can you tell me that she. still. can't make it out of. the money. countries gone into a nihilistic feed that's why i'm thinking and they've got to hit the road and get the child in america to find what makes america take the charlotte change the genius of america here this is it we point around which hollywood is going to say we're starting last with is going to head east into the swamp to go into the belly of the bee i think i'm gonna leave now doesn't get a more gonzo that he may be completely different in this journey. that unbreakable still to last for his guide to fracking an excellent book you were

a philosopher and then you got into this fracking business have that happen what we do what we call field philosophy which means we take our ideas about ethics and justice say bring it to the real world where it's actually happening so i was interested in energy issues fracking was going on in denton 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 the texas legislature overturned our ban they passed a ban on fracking. we all voted on the 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 or they 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 aha moment 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 nobody 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 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 and 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 effort 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 and you 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 did very little for our schools for our parks but they sure like to talk about how much it does you save a depleted. after two or three years with the financing the bond issuance are for

twenty years so 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 they do the countability chain if you well into less celebs a huge ecological problem with no one paying for it all right here what we have around it was 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 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 weaknesses like a land use planning meitner for the city bell your background is in philosophy and you come across as 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 or they 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 tract wells that are not doing anything they're just debt gobbling 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 an inconvenient truth 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 the 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 that speaking of 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 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 draconian 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 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 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 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 to clean up the water will scrub the carbon out of the air we'll come up with a new energy technology so you don't have to change the way. the tech solution is where fracking comes from it's a tech solution to a diminishing royals 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 going. to listen. listen dad i'm in the constitution in this book stop your consumption of energy i think that our beautiful so we got this book we got my. i brought the constitution to 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 reject tracking in your audience. so it goes. with it i love it i think it'll work you know head into town and jim are preaching in the middle of town just jump in your car you gotta remember i renounced fracking so i got my bike. all right is that all right that's fine that's great man this will work because you know we've got to get into the habit now over it we're. going to get instructors. we get it you're sitting on my hand do we want our hand out of the stuff. that's an interesting time track you know centrally which is denton texas very much

ground zero because they first frack and then the first to reject fracking and the first to have the state overall to pass an 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 brickell. 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 or have the u.s. military on their side on the ranch or just have themselves on their concept. back

to that second amendment right the oligarchies america goes in the following order military energy and then probably i'd say number three is the copyright cartel it's time to exit texas and go to louisiana i'm running let's do it. and the list on. my side is that. there was a building also up. in the him a rundown mission but then. look.

out of the modern i don't want to go about. something. mr need to. own. one of the shuttle steming we have been down. there and you'll get a little warmth and you know what. 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 have given up their rights as. yes some 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'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 appeal ation there that they're unionized in 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. longa 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 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 extract in the wealth dismantling the infrastructure and taking yen privatizing the highways and basically privatizing all infrastructure you know extracting all from new 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 deregulate fifty miles west of here you have cancer alley this is one of the first settlements of freedom the free 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 would it have. 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 well they they they have an alliance with the catholics now but they started out as anti catholic baptist 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 a gibson the mel gibson version of jesus the same. stick fabby of nazareth. that's

like the christian rights icon washed away 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 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 anything said on the bench. 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 he plays for jimi hendrix. i'll take the hunter s. thompson mirror she has a kind of look blue outfit 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 her dirty me you know we learned that this wanted by 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're 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 bands 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 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 or a misunderstanding of the more left sort of 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 around they 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 not learning more about. them and you know it isn't in the restaurants in washington i mean we don't have the same value. the same. they do here. and. frankly. there's. a mess in the islands is a great writers town yeah oh look at this oh it prior talking about writing the writers are busking out here with a poem. gonzo so we're traveling across the country 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 semi handsome 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 low center 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. just your survival anyone living there a live in years past think change if the train at the dilution of the true heart. knows the one for you it's the most well first got her nose. never saw the new new orleans and knows things are starting to. see it taken over

a minute you know your own thing he said you are good the bar we had a whole bunch of. liquor in a whole case of coke and i require the drink to give you the heinz. the liquor and just you. the people you don't need it back to listen jack. talk to trash some people have me time right. 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 and i mean to say that i have to do. all this just that it is the. concentration of these people who are all lean on and like to see good news. is not something that you can go around every corner it seems to me. in these two d.

you know me i bought the poetry as it changed three 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 is silly and saw a bunch of you don't want to do that look we were writing stories to tell stories pretending to tell each other and it was like ballpark him mommas high speeds and i was like you 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 for months but the samples that your our souls the cross-member ideas piling up we celebrate something we believe in each of these things are there for all i. know people are.

dead. because. of. the movie the. fuel. the. sixteen month. isis fighters. boarding a philippine naval ship. but

not. just us still don't know what's waiting for them. and i am lucky. enough to make it out. i. i.

a journalist working for an ati affiliated companies injured on the colombia venezuela border where violent clashes over the weekend softeners where the national guard that serves as plow their own. vehicle through crowds in an attempt to get to colombia. almost six thousand protesters a flooded the streets of paris for a fifteenth successive weekend rather. to come on the weekly and.