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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com Foreign It's Friday, Oct. 31, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca, and though it was designated a couple days ago, I haven't talked about it, but I feel the Gist should as it is a very Words Forward podcast. It's the word of the year as named by the American Dialect Society. Maybe you've heard it. It was six, seven. Yeah, that meme thing. Six, seven. The American Dialect Society, they're just looking to get attention. They're also making a point, right? The word of the year is more politically inflected than the MacArthur genius grant over there at the American Dialect Society. Their last few words of the year, Raw dog in shit ification. We had Cory Doctorow, who invented that word, talking about that the year before 2022. Usi. What's usi? It's the last four letters of pussy. Okay, great. How's that the word of the year? Well, you could put it behind another letter, like bus. What's bussy? It stands for boy. Pussy. Okay. I guess I'll take your word of the year for it, you know, as a good word of the year. Merriam Webster. You know what, there's a dozen of these words of the year. They just go by the stats. Who's looking up what. There's a little bit of subjectivity to it, but when people are really interested in a word, this is where dictionaries come in. And this year, people were interested in. Or last year, people were interested in polarization. That was the word of the year. I stand by that. If I were them, I would stand by that. Oxford. Oxford English Dictionary. They're also pretty good with word of the year. A couple of years ago, goblin mode. Remember when Elon Musk said that? And everyone's like, what's goblin mode? Which is why you need a dictionary. Which becomes the word of the year the year after that. Riz. What's Riz? Short for charisma. Oh, thank you. You've added some knowledge, Mr. Dictionary. Mr. Oxford English Dictionary. So I got to say, my son and I were talking about six, seven, and he's the one who explained it to me, that it just sort of a meaningless thing that people say and they don't know why to say it. It's an example of brain rot, by the way. 2024 Oxford English Dictionary Word of the year. And I said to him, you know, there's, there's never really been a word of the year like this. And he said, no, in 2012, Merriam Webster's Word of the year was capitalism and socialism. And I said, how is that like six, seven? And he said, well, this year the winner is six, seven and that year two, one on the show. No, no, I'm not doing, I'm not doing that. I will say this. If you want to pay more for Pesca plus, we will give you a show without puns. We haven't perfected this technology, but you go to subscribe.mike pesca.com One day there will be a pun list, a terrible punlass version of the gist or I actually think you might want bonus puns. Either way, we have a show without ads. We have a show with bonus content. Today we have some bonus content for the Pesky plus listeners. And I will also say if you want to go and subscribe to the Gist list, which is a different thing, one's talking, one's writing, we can't integrate them. But hundreds of people commented and liked my write up of the interview of Karine Jean Pierre struck a nerve. I have this analysis. I think Karine Jean Pierre might be the most unifying force in American politics today. Not for reasons she'd want, but if you never liked the Democrats to begin with. She does something that validates your priors and if you wanted so much for them, she can be the source of your anger. So you could go to my substack.mikepeska.com and there you could also sign up for the content that's behind the paywall, which is today's Just list. So many opportunities to learn and hear and grow in the Mike Pesca universe. And here is one now for free or if you subscribe. Like I said, bonus content. I will spiel today about the mayoral race in Seattle. But first we're joined by a returning guest on Art Cullen. He is a columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner based in Iowa. Talks a lot about the needs of farmers and the politics of Iowa. And he's out with a new book which has the title Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest Notes from the Edge of the World. The edge of the World is Iowa. The Nest is Iowa. Lot of Iowa talk here with Art Cullen up next, followed by some bonus content if you're of the Pesca plus ilk.
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Katie Wilson
Foreign.
- [05:09]
Mike Pesca
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Art Cullen
Yeah. So it's called the Corn Gospel, and I wrote it with my old high school buddy, Marty Case. And the book is entitled Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest. That's who Marty is. And so the book is framed as kind of a loose letter to Marty Case. And he helped me write this chapter, the Corn Gospel. And it basically explains how human beings domesticated corn in Mexico 9, 10,000 years ago. And we have engineered it and engineered a petrochemical base in which to grow corn. And everything revolves around corn and hogs in Iowa. It's strangling us. We're choking on corn, and we're killing ourselves from toxicity. We're suffocating the Gulf of Mexico. We have corn coming out our ears, and there's no. And prices are falling. Farmers are in trouble, and we're Poisoning ourselves. It's nuts. It's crazy.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. Explain to me why a good Iowa farmer whose family has raised corn for generations might now look at corn as a source of destruction rather than the source of sustenance.
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Art Cullen
They look at corn as their principal income source because that's the way that the industrial. You know, it's an industrial crop. It feeds livestock primarily what we use corn for, and then secondarily, we make fuel out of it, ethanol. And they think that growing corn is the only way that you can make a living in Iowa, and that's just not true. You do not have to plant. From the Mississippi river to the Missouri River, 97% of Iowa is under cultivation. And it just doesn't have to be that way, considering that corn has actually fallen in price in real terms since the Civil War. So we're just digging this huge burial hole for ourselves as a state.
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Mike Pesca
So was this the culmination of the gospel of corn, or was this an abuse? Was this a. I suppose, like when Lucifer fell, some sort of aberration?
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Art Cullen
Yes, it is somewhat of an aberration. We should be on Easy street here. And the native people, before the European settlers showed up were on Easy street in Iowa because it's a sweet spot for growing crops of all sorts. And so, yes, we did fall from grace. And we discovered. We discovered, for example, anhydrous ammonia that while trying to make bombs During World War II, we discovered how to make anhydrous ammonia, which injects nitrogen into the soil. And corn needs nitrogen to grow. It's just everything in moderation. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And now we're spreading commercial fertilizer in the form of anhydrous ammonia. And then to have a suspender with our belts, we pile a bunch of hogshit or turkey shit on top of it until the Raccoon river is toxic. It's one of the filthiest rivers in North America because of ag fertilizer runoff. And it's all going to the Gulf of Mexico and creating a huge hypoxia zone, a dead zone that's killing all the shrimping industry down there.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, I understand that you write about. You talk about agribusiness, you talk about how the Farmer's Bureau is essentially controlled by agribusiness. But the farmers aren't stupid. They understand this. And even if they have different political leanings, they definitely understand their own business. Right? So why aren't they saying or doing anything to prevent this? They're not the actual Literal farmers. Not the majority of voters, but a strong constituency. Why isn't the interplay of democracy and the business interests of these actual farmers leading to a better result?
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Art Cullen
Well, because there's so much money stacked against sustainable agriculture, or whatever you want to call it, resilient agriculture, something that will allow us to preserve our soil and keep our water clean. We know how to do that. It's just that if Koch Enterprises needs every acre, because every acre lost is a dollar loss to fertilizer, or it's a dollar loss to Bayer, which makes Roundup fertilizer. And so farmers understand this, but they're not really running the show. It's this agribusiness cabal that actually controls the strings in Iowa. They own the legislation. It's a one party state, it's a Republican state. It's run by the Farm Bureau. They've stacked the Iowa Supreme Court, and there's just no way around it. If you're going to farm, you're going to do it their way or hit the highway.
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Mike Pesca
Okay, so you're saying that the big business interests aren't in the actual crop that the farmers are cultivating, it's in selling the farmers pesticides to grow that.
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Art Cullen
Crop, that and then post use, you know, to feed cheap corn. So then you have cheap hogs and cheap pork. So Mike Pesca doesn't get upset and start voting the wrong way. We've had a cheap food policy for a long time and it's beginning to show its costs in terms of the environment.
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Mike Pesca
Tell me about what I quoted in the beginning, because I did not know this. Some parts of the state have the highest cancer rates in America.
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Art Cullen
Yes, Northwest Iowa, where I live. The 4th congressional district, it's the mostit's a little slice of Texas, I call it. It's the most heavily Republican district and one of the heaviest in the country. Well, we have the highest breast cancer rate and the highest prostate cancer rate. So men and women are treated equally in North America. We also have the densest concentration of livestock in the 4th congressional district in North America. And it seems to me that's more than a coincidence. And I, in fact, will undergo surgery Nov. 4 for prostate cancer. All my brothers have been treated for prostate cancer and my sister was treated for breast cancer.
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Mike Pesca
Did it run in the family before your generation got it?
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Art Cullen
No, no. My dad died of pancreatic cancer and my mom died of heart conditions. And so no, there was no prostate cancer that we know of in the family. And we also had genetic tests done at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which determined that it's not congenital. This is an environmental illness.
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Mike Pesca
So Steve King was known for racist comments and he was stripped of party stature by the Republicans in I think 2020, and he actually lost a race. And in your book you say Feenstra just knows how to advance policies, but not saying such obviously crazy things. What is it about the place you live? Maybe not Storm Lake, but the Fourth that is given or driven or attracted to this kind of sentiment, this view of the world?
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Art Cullen
First of all, it's 99.9% white until Latinos started moving in to work in meatpacking plants. But most of the small rural places are overwhelmed, are almost exclusively white and they've never really met a Latino or a black person. And so it's easy to make stupid conclusions about things you know nothing about. And then there are also people here are kind of naive and gullible and they believe what the preacher and the politician tell them about these nasty immigrants coming in who are stealing their birthright. And they believe all that. And they forget the fact that the pork chop they're eating was cut by one of these Mexicans. And they don't have any intention of letting their kids work in that meat packing plant. They want them to go to Iowa State University and get an engineering degree so they forget about the fact of who's actually feeding them. And it's Latinos in large part. But you brew this toxic brew of evangelical religion and meld it with the corporate farm bureau thing and then you infuse it into politics and that's how we end up with a Steve King.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, so I do wanna talk about politics. Cuz you talk a lot about it. There were 577,000 active registered Iowa Republic September 23rd. 467,000 Democrats and 413 no party voters. So you have a formula or a plan to attract more votes away from Republicans for Democrats. But it does seem, and you acknowledge this, that there are crosscurrents and difficulties to the perceived self interest of these voters. And as far as I understand how you're laying out your policy, it's to emphasize all of the economic interests that the Democrats could help them with. But then do what about the racism or do what about the social interests, you know, their propensity there, especially in the fourth, to be anti abortion. How do you, how do you think the Democrats should handle the fact that just culturally, even if economically they would be culturally, they are so far away from the Democrats.
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Art Cullen
Well, yeah. So first of all, quit Leading with cultural issues. The Democrats need to stop leading with trans people playing basketball. And in rural areas of Iowa and southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, it's not especially wise, I don't think, personally, to lead with abortion that we should be talking about how can we make rural communities prosperous with a sustainable agriculture and food processing industry? And I think that's really what is mainly on the minds of rural Iowans is what happened to this fairly moderate place where everybody was making a decent living up until 1980 or so. What happened and how did we lose that? And it had nothing to do. The Mexican didn't bust the union. The Mexicans didn't bust the meat packers union. Ronald Reagan did. And people forget that. And there's no Mexican setting your pay in any meatpacking plant. It's a white guy. So the people who stole your franchise are not Mexicans or blacks. And they're not abortion doctors. They are corporate CEOs who have decided that we're going to create a second world economy in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. And I think people do understand that. If you can break through Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and break through all the. The noise. And that's very difficult.
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Mike Pesca
Will an Iowa Democrat who will probably be white, will probably be Christian, might have grown up in Iowa or played baseball in Iowa or held a lower office in Iowa. So a real Iowan won't they have to run against. Given how things work and how all politics are national, won't they have to run against the national party in order to. And that's an impediment. Right. In order to gain the votes of Iowans?
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Art Cullen
I think. No, it's not an impediment to run against the national Democratic Party.
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Mike Pesca
Oh, yeah. What I meant is they will have to run against it. But the national party is an impediment to success in Iowa.
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Art Cullen
That's true. Chuck Schumer should keep his mitts off the Senate race that's taking shape in Iowa. And he wants to put his thumb on the scale and he should back off and get the government operating again and forget about playing Iowa politics. That's how we have two Republican senators. And it's because of Chuck Schumer and congressional leaders is the reason we have an entire congressional delegation that's Republican. The Democratic National Committee, under the leadership of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, killed the Democratic Iowa caucuses. And so that's one hell of a way to reach out to rural voters and is to tell them to go take a hike and throw them in the ditch.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. They would probably say that Iowa is too far gone anyway, even though Barack Obama won it once, and so someone has to go first.
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Art Cullen
Twice.
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Mike Pesca
Iowa's twice. Yeah, it won twice. I meant that there was a time when the Iowans voted for hope and change, and then hope and change didn't come, so they said, screw it, let's vote for.
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Art Cullen
Yeah, yeah. And when there is no hope and change, just give me a tax break.
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Mike Pesca
Right. Yeah. The problem or the uphill battle as I see it, is that all politics are national. The national is actually in this discussion, whether you even countenance a maybe even pro life Democrat, which might do well in Iowa. And there is somewhat of a tradition of that. And I also, as we've documented, Iowans really are culturally not where the Democratic Party is. And then you have things like gun control, and then you have a whole lot of other issues that really are important. They're not distractions. If we want to say the trans issue, come on, do we have to really have that as the number one thing we go to in a poll for? For a lot of people, abortion and guns are super important. And if the Democrats aren't with them on that, it's gonna be a tough ask.
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Art Cullen
Yeah. And I was raised Irish Catholic. My views on abortion are probably not in tune with Chuck Schumer's, but that doesn't mean I don't understand what a pluralistic society is and how it operates. And so I realized that the majority of Americans, and even Iowans, favor a woman's right to choose. And I've come to that same position over the years because I realize we're in a pluralistic society. And I think when you explain it that way, you can talk to these voters, but they aren't even attempting to talk to these voters. I was just talking to a Senate candidate this morning who said, yeah, I haven't been up to northwest Iowa yet. And I said, well, no Democrat has in a long time, so don't worry about it. You know, there's 3,000 Latino voters waiting to be talked to in Storm Lake, and nobody shows up. There are almost as many inactive voters in Buena Vista county where I live, as there are active voters.
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Mike Pesca
Are the economic arguments, A, able to get through and B, so compelling to make these voters that you have in mind vote for Democrats?
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Art Cullen
They have not been compelling enough. But I would suggest that the messaging hasn't been very good either. Tom Harkin did very well in Iowa for a long, long time, and so did Berkeley Bedell, former congressman from northwest Iowa, who himself at one time was pro life, very anti oil, anti military, that has really deep traction among evangelical voters. Democrats don't recognize it anymore. And so yes, with the right messenger, you can sell that economic argument. But first you have to get your ass to Northwest Iowa where these conservatives lives and speak to them. You don't have to win the 4th Congressional District, but you have to be able to improve your performance there by 10 percentage points to win a statewide race. When you have a D behind your name now, it's a 10 point drag on performance.
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Mike Pesca
When Obama was winning, was it?
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Art Cullen
No, it wasn't, but it is now because the Republicans own the channels of communication and they have made Democrats into the boogeyman. And when you don't show up, when you don't show up for, you know, organizing for America, as soon as Barack Obama won, Organizing of America took off and disbanded.
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Mike Pesca
I mean, all that or the fact that NAFTA is identified with a Democratic president or the fact that the national party was literally talking about issues that weren't important or anathema to Iowa. I mean, some of it is the Fox owning the channels or other right wing outlets owning the channels of communication, but some of it is just Democratic policies not being given a great chance, but not delivering given the chance they.
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Art Cullen
Were given and they didn't deliver. During the Biden administration, we had talked about channeling money for sustainable ag practices to farmers. And so they took 20 or 30 billion of money from the USDA and gave it to Cargill and other companies like Cargill, hoping it would trickle down to farmers. It didn't. And so there's no cover crops, there's no conservation work going on in Buena Vista county that wasn't going on before they blew it. We didn't get any of that street money in Storm Lake, Iowa, any of that infrastructure money. There's no street construction going on in Storm Lake. They didn't deliver and neither did Obama.
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Mike Pesca
R. Cullen is editor and co owner of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, for which he won a Pulitzer in 2017. His new book has the provocative title, It's a letter to a friend, an old high school friend, in advance of their 50th high school reunion. Dear Marty, we crapped in our nest Notes from the edge of the world that is Iowa. Thank you, Art.
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Art Cullen
It ain't the end of the world, but you can see it from here.
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Mike Pesca
And now. The spiel. The mayor of Seattle is Bruce Harrell, who has a fascinating, genuinely and inspirational life story. His mother is Japanese and was interned during World War II. His father is black and Harold's a former football star who leveraged his athletic scholarships and got a law degree and became quite successful and entered local politics. And now he has been mayor for four years and he worked in politics for more than a decade before then. Seattleites seem to quite dislike the man, not because he's a bumbler or outrageous, but simply because he is the incumbent. This is how it goes in Seattle. They often vote out the incumbent. They want change and then when they get changed, they want change from that, and then when they get changed from that, how about a little more change in Seattle these days, incumbency is not the protection it used to be. The appetite to stick it to Donald Trump specifically right now has morphed into a general distaste for anyone actually in office. So who will be the next Seattle mayor? If the polls and the primary are to be believed, it's an organizer named Katie Wilson. Wilson heads a group with no employees called the Transit Riders Union. The Transit Riders Union annual budget about $200,000 and they lose, you know, a few tens of thousands of dollars every year. They're not a for profit. I guess that's fine. According to Cairo News Radio, Wilson hasn't had a steady paying job for more than a couple of years in a row. Her husband is unemployed and her parents, who are both professors at the University of Binghamton, are helping pay for daycare while she campaigns for mayor. The parental became fodder for Harrell, who cast it as evidence of privilege. Look at the out of touch rich girl. But Wilson, two and a half decades younger than Harold Jiu Jitsu that turned it into a social media post featuring her mom and her adorable daughter Josie. It's hard to begrudge a grandma helping raise adorable Josie. When asked about a past defund the police statement, as all organizers were required to do in 2020, Wilson told a debate moderator that actually what had been going on is a conversation.
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Katie Wilson
In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, we had a very contentious public conversation around the country about community safety and policing. I participated in that conversation and also I have learned a lot since then and I'm proud of what I've learned. I've been having a lot of conversations about public safety with former officers, with other people in the public safety space. And I'm very confident that we can make progress on these very difficult issues and we can create a city that is safe for everyone.
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Mike Pesca
So you aren't arguing that that is something you said five years ago you have since learned a lot more, as you said.
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Katie Wilson
What changed your mind? I think, you know, the conversation back then. And, you know, honestly, we've. We've made a lot of progress based on that conversation. Right.
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Mike Pesca
I guess it's not an altogether terrible answer, especially since a lot of voters in Seattle also wanted to defund the police, and that was her position at the time. So she's not lying about it. Harrell had the opportunity to pounce, but instead. Well, this is indicative of his not tremendous speaking skills, his ability to make certain points in the moment, but not the killer blow. I mean, basically, what he does here, I don't want to step on it too much. I'll let you listen. He changes the word conversation to dialogue. Sure. My opponent talks about, we had discussions after George Floyd was murdered. We attended hundreds of discussions. We marched on the streets. I did not see my opponent in any of those discussions because had she been at the real discussions, we would have said, in the black and brown community, our community would suffer the most if we defund. And there at the end, he reaches for the only lever he seems to have in Seattle politics, emphasizing that he's biracial and represents marginalized communities, in contrast to Wilson, who is white. But voters don't seem to care. Many of them are also white, and many of them also, quote, acknowledge their privilege as often as she does. Wilson is up on Harold in the polls. At another debate, Wilson was asked what she would do if a major earthquake hit. Serious question for a city that sits atop the Cascadia subduction zone randomly.
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Art Cullen
Ms. Wilson, let's say an earthquake strikes the region. You're the new mayor. What three specific steps would you take upon feeling the shaking? The first shaking.
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Katie Wilson
That's a great question. I'd probably make some phone calls.
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Art Cullen
Boom.
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Katie Wilson
So I know we have, like, really strong emergency management protocols in Seattle and King county, so I would probably call the person who is the head of those efforts. Probably be good to call the governor and probably be good to call the police chief. Yeah.
- [34:06]
Mike Pesca
Her answer again, not terrible, just vague that she'd ask for help. Harold had an answer, and he really could have jumped on her and said, well, you can't call anyone if the wireless is out. He said something like that. He could have said, you need to have a plan beforehand. He could have said, I actually know all the officials. You could have called Ed, who's in charge of this department. He was over my house two days ago. Sandy, who's in charge of that department? I know his kids, Connor and Lulu. He didn't quite do that. He didn't quite trounce her with the answer. His answers aren't much better than hers, but they are grounded in the fact that I have done this job for a while. The vote is Tuesday. Wilson, as I said, beat Harrell in the primary. It's an open primary in Seattle. She got 50.8% of the vote back then, and Harold got 41.2. But polls do have the race tightening, wilson told the Stranger, the Alt weekly in Seattle. Honestly, I'm more worried about putting together a mayoral wardrobe than I am about running the city. She is known for assembling thrifted outfits from Goodwill, thereby embodying the esthetic of today's viral political hero, one that, of course, plays very well on vertical video. That's it for today's show. Cory War is the producer of the Gist. Jeff Craig runs our Social. Kathleen Sykes helps me on the GIST list very much. And Michelle Pesca helps us all so very much. See the error of our ways and the wisdom of our future. Do Peru and thanks for listening.