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Something I'm always thinking about is the way that algorithms are often self reinforcing, giving us more of the content and news that we want to see, which isn't the most healthy way to take in information. Which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Ground News. Ground News shows you how the same story is being covered across the political spectrum so you can actually get the full picture and not just the one version that's being given to you. If you want to check it out, go to groundnews.com/ to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan. Again, again, that's groundnews.comquestion. make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. Hey everybody, it's Brian. On Tuesday, June 16th, I'm going to be live on stage in New York interviewing Ashley St. Clair. Ashley used to date Elon Musk. They have a kid together. And the reason I've been wanting to interview her is she was the target of a terrible harassment campaign by Musk's supporters who used his AI service Grof to make all these hyper realistic sexually explicit images of Ashley without her consent, including images of her when she was as young as 14. These images were spread around X used to humiliate Ashley and she's now suing Musk's AI company, xai, for allowing users to do this to her with its product. And surprise, surprise, Xai is trying to use Section 230 to shield themselves from liability. It's one of the first cases where section 230 is being invoked to protect generative AI in this way. So Ashley and I are going to dig into that on stage. And also she is just in such a singular situation where she has this intimate personal relationship with the man who owns the technology and platform that was used to harass her, who also just happens to be the world's richest man. So we're going to talk about what that's like. If you will be in New York on June 16th at 6:30pm and are interested in coming to this. It's mostly filled up, but we have a handful of tickets available and we're going to give them out randomly to anyone who signs up for our free question. Everything substack before next Thursday, June 11th. You go sign up there before June 11th, we will do a little drawing to give out these tickets to the live taping of my interview with Ashley St. Clair in New York. Okay. This week, while we're prepping for that live event and also a bunch of great new shows we have coming up for you we're showing the first episode of a new season of Drilled, a podcast about the climate and energy, hosted by reporter Amy Westerbilt. Amy's great. I've admired her reporting for a long time. She focuses on document heavy follow the money reporting on a topic that is not easy to cover. The mystery she's taking on in this season of Drilled. A hospital in a Brazilian farm town has a new maternity ward that is named after Bruce Rastetter, not a Brazilian, if you can't tell by the name. The staff at the hospital think Rastetter's a doctor from Ohio, but he isn't. He's a Republican pork entrepreneur from Iowa. Amy's been partnering with a reporting team in Brazil from the Intercept to figure out why Rastetter's name ended up on that hospital ward and the implications it has for energy policy, the environment, and politics. After a quick break, we'll hear the first episode of Drilled from Amy. Artificial intelligence is moving very, very fast, and it's raising new questions just about every day about what it is, what it isn't. When all of a sud done, what is the end game? I'm Chris Hayes, and as part of my podcast, why Is this Happening? I'm speaking with leading experts each week to help ground that conversation.
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We're right now in a situation where it's very difficult to understand what is real and what's not real.
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Why is this happening? The AI Endgame, a special miniseries from Ms. Now. Start listening today, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission. They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. The idea behind this new technology was simple. When you turn corn into ethanol, it generates carbon dioxide. And that's a problem if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now people from Iowa to North Dakota were capturing that carbon dioxide, storing it, and selling it. Never mind that they were selling it to people who would inject it underground to get more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground. And if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution. The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea had a lot riding on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to Ethan was a great green success story, a win win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned the local newspapers, they might have found a different story. If you live in Iowa, your land, your Water and your voice could all be at risk, thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. You know, essentially paying him to capture CO2 at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere, many states away. On September 2, the Brazilian contingent met with an Iowa company called Summit Carbon Solutions. Summit has been trying for years to build a carbon capture pipeline to connect dozens of ethanol plants from Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project. Harold Ham, who controls many of North Dakota's oil fields and is an energy advisor to President Trump, is a major investor in the company. Bruce Rastetter is the company's co founder. He's also founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's managed to do what almost no politician, issue, or campaign has been able to do in the US for years, united far left and far right populace. People from both sides hate this pipeline. For Rastetter, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa. Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're going to get a response. Jess Mazur is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club, Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she dealt with Bruce Rastetter. They know who it is, and they go, oh, you know, that guy did this, or that guy put a factory farm near my house. Or he's the one that, you know, got Iowa State in trouble. So I think everyone's got an opinion of him, and he's really, really good at being able to avoid ever having to be in the public. He doesn't get interviewed. He doesn't take media requests. Kind of secretive. He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa. Rastetter got his start as a big hog farmer. From there, it wasn't a big leap to growing corn. And then, like a lot of corn growers, that led quickly to getting into the corn ethanol business. As a longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its carbon footprint is similar to regular gas. It requires around 30 times as much land as solar, plus lots of water and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But industrial agriculture gets loads of subsidies from it, so they're always finding a way to keep it Alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its
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latest lifeline, the Inflation Reduction act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. It contains sustainable aviation fuel. We think that's an incredible part of decarbonizing the planet.
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The Inflation Reduction Act. Biden's big climate policy created a whole new revenue stream for the corn ethanol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Rastetter to the rescue.
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So I think without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy. So that's what lowering carbon scores this project on the pipeline is about. With 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular, Iowa.
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Summit Carbon Solutions still talks about the project today as a way to open up new markets for Iowa corn farmers. So the company was caught off guard when people across multiple states began organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express. And it quickly became a big problem because Rastetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of Iowa, his company was also the majority owner of a Brazilian ag company, FS Fueling Sustainability. And he'd helped to make corn ethanol a thing in Brazil too. Now Summit is trying to make carbon capture happen there too. Welcome to Drilled Season 15 Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at the Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there.
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I'm Felipe Sabrina with the Intercept of Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of this season over on the Intercept Brazil feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil and how a
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bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and ag industries got rebranded as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush. A few months ago, Felipe started telling me about this giant pig statue that greets people near Bruce Rastetter's home base in Brazil. Because, yes, his partners in Brazil also started out as pig farmers. These guys are all still in the pig business, and boy, do they love pigs. When Felipe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I was kind of shook. If you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue, think again. This is a massive porky pig looking thing wearing lederhosen and a bright green hat holding a corn cob.
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And it even has a name, Lucinha or little Lucas, because the town is called Lucas do Hioverde. It tells you actually a lot about this place. It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area, big agriculture business guy. He comes from a German family, which is why the pig is wearing a German outfit. Around 50 years ago, the Brazilian agriculture industry came to this place looking for a cheap and easy land grab. Today, the American agriculture industry is doing the same thing.
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This audio you're listening to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas Torio Verde city government. Highlighting the wonders of the city, the video mixes images of macaws, forests in the sunset, and large cotton, soybean and corn fields. The city government wants you to know that Lucas is the city of opportunities. It has more than 95,000 inhabitants and produces more than 2 million tons of grain per year. The narrator of the video says, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil. And then the screen fills with a mix of smiling children, crops and grain pouring out of machines. Lucas, the Rio Verde, is all money, growth and seas of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.
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The first time I visited, it shocked me to see massive crops right next to people's homes. But the more I learned about Lucas, the more it made sense. The town is a fiction designed and built by the government to impose development on this region. Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners. The wide avenues are lined with silos, agricultural machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks and real estate agencies. Trucks over 20 meters long, loaded with soybeans or corn, have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb. Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge. Because of the distances between the long avenues, the heat and the lack of trees to provide shade. The city is obsessed with imperial palm trees. There are hundreds of them in the town center and on the sides of the roads. With nothing but monoculture crops and imported palm trees. There is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extreme temperature changes. Lucas can go from freezing cold to unbelievably hot from one moment to the next. It was weird for me, but the people I spoke with here didn't seem to mind. The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas.
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My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw reports about the city, which is a very good place to live, to raise children, and even in terms of violence. So we packed our bags. Isabella is from Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas. But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells acai bowls in front of the parking lot of a multinational grain company. Acai is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of acai cream through the fence. And the truckers pass back cash. Isabella said Lucas is great, not least because when she needs to take her kids to a public hospital, she never waits more than an hour to be seen. Me in the city, I don't think anyone can complain about health care, she says. The Lucas do Rio Verde hospital, San Lucas in particular, is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs. Now they've opened a really nice ward at you. The whole hostel has been renovated. In fact, the new maternity ward at the SA Lucas Hospital has a promotional video, too. And a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize a not so Brazilian sounding name. Bruce Rastetter, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. He wields a lot of power there, but outside the state, he's not exactly a household name. Now, suddenly, a new wing in the hospital in this Brazilian farm town was being named after this guy. How did that happen?
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The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived. So our producer Marce Riverdoz, and I just showed up to see what we could see. We talked to a hospital worker in the hall.
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It's a little hard to hear there because Felipe and Marcia were trying to tape with their phone. And of course, she's speaking in Portuguese, too. But when they asked her about the name of the ward, the Bruce Rastatter wing, she said it was named after Bruce, a doctor from Ohio. We're still not sure where she got that idea, but funding big public projects, especially around hospitals and healthcare, is really common in Brazil. You just heard how, when telling Felipe about what she likes about Lucas, Isabella mentioned healthcare. People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So if Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that's focused on women and children. So a maternity ward checks a lot of boxes. And then we found out that the hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Rastetter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paolo, was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And to understand how Rastatter, the American farmer, ended up with a Brazilian rural maternity ward named after him, we had to figure out how the Franz Brothers fit into it and what brought Bruce to Brazil in the first place. That's coming up after the break. This is Kim Masters, host of the Business on kcrw. Every week we take a deep dive into the deals and the drama that shape Hollywood. From the power plays in the boardroom to the creative battles on set, we bring you the inside inside stories behind the entertainment headlines. Check out the business part of the NPR podcast network. Luca Studio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a state that is almost exactly half agriculture and half Amazon rainforest. It used to be even more Amazon. For decades, the state was considered the frontier in Brazil. The forests were preserved and it was home to even more indigenous people than it is today. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy. It was called the National Integration Plan. The idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti development and integrate the north and Midwest of Brazil into the national economy. This propaganda film from the 70s celebrates the, quote, revolution reaching the jungle, toppling trees in favor of roads. The goal was to develop the Amazon by building infrastructure in the wilderness, displacing indigenous residents and encouraging people from outside the region to move there, to be pioneers and go to this frontier and tame it. The main farm towns in Mato Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian government. The government offered people plots of land, housing, and sometimes even credit to move there. They even funded research to figure out how crops like soybeans and cotton could be grown in the tropical climate there. That's what brought the Franz Brothers there decades ago. And according to Paolo, it's the Franz Brothers who brought Bruce to the area. In Paolo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa and an important contact he made there. Here he is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast,
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Un homied. Terry Branstad.
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Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa at the time and eventually US Ambassador to China during Trump's first presidency. Powell says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Powell says it was Branstad who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter.
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Bruce is the CEO of the company, the founder. He has a huge passion for pigs and has been involved with pigs his whole life. He was a pig farmer until he started getting into ethanol, which is a very recent thing. I don't know whether, just to clarify, Americans produce more ethanol from corn than we do from sugar cane. There the philosophy, the culture is producing ethanol from corn. So as president, I met with this Terry Branstad, who is the governor of Iowa. We met and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil.
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Bruce doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about how he wound up in Brazil. Here's how he talked about it on a farming podcast a couple of years ago.
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So when we sold Hawkeye to Koch
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Industries, that was one of his ethanol companies.
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That freed me up for the first time to do other things outside of being responsible for a larger company and started traveling to Brazil.
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This is how Bruce talks about it in other interviews too. He was interested in Brazil because it's the main agricultural competitor to the US or because other US companies had done well there, etc. Etc. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paolo's differing versions of this story that our Brazil editor, Alice de Souza, found a guy with yet another version.
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Is this Pro Ethanol? Are you tree huggers? Are you looking at this from a negative standpoint or are you looking at it from a neutral standpoint? I don't mind being neutral. I can be critical of this too. But because clients of mine have invested upwards of a billion dollars now in my Pedroso, I don't want to fuck this up.
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That's Corey Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil.
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I came from northwest Minnesota developing land. So of course when in the early 2000s, when Mato Grosso and all of this soybean expansion was taking place, I was going to be the lamb guy for a group of from some of the first guys I went down with. You're going to be here, Cory. Pick up the language, make up the contacts. You could be the real estate guy. So that's where I started was from that perspective.
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Full disclosure. We paid Corey Melody to be a fixer for us on the ground in Mato Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the Brothers Franz at their farm. None of that ended up panning out, but he did talk to Felipe and I and he told us a lot about how Bruce started out in Brazil. He also added me to his newsletter list, which is a wealth of ag knowledge about Brazil. Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder marked Corey.
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So I've been on every Fireman by proso. I wrote the the boom times and the Bus and the Boom times and the bus again with all my friends. So I, I, you know, I have that 25 year arc of experience now of the good, bad and ugly of Michael Grosso. And believe me, there's plenty of all of it.
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He knows a lot about Bruce and the Franz Brothers because he did for Bruce what he's done for the past 25 years for other Americans looking to get into the ag business in Monto. Grosso. He toured them around looking for land.
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Back in 2011, I was visiting Reba, and he was a young, dynamic guy, and he would say, cory, we're looking to develop a corn oil mill. Processing and investors are partnering that corn oil. So I was writing about this BS in my newsletters at the time and also visiting in Lucas de Alberti at the elevators at the time, talking to farmers. Oh, corn ethanol. Corn ethanol. We gotta get corn ethanol here or we're going to bury ourselves.
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Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American ag folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to get a sense of Mato Grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before he got a call from you know who.
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Summit from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with. Bruce Rastetter and Eric and then the whole club. I get a call from Bruce's letter, email. Hey, we would like a tour of Marco Grosso. We're going to be down there for another reason. Could. Could we do something a la carte with you, Corey?
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They didn't want to take one of Corey's prepackaged ag tours.
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Okay, so this is 2011. We do a little quick power tour, they go home. I figured just another tour. We were looking at land. We would love to get going on some land deals.
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Corey carried on, thinking nothing of it, but six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Malto Grosso.
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My good friend, the Franzes, you know, they were, Cory, we want to get an ethanol mill when out here, but we need help, we need Americans, we need capital, etc. Etc. So I was telling Bruce and the guys at the time, you know, I've got friends out here.
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According to Corey at the time, Bruce and the guys weren't quite ready to get into the ethanol business in Brazil. They were just looking for some farmland. Then they came back for another trip. And as Corey tells it, this is when they met the Franzes.
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All of a sudden, you know, Brazilians being Brazilians, oh, we've got a farm for sale.
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Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzes, and it kept them all talking.
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Three years to close on this damn farm. But that farm purchase then opened the door with trust and capital. Hey, let's build an ethanol mill. And Lucas together, the Franz brothers had
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hit the big time. They were getting into business with the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. It was a whole new level. Or as Corey calls it cycle three.
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Cycle one is deforestation in cattle. Cycle two is. So cycle 2.5 is soy corn. Basically, you know, the combination cycle three now gets to be what we would say, industrial or added value. No different than Iowa.
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For the Franz Brothers, Bruce was a white whale. At a time of booming Brazilian industrial agriculture, he happened to have some free time on his hands. And now this international king of corn had picked them. What luck. But that story misses one important detail. At the time he was doing land tours in Brazil, Bruce Rastatter was having a really bad time back home in Iowa. Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in Iowa. It's just that's what he does is like his business model, you know, and whether it was in Iowa with, you know, how he was treating Iowa farmers, or now it's globally. Yeah. He just keeps pushing his business advancement. Right. It's all about his corporate profits. Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which, I mean, I suppose if I was in his shoes, if I had the choice of, you know, being a place where everybody hated me in a place where people fawned over me, I'd probably go to people fond over me. That's our story next time. We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz Brothers, Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, and all Summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season.
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Carbon Cowboys Cowboys of the Isejado is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil.
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The show was reported and written by Felipe Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt.
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Our editors are Audrey Quinn in the US And Alice de Souza in Brazil.
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Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Heverdosa and Felipe Mooks.
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Our Impact producer is Lindsey Crowder. Theme song and original music by Eric Terrena.
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Additional music by Martin Zaltz Austwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff.
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Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming.
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US Fact checking from Naomi Barr.
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Brazil fact checking by Studio Frontera.
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Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. We are also proud members of Reporter Shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, president of the Intercept Brazil.
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Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries.
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Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Treburneck and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to the Intercept Brazil's site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed. Wherever you listen to podcasts.