Offline with Jon Favreau - Naomi Klein on What Happens When You’re Mistaken for a Conspiracy Theorist

Episode Date: November 5, 2023

Naomi Klein, activist and bestselling author, joins Offline to talk about her new book, Doppelganger, and the woman who inspired it, anti-vax crusader Naomi Wolf. The two are often mistaken for each other, and in Doppelganger Klein wades into the confusion to tell a broader story about the morass of the internet today. She and Jon talk about what it means to build a personal brand in the attention economy, how the pandemic fractured our collective sense of reality, and whether the internet is a good place to build a populist movement. Plus, Max is back from the dead! He and Jon break down Biden’s new executive order on AI and exchange tips on how to have more productive conversations about the destruction in Gaza. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You talk a lot about how these algorithms encourage the worst parts of ourselves, right? But I think we don't talk enough about how the logic of personal branding intersects with that and how we actually don't even really believe each other are human online. And partly that's because we are performing a thing version of ourselves, right? Like to be a brand is not to be a human. It's to be a commodity. And that has maybe more consequences than we like to admit. I is not to be a human. It's to be a commodity. And that has maybe more consequences than we like to admit. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. That was Canadian journalist, activist and author Naomi Klein. I talked to her about her new very offline book, Doppelganger, which discusses the way technology has scrambled our relationships and our politics through Naomi's journey to understand her online doppelganger, anti-vax activist Naomi Wolf. You'll hear that conversation in a minute. It was fantastic. Highly recommend, one of my favorite conversations. But first, Max Fisher has returned.

Here I am. How are you feeling? So happy to be amid And talking to human beings again Oh And something you really forget About being sick Is that it's incredibly boring

Very boring By the end of it I was sitting on my sofa Like slinging Israel-Palestine takes With my cat Oh, so you're very So That must have felt great

He's a big two-stater He's a big, you know Old--time, traditional, like, John Kerry. And I'm trying to tell him, like, look, I get it. But I really think we have to be more forward-looking here. You know, you understand. But you guys worked it out together. That's right. But we did come up with a 10-point piece plan.

You sort of post-played. That's right, yeah. Sort of internet debate. It will be on my sub stack, yeah. Fantastic. So be sure to check in for that. Really glad to have you back. Thank you, man. Really glad to have you man really great to be back uh it was lonely doing this without you um let's get to the news uh before we get to the conversation with naomi klein on monday president biden signed a sweeping executive order to address the harms of artificial

intelligence because he is an offline listener. It honestly kind of feels like that. The concisely named executive order on the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. Rolls off the tongue. Just be glad they didn't go for an acronym. That's what they often do. It features more than 100 pages of new AI rules and regulations, including requiring AI developers to notify the government and share safety testing before releasing new products to the public.

It also directs federal agencies to take steps to prevent AI from being used to further discrimination. Vice President Kamala Harris also spent the week at the Global AI Safety Summit in London. She gave a big speech. She announced a few more initiatives, including an AI safety institute that's going to be housed in the federal government and a commitment from 30 nations on a declaration about the responsible use of AI. So, Max, has the AI apocalypse been averted? I think two really good big things that this does and then two kind of things that I worry about. The first big good thing is something that you and I actually talked about like a couple of months ago as at the very top of our AI regulation wish list, which is rather than just trying to anticipate and preempt any possible harm of AI with like preemptive regulations. Which tend not to work and then the technology goes faster than regulation. Yeah, there's only so much you can do

is that to try to get federal government like actually in the loop for the development of this. And that's something that they've done here with these rules that say, if you build an AI that surpasses a certain threshold of power size, you have to notify the government and then you have to conduct

all these regular government mandated safety and performance, they call them red team tests, and you have to share those results. And they've actually, they pegged it to the Defense Production Act, which I thought was kind of funny because when we talked about it, we drew the comparison with the development of weapon systems, where the government has to be preemptively in the loop, they have to be included in the development of it. And I thought that was good as just to make sure that regulators and people who are tracking this understand what's being developed in real time and are part of those conversations.

I think that's something that is a really good step. Yeah, it's like, hey guys, if you're going to invent robots that take over the world and kill us all, give us a heads up. Yeah, right. Just keep us in the loop. Right. And the second big thing, as you mentioned, is to set up like a few really big guardrails, one of which is watermarking AI-generated content

to crack down on stuff like deepfakes, rules to prevent AI being used to develop chemical or biological weapons, which... Seems like that's a no-no. I know. We don't want that happening. I know. It's a little controversial. You'd be surprised to hear. You've got enough people doing that without AI. The Ebola

lobby was really upset about this one, but sometimes you've got to take your losses, guys. And it comes down to, I thought the way they worked this out was pretty interesting. DHS is going to be enforcing these rules and how AI can be used in genetics research, so there's not even a possibility it could be used to sequence something like, you know, a dangerous virus.

And they're also setting a lot of rules. And again, I thought this was kind of interesting to ensure AI can't be used to exacerbate discrimination or otherwise infringe on civil liberties and things like criminal justice, housing and federal benefits programs. Yeah. And then the two things that I kind of worry about is that first is like, you were saying it's like good to have big guardrails, but you're still trying to guess where the technology is going to go and trying to guess what the harms are going to be. And this is just going to have to be a continuous never ending cycle of putting up like a million

little guardrails. And it seems like that's working now, but you know, they're going to have to keep the attention up. Congress is going to have to get involved at some point. That where it's right that's where it goes south because congress is not a thing no i mean it's really sad to say that but i'm like my first thought was like how much can they do via executive branch regulation right and what are they going to actually have to legislate right and you know god forbid we get another republican administration or like Trump comes back to the White House, then they can just undo everything that the Biden administration has done. Right. Or at least stop proactively putting up the guardrails.

And the other thing I worried about, and this is not something that I think it would have been possible to address in the executive order, is I just think there's always a risk of industry capture when you're talking about regulation. And you kind of have to wonder looking at this, is this going to be like car safety testing, which in the audio industry, it works much like the stress tests where car companies have to proactively themselves run all these safety tests and then report the results to the government. And it works pretty well. Cars tend to meet the safety standards set in the regulations. Or is it going to be like financial regulation where you have a revolving door between industry and regulators you can get a sense of industry capture you know they can get too cozy and time is just gonna

tell on which which of those paths we get yeah the one sort of red flag for me was reading Kevin Reese's story in the New York Times about this he said he was talking about how tech companies responded to this he said several executives I spoke to on Monday seem relieved that the White House's order stopped short of requiring them to register for a license in order to train large AI models. A proposed move that some in the industry had criticized as draconian. It will also not require them to pull any of their current products off the market or force them to disclose the kinds of information they've been seeking to keep private, such as the size of their models and the methods used to train them. So I do, and I don't know, like maybe that would have been too much for the federal government to do, but anytime that the tech companies are like, I think I like this, it's not bad. I'm always like, eh.

I know, I know. And I think it also speaks to the fact that we don't yet know what a lot of the harms that we have to guardrail against are going to be. But Google doesn't want to be in the deep fake making business. They don't want to be in the bioweapon making business. So I think they're very happy with this. And I don't know what the point is going to be where we're going to have regulations, like the kind of things that we're wishing had been developed with social media years ago that cut against their core business model. I also think that the big question, and this is not something that the federal government's regulation could have handled, but what's going to happen with other countries, specifically like China?

And there was a lot of, and we're recording this on Wednesday, but there's a lot of discussion about this AI summit, and China's going to have representation there as well. And like, will the United States and all these other countries be able to get China to sign on to some sort of, you know, joint declaration that they're going to follow these AI principles and is that going to have teeth, right? But so much of this is going to be not just what we do in the United States, but what other countries are willing to do or not do. Right. And there is, I think, a regulation in here that if you are a company that rents out server space in the United States, you have to notify the government if a foreign-owned AI

entity is renting that out, right? And there's also part of the philosophy here, which can only do so much to address the concerns of Chinese AI companies, I think is just like, they want American companies to completely own this industry. And that's partly just, you know, national self interest. But I think the idea is also like, we can regulate American companies a lot more effectively than we can, for example, Chinese ones. And that's why I think you also see a lot in this order, which the companies like that is trying to encourage the development of AI in fields where there's at least a hope that it could be beneficial, like healthcare. Do you think in general, this shows the

federal government has learned some lessons after not doing anything related to social media? It definitely feels like regret over allowing social media companies to just develop however they want is really like, you can really read that between the lines here and really feels to me like maybe I'm just reading that into it. And it really feels like that's hanging over this. And I think there's some evidence to that. And, you know, who's staffed on this and who's working on this, who are people who were involved before they came into this administration and calling for regulations on the social media companies. Yeah. And like in or in the Obama administration when there was like the tech companies are great. We're like they're going to connect us all. And I mean, that's how everyone thought back then or a lot of people thought. So where's your anxiety level on AI after this? Is it down a little bit? Only in the sense that, and it was sort of down when, I remember, we've talked about this before, that Pfeiffer interviewed Jeff Zients and he, the White House Chief of Staff, and he was like, this is like top three issues for us on the White House.

So the fact that the entire federal government is focused on this and worried about the dangers, I think is a good thing. Yeah, I agree. I don't know how much it can slow this down because like my larger sort of more uh pessimistic take is it's really hard to put toothpaste back in the tube right uh and this thing is moving forward and the technology is moving forward and we can slow it down and put up some guardrails but it's moving really it's probably the fastest moving technology that we've ever seen and the implications are huge and so it's gonna i mean to to deal with this correctly it's going to take more than the Biden administration. It's going to take governments all over the world and it's going to take companies doing the right things.

And it's going to take behavioral changes in society and all these things that we've talked about that are really hard to do. So that's what I'm worried about. Speaking of social media, a couple of weeks back, we talked about the way social media has made it nearly impossible to follow the ongoing uh israel hamas war uh we talked about how misinformation and online fighting seemed to be worse than ever before on twitter yeah tiktok and other platforms uh certainly the conflict has become worse since then right we're not gonna get into that but it seems like the the online discourse or the discourse in general about the conflict has also gotten much much worse since then uh what do you what are your what are your thoughts on that as someone who's just been just been consuming it like non-stop at home on the

couch for two weeks i have i have been absolutely stewing in it because i've been doing nothing except just like on my phone my screen time numbers are really for shit. I mean, look, this is a very emotional topic for a lot of people and Americans especially. It's also something where the stakes feel so extreme and so urgent that people feel obligated. They feel obligated to do something about that. And I think that's a good impulse. It's good to care about the world,

but most of us don't have the power to directly influence a faraway conflict in the Middle East. So something I feel like I'm seeing a lot these days whose relationships have really been damaged over the last couple of weeks over discussions about this. And that is also not advancing or helping the conflict itself. So I really think from having spent the last 10, 15 years talking and thinking a lot about this conflict that often what's actually happening is people are just talking past each other, not because of unbridgeable moral or political disagreements, but because this conflict is hard to talk about. So I wanted to, for the sake of trying to be helpful to people, to offer four tips for how to talk about Israel-Palestine, talk about the conflict with people in your lives productively, but also compassionately. Wow. I know.

Number one. Number one. Number one. Slam them on Twitter. Absolutely get their asses. Go in guns blazing. Do not read the news. Whatever the infographics you saw on Instagram, just run with it. It's probably true.

Whatever your feeling is more correct than the actual information. That's right. That's right. Just go with your feeling. If you read a news report and it doesn't confirm what you're feeling, just- It's probably wrong. Just find the reporter on social media. Let them know. No, I'm kidding. Okay. So number one, you are not responsible for other people's statements or opinions on this conflict,

no matter how bad they are. I'll give you an statements or opinions on this conflict, no matter how bad they are. I'll give you an example, because I think this is something that sounds obvious, like a lot of people feel an obligation to get involved in this. So a friend of mine, a guy named Keith, not really Keith, has a coworker who's been like posting a lot of pretty strident things on his Instagram in support of Israel's siege. Some of them are correct. Keith is very distressed about this. And he asked me for advice on like, what can I give my coworker, like things to read to help him like correct his misunderstandings or to like bring him about to a

more humane view of the conflict. And my advice to Keith was, what are you doing?'t just like i i get that there's like this sense we all feel that the discourse is the most important thing we all feel so much pressure to like have our takes make sure other people's takes are good the takes are the most important thing the takes aren't the most important thing they're really not yeah so i mean you know i i just had this conversation with naomi klein that everyone's about to hear but like part of her book doppelganger is that like living online and all of us spending so much time online it creates this binary right where it's like one side or the other and and it's so performative and this is not to say that people's takes about this crisis are performative because most most of them are not they're deeply held beliefs sure but it's like what you said it's like there's there's only so few of us who can actually influence what's going on there or

there are things that we can do to influence whether it's you know donating whether it's uh writing to members of congress calling them protesting whatever it may be there are things you can do that may have an effect winning an online fight it's just it's not one of the things that's gonna fix it yeah it's not it's like this is and i also think this is because we are in this mindset of all we do is fight online now this is like so much bigger and more important than another online fight to win. Right? Like it's not a constant performance

about which side you're on. It's not productive to just dunk on people or shame people or for not being sufficiently outraged or for tweeting misinformation or for shame, you know. It is like there are lives at stake.

There is like devastation lives at stake there's like devastation and like that is something to just be uh just like mindful of i think yeah we're talking about all that yeah and just be aware that the way that the internet and social media works is it flattens everything so that a news report about something horrible happening in the middle east feels the same as a bad take you saw on instagram and it's it's I'm sympathetic to that but it's you really I think will be so much happier and more engaged and will have so much less conflict you know you just try to remember that one is significantly more important than the other I think another very internet II thing is like the

argument over is it genocide is it not genocide what is ethnic cleansing what is not ethnic cleansing and it's like look at these in some ways these are right now in the middle of a war yeah like very academic right esoteric debates right whether it whatever it is like innocent people are dying yeah like like by the thousands yeah and that's enough right that's enough for your outrage that is enough for pushing on governments to change. Right. Like all of that kind of stuff. And only in Internet culture do people constantly get wrapped up in the definitions of words. Specific words. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. That is something I feel like I see a lot as people getting really hung up on. Will you use or not use this word as a litmus test? Of which, again, of which side you're on. Yeah. And that becomes a signifier of like, you are good or you are bad.

Right. Yeah. I used to, when I was at the Times, I used to get asked all the time, whenever there was a like big word, it's like, is this a genocide or not a genocide? And I would always try to redirect that assignment and say, look, instead of taking a binary statement, it is or it isn't, let's actually, let's interrogate what are we actually talking about when we talk about this? We're talking about how we feel about it. We're talking about motivations and intentions on each side. And if you get away from the like magic word discourse, I think that you'll, you know, you could do a lot more learning and thinking. Yeah. Okay. Keep going. So tip number two, and this is the really big one.

Like, I really think if you take anything away from this, I would really ask people to try to think and internalize this one. Often when people talk about this conflict, on the surface, it might sound like they're asserting a political opinion or they're making a factual claim. But a lot of the time, what they are really trying to express is how the news makes them feel. And they're just expressing that as a political judgment or as a factual claim. So really try to listen for what they're telling you about how it makes them feel instead of getting hung up on whether you agree with that

political opinion, whether that factual statement is correct. Let me give you an example. So a friend of mine, Kelly, and her mother, both Jewish, both live in New York, have been getting into a lot of arguments lately about the Gaza solidarity protests in New York, which Kelly has been attending. And Kelly's mom has been really distressed about this. She says, you know, these protests are apologists for terrorists. Why can't you protest for the Israeli victims? And having these really big fights over what feels like this unbridgeable political difference where Kelly's saying, why don't you care about what's happening in Gaza to her mother? And finally, it comes out that Kelly's mom is really, deep down, she's upset because the family synagogue in Manhattan put up bulletproof glass this week, and Kelly's mom feels scared. Now, factually, is she really at tremendous personal risk in the Upper West Side?

Maybe not, but this is a feeling that she has that Kelly and her mom can talk about. Kelly's mom was really expressing was an emotion for how the news made her feel. They were able to get past these disagreements that were so divisive for them and really actually understand each other. I've thought about that a lot because I think what everyone wants is attunement, right? They want emotional attunement. They want people, when you're talking with someone- Validate my feelings. Yeah. And you don't have to agree with my feelings, but they're my feelings.

And I just want, people want to feel seen. They want to feel heard. They want a sense of empathy. And if you talk to people with that in mind, then like, you might not agree on the politics of the crisis, but at least you have seen each other and you're probably going to have a conversation that is more productive or at least less angry than you would online. Yeah. Yeah. Let me give you another example is just because there's been so many variations of it. So I have two friends who are in DC, they're in politics and have had these really bitter fights, like saying things to each other that are very hard to take back because one of them is, this gets to what you were saying about using big magic words. One of them is insistent that Biden's support for Israel means that Biden is actively supportive of genocide against Palestinians. And the other friend is saying, I don't really think that's true, which the first friend feels like not just a differing opinion, but it's like complicity in war crimes. Why are you denying what's happening? And they're kind of finally starting to unwind it

by both of them acknowledging that what the first friend was really trying to express was a sense of frustration and helplessness over what's happening in Gaza. And that was coming out as this very hard edge political opinion that the second friend was disagreeing with, which felt like denying the first one's feelings.

So you have to do a lot of work to kind of get past like, what are we actually feeling and expressing as opinions? But I would really urge people when you hear someone say something that you really disagree with, try to listen for what's behind it. Something that Tommy and Ben do that I think honestly, a lot of us can learn from and like how we talk about this in our day-to-day lives is they will express a, you know, an opinion about a contentious political issue related to the conflict, but they will couch it in a lot of empathetic discussion about how that particular issue makes people on both sides feel. And that like helping people feel heard, helping people make their feelings and their emotional response to this feel validated will make people much more open to your opinions on it. Number three, and this is kind of connected to the second one.

If someone in your life doesn't share your same emotional response to the news or if they're upset about something else that has happened that implicates the quote unquote other side, that is okay. And it doesn't mean they're trying to undermine or distract from the thing that you care about yeah which is a hard one to remember but it's one that you should remember right it's very good to remember yeah and it like my i'm sympathetic to this one because there are so many voices in our national politics telling us that you can care about one side or the other and if you express any sympathy for civilians on the other side, that means that you are trying to distract from my side. Or you're trying to both sides it.

Yeah, right. Or you're trying to both sides it. Or why are you bringing this up when this other thing is so much more urgent? And I just really can't overemphasize how important it is to reject that kind of thinking. And then the fourth one, which is something that you mentioned, is when you feel scared or outraged, that's okay, but try to be thoughtful about how you want to channel that energy. And especially try not to take it out on the people around you, even though that can feel very tempting, because that is the one thing that you

might feel like you can influence. I can't stop Benjamin Netanyahu from what he's doing. I can't change Hamas's calculus, but I can sure go after this guy i know on twitter who had a take i didn't like right and i do this again this this this conflict requires us to hold two thoughts that seem contradictory but i think they're not in our minds at the same time. One, which is like the brutality of Hamas's attack and the anti-Semitism it's unleashed is revolting and terrifying. The horrific civilian casualties in Gaza and the Islamophobia we're seeing

is also revolting and terrifying. And when you hold both of those thoughts in your head at the same time, it's not only possible to do, it's fundamentally humane. Yeah. Because it means that you believe that Jewish lives matter and Arab lives matter and every life matters equally. Right. And you believe that no one should be treated differently because of who they are or where they come from.

Right. And that, if all of us like spoke with that tone more, it would not fix the conflict, but at least the conversation around it, it would ground us in this morality where we're like, okay, we get it. Like, this is a tragedy. The human condition is incredibly complicated. There is evil. There are people who do bad things. But if we start from this fundamental thing that like all life is like extremely valuable and the loss of any life is tragic, then like at least you come from a moral standpoint that makes a lot of these conversations, I think a little bit better. I agree with that. And I think that a lot of people who feel very strongly about this issue are starting to react against that, not because they don't see the humanity on the other side, but because they feel like they are being pressured by cynical political actors to performatively

condemn one side or to overstate the harm to one side in a way that they think is meant to distract from the other. And I think that's true. It's always been the case that there's a lot of ref working in the international discourse around this conflict. There are a lot of interest groups that I think are not part of the solution, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept their logic. And we can acknowledge that that's happening, but we can still rise above it, especially in the way that we talk to each other, which is something that you can control. Yes, that's right. Those are fantastic tips, Max. Very good pieces of advice. We are going to'll be doing a live show at the Joy Theater on November 10th. Tickets are going fast.

So head to cricket.com slash events to get yours today. And we have a big week coming in the Friends of the Pod Discord. On Tuesday, me, Max, and all your favorite cricket hosts will be reacting to the results of the big election in our election night support group thread. And then on Wednesday, we're doing another Republican primary debate group thread. To see all the takes that don't make it to Twitter, head to crooked.com slash friends

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Just head to cricket.com slash store That's cricket.com slash store. That's cricket.com slash store. Naomi Klein, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. So your book first caught my eye because I also have a famous doppelganger who does not look like me, but shares my exact name. Actor-director Jon Favreau. I get his invites, his emails, his restaurant reservations. It's like a whole thing. Often I would imagine good reservations.

Yeah, so that's how I get my reservations. No, I once had a colleague at the White House say to me like, oh, I was just watching Iron Man 3 and I saw your name in the credits. Did you do that? And I was like, you've been working with me every day in the white house like where did you think i had time to do to direct iron that makes me feel better about the fact that my colleague um when your show reached out was like a little too excited about it i was like no offense not that one not that one but the big difference is mine is not, my doppelganger is not as problematic as yours. Yours is the feminist author turned conspiracy theorist, Naomi Wolf.

And that's what led you to write this book. Though the book isn't really about you and Naomi Wolf. It's really about so many of the themes we've talked about on this show. And I was, I've loved the book. I found myself nodding and taking notes on almost every page because we've had so many of these conversations here. So I'm really excited to dig in. I guess my first question is, how did you get from people confusing you and Naomi Wolf to this larger meditation on identity and reality in the internet age? Okay. Well, first of all, I'm thrilled that you have enjoyed the book. And I agree that it does

resonate with a lot of the themes that you unpack on the show, which I really appreciate. I'm a fan. And I have been thinking about many of these themes for a long time. My first book that I wrote in my 20s was called No Logo. The subtitle was Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. And it was, you know, it was about the rise of the first lifestyle brands, like the first companies that said, we actually are not companies that primarily produce products, we primarily produce brands, which was a sort of a new idea in the 90s, right? And so that's what No Logo was about. And it was also tracking the first individuals who declared themselves to be brands, like Michael Jordan's agent to declaring that Michael Jordan was the world's first super brand.

But back then, to our 1990s brains, the idea that everyday people who are not mega celebrities who have to have their own PR firms could be brands themselves, didn't make any sense, even though there were marketing firms and fast company articles telling us that we should all become brands because we were never going to get jobs, right? So we understood the idea of personal branding to basically be sort of like a silly concept that was being sold to us in lieu of having jobs that we could depend on. And then comes the iPhone. But No Logo came out really on the cusp of that new world. It came out just on the cusp of social media. It was published between 1999 and 2000. So I write in the book

about how it was very strange for me because that book turned me into kind of a brand because I became the face of a certain kind of anti-corporate politics. And suddenly there were all of these no-logo products being made by other people because I hadn't trademarked it. Like there was a line of no logo olive oils and sundries and in Italy that were like actually pretty good. And they sent me some at least because they never asked my permission. There was also a really sort of seedy no logo restaurant in Geneva and so on.

So because I was in this- Like, oh, the irony. I was in this awkward position of having written a manifesto against the idea of personal branding and then was turned into one myself. I sort of ran in the opposite direction. And so my later work, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, had nothing to do

with marketing, had nothing to do with branding. And that was me trying to be a very bad personal brand, which I figured was the only thing I could do about this uncomfortable reality that I had turned into a brand by writing critically about branding. So it had been in the back of my mind that I wanted to return to this material precisely because we all now are personal brands, any of us who maintain a social media presence are creating this doubled version, this commodity version of ourselves. And so when I found myself having a personal branding crisis because of Naomi Wolf, the working title was Off-Brand Me. So I thought better of it. So that's why I decided to write about this. I saw it as a way back into

this material because I was watching how it was changing our interpersonal relationships, how it was changing our social movements, because so often the spokespeople for social movements were not people who had been lifted up democratically within social movements, but were rather they're people who were best at personal branding. And that was creating all kinds of tensions within movements. So I thought, hmm, maybe this is a kind of a gift because it lets me write about it from the inside and with a healthy sense of irony. And, you know, like as a listener of your show, I know that you talk a lot about how these algorithms encourage the worst parts of ourselves, right? But I think we don't talk

enough about how the logic of personal branding intersects with that and how we actually don't even really believe each other are human online. And partly that's because we are performing a thing version of ourselves, right? Like to be a brand is not to be a human, it's to be a commodity. And that has maybe more consequences than we like to admit. Can you talk a little bit about what happened to Naomi Wolf? Because like, when I thought about Naomi Wolf, I thought about the like, she advised Al Gore on like how to reach women voters. That was like a story back in the in the early 2000s. And then I hadn't really kept track of her until i

heard that she was like spouting conspiracy theories but to your point i was actually reading the book prepping for this episode and i was with some colleagues and one of them was talking about some anti-vax thing and uh i don't want to hear it tommy and my friend tommy goes oh god you're sounding like naomi klein and i was like no that's that's literally who i'm talking to yeah yeah it happens so what happened to her uh yeah you know just as an aside before i like there's something about the name naomi seems to be, it's just rare. It's not a rare name, but it's also not a common name. And somehow the first Naomi that people become aware of gets confused in their brain.

And yes, we are both Jewish Naomi's who write nonfiction books, sort of big idea, big theses. But earlier in my career, I would often have the experience of going on a television show, particularly in the UK, where they'd say, coming up next, an interview with Naomi Campbell. And I would then have to disappoint people terribly, you know, and just be like, I'm so sorry. It's just me, you know. So I don't know what it is about the name Naomi, but people get confused a lot. All right. So yeah, you're asking what happened to her and who she was. I mean, when I was an undergrad, she published The Beauty Myth, which was her breakthrough book.

And in Doppelganger, I talk about, at the end of the books, or spoiler alert, my experience of meeting her as a second year university student, and that having probably a pretty formative impact on me, this, that the idea that you could have, you could write a book taking on the patriarchy, and people would listen to you, and you could look cool doing it. You know, she wore a leather jacket in her publicity shots. And we were all very impressed by that as undergrads. But yeah, she was a very big deal in what was being called at the time, the third wave of feminism. So she was kind of that wave of feminism's

most telegenic face. But there were other people like Rebecca Walker, Susan Faludi. But Naomi Wolf really, I would describe her feminism as more like the lean in of its time. She wrote a book called Fire with Fire. It was very much access feminism. It was not radical feminism. It was not socialist feminism. She was very clear that that's not what she was doing. And she was on all the talk shows. She did a little advising of Bill Clinton, apparently, and then was brought on by Al Gore in 2000 to be his female voter whisperer.

And there are big controversies about whether or not she advised him to wear earth tones. She denies it, but all the talk show hosts insist she did. And she was really, you know, before, before public shaming went supernova online, you know, she was she was more like the Monica Lewinsky era public shaming, like she was very much like a butt of Jay Leno jokes, you know, in that era. And then, you know, I think the Bush era broke her brain a little bit like it did for a lot of people. And so I started to get confused with her when she stopped writing mainly about feminism, because I mainly write about economics and states of emergency. And so she, in 2007, 2008, wrote a book about how the US was sliding

into fascism. So it makes it extra ironic that she now pals around with Steve Bannon and is on his show. Sometimes every day, they published a book together about the Pfizer vaccine. They even put out t-shirts together. I don't know what happened to those t-shirts because they were short-lived. I think they may have had a branding dispute over them because then they were taken down. But I know that for a very short period, you could buy t-shirts that were co-branded that War Room, his podcast, and Daily Clout, her website, and it would declare you a special vaccine investigator. That is wild. What a journey. So you identify in the book, the pandemic is one of those shocks to the system that's fueled a lot of the social destabilization that we're still grappling with today. I've had

the same thought, like, it's almost like a collective trauma that we still haven't fully confronted. And it's actually one of the reasons we started this show, especially because of how the pandemic led us to spend so much time online. You've said that this has led to a sort of derangement. Can you say more about that? Yeah, well, I mentioned, you know, I've written about states of shock before, and it's important to understand what a state of shock is, right? It is not just something big and bad happening. That is something big and bad happening. A shock is something that happens for which we do not yet have a story to explain. A state of shock is the

gap that opens up between event and narrative. We are creatures of narrative. We need stories. That is how we stay oriented. And so if we think about the shock of 9-11, that is an event that opened up a gap in the American brain, in the Western brain that said, what is this thing? This was not part of our conception of ourselves, of our countries. And into that gap, enter lots of people who say, I know what the story is, right? And the story is you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. The story is they hate our freedom. And then some people are trying to reach for narratives that might put the event into some other kind of story. It's why people want to read history in these moments. And if we think about the early stages

of the pandemic, there was so much of that, right? Like people were reading deep history. They wanted to read about previous pandemics because this was not part of that, right? Like people were reading deep history. They wanted to read about previous pandemics because this was not part of our story of self. Like, like we, I don't know about you, but I did not, like, even though I knew that it was possible, I mean, you probably knew it much more than me because you're in the white house that this is, this was always possible that it could have happened, but it just, the idea that we would that we would have lockdown on that scale, that there would be mass death on that scale. Yeah, we didn't have a story for it.

And so when that intersects with the attention economy, and science takes time, right? And the scientists are saying, give us a minute. We need to do some studies before we can explain exactly what this novel virus is and how we should respond. And there will be some mistakes and people will say things about masks that turn out not to be true and so on. The huckster economy, the grifter economy, whatever you want to call it has none of those compunctions. And they understand how this economy works. And they understand that he who has the most outrageous claims will get the clicks and the views. And so I think that was particularly true. And you know, in the book, I talk about the autism vaccine myth as a prequel to this is that there are people there were people like RFK Jr. and others in the anti-vax world who had the infrastructure

ready. And they could kind of do a bit of a search and replace on those childhood vaccines with the COVID vaccines, and they were ready to go with the plandemic story, right? And that's why a film like that goes viral in the early months of the pandemic. Yeah, so it was all those factors. It was all of us being in our homes and looking for story, looking for meaning, looking for a simulation of the social relationships that tell us who we are, and instead getting conspiracy culture. Yeah, and I think it's that, I mean, I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, right? It was, you know, Zoom happy hours. And even though we're apart, we can all be connected. Thank goodness for technology.

And so we can, if this was a pandemic, you know, in the early 1900s, last time there was one, like we wouldn't be able to see each other, but now we can, we can have this kind of connection. And I think that, I don't know if we fully realized until later into the pandemic or even now that the connection that we get via technology is not the same as the human connection that we have when we're in person. And I think a lot of, and you talk about sort of maintaining our digital avatars, and of course, you were talking about personal branding. And I almost wonder if the pandemic sort of forced us to even think more about ourselves, our branding, and then sort of what

that did to both us as individuals and society? I think so, because that was all we had to represent us to the world. And I think it was particularly hard on public figures who are used to getting a certain kind of input on a regular basis and who suddenly had all of their comedy tours canceled and their book tours canceled and their public events canceled. And so that little thumbnail version of you is your only way of getting those forms of validation. So the desperation behind the people who just could not stop posting, could not stop saying the most inflammatory things are suddenly ivermectin, you know, scholars. They just, the need behind it is so deep, you know. I have a quote in the book from Gore Vidal saying,

some writers take to drink, others take to audiences. And, you know, I think that that is, I think Gore Vidal may have taken to both. But, you know, these platforms mean that we, like, if you are a writer who takes to audiences in the way some people take to drink, then Twitter is an unlocked liquor cabinet 24 hours a day. And so that creates a certain kind of possibility that just wasn't available to people earlier, right? And Wolf is somebody who took to social media with great enthusiasm in that way of like, oh my God, I don't have to go through a gatekeeper.

I can just share my thoughts at any time of day or night. And I see the appeal, but I'm somebody who really values editors. For instance, Wolf, early in the pandemic, was greatly mocked for tweeting that she believed that children had lost the ability to smile because of masks. Like that their smile muscles were atrophying. And she based this on, I don't know, a couple of random encounters of children who might

not have been happy to see her. Now, if she had pitched that to an editor at, say, The Guardian, where she used to write, I think that an editor might have said, that's an interesting idea. Would you like to do some interviews with experts? Any social science to back that up? Maybe a study? And she might have come up with a column that would have raised some interesting questions, you know, about mirroring and what we tell each other with social expressions that would have been valid and not be worthy of being mocked. And so, yeah, I think that this is, that what people are able to do because of these platforms is something we still haven't fully unpacked. Yeah. I mean, to me, this personal brand building attention economy dynamic that you describe is one of the most underrated explanations for why our politics has become so

dangerously toxic and broken. I think you argue so powerfully that it's not just people spending too much time on Twitter arguing with each other. There's something deeper going on here. Can you talk about some of the various political implications you discovered while writing this book? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of them, but just keeping to the branding piece of it,

it is worth spending a minute to think about what a brand is. I mean, it is a, and what makes a good brand? I mean, this is the thing, the reason why I found it troubling to be accused of being a brand as a journalist is that as a journalist, you want to be able to be changed by your research. I mean, to be a trust,

like the people who I trust are people who I know read deeply, report deeply, and are willing to have their mind changed, whether they're scholars or journalists. To be a good brand is to repeat yourself ad infinitum. I mean, a good brand has good discipline. And the measure of a good brand is that you don't stray from your central message. You can have an extension, but the extension has to lead you back to the message itself. And it seems to me to be a really diametrically opposed mission to be a good brand versus to be like a good human, a good participant in society, let alone a good researcher, a good journalist, a good scholar. So I think some of the implications

we're seeing is just the implications of telling people that because they're not going to have a job and because they're not going to have a pension, their lifeboat in these roiling capitalist seas is their personal self, their optimized self. That might be the branded self, but it might also be like the optimized body, which is often very related to this. Because one of the things I look at is why it is that there are so many figures who like Wolf have made this migration from left to right or liberal to right. And there's often an over-representation of the sort of people who come from the wellness world, who are sort of experts in bodies, health. Think about somebody like Rog know, why is it that they're all selling supplements, right? What is it about? And so that's another kind of doppelganger that I look at in the book, right? So, you know, your brand is your doppelganger, but when you become

truly body obsessed, your body is your doppelganger. There is this idea of an idealized form that you're constantly reaching towards, right? That you achieve with enough reps, with a clean enough diet. And that can tip into a kind of a ferocious hatred of bodies that don't conform to that. So when we look at who was most anxious about the vaccine and who really made it their defining issue, a lot of it had to do with this idea that the vaccine was polluting the body, the perfected body, the clean body, and turning people into, I don't know if you've heard this phrase, like GMO people, which is an interesting phrase because it comes from this

kind of wellness, anti-big agribusiness world that I identify with. I've been parts of movements that have been very critical of big ag. I remain critical of big ag. But what you see is this flip from a sort of structural critique to this idea that it's just about purifying your body, right? And then you have people like Alex Berenson who calls himself a pureblood, right?

Because he's not vaccinated. But that's really worth pausing over because then it is not a surprise why they are sitting so comfortably with people like Steve Bannon and his project of building a fascist alliance across borders. There's a hierarchy of the human, is what I'm saying, in a lot of this quest to perfect the self.

I mean, I love the, you have an equation in the book to explain people like Naomi Wolf will go down the rabbit hole. Narcissism slash grandiosity times social media addiction plus midlife crisis slash public shaming equals right-wing meltdown. I just love that. I mean, God, I mean, we've watched this in so many people. But with Wolf, there was also this thing that happened right before the pandemic, which is she published a book called

Outrages. It was her attempt at a more serious book. It was a piece of historical work that was her dissertation. It was looking at the persecution of gay men in Victorian England. And she makes this claim that many more men were sentenced to death, were killed by the state than was previously believed. And live on BBC, Matthew Sweet, who was interviewing her, pointed out that she had misread completely the historical record. And what she believed was a death sentence was actually these people being sentenced and then released. So this becomes totally- Big thing to get wrong. Big thing to get wrong.

Good on him for catching it. We all need better fact checkers. But then what happens is it becomes this spectacle of public shaming on Twitter. I don't know if you saw any of this. I saw quite a bit of it because people thought it was me. Of course, yeah. So I mean, this but you see this happen to so many people who become radicalized or who just you look at and you're like, their brain has been broken somehow.

It starts with some kind of a public shaming incident. And that sort of spirals them into this anger and resentment and sort of, I think, obsession with yourself and what's happening to you and what people are saying about you. And it does, it makes sense that that sort of leads you to more sort of right wing rabbit holes and more conspiracy culture. So much of this, you know, you start by talking about Naomi Wolf and sort of these rabbit holes that take you down the right. But I think a lot of this also affects the left as well. And you write about that. You have this line I love about how, you know, we're living in a story in which the self takes up too much space and talk about how, you know, we're living in a story in which the self takes up too much space

and talk about how, you know, you say so much of intellectual and activist life today is about credit claiming. I wrote that. I said that that's my phrase, my buzzword, as I wrote, as I said. Just bumping this up. Yeah. Or like, I tried to tell you people this. I've warned you. I was saying this years ago, right? Just to prove how right you are. And you see this all I've warned you. I was saying this years ago, right? To prove how right you are. And you see this all over Twitter, but you also see it everywhere. It's blogging culture, like early blogging culture. I wrote this here. I wrote this here. Look at this earlier piece. Yeah. Self-citation is a very strange thing.

But what struck me about it is that it seems so antithetical to the larger project of progressivism, liberalism, socialism, whatever on the left, which seems like it has to be based in solidarity and on the other and on are the ones who are right, and it's about our argument being right, then it seems like it would sort of harm the larger project of activism. Yeah. And I mean, I came of age, you know, in like, I was in university in the 90s, and then No Logo came out. And I was sort of navigating politics in those years pre-Facebook and Twitter, pre-iPhone, and then have experienced the other thing, which we're all in. And I think that the biggest difference is it's not that previous to this, we were all in this, had a left that was immune to the logics of capitalism. We were never outside of it, which is what I learned when I published No Logo and

became a logo, you know, and had all those weird contradictions. But our primary way of communicating with each other on the left was email lists and boring conferences and teaches. And now we are on the platforms that we do not own, that are owned by the richest men on this planet, and we are changed by them. And the logics of capitalism are inside of us very, very profoundly in the words that we say to each other, in the way that we express our left wingedness. It's on Elon's platform, right? And I think that there's a way in which that is humiliating for everyone, but it's particularly humiliating if you are a socialist, if you are somebody whose whole sort of identity and belief system rejects all of this. So it's quite possible that the sort of inherent humiliations of being a leftist enclosed in the logics of capitalism on the platforms of the wealthiest men alive is so humiliating for the left that the need to attack one another and just find somebody else who you can project all of your self-loathing onto and claim that they are the ones, you know, that I would say that the pressures may be uniquely heavy on the left. Because if you're a liberal and you love capitalism, you don't have to loathe yourself quite as much for the being on these platforms in the first place.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here, John. Well, but even as liberals, right, I do think that the focus on identity too, as sort of like the driving force of politics, it makes it really brittle in a way. Like you can't sort of change your mind, change your ideas, think about things, think about other people a lot. Because I love the bell hooks advice that you cite where she cautions activists to avoid using the phrase, I am a feminist and instead say, I advocate feminism. Can you talk about why that difference is so important? Yeah. I mean, this journey into doppelganger-ness brought me to different thinkers who have

tried to navigate these tensions between being a public self, being a public intellectual, and having these kind of parasocial relationships where people think they know you, but they don't know you, and being an activist and trying to stay true to a belief system. And bell hooks is somebody who thought a lot about this. The book, she's one of the people the book is dedicated to, because she died while I was writing the book while you know, while I was sort of turning to her writings on this. And she talked about it at different public events at the end of her life. She didn't capitalize. Well, first of all, Bell Hooks is not her actual name. And it's her public

facing name because her name, Gloria Jean Watkins, she said she wanted to have to walk around in the ordinariness of her life. But even in taking the public name, her writing pseudonym, Bell Hooks, she wrote it in lowercase as a way kind of to make herself smaller than the ideas that she was writing about, to sort of signal that. But then, of course, within these logics, that itself becomes a brand. And this is, you know, we're caught within this loop. You know, so I'm not saying she figured it all out. But we do have predecessors who really were trying to think this through. And there's something about the fact that if you over inflate the self, if you care too much about the author, it gets in the way of the ideas themselves. And if you are a leftist and you write about ideas because you want ideas to spread, then

there is a kind of an inherent tension between the idea of claiming, of saying this was my idea, I thought of this first. And if you think about the prototypical left-wing pamphleteer like it's like we want we should want idea like we should be deeply invested in popular education and in just doing everything we can so that ideas can can fly and not weigh them down with the need for credit with the need for claiming you know that said you know some of the people who tend to get most of the credit anyway tend to be white men and white women. And so partly what happens on Twitter is people who've been uncredited, whose labor has never been compensated, come forward and say, actually, that was my idea,

and make sure that they get credit. So it's complicated. It's all really, really complicated. And yeah, I found Bell's writings really useful to help navigate it. There's the dynamic with individuals and with the self there's also dynamic with sort of how we're defined into groups and you talk about the the mirror world right and you say with a society split in two and each side defining against each other whatever one says and believes the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs but acting as members of groups it does feel like much more difficult to

figure out where you are on any given issue or what you believe without like first finding out where your side comes down it does seem like it's like the line is is uh is drawn harder and sharper these days. And I do think that like the internet world does that, right? Like the extreme, us all being extremely online sort of draws that sharper. Yeah. And, you know, this is why I call it the mirror world because I think a lot of what, you know, when I listened to a whole lot of Steve Bannon,

because she was on it all the time, but then I just started listening to it because I realized that I didn't understand what he was doing. Like I didn't understand the political project enough. And he, you know, he studies Democrats and he studies leftists very, very closely. And he tries to figure out what pieces of it he can co-opt, right? This is how in large part, how Trump won, or at least part of the story of how Trump won in 2016, was Bannon knowing that there were a lot of people who'd voted for Obama and for Clinton before, who were really upset about NAFTA and other free trade deals that they associated with deindustrializing their communities. And then they just got more of those trade deals. And,

and, you know, I don't think Trump really cared about free trade. I think Bannon told Trump that this was going to be a very effective way to peel away a portion of traditional democratic voters. And I think he is doing that now with a constituency that they have really had trouble with, which is women. And that is what Bannon sees in Wolf. That's why he's co-writing books with her and why he has her on the show and why he treats her as a kind of mom in chief, right? He loves that she's this prominent, you know, ex, well, she still say, I mean, when she goes on the show, she still identifies as a feminist, right? You know, even though this is, you know. Well, they like to co-opt words on the left, as you point out.

Yeah, but I think, but he sees her, he sees the fact that she was this prominent third wave feminist, that she did work for the Democrats as a key to peeling away women who didn't vote with their husbands in previous elections, but who might now because they were upset about the school closures, they were upset about mask and vaccines, and he bundles it into this package of issues that are all around kind of protecting the idealized child, the pure child, right? And so that's how you connect vaccines, masks to hysteria about all gender bathrooms and critical race theory and, you know, making kids hate their countries, right? It's all about these sort of invasions into the child. And so Wolf is a really key piece of

that for him. Yeah. And I wonder if there are lessons for the left in this. I've also unfortunately listened to The War Room too much. And then when we had Jennifer Senior on the show, and you cite her Long Atlantic piece on Bannon in your book, and she was telling me when she was on, she's like, oh, yeah, he listens to Pod Save america because he tries to keep tabs on you guys and i was like oh well that's it's good that we're keeping tabs on him then but i do wonder if we if there are lessons for us and one of the passages in your book that sort of stuck out at me is you said when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender and labeled privileged there's little room to confront the myriad ways that working class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order with with left wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances. It does seem like that is exactly what Bannon and people like him and the MAGA movement and the Trump movement are trying. They're trying to exploit that sort of those definitions to try to win some of those folks back. Yeah, yeah. And just to unpack a little bit further, he is studying us. We generally don't pay much attention to him, except to do that sort of

whatever they're against, we're for, and vice versa, right? And so one of the ways that I understand the viral spread of conspiracy culture is that while they get the facts wrong, they often get the feelings right. And the thing that Wolf did, and this is part of one of his big narrative pieces on the war room, is this idea that technology is waging war on the human, right? And so when she talked about vaccine verification apps or vaccine passports as being all about surveillance, then we sort of laughed about that, right? And then we had, there was this joke on the left, wait till they hear about cell phones, as if we're so kind of, we're so savvy and kind of world weary that we know that our cell phones are actually listening to us and surveilling us. And,

and, and not, it's not just the, it's not this app, which is just finding out whether or not, when it gets scanned, whether or not we got our vaccine. And it's not being kept track of in some massive database. But the implication of that sort of sneer, wait till they hear about cell phones, is like, oh, yeah, we're kind of okay with it. And he's not okay with it. And that's why a lot of people are going over there. So I'm interested in how do we take the parts of this mess that are true, that he's mixing and matching with a whole bunch of really dangerous ideas, and do something real in the face of them. Like we actually should have done more in the face of, you know, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. It was one of the things that Biden talked about. And then, you know, it's one of the things that probably we haven't done enough about.

But I think it's kind of bigger than that why we are in a moment like this, where so many people are just kind of checking out of anything that we might recognize as a shared reality, which is, and this relates to that passage that you were reading about identity categories and who feels excluded from that. And a lot of people feel excluded from it. A lot of people felt excluded before when the default was just white people. Right. But we are in a moment that, in the book I describe as a kind of a triple reckoning or a triple unveiling where COVID itself,

it wasn't just hard because we hadn't experienced this kind of a shock before, or because we were isolated from one another. It was also hard to look at because COVID was a kind of a searchlight that showed us everyone and everywhere who we had studiously looked away from, right? Because these were the COVID hotspots. So suddenly we're forced to think about the way in which our culture produces disposable people, you know, whether they are working in elder care facilities, when there's suddenly COVID outbreaks, because actually you need to work in three facilities a day to piece together anything approaching a wage that you can pay the bills with, you know, or the poultry plants that were also COVID hotspots.

And these are places where you never see a camera because we're not supposed to think about these places where we don't think about what's going on in prisons and prisons were also a COVID hotspot. So, you know, the sort of liberal discourse around this was, let's celebrate essential workers, right? But that's just a very kind of whitewashed way of looking at who was actually on board the risks of this virus. And to me, I think if we want to understand the mass derangement that took place, I think it's because we live in a culture that has told us

that we are just heroic individuals if we have succeeded, and that we are not part of enmeshed bodies of people who support our ways of life in all kinds of unseen ways. And then COVID comes along and forces us to think about enmeshment in ways that were really troubling to a lot of people. And I think a lot of people rose to that occasion and thought, okay, well, let's make sure nurses don't have to go to work in garbage bags. And let's fight for living wages for those essential workers. But I don't think we, one of the things that we haven't reckoned with enough is, you know, like I live in Canada now, and we had this trucker convoy, which was, it was like, it was like all of these people who really believed that story. Like these are independent

contractors. They got their truck. They were just supporting themselves and their families. And all of a sudden the government comes along and says, you need to think about other people. You actually need to think, you know, epidemiology is about treating us as a body of bodies, right? And it's like, you may be healthy, but somebody else might not be. And you need to now think about that. A stranger or somebody who you have already decided not to see because they don't look like you, right?

And so there was a way in which the convoy was just this w whale of like, no, I am not accountable to anybody. I believed Margaret Thatcher when she said there is no such thing as society. Like I, I believed the myth of neoliberalism. Like we are just individual people and families, and we don't owe anything to each other. And I think that COVID said that that wasn't the case, because you can't actually just treat individuals. You have to treat a body of enmeshed individuals. And I think it broke people in a way that goes way beyond the internet.

The internet just helped people find each other and all go to the same convoy. Well, the other thing that happened with not only essential workers, but also like a lot of small business owners and a lot of like small business owners of color and like some of the people who are who maybe to some white liberals were surprisingly, you know, pushing against shutdowns, lockdowns, all this kind of stuff is people who are like, I don't make a lot of money in the first place and i need to work and i have this small business i need to like sell you know and i can't homeschool my kids i don't i can't i don't have that luxury and my kids now are going to miss a couple years of school and i get that we want to keep each other safe but also i can't make a living now yeah and I think for a lot of like wealthier, wealthier liberals, right? This was like, no, no, no. It's like you wear your mask and you get your vaccine and, and all the, you know, all the NPIs are correct and that's it. And if you're not, if you're not on board with that, you're bad. You're like a right winger.

And I think the Bannon types see that and they're like, okay, we're going to go after a lot of those people who are working class and who are sick of all this and who just are trying to make a living. And we're going to try to bring them into this movement. A hundred percent. And the reactivity of like whatever they're against, we're for meant that, you know, the early in the early months of the pandemic, when it was clear that we were working towards a vaccine, there was quite a bit of discussion on the left about whether or not those vaccines should be patented at all, if they were being developed with public money, if it was going to be on a fee-for-service arrangement. People were quoting Jonas Salk saying, would you patent the sun about the polio vaccine?

But once this became a battleground, like a culture war issue on the right, and they were saying, don't get vaccinated, mainly what we were saying was roll up your sleeve, wear your mask, you know, do these things that were quite individualistic. We offloaded the responsibility of controlling COVID mainly to individuals. And I think if there was a more robust left, we would have been fighting for lifting the patents on vaccines, clean indoor air, raises for all those frontline workers, more teachers so that we could have smaller classrooms, more outdoor education, like collective responses, as well as wear your mask, get vaccinated. But that was kind of all we were saying.

And I think that that made us very ripe for Bannon to come along and be like, I hear you're paying. Yeah, tell me more about your business being closed and all of these rich liberals telling you to just suck it. And that was not great. I've often wondered if all of this sort of individualism that being extremely online promotes and the personal branding and all of that has just made the work of democracy that much more difficult than more authoritarian forms of government and i've obviously thought about that in the last couple years just because as we're seeing sort of the rise of fascist

governments all over the world and you know proto-fascist governments and whatever it may be it's always like i feel like our job as people who want to live in multiracial democracies is just that much harder because people are constantly being told that like you're the only person who matters and the individual matters and as we're pushed towards thinking about ourselves more and less about the other it just makes those authoritarian appeals sort of more attractive to people it's i think with within the logic of individualism, sort of frontier myths, up to this stage of capitalism, which is all about optimizing the self and commodifying the self, the message of you don't owe anything to anyone is one that can be sold much more easily by authoritarians. And I'll just keep you safe. And I'll keep the hordes out. What's interesting, because we've talked a lot about the ways that COVID broke people, I think it's worth remembering that despite the fact that

we were all raised within this culture and with those messages, that for a good two years, a critical majority of people in a lot of countries welcomed the arrival of a social state, set up incredible mutual aid networks. Many people participated in that in order to fill the gaps left by state responses, and never bought the idea that we didn't owe anything to each other. And that is something to build on. But there needs to be a political project that is building on it, right? And this comes back to this question of whether or not there is an us that everybody feels included in, or whether there are these hard identity boundaries that leave enough people out that then they flock to some pretty toxic

individuals who are going to say, I feel your pain, right? Which is what a lot of young people are getting from Andrew Tate. It's certainly what people get from Steve Bannon, which is a much more kind of welcoming space than I expected it to be. And I think, I don't know if you got into this a little bit with Jennifer Senior, but one of the things that I was really struck by is his sort of this, like we all see the fire breathing Bannon, you know, I'm going to put their heads on sticks and all that, because that's what media matters clips. But there is like when he's with his people or his posse, as he calls them, it calls them, it's a very inclusive discourse. In fact, he calls it inclusive nationalism.

And it's this whole discourse of I'm never going to cancel you. We can actually have disagreements here. That's partly why he likes people like Naomi Wolf, this Jewish feminist who he's teamed up with to show, unlike them, unlike those intolerant liberals, right? I was part of the Bernie campaign. And I think coming back to some of the derangements on the left, I think part of the way COVID hit us particularly hard was that Bernie's collapse was absolutely simultaneous to lockdown. So we were all part of this moment where I know everybody likes to go off on the Bernie bros online. And I'm not saying that there weren't obnoxious people in

the Bernie campaign, but I will also tell you as somebody who went to five states with him, that in the real world, the Bernie campaign was a very welcoming place that allowed people to escape some of the burdens of individualism, right? Oh, I mean, we're like the neolibs at Pod Save America, and we've tangled with the Bernie bros as well. But we also went to a lot of Bernie events on the road. And I remember specifically an event in Vegas, and everyone was so nice to us, and they knew who we were. And then, and then we saw Bernie backstage and it was like, and the, the not me us message from Bernie, I thought was so powerful.

And I do wonder if sort of, as I finished your book thinking like the, the political project you're talking about on ours, the work that we need to do on the left is sort of maybe be more welcoming, maybe be more like, this is a big movement. And even if you don't think like us, we're going to try to persuade you and bring you in. And we're not going to write you off. And we're going to show each other a little bit of grace in these very tough times.

And I feel like that is sort of not just a morally good thing to do, but like a good political strategy. It's a really good political strategy. It's really good to build movements that have a horizon of a future where everybody can see themselves. And I do think it is possible to have a political project that has a story of an us that feels really liberatory because having to carry everything on the back of the self is really debilitating. Ourselves aren't built to carry as much as we're putting onto them. We used to have communities, social relationships, religions who helped carry the burden of the self.

And we're trying to build selves that are so perfect, so optimized, that they are not only our income, but our pension and our kids' futures. And so many selves are breaking under the weight of that. And what was beautiful about that campaign, but I would say is also true of tenant organizing or the work of the debt collective, is it's the same message of here you are carrying or union organizing for that matter. Here you are bearing these what feel like private, shameful burdens of not being able to pay the bills of this heavy medical or student debt. And it feels you feel alone, you feel ashamed, it is your problem. But what if, what if there is an us that we could build of debtors, of tenants, of workers who could share the burden of that and indeed flip the tables and create a crisis

for the landlords and the bosses? I mean, this is the project of the left. And that's why there are these sort of thrilling moments. And why, you know, I believe, you know, there've been all these conversations of like, you know, I now get asked because I've written about conspiracy culture about how to, what to do about misinformation. And, you know, that's not what the book is about, but I, you know, I don't have a ton of hope that we're going to moderate and de-platform our way out of misinformation. But when I see somebody like Sean Fain in his Eat the Rich t-shirt, you know, the head of the United Auto Workers, talking about how record profits mean record contracts, I feel like he is doing more to undercut the Steve Bannons of the world than an army of content moderators, because he's showing what it means to actually build collective power, to actually go after the bosses and not some like amorphous elites who, you know, I don't know who Elon Musk is talking about when he talks about the elites or Rupert Murdoch, you know. But, you know, he actually has an organizing project. And it's like, we're going to get more of the

profits. It's pretty simple, you know, and we're going to do it by disrupting and we're going to win. And he even won. I mean, they won. They won. And I think if we really want to figure out how to beat fake populism, he's showing us like build some real- Real populism. Yeah. That's not me, us. This is a message that is bigger than Bernie. And I think one of the lessons of the Bernie campaign is that an electoral campaign, it gives us this sort of temporary high, and we do need to do it. But it can't be instead of a movement that outlives an electoral campaign. And I mean, I know you've thought a ton about this. And, you know, in lots of ways, it was the same challenge around

Obama is like, you have these campaigns that feel like movements, Obama's campaign felt like a movement, Bernie's campaign felt like a movement, but it could not contain it. Right. So then it stops. And like, it was funny. I was talking to somebody in the UK about this. And I said, you know, like we didn't like all we got was an email thanking us, you know. And she said, you got an email because she had been part of the Corbyn campaign.

And it's like there's now a whole generation of leftists who have gone all in for these insurgent candidates. And when they lose, and then it coincides with the pandemic where we're all locked in our houses, and then we have social media to go like, oh, but your consolation prize is you get to attack each other. That's what we do. Yeah. No, you we do. Yeah. No, you really sort of need, and it's always the difference I draw between the people who are arguing online

and like activists and organizers I've met in person, whether they're on the far left or the center left, they always seem to have more of a pragmatic, strategic approach to politics that is more joyful also than like the online warriors only, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. Well, because we're social beings and we actually draw energy from one another. And I mean, that's been the nicest thing about being on book tour again.

I mean, and you know, like after these years of being isolated and then it's, it, it, it takes a lot of isolation to write a book. And then you just remember like, oh, like we, we, we feed each other. Um, it's a give and take. And the thing about the technology is it's just take, you know, you pour yourself into this little green light and you're trying so hard to sort of simulate a personal connection where like, if you and I were sitting across the table from each other, it would be a lot easier. Like we wouldn't have to try it quite as hard because there would be all these other ways that we would be connecting. So yeah, we have to do both.

We have to do both. Naomi Klein, thank you so much. This was fantastic. The book is Doppelganger. Everyone go buy it. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year. I really, really appreciate it. And thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, John. It was a real pleasure. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

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