Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Smart People Become Conspiracy Theorists with Naomi Klein

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

What is the appeal of conspiracy theories, and how is it that they entrap our friends, coworkers, or family members? Political polarization and the rise of social media have generated an unprecedented amount of seemingly absurd misinformation, yet many real people fall for it, and a seemingly endless supply of grifters are ready to exploit them. In this episode, Adam speaks with award-winning author Naomi Klein about what led us to this moment and what hope we have of extricating loved ones who've fallen prey to conspiracy. Find Naomi's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. This week, I want to talk about an experience that is both weird and weirdly common in 2023 in the past couple of years. You've probably seen it happen to someone around you. Maybe it was a roommate, a parent, a family friend, or for me, some comedians I started out with. Whoever it was, the story is the same. Someone who seemed sane with it and living in the same reality as you did suddenly lost their mind and went down some rabbit hole to emerge as a fully blown conspiracy theorist. Now, people have been losing their shit like this from time immemorial. As I've covered before on this show and on Adam Ruins Everything, conspiratorial thinking follows from the normal patterns of human thought

that we use to understand the world around us. But it seems that there's something particular and special about the way that people fall into the trap of conspiratorial thinking now. Whether it starts on 4chan or Fox News, anti-vax or QAnon, there's a mirror world of socially poisonous conspiracy that people keep falling into. It is incredibly painful when it happens to someone who you know and love, and it's often hard to know

how to even understand what happened. What is it about our world, our media, and our politics today that makes this happen over and over again to reasonable people who we love and care about. Well, today I have a truly brilliant guest to help dig into this issue and into the entire mirror world that our politics and media ecosystem has become. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can hear all the wonderful interviews we do every single

week and you can support other people getting them as well. And by the way, if you like stand up comedy, just want to remind you, I am a touring stand up comedian. I just put a whole bunch of new dates up on my website in twenty twenty four. I am heading to New York, Boston, Philly, D.C., Portland, Maine, a bunch of other places, Chicago, Nashville, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to today's guest because she is incredible. She's one of the most respected and influential public intellectuals and nonfiction authors on the left of the past century. Her writings on consumerism, capitalism, and climate are required reading, and her most recent book is called

Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World. I am, of course, talking about the incredible Naomi Klein, and her new book is a fascinating and personal look into the conspiratorial ways of thinking that are thriving in the moment we live in today. So without further ado, please welcome Naomi Klein. Naomi, thank you so much for being on the show. It's a complete thrill to have you. I'm very happy to be with you. Your books, every time one comes out, they make waves every single time. This new one, I am so excited about having read the introduction in the first chapter.

It's immediately gripping. I am so excited about having read the introduction in the first chapter. It's immediately gripping. You do something that is a form of thinking and communicating that is very close to my heart. Always interesting to me where you start from a fascinating personal story and you ladder out from that to a really wide ranging discussion of the world that we live in today and some really fascinating intellectual issues. It's so cool. Let's start from the starting point. The book's called Doppelganger. world that we live in today and some really fascinating intellectual issues. It's so cool. Let's start from the starting point. The book's called Doppelganger. Please tell us about your doppelganger and how it led you on this investigation. Sure. So I do have a doppelganger, by which I mean a person who I am perennially confused

and conflated with. Lots of us have had this experience. I would say mine is more extreme than most. There is another Naomi nonfiction writer of books who is close to my age. And I don't know, we're both Jewish. We're both named Naomi. And we both write books of sort of big ideas, I suppose. And- You're both cultural critics as well. Yeah. Her first book, I'm referring to Naomi Wolf. And so lots of your listeners and viewers might not be familiar with her. She was big in the 90s.

She wrote a book called The Beauty Myth. She worked for Al Gore when he ran for president. She was one of the most prominent feminists of her generation. So she used to be more on the liberal left. And now, and this is why it became a little awkward for me to be confused with her. Now she pals around with Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and was a real vector of medical misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. during the COVID-19 pandemic. So I, you know, I use her as a case study of, you know, we all know people who changed a lot during COVID. We all know people who we've scratched our heads and gone like, what happened to that person? Right. And maybe it's like a public figure, or maybe it's like

a brother or a sister or yoga instructor who suddenly is talking about QAnon. So, so yeah, so, so I use this personal, this experience of identity confusion because during the pandemic, I would go online and just, there would be thousands of people really angry at me about things that I hadn't done, you know? So I just, because they, because they saw a Naomi on TV saying something who looks, I mean, if you were next to each other, I could tell the difference. But if someone hasn't looked at you for a couple of years and they see the other, oh, brunette, et cetera, same age, et cetera. I always say she has much better hair than me. It's really important to know.

So people are actually misattributing. Naomi Wolf was out there saying sometimes horrible things. And they were saying, no, Naomi Klein said this and getting mad at you. Yeah. Like why is Naomi Klein saying that unvaccinated people have to stay away from vaccinated people because they might shed vaccine particles onto them and then not be able to have babies, things like that, which I, you know, so, you know, in the book, I use this identity confusion, which, you know, all of us who, you know, have something of a public platform. I think the pandemic had a particular kind of vertigo because we are used to being in rooms full of other people who help tell us who we are,

right? Like the last thing, you know, I canceled a book tour. I canceled all these public events. And so I think that, I think generally we're confused about what our social media avatars are. Like, is that us? Um, is that really you? Um, you know, like it's, it's a, it's a sort of a approximation of you. Like it's, it's a character version of you. It's a branded version of you. Right. Um, and so, you know, I think that I didn't like being confused with her because she was saying a lot of strange and dangerous things during COVID. But I also think that I was very confused about who I was during COVID because I wasn't able to do the things that tell me who I am a lot of the time. Right. So I used it as this kind of portal to get into the weirdness of how we are represented to

the world through our avatars, whether we really believe that each other are real when we just see these avatar versions of one another. And in a way that's like, like she is my doppelganger, but so is my Twitter avatar. Like that's not really me, whoever that person is performing me on Twitter. So I think we live in a doppelganger world, especially with AI, where we're not really sure who and what is real. And so she is a, you know, I guess a kind of a literary device to get at this hall of mirrors that is contemporary culture. And as soon as you start talking about that, the number of doppelgangers starts multiplying in my head because you talk about, yeah, do you understand yourself? That Twitter avatar is part of you.

There's these sort of strange loss of your own identity you feel when someone confuses you with another person. Whenever someone says, that person looks like you, I'm like, that's what you think I look like. I, it's not what I think I look like. Like it's, it's destabilizing just to be mistaken for another person. Um, in fact, I was once told, I told, uh, this happened to me in comedy 10 years ago. I told a comic I ran into that she looked like another comic and she said, no, I don't. And then she said, you should never tell anyone that they look like another person because you don't know what the person you're talking to thinks they look like. You know, you don't know what their self-image is and you could be violating their self-image in a deep way.

And I always took that to heart and I no longer do that. I no longer say, oh, you kind of look like this other person because you might be triggering some insecurity the person has or whatever. It can be very destabilizing to be compared to another person out there. But, you know, in the end, I decided to embrace it as an unconventional form of, you know, sort of Zen non-attachment because, you know, we live in a culture that is constantly telling us that we need to perform this perfected version of ourselves and optimize ourselves. And it's like, you know, it's a kind of our life raft in these extremely competitive waters. And, and there's something sort of liberating about realizing that no matter what, how carefully you tend to your personal brand and project yourself with the exact right caliber of irony and earnestness. Um, and if, if thousands of people

think that you are somebody totally different, it really is just telling you like, get over yourself, you know? Um, and so I, I've decided to be grateful for my doppelganger, um, and to take it as a message to just, um, find, find other people, find the others, build, you know, invest in community, not, not in personal perfection, because people are going to think that you think wild things, no matter what you do. I feel like you've given us the beautiful conclusion of this book at the beginning of the interview. So maybe we should bleep it for spoilers. I don't know. That's, that's wonderful, but let's, let's keep exploring. Something else that you said that made me think is, you know, when our online avatars,

are those us, are people seeing us when they're looking at us? That makes me think that when people, you know, lose that screw like Naomi Wolf did, when the person goes QAnon, when they go anti-vax, when our friend starts behaving in this bizarre way and starts accusing us of being involved in a conspiracy or seeing those around

them it often is so hurtful of yourself like stepford people and stuff yes oh you're not you anymore and they they turn it away on you well that the pain of that is often that we no longer feel seen by our friend the person somehow loses their ability to see us and to see you know when people are really going nuts on twitter and accusing and to see, you know, when people are really going nuts on Twitter and accusing each other of being, you know, whatever vaccine propagandist or whatever, they're not seeing the people they're talking to as people anymore. And we sort of, it seems like a very modern thing to lose our ability to see each other as human beings. Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's weird enough when it's somebody who you don't know, who clearly has you completely wrong. But what's weird, as you're saying, Adam, is like when it's somebody who does know you and is suddenly treating you like this, like entirely two-dimensional form.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of relationships were severed during COVID because we were all really stressed out and we were confused, we were anxious. And so people were disinvited from family dinners and, you know, often for good reasons, you know, they are immunocompromised and, you know, like if you had immunocompromised people in your family and you had somebody who was not taking COVID seriously at all, you know, that's going to create a rift and it created rifts in countless families. But I've also heard some really nice stories since the book came out of people who's,

who, who said that they reached back out to a sister they lost touch with, or, you know, another family member and realize that, you know, they didn't want to have all these severed connections. And maybe there, there are some things that they agree on. Maybe they, maybe, maybe you don't like big pharma either for different reasons, but you might be able to find some common ground and maybe pull them back from what I call the mirror world. Um,

because, uh, yeah, there's often a, like, you know, I write that conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. And there's a, there's a way in which there's always a little bit of truth mixed in with the fantasy in any of the conspiracies. So, you know, you've got to extend some kind of a bridge where you find, maybe you find some common ground and give somebody an out cause they might be looking for an out. There's a lot of grifters in there. The fact that you call it the mirror world is just, again, such an evocative image you

found to the, uh, that really makes me think about it differently. Um, what, so let's talk about what is it, do you think that pulls people into that mirror world because it's happened with a lot of events i saw it happen to friends of mine after 2016 after the pandemic um you know it seems like there are these inciting events and what is it that that causes this to happen to people so i think human beings are creatures of narrative. We like to have stories that, that tell us who we are and where we are. And, and when you have a shock, like a major event that, that, that scrambles the story of who you thought you were, like 9-11, like a lot of Americans had no idea who these people were. And that was, that was the question,

like, why do they hate us? Like, what is this? Um, you know, we don't do a very good job of teaching, uh, uh, people like geopolitics in high school, let alone university. So, um, when it turns out that there's like people on the other side of the planet who are very angry at your country and you, you never learned why, like you never learned, you didn't even know they were there. Right. Um, but after nine 11, I, I, I wrote a piece. I remember, I think it was for the LA times saying, you know, Americans woke up to realize they were, uh, that they were at war only to find that they had been at war for a long time and

no one told them, you know? So, so I think that we go looking for stories when, when, when our stories of self fall apart and, and, and like, I don't know about you, but I've never lived through a global pandemic before. I've never been told to stay home for months before. This was new terrain. I've never looked up at the sky and not seen planes, Times Square empty. I mean, these were shocking events. And so as creatures of story, we go looking for them. And I think what really derailed us during COVID is that that search for story intersected with an attention economy. And it's an economy that means that whoever has the most outrageous, over-claiming story wins the clicks, wins the eyeballs. Science takes time. We were confronting a novel virus. And you had all these scientists saying like,

okay, be patient. We have to go do our research and then we'll get back to you. And then you had a whole bunch of grifters just rush into that gap saying, we have the story, we know, come over here. And, you know, often they were dusting off theories that they had been using in different contexts, like the anti-vax movement, right? Like they had been spinning stories about childhood vaccines and autism, which were lies before COVID, but they just needed to kind of do a search and replace on the COVID vaccines. And they were good to go. Like they didn't have to, you know, anyway, so that's some of it. Why do you call, how did you come up with the term the mirror world? And why,

why do you think of the conspiracy theory world as being a mirror? Well, I was struck, you know, so I, like I use my doppelganger as sort of my white rabbit, like in Alice in Wonderland to fall down the rabbit hole and really explore the world that she is in now. Because it was either going to be like, just be horrified by everything she was saying or, or actually try to understand like how she could have changed so much. And I'm a researcher and this is how I understand the world. Like, you know, when something confounds me, I try to understand it. And, um, so, so I started listening to a lot of the, the interviews she was doing with people like Steve Bannon. She was on his show almost every day for a while. So I listened to hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon's podcast, the war room.

Um, and you know, she was also on like many lesser known. So I listened to hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon's podcast, the war room. Wow. And yeah, she was also on like many lesser known. Did you start to like the podcast after a while? Or are you like, okay, these are like my buddies. Now you get a parasocial relationship with Steve.

I didn't. Okay. I, I admit that I got the, his theme song stuck in my head, which is like pretty catchy. It's a very weird anti-China theme song that I won't try to sing right now. But it does end with like, let's take down the CCP. And that's when I knew I was in trouble when I just was like, couldn't get it out of my brain when I was unloading the dishwasher.

But I call it the mirror world because I was really struck, particularly listening to Bannon. One time, I remember, it was Christmas 2021, and he was shilling a new coin called called um fjb like fuck joe biden and and he was just trying to fleece people before christmas he was like get this for your relatives and he was making this whole pitch about how you couldn't trust the dollar anymore so you had to buy these coins and so on this is cryptocurrency it wasn't exactly it was even like not even crypto it was just like literally a coin that said oh like just like just we made a little a little piece of metal disc that says fjb which is why i say you might be able to get some friends and family members back from the mirror world because there are so many drifters there right that they might be looking for some kind of help it's so they're getting fleeced nonstop, right?

Right. You know, send that lifeline, see what happens. But as he was making his pitch, his pre-Christmas pitch, he was saying, you know, we need to have, this is why we need to have our own money and we need to have our own publishing companies and we need to have our own social media platforms because we will never cancel you. We will never other you. You'll always be welcome here. And so, and he was really talking about a one-to-one, like, you know, get kicked off

Twitter. You can join Getter, which they call themselves the Twitter killer. You know, get kicked off YouTube. You can join Rumble and so on. the Twitter killer, um, you know, get kicked off YouTube. You can join rumble and so on. And there was, there was like an exact mirror of everything like in the world that I lived in. And I was just really struck that most of the people who I know and hang out with have no idea this world like fully exists. Um, and they actually think that when somebody gets kicked off the social media, that site that they're on, that they almost like have been deleted from planet earth.

And it's so strangely arrogant because actually they're really good at this and they are building massive platforms and they're reaching lots of people. And, and that's, you know, that's why I pay attention to them. They're a major political force, you know, Steve Bannon's a strategist. He's trying to get back into power. And these are happening on the public internet. They're not, it's not the dark web. It's like, you can just go to these websites and look at this stuff. How do you, you know, I know you tracked Naomi Wolf's progress through the book. How did she fall into this? Cause it's, it's a

very, even if it weren't for the connection to you, it's a very strange story. Yeah. It's a strange story because she was such a prominent liberal, such a prominent Democrat feminist. How did she fall into it? You know, I have an equation in the book that might be useful because I think there's a lot of people who have, who have changed as we, who have changed as discussed, which is social media slash grandiosity plus social media addiction. Many of, I think pretty much anybody who we might be thinking of

spends way too much time online. Yeah. And plus midlife crisis divided by public shaming equals right-wing meltdown. So I want to talk a bit about the public shaming piece of it, because I, you know, I think one of the big drivers for her is that she's one of these people who became a spectacle for liberal left Twitter. Uh, and that's because she made a foundational error in a book that she published in 2019. And this error was discovered live on BBC radio. It's every writer's worst nightmare. I mean, I sort of remember this as a viral moment and I didn't,

I honestly did not really know who she was or really follow her that much, but I sort of remember this. What was the error that was discovered? So she wrote a book called Outrages. It came out a few months before the pandemic. And it was a historical work. It was actually her PhD thesis. It told, during this interview, she made this claim that gay men had been executed for sodomy long after it was, like, people thought that they stopped sentencing people to death for being gay. And what happened, and the BBC interviewer pointed out that she had misread the historical record. And he said, like, in a very polite British way, like, it's just the thing is, is that I think you misunderstood. And then he explained that.

And then the bottom falls out of her entire book. And she and it turns out that those men had actually been released. She misunderstood a term called death recorded, which is which she thought was a death sentence but it isn't and so that was just a journalist doing his job you know he fact checked a book that should have been fact-checked by the author and the publisher and found a massive error but then she becomes a meme you know, then people just cannot get enough of this. Why does she become a meme? Because the, you know, this sounds like an error is an error. That's embarrassing.

Maybe people have a little bit of fun, but there has to be something deeper going on for people to really go in on that. You know, I think not really. I mean, I think she was, she, she was enough of a, of a big deal. Um, you know, enough of a, you know, New York times bestselling author, um, that to watch this happen live on the air, it was just one of those moments where, because it would be your worst nightmare. And there's a lot of writers on Twitter, the idea that you could point and laugh at it happening to somebody else somehow made you feel safer um got it and but also she had been dabbling in conspiracy culture you know

before that you know she had made she did things like they took pictures of clouds and speculated about government you know um yeah you know chemtrails and things like that you know she was a bit of a cloud truther she's just a little spot of cloud truth just like you're hanging out with her and she might go hey clouds are fake you know and you're like oh well that was weird that naomi just sort of tossed that on me but other than that she's pretty nice just a bit of a cloud truther i mean i think she thinks birds are real. I'm not sure. So, so, but because there was a little bit of a reservoir of annoyance with her already online because she was dabbling in other conspiracy theories, that's why people,

part of why people really went in. It sounds like. Yeah. And then during COVID, I think she was, we were all bored and at home and she was like just endlessly sharing wild theories. Like, you know, like she, she'd come, you'd log online and, you know, she had like almost 200,000 followers. You know, it's not like she's like, it didn't have reach. She has many more now. But she, you know, she'd say that she thinks that children were losing the ability to smile because they were wearing masks, you know, and then that would be days of entertainment, things like that. You know, there was a lot about vaccine shedding

onto unvaccinated people. And I mean, but I call her a conspiracy influencer, not a conspiracy theorist, because there are often these glaring contradictions in the claims. there are often these glaring contradictions in the claims. Like, you know, for a while she was talking about how COVID was a bot, maybe had been cooked up as a bio weapon. But then she was like, but why wear masks? You know, like, and it's just, it just seems like a bit of a contradiction there. Like, you know, if it's a bio weapon, surely try not to, um, not to get it, you know? So she's an influencer. You should be worried about it. It contradicts the idea that it's not that big a deal. Yeah. So the, the, the story is constantly changing with whatever is going to get more clicks. So if everyone's supposed to get vaccinated, now the vaccines are a bioweapon.

If everyone's supposed to get an app on their phone to see if they got vaccinated, well, it's not about the vaccine. It's the app. The app can listen to your phone conversations and things like that. But this is what I mean about how they often get the feeling right and the facts wrong

is that that's where she really took a star turn on the right was when she started talking about those vaccine verification apps being a covert surveillance plan. So the truth is like, like people are very anxious about surveillance. They're very anxious about what happens with their data. They're anxious about their cell phones. They don't really under, we don't really understand, you know understand what is known about our movements. And so she projected all of our collective surveillance fears onto this one app. But the response on liberal Twitter was, wait till they hear about cell phones,

which is kind of funny, right? But the assumption behind that joke is that we all know that our cell phones are listening to us and we're okay with it. But the thing behind that joke is that we all know that our cell phones are listening to us and we're okay with it. But the thing is, people seem not to be okay with it, right? Right. So this is part of the appeal of conspiracy culture is that they're telling a very simple story. Like if we can just get rid of these apps, then everything will be fine and nobody will be able to track you anymore, right? Or the vaccines or whatever is the kind of boogeyman of surveillance, whereas we actually need policy responses so that we can control these tech

companies and they're not able to mine our data endlessly and create more doppelgangers like AI versions of us and so on. Right. The story with a grain of truth, but with a much simpler solution and you can apply it to almost anything. Now, often when someone is a conspiracy influencer like this, there'll be this implication that people will say, oh, they're a grifter, and a grifter generally means someone who doesn't believe anything that they say. They're just trying to get the clicks.

They're harvesting clicks. They're like following the audience. Did you feel that that was the case in her case? Was she a complete cynic about it? Or do you think she was believing these things and was just not able to sort of connect the dots that they were self-contradictory? It's very hard for me to know what she believes, right? And I think that a lot of people who really go all in with conspiracy culture, aren't completely cynical. They have to convince themselves of some of it on some level. But that doesn't mean that the primary impulse

isn't grifting, isn't ego, isn't getting people to treat you like a savant or whatever. I think she gets a lot out of this, I guess is what I'm saying. I think she lost a lot in the world that she used to travel in. She could no longer get published. After that error on BBC, her publisher dropped her book. So she had every reason to move to a new market that is very large. Tucker Carlson, when he had her on Fox, he was getting, you know, 3 million viewers a night, you know? Um, there's no show on the left that she had access that could to, that could go near that. Right. So there's, there's every reason. Um, so I don't know what she believes, but I do know that a lot of people who follow this are not just grifting, right? Like, like the only reason

the grift is successful, if it's a grift is because there are lots of customers who sincerely are listening to Steve Bannon and Naomi Wolf and RFK Jr. and believe it. Um, or else it's not a good grift. You don't have customers. So it's worrying because they're using such apocalyptic language um yeah and you know if you really are in this battle for humanity against a genocide you know that's the kind of language that she uses um good and evil like you know she's claimed that there is a genocide that has happened because of these vaccines um i think that it and know, she also takes pictures of her new gun and says we're at war and post pictures of her husband doing target practice. So like, this is, this doesn't end well, I guess is what I'm saying. Like, I mean, if you're telling people they are fighting a genocide

for good and evil, I think, you know, they might take you at your word, whether you're grifting or not, and they might decide to do something about it. And we're seeing lots of examples of that, actually. We absolutely are. Well, we have to take a really quick break. When we come back, I want to ask you more about how this has changed your own interaction with your online identity, but we'll be right back with more Naomi Klein. Okay. We're back with Naomi klein talking about online conspiracy theories the mirror world doppelgangers uh you had this really intriguing idea at the top of the interview about how it made you think about how your own online identity is in some ways a doppelganger can you please get into that for us so i think when we create an online version of ourselves, when we choose the picture, that's going to be our avatar. When we write that sort of like kind of satirical bio, like we are, like we're, we're creating a brand, you know, uh, and what is a brand? A brand is a thing version of you, of me. And this is actually the first book I wrote when I was in my 20s was a

book called No Logo. And it was about the rise of this idea that companies should first and foremost be selling an idea, a brand, not that the product was incidental, which was an idea that took root in corporate culture in the 90s, but also that individual celebrities, like, you know, the first person who called himself, uh, whose agent called him a super brand was Michael Jordan. And he was, you know, he was a, he was a, he was a mega corporation. Uh, and you know, there were others, there was Richard Branson and Oprah, of course. But the idea that regular people could be brands was not possible, you know, at that stage, even though there were kind of management consultants saying, this is the future,

you know, you're not going to get a job, you're just going to have a series of contracts. But if you really want to get ahead, you need to create a brand. to get ahead, you need to create a brand. And so, um, you know, that, that didn't become a reality until social media put advertising agencies into all of our back pockets, right? Um, because suddenly you, you too can do this for free, like for the, for the price of, for the, for the price of your phone. Um, and the, you know, what I'm trying to do in the book is, you know, look at it with a little bit of, of, of distance, because I think people are, you know, are often called out for being performative and, and, you know, being inauthentic online and so on. And this is like the, the, the ultimate smear is like, you, you, you're just performing, but we're all just performing. smear as like, you're just performing, but we're all just performing. And the reason we're doing it is because we have all received this message that the perfected, performed self, the branded self

is really our only hope of survival in these, you know, incredibly competitive, um, shark laid waters. Um, so yeah, I think we should treat ourselves with a little bit of compassion and thinking about why we build these doppelgangers of ourselves. But a brand is a thing. Humans are not meant to be brands. We've accepted the logic and we're all doing it. And that's why we think we all need to issue like press statements whenever anything terrible happens in the world. You know, right. That is where I went as well, because there's a lot of that happening right now with people saying you need to post about this. You need to post.

You need to speak up. And it's at that moment that the distance between. Do you don't? Thank you. I agree. I don't think anyone can force you to post. And I don't think that posting is good by itself. Posting can be something, but it's not.

People will try to shame you into it. Your silence is its own statement and so on. And they're just performing themselves. That version, whoever those people are who are calling you out for not having issued a, you know, like a, a press statement about the Middle East, you know, um, like, unless you are a politician, unless you are a public person with some kind of record, you don't owe that to the world. You, I think you should read, you should become, um, literate about, about the, these issues that are going to impact all of us. But if this is not your area, you do not owe anybody that sort of us versus them performance.

Correct. And I felt that really strongly. Well, it made me think about the distance between my brand and my personal self because I post, I have a large social media presence. There are things that I post about a lot. What I don't post about international affairs.

That's not part of my brand. Now, as a person, I have a responsibility, right? To check in on my friends who are affected, to learn as much as I can, to try to, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a big, there's a big gap there. And I really was really feeling the gap over those, those last couple of weeks. Yeah. And I think people feel, you know, you start to feel like somebody is keeping track. Like there's some list somewhere that's keeping

track of everybody who has said something, everyone who has said nothing and we don't want to be on the wrong list. Wait it out is all I can say. Just wait it out. Um, and certainly don't say anything if you don't know what you're talking about. But the point about this idea that a brand is a thing version of you is a bad way to be human. I have studied what it means to be a good brand. And what it means to be a good brand is to repeat yourself endlessly and have extreme message discipline. So if you are a good brand as a human being, you are incredibly boring. You do not evolve. And you basically are just like a dog chasing its own tail for the rest of your life. You're just Nike. You say, just do it,

just do it, just do it, just do it over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Change the celebrity, keep the slogan. Good branding is all about discipline, and that may work for Nike, but it is really not what one should look for in our attempts to be human, which is to actually evolve and learn from our experiences and reserve the right to change. So, you know, it's interesting because it relates to AI, because I think the more formulaic we are as people, as artists, as creators of any kind, the easier we are to make a doppelganger of us by AI, because AI studies formulas, as you got to keep some machines guessing. Be a bad brand. Break their own formula.

But I also think it relates to the cruelty, you know, because a brand is not a human. A brand is a thing. And I think that when we're all out there performing thing versions of ourselves, we start to forget that each other are humans. And then we start to throw very sharp things at one another. And then we're surprised when we hurt each other. Things don't bleed, right? You can just, you can hurl anything you want at Nike. That'll be fine. Do you feel that you've created a brand for yourself? Is that, did you say, oh, wait, hold on. I, I am a brand in a way that I'm no longer comfortable with as you were looking into this? Yeah. I mean, this was a question that came up for me pretty

early because my first book, I got really, really fortunate with my first book and No Logo became a brand in the world. And it was very awkward because it was this anti-branding book that suddenly like there's a no logo craft beer in England. There's, there was a whole line of Italian sundries, including some very good olive oil in Italy called no logo. And then there was like a restaurant in Geneva called no logo, which I went into, I was like, wow, there's a no logo restaurant. And I went in and I introduced myself to the owner who ran away. He was so panicked that I was going to sue him for something that I had decided not to trademark it because I thought that that compromised my ethics. Anyway, I was like in my twenties, I could have gotten so rich.

Well, yeah, it became a meme, no logo. It was everywhere. Yeah. So I was confronted with this tension early on of like, okay, so even if I didn't want to be a brand, but I did sort of want to be a brand. And then I just realized it got way beyond my control. So I just decided to try to become a bad brand. And then the next, for me, what that meant was not writing about marketing for another 20 years. Um, so I, you know, my next books, my next books were, um, really not sequels to no logo, um, the shock doctrine and this changes everything they were, you know, I just, because I thought to be a good researcher, to be a good investigative journalist, I have to follow my, I have to follow the research and not just chase my tail. And it was very clear to me that some writers just write the same book over

and over again and slightly change the title. I mean, they're franchises. It's very popular. But to me, it was never really an option because I don't have the discipline to write about things that are not interesting to me. I'm too lazy for that. It has to interest me. I have to not understand it and have this desire to understand it to keep me working. And the thing about being a good branded author is you've already figured out the formula and then you just have to repeat it. But to me, writing is too hard to do that. You know, like, like, like if I, if I'm not in a process of discovery, I will just watch television, you know? Um, so it wasn't so much like that. I was so pure. It was truly not an option for me. I mean, I guess I could have now I could have hired an AI to write

those books for me. Well, it seems like you also, you had an urge to resist it, which I do with that in my own work. I have my pet topics I return to again and again. Anyone who listens to this show knows what they are. I don't need to list them. But then, you know, I have an urge to get away from that and do something new. But then the problem is, well, how do you sell that? Because people know you for the thing that you just did, right? People know you for that. And so maybe they want more of it. I mean, even this book seems very different that it starts from such a place of personal history of like, Hey, this weird thing happened to me compared to, well, I think any kind of success is always going to create its own, its own trap. Right. I mean, that's like Dylan, you know, going electric, like people didn't want that from him.

And, and then that's why he had to do it. But with this book, it was similar in the sense that I couldn't bring myself to write a conventional nonfiction book again, because I had lost faith that argument changed minds. I had lost faith in the concept of a linear nonfiction argument-based book. Life was just getting too weird. And so I just thought, well, maybe I can write in a really different way. And this book is much straight. It's weirder, but we live in weirder times. And it uses my own double to go into a hall of mirrors. And I think that if I had tried to write about this, the weirdness of now as if I was outside of it and just be like, I'm now going to make an argument about doppelgangers. No, no.

Who would want to read that? Like what's fun is to read about a hurricane from inside its eye. Oh, I love that. I love that. And to explore, yeah. What does this, what does this mean? What does this word mean? And to explore the hall of mirrors from inside the hall of mirrors, like to join you right there and to like, try to get out, try to get out, you know, but you got to start inside. Do you have any belief that that project can change minds more than the linear argumentative essay can? You know, I have found that like I've I've I have received so many really beautiful responses to this book of people who are grateful to have a kind of a map of, you know, this dynamic with the mirror world where we're defining ourselves against one another and projecting everything we can't stand about ourselves

onto them, you know, and then feeling pure because we are not them. And I think, you know, even something, having a term like the mirror world, I have found all a writer can do. I always see my role as helping people read the news better. I know this is sort of a strange job I've assigned to myself, but I don't have grand ambitions about what books can do on their own. But I do think that we can provide a little bit of orientation and some language, right? Like with the shock doctrine, I gave people some terms to describe what happens when we're in a state of shock and people try to take advantage of it.

They try to push through a pre-existing wish list, right? And so whenever there's a disaster, I start hearing people say, well, it's the shock doctrine. They're doing disaster capitalism. And I think, okay, I helped people just get oriented a little more quickly. It's not nothing, you know? Yeah. That's all I can do. I think there's more that we can do that are not books that mostly involve organizing with one another in the real world. Yeah. Well, but to create a piece of language that can help people understand the world more quickly is a powerful thing to do. It's, as you say, it's maybe a small contribution in the overall world of language, right? Or of our concepts,

but it does give people a new verb almost, a new way of relating. I want to return to that point of organizing because I obviously believe that strongly as well. But the online world, I'm curious how you feel about it because there's just a little aside early in the book where you say something like oh i dismissed that as happening just online and not in the real world you know i was so naive back then we were all naive enough to still say things like that

um and what's weird to me is i lately have found myself saying oh that's just happening online more you know i've i've been on the internet oh that's just happening online more you know i've i've been on the internet my entire life literally since i was you know very young i was obsessed with uh the internet with the computer world um and like dwelled there and now over the last couple years i've been like i want to be on the computer as little as possible i want to go look at a fucking tree i want to go like you know, do comedy with people in a room. I want to meet people face to face. I like, I hate zoom meetings.

I want to like, I will go 45 minutes to meet you in person. You know, that's just been my own, my own orientation. And yet we do at the same time live in a world where you can't say, oh, that's just Twitter or you can't, I'm not that's just Twitter or you can't. I'm not sure. How do you feel about it? I mean, I think like you, I am drawn to the real, to the embodied spaces. You know, I live in an incredibly beautiful part of the world in coastal British Columbia, where there are many trees to spend time with. And, and, and, uh, you know, it, it is really literally grounding. And I don't think

that I could do the kind of work that I do if I wasn't able to balance it out, um, with a hike in the forest, um, or some time on the water. Um, and since this book came out, like being in rooms full of other people has felt incredibly nourishing after so much time away. And I think this is how we keep each other sane in these, in, in these very vertiginous times. And we are creatures of narrative, like I said, and we do that work together. We make sense of the world together. And I don't think we can do it just in a Zoom meeting. I think there's something irreplaceable about doing it with one another. And so the way I try to use social media is as a way to get people off social media. So like, come on over, you know, yeah, join the picket line

and go to the rally and come to this meeting and come to this event and go to this concert and read this book, you know, and, you know, get wherever the work is deeper than whatever the little box Elon Musk has given us, you know, whatever that little box is or Mark Zuckerberg. So, um, but I see a lot of people

using it in that way, right. To, to, to bring us to more, to, to, to more deeper work that more fully represents us, whatever that is. And sometimes it'll be embodied with one another and sometimes it'll be, you know, just offline. So that's the way I tend to relate to it. I really like that. I, you know, I became well known over the past year for posting from the Writers Guild picket line quite often. And I was, that was to me, a very beneficial use of social media because people became connected to our struggle and they were able to offer support and, and just telling, you know, showing people what was happening was important. But I think it was really important that I was doing it from the picket line. You know, that was like, here I am surrounded by other people and you can see what is happening

here in the real world. I'm on the street in front of Netflix and here's hundreds of people around me or we'll at, we're at a rally, et cetera. If I had been doing that from my bedroom, you know, if that if that was where the struggle was taking place, all of us on the Internet, it wouldn't. First of all, it wouldn't have won. It wouldn't have been as powerful, but it also wouldn't have. It wouldn't have mattered like the connecting to, you know, the real life physical organizing mattered so much. And when you're doing that face to face, you see how powerful it is to see someone who you're in struggle with. And you see them face to face and you give them a hug and you say you need some water and you like have a connection. It's just funny, though, because so in all this about return to work, so many people make fun of bosses for going oh the ineffable synergy of being in the

office together and people would make fun of those bosses for requiring people to go back to the office and part of me would go i do kind of believe it though a little bit like i do agree face to face uh has something irreplaceable uh but talking about nobody wants to go back to their workplaces it probably means that their workplaces sucked and you know they need to need to change their workplace culture. And that's another argument for organizing, but I love that description because, you know, all of these ways, like ways of building doubles of ourselves, right? Like whether we're optimized, we're, we're, we're, we're perfecting our brand or we're, you know, I talk about the, the optimized body as being a kind of doubling, right? Like the idealized form. And this is,

you know, part of what pushed a lot of people over the edge during COVID was this idea that they had a strong body, a strong immune system, so they didn't need to worry about other people. And they didn't, you know, they didn't have to think about being in this enmeshed, you know, world of other people. Or they see their kids as their little mini-me's, their little doppelgangers, but all of it is about the self as opposed to building collective power. And, you know, when, when, when we are trying to, to face huge collective problems as individuals, that's when we feel most powerless, right? And we feel ashamed, you know, because we can't seem to make ends meet despite the fact that we're working so hard or we're

carrying this debt, you know, or we have this terrible boss. And the power of the demonstration, you know, and this is really where the book ends, quoting my friend, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who teaches history at Princeton, and also quoting the late, great John Berger about the power of the demonstration, is not just that you demonstrate to those in power at Netflix or wherever that there's a lot of you. It's that you demonstrate to one another that you are not alone, that you are, that, that what felt individual, like an individual crisis for you because you couldn't pay the bills is actually a collective crisis. It's actually a crisis for your boss when, when everybody gets together and withholds their labor or withholds

their rent, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a tenants union or withholds their debt payments in a debtors union. So that's why we need to get over ourselves, right? That is why I'm grateful to my doppelganger because I think I care, like all of us, I cared too much about my own image. Like who the hell cares, you know? So people confuse me with somebody else. And that's that, I take that as a message to just get over myself and reach towards other people, build collective power. Oh, I love that. Um, it makes me think of this thought that I've had recurringly over the past couple of years, which is that when you're face to face with other people, they, uh, see you in a way that you can't control. I think about this as a standup comedian who I perform live in front of other

people. And I watch other standup comedians. And when I think about how the audience regards you on stage, they're looking right at you. You're, you're exposed in front of them. You can try to put up whatever front you want. And a lot of people can put up a front quite well. But the audience's gaze always pierces to something that you don't control. You know, that I feel that people are able to, you know, when we're present for each other, we see each other in this sort of like deeper, uncontrollable way. And maybe that's why it's a relief to be in person, because, you know, on the Internet, it's all artifice, right?

It's all anybody sees is what I control. And it's actually helpful to be in a situation where I'm not totally in control. And then I get, I get seen as a person, which is satisfying and sort of lumpy and weird, even though it's, I don't have control over it. It's a little scary, but it is ultimately so much more, there's more fucking going on there. Well, they will also do things you can't control, right? Like, and that's, that's a whole other thing, whole other thing. But it is. I mean, this is the thing about, I think there's certain things about the tools of technology that are habit forming, you know, that when you can mute somebody, you know, and just, or just block, like there's

something habit forming about the idea that you can just make inconvenient people disappear, which look, I'm a muter. I admit it. Like when someone's putting me in a bad mood, I'll mute them. I don't block. I don't give them the satisfaction. You can't block, but it's so fun to follow someone and then mute them and be like, they don't know that they're muted.

They still think I follow them. They're still yelling at me and they think I hear them. But it, but it is, it's a sick thing to take pleasure in. No, because when you are in a room with other people, you realize that you can't turn them off.

Like they are going to be, they're all fully human selves. Right. And this is why we need gun control. Because it does make it a little bit more charged i love we're having this very like airy philosophical argument about seeing each other and control and identity and persona like and that's my policy argument for an assault weapons because i want to have a debate i just don't want it to end that way. You know what I mean? I love it so much. And this, again, it connects to so many things that, that I've been thinking

about who I am and how I move through the world and what I do. Um, sometimes I get too high and I start wigging out about my online identity and stuff. And, and this is, this is helping me giving me a framework to think about it, which I think is your goal. So do you have any, to bring us in for a landing here, concrete steps that you take away from this journey that you went on with Ms. Wolf wolf and um everything that you that you learned about the mirror world like how do we especially if we talk about those people who are really trapped within it we want to like connect back to them because i have so many friends who've experienced the pain of that i have i have friends who've lost parents to q anon yes um who they can't speak to anymore and to that mirror world what what do we do well Well, so all the research shows that if somebody is going to

get out of that mirror world, if they're going to get away from Steve Bannon or whoever it is that they have adopted as a guru, it's going to be somebody who they have a preexisting relationship with who will have reached them. And like I said, you know, this, this world is full of grifters. They're getting fleeced all the time. The stories are changing all the time. They probably have questions. Some people are too far gone, but there may, there may well be people who are looking for an off ramp and it's not going to be my book. That's going to get them. It's going to be a friend from high school who maybe read my book and had some ideas for how to extend a bridge and find some common ground

like i said maybe i don't like bill gates i don't think he's in i don't think he's implanting us with chips you know but i just think he's a fucking asshole who who made his billions in a horrible way and then is bad to people and created a propaganda machine about how great he is, where he made his own Netflix documentary about how he's the smartest guy in the world. And- Except there's so many reasons to hate Bill Gates

without making anything up, you know? So I think- He's mean to his wife. Like, you know, he's like, he's an asshole husband, isn't he? Hangs around with Jeffrey Epstein, if I recall. So I think that, so I think, I do think that it is worth extending those bridges, but I don't think we're going to solve this one uncle at a time. wing, um, populists are gaining ground it's by mixing and matching some true things with some very dangerous and untrue things like great replacement theory and the immigrants are

coming to replace you. And, um, you know, and teachers are turning your kids trans, right? So, you know, they'll take something like, you know, or rightful suspicion of big pharma, and they'll mix and match it with this much more nefarious agenda. So what we can do is we can take away the true things. We can take them back and put them to work in a real progressive project. So I don't think we fight conspiracy culture by just deplatforming and content moderation. I'm not saying that there's no role for that. But I think that Sean Fain, the head of the UAW, has done more to fight conspiracy culture

just by being out there in his Eat the Rich t-shirt and saying record profits should mean record contracts and being an actual left populist with a plan, an organizing plan for how to actually meet people's needs. Because what conspiracy culture is, is a distraction machine. It takes people's anger at elites, feeling that they're being screwed over and it pivots it towards scapegoats. Right. So the best way to fight it actually is to give people a real economic project that's going to meet their needs. So they're less likely to fall for these counterfeit grifters. Absolutely right. To,

to give the, say, Hey, the feeling that you have is real. There needs to be a fight, but to actually wage the right fight and don't just pay it lip service, but organize Marshall to power. I mean, Sean Fain has power in the UAW and he is winning and people can, Hey, don't you feel like you're getting screwed? Everybody says, yes,

let's fucking do something about it rather than selling you bullshit coins. Fuck Joe Biden coins. He's going after the bosses and the, and that is what they fear most. I mean, the reason there's a reason why some of the richest people on this planet love a good conspiracy theory. Like why is Elon Musk the single greatest vector of misinformation right now? If you were the richest man on the

planet on a good day, you would want people distracted too. You would want people not looking at systems of economic consolidation that allowed you to get as rich as you are. You would want them talking about the Jews and the CCP and Anthony Fauci and the rest of it. It's a distraction machine. And it serves elites even though they claim to be fighting elites like Rupert Murdoch. So we just need to understand this. We need to do a little mapping. That's all right? So we just need to understand this. We need to do a little mapping. That's all. We need to understand it. And then we need to organize to show the

alternative path. And then we need to win, which we are starting to do, I think. I think so too. I think so too. And I want to thank you for all of your organizing in real world action, right? Because that's the best way we fight this sort of fake world is by doing real work. That is such a beautiful conclusion to this conversation. Uh, Naomi, I'm so thrilled that you came on the show. I can't wait. I'm going to get this book on audio book. I think is going to be for my next month of travel on the road. I can't wait to listen to it. Um. I hope folks check it out. If you want to pick up a copy,

you can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Naomi, is there anywhere else that people can follow you or your work? Okay, I guess I'm on. I mean, I can't answer that question. You're right. After an hour of talking about Twitter and stuff like that,

you know what? How about this? I have a website, naomicline.org. And you can follow my articles in The Guardian. And you can sign up for my newsletter, which is free. How's that? That sounds beautiful. And then maybe someone can see you in person and talk to you about organizing or something

like that if they run into you in British Columbia. Thank you so much. This was such. Yes. Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here, Naomi. Well, my God, thank you so much again to Naomi Klein for coming on the show.

I hope you love that conversation as much as I did. If you want to pick up a copy of her book, you can get it once again at factually pod.com slash books. That's factually pod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support this show, you can do so at Patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

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