Hey there podcast listeners, backstories relaunching its podcast with new hosts and a new partner, Slates Paneple Network.

You'll find a brand new episode in your podcast feed this Friday.

In this episode, we're going to ask you to imagine a future, one in which much of the great planes,

more than 100,000 square miles, is a vast empty prairie.

The great planes has been losing population for in fact well over a century.

We have a solution for what happens when the population, even farther than it already has.

That solution turned the region into a giant nature preserve and bring back the buffalo.

This idea was cooked up by two East Coast academics.

We thought we were being evocative, it turned out we were being provocative.

We represented to them a kind of bi-coastal academic loss of touch with how the world worked.

The reaction here was swift and it was mefthed.

Which side of the fans is my house on?

How many of you are there in this conspiracy?

I think it has such an impact because of the possibility that what they were proposing really would be the end of our story.

Throughout the 2016 election, pundits often talked about urban rural political divide in America.

On the next backstory, we'll look at what happens when urban and rural Americans collide.

I draw 300 miles to hear you and you're still full of nonsense.

We'll also trace the urban rural divide back to the founders.

When city Slicker, Alexander Hamilton challenged Thomas Jefferson's vision of a country composed of humble, yeoman farmers.

And we'll look at how attitudes towards small town voters have shaped American politics.

I say without fear of contradiction that the average citizen in the rural district is superior intelligence, superior immorality, superior in self-government

to the average citizen in the great cities.

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