Hello everyone is Clay Jenkinson with my introduction to this week's

podcast my conversation with Richard Rhodes the author of the Making of the Atomic

Bomb about the future of rural America. This was his suggestion. I frankly was a

little puzzled when he provided it, but I'm glad we had this conversation. I

think it was an

exceedingly rich one.

He has a deep interest in rural life. He spent some formative years on an orphanage where he and his brother were placed for their safety

after their domestic life shattered. He wanted to talk about how the plight of rural America

fuels the sort of angry and polemical politics of our time and he I tried to pull away a little

bit from this but but he sees Donald Trump as a sort of a false profit as he likens them to the to the

music man the famous movie and a Broadway production the musical the music man which by the way, a very great piece of Americana.

At any rate, we talked about the Oglala Aquifer, which underlies parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, and how it's almost spent.

We talked about the coming of robotic agriculture, the virtue and value of being deeply connected to your own food

supply, and he's slaughtered some creatures, I've slaughtered a few myself. It's a bloody

awful business, but there is something to it that is deeply invigorating and reconnecting to the basic processes of life.

My question was really Jefferson's question, is rural life superior to other ways of living?

We're now a really profoundly urban culture in Jefferson's, 95% of the American people were farmers,

in our time about 2%.

So whatever Jefferson's agrarian utopian dream was,

we are no longer living it.

How important was that? Was Jefferson just

mythologizing? After all he was a large farmer of huge tobacco plantations

...