the belly of the bee i think that leaves now doesn't get any more gonzo he may be completely different in this chair. that i'm brittle still to last for his guide to fracking an excellent book you were in floss of for and then you got into this tracking business how did that happen what we do what we call field philosophy which means we take ideas about ethics and justice say bring it to the real world what's actually happened so i was interested in energy issues fracking was going on and. i just wanted to get involved because i saw it as a basically a justice issue right in denton is a remarkable all fracking story because it's the birthplace of fracking more or less as well as being the first town to ban fracking and then something very interesting happened what happened right at the texas legislature overturned or they passed a ban on fracking. we all voted on that passed by almost sixty percent of 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 you get gas land in that film where they're igniting you know orders to come out of the faucet and i thought that people's consciousness would be raised somewhat about the dangers of fracking right that that didn't seem to reach dent and it didn't reach that industry i would say but a lot of people in didn't watch that movie and it it was an off 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 then 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 county. the industry in fact 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 asset they don't replenish once they're gone they're gone they're gone at least on any human timescale so yes and then the water that does come back up is polluted and you've got to 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 there at play 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 they did very little for our school for our parks but they sure like to talk about how much it does right you say they deplete after two or three years but the financing the bond issuance are for twenty years what happens is the divines 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 no i'm paying for it all right you know 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. it happened here it's that no way would we ever do this right this is

a product of 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 park marked around town and they're going to be abandoned and we 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 meitner for the city bell your background is in philosophy and you come across to someone now who has a bit more circumspect. when you come to this issue philosophically speaking can you help us understand 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 birthing 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 framed 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 interests of the corporation it ends up in the municipal interest and then abandoned as you and it's over 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 he talks 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 an inconvenient truth yeah they're like religious theocratic fanatics who only read part of the text and base all 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 it's a 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 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 social contract is broken with fracking i have a life jacket here you have your book i have got the constitution of the united states there we go in the 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 this. 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 were involved in against the british in seven hundred 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 that 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 board 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 will clean up the water will scrub the carbon out of the air we'll come up with a normal 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 problem yes but it the extra maladies are much greater cost in many different ways than the benefit yet which is why i was like about being cautious about the tech solution do we need it perhaps a savior. we need. stuff here is going. to listen. listen dad i'm in the casa to shit in this book stop your consumption of energy you think that'll work it's beautiful so we got this book we got my book the constitution put the studio gather 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 reject tracking in your audiences. so it goes. those

golden globes. how do you cope with it i love it i think i work you know head into town i'm jim martin preaching in the middle of town just jump in your car you gotta remember i renounce fracking so i've got my bike. all right it's all right that's fine great man this will work because you know we've got to get into the habit now renouncing the big oil most good. nope word. against truckers. we get it you're sitting on my hand through your hand out of the stuff. it's an interesting time back you know century which is denton texas very much ground zero because they first frack and then the first to reject fracking in the first state over rule 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 bring. 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 there's not 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.

to louisiana now it's time to exit texas and go to louisiana i'm running let's do it. from a busted new sewer why is because of the slime do you force me to do the focus on both of you so he's. going to want. to see you dropped almost nothing but most board members in. your. little chain don't let. the little.

as far right parties obsess about the danger is them presents to the western lifestyle some islamic scholars are concerned about the opposite on no advantage on blog use the dead muslims don't step up their game within the next twenty to forty years islam may vanish from europe are those fia's really justified. we came here where did you work before you came here when you live. 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 of the death penalty there are some people because of what they did they have given up their rights as live amongst us. some are even proven. true and how

many more exonerations is it going to take before we as a society realize this is not working and we actually do something about. it we're going to hand over to the french quarter i was here before katrina you can actually see a lot of the changes in the city others been enormous gentrification barack obama said to k.h. and 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 they're unionized and the teachers 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 to. come to power. and to the after a month after hurricane sandy i mean you longest 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 your roads this is what we saw crossing the us 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 extracting 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 with. 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 complex politically 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 trump 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 there anti-gay well they they they have an alliance with the 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 earl 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. you know gibson for 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 and then you surrender and your sins are washed away and at the same time you know while being masochistic you're him sadistic and you lash out at the evil doers the homosexuals who represent what you hate about yourself the abortionists the porn pedlars new orleans but at the same time you have to make peace with the political process to have 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 and that's the dynamic with imus you 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 gotta pick

a sunglass to go with you know the trip so we played for jimi hendrix we. all take the hunter s. thompson mirror shit and say kind of the blue out think i'm like blue men the donovan mellow yellow member donovan from the sixty's yeah i'm a smoke a banana yeah exactly there was that. controversy about thirty thirty 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 fat cats the swamp is expanded so our journey is called guns and we are here 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. food before day 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 one of the i would call him a journalist in a way because he made more radical political statements than anybody else on c.n.n. and our image that we 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. are. fascinating max limit the amount of marching now coming to the states and then to change it up to probably learning more about. them and you know in the restaurants in washington i mean we don't have the same value. the same. they do here. and. frankly. there's the. you mentioned the islands is a very. writers town yeah oh look at this oh it for us are talking about writing

the writers are busting out here with a pumpkin and an idea gonzo so we're traveling across the country are trying to get in touch with the freaks in the geniuses at our america i met some ghosts in flak william faulkner mates hunter s. thompson lakin and then they interviewed a jew in new orleans roof over your salmon he had some brisket in texas a lot of it so it's at the soul of who we are as a people man yes well that's why i was the right again for you guys see what's the state of poetry today in america a loathsome losin or sometimes hard to pull 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 see die just to survive the anyone living there a living hears pathing changes have to train it with dilution of the true heart.

was the one for you it's the most raw first guy who knows. ever saw the new new orleans and knows things are starting to. see taken over a minute you know your own thing he said you are good the bar we have a whole bunch of. liquor in a whole case of coke and i require you order a drink to give you the hinds in the glass in the liquor and just you. the people you don't need to stare for long you want to meet 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 there so my cooks. 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 does that have to do with katrina although . just that it just said that the concentration of these people more all lean on

and like to see good news. is not something that you can go around every corner and seem to mean they used to be you know me about the politics as it changed pre and post katrina you're a poet and a certain point. kapil d not poetry wasn't wasn't the first thing he was thinking about we 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 us to tell each other it was like ballpark him mommas high speeds and i would like to know all that i can say he's going to read the book first good people is what i titled it hitting the beach hard making the bells rang the search for truth leads us to each of these cracks trusting our souls to settle someplace that will not rest our mothers bad examples your our souls the cross memory ideas piling up we

celebrate something we read in each of the designs was beautiful i don't. know where. you. get. the same tanning bed. because. the purpose. of. the movie. please. know this on.

my side is that. there was a building also up. in the him about a mission about how they night. look. for the little guy we. don't want the money i don't want to worry about. something you didn't really. want to. mislead just. thrown. out of a full stomach we have been down. there and we'll get a little off and you know we'll be. shot idea. of the.

motto for sixteen months and i said did you know the. isis fighters know philippine naval ship. i'm. just still don't know what's waiting for them.

and i. have to get out. and. i am.