Former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp and her brother, KFGO radio talk show host Joel Heitkamp, engage in animated discussions with newsmakers, elected leaders, and policymakers who are creating new opportunities for rural Americans and finding practical solutions to their challenges. Punctuated with entertaining conversations and a healthy dose of sibling rivalry, The Hot Dish, from the One Country Project, is informative, enlightening, and downright fun.
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Rural voters keep hearing about scandal in Washington, but most of it never gets past the surface. Tim Miller, host of the Bulwark Podcast, joins Heidi to dig into what's actually driving political corruption right now, from foreign money shaping U.S. policy to the insider trading scandals barely making headlines. Tim traces how political corruption has evolved, from straightforward kickbacks to…
Trump is fighting to control how states run their own elections, and the fallout could shape the midterms before a vote is cast. Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist who's tracked Trump and the media covering him for years, joins Heidi and Joel to break down what's happening and why it matters outside Washington. Aaron explains how he tells what's real from what isn't, in a news cycle built for…
Data centers are showing up in rural counties across the country, and not everyone is happy about it. Isaac Wright, a strategist who's spent two decades working rural campaigns, joins Heidi and Joel to talk about why that is, what tariffs have cost farmers selling to Brazil and China, and why he sees real opportunity for Democrats in Iowa and Ohio in the midterms. Isaac explains why rural voters…
Farm country has been waiting on a new farm bill for almost two years. Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee and a Minnesota congresswoman now running for the state's open Senate seat, joins Heidi and Joel to talk about what's holding it up, what tariffs have cost rural families, and why farm bankruptcies are becoming as much a security question as an economic one. Angie…
Screw worms nearly disappeared from American ranches sixty years ago. Dr. Eric Deeble, executive director of Americans for the Common Good and former Deputy Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs at USDA under the Biden Administration, has watched them find their way back, and he joins Heidi and Joel to explain what this parasitic fly means for livestock, trade, and the food supply.…
For America's 250th birthday, Heidi and Joel skip the fireworks and head for the ballpark, and they bring their guest, Bob Kendrick, along. He is the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. The museum is just a few blocks away from where the team owners established a league of their own in 1920. Bob has spent three decades making sure that the players and the…
For Heidi, the reflecting pool on the National Mall in D.C. is more than a tourist attraction; it's a metaphor for how Washington handles problems. Years of algae, cloudy water, and expensive repairs reflect a familiar pattern: ignore an issue until it becomes a crisis, then spend money on a temporary fix rather than addressing the underlying cause. She believes rural America has been treated the…
Nick Levendofsky has spent years watching Washington write farm bills that land badly in the field. As director of the Kansas Farmers Union, he's tracked input costs climbing, cattle herds shrinking, and processing power concentrating into fewer hands, and he's done sugarcoating what that means. While Heidi is out this week, Joel sits down with Nick to work through where the farm bill actually…
Buckle up, history buffs and democracy defenders. We're sitting down with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, author of Strongman , and one of the leading experts on authoritarianism, to connect the dots between today's political chaos and the playbooks of history's most dangerous leaders. The parallels are less "ancient history" and more "this week's…
This episode pulls back the curtain on the AI gold rush, the data centers, the water bills, the NDAs, and what it all means for rural communities that rarely have a seat at the table. AI sounds like the future, but the costs are landing unevenly, especially outside major cities. Heidi and Joel join Dr. Emily Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna to dig into the real, and rarely discussed, toll of our digital…
