On with Kara Swisher - What Naomi Klein Found Down the Steve Bannon Rabbit Hole

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

For years, Naomi Klein has had a problem: the author and Guardian columnist has been chronically confused with Naomi Wolf, a conspiracy theorist and favorite guest of Steve Bannon’s podcast. This is the premise of Klein’s new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, where she investigates how her dark twin fell down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole – and what that tells us about the lure of conspiratorial thinking and its dangerous use as a political strategy. Today, we talk to Klein about her journey deep into Steve Bannon’s podcast archive, anti-vaxx groups online, and more realms of what she calls “The Mirror World.”  You can find Kara and Nayeema on Instagram/Threads @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza and Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting

on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naeem Araza and today we're discussing doppelgangers. Yeah, it's a German word, I mean double goer. And it's often someone who is sort of often seen as the evil version of yourself, but someone who, it's not quite someone that looks like you or your twin, but it's someone who's part of your soul that maybe reflects other things about yourself. It can look like you. I actually came to learn of doppelgangers in the highly intellectual way of the TV series Vampire Diaries.

Oh, okay. Which is not. There's someone who's like you, right? Vampire Diaries. Oh, okay. All right. Which is not. There's someone who's like you, right?

Exactly. Nina Dobrov played her angelic self and also an evil self, which is a trope. But we're not here to discuss that. We're here to discuss Naomi Klein, who is the Canadian bestselling author and Guardian columnist, who's known a lot for her work on climate and the Green New Deal. But she has a new book out on September 12th. That's her ninth one. She's written a lot of books. And it's called Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World. Right. It's about misinformation is what it's about, really. I think that she takes it on because she's been mistaken for someone who's gone down sort of the rabbit hole name, Naomi Wolf, who was a very famous author way back when,

wrote the beauty myth. And people mistake Naomi Wolf for her. I'm not sure why. They don't look anything alike. But just the name Naomi, I guess. Yeah. So let's remember Naomi Klein. It's our guest. Naomi Wolf is what she calls other Naomi in this book. Uses Naomi Wolf as a case study to kind of get into this world of misinformation. Because while Naomi Wolf came up to fame as a kind of feminist writer and as an advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton back in the early 90s on how to get feminist voters to go with the Democratic Party, she has become, let me think about how to put this, a raging conspiracy theorist.

Yes, yeah. And anti-vaxxer. Yeah, she's gone down a lot of highways that people get into and have gotten into and gotten radicalized down, due to largely online. She lives and occupies a different universe that exists online. I mean, she would not characterize it that way, I assume,

but she lives in a whole different universe than the factual universe. Yes, she does. And the internet has gotten so obsessed with this, But she lives in a whole different universe than the factual universe. Yes, she does. And the internet has gotten so obsessed with this, has so conflated Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein at times that someone went as far as to write a poem about them that became viral. And Kara, I'm going to ask you to read it to a dramatic reading. Sure. If the Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine.

If the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy, oof. Thankfully, this book is better than the poem. Yeah. I think we can say that. To borrow a term from our dear guest, Barry Diller, it is my fave of her writing. But what was super interesting is this process that she took on. She embraced this rabbit hole. She went down countless hours of research.

Naomi Wolf is a regular guest on Steve Bannon's podcast, War Room. And so Naomi Klein spent hours and hours looping Steve Bannon, War Room podcast. Her husband, she describes in the book, walked in on her listening to it while doing yoga before bed, which is the most relaxing thing you can do to fall asleep. No, it's not. It's not. Yeah. And I think we've talked about this topic a lot on the podcast, this idea of what happens when information isn't accurate or the way we use, we don't share the same realities. And so, and that's not a new and fresh thing necessarily. And she's using as a bit of a trick to write about what is a really important topic and has implications in politics, obviously, and society and for everything from climate change to elections to the vaccine to everything. And so that's really what she's

writing about, which is a bigger topic. And Naomi Wolf is an entry into this world. But she's also, it's funny because while Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are framed as doppelgangers in the story, they're also mirror images of each other, like Naomi Wolf being to the far right, what Naomi Klein would be maybe to the intellectual left. Naomi Wolf is also a doppelganger of herself. She is not the 1990s Naomi Wolf. 2023 Naomi Wolf has gone down her own rabbit hole, has become her own doppelganger. She still looks like herself, she still is herself, but her point of view is extremely different. And that got me thinking when I was reading the book about who else would be a doppelganger of themselves.

And I wondered, do you think Elon Musk is a doppelganger of himself? Yes, he's sort of changed the way Naomi Wolf has. You know, he used to be somewhat reasonable, and now he's running down all the conspiracy highways, mostly to take blame off himself, because he's never at fault. That seems to be an take blame off himself because he's never at fault. That seems to be an important thing to him. It's never his fault.

It's always someone else acting upon the richest and most powerful person on earth. So just this week, he's blaming the Anti-Defamation League and threatening to sue them for defamation because they are saying that Twitter is a toxic hole of crap, which it is. And they do various studies and things like that. And he's saying they're responsible for the ad declines on the platform. It's just a typical aggression from someone who has made a lot of mistakes and a lot of bad investments to blame. His theory here, for people who have forgotten the timeline, is that the ADL, when they called out the anti-Semitism that was allowed on Twitter, when Kanye and others, that's when ad revenue began declining.

And Elon Musk is saying, well, that's the reason, not the gutting of the organization. Or putting them back on there, bringing on anti-Semites and white supremacists and this and that. And also, by the way, insulting advertisers. He threatened advertisers. I mean, by the way, insulting advertisers. He threatened advertisers. I mean, give me a break. It's such nonsense. And of course, it plays into an old trope of blaming the Jews. And that's something that Naomi Klein talks about in this book too, which is one side co-opting the language of the other. So all of a sudden, the powerful become the victims and they use the victimization language of the Holocaust or

elsewhere. And also, what Twitter has done magically, which is that you can choose your own mirror. You can choose your own world that you want to live in. Take the same facts and come up with a completely different conclusion. That's right. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with our guest, Naomi Klein. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer

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Your doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, who was a well-known writer many years ago, has morphed into something else. I need you to explain to people who she is and how they can be sure she is not you. Well, maybe you can never be sure. That's right. I guess you'll have to just take my word for it. Also, she has better hair than me. She does. It's luminous.

I didn't have to say that. Yeah. She does. Voluminous. She has better hair than most people. But anyway. So who she is, I first became aware of her when I was in, I think, second year undergrad. She wrote a blockbuster book that kind of took the world by storm. I was a baby feminist on campus called The Beauty Myth. Yeah. a baby feminist on campus called The Beauty Myth. And it was about what it sounded like. It was about female beauty ideals. It sort of got paired a lot in the media with Susan Faludi's backlash because it had a backlash thesis. It was basically arguing that women were having to meet these model-like beauty standards in the workplace because they had just broken the glass ceiling and it was kind of a conspiracy to hold women back.

She also was well known for being a controversial advisor to Al Gore. She was involved in the Democratic Party. She became a political consultant. She advised Al Gore on how to attract women voters in the 2000 election. And then she wrote lots of other books. And I didn't used to get confused with her because I also write books. I'm also named Naomi. I also have brown hair that sometimes goes blonde from over highlighting. But my work has been focused on the economy, democracy, climate change. And she was writing about women's issues. But

about a decade and a half ago, she started writing work that kind of overlapped a little bit with mine. But, you know, I say in the book, kind of put through, not very nice, but a little bit of a bonkers blender with a lot of the facts removed about states of emergency. And then during COVID, things went really off the rails because we were all online too much. And things went really off the rails because we were all online too much. I know I was looking for some simulation of the friendship and community that we were missing. I wasn't particularly active online in that period. And she became hyperactive. Yeah, she had started that book.

Those books started to become panicky is what I used to think. And then she got real panicky. Yeah, I mean, she had dabbled in conspiracy theory before. You know, there's stuff about chemtrails and 5G and even like very strange things about ISIS beheading crisis actors. Yeah. But during COVID, it was, you know, one of many, many people we've seen this happen to, right?

And it was, it's a cover, it's a bioweapon, it's, you know, masks are trying to destroy our children. And then she went very, first she went very hard on vaccine verification apps, which should never have been called vaccine passports, but were called vaccine passports. That's when she started getting deplatformed on social media like like twitter and but then she got some very big new platforms on steve bannon's podcast at certain points she was on every single day she was on tucker carlson's old show she was on other fox news shows where she would say basically not basically literally that these vaccine apps were a kind of cc Bill Gates, Fauci plot to bring a social credit system, a Chinese-style social credit system to the United States was her line.

She put out a video that went viral that said that they were going to bring slavery forever to the West. So why write this book now? It is a compilation of a lot of stuff you've written, right? It sort of leads, it's a narrative that has been ongoing. Why did you think it's talk to tells me a story, sometimes, you know, very privately in hushed tones about a sister, a father, you know, somebody who has disappeared down the quote unquote rabbit hole, who's become a doppelganger of themselves, right? Like not who they used to be. And I think that's what's interesting about having this perennial confusion with Wolf. And it really is very widespread at certain points. It's been like a favorite joke of left Twitter is like, making fun of what she's going to do and laughing about the

fact that I'm going to get blamed for it. And so right, right. What's interesting about that is that she is sort of a doppelganger of who she used to be, right? She's, she's, she's one of these people who has changed, who has, who's become, who's become radicalized. I think that's where you Yeah, now let's explain what a doppelganger is. Full disclosure, I actually wrote an outline for a novel called Doppelganger. I've been fascinated by doppelgangers for years, this idea of... Really?

But in a different way, more like a modern-day version of Jekyll and Hyde, that there is a part of you that exists. You're angry at crime, you're angry at this, but you don't indulge yourself. But there is a person like you. But this is a theme that's not a new one, the idea of doppelganger. Explain what that is, because it's been with us for a while. Exactly. Yeah, it's been around since the 1700s in German.

Originally, it had a very foreboding meaning. You know, if you came face to face with your double, that meant you were going to die. And there is this idea that doubles carry messages. They're kind of ominous. But what's interesting about them, Freud wrote about doppelgangers as an example of the uncanny in an essay called The Uncanny,

where he defines the uncanny as the species of frightening that is frightening because it takes something an example of the uncanny in an essay called The Uncanny, where he defines the uncanny as the species of frightening that is frightening because it takes something that was once familiar and makes it strange, right? So when it's yourself that is strange, that's a particularly profound kind of uncanniness, right? And I think in the AI era, more and more people are having that experience of watching somebody who seems to be you who is not you. Right. Because we can have doppelgangers made by others, but then we also make our own doppelgangers.

Right. That's what our avatars are. It's called performative, right? It's the idea that certain people perform. I do think Donald Trump started off with performative and now believes it. Right? That often happens. For sure.

It's really interesting because of lots of reasons. One is you create a whole new you online. One is being anonymous and doing things online you wouldn't do normally. If you're anonymous, you can say and do things. The other part is many years ago when I first started covering the Internet, I think it was Ted Leonsis of AOL said, we're all going to have our personalities and then our online personalities, our digital selves. And we want to run the digital self part of it, like where you are, which is your identity. You use the term, but it is supposed to be a darker version.

Doppelganger has always had that darker idea, even though we use it kind of lightly today. Yeah, originally it did. The first piece of theoretical work about doppelgangers was published by Otto Rank, who's a student of Freud's, in the very first year of the First World War. So Europe is going into this spasm of violence. And he is trying, from a psychoanalytic perspective, to make sense of why doppelgangers are everywhere in the arts and he's looking at films like the student of prague and then there's another spasm around the second world war where doppelgangers get used to make sense of of the fascism within our own societies with even perhaps within ourselves, and most famously by Charlie Chaplin

with The Great Dictator, where he plays both the Hitler-esque dictator and the Jewish barber, and then swaps places. So I think when we're in a moment where reality is terrifying, uncanny, hard to hold in our heads, like we're in a Timothy Morton hyper-object moment, doubles shrink things down to size. And I think that Wolf played that role for me as a writer, right? Like I'm overwhelmed by whatever Bannon is building right now. I'm overwhelmed by the way in which political signals are getting crossed and people are changing. And by looking at this double of myself, it helped me make sense of a lot of things. So the book, you use the term the hangs out with Carlson and Bannon.

And it makes a replica of the world where me and my friends live, right? Where you have these kind of mere social media platforms, as you well know. You know, she got ejected from Twitter, now ex. You know, she's back. And she went to get her and, you know, just created this kind of mirror politics. Listening to Bannon, you really get – he's very explicit about it. He's like, we need our own publishing, our own social media, our own currency, our own – we need to create replicas so that he says we can never get canceled, we can never get disappeared. Right, create our own thing. I want to get to Bannon in a second.

So explain the relationship between mirror worlds and conspiracy theories because because they go hand in hand, and the latter requires the former. You have to have a mirror world in order to have conspiracy theories that last. as well get kind of twisted and turned into a warped version of themselves, right? And you see that in the way they appropriate anti-fascist iconography and discourse, right? I mean, the thing that worries me most about Bannon is that he's making common cause with all the would-be fascists and fascists around the world. He's palling around with Orban, Bolsonaro, You know, he's palling around with Orban, Bolsonaro, Giorgio Malone in Italy. But if you listen to him, he positions himself as an anti-fascist. Wolf is constantly talking about how people who were, you know, unvaccinated were treated like people having to wear yellow stars during the Holocaust. You know, they appropriate the language of the racial justice movement.

You know, I can't breathe. You have anti-mask protesters saying, I can't breathe. So it's a simultaneous appropriation and warping. where when something becomes an issue in what I call the mirror world, in sort of polite, liberal, and left circles, it becomes kind of unsayable sometimes. So something like the lab leak theory, right, that was treated very early on as like, well, that's just a conspiracy theory, and we won't cover it, and we won't talk about it. And now finally, there's some real journalism going on, which is what we need journalism to do, right, like get to the bottom of it. But or even something like the effect of prolonged school closures on kids with special needs. Why didn't we have more coverage of that? Well, because that was a mirror world issue.

And then it becomes self-reinforcing because Bannon and the Bannons of the world, but he is particularly good at it, they look, the way they gain power is by looking at what issues are being neglected, traditional issues for the Democrats that they've abandoned. He did it in 2016 with free trade and deindustrialization. And he said, come on over here. And now he's doing it with the COVID moms. And now he's taking all the COVID complaints and mixing it with transphobia and mixing it with— It's interesting. You spend a lot of time talking about CBN, and I think he is, everyone thinks he's not relevant. I think they're wrong. I pay attention to every single

thing he does, because I think, one, he's good at it. And what he says and how he says it is really important for me to pay attention, because I think he's the best at it. Explain some of the techniques that are used by him, because I do, I think you're absolutely right to focus on him. Yeah, most of my work is focused on the climate crisis. And I've spent a fair bit of time studying how climate change deniers do their dirty work, right? And I've gone to conferences of the Heartland Institute, which is like the annual confab of all the climate change deniers. And their technique is very similar to Bannon's, right? You know, we talk about conspiracy theories,

but this is conspiracy without a theory, as it's sometimes referred to in the social science. It's not like there's a coherent worldview that Bannon is putting forward in the same way that there isn't a coherent explanation for why the climate is changing if you go to a Heartland conference. They just throw a whole bunch of doubt at the wall. It's the old point. Yeah. Doubt is our product, right? So

it's funny. Somebody asked me if I was afraid of red pilling myself by listening to so much Bannon, like, was I afraid that I was going to start agreeing with him? And I wasn't because he contradicts himself all the time, right? He'll platform anybody who is sowing chaos, right? So one day, you know, COVID is a cold. The next day, it's a bioweapon, you know? And there's no attempt to reconcile these ideas, which completely contradict themselves. Right. Well, it's a similar thing with Biden.

He's either completely stupid or he's a mad genius, right? Like, which one? Is he with it or not with it? But it doesn't matter. Or an actor in a mask. Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. No, so you, I often, I would often feel terrified, though, because you just have this sort of sense of, yeah, like, what is being hidden from us, right? And this is something I write in the book that they get the facts wrong, but the feelings right. You know, this feeling of living in a world where important truths are not being, you know, foregrounded.

I was listening to your episode about Elon Musk with Ronan Farrow, and it's like, well, no wonder people like Bannon and Musk love conspiracy theories, because they deflect attention on the conspiracies in plain view, right? Right, right, right. So I think that's a big part of what Bannon is doing, is just distraction. It's always been the game. It's the same game as flood the zone. But he also really looks at, I think, the mistakes that we make in left and liberal circles, including the way we treat each other like garbage, to be honest. He makes this big performance of being kind to his viewers.

He flatters his viewers and listeners endlessly. He performs being willing to talk to people who he disagrees with. The first time he had RFK Jr. on, for instance, gave him a whole show and talked about how, unlike, you know, those people on MSNBC, I can talk to you despite the fact that we come from different political parties, you know, things like that. And so that is a really important part of his move, right? It's whatever you are, I'm the opposite. And welcoming the people who've been like- It's a sleight of hand. It's called con man. But go ahead. Yeah. But he's good at it.

A con man strategy. It's also called political strategy. He also says his goal is to take power for 100 years, and we should take him at his word. 100%. One of the things that I—having spent time with a lot of tech people who are like this, destruction is the point. Destruction and distraction are the point of everything they do. They don't want to—they want to move fast, break things, but build nothing. It's breaking it is the first goal, I think, I've always thought it was. I'm just curious, you know, Donald Trump certainly employs these things. I've always thought he was a vessel of Bannon. Is Bannon better than Trump? Oh, definitely smarter than Trump. Yeah,

I think I think more strategic, but I think Trump probably has a little bit more of a kind of a visceral instinct for what is just going to work on TV. Right. But I think what they share is, you know, and, and they aren't the first people to believe it, that they can just create reality. And so what interests me and,

and, and, and, and they're skilled at it because they, they make movies and they do reality television. And conspiracy culture is a way of not looking at what is hard right in front of us, right? You always move the horizon. When I wrote The Shock Doctrine, people would, like the first person to the microphone at almost every talk was,

why won't you admit that 9-11 was an inside job and that this whole thing was, and I'd say, why do you need 9-11 to have been an inside job? Hundreds of thousands of people have already died in Iraq. Why isn't that enough for you to get excited? Why are you trying to get me to admit that I believe in something that is not, you know, that is not proven, you know? And so, but that I think explains why conspiracy culture is appealing to those who have a lot of power. I mean, what they get out of it is distraction from their real crimes, too. Who else has become good at it? Vivek Ramaswamy? Who else do you think is good at it, both on the left and the right? I'd love to get a sense for you. I'd love to get a sense for you. There's no end. I mean, I think the entire Republican Party has really decided that this is where the juice is.

The whole, quote unquote, freedom caucus. I mean, even the way they're using, you know, aliens. I think right now you've got to have kind of a heat-sicking missile where there was so much juice. Talk about aliens. Explain what you mean about aliens. Well, I just mean like there was just the hearings. Like I'm interested in where the energy and heat of COVID is going to go now that the mandates are gone, right? Because people got a lot of followers. They were able to monetize that.

And now the mandates aren't there. So where is that energy? Like where is the next freedom convoy going to come from? Trans people. And a few places. Trans people, this idea that climate change is going to lock you in your house and that it's a cover from the Davos elites to take away your freedom. And some of it is going to this idea that aliens have already taken over the earth and they're lizard people. Oh, lizard people.

That's an old one. I know that's all old. You know, this is. No, years ago, I have told this story, but years ago there was ads on Facebook that Hillary Clinton was a lizard person. And I saw them everywhere. And because I have some conservative relatives and I was like, huh, look at this. And inevitably, wherever I went, it's you don't know who she is. I'm like, huh, look at this. And inevitably, wherever I went, it's you don't know who she is. I'm like, I'm certain she's not. Like, it was crazy. It comes

up a lot more than you think. Really? Yeah. I mean, I actually heard from somebody recently who was physically attacked. Just a total stranger came up to her and she said he was screaming gibberish at me. And because I'm following this stuff, I said, do you remember what the gibberish was? And she said he kept talking about lizards. And so what really scares me is like we do have, we have a mental health crisis. We have a lot of people under a massive amount of stress. And then we have these, you know, jokers, you know, like, I mean, that in a very negative sense is in the Joker, like Steve Bannon, who think it's fun to just seed the culture with this chaos, but people are taking themselves taking it seriously, and they're very

well armed. Okay, so let's let's talk about counter conspiracy theory as strategy. First, within the Republican Party, what about opponents to Trump, like Chris Christie? He obviously, do they need to fight fire with fire or mirror with mirror? Because he's now just saying the truth, right? I think it looks like he's just decided to just wail and be repetitive about it. He's certainly repetitive. He's using a lot of those techniques. What is the counter strategy within the Republican Party? And then should Democrats consider something similar tapping into this mirror world? So, you know, we were talking earlier about it

as a kind of counterfeit politics, right? And I think you see that very clearly with somebody like RFK Jr., where he's tapping into people's, I think, rightful anger at pandemic profiteering, a big pharma preying off their misery, a big tech being unaccountable. He doesn't have any solutions to any of this. No, they never do. Right. But I actually think the way to deal with

this is not to be like, you are bad and wrong and counterfeit and should be deplatformed or whatever. I think, you know, I'm not saying that people should be free to spread medical misinformation. I don't think they should be. But I do believe that they will find other platforms as we've seen, and that the best way to counter it is actually to take away their most potent arguments. Like I think, and I think you agree that we really should do something about surveillance capitalism and big tech and big pharma. And so I think we can waste a whole lot of time and energy just saying, stop it. Yeah, you're wrong. Don't be a conspiracy theorist.

It's so clear that the skill, the move, is to take the issues that are juicy, that are important, that resonate with people, that have been left unattended, and move them into the mirror world and mix them with all kinds of very, very nefarious agendas. Redirect is what you're talking about, correct? Well, I think if we're talking about individuals, it's very bad to cut them off, very bad to tell them that they're stupid. The extent to which you can find out something where there is common ground and build a bridge, I think you should do it. If you, if you agree that, you know, drugs should be much more affordable, talk about that. If you think that these vaccines shouldn't have been patented, as I don't,

I think that, you know, they were funded with public money and they should have been, you know, as Jonas Salk said, would you patent the sun? You know, maybe you can find some common ground. And if this is somebody who you know and love, who you have a history with, there is much more chance that they're going to listen to you

than they would listen to me. And maybe find some of those bridges. But I think big picture, yeah, like not just the individual deprogramming piece of it. Because it's like a political project. It is like a cult. Yeah, but you know what? I think there are lots of ways to not look at reality.

And I don't think Steve Bannon is the only one who is distracting people. I think that it's too easy to just say, well, they're the ones who are taking a flight into fantasy. I mean, I went to the Barbie movie. I don't know if you did. I mean, we distract ourselves and numb ourselves and find ways to not look at the hyper object, because we can't do it on our own. And this is where I found like the image of the doppelganger really useful and challenging, because the doppelganger novel is always not about the doppelganger. It's about you. It's about you. It's about what you're not willing

to look at about yourself. It's like that moment in the Jordan Peele movie Us, when the shadow people whose lives the people above ground are feeding off of, who can only have the comforts because of the people underground. It's obviously a metaphor for racial capitalism. They come up and they wreak havoc. And one of the characters says, who are they? Who are these doppelgangers? Who are these doubles? And the answer is, we're Americans. We're you. We are part of the system. So let me get more specific. I just want to finish this thought, if I can, which is that all of these kinds of doublings that this rabbit hole brought me to, like the way we create avatars of ourselves online, the way we try to optimize our bodies, the way we try to become these perfected versions of ourselves, the way we try to perfect our kids as extensions of ourselves, and how that can lead to this

anti-vaccine, you know, mania. There are all ways that the self takes up too much room, where we think that we can solve collective problems just through our individual self-optimization, right? And that's the Silicon Valley promise, right? You can count your steps, you can sleep better, you can just turn yourself into a superhuman. And I don't think that's how we're going to solve any of the crises that we're trying, that we are desperately averting our gaze from.

Right, and because the conspiracy is more interesting, honestly. That's my only issue is that they have more interesting stories. Reality isn't quite as interesting as aliens, for example. Aliens is a great story for everybody. I mean, right now, everyone's searching for the Loch Ness Monster over in Scotland, which I'm interested in. I don't know why, but I just am because I don't want to focus in on, I don't know, election fraud in Michigan. So I want to talk about specifics. I think people need to understand specifics. One 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, and I'm using the term Lucy, lives in a mirror word, RFK Jr. In June, you wrote a Guardian column called Beware, We Ignore Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Candidacy at Our Peril. Now, he's hardly a threat to Biden's

nomination, but still, explain, one, why should we be scared? And then how would Biden handle someone if not ignoring him and the media too? I mean, I think when I say we shouldn't ignore him, I think we should look at why he's getting the traction that he's getting. I mean, obviously, some of it is his name. I don't think it's all his name. I've spent a fair bit of time listening to his speeches, and, you know, I'd say I agree with a good third of them. You know, he's very persuasive when he talks about regulatory capture. And he knows a lot about it as a trial lawyer and having sued different agencies.

He's pretty persuasive when he's talking about militarism and endless wars. He is not persuasive when he's talking about vaccines, but I happen to know a lot about vaccines and the autism myths because I have a child who, you know, is on the spectrum. And I've done a lot of research about it. And I understand, you know, that when he says like, well, why is it in the 90s that all of a sudden there was this huge spike in vaccine diagnoses? And he just leaves it there as a question, you know, hanging in the air. Well, there's an answer to that question. They changed the definition of autism. But if journalists aren't explaining all of this, then why should people know that, you know? But what should Biden do? I think Biden should take away his best arguments by, you know, actually going after big tech and big pharma. I don't think it's about debating him. I think it's about looking

at why is this resonating? And you shrink the base. So what about the media itself? So Biden should talk about big pharma dealing, yes, big tech is a threat. We're going to do something about it, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think, you know, the media piece of it is we have to do our jobs, we have to do reporting, and not buy into this idea that certain things are that we don't, you know, we can't trust readers with something like, you know, the fact that there are some adverse reactions to vaccines, it's very rare, but it is real. And if you just kind of create a sort of sense of, oh, no, if we if we report that, and I'm not saying every media outlet is like that, but there is a feeling of like, well, we can't really report that there are some signals that, you know, that it's been linked to some cardiovascular events, you know, then if somebody

is wondering, all they're going to find is the conspiracy stuff. The reason why you don't say it is because you don't want to set them off, right? Because they'll take any little tiniest crumb of problem and not try to look at it. That's the theory. That's the theory. But it's possible that if we in the media do our jobs a little bit better, and there really is a sense that I'm going to get, if I want to find out what is happening, I can go to my newspaper and they will tell me. Then I think you're less likely to go down the rabbit hole and try to find answers

for yourself. We'll be back in a minute. Thank you. for Grammarly. Grammarly's AI ensures your team gets their points across the first time, eliminating misunderstandings and streamlining collaboration. It goes beyond basic grammar to help tailor writing to specific audiences, whether that means adding an executive summary, fine-tuning tone, or cutting out jargon in just one click. Plus it surfaces relevant information as employees type so they don't waste time digging through documents. Four out of five professionals say Grammarly's AI boosts buy-in and moves work forward. It integrates seamlessly with over 500,000 apps and websites. It's implemented in just days and it's IT approved. Join the 70,000 teams and 30 million people who trust Grammarly to

elevate their communication. Visit grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly. Enterprise ready AI. Support for the show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire, you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. So I want to get back to technology. You know,

I've talked about for decades about the turbocharging of conspiracy, among other things, surveillance, privacy issues, power, etc. And back many years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, I said this is going to make them more powerful than ever. And you also wrote about it, and you argued way back then, too, that it helped expand their power and surveillance footprint. You called it the Screen New Deal, which I thought was great. I wish I had thought of that. But the quote I have for you is, a living laboratory for a permanent and highly profitable, no-touch future. It's a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mindable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants. And you were talking about the

influence of Eric Schmidt, who I've had many years of experience with, but, you know, always the sunny, tech is sunny, no matter what part we're in. But talk a little bit about the pandemic. But Schmidt also trades in terror, right? Yes, totally. He's all about China panic, all about China panic. Well, they all are. Mark Zuckerberg did that to me once. And I call it the Xi or me argument.

And I'm like, I don't like any of yas. I don't like none of yas. I don't like none of yous. I guess I suppose I prefer you to Xi, but it's a very difficult decision. But you have to let us do it or the Chinese will do it. Yes, that's right. We don't have to let any of them do it, actually. Exactly. So you talk about this no touch future. Talk about how the pandemic did that. And I call it, they like everything seamless, like nothing. There's no friction. Frictionless is a word they love to use. I think they got an accelerant in the pandemic. So talk about what happened then.

Yeah, there was a sort of a hasty rebranding of a bunch of pre-existing technologies that were having trouble getting to market because of things like run over pedestrians, you know. And then suddenly driverless taxis are no touchtouch technology. Like, oh, you don't want to breathe the same air as a taxi driver. This, you know, this will... I happen to like them, but go ahead. I don't mind that one. The driverless taxis, okay. I'm better with those than a lot of things, but go ahead. Well, whether, this isn't about the merits of them or not, it's about the

fact that they were using the pandemic very opportunistically to suddenly repackage these technologies that were already in the docket as actually being virus prevention. Right, sure. You use the term frictionless, and they use it all the time, right? And it's so interesting because there is no such thing as a frictionless economy. There is no such thing as a frictionless economy. There is no such thing as a frictionless product. All there are are products that do a better job of hiding the friction, of shoving it deeper into the shadows or into the shadow worlds that Jordan Peele was making physical in us. So it's the content moderators in the Philippines, you know, and it's the deliveries being put into the touchless technology. I call them Dobbies from Harry Potter. You know,

Dobby was where the servants that come out and serve them. The food just doesn't appear. They're made by all these servants you don't see. Yeah. So the technology is about hiding. And I think we know that. And that's part of the uncanniness of this moment is we know we're implicated in all these crises. That's why it's so hard to look at directly. It's not just that climate change is scary. It's that we know that we are fueling it in our day-to-day activities, right? Because we are all within this system. And that creates, I think, a really strong incentive to look away, whether it's through distraction or conspiracy. There are both ways of not looking.

Exactly. So explain Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt was the, I actually broke that story when he became the CEO of Google. He then went on to become sort of a pontificator-in-chief for technology. Talk a little bit about the focus on him. He's a real cheerleader for tech being a benign and benevolent force in general. Except he works a lot with the military. That's right.

So it's unclear what exactly is benign about it. But yeah, no, he's kind of, it seems to me that his main role is lobbying on behalf of the industry, although he's still invested in Alphabet. He's no longer running it. But very early on in the pandemic, just a few months in, he started doing interviews about how this was a kind of a crisis opportunity, right? And he was talking about things like remote schooling, telehealth, and dusting off these sort of pre-COVID presentations that were all China fear, right? China is doing this. They're getting ahead of us.

They're getting ahead of us on telehealth. They're getting ahead of us on remote teaching. They're getting ahead of us on smart cities. You know, I'm originally, you know, I spent much of my adult life in Toronto, which where we had a failed Sidewalk Labs. Sidewalk. And they just immediately dusted it off

and, you know, and rebranded it as COVID control. And this is the thing that's weird about having a conspiratorial doppelganger. When I talk about this, I know I sound more like her. But the fact is, I do have a subsection called The Conspiracy is Capitalism. I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think this is just what the system is designed to do, which is maximize profit and growth and create, you know, seize on every single opportunity. And that's what they're doing. And Schmidt has been very good at that. And then he also, you know, he was also working with Cuomo.

Yeah, he's working with everybody. It's really interesting because what they do is they want to get, they want to make you realize their version of reality, just like the recent story about them buying up land in Northern California to create their own city. To me, everyone was like, can you believe it? I'm like, yes, I can believe it. They think they can do better, and they want to control everything. I said, it's perfect. It's perfect. And they're probably right about some of the things.

We should have better energy and design. But cities by nature are chaotic, and it's never going to happen unless we have a fascist. It's also a sad future. Yes, it is. It's a sad future. It's a beige future. They like beige a lot, just so you know if you've been to their house. It's a lonely future. Yeah. In any case, let's talk about this era of gender of AI. Let's finish up talking about that. You wrote, in that reality of hyper-connected power and wealth, AI is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further disposition and despoilation. I love this word. Earlier, you mused that this tech could turn out to be the largest and most controversial theft in human history.

I think they stole before, but you're right. This is the big diamond. This is the hope fucking diamond for them. Yeah. And I mean, and I know, you know, I, I read Soshana Zuboff's book in galleys and I interviewed her in New York when the book came out and brought my students and, you know, she was trying to also explain to this generation that never had an expectation of privacy of like, why you should be upset that you're being surveilled and watched and tracked. And she said, you, I know you think you can create a Finsta. I know you think you can do all these things to subvert it.

But you have a right not to hide inside your own life, which I thought was a beautifully poetic way of putting it. But I can tell you from teaching undergrads, they don't entirely get it. Like, what is being stolen? Their data. I didn't need my data anyway. You know what I mean? And so I felt as a writer, I knew I was giving it away for free.

We all know that when we're giving our best lines to, whether it's Jack Dorsey or now Elon Musk, it's a kind of self-exploitation. Yes, we're getting something valuable in that we now have direct access to readers. But I always thought Twitter should have been a workers' co-op. We built this thing. And why should that be controlled just by a few people or now one guy? I feel like for a lot of people, we didn't understand what was at stake. And now with generative AI, the stakes of it are finally clear. So if the stakes are clear, explain why they with generative AI, the stakes of it are finally clear. So if the stakes are clear, explain why they're higher with AI for the person who doesn't understand it, why they're higher, because it's everything, right?

Well, it's also just that we, you know, I think there's a bit of a bait and switch. And this is where I think the early days of surveillance capitalism, it's useful to revisit that history, because you get given the toys for free, right? And it just is so convenient. It's so convenient to use Google Maps. It's so convenient to be able to use Google Search. And the first stage is like, oh no, there's no advertising here, right? Information wants to be free. We're just digitizing all of human knowledge. But then it turns out actually it's an entirely advertising-based model. And that advertising-based model requires the extraction of your data, which requires your tracking. I think the stage we're at with AI, I fear, is like we're getting the free toys and the conveniences, but that's not the business model.

And we're also getting a kind of bait and switch of like, we're going to solve climate change and cure disease. Well, how is that going to be profitable? I think it's going to be the same extractive model that is the main cost saving is going to be for companies to figure out how to have fewer workers. The absurdity of Sam Altman saying, oh, so much of labor is automated and is drudgery anyway, right? This is true. So wouldn't you all like to? It is sure it's true, right? Mark said so as well.

But Sam Altman is not actually out there to free the workers from drudgery. He's out there to create a technology that is going to be sold to their bosses in order to lay them off. Right. I would agree with that. Now, when you talk, who is doing a good job? Because they tried to do a government, there's been ideas of having a Department of Information,

which people get terrified of, justifiably so. It sounds very, you know, a brave new world or whatever. Any of those books, pick any of them. Who is doing a good job at preventing, putting some sort of strictures or guardrails around tech? You know, I think some of it is guardrails, and that's a good example. But some of it is also just recognizing that this should be a commons. That, you know, one of the Silicon Valley plays is using the discourse of the digital town square, right?

Yes. Using the discourse of information wants to be free, of, you know, of we're creating a commons of, you know, for all of humanity, but it's a private, point of a commons is that it's not private, it's for everyone. And so that's why it does matter if these platforms were built with our creativity and our labor, because that strengthens, I think, the moral case that we have a right to it. I also think we need these, especially in the context of climate change. Like, you know, I live in Canada and, you know, we're in the middle

of this really heavy wildfire season and meta is blocking links to a lot of really important news stories in the middle of disasters and people need this information. So, you know, I really like Ben Turnoff's work. He wrote Internet for the People about the idea of thinking,

I think we should be thinking about a lot of this as a public utility worker. I think we should think about them as creative co-ops. I'm disappointed that in the crisis that is X, nobody really stepped in in a serious way. I mean, people who are on Mastodon are going to get mad at me for saying this, but I think we needed a really big player, like maybe even you know a public broadcaster like the bbc or the guardian to have a non-profit non-extractive social media platform that recognize that we just we do need these these town squares i also think we need redundancies like i think even though it's wonderfully convenient to all be on the same platform it's's just too vulnerable, whether it's government controlling it or whether it's, like, billionaires controlling it. We just need to have other ways of finding each other.

Absolutely. So, two last questions. You never talked to Naomi Wolf. You analyzed hours of her instead. Why not interview her? I did try to interview her. And it's interesting because she used to try to engage me in debate a lot online before COVID. She had a whole conspiracy theory about the Green New Deal, and I was one of its advocates. So she was always trying to tag me. But I think it speaks to the

power of the mirror world that now she has no use for people like me or you. I'm sure if you tried to interview her, you'd get the same response I did, which was silence. And it's because I think she's gotten, she has a much larger platform now. And it's a platform that never challenges her, that treats her like a prophet, that treats her, you know, every little bits of informational flotsam she shares is treated like a golden nugget. So what does she need with me? she shares is treated like a golden nugget. So what does she need with me? So if people read to the end of the book, they'll discover that I did actually interview her once. So you mentioned at the start of this interview that you follow her work in college. Spoiler alert. In the book, you end with a story of having met her earlier in your career, and you talk about the epilogue. Explain that, if you would end

on that. Why choose to reveal this reveal for the end and what do you want us to take away from it? Well, I mean, I think just from a writing perspective, she's the white rabbit and she leads me down this rabbit hole and then the book ends up being much more about the rabbit hole and some of the other figures in it than it is about her. But it comes back to her in the end in this story of meeting her as an undergrad and interviewing her for my school newspaper. But she betrayed some characteristics even then, even back then, that I think were a foreshadowing of why she turned into what she turned into. And I'm not going to spoil my own book

because I actually want people to read to the end. But I would share one equation that I think might be interesting. I just want to get your take on it, Kara, which is a lot of people ask what happened to this person? What happened to her? What happened to him? Fill in the blanks. We've all got, we've all got people in our heads when we think about people who

dramatically changed and made these new alliances. And my equation is narcissism slash grandiosity multiplied by social media addiction plus midlife crisis divided by public shaming equals right-wing meltdown. I like it. I think it works. I have a more simpler one, a very simpler one. I'm so sorry you weren't hugged enough by your parents. She loved her dad so much she wrote a whole book about how wise she was. Something happened. You weren't loved enough by someone. I'm sorry. I'm going to go hug my kid. Go hug your kid. I don't know. I don't want to psychoanalyze Naomi Wolf. I prefer Naomi Klein. This has been a fantastic conversation. I urge everyone to read this book and check out The Mirror World, but don't stay there. Leave.

Thank you so much, Cara. there. Leave. Thank you so much, Cara. I love that last equation she shared. Yeah. And it's been really on display this week. Mark Cuban is trying to take on people, really heinous people like Matt Walsh and Stephen Miller. And he's really showing them like he's just being very not argumentative but not backing down and being very clear and so he really took them apart which i think can be very effective the way he did it that equation which is also in the book obviously and it just means that someone might be just a midlife crisis and a public shaming away and to write just maybe they're terrible people like i just i you know ultimately that was your theory you think they're just not hogged

enough although she said naomi naomi wolf was not we don't know i you know, ultimately. That was your theory. You think they're just not hogged enough. Although she said Naomi Wolf was hogged enough. We don't know. You know, I don't know what makes people turn, but they do. They do in some ways. And that happens in lots of people. That happens too in life. But now it gets weaponized in this way that's very different, I think. It used to be people used to be quietly like this, and now they're loudly like this.

I thought the best line of what she said, I'm trying to remember what it was, it's that they don't get the facts right, but they get the feelings right. Yeah. I thought that was really powerful because what she's explaining is this, and she talked about the kind of mental health of it all, right? Yeah. So she's talking about this idea that we are living in a world where, yeah, they get the facts wrong, but they get the feeling right. And she used that to get into the mental health crisis. Here are a lot of people in this country and around the world who feel disenfranchised, who feel left behind, who may be struggling with other issues, addiction, mental health, unemployment, et cetera. And here comes a

narrative they can plug in to make sense of the world. Yeah, to feel better. Yeah, we said that to the guy from Parler many years ago. You know, he was saying, he was saying things, and I said, facts aren't feelings. And, you know, it's a common thing to say, but it's, you know, again, at the same time, tolerating this is ridiculous. They're adults, you know, they can seek can seek help you know you see it all over the place i um there's a story going about matt schlapp and the c-pack which is yeah you know he's been alleged to been touching men against their will and um the wife is online being just mercedes mercedes yeah who herself is a big political consultant yeah all i could think of was you need to seek some help.

That's what, you know, seek help that isn't online where you get to just continue your spiral into wherever you're going that isn't going to help anybody, most especially yourself. What did you think of Naomi Klein's take that the left does its own mirroring back? Sure. The left does its own mirroring back. And she gave the example that I thought is a powerful one of the lab leak theory. You know, won't cover it, won't talk about it. Now the journalism's happening. Agreed, agreed.

But it's quite different because it does, it's in action. Like a lot of these people are upset about trans people and they make laws. That's a real thing. It becomes real. It's manifested. Yes, absolutely. Of course, every group does. I, whenever I, you know i'm nice

to a conservative i get like attacked by the law how could you i'm like oh god really come on like it's really this is it's a real disease of our culture now of this instant uh everyone has too much information and not enough knowledge i think is how i think about it she seemed to think the media has a much bigger role to play in this. She said, you know, if journalists would only correct the thinking or if journalists would only, but I think the media is fighting, is putting facts out there. The concern is trust in the media, right? Like trust in everything, the military, the church, the media. Everything has kind of fallen, which is interesting, right? Yeah, that's the whole point of Bannon. If you listen to him just even for a short time, his whole thing is to burn it all down. And that's what they want to do.

It's very easy to burn things down. It's very hard to build them. And they want to burn it down. For what purpose? What they're going to do with it once it's all burned? I don't know. But burning it all down, they hate the system as it is for whatever personal reason that each of them has. And it's always different.

Often they're from the elite, of course. Bannon is from an elite school, Vivek Ramaswamy, all elite schools, Ron DeSantis, and they're all mad all the time. Which makes them the perfect Trojan horses for this message because they're from the inside calling it out, right? That's kind of what Trump did. We just interviewed someone on Pivot, Professor Peter Turchin. He's a mathematician looking at historical trends around this kind of stuff. And he said there's an overabundance of elites,

which means everyone's trying to get into the elite. And then those that don't get in are angry and have an ability to organize. those that don't get in are angry and are able to have an ability to organize if you don't get in you know i think if you wanted to boil trump down to one thing is nobody was nice to him in new york and he's taking it out on everybody else you know so it's interesting and it is interesting yeah there's a lot of anger out there there is and i think social media has only like spun that up because you feel that everything should be accessible. You should be having that life.

And it isn't the case on Instagram or in real life. But what she was advocating for and how to fix it was a much different thing. I mean, she's talking about almost ascertaining a common enemy of sorts, which is capitalism, really. I mean, she's saying this is kind of the conspiracy is capitalism. She has a chapter on that. I mean, she's also advocating for instead of social media platforms, let's have fractionalized social media platforms and someone like the BBC step in. I mean, what do you make of that? Obviously, that's a very Canadian solution. Rather simple thing is pay people well, get bring the minimum wage to $25 and give everyone health care and good education. I think people feel

under siege financially or from an educational point of view they get angry and so I think there's a lot of very simple things we could do. So that's the kind of stuff. If people feel better about their lives and where it's going they feel more positive and

contributing. I do think there's more commonality than we realize and just need to be reminded of it. What happens when AI takes all the jobs? Oh, they're not going to do that again. The $25 minimum wage won't be much. You know, it used to be killer bees. Now it's AI, I guess. I don't know.

I liked her idea of a workers' co-op. Twitter. You should have had a piece of Twitter, Carrie. You were getting to them. No, thanks. Not today. It's getting uglier and uglier every day. But it's the fault of the ADL, apparently.

Apparently. Let's get to the credits. Do you mind reading us out? Not at all. Today's show was produced by Naeem Arraza, Christian Castro-Rossell, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan.

Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you have a celebrity doppelganger. If not, you get a long-term stay in the mirror world. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world.

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