, including an app to help Ukrainian companies check on employees after attacks, software that helps computers identify Russian malware, and a special VPN to help people in occupied territories circumvent Russian censorship.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While getting a tour of the MacPaw office, something catches my eye. It’s a wall filled with a collection of old Apple products from across the ages. It’s got ancient looking grey computers, and those bulky, colorful desktops that always felt to me like the computer version of a jolly rancher. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b> \u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember having these in school. It brings me back. Very nostalgic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oleksandr created this wall as an homage to Apple, which has always been an inspiration to him. Before the war, he wanted to create a museum full of the company’s products. For now, this wall is a little shrine in the middle of the MacPaw office.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a Bay Area resident, it’s kind of funny, being here and seeing traces of where I’m from all over the tech industry here. Granted, Silicon Valley is hugely influential but what surprises me is just how intertwined Silicon Valley and Ukraine’s tech industries are. Like how Iryna of Dzyga’s Paw worked for a San Francisco startup.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this is not unusual I’m learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, tech companies from San Francisco to San Jose have relied on Ukrainian engineers for their technical skills, English fluency, and lower labor costs. Companies like Google, Grammarly (which was founded by Ukrainians), Ring, JetBridge, and Caspio all had employees based in Ukraine when Russia began its full-scale invasion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a general cultural ethos here that feels familiar to my Bay Area sensibilities, like the food trucks, ping pong tables, and hoodies I see all over tech campuses in Kyiv. There was one friendship bracelet-wearing tech worker I talk to who tells me all about her recent ayahuasca healing journey in South America. I felt like I was back at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are all the personal connections I notice with the Ukrainians I meet. Some worked for Bay Area companies. Or, have friends who live there for work. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since the war began, these transnational ties have become a quiet but meaningful network of support for Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Silicon Valley–based nonprofit Nova Ukraine, which was co-founded by a former Facebook and Google employee from Kharkiv, has raised over $160 million in humanitarian aid.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna’s old employer, JustAnswer, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">has expanded its Ukrainian workforce. It funded a pediatric mental health center in the country as well. Caspio \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">helped relocate dozens of Ukrainian staffers safely out of the country, and\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> continues supporting staff remotely. Sometimes, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">company Zoom calls will be interrupted by the wail of a siren telling Ukrainian workers to go to a bomb shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While there’s a lot of overlap between these two parts of the world, the innovation mindset that runs through Ukraine’s tech sector has deep roots. It started long before Steve Jobs or Silicon Valley exploded onto the global scene, like, decades before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1951, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, engineers on the outskirts of Kyiv developed the first computer in all of Europe. They worked around the clock, under tough conditions, in a crumbling old building that was ravaged by bombing during WWII. The people who made this computer, they’re considered the godfathers of Ukrainian IT. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Oleksandr again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the, uh [inaudible] or IT on that era was actually originated from Ukraine. And um, beside that, there were like so many engineers, like my father was an engineer. There are so, so many great engineers that were working for this industry back then. And, and this basically were like the birth of the modern IT industry in Ukraine. So when the USSR collapsed, this talent and this, uh, uh, knowledge, uh, stayed in, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And today, the industry those engineers helped to create now plays a significant role in Ukraine’s economy. In 2024, Ukraine’s IT sector contributed 3.4% to Ukraine’s GDP, behind only the agricultural industry, according to a report published by the IT Association of Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally hundreds of thousands of people joined, uh, Ukrainian army. They started to bring their experience and their, like, creative, uh, vision and approach, uh, to the Army. And they started to apply, uh, some changes from, from bottom up. Uh, because, uh, these generals here, they probably know how to, uh, find the war of previous era, uh, but they don’t, uh, definitely understand how they can apply these technologies in order to, to receive some, some advantage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To this point, we’ve been mostly talking about the physical battlefield, like drones attacking targets in the real world. But a new frontline has emerged in this war — the internet. And the tools and tactics needed to fight in these spaces look completely different. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The new digital battlefield.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our guide to this world is David Kirichenko, a fellow journalist who splits his time between the U.S. and Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m a war journalist and since 2022, I’ve been working on the front lines, um, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But he’s also been reporting on another front: the digital fight between the two countries. Because the information space between Russia and Ukraine has become its own proxy war, with each vying for support at home and abroad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It certainly has, I think, a very big impact on what goes on the physical battlefield just from the amount of influence and impact that you can have. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia’s a country long known for its sophisticated cyber warfare campaigns. In the current conflict, it’s been deploying vast amounts of disinformation online to weaken support for Ukraine around the world — on social media, fake news sites, even video games. This practice, as David points out, has deep roots, going back to the Cold War.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Even since the 1980s, the Russians first started out by building like a newspaper in India. It prints a fake story and then you have a, a more slightly more credible one, print that, and then everyone just starts citing it and it circulates around the world. And an MIT study showed that, um, like the fake news it it spreads like six, seven times faster than the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Enter: The Fellas. They’re a niche online community that has come together to fight Russian disinformation. They call themselves the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, or NAFO, for short. And because it’s the internet, their entire social media “army” has adopted the likeness of one very good boy: A Shiba Inu.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The members of this online battalion, who like to be called the Fellas, usually identify themselves on Twitter, or X, with a cartoon Shiba avatar. And they have one major purpose: To take up digital arms against Russian propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When a pro-Russian narrative pops up on social media, The Fellas leap into action. Their objective is to distract, mock and debunk the Kremlin’s talking points. Politico called the group “a sh*t posting, Twitter-trolling, dog-deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time.” \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are now thousands of Fellas out there in the digital dog fight. They’re an organic phenomenon, borne out of internet culture. And they make anyone who earnestly tries to engage with their trolling look ridiculous. “Oh, you’re fighting with a cartoon Shiba at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Don’t you have anything better to do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The best way to counter Russia propaganda is by mocking it, ridiculing it, and showing that like, this is how ridiculous it is. And like you just make a joke at it yourself by sharing it. Just the fact that, you know, over the years you had all these high-ranking Russian and then other officials engaging with cartoon dogs on, on Twitter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A less cheeky example of digital warfare is the IT Army of Ukraine. They’re a collective of volunteer hackers around the world who coordinate cyber attacks against Russia. They’ve attacked thousands of targets since the war began, from Russian banks to media outlets, and power grids. In June 2024, the group claimed responsibility for a large-scale cyberattack against Russia’s banking system, reportedly causing outages on banking websites, apps, and payment systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The IT Army of Ukraine isn’t a traditional military unit. It’s a sprawling, loosely organized network that runs primarily online. They post updates and send communications on their Telegram channel, where they have nearly 115,000 subscribers. They also have a website that lays out more information about their work and how to get involved. One page, for example, is titled: “Instructions for setting up attacks on the enemy country.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">David has also been reporting on this group. The IT Army’s spokesperson told him last year that its volunteer hackers had caused something like a billion dollars in damage from these attacks. David explains the anatomy of an attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You typically have people that you have the toolkit installed so it doesn’t interfere with your, your Netflix or slow down your internet. You couldn’t set it to, I want to run from like 12:00 AM to 6:00 PM, I’m gonna leave my computer on. So if the IT army, like, runs the botnet and wants to direct an attack, it has the access to the compute to be able to run it and send pings from a lot of different places to overwhelm, um, a system. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so they like posted the, the toolkit onto their website so anyone’s able to go and, and download it. And it’s pretty, pretty simple to install it. And, uh, all you gotta do is just make sure that your computer is running and contributing your compute power to the botnet so that it’s overwhelming, like services when the attack begins.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve met people that said like, even my 12-year-old child is like doing these, uh, cyber attacks against Russia. They just download the toolkit and, you know, you set, you can even set a timer, allow your computer to participate in this botnet\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But these IT soldiers operate in a legally murky zone. There’s obviously something troubling about kids participating in cyberwar against another country. And, if someone participates in an attack from their couch on the other side of the world, are they breaking any laws?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is a gray space. How do governments prepare to legislate for this. Like, are you a combatant If you’re engaging in like cyber warfare? Are you breaking any laws? Should governments build a cyber reserve or some sort of like legal framework for their, like, people to be able to participate in this stuff? I mean, it, you know what, if you’re in Poland and then you’re conducting some cyber attacks and the Russians are very upset and they can launch a missile and they claim that you’re an enemy combatant. And yeah, just it’s, it’s a very challenging space and for I think lawmakers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For all the reasons he just laid out, most of the people I spoke with wouldn’t talk openly about participating in the IT Army. Though one person told me that “literally everyone with a laptop did.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Regardless, all these IT Army volunteers are having a real impact, David says. And this theme of a decentralized, grassroots approach as part of Ukraine’s strategy — chaotic with flashes of ingenuity — it keeps coming up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It ties back to Ukraine’s, wider story of, it’s a volunteer driven war effort. Like Ukrainian soldiers across the frontline are just dependent on online communities and, and volunteers. And so just people around the world have had such a big impact, both in information space, getting supplies to soldiers. Um, and one of the other ways has been on the cyber realm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This grassroots system is pretty much the opposite of how \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> does things. Which is centralized, top down, structured. Just a few solutions, scaled across every single military unit. They’re two competing philosophies fueling this technological arms race between Russia and Ukraine. A war of who’s quicker to out-innovate the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Ukraine is so decentralized, it’s kind of its biggest strength and biggest weaknesses. You have a zoo of solutions of every volunteer group. They’re making, they’re iterating, but then there’s so many different technologies and, and weapons, that everyone’s using different things and it’s hard to standardize, but then it also makes it very effective. But then the Russians learn what’s working and over time they can steer \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the whole war machine to focus on a, on a few things, and it’s sharing those lessons. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no matter how things end, what they’re coming up with is changing what war looks like altogether. With major implications.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drones dominate not just the, the frontline itself, but it’s changed like naval warfare. Ukrainians’ naval drones have helped to neutralize a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and they’re basically blockading Russia’s fleet that had to retreat from occupied Crimea. Ukraine has built, right, these ground robots that are becoming like mechanical medics, and the naval drones help shoot down multiple Russian helicopters, a couple of fighter jets. And those two fighter jets that were lost in Mayra, um, each like 50 million. So you can have a sea drone worth like 200, $300,000 with the, uh, missile worth that much or less, shooting down something that’s $50 million.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so we’re going to continue to see the proliferation of like, cheaper, faster tech. And we gotta learn what, you know, how do we prepare for that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technology is fundamentally a gray area. It’s built on these bursts of genius and promise, and also shows up in our modern world in dark and scary ways. It’s that first European computer, created out of the ashes of a bombed-out building in the Soviet Union. It’s Silicon Valley revolutionizing the world we now inhabit. For better, in some ways and in many ways, for worse: consolidating power, money, data, and influence, on an unimaginable scale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s the real story of the geeks of war. There are the lifesaving apps, like Air Alert, Telegram channels with real-time information about missiles and drones, VPNs connecting people in occupied territories to a bigger, broader, information ecosystem- Tools that are keeping people safe, connected and alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are also new technologies that are killing people, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of cyber saber-rattling. Destroyer drones, yes, they can give an underdog country like Ukraine an edge, but when you stop and think about their capabilities, the damage that can be unleashed with a tool literally anyone can buy for just a few hundred dollars, it’s terrifying. And then of course, there’s cyberwarfare, which can take down a whole country’s infrastructure, cripple power grids, communication networks, financial systems and thrust us all into completely uncharted geopolitical territory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It reminds me of the early days of social media. When Google was still telling us not to be evil. When social networks were described as a revolutionary, democratizing force, helping to topple authoritarian regimes, organize mass protest, connect people all over the world. But we all know what actually happened was a lot more complicated than Big Tech’s aspirational mottos. The lens flipped. The narrative cracked. And now we’re living on the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what will be the story we tell about all these tools 10, 20 years from now? The technology we’re seeing in this war is opening up a new frontier. But who knows where it will be deployed next: What it will look like, who it will target. The geeks are showing us the future we just don’t know where it will lead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks to Erica Hellerstein for her reporting and collaboration on this episode. Erica’s reporting was supported by a fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With that, it’s time to close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios in San Francisco, and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Hambrick is our editor. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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},
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"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
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"order": 8
},
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"order": 1
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
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"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 9
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"meta": {
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"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"source": "NPR"
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"hyphenacion": {
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
},
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
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