Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Doppelganger by Naomi Klein with Naomi Klein

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

This week's book guest is Doppelganger by Naomi Klein.Sara and Cariad are joined by the award winning and internationally bestselling author Naomi Klein herself, to discuss the Left, the Right and everything in between.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we briefly mention rape.Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is available to buy here or on Apple Books here.You can find Naomi on Instagram and Twitter: @naomiakleinSara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Follow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco. Hello, I'm Carriad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we've created the Weirdos Book Club.

Join us. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. A place for the person who'd love to be in a real book club, but doesn't like wine or nibbles. Or being around other people. Is that you? Join us. Check out our Instagram at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdos Book Club for the upcoming books we're going to be discussing. You can read along and share your opinions.

Or just skulk around in your raincoat like the weirdo you are. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. What's it about? Two women with the same first name, but very different politics. What qualifies it for the weirdos book club? Well, Naomi the author, when writing this book,

decided to regularly listen to Steve Bannon's podcast by choice. What a weirdo. In this episode, we discuss. The left, the right, the middle. And then we shook it all about. Joining us this week is Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is an award-winning author of international bestsellers, including This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire,

which has been published in more than 35 languages. Doppelganger has been shortlisted for the Ennorgal Women's Prize for Nonfiction. The winners are announced today. Naomi Klein. We're so excited you're here. Yeah, we're over-excited. If we can start with the compliments and gushing from us towards you. I love your brain and how you think.

so much and I want you to explain everything in the world to me. And that's what your books do. Yeah, it's very kind. This is an incredible book. We're talking about doppelganger, which has just come out by Naomi Klein. By Naomi Klein. To Naomi Klein. That's very mirror world. That made me feel a bit confused. Yes.

The book is incredible. Incredible. Yep. So good. Sarah read it before me ages ago. And also, the reason it came up on the podcast when I was reading it's because we have quite a lot to read for the podcast. So any extracurricular reading. is ridiculous. Sarah does more than I do. But we do a book a week.

Oh, at least. I mean, several on the go at once often. But the second this came out, I'd read a review of it, and I bought it thinking, I know I want it there on the shelf, and then it literally arrived and I started reading it and then kind of stopped talking about it to people. In a way where you go, well, you have to start reading it now. And with this one, because I mentioned it at Christmas,

I've had so many people thank me for mentioning it because they are enjoying reading it so much. They are very red caught. They look like they may have been to the bath. Well, I feel like a two-year-old. Oh, my goodness. I love that. I want a picture of that.

No, but you've signed this one, annoyingly. And then my toddlers are signed over the top. Oh, no. He didn't realize he was. No, no. He did. It's my bad. He saw me writing in it.

Should have given him some nice colors. If he sees me do it, I can't then say, no, you're not allowed to write in books when I have. I vandalize all books. So sign of love in my view. Yeah. So just in case anyone listening doesn't know. Yeah. So the doppel gang, and it starts right at the beginning of the story with you in a toilet stall,

listening to people talking about you, but it's not you that they're talking about. They're talking about Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolfe. But they say Naomi Klein. But they say Naomi Klein, which is your name. That is cognizance right there. Yeah. And they were moaning about her, you.

They were like, oh, she's really changed. It was a scene out of mean girls. Yeah, yeah. Like Naomi Klein, she's not supporting this thing. Guess what she's saying now? And she's saying this. So you're sitting there in a toilet cubicle being like, oh, God, they said my name. But that isn't me.

They're not, the things that person's done is not what I've done. They are talking about Naomi Wolf, who is someone you were beginning to be constantly mixed up with back in the day. Exactly. Yeah. This was almost 15 years ago. Wow. So it wasn't as intense as it got for a while, especially during the pandemic, where it was kind of mass confusion and also one of, you know, left Twitter's favorite jokes. So it was, it was like, it was confusion and then lots of talk

about how there was going to be the confusion and thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein every time she did something. What was the rhyme they did? If it's feeling fine, it's Naomi Klein. What was the end of it? I couldn't remember. I tried to write it in the book. Naomi Wolf, oh, buddy, o'buff. It's not even, like, it's quite a viral poem for a bad rhyme. They've done well. Because you said it was something that was very consistent. We were bored. It was the pandemic. We were looking for entertainment anywhere. So the idea from this book comes from this very simple miscommunication, which as you said, once we hit the pandemic and Naomi Wolves start saying much more. What word do you look looking for?

I was going to say crazy and I was like, that's not fair. We're going to say the word crazy a lot, aren't we? But what I mean is, yeah, outlandish, yeah, not bananas. Bananas. Okay, bananas. Especially compared to your own opinions. So we hit the pandemic and she starts. doing things which if people think you have said it or one has said it, it becomes a bananas thing for someone to think about you. Right. And there's also this kind of uncanny phenomenon where she is in a way sounding more like me because, you know, she, we used to have more defined sort of areas of, of expertise. You know, she was much more known for writing on women's issues and feminism and body image. And that wasn't, you know, I write about politics. I write about about

economics. And I write in particular about shocks and disasters. I've been a book called the shock doctrine about how large-scale crises are often exploited by politicians and corporations in order to enrich themselves and push through things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So the reason why things got so wonky and upside down for me during the pandemic is that she started saying things about the pandemic that sounded sort of like the shock doctrine if you took all the facts and evidence out of it. And so it was all about how the pandemic was the kind of a plot by the Chinese, and it was all about some Bill Gates wanting to do this to you and all.

And then she would bring this fop puree to Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and all of these people on the right who were just like, aha, it's when. And then I would get all of these, I can't believe Naomi Klein's gone off the deep end. She's on Fox saying these wild things. And so I sort of face this just turning point of, you know, I either, just spend my days correcting the record in an act of total futility because all I'm doing is sort of training the algorithm to confuse us even more. Or I just got, I just get interested and sort of treat it as my subject. So I just decided to try to figure out what was going on with her

because she was one of many people who changed during the pandemic, who fell down this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. One of not an insignificant number of people who were, more associated with the left, who switched over to the right. I mean, you think about people like Russell Brand or, you know. And so, you know, the book is not about her, as you know, from reading it, but it sort of uses her as the white rabbit to fall down the rabbit hole and kind of do a study on the way in which the pandemic, yeah, changed, rewrote the map a little bit.

I actually can't believe it was so closely written to the pandemic because it feels like We're still sort of living in a time. And yet you had thought so much about the things that were happening that last people were still confused about. Yeah, like assess a situation which most of us are still like, what just happened? What did we just do? But to be able to step back and go, this is what we all just went through. Something I hadn't even noticed.

And I think you used the word diagonalism. And so sorry if I've misremembered the word, but how people went from wellness to being skeptical of medicine or because of the way that vaccines were rushed through and there was a huge amount of, in inverted commas, information and people were having to pick and choose which sources they trusted that people who went from one minute like, we should always have 10 vegetables, not just five or, you know, like, and vaccines can leak up your body and infect you. Yes, yeah. Of course, yeah. The stuff you wrote about wellness is really fascinating, especially if you grew up in a slightly left-wing house

because there's always been this assumption that if you have this left-wing vibe then you also have this kind of environmental vibe and more hippie-ish vibe, which as you said is kind of comes from the 60s. And we're seeing this point where that whole the hippie side has jumped over this massive, huge barbed wire fence into a right-wing side of being anti-vax and the government are trying to control you. And I found that really fascinating,

someone who grew up with like hippie parents and going to the commune in Scotland being a normal thing of having watched that happen on Instagram and watch that happen people you knew. People I knew. It's still about individualism. Like that's what it's always about is have the 10 vegetables because it's good for you, not good for the community.

And that's what I hadn't absorbed at all or noticed until your book was that it's about superiority. The individual and I am precious, my family are precious. Yeah. More precious than your family. Oh, and yours. Yeah, the pure, the sneaky, sneaky, pure thing that sneeps in. Clean, clean eating, clean. I mean, you can see how it starts to rhyme with some of these fascistic worldviews.

Better, maybe you have better genes. Maybe you're just better. You just try harder. You just exercise more. You know, you just care more. It's like. There's a smugness in wellness culture. But, I mean, you know, I also don't want to sort of throw it all.

out because I do think that there are parts of what you're defining, you know, as like the hippie culture that you grew up in. I grew up in that, where I guess some of it was always individualistic, but some of it was really like we need a different kind of food system. We need a different kind of health care system. We need a different approach to childbirth. We need to demedicalize it. And they were much more collective solutions and they were part of movements. They were part of movements for, you know, a less medicalized approach to birth and health. And it is true that we are overmedicated. It is true that our medical system is over specialized. It is true that it only comes in once we're already sick and doesn't really focus on how we maybe stay healthy.

Yeah, preventative care. So, so, you know, and, and it is true that our, that, that, that, that, that our agricultural system is, you know, very much governed by what big agribusiness companies want. And, and, and, our medical system by pharmaceutical companies. So there has to be some truth in order for the conspiracies to have the kind of traction that they have. They have to tap into something real. And there have to be some kind of real failures that they're exploiting. But of course there are now just a ton of grifters, which was not true, I would hazard,

when you were growing up, where it was that sort of crunchy vibe was not. It wasn't a huge business, right? It was weird. And people thought you were weird for doing it. So the people doing it weren't doing it for the money. It wasn't glowing influencers. And I guess that's the problem with anything once you can make money from it, which is what Instagram enabled.

Or even if you're not making money, you're getting likes, dopamine followers. I'm just going to quote you. There is always some truth mixed in with the lies, always some devastating collective failure it has identified and is opportunistically exploiting. And I thought it was so clever because what you're saying is like, it's not that people are stupid or mis. mean, you know, I mean, like there are these grifters you said, but most people are, like you said, there's a truth in there that that they see and then they grab onto and someone else is exploiting that for their benefit. But these things are. They see a system. And also, they maybe can't get in to see their family doctor and their, you know, your healthcare system, which once was the pride and joy of this country. I mean, all I hear is how people, in the waitless and this is the same thing that's happened in. Canada. And so people are turning to, you know, quote unquote, alternative health in large part

because of necessity. And it is a sort of a slow privatization of the health care system as well. And a lot of this hyper individualism is just what happens when you tell people that they're on their own, you know, that they're not going to have any kind of security or job. So yeah, you better self-optimized. You better, you know, try to purify. You better, you know, be better than other people because that's your only hope of advancing. So it's too easy, I suppose. I found that it was too easy to just kind of make fun of the wellness influencers, even though they do some really bonkers things.

You're very compassionate to everyone you write about, including and especially Naomi Wolfe, or maybe compassion is the wrong word. Fair. You're interested about why people do the things that they do. So you're never, ever as a writer, saying this person did a bad thing that has negative effects. You always question, do they believe this thing that has negative effects? And if they do, then why?

And that's why I think it's so helpful to read because actually with the internet, we get into binary, very short. Yeah. My friends, not my friends. The enemy. Just sorting. Yes. You know, stupid evil. Yeah.

Rather than. With me against me. Where are we getting information from? Why is it sticking? And also, you're doing that because that's your way. I mean, it's all of our way of, of, of. trying to keep the mob from turning on us, right? I mean, if we project the right sort of values and perform the right kind of self, then hopefully people will be nicer to us. Well, actually,

I was really reading that this morning. In terms of the mirror world, all of the, the variance on doppelgangers you explore in the book, one of them is we create an online cell. We all have a digital self. When you were talking about the influences as well, that, you know, we absorb these influences, we eat them alive, and then they post the like, this is really hard for me. And you say, don't come from me. These influences seem to be pleading to the fans turned foes. I'm wounded. Can't you see I'm bleeding here?

Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there's nothing bloodier than performative trauma. And it's like, it makes you feel like, social media is this hellhole, but yet, how do we get off the roller coaster? I don't know. We're all on it, aren't we? Well, maybe that's why reading is good. I think we used to have more opportunities to give ourselves over to conversations, to just being in the presence of other people or art.

But now when you spend time with the book, it's a big commitment in terms of our focus and our attention. Very touched whenever people honestly read my books. Because it's a much bigger deal than it used to be. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. And, you know, No Logo came out in 2000. And there was, I really remember the shift from shock doctor, which came out in 2007, to This Changes Everything, which came out in 2014, where the shock doctrine, it was like people

which were still coming up to me like, I read your book, and then they would want to talk to me about part of the book. But then once we got to, this changes everything, it was, I read your book. Like, almost like they wanted, like, a sticker. I read the whole thing. And that was that was the, that was the, that was the change of everything. That was mainly like it was such an accomplishment or, I mean, I even met somebody last night who was just like, I am going to read. I'm going to, this is going to be the book that I read, you know, this summer.

And I get that, you know, people don't have, have the time. And when they decide to do it, when they decide to really sit with a book, it's, in a way it means more because people are reading less. So you have kind of a deeper commitment, a deeper relationship with a reader who rarely read, read, It's a book from start to finish. But I don't think it's good for our brains. No, it's not. Obviously, I'm very interested in terms of Naomi Wolf's response. Yeah, I wanted to ask you that has...

Especially because we're now in touch with you. Yeah, she has, she's been strange about the book. She claims not to have read it, but she has commented about it extensively. She's done a research as normal. And she says, you know, she believes she has a whole conspiracy. She has several conspiracies about me, my husband, my parents-in-law. apparently we're all in the pay of big pharma which is news to us that would be such a plot twist yeah exactly um and so she's been she's been trying to figure out what i'm going to take her down

um that i've been a part of which i do i really do wish you would read the book because i think that she would be she's not pleasantly surprised that it isn't what she seems to think it is and also like i didn't take her down you know she was already i she was already i she was She was already out of the left, right? I mean, she had had this horrific moment. Yeah, can we talk about that? Because Sarah actually, when you read it, you were like, did you know this happened to Naomi? Well, so I knew it.

Because my friends write books, everyone's a little bitch. And what happened to her, what happened to her was sort of everyone's worst nightmare. So we should say, which you describe in the book, she has a book coming out. This is Naomi. Right, so this is right before the pandemic. And I think that that's significant. It's a tipping point. I think it explains in part why she was prone to change and engage in the kind of desperate sort of cloud chasing that she does when she starts appealing to the right.

She had nowhere to go. She had nowhere left to go when it came to her traditional sort of liberal audience because of this thing where she published a book called The Outrages. It should have been a serious piece of historical nonfiction. was based on her dissertation that she got late in life. And it was about state violence against gay men. And she basically, she found out live on the BBC. On a radio four interview. So Matthew Sweet and then would have been producers as well.

Rather than thinking, you know, we've booked an author on, we've then looked at the book, we've found some problems and giving them a heads up beforehand. Yeah, there was no heads up. They waited until live on the radio, which isn't something that they would normally do. That's interesting. I've not heard anybody say that before, that that that in and of itself was, not even like a departure. I think they would have, they treated her like a politician. They'd never give a politician.

Yeah, heads up. Also, they knew what they were doing was cool. Because this person, I mean, what went on is that, you know, her book was pulp. So we should say they highlighted live on air that she'd made a massive mistake and the whole book. They led her into it. I'm going to say they, Matthew Sweet. who was an expert on Victorian, the period she was writing about as well.

So she'd used his phrase and she'd death recorded and had taken it literally in her research. And believe that she was discovering something extraordinary, which was that though people thought that having the death penalty for sodomy was no longer happening in this period, she had discovered that they were still sentencing and executing gay men for sodomy. yeah because it's said death recorded the crux of her book you can see understand why she thought that

yes and you know and and and on reflection it wasn't picked up by fact checkers yeah or the publishers editors publishers it's the kind of thing that it is their job to look at when you hand a book it's academic research too because you would think that that's what you have peer review for her phone she got peer review live on BBC that was bad so so live on the BBC they find out death he doesn't mean that no it means that they were he didn't just tell her that he didn't say oh by the way He asked her what she thought it meant. It was two or three, and obviously this is on YouTube, if anyone listening wants to go to. But it's horrible.

It's horrible. It's every writer's worst thing. Yeah. Anyone who spent any time doing anything. Also, to be fair, a lot of people thought it was me. So it's also bad for me. Yes. I was like, oh my God, Naomi normally does really good research.

There are two victims here. There is not a victimless crime. Absolutely not. Yeah. It's horrible. And she does remain composed. She doesn't burst into tears or anything. But...

No, she's actually kind of nice. She thanks him. Yeah. And she says, I mean, everything about it gives you chills. Yeah. Yes, you told me about it. You're like, have you heard this? Yeah.

And that's just the first phase, because then there's the huge internet pile on. And the memes and that, yeah. So I was sent it by several other writers glorying in that moment because it's that moment where you're like, thank God, it's not me. Yeah. The tribe celebrates. They have chosen the sacrificial victim. and it is not me. And Nomi Wolf, so the vagina biography book is obviously, you know,

interesting to think about, but some of it, in terms of like scientific research, I haven't read that one. She says that people have been raped are easier to push over, and then just full stop next sentence. So she says that like that, women's intellect runs through their orgasms or things like that, yeah. But I have to say, I mean, I don't write much about that book.

It's almost too painful to me. Honestly, but it would be imagined. The things of thinking you'd do it in that. Well, it wasn't as common as during the pandemic, but it would still happen that whenever she would do something quite extreme or have some conspiracy theory about something, I would go online and I would have to reverse engineer to try to figure out why all these people were angry at me. It was like always entering into the middle of a conversation and people were acting as if I understood. And then I would be like, okay, what has she done now? And then I would go look at her Twitter feed or whatever. But when I saw something about the fact that she'd written a book called Vagina Biography,

and I just turned red. People are going to believe that I've written this. You all love no logo. And I'm not proud of this because I really am quite a repressed person. And there's almost a way in which it felt as if, like, if you had engineered a doppelganger in a lab that was specifically designed to play on my personal and It would be somebody who'd written a biography of their vagina, incredibly explicit about their problems having an orgasm, and also made huge scientific errors. Like, wow.

Like that would be that. And let me show your worst nightmare. Yeah. But you know what? It was actually very liberating. This is why at the end of the book I say that I've decided to embrace Naomi Confusion as a sort of unconventional form of Buddhist, you know, ego death. It's just that if the thing that you most fear, like you're, you're, you're, you're,

your panic dreams are actually sort of happening with somebody else doing them. Like you have no choice. You just have to get over yourself. You can't. Yeah, it's a radical acceptance, isn't it? You just have to go. Whatever you've told yourself about the control you have over this thing we call the self, like whatever, all the things that we do in the world to present ourselves

in a particular way, project a certain kind of affect. I mean, you can do all that. But if there's another person out there who's doing the exact opposite. Yeah, the chaos maker. then you could just chill out. And for me, as somebody who needed to chill out, it was actually, I'm grateful. I don't know what kind of hippie parents you had,

but the brand of hippie pairs I had were, they were very exhibitionists. They were constantly embarrassing me. And so this is where I got this overdeveloped. Naked Tai Chi, that's what I'm going to say to. Okay. I'm going to say like skinny dipping and, you know, like, you know, I was basically mortified for her.

And it makes you more repressed. Makes you more repressed. Makes you more repressed because you're just like, Like, what is he going to do now? So you have to be like, that's just, I have to repress all of my feelings because this person's mad. Yeah. Just take it, take out, taking all the shame for them.

Yeah, yeah. So, so it was, it really was actually useful for me. And there was a way in which it seemed like at a certain point in my life, all these things that I had repressed were coming back. I ask how you deal or process anger on the internet. Because even though it essentially was nothing to do with you, it was still directed at it. at you, it was added at you, or it was read like messages. Did it feel like you were in a row with people? I mean, one of the interesting things about the, having, having somebody else's shame

directed at you, right, is that you realize that people do not read well on the internet, right? So, like, people would scream at me linking to an article, which had her name in the headline, you know, like, you know, and they would, but they would send it to me with my name, right? And they and they would be furious that I had said that vaccines were like, you know, the Nazis making Jews wear yellow stars. And like, look at the article you just linked to, you know. And so that's like a kind of an internet speed reading where you're just reading for exactly long enough to be able to get your position in. You're not actually spending time with text here. Like you're just like, read it up.

Okay, got it. Now I'm going to perform the burden. I agree. And it's a trouble with anger as well. is anger is one of those things that makes the, you know, the processes of the prefrontal cortex are just sort of bypassed. So intellectually, I know that. And I also, you know, I have been attacked for things I actually have done, you know,

and face, and big backlash, but also had the way in which the thing that I had done really mischaracterized, right? And be to a degree like that same kind of internet fake reading, right? but I can't say it makes it that much easier. I think you can know something intellectually and still be hurt by it. And I think the expectation that we have for ourselves that we're going to somehow be able to be exposed to this level of vitriol and have it not get to us. It's just not really a reasonable expectation, right?

So we need to develop ways that we heal ourselves, balance it out, spend time with people who love. us, you know, who can tell us who we are. But I think the expectation that we're going to not be affected by it is almost like adding to the difficulty of it because in addition to being harmed by it, you're also feeling stupid that you're letting it get to you because we all know it it doesn't really matter and they're not really reading anyway and it isn't really you that they're reacting to. It's an idea of you and all of that. It's still sucks. Yeah, because you're still being shouted. And it's still the thing. As you say, so when children are bullied at school on the internet, especially it seemed to be when the internet was new, they would be told that internet

wasn't a real place. So it's not real bullying. So, and again, so you feel wrong. Don't feed the trolls. Just ignore them. Don't go on your computer. Yeah. So this is like, you can solve the problem. But yeah, as we are now, the trolls are real. I've met them. Yeah. Yeah. I don't matter if it's something that you care about. Like I have a whole, I have many categories of things where I'm actually genuinely okay if people attack me because I have already slotted them into the category of people who are on the other side of a political divide. And so it doesn't hurt me. Like I write about Israel Palestine and, you know, people who are, you know, ultra-Zionists

and defenders of Israel really don't like what I write. And they call me the worst things you can possibly imagine, including many times a day, Acapo, which are the Jews who worked in concentration camps for the, it's like the worst thing you can call Jews. I've been called Mrs. Mangolin. I mean, you literally, like, you can't imagine. And that actually, I'm so used to it. It's been happening to me for so long. I understand where it's coming from. I've slotted into my sort of map of political warfare. I'm like, that's you doing your propaganda. It has nothing to do with me. I'm just the target of this particular campaign. But when it comes from my side, and it does, then it's much, much harder to deal with. So there's different kinds of being added. And the same way there's different kinds of arguing with someone

and there's different kinds of people shouting at you like there's always a nuance this situation but like it's when we pretend it's not real like we keep saying like you know we are living this generation of the internet wasn't real but now it is a room that we all go into we spend as much time there sometimes the average for teenagers is like three hours a day on their phone

like if they went swimming three hours a day they'd be amazing swimmers and we'd be like wow look at them working on those swimming And yet we don't act like three hours a And also even the phrase Social Media is if it's the same room As if it's the same country You know it's as different as Parises to Madrid as to London

Like they're different spaces that we exist in They have different rules and different vocabulary And different language I think you write about that brilliantly in the book Especially the history of Israel and Palestine And what you're So fascinating It's fascinating

And again the most important thing If I had to distill this book down To one sentence to implore people to read it is two things can be true at the same time many things many truths that the fact that thought and you quote Hannah Arant you know thought is a dialogue with you with yourself it's not just this is this is the thought I'm thinking it's the acknowledgement of more a myriad more than one thing yeah and it's so hard all of us get emotional and and think worstly I think two two things are true at the same time is basically I think we're all

is about. All therapy is trying to get you to accept. Your parents loved you and they made mistakes. Or that person didn't love you, but they did their best. Like, we as humans, we would love things to be binary. It would make things so much easier if they were right or we were right and they were wrong. And I think what you do with Naomi Wolf and the anti-vaxxers and the conspiracy theorists and, you know, all of these groups of people is you honor their opinions with

understanding where they're coming from. That temptation of the left to just say, well, they're wrong. They're crazy. But as you said, like, that's not what the right are doing. They are taking them seriously. And it doesn't improve any situation. The tricky thing is, is that I am still leftist. And I do, like, I don't, like, I'm trying to find a way to hold that nuance and sort of,

and without ending up with this kind of mush where we don't believe in anything and nothing is true, you know? And I do think that's sort of like liberal centrists have given nuance a bad name for a lot of young leftist where it's like as soon as you say the word nuance, it means that you're just trying to like forgive war crimes. And that's because a lot of people who invoke nuance really are trying to forgive war crimes. So it's a tricky moment actually to kind of engage with, with, I appreciate that sort of summary of the book.

And it really is true. And it makes me emotional thinking about it because I do think that we have to become porous to one another's stories and narratives. That doesn't mean that we need to agree with each other or give up our core ethics. In fact, I think we need to have a greater sense of our core ethics and be less sort of reactive and sort of, you know, just to have positions based on what our side, you know, wants and compromise our ethics and principles, you know, for political expediency. But I think that there's a way of holding complexity that also stays true to principles and ethics. And I think all of this language has gotten really, really muddy. there was something that happened in politics here

or it may have always been the case in politics here is that people looked weak if they changed based on information we're in the middle of a general election campaign you know we're in the TV debates have just been such a surreal experience to watch people say the same things but wearing different coloured tops but it means that when something's disproved

it's a real show of I mean I think truly is bizarre it feels like like musical political musical chairs where it's like laborers try to sound like Tories. And then reform are basically merging. We're talking about it. And then the Lib Dems are like, we're the new labour. Yeah.

So playing on a marketing system, on an advertising system, like what sells well, what brands sells well. And then you have, like you said in the book, like we're all living our own personal brands. So you need a politician to appeal to your personal brand. So you can go on Instagram and say, I agree with him and get your likes. Because if he deviates and says, oh, I don't know. This is complicated.

I've always loved how you write about Donald Trump so much, how me. Because I hadn't realized that I try not to, because I don't have to think about him. Okay. So I don't. I mean, unless he gets back in. But did you know that his background is in wrestling? I didn't know that. I didn't know that from.

Well, he has, yeah, he has something. I mean, his background is in lots of things. But yeah, no, he has appeared many times in WW. Yeah. And so Naomi was sort of explaining at WWE something else I'm not familiar with, but in terms of like you have a baddie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And by describing them as a baddie or, you know, boo the baddie, you make them stronger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not how you fight baddies. Yeah, which is why, you know, it's been so hard to face.

That's what he went straight from his conviction to this massive MMA stadium where they greeted him like a champion because he was the ultimate baddie. Yeah. He had just been the first president convicted of a criminal offense. And I was saying to act like, my husband's obsessed in American politics. I know it's so confusing. Well, that's what I was like, it's terrible because if he hadn't been. convicted, he would have said, see, I told you I was innocent. And if he's convicted, he goes, see, I told you it's conspiracy. So he wins. He always wins that chess game, like he's changing the rules and moving the board round. And it's, like you said, it's very hard from a

left point of view, then where do you go with that mush that you're holding a player? Well, no, it doesn't only only have me solved it. You need a goodie, like a wrestler. Well, well, he's a counterfeit. And so if he is in the ring with another kind of phony and frankly, like Joe Biden reads that way. And then he's thriving, right? But if you actually put him in a ring with a real human being, he doesn't work nearly as well, right? Like his phoniness is magnified. That's why the people around him, including Steve Bannon, were really terrified that Bernie would be the candidate in 2016.

Oh, my God. Because like you picture, like, Bernie's just like such a, whatever you think of him, he's just, he's a very real guy, you know? He doesn't know how to put on anything. You know, he's so gruff and he's just not a performer. He's just not wired that way. And, you know, as somebody who supported him and worked a little bit on his climate, the climate part of his campaign, it was often frustrating that Bernie would just not charm people, just would not call someone. It's just like, I'm just here with policy. You know, and like, I don't know if you saw Larry David do Bernie on Saturday.

But that's really what he's like. But that is the kind of thing that that's Trump kryptonite. But they're not that many genuine politicians out there. They're aren't. That's why people are still sort of charmed by Bernie and his mittens. Yeah. That was the thing that was Massaer was the mitton pictures. Yeah, because he was just like, everyone's all dressed up and there's just Bernie.

No, mittens, Bernie. He's warm. In the book, you talk a lot about Steve Bannon and listening to his podcast. Warham, are you still listening to it or have you managed to escape? I checked it on it this morning, actually. I can tell because you write so much. I mean, you say, like, your husband comes in and it's like, seriously, you're still listening. And you can tell you sort of, it's that thing where something's so disgusting that you kind of,

and you begin to know the vocabulary. Well, it's not marginal. This is the thing. It's like when I talk to people on, you know, our side of the political, you know, spectrum, they cannot believe that, like, why would you ever listen to him? And it just seems to be such a strange, willful neglect to not pay attention. I mean, I also turn on Fox News every once in a while. It's not fun.

But, like, you have to keep track of what, what narrative is being sold to, like, more than half the population. It's not like this is just like a small little, like, college radio station. But you're brave. Because as Sarah said, it's like, a lot of us don't want to think about stuff because it's so painful. People have such a limited amount of time, because this is what I'm guilty of in terms of avoidance.

A capacity for truth. People as a parent ask you, you know, what are you going to do about Andrew Tate when they want to watch Andrew Tate videos? And you think, well, I'm just not going to. watch any Andrew Tate videos and hope he's gone away.

Yeah. And you're absolutely right. How do you know what Andrew Tate is saying to your children unless you've watched Andrew Tate videos?

Have they let him do C.Bee's story time because they shouldn't do that. It's not a game. It's not Tom Hardy this week then Andhutate next week. It's now got a YouTube algorithm on C. BIVES.

So you just get what you get. But of course, how can you be informed to argue with your, you know, enemy or just because you're... Or understand. I think that's what this book does

so brilliantly is is pulls the rug out a little bit from that safety of a left point of view like they're crazy I don't oh I can't even listen to them it's so awful and so like Nomi Worf arguing with your book that she hasn't read if I said I hate Steve Bannon's podcast without listening to it yeah well we had this when Brexit happened because you know I remember obviously everyone was like can't believe it can't believe it and you were one of those few people at time being like why are you being so mean about these people who voted to leave because it wasn't my family yeah well my family too and I remember being at a media event and accidentally speaking to a very important conservative politician.

I don't know how this happened. Who tried to say to me, oh, well, you North London intellectual. And I was like, loads of my family voted to leave. And he was really shocked and had to sort of rearrange his, you know, oh, this is what happened. Was this for a Schontzer? No, you know, it was James Cleverly. And I did not know who was. So I got home and told my politics-obsessed husband that I'd had a chat with his

Kevilly. And he was like, what? But both you, I remember you were the first person to be like, Like we can't just laugh at these people for voting leave. That's really horrible and patronising. Stand-up comedy, which is our world. It's a really, really limited worldview because people say one thing on stage. It's sort of very socialist, even the rich people.

All left. I think there's one or two. Shout out to Jeff Norcourt. Right. A sort of performative goodness, I guess. Yeah, and when Brexit happened, the joke was these idiots have destroyed our country. It was super hand saying you can't try. us people, people voted for the Nazis and they like cold play. That was like the jokes. I went through

a long period where I would, the only way I kept up with British politics was by listening to the news quiz. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was, I would do sort of a reverse engineer from the jokes on the news quiz of like, what has happened? That's where you said like James Cleverly. I'm like, I know that from the news quiz. But that idea of like you said of keeping an eye on them, keeping an eye on Bannon, I think is a really good. I don't think we should be turning our back on what Steve Bannon is up to. No, and I mean, I think this is... He'll be like, why, my listeners doubled?

No, we can't give me a shatter on English podcasts. Listen to Steve Bannon. That's our takeaway from today. Buy the book and also support Steve Bannon. I mean, I also listen to sort of centrist podcasts that I... I think we need to know the stories that we're all telling ourselves. And I would think that... I mean, I know that Steve Bannon, you know, reads Lennon.

You know, I mean, he's obsessed. with the left and he, you know, he's interested in Chomsky. I mean, he, if you're a smart strategist, you look at what your opponents are doing. So, but, but also, like, you're not going to be completely blindsided by the way in which the Trump base is metabolizing this conviction, because you know the story that they've been telling themselves for years, which is that there is a conspiracy to take down their guy because he's so great. And so the deep state is, has been doing everything that they possibly can to stop him. And so everything that you try to do to stop him just reinforces the story that he really is the savior. And, you know, then I would also

listen to Pod Save America. I just listened to too many podcasts. I'm just going to say this right now. But they really believed that if they could get the conviction that this might really move the needle, you know, the same thing on MSNBC. And if you're listening to them, you know that that is absolutely not going to happen. And so it's just willful. delusion. Russell Brand took that exact playbook. That's the exact same thing of I'm such a threat. They're going to, you know, accuse me.

You must know what happened this week as well? Have you seen what happened this week that he was posting his hanging out with Trump, one of the trumps? I heard something. Yeah, on Twitter. I haven't seen what he did since he got dunked in the river. He went and got baptized in the Thames. He went and got, who's a TV presenter, dunked him in the river.

And they got, and it, yeah, it said me, bear and the Holy Spirit. And they were in the Thames, which is famously not the cleanest river. It was a bizarre. It's the cleanest, much-prolton river in the world. I'm sorry. I know you know that. I'm sorry. I forgot your facts about the Thames.

There's often a kind of a born-again Christian thing that happens with the conspiracy influencers. Because often, I mean, I watched this happen with Wolf, actually. I mean, she's Jewish and she, but she posts a lot about Jesus. Like for, and I think it's what her base wants, her new base. And the same thing has happened with Russell. And so once they take this right-wing turn, they realize that they have a very, very large religious Christian base. That's part of why they oppose the vaccines.

It's a big part of their worldview. And this is the kind of audience capture that happens with algorithms is like you're going to give them more of what they want. And so it was only a matter of time before Russell Brown was going to get baptized. I keep waiting for a wolf to convert. I think she will eventually. Yep, I do. I mean, that's a great book. She's going to get out of it, right?

That's a great podcast. So really a great win for it. you know, the church, I guess. If I was producing, if I ever do this, you know, if I was producing her, I'd be like, you know, it would be really good. I was trying to think if there was any other doppelgangers. In a way, it's strange that it hasn't happened more with people.

Yeah, yeah. But I do think that it happens more to people who are like slightly outside of the ethnic norm. And he happens to black people all the time. Yeah, yeah. And it happens to. do lots of people of color where there's even like a word for it like where people talk about having a work twin, which just means that their white colleagues just confused chronically to brown people from like wildly different ethnic backgrounds just because they're just, you know,

they're all the same to me. And I do think that the Naomi Naomi thing, there's this is, you know, this is how I get into the Israel-Palestine stuff because my mom's like, you do realize it's just anti-Semitism, right? It's like, oh, I just miss this. And then we start talking about ethnic doubles. Yeah. In psychology, they call it. So it's retrieval failure. And it's when your brain, your memory goes in to get something.

And how they describe it, this is A-level psychology. But it's like you put your hand in and you just bring it out. So if someone's name starts in the same way, you call someone by the wrong name because you haven't gone all the way in. So it's called schemata or schema, the story. There is something weird about the name Naomi because I did honestly use to have. this experience of like a TV host here who called, he was like, and coming up next, we have Naomi Campbell with us. And I was like, this is going to be a huge disappointment to all of your

horridors. It does happen. This is what happens sometimes with hosts at comedy gigs. They say a more famous comic who's called Sarah Milica. And again, you start your gig by the guy, I'm so sorry if you got excited. Alexis Cyprus did it and it got him into a lot of political trouble. The Greek press went to town on him when he talked about Naomi Campbell's shock talk about being imposed by the Germans and the Troika on Greece. I felt so bad reading it because there was a point when I was like, oh, I've done this because I read no logo and I read the beauty myth and halfway through I was like, she didn't write the beauty

myth. Like I have completely merged. There are a whole categories of people who think that I have just written a lot of books. Like it's not really confusing. It's just like one. I just think you've written a lot. And also if you read a lot of, if you read a lot of, if you've read a lot of, if you read lots of nonfiction and it's about like stuff that's happening. There's a slight crossover

of like advertising and pressures. We're all dealing with the level of information and indation that is unprecedented human history. So I think we should all just cut each other some slack. I went through a phase of reading doppelganga novels. So it's about 10 years ago and you'll appreciate this. No one else did. Okay. Apart from me in the sky. So on a tube train, I'm reading the double by Jose Salomego and he is reading Dostoevsky's the double and we looked at each other. Did you beat? We looked down. We looked around to everyone else like this is this.

And no one cared. No one cared. Oh, that's really sad. Yeah. But I think about it all the time. But at least you do have that moment. That was my glitch in the Matrix. Yeah.

Namy, thank you so much. Thank you so much. We love this book. We should have asked you more questions and instead we told you what we liked from your book. Yeah. But that's what good students do. We've been being good students. This is the things we liked about it.

I think you just had a very nice chat. I enjoyed it very much. We can't recommend it enough. It is such an interesting book. Can I ask a quick question? Yes. Sorry. No.

You must get asked this a lot, but would you ever go into politics? Oh, no. No, but my husband is going into politics. He's running again. So I like helping behind the scenes. That's politics. Yeah. But I just really, not you heard how rambling my answers are.

You have to be very disciplined when you go into politics. and you have to be willing to repeat yourself a lot, which I think I'm a little too curious to just have that discipline. But thanks for asking. How about you? Oh, no, no. I don't think you'd have a happy life. Sorry for your husband.

Double Ganger, a trip into the mirror world by Naomi Klein. Guys, Klein is available now. Oh, not Wolf. I know. I wondered why you were saying it in that weird way. I'm now asking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is out now. Sarah's novel Weirdo and My Book on Grief, You Are Not Alone, are also out in paperback and available to buy now. You can find out all about the upcoming books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram at Sarah and Carriads Weirdo's Book Club. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.

It's been a doppelgain.