this issue right and denton is a remarkable fracking story because it's the birthplace of fracking laura left as well as being the first town to ban fracking and then something a very interesting happened what happened right the texas legislature overturned our ban they passed a ban on fracking and. we all voted on that passed by almost sixty percent the texas legislature which is kind of a petro state decided now we're going to let you do that you know it's interesting is that you started your denton anti fracking campaign kind of on the heels of josh fox you know he did gas land in that film or there igniting or to come out of the politics and i thought that people's consciousness would be raised somewhat about the dangers of fracking resit that didn't seem to reach dent and it didn't reach that industry i would say but a lot of people and didn't watch that movie and it was an automaton but that's what's going on it was able to connect it with a broader sort of global energy transformation some people thought this is like

water drilling or what's going on nobody would inform us that was a big part of the problem that we would say hey by the way we're going to put a gas well in your backyard and so it took the kind of that movie to help us connect the dots and realize what happened speaking of water it's an extraordinarily water intensive industry and they've got really two industries at loggerheads here because the cattle industry in texas that's very water intensive fractures that's no water intensive business on these two battling it out politically yeah that's a big part of it it's it's pitting water interests against each other around here municipalities are also big water users and so the cities are worried about how the fracking industry. is taking a lot of the water to just pour it down the ground where it sort of never recovers and it comes from aquifers right and these are confers are wasting assets they don't replenish once they're gone they're gone they're gone at least on any human time scale so yes and then the water that does come back up is polluted. you gotta

find a place to put it and that introduces another problem where you have these disposal wells where you're pumping down millions of gallons of water and sort of destabilizing these formations which causes earthquakes right the earthquakes another byproduct of this industry what did you find out about the economics of fracking i did a lot of research locally because when we started the band the industry hit us hard with a lot of flyers about how great it is for the local economy but in fact it hardly did anything you talk to city council they say it gives us a few extra bucks but we never rely on it because these wells deplete after two or three years. and so really did very little for our schools for our parks but they sure like to talk about how much it does you save a deplete after two or three years with the financing the bond issuance are for twenty years what happens is that the bonds can't be paid off and then there's a cycle where these projects are passed down down the road the accountability chain if you well into less and less accountable developers and you end up eventually

abandoning the wells and it just becomes a huge ecological problem with now i'm paying for it all right here what we have around it is a lot of the bottom feeders we call them the lowest like cutthroat part of the industry that has no margin to work with and they cut every corner possible i've even had people in the industry with the majors you know the bigger companies look at what happened here and say no way would we ever do this right this is a product of a marginal company trying to get away with whatever they can in the short term and then now we've got three hundred sites all around they're like measles pockmarked around town and they're going to be abandoned in week we don't know how we're going to develop around these things who's going to care for them and it be it introduces like a land use planning nightmare for the city that your background is in philosophy and you come across as someone now who has a bit of more circumspect. when you come to this issue philosophically speaking can you help us under. stand this in the grand tradition of philosophy because if you

go back throughout the history of philosophy there's a huge body of work to suggest what happens to people when they engage in hubris berthing gauging or narcissism you know they fail to know themselves you know philosophically we're just going adam you know as a professor of philosophy were we had it that's the best question i think i've ever got and i frame my book around this actually. it's sort of this the lesson of frankenstein in a way what we do with fracking and with so many technologies is we kind of create something without thinking about all the wider ramifications all they're thinking about is how to get that gas out of the ground they're not thinking about the environmental questions the local control questions and so i think this is a this is a lesson learned about being precautionary. right but it's a lesson that's not learned and never learned and can't seemingly incompatible with modern capitalism where accountability is considered quote unquote an xterm ality.

commerce and therefore not the responsibility of the commercial interest of the corporation it ends up in the municipal interest and then abandoned as you and it's a stark representation of abandonment because as you're saying these frack do wells that are not doing anything they're just debt gobbling catastrophes or just pockmarked the into the the environment i don't know if we'll ever learn this lesson because it involves collective responsibility and we have this myth of the invisible hand that somehow individually greedy actions will add up to sunshine and flowers for everybody and when you talk about the greedy hand the invisible hand of course adam smith and the wealth of nations he wrote a corollary book to this about the moral sentiments of capitalism or he talked about the need for regulation right to balance the greed of capitalism but no one reads that blog now that was an inconvenience this is going to be here. yeah

they're like religious theocratic fanatics who only read part of the text and based on their actions on what they believe to be the meaning of that text but forget the entirety of the text yeah it's half truths that's all we want and that's the story of our age this tribalism we've got going on everyone wants a simple narrative and the invisible hand is such a wonderful simple narrative if you wrote another book that complicates it just forget about that right we don't have to worry about them speaking a philosophy i don't know if you've read much of john locke sure but isn't he the one who said that when the social contract this broken the people must revolt in fact the people aren't really revolting at that point because the contract was was broken by the powers that be so we would just be reconstituting a new social contract yeah contract is broken with fracking i have a life jacket here you have your book i have got the constitution of the united states here we go out of pocket constitution so this is the social contract that

binds americans together ok now if you have corporations overriding that contract by going against the people and imposing jack kone and financial armageddon in the nomic slash ecological apocalypse the social contract is clearly broken and i'm so in as john locke said we need to therefore stage a revolt i mean is it time for a revolt what do you mean by a revolt i mean like we revolted against the british in seventy eight seventy six we declared our independence from the british we needed to clear our independence from the special interest of the energy industry well you know if you put it that way i'll give you that the social contract is premised on consent right the consent of the government is where power comes from and this didn't is a case study and how that doesn't work anymore we consented to has. to ban fracking and the government said we're going to listen to that so if that's what you mean yeah i'm on. with you where does that leave us engineers tech fix i mean i

think we're putting all of us are putting our money on a gamble that the engineers will solve all of these problems to clean up the water will scrub the carbon out of the air we'll come up with a new mobile energy technology so you don't have to change the way you have you know you have to vote just keep the uncomfortable it will make it sustainable and the tech solution is where fracking comes from it's a tech solution to a diminishing right illness problem yes but it the extra maladies are much greater cost in many different ways than the benefit yet which is why i was talked about being cautious about the tech solution do we need it perhaps a. savior. we need. stuff here is selling. books and data in there because it too should in this book stop your consumption of energy i think that our beautiful till we got this book we got my book the

constitution will put these two together this will be the rock of our new church the foundation of our new religion no more fracking the church and no fracking let's go downtown and start preaching this message are you with me do you do you read jihad tracking in your audience. so it goes. with it i love it i think it'll work you know head in the town and them are preaching in the middle of town just jump in your car you've got to remember i renounce fracking so i got my bike. all right is that all right that's fine now great man this will work because you know we've got to get into that have been our announcing the big oil pipeline and stood rooted in open word. do you. think good strikers. we can beat them if you're sitting on my hand to. hand out of this stuff.

it's an interesting time tracking bill sensually which is in denton texas very much ground zero because they first frack and then the first to reject fracking in the first of the state overruled the. anti fracking protest band that doesn't sound very democratic to me but i was talking to the author and he said basically it's pure hypocrisy and burgle. pure hypocrisy so has denton change your mind about fracking what do you feel about it now it reinforced what i already knew about fracking number one it's economically unbuyable number two it's environmentally disastrous number three a critical mass of people in any community big enough to push back against the entrenched oligarchies of energy and of course if it's crackers versus ranchers

well the frack have the u.s. military on their side on the ranchers just have themselves on their consequence back to that second amendment thing right the oligarchies america goes in the following order military energy and then probably i'd say number three is the copyright cartel that's true to the state department works part so we're heading into louisiana now it's time to exit texas and go to louisiana i'm running the stewart. and the list and then she. might decide that this is a community that. so

there are other buildings still up. and in the wind mission but then. lots of them up on the hood of the little guy could. put the money out of the money i don't know i don't want to go about. trying to get rid of. mr need to. hold. on to a shuffle stemming with. a little you know what. shall i do. this i don't. have got a could be this liar who will accept the idea of course this would be or should would have been listening i was there when the board of sixty seven was there was it about as it's covered all we are going to be slipping i underline this and it

being go once they feel it i underline which means that we will be living in it be fine one this did situation before it is light or with find it's that naive out of your wish i was big nor do i woke up because they're clear. what do you do before you came here where did you work before you came here when you live well death row in many us states capital punishment is still practiced convicted prisoners can spend years waiting for execution but most of the time the victims' families they are very much in favor the death penalty there are some people because of what they did have given up the right to live among us some even proven innocent years on death row and how many more exonerations is it kind of take before we as a society realize that this is not working and we actually do so. think about.

it we're going to head over to the french quarter i was here before katrina you can actually see a lot of the changes in the city there's been enormous judge of accretion barack obama's education secretary arnie duncan said that hurricane katrina was the best thing that ever happened to public education in america because they were able to privatizing charter eyes all of the public schools here which were flooded and basically the charter movement which is about privatization their biggest problem is finding space to impose their agenda they need schools so all the sudden all these schools open up and now there are zero public schools and new orleans they're all charter schools that created the context for massive gentrification of new

orleans and opened up the city to the privatization of really what was the last institution where there was lots of public money that hadn't been sold off already and now it's it's gone i mean who does that hit that hits the black population there that there are unionized in the teacher's union so many black women support so many families here and they start losing their jobs you know you would see ten thousand firings at once and then people have to reapply for their own jobs and nonunion positions didn't. come to power because. of the after my months after hurricane sandy i mean you long just came to power on the promise to soak the fat cats and spread the wealth in because the state was totally underdeveloped undeveloped and you had all these farmers self identified hicks who couldn't get their crops to market on time because there were no roads and he said i'll build you roads this is what he thought crossing the line. yes this notion of building

the infrastructure to create the wealth to provide access to markets and we no longer see that we in fact see the opposite we see extract in the wealth dismantling the infrastructure and taking. yeah and privatizing the highways and basically privatizing all infrastructure you know extracting all from the infrastructure instead of building the infrastructure within the region huey long you know he also helped build the bring the man the extraction industry to louisiana and really. distribute that wealth to the public you don't really see that as much anymore i mean the wealth stays in the hands of the extremely wealthy the b.p. oil spill was a huge disaster for the gulf of mexico and it was you know basically. a perfect example of the deregulation of the extraction industry then you have nearby today in st charles which is fifty miles west of here you have cancer alley

this is one of the first settlements of freedom the freed black population they can't get recognized by the state and they have about ninety percent cancer rates and it's basically where all the plastics industry is centered. they're making all kinds of cancerous products there and the everybody there knows someone who's dying of cancer so basically you have some corporate democrat who's governor now john bell edwards and he is completely explicitly refused to do an environmental review in cancer alley they've done no specific review to show that it's a cancer cluster because the industry is so threatened by the scientific proof that they're basically killing a black population does new orleans play any role in trying happening like how did it how did we end up with trump well during hurricane katrina you had one of the big pastors who endorsed trunk john hagy who has a huge. church in san antonio which is

a pentecostal church and he is the founder of christians united for israel he's a big figure in the evangelical pro israel lobby and he said that hurricane katrina happened because there's so much sin in this city that's the way that the christian right understands new orleans what is who built new orleans that's the french catholics and what is the christian right very anti well they have an alliance with catholics now but they started out as anti catholic baptists and pentecostals and so this city really represents. just like a cesspool of say tannic sin for the christian right and at the same time it seems like a place trump could actually be at home in right i mean you could see a trump tower being built here you could see trump you know dallying around with porn stars and whatever here he probably has done that why did they support trump why it's a good question i mean trump just got them the supreme court for at least a generation that's the dream of the christian right overturning roe v wade and you

know short of that basically overturning the entire liberal agenda that we've seen on the court since or warren became a justice we also have to remember that the christian right really thrives off of the culture of personal crisis i mean that was the real theme of my book republican camorra is that all these people who can't deal with monday are nitty and living in a secular society because they couldn't control their alcoholism they hate homosexuality but they have homo sexual urges they can't they get involved in crime and drugs and then all of the sudden they wash their sins away in the redeeming blood of christ and bow down before the macho jesus who represents not them the prince of peace in the bible but you know i'll give sort of the mel gibson version of jesus the sadomasochistic fabby of nazareth. that's like the christian rights icon you bow down to him in this masochistic way in. then you surrender and your

sins are washed away and at the same time you know while being masochistic sadistic and you lash out at the evil doers the homosexuals who represent what you hate about yourself the abortionists the porn peddlers over new orleans but at the same time you have to make peace with the political process so if some of those kind of flawed people like donald trump or brett kavanaugh are going to help you advance your agenda well i mean let's come in again as the dynamic witness who can sit on the bench all right. so worrier gonzo american program is wrong coast to coast really get into the characters all america what are you doing here i actually just want to get out of the beltway swamp and get down to the by you on the gonzo you got to pick a sunglass to go with you know the trip so we had the purple laser jimi hendrix. i'll take the hunter s. thompson mirror and say kind of like blue outfit like blue men pull the donovan

mellow yellow member donovan from the sixty's yeah i'm a smoker banana yeah exactly there was that. controversy about her you know we learned that this wanted to buy you different things yeah the swamp is you know what trump said he was going to drain but actually what we see going on there is just a bunch of contractors getting rich living like crap cats the swamp is expanded so our journey is called guns and we're here you know doing anthony bourdain hunter s. thompson ordain women like he's been doing you think i'm sure that more dane would like give a detailed description of these band because this is really rich and exotic i'm not much of a. i don't know anything about food before dane also went out of use food as an entree to local politics yes. it was one of the actually the most political of our journalists he was my. that i would call him a journalist in

a way because he made more radical political statements than anybody else on c.n.n. and m.s.m. you see and the more left. side of politics he you know engaged with the cuisine of gaza and you're so you're going to one of the most political places on earth which is the besieged gaza strip. it's the most heavily surveilled place on earth it's a place. which is home to the most demonized population on earth and he managed to get in there as a c.n.n. host by focusing on the cuisine and so in a way that was really genius and he showed he humanized the people there who are just so roundly demonized as terrorists and showed how rich their culture is and how closely connected they are to the mediterranean as a whole while they're surrounded by fences and drones so out of contact and us. and heart yeah that's the thing max limit the amount of marching now coming to the

states and then to change it up to probably not learning more about. them and you know in the restaurants in washington you know i mean we don't have the same value . the same. they do here. and it seems. likely. there's. a mention of the islands is a great writers yeah oh look at this oh it prior talking about writing the writers are busking out here with a poem good idea guns are so we're all traveling across a kind. trying to get in touch with the freaks of the geniuses at our america i met

some ghosts in flag land bought their mates hunter s. thompson lakin and then they interviewed a jew in new orleans roof over your salmon he had some brisket in texas we want to get so it's at the soul of who we are as a people man yes well that's why i was there right again for you guys what's the state of poetry today in america a loathsome lowson are sometimes hard to put what's going on in the words without poetry you know we. can all be dr seuss like it is gonzo it blows my mind that's my favorite thing is it i want to die just to survive i don't even live in it alone years pathing change i have to train it with dilution of the true heart of noise the one for you it's the most well first guy who knows. ever saw the new new orleans and knows things are starting to. see it taken

over a minute you know i mean you don't think he said you are good the bar we had a whole bunch a pint of liquor in a whole case of coke and i require you order a drink the queue behind the glass in the liquor and just you. the people you figure all you need to stare for as long as you want i mean she's not doing all this now sit back listen to jazz new food grin draw. talk to trash some people have me time right and some i cook. going to brief the food is an odd man like almost like you that you're the neighborhood or everybody look the neighborhood taste test no i mean i hear what you're saying and what is that have to do with katrina all this just that it just said that the concentration of these people who are all leaned on and like to see good news. is not something that you can go around or.

corners and steam you mean they used to be you know i mean i bought the poultry has it changed pre and post katrina you're a poet and a certain point. kapil poetry wasn't wasn't the first thing he was thinking about didn't want to write a book and still if you saw a bunch of known exactly what we were writing stories to tell stories brain tell you to tell each other it was like ballpark him mommas high speeds and i would like to know all that i can he's going to read the book first good people is what i titled it hitting the beach hard making the bells ring the search for truth leads us to each of these cracks trusting our souls to settle someplace that will not rest our mothers but the samples that your our souls the cross-member idea of splitting up we celebrate something we believe in each of the desires therefore i don't. know where.

you. get. the same talent. because. the purpose of. the movie. as far right parties obsess about the danger is the ampersands to the western lifestyle some islamic scholars are concerned about the opposite oh no it's been gone argues that good muslims don't step up their game within the next twenty to forty years islam may vanish from europe are those fears really justified.

by its own keep the slime view or new. few stories. i want. to see in the. most good nobody. in. the last.

sixteen. isis fighters. boarding a philippine naval ship. i'm . not all. that i. just still don't know what's waiting for them. to. be new and i am lucky to. still. make it out of. them the money.

i. made out of clashes along venezuela's border trucks carrying us stopped by the country's military. claimed interim president calls for the elected leader president nicolas maduro to be ousted. almost six thousand yellow vests protesters flooded the streets of paris on saturday for a fifteenth weekend in a row government unaddressed.